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The fucking constant honking is getting unbearable as you wander the halls of the meteor. You have no idea what’s up with Gam; you’ve been in your lab and he’s been in his… wherever he’s holed up… but he’s either having the time of his life or is on the brink of some kind of breakdown the same as you.
Each honk is like a slash across the thinkpan, a knife scraping at your sanity. You kind of think maybe you want to cry, or maybe scream, or maybe just throw yourself off this meteor somehow. Your whole life has gone wrong. You think maybe you’ve hit the breaking point.
You’re spiralling. Of course you’re spiralling. You’re almost always spiralling. You can’t remember a time when you haven’t been spiralling, at least most of the time.
It’s been worse since the game and everything. It’s been worse since you somehow managed to drive everyone away. You even seem to have driven Kar away now. No one wants to spend any time with you. No one wants to talk to you. No one will even humour you anymore. You probably shouldn’t have been hitting on everyone, but you’re so terribly lonely, and you just wish someone would touch you for a bit. Hold you. Ideally shoosh you and pap you, but you know that’s asking for too much, so you’ve been asking what you think you could convince them to give instead.
You’re not quite sure what to do now. Everything’s up in the air now. Your plans are coming to pieces to the sound of incessant honking. When you woke up today, you’d kind of made up your mind to go and do something no doubt stupid. Or maybe not, maybe you’d only decided you’d made up your mind to do it so you could go tell people and try and prod them into acting a little like they care about you. Maybe not even care about you. Maybe just the things you’re doing.
You’ve been feeling all sorts of invisible recently, or maybe not invisible, maybe more like you’re slipping out of tangibility, like you don’t actually exist, like you’re not actually you, just some role you’re playing, which is a thing you’ve kind of always felt, and kind of always dealt with by contacting one of your peers and being melodramatic at them so that they were forced to pay attention to you. Even bad attention made you feel a little more real for a moment.
It closes the disconnect between who you have to be and who you’re afraid you are. Except, do you really have to be that person anymore? Your world is gone. The life you were born to has evaporated. You’ve spent so much time grappling with it all, struggling with it, a whole lifetime, and now it’s all meaningless, but you don’t know how to make it stop feeling like it still has meaning.
Like it still matters. Like you’re still trapped in it.
What you’d intended to do before things went odd was go find Fef, tell her your stupid plan, and spark some kind of confrontation. You’re almost sure that you actually do intend to go find Jack and join him, or at least you were, but you’ve also always kind of repulsed by the idea. Doing something like that fits the person you’re supposed to be, though, and telling Fef is sure to prompt her into some kind of reaction.
She ignores you these days. She ignores you and spends all her time curled up with that mustardblooded mutant freak, and that makes you feel all sorts of things. A lot of those things being things you refuse to even sort of acknowledge, but the big one, the one that won’t let you ignore it, is used.
She dumped you the moment she could. She dumped you the moment she no longer needed to use you to feed her lusus. It had just confirmed what you had long since suspected, which is that she was never really pale for you to start with.
It made you think about how you were probably never really pale for her either. Hard to feel pale, really pale, for the person you can’t help feeling is somewhat the cause of a lot of your miseries, but you’d done your best, and when the feelings hadn’t come properly, hadn’t been right, you’d tried to convince yourself you were red for her instead. There had to be something there. Something salvageable. Some justification for your sacrifice. Even if it’s hard to imagine actually touching her like that.
You do know all this. It whirls around in your thinkpan if you let it, part of all those thoughts that try and drag you down into blithering insanity, but you rarely acknowledge it. You can’t acknowledge it. You walk a razor thin wire to remain even a shadow of the mask that is Eridan Ampora.
What right have you got to feel used, anyway? Fef was being pragmatic when she approached you for help, the highest blooded and highest born after her, one of the very few young seadwellers on Alternia, and one of her hatchmates. Pragmatism was something to be admired. Her ruthlessness was emblematic of her worth as the heir. She likes to think she’s a whole lot of things she’s not. She may fantasise about a better, kinder, more ethical way, but you’re not sure what she’d actually do if it came down to it. If Her Imperious Condescension ever kicks the bucket you personally think Fef will make a good replacement. She’s got the right kind of mind, underneath it all, you’ve seen it. She thinks the universe is hers to do with as she desires, to use and discard on her whim. The perfect fuchsia blooded heir.
It's not her fault that you didn’t know that by saying yes you were sealing your fate. Neither of you knew that the first lusus you took down would have an adult on your doorstep the next evening informing you of the fact you were now gainfully employed by the empire. Or at least you hope she didn’t know. She never made any sign of knowing you have lived your life very much in the service of your empress.
You’ve always sort of resented your peers for the way they go on about wanting to be Legislacerators or Cavalreapers or Threshecutioners or the like when they grow up. You’ve always resented that gap they’ve all existed in, that young troll stage, no matter how dangerous and full of the potential for culling it is, that age before adulthood. You feel like you pretty much moulted out of wiggler stage and straight into the job of Orphaner.
It's a role you were destined to hold for the whole of your long, long life, no matter what you thought about it. It was a role you were destined to hold long after all your acquaintance left the planet or died off, and long after Fef was inevitably culled when she got too old and too strong and risked gaining too much support. It was a role that also meant that she would never have the fighting practise that would have come about had she needed to feed her lusus herself.
It was a role designed to keep her, and all the others like her that had come before, and those that would come after, weak and easy to destroy once the cons of their existence started to outweigh the need to have a backup empress on hand for the good of the species, just in case anything ever went horribly wrong and Her Imperious Condescension ran out of luck.
If you were ever really, deeply, terribly unlucky you might have been tasked with culling Fef yourself. Or helping her to be culled. Being expected to lure her into a trap or something. Then you would have had to make a choice of where your loyalties lay, and Alternia was a cull or be culled place. You like to think you’d have done the right thing, but part of you has always been at least a little sure you would have ended up going out with her. Going out trying to protect her. No matter your complicated feelings about her she was your friend. It was terrible being sure you’d have to chose between that friendship and your duty.
Except now you’ll never have to make that choice, or at least not for that reason. If you do join Jack and Fef refuses to come with you then you might be faced with it sometime soon. But that’s alright, isn’t it? These days you’re almost sure you could cull Fef. Fef acts like she wouldn’t hesitate in culling you.
You wish Gam would stop honking those fucking horns. HONK honk HONK honk HONK.
Except maybe you couldn’t cull Fef. You never did want to cull Fef. You don’t know if you could cull Fef if it came down to it.
You should go and confront her. Tell her you’re leaving to join Jack. You are still leaving to join Jack, aren’t you? You don’t really want to leave to join Jack. You never really did, but you want to even less now. You do want Fef to fuss at you, though, to beg and plead and play pretend she’ll be your moirail again if only you don’t go join Jack. Except you kind of don’t want that either. You just want to want it. You want that kind of comfort and she’s the only one appropriate to get it from.
You were going to go do that, but for some reason the blue text human contacted you right when you were heading out. He didn’t say much, but he did mention something about hearing you used to be Vris’ kismesis and wanting an explanation of what that meant, which you were sure someone must have explained to him before, but maybe not very well, so maybe that was why he was asking you. You don’t know. All you know is after trying to explain it the thinking about her had you seeking her out instead of Fef.
Vris is always difficult. This time was no less difficult, not least because you think maybe you just had some kind of shallow grey fling with her and Tav, the kind that comes on intensely and is over in an instant. She was definitely working up to killing the brown blood. You and she have killed often enough together that you know what she looks like when she’s about to do something like that. You’d stopped her, because you knew she’d regret it, because you know she’s long had the most unbearable pitycrush on the boy, even if she keeps trying to convince herself and everyone around her that it’s not that. That it’s contempt, or maybe black, and not the throbbing red flush you know it is. That’s she’s confessed to you it is.
Truth is you really have no right to feel used by Fef. You did cheat on her after all. Properly cheat on her, not just your inability to stop pale flirting with Kar, but a proper pale affair. Just the once. Just one torrid pale fling with Vris that neither of you has ever acknowledged after. The reason, you suspect, she then started ghosting you and your blackrom fell apart.
Vris is proud, proud enough to be self-destructive in it. Earlier Tav said some things about what Vris has been up to before you finally convinced him to give up and leave, to maybe go and tell someone else instead of facing her himself, and then when he was gone she confirmed them. It’s so like her. She’s always been the type to shoot herself in the foot while she’s aiming at the rest of the world. You’re impressed. You’re horrified. You don’t know what to do.
Things got a bit black between the two of you again, but then they threatened to flip pale again, but she managed to pull herself together before the two of you ended up in a pile and instead told you to either join her in taking down Jack or to fuck off, and you chose the latter in your stinging state of pale rejection. Now you’re wandering around trying to regain the determination to maybe go join Jack, but Vris really has ruined it for you, even if you weren’t already feeling a crippling case of the maybes about it. You don’t actually want to have to fight Vris.
You can still tell Fef you’re going to do it and then let her think she’s talked you down, you suppose. Maybe that would get you some of her attention for a while.
You think you do want her attention, but now you’re starting to think that maybe it’s that you think you should want her attention. You know she hated being your moirail, but if you’re honest you don’t think she was a very good one.
Her shooshes were stilted, her paps limp, and she’d dodge you or flinch if you tried to return the favour. She used to complain about the way you never wanted to talk about her feelings, but you did try, at least early on, except she’d never seem to really want to share them with you. She’d sometimes talk about her thoughts, her plans for Alternian society when she took over, but that was always hard to listen to because she is so blisteringly naïve.
She was never going to take over. She was just going to end up another dead fuchsia blood.
Even if she did take over her worldview was so simple. So incredibly privileged. She’s had a much easier life than pretty much any other troll on Alternia. Of course you’re privileged too, but in a different kind of way. At least you think you are. You think you’ve got a more nuanced understanding of the hemospectrum and how it affects those lower down it. You’ve seen it in ways she never has in her sheltered existence. You’ve seen it while you were hunting for her. You’ve seen what it does to trolls. You’ve long tried to pretend you don’t know how unfair it is. It’s led to a whole lot of overcompensation.
Sometimes you think about finding where she’s tangled up with the pissblood and bringing up a few of the things you can remember her saying about the helmsman system in front of him. So much pity, but so very patronising, and the way she’s spoken of it as a terrible necessity and how there must be a kinder, more ethical way to do it.
She’d just deny it, though. Then he’d probably kick your ass again with his psiionics.
Though you’re pretty sure you can now kick his ass with your awesome white science wand.
It might still come close, because he is powerful. You wish you hated him. Sometimes you try and black flirt with him, but he’s not interested and your heart isn’t really in it. You were always kind of fascinated by him, even though you used to try and keep away from him before the game. You knew about him, though. You think he’d cringe, maybe even cower, if he knew how far and wide the reputation of his power had spread. Maybe there’s a little residual pity there too. It was always so hard not to pity him. The moment he finished his adult moult he was going to be cornered, captured, broken down, and installed in a ship somewhere.
Of course, you think he always suspected that was going to be his fate, but you don’t think he knows it was already officially on the books, that there was already some competition about who was going to get him for their ship amongst the adults. You don’t think any of them know. It’s not like you were going to tell them. They would have asked how you knew, and you couldn’t exactly explain without explaining what you were, that you were already part of the system.
A system that you’re maybe not sure you believe in, underneath it all, for all that you’re desperate to convince yourself and everyone around you that you do. If you don’t, if you acknowledge that it’s all rubbish, and monstrous, and pointless, and awful, then what does that make you? You’re one little cog already in the machine. You’re already part of its perpetuation.
The lowbloods and landdwellers have to be worthless or else you might just have to acknowledge that what happens to them is unfair, and that their hate of you is justified. Orphaner. There are few young seadwellers on Alternia and all of them try to stay away from you and from Fef and her lusus, which has impacted the prey you’ve chosen. Everyone knew who you were, and no one liked you because of it. You had a reputation. You had to be careful all the time. You could never be friends with some random lowblood, you could never get close to them, you were always in danger of being killed. Cull or be culled. You’d been attacked so many times. You’d deserved it, you knew that, but it still hurt. The distance between you and everyone else still hurt, the distance that had been built the moment you said yet to Fef. It was so hard not to resent her a little for that fact.
Vris was such a relief. She was never scared of anyone. If it wasn’t for her you never would have risked getting to know this group of trolls you’re now stuck with and are now sick of you. Back then you’d thought your black romance was strong enough that she would defend you if it came to it, if they tried to cull you. You’d thought the connection between the two of you was strong enough. Not really the connection forged by your ancestors, but that forged by your shared misery, the terrible things you had to do to keep a pair of lusii fed.
You used to help each other, and watch each other’s backs when hunting, that’s how the pale affair happened. Things had gone wrong. What had looked like easy prey, a brownblood with a seemingly weak lusus, had fought back and fought back hard, and on top of that had allies within easy summoning distance, meaning two against one had soon ballooned into two against nine. The two of you had won, of course, but you’d both been injured in the process, and her hive was closest, and you’d followed her home so you could both patch yourselves up, and you were both tired, tired of what you had to do, the wretched violent duty that had been laid on your doorsteps as little more than wigglers.
Things had gotten out of hand. Honesty had risen to the surface. Piles had been snuggled in. There had been shooshing, papping, and worse yet equally distributed. She’d let you comfort her too. She’d let you trill and chirp and sooth her. She’d let you rub her horns and stroke her hair. She’d gently run her fingers over your gills without any intention of slashing with her claws. Secrets had been shared between you.
In the evening, when you both woke curled together, things had been awkward. Stilted. Broken. You’d been weak, you’d made overtures, willing, eager even, to forget all about Fef. Vris had shut you down, then ushered you out of her hive, and that was that.
Sometimes you want to tell Fef. Sometimes you want to shout it in her face, that in your personal experience one wretched, adulterous, torrid pale pal pile with Vriska Serket was more satisfying that sweeps of lukewarm diamonds with her. That in your personal experience Vriska Serket was a better moirail than Fef could ever hope to be.
The latter wouldn’t be true, of course. Fef always had the potential to be a great moirail, just not for you, obviously. You’ve seen her pale-red vacillations with Captor. You’ve witnessed the feelings jams, the papping, the shooshing, which then devolves to kissing. She’s so good at it with him. She’s so obviously pale attracted to him, on top of the red. She never acted like that with you. She was never eager to pap you the way she does him. It’s weird and obscene. You want it so badly.
The comfort, the affection, the touching.
Sometimes you maybe think you don’t even want it from her, you want it from anyone, anyone who will show you the slightest pity. It makes you want to hurt her, though, watching her experience it, watching her give it to someone else, knowing she never wanted to give you any of it, no matter what she pretended, and that being with her like that prevented you from finding it elsewhere.
Fef probably wouldn’t believe you if you told her about Vris anyway, and whether or not she did Vris would kill you for exposing any of her softness to anyone. She does her best to curate her own untouchable image. It would be a betrayal to reveal a hint of her weakness. She might have betrayed all of you, but you still don’t really want to hurt her.
You shudder, coming to a stop, leaning against the nearest wall as you desperately try and push away the thought that you don’t actually want to hurt anyone. You never wanted to hurt anyone. You’ve never been a very good troll. You don’t actually like the violence, the killing. Sometimes it feels like it’s killing you instead, every time you take a life. Even the life of one of those awful Angels.
It’s hard to force the thought down. It keeps bobbing to the surface, keeps occupying the mind. Maybe you’d do a better job without all the fucking honking, but the fucking honking just seems to be getting louder and more insistent.
What a fucking terrible troll you are. What a fucking terrible Orphaner you’ve been. You don’t think you’ve ever wanted to hurt anyone, ever, at all. You don’t think you’ve been ok with what you’ve done, what you’ve had to do, for even a single moment since your heart cracked open when Fef asked you to do it.
Maybe you won’t go to Jack. Not that you think you ever really wanted to, were ever really going to, at all, you just wanted to threaten to do it and get some kind of response. You wanted someone to pretend to care about you for long enough to sooth the spiralling thoughts shredding apart your pan. You’re all going to die. You can’t do anything to stop it. Everyone you care about is going to die and you can’t prevent it. There is no hope left.
The idea occurs to you that maybe it’s better to die sometime soon, surrounded by the few trolls you actually honestly care about, no matter what they think of you, instead of at some uncertain future point, after all of them are long dead. Maybe…
You jerk you head sideways, body moving on instinct, propelling you away from the threat before you even register whatever it is swinging through where your skull just was to knock a dent into the wall. It’s a lifetime of honed instincts that makes you move, of never knowing when you would be under attack, when someone would honestly be trying to kill you.
“Honk,” you hear, spoken, tone flat, as you whirl to face your attacker.
For a moment you can’t quite comprehend what you’re seeing. Your brain tells you it’s just Gam, but your instincts are screaming threat, and then you’ve had enough time to properly examine him and past experiences are giving you unwanted context. He must have run out of sopor.
You’ve encountered other slime eaters before. You’ve made slime eaters before. Only a truly negligent lusus lets their charge get at the sopor, but when a good lusus is gone, when a good lusus has been made into a meal but the lusus’ troll wasn’t around to be caught to feed Vris’s lusus, one of the things that sometimes happens to an orphaned troll without anyone to care for them, control them, or shoosh away their grief, is they spend the last little bit of their life, before they end up inevitably culled, off their heads on the green stuff.
It's ugly. Sopor addiction is always ugly. Destructive and ugly.
Sopor addicts also make easy prey.
Sometimes Vris asked you to help, and you never really knew what you felt about doing it, other than miserable and guilty. It felt like cleaning up your mess though. You always felt such wretched, terrible pity. Not red, not pale, some other kind of pity.
Gam has always been in better shape than most of them, without the signs of sickness, the sores and physical wasting, but then he is a purple blood, and a descendent of The Grand Highblood. Incredible physical endurance is part and parcel of his legacy.
None of the other slime eaters you’ve ever met has been as high up the hemospectrum as him. Foolishly you’d let yourself believe that he had to be immune to sopor’s worst effects, even its withdrawal’s worst effects, that’s why you never said anything to anyone. Obviously you were wrong.
He starts babbling some crap about Dark Carnivals and Messiahs and killing everyone, all interspersed with honks, but you don’t really listen. He’s standing there, hunched forward, staring at you with malevolent eyes, a juggling club in either hand. He is going to try and kill you again.
Slime eaters that run out of slime go off the deep end.
They’re terribly dangerous though, because they can’t seem to feel pain, and their every instinct turns violent and self-aggrandizing, like they become some manifestation of the horrorterrors the slime is supposed to drive away. He’s not the first one of those you’ve encountered before, either. You’ve heard about others, seen evidence of the rampages they’ve left behind when you’ve gone to collect the easy prey of wounded lusii who have lost their charges when a sobering slime eater broke into their hive, but you’ve encountered two of them yourself, personally. Both tried to kill you. Both were harder to put down that they should have been, because they just kept going no matter how much you damaged them. In the end decapitation was the only thing that stopped them.
Gam is ranting about being the Mirthful Messiahs right now. You let the words rush over you. The brown blood you encountered thought he was Her Imperious Condescension, the teal blood thought she was The Sufferer, that kind of delusion of grandeur and religious mania seems part and parcel of the experience. At least Gam’s current insanity makes sense, for status, descent, and blood colour.
“Wwhen wwas the last time you had some pie, Gam?” you ask, interrupting him mid rant.
He blinks at you, visibly surprised at your daring, before roaring out, “THERE AIN’T NO MORE MOTHERFUCKING PIE,” followed by a hushed whisper of, “fishface motherfucker.”
He starts rambling on again about killing you and all the horrible things he’ll do to your body, but you’ve heard worse from the few adults you’ve had to interact with in your role of Orphaner, so you ignore it.
For a moment you think about contacting Kar, or maybe Kan, but then you imagine being the reason either of them ended up face to face with a highblood on a homicidal rampage, and the thought fills you with a queasy kind of fear, so you don’t. You’re not sure what they could do, either. You’re pretty sure Gam is stronger than both of them. You then think about contacting Vris. You’re pretty sure you and Vris together could take down Gam, but then that would mean you had made the choice to take him down, to cull him, to kill someone almost like a friend. It would be easy, wouldn’t it? You probably wouldn’t even need her help. All you need to do is draw your wand.
You don’t want to, that’s the thing. Maybe you could convince yourself to do it if you hadn’t been wrestling with the reality of how much you really don’t like killing just moments before. Gam has always seemed so gentle, for a troll, sweet and a bit stupid, but that may be the sopor. The perfect victim if you and Vris were on the hunt, if he wasn’t also a highblooded landdweller and as naturally terrifyingly strong as they tend to be. Your actions have led to the death and suffering of so many such trolls. Can you really do it again? Do you really want to do it again?
This ravening loon in front of you making suggestions about what he could do with his juggling clubs and your nook doesn’t seem much like the soft slime eater you know, but it’s not like that personality could possibly be fictitious, when this one is so much like the other sober slime eaters you’ve encountered. You’ve never heard of a successful case of a slime eater coming through withdrawal, because you’ve never heard of a sober slime eater who didn’t either find themselves some more slime to gorge on, often ending in overdose, or wasn’t culled within a perigree of going on a rampage.
It must be possible. Gam just needs to calm down and to stay calm until he gets through it. If only he had a moirail, but the closest you think he has is Kar, and this situation is far too dangerous to bring him into. Kar is soft, for all he tries to pretend like he’s not, and he’s delicate, you may not be entirely sure of his blood colour but you are sure he’s not hardy the way a highblood is, too easy to kill, and no natural born killer. You’re not sure Kar has the instincts to strike first if Gam turns on him. The only other troll you can think of that Gam is really close to is Tav, some sort of one-sided flushcrush you think, but Tav is an even worst choice than Kar when it comes to self-protective instincts and ease of injury.
Of the hardier members of your group none of them are that close to Gam, and even if they were absolutely none of them have the right kind of personality to deal with this situation without making it worse. That’s when it occurs to you that it may be up to you. Something in your chest swoops at the thought. You were a terrible moirail for Fef, but you think maybe you were a little better that one time with Vris, and that’s what you have to focus on right now. You have to pretend you can go this for Gam.
You need to get him calmed down, to get him shooshed and papped, so this situation can be contained. You don’t want this to end up like those hives you’ve visited after a sober slime eater’s broken in, all the blood splattering the walls, the injured, almost dead lusii you were there to collect, the smears where their charges fell after the slime eater was through goring them. No one is prepared right now to face that kind of threat, and if you focus on warning them instead of calming down Gam the best that will happen is that one of them ends up culling him before he culls them. Either way at least one of your friends will end up losing their life. You can’t bear the thought.
“I’M GETTING REAL MOTHERFUCKING TIRED OF THE WAY A MOTHERFUCKER AIN’T TAKING A THING FUCKING SERIOUS RIGHT NOW,” he’s snarling as you make up your mind and get ready to approach him, “this is about as motherfucking serious as a thing can motherfucking get.”
“It’s the sopor, Gam,” you venture, your voice wavering more than even usual. You take a tiny step closer to him, hand held up and ready to pap. You can do this. You’re feeling all kinds of pity to see him in this state. The inside of his poor pan must be a real horrorterror right now. “I’vve seen trolls that’vve come off a it before. It messes wwith the head. You must be feelin all sorts a vviolent impulses. Wwhy don’t wwe take this to a pile and you can tell me all about it?”
“YOU TRYING TO BE MY PALE PAL MOTHERFUCKER?” he roars, except maybe it wasn’t ‘pale’ pal but ‘pail’ pal, he’s got the kind of sleezy look on his face that suggests that. “You trying to be all like your motherfucking ancestor, gifting yourself over to the highest-blooded motherfucker you can find for him to make use of like he likes? MIRACLES IS WHAT IT IS, FISH BROTHER. Miracles.”
You try not to roll your eyes. You’ve heard those rumours too, and promptly dismissed them. It’s always landdwellers going on about Orphaner Dualscar being taken as a plaything by The Grand Highblood, with The Condesce’s permission, instead of just being executed like all your actual, factual, research suggests. You think they like the idea of one of your station being used as a pail toy.
‘I’m not that desperate, Gam,’ you say, softly, as you edge in close. He’s watching you. His eyes are large, baleful, full of a kind of crazy intensity. He’s already taller than you. By the time he’s fully grown he’s going to be massive. Everyone is at that age where they’re starting to have those little growth spurts that begin to show signs of the adult form they’ll one day moult into. He’s probably due a proper moult sometime soon, as troll skin can only stretch so much, but it’ll be a while before you need one, if you even need another before your adult moult. Adult seadwellers tend to be smaller than all but the smallest of adult landdwellers, and your looks are very stereotypically violet blooded. You feel the size difference between you now.
You can see the adult highblood he’ll one day be in his wide shoulders and those large hands curled around the handles of his clubs. He’s got a noble kind of face beneath the paint, not too bad looking, almost handsome really. You hope he doesn’t try and take this encounter in some kind of unsavoury direction. You want to keep things pale. You feel pity for him, but the other kind of pity. You’re sure the other trolls on this meteor with you wouldn’t be able to believe it, but you have some standards, and concupiscently propositioning a slime addicted pan rotted troll going through withdrawal seems too much like taking advantage.
It always did, that’s why you don’t flirt with him, not in a concupiscent way, no matter how desperate you’ve felt, how lonely, or how often the voices of adult seadwellers have rattled through your skull telling you that if you don’t secure someone to fill your own quadrants by the time the drones come then someone will be secured to fill them for you. Your genetic material is too valuable to risk being wasted, you’ve been told, and so few violet eggs are ever laid, and fewer still make it out of the trials, and there always has to be an Orphaner, and what will happen if you fall? If you die? Your whole species will be doomed. So, of course you’d have had to submit to the pawing of trolls you’d never met before, just to fill your buckets, no matter how much the thought had made bile rise in your belly. You rarely let yourself think too hard on that, though, even if it did always add an extra edge of desperation to your flirting, beyond even the need to find someone to care about you even a little.
He's laughing at you, lips peeled back to reveal his sharp, sharp fangs. Still, he doesn’t lash out, doesn’t try to hurt you, lets you creep closer and closer until you’re almost in papping range. “ANY PORT IN A STORM,’ he barks, “isn’t that the way you roll, my motherfucking fish faced brother? ANY MOTHERFUCKING PORT IN A MOTHERFUCKING STORM?” You reach out, your shaking hand almost making contact with his cheek. He catches you by the wrist, in a flash, moving so quickly you can’t see where the juggling club he was holding ended up. His fingertips overlap, his claws dig in bruising tight, and he shakes you a little, leans in close. It would take a moment, just a moment, to pull your wand and blast him into oblivion. “you going to be my motherfucking port,” he purrs, his breath wafting against your face, “IN THIS MOTHERFUCKING STORM?”
“Shoosh,” you reply, voice soft, doing your best to project an air of sincere pale intentions. “Gam, shoosh. Sopor wwithdrawwal is a terrible thin. You must be feelin pretty wwretched right noww. Wwe should find a pile. You can tell me all about it. I’ll listen. I wwant to listen. Gam, you got me feelin all sorts a pale right noww.”
You actually are. You always did feel a bit of pity for him, a different kind of pity than the awful, shattering kind you’ve always felt for Captor. Poor Gam. He must have had a terrible lusus. He must have been awfully neglected. It’s awful. How could something like that happen to such a sweet troll. It just makes you want to pull him close and comfort him. You’re starting to get that pale, tingly, pleasant sensation, that lassitude, that strange sense of affection and caretaking, you experienced in that pile with Vris. You try and push it down though, at least for now, just because you’re feeling it that doesn’t mean Gam is, and you don’t really want to be clowned to death while you’re caught up in a pale swoon.
He blinks at you, looking confused for a moment, like you’re not doing what he expected. “my best friend’s voice is all rattling round in my motherfucking pan like a miracle,’ he murmurs after a moment, “TELLING ME NOT TO LISTEN TO A MOTHERFUCKING WORD A GILL HAVING MOTHERFUCKER GOT TO MOTHERFUCKING SAY.”
You wince, a little, imagining Kar telling Gam to avoid you. You thought you and Kar had something of an understanding. You’ve always enjoyed talking to him, the two of you edging towards emotional intimacy in a way you really shouldn’t have been doing while Fef was still your moirail, yet he must have told Gam to steer clear, that you were dangerous in some kind of way. Surely Kar has to know you were never going to try and take advantage of Gam? But then maybe the intimacy you had seen there was an illusion. He never did come and visit you, no matter how you begged. He left you all alone with the Angels and all their wrath.
Gam’s looking at you, dark eyes roving over your face, some strange fascination in his features. “Did I up and hurt your motherfucking feelings?”
“I’m fine,” you manage, trying to push down the sting. “My feelins don’t matter right noww, not like yours do. You’re hurtin Gam, and I wwant to do wwhatevver I can to help you feel better.”
He lets out a churr of satisfaction, his eyes heavy lidded, “I AM THE MOST IMPORTANT MOTHERFUCKER ON THIS MOTHERFUCKING ROCK. How up and righteous it is for a fishy little brother to be motherfucking understanding that.”
Yep. There’s the sober slime eater’s sense of self-aggrandisement. “A course you are, Gam,” you reply, giving him the best pale eyes you can, letting your body hang in his grasp as if you can’t imagine not trusting him not to hurt you. You can start to try and make him see sense once he’s calmed down. There’s no point trying to remind him that he cares about all his friends and doesn’t want to turn them into some morbid pile of heads that he can do horrible things to right now, because he’s in no state to listen.
You do realise you’ve got a spare hand, one not caught up in the punishingly tight grip of a murderous landdweller, but you’ve been kind of wanting to keep it free in case you need to fetch your wand. It’s foolish, because you realise that while he’s distracted looking at you in this strange kind of way, you can just reach up and pap. He shudders, the heavy lids over his eyes fluttering for a moment. You pap him again. “oh, that feels something like a miracle,” he purrs, leaning in to the next pap, his voice remaining quiet as he adds, “you got some miraculous, righteous little hands there my brother.”
You pap him again, leaning in against his bulk. Those tingly pale feelings are coming back. Your mind starts to fill with all sorts of thoughts of piles and being tangled up in one. “I can keep papping you if you don’t kill me,” you point out, your voice a little husky, a velvety churr to it in the way you’ve seen in movies with notoriously good pale scenes. “Wwe could go back to your block, curl up together in a pile. Wwe could talk about your feelins and evvery time somethin feels evven the slightest bit…” you hesitate for a moment, before deciding on, “unrighteous I can then givve you another pap. I could evven… Gam, I could evven rub your horns for you, if you wwant?”
He lets out a great, rattling purr at the thought, before a hint of something sharp, suspicious, enters his gaze. He shakes your wrist again, and you do your best not to wince at the tightness of his grip. “PAPPING A BROTHER LIKE THAT, ALL SWEET AND SOFT AND MOTHERFUCKING PALE,” he snarls in your face as you try not to flinch back, unable to prevent your fins from pinning themselves down to the side of your face. He sounds unstable. He looks unstable. It feels like you’ve lost any progress you were making. For some reason that makes your bloodpusher hurt, makes it ache. You want to coo at him. You want to shoosh him, but he’s now ranting in your face, “like a motherfucker doesn’t know what an unrighteously slutty thing this motherfucking little gill bitch is. LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER DOESN’T KNOW THIS LITTLE FISH BITCH DOESN’T MEAN IT. Like a motherfucker doesn’t know this LITTLE SLUT HANGING FROM MY MOTHERFUCKING RIGHTEOUS GRIP would go and pap every other motherfucker on this motherfucking rock the moment I let him go.”
“N-no!” you protest, reaching up to pap him again, only for him to drop his other juggling club and catch your other wrist. Now if he tries to kill you you won’t be able to fetch your wand. You are such an idiot. You can’t even focus on feeling stupid, because you’re too busy feeling awful. It shouldn’t hurt to be accused of essentially being a pass around pale pal, especially as you cheated on Fef with Vris, and maybe edged into improper territory with Kar from time to time, but you’re sure if you’d actually been satisfied in your moirallegiance you would have been the most faithful troll ever spawned on Alternia. You would have been there for her, you never would have wavered, you would have shared all your secrets, your hurts, your wishes, your dreams, and listened to hers in turn. You would have shooshed as sweetly as any troll has ever shooshed, you would have papped with the utmost tenderness. You know what they all think of you, that you’re easy with your concupiscent quadrants, but you find yourself not wanting to be seen as a solid diamond slut too.
All of a sudden you mean it, your pale solicitation to Gam. If he lets you pap him again, if he lets you shoosh him, if he lets you get him into a pile, you’ll be his for the taking. You’ll be his for ever after. Even once he’s through this, once his slime eating days are a faded memory, if you both live through what’s to come you’ll stay diamonds for him forever. “Gam, no,” you whine, voice breathy and vulnerable. Your eyes feel huge in your face, watery around their edges. You think your lips are trembling. “It’s not like that. I’m not like that. I wwouldn’t go an pap just anyone. Wwhat I feel for you, it’s... Gam, it’s special.”
“Slutty little fish bro motherfucking acting like we don’t all know he used to be all about papping fish sis all the time,” he growls, low, threatening. Is he jealous? You think he’s jealous. Jealous of Fef.
You can’t quite hold in the breathy gasp or stop yourself from swaying a little towards him. No one’s ever wanted you like that before. No one’s ever really been jealous of your attentions. Even Fef’s resentment of the way you talked to Kar only ever seemed half-hearted. “It wwasn’t like this wwith her,” you breathe out, squirming a little in his grasp, the urge to pap him surging through you. You want to rub his horns. You want to shoosh him. You want to curl up in a pile with him and comfort him and listen to all his woes. You want him to want you like that too. “It didn’t feel like this. That wwas barely pale, this is wwhiter than wwhite. I’vve nevver been in diamonds like this before. You gotta believve me Gam. You gotta believve me. It’s gonna destroy me if you don’t believve I’m pale for you like I’vve nevver been pale for anyone before.”
He shudders, suddenly dropping both your wrists. If you had one iota of sense left in your pale rotten pan you’d fetch your wand, but instead you push in close and go straight for him with a double handed pap. He groans, leaning his large head into your hands. It feels so good. You just keep papping him, all while he leans into your touches. His eyes are heavy lidded, pupils blown. You can see the way you’re affecting him, and it’s affecting you in turn.
This is like the best kind of pale porn, the kind that really does it for you. Maybe it makes you kind of gross and regressive, but you’ve always been into the more traditional types of pale porn, where there’s one more unstable, more dangerous partner, about to go off the rails, who has to be papped back into a state of something like sanity, instead of two more equal papfriends. It’s kind of the dynamic you guess you were trying to emulate with Fef, but it never worked, because in your most lurid pale fantasies you were never the one in danger of flipping the fuck out, but always the one curled around and calming down your partner. Fef has always been one of the more stable trolls you’ve known, so she was never going to give you what you needed, and trying to force an inverted version of that dynamic was just destructive to both of you. Maybe that’s why things felt so much better with Vris, but your fling with Vris was still a tepid affair compared to this.
Vris has never really been that much of a danger to you. Of course she is dangerous, but you think less to you than pretty much every other troll. Gam is radiating threat. Like some murderous purrbeast letting you gently stroke its mane. Maybe you should go for a horn next? You risk it. Shuddering, overcome with pale tingles, as he moves his head into your touch. Your knees feel weak. Every instinct in your body is urging you to curl around him somewhere in a pile of something and get to the good stuff.
He grunts, nuzzling at your wrist, and you shake and shudder and imagine snuggling up all close and tight with him. “A brother said something about a pile?” he eventually whispers, close and intimate between the two of you.
“Y-yeah,” you gasp out, “Cod, Gam, get me into your pile. I wwanna be ina pile wwith you right noww.”
He lets out a rasping laugh, sounding as wrecked as you feel. “RIGHT AWAY MY SOFT PALE MOTHERFUCKING MIRACLE. My sweetest white diamond. WE’RE ABOUT TO HAVE THE MOST SICKNASTY, THE MOST RIGHTEOUS, THE MOST MIRACULOUS OF FEELINGS JAMS. Just you and me.”
“I’m gonna pap you so good, Gam,” you promise as he scoops you into his arms and starts almost sprinting towards the nearest transporaliser so he can bring you to wherever it is he’s been hiding out. “I’m gonna pap you and shoosh you and rub your horns and you can tell me wwhatevver you wwant to and I’m gonna listen to you and try an make it all better.”
“KEEP TALKING LIKE THAT MY SWEET RIGHTEOUS DIAMOND AND WE AIN’T MAKING IT TO A PILE,” he warns, “There’s be feelings jams all up in this here empty hallway all up on this cold, hard floor.”
“I don’t care,” you whisper, nuzzling against his bony chest. You’re vaguely aware that you’ve gone totally diamonds dumb, but you can’t bring yourself to care. You’ve never felt this pale before. You never want this feeling to stop. You chose to ignore any voices in your thinkpan pointing out that this might just be one of those weird evolutionary things where your instincts tell you that you’ve been caught by a bigger, stronger troll, and now your body is doing everything it can to make sure the last thing the troll wants to do is kill you. That doesn’t matter. This feels too good. “I just wwanna pap you, I don’t care wwhere it happens.”
“I MOTHERFUCKING CARE,” he growls, “I ain’t risking those other motherfuckers catching a glimpse of my sweet pale pal when he’s giving out his miraculous pappings. A MOTHERFUCKER CATCHES THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS SQUINTING THEIR FUCKING GANDERBULBS WHERE THEY AIN’T MOTHERFUCKING WANTED AND THERE’S GOING TO BE SOME RIGHTEOUS FUCKING BLOOD LETTING ALL UP IN HERE. A righteous carnival of blood letting. A MIRACULOUS MOTHERFUCKING FESTIVAL UP AND WORTHY OF THE MIRTHFUL MESSIAHS. A miraculous motherfucking festival all up and worthy of me.”
Oh, he’s really possessive right now. You shudder, letting out a quiet little mewl. It’s weird how good that makes you feel. You want to agree with him. You want to promise to never pap where anyone can see, but you somehow mange to hold yourself back. In reality you know you might have to if the two of you encounter anyone else before he’s recovered from this withdrawal. You can’t risk him trying to kill someone just because you promised to keep your pale affections where only he can see.
“Gam, you getting all wworked up like that is just making me wwant to pap you more,” you whimper, sounding all sorts of pathetic and tender, trying to take his mind off his possessive rage. ‘Are wwe almost at your block?”
“JUST A LITTLE MOTHERFUCKING MORE,’ he shouts as he climbs onto the transportaliser. A moment later you’re in a cavernous, dark place, and then a couple steps and he’s depositing you gently into a pile. You would have expected there to be a cacophony of horns honking, but this isn’t a horn pile, instead it seems to be made of clown pants and random socks. It doesn’t smell great, but it could be worse, the horns would be worse, so you reach up for him and curl your arms around him as he follows you down into the pile.
You pap him, and shoosh him, and make a soft, churring noise, as he buries his face against your throat and grumbles lowly. You glance around briefly, trying to get a sense of where you are, one of the labs, maybe, but it’s hard to tell, especially as your pan feels so addled full of pale feelings and all you want to do is curl closer to him and comfort him more. You wonder if this is where he’s been sleeping, or trying to sleep, you suppose, you doubt he’s been managing much without any sopor. The thought fills you with pangs of pale pity.
You’re in the process of turning your full attention back to him when you spot the human-shaped puppet propped up where it can get a voyeuristic view of everything that’s happening in the pile. For a moment your hands pause, one papping the side of his face, the other gently stroking a horn. It’s so creepy. Disgusting. Yuck, you don’t want it looking at you like that.
He makes a rumble of displeasure, and starts to lift his head, so you quickly go back to papping, shooshing him sweetly, your voice a tender, husky chirp. It’s so easy to fall into the sweet, pale sensations, the tingling warmth, the pleasant intimacy. This feels so good. You shudder and nuzzle closer to him, whispering softly that he can tell you whatever he wants to, that the only thing you want to do is listen to him share his feelings and to comfort him in any way he wishes. You’ll do whatever he wants. Whatever he needs to make him feel better. He groans against you and starts stroking his hand up and down your side, gentle and comforting, feeling better than even Vris did when she touched you like that. Your abdominal gills are just under there and he’s making no move to hurt them. You whimper and chirp, nuzzling closer.
You try to forget the puppet, though you promise yourself that the moment you’ve successfully shooshed, papped, cooed, petted, listened, and snuggled Gam into a proper sleep you’re going to draw your wand and blast it out of existence. You suspect that you may be in this pile with your new moirail for quite a while, as long as it takes until he’s made it through this withdrawal, and in that time you’re going to be performing some of the lewdest pale acts a troll can perform. The kind of diamonds reserved for the most committed of moirails. The kind you’d bet Nep and Equ get up to all the time behind closed doors. The kind you don’t see in regular romance movies, only in the most explicit of pale porn, the sort of porn you’ve shamefully downloaded and watched in the past, back when you were wishing you could have something like that with Fef. The kind that’s not for an audience, especially not an audience as gross and offputting as that puppet.
You could swear it’s like it’s actually watching you. Its beady little eyes seem to be roving over you in this violating way as you snuggle against Gam and let yourself make the chirping little purr of a seadweller soothing their palemate. It’s like the horrid thing is enjoying your vulnerability in a way that could even taint the sweetly soft intimacy building between the two of you if you let it get to you.
You could just ask Gam to get rid of it, not just store it away in his sylladex, because you feel like you’d still be able to feel its presence if it was that close by, but to throw it out of the room or something, or transportalise it somewhere else on the meteor, but for some reason you don’t feel like it’s adequate to do that. It’s like some instinct of yours, some protective urge coming straight from the diamond core of you, wants it away from your moirail and everything the two of you are going to share in the future. So, you’ll blast it when he’s asleep, and pretend you have no idea where it went if he asks you about it.