Work Text:
You hate your job.
Things could have gone a lot more pear shaped, you guess. They could have taken one look at your blood on the ascension station scanner and popped you through the neck with a culling fork, or any other various and sundry devices to accomplish the same end. But instead, they took you aside, and they had talks with upper management about what to do with you.
And, in the end, they put you here. You have been aboard Her Imperious Condescension’s Hestia since a few nights past your ninth sweep. You’ve been on it about six sweeps more, making a steady ascent into what’s known as deep space.
It’s where they keep the rest of the fleet, including most of the highbloods in charge of overtaking new and exciting territory. They need forms of entertainment, and stress relief, and important reproductive services. Your ship attends to those needs in the form of a handful of jadebloods – plus you – overseeing the massive inventory of useable human adults.
Yours aren’t for entertainment, though. They’re for breeding purposes, for that horrorterror-forsaken birthright that allows humans to gestate troll eggs and slurry donations.
Right now, you’re seeing to that birthright. You’re seeing to your birthright, too.
You, Karkat Vantas, are a mutant. But the same rules that govern troll reproduction don’t work on humans. A mothergrub produces faster given more varied and voluminous slurry to feast on; humans who have already absorbed the first slurry donation are only affected in speed of gestation by the warmth of their slurry donors. You, theoretically, are the best man for the job.
You just wish that wasn’t the case.
The smooth steel of the doors breaks your reflection in two as they part for you to enter through them, almost immediately hissing back into place. Human enclosures are normally pretty bright, but this particular one came from rare genetic stock – mutant red eyes the colour of cherry candies stare back at you from the far side of the room.
“Hello, Dave.” you say to him, and he merely continues to stare at you. You don’t know why you still talk to him. Why you talk to any of them. Humans can’t talk back, all they can do is parrot, if they’re real smart, and even then it comes out half mangled. But Dave doesn’t even do that. He just stares.
Maybe it’s the colour of his eyes. Or maybe it’s the way that he looks at you, so intense you could swear his detachment is something personal.
Maybe it’s the newness of his shape to you right now, his belly swollen up with precious cargo. First lot since the two of you have hit the outer edges of deep space. Three eggs for some violetblood who oversees – surprise, surprise – cargo shipments of humans.
Your hand touches his knee. Dave sits, cross legged, unmoving; his back is pressed against the wall, and he sits atop the soft structure you’ve heard others on your ship call a bed. It can’t be too uncomfortable, but there’s something about his stillness that tells you it is.
“I know you’re not happy to see me,” you say to him, because the last time he did see you, you were tasked with artificially inseminating him with a pailful of violet slurry, “But… Well. I guess I can’t say this time is going to be better.”
It’s supposed to be less stressful for them to actually copulate, rather than just keep getting filled. That was what your boss told you, and given she’s made multiple runs for human breeders, you guess she knows what she’s talking about. It doesn’t make it any easier, though, as you try to manipulate him.
“There. That’s right.” you tell him, trying to be crooning as you lay him down on his bed. His clothes have been taken away for a while now, so there’s nothing to strip him of. You just need to get him laid down, and -
A grimace crosses your face. You hate your job.
Humans are animals, and you’re not going to pretend that you enjoy the fact that you have to pail them to do your job. But you can’t deny the fact that they are kind of pretty, in a way, and that Dave is pretty in a really particular way that makes your bulge rub up against the crotch of your jump suit eagerly.
You unzip yourself, slide a hand down to get a little of what you’re already dripping on your fingers. The thin line of his lips open, as if on command, and you try not to shudder as you feel his tongue prod against your fingertips, lapping up slurry. You try so hard not to pretend he’s another troll for a hot second.
Normally, it would take a larger dose for you to be able to get to him, but given that the hormones from the eggs he’s holding inside of him are already running wild, it doesn’t take more than a few drops to force the same reaction.
It’s so systematic, so fucking hardwired that you could close your eyes and see exactly what happens. A flush will start from his cheeks to his ears and neck, from his neck across his chest. His nipples will prickle up, swollen and red, and the weirdly rigid bulge he has will perk up, too. The lips of his nook will swell dark pink, his eyes will be almost black with the way his pupils engulf his irises.
The problem is, you don’t close your eyes. You don’t ever close your eyes. You could, you probably should, it would be the decent thing to do. But there’s something about Dave that makes you watch.
He’s not the kind of human model that gets waxed poetic about in Alternian prose or movies. He isn’t dark enough that his skin blurs the line to the black chitin of adult trolls, and he’s not pale enough to symbolize the lusus that every ascended troll misses, no matter how old. He isn’t threat or comfort, familiarity or total alienation. He’s the soft colour of wheat, with darker spatterings of freckles despite never having seen anything resembling natural light.
His gold hair is fine silk when you stroke your fingers through it. His eyes study you for a moment more, then slide shut. You feel something liquefy inside of you.
“Stop making me want to protect you. It’s fucked up.” you grumble to him, leaning back just enough to slide out of your suit. Business or not, you aren’t walking back to your respite block covered in slurry. It’s just not a thing that’s going to happen.
When you lean back over him, his eyes are open again, and he’s staring at you. You put your hands above either of his shoulders. They always look so fucking big. You’re a tiny ass troll and they still look so big compared to Dave, one of the bigger humans.
“You’re so little.” you murmur to him, and the way his lust darkened eyes lock with yours makes you shiver. The human shifts beneath you for a moment, and you still, brows furrowing as you wonder what the hell he’s doing.
He reaches up and rubs the heel of his hand against your jaw.
It makes your knees go wobbly for a second, because you’re not expecting it. You’re not expecting the rush of hormones that tells you that you need to cuddle, defend, comfort. Before you can tell which way is up, your body is mooshed down over his and your limbs are in lock around him. Protect, your brain tells you, and you’re too temporarily dazzled to disagree.
Your bulge takes it upon itself to remind you that this is not what you signed up for. It squirms between your legs and laps the tip of itself against Dave’s nook, and the both of you rattle against each other with a groan.
“Stop making this so fucked up.” you tell him, struggling not to groan or chirp too embarrassingly. He must have picked that up in one of the grubtube videos he’s allowed to stick his snout into. You take his hand, grip it in what you hope isn’t too rough a way, but still authoritatively. “You don’t do that shit when we’re paili- When we’re doing this.”
Dave looks at you a second – or, at least, you think he’s looking at you, you’re too fucking close to tell – before he leans forward and rubs his own jaw against yours, and he definitely learned that from a movie, and you definitely let out a hard purr at it. It’s the most embarrassing moment out of the plethora of pathetic shit you have to choose from in your miserable existence, which is fucking saying something.
It doesn’t stop you from rubbing back.
Your system thrums hard with the excitement of mating and the excitement of conciliating, like all the worst fucking tropes. But then again, you’re a mutant fucking a human on a breeding ship, and maybe you deserve a little leeway in terms of what you’re allowed to like when you’re helping to keep a human knocked up.
The tip of your bulge curls up inside of his cunt, looks for that rough little patch to rub against. Human parts are different, apparently made for ramming those weird, rigid bulges into, but they take troll bulge just fine as long as you know how to use it. You feel Dave’s hips jerk up a little, involuntary, and you keep your hand around his wrist, use it as leverage to lean up over him and buck your hips back down.
“You’re messed up, you know that? Fucked in the pan.” you tell him. “You’re so goddamn beautiful.”
“Krrkt.” he says back, and you don’t know what to make of it. There’s no possible way he can understand you, but you like to think he’s approximating your name. Your claws scratch his scalp as your bulge rucks up further into him, rubs against that little mass that makes his nook clench around you. You let it pulse a few times, twist it up and rub it down hard, get him good and breathless on it before you nuzzle him again.
Thin fingers wrap around the back of your throat. You don’t know if he’s doing that on purpose or not, but you feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up, melt right down against him for a second again, just barely keeping yourself from crushing him. His bulge is rubbing against the lower part of your belly, and you don’t even care about the sticky mess it’s making. Not when he’s clinging to you like this, not when you can feel yourself dripping scent all over him, when you want to nibble and scratch and mark ‘mine, mine, mine’ all over his skin.
They tell you human beings don’t have pheromones to mark you back. That their slurry and scent does nothing to you the way yours does back. Maybe so. But Dave does something to you, and you find yourself pressing your mouth against his, tasting his tongue and running the hand you had gripped at his wrist down to his swollen stomach as you kiss him.
You’ve been doing this for weeks now. His stomach is almost as taut as it can be, the eggs swollen up to what either is or is rapidly approaching their full size. When you press in against his abdomen, he groans, but it only spurs you on.
He’s a human. This is a job. You don’t need to get so fucked up over quadrants. But you can’t help it with him. It’s Dave, he smells of something sweet next to the human-grade detergent all your stock are given; his jaw rubs against yours like he wants you there, like he understands what it means.
“Krrkt-“ he fumbles with some word again, and you kiss him for it. The hand on his stomach goes down to play with his bulge, to rub at that weird slit at the top.
It doesn’t take much for him to come; humans are no match when it comes to what troll slurry does to them, and you’ve been leaking inside of him pretty consistently now, even when you’re just coming to knot. You cover his mouth with kisses, feel his hands clutch at your neck and back, rock into him hard as he tries to buck into your touch.
Dave comes when you’re halfway through your own orgasm, hot human genetic material spattering between your abdomens. But you’re too busy drawing out something of your own, feeling his body fill with too much of your slurry, barely enough room for anything besides the eggs, now. For a second, you let yourself loose in a fantasy where they’re your eggs, and he is your human, and everything is alright.
Fuck, it feels good.
You resent reality when it comes crashing down around you, primarily in the form of desperate little noises that are now coming from the human beneath you. There are cameras in every room, if something really fucked up happens, your cohorts will be there to take care of the situation. But somehow, that doesn’t stop you from clutching the little human to yourself as he shakes. His small hand clutches at the crest of your shoulder and you would melt if you weren’t so rigid.
For a moment, there’s a terrible sensation inside of you that you’ve killed him. Somehow, you fucked it all up, you fucked him to death. And then, with a terrible heave, he presses the first egg out of himself.
It almost looks like he’s just rejecting your slurry, at first. But there it is, a very purple looking egg that you can pull right out of the mess of it, engorged with new life, nearly translucent with the grub inside. There almost isn’t enough time to set it aside before he’s tensing up again.
The thing is, it’s not… An entirely painful sound. In fact, it kind of sounds like he keeps tensing around long, laborious orgasms that he’s suffering to let go. His body is so hot against yours, you’re afraid he’s going to burn away to nothing in your arms.
All you can do is clutch at him, hold him through the worst of it. You hold him through two more screams of agony-addled-bliss, two more eggs that shouldn’t have fit in that tiny nook of his in the first place. His bed is dripping with your colour, a mixture of slurry is spread across your legs and his, and you can do nothing but let him cling to you with shaking limbs as some of your cohorts enter, remove the eggs from the bed, and exit as quickly as they came.
They do not tend to him. That, it is clear, is your task. But you don’t know how, and Dave feels even smaller than usual in your arms. You come to realize that the wetness you feel beading on your chest isn’t sweat.
You’re lost and small yourself when you bend your head to lick at them, like you would any wound. Like your troll spit can heal whatever’s happening in your little human’s head right now. He looks so fucking pale.
“Krrrkttt.” he says, and you can’t deny what that’s supposed to be right now, you can’t pretend you don’t know – “Wnt t die.”
You cradle his head into your chest.
You hate your job.