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Chapter Text

The first time Halore Travye saw Kurloz Makara was the night he was conscripted.

He was seven and a half, then, missing his hive and goatdad, everything he owned in his sylladex except his marked up book of scriptures he copied out himself off the church homenet.  The purplebloods were thrown together and then pulled apart, the only caste split and sorted—facepaint in one line, bare-faced shoved without dignity into the other.  One elder of the church, old and heavy-horned, sat up high and watched—the work got left to adults much younger, towering over the others in line with dark skin and powerful build.

Halore never towered, not really, but he didn’t either get shoved or pushed around.  The ones that hit into him bounced off and left him unmoved.  A heavy build, a strong will, a direct and to-the-motherfucking-point attitude, that shit got you far. 

It would have to.

He’d looked up, in that uncertain moment, and there was a laughsassin standing tall over him, painted face and dark clothes and clubs on his hip so everybody could see the threat of them.

“Line to the left, little brother,” he’d said, grinning paint and face of sharp, beautiful angles, and smiled with long, perfect white fangs that could tear out a throat.  “Welcome aboard the Painted Disciple.”

--

Halore hadn’t pined for the tall and beautiful brother who directed him to his new life.  There was too much to do.  Too much to do for nights, weeks, perigees, hell, for sweeps even.  He had training, and schoolfeeding, and he didn’t know yet what he wanted his life to be for, and that took up the time that might have been spent dreaming.  Maybe once or twice, in the dark in his ‘coon, on hot nights when his pan was buzzing too hard to sleep, he’d imagine…things.  And in among the slick flesh and warm breath there would be a face he knew, not recalling where he saw it.  A tall figure, lean and strong and older and taller, white fangs in a grin that could tear down the moons. 

And so things went on, and so they stayed, until the night he was finally allowed for advanced schoolfeed of scripture and verse. 

He'd aimed so high since he was first conscripted; the early lessons, beneficial as he was sure they fuckin’ were, were a size too small and a shade too basic for a fucker who spent his whole life on-planet reading scripture whenever his time allowed.  He'd had a day to enjoy the honor and satisfaction of it, and forgot, until the second he walked into Advanced Scripture, that he'd be very much no longer among his own kind.  The kin there for schoolfeed were grown laughsassins in muttering groups, subjugglators taking up space and laughing raucous at their jokes, contorturenist and interrogator gathered around papers and palmhusks.  Not a one still small and pale, not a one still waiting on pupation. 

And right up in the back, alone and watching, smiling real small, there was a single face he knew.

Halore had edged up the side of the room past the full-grown kin talking and laughing below, and the brother from conscription day had watched him, still-faced.  Gave only a quiet nod of allowance as Halore sat down, cautious, a few seats down the row.

"Good afternoon," Halore had said, real polite.  "I figured you were well out of schoolfeeds, big brother."

He'd smiled at the deference of it, a small dry twitch of his mouth under his paint.  "Not so old as all that," he says.  "And there's not anybody alive who couldn't use a little schoolfeeding, however old they get to."

Sounded so true and so fuckin' wise, when he said it like that.  Halore's cheeks had gone warm under his paint, for no reason he had proper words for.

"Some of us could use more than others," he'd said, and looked down at his feet like the dumbass wriggler he was.  "I didn't mean—  If I presumed too—"

"Makara."

"What?"

"Makara," said the laughsassin, and smiled again, different this time, sharp and cunning slice of white fangs.  "Brother Makara.  If you were ever gonna get around to asking a name or making a motherfucking introduction."

"I—  Oh.  Travye," he'd said, after a stupid moment or two trying to remember his own goddamned name. 

Brother Makara had smiled, head high and eyes lazy like he had the right to judge whatever fell under his gaze, like he was king of everything he saw.  Halore Travye bowed his head down and looked at his palmhusk with warm cheeks and beating pusher, and didn't say a word. 

--

Pupation did nothing much about changing Halore Travye, except that he grew, taller and broader still than he had been.  The sweeps passed on; a gradual progression of age and skill and knowledge, a powerful knowing of scriptures.  His talents tended to, his weaknesses beaten out of him by kin and confession, schoolfeeder and scripture.

His love of scripture fed, always, by a most beloved tutor.

Makara brought scriptures to life.  Makara burned and thundered with scripture like he was reading of his own testimonies, not some long-dead ancient saint.  His voice caressed stories of ancient holy serendipity like a lover’s hand and hissed and cut through the books of suffering like torturer’s tools.  Scripture was bright and beautiful, brought to life in his hands.  His sermons lifted the soul.  His voice brought his kin to attention and led them true through danger and fire and back home.  He bled, and led, and came back to the ship and sat down with a brother whose only skill seemed his growing skills in scripture verse, solid power and a dependable word.

Halore's face no longer betrayed him at it, but his pusher beat on still, with every night, and still he didn't say a word.

It was obvious though, as he found, to the right people.  Every ship has its matchmakers and rumor mills, and they were full and clear on who he wanted, and how badly.  Any other ship, they'd buy and sell that knowing to any motherfucker with an interest, but they were kin and on the holy fleet flagship, and contributions would soon come rolling around.  Their color, pure and holy, had so few already in its fold.  The better to keep brothers and sisters living, matches had to be made.

But there were better matches for him, they told him.  Dark rumors about brother Makara, his tastes and tendencies, things a brother just pupated wouldn't handle so well.  Reasons he picked his contribution-mates so careful and quiet, and why they never returned to him a second season. 

“Just be careful around him, brother,” a sister had said, and pulled up her sleeves to show eight neat scars, white and clear, four on each arm.  Claws digging at flesh.  “Good brother as he is, he does…play rough.”

--

But Halore Travye was tough, and he was young and jumped up on stupid motherfucking hormones and hope, and he wasn’t scared of pain.  So he sat down that day, and with a prayer and a firm hand, he made up his mind.

He’d come into scripture the next night, and gone up to the back where he always sat.  Makara was there—Makara was always there first.  Halore had asked once how fucking early a brother even had to be, and Makara had just looked at him and then smirked to himself and looked back to the front again.  Halore sat and pulled his palmhusk out to pull his books up on, and then with everything done, just…sat.

“Good afternoon to you too,” Makara had said finally, quiet and amused, as Halore struggled with the words to say.  “What’s gone crawling up your nook?”

“Fuck you,” Halore had said, because that was the thing to say when somebody was being a motherfucking bulge-sniffer at you.  Even if you’d spent yesterday distracted with the thought of them pinning you over the desk and putting their lips to your throat.

“Fuck you,” Makara had said back with no malice, and pulled a wicked elixir from his sylladex.  “You heard there’s a party coming up?”

Conversation, for some dumbfuck reason, had not been part of Halore’s plan of how this night would go.  Still though, mirth and delight weren't to be looked over and disregarded.  Warranting celebration, sure as shit.  Except...

“You don’t sound pleased, brother,” he’d said, and taken the bottle Makara passed him. 

Makara had snorted.  “—Wader party,” he’d said, disgusted.  “Our lordship’s gone inviting saltsuckers on holy fleet.”

The source of brother Makara's dissatisfaction became immediately apparent.  Fuck that noise. 

Makara laughed at the look on his face—rare to hear him laugh for real, but that half-laugh, low and quiet, that was wonderful too.  “Yeah,” he’d said.  “Me too, brother.  That’s how the whole fleet’s got to feeling about it, but fuck does he know about what we want?  Never comes out the Big Top, does he?  Heard he sleeps on the throne—”

“Brother…”

Makara blinked—caught himself.  Sighed and then growled.  “I know. I fuckin’ know.  Not treason to say what’s true, any-fucking-way.”

Halore hadn’t answered that with words, but he did give a stern looking-at and Makara sighed again and let go some of the anger.  He always did bristle, at the overstep of the current Mirthful Majesty.  He always did know what he'd do instead and how, where his loyalties would lie.  He always seemed to know himself, even then. 

“Fine,” he’d said.  “I’ll shut my motherfucking trap.  Not like he’s spying though.  Fucker doesn’t care enough what we think to do shit like that.”

There was silence a while after that.  Brother Makara was brooding, glaring ahead and thinking deep.  Halore was…distracted. 

“So,” he’d said, finally and quiet.  “You…you got any quadrants?  For this week, I mean.”

Makara had rolled his eyes, not at Halore but at the entire old song and dance, the tiring trial of it.  “You know fucking well I don’t.” 

He'd said no more than that, and no more was to be seen, unless you knew him well.  Unless you were an observing sort.  Unless you were Halore, and you'd studied him like scripture.  The softest hint of smell from him, the barely-there fog of longing that's in the air before drone season.  How his shoulders worked as he stretched, the muscle in his back and arms and how it moved, the place up the back of his posture column where he carried his stress and where he hurt when he'd been worried too long.  A subtlety of words unsaid, tiniest shreds of confiding he'd given out that Halore had taken like treasure and stitched into a fuller picture; they whisper about me, brother, and choices grow thinner by the sweep.  Brother Makara grew ever-harder to read, but slowly he grew also to trust.  He gave Halore those pieces of himself. 

Halore knew him; knew his worry, in the low set of ears and jaw.  Knew his hurt, in the quiet steady edge of his voice, and knowing him so felt precious and private.

Brother Makara was quiet, then, a thinking quiet, chewing over whatever pained him.  Halore had regarded his face, the beautiful hard lines of it, and seen his pain, and known what he felt was pity, true in that moment, helpless and inevitable.

"Hey," he'd said, as Makara looked off far away in his own thoughts.  "We could hook up, brother."

Brother Makara had smiled a little, distant, and then he'd heard what Halore said and gone still, a single slow moment.  He'd made at opening his mouth to speak, but any voice he'd tried for came out silent—the first time Halore would see him lose his words, but not the last.  For a long couple moments they just stared at each other, until Halore was ready to retreat in shame at the blankness of the look—of course he wouldn't want to.  Of fucking course he wouldn't—

"If that's a no, I mean, I get it, brother," he'd started, and he would remember the rest of his life how brother Makara had nodded so slow, and how he'd looked just short of scared. 

--

“Kurloz,” he’d breathed that morning, close by Halore's ear.  It had been such a beautiful thing, the trust uneasy in his voice, the feel of his body working so close, the heave of his breath and the power in his shoulders.  The pain of his claws digging in still burned, still hurt, but if Halore was good at something it was enduring, and so he closed his eyes and endured, with warm cheek and beating pusher, loving until the pain of pity washed away any other hurt he could feel.  “My—name, name’s Kurloz—“

--

Kurloz always used his claws a touch too deep.  He didn't seem to notice as it happened—it took him a long, long time to say the words out loud.  But Halore knew.  He saw, he hid the knowing away behind his eyes.  He never had to ask why when he let himself whimper and pushed into the hurt until his eyes flashed white, he'd come back and see Kurloz looking down at him like he was a wonder.  Like he was a miracle, the center of all that ever was. 

He'd been so young.  They'd been so young, and he'd thought he was being kind.

When Kurloz came to him in confession and shame and got out the words, hurting, I've got too powerful a love for it, I'm fucked up and made use of you and I owe you some apology beyond my means, Halore said "I know, brother, I know," and saw the wonder in his eyes, and wanted to give him everything he'd ever wanted.

For sweeps they came together and apart again—lingering together after contributions were done, past when there was no excuse not to anymore.  Finding each other days in advance—helps during drone season if your body warms up to it slow, one of them had said, earnest in the shadow off a hall, and their kisses tasted like blood and words neither of them would say.

Kurloz hurt.  Never enough, never as much as he wanted, that was clear.  But he took every scrap he was given like a starving troll grateful for every bite.  He'd let go his dignity and proud, cool distance to sit on the ground by Halore's chair as he read, kiss his fingertips and bite his palms and wrists until his skin burned with a thousand tiny cuts and he was boneless from the attention.  The pure, grateful motherfucking worship in the way those bigger, harder hands held his so soft, the way scarred lips and killing fangs turned gentled against the bones of his wrist and knuckles.  Kurloz hurt and watched and never slipped—when Halore reached his limit of enduring whatever pain was being done and cracked a moan not of pleasure, Kurloz would pull back that second, eyes searching, hands hovering to soothe whatever he'd done.

There was a softness, always, under the ever-growing walls of blank mask and cool calculation.  There was a warmth behind the keen cruelty, something that wanted fingers entwined and flushed promises for forever.  Kurloz would hurt and hurt with eyes full of hunger, as long and deep as Halore could bear—but when hurting was done he would kiss and praise and soothe, and clean the wounds he'd made so carefully.  So motherfucking carefully.  However long it took for the shaking to go away, however long it took to stop the bleeding and make things right again, he would be there, a hand on Halore's back, fingers in his hair, a voice saying so good to me brother, can't believe I'm blessed with you, you looked so beautiful...

It was sweeps of coming and going.  It was knowing the tiniest things about him—when he was silent for silence's sake, when he'd locked up inside, when he was hurting or when he was angry or when he was hungry and cruel and in love—when he was going to do something that would hurt really bad, and it was time to take the pills before they got together. 

It was sweeps on sweeps, and they'd been alone in Kurloz's block, where he trusted no fucking other to go; Halore's eyes on the bare silver-black of his face as he cleaned his paint away, as no fucking other was allowed to see.  Pills still dulling down the hurt that was left, after Kurloz got him bandaged and dressed and cleaned his own smeared paint for him with tender hands.

Kurloz had looked over at him, bare face in the dark, and given him a smile sidelong, dark in the eyes and soft, and Halore had said, "What kind of stuff do you want to do to me?"

He'd not meant to say the words out loud, but Kurloz had looked at him again and and his cheeks had gone soft-flushed.  He'd said, "You know what I want," and looked back to his gaze-pane, cleaned the last paint away around his eyes with busy fronds, like that was an answer.

"Yeah, but.  Other stuff."  A thrill, always, to see some softer piece of him, his abashment of his own wants, a part almost shy.  And the younger of the two, Halore had always pushed to seem daring, to show off how cool a motherfucker could be.  He'd said, "Stuff you get yourself off to," and seen a flick of one ear—all the more sign you'd get, now, that Kurloz was flustered.  That he was thinking quick for an answer. 

It took him a long time to find one.  Just fixing up his face, wiping up the corners, making sure every last smudge was gone.  His face was so still, still like it never got unless there was a fight going on behind it.  Halore waited silent, to see if he'd win.

"It's..." he'd said, finally, soft and slow, tight with nerves.  And that was the thing about Kurloz, when truth came to truth—that his wants had lashed back at him so often, that he'd been hurt and scorned and pushed off and told a hurting pity was monstrous.  Halore should have known, should have known, should have known.  "It's...fucked up.  Shouldn't want..." He'd threaded together his fingers and let them loose again, a twitch Halore knew from the times words weren't coming to his pan.  His face was bare, precious and beloved, and with the pills it was easier to watch and wait and ignore the boil of dread.  The thought of what this beautiful, fucked up troll could think was more fucked up than what Halore endured for him already. 

"I mean," Kurloz had said, real quiet."I don't wanna hurt a motherfucker too bad.  Just a...fucked up pailing dream some nights, is all..."

Halore had opened his stupid, eager mouth, and said, "I can bear it."

The words would stay with him the rest of his nights; the way Kurloz had gone still and Halore had been too blind, too stupid to notice.  He'd just kept talking, soft with his pity, stupid with it.

"I could bear anything for you, brother.  Bore the rest okay."

"You make it sound...mighty motherfucking unwanted," Kurloz had said, slow, and turned keen eyes on him, watching sharp like he was putting things together in his pan.  Things he'd seen, maybe, and ignored.  Things he'd hoped and trusted were nothing to think on.  Things Halore worked to hide from him, to let him have what he wanted.

"No—  No, that's not what I'm saying," Halore had said, but he'd known as he said it the hastiness of his own answer.  An answer in itself, to an inquisitor, and Kurloz had long been a master of inquisition.  He knew a damning answer when he heard one.  Even then, you couldn't lie to Kurloz Makara.

"Tell me straight to my fuckin' face," he'd said, and his eyes were starting a slow burn, realizing, coming to know and understand.  "Do you like it.  When I motherfuckin' hurt you."

There wasn't a way out.  Not one Halore could take, not one that would bring them through the other side.  He'd always wonder, long into the future, if he could have lied then.  If he would have been believed, if Kurloz was so desperate not to think himself a monster, he would have taken any reassurance.  Endlessly rewriting what he could have said, what he could have done, what canny and heartfelt confession he could have made to keep his heart whole.

But he hadn't, then.  He'd been stupid and shaky, on pills and pain, on mortification and conviction.  He'd lowered his eyes to the ground in shame, and shaken his head.

Kurloz turned away in a rush, like he couldn't bear to stay still, walked three short steps away and three back, breathed hard and deep through his teeth.  Moved his lips, found only silence.  "Fuck," he'd managed, forced through the shock of it, words coming sharp and brittle.  "—Why?"

That had hurt, hearing it asked when the answer felt so clear and right.  "Because I'm flushed for—"

"Don't," Kurloz snapped, a whipcrack of a voice, sharp and fast and harsh.  The exact sound of it stayed in Halore's ear, the brutal clarity of the memory comes down on him in the quiet.  The growing rage in Kurloz's eyes, the betrayal below that.  Below that, the agony.  The words coming from him in fits and starts, faster now and louder.  "You said—  I thought—  All those times, those times I said I was coming down, I got there and you were fucked-up high, what, so you could—bear my touching you?!  Because I was a fucking torturer to you!"

"No!" To hear it turned around like that, it's wrong, it's not what he meant.  "I can take whatever pain you need, whatever it takes—  Whatever makes you happy, I just want—"

"I wanted to fucking DO RIGHT BY YOU!" Kurloz snarled, and slammed a fist against his wall, bone on metal.  Turned away from it, paced again, tore a hand through his hair.  "You told me—  You said you wanted—  Fuck!"

"I do want you!" Halore had said again, again and again.  It was clear in his mind's eye, for sweeps of agonizing after, how he dug the knife deeper with every word, how deeply he dug his own grave.  He didn't see it, then.  He only saw Kurloz's too-bright eyes and betrayal, the hate of himself.  He only felt his stupid, thoughtless pity.  He only said, "I can take it!  If it's you, brother—  Kurloz, you know I could take it for you—"

"I don't want you to BEAR MY TOUCH like some motherfucking TRIAL!!"

Those were the words his voice had broken on, and he'd turned away his bare face, swallowed a cracking sound, dashed a hand harsh at his eyes.  Seeing that—  Fuck.  The worst hurt he'd done, a pain Halore couldn't bear for him, a pain Kurloz would never touch him again to gentle or fix.  He'd spoken again, quiet, and Halore knew him as deep as scripture.  Knew he was quiet in his hurt.  "I wanted you to love me," he'd said, and the terrible betrayal was bare in his voice like an open wound, flayed bare like his paintless, anguished face.  Deeper than any injury Halore could have put on his flesh—deeper, he knew then in one terrible moment, than he could ever heal.  "I wanted you to—  And how much of it was a lie, Halore?  How fucking much?"

Halore could only stand, words caught painful and choking in his throat.  Kurloz held his eyes another moment, a long agony of silence, waiting for some word, some redemption—and then looked away, shrank and crumbled down, slumped forward on a chair and dropped his head to his hands, digging his claws at his hair and his horns, made less in pain and shame. 

"Leave," he'd said, so quiet, barely more than pleading.  "...Leave."

Halore had gone.

--

Gamzee Makara is what Halore never was. 

In a lot of different ways.  He’s young, maybe even a little younger than Halore was when he first hesitantly proposed just a hookup, brother, no hard feelings after.  He looks like Kurloz, and with that name and that sign and his face so much the same it makes Halore’s pusher skip to see him in sermon.  But he's not quite like Kurloz, either.  Brighter, more smiling, open and sweet, not guarded and still.  He came to the fleet on sopor, and Kurloz—Lord Makara—caught him high out of his mind and screamed him to conviction and threw him into detox.  Another slip and he might well have been culled—but slip again he does not.  He excels, once he's guided.  Like his ancestor before and behind him, he turns a deft hand to cull and calling, to preaching, to...scripture.

Scripture was Halore's, once.  It was what he was good at, what made him stand out above, what made him exceptional enough to remain on the ship of the Grand Highblood.  Young brother Makara has studied the holy word a hundredth of the time, but they've made motherfucking hive in him.  He knows them forward and back, he strings his bones together with them, he calls them to mind like his own name. He lights them up like Kurloz does. 

He's young, yet, no deeds of remark on his name and no title.  Not worth the time or attention of Halore's thoughts.  Still, though, he keeps them, ignorant of the watchful eyes on him and Halore's ear turned to the tune of his rumors.  He hears that brother Makara has let a group of his kin bear witness to his love of pain.  Hears he confided a matesprit that hurts him.  Hears that he praised the pain done to him, that he can't get enough of it.  He listens, and he hears.

There's a sick and terrible certainty that grows, at that.  A knowing that Halore denies for as long as he can.  It's impossible, or so he tries to tell himself.  Finding your own descendant, that enough would be a long stretch.  But to find him with a twisted thinkpan so complementary to yours, so well-fit, and such a young and grasping thing, still climbing and searching and seeking for power—no.  Kurloz knows better than to let the young take up with him.  He knows their hunger, their search of status.  In the end, it'll come back around to favors asked, liberties taken.  How would they even come to meet? 

Why would Messiahs be so cruel?

He turns his eyes away, he argues away his fear, until the day word reaches him in certainty, and it comes down on him with an old pain that still burns like fucking fire.

Kurloz is deep flushed for this boy.  This wriggler, this little sweet-eyed motherfucker who by luck and luck alone fell hornlong and stumbling into what Halore longed for and couldn't have.  Who looks up at him with hurt in his eyes when Halore accuses him, who clutches at his wrist and doesn't lash out as Halore's grip tightens at his choke.  Under Kurloz's eyes, standing and judging between the two of them, kindling slow and terrible with rage, the old pain rises up like bile.  How fucking badly he wanted, the things he thought he'd come to peace with sweeps and sweeps ago. 

When he lets Gamzee go, Kurloz pushes past him without another look, bends over his matesprit and brushes a tear tender from his cheek.  When his shoulders start to shake and his growl rises in fury, Gamzee grabs his arms and pleads soft with him, brother, no, Kurloz, I'm fine, with tears still in his eyes.  When Halore steps back, uncertain, he looks over Kurloz shoulder in worry and fear, not of Halore but for him. 

His eyes say leave.  His eyes say, I don't want him to hurt you.

Halore goes.

Chapter Text

“You ever have a purpleblood hatefrond?”  says the empress, and opens her mouth.  You take your cue and hold out a candied beetle—she leans forward and for a second her lips brush your fingers and your skin electrifies.  She leans back again and swallows, licks her lips with a black, slick tongue.  “Down on-planet, I mean.  You talk about him swimtimes, don’cha? Clam...somefin.”

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are in the Condesce's personal quarters--in theory, guarding her while she works, but in practice sitting in her lap barefoot and feeding her candy on demand, which is thrilling and embarrassing as fuck.  She fucking loves embarrassing you.  You think maybe she knows full well what kind of misplaced, disgraceful thoughts go through your head when she has you do things like this, and thank god she seems to find them funny, not insulting or presumptuous (by all rights you should be culled by now). 

“Uh…” it’s weird to think about home—about before you were out, when you knew in theory you’d have to learn how to suck it up and be polite to people and kick ass in actual fights and not just alone in your block.  It doesn’t take long to remember though.  “Yeah.  I mean—yes, your Condescension.  Ma’am.  Uh…Gamzee Makara.  That's...that was his name.” 

The familiar slight twinge rolls through you at the thought—you do your best to lock it the fuck away, because you are a goddamn THRESHECUTIONER, okay, you are tough and boss as hell and you don’t have time to feel concern for sopor-addicted idiots who are 100% definitely too…nice to have lasted.  He’s got to be dead by now.  There’s no point thinking about the dead.  Not even the dead whose husktop must have been stolen by some asshole and whose trollian icon still blinks on and off sometimes like he’s still online. 

“Clamzee,” she says, contemplative.  “Mm.  Yeah, you’ve said the name before.  You know a lot aboat him?”

The sharp snort comes out before you have time to stop it.  “He was a mess,” you say, much more baldly than you mean to, and then flush at your own presumption when she gives you an amused smile.  “Sorry.  I mean, he was—”

“No, I asked,” she says.  “I wanna hear your roepinion, not a bunch of political hoofbeast ship.  Brutal-honest.”

“I…o-okay.”  You square up your shoulders, take a deep breath.  “He was a degenerate.  Like, a complete shipwreck.  He couldn’t go five seconds without calling me his—best friend or some shit, even though I was never anything but a raging sack of bulges to him.  He ate sopor slime like it was candy, his thinkpan was absolutely fucking rotted with that shit.  But he, uh.  He still trolled me every night, stupid lonely piece of shit.  His lusus was never there and every time we talked it was like I’d say some basic fact or mention some basic fucking amenity and he’d be like ‘haha best friend I ain’t ever even get my know on of that shit’—!”

You’re breathing a little harder.  You settle down. 

“He’s probably dead now,” you say, rough and tired.  “He wouldn’t have lasted on the fleet.  I’d be surprised if they didn’t cull him the second they found out about the sopor thing.  Poor fucker.”

“You figure he coulda ship-shaped up?”  She’s looking at you—you don’t dare to look at her head-on and see what her expression is.  “Coulda got it together if he had somebody to shellp him out?”

“I mean…” you imagine the blurry webcam pictures of Gamzee that are your only real memory of his face—the big, sad eyes, the slightly hopeless smile he always had plastered over his face, like he was really hoping somebody would be nice to him this time but he wasn’t holding his breath for it.  “I mean, anybody would have been better than him being alone all the time. He wasn't the worst highblood ever, y'know, he was plenty strong when he needed to be, he handled the seadwellers in the bay by his hive, he was really into their bullshit church.  He just needed to get his goddamn life together.  I told him!  I told him all the fucking time he needed to sort his shit out before conscription, but he never got off the sopor.  And now he's not going to, so.  Fuck me, I guess.  I mean how fucking hard is it to just not faceplant into your recuperacoon and shovel sedative chemicals in your mouth?!”

You glance at her, and she’s grinning at you.  Your cheeks go hot.

“He was cullbait, anyway,” you mumble, like a defense, and hunch down.  “So.  It's not like it matters now.”

“I sea.”  

For a little while after that you’re both silent.  She’s chatting with somebody on her tiaratop, you think—there’s a certain flicker to her eyes that suggests she’s reading invisible writing, her lips move a little as she dictates words in her head.  Then, finally, she blinks and focuses on you again.

“I’m goin’ over there, is all,” she says glibly.  “Wanna come with?”

“...'Over there’, ma'am?”

“Get on up, threshie,” she says, and stretches.  Her rumble spheres are pushed abruptly out at the level of your eyes—you jump up faster than you ever have in your life, face burning.  “Tell them to get my shuttle set.  We goin’ to the Dark Carnival.”

--

You stand outside the Grand Highblood’s throne room on guard for all of five or ten minutes after the empress goes in—nobody comes by.  It’s pretty late in the day already, hell, you’re surprised he’s up and in his throne room at all considering.  You stand and look straight ahead, straining your sponge clots, but you can’t hear what’s happening behind you.  The doors are massive and muffle all the sound from inside—fuck though, they look fucking ancient—

Just as you turn your head to glance back at the doors, they go flying open.  They slam against the walls on the outside with a thunderous CRACK, and you jump back as the empress comes striding out, talking at the tops of her aeration sponges. 

“Karcrabby!”  She looks around and then spots you and goes for you like a shark after prey.  “We headed out to get a drink, and you comin’ too!”

You open your mouth to give some kind of respectful and careful answer to that, and then glance back past her and almost choke on your own tongue. 

You’ve seen the Grand Highblood before, but only from a distance and certainly never looming over you and looking directly at you.  Fucking hell, he has to be at least eight or nine feet tall.  At fucking least.  Without the horns.  His face is painted into a jagged, skull-like leer.  Behind the paint, you can make out the shape of sharp, carved features , eyes way too sharp to belong to some faygo-swilling church-chump and a complete lack of interpretable expression.  His horns are huge, spiraled and scarred and battered, and he’s a lot…thinner than you expected, but that’s just because he doesn’t seem to have a spare ounce of bounce-tissue on his whole body.  Holy shit. 

You stare at each other silently for the space of five painful, terrifying seconds, and then a vaguely familiar voice bellows “—KARKAT!” and you’re suddenly slammed right off your feet by a blur of grey and purple. 

Your first reaction is to thrash, swear, and try to pull your sickles, but a few seconds later your brain catches up with you a little and you see a huge grin and big, wide purple eyes with sideways seagoat pupils and something seems to slot into place in your thinkpan.

“Wait,” you get out, and he literally lifts you off your feet like a wriggler and swings you around.  He barely seems to be squeezing but it’s significantly more difficult to breathe with his hands wrapped around a significant portion of your thoracic cage.  “Hold the fuck up, just—” he squeezes—you huff out a sharp breath of air and squirm.  “Are—Gamzee?”

You know you’re right, because Gamzee lights up like a goddamn 12^th Perigee’s Eve decoration.  “Best friend!”  He stops holding you out in front of him by your thorax, which is theoretically good, but trades it out for wrapping you up in a fucking cartilage-snapping hug.  “Hey!  Karkat, holy shit—motherfuckin' miracles getting their fucking dance on around this motherfucker, and this the happiest motherfuckingest of the whole fuckin' lot, holy shit!”

You roll your ganderbulbs and growl, and pretend like the words motherfuckin' miracles didn't just make your squawk blister choke up and an embarrassing, pathetic wet prickle start at the corners of your eyes.  "Shut the fuck up," you say, on reflex, “It is not a—”

Your eyes go up past him over his shoulder for just a second—the Grand Highblood is still staring at you with unwavering intensity.  His expression doesn’t seem to have changed an inch; he’s not moving in a threatening way or growling or anything, but…he’s just…staring.  You come to the quiet but abrupt conclusion that badmouthing miracles in front of the head of Gamzee’s bullshit church might not be a smart idea. 

“Sure,” you say, really carefully.  “…Sure, fine, whatever the fuck you want to call it, you pan-leak.”

Gamzee makes a ridiculous joyful croon and cuddles you even harder.  Half the time you’re enveloped in a mess of shaggy hair or you have your face squished up against his (bare, what the fuck?) chest, but the other half of the time you keep an eye on the Grand Highblood and, finally, he moves.  Turns to the empress and says something very, very quietly.  He turns without waiting for her to answer, and leads the way back behind the old, thick doors, pulling them shut behind him.

A few seconds of tense wondering later, Gamzee apparently decides his new plan is to literally hug you to death, and you have to punch him in the thorax a couple of times to even get him to notice you can’t get any air.  He lets go reluctantly, but only enough to shove his arms out in front of him and dangle you at the ends of them like a meowbeast.

You look each other over properly for the first time.  He looks amazed and impressed, which he fucking should be; you look badass and kickass and hotass and whatever other kinds of asses are available.  You know you're not the nubby, crumpled little mess in an anonymous huge sweater that he saw once or twice over a trollian call. 

You're not the only one who's changed, though.  Holy shit.  Holy fucking shit.  Gamzee was small before too, you're pretty sure—small for a highblood, so still definitely bigger than you, but he'd been a scrawny, weedy little asshole with teeth too big for his mouth.  If you'd ever let yourself wonder what he would look like at 13, you would have figured he'd be maybe a head taller than you, still a sad, dopey kicked barkbeast in too-big clothes.  But the troll grinning back at you has dark, healthy horns and a narrow, pretty, hard-edged face, with a smile that's grown into his fangs.  He's not wearing his paint, for some reason, or a fucking shirt, which means this is how you get to find out he's the kind of purpleblood who's got seadweller complexion splatters and a shimmer of very faint scaling along his cheekbones.   His bare thorax still doesn't have even a hint of bounce tissue on it, but it's startlingly filled out with lean, ropy muscles and he's covered in scars and highblood decorations, little gold and silver piercings in his half-fins and—holy shit.  There are studs in his horns.  How the fuck did Gamzee Makara of all fucking trolls end up with horn studs?  Right at the bases of them, too—you saw a big, scarred-up old brownblood get one out near the tip of his horn, once, and he just about threw up.

"Holy shit, you got fucking enormous," you say, because what the fuck else are you going to say, really.  His hands cover massive chunks of your thorax, long fingers and broad palms, holding you up easily.  "Have you even pupated yet?  I thought I was a mutant freak, holy fuck."

He ducks his head, long, downy ears going deep purple at the ends—looks back up at you, and gives you a look so unexpectedly pleased and shy you feel your face go hot.  "Best friend," he repeats, and folds you back up into his arms to squeeze you again, nuzzling against the side of your neck like you're some kind of wriggler's comfort toy.  Wow, okay, fuck.  You never thought much about what he'd be like in person either, but you probably should've known he'd be a handsy asshole. 

How the fuck is this surreal bullshit your life?  You're in the heart of the church fleet, getting cuddled by an actual fucking highblood.  He's not as cold as the empress, but his skin is cool against yours—fuck knows you have plenty of opportunity to notice, considering he's shirtless and the cheek rubbing against your neck is clean and bare.

"Why the fuck aren't you wearing your paint?" you say, and wiggle around fruitlessly in an attempt not to get cracked in the cheek by Gamzee's horns.  "I thought on this ship for sure, you'd be wearing your—"

He drops you.

Just drops you, from his full height like a sack of rocks, and you have to twist and roll to avoid falling directly onto your ass. Gamzee backs away from you and hunches over on himself, and you can see the purple at the tips of his ears rush down to his fins and across the back of his neck as you get up, growling.  

"What the fuck do you—" you start, and then falter as voices rise behind the door to the throne room, so loud even the thick metal can't muffle them.  You and Gamzee both turn to look—he twists away from you at an awkward angle, and when you try to lean over to look at his expression, he only shuffles around further. 

You can hear the empress snapping—you hear the Grand Highblood say something about mutants and your pusher sinks like a stone.  You can't make out most of the words—Gamzee probably hears more, with ears like those, but he doesn't seem interested in sharing.  Fuck.  Goddammit.  You'd figured the empress had already dealt with anybody whose opinion might sway her, but if the Grand Highblood wants you culled your odds aren't great.  Fuck.  Why the hell did you figure it was a good idea to come here?  What kind of dumbass was past you?! FUCK.

Gamzee makes a tiny noise beside you, and you give him a worried look, waiting for bad news—but he doesn't seem to be listening to the argument inside anymore.  His whole body is bending in on itself, and his shoulders are shuddering in faint, shivering waves.  He doesn't seem to notice you looking at him; his eyes are wide and unfocused, fixed on the ground in front of him. 

"...Gamzee?" you say, and his ear twitches toward you but the rest of him doesn't move, frozen in place and trembling.  "Hey, it's not you they're pissed off at, okay?  I'm pretty fucking sure—Gamzee?"

He jumps and looks up.  The tremors are getting worse in his hands and his legs, and his ears are pinned back in something like fear.  It would look like pure terror, if his fins weren't also flared and his lips weren't peeled back, showing an alarming slice of long, white fangs as he pants.  You've seen the empress and her seadwellers facing off, you know fin-flaring is a challenge display, a response to a threat.  He doesn't look like he's ready to fight somebody, though.  He's shaking all over.

His eyes focus on your face, and he immediately straightens his back, pulling up that wide, careless smile again—it's fake and see-through as fuck, and he must know it, because he covers his face a second later and turns away from you again.  "Sorry," he says, late and too loud.  "Sorry!  I spaced out."

"You look fucking awful," you say, and he winces.

"I spaced out," he says again, mumbling, and tries to turn away from your stare.

"You don't look spaced out, you look like trampled shit."  Something is going on here.  You look again, and this time you don't get distracted by the bare face and the jewelry and the smile—some of the scars on him are fresh, there are shadows of fading bruises scattered across his bare thorax.  The subtle dullness of bandages in the dim light.  His arms wrap around himself defensively as you look at him, like he wants to hide from you.

"Gamzee," you say, and he hunches down, hiding behind the shaggy mess of his hair.  "Gamzee, hey.  Are you, uh...are you okay, man?"

"I'm good!" says Gamzee, fast and fake, and takes a stumbling step away from you like he's about to bolt.  When you grab his arm, he makes a sharp, terrible noise and tugs at your grip.  He should be able to pull away without even trying, but he can't seem to remember how.  His fingers are curling to show his claws, his fins are flared—it's a hell of a threat display, but when you look at the frond you've got a grip on, his claws are round and ragged.  Somebody chopped them off.

"Gamzee," you say, honestly fucking freaked out now, and he yanks on your grip again, breathing sharp and ragged.  "Gamzee!  Whoa, fuck.  Fuck.  You need to, uh—sit down, or, or something—?"

Gamzee jerks—jerks again, weird, seizure movements—jerks a third time, and this time a hoarse, awful sound snaps out of him with the movement—HA—HAHA! And he’s laughing, gasping, wailing laughs that sound more like screams than laughter, clutching at his thorax where one of the bandages wraps around, shaking his head convulsively.  You start to say something, to shout for help maybe, fuck, you don’t know—and then he crumples forward and hits the ground and you forget what the fuck words even are.  He’s laughing so hard his eyes are watering, so hard it comes out in hoarse sobs, and you think he might be trying to make words somewhere in there but god only knows what they’re supposed to be. 

You don’t know what the fuck you’re planning to do, but it’s not logical thinking driving you when you reach out and cup his face in your hands, stroking his wet cheek feverishly as his laughter turns to sobbing and then to snarls and then back to laughter again.  His eyes stare right through you, knife-edge pupils and red-orange sclera, and when you trace a thumb awkwardly along the arch of his cheekbone his breath catches for just a second and he gasps in a breath.  Another one.  His shaking hands rise a little, starting to reach for you—

“What the FUCK is going on here?!”

A huge hand closes like a steel trap around your arm and tugs you up so hard it almost lifts you off the ground.  Gamzee wails as your hand jerks away from his face, thrashing, trying to reach out after you, and the Grand Highblood’s grip on you loosens just enough for you to dive forward and grab Gamzee again, cup his face in your hands and shoosh him.  He gasps at your touch and then dives toward you and clings. 

The Grand Highblood’s hand takes your wrist, tensing like he wants to pull you away—he hesitates and you squeeze Gamzee and glare up at him. 

“Something happened,” you say, and the empress appears next to him, brows furrowed.  You address it at her, not him—he’s purple in the ears and they’re both breathing hard.  There’s considerably more emotion in his face than when he was just staring at you—worry, mostly.  It sits weirdly on his grotesquely-painted face.  “He started laughing really fucking hard and fell over all of a sudden, don’t know what he was laughing about—or what the fuck happened, but I’m not hurting him, okay?!  Holy fuck—”

“Karkat.”

You jump at the sound of your name and then turn back to Gamzee—he’s still staring past you, through you—but his hands have come up toward you and as you lean in they find the front of your uniform and clench there, shaking.  Those hands that were big enough to hold you up without an effort seem delicate when they fist up trembling handfuls of your jacket.  You can’t help yourself to save your life—you lean in and hum stupid, broken fragments of comforting words to him, pet his tear-streaked cheeks and his twitching ears and the sides of his throat as it works around guttural, tiny sounds. 

His eyes come back to the present, eventually.  He blinks and breathes deep and hard and his eyes refocus on you and the hallway around him and the Grand Highblood crowding in next to you possessively, staring at Gamzee with absolutely idiotic amounts of concern.  Right, you forgot.  Clowns.  “family”.  Creepy as shit.

Gamzee glances over at him too, and all of a sudden his face crumples again, his eyes well back up.  “No,” he says, half a sob, “—Please don’t—” and one hand leaves your thorax to reach out to the Grand Highblood, shaking.  Don’t?  Don’t what?  If he tries to—god, to cull him for this or something—you’ll—

The Grand Highblood leans in close to your back, reaches out a hand and cups Gamzee’s face in one big palm, as gently as any serendipitous goddamn quadrant. 

Your brain comes to a screeching halt.  Gamzee shudders and gasps and then takes a breath, and another, settling.  The words come again, faster now.  “Don’t,” he says again, “—Don’t, don’t, m’okay, please, fuck—don’t l-look at me like, l-like that…”

“Holy shit,” you hear yourself say distantly, and lean forward away from the cold, broad chest that’s weirdly close to your back, which has the added bonus of pressing you up against Gamzee and letting him wrap himself around you.  You think it helps his shivering.  “Holy shit, what the fuck—“

“Little one, you’re out now,” says the Grand Highblood softly.  His voice is so fucking deep it seems to make your bones thrum, and right now it’s ungodly warm and soft, indecently gentle.  If you didn’t know better, you’d almost think he sounds…pitying.  But that’s not right, so your only option is to conclude that clowns are weird fucking exhibitionists and leave it at that.  “You’re safe, and they’re all being paid in full for what they motherfucking dared to do—”

Your thinkpan flashes to the scars and bandages, the hysterical sobbing laughter.  “What?”  You pull back a little, and good fucking god, your thinkpan actually bumps against the Grand Highblood’s jaw, he’s sitting so close.  You feel 100% unfuckingsafe.  “What are you talking about?  What happened?”

Then you realize how interrogative and sharp that sounded and flinch forward, half-expecting those teeth that are so close to you to sink into your throat.  He doesn’t even seem to hear you.  That big, scarred hand traces Gamzee’s cheek almost tenderly and wipes away tears—tucks some of his wild hair out of his eyes. 

“What is there I can do?”  he asks, and Gamzee closes his eyes and sighs and shakes, and the words echo and repeat in your head and you are beginning to think you’re in way, way over your head.  “What is there I can do to fix this?”

Chapter Text

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and you’re five and a half.

You just broke your finger.

Sure is busted as fuck, you figure, and turn your hand around and look at it, how it sits wrong against the others, all swelled up and crooked.   Don’t feel so bad though.  Feels all…sharp.  Pounding.  When you try at moving your frond, it makes hot stuff shoot out through your bones and your whole body gets to feeling all kind of…weird.

You search on your husktop, shivering up and down you when your snapped finger drags or twitches, WhAt DoEs A bRoKeAsS fInGeR fEeL lIkE?

Well probably pain, dumbass, is the first thing that pops up, and you look at the miracle answer and run your other hand’s fingers real slow over that one, thinking.  Broken bones hurt. 

Well if that’s what it feels like, hurting, you don’t see as how other motherfuckers got a problem with it.  Feels…nice.  Weird.  But it makes parts of you do shit you don’t understand and that ain’t ever sat too well with you, so you tie your finger to its brother next to it to keep it still, and the hurting eases after a couple pies and goes right gone again after a couple nights. 

--

You’re six and a half, and a handful of sweeps out from conscription, when the hormones and shit your body’s trying to turn out start to slam through even the sopor.  You see shit on the sidebars of the videos of bright lights and colors you like on your husktop, shit that makes you stop and look.  Long lines of backs, open softness of mouths, sweet swell of rumble-spheres, hungry fangs and claws with spades in the titles. 

The first time you click one you watch with eyes wide and mouth open.  You watch them snap at each other and when one sinks fangs in deep and comes away with teal blood on her fangs your insides do something powerful strange. 

You learn a fuckload about your body you didn’t rightly know that first day—watch them sink their fangs and claws in and your hand finds your belly and drags over it points-first, soft and scared and then harder, harder.  You leave purple lines across your flesh. 

You’re worked up and panting by the time that first one ends, and it’s by the second one you listen at what your body wants and drag your pants off, scramble to get between your legs and just about howl at what you find there, pant and twitch and shudder.  On the screen matesprits twine up around each other and you watch them through wet eyes, shudder and touch and watch them be so fucking gentle with each other.  So sweet and so fucking close and saying the nicest shit, I love you I’d never leave you we were meant for each other I love you I love you—

Orgasms, you figure out, after a couple messy searches that finally get results when you get it to something like LjdfkjJLWhaT hwnE YoU tOUchH YoufRSEfl nd fELs ReALly gOod//?  Wow okay, what the fuck.  More than any possible shit you have ever said it about, which is motherfucking saying something…miracles.  That.  That was.  Wnhhnnnnghhh.

That’s about the noise your thinkpan makes for like an hour and a half after, and then you finally get yourself up a little and set out to see if you can’t bring that miracle to happening again.

You go deeper, more videos, looking for what you need, looking for more good feeling—you forget to eat a pie when the moons go down like you normally get to doing.  And at the end of the day as the moons start to rise back up again to light up the dimming sky and you not sleeping at-fucking-all, you find…something else.

You find a troll huddled up in chains, spread out and naked.  Pulls at the chains and you imagine how you’d be held still for touching and feel that feeling your starting to get acquainted with, that gasping twitch up and down your insides.   

And then another fucker comes out from the edge of the picture and they start screaming and saying no, no please and your good feeling turns sour at the edges. 

You watch pain happen with eyes that water at how good you feel, and see their face as they thrash in misery and feel like you’re gonna lose what little you got in your acid sac right now.  The blade slices up through flesh and there’s screaming and the blood is blue but it’s close enough to your caste as no fucking matter and you gasp out a curse and you feel like you’re so close you can taste sweet white light on your tongue but—

…But you don’t want to be that poor fucker, locked up and hurt and scared.  You feel a sorrow and hurting for them, like the dumb fucker you are. You want that warm touch, the way those two in the second video looked at each other, but the more you watch the more you find that not happening.  The more you find it can’t be the both.  You can’t be hurt and loved both.  Even hated, the real pitch way, you wouldn’t be hurt like that. 

But you watch them put their claws between each other’s legs, joke that they’ll dig them in and you want to see them do it. 

--

“What the fuck?” says the brother you’re tangled up around, and digs his claws the deeper in his shock.  Deeper still when your head goes back and your breath sighs and moans out of you.  “What the fuck?!”

“Please,” you breathe, and he pulls his claws away like you burned him and stares at you.  “Hnnf—nn, no, come on—motherfucker c’mon please ‘m so close—”

--

"Welcome to the holy battleship Dark Carnival, you rowdy little freaks," says the Grand Highblood, half purr of welcome half growl of a threat.  When he leans on his pulpit and looks out over you all, you can see muscle work up his arms and through his thorax.  You swallow real hard, and even through the foggy sopor haze, you can feel your throat dry.  You lick your lips and dig your claws at your own legs and swallow down the noise that means to come out of you.  "We're gonna show you little motherfuckers how we came to own the motherfucking galaxy."

--

“You dumb little FUCKER!”  howls the Grand Highblood, and he hits you, slaps you full across the face.  Even through the fuzzy ache in your eyes, that hurts.  You groan and laugh all breathless and he growls.  “Do you have any GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING IDEA how fucking strong that shit is?!  If I ever see you fucked up on this stuff again—if I ever hear a motherfucking WORD about it, I’m gonna TEAR YOU LIMB FROM MOTHERFUCKING MESSIAH-DAMNED LIMB!!”

You imagine that in the dark heat behind your eyes, whimper just once and pass the fuck out.

--

“What?”  You sit up a little straighter, and she looks away a bit, not quite at you.  “Heard—  What's that mean, what'd you hear?”

“Just that…I dunno, brother.”  She shrugs.  “That you might do something weird.  No clue.”

You play normal as you know how and then reach down in the blind moment as she comes and dig your claws in your own flesh.  It’s guilty and hot and wet, shameful in the dark.  Good feeling stolen unknowing.  You smile at her the next night and go back to your own ship and cry all night alone in your block and don’t know quite why.

--

“You bend real good at the wrists,” says the Grand Highblood, half-laughing, and pushes harder.  You feel your bones creak with just the twist of his hand.  If you pushed back—if you…

It’s sudden and crazy and motherfucking stupid.  You bite your lip and do it anyway.

--

Your name is Kurloz Makara and

Well

Fuck.

Chapter Text

“…I want to fuck you.”

Gamzee’s eyes go startled-round.  He opens his mouth, closes it again—he’s struck so dumb you’re writing up his denials and demurring in your pan already, for all he’s only ever seemed eager for it.

“If,” he starts, and his voice comes tiny and faltering.  You take it for fear a moment, and your pusher doubles its beating—you tried to impress to him how careful you meant to be, you didn’t mean to put some fear of you in him—but he licks his lips, swallows hard, breathes.  “If I can walk all night and day after you’re done with me, brother,” he says, and he looks up at you and you see in his face he’s scared like you are, excited like you are.  “Saints and messiahs, I’m gonna be so motherfucking disappointed in you.”

You’re so damned fond of him, it takes your breath a second.  Then you think on his words, realize his answer, and a breathlessness of a whole other sort comes on you.  You’re going to fucking ruin him.

“If you can walk a week after I’m done with you," you say, and your whole body is starting a slow burning now, you can feel it thrum out in your chatterbox and growl in the air.  “I’m gonna be so motherfucking disappointed at myself.”

You kiss him then, deep and sweet and thankful, and he whimpers and takes to it with something just short of frenzy.  His hands grope at you, his hips rut up sharp and helpless against yours.  You have to laugh—reach down and hold him, keep and calm him a little.  You want his passion, but not a frenzy, no.  You’ve planned and considered too fucking long, waited too wanting for this to be a rut against a wall in the dark.  Those can come later. 

“Slowly, little brother,” you say, and back him up against the wall, crowd him against it until his precious shaking body is pressed hard against you.  He breathes in shallow little gasps, fighting the weight of you, breathless, pinned and helpless and so fucking pretty.  He whimpers sharp and rubs his face against your throat to breathe you in, and you fucking hunger for him. “Slow down,” you say again, and it’s half to yourself.

He squirms and you hold him still; he growls and groans.  “Come on!” he says, and you laugh and he growls all the louder.  “Come on, motherfucker!  Don’t you fuck around with me right now, fuckin’ asshole—”

Frustrates so easy, your little one.  “Just wanna make this last,” you say, like you’re not even aware how fucking bad he wants.  When you strip him you make it slow, and it’s only partly to frustrate him—gorgeous, how your matesprit comes bare for you, like unwrapping something sanctified.  Having him hold still and take it for you as you lay him naked.

You don’t mean to work him up quite so far as you do—don’t realize how he’s working himself up until you start to clean his paint and his fangs click and snap in aggravation, dangerous-close to biting at you.  You consider, and then take the strip of cloth you were cleaning at him with, and shove it between his fangs.

He glares at you in affront like a meowbeast flicked on the nose.  You press your finger over his mouth, and he groans complaints, for all his body presses against your weight again.  For all his breath shudders.

When you lead him on through to your pailing block, he stops a second and shudders at the sight.  Looks arrested, all but scared—the smell of him speaks different, a hot, needy thing, delicious. 

You come sit down on the edge of the platform, and he comes to you in shy steps; when you take him and reel him in, run your fronds all up and down the strong, sure arch of his back, his lashes flutter and he shivers.  When you grab his ass, he squeaks though the gag and jumps. 

When you leave off and go back to his paint again, he gives a growling whine of rage at you and tries to snap his fangs again on the cloth stuffed between them.  You have to laugh; grip his throatstem, hold him still and clean him up, ignoring how he tries to rub up eager against your thigh.  You pay no mind to it, until he tries to reach up for the gag—you growl at him and he makes a soft and surrendering noise. 

“Don’t you fucking dare,” you tell him.  “You’ll have it out in a minute.  You don’t wanna know what I’d do to you if you touched it, little one.”

It’s an arresting thought, what all you could do—how long you could keep him tied up and begging mercy, if you could string him out so long and make him come so hard he passed out from pleasure.  But Gamzee puts his hands away and only disobeys so far as to make a snarky, muffling noise and roll his eyes at you. 

The noise he makes is far sweeter, when you wrap your fronds round his ribs and give a slow, long squeeze.  He pants, he moans.  It must ache, and he’s trying to grind against you again.

“I could crush you,” you tell him, gentle, and squeeze just to feel him creak and groan.  “Just a little squeeze.  Break you, just like that.”

He moans again, of pain as much as wanting this time; your claws are in his flesh, first blood drawn and slick on your fingers, and the want to tear into him is strong and heady like the best fucking elixir.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” you say, soft and low to him, and he whines and nods quick and desperate.  Fuck, he’s so hungry for it.  The reminder of how he was made for you to hurt is so fucking sweet.  “You’d like that.  I could make my claws meet right through you, little one.  Every precious brittle piece of you would snap like nothing and you’d love every second.”

You pull his head back by the hair, tangle his curls in your fingers like silk and look at the trembling, needy arch of him.  Strong and lean and fragile and precious. 

“This is going to hurt,” you promise him, and he whimpers and trembles and tugs at your grip of his hair like he’s desperate to nod, to beg you yes, yes, please the only way he has.  Something in you hungers for that, for the muted noises of his wanting, for how he strains helpless for more of your touch; you bite down at the tender place his neck meets his shoulder, directly under one empty gillslit, and when you bury your claws in his back he screams out loud and thrashes, pants and chokes against your chest.  Makes soft and animal sounds through the gag, muffled to soft and open screaming, gasping cries with every breath.

When he’s slumped and settled, you reach down and pull the cloth out of his mouth, and he makes a sound of sweet agony and then jerks his hands loose as fast as you’ll let him.  You made sure not to touch him, not to let it quite satisfy; he reaches down desperate to touch himself, working at himself so filthy-frantic it makes your bulge ache.  Writhing in your lap, panting and twisting and working at himself with both hands like some desperate fucktoy from the most motherfucking decadent of pailing videos. 

“See?” you say, as he works himself out to dazed panting, slumping on your lap.  “Can’t savor the damn moment.  Greedy little motherfucker.”

He’s well out for the moment; you lay him down gentle on the pailing platform and duck out to clean up, clear your own paint, undress; when you come back he’s still laid out and shaking, but he’s half-unsheathed again and his hands seek around for you, ears flicking and nose twitching and claws scraping slow and eager at the sheets.  You want to bite his thighs, beat his skinny ass until his squeaks and whimpers, put needles to the softest parts of him until he sobs.  But you want other things as well, and you settle down and lift him up to your lap again instead, kiss his bare temple and up the base of his horn and feel him cling and purr and rub up against you.

His purr stutters out after a minute or two—awareness coming back to him, slow and steady like moonrise.  He looks up at you frowning, foggy and slow like he’s trying to think something through. 

“Hey, what the fuck,” he says, and you raise your eyebrows at him. “Thought you said you’d—”

You get a hand on the toy in his nook and grind it up hard into him, and he lets out a sharp and wonderful cry, arches up against you and clings at you.  You can feel him clench and shudder, trying to press down at the unyielding weight of it, and you’re fucking hungry for him.  Fuck.  You’re going to fill him so well he can’t hardly breathe to scream.  You’re going to make him cry for mercy because he can’t bear to feel so fucking good.

“Just getting you warmed up, little one,” you say, and he chirps and whimpers soft and mouths at your chest in aimless worship, soft lips and slick fangs.  You fuck the toy in and out of him slow and easy, and he doesn’t even complain this time, just makes wanting noises and nuzzles into you, hips rocking.  “Gotta get you nice and relaxed—mm.  Good and ready.”

He moans in longing and presses his lips to you again—again, and you realize with a shot of something softer and sweeter that he’s following the line of scars across your skin, not desperate and open-hungry like he kisses your lips—gentler, warmer.  He’s so precious.  His pity for you, who tortures and torments, his love that looks right through into you so deep he might as well carve you open with it and claim your pusher with his own two hands. 

You slow, stretch the toy in and out of him slow and hard—and then draw it finally free and set it aside, breathing in deep at the slick noise of it, the sudden fresh smell of how he wants you.  Trolls are fucking animals, you know this, and you feel it.  Smell of him makes you want to press him down and taste every fucking inch of him.

When you stroke him he all but sobs for you, tries to slam down onto your fingers, struggles to ride them like they’re something to satisfy; when you hold his hips still he gives another snarl of frustration, cracked to a cry.  Spreads his legs wide as they’ll go, panting and moaning for your touch.

“Do it,” he pleads, and you consider that with wicked slowness as he struggles to get on your fingers.  When you give a sharp little pinch at the base of his bulge he cries out; when you take your fingers away from him completely he moans like you’re killing him. 

He does more than moan when he sees you reach down and touch yourself; pupils go wide and black and hungry as a predator scenting prey, he jerks at your grip hard like he wants to climb on your bulge so bad he’d fight you for it.  He growls, twists at your grip, struggles and then cries out again in frustration when you keep him from moving.  Growls, “Motherfuckin’ do it already, do it you fffh, aggravating motherfucker!”

“Patience,” you tell him, and for a second you think he might well claw at you.

“I did patience!” he gasps out, and you have to laugh.  The wriggler thinks a single sweep is patience.  The motherfucker is so small and precious and doesn’t even get his motherfucking know on yet.  “Been patience to fucking hell and back!  I did patience, are you gonna get your move on and fuck me, or—”

You do love him so, and he’s been so very sweet for you, and your bulge is about to drop the fuck off from lack of using—and you haven’t ever been able to refuse his begging, his shameless and wanton pleading.  You hitch forward on his hips and let yourself start to have him and he chokes off in a whisper of “Oh, fuck…” and clenches up tight and cool and slick as sweetest sin around you. 

Motherfuck he’s tight.  You open your eyes with effort and see part of why; see his face tense and worrying, watching you like he worries you’ll judge him lacking somehow.  You see how he trembles and the tightness of his body and force yourself to slow and halt. 

“If I really am tearing you, inside,” you say, and see him try to attend, see him bite his lips and listen while his body shudders for you, his flesh clenches and wants.  “If I’m hurting you some way that won’t be fixed, you tell me.  Don’t care how good it feels.  You hear me?”

He huddles down a little at that, convicted, and you have to smile at his sweet fuckin’ heart.  Turn his face up, and kiss him soft. 

“I like your nook, you know,” you tell him, breath of his breath, and let yourself move again, deeper in him, feeling him tight and wanting around you as his breathing starts to hitch and catch against your lips.  “I want to get a lot more use out of it.  Don’t want to break my favorite toys.”

You doubt it as you hear it come from your mouth—presuming and cruel, claiming ownership—but he makes a noise that twists you up like a knot inside and arches his back, whimpering words you don’t even know if he hears himself say, yes yes fuck oh fuck yes.  You have to laugh at his eagerness, and you bite him hard all up and down his neck as reward; deep and hard, merciless with the pain.  You get him shaking like that, so fucking tight, and every time you shift he only grows tighter. 

You tell him “Fucking relax,” and you know he tries, nods fast and tries so hard for you, but it doesn’t do much good.  You can see the ache grow in him as it starts to hurt him, and it’s all your self-control not to just let yourself lash inside him, watch it break him. 

Instead you stop and take his horns in your hands, and he squeaks and then gives a blurry-edged moan as he loosens and softens for you.  It almost hurts you, and you know it’s more than ‘almost’, for him—he’s whimpering soft on every breath now, trying to fight his way loose and press down on you—

“Kurloz,” he says, slurs the word dazed, and gives a shaking sound, rolls back his neck to moan, beatific and beautiful.  “Hurts.”

Your hips jerk despite yourself, you press hard forward into him and he howls, a jagged little gasping thing only as long as he has breath for.

You breathe and hold still and fucking gasp for control, and don’t do anything fucking stupid. 

“Fuck,” you say again, spit the word out instead of the blasphemy you want to say, desperate curses and prayers, naming him with the motherfucking saints.  “Hha, fuck, that’s good.”

Gamzee make a noise agreeing and tries again to press down on you, and you can smell how bad he wants it, see it on his face.  Sweat and flush and the start of tears, overwhelmed in his eyes.  He’s so fucking beautiful.

“Okay,” you say, and let yourself speed up, hold him hard and lower him, let go mercy and sink deeper into the tight silk and squeeze and tremble of his body.  “You fucking asked for it.”

He screams for you just like you’ve dreamed, when you let yourself be reckless with him; tosses his head back, heaves for shaking breaths.  You can feel new, just-warmer wetness—he’s bleeding, you think, and it makes you feel monstrous how that makes you want him harder, except he’s straining and sobbing to take more.  He hardly seems to know what you do to him; you take his bulge and toy with it, pinch the tip, rub callous and clawtip across every most sensitive places along it, and he jerks like you’ve stabbed him, weeps like you’re killing him.  Shudders like he’s coming, and keeps on shuddering.  Keeps on and on and on, lying up against you, limp for your hands, helpless for your using, beautiful and fucking perfect and tight, holy messiahs.

You hardly hear your own praise of him—little one, messiahs take me, Gamzee, fuck—you only have ears for the little sounds of his agony and eagerness.  Holding him so tight your fronds tremble and shake, his flesh bruising under your fingertips as he cries out endless and eager for more. 

And then it’s done.

You’re still for a second, just panting, catching your breath as best as you can.  It’s every single fucking piece of all your self-control not to move, a struggle enough to make you fucking cry, but when you look down at him he’s swaying, not moving, hardly breathing, slumped forward.  Worry takes you, overrides even the motherfucking glory he’s working on your body, the too-tight smoothness of him, the trembling of his flesh filled and stretched past tolerating.

He lifts up his head after a second—looks at you with eyes like glass.  His mouth hangs soft and slack, his jank-ass gillflaps so like yours rise and spread and try to get air through gills that aren’t there.  He’s in pieces.  Broken and shattered.  He’s beautiful.  He’s gone.

“Gamzee,” you say, and he gives a soft, shivering sob of a sound, a swell of ragged purring that comes and fades again.  “Tell me you’re alright, sweetheart.”

He stares at you like you didn’t speak, at you and through you.  Takes those deep, fast little breaths and makes a tiny, weeping chirr of affection, dying-animal weak.  You say his name again, and again; he doesn’t see you.  Makes no sign he hears.

There’s a fear in you now, a rising fear that makes you reach for his shoulders and squeeze, shake him a little.  His head sways with it, his eyes blink slow and blank.

“Gamzee,” you say, sharper.  “Fucking hell.  Talk to me, little brother.”

He groans, long and low and breathless—you touch his face, sweat and tears, drool and blood, his hair stuck to his slick skin, his lip swelling and bloody from biting.  He nudges against your hand, cloudy-eyed—licks at your fingertip, when you touch his lip.  Purrs, in small and breaking swells.

“Gamzee,” you say, and he blinks at the raising of your voice—blinks again, and then groans.  You wait as he shifts a little at a time—as his eyes slowly come to focus, move around dizzy, settle on your face.  Conviction comes on you, sudden as death—you broke him beyond fixing, and the horror of it is beyond your ability to survive—

“Mm,” Gamzee says, tiny and trembling-weak, and he draws in another breath, shakes.  “Mmm.  More.”  Another breath—he shifts himself just so slightly and you bite your cheek and don’t move.  Don’t move.  “Hhfuck.  More.”

Holy shit.

The worry leaving you is like renewing of the pleasure ten times over.  You drop your head back and laugh a little, sigh out the fear like a poison.  When you touch his face this time he turns his cheek into your hand, and when you touch his swelling lip he sighs and shivers all around you.  You can feel the rippling living movement of him, and you shudder with him, just for a second, how fucking good it feels.

“Saints and messiahs,” you say, sighing again, and pet at him, stroke all along his body just to feel him respond to you again.  When you come back to touch his lip he shivers again and then gasps hard as his body clenches down at you without his intention.  His own twitch and clench tortures him as much as you do, and it’s so fucking beautiful you can’t hardly breathe.

“More,” he begs you again, and you hold him flush against you and shift in him, let your body do what it wants for a second or two and just move in him.  He keens just from that, shudders around looking for something to hold onto and finds his own hair, your shoulders, your hands on his hips.  Clinging to you, pleasure shaking through him like lightning.  “Fuck,” he gasps out, cracked ruin of a voice.  “Fuck, messiahs, oh, fuck.  More, fucking, more—!”

You have to laugh, helpless, at your own worry.  For all the hard lessons of pleasure you’ve learned of him, haven’t you learned even more there’s no pain you can do to hurt him?  Haven’t you learned, Kurloz, don’t you ever fuckin’ learn?  And you brought him down from some high and holy place, all for nothing.

Still though, it’s nicer to have him here with you.  You lean in and find where you put your teeth to his neck, lick up the salty-sweet of his blood and feel his bulge slide in worn-out needing against your belly, overused and tender, pinned between the two of you and vulnerable, he’s so wide-open for you.  You could tear the heart out of him and he'd beg you to sink in your claws.

“Greedy little wriggler,” you say into his neck, and kiss him hard, stroke his shaking back, grip his hips again and hold him steady.  “Gave me cause to think I fuckin’ broke you and that’s all you’ve got to say about it?  Didn’t even ask politely, you little shit.”

He opens his mouth to answer, and you lash in him hard.  He screams, oh messiahs but he screams so pretty for you, clenches on you like slick silk, strangling-tight, and wails out as you do it again and again and again.  “Let’s fucking hear you, little one, let me hear you…”

“Hurts!” he bursts out, great howling sob like a sinner driven beyond his wits.  Struggling again to stay with you, words stumbling out of him in fits and starts between his moaning and his screams.  “Messiahs, yes, yes, yeah, I can’t, I, you’re—” he sobs again as you move, quivers tense and then slumps, wrecked and gasping.  He whines like you’ve driven the air from him, like you’re ruining him, like you’re—  “Fuckin' killing me, brother, please—”  

You slow a moment at that, a sting of concern—he wails in frustration and drags at your shoulders, your arms, your hair, half-feral how bad he wants it.  “Harder!” he begs you, “I need it, harder, fuck, come on hurt me—”

Fuck.  Something this perfect can’t be right, something this good has to be a sin.  You must be damned, for how he shakes and pleads and writhes in your lap, how you grind up into him and smell blood and see his eyes overflow and his face go slack and sweet and empty with pleasure.  He struggles his way back to himself a second later—draws your hand back up to his cheek and kisses it, clumsy with what you’re doing to him, and gasps against your skin when he rocks down onto you on purpose. 

Your head goes snapping back at the feeling, and his eyes are on your face, he moves on you with intent.  Slow and sliding pressure, hurting himself on your body, taking the pleasure he wants and watching with worshipping eyes as your self-control strips away from you.  Your voice cracks like a troll a hundredth your age, your saying of his name is barely more than begging. 

It startles you when he dives up and kisses you, sudden and deep—you didn’t know how hungry you were for his mouth until he came to you, but you realize it now so sudden and sweet it hurts.  You kiss him back, curl around him, taste his gasps and sighs.  Your hands that have held him as anchors, bruising your touch into his hips, you shift again—stroke up along his body and twist hard at every soft place you can find, sink in your claws, get your fingers in his gill-slits and force them open to dig into the tender places inside.  Pull his hair, take your claws to his horns, and feel his nook do something fucking glorious around you, drawing you fast and far toward an edge, toward some ending—

“Wait,” he gasps, and it takes you a second to even make sense of the word.  “Wait, w—ah—!  W-wait—”

You never had a harder motherfucking challenge than making yourself slow and stop.  Manage it you do, though, because he’s so precious in your arms, because you thought you’d broken him today, because he’s asking you to.  You stop yourself, and breathe, and manage, “Yeah?  Fuck.  Yeah?” in choking tone that hardly sounds like yourself.

He gives half a laugh and tries to brace himself, moans “Don’t stop, don’t stop, just—  Just—"

There’s a spirit of cruelty in you still, and he’s clear you’re to keep going—you wait until he gets his voice, until he fits the pieces of himself together into a whole again, and then when he starts “How—” you rub back up in him again and he moans and loses it, precious and helpless.  Crumples at your moving like a puppet with his strings knotted in your hands.  You do that three or four times, and he gets increasing-salty at you until you reach down to where he’s stretched and find the sensitive place right at where his bulge meets his nook, pinch hard and tug at the nub there and make him fucking howl.  You didn’t motherfucking anticipate, weren’t ready—he tightens down and you choke off your laugh to a groan, trailing off long and low into a purr as he settles in aching jolts.

“Alright, little one,” you say, and pet his hair, his back and thighs, ease him back down.  Let him rock slow and easy, his own pace, let him catch his breath.  “What’s up?  Everything still good to a motherfucker’s liking?”

He nods fast and eager, so earnest-sweet with you you have to laugh.  Rub at a horn a little, just to make him settle and his lashes lower.  His breathing slows and steadies. 

“Well, good then,” you say, and tug a curl.  “Bitchtits.  So—ah.”  Fuck, that feels nice.  “So, what’s up?”

“What’s it,” he starts, shaky, and takes a breath long and slow.  “Wh-what’s it—feel like?”

Asking the hard questions outta you, and right now when you’re so well wound up you’re about ready to lose your fucking mind.  You consider that—he rocks restless as he waits, and hiss through your teeth as his moving rubs slick and tight and close right at where you just pinched him to make him scream.  Fuck, but that feels nice.  You’d rip a motherfucker’s hand off if they did to you what you did to him, but fortunately he’s got no inclination—just rocks slow, works at you in long steady rolls of his bruised hips. 

“…What do you feel like,” you say, and you force your breath in and out and in again, calm.  He asked you to wait and you will fucking wait if it kills you.  Which right this second it feels like it might.  You reach out and touch his stomach and he whimpers and then moans frantic and shaking when you push.  Fucking hell, you can almost feel your own flesh through him.  Feel the tense and quiver of muscle, feel the shift under your palm as you move in him.  Fuck, this must be too much.  You can’t be allowed this.  “…How does this fucking feel, huh?”

“Please,” he moans.  You can’t help yourself—hurt him, hands hungry for his skin, finding the soft places of him, pinching and twisting and clawing and needling.  His thighs tremble where they’re spread around yours, and every time he clenches around you your own nook aches and your breath breaks in you.  He’s so fucking pretty when he cries, the ugliness and need of him, his desperation, he’s fucking gorgeous.  Getting the words together to answer his question takes you a while, and you amuse yourself by making him plead and shake and sob wretched for more.

“…Smooth as fuck,” you say finally, soft and loving, and he jumps like he forgot the question and then cries out when you reach down to grip his bulge again, teasing and torturing, too much and then too little.  He flinches up on his knees in shock, lifts off you a little, but his legs give out barely a second later and he sinks right back down with a hungry moan.  Pointless little struggles, here in your arms and all for you, your precious love.  You’d kill whoever saw him like this.

“Slick as sin,” you tell him, and he sobs and lets you hurt him.  “All around me, and you move so easy for you little one, I feel you fucking shake inside for me when I just…”

You squeeze his bulge, let go, squeeze and let go and make him clench and shudder around you like he’s a toy, a tool for your use.  Like he’s for your pleasure.  He sobs and shakes, and you want to kiss him and use him and fuck him and hurt him and hold him to your heart and never let him go.  You say, “Something’s fuckin’ wrong with me, sweetheart, how I like it when you feel so good you cry, when you’re so fucking helpless for me…”

You reach down and find where his flesh gives way for you, tight and hot and slick, the unbelievable stretch of him around you, and when you stroke him there he makes the most beautiful fucking noise you’ve ever heard in your goddamn life, panting and crying and screaming as you keep touching him, gasping against your skin, going away from you in pleasure. 

“I can feel you bleeding, little one,” you tell him, prayerful despite yourself, and he blinks up at you hard and fast, his eyes are wide and dark and won’t find focus.  He’s at the end of what he can do for you and he’s beautiful, he’s fucking beautiful like this, trusting you so much, letting you break his body so tender with your own two hands.  You grit your fangs together and try not to sob at how fucking close you are, how it almost hurts to feel this good—

“Khh,” Gamzee chokes out, and you thought he was long since too far to make words, but you know you don’t mistake the sound.  When you force open your eyes he’s watching you, sweat and blood and slurry, and you can see the beautiful obscene stretch of him around your bulge, the bruises and swollen tender places where you’ve played with him.  The last of him falling apart behind his eyes.  He says, “Kurloz,” slurred almost past recognizing, and he fucking smiles at you.

“Oh,” you say, and it breaks like a sob.  You don’t know what he’ll see on your face—for once you don’t fucking care, breaking apart as he does, falling to pieces.  “Oh, but you’ll be the motherfucking death of me, love.”

You kiss him hard, sting of his fangs on your lip, and he tries again to say your name, and that’s all, that’s plenty.  You press him close and hard against you, and let yourself come fully and shamelessly apart.

Chapter Text

She leaves it for after the first four courses, as everyone is just starting to relax, pleasantly drunk on the best soporific drinks in the empire.  At least, relax as much as it’s possible to relax with that…filth sitting up at the high table, tossing his horns and showing his fangs and purposely baring his throat to the whole hall.  Purpleblood slut.

He's not, and that doesn't make it any better.  He has no quadrants that anybody can discern, and he never brings any pretty unquadranted consorts like some of your fellow nobility do.  As far as you're aware, he hasn't even contributed to the drones since his status rendered him above the imperative. 

He just follows his orders.  Any orders.

Her Imperious Condescension lets the tension build for four courses before she looks at him; she catches his eye and inclines her head, and the purpleblood stands silently, immediately, still smiling and holding her eyes.  He shows no sign of awareness that he's being watched; he looks only at her face, slinking to her throne in fluid, noiseless steps and sinking down on his knees by her feet as gracefully as a bowing courtier.  Around you, the conversation rises, strained at the edges.

The empress reaches down and touches his face, and for a moment, watching out of the corner of your eye, you think the debauchery this time is going to be pale.  Then her hand shifts slowly forward and back, forward and back, and you realize her fingers are in his mouth, incautious of fangs that could tear out any throat at this party without an effort.  He seems to have his eyes closed—he lets her finger-fuck his mouth without protest.

You put a bite of perfectly juicy-rare hoofbeast steak in your mouth and chew desperately.

“How has trade been, my lord?”  you say to your neighbor—he’s staring straight ahead and down, eyes never quite flicking all the way to the main table.  He jumps a little and laughs mechanically, automatically.  Behind him as he turns his head, the empress says something quietly, laughs and pulls her fingers away wet. 

Her purpleblood licks his spit-slick lips and although his paint makes it hard to read his face, you think you see him smiling.  He says something in return, lips barely moving.  Whatever it is, it makes the empress let out a peal of delighted laughter, head thrown back.  For a second, everyone is deadly silent, frozen—then she responds, giggling quietly, and conversation surges back.  Looking?  Listening?  Nobody is, of course, doing either of those things.  Not after what happened to the last dumb fucker who pointed out how fucking disgraceful this debauchery is.

She leans back in her chair, grabbing a plate of breaded gobblefiend wings—he leans forward, head on her thigh, and goes still.  Her hand is possessive—threatening—on his throat, and any other troll would be asking to have their neck broken one-handed.  But he just sits by her chair, watching you all through lazy, hooded eyes. 

Every so often she’ll lean down a little and feed him a piece of meat with her fingers—he takes far too long to lick the grease from the meat off her perfectly-manicured claws.  His tongue is long and slick and black.  You make desperate conversation with your neighbor, who returns the favor gratefully. 

Another course gone, and they’re bringing out the stronger drinks now.  She holds one down and tips it back—he drinks deep and grins, open and wide this time, not the carefully-judged smirk he uses on the rest of you.  Your neighbor, who has been desperately imbibing, makes a pained whimpering noise as the empress takes a handful of the purpleblood’s hair and tugs, guiding him around in front of her chair and spreading her legs wide to drape them over his broad, sharp shoulders.  One hand goes back to ferrying candied ganderbulbs and wine-marinated eel tongue from plate to mouth—the other one closes in her purpleblood’s hair as she rocks her hips against his face and grins at all of you. 

You wish you were me, says that grin, and you can smell pheromones and frustration in the air.  Her oldest advisors sit on either side of her down the head table, calmly eating and apparently not in the least fazed.  One of them even leans over to the empress and says something to her, cocking her head down at the purpleblood—the empress snorts and nods and then leans her head back, closing her eyes.  The expression is one of wicked pleasure, lip curled, tongue sliding over her fangs. 

After another ten long minutes, she seems to have enough of his mouth.  She pulls back on his hair until he pulls back, taking deep breaths. 

She beckons, and for the first time he hesitates—his face is turned away, but tension flickers through his body.  A second later, though, he’s standing.  His face is impassive as he turns, sliding back into her lap so her chin fits into the crook of his shoulder.  Her fangs trace the line of his stunted cervical gills, and for a moment his teeth flash in the light, bared and clenched, holding in any incriminating sound. 

He shifts his weight—grinds slowly up against her bulge like—like a cheap fucking concupiscent hire in a shitty club.  For the first time, there’s an almost inaudible susurrus around the room.  No individual face or mouth seems to move, but there’s the slightest hint of a scandalized murmur.   The empress just grins and runs her hands slowly down his thorax to his hips, framing the tailored lines of his powerful chest and the narrow cut of his waist. 

Their eyes both sweep the room—his hooded and dark, satisfied and mocking, hers glittering and gleeful.

And then there’s a split second of motion and a loud thud and she’s on her feet.  The purpleblood hits the table, and for a moment every single person in the block tenses, eyes widening, hands twitching for weapons.  The purpleblood resists for a moment, jerking like he’s going to throw off her hand—then, slowly, he goes still.  His body goes limp.

The empress laughs, not a noise as much as a sharp jerk of her shoulders, and shoves his pants down.  Nothing of the skin she bares is visible from the angle of the other diners, but her expression is clear—she looks hungry, teeth bared in a vicious grin.  Her hips roll forwards against his and her hand closes in his hair, arcing his neck back and turning his face up as she pulls back and slams forward into him so sharply his whole body seizes and jerks, tensing like a bow.

For the first time, the purpleblood makes a sound—a low, almost subsonic rumbling groan in his thorax.  You shiver as a frisson of instinctive, animalistic fear runs up your spine, and simultaneously clenches your nook with entirely involuntary lust.  His face is obscene in its open pleasure.  His mutant landdweller fins flare and flutter as she bares her teeth, letting out a possessive, full-throated snarl.  His thorax heaves in long, slow breaths.  The empress twines her fingers around one horn and he shivers.

She looks up from him and bites her lip and whatever she does, he groans again.  Her eyes sweep across the room; you don't look down from the spectacle fast enough.  For one long, agonizing, terrifying second, you meet her eyes, and you can’t look away.

She fucks him until he can’t stay silent anymore—still controlling himself, teeth clenched on grunts and moans, but huffing out sharp pants of air every time she rolls her hips against his.  She doesn’t bother with a bucket, just moans long and loud and decadent and comes in him instead; makes no effort to satisfy him afterward, and he either isn't allowed to do so himself or chooses to maintain what dignity he has left.  He just cleans himself up, straightens his clothes slow and steady and just barely swaying, and gives an insolent, mocking little bow out toward the bowed heads very pointedly not looking his way.  Then he settles back in his seat, with the barest hint of a wince, and leans back indolently to eat a piece of fish with his fingers. 

Your nook aches, almost as badly as his must right now.  Your bulge chafes at the inside of your pants. 

You fucking hate that purpleblood.

Chapter Text

It’s a perigee after your little one comes to you begging pain for the first time your dreams start to change.

The daymares are old now.  Practiced, roads you’ve been walking for sweeps on sweeps.  That echoing, leering spectre of you stalks through them and whispers in your ear and makes mockery of what you love and you banish him off again and again and wake cold and breathing so hard in your slime. 

Those days, you’ve learned, you go and do some other shit.  If you go straight back to sleep, it’s back down in the dream you go.  It’s back to the cold and the fucking helplessness. 

You've not been helpless in an age.  Not a hundred sweeps.  Not but in your pan at daytime, with that voice whispering blasphemy in your ear.

You walk the chapel today, in the dark and quiet of your dreams.  There’s a congregation there, faded and far off, hands raised.  It’s peace.  It’s soft and warm.  Someone’s at your shoulder—familiar like that, so close and cool, has to be Gamzee.  You’d reach for his hand, but you’re walking now.  Just peace.  A good dream, this one time, walking through the congregation with their bared heads.  Through the raised hands and painted wrists.

Far away, a single soft voice urges you there’s something you should be noticing.  But you’re in your chapel, in with your family.  They turn to you and bow their heads and raise their hands in reverie to you.

Can we start?  A voice real soft behind you.  They got no need to wait on you to start worship, and you must tell them so because they stand and look forward, up to the front.  Are you preaching?  You don’t have a sermon ready, but that ain’t a thing to fear, you’re not green little wriggler. There’s a body spread out on the altar.  Small and pale and its face seems bare—you move closer, feel the one behind you stick close to your shoulder.  A lowblood up there probably, there for bleeding out—

It’s Gamzee.

It’s him, your little one, your matesprit, tied spread and flat on the altar, chained at all four fronds and bright with gold.  You go still.  Can’t move.  That cold presence is still at your back, and as you watch still and frozen the congregation eases on up to him, all murmurs and hands.  He’s got no covering beside scraps of cloth, red and green—they’re lifted away.  He’s bare and thin and shaking all over, and you can’t see his face.  He lies head turned away, but you know it’s him.  You know.

Won’t you partake, Brother?  The voice speaks from behind you and everywhere, and you recognize it and you know that you’ve been pulled down again.  Swallowed up.  You want to.  You want him.

They take Gamzee like ants on a corpse.  Hands cover him up, pull and pinch and twist and claw at him.  A head bows between his legs to lap at his nook and he arches up to the touch and then squeaks as hands take his bulge and pull, not bothering to coax at it to come out, fingers spreading his sheath, claws teasing at the flesh.

For a second you’re someone else, a cold smile, a blasphemous eye, and you see him with a look not like your own—he doesn’t squirm half as much anymore, he whispers behind you (it whispers inside you), he’s learning his way out of his wriggler blushes.

Your precious beloved cries out high and reedy-thin with need as another head fits in between his legs, hands and horns and mouths pushing his legs apart further so the second can bury fangs in the base of his bulge.  Your spine shivers hellfire.  Your nook aches as he whimpers.  You can’t see his face, beyond the barest corner of his jaw as he turns away, twisting and squirming and gasping.  You don’t see any paint.

Sometimes he gets so overwhelmed, our precious little one, says the voice of your damnation, and you stand frozen and watching as hands cover him, play with him, sink in claws and twist and tease.  Sometimes he cries mercy, mercy, like he wasn’t gifted with enough hunger for eternity and more.    

He screams, open cry like a song, when hands pry open his gill-slits and they take small things to him, little glittering things in the unbearable softness of flesh under the dud flaps.  They touch every part of him.  Their hands cover his eyes and mouth.  Brother Immortal, they murmur to him, and a hand lays a harsh slap on the soft inside of his thigh, and you see the tip of his bulge is pierced, leashed on short chain to the nub at its base so a move of one makes a tug at the other.  So it’s never fully sheathed, open for playing with.

As Rage subjugated Mercy, Immortal whispers, and he goes past you, enters the scene, waves the ones between your boy’s legs away and steps in himself.  You know what he plans and intends, and still you can't move.  He could have been yours, Kurloz.  And Gamzee arches up and spreads his legs out wide, trembles and gasps as your double gives his nook two long, slow thrusts with fingers heavy and cold with gold.  Always willing, always ready.  Bowed to our whims, following holy Mercy's footsteps, submitting.  He reaches down easy, plays with bulge and nook both a second and watches your little one writhe and pant through his nose. 

You like it like this, don’t you little messiah-bringer?

They kiss his hands and feet, and you don’t see what their hands do in the wake of their kisses but it makes him sob and his bulge lashes in Immortal’s hand as he murmurs his hungry blasphemies to the shaking shell of your beautiful, sweet, bright-eyed boy.

Nights here, hungry for every ache and twinge, panting every sermon for what pain you’re granted

Gamzee’s head lolls to you, and his face is twisted in pleasure and tear-streaked and empty from too-much-to-bear

…and at days, when they’ve all had their way with you, back to my block for some shackles less giving and cruelty more keen and maybe I'll let you come even, little holy one, just for me

and there’s a moan and a whimper in his throat as Immortal’s bulge slides into him and the others around kiss him and bite him and leave bruises and burning nicks on his skin, and the sick lurch in your gut is only as strong as the throb and burn of want.

OURS.

His lips are soft and bloody and spanned with purple stitches.

MINE.

You wake up with a half a shout as every muscle in you shudders.  The sound of his sweet voice in a moan through tight stitches has you gasping and arching up and coming so hard you could almost shake apart.

You lie there after and you shudder like a long, slow death of cold.  If your eyes burn and ache and your thorax is tight and hot, if you hate yourself right then so strong you could tear at your throat and finish it—

Nobody’s there to see.  Not your congregation, not Gamzee, not…

You can still feel how it was to be him, how you looked on your matesprit’s body like meat you could use for your pleasure and nothing more or less, and you don’t sleep again that day, for the fear of what you could see (could be) if you do.

Chapter Text

Your name is Halore Travye, and you still care.

But you’ve ruined it, ruined it all with that sharp-eyed, brilliant troll you thought you’d have forever, so you sit far from him and half hidden, and just watch him some times and others.  Just check on him.  Just see how he carries himself, if he’s happy where he is and if there’s any serving you can render on him from where you are. 

You’ve seen him grow fast up ranks and through esteem of chaplains and the most hilariotous of murderous jokers, heard the whispers (so careful these nights, so careful to keep from spongeclots that shouldn’t hear) that there should be a new Grand Highblood in the Big Top.  One that shines fierce and young and hot like starshine, has a gleam in his eyes like knife’s edge and a fresh edge to his paint. 

He never answers a word to those whispers.  Just smiles and watches the Grand Highblood with those killing-sharp eyes. 

He’s not smiling now.

“His Hilarity’s gone off,” somebody is whispering, and they don’t see you as you come closer, head down, focusing all you got on the not-noticed smallness of yourself.  You got a bit of a gift, being the one unseen.  Eyes go past you, sometimes.  It’s a knack.  They should know better than to talk treason in main ways where kin walk by—there’s a growing unrest in the family, sure, but not so big an unrest they should make themselves known for it.  He’s uncareful of family, these nights.  He hurts his cult and blood.

“—raids—”  “—a fight and he broke her jaw—”  “motherfucking violence on his own family—”

“He’s excommunicating,” somebody whispers, and you know Kurloz’s shoulders when they go stiff and sharp at the words.  “He says it waters purple blood down to quadrant out of fleet and he’s going through ranks digging out quadrant-signs—”

“No,” says Kurloz, and stands hard and sharp.  “No, this won’t be born.  I’m fucking ready.”

“Ready?” A sister, Sister Tischo if you know her right, “Ready for what, brother?” But you know already, and you know you can’t step in.  Can’t say a word.  From you, he won’t take them.  Your insides turn cold and aching.

“Ready to challenge,” Kurloz says, and whispers run wild out from him like the words sent out a shock.  “I’m ready for a motherfucking promotion.”

-- 

Your name is Kurloz Makara, and

And

Your name is Kurloz Makara, and you’re so tired.

So fucking tired.

You don’t know how long the fight went, but it feels like weeks, perigees.  Lifetimes.  You died, time after time, every second you had to push yourself back up and keep moving, fighting, breathing, you feel you killed some vital part just to keep on.  But here you stand.  Here you live. 

Your Grand Highblood lies dead at your feet, with his name till ringing round and round your auriculars like it was his last prayer. 

You pray.  You’re so tired, there’s fuck-all else to be done.

“The Grand Highblood,” says sister Witnesse real quiet.  “May he now be blessed as voice and body of the church.”

“Amen,” whisper the voices all around you, so close it might be one big voice that echoes around the room.  Your mouth tastes blood and salt.  Your gills work for water that ain’t there for them.  Everything hurts.  Your hands are bloody with the color of kin. 

The picture takes your pan again of the Grand Highblood—of Rakhem—turning his head away and bubbling out a breath as the knife touched his choke.  Was that his last rattle as you twitched your wrist to end him?  Was he gone before his blood coated over your skin?  Or did you…

Your eyes burn, and it ain’t from the overwork.  You keep them shut, and don’t let that burn become wet overflow.  Doesn’t matter.  Brother’s dead.  Long live the Grand Highblood, Kurloz Makara.

You thought you’d feel better than this.

“May he now be lifted up in power and regard,” Witnesse says by you.  You focus what you got on staying on your feet.  “Blessed in face of trials to come and beloved of kin.  Doing great harm and taking no motherfucking shit.”

“Amen.”

“May he get his know on, ever and always, what all the fuck he got here through and for and by, never losing his recall on the family and church that got him here.”

“Amen.”

“May he now get his royal ass to the doctorturers before he bleeds out all over his new throne room.”

A laugh—you can’t find you remember how right this second.  Your eyes keep blurring over, your head feels heavy.  “Amen,” a few say, laughing, and fronds take your arms and hold you up.  “Come brother—your lordship.  Sir, you gotta walk on up to get fixed.”

There are five of the oldest of the church around you when you collapse on a platform in the medbay, but you can’t tell who they are before your eyes go blurred and black at the edges.  You’re safe.  After all that long time of fighting, you’re safe.

Somebody touches your hand with the snapped fingers.  You pass the fuck out.

-

You’re all of a sweep out of your crowning when they come to you.

“Did you wonder why so many followed you when you had no proof of your worthiness yet made?” says a one.

“We made talk of you in high places,” says another, and the words are a sting.  How dare.  How motherfucking dare, to put your hard-fought win on their own fronds, to say you showed no sign of deserving when your kin threw in with you and put their necks to the Handmaid’s needles for you?  How dare.

“Who are you?” you ask them.

“We believe in you,” says a one.  “As you truly are.  The Holy Father.”

The name means fuck-all to you, but you can feel it coming for you.  Feel the chill of what messiahs are going to send to you.  The words send ice down your back.

“Who are you.”

 “We are nameless,” says another.  “We honor you.  Father of messiahs’ bodies of flesh.”

“Never raised any wrigglers,” you say, from far off.  “No messiahs either.”

“Not this body of you,” says a one.  “Not as you are now but as you were sweeps on sweeps ago.  You are reborn.”

“For always, reborn,” says the others.

“You are for always reborn to lead the church to glory,” says the one in the lead again, and looks to you with eyes that are burning mad.  “…Brother Immortal.”

--

Your real kin come to you and find you bloody, sitting back and praying with your eyes closed tight and your face turned to the high ceiling.  We are many, they said.  We are nameless. 

“Biggest brother?”

“…There’s heresy in our ranks,” you say, and hear them breathe in sharp and know this is how your brother gone on fell to you.  Inquisition and cruelty to his family, that was what set the whispers going, what set his family against him and opened him up to challenge.  But what else could even deal with this shit?  What the fuck else is to do?  “They call themselves nameless but I’ll give them their name for them, Cult of Flesh.  Worshipping at imagined flesh-body troll-ass messiahs like it could ever be so.”

“They believe the messiahs came to troll form?”  Sister sounds shocked and sick as you did when the thought came to your pan.  You’re sorry she knows it now.  Sorry she has to think on that little bit of blasphemy, but you need her to know how harsh she’ll be forced to motherfucking be.

 “Find them,” you say, and feel a terrible knowing settle on you, the feel of brother Rakhem’s blood cold on your fronds.  You’re set to kill your kin. 

You haven’t got the choice.

“Crush them out.”

Chapter Text

Your name’s Meenah Peixes, and you aboat to meet your new Grand Highblood.

Not exactly mad the old one got beached.  Rakhem kept the clowns in line but he didn’t do a whole lotta anyfin else, threw a fit when you sent fission briefings, culled whole hatches of little clownfish who didn’t hardly have a chance to deserve it yet. 

The new one’s another big, fighty guy, which suits you just fin.  The head bitch before Rakhem was a hell of a highblood but she was too codclam much to keep an eye on all the time.  Boys are softer, even the sharp, nasty ones are reel easy to steer; less finclined to scheme and plan, less irons in the fire.  Telric was too good at her damn job and wanted more, Rakhem was just barely good enough.  You gotta hope this one’s swimwhere in the middle.

He ain’t much to hook at, at the moment, but they never are the first night.  That’s why you bring ‘em in as soon as they’re patched up enough not to bleed all over the floor.  Let ‘em look up at the throne, hurting and tired and too new to be cocky yet, and see you up there lookin’ cool as glub and hot as shell. 

This one’s already tall for his age, and he’s got a pretty, pointy face under the big, fishious scar across his mouth and the blacked eye.  He’s got a fang missing and marks from bites and claws every plaice you can see and probubbly more you can’t, but those will all eel up.  The eye that can open is reel sharp, nice pure highblood purple with thick lashes and sideways pupils like a seagoat, and you can see it looking you up and down, taking the whole fin in and thinking fast.

“Your Condescension,” he says, and gets all the wave into a bow, even though bending forward makes one of his legs shake and when he straytens up there’s a nasty purple drip down his lip from his big, broken beak of a nugbone.  He licks it off his clownfish paint, and says, “At your motherfuckin’ disposal.”

He’s fast, efin as bloody and glubbed-up as he looks—he gets a club out and up in time to catch your culling fork when it goes for his thorax, and he’s strong enough to hold you there, even though the effort makes every long, bony fin-ch of him tremble.

Telric called your bluff, when you tested her.  Stood there cold and let you pull the stab, looked at you with your culling fork in her side and said “anything else, your condescension?”.  Rakhem knocked your fork away and went ray-t back at your throat, made you put him on the floor.

Your new Highblood holds you back a moment, holds your eyes—and then he twists his club loose of your culling fork, drops his fronds to his sides, and shows you his bare throat.

“At your motherfucking disposal,” he says, and lets you press the tines of your culling fork under his jaw where the paint ends.  He don’t try to step awave when you press harder, just tips his head back and breathes and waits, as one more line of purple blood runs down past his janky purpleblood gillslits.

Whale.  That’s a new one.

--

The empress hums, considers your life as she holds it in her fronds another moment.  Then she flicks her jingling gold-heavy wrist and the cold gold digging at your throatstem vanishes away again.

“Whale, alright,” she says, and looks you over again, this time maybe with a touch less judgment.  A test, then, and it seems like you passed to her satisfaction.  Not like you had a fuckin’ choice but to back down to her, the way she came at you one-handed and it took all the strength you still had stored up just to hold her off you.  She’s a head or two shorter than you, horns long and heavy with age, enough to make the difference up between you, built heavy and dangerous, dark chitin over insulation of bounce-tissue over muscle deep-sea dense. 

“What’s your name,” says the empress, and you open your mouth and—

And.

Of all stupid motherfucking times.  Not now.

You’re tired, and you’re hurt, and you’re her Grand Highblood.  You’re relieved, and pissed off, and you killed your kin today.  The overwhelm locks your throat; the words vanish from your pan.  Messiahs, it’s just your name, you know it, you can and should and motherfucking have to answer her with it, but when you try to force the words all that comes out is a creaking croak.

“Mm,” says the empress, and narrows those fuchsia-bright killer’s eyes at you, lashes glittering with gold dust at the tips.  Raises a hand, and for a second you expect a change of heart, motherfucker’s going to summon up her culling fork and make good on the threat she made at you just now.  But instead she signs, “Your name,” like it’s in every way an order.

You don’t sign, often, if silence takes you then you let it have you till it lets you go again.  But by the messiahs grace you remember enough to spell her out your name.

“This happen often?” she says, and you shake your head.  Not often, not anymore.  More when you were a wriggler, when every shock and emotions came on you so strong.  But you have yourself better in hand now, and it takes a real motherfuckin’ strain before you lose control like this. 

“Good for a laughsassin,” you tell her, as much as the exaggerated shh of signing “laughsassin” hurts your whole entire motherfucking face, and she actually laughs at that.

“Whatebber then,” she says.  “We’ll do briefing anotter time.  When you’s not about to fall on your face on the floor.”

It’s as clear a dismissal as you could hope for.  You bow to her one more time—still alive, entrusted, avowed, her Grand Highblood—and you go.

--

Kurloz is an anglerfish.

The light’s the way he acts when you mako him come to parties or when you see him around his li’l clown wrigglers; got a sense of humor, your Grand Highblood.  A fast mouth and a fast pan behind it.  His clowns glubbin’ adore him. 

And the ones who like him a little bit too much, they get the teeth.

You don’t ask too much about the inquisition he starts; if there’s a cult who wants to give him more power, you don’t sea why he wouldn’t go ahead and let them.  But that’s heresea apparently, and when you say that it makes him actualee growl at you.

You kiss him first, one of those days, teeth and tongue, and he’s too new to bite back at first but when you dig a claw at the scar your culling fork left under his jawbone, he growls and pushes back against your grip.

--

You get two whole pitch-flavored hookups with the empress, your first few perigees as Grand Highblood, before shit flips on you.

You’d refuse to come report if you could, but she sent the order and you’re bound to obey, even when nights and days of interrogation and inquisition have your fronds shaking and your horns buzzing.  You think you’re coming to the end of them, you must have dug the rot out now, but there’s purple blood in the cracks of your claws and you can’t bear to keep going but yet know you motherfucking must.  You can’t hardly bear it any longer.

The empress is waiting for you lounged on her throne, but she sits up when she sees you come in, still bloody and red-eyed, and whatever smart-ass comment she’s about to make she’s wise enough not to, because you cannot motherfucking abide wader bullshit right now.

“Ray-port,” she says.

“All but done,” you say.  Comes out too quiet, croaking with how little sleep you’ve got the last days.  Strained-tight with how hard you’re holding your shit down.  Haven’t slept, hardly ate.  Haven’t been back to holy Alternian ground since before you challenged brother Rakhem.  Just cold space and cold blood and cold in your block alone at daytime, lying awake despite your sopor.  “I’ll have ‘em cleaned up soon.  I got it handled.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, and looks at you.  She just looks at you.  Your paint’s smeared.  You know there’s purple blood down your cheek, where one of the dying heretics spat at you from his torn-out tongue.  Your horns throb, your eyes burn.

“You look like ship,” she says.

“Got it handled,” you say again, because what else the fuck can you say?  What the fuck are you supposed to say about your kin screaming and how it heated you on the inside, all the places you were made wrong, all the ways you’re splintering under this? 

The empress stands up and steps down toward you—comes up in front of you and looks you dead in the eyes, and you struggle and fight and…can’t hold her eyes. 

“Anglerfish,” she says.  “You look fucked up.  You gonna shell me the truth?  Or do I have to beat it out of you?”

Confess the truth, says your own voice in your ringing ears, and there are screams, the sound of blood and flesh and suffering.  Recant, sister, or die and die again, don’t make me the hand of your damnation—but you were, you are, messiah-father they call you, as they plead for you to stop, not understanding why you’d do this to them, why you’d betray them.  Brother Makara, Brother Immortal—

“They’re my fuckin’ family,” you say, for all you shouldn’t, shouldn’t even want to.  Shit like this, it’s not for a kismesis, and it sure as fuck ain’t for your empress.  No reason for her to give a shit, but she demands, and you have to answer.  The confession comes spilling out like blood, like gutted entrail, like she tortured and broke you with so little a word.  “They’re my family and these—fuckin’—” your hands are stained and shaking.  You’ll never get the smell of seaside blood out of your clothes, your hair, your mouth and nose, it crawls down into you like their screams do, pushes your voice higher and louder despite yourself.  “Hurting my own fuckin’ kin with my own two motherfucking fronds and I fucking loved it, I wanted more—”

“Nofin wrong with a little bloodlust,” she says, and she may as well have stabbed you right through the thorax, the way that staggers you back, how entirely she doesn’t fucking comprehend.

“It’s damnation,” you snarl at her, and claw at your own arm, try to tear the blood away from your skin, tangled up in your own hate, in how long you’ve been tired, how long you’ve tried to keep your horns up and do holy work when every step you take feels like sin.  “If I kill the last of their heretic cult and Messiahs strike me down before they’re cold it’ll be the least I deserve--!”

The blood on your arms is fresh now, hot tears through your skin, and the fresh wash of it mixes with the rest, the same color, the same.  Your family, some of them not even pupated and already taken by heresy so foul, your brothers, your sisters, your blood—

You don’t even see her come close, this time, don’t have time to raise a club even if you wanted to—but there’s no stab of pain as she runs you through, no cold execution.  Just a hand, touching your face, the smooth lacquer of her claws running over a fin.

“Kurloz,” says the empress, and the touch makes you tremble to claw out at her, shake with how hard you’re fighting the urge to lean down into her.  She owns your bones, could cull you for how you’ve fallen apart in front of her.  She pats her palm gentle down your cheek instead, and says “C’mere.  Let’s take this somewhere quiet,” and you stumble at her heels, after that cold palm, and let her draw you down.

You see her block the first time, that day, and she sees every damn thing you got inside of you in return.  Sees your rage, sees your grief.  Sees your shameful love of your kin’s pain, sees your face—pins you and strips you and touches your bared fins and lips and aching horns until you’re ruined from it.  She breaks you to pieces.  Shatters you kneeling on the floor of her block, puts you back together again.

You’re nothing real, maybe, nothing permanent—but she doesn’t make to kick you out of her block when she’s done with you.  Lets you lie, on her mountains of fancy thrown-away fabrics and gold and plundered jewels, lets your face rest against her thigh and taps away on her shell phone over you.

If this is what it feels like—getting calmed, handled, motherfucking conciliated—you can’t hardly wonder trolls go out their pans to please their moirails.  Your dread still lies heavy on you, a tired, aching horror at the task ahead, but it’s got no bite to it now, no claws to tear at you.  You’re not driven wild by it like you have been for nights on nights.  Given respite of it.  Quieted down from it.

You almost can’t mind, that you’re yet unpainted in a ship not yours, in a block of a troll who’s as like to kill you as shoosh you.  It’s a funny motherfuckin’ thing, this troll disease called moirallegiance.

“Truth or dare,” you say.

The empress looks up from her shell phone and laughs, that glubbing laugh a seadweller makes, gills flapping out on her sides enough to tap against your horn.  “I pap you right back into the brooding caverns, angler?” she says, amused at you, and you laugh too, because you knew it for a wrigglers-first-pile game when you said it.  You can laugh at that, right now. 

“What,” you say, “You scared?”

“You wish,” she says.  “Dare.”

“Yeah, alright,” you say.  “Gimme somefin.  A present.”

You get another laugh for that.  Likes you a touch audacious, your empress.  Likes a little mouth on you, for all you’re too new to her still to tell how far’s too far to push.  And likes a shitty little fish pun or two, which seems the least you owe her today.

“Guess if you’re gonna spray wriggler games, might as well just commit to the bit,” she says, and holds up the hand she touched your face with.  She pulls a ring off one claw—gold and glittering, with a big-ass fuchsia stone set right in the middle of it. 

It’s a dare in return, when it ain’t even her turn yet, but you don’t call her out on it.  Just hold the ring up, considering, and then pluck the stone out and slide the plain gold band onto your littlest claw.

“You’re shellcome,” says the empress.  “Truth, or dare?”

“Truth.”

“You ever get piled before?”

She has to know the answer to that, but of fucking course she’ll make you make the words.  “I been busy getting’ shit done,” you say, and she laughs at you anyhow.  “So no.  Truth or dare, motherfucker.”

“Mm,” she says, and smacks her lips, glubs her gills.  “…Truth.”

You almost think better of it—but she’s taken everything out of you, today, and you want something back outta her.  Something you can take in return.  And besides, you wanna see her face because if she don’t kill you it’s gonna be fuckin’ funny.

“What’s your hatchname.”

She pauses at that, looks at you hard and cold and considering.  For a second you feel all the weight of her again, royal tyrian eyes and the pull of deepest, darkest water.  Then she laughs and says, “Whale, ain’t you forward?” and the moment’s passed, and you’re still not culled.  She says, “Meenah Peixes,” as easy as it ain’t no thing.   “Better keep that shit to yourshellf though, buoy.  Or you’re gonna have to get good at signs reel quick, ‘cause I’m gonna mako sure you never talk again.  Truth or Dare.”

You believe she’d do it, too—you had no motherfucking intention of gabbing the empress’s name around, but you make special note to hide that one down deep. 

“…Dare.”

She opens her mouth, and just then her shell phone chimes off.  She pops it out, looks the screen over—looks back at you and clicks it shut again.

“Gonna have to wait,” she says, and stands up, shakes her hair out down her back in its thick and wild waves, straightens her crown around her horns.  “Go do what you gotta do.  Fin-ish this.  And then you can be done for a whale, how’s that sand.”

Hurts to contemplate, goin’ back to your grim work.  But you’ll have a chance to do right later, she told you.  You’ll cut out the rot and the rest you can bring up how they should be, and they’ll never have to know you as you are now. 

“You can dare me when it’s over,” you say, and she pulls you over for a kiss just a shade too toothy to be pale, and then sweeps out of the block like the tide of a storm and leaves you behind in the dark.

--

“No.”

“You can’t say ‘no’,” says Meenah, and puts her feet up on her big fancy footrest.  It’s got BAD BEACH on the side in little glittery stones.  It’s hideous.  A motherfucker can’t help but be impressed. 

Meenah says, “that’s not how Truth or Dare works, guppy.”

“Ain’t gonna humiliate myshellf—self—for one,” you say.  Another day you’d be more cautious—but the inquisition’s done, and you’re real and deeply exhausted, guilt and confession weighing you down.  It’ll be a real motherfuckin’ while before you feel right again, and playing pail-slave to her in front of a whole wader party is not gonna help your hurting pride.

“You don’t wanna show ‘em all how good you can be?” she says, and the piece of you pale for her purrs as the part of you pitch growls. 

“Have a whole glubbing weak-ass fancy little school of waders walk off thinkin’ I’m no better than your willing little bitch,” you correct her, and she props her face up on her frond and smiles at you.

“You sprayin’ you ain’t?”

Arrests you in place a second.  “I’m your Grand motherfuckin’ Highblood,” you say, and you don’t mean to have a half a question in the words, but maybe she hears, because she rolls her eyes at you.

“Course you are,” she says.  “And you also, cointridentally, mah beach.  That’s moray than they are!  You tellin’ me you don’t want them to sea me lay clam to you?  Tell ‘em all, this one’s mine.”

…Fuck.

--

It’s been almost a sweep and a half since you set foot on Alternia when you land for Meenah’s party.  You give your laughsassins, your subjugglators, your family as remains, leave to go off-ship and make it known through the ship’s loudest whisperers that you won’t hold shit against any kin who go off planet-side and don’t intend to come back.  Figure it’s the least you owe, that if you’ve lost their trust, they deserve time in holy communion in the Big Top, heal up their souls and settle their pushers. 

You’ll go there yourself, in due time, take up your seat there, rule from the homeworld for a while.  Remind yourself the faith and frenzy of glory that led you to where  you are.  But tonight…

There’s more violets at Meenah’s parties on the homeworld; they like a place where they can think themselves the highest, like orphaning and delivering the fear of the empress on the dirtbloods below them.  You can full sympathize with that part, but their strutting and their preening and their pride at themselves is galling in the motherfucking extreme.

Meenah makes no great ceremony about her dare to you, which is some smallest shred of mercy at least.  Just beckons you up and has you to kneel, and puts her hands hard on your horns, rubbing where the touch can’t be seen, turning you pale and melted down even as you hate her for what she makes of you.

“Hear ‘em whispering?” she says, so soft nobody else could hear it, and you do, and feel their eyes on you, and feel her hold you and use you at her pleasure.  Every troll ever hatched, made to be at her pleasure, but you’re the motherfucker tasting how salt-cold she is, her bulge slipping against your cheek and seeking for your mouth.  It’s a humiliation you’d tear her throat out for.  It’s an honor and a privilege.  You growl, and she laughs.

“They want this,” she says, still soft to you.  “Waverybody washin’ you, they wanna be you, or me, or both, but guess what, angler?”  She leans down over you, and purrs the words, just for you like some filthy and heretic scripture.  “Today you higher than any of them.”

Picture flicks up through your head—violets down on their knees, how they’d snarl and sneer and you could just kick them over and put your foot on them and push down, watch them squirm when your claws brushed their gills…

“Focus.”

You growl a little, but that just makes her moan real soft and hook her leg over your shoulder, grip on your horn and pull you harder in.  Well—fine.  That’s fuckin’ fine.  If it’s her delight to make an eager fool of you in front of half her wader terroristocrats, a motherfucker might as well see if he can put a crack in her pretty made-up mask.

You’re holding up, gone somewhere off in your pan as if like to make prayer or devotions, when you feel a footfall near by you, and feel Meenah shift like to look at somebody.

“Glad to see your Imperious Condescension enjoying yourself,” says a voice, seadweller accent and a glub of a laugh.  “We heard landside that the clowns had one of their little schisms, but I’m surprised you already brought this one to heel so easily.”

“You all heel to me,” the empress says, and her hand’s cold on your horn as you fight as the snarl in your thorax.  “He’s doin’ me a sauryvice, and he’s doin’ it better than I’d expect from alla you yellow-bellies.”

More praise than you’d figure, in front of the waders and everything.  Not sure if you like to have this new bitch up here with you, lookin’ down at you—your face is still painted but you can’t reach a weapon and your empress’s hand’s seized on your horn.  Puts something hot and dark as pitch in you.  Something like pride, sharp and poison and wanted.  You play at the piercings on her bulge, in warning, in thanks, and feel her leg twitch, her grip tighten.

“The Orphaner’s not happy about this,” says the seadweller over you, and Meenah snorts.

“Orphaner’s got work to do,” she says.  “And his work ain’t sandin’ around bein’ a li’l gossipy bitch, so if that’s all he’s here to do he better get back out on the water.  And my Grand Highblood’s got work to do too, so how ‘boat you say whatebber you came up here to say.” 

“Just paying my respects, your Condescension,” says the wader, and you do growl this time, at the fakey bullshit sweetness of her tone, at how she came to gawk and stare.  “We’ve all been wondering whether this new highblood would be worth anybody’s time.  I wanted to congratulate you, that he turned out to have a use after all.”

You pull free enough to turn and snarl at her, at that, and it’s a reassurance to see her twitch back from your bared fangs, even though you know the death’s head smile of your paint must be well-ruined and your empress’s color all across your mouth.  Meenah laughs and gets your horn again, squeezes, says “Makara,” and you see the look in her eye and make yourself to swallow your fury back down again.

“He’s a keeper,” she says, and the seadweller frowns at how she sounds, all but proud at you, the possession of her hand on your horns.  “Pretty to look at, good with his mouth, and he could probubbly pop the head off any glubber here stupid enough to cross him.”  She looks up at the bitch standing over you, and you can hear her threaten for you and you give her pleasure back in return, mind your fangs and let her make use of your mouth as she’s free to make use of the whole rest of you.  At your disposal, your Condescension, you’d told her, and you intend to see that through no matter how much of a smug motherfucker she acts like.

“He’ll mako a good Grand Highblood,” she says.  “I think we’re gonna go reel far,” and it’s stupid, total fuckin’ idiocy, how your fins flare hot and your nook twitches for that, but a pitchmate talking shit to your face and snarling down any motherfucker who dares criticize is porn all the way through, and your empress talking you up to her own violetbloods is all the fucking sweeter.

“Well, if he’s that good, you should open him up for use,” says the wader, sharp and offended, intending to insult, and before you even have time to bristle Meenah’s fingers are in your hair and she’s laughing at them.

“Nah,” says the empress, and you hate her and hate her, and motherfucking glory in the tiniest shake her voice gives as you bury yourself in her pleasure.  “This one’s mine.”

Chapter Text

The Messiah-Father sleeps.

You’ve heard word of him, but you didn’t expect to see him with your own eyes, not so soon.  The timing of things has been pushed forward, with the death of the kin who made attempt on Vetrum; there are whispers they said something unwise, thinking their victory sure, and that the fallen lord is sniffing for you like he did in days of old. 

Well, if he wasn’t before, he surely will be now.

Brother Imortal is smaller than you expected, though bigger still far than you; after the sicknesses that ravaged your earthly body as you struggled through pupation, you’re left fragile and limping.  After the church sent you out heedless of your struggling, you’re left scarred and one-horned.  The new Immortal isn’t nearly so fragile as you, but you’ve seen his history as all your kin have, and you see your struggles in his holy suffering.  Addiction and starvation, abandonment and weakness.  Struggling, always struggling.

Brother Uumbrage has warned that he’ll likely need to be brought around.  That he’s been far bent to the side of the false church and the purge of his sin will be painful.  You know about pain, and the value that you’ve been assured can come from it.  You resolve to make your brother's stay as better as you can, and stay by his side as he sleeps.

You know him to be the one—you don’t doubt, you tell yourself so over and over again—but still you can’t look away as the first dose of the holy nectar is delivered.

The lowbloods Brother Uumbrage fed the nectar to were destroyed.  Most of them never woke, and if they did they were husked and burned empty.  The faithful who submitted to the trial took the test better, but they struggled even with the loading dose and the moments of contact they made were only fleeting, glimpses of earthly bodies and no trace of divinity.

Brother Immortal takes the nectar in small mouthfuls, those first nights, and it disquiets him, it moves his eyes under fragile ganderflaps, it sends a twitch and shiver through his fronds.  But after a time, after days and nights, he quiets again.  He settles, and he breathes steady as a dreamer.

Those faithful among you with power in their pans approach his pan with reverence and report that he only dreams, unconscious and quickly waking, and you sit near by his side and wait in anticipation.

The faithful present gather near him as he begins to stir, and he growls, shivers like he’s chilled, opens his eyes a crack wincing. 

“Water,” he says.

You take to your heels and bring water, lift him up careful and give him his fill.  He drinks and drinks and when the water’s gone he breaks away to gasp, slumped down in your arms like common troll, panting and weakened.  He’s yet in reverie, you can tell—when his eyes crack open the pupils of them are opened wide and light flickers fitful inside of them.  His eyes open and blink and squint and water and squeeze shut again, and one of your sisters makes sound of realization and draws up relay to turn on the dampers hidden plain and lowblood-ugly on the arch of his holy horns.

It pains you to see how he gasps at that, how he tries to reach up and how the glow of his eyes flares and struggles, trying to break free.  But his trials will be greater yet, Brother Uumbrage has warned you a thousand times, and you harden your pusher and hold him still as they test and check and poke around, making sure he’s hidden and the cult of the unenlightened have no purchase to track him down.

“Horns,” he says, and shakes his head like to shake you all off, tossing back and forth in aimless, half-dreaming struggles.  His eyes are drifting, his voice drifts too.  He barely seems to hear the noises of comfort, or the apology of your kin.  “Khh, ‘loz, nnh, majesty, his—”

Your chucklevoodoos were never the strongest, but you’re close to him as purple flashes through his eyes and you catch the faint edge of a face, familiar and yet dreadful-distant—the fallen Immortal, terrible and tall and haughty.

“Your ancestor?” you say, and his ears twitch flat, his fins pin like a guilty wriggler.  Like he knows, some piece of him, the poisonous, sinful shame of that link in the holy bloodline. 

“He’s been turned away,” says another faithful, and you bite your tongue on the urge to chide them—Brother Immortal’s tired yet, strained with his first dose of the nectar, there’s no need to push, to convict him yet further when he’s still new yet to understanding his own purpose.  “Motherfucker wasn’t a true inheritor, your Holy Communion.  He turned his back on the Messiahs he raised, so they turned their backs on him right back.”

Brother Immortal swallows, turns his face away, and a brother reaches out and brushes water careful from his lips before his paint can be blurred.  The kin who’s talking is taken in righteous anger, growling about that bitch who poisoned your drinks and the holy blow that was struck to his ancestor instead.  You don’t listen.  You watch him instead, the way he shifts and twitches, shakes his head as though the images are coming to him already, as though he tries to shake them away.  It’s a hurt to you, but not a surprise, when he snarls and cuts off the kin who’s speaking.

“Flesh,” he says, hoarse as though you never let him drink, rasping from him.  “Cult of Flesh.”

It pains you how he says that, malediction in your brother’s holiest voice.  You want him to understand, to know it for what it is—not some filthy poison, but the Church of Messiahs Made Body, belief long held in strength and silence. 

“Yes, my lord,” you say, and he breathes fast and shaking.  He fears you.  You can feel it hum in your horns, so near to him, even with the dampers to protect there’s nothing so powerful through chucklevoodoos as fear, and you can feel him.  Brother Uumbrage has come in as more faithful gather, coming close to see an hear; you feel his eyes on you.  “We’re not so many, now, twenty maybe who truly believe, and maybe ten more we might—”

Brother Uumbrage hisses and you silence yourself at once, chastened at his annoyance.  He’s been so powerful hurt, you know this.  He’s tolerated so long for the faith and he isn’t to be trifled with, for all you intended only to reassure.

“Mind your tongue,” Brother Uumbrage says, to every faithful present, and turns his eye to your brothers and sisters trained up in the art of the holy nectar.  “We waste no more time.  We have none left to waste.”

He intends another dose, and already?  “But,” you start, when it seems none of the others will say anything.  “But—”

He hisses to you again, and you turn aside your horns in deference.  But you have to try—for all his holy potential he’s but a troll, and when you lifted him in your arms to drink, he shook.  “Brother,” you try again.  “A little time to rest—to grow used to it—”

“He’s had nights straight of unconsciousness to acclimate to the loading dose, brother,” says Brother Uumbrage, chiding-sharp, and Brother Immortal wavers again by your side, shivering tight in on himself and then swaying back against his resting-place, panting.  “I would say he’s had plenty of rest, wouldn’t you?  Instruct him what we need him to look for, and then we’ll do as needs must.”

He won’t be swayed, and you know, you know he’s right.  With family so few and so weakened, you can’t afford to delay. 

“You’re needed, Immortal,” you tell him, and can’t even tell if he hears—his eyes are cracked and distant.  “We’ll be many again, with your help.  But you have to find them for us, first.  Bring them back, speak to them—Messiah-Father, they’ll hear and heed you.  Tell them we need them.”

“Bring us with you,” another voice says, and more, joining in, rising in praise and entreaty.  “There, by their sides, with no fucking heretic who can stand before us.  Not a single one of the whole blaspheming mass of them, with all their weapons and ways.  We’ll be invincible.”

Messiah-father makes a soft noise, the beginning of a word he can’t seem to form—he’s still struggling with it when the rest of the nectar is blessed and brought to his lips and he twitches away from the strange burning-sweet smell of it, lip twisted and ears pinned back.

“I know,” you find yourself saying, and trespass to put a frond on the bony strut of his shoulder as kin stronger work to coax his jaw open.  “We must start as soon as possible, my lord, I need you to open your mouth.  Without the full dose—”

Sharp shock jolts up through him at those words, and he truly struggles away from you, throws himself away from your fronds and pulls free of he cup of nectar.  “No!” he says.  “Fuck, I, I don’t, hhnh, sopor--  I can’t—”

“It isn’t sopor!” says one of your sisters, and Brother Immortal stumbles and falls, back into his family’s arms, helped gentle back to his knees and back to his resting place, as his strength leaves him again.  Your pusher aches for him in ways that would be pale if you had such presumption as to allow it—weakness, struggle, the fear of him buzzing faint in your horns.  No wonder he was taken so fearful, if he thinks you’d drown him again in soporific swill, rot and rust his thinkpan so.  This time, when you gather around him to reassure and tip back the nectar again, he makes no resistance. 

“We wouldn’t give you back to sopor,” you tell him, and his throat works, the flash of his eyes grows brighter and brighter yet.  “This won’t numb you, lord.  Only bring strength to your connection.”

The flicker of his eyes brightens, brightens yet further—and then all in a single rush, it overtakes the whole span of his ganderbulbs, washes them over with flashing church purple and holy, brilliant red, as red as Messiah Raging, as red as the blood stolen from the fallen Immortal’s blocks. 

Brother Immortal shudders up off the ground, reaches out to nothing, makes a noise without words, and then all at once his strength leaves him.  He cries out and falls back, lashes back and forth under your hands, stares at things you can’t see. 

“Take him,” Brother Uumbrage murmurs, in tone of prayer, and you recall all at once that you need a breath and draw one in with effort.  Brother Immortal gasps, cries out again, tries to reach and grasp and claw at his hair, and your kin take hold of his fronds and hold them, kiss them, bow over them, turning him away from his own flesh.  “Messiahs, he’s yours, as he always has been.  Make use of him, speak to us.”

The glow of his eyes banks again, pulsing and pushing in waves, and Brother Immortal’s screaming dies too, to gasps and sounds and shaking. 

“Did you make contact?” says a sister, eager, and other gather close, pushing too, reaching to touch his skin.  “Did you see them?” and other voices say “He’ll come around to it” and “Lord Makara, be easy, blessed—” and “I know it’s a shock but they wouldn’t bring harm to you, reach for them—”

He cries again, head snapping back, and for a moment you see bones, a dark beach, in your mind’s eye. 

“What did you see?” you say, dry in the mouth at the closeness of divinity, like you can almost feel them reaching through him.  “Did you reach them?  Are they speaking to you?”

He wails—coughs, gasps, cries out again, weaker and whimpering.  “Kurloz,” is the only word he says, and Brother Uumbrage makes a noise displeased and bows his head, knots his hands together and prays only more fiercely, leading you all by his example.  It’s known, the name of the fallen Immortal—there are none now left who knew of him when he was made Grand Highblood but their stories were passed down, and Brother Uumbrage carried them through for the rest of you. 

It's known, the fact they consorted, and that he’ll have been taught most foul untruths of your faith.  The scourging of those ideals will be harsh.  The glory when he realizes their falsity, unparalleled.  You have only to be patient, Brother Uumbrage says. 

You sit by the Messiah-Father's side, as another dose is prepared.  As Brother Immortal sinks to dreaming.  As his children-messiahs take him to trial.  You sit by his side, and you’re patient.

--

You stay by Brother Immortal as much as you’re able.  You feel a duty, even though it’s foolish to think one so little as you could offer much to the Messiah-Father; yet you feel the urge to protect and take care, while he’s scourged by his penance.  You can feel some briefest flash, still, of what he might see; you feel, often, the brilliant holy red, and at those times he grows unquiet, sobs or cries out.  You see his dread ancestor and how the vision of him torments.  He turns his face from it, he claws at himself until his fronds must be cuffed to keep him from blinding himself. 

You hate to leave him.  Your kin who spells you when you must be away takes faithful care of him, of course, but you find it uneasing how they look on him, the smell of them, the way they touch him.  Seems almost pale, for all their pious denial when you make gentle reproach.  They find cause to remove his paint, for the tiniest smear of the lines.  Other faithful come to sit by their side when they do, and the show of it feels…

You don’t like to leave him.  He’s suffering, and for you, and what pity you feel is kinship, not hunger.  When you were taken, terrible ill, struggling and suffering and brought too low to care for yourself, you never wanted a matesprit, a moirail, someone to see you for pitiable and make your misery the reason for their want.  You do the most you can to give him food and drink, when he can swallow without choking.  You take the care you would’ve had for yourself, and temper as best you can the way they drink in the spectacle of his holy suffering.

You’ve left to bring him water when he wakes again—he’s lying still, as he has been the past hours, but you know the shape of his breaths now, you’ve sat for so many hours, and you know when he breathes it’s deep by intention, that his pan is aware of his body again.

“Lord Makara,” you say, as quiet as you can, and even that makes him whimper like a troll a third his age and turn away from you.  “You did such a great motherfuckin’ job, my lord.  We know it must hurt terribly, seeing them so clear, it’s—I’m sorry it’s gotta be like this you meet them again.”

He’s not listening—only yellow in the slits of his eyes.  There’s a dry rattle to the way he breathes.  You pick up the water and come to his side, and do as you can.  He devours what food you can bring and your water, and this time he wakes enough for distress when you have to clean his paints.  Even knowing his best face must be presented, ready for communion, you find yourself turning your eyes away as best you can until you can paint him again and correct the indignity. 

Other faithful see him waking and come to help—you settle him higher on the throne of soft things you’ve made for him, soften the tightness of the cuffs around his wrists, wipe down the sweat from trembling limbs.  To touch him feels like presumption, but his distress to be touched is painful to see—you hum hymns to him soft and low as you work and he seems to hear, seems to quiet a little.  You tell him what you do as you do it, reassure him the fleetingness of it all.  That the cuffs are only protection, that soon he’ll complete his trials and he’ll be freed.  Whether he hears, you can’t tell. 

He speaks this time, when he’s given nectar again, and it’s hard to hear, harder even than his screaming.  He seems to know the taste and he sobs at it, cries no, please, I can’t, please, no, don’t—and then only screams, long and tearing cries like an abandoned grub, terrible to hear.

You pray at his side until he finally falls quiet again, but it takes longer yet for your pusher to stop its painful twisting.

--

Brother Uumbrage draws you aside, one of his visits, and you know from the look of his eyes that your guilt is found out.  That he knows the nag in the bottom of your thinkpan, this is wrong, this is wrong, you torment your kin, this is wrong.

“Something to say to me, brother Enishe?” he says, and his voice carries a hint of the harsh conviction you know he could deliver on you.

You know his patience for you runs lower and less than other kin more whole.  Small as you hatched, you have little to offer the church in body, and if your faith is shaken he has no reason to look kindly on it.

“I worry about the prophet,” you say, and he raises his brows.  His paint is fresh and crisp—he must have come from the empress’s ship.  “He’s bearing up, I mean, he’s bearing the communion, but I worry—trolls weren’t meant to see the messiahs so clear for so long.  Seems like he’s in—in such terrible pain, brother.”

Brother Uumbrage considers you a moment.  Then he says, “Have we not all suffered as well?”

You have—of course you have, and so has he, and you know that.  A hundred sweeps more than you, he’s been forced bare-face among seadweller rabble.  Two-hundred sweeps, forced to hide his faith.  “Of course,” you say, and turn your horns aside in deference, showing bare throat, lowering your eyes.  “I didn’t mean—”

“Brother Immortal belongs to his Messiahs,” he says, and the pressure of his voice stings reproach at you, at your doubt.  “He was made to be theirs, host and vessel and lusus.  It’s not to us to question whatever trial they set before him.”

“I know,” you say, and curse your tongue for the guilty haste of the words.  “I know, I didn't mean to call doubt on the holy plan.  Forgive me my trespasses.”

“You’re forgiven,” he says.  Says, “It would do you good to be away from his side a while, I think.  Spend time in prayer.  Remind yourself where your convictions lie.”

You take it as the order it is, for all your pusher falls at it.  You nod, and bow, and go.

--

It’s days before you’re allowed back to the side of Brother Immortal.  He’s changed, while you were away; thinner, more shaken, too far away to take food or water.  The jewelry that pierced through his gills and ears and horns has been replaced in holy colors. He shudders at any touch.  His voice comes cracked and rattling, his screaming quieted to shaking moans. 

You coax water to him, a drip at a time.  Try to offer him food, for all he doesn’t hear or see or know you’re there.  Settle, finally, by his side, and pull out the book of scripture and settle in to read to him, to offer whatever comfort you can.

You’re halfway through a page, murmuring quiet and tracing along the words, when you hear another voice whisper in harmony with yours.

“Children I love,” Brother Immortal croaks, as your frond freezes shocked on the page.  “I’d fight for the both of you, though I’d tear in half to do it…”

It’s only a fragment of a verse, but verse it was, scriptured holy verse, known unlearned.  You gather up the faithful and tell the news and they murmur and praise and call Brother Uumbrage, all of you coming together around your prophet as he begins to wake.

“Lord Makara?” you say, and you take one cold frond and squeeze it, and his head twitches toward you.  Praise and glory, he does hear you.  He’s come back. 

“Messiahs,” he murmurs, broken-small and shaking, and his voice cracks almost to nothing.  You grope for water, bring it to his lips, and he drinks so eager you worry he’ll choke on it—whines when you have to take it away.

“What did you see?” a sister asks before you can offer more, and you remember the pieces of his visions you’ve seen even as he shivers.

“Just, nnh,” he licks his lips, words wandering.  “Hot, so, red, and so ffh, hh, fucking small…”

“The Messiah Raging,” someone murmurs at your shoulder, reverent, and you offer him another sip, trying to tame how your frond shakes with eagerness.  “What else, brother, what else?”

He lifts his head after the cup as you draw it away again—falls back, no strength in him.  “Water,” he pleads, and his eyes come hazy to your face a moment, begging at you, and your triumph and pride come crashing against your sudden hurt.  He looks so tired.  “Water.”

“Give it measured,” says Brother Uumbrage, sharp, as you go to offer more.  “Not yet.  Suffering is focus in the pan of the prophet.”

Your thorax aches at you—Brother Immortal gives a cry, pleading yet, needing. You sit by his side, hold the water, and don’t move a muscle.

He doesn’t give you more visions.  He’s found his voice again but he uses it only to plead, voice breaking into a wriggler’s pitiful sobs, begging for his lusus, pleading to let him go home.  The strength to speak leaves him quickly, the words slur to nothing, and Brother Uumbrage sighs.

“Leave him,” he says, “Let him rest.”

Brother Immortal rouses at that, rasps out “Water,” again, and you squeeze the cup in your fronds and look up at Brother Uumbrage, begging permission.  He sees your look, sighs, reaches up and rubs a hand at the root of his horn, careful of his paint.

“Give him his water, brother,” he says, and brother Makara’s shaking quiets a little.  “Feed him, comfort him to sleep.  He’ll need his strength, if he’s to give us any revelation.  Whoop?”

“All whoop,” you say, grateful, and turn to your duties as kin begin to leave, still discussing and replaying, all excitement. 

Brother Immortal doesn’t speak to you again, but he doesn’t cry either, and this time when he falls back to sleep it’s peaceful.

--

He begins to speak, after that.  Only fragments, in his sleeping, but he speaks.  You take pen and paper, and one of you at his side has it always on hand.  He says “please, fuck, don’t cry”.  He says “I’m right here”.  He says “Can’t stay, my loves, can’t bear to stay…” and murmurs shreds of scripture and devotion.

He whispers the book of Angels, I wait for death, brothers.  Pour one out for remembrance of my soul.  And then, he goes silent.

He breathes, yet, but you’re gripped with such an immediate and certain fear.  The trolls who’ve taken nectar before have been scorched away, their pans never came back—it can’t be, that he would suffer the same fate.  Even Brother Uumbrage allows, when you call him in fear, for a break, a night of rest.

When he wakes this time, he’s changed.

He looks at you all, for all to push himself up and raise his head makes him shake and pant.  He looks you over with judgment and harsh eyes.  You were coming back to shift, and you’re shamed to find they’ve left his face bare again, that his anger shows clear without any mask to soften it. 

“Any more words to tell?” you say, and come careful to his side, keep your eyes from his bared face.  “Brother—”

“Get the fuck away from me!” he spits, and he wrenches free from your touch, struggles at the cuffs—not to claw himself, this time, straining to reach for you, claws bent to tear at flesh.  “Leave me the fuck alone! GET THE MOTHERFUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT YOU FILTHY FUCKING HERETICS—”

His voice gives way to howling, then, snarling and snapping like a feral thing, but you’re already on your feet, taken in panic at his sudden fury, all of you running from his damning sight.  As you reach the door you hear him weaken, look back a moment and see him fallen onto the pile again, shaking and gasping; you meet his eyes and he looks at you just a moment with a look of such terrible fear on his face.  His eyes catch yours and you freeze with that look, the hopeless and wretched terror, the hate and blame. 

Then he bares all his fangs at you, and you run.

--

For two nights, none of you dare go near him. On the second, Brother Uumbrage arrives, and you count yourself lucky you aren’t there when he does, to explain the how and why of it.  He goes to the prophet’s chambers, and he doesn’t come out for a long while. 

When he does, he looks grim and tired, but he delivers hopeful news.  Brother Immortal is woken enough to speak, and that there are glimmers of hope for his soul.  That he’s taken and shaken by his faith in the greater cult—fighting back against the holiness he’s been forced to see, struggling with the truth of it.   Conversion is a powerful thing.

Brother Uumbrage leads the way, still, when you go back cautious and creeping to the block he lays in.  He sees you coming and watches with wary and unwelcoming eyes as you come to him, but he doesn’t snap or snarl.  He allows you to paint him again, and when he’s covered you think you feel some amount of struggle and tense leave his body.

He balks again, still, when Brother Uumbrage brings out the nectar.

“I don’t fucking want to,” he says, sharp and clear—quiet still, with his throat so worn and torn, but loud enough you surely hear him.

Brother Uumbrage doesn’t hear, though, or if he does he takes it only as a sign he must do what he must do.  He opens the holy book and he begins to read, and Brother Immortal shudders and twists from the words, scourged by them as sure as holy exorcism.  He bares fangs and snarls and tugs at his cuffs, but Brother Uumbrage has no fear of him, reverent in word but as rough as he needs in deed, and he tames the sinful snarl of him and feeds nectar into him until he goes to his messiahs again. 

His speaking comes fragmented this time.  You write “I feel it, sister,” and “You see me, you hear me?”  You write “What does that mean, is that why it hurts?”

“You were the first thing,” he murmurs, the clearest he’s been, and his eyes well over as he sleeps, he gives a noise of pain like the words take some terrible effort.  “First thing, that touched me.  Nhh first thing that.  Hurt me.  I wanna remember…”

You carry the new word to the sister who’s been transcribing, and by the time you come back he’s awake again, moving slow, blinking steady.  He’s coming back faster and faster.  You dare to think, maybe, that he’s stopped fighting it.  That whatever had hold of him, whatever spirit of fury took him, that Brother Uumbrage did truly drive it out of him.

“Brother Immortal?” you say, and he moves to look at you, one painful shift at a time.  He looks so tired, so sick and frail—it’s terrible to see.  It’s terrible and familiar, and it sickens you to have done it to him.  It doesn’t feel worth it—but it is, it must be.  You know it is.

“Whh, wh’happened,” he says, soft and dry, and coughs, and when you bring water he leans up for it eager, drinking hungry for it. 

“You were…” you don’t want to pass blame, not when he already suffers so, when he’s already been so harshly convicted in front of all his kin.  “You had a harsh time, brother.”  You don’t know what to do with yourself, and so you offer all you can offer, another glass of water.

You aren’t expecting, when he twitches his lips in a smile.  “Miss the fleet elixir,” he says, and you can’t help how your pusher leaps at the tone of him.  There’s a gentleness to him that’s been gone since first he woke up, and it turns the hard lines of his face to something softer, a troll like you. 

“We could get you some,” you say, eager, for all it would be dangerous to try.  You want to keep that brief smile on his face.  “Could steal some off of there for you, wouldn’t take more than hours.”

He flicks a fin at that, and his eyes fall to the water in your frond.  “Water,” he says again, and you give it until he turns his face away.  Drops his head back against the pile, with a long and sighing moan. 

“…I’m hurting, brother,” he says, voice so small it shakes you.  Just a troll, only sweeps younger than you, whispering the self-same words to you that you held inside so many times as sickness took and shook and racked you.  “Can’t—I can’t, breathe.  All cold, always.  I can’t…” he blinks, wavers a moment like he’ll fall away from you.  “Won’t make it, to see the church.”

Your whole thorax tightens like a fist at how familiar that feels, hearing him talk so.  There’s things you want to say, your messiahs love you, they wouldn’t do that to you and I’m with you, brother, I know that hurt, and wretchedly, stupidly, I’m sorry, I’m sorry what’s been done to you. 

“We try at caring for you,” you say, instead of any of those things, and you reach out to touch his shoulder as you have before when he slept—but he’s awake, now, and you know he takes it for pale presumption, the way his ears flatten and his chin rises.  You’re already pulling back when he says, “Fucking watch it!”

“Yes,” you say, in reproach of yourself.  “Brother, of course, I’m sorry—”

“I’m not for your hands,” he says, and there’s a hint of majesty to him, for a moment, as wasted and hurt as he is.  “All of you are too, hh, too motherfuckin’ easy to lay your hands on me.”

He doesn’t want your help.  What little help you could offer.  You nod and bow and offer instead, “A doctorturer then, biggest brother?” and he rattles another breath and nods.

“Yeah,” he says, and you can hear he’s growing tired, exhaustion drags harsh at his words.  “Yeah.  Fuck.  Thanks.  Little brother.”

--

You ride the high of his acknowledgement for the whole day.  Brother Uumbrage looks thoughtful when you tell him what was said—some of what was said.  You keep your feelings on it to yourself, and you don’t tell him yet that the holy Messiah-Father called you “brother” and smiled at you so.  But he nods, and says “Dose him again.  I’ll take care of the mediculler.”

Good as you felt, it makes the hurt worse.

The nectar seizes him hard and vicious this time, and he shakes like a seizure and thrashes and drools and his fangs chatter till they tear into his lips and tongue.  He says please, please through bloody lips.  He prays, delirious in desperation, haven’t I been faithful, fuck, please, mercy, please, I can’t—he mangles scripture in bubbling breaths through purple-wet fangs, trying to say holy word and too ruined to form the sounds.  Something aches and throbs at you.  Something in you is turning to poison and bile. 

You aren’t there when they bring in the mediculler.  You go to the tiny block that’s all you have for a chapel, and pray in the quiet, to the figures of the messiahs on the wall.  The figure over them, all in purple, with the sign Makara on its chest.  It made sense to you, that messiahs would come to take form in flesh, that they would seek to struggle as their children struggled, that a troll would serve and raise and care for them.  The messiahs of the greater cult never cared for one like you.  Never came down to suffer or struggle.  You were distant from them.  You weren’t the troll they wanted.

It felt right to you.  But this, all of this, his crying and his praying and his pleading alone, this does not feel right.  You don’t want to hear some heathen lowblood pass judgment on the torture you’ve done to his body.  You don’t want to hear what you already know, how deep you’re hurting him, reaching through him for your messiahs.

You hear that rage took him again, when the dirtblood was executed.  You’re glad, shamefully, not to have been there to see.  Glad that by the time you return to him, his anger has died again.

He asks for mercy, this time.  He begs, they’re too bright, I can’t, and you can’t help but beg in kind.  He called you his brother.  He called you little brother, and he’s shaken and in pain.  Messiahs came down, didn’t they, to flesh and blood and pain and struggle—they know him better than any other and they know he’s only flesh and blood, for all his holy bloodline.  He’s just a troll, and you don’t want to hear him plead and scream anymore.

He sleeps again, and you aren’t thanked and you know Brother Uumbrage watches you narrow-eyed and harsh, but you can’t quite tell yourself it was wrong.  He’s just a troll.  He needs to rest.

Brother Makara’s breathing evens, as the nectar comes out of his body; still harsh, but not shaking anymore.  You do your best to comb the tangles out of his hair for him as he sleeps, and are struck, frozen in place, when after some endless time he turns his face against your hand and gives the briefest, smallest rasp of a purr.

You take your hand back as though his skin might burn you, and he leans after your hand a moment before he falls away again.  Guilt and shame and some frantic desire to soothe and quiet take up hive in your thorax, and you hesitate and hold your own hands instead of touching him.

“Did you see them?” you say, as quiet as you can, and he shudders.  “Did it hurt?”

“Wanted to fuckin’—die, it hurt so bad,” he whispers, and you can’t help yourself, at that, you’re reaching out and touching him again, the most chaste comfort you can give, just touching his painted cheek and the tamed tangle of his hair.  He doesn’t growl of presumption this time.  He says, “It was, nnh, killing me, I, couldn’t—sorry—”

“No, lord,” you say, urgent in your unworthy pity, the strange and presuming urge to protect him.  He’s only a troll.  You’ve hurt him so deep, and for all Brother Uumbrage’s talk of sin to be burned away and unholy filth in need of purging, all you’ve seen of him is prayer and scripture and begging, crawling, crying to his messiahs in his torment.  He’s got no call to apologize to you.  “Brother, no, you’ve done more than any of us ever could.  Brother Uumbrage just—he just wants this real strong, you know he means no harm to you.  We’d never want that.”

He moans, soft and quiet, and turns into your touch again, and you calm and reassure, and aren’t turned away.

--

You step away, once he sleeps again.  He’s dosed and this time he takes it without complaint; he makes noises of pain but he doesn’t thrash or fight or struggle against it.  Brother Uumbrage looks all but pleased. 

You aren’t there, you don’t see what happens.  But you hear the screaming.

By the time you arrive, limping and breathless, there are all the faithful gathered.  Brother Makara is on his feet, all but one cuff broken loose, with holy purple blood down his chin and throat and bare chest, painting over the gold and green and red of his raiment.  The kin who would leave him bare-faced lies next to him on the ground and you know as soon as you stumble into the room that they’re dead.  The air is rich with the smell of blood.  He’s wavering on his feet, empty-clawed and red-eyed with rage; he barely stands.  Only a troll.  Cornered, afraid. 

You know, then, some part of you, that you’ve been used.  You know the fakery of the face he showed you.  Not a brother coming to the light, but the desperate gambit of a troll trying to turn away a torturer. 

You stand, frozen, and Brother Uumbrage shoves you aside as he enters, sends you almost staggering off your feet and comes down on the—on brother Makara, on Gamzee, like a wrathful angel.

“Back the fuck off me!” Brother Makara snarls, and he steps back, again, you can see his brave face but you can feel his fear, thick as the smell of blood, thick as poison in the air.  He shows all his fangs, but he’s trembling just to stand, his shoulders rise and fall and heave in desperate breaths.  “Not gonna bend for you, for your, fucking, heretic shit—”

“You have no idea what we’re offering you!” Brother Uumbrage says over him, a thundering dread on the words, “I won’t lose another incarnation—!”

“He’s coming,” brother Makara hisses, and dread shoots up your posture column at the look in his eyes.  Brother Uumbrage goes still.

“He’s coming,” brother Makara repeats, and spits purple blood on the ground, smiles with fangs dripping blood.  “He’s coming, to do judgment on you.  You gave me eyes to see, and I saw.  You gave me tongue to speak, well holy fucking shit did a motherfucker speak!  My motherfucking words will bring you low.”

Brother Uumbrage takes him to the ground in a rush, slams him flat with no mercy.  Something cracks, and you jerk forward despite yourself at the scream of pain—there are kin stronger between you and him, you can’t make your way forward, you don’t know what you’d do if you did.  Brother Uumbrage does more things, causes more screams.

“Do not be afraid, brothers and sisters!” he says, over the sounds of pain.  And you are afraid, you are, but not of the troll pinned and screaming in front of you.  Not even of he messiahs you’ve feared always, sitting in judgment.  Brother Uumbrage turns back to look at you all, and you don’t know him.  Your paint feels cold as corpse-ashes on your skin, your tongue is a dead thing behind your fangs.

“I’ll hurt you until the day you bleed and rot and scream to death,” brother Makara hisses, panting in misery, pain and rage lighting up his eyes in red.  “He won’t kill you, motherfucker, you I want dying in my claws!”

Uumbrage hurts him again, crushes the wind out of him.  Reassures you all even as he crushes and strangles off the voice he called most holy, the troll he called most honored.  As he forces a mediculler’s tube down his throatstem, holds it there despite brother Makara’s gag and choke and struggle.  He preaches to you all how this is a warning from the true heart of your Brother Immortal even as he holds him to the ground and shoves a handful of cloth roughshod between his fangs.  The trolls around you are yelling, moving, preparing for the fight to come and paying no heed; you stand, and watch, and stare.  You hear.

“I’m done playing nice with your delicate holy self, Immortal,” you hear Uumbrage say, as he draws a jar of nectar from his sylladex, not measuring and careful, pouring it out and out and out, forcing it down unwanted as brother Makara chokes and shakes.  “I’m done sparing your body, when your soul is all we need.  Your connection will serve us, your guidance will lead us, if you have to do it from a mediculler platform the rest of your fucking life!”

You feel the moment faith gives way beneath you.  You turn, and you run.

--

There’s no means to leave the shuttle now, and so you don’t; you find the smallest, closest place you can, and you huddle and hide like a filthy coward.  You hear feet running—you hear the distant first scream and then the rising mayhem of subjugglator, laughsassin, the whooping, riotous chorus of death.  You hear other voices scattered throughout—no hint of whimsy, theshecutioners with hard, angry voices moving fast and vicious through the lowbloods Uumbrage brought to guard. 

You feel the fallen Immortal come—but he’s not, he’s not, the brother you hurt was only troll and so the Grand Highblood must be as well.  Although the knowing of that won’t save you from your destruction by his fronds.  Nothing will save you from anything, now.  Every piece is falling apart under you, every certainty fallen away.  You feel him come, and maybe it’s the long days you’ve spent by his descendant’s side, but under the fury and dread shrieking from his pan, you feel his own fear. 

You hear a threshecutioner say “Hold positions!  Hold up.  They found what they’re looking for.”  You hear another say “Fucking finally, does the captain know?”  And the first says grim, “Oh, I think he’s pretty fucking aware.  Sounds like it’s not good down there.”

It’s entirely madness that drives you forward, at that, guilt and some strange, suicidal sense of lingering duty; you were tasked to care for him, and care for him you did, for a handful of nights.  He’ll die, if they don’t help him.  They don’t know what was done to him, and you know as sure as you know nothing else, that he won’t survive much longer.

A threshecutioner catches you before you manage half the hallway.  They’re about to take you, to torture or to cull or to capture you don’t know, but you plead “I need to talk to the king of colors, please, the one they’re looking for, he’ll die if I don’t—” and the olive-blood who has hold of you hesitates and then growls and hauls you off and down, down familiar decks.

You arrive in time to hear brother Makara scream.

The Grand Highblood is bent over him, kneeling on the bloody floor, painted in all colors up to the shoulders, splattered with it—he’s pulling his hand away in shock, and you recognize with terrible clarity the look of hurt and worry that crosses his face before he hides it away.  A threshecutioner kneels on the other side of him, and when you’re dragged in they both turn to look at you and you see that the threshecutioner has eyes red as messiah-blood, red as the mutant preacher of the first rebellion.  Brother Makara's moirail, Vantas, smaller yet than you ever pictured him, with his own rainbow of blood splashed across the plates of his armor.  You're aware, at those matched glares, that you're in the presence of the quadrant-corners of the troll you took part in torturing.  You're aware, also, that you're about to die.

“Captured this one trying to get down here,” says the oliveblood holding you, and shakes you hard.  “Says he wants to talk to—”

“You have to get it out of him!” you say, pleading—brother Makara doesn’t beg, now, doesn’t scream or plead anymore, but he chokes and spasms, nectar bubbles thick from his nose and mouth and the tube forced down him.  “They gave him so much, too much, please—”

“You know what they did?!” Vantas stands, and draws vicious sickles with the imperial sign worked into the blades.  Rumors have been long-spreading of the empress’s blood-red pawn, but you didn't expect to be frozen so in front of him, eyes burning in you like irons.  His horns are small, he’s barely taller than you, but his fangs are sharp and even as a seadweller’s and the way his hands work on his sickles you know he means to make you pay.  “Talk!”

“They said they wanted to help him make communion,” you say, helpless with shame and guilt as the troll who called you ‘brother’ seizes and shakes at your feet.  “But, in his dreams he only ever cried, it hurt him, and brother said he was blasphemous before and that was why but—he said scripture in his sleep, he prayed and—” the words are ash and nothing in your mouth, meaningless, and the Grand Highblood crouches over his descendant and stares at you like he’s a moment from springing for your throat.  “Please, before you kill me, I know what they gave him, let me tell you before I’m damned—”

“You know what this shit is?” the Grand Highblood moves like a scalebeast striking, up and to you and hauling you up off your feet before you have time to catch a breath.  He’s furious, he’s frightened.  He’s a shrieking storm of frenzied hurt.  You knew they pailed.  You never credited he might be truly, deeply flushed—that he might care this deeply, that it would hurt him so even you can see it written across his face.  “WHAT DID YOU DO?!”

“I just took care of him,” you babble, under that stare—he’ll hurt you, he’ll kill you, slow and hungry and painful—  “Nothing else, I just took care—”

“Makara!” snaps Vantas, and it startles you a moment, until you see the Grand Highblood’s head turn and his ear twitch, listening even as he growls.  “Put him down.  We need to know what he knows, now.”

“Oh, little motherfucker will talk,” snarls the Grand Highblood, and his fear drenches you, drowns you, like his descendant’s couldn’t. 

“Yeah, he will!” says Vantas, and you can’t help the weak and shaking sound of gratitude you make as the grip on your choke and your thinkpan loosens.  “He already said he would, he’s literally begging you to let him talk!  Put him down!”

“He’s overdosing!” you say, and he doesn’t put you down—grip tightens again, strangling your voice to a choking gasp.  “He’s, you have to get it out of—hh, him— They gave him a triple dose—”

“Overdosing,” repeats the Grand Highblood, and his eyes go sharper, wider, dart to brother Makara’s slack face and the trickle of nectar across his cheek.  Vantas is moving already—grips the root of a horn, reaches fearless past brother Makara’s fangs and wrenches loose the gag and the tube and a mess of nectar and acid and blood. 

“I’ve got you,” he says, as the troll you called holy retches and shakes, heedless of the hand familiar on his cheek.  Not careless and cruel as Uumbrage was in his desperate rage and not fawning-useless as you were, in the end.  Warm and firm with him, steady and soft, ignoring the mutant-red tears gathered up in his eyes.  You’re shamed, watching him.  You’re humbled.  You’re so dead.  “Shit.  Gamzee, I’ve got you, you’re okay.  It’s okay.  Fuck.”

You’ve done all you can for him—better than whatever paltry assistance you gave while he was brought low for nothing, for a connection he couldn’t have found.  What punishment or mercy will come to you, will come whatever your pleading and your struggle.  You kneel by his side, a thousand miles from him, and you wait patient for your judgment.

Chapter Text

Your name is Shufte Wachin and you’re fixing to get your schoolfeed on.

You’re nine sweeps, fresh-conscripted, and aspiring to train as a laughsassin; by virtue of your faith and blood, you’ve been taken to the holy church fleet.  By show of your conscription trials, you have been most mightily honored to train on the battleship Dark Carnival.

There’s a purpose for every ship in the holy fleet; for the rowdy and the righteous, the penitent and punished.  The Dark Carnival is a place for the best, the strongest and fastest and smartest, the strangest, most rowdy freaks.  It’s strange and baffling, fresh off Alternia, to walk among adults all your own color and kin just-pupated and fresh blood like you all mixing together. 

You grow used to the mix, in some ways; the feeders come to be expected faces, the kin around you slowly march toward pupation themselves.  But some faces, you don’t ever grow familiar with.

Feels like being a skitterbeast looking up at a behemoth, sometimes, when you turn a corner and fall under the great shadow of the Grand Highblood, schoolfeeders and storied church champions around him.  Titles that might as well be lifted to sainthood already for how your older kin speak of them, Lonesome and Sungazer and Stitcher and Untoxxic.  And his Cruel and Mirthful Majesty, coming among you all and delivering words of scripture and prayer to you, looking on you all with both a warmth and a most terrible weight of expectation.

That in mind, you keep to your studies.

Studies are yours to find, however many you want to seek; some schoolfeeds everyone knows you most surely must have, in scripture and culling and so on, but others you seek by your interests.  And, so you’ve heard, some of them are harder to find than others.

Feeder Vantas is a strange and special brother, even for the Dark Carnival.  He doesn’t wear your paints, he doesn’t speak with whimsy; he’s a small and angry storm, rushing around, yelling at kin, speaking in confidence of the Grand Highblood, coming and going on Empress’s orders and by his own whim.  His eyes burn bright as the color of the Messiah Raging, a mutant color, not even on-spectrum, but he wears the empress’s sign next to his own and even the highest-blooded of kin seem not to question him in his wandering.  And, so you’ve heard, he has a mighty deal to speak on quadrantcraft.

He preaches as holy-passionate as any faithful, when you finally catch him.  Kin from your age up to pupation and past all follow him intent, and he waxes eloquent and filthy on topic from respect and clear-speaking to honor of your kismesis to technique of pile and pail even he seems embarrassed to form word around.  Mighty educational, though.  You are well and truly educated, and in a way so loud and funny and fun to hear, you come back even on nights he only speaks on some movie or shit he watched, even when he looks tired and pissed and gives only a few words of wisdom before moving on to whatever his duties.

He doesn’t seem of an inclination to stop and give you extra schoolfeed, today.

You’ve found him in one of the study blocks at an activity plateau; he’s got a husktop in front of him, a fan of papers shuffled through his small, hot hands, and he glares at them like he’d like to set them on fire, hand in his sheared-short hair and tugging hard.

“Stupid,” he says to himself, sharp little rasp of a malediction, and tears up a paper in three fast rips, crumples the pieces and tosses them away across the table heedless of his mess.  His face is strange to see and paintless, the shadows under his gandersockets so clear and unmasked, scars striped pale red through the dark of his skin. 

He taps the inkstub he’s holding on the wood of the table, fast little chatter-tap-tap as it bounces between his fingers; picks up another paper and starts working at it like a grudge, making symbols and shapes, one fang worrying into his lip until you catch sight of the color you’ve heard so whispered about, bright unfamiliar red like poison and blindness and one half a messiah.  Feeder Vantas doesn’t seem to notice the red on his fangs—he’s muttering to himself, going from papers to husktop to papers again, saying “Fucking useless,” and “—flanked, again, there goes the whole fucking battalion—” and “useless” and “idiot” and a hundred words even saltier.

You didn’t take note of the older kin sitting down the way shooting the shit, but one of them looks up at a curse especially loud—a brother you’ve seen in presence of the Grand Highblood, not a feeder.  From what you’ve gathered he’s only but a sweep or two past pupation, but he’s powerful big and with great, curved horns with studs right through the marrow of them.  You’ve asked older kin before, how he got to be speaking to the King of Colors so familiar, and they’ve shared looks over your horns and then told you he’s not yet titled but that he’s in good with a few powerful kin.  Clear to you that he’s in on some church business you’re not cleared to poke your snuffnodes into.  Clear to you, his quadranting is in some way twisted up and complicated, and not intended for ears so untested as yours.

You know at least the name of Makara, in his reference, although if that’s a hatchname you’ve got no fucking idea.  His paint’s a smiling sort, but his arms and the bare thorax you can make out through the front of his shirt are covered in pale and healing scars, some in design and some of claws or fangs or weapons, as though he griefs every night of his life.  Although his paint smiles, still he watches Feeder Vantas fair sharp, listening as you’re listening, and looking less pleased with every profane and salty outburst.

“All chill and good on your shit over there, brother?” he says, and feeder Vantas sits up fast like he didn’t recall there were other souls nearby.  You don’t wonder at his affront so much as at brother Makara’s nerve—seems downright asking for grief, to speak to a feeder at work so lacking in respect.

“Fuck,” Feeder Vantas says.  “Yeah, what?  Shut the fuck up.”

Brother Makara laughs and waves the anger off like smoke.  “Pretty noisy, for a motherfucker just fine,” he says, all but clearly intending for a fight, and you step back in the rows of shelves before you can stop, at the look on feeder Vantas’s face.

“Yeah well, I’m working,” he says, and slams his husktop over to pick up another paper and start scratching at it like it’s a heretic he’s setting fit to tear apart.  “You’re pretty noisy for a huge honking gangly waste of air, but you don’t hear me giving a shit about it!”

“Alright, okay,” says one of the sisters who was sitting with brother Makara, and stands, the others around them following.  “Gonna let you two sort this shit out or whatever.”

“Yup,” says brother Makara, and stands too, to a height intimidating-tall.  It comes to mind that you might be about to witness real, adult griefing, two adults, one of them even a feeder.  You’ve heard how this goes, how bloody-brutal the holy violence—you don’t want to see your favorite feeder thrown down, and feeder Vantas is a bright and fierce and frightening motherfucker but brother Makara looks big enough to snap him in two pieces without trying, and dressed like a subjugglator of high regard.

Feeder Vantas doesn’t turn as brother Makara comes toward his back—he’s angry enough to shake, fangs grinding and worrying at himself.  His eyes don’t seem reddened but he’s lost in it yet regardless, paying no heed to his surroundings in his anger at whatever problem’s troubling him.

“Lookin’ awful tired over here,” says brother Makara, mild like it’s a passing fact, and by the way Feeder Vantas goes stiff again it’s clear the insult he takes it as.

“I’m fresh as a goddamn hunterrorist bounty,” he says, furious-hateful, and types something so hard you’re surprised to not see a crack in his husktop.  The other adults have gone on their way now—just the two of them, alone at the table, both standing still, getting their sense on of each other.  Neither pulling weapon, not yet.  Neither challenging, not yet.

“Karkat,” says brother Makara, low and sharp in ways you can’t read.  The words hum in his thorax in ways you don't have ear for yet, unpupated as you are.  Whatever he sounds or smells or says, it draws Feeder Vantas to a sharp and motionless tensing.  “Just you and me now.  How ‘bout you spin on ‘round and lemme see at you, huh?”

That’s entirely too fresh of him in many a way, and for all Feeder Vantas never wears a holy face, he lowers his head and growls anyway, like he's hiding the bareness of him.  “I said fuck off,” he says.  “If you put a finger on me I’ll chew it off, I fucking swear.”

Brother Makara considers that, considers him—and then reaches out toward him, no weapon in hand but intention, reaching for his neck where his strange short hair lays it bare.

You’re about to steel yourself to jump out, make some form of distraction—but brother Makara doesn’t aggress, there’s no flash of miracle blood or snarl of pain.  One huge and scarred and sharp-clawed frond comes bare-palmed to cup the shaved slope of Feeder Vantas’s neck, a touch that is in no way what you expected and in every way what you should not be seeing.  Holy shit.

“Karkat,” says brother Makara again, softened with gentle whimsy and pale worry, and you are the biggest idiot in the whole holy fleet.  It’s you.  Holy shit.  “Talk at me, beloved.  You sure you’re okay?”

Feeder Vantas, invincible feeder Vantas who could yell a ship out of the sky, scream stars into place, take a planet on his own—he shudders down and digs his nails at the table and just shakes.

“Aw, best friend,” says brother Makara, so soft as he might as well be unpainted in front of you, and your fins feel as hot as the surface of a sun to see the way he rests a hand on Feeder Vantas’s bowed-down head, like benediction but a hundred times more filthy-pale.  Holy shit, no wonder they said he was so highly in regard, he’s piling a schoolfeeder.  Even a young and mutant one, that’s a powerful weight in his corner. “My pretty fuckin’ starshine diamond, you went and got all twisted up and I never got my dumbass notice on.  No motherfuckin’ wonder you’re all fired up, huh?  C’mere, brother, let’s see you right.  C’mon.” 

Feeder Vantas twitches away to the hand that tries to bring him round, fangs snapping, but brother Makara pays his fangs no mind at all, gathering his shrunk and shaking figure and all its fury into an arm.

“Gamzee,” Feeder Vantas says, snarling and pleading in the same breath, and you come to your senses all in a rush and back away into the stacks as silent as any laughsassin, face burning fit to melt away your paint, still hearing him behind you as you go.  “Gamzee—fuck.  Please—”

--

“Please,” says Karkat, and fights himself, grinds his teeth on the words as they try to escape but they make it out anyway, torn up and limping but still plenty clear to hear.  “I’m—so tired, fuck, I can’t—I was such an idiot, I could’ve gotten us all out of there—”

You shoosh and pet at him, and he clings and digs his claws at your shirt as his curses turn all to pieces.  Remembers he’s pissed and tries to push off of you, strikes and shoves out when you don’t let him go.

“Get the fuck off,” he says, fangs and fins, wild threat display, and you take his wrists and let him grip yours in turn, dig his claws at you, breathe hard like he wants to snap again.

“We’re going to my block,” you tell him, and he snarls again, digs in his claws and tries to pull loose.

“The fuck we are,” he says, still wrapped up tight in not letting himself loose, in his temper and hate.  “I told the empress I wasn’t going to rest till I fixed my fuck-up, I—”

“I’m takin’ you there anyway though,” you say. You got longer arms, and highblood strength in you enough to hoist him on up and squeeze hard where his horn meets his thinkpan, take hold of that beautiful troll mistake called instincts and turn him boneless and twitching against your grip.  He says “Fuck” and “I can’t”—never tells you “no”, thought.  Never says at you to stop. 

You know your palemate, is all.  You know the books he reads, you know the movies you walk in on him watching.  You know he gets all hornbent and knotted and tangled around himself.  You know the things he wants.  You know he’d fight fang and claw and every last drop of his miracle blood not to let you give it to him. 

More to the motherfucking point, you know where he hides his porn, because he takes for granted you don’t pay attention to shit.  Well and deeply illuminating.

You might not be some kinda cool planet warlord, and you sure as fuck don’t have a fancy harem outfit, for him or you either.  And there’s enough of his books and his videos where a big, scary highblood gets tamed and turned willing, it just about turns you hot in the face to think about.  But it ain’t always the highblood getting tamed, when he touches himself and he thinks about you.  What doubts you got get quieter as he keeps on fighting just not quite enough to break loose away from your grip.

When you get to your block and press him down on his back, he’s breathing hard, looking about ready to flip his shit on you—cry out how bad he’s gotten to feeling or scream you into a new angry universe, you’re pretty sure he doesn’t even know. 

“Gonna treat you like you deserve,” you tell him, like you’re the boss here, the motherfucking highblood top bitch, and get his hands pinned up with one of yours, holding him there tight.  “Make you feel real good, best friend.  Can’t stop me.”

“Oh, fuck,” he rasps, and when you take his jaw and turn his face, make him to bare his throat for you so you can kiss it pale and gentle, he moans for you like he’s fit to fall to pieces.  Motherfucker shakes and he quakes and he pants up against your ear, little panicked heaves of his aeration sponges like prey trapped in front of a hunterrorist.  “Oh, Gamzee, fuck.  I, fuck, please.”

He’s so pitiable-sweet, how he takes his refuge in you like this, how he begs you to quiet him.  You, fucked-up panleak as you are, you know his body now, and know how to make him purr and whine and sob for you.  You know how to take him away from the things he uses to hurt himself.  You know how to help him, even when it’s all too much and big and complicated to get your figure on of how to start at helping yourself. 

“You sound so motherfuckin’ sweet, askin’ so nice,” you tell him, because it’s true and because it soothes the raw, worried edges of you, hearing him ask.  “That what you want, brother?  Want me to get down into you, find where it hurts, make it quiet in there?”

It’s talking dirty enough to warm your fins, but it’s nothing on how he moans in return for you, comes back with “Yes, fuck, okay, just—  Fucking fix me, please, I need you, I, I need this, I’m—so tired, just, please, please fucking fix it—” like you’re up in some kinda burning-pale hot pornographic bullshit.  Drives you to kiss him, and his throat, and his horns, and then take fronds to the delicate candy-red flutter of his fins, stroke at them with just fingertips.  He moans for it, tries to jerk his face away and is held and made to stay instead, and moans for that too, as good as pleading at you still.

“I,” he tries, “I’ve, got to—”

“Gotta do fuck-all but warm my pile, diamond of mine,” you tell him, and the sound he makes is all but a whimper, shuddering to your touch. 

It feels good, to make him so—tugs some piece of you, still hurt, some part of you that’s raged and wept to be confined to a plaything.  But Karkat is fierce and tired and furious and lovely and he needs a break, it’s no way near that unwanted type of torment for him.   

“You went and did yourself more hurt than a hundred motherfuckers could do at your flaysquad,” you tell him, and he closes his eyes at the reminding and tenses up under you, pulling at your hands.  “You think it’ll unspill that blood, fuckin’ yourself up like this?  Hurt yourself, make penitence to nobody, beat yourself all to shit, to rags and ruin…best friend, by the time you get your shot to make shit right again you’ll have nothin’ left in you.”

“That’s—not what I’m,” he tries, lying to you.  You growl at him, soft and half-purring, just to let him know you’ll take none of his shit.

“You wanna play a game of hard to get at me, best friend?” you say, sweetly dangerous like how they talk in his videos, and he bites his lip and his pusher pounds in his throatstem, frantic and eager.  “You want me to break you on down, palest, beloved, I’ll motherfucking oblige.  I’ll pull you open until a brother can lay fronds on the pretty naked center of you.  Make sure you got nothing left to hide behind and then show you how sweet a motherfucker can make you feel, once you’re all in a ruin for me…”

“Fuck,” he gasps, and his head falls back, his throat bare to you, drowning you in the eager-sweet needy scent of him even as he says “I, you can’t, Gamzee please, fuck.  I can’t.”

“I’m gonna make you,” you promise him, and he makes a noise both shaking and surrendering.  “We’ll get you there, whether if you can or not, best friend. Shhh…  So tired of worrying, brother, I can smell it on you, well how about you stop and lemme have you a while.”

--

Feeder Vantas preaches on the need of a moirail, the next night, with flushed cheek and darkening eyes, with his mutant half-fins as bright scarlet as you’ve ever seen.  You make a look at a sister older than you, and you see her recognize in your eyes, and both of you are in the know, now.  You look away quick.  She flicks her fins amused, and you both go back to listening.

Feels good to know the secret, next time you see your big brother Makara, and you don’t have to ask your kin on him again.  Mighty secret, and no wonder they treated it so discreet, that he spends his days with Feeder Vantas—but you tracked it down all by your bad self, and it’s good to look at his smiling paint as he passes at the Grand Highblood’s side, and know you figured his shit out.  Sneak-ass motherfucker as you are.  Laughsassin training here you come. 

Chapter Text

Your first mission’s smooth and sweet as sugar, until the second it fucking isn’t.

Your team wades in joyful for slaughter, subjugglators all and righteous and reckless with it.  Your clubs mow them down, culling just like they taught you; two, six, ten.  You’re unstoppable, you’re holy and destroyers.  You’re heedless of the noise you make, you’re well and ready for whatever resistance they mount.  You’re so sure.

Then they start to come, in numbers greater, in crowds thicker.  You find yourself backing up, losing ground; you break a neck and two more lowbloods come up in front of you.  When you swing out at them, sparks of different colors tear your club out of your hand and a whole handful of spark-ass psionic motherfuckers throw you back hard off your feet.

There’s blood in your clothes when you jump back up.  There’s blood in your mouth, and it’s your own, your lip torn on a fang.  You spin your grief abstratus, snatch up a throwing axe, wing it overhand and get one of the ones who threw you right between the eyes, but there’s more of them, always more. 

You grip hard on your other two clubs, but before you can make another rush for it a smaller brother yells out by your side.  You see him swat at his arm like he’s stung, toss away something small and green-glowing and then sway hard and fall to a knee; some motherfucker is shooting, from the hoard of lowbloods piling up out of the ship’s guts, and they’re not aiming to kill.  Your kin are dropping, staggering and falling.  You knock a dart away and it shatters on the ground, a thick spray of lime-green soporific mixing in with the blood on the floor.

You’re staring at it still, jolted numb, when something stings you in the thigh.  You feel how it comes on, the thick and heavy warm of it—you hear your own roar bounce back from the block walls, noise of your fury at what they try to do.  You wade in and feel them sting you again, rip into warm bodies, and feel it again, and stagger, and kill, and then it hits you again. 

There's blood on your tongue as you fall, still fighting it, raging and snarling until the moment black and numbness take you.

--

They mean to hurt you.

All of you, your precious kin, you wake and it’s clear what they intend.  Each of you chained frond to frond with short chain, heavy steel loops on the floor pinning down the chains.  They mean you to be close enough to touch.  They mean you to be close enough to hear and feel and see and smell.

They hurt all of you together, first.  They have hands and means.  Motherfuckers have no finesse but they do have tools made for crude purpose.  They send message, standing there among your screaming.  Then they fuck off, and leave you alone.

No clue of the days and nights you stay there, in the heat, in the dark.  They come to you each, like at their whimsy—sometimes to a motherfucker the same twice, and to hear your kin sob knowing they’re about to be hurt sends you snarling for blood, struggling in rage.  It doesn’t help.  Makes not a single motherfucking difference. 

It’s relief, when they come to you.  Not mirth, but relief, that you won’t have to hear your kin weep and beg anymore.  They order you to tell them the church’s ways and means.  They order you to tell them your numbers, your plans.  When you tell them to sit on a culling fork and motherfucking spin, they punish without ceremony or hesitating; take metal bar and pin you right through.  The sister next to you is squeezing your hand as the hurt takes you, as cold steel moves in you and through you and out again.  As you scream and choke on it.

You can’t breathe.  Can’t breathe.  Can’t breathe. 

It hurts.

“How many of you are coming to this planet?” they say, and you make to gasp and feel blood up the back of your throatstem, cough it out down your chin.  It hurts so deep inside you, it feels so good but you can’t breathe.  Greenblood face is hovering in front of you, in the hot and the dark.  You spit blood at her and she rears back and hits you, pan-ringing hard.

“Fine,” she snarls.  “Fine.  You wanna play it like that?”

Sparking motherfucker at her shoulder puts his hands on your horns, and you got just a second to snarl before he lights up and hurts you.  Blazing down to the core of you, pain from horns to thinkpan and down your posture column, drawing cry and writhe from you.  Making your body puppet-shaking and not your own with how good it fucking hurts.

“What the fuck,” says the oliveblood.  She curls lip at you, looks on you disgusted, and you don’t have pan to know why, only how it hurts and how your screaming comes breathless, struggling moan slipping in unwanted with how you’re burning from inside.  Your kin are making noise of rage.  Beside you, your sister you’re chained to squeezes hard at your hand.

“I think he likes it,” says one, and the motherfucker hurting you makes noise of disgust and lets go all at once, hands working like he’s touched rot and poison.  You fall back weakened, every piece of you trembling.  Blood between your fangs.  One says, “Fucking freak.”  One kicks out at you, hard jolt of pain as a boot hits your thigh.  Not so strong they can break you, but a bruise deep to the bones.

It hurts.  Hurts when they shred cloth and leave only your face to cover you.  Hurts in ways not of your body, when they jeer and jolt you again and make mocking announcement how you like it, how you love it—

“Leave him the fuck alone,” says your sister by your side, and her frond’s none the looser on you.  Not letting you go like filth, holding on so tight she shakes.  Or you shake, or both of you.  She has no love of pain—below her rage for you, her voice trembles when their attention turns on her.

“Nhh,” you say, wet, and swallow.  “Nnno, fuck.  Sister.  Don’t.”

“What, you don’t like watching?” one of them says to you, enjoying to hurt you this new way they learned, this thing they’ve dug out of you.  One of them kicks you again, gutshot this time, knocks your aeration sponges stunned and airless and you wheeze to get air back in.  The olive says, “Why.  Are you jealous?  Well then you’re gonna hate this.”

They hurt your sister, deep and vicious.  You hold on her hand as she screams, snarl and can’t reach to stop them, in the close air, in the hot, dark room.

Your sister falls bleeding on your shoulder when they leave her.  When you lean over to make prayer with her, you bring out pieces of words, drool out weakened scripture and blood with every dragging gasp.  Someone’s sobbing.  Could well be you.

They know how pain takes you, now.  You can’t start to guess how they’ll twist that against you.  The starts you can make at guessing, fill you fronds to horntips with terror. You bow your head down to your sister’s hair, and pray for your matesprit.

--

“We know who you are,” one of them tells you. 

You were sleeping when they dragged you up and out, threw you into an eye-searing bright block and tied you there.  It’s been hours since last they came.  Or nights.  It’s hot here too, not hot like boiling as it is in their prison block, but hot still and bright like a desert.  Your hair mats to your face and horns with old sweat and blood.  Your mouth’s dry except the persisting taste of royal purple.

You’re silent too long.  One of them hits you.  It rouses you enough for flash of rage through exhaustion—hunger for their deaths, lifeblood on your fangs, your claws turned to what they were made for.  You rouse to snarl and snap.  All it gets you is hit again.

“We want you to tell us about your ancestor,” says the one who asked you the question—big rusty motherfucker, ordering around like she might run the place.  “You’re the Grand Highblood’s spawn.  You can’t tell us you don’t know anything about him.”

“Get his name outta y’r filth mouth,” you get out, snarling and sticky with drying blood, and one of them twists hard at your ear, makes you yell out sharp with how it almost tears your fin. 

“Tell us about him,” says the rusty.

You tell them alright—tell them what the fuck they can do with their questions, almost break your fronds tugging at the cuffs they put you in, snap your fangs at whoever comes near—their psionic pins you back down, clamps shut your jaws, jolts at your horns again until you’re whimper-mouthed and whining through your grinding fangs.  Drags a peak of pleasure out in burning spasms, and another, and again, no single moment to breathe in the endlessness of how they hurt you.  By the time you’re let go, you’re barely in your own pan—unholy delirious, sobbing wet with overwhelm, keening Kurloz, Kurloz, please, I need, stop, please—for mercy and breath he’d give you in a heartbeat, mercy you’d never even have to ask for.

They’re talking, over you.  You gasp out please, convulsion of a sound, and then remember where you are and what you’re about and force yourself to swallow it.  Rustblood’s arguing with the olive who likes to hurt your kin in front of you.  Not listening to her, doing something you can’t make head or horns of with some box of a machine. 

She says, “Guess who we have, my lord Grand Highblood.”

You know that title, and you’re sat forward in a breath, staring around wild for him, shook-panned enough you expect to see him brought there just by your weakness.  You’ve dreamed him coming for you—you’ve had daymare plenty too, how they’d hurt him like they hurt the rest of your kin.  How he can be hurt as vicious as any other troll, how he’d bleed and how he’d scream.  He’s not here, though.  Nowhere, just a machine she holds in her hand and talks into. 

She says, “You’re taking some risks, aren’t you?  Sending out someone so valuable.  He’s not enjoying his stay, are you, wriggler?”

She’s making message.  To Kurloz, she’s talking to him, he’ll hear you.  You want to scream out and beg for him, like you have when they hurt you—you want not any such fucking thing.  They don’t get to hear the sweet shit you’d say to your matesprit.  You know he’s getting his search on of you already.  You know how they’d love to send him this and cause hurt at him. You can’t hold his hand in yours in the dark but you sure as fuck can keep him from getting dragged on down to the dark with you.

“Tell him,” snarls rusty, and hits you, hard strike against your cheek, pan-ringing.  “I said fucking talk, you cultist freak!”

“Go fuck y’r lusus,” you get out, shaken and airless how bad you hurt, trying for laughing and fearless and getting only the one.  “Words of the holy messiahs, a hundred motherfuckers can’t tell me—” One of them slams frond against the metal in your thorax, and it chokes you again, spasm of your aeration sac, wet cough. 

“I told you it was a bad idea,” hisses the oliveblood, the one who knows, and the rusty looks you to her, confused and pissed and the first rise of that disgust you know so well.  Figuring you for what you are, for the things you like, sickened by it and you.  “This one’s a goddamn freak!  He doesn’t even—”

“Shut it off,” says the psionic, and they set to arguing, hissing like he won’t be able to hear them, babbling back and forth with their meaningfless filthy flaps, maws jawing and flapping and making pointless air.  You hurt.  You’re so tired.  You can’t stop laughing, and when they hit you it only makes you laugh harder.

“Miss you, old man!” you say, and the psionic snarls at you.  “You should see all the blood in me, shit’s miraculous as fuck how it all just comes out and—”  He sparks up and presses at you so every bone creaks.  Your tore-up aeration sponge gives up more purple, coming out thick and salt-sweet and choking, and you let yourself show how good it feels, for Kurloz, for him listening in fear for you, you gasp out thanks to messiahs how good it feels.  You give thanks, and pray he finds you soon.

--

Your prayers aren't answered.

Time passes, in twitches and sparks, in the hot, in the dark.  They come to hurt your family again.  It’s hot, and still.  There’s not so many voices, now.  Less to sob, less to scream.  Your sister losing blood, a thick pool under you from where her leg was.  Sobbing against your side, stilled now.  Breathing small and gasping.  Frond in your frond.

You don’t know who’s dead already.  Messiahs haven’t brought Kurloz.  Haven’t brought mercy. 

You don’t wanna be the last one to die.  That’s the last mercy you plead for, in the dark, face turned up and mouth too dry to pray.  Let them take you all at once, quick and with mercy.  Let them come and wash your souls clean, and they can stop hurting, and you can stop drowning in your fear and pain unwanted.  Stop being spared only to watch your kin suffer instead, stop being used by filthy blood for filthy use, stop hurting.  Stop liking to hurt.

Your sister whimpers small, and you squeeze her hand and pray death comes swift.

--

It's all blurred.

Your pan’s playing with you, now, you know it, like when you’d take too much sopor and the walls would start to blur and change.  There’s a motherfucker here you don’t know.  Small, with curling horns and knife in hand.  Stands in the dark, looks round at you all and says “Oh, rage and mirth,” in voice shaking-small.  Picks forward, looking over you all—footfall is sticky and thick.  He says, “Fuck.”  He says, “Any of you still hearing?  Kin, please, speak to me.”

The words don’t mean shit to you.  You know you’re snarling, what little pan you can focus—some motherfucker’s here.  Means to make pain at your family.  You can’t make him out.  Maybe he’s not there.  It hurts, you can’t breathe, it’s hot and it’s dark and it’s hot and you can’t breathe.

Feet fall outside.  Moan of dread starts, sobbing and sickly—you all know what happens when they come for you.

"Fuck," says the one standing over you, and he looks down, sees you looking at him.  He says, "Can you hear me?"  He says, "I'm not letting them in here, brother, I swear.  On my motherfucking life, I swear.  You won't be hurt again."

You open your mouth to make response, and time slips from your claws, in bites and snatches.  The door’s open.  Noises come, screams of new voices.  Your kin still sob around you.  Your sister next to you hasn’t woken even to the door opening, heavy and cold and hasn’t moved even a twitch.  Her hand’s still in yours.  You’ll kill any motherfucker who touches her. 

You try to move, and catch on a cough, and the pain takes the metal cold in your thorax and shakes you hard.  Your pan swims.  You drift in a body that’s not yours, in a pan strung too thin to use. 

A hand touches your face.

You scream your rage and hurting, snap wild at the motherfucker leaning over you—they chained you looser, complacent, their fucking complacency, you have the length of chain to claw and snap and savage, snarling leave them the fuck alone, don’t FUCKING TOUCH THEM—

“Gamzee,” says a voice, and you howl your rage—how fucking dare, speaking to you gentle—you can’t breathe, messiahs, you can’t even think.  It hurts, and it’s so hot, and you can’t breathe.  The hands on you feel cool compared, cool and gentle with you, mocking.  Making gentle with you so they can hurt your kin—

You’re being held.  Not fucked, not hurt, not touched.  The body holding you isn’t rust-blood hot—it’s cool, like the hand you held in the dark.  It steadies you careful.  Soft rumbling chirr against your cheek.

“Gamzee,” says the voice again, and this time—this time, you know it.

“Ah,” you get out, gasp of a breath, taste of blood.  “Khh.  Kurloz.”

He holds you closer, croons comfort to you.  Comes to you, in the back of your pan, that you let go your sister’s frond.  That you’d hate if she felt you let go.  That you hope she’s not scared.  You’re safe, now.  All of you, safe now. 

“Came and took you back,” Kurloz says, and his frond strokes over your hair, blood and knots and all.  He’s careful with you—holds you gentle, looks you over, touches the places you’re hurt.  Cradles you near, tender with you.  “Caught a ship full of heretics on the side, and…saved all as could be saved.”

You hope your sister’s not afraid.  You hope she wasn’t.  You hope she knew it was a mercy in the end.

“The others…?” you say, and he touches your cheek and strokes away the wet. 

“Got ring-side seats to the endless show,” he says, and you can smell blood on his hands.  You can hear how few voices are still around you.  You can feel the cold of your sister’s hand in yours.  She’s in better places.  She doesn’t need you to hold on anymore.  You don’t rightly know if you remember her name.  You would’ve killed anybody who touched her.

“Hail messiahs both,” you try to say, but all you can wrestle out of your spasming choke is a wriggler’s sob, motherfucking bereaved, lost as a squalling grub.  The relief is cool and soft as rainfall, as wind off the sea, as Kurloz’s hands on your hair and your shaking, pain-addled body.  The tears come on hard and painful; your pan splits and swims, your thorax burns fresh like they just ran you through.  You wail out in pain of every kind, pains you wish you could hate and pains that tear at your soul and pusher like hot iron, and you hear other voices raised with you.  Church voices, mourning and crying, wailing and gnashing, sobbing with you. 

Breath runs out, and so does your strength.  You go limp as a dead thing in Kurloz’s arms, and this time you make no fight against it, when you fall headlong down into the black.

Chapter Text

Your heretical-ass daymare is waiting for you, when you go to coon.

You had Gamzee’s words running round in your thinkpan, when you drifted off, and it’s no surprise, becoming aware of him there.  Your matesprit’s sweet and earnest viewing of you, they send you what you could be.  They say disciple, well done.  

Gamzee is here, too.  You go sharp with shock at the sight of him, before you give him a real look over and realize there’s nothing behind his eyes, no hum of your little one’s true dreaming power.  This isn’t him, just the empty puppet of dream-flesh Immortal raises up to taunt you.

Still, it grinds your fangs to see him settled in that motherfucker’s lap, bare-headed and empty-eyed.  You have detail to add to the picture, now—the piercings in their colors, the exact shapes they’d paint him with.

“So that’s how he thinks of me, is it?” says Immortal, without looking up.  The Gamzee in his lap blinks slow at nothing, and gives a soft, hoping chirp at the sound of his voice; Immortal fits a thumb into a gillslit on his side, rubs rough, and he sighs and whimpers, beatific.

It’s familiar enough to burn.  “I think he gives you too much fucking credit, ” you say.

“Well, we knew he was a soft motherfuckin’ touch,” he says, and sets his claws in your boy’s soft, shaking belly, dragging them back in slow, deep cruelty.  Just needling and clawing and clawing again, leaving bright purple lines and drips of royal blood.  His Gamzee moans, eager and hungry as you know him but with a submitting croon more foreign.

“Please ,” he whispers, and Immortal raises a hand bloody-purple and grips it hard over his mouth, mutes him to muffled whimpering as the other claws dig in all the harder.

You’re not—you won’t.  You refuse to play at this game he’s trying, provoking you to snap and snarl and lose your control.  That’s not really your matesprit, no matter how sweetly familiar his noises, how perfectly you dream the smell of his blood.  No matter how it burns at you, seeing three bloody fingers pushed careless into his mouth, or how he eagerly takes to them, cleaning his own blood like he’s desperate to do no more than please you.  Be yours, your creature, your flesh, your holy and worshipped pailing toy—

For a second you can feel him on your lap, feel his mouth doing eager worship to your sharpened claws.  Then you shake Immortal loose in cold revulsion.   The dream trembles around you, all but throws you into waking.  You feel yourself turn over, growling, claws working at the slime, before he drags you back down like deep water.

Immortal’s watching you when you settle.  You know your own smile; I know all your secrets.  You know your own motherfucking tricks of interrogation, and you look back at him cold and wait for him to say what he wants.

“How many times are we gonna walk down this road, brother?” he says. 

It’s not what you expected.  He looks at you still smiling, but it’s a smile less mocking than you know from him.

“I saw what they did to him,” you say, and he nods slow.  Gamzee in his lap turns thinner and shaking, insensible in his arms, cuffs at his fragile fronds with green and red gems set in them.  As you found him, trembling, eyes rolled back and lips dripping their foul black elixir.  You say, “What other fucking road do you think I’ll walk with you, exactly.”

Immortal says, “He thinks there’s nothing wrong with us.”  And in his lap Gamzee twists to reach up and kiss his jaw.  Whispers nothing wrong with you, brother, please, I want you.  Fantasy of a different kind, no more true for it.  Immortal says, "He thinks he'd still want us, if he knew what we are."

“There’s no us, ” you say.

“There’s always been us, ” he says.  “Ever since first time you saw hurt, brother, and you wanted more.  Ever since you learned what you are.”

"What I am," you repeat, and he props his chin on Gamzee's shoulder and digs in his claws again.  Both of you feel it, know it, as Gamzee whimpers and the sound rolls down your spine like sweet fire.

"Freak," whispers a voice, and it's not Immortal's.  Some other motherfucker, some lowblood you tortured, some kin you pailed for drone season.  Some whisper you could always feel following you, even when you didn't hear it.  You know.  They whisper in a thousand voices, overlap making nonsense of them; freak—he's a—you fucking monster—has a hunger for it—he likes it too well—fucking freak—

"What we are," Immortal says again, and brings bloody fingers back to Gamzee's lips, holds them just away from his mouth so he drools and licks and strains up to reach them.  Mindless, wanting.  Immortal says, "How's that, brother?  You think messiahs are proud of you yet?"

"I know what the fuck I am," you say.  "He knows."

"Oh, he knows," Immortal echoes back at you.  "He knows what we let him know, brother.  And you don't ever let him know it all, do you?  How you'd use make use of him..."

“Kurloz,” says the Gamzee in his lap, and turns to look back at you, eyes big and bright and sweet at you, all empty behind them.  Pretty little puppet, just for your cruelty.  He says, “Brother, stitch me up,” and there’s a hungry moan in his voice, he doesn’t touch himself but reaches down and kneads at his own open thighs, lays the whole long and pretty length of himself out for you.  Immortal holds him there, kisses his throat and leaves a ring of toothmarks behind.  Holds your eyes, watchful, waiting.  You can all but see the puppet strings, when Gamzee says, "Need you to have me, brother, please, sew me up and fuck me—"

“He’s not your toy,” you say, not meaning to.  You know it for his win, even as you say it.  “He wouldn’t forgive, he wouldn’t allow. ”

“He would,” Immortal says, hungry, murmured in your boy’s ear like confession of love.  Things flicker, they change; heavy collar on your matesprit’s neck, toothed inside to dig and drag at his throat and his gills.  Long bar pierced through his bulge, hooked to rings at either side, keeping it out, letting him toy with it.  Gamzee suffers for him, broken down and open and apart in a thousand dreaming tortures at once.  Loose-limbed and bare-faced in his lap, whimpering pieces of brother, Immortal, please, please…

Immortal says, “He’d allow whatever the fuck we wanted, once we taught him to.”

“No.”

“He just wants our love, brother.”  Claws drag up his thigh, leave lines of purple behind them.  “He’s so thirsty for it...  He'd train up so easy.  You know he’d hardly fight.”

“No. ”

“What couldn’t we teach him to beg for?”  He muses, and tugs the collar, makes his puppet arch and whisper fuck me, brother please, split me open brother, hurt me…  “What wouldn’t he learn to love, just to make us happy?  Our poor, hungry little one…”

They tempt you, show you what could have been and say “disciple, well done”...   

Gamzee sounded so sure, so sweet in his believing of you.  You look at your own face in heretic paints and you know, at that moment, there’s no way for you to believe the soft and holy lie he wants you to.  There’s nothing holy, how this other you smiles.  Nothing messiah-sent, in the way he turns your sweetheart into flesh and object.  He’s from somewhere darker.  Sent to hold up mirror to you and scourge you with repenting.

“Then mirror I’ll be,” Immortal says, and you know he hears your dreaming thought as clear as words.  “You wanna hear him beg, brother?  We could fuck him full of slurry and see how much he’d fit before he begged us and cried.  We could chain him in front of our throne while we held court, whip him whenever he takes his mouth off our bulge—”

That’s enough.  You turn your pan away, and sink it back and away into yourself.  Close off from dreams, reach for your body, meatbound and cold.  Immortal laughs as you go, and you know your retreat for cowardice, and you know his laugh as victory.

“Say good morning, little brother,” he says, and you hear Gamzee murmur good morning… and then the sudden muffled sound of his cry.  

Brother Immortal smiles when you look back to him; you see him like he’s against a closing door, slice of light behind him, shrinking and shutting as you wake.  His claws on Gamzee’s shoulder, draped now in cloth all royal purple, with your sign worked in it in poison green.  

“Come right back, before he misses you,” he says, sickly-sweet, and he tugs the needle in his hand; thread pulls at your boy’s stitched and muted mouth, makes a one-sided smirk of his far-off, dream-empty smile. 

“We’ll be waiting,” Immortal promises.

The door shuts behind him with a dull and deathly sound, and you wake gasping in the dark.

Chapter Text

Your name is Meenah Peixes, and it’s your blood-given right to do whatever the fuck you want.

You don’t come to the Dark Carnival to yank the li’l Makara’s chain.  You seriously don’t.  You’re there to see his ancestor, maybe slap him around a little depending on how you feel.  Maybe fuck him, maybe shove something up his nook to see if you can really get him shuddering and clawing up his throne.  Clamzee’s an interesting little tidbit, but you don’t spend hours in a shuttle just to bait a minnow like him.

Still, though, he is cute.  Like Kurloz, except he hasn’t even tried to put up the walls Kurloz has had since before you ever met him.  You can sea what your threshie seas in him, you suppose.  Little clownfish is wide the fuck open.  Whether you wanna hurt him or tease him or make him blush, it’s all right there in easy reach.  Like a game you can play with, like the funnest, easiest version of your anglerfish you could possibly ask for.

So when you come to your Grand Highblood’s throneroom and find his buoytoy standing there looking lonely and cute and smelling all sweetly frustrated, play with him you glubbin’ do.

You know Kurloz is flushed for him, but it still startles you a second when he comes in and snarls at you finstead of laughing.  You were having fun, waverybody was having fun here; Clamzee’s prow-d like his ancestor, but not nearly as good at kelping his mouth shut or hiding how he feels aboat things.  Nervous and resentful and humiliated and too horny to try to stop you.  

You settle back anyway, just so Kurloz will settle the fuck down; this little minnow’s not the catch you came here for anyway.  Kurloz doesn’t get less pissed off, but he puts his horns down and stalks up toward you, and he locks the door behind him.  

Whale, if he’s going to lean into the pitch swing, you don’t have any complaints.  You prop yourself on the arm of his throne and pet li’l Clamzee’s horns, and he makes a noise that was probably meant to be a growl.  Oh praycious, his horns are sensitive, too.  Not nearly like his moirail’s of course, but whose are.

Kurloz is making a stink about swinging pitch and dragging his matesprit into it and what a low piece of shit he thinks you are.  You roll your eyes.

“He doesn’t mind,” you say, and reach down to touch Gamzee’s lips, where you left fuchsia paint smeared over the grey.  He whimpers, and the smell of fuck me, fuck me, comes on strong enough you can almost taste it.  

“Your fight’s with me,” Kurloz says.  “You don’t go through my family to get to me, Meenah, we have an accord.”

“You made that accod,” you say, because you’re the mothafuckin empress and you’re not perchicularly inclined to give the swimpression trolls can just make demands of you.  “Maybe you ain’t kelpin’ my finterest quite like you used to, you think of that?”

“I’ve thought of how maybe you’ve got too old to want a real rivalry,” he says, biting.  “Lookin’ for easier catches these days, someone you can fuck with who doesn’t stand a fuckin’ chance against you.”  He tosses his horns, like he doesn’t give a shit it bares a flash of his pretty, slim throat at you, the places you could bite.  You both know he’s not just talking about his matesprit.  He’s made it pretty glubbing clear what he thinks of the games you play with your new threshecutioner.  “Sick old hag as you motherfucking are.”

Tastes good when you kiss him, full pitch and hateful, his fangs on your lip, your claws digging into his back, the way he stifles a gasp and then gives a pitch, growling moan into your lips.  

“Scared?” you demand, when he breaks away, and however strong he’s gotten over the sweeps, he still staggers back when you shove with all your strayngth.  “I’ve known you since you were on trayning clubs, little brother.  I know all your tricks and whelknesses.”

You’re ready to settle in for a good makeout, when you hear a noise behind you and you frymember that you’ve got an audience.  Gamzee’s trying to sneak a hand down into his pants, seager little niblet, and you flashstep past Kurloz and catch those wandering hands, slam them down on the arms of the throne and crush them there hard.

“Don’t you fuckin’ touch,” you purr for him, and he tugs at your grip, resenting you, ears pinned down angry and chin and horns lowered at you like he thinks you’re here for a fight.  

“Move over,” Kurloz says behind you, and you’ve known him for long enough, the smell of his interest, the way his voice twists when he’s smiling, you know he won’t stop you when you pick his matesprit up and take his palace on the throne, settling his narrow twitchy hips in your lap and getting him straddled onto one of your thighs. 

There’s something in his nook, because of course there is.  You rock him on it, and he forgets to be pissed with you, chirping and eager, and Kurloz croons back to him and crowds into your space to kiss him.

You play with him a while, between the two of you—not often you’ve ever teamed up with Kurloz on swimbody, but you’ve worked together on shit that’s way less fun and you sink up easy by now.  He growls and curses and squirms around, but Kurloz has got him distracted, kissing him sweet and flush, gentle when you hurt him, hurting when you’re gentle.

You know he gives way way more shits about how his boy’s doing than what you want, but it’s still downright insulting when he leans down and says “Hey, little one, I can tell her to fuck off if you want.”

Most trolls you’d be able to say exactly what they’d want, what they should be honored to want—but the things li’l Clamzee wants aren’t quite what a normal wriggler would want, and you aren’t sure which way he’ll go right up until he laughs and hitches himself up halfway off your lap to cling to Kurloz instead, grinding.  

You don’t know what the fuck to do with this little basshole, which is why you say, “...Don’t hurt him.”

Kurloz frowns.  But his matesprit whimpers and gives a wave of conflicted yes good please mixed with don’t know if I can i surrender I surrender please be merciful.  Fucking fintoxicating.  

“You don’t order how I treat him,” Kurloz says, slow and growling, but he’s thinking about it, you can see it in his eyes.

“Oh, come prawn,” you say, coaxing.  “Don’t you wanna know?”

Gamzee opens up his mouth to say something distracting.  But you’re not playing baby games for wrigglers right now, you’re challenging your kismesis, and you pull a gag outta your shelladex without skipping a beat, shoving it between his fangs.  

“Do I wanna know what,” Kurloz says, suspicious, and you grin at him over his buoy’s shoulder, feeling him tug on your line.

“Know weather or knot he can get off without you hurting him,” you say, and Clamzee helps you out with a shudder and a moan when you kiss his neck.  “Know if he can efin do that anemonemore.”

He’s fighting with himself over it, you can tell—see the twitch of his lip as he works his tongue at the place his fang is missing, the way his eyes flick from you to his matesprit and back.  

“Come on, angler,” you coax, and trace your tongue past an empty gillflap so the wriggler whines.  “Have a little fun.”

Kurloz considers for another couple of seconds; then he reaches down and pets his buoy’s head, and Gamzee presses up into his hand and whimpers.  

“Yeah,” says Kurloz.  “Yeah, okay.  But you have to take that shit out of his mouth.  Won’t fucking have it, Meenah.”

It’s not like it makes a lot of difference, considering when you take it out all Gamzee does is make more begging noises.  But Kurloz stops being such a stick in the mud and comes over to get a handful, bending down to pin his buoy between the two of you.  

“Little one,” he says, downright embarrassingly soft and flushed and sweet with him.  You roll your eyes again.  “Just settle on down, now.  Let me play with you a bit, let me have you.”

Gamzee’s already barely making words; he only gets less coherent as you play with him, chirping and whimpering in surrender, groaning in frustration, mumbling please, please, please…  You can’t deny, he’s a cute li’l mouthful when he’s desperate like this; he rocks his hips on your thigh and moans and tries to claw at himself until you pin his arms behind his back—Kurloz growls at you for that, and you get distracted just making out for a while, biting and growling over his matesprit’s head, ignoring his struggling and frustrated, demanding noises.

“Fuck, I’m, please, I’m,” he moans, and cries out when you play with his bulge, kneading gentle and sweet and not nearly hard enough to hurt.  His hips jerk and you follow, not letting him press into your hand or pull away, and he wails and gives a weak attempt to thrash, trying to jerk his hands loose again.

“You wanna come?” you coo against his ear, and you don’t even know if he really hears you, just that he grinds down on you again.  “Whale what’s stopping you, li’l clownfish?  What if we don’t help you out, huh?  What if we like you like this?”

“Hhha, fuck,” he whimpers, and then tries to beg again and loses the words into Kurloz’s mouth, gasping against his lips, bulge lashing against your fingers.

“Hurt me,” he manages, when Kurloz lets him go, and you see Kurloz’s eyes go darker, you know he’s weak to that shit.  “Ah, please, fuckin’, just, Kurloz, messiahs!  Mercy—  Fuck—”

“Not yet,” you say, as Kurloz starts to press closer, lips pulling back hungry from his fangs.  “Ah, ah ah ah, don’t get distracted, bayb.  Not yet.”

“This shit isn’t something you order, Meenah,” he snarls at you, and he kisses you hard, heavy with the smell of pitch, trapping the pleading sound and smell of his matesprit between you.  Li’l Makara’s good and desperate now, and you’d be lying if you said it didn’t get you hot as glub, feeling him writhe around and beg for it, even if he’s begging to get hurt instead of begging to get fucked.  You take a big breath of him and Kurloz growls and tugs him away by a horn, possessive, like he can hoard all of it for himself—the sobbing moans, the sweet helpless smell of how frantic he is, how fucking bad he wants you to—

“Stop!” Gamzee gasps out, a thin, strangling whine, and Kurloz goes so still he might as well have turned into ice.  You start to kiss him again, but he’s not efin paying attention to you anymore—he grabs Gamzee and shoves back off of you hard, backing away as his buoy sobs “Fuck, stop, stop, please—” into his shoulder.

You start to sit up and open your mouth, but then you catch sight of Kurloz’s face and close your mouth again.  Whale, shit.  

He is flushed for this little motherfucker, isn’t he?  Fully coddamn flushed, stupid with how glubbing flush he is.  

It’s not like you did anyfin bad, is the thing, fuck.  You kept your little mutant threshie on the hook longer than that the very first time you played with him, and he’s not even a highblood.  But mating fondness makes you stupid as fuck about things, and Kurloz looks reel freaked out as he lays Gamzee out on the floor—ears pinned down and face turned hard and panicky behind the mask, like he looks on missions that go really, really wrong.

“What,” you start, and he turns and snarls at you, not pitch this time.  Like an animal over a wounded mate, pupils turned knife-edge thin and showing every single one of his fangs.  Whale, fuck.

“GET OUT,” Kurloz growls, hard and flat, and turns back over his matesprit without even waiting to see what you do, whispering to him.  “What do you need, little one, fuck, talk to me, tell me what you—”

“Hurt me,” Gamzee sobs again, and you’re starting to think maybe you didn’t check how deep that particular water was before you jumped into it.  “Hh, hurt me please I’ll do fucking anything, hurt me!”

He screams as you see yourself out, and you take one last breath as the door closes and smell blood and slurry and your Grand Highblood’s abject, terrified weakness, his love, his pity, thick in your mouth and nose. 

—

Karkat is in the bay getting ready to leave when you get back to your ship, and you don’t know if he can smell his moirail on you with a pre-pupation nose, but he must see somefin because he immediately looks efin more stressed out than usual.

“Your Condescension?” he says.

“Your moray-eel’s weird as glub,” you say, and reach up to straighten your crown, like it’s not already perfectly strait.  

“Gamzee?” he says, sharply, and then catches himself on his tone and says, “I’m sorry, your Condescension.  I got a message that—  What happened?  If I can, uh.”

It’s cute, how he just won’t lighten the fuck up.  Like shore you’ve only played with him two or three times yet, but usually when you take a consort it doesn’t take them long to start getting too familiar with you.  Not your little Vantas, seems like.

“Nofin big,” you say, and wave the point off.  “Just saw him around when I went to brief my clowns.  Hard not too, how he’s glued to my Grand Highblood’s mothaglubbin’ hip.”

He doesn’t like that answer, but he doesn’t push either.  Just worries on his lip with his pretty white fangs and says “...Fuck.  Okay.  I mean, uh—  Yes, thank you.  Your Condescension.”

—

You pretty much forget about all that bullship within a night or two.  There’s wars going on and court intrigue to handle, and Kurloz may be stupid in hearts but he’s smart enough not to kick up any silt about the whole thing.  So it’s confusing and irraytating when Threshecutioner Vantas all of a sudden starts acting pissed off at you.

He doesn’t say anything about it at first—you don’t bother to do shit about it at first either, because people get pissed at you all the time and you don’t espeshelly give a shit.  But he’s so fucking polite about it, duty-bound and ship, and it just grates on you like sand in your gills.

“Threshecutioner Vantas,” you say, after four or five nights of passive-aggraysive polite glaring.  “You got somefin to spray to me?”

You’re in your work block; he’s standing by the door on guard, but he hasn’t been giving you those shy little glances, this time.  Just staring straight ahead, chewing over something, making little grumbling noises in his thorax he probubbly thinks you can’t hear—if he efin knows he’s making them.

“I’m sorry, your Condescension?” he says, clipped neat little voice and polished boots and still glaring at you.

“You’re pissed at me,” you say.  “Don’t efin try to lie to me aboat it, threshie.  What’s got your bulge in a knot, huh?”

He’d blush about that usually—this time it just makes his ears pin back, his glare go a little nastier.  “I don’t—” he starts, and stops, chewing on the words, grinding his fangs so hard you wouldn’t be surprised if he breaks one.  Starts again, clipping the words off like he’s gonna get punished by the syllable.  “It’s not my place to tell you how to—how to interact with your subjects.  Your Condescension.”

“Oh yeah?”  you say, and settle back, waiting.  “Whale, consider this an order then.  Pull that stick outta your ass, and tell me what the fuck you mad about, now.  Not like I’m the empress.  I wanna hear you say what’s on your mind.  Troll to troll.  Say it.”

He holds out for one more second—then he says, “I don’t—”  Chokes on the words, then pushes through, opening up whatever box he’s been shoving the anger down in, aiming his nubby little horns down at you.  “I don’t care what you’ve got going on with the Grand Highblood,” he says, “I don’t give a shit if you like fucking with him, I could care less.  But don’t you touch my goddamn moirail.” 

That’s what the fuck this is about?  Fuck’s sake, you didn’t even hurt him.  Which is the problem, apparently.  

Boys are so damn up in their emotions all the coddamn time about shit.  But hey, it’s his moirail, after all.  And you don’t hate how the fire’s lit back up in your threshie’s eyes.  

“What, did Clamzee say that ship was all my fault?” you say.  “You know his matesprit was there too, rayt?”  

It’s not a surfprise—of glubbin’ course as far as wriggler Makara is concerned it was all your fault ship went sideways.  You would’ve figured Karkat knew better than to take him at his word.  But bein’ pale makes trolls do some stupid shit, and you do know that.  You’re surrounded by moony-eyed fresh-quadranted boys.  Good glubbing cod.  

“He thinks the old anglerfish hung the moons,” you raymind Vantas, and see the flick of an ear.  He knows you’re right.  “Like shell he’d admit I wasn’t the only one not sprayin’ attention.”

He knows it’s true, you can see it in the way his eyes dart to one side.  “Gamzee said it was your idea,” he says.  “He said you were already fucking with him.”

Oh, of course he would rat you out.  Whale, you suppose that’s fair.  “Yeah, shore,” you say.  “He sure as hell wasn’t sayin’ ‘no’.”

Karkat blinks at you like you just starting speaking East Alternian.  “How the fuck was he supposed to say no?” he says, like you’re a coddamn idiot.  Finishes, pointed, “...Your Imperious Condescension?”

You glare at him.  He glares right back.

“Who’d want to say no?” 

“I don’t know,” he says.  “Because who the fuck would dare?  That’s all I’m saying.”

You’re not in the habit of being uncomfortable, because that’s a bullshit emotion for wrigglers.  But you’re not pleased with that thought, with him glaring at you like that.  You were under the impression you had a fun kinda fin going on with him, and you aren’t espeshelly pleased to think he might have been humoring you.  

“You saying you know somebody who would’ve rather said ‘no’?” you say, and know he knows what you’re asking him.  His cheeks are going a little bit pink, which seems like a good thing—but he doesn’t answer the question.

“What I’m saying,” he says instead, “Is that Gamzee rotted his thinkpan sweeps ago and he still hasn’t learned how to turn people down.”

“Sure knows the word ‘stop’,” you say, and his ears shoot up sharp, his eyes go narrow at you.  “Simmer down, threshie, we glubbin’ stopped, alright?  I know you got it bad for him but you don’t gotta hold his hand through shit.  He’s a big clown now.”

“I’ve known him since he was a wriggler,” he says.  “He’s a fucking idiot.”

“Whale, he ain’t a wriggler anymoray,” you say.  “Sands to me like you makoin’ the mistake of underestimating a Makara.  Sean a lotta people make that mistake over the sweeps.  Can’t think of one off the top of my head who ain’t dead, now.”

He bristles up at you.  “Don’t turn this around on me,” he snaps, and then remembers who he’s talking to and lifts his chin, turning his horns away from you and showing you his throat, backing down a little.  “Uh.  My.  Ma’am.  He can’t say no to people, especially you, so.  Don’t fucking mess with him. Please.”

“He can’t,” you repeat.  “And you could?”

His ears flick again, and his eyes dart away from your face.  “Sure,” he says.  “If I wanted.  I don’t know if you noticed, but I’ve got a lot more panmatter and willpower than he does.  ”

“You got a sassy li’l mouth, is what you got.”

“You asked me to pull the stick out of my ass,” he says, and spreads his hands like ta-da.  You can smell the nerves on him, but his voice is steady when he says, “If you were going to cull me for it, you would have done it already.  Alraydy.”

Surprises a laugh outta you.  “Yeah, alright,” you say, and step over to him, snag your claws in his collar and back him up against the wall.  He lets you push him, and the red tinting the tips of his ears goes flooding across his face like a tide.  Like fuck you’d have ever mistaken him for a rusty.  Poor, stupid, desperate little niblet.  

“He’s not as fun as you anywave,” you say, and touch his jaw, turn his face up.

“Your Condescension?” he says, tense and breathless, and tilts his chin up even more, like he doesn’t even notice himself showing off his throat and turning his horns away.  He smells eager.  Looks hungry.  Like he still doesn’t really bereef what’s going on, but not like he doesn’t like it.  Whale…good.

“Go on,” you say, and bend down to whisper in his ear.  “You talked a big game just now, threshie.  Tell me to stop.”

He swallows hard, takes a quick gasp of a breath and lets it out again.  “No, ma’am,” he says.

Oh, finteresting.  “Tell me no,” you say, deadly-soft, and brush your lips against his ear.  “That’s an order.”

“It’s a test, is what it is,” he says, and then shudders when you palm at him through his uniform, teasing.  “Hhha.”

“Smart buoy.”

“Fuck.”

“Money where your mouth is,” you say.  “You said you could turn me down, whale, prove it.”

“I said I could if I wanted to,” he says, and takes a sharp breath, and twists out of your grip.  You feel the way the air sparks, and you have your culling fork out faster than thought, planted between you, blocking the edge of his sickle.  He licks his lips, nervous little flick of a slick, dark tongue, and puts his weapons away again, spreads his hands empty.  “...Why the fuck would I want to?”

He’s a sturdy li’l handful, and when you grab his hips and pick him up off his feet he tenses up but he lets you do it, keeping his hands down by his sides, keeping his claws under control.  His armor rattles and clangs against the wall of the battleship, but this isn’t aboat that.  You wanna see his face.

He says, “Somefin I can do for you, your Condescension?” and it’d be a cool line if there wasn’t a warbly, wavery chirp under his voice.  You let him have it though, because he knows you like it when he makes fish puns at you and he’s so fucking cute.  A solid, sturdy, handsome kind of cute that goes reel good with his downright defishious glutes and his nice rumble spheres.  Kurloz is nice to look at sometimes, lean and strong and scarred, with that narrow, pretty face and those fucking eyelashes, he doesn’t even weir real makeup, fuck him—but he’s got no curve at glubbing all.  It’s nice to fuck around with swimbody you can reely sink your fingers into.

That’s a nice thought, so you do—put your hands on his ass and give it a good squeeze, and he catches his breath and gives a shy, strangled chirp.

“Somefin I can do for you?” you say, amused at him.  “Threshecutioner?”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, and when you press a little closer his legs wrap around your waist, careful, like he’s not shore he’s allowed.  When you smile and squeeze his ass again, he bites his lip and shivers.  “Oh, fuck,” he says, like he doesn’t mean to, and tilts his chin up, shows you his throat.  “If you want—  Hhf.  If you want.  Your Condescension.  Please.”

Kurloz shore does seem to like his weir-d, jumpy li’l clownfish, but you’ll take this one, you think.  When you nip his ear he goes “Oh, please, fuck, please?” and arches up for you, and he’s soft and cute and thinks you’re the best glubbin’ thing in the universe.  As he should.

Just fuckin’ like Kurloz to catch eelings about it, you think, as you suck a little mark in Karkat’s neck, mako sure everybody knows he’s yours.  Trust your Grand Highblood to find one cute li’l sweetheart who makes him feel warm inside, and go giving out his hatchname and getting all praycious about him.  You’re a stone-cold bitch and you do what the fuck you like.  Catch you going soft over some idealistic little minnow.

“Your Condescension,” Karkat murmurs again, and lays one careful frond on your arm, not daring to grab, just kneading at you slow and hopeful.  “I’d—  I’ll tell you, if I don’t want—if you want, that, I’ll tell you, I swear, please?  I-I do want.  This.  You.  Ma’am.”

You’re a stone-cold bitch, and the warm spark in your thorax is at his rightful obedience.  You’re a sick, murderous motherglubber, and when you tell him good buoy and put another mark on his neck, it’s cool and calculated.

You’re a fucking idiot, and when you shell out your hatchname less than a sweep later, it’s really no coddamn surprise.

Chapter Text

Your name’s Kurloz Makara, and you’re surrounded in glory.

You were ready for some adult motherfucker when you woke to noise and lights outside; some orphaner bullshit, some gamblignant fleet pulled up in the bay ready to rain cannonry on whatever the fuck poked its head outside.  But when you slipped up to the gaze-pane, you saw bright lights of all colors instead, and colored cloths draped into huge tents, your hive turned into just another ring of the show.  When you crept to the door, clubs in your hands, silent as shadows, you heard laughing and mirth, voices calling out.  When you opened it…

It’s beautiful.  Shining like nothing you’ve seen before, and everywhere you see eyes purple as your blood, signs in deep highblood colors, church dress and painted faces.  Where you've walked till now, eyes have watched you wary.  Lowbloods with fearful hate, and grown bluebloods amused and disdaining, lower than you by blood but still well-pleased to take the superiority of age and size.  Where you've walked before, every face a threat.

Here, paint and faces alike smile at the sight of you, jeer and yell and cheer for your arriving.  Other wrigglers along the coast they've gathered today, and you all wander and stare as the church makes bloody merry on the sand.  Faces of the messiahs painted on the walls of your hive in every shade of blood.  Somebody shoves a stick with fried cluckbeast on it into your frond.  Somebody smacks you on the ass and blesses you in the same breath. 

Brother in a fine and bloody suit of clothes draws cards for you that day.  He tells you your past is a drifting ignorance, your present a fool on a wire, eyes on you as you waver.  He tells you your future's bright as the goddamn sun.  A real motherfucking scorcher, the highs high as mirth, the lows as low as holy rage, dark things with their teeth in you but the messiahs' eyes fixed on you like an audience in ringside seats, lifting you up.  Then he laughs at you for believing in fake and bullshit prophecy, calls you gullible and hits you in the face with a pie.

It's a fine and rowdy carnival indeed, and you're dazzled at it by the time an adult in rainbow-sweeping robes finds you.  Not the Grand Highblood, but one of her gymnabsolutionists, clever-talking wise council of your path in faith.  They tell you, “Time’s come to leave wriggler things behind, little brother.  Church moves on tomorrow at nightfall, and it’s your right and honor to come with.  Dry-ass schoolfeed on a husktop alone can teach you to be a troll, but we'll teach you to be a motherfucking highblood.”

Your dad broke through the fallen stone that kept him in your bay more than a perigee ago, and you haven’t seen him back since.  The water outside your hive glints sometimes with watching eyes, the open ocean beyond the bay glitters with gamblignant lights.  

It’s a sign, and an honor.  You pack whatever you have, and that night you fill your hive up with fireworks and you burn it, in glorious color, to a smoking ruin on the sand.

–

There’s no rushing to get to the stars, then.  You spend sweeps on the good ground, first, learning the faith, growing taller and stronger and growing in revelry.  You learn to slip through shadows in great dark forests, hunt down wild prey and fall on them from shadows, dead before they hear your footfall.  You learn how to make yourself known in lowblood slums, how to knock heads if you’re not treated with some proper goddamn respect. You learn to mix your paint; greasepaints then, wax and fat and powdered colors mixed careful and blessed by hand.  How to sew up a wound if it's bad enough, and how to rub some dirt on it and get the fuck over it if not.  How to climb, how to run, how to follow a trail.  How to tune your pan to a motherfucker’s dreaming, the shifting taste of their feeling in the air.  How to sing fear out through your horns like a hymn.

You learn how to tell when you should back down.  You learn how to kick a motherfucking ass.

You lost most every fight you’re in for a long while, and it’s not until you win that you realize what you feel, when you get a hit, when you feel blood on your claws, when you hear a snarl of wounded pain.  You’re fighting with a motherfucker over turf to set up your tent hive on the campground, and when he goes for you you’re a step too fast and slam him down hard.  You hit him, hit him again, and he yells out in hurt and tries at smacking your fronds away—it shudders something in you, the tone and pitch of it, the way he yells.  When you dig in your claws, he hisses in pain, and your ears feel hot and your pusher shudders.

“Alright, alright!” whoops a voice, and a brother towers up over the two of you, yanks you apart at the collars.  “Break it the fuck up, pupas.  You, shrimpy, you lost and you fuckin’ know it.  Clear the fuck out.  You, little brother—” and he knocks at your horns, gives you a rare, flashing smile.  “Looks like you got a taste for it, huh?  Don’t like it too well, now.”

It’s cloudy that day, dark as twilight, and you lie awake a long time and listen to the acid rain pelt and pour.  

You got your lectures on pitch—that wasn’t pitch, you don’t figure.  You don’t know the motherfucker, let alone hate him.  But fuck, how it takes you to remember the hiss of his breath in his teeth, flesh giving under your claws.  Soft cry out of pain—

You’ve got a taste for it, he’d said, and you wonder what he saw on your face, if he knew how it shivered you inside.  Not a killing rage, not hate, but just a fascination and a hunger for that shudder and cry.  For the way skin parted under your claws.  

Don’t like it too well, he’d said.  You’re beginning to think that you well and truly passed that point.  And you don’t know if there’s a way to go back.

You hear it then, in your pan.  The first time, but not nearly the last; a voice, soft and sure.  

There’s something wrong with you.

–

There’s something wrong with you.

You know the sister who you hook up with for a drone season wants you–well enough it goes, you think, for a first and unceremonious of attempts.  Sweet enough the gentle way she kisses you as together you make your nervous drone season fumblings.  

You never think to even hint to ask for more, but you don’t think to hold back either.  When you fill your half the pail your claws rake deep at her back.  Brings you to soft and wordless shuddering, the noise of pain she makes.  Pleasure comes on hard and sweet and sharp, rivaled only by the shame and the hate of yourself that follows.

You slow the bleeding after, enough for her to head to the medicullers for a real fixing up.  You make your apologies, and you don’t have the gall to voice the lie, but she says it for you, empty reassurance; says you didn’t mean to.  Says you did it on accident, and she knows that, and it’s alright.  

You know immediate and with certainty you can never come to her again.  Never show her the lie of her charity toward you.  Never let her see the thing that lives in you, that escaped so brief and sharp and took delight in her cry of pain.  You make your resolve, your next drone season will be better.

–

First season on-ship, you’re bristled-up and tired-tense still with the strangeness of metal halls and hiveblocks, the hum of the ship through your horns and the strangeness of it all; you bite your brother’s lip so hard he growls, growl back unintended, turn to shoving and snarling and you flip pitch by accident entirely.  You vacillate quick and messy through drone season and break ways the very night it ends.  You make resolve, you’ll find control.  You make resolve, your next drone season will be better.

–

You handle yourself so fucking careful, but when she whispers in your ear come on motherfucker, ride it like you mean it and licks along the slits of your not-there gills, you choke on the noise you make and cut off the sound biting hard at her shoulder.  You taste her blood and hear her hiss ow, fuck, easy—

–

You make it through next season without pain, but your sister says sorry to you it didn’t work out, after.  Says she could tell you weren’t inclined to her, that you didn’t much want anything to do with her.  You make your own polite apologies, and fight with the urge to claw at your own self just to let go the burning hunger in your claws—

–

He says he likes it a little rough, even flushed; he lets you pin him down.  When you threaten your fangs at his flesh, he makes noise of hot interest and shivers.  When you bite enough to feel the first break of skin, he twists away from you, closes off to you and says hey, watch it.  Your mouth makes gentle apology of the place you hurt, kisses away soft the purple marks of your fangs, and you dig your claws into his pailing platform with the urge to make him hiss like that again.

–

He says, “hey brother, we could hook up,” hesitating-soft, a strong and sturdy motherfucker, a friend as much as any friend you’ve had on the Fleet.  Cold and proud motherfucker, you.  Well-respected, but not easily in kinship.  Not easily a friend.

You could ruin what friendly shit brother Travye feels at you, like this.  Dangerous and shameful to take him for a season, when you know what you are by now.  You should warn him.  You should deny him.

You nod instead. 

You’re getting better.  This season, it’ll be better.

–

There’s something wrong with you.  What the fuck is wrong with you.

You're pacing your block, wrecked now, torn up and thrown around in rage and in grief.  Quiet you sat, after Halore left you.  Then furious, then only hurt, wretched and ruined with it.  You'd thought you were well past the age of tears, but you can't ignore or pretend like your eyes aren't wet and itching, your face still bare as it was when you told him to go.

It's fallen apart.  As they all do, as you knew it would, when you took him sweeps ago.  As you tried to pretend it wouldn't, when you felt Halore look wondering and soft on your bare face.  When you hurt him and he made noises soft and trembling and breathed harsh at the pain, not drawing away.

You can't think on that.  You're thinking too much already, too much by far; you've gone back over it a hundred times, a thousand, how Halore smiled at you when he said "What do you want to do to me?" and you almost opened your fool mouth and told him.  The way he looked at you when you convicted him of his filthy fucking lies.  Pity.  Fucking pity he calls that.  Motherfucking flushed, he says.  How could he be, with something like you.

Your rage rebels at that thought—he made use of you too, took satisfaction plenty, made himself full familiar with your bare face and name.  You gave him your trust and confidence.  Showed him the shameful shadowed corners of your soul you should have fucking known better than to air out.  You'd thought he wanted them.  You thought he wanted you. 

But he drugged himself to let you touch him, and when he went to reassure he told you he could bear it.  When you thought you were being so careful, taking so very little.  And still, too much.  You told yourself in wretched gratitude that it was enough and plenty, and you wanted more but you’d made your peace with that.  You’d bowed in gratitude to the chance to let loose even a fraction of the cruelty that lives in your pan, fucking pittance of indulgence that you were determined to be satisfied with.  And still even that was too fucking much.

Halore told you he was flushed for you, and that was cruelty beyond what you ever allowed yourself to do to him.  He'd known your want to hurt him and told you ‘brother, I know.  It’s alright’, and you’d wanted that simplest and softest absolution so fucking desperately.  You’d let it blind you.  You’d let it make you fucking stupid.  If you’d admitted the shit you dream about, if you’d told him how pretty he’d look bare and worshiped under your hands, the soft sound of his moaning muffled off behind careful stitches—

You don’t want to think how he would have looked at you.  You don’t want to think on the horror he would have tried to hide, how he would never allow—or if he had, if he’d drugged himself to a far-off shell of himself, and let you do it.  Tolerated you.  He could bear it, he’d said.  He could bear it, like he bore everything else.  The torture you put him through.  The trial of the way you wanted him.  The bare and maskless-raw you, hungry to hurt him, crawling and pathetic in its want to be wanted.

There’s something wrong with you.  Messiahs, but you wish you’d never been made as you were.

You know as you pray it that it’s blasphemy on their plan, and you know they’re laughing at their joke on you.  Oh, how you writhe and struggle, pupa.  How you fight to be what you’re not.  Fucking hilarious.  What a goddamn joke.

It’s a trial, and you can and must out-do.  It’s a test, and you’ll surpass. It's a punishment, a lesson well-deserved.  There’s service you can give your church, and your messiahs can have better offering from you than your fucked up pailing.  You can lock this away, you fucking know you can.  You can put this hurt deep away, and close the door on it.  You can walk on, as you always have before. 

If that’s the lesson you’re being taught here, then you’ll turn your ear to your messiahs and listen.  The things you want, you’ll put away, and they’ll have no need to punish you further.

In your dreams that morning, a voice you know and yet can’t recognize whispers against your ear; he couldn’t have told those lies at you if you stitched his mouth shut.  You wake hot in your skin and sickly-cold in your pan, breathless with heat and heartbreak, and you don’t go back to sleep that day.

–

Your name is Kurloz Makara, and you’re surrounded by glory.  You work, ever harder, to deserve it.

There’s something wrong with you.

Chapter Text

The Grand Highblood has a matesprit.

It’s not like you had a chance with him anyhow, dumbass little 14-sweep-old Gamzee Makara, with the shit about the sopor on your record and no title or great renown on your name.  But even if you were the greatest and highest, you know still he’d look on brother Stædfast greater and higher yet.

Well the fuck he should.  You look at the both of them in envy, all mixed up in your fool pan.  You go shy and cautious along your ancestor’s side as he walks, and make talk with him often as you can—you’re a subjugglator now, pupated and all, and he doesn’t turn you away.  But you don’t have nerves or gall enough to do much more than offer answer and example when he asks in schoolfeeds, and do just as he wants, whatever he’s looking for.  Whatever he wants you’d give, free and easy.

You’re maybe, possibly, a little bit really fucking stupid about him.  

Like other things about you, you put that the fuck away, bottle it down deep, avoid the looking-at of it.  Like other things about you, it tastes pathetic in your mouth and pan and pusher when you think on it too hard.  Not pitiful like someone could pity you for it.  Shaming to you and to him—and to his matesprit which he sure the fuck does have.

It would be a whole lot easier if you weren’t in Feeder Travye’s scripture schoolfeed, and you hadn’t seen him speak on the holy word.  It would be easier, if you could look on him with a pitchless, hateful eye and if that motherfucker didn’t make the holy word sing all the way up your horns and down your posture column.  It would be so much the fuck easier, if your shameful-ass pusher didn’t rise eager as hunger and thirst for his spare and small word of praise on you.  

And a hell of a motherfucking rack he’s got, too.  And horns like a crown, tall sturdy curve of them.  When he tells you “Well-reasoned, Makara,” and your eyes can’t hold his, they come instead to his proud horns with highblood-purple quadrant sign wound around them, or drop down to consider the heavy muscle of him in ways you are downright embarrassed at yourself to think on.

If you could manage dislike for either one of them, a motherfucker sure as hell would have an easier time with getting his pan straight.  But sometimes when you set yourself in the front of advanced scripture feed, when Stædfast comes by you close enough to smell, you catch a sniff of something yourself, but other, something warm and intent, and you catch briefest sight of a bruise on his throatstem and know with a mortification well-the-fuck-earned that they’ve been at each other again.

Totally fucking useless it makes you, with the fucking frustration of it.  Quadrantless yet, still making only briefest hookups for drone season, still stupid and panleaked and making light of you can use your teeth a little unwary, sister, a little rough works well enough for me.  Hidden scars of things you’ve done to yourself grow in crooked and ragged ugly lines, across your belly, down your thighs.  Shameful marks made rough and hasty on your skin, pain stolen quick before they can realize what exactly the fuck you're moaning for. 

You don’t pail your kin in the light, and you grow real sharp and quick at waving off whatever notice they pick up on.  You get your learn on from the Heart of His Holy Hilarity, and struggle to make better of yourself without knowing the how or why you should.  Like struggle and strive ever got you hardly any further than sitting in the sand with sopor in your claws.

Still, you keep on.  Still, your stupid pusher kicks you in the fucking globes on the motherfucking regular.

Your ancestor says “A lighter club won’t kill a troll so easy, but sometimes killing’s not what you caught ‘em for,” with your frond twisted behind your back and a narrow-barrel juggling pin crooked hard between your horns, pressing your face to the floor.  If he twitched he’d break a horn off at the root.  You shudder and work against his grip.  He growls sharp and soft like he doesn’t notice himself do it and gives a little shake that sends hot pain through your frond and along the wing-strut of your back.  He says, “Settle, little one,” like he doesn’t think about the words, and the whimper you make could be just from the pain, if any motherfucker asks.  That could be all it’s for.

Your schoolfeeder says “You do take the holy word well in hand when you try, brother Makara,” and gives results back of perfect and better than perfect, typed up annotating of your rambling on scripture, talking back to you about it, discussing read and meaning.  He says, “You’ll write up response to that,” and you know it’s not something he's asked for from any other motherfucker in the class, and that he wants to see what you’ll think and say.  It drags and draws at you, makes you stupid and desperate for him to look at your answer and say good.

The Grand Highblood’s got a matesprit.  Sure would be fuckin’ nice if you knew which one of them you were supposed to aim your envy at.

–

Gamzee Makara is your matesprit’s descendant.

This is obvious, not only because of his name and sign and face and fins and horns—the grand picture of the whole thing makes it likely, the details make it irrefutable.

You hold him to higher standard than any of his kin, you know.  And a high standard you do hold to begin with, but still higher you aim to push him in particular.  For his bloodline, which you know is so capable, beyond sopor and shame.  And for Kurloz, who acts like he doesn’t care for the wriggler and worries for him yet still.  Worry he wouldn’t call it, but worry it is regardless.

You will not have little brother Makara disappoint.  And so, harshly you schoolfeed him.

He’s been deep in distraction tonight, as he is some nights.  Unclear to you why still sometimes he drifts and unfocuses from the work at hand, even after so many sweeps off the sopor—none of his other schoolfeeders have made mention of it, and it…irritates.  Clear to you, that he takes to scripture loving and intent.  Clear to you, that he can do better.  And thus it is when you go to return the little motherfucker’s work to him with marks less than perfect, you look down on him hard and say “Stay after, Makara.”

Hoot and jeer comes from his feedmates.  Makara shrinks down a little in his seating stub and mumbles “Yessir,” and you go on with your teaching with an eye on him as he applies himself far closer, striving again to soak in every word.

He stays behind as ordered, and comes shuffling on up to you as the last of the others filter away.  Pupation was kind to him—similarities to Kurloz come through clearer now than even they did when you first saw him, although he’s still not grown nearly so far.  His hair isn’t long enough for the curls to turn rough and spiked, horns not grown enough for another full turn.  

You note, as you have before, the deep chip midway up one of them, a round punch taken out of one of the keratin ridges—doesn’t look like a crack from hard use.  More like someone tried to put a horn-stud through and did it bad and crooked, too near the surface.  More like the little idiot tried to put one in himself and did a poor job of it.

Lack of planning and forethought are one of the many cracks and chips you plan to buff out of this little motherfucker’s hide.

“Your work today was sloppy, Makara, and you knew that when you turned it in,” you say, without bother of preamble, and he winces.  “Explain that to me.”

Brother Makara shuffles his fronds and pins his ears and makes no answer.  So clear and clean you can read him, Kurloz but written in letters a hundred feet tall.  How he regrets to have disappointed you, and how he doesn’t care to tell you why.

You care more than you should by rights.  But care still you do, and no point in pretending otherwise.  You consider him, and then say, “...I won’t tolerate half-assery in my schoolfeed.  Once is a mistake, twice a failing.  Repetition after that, a motherfucking disrespect of my time.  Next time I’m inclined to give you penance you’ll enjoy less.  Let that be a warning.”

He looks at once wilted and shameful with your harsh tone—but you see him take in what you said, and he blinks and looks up at you, eyes searching all across your face.  You can read this boy, most easily you motherfucking can.  You read a strange and subtle interest in his stare, a strangeness all but shy.  Not a horror or a chastised fear, but a curious hunger.

He says, “Uh.  Penance like how?  Sir.”

You are driven to consider him.  What he expects, you would likely think, would be a hard clap around the horns.  A whipping even, depending on the harsh hand of the schoolfeeder he pissed off.  Strange then that he reacts so, looking up at you and pretending so casual, purple tinting into his fins.

This is a situation, you are beginning to think.  What form and manner of situation, you have no way yet to know.  But regardless of the strangeness, indirectness has never been your way.

“By the way you ask,” you say, “I think some idea has found its way through your pan.  Tell me what you’re thinking.”

You had been maybe half sure that you saw that flush of his fins.  Now you’re certain.  It tints the tips of his ears as well.  He says, “Uh.”

“‘Uh’ is not an answer, pupa.”

He straightens his back at your tone, opens his mouth, closes it again.  Considers a second, like you asked him for an answer in schoolfeeding, and then says, careful with the words, treasuring with them as you know he is at his best, “If fool-ass jokers fail to learn from looking, let their bodies learn it for them; scars teach best what a motherfucker’s too deaf to hear.”

You are pleased, despite yourself.  Call you a fool for your own topic of feeding, but mightily weak you have always been to an answer taken from the scriptures.  “Conviction,” you say, thoughtful.  “Fitting pull, Makara.  If you would apply this focus with motherfucking consistency, I would never have chance to fault you.  And I’ve well-noted you’d walk a long road of broken glass to earn praise, so I find it hard to credit that you’d fail on purpose.  Unless you’re seeking out that very scarred and suffering penance.”

Oh, this boy.  He is your matesprit writ large and bright as suns.  His eyes widen, his ears pin, guilty and startled at you.  On his face, sharp-edged and fine-boned and familiar, you see clear his shock, that somehow you could ever have flipped him open like scripture book and read him one glaring letter at a time.  “What?” he says, and then, “Uh, I mean, I’m—”

Near the heart.  But you think maybe, not quite to it.  He looks not convicted but hunted, trying to think of how to turn you away from pushing further, which speaks to you that there’s a further to push to.  Well, push you most easily can.  

“You seeking some larger penance?” you say, and watch him sharp and close.  Interrogation is not your field, Kurloz is the one who knows ways to break a troll without ever breaking skin—but in interrogation of the Makara line you feel well-qualified.  “If some heavier sin is riding you that demands a payment, then you owe the church confessionihilation and absolution, however heavy that single penance might be.  A thousand tiny punishments for all the wrong things does no good for your soul but pisses the fuck out of your kin.”

He licks his lips like a nervous barkbeast—uncouth little motherfucker that he is, his shoulders are drawing up and his chin and horns lowering.  You don’t think he means or intends, he'd be panbent to challenge you on purpose.  But you do think you have him well on the ropes.  

He didn’t flinch at the mention of sin though, as though you’d caught him out.  You can’t think why else he’d search to be punished, if—

You think again of your matesprit.  You think of how he loves to hurt.  You think of theology, of the funniest of cruel whims the messiahs might visit on this praise-hungry, lonely little motherfucker.

You think about the scars on his arms, bare today, sleeves pushed up to the bends of them; there are bite marks there.  Many a troll has them—in the rage of a fight, getting a big fucking bite taken out of your arm is a real and present threat, and you wear armored guards for a reason—but it comes to you, a flash of note and insight, that more than half the pale scarred marks you can make out are on the side toward his own fangs.

You say, businesslike as if it’s nothing, “I would be well inside my right as feeder to borrow a lash from Feeder Rissan and leave some teaching scarred across your back, Makara,” and called shot as it is, still it startles you to see just how fast and deep purple floods across his ears and down his throat.  More than that, though, you see how still he goes.  Guiltier than the one and only time he came late to schoolfeeding, more convicted even than when Kurloz tore into him for eating his sopor.  

Guilty—and more than guilty, something deeper.  Deeply, mortally, fearfully ashamed.

You’ve seen that look in your matesprit’s eyes.  You sit still as stone a moment, gaining mastery of the ways you feel about that.  Then you say, “That’s not my inclination today, though,” and you see him breathe out.  Disappointment, you think, or relief.  Both at once, more likely.  Testing, you say, “Make thanks in your prayers today, wriggler.  Pupated or not, a strong arm and persistence can work a troll to bleeding, and you know well that I have both.”

It doesn’t startle, quite, how he shifts at that, hint of a yearning lean toward you before he catches it.  Muted, as he tries so very, very hard to control himself, the faintest thread of a familiar smell of wanting.  All he says, though, is “Yessir.  I’ll—I’ll focus the fuck up, I didn’t mean—” he shrugs, helpless, and finishes instead, “I’ll focus the fuck up.”

Well, in the words of Saint Nixtik before her execution, fucking hell, don’t that just beat all.

–

Kurloz is in your block when you arrive back; by the mixed and uncertain smell of pitch and pale, the empress has called him while you were away, and he’s in fine and rowdy mood.  

“Evening, love,” he says, and honks your ass as soon as you step in reach of his document plateau.  You elbow him off and he laughs and stands to greet you properly, leaning down a little to kiss at the place your hair meets your temple above your ear, right where your paint doesn’t quite cover.  

He draws away, and you’d swear your face is chill as chill can get, but his eyes look you up and down and they narrow just a hair.  He says, “Something goin’ on, motherfucker?”

“No,” you say, careful and simple, and he looks you over and raises a brow.

“...Well, my mistake,” he says, in tone of overdeep conviction, sarcastic at you.

“Bastard,” you declare him.  And…consider.

“Brother Makara tested my patience today,” you say.

Kurloz rolls his eyes, but not unfondly.  “What patience?” he says.  “You’d smack the wriggler down for breathing in the wrong part of the verse.”

You narrow your eyes at him.  He narrows his eyes at you.  

“I require better of him,” you say.

“You just like how hard the little motherfucker’s willing to work for it,” he says back, which is a shameful slander and more true than you’d like it to be.  Sharp-eyed, your matesprit.  “You like him well enough, don’t you lie to me.  What, did he tell you Hot Shit ain’t that deep?  'Cause he was right.  It’s smut, brother, we all know that except you.”

You are well aware Kurloz's scriptural readings on the book of Hot Shit.  You aren’t inclined to humor them tonight more than any other night. “I’m in council with you, my lord,” you say, dignity itself.  “If you can’t make discussion with me, find the means to use your wicked tongue to your own pleasure today, because I'll busy mine with other uses.”

Kurloz doesn’t laugh at you, but his eyebrows rise and his mouth twitches.  He makes a stitching motion at his lips and ties a little bow of the imaginary thread, then props his jaw on his fist and waits polite and patient for you.  

You ignore his smirking look and how damned charming you’re stupid enough to find it.  As ever you have, you push on.  As you’re wont to do, you cut straight to the core and pusher of the thing.

“I think he likes to be hurt,” you say.

Kurloz goes still—not like he’s put together the whole of that picture yet, but like he’s trying to bring his pan around fast to what you just said.  He lifts his face from his hand and looks at you hard, looking for joke or lie—when he doesn’t find one, his brows draw in and his eyes narrow, thinking, considering.  

After just a long moment, he says, “...I take a certain meaning from like.”

“A meaning I did intend.”

Kurloz sits still another few moments.  You let him, watching him work his way through that.  

You’ve known your matesprit so very fucking long now.  You understand each other long since.  Since the first time he came to you begging forgiveness for keeping a secret you already knew, the way he liked to hurt, how it came one and the same with his pity.  You’d found some spark of wisdom in yourself, you think, then.  You’d gathered courage and told him you couldn’t follow him the whole way down that road.  That you knew he wanted more than you could give him, and you’d understand if he broke away from you for that.  That if he stayed, you’d gladly have him, gladly let him hurt you still, gladly learn what pieces of it you could come to love.

You don’t know what might have been, if you hadn’t answered truth for truth and trust for trust. Now, after so many sweeps on sweeps, you are full aware that it doesn’t matter at fucking all.

Kurloz breathes out, and moves again.  “...Illuminates a couple things,” he says, slow.  “Hasn’t ever begged off for a joint lock.  Doesn’t flinch off of hits in griefing.”  He rubs a hand at his mouth.  “...Fuck.”

You watch him.  He looks troubled, almost, but time and patience will tell you over what piece he's caught.  

Your patience is rewarded, after a time.  He flicks his ears, and looks back to you.  “There a reason you bring this up to me?” he says, and looks at you, right into you.  “I know you trust well enough, motherfucker, not to make this a test of me.”

You didn’t intend it that way, or you’d like to think you didn’t.  It would be a lie to think there was no part of you that didn’t wait for the look of hunger in his eye.  But no, that wasn’t your intent.  “A few things it does make clear,” you say.  “Quadrantless, how he is.  Well-liked though he has been.”

You know that hits hive for Kurloz, as it did for you.  Not the same as the fear of hurting his kin, not the same as the locked-away isolation of himself that Kurloz set himself to, but a hatchmate.  The shame you saw on his descendant’s face when you pressed too close to the truth, you recognize.  And you’ve had long practice at feeling the pang of softness that came on you after that.

“He’s well and deeply horns over heels for you,” you say.

Kurloz sighs.  This, you’ve discussed in pieces and parts already over the sweeps.  “As many a little motherfucker has been,” he says—not a brag, but a clean and simple fact.  He’s quiet a moment or two, then he says, “...And he’d offer you up his pusher ripped out if you gave him a good word for it.”

As less a little motherfucker would, you’re aware.  You care little at all whether your wrigglers are hot for feeder, when your quadrants are neatly and cleanly filled, but it has been a joke between you for sweeps past counting, how Kurloz’s suitors aim for quantity over quality.

Your kismesis makes his sneering points at you for it.  But paintless faithless motherfucker as he is, you don’t entertain his opinion past the deep ire he sparks in you.  Tenacious wader-worshiper as he is, ever since he started courting you in spades with fierce and needling spite.  Ever searching and seeking into your life for ways to rile you, wheedling a deeper knowing of Kurloz only and entirely to use in angering you—

You’re growing distracted in irritation at that thought, his disdainful judgment on your quadrants and how he sneaks and schemes.  You put Cerahi from your mind and focus back on the task to hand.

“Seems cruel,” you say, slow, working through the thought as you go.  “To play games with his pusher.”

“I don’t play games,” Kurloz says.  “And I made no suggestion to."

"Neither did I."

"...That's not how flushed works," he says, but you know his tone when he's putting up resistances to you, finding argument to buy himself time.

"You and the empress make a spade out of diamond and a diamond out of pitch," you say, and he folds his arms and huffs through his nose, which is as good as admitting loss on that point.  "Don't play quadrant purist with me.  'Urge of chaos and whim of change be ever on your skin like paint, in your pusher like blood, on your horns like a crown.  Mirthful, faithful.  Kickass and giving no shits'."

"How the fuck is a motherfucker supposed to win a single fight when you hide behind scripture every damn time," he says, grumpy, and flares his fins at you.  Keeps his fronds crossed.  "...Even if he's inclined—"

“I made mention of whipping him bloody,” you say, and he closes his mouth fast.  You see his lip twitch where his left front fang used to be, his eyes dart away a second.  “Kurloz, you know he’s clear and easy as reading wriggler’s first schoolfeed.  He liked it.  Liked it a great motherfucking deal.”

“Easy enough to like the idea,” Kurloz says, but there’s a tension to him.

“Not for everyone,” you remind him, gentle as you can, not blame or conviction but simple fact.  “Not even for most."

Kurloz rubs at a horn like he doesn't notice himself do it, but he doesn't freeze or go cold at the reminder anymore.  He knows, after so many sweeps, that your flesh has learned the ways pleasure can mix with pain.  He knows you gladly give him whatever suffering you can bear, and you know that if you let him hurt you past that, you'll wound his pusher deep to the quick.  It's something to be gentle around, now, but it's not the raw, struggling confusion it used to be when the two of you were new-quadranted. 

"Brother," you say, coaxing his thoughts back to you.  "You said yourself, you almost broke his horn the other day because he didn’t tap out.  Should have been begging mercy long before it got to there.”

Kurloz makes a noise of quiet discontent, eyes far off.  When you give a soft, prompting rumble in your thorax, he blinks and his eyes focus up again, seeing you instead of whatever demon he's wrestling.

“...Sweetheart,” he says, low and steady and quiet like he gets with you, when even your toleration has been pressed to the edge and he’s quieting you out of the fog of pleasure and pain.  His pity of you, that softness, never fails to bring you helplessly to his heels.  “Halore.  Tell me why the fuck you’re saying all this.”

You choose your words, and he waits, patient.  "Little brother is sweet and faithful,” you say, and see him watching your face, searching.  You know he thinks you’re doing this in some self-sacrifice—not often, but enough times, across the sweeps, you’ve thought him better-served with another.  Every time he’s been so sweetly furious for it.  He’s revenged himself on you with pity and a gentle touch.  You search yourself, and when you say, “Whatever flaws I aim to make him improve on—he’s got no call to feel shame of himself like I saw in him.  It’s a wrong, and I feel a call to right it,” you find that you mean it.  

“...Can’t say I’d hate to see him a little less…” Kurloz waves a hand, not finishing—you think you know the shape of what he means.  Lonely, angry, desperate and frantic, easy in hatefriendly kinship with the family but no troll deep enough under his skin to sort his shit out with him.

“Can’t say I’d hate to see it either,” you return, and rest a hand on his frond, run a clawtip up the inside of his wrist where still his skin is softer and thinner.  “I could hold him for you.  Seems he’s had so little holding, over the sweeps, hungry little brother.  And you could try him one pain at a time, and find what kind of hurt makes him blush for you, like he did for me tonight.”

You know when your matesprit wants.  You smell it, see it, feel it.  The taste in your mouth and nose, the darkening of his eyes, the way his frond turns a little to invite more of your touch at the soft place inside his arm.  You may not be able to give him all the hurt he wants, but you’ve set the learning of his pleasure in a place only just below your scriptures, and you’ve aimed to know it deep and thorough over the sweeps.  His body knows well by now that even if he can’t sink fangs or claws as deep as he’d like, your touch promises other pleasures.

“He’s bitten himself,” you say, keep your voice low and steady, drawing him into the words, holding his eyes.  You know how he likes your voice, to hear you say scripture or to speak to him sweet and low.  In intonation you might be quoting holy word; you shape the words with care, neat and formal on your elocution flap.  “Deep enough for scars, he’s bitten himself, and not only once or twice.  Do you think I don’t know how desperate you are, my heart—do you think I’m not aware, brother, what you would give to make a mark that deep, and see what sounds he makes in his desperation?”

“You think he likes it that well,” he says, low and just a touch rough.  His eyes are dark on the place you’re touching him, the slow and wandering shape you’re drawing on his skin with the tip of your claw.  “You think that’s what he’d want?”

“I think well he might.”

“Fuck,” says Kurloz, and breathes out hard, tugs his frond away from you—not like he doesn’t enjoy, but like he does.  Like he knows control is something he won’t long have if you keep at him.  It’s satisfying to a level deep and profound, and if you’re smiling as you sit back, you consider that only holy.

“Okay,” says Kurloz, and rakes back his claws through his hair.  “Fuck.  Stubborn motherfucker.  Fine then.  How do you want to do this.”

Chapter Text

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and you think you might have fucked up.

You don’t know what exactly you went and did—weren’t even distracted, you minded when Feeder Travye told you to shape the fuck up, you’ve been trying so fucking hard—but he seems in a mood today.  Doesn’t snap or yell or swear at a motherfucker, but watches you so keen you feel just about pinned to your chair, and digs into every word you say, makes you quote verse and think fast as your rotted pan will go and argue back to him and tell him what you think and how and why.  Rides your ass pretty much the whole class.

He dismisses the rest before time is even up on schoolfeeding, halfway through another back and forth about verses of Hilarities, he just says “The rest of you, clear out.  Seems we have discussion to see to,” and you’re left there with just you and him.

Last time it was only you and him, he looked at you steady and told you how he could whip you bloody.  Already your blood is up from the arguing, already your fins feel hot and your eyes won’t leave his horns and lips and chest and arms.  

Feeder Travye looks on you, just long enough you know he’s passing his judgment.  Just long enough you wind tight inside with waiting.  When he says, “...For all your arguing about your pan being rotted, you manage a holy and lyrical turn of the tongue when pushed,” it feels like hot, sweet fire hollowing out the inside of you.  Turns you stupid with it, turns you grinning and shy and wriggler-dumb, fighting a pleased chirp.  No laughsassin, you—you don’t keep how you feel close to your thorax, and he must know how his praise takes you.  Feels good enough, though, you can’t give a shit.

The next thing he says is “Is there something you want from me, Makara?”

You’re fired up from argue and debate—you open your mouth to give answer, and then hear what he said and choke on the words.  “Do I what?”

“I believe there might be something that you want from me,” he says again, and there’s a twitch of his mouth at the corner.  “And I think I may have divined, somehow, through all my long and extensive motherfucking experience, what exactly it is.”

You freeze up hard, as panic goes straight through you and out the other side like cold steel.  “What,” you say again, small and flat.

“You’re not so careful with your face as you could be, pupa,” he says.  “I’m well aware when a wriggler sets sights on me.  If that isn’t clear to see, it’s only because I give no interest in return.”  He stands, folds his hands behind his back and considers you like a pillar, like a motherfucking tower.  “...Usually.”

You are full gaping at him.  Not the secret you thought he’d figured, but fuck, you weren’t as obvious as that, you weren’t.  Kept your eyes to yourself, you never said shit untoward—did you?  How the fuck did he know?

And then your pan catches up and catches hold and you hear the word usually and see his eyes on you.  Considering.

Oh, shit.

“You,” you say, swallowed and stupid.  “You got, uh.  You got a matesprit though…?”

Steadfast blinks, like you startled him—and then, of all fucking things, he laughs at you.  You never heard him laugh out loud before in all your sweeps on the Fleet; it’s a low and holy-gorgeous thing, and you’re so fucking stupid over it even while you’re also scared and confused and kind of pissed.

“Little brother,” he says, and it’s an affection you didn’t look for from him, freezes you up.  “Did you think I wouldn’t have spoken to him first?”

You are so totally and completely and absolutely fucking lost.  You gape at him just a second—and then feel a whisper of a shift behind you, and whip around on just instinct, pulling a club.

The Grand Highblood catches it bare-handed, holding it between you, amused and pleased.  Stops you dead like hitting stone.

“And a good morning to you, too,” he says, and gives a tugging twist; club slips from your slack grip and he tosses it spinning, catches it out of the air, reaches out with the tip of it and nudges it under your chin.  “Gotta keep an ear out better than that, brother Makara.”

You’re frozen-up—in terror, first and hardest, that he was here, that he heard Feeder Travye talk on breaking their quadrant with you.  Then the words Travye said last come back to pan, and you look at his amused and watching stare, and a whole new and other stillness takes over you.

“What the fuck,” you say again.

Your ancestor says, “You think the both of us can’t tell when a little brother takes an interest,” and pushes again under your chin, pushes so you lift your jaw and show him your throat.  Could be pale, if he wasn’t looking at you so thoughtful and hungry.  Could be pitch, if he didn’t sound so warm with you.  Could be flush, if—you don’t know.  Only thing it sure as fuck couldn’t be is nothing at all.  He intends some shit.  You can feel it, how he’s looking at you.

“You want us to play around with you, little one?” he says, and pushes a little harder, tips your head back.  It hurts, just a little, not enough.  Strangles the stupid little chirp off in your throat.  

“I,” you say, and choke on the word.  He takes the club away, and you breathe and swallow and say, “Seriously?”

“You have our interest,” says Feeder Travye, in the same tone he’d use to begin in debate with you, making his points.  He comes around the document plateau, and you have to twist to look at him, to see no trace of joke or play on his face.  He’s solemn like he ever has been, serious eyes and heavy brows and his posture column straight like a steel rod.  He says, “Don’t waste our time with disbelief of the obvious, wriggler.  Consider your answer and motherfucking deliver it.”

You consider your answer.

Everybody knows the Grand Highblood and the Staedfast have been matesprits since hundreds of sweeps before you were ever hatched.  You know better than assuming this is somehow a change in that, now that you see the two of them both together.  Clear enough to you that they’re flushed for each other still, moving like a pair.  Just…both of them also seeing fit to be entertained and amused by your stupid-ass inclinations toward them.  

Doesn’t seem like it’s any other quad you’re being taken for either—you don’t know if your ancestor’s got other ones filled, but you know about Feeder Travye’s, and you’ve even met his kismesis, when he came on-ship once.  Scary-ass bare-faced motherfucker.  Not pitch then, and not flush.  But it seems like they’ve got a real definite intention all up in their pans, that they’ll make some wicked use on your body.  So…

Highbloods used to do shit like this, you’ve seen it in movies and shit.  In porn, mostly.  If a real powerful and highblooded motherfucker picks up some lucky piece of trollflesh to play pailtoy with, nobody says shit about it.  Not a thing, if them and their quadrants want to spice shit up.  Have some fun.

Even if that’s it, even if that’s all you are—some spice, some fun—for the motherfucking Ringmaster and his titled matesprit, how the fuck could you be inclined to say no?  You can’t well hurt yourself with them, not here under even the dimmest of lights, they’d see you for sure.  But even if it’s not good for you like it is for them, how the fuck would you even start to make like to want to refuse?

You nod.

“I said deliver, Makara,” says Feeder Travye, in tone of schoolfeeding, and you straighten up more without even meaning to, taken to task.

“Yessir,” you say, and look back shy at your ancestor, trying to keep an eye on the both of them at once, stupid motherfucker as you are.  “I’d, uh.  Yeah, that’d be, be real fuckin’ sweet.”

The both of them smile at that.  Fuck knows why.

“Well then,” says Feeder Travye, and settles back against his document plateau, reaching out to bring you over to him.  “Come here.”

You’d have to turn your back on your ancestor to come to him, and you might’ve grown up a seaside no-lusus mannerless motherfucker but you’ve learned some graces by now—you hesitate, and hear him laugh.

“Go on, Makara,” he says.  “Get your face in there.  Well aware you’ve wanted to.”

Takes you a second to realize what he means, and by the time you have, Travye’s caught your frond and pulled you over against him, soft over solid, gripping you firm.  You give the most embarrassing of startled wriggler chirps, muffled by how you’re all, like, face-first right in the motherfucker’s rumble-spheres and dying about it.

“That’s for staring, Makara,” he tells you, and while you’re still hot-finned and gaping he reaches solid arms around you, snags his claws under the back of your shirt and drags it slow up your back.  His claws prickle, and then before you can even shiver they’re digging in harder, harder, not quite drawing blood but hard enough to sting and burn. 

Your fronds betray you, jerk up and grip at his sides.  He wears armor laced tight around his thorax, curves of hide like a thoracic cage laced down the front, but your claws catch in the seams of it and you cling for a whole, stupid moment before you manage to pull your hands away.

Fuck, is this the game?  Did they mean to catch some motherfucker for hurting?  Cruelty on the family like that the Grand Highblood before might have pulled, but your ancestor gets only sweetest praise from every kin you’ve ever talked to and you haven’t seen a lie in their eyes.  Did he mean to hurt you?  Should you be showing pain, should you try to turn away—you’ve been thinking too long, you’re frozen in place, and it stings where his claws are in your skin, and it feels so fucking good.

Feeder Travye says “Did that hurt?” and in his low and steady voice the words send a shuddering shake down your whole posture column.  Behind you, your ancestor is silent, watching.

He has to know it did.  He digs his claws just a touch deeper, and you twitch all over.

“I asked you if I’m hurting you,” he says.

He knows the answer.  Helpless, you nod.

“But it isn’t enough for you.”

Breath goes out of you.  Your outside freezes, your insides go up in fire.  You turn to stone and ice in Travye’s arms, your horns lower.  You’d be fucking stupid to try fighting them, but your body pants shallow and fast and crooks its hands claws-first anyway, trying for useless defense that your numb elocution flap can’t rally.

“Little brother,” says your ancestor, and steps up behind you, slow and steady like he thinks you might bite.  Fuck, you might.  You might fight your way out and throw yourself out the nearest goddamn airlock.  But he doesn’t try to touch you, and he speaks startling gentle when he says, “No shame, motherfucker.  Only the truth.”

“As it is set down in Revelries,” Travye says, dry and sighing, not quite a laugh, “‘Never will we be anything but loud, nitty-gritty dirty little freaks.  Lo, pour elixir and raise a glass’.  Do you think you’re the only troll whose concupiscent equipment hooks up different from your kin?  No need to come over shy about it, Makara.  No need at all.”

You pull back out of his arms all in one stumbling step, so fast and hard you almost stumble into the Grand Highblood instead, and come to a stop there.  Look at Travye, back at your ancestor, half-wild, trapped between the two of them.  Stuck between the urge to run like your ass is on fire and the want to drop onto your knees and beg.

Feeder Travye reaches out, grips your shoulders, and turns you back to him.  “Gamzee,” he says, and you don’t rightly recall if he’s ever called you by name before.  You stare, waiting. “...Only tell us what you’d like.  And I think I’d know someone who might be inclined to give it to  you.”

You have just a second to stare at his face trying to figure out what the fuck that means, before your ancestor steps up behind you and gives a soft, low, hungry growl.  

“Only tell me what you’d like,” he repeats, and there’s a second’s pause in his voice, almost hesitating, before he says, “...You’re not the only one, little brother, who wants…the wrong things.  Not by a long shot.”

“Oh,” you say, too slow to realize, pan-dead with shock.  “Oh, fuck.”

He likes that.  You can smell it on him, smell like yours.  He likes that, hurting.  He might like it, to hurt you.  He might hurt you.  Fuck, you’re a mess, you’re a knot, a fire, a meteor crash, you’re a motherfucking disaster over this.  You almost wish you hadn’t realized.  Realizing has fucking destroyed you, top to bottom, inside and out, in the space between two beats of your pusher.

“Well?” says Feeder Travye, and prickles with his claws again, just promising you more.

“I,” you manage, rasping-hoarse whisper of a thing.  “Motherfucker.  I’m all.  I need.  Fuck.”

“Brother Makara,” he calls you, and grips you close, uncompromising, Steadfast as his name is, tone expectant.  “I know you’re capable of better than that.”

He thinks high enough of you to expect and anticipate.  He thinks you can do better.  You lick your lips and let him press your coward face against his shoulder.

“Can you,” you start, “I want.  Want you to hurt me.  So fucking bad, please.”  He makes a low and humming noise that rumbles against your cheek, at that, and you pleased him, you said it right.  “Please,” you say again, weak and needing.  It’s not like it was, when your kin were hurt for you.  It’s not like it was.  Motherfuckers already know what you want, they just want you to say it.  “Just—please.”

“Good,” says Travye, near your ear, and it’s reward almost as sweet as another hand coming to rest on your back, claws sharp and strong enough to tear you open to the bone.   Touch traces delicate down your thoracic column.  

“...Very good,” Travye says again, heavy and clear like a huge, deep bell—it rings your thinkpan from the inside out.  His approval hurts something deeper than flesh, but no less sweet for it.  Aching, crashing pain in behind your ribs.  “I’ve known you to speak better, though.  I want you clear on what you want.  You understand?”

“Yeah,” you say, for all you got no fucking idea how you’re going to force the words out.  “I’ll, sure, yes, yessir.”

“When I spoke on whippings, you liked that.”

Shit.  Just how deep did he fucking read you? “Yeah,” you admit, cowardly-glad not to have to look up at his face.

“Being hurt to bleeding, you liked that too.”

“Fuck.”  He wants you clear.  “I mean, I, yeah.”

Another growl from behind you.  Your ancestor’s claws find the ragged line of fin on your back.  Find the web of it, and pinch, testing, clawtips digging.  A hot and burning spot of pain, so small and so focused-tight, your whole pan and body narrowed in on one fine point.  The noise you make is half a whine, disgraceful even to your own ears.

“Please,” you say again, useless with repeating.  “Motherfucker, ah, fuck, please.  More of that, brother, more than that, plea–ah!”  You feel him break skin, draw blood—feel the cool trickle on your back, fiery burn of the hurt in so small a place.  Fuck, you haven’t had shit but your own hand since drone season, and far as you are from the home planet the drones haven’t been around in more than a sweep and a half.  Pretty clear, even to your addled pan, that it’ll be a downright disgrace, how fast this’ll be over.  Pretty clear to you that you should take it as it’s given and not look sideways at a blessing when it appears right in your lap.

You don’t realize you’re shaking again, clutching for Travye’s shirt, until he says, “You’re doing well,” in a tone gentler than you’ve heard him.  You’ve heard him speak quiet but never so low and softened, never with half a purr under the words—shakes you hard.  You're downright fucking stupid with how bad you want him to say that again.  You're drowning for it like it's air.  Humiliating enough, you feel half a soft laugh and you know he knows exactly what he's doing to you.  Desperately, you hope it amuses him enough not to stop.

“I want to see him,” says the Grand Highblood somewhere behind you, and the touch on your fin draws away, leaving a lingering sting and burn behind.

“Hm,” says Feeder Travye, and he grips a hand in your hair, holds you and draws your face away from his shoulder.  He says, “He’ll overwhelm easy,” looking at your face hard and intent, and it turns your cheeks hot and purple even as he says, “He’s trying very hard already,” and him knowing that makes you want to sob, or purr, or something even stupider.

They talk about hurting you like they don’t care it’s not what you should want.  They talk on how you like it and don’t let you go in disgust and distaste.  A voice is still in the back of your pan; your first mission, a block dark and hot and close and pinned helpless on your back.  A voice saying what kind of troll fucking rolls over and begs for it like that, and a boot pressing down choking-hard on your throatstem as someone says who said this thing’s still a troll?

Your thinkpan’s a ruined mess; your thorax is worse, fear and hurting and wanting and anger chewing away at you until your fangs ache to bite them for touching you.  

You wouldn’t.  Couldn’t ever.  It feels so fucking good.

You don’t fight when you’re turned around, for all shame tries to drive you to.  Travye has himself settled on the edge of his document plateau, and he reels you back into his grip and pins you there with your back to him, rumbling soft against your ear.  His hands find your shirt again and this time he pulls it up and off the rest of the way and sets it aside, leaves you bare to the waist.  

Your breathing comes ragged and panting, breath won’t come.  You want them to turn you over the document plateau and fuck you raw.  You want to run into the darkest corner you can find and never come out to be seen again.

Your ancestor is smiling at you, when you dart your look up to him.  At whatever he sees on your face, though, his eyes sharpen and his ears point up.

“Halore,” he says.

You feel Feeder Travye move behind you, and realization comes slow and lagging that that must be his hatchname.  Your face goes useless-hot over that, for no damn reason.  He sniffs the air, so near to your throat you can feel his breath, and goes hm.

“...I’ll ask words from you again,” he says behind you, “The hundredth time tonight, I know.  You contradict yourself moment to moment, wriggler, the answer I read in you keeps changing, capricious as your line does tend to motherfucking be.  Would you have us stop.”

 How many fucking times—  “What do you fucking think, motherfucker?!” you say, snapping without meaning, rage hitting the back of your throat like bile—bite it back down a second later, shrinking.  You’re lucky enough to have them bother to get all up in your business in the first place, stupid motherfucker.  You’ll ruin this shit, and you’ll be alone again.  

You’ll be alone again once they’re done, regardless.  But if picked up and dropped again when they want you is the best you can have then that’s more than plenty.  You’ll take whatever scraps you’re given and wait faithful and patient for them to come back again.

If they ever do come back again.  Fuck, your stupid running mouth.  You’d hoped pupation would fix it, how you waver out of true, from rage to cringing softness and back again—

“Hm,” says your ancestor, and he grips your jaw and holds it, makes you look up at him.  “We’ll stop asking,” he says, making you hold his eyes.  “But he’ll tell you; if I hurt too far, I expect to hear you tell me ‘stop’.  Understand?  I won’t forgive or tolerate the bending of that rule.”

You can’t nod, and they want you speaking.  Speak clear on what you want.  “Yeah,” you say.  “Sorry.  Fuck.  Yeah.”

“Good,” he says.  “Otherwise, put your fangs away and mind your rude tongue with my matesprit, and we can all have a good motherfucking time.  How’s that, little brother?”

Better than you deserve, is how it is.  He lets go, and this time you do nod, fast and eager to show how you understand.  He sighs at you, but he’s smiling still, and his palm scrapes soft over your skin when he reaches out and strokes down your side, over your stomach—pauses there, stops and frowns.

You don’t get why until he moves his fingers again and his touch turns to a dull, dead tingling.  His claws are running along a knot of a scar just clear to see above where your pants cover up.  You tore at it too fierce last drone season, when you’d already turned in your pail but your flush hookup ditched early on you—still itching all over to be touched, frantic for it but nobody to go to and nothing to do about it.  You’d bled all over your block, and it healed up fine in the end but the scar is thick and numb.

He’s frowning, looking at the scar.  He traces over it with the backs of his claws, for all he couldn’t even hurt you there, and that flips something hot and hurting in you, all motherfucking gentle with you as he is.

You make attempt to get twisted around, but Travye’s got good grip on you and you can’t get away from their eyes.  All you can do, the only place to be, is in his hold, being touched and looked at and fucking seen.

–

Kurloz knows how to hurt, and he knows how to fix it clean and perfect; he touches the ugly scar inside Makara's hipbone with solemnity and with distaste.  It's rough and broad and ragged, claws ripping deep and careless enough he could well have struck muscle.

“You did this?” says Kurloz, and he was amused, before, but you see in him now what you’ve been feeling for nights now.  Pitiful to think on, the lonely, angry little motherfucker longing to be hurt and held.  Brother Makara turns his eyes away, shamed again and angry, and doesn’t answer or meet his eyes.  Turned still and tense in your grip.

Kurloz says, “Little one,” and it’s not an unthinking fondness like when he’s said it before.  It’s softness badly hidden.  It’s disappointed.  One or the other or both makes brother Makara—makes Gamzee shudder in your hold.  He is a feral and frightened thing.  Ready to glare, ready to hiss and tense and fight.  Ready to come, more to the point.  He’s wrapped so tight in on himself it feels like holding an incendiary device with a hissing fuse, but he’s flushed and restless in your grip and he smells like want with a clarity and shamelessness that brings your own hunger to a slow, low boil.  

“Who the fuck else was gonna do it for me?” Gamzee says, resentment on his tongue like bitter poison.  He’s trying to watch his mouth, you know he is, but the anger comes through anyway, a snarl badly controlled.  “Took care of my own fucking self then, and I’ll take care of it again when you’re done doing this–fuckin’—whatever the fuck you’re doing.”  His voice cracks subvocal at that; to a wriggler’s ear it would be all but steady, but in his thorax the words breaks a moment.  

“You didn’t take care of shit,” Kurloz says.  His hand moves, tugs a little at the fabric—more scars make their show as he pulls it down one inch at a time, and Gamzee twitches, breathing hard and shaky.  Kurloz’s face is well-guarded after all these sweeps, but you see the tight set of his jaw and his ears and his flattened fins as he touches them, feeling across the pale marks.  

“Little brother,” he says, all but pained.  “You could have done pain in plenty without being so truly motherfucking unkind on yourself.”

You think brother Makara means to answer that, motionless and hurting in your arms, but Kurloz shifts cloth a little further just then and Gamzee is abruptly distracted.  For all his vacillation, shy and flushed to resenting and pained, there’s no reticence to how the little motherfucker’s bulge goes straight for Kurloz’s hand as soon as it wins free.  

Brother Makara gives the sweetest of whines and trembles in your grip when Kurloz lets it wind through his fingers; when you squeeze him firm and steady and mouth at his fins, just like his ancestor likes it, you find he likes it too.  He gives a broken curse and tries to spread his legs wider, straining at the fabric caught around his legs.

Worse scars yet make themselves known, when he kicks them down.  Even in just the sweep since pupation, he’s got scars over scars over scars, ragged, raking lines of claws, dangerous-close to strut and tendon and pump of blood he should be treating with much more care.  You know, from the knowing of him you’re gathering and from the angle and shape of them, that he made them himself.  

Pity stabs at you again, and this time it’s no single flaring pang but a sweet and steady burn instead.

Kurloz grimaces at the scars, ears pinned in dissatisfaction, but he seems well-eager to get started.  Flighty asshole, distracted from the brief argument as easily as his descendant was—you let him be distracted, and think over brother Makara’s bitter growling, holding firm and steady as he pants and shivers in your grip.  

“What we’re doing,” you say aloud after a minute of chewing that over, and the both of them twitch like they forgot you were there, breaking apart from a kiss that leaves royal blood smeared over the paint on Kurloz's lips.

“Whuh,” says Gamzee.  He sounds well near pan-rung, like someone hit him so hard he can’t put words together.  “Huh?”

“You said, when we’re done with whatever we’re doing,” you say.  “You know I hate a lack of clarity, pupa.  We intend a mutual arrangement.  As you’ve noticed, the both of us are well on board, if you’re also so inclined.”

“Seems like you know my motherfucking inclinations,” Gamzee grates out, and makes a noise that’s barely better than a sob when you take your lips gentle to the shell of his ear.  “Hhh, ah, just, just fucking tell me what the fuck you want outta me!  Why’d you—  Why are—  Ah, fuck…”

“I want to improve all the many places I find you falling short,” you say, and you know by the way Kurloz huffs through his nose at you that you’re speaking too plain again, maybe.  But plain instruction is a clearer schoolfeed, and Gamzee’s head has turned, listening, intent on the lesson even more than the hand still touching him.  “But for the moment…we want to pail you until you can’t walk straight.  It seems to me you would enjoy that.  Seems to me that you’re more than ready for my matesprit to take you in hand and cause you pain most intently, little motherfucker.  Have I read you wrong?”

“Messiahs,” he says, fervent and sighing.  He says it like Kurloz does, like he speaks to them, like it’s not just a word to say but a prayer.  You nip at his throat, biting deeper than you would for your matesprit, and feel the hum of his moan.

“Ask him,” you say.  “He likes to hear you say it, brother.  Just settle yourself down, and ask.”

“...Hurt me,” Gamzee says, uncertain, and turned this way he can see, as you did, the way Kurloz’s tongue flicks over his fangs, the darkening of his eyes.  As you hoped, you can feel Gamzee loosening, now that you’ve made clear your intent.  Not entirely settled, but encouraged.  It’s with a sweet and hopeful voice he says “Messiahs, please.  Fuck.  Brother—sir, I mean, lord, I, fuck, please, make me scream then, show me how I should’ve did it.”

“Hurt you, little one,” Kurloz repeats, and his hand that had gone still moves again, kneading slow.  “But where and how, now, that’s a question.  Anybody do you pain for pleasure’s sake before?”

You can’t see Gamzee’s face but you feel how he looks away; you smell and taste his lonely misery, bitter on your tongue.  

“Not…meaning to,” Gamzee says, a moment too late, more telling than you think he means, and you look down over his shoulder again at the marks his own claws have left on his thighs. 

Kurloz must be thinking much the same, because he makes a noise of dissatisfaction and squeezes, hard enough to draw attention back in a startled gasp.

“Let’s change that,” he says, and all it takes is a crook of his fingers, the tips of his fine, sharp claws pressing right at the root of the little motherfucker’s bulge.

Kurloz doesn’t hurt you there.  He knows you bear pain best on harder and stronger places, that the toleration of the pain that you’ve learned to enjoy is a high like struggling through a mission, an exhaustion that feels like flying.  Pain in so delicate a place he wouldn’t attempt on you, knowing you’d hardly bear it.

You think, looking at Kurloz’s face, that this is a test still.  He should start smaller and more careful, by rights—you think he expects, like part of you does, that you’ll hear a noise of pain and feel the body pressed against your chest try to struggle loose.  He’s trying to get the moment over fast, when this new strange thing breaks apart.

But the narrow hips between your knees only go shiveringly still, not trying to pull away.  Gamzee catches his breath so sharp he chokes on it, but doesn’t cry out or beg free.  “Oh fuck,” he says again, all the eloquence you know him capable of strangled off to a broken whisper.  “Oh fuck, oh, please, oh fuck.”

It’s not like holding your matesprit, except in the ways that it is.  The taste and smell of him, the way his voice betrays him, needy croon for more under every pleading word.  Kurloz deals with it by muffling himself, quiet and controlled—this wriggler does none of that.  His voice is an ever-more-broken mess of chirrs and chirps, whines and whimpers, begging like shame is something he was never taught.  

“Fuck,” says Kurloz, soft enough you don’t know if Gamzee hears him.  His eyes are hungry, hunger you’ve seen and seen him control so many sweeps, hunger in his slack lips and bared fangs, hunger in the way he shifts his grip so minutely.  Like an artist choosing every most exact shade of paint, he teases and he tortures with each claw at a time and then with rough fingertips, testing.  He breaks no skin, but his claws pinch and press and draw lines and leave marks of tiny bruises.  He’s careful and he’s patient, as you know him to be.  Relentless and fascinated by his own cruelty, working over fragile skin until it’s a flushed and painful violet, seeing what noises each hurt will win him.  

It wins him nothing but eagerness, spiraling up into sweet desperation as he sticks to only one place and focuses there, intent.  Gamzee’s barely managing even the simplest plea, by the time Kurloz satisfies himself for the moment and turns his claws away again.  With his dulled grip he squeezes and your brother in faith cries out and clutches back to cling to your thighs, melting into your hold on him, shuddering like he’s freezing to his death.  His face is turned up, eyes fluttering shut; he looks lifted, taken away, transported.  He looks like he’s in holy ecstasy.  

You’d be lying to deny some envy for him.  If you were less well-settled, lonelier and less sure of your matesprit, you’d be damn near sick with envying the little motherfucker.  Seeing what it’s made of him, though, without that envy to cloud your eyes, you find you’re just about fine where you’re at.  

“Just look how well he takes it,” you say, to Kurloz’s expression of dark and bright-eyed intent, and he gives half a snarl and presses closer, looking from you to his descendent in hungry glances like he doesn’t want to look away from either.  “How does his pain please you, heart of mine?”

“Shit,” Kurloz hisses, soft between his fangs, and leans down to kiss you over Gamzee’s shoulder, brief and sweet, careful with his fangs.  He never can resist when you turn words of romance on him, which is yet another reason why he should credit the book of Hot Shit with more holy purpose, is all you’re saying.  For now though, you won’t have that argument.  Just kiss him back, catch his lip gentle in your fangs and feel him half-laugh against your lips.

A moment later he breaks away from you again, only to catch one of his fangs at the empty slit of a gill on Gamzee’s narrow throat, and wins himself a wavering gasp.  “Pretty little motherfucker takes it all in real fuckin’ nice,” he murmurs, against your lips, against his descendant’s throat, and Gamzee gives one of those frantic and broken whimpers again, squirming aimless between you at the praise.

“Speak, brother Makara,” you say, expectant tone as you’d use when he fails to recite promptly in schoolfeeding, and he shudders in a new way, groans and pants and struggles to drag his pan back together.  “What do you want?”

“More, motherfucker,” he demands, rasping, manners vanished away in his frustration.

“To what end.”

“Fuck me.”

Kurloz’s teeth bare hungry and his ears perk up—he catches himself before you can speak caution at him though, breathes out rough through his fangs and says, “Not today.  Could well break you some way real and lasting, and I’m not inclined.  What else, little one.”

A frustrated snarl.  “Lemme get off!” he says, and in the same breath, “Fucking hurt me, c’mon! Rip me in half, I don’t give a shit, bleed me out, who cares, just fuck me—”

“Not today,” Kurloz repeats, a sharp and frowning snap, and his descendent closes his mouth and flinches back from it against you, swings back to chastisement so fast it startles.  

“Kurloz,” you say, sharp enough to catch his ear, and Kurloz looks at you and then at his descendant, and realizes his own tone.  You give him a second to win back over himself, and turn your attention to Gamzee instead.  “Little brother.  You’ll be hurt all you want, but if we’d come here to tear some motherfucker apart we could have gone and found some heretic to claw the guts out of.  You, we intend to do right by.  By which a motherfucker does not mean working destruction on your body so you can have one single day of panless fun.  We can find other means to bring you satisfaction.  So chill your negligible tits.”

Gamzee huffs half a laugh at that, although it sounds reluctant.  “I could take it,” he says, half resentful-stubborn and half earnest-assuring.  “Never found a hurt I’d say no to.  I’d heal.”

Kurloz’s face is still and settled now, but he growls soft at that, bristling a little at the carelessness implied.  You give him a look, and he swallows it again.

“You’d heal,” you say.  “But first: you’d be of no use at all for the church until you did.  Second: as I’m sure you’ve noticed, scars will dull both your pain and pleasure, especially in places so easily torn.  And third: it pleases me mightily to have a project.  I like to have ways and means to fill my days, and I think with work we could teach your flesh well to…make way for your desires.”

Gamzee has just time enough to make a questioning noise at that, and then he chokes hard as  you get a hand to his nook and stroke careful and easy, teasing at him.  

“...But no wonder you’re so eager,” you say, just speaking your mind and it makes him moan, trying to push down onto your fingers.  “Seems it’s been a long time, little brother.  Hardly took any work at all, to make you so very…” you flex your fingers, push and spread, and see his fins and ears flush a deep and brilliant purple at the sound and smell of his own want.  “...Ready.”

“Brother please,” he says, wretched with desperation, and then, “I mean, fuck, sir, feeder—”

“Halore,” you say.

Kurloz raises his eyebrows at you.  Gamzee doesn’t notice—he’s too busy shuddering forward in your grip, clutching down at your frond between his legs, rolling his hips needy onto your hand.  Yes, it’s early maybe to give the little motherfucker your hatchname and invite him to use it.  Still though, you have never been accused of being reticent once your mind is made up.  Bull-forward horns-down motherfucker, you.  

“Hhha, Halore,” Gamzee repeats after you, obedient and shy, and chirps needy when you grip him hard at the thorax with your free arm, making sure he feels well-held.  “Uh, ha, yeah?  Fffuck.  I, okay, so—please.  Please, lemme come, it’s, it’s been a, ahh, it has, it’s been a long fucking time.  Whatever the fuck you want, just.”

“Make it hurt,” you say, and he nods, breathing out hard like hearing you say it is a relief and a torment both at once.  “We know.  Don’t worry.  We’ll hurt you wretched, little brother.  We’ll get you well taken care of.”

Kurloz gives a sharp, hungry sound at that and moves all in a rush, fast enough even you startle; in a quick and easy motion he’s on his knees, and gripping Gamzee’s legs hard, and butting past your wrist to mouth hungry at the little motherfucker’s bulge.  

Startled though you are, you recover faster than Gamzee does—he squeaks like a troll a quarter his age and then breaks into a louder, choking yelp and grabs down at Kurloz’s head and hair and horns, trying to yank at him in restless desperation.  You gather his wrists and pin them to his chest, and he all but sobs.

“What the fuck,” he manages, and you have to laugh, how round his eyes are even as the pleasure racks him like torture.  Not something he’d planned for, you take it, having his most holy and powerful ancestor swallowing him like he’s hungry for it.  He underestimates, yet, the gratitude your matesprit is willing to most eagerly grant for being allowed to cause even a fraction of the pain you know he wishes he could.

“Service to kin is a good and holy use for works of the body,” you remind Gamzee, and catch a fin between your fangs, nipping at it hard enough for a taste of blood on your tongue.  Kurloz growls low at the noise Gamzee makes at that, and applies himself only more eagerly, all but rough in his work, breathing harsh, growling hungry.  “...Works of the body, and of the tongue…  Take note, wriggler, as you’re led by example.”

“Fuck,” Gamzee moans, voice turned broken and rasping, a rough and shaking click in his thorax.  He gives another trapped, shuddering twist, and you tighten your grip around his thorax.  You can feel Kurloz’s jaw work against your other wrist, and you’re struck by the urge to stroke his fins for him, rub his horns and comb at his hair in affection.  It would be somewhere near cruel to stop now, so you master the impulse, but damn if your matesprit isn’t pretty like this, sight so few trolls have ever been honored to see.

“We’ve only begun with you,” you tell Gamzee, on a suspicion—and it seems he likes to hear you speak sweet to him as much as his ancestor does, because his ear twitches to you immediate and he presses a little harder back against you, yearning into your arms like he doesn’t even notice himself do it.  “Only started to see what might be done with you, little brother.  And look at you.  Taking it so sweet and hungry.  Doing so well for us.”

The noise he makes for that has no words in it, only desperation, and he strains against your grip to buck his hips—Kurloz grips his legs and digs in his claws to a flash of blood and you know, you can feel a breaking point in the familiar body in your arms even before Gamzee gasps out “Fuck, don’t—  Just, just keep, fuck, please—” 

You feel Kurloz shift, but you don’t know why until you feel his hand against yours, his fingers pressing relentless in alongside yours in a stretch sudden enough it must ache.  Crooks his claws hard and snarls, hungry and demanding, and Gamzee answers with a wordless and shaking wail and falls utterly apart in your arms.  Thrashes like caught prey, shakes so hard he almost loses his footing.  His body is a falling hive of weakened struts and shivering flesh, his pleasure a tempting ripple of slick muscle around your fingers, jolting as Kurloz plays vicious with his claws.  

Thought of how that must hurt sends the urge of sympathy through you, but Gamzee just moans again with every cruelty, further pleasure wrung from him relentless until his moaning turns low and wounded and surrendering.  When Kurloz finally leaves him be, he falls back limp against your chest and gasps to catch his breath.  

Kurloz stands all dignity once it’s done, and licks off his lips and then his fingers, watching his descendant fall entirely apart like he’s trying to burn the image into his pan.  You know him, and you know his wants and likes—he wants to touch and be touched, wants to cause more pain.  He won’t, without invitation.  But you know well how hard it is for him to put that hunger away again.

Well, tonight he might not have to.

“Have you had enough yet?” you say, to the gasping body in your arm, and slip a claw into one of the slits along Gamzee’s thoracic cage, pressing a claw against the soft flesh inside with judicious application of force.  As you suspected he would, Gamzee makes a rasping noise of surprise and grips at you, kneading fitfully, still panting but already more than eager to be put to use again.  

“Only hh, let me hear you want me,” he mumbles, and you are pleased beyond reason to hear him quote the holy word at you, even now.  Well-suited to the book of Hot Shit, the way his voice comes breaking and small.  “Hold me down and, fuck, devour me, my—” he doesn’t finish the verse, doesn’t say my love.  His ears and the back of his neck turn a familiar deep violet in place of the omission.

“You were promised a whipping,” you say, taking enough mercy on him not to address his shyness directly.  When you reach down to grope a rough handful of his ass, he goes mmm and twists to bury his face in your shoulder again.  “Catch your breath, little brother.  We’ll make good on that yet.”

You fold him down into your own seating stub, aware as you do you’ll have to clean it before you use it again—he had presence of mind not to make a mess all across your feeding block, and doubtless could use a pail, but if he’s not inclined to ask nicely and he didn’t bring his own it seems like he can wait a while.  You turn, instead, to your matesprit, standing and watching, still except for the shift of his hands by his sides and the motion of his eyes as he tracks the both of you.

Even with the proof he’s been given, still he holds himself back.  A fitting, trollish wariness, some of it, but you know the deeper places below that, and you know how he fights himself.

Kurloz softens a little when you come to kiss him, but when he raises his hands to hold you the poor, stupid motherfucker’s touch is so deeply controlled it ghosts over your skin like he’s trying to hold a soap bubble between his claws.  Like he puppets his body from somewhere away from it, instructing it through every careful and painless motion.

“You won’t break him, Kurloz,” you tell him, low enough Gamzee won’t hear, and he comes back to himself a little.  His fronds rest light on your back and knead there, uneasy.  “Have what you want for once, you most pitiful and self-martyring motherfucker.  It’s on offer.  Take it.”

He doesn’t answer that.  But he leans down and kisses you again, and his grip settles on you, hard and then harder, grateful.  The prickle of his clinging claws is a familiar and welcome sting.

You say, a touch louder, “...Seems your appetite’s well woken, doesn’t it, my lord.”  In courtly tone even as you reach down and trace the flats of your claws up his thigh.  Kurloz hisses soft, and you can’t see Gamzee’s face but you can hear the choked sound he makes, the loud, clumsy swallow and the mumbled curse.  You pretend like you don’t, only touch your matesprit slow and steady, avoiding where he wants you, steady and relentless.  “Since we’re all declaring plain what we want, seems fair we should all be most simple and clear.”

“Says the motherfucker whose elocution flap works as subtle as a battering ram,” Kurloz says, but his eyes are still on your face, in interest and hunger.

“I wasn’t titled for my delicate and deferent speaking,” you say.  “Following that point: it would please me greatly, my love, if you would turn this little motherfucker over the desk and whip him until he begs for a pail.”

The two of them make all but the same noise, pitches slightly differing and volume very much mismatched, but the same hungry and shaking sound.  Kurloz slips past you flickering-fast, and Gamzee goes still as he’s pressed back against the edge of the document plateau and kissed hard.  His fronds half-rise, shy and cautious all over again, and he makes a softened, sweet sound—then Kurloz takes his horn and pulls him stumbling around to bend him down, pinning him to the desk by the back of his neck.

“Ah, motherfuck,” says Gamzee, and his body makes up for his lacking eloquence by arching in mute demand.  He says, “You sure you can’t fuck me?” in tones of hopeless hope, and you have to laugh, the second time in the night.  Feels good, to laugh sometimes.  Too often you find yourself straight man to Kurloz’s capricious and whimsical bullshit—of all the sacraments you so carefully observe, the most basic of holy mirth isn’t often among them.

“Not today,” Kurloz repeats, but this time it’s a promise, and not a rebuke.  “Not yet, little one.”

You let Kurloz start in before you make a move—soft and meditative rhythm of flesh on flesh, palm on skin, slow-growing force and strength to the impact.  Slowly, a rising purple flush, tended to with care, evened and spread with precision.  You watch your matesprit, and feel a steady and familiar ache in your pusher.  How beautiful he looks like this, intent and fascinated, eyes dark and sharp as blacked steel blades and the unreadable line of his lips turned soft.  How he lights up as he turns himself to pain like it’s worship.  

You don’t make a big thing of it—come around by his side, in a break as he’s working his frond and Gamzee is catching his breath, and slide down onto your knees in front of him, careful with your horns.  Not fast and eager as he did, just unhurried and certain.

Kurloz looks down at you, and you see realization in his stare.  You aiming to distract me? You can all but hear, and you smile for him and raise your eyebrows back at him.  That depends.  Are you going to let me?

He shudders much like his descendent does, when you touch him soft in the bend behind a knee; you draw your hand gentle and slow along the back of his thigh, not so much as a catch of your claws in the fabric, and get a good and thorough grope of his ass.  And then, you reach up and begin to get his pants out of the way.

“Sir?” says Gamzee, ragged and half-chirping, and you feel his weight shift, feet shuffling near by your flank.  He can’t see back to where you are, hasn’t realized why Kurloz has stopped, and he sounds most desperately horny and deeply nervous both at once.  “You can, I want—I mean, it’s real motherfucking good—”

“Just…admiring the view back here,” Kurloz says, delayed only a moment, and he reaches over your head to do something that wins a pained, grateful whine.  “Starting to blush up nice.”

“Oh,” Gamzee says, and you know below the paint he’s well-blushed as well, the way he says “Ha, fuck, uh.  Yeah?”

“I could just keep you like this,” Kurloz says, testing, and you get him situated and get a grip firm and possessive on his bulge.  His hips give a hitch of a twitch, and then a much sharper jerk when you look up at him and allow only the final inch or two into your mouth, careful of your fangs, teasing at him with your tongue.  To his credit, his voice hitches only barely when he goes on, “It’d take time, but I could work you bruised and begging, motherfucker, nice and slow…”

Gamzee gives a sound of deep frustration and shifts sharp, like he’s bucking at Kurloz’s hold on his neck—by the breathless chirr the noise breaks into, he’s well-held and gets no purchase.  “Fuck, no, c’mon,” he says, and then, remembering his manners, “I mean, shit.  My lord.  If you, if that’s, how you want…” in tones of deepest reluctance.  

Kurloz laughs this time, and strikes him again, sharp and sudden.  “No,” he says, over the resultant yelp.  “No.  Not tonight, anyway.  How I want is gonna leave you wincing to sit for nights, little one.”

“Fuck, yeah,” says Gamzee, enthusiasm returned immediately.  You smile, as well as you can with your mouth sweetly occupied, and allow Kurloz a few finger’s-widths more, working your way down with slow intent, feeling your matesprit strain to hold himself controlled.  Gamzee says “I want it, motherfucker, don’t promise if you’re not gonna give it to me,” and you grip Kurloz’s hip with your free hand and suck slow and hard.

“Fuck,” Kurloz says, to you or to Gamzee you don’t know—what you do know is the sizzle and pop of him pulling something out of his sylladex, and the crack of bone as he opens it.  He says, “You want it to burn?” and Gamzee catches his breath as Kurloz’s arm moves over your head.  

You can picture what he’s doing—you know him.  Know how he likes to savor this moment.  The gentle-sweet stroke of whatever tool of pain he brought out, tracing over skin worked sensitive, soft and flushed as the touch of his hand.  He makes sure you’re well-ready for it, before he takes any whip or rod to you; he takes you deep enough that by the time he touches you like this you’re ready to welcome it.  More to come, more to breathe with and bear through, letting him have and hurt you, high off the way your body fights itself and how tender his torment can be.

“Hurt me,” Gamzee says again, begging, and you lick slow as he says the words, add an edge to Kurloz’s rough exhale. 

You think it’s some cane or rod he’s taken out, because it hisses when he brings it down, and the crack is sharp and bright.  Gamzee makes a shaking and wounded sound, “Oh,” and then “Ffffuck,” on the back of it, all but worshipful.  You loosen your grip another little bit in encouragement, and Kurloz’s hips jerk again against your hand as he brings his arm down again, and again, and again.

Gamzee becomes frantic a touch more slowly this time, but frantic he does become, and shameless again with it.  Crying out like a tortured heretic, begging not for reprieve but a lack of one, crying out in dissatisfaction whenever Kurloz pauses.  You know he takes it for teasing—from where you kneel, you can see the fuller picture, the way Kurloz pauses because his hand wavers or his grip falters, ears deep-flushed and breath coming slow and deep, muscle shivering all through him. 

“I wanna,” Gamzee pants, and gives a harsh noise of needing when Kurloz stops again, gone graceless where his descendent can’t see, jerking a hand down to clutch at your braids and then at your horns.  Caught between your mouth and the pain he’s causing, gone clumsy with it.  When he reaches down to your head the rod he’s been using raps against the root of your horn, and he huffs and smooths the pad of a frond over the spot in fumbling apology.

Behind you Gamzee tries, as he increasingly has, to squirm loose or reach down to touch himself, and then gives a sharp cry as Kurloz lets you go to hit him again for his trouble.  “Fuck!”  He gasps out, loud enough you’re glad Kurloz locked the door behind him, shameless enough even your cautious ass can’t take it for a plea to stop.  “Ahh, fuck that hurts—!  Don’t you fucking stop, I’ll motherfucking kill you dead, I’ll—  Fuck, please!”

Kurloz tosses away whatever he was holding and reaches out bare-handed, and you don’t know what he does but it wrings a mess of noise from the trembling body behind you, curses and moaning and pleading to be hurt, and Kurloz gives a wrenching groan at the back of his throat and has to lean on the desk’s edge as he comes, panting in rough bursts, gripping again at your horn.  

He’s let go of Gamzee entirely in his pleasure—as you draw back away you’re just in time to see Gamzee pound a fist and jerk up, whipping around.  He’s purple all down his thighs, blood-flush under vivid, rising welts, and he’s snarling but his eyes are wet with overwhelm.  Paint smeared on one cheek, a slash of naked purple skin across his cheekbone.  He looks well-prepared to bite a chunk off someone—he falters back in shock when he sees you on your knees and Kurloz leaning on the desk, claws working at it as he slowly settles.  

“Whuh, fuck,” Gamzee says, and staggers a little, staring hard.  “Huh?”

“Did you forget this wasn’t for only your own satisfaction?” you ask, unimpressed.  Your paint must be smeared at the lips, you’re sure, but you think you keep your dignity well enough, as you stand and dust off your knees.  Gamzee growls a little, too flushed and flustered to make even an attempt at a real threat—you do him the favor of ignoring it, and look back to Kurloz, who’s making his best attempt at looking like he’s never been out of either control or breath in his entire life.  “I have this from here, my heart.”

“Got a job to finish,” says Kurloz, in a passable imitation of a tone blank and amused.

“And you can find yourself more than welcome to join me at it momentarily,” you say, unimpressed, and turn back to Gamzee.  He’s swaying, and sweating, and very much naked, and very much desperate, and very much pissed the fuck off at you.  You give him a look, and say “Come here.”

“Why,” he says, snapping out in a flare of frustrated rage, “Why fucking should I?  Fuckin’—playing around with me, I’m not—” he cuts himself off, winces over the words he was going to say, thumps the heel of a frond against the root of his horn and growls at himself.  “I mean, I just, no, fuck, sorry.  No, just, brother I’m losing my damn mind, just gimme a pail and lemme finish my shit if—if  you’re done with me, just be fucking done with me!”

“You are most deeply in need of a motherfucking moirail,” you observe.  “We are not done with you.  Sometimes need for pause happens at times inconvenient, and every time is most motherfucking inconvenient when you’re a hungry little wriggler with no patience.  So: get your ass over here, why don’t you.”

He hesitates still, rebellious and still growling. He says, “...Dunno if I can wait again,” sulky and resenting plea, sweet and uncertain complaint.  

Kurloz has finished getting his clothes back in order, looking lazy and settled now—he looks up at that, sighs and steps over to him.  Gamzee looks at him distrusting and eager both at once, but he doesn’t draw away when Kurloz leans down to kiss him again.  Shudders, when Kurloz cups his jaw and digs a nail against the pulse in his throat.  

“Don’t know if you can,” Kurloz repeats, when he draws back, and darts back in to nip his lip, leaves a drop of purple blood at the corner of his mouth.  “But you’re gonna try for him though, aren’t you?”

Gamzee makes one of those frustrated, surrendering sounds again, eager to the point of frantic desperation.  Kurloz rumbles soft, amused and pleased, encouraging.  “Yeah, you like to earn it when he’s sweet to you,” he says, and reaches down to run his clawtips over flesh whipped tender and eager purple, tempting.  “I recall being like you were, angry, hungry, needy little motherfucker.  Halore sees good work and he credits it duly.  Be real good for him, make him happy with you, little brother, he’ll rule just and fair on you.  There you go…”

Fuck, but sometimes you forget that Kurloz knows you as well as you know him.  The low humming chirr of your own interest comes without meaning, heavy in your throat; your own forgotten pleasure rises back up to a point of focused and demanding need as Gamzee looks over at you shy and hopeful and with a familiar hunger in his narrow and intent stare.

“Come here, then,” you say, and he comes nearer like he was only waiting for your word.  He lets you pull him with you as you settle on your seat—fuck, so much for cleaning it first.  Damn.  You find it increasingly hard to give a shit, though, when he settles himself in your lap and kneels there in anxious readiness, watching you like he’s waiting on instruction.

He’s quite a lapful; not taller than you yet, but close enough.  Despite that, though, he is a lean, narrow whip of a motherfucker, your matesprit but in miniature.  He is trimmed to the bone without an inch of spare.  

When you settle his ass down on your thighs, his skin there is hot and tender and he hisses, lashes fluttering for you.  You don’t like to hurt in the ways Kurloz does, but you’d have to be a much harder troll not to enjoy how it looks when a brother’s sitting so pretty in your reach and waiting on your word.

“Y’know,” says Kurloz behind him, thoughtful.  “He could take you.”

“Hm?” you say, maybe a touch distracted.  When you grip the poor wriggler’s well-abused ass and squeeze it makes him all but sob, it’s most mightily distracting.  

“If he’s still got a mind to be fucked,” Kurloz says patiently. “Still a stretch, for fuckin’ sure, but I figure he’d take it okay.”

For whatever reason, that had not occurred to you—the fact that he asked for Kurloz first and hadn’t asked you, maybe.  Now that he says it, though, and you see Gamzee’s face turn immediately hopeful and eager—

“So he might,” you say, and Gamzee scoots immediately closer, grinding down on you intently at the first sign of allowance.  You give him a groan, low and aching sound at how good that feels, and he looks thrilled like you handed him the moons and does it again, making his own soft sound of want as he rubs up against you with skin whipped sharply painful.  “Alright—alright, little brother, enough, sit.  Give me a second.”

He sits, eyes bright and hopeful—panting a little still, through parted fangs, gillslits flaring and settling as he tries to catch his breath with no gills and no water.  You’re of a size less inconvenient than Kurloz is, in pailing as in fitting through doorways—still you’ve had hundreds of sweeps to get a slow and steady grow on, and you’re expecting at least a moment of uncertainty.  

None do you receive.  Gamzee stares at your bulge only long enough to lick his lips in hungry anticipation, and then edges forward like a barkbeast who isn’t sure he’s allowed a treat yet, glancing up at you in mute pleading.

Does no good to relent on rules set forward, you are distantly aware.  Whimsy is well and good, but consistency of expectation keeps your way clear.  “Ask,” you say, expectant.

“Lemme have it,” Gamzee says promptly, which isn’t so much asking as making demand at you.  Still though, you have to respect the clarity.

“Such mannerly respect, the motherfucker has,” you say, and grip him by the hips, drawing him closer, setting him over you.  Lowering him slow and easy as he tries to jerk down as hard and fast as he can.  “Polite to a very fault.”

“Fuck you,” he says, half-moaning, which you suppose is fair.  Makes Kurloz laugh, anyway, so you can’t feel too harsh about it.

You say, “I hope you know, once I have you I won’t be inclined to let you go,” and pull him down a little further—a sweet slick slide, beginning already to feel tighter and slower.  He’s got eyes like Kurloz, pupils flat and lashes thick and dark like a seagoat, and they’re most magnificently dazed, now, hazy and dark and falling half-shut as he tries to stay focused on you.  You focus on the in and out of your breathing, and tell him, “I’m patient, motherfucker.  I’m inclined to take my time.”

“Fucking relentless,” Kurloz corrects you, and he gathers himself to step up behind Gamzee, gripping firm at the back of his neck, leaning down to his ear.  “...You come all you want to, little one, but you’re staying there full until he’s ready to let you go.”

Gamzee makes another whimpering sound that might be messiahs, and tries to rut down onto your bulge.  Fuck but that’s tight.  Poor little motherfucker really has not gotten so much as touched, has he?  He must have turned in his pails or he wouldn’t be here, but it seems he’s done very little else.

Kurloz all but broke, the first time you let him hurt you after he told you.  Lacking for touch, longing for pity, a hard, brutal and bloodthirsty armor with the pusher inside left all the more raw for the guarding.  Fuck’s sake, but you have found a matched pair of desperate motherfucking messes.

You tell Gamzee that’s good, little brother, you’re doing well and he trembles.  You tell him you make such sweet noises and he gifts you with another, a sobbing gasp.  You tell him that’s all of it, brother, settle.  Breathe, and he follows instruction, gasping as he finally lowers his weight down to your lap again, full with you and moaning unceasing on every breath.  

“Does that hurt?” you say, simple and prompting, and as it did before it makes him shudder, clenching on you as much as he can, blinking hard.  His eyes are wet.  “Burned clean from suffering… Tell me scriptures of penance, little brother.”

“I, hh,” he murmurs, and gasps hard when you squeeze his thigh, pressing a thumb at the place where Kurloz’s claws drew blood.  “I d’nn.  I can’t—”

“Yes you can,” you tell him, gentle and not yielding.

“Fuck,” he whispers, hoarse with the repetition of it, and takes a deep and shaking breath, squeezing his eyes shut.  “Uh, hha, uh.  If.  If your kin gets you sinning, cut them away, no true fucking family can they be.  If the noise from your flap be blasphemous, carve it from you and fffuck, stitch shut your filthy mouth, motherfucker, messiahs.  Oh, fuck.”

Kurloz doesn’t preach on these books much for this very reason—you see the flash of his dark eyes at that verse, and he looks away quick, purple at the fins and distracted at the thought.  You smile, warm with how good it feels, savoring it, and stroke your claws in slow, stinging lines across Gamzee’s gills, leaving soft purple lines over his thorax.  “Go on,” you say.  “Sing out, brother.  Recite for me.”

“If your flesh leads to sin scourge it clean, washed in blood,” he gets out for you, a stumbling rush—he’s falling apart as you watch him, close enough you can smell it on him.  Delicious to see as he makes holy word and writhes for you.  Grinding down on you in slow, desperate motion, hurting himself on you and for you.  “Cut away rot, and leave only what’s holy, please—”

“Whenever you want,” you tell him, and it rumbles in pleasure, there’s a purr in your throat.  So deeply content, watching him like this.  No urgency, only the slow, driving advance of pleasure.  “Only keep speaking to me and you can come as many times as you’d like to.  Look how well you’re doing for me, sweetheart…”

“Please,” he whispers again, like he means thank you.  “Fffh, hha, repentance by mouth nnnever, saved a soul, spill blood—” and you dig your claws into his sides and lash in him, slow and easy, and the words leave him, his voice breaks into beautiful noise as he comes and shakes and cries out for you. 

“Blood and flesh,” you finish for him, and hear Kurloz purr soft as you draw your claws over the welts of his whipping, wring out more sobbing cries and pleading for more.  “The price of forgiveness.  Mmm.  But nowhere in holy word does it say you can’t be hurt only for our amusement.  Nothing in the books to decry torment for the delight of torment’s sake.”

He looks up at you with wet, hazy eyes, like he hardly hears what you’re saying—leans forward, hesitates.  You close the gap for him, and kiss him soft and slow until his breathing trembles.  “Catch your breath, brother,” you tell him, and hear Kurloz chuckle somewhere over you, not ready again yet but hungrily watching.  “...We’re not nearly done with you, yet.”

Chapter Text

Your name is Gamzee Makara, and you guess you’re a motherfucking pailtoy now.

Grand Highblood and his matesprit like to call you around sometimes; pleases them greatly how you take punishment, pleases them most motherfucking deeply to cause you hurt and then toy around with your pusher and make you soft and weeping for them.  You can’t say you’re of a mind to fight it, either.  Feels so damn motherfucking good.  

But in the end, they’re flushed for each other. And not for you.  In the end, you’re alone in your block again, and they’re together and flushed and happy without you.

It hurts in ways you wouldn’t have credited.  

Today you cried again when they were done with you, and Stædfast told you you did a good job and your ancestor tweaked your fins and scratched gentle at your skull and ran his claws through your hair, and it got too much, it brought something powerful and choking up in your thorax.  You begged free before it could break loose of you, like you have more and more often, and you ran.

There’s a cut on your chest, stitched up now but stinging, and you’re stupid for how good it feels, and stupid for wanting to go back and feel again the way your ancestor rested his frond over it, covered it with a palm like he’d run his fingertips over some kind of holy idol.

You’re so motherfucking stupid.  Why are they doing this to you?

You turn a corner, and you have to back up fast before you run into a figure a little broader than you and a couple inches taller.  Plain-face motherfucker in wader court clothes, but the sign on his collar’s a shade like yours, and when his eyes meet your stare they match.

“Oh, fuck,” you say, and turn eyes down from him in respect.  “Shit, kin, sorry, you need paint?”

He’s quiet a second, then he sighs a little.  Says, “...It’s been a long time since I wore paint. I’ve seen you before, haven’t I.  Brother…?”

“Makara,” you say.

“Brother Makara,” he repeats back to you, like he knows the name, thoughtful. When you glance up at him, he’s giving you a considering look. He does look familiar—you look at him, and to where he’s walking, and realize all in sudden and embarrassing rush where you know him.  Feeder Travye’s kismesis, paintless court motherfucker with a sharp eye. You see him come over from the Condescension with word from the empress, and all and every kin around whispers and laughs and turns their eyes away off his shame.

“...You used to wear paint?” you say, for all you got no right to question, and he looks on you and then away, sighs out a breath you think might be sad.  

He says, “There are options in court that don’t open, unless one is willing to sacrifice.”

You give a thought at being surrounded by waders, barefaced and hardly a purpleblood at all, and shudder distaste.  Fuck, you can hear it how he talks, too.  Flat and steady, no church whimsy.  “Hell of a motherfucking sacrifice.”

He huffs out through his nose, twists his lips, and you think he agrees but he doesn’t answer to say so.   “What were you doing up here?” he says, instead of answering.

You don’t have any fucking clue if you’re supposed or allowed to say what use they make of you.  “Uh,” you say.  “Feeder wanted to see me after.  Fuck-up like I am.”

“Why do you say that?” he says.  Real sharp eyes a brother’s got, watching you thoughtful.  Looking up you and back down, horns to face to sign to clothes and back up again.

“Rotted my pan out,” you say.  “With the.  With the sopor thing and all, a motherfucker never got learned it was pan-poison so.”  You shrug helpless.  Ears all purple—worse and stupider, your eyes, still wet and hot from the way you broke earlier, feel hot all over again too.  You’re not gonna bawl like a wiggler in front of this motherfucker.  

“You don’t seem rotted to me,” he says. 

Twinges something hot and sweet in you, a kindness you didn’t look for.  You find yourself all fidget and flush.  “Yeah,” you say, dumb, and blink off how your eyes burn.  “Yeah, well, so.  Uh.”

He says, “The urge to return to something like sopor.  It never quite goes away, does it.”

Strikes hard, hits you close at hive.  You know what you oughta answer—clean now, done with it, of course you are.  But the way he says it, and the truth of the words, strikes you dead where you stand.  Instead, stupid and small, you say, “...No.  Motherfucker sticks around.”

He nods, twists his lips up again like sympathy at you.  Like maybe he knows, like there’s something with its claws in him too.  He says, “...I have messages from the empress to deliver.  But…I might have resources that could help.” He reaches to his sylladex, does a quick shuffle of something-in-something-out-something-in-something-out, like he’s reordering so fast you can’t make out what he grabs before it’s gone again.  Pulls out a form, and an inkstub, and rips the corner off it to write.

He hands you a shred of paper that says unityUnbound.  “No expectation,” he says, quiet.  “...But I know it can be…difficult.  Being surrounded by trolls who are supposed to be family, and still feeling as though you’re carrying some kind of shame, alone.”

Cuts you at the core.  You blink real hard, look away from his watching eyes.  Can’t answer.  But you reach out, and you take the paper.

“I’m glad we met here, brother Makara,” says the motherfucker who sees you, and steps past you. “Unfortunately, duty calls.”

He steps past you, and the urge to grab out at his arm is so strong for a second you twitch with it.  Then he’s past, and gone.

–

“I don’t like that motherfucker coming on-fleet, Halore,” says Kurloz, low and growling, after Cerahi’s come and gone.

“I don’t either,” you say, half-sighing.  “And he knows that.  Why do you think he does it?”

“Pitch is one thing,” Kurloz says, like he has before.  “He’s got no spades with me.  Motherfucker tries to steal one more fresh, faithful soul away from the family, I’m gonna rip his horns off.”

“I know.”  Fuck, you don’t exactly sit easy with the thought either.  But it’s been a while since Cerahi made any move to steal heads from the church. Knowing, maybe, that your hate for him would flip easy to platonic if you thought he made threat to your family.  It’s well and good he’s stopped, whatever the reason—a skill, the motherfucker has, for finding the kin who struggle.  A skill, for luring them away with words sweeter than mindhoney and a hundred times more poison.

“Don’t worry,” you say, and kiss your matesprit, soften the bitter line of his frown.  He warms easier, today, settled and sated now your poor, flinching sweetheart has come and gone.  

It hurts you to see how the wriggler refuses to let himself be held after, how he’ll let you tear him open but will hardly stay in Kurloz’s arms long enough to stop shaking before he’s on his feet and begging his leave.  But damn if it hasn’t helped Kurloz already.

Watching him learn to be flushed all over again, the tender, protecting way he looks when he has his descendant hurting and teary-eyed for him, has your own heart so fucking tender for the both of them it’s hard to credit.  Not that you make show of it, of course.  You’ve got dignity to uphold.

“Don’t give that motherfucker thought,” you say, and lean past to mouth soft at Kurloz’s fin instead, tug gentle at his ear with your fangs and make him huff at you.  “If he tries to tear up another ticket, I’ll kill him with my own fronds.  And as long as he doesn’t, don’t spare him the time of night.”

“I’ve got better shit to do,” he agrees, and grips at your hip, kneading gentle.  “...And I figure, you got shit to do too.”

“Shit like you.”

“Shit like me, motherfucker.”

“Well, if my to-do list is going to demand,” you say, and kiss him again, lingering, drawing him up with you to his feet. “...Then I suppose, let’s get you well-done.”

–

terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling unityUnbound [UU]

–

A perigee passes.

The Uumbrage tells you i don’t think yoUu want sopor becaUuse yoUu’re weak.  This life is hard, for trolls.  To want comfort isn’t a sin.  Or, it shoUuldn’t be.

Brother Calibe tells you, There are things yoUu can take that won’t damage yoUu like sopor woUuld.  That coUuld soften things for yoUu withoUut harm.  AlthoUugh I know it woUuld be asking a lot for yoUu to trUust me.  I’ll keep looking into it, and if yoUu change yoUur mind, I’ll be prepared.

Cerahi tells you, I sUuppose I feel protective of yoUu.  However foolish and presUumptUuoUus that might be.  YoUur matesprit shoUuldn’t force yoUu to keep it a secret.  They shoUuldn’t make yoUu feel alone like this.  

He says, A schoolfeeder?

TC: i don’t know i’m supposed to talk about this shit or not, is all
UU: Of coUurse.
TC: just, you keep saying matesprit, i’m just
TC: I’M NOT HIS MOTHERFUCKING MATESPRIT IS ALL
TC: i don’t rate so high
UU: What do yoUu mean, yoUu aren’t his matesprit?
TC: i don’t know if
TC: FUCK
UU: Are yoUu worried he’ll hUurt yoUu for talking aboUut this?

You weren’t before, but now he says it like that you sure the fuck are.  Shit.  Fuck.  What if you’re not supposed to talk about this?  What if they’re pissed at you, what if you’re punished—what if you’re sent away, for real and for good, and they leave you alone again?

UU: Gamzee?
TC: i don’t know
TC: YES
TC: no?
TC: FUCK :o(
UU: I woUuld never tell a soUul what yoUu tell me in confidence.
UU: Whatever yoUu can safely tell me, I’m listening.

Makes your thorax hot and aching when he says shit like that.  And from him not even church.  From him who hasn’t had family in so long.  You sniff, breathe in.  Breathe out.

TC: he’s got a matesprit, but it’s not me
TC: PLEASES A MOTHERFUCKER TO PLAY AROUND AND MAKE A WICKED MOTHERFUCKING JOKE OF ME
TC: pleases him and his real motherfucking matesprit to get all up in my shit, treat me real sweet
TC: CALL ME SWEETHEART, ACT LIKE EITHER OF THEM WOULD EVER BREAK THE OTHER MOTHERFUCKER’S HEART
TC: and i’m a stupid shit-panned stupid lonely nobody-ass motherfucker
TC: I’M A STUPID MOTHERFUCKER GETTING MY OWN MOTHERFUCKING HEART JERKED AT AND AROUND
TC: letting them play like there’s any flush they got left over for some rot-panned wriggler
TC: GIVING ME THE MOTHERFUCKING SCRAPS AND ACTING LIKE EITHER ONE OF THEM INTENDS TO GIVE ME THEIR SPOT AT THE MOTHERFUCKING NUTRITION PLATEAU
UU: That’s UuNACCEPTABLE.
UU: YoUu are not some lowblood concUupiscent hire, they have no right to treat yoUu like that!
UU: YoUu aren’t nobody.  YoUu aren’t.
UU: YoUu’re something special.
UU: YoUu’re better than either of them, and if they can’t see that then they don’t deserve yoUu any more than any of the other blind idiots who’ve left yoUu feeling alone like this.

Chokes your throat hard, burns your eyes.

TC: shit
UU: I’m sorry.  I’ve overstepped.
TC: NO
TC: no, brother no, don’t say sorry, fuck.
TC: you’re so fucking good to me and you not even family and me all fucked up
TC: how’d a motherfucker even get so motherfucking kind?
UU: I told yoUu, yoUu’re special
UU: And if not to the chUurch, then yoUu are special to me.

–

He invites you to his block, and you go, stupid over how bad you want more of—you’re special to me, more they might not treat you right but I will.  He says, “You’ve been wanting the sopor, haven’t you?” and when you admit your weakness at him he doesn’t tell you cullbait, he doesn’t tell you never again you rot-panned pupa, he says “I have something I think will help you feel better.  If you trust me.”  and you trust him, of course you do.   He’s been so very motherfucking good to you.

Whatever he gives you, it turns your thinkpan to soft, melting heat.  Turns your voice into purring, turns you boneless and warm.  

You tell him, “Brother I think I’m pale for you,” in the deepest depth of the warm, and he says “It would be an honor,” like he means it.  

You don’t hear what he says to you, really, after that. Your pan is melted and flying, and you think you hear you’re special again.  You’re different from the rest of them.  You hear, your messiahs love you, and when he says, even if your church doesn’t, the hurt hardly makes it through.  He’s so right.  Everything’s so right.

He sends you back when you sleep it off, and a week later he brings you back again.  He gives you things that make the air dance and sing for you, he tells you “Do you see the light of grace?  Imagine their eyes, brother, imagine the red and the green.  How warm their fronds are when they take your claws in theirs.  You see them, don’t you?” and he shapes the colors into pictures, he makes the chaos of color and shape into something clear.  When you nod, happy to give him whatever the fuck he wants, he rubs your horns and he touches your face and he tells you you’ve made him so very motherfucking proud of you.

When you have to wake up, you tell him “I don’t wanna go.”  And he smiles and says “Someday, you won’t have to.”

–

Something is going on with Gamzee.

You’re not sure what, exactly.   A sharp edge, the one that drove him to snapping and snarling at you and Kurloz, has softened.  But some other sharpness has gone from him as well.  He takes his notes in scriptures, he comes to schoolfeeds, but he seems uninterested, somehow, thoughts far off.  

He still loves to be hurt, but he seems dazed even then, not with you.  Suggestible and vague, enjoying what’s done to him, but going where he’s told like a doll.  Repetitious, echoing what he’s told, biddable and sweet but not himself.  Flashes of him come through, time to time, but there’s something up.

You speak first, as you tend to.  With Gamzee in your lap making sweet and sleepy noise, his eyes so far and strangely distant, you don’t mean the words to come out, but they make their way unplanned.

You say, “What did you take?”

Gamzee blinks at you slow, panting still with all Kurloz is doing to him; Kurloz has paused too, claws in the little motherfucker’s gillslits, looking from you to him and back. You’ve talked on this, the two of you in confidence—he didn’t know you were about to say that any more than you did, and he’s giving you a look like he’s not sure he likes the move. And yet, the words are spoken. And it’s not in you to step back from them.

Gamzee says, “Uh.  Huh?”

“You’re not hardly here,” you say.  “Either you took something, or something’s been done to your pan, or both.”

“Oh,” says Gamzee, and blinks at you.  Late and laggard, guilt thinks to cross his face.  “No, I’m, it’s not a sopor, he said.”

“Who said.”

Gamzee’s mouth clams up tight.  Later than it should, a hunted awareness that you’ve caught him out dawns in his eyes, and they flick for the first time over at the door, like he thinks of running.

“Someone’s sneaking you shit?” Kurloz looks pissed, looks worried.  Pissed is what reaches through in his voice, though, and Gamzee winces.  “I told you I wouldn’t see you on sopor again.”

“It’s not sopor,” Gamzee says again, sharper, and wrenches back free, pulls himself away from Kurloz’s claws.  “Tell me what the fuck you think I did wrong off it, motherfucker, I pull my time, I make with the motherfucking schoolfeeds—”

“Brother,” you say, and put a frond on his hip, aiming to steady.  He jumps instead like you touched him with red-hot iron, whips up acrobatterer-fast and backs away from the both of you.  “Pupa, you’re making a gash into a gutting, settle your ass—”

“I’m, I’m not a fuckin’—”  Gamzee shakes his head; unsteady on his feet, still retreating.  When you stand to follow him, alarmed now, he flinches back like he expects you to strike for the cull.  “I’m not a motherfucking toy for you!  Don’t you play at trying to ease me now, motherfucker, like you know what I fucking need, like you ever gave a fuck what I needed past the next time you could jerk my motherfucking chain—”

“Gamzee,” you say, sharp and quelling despite yourself.  “Where in a thousand unholy cullpits is all this coming from so motherfucking sudden?”

“He told me you’d,” Gamzee mumbles, and shakes his head again, like he’s trying to rattle the cobwebs out of his horns.  “I knew.  I knew you’d.  Motherfucking.  Why the fuck am I still here—”

“Hold the fuck on now,” Kurloz says, and you can hear the urgency of worry to his tone, but Gamzee only seems to hear the growl.  He flinches back, he scrambles for the door behind him.  “Where the motherfuck exactly do you think you’re headed, little—”

“Go fuck yourself, freak-ass unfunny motherfucker!” Gamzee snarls at him, sudden and snapping rage blazing up hard through his hazy meandering.  Kurloz rears back, claws crooked and posture column snapped straight at freak, and gives a sharp and chiding snap of a growl, and Gamzee cringes at once in the horror of his own idiot outbursting, ears gone low and fins pinning flat and pale.  

“Oh, fuck,” he says, barely a whisper, and takes another faltering step back, finds his back against the door out of the block and pins there, wide-eyed terrified of you, like some painted demon’s taken the place of you. “I’m, I mean, I just meant—  Fuck—”

He turns on his heel, and motherfucking bolts.

–

Cerahi lets you in, when you come to him; he opens the door and sees you and it’s like he knows what happened without you even saying. He says “Oh, brother of mine,” like he pities you, but like it’s just what he expected.  Like he knew, all those times he told you they didn’t care for you.  Like he was waiting for this, every time he told you the church isn’t kind, even to its own.  

He gives you a pill, like he does.  Gives you a sip of the stuff he has you wash it down with, spicy-sweet dark drink from a glass bottle.  Tells you “Come lie down.  You need to rest.”

He understands, and he pities you, and he’ll make things alright by you.  You take his hand, and you follow.

–

Takes you and Kurloz a night or two to figure that Gamzee’s gone.

When he doesn’t come for schoolfeeding, you sigh inside, turn your face to your work and resolve to let him settle.  When he doesn’t show for chapel the night after, Kurloz notes it to you after and you see below his mask the frustration and the worry, the drive to fix something he’s decided to take on blame for.  Neither of you wants to corner the motherfucker, though, and so you reassure each other down, and you go on with your day.

The next night he’s absent again, and when you find resolve and go to his block, you find it thrown around and empty, left at a run.  And he’s already gone.

–

You hardly have to be awake to feel the guilt anymore.

Sometimes Cerahi gives you things enough like sopor you wake up to make complaint—he tells you it’s not, he’d never, says to trust him, and so you do.  You do, you do.  Only person who’s ever really wanted you, of course you do. So you wander and walk dazed through the block he put you in, but you can’t recall how to use the door, and when you make lonely noises he comes in and tells you hush, shoosh, why don’t you dream some more for me?

You dream for him, and you wake.  You dream, and you wake.  You dream—

Other trolls are there with you.  Someone touching you, and it’s not Cerahi and you’re too spaced and weak to push them off.  Just shake and twitch away, all shades of motherfucking disoriented and lost.

“Brother,” says—voice, Cerahi’s voice, and the hand on your face leaves and his hand comes instead, on your cheek, in your hair.  “This is a truer family than you left. I told you, you’re worthy of love; let them offer it to you.  Be good.”

Everything he’s saying’s too big and broad and hazy by far, but he wants you to be touched, and he told you to be good.  Easier to settle and be helpless for him than to twist away from under their hands.  So you let them touch you.  Let it happen, the lips on your claws and knuckles, on foot and ankle, the catch and shiver of horns rubbing on yours.  Something like screaming builds and ebbs back in you, it’s so much, gets you dizzy, gets you shaking—Cerahi told you be good so you lie and let them, and try to sink deep enough in whatever he gave you not to make pointless fussing about it.

When they’re gone he gives you a drink, and the water soothes down the harsh burn in you—the next cup is something that burns fresh, and he pets your hair when you choke on it and says “Shhh, shh, this will help you.  This will help.”

It’s black enough you hardly notice when he puts something over your eyes.  It’s quiet enough you barely get your notice on when he puts something in your ears and sound dies away, leaves just your own pusher thumping.  When his hand touches your head, you can hear him in your thinkpan, and you can feel the way your eyes flash as the words sneak in like a voice in a daymare.

Don’t stray, he says, and it’s just when his fingers touch your face you figure out far off that your skin’s bare.  When did your paint come off?  Tell me what you see.

–

Someone says “Psst.”

You didn’t realize you were awake—have been, for a second.  You can hear again, for all the blindfold’s left on; you reach up, clumsy like you never had fronds before, and get it off, fumbling.  

There’s a troll staring at you, teal eyes in the dark.  She says “...You stupid asshole,” like it’s to herself as much as to you.  “Hey, can you even hear me?”

“I hear you,” you repeat, dazey-panned and sleepy, and smile at her.

“You’re that Makara wriggler.”

“I’m Makara,” you repeat.

“How long is he going to be gone?”

“He’s gone.”

She groans.  “Fuck,” she says, and creeps a little closer in the dark.  “Are you even listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“You need to get out of here.”

You need to—hold up, wait.  “I, huh?” you say, and blink slow.  Try to bring your pan around to focus.  “Uh.  Wha, why?”

“He’s trying to get you to join his damn cult, is why,” she says, hissing it out low.  “You’re going to get slaughtered, and so’s he, and so am I for being his ‘matesprit’.”  She sketches out enclosure talons in the air with her claws on that.  “I know you’re the Grand Highblood’s descendant!  He’s going to be furious when he finds out—”

“Cult,” you say, too slow.  “What’s, what?”

“Fuck, you let him melt your pan to fucking mush,” she says.  “Whatever you clowns call it!  The cult of—meat, or flesh, or whatever!  The Church of the Messiahs Made Body, he calls it—”

“Flesh,” you repeat back, and blink, slow and hard.  “Not, ‘m not supposed to talk about.  That’s not.  That’s heresy.”

“I know,” she says, like you’ve about got her tearing her hair out.  “I know!  That’s what I’m saying!  Cerahi thinks you raised his gods, or are going to, or something.  Listen!  I can implicate him in all kinds of shit, but first you have to get me out of here.”

“But he’s,” you say.  “He’s.  My moirail.”

“He had a moirail before you,” she says, sharp like a knife edge.  “He had her settle him down every fucking day before he went to the recuperacoon, for sweeps.  And when he realized he had a shot of getting you to do what he wanted if you were pale for him, he came back and fucking culled her.”

The hurt comes through slow and sharp, through whatever it is he’s given you, but it does come.  “You’re a motherfucking liar,” you say, slow and slurred, and she laughs hard and sharp, and you know she’s not.

“He’s using you,” she says, “Like he uses that chump clown he pretends to be pitch for, so he can get in the Grand Highblood’s blocks and spy on him.  Why do you think he—”

Feet fall outside the door.  She glances up sharp, looks back at you, and then in a flash she’s gone back into whatever block she came out of.

You look at her, at the door as something beeps in it, and then you can’t hold yourself up anymore.  You fall back, eyes too heavy to open, and just breathe.

Seems like it takes a thousand sweeps for him to come in.  Time turned all syrupy with the drugs and the fear and the hurt.  It’s a lie, and it has to be.  You should tell him what she said.  You should tell him—

“Gamzee,” says Cerahi, real soft, that tone he uses when you’re far off, and he tugs the cloth down again over your eyes, setting it perfect.  “No.  That stays on.  What did you see?”

Your mouth’s dry like bones.  Your voice sounds not like yours.  “...Dunno,” you say, and see light and shade move behind your ganderflaps, color painted on your lids.

He says, “do you see the red and green?”

He’s asked you before.  Turns you always to those colors.  You nod, and his voice hums through you, presses at you.  “Red and green,” he says again, “the spiral, always together but never mixing.  You see them?”

Breath catches in your throat.  “I,” you say, “Bro, I don’t—”

“Shhh, shh.”  Hands on your throat, on one horn.  “There’s a face, isn’t there?”

“A face,” you hear yourself say after him, repeating it back like you always do, your mouth like a stranger to you.  He rewards you with touch, soft and warm with you.

“A face,” he says again, and starts over, low tone, repeating in soft rhythm, pressing at your pan with whispering voodoos, rubbing at your horns, turning you staggered and soft all the way through.  “You see the red and green.  The spiral turning.  You see their eyes.  Red and green.”

“Red and green.”

“Yes,” he says, half-purring, and it all but takes you to pieces, you want so bad to feel good for him.  To hear him so proud of you.  The horror in you melting away just how good it feels to let him shape how the colors move.  The words your mouth speaks without you.

“You see their smiles.  They love you.”

“They love me.”  Fuck, your thoughts move like honey, slow and sweet and hot.  

“You see their eyes.  Red and green.  They love you.”

“They love me.”  

“You love them, don’t you?”  He moves—puts one of those noise-blocking things in one of your ears, and you shudder at it, even with his hand on your face.  It’s not the same, having his voice in your head.  You don’t want to be blinded and deaf and not have a body anymore.

“Please,” you say, and you don’t know why.  He sighs and touches up your jaw to find the other ear, and you curl away like a scared grub before you can think.  “Please—”

“Sh.  Shhh,” he says, and holds you there, presses you in place stern and patient until you’re quiet again.  “This is important, you know that.  You don’t want to fail me, do you?”

“No,” you say, and he pets your head, your hair, your horns, pleased.  “No, I, but…”

“You have to be willing to walk through trial and suffering for your quadrants,” Cerahi says.  “Or they’ll leave.”

“No—”

“They’ll leave you.”

“No,” says your body, like it’s somebody else's, like it’s some stupid wriggler’s, small and shaking.  “No, please.”

“Then hush,” he says, firm.  “You need to avoid distractions.”

You let him turn you deaf, and you can’t hear but you know he tells you good, when his hand pats your cheek.  Pauses there, and then comes back to your head.  They’re yours, he says, just a whisper, and you move your mouth to repeat and can’t hear it as you say it.  You love them.

“I love them,” you say, or think you say.  Not like you can hear it.  Your pusher’s slamming in your throat, but your muscles are a melted, shivering warmth.  Your pan is a hot fog.

You wonder for the first time what the fuck he gave you.

They’re so small, brother.  You have to take care of them.

“Who…” your mouth shapes, and then catches on a breath, makes the sound of “Hha, fuck…” as he strokes a thumb along one of your fins and kneads deep at the root of your horn, filling all your pan up with him.  He’s done it before and you let him do it again, not strong enough to make him stop.  He’s done it before, and you were so deep away you don’t even remember what happened after that.  

You wonder for the first time what he had you say.

“Shhh,” he says, leaning down close enough to your cheek you feel it against your ear without the means for hearing it.  His hand comes back and grips the curve of your thinkpan so hard it hurts, and his pan curls in and around yours, taking yours apart into small and breaking pieces.  He says, let go, brother.  He says, speak to me, Brother Immortal.

–

You come back to.  Sleepy, drifting.  Your pan shook up, your pusher too fast and stuttering.

“What happened,” you say, and you can hear yourself again, hear it as he shooshes you.  There’s something you should remember.  There’s something so important.  Can’t get your recall on.

He gives you food and water, he rubs your horns whenever you gather your thoughts to question.  He gives you pills, and that burning drink.  Tells you you see them, you see them.

“I see them,” you answer back for him, hardly knowing the words from your mouth.  In the dark and silent nothing, your thoughts try to go off to trolls you know, but it’s dark and the church won’t take you back, and all you have to hold is his voice ringing your skull, pushing you some other place. The sky splits and you’re being touched.  Hands on your face, skin bare.  Lights, wings.  An egg in a dark crater.  A motherfucker in strange laughsassin paints, eyes white and blank and smiling mouth stitched in purple.  A fearful-tall tower in a desert of gray dust.  He tells you you see them.  Green eyes and red.  Clawed little hand holding yours.  A tongue black and white, hissing for food.  Teeth buried in your neck.

You see them, you see them.  Your body’s a broken machine that draws endless scrawls of its blood through the ashy sand.  He tells you they look on you with love, but all they want from you is your death, and you can’t even serve them with that.  You’re a single smallest point in black emptiness, lonely and raging and numb and you’re not supposed to be here.  There’s no mirth and no green and you’re only rage.  You’re just rage and deep hurt in your pusher, and something’s wrong.  They love you, Brother Immortal.  They love—

–

You come back.  Don’t know how long you’ve been away but your aeration sponges get a burn on like fire when you breathe in, and you cough and choke on it.  Say, “Cerahi?” and he pets your hair through your spells of shaking, through the cold and the sweats, as the last of the mess leaves your pan and you’re a body again.  You feel sick, your horns are numb and your skin’s all cold.  You tell him, “I’m, bro, I’m scared, I don’t—” and he shushes and strokes you, runs his fingers through your hair.

“You don’t have to be scared,” he says.  “Here, take this.  This will make you feel better.”

Corpses climb out of the walls.  Paint with no faces behind it leers down toward you, church masks with no church behind it.  He’s telling you what you should see, but you can’t find it.  There’s crawling under your skin.  He shooshes at you, but all it does is turn the dreaming to dayterrors, shaking in place and too weak to move away.  

–

As you’re lying there, the door opens and shuts.  

You wake a second, but Cerahi doesn’t come in, and you’ve got no panmatter to pay any attention at it.  You lie, and shake, and breathe, waiting for Cerahi to come back, hoping desperate he’ll pick to let you rest this time.  When you tell him how bad it feels he tells you he knows, it’s only a little longer.  But it’s so dark, you can’t even see your own self anymore.  Might as well not be there.

Feels like you hear something move in the black.  Breathing, a noise so soft it’s all but silent.  Then there’s nothing.  Only quiet.

You’ve just started at drifting again, when the door opens and closes again, and you hear Cerahi say “Gamzee.”  Hear him come forward in the dark, slow sliding step of a troll moving without sight, and then finally feel him settle at your side.  

He says, “Did you sleep?”

You make a dry and cracking noise, and he sighs and goes and brings back water.  He says, “I will be very glad when I can return to my real duties.  Not that it isn’t an honor to be your…caretaker.”

He’s tired of you.  You flinch from it as well as you can, mumble apology that’s hardly words.  He sighs again.

“It can’t be helped,” he says.  “The disciples love you, of course, but they can’t be trusted to guide your visions.  You’re so easily distracted.”

“Sorry,” you mumble out, tripping on the word and your own tongue, tangled up in your fangs.  “‘M sorry.”

“I know it’s a great responsibility,” he says.  “But it’s a great honor as well, and you need to treat it as such.”

“It’s, what,” you say, dumb and staggering in the dark.

“Your bloodline,” he says, frustrated with you again.  “You are our Brother Immortal.  Makara Unending.  Capricorn Ascendant.  You’ve shown us great promise, Gamzee, but platitudes and unfocused visions bring us no closer to ascendance, do you understand?”

You don’t.  You don’t, and you’re starting to figure you might maybe have never did.  The woman in the dark saying he culled his moirail and saying the Cult of Flesh.  The faces he makes you to see.  

“Cerahi,” you say, small and soft and stupid, and you see him only as the flickering glance of a pair of shining eyes, as power flickers through him in the dark.  “What’re.  What’s.  Why’m I here?”

“You will lead us to glory,” he says, like you should oughta know better.  Like he’s told you before, because he has, you dumb motherfucker, only you didn’t listen.  Only you let your mouth speak on without you, and say whatever the fuck he told you it should say.  “You will bring the church through its…painful pupation, and to its truer shape.”

“And I’m.”  Your throat is dry and rough still—like you’ve been speaking, or like you’ve been screaming.  Maybe both.  You don’t motherfucking remember.  “I’m your, your motherfucking palemate?”

“Oh,” says the Uumbrage, and this time.  This time you hear the smallest and faintest edge of his condescension.  “Of course.  For as long as you’d like.”

You open your mouth—to what, you dumb motherfucker, to do motherfucking what, to beg to go home, to condemn, to say some true piece of scripture and see if it burns him—but the words never make it from out of you, because something else seizes a grip on your thinkpan.

“Okay,” it says, with your mouth, and makes a deep breath come in and out of you, like relief.  You start to thrash at it, make like to draw power up your horns and struggle—and feel a gentle press, just cautioning, like fangs on the nape of your neck, like claws rested light over your pusher.  A whisper of wait, little brother.  Wait.

Your mouth says, “For you then, brother.  If you’ll keep me,” and it’s not quite your voice and tone but the words cut so shameful close to hive you flush hot in the dark to feel your mouth make them.  “Can you bring the church here?  Bring them all?”

“Oh,” says Cerahi, and you can all but just about taste how his attention turns to you at that, again like it was when he first turned his eye on you and talked so sweet to you and told you all and every lie you wanted to hear.  He says, “Yes, Brother Immortal,” and it’s not the voice of a palemate, and it’s not a preaching, sweetflapped temptation anymore.  There’s a hungering to him, a revering purr like some motherfucker in ecstasy at the feet of a holy idol.  “Are you seeing something?  We must dose you again—”

“When it’s too much I lose them,” says your mouth, smooth and turning that aside, while your body shivers and shudders unseen in the dark and makes like to cringe.  “I’m here.  I’m there.  Not for long, brother.  Bring every motherfucker you got, please.  Bring the church here safe in the dark with me.”

Cerahi speaks not a single other motherfucking word to you.  Takes no motherfucking note of the voice that’s not yours, of the ways you’re being you’ve never been before.  The troll he called ‘palemate’ with such a slick motherfucking elocution flap, he leaves back in the dark and goes running off out into his blocks, and the fast flash of light as he goes sends a frantic hungry terror up through you.  You can’t raise a frond to reach for it—and then it’s gone.

The dark is so motherfucking quiet.

“...Hello?” you say in it, soft as a breath, and your voice comes out your own this time, however shaking and small.

The dark makes no answer.

“Please,” you get out, whispering, and then run out of air and choke on your own dry flap. 

The dark holds its motherfucking peace.  Shame strikes you, and hurt—you stupid motherfucker, locked up in your own prison, seeing motherfucking visions, making up signs and spirits.  There’s nobody here to help you.  You’re a stupid wriggler in the dark alone, and whatever blasphemous bullshit moved your flap to speak and beg the whole heretic cult down on your head, it was a cracked pan at best and at worst…

“I’m not.  Yours,” you say, to whatever might be listening.  Fighting your raw choke for every word.

And whose are you

It’s not words, barely even a feeling, just the gentlest tickle of thought so soft it might as well be yours.  Like some kin’s holy voodoos, but none of the clash and heavy press of another pan sneaking into yours.  Like someone turned your own thoughts back to you.

Who are you pleading to little brother

What is it you pray for

It feels so gentle at you.  Not cackling glee, not scouring rage.  Like another troll might talk, and thinking that, knowing the kind of beast you walked right in the mouth of, puts a cold turn in your guts.

“I swim the sea-salt tides and I’m not drowned,” you croak out, feverish, and raise a numb frond in the dark, try to sketch out the sign of a holy smile in the air.  Wavering, falling the fuck to pieces.  “I walk the.  The, the moonlight ground and need no water and.  And I’m smiled on, my makers and Mes—kkh, hh—”

Affirmation of faith chokes dry in your squawk, and it’s only for how you’re thirsty like a desert, but it still feels like failing.  The noise you make is a sob, but there’s no wet in you to give up.

You left your church

Ran from your family

“I’m sorry,” you beg—to the dark, to your own fool thinkpan, to whatever drug Cerahi gave you.  To your messiahs, to a demon.  You don’t fucking know.  “Sorry, ‘m sorry.  Just, how they had me.  Shit they did—hurt so motherfucking bad, and he told me it shouldn’t, and I.” You can’t find words for what you did. Catch your breath in the dark, and finish, “...I couldn’t. Couldn’t motherfucking handle it. Anymore,” in a cracking little whisper that hardly sounds like a voice.

Long and quiet, the dark silence stands.  When it comes back, the voice is all the quieter, strange and small.

Was pain not your wish

The pain of them holding you, pain of their little softnesses whispered by your bare throat while they fucked and hurt and held you—  Pain of knowing how they’d never mean it for you like for each other.  Pain of a starving troll hung by the boiling, burning wrists and forced to watch a feast.

“Not like that,” you say, to the dark, and try to curl on yourself like a grub, and can’t even do that.  “Pain like they—fuck.  I wanted.  I want—shit I can’t get, and it won’t come.  No matter how good I.  Nnh.  Hhhhhow good.  I wait.  Messiahs don’t mean it for me.  And it hurts, motherfucker.  It—”

You run out of words.  Reach up and find your own cheek bare in the dark, and cover your burning, too-dry eyes and your shameful naked, unsmiling face with numbed, shaking fronds.  

The quiet that comes after that is long, too long to put time to.  Minutes, must be, but it feels like sweeps, like the whole span of the empire.

And despite the pain your church did to you, murmurs the touch across your pan, after time unmeasurable.  You have faith, still

On your very ticket, can you swear to your messiahs that your pusher is true

“If they’ll take me back,” you say, and the time has dulled down the frantic hurt in you again, but motherfucker if it doesn’t rise up again just to say the words.  In the dark, it’s nothing to close your eyes, but you do it anyway, like it’ll help you not hear how your voice cracks down the middle like a pupa on a beach wailing for dad.  “If there’s a forgiveness like that, up off where they’re at, for fool-ass motherfuckers, I’ll be a church of one to them.  Not like my kin’ll give me so much as the fffucking, the paint for my face, after I spit in the church’s motherfucking eye, after I—”

Oh, pupa, murmurs the voice, but you’re not listening.  Raising up your voice, rasping wild through the wreck of your throat, pleading to whatever power is on you.

“How’d he fucking get me here?” you demand of it, and dig your claws down at the soft things Cerahi’s put you on.  He’s not cuffed you down, but he didn’t need to.  You were his, weren’t you?  Gullible little motherfucking lead-around motherfucking stooge.  “One pretty lie like he’d stay with me, motherfucker.  That’s it?  That’s all?  I’m so fffuckin’.  Such a stupid, rotted, motherfucking USELESS—”

HUSH.

The pressing weight comes on you so fast and sudden it startles the air from out your aeration sponges—silences you sharp, and a moment later you know why.  A crack of light, a door opening, the shuffle of bodies.  Even with the extra seconds to see, your gaze-pits won’t clear, and you stare blinded into even the dimmest ray until even that hungry hint of the outside shuts back off from you again.

“Slowly now, and carefully,” says Cerahi’s voice, and you hear sweeping fronds, eager breathing, brushing cloth.  “Forward ten paces…”

Be still, little brother

You’re still.  Eyes shut and praying—you know they came here for worship on you, you know they’d not hurt you—Brother Immortal, you’ll bring the church through its pupation—but your whole skin’s electric and your horns ache and you’re shaking how much you wish you could—run, fight, bite some motherfucker.  The first time a frond touches you in the dark, you gasp a breath in even with the warning, and then another hand comes, and three, and ten, and twenty—feeling the shape of you in the dark.  Making free at your flesh.

“Brother Immortal,” says Cerahi, and you know it’s him who settles by your head, who lays a hand familiar as a motherfucking palemate on your horn.  “Every truly faithful soul in the empire is gathered to your side.  Are you still ready?  Give your commandments.”

You don’t know what to say, and this time when the whisper in your pan takes you over, you let it and gladly.  It says, “I’ve found the place of revelation in my pan, kin,” and you close your eyes, and pray, and let it.  “But I’m not enough alone.  I need the mirthful noise around me—I need the church.  Yell out however and any the spirit motherfucking leads you, holy laughter or curse on our enemies or speak tongues—let my children slay each and every in the motherfucking spirit, one by one.  And when all’s quiet again…Brother Uumbrage.”

“Brother Immortal,” he says, and only now he touches your cheek, playing so sweet and pale.

“When every motherfucker here falls to silence,” your mouth says, and it’s not your smile that tugs your lips, flashing your fangs in the dark.  “You’ll lead us in prayer.”

For a few minutes that feel like sweeps, you’re in the unfunniest cullpit Messiahs ever damned a soul to.  There are hands on you, touching and petting and digging in eager like they want a piece to take back to hive; voices raised, cackling and shrinking in mirth that sounds holy but comes from blaspheming mouths, snarling in rage just as unfunny.  Cerahi—Uumbrage over your head, whispering some heretic false scripture.  

And then, a pair of hands falls away.

“Rage is among us,” your mouth yells out, over the unholy noise.  “Do you feel him here in body, motherfucker?  Feel his hands draw your soul out through death and to the other side?”

A voice cries out, and goes quiet.  The other motherfuckers around you gasp and raise their voices up all the louder, clamoring and pawing, begging you take me next, I’m faithful, I’m ready, ascend me, Immortal, bring your children to me—until there are a dozen voices, and then half so many, and then a lone few begging plaintive—and then Cerahi, cradling your head, praying so hard bent low over you you can feel his breath against your bared face.  

He doesn’t seem to feel how you’re shaking, horror-breathless and shook to your pusher’s motherfucking core.  This is witch shit, ritual heresy, double-damning blood-ritual church-knockoff bullshit fakery, but as the last voice falls quiet and the dark falls absolute again, you look up and up and up and see a figure towering tall in the dark.  Glowing eyes and faint, humming holy fire along two great, spiralling horns, like shipstrut fire out on the ocean during a storm.

Uumbrage looks up too, and his grip goes so hard on you you catch your shaking breath at the hurt of it.  

“...Brother Immortal,” he whispers, like each and every dream’s come true.

“Not quite, motherfucker,” snarls his Holy Hilarity, and then there’s just the dark, and a wet thudding sound of things breaking, and a pouring splatter of lifeblood painting your bare face thick and cool like the thickest of church paints.

–

Kurloz brings back your boy in ruin.

You wouldn’t be left on the Fleet while he ran the mission himself, but once you came to Cerahi’s shuttle docking Kurloz insisted to make with the sneakery alone himself, and then for long hours went silent as the grave.  And then Cerahi came out hurrying, and then returned with a dozen or more highbloods, with faces plain or painted or painted but…strange.

You were all but ready to charge in with your clubs raised, and damn his scheming, when Kurloz appeared at the shuttle door again, painted up his fronds and across his fangs with purple blood, carrying the wasted body of his descendant in his arms.

The empress sent down a squad of her dirtbloods, to play witness and report to her; the head of her threshecutioners, and a handful of petty cullfodder alike.  When the little freakblood threshie sees Gamzee, he goes “what the fuck” so soft you hardly hear it, and starts forward, and you snarl at him low and come to your matesprit’s side.

“Back to the holy fleet,” Kurloz says, and you can tell he’s shook all the way to his pusher’s core, the way his lips hardly move and his face is still and cold.  

“Gamzee—?” starts the threshecutioner, and tries to tag along behind.  “Hey, what—”

You take a sharp and snarling step at him, and he balks back again but doesn’t cringe and shrink from you like you’d expect.  

Gutsy little motherfucker.  And he seems to know your boy by name, no less, when you know you made no mention of who you came for.  You consider, then say, “Troll him later, pupa,” and turn away from him with no space for arguing, and follow after your matesprit.

–

It’s bright.

You’re carried.  Your pan is throbbing like your horns are fit to come off.  There’s voices all around.  

You sleep.

You wake.

It’s bright.  Grit in your eyes, foul sticky bloody taste in your mouth.  Carried, and then laid down easy in cool, strong sopor.

Sends you drifting, but not quite sleeping.  You’re well-used to sopor, by now, foolass motherfucker as you are, and.

And there’s voices, talking over you.

“This was no motherfucking godless scheming,” says one, and you try to open your eyes and have to wince from even the dimmest of lights, blinded and dizzy.  “They had their motherfucking messiahs, heretic fuckin’ shit—  This was the Cult of Flesh, Halore.  Uumbrage was their very motherfucking head.”

“Oh,” says another voice, and you hear cloth rustle, a sudden heavy creak like a big motherfucker sitting fast.  “Oh, Messiahs grant me mercy.”

Light swims.  Words come and go.  Like you went out too far after dad and got swept under, cold and pounding, shit all muffled and far away. 

“—Didn’t know,” your ancestor’s saying, when your pusher’s pounding fades enough you can hear again.  “Uumbrage knew how to talk sweet poison, and you know how the little motherfucker takes to it.  How hungry he is for…”

You didn’t realize his frond was on your head until he pulls it away, sudden.  Makes a noise you don’t know—if he’s pissed at you, if he’s about to come down on you for your stupid bullshit.  

“...Kurloz,” says Brother Travye, and his voice sounds tender with pity like you don’t ever hear him.  “Heart of mine.  Don’t go away from me.  If there’s some penance I can take from you, I’ll gladly hear you make confession, but…stand fast with me, here.”

“I asked why he ran,” says your ancestor, and you shift half-listening, taken more by how cold and alone you feel without his touch on you.  When you make a noise uneasy, it’s the Staedfast who puts hand on you, and you’re so soft for him you hardly hear your ancestor say, “—said we hurt him.”

“Oh, love,” says your stern and hard-horned schoolfeeder, low and tender.  Then steady, firm like he saw a flaw in your scripturework, “...But.  You must know, motherfucker, that he didn’t mean what’s you’ve done for his body?”

There’s a quiet moment.

“Kurloz.”

“Must know, huh, motherfucker?” says your ancestor, and you never heard him so grim and sulking.  “The fuck I must.”

“You trusted me to keep an eye.  He’s not flinched from a single thing you’ve done to him.”

“Trolls lie.”  An uneasy growl.  “Want-hungry pupas like him, offered some—some unaccustomed treasuring—  They’ll gladly pretend to bear—”

“How many trolls have you taken to inquisition?” Travye says.  “You know what a troll can bear up and lie through, Kurloz.  Far less than he gladly begged you for.”

Distant and drifting distress comes to you.  That they’re speaking on you, you dumb motherfucker.  That shit is getting said and thought of you, and you’re just lying dazed and letting it happen.  That you’re not with Cerahi anymore, not in the dark.  

That it’s your Grand Highblood who speaks over you, and his storied matesprit, and both those hallowed motherfuckers you came just short of snapping fangs at…sometime.  

Messiahs, how long were you gone?  How motherfucking deep did he take you?  And what blasphemy did you speak, what did you testify to, when you were so high and so far off you hardly knew your own name—

“Sweetheart,” says your ancestor, and you think he’s turned to his matesprit until a hand touches your hair, combs sopor through it.  “Little one, lie easy.”  A rumble, discontenting.  “...What the fuck those filthy motherfuckers gave him, demons and angels only motherfucking know.  His pan was a chaos like I never felt and now that he’s out and away he only sleeps and sleeps, but so motherfucking fearful…”

“Let him,” says Staedfast, and sighs.  “Let him rest.  And when he wakes…we’ll need to talk to him plain, and give him no quarter for running this time.  We can see our meanings plain to each other.  And I’ll make a wager on my very ticket that it’s no torture or torment of yours that drove him from us.”

You should struggle yourself awake.  Speak on that, speak to them, set shit right.  Look him in the eye and ask him if it was you he meant, somehow, when he said sweetheart so soft and gentle when he didn’t even think you could hear him to flatter at.

But.  Talk to him plain.  Don’t let him run. And it’s so motherfucking bright on your clanging horns and throbbing gazeorbs.  And his claws are still combing in sopor, thick and numb and heavy on your hornroots, and you’re asleep again before your coward ass can make a sound.

–

When you wake again, it’s with a thinkpan clearer than you remember in messiahs know how motherfucking long.  Still your body feels aching and weak, your horns and ganderbulbs throbbing, your mouth somehow dry and drooling-wet and sticky as glue all at once.  How’s that even happen?  Miracles you guess, although feels hard to get up in the glory for that shit like you’d try to get to normal-like.  Motherfuck but you feel like shit.

You pry yourself up, and find yourself in a coon you never slept in, in a block made dark and quiet.  On a document plateau nearby, a candle.  On a chair by the document plateau, Feeder Travye.

He’s not minding you, feet up and flipping through a huge-ass book with an annotation stick tucked behind one ear.  With the light getting its shine on of him so soft and low, and his face so still, he’s got a look to him like how a sainted statue looks down on a chapel, and he’s fucking hot as shit, and you’re motherfucking terrified of him.

You go to lie back down again, maybe pretend like you’re sleeping until he fucks off, slip out and make a run for it and never see a faithful face again—and then slip on the chitin, in the slick of the sopor, and slap back down hard against the plateau for where your head’s supposed to get its lie on, shoulder-first with a squeaking yelp through your raggedy-ass throat.

Feeder Travye is by the coon by the time you shut your dumbass flap, and there’s no running and no means or ways to play like you’re still knocked out.  You push up on your elbow again, careful this time, and try to meet his eyes, and completely motherfucking fail.  

“Little brother,” he says.  “Are you well?”

You open your flap looking to speak, not sure yet what the fuck you’ll even say, and find yourself choking on your own self in a raspy little wheeze.

Travye moves to reach out at you, closing up the coon opening with the size of him, dark shadow with the firelight on the edge of his face and his weeping mask in the dark, and you’re flinching back before you can stop yourself, hitting back up against the back end of the recuperacoon and going still there like a hopbeast trapped in a hole.

He doesn’t flinch back from your flinching—but he goes froze up and still too, not back and not forward, looking at you quiet in the dark.

He says, “...I’d like you making words at me, brother,” and holds up the hand he was reaching to you; there’s water in it, a big cold bottle fresh enough the outside’s got misted-up sparkling-cold fog to it.  “You sound dry.  That’s all and everything I intended.”

It hurts, it hurts.  The way he talks to you so kind, when he snarled at you as you ran.  How he acts like you’re kin still when you know all well and good you went and fucked that barkbeast full to death.  All his gentle offering when you know he intends to hold you here and not let you run from him again, and you’re clumsy and weak-shit enough you’ll not ever manage to break free again.  

Not like you know where you’d go.  Cerahi is—  Cerahi was—

Staedfast is still holding the water on out at you.  Steady and waiting.  Not a move to grab at you, or to punish you with taking away.  Still he could grab you pretty motherfucking easy if you reach out.

…Still, he could grab you pretty motherfucking easy regardless, you guess.  Length of his arms, and the clumsy wallow of you in the sopor, he could have you dragged out and had you culled before you even managed to bite, if he wanted.  And still the motherfucker stands there, and waits.

You’re growling a little bit, stupid little croaky wheezy noise like a dying rustblood.  It’s stupid as fuck, but the fear that’s up making hive in you, you can’t shake enough to stop.  But you make motion of yourself.  One creaking shift at a time.  Reach out; grip the bottle, all but drop it, and fumble it back up to your chest to claw for the top.

Water tastes better than any motherfucking thing you ever tasted.  You start one gulp and then drain half the bottle before you can stop—gasp air, and have to press a frond over your mouth as your acid sac churns and hitches and eats itself in hungry, empty growling.  Drink, and gag, and gasp, and drink again.

“Easy, little brother,” says Staedfast, and frowns a little.  “Steady and slow.”

You try to mushmouth some motherfucking words out, stumble on them, drink again and find the bottle dry.  Scrub your wrist at your mouth, and then flinch back, reviling, as a smear of numbing-cool sopor brushes your lips, bittersweet.  Claw at your mouth, draw your own blood, gag again, clutch at your throbbing horns.

There’s claws gripping your fronds. Pulling them away off you, out of your skin. Holding on when you thrash and twist at them, pulling you out of the safe, smothering cocoon and the smell of sopor, cold and slick onto the ground. Like pupation, like some fresh motherfucking hatching, like you’re raw and still half-made and Travye’s just holding you, gripping on tight on both of your wrists and squeezing.

He says, “You swim the sea-salt tides and you are not drowned.”

You remember the words. Remember saying them, whispering them out in a flat and fearful croak, and how the words died in your throat. But you never heard them like this, like that. A benediction, a soft mercy on you. Cracking your breath ugly, how gentle it is.

“I,” you get from your numbed elocution flap, stumbling through. “I’m, I walk. The moonlight ground and I don’t need water, and I’m…”

You can’t make the words. Can’t put a claim on that shit, can’t—you ran right into that heretic motherfucker’s arms—

“And you’re smiled on,” Steadfast murmurs, and brings you closer. And holds you. Squeezes you hard. “Your makers and Messiahs will laugh at you yet.”

“But I’m—” why the fuck’s he so gentle with you, you can’t, you can’t bear this. When you try to twist away, he lets you pull back but he keeps his hold on you. You say “Lemme go,” and he starts to, and then sets his heavy jaw and lowers his horns and keeps his hold.

“Not this time, sweetheart,” he says, steady and unbending, and watches with a narrowed eye how you twitch and shiver to hear him call you that. “...You do come by half your shit right through the blood, don’t you? Dodge and detach, delay, deny…”

A voice says, “You airing my shit out now, love?”

Your ancestor’s standing over Staedfast’s shoulder. Looking down on you in the dim-flickering light, towering motherfucker like he is in plain block-wear and.

He’s not wearing paint.

You stare at him like at the sun, like it’ll blind you and you don’t care. He meets that look and you catch an ear flicking, the flicker of a ganderbulb like the motherfucker’s inclined to look away. But he doesn’t. Just looks at you and cocks a brow.

“Figured some things are said better face to face,” he says, answering back at your looking-at, and comes to take a knee, then a sit, settles himself down fold-fronded on the floor with the two of you. 

Steadfast is looking back at him; how soft he looks, you can’t hardly bear to look at. Just about burns you, when he murmurs “Seems I spoke too motherfucking soon,” and lets go one of your fronds to lean over for a kiss. You turn your look down and away, all eaten away inside with the miserable chewing ache of it, how motherfucking tired you are of this.

Your ancestor says, “Tell me what hurt I did you,” and you wince down under the sharp edge of his tone before you hear the sharp, weird squeeze of his rattlebox, the way he says it fast. Like the words are burning a hole in his thorax to hold them in. Like he doesn’t hardly want to hear the answer. When you look at him, bewildered to the tips of your horns, he’s looking on you hard and set, steeled.

“Wh,” you say, stupid motherfucker like you are. “Huh?”

“In that. Motherfucking rot pit he locked you in,” says your ancestor, and in the dark you can catch the shimmer of his eyes, some unease rising under his horns. He locks that back, whatever he’s feeling, and just says, “You said you left us because we did some hurt on you. Some shit you couldn’t bear.”

Messiahs, you don’t hardly remember that. Fucked up like you were, sky-high and just drifting further, loose from everything that keeps you a troll—it’s a dizzy mess of flashing pictures. Hands on you in the dark, cackling and crying. A voice in your pan whispering wait, brother, wait. A shape towering up in the dark, the barest shape lit up just in the ghost-light of his horns and his glaring eyes.

You know what hurt he means. What you would’ve said, when you didn’t know he was there.

“It’s, uh, nah,” you say. “All good, I’m good, bro. Felt real—”

“Your body, we’ve tormented no way you can’t tolerate,” Steadfast interrupts you. Horns down and marching in, not even sparing the time for the half-truths to hit the air. “This, I trust and believe. Make clear to me, wriggler—Gamzee. Make clear to me why you weep and flee off away from us when we hold you.”

Shrinks you down, locks you up. You can’t answer that shit. You can’t, the way they’ll look on you—stupid little needy wriggler, want-hungry pupa he called you, the pathetic motherfucking pan-rotted soft-horned blunt-clawed idiot who got offered a fun time and caught feelings about it—

“You need a motherfucking moirail,” says Staedfast, and reaches out to flick hard at a horn. Rings your pan, drags you back. To the eyes looking on you, to the question put on you. To you need a moirail, which is the last shit you want to talk on right now—makes the idea of spilling your guts about some other shit look downright merciful. “Gamzee. I will have you answer me. Now.”

It’s not like you can fuck this up more, is it? Not like you’ve got more to lose than just. Be a punchline again, like you have been your whole life; the sucker, the fool.

“...You’re flushed so motherfucking good. At each other,” you get out, little fragments of creak and scrape, breaking and wobbling. Stupid motherfucker, don’t you fucking dare make with all the snivelling and sobbing, don’t you even fucking contemplate. “And it’s. Not for me, it’s never motherfucking gonna be for me, I’m not—for that, I’m not right, I’m. I’m just…”

Your ancestor opens his mouth to say something, ears up and fins flared, and his matesprit, his matesprit, reaches back and rests a frond on his knee, squeezes and stops him, watching you like you’re a thing he doesn’t know. They’re not sneering at you, not enough mercy in their pushers to cut you off, and you sure the fuck can’t now the poison’s coming out, now he cut your pusher open and pulled hurt out of you like lifeblood on the ground. The first rush is hurt, and the one behind it…

“But you keep yanking me around,” you say, and taste the presumption of the growl and can’t swallow it back. “You keep motherfucking acting at me like you’re—like I’m—like we’re something, like I’m anything, like two fuckin’, holy badass motherfucking smokeshows are ever gonna break, or flip, or, or whatever the fuck—there’s no motherfucking spot for me! What hurt did you do, motherfucker?! Saying sweetheart at me like you think I’m stupid enough to think—”

“Messiahs’ motherfucking globes,” says your ancestor.

Staedfast cuts off from staring at you to frown at him, and your ancestor frowns back, sighs, growls, makes a holy frown above himself in promise of penance for his blaspheming and goes right back to looking at you like you’re the one saying backwards shit.

He says, “You think Halore gives his name out to little pailtoy side-pieces?”

Takes you back. You don't call the motherfucker by hatchname—feels too bold by far. But…he did tell you.

“But,” you say, and he talks past you, sharper yet.

“You think for some little daytime dallying, I’d go after the motherfucker into that motherfucking—that filthy den of heresy? You think I’d come to them after bare-faced?!”

“Kurloz,” says Staedfast, and it’s not the first time since you got brought back you heard him say it, but it’s the first time you see your ancestor draw to heel for it. For his name. Motherfucker, you hardly thought to think about how he’s got a hatchname. Kurloz.

Steadfast says, “I full comprehend your upset, heart of mine. Believe me that I motherfucking do,” and his voice is still and heavy like miles of deep water pressing down. Calm like stone. “But thrashing around just bloodies the water.”

The Grand Highblood—your ancestor—Kurloz— sighs weary and pinches his knuckles at the root of a horn like you're wearing him thin. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, motherfucker, heard. Tonight's been…”

“I know,” says Staedfast, and turns back at you. He says, “I'll lay shut straight for you, little brother. Since…twisty as the two of you are, Messiahs only know you must have hatched straight-horned and ended up like this by tying your horns in knots over nothing.”

Your ancestor huffs a startled half-laugh. You do too, for all you feel—crazy, the shit they're saying at you. You never heard old Travye joke or tease, most especially not with the very King of Colors as his punchline.

Travye says, “We spoke flush to you because we're sweet on you. Soft in the pusher, brother, comprehend my exact meaning and see it clear. Soft not only for how you entertain, although you surely do entertain. You move my pusher, you pitiful little motherfucker. You brought your king to pray the day away in worry over what might be done to you when you vanished from us.”

You stare at him, just motherfucking bug-eyed. He looks back at you steady. Your ancestor grumbles uncomfort, but when you look at him next he huffs through his nose, purple under the flarespots and sunspeckling across his bared face, and doesn’t deny it.

“The fact that you’re so entirely cracked in the heart about this all is more pitiful even yet than I thought was possible,” says Travye, brisk at you like his schoolfeed’s running long. “Messiahs’ very motherfucking mercy, brother. You’re entirely a disaster.”

“Halore,” says. Kurloz. And dips his head over to knock a horn against his matesprit’s. Halore looks over at him, then at you, and sees how you’re staring half hopeful and half curled down in with shame.

“Ah,” he says, and coughs. “...What I intend to say is. There are more ways and means of quadrants in this empire than any motherfucker ever made mention. As long as the Mother gets contributions, who'll have a reason to raise complaint?”

“And if they do,” says Kurloz, low. “If they decide to bring their fool asses to fuck around. They’ll motherfucking find out.” He looks at you, looks at you right in the eyes and holds you there, paintless as you are. “So?”

You can’t make yourself move quite all the way close enough to kiss him, but you lean to him at least. When he smiles at you, crooked in candlelight, bare-faced so you can see the fine little lines by his eyes and his mouth, some shit that was twisted wrong in your pusher for longer than you can put a number to untwists all at the same time. When he says, “...So alright then, motherfucker,” and leans the rest of the way to kiss you, just a nip of fangs at your lip. “Let’s see what we can do to put action to oath, motherfucker—”

“If you’re so moved by the mirth of the Messiahs to take some action, flushes of my very bleeding heart, you can allow them to move you down to the motherfucking nutrition block and haul back any real sort of morning nutrition,” says Halore, dry and sassing at him, and reaches down to scoop you up. You’re taller than him by a head, but he’s a mountain of a motherfucker and he throws you over a shoulder like a bag of dirt-tubers, ignoring how you yelp. “We’ll have all the time in the universe for frenzy and passion when the wriggler and I have had a long-overdue fang-scouring and a hot shower.”

Kurloz rumbles rebellious, and then breaks his growl to sigh. “...Downright motherfucking whimsical, how you throw fancy motherfuckin’ wader-ass words around,” he says, humored about it. “Alright, motherfucker. Take your shower. And you…” a big hand takes your heavy head by a horn, and pulls up gentle until you pry yourself up to look; your ancestor gives you a little shake. “You’ll be here when I come back around.”

Shakes you. Waiting, you don’t—but waiting for him, because he asked. Waiting, because he wants to find you there when he comes back. Waiting with a motherfucker, this time, somebody who’ll carry your failing half-corpse body off to clean up in the warm. So he can fuck you. So both of them can. And mean it, and want you, and come back—

You’re going in circles.

“I’ll. Yeah,” you say, and it feels stupid when you draw a thumb claw criss and cross past your throat and promise, “If I lie lemme die, motherfucker,” except it makes him smile and lean down to knock his horns to yours.

“Well the fuck enough,” he says. “Then, I’ll be back.”

“Take your time, brother,” says Halore, and hefts you a little closer, squeezes you down on his shoulder. “We’ll be here.”