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edenfallingSummary: Aradia and Sollux have been borderline non-platonic friends for a while, but neither has had the courage to take that last step and ask if the other is also feeling pale. Then Aradia has a run-in with her neighbor's robots and ends up with a psionic burnout headache at the most inconvenient time. (3,000 words)
Note: This story was written for Cotton Candy Bingo Round One, in response to the prompt: headache.
[ETA: The slightly revised and extended final version is now up on AO3!]
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The nerves in patterns on a screen
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You've spent the aftermidnight mostly lying on your couch wishing you could just not exist for a while, but when Sollux trolls you to say he's leaving the city, you haul yourself upright to make a few preparations, and then sit down in your open doorway to wait for him, leaning against the frame. The walls are cool in the green moonlight and the gentle dim season breeze, and you imagine you can feel a teaspoon or two of pain leaching away from your skull into the foundations of your hive.
An indeterminate stretch of throbbing later, you open your eyes as the wind picks up unnaturally, just in time to watch Sollux land between two of your old test pits. Blue and red sparks crackle behind his shades for a moment, residual psychic energy bleeding into the air. Then he blinks and any sign that he could break a troll in half without lifting a finger disappears, leaving nothing but a too-skinny, slope-shouldered doofus.
"Hey AA," he says as you carefully push yourself to your feet. Then he frowns, steps forward, raises one hand but leaves it hanging useless in the empty air between you rather than venture to touch. "You look like shit. Bad night?"
You start to shake your head, then think better of the motion as pain grates on the inside of your skull, sharp, hot, and nauseating. "Just a headache," you say. "I'm sorry, I don't think I'll be much company tonight. I'll be better tomorrow, though! You're not getting out of this prospecting trip that easily."
"Curthes, foiled again," he says. His tongue trips a little on the esses, like always, tangled in his own teeth the way his brain gets tangled in the messy, inconvenient realities of wearing a physical body.
You grin weakly. It took you a good perigee to persuade him to leave the city for more than a single night, especially since the point is to go out camping in the middle of nowhere and hunt for the ruins of pre-exile civilization. (Or even ruins of pre-spaceflight civilization, though those are a lot rarer and deeper underground.) You're going to have to live with other adult trolls after conscription. You want to see how your people managed that in the past, even if ancient planet-bound patterns probably won't have much relevance to modern life in the fleet.
Anyway, the point is you've been looking forward to this trip for ages. You pulled together supplies, borrowed credits from Terezi to purchase a radiocarbon analyzer and some other nifty gadgets, sent raptormom off for a long hunting trip in the mountains so she wouldn't worry about you, and you are not going to let anything get in the way, not even your neighbor's latest spoiled-wiggler tantrum and its lingering aftereffects.
"I put together a sandwich for you," you say. "Fair warning, it has actual unprocessed vegetables in it!"
Sollux makes a terrible face. "There'th no quality control for that shit, are you trying to kill me? But okay, whatever, I'll eat your sandwich. It'th not like you won't hear me haunting your ass if I die. Now come on, let'th get you back indoors and lying down with your eyes closed."
He sets his hand on your shoulder, light and tentative. You wrap your arm around his stupid, skinny waist and pull him close as you walk through the door into the main block of your hive. Maybe one of these nights you'll convince him he's always allowed into your personal space -- and besides, it's not like arm's reach actually means anything in terms of safety when you're both psionics.
"You've taken painkillers and drunk water and all the usual thtuff, right?" he asks.
"Yeah."
"And you thtill feel like a three-night-old rotting carcass?"
You make a face as your think pan conjures a nauseating phantom stench into your nose. That's the nastiest stage of decomposition: old enough for the burning metal reek of dead meat to set in, not old enough for scavengers to have stripped the corpse to bare, fascinating bones. "Thank you so much for that image. But yes, more or less."
Sollux helps you sit down sideways on your couch and floats over two spare towels from your ablution block to wrap around your shoulders and legs. Oh. That's a good idea. You should have thought of it earlier.
"Burnout headache. What the fuck have you been doing to get yourself that psionically overextended?" he asks as he perches at the other end of the couch, leaving a little strip of neutral territory between his legs and your feet. "It'th not the dead, you can send them away -- they have enough actual brains to listen, unlike shitty disembodied voices. So what were you moving, and why?"
You cuddle into the towels, even though the cheap fibers feel scratchy-wrong against your skin, like steel wool on a balloon stretched too tight and hot. "I can't just have a headache?"
Sollux rolls his eyes at you behind his glasses, exaggerating the motion to make sure you get the point.
You sigh. "My northern neighbor, Hermia Jeston -- you know, the one who's into robotics? I guess raptormom broke some of her robots again, and this time instead of sending spybots and viruses, she built a sort of-- of hunt-and-capture bot."
"She what?" Sollux shouts.
You flinch, huddling deeper into your horrible, scratchy towel, and swallow hard against the sudden surge of nausea. Your horns feel like iron bars being soldered into your skull, and your hair is a lead weight pulling at your scalp and bowing your neck.
"Oh, thit, thorry, I can't believe I did that. I thuck. I thuck tho much, do you want me to go, I can go right now if that'll help," Sollux says immediately. His lisp is suddenly twice as noticeable, a sure sign of trouble, and he's holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
You snake one hand out from your little towel fortress and grab his wrist so he can't run off to beat himself up out of earshot. "Just be quieter," you say once you've wrestled your headache back into an uneasy truce. "So like I was saying, Hermia built a robot to capture me. Actually two of them. They got the drop on me this evening when I was in my garden. I didn't take them seriously at first, but they had anti-psionic countermeasures, the artificial draining kind, which is weird since those are incredibly expensive and she's only olive. I don't know, maybe she stole the materials? Or maybe I pissed somebody off in Flarp without realizing?"
"I'll look into it. The Empire keeps a sharp eye on that kind of thtuff, there must be records somewhere online," Sollux promises. "Obviouthly you won, but did you break them or jutht chase them off? Do I get a chance to play big damn hero when they come back to try again?"
You grin despite the pain the motion sparks behind your left eye. "Sorry, no heroics for you tonight. I broke them all the way down to dust."
Sollux facepalms with his free hand. "Right after you broke out of the countermeasures and were still half-drained. Am I right? No, don't bother answering, of course I'm right. What the fuck, AA, you're not suppothed to be the reckless dumbass in this relationship. That'th my job."
You keep grinning. "I know it was kind of dumb, but I was pissed off and I wanted to make a point. So I did!"
"If you didn't have a burnout headache, I would be shouting at you so hard right now. Tho hard," Sollux says.
"Don't worry, you'll get plenty of chances to shout on our trip. Which we are still taking! I'll be good enough to fly tomorrow, and I want to leave right after sunset to make the most of our travel time."
Sollux scowls at you, all snaggletooth outrage. "Fuck you, you're not flying anywhere until at leatht the night after tomorrow. I'll carry you. And thtop giving me that look, it'th not like you haven't carried me home when the voices get bad and I have a headache. If I can't be a shithead about my health, you can't either. Fair ith fair."
You scowl back, but you can't find a good way to protest because dammit, he's right. You could fly tomorrow -- you know you could, you've suffered through temporary burnout before and you know the recovery pattern -- but it's not really a good idea and it would hurt. A lot. And if you hate seeing Sollux hurt himself, the obvious corollary is that he hates seeing you do the same thing to yourself.
At least you hope it's the obvious corollary. He's never actually come out and said so... but then, neither have you.
"Fine," you say grudgingly as you let go of his wrist.
"Good," he snaps back. "Now thtay here while I get that sandwich and some juice or soup or whatever for you."
You lean against the corner of the couch where the arm meets the back, letting the furniture take the weight of your horns and hair partially off your skull. You close your eyes. It doesn't help the pain, but at least now you're not trying to process over-bright colors and shapes as well as ignore the hot, spiky pounding in your head.
Sollux clatters around in your nutrition block, grumbling quietly to himself as he opens and shuts drawers, cupboards, and appliance doors. After a while the cookalizer dings, sending a small spike of pain inward from your right ear. You open your eyes a narrow smidgeon to see him walk back into the main block with a plate and a bowl floating behind him. He sits down beside you again but this time instead of avoiding contact he lifts your feet, stretching out your legs until they're lying nearly straight across his lap. He sets the plate with the sandwich on your shins. The bowl continues to hover until you sigh and stick out your hands to hold it.
"Thquawkbeast with noodles," he says. "Canned. Sorry I don't have time to go catch a real live one and make you a headdress with the beak and feathers."
You venture a spoonful and manage not to gag either at the flavor on your tongue or the sudden heat and weight in your stomach.
"I probably won't finish this," you say.
Sollux shrugs and swallows a half-chewed bite of his sandwich. "Whatever. Jutht eat what you can. Bodies need fuel."
"Yeah," you agree. You eat another spoonful, and a third, and a fourth. At the fifth, your stomach lurches angrily. You hold your breath until the stab of nausea subsides.
Sollux takes the bowl out of your shaking hands. "I said eat what you can, not make yourself even more sick. Idiot."
"Idiot yourself," you say as you close your eyes again and clutch the towels tight around your body. They almost don't feel scratchy anymore. You think if you dug out one of the refillable sopor pillows you use for long excavations and tucked it under your neck, you could fall asleep right here on your couch. Sollux can use your recuperacoon.
Except suddenly you're not on the couch anymore. You can feel the intangible, shimmer-spark embrace of Sollux's telekinesis holding you up and moving you slow and gentle through the air. "Almotht daylight," he says. "Time to go to thleep."
"Nooooo, I don't want to move," you tell him.
"You have a burnout headache. You need real thleep, in a real recuperacoon. Don't argue, you're not allowed to be a shithead about your health, remember?"
"But I like the couch. And I don't want to get undressed. Getting undressed means I have to move."
"Tough. You'll feel better once you're in the sopor," he says as he walks beside you into your respite block. "You have a couple thpare packets I can toss into the ablution trap? I bet that would be more comfortable than your weird goo-pillow monthtrosities."
You tilt upright, slow and gentle, and you can feel the solid wall of your recuperacoon against your side as your weight settles back onto your feet and the shimmer-pressure of Sollux's psionic grip fades. You pull the towels a little tighter around yourself and scowl. "You've seen my ablution trap. It's tiny. You'll have to sleep all folded up and you'll wake up feeling like shit. The travel pillows are in the top cupboard in the main block, you know, the little one on top of where I keep all my prospecting and digging gear. Just use two of them and take the couch."
You open your eyes just in time to see him make an incredibly awkward this-is-so-disgusting face. "I don't want to," he says.
"You're not allowed to be a shithead either, remember? Fair is fair. And I don't want to listen to you complain about sore knees and elbows while we're traveling tomorrow."
"I'll complain if I want to and you can't thtop me," he says, but you hear a cupboard door opening in the other block and you can tell he's going to follow your advice. Which means you should probably follow his and get undressed. Stupid clothes. Who invented them anyway. You let the towels drop and start to wrestle your way out of your shirt.
"You need any help reaching the zipper?" Sollux asks.
"It's a shoulder catch, not a back seam," you say as you unzip the collar, "but can you help me lift it over my horns? I don't want to put pressure on anything by accident."
"No problem. Jutht put your arms up over your head and hold thtill."
You expect him to use psionics again, to go back to his habitual distance despite that unexpected interval of contact on your couch, but he surprises you and steps forward to grab the hem of your shirt in his hands. He pulls it up your torso, slow and careful, pausing to tuck your hair down through the collar so it won't catch and tug, and never so much as grazes your horns.
You turn and set one hand on his narrow, boney shoulder, keeping him in place. "Thank you," you say.
He looks aside, balls your shirt up in one hand, mutters something too mangled to understand even though you're standing so close you could almost stretch up on tiptoe and kiss the tip of his nose, pale as milk and sweet as honey. You don't kiss him. You don't feel brave enough to ask that question, not quite, not yet. But you don't want to let the moment pass, like you've let others pass and slide away over the perigees, staying in slightly-too-close friendship rather than take a leap and miss your landing.
You slide your hand upward, over his neck, past his chin. You cup his cheek, trace your thumb along his cheekbone, press your fingertips against the hinge of his jaw.
"Sollux. Thank you," you say again.
He swallows, looks aside. "It'th not-- anyone should-- I'll use the goo-pillows," he says. "Um. Where'th your laundry trap?"
You sigh and let your hand drop. So much for moments. "In the corner."
You step out of your skirt and underthings while he floats your shirt over into the plastic basket, then let him help you climb into your recuperacoon. As you sink back into the sopor's warm embrace, Sollux leans down and runs his fingers through the tangles of your hair. "I suck at words sometimes, but maybe this time I'll get them right. Tonight'th not anything you need to thank me for, because it'th not anything thpecial. I jutht wish next time you'd athk for help sooner. Moirails are supposed to have each other'th backs. If that'th what you want. I hope that'th what you want. Otherwise I should jutht go drown myself and save you the trouble."
You swallow, raise the hand still clutching the edge of your recuperacoon to trace your fingernails along his eyebrow, all tense and furrowed with uncertainty. "What kind of moirail would I be if I let you drown yourself in my own hive?" you say.
Sollux's face clears so fast he misses impassive and swings all the way into goofy happiness for a moment, before he corrects himself back to something that could almost past for calm if you didn't know him so well. He drops a kiss in the center of your aching forehead.
The contact doesn't hurt at all.
"I'll carry you tomorrow. The next night there'th going to be a meteor shower, you know, the one that looks like it comes right through the pink moon in crescent. Let'th watch it from orbit to celebrate you kicking your neighbor'th butt. We can share a bubble."
"You don't think I'll be able to manage my own air?" Even after nearly two days to recover from psychic overextension? There's watching your back and then there's over-protection, and if he thinks an official declaration of diamonds is going to change anything that basic about you--
But Sollux scowls, all snaggletoothed indignation, and cuts off that ship of though before it can properly leave the star system. "Don't be a dumbass, AA. I trutht you to manage half of mine. Now go to thleep."
He pulls the sun-shutters closed and shuts off the overhead light as he leaves your respite block. For a few minutes you can hear rustling in the main block as he sets up the couch. Then that light snaps off too and all that's left is the faint, blue-green glow of a computer screen. You guess he's gone online to kill a few hours until morning -- probably chatting with Karkat or Terezi, or playing around with viruses just because he can.
Or maybe he's tracking down Hermia's source for the psionic countermeasures. You hope he finds out soon -- you think you'd like to pay the supplier a personal visit, and you're pretty sure Sollux will want to come too. It could almost be a date, protecting each other from future trouble.
The faint, irregular sound of Sollux's fingers tapping on computer keys accompanies you down into sleep.
You dream of taking flight.
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End of Story
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Ye gods and little fishes, that story took WAY longer to finish than it had any right to. But victory is mine!
"The nerves in patterns on a screen" is part of my Alternian Nights continuity. It obviously comes after Romancing the Sky, wherein Sollux and Aradia meet, and (slightly less obviously) comes before Raiders of the Deep Caverns, wherein Aradia has had her radiocarbon analyzer for a while, but I'm not completely sure of its relation to the other fics. Probably it's roughly contemporaneous with Scourge of the Sea, maybe set a perigee or two later.
Note: This story was written for Cotton Candy Bingo Round One, in response to the prompt: headache.
[ETA: The slightly revised and extended final version is now up on AO3!]
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The nerves in patterns on a screen
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You've spent the aftermidnight mostly lying on your couch wishing you could just not exist for a while, but when Sollux trolls you to say he's leaving the city, you haul yourself upright to make a few preparations, and then sit down in your open doorway to wait for him, leaning against the frame. The walls are cool in the green moonlight and the gentle dim season breeze, and you imagine you can feel a teaspoon or two of pain leaching away from your skull into the foundations of your hive.
An indeterminate stretch of throbbing later, you open your eyes as the wind picks up unnaturally, just in time to watch Sollux land between two of your old test pits. Blue and red sparks crackle behind his shades for a moment, residual psychic energy bleeding into the air. Then he blinks and any sign that he could break a troll in half without lifting a finger disappears, leaving nothing but a too-skinny, slope-shouldered doofus.
"Hey AA," he says as you carefully push yourself to your feet. Then he frowns, steps forward, raises one hand but leaves it hanging useless in the empty air between you rather than venture to touch. "You look like shit. Bad night?"
You start to shake your head, then think better of the motion as pain grates on the inside of your skull, sharp, hot, and nauseating. "Just a headache," you say. "I'm sorry, I don't think I'll be much company tonight. I'll be better tomorrow, though! You're not getting out of this prospecting trip that easily."
"Curthes, foiled again," he says. His tongue trips a little on the esses, like always, tangled in his own teeth the way his brain gets tangled in the messy, inconvenient realities of wearing a physical body.
You grin weakly. It took you a good perigee to persuade him to leave the city for more than a single night, especially since the point is to go out camping in the middle of nowhere and hunt for the ruins of pre-exile civilization. (Or even ruins of pre-spaceflight civilization, though those are a lot rarer and deeper underground.) You're going to have to live with other adult trolls after conscription. You want to see how your people managed that in the past, even if ancient planet-bound patterns probably won't have much relevance to modern life in the fleet.
Anyway, the point is you've been looking forward to this trip for ages. You pulled together supplies, borrowed credits from Terezi to purchase a radiocarbon analyzer and some other nifty gadgets, sent raptormom off for a long hunting trip in the mountains so she wouldn't worry about you, and you are not going to let anything get in the way, not even your neighbor's latest spoiled-wiggler tantrum and its lingering aftereffects.
"I put together a sandwich for you," you say. "Fair warning, it has actual unprocessed vegetables in it!"
Sollux makes a terrible face. "There'th no quality control for that shit, are you trying to kill me? But okay, whatever, I'll eat your sandwich. It'th not like you won't hear me haunting your ass if I die. Now come on, let'th get you back indoors and lying down with your eyes closed."
He sets his hand on your shoulder, light and tentative. You wrap your arm around his stupid, skinny waist and pull him close as you walk through the door into the main block of your hive. Maybe one of these nights you'll convince him he's always allowed into your personal space -- and besides, it's not like arm's reach actually means anything in terms of safety when you're both psionics.
"You've taken painkillers and drunk water and all the usual thtuff, right?" he asks.
"Yeah."
"And you thtill feel like a three-night-old rotting carcass?"
You make a face as your think pan conjures a nauseating phantom stench into your nose. That's the nastiest stage of decomposition: old enough for the burning metal reek of dead meat to set in, not old enough for scavengers to have stripped the corpse to bare, fascinating bones. "Thank you so much for that image. But yes, more or less."
Sollux helps you sit down sideways on your couch and floats over two spare towels from your ablution block to wrap around your shoulders and legs. Oh. That's a good idea. You should have thought of it earlier.
"Burnout headache. What the fuck have you been doing to get yourself that psionically overextended?" he asks as he perches at the other end of the couch, leaving a little strip of neutral territory between his legs and your feet. "It'th not the dead, you can send them away -- they have enough actual brains to listen, unlike shitty disembodied voices. So what were you moving, and why?"
You cuddle into the towels, even though the cheap fibers feel scratchy-wrong against your skin, like steel wool on a balloon stretched too tight and hot. "I can't just have a headache?"
Sollux rolls his eyes at you behind his glasses, exaggerating the motion to make sure you get the point.
You sigh. "My northern neighbor, Hermia Jeston -- you know, the one who's into robotics? I guess raptormom broke some of her robots again, and this time instead of sending spybots and viruses, she built a sort of-- of hunt-and-capture bot."
"She what?" Sollux shouts.
You flinch, huddling deeper into your horrible, scratchy towel, and swallow hard against the sudden surge of nausea. Your horns feel like iron bars being soldered into your skull, and your hair is a lead weight pulling at your scalp and bowing your neck.
"Oh, thit, thorry, I can't believe I did that. I thuck. I thuck tho much, do you want me to go, I can go right now if that'll help," Sollux says immediately. His lisp is suddenly twice as noticeable, a sure sign of trouble, and he's holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
You snake one hand out from your little towel fortress and grab his wrist so he can't run off to beat himself up out of earshot. "Just be quieter," you say once you've wrestled your headache back into an uneasy truce. "So like I was saying, Hermia built a robot to capture me. Actually two of them. They got the drop on me this evening when I was in my garden. I didn't take them seriously at first, but they had anti-psionic countermeasures, the artificial draining kind, which is weird since those are incredibly expensive and she's only olive. I don't know, maybe she stole the materials? Or maybe I pissed somebody off in Flarp without realizing?"
"I'll look into it. The Empire keeps a sharp eye on that kind of thtuff, there must be records somewhere online," Sollux promises. "Obviouthly you won, but did you break them or jutht chase them off? Do I get a chance to play big damn hero when they come back to try again?"
You grin despite the pain the motion sparks behind your left eye. "Sorry, no heroics for you tonight. I broke them all the way down to dust."
Sollux facepalms with his free hand. "Right after you broke out of the countermeasures and were still half-drained. Am I right? No, don't bother answering, of course I'm right. What the fuck, AA, you're not suppothed to be the reckless dumbass in this relationship. That'th my job."
You keep grinning. "I know it was kind of dumb, but I was pissed off and I wanted to make a point. So I did!"
"If you didn't have a burnout headache, I would be shouting at you so hard right now. Tho hard," Sollux says.
"Don't worry, you'll get plenty of chances to shout on our trip. Which we are still taking! I'll be good enough to fly tomorrow, and I want to leave right after sunset to make the most of our travel time."
Sollux scowls at you, all snaggletooth outrage. "Fuck you, you're not flying anywhere until at leatht the night after tomorrow. I'll carry you. And thtop giving me that look, it'th not like you haven't carried me home when the voices get bad and I have a headache. If I can't be a shithead about my health, you can't either. Fair ith fair."
You scowl back, but you can't find a good way to protest because dammit, he's right. You could fly tomorrow -- you know you could, you've suffered through temporary burnout before and you know the recovery pattern -- but it's not really a good idea and it would hurt. A lot. And if you hate seeing Sollux hurt himself, the obvious corollary is that he hates seeing you do the same thing to yourself.
At least you hope it's the obvious corollary. He's never actually come out and said so... but then, neither have you.
"Fine," you say grudgingly as you let go of his wrist.
"Good," he snaps back. "Now thtay here while I get that sandwich and some juice or soup or whatever for you."
You lean against the corner of the couch where the arm meets the back, letting the furniture take the weight of your horns and hair partially off your skull. You close your eyes. It doesn't help the pain, but at least now you're not trying to process over-bright colors and shapes as well as ignore the hot, spiky pounding in your head.
Sollux clatters around in your nutrition block, grumbling quietly to himself as he opens and shuts drawers, cupboards, and appliance doors. After a while the cookalizer dings, sending a small spike of pain inward from your right ear. You open your eyes a narrow smidgeon to see him walk back into the main block with a plate and a bowl floating behind him. He sits down beside you again but this time instead of avoiding contact he lifts your feet, stretching out your legs until they're lying nearly straight across his lap. He sets the plate with the sandwich on your shins. The bowl continues to hover until you sigh and stick out your hands to hold it.
"Thquawkbeast with noodles," he says. "Canned. Sorry I don't have time to go catch a real live one and make you a headdress with the beak and feathers."
You venture a spoonful and manage not to gag either at the flavor on your tongue or the sudden heat and weight in your stomach.
"I probably won't finish this," you say.
Sollux shrugs and swallows a half-chewed bite of his sandwich. "Whatever. Jutht eat what you can. Bodies need fuel."
"Yeah," you agree. You eat another spoonful, and a third, and a fourth. At the fifth, your stomach lurches angrily. You hold your breath until the stab of nausea subsides.
Sollux takes the bowl out of your shaking hands. "I said eat what you can, not make yourself even more sick. Idiot."
"Idiot yourself," you say as you close your eyes again and clutch the towels tight around your body. They almost don't feel scratchy anymore. You think if you dug out one of the refillable sopor pillows you use for long excavations and tucked it under your neck, you could fall asleep right here on your couch. Sollux can use your recuperacoon.
Except suddenly you're not on the couch anymore. You can feel the intangible, shimmer-spark embrace of Sollux's telekinesis holding you up and moving you slow and gentle through the air. "Almotht daylight," he says. "Time to go to thleep."
"Nooooo, I don't want to move," you tell him.
"You have a burnout headache. You need real thleep, in a real recuperacoon. Don't argue, you're not allowed to be a shithead about your health, remember?"
"But I like the couch. And I don't want to get undressed. Getting undressed means I have to move."
"Tough. You'll feel better once you're in the sopor," he says as he walks beside you into your respite block. "You have a couple thpare packets I can toss into the ablution trap? I bet that would be more comfortable than your weird goo-pillow monthtrosities."
You tilt upright, slow and gentle, and you can feel the solid wall of your recuperacoon against your side as your weight settles back onto your feet and the shimmer-pressure of Sollux's psionic grip fades. You pull the towels a little tighter around yourself and scowl. "You've seen my ablution trap. It's tiny. You'll have to sleep all folded up and you'll wake up feeling like shit. The travel pillows are in the top cupboard in the main block, you know, the little one on top of where I keep all my prospecting and digging gear. Just use two of them and take the couch."
You open your eyes just in time to see him make an incredibly awkward this-is-so-disgusting face. "I don't want to," he says.
"You're not allowed to be a shithead either, remember? Fair is fair. And I don't want to listen to you complain about sore knees and elbows while we're traveling tomorrow."
"I'll complain if I want to and you can't thtop me," he says, but you hear a cupboard door opening in the other block and you can tell he's going to follow your advice. Which means you should probably follow his and get undressed. Stupid clothes. Who invented them anyway. You let the towels drop and start to wrestle your way out of your shirt.
"You need any help reaching the zipper?" Sollux asks.
"It's a shoulder catch, not a back seam," you say as you unzip the collar, "but can you help me lift it over my horns? I don't want to put pressure on anything by accident."
"No problem. Jutht put your arms up over your head and hold thtill."
You expect him to use psionics again, to go back to his habitual distance despite that unexpected interval of contact on your couch, but he surprises you and steps forward to grab the hem of your shirt in his hands. He pulls it up your torso, slow and careful, pausing to tuck your hair down through the collar so it won't catch and tug, and never so much as grazes your horns.
You turn and set one hand on his narrow, boney shoulder, keeping him in place. "Thank you," you say.
He looks aside, balls your shirt up in one hand, mutters something too mangled to understand even though you're standing so close you could almost stretch up on tiptoe and kiss the tip of his nose, pale as milk and sweet as honey. You don't kiss him. You don't feel brave enough to ask that question, not quite, not yet. But you don't want to let the moment pass, like you've let others pass and slide away over the perigees, staying in slightly-too-close friendship rather than take a leap and miss your landing.
You slide your hand upward, over his neck, past his chin. You cup his cheek, trace your thumb along his cheekbone, press your fingertips against the hinge of his jaw.
"Sollux. Thank you," you say again.
He swallows, looks aside. "It'th not-- anyone should-- I'll use the goo-pillows," he says. "Um. Where'th your laundry trap?"
You sigh and let your hand drop. So much for moments. "In the corner."
You step out of your skirt and underthings while he floats your shirt over into the plastic basket, then let him help you climb into your recuperacoon. As you sink back into the sopor's warm embrace, Sollux leans down and runs his fingers through the tangles of your hair. "I suck at words sometimes, but maybe this time I'll get them right. Tonight'th not anything you need to thank me for, because it'th not anything thpecial. I jutht wish next time you'd athk for help sooner. Moirails are supposed to have each other'th backs. If that'th what you want. I hope that'th what you want. Otherwise I should jutht go drown myself and save you the trouble."
You swallow, raise the hand still clutching the edge of your recuperacoon to trace your fingernails along his eyebrow, all tense and furrowed with uncertainty. "What kind of moirail would I be if I let you drown yourself in my own hive?" you say.
Sollux's face clears so fast he misses impassive and swings all the way into goofy happiness for a moment, before he corrects himself back to something that could almost past for calm if you didn't know him so well. He drops a kiss in the center of your aching forehead.
The contact doesn't hurt at all.
"I'll carry you tomorrow. The next night there'th going to be a meteor shower, you know, the one that looks like it comes right through the pink moon in crescent. Let'th watch it from orbit to celebrate you kicking your neighbor'th butt. We can share a bubble."
"You don't think I'll be able to manage my own air?" Even after nearly two days to recover from psychic overextension? There's watching your back and then there's over-protection, and if he thinks an official declaration of diamonds is going to change anything that basic about you--
But Sollux scowls, all snaggletoothed indignation, and cuts off that ship of though before it can properly leave the star system. "Don't be a dumbass, AA. I trutht you to manage half of mine. Now go to thleep."
He pulls the sun-shutters closed and shuts off the overhead light as he leaves your respite block. For a few minutes you can hear rustling in the main block as he sets up the couch. Then that light snaps off too and all that's left is the faint, blue-green glow of a computer screen. You guess he's gone online to kill a few hours until morning -- probably chatting with Karkat or Terezi, or playing around with viruses just because he can.
Or maybe he's tracking down Hermia's source for the psionic countermeasures. You hope he finds out soon -- you think you'd like to pay the supplier a personal visit, and you're pretty sure Sollux will want to come too. It could almost be a date, protecting each other from future trouble.
The faint, irregular sound of Sollux's fingers tapping on computer keys accompanies you down into sleep.
You dream of taking flight.
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End of Story
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Ye gods and little fishes, that story took WAY longer to finish than it had any right to. But victory is mine!
"The nerves in patterns on a screen" is part of my Alternian Nights continuity. It obviously comes after Romancing the Sky, wherein Sollux and Aradia meet, and (slightly less obviously) comes before Raiders of the Deep Caverns, wherein Aradia has had her radiocarbon analyzer for a while, but I'm not completely sure of its relation to the other fics. Probably it's roughly contemporaneous with Scourge of the Sea, maybe set a perigee or two later.
