#becauseisuckatart

He leaned back, abashed; opened his mouth and closed it again. He had the sudden feeling that human flirting body language was in fact very similar, if not identical, to troll flirting body language and he had no idea what to do next. Why did she keep asking about unzipping his files? Obviously he was capable of unzipping his own files, even wigglers could do that. Wait, did humans get aggressive if rejected? Not that he cared about being rude but her outfit indicated that she was obviously a god tier and -

She burst into giggles, interrupting his train of thought, and extended a hand. "I'm Roxy," she said. He took her hand and shook it, unsure where this was all going. She squinted thoughtfully at him. "And you must be..." 

"Sollux Captor, hacker king. I see my legend precedes me," he interrupted sarcastically.

"I was going to say you must be a thief, Sollux Captor."

"Thief? What the hell are you even saying? I'm a mage," he corrected her. What did this have to do with unzipping files? He was lost and therefore grumpy.

"Are you sure? 'Cause you definitely stole my heart from across the room!" And she winked.

Sollux stared blankly at her. "Can you just go away now? I'm trying to do something here. Obviously."

"I can see that," she said, and instead of leaving, she came around to his side of the husktop and peered down at the screen. "That bracket should be red, not blue," she said, pointing.

"Are you fucking kidding me?!" he exploded, jumping to his feet. "You think you can just waltz in here, say totally incomprehensible things about zipping files and stealing hearts, and then debug my code? My code? For your information this is written in pure ~ATH," he pronounced it til-death, "and your tiny human brain can hardly fucking even begin to comprehend it, let alone correct me on it!"

"O-kay, whatever you say, Sollux Captor." She threw up her blue-gloved hands and started to walk away. "But it should still be red," she called over her shoulder.

"Fine!" he said, and slammed his hand down on the color-change command, like it even mattered! If it was supposed to be red he would have noticed that and fixed it already because he was the best hacker and he was never wrong.

Naturally, because Sollux was Sollux and nothing could ever go right for him, the bracket turned red and the program started to compile. He stared at it, wide-eyed. "Fuck!" He looked up and saw Roxy watching him.

"I hack madfilthy ~ATH," she grinned, walking back over to him. "Roxy Lalonde, hacker goddess. As deadly to the grid as I am beautiful." She was standing very close to him. Too close? Disorientingly close. He gaped at her. Now that he thought about it, yeah, she was kind of pretty. For a human. A human with short hair. 

A human who could hack ~ATH. Now that was hot.

She wiggled her eyebrows again. "And if you were a dynamically allocated variable in a ~ATH code you'd create a leak, because I would never delete you from my life." She frowned at his blank look. "Do trolls not do pick-up lines? Is that not a thing?"

"Pick-up lines?"

"Oh my god," she drawled, realization dawning. She started to laugh. "You don't have pick-up lines. That's why no one even laughs, they have no clue. Oh my god. Oh my god, I have to go tell Janey."

"Wait," he said, and grabbed her wrist, surprising both of them. He let go immediately when she glanced down. "Uh. I'm sorry I flipped my lid." He ran his hand through his hair just to have something to do with it. "Stick around for awhile. Maybe uh, you might find something else I missed. In. The code." He grabbed a chair and yanked it over to her. She had no idea what it cost him to even admit the possibility that he could have missed something.

"You want me to stay?" He noticed a faint pink flush to her cheeks, and felt a little flutter in his pump sponge. 

"Yeah, I mean, two's better than one, right?" He winked at her, cringing inwardly as soon as he'd done it. That was stupid. He probably looked stupid and she was going to leave now.