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By Ways I Have Not Known

Summary:

You're bleeding, broken, blind, and bereaved. Now what?

Notes:

The sole point of AU is that Sollux didn't half-kill himself when he threw the asteroid, and thus he was not issued a ticket to the corpse party.

Any references to troll biology presume that Karkat's mutation is cosmetic and only effects his blood color; thus his core body temperature, lifespan, (lack of) psychic abilities, etc. are all in line with that of a non-mutant limeblood troll.

Chapter Text

"We should take care of Sollux," Kanaya is saying, and you can practically hear the Capital Letters of Importance in her words. She's moved further away from you; she isn't speaking from right next to your auricular sponge clots anymore. "I am afraid we may still lose him if we do not."

You can't come with me because you're not dead, Aradia had told you. Which is stupid, because you're pretty sure that in a contest between the two of you you've died more times than she has. Apparently shenanigans involving multiple dreamselves don't count, not that you'd know anymore; all you know now is that you're all still going to die (except maybe Aradia and probably Kanaya, since they've both already died in ways you're pretty sure count) and now there isn't going to be any warning swell of voices in your head, getting louder and louder and telling you it's someone's time. It's kind of comforting, really; you'd rather be caught unawares than giving everyone a useless prophecy they won't believe (or won't believe the right way) and have to deal with the fact that you'd told them so but it still isn't enough.

You bite your tongue before you can say I'm fine, KN because fuck, you aren't fine at all; you're bleeding from your empty ocular sockets and it's pooling in your borrowed goggles, you're bleeding from your face gash where your teeth were knocked out, and you're not entirely sure but you think maybe you're bleeding from your near-vestigial remains of a probiscial organ from the strain of the best bit of psionics you've ever pulled off. Then again, the migraine is nearly always there (so much so that you weren't the slightest bit surprised when your planet had been full of brains and fire, one of them always goes along with the other) and there's definitely blood from under your goggles running down your face, so maybe you do have one hole in your face that isn't bleeding.

"Anybody here know any first aid that doesn't involve amputating limbs and replacing them with robot pieces?" Strider asks, and you can't really place where he is in the room by the sound of his voice. It makes you more than a little nervous that you can't. "Because as on board with making you all a race of cyborg bugs as I am, I have yet to see you all break out a set of robot eyes."

"I'll take care of this, coolkid." Terezi is closer to you than you'd thought; in fact, she's so close to you that you can practically feel the vibration of her voice in your horns. Of course she knows how to treat injuries; she'd grown up without a lusus, hadn't she? "You're way too tall for me to be your crutch, appleberry blast, so I sure hope you can walk."

"Perhaps someone who can see what they are doing without licking and thus introducing infection to the open wounds leading straight to his brain matter should accompany you to assist." Have you ever mentioned Kanaya is your favorite troll? Kanaya is your favorite troll. She should be the leader, so much is she the best troll left in existence. Fuck Strider and his unfunny jokes about robot eyes, Kanaya is leader now. Fuck, you sound stupid right now; how much blood have you lost?

"I'll go." Karkat worms his way under your other arm, because of course the second-shortest troll here would help the shortest troll here drag your overly tall sack of damaged protein fibers and scrambled neurons into the ablution block. Then again, you're not sure how badly you want Kanaya right next to your bleeding face, and you are definitely very sure you do not want Gamzee anywhere near your face in any condition.

"Up you go, appleberry," Terezi says, and with that you're somehow putting one foot in front of the other again. Every step jars your brain a little more in its damaged housing, as if all your thermal jelly has melted and your bees are swarming search of a more temperate hive. You feel like that's what may have actually happened in throwing this entire asteroid straight across the Furthest Ring, as if it's a simple matter of overclocking you and your mainframe-bee neurons.

You hunch over low because your helpers are so much shorter than you are, and that jars something heavy and sore in your thoracic cavity that makes you choke up what tastes like blood.

"Fuck, Sollux, you're going to be okay. You're going to be fine." Karkat has a particularly horrible balance of comfort and insult that nobody else can really duplicate, and it's so familiar you can almost believe him.

Step, step, step, cough. Whatever blood clot or piece of an internal organ walking has knocked loose inside of you, it feels like it's trying to claw its way up through your windtube.

"Come on, we're here now." Karkat is already wiping the blood off your mouth, even before they've completely maneuvered you into the ablution block. "We've got you, it's okay."

You flail a little bit when Terezi sets you down on the side of the ablution trap, because the thought of scouring slime searing in your burned-out, raw ocular sockets is enough to overcome even your desperate, instinctive urge to curl up into a ball and die. She's not having any of it, though, and you're so weak at this point you can't even slap her hands away effectively when she takes your goggles off and blood spills out of them to slide down your face in a rapidly-coagulating slurry.

"TZ, don't," you manage to choke out. "Please, don't—"

"Shhh." It's Karkat who answers you, not Terezi. Shouldn't he be off making sure Gamzee isn't holding a corpse party down in the lab? Not that you're going to complain, because Karkat— who's got enough pity in his stupid little bloodpusher to shoosh all of you at once, seriously, what kind of pale stud can do that in real life?— is really, really good at shooshpapping. You are talking stupid good at it; you can't help but stop slapping vaguely in the direction of Terezi's hands and slump down in shooshed defeat. "Shhhh, it's just water."

He's not lying, but it still burns and you can hear yourself screaming. Your voice echoes up into your thinkpan and makes that ever-present headache of yours (so much so that you could almost declare it your kismesis) get louder like feedback from a microphone. Karkat still has one hand on the back of your neck, petting; the other must be the one pouring fiery saltwater torture onto your face, because you can feel Terezi's spidery little hands holding your arms down so tightly her claws puncture your skin. If anyone else is in there watching, they're being quiet enough about it you can't hear them over the sound of your own choking and sobbing.

"Shoosh, you're going to get an infection if we don't clean this out." Karkat's stubbly little claws are scritching at your hairline like you're a grub and he's some bizarre kind of lusus, his knuckles kneading over places that have been tense for so long you've forgotten they're not supposed to be like that. You're crying, which is just making more of a mess they're going to have to clean out but you can't help it.

"Please, KK." You almost don't recognize your own voice, wheezing and thin and able to hiss out the s in please, and Karkat might as well not recognize it, either, for all the good it does you. "It hurts— I'd rather die, fuck, please stop."

"I might be of some help," Lalonde says from somewhere in the void past Terezi, outside the little bubble where you can tell exactly where everyone is because their hands are all over you. "Provided vodka is not innately toxic to your species, it might make an effective sedative."

"Allow me to take a look at this sedative of yours." That's Kanaya— how many people are crowding into this tiny torture chamber of an ablution block and watching you cry like a wriggler? You should be charging admission to all of these kinky idiots, twenty boondollars to come in and see the Sollux Captor Wet and Messy Pity Extravaganza. So far it seems like Gamzee and Strider are the only ones with anything better to do. "I will stand to be harmed the least if it is dangerous, I think."

Karkat is murmuring pitiful nonsense about how it's almost over in your ear, too quietly for anyone besides maybe Terezi to overhear, and rubbing at your shoulders. You can't even get mad at him for getting all pale all over you, because without it you're pretty sure everyone in the room would be buried under a pile of rubble. Now that you're in the receiving end of it, you can see how he managed to talk down Gamzee with petting. He’s really, really good at petting.

"This is fifty percent ethyl alcohol diluted in water, albeit a formulation that is strangely magnetized. We will have to be careful, but if there was ever a time for such a thing this is it." Kanaya sounds like she's scandalized, which is to say she sounds like she's head over heels flushed because Kanaya Maryam loves scandal like she loves heaving bosoms and purple prose.

"What the hell," Terezi says, and jerks her head up so hard it shakes you. "That is so, so illegal. If the dismembouncers caught you with that they'd cull you on the spot."

"I find myself more and more in admiration of your society every moment," Lalonde murmurs. "What percentage alcohol is normally in the solution your people take recreationally?"

"Oh fuck no, you are not giving that garbage to Sollux." Does Karkat have to be so loud when he's right next to your face? Okay, now you know you're dying of blood loss, because of course he has to be that loud. And if he doesn't stop it, his voice is about to become your migraine's matesprit and join it in trolling the sanity right out of your thinkpan.

"I do not know," Kanaya says, as if she didn't just hear Karkat shout the remaining blood right out of your head. "But I would be extremely cautious, as he has lost a great deal of his blood. I am afraid that is partly my fault, as I had little choice but to feed on his blood."

Wait, when had she bitten you? Admittedly, everything is a little bit hazy— okay, a lot hazy— after having your ocular apparatus seared right out of your face and your maybe sort-of almost a potential matesprit killed in front of you and wait, when did Kanaya come back from the dead, anyway? Maybe she did bite you, and you're bleeding out of holes in your neck, too; it's not like you can differentiate much between all the different knives stabbing through your skin and lighting your nervous system on fire at the same time.

You take it back. Kanaya can't be the leader, because it's completely unfair that she gets to be dead but stay here with everyone but you have to be alive but can't go back with Aradia. Karkat gets to be your favorite troll now, even though you can never tell him this because he'll either make fun of you forever or he'll say something really embarrassing and you'll have to pretend not to be his friend for two whole hours.

"What the hell, it's just vodka." Strider is there too, laughing at your misfortune, and you groan in pain and defeat; now literally everyone alive besides Gamzee can see you as an eyeless, blood-drenched mess who can't even stand up on his own.

"You don't have to take it if you don't want to." For once in his life, Karkat speaks softly, so quiet that you can barely hear him. "We won't let them make you." And you can feel Terezi's nod of agreement against your shoulder.

"No, I'll do it." Your answer makes Terezi stiffen; Karkat just skates his claws up the back of your thinkpan to scritch down between your horns. That makes things hurt just a little bit less, but not enough to change your mind about this. "I hurt so much I want to die already, and it's either going to kill me or make me feel better."

There's a bit of shuffling and the sound of a heavy object hitting the floor and rolling, and then someone is holding a cup to your lips.

"I'm afraid this is going to burn," Lalonde warns you, and tips the cup so you can drink. She isn't lying to you-- it's two mouthfuls of fire, and it stings where your fangs were knocked out almost as much as it burns your raw throat. "It will, however, help disinfect the damage in your mouth in addition to sedating you."

You don't manage more than a voiceless little rasp in return; the fire she's just fed you has burned out your voice. At least, that's what it feels like for the next few minutes, and between that and the rest of it you've been reduced to muffled sobbing as they finish washing out your injuries. By then, you're pretty sure the pleasant haze that's started to descend over everything is the weird human sedative at work. But at least it does work; you calm down and feel sort of disconnected from everything.

Everything sort of tilts after that; Terezi stops holding you down and starts holding you up. She and Karkat are putting something in your ocular sockets that makes them feel dry and tight, and you're not really sure it's an improvement over weeping blood. At least you've got a distraction from how much it hurts, because you're pretty sure without those bulge-out insane drugs Lalonde (and you really like her name, it's got a ring to it— La-londe, you can call her LL) has been carrying with her for no apparent reason whatsoever, you'd be screaming again. As it is, though, you're just kind of drifting away from everything. You'll have to thank her for bringing her scary culling-offense drugs with her when you can figure out how to speak something besides Alternian again.

"We should keep the goggles off, for now. Exposure to fresh air is important to wound healing." Kanaya says from wherever out there in the dark she is. She hasn't come closer this whole time, the only one of them who hasn't gotten up in his personal space at some point. "Or so I have read."

"Rainbow drinker novels are not docu— no, never mind, I can't even say that now." Karkat grumbles as he wraps bandages around your head to keep the weird itch inside your empty sockets, and he sounds like an angry little grub, all grrr bzzz click behind his words. It's so funny that you don't bother not to laugh at him. "Yeah, yeah, I'm hilarious, you nooklicking moron. Just remember that when you aren't so high we're about to lose you into low-Alternian orbit."

"You still make grub noises when you're mad." You try to reach out and pap him on the cheek (because two can play at moirallegiance cluckbeast, which happens to be a game you will probably be awesome at), but your hand misses and you almost lose your balance all over Terezi.

"Pretty sure he just landed on a moon, Karkles." Terezi loops an arm around your chest, slinking under your own arms because she's not tall enough to hold you higher up. You always feel kind of weird about that, since bluebloods are supposed to be big but she's the smallest of all of you. "Let's get you to bed, appleberry blast."

"I'm not, anymore." You're not mad about it, not really. You're pretty sure you might be later, when you try to do something and fail at it because you can't see, but until that time comes you're okay. It's not even Lalonde's magnetic drug trip telling you that, either, because you'd been okay with it before that, too. "Nasty mustard, I guess that's what you have to call me now."

"Nope!" Everything lurches as she lets go of you long enough to stand up on tiptoe and lick your face, but rights itself again when someone— Karkat, of course, because he's barely bigger than Terezi— comes up and supports your other side. "You taste too bubbly to be mustard right now. Suck it up, appleberry."

"I presume you have a working alchemeiter, or else you would have all starved to death." Lalonde is far away again, her task of delivering hard drugs to you complete. "I have a few items that might be of use in creating a suitable pile for him to sleep in, if one of you would be so kind as to show me where it is."

"Somebody should probably watch him," Strider says from whatever safe vantage point he's been using to watch this entire mess without your knowing. "Shit, have you ever seen a Youtube video of drunk bees? Because that is seriously what this guy reminds me of."

"Bzzzz," you say, both because he's talking about bees and because you're still making fun of Karkat for losing all control of his tone like that earlier. You would laugh more than you do, but moving it that much really hurts your face right now and you've done such a good job of forgetting about everything that's on fire you don't want to remember it. "Should have gotten some mind honey, I'd have sent ED right into space. Pchoooo, no more scarf-chewing asshole."

"…I'm telling you, wasted like Youtube bees." You can hear Strider shaking his head. You know you can. It's easier to understand than his human words, even.

"I'll stay," Karkat says. Shit, you're supposed to be playing moirallegiance cluckbeast, aren't you? If you keep forgetting that, he's going to win and that's just not on. So you lean to one side and rest your cheek on top of his head.

"Thanks, KK," you tell him, and you actually kind of mean it. He makes an odd, soft noise that sounds like he thinks this is an entirely different sort of cluckbeast game (and you realize sort of dimly that if you were thinking clearly you might prefer this one; losing a new flirtation does hurt less than being abandoned by your sweeps-long moirail, so you have fewer bruises for soft, affectionate matesprit chirps to poke unwanted claws into), and reaches up to pet at the back of your neck again.

"You are not allowed to die and leave me here with these freaks, do you hear me?" Even his angry orders are softer right now, as if the sight of you is making pity hemorrhage through even the worst of whatever it is that fuels his rage.

"Bzzzz." You give him another humming, giddy sort of buzz, which you mean to be a vague sort of affirmative, and angle your head so that one of your longer outer horns touches one of his. You can feel him shiver against you; you're going to win matesprit cluckbeast, too.

"Stop those idiot bee noises, too," he says, but he rubs his horn against yours right back. "And Terezi's right, you're already way out in space. Come on, time to drag your mangled, drunk sack of chitin to whatever pile the humans put together."

The walk to whatever room they're putting you in-- your own respiteblock, as it turns out-- isn't long, but you keep stumbling over your own legs. You haven't been using for much more than a storage space, since Karkat's banned sleeping and it's too cold to keep your mainframe in and the terminals in the main computer room make keeping one in your respiteblock a redundancy.

"Shouldn't you be keeping track of GZ?" You ask, because the last thing anyone needs is Gamzee snapping again without his moirail there to make out with him until he forgets the definition of the word murder. Even dizzy with Lalonde's bizarre metallic burn, you know that much.

"Kanaya is keeping an eye on him. She's so pissed off at him right now I'm almost into her in a black kind of way." Terezi answers for him before he can say anything, but you can't feel any twitching or scowling or anything like that. And Karkat has a tendency to make such big gestures and facial expressions that you would know, even without being able to see.

"Now come on, into the stupid looking pile Lalonde made you. It looks like one for a wriggler just out of the cocoon, all pillows and shit." He pulls you forward and sends you stumbling into-- well, exactly what he'd said it was. It's so soft you're practically swimming in it, and there's a thermal tarp with it-- another thing for wrigglers too tiny for a proper recuperacoon. You immediately wrap it around yourself and sink down into the pile; between your high and the plush suspension of the pile, you feel pleasantly weightless. Karkat settles down next to you and goes back to the lovely light scratching between your horns.

You finally fall asleep like that.

You wake up with your face still throbbing, your mouth dry and your nutrition-retaining digestive sack roiling. It's like your headache has spread downward to your guts, but hasn't lost any potency despite its divided force. The pile they made for you is much, much too soft; you're more used to either the comforting buoyancy of the sopor or the sharp, startling edges of the horn pile. It reminds you of glubbing in the brain pile with Feferi, just a little bit, except that had been slimy (a little more like sopor) in a way Lalonde's alchemized pillow pile isn't. You shift a little, trying to find a stable position in the too-forgiving squish surrounding you, and your arm hits someone sharing the pile with you. Oh, right, Karkat had been with you when you fell asleep.

"Watch your hand, brother," Gamzee says in his rough voice, and you jerk you claws back like he's just tried to bite them off. He laughs. "Chill out, motherfucker, I'm just here because my best palebro is asleep here on your pile. Felt like getting my cuddle on with him while he isn't all a talking spikebeast, you dig?"

That… well, that's pretty fucking creepy, actually, that he's climbed onto the pile and is nonconsensually getting his pale on instead of doing it while his moirail is competent to consent. Not that you think Karkat doesn't want to sleep next to his moirail— just the opposite, it's exactly the sort of traditional, quadrant-normative thing that totally gets Karkat off. It's just that the way it's happening here is making your skin crawl.

"…okay," you finally manage, because at least he's not trying to subjugglate you for sleeping all over his moirail before he did. It's one of the few small mercies the universe has ever given you.

"I ain't gonna get my paint on with you, bro." Gamzee chuckles. His voice is already lower than yours or Karkat's, the bigger chitinous windtube of a highblood letting the sound echo around. "If I were a motherfucker given to being jealous over a little bit of jamming in the pile, I'd have fallen pale for the worst motherfucker in the universe. Shooshes people like some kind of fuckin' miracle. 'sides, I'm pretty sure your diamond's still got our righteous red timesister's name all over it. Wouldn't have a thing to worry about anyway."

The mention of Aradia hurts, hurts as much as any of your physical injuries do. She'd chosen to leave you here. She's god-tier, not dead; she could have decided to stay with you instead of consummating her status as death's number one fangirl. Then again, it's been nearly half a sweep since you were really moirails, first she was dead-- and no, no, you can't phrase it like that, first you killed her no matter what Karkat or Terezi or anyone else has to say about your culpability in the matter. First you killed her, and then she was a ghost who didn't seem to feel anything or care about anyone, and then she was a robot who only seemed to care about Equius when she felt anything at all. And now, just when you thought you'd have her back, she's gone again; making friends with the dead is more important to her than whatever shambles of your moirallegiance you've been clinging to.

"That doesn't matter." Your voice shakes when it comes out, and you're not sure whether it's the fact you've just realized your moirallegiance was dead long before Aradia had done the next best thing to formally ending it or that you're still horrified by what Gamzee is getting up to in the pile that you're pretty sure was explicitly made for you. It shouldn't remind you of climbing into the recuperacoon in Aradia's hiveblock, of settling in next to her and letting her hair float around both of you almost as much as the sopor had. "I'm pretty sure leaving me when I'm the most pitiful troll left alive means she really doesn't have those kinds of feelings for me anymore."

"I dunno about that, bro." There's a faint rustling sound, like cloth being pushed aside, and Karkat trills a little in his sleep. What the fuck is Gamzee doing? "The way I see it, we all gotta make sacrifices for this fucked-up story we got put in, you get it? I bet your palesister leaving you there was the hardest thing she ever did, because there ain't no way she don't have some god shit and time shit to take care of instead of partying it up in some dreambubbles."

The heaviness under your bloodpusher has to be blood and swelling in your air sacs, capillaries burst with the forces you'd commanded with no regard for what your frail goldblood body could handle; there's no good scientific reason why the thought of Aradia being as distraught as you are should cause a physical ache in you.

"I think I'd rather have her dump me, though," you find yourself saying, all that misery spilling over into your words. "I don't want her to feel as horrible as I do right now."

"That's because you're the second-best moirail I ever saw." Gamzee makes a sound low in his throat, and Karkat gives him a sleepy, answering murmur in return. It sounds like something you shouldn't be overhearing in the first place, but it's still nice in a squirming, guilty sort of way; you might be grieving for your own moirail right now, but you still get a secondhand warmth from hearing Gamzee and Karkat in the first flush of a new moirallegiance.

"Mmm," Karkat hums, and the pillow pile shifts. He must be sitting up and stretching. "Gamzee?"

"Right here, best friend," Gamzee assures him; the inflection he gives to the words best friend proving that they're not just best friends. They're stupid pale for each other.

"Shit, Sollux?" There's a sudden panic in Karkat's voice, as if he's just awakened enough to realize they aren't alone. "Are you okay?"

"No," you answer, too tired for anything but honesty now. "I hurt everywhere, AA dumped me, FF is dead, I can't fucking see, I think I damaged myself internally when I threw this entire asteroid across paradox space, and I woke up to GZ getting his pale on with you in your sleep. I am in a state exactly opposite of okay right now, KK. How could I be anything else?"

There's another shifting to the pillows, and then Karkat is right up in your face.

"You think you damaged-- fuck, Sollux, how bad are you hurt? I thought you were choking up blood you swallowed when your fangs got knocked out! Were you actually coughing up blood?"

"Yes." You shrink down on yourself and wrap the thermal tarp around your shoulders like you're a shitty hipster with a shitty cape. "And my thorax hurts like I'm going to do it some more."

Last night-- fresh from the loss of the defining relationship of your life and a new infatuation at the same time, sick and exhausted and in so much pain you were ready to die, ready for nothing more for your moirail to pull you away with her and shoosh you right into the afterlife. Things aren't much better now, except that you've just realized you don't want to die. You want things to stop hurting, yes, but you also want to get into slapfights with Karkat and to get poked with Terezi's cane and maybe to punch Strider more than a little bit.

"I don't want to die, KK." You reach out to where you think you'll find his arm, and you miss. He gets what you're trying to do, though, and takes your grasping appendage in his.

"I told you, you're not allowed to leave me here with the hulled ground-nut collection." His voice breaks to a chirrup of distress in the middle, but he holds his ground and keeps on talking instead of breaking down completely. "I'll make a new memo about it, if I have to-- the Sollux Captor Is A Shitty Friend If He Dies On Me, And He's Not Allowed To Do That room."

"Your memos are so stupid, KK," you half-sob on him. "Never stop making them, they're the only funny thing I have left in my life."

It's the stupidest thing you've ever said, and you mean every unironic syllable of it.

"My memos are not stupid, and you sound like you can't breathe," Karkat says, his alarm completely subsuming any potential affront at the insult. "Gamzee, get Terezi in here, fuck, I hope she knows what to do. Because I sure as hell don't."

"Sure thing, best friend." Gamzee rises with a force that knocks a couple of pillows loose, and leans in close for a second. He's probably dropping one last pet on Karkat's head, or something, before he leaves to find Terezi.

"You're not going to die, you horrible, horrible asshole," Karkat reiterates after Gamzee leaves, and he lays one of his grasping appendages palm-down on your forehead. It's cool against your soft chitinous exoskeleton layer, a small relief against the sparking fever-heat in you. "I'll fight."

That brings to mind the sudden, horrible mental picture of Karkat and Aradia slapfighting each other over who gets to keep you. Aradia would insist you're invited to her corpse party and Karkat would start shrieking about how you're the only bastion of sanity left on the asteroid and like hell she's having a stupid corpse party anyway. It's exactly the kind of thing they would have done when you were all half a sweep younger and a lot more stupid, sitting around your hiveblock some evening Aradia didn't have her FLARP game--

You can't help it, you really are crying into Karkat's sweater now. He doesn't shoosh you; instead he lets you keep going, stroking at your back occasionally to let you know that he's still there but not doing anything but listening. It's an oddly ashen way to deal with someone's pain, to sit there a silent witness instead of actively comforting them. And you'd bet all the boondollars on this asteroid that Karkat is not in any way, shape, or form ashen for you, but he must know that anything else would just upset you more.

"What's wrong?" Terezi doesn't cackle or shriek or make any jokes when she approaches the pile, which is just as scary as Karkat trying desperately to bargain you into staying alive or Gamzee getting a feelings jam on with you. They're all afraid you're going to die, too.

"Please tell me you know what to do," Karkat says, desperately.

Terezi, as it turns out, does not have the faintest idea of what to do. She also brings Lalonde, Strider, and Kanaya with her, because it's apparently time for the sequel to last night's watch a desperate pale slut beg for it live action porno.

"I don't think you're dying, but you shouldn't move around too much. You could dislodge a blood clot." Terezi has poked her cold, sharp fingers just about everywhere that's decent by the time she declares her (lack of a) diagnosis. "We should get you some water and hot nutrient slurry before you go back to sleep. You'll need that to heal properly."

She's as perfunctory about medicine as she is about the law, and that's actually sort of comforting right now. Even if you're really desperately hoping you don't have some kind of blood clot in there, because you don't have any more of a clue about the proper treatment for that than anyone else here seems to.

It's a cycle: you get drugged, you go back to sleep, you wake up sick and horrible, and you get drugged again. This time when you wake up, though you're clear-headed. Everything still hurts— a hundred different raw places are all torn open and burned and bleeding, all doing their best to protest the fact you've survived at all. Your body does a pretty good job of calling for your doom all on its own, no supernatural powers required, and if this is the kind of misery you're going to have to live with then you kind of want to listen to it.

"I'm sorry," someone— Kanaya, that's Kanaya— says, and brushes your hair back from your face. "I am afraid we cannot sedate you again for the time being; it was starting to make you ill. We are attempting to alchemize a more effective substitute for sopor slime, but it is difficult and we cannot be careless with our grist."

The thought of a recuperacoon is simultaneously comforting and horrifying right now; while floating in a sleepy haze is such a wonderful thought you almost shiver in the anticipation of it, that would mean sopor slime getting in your wounds and probably burning, not to mention what getting it literally inside your thinkpan might do to your brain. It would probably make Gamzee's sopor-addled mind look sharp as one on mind honey.

"How are you feeling?" Kanaya asks, and her breath on your face is warm as death.

"Like I want you to cull me." Maybe she'll bite you again. You'd been downright prescient when you'd guessed before that being okay with everything had been temporary, and ephemeral thing that gives way to the too-familiar weight of your own traitor brain.

"I am afraid I cannot do that." She sits down on the pile next to you, a shockingly pale gesture.

"Karkat has already made a memorandum promising unending torment to anyone who kills anyone else, and Rose has given it her leaderly approval. As I do not wish to be on the receiving end of what is sure to be a dangerously loud lecture, I will have to abstain."

She puts a hand on your head, soft and hesitant, and when you don't pull away she digs her claws in between your horns. You've never been a touchy-feely type; even with Feferi, you had been more about talking than you had been touching.

"Am I so irresistibly pitiful now that you can't keep your hands off me?" You ask her, but can't help pushing your head up into the touch. It thrums through you, the instinctive reaction to being scratched between your horns relaxing the muscles at your temples and in your neck and easing, just a little, the headache that never really goes away.

"Yes," she says in a quiet, embarrassed voice. "But I am honestly not pale for you, not really. You simply look like you could use a friend with benefits right now, as neither of us has a moirail— oh, this is embarrassing, I'm sorry."

You're heartsick and diamondsick and lonely; everything hurts and you feel fuzzy and thirsty. You've never been pale for Kanaya— you could have easily been Karkat's moirail, if Aradia hadn't been there first, and you spent part of the game with a brief, ashamed pale crush on Terezi that had only evaporated after how much more competent than you and utterly not pitiful or in need of a moirail she is became obvious. But Kanaya has not ever crossed your mind in relation to any quadrant before, not even ashen— but that actually makes this less awkward than it would be otherwise, less of a betrayal to someone who doesn't even want you anymore.

"Thank you," is all you have the energy to say, and you press your face to her shoulder and let her stroke your head. You're too dry and wrung-out to cry, but you can feel yourself shaking in a way that would probably be sobbing if you had the moisture in your body right now for tears. She doesn't shoosh you, kiss you, or do anything else crass or overly pale; she just pets you and gives you a place to lose it on in a way that could actually really be platonic, albeit in a modern, quadrant-liberated kind of way. It's unnatural for any troll to be so warm, much less someone higher-blooded than you are, but she feels nice against your skin.

"It's too cold in here for you," she says finally, after you finally stop shaking. "It is making you worse. I myself found it slightly uncomfortable here before my… change, so I cannot imagine it is healthy for you. I suppose that is what we get when we allow Terezi to control the ambient temperature."

That had been a compromise, so that you and Tavros didn't freeze to death but Eridan and Feferi didn't overheat. Maybe you can re-negotiate now that nobody here needs it quite so cold; Gamzee doesn't quite have icewater for blood.

"The humans are most comfortable at a temperature I believe you would find favorable." Kanaya puts her free arm around your waist, holding you to her. "Rose has offered to let you keep your pile in the sitting room she's put together, at least until you recover somewhat and can better handle the lower temperature."

Then comes the bad news.

"We have been changing the dressings on your face while you were drugged, to spare you the pain. I am afraid it will be necessary to take them off at least this one last time, though if they appear healed enough we may be able to leave you with just your goggles." Kanaya keeps you pinned into place with the unnatural strength of her stupid dead arms, and all your flailing doesn't get you away from her and the torture session that's about to follow. "We still are not sure how I will react if your wounds are open, and Karkat and Terezi are both otherwise occupied. Rose will be taking care of this for you, since she seems a better choice than either Gamzee or Dave."

The truth is that none of them would have let you slip away; Kanaya holds you with brute force, Karkat would scream until you'd forgotten what you were trying to do in the first place, Terezi would just drub you across any available body part when you tried to get past her, Gamzee is... just no, Strider could just go back in time and keep you from leaving, and Lalonde is-- from what you can gather-- completely and totally omniscient.

"Come on, then," Lalonde says out of completely fucking nowhere, and how long has she been there listening? "I would like to get this taken care of as quickly as possible, which I think is something you might also appreciate."

You're finally well enough to walk around, evidently, even if you're weak and off-balance from being on pile-rest for so long. Terezi hasn't swooped down out of the sky to berate you and drag you back to the pile with promises of so many drubbings the second you're well enough to take them, at any rate, which has to mean something. You hang on to Lalonde's proffered arm just because you're not used to navigating without your eyes yet, especially not when two new people on the asteroid probably means new treasure chests and new piles of stuff and all kinds of other new things to potentially trip over and knock the rest of your teeth out with. At least it's not far to the nearest ablution block.

Given her lack of claws and surfeit of manual dexterity, you have to wonder why giving her this job hasn't occurred to anyone before; she doesn't scratch when she takes hold of the bandages and starts to unwrap them, which is such a miracle (and fuck Gamzee, you can use that word when something honestly qualifies) you almost can't believe it.

"Do you want to talk about what's happened? I'm given to understand that it was worse for you than it was for anyone else." The question comes out of absolutely fucking nowhere; you’re gaping at her audacity, which seems to clue her in to just how culturally insensitive it was. "I am not proposing a feelings jam with you, as the others would call it. Humans often find it cathartic to share their thoughts and troubles with an impartial third party whose job is to help them work through their issues. I was merely offering myself as a sounding board, should you desire such an outlet for your emotions."

The lengths humans go to in order to fulfill their emotional needs in a society without quadrants will never stop being stupid-- professional substitutes for moirails, really? Pale prostitution isn't really rare, since there's no chance of getting culled for not filling your conciliatory quadrants, but it sounds like it's actually normative to the humans. Lalonde sees nothing wrong with propositioning you for such an arrangement, and you barely know her.

"At any rate, your wounds are healing nicely. I think we can skip washing them again, and leave them to dry out." She is suddenly the best person on the asteroid, bizarre fetish for clinical feelings jams or no, because she isn't going to slough a layer of dead tissue out of your tenderest, most pain-wracked places without an anesthetic. "I do not believe the sopor substitute we've managed to alchemize should get into your eyes, however. No one has attempted to ingest it, for obvious reasons, but I cannot imagine it could be beneficial to directly inject into your brain. Do you still have your goggles?"

"They're not mine," you say, and your mouth is full of ashes. "They're FF's."

"Do you think she would want you to have them?" Lalonde asks, as if she can't see the damn answer for herself. Maybe she's not looking, out of respect for your privacy.

"Probably." She'd switched your glasses and hers once, proclaiming that you looked glubbing ador--able! and that seeing everything in red-and-blue was so--ooo tentacool! It had been one of the stupidest fish puns she had ever made, and you had thought it was cute.

Remembering Feferi doesn't hurt nearly so deeply as thinking about Aradia does-- she had been nice and pretty and dangerous, and you had really, really liked her. You think you could have pitied her more than anyone in the world if you'd only had more time; you'd spent bare days considering each other as potential matesprits. It hurts like losing a good friend, not like losing a pity-mate-- it's awful and you miss her, but she hasn't left a gaping wound in your bloodpusher the way Aradia has. The sick rush of guilt you get whenever anyone here paps your head or tells you that you're getting better in the small gestures of casual pity you've gotten used to doesn't come when you consider that Karkat appears to have the world's most incompetent flushcrush on you. Trust him to fall headlong into romantic pity for someone just because he loses his sight and ruptures what had felt like seven different organs saving everyone from Jack Noir and the Green Sun.

"Then they are yours now," Lalonde says. She leans forward to take a closer look at your eyes; you can tell because you can feel her breath on your face, warm as Kanaya's and somehow even more menacing in that way peculiar to the two of them. It's an elegant, delicate proclamation of fire and doom. (Sometimes you think you miss the prophecies, at times like this. Then you remember that the ones you'd heard weren't like this; they had been messy things that were haunting for how they ripped you raw, not for how they could have been beautiful.)

"I-- they're in my respiteblock." You're probably not ever going to think of them as yours; they're borrowed from a girl who had been a good friend, a girl who had laughed all the time but was deadly serious when she told you she wouldn't eel-ver let them make you a helmsman!

"Well, you don't need to wear them all the time-- in humans, at least, oxygen is supposed to be important for healing. So I would only recommend wearing them in your recuperacoon." She moves back, away from such close proximity to your face. "I think we're finished, for now."

She doesn't pet you, she doesn't push you to do anything, and she doesn't tell you how much she pities you with the tone of her voice. You're pretty sure the feeling low in your gut is gratitude for that, that she's treating you like she does everyone else.

You still spend most of your time outside the recuperacoon resting, interspersed with visits from the others. Karkat tells you to get the fuck better, you can't leave me alone with these people and snarls and spits until you tell him to stop interrupting your pity sleep with his nonsense, which makes him sputter and yell even more. Terezi comes by to try and teach you to taste the world like she does, but it turns out teaching someone when you can't telepathically impart the instructions is so much harder you privately think you'll never be able to do it. The one time you make this thought heard, it gets you a drubbing right across your knuckles.

"Nobody is going to hit each other with sticks in here," Lalonde says crisply after the cane leaves a stinging stripe across your skin. The clicking that always accompanies her words never stops. "Dave may find it endlessly fascinating when you act like a ravening barbarian, but I do not. You may refrain from administering cane drubbings for a few moments of your fantastically violent life, or you may excuse yourself from my parlor."

That just makes Terezi snarly and contrary, which ends the lesson for the day. She leaves with a grumble about how Lady Lavenderlocks is going on trial in Can Town for being a bluh bluh huge bitch. You don't even want to know.

Lalonde is still clicking, even though she isn't talking. Maybe it's not part of her voice like you've thought this whole time, after all. You hadn't heard it that time she'd earned her place as your favorite human, so it must not be. Humans are so strange, not even having a tonal quirk to their voices.

"What is that?" You finally ask her; the two-beat rhythm is one of the most comforting things you've heard in a long time. "I thought it was your voice, but now I don't think it is."

"Knitting," Lalonde says. "And before you ask, I believe the troll equivalent would be 'fabric pattern creation via an analog binary needle system with output intended to be worn by sentient beings.' Or something close enough to that to give you an idea."

That… actually does make a surprising amount of sense. And since 'binary' and 'pattern creation' are two things that never fail to light up your programmer's brain, you reach out for the cane— no concealed weapons inside, because you still don't need to waste your time with that nonsense— Terezi had gifted you with when you were first well enough to hobble around a little bit, and stand up.

"That rule against drubbings applies to you, too," Lalonde says. Clickclickclickclick, her analog binary needle apparatus says in counterpoint.

"I just want to see your analog binary pattern creation apparatus in action," you tell her, and fuck, you're whining. "The only entertainment I get anymore is KK melting down and TZ drubbing me when I don't lick things enthusiastically enough, and what you're doing actually sounds kind of interesting."

"Very well," she says, and the clicking slows but doesn't stop. "You'll have to come and sit down; it's a very small apparatus."

Knitting, as it turns out, is fascinating. It's got a comforting similarity to programming at its most basic level: put raw material in, apply binary-powered engine, and watch useful output come out at the end. You can feel the patterns in the fabric under your fingers, as exact and perfect as anything a machine could put out, and that makes you feel a little bit better about everything.

That fascinated distraction for a new hobby—even one you can only partake in by proxy-- lasts for all of a perigee, until the newest interpersonal disaster decides to show up, introduce itself to everyone, and sit the fuck down in your life and refuse to leave.

"Hell fucking no," Karkat is yelling at everyone and no one when you feel your way into what used to be the computer room. Tap-tap-tap-fwoosh, you've hit yet another pillow pile. Lalonde and Kanaya are worse with those than Gamzee is with those stupid horns, and you're pretty sure they get up to things Gamzee doesn't even have a quadrant for on some of them. "I am not taking that garbage, it is not oh yes, let's poison Karkat because dead is better than not sleeping day up in here!"

"Stop being such a dramannihilator, Karkles. Even I have to admit it's not going to kill you-- it didn't kill Sollux, and he was even suffering from blood loss the first time." Terezi sounds more annoyed than you've heard her since back when her kismessitude that wasn't was still a thing with Vriska.

"Oh my god," is all you can say when you realize what they're talking about. "Are you still not sleeping?"

"Shitty sopor substitute doesn't work right." He sounds petulant, like he's going to do like always does and dig his claws in. Stubborn fucking crab.

"Look, we're all really impressed by your dedication to dying from sleep deprivation, and by that I mean just saying that has made today spontaneously transform into opposite day. Take the fucking vodka and chill on that pillow pile you're always making googly eyes at Captor from so the rest of us can have a couple of quiet hours before your next thousand hour speed bender, or however it is you stay the fuck awake." It's Strider, of all people. "And speak of the devil and he shall appear, your-- no, never mind, neither one of you is the better half. You're both the fucking worst half. Captor, make him take a shot of metalloid moonshine and put on Titanic or some shit so he can cry all this out, because I am done."

You are honestly sorry you can't see what's going on in front of you for the first time since this happened-- oh, you've been sad, upset, and angry, but never really sorry. But right now you would give mad caegars to see exactly what's going on in front of you. It sounds like Terezi is drubbing Karkat and Strider is possibly holding him down (and if they think their blackrom is some kind of secret, well, someone should probably clue them in that it's sure as hell not) and you aren't really sure which one of them is dosing him with the liquor. You just know that it's happened, because pretty soon Karkat has stopped yelling at everything and started acting like, as Strider had so disgustingly put it, he was making googly eyes at you.

Karkat has settled in next to you in the absurdly squishy pile, a surprisingly cool weight against your side. Everyone's just sort of assumed he's a rust blood who's been hiding it for as long as he can so as to have some semblance of deniability for the highbloods who had barely tolerated his leadership as it was, but now that you're up close and personal with him you're not so sure that's true. No, scratch that, you are absolutely sure it's not true, because he would feel warm to the touch if that were the case. He feels, well... cool isn't quite the word you're looking for. Tepid, maybe, like water just cool enough to be unpleasant to bathe in but just warm enough to be unpleasant to drink. He has to be higher on the hemospectrum than you, but not by much.

It actually feels nicer than your stupid mental metaphor makes it sound, since the ambient temperature in here is actually a little bit high for you. It's the kind of warmth Aradia would have liked in her hiveblock, and that feeling is a little bit less painful with Karkat a mess of an entirely different sort of pity--

--oh hell, he really is. He's as stupid high as you'd been that first night, which means he's not even trying to hide his flush. He even chirps at you when you pull the thermal tarp aside (it's way too warm in here right now to need it), a clean, affectionate little sound that speaks entire volumes' worth of pity.

"You are so high right now, KK," you tell him with a sigh. It's not that you've never considered the possibility of a red quadrant with him before-- back when you'd realize the two of you were a callous disregard for Aradia away from having an undeclared moirallegiance, you'd considered flipping it rather than keeping it strictly friendship. Now that you're both older and he's a pitiful disaster and you're a declared catastrophe of pathetic and he's realized Terezi's cane drubbings are entirely platonic now that the Knight of Douchebaggery has touched down on the asteroid, maybe it's something to think about.

"Not as high as you were, with your bzzzzzz." He can't really make the same sound you had, and his rasping attempt at it is ridiculous.

"Funny, I wasn't crawling all over you for adulterous pale touching when they drugged me," you tell him, and he headbutts you. Horns right to the chest, even if it lacks any kind of force. That pretty well clinches the fact that this isn't pale, because that's ridiculously red.

"Not pale," Karkat grumbles, as if it's necessary after that blatant display of flushed horn-touching, and settles back down against you. "Thought I was being obvious."

"You're seriously so high you don't know what you're doing." You know that because you know how it fucked you up the first time; you'd been practically giggling from it, dissociated from how painful everything was and floating on the haze of it. And yeah, this is something Karkat wants-- you've seen perigees of his badly-hidden crush on you since you threw this piece of rock between universes, and considered reciprocating it for a little while now. Even without that, you doubt being high would trip flushed pheromones like that (oh hell, he smells good right now) without some kind of underlying attraction. But you remember how little control you'd had over anything you did, and maybe this is something he'll regret when he sobers up. "I'll make out with you when you're sober."

That doesn't dissuade him from trying, wrapping around you like some kind of undersea inkbeast and digging his horns in under your chin just hard enough to feel really nice. He falls asleep like that, as if he's afraid you'll leave if he doesn't lock all his limbs around yours to keep you where you are. Unfortunately for him, his drunk brain seems to have forgotten that you have telekinesis; it's not hard to hold his limbs in place while you slip away. It's not that you don't want to stay-- it's that you don't want to wake up tomorrow with him looking horrified and asking frantically if you're still friends, and that means putting on Feferi's goggles and climbing into your recuperacoon for the night.

You wake up with your bulge wrapped around your hand and a soft, inviting matesprit trill in your throat. This is just another culling fork of Troll Damocles finally falling on your head, because you're a lowblood and after so many years of selection for it low-blooded trolls are built to pail brutally early and almost as brutally often. Aradia had already been hitting things in frustration by the time she'd died, and you're fairly certain Tavros's sudden bravery in the face of Vriska had been caused by the same. Now it's your turn; whether it was the near-death experience telling your genes they need to propagate right the hell now, spending so much time in a pile with a chirruping bundle of sleepy, pitiful noises and flushed pheromones, or just nature finally deciding that it's time, your body is ready to start hoarding genetic material for the first encounter with the drones your base instincts are still sure you'll have.

You lean your forehead against the keratinized inner shell of your recuperacoon and groan. This is going to be the longest couple of perigees of your life.