Work Text:
Request: "Sollux, who is in the process of pickling himself with energy drinks and coding himself into oblivion, is resolutely ignoring his fucked up sinuses, sore throat, mild fever, and persistent cough. A high level psionic has no use for sleep! He finds himself interrupted when a sudden Wild Strider appears, clad in a Ms. Piggy t-shirt and sweatpants that say SASSY on the butt in glittery purple text, and demands that Sollux get his narrow ass to bed. Dave can hear him hacking up a lung all the way from the next room, his hissy lisp combined with his plugged up sinuses makes him even less intelligible than usual, and Dave doesn’t want to get stuck performing alien space surgery on his squeedley spooch. Sollux is less than impressed, but Dave persists with lots of amused bickering and threats and poking Sollux in his skinny ribs and will simply not let up, and eventually he succeeds in peeling Sollux out of the disgusting chair, undressing him, and pouring him into his recupracoon. There Dave feeds him two aspirin, some mild tea, and proceeds to sprawl out on the outside of the ‘coon and massage his horns and talk to him until Sollux falls asleep. All in all, very pale, but you can make it redder if you like. Mostly I just love the idea of Sollux being completely unintelligible and fussy and flaily every time he gets a cold. Bonus points if you include Dave poking fun at Sollux’s energy drinks and Sollux doing anything amusing with his psionics."
~
See, okay, you are the best of housemates. It is definitely you. You don’t even fuck with his goddamn color-coded shit in the fridge and you absolutely do not go anywhere the fuck near his color-coded toothbrush major arcana in the bathroom. For the most part you kind of stand over here and let his weirdness just kind of handle itself.
You have, however, reached your limit for this particular style and model of bullshit and so you bang on his door and when he sort-of grunts in response you bang on it again and then you try the knob and hey, check that shit out, it’s not locked.
...Wow, he looks like ass.
He’s been coughing for days, first just a little clearing of the throat that built up to a sort of wheezing hack that you think has got to hurt; he’s gone from just unintelligible on account of his crazy fucking lisp to something that requires semaphore or sign language to get past the stuffed-up sinuses plus the fucked-up teeth. Aw, hell, and he looks like he’s running a temperature, too, hunched over his machine, gantry-thin, not even so much a troll as a collection of angles and gross sweaty hair.
“Yo, Captor,” you say. “I can hear you choking up a lung from like two rooms away. Quit it with the Best Hacker Of The Week bullshit and go the fuck to bed, or slime, or whatever you assholes do.”
He flips you off, but only with one hand, and you take that as tacit permission to make your way through the obstacle course that is his shithole of a room. When you’d moved in together you’d kind of been glad he wasn’t a stickler for neatness because your own room ended up inevitably covered in bits of clothes and weaponry and record sleeves and so on, but Captor puts you to shame in the shameful fucking slob department.
“Go away, Strider,” he says, or you think he says: it comes out more like “nnghwy thtrider” through all of that. He sort of flaps a hand at you as if this will make you disappear.
“Nope. Fuck, Captor, check you out, it’s like revenant central all up in here. You’ve been sick for like a fucking week already, what is even your problem.”
“...’m not thick,” he says, or you think he says.
“You’re fucking thick all right, jesus dick. When was the last time you consumed something that didn’t have its name spelled wrong for legal reasons?”
“Monthter ithn’t thpelled wrong.”
“Answers my fucking question, wow.” You reach over and rest the back of your hand briefly against his cheek; he winces away and flails at you with bony uncoordinated limbs. “Yep, running a fever. Seriously what are you even working on?”
“None of your buthineth,” you think he says but it really isn’t clear, plus he sort of curls over in an unhappy-sounding coughing fit and wow, dude is going for Olympic-level pitiful here. When he can catch his breath and snurfle and wipe at his face and stare at you, you just return the stare through your shades with one eyebrow quirked juuust enough to be visible over the frames.
“...Thtrider, what the fuck are you even wearing?” He waves a hand at you as if to motion you invisible. You look down at yourself.
“Captor, I hope to fuck you are not suggesting that Ms. Piggy is a poor subject for a fucking t-shirt,” you say, and do a little shimmy to show off the SASSY printed across the butt of your sweatpants. It is sparkly. “Cause I might just have to evict your ass from this stupid apartment if you were to imply such a thing.”
Apparently your SASSY ass has had a less than salubrious effect on him, because Sollux is doubled over coughing, and you think, jesus fuck, seriously, he coulda thrown this stupid shit off days ago if he’d actually acknowledged that troll or not he is a physical creature with physical limitations, and aw jeez he looks so fucked-up and fragile and you have to go over and prod him in the ribs.
“Gah, what the fuck, Thtrider!” He coughs and twists away from you. “Leave me alone.” It comes out something more like eeve bee ahone through the congestion.
“Nope. Not going anywhere until you stop being a douchebag and go the fuck to bed. I cannot be having with this soundtrack of the Black Plague shit coming right through my goddamn wall, Captor, it is not conducive to laying down any kind of decent fucking beat.”
He flails at you and his fingers are bony and too hot and then his computer does something and he immediately and completely loses any kind of interest he’d had in you and goes back to typing so fast you can barely see his goddamn hands move. You count the empty energy-drink cans on his desk.
Fuck.
He hadn’t come out for breakfast, lunch, or dinner yesterday and you know he’s had this cold or whatever for way longer than that and okay, welp, Captor, you just won yourself the undivided fucking attention of the Strider. You aren’t such an asshole to completely destroy what he’s working on, though, and so you creep closer and wait until he seems to’ve come to something like a stopping point before you attack his ribs again.
“Gaaah!” He wriggles away from you, coughing. “Thtrider!”
“‘s not my name, but hey, points for trying.”
“Thtrider, what the fucking fuck are you even trying to do, leave me the fuck alone, I don’t have time for your thtupid bullthit...”
“Yeah, I know, Captor, but I talked to the dudes at Monster this morning and they were like ‘no, sorry, we just can’t use this guy as our posterboy, he is way too much of a hot mess even for our tastes.’ They totally gave you consideration though. So did Red Bull but they’re kinda going for a different market, you know, less gross unwashed computer nerds and more stupid people at bars who can’t drink straight up vodka.”
“Oh my God thut up,” he’s saying, a sort of nasal groan. You think you’re getting somewhere. “Jutht go away and leave me alone, can’t you?”
“Thought I made that clear, honeybunch.” You come over to stand behind his chair and drape your arms over his shoulders and yeah, he’s too hot, he’s a bit shivery as well, poor fucking bastard. “I’m not going anywhere until you agree to be a reasonable troll and quit coding and go to fucking sleep.”
Sollux coughs, coughs again, and you can feel him trying not to under your hands, a sort of intent trembling. You absently let yourself lean down to rub his chest, and that seems to break some dam or other and he just droops under your touch and after a moment or two you think his breathing is easier. You don’t stop at once, because this is farther than you’ve ever got the bastard to fucking relax and you don’t want to jinx it, but he seems to be assholed out for the time being as you rub little warm circles up and down his (gross skinny) chest.
“C’mon,” you say after a little while. “Bed. Or recuperawhatsit.”
Sollux makes a small unhappy sound and wriggles under your hands. “Ngh. No.”
“Ngh yes. I am not fucking letting you spend another night sitting at this goddamn machine, Captor.”
“Jutht go away can’t you, Thtrider--” he’s cut off by more coughing and at this point you will pick the asshole up and fucking carry him to his gross weird alien slimepod. He pushes at you and says something unintelligible and honestly you should be used to this, he’s always like this when he’s got a cold, this is just the worst one you’ve yet seen.
“Shh. Shh, Sollux. No, seriously, just shut up for one sec and listen, okay?” You slide down to kneel beside his chair and look intently up at him, and he sort of blinks down at you behind his stupid anaglyph glasses. “I will spend the entire rest of the night tickling you if you do not yield and stop this and go get some fucking rest. I swear by my Bro’s anime goddamn sunglasses I will.”
Sollux blinks again a couple of times and then just sort of droops in the chair, and you swallow whatever else you’d been about to say and just nod. “Rock. Okay, up, get that gross fucking outfit off, you don’t wanna sleep in that or you’ll turn into a glutinous version of a Cheeto and that shit is not on my agenda of things that need to happen.”
You think he giggles a little: it’s a thick snotty unhappy noise but he doesn’t seem to hate making it. When you get an arm around him he doesn’t flail at you and try to get away, just hits a bunch of keys that you think have to be telling his machine to hibernate, and then he lets you haul his skinny ass off the chair and drag him toward his recuperacoon. (Yes, you know what they’re called. You don’t let that stand in the way of some perfect goddamn setups.)
He does a bit of flailing when you tell him to get his goddamn clothes off and you end up having to help a bit with that, leaving his alien version of boxers on because you’re not really into the idea of getting close-up and personal with troll junk right now, and then you basically scoop his bony ass up and deposit him in the green slime and stand there watching as he sort of...relaxes. It’s weird. You haven’t actually seen him do that before.
Welp. You gather up his discarded clothes and hurl them merrily onto one of his piles. “Night, Captor.”
“Nngh. Thtrider.” He sounds as if there’s something on his tiny bifurcated mind.
“What?”
“...Don’t go.”
Okay, something fucked-up just happened, but you can run with it. “Sure. But hey, fuck it, you hang tight while I go get your plague-ridden ass some fucking tea or something, okay?”
Captor seems to be okay with that, drooping against the side of the ‘coon with his narrow bony fingers clinging to the edge. You go rootle through the bathroom’s medicine cabinet and find an elderly bottle of aspirin--that shit is good enough, right? You don’t have any nyquil or anything and you’re not sure trolls can even take stuff like that--and you go look in your pathetic excuse for a kitchen for stuff that’s good for sick people.
Thank fuck Aradia’d been over a couple weeks back and one of her care packages had included a couple boxes of tea. You nuke a mug of water and read the back of the box and try to follow instructions despite being a Strider, and in a couple of minutes you bring the tea and the pills back out to Captor’s room. “Here, wake up enough to take these, you’ll thank me.”
He obeys without question and well, yeah, okay, that’s enough to get you actually worried, and you hook a chair over to sit beside the edge of the gross cocoony thing. “Captor, you gonna be okay?”
“Mmh,” he says, swallowing again with a wince; you think his throat’s got to be pretty sore, poor dude. Maybe the aspirin will help.
You look at the stupid derpy curve of the back of his head where it rests against the recuperacoon’s rim and at the rather wonderful pointy little candy-corn spikes of his double horns, and....well, this night has been deeply fucked already, why not fuck it a little further, you think, and you reach out and run a fingertip very lightly up one of the smaller pair.
Wow.
Sollux had basically shivered all over and made a sort of little helpless keening noiselet, and okay, yeah, you need to explore that paradigm a little further and you have a go at the matching smaller horn on the other side and wow, he’s capable of making some amazing little noises when you do that.
You can also tell he’s relaxing, and so you don’t stop fucking with his headgear: you discover that rubbing gently round the bases of both sets of horns makes him sort of purr, and after you’ve done that for a while and let yourself enjoy it you slide your fingertips up the orange band to the gold-yellow tips and he makes a lot of even less dignified noises when you do that--but those noises are much much better than his painful coughing. The horns are so fucking weird, they’re warm and hard but sort of velvety-plush to the touch, apparently incredibly delicate--jesus, you don’t even want to think about going around with something that fucking sensitive sticking right out of the top of your head, ow.
You go on rubbing his horns until you’re almost completely sure he’s asleep, his purring fading into deep and even breaths, and...well, you kind of don’t want to move even after he’s sleeping.
Fine, you’ve spent the night in weirder places. You’ll just...leave before he wakes up, that’s all.
Goddamn, trolls are fucking weird.