Work Text:
He finds you, paint cracking in the dry desert heat under the sun you’ve very nearly gotten used to.
“Don’t I get to know the name of the guy who saved my life?” you ask, forcing the words out through your burning throat.
You’ve never seen a psionic with two red eyes before. They match his coat.
“My name is Vash,” he says, and you knew it already but you still catch on the edge of the word, waiting for the next syllable that doesn’t come. Later, you’ll ask him how he ended up with a name like that.
Nobody with any ambitions of living to see the next sweep would ever admit it, but way out here, on the ass end of the empire, )-(er influence gets thin. Gunsmoke is populated mostly by deserters, washouts, and illegal hatchlings who’ll pass their entire lifetime without getting within 50 lightyears of the imperial core. Anyone being smart avoids a title. You’ve learned the hard way that the messiahs don’t find it very funny when you’re smart.
“Punisher,” you grind out. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
The world is growing very dark around the edges. You feel his arm around your thorax, warm even against the desert heat.
There’s an old joke that goes: What do you call a psionic without a moirail?
Cullbait.
“You know,” he says. “A guy might get the wrong impression with you following me around like this. Once is a coincidence, twice starts to seem an awful lot like a pale solicitation.”
You roll your eyes. “If I were interested in one’a your quads you’d know about it,” you say. You don’t say: Half the motherfucking planet is pale for you and the other half just hasn’t met you yet.
The guy is a messiahs-damned walking pity machine and he carries himself like he doesn’t even notice. Short, clipped claws, four horns marking him as a mutant, his left front horn broken so close to the base that it hardly sticks out of his hair.
He carries the sorriest excuse for a strife specibus you’ve ever seen, so old he might as well have stolen it off the Signless Sufferer, may he burn in hilarious and eternal damnation.
You’ve never seen somebody screaming cull me or pap me about it more loudly. You think it’s making you a little insane.
“I’m not looking to fill my diamond,” he says.
“I told you,” you say. “If I were after one’a your quads, you’d motherfuckin know about it. Besides, what’s with the blushing maiden routine, you got a moirail back home?”
“Sure, something like that,” he says. It’s hard to tell with psionics, but it looks like he might be rolling his eyes at you. “If it’s not one of my quadrants, what exactly are you following me around for, then?”
Your pusher is pounding so hard you’re surprised he can’t see it through your thorax. You don’t put your frond up to still it, you just take another sip of your Faygo and sigh.
“I go where the messiahs will,” you say. “I’m not in the business of questioning something as miraculous as good company.”
There’s an old joke that goes: What do you call a rustblood at a church meeting?
Paint.
“You know,” he says, real slow like the sopor is doing most of the talking for him. “You don’t talk much like a highblood.”
You think about the constant ache of your pusher beating too slow in your thorax, and how your eyes don’t feel like they sit quite right in your pan anymore. You think about how your fronds go numb with cold even in the desert sun.
“Spent too much time out in the motherfuckin sticks, I guess.”
“So how’s a guy like you end up way out here anyway?” he asks.
You watch bubbles pop and fizz in his glass. There’s condensation beading on the rim
“Seemed like it would be funny,” you say.
You’re sitting in a bar listening to talk of revolution in the south. This far out, there’s nearly always talk of revolution somewhere. People don’t abandon the empire without some grievances.
The men sitting at the next table are a few too many glasses in for that kind of talk to be a good idea.
“You hear this latest Sufferer wannabe is a psionic?”
“They had one ‘a those before,” says his friend. “Pissbloods are always talking like this is the one that’s gonna get them out of the helm for good.”
You watch Vash’s hand tighten slowly around his glass. Neither of you has had the money to sleep in sopor in a perigree and you can feel it in the uneven edges of your conversations and the way Vash has been sucking back Faygo since the moment you walked into this bar. Goddamn prophets of doom. You don’t need the voices of the dead to tell you where this is going.
“Hey,” you say, and you watch his eyes snap to you. “Let’s get out of here.”
It’s too pale, especially to somebody you’re not in any quads with, but he just nods and tosses the rest of his drink back.
“Sure,” he says. “Let’s go.”
You meet the girls eventually, Millie and Merryl. Olive and teal, only the legislacerator’s gone private. She’s got the biggest flushcrush on Vash you’ve ever seen. Her eyes practically turn to hearts when she looks at him. Well that’s interesting.
“He’s—“ Merryl looks nervous, or maybe embarrassed about what she’s about to say. It’s another night, another bar, and Vash is up at the counter securing libations. You can’t imagine what Merryl could feel like she has to confide in you right this moment. “His scars, I think he was helmed.”
You laugh at that, you can’t help it. “Escaping the helm is a fairytale that pissblood wrigglers tell each other,” you say.
She looks angry now. “I’ve been on a helmed ship before,” she insists. “I know what it looks like.”
You tilt your glass at her. “So then you know why I don’t believe you,” you say. “Nobody who’s been helmed can escape. Even the Psiionic died in the helm.”
“I know what I saw,” she insists.
Later, you’ll see the scars for yourself: endless grooves and pockmarks where biowires dug under the skin and were extracted. Haphazardly-placed metal hardware does a poor job covering places where there wasn’t enough skin left to knit back together.
He’ll let you kiss him that night, and you’ll run your fronds up and down the topography of his skin. It’ll feel strange, a persistent electric buzz like he can’t quite keep it all inside anymore. When your fingers graze metal, you’ll feel it in your teeth.
Now, you open your mouth to argue with Merryl and that’s when he sits down at the table, bottle hitting the wood surface so hard it makes the glasses shake.
“What are we talking about?” he asks, an artificial chirp lacing his words.
Meryll just turns her head away. “Nothing.”
You sigh, making a big show of it. “The rising cost of cluckbeast eggs,” you say.
“I’m not cut out for quadrants,” he tells you.
It’s late at night, and you’re curled up together in cold slime that feels like it’s more silicone than sopor. It’s a terrible idea to share a cupe with a troll you’re not quadranted to but you’ve got marks from his oversized yellowblood fangs in your neck and the lingering taste of honey in the back of your throat. You’ve been telling desk clerks he’s your matesprit for a perigree just so they’ll rent you a one-cupe room.
The cupe might as well be an empty ablution trap for all the good it’s doing to help either of you sleep.
“I’m never gonna put a ring on your finger,” he says.
Your prong traces a line down a divot in his arm, to the vulnerable junction where flesh becomes biowire. You feel the wires part beneath you ever so slightly. Later, you’ll wake up in cold slime with him wrapped all the way around you, breathing hot against your neck.
“I know,” you say.
“Then why are you still here?” he asks. “Is there a joke here? Is this funny to you?”
You trace another line from the edge of his arm to the front of his neck, where the skin is mostly unbroken.
“A little,” you say.
You’re in yet another shitty motel, rubbing the last of your medical-grade sopor concentrate into a gash on his arm. Later, you’ll tie it off with a torn-up towel. It feels like something out of a goddamn pale porno, one of the really graphic ones that get banned from Church ships.
“You know,” you say, letting the last burning edge of adrenaline make you mean, “I wouldn’t spend so much time bandaging you up if you’d just upgrade your damn strife specibus.”
“Modus is too old,” he says. He sounds tired and flat, and he doesn’t rise to the bait. “A newer model wouldn’t work.”
“Then get a new modus,” you say.
He sighs, like you’re the one being unreasonable about this. “I like this one fine,” he says. He yanks his arm away too, for good measure. You watch slime drip down it, sticky and undiluted.
“Fine,” you say. “Be like that. See if I patch you up next time.”
“I have…a brother,” he says, all weird and halting like that’s supposed to mean something to you.
“Yeah,” you say, one eyebrow raised to show just how much you are not picking up what he’s putting down. “Me too. Whole motherfuckin churchful of ‘em actually.”
“No,” he says, and you expect him to laugh or make a joke or pivot away like he always does but instead he just meets your eyes, real deep and intense. “A twin.”
The word sounds strange in his mouth, and foreign to your ears.
“Twin?” you say, for want of anything else. The word sounds no less strange when you say it.
He nods again, focused and intense, those oversized goldblood features suddenly too big for his face.
“Another me,” he says.
“A clone,” you offer. It’s nonsense highblood shit but you’ve heard of it, of people not willing to wait for the Mothergrub to spit them out a descendent.
He makes a frustrated, inarticulate sound. “No, not the same as me, the other half of me. We had an ancestor. A psionic, a powerful one. They wanted to see if they could make a version of him that would be easier to use in the helm. They took his slurry, split him into two.”
You met him once. The other half. You remember his face, those unnatural blue eyes. They burned so bright it hurt to look at. You remember the feeling of his psionics over every inch of you, through you, between you, taking up space you didn’t know existed.
“I’m not sure I get it,” you say.
There’s an old joke that goes: What did the blueblood say when his moirail told him she was flipping pitch?
I’ll grab the bucket.
“Not very conciliatory of you,” you say, poking at the thin gash that follows the curve of your cheek from your ganderbulb to your auricular. The knife that made it is embedded somewhere in the wall behind you but fuck if you’re gonna turn around to look at it now.
He gives you a sharp look, turns the other knife in his hand. “It’s good that you’re not my moirail then.”
“So you’ve been letting me patch you up for perigees just for the fun of it?” you sneer. “Sharing a cupe with me hoping I’ll kill you in your sleep?”
He sheathes the knife and takes a step toward you. “Sure,” he says. “Let’s go with that.”
You’re not pitch for him and you both know it but you let him pull you in for a kiss anyway, bite at his lip until there’s yellow smeared between you, metal and honey and lightning in your mouth. He returns the favor, clawing at your back hard enough that even his bitten-down nails leave scratches.
You hear the sound of blood hitting the floor, and you know if you look down you’ll see that strange, too-vivid purple staining the cheap wood, mixing with a hundred other bloodstains now all old and dried beyond recognition.
Your hand comes up to his face and he flinches away, as if you’re going to try to shooshpap him out of this like you’re in some shitty quadrant-smearing video feed. Painted Indigoblood Shooshpaps a Mutant Psionic Goldblood during Catiliginous Pailing. Featuring No Fewer Than 5 Heretical Offenses, a Dubious Claim of Quadrant Vacillation, and a Pile Constructed Entirely of Used Faygo Bottles. Suitable for Trolls 10 Sweeps and Up.
You don’t bother to correct the assumption, just grab a fistful of his hair and yank him back. He growls against your mouth, but there’s an approving chirp on the edge of it.
You’re marching towards the punchline. This should be the fun part, when the audience is waiting with bated breath, when the payoff is within reach.
You watch him sleep at night, tossing and turning in too-shallow sopor and you think about walking offstage. Show’s over, folks. Gotta catch the next shuttle off-planet and never look back.
He’d never go for that, no matter how you pleaded. And the messiahs don’t take kindly to an unfinished joke.
You’ve never seen somebody be helmed before, but Knives makes you stand and watch as the wires move over and through Vash.
Knives just stands there, his blue eyes glowing faintly, a slight smile on his face. You can see the biowires moving under his skin. Later, you’ll wake up soaked in sweat imagining the feeling of those wires burrowing into you, over you, through you. Suffocating you.
You thought he would scream, but he doesn’t.
There’s an old joke that goes: What did the tyrian say to the mutant?
We’re not so different after all.
8 perigrees later and you’re bleeding out in a cave and he’s more wire than troll. The taste of serum coats your mouth, hot and chemical, and your heart is beating in your chest quicker, and then slower, and then erratically. The air is choked with the artificial sea salt scent of your blood.
“Punisher,” he says, papping at your face like that’s going to somehow put the blood back in your body.
You put a frond up to stop him. “Shoosh, I’m gonna be fine. Takes more than that to kill a cultist.”
Vash looks at you skeptically. “Are we still pretending you’re an indigoblood?”
You laugh a little at that. “Nah,” you say. “But they didn’t give me purple blood for nothing. I’m gonna be fine, seriously Spikey.”
He looks like he’s gonna press the issue so you sigh.
“Look,” you say. “It’s funny, right? Not enough indigos to do their dirty work so they’re color swapping rusties instead. They got me when I was a wiggler, told me I’d be a miracle.”
“What’s so funny about that?”
You shrug. ”I can’t explain the joke.”
Vash rolls his eyes at that, or as close as he can anyway. “Goddamn cultists,” he says finally.
Turns out being raised by followers of the Signless Sufferer has its perks.
You’d known there was an outpost somewhere on this planet, if only because every backwater deserter planet has some kind of Suffrist outpost, but the ship that Vash takes you to is kept in relatively good repair.
There’s a long flurry of doctorurer examinations and strategy meetings about how you’re going to take this asshole down and then suddenly you’re just left alone to wander the halls.
You’re wearing some clothes they gave you, standard-issue civilian stuff. Your subjuggalator regalia will have to be burned more than likely. You’re barefaced, too.
Your paint was a mess and somebody in one of the mediculler offices offered you a rag. You have paint in your sylladex, you could fix it. If you were a real cultist you’d probably have made a scene about it.
Instead you’re barefaced standing at the door that somebody in the mediculler’s office had told you was his, hoping to Gog you’re not about to scare the shit out of some unsuspecting Suffrist.
Your relief when he opens the door is immense, and judging by the expression on his face when he realizes who’s standing there, so is his.
“Punisher,” he says.
“Hey Spikey.”
The slime on the ship is stronger than you’ve had in sweeps and heated too. When you collapse into it together you’re awake for only a single, blissful moment listening to the shaky, rattling sound of him purring against you, before you’re drifting off to sleep.
There’s an old joke that goes: What should you do when you hear a subjuggalator laugh?
Run.
You haven’t been on a Church ship in years but the smell of blood and the dazzling array of pictures covering the walls still fill you with a half-remembered sense of nostalgia.
You spent a lot of time here, most of it blurred by smoke and pain and chemicals, but there’s something comforting in the familiarity.
Chapel is waiting for you when your shuttle docks. Chapel . Stupid fucking highblood word for a stupid useless outdated concept. Almost as bad of a title as Punisher. You draw your weapon: clubkind, just like his. He looks you up and down with those dull purple eyes, exactly the wrong color compared with yours.
There’s half a ship’s worth of subjuggalators between you and a room full of miracle children. You can feel a laugh bubbling in your chest, a grin pulling at the edges of your mouth. There’s no more setup; here’s the punchline.
He draws his weapon, ready to strife, ready to cull a motherfucker at a moment’s notice, just like he always taught you.
Later, Vash will find you there, paint slick with two colors of purple blood. He’ll hold you on the concupicent couch and you won’t let him kiss you, mouth thick with the taste of Faygo and serum and too-thick sea salt blood and he will look so impossibly sad.
You’ll feel his arm around your thorax, warm against the air conditioned chill of the ship. The world will grow very dark around the edges.