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Somewhere in a past life you would never have had reason to believe this would happen to you. Then again, this isn’t life, not really. You know this because you have full, uninhibited use of your arms and legs. You also know this because here are two other sets of arms and legs, two bodies, two faces fixed intently on you.
Paradox space introduces them as princes. Your streak is not a good one, where royalty is concerned. Nonetheless, you fill in the blanks for yourself—you didn’t spend centuries as a supercomputer for nothing.
Prince One’s eyes are blank: you imagine yours would match, if their perpetual glow hadn’t burst. You miss it, a little, that definition of who you were. Are. There’s a crook to his horns that tugs at the edge of your memory, making you uneasy.
He looks about the same, though, with the way his sightless stare lingers over you.
Then Prince Two appears over his shoulder, unlike any ghost you’ve ever seen. He’s paler than any creature you’ve come across in what was passed off as your existence, from the shock of hair under a game-assigned circlet to the patches of skin that peek out above his sleeves.
“Who’s the skinny kid?” he asks: his voice is—almost agonizingly soft.
You open a mouth that hasn’t needed use in decades and reply, “I’m not a kid. I was in commission for seven hundred thirty-one sweeps.”
Prince One’s frown deepens, angular features of something higher than you on a younger face. Oh, well. Social currency is a bit of a moot point, here.
“You were a battery,” he says, after a minute, and the sea-grist roughness of his voice beneath the smooth overtones calls up a database of blue-white fire, a map of scars over the planes of his cheeks. You want to run. You forget how to use your feet.
“I was,” you hear yourself answer, dryly. “Battleship Condescension, serial number 06I2B43—”
“Hey,” Prince Two cuts in, and only then do you realize you’re sparking, crackling like a faulty outlet. “No offense, man, but whatever the fuck that means, I honestly can’t tell much of a difference between you and Fish ‘n’ Chips here.”
“We’re nothing alike,” you both protest.
He rolls his eyes, a motion that feels wrenchingly familiar. You’re a little mortified that this alien child in royalty’s clothing is—getting to you.
Prince One seems to catch on at the same time as you. He leans over to Prince Two (Dirk Strider, hemotype #?????? specibus bladekind threat level don’t know don’t know) and whispers something in his ear. Dirk cocks his head to one side, pushes his shades further into his hair and approaches you, one cautious hand out like you’re a wounded thing.
“Here?” he asks, in that voice that pierces whatever part of your bloodpusher that hasn’t burst with an unimaginably soft weapon, and his fingers cup your cheek.
Your knees almost give out.
Dirk follows you down, his other hand mirroring the first, soothing fucking symmetry. “Woah, are you—”
“He’s good,” Prince One interrupts (Eridan Ampora, hemotype #6a006a, specibus riflekind *designation Ahab’s Crosshairs threat level no please no no it’s not him get a hold of yourself—). “That, that’s a good thing, honest.”
He raises an eyebrow at Eridan, then turns back to you. Even his eyes are soft. You blink a couple times. “You good?”
“I,” you say.
Eridan laughs, but whatever malice you may have attributed to it is lost in the strain you can make out. “Told you so.”
Dirk’s thumb brushes over the sharp plane of your cheek. You feel pried open. It’s been two hundred fourteen sweeps since someone’s touched you; it’s been, again, seven hundred thirty-one since someone’s touched you like this .
“That’s an awful long time,” he says quietly, and you realize with a painful jolt that those numbers were out loud. You make an embarrassed sort of noise, this half-whistle between your teeth, and Dirk says, “hey, easy, shhh,” and you can practically feel your blood congeal, slow to the violet crawl in Prince One’s veins.
“Higher,” Eridan chimes in again: he’s dropped to a sitting position, scooting closer, and one of his killer’s hands (statistics flash behind your empty eyes when you blink, and you feel a familiar deep-set fear in you) moves up to his horn, a couple inches from the base. “Grab ‘em here.”
Dirk shifts upwards, on his knees, and complies.
The absence of warmth on your cheek, however brief, has you chasing more, tipping your head to follow his hand. When his fingers wrap around one of your outside horns, though, you stop, like someone’s yanked you free of all your wires. You feel—you—
“Oh,” say the princes in quiet tandem, in something like awe, and you’d laugh at that, the notion of you being anything but cullmeat with an expired piece of machinery for a pan, of—
Dirk gives your horn a squeeze, and you let out this choked-up sob, centuries in the making, and his hands are so warm, you’ve missed warmth so. Fucking. Much.
Eridan is watching with a flush across his face, a deep colour the likes of which followed you into daymares, two lifetimes ago. His fingers have moved from his demonstration, tangling honey-slow in his own curls. You watch with whatever focus you are, for reasons that escape you, struggling to retain: his fingers are calloused, on the insides of his joints.
From his perch between the pair of you, Dirk turns to follow your gaze. “You want in on this, kid?”
Eridan’s hand shoots into his lap in a flash, and you have never seen a highblood look so guilty in all your Alternian life and beyond. “I—”
“You know more about this than I do. Besides, I see the look on your face.”
You see it, too. It isn't hard to compute the tells behind the blank canvas of death: the poor bastard’s pupils are blown, swallowing the bright colourful ring of a recent molt. Whatever Eridan’s been deprived of paleways, he wants it badly. Your brain attempts, very briefly, to calculate the remaining resistance time of his self-control.
(It doesn’t take wires implanted into your pan to deduce it can’t be much longer.)
The hunch is proven almost immediately, when Dirk says, “Last time I ask, fish sticks. You gonna let me do this for you or not—”
“Please,” Eridan murmurs, a submissive note in the hoarseness of his voice that you recognize as a serious need for attention. “Please, okay, yeah, you can—”
“C’mere.” Dirk reaches out a free hand (but not before letting his fingers trail along your cheek, and you ache inside) to beckon him closer. The reaction is instantaneous: Eridan rolls to his knees in one fluid motion, ass off the backs of his heels until the crown of his head meets Dirk’s waiting palm.
The relief on his face borders on the obscene.
“Okay,” Dirk’s saying, soft as his eyes, floating over the pair of you like liquid gold. “Okay, I can work with this.”
“What, you got some kind a’ plan?” Eridan shoots back. It earns him a tug in his hair, and you watch him deflate.
“Nah. Playing by ear.” Dirk lowers one finger to run a nail along the skin behind his fin, and the sound Eridan makes has you leaning in like an overgrown mirror.
Somewhere in your pan, a wire reconnects to your tongue. “So what do your ears hear, Prince?”
He glances back at you and holds your gaze. “Right now? Mostly that this feels better than either of you have felt in—fuck, years, probably.”
“What’s a year,” Eridan starts, then cuts himself off with a shaky sigh, a wavering lilt that almost kills you again. When you force yourself to look over at the noise, Dirk’s eyes haven’t left you, even with his fingers curled in a steady grip around the jagged curve in the younger troll’s horn.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he murmurs, and the same shiver takes you—things you thought you were above, with your mutated age and (admittedly warped) experience out in the universe.
You’ve been papped before. A belated scan of Ampora’s file out of habits branded into you indicate that he’s no stranger to it, either. So what’s different about this? What does this alien boy with ghostly hands have over you? You are familiar with mind control, and this is not it.
No, this...this is longing.
When Dirk speaks again, it’s muffled: you wonder why, until you realize with a bolt of horror that your head had slowly been lolling forward until your ear was pressed to his chest. “I—say again?”
You move to straighten, but his hand braces the back of your head and roots you to the spot. Your foot or so over him earns you no advantages.
“I said,” Dirk repeats, patience a low register against you, “what are you called?”
That gives you pause, when you open your mouth to answer. “My serial number is 06I2B—”
“You said that already.” A mumble from Prince One that might have been words results in pats at the back of your hair. “Don’t tell me you don’t have a name.”
“I…”
A name. You used to have one, you think, shared in confidence between renegades, murmured over campfire sparks. A name cried out in pain, and desperate need for comfort, and lost under the roar of a crowd and the roar of a voice you’d come to know better than your own. A name you were stripped of, along with a title you’d carved for yourself, replaced with something unnatural, unclean, wrong and wrong—
“Hey.”
So, so soft. Your head’s fallen again; it’s heavy when you raise it.
(###### ######. Hemotype #a1a100, str##011010##/10010///00010##111)
“...I can’t remember.”
Your voice, in contrast, is hoarse, scratched up like a worn piece of equipment thrown aside. Something feels warm on your cheeks: gold, traitorous of any emotion your biological side’s ever felt.
“He’s crying,” Eridan whispers. The observation reaches you like tendrils of shameful smoke, like this violet-blooded kid’s statement of fact shouldn’t have been stated in the first place. “No tears, helmsman, c’mon…”
The title slips out, as clumsy and hesitant as you feel, but his hand is steady when it strokes over the dull yellow tracks along your jaw.
Something catches your attention, a peculiar noise, and it startles you to realize that it’s your own rusty purr.
It’s strange, unheard of in your past experiences. But then, most of your experiences have been, by definition, strange. Following this train of thought grows easier and easier, and you let yourself tip your head into the palm of the Orphaner’s get.
Dirk watches, transfixed: out of the corner of one half-lidded eye, you see him look over your headgear. You wield double duty, Ampora carries royalty’s angles like someone’s bottled lightning and shoved it into the slurry that spawned him.
Kind of fitting. You are giddy enough to consider snickering, but then Dirk raises a hand to his own hair, an alien echo of Eridan’s prior concession. His joints pop as they part his locks, lusus-white, to where he might have had a pair of horns for himself if he had been less lucky. You hear the barest hint of a sigh.
“Strider.” You can’t tell if you mean it as a question or a statement.
“Hnn.” (Apparently, neither does he.)
“You’ve never been papped, have you?”
He cracks a dry smile; more of a straightening of his lips. “Is that what it’s called?”
“Drop the blasé schtick, kid. I know lonely when I see it.”
You strike a nerve in the form of a spectral frown. “I’m not lonely.”
None of you are in any position to argue, not even when he amends, “It’s never been something that bothers me.”
You and Eridan exchange a look. He gingerly pulls his hand away — it’s cold, you’re no stranger to the feeling but find yourself sinking into it anew — and spins on his knees to face Dirk. “Pale’s meant to be a two-way street,” he says, “else it don’t go over well. You gotta give back what you take, or same shit turnways.”
“Speaking from experience?” you ask. Eridan shoots you a look you’re pretty sure was intended to be a threat, but sort of...breaks, crumbles around the three of you along with the walls you landed in this bubble with. Two out of three of them, anyway.
You lean in again to murmur apologies and nonsense shooshes into his hair until he nods at nothing in particular, and then you also turn to face Dirk. “He has a point. Let us help you out.”
Dirk’s expression tells you that help is not a department he’s overly familiar with. “But I...I mean, I don’t have, uh.”
“You don’t got the shortcut we do,” Eridan clarifies, and tosses his horns in a highblood movement so blatantly unconscious that you roll your empty eyes. “Don’t mean you don’t have another. We just gotta find it.”
He doesn’t look certain. You meet Eridan’s gaze again, and give the tiniest nod. “Good to let go, now an’ again,” he says, and reaches up to gently brush Dirk’s fingers out of his hair.
Prince Two does not put up a fight.
His hair seems to match the rest of him—Ampora’s fins cant down to join the rest of his defenses as he tangles his hand through pale, pale strands. Dirk’s breathing catches as it tries to slow. If you concentrate, you can almost see the knots and tangles in his wiring. You join your hand to Eridan’s and hum softly at the pleasant feeling under your fingertips.
Dirk’s shoulders drop. The younger troll seems to count this as a victory of sorts, and competition inscribed into your bones — a survival tactic you’d thought to have outgrown — has you moving your touch to his temple, over the fine hairs at his brow. Exploring.
Eridan takes the opposite route, over shocks of white towards his collar.
And Dirk goes very, very still.
Curiosity lances through both of you—through all three of you. “Shortcut,” Eridan whispers with a smirk, and curls his fingers at the base of Dirk’s neck. Two and a thumb, cradling the top of the spine.
He melts. You note the surprise in his face, in eyes that fight to stay open: amber swallowed by shadow, companions to Ampora’s, pupils the colour of your sclera. His breath leaves in a rush—a quiet half-whimper.
You were the imperial fleet’s strongest warship for hundreds of sweeps. You have never felt so powerful; you have never felt more an equal.
Together, you and Eridan work the tension from this boy you begin to suspect has been carrying it all alone. The three of you are alone, you think, in paradox space and in your own minds. May as well be alone with others.
Dirk’s head nestles in the crook of your shoulder. He’s warm in a way that calls to mind a warmth you miss terribly, and your arms wrap around him easily. You absorb his shivers into yourself.
Behind him, Eridan shuffles forward again to press a hesitant kiss to the base of his neck, where his hood ends and his hair begins. Dirk lets out that little noise again, buried against you. It’s devastating. You kind of love it.
“Isn’t this better?” you ask, a question you and your centuries of analyses and decryptions have already revealed the answer to.
He nods anyway, a minute movement against you. You are in a haze; Ampora looks much the same, murmuring words you don’t know against Dirk’s hair, his spine.
Time escapes you, in the dreambubbles, and even if it didn’t you wouldn’t be inclined to keep track. Somewhere along the way, you sink to the ground, unhurried, let your spine melt under you. Dirk follows, Eridan close behind, until the three of you are some sort of mess of limbs and unfurled fears, cracked open and left abandoned in ways very, very different than the rest of yourselves.
In a moment of silence, you raise a hand a final time, and rest it on Prince Two’s ribcage, index and middle fingers splayed. Prince One looks, and laughs, and mirrors the motion. Dirk raises an eyebrow, and copies you as well, his fingers over the pair of yours.
None of you say anything: instead, you keep your hands there and wait for the sky to fall again.