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“It feels fuckin invasive is how it feels.”
He’s sitting on the edge of the exam table, stripped to the waist, the visible violet-flushed filaments of his gills behind their opercula looking a sickly dead-burgundy under the fluorescents. You take your gloved hand away. “Sorry! It’s just...you’re so...”
“Other?” Eridan finishes for you. “Yeah, we get that. Just don’t poke at them, sheesh.”
You nodnod, your hair bouncing down the back of your labcoat. “Can you open them then so I can get a closer look?”
He sighs and you can see the opercula move slightly, glinting almost pearlescent. “Fine. But this is all you’re gettin out a me this session, Harley. And I ain’t doin it for long.”
Nodnodnod. Eridan sighs again, gustier and more put-upon, and then takes a deep breath, holds it, and with almost risible delicacy slips a clawtip under the edge of the middle operculum on his left side. You stare closely: you can sort of see something filmy in there retracting, a membrane, revealing the fine rows of purple filaments like silken fringe. The moment he opened himself for you his pent-up breath escaped through the open slit and you can see the way he’s sort of canted himself to his left, huddled in on himself, unconscious lines of discomfort appearing at the edges of his mouth and eyebrows.
You have a quick but very focused look at what he’s being kind enough to show you, how the exquisitely delicate filaments flushed with his blood function in water the way his alveoli do in air, gas exchange occurring across the barrier of each filament’s whisper-thin membrane. They flutter uncomfortably and you think about purple fringe on a dancer’s dress and then you think of the fact that he’s doing this for a reason and you take a lot of very rapid images, and then you say “--thank you, Eridan.”
He lets go of himself and does a very odd sort of gasp-choke-hiccup thing and launches into a truly impressive fit of coughing.
You use a couple of Dave’s more effective curses and steady him with a hand on his back, and then you just start rubbing his back because jesus christ he sounds like he needs it, and once you start doing that he seems to be able to catch the rhythm of his breathing and get control again.
“...Eridan,” you say. He’s taken off his glasses and is wiping purple tears from his eyes. “Eridan, are you okay? What the hell just happened?”
“It’s,” he says, swallows, and starts again, “it’s kinda the disadvantage a havin both lungs and gills. They don’t really play well together.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well...when I open these things in air, it kinda retracts this flap thingy that keeps pressure in my lung, and...”
“...Did you just give yourself a goddamn pneumothorax right here in my lab?” you demand.
“...what’s one a them when it’s at home?”
“Oh my God,” you say. “You are straight-up shithive maggots insane, Eridan. Why the hell didn’t you say no?”
He shrugs, putting his glasses back on and blinking at you. “You asked to see.”
You roll your eyes so hard you feel like Karkat. “I will never understand you trolls. We could be doing this for a thousand years and I’d still think you were inscrutable weirdos.”
“With good hair,” Eridan points out. “Not about to let you forget the good hair.”
“Fine,” you say. “Inscrutable weirdos with good hair. Are you really okay? You sounded terrible just now.”
He waves this away. “Happens. I’m fine, Harley. Your concern is touchin however.”
By now you’ve learned that Eridan Ampora’s eyebrow-waggle is not to be taken as a serious attempt to get you into the troll equivalent of bed. Or, well, it’s certainly an attempt to get you into bed, but at this point you and he both know that it’s unlikely to happen and so the waggling is more for tradition’s sake than anything else.
“Mmh,” you say and you shrug out of your lab coat. “That’s enough for today, anyhow. I want to look at your scans again before I do anything else.”
“You just want another chance to oggle my choice insides.” He’s slipped off the table and is pulling on his shirt, which has obnoxiously bright violet Aquarius zigzags on it as if anybody could forget for one hot minute what his sign might be.
“It’s ogle and your insides are of purely clinical interest to me.”
“I know better,” he says, and gives you that lazy infuriating grin, and you as always find it hard to reconcile this obnoxious hipster (with good hair) with the troll who’d been doubled over hacking under your hand a minute or two ago.
“Shut up, Ampora,” you sigh, and you avoid his obviously telegraphed attempt at an assgrab. Through the wall you can hear the unfortunately familiar sound of something expensive and large breaking, and then rapid-fire shouting and argument. “--Let’s go see what they tried to get Equius to manipulate now.”
You can’t deny that you kind of love your work.