Chapter Text
You wake up sweat wet and with the sheets sticking to you like someone dumped water in your bed. It’s high summer and the air outside is still as death and twice as stale, hot and muggy like to choke the motherfucking life out of anything that tries to live, but you’re cold-blooded enough you usually never get this uncomfortable. You give some thought to dozing all sleep-dazed in bed, but it’s sticky and soggy and you’re hot enough the floor sounds more inviting, and anyway an acolyte’ll be poking their head in soon to shake any stragglers up awake and you don’t want to get dragged, so you get up.
Getting dressed turns into a chore. Your clothes all stick too and you feel a flash of irritation as sudden and intense as a summer flood when you have to jump and wiggle into your pants, the fabric sticking nastily on your thighs.
Karkat’s sitting already dressed on his bed, thumbing through one of those soppy novels he pretends what he doesn’t love, shooting you looks over the top of it. “You smell weird,” he announces to the room just as you get your shirt all buttoned up, and that lightning flash of anger is back again, there and gone almost before you feel it. The afterimage burns up in your chest, though.
“Took a bath just last night, best friend.” You raise your arm and give yourself a sniff, anyway, just to be sure. Nothing unusual there, sweat and skin and maybe you’re a little sharper than normal, but you spent all night swimming in your own sweat pool so you think you can be forgiven that. Anyway, there’s incense up in every room and you’re not half as ripe as some of the warmblooded brothers here get. “Ain’t catching anything nasty with my nasals.”
“Of course you can’t smell yourself,” Karkat says, all eye-rolling exasperation. You think about flipping his book into his smart little mouth and go paint your face on instead. “I guess it’s not bad though, so whatever.”
Then it’s off to early evening service for you two and then schoolfeeding and on the way the memory of that just falls out the hole in the back of your pan. It’s some kind of relief because you’d been starting to get antsy at how angry he made you, wondering why you suddenly got all those salty feelings up inside you.
You keep feeling nug-muzzy all day long though, up behind your eyes like some motherfucker stuffed cotton all in there while you weren’t looking, and weird in your skin. It slides like it wants to catch on your bones wrong, like you don’t fit it anymore. You get cracked across the horns three times for fidgeting too much in class. By the time lunch comes you don’t want a single thing more than to just go lay back down on the cool stone floor of your room and sleep for the rest of the night and day. All the smells up in the cafeteria are more like to making you nauseous anyway, and you poke listlessly at the slop on your nutrition platter before pushing the whole thing over to Karkat.
“I got any shit on the back of me anywhere?”
“What? No, I don’t think so. Why?” Karkat starts in shoveling both your lunches into his face like maybe he’ll drop dead if he doesn’t eat them both right now, and even as weird as you feel that’s still cute as fuck.
“Motherfuckers be getting their stare on at me like it’s going out of style or something.” It’s made you feel even more uncomfortable. You can feel a few people staring even now and you hunch up, like a shellbeast, dropping your head into one hand. “I don’t feel too motherfucking hot, best friend.”
“You’ve probably got a cold or something.” Karkat shrugs. “Try not to give it to me.”
You didn’t think you felt sick or anything, but maybe it is a fever getting you all hot itching inside your bones. “If I get sick, are you gonna take care of me?”
He rolls his eyes but smiles at you just a little. “Of course. Someone’s got to make sure you don’t choke on your own miserable vomit, right?”
You reach out and brush the fingers of your other hand over his cheek, smiling back, and you figure everything should be okay even if you do end up sick as a barkbeast.
The next day you feel about the same except tenser, every muscle in you drawn all up like you’re about ready to run, which doesn’t make any sense because what have you got to run from here? It’s just Karkat in your room and everywhere else is just the same cold stone and faces you know. Not like back on the home planet like you’ve always been told about, where kids grow up on their own and have to fight their whole lives just to live.
Every time someone gets too close you get tenser, all up your back and down your stomach and in your legs, and there’s a weird ache starting up somewhere in your guts at the end of the day that you don’t have any understanding of but don’t like. You don’t feel like any kind of sick you’ve ever been before and it’s almost starting to scare you, because you keep being hot and wrong and itching down in your horns and bones and you feel like you’re waiting for something to happen, some kind of big old motherfucking thing that’s you don’t even know what. It wants to rise up out your skin and you don’t know what it is, you can’t feel the shape of it, and it makes you all squirmy and nervous.
The day after that you wake up with Karkat a warm lump molded against your side, and you’d be mad at how much hotter he’s making you except he’s got his dry lips against your neck and then he’s licking you, tongue wet and warm and rasping up over the pounding line of your pulse. You can’t do a single motherfucking thing except tilt your head over and whimper for it, the arm he’s laying on coming up to pat at his shoulder and back wherever you can reach.
You both sleep naked as the day you were hatched and you’re pressed chest to chest, his legs all up against yours, but you need more of him right now. You need all of his skin up on you, need to get all up in his skin, need those little square hands rubbing over you. Mostly you need his mouth to keep doing what it’s doing, with that clever fucking little tongue licking long stripes up your neck.
He gets all on you, straddling your hips and kissing your throat, and it’s a hard fucking decision to bare it to him instead of looking up at him. You’re not sure why this even feels so good, why it doesn’t just feel weird and kind of gross like you know it should, but you figure you gotta roll with a miracle like this. The way he feels on top of you is satisfying like a long cold drink after a long hot day. Your hands come up mostly of their own will and grab on his shoulders, stroke down his back, and your mouth is all sighing out his name all plaintive-like with every lick.
The bottom of your stomach keeps dropping out like it’s on a string, up and down and up and down. It’s making you dizzy in a real good kind of way. You think you could get used to this, you could get some understanding on to why you like this so much, and then Karkat sits back right on your hips and you can’t hardly even think for a second.
You both look at each other, your face flushed hot and his looking a little red too, and you open your mouth to say something but then somehow end up kissing him instead, hands tangled up in his hair. It’s all hesitant slide of wet lips and teeth clicking together because you’ve never kissed a motherfucker on the mouth before, never even really thought much about it before right now, but you get kind of the way of it and slide your tongue up between his teeth because you’ve read in his novels that that’s how you do it.
He tastes good, not like anything really but Karkat. His teeth are all slippery and sharp against your tongue and you cut yourself on one of them, both your mouths filling with the taste of blood, and that makes him make a noise that makes something in your stomach squeeze like it’s about to fucking pop.
You keep thinking of this disjointed phrase you read in one of Karkat’s books, his searing kiss was as languid as a summer night. It’s right, it’s motherfucking perfect. You think of sitting out at night watching the stars come out and putting your head in Karkat’s lap and him pretending like he doesn’t want to scratch around your horns and it’s just like that, how big and slow and soft everything is. It’s just like that. You think you love him.
He keeps breaking the kiss to lick your lips and neck and shoulders, his tongue all tickle fluttery on your skin, and it keeps making you squirm and laugh and dig your claws into his back maybe harder than you should, but he’s not complaining so you figure it’s okay. You’re even hotter than you were when you woke up. You feel almost like you’re on fire inside, like it’s going to burn away everything in you until you’re hollow and you just fall in on your own self in soot and ash grease, but you can’t even care. It burns good.
He kisses you until you’re both making little clicky chirpy noises up into each other’s mouths, sounds you aren’t sure you could even make yourself make later. You both move around against each other a little, you wiggling where you’re framed by his legs and arms and him kind of pressing down against you and somehow the sweaty slide of your skin feels good instead of just sticky and annoying. You think you might want to kiss him forever.
It’s getting pretty hard to think, actually. It’s getting pretty motherfucking difficult to pay a shred of attention to anything that isn’t Karkat’s tongue in your mouth or the places where his skin touches yours. Maybe he’s the one on fire, because you’re so hot where he touches you. You want it all over so you melt under him.
You don’t know what you want. You want his hands but you don’t know where or how, just that if he doesn’t start to touch you the way you need him to soon you might go completely insane.
Then suddenly he’s being pulled off of you. For a moment you don’t even know why or what or that he’s gone, really, just that no one’s kissing you or pressing down on top of you, and then you start to be able to kind of see again and there’s a greenblooded acolyte standing there with his shoulders clasped in her hands, looking like she doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or get pissed.
You prop yourself up on your elbows and whoa, you are fucking shaky, your whole body is just kind of shivering and trembling and your voice isn’t doing much better. “Give him back,” you tell her, trying to be all imperious like you’re a subjugglator. You’re not yet, but she’s just a greenblood and you get to wear your own personal face around, so she should get her listen on to you if you lay down some righteous orders, but she just chuckles and pushes Karkat towards his bed.
“Both of you get dressed. Makara, come with me.”
You do it all as sullen as you can, being slow on purpose just to spite her, but you can’t stretch it out that long and soon enough you have to leave. As soon as you get up and start moving around you come into the realization that there’s a wicked ache all down between your legs. It’s hot and wet and throbbing like it hurts, except mostly how it feels is like you’d really like to have Karkat touching you there.
You go with her and try to tell yourself to remember to ask him if he will before you to go to sleep tonight, and see if you can maybe get some kissing in, too. It makes your stomach twist like maybe you’ll be sick and you vengefully hope you will, right on her feet, but it just keeps twisting and twisting tight until you ache there too and you mostly feel miserable and sweaty and like you might up and die if you have to wait all day to get him kissing you again.
Your rude-blooded bitch guides you down to the mediliquidator’s office. There’s a stirring of worry up inside you now, curling like a basket of snakes all in your stomach with everything else you still feel. You’ve never been down here a time your whole life except for once when you tried to climb up a tree and fell and cracked your dumb nug right open and got a line of stitches neat as you please over one eye. They don’t cull wigglers for getting hurt, mostly, but there’s a sister in one of your classes you remember came down with something wicked unchill and never came back after they dragged her phlegmatic, wheezy ass down there.
You try to pull your distant thoughts back together to pay attention, just in case they are talking about culling you, but you’re still too hot and squirmy and there’s still some kind of aching need you don’t even know how to fill, like someone carved you out hollow between the hips, and you can’t get your focus on to anything. The greenblood talks to a couple of people and then you get pulled into an office and your glutes parked on a steel table, cold through the fabric of your pants, with edges that bite into your thighs.
You’re just about thinking culling would be better than being this fucking bored when the mediliquidator comes in. He’s a big blue motherfucker with corkscrew horns that nearly brush the ceiling, done all up in black and turquoise and a big white medic’s coat. You’ve been raised up around adults your whole life, but you’ve been schoolfed what the fear of them is an instinct when you’re little, and you think you’ve gotten the knowing of that now because of how fucking bigger than you he is. You squeeze back a little on the table and feel small as a fleck of flea shit while he looks you over, nostrils flaring.
“Take your clothes off, boy,” he orders you all gruff-like, turning away to rifle through a cabinet. You stare dumbly at his back.
“What?”
He doesn’t spare you a second glance. “I said take your clothes off. Shirt, pants, underclothes, everything, get it off.”
You start in on your shirt buttons even while you ask him why you gotta do something like that, what’s he wanting to see your skin for. It’s not that you’re body-shy or anything, but you feel even softer and littler with all your threads off and nothing between you and the room but your skin.
He doesn’t give you an answer, just gets himself a pair of gloves and pulls one on, then pushes you flat on your back when you’re naked. The metal of the table is a motherfucking balm to your hot skin and your eyes slide shut, just for a second, until you feel his bare hand nudging your legs apart and then they fly right back open.
You prop yourself up on your elbows to get a good look at what he’s doing, which seems to be touching all up on your junk like he’s got any fucking right to. You try to wiggle away and he swats your thigh like you’re a fucking wiggler and you can feel the angry flush right up to the tips of your ears.
His gloved fingers sweep up between your legs and over the slit there, and this time when you get to squirming it’s not away but just any way, because what should just be skin like anything else feels so sensitive you almost want to whine. He touches you all soft and quick and no-nonsense but he’s still stroking your crotch and it feels so good.
Then he presses a finger against you where you feel wet and it sinks down, and in, and you cannot even think of fucking helping yourself. You twist and squeak and nearly squeal. It feels so fucking good it hurts, his finger a huge blunt pressure and the glove all catching on delicate inner skin nothing’s ever touched before, and it feels all kinds of motherfucking wrong.
This blue-blooded motherfucker’s two shades away from dark green and you haven’t even seen him before in your life and he’s got all kinds of liberties taken here, he is taking the most flagrant fucking liberties, he is making trespass on your motherfucking body. He’s got his finger in your insides, pushing it as deep in as he can, and the very worst part is that even though it hurts and you hate it it feels so good that your mind is stuttering. Your breath and pulse come up all loopy and dizzy and you can’t make your hips stop their aimless pitching or your thigh muscles stop twitching.
Then he pulls it out, the white latex all slicked with translucent purple. You feel empty as a chasm, hollow as an eggshell. Humiliated tears prick at your eyes and you blink them away hard, biting down to keep the sob in your throat. You snap your legs together like there’s magnets in your knees and sit up, scooting your ass away from him and trying not to think about how good the press of your thighs feels.
He’s not paying you any mind anymore, back turned and pen scritching on paper on the counter. The glove is in the trash. You catch a little glimpse of purple again and your stomach turns over and this, at least, you get your recognition on as sickness.
“Get dressed,” he says, and watches without really looking at you while you do. Your hands are all heavy and clumsy and your skin is tight again, your whole body acting like it’s up and fuck and forgotten how to even move, but you get there. You feel better dressed.
He sweeps out of the room with an indication such that you should make to follow him, and you do, trying to ignore the wobble of your legs. You’re handed back into the greenblood’s custody. A wave of relief sweeps over you and you suddenly almost feel like wanting to cry again, like you’re a wiggler and she’s your toy that just got given back. You chomp down on your bottom lip until you taste blood and it mostly passes.
She gets given an armful of papers and takes you in hand again to sweep you off who even fucking knows where, and you put your foot down. You dig your heels in. You are tired of being dragged around without a motherfucking single peep about why or where.
“Where are we up and going now?” you ask, stopped still in the middle of the hallway. She’s trying not to look exasperated and not doing very well. Your voice is shaking and you don’t even care. You still feel trespassed on in the worst way and it’s shaking all up from between your legs to your squawk box and you don’t give a single solitary half a fuck if she can hear it.
“We’re going to go talk to some priests. I can’t really tell you much, it’s not my duty.” Her face goes a little soft and she gives your arm this gentle tug like hey, wanna come along? instead of the follow me yanking she’s been doing. You step to like the sullenest quackbeast but you do it. The priests are all basically good motherfuckers and you like them and you bet none of them will stick any fingers up inside you.
The room she takes you to is one of the serious ones, a little dark place off the edge of a chapel with blood tapestries up on the walls and incense curling through the air, the deep musky kind like you use in services and meditation, not the weaksauce light shit up in the rooms to make you sleep easy or the sharp note that gets keeps your concentration on during schoolfeeding. It’s heavy in your nose and lungs and almost makes you want to sneeze.
You sit on one of the prayer benches and squirm a little. You’ve never done good left up on your own and your patience is at an all time fucking low right now, it’s the opposite of what you’d call motherfucking existing, and you have half a mind to get strident at some motherfuckers if you don’t get some information in your pan soon.
The heavy shit in the air isn’t helping with your problem, either. Your shirt’s all stuck under your arms with sweat and you feel hotter than before, especially when you realize squirming feels pretty good and if you move just right you can rub up on the lip of the bench. That’s basically like a little motherfucking miracle right there, that little wooden bump. If you weren’t worried about getting caught up looking like a silly undignified motherfucker you’d lay down and try to rub it in the seam of your slit - like his finger did you think before you can stop yourself. A hard shiver wrenches down your spine and you don’t want to think about that anymore.
You don’t get left to your lonesome much longer. Two priests come up in and sit across from you, big indigo motherfuckers with their faces painted like skulls and one of them with some wicked etchings up on her horns, which you’ve always thought was cool as shit and wanted to do one day.
All the sass thoughts you’ve been having dry up before you can squawk them out to these sisters, and so you just sit and look and wait for them to get their talk on. The priests are always real fucking good about making you get your understand on to shit you think you can’t even get, so you can almost be patient. You manage to quit squirming, at least.
You three all exchange some greetings, all proper like, and then they get down to filling your aurals with some righteous fucking information. They drop it all slow as you please so you get every beat, and it is some heavy shit to be wrapping your pan around for sure, some pump-shiveringly serious stuff.
The news is, what’s going on is that at six sweeps and some change you’ve just hit your first heat cycle, which makes sense about all the weird feelings you’ve been getting up in yourself as of late. And you’ve been taught what follows from that before, but they tell it to you again, how when an indigo brother gets into his first cycle he gets a choice all laid down in front of him.
There’s a ritual, an induction ceremony of most serious sacred importance, that gets done to such a troll when they’re of the proper age. You’ve learned a little of what it is, in secret lessons with the handful of other indigos in this branch of the Church, and now they lay bare its entrails for you, pull out all the details out of it. They steal the mystery and hand your pan knowledge.
A subjugglator has no quadrants, no concupiscence in his heart, no base motherfucking desires for another troll’s flesh parts. A subjugglator is married to the Church and will serve and love only the Church for all his days. Violence is the pleasure a subjugglator takes, killing his climax, blood the only material he will splash into a pail. They have taken vows, all your holy family, but not just vows in writ like you always thought. They take their vows in flesh and make their fealty in pain penance. They spend their first cycle getting the only pailing they ever will, to make sure the caste keeps, and then they give themselves to Church service and they never can again.
Your choice now is to say yes or no. If you say yes then you’ll go on to your ceremony and give your first true allegiance to the minstrel messiahs of your faith lobes. The allegiance of holy mutilation is your fealty to them forever after, because you can’t take it back, and you can’t take that vow if you don’t mean it in every inch of yourself because that is the most flagrant heresy anyone can ever get to performing. It’s defilement of the messiahs and the Church and every teaching of pain you’ve ever been gifted.
If you say no, then you’re nothing. You are flea dirt, you are rat leavings, you are the scum on top of dirty water a barkbeast wouldn’t lap if he lay dying in the street. You are antithesis to everything you’ve been raised to be and all the beauty that flows in your own veins.
Your sisters start to say you can have time to think about it, but you’ve known what your answer would be since practically you were even motherfucking hatched. This is what you were even motherfucking hatched for, the only reason your dumbass self ever climbed out of his shell. It’s serendipity. You are for the Church and the Church is for you and you can think of no other that you’d rather give your allegiance to than your family and your messiahs. You can’t think of any other allegiance you’ve even got to give than what’s already due them, if it comes to that.
So you tell to them yes, motherfucking yes, you are as ready for this as it’s possible for a brother to be. They both smile all pleased and fond at you, and the sister with the art up on her horns reaches out to take your face and kiss on your forehead, calling you a precious little thing. You don’t know if it’s being in heat or the incense or both, but the touch of her palms feels like about the best thing you’ve felt all day and you nuzzle up into them. She lets you for a second, then pulls away.
The other subjugglator peels off to go arrange arrangements and talk to people, because these things need some setting up. The sister with the horns takes you by the hand and pulls you to your feet, nudging you in front of her and then guiding you deeper into the bowels of the building with one light hand on your shoulder. The passageway you go through is narrow and lined with tapestries and smoky. It’s barely lit, too, darker than you’re used to ever having to try to see in, but your eyes get adjusted soon enough.
You crane back to look up at her while you’re walking and she gives you this funny little twisty look back, one mouth-side and eyebrow all quirked up. “How’s that feel? Gettin’ your horns done like that.”
Her laugh is low and husky. “Kind of tickles. You think you want etching work gotten done on you?”
“Aw, shit, maybe someday, it’s bitchtits.” This time you laugh with her, even though you don’t think it’s really funny, except right now you kind of feel like everything is funny. You don’t know that you’ve ever breathed in this much smoke at one time for so long and it’s making your head feel funny, like it’s growing bigger on the inside and getting swoopy. You think if you closed your eyes you’d probably fall over and almost do just to see, but you bet your sister here wouldn’t get her appreciation on to that much so you don’t.
Eventually the two of you come to another room. It’s a bare fasting kind of room, no dresser or chests in it or nothing but the bed and wall hangings, not even any incense burning in the room proper. The scent of it is still thick from the hall, but the air feels lighter in your lungs.
“Make yourself comfortable. You’ll probably be here a few hours before anyone gets on back to you.” She looks like she might want to say more, mouth getting all twisty again, but she just looks at you for a little and then leaves.
You do a circuit of the room to look at the wall-art, but it’s nothing much special and you get bored of that quick enough. The bed looks inviting as all get out and you flop right in it, sighing a little. You’re pretty tired for a motherfucker what’s spent most of the day sitting and who just woke up a couple hours ago, but you don’t got much to do in the meantime so you figure no one will get salty with you if you take a nap.
You strip your clothes off to get all cool between the sheets, because it’s seriously motherfucking warm down here. Maybe any other time you’d be getting cozy, but apparently they call it heat for a motherfucking reason.
Mind getting all drowsy already, you think soft thoughts about touching yourself. No one’s going to be back for a few hours, probably, and everything that touches your skin feels so nice you roll yourself over in your sheets a few times and wiggle just for the hell of it, giggling like you’re some kind of stoned-ass brother. You guess you probably are.
You lay on your stomach and rock your hips down against the bed, lazy and half asleep about it, before deciding that yeah, you think you wanna give that a go. So you roll on over and kick out the sheets until they’re in a nice pile around your feet and not constricting anything, and skim a hand down your stomach to your crotch. You finally get a feel on yourself, almost ginger like you’re afraid of breaking it or something, and you really wish you could bend enough to look at it right because it feels weird.
Your shit’s supposed to be all tucked up nice in a tight little slit up there, but it’s all spread out kind of like a flower, with these little fiddly wet folds tucked up in between the lips you’re used to. The folds are all slippery and feel all kinds of nice to touch, so you just trace them for a while, pushing the skin this way and that with your fingertips, moving inwards all gradual until you hit another slit. Experimentally, you press, and your finger sinks down into yourself and it’s wet and slick and hot and you moan, you can’t even help it, this high weak little sound you almost blush to hear yourself make.
Before it even feels too good, though, the image of the mediliquidator flashes back into your head and everything between your legs kind of spasms and tightens up unpleasantly, like flinching back from a flame. Suddenly your finger feels too big and rough inside yourself and you yank it out, catching a fold with your claw and not even caring at the sudden sting. You wipe your hand off on the bed and squirm a little, like you can move away from that dirty crawling feeling, but it stays tucked right the fuck up under your skin and in all your soft new folds.
You curl up on your side with your hands tucked up against your chest and decide to just sleep. You’ve got all kinds of exhaustion settling in all cottony behind your oculars and it’s nice to close ‘em and drift. Hard to actually get past drifting, though, with all the shit up in your head. You’re all antsy up in your chest about this whole ritual shit so you can’t hardly even breathe, and every time you start to feel a little calmer it hits you again that you’re really doing this.