God, they’re going to kill him. God, they’re going to get him backed into an alley and even powerful psions can’t fight back against a group of angry paintheads, the lean hunger in their faces only amplified by the black soot and white powder they coat their faces in. They’re going to rip him to pieces and sell off everything he has on him, in him, and pocket the cash.

It’s none of your business. You should turn on your heel and walk away and let the uppity fucking highblood suffer for thinking he could step foot in a space he does not belong, but something stills your feet, wraps a thick hand around your bloodpusher and squeezes tight, holding you frozen fast. It’s none of your business but you can’t just let him die. You can’t just let someone die- Feferi, gods bless her soul, would haunt you for eternity for allowing something so terrible to happen, and you can almost feel her hands pressed against your shoulders, pushing you forward.

One second, you’re halfway across the market- the next, you’re four steps from him, three, two. You stand beside him and nod and put a hand on his shoulder; he startles, staring at at you [with such tired eyes, god], and you tighten your grip, smiling pleasantly at him.

“Play along,” you hiss through your teeth, needling through the thick cloth of his embroidered jacket with your ragged claws; he narrows his gaze but tips his head agreeably, setting the little trinket down and following as you tug him closer to the middle of the street.

Your hands seem to move for you, like someone else is guiding your touch; you straighten his jacket for him, your fins angled low and easy, fingers curling to adjust the little golden chain hanging from his lapel; at the physical expression of fondness, you can feel the gazes of the other lowbloods wavering, the four of them staring at each other and flicking signs across the streets, arguing. Good.

“You’re bein’ followed,” you murmur, and comprehension dawns on his face; the hand that presses against your shoulder is hot, almost too hot, and you shiver beneath it, trying not to cringe away from the feeling you’re decidedly unused to. Warmth is not something you experience regularly.

“And I take it you’re supposed to be my rescuer?”

God, his voice is awful, but at least he’s not fucking stupid; some highbloods, their pans practically rot from lack of use, their brains reduced to mush by all that lazy indulgence, but he speaks with the sharp snap of someone who can at least string multiple words together to form a complex sentence.

“Unless you want to get ripped to pieces and divided up into coolers to be sold to the highest bidder,” you reply calmly, because if you’re not calm then the idiots still staring are going to think there’s something wrong, god forbid; a weak relationship is worse than no relationship at all, and the only reason for a highblood to be so deep in the slums is because of some attachment or another.

Which doesn’t explain why he’s here, but whatever.

“Highbloods pay a lotta money for organs, you know.”

Your fingers pet over the side of his cheek, a mockery of a pale caress, and you can see the struggle in him not to snap at your hand; instead, he leans into your touch, and you tug him back to your own stall with little resistance on his part.

“Four’a them,” you continue, voice lilting sweetly as you push him into a chair; the words don’t matter so much as the tone, and you know they can still hear you but the noise of the busy street will drown out most everything else, “Three purples and an indigo. Clearly you’re fuckin’ pandead if you think it’s a smart idea t’parade around like a goddamn peacock with all your finery all aflutter in a neighborhood where the profits from one’a those gold chains would feed a troll for more than a month.”

He has the audacity to raise an eyebrow at you, the bastard; you rub a thumb over his horn and delight in the startled little chirp he lets out. [You refuse to admit it’s cute.]

“Last I checked,” he drawls, lathht and it makes your fins twitch, “You aren’t my lusus.”

Luthhhuthhh. Dear god.

To shut him up [and not because he’s nearly as skinny as you, fucking hell], you stuff a cup full of your particular ware into his hands, even though you can’t really afford to go handing that shit out for free. It’s whatever. Fuck, you’ll just skip lunch. You ate yesterday, you’ll be fine.

Your own stall is tucked out of the way but still gets plenty of business; cheap fish is hard to find, and your particular shade needs all the nutrients from the fatty flesh as they can get. You primarily sell street food, because it’s easy and quick to make- little fried balls of dough stuffed with cubes of barely-seared salmon and tuna, but you sell bulk meat as well- and jars of fish eyes, but only for special customers. Your favorites.

He picks at the food like it’s going to bite him, but after a chitter and a flick of your fingers he’s eating, at least; you keep an eye on the four that seemed hellbend on stalking them, but one’s already given up the chase and the three remaining are fussing at each other, debating the intelligence of pissing you off. Good. You hope they fuck right the fuck off a cliff, but if not, you’d gladly sharpen your claws and teeth on the hide of some overinflated buffoon who dared to snatch yours out from under your nose.

Not yours. Whatever. Just don’t think about it.

“One down, three to go,” and he nods at you, staring with those weird mismatched eyes, his gaze a little too intense and making your skin itch and shivery with the force of it; impeccably manicured claws pluck little bites out of the cup you’d handed him and you just. Twitch.

“Why?”

You busy yourself handing another cup to someone who hands you a dented bronze coin in return; it goes straight into the safe you have stuffed under your stall specifically for that purpose as you ponder the answer to his question.

“There’s already too much death here,” is what you decide on, the words sitting strangely in your mouth, not quite the truth but not quite a lie, “An’ besides, if you die in a lowblood market the whole place’ll get razed to the fuckin’ ground by highblood patrol officers.”

Also true. But not the truth; he stares at you and it’s like his gaze is clawing its way into your chest to settle in among your lungs, heavy in your throat. He looks tired, he looks thin; despite the pristine care he’s put into his appearance there are certain signs, certain blaring alarms of exhaustion and overwork that you see on your own face, on the face of every troll that frequents the marketplace here. The narrowness of his limbs, the brittleness of his hair, the dark, dark shadows underneath his faintly glowing eyes…

Fuck.

You scan the market; another purple is gone, leaving only an indigo and a clown with dark, messy streaks of soot-paint down his face; they’re huddled together across the street from you, and you make a point to rest your hand on the highblood’s head, fingers petting down the side of his face.

The indigo turns and leaves.

“If you wait a half hour, I can walk you back to the Wall,” you say, and when he blinks his eyelids are so thin you can still see his eyes glowing through them; despite the symbol of power it makes him look so fragile. Your face aches from the false smile you’ve had plastered to it since you picked him up like an errant barkbeast pup. You kind of want to hit him.

The next half hour passes so slowly you could swear time has become molasses; you sell a lunch-rush’s worth of dough-fish snacks and bulk packages and fish eyes and he just sits on his ass and stares at you so much you want to shake him, except if you did he’d probably snap in half. It’s infuriating. Your chest aches. You hate it. He says nothing, except when you turn to stare back at him and he reminds you your food is burning. His lisp makes you want to pull his teeth out.

[Except not really.]

Except yes really, fuck off. You pack your pans and everything you can’t live without into your safe and stuff that into your worn and overladen sylladex, and he stands without a word, following you as you lead him to the monolith of stone that separates the lowblood slums from the highblood lawnrings you can’t even afford to look at, much less live in.

You hold his hand, even though you don’t really need to.

There’s no sign of the final purpleblood but he could be hiding, you justify to yourself; his fingers curl around your hand sun-hot and skinny and your fins flutter. It’s always possible. Your prescription hadn’t been changed in sweeps and your glasses are cracked and dirty- for all you know he could be standing right down the road and you wouldn’t be able to see him if he had a bright-ass neon sign.

So you hold his hand. You walk him to the Wall, and when you part, he looks at you with all the feverish fervency of someone on the verge of solving a centuries-old puzzle. Like you’re something to be cracked open and examined with all due clinical interest. It makes your skin shiver.

“Thanks,” he says, and he slides his hand from yours and is gone, disappearing with a burst of bright red-blue, a powerful leap boosted by psionics that takes him straight over the Wall.

There’s something heavy and cool in your hand. When you manage to uncurl your fingers, a thick gold chain lays twined in your palm, along with a note- a name, a trollian handle.

Sollux Captor, Advisor to the Court, Seer First Class

twinArmageddons

take me on a real paledate next tiime, diip2hiit

“I’m not done yet,” he murmurs, and you nod, propping yourself up on your elbows to stare down at him with your headphones dangling around your neck, low bass pulsing out of the small speakers. Sometimes it’s more interesting to just watch him work, to see the way his fingers move over the lower half of your body, even if it gives you an odd, uncontrollable sense of disconnection from your own limbs. Even if sometimes it makes you heat up in places you don’t even have anymore.

You’re attracted to him, but you’d never say anything about it. He’s… he’s unattainable, of course he is, and you’re positive he wouldn’t be interested in you even if you weren’t missing all the important parts required for a concupiscent relationship. You’re nothing compared to him- you’re a lowblood piece of dirt on the bottom of his shoe, according to the bullshit hemospectrum he ascribes so much of his faith in, and even though Karkat has made it thoroughly understood between all of you that the hemospectrum has been abolished he still clings to it like it’s the only law and order he has left. Maybe it is; laws have been the last thing on a lot of your minds, lately.

His hands slide over your internal workings, patching damaged wires and repairing all the little scrapes and dings you’ve put in the hard metal through daily use; his fingers are long and elegant and he’s finally starting to grow into them, his hands almost looking proportionate to the rest of his lanky frame now. When you’d first met him, sweeps ago, he’d been sweaty and short and stocky and his hands had seemed almost like too-big spiders poorly grafted to his wrists; he’d been cute then, too, but you’d been in far too much pain and far too scared of him to do anything but scream and cry.

What a good first impression.

“Almost done,” he says, and you shrug in reply; you really have nothing better to do than stay here all day, watching him work on you. He’s just so good at it, and you’ve always been attracted to competence. It’s probably one of the reasons Vriska had appealed to you so much, despite her cruelty; she had been absolutely batshit insane, but she’d been so very good at what she did. What she does. She’s not dead even though sometimes, in the dead of night, when you’re alone and your legs ache with phantom pains and your body quakes with remembered fear, you wish she was. Just a little.

“Take your time,” is all you say, tilting your head a little to watch his hands slide deeper into the joint between your knee and thigh; you absently wonder if this is more or less intimate than his fingers thrusting into your nook.

God, you wish you still had a nook. It’s one of the few things he can’t give you- no nook and no bulge, but honestly you hardly care about that last bit. You still wake up sometimes in the middle of this planet’s strange, dark night, trembling and flushed with need, except there’s nowhere to slide your fingers, nowhere to tease and nothing to stroke. It’s absolutely maddening, and you’re reduced to rubbing yourself against the covers of your dumb human bed with little results until the feeling finally fades and leaves you unsatisfied and pent-up.

And then, of course, you come here and watch him play with your wires and gears and you wish those fingers could go somewhere else, could spread you open and fuck into you and--

His hands slide up, over your thighs; if you close your eyes for a moment you can almost pretend his palms are sliding over smooth skin instead of cool metal, spreading your legs and opening you up for something a little bigger than just his fingers. It makes you shiver.

“Are you alright?” and his voice rolls over your aural canals with the same frequency as the low bass pulsing through your headphones, soft and deep and thrumming with just a hint of concern, “Your circuitry is starting to overheat.”

One palm presses flat against the thick metal plating of your groin, and you can’t help the soft gasp that slides out from between your lips or the way your hands clench in anticipation. You can’t feel it, not really, not with everything all numbed up, but you’ve always had a very active imagination.

“I-I’m fine,” you rasp out, voice suddenly hoarse, and when you glance up at him your cheeks are flushed, eyes sliding over his sunglasses before dropping down to stare at the floor, “Sorry, I just, uh- Just was thinking a little too, too hard about some things- It’s nothing, you can- can, um. Just finish up and I’ll get out of your hair-”

“Thinking about what things?”

He flips open a panel adjacent to the seam between your hip and thigh and he’s working so close to what used to be your bulge sheathe that if your hips weren’t numbed, you’d be rocking them up into his touch; you turn away, unable to watch him fiddle around with the wires there. It’s too much, too frustrating, reminds you too much that you can’t have him anyways-

“Just… stuff.”

You’re certain if you said everything on your filthy mind that he’d break into a sweat, lock up, maybe even faint; you almost entertain the idea, just because it’d be funny, but then who would repair you when you broke yourself?

No, it’s best to keep silent. Best to keep… silent…

You can suddenly feel everything again. And his hand is still there. It’s cool and calloused, just slightly damp, and god, you can feel it so well- so well-

“You clearly think me naive.”

Oh god.

“Not naive, no-” you stumble, your legs jerking- but not closed, because you’re an idiot, no, they spread open wider, giving him more space to stand and tower over you like the tall, physically imposing troll he is, “I just- I- I-”

His palm rubs and you yip, gasping pitifully as your head falls back to bare your throat to him, teeth digging into your lower lip to muffle whatever other pitiful sounds try to escape. He’s cool to the touch but it feels so good against the overheating metal, your thighs quivering with the need to release, but you can’t. You can’t, there’s nothing there to fuck, nothing to touch, and even though you’re practically grinding your hips against his hand it’s not doing anything and god it’s going to drive you crazy-

“Equius-” and it’s a little too close to a sob for your comfort, a little too vulnerable; his other hand grips your chin and tilts your head so you’re forced to look at him, flushed face and parted lips and all, and you’re just reminded how much better he is than you. He looks impassive, composed, like this isn’t affecting him in the slightest, and you’re just a dumb, awkward mess. As per usual, really.

“It’s very hard to be naive enough not to notice the way you’ve been staring at me for months,” he says dryly, a bead of sweat sliding down the side of his face, his soft, silky ponytail falling over his shoulder as he tilts his head; you want to follow that drop with your tongue, to comb your fingers through his hair and use it to drag him in to kiss you.

“At first I thought it was just proximity, but you’ve had plenty of opportunities to branch out and forge attachments to the other members of our group. And yet, you still seem to fixate on me.”

Of course I do, you want to say, look at you. But the meowbeast has your tongue in an iron grip and all you can do is whine, your hips twitching against his palm as he presses a little harder against you. It’s torturous teasing and it’s going to drive you to an early grave, you’re sure of it. Your tombstone will say Tavros Nitram, Death by Sexual Frustration, and everyone will laugh at you until the stone has turned to dust.

“...so I suppose if you’re truly interested- Tavros, are you even paying attention?”

Oh. You suppose you should stop focusing on your inevitable demise and start focusing on the troll that has a hand on your groin. That- may be a good idea.

“I’m a little distracted right now, ss-sorry-”

And then his hand is gone and you can’t help the little whimper that escapes your mouth, one of your hands lashing out to grip his wrist, your fingers easily able to wrap around it. Your adult molts had almost reversed your appearances, you broad and thick and big in the shoulders and him thin and wiry from head to toe, though his frame is layered with so much sinewy muscle it would be absurd to call him skinny.

“I was asking if you’d like to engage in sexual congress with me, but if you can’t bring yourself to pay attention I suppose it’s not that important,” he says, lips tugging down into a scowl; your arm twitches, pulling him closer as you sit up, and you shake your head, your other hand sliding down to rest on his hip, in part because you’re now at least half positive that this is a dream. And if this is a dream, then who’s going to fault you for sliding your hand up the length of his arm to grip his shoulder, lips parted so you can pull in enough breath to keep yourself from fainting in shock? Certainly not your own subconscious, which has provided you with plenty of opportunities to do just that in the long, lonely nights you spend curled up in bed with little more than dreams to entertain you.

“I’m sorry,” is a phrase that finds itself on the tip of your tongue more often than not, but here you are, uttering it again, “I was just- you’re a- a very distracting person, Equius. And nobody’s touched me like that since, um-”

Since ever. You just finish with a shrug, and his face softens a little- just a little. His cool fingers touch your chin, tilting it up to face him, because with all the height you’d attained in your final molt he’s still taller than you even if you are broader than him.

“Then I repeat the question,” he says, mouth almost close enough to brush against yours, and he smells like iron and metal shavings and sweat and a little bit like black coffee and it’s the best scent you’ve ever smelled, “Would you like me to continue?”

“God yes.”

The kiss is phenomenal, though you suppose you might be biased, having only kissed Vriska before; there’s no biting and hardly any teeth and no blood at all, which already makes it so different from anything you’ve ever felt that you’re shivering in pleasure. His tongue slides over yours and you wrap your arms around his shoulders as he presses closer, his cool, slightly sweaty chest pressing against your hot one. The hand on your chin shifts to tangle in your hair and when he pulls, you moan into his mouth, shuddering against him.

“Equius-” you gasp, pulling back just enough to talk, your hips twitching when he pulls your hair again, “Equius, I- I don’t, I can’t even- but-”

“Shhh,” is all he says, his other hand dropping between your legs to press against the panel that covers most of your groin once again; the contact makes you whine, the tug to your mohawk makes you groan, and when his tongue, soft and wet, licks over your lips, you can’t help but open your mouth for him again, accepting the next kiss with frustrated eagerness. Your entire body is hot and trembling, even your hips, your legs- you can feel it in the way his coolness feels cooler still against the heated metal, and for a moment you worry about burning his fingers before he pulls back to bite at your throat.

“Hhhnn-”

You roll your hips up against his hand and his fingers dip into the joint between your hip and thigh, nails barely grazing wires and it feels so strange you almost can’t breathe, a foot kicking out in shocked pleasure. He licks at your throat, bites down, and you pull his ponytail enough to make him yelp, hurriedly running your fingers through it as you chitter out another stuttered apology. Fuck, you feel like you’re drowning, but the pleasure never peaks- it just builds and builds and never goes anywhere until it almost hurts, and you have to pull his head back, shaking your own in whimpery denial.

“I can’t-” you gasp, almost in tears, because this is everything you’ve wanted for months and it’s right here in your hands and now you can’t have it, like fate is fucking laughing at you again and again and again- first Vriska, then your legs, then the whole fucking game, and now this? What did you do to deserve this? What mass murder did you commit in another lifetime-

“Shush,” he says, kissing you chaste and soft for a moment, almost tender; it’s so at odds with how you perceive him that it startles you out of your little pity party, your legs twitching again as he slides down your body, on his knees in front of you, “Trust me. I’ve been working with these mechanics for sweeps, I know how to handle minor inconveniences.”

You lack all sexual organs but that’s okay, it’s just a minor inconvenience, he says. A little semi-hysterical laugh starts to bubble up in your throat because it’s not like you haven’t been struggling with this for fucking ages-

And then you’re gasping, back arching as his tongue laves cool and wet over your panel. The mechanics for your legs jerk and seize for a moment, clicking as gears are overworked, frozen in place; you can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but stare as his mouth presses against the hot metal, licking at it like- like it’s a nook, Jesus Christ. This is so undeniably filthy even though nothing’s happening and your face must look like somebody crammed it into a mud puddle with how flushed you are, your hands shaking as they rest on his head, fingers curling in his hair as you push your hips up against his tongue.

“Equius-” you keen, all sharp-edged and too-high, gasping and breathless, but it’s still just surface pleasure; it’s not deep enough to make you cum and it’s driving you up the fucking wall.

His fingers tease along the joints between your hips and thighs, then delve in; there’s a click, and the panel folds away, lifting up to bare the mess of wires and gears of your groin to his wandering touch. Your thighs shake, legs dropping to rest over his shoulders, and he supports the weight of your metal legs with little difficulty.

Everything stops when he slides his fingers past the wires and into the mechanics of your hips, fingertips stroking over a clicking gear. It’s everything you’ve been screaming for, everything you’ve been begging for since your legs had been taken away from you, your body arching into his fingers as you nearly scream. The noise that comes out of you is loud and desperate and choked, your hands tugging at his hair as the clicking of your hips and thighs gets louder, joints locking up in pleasure; it feels like he’s sliding his fingers into a nook you no longer have, reaching so deep into you, touching things that he shouldn’t be able to touch, and it feels good.

“Yes,” and it’s a broken, plaintive gasp, your body curling around his head as his tongue traces over a wire, fingers rubbing little methodical circles over the metal struts and clicking gears that help your legs actually do their moving; it’s like every nerve in your body has zeroed in on that particular spot and it feels even better than fucking your nook ever had, even better than touching your bulge, better than all of it. Better than the best orgasm you’ve ever had and you still haven’t even cum yet.

“Yes, yes Eq-quius- pl-le-ease-”

His other hand rests on your thigh and he grips you so hard you dent, the metal bending in around the force of his clutching fingers; the slight pain just makes your groin throb, your hips tilting up to grind against his fingers in desperate abandon. You’re so distracted you can’t even protest when he pushes your legs off his shoulders; you just slip one between his legs and spread the other as wide as you can as he stands up, his fingers still pressed against that spot inside you even as he rolls his own hips forward to grind against your dented thigh.

He kisses you firmly as you rub your leg up against the wet spot in his shorts; something inside you has enough spare braincells to feel powerful, that you can work him up like this. That you’re turning him on just as much as he is you, that he’s attracted to you enough to get so wet even though you’d hardly touched him. You gasp against his mouth and haul him closer with your grip on his hair, dropping a hand to slide unceremoniously into his shorts, and the noise he makes when you slide one finger, then two into his soaking wet nook is enough to make you moan right back, his bulge wrapping so tight around your wrist you think you might end up with bruises.

“The- the nerves in your nook and bulge had to be redirected somewhere,” he says, voice hoarse with lust and need, lips moving against yours as he speaks, “It’s just- just a matter of finding out where, and accessing it-”

You kiss him and thrust three fingers into his nook, purring against his lips as he wets your palm with genetic material; you rut against his hand with all the control of a hormonal six-sweep-old, trembling so hard your joints rattle. You want him to spill first; you tilt your head and nip at his ear, pulling his sweat-dampened hair again as you grind your thigh against his bulge, curling your fingers in to rub against his seedflap in the same slow, methodical circles he’s teasing your gears with.

“Fuck,” you hiss, moving to his throat, marking him up, tasting beads of perspiration on your tongue as you lick and kiss and bite, needy and desperate and unable to control the words that come out of your mouth any more than you can control the way your gears keep locking up, aching with tension and heat, “Fuck, fuck, god, Equius, yes, please fuck-”

It doesn’t take much longer, or much more than that. He lets out a soft, breathy little noise that has you tensing up, working your fingers into him faster, harder, and then he’s spilling all over your hand, bulge tightening so much around your wrist that you actually lose the feeling in your fingers. Him cumming makes his hand jerk, pressing hard as your hips rut forward, and then you’re cumming too.

All of the cliche little euphemisms you’d never quite related to before suddenly come true, your body locking up as you go stiff and tense; it ends up being a lot like getting punched in the stomach, except so good that you can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but shake and drool on Equius’s shoulder, held against his chest as you tremble. You suck in a single gasp of air, eyes squeezed shut as fireworks go off behind your eyelids, metal squealing loud enough to make your ears hurt as one leg jerks, a strut snapping under the tension. It takes minutes for the results of sweeps of accidental edging to fade, minutes you spend writhing against him and grinding your hips against his hand, too sensitive and overwhelmed to do anything but yelp and cry.

Finally, you go limp, splaying out over the table as all that tension is finally released. His hands are soft on your thighs, already checking on the strut you managed to break, fingers gentle as they pet over cooling, pinging metal. You’re exhausted and barely able to move with how relaxed and pliant you are, but you manage to hook your fingers in his shirt, tugging closer, coaxing him up onto the worktable with you with wordless, hoarse little whines.

“You damaged your leg again,” he grumbles, but obligingly lies down beside you, one of his arms draped over your chest, “I’m going to have to repair that, you know.”

“Later,” is all that you manage to force out, low and slurred, turning your head to nose against his chin, “Shhhhh. Nap.”

Steel shimmers under your palm as you drag your hand across the wall, keeping up pressure as you walk down familiar corridors. You shut your eyes, and the map of the ship is superimposed over your eyelids; a left turn here, a right turn there, two more lefts then straight on till morning, your quarters at the end of the hall. You’ve lived on this ship almost as long as you’d lived on earth, and you know her better than the back of your hand, but now… she’s being taken from you.

Recently, things have been changing. You’ve been pushing her further than she’s meant to go, the poor dear; with each day, month, year the passes, the search for habitable planets grows more and more urgent.

The sun is dying, and it’s going to take Earth with it.

No one is sure when it will happen, or even how, but there’s no doubt even among the notoriously quarrelsome scientific community that it will come, and when it does, everything this side of the solar system will be eradicated in the resulting expansion.

So recently, you’ve been pushing your girl beyond her limits; you should have expected some backlash, but this… she’s always had her quirks, all good ships do, but but suddenly, they are exponentially worse. It’s almost like she’s protesting, temperatures fluctuating wildly in bathrooms and berthrooms, gravity shutting off only when officers are on the bridge, lights flickering, doors opening and shutting in people’s faces…

If you didn’t know better, if you weren’t as rock solid and ocean-minded as you are, you’d suspect paranormal activity. A gremlin in the wires. You’d suspect your ship to be possessed, but alas, you are far more grounded, and not prone to such flights of fancy, unless those flights find you seated firmly in the cockpit.

No, it’s a simple malfunction grown worse with age and the stresses of interstellar travel, even if that malfunction is strange as strange can be. Your only complaints are that the mechanics refuse to teach you how to fix the problem yourself, and you could not find a single manual that tells you how to do it. And now, they refuse to fix her at all.

Your ship is being decommissioned. You are being taken from your home, the place you’d lived for eighteen years is being snatched out from under your feet, for something as simple as a malfunction that no one will correct. It is… infuriating, and you are helpless to stop it.

You turn.

There is a corridor beyond the confines of your quarters, a narrow, dark hall with rough, riveted walls and an unfinished floor. You’ve never ventured down here before, and you know exactly why; this is the corridor that leads to the engine room, and you were forbidden from going there the first day you took post as the captain of this vessel.

Your orders had been clear: venture out into the deeps of space, search for habitable planets, report back to your commanders, and never, ever go into the engine room. Trained technicians back on Earth would do all the fixing your ship would ever need; there would never be a reason for you to disobey a direct command from your superior officer.

No reason except curiosity, of course. Curiosity, desperation, and a need to understand so powerful you can feel it tugging you past the door to your quarters, step by step- like you’re a bass on a hook, being reeled in against your will.

You want to know; the same drive that led you to the International Exploration Federation, the same drive that led you to your post as captain of the USS Soylentas, the same drive that led you to leave behind everything you’d ever known, to abandon your home and your family, to venture out into the far reaches of space… That is the drive that is hauling you towards the darkened entryway.

You want to know, and this… this may be your last chance to find out.

Each step drags you closer. With each step, the walls get narrower, the passageway smaller, more tangled with hanging wires like jungle vines, panels misplaced and dangling precariously, protruding from the walls and floor and ceiling like obstacles in a maze.

You place your hand on one panel, to brace yourself; it warms at the touch, not hot, just… comforting. Beckoning. Your ship is pleased with this course of action, and you pat the wall with fondness in your heart, your touch soft, fingers rubbing absently over the seam of panels welded together. The solder is rough; it catches on your callouses.

She’s always had some rough edges, from the very moment you’d first sat in the pilot’s seat. The ghost ship, the gremlin ship- her name had almost been the USS Gremlin, but someone had thankfully nipped that decision in the bud, somewhere along the chain of command. Strange malfunctions had plagued her, but you’d never had much of a problem with it- it hadn’t ever been anything too odd. In fact, sometimes it had almost been helpful.

Instances where your human reflexes just weren’t enough to pilot her through an asteroid belt or meteor shower, where your own shaky overcorrections had been balanced out by unseen hands, the flight smoothed out and perfected; times when you lay in bed staring blankly up at the ceiling, and the map holos had turned themselves on without your guidance, projecting the vastness of uncharted space for you to trace with your fingers and your eyes till you could no longer keep them open.

The terrifying moment you’d heard the alarms malfunction, waking everyone from a dead sleep just in time to detect the gas leak that would have suffocated you all, with nary a single stir from any of your slowly dying bodies. Several points in time where little error messages and pop-ups had alerted you to budding problems none of you would have noticed till far too late.

No, you don’t mind the gremlins half the fleet accuses your ship of having. You love this ship, and you like to think that if it were sentient, the ship would care for you in turn. You’re partners, of a sort; you have such an intimate knowledge of the way she flies, the way she works, that no one could pilot her as well as you. You know. They’ve tried.

All have failed.

You are the sole pilot of this ship. When she’s not in your hands, she’s docked, waiting for your return. You are familiar with her inner workings, the way she turns, the way she flies and banks and drops. You are the one who knows her best. She’s your ship, and you know everything about her…

Except what’s down this corridor.

A cord tangles around your leg, and you hiss out an expletive, bracing your face with your elbows as you topple to the floor; the panels under your body heat, as if in apology.

It’s a mess back here. You’ve seen more orderly wire configurations in an MIT dorm room, for god’s sake.

You idly think about organizing, but there’s no point; she will be spare parts and scrap metal soon enough, but still, you venture on. You feel the pull again, the draw, lifting you to your feet and pressing you forward even as a panel cuts open the fibre of your flight suit. Blood pools over your calf, into your sock and shoe, but… there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, a literal light, as if god himself is telling you the answer to all your questions is barely ten feet away.

Wires are under every step, tripping you up, tangling around your arms, your legs, your throat, like boa constrictors, cool to the touch, nearly cold against your feverishly hot skin. Still, you trek through a wasteland of rusted paneling and twisted conduits, pushing through dirt and dust and unused building materials jutting from the floor like fallen trees, like stone monoliths to long forgotten gods.

You need to know this last, untouched portion of your ship- she’s yours, yours, and you need to know every inch of her.

The light you’d seen is blinding, up close. It’s a door, sealed, with a porthole window that emits such a strong luminescence that it leaves afterimages when you blink, your eyes still used to the dimness of the hallways behind you.

It opens at a simple touch.

Your heart pounds, your hands trembling as you ease the door open, your knees nearly knocking together as you take first one, then another step forward. You are scared.

For a moment, your hands grip the doorframe so tight your knuckles go as white as the light flashing in your eyes. You shouldn’t be here. They’d forbidden you from this area for a reason- there’s something so… there’s something off, about this place.

What could you do, anyways? This is the scientist’s domain, not yours. You’re just a pilot, just a mechanic- you don’t know anything about science, about what they do in their labs, hidden behind steel doors and hospital masks and goggles thick as sin, their features hidden by one article or another till they hardly resemble humans anymore, just bugs, just alien creatures. You aren’t one of them.

You shouldn’t be here.

Still, inexplicably, you’re drawn forward. It’s like your feet have minds of their own, now- like you’re nothing but a scrap of iron in the face of Soft Gamma Repeater 1806-20. You’re locked on course and despite your sudden reservations, there’s no way you’re stopping now.

It takes what seems like forever, for the blinding light to fade from your eyes.

There is no engine.

it seems an impossibility, but it’s true- you are in the engine room, but there is no engine. The cavernous space is empty, full of nothing but air and the echoes of your footsteps as you walk towards the center. There is nothing here but a dark pillar, made of wire and tangled metal posts; you are unsure as it its purpose, but there’s no way that this is the only power source for the ship. It’s far too small, and-

There’s a sound like shuffling cloth and you jerk, looking behind you- nothing. Nothing to the left or right, and nothing up. Another shift. An inhaled breath of air, not from your lungs. You can hear these things as clear as day, and yet you have not yet found their creator.

Until, of course, you turn forward, back to the pillar, and you look.

For a moment, you just… don’t understand.

It doesn’t make sense. It is literally incomprehensible. You do not understand, and you blink once, twice, and still don’t register. There, dangling from the cords and wires like a tangled parachuter hanging from a tree, is a man.

Is you.

You jerk back, and he stays still. His arms are bound over his head by cord, his legs the same- he is you he is you but not and he looks at you with something like resigned acceptance before letting his head drop, staring blankly down at the floor.

He is you, down to the last freckle, down to the last crooked tooth. He is you, from white streak in your charcoal hair to the quirked tilt of his left eyebrow, from the darkness of your skin to the lightness of your eyes, from the strange way your breath whistles in your throat to the way his head lolls to the side at an angle, his neck slightly bent. He is you, except battered, ill used. He lifts his head up, and you see his eyes, his eyes- they are coherent, alive, and he looks at you with a sort of wearied, resigned understanding, his face lined and scarred.

Hysterically, you face off with the crippled, mutated frame of your own clone, staring at the hollowed pits of his temples with their protruding wires and viscous leakage; you stare at his hopeless expression, his foreshortened limbs and the limp, broken way he dangles from his wire prison, and, struck by horror, by a deep, gut-wrenching, nauseous terror, you realize that your engine- your ship- is sitting right in front of you.

He bows to your whims and desires like a blade of grass against a windstorm, except easier, more willing. He caters to your commands and does his best to please you, even if you order him to do ridiculous things, or tell him to embarrass himself in front of you. You’re ashamed to admit that you had done so more than once, at the beginning of your relationship.

You’ve grown in maturity, though, and he’d grown in independence, confidence, enough to tell you when you order him to do something that makes him uncomfortable. He’d grown in trust, and he trusts you not to take things too far, or make him do something dangerous.

He trusts you, caters to you, obeys you, and in turn you provide him with something akin to stability in this huge fucking mess of a life that the two of you now lead; the rules of your little trysts always stay the same, as do the punishments and rewards for disobeying and being obedient, respectively. This is a constant, for you and for him, and both of you cling to the stability and sameness perhaps a bit more than is healthy, but hey, you’re not killing anyone in fits of madness so who cares?

His hair is soft as you sift it between your fingers, guarding him as he sleeps; by the time he wakes, you will have turned it into a mass of braids and untangled curls, but you know he doesn’t mind. You think he likes it when you play with his hair, not that he’ll ever admit it, even to you- there are some things that even the level of trust you share isn’t enough to forego his blueblood pride for.

You comb out tangles and twist another patch into a fancy fishtail braid, smooth and shiny, inky black; his skin is damp with perspiration even as he rests, and you have to tease a few strands away from his forehead, smoothing them back with the palm of your hand. He twitches, breathes sharply, and you tug a lock of his hair, letting out a little croon. He relaxes against you, solid body lax with sleep.

He has nightmares about arrows and crimson blood, he has for as long as he’s known you; it’s not unusual for him to jolt awake in terror, but you do your best to keep it from happening. Poor guy deserves at least some rest, with all he’s been doing for everyone.

Guard bots have slowly taken the watch positions of everyone on board the stupid meteor, leaving more time for valuable sleep and more valuable preparation; he works tirelessly to provide some sort of boon to your side, and you appreciate him for it, even if he stutters and mumbles and sweats and attempts to downplay his efforts.

So, you guard him the rare times he allows himself to sleep. You card your fingers through his hair and hum, and you protect him in a way he will allow no one else to do, just as he allows no one else to order him as you do. He is yours, yours to order, yours to protect, yours to care for, and you sit with him as he sleeps off nights and days of work alike, braiding his hair and making sure he’ll wake up with a curly mane fancy and full enough to rival even the most pampered of show hoof beasts.

You like doing what you can for him. As much as you enjoy the system you have, the little games you play, the strict, unbending rules and the roles of dominant and submissive, you think that you enjoy this more. You enjoy caring for him, you enjoy making him feel safe, and you think he needs someone to do such things for him, after everyone just assuming that he’s fine on his own.

With his strength and his height, it’s not really farfetched, and you don’t blame anyone for scoffing at the idea that Equius fucking Zahhak would need caring for, would need protection and safety, but he does, needs it more than anyone you think you’ve ever met, and you just so happen to want to provide such things for him.

He whines, high and sharp, a sound incongruous to his appearance and the rigid control with which he holds himself in his waking moments, and you bend to press your lips to his, your hand gripping his hair tightly. The other worms its way between you and scruffs the back of his neck, your hold strong and firm, and the harsh sounds die away, replaced with a soft, ragged purr.

“Hush,” you croon, and he relaxes further, even his purr fading as he falls deeper into sleep, “I have you.”