simplerbox | Play with me

[She can't even deal with him anymore. Her arms wrap around him so tight, first voluntary contact he's given her of this significance in...some time. Before falling asleep, she manages to negotiate their bodies into a position that doesn't involve either of them drowning in sopor, and then finally lets go, with one last check for his pulse.]

[He wakes up sweating and panicked, pusher rate elevated two hundred and twenty two percent. His body never quite got the memo that he's giving up the duality theme.

His psiionics are out of control, if sopor could catch on fire then it would have. It evaporates in puffs of steam leaving concentrated spots of rubberised sopor.

A whiff of something that is right at the top of his records infiltrates through the crusted snot in his nose. It's important to know what seared troll flesh smells like. Not high quantities.

He's too frantic to know if it's his or Terezi's. ]

[Here's a not-First: waking up screaming and smelling fire. Every troll ends up having nightmares and daymares at one point or another, but this one feels real. One moment she's drawing a moustache on a grumbling Vriska's face and the next one she's wrapped up in electrified barbed wire.

Oh wait, it's Sollux.]

Hey! Get yourself together!

[They snap off in a flash at her voice.

A literal flash, unfortunately. His hair and her hair stand on end and he reaches up to touch above his eye sockets.]

Losses: two eyebrows.

[No laughter, if he was being funny he would have commented on the sopor ones he's drawn on.]

[There's a beat, then she flops back down in what's left of sopor.]

I wouldn't call it a loss, they're the shape a wriggler makes when they first grab chalk.

Incorrect. Eyebrows take up to two weeks to grow.

[He sinks down and his lids close. One thing that his programming has never been able to fix is the irrational desire to have them open.]

You can't show your face in public, this is terrible!!

[She rolls on her side.] I'll draw you some. We can alchemize a sharpie.

Affirmative. Sharpie creation feasible.

[He follows her minutely, angling towards where the sopor shifted.]

[She leans forward, bumps her forehead against his.] Gah, you stink of charred sopor. We better shower before it ends up making us high.

[She comes within his proximity and collides - he doesn't react. Not enough force in the bump to necessitate avoidance procedures.]

No conclusive study has every been conducted on the intoxicating properties of sopor.

Sure it has, his name is Gamzee Makara. Come on, conscript, haul your ass out of this joint.

You're rested, you can manage the few movements on your own.

[It registers and he jerks out of the sopor shakily to his feet.]

Destination?

The shower.

Target locked.

[He clutches at her as he trudges towards the shower's coordinates.]

[Luckily, she's pulled herself together and out of the recuperacoon by the time he locks onto the target, and she feels like there's been a breakthrough in the past night. He held her, voluntarily, and despite the crispy eyebrows and sopor, he turned towards her too, like she was his control beacon.

Gives her a little hope.]

[He leaves footprints of sticky residue behind him but lands shivering in the shower. Stands to attention. Tilted slightly to the left. Some sopor got in his ear and it's throwing off his balance calibrations.

The spots where he was plugged in, and the last few places that the cables had to be ripped out haven't healed properly, they still sting in the air and they're a distraction from his routines when they ache.]

[She takes care of him first. She makes sure he's scrubbed clean of sopor, and though she lets him do most of the work, she is there to make sure he doesn't take his ear out or something like that. And no matter how smart Sollux is, he can't reach his back, so she gets that for him, gentle as she can be. Possitively reverent.

She might even kiss near a wound if she weren't sure he'd zap them on instinct alone.]

Decontamination com... [he trails off, gently rather than like an aborted script.

He reaches and uses his knuckles to scrub lightly over her hip, dislodging a patch of sopor that had congealed.

He doesn't have anything to tell him what to say.]

[She doesn't expect it at all. It makes her stop scrubbing the scabs of sopor off his back, soapy hand pressed between shoulder blades; she needs a few seconds to come to terms with this voluntary touching.

Also she's fucking speechless.]

[His hand shakes, tremor stemming from his shoulder. His knuckles press into her skin. Standing firm through his growing shudders.]

[The shudders send her into action finally; she moves her hand from his back to cover his hand, stepping twice so they're compressed into the cabin at a better angle from each other. A modest tit may or may not be brushing his arm. She may or may not be holding her breath.]

[He notices nothing but the fact that warmth and contact is holding him steady.

He feels blind in all his senses and his functions are shrinking back into primal ones, the ones that tell every wiggler to cry and scream and fight, he has the first one covered, and the second is certainly building with it. Snorts and gasps, stutter out with tears and he can't hold himself still. He wipes an eye with the heel of his hand, doesn't know why and doesn't know why it comes back damp. Couldn't hold his hand still to see for trying even with eyes.]

[It's not like she's an expert on what's going on in his brain half the time, having no BA in programming BS, but there is one thing that sends her into action. She doesn't care if he burns her skin to pieces this time.

When she wraps her arms around him, she steps so she's in front of him; one hand hooked over his shoulder from behind while the other runs soothingly up and down his neck. She pulls him close.]

[She always does the right thing, and he trusts her to do it as well. When he remembers. When he can.

Right now, he can.]

Terezi?

[That has her snapping her eyes open, the water registering only mildly as it sprays and gets in them.]

Yeah? [Her heart's in her throat.]

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