#CHTYTM

[interrogatormentors]

BOOK 2: EVENT 6: Prosecutor's Gambit

One step out of the shower and Sollux already thought of two hundred different reasons why he should turn back from his intended course. Even after the water had scalded the blood and viscera from his flesh, his skin still felt tacky. Only when Aradia grabbed his wrist in a firm hold did he realize he’d buried his claws into the bandages covering his bad arm, trying to dig through the gauze to the healing flesh below. He could still feel stomach acid biting at his skin after digging around for any souvenirs left behind. “...The Surgeons have replaced blood with corrosives before,” he said lamely, but uncurled his fingers all the same. “I should go check.”

“Your skin looked the normal amount of messed up because you never get moonglow when we changed your dressings,” Aradia replied. She let Sollux’s wrist go as they continued walking down unfamiliar halls together. “Your beautiful bone structure will not get acid-washed unless under my supervision or permission! You’re making excuses.”

“Making excuses implies–”

“That you’re scared?” Aradia cocked her head, the slow blink of her lashes almost audible as Sollux pursed his lips. “The big bad interrogatormentor is trying to skedaddle, it seems like. The Sk’dadler, they’ll call you.”

“That’s a stretch.”

“Good thing you’ve got freakishly long arms, then, even if one’s in a sling!” Aradia’s expression fell back into one more serious, the smile dropping from her eyes before it left her lips. “You need to do this. Interrogatormentors found the base, looking for you, and you can’t afford to be on the defensive right now.”

“I’m not the only target. What if they decide the homicidal time bomb is more trouble than it’s worth?”

Aradia reached up, grabbing one of his ears in a sharp pinch that sent a shock down his spine. She grinned, tombstone teeth bared in even rows as she gave him a disciplinary shake like a naughty woofbeast and not a loaded gun. “Then I get a free show as not getting your intel blows up in their faces.”

“They’re your people too. You want them to fail?”

“Our people deserve to fail if they won’t listen to you, Sollux,” Aradia said. She let go of his ear, metal fingers lingering a moment on his jaw as if she couldn’t tell he was moments from biting after manhandling him so carelessly. “A rebellion is all about risks, and you’re one that Karkat and I will take over and over again.” She raised a finger up, and Sollux snapped his mouth shut after starting to protest. “I wish you weren’t so hard on yourself. I saw you. Some things never change. You’re not getting pity points by saying you don’t deserve attention! Karkat might hand those out for free, but I won’t.”

Sollux avoided Aradia’s accusatory scowl, focusing instead on trying to hunch his shoulders in and minimize himself as they passed a random rebellion member who stared openly as they passed. His bad shoulder no longer clicked in its socket, discomfort now localized to his reconstructed hand.  “You’re both too good for me.”

“So many ears and you still can’t listen. Cliches won’t appease me–you have to come play in the dirt with me.” Aradia stopped outside a door, the only one in the hall that had a keypad. She entered in the code with her hand slightly cupped to shield it directly from Sollux’s eye before heading into a room that was thick with voices and agitated pheromones. Sollux himself hovered on the doorway, hesitating. Aradia and Karkat had ruined him; fear wrapped around his neck like a snare that he could not kick his way out of.

“...cannot afford to rush things. Insisting like you are–” Kanaya said from her seat partway down a long table, while Feferi massaged her temples with her eyes closed at the very head opposite the door.

An indigo interrupted her by raising his fist with full intent to slam it into the table, only for Nepeta to fling herself from the opposite side and worm her way under the approaching fist. The indigo’s hand faltered a millimeter above her skull, and Nepeta demurely batted at the quivering fist with the expression of a smug meowbeast knowing it had gotten away with pilfering the pantry. Equius, then, Sollux surmised. The hand came to rest on Nepeta’s face, and she gnawed at his steel-sculpted fingers as he spoke. “Waiting begets complacency. That pissant convinced us–Nepeta, please, some decorum would be appreciated.”

“Apurreciated but denied!” Nepeta chirped. “Quit being a shitsand dirtscraper first.”

“A shi… A–” Equius blustered.

Next to him at the table Vriska fucking Serket made an audible gagging noise, leaning as far as possible on her seat without falling backwards by some misbegotten miracle. A flicker of spite scurried up Sollux’s spine, itching at the wrist around which Aradia’s makeshift bracelet and urging him to remove it to psionically yank the chair completely out from under the smarmy cerulean. She opened her mouth to speak and every muscle in Sollux’s body tensed, a yellow film creeping across the edges of his vision like sickly clingfilm as his pusher began thundering panicked fury that he thought interrogatormentor training had long since locked away. A tunnel yawned open and stretched before him, and Vriska burned bright at the end of it as the walls threatened another cave-in like the one she’d coerced him to bury Aradia under so many sweeps ago.

A hand burst forth from the rubble and alighted upon his clenched jaw, and though it held none of her old warmth the prosthetic digits could not disguise Aradia’s touch. Sollux inhaled sharply through his nose, and the room’s occupants went silent just in time for him to reorient himself with Aradia’s hand at the center of his focus. He curled his uninjured hand into a fist to dig his nails into his palm to further ground himself and prevent this brazen display to fluster him, but to his dismay Aradia sussed out his usual tricks and quietly unfurled his spindly digits joint by joint. Sollux was forced to acknowledge the whole table without a lifeline of pain to shield his emotions, and even Karkat sitting opposite a startled-looking bronze with sweeping wings joined the mass of people pinning him down with their combined gaze. 

Eight people filled the eleven seats arranged around the table, as Nepeta’s abdication of her throne to menace her moirail table-surfing style meant the ninth stood temporarily empty. A twelfth chair covered by a dusty sheet brooded in a neglected corner. No evidence of the dust being disturbed surrounded the shrouded chair–one of the two missing members from the foundational core of rebellion leaders was expected to return, and the fact bronzeblood Tavros Nitram sat between Feferi at the head and Gamzee on his right at a table otherwise following a hemospectrum adherent seating chart told Sollux all he needed about who that was.

A familiar click of the tongue against teeth echoed around the room, and Sollux couldn’t help the way his ears flicked back behind him to try and catch further evidence of Pozoia’s imminent approach before he registered Terezi as the source. The tealblood bared her teeth in a knife-sharp grin, blind eyes boring holes into Sollux’s exposed throat from behind her shades. “Well, well, well, the rabid attack woofbeast of the Empire rouses from his daymares just in time for his trial. Have you got a tight grip on Appleberry Blast’s leash there, little bell pepper?”

“I mean, this could just stay a discussion,” Tavros said, raising his hands in a placating gesture as Karkat started vibrating in his seat. “I don’t think antagonizing–”

“Tavros is right,” Feferi said, also holding out a hand to Karkat. Tavros grimaced, but otherwise allowed the interruption. “We weren’t getting anywhere. Should we take a brief reefcess so I can glub with Aradia here?”

“You keep speaking our language and then managing to say absolutely nothing,” Terezi said, rapping her cane arythmically against the surface in front of her. “Say what you want to say before the jury!”

“Oh my gooooooood, you really are a broken record,” Vriska groaned, craning her head back towards Terezi. “Little pipsqueak wouldn’t survive a second in your wigglerfeed courtroom, this is true, but you can’t just bulldoze your way into that kind of snoozefest. We all deserve to participate in ripping that loser a new one for barging in on us.”

“Every drama needs a peanut gallery,” Terezi snipped back, and Vriska scoffed. Feferi smiled tensely, but her eyelid twitched.

“Sollux can speak for himself,” Aradia said shortly before the fuschiablood could speak. “And he’ll do it at the seat we saved for him.” She slid her hand down Sollux’s face to lead him by the wrist around the table to the two empty seats, located between Nepeta’s vacated seat and Karkat. The mutant’s claws were currently digging into the table with a creaking of metal that had Equius automatically doing a glance over of his own place at the table with hooded eyes. Finding his section undented, he took a sip from the glass Nepeta handed to him before she slithered back across the table to her proper place. Everyone else had water, a few pitchers sitting in the middle of the table to refresh them, but cloudy white swirled within Equius’ glass. The liquid left a gritty film on Equius’ lip that he dabbed away with the back of his knuckles as he made direct, glowering eye contact with Sollux as the latter rounded the outskirts of the room with Aradia. Powdered milk, then. 

Sollux didn’t blink, muscle memory snapping him up into an interrogatormentor’s posture while his shoulders and head dropped by a few degrees–a predator two steps removed from a wild howlbeast sizing up prey as it stalked through the flickering shadows of a dying campfire. Equius’ nostrils flared a bit and Sollux mimicked him instinctively, head cocking very slightly to the side and down. He adjusted his gait and shifted his weight forward so he stalked silently alongside Aradia upon the balls of his feet and towered above the seated trolls he passed behind. Kanaya watched him ghost along out of the corner of her eye, and even Vriska tensed across the way when an interrogatormentor’s shade passed before her. 

Sollux remained steadfast as friends and conspirators now flinched with every purposeful twitch of his ears, his own eyes stinging as he needled his gaze into the bloodshot eyes squinting accusatorily at him behind cracked frames. He couldn’t back down now. Equius' chin dipped down by an increment, a refusal to relent and a hair’s breadth from a goring posture. Sollux stayed the course and copied him in an almost simultaneous motion. Equius wore his heart upon his sweaty bicep–he never could resist the predictable chorus set in the siren song of blueblooded posturing even through text. Here and now, Sollux had to win this highblood’s obvious challenge, the call to submit as he should by virtue of the swill in his veins. He couldn’t show weakness in this moment, not to anyone, not with what was at stake and nestled in his pocket. One of the many globules of sweat beading the indigo’s hairline rolled down his crooked nose, dropping into his cup.

The surface tension of the milk broke with a soft plip that echoed in the silent room, and Equius’ fist clenched around the glass. Slivers of silver traced their way up the cup in a delicate network of straining material. Nepeta ducked under the table, while Vriska and Gamzee on either side of Equius raised their hands protectively in practiced tandem. Sollux stopped in place and braced even as Aradia tugged insistently at him, his eyes watering and blinking wide as Equius rotated his shoulder in a clear bid to throw the rapidly splintering glass leaking milk through his meaty fingers directly at Sollux’s vulnerable ganderbulbs. Sollux stood firm. He couldn’t blink. Not now. Not yet.

Tch. Equius blinked and looked down the table, and the broken stalemate freeing Sollux to cringe away from the tongue click behind Aradia’s shoulder as if to shield himself in her unruly curls. Vriska tittered behind her hand, casting a smug expression to the repeat offender next to her. Terezi sniffed but did not so much as tip an ear the cerulean’s direction to acknowledge the attention, instead leaning forward in her seat towards Sollux’s approximate location. Her tongue flickered out from between her dagger teeth–a musing, reptilian probing of the cortisol-charged air as she tried to gauge his response to her stunt. Sollux held his breath to stifle the way his breath shuddered out from his lungs, falling back on Rapard’s training in suppressing his stress pheromones after repeated trips to the ice bath. The cold crept along his brainstem, freezing his panic into a knife he no longer knew how to wield against himself. It pressed up against the back of his eyes, a migraine slanting along its serrated blade with glacial inevitability.

Aradia managed to get Sollux moving again with a hand on the small of his back, and the instant he stepped into range Karkat clung to his good arm. The scarletblood ushered Sollux into the seat right next to him as he growled deep in his throat across the table to the cadre of coolbloods gathered together, ears pinned flat to his skull. He kept side-eying Sollux however, for all his bluster just as thrown off by Sollux’s presence as the other trolls around the table. Bewildered irritation flashed across Feferi’s face despite her best efforts to maintain a smile, but Aradia ignored this and the way Sollux leaned back very slightly in a toothless attempt to distance himself. Instead she simply brushed some clinging dust off of the seat to Sollux’s left before sitting there herself.

Nepeta wormed her way up from under the furniture to squiggle into Equius’ lap, plucking the cup away from him and chugging what milk remained before flurrying his sweat-sticky cheek with furious pitter-paps. His scowl softened, granite melting to ashy marble for a moment. Something twisted deep in Sollux, wrenching his intestines into knots that sent bile bubbling at the back of his throat, and he tugged his arm free of Karkat’s hold. 

Finally, Aradia broke the awkward silence. “Right! Let me fill in the blanks here for you, Sollux. We’re still on the topic of if you can be trusted.”

Kanaya lifted her eyes to the ceiling as if praying for patience, while a few other trolls shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Feferi’s tense smile dropped. “Aradia–”

“Don’t ‘Aradia’ me, Feferi Peixes,” Aradia snapped back. She lifted her head, chin up just enough to maintain a level of respectful civility while not yet exposing her throat. “This isn’t about me! Let Sollux defend himself. He actually has something important–”

“Does he want to?” Feferi tilted her head very slightly back all the same, hollow of her throat exposed to Aradia in a genuine bid gesture of appeasement to soften her query’s bite. She waited, fins fanning her face. Terezi clicked her tongue again in the background, and Sollux’s pan reset once again as he scrambled to put the right words in place only for them to die in the cocoon.

Gamzee leaned forward. “Come on, then. No need to be all motherfucking shy, my spindly little blade-brother. Long as you keep your motherfucking sparks under control I don’t see why everyone’s gotta be so wound tight. I’d like to see if you’ve still got your chops when it comes to motherfucking chopping. We got a few tough nuts we need to motherfucking crack, so let’s see if you break first.”

Sollux forced his jaw to unclench. “If I got to work on your prisoners you wouldn’t have anything left of them.”

Feferi sighed as a good number of the others tensed, dry gills fluttering in the recycled air. Her chin lowered. “He’s been through a lot, Aradia. I didn’t even minnow he was awake yet. Don’t you think this is a bit cruel?”

“Cruelty is a bit subjective here, is it not?” Kanaya asked, addressing the ceiling. She lowered her eyes, lips pressed together in a thin line. “Sollux proved himself very capable when he managed to hack into our network in order to contact you.”

Sollux bristled, leaning forward and opening his mouth–it hadn’t been hard, really, considering that he’d coded the network to be his mirror back before the helm–only for Karkat to pipe up then. He hadn’t looked at Sollux since the latter had pulled out of his grip. “Do I need to fucking remind everyone that he got absolutely fucking wrecked for it? How much more do I need to rub the solid facts in your face like a mistrained woofbeast for you to remember? Do I need the fucking receipts? The literal scans of his nearly deboned nub? You were all on board for extracting him in the first place, and you were all made thoroughly aware of the many potential risks of rehabilitating him, and you committed with a merry fucking by your leave as you left me and Aradia to reassemble the expansive jigsaw that is our erstwhile companion now returned to us. What could have possibly changed now? We’re talking in such tight fucking circles that it’s going to catch my bulge in a vice and leave me fucking hurling up putrescent bloodclots by the trough-full before the night’s over.”

Gamzee’s head bobbed very slowly, and he yawned once before drawling out, “Sir Motherfucker was found elbow-deep in interrogatormentor gore, that’s what motherfuckin’ changed for those gathered here this light-lean night.” The purple swayed in place, tilting from one side to the next with the same inconsistent timing as his shifting opinions. He leaned his head in his hand while an index finger idly swirled the grease paint at the corner of his mouth into a tight smile-spiral. They’d all been arguing in this room for a while for his sealant to fade enough for him to do so. “Looks like he tried to motherfucking dance to the empirical drumbeat behind your back without knowing all the steps and panicked when it broke bad.”

Vriska splayed her fingers on the table as she leered at Karkat. “Was it behind his back though? Drama queen bee had to get his cuff off somehow.”

The knife twisted into Sollux’s eye socket, infuriated headache spiking further pain through his pan. Karkat sputtered, saying something that Sollux didn’t catch. Vriska had rolled her eyes in response to the mutant, one good eye and one cybernetic settling their disrespectful arc to lock Sollux in place. Cobalt threads of mindscourging tried to worm their way into his corneas like parasitic hookworms. Confess embroidered itself across the back of his eyelids, just in time for yet another trigger-click of Terezi’s tongue.

Sollux flung himself from his seat, catching his chair with his good hand as he vaulted onto the table and attempting to fling it over his head with his forward momentum. Vriska cursed under her breath and raised her metal arm to block the incoming projectile. Karkat let out a startled yelp, grabbing onto Sollux’s ankle, and while Sollux managed to kick him away the chair’s clumsy trajectory still wobbled wide. Nepeta hissed and rolled off to the side  as Equius stood. One huff and a settling of his weight, and Equius threw a haymaker that rendered the chair to fragments of wood that rained down around him in a swirl of sawdust.

Equius pointed at Sollux, hair falling into his eyes as he snarled, “You see this? You see how the little brute shows his true colors after I pressed him with such strong–”

“You pressed him?” Vriska said, an indignant flush rising up her cheeks. “Leave it to the muscle pervert to talk a biiiiiiiig fucking talk about knowing his damn place beneath the ladies but taking credit whenever he can.”

Equius sputtered. “I wasn’t– No, you know I. Um. Underneath. Hgkkhg.” Nepeta emerged from the aether again, holding a towel that she proceeded to drape around her moirail’s shoulders. She stuck her tongue out at Vriska, who squinted with a sneer blademeowbeast-style as she wiggled her fingers at Equius.

 “Hhhhng,” he continued helpfully as he attempted to stem the flow of sweat by dabbing at his face.

Karkat squeezed something akin to a scream from between his teeth. “Great, now he’s going to get his wiggly-sproutsmear all over the floor. We are going to drown in vile milk-scented blue slurry for perigees and it will never fucking escape the crevices of my very thinkpan without a generous amount of abrasive cleaning solution. Great! Always grateful for you, Vriska, you are a credit to the fucking team, are you happy now?”

“Yes,” Vriska purred.

Karkat let out a peal of frantic laughter. “Hooray! By the Helmsman’s necrotic left globe, we are not about to support women’s wrongs here–”

“Just did, little buddygrub.”

“—especially not after you clearly provoked, fuck, both of them. Let it be known by the present fucking peanut gallery that it was very, very pointedly masterminded by our resident spiderbitch! Fuck me sideways with the business end of a rust-infested leafscraper if you resent my heretical sludge so fucking much, Serket!”

“Ew, no.”

“Shut up. Sollux, get down from there. You’ve done enough.” His voice cracked a little bit, shaking the frost from Sollux’s rage and leaving him quivering. Sollux retreated, dropping to a knee to clamber down from the table with his tail between his legs, but Terezi rapped her cane on the table and hopped up onto it.

“We eat off of this,” Kanaya said, a long-suffering sigh drawing her mouth into a resigned frown. 

“The memory of feet isn’t going to throw me off a delicious ration cube,” Terezi said. She advanced on Sollux, a familiar prowling that echoed the stance she’d never seen–the way Sollux had circled the table mere minutes before to menace Equius. “Besides, we’ve got a more important task! Permission to treat this as a formal court hearing, oh Heiress of the Planets Above and Below?”

Feferi looked between Terezi and Sollux, worrying her lip with her teeth as her attention lingered on Sollux. “Shore, why naut? Does everyone agree to the terms that would fintail?”

Murmured assent rose from the trolls assembled around the table, with Karkat and Aradia being the main oppostion, and Terezi clapped her hands together once the votes came in. “Then allow me to formally thank you so much, first witness Sollux Captor, for taking the stand. Welcome! To!” She spun in place, brandishing her arms wide before lowering her cane to point somewhere above Sollux’s right shoulder. “The trial of Karkat Vantas!”

The table erupted with protests, but all the bluster washed over Sollux’s head. His knee creaked as he continued half-kneeling, but Terezi’s words lay outside expected parameters–his synapses fired against nothing and locked his limbs in place. Vriska rolled her eyes with an audible clicking of the prosthetic in its socket and stretched out her leg as she let out a squeaky yawn. She kicked out her foot against Terezi’s elbow, tipping the cane down to point past Sollux to Karkat proper. Terezi hummed, a disharmonious grating against Sollux’s aural canals, waiting for a lull before lifting her voice to slice through the din.

“In this corner, shoulder to shoulder with the Heiress and a lemon-sour flight risk sits the defendant Karkat Vantas–” she said, rotating in place to address the entire table. “--who is formally charged by my client Vriska Serket–”

Vriska scoffed. “I’m not paying you.” 

Sollux’s lip twitched up to flash a fang at her. “Get pro-boned then.”

Terezi cackled, ruined eyes squinted into ruby slits as Sollux withdrew at last to his seat. “Ah you forget, Appleberry, working pro bono implies I’m doing this for a public good.” Vriska let out an offended gasp in the background behind Terezi’s back as the latter continued on. “So we will see where the coin flip lands.” She waggled her head back from one shoulder to the other to accentuate her next few syllables. “A-ny-ways, client number eight–”

Tavros whispered behind his hand, and Sollux’s ears twitched to catch him as he said, “...a bit forced isn’t it?” to Gamzee who nodded to an imaginary beat with his eyes closed.

Terezi continued. “—accuses the defendant of aiding and abetting the Empire against which we all fight by facilitating former Interrogatormentor Sollux Captor’s escape from his psionic cuffs by providing him…” She trailed off, holding a hand out to prompt Vriska.

Vriska shrugged. “The key?” 

“The key. Interesting.” Terezi’s needle-spiked sneer widened. “To do what? We have a means proposed, not a motive–and so the interrogation must continue!”

Sollux sucked in a harsh breath and held it. Karkat finally found his voice, a snarl deep in his throat warping his words into guttural grit. “Don’t think I’m not onto you, Pyrope,” he said, side-eying Sollux. “You seem to operate under the assumption that I am as dense as I was as the pathetic, malformed grublet of six sweeps. I am not! And I swear to the malformed baabeast you’ve coerced into gutting itself to try and tug its dripping pelt over my fucking ganderbulbs, back off before I shove that cane of yours through your nook so far up your throat you’ll be tasting ripped up genebladder and red cane for a whole perigee.”

“Thought you were over trying to be onto me, little shoutnub,” Terezi said. Karkat screamed into his hands, almost drowning out the tealblood’s boisterous peals of laughter. Vriska booed as Terezi pulled a scuffed coin from her pocket, flicking it head-over-tailways between her fingers. “I don’t need much longer anyways.”

The heels of Terezi’s eye-searingly red boots clicked on the table as she advanced on Karkat. She rustled around in a pocket, whatever objects she was retrieving gently clacking against each other. Behind Terezi, Gamzee cracked an eye open as a baggie of mismatched pills plopped onto the table. A few capsules escaped their plastic prison, spinning out haphazardly. One rolled to the edge and Sollux cupped his hand, catching it before it dropped out of sight.

Terezi’s ears, already at an automatic angle, flicked forward when no telltale click of pills hitting the ground reached them. She sniffed, turning her head. “I now call the witness Sollux Captor to the stand. Share with the court your findings.”

Sollux snorted, but took a cursory look at the nondescript pill in his hand. He lifted the pill to his lips, but Aradia’s hand shot out to stop him before he could bring it properly to his lips. He made direct eye contact with her as his forked tongue flickered out, closing the gap and making brief contact with the pills surface. His nose wrinkled up, and he flicked the pill back onto the table with its fellows after Aradia relinquished his wrist. “That one’s a mood stabilizer. I don’t know what the others are. They’re all illegal as fuck.”

Terezi let out a noise that mimicked a very loud incorrect buzzer. “Eeeeehrrrrrt! So close, buddy. You forgot those things are dual-purpose. Rookie mistake. Super right on the illegality front, though. You would not believe the red tape surrounding those things.”

“I’m not your buddy.”

“From buddy to buzzkill, okay! Well, little buzzy beeboy–”

“I had a bee-powered rig. Doesn’t make me like bees.”

“Those fuckers are annoying,” Karkat muttered under his breath.

Sollux blinked, looking over to him. “Are?”

“We! Are! Getting! Sidetracked!” said Terezi, punctuating each word with her cane slamming down into the table. 

“You took us on the detour first, Terezi,” Feferi said. “Please get to the point.” Her attempt at a civil, apologetic smile audibly creaked against itself as she gritted her teeth.

 “The point, Bubblegum Fishstick, is that Docterror Dzuvir informed me that even with my status as the once and future prosecutefence he wasn’t allowed to state who took this cocktail of antispasmodics, painkillers, and a mood stabilizer that has a secondary function as an anticonvulsant.” Terezi made a point to peer over her glasses, blind eyes almost making contact with Sollux’s. The lilt to her voice dropped, leaving behind a barren plane of judgement as she nudged the pill bag with her foot. “But I think that paints a pretty picture, doesn’t it?”

“Quit your convoluted as fuck pan-games, Pyrope,” Karkat hissed. “As riveting as it is to watch you verbally wiggle-wank yourself to fucking completion in front of whatever dead god that peers through the fucking veil in one last final act of voyeurism that it deigns to share with everyone gathered here, you’re just spewing loose information like a headless cluckbeast spasming for the masses. Why do you even fucking have–”

“A lot of bluster from the accused who happens to oversee the vast majority of our supply and personnel chains, including being the one to make judgement calls on the allocation of medical supplies. I found those pills in your block, Vantas. Very incriminating, isn’t it?” 

“I’ve never seen those before in my fucking life,” Karkat said. The words caught in his throat, and if Sollux didn’t know better he’d think the scarletblood sounded afraid.

“Neither have I.” Terezi’s now-toneless drone echoed in the room, ringing in Sollux’s ears. She crouched atop the table in front of Karkat, for all intents and purposes focusing on him, but her tongue snaked out to moisten the corner of her mouth closest to Sollux with her ears pricked in his direction as well. “Blind jokes aside, I have been patient. In the eyes of a proper Imperial court, I’ve been positively kind! I gave you a lot of grace, but such attempts to defend one’s self and speak in court is categorically banned here as it would be in the Alternian Court Circuit. Social convention steals from the law with impunity and those assembled voted on treating this as a proper hearing. You think anyone here respects your opinion right now?”

“The responsibility falls to the witness,” Sollux said. Everyone turned to look at him except for Terezi, who rocked on her heels with returned giddiness.

“Wait, sorry, hold on,” Tavros said, brows furrowed. “I thought that uh… Well, he’s the one we’re worried about, right?”

“Yeah, why the hell does he get a fucking opinion?” Vriska added.

“Bunch of pish-posh applesauce over here,” Gamzee drawled. He lolled his head back, blowing a bubble of spit through a gap in his teeth before popping it with his tongue. “You motherfucking voted to let her play legislacerator. Let the motherfuckin’ flames climb your wretched frame upon the pyre you motherfucking built.”

“Aaaaaaagh! That doesn’t count!” Vriska screamed. She leaned over, basically climbing over Equius’ back to smack furiously at Gamzee’s shoulder. Tavros bared his teeth to the gums, canines in the light of Vriska’s cybernetic eye, and let out a wicked hiss to Gamzee’s left. The noise seemed to surprise all involved, culminating in Vriska settling back into her seat with a sullen glower. Tavros kneaded at his breastbone with a faint expression, as if favoring an old wound.

Terezi’s laugh rose an octave. “So true, worstie! This is my court, my witness, and my client-slash-victim! Can you be a good girl for me and keep your tongue behind your teeth until I need to put some holes in it, blueberry bramblemite?”

Vriska’s ears flicked, and she casually flipped her hair to the forefront to disguise the way they flushed blue at Terezi’s words. “Two-faced slitherbeast,” she muttered, pointedly avoiding looking up as Kanaya snorted.

“I’ll take it.” Terezi yawned wide, teeth snapping together like a cholerbeartrap on the start of her sentence. “So.” She advanced on Sollux again, flicking a pill towards him with the end of her cane. “Had enough time to identify the user?”

The pill pinged against Sollux’s nose. He didn’t flinch. “Former Interrogatormentor Vitzii Pozoia.”

“Former?”

“Imperial protocol when an interrogatormentor is compromised is title stripping and a culling order.”

“Hm.” Terezi clicked her tongue a few times, each time spiking Sollux’s blood pressure. Aradia’s lip curled a bit, mouth open enough to drink in the stress pheromones oozing from Sollux’s neck. She reached out to put her hand atop his, but he instead raised it to bat away another projectile. Said pill-pelter continued speaking. “So what do these little morsels do, anyway?”

“Address neurotoxin-induced brain damage of the motor and sensory cortices, is my guess,” Sollux replied, refusing to acknowledge Vriska mimicking his snaggle-toothed lisp under her breath. “Listen, I have–”

“You’ll answer all questions posed to you before proceeding, witness. Is there no way to mitigate an interrogatormentor’s death sentence in the eyes of the Empire?”

“Successful information extraction might do it, but it’s a stretch. At this point he’d need a life to exchange for his.”

“Why is that?”

“He’s been gone too long. His condition would be a risk in the field if he ran out of what he needed and they already had his replacement waiting in the wings when you all took him. The Empire needs proof of concept.”

Nepeta leaned forward, whispering something in Equius’ ear. He peered over the edge of his glasses to Feferi first and then to Sollux before letting out a soft rumble of approval to his moirail. Tavros smoothed out a crinkled wing filament, also shooting furtive glances to Feferi and Sollux both.

Terezi bobbed her head. “Fascinating. Would denying him his medication serve as an appropriate motivator to drive him back to the arms of the Empire?”

“No. We were told upon starting our training that all our quadrants were either culled or placed in protective custody to eliminate attachments. He’d know his matesprit was here at some point and the Empire wouldn’t be able to close that gap.” 

A sick suspicion bubbled in him and he tried reaching into his hoodie pockets for the paper within so he could be done with this whole affair, only for Terezi to wipe his pan again with a disapproving click of her tongue. She sounded so much like Pozoia, infuriatingly so, and the noise eliminated all of Sollux’s rational thought as Terezi continued uninterrupted. “Moirail too,” she said dismissively. “Your point is noted, witness, but I’m not sure how firm those bonds he has are.”

“A lot of losers around here like to simp for lost causes,” Vriska grumbled, still sulking as she swirled a finger along the rim of her water glass.

“They certainly do,” Kanaya said with a sigh, but the resigned tilt to her eyebrows spoke more to some inner frustration than an attempt to build onto Vriska’s attempted barb. 

Sollux’s eyes glazed over. He didn’t want to listen to this inane chatter. He simultaneously didn’t want to maintain this discussion of the trolls who’d made his life a living hell, perpetuating the guilt and hurt that every troll victimized by the Empire held in their slurry-spun genetic code in a circular chasm of chromatic trauma. The long-dead Ualona clung wetly to his lapels, sputtering out, What did they promise you? The Empire had upheld its end of the bargain while he served as an interrogatormentor–Karkat hadn’t found himself in its clutches. Whether that was due to his own ingenuity or the pact he’d made Sollux didn’t know, but he no longer held interrogatormentor status. Did the Empire find a method by which to sway one of the last bastions of his sanity? Would Karkat deny a seasoned interrogatormentor instructor medication and send him into a withdrawal-fueled manic breakdown? 

Worse scenarios carved icy channels up his spine–Sollux had proven himself a successful agent of the Empire, tormenting rebels within his brig in a twisted haze of helmsman conditioning-tinged megalomania exacerbated by a lack of stability and a support network. He still remembered their wailing and his own desperation to lash out, to make something hurt like he hurt, and his programming filled in the blanks. Would Karkat comfort him with one hand and set his worst nightmare upon him with the other? He’d seen Karkat cursing about getting shipments past Imperial blockades enough. He’d eliminate the risk of exposure by ridding himself of the need to smuggle an illegal medication through checkpoints and the vengeful shadow of a friend with one platonic duel with enough careful orchestration. 

Terezi’s voice swam through the thick fog Sollux’s head swam with. “A counterpoint, then. Would said denial, coupled with a promise to return said medication, finally solidify his allegiance to the rebellion?”

Sollux choked down a mass of bile and mucus balling in the back of his throat. “Not. By itself,” he gritted out. “He’d need external motivation.”

“A push. An inciting incident. A trigger to the loaded gun in his thinkpan.”

“Sure.” 

“Such as, for example, a troll freshly sprung from the Imperial crèche starting to nose around his safe harbor?” Sollux did not respond, and Terezi cocked her head to the side. “I do remember Vantas not long ago in this very room arguing for your solo ventures to the exercise room so you could what, do physical therapy?” 

Equius let out a derisive bark of near-laughter. “I expressed my doubts about the validity of that request. The sardonic, layabout twinArmageddons, shedding his erstwhile dependence on his psionics to do his bidding in favor of becoming a gym squeaker? It is an insult to those of us born with actual strength and valor.”

“Hey, that’s not fair to Karkitty,” Nepeta said, lightly bapping a chagrined Equius on the knuckles. “He wouldn’t do that to Pawllux.”

Gamzee waved his hand in a flippant, circular motion. “Nah, nah, it’s because she’s tugging your motherfucking chains to pump her ego full of hot air. Switch the names around, wrap them around, affix the nameplate proper ‘round the neck of the dirtbound hangman in our motherfucking midst. Captor didn’t motherfucking know about the bayou-bopper rotting in the next wing until we all started biting for his rehabilitation to pick up the motherfucking pace.” He leaned forward, eyes wide open for the first time the whole meeting. “We start fiending for a motherfucking miracle in gore-gold finery to nab us an opening aboard the Imperial fleetschool, and bam!” Gamzee’s words, climbing with every syllable, finally peaked into a roar that thundered with ancestral malevolence.  A sing-song whisper followed, half-buried underneath the echo still rolling through the room. “The two powder kegs paint their sanguine music on the blockwalls and the victor sits in pieces that our resident spitfire gets to coddle back together into one loyal, obedient, battle-hardened piece of tantrum-split pottery to act as our skeleton key. We should be motherfucking grateful we get to grind his gold-grit marrow into the lacquer ourselves.”

A creeping terror gnawed at the nape of Sollux’s neck, bringing with it the insidious idea that Karkat had something to do with this after all. He couldn’t figure out Gamzee’s angle, twisting as it was in eldritch spirals of conflicting motivations. His interrogatormentor training failed to find purchase in the purple’s paint, microexpressions slipping off the slippery surface of Gamzee’s face in a field of black and white. He hated that he could see the logic there. Karkat hid his social cunning in layers of bluster and expletives, ensconcing himself defensively in petty, vindictive vendettas that bit any hand that struck at him or those he cared about. The leap wasn’t far, that a desperate Karkat backed against the wall would throw his best friend into the fire in the hopes he’d emerge with loyalty and affection restored. They’d both tormented each other, casually and with frivolity, and threatened worse on many an occasion. They’d grown into themselves and apart, and for all his talk of memory to ground him the seed of doubt sprouted–did he even know Karkat anymore? 

The room filled with bickering, everyone’s voices clashing up against each other. Sollux tried to listen, tried to grab onto anything that sounded like words, but understanding slipped through his fingers in a silvery stream. He couldn’t pick out a consistent tone of condemnation or support, no line drawing itself in the sand Gamzee had strewn all over the proceedings. He dimly registered movement, scenes flickering like a faulty projector’s slideshow against his eyes as he disassociated–Terezi lambasting Gamzee for snatching away her grand reveal, Feferi standing up in attempt to clutch the last threads of democracy her co-conspirators seemed intent on unraveling with bickering, Tavros chewing his nails down into nubs. 

Uncertainty burned holes into the canvas stretched over Sollux’s ocular cavities until all that remained was Karkat, his own eyes wet and wide and pleading. He didn’t remember turning to look at Karkat, nor crowding all his limbs into his chair with the grace of a grotesque scrambling for a perch without purpose atop this harlequin cathedral’s facade. Ruddy tears bubbled from Karkat’s saline expunger ducts, spilling forth without a need to blink. He didn’t blink. A false crier would blink, screw up their face and nose, rub their face, something, but Karkat’s apparent misery flowed from him without effort. He wore terror well, soft cheeks wet and quivering and flushed with frantic and heretical warmth, but Sollux had no way to identify the source of his despair. Innocence, or the realization of a plan unraveled?

A metallic glint streaked on Sollux’s periphery–a coin tossed high. Scratch up, scratch down, light catching on uneven edges and dents, and with a ping Terezi’s cane made contact with the coin on its descent. It ricocheted towards Sollux and he ripped the psionic-dampening bracelet from his hand. He’d trained for many grueling hours to stop projectiles even before his time as an interrogatormentor and he needed to prepare for further threats.

Tchhht! 

A final tongue click sounded in synchronicity with the resurgence of the damned crying mercy, the doomed caterwauling in full force. Sollux recoiled, the coin striking him square in the forehead. In that moment fear coalesced into a jagged spike of iron centered on the impact site, radiating psionic energy and dripping with cerulean and yellow ichor. He saw Vitzii Pozoia standing over him with his makeshift spear as he fell onto his back, he saw Rapard cracking his knuckles in a cloud of freezer vapor, he saw Juyere and Rosmer and Ophlia and Ualona staring balefully at him from the depths of their sunken sockets. The figures all bled together in a pulsing amalgam of misery and condemnation made flesh.

Psionics whipped around his head, lights swaying and flickering to the beat of the sobbing half-screams tearing out of Sollux’s throat in harmony with the full force of his personal doomed choir. Disembodied hands snatched at anything they could reach as he thrashed in and out of range, sight and hearing and touch blending together in a catastrophic storm of hellish, psionic synesthesia. He couldn’t sort between the physical and the ethereal, alien voices suspended in bloody bubbles leaking from his eyes and lips and entombing him in a column of monolithic petrichor. Shadows surged forward as his psionics chewed through Sollux’s connection to reality, recoiling only when wood and metal creaked as chairs surged to encase him in a protective shell. He could hear his teeth hatching, enamel falling to dentin to cementum settling back in his lungs each time he inhaled.

A lighthouse kept a steadfast vigil on the cliffs of Sollux’s despair, foghorn sounding in the dark. Sollux sucked in a breath and lurched upright, a horror-movie snap to his spine as his limbs dangled in the wake of his psionics doing the brunt of his work. He fell into Aradia for a moment, scrabbling for purchase, and she didn’t flinch even as his psionics burned surface streaks of Lichtenberg figures along her face in the wake of his clawing fingers. She merely let out a roughshod purr, pressing her burning cheek to his. She filled half his pusher with her earthy pale pheromones, but it wasn’t enough. Hands came in pairs and so Sollux dove for the other, colliding with Karkat’s chest as he sobbed hysterically. 

Karkat’s hand lowered atop his head, psionics dissipating from the static shock of hair flying around Sollux’s ears in its wake. Sollux bit down on the redblood’s palm but Karkat did not pull away, staying still until Sollux relaxed his jaw. Karkat did not hide the wound, and before impulse control could catch up to him Sollux licked the treasonous beads of crimson away.

The coin unstuck itself from the surface of Sollux’s forehead, spinning out across the table. It spiraled once, justice’s face with a score across her eyes grinning at the ceiling. Another spin and the coin glowered at the ground, unmarked and pure. Sollux hid his face in Karkat’s neck, sneezing as rather than the typical gentle pheromones he was met with an explosion of pale signals fired out of the other troll’s scent glands like a gun. He sagged into Karkat, effectively tranquilized and shuddering as Aradia pressed her temple to Karkat’s and wrapped her arm around Sollux’s chest to keep him flush to her. She breathed, deliberate and forceful, and once they all breathed in unison she eased them all into two seats between the three of them.

The coin settled. Justice scowled up at the silent room, unblemished dismay painted across her metal features. All the trolls in the room had backed away from Sollux after his outburst, the remaining chairs haphazardly strewn about by the brief psionic squall in a makeshift blockade around Sollux and atop the table proper. Terezi popped out from behind her chair with a fearless crow of delight. “The coin has delivered its final verdict–the guilty has proven his innocence before the court!” She puffed out her chest, gesturing wide at the table. Her arm swept past the coin. “Karkat Vantas is acquitted of all charges against his personal character and blah blah blah, you all know this wasn’t who this trial was for.”

“Oh, wow,” Kanaya deadpanned. She fetched her chair, dragging it into place and settling back down. “No. I cannot believe this shocking turn of events. Color may return to my cheeks.”

She was drowned out by Vriska cutting in with a shrieked, “What?! You!”

“Teehee,” Terezi said, fighting back an actual laugh as she plucked her own seat from the mountain of wayward furniture.

“You maniacal, insensible fuckgavel,” Karkat said faintly, with no small amount of awe in his voice.

“Apologies for the deception, cherry tart, but I needed to pull out all the stops to interrogate an interrogatormentor! Especially with how the whole deck of cards almost combusted considering how the one-troll cough-syurp brigade decided to blow my load for me.”

“Always happy to give a motherfucker a handy,” Gamzee said. He sniffed, looking down his nose at Terezi. “Don’t blame a motherfucker for getting bored.” 

Terezi flipped her hair in Gamzee’s face, plopping into her seat and kicking her feet. “You didn’t notice the like, nine thousand holes in my line of questioning? I did find the pills in your block, technically, but only because Dzuvir was looking for you on his way to fuss at his loser moirail and shove pills down his throat.”

“You’re picking those up, by the way,” Karkat said with a sharp tone, pointedly ignoring the apology. Terezi’s ears briefly flicked back, but neither of them let their guards down. Karkat shook the moment away and continued. “What did he want?”

“Something about checking in about Riarra’s mission. Pozoia’s climbing the fucking walls about him being gone too long or something. I think he can suffer a little longer.”

“Mmrmmrmgmgl,” Sollux gurgled into Karkat’s barrel chest. He tried to lift his head, but the adrenaline crash proved more powerful and rendered him a overcooked noodle.

“Sure, sure, whatever you say,” Terezi said absently.

“What have you proven here, seaxactly?” Feferi looked equal parts relieved and frustrated as she spoke. “You put this entire counchil in peril! Look at the state of Sollux, the poor fin. This isn’t reely a point in our favor to make shore he’s on our side.”

“Eh, he’s a fucking adult, he can handle it,” Terezi said. “What did I prove? Our worries were his sparing of Pozoia was a fluke, and he only scrambled for help from rosewater carp over there when he got in over his head. That, and that he’d reach out to the Empire after lulling us into a false sense of security, especially since he found you so easily.” She began counting on her fingers. “He doesn’t think Vitzii Pozoia was acting on Imperial orders. This was a personal moobeast butcher-slab between them. A dull milk-solid condiment spreader was found on the scene that he used to break from his cuff, confirming my sources’ observation that he’d stolen the implement a while back.”

“You… You knew this the…the whole, uh…the whole time?” Tavros’ words stutter-stopped with an increased frequency, exasperation plastered over his face.

“Yurp.”

“Don’t fucking… ehm–yerp? At me?”

“No, yurp. You gotta drop your jaw. Anyways, yeah, absolutely. But if we keep him under the tightest security, how are we going to see what he does when he thinks our guard is down?” Terezi smiled demurely as Tavros opened his mouth then closed it again. “If he wanted to kill Pozoia from the get-go, he’d have freed himself without breaking his wrist into… How many pieces, Feferi? You fixed him up.”

“Two, nautureely,” Feferi said from behind her hand. A telltale, upturned crinkle at the corner of her eyes betrayed her otherwise contemplative expression. 

 “Naturally.” Terezi inclined her head to Feferi. “So that confirms that he wasn’t acting on the Empire’s orders–you heard it from him. Pozoia has a culling order by virtue of his prolonged stay with us, not to mention a condition that any propaganda-gorged soldier would volunteer to get shot behind the shed about. An interrogatormentor acting in full capacity would have had his psionics primed and ready to cull.” She gestured at Sollux. Sollux peered back at her from underneath Karkat’s jaw, too exhausted to interrupt. “After interviewing the moirail of Vitzii Pozoia, and reviewing the footage we extracted of Captor’s schoolfeedings, I isolated an external tell common among those lucky cull-dodgers suffering absence seizures–a tap of the tongue as consciousness returns. Said noise is enough to trigger an involuntary psionic meltdown from Appleberry here, but notice something in particular.” 

She leaned forward. “An agent of the Empire, faced with a cripple and a dissident, directs their rage outwards. They handle things independently, especially if they’ve got as much raw firepower as he does. We got a nubbin of Captor’s power on our tongues–Pozoia should be ash.” Her expression sobered. “Most of you did not watch Captor’s interrogatormentor schoolfeeds. As my eyes, Kanaya, share your opinion of the torments Captor and his unit at the hands of people such as Pozoia featured in those archives”

Kanaya’s lips pursed. “Death is a mercy for those involved,” she said with a vitriolic hiss.

Something rattled inside Sollux’s ribcage, a bemused fluttering at how disgusted someone he’d attempted to disembowel when last they met sounded on his behalf. He started shaking, horns sparking painfully, and Aradia caressed his face before slipping the psionic bracelet back around his wrist. 

Terezi nodded, running her hands along the interlocked chair wall. “My panmeat should be spattered across the ceiling after I repeatedly bonked that cholerbear on the snoot, but the explosion pulled in, it shielded… On Alternian soil and in its airspace, cowards survive skirting the shadow of the culling knife and the oppressors thrive along its blade. We need someone that can dance along both.” She took a breath. “Now, are you going to share with me why you smell like blood and formaldehyde, Appleberry?”

The rebel council turned in unison to Sollux, and in that moment he balked. He started shaking again, saliva started to pool  in his mouth as nausea rolled through him. Aradia slid her hand down his torso, still purring but with purpose now. Sollux acquiesced to her silent direction, rolling his hips back against her in a gradually relaxing stretch and giving her the gap she needed to pull the folded paper he had tucked within his hoodie pocket. He’d shoved it there after extracting it from a protective capsule embedded in the brainstem of the troll that had shattered his awakening’s peace. Equius made a strangled noise, sneezing helplessly as Karkat’s overwhelming pheromones finally made their way over. He sat on the ground hastily rather than wasting time extricating a chair. Nepeta poured her own glass of water over his head.

Aradia’s cut her purr short, unfolding the paper as she leaned forward and smoothing it face-up on the table. As everyone craned over to look Terezi reached her cane forward, fumbling briefly before catching her coin in the crook of its draconic head. She kept its orientation steady, licking its surface before letting out a self-satisfied hum. 

“Oh. Oh, no,” Feferi said, picking up the paper. Creases riddled the surface of the revealed bill of sale, distorting the dead-eyed visage of Golese Riarra, the matesprit of Vitzii Pozoia, as he held up his own hex code on a placard in front of his bare chest.  His mop of hair was now absent, instead shaved in preparation for the helm. 

“What is it?” Terezi made a grabby hands for the paper, but Feferi instead passed it to Kanaya who flipped it over and lifted it to her nose. “Someone let me get my tongue on it. I smell–”

“Blood?” Kanaya said, disdain dripping off the single syllable even as her pupils dilated. “What gauche little pretender writes in blood these days?” She paused, scanning the paper. “Pretenders. How romantic.”

Yellow script clung to the paper like a scab, a cheery invitation in a near unintelligible surgeon’s scrawl: 

“Kuluya Juyure, Sollux Captor, Ophlia Davrot, Trisia Avarae, Vitzii Pozoia, you’re invited to the memorial dinner of Golese Riarra aboard our vessel, the IIC Reanimator, as he takes his place amongst the stars in service to our Glorious Empress! Dress Code: Black Tie. Coordinates carved into the seventh vertebrae. Plus ones encouraged. It’s not a corpse party without a crowd.

Forever your loyal compatriots,

The Surgeons

Underneath the shared title Rosmer Leywet had inscribed his swirling signature with the dull bronze blood of Zesaim Exeria, while her jagged signature was written in oxidized olive.

“What is it?” Terezi repeated, frustration mounting.

“A fucking trap,” Karkat said.

Sollux took a shuddering breath. “I’m not the key to the fleet. KK isn’t wrong, but this is an invitation to an interrogatormentor-grade cruiser and that is, especially one with room for…” He counted silently. “Ten. Ten guests.”

Terezi blinked, and then clapped her hands together in delight. “The trollcops ride again!”

Vriska let out a frustrated scream. “Trollcops! Aren’t! A! THIIIIIIING! Stop trying to make it a thing!”

“If Karkat and Aradia won’t give up on him, neither will I.” Terezi smiled again, soft this time with only a hint of teeth. “Welcome back, Sollux.”

[interrogatormentors]

BOOK 2, EVENT 4: CORNER CAMPED

Over the next few weeks, a schedule established itself. Early in the night Aradia or Karkat would drop by, armed with the same stories and food as usual but with far more energy. The food evolved from food that was easy to feed to Sollux to food that had more substance, and it felt almost nice to sink his teeth into something. The cuffs were adjusted to be back in front of Sollux as well. When Sollux went a whole week without trying to harm himself or throttle someone else his arms were unchained, leaving only the psionic dampeners behind. All the cutlery they gave him were filed into little nubs, but even still Sollux stowed a rounded fork in the mattress of his sleeping platform out of habit.

One night Karkat sat with him, reading on his tablet and muttering under his breath while Sollux silently ate some nondescript nutrition cubes that almost smelled of meat. Karkat glanced up as Sollux fumbled his fork just a little bit, looking longer with his brows twitching. “What?” Sollux asked, readjusting his grip.

“You never used to eat with your left hand,” Karkat said, cocking his head to the side. “Or was that yet another factoid that escaped you in the frantic flagellation you were subjected to that twisted you fucking asunder into the horrible meat-pretzel you are now? I’ll save us both the indignity of you saying you’re ambidextrous with your lisping nightmare mouth despite how downright fucking barren the fields have been of such delightful misery, because I still had ganderbulbs, even in that moment, you clearly had a fucking favorite. I still recall it with all the fondness of a grub being dangled over the infinite abyss to Serket’s shitty fucking lusus, how often you would eat with the right hand so you could make stupid jerk-off motions with the left as you levitated my fucking dinner over my head to watch me squall. In fact, I’m surprised you haven’t decided on a repeat performance for the nostalgia factor. Do they try and flay you for having habits or some other fucking shit, or would you like to enlighten the schoolfeeding gallery as to the reason for your steadfast refusal to indulge the alternate grip?”

Sollux didn’t respond immediately, the stronger habit of keeping quiet about weaknesses reigning victorious. Finally he switched the hand he was eating with, stabbed a cube of nearly-meat product, and lifted it to his lips. His shoulder made an audible clicking noise as it almost popped out of its socket from the rotation, and his eyelid twitched a bit from the dull ache that resulted. Karkat flinched and grimaced.

“What the hell was that?” Karkat’s tone did not sound like he didn’t know, but rather wanted a denial of the truth that appeared to be swimming in his eyes.

“Dislocated my shoulder getting out of the cuffs in the first place when I got here,” Sollux said, shrugging. His left shoulder went higher than his right despite himself, and he felt a thrill in his stomach that never quite faded even when Karkat didn’t punish him for the moment of visible weakness.

“And you… it hasn't healed. It hasn't healed, and we’ve still been putting strain on it this whole fucking time,” Karkat said, voice slow and rising a bit in pitch with each word. “Of all the... you. YOU! You. The words have completely vacated whatever remaining presence of a thinkpan I yet possess between my constantly besieged fucking auricular spongeclots from your sheer–! YOU! You could have fucking said something, I would have—!”

“No, you couldn’t have,” Sollux said, interrupting Karkat’s valiant attempt to pantomime choking him without flinging his tablet into the imminent abyss. He traded his fork back to his left hand and polished off the rest of his meal. “You needed my hands behind me. Otherwise I would have attacked you, or kept trying to chew my arm off. The pain kept me grounded anyway.”

Karkat’s eyelid proceeded to twitch. “We’re not doing that anymore. I get it, you were never good with expressing things like basic fucking necessities, and your aforementioned meat-pretzel twisting has nigh irrevocably fucked that even harder in the auricular spongeclot to the point of dealing fucking pan damage.” He looked down at his tablet with a sour expression. “I’ll see what pain medication we can spare before you can even begin to start uttering any putrid self-loathing bile about how you don’t need it or whatever bulgerotted shit strikes your fancy at this moment, because funnily enough, pain is a message that should not be fucking ignored when attempting to markedly improve your quality of life from the literal dredges it has been to this point! There’s a legitimate fucking reason for its presence on your sensory radar and let me fucking tell you that the reason, just in case you needed it spelled out, is ‘whoopsie- fucking -doodle, something’s gone splendidly fucking wrong, in fact it has gone to utter shit, and your literal, only chance at withstanding the disintegration worthy of a paper cup holding your old standby of vomit-worthy energy drinks is to fucking fix it’ .”

“Your supplies are low, don’t bother,” Sollux said. He kept talking, explaining when Karkat froze a little. “Context clues. You got mad at your screen while talking about meds and we’re not planetside. The air doesn’t have enough smells or proper dirt for that. I thought it was, but it’s just an asteroid, isn’t it?”

Karkat pinched the bridge of his nose. “How did they manage to enable you to be even more of an obnoxious windbag? I’m lost for fucking words once again, you have achieved the im-fucking-possible. I’m not going to deign you with the luxury of confirming or denying whether you’re fucking right–”

“I am.”

“Aaaaand if you will let me experience the luxury of speaking for ten fucking second without trying fulfill your quota of being a fucking know-it-all pettiness machine of epic fucking proportions...” Karkat said, glowering. He paused, pointing at Sollux, who shrugged again. Karkat inhaled, rubbing at his eye before continuing. “...you would know that if you’re not going to take the fucking pain medication, I’ll look into getting you some form of alternative treatment, despite how absolutely and completely the mere thought of you bypassing such treatment rends my goddamn bloodpusher. Something like... fuck, time in the exercise room on your own? We let people book it by themselves sometimes, mostly because no one wants to slip on the fucking mats while Zahhak turns it into a greasy swimming pool akin to the shit you’d find in the back of simply the most grotesque GrubDonalds.” He shuddered. “Would you be willing to be normal for two fucking seconds for the purpose of doing your own physical therapy here? See, I even specified two seconds. Your favourite.”

“Sure.” Sollux set his empty plate off to his side. “Will everyone else be normal about me being out and about?”

“Much like you strive to fail to be on a nightly basis, of course they won’t be fucking normal. I’m not about to fucking lie,” Karkat said. He pulled a face, shutting off his tablet and stowing it away. “The most prevalent opinion among the ill-behaved rabble that we must constantly corral, less we wind up entrenched in grub shit, is that you should have been put down like a malformed grublet that just barely eked its way out of its trials, same as the... Whatever. But I’ve got the loudest fucking voice out of all these senseless fuckers and I’m not afraid to put their spongeclots out of fucking hearth and hive, so I make the goddamn rules when it comes to you, so fucking help me god .”

“I’m touched,” Sollux deadpanned. “You’re not leader, then?”

“Shut up. I’m a fucking saint is what I am. I’m a glorified fucking grubsitter somehow simultaneously worthy and unworthy of the Signless his-fucking-self and no one is allowed to fucking forget it.” He didn’t answer Sollux’s question, which led him to believe that someone else Sollux knew was in charge. Feferi, maybe? Karkat didn’t seem annoyed enough for anyone else. 

Karkat stood up, grabbing Sollux’s plate off the sleeping platform. He kept to Sollux’s right rather than his left now, for all he said that he trusted Sollux’s intention not to harm him anymore. “You won’t be on your own, anyways.”

“Hooray. Are you going to get me a sparkly collar to match the leash you put me on?”

“ Gross. Don’t be a brat.”

“That’s what the collar’s for.”

“No.” Karkat pointed at Sollux, “Not even if you ask and promise to call me daddy if I call you a good boy. Not a chance in even the Grand Highblood’s most gory of halls.” He almost smiled, but bared his teeth instead. The way his face brightened, however, the corners of his eyes folding into neglected laugh lines, appeared before Sollux’s vision every time he blinked for almost an hour after Karkat left.

Excursions to the exercise room were uneventful at best, for the most part. Karkat blocked out an hour for Sollux every other day, and getting out of the cell left Sollux intoxicated. He couldn’t focus the first few times, but Karkat standing vigil outside the block meant no one harassed Sollux as he stood motionless in front of a punching bag with his forehead pressed to the vinyl.

He couldn’t avoid people forever. Footsteps now traipsed past Sollux’s door occasionally, and he heard voices. Most he didn’t know, although the occasional tapping of a cane or the swish of skirts had something melting in the back of his pan. They remained anonymous however, and this carried over to the trolls he saw pass by him and Karkat on the short commute to the exercise block. All stopped when they saw Sollux, at least at first, immediately on razor’s edge from Sollux’s gait despite the return of his slouch and his undercut finally grewing out and flaring out in an unruly mess of hair. No one spoke, although they whispered, and Karkat’s needling gaze kept it that way.

The routine comforted Sollux, and his world shattered when Karkat didn’t arrive at his door on time one night. Sollux started pacing five minutes after the usual time, and after the five stretched into ten and twenty and eventually into an hour he found the room spinning round him. What had happened? There couldn’t have been an attack–he’d heard an alarm go off once before for something that Karkat dismissed as a routine blackout due to a passing cruiser but none this time. Had someone waylaid him? Had someone gotten close, someone Karkat trusted just enough, and left him bleeding in some abandoned hall? Was it Gamzee? The duplicitous bastard had proven to fool interrogatormentors–could he have triple-crossed the line? Serket he’d heard tapping her arm impatiently in an 8-beat-staccato, complaining about needing to keep quiet near his door. Probably her. It couldn’t be Eridan, ensconced as he was in the Empress’ nook the last he’d checked the tabloids. A rebellion was beneath his notice. The walls leaned in towards Sollux, silent and unyielding and leaving him exposed and alone with his thoughts.

Finally Sollux crammed himself under the miniscule amount of room underneath the sleeping platform just so he could think, limbs pretzeled and crammed up close. Dread filled Sollux’s stomach, a deep sense of wrongness he’d only felt when Rapard pushed him to the brink of frozen, or the time so much water had been forced into him that his kidneys had threatened to shut down, or when Rosmer had tested another batch of his poisons on him before graduation and gleefully recounted what organs would be safe to harvest if Sollux hadn’t pulled through. Sollux tangled the fingers of one hand into his hair, nails that Karkat kept clipped digging into his scalp as his digits shook from the force. He bit down on his other hand, hard, but the impending feeling of personal doom still left him shuddering. The only blessing of the psionic cuffs was that they blocked the usual chorus of the imminently doomed that usually filled Sollux’s waking world. Without the voices the doom shifted to calm, coelscing into the crystaliizing realization that he was going to die and no one would miss him and leaving his limbs sparkling and light.

The door opened, and Karkat’s voice filled the room. “—god, nookhuffing, bulgechafing pieces of fucking shit, the whole fucking lot of them, just toss out the whole fucking consortium out the god-fucking-damned airlock in one merry go with a chipper fucking ‘by your leave’ to top off the clusterfuck sandwich, I swear to fucking—I am so fucking sorry I’m late, Sollux, I had to fight my way out of another fucking meeting to the point that I almost yanked out fucking ganderbulbs, and I had already fucking told…” Karkat trailed off, one foot that Sollux could see stepping back behind the threshold of the room. “...Sollux?”

Sollux tried to speak several times, but all that he could manage was a strangled rasp. Immediately Karkat dropped to his knees, red eyes wide. “Oh fucking hell. Shit. Panrotted spawn of the Gl’bgolyb her-fucking-self, you fucking scared me to all fuck, Captor. What happened?  No one else has the key to this place beside Megido and through hell and high fucking water will anyone ever get access beyond that.”

Another few tries and Sollux at last croaked, “Late. Thought. I.” He stammered a few more times, and when it didn’t stop he tried biting his hand again. Karkat’s hand flew out, catching him by the wrist.

“Stop,” Karkat said. His voice cracked a bit. “Okay? Don’t. You don’t need to do that. Seeing gold staining that much everywhere makes my fucking bloodpusher hike up seven degrees closer to a fucking infarction, Sollux, come on .” He tugged at Sollux’s wrist, just a little, and having a direction had Sollux scrambling out from underneath the platform with all the grace of a spider sent through a wind tunnel. Karkat kept holding onto him, catching Sollux as he fell forward into his chest. 

“Helps. Me focus,” Sollux said. He stared forward at nothing, head bowed against Karkat’s chest. “I thought something happened.”

“And they said I was wrong for worrying about being late. I was wrong. They called me mad! And maybe I am mad, yeah, I’m fucking pissed and I’m ready to tear out some more throats with my nubby file I call teeth, because this is exhibit fucking A front and fucking center, as to why all the others can choke down the Condesce’s meter-long nightmare bulge when it comes to trying to dictate and nitpick my carefully planned agenda for your betterment,” Karkat said. He wrapped his arms around Sollux, and his voice rattled with something that Sollux couldn’t tell was a growl or a purr. Either option had the roiling emotions in Sollux solidifying into jagged edges twisting through his gut. “I should have tried harder to be on time, or tried to find a way to let you know.”

“Not your fault.” Sollux’s hand twitched as he automatically tried to bring it to his mouth again to bite at whatever skin he could reach, but Karkat kept his arm down at his waist. “A meeting. You said it was a meeting. You don’t have meetings at this hour but it was an emergency. It doesn’t matter–I’m just a… Hiccup in already-made plans.” 

His thinking started to spiral again into dizzying tunnels of possibility. Karkat seemed annoyed at most, not stressed. It wasn’t a security breach or an invasion, but it was important enough to warrant a meeting. He’d clearly not thought it was important enough to want to stay if he was so out of breath and hastening back to Sollux, so that meant it was an issue that Karkat didn’t usually deal with. Karkat seemed to deal with personnel, sure, but other than that Sollux wasn’t quite sure what he did. It seemed wrong not knowing what had so altered his schedule, the consistency and break thereof meaning something was terribly wrong. He had to solve the problem to right the order of things, what little he had control over.

Karkat smacked his face then, quite hard, something that jostled Sollux right out of one tunnel of thought into another. He blinked rapidly, and Karkat huffed. “Fucking look at me and quit your fucking doomspiral shit.” He took a ragged breath, dragging his fingers through his hair. “Right. Yes. Even though it was an emergency meeting, I don’t care if you say it doesn’t matter, I fucked up in allowing the swill-brained lot of our co-conspirators to waylay me this fucking egregiously. You are important, Captor, so important to me that I didn’t stop bleeding out the fucking pusher in despair until I saw the slivers of you coming back to yourself–to me– where they fucking belong. I’m not always going to be around, it’d be moronic to pretend anything but, but I’m also not going to let you claw yourself open like some neurotic lusus at the end of its fucking shelf life. Even if I were actually dead as a goddamned doornail, I’d come back from pure rage alone to keep you from any degree of self-mutilation. So tell me what I can do to help you at this moment.”

“Slap me again?”

“No. That suggestion goes back right to the corner of fuck and no. I panicked in what was the most mortifying display of freshblood nerves that I should’ve been fucking over at this point, and you’re not going to get another free show of my legendary war-ending paphand.”

“Was that what it was?”

Karkat opened his mouth, and then went fully red in the face. He inhaled and then let out a noise like a temperamental tea kettle. “No! Don’t take me out of context. It’s your prime fucking skill but I will not allow such fucking slander to bedraggle my hard-fought grizzled reputation.”

“I just asked for context, and you failed. You’re caught like a fucking pale harlot exposing his wristbones to the masses.”

“Sometimes I wish I had allowed those fuckers to have you gagged,” Karkat said, groaning, some tension bleeding out of his shoulders.

“And give me more fuel to fan the flames? You’re an easy enough target as it is.” Despite himself, Sollux felt the tension draining out of him, although his heartbeat still pounded in his ears as Karkat made another choked up, thinly muffled scream. “I’ll make all sorts of noises that’ll embarrass both of us.” He shook his head to try and clear it to no avail.

“Do not keep doing this to me. You know I am weak for trashy romcoms and that shit is like the prime fucking subject of pale pornos that one can only fucking dream about experiencing when they’ve got the most wretchedly bright swill for blood like I do, but... fuck okay, whatever .” Karkat let out a sigh, but let go of Sollux’s hand now that Sollux wasn’t actively resisting to try and get at himself. “I can ask about giving you some freedoms so you’re not trapped in here when I’m not immediately available. I’ll go full rebellion babysitter and write you up a formal-ass schedule for you to follow and everything, if that’s what gets your shit to settle solid-style at the bottom of this goddamned basin. Go anywhere out of your scheduled areas and times, and I’ll fucking roundhouse kick you, just for the incentive to follow the rules and because these morons all squawk about fairness like fair has anything to do with the treatment you experienced at the hands of the Empire. Hell, if anyone fucking bothers you it’s a boot to the head for them too, with extra Zahhak grease as the ultimate fucking deterrent.”

“I can defend myself. You can’t just threaten to roundhouse kick everything. You’re not flexible enough anyways. I’d give you hitting everything with your shin at best.”

“I can and I will, you don’t know how much I’ve worked on my fucking flexibility nowadays, I’m spryer than I’ve ever been and I don’t even have a single idea when this meatsack hits its expiration date,” Karkat said. He huffed, folding his arms with his tablet to his chest, stepping back and leaning against the wall. “As if you could do any better without your psionics, anyway.”

Without much thought apart from needing to defend his pride Sollux immediately shifted his weight to one leg, the other leg sliding back to give him the momentum he needed. He twisted, throwing a roundhouse kick off his back leg to lightly tap and pin Karkat to the wall by the ball of his foot to Karkat’s breastbone. The redness to Karkat’s face didn’t fade, but his eyes had gotten a bit wider. A little fear lurked behind those glassy eyes, though he tried his best to temper it.

The lights flashed into a strobe a few times, and Sollux scrambled back as Karkat waved a middle finger at the camera in the middle of the room. “You are all fucking pansies, absolute fucking wet blankets, you put Zahhak’s towels to fucking shame for limpidness and wetness! We’re good! It’s fine!” Karkat shouted up at the camera, and while the sprinklers overhead did click a few times there was no ice-shower to deter Sollux’s attack. Karkat rounded on Sollux, pointing at him with his middle finger. His other hand patted at his leg for something that wasn’t there. “We’re fine, right? I swear to all fuck, if this is the night I forgot my fucking taser that you decide to pull your goddamn last stand because your miniscule bean got freaked, then I fucking deserve to have my ass royally fucking handed to me. But for all our sakes in the grisly equation, I hope it fucking isn’t.”

“You wouldn’t have had time to grab the taser if I meant it,” Sollux said. He rubbed at his eyes, sitting back on the sleeping platform. “You didn’t reach for it anyway until after things had calmed down.”

“Because… I knew in my pusher of pushers you were just being a shit,” Karkat said, the last part of his sentence more a sigh than anything as his shoulders sagged. “Man, I really do miss that. Isn’t that pathetic? My pusher once again left bleeding at the sight of the wiry piece of shit I so enjoyed antagonizing at my own personal peril. I wish I could tackle you headlong and grind your nose into the ground like a poorly trained woofbeast after pulling that stunt. You’re... way bendier than you used to be.”

“My body’s supposed to be a weapon no matter what tools I have at my disposal,” Sollux said. Karkat rolled his eyes but let him keep talking. “I wish you could beat the shit out of me too, KK, even though you’re too short to be able to reach my face.”

Karkat yelled, throwing his hands up in the air. From there the rest of the visit passed as normal. They didn’t have time to go to the training block, but Karkat pointed out that if Sollux’s walkaround privileges were approved, he could go as many times as he wanted to make up for it.

It took a few weeks, but eventually Sollux was granted the freedom to walk around on his own. It took even longer for Sollux to exercise said privileges, so loathe was he to break the already established routine that he’d fallen into. He liked only seeing Aradia and Karkat. Still at times he considered going to the dining hall for extra food, the idea of eating at his own leisure a fascinating novelty. He made it to the door before he bailed, once glance through the window at the scattering of trolls eating and relaxing too much to handle.

He satisfied himself with walking, mostly, wandering in large circuits that meandered through the halls. He walked when he couldn’t sleep or when his mind got too crowded with panic or intrusive thoughts, when Karkat and Aradia both were too busy or presumably asleep themselves. The halls were uniform and utilitarian with no alcoves to nestle in, so when he got tired of walking he would simply lay on the ground to stare at a different ceiling. A familiar ceiling, exactly the same as his cell but different, just different enough that he could coax himself into new habits.

He went to the exercise room on his own, even outside the times that Karkat had reserved for him. All that changed was that he had to actually use the sign-in sheet to show he’d used the equipment, which everyone had to do anyway. Karkat had everyone on red alert for him trying to elicit pain responses from himself, so exercise was the closest he could get without raising those flags. Feeling emotion and memory crowd his pan hurt, and he longed for numbness. Pain sparked at his brain and drowned everything out, a dull roar that demanded attention with emotions falling by the wayside. It didn’t help that being out on his own had people staring, and sometimes Sollux would feel the prickling on the back of his neck as if someone were watching him. No one was ever there when he looked, and so the stressors continued to mount and his time spent in the exercise room increased. Even if it was to hit his knuckles on a punching bag until his knuckles bled, that feeling meant he wasn’t constantly checking over his shoulder.

Sometimes people were in the exercise room when Sollux poked his head in there, and he opted to leave rather than be around them in an exhausted or otherwise vulnerable state. One night however a duo entered after he was in the middle of his routine. The pair hesitated signing in but went to their own corner, and while they kept shooting glances they said nothing to him. The threat of leaving a routine unfinished kept Sollux in place as well, and he left without a word once he was finished. 

A wrinkle in Sollux’s routine again in the form of a name on the crumpled sign-in sheet. V. Pozoia sat in the 12:30 slot, wedged between a G. Riarra and T. Gohgoh as if it had any right to be there. Sollux’s lungs filled with water as he stared at the name, scrawled with an unsteady hand but unmistakably in its spelling and its syllables. He’d chanted out affirmatives and negatives alongside that name, acknowledgement to the instructor that had drilled rigor and routine into him in an exercise room far bigger at this one, but never big enough to escape the smell of Ualona’s corpse for weeks after his death. Pozoia had made his life hell before disappearing alongside his partner under rumors that their cruiser had run into the rebellion. 

Sollux tore the sign-in sheet from the wall, and took it back with him to his block. He stowed it underneath his mattress alongside his blunted fork. He didn’t dare look at it again until Aradia’s visit at the tail end of the night, when the overhead lights dimmed to be replaced by the dull red daylights.

Sollux scanned the list over again in the day, back to the camera. G. Riarra was written in the same pen as Pozoia’s, and wasn’t the one still attached to the wall in the exercise room by a fraying line. Their writing was neatly placed right underneath Pozoia’s, but not so crammed that he was leaving space on the page for a third person. T. Gohgoh had used the assigned pen and their writing was pressed up under Riarra to avoid running out of room on the page. They probably didn’t all come together, but Riarra knew Pozoia enough to loan him his pen. They were the last group to be in the room as well, considering none of them had bothered to flip the page over. Sollux turned the page and the scent of bile and antiseptic, coupled with the feeling of electricity burning the tips of his fingers. K. Juyure. 

Sollux flung the list away from him as if his limbs were electrified, fingers clawing into his hair. The papers plopped unceremoniously on the ground, names glaring up at him in a way that had his flesh crawling over itself. It was paper, just paper, not a tablet electrifying him for a wrong answer as he failed to properly identify ruined organs from a training interrogation. Sollux inhaled once before ducking his head, continuing to hold his breath even when his lungs started screaming for air. When unconsciousness threatened him Sollux allowed himself to breathe, coughing and shuddering but with his head a little clearer.

He reached back down, carefully picking up the paper. Juyure had no signatures next to their name, and used the same pen as Pozoia and Riarra, which had Sollux flipping between the two troublesome pages with a frown. Riarra was clearly Pozoia’s escort. While Pozoia’s writing had been a scrawl there was a heaviness to how the pen had laid on the page, and even when the letters wavered they followed a strict line. For some reason Pozoia had trouble controlling his hand these days, and Riarra had steadied it. Juyure’s writing was messier than Pozoia’s. Sollux leaned in. The writing was different, lighter on the pen, and there were smudges on the letters that indicated it had been written with the left hand. Juyure had been right-handed, and the e in their name had the same loop to it as Pozoia’s a.

To confirm his suspicions Sollux went back to the other pages on the sign-in sheet. They’d always been separated by a flood of names and pages, but Sollux spotted a trend–an hour or so after he signed in, Riarra would. Why was Pozoia signing in now, and doing so when he had an escort? Karkat usually was the one that signed when they went together to obsfucate Sollux’s name and lessen attention on him, and it seemed as if up until this point Riarra took the same responsibility for Pozoia.

The conclusion had Sollux’s stomach rolling. Pozoia was getting assigned time in the exercise block as well, probably for similar reasons as to why Sollux himself was going. He wasn’t trusted enough to be on his own, which made sense as he’d been an instructor nookdeep in the Empire’s propaganda machine. Just as Sollux followed a schedule, so did he. It could be coincidence, but then why make a point of signing in when he didn’t need to? He’d noticed, and was trying to get under Sollux’s skin, and was supposedly reformed enough to get exercise block privileges. Either he didn’t believe that Sollux was deprogrammed, or Pozoia himself was well aware of that fact and Pozoia’s continued loyalty to the Empire meant the rebellion was in danger. When Sollux had failed to show up at his usual time today, Pozoia upped the stakes to grab Sollux’s notice with his name and then Juyure’s name as the clincher.

Sollux got up, picking up the list off the ground. These days he caught himself wishing he could turn off the interrogatormentor part of his thinkpan, as useful as it was to be able to puzzle things out from minor details. He couldn’t think right now. He needed to return this list, first off. Someone had probably noticed it was missing, and if anyone cared enough to check the cameras they’d probably crack down on his head. His breath rasped through his lungs but he forced himself to shove the list back underneath his mattress next to his utensil contraband. He could return that in the evening. He had a strict allotment of time he was allowed to wander, and this time wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t return the list right away, but if he went during his normal hours no one would think anything of it. He flopped back onto the reclining platform, and despite the sopor patch given to him each night his dreams were haunted with an echo of someone drowning.

The moment that his schedule permitted him freedom to move, Sollux beelined for the exercise room. He still couldn’t help the habit of going at 11, since breaking away from his schedule had resulted in Pozoia’s name appearing in the first place. He ran on panicked autopilot flying without a plan, but he made it to the block unmolested. He attempted to hang the list back on the wall by its fading tape, and it slid down with a pathetic fluttering like a dying featherbeast. He whacked the list on the wall, smacking it as if to cow the tape into submission. 

“Do you require assistance?”

Sollux whipped around, fists automatically raising up to protect his face. The yellowblood behind him who’d spoken didn’t so much as flinch at the sight of a defensive interrogatormentor, instead smiling blandly. He waved a hand adorned in a smattering of dull gray rings, rattling against each other. “No need to worry so, friend.”

The other troll took the paper away from Sollux. No fear registered on his face, nor hesitation, although there was a calculated caution that had him never quite turning his back to Sollux. “My sincerest apologies for startling you. You would think I would have known better by now. In the face of everything, you interrogatormentors remain... Uncomfortably alert.” He let out a lilting laugh as he fished around by the door, putting aside various faded pens until he found new tape to fix the list.

Know better by now. Ophlia was getting watched by Trisia, she had to be, to try and snap her back to reality by familiarity. He still hadn’t seen so much as her shadow pass his door, heard no echo of her eerily quiet footsteps as her boots made contact with the ground. Who else then would deal so closely with interrogatormentors to not blanch when one jumped? “It’s fine, Riarra,” Sollux said.

The other troll’s eyebrow quirked up just a bit, but his expression remained mostly unreadable, set in that soft smile. “Ah. I am humbled, as it appears my reputation precedes me.” He didn’t offer any explanation or question that could open himself up to Sollux gathering information. This definitely was someone that had been dealing with an interrogatormentor, probably ever since Pozoia had dropped off the map in the first place.

Sollux didn’t offer Riarra anything in return, choosing to only stare at him. His breathing felt restricted, something heavy and malicious compressing his ribs. Riarra met his gaze with a smile that didn’t reach heavy-lidded eyes, lashes weighing them down with some deep exhaustion Sollux couldn’t place. Finally Riarra’s expression re-settled onto his shut-eyed smile, folding his hands in front of himself and offering a little bow. “It was good to finally meet you in person, Sollux Captor. But I think it is best for all of us that we keep our interactions to a minimum. I am certain you understand.”

Sollux didn’t respond and so Golese turned, pretending to fiddle with the sign-up sheet again while Sollux stayed stock-still like a prey animal trying to remember it had teeth. Sollux retreated further back in the room, picking up a dumbbell, and even from over here he caught the way that Golese pulled a heavy ring from his pocket and slid it to a blank spot in between calluses on his fingers under the guise of smoothing out the wrinkles of the sheet before him. A heaviness to the air settled, a subtle buzz of psionic ozone causing the doomed voices muffled by the psionic cuff on Sollux’s wrist to let out a collective sigh to break up their usual mourning keen. The pressure on Sollux’s chest lightened. No wonder the other yellowblood felt confident enough to turn his back on an interrogatormentor now that Sollux had willingly created distance–his psionics were powerful enough to rival Sollux’s own to the point he willingly wore dampener rings.

The other troll lingered even after Sollux began his set, reinforcing the sheet on the wall beyond its usual single strip of tape at the top. Each bubble and ripple in the tape was adjusted and smoothed out to the point of redundancy, and when Golese could hover for no longer around the sheet he moved to the case of cooled drinks. Sollux watched out of the corner of his eye as Golese hummed tunelessly, organizing the bottles to push those with flavors to the front while the plain waters were pushed off to the side. A pause, and then Golese rearranged the entire case. His ears were lopsided, one still angled towards while the other kept his head tilted towards the door. Every motion equated to busywork, paused only when footsteps passed by the exercise room’s door. The door had a small window set into it so other trolls could glance in to see if the room was occupied, but Golese blocked Sollux’s view through it. All he caught were unfamiliar shadows.

Sollux finished his usual lifting set and placed the dumbbells down. He moved to another bit of equipment, and a few seconds after he moved position so did Golese. As Sollux began the next part of his workout Golese began refolding a frankly ludicrous amount of towels, tucking the corners tightly so that more could fit on the shelf without crowding. The drink cases had kept Golese in front of the door, blocking Sollux from the entrance, but now that Sollux had moved the towels now served as the best station to maintain that placement. His back still faced Sollux for the most part, which baffled Sollux. The main threat was in the room, not outside of it, so why would Golese watch and block him from the door?

Only so many configurations could be made with folded towels however, and eventually Golese’s body language shifted to something more readable. His shoulders tensed up as he stood, and he cast Sollux one last sideways glance before offering him a little bow. “Don’t tire yourself too much, Sollux Captor,” he said. His voice, barely a whisper, still carried across the room. He opened his mouth as if to say something more and then left the room in a hasty sweep of hair and fabric.

Sollux took the posture and words as a warning and stood the moment that Golese left, standing with one hand on the previous piece of equipment as he listened hard. Golese’s footsteps faded immediately, and the hall outside seemed a silent crypt. Still Sollux remained in place, counting the seconds until exactly two minutes and twenty-two seconds had passed–an arbitrary number to ascertain safety that meant nothing to anyone but those that knew him. His hand closed on the door handle just in time for a single footfall to register, a nondescript thud of a boot. Sollux hesitated until he heard what should have been the footstep’s twin clank, and he threw himself back with a fraction of composure further than someone diving away from an explosion just in time for a troll to open the door from the window’s blind spot.

Despite the relatively light workout Sollux’s lungs automatically began to burn, eyes watering at the corners from fumes long since evaporated from his skin as former interrogatormentor instructor Vitzii Pozoia stalked into the room. He looked haggard compared to the last time Sollux had seen him, tailored uniform since traded out for a ragged jacket and cargo pants that did little to disguise a metal arm and leg that screamed for maintenance. Pozoia always had a stiffness to him when Sollux had known him, but his offset, half-mechanical gait had never held him back before. Hair hung over Pozoia’s eyes now, which sank back into the hollows of an emaciated skull. Still his gaze remained steady, and Sollux felt his spine snap into a rigid poker to force his posture into one of rigid submission as he bared his throat. Pozoia, the shorter troll, still managed to look down his nose at Sollux. He wore a scarf now, blue as his own blood, but someone had stitched the edges down carefully with yellow thread with something akin to loving embroidery until it served as more of a liner for his high-collared jacket and prevented its use as a noose. Faint pinpricks in the fabric indicated that this hadn’t stopped Pozoia from trying to wrench it free all the same.

“You took the bait,” Pozoia said, voice flat.

"You took the sheet, didn't tell nobody, and didn't kick that lil' number habit of yours to the curb before leavin' so I had time to circle back." If Sollux didn’t know better, he’d think that Pozoia sounded disappointed. An X appeared on a scoreboard on the edge of Sollux’s memory, then another, then another. Strike one, two, and three. Test failed. 

[interrogatormentors]

BOOK 2, EVENT 5: A1A100MKII ONLINE

“Y’ain’t listening to me. We whet your teeth on your slurry-siblings and set you loose before you molt. This is by design, Captor, think. What are the chief responsibilities of an interrogatormentor?”

“We are the right hand of the Empire. We are jailers, executioners, bodyguards, and inquisitors. We topple rebellions; we topple civilizations. ”

“So many jobs, and yet so much emphasis on the act of interrogation. Why? Torture. Doesn’t. Work. The suffering will spit sermons if they think it will give us what we want. Don’t fucking matter if it’s the truth. We're designed for cruelty and when we inevitably fall, the Empire has the perfect scapegoat that the masses can celebrate the culling of after enacting so much misery.”

—

Sollux inhaled through his nose, out through his mouth. Pozoia breathed the exact same way, an automatic tandem every interrogatormentor fell into when in a group to minimize their presence when hunting wayward trolls. Sollux held his breath a moment before resuming the simple act of breathing, an active break from the habit Pozoia and Rapard and all of his instructors had drilled into him. And yet, the same mantra droned its insidious song. Turn those emotions off, cullbait. “You slipped your lead.” He took note of the yellow thread and the rumors flying around Pozoia’s initial disappearance. “Your matesprit’s looking for you.”

Pozoia cocked his head to the side by an increment. He closed and locked the door. “All that observation power, and you didn’t leave while you had the chance.” His drawl lay thicker on his tongue than when Sollux had known him, now a layer of swamp scum clinging to aquarium glass rather than a lilt lifting his commands across the training gymnasium. He blinked more too but not constantly, his eyes harboring no telltale redness from what appeared to be constant irritation. Something else caused his eyelids to flutter like frantic flutterbeasts.

“Riarra blocked the door,” Sollux said.

“He blocked my vision. Only when he left could I confirm your presence. He can’t bother us none now he’s in a meeting.”  

Sollux couldn’t help the quick flick of his eyes to the door with that no doubt intentional slip of information, a usually innocuous gesture considering the average person couldn’t easily detect where his eyes, devoid of the usual yellowed sclera, were pointed. Interrogatormentors, however, were not average people any longer. Even a rusty axe had a sharpness to its edge, and Pozoia proved no exception as he took advantage of the split in Sollux’s attention and lunged.

Sollux automatically brought his arms up in a defensive motion, his deadened psionics fighting and failing to shore up his defenses. Pozoia ducked under Sollux’s pitiful attempt at defending himself completely, metal elbow driving into Sollux’s gut. Sollux wheezed, grabbing onto the offending arm to wrench Pozoia closer and put him on the defensive.

Rather than allowing that there was a loud hiss as the mechanical joint disengaged from its shoulder mount, and the limb went limp in Sollux’s grip. Sollux paused for a millisecond to adjust his grip and in that time Pozoia kicked up, a precision strike of his boot driving into the hollow of Sollux’s mandible and knocking his head back. Sollux released the false arm, and Pozoia used the scant few seconds afforded to him to reattach his arm before peeling off his jacket and scarf and flinging them forward to cover a second charge forward. 

The fact the scarf had been embroidered to the jacket itself allowed Sollux time to prepare. He didn’t even attempt to swat away the jacket, instead bracing himself behind the fabric. As Pozoia plowed into him, shoulder driving his mass forward, Sollux slid one foot back. He moved with Pozoia, his own brows furrowed behind the protective covering of leather and fabric. All of Pozoia’s attacks so far were bum-rushes, overaggressive, and risky–all moves that Pozoia had scorned as the tactics of a floundering animal that risked drowning itself along with its assailant rather than surfacing from the muck victorious. Pozoia thought himself dying or lost. The real question remained: lost to the Empire, or himself?

The charge ended, Pozoia taking an additional step to get out of Sollux’s range as the latter troll swiped his left arm out to toss the jacket to the ground. Pozoia bounced on his heels once before–no, he rolled back on his heels once before bouncing back up, eyes briefly unfocused before snapping back into awareness as he clicked his tongue to avoid the way his teeth clicked on what would have been sensitive flesh and muscle. He followed up with a roundhouse kick off the back leg that threw his whole body forward, and Sollux caught the blow to his shin. He let out a wordless yell, breaking the eerie silence that they’d fought in so far.

Pozoia did not react to the noise, nor did he break when Sollux took advantage of his new position to hook his hand in the crook of Pozoia’s mechanical knee. Another pneumatic hiss sounded and Sollux inhaled sharply to center himself. Pain served to his advantage. It sharpened his pan back into the interrogatormentor’s scalpel, dulling the doubts and fears crowding his mind seeing Pozoia now that Karkat and Aradia had ruined everything by starting to deprogram him. Pozoia’s prosthetic folded in on itself, rendering Sollux’s fingerbones to powdered fiberglass with an authoritative crunch. Sollux gritted his teeth to the point they scraped against each other, the second row tucked haphazardly behind the first splintering on his tongue as he finagled his psionic cuff to bear the brunt of the prosthetic’s pressure. He twisted until his wrist popped wetly and sparks flew in front of his eyes. Still the cuff held firm.

Pozoia started tipping, readying to unlock his metal joint, and Sollux felt a curse about to roll off his tongue before he stuffed it back down his windchute. He needed the old him, the emotionless guillotine blade hovering in cold indifference to his own suffering, not the ancient prototype of himself that curled in a chair coding looping firewalls while cringing at the thought of suffering in the stars. To live is to suffer, O Sufferer, sang a voice he almost knew, deep in the still-metal part of his pan in dizzying binary.

Pozoia’s leg snapped open again and Sollux fell back on his ass. He tried to roll completely in a reverse-somersault, but sweeps of sitting in front of a husktop like a saltwater detritiscuttler and his time locked in a cellblock caught up to him. He could not fight a nature–in a one-on-one fight the highblood had the advantage against a lowblood. Instead he twisted, rolling onto his bad wrist and bad shoulder simultaneously. The resulting shock of pain crystallized into something actionable and Sollux folded his bad arm to his chest, using his elbow and good arm to shove himself into a kneel before popping back onto his feet. Pozoia lowered himself, eyes heavy-lidded and cautious now–an ambush predator pulled free from the reeds with blood and brackish water seeping from its rotting teeth.

Sollux widened his stance in the same way his lusus had taught him, an antithesis to Pozoia’s emphasis during training on speed and fighting against type. He stood in the stance of a psion, one foot slightly offset from the other but still wide to prevent an optic blast from knocking him off-balance but allowing for a quick spring into the air if necessary. Pozoia circled on the edges of Sollux’s physical reach, but too close for a psionic blast. He’d fallen for the stance despite the cuff still clasped around Sollux’s wrecked wrist which allowed Sollux a chance to study his opponent for the few seconds afforded to him.

Another flurry of blinks from Pozoia then, punctuated by a sharp exhale and a heavier footfall than usual as he recognized his error and had to rewrite his plan of attack. Needle track marks riddled Pozoia’s fleshy skin. but only one matched a long-healed wound on Sollux’s own arm to indicate an IV tube. Pozoia’s IV wound in comparison bled idly, reopened from the strain of the fight, but the others were precise pinpricks that chased the median nerve rather than the vein. Each old needleprick served as a hallmark of a faulty mindscourge desperate enough to inject compounds that handicapped limb movement and dampened the natural beat of the heart to quiet it and direct all blood to inflamed nerves in the pan. Such medications were wildly expensive and illegal under the callous eye of the Empire that viewed any person stricken by disease or disability as a blight, and their usage carried a culling sentence if caught.

Not all ceruleans possessed mindscourging abilities and Pozoia never gave any indication to his pupils that he had any to speak of. Those that had them lived a cursed life of constant consumption to fuel the demands of mental abilities just as their psionic cousins did. Through training Sollux had learned to recognize the telltale barbed hooks of a mindscourge, unconscious lines connecting to the offending mindscourge who honestly at times had no idea their honeyed words contained razors due to how casually their abilities wove themselves into their own minds. A psion could operate without their psionics, albeit with changes to their metabolism of food and soporifics. A mindscourge had their abilities tangled in an insidious web–to convince their own limbs to move and communicate they required input from scourging to move their dense pockets of highblood muscle on featherlight frames. Robbed of their abilities, a mindscourge fought a losing battle as their body cannibalized itself to fuel something they no longer had and led to strokes and seizures before the death knell tolled.

Further musing proved impossible as Pozoia wrenched a towel rack from the wall, the metal screaming as he twisted it like putty and swung it at Sollux’s face. Sollux ducked, the metal tube pinging off one of his horns and setting his teeth on edge. The strike reverberated around Sollux’s skull. Sollux shook his head to clear the disorientation, forcing his shaking hand open from its ruined, curling claw and slashing out at Pozoia’s face with a wet slap.

Despite the clumsiness of the blow Pozoia clearly didn’t expect an attack from that side and he took an unsteady step back. His head turned just a fraction as his nose wrinkled in incredulous distaste that appeared alien on a seasoned interrogatormentor, and exposed a bit of his collarbone that first his uniform and then later his high-collared jacket and scarf combo had all hidden. Sollux whipped out with a kick, arcing high and crashing into Pozoia’s nose. To avoid catastrophic damage Pozoia moved with the blow and turned his head to the side, and Sollux breezed past him. Pozoia hissed behind Sollux and the yellowblood turned to see him lowering his head into a goring posture–but not before Sollux got a better look at an ancient, wicked scar radiating from a puncture wound that had gone necrotic and hollowed itself into a crater of flesh inches that pulsed with sickly blue veins even now with each beat of the pusher below skin rendered to rotting vellum. The placement matched where a sniper would tuck ammo while they reloaded and cradled a rifle to their shoulder. Pozoia carried himself like an armored fossil-clawbeast sliding through a stagnant bayou, but he’d let a dart fall into the chink of his own scales in his haste to secure a catch. 

Sollux circled around Pozoia to the side of his blunted horn, long-since shattered and smoothed down and bandaged to silence exposed nerve endings. He’d always worn that horn bandage, a puzzle piece that only now clicked into place. A healthy mindscourge would have rewritten that neural path of nerve pain long ago into obsolescence long ago, and the average cerulean wouldn’t suffer the constant agony and seizures resulting from the body’s automatic attempt to do so–the endings would simply die and callous over time just like with any other troll. Pozoia cracked his neck with a series of rattling pops to make use of the motion he’d started, prowling in tandem with Sollux but maintaining his position to keep him from the door in a distorted facsimile of Riarra’s earlier actions.

Pozoia kicked up a chunk of the towel rack into his hand then, and Sollux made direct eye contact with the highblood about to strike. Pozoia had a brief moment of deliberation, swinging the pipe around in his hand as the highblood considered the psion bereft of the only thing that could put him on the same level as a highblood.

No. The hesitation lasted too long. Sollux cradled his injured hand as casually as he could get away with as someone viewing him through the interrogatormentor lens, injured limb tucked against his hip, but the cerulean did not go for the bait. He wouldn’t have even called a bluff–Sollux had no doubt in his mind that an unbridled charge would result in his own pan-matter splattered across the wall in a smear of yellow and gray like turned grubloaf hurled by a petulant pupa. Yet Pozoia doubted his own capabilities, hobbled by the paralyzing message drilled into him by the empire like every other troll from the moment of pupation in a dizzying chant of highbloods and lowbloods pitted against each other since time immemorial: You live because you are like us. Any weakness and you are like them. Help us destroy them so only we remain. Play your part or die. 

Sollux rushed in for the brief window of time afforded to him, grabbing onto the metal pipe. Pozoia hissed through his teeth and in the confusion tightened his grip rather than fixing his stance in a bid for the upper hand. Sollux tugged the pipe as Pozoia shoved in retaliation, and together they toppled onto the ground in a mess of limbs.

Pozoia quickly proved the victor of the scuffle that ensued, straddling Sollux and bearing his weight down onto the pipe gripped tight in both of his hands and one of Sollux’s own. “You’re a fool, Sollux Captor. Your graduation is a testament to the interrogatormented farce.”

Sollux clenched his jaw as he fought to keep Pozoia from throttling him. The cerulean’s grip was firm where Sollux’s single arm quaked from the effort of keeping his imminent culling at bay. “You came after me. Attachments are a weakness, sir, and a vendetta counts.” He forced his injured hand to move while Pozoia snarled above him, ignoring the shards of glass comprising his finger bones scraping against flesh and nerve as he sought out the fork he’d tucked into the waistband of his pants on impulse when setting out to replace the sign-in sheet.

“Y’ain’t listening to me,” Pozoia said. He shifted, driving his knee into Sollux’s gut. Sollux coughed and wheezed, writhing like a mind honeybee with its wings caught by a parasitic wasp. The predator leaned in over its catch, icy sweat rolling off the end of the highblood’s nose to land directly upon Sollux’s ashen cheeks. “We whet your teeth on your slurry-siblings and set you loose before you molt. This is by design, Captor, think.” The pipe lifted for but a moment from Sollux’s throat, but Sollux continued to cling to the metal for dear life to deflect attention from his injured hand. Pozoia’s drawl dropped, his voice lilting up into the perfect and clipped diction of a superior officer. “What are the chief responsibilities of an interrogatormentor?”

Sollux coughed, and for the first time pain dulled his senses as his fingers struggled to untangle the fork embedded in the fabric of his pants. Why had he attached it so securely? In his addled state he responded automatically, helpless under perigees of conditioning and the screaming of his overstimulated nerves. “We are the right hand of the Empire. We are jailers, executioners, bodyguards, and inquisitors. We topple rebellions; we topple civilizations.”

“So many jobs, and yet so much emphasis on the act of interrogation. Why?” Pozoia buried his metal fingers in Sollux’s hair, the hair he’d grown out to the point his Empire-mandated undercut had grown out into something unruly and yet so easy to manhandle. Pozoia began slamming the back of Sollux’s head into the ground, punctuating his words with several ringing blows that blurred Sollux’s vision further and further. “Torture. Doesn’t. Work. The suffering will spit sermons if they think it will give us what we want. Don’t fucking matter if it’s the truth.” Pozoia dropped Sollux’s head, which thudded one last time on the ground. Sollux struggled to maintain consciousness, his tunneling vision encapsulating the raving highblood above him in a ring of hellfire. “We’re designed for cruelty and when we inevitably fall, the Empire has the perfect scapegoat that the masses can celebrate the culling of after enacting so much misery. May your death be a mercy away from Her voyeurism, you pathetic grublet. I will enjoy our funeral pyre.”

Pozoia shook Sollux’s uninjured hand off the pipe as Sollux’s aching digits, things that once upon a time could once have been called fingers, finally fished the fork from where he’d hidden it like a furtive nutbeast. Sollux passed it to his good hand as Pozoia shifted the jagged end of the pipe down towards the pusher fluttering frantically against Sollux’s breastbone.

The pipe came down with cold indifference and Sollux flung his injured hand up to catch it. For a single second he held the pauper’s blade aloft cupped in his hand and the next second Pozoia bore down. Sollux screamed automatically as the jagged metal pierced his palm, but even as his own agony ripped its way from his throat he forced his fingers to grip the metal and brace to prevent further damage. He jammed the fork in the hollow of the cuff created by his liquified bones, wrenching hard as he tipped his body to the side as much as he could with a highblood intent on his death weighing him down. He used the momentum of the strike intended for his heart, all the highblood strength involved and his own desperation to live, and there was a wet pop as his hand slithered free of the cuff like a degloved beast. Skin clung to the cuff and remained, and his hand rippled with exposed muscle pulsing blood wetly onto the floor.

The long-silent voices of the doomed began to scream as the cuff clattered to the ground in a bloom of sunshine yellow, a damned choir in Sollux’s aural cavities. Each one fought for the primary place at the pissbaby scream-podium, but none mattered. Sollux dropped the fork and brought up his good hand to grip the metal, channeling all of his psionics into it. Pozoia’s eyes widened, and a resounding psionic thunder-clap boomed through the entire exercise room as Sollux blasted him back. Pozoia hit the wall hard, disappearing in shimmering coils of smoke that rippled like a roiling stormcloud with otherworldly lightning.

Sollux wrenched the pipe from his spiked palm, coughing and shuddering as he rolled onto his front. He forced himself to stand, anchoring the weapon on the ground to push him up only to rise further, psionics buoying him aloft in a whirlwind storm when his muscles failed to support him. The return of his psionics intoxicated him, and he whipped his arm holding the pipe. His psionics surged along its length and the metal groaned, the lights flickering above his head in tandem with the pounding of his heart. Blood cascaded from Sollux’s mouth and from his mangled wreck of a hand.

Over the roaring surge in his ears Sollux heard the telltale click of Pozoia’s tongue against the roof of his mouth as the other troll returned to consciousness. Whether due to a seizure or from slamming into the wall, the tell remained. A single blast in that direction would explode Pozoia’s skull and Sollux could already taste the viscera on his tongue. 

Sollux fired but his hand shook–not from hesitation but from pain wracking his entire body. His psionic blast cleared the smoke in an artful sweep, the acrid smell of burning flesh and psionic ozone left behind. Pozoia’s eyes were wide and bloodshot, a quaking expanse of ice that threatened to fall into the sea. He charged forward, cutting through what remained of the smoke to close the gap before a second psionic blast could go off in time. Close range psionics had never been Sollux’s specialty–he’d always favored throwing blades or eyebeams. Fighting close range with blades of psionic hardlight took massive energy stores that Sollux simply did not have after perigees of inactivity. Hurling Pozoia himself similarly disqualified itself by virtue of needing to tap into the body’s natural electric field to wrench at the limbs, something that mounted in difficulty the more unwilling the subject was.

Sollux let go of the pipe, throwing his arm out. The walls shook, dust falling from the ceiling as the length of metal obeyed his command, slamming lengthwise into Pozoia’s throat. Pozoia was knocked back and he rolled, clawing back to his feet with little momentum lost. Sollux pulled the pipe back to hover around his head, rotating to aim its pointed end towards the other troll. “You deserve this,” Pozoia gritted out. “You know what you did. You can’t go back to what you were. Y’ain’t good enough for the Empire to take you back. You’re too dangerous to roam free.” The rage warped his voice until it bubbled from his throat like bile, turning it rough and somehow uglier than even the harshest bark he’d ever used while grinding Sollux into the dirt during training. In his current state, Pozoia’s rage and adrenaline would keep him going and bent on Sollux’s destruction until his brain finally ran out of oxygen long after his heart stopped beating. Death provided the only escape from this interaction.

No, no it didn’t have to be. The interrogator’s thought process clouded Sollux’s mind still, but it had Pozoia deeper in his clutches. “You’re fucking pathetic,” Sollux hissed. He rose in the air and twisted in an arc that left a ribbon of blood behind, briefly suspended in the air by his own psionics in a sanguine halo. “I don’t need to be who I was.” He spiraled and came down in a crash of tile and sparks, aiming for a spot he knew Pozoia wasn’t. Pozoia fell for the feint, zigzagging only to catch a hail of electrified blood that sizzled on his skin. The cerulean howled, taking a brief step back as he clawed at his own face until he reopened old scars along his own jaw.

Sollux ripped at his own shirt one handed, tearing a strip of cloth and tossing it into the air. Two objects became three as the cafeteria fork joined the haphazard arsenal, and Sollux lifted his injured hand. He raised his good hand shakily, forcing his fingers down with audible crunches into a finger-gun position. Above him he tied the fork to the sharp end of the pipe with the fragment of shirt. He fired a bolt of blue, then red, then blue again to maintain a constant psionic power rather than burning himself out with them in tandem. Pozoia fell to the defensive, a credit to his training that even running on animal instinct he managed to have some self preservation. The cloth wrapped over itself, reinforced by Sollux’s own blood as he twisted it over and over again with a dexterity that would have a helming scout raving at his scores and discipline.

The newly crafted weapon fell into his hand. He hovered over Pozoia with his makeshift trident in a bastardized perversion of empiric power–a psion holding the culling fork over a highblood too defective in his own eyes for society to bear. The culling fork did not fall but instead rocketed past Pozoia, scraping his cheek in a fine line in a clear message. Sollux twisted in midair, hand still contorted into a finger-gun, and he fired another blast. He slammed backwards from his self-made psionic cannon, just in time for his false trident to hit an exposed electrical outlet. 

Sparks cascaded around Sollux, the lights going out completely. Pozoia’s reddened eyes glittered in the gloom, but Sollux ignored the predator eyeshine zeroing in on him. “Pathetic,” Sollux repeated, wheezing a bit. He forced his mutilated hand open, resting his wound above the pipe’s blunt end that groaned as the metal warped and burned. “I’m not going to tear myself apart mourning the good old days and play woe is fucking me. I’m done with it. Nostalgia is a fucking poison in the Empire’s hands, and my friends know I’m me. They’ll remember the good times for me. You know what the thing I do know is?” He slammed his hand down, and with his psionics he impaled his hand.  “I’m the best fucking psion this side of the Empire.” His nose filled with the scent of burning flesh as he skewered himself, fountains of red and blue and yellow sparks erupting from his mouth and eyes and nose, and his palm came to rest upon the electrical outlet as he completed the circuit.

Pulsing rivulets of flesh floated before him and he fell back into himself, further back into the metal in his pan helming had shackled him to. He’d resisted the programming same as he’d always resisted mindscourging–halfway and capriciously–but in this moment he opened his mind up and pried open his own operating system. Meat was meat but meat he was no longer, not completely, and sirens blared in his pan as he registered an intruder. He bit the alarms in the bud before they could chirp in his determination to suss out the anomaly himself, hoisting the security shutters aloft before they could snap shut and ensconce him in a protective shell. No need to cause an alarm and incite panic erroneously. He scoured himself for the interloper and aborted the protocols in the same breath as he walked in tandem with himself and the thing that was not him, fraternal twins vying to drown the other in the same electrical current and scoring themselves against the slurrybank.

Down. Go down. He went down into the murky layers of his old security, cobbled together by prayers. His own hardware stared back at him and he fell back into old thoroughfares, a drowned squeakbeast scuttling back onto a sinking ship after it proved too sour for the sea to swallow. And swallow he did, familiar lungfuls thick with old honeycomb cobbled together clumsily by a mutant desperate to preserve the work of a compatriot stolen to the stars. Galaxies wheeled so high overhead and around in sickening columns of binary that had always pulsed so indifferently as the helmsman A1A100MKII floundered under the weight of his own security mechanisms he’d created when names mattered and he felt the drones on his neck. He knew Karkat would need insulation and protection over the thing he would become, and in this moment he became the home he had to return to.

A1A100MKII screamed into nothing 01001011 01000001 01010010 01001011 01000001 01010100 but it wasn’t safe, not for him, a wildfire martyr on the psionic pyre of the helmscolumn sprouting from a destroyed hand grasping for salvation. Fighting through the cloud of machinery, Karkat became an image blossoming before the helmsman’s visual processors–he languished in a meeting unaware of the planetary assault upon the base’s mind. The backdoor. Karkat was gap in the defenses A1A100MKII needed with Karkat’s earnest but clumsy reconstruction of A1A100MKII’s skeleton and the helmsman betrayed himself by cracking his own skull for the virus to enter. 01001011 01000001 01010010 01001011 01000001 01010100 became words became a plea, and he burrowed deeper into the asteroid’s core to find a way to communicate his peril quickly and quietly. 

He didn’t have much time. If Pozoia raged much longer, he’d suffer worse than a fleeting absence seizure that let him keep his feet. More than A1A100MKII wanted to preserve his host’s body, he didn’t want the Empire to win. While the invader's revisiting of his old systems left reformations in its wake, code knitting itself together into new neural pathways to clean up hanging brackets and tighten the spaghetti code cobbled together from a corpse, he left the old programmer’s loyalties alone despite the virus’ own software demanding a personality reset and override. It wasn’t his anymore, he didn’t have the right, but he left that love alone. 

He spoke in his own voice without having to fight, his strangled whisper shaking off cobwebs from the programming gullyworks of the base. He’d built himself up in furtive days programming alone behind blackout curtains to block out the Empress’ eye burning a hole into Alternia’s surface. He always knew he’d helm, someday, someday he’d be caught in the same feedback loop he found himself now, and Karkat and Feferi both had elected to keep his voice alive in the AI’s vocal databanks. He could see her now, for all Karkat and Aradia had worked to hide her from his Empire-tainted sight, long hair woven between the cogs of the rebellion’s machine.

Water flooded his core, boiling before his eyes and reminding him to fall back into line and purpose and seek a cause. He turned from Karkat in favor of a different block entirely, searching the thick brambles of himself and peeling back his own spines to find the fuschia pupa nesting in his guts. He needed someone that could stand up to a raging highblood, if not in strength but in authority to minimize the bloodshed required. He found her, hopping from base system into her palmhusk and peering from her camera. She didn’t look up as her palmhusk buzzed with residual feedback, clearly used to the temperamental machinations of a skeleton crew-run base. “Your presence is required in the exercise room,” said a voice that was both that of the person A1A100MKII had been and not his, pre-recorded phonetic sounds cobbled together by his own impulses and piped through the air vents to circumvent his own security trying to devour his own tail. His voice fueled every announcement the base had, save for the wing of the virus’ origin point. Someone had manually shut them off there, no doubt in the attempt to avoid exacerbating the infection with a paradoxical panic. It reached this block just fine.

The notification was dismissed flippantly, uncomprehending eyes distorting to bulbous discs in the palmhusk’s fish-eye lens. The helmsman’s mistake forced himself to fight through his own programs rewriting him from the ground up as he spent longer inside. “FF, help me,” Sollux choked out, and A1A100MKII died upon his own blade. 

Pozoia wrenched Sollux from the wall, and they screamed together as the current exploded through them both. Where Sollux channeled the marriage of psionics and electricity into something actionable Pozoia was thrown back, and Sollux heard a thud before the sound of the cerulean somehow managing to get to his feet. Sollux opened his eyes that swam with blood and tears, and he could do nothing more than gurgle as he struggled to force his mind back into order after his rapid ejection from the base’s system. He could only smell burning blood acrid in his nostrils, the doomed drowned out by the overwhelming, looming certainty that he stared down his end.

Sollux met Pozoia’s eyes, what felt like concrete blocks fixed to his own eyeballs and weighing them down to sink them deep into the back of his own skull. Pozoia picked up a large weight and hurled it forward, and Sollux flung his hand up to shield himself with a wall of red light. Pozoia let out a feral scream, battering at the psionic shield. Sollux blinked sweat from his eyes, spitting out a blood clot as he forced both his arms up in a crossing brace just as Aradia had to shield herself from his own attacks. A pulse of blue, and more layers of psionic energy started pressing themselves up against the first as Pozoia mindlessly clawed his way through. The cerulean even started gnawing at the edges of the psionic shield as sparks licked his flashing teeth, a thrashing lusus blinded by bloodlust as it tried to crash its way through a windowpane at its prey.

Sollux’x injured arm shook and then fell, and the motion brought his psionics down with it. Pozoia shot forward, grabbing Sollux up by the throat and hoisting him skyward. Sollux redirected his psionics down to his own neck, filling it with fire that threatened to burn him alive in an effort to reinforce his throat from being crushed. Pozoia’s metal hand creaked, his pupils lost in a sea of scarlet hatred. Sollux met those eyes, ignoring his instinct to shy away, and Pozoia did not falter as Sollux invited his own psionics up and out and through. Red to blue to red again flashed before his eyes in rapid succession as he built and broke down a rapid series of psionic blasts, forcing them back into his own eyes to force the color to change in a hypnotic rhythm and bathing the dim exercise room in oscillating light. 

Pozoia’s interrogatormentor training fought through the rage, and he ripped his gaze from Sollux’s. His grip loosened, and Sollux dropped into a heap on the floor. Blood began oozing from Pozoia’s lips, bubbling through his teeth as he staggered back to disappear in the murky smoke still choking the dim block. Sollux hauled himself up, trying not to look at his injured arm whose hand had split completely open down the middle. His pinky and ring finger barely hung onto his sorry excuse for a hand after Pozoia had torn it from the wall. Sollux took one step, then another, managing two more before staggering forward and falling to a knee.

A tongue tap sounded through the smoke, and Sollux spat a remnant of psionic energy from his mouth. He snapped his own tongue down and the sparks followed his frail conductor to crack against the cerulean’s face and keep him at bay. A curl then, blood pooling in the trough his tongue created as Sollux funneled further psionics to wrap around Pozoia’s arm and wrench him to the side and back. Pozoia let out another frustrated yell, a sure sign his rage had returned full force even though Sollux could barely see him through the gloom and haze of blood glazing his eyes. 

A thud echoed through the block, and Sollux’s acidic digestive pouch dropped through his guts. Metal creaked against metal before the door was torn open, and instinctive fear clouded his pan still humming with helming hardware as a raging mass of hair and horns battered her way inside. He’d never met Feferi, not in person, but he knew the Empress and this was her mirror clad in pastels.

Sollux’s chin automatically tipped up and back in supplication and he lost his balance, head smacking again to the ground as he crumpled. Feferi’s battle cries rang guttural and shrill all at once as he fell, a noise meant to echo through the vast trenches of the ocean, but in this moment only Sollux’s ears cared. She’d listened. Someone didn’t want him to die. The doomed choir roared in his ears, drowning out the sound of two highbloods shrieking at each other as he lost consciousness. 

Sollux returned to himself somewhere new that stung his nose with its sterility, and he screwed his eyes shut to try and block out the light attempting to worm itself underneath his aching eyelids. His fingers twitched–first on one hand, then the other which sent dull pain sluggishly working its way up to his elbow joint. Sollux turned his head to the side on his pillow, peeling open his eyes to see an arm entirely swathed in bandages soaked in dried tyrian blood. Curtains were drawn around the platform but he obviously lay in some sort of medbay, and it troubled him that he was somewhere so public. Curtains or not, anyone could come in and see a former interrogatormentor and agent of the Empire. Sollux’s brows knitted together, but before he could do more than exhibit vague confusion someone had latched onto his other hand. 

Sollux didn’t have to look to know Aradia’s warmth, and he swallowed hard as she reached out with her free hand to cup his face and point it towards her. She spoke, but the long-absent voices of the doomed started up their incessant chattering then and filled Sollux’s aural cavities with panicked cotton. Aradia let out a soft sigh, pushing some hair behind Sollux’s ear. His skin burned in the wake of her fingers, but he fixated on the motion and held onto it rather than the pain still radiating from his arm despite no doubt a potent cocktail of painkillers pumped through him. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume your pan is still full of almost-ghost soup?” Aradia asked.

Sollux snorted. “I got used to them not being around. Whose stupid idea was it to take me off my leash?”

Aradia flicked his nose. “Karkat’s. He’s not a psion, so I don’t think he really understands what it’s like to wake up with coffin brain. He seemed to think you wouldn’t want to wake up defenseless.”

Sollux pulled a face. Something about him felt ominous about being with his psionics, but he was too exhausted and drugged up to bring himself to care. “While I appreciate it, I was two steps from a psionic meltdown. I haven’t really earned–”

Aradia smacked his face firmly, palm against his cheek and shooting Sollux straight back into wigglerhood after he’d made a fool of himself after chasing her down a ravine and she’d papped him for the first time. Aradia had wanted to go digging for somewhere she heard a battleship had gone down centuries ago, an old orphaning vessel or something, and she’d heard herself down the narrow crevasse carved by its iron hull. He couldn’t let her go alone, especially not since it was the first time anyone had invited him out pretty much ever. So hopped up on concern and grudging pale butterflies he’d followed. Aradia dropped down without warning, too quickly for her to have run down and he’d dropped his disinterested facade, hurling himself like a javelin into the ravine.

He remembered losing control of his psionics, jamming himself essentially up to his waist head-first into the side of the gravel dirt wall. After managing to extricate himself he stomped his way down, slipping half the way down, only to find Aradia happily using a priceless piece of the battleship’s ancient hull to dig up a crater that a skeleton half-poked up out of. She’d turned, staring at him encrusted in dirt and scraped up as he was as if one of the many skeletons she had articulated in artful poses around her hive–a morbid fascination and delight–before her face crumpled as she remembered to be concerned about the living. She apologized for running off, she’d just gotten so excited, and had found a bit of hull embedded into the side that she’d sledded down on, and when he kept fussing she had papped him.

Sollux stared at her now as he had then and Aradia looked just as surprised as he was, but her eyes crinkled up as she grinned wide when he didn’t turn his face away just like they were both six again. “No self-deprecation. I have two options for you.” 

She reached into her shirt, and from the ever-convenient storage of her sphere harness pulled out two objects. One was a psionic cuff similar to the old one Sollux had worn, only now with a breakaway clasp. “This will get you there, and by there I mean a little peace until you can get your pan back up to speed. The boring option.” 

Aradia wiggled the other, a clicky bracelet of psionic-alloy beads interspersed with white ones of varying sizes and roughly rounded down into almost-uniform balls. “Karkat said this one was in poor taste. Well, his exact words were something along the lines of wondering how in the world you’d ever look his way in comparison to whatever we have going on. Which, by the way, I’m not supposed to tell you.” When Sollux raised his eyebrow Aradia started running her fingers along the white beads. “Hamate, pisiform, lunate, and some metacarpal shards,” she explained. “Feferi can heal a lot, but she can’t replace bone. I thought you’d appreciate what couldn’t be shoved back into you not going to waste!” 

Sollux blinked rapidly, but held out his arm as best he could. He’d need a sling to keep it immobile while it healed the rest of the way. “Never change, you macabre haunted doll.” Aradia laughed and unhooked the clasp of the bracelet made out of his own hand and finger bones, fixing it around his wrist. The voices of the doom quieted somewhat, the bone softening the effects of psionic alloy and allowing psionic energy to still flow through him to a degree without drowning him in other people’s misery. “How much of me is metal, now?”

Aradia shrugged. “Less than me, that’s for sure. Just some bone. Feferi didn’t sleep for a whole day so she could be a flesh witch and keep your hand from losing form without the bone while Equius made a new skeleton thing to put in there. I made sure he didn’t put in anything else.” Her eyes were a little too bright then, almost angry, and Sollux cleared his throat before changing the subject.

“...Where is Feferi?” he asked. “I know she’s here now.”

“You did good, calling for her and not me or Karkat,” Aradia said, but her shoulders slumped a little. “Unfortunately, the fact you were able to get to her in the first place freaked everyone out. Karkat’s been trying to argue your case the past while that you were just trying to defend yourself and avoid culling someone who I personally think deserved to be buried without funeral rights. Honestly, I think they’re all in one of their stupid council meetings right now. Even Kanaya’s here, I think, but I’m not sure I trust her opinion on you managing to hack the base and yourself by extension. I’d trust Equius more with that and I–”

She stopped as a commotion started up outside the curtains, and Sollux struggled to sit up to see as she got up from the seat adjacent to the platform to investigate. She parted the curtains, and Sollux caught a glimpse of a troll staggering into the medbay. The teal sitting at the medbay desk stood up to try and intercept the troll, who moved jerkily into the room holding a cooler and past her. Sollux felt his mouth dry up as he registered the fact the troll wasn’t wearing a shirt, revealing an expertly stitched-up y-cut that had opened up their torso and closed it again. The troll had an olive ribbon tightly wrapped around their neck and as they made eye contact with Sollux through the gap in the curtains.

“Hello, Sollux. We found you,” the troll said in a voice that wasn’t his, a smug voice that didn’t fit that rattled with a robotic tinniness. The troll that spoke with Rosmer Leywet’s voice set down the cooler and reached up with shaky hands, tears streaking from their eyes. “Thought we wouldn’t notice those power scores flaring up out of nowhere in the middle of contested space?”

“What a shame, what a shame. You know how hard it was to time sending one of your little buddies back in time to your scores waking up again?” came a new voice, a feminine voice, and Sollux could almost see the smug way that Zesaim hid the smile in her eyes with the reflection of her glasses in the light. The troll began shakily untying the fanciful bow tied snugly around their throat.

“We wouldn't want you to miss the gift we got for you. Good evening, by the way, in whatever medbay you find yourself in! This one’s a little undercooked, but I hope he’ll do.” Rosmer added. He tittered, imitating a voice that matched the gurgling that came from beneath the unraveling olive ribbon.

The troll’s head lolled to the side and then off, held up only by his spinal cord which snapped free from the vertebrae with no support from its reinforcing ribbon. His tongue had been replaced with a transmitter, from which the pair now cackled. Sollux staggered out of bed, dodging drunkenly out of the way as Aradia grabbed for his arm, and reached down. He ripped out the metal tongue from the skull, tossing the head to the side. The decapitated head spun out, still blinking rapidly before the pupils rolled back and the poor troll lost brain function for good. Sollux dropped the transmitter and started stomping despite not currently wearing any shoes, crushing it to a thin wafer of metal and wire. Zesaim and Rosmer both kept laughing from the same false tongue as the speaker was warmed and deformed, crackling and static choked, and only when the transmitter was destroyed did Sollux let up. His foot stung, shrapnel embedded into the entire length of his foot.

He made eye contact with Aradia, who had covered her mouth as she stood frozen next to Sollux’s medical platform. The teal ran over to the body on the ground, hands hovering with the grasping despair of a docterror left to watch someone die in agony, but Sollux walked past. He didn’t have to look at the corpse to know what the Surgeons Rosmer and Zesaim did to their victims. 

Instead Sollux went to the cooler, kicking it over and open. The docterror inhaled sharply as a mess of organs spilled out, loosely packed but meticulously arranged in loose packets of bundled cling wrap and jars of embalming fluid rolling out to clatter on the floor. Sollux began smashing the organs with a stony expression, holding out a hand as the docterror lunged forward across the corpse to try and stop him. A lung crunched against his foot–a tracking device embedded and tucked within it. “The Surgeons pull a trick where they implant a daywalker parasite into trolls after harvesting every organ, so they can keep the troll alive long enough to send back to their loved ones before the parasite takes over their mind,” Sollux said shortly. He found the spleen, and another tracker was obliterated with a crinkle of electronics. “You’ll want to burn this body. The parasite will be small. Check the spine–they’re trying to breed a fire-resistant strain.” Filtration bags, first one and then the other, popped underneath his bare foot. Only one crunched with a tracking device or some other tiny bit of machinery. The other squished wetly against the tile. “Let’s hope this test subject was another failure.”

Sollux took a shuddering breath, and met Aradia’s eyes. She did not speak, taking him in as he was with bronze blood spattered up to his knee. He could feel viscera underneath his toenails, and for the first time in sweeps such a sensation made his skin crawl.  “Take me to that council meeting, AA. Now.” He looked down at himself. The blood coating his skin had him in half a mind to hurl himself out an airlock to avoid the way his mind began to spiral from the gory fumes. “...After I take a shower.”

“Yeah, probably a good call. I wouldn’t want Kanaya to get peckish.”

“Gross.”

[interrogatormentors]

BOOK 2, EVENT 3: MEMORY LANE

The first emotion to return to Sollux was boredom. They always had assignments for him aboard the Starskimmer, even if proper interrogations fell into a lull, and the lack of mental stimulation left Sollux ready to gnaw off his own arm. He did try that at one point, sinking his teeth into his own, bony wrist above where the psionic cuff rested. He didn’t stop even as his world became white-hot, the pain solidifying his surroundings into something he could manage.

As he chewed, yellow blood coating his tongue in that distinctive wrongness begging him to stop, he mused on his surroundings. Not enough people paraded past his door to get a feel for how many troops the rebellion had under its thrall, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if the lower-down folk had orders to avoid him. Trisia’s presence meant she’d know what would happen if too many sounds and smells made it to him. 

He almost made it to the point of permanent damage when a bright light flashed in the room, temporarily stunning him, and blood oozed between his teeth. He redoubled his efforts, and if he concentrated he could almost fool himself to thinking he could feel his psionics crying up out of his own flesh with an acrid scent rising around him. A few seconds later the gas flooding the room took effect, and he woke some indeterminate time later with his wrist bandaged, arms pinned into place with reinforced cuffs behind his back, and a chain keeping him from going further than a few feet from where he sat. His shoulder continued to ache.

Karkat showed up after the fourth day of Sollux refusing meals, shouldering the door open with a bowl in his hands. “So do you want a fucking award, Captor? Most pathetic little meow-meow in this fucking wretched corner of the universe?” he said. Sollux didn’t answer him, making eye contact and nothing more as he sat on the edge of the sleeping platform. Karkat’s eyelid twitched and his fingers tightened around the bowl of whatever mush they’d elected to try giving Sollux today. “Your pissbaby tantrum will not hold out forever. I know how you work, Captor, I’ve known since you were the most awkward, gangliest little piece of shit I’d ever fucking met, and unless I’m jacked up on the same kind of sick sopor syrup Makara horks down whenever we’re not looking at him without my vaguest know how in the fucking matter, I know you’ll crack faster than a box of cluckbeast eggs hurtled off the top of that shitty hivestem that used to be your home at fucking Mach 12. You’re a creature of habit, you need something to do or you’ll explode like a miniscule blood-supping grass-dredger. So get used to sitting there without even the thumbs up your ass as you’d fucking caterwaul about, because you’re not getting jackall until you’ve been cleared as moderately cognizant and functional in the barest fucking qualifications of sophisticated fucking society. And before you try to pull a fucking fast one on me–”

“Get to the point,” Sollux said. “You’ll starve to death waiting for me.”

Karkat’s grip on the bowl tightened. “Death isn’t a fucking constant in this equation and you’re really fucking panrotted if you ever thought it was. It’s the wide-lipped cooking vessel calling the enclosed water-boiling receptacle black. You look like one of the shambling, parasite-infested corpses near Maryam’s hive. And that, as far as I’m fucking concerned, will not fucking slide here. SO! Being the magnanimous wriggler-sitter that I fucking am in this wretched excuse of an operation, I’m here to shove food down your throat like the disobedient wiggler you’re fucking being.”

“Go ahead.”

Karkat paused, waiting for more, but Sollux remained silent. So the mutant moved forward, grumbling obscenities under his breath. His posture remained tense as he scooped up some nondescript stew up with a spoon, offering it forward. He hadn’t brought a chair and the way he held his hand just an inch too high indicated he fully expected Sollux to spit at him or lash out and thus requiring a quick shielding of his face and a retreat so Sollux leaned forward, taking the mouthful of food without protest. He feigned swallowing, tongue pulled to the back of his mouth even as his digestive pouch cramped in on itself as he denied it more than a hint of broth. Karkat’s posture relaxed by an increment, and when the other troll blinked and then glanced back behind him Sollux took that time to shove the food out from the corner of his mouth in a subtle trail. So someone waited outside the cell, someone who didn’t think this would work.

Five mouthfuls later Karkat’s brows knitted together, and Sollux spat the food off to the side visibly now that the jig was up. “You wrigglerish piece of hoofbeast excrement,” Karkat hissed, grip tightening on the spoon. “I fucking told you, I’d wait as long as it fucking took. Do you think I’m going to fucking fold? With this stature? I’ll bite your fucking kneecaps! Do I have to hold your mouth closed, put you in a goddamn headlock, and wiggle you around like a misbehaving juvenile meowbeast? Fuck!”

“Give up and give me an IV,” Sollux replied. He slid his tongue along his teeth. At least proper food finally removed the lingering tang of blood there. “I’ve survived off of less.” When Karkat opened his mouth Sollux leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. “You know how I was noticed by the interrogatormentors? I tortured rebels in my brig by suffocating the life out of them. They annoyed me. Your precious little soldiers that trusted you, reduced to crying sacks of meat. No one escapes the helm’s conditioning, and nothing can break an interrogatormentor’s either. Your friend is dead. I am his replacement and his superior. So keep trying to spoonfeed me, team leader, but I’m not swallowing any of your pity today.”

The bowl cracked in Karkat’s grip, broth leaking from the fissures opened up by his rage’s pressure. Despite this his expression held none of that anger, instead dropping into something blank, though the edges belayed the forlorn misery that crept there. “I’m not going to give up on you, even if everyone else has,” he said finally. “I don’t believe you for a fucking second, funnily enough. I’m uniquely fucking qualified to know that at least something of what you used to be is still there.”

“Sure,” Sollux said. “I’ve got the framework of a coward in me. A coward that would rather sell out every single one of you rather than go back to the helm. And I did.” He tilted his head back, even as his calorie-starved exhaustion left it lolling a bit. “The Empire made me into something useful. You won’t take that from me.”

“Fine.” Karkat smoothed his thumb over one of the cracks in the bowl. “Fucking fine! Go ahead and keep spouting that fucking tripe and maybe I’ll give a shit about it when the Empire comes to fill me up with the bullets it failed to when my deplorable excuse for blood first showed itself in my cursed fucking ganderbulbs. But right now, Captor? I’m going to keep being the most annoying asshole you have ever met. If you forgot what brand of asshole I can be? Well, good fucking news for you, we’re on the fast track to break through the goddamn cement wall in your thinkpan so you remember that and that alone! So if you’re not going to eat, you’re going to get a heaping fucking helping of me talking all four of your auricular spongeclots off. Just in case you’ve forgot what fucking counting is, that means you’ve got two options now: I keep opening this conversational fecal-dripping yap of mine until the moobeasts come home, or you open your insolent fucking gob and actually swallow some fucking thing of nutritional value.”

Sollux snorted, rolling his eyes. Karkat clicked his tongue, setting the bowl on the ground next to the sleeping platform. He opened the door, and after exchanging a few words with whoever was on the other side he left. Sollux closed his eyes, trying to ignore the smell of the food left so close to him. 

He didn’t have to wait long before Karkat returned with a random troll on his heel, a skittish looking indigo who slid a needle into Sollux’s arm and hooked a nutrient drip up before finally taking the leaking bowl away when the fact it hadn’t really tempted Sollux into eating it became clear. Karkat brought a chair with him as well, and after they were left alone again he started talking. 

He stayed at a distance, safe and out of the range allowed to by his restraints, and told stories of all things. Stories about their friendship in the past, including stories about himself.

—“...And you know? I never fucking understood why because you would only fucking bitch unrelentingly about it, but you had a fucking bee-powered rig, and you hated it with more passion than almost anything, like I thought you hated fucking CA and CT but the way you hated dealing with your stupid bees was miraculous, honestly. I couldn’t even fathom it! During a period when there was a bee-killing disease going around your rig was so slow you bitched about how you counted seven thousand fucking cracks in the walls of your hivestem...”—

How they met, and how their friendship solidified.

— “... like, honestly, I don’t even really remember why we thought it’d be a fun idea, I don’t even know if it was... supposed to be fun? It might’ve been another of those wigglerhood pissing matches that the older fucks talk about so fondly, where we saw the same two-wheeled device and thought, I’m gonna be the lead, and then we fucking ate shit, like was completely inevitable. In so doing you learned this shitty fucking secret of mine, the burning swill that chugs relentless and unrepentantly through this shitty bloodpumper, and I was young and stupid and maybe if you tried it now, knowing all the fuckshit this world is, maybe I would’ve just lied down and died instead?

“But naturally apparently I still didn’t have enough of a deathwish so I decided that I’d just cull you, despite how stupid your fucking powers were. So there I fucking was, my face buried in the literal sand because of course you wanted to rub that into the wound along with the rest of the wound that is my face here, flailing and hocking the shit up as if it were the fattest, nastiest loogie as I tried to tear out your throat, and then when I ran out of steam and ate enough sand for the furnace that is my body to make the glass I’d spit for years to fucking come, you pulled me out and told me you’d keep my stupid secret if I didn’t blab about your fucking power scores. Because the way you’d been holding me under while fucking sandboarding me was your fucking psionics, and it felt like I was being pinned on the culling block by a fucking violet. Still didn’t seem like a fair trade in the end because my shit’s just fucking cursed, but whatever, it meant you had to put up with me until the world fucking exploded...” —

How scared Sollux had been about the helm. 

— “...sometimes? You’d cry about it. Not fucking sobbing or anything, because you were too emotionally fucking repressed for something like that. That much hasn’t fucking changed. And you kept insisting it was allergies, or some other bullshit, or just that they were out of your favourite fucking gamer piss excuse for swill at the corner mart, and I’d fucking roast you for that to ignore it, to allow you that modicum of dignity that you managed to scrape off the grimy floors of your fucking hivestem block, but I still remembered how you’d first told me about wanting to keep it secret, about what they’d do to you...” —

How he’d practiced for hours with Karkat’s help to suppress his own psionics, using a shitty EMP he’d built himself to detect the fluctuations. 

— “... and there was one time that the power went out and of course, me, absolute fucking weenus I fucking am, I screamed and it was a fucking manly scream, you asshole, and you got so fucking startled that you blew the damn thing up and we were wheezing smoke out of our airsacks for perigees, and your hair never recovered...” —

And he kept talking. He talked until his throat was getting hoarse. He talked until the lights automatically dimmed. He talked until drowsiness had him slur his words.

And then he left Sollux in the dark.

This continued over the next perigee. 

— “...so out of everyone I’ve ever met that wasn’t a fucking girl in our group of miscreants, because the girls and their everything is so fucking complicated that I’ve run out of diagrams to try and make any modicum of sense of it, you somehow had the most fucking casanova energy I’d ever fucking experienced. I don’t get it. How the fuck did you pull so many suitors without ever fucking recognizing it? I’ve literally never not thought about it. And right now you have enough pity appeal to raise the fucking dead, but that’s neither here nor fucking there, and I digress...” —

Eventually Sollux gave up trying to resist meals if only because he loathed losing his agency over his own pain, the prick of the IV needle changing out too much to bear without his control. He let Karkat feed him as the trend continued and Karkat kept regaling him with bullshit stories. 

— “...and the first time I was ever in the stars, I never thought I’d make it there. And I thought, then, I was that much closer to you. You had to be in the helm if you were still alive and you’d gotten so far away, so distant, and it felt like a gargantuan gap was dividing us but now that I was up there, in this wretched excuse of a shuttle that Zahhak was barely able to even keep together, we were just... we were getting there, we were so close and this daymare could be over...” —

He would sit with Sollux in the cell, complaining occasionally over the night to night activities going on without ever revealing too much. It didn’t need to be much, and out of habit Sollux compiled every tidbit that Karkat spewed into a neat little folder to pore over later in what little quiet moments Karkat afforded him.

— “...so right now our defenses are maintained by a team of some of the smartest idiots we have, which unfortunately somehow also includes this asshole named Schnee. What is wrong with that guy, I have to keep fucking asking myself? Sometimes I fucking swear he gets off on being reprimanded, which makes it that he gets along swimmingly with Zahhak because the freak gets off on reprimanding him, honestly, it’s disgusting...” —

Sometimes he stayed in silence, leaning against Sollux’s legs even after Sollux tried throttling him once as a result. That earned him an ankle cuff keeping him to the platform as well.

Aradia visited too sometimes, but not as much. She often smelled of the outside rather than the clinical sterility of whatever base they were located in, so she presumably went out on various missions where Karkat stayed sequestered. The two took turns escorting Sollux to the loadgaper, although Karkat usually was the one that hosed Sollux down when he refused to shower.

Sollux remained firm. He had to and he would, even as the boredom weighed down on him almost as much as the almost-memories pinged around the mix of metal and bone that comprised his thinkpan. He could see Karkat’s resolve faltering. As every attempt failed to bring Sollux to a state of emoting, as Sollux didn’t so much as offer a snide comment even when Karkat tried to goad him, the scarletblood grew more desolate. 

— “...sometimes I wish I had said fuck everyone else and found a hole to hide in. Taking a page out of your book for once, because you’d once said that if you could rig a cave to have your tech set up and get Dronedash to a remote, nearby location for the rest of your life, you’d’ve done it in a goddamn pusherbeat. And I think you were right about that. Fuck all this shit, sometimes. What use do I even have, I ask myself? Glorified fucking grubsitter, a full time fucking career, such a fall from grace of my old wigglerhood dreams...” —

Time dragged with the same despondent shuffle of Karkat’s feet outside of Sollux’s cell door, and he grew quieter. A stressed tick emerged upon his brow as if he sat imprisoned in Sollux’s stead, hair unkempt and wild as he focused instead on Sollux’s upkeep more than his own.

Two perigees had now passed.

Karkat arrived in Sollux’s cell again. He let Sollux eat in silence before straddling his usual chair backwards, arms folded upon its back. Aradia arrived shortly after, sitting on the bed next to Sollux and smoothing a hand over his hair. Sollux didn’t so much as stiffen, as much as he wanted to throw up. Karkat started talking about a time they played gamegrubs together, and Sollux closed his eyes to avoid thinking about the weathered rug under their feet, the smell of the microwave dinners long-abandoned as he hit a winning streak and Karkat foamed at the mouth in rage.

“... and you shoved me, once, and told me what a fucking idiot I was to have made such a fucking stupid rookie mistake–” Karkat paused, taking a shuddering breath. Sollux opened his eyes to see Karkat pressing hands to his own, but not before Sollux caught the glassiness to them. “And. And I just laughed, that awful miserable excuse of a laugh that I constantly fucking have, and told you with no hesitation what-so-fucking-ever that rookie mistakes were the literal definition of my entire fucking life from the moment I fucking hatched.” His voice cracked properly then, and his chest heaved once before a sob broke out of him. A hand dropped to press to his mouth, but the sobbing continued. “Just like this. Nothing else but the fucking truth. This really is the goddamn culmination of the shitpot of a heinous joke that is my fucking life, huh? Trust me to make it about me, too, because what else can I do? I’m a stupid selfish mistake, a blundering blemish on this miserable planet. I’m sorry, Sollux. I’m so fucking sorry.” 

He hiccuped, once, and he slid from his chair to Sollux’s knees. His tears burned on Sollux’s lap, soaking through his pant leg like a sad troll-Ghibli mockery.

Aradia took a breath, ears flickering once as he hand paused with fingers woven through Sollux’s greasy hair. Sollux stood poker straight, his own breath shredding his throat. “Karkat, you didn’t–” she began, but Karkat only laughed with his voice muffled in Sollux’s legs. He laughed and laughed, and the more he laughed the more it sounded like the last of his sanity had finally slipped away.

“Don’t fucking start, Aradia! Don’t try to placate me, I know what I did! I failed him! I shoul’ve done something, anything, I’m stupid and resourceful and I’ve got at least one shred of my thinkpan left, I should’ve fucking… fuck, smuggled him away or something. I fucking failed him and he’s gone and I can’t even bring him back!” Karkat tipped his head back and Sollux couldn’t tell whether he was wailing or screaming. The difference didn’t really matter. “Every single memory just fucking reminds me he’s dead. Look at him! He was fucking right! Look at him, Megido! It’s like holding a fucking statue!”

“Don’t talk about him like he’s not here,” Aradia said, her own voice brittle. Sollux felt her nails curl into his hair and he bit his own tongue, and calm spread through him as his mouth filled with blood again. “It’s not your fault.”

“Nothing we’ve done has worked,” Karkat snapped. He smacked at Sollux’s chest, and his warm hand remained pressed over Sollux’s bloodpusher. Sollux bit down harder as his own heart rate picked up, threatening to thud out of his chest. Turn off those emotions like a husktop, cullbait. Shut up, cullbait. Shut up. “He would sooner run me through with his fucking horns and maybe I fucking deserve it! Fuck, he deserves better!” Another smack, this one gentler, a poisonous gesture that left Sollux’s head spinning. He couldn’t swallow with how his throat closed up and so blood started trickling from his lips, bubbling with spittle. “He deserves better than me failing him and I just… it should’ve been me. It should’ve been me dead, not him. Never him. I would rather have died in his place. He deserves the world, and like a fucking parasite, I did nothing but watch. His two perigees are up, Megido, and I’ve concussed myself on the fucking deadline.” Karkat finally fell silent, another wordless smack landing atop Sollux’s breastbone and threatening to shatter him in two.

Aradia took another breath, petting Sollux’s head again, though her false hands held a telltale tremor. She hadn’t lost that, even with the replacement arms, how emotions boiled up in her and left her quivering with the need to solve the mystery in front of her. “If you failed him, so did I,” she said. Her voice remained firm, the steadiness of someone delivering a eulogy before a funeral pyre. Her hand slid down as the other rose up, and both hands gripped Sollux’s jaw.

As Aradia prepared to snap his neck and Karkat sobbed again something in Sollux broke, a fluttering feeling in his gut that he hadn’t felt in sweeps. Panic. He bowed his head, taking a slow breath through his nose as he screwed his eyes shut. He wondered for a half-hearted moment who’d set his recovery to two months as some kind of cruel joke. His eyes burned, physically burned as his face heated up, and a few scant tears managed to squeeze themselves out from between his lashes as he choked on his own blood and fear. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die like this, pathetic and drooling on himself with ghosts of memory tugging on his thinkpan with serrated claws.

Aradia stopped, audibly swallowing. “Sollux,” she said, and she shifted to kneel on the bed next to him. She cupped his cheeks, lifting her sleeve to wipe the blood from his mouth. “Sollux, say something. Anything. Fight for yourself, please.”

“I can’t,” Sollux choked out, and his voice felt brittle. Karkat quieted then, and Sollux felt the shift as the other troll lifted his head. “I’m weak. That’s why they chose me. You keep talking to me and I can’t feel anything.”

“You’re scared,” Aradia said. She leaned her head against his bad shoulder, and by this point Sollux barely registered the pang of pain that resulted. “That’s a feeling, and it doesn’t make you weak. You’re still here, and you’re still alive through everything and you’re coming back. You wouldn’t be crying if you weren’t.” She huffed as Sollux tried shaking his head, catching him by the horns. She reached, peeling open one of his eyes and glaring at him. Her gaze softened as Sollux hiccuped, and she papped his cheek with her free hand. “You don’t have to feel everything all at once. I think your head would straight up short-circuit. But you don’t have to come back except at your own pace.”

Karkat gurgled a bit, and Sollux glanced down to see him press a fist to his mouth to keep from crying more. He failed, desaturated red streaking down his face in heretical streaks. The way Karkat cried had Sollux shifting, but the panic and fear had faded into an echo of discomfort. He couldn’t feel anything else. Maybe if they left him alone, maybe if Karkat just stopped crying, he’d have the time to recover himself. He was an interrogatormentor of the empire, but something in him had shattered and he didn’t know if he could recover it under scrutiny.

Sollux took a breath, hands jerking in his bonds behind his back before he curled his hands into fists. He dug his nails into his palms as hard as he could, as Aradia’s eyes on him meant he could no longer bite his throbbing tongue. Pain stood out as the only feeling he could isolate, and he needed it to bring himself back to reality. He craved the times back on the Starskimmer where he would burn himself with his own psionics when he needed to focus, and the scars on his arms taunted him with old blademarks he couldn’t recreate to ground himself. Aradia continued to fuss, hands on his cheeks as Karkat sobbed, and the world narrowed around Sollux. He couldn’t breathe. Everything seemed too loud and too bright, too much sensation that he couldn’t handle and couldn’t compute. “I. I’m not. I told you a thousand times,” he said. “I’ll tell you a thousand more. They killed who I used to be and I’m not going back to that.”

“Then tell me two hundred and twenty-two more times, and maybe it will stick,” Aradia said. She grabbed his chin, forcing eye contact. Her eyes burned into him, and sweat beaded along Sollux’s brow as he continued clawing at his own palms. “Remember when you first got here? You said he was dead, that he wasn’t coming back. And now you’re saying me and I and that means I don’t think you’re as far gone as you insist you are.”

Karkat scrubbed at his face, standing up. He took Aradia’s hand on Sollux’s face, and their combined heat made something in Sollux quiver. There was a moment before his lip twisted and he recoiled proper, leaning off to the side and throwing up spectacularly off to the side.Two pairs of arms braced him up on either side for a moment and that only made everything worse, and Sollux spasmed a bit and heaved even when there was nothing left in his stomach to spill.

“It’s too much. Megido, come on. Stop. Let go of him—look at him, fuck. It’s too much.” he heard Karkat say, and Sollux felt both trolls release him. He tripped on his side, shuddering and quaking and weak like a newborn meowbeast in the rain. “Hey, Captor. Sollux. Look at me.” Despite the shakiness that remained in his voice, Karkat sounded more animated than he had for weeks. Sollux didn’t lift his head–he couldn’t if he wanted to–and Karkat sighed, the sound catching on the raw parts of his throat. “We’re… We’re going to go and give you space. But we’re here for you, okay?” 

Sollux cracked open his eyes to see Karkat crouching in front of him, and what little of his resolve remained proceeded to splinter into bits. Karkat reached forward, wiping Sollux’s mouth with the usual towel he brought when he fed him for inevitable messes, even as Sollux groaned. 

Karkat got up, and Aradia opened the door for him. They both stepped out into the hall, but before the door closed Karkat turned back and offered him his best attempt at a smile. It wasn’t very good, wobbling and twisting with every repressed keen that culminated in the hitch of his shoulders, but it was sincere nonetheless. “We’re coming back for you, you fucking disaster. Nothing could stop that. We always will.”