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The first thing that goes wrong is that Terezi has so much fun playing kissyface with her stupid dragons that she won't leave her Land. You knew it was going to happen the minute you heard 'Terezi' and 'Dragons' and 'I've named him Eustace Greenwithers', you fucking knew it, and even if Past Karkat was on top of this shit for once in his sorry life Present Karkat has still got his hands fucking tied. It's always one more fucking quest with that girl, one more little side trip or sky-level or fruity asshole autoerogenous grooming session, and a sharp cane to the face if you dare point out that this is retarded and she is retarded and her dragons, especially those goddamn giggling ridiculous shiny rainbow dragons, are fucking retarded.
The second thing that goes wrong-- and again, you called this, and again, no one ever fucking listens-- is that Eridan gets in over his head like you kept warning him with that bullshit angel-murder thing and his sidequests have spiraled out of control and he's been such a sleazy douche that there is literally no one else who can stomach the thought of bailing him out of the mess his session has become for even five or six goddamn hours.
The third thing that goes wrong you don't see coming at all, and it is that all of the cathedrals are joined together by sacred underground rivers and with the angels out for Eridan's sorry purple blood there's no other way to navigate.
"No," you say. "No, no, hell no, hell to the fuck no, fucking hell ass-shitting grubsicles on a flaming nutrition plateau no."
"I'm not gonna let you fuckin' drowwn, Kar," Eridan says impatiently. "You can hold onta my cape or somethin', okay? I'll pull you along."
"It's not-- I don't-- I just, no, okay? No, you go, I'll stay here. You can report back over Trollian."
"If you're wworried about your husktop, you knoww my sylladex is wwaterproof--"
"No!"
"Well then wwhat the fuck are you gettin' your carp on about Kar, I wwanna knoww, because on accounta howw if I stick my snout out the front fuckin' door I'm getting a face fulla wwhite-hot angel schoolfeed on the subject of Incinerateification! The tunnels aren't that long, it's not evven fuckin' dark dowwn there anywway, I swwear on my honor as a seadwweller I'm gonna keep you from drowwnin', so by the skywwhales' salty asscracks wwhat the fin floppin' fuck is the big coddamn deal!?"
You take a deep breath through your nose, and let it out through your gritted teeth. "I can't," you say, the words wrenching up out of you like a string of vital organs. "I just can't."
"Hey," he says, softly, coming up behind you, one ring-encrusted hand settling heavily on to your shoulder. "You're our leader, Kar. I'll take care of you."
The fourth thing that goes wrong is that you're the leader.
It's you.
And leaders do what they have to do.
"Keep your slimy little fins to yourself," you grumble, shrugging him off. "And don't you dare go pale on me, you wretched loser, I'm not that desperate. No one's that desperate."
"Right," Eridan sighs, rubbing his hands together. "Right okay, so come on. Can wwe do this already?"
You take another breath, deep as you can, the air thin and cold as it goes down your throat, hot and burning as it comes out between your teeth, your jaw clenched so tight you can feel it ache behind your eyes.
You stoop down to catch the very edge of his cape, and let him lead you into the water of the sacred pool. It closes around you like a fist, beautifully cold, beautifully dense, and you can feel every inch of your skin thrill at the feel of it sliding soft and heavy across your face, along your chest, saying to your brain yes, saying yes yes this, this is good, this is right. Your gills tremble, involuntarily, straining against your self-control to flare open in the water's cool embrace and it takes every piece of your concentration to keep them shut.
God damn it.
The pool swoops down and along to the next cathedral over, a massive tunnel big enough for ten of you to swim through at once, a hundred of you. The far-off walls are lined with scripture that glows an unearthly white and lights the water between the two of you a thousand shades of blue and silver. Eridan's hair ripples in the cross currents and his face is painted strangely in the silver light, uncharacteristically dignified and serene. He is a lord down here, regal with the grace and power of a seadweller within his realm and he moves like lightning, towing you along, sharp motion and liquid speed carrying him effortlessly from point to point.
This is his element, and all you can think of as you thrash awkwardly along in his wake is is stupid, stupid stupid dumb he promised it wouldn't be too far but how the fuck could he know how long it takes a landdweller to run out of breath?
Your gills ache with the tension of holding them closed, and your lungs ache with the pressure of stale air. The tunnel is endless ahead of you, and even with the current and Eridan's strong, assured strokes towing along your clumsy paddling you know you're not going to make it.
You repress your instincts as hard as you can, white knuckling the edge of Eridan's stupid cape, clenching your gills shut till your very bones throb with pain but as the seconds stretch out to endless minutes your diaphragm rebels on you despite everything and a bubble of used-up air forces its way through your teeth, and then another. The burn in your chest is immense, overwhelming, and your head feels hot and stuffy. The lights in the tunnel are dimmer, flickering, the slippery fabric of Eridan's stupid fucking cape grows harder and harder to keep hold of, slithering out of your numbing fingers.
"Glub," you manage to say, and use up all the rest of your air.
"Oh, fuck," Eridan says, looking back over his shoulder, and starts kicking harder. It's not hard enough, it's going to be nowhere near hard enough: the end of the tunnel is right there, so close, but it's nowhere near close enough and you are dying and there's no more air, no more time--
Your traitorous body takes over, then, flooding your lungs with the rich salt tang of seawater and your gills, your fucking gills after all of this, after everything you've done, your gills flare wide between your ribs despite yourself, in fucking spite of yourself. All six freakish gashes between your ribs pulse and flutter, opening you to the sea as your body sucks down deep droughts of water and pumps it back out fast enough that the flood of oxygen sets your brain to spinning, leaving you doubled-over and shuddering with disorientation and the desperate relief of not suffocating any more. Bright lights pound between your eyes as you gulp and gasp and sob and breathe, and you feel distant and unreal as Eridan stops hauling ass for the light and turns, slowly, so slowly, around to face you.
Your eyes meet his, and you feel real again, real and solid and incredibly scared.
"You," Eridan says, "you've..." his perpetually-sneering mouth soft and round with wonder. He reaches out one cautious hand--
"No!" you shout, your voice shockingly loud underwater. You clamp your gills closed and kick him away from you, then spin and strike out wildly for the surface. You burst up out of the pool, clawing at the stone lip to try to get free and the air is so thin and your heart is going so hard you're still so breathless-- a new cathedral stretches dark and menacing above your head and you feel too heavy and you can't get your bearings and Eridan breaks the surface just behind you, smooth as a nightmare.
His hand finds your ankle and clamps down hard, dragging you back to sprawl half-in, half-out of the water, and you're still so fucked up your gills flare back open the instant they're submerged. You get a breath that's half air and half water and you feel dizzy and sick and helpless. It all drains away through your chest, the water and the air, and you've been here before and it's no more fun than the first time.
"Back off, brinesucker!" you hiss at him, swinging wildly with your regisickle, but he's already under your guard. His body is lean and smooth between your splayed legs as he reaches for your wet shirt and rips.
"No," you gasp. "No, no, fuck off, no--"
"You have gills, Karkat," he says, sounding nearly as breathless as you. His thumb presses suffocatingly down on your left middle slit, all his fingers splaying hungrily across your body, devouring your secrets. You would kick him off you, you would run but no one's
no one's ever touched you there without hurting you and
you're so trapped you're trapped
oh god oh man oh god
oh fuck--
"Easy, easy, there, come on noww," he's murmuring, peeling the tatters of your shirt farther up, farther off of you, and your mind is a perfect blank of terror and your neck aches for the killing blow that's going to come and you can only think, inanely, maybe dying won't hurt.
The tender blood-flushed flesh of your gill filaments are a stark, staring, mutant red, the exact color that no other living troll in the world is supposed to be.
"No hemochrome," Eridan says. His fingers are deft and relentless as they peel you open, his eyes narrow with fascination. "You got no hemochrome but these are... these...Kar, these're bigger than mine, these are almost like Fef's." He brushes your wet hair back from your jaw, and you can hear him absorbing the sight of your scars, long-healed but nowhere near healed enough, never healed enough, and you can hear even through the thin air the sharp hiss he makes through his teeth.
There's no way to hide what's wrong with you in the ocean: seadwellers smell blood like sharks, and to very much the same purpose.
"You can't tell anyone," you gasp, finding your voice at last, "I'll kill you, I'll kill you first, I swear it, you can't tell anyone, oh god, don't you fucking tell anyone."
"Oh yeah," he snorts. "That'd go ovver swwimingly, I don't think. 'Hey guys Kar's a mutant hold evverythin' and let's havve ourselvves a lynchin' right noww.' Yeah, fuck me sidewways wwith a shark if I don't think that's gonna up our chances a gettin' out a this whole freakin' mess alivve."
There's a long moment and you breathe hard through your gritted teeth and think maybe it'll be okay maybe maybe maybe--
"Although..." Eridan cocks his head to one side and fuck, fuck, the terror crashed back through him like a sick tide. "Although I wwouldn't have to go informin evveryone, noww, would I? Just maybe... a feww particular bluebloods. One certain blueblood. If I wwas... mad, say. Disappointed, maybe."
"You wouldn't. You can't. I'll kill you."
Eridan only laughs, nasal and maddeningly smug. You roll him over easily, finding your blade, setting it to his neck just under those perfect, regal fins of his.
"You think I haven't killed anyone before?" you hiss. "You think I got this old with these fucking things between my ribs without knowing how to make it look like an accident?"
But all the prophecies say twelve heroes will win the game, and you both know it, and now the question is which of you care the least?
"Cahoots," Eridan says, infuriatingly calm, that purple streak in his hair fanned wetly across the stone floor like an accusation. "Be in Cahoots with me, seadwweller to seadwweller, until the tides of fortune wwash us apart, and I'll keep your little hemosecret."
"I'm not... fuck. Why not." You lean back, just a little, on your heels. "I'm not being your fucking moirail though, so tell me what you're getting out of this."
Eridan's fingers return to your gills, sliding slick and dirty up and down the clenched membranes. The feelings that blossom up from his touch are something like panic and something like shame and something really unpleasantly close to pleasure.
"Physical compensation, Kar," he says, each syllable bitten off perfect as a pearl, and you recoil.
"I'm not being your fucking matesprite either, you revolting sack of frothy cuttleshit!" you yelp. "I'll slit my own fucking throat before I climb into a flushbucket with your repugnant douchenub of a carcass."
Eridan grins, all perfect teeth and charm. "There wwon't be a single pail," he promises. He props himself up on a nonchalant elbow: he has you already for any perversion he'd care to name, and he knows it.
"Let me make you feel good, Kar," he says. "Evvery noww and then, and you can make me feel good too. It's not gonna be much skin offa either of our teeth, I promise."
He holds out a hand, sea-slick and thick-webbed between the knuckles and the first joint, like yours used to be.
Like yours.
You take his hand, hating yourself, and he leads you back into the pool.
"Breathe," he murmurs, the sound of his voice so much richer underwater. You grit your teeth and squeeze your eyes closed and open your gills, and the water runs through you like magic, like something beautiful and right. You've made do for so many sweeps with hours stolen here and there in the ablution trap, your ankles hanging out of the side and your ceiling staring down at you through the scant inches of thin clear water over your head; now, here, you don't resist as Eridan pulls you deeper, to the curve of the tunnel where the pressure twines around you both like an embrace and the water presses thickly down your throat every time you breathe, and the salt of it-- you'd missed salt so terribly, all your life, and the way it rasps through you now on every exhale is like a benediction.
Eridan closes his teeth over your open lips, over the edge of your jaw, sloppy and hungry but gentle enough not to break the skin yet, and you breathe easier with every second that nothing terrible happens to you.
"Better?" he asks. His hands are busy with his own clothes, unwinding that scarf of his from his stupid billowing cape.
"Yeah," you say, angling your head back and shivering, just a little, when his teeth score lightly at your throat. "Yeah, I-- oh. Yeah."
You catch his grin, a flash of silver teeth at the edge of you vision, and his teeth drag down to where your neck meets your shoulder and bite down. He twines your legs together, a sinuous, disorienting motion, and strokes roughly down your stomach with his nails, five sharp lines of sensation.
"Eri-- oh, oh fuck," you hiss, digging your nails into his wrist, "not so fa-- ahn!"
He has rubbed your gills together. He has somehow gotten his shirt off too and your fucking gills are fucking rubbing together, the splayed covers tangling with the sensitive inner filaments and you can feel the current of his exhalation ghost across your stomach, warmer than the rest of the river and somehow electric. You pull back just enough to see what's happening and yes, those are his fucking gills meshed up against yours like the prongs of two multipronged food spearing utensiles, flushed that royal purple and-- ha!-- smaller than yours, a good few inches shorter along the lengths. He's breathing faster than you, for all your fear, a breath and half or more in and out for each of your exhales, and his presence is a constant nerve-jangling flutter.
"Wow," you say, like a pan-rotted cull-ripe wriggler, "wow, your--"
"Yeah," he says, his voice hoarse and just as stupid as yours. He undulates his whole body up against you and all your tender places catch and drag and you let a truly shameful high whimper loose into the water between you. Eridan shivers and does it again, and then again, and you hook one of your knees behind one of his and the other knee around the solid column of his thigh, trapping Eridan's wandering claws against your lower stomach and then he shifts, unexpectedly, and then the erogenous structures of your mutual vestigial pleasure apparatuses grind together through your pants and you see sparks that definitely aren't from the silver walls.
"We gotta get these off," Eridan gasps out through his mouthful of your shoulder. "Holy fuck, Kar, holy fuck."
"Nnngh," you agree, and claw desperately at your waistbands, every motion brushing the two of you together in ever increasing washes of pleasure and need. He peels those bulgereek-stupid striped trousers off his thighs and you kick your jeans free of your legs and you clash back together like cuttlefish, too many limbs and not enough space to put them. You grab for those lightning-shaped horns of his and he moans when you squeeze, his hands scrabbling sloppy-frantic over your skin.
"You like that," you gasp out, kneading at the lust-flushed velvet at the base of his horns, "yeah, god, you fucking like that?" and he nods frantically, horns bucking in your grasp and he nuzzles his cheek along the rounded curve of one of your own horns and you forget to talk for a while because your think-pan is too busy trying to melt and catch on fire at the same time.
One of his arms goes around your shoulders, keeping you pressed tightly up against him, and the other plays over the spaces between your legs, grinding eagerly at your flushing bulges. The two of you lock into a rhythm, his hand between your thighs and your hands tight around his horns, so flushed for you that you can even feel his pulse in them. There's no friction underwater, no pails and only your hands and everything slick and dreamy and you're probably even upside-down right now and you can't bring yourself to care. When he kisses you again, you kiss back, sinking your teeth into his soft dark lips until you taste his blood. He moans, a high, trembling wrench of a noise, and his hands slide up and over your sides until they reach the very beginning of each gill cover nestled on each side of your ribs, a finger resting along each raised flap and his thumbs and index fingers digging sharp stinging curls of desire up over your sternum.
"Eri--," you gasp, squirming, uncertain.
"Kar--," he agrees, all breath and fangs against your throat and the thunder of his pulse in your clenched fists and he presses--
--and he--
--he presses his fingers in to you.
And it's not like you haven't touched yourself there before, your tongue between your teeth and your pail between your legs and your hands careful along the rims of your gills, inhale, exhale, exploring the definition of your monstrosity. It's just that it's as different, here, now, as the moons are from the blazing sun, it's different and the fucking bastard's playing you like a fucking harpsichoruscationator strung with the taut strings of your own goddamn mind, his relentless fingers wriggling and teasing, pushing and kneading and driving you crazy. He's such a douche and he knows exactly what he's doing in a way you never did as he slides steadily along into you, sheathing his fingers so far into your body that you couldn't close up if you wanted to and the worst part is that you don't, anymore, you don't ever want anything but the insistent pressure of the water and the salt down your throat and his smooth claws stroking up your trembling arches, making you ache with a bizarre new fullness, this strange foreign satisfaction.
You can only wrap your arms around his neck and sob with the insane pleasure of it and no one can even stand Eridan so how did he ever get so good at this? Or are you just so desperate to be touched for once that even his sea-slime attentions will get you off? You hate him and yourself and the water that runs so sweetly through you in time with the pulse of your blood and the endless pleasure of someone else's hand and you are going to absolutely explode if you don't come.
"Gonna-- fuck, oh, gonna come, Eridan--"
"Then come," he gasps, and his fingers twitch, all at once, hooking even farther into you and pulling out a desperate scream.
"Need-- let me oh, oh oh please Eridan let me up let me get the pail oh god--"
"You're underwwater, you bloody imbecile," Eridan moans breathlessly. "Just come." He punctuates that last word with a desperate bite to your lower lip, hard and merciless, and you see nothing but stars as your genetic material blossoms into the water around you two.
Eridan's gills flare wide at that and he's-- oh god he's breathing you in, it in, lips pressed softly up against your own through the clash of your teeth and he drinks your mutant essence down in between the convulsions of his own climax. The water has grown murky with violet and red, the light from the walls staining pink, and you can taste it too, somehow, the both of your colors drifting back inside you with each breath, his purple blood lacing in and out of your body like ribbons, like chains, and you drift.
"Kar," he drawls eventually, and the syllable is soft and pleased and unbearably tender.
You knee him square in the chest. He reels back, his fingers scraping out of your gills in six blisteringly painful jolts, and in the little space you have won you close up tight and scramble wildly for the surface.
"That was the worst thing I ever fucking did," you say to all the empty space above you, crawling weakly over the lip of the pool. Your voice sounds thin and too quiet in the air, as if you'd left the better part of yourself back in the water.
You shiver and wrap your arms around yourself, getting your balance back, your mutant blood dripping loud and accusingly against the bare stone floor, from your mouth and your ribs both, plip plip fuck you Karkat plip.
It's cold up here.
Eridan surfaces, briefly, a flash of bright eyes and violet hair. "Karkat?" he asks, his eyes wide and his mouth a strange vulnerable shape. You shiver and shy away, try to wring the water out of your hair and fail miserably and your hands are shaking so hard you can't manage a thing. You feel too heavy, and too small, and there are a swarming fuckton of pissed-off nonfictional angels waiting to hand out truly ludicrous amounts of nonfictional beatdown to whoever goes outside but--
"Kar, wwhat's wwrong--"
You take one step back from the pool's edge, then another. The salt burns the gashes on your chest like holy fire, merciless, insistent, no forgiveness--
"No," you say, and your voice is so small up here.
Eridan smiles humorlessly, his eyes narrowing once more with his usual expression of contempt.
"You go on ahead, then, O Fearless Leader," he says, sinking back down into the water. "I'll see you wwhen I see you."
With a sneer of those perfect silver teeth, he is gone.
*
"What are these?" the alien asks you, his fish-pale fingers trailing gently over the slits between your ribs.
"Gills," you tell him. You open them wide all at once, half a dozen hungry windows to your soul, and he does not flinch away.
"Oh cool, like Eridan," he says. It's a question. His eyes are wide behind the glasses, and blue as a wave shot through with sun.
His fingers are so gentle-- you catch his hand.
"Yeah," you say, easing him away. "Yeah, like Eridan."