#psiiscar

We've got obsessions I want to wipe out all the sad ideas that come to me when I am holding you We've got obsessions All you ever think about are sick ideas involving me, involving you

—

The lot of you have a thousand empty hours, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It gets to you, sometimes. You can reach out and touch walls, now, dig your feet into whatever floor you’re standing on, eat and sleep if you want - but there’s still not much difference between your hive and the bottom of the ocean, when it comes to being left alone with the inside of your head.

It was a little easier, before. You could detach from yourself. Now, you wake up sweating, convinced that everything that has happened is some sick dream. It never got any more fun, waking up from a dream that you weren’t you, returning to a bundle of fucked-up and quiet, accepting self-loathing.

You don’t sleep much.

Suf doesn’t really notice; he’s too used to odd hours, and you’d think he didn’t sleep himself if you hadn’t witnessed his talent of passing out in two minutes on the most uncomfortable surfaces known to trollkind first-hand. Psi doesn’t notice at first, either - their entire band has met the idea of sleeping at a routine time and decided they don’t care much for it. So if you’re up in the early afternoon and one notices, and up after sunrise and the other notices, they shrug and figure you’re sleeping when they do.

Disciple is the one who figures it out. Which is downright humiliating - you know how important she is to Suf and Psi, you know Dol would die for her, but you don’t know her yourself too well. She has the same heart as the rest of them, though, which means when she finds you in the kitchen late morning three nights running - and you’re not trying to invade or anything, it’s just that having people in the place, even asleep, feels more real than sitting alone in your hive and it’s easier to breathe - she drops a blanket on your head.

“We’re in the middle of a fuckin’ desert,” you point out, carefully unhooking the blanket from your horns. You don’t particularly want to explain to Dol how one of her blankets got ripped to shreds.

Disciple sets a cup of tea in front of you before sliding into the chair on the other side of the table. “We are playing cards,” she informs you, and tosses a deck on the table. You’re not entirely sure where she got it from, and you’re not going to ask. “You’re going to want the blanket to cofur your shame after I take you fur everything you have.”

You play cards. She’s not wrong.

When you’re down to your last ring, Disciple holds a finger up to her lips. Before you can be an idiot and ask why she’s keeping you quiet, she gets up without scraping her chair along the floor and beckons for you to follow her. You do, despite a flicker of unease, leaving your blanket on your chair and the shittiest hand known to trollkind on the table.

She leads you down into the cave system, away from your lake and further underground. It’s cold, and dark, and it smells wet even though the walls are dry - you guess that’s your fault. “I know you don’t sleep much,” she says, her voice barely a murmur. “Nobody seems to, and they all think they’re alone.” The two of you come to a fork, and she pauses before leading you down the left one. You follow, increasingly baffled. “Rosa sews. Kar uses sopor, sometimes, but he doesn’t like it, so mostly he just reads and naps a lot. Pol…” She jerks her chin ahead of the two of you, where your branch widens into something less claustrophobic. Now that you’re looking for it, you can feel the crackle of electricity in your horns.

“An’ you?” you ask, looking down at the woman you’ve been underestimating this whole time.

She grins up at you, a flash of teeth in darkness. “I beat douchebags at cards.” Before you can - what, protest? You’re pretty solid on your status of douchebag lately - she sobers. “Rosa gave you the lusus talk. Now I’m giving you the best furrend talk.”

You should have just slept. The daymares would have been much less worrying.

“You’re all acting like you’re alone still,” she says, looking away and shrugging a shoulder. You don’t think she’s given the Best Furrend Talk all that often; Suf’s hardly experienced, and Psi… well, his partners wouldn’t have cared, you’re guessing. Short-term arrangements don’t break your heart. “And I get it, that everything’s new and tentative. But if you don’t try to move forward, you’re never going to be able to help each other. There’s nothing here that we don’t make, so if you don’t try to make something, you’re just going to drift away and hurt each other all over again. You especially.”

“What, becod I ain’t one a’ you?” you protest.

“Yes,” she says, unflinching. “And also because you drift off, when things hurt. You hide at the bottom of the lake, where we can’t find you. And fur people like us, you might as well be wearing your heart on your sleeve. We can tell, Dualscar. We might be the only ones you’ve efur met who care enough to do something about it. Don’t waste it.”

You stare at her, your throat dry. Finally, you manage to eke out, “You are Dol’s fuckin’ spittin’ image.”

She smiles. “If you don’t become worthy of Kar and Pol, I’ll chew you up and spit out your bones. She taught me how.”

Entirely too scared of the last member of the rebel party, you edge into the cave and give Psi the fright of his post-life life.

—

Mindful of Disciple’s advice after that, you start watching people. And now that you’re actually watching, you start noticing things. Spin projects loudness and brashness, a force of personality impossible to ignore, and she hides in plain sight when she’s not talking, as if she’s not even there. The way she looks at her cavalreaper - you can’t watch that; you imagine that you looked like that after her, at one point. Her cavalreaper seems bland, but the way he looks back is iron, and you daresay you don’t need to ask after the story. Dol’s legislacerator is more normal than she seems, building walls out of interminable jargon and terrible colour combinations. Dol throws herself into the building of this place at this time. The Handmaid - the most terrifying troll ever to come up to your armpit - drifts around on aloof, vague mystery.

Dol’s doing her best, as desperately as she can, but you’re hardly going to form a community if things stay this way.

While you’re watching, you get watched. Suf is kind, of course, and you don’t like thinking about that all that much. Every time you do, guilt unfolds in your chest, showing unique facets every time. You - you’re still not sure you want to be kind, to be decent. It’s asking for a shot in the back, it’s difficult, it hurts, and the only reward is being more like the trolls you’ve come reluctantly to admire a little for somehow pulling off kindness without cutting themselves to pieces on the wanting of other people. You can admire them without imitating them, your mind tells you, and it’s too late to change who you are, anyway.

Except it’s a knife, being who you are. It’s the pain that followed you to the bottom of the ocean and kept you there until you turned blank and let yourself go. And every time you think it would be easier not to, you remember the feel of your gun cooling in your hands after taking the shot on Dol. There’s no solution you like here.

Psi watches you like he knows that, flat and baleful. You run into his stares like you’ve run into a door, and he doesn’t even have to say anything. He knows who you are. He saw you at - your worst? Your best? - and he hates you for it, with depths you cannot begin to fathom. Things - things haven’t progressed far with Suf, part because he’s shy and part because you don’t want to ruin this - to ruin him, the existence of something nice even if you’re not sure where you stand on the subject of ‘nice’. Things with Psi… well, he throws himself at you, trying to break himself to splinters on your edges, and you gather that this isn’t an entirely new coping method for him.

You hate him more than you can breathe, sometimes, for being so straightforward about it. You’re just the asshole who hides at the bottom of the lake.

You take up cooking communal meals, ostensibly because you’re the only one in the entire universe who knows your way around a nutritionblock. In reality, it’s mostly because you can feel Disciple watching you not do anything about her advice, and you are a bundle of guilt and overthinking. Partly, it’s just… you enjoy it. You’re allowed to enjoy it. You can like assembling a meal without thinking about repercussions on your essential being, even if everyone else is doing their best to think about it very loudly for you.

Psi corners you three evenings into your newfound hobby, when the novelty has worn off and there aren’t five people hanging around and watching you peel potatoes. You can feel the crackle of power in the air when he walks in - he’s normally considerate enough to keep his psi to himself - and are halfway through the process of turning to give him a hard time when he finishes the job for you by slamming you back against the counter and pushing up in your personal space.

“What?” you snap, and flex your shoulders as subtly as you can. He’s not restraining you, so he’s picking a fight. It’s depressing to know how easily he could dispose of you, if he tried.

“This act is sick,” he snarls, low but intent. Just because nobody else is in the kitchen doesn’t mean that nobody else is nearby; Dol’s hive is always full of people. “I’m sick of it, fuck, I don’t know how nobody else has seen through your domestic bullshit. Stop trying to fucking convert DR and DC, and-”

“So,” you interrupt, and lean back on one elbow, “I take it you don’t like the cookin’.”

Your kismesis is fucked in the pan. You know, because you’re responsible, and you’re counting on it. Instead of lashing out with his psi, he tries to slap you instead. Powerful, he might be, but he’s a sad twig of a thing and telegraphs his blows because he never had to rely on fighting dirty.

You catch his wrist and bend it away from your face. “I got enough scars.”

He barely hears you. Normally, he’s an onslaught, and the first blow means he’s not going to stop until he wins or dies trying - but here you are, his wrist in your grasp, not firm enough that he couldn’t break it if he tried, and he’s breathing hard. Experimentally, you twist his arm back a little, and he turns bright mustard.

He doesn’t do anything else.

You stand there in that tableau, let it spin out, then drop his wrist right before he says anything. “I ain’t the only one puttin’ on an act.” Your knife has spun off into a corner, so you collect it and begin paring the skin off another potato, projecting nothing but calm and mild-mannered. He hates it when you do that, like you’re the reasonable one. “Lemme know if you get yours to stick, Helmsman.”

It’s a shot in the dark, but you spent some very intense seasons holding him down by the arms, and you’ve noticed his tendency to drift off. His responses get more factual and single-minded if you interrupt him, then. Helming isn’t exactly the most pleasant of his life experiences, but you imagine that being able to detach and drown yourself in subroutines is a hard addiction to escape.

“Fuck you,” he says, finally, and walks away. You let him go and start dicing the potatoes, sinking every piece of brainpower you have into the task, and ignore the way your own hands are shaking.

—

You’re good at fucking things up. Exhibit A: Your Entire Life. Now that you’re rebuilding that from the ground up, though, you get to stop and question what you want in it. Right now, you have a hazy notion that your relationships are supposed to make you better, somehow. To kick your failings out of you, and to encourage your best. Choosing Suf and Psi has to mean something, then, about what you think better means - but that just puts you back on the mental treadmill of whether you want that, and how hard you’re going to smash things to pieces when it turns out you’re the same bag of bulges you’ve always been.

Being with Suf is so easy, is the thing. He’s stubborn and fierce and somehow patient, and the bits of him you’re starting to see now - hopes and worry, nerves, all the things that aren’t the best-foot-forward of early relationships - just make your heart ache a little. Would you have valued this, before you went mad from isolation? Are you just valuing it now because it’s better than being at the bottom of the ocean?

Dol watching you, assessing you every time you cross paths, helps. She knows you, and she cares about her - her son. Her sons, plural. If you were being yourself - your old self? - you think she’d probably kill you, never mind your current state of already having died. You’re going to have to decide if you like their standards of decency or not, so you can figure out whether to be glad or insulted there’s someone keeping you in line.

Psi is more complicated. You should be sick of all this mental looping, but it suits your mood, at least.

He needles you, is the thing. And you can take needling - you tune it out, because for the most part it’s just a rerun of what’s in your head anyway, except this time you get snapped out of it by him peeling himself away from you and putting his shirt back on. “-might as well go fuck my hand,” is the first you hear and process of his sniping.

You reach out and grab his sleeve. “Hey, don’t fuckin’-”

“Yeah,” he says, tightly controlled. “Not fucking was what was happening here, apparently.”

You roll your eyes and twist your hand in his sleeve harder. “I got fuckin’ distracted, you over-dramatic shit. Don’t even pretend that you aren’t usean’ this to ignore the world.” He hesitates, because that would be hypocrisy that could break the bubble universe you’re all stuck in. You take the time to pick yourself up to your knees and hook a finger between the buttons of his shirt, letting go of his sleeve and leaving that finger the one connection between you. He looks down at it and bristles, so you take a chance and shove him backwards before he can puff himself up into a self-righteous rant and sneak out in the middle.

He falls, awkwardly. He doesn’t scramble away as you follow him, leaning over him on your elbows. “I ain’t distracted now,” you say, keeping the scant inch between the two of you as an invitation and an escape route. “An’ if you manage to make it through the rest without driftin’ off, I’ll even apologise.”

His eyes narrow. Before he can attempt to wrest control of the situation - and his dignity - back, you skim down him, taking his pants with you, and sink your teeth into his hip.

He comes with his shirt tangling his arms behind his back and you weighing down his legs with your arms, and you wonder if you’re just a means to an end.

—

“We goin’ to keep fuckin’ around this, or?” you ask him, several sessions of strangely-charged hatefucking later.

“In is better,” he says in typical snide fashion, and demonstrates with a lewd gesture that you file away for later reference. It’s edifying, for how simple it is. “Really, DS-”

“Helmsman,” you interrupt. Wonder of wonders, he goes silent. “Becod I don’t fin you’re Psi, when we’re fucking.”

His shoulders slump. “Like you even care,” he says, weary. “Just - drop it, it doesn’t matter. We’re just-”

You lean forward and kiss him. When he tries to set his hands to your grubleg scars, you smack them away without pinning them down and kiss him again. You’re not sure what you’re doing, but he’s not sure what he’s doing either, and you’re sick of this - this unspoken thing where you’re in some kind of gentletroll’s agreement to use each other to cut out parts of yourselves. All it does is make you hate yourself more than him and that - you fucked up romance enough with Spin, you don’t need to go for the gold trophy here too.

Hesitantly, he raises his hands to your shoulders, then scrapes his claws along your gills. You shudder, and he presses the tips of his nails against your opercula harder, and laughs against your mouth at the sounds you make. You have to pull away for air and he lets you, smirking as he toys keens out of you with the barest touches. “This is what you want?” he asks, and traces the middle tine of one of your fins. “Orphaner Dualscar, undone by someone showing a little interest.”

“I hate you,” you tell him, because it’s important he knows. “I fuckin’ hate you and how you can turn on an’ off.”

His mouth goes into a flat line, an expression you’ve seen on Dol’s face enough to know it’s not good, and he sends sparks through you. It counts for more than any thousand bruises or scratches. “I hate you for always coming back.”

You collide somewhere in the middle, and it doesn’t matter that you just fucked. It doesn’t matter that you’re depleted - of food and water, rest, the sheer ability to care. You want him like you’ve never wanted someone in your life. He lays into you ferociously, finally bringing his psi to use. Normally, he’s targeted with it, using it for difficult tasks like ‘crossing the room’ or ‘getting the remote’, but now he emanatesit. It prickles against your skin, not quite painful, and when you reach up to tug at one of his horns it stings you from the inside out.

You’ve been feeling like that a lot, lately.

He doesn’t do anything showy with his powers. He’s bounced you off ceilings, before, and fucked you with nothing more than a mildly interested look from across the room, but now all he does is keep the pressure on - or maybe he’s taking it off himself. He’s - he’d impressed the scienterrorists pretty soundly when he wasn’t quite the Helmsman yet, already maxing out their charts. From bits and pieces Dol and Suf have said, offhand, he only got more powerful in the interim between you knowing him and his death. Maybe the keeping-himself-to-himself is the act of control, and the prickling means you just broke it.

You drink it down, pressing every inch of skin to him that you can. He burns near as much as Suf does and you relish in it, dragging your hands along his back and kissing him between gasping breaths, never desensitising to the feel that you’re always going to associate with him, even if it never happens again. When you drag him closer, into your lap, he sets his hands to your gills and pushes, the sting making you cut away with jerk even as you nearly make a mess of the both of you.

“What, you done?” he taunts. “CN liked to push feedback through me whenever I managed to break programming. Did it for an entire sweep, once, guess you’re just not cut out-”

You don’t want to listen to it. You don’t want to hear about all the indignities you enabled, you don’t want to deal with it, not now, you don’t want to stop hating him and start hating yourself and whittle away another part of you. There’s nothing left of you but raw nerves, and you don’t need to fuck him to hurt yourself. You’re doing a good enough job of that on your own time.

You want him as fucked-up and flayed-open as you are, because then at least you won’t be alone in it. So you set your fingers against his top pair of spinal jacks, which you’ve been avoiding in order to give this relationship the faintest veneer of normalcy, and pull down. You bump your way from pair to pair, your nails catching on the lip of each narrow tube, and with each tug, Psi goes a little slacker, a little looser.

You’re halfway down when he loses any expression at all. You stop, and when that doesn’t work, grab his chin and make him look at you directly. “I ain’t fuckin’ a machine,” you tell him.

“You sure?” he says, a little distant. He’s insulting you without even being here to deliver it himself, and it hurts that he can’t even be bothered to stick around for that, if you’re not letting him taunt you with failures you’re sick of chewing on. “You like it. You like having me on your strings.”

You suck in a breath, like he just punched you in the gut. Maybe he did. “I ain’t that person anymore,” you say, and you can hear the lack of conviction in your voice more plainly than he can.

He focuses on you a little more, and the slight smirk on his face is more painful than any number of words you’ve exchanged, in the course of this mess. “And I’m not a machine.”

In the silence that follows, he reaches around and presses your hand back to his jacks. He keeps his hand on top of yours, his long fingers a stinging, comforting thing. Slowly, you trace a circle around one of his jacks, and watch his face go slack again.

You lean in, press your forehead to his chest so you don’t have to watch (so you don’t have to admit that you want to watch), and resign yourself to being a terrible person as you play him like a fiddle.

—

You shouldn’t like pressing his buttons. That’s pretty high up on the list of How to be a Good Person, you’re pretty sure. But you, sick fuck that you are, like tearing him to shreds to figure out how he works nonetheless. And he likes tearing down the walls of Good Person that you’re trying to build, delights in pushing you until you push back.

He knows you. He knows you better than anyone else seems to, at this point. And he won’t let you stop.

He finds you at the lake. Not swimming, because you just got back from cooking and stripping off your clothes seems like too much effort. So you’re just sitting with your feet on the edge, one boot off and one boot on, staring across the black surface of the water and trying not to think about anything at all.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Psi says, and sits next to you. You don’t even jump as he takes off his own boots and sticks his feet in the water. “SF too. And DR, and DC. Mostly me, I’m guessing.”

“You want somethin’?” you ask, and your voice comes out flatter than you mean it to.

“You could just tell me I fucked up.” Psi’s shoulders hunch up, defensive, and he doesn’t look at you as he swings his foot in the water. “Or that I’m fucked up.” When you don’t say anything, he continues, resolutely not looking at you. “You tried to tell me to back off, and I didn’t listen. So. I get it if you keep avoiding me, but at least quit making SF worry.”

You rub a hand over your face. It’s too late or too early for this. “I what?”

He shrugs a shoulder. “You don’t fuck machines.”

“Fuckin’ shell,” you say, more to your hand than to him. Dropping your hand into your lap, you say, “You were fuckin’ right, all right? You win. I’m a piece a’ shit that gets off on undoin’ you. Puttin’ on an act. Sorry I ain’t a better person.” Laboriously, you drag your still-booted foot closer and start working your foot free. It seems like a good time to go hide at the bottom of the lake for a while.

Psionics wrap around your hand, locking it in place.

“You control yourself,” Psi says, speaking fast, the words falling out of him. “It - it isn’t an act, but it feels like it. And sometimes it feels good, to just let go and take the easy path.” The power locking you in place dissipates, and you’re left staring at him, your hands frozen on your bootlaces even without him keeping them there. “To piss you off into controlling me, instead. So I don’t have to think.”

You close your eyes. It’s not like this sort of arrangement is exactly a new thing, but you’re the worst person he could have picked. “Psi. Leave you to me, an’ Isle-”

“You’ll what?” he snaps, vicious. “Helm me?” You flinch, and he presses the point. “You can’t fuck me up any worse than I’ve already fucked myself up. You don’t even want to.” While you try to come up with a rebuttal, he yanks off your boot, then goes for your shirt. Button by button, he spits out, “Who knows? Maybe you perfected the act. Maybe there’s nothing left of what I hate in you, and I’m the only one who can’t fucking move on.”

You grab his hands, because you know that monologue more intimately than you care to admit and it hurts more than you thought it ever would, to have it pouring from someone else’s lips. “Stop.”

He looks up at you, searching. You stay like that, then finally he licks his lips and says, “Make me.” It comes out more forlorn than you think he intended it to.

You let go of his hands, trace a finger along his jawbone. He swallows, then grits his teeth, ashamed of letting you see.

You have to get this right. More than anything else, you have to get this right.

“Arms behind your back,” you tell him, your mouth dry. Your hands are shaking again, so you put them on his hips and smooth your thumbs idly along the knives he calls hipbones until they stop. He looks at you, uncertain, but then pulls his shirt over his head and links his hands behind his back.

You slide out from under him and get up, head to the pile of clothes you’ve accumulated down here. A wardrobifier would be a good idea to have here, but you aren’t exactly renown for being a font of good ideas; case in point. Slowly, methodically, you unbutton the rest of your shirt, toss it in the pile of dirty clothes. Your pants will do, and you’re not entirely sure how you feel about taking them off at the moment, in any case. You can feel him staring at you as you shrug into one of your more formal shirts, purple stripes around the sleeves and your sign on your collar. You put your boots back on, one at a time, taking more care with the laces than you really need to. The bite of them against your hands as you pull them tight keeps you grounded. Your rings get put back on, and you even manage to dig up a couple of the fin rings you’ve been ignoring - you don’t think he’s likely to yank them out, at this point.

The pressure in the room feels strange. At first, you think it’s just you, then you realise how fixated on you Psi is, his power flaring when you tap the toe of your boot against the rock to settle it.

After considering a moment, you leave off the armour. What you’ve got is near enough the outfits you used to wear when you needed to remind people of your rank and still put in a solid night’s work. That done, you take a moment to close your eyes and breathe while your back is turned to him, then shove your hands in your back pockets and saunter over to where he’s still kneeling, arms still behind his back.

“Helmsman,” you say, flat military greeting. He comes up to your waist like this, and he stares flatly at your shirt, not responding. The air near him near crackles as soon as the word leaves your lips, though. You let the moment play out, then slide two fingers under his chin and crane his head back, make him look at you. You can’t make the air crackle, but you’ve had more than enough experience dealing with insubordination. “Helmsman. You wouldn’t be refusin’ to acknowledge a direct superior, would you?”

He sweeps his eyes up you, and if you didn’t know better you’d think he was bored. “Acknowledged.” You wait, and reluctantly, he adds, “Sir.”

It’ll do for now.

You drop his chin and pace behind him. He tenses, and part of you has a savage smile at the ready, pleased beyond all measure that he’s - that he’s scared, you are fucked up. But he doesn’t move otherwise, just breathes out his nose, doesn’t raise a single word of protest. “I’ve been told that you’re the best of what you are,” you say, because you were told that, once, and you doubt anything has changed. He near preens at the flattery, even with everything, and you can’t resist settling a proprietary hand in his hair. “I don’t care. You’ll perfoam for me, or you’ll naut.” At that, you let your fingers brush down his spine, barely missing his top set of jacks. He swallows then, and does nothing to hide it. “I fin you’ll find I can be pleasant to work under, so long as you work.”

“Go fuck yourself,” he says, flat, and at first you think you’ve done wrong, somehow, gone too far, misunderstood entirely, but then he adds with a tinge of triumph, “Sir.”

“Hn,” you say. “We’ll sea.”

He’s waiting for you to slap him, to scratch stinging lines across his back, to hurt him, to give him input he so desperately craves. Instead, you walk back to your small personal area, walled with all the crap you’ve accumulated, and pull Ahab’s out of your captcha deck. Psi watching in confusion, you sit down, grab a rag and the toolbox you keep nearby, and start disassembling your rifle to clean it.

You can tell when Psi’s back starts aching. He slumps a little, then tries to stretch out his shoulders without moving his arms. You hold the energy generator up to the light, then scrub off a bit of oil that got out of hand. You unlaced your boots and toed out of them fifteen minutes ago, made yourself comfortable for the long haul. Nobody ever said that having a kismesis was easy.

“DS!” Psi calls to you, five minutes later. You ignore him, re-cross your legs into a more comfortable position, and begin the fiddly task of getting Ahab’s barrel reattached. It’s a bitch of a thing, and if you don’t get it right, your aim will be off until you can be bothered to do it properly. Two minutes after that, Psi says, “Captain,” barely loud enough to carry to you and stained with loathing.

“A moment,” you say, at the same volume, and finish your task. When you get up, you don’t bother putting your boots back on, or rolling down your sleeves. Your fingers are stained black with oil, and you think you probably raked some through your hair a few times. Still, your point was made, and you’re hardly going to put your life on hold for him.

That isn’t how this works, after all.

“Helmsman,” you say. “Is there a problem?”

He squirms. Carefully, he says, “The physical component is in some discomfort.” Still with a pause, but not as much of one, he adds, “Sir.”

“I fail to sea how this is my problem,” you say, and wait. You can see the possible responses ticking through his head - no, it isn’t bargaining you want, no I’ll-pilot-if-you-fix-it, no I-won’t-be-insubordinate. You don’t care, and he knows that. There are means and ways, and he knows you know that. He tries to figure out what you want, and you know that if you asked for the moon he’d try to pull it out of the sky. You could have anything you want.

He settles on making it your problem. “It is adversely affecting operations.”

You could make him beg for just this. When you graze your fingers over the top of his shoulders, he nearly sobs with relief, and actually gasps when you dig your thumbs in. You knead his shoulders, losing yourself in the repetitive motions. At some point you kneel to get a better angle on his upper back, although you wish you had a stool so that you didn’t have to. Kneeling is a bit charged, the way things are. Still, it’s what you have at your disposal. When you reach his grubleg scars, he shudders.

It’s nothing compared to the way he keens when you tongue his spinal jacks. He does his best to keep still, even as you take your time, going from port to port. His efforts are mostly useless, of course, and you wrap your arms around him in the guise of idly stroking his chest to steady him. This isn’t something you’re doing for him, even though it’s something he asked for. You’re doing this because you want to, because taking him to pieces like this is - is satisfying.

You know him as much as he knows you, you realise, as he melts against your arms, still keeping his own behind his back, his fingers digging pale-yellow divots in his wrists. When your hand skims across his waistband, he actually gasps out a please, or at least half of one, so you take that as invitation and slip your hands inside his pants, ignoring his bulge to go for the quick release of his nook. He comes all over your lap, staining your pants, and you make him drowsily lick his genetic material off your hand as you steady him against your chest.

“Good job,” you tell him, and nip a kiss behind his ear before coaxing him back to his own support and standing up.

To your surprise, he yanks at you with psionics when you take a step, making you nearly stumble into him. Then again, he is an asshole, so you probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Before you can reprimand him, he mumbles - lethargic, he always gets sleepy after pailing, “Forgot something, Captain,” and undoes your zip with psionics, leaning forward to coax your bulge into his mouth. At first, you stand there stiffly - he’s never done this before, you figured his teeth made it tricky and never asked - but then you unwind and comb your hand through his hair, and it’s hardly like it feels bad - and the part of you that you’ve let out likes how he looks, your genetic material dripping down his chin. When you come, he licks his lips and looks up at you, smug like he’s gotten his own back.

“That’s enough, Helmsman,” you say.

He hears it for what it is and groans in relief as he slumps forward, letting his arms hang loose by his side. “My fucking knees, DS,” he complains.

“You poor, decrepit thing,” you say, but you manage to crouch down and pick up the bag of bones he calls a body.

—

You help him clean up, given that he got more messy than you did, through it all. He puts on his own shirt and one of your pairs of pants, loose around the waist to the point he can tie the excess fabric in a knot, and you put on the most neutral shirt and pants you can find. It’s still too early to sleep, which is a shame, because you’re suddenly so tired you could just about fold over and go to sleep standing up.

“So,” Psi says, and shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Gonna go murder all the lowbloods?”

“Goin’ to go hop back in your helmscolumn?” you ask, and are rewarded with a slice of a grin that isn’t mocking, or holding you in contempt. It’s just a grin, and you can’t help grinning back. “Look,” you say, edging out on thin ice. “I’m about ready to fuckin’ keel over an’ it might be the best sleep I’ve had since dyin’. I know you ain’t been much for sleepin’ either. Stay?”

Psi bites his lip, then shakes his head in disbelief, either at you or the situation, but the sweet smile you’ve never seen before and are unaccountably fascinated by stays. “Yeah, I’ll stay.”

—

"Psiioniic?" you hear, and that hand brushes across your face, long fingers wiping away some of the wetness there. Have you been crying? You haven't cried since the tenth sweep of your service to the Empire had passed. It's been so long… 

  When you open your eyes, you're met with a haze of blurry shapes and colours. You haven't been able to see clearly since your thirtieth sweep of service, the Empress's angry screeching damaging you in more ways than one. You can make out a vaguely troll shaped blur above you, though, large and imposing and… violet?

  "You're awake," he says, and you can see the little blurs on either side of the larger blur flutter wildly, "Thank god, you're awake."

  You don't know how to react for a moment. You're confused, the migraine you've lived with every single day for thousands of sweeps flaring and subsiding in waves, like the tides, you can't think straight and your face is wet, have you been crying? You haven't cried since the tenth sweep of your service to the Empire had passed… 

  "This is a nice dream," you finally decide, and your voice is rough and hoarse from screaming. You reach out with shaking, weak hands and grab the thin fabric covering the other troll; you always have your hands back, in the good dreams, and your legs too, flesh and blood and bone from the knee down instead of a mass of writhing biocables. The cloth is cool against your fingers, with a  smooth texture that feels really nice against your skin and you kind of want to rub your face against it, but you don't want to spoil it with your tears. 

  "Oh, love, you ain't dreamin'," he says, and his hands touch your back, slowly sweeping down the curve of your spine. There's a harsh pinch of pain, and one of the biocables embedded in your spinal ports flops to the ground beside you. 

  You repetitively rub your hands over the fabric in your grasp, trying to block out the uncomfortable stimuli. Someone on the outside must be adjusting your hardware, and you don't want to the feeling to wake you up. You want to stay here. 

  "You… you're dead, Psii. You died. This is a dream bubble, don't ask me t' explain the logistics cause I ain't got the slightest clue, but it's like… life after death. You're not stuck on that godforsaken ship anymore."

  Another pinch, and another cable falls to the floor. And another. And another. They must be doing a maintenance check. It hurts, it hurts and you want it to stop but you're used to pain, by now. You let out a soft whine anyways, just the smallest of sounds because sometimes it makes you feel better, to vocalize, to remind yourself you still have a voice, that you're still something other than an emotionless, unfeeling machine. 

  "She would never have let me die," you whisper, because She wouldn't, She hadn't, even long past your natural lifespan She kept you alive and enslaved, tormenting you for sweeps and sweeps and She would have never let you escape. 

  "She didn't have a choice. She went too far, traveled too long. Gl'bgolyb got hungry."

  Another cable. Your twelve thoracic ports are empty, as well as the three cervical ports. His hands dance over your back, massaging away a millennia of built up stress and pain, soothing the aching scars and ghosting over the bruises and burn marks covering your shoulders and sides. That plus the cloth sliding over your fingers knocks you into a state of almost complete calm, and you are relaxed and you feel safe and you look up at him as best you can and chirr, the sound choked and rusty. You haven't had a reason to chirr in a long, long time. 

  "Dualscar…" 

  His head bows, and when he touches his forehead to yours you can finally see his face clearly. His eyes are blank white, and there's violet blood streaked down the side of his face, but that doesn't matter because he's crying, crying and holding you as close as he can, one hand pressed against your back, the other buried in your hair. 

  "I'm sorry," he gasps, "I'm so fuckin' sorry, I tried to get to you, I tried, I swear I wouldn't'a left you, but she kept me away, I tried, I tried, I'm sorry…" 

  You detach one of your hands from his shirt and reach up, touching his face. His skin is cool compared to yours, smooth except for the raised ridges of his scars. He's exactly like how you remember, except his eyes. His eyes are dead. He's dead. You watched him die, She made you watch him die, you know he's dead. 

  "Don't let me wake up," you say, because you cannot accept that this isn't the best dream you've ever had, you can't get your hopes up only to have them dashed again, you can't taste heaven only to be pulled back into hell, "Don't- Dualscar, please don't let me wake up."

  He cradles you to his chest and you curl into him, limbs trembling and weak from disuse but you force yourself to move anyways, force yourself to wrap your arms around him and clutch him to you because you never want this to end. You never want him to leave you again. 

  "You're never goin' back, I swear," he says, and presses the lightest of kisses to your face, a barely there brush of lips and you want more but you've overwhelmed at the same time, "I promise, you're never goin' back t' the ship."

  You shiver in his hold, because he sounds so resolute, so adamant, that you can't help but believe him, even though you know it'll just hurt more in the end if you do. He's never lied to you, though. Never, not once, has Dualscar lied to you, even the times you desperately wished he would.

  He's never lied to you before, so why would he start now? 

  Why would he give you false hope? Because as much as you wish it were so, the Empress would never let you escape. She has kept you in Her grasp for thousands of sweeps, despite your best efforts… so why would She let you go now?

  "I love you," you say, shutting your eyes, "I miss you."

  He kisses you softly, all lips and tongue and no teeth, gentle with you like you're made of glass, like you're something precious to him, and it's been so long since you were last treated with such kindness that you can't stop your tears or the desperate way you sling your arms around him, holding him close. You're crying, it's been so long since you'd last cried, you haven't cried since the tenth sweep of your service to the Empire had passed but you love him and miss him and now, for a short time at least, he's here, with you, and you can't stop the tears from falling.

  You ache with love for him, with love and pain and desperation and sheer, unrelenting agony because you're sure this is a dream, a horrible, torturous dream, and you'll be ripped away from him soon enough. You can't stop the thoughts racing through your head, your brain screaming "how much longer do I have?" every second that passes. You can't just lay back and enjoy the time you have with him, as fleeting as it may be, because you want to memorize everything, remind yourself of every little detail you've forgotten during your sweeps of service. He's cool and smooth under your hands, though, patient and implacable as the seas, and when he wraps his arms around you and holds you to his chest you feel like you've been caught in his current, unable to resist even if you desired to do so. 

  You don't. 

  The steady beating of his heart quells your desperation as it calms you, as the hands running up and down your metal plated, damaged spine sooth your body's nearly incontrollable spasms. Pain has been your constant companion for so long that the lack of it confuses you, makes your head spin, makes you dizzy but you don't think it's an entirely bad feeling. The aching of your ports eases with every brush of his fingers and the chill of his touch and the scent of salt and sea soothes your ever present migraine. 

  He croons, chest rumbling with the noise, and you trill in response, catching the silk of his shirt in your hands and running the sleek fabric through your fingers. You like smooth things, glossy and polished and frictionless, things that slide over your skin with ease, things that remind you of him and his touch and his clothes. The textures relax you, keep you calm, and he seems to notice because when he shifts you into his arms he does so in a way that lets you keep his shirt in your grasp. 

  "You're safe now," he murmurs, and stands, lifting you effortlessly, "You're safe now, an' I ain't ever lettin' you go ever again, love."

  You don't know how long he walks, but the sway of his steps lulls you, his touch cooling your hot, inflamed flesh and his voice keeping you grounded in the here and now. He speaks, so much, says he loves you and he’ll never leave you and that you’re safe, you’re safe and you’re never going back to that fucking ship, and you desperately want it to be true. You want him to be right. You want to stay with him forever. 

  He sets you in an ablution trap and washes the tacky, viscid blood from your ports, and the soap stings but being clean feels so much better. His hands feel so good rinsing the gore and grease from your hair, cleaning the oil and buildup away from the port housings and the cool water is the best sensation you’ve felt besides his touch in ages. 

  “I… “

  He pauses, his hands hovering over your skin like he’s afraid he’s hurt you, and you reach up with trembling limbs to grasp his fingers and hold them to you. You tilt your head and he’s there, taking up your field of vision, an indistinct blur but still so recognizably your matesprit that it hurts. 

  “I love you. Thank you.”

  “No need t’ thank me, darlin’,” he says, voice low, rumbling in his chest and it reminds you of rolling thunder and lightning storms and when he drops a kiss to your forehead you surprise him by tilting your face and catching his lips with yours instead. 

  He brushes your wet hair from its place plastered against your cheek and hums, a soft, pleased sound, and you love him so much you want to die. 

  You’re aware that you aren’t whole, not anymore, that you’re broken, maybe beyond repair, but he doesn’t seem to care. He sees your damaged hardware, with all it’s busted parts and mangled pieces, and he still loves you, still touches you like he wants you, still holds you close to him and doesn’t cringe away when you touch him in return, with your clumsy, disused limbs. 

  It makes your chest ache in a way it hasn’t in a long, long time. You love him so much, and he’s wrong, he’s so wrong, you do need to thank him because you’re not sure anyone else would continue to pity you after such a hideously, painfully long time, or still pity you after you'd become so inutile and obsolete. You were stuck in Her ship for thousands upon thousands of sweeps, night in and night out serving the mistress who’d killed your friends, your family, your lover, and he’d… he’d waited for you. He’d waited for you and even though you are now bruised, bleeding, broken, changed, he still cares for you. 

  You lean against him, and he picks you up in strong arms and carries you again, to a new place, dark and quiet and filled with soft things that brush soothingly against your skin, textures and patterns you catch under your fingertips and it’s been so, so long since you’d felt anything but the rigid, sickly warm biowires and the rough gloves of the ones who performed perfunctory maintenance on your mechanical parts that it takes a monumental effort on your part not to cry again, from sheer, beautifully agonizing overstimulation.

  You’re tired, so tired, but you’re afraid to fall asleep here, just in case you wake up imprisoned, wake up grafted back to that unholy amalgamation of organic mechanics, mind attached to too many data processes, too many information packages to count. You haven’t been receiving systems alerts here, but the few times you’d managed to dream they hadn’t interrupted your sleep cycle. In their place, consistent error messages ping against your brainstem, revealing a glitch in your mental processing systems, one that you can’t seem to feel, identify, locate, or fix. 

  You’re not sure what it means. 

  “You look exhausted,” Dualscar murmurs, and the vibrations of his chest reverberate through your body, strong and powerful and calming, “Try to sleep, darlin’, I’ll watch over your dreams. Everythin’ will make more sense come nightfall.”

  “I don’t want to wake up… back there,” you rasp, hiding your face in the fabric of his shirt, shivering as his hands skim down the ports in your spine, “If I fall asleep… I don’t want to- I don’t-“

  “I swear t’ every last deity, every idol, every divinity, every greater power, that you will not go back there,” he says, and his voice tolls like deep church bells, solemn and truthful, and you can tell he’s not lying but… 

  “…Promise?”

  You mangle the word, lisping it out through jagged, mismatched teeth, but he croons low and nuzzles your horns, tracing over the lighting scars across your back and sides with cool fingers. 

  “Promise. You’re never goin’ back, love, you’re stuck here with me for the rest’a existence, an’ I ain’t lettin’ go’a you easy.”

  It’s been such a long time since you’d seen him last, since you’d been ripped from his arms, kicking and screaming. Such a long time since he’d held you like this, since you’d felt so loved, so safe. You don’t remember a time here you weren’t afraid for your life, on the run, even when you were with him, you always felt hunted, always feared you would be caught and both of you would be executed, but… He’s relaxed, the most relaxed you’ve ever seen him, and the way he’s curled around you, guarding you on all sides, it makes your tense muscles go lax and eases your ever present fear. 

  You make a choice. You believe him. You believe him when he says you aren’t going back, you wrap your arms around his neck and cling and believe, because you desperately want to, you desperately believe he’s telling the truth because if he is, you’re free. You’re free of Her, Her torments, Her orders, your pain and suffering, you’re free of it all. 

  “I love you,” you say, tired, weary, and he hugs you closer, tucks your head under his chin and kisses the tip of one cracked horn. 

  “I love you as well, darlin’. Now, please, sleep. I’ll explain everythin’ in more detail next nightfall.”