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.

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[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."

[aerolith]

At that, she finally grinned more fully.

"Yeah, I got that impression, oddly enough," she said. "He'll probably want to talk later, though, after it's settled in some more. It was probably kind of bad timing for him, since I doubt being in that engine block again does great things for his head."

"He'll probably be weird about it," she said, after a pause. "But he's weird at everybody."

[awakener]

The Awakener laughed weakly. "Weird is fine. I just ... I didn't want to upset him." He sighed. "I should probably ... is there anywhere I could go on board here to be alone for a little while? I kind of have a lot to think about."

[aerolith]

"Oh, yeah, totally," she said, brushing that off with a wave of the hand. "I can probably get you a block to yourself and everything. The Aerolith is pretty fucking huge - I personally share a cocoon, but that's because one legged, cycloptic pilots are hella sexy, and not due any particular lack of space."

She tapped a few keys on the control pad.

"I'll take you to the habitation blocks and see what we can drum up."

[awakener]

He laughed, glancing not for the first time at the exposed machinery of her leg, but going by his smile he wasn't about to dispute her assertions about the sex appeal of bionic amputees.

"Thanks," he said, with a sort of weary relief. "I mean, pretty much anything would be great, usually I just sleep in people's ablution traps."

[aerolith]

She snickered at that genially.

"Pretty sure we can get you set up better than that." The ascender slowed to a halt, the door leisurely sliding open. "Come on, I'll show you around."