OK THEN

[awakener]

The Awakener had some acquaintance with being suddenly abducted from a planet's surface and whisked off into space by shady and probably illegal personages, so he would have considered himself relatively prepared for this, but last time it had been a lot more personal and he'd been told what was up pretty much as soon as he was conscious. This was just kind of worrying.

It seemed like they were rebels, which was pretty much a thing that he could get behind, but you could never really be sure with border-raiding rebel factions. These ones didn't seem particularly hostile – not now that they were done razing the hivestructures of the unjust oppressor, anyway – but in his experience people who didn't seem particularly hostile frequently tended to become pretty fucking hostile if, for example, his dark glasses got knocked off, even if they did oppose the cruel and unjust caste system that made that a problem in the first place.

He tugged his hood over his head a little more and did his best to make himself relatively inconspicuous amongst the little throng of similarly kidnapped trolls while he tried to take a few deep calming breaths and stock of the situation, but unfortunately he couldn't come up with much better than "Shit, shit, shit, I am trapped on a spaceship with no way off and I am probably going to die."

It wasn't a very confidence inspiring summation of events. He'd dealt with worse and got out okay, but, well, there was a first time for everything.

Comments

[awakener]

"Yeah. I mean, I had to, otherwise I wouldn't know what it was like. But, I guess, instead of getting conscripted I just got smuggled offworld by Sufferists." He shrugged, lopsidedly. "It's kind of a long story, but it doesn't usually come up all that much. I don't think it really matters."

[aerolith]

Starfall let out a puff of air like she was trying to relieve a weight. She gave a firm nod of understanding.

"Yeah, I dunno. You're still a troll, right, so I guess it's cool to hear like...how things actually happen." She shrugged back at him, before sprinting lopsidedly ahead a few steps, to what appeared to be an elevator.

The button compressed and the doors opened, without her ever having touched them and with little more than a flash of silver light in her eye. She hopped inside.

"Here, get in. This'll take us right to the engine block."

[awakener]

The Awakener watched in surprise as the elevator opened unprompted, but he figured he probably shouldn't look too startled or anything lest he make it too obvious how embarrassingly unused he was to the swish futuristic workings of any spaceship that had been constructed after he'd pupated; he followed her inside without comment.

"There's not much to hear about, really," he said. "They took me off Alternia and told me what I was meant to do, and then..." He sighed, not looking at her; when he did look back it was with a small, sad, apologetic smile. "It's not really that long a story, I'm sorry; it's just probably not the time."

He glanced round the interior of the lift, looking just a little apprehensive.

"...How long does this take to go down?"

[aerolith]

"Yeah, that's fine," she said with some pointed nonchalance. "We've all got our shit. Just making small talk, really."

The guard that had been following them, Helion, stepped in after them and the door swished shut. Starfall leaned back with the boredom of someone had who taken this lift many times, and gave the Awakener an uncertain look as it started to move.

"...I dunno, I mean, technically I think we're going up right now - the engine block is a bit more centrally located. I think it goes pretty fast though. Why? Not big on ascenders?"

[awakener]

He winced a bit at that. He was fairly sure he was not, actually, supposed to have his shit, or at least any shit that was not the immense sadness brought about by possessing boundless pity for all trolls in a universe where they were nothing but cruel to one another.

Which wasn't to say he felt bad for being upset about what had happened to the cultists who'd lifted him from Alternia; anybody reasonable would be, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. It didn't fit. He wasn't supposed to be contending with his own tragedies – other people had more than enough of them to keep him occupied.

He was fairly sure it was his fault, besides, and that if he hadn't been such an egregious little shit at the time then they wouldn't have died.

And that was why he was apprehensive – it had just sunk in that he was about to meet somebody who had even more grounds than most trolls to be disappointed by his essential inadequacy.

"Oh, no, it's fine," he said, laughing, because the ascender was if anything less cramped and claustrophobic than one or two of the spaceships he'd used over the last sweep or so. "I guess I'm just ... excited."

[aerolith]

Starfall grinned at that, though there a flash of uncertainty that hadn't been there before. She seemed quick to shrug it off, though.

"Well, cool," she said. "From the sounds of it, Aero's pretty eager too."

The ascender, as promised, was suitably fast. The indicators above the door flashed by at an accelerated pace until it slowed at a level titled "engineering." The interface at the side of the door displayed an authorization prompt. Starfall pressed her fingers to the screen, and was greeted with a swift "access granted: captain starfall".

Once the door slid open, there wasn't much on that level to look at, besides a few doors of to the size, and a large gate straight ahead guarded by two trolls.

Starfall gestured for the Awakener to follow, and approached them.

"We're here to see Aero," she announced as they approached. "Can you ring us in?" The trolls immediate looked to the Awakener in an uncertain kind of awe.

"Uh, right," one of them, and touched what appeared to be a headset. He hesitated. "...Is this him?"

[awakener]

"Yeah," he said, smiling genially and trying not to seem too nervous about the idea of people knowing who he was without him having personally told them so. "I'm the Awakener. Hi."

[aerolith]

The troll raised their eyebrows, apparently at a loss for words. A few moments later, he gave up on searching for any, tapping the headset with a finger.

"Hey," he said. "Captain Starfall and the Awakener requesting entrance."

There was no auditory confirmation - just a lingering, indeterminate pause followed by the soft mechanical click and slide of the doors opening on their own. The guards stepped out of the way, Helion joining their ranks. Starfall gestured for the Awakener to follow, and took the first steps inside.

"Hey Aero," she called out. "We're here."

It was dark, in there. Purplish shadow outlined the shapes of sleek metal machinery mingled with deep tyrian biotech, tendrilled wires extending out into the darkness. It was hard to take in the details, with the rooms center piece and main source of light at present hanging in the far center.

The red and blue lights of the troll's eyes cut through the shadow like a beacon, sparks of their brilliance radiating off of their body and up through the bio wiring that suspended them like webs. The column was more refined than the typical image of a helmsman - fewer connection points and more practical supports. But three of the limbs that could be seen were amputated stumps, biotech flowing straight out of their ends.

The helmsman hardly stirred as they entered, their expression obscured by their flight visor as their head hung, lungs panting with sustained exertion. Four horns poke through a mess of black hair and reddish connections.

But as the Awakener entered, the trolls face finally lifted, their breath catching in their throat.

[awakener]

The Awakener only took two steps past the doors before he stopped in total shock. Whatever he'd been afraid of before paled into insignificance next to what he was looking at now, but he couldn't even work out whether he was horrified or relieved.

Perhaps, he thought frantically, it was just a weird coincidence, the red and blue and the two sets of mutant horns, but even as the idea crossed his mind he realised it was laughable – and then the helmsman lifted his head, and the doubt he was trying in vain to make room for was ousted completely.

"Sollux," he murmured. He couldn't find the words for anything else.

[aerolith]

Hearing his name like that sent a shudder through the troll's body, his breath suddenly coming in louder and shakier as the rest of his expression remained uncharacteristically flat. The air around the Awakening suddenly shifted, the subtle touch of psionics moving over his body, like the hands of a blind person's feeling the feature's of someone face.

He didn't say anything, his head shaking slowly to himself like he wasn't sure whether to believe his own eyes. In the end he just forced himself to look away, head turning away to what limited degree it could.

"You know him?" Starfall asked quietly, uncertain but somehow not surprised.

[awakener]

He nodded very slowly, but didn't look at Starfall – even when Sollux looked away, making him flinch, he couldn't seem to tear his own eyes away from him.

"Sollux," he said more loudly, and took another step forward, an edge of desperation in his voice that was slight but threatened that this was only the tip of a vast iceberg of embarrassing emotional wordvomit. "Sollux, it's me."

[aerolith]

Starfall glanced at Sollux's reaction for a few moment and then nodded, stepping back and deciding to just let herself blend into the background for the moment. Whatever was occurring here seemed way too awkward to want to walk in on.

The energy flowing across the wiring sparked more violently now.

"Don't..." he said faintly, with his own lips instead of the harsh computerized voice he'd used before. He choked on his words, his breath becoming quicker, more panicked. "Okay, you can go," the computer voice picked up where his real one had faltered. "You can go."

[awakener]

Karkat almost took another step forward, but he seemed to think better of it. His face fell, and he shrank back. His look of confusion and dismay hardened, momentarily, into one of defensive anger very little like anything that had been on his face since he'd come on board; for a second it looked as if he might growl at the helmsman, but it faded before it could reach his throat, and he seemed to snap out of it – or perhaps just to press it down. He gathered a sort of miserable calm back to himself, but he was obviously only very narrowly suppressing a more emotional reaction.

"Okay," he said. He glanced at Starfall, eyebrows raised slightly, as if seeking some kind of explanation from her, but also just eager to leave.

[aerolith]

Starfall perked up as he looked at her, just then realizing that her contributions were desired again. She took a step forward again, giving the Awakener her own inquisitive look, before turning her attention back to the helmsman.

"Uh, fuck, um," she started eloquently, apparently searching for shred of a dignified way for them to leave the situation. "Alright, man. We'll let you focus on your boat stuff. They're going to be in to take you down right away, okay? We can talk more later if you want."

Sollux didn't reply, but he did relax a little as if the knowledge that the confrontation would be over shortly was enough to start calming his panic.

She reached out to put a hand on the Awakener's shoulder and started ushering him out - but before letting the door close she turned around to face Sollux again, for a few short moments.

"It's cool, Aero. You're going to be alright."

Silence lingered for a few more seconds, and with a sigh Starfall exited into the hallway outside.

[awakener]

The Awakener waited outside for her, trying not to look too anxious or distressed for the benefit of the guards. He didn't manage to be very convincing.

"I'm sorry," he said, when Starfall rejoined him. "I'm sorry, I didn't know, I –" His voice cracked. "What happened to him?"

[aerolith]

Starfall bit her lip at that question, raised a finger to suggest that he should wait a moment, and then turned back to Helion who had been waiting with the other guards outside.

"I think I've got this covered now, you can go back to doing what were doing," she said.

Helion gave her a sort of 'yeah sure,' look, but just shrugged. As soon as that was covered, she started leading the Awakener back towards the ascenders.

"I don't know, a lot of stuff I guess," she said, like she was annoyed with the helplessness in her own tone. She glanced back towards the door again, and then shook it off. "I mean, even after you get out of a gig like helmsmanship there's a lot of baggage to deal with, and it sounds like he has a ton of crap on top of even that."

"Like..." She glanced over to him and away again. "I'm pretty sure with you a lot of it probably has to do with all the sweeps he's spent being convinced you were fucking dead."

[awakener]

He winced.

"Well it wasn't like I could just get onto Trollian and tell everybody I knew what had happened," he hissed, a little too defensively. "I – shit. Shit, shit. I'm sorry. I shouldn't be here."

[aerolith]

She gave him a raised eyebrow look, like she thought he was being kind of absurd.

"Why not?" she asked. "Don't you think this is good news for him, after he gets over the whole 'from beyond the culling pile' part?"

[awakener]

"No!" he said, still trying to keep his voice down. "No, it's not, I'm not that guy any more, it'll only make things worse for both of us." He pushed a hand through his hair and made a quiet noise of despair. "Look, when I was eight I was a total piece of shit, okay, I – fuck, no wonder he freaked out, he fucking asked to see the Awakener and then..."

[aerolith]

Starfall didn't really look like she knew quite what to do with the hand of cards she'd just been dealt with this conversation, but she soldiered on sort of incredulously.

"Well, I mean, he did say you were an asshole but he's also been super fucked up over you being dead I guess? Like, he didn't even know about the Sufferer until like two perigee ago, so you'd think maybe he'd appreciate the long lost friend angle more..."

She put up her hands.

"Also, since when is you being less of a dick a bad thing?"

[awakener]

"It's not, but ..."

He trailed off, shaking his head in the manner of one who, put simply, just cannot deal with this at all.

"... You actually think he'd be glad to see me?" He hesitated. "Wait. Wait, fuck, are you saying he's talked about me?" His expression was somewhere between horrified, disbelieving and intrigued.

[aerolith]

"Well...yeah?" she started, giving him a look. "I mean how else would I know that he'd thought you were dead? We've got some good telepaths on reserve, man, but I'm not one of them."

She sighed, and let her hands drop, looking like she was debating something to herself. After a few moments, she flicked open one of the ascenders and guided him inside, with the conspiratory gait of someone who was about to tell a secret.

"Look," she said as soon as the doors closed. "You look like you need some kind of pep talk so I'm going to give you the schmaltzy version." She leaned back, taking a steady breath. "When we first raided his ship, I'm pretty sure he was looking to pull off some kind of murder suicide on our asses. Like, we weren't actually going to do anything bad - I mean, until we got in there we didn't even know anyone onboard was still alive. There were these crazy rumours about this ghost ship fucking around out there, and we managed to track it down, so..."

She batted away the topic with a wave of the hand. "Anyway, point is, I think he thought we were trying to like...capture him or something? So I think he was just going to kill everybody rather than face that, but when I realized how far off the deep end he was, I did the only thing I could think of that might show him we were friends."

She pulled the pendants out of her shirt, dangling them for him to see.

"I flashed him these, hoping that maybe he'd heard of Sufferists before and that it might get through to him. And it sort of did, I guess. He took one look at the Sufferist pendant and stopped what he was doing and let us help him. I assumed he was a follower or something but when I asked him, he was just totally clueless about it."

She gave him a not-quite smile and a shrug.

"He said it was just the sign of a friend he'd had on Alternia, who'd died before he was recruited. I guess it was as good of an omen as he could hope for."

[awakener]

He stared at Starfall as if she'd just told him that gravity made stuff go up.

Then he shook his head.

"But..."

He dropped his eyes, staring with intense confusion at a point on one of the walls of the ascender about level with his knee.

"... I guess I ought to talk to him, then," he said, after a protracted silence. "Fuck. I didn't think..." He covered his face with a hand, and left it there.

[aerolith]

She leaned to the side a little, like she was hoping to catch a glimpse around his hand.

"Didn't think what? That he'd miss you?"

[awakener]

"Yeah," he said, lowering his hand slowly. "He should have been better off without me." He paused, took a deep breath, and seemed to regain at least a semblance of composure. "But," he added, "I guess he was always kind of unreasonable."