Work Text:
Anonymous asked eridan-hc-on-demand:
When Eridan is just kinda sick, he bitches and moans about it constantly. When he's really and truly ill, though, he shuts up and pretends that he's fine--showing too much weakness would just make him look like a good candidate for culling. It's fucking dangerous.
--carcinoGeneticist (CG) began trolling caligulasAquarium (CA)!--
CG: HEY.
CG: AMPORA.
CG: ALTERNIA TO AMPORA. DOUCHELORD, DO YOU READ.
CG: ...
CG: ERIDAN, ANSWER YOUR GODDAMN MESSAGES, I AM STARTING TO LOSE THE VERY EDGES OF MY VAST AND MAGNIFICENT PATIENCE.
CG: IF THIS IS YOUR NAUTICALLY THEMED IDEA OF AN AMUSING AND DIVERTING JAPE, JOKE, OR JOCULATION, I HAVE TO SAY IT KIND OF FUCKING SUCKS.
CG: OKAY FINE I'M COMING OVER THERE
CA: wwait
CG: IT SPEAKS!
CG: WHAT THE SHIT IS YOUR DEAL, AMPORA, ARE YOU PLAYING LET'S SEE HOW LONG WE CAN GET VANTAS TO TALK TO HIMSELF BEFORE HE EXPIRES OF SHEER HEAD-EXPLODING EXASPERATION?
CA: no
CA: wwhat did you wwant
CG: ...
CG: ARE YOU OKAY?
CA: fine
CA: wwhy wwere you trollin me
CA: im busy
CG: BUSY. DOING WHAT? FONDLING YOUR SHAME GLOBES AND MEDITATING ON YOUR INCREDIBLY TACKY BLUE GUN?
CA: just busy
CA: if there aint anythin you wwant howw about you quit wwastin my time an go bother someone else
CG: WOW, WHAT THE FUCK.
CG: SINCE WHEN DO YOU TURN DOWN ATTENTION OF ANY SORT?
CA: just leavve me alone ok vvantas
CA: an dont come ovver
CA: i dont wwanna see you
CA: dont wwanna see anyone
CG: SERIOUSLY, ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? YOU DON'T SOUND LIKE YOURSELF. AT ALL.
CG: ARE YOU FEELING OKAY?
CA: goddamnit kar i said leavve me alone
-- caligulasAquarium (CA) has blocked carcinoGeneticist (CG)!--
~
It's the dark season and it's cold as fuck outside and the storms are singing in the Dualscar's rigging the way they always do. It's a lonely sound, one that seems to find its way inside you, echoing in the hollows of your bones and the spaces of your body; it accompanies you in and out of dreams. The water counterpoints the windsong with its roar and crash. Sometimes you can feel the ship shift around you, a vast dark hollow fish, blind and dumb. Sometimes you can hear it move.
The insistent pinging of your palmhusk had roused you, and it was difficult to read the grey laddered text of your friend's repeated queries: the letters seemed to swim and wriggle on the screen, the way the tiny drifts of cells inside your eyeballs swing and wheel when you look up at a bright sky. It would have been much easier to ignore Karkat, but he was typing something about coming over, and you cannot have that, you absolutely cannot have that, even if he could get hold of a boat and even if he could have made his way out here in the storm, you cannot currently be seen.
You had been fighting off a chill for several nights, complaining about it to Fef online and swilling tea and wearing two scarves at once, but it wasn't until you woke up and found yourself on the floor half in and half out of your ablution block that you realized you were seriously impressive levels of unwell. You couldn't remember passing out, but there was an overturned glass on the floor next to you and a puddle of water that had begun to dry around the edges; you'd been out for some time. It had come as a surprise to find that getting back upright was actually difficult. The floor tilted sharply under you and you flailed your arms to try and rebalance and grabbed the doorframe. Everything hurt. Your muscles ached dully, your head clanged, your chest was tight and felt strangely hot and thick, you couldn't take a deep breath.
With considerable effort, you'd staggered out to the couch and wrapped yourself in your cape and curled up, shivering, and everything had gone away for a little while.
That had been last night. Now you are lying on the couch wearing three sweaters and two scarves and your warmest pants, all your blankets wrapped round you, and you are still cold as the goddamn ocean outside except for the hot pain in your chest. You can hear yourself breathing, a nasty bubbling wheezing sound: each breath aches. Your gills are swollen, inflamed, resenting the weight of the layers you're wearing, but the idea of taking anything off makes you moan.
Nobody can see you like this. This isn't one of your mopey hypochondriac colds, the sort you whine about to Kar and Fef and Sol, when he lets you; this is beyond your control and right now you know any Imps who saw you would cull you on sight for such weakness. More than once you've mistaken the creaking and crash of the waves for the drones arriving, culling-forks in hand.
Maybe three or four hours after you blocked Kar on Trollian, the lusii start to appear. All kinds of them. Whales, crabs, sea-goats; squeakbeasts, mewbeasts, barkbeasts. Hoofbeasts. They are all white as bone save for the holes you made in them with Ahab's, and those are brilliant, every color of the spectrum, those are so bright they hurt your aching eyes. They make no sound: they merely gather, crowding into the room, packing themselves together in a fascinated audience, every eye on you. They must be breathing all the air. You can't seem to get any, no matter how hard you try.
After a while you start to see holes in the room, black stains that bloom at the edges and spread, and after a while longer you can't see anything at all.
~
"--sit him up, he's--"
"--freezing out here--"
"--get me that bowl--"
Someone is tugging at you. One of the lusii, maybe, only you don't remember killing one that had hands like a troll's. You sort of try to wriggle away, but it's almost impossible, the grip on your shoulders is like iron, and they haul you upright and something hits you hard on the back and it makes you cough and you can't, you can't breathe, your chest is full of black benthic ooze, but they hit you again and again and somehow it helps. Everything hurts. You can't stop coughing now, and they hold you while you bring up whatever's clogging your lungs. Purple tears blind you.
You think you have never been more miserable in your entire wretched life.
They're wiping at your face with something cool and damp. When you can finally breathe--oh, God, you really hadn't been able to before, it hurts like fire but the awful feeling of drowning is gone--whoever's holding you lets you lie back against the couch. You blink up at them.
Oh. That's not a lusus.
"You're an idiot," says Kar, sitting back on his heels. "I am at an absolute all-time loss for sufficiently vile words in which to tell you just how much of an idiot you are."
"I think I know some." It's Fef, she's standing beside the couch--she must have been the one holding you, you think you recognized the vise-grip. "How about you fucking terrified us, Eridan? Or we thought you were dead?"
You can hear tears in her voice. You wish you could think straight. "What," you try. "How."
"After you totally non-suspiciously in any way blocked me on Trollian, I took it upon myself to get in touch with the one person on the planet who's actually obliged to give a shit about you, and she told me you'd been sick and you weren't answering her, either." Karkat wrings out the cloth he's using to bathe your face. "So we came out here and found you burning up and barely breathing, you irredeemable nookmunch, why the hell didn't you say you needed help?"
"Couldn't," you manage.
"What? I'm sorry, I don't speak terminally stupid, try again?"
"No...couldn't. Can't be...seen like this. Dangerous."
"What's dangerous is how close I am to throwing a rage aneurysm right here in your living room, Ampora--"
"No," Fef cuts in. "No, I think I get it. He didn't want anyone to know he was so...weak. Vulnerable. It's a royalty thing. It's a stupid royalty thing, were you just going to lie there and pretend you didn't have pneumonia in the hopes it'd get the hint and go away?"
"Don't have pneumonia," you protest, but you are starting to feel just a tiny bit uncertain about the wisdom of your recent decisions.
"The hell you don't." Karkat glowers at you, but you think he looks tired--tired and frightened. So does Fef, and all of a sudden you have to hide your face in your hands because you are about to burst into deeply embarrassing tears. "--Ah, fuck," he says, and then he's beside you on the couch and he's hugging you, and Fef wraps her arms round you both and the sweet-smelling cloud of her hair blocks out the world for a little while.
~
They stay. Both of them stay. They make soup and bully you into eating it; they pour countless cups of tea down your aching throat. They haul you off the couch, blankets wrapped round your shoulders, and make you hobble around the room--Fef says it's something to do with making sure your lungs don't fill up again--and ignore you when you complain. One of them is always with you. Even when you dream of the drones and wake choking and sweating, one of them is always there. "How many times, Ampora," Kar says. "There are no fucking drones, and if there were, do you think I'd let them anywhere near your right royal fish-flavored ass? You think I'd even let them in the room? Fucking drone tartare, man. Drone on toast. Go back to sleep."
You turn your face against the coolness of his hand, and you go back to sleep.