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When you die, it doesn’t take you long to figure out why.
You were a terrible person. You went grimdark and killed your best friend and the man that made her happy. You followed the teachings of a genocidal maniac because you had nothing else in your lost, lonely little life to live by. You’re terrible. You deserve this.
For the first portion of your endlessly stretching time in this bubble, you’re alone in a vast, dark abyss. You float in the cold waters, numb to the world, giving your penance.
You think on nothing but what you did to them. You burdened them. You made them feel responsible for your every emotion. Every high crest on the back of the waves, every dashing against the rocks, you made them feel like they were treading it with you. You tainted Fef’s beautiful, steady growth with such storms. You made Kar and Kan pick up the pieces. You dug your claws into everyone else around you and ripped them down like a vicious riptide, all to feel just slightly better (It never even worked). You cry a few times, into the black waters, violet tears dissipating into the massive, cold, unfeeling ocean around you. You never really hated them.
You never really hated lowbloods. You never really thought they were lower than you. Hell, you swore to Fef when you were both just little pupas that the two of you would tear down that entire society. Then you learned of how that fuck of a planet actually worked, and you were a fucking coward. You pressured Fef toward flush when you didn’t really want that and knew she didn’t.
You started ripping into every land dweller but Kan and Kar. You clung to the teachings of your ancestor, all in the prayer that they would keep you alive to see Fef to the throne.
But it didn’t matter. The game started. Fef broke off the moirallegiance. You, you, you fucking horrible stain on the light of every other person in that meteor, you killed them.
You never hated Fef or Captor! You never hated any of them! Why? Why did you do it? You killed them, you watched the light leave your beautiful best friend’s eyes, your former moiral, the most steady and kind thing you’d ever known, the troll who had tolerated everything by your side until you drove her away.
Worse yet, you killed her matesprit, all for what? Jealousy? Because he attacked you? No. You were a fucking coward and you knew that if he saw through this total loss of hope, of care for yourself, he’d see that you were going to turn that wand on yourself next. You wanted him dead before he could make you try to live.
And then the grimdark really took hold.
You.
Fuck.
You destroyed the mother grub’s egg.
The last hope of repopulating the troll society.
You prayed to every outer god who drove you to that horrible edge that they’re happy.
And that they’d rip you to pieces after Kanaya cuts you in half.
But they didn’t.
So you float in that endless darkness.
You let the cold put you in a half-aware state, focusing in on the lost wandering of your mind until you feel something pull.
To your shock, eventually, they make a sprite out of you and… someone else? You can feel them, their presence, wrapping warmly around the bubble, changing its shape in an odd way. You turn your head for the first time in… stars know how long, and see… a communal hive stem.
It’s the entire communal hivestem, not just the one apartment. You can see that it extends out of sight, breaking the surface of the water (you didn’t know there was a surface to this void at all. You never had any gauge for what direction you faced in this cold abyss). You can see someone opening the window. Bugs are fluttering out. Captor… kept bees, didn’t he. You watch his face appear through the window, observing the surroundings, you watch it from under the water. You wish you could turn off your bioluminescence more than ever. He glances into the water with confusion. He probably can’t see anything but faint violet lights, land dwellers can’t see through water the same way sea dwellers can, especially not this distance, from the top down. Hell, from above water, you don’t know if you could see this far.
A few… you have no real gauge for time, anymore, it could have been days or minutes or hours -but either way, you eventually feel someone looking at you. You turn your head with the weight of stone.
Sollux Captor is looking at you.
He doesn’t look mad.
More… irritated. He raps on the glass like this is some human aquarium, trying to confirm you saw him. You blink at him. Flick your fin ears in an odd pattern. That’s the most he’s getting, you’ve got penance to pay for fuck’s sake (for killing him).
Time gains a little meaning to you, as once every time block, he’ll open the window at the top of the hive stem, then close it later.
Then you notice something new.
Light. There’s no more eternal darkness.
Once every time block, a sun rises, far more gentle than the alternian sun, then later in the time block, a pair of moons rise. A day and night cycle. Huh.
He starts to visit you, after 218 days. You don’t really understand why. He sits by the window around sunset, talking, knowing damn well you cannot hear him through that glass.
It happens… 125 times, by your count. He sits there, speaking to you in english or alternian or a mish mash, until he starts to do something strange.
Around the afternoon where he should be doing it for the 126th time, he opens the window he closed just earlier in the day, the one he uses to let the bees out. He’s wearing something that resembles your seadwelling clothes, he must have manifested them to look similar.
He sits with his legs in the water for a while, before gripping the window sill, turning around, and dipping himself up to his chest in the cold water, kicking his legs wildly in an attempt to figure out how to stay afloat (you can feel the movement in the water, the first you’ve felt in 343 days plus eternity before). He’s panicking too hard, you realize, trying so hard to stay afloat he’s practically sinking.
He pulls himself out of the water using the window sill, teeth clattering together from the horrible cold of the water. He looks down in the water and says something you can’t hear.
You don’t care what. (You very much do).
He does it again the next day, and the next, and the next, slowly figuring out how to tread water without looking like a flailing target for any seadwelling lusus. After 15 days of treading water, he begins to try and actively swim. He makes that learning jump surprisingly well, taking only 13 days to figure that out, swimming an impressive distance for a land dweller to test his own abilities, and only flailing at the very end of the lap.
Then he tries swimming down.
You feel something very akin to humor, at the face he makes trying to hold his breath underwater, though your face remains neutral as ever. You think he’s insane to be doing this, there’s no way he can see in the dark waves, hell, you have trouble seeing in them sometimes.
And yet he continues. It takes him much longer (45 days, better than you expected from a land dweller) to learn how to dive down farther than a few feet, and even then, he can’t go very deep.
You don’t know how to feel about it, as he slowly gets more confident going under the water.
No one ever bothered to see if you were okay where you were. They always assumed you must be- you’re an Ampora, you were made for the deep, crashing waves that would pummel any lesser soul in far less time. They always assumed you were fine in the waves. In the cold. They never really asked. Even Fef always thought it was silly, the way you felt like the pressure was crushing you when you swam to the abyss to help her with her lusus.
You were always a lesser soul than people around you thought.
It weirds you out a little, to see someone so clearly determined to see what it felt like for you.
He makes it a little deeper every day, but he is a land dweller, and his oxygen never lasts him long enough to get more than halfway down to you.
(You could make him an air bubble, if you really wanted. You’d just have to cup your hands together and guide the water into a bubble for him. It’s not that hard. You used to do it all the time for Gam when he’d visit Fef’s palace).
On the 35th day of trying to swim down to you, you finally move, for the first time since getting here. He’s trying to swim down to you again when it begins raining, hard. The waves are pushing him down. He can’t get back up for air. He’ll just respawn if he dies, but you…
You really don’t want to see him die a second time because of you.
You move your hands faster than you’ve moved anything (still not super fast), and form a decently sized air bubble in your hands. You send it up to him with all the control over the water you can spare.
It bubbles around his face easily, allowing him to breathe.
You keep filtering the Co2 into the water, focusing so hard on ensuring it’s oxygen in this bubble that you forget to leave your face neutral for once in god knows how long.
You stay like that for a long time.
Him clinging to the bubble as a lifeline. You keep the bubble full of oxygen.
The rain stops after a horribly anxious timeblock. He swims back up and pulls himself into the hive stem.
It’s a much shorter timeblock when you see him in that window he still sits by so often, hands pressed to the glass while he looks at you.
You recognize the words “was it you?” in English falling from his lips.
You form another bubble in your palms.
He looks at you with that unreadable expression again.
You begin to give him a bubble when he reaches the halfway point, 5 more days after that. You might as well, right?
He makes it two thirds of the way down to you with one.
You debate giving him another, but you’re scared what would happen if he did reach you.
He’s set up a little work station in the window looking out on you best. Somewhere he can sit with his laptop and work without leaving. He even sleeps there sometimes. You don’t understand why.
16 days after he reaches the two-thirds mark for the first time, you speak for the first time.
He looks so upset when he can’t reach further, and the sea-tongue pushes out of your rasping, unused vocal cords like a fucking plea.
“Kisthel?” you ask him.
Wwhy?
When you look at the window next, he’s studying sea tongue on his laptop.
He notices you looking.
He switches tabs and begins typing in a very large font on a document so you can see.
You’re stiill a person, Ampora. You don’t deserve two rot.
“Uchesa!” You growl into the waves, knowing he can’t hear you.
LIAR!
You think on what he said nonstop.
You don’t deserve two rot.
But you do. That’s all you’ve done, for eternity since you died, is rot in this cold water like you deserve.
But he doesn’t think so?
And he continues to look so mad when he can’t reach you, in a way that confuses you so badly.
10 days after he said those words, he injures himself. You see him resting his ankle, elevated, for hours.
He still tries to swim down to you, but you see how much pain he’s in.
You force the currents upwards to make him go back to his hive stem.
He tries, for far too long, to swim against your currents, until he finally just lets them carry him back to his window.
He looks pissed at himself when he sits back at the window.
It’s maybe 14 days later, 14 days of miserable nonmovement in the waters aside from the occasional rain, that your muscles begin to itch. You want to move. You never want to move. You want to cry. You never want to cry.
“Shusa de ton eo nal?” you whisper.
What did you do to me?
He looks out his window when he sees you speak. Presses his palm to the window and lays his head against it, presses as much of his body against it as he can. This little window seat he’s built so he can be near you, and you’ve never felt horribly farther from him in your non-life. Your chest feels like it’s ripping open.
“I’m so alone,” you see him whisper, “Please. I can’t swim to you, Ampora. I can’t. I can’t even heal these stupid injuries. Swim to me. Please.”
You wish you weren’t so good at reading lips sometimes. You wish you were the one who was blinded instead of Tez.
You wait till his eyes fall away from your still body to let the tears dissipate into the waves.
You never hated Sollux Captor.
6 days later, you can hardly take it anymore. He’s wasting away worse than you at that window, hardly able to put weight on his ankle without being in horrible pain. Did he sprain it? Break it? How did he do that? Healthy trolls have to do a lot more to sprain muscles, especially that bad.
You want to press your face to the window like he does. Tell him it’ll be okay. God, it hurts, but it’ll hurt worse to move.
You don’t want him to see what a failure of a seadweller you are. How your weak joints being still for so long will have killed your movement speed.
You wait until he falls blissfully asleep.
You stretch your legs out slowly. It hurts, it hurts in the worst possible way. Your joints are so cold and delicate, aching horribly. You continue to stretch them slowly in the darkness.
You don’t deserve two rot.
It’s an embarrassing 4 days of slowly stretching your limbs after Sollux has fallen asleep with his forehead pressed to the glass before you try to swim. The first movements of your legs in water are by no means elegant, taking swimming in loops around where you’d been resting for an additional 3 nights before your muscles feel in proper shape.
When he’s asleep, you move so slowly it could be considered glacial.
You get so close to the glass it feels dangerous.
You press your hand to the cold window over where Sollux’s hand rests.
Your bioluminescence increases brightness the longer you linger there.
He shifts in his sleep and you dart back to your spot like hell.
Nights pass of this same routine, glowing like a nightlight, tracing Sollux’s shape against the glass of the window between them and retreating the moment it looks like Sollux is waking up.
You always admired Captor’s audacity. To send viruses to a prince’s computer just because he got beat in troll tf2 and relentlessly shittalked.
To be so unapologetically himself against the world. When he killed Ara, he still remained himself. When his bipolar had his pan out of wack in the most insane ways, he was still himself. Even now, he is still himself, endlessly stubborn.
His wit and reaction time. He could keep up with your speed almost effortlessly, where even Fef struggled against the wild fluctuations in you, mood and battle alike, Sollux caught them flawlessly, unstartled by your flips from joyous to asinine and cruel. He could tread the waves without breaking a sweat, even if it was just to mock you while you struggled against them.
(Your heart stutters when you think that thought, sometimes).
You linger a little too long at the window tonight, 5 days into this routine.
You press your forehead opposite of where Sollux’s is pressed.
His eyes flutter against the light of your violet bioluminescence.
Red-blue eyes open, blinking blearily against your light, while you are occupied closing your own eyes and pretending you had the courage to leave the cold depths.
You can hear his voice against the glass, breathless, shocked, for the first time in so, so long.
“Eridan?”
You don’t come to his window the next night, too scared.
He looks upset by it.
“Dasa,” You mutter into the abyss.
Sorry.
You gather your courage the next night, when he looks exhausted by his own pains, seemingly unable to heal these wounds, however he got them. You swim over and allow your horns to clack against the window noisily. He looks up at you tiredly. He smiles. (His face isn’t as unreadable as you thought anymore).
Your heart stutters again.
You establish a routine, the two of you. You curl up against the glass through the nights, slowly getting used to swimming again, gathering whatever you have in you.
You don’t know what you’ll do, if you ever leave the water like Sol seems to want.
You’ve been here so long.
You wonder, idly, what it’d be like to share a hive with Sollux. You wish it weren’t in the middle of the sea, maybe somewhere like a shore so they can walk and you can feel sand under your feet again.
Solid ground under your feet. What an idea.
You wander your thoughts while sitting beside Sollux’s window every night, and while sitting fifteen feet away from it every day.
It’s 12 days of this routine before the water begins to feel… strange.
Like something is brewing in the weather that will hurt the ocean too.
3 days later,
The hurricane hits.
The waves are harsher than normal, pulling back and pushing forward more than usual. It rains more than usual. Then in the middle of the day, when the sky looks like it’s midnight, the lightning and rain becomes too intense. The waves reach too far down. You go from being gently tugged to roughly torn from your spot fifteen feet from the window, relaxing your body as much as you can through your anxiety in the prayer that it’ll save you.
Sollux was sitting with his legs out the window he lets the bees out of again. He’s doing slightly better these days. The two of you were enjoying the storm before the high winds ripped at him.
You lose all relaxation when Sollux is pulled from his perch into the waves by the wind and currents
You kick and kick and kick against the water to reach him.
He’s not strong enough to tread the waves, being ripped into the undercurrent without mercy, screaming silently into the water.
You reach him, against all odds, you reach him. You give him a bubble over his head and cling to him with your arms and legs, wrapping yourself entirely around him and praying. You know what happens when two people are ripped apart by hurricanes, it happened to you and fef once, you woke up on shores hundreds of miles apart, horribly injured, so you pray and pray.
Please don’t take him away from me (again).
We’re so alone.
You don’t know how long the two of you are adrift.
You lose focus, holding that bubble tightly over his head, ensuring he can breathe.
It could have been days. Weeks. Months. Time loses meaning again, adrift in the blackness, wrapped around him. When he can, he speaks to you, mostly just quiet affirmations that he’s still alive and you’re both okay.
“Na dasa,” you tell him over and over, knowing he won’t know what it means.
566 days since night/day cycle, you were there by that fucking hive stem, and now you don’t know where you are or how long it’s been. Two thirds of a sweep. A year and a half.
One timeblock, while you’re watching him sleep in your tight grasp, you feel your eyes slip shut.
Darkness.
You fight it, but no matter how hard you try, for an imperceptible amount of time, you sleep.
You sleep until you feel yourself die.
When the two of you wake up, it’s on the floor of a hive.
It looks like someone meshed your hive from Alternia with Sollux’s.
The two of you are laying on the floor beside each other, sopping wet, but alive once more.
The dream bubble reset, and now here you are.
You sit up slowly, adjusting to the coastal chill air against your already freezing body.
Sollux sits up beside you, looking around before his dual-colored eyes land on you.
“ED,” He breathes, one hand coming up to cup your cheek like he wants to confirm you’re real.
“Sol,” you choke out in english.
He wraps himself around you entirely, just like you did to him when you were in those waves.
He climbs entirely into your lap, wrapping his legs and arms around you.
He sobs.
Sollux Captor sobs into your arms.
You sob too.
“Sol,” You repeat, so tired it could kill you, “Sol.”
He hiccups and sobs and you do too, and he doesn’t let go of you unless it’s to hold your face in both his hands like fragile porcelain.
You sit there sobbing together for a strangely liquid amount of time.
When you’ve both calmed, he leans back and just holds your face.
His glasses are gone.
You haven’t had yours in so long, you don’t need them in water, they’re for land only. He’s not horrifically blurry at this distance, though, holding your face.
He becomes steadily clearer the closer he leans.
Your heart stutters once
Twice.
You close the distance.
After two-thirds of a sweep and stars know how much longer here, and… if you’re horribly honest, quite some time before that when you were alive, you kiss him.
He takes your breath away with it, entirely wrapped up in each other for who knows how much longer.
When you do finally separate, he looks at you with that look you used to find unreadable.
Care, you realize. Care and respect and horrible, red troll pity. You could cry again.
“Let’s get off the floor,” he murmurs. The pair of you fumble around the hive until you find a respiteblock with a human bed in it, decorated like it’s yours. You find your clothes in the closet. You suppose it must be yours. You gather your softest, warmest clothes.
The hardwood floors are so solid under your feet, when Sol and you stumble to the room across the hall. It’s Sollux’s, his things are in here. He gathers his clothes.
The two of you find the ablution trap. You’re not willing to be apart, so you strip there.
He sees your scars, deep marks from a royalblood’s training.
You see his, electrical burns running his body like lightning from his own psionics.
The two of you shower. Both of your soaps are sitting right on the shelf inside the ablution trap, like you’ve always . He rubs your shampoo through your hair and rinses it out with water so gently warm it makes you want to cry. He does it again with your conditioner.
You do the same for him.
You wash eachother’s bodies.
You sink to your knees in front of him when you notice his bulges out.
He learns sea dwellers can breathe through their gills on land.
You get painted gold.
He returns the favor by showing your nook his bifurcated tongue.
He gets painted violet.
You can hardly remember the details with how fuzzy your head feels. How tired you both are. He’s so fucking pretty up close, you feel so dizzy.
You dry eachother off.
It’s been so long since you’ve been dry.
He dresses you with such gentle care, and you dress him with kisses between every layer.
The two of you stumble to your respite block.
You fall into the bed together.
You curl up together, foreheads touching.
God, he’s so warm. You’re so cold, naturally, it’s part of your seadweller physiology, but your fragile joints never liked it.
He’s like a heated blanket.
He’s wrapped around you so warm and loving. At the same time, you know you can piss eachother off like nothing else, driving eachother to be so much better.
“...I can’t pick a quadrant,” you mumble.
“Then don’t,” He whispers, “Let’s just have what we want. We’re dead, anyways.”
“Then what should I say?” You ask, flushing a little.
“I love you,” Sol offers.
“I love you,” You repeat, voice cracking with the flush you currently feel.
“I love you too,” Sollux repeats back, laughing.
You never hated Sollux Captor.
You love him.
Maybe you aren’t so terrible after all.