Chapter Text
The Author: Welcome.
You are THE AUTHOR. You enjoy writing fanfiction of a romantic and epic nature, especially alternate universes and crossovers like this one. You will be directing much of this story, although not all of it because your stories have a tendency to get away from you. What will you do?
TA: Introduce.
Your name is THE READER. You enjoy reading stories of a romantic and epic nature. Or maybe you just have nothing better to do. Who knows? Not the author. You will be directing much of this story, but only symbolically because this story takes its cues from the webcomic that inspired it. But you’re getting tired of this introduction bullshit. You’re ready to get to the real deal.
The Reader: Read.
--
The moon is setting by the time the fishing boats come in.
The sea has been generous today. It’s as though something has stirred the water and sent the fish spinning, flurrying up to the nets above. The boats bob at anchorage now, or lie on their sides in the side, like great diurnal beasts that have done their day’s work and are now sleeping off the harsh Alternian sun. The fishermen have gone to catch a few spare hours of sleep.
Only one figure is left.
The fisherman threads his way through the boats, checks knots and inspects every boat for damage. Occasionally he’ll stop and shake his head in disgust at a slack, lopsided sail or jumble of tangled nets, and the offending items glow flickering red and blue and rearrange themselves.
He's one of the most powerful men in the city. He considers this one of his greatest responsibilities.
He’s most of the way down the beach when something pale moves at the corner of his vision and he freezes, his eyes sparking briefly before he calms himself and turns slowly to look. It’s not the tentacle of some sea creature here to snag a landdwelling snack, like he immediately thought. It’s small and almost white, and still several yards away, but it's unmistakably a troll’s hand. The rest of the hand's owner is hidden behind one of the beached ships; as he watches, the fingers stir slightly again, and then fall still.
The fisherman analyzes the situation.
It's not uncommon for his fellow psionics to exhaust both their minds and bodies hauling nets and rigging and working long nights, and it's possible one of the fishers was last to get off the boat and fell unconscious from the strain. If so, it's a miracle they haven't been hauled off into the water for a meal yet, and every second they lie unconscious this near the water's edge is a risk.
On the other hand…
There are creatures in the ocean that can change their colors and shapes. There are creatures smart enough to use cutting tools to ruin nets when they’re left out too long, releasing any catches that aren’t hauled in fast enough. There are creatures smart enough to take a troll’s dead arm and use it like bait in a hunter’s trap. And he knows, as a pure, empirical fact, that the republic cannot afford to lose him.
He can’t get too close. So he does the next best thing.
The boats creak and moan as he hooks his hands in the air and calls them out of their beds of sand and water, focusing the electric-ozone tingle in his eyes into physical force. The boats shudder but don’t move—he grits his teeth and snarls at them, dragging his hands through air that feels like wet sand. Finally, they rise, groaning as they're dragged across the sand.
The hand doesn't belong to a sea monster. It belongs to a troll, a pale, limp body collapsed halfway out of the surf. The fisherman stares for a second before the trembling in his arms and the erratic spark of his eyes reminds him how severely he's already depleted his powers tonight. He lowers the boats back into the sand as gently as possible and starts forward toward the collapsed troll; she's sturdily built, bloodlessly pale even though he can't see any blood in the surf around her. Her hair is a soaking tangle full of sand and brine and her horns curve gracefully outward.
She's also naked. She's wearing a pretty startling amount of gold jewelry, but she's definitely completely naked, also. That's something that's happening.
The fisherman does not allow himself to be distracted by this. At all. In any way. If his face goes mustard yellow in the last rays of the setting sun, there's nobody there to see except the mysterious drifter. He shakes the shock off a moment later, wincing as the movement sends a jolt of pain down his horns and through his skull—and leans over to look down at her. Her face is obscured by her hair, but at least it isn’t turned into the sand. He’s had sand under his eyelids before. It’s not an experience he would wish on anyone else.
The girl is breathing, steadily, but in sharp little shivers that make him uneasy. It seems likely she's been in the water for a while, and the sea is still icy from the lingering chill of the dark season. He has to get her back to somewhere warm.
She's wearing a lot of gold. Gold jewelry isn't unheard-of in warmblood territory, but that amount of bracelets, armlets and necklaces…that's highblood through and through. He doesn't want to bring a highblood back into the city, even a concussed highblood weak from a long naked swim in icy water. They have enough problems with the highbloods at the border without inviting them into the heart of the capitol.
The girl isn't bleeding blue from the cuts and scrapes on her bare skin, though. She's not even bleeding purple.
She’s not bleeding at all.
A wave washes up high enough to stir the drifter's tangled hair, and the fisherman shakes his head again, reaches out and lifts her unconscious body in a crackle of red and blue sparks. She stirs again as she's pulled up onto drier, warmer sand, and then coughs weakly and pushes herself up as he lets go again, still waiting warily for a trap. It's rapidly growing too dark to make out details, and when she opens her eyes he can't make out their color; he edges closer, and she looks dizzily around and then notices him and staggers up in one stumbling rush, catching both his arms and holding on hard, legs wobbling under her weight. Her hands feel as cold as the seawater, freezing cold and strong—his bones creak under her grip.
He’s just strong enough to go out with the boats and haul in the nets, but he’s always been built slight and bony and it’s a miracle he doesn’t overbalance. In the end, when all the stumbling and struggling is over, he’s upright and she’s clinging to him, completely naked and staring up at him with a weird look in her dark eyes. She looks…excited to see him. Except he's never seen her before in his life.
“You wath…wasshhhhed up on the…beach,” he says carefully, struggling to keep the hint of a hissing lisp out of his voice. “Are you okay?”
She opens and shuts her mouth, but all that comes out is a strange, throaty hissing sound. She blinks like it's a surprise, raises a hand to her throat and tries again—more breathy wordless noises. She lets go of him all at once, and starts looking herself over instead, like she's trying to find something—lifts up one foot shakily, stares at it, and then almost falls over. Then, like an afterthought, abruptly captchalogues every piece of her golden jewelry at once, with a faint pop.
She looks up and gives him a slightly nervous grin full of even, pointed white teeth.
"What the fuck," says the fisherman.
The drifter doesn't answer, just looks at him and smiles. A flash of abrupt anger jolts through him—what the fuck is she ignoring me I just saved her life—he stops himself just as he's opening his mouth. He doesn't just let his mood swings jerk him around anymore, he's not a wriggler, he's an adult and he can act like one, dammit. He takes a steadying breath, wincing at the never-ceasing ache behind his eyes, and says, as calmly as he can manage, "You can't talk?"
She shakes her head sadly.
“Fine." He should probably offer her his coat or something. Dammit. No. Wait. He doesn’t have his coat. Did he bring his coat? Shit. His head hurt even worse than normal this afternoon, and trying to concentrate is interminable.
He spends a moment rifling through his sylladex before he finally digs out a really shitty coat. It would have been faster, but the mystery girl from the sea is still leaning on him and wobbling all over the place, trying out her legs like she’s never had any before. She keeps wincing when she puts weight on them; maybe she got injured during the shipwreck…she must have been shipwrecked, right?
Whatever.
He untangles the really shitty coat, which has somehow managed to tie itself into a knot, and throws it around the girl’s shoulders. She jumps and stares at the cloth like it’s some kind of creature from the deep sea who intends to eat her. Then she stares up at him, and gives him a wide, brilliant smile.
Something stutters a little inside of him at that; something he can’t name and doesn’t want to think about. It makes him feel like he can’t breathe. The first time she’d smiled she had been anxious, and uncomfortable, but this one makes her face light up and makes him really fucking uneasy, honestly.
“What are you th—smiling about?” he snaps, and she winces, ears twitching, smile falling. She's got long ears, and there are scars striped along the rim of them, and down the sides of her jaw, like something's been chopped roughly away. Maybe she's an escaped highblood slave? He's heard of bluebloods and purplebloods who would cut up their slaves just for fun. It doesn't explain how she would've ended up on this shore, miles from the closest highblood territory, but it does make him feel like more of an asshole for snapping.
He’s thinking too much, like he always does. The fisherman pulls the really shitty coat around her, and then pulls her arm around his shoulders and starts trudging toward the distant hivestems of the warmblood capitol.
By the time he gets to the Consulate in the city center and shoves past the first few orderlies up and about, he's in a foul mood and his vision is full of sparks and pain. People keep calling after him, “Sir!” and “Mr. Captor!” and, in one case, “—Sollux, who’s—?!” But he snarls at anyone who gets in his way and shoves past them. Everything hurts, even moving. Especially moving. The girl should be light, easy to carry, but he's been lifting and hauling and using his powers since early in the morning and she feels like she’s made of solid lead.
One of the perks of being on the council in charge of the entire goddamn city: when he puts up his DO NOT FUCKIING DIISTURB sign he's not fuckiing diisturbed. He reaches out with his psionics to flip the card up as he shoulders his way through the door, and even that tiny amount of effort feels like it's trying to drag his brain out through his eye sockets. This is going to be a bad night, he can already tell. He’s never liked coming in so late he has to sleep in the nighttime, but trying to sleep with one of his headaches? Shit.
The girl is unconscious, or sleeping, or just resting all of her weight on him, and he bares his teeth in a jab of anger and dumps her unceremoniously on one of his couches. Then he staggers to a pile of spare wires and pillows and old clothes across the room and curls up as small as he possibly can. The faint glimmer of the lamp on the table is dimmed to its lowest setting, but even that light digs white-hot screws into the base of his horns and lacerates his eyesockets. He groans again and just sits still, concentrating on breathing. Once he feels a little better he’ll go sleep somewhere more hospitable, but he’s not going to vomit all over his respite block again, it’s not going to happen. He just needs to—oh Sufferer dammit it hurts—
It feels like nights later, but really it’s probably closer to an hour when he hears the soft shifting of cloth. He opens one watering eye and sees the girl he rescued sitting slowly up on the couch, looking around. As soon as she sees him she smiles at him, and then seems immediately to notice his state of discomfort (Discomfort? Ha. Hahaha. FUCK). She sits up and swings her legs off of the couch awkwardly, takes a deep breath, and pushes forward as though she’s trying to stand.
She almost topples over, but he can barely muster up the energy to care, let alone to lurch forward and try to grab her. He just huddles in his shitty, tiny pile of shit and clutches his head, feeling his eyes spark and agony throb in brilliant spiderwebs through his skull. He just concentrates on breathing. (In and out, in and out.)
She gets upright after a few moments of staggering, and although her walk still looks painful, she limps forward to him and settles down next to him on the ground next to the shitty pile. He watches her warily, and for a while she just looks steadily back at him. And then she holds out her hands, palms up, in a gesture of peace.
That gesture used to be common, but that was fifty sweeps ago, before the Great Suffering. The only reason Sollux knows it at all is because the last troll who tried to pacify an enemy with it never got his hands back. Every warmblooded troll knows the story of the Sufferer, and the red-hot shackles.
The highbloods still use the peace gesture, but ever since then the lowbloods haven't bothered. The court of the Grand Highblood made it clear how much of a shit they gave about peace offerings. There isn’t a single wiggler who isn’t raised knowing better.
But his mysterious drifter just sits there, hands held out, with an innocent smile on her face.
“What do you want?” Sollux tries to say, but it comes out as a raspy, hoarse little croak. The girl from the ocean cocks her head to one side, and scoots a little closer, as though testing to see if he’ll snap at her. She watches him clutch at his hair and chew his lip bloody, and seems to understand.
“Hhhh?” She breathes questioningly, and she points to her head and grimaces in pain. “Hhhh?”
“Well what the hell do you think ith wrong?!” Sollux snarls, forcing the words out on a sudden spasm of rage. The girl looks chagrined and looks quickly away. Sollux tries to glare but them the echo of his own voice seems to reverberate around his skull—he groans again and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees red and blue fireworks. “Ahhhh, dammit dammit f—!”
Cold hands touch his. Sollux jumps, but the hands don’t move, just rest there, as though the girl is asking permission. He sits still, frozen, waiting for her to make a move.
She waits for several long, long seconds, and then the hands leave his and go instead to his temples, rubbing slow circles. Sollux takes a deep breath to yell, forgetting that it will make the pain worse; he’s done this before, it barely even scratches the surface of—
Cold water floods into his bones.
The white heat of the pain behind his eyes goes out like a quenched flame, and he hears himself make a distant, strangled noise as every muscle in his body goes limp with disbelieving relief. There are distant twinges still bouncing around in his head, like the echo of the agony from moments before, but the pain is gone.
The girl takes her hands away, and Sollux raises his head slowly to look at her. She makes another one of those soft, familiar-sounding noises, and for the first time, away from the breaking waves, Sollux recognizes it. It’s a sound he’s heard almost every day of his life for the past eight sweeps, so often and so incessantly that the noise barely registers with him anymore.
The girl opens her mouth in a mute pantomime of a laugh, and the sound of the ocean pours out instead.
TR: Go back.
You go back, and you’re—
—under the water, deep, deep under the water, slimy darkness stirs, illuminated by floating baubles of rich violet light and the flashing of red and blue eyes.
"You’ve fallen in love…with a land-dweller?" The Sea Witch’s tentacles slide over the floor of her cave, her silhouette spangled with golden necklaces, rings, armbands, and a gloriously ornate golden crown, set with a single glimmering stone in royal purple. Her two eel slaves slither through the water, mirror images of sinuous threat. They would be identical if it weren’t for their black, blind eyes—one on the right, one on the left. Their remaining eyes are drifting points of brilliant red and piercing blue. "You poor, unfortunate shoal…"
Her smile is a collection of glittering, pearly-white fangs in the darkness.
"But we get that," she whispers to her eels, and they turn their heads, moving in such perfect unison it’s like seeing double, like they’re two halves of a single whole. "We know how that goes…don’t we, my love?"
TR: Further back.
TR: Farther up.
—
The light is brighter here. Golden and twilight orange, rippling through the water. Even the sun that can sear out a trolls eyes at a glance and bakes corpses to bleached bone can't burn or blind under the water.
Just to be sure though, the seadwellers don’t look up.
The princess of the empire under the waves flickers through her palace, a flash of silvery skin and golden jewelry and a wave of silky black hair. The palace guards are good, but they’re slow, so slow compared to her, with her fuchsia blood and quicksilver speed, and she flickers past them so fast they barely have the time to notice she’s there before she’s gone again.
There was a storm today. The spoils have been spectacular.
Princess Feferi Peixes, Heir Apparent of the Sea Kingdom Most Glorious, princess of all the oceans and seas, mistress of the currents, does a happy little flapping dance in the corridor of her palace and lets out an undignified little squeak of glee, holding her bag to her chest. Today’s hunt through the wrecks around the shore has kept her out all day, but it's also yielded results beyond what she could have hoped. She can’t wait to tell—
“Fef!”
Eridan Ampora, Prince Regent of the Sea Kingdom Most Glorious, greatest hunter under the sea, comes tumbling to an undignified halt in front of her and gives her a furious, far-sighted glare, his gills fluttering and rippling from the exertion of chasing her. She didn’t even notice he was behind her and she wasn’t even swimming at her top speed—but then again, it looks like he's been out hunting, tonight. There’s a faint purple bruise on his shoulder from the tremendous recoil of Ahab’s Crosshairs, so he must have been after something big.
Feferi glubs her gills and does her best to look appropriately chagrined, even though she suspects it doesn't really work at all.
“W-what the hell?!” Eridan gasps, and she really winces this time; his accent always gets much stronger when he’s upset, and if she can hear every doubled ‘w’ today. He definitely knows where she’s been, oh cod he’s going to be insufferable…
But today she has something that just might cheer him up.
“Hello Eridan!” She says brightly, and she can’t hide the undignified trill to the ‘e’—Ehhhridan!—he must notice that she’s excited, because at least the bony strip of fin down his back subsides again. He can never be too awfully angry at her if she’s excited. “You’ll never guess what I found!”
“Found because you been trawlin’ seawrecks again,” says Eridan sharply, but the wavy accent has died back down a little and he sounds slightly more in control. He seems to like the drama of the accent and he refuses to try training it out of his speech entirely, but he also maintains that it’s undignified for a prince regent to bubble his words like a common market tradesman. “Cod’s sake, Fef, it’s dangerous up there! It’s sunset, you’ve been out all mornin’—”
Feferi ignores this just like she always does, and reaches down into her bag, pulling out her best find with a flourish.
Eridan waits for a few seconds as she holds it up and then says, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “Oh yeah, just wonderful, somefin shiny and blurry. You shore know how to wow a guy.”
Feferi flickers forward through the water and balances the landdweller devices neatly on the bridge of his nose. Eridan blinks at her through the thin glass, his eyes suddenly a little too large, and she giggles at the look of incomprehension on his face.
“Everybody knows it makes you mad you can’t sea very shell!” She says cheerfully, and does a little spin in the water. “Are they working can you see me? Eridan?”
“What…?” He takes the things off and holds them at arm’s length, squinting at them; the black, square frames and the glinting glass inside them. “How the hell did they do that?”
“I don’t know!” Feferi takes them from him and balances them on the bridge of her own nose, tucking the hooked parts awkwardly behind her earfins. The world goes into strange, sharp focus, too clear for her eyes, and then resettles itself as she takes them off. “They just tell your eyes how to see better!” The word ‘see’ is a squeak of delight; Eridan winces a little but takes the glass things back and puts them gingerly back on, staring at Feferi.
It occurs to her suddenly that he’s probably seeing her clearly and up close for the first time. She fidgets a little, wishing suddenly that she could have had time to put on the rest of her imperial gold—or at least comb out her hair. He's been out and about as well, he's not exactly in formal regalia, but his arms and wrists and neck and waist are all glittering with gold. Eridan never goes out without making sure he looks perfect first. He says it’s his duty as Prince Regent to appear stylish and composed in front of the peasantry, but Feferi is pretty sure (pretty shore, heheh) that he just likes to dress up. He’s even wearing his earrings, and all she’s got on is her crown and a golden bracelet on one wrist.
He’s still staring at her, mouth open. His face looks slightly purple, but when she leans in closer to check, concerned, he clears his throat roughly and backs away.
“…A course, I can’t wear them in public,” he says awkwardly, and then, as Feferi’s fins droop despondently, he adds “…thanks, Fef,” and reaches out, sudden and strangely soft, to brush a flowing lock of hair away from her face.
Then he’s gone again, the landdweller eye-glasses hooked over one of his delicate golden belts, leaving Feferi to stare after him.
She…doesn’t want to think about this now. Not right now. Not about why he was staring at her, not about the way he sounded almost surprised when he thanked her, like he was thinking something he’d never thought or expected to think.
And anyway…
…she has somewhere she needs to go.
—
TR: Follow her to the surface.
Feferi surfaces with a gasp of air, on the bank of the seagull island. The air is full of spiraling birds, disturbed from their rest by the sudden splash and gasp of a seadweller surfacing nearby, and the water is unpleasantly murky in her gills at the best of times. Bits of fish, seagull droppings, stray feathers…
Seagull island looms over her; the crashed remains of half a fleet, dragged together into a mess of crushed wood by some great storm sweeps and sweeps ago. Nobody comes here if they can help it. They say it’s cursed by the vicious spirits of the landdwellers who sailed those ships.
Maybe there really are ghosts. Its new occupant, somehow, doesn't seem the type to care.
The moons are starting to rise, but he doesn't seem to be up and about yet. Feferi peers up into the tangled rigging, and finally finds the silhouette of a lanky figure hanging precariously among the torn sails. The ropes and canvas have formed a sort of makeshift hammock, under the shade of a ragged sheet of sailcloth to keep off the sun; in the middle of the mess, almost twenty feet above the ground with a bottle hanging from one slack hand, is the madman of seagull island.
"Gamzee!" Feferi calls out softly. The figure above her snorts and rolls over, miraculously failing to fall to his death on the broken planks below. A rope just happens to snag one of his arms, and he settles down again, bony limbs dangling aimlessly in open space.
It takes him a while to wake up every night. Feferi waits patiently, and eventually Gamzee stretches in his rope hammock and sits up. The rest of the hammock falls apart without him in it, leaving him sitting on a precarious loop of rope, rubbing his eyes and raking his hands at the tangled curls of his hair, staring around at the horizon and the slowly-rising moons with sleepy confusion.
"Gamzee!" Feferi calls again, "Down here! It's me!"
There's another second of blank silence, and then Gamzee gives a cheerful honk! and drops off the loop of rope, snagging another dangling line as he goes, lowering himself from rope to rope until he lands on the ground in a flail of long, lean, rawboned limbs. Feferi's seen it before, but she's always fascinated; legs are so strange to watch in action, almost as strange as the thin, deformed dud slits on his sides, like his body tried to have gills and couldn't figure out how. He doesn't have the right hum and glub to his voice, either—Feferi hasn't talked to enough landwellers to know if that's normal for them, but it sure is weird! Cute, but weird.
Gamzee sidles across the wrecked deck of his home and drops down into a crouch at the water’s edge, peering at her through his hair. “Lil’ sister, you been gone a while!” he says cheerfully, and before he can even ask, Feferi holds up a hand with a salvaged glass bottle in it. Gamzee takes it, tugs out the cork, and drinks half the bottle down in one swift, economical movement. When he lowers it again he looks considerably more awake, but even more mellow than before. He sighs contentedly.
“Gooooood stuff,” he says, drawling the word out lazily, and takes another swig. “Okay. Whatcha got, defiúr?”
Feferi pulls her sack of salvage up out of the water and holds it out, and Gamzee settles down cross-legged in the shallow water at the edge of the deck. Feferi watches his toes twitch as he gropes through the jumble in the bag, and wonders.
“Hey, Gamzee?” She asks eventually, and he makes a distracted little ‘mmm?’ sound as he lays out the last salvaged item in line with the others. “What does it feel like to…to have legs?”
He blinks at her, and then, absentmindedly, takes another drink of wine. Then he settles down with his chin in his hand, his face twisted up in concentration, and goes silent.
Feferi waits. Knowing him, Gamzee will need to marshal his thoughts even to understand the question, let alone to come up with an answer. He’s just staring out to the ocean, thinking and thinking and…
Gamzee lets out an almost inaudible snuffling snore and Feferi sighs. No answers to that one then. Honestly, sometimes she thinks it would be better if she didn’t bring Gamzee any more wine. He’s distant and vague enough when she gets there usually, and the wine usually serves to make him almost completely incomprehensible. But it must be hard, to live out here alone, and she can't really blame him for wanting something to make him feel better. There are things in the water more dangerous than trolls, and if Gamzee has weapons she's never seen them.
“Aw shit, I up and motherfuckin’ zoned out,” declares Gamzee, so suddenly Feferi startles and has to clamp her gills shut to keep from glubbing some horrible gullwater through them. “Sorry. You ever sit and just all get to listening at the ocean?” He cocks his head thoughtfully. “Nah, you’re under it, huh. You’d get a better hear on of its wicked whimsies from the fish and all.” He looks briefly troubled. “Wait, you get your talk on with the fish? ‘Cause I can all stop eatin’ them if—“
“No, Gamzee, we don’t talk to the fish,” says Feferi soothingly. “Now, come on, what can you tell me about these?”
Gamzee nods and focuses on the items laid out in front of him on the deck. He picks them up one at a time, looking at each from every angle—he’s mumbling under his breath—“Caed attú? Caed attú, dethái?”—but even if she could make out clear words or phrases Feferi is sure she couldn’t understand what he’s saying. She pressed him about the language the first time she heard him use it, but all he would tell her is that a lot of people with blood the same color as his use it and she shouldn’t worry about it. He always seems to close off when he mentions his blood color, and Feferi has never dared to ask—but it sounds like they’re very civilized and spiritual to her. Whatever the reason is behind his separation from them, using their language seems to help him think, so she just sits and waits and listens as he examines each piece of flotsam in turn.
“Okay,” he says finally, and Feferi sits up in the water as he lifts up a bundle of thin sheets of something, rolled up and covered in wax. “This is what you got, sister…”
Feferi returns to the palace with a collection of waxed pieces of “paper”, torn into mostly shreds but still occasionally readable, some scraps of a “fabric” that Gamzee, after long thought and a few more swigs of alcohol, hazarded might be silk (all stained and dyed in beautiful gold) a little instrument almost like a single end of her 2x3dentkind that he says they use to eat, two little pieces of metal that are mysteriously attracted to each other by some invisible force Gamzee can’t begin to explain, and the pride of her new collection stashed in her bag at the very bottom.
Gamzee says there are ways on land of making pictures that are exactly like the real thing, and that this is one of them; that this is a ‘photo’ and that he doesn’t know how they work. But he’s pretty sure it’s by miracles.
“It's a miracle, brought you that thing,” he had drawled, and pressed a finger to the young, proud face in the frame, tapping a finger against the glass. “This guy? You better all up and get your rejoice on, lil’ sister, you’re gonna find him.”
The landdweller’s face is almost gaunt, dignified. He has two sets of jagged fangs, white against his lip, long and thin and uneven compared to the clean white triangles of seadweller fangs. His eyes are blank red and blue, pupilless in a way that she knows—from her hasty glimpses of the landdweller fishertrolls—means he’s one of the landdwellers with psychic powers. He has…she blushes at the thought, but thinks it anyway, rebellious…he has beautiful long eyelashes and there’s something about the slim boniness of his neck and folded hands that looks almost delicate. She wonders if all landdwellers are like that—she's never gotten to interact with any besides Gamzee, and even under the water the only person she really gets close to is…
She feels her face warm up and tries to shake the thought off, but it won’t go away. The memory of Eridan staring at her, one hand reaching out to brush her hair out of her face keeps swimming in front of her eyes.
It’s…it’s not like she finds Eridan…well, attractive—well, actually, the real problem is that she can’t pretend he isn’t, and it still makes her feel strange to compare the two of them. Eridan is broad-shouldered and strong and holds himself with a sort of easy grace, and there are a lot of trolls under the sea that would dream of having him in one of their quadrants, if he wasn't such an ambitious, proud, high-strung worry-wart! But this landdweller has none of that relaxed power to his frame. He stands with his thin, angular shoulders pulled back square and tall and his spine straight. He's tense with dignity, tight with authority, but there's a tiny quirk at the corner of his mouth and a hint of white fangs that might be a smile.
The thin face looks back at her when she closes her eyes, and that night she dreams that everything is candy red and electric blue.