simplerbox | Play with me

[They barely rescue him from the ruins of the sunken ship, only going in because Terezi remembers Condesce's ships are sailed by mustard bloods and it's been ages of eerie silence from Sollux and it couldn't be but then it suddenly was. Her moirail, wired up to the helm, talking in numbers, mumbling, brain lost (her Highness had had a reputation for abusing her helmsmen) almost. It breaks her heart to the point where she's clawing through derse agents and felt and rubble and who knows what just to get to him, and it still breaks her heart now.

She let him go off with Aradia, took it as a 'hey tz i need some alone time with that fine ass' sign, and let him go and that's where it got him. Yeah, part of her resents Aradia for it; always will.

But time's past now, and he's been getting better. She's developped a system based on certain touches to trigger certain habits he keeps losing. It's all psychological, Rose tells her about it, and she's tried to keep the routine religiously ever since. Her knee bumping his under the table means 'blink, Sollux'. Her hand on his shoulder means 'breathe, Sollux'. And so on.

She's writing up a progress log, sitting next to him at the table. The rest of the gang are scouting or doing whatever they're supposed to be doing, but Terezi's grounded herself. Strategy and Sollux-sitting is her duty now. It makes her laugh to imagine him trying to say that. Before, anyway.

She bumps his knee with hers.] I'll get your recuperacoon ready.

[His eyes fold and it's a moment before he completes the action bringing them open again.

The world is so big but none of it's here with him in this room. He's barely here in this room. His breath rattles in his chest, there's something lodged in there and no pummelling his back to bring it up has worked.

He doesn't thank her, that process locked down and stopped initiating when he stopped existing without tubes. Instead he sends out a piece of fire to sting her cheek, moving with psiionics is easier than shifting any piece of his body, it could be acknowledgement or it could be checking where she is. It's not in him to tell her.]

Forty percent.

Sollux. [It's low voiced, not a warning at all, just a mention of his name; just in case he's doing it without noticing. Just because she still thinks that maybe one day he'll remember he can touch her just as easily, rather than zap away.]

Stop jumping over percents so fast you douchebag, I know you're just doing it to watch me flail. [Which she doesn't. All flailing is done internally, but on the outside she is an oasis of calm in his otherwise electrified desert. Or something of the sorts.

She misses touch, sometimes. They weren't the most tactile of moirails even when they'd had the chance to be, but nowadays her heart would stop if he were to touch her with his fingers rather than the psiionics. Even so, she can't help but feel tender for him anyway.

With a suffering and obnoxious sigh, she sits up from the desk, grabbing him by the elbow.] Come on, conscript.

[She leads him to the recuperacoon - Terezi knows the looks she's been getting from people for voluntarily sharing a recuperacoon with someone whose daymares could easily zap her out of existence (and there have been times, in the beginning, when he almost has; she keeps the scars on her back, they make her cool) - and fills it up for both of them, deciding to call it a night.]

I dare you to form one phrase that has no numbers in it.

[He wobbles as she leads but remains upright with it.

Sleeping container in sight. Analysing: Not ready.
He stands as stationary as he can while she fills it. Only a slight sway and a jerk as his knee threatens to fold.

Her words permeate the fug in his thinkpan.]

Denied. Computations necessary.

[His face twitches through the phrase and his hands spasm, though the lightning around them remains steady. Dares aren't concrete, they're one step down from paradoxes, they require thinking rather than calculation of known variables.

But he returns to calm and limp soon enough.]

Twenty two percent.

[She doesn't have time to lean against the recuperacoon, or let the anguish and pity fill her up until it overflows. Because under thirty percent means he'll give up on maintaining his limbs up by himself, which means she has to turn and grab him. She's still tiny as shit in comparison. He's still an unboiled noodle.

Fuck him. And his numbers. And his variables. So much. She misses her friend so much, but there are times when she doesn't know what to do with him. How to fix him. Short of finding him a ship and wiring him up, and keeping it. But then he'd be hers, not the Condesce's, not anyone else's but hers. And that's dangerous.]

Hey...remember when I used to beat you up at video games like all the times, even before you went blind? Is this you being a sore loser?

[Memories are hard, they're so unnecessary, who did what when and why? Irrelevant. Anything that matters is stored in non-volatile hard-disk records. He tries to reach out to the database he's no longer wired up to and jerks forward, yanking out of Terezi's grip and barking out a sound that should never originate from a troll when his elbow hits the side of the recuperacoon.]

Status: Sore. Loser: Negative.

Well that's because you're forgetting to control your own limbs, dumbass!! [How can she say that and say it with such a cheerful tone and how can he not remember that's been her Sollux tone since they met in person. She'd shove his head under the slime if she wasn't unsure he'd remember to breathe.] Clothes.

[And she gets started. Methodically, heart saved in a compartment of its own where it's not feeling a single thing as she peels off his shirt and pants and boxers and takes hers off too.]

[Clothes registers and he manages not to work against her as she strips him, forcing a small amount of energy into his arms to raise them and just enough into his feet to allow her to slip the cloth under and off.]

Five percent. Energy level: critical.

[His voice creaks, like it's losing energy too.

He was able to leap entire galaxies in the ship, now he can't step two paces without assistance. His mind whirs and spews up data that he can't convert into any meaning. It drains the last of his resources and he falls over the edge.]

[Good for fucking him! Raising his arms like a big boy and all. The thing with this recuperacoon now, the thing with it is that she made it so it'd fit two trolls rather than one, alchemitized it herself (our of a bed and a bucket, what's up), and the edges aren't as high up as the normal one's are. So yeah, when he folds like a lawnchair and falls over the edge, he really falls over!

Thankfully, she's only half occupied with slipping out of her boxers and manages to grab his arm before a complete topple over happens.

That done, she helps him in with a bit more finesse, and slips in as well. Darkness and cool wrap around her, and Terezi feel awake rather than sleepy. She sits next to him, pulls and pushes at his twig body until he's on his back and not face-first into slime, and lies down next to him.

And because living around Karkat for so long has contaminated her braincells, she reaches for his hand and threads their fingers together.]

[His fingers jerk closed around her own and the sopor soothes everything, muscles and mind.

Sometimes with slime pressing all around him and into his pores he thinks. Not about anything not with a purpose but just like he used to, or he imagines he used to, he imagines he imagines he used to. And then as fast as it came he's thinking in binary again. No fight no pain just 01100100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110110 01100101 spiralling into the depths of his mind.]

Zero percent. Shutting down.

[She brushes her thumb against the knobbly bone of his, turning her head in the sopo, barely, towards him.]

Remember to wake up. [And yes, it's said quietly, a knot in her throat and an ache somewhere under her ribs. This'd be the time she'd want to lean over and kiss his nose or his brow, to run her fingers through his hair or her nail down his spine. This'd be it, if not for her heart in that box.

Oh, who's she kidding.]

[He mumbles] Affirmative, command locked. [and lets the rest of his processes shut down.

Even without sopor dampening daymares he wouldn't have them. He isn't free to experience anything even in sleep, trapped within his skin he releases control of his muscles. Breathing is the only thing he needs to run now, all other threads have been dropped and released.]

No - [She raises her voice, suddenly urgent,] No, not a command, dammit, it's a plea. It's...[She sniffs the air.] Pointless. Of course you're sleeping, you bigass nerd.

[If she had a pillow to whack her head back against, she'd do that, but she doesn't. For a brief, weak moment she wonders what it'd be like to just sink down into the sopor. Not breathe it in or get high on it, she's not Gamzee and she's also not a dumb fuck, but to just sink down and not resurface. Would he miss her? Would he know who to miss? Would any part of his brain remember her as anything other than a voice or a presence that somehow insists on kicking him into gear when he's only trying to find the wires again, or would she just be an archived thought?

That thought freaks her out, to the point where she's clutching his hand tighter than she realises it, her breathing taking the rhythm of an upcoming breakdown. She hasn't been papped or shooshed in cycles now, and she doesn't even remember if he's ever done it. So she picks herself up, even if it's a slow process.

It'll have to get better than this. It'll have to.]

[He is sleeping, breath rattling up through his lungs and back out his mouth and nose.

Doesn't stir when her hand clutches his. Tightness increased 47.33333% blips over his mind.

Her breath fails to regulate and his eyes drag open. Doesn't see shit - ocular function is disengaged. Hearing, minimal but the two percent is only picking up her. The sopor is getting to him just enough. He squeezes her hand.]

[It's like having the breath punched out of her chest when he does that. She first goes tense all over, then limp when her brain realises it's real and associates it with a papping of sorts. She finally turns her head to look at him, getting an earfull of sopor but what does it even matter, not like she sees with her ears.

Sollux, Sollux, Sollux, how she pities him. No, fuck that word, might as well use the one Karkat's been throwing around with precision lately - love. She loves him. He's her sassy childhood friend, the only one with whom conversations didn't feel forced or full of bullshit, the one who picked her as team leader because he knew what was in her head better than she did, even then. Her moirail. Just her moirail.

Why join the line of hearts that bleed for him, flushed red and pulsing, when she can do ten times worse with her own little pale place?

He'd probably call her a sissy for that. He'd call her a sissy because he'd know it'd amuse her to no end to hear him say the word.

The sopor around her starts to smell different, and it takes her a moment to realise it's her. Stupid eyes and their leaking.]

[Sopor saline: increased by point zero two percent. Probable causes: chemical imbalance, foreign detritus, insufficient exfoliation.

He's busying himself with little things. He shouldn't be, he should be in shut down mode but there's something about increased salt that's set activity spinning. The more unusual keys still remain. Because he's the only one to properly deal with them. Arrogance was stripped with everything else. The logical statement is that he doesn't know anyone else who deals with this. Unique pathways must be maintained.]

Sopor is inefficient with increased salt content. Saline must remain stable at three parts per ten million. [He gets sopor over his chin and halfway onto his lip, on someone else that might matter but he's not going to lick it off.]

[He might not bother licking it off, but she's got a sixth sense about sopor near Sollux's mouth and that's the last thing they need, so she ends up reaching up to rub it off. Smear it off. Unfortunately, they've been marinating for a while.

Also unfortunately, she can't wipe away at her stupid cheeks without getting sopor in her eyes. She doubts it'd hurt or anything, but still. It would be gross. So she just forces herself to stop crying.

They key is to not linger, of course. To not cup the side of his face with her hand, to not mold it to the curve and angle of his jawline; sure isn't working though. And any moment now he'll make a comment about some statistics about her hand on his cheek related to his sleeping pattern and she'll hate the empress and all she fucking stands for and all she fucking did to him.]

Increase in saline stabilized.

[The bubbles in the sopor rise and he can feel some bursting on his skin. It registers in the outer rings of his conciousness.

What should be worrying is that the bubbles have the same priority as her hand on his cheek. But worry can't be calculated.]

Body coverage at ninety two percent, standard sopor coverage is eighty nine.

[His psiionics fizzle over her hand.]

Discrepancy dismissed.

[How can her bloodpusher tremble like it trembles for him? Maybe it's never really stopped, not since she called him half-the-time-cool, not since the first shoosh. Or before it. There's always been a membrane or a muscle in there beating and moving for Sollux Captor; it's just grown with time. It grows more every day, and it's an ugly thing.

It hurts. It hurts like losing Vriska to her own two hands hurt. Hurts like missing Vriska hurt. Hurts like seeing her ghost again hurt.

Maybe she's an emotional masochist and that's why. Or maybe she just loves him, screw explanations, and that means staying with him through thick and thin. She's already let him go once, and look where it got him. She won't do that again. He'd blow himself off the planet without even a second thought spent towards the lack of logic to it.

She keeps her hand there, against all odds and fizzles at her fingertips, and her whispers don't echo in their recuperacoon.]

Do I ever register as anything else but discrepancy?

[He's so so low on energy. All the time, even at one hundred percent his memory banks tell him it's not one hundred percent of his full capacity, just one hundred percent of what he's capable now.]

Affirmative. [He doesn't go on to explain when, or why, she's not. Not always.

But there are times when he can tell that people are people who have memories and experiences rather than thinkpans filled with calculations more random than his. Mostly when that comes to light his ability to articulate that maybe he won't always speak in numbers is locked down. How do people move without knowing the airflow around them?]

[Affirmative. He could've said yes, but he said affirmative. Of course - once a helmsman always a helmsman. And Sollux, he was bound to be strong. His psiioniics moved a whole planet, of course that would've triggered the Condesce to his presence. She'd probably wanted another mustardblood for ages. How could she have not forseen that then?

My fault keeps ringing in her ears, because essentially, she believes that it is her fault. One way or another.]

That's great. What do I register as?

Terezi Pyrope: Female troll.
Possible threat.

[That feels disingenuous to his mouth and his tongue, even his mind doesn't really acknowledge her as a danger. But for different reasons. He's wired for combat threats, tiny, wiry, buttless Terezi shouldn't make a serious combat threat. Knowing Terezi, she could have taken down ship, upon ship before anyone so much as noticed they were gone. She is the biggest threat but his lips and his tongue and the bits of him that remain untainted know that she's not a threat to him.]

[That brings out a snort, which echoes somewhat in their recuperacoon. Possible threat her foot, she's a definite threat. If she wants to be, anyway. She wonders if that's what his records say on her, or if it's really what he thinks.

If he thinks at all. And she hopes he does. She could burn an empty empire to the ground, and he'd be the safest troll on it.]

Threat to you?

[It's a while, thirty seconds - thirty one and fourty nine miliseconds if it was being timed, before he arrives at an answer. So many variables need to be accounted for. More than the average troll. The average troll has five, intelligence, strength, luck, agility and charisma. Terezi has league upon league of them.]

Negative.

[Another long, long pause.]

Unless in possession of paint materials.

[Small part of her would be really proud to hear that's the way she ranks in his stupid system. Small or big part.]

Hehe... that's true. I'm a menace with chalk.

[Another long pause to match his.] Why am I not a threat?

mmmm

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