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The tiny ‘cupe almost splits when Eridan crawls in with you, but you’re glad anyway.
“We made it,” he murmurs in your ear. “I told you, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” you mutter, and twine your fingers through his. “Yeah, yeah, thank you for the heaping fucking helping of told-you’s, they’re delicious. Did you bake them yourself?”
He nips your ear. Squashed this close together he’s not so much holding you as curled up around you like armor, and it’s an incredibly comforting feeling. You can hear his slow, heavy pulse. You’re three lightsweeps out from Alternia, still unfamiliar with each other’s bodies, crammed into a filthy little berth on a filthy little scavenger’s ship, and accelerating.
When you feel his bulge pushing up against your ass, you push back.
*
The first few seasons are a nightmare you can’t quite wake up from. You lived a short, pointless little life that involved a lot of arguing about movies on the internet, some halfassed solo weapons practice that tapered off the older you got and the more pointless you realized it all was for you, no leaving the hive at all for any reason ever, and a on online boyfriend with connections offplanet. You spent sweeps just passing time instead of planning for a future and now you’re struggling to survive, really struggling, and you lose two fingertips to a wiggler’s mistake with your exosuit’s thermal regulator your first week because you’re a fucking idiot. Eridan loses half a horn to a firefight in an asteroid belt because he’s a fucking idiot, and spends too many weeks smashing awkwardly into walls and misjudging doorways while you fumble to re-learn how to how to dress yourself. You also struggle to sweep floors and sort inventory and fake up authentic-looking manifests, always too slow, always too small, always too far behind.
The people up here look more like ghasts than trolls, shatter-horned, gap-toothed, patched all over with greasy, rattling prosthetics, hook hands and camera eyes and clanking robot legs, and they have no forgiveness for a kid who can’t sort out his own chute from a warp shunt. Just when you’re getting the hang of putting your own damn shoes on and Eridan’s figured out how to walk a straight line you lose the thumb on your other hand to a greasefire in the galley and he gets his right leg blown off below the knee.
He holds you tight in your tiny cupe and sobs like a wiggler. You don’t have anything to tell him, you already told him, you told him to go away, to leave you to your own well-earned decline, to haul his sorry purple glutes to the nearest Imperial station and beg forgiveness. This is insane, he’s insane, no one should be this insane, especially not the only kid decent enough to ever love you. He should be an Admiral somewhere, decked in rich clothes and bright medals, but he’s not, he traded his entire hatchright to smuggle you out here, and now his own body is being taken from him. Yours, too, but yours wasn’t ever worth much, let alone... this. The two of you thought yourselves so smart, so brave, so talented, told each other you’d be pirate Captains, daring rebels. Instead you’re scared and hungry and tired and hurting, all the time, and guilt curdles in your guts like poison. It’s eating you away faster than all the accidents.
When he spreads his legs you fuck him, hard and desperate. It’s the only thing you can really offer. When he kisses you you can feel the gaps in his teeth, so you just tuck your head underneath his chin and count the beats of his blood pusher.
*
You find your spacelegs, finally. Finally. You learn to patch a hull and stretch out rations and smother an electric fire and wipe down a helmsman and play blackjack well enough to win a box of cookies. You learn to stop fucking flinching when people call you freakblood. You learn to keep your head up, to throw a punch, to run away really fast and scramble behind your matesprit, who learns that standing up really tall and flaring his fins out makes even the oldest hands think twice.
You learn to shout at people, which is great, and you learn to shout at them until they stop being such tremendous assholes and do what you want them to, which is beyond fantastic, and then you have a hatefling and a few paleflings and you do pretty well as the ship’s ashen two wheel device. Your quadrants are a revolving constellation of confusing flips and muddled, awkward fights and it’s nothing like as meaningful as the movies always made it seem, it’s strange and often embarassing and there’s always too many elbows to have to deal with, but it’s nice. It’s more than you ever thought you’d have a right to claim. It’s amazing.
Eridan’s working his way up from fuck-off nothing, too, he’s learning his own set of lessons. He’s earning some respect. His penchant for life-and-death action games has rendered him fit and sharp and good with guns, and under his embarrassingly nerdy enthusiasm for historical conquerors he’s got a good solid head for tactics. He finally gets to lead an away party and comes back to your berth roaring drunk, with a glittering ruby stud set into one fin that makes you wet just looking at it. He takes you against the wall, loud and laughing, bearing down hard on your bulge and biting your shoulder hard enough to draw blood.
“I’m gonna have you forever, love,” he slurs, “come on, come on, fill me up, I want you.”
God, you’re so glad he’s here.
*
He gets to lead more raids. A lot more raids. He takes to fucking you before each one, riding you fast and desperate and putting his armor on with his nook still wet, carrying your slurry like an obscene talisman into battle. He comes back with more rings on his fingers, studs in his face. When you tongue each ruby drop set into his fins he screams like the mothergrub made you just for each other.
As for you: you kind of wanted to be a hacker and code viruses, and you’re not so bad at it, really, but the crew finds your talent for cooking more impressive and you get assigned to the galley full time. It’s warm there, though, only part of the ship that’s warm enough for you, and the head cook takes to sneaking cuddles into the work shifts and snacks into your pockets. The two of you are finally getting enough to eat, and Eridan’s eating constantly, these days. You went to space before your final molts and Eridan’s a highblood, all starved-looking angles and outsized paws, he’s already a head taller than everyone and there’s no way he’s getting enough of what his growing body needs. If he was in some Imperial command academy right now he’d probably be getting fresh raw meat six times a night. Instead he gorges on cheap sugary grubmeal, and you sweet-talk the head cook into letting him sneak into the kitchen and scoop handfuls of raw powder right out of the crates. He’s getting soft around the middle and still eats like he’ll never be full.
*
You’re walking through a market, some strapped-together station perched like a blister on the ass end of nowhere, trading bites of this massive bloody haunch of some kind of alien musclebeast, enjoying the experience of real meat, for once, and Eridan says, his mouth full, “Let’s get a new ship.”
You look up at him and he tears off another dripping bite and looks down at you. He’s reached a truly imposing final maturity and has settled quite contentedly into being big as hell. He wears bright sashes around his heavy stomach and a long coat that flares out wide around his mis-matched legs. He’s the kind of guy who demands space just by existing, and when you tag around after him sometimes you feel more like a remora than a troll. But... those ruby studs in his fins. The arm around your shoulders. Even if you feel smaller than ever, around him, you can’t feel unwanted.
“Why do we need a new ship?” you ask. “We’re doing fine on ours.”
“We got hired on as kids, there,” he says. “We are forever gonna be kids to them, come on, doesn’t Cookie call you pupa while she diddles you? Let’s go somewhere as sees us like men.”
You’re not even nine, you don’t feel like a man. You feel like a scared kid who’s still fucking faking it, who’s always been faking it, who is always going to be faking it. Eridan’s got the coat and the rings and the swagger, Eridan’s got the pirate thing down from his busted horns to his mechanical heel, and what do you have? A penchant for shouting at people, horns that never did grow in, and seven and a half fingers.
“Karkat?” he says, gently, and stops, right in the middle of foottraffic. Everyone steers around him.
You pull the haunch out of his long claws and take a big bite. The blood spills across your tongue rich and sour, and you chew ferociously. You can cook really well, you can code pretty okay, and you can pap someone crosseyed before they manage to get their sword out of the sheath. It’s not the worst skillset a guy ever ended up with.
“Let’s find one with a prettier head cook,” you say, and he laughs and stoops to kiss you.
*
It takes a week on your new raiding ship before you’re the head cook and locking horns with the Captain more days than you aren’t. It’s mostly because there’s only two other guys in the galley and you’re the only one with all four limbs and no drug problems, but it feels good to bark an order and watch guys twice your size scramble, even if it’s just about seasoning a stew or mixing up a batch of biscuits. And the blackrom’s pretty amazing, she’s got all this experience and still thinks you’re fucking loathsome, and sometimes when you stagger back to your ‘cupe it’s like your feet aren’t even touching the floor. Eridan just laughs like you’re the funniest thing he’s ever seen, fingering the scratches all down your back, and sometimes, just for the hell of it, you let him take you up against the galley countertop, his horns clanking up against pots and pans and his big hands holding you so tight. He’s working with cannons now in the gunnery bays, wrestling guns the size of respite blocks around in their berths, and you can feel the lethal power in his arms coiled up under the grubloaf softness.
Your kitchen buddies learn fast that you go easier on them if they feed your matesprit, and Eridan’s snowed under in biscuits and bites of stew the instant he levers his big crooked horns through the door. He takes to pouring over starcharts and shipping lanes at the long table, drinking cup after cup of sweet buttered tea with a funny little smile on his face. You think you’ve never seen him happy, before, on Alternia. You think he probably wasn’t, and, then again, neither were you.
*
He gets sick.
It was kind of inevitable your luck would run out sooner or later, but you still weren’t prepared. First he’s just kind of distractible and grabby and then he’s feverish and brainless and does nothing but eat and sleep and try and fuck you. You’re scared and sore and he’s confined to quarters and then he breaks through the door and eats everything in the kitchen and throws it up again and he breaks your arm, trying to pail you, he grabs you hard enough to snap your bones. Then he’s confined to the brig. He hangs from his shackles and screams. Bloody froth runs down his chin and worse runs down his legs.
You sit in the medical bay and shake. The Captain fingers her pistol and watches you.
“He ever done this kinda shit before?” she wants to know.
“No,” you say.
“Highbloods ain’t stable, Vantas.”
“He is,” you say.
“They go bugshit.”
“He hasn’t,” you say.
The chief mediculler finishes knitting your bones back together and you scratch gingerly at the new-healed skin. You have bruises everywhere.
“I c’n put him down for you, kid,” she says, almost kindly, and you look at her and wonder how you ever brought yourself to so much as slip a hand up her shirt. But you take her pistol, anyway.
You go and you hit Eridan in the head with the butt of the gun until he hangs limp, and then you drag him by the chains to the nearest shuttle and you drive it the nearest port. You trade most of his rubies for a week’s berth at the dingiest tavern you can find.
When he wakes up he tries to go for you again, his eyes hot-violet and empty, but you kept the chains.
*
You spend three weeks busing tables at the tavern and blowing kisses to any foul taintchafer who pats your ass. But the guys in the kitchen like some of your recipes and you get to take extra meals up to Eridan, who eats face-down like an animal and has worried open awful purple welts on his wrists.
“How’s he doing?” asks the bartenders, and you’re that tragic kid with the space-mad matesprit and you say “Fine,” each time and let more strangers pull you into their laps. Seven fingers or not you can still can shoosh-pap a hell of a tip out of a drunken old stardog.
And you’re still fucking him, is the worst part, after you’ve had too many free pints from the bartenders who all think you’re such a goddamn hero you wobble into your block and you take your mad matesprit from behind so he can’t bite, driving up into his constantly-dripping nook like you could leave your brain up there alongside his, and before you go to sleep each night you still kiss him, fast and light and sorry. It’s not the worst life. It’s a life. You could be dead. He could be dead. God, don’t let him die.
For your ninth wiggling day Eridan blinks at you, while you’re wiping breakfast off his chin, and he goes, “Kar?” for the first time in a perigee, all soft and confused. You wrap your arms around him and you cry your fucking heart out.
*
He comes back slowly, piece by piece. He talks a little more every day, for a little longer. He starts showing a preference for foods rather than bolting down anything you slop into a bowl for him. He wants you to spoon feed him, then demands some pants. You spend a really happy night washing his hair, combing him all neat and proper again, and he holds so still and smiles so softly. The first time he’s got it together enough to make fun of himself you laugh until you weep.
He asks you to take his chains off.
You just
You
Your arm
and
The way he was, over you, eyes blank, and his eyes still go blank, sometimes, he still acts like he wants to grab you up.
You turn around and walk out of the block and go downstairs and take a double shift. You flirt and you sing and you let anyone who wants to share their drink with you, till the laps and orders and smiles and jokes all start blurring together, till some wiry old prospector with gnarled hands and a bad limp, bent nearly double under her huge horns—she’s as weak as you are and you can feel good about that, you can feel safe—is easing you up the stairs, past your door, into her own dayblock. She holds you like you’re the most delicate thing she’s ever gotten those hands on, and she’s got fingers like she’s been fondling a trash chewer but hell, so do you. She’s just nice, she’s so nice to you, and you just want something nice right now. When the two of you twine together just inside her block, petting and nuzzling everywhere, she purrs like a busted cooling fan, an endearingly rusty old rattle that makes you giggle, and she’s so warm, she touches you so gently, you can let yourself go away for a while.
“How much do I owe you?” she wants to know, after some interminable dreamy period.
You rub your cheek against hers. Her skin’s like old cured leather, tough as hell, and you wish you could just absorb some of that strength. You wish you knew if you were ever even going to get old. You feel fucking ancient.
“No, it’s okay,” you murmur. “I wanted to.”
“With me?”
You nod and clutch at her a bit and try not to cry. She levers onto her elbows and peers down at you.
“Aw, kid,” she says. “Hell. Don’t cry. I was always goddamn terrible at the crying parts. Here, sit up. Sit up. Deep breaths.”
She combs her few remaining claws through your hair until you’ve got yourself under some semblance of control.
“You, uh, wanna talk about it?” she asks gruffly, in a tone of voice that means oh god please don’t.
“Tell me about yourself,” you say instead. “You got anyone out there waiting on you, too?”
*
You stagger back to your block come evening, exhausted in a floaty, scrubbed-clean kind of way, and Eridan’s sitting at the end of his chains looking wrecked.
“I hurt you, didn’t I?” he asks. “Why’re you still—I hurt you, Kar, didn’t I. Didn’t I?”
You go take a long drink from the ablution block’s sink. Your head pounds and under the thick warm mess of booze and shooshpaps you’re still so scared of him, you’re still so angry. You rest your head against the cool mirror.
“You hurt me really bad,” you admit.
There’s a long silence. You can see him in the mirror: perfectly, breathlessly still. He looks like he’s just been torn apart, he looks like that time you saw a guy get ripped in half in a hull breach, like he’s staring at his guts and thinking if he just doesn’t move the pain won’t catch up to him. You feel so small and miserable you could scream.
“I’m sorry,” you whisper.
“No, don’t be,” he says, still so blank and careful. “I thought—I wanted to think I was just chained up so’s I didn’t hurt myself. I wanted to think I could never. That I’d never. But I hurt you. You should leave me here to rot.”
You take a deep breath, and you go and unclip his chains. He sits in just the same position, as the metal falls away, though he hooks his fingers around each other so his hands stay behind his back. He won’t look at you.
“I didn’t know,” he says all in a rush. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know, you should hate me, I’m a fucking—monster and I didn’t even—tell you, didn’t even warn you, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. Please don’t go.”
“I won’t, I’m here,” you say, and lean up against his shoulder. He trembles a little, at the contact, and you do your best to hold still.
“If I’d just been tougher, kept in shape, I could have fought you off just fine,” you mutter. “If I’d caught on you were going crazy earlier—”
“No, shut up,” he says savagely. “I didn’t go crazy, you couldn’t have known, I didn’t warn you, I didn’t think, it’s my fault. That was an ovulation cycle.”
“A what.”
He hunches his shoulders up. “The old histories have accounts in, sometimes. References to shit, like, heirs, descendants of the body, weird shit like that, and us seadwellers are the most ancient and noble form a troll there is—I think seadwellers can be oviparous under certain conditions.”
“This was a science experiment,” you say. He squirms.
“Um.” He grimaces. “Yeah, kinda. More or less.”
“More, or less?”
“....mostly.”
“You ran away with me as a science experiment.”
He flinches like he’s been slapped, and you have to get up. You have to back away.
“I ran away with you because I love you,” he says desperately. “Kar, Karkat Vantas, I don’t expect you to believe me, ok, you can just, you can not, that’s ok, I understand, I’m a stupid piece of shit and I’ve treated you abominably and I deserve anythin’ you wanna throw my way, but just listen. I did all of this for you, I wanted to—you’re such a fuckin’ miracle, I love you so much, I needed to see if I could just do this for you. Make more of you, there should be more of you, Kar, there should be—a whole caste, a whole new race’a scrappy little gorgeous kids who care too much about everythin' and it’s not fair that there isn’t one already, I won’t fuckin’ stand for it. And anyway, what hell else was I gonna do with my life?”
“Be important!” you exclaim. “You could have had such a career, Eridan, you’re fucking brilliant, you could have done so much. You could have been someone.”
He snorts. “I already am someone, thank you very much, and that someone loves you and wants to make your descendants. I think it worked, even. I think I can feel ‘em in me.”
You want to throw up. You can’t stop staring at the heavy curve of his stomach, the thickness to his arms and thighs, how much weight he’s put on since you left planet. You were always the stocky kid, when you were young. You were always desperate to get in enough exercise because you couldn’t go outside because you’re a mutant freak who shouldn’t even exist, and if they caught you they would have every right to cull you. And now this brilliant, stupid boy who junked his whole destiny just to bail you out of the mess you got hatched into has gone and tried to make more of you.
You slide down the wall, feeling faint. Deep breaths. Head on your knees. Hands over your horns. Deep breaths. You’re so sick you just want to scream until you rupture.
He shuffles over to you on his knees.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry I hurt you. I just thought if I could do whatever all the other seadwellers weren’t it’d work out. I didn’t know I was gonna get so fucked up, no one bothered to write down the part where there’s a heat, by the time I realized what was happening I just didn’t care—”
You make an awful, ripping kind of laugh, and lay a hand on his head. “And before then, all those seasons, you didn’t think you’d mention ‘oh by the way when we play It’s Drone Time I wanna be the mothergrub’?”
“I didn’t know if it’d even work,” he says desperately. He’s snuffling back tears again, he looks utterly wretched. “The hell was I supposed to even say. I didn’t know. Look, you gotta keep the chains, ok, if you’re not gonna leave, you can leave if you want, I’m sorry, I won’t keep you, but—if I ever hurt you again, if I ever even look like I might, you just run, okay—”
“Shut up and come here,” you say tiredly, and hold your arms open. He slides his hands around you so carefuly, inch by inch, so pitifully frightened of your anger. He hugs you for the first time in ages, his tears dripping into your hair. Under your anger is fear, has always been fear, will always be fear. But somewhere under that is love.
You hold him tight.
*
He recovers faster, after that. He paces around your little block, then back and forth along the halls. Sometimes you catch him with a hand on his stomach and his eyes far-off, and it sends awful prickles down your spine. There isn’t enough room for you both to fit in the recuperacoon, not really, but he goes in first and you curl up on top, you let him pour slime across your shoulders and rub your tired feet and tell you he loves you, he loves you, he’s happy, and it’s... kind of okay. It’s kind of nice. You’re getting used to it.
The morning he comes downstairs to the main hall you drop your tray, to see him standing there in his coat and everything, hair combed back, boots shined up. Your asshole friends and co-workers and regulars all applaud, and you can see Eridan struggle not to flinch away. He makes his way carefully through the crowd, looking astonishingly fragile for someone built like a thermal hull, and eases onto one of the stools at the bar. He’s probably the highestblooded guy to ever have come to this station, let alone this rattletrap tavern.
“H’lo, ma’am,” he says to the bronze-blooded bartender. “May I have some water?”
He minds his manners, and you wonder where the fuck he learned any. You’re achingly aware you left his guns and everything back on the ship you absconded from, that he doesn’t have so much as a toothpick on him, that you filed all his claws down. But you run drinks and rub horns and after an hour your shift’s over, and you find him still at the bar, looking sweaty and tired, surrounded by interested staff and paper napkins covered in flanking maneuvers.
“An’ that’s probably how War-King Aurthour’s troops routed the Clan of the Devourin' Birds,” he’s explaining, between sips of water.
“Hi, nerd,” you say, climbing up beside him.
“Hi, Kar,” he says. “Nice place you got here.”
The cooks all snigger. You shoot them a glare. You’ve taken enough kitchen shifts to have dirt on every one of them by now, and they shut up fast and find their claws very interesting.
“Where do you think we should go next?” you ask your matesprit. You poke at the scribbled napkins.
“You’re leaving?” the bartender asks, aghast.
You stare at her. “Well, yeah. Eridan’s okay now. And he’s wasted just watching cobwebs grow in our block.”
Everyone hauls off and glares at Eridan, who looks intensely uncomfortable. You don’t get it. You harbored some fond daydreams that your coworkers would be polite enough not to high-five each other right in front of you when you announced your intentions to clear out, but people are starting to drift closer, looking genuinely upset.
One of the proprietors shows up.
“You’re not leaving,” he says.
“Like hell I’m not,” you say, affronted. “You really thought I wanted to hang around this feculent shitheap getting my cheeks pinched for the rest of my life while my matesprit drooled on himself?”
“I’ll give you a raise,” he says.
“You haven’t even been paying me,” you point out. “I’ve been working for tips and a free room.”
“Wait, what?” the bartender asks.
“What indeed,” Eridan says dangerously, rising up to his full height, fins flaring, that ruby chip of his glittering, and the proprietor flinches back.
“That’s fucked up,” says a cook. There’s a rising murmur of agreement. An old patron sticks his snout into the huddle, brown eyes gleaming.
“You ain’t been payin’ Vantas?” he demands. “Fuck is wrong with you, you blitherin’ nincompoop, you deserve to lose what you don’t take care of. Kid works harder than anyone I ever seen! Here, boychik, you come along with me now and I’ll introduce you to my Captain. She’ll sign you on faster’n a virgin in a whorehouse.”
Another regular shoulders into the mess. “No, hang on, are you sayin’ Vantas wants a new job—is he throwin’ in with that huge mad bastard of his?—kid, you lemme get you a drink and then come with me—”
Several rounds of drinks and increasingly baffling pitches later, you’re awarded a perigee’s worth of backpay and you and your matesprit are ushered off to a tidy new berth on a beautifuly sleek Bandicoot-class ship, and your new Captain shakes both your hands and talks about sign-on bonuses. After she leaves you alone with each other Eridan just scoops you up in his arms and kisses you, for the first time what feels like forever, really kisses you. You are breathless and dizzy and don’t quite know how this is your life.
“Still wanna tell me I’m crazy for thinkin’ you’re somethin’ wonderful, huh?” he asks.
“You and the rest of the universe,” you tell him, and you can feel the swell of his stomach pressing against you but you’re flying so high right now it just makes you giddy, what he might be full of. He carries you off to your berth and drops you into the slime and heaves in after you, and you splash and growl and roll around in the slime like you’re kids again, till he rolls you underneath him and you’re not even a little scared. He goes soft and still and lets you reach down between your legs, he nuzzles your hair and moans your name like an oath. It’s so good to have him in you, to have him wrapped all around you. It’s so good to have him.
*
The galley’s well appointed and the rations are good quality. You’ve signed on with a gang of smugglers, and the ship’s kitted out to look just a respectable frontline supply ship. You actually get to see actual Imperial officers come through sometimes, and then lie your fucking ass off right to their faces. Drug runners, sir? In this area? Gosh. Would you like a sandwich?
It’s so cool. Eridan tries to pretend he doesn’t think it’s as cool as you do, and fails terribly. He strips and cleans his new plasma rifle in your block so many times you start calling it the auxiliary trouser snake. He says it ain’t like that and you say like hell it ain’t and give the barrel a lick, and his eyes glaze over. You spend the morning and a chunk of the afternoon fucking each other silly.
“Are they eating each other in there?” you ask, lying with him afterwards. “Like do you just get a new batch each time and the oldest guys are getting hungry?”
“Euuuruurrrrgh,” Eridan says, and shoves your head off his mountainous gut. “No, you blithering imbecile, they’re eggs. And I don’t think any of the nonsense we’ve been up to since my fertile period’s made a difference.”
You lean into his hand until he lets you go, then you put your ear right back against his skin. You can hear things gurgling and sloshing around. “What if they hatch inside you, though,” you say. “I mean, hell, how the fuck are they going to get out? How are you going to know when it’s time? Is the first sign going to be them gnawing their way out of your, of your...”
“Hush,” he says, and this time he just cups your head in one cool hand. “It’ll work out.”
“What if you don’t have the right parts—”
“Hush.”
You close your eyes and listen to the slow pounding of his heart, the weird gurgles of his internal anatomy. You know they’re still eggs, safe and harmless, locked into thickening shells, but you can’t help of thinking of them as little kids, like you first remember being, crouched at the edge of the caverns and peering suspiciously out at the stars. Licking your hatchmates’ blood off your lips.
Hungry.
“They’re gonna be beautiful,” Eridan says dreamily. “Such pretty little conquerors.” His thumb swipes at your hair, circles one of your horns till you squeak and pull your head off his stomach and kiss him again.
*
The thing is, you were told about sign-on bonuses but they never really turn up. The ship runs like a sleek machine and the Captain’s nice enough but she seems to have lost her wits somewhere up the Quartermaster’s nook. You get promised pay with interest just as soon as you run some recreational chemicals off to the front lines, but that somehow turns into smuggling subjugation-tier plasma cannons off to some godforsaken nebula for an insane Admiral's wriggling day game of turbo laser tag which leads to hauling a dozen clapped-out old helmsmen off to a shady medical experimentation station, and no one likes the last one. Half the crew is gutter-blood draft-dodgers and this ship’s propulsion rig amounts to an easy chair, a coffee machine, and a sign-up sheet.
You collect sixteen very interesting electrical burns all up your arms just keeping one pissy psionic bastard or another calm enough to get back to their post. Paid or not, work to do still needs doing, and somehow it keeps on being a long way to port. You keep the kettle on and the cookies coming and your tongue sharp, you haul idiots back from the edge of rank insubordination by their horns and in one case you hit someone with a frying pan hard enough his glass eye cracks right in half. They don’t like it, but they always simmer down once you lose your temper enough to start shouting. And reaching for the frying pan.
“This is a great big bloody pile’a bullshit,” Eridan says one night, working crankily at a bent flange on his robot leg. “Somethin’s fucked up ‘round here. This is bullshit, Kar.”
“We’ll get paid next run,” you mutter, tamping down the dermal tape on his scraped-up arm.
“Like we got paid the last three?” he asks. He waves the roll of tape at you. “Now we’re shippin’ hoofbeasts! The fuckin’ hold is fuckin’ full’a hoofbeasts! I had to climb a pile’a crates to keep from bein’ fuckin’ eaten by someone else’s steak. And every fuckin’ time I get the worst fuckin’ job in the most dangerous’ fuckin spot and I drag my sorry ass off to the Quartermaster and she says—”
“We’ll get paid,” you repeat.
He gestures grandly with the tape. “See?”
“I don’t see why you’re so mad,” you sigh, and smooth more tape over his knuckles. “We’re going to get paid next run.”
“Kar,” he says, sitting up. “Kar, love. Look at me.”
“What?”
He peels one of your eyelids back. “Tell me when we’ll get paid, Karkat.”
“Next run, I just said.”
“Son of a—” he grabs you up and holds you close. He’s shaking.
“Eridan?”
“She’s a mindscourge,” he growls. “That teal-blooded bitch is a mindscourge. I should have noticed before. I should have—fuck. Fuck. I’m the only one here noble enough she couldn’t get me and I’m so bloody dense took me this long to fuckin’ notice! Wait here.”
Oh fuck. Oh, fuck. The thought comes to you like a bubble of air rising up through a tank of effluence. Fuck.
You grab for Eridan but he dodges back, and he’s got his sash off his waist and he ties your hands. You kick him in the chest, roaring in anger, and his face is set and cold and he lashes you to the little bolted-down table in the corner. You bite his wrist, and even when he cries out you just dig your teeth in further.
“Don’t go,” you hiss through your fangs, through his blood. “Don’t you dare, don’t you leave me—”
“I’ll come back with our pay,” he says.
“We’ll get the crew together!” you shout, and he whips his wrist out of your mouth and you’re an idiot. You scream at his retreating back, “I’ll get the crew together, we’ll all go, we’ll have a mutiny—”
“We’ll have a massacre,” he says. “Kar. I’ll be back.”
You hurl yourself against your restraints, and something awful goes pop in both your elbows. You sag to the floor and everything’s gone silver-hot with pain and Eridan gets his gun down from the wall, and sights down the barrel, and walks out of the room.
*
It takes a long time to chew through silk. The angle is incredibly painful, and your teeth aren’t sharp. You hope the grubs get Eridan’s fangs. You don’t know how that’s going to work. And you won’t, ever, if you don’t get a move on. Your hands hurt when you flex them and you’ve got a really distressing shooting pain through one arm, wrist to shoulder. You ignore it.
You bolt out the door the instant you’re free, tearing ass blindly down the corridor. You don’t know where the Quartermaster’s block is but you can feel yourself getting pulled there. You steer by the increasing thickness in your head, the vagueness of your thoughts. You clip a corner with your painful arm and nearly turn around and go back to your block. The thought sticks in your head and nags at you, you should go back, you should go back to your block, go into the recuperacoon. Eridan’s probably just making a big deal out of nothing, he was always prone to making a big deal out of nothing. You certainly shouldn’t go down this corridor, slapping on everyone’s doors as you go, shouting at them all to wake up, it’s dumb, you’re dumb. What the hell do you think you’re accomplishing, barging in on an innocent woman like this? You’ll get paid next run. You should go to sleep.
You shouldn’t open this door. People are starting to peer out of their blocks, rubbing slime from their eyes. Your arm hurts so much, your head. You have to lean against it, gasping for breath. Your hands are numb as you scrabble at the access panel. It’s locked. It should be locked. You shouldn’t go in. This is wrong, this is so wrong, you need to go away.
You can hear Eridan through the door. He’s screaming.
You headbutt the access panel in frustration. Eridan’s screaming.
No weapons, no blade. You were never any good at sickles, you left them on planet. You didn’t even bring your frying pan. You headbutt the panel again like some stupid beast, and it’s starting to give. Your horns are nubby. You’re a worthless stupid wreck and your horns are ugly and no one’s horns should be used like this, not even yours, not for hitting things, they hurt. But the panel’s caving in, starting to ooze neural fluid. You give it another hard hit and you can feel the impact all down your spine and it goes crunch. The door comes open.
She’s beating him. He’s fighting back slow and sluggish, like he’s struggling through mud. One of his fins is half-severed from his face, his blood streams down his shoulders, and she’s tearing him apart with just her claws. There’s blood everywhere and most of it is violet. He’s got size and weight and blood on his side but your head’s spinning from here, you can feel her power flooding the room like poison, it burns at you. She grabs his torn fin and pulls and he screams again, striking feebly out at her, his eyes blank and stupid, and you can see her bulge coiling in her pants, she’s so fucking focussed on him that she hasn’t even heard you come in. Eridan always got the worst jobs, the most dangerous ones, and there were always all these accidents that Eridan thought were due to his condition. He worried himself sick over losing his edge. How many times have you patched him back together just in the last few weeks? And all this time, you never knew, none of you knew, she hasn’t been flirting, she’s just skipped straight into getting off on hurting him and none of you knew, that’s sick.
You want to just throw yourself at her but she’s twice your size and his gun’s in the corner. Your face is pressed into the floor. You drag yourself inch by inch towards it and when you manage to lay hands on the barrel you can’t even think what to do with it. Did you ever know?
Eridan’s seen you, now, and you can’t read his face. But just when the Quartermaster goes to turn around he grabs her by the shirt, hauls her down. He kisses her. She makes a low throaty moan and kisses him back, still holding on to his torn fin, and you don’t know what to do, you don’t know if you can attack her now.
You shove the gun as hard as you can, so it skitters across the floor, it fetches up against his hip. He grabs it up in a flash, and sets the muzzle to her chest.
“Love,” the Quartermaster says, “no, don’t—”
He pulls the trigger.
*
When you come back to yourself, after a weird murky period, your arms are around Eridan’s neck and you’re both shaking like mad. He’s petting you very gently. You keep kissing him, quick and convulsive, making sure he’s still there.
You pull back far enough take a deep breath.
“We need to patch your fin up before it rots or something,” you say.
He makes an awful wet laugh. “Okay,” he says. His voice is tight with pain and half his face is tattered. You think you can see the gleam of cheekbone through one rent, he’ll have awful scars. It’s amazing he hasn’t lost an eye. You’re so angry you’ve gone cold, but the Quartermaster is a pile of burnt bones in the corner of the room. She’d said love, she called your matesprit her love, and he’s so hurt...
When you spot a crowd of anxious faces all peering through the broken door, you’re so relieved you could cry. You lever yourself to your feet, square out your shoulders.
“Well?” you demand. It’s a good word. It makes people guilty.
“The Captain’s sick, Cookie,” the chief navigator says. “Won’t wake up.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” you moan, and rub at your temples. “Okay. Where are we right now?”
“Uh, five lightsweeps rimward of the Kasterborous constellation. Sir.”
“Kasterborous... okay, we’re not too far from a waystation, right?”
“We could be there in a few nights if we push hard.”
“Good. You and... you, haul ass to the propulsion rig. I’ll send someone down with the Captain’s stash of beans for the coffee machine, she’s probably not going to need them.”
“Is she going to be okay?” someone asks. You realize, with a pang of horror, it’s the apprentice mediculler, and he looks like he might cry.
“Hell if I know,” you sigh. “She’s been pailing a mindfucker for god knows how long. I’ve been on this ship a perigee and I feel like someone’s been at my pan with a gaper brush. Here, guys, stop doing such sterling impressions of scumfuckingly useless layabouts and help me peel Eridan off the floor, he needs attention.”
The apprentice and a burly midshipman come over and helps lever him up, but when he’s standing upright he makes an awful, grating cry, and clutches at his stomach.
“Did she hurt him there?” the apprentice asks.
“No, it’s just, it’s just my—oh my god,” Eridan whimpers. “Kar. Oh my god.”
“Oh my god,” you repeat.
“Fuck,” he whimpers, and stares down at you with a look of deep, terrified horror.
“Okay,” you say. “Okay, uh. We’re going back to my quarters.”
“Cookie—sir—he should go to the medical bay—”
“We’re going back to my quarters,” you hiss, getting up in the apprentice’s face. “You want to fight about that? Now? With me?.
He does not want to fight about it. He’s a head taller and four castes higher and you’re not actually sure where ‘grumpiest fucking cook in the entire parsec’ ranks on a smuggling ship, but he’s evidently heard about the incident with the frying pan and he just nods really fast. Ordinarily you’d feel shitty about having to scare the mentally infirm, but your matesprit’s hurt and may or may not have grubs eating through his guts at this very moment, so you turn around to clear a path and are confronted with a panicky mob. They’re all in one phase or another of realizing they’ve been being merrily skullfucked for fuck knows how long, and they’re all staring at you. Some of them are even wringing their hands. You have papped, slapped, fed, harangued, menaced, blackmailed, dosed with tea, dosed with moonshine, withheld moonshine, bulge-blocked, put out for, or frying panned pretty much each and every crew member on this ship in the span of one truly exhausting perigee, and this is your reward. Now, in your greatest hour of need, you get to be a lusus to forty-something grown-ass adults.
“Okay,” you growl. “You, get me the electric kettle from the galley, you, get me the sterilizer from the medical bay, you, get me as much topical anaesthetic as you can carry and you get me all the dermal regenerative. Everyone else had better figure out a job and do it or so help me I will acquaint your putrescently slack asses with my favorite side of the fucking airlocks. Move!”
Eridan makes a truly awful noise, and you clutch his hand.
*
No one will leave you alone. It’s a fucking nightmare, you feel like it’s your first berth offplanet all over again, scared and sore and clueless. Eridan fills up and then crouches in the little ablution trap off your block, then, coherency spent, he gives himself over to twitching and moaning and generally freaking out. You keep trying to clear people out of the chamber but they keep barging back in, demanding you tell them what to do. You work on gluing Eridan’s face back together in between his fits of shuddering and crying, and issue a steady stream of commands and invective. Who the fuck knew running a ship involved this much shouting?
“Holy shit, what the fuck is that,” the first gunnery officer says. “Ampora, mate, the fuck are you up to?”
You look back down to see, in the water, between your matesprit’s legs
And they’re just
There’s
You
They don’t even leave you alone after you’ve fainted. You come to with Eridan patting your face, wetly, and someone else squeezing your hand.
“He has spells,” Eridan’s saying. “Mad as, hnnn, ow, ow, mad as a cheese rifle.”
“Yeah, well, he would be. He’s taken up with you, you daft egg-layin’ bastard,” the gunnery officer says cheerily. “Ah, Cookie, there you are. So what was that you wanted about priming the antimatter cannons?”
You moan. “We’re cutting through a patch of bad space, aren’t we?”
“It’s inefficient—”
“No, me trying to fuck you through the aural canal is ineficient, you obscenely cheery shitstack,” you snap. “You don’t enough brain matter to properly cradle my enormous bone-bulge. The last thing we need is anyone getting the drop on us now, I am having a lot of personal crisis right at this moment and want to to know that I am surrounded by very large guns that are all turned on. Go turn them on. This is not negotiable. You’re dismissed.”
The gunnery officer grins, salutes, hesitates, and ducks down to cup Eridan’s less damaged cheek.
“Get well soon, Ampora,” he blurts out, then scurries away, his ears bright green.
Eridan’s gone violet. “Um,” he says, and giggles weirdly. “Wow.”
You moan, and contemplate fainting again. It was very peaceful.
“Okay,” you sigh, “so how many people know you’re, um, you know, by now?”
“Well I thought about telling everyone I was just lavishly crappin’ myself for funsies, but it seemed kinda, owwww untenable,” Eridan says. He’s absently touching the side of his face. “So basically everyone knows I’m um, you know.”
“Eridan!”
“Karkat! You’re a mutant and they think you’re cute, my weird shit is just gonna have to be one more thing we get to deal with. If you’re dead set on bein’ a paranoid bastard get someone to bring me my gun. I’ll shoot anyone as looks at you crosseyed.”
Eridan pets your hair, then goes into another fit of horrific whimpering. The air is getting muggy and smells deeply weird, not like sex, but not...not like it. A bitter, bloody kind of smell, gross and alive.
Someone else sticks their head through the bathroom door. They have a clipboard.
“About the hoofbeasts, sir,” they say nervously.
“Get Eridan his gun,” you tell them. “I’m going to have him shoot people for me.”
“Um,” they say. “Okay, sure, Cookie, whatever you like. But about the hoofbeasts—”
No one brings either of you a gun. But there are a lot more clipboards.
*
You lie with Eridan on your ablution chamber’s floor. Things are blissfully quiet.
“I can’t believe you had all this in you,” you croak.
“Mmm,” he says tiredly, and stirs his claws through the amazing pile of eggs floating in the trap. “Felt like more, comin’ out.”
“It’s still so gross,” you say. You can’t quite bring yourself to touch one. There’s dozens, each of them a bit smaller than your clenched fist and red as rubies, with a dark yolk at the center. With the trap drained and refilled a few times the water’s clear and the eggs are fucking beautiful, like bubbles of fire. It doesn’t feel real, but at the same time it feels like this is the realest thing to ever have happened to you.
“We need to figure out what to do,” you murmur. “We need to offload those damn hoofbeasts, and make up a list of everything that needs replenishing at port, and sort out who’s owed what pay and what the Quartermaster was doing with all of it, and what the fuck are we going to do with all these eggs, we can’t take care of eggs, how the hell do we take care of eggs, and we need to get together and appoint a new Captain—”
“You’re the Captain,” Eridan says.
“Like hell,” you say. “Me?”
He just laughs. “Come on, you bossy little shit, like you’d let anyone else give orders. Especially now that you gotta help me sort out what the fuck to do with all our eggs.”
Somehow it’s the word our that really gets to you. You sit up and stare into the tub, all those floating red globes.
You reach into the cool water and pick up an egg. It’s slick and squishy, and heavier than you thought it’d be. It could be a kid someday, crouching at a cavern’s mouth, staring out at the whole rest of the universe, if you get the near future arranged right. You’re never going to look at cluckbeast ovum the same way again. You put it back in the water and then you just can’t stop touching, stroking your fingers over the strange slippery surface of each egg. Fifty two eggs. You can’t believe they all fit, that Eridan managed to get big enough to encompass this many little potential people inside him. God, you hope at least a few of them do better than you have. You hope they got his teeth.
“Hey, you okay?” Eridan says, and you realize you’re crying.
“I think so,” you whisper, and wipe at your face. “This is just the weirdest thing that has ever happened at me. Are you okay?”
“I hurt like hell,” he says frankly. “But yeah. I’m great. I just fuckin laid your eggs, Kar. I’m amazin’.”
“You’re awful,” you say. “I can’t believe you did that to yourself. I’ll never forgive you. I just. I. Thank you. You mad bastard. Thank you.”
You turn and kiss him, careful of his cuts, and then you can’t stop. He rolls over, gingerly, and gathers you up against himself, strokes between your legs.
“My brave love,” he says, squeezing you, “I got you, you brilliant thing, I got you. We made it.”
You’re gasping, arms wrapped around his neck, desperate for more of his mouth, his clever fingers, and he drives you to spill yourself across his sweaty, blood-stained shirt so quickly you’re almost ashamed. But you love him so much it kind of hurts and so it’s okay, that he knows you so well, that he can play you this easily.
“I told you,” he says. “I told you we’d make it, Captain.”
Captain. God, you do like the sound of it, it’s lightsweeps better than Cookie. Your six-sweeps-old self would probably dislocate his arm trying to pat himself on the back for that one. You always did kind of furtively hope you’d make something of yourself, somehow.
“Now we just gotta make it back home,” you murmur.
Eridan doesn’t even startle. He just lies back, and tucks you up against his side. “Yeah?” he says comfortably. “You reckon?”
“We’ve got a smuggling ship, don’t we,” you say. “And a crew that isn’t half bad at not being completely awful. Bet we can sneak a bath tub’s worth of eggs back into the brooding caverns.”
“And we’ll get paid next run, huh?” he chuckles. You elbow him, gently.
“I’ll pay the crew myself, if I can’t figure out how to make a suicide run back to the homeworld profitable. Or I’ll just... I dunno, hit everyone a lot and scream. They seem to like it.”
“They like you.”
“They’re crazy. We’re all crazy. Space makes you crazy. I wish we were told.”
“I’m glad we weren’t,” Eridan says. “It was fun findin’ out.”
“Bite your tongue. God, just. Eridan, we have eggs. You made eggs, we have eggs. Our eggs. We need to hire a hacker, or something. The ones that survive the trials’re gonna need allowances and shit. They’re gonna need...” you yawn, “...hives...” you yawn again.
“Hush.”
“Gonna need lusii....”
Eridan picks you up, slings you over his shoulder, and limps heavily off to your recuperacoon.
“Hush,” he says, settling into the slime. “It’ll work out. We’ll work it out. We’ll all work it out.”
“Yeah,” you agree. He kisses you and you yawn, awkwardly, gigglingly, around his tongue. God, you’ve got so much work to do. You’re looking forward to it so much.
You hold each other tight.
*
So raise a glass to turnings of the season
And watch it as it arcs towards the sun
And you must bear your neighbor's burden within reason
And your labors will be borne when all is done
—The Decemberists, Don't Carry It All