simplerbox | Play with me

[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?

[His breath whistles in and out.

Calculations are hard coded, decrypting them takes more time. It's two minutes precisely when he responds.]

Empathy is on the records.

Trolls and empathy. [She scrunches up her nose before shaking her head slightly.]

Moirail. Do you get that?

[Parsing incomplete sentences reduces his accuracy.]

Negative. Moirallegance requires equal participation.

I guess that makes me a sucker, then.

[She turns around, eyes closed and sniffer pointed away from him.] Good to know.

Negative.

[It comes out before calculations, an anomaly. An aberration.]

Not a sucker?

Affirmative. [It comes out as a sigh, he's so tired. Tired of his head, tired of thinking like this, like a troll not a machine. He's so good at being a machine. Churning over percentages. And he's not even all the way there. Not even half the way there. This is it. This is all he's managing. Affirmatives.]

[No. By any troll's standards, unrequited romance, pale or flushed or the dangerous mix of both she feels, would make the yearning troll a complete and utter sucker. And if he's saying she isn't, then it's not the records talking; it's Sollux.

Quietly, she takes one of his hands and brinds it up to her mouth, brushing a tender kiss against his pulse. He could zap her out of existence right now, for all she cared, and it wouldn't hurt. Slime and all, it still tastes like Sollux. Not toxic.]

You're the only troll in this joint to think so.

[He doesn't know who else is around. Can't tell what they're thinking anyway. So he can't let a 'negative' fly. But it seems unlikely that everyone thinks she's a sucker.

Terezi Pyrope with stubborn off the charts, that's not being a sucker.

Except that's only what Sollux thinks as he doesn't realise that kiss was a kiss and doesn't know what lips on sopor on skin means beyond what every piece of contact means.]

Insufficient evidence to support Troll Pyrope's claim. [Is the best he can do.]

We're not in a courthouse, conscript. Session has been adjourned. [Another kiss, pressed hard against the back of his hand, trying to leave it there like a burning tattoo. She's almost hoping, almost wishing, it'll trigger his psiionics, and her lips will burn, because then she'll feel something that isn't -

Ridiculous. Being ridiculous. She lets their arms drop.] Troll Pyrope claims to be the maximum authority on the matter, as well as the owner of a hot ass.

[He sighs with a huff that might be a laugh or might be just another irregularity in all physical functions. It's almost certainly just another quirk of being out of tune with his body.]

Troll Pyrope - file updated to indicate spreader of falsehoods.

Ass is of regular temperature.

[!! Did he just - that was almost a laugh, wasn't it? Now's not the time for her eyes to burn with the threat to leak everywhere again, what is she turning her into. But oh does it give her some hope, if he still is capable of those irregular noises.

It makes her croak out a laugh.] You bitch. I'd demonstrate that it's hot but we're covered in slime. And it's a good thing, too! Otherwise this whole recuperacoon would be on fire from my butt.

[He's- that's- his mind is spewing up errors and now he's leaking just as much as she was. He doesn't know what to say. He would have known what to say before but now, now his brain can't do jokes, he can't find what to say.

Through the slime that's dripping out his nose, he reverts to facts. Truths that he knows.]

Sopor is flame retardant.

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