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She knew he wasn’t going to be perfect when she came up from underwater for him.
Feferi has heard that there are some people who seem to be vocally under the impression that she is fooling herself about Sollux Captor’s personality and that as soon as he slips up and stops hiding it from her she is going to leave him in a fit of disgust. That she thinks he is the most amazing person she’s ever met (which he is, but that doesn’t mean she worships the ground he walks on) and that she is completely, blindly infatuated with him. That as soon as she is ‘disillusioned’ about what an asshole he is on a regular basis, even to the people he likes, she will see the error of her ways and leave him.
This is bullshit.
Feferi Peixes is not an idiot. She knows who she’s quadranted to; a snappish, short-tempered, easily-depressed and workaholic psionic with far too many burdens in the fire. She knows he gets headaches when he works too hard, which is always—less headaches, and not as bad, after the battle that won Feferi the position of empress and her freedom, but still bad enough and frequent enough to make him miserable and temperamental by most mornings. She knows when Sollux works so long and hard his horns start sparking and he lives off of sugar and caffeine, she has to be patient and wait for the right moment to help.
This is the worst she’s ever seen him.
Sollux has closed himself in his room with hundreds of tiny wiring components and pieces of beeswax and something he’s recently developed that he’s calling ‘silicomb’, and he doesn’t come out for meals, to do his work or to sleep. Nepeta Leijon, the council spymistress, is tasked with checking on him; after a day and a night she reports, through mysterious sources, that he has not slept for at least three days.
Karkat attempts to go up to Sollux’s room and yell at him. Sollux picks him up with his brain, carries him outside the door and dumps him there, all without looking up from his work. It is generally acknowledged, despite all protests to the contrary, that Karkat and Sollux are best friends. If Karkat can’t do it…
…the council gives the matter entirely to Sollux’s matesprit, and wash their hands of the problem.
Feferi lets Sollux overwork himself for a week. That’s as far as she knows he can stretch himself and still recover quickly, and she respects that sometimes he has to do this to himself, to catch the sparks of his genius and pull his brain together to focus. She’s not his moirail, she can let him run himself down a little. And if he pulls himself together before the end of the week, then she won’t be needed.
…she should have known that was never going to be an option.
It’s one week after Sollux slammed his door shut and vanished from the realm of the living and sane, and here Feferi is, standing in the door of the respiteblock. It’s fascinating, watching him try pieces of wax and honeycomb, fingers darting over the parts and tools laid out on his desk. For someone who’s blind he is remarkably dexterous, and he knows where every single component goes and where he’s laid it. It’s amazing, watching him work.
She sighs and walks forward. He doesn’t seem to notice her at first—not even when she’s standing directly behind him. But she stands there, waiting, and eventually he half-cocks his head to one side, pausing for a second in his work. They don’t greet each other—he springs back into action a moment later, acknowledgement done with.
She reaches out and digs her thumbs into his back.
He makes a ridiculous, startled chirping noise and jumps, but she just keeps rubbing his back when he tries to turn around and eventually he stops trying to give her his blind, startled glare and just huffs and goes back to working, determined. Oh, he is stubborn as a clam but she is not going to be swayed this time. Of course, she could just pick him up, throw him over one shoulder and carry him to his bed. He would need a sopor patch to convince him to stay there, but that wouldn’t be hard either.
But she’s not going to do it like that. That would be cheating. Feferi squares her shoulders and digs into his back a little harder, right in the hollow of his shoulderblades where the knots are the worst. She gets a satisfying, stifled inhale as his hands spasm and his back arches a little bit. He just wants to go to bed so bad and he’s not letting himself. It is utterly pitiful and kind of adorable.
…really, though, his back is a complete mess of knots. Feferi frowns and moves up his back to the back of his neck, which makes him shiver and almost fumble a chunk of wax and wiring. She muffles a giggle and then, hesitantly, runs her nails over his scalp. Different reaction. Instead of sudden tension, sudden relaxation, all through every bony inch of his body, like a shudder in reverse. Then he tenses up again. It’s like a nonverbal argument—you’re tired—no I’m not! You’ve been working too long—I’m fine!
…except she has a not-very-secret weapon and he has to know it. And the fact that he isn’t cutting her off before she can use it means she has all but won already. He wants to be convinced to give up and go to sleep, but he’s going to fight it because he’s a grouch and an idiot and he just loves to make life harder for himself. Feferi grins. Checkmate. She stays there for five or six minutes, rubbing slow circles on his scalp and the back of his neck, and then just when she can feel him tensing up to sit up and tell her to stop, she trails her nails up and rubs slowly at the bases of his small set of horns.
He resists for all of a second and a half before he gives up and melts, sprawling back in his chair with an irritated sigh that somehow ends more contented than irritated. He tilts his head back into her hands. “You are fucking evil,” he mumbles, and shivers, all bony limbs and exhaustion. “…how long have I—?”
“A week,” Feferi tells him quietly—keeping her voice low, not breaking the peace of the moment, and he looks like he wants to freak out about that for a second before she presses a little harder and the relaxation washes over him again in a wave. (It’s a submission reflex and it’s an incredibly intimate thing to trigger in someone, and the thought that he trusts her to do this still makes her feel like turning him around and just smothering him in kisses every single time.) She’s had her horns rubbed for her before—she doesn’t remember much of anything except feeling really good and then feeling nothing but pink, happy fog for a while. Wiped out, peaceful happiness. No wonder this is usually a pale thing to do—she can’t imagine a single troll in the world who wouldn’t relax for a feeling like that.
“…I’m getting somewhere, FF…” He tries to sit up, but she hooks her fingers around his front set of horns and pulls him back and he only keeps trying for a few seconds before he slumps back and closes his eyes, raising one heavy hand to stifle a yawn. “I’m—fffinally getting somewhere, just a few more—”
“No,” she says gently, and he groans, pinching the bridge of his nose and then letting his hand flop bonelessly back down to his side. “You are worrying everyone! Come on, Sollux. We both know you are glubbing exhausted.”
“I’m not glubbing anything,” he complains, but half-heartedly. “Come on, I eel just fine. I—dammit.”
Feferi giggles and kisses the top of his head. Sollux grumbles wordlessly.
“Come on,” she repeats, and slides her arms around his neck, snuggling against the warmth of his back. “Dear heart.”
He turns yellow at that, all the way to the tips of his ears. “You are fucking cheesy,” he mutters, but she sees the smile trying to tug at the corners of his mouth. She kisses the thin skin right behind one ear and he jumps and then presses back into her arms.
“Only because I know you like it,” she whispers back, and nuzzles her face against the back of his neck, her voice muffled, punctuating words with kisses. “—come on…let’s go to bed. Sollux. Dear heart. Honeybee…”
“Fuck,” he mumbles, and half-turns himself around in his chair, leaning up to lazily return her kisses. She leans down, pulls and his chair swivels around to face her, the half-built mainframe on the desk completely forgotten. “—you have to stop calling me that.”
“No, I reel-y don’t,” she tells him seriously, and kisses his shadowed, blind-black eyes, laughing. “—because it’s your favorite. Don’t even lie, sweet heart. You love it when I call you that. I did experiments.”
“Mm?” The last of the tension is going out of him—he’s melting into the hazy, happy, exhausted stage now, faint smiles between slow kisses. She goes back to petting his horns, and he makes an appreciative noise that she would never get out of him if he was completely awake.
“Of course,” she says, and then she twists around and he yelps as she scoops him up in her arms, an awkward mess of long, bony arms and legs. “—and when I call you that, you are eighty-seven percent more likely to kiss me.” She lifts him higher as he starts to protest half-heartedly, kisses him again, long and deep and slow until he stops arguing. “...two sopor patches. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
“One,” he croaks, but he’s already going limp, too exhausted to even object to being carried.
“Two, and I bring up breakfast,” she counters, and he groans. “Done?”
“…done.”
She starts walking, slow, careful not to jostle him, towards the next room over. “And I wouldn’t worry about other people finding out I call you that, by the way.”
He cracks open one eye as though it will help him see her, then groans and closes it again as she lays him down and sticks the bright green patches in the crook of his elbow. He makes a questioning, vague sound and then yawns cavernously, already more than half asleep. “…nnt? Why…?”
“…because most of them already know,” Feferi confides, but he doesn’t answer or react. When she leans down over him he’s fast asleep, fully clothed and curled up awkwardly with no covers. She smiles, kisses his forehead one last time, pulls a sheet over him and flicks off the lights.
--
Sollux wakes up more than two nights later with piles of memos pinned to the door in Karkat’s unmistakably practical, blocky, all-caps writing, and each and every one of them starts the same way.
HEY, HONEYBEE.
The fight is legendary.