Chapter Text
Spring that year came in a fury of daffodils, a brilliant nodding scrambled mess of yellow bouncing in all the verges and all the undergrowth of Anningley’s woods. You’d started classes again while the weather was still fucking horrible and you bundled yourself up in all your warmest things like a fucking cocoon and even so you couldn’t ever get warm until you found yourself alone again with him, wrapped up in him like a web of annoying angles and violet and that wonderful sharp-rose smell that you think has to be him as much as it is that orange-bottle crap he puts in his hair. You were always warm when he held you.
By the time February gave way to March you’d got him okay enough with the Mercedes that he felt comfortable driving the two of you out to your glade. The glade. The theater people’s glade, but fuck it, he’d taken you here on your first real soi-disant date and now it was yours, suck it theater people. Dead grass and leaves had crackled under your feet and the chill had bitten into your thin bones but when you’d made your way down the narrow trail to the gorge itself you were wordless at how simply lovely it was: that bright cheerful stupid wonderful yellow of the flowers was drifted like snow on every flat surface that could sustain a root, wide exuberant trumpets turned up to the sun’s touch, nodding and dancing as a skirl of breeze flickered through their ranks.
Eridan had picked you one, a jonquil rather than a daffodil, something so fragile and precious it was almost a pity to cut it from its stem--but, as he pointed out, it would be battered to transparency anyway by the night’s forecast rain and it was better to appreciate something while it was there to be appreciated and it was such a lovely, lovely little thing and you had held it carefully between your fingertips, wondering if the arrangement of petals had anything to do with Fibonacci, and then he’d caught your chin in his fingers and he was kissing you.
Some pleasant time later you’d tucked the flower behind your ear and you had fished the little box out of your pocket, a box you’d been carrying around for weeks now waiting for just the right moment. This hadn’t seemed totally perfect, but you were also enough of a pragmatist to realize that if you were going to wait for total perfection you would likely carry the fucking thing to your grave, and so you just swallow hard and you go for it.
The box contains something you’ve saved up for for a while. You’d used your Christmas and Hanukkah money from your dads and all their friends-and-relations, plus a bit you’d been putting aside for a memory upgrade. Kanaya had driven you all the way to the remotely civilized town half an hour away which had an actual mall, and you had spent an hour and a half pickily browsing through the jewelry store’s selection before you’d finally bought something. It’s not very valuable. Half the shit he already has on his fingers would buy it several times over.
You awkwardly hand over the box. “Way late birthday present. Sorry, I’d meant to, like, give this to you sooner, it just, it...”
Eridan blinks down at the velvet box in his palm and you hope, oh you hope to fuck, that he doesn’t hate it. He opens the lid and behind his glasses his eyes go wide, pupils shrinking and then dilating again in a weird little flicker, and he makes a weird noise in the back of his throat.
“I, uh. I have the receipt still, if you’d, uh, if you want something else instead,” you stammer.
He ignores you and he reaches into the box’s white velvet cushioned interior and lifts out what you’d after long deliberation bought for him. It is nothing like the vast ostentatious gems he wears as a matter of course. It is...just two jagged wavy lines of gold that hold between them two round brilliant-cut stones, one an amethyst, one a citrine.
It’s an Aquarius ring, according to the lady at the jewelry store. And you know he’s sort of always been into his sign. And this had had your favorite color and his favorite color and and and...
Fuck, Eridan, say something.
He doesn’t say something. He just wriggles at his left hand, and you don’t get what he’s doing until he’s wrenched off the ruby that lives there, and he slides your ring, your ring, into its place. Thank God, you think, you’d figured out the size right.
Eridan stares down at his hand, turning it this way and that, watching light catch and slide in the gems, run across the jagged gold.
“...Say something,” you ask him. “Please.”
He doesn’t: but he does wrap you up so tight in his arms that your ribs creak and you think he’s lifted you off the fucking ground and he pushes his face against your neck and suddenly you can breathe again, suddenly everything really is going to be all right.
“...l-love you, Sol,” he manages, and you can tell he’s close to crying, and you wrap tight around him.
“Hey--Eridan, hey, it’s okay--”
“I know it is, dumbass,” he says, and sniffles, and hugs you tighter. “Jesus fuck, do you even know how perfect this is, it’s, I’d, I’d sort of wanted to ask you for something like this, I just never ever came up with a good way to say it and, oh, Sol.”
You stroke his gelled hair, carefully, and then his back, in slow little warm circles. He gets so damn overwrought and you can generally chill him out with backrubs and instructions to breathe. Now, though, you just kiss his shoulder and you tug him down to sit with you on the new grass, jade-green and translucent and bursting with life.
He settles in your lap, leaning against you, wriggling against you, and that he’s so obviously wanting your touch makes you fucking melt. You wrap him up in your bony uncomfortable embrace and you hold him tight and you talk to him, you say all the things you’ve said before but that you think perhaps right now he needs to hear again: how he is the best thing that has ever happened to you, how much you love him, how much he means and is to you; how you go through every fucking day thinking of him, how you can’t wait to get back to your room at night and do stupid shit like argue with him about TV or games, how you relish every stupid fucking chance to go make him his horrible tea stuff and how much you fucking adore it when he makes you your coffee in the mornings. How...
There’s a lot of it, really. You go on for a while. You are so fucking retarded for Eridan Ampora there should be a whole new goddamn entry in the DSM-Whatever for this particular case.
He listens to you talk and makes a sort of soft purring noise and after a while he wriggles down to lie with his head in your lap and his arms wrapped around your waist, and that’s lovely and you sort of maybe wish you had a blanket or something else to lie on that was more conducive to bad behavior than slightly damp new grass because wow.
“...love you, Sol,” he’s saying. “Do you even know what you’ve fuckin done for me? Every goddamn day I go out there and deal with the assholes bein assholes and they just....they don’t matter, Sol, cause they just keep on bein assholes and I get to come home to you, no fuckin contest who wins in that situation. You’re like....okay, this is fuckin stupid.”
“No it isn’t,” you say, stroking his hair. “Tell me.”
“It is fuckin stupid but. Well. Like. When I was little, right, I read all these books, adventure bullshit, you know, little boys’ fuckin daydreams a bein heroes and shit. All a them had friends in them. Real friends, not just kids your dad brought over to play with you for an hour each week cause you were supposed to mingle with your own fuckin class or whatever. Friends who cared. I never had that until Fef, and even then it wasn’t...the thing and the whole a the thing. I never had anyone who honest to fuck gave a shit about me until you came along.”
“Eridan--”
“Shh, I gotta finish.” He’s playing with your ring. It looks....actually pretty okay with the others he has on, even if it’s smaller and less ostentatious: the stones are good quality, they sparkle like anything. You remember tilting it in your hands in the white-velvet-and-glass store, flushing brilliantly with awkwardness, and it looks so right on his finger: you did good. You think that to yourself, deliberately: you did good.
“I spent so much a my life bein as flagrant and unbearable an asshole as I could possibly be for reasons and it took me a while to get past that shit with you, and...you put up with me, Sol. You had patience. I know it ain’t like the easiest shit in the world for you to be patient.”
You laugh despite yourself, curled over him, cradling his head against you.
“An’...I always wanted to, like, have something from you. I gave you that ring on the ITW openin night cause I wanted to and it...it seemed auspicious, you know? I knew you liked it. But I didn’t know how to, like, ask for somethin in return.”
“I know,” you tell him, stroking his hair. Now that the production is over the brown dye is fading slowly from his purple lock but you know from listening to him bitch out loud over and over and over and over that he’s just going to have to bleach the fuck out of it again and start over, woe is him. You give it special attention, letting the wine-colored strands slip through your fingers. “I know and I wish I could’ve given this to you before, but....uh...I suck at, like, preparing scenes and shit like that. I’ve been carrying it around for a little while now.”
Eridan opens his purple eyes and looks up at you. “You are such a dumbass, Sol,” he says.
“I know,” you agree blissfully, and he takes your hand in his and kisses your fingertips.
~
On the way back to campus he doesn’t fucking stall once. He’s so anxious most of the time--you can tell driving makes his stomach hurt, you wish you could do something about that--but this afternoon he seems to be pretty chill, not glancing down at the shift knob at all, managing his starts without juddering or racing the engine. You think it’s because he’s thinking hard enough about something else to let his less-anxious hindbrain get on with the business of driving: you remember from your own awful learning days how much better you were when you weren’t thinking about what you were doing. You’d actually used that, capitalized on it, and often made yourself focus on something outside the car when you were doing hillstarts; watching traffic or checking out the state of the opposing light made you magically way less likely to fuck shit up.
Nobody has keyed the Mercedes. You’ve named it Horatio.
The skull he’d borrowed from Jake English is, of course, Yorick. Strider apparently has some kind of unreasonable animus against poor old Yorick and refuses to let him back into the Strider-English household, so Yorick has taken up residence on Eridan’s desk and seems to be enjoying his new digs. He’s pretty cheery for a skull, you guess.
English is a fucking piece of work. You seriously do not even know how to parse him. He talks like a pastiche of Rider Haggard, Grant Morrison, and a normal kid; he seems to either be trolling the whole fucking world so insanely hard you have to give him major props for effort or he really, really, really does not understand why KK and Strider and everyone else give him the side-eye whenever he goes off about man’s great love for his fellow man and the noblest of all affections. You think he’s probably either bi or just totally on another planet; you’ve seen him dallying (and dallying is the word) with a chick from the girls-only dorm, colloquially the Virgin Vault, but you have not heard word one from Strider about any activity that could remotely lead to sexiling. Apparently English likes to take his lady friends to the local pistol range for mutual shootin’ shenanigans, but either they don’t like to come home and see his etchingsskulls or he just has his way with them off-campus.
You think it’s probably the former.
Then there’s Strider, who has not suspended his campaign to drive KK absolutely permanently shithouse maggots. The milk theft incident had been followed by a ramen theft and then a second frozen edamame theft, after which KK had apparently appealed to his mysterious parents and a small cheap dorm-room fridge had appeared to replace his and Gamzee’s broken one. After that there was considerably less yelling in the kitchen.
Eridan had appealed to your RA and then to Res Life about the shittiness of the kitchen and, lo and befuckinghold, the range had gotten repaired and St. G had come back from Target with a boxful of basic kitchen shit and a manifest to hand in to Res Life along with his receipts. He’d grinned when Eridan squealed like a goddamn teenage girl over some of the shit he’d bought, and demanded in return only that Eridan make something decent for dinner. Which he had.
St. G wasn’t a bad guy, you realized, the second time he handed you a beer. You’d asked him about being an RA and he’d told you both delicious horror stories, and asked you about your classes in a way that wasn’t obnoxious, offered some advice, and most of all just honest to fuck enjoyed the unpronounceable stuff Eridan cooked. You could tell how much it meant, just looking at how he was beaming behind the hornrims and the fading wine-purple-brown forelock. That stupid wonderful smile did things to you.
But going back to Strider. You think he’s actually mounting an actual campaign either to drive KK sufficiently batty to kill him via aneurysm or stroke or whatever or to get into his pants, and you honestly cannot figure out which. When Strider had gone tearing off after English, katana at the ready, after that extremely fucking amusing incident where English had apparently either hacked his roomie’s machine or just taken advantage of a lax moment in Strider security, KK had taken it upon himself to stop Strider committing murder and getting himself kicked out of Anningley, and apparently had A Moment with Strider while he was at it. You hadn’t been there to actually tell for yourself, but you were more and more convinced that the blond asshole had it seriously very terribly bad for your best friend, and unfortunately had decided to express his feelings along the lines of kindergarteners in a playground.
You said as much to KK in the hippie hut, sharing one of Lalonde’s Djarum Blacks. You all preferred the milder, sweeter Specials, but apparently Lalonde’s connection had dried up and she was reduced to sourcing the gothic shit on the internet. You give her kudos for maintaining your supply chain even if the goods are less than optimal.
“I don’t even fucking get it, Captor,” he groans, lying back against a makeshift pillow consisting of his hoodie and your backpack. “I’m like I don’t even know how more clearly I can put it that I AM NOT FUCKING INTERESTED in anything at all he may have to offer. Ever.”
“Poor Strider,” you say. “Spurned by your delicate fucking foot, KK.”
“Fuck you, you aren’t helping. Seriously, how do I get him to just leave me the fuck alone?”
“I dunno. Maybe you could have an actual honest discussion with him without either of you resorting to irony or fulminant fucking shrieks.”
“Yeah, like that would ever happen.” Karkat sighs and reaches for the cigarette. “Dammit. You and Ampora are all like fucking perfect and shit. I admit to a flicker of envy.”
“Awww.” You hand it over and ruffle his hair, earning yourself a look of death. “KK, honey, it’ll happen in time, don’t push things.”
“Shut the livid fuck up, Captor.”
“Yessir.”
After a moment or two he adds, thoughtfully, “I seriously don’t get it. If he was trying to get my attention, he’s done that, he did it like a fucking semester ago. If he wants to annoy the wriggly shit out of me, he’s done that. If he wants me to suddenly go “oooh Mister Strider you and your shitty anime swords are the measure of my dreams” he is gonna be sorely fucking disappointed.”
“Maybe,” you point out, “maybe he’s as lacking in social graces as you are and simply has no idea how to court somebody without being a dickhole to them. You want I should have a word?”
“Fuck no, Captor. Do not you even think of daring.”
You smirk. “It might do some good.”
KK rolls over and glares at you and dang, but he gives good glare. His eyes look burgundy in this light, a wonderful dark rich red-brown, and yeah, okay, you can see why a guy might act insanely stupid when in his presence. Mostly you just want to hug him and mess up his hair. “--Okay, okay, jesus. I won’t say a thing. I will just stand over here and go d’aww every now and then.”
“I do not get,” says KK, handing you back the cigarette, “I do not fucking get why everyone and their motherfucking roommate thinks that because I dislike Strider I wish to get naked with him. I fucking hate the guy, okay? Like that’s it. What about ‘I hate him’ translates in your weird bifurcated brain to ‘I want him to take me to prom’?”
You can’t help laughing at that and you sort-of choke on clove smoke and it takes a little while before you can get yourself back in any shape to answer. “Fuck, I love that mental image. Which one of you would wear the dress?”
“Him. Definitely him. I would not look good in a dress.”
“Oh, I dunno, KK. You could rock something in a nice dark red.”
“Fuck, Captor, you have been hanging around Ampora way the fuck too much. No. No and also no, I am not even having this discussion with you right now. Gimme that.”
You pass the butt back and lace your fingers behind your head. “Fine. Change of subject. I’m thinking of offering to run lights for the spring production.”
He looks up at you. “Really?”
“Yup. Shit is simple as fuck, it’s an older board and the cues are easy as hell to program. I fucked around with Lightboard M back in high school, I figure I can work out their board with no problem.”
“You did tech?”
“I guess you could call it that? Super primitive, though. As long as someone else hangs the fucking lights I can tell them when to turn on and off.”
KK tilts his head and you aren’t quite sure how to parse the look on his face. “What?”
“...Can you show me?”
“Sure,” you say. “I didn’t know you were even interested, man.”
“I’m kind of...curious?”
“Come over to the theater with me tomorrow. Eridan got me a real quick interview with the stage manager, I should be able to either get a yes or no and if it’s a yes I can show you the lightboard. You think you want to do something like tech?”
“Maybe.” KK sighs. “I dunno. I just...I like watching shit, but there’s so much that goes into a show that you never ever know.”
“You are a techie,” you tell him. “Right fucking there you are one, man. Sorry, it’s your destiny. You have no choice.”
“Fuck you.” He lies back and yawns. “Okay, I’ll come with and I’ll try not to break anything. But I have like no experience with this shit.”
“That’s cool. They’re used to freshmen coming in and being fucking clueless. Fuck, I’m clueless, but I am also a very quick study.”
“Yeah, yeah, you and your magical brain.”
Companionable silence falls.
~
It takes you by complete surprise when you find Dave Strider on the balcony in the wee hours, draped over the railing with none of his usual grace. His customary shades dangle from one hand and his fucked-up white-blond hair is a bit damper than the night’s dew might explain.
You haul up one of the armchairs, not bothering to be quiet about it, and he jerks and lifts his head, blinking at you--yeah, okay, his eyes really are red.
“Strider?”
“Fuck off,” he says, and, wow, he looks like shit.
“You can’t be albino,” you say. “Your pupils are too dark. What the hell, man?”
He blinks. “.......What the fuck.”
“I’m just curious, yo.”
You’re not prepared for the weirdness that is Dave Strider not in complete control of himself and it makes you want to wriggle out of your shitty dew-damp armchair and go put an arm around him: but you figure it’d make everything a lot worse if you did that so you just stay where you are and watch him sort of choke and gulp and get his breathing back under control.
“....for your information,” he says, raw, rasping, “I’m a fucking mutant and I have mutant powers, so don’t fuck with me, Captor. In addition, go the fuck away I am so not in the mood for you right now.”
“Ha,” you say. “Picked the wrong guy to use the mutant line on, have you fucking seen my eyes, dude? Seriously, what is your deal?”
“My deal is I need you to go the fuck away, you are supposed to be a smart kid, how are you this fucking dense--”
Strider cuts himself off and lurches to his feet, and you think he’s going to be ill over the balcony rail but he just pushes past you and into the dorm, and you figure either he’ll make it to a bathroom or he’ll decorate the floor and neither of those outcomes are your problem but fuck.
You at least finish your cigarette and check your watch. Not so horribly late. It’s just gone one. Pitching the butt over the balcony’s railing, you settle your hoodie more comfortably round your shoulders and you head inside. If you happen to come across a Strider in extremis you’ll deal with him; otherwise you have a date with your roommate that you’re looking forward to.