Chapter Text
You screw up the script and throw it in the bin for the fifth time in the last hour and fling your pen at the wall. This is bullshit. Certified grade A horse manure, perfect for composting and an excellent edition to any home garden. It’s all you can produce lately and that familiar insidious weight is creeping back into your lungs. You feel like you’re sixteen again, laying face down on the floor of your room under a stack of half finished puppets and trying to force yourself to care enough about the abominable failure that is your existence to cry like a normal goddamn human being. Only you’re not sixteen and struggling to find your artistic direction, you’re thirty goddamn nine plus void time and you’ve clearly passed your peak.This is it, this is gonna be the early death your teenage self dreamed up for you. No one will notice or care, except a few straggling subscribers who will mourn not you but their dying boners since you stopped updating Plush Rump.
Your obituary will read thus:
foamfriend: where the fuck is latest upd8?? proboscis going soft stuff OTL
A true tragedy for the ages.
You pick up the pen and start again. So, Not-Kermit-For-Copyright-Reasons the Frog walks into a bar and-- Nothing fucking happens. Not a goddamn thing. It’s just runny shit flowing freely from your pen and staining the page. The torrent of swears you cough up as you throw your latest failure at the waste basket with its fallen brothers is the most creative thing you’ve come up with all evening, it also summons Psii’s concerned face around the edge of the door so that’s an added bonus. He does that thing, the slightly disconcerting thing where you can tell his eyes are darting side to side like a scanner to take you all even though you can barely see his pupils at all. You’re getting better at recognising the two gold rings that are just about visible under the ambient glow of his eyes but it’s an inexact science. This gesture though, this gesture has that telltale pinch to his eyebrows and the damn near audible ticking of him trying to logicify your dumb human emotions with his robot brain.
“You’re stressed.” He concludes.
“Thank you, Einstein.” You snap.
He flinches almost imperceptibly and you feel the weight crushing your insides. He doesn’t leave though, he just steps through the door frame and crosses his arms at you. He hums and moves himself between you and the desk, sliding his skinny ass into the space where your work used to be until he’s straddling one of your legs. His arms drape over your shoulders and his pushes his hands up through your hair until your hat falls backwards off your head and his fingers rest around where your horns would be.
“I’m going to make a pile.” He says. “And we’re going to jam about it but first, you’re going to strife me on the roof.”
“Strife you with what, you don’t have a--”
A line of sharp little static shocks stings the side of your face just under where his thumb is hovering and his hands shift just slightly so you can feel the points of his claws in your scalp. He raises an eyebrow at you and your adam’s apple bobs in your throat.
“Okay.” You say, your tongue darting out to wet your lips and hopefully distract from the shivery feeling currently taking residence in your gut. “Point taken.”
His frown twists into a grin. “Good,” he says and then he musses the spikes of your hair with both hands before absconding.
You grab your hat and your unbreakable katana and take the fire escape two steps at a time. By the time you’ve ducked out onto the sunbaked concrete and wedged the door open with a loose brick he’s already waiting, sitting cross legged in mid air with his gloves off, floating just high enough that his nose is level with your forehead. He squares his horns at you and drops to the floor when you approach, red and blue flashes still haloing his entire body which should be intimidating but there’s something in the way he’s grinning at you and bouncing on the balls of his feet that makes it seem less “look upon me and despair” and more “bruh, do you even lift?”.
You aren’t actually sure how the whole psionic strife thing is going to work. Him and Sollux train a fair distance from here for safety reasons, which is worrying in itself but it also means you’ve never actually seen him fight with his psionics for real. Sure you’ve seen him use them around the house, dumping his dishes in the sink without getting up and that kind of lazy boy bullshit. You’ve even been on the receiving end of a few tricks but nothing that really gives weight to the monumental force of nature junk that gets thrown around when his name is mentioned. You rest your sword on your shoulder and tilt your chin up at him.
“Rules?” You say.
“I promise not to blast you into the dirt on the first round.” He says.
You give him a perfunctory “alright then” before darting forward with your sword raised. His hand comes up, you think to block you but then your sword stops dead in a halo of red and blue throwing you off balance so you almost slam past it and into him. You catch yourself as he steps backwards, waving his hand in a gesture you know is entirely for appearances as he releases his psionic grip on your weapon. He flashes teeth at you as you sidestep around him, crouching low and bringing your sword around to the back of his knees but when you turn your weapon to the flat side expecting to knock his legs out from under him you find him floating just above your strike and grinning at you like a particularly smug cat. You drive at him again and again flash stepping around him in dizzying circles only to have your sword yanked out of the air or your attack dodged in increasing infuriating physics defying ways. With each missed strike you can feel your stance loosening, your jumps coming to you faster and faster. You feint with your sword, letting your hand slip off the grip when he stops it and slam palm first into his jaw. The sword clatters to the ground and he grunts, the points of his tongue darting out to lick at where his fang caught his lip with the force of the impact. You hop back to grab it in the precious seconds when he’s distracted only to get shocked when you try.
He's got one hand up with his palm out to you and he’s scrubbing his lip with the back of the other. “Point to you.” He says, and tosses your sword into the air so fast you almost lose your fingers trying to catch it.
This is almost entirely for your benefit you know, but now that you’ve gotten the first hit in when he didn’t expect it you can tell he’s upping his game. When your sword stops in the air now the shock vibrates the grip in your hands and you’re thankful for your gloves or it would have been lost off the edge of the roof a long time ago. He’s also apparently decided that the rest of you is fair game. The first time he closes his powers around your knee mid flashstep you’re almost picking gravel out of your goddamn teeth but you roll with it, coming up behind him on your knees and forcing him to switch tracks to knock the blade away from his own ankles. You sort of wish you brought some music up but it doesn’t matter because between the thuds and scratches of your trainers on the roof and the harmonic crackle of his powers going off every which way you’re making music all by yourselves. It’s incredible, even though you know he’s going easy and he’d flatten you in a real fight you’re on top of the goddamn world. Your muscles are singing from the strain, your brain a blissfully clear hum of focus as your limbs fall into rhythm with his. Red and blue lights up your trainers and you notice a beat too late, stumbling forwards until you're practically in his arms, one of his hands fisted in your shirt and the other with three claws pressed firmly under the softest part of your jaw.
“Your point.” You say, and he grins and uses his grip on your face to pull you in for a kiss.
“Best of three?”
You risk your neck to kiss him again before you bounce back, sword held above your head and knees bent. You hold one hand out to him, palm up and curl your fingers twice. He laughs and jumps up clean over your fucking head to attack you from above and there has never been a more perfect person for you in this history of all the pre scratch, post scratch and alternate universes. His descent is too slow and you’ve flash stepped out of the way long before he’s landed the hit. It occurs to you that as much as you are pushing your limits he is having to exercise mad restraint, especially as you both move more and more in sync, your blows coming quicker and quicker and the both of you darting around each other so fast you leave scorched boot marks on the baked floor. You toss your hat at him, a cheap distraction but enough to stop him from noticing you rushing forwards until it’s too late. Your sword stops with the point just touching his breastbone and his hands framing it. Whether it was you or him that caught it before you skewered him you just don’t know but his eyes are wide when they meet yours over it and the point dents his skin when he breathes in.
“I didn’t actually think you’d win.” He says. There’s not an ounce of disappointment in it.
You glitch your weapon back into its deck and step forward to close the gap, puffing up your chest against his and wishing you had the extra inches to back the gesture up. He pulls the height advantage, knocking his forehead down against yours and lowering his hands to dig his claws in at your waist and for a long moment you just stand there and share air. It’s hot, and the two of you smell like sweat and dust and a hint of yesterday's chinese for breakfast. You can feel the static still prickling under his skin everywhere he’s touching even through his ridiculous conductive suit. He takes a long shuddery breath and smooths his palms up your sides.
“Better?” He asks.
Oh, right. You headbutt him gently and sigh. Your mind is already racing again, picking out flaws in your stance, steps you could have made cleaner, blows your could have made faster but it’s different. It’s not about picking out your flaws so you can use them to beat yourself it’s about improving. Knowing that you can be better. You nod and he hums.
“You still have to talk about it.” He says.
“Fuck.”
His laugh is nasal and breathy and it tickles your top lip. He steals a kiss and then he steals your hands and starts pulling you back downstairs.