Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You wake up because your palmhusk is going off in really close proximity to your auricular sponge clot and making your horns hurt.  You slap at it awkwardly and manhandle it up to somewhere approximately around your face, and the first thing you hear is your agent’s high-pitched, breathless voice (why does she have to get so much louder when she’s excited?).

“Karkat,” she says, and you start to bristle for a second before you remind yourself who you’re talking to.  You know her.  Hell, you even kind of like her.  She can call you by your first name, if she has to.  “Karkat!  Sugar you will not believe the deal I just got.”

“Mmngh,” you say, because hell, you just checked the clock on your palmhusk and it’s a few hours before sunset.  You're so fucking tired. 

“You’ve got another shoot,” she says.  You’re about to start growling at her for real—what the fuck, that’s nothing new, people are lining the fuck up to shoot with me— But she lowers her voice and goes on, like it’s a big secret, and you have to shut up to hear her.

“You have a shoot,” she says, “…with Capricorn.”

—

Normally you’d get a warning for a shoot a couple of days in advance, with enough time to vet the person you're supposed to work with and decide if you wanted to take the gig—you're big enough in the business, now, with your imperial sanction and your absolutely bugfuck download numbers, you can actually say 'no' to one or two jobs before people start bitching about it.  But Capricorn is a celebrity, and you’re a celebrity, and now that the moons and your schedules have all aligned, his agents apparently don’t want to wait any more than yours do.

The porn’s not going to fucking make itself.  You’re on set the next afternoon with a folder full of info in your hands.

A surprisingly small amount of the night is devoted to the actual shooting parts.  You get there early, get preened at and picked over, and then they turn you loose, in a relatively low-traffic area of the studio, while they get the set arranged.

Possibly you should give a shit what the set looks like, but you don't.  It doesn’t make a difference to you where they put what, since you don't work off a script.  So instead of hovering around and getting in anybody's way, you find an odd corner and settle down with your folder to get a look at what you’re going to be working with.

The folder doesn't include a picture of Capricorn's face, but you don't really need one.  They've been having you watch his videos ever since he got popular enough to challenge your download numbers and got imperially sanctioned, and you know what he looks like.  From what you've seen of his oeuvre, his skills are mostly based in an impressive ability to sell his fucked-upness as genuine, actually in need of conciliation.  He's built for the job, too, purpleblood-tall but thin and fragile, and his horns are elegant and nicely-curved but yellow and soft-looking.  You couldn't tell in his videos if it was actual malnutrition or just a convincing paintjob; he wouldn't be the first troll to get a taste of fame and start taking some drastic measures to look as pitiable as possible.  He gets a lot of mileage out of the big, sad, purple eyes and thick eyelashes, and he's got a knack for making himself look smaller, hurt and timid.

There's also the really convincing way he lashes out and tries to maul people when he's spooked.

There's a lot of debate online about whether his persona is acted or whether he's genuinely unstable, and you haven't made a decision either way at this point.  You're not all that worried about it, honestly.  99% of the time you're acting, but you've had people flip out in the middle of shoots before, and going through the motions with them brought them right back down again.  Doing the thing for real was just the same as doing it for the cameras; simple and routine.  Practically boring.

...It's fair to assume Capricorn won't have to do much character work, beyond looking—you're assuming, by the sound of water being tested somewhere on-set—dirty and sad and upset.  The scraps of character setup that you do need are brief enough to fit on a single sheet of paper, near the end of the folder; you're a visitor, looking for your kismesis.  You're intended to walk into the wrong place, find this desperate, exhausted shut-in and clean him up real good.  An unstable highblood, whose pitiable traits include...

You look down the page, and then flip to the next one, eyebrows rising.  Fuck, could they pile this shit on any heavier?  Abandoned by his lusus, sopor-addicted, touch-starved, uncontrollable rages...holy shit, there's making stuff up and then there's globes-out lying.  You couldn't make this guy sound like more of a mess if you tried. 

There’s a sudden rise in the level of noise behind you, and you turn to look over a stack of boxes and film and shit, toward the set.  A crowd is gathering around one side of it, all of them in a circle around a big skinny, lanky figure with curvy horns that poke out over everyone's heads.  It turns slightly—you catch a glimpse of a white-painted face, a wild tangle of hair and a baggy, beat-up black jacket with a swooping purple sign on the shoulder.

You can’t see much of tonight's moirail, but he seems to have come already dressed for the part—the ragged, too-big clothes, the mess of his hair…he’s painted up, even.  The paint looks smeared and clumsy—not by choice, apparently, because as you're watching one of the satellite trolls orbiting around him bends him over and takes a rag to it, smearing one corner of his painted smile, and he winces.  Ugh, and your suspicions are correct, according to the dossier; this is supposed to turn into a shower shoot.  You’re going to be finding paint in under your claws for weeks. 

Capricorn's clothes aren't the only thing already in character; he's standing small, shoulders hunched and arms wrapped around himself like he's cold despite the oversized jacket.  He looks even skinner than you remember from the videos, rawboned and fragile and lanky.  For a guy so freakishly tall he keeps having to duck his head carefully to avoid tangling his horns in wires and lights, he manages to look real fucking breakable. It’s an art-form, you have to suppose.  If he wasn’t good at putting on the vulnerable act he wouldn’t open himself up for papping, and he wouldn’t be the second-most searched-for name in the industry.  Not a skillset you've ever bothered to cultivate, but one that's still crucial to the job.

As though to remind you exactly how much is engineered, someone comes into the shot just then and reaches up to Capricorn's face again. He winces even harder this time, when they start to smear something across his paint, hunching like he wants to pull away, but he doesn't.  Just stands there, frowning, and lets them wipe an artful smudge of dirt across his cheek.  He really is part of the church then, at least that part of his profile was true.  How they convinced a highblood to fuck up his holy smile or whatever the fuck, you have no idea.

Still, even if he's lapsed enough to let them commit cullworthy offenses to his religious regalia, he's obviously highblood enough to wear it in the first place, and not pleased to have it fucked with.  You don't know exactly what you're feeling, about that; it's dangerous, subversive even.  A mutantblood like you, even a famous one, taking care of an actual purpleblood cultist…going as far as fucking taking his paint off, probably.  They can’t very well want you to clean him up but leave his face alone. 

“…Trance or something,” someone is explaining, a few feet away in a hissing whisper you would have to be deaf not to hear.  You look away from your new moirail, dragging yourself out of your thoughts. “He doesn't want strangers disturbing him.  Fuck off.”

“I don't want anybody disturbing me," you growl, and snap the folder shut.  The guy whispering at the top of his lungs is one of your agent's agents—a toadying little douchebag, you’ve never liked him.  He’s talking to someone you don’t know, but by the mark on her nametag you’re pretty sure she’s with your temporary palemate’s little squad of makeup artists, agents, handlers and bodyguards.  She raises her eyebrows, horns and hands in obvious surrender and backs off, and your minion's minion turns back to you and smiles a huge, condescending smile.

The thing is.  It’s not that you don’t get why you have people hanging around making sure nobody comes near you while you’re zoned out.  You’re one of the empress’s favorites, after all, your videos have gone all over the empire.  You’ve had more than your fair share of desperate stalkers.  There have been plenty of trolls who think you’re the only one to shoosh them, and take it really badly when instead of crumpling down and soothing them you call security, draw your sickles, and tell them to fuck off.  You get why the douche squad have to hang around you all the time.  They’re just…almost universally assholes.

You raise your eyebrows at him, and flick your claws, shooing him away.  He doesn't move.

"...So leave?" you suggest, with brittle civility.

“Oh, uh—"  You can see the guy not knowing how to deal with you.  He settles on being a patronizing shithead, which is his mistake.  Patronizing shitheads, you know how to deal with.  You’d bet he’s only been around when you’re in scenes before now—he leans down to you like he’s talking to a wriggler and talks really sweetly at you.  “I’m just trying to get him to give you some peace and quiet before you start your scene, Kar—”

“Vantas,” you snap.  “I’m Vantas to you, or Cancer.  You don’t know me, I don’t know you, I’m sure as fuck not pale for you.  Unless you’ve got enough money to hire me for a private shoot, which..." you look him up and down and sneer.  "...Let's be fucking real.  You don't.”

He actually takes a step back.  Then his face does that familiar transformation, from sickly-sweet to bitter and pissed off.

“Oh, no," he says, coldly, “They don't pay me well enough to buy you, Vantas.  You’re one of a kind.  Freaks are expensive.”

“Mm.”  Freak, huh?  Yeah, that’s getting him fired.  You put on your warmest little smile.  “What a shame!  You should go find a job that pays better. They’re always firing people around here.”

He seems to get your message, because he fucks right off.  Hopefully, directly into an open cullpit, where you'll never have to see his stupid fucking face again.  You settle back in, grumbling to yourself, and open the dossier again—

“Shooting in five!”

Ugh, shit.  You’re not going to have time to get a drink, are you?  That’s okay, it’s okay.  Doesn’t matter.  Take a deep breath.

Let it out.

You’re not Karkat Vantas.  You’re not an actor, you’re not famous, you’re nobody special, you’re here to meet your kismesis.  The guy you’re supposed to be doesn’t know he’s about to meet his fated moirail.  He doesn’t know how to shoosh someone, he’s never had a palemate before. 

You’ve never had a palemate before. 

You’re here to meet your kismesis.  You’re coming up to a door—of a hivestem, you walked up the stairs to get here, didn’t you?  The room inside is dark and (there aren’t any cameras where the room’s wall should be, just a wall, there’s just a wall) there’s a troll huddled in the corner in a heap of old clothes and broken furniture, knees pulled up to his thorax, head bowed.

Here’s the thing about you; when you start a scene, you aren’t you anymore.  It’s really just, like…a survival mechanism, but you’re pretty sure it’s why they all love you  They can tell, even if you know that this is only temporary, that you won’t give a flying fuck about this guy if you meet him tomorrow; right now this is real.  What you feel about him is real.  Made-up story?  What made-up story?  He got left behind by his lusus, his hair is a tangled mess, he looks on the ragged edge of flipping his shit and you’re moving forward for him before they even tell you they’re shooting. 

He looks up at you, breathing hard and fast and panicked, opens his mouth to speak and instead of words he comes out with a long, low whine.

“Is this your hive?”  You ask him, and he croaks something in the affirmative.  You barely hear it.  What you're feeling might be temporarily genuine, but you’ve said this script and a hundred like it hundreds of times and you could do it in your sleep. “I must be on the wrong floor—I’m looking for my kismesis’ hivestem.”

You go through the briefest possible pretense of conversation.  He manages to get himself at least part of the way upright, clinging on every word like focusing is a chore; he tells you the hive is upstairs, and you turn around to go, face the cameras for a money shot—

“Wait!”

The tiny part of you that remains an actor is impressed.  There was a really good tone of desperation under that, tight and wobbly and barely controlled.  You go still and bite your lip, eyes wide and innocent for the camera; it follows you around as you turn to look back at him.  Capricorn's standing, but barely; he slumps against the wall like his legs barely hold him up, reaching after you with one of those thin, long-fingered hands.  His face is open and soft and perfectly vulnerable, pleading; there are beads of sweat on his temples under his wild hair and on the bridge of his nose, and he looks an inch away from breaking down.

“…Don’t leave me,” he says, pleading, and something about the look in his eyes sends shivers up and down your spine.  He really does look desperate, like he’s on the edge.  “Don’t leave me, it’s so—so fuckin’ dark and I—I can’t—” he trails off, mouthing silently.  When you don’t move to come back to him his shoulders hitch in a stifled, convulsive little noise, almost a sob, and he slumps back and slides down the wall, clutching at his head.  Kneading at the tangles of his own hair, rocking slowly back and forth and back again.  ”…Won’t stop talking," he croaks, more to himself than to you, "They won’t—my fucking head—”

When you put a hand on his shoulder, he jumps and gasps so sharp he chokes on it.  He coughs and shudders and stares at you, and close up you can see the fear and the tight-coiled edge of defensive rage in his eyes.  He’s vulnerable now, but you can tell—anyone watching could tell—if you don’t handle this just right, he’s going for your throat fangs-first.

“Okay,” you say, and settle down slowly in front of him, not making any sudden movements.  “Okay, I won’t go anywhere.  What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head mutely, makes a noise that’s half a growl and more a whimper. 

“Voices in your head,” you repeat, buying time, thinking fast—not the direction they suggested you take it in the script, but he looks distressed enough you can definitely swing it.  When you repeat it back to him he cringes and one of his thin hands knots in his hair.  A low snarl hums in his chest, almost a purr but with a rumbling, rolling edge to it that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.  “Hey.  Hey, focus on me, okay?  Whatever’s going on in your pan, it’s not real.”

He makes an anguished noise and jerks like he’s trying to shake off a hand that’s touching him.  For a second you’re concerned, and not just as the character—then you catch yourself.  He’s an actor, you’re an actor, you’re actors. Goddammit.  You slam that feeling deep down inside you, even while you let it flash across your face as pure, pale concern. 

“Feels—FUCKING—real,” he grits out.

“It’s not.”  You scoot a little bit closer, down on your knees, leaning down to try to get a good look at his face.  “I’m real.  I’m here.  You and me, nobody else.”

“You’ll go,” he says into his knees.  “It'll end and you’ll go and they’ll motherfucking come back—!”

When you reach out and lay a hand on his shoulder, he jumps so hard he almost throws your hand off, and he barely catches himself before he can rake his claws across your face.  His shoulders heave as he stares at you, eyes wide and wild and almost frenzied; his face is gaunt and desperate in the dark.  You keep your hand on his shoulder and let him go still again.

“You’re okay,” you tell him, and he jerks, clenches his claws on his legs to keep himself from swiping at you.  Your whole body throbs with pity, and for now it's so real.  “You’re okay now, I’ll take care of you.  Let me—  Let me make you feel good.”

In-act you know, of course, that he’s starved for your touch, that he needs your affection, but in scene or out it still shocks you a little how quickly he goes for you, how he throws himself into your waiting arms and huddles up against you like you’re the only thing that can save him.  It makes something hot and possessive and strange throb in your guts, something fiercer than the gentle softness you’ve trained yourself into. 

You tamp it down hard.  That’s not what they pay you for.

“There you go,” you hum at him, and one of the directors makes a motion you know well at the corner of your vision; you bring a hand up to dig through his tangled hair, find the root of his horn and scratch gently.  He croons and shakes.  It's a hell of an act; unstable, cracked to the point of breaking and grasping at you to save him—it's easy, startlingly easy, to forget you're acting.

“…There you go,” you repeat, and bow your head without prompting to kiss the top of his head.  He smells like sweat; under that, like loneliness and fear, like a troll who hasn't been touched or talked to for weeks.  There's dirt smeared through the paint on his cheek.

"Shit's all, motherfuckin', twisted around, in my head," he mumbles against your chest—slurred from the way you're gently rubbing around his horns, but still clear enough.  Clear enough for you to understand. (For the cameras to pick up—cameras?  What cameras?)  “All the loud, all the raging, all the quiet—  All the—  It won't, nnh…won’t leave me alone.  Don't leave me alone…”

“You’d feel better if you weren’t locked up in a dark block,” you tell him, playing chiding and reluctantly gentle.  “Come the fuck on, man.  This place would drive anyone crazy.”  You drag your fingers through his hair again—it’s a mess of knots.  You twist your hand so they’re visible, so the camera picks it up, so everyone can see what a mess he is, before you tease them out and let go of the hair you had wound around your fingers.

“When was the last time you washed your hair?”  You ask him, and he shivers.  You can almost feel the audience who’ll watch this; the eyes on you, the hands on skin, a thousand thousand tiny, wanting moans.  “You’re filthy.”  You lean in, close enough you know the recorders behind him will pick it up, close enough you’re whispering in his ear.  “If you need help..."

“Fuck—yes, please fucking yes—” He keens low and sweet and needy, and presses hard into your hand.  It’s strange how cool the ridges of his horns feel, smooth and cold under your fingertips.  The tangles are worse around the bases of them, a greasy, dirty mess with chips of unpolished horn catches under your claws.  When was the last time he got his horns cleaned?  “Please, clean me up, brother, fix me, I wanna feel right again, please…”

You haven’t ever been all that into dirty talk, but holy fucking shit.  You let yourself be taken aback—it’s in character, right?—for just a second, and then you’re in charge, guiding him, keeping your hands on his face and his horns.  He follows you blindly as the cameras do, doesn’t bother to open his eyes to see where you’re taking him, and you can’t breathe.  Maybe the lights are too hot.

“Come on,” you tell him; hunched over you, a column of bones and neglect and need.  “…Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Scene!”

It's disorienting, snapping out of it, a familiar kick in the thorax.  You stop at the edge of the stage, blinking it off; someone is already there at your elbow, holding out two bottles of water.  Apparently they're smart enough not to try to make bullshit smalltalk, because they don't say anything or get pushy about handing you one, just hold them out patiently and wait for you to surface.  You nod at them, take the first one, and turn to hold one out in Capricorn's direction.

He doesn't take it.  He's not where he was last time you saw him, standing by your shoulder; he's slumped over by the edge of the set in a corner. He's got his eyes squeezed shut and a hand knotted in his own hair, and one of his fangs is digging at his lip hard enough it's leaving a raw purple line in his paint.  You pause in place, startled and kind of irritated—here you are making your best effort not to be a complete sack of shit to your rival and he's not even paying attention.  He's been on the papped end of more pale smut than just about any other troll in the galaxy, what's he doing freaking out between scenes like some kind of rookie?

He did make it look pretty fucking genuine, though.  It's hard enough for you to get your pan in and out of character in the brief break between scenes, and you're not the one here who has to sell chaos and fear and lack of control and still make it look good for the cameras.  Being the unstable one every single fucking time has to be kind of hard on your thinkpan, right?

Capricorn's hand is resting on his own head where you touched him, right by one horn.  As you're watching, he takes another rattly, shuddering breath and squeezes, hard and clumsy like he's not thinking about it, and his fangs scrape at his lip again.

You’re so used to feeling that pang of pity when you’re in character, it takes you almost a minute of pointless staring before you realize that that’s exactly what you’re feeling now—and not even for his character, for the actor.  The fucking actor himself.  You know jack-shit about him but you’re aching a little bit inside, watching.

You take a deep breath, give yourself a couple of mental slaps across the metaphorical face, and then straighten yourself up and march over to nudge Capricorn on the shoulder with a water bottle.  He jumps all over, stares around and then up at you, and then realizes who you are and goes even darker purple across his long ears and skinny neck.

“Thanks,” he says, really quiet, and takes the water bottle.  His hands are still twitching like he wants to claw something.  You leave him alone.

You sit there in silence together while people shuffle the set around next to you, turning the dark, dingy main block into a lighter and slightly less dingy ablutions block.  Capricorn drinks his water, stares out at the set, and doesn’t say a word to you.  He does mutter to himself, though—he seems to still be jumpy from the scene, and after a performance like that, you have to grudgingly admit you’re not surprised.  That was…intensely real-feeling.  It made your job even easier, like you were hardly acting at all, like you were genuinely pale for each other and he was genuinely distressed.  A shitload better than the amateurs who have to stop in the middle of the scene to read their scripts again and remind themselves of their characters.

You have just enough time to finish your water, and then you're rolling again, barefoot on the thin, fake carpet outside an ablutions block, holding onto him like you never left.

Deep breaths.  (Rolling in five.  Four.) Leave Karkat Vantas behind. (Two, one—)

He's even jumpier than he was before the break, and when you lead him into shot and your hand slips down the back of his neck, he balks and tenses up.  When you squeeze a little, meaning to be calm him down, he locks up all over and snarls louder than he has this entire time, and you loosen your grip immediately. 

“You’re okay,” you murmur to him—the golden words, the most important words—and leave the door open behind you.  “Look, you can leave whenever you want.”  And then, a little daringly, you reach out and pap his cheek gently with the hand not on the back of his head.  There's a split second where you think he's going to snap at your hand; as soon as your fingers touch his skin his eyes flutter and he softens up, leaning into the touch.  Good, alright.  So you've got work to do before you get to the ablutions part of the scene, that's fine.  You can still hear his hoarse voice in your head, pleading fix me—you have to calm him down before you can start cleaning him up, you can move slow if you have to.  You wouldn't know what to do anyway, right?  You just came up here to meet your kismesis.  You've never had a moirail before...

It's just as well nobody expects pale porn to get right down to it like the flushed and pitch ones do, because it takes you an unusually long time to figure out how to deal with this guy.  Touching and talking to him keep him from attacking you, but actually calming him down… that’s harder.  You finally figure out something that works when you take his face and turn him to look you in the eyes, force him to see you—“Look at me,” you tell him, and when his eyes meet yours some of his shaking fades away. 

So, he needs to be reminded that…what.  That you’re there?  That you’re real?  Voices in his head…highbloods don't have the same kinds of psionics as lowbloods do, but they like to boast plenty about royal chucklevoodoos and shit, even if they're cagey about what they are and how they work.  Some trolls just hatch with pans halfway-cracked, and it's just a matter of luck and skill whether they crack in a way the empire can use or not.  If he hadn't stumbled into pale porn, whatever psionic bullshit he's dealing with sounds like it could've easily seen him culled—

Assuming that's real.  And not a character choice, like it almost certainly is.  Fuck, Vantas, focus.

You have plenty of time to think about it, is the thing.  Some part of you spaces out once you find an angle that works; you’ve done it so many times before, it doesn’t require too much thought.  You keep coming back to the moment in startling bursts, though; you like how his face fits into the palm of your hand.  How he turns his face so his breath brushes over the pad of your thumb, not quite kissing your fingertips but close enough that something in your chest flutters.  The way he moves, how well it fits the way you're touching him.  Well, he has to have a lot of experience…

Shit, you shifted closer without thinking about it, now he’s startled.  Less startled this time, though—he’s getting used to you.  What does catering have for lunch today?  (Why does he have to look so hard into your eyes, fuck, why is it so hard to breathe?)

By the time he’s settled down enough for you to take your hand away, your palm and your fingertips are coated in white and grey paint and the design on his face is hopelessly smudged. 

Hopeless…yeah, that’s the word.  You sigh and swipe a thumb over his cheekbone, holding it up between the two of you to show off the smear of grey-white on your fingertip. 

“Come on,” you say, “Let’s get this stuff off.”

You catch sight of a movement out of the corner of your eye, the director sitting up, eyes widening, shaking his head and waving his hands to get your attention—

Capricorn hesitates for a split second, eyes fixed on yours, not breathing, not moving.  Then, very slowly, he nods.

There isn’t a murmur—cameras still rolling and all that shit, you're professionals—but there’s a ripple of movement around the edge of the set that is the silent equivalent.  You notice.  You barely notice.  There's no cameras.  You smile at him, and he doesn’t smile back but he doesn’t snarl anymore either.  He’s…docile.  Not soothed, but tamed for the moment.  Under all the layers of personality you’ve poured over yourself, something thrills with excitement—you’ve got this.  He’s genuinely dangerous, but you put the work in, this time, and you’ve got him. 

His paint is thick and waxy, made to stay, and getting it off actually is a pretty involved process.  You have to scrub a bit, but there are bottles of hide softener and contamination deterrent around the block (around the set) and you slowly wear away the layer of white and grey that’s hiding his face. 

He keeps his eyes on yours the entire time, like he’s looking for something, and you look back at him, not quite sure why but feeling like there’s something happening here, like there’s something happening that you should be picking up on.  He has a few scars under his paint, you’re surprised to notice.  At least one you vaguely remember him getting in the course of one of his videos.  You’d been impressed by the blood effects.  Looks like they weren’t just effects.

He gets twitchier and jumpier the more paint you get off, but thankfully the sensation of your soft cloth on his skin keeps him from snapping or struggling at all.  But when you’re finally done and you pull the cloth away and reach for the hem of his shirt, he balks and lets out a harsh, full-throated snarl. 

You back off immediately, but the harm there is done—he’s jumpy again, hissing between his teeth.

“You can do it for yourself, right?”  You step back, and he stops hissing, at least, breathing harder again, calming slowly as he sees you stand down.  “It’s okay.  There’s nobody here but us.  Nobody here but you and me, go on…”

He’s clumsy getting undressed, still shaking and flinching to look up at you every time you move, but he gets his clothes off eventually.  When you half-turn to come over to him he winces and huddles in on himself.

“You can get in first if you want,” you tell him, really soft and soothing, that exact tone of voice you’ve perfected over the sweeps.  “Get the water just right.  I’ll be there in a second.”  It’ll give him something to think about, too…you move a little bit to one side so the camera can come around you and watch you get undressed.  There’s not much you’re shy about anymore, but you make a good show of acting like it, and glance over at the ablution trap while you get ready, thinking, schooling your face into pensive nervousness. 

He’s huddling in the spray when you open the curtain and move in, sitting on the ledge at the other side of the trap, under the water—neither of you pays attention to the camera that hovers over you and moves around you.  When you step in he looks up and presses away from you just a little, wide-eyed and nervous and embarrassed.  For a second, the two of you just stop and look at each other.

Naked, he’s even more pathetically battered than you expected.  His skin is stretched tight over his bones; you can see the sharp angles of vestigial cartilaginous wing-struts, the shallow fake gill-slits of a purpleblood on the line of violet, every bump of his spinal column.  His arms and hands are bruised, who knows why, and his fangs have left vivid purple splits in his lips.  He tilts his head up to you under the water and his face is soft and needy, his hair hangs in his face in soaked sheets, leaving only a single anguished purple eye clear for you to see.  His throat is stretched out and bared by his raised chin and his low shoulders, and it makes you want to run your fingertips over it and kiss his worried forehead and stroke his hair out of his eyes.

“Turn around for me,” you purr at him, and he groans softly in pure relief and turns his back.  You’re sunk deep in your role and you’re touched breathless; he’d turn his back and bare the nape of his neck to you, when you’d just met, that’s so fucking romantic it’s almost…

Serendipitous.

No.  Nope, fuck no, in-character or not, that's a dangerous fucking word.  You can say it for the cameras, but you never let it into your head.  You shut that thought down cold behind your warm smile, and reach out to touch the back of his bowed neck. 

He jumps and snarls a little at your touch—a threat show with no threat behind it, an automatic reaction.  He’s scared.  Distantly you can tell there are cameras around you, watching his face, getting the good shots of whatever his expression is as you touch him, but you don’t think about it too much.  Reach over his shaking shoulders.  Stroke his face gently.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” you tell him.  “You don’t have to be scared.  Shhh.”

There are five deep scratches on his shoulder—not any kind of makeup or decoration, they’re real.  Puffy and bloody and painful-looking, swollen enough they might be infected.  He whines low in his chest when the water touches them, and even louder when you have to scrub at them gently and break off the crust of sweat and dirt to get them clean. 

By the time you finish cleaning the cuts on his shoulder, his shoulders are hitching unevenly with every breath.  You don’t even fucking believe—but he is.  When you lean around and get a good look at his face, there are streaks of purple tears on his cheeks.  It’s been a long, long time since someone could genuinely cry for you during a shoot, and the last time was almost a sweep ago, with a jade girl you’d shot with at least a dozen times.  You knew her.  You trusted each other.  The vulnerability of it, of tears of pain when he only just met you, when he barely knows you, rocks you to your core both in-character and out.  You shoosh and soothe and wipe them away and that just makes his tears come harder, his face crumpling and open without his paint to cover it, bruised knuckles scrubbing at his eyes.  He looks so young, like this, and you’re keenly, painfully aware that you can’t be much older. 

Your insides twist up and this time it's more than a pang of pity that hits you.  Pity for how vulnerable he is, and how long it must have taken to pretend, both at the same time—who he is and who he's pretending to be, this poor, stupid, fucked up troll and how stupid and fucked-up this job's got him, crying for a stranger in a block that's not his, letting a stranger's claws trace the flutter of his pulse. 

You’re supposed to be running this scene, comforting, commanding, but the miserable relief on his face as he cries is tugging you inside out.  You don't remember how the scene was supposed to go—you don’t fucking care how the scene was supposed to go.  There is no scene.  There’s just your hands and his bare, tear-stained face and his face pressing desperately against your palms.  You smooth your fingers through his wet hair, coaxing him around, and he gives in as soon as he realizes what you're trying to do, turning back to face you.  He has to sink to his knees to put his face against your chest, and he does, without hesitation, letting you press his head against your thorax and work cleaner through the tangles of his hair, crooning to him.

Getting his hair clean is a production, in or out of scene.  You have to do a lot of careful working at the knots, fixing the tangles carefully without tugging at his scalp.  You don’t think he takes well to pain, and he’s still crying—great, jagged sobs, of relief as much as pain, you think.  The last thing you want to do is make him worse when he’s already so broken up.  You do almost as much soothing and petting as you do untangling and cleaning. 

And then you’re done, and you comb his hair out of his face with your fingers and, on a sudden impulse, turn his face up to you to kiss his forehead.  He looks half out of it, cried out and shaky—he leans into your hands and all of a sudden, soft but unmistakable, you hear the sound of a tiny, utterly genuine purr.

Your bloodpusher leaps so hard you actually physically swallow, like you have to keep it from jumping out of your mouth.  You’ve had videos where your partner “purred” before—but they dubbed it in later, you just had to imagine hard that it was happening.  You can feel the soft hum of his thorax and the subtle rise and fall of the sound as he breathes.  You couldn’t fake that shit.  The character is so pale he can’t breathe.  Karkat Vantas is suddenly, devastatingly terrified.

“Does that feel good?” your voice is hushed without you meaning it to be, you can't pretend anymore that your hands aren't shaking.  Is that you the actor or you the character?  You can’t fucking tell anymore, your breath doesn’t seem to want to come out and your eyes are stinging.  He doesn’t answer, just leans his face into your neck and purrs at you, utterly unguarded, as vulnerable as he can possibly be. 

People are moving around the set, gesturing at each other, trying to argue without making a sound.  You’ve been ignoring them so far, but suddenly you’re annoyed by them.  The fuck do they think they’re doing?  You finally got him to relax for you, they're going to set him off again, fuck.

Footsteps. Someone's walking towards you, and you're so hazy you half-open your eyes and snarl at them, curling protectively up in front of him.

“Hey,” starts the person who walked into the shot—then stops for a second.  When they go on their voice is deeper and grittier, with a sharp, scathing hiss that your pan reads, faintly, as pitch.  “—The hell do you think you’re doing, you lowlife?!  I know you think I’m the most loathsome thing in existence, but making my palemate fucking cheat on me?  That’s low.”

This isn't how the scene was supposed to go.  Some part of you knows that, and is pissed and confused. The rest of you is burning with rage, boiling over.  Your kismesis, yeah, he’s your kismesis, the one you came here to see.  You’re not acting you’re living, you’re somewhere else. There's no cameras here, just your asshole pitchmate, pretending he's pale for the starving-thin troll collapsed against you and shaking.  The one you found huddled in a dark room on his own, filthy and lonely, he says they’re pale.

“Take better care of your fucking moirail then,” you snarl at him.  Your hand is combing through the purple-blood’s hair, gentle and possessive and barely under your control.  “You piece of shit, you don’t deserve him!”  (You're fucking this up, you can't be like this, snarling and pissed, not in front of the camera, what the fuck is wrong with you—)

“I,” the purple-blood starts to sit up, but the further he gets from you the harder he shakes.  The towel slips off his thin shoulder to show a slice of pale silver skin.  He’s still soothed and foggy and weak and so fucking vulnerable.  “…No wait, shit, he, he takes care of—”

“Where was he when you needed him?”  You run your fingers over the scratches on his shoulder, the swelling that you had to clean.  He shudders.  You turn up at the asshole who walked in—your pan tells you distantly that you know that face.  It's one of his agents, it’s someone you work with, it’s…

Then he makes a move towards the figure in your arms and you’re snarling again.

“I was pitch for you,” you growl at him, “But you left him like this and you still say you’re pale for him?!  You’re disgusting, you piece of shit, I should tear your fucking throat out!”

A hand touches your face.

It startles you enough to stop you dead—you turn and stare and the purpleblood stares back at you.  His thin, cool fingers stroke the crest of your cheek, the bridge of your nose; when you just stare at him he shifts in closer, makes a soft, rumbling croon in the depths of his chest and paps you gently.   

The thought makes it through again; this isn't right, this isn't what you're for.  You’re supposed to…you’re the one who always…

Oh fuck it feels so fucking right though.  The hot fog of rage that was starting to rise in your thinkpan is easing away. 

“Fuck,” you get out, croaking and hoarse, and you don’t know what you’ll do if he goes back to that—that heinous, fucking—  Oh, shit, his hands are so cool on your skin. This isn't anywhere even close to the script,  it's wrong and great and fucked up and you don't even know if you're still in character or not when you say,  "Don't let him.  Just—fuck. He doesn't deserve you."

The purpleblood looks at you for a second—opens his mouth, closes it again and bites his lip.  You can see the jutting ridges of his collarbones, the scrapes on his shoulder are oozing a trickle of purple blood…

He turns back to your pitchmate—the actor—your pitchmate, and his hand stays on your shoulder.

“…Guess it wasn’t as right as we thought, huh?”  He asks, this lovely, sweet little rasp of a voice, and takes a deep breath.  You squeeze his shoulder—he settles a little, raises his voice a little.  “Gotta ask you to leave, brother.”

Your kismesis rears back, affronted.  “You don't get to just—!”

“I said—” Capricorn bares all his fangs, draws himself up and towers suddenly over you, one arm around you as he snarls—like a threat, like a claim, a real highblood growl, possessive and forbidding.  You've watched dozens of his videos and he’s never made a sound like that. “Leave us alone.”

Your ex-kismesis fucks off. Backs out, still watching you. The purpleblood settles back on his haunches, and he doesn't let go of you, which is.  Important. That’s.

It.

Fuck.

Fuck what the hell was that, fuck. 

You stumble through the rest of the scene, but nobody seems to care that your lines are less fluid than normal, that your expressions seem strained.  You finish up as fast as trollishly possible, and stumble off the stage the second they hand you your money.

About a minute and a half later you’re sitting on the ground in the hallway outside the studio, back pressed against a reassuringly cool wall, head on your knees and horns throbbing.  Your digestion sack feels like it’s been shaken hard and hasn’t settled yet, your thoughts won’t hold still long enough for you to string a sentence together and—yeah.  You’ve got greasepaint under your claws.

You’re just wondering how quickly you can possibly get home and into your slime, preferably without talking to anyone, when you hear footsteps.  They get closer, closer…and then stop.

“Hey, brother,” says a sleepy, vague-sounding voice.   “Can a motherfucker get his sit on down next to you?”

It's hard to look Capricorn in the eyes, for some stupid reason. You force yourself to do it anyway, because you’re not a coward. You’re not a coward and this was just another shoot anyway.  What’s so different about this guy? Absolutely fucking nothing, is what.  You're fine.  This is fine.

Capricorn grins at you when you look up at him, big, uneven teeth a little bit too big for his mouth.  He has a dumb overbite like yours, and much longer eyefangs, long enough to poke out over his lower lip.  He hasn’t bothered to brush out his hair—it’s still a damp, tangled mess.  Your fingers itch to brush it out.  You jolt yourself, remind yourself you don’t have a character to stick to. 

The urge doesn’t go away.

“I’m Gamzee,” he says, and shakes his hair out of his eyes.  When he smiles again it’s a little higher on one side than the other, and it makes his cheeks dimple.  He is horribly, disgustingly, unrelentingly cute as fuck.  It’s made worse, so much worse, by how hard it is to see, because he doesn’t fucking take care of himself.  He could be pretty as hell if he would just trim and brush his hair a little bit, polish his horns... It drives you off the fucking handle to see people with great, long, elegant horns like he’s got who don't fucking take care of them.  If he would just eat enough to fill out his hollow cheeks and scrawny shoulders...

His face is freshly painted, and this time it’s crisp and neat, meticulous like you wouldn't have figured he was even capable of.  He’s wearing a pair of huge, baggy drawstring pants and a clean black shirt with his sign on the front.   He gets down awkwardly on his skinny knees next to you and holds out a hand to you.  You glare at it for a second, thinking it over, and then take it and give it a single firm shake, holding on no longer than you have to. 

His palms are cool and smooth and soft—and when he laid them on your face you went warm and gentle inside.  You don’t fucking understand.  You never reacted well to other people papping you before, that’s why you’re always the one taking care of your partner, doing the shooshing and the papping and the cleaning and the reassuring.  When other people papped you it didn’t work.

You realize you’ve been staring at him without answering, for a lot longer than you should.  Especially considering his blood color, and how much debauchery you just went through with him. He doesn’t look upset, but with a lot of highbloods it can be impossible to tell. 

“Karkat,” you say, reluctantly, and he brightens up even further and holds out a bottle to you.

“Returning the favor, my main motherfucker,” he explains, when you stare at him. It takes a second before you remember your break between scenes.  You handed him a water-bottle, didn’t you?  Seems like ages ago.  You take the bottle, and try not to feel like you’re sealing a deal. 

Capricorn—Gamzee—shuffles around and then flops back onto his ass so his back thuds against the wall.  He’s even more ludicrous-looking when he’s sitting next to you, a skinny pair of legs in too-baggy pants. 

“Man,” he says, eventually, as you both watch the set get taken down.  “…You know we got another shoot after this one?”

You didn’t, actually.  You wonder if your guys know about it yet, if his are just assuming that yours will be up for it.  Then again, he doesn’t seem to be waiting for an answer.   “Think my arm’s gonna get infected or some shit,” he says vaguely, and he glances at you, almost shy.  “Might not be in any sort of place in my pan to say it next time, so, uh.”  He grins.  “…One hell of a time.  You got skills all pourin’ out your motherfuckin’ auriculars, bro.”

That takes you aback like a slap in the face.  He grins at you, utterly guileless, like his people haven’t been pushing him to beat you, just as hard as yours have been pushing you.  You’re rivals, right?  Only sort of not rivals, because you’re on opposite sides of the industry, really, but—

“You too,” you admit, grudging, and he goes purple at the edges of his paint and along his ears.

“Too much kindness goin’ around here and all,” he mumbles, and bows his head, scratching at the back of his neck.  “Pity I'll not gonna be much up for it to see you do your thing next time.”

“What?”  You honestly have no idea what he’s actually saying half of the time, but it sounds like he’s…not going to be there?  How exactly the fuck are you supposed to do a sick shoot, if the sick party can't get there?  “What are you talking about?”

Capricorn gives you a dopey, baffled look, like you're the one talking backward bullshit here.  "Gonna be getting all that wicked motherfucking ill in me, right?" He says.  "Can’t do much watching like that.”

He pulls up his sleeve and looks at his shoulder, the cuts you cleaned out.  Chews on his lip and pokes at them.  “You cleaned me up too good, brother," he says, thoughtfully.  "Gonna have to get some shit to put on this, get it going again.  Nasty it up for you.”

You find all of a sudden that your traitorous aeration sponges don't want to work.

“You’re actually going to get them infected?  On purpose?”

He blinks at you.  “…Yeah…?”  He says, like he’s not sure what you’re asking, and all of a sudden you remember the scars you saw on him as you cleaned him up, the other videos you’ve grudgingly watched where people cleaned his wounds and taken care of him when he was sick.

You thought those special effects looked suspiciously, unfairly good. 

“Oh,” you say, because what the fuck else is there to say.  “Okay.”

“Makara!”

Gamzee looks up, sighs, then unfolds himself all the way up onto his feet, offering a hand down to you.  When you take it, staring at him, he pulls you effortlessly up onto your feet.

“We gotta go,” he says—reluctantly, long ears drooping and half-fins low and limp like a sad wriggler.  “Gotta rest my bad self up for tomorrow, see who I’m gonna get with then.  I’ll get a look on for you next time I’m around, bro.”

“Yeah,” you say, but he’s already gone, strolling off towards his manager with those long, skinny legs.  The guy who welcomes him is the one who came onto the set unexpectedly—your ‘kismesis’.  Gamzee smiles at him, but it doesn’t look quite the same as it did when he smiled at you.

You’re just trying to pick out what exactly is different about it, when someone grabs you by the shoulder and pulls you around and your whole team is staring back at you, eyes wide and grins wider. 

“What,” you say.

“Oh my god, Vantas,” says the director, “I thought we were gonna lose you today! You're a goddamn idiot but you've got serious fuckin' globes.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”  You ask, and they all look at each other like can you believe this kid? 

“The paint,” says your agent tremulously.  “His paint!  I can’t believe you asked him to take it off and he just—did!”

Something clenches up in the pit of your stomach.  “He—  That wasn’t—  He wasn’t supposed to take his paint off?”

“You’ve watched his videos, right?”

"Sure, some.”  You’re supposed to watch all of them, but you haven’t exactly been keeping up on your homework.  And you haven’t watched most of the shower ones, either.  You don’t really like seeing other trolls naked, you don’t do it much outside of work.

“Capricorn never takes off his facepaint,” says someone else, kind of hushed, almost awed.  “And he just—said yes!  Just like that!  Last time someone asked him to do that, he put their head through a wall!”

You try to imagine the mild, sweet troll you just cleaned and shooshed and soothed putting someone’s head through a wall.  A jolt of breathless, tight…something runs through you, like arousal but higher in your thorax and squeezing your aeration sponges.  Almost fear.  So he does have his highblood rages after all?  Not just the edgy, snarling threat shows you helped him through, but real rages, violent swings?  They never show those on film, he’s always soft and vulnerable, or maybe snarling and tense at worst.  Never dangerous—

“Vantas?”

You shake yourself awake and then immediately hate yourself.

“I don’t know why he let me, okay?" you say.  Your director opens his mouth, looking dubious, and you rush on past that, before anybody can say anything stupid you'd have to fire them for.  "He said we were going to have another shoot together, when’s that?”

They look surprised by that, too.  Someone in the back flips through a clipboard and hands it up to the director.

“A week and a half,” he reports.   “You don’t have another shoot till tomorrow night, though—if you want to head out for a couple of hours…?”

You’re honestly surprised.  Usually they don’t want you going out in public—somebody might notice you, recognize you—god forbid, somebody might kill you and then they would be out a metric fuckton of money.  They must be really happy with what they got today.

“Okay,” you say finally, suspicious and not bothering to hide it.  “Okay, yeah, sure.”

—

There are people tailing you, of course.  You can see them as you head down the street in your nondescript jacket and the stupid hat they make you wear, with the fake horns so nobody recognizes your little nubs.  You buy yourself some really nice cholerbear steak to cook up for dinner, a big bottle of good nectar and—hell, why not—a bag of sugar-grubs, because you just did some seriously fucking quality work and you know it.

Then you go home, snuggle into the big pile of cushions next to your ‘coon, and boot up your husktop.

The video is just up, only 100 views but already the comments are gold.  There’s one or two hate messages, or people tearing one or both of you down on looks, acting ability, or unspecified reasons that they just don’t fucking like you, but overall everyone is as thrilled as ever.

There seems to be…one theme, running throughout.

never seen Cancer get papped b4, l%k a+ +he l%k on his face! goddamn +ha+ shi+ = quali+y.

oh my god that protective Look on Capricorn’s facial Expression @8:50  i’m going to fucking die to Death that’s hot as Hell is Hot. has he ever done That before?

Never seen th^t before

is it me~ or is this one different~??? like different from their other videos~~~~?!

And of course, scattered throughout, “LOL chutefuckers”, “this shit is all so faked goddamn”, “AVOID THE CULLIG DRONES WITH THIS FULLPROOF METHOD REVIEW RATE AND SUBSCIBE TO FIND OUT”, “that’s not how it works with me and my moirail”, “NOW they should FUCK >87” and various suggestions for other perversities you should add in the next video.  But every few comments, there it is, again and again.  “never seen that before”.  “That’s different”. 

The industry is looking for what it already has, but can’t ever get enough of—that’s what your team keeps on telling you.  Contact.  Intimacy.  A clear power dynamic that they can put themselves on one end of.  One of you soothing and the other one unstable. 

But when you got angry, minutes after you’d calmed him down, he turned around and he papped you.

You watch the video even, even though you’ve promised yourself you’ll never ever watch your own videos.  Your face when the hastily-conscripted kismesis comes towards you is…unfamiliar, even to yourself.  You see yourself angry, sure, every time you look in the mirror, but never like that.  You’d bared more teeth than you even knew you had, your eyes looked dazzlingly, overwhelmingly scarlet.  And when Capricorn—when Gamzee reached up and touched your face—

You have to stop the video.  You’re not embarrassed, come on, you’re a professional, you just…don’t…  You can’t.

You close the video as the views tick slowly up towards 500,000, and head off for actual ablutions that don’t involve a camera hovering in your face.

—

The next week and a half passes quickly.  You have a lot of shoots—they’re even more boring and incredibly annoying, after the smooth way you and…Gamzee…managed together.  People stopping, checking notes, fumbling pre-decided lines, breaking up the mood.  Trying to sneak in ‘rails with pails subtext so grossly blatant you flatly cancel the shoot and refuse to continue.  You receive a letter full of fish puns the day after your video goes up, headed with the crest of her Imperious Condescension herself; she says that ship was hot as glub and you and Kelpricorn should keep up the good work.  You bury your face in your pillow and make undignified noises for a few minutes before you pin that up on your wall with the few pieces of fanmail you see fit to keep.

And then it's evening again and you’re wandering onto set, flicking through the profile you picked up a bit more than a week ago, looking at a familiar backstory.  You’ve been wanting to ask Gamzee ever since last shoot about his acting methods, because what the fuck, why not—but he’s not there when you get there. 

You aren't a rookie, and you don't get the jitters anymore.  If you're pacing around the set with your horns down for the next thirty minutes, it's for the health of your own bloodpusher and no other reason.  And if you shoot up and look over at the door when you hear a familiar rush of voice and activity from across the block, it's because you thought he was going to be late, dammit.  You're the only goddamn professional around here, apparently, and he's showing up late to his own shoot, five minutes before you have to be on camera...

You make it halfway across the block and then stop dead in your tracks.

The black tanktop is back, the baggy pants—but the shoulder you cleaned last time is wrapped up in bandages that look old and filthy and are spotted with old purple blood.  There are two other trolls supporting Gamzee; he’s swaying where he stands, eyes half-shut, shoulders rising and falling with an effort that’s obvious from all the way across the room.

You don’t realize you’re running until you’re elbowing one of your team out of the way, hurrying up to the group of agents and handlers gathered around Gamzee.  Your lead director is talking to his agent—you catch the words, ‘—a little more than we meant it to—’ and ‘—purple, he’s tough enough to live through almost anything,’ and then, quieter, a nasty sort of laugh, ‘…we’ve done worse, he’ll put up with whatever we—’

“What the fuck is this?”  You demand, and everyone turns to look at you.  Gamzee twitches, but doesn’t raise his head.  There’s a horrible smell in the air around him—infection.  Sickness.  Your eyes fall on the old, dirty bandages again, and the spots of blood seeping through them.  “The hell is this supposed to be?”

“For the shoot,” says his handler casually.  “It was just meant to be his shoulder, but the big idiot got sick on top of that and we thought it seemed like bad business sense to—”

“To take him to a fucking doctorturer before he passes out on the ground?!”  Your pusher is thundering in your mouth, your skin prickles with sudden, unreasoning anger.  “He’s sick!  He’s really fucking sick!”

“So take care of him, hotshot,” says his agent coolly.  “That’s what we’re paying for.  Do your job.”

You want to scream his horns right off of his skull—you're going to, you're already drawing yourself up ready to shout—but your director puts a hand on your shoulder and pushes you firmly away, and the flow of people comes between you and Gamzee like a tide.  Someone is yelling shoot in five! and across the crowd of people you can see Gamzee staggering slowly over to the mess you found him in during the last scene, collapsing over onto it and curling up into a shivering ball. 

You can't help yourself.  The need to argue gets shoved down with everything else, as you climb the steps, as you open the door.  As your hands find his face again.

The shoot takes almost the entire night.  It’s exhausting too, fuck.  It involves a lot more running around and lifting things than usual, including Gamzee's lanky, limp body, and there's a lot more gross body stuff than you're used to, by far.  Technically, the plot is an old favorite, almost a tradition; a fix-up sequence you could do in your sleep. 

You could do it in your sleep when your partner is acting.  During this shoot, there are times you're sure Gamzee is actually dying right there in front of you.  Whatever got into the cuts on his arm has him sweating and shaking and moaning; when he tries to get in a deep breath it comes back out a hacking cough, and then he panics and it gets worse and then he's retching, hacking and shaking on the ground.  Those are the worst parts of the shoot; he curls up like a grub and shakes, claws at his own thorax and fights to get a breath in. You have to lean over him and press him down against the ground with the full weight of your body to keep him from thrashing too hard and hurting himself. 

His shoulder, when you get the bandages off, is just as terrible. The skin is taut and shiny and sickly purple-swollen and there are substances you don’t want to put names to soaking into the makeshift bandages.  When you clean it he struggles hard, trying to thrash away from the pain, and the noises he makes are terribly young and confused and helpless. It takes everything you have not to get up, storm over to somebody important and punch them in the guts until they agree to fucking fix this.

But you don’t, because you need your job, because he needs his job, because you’re sunk too deep into the character—because you don’t want to leave him.  You just hang onto him and pat his back to clear out the shit inside his lungs, give him water and put soaked rags on his face until his fever breaks. 

It takes hours.  But when his eyes finally open and focus on you, whether it’s the pure relief on his face at seeing you’re there or the soft, half-heard sigh of relief from everyone around you or just the way his hand slides down to touch yours, the aching in your shoulders and the tension headache pounding behind your oculars like white-hot nails are suddenly all worth it.

After that, of course, there’s a bit of cleanup, a couple of scenes of sweet pale nothings, you worrying over him a lot (hardly acted, goddamn) just to give the impression that he’s on the road to recovery, but that bit is always kept to a minimum.  The palemate shows up and through their well-edited and montaged diligence, the sick troll is healed and taken care of.  Boom, everything is all better. 

They don’t feel the need to show the fact that as soon as the cameras are shut down, Gamzee collapses, coughing again.  You manages to catch his bony shoulders before his head can thump against the ground, and he’s just conscious enough to give you a strained, split-second smile before his breath catches and turns into coughs again.  And.  The shoot's over.  And they're going to take him from you.  When you just got him awake and with you again, when you spent all night trying to help him after they hurt him.  They fucked him up, they hurt him, they'll take him back.  He'll let us do whatever we—

“Vantas,” says someone over your shoulder, and you flinch and hunch over Gamzee's body.  A growl starts up deeper in your thorax than you’ve ever felt, with this chittering get the fuck away from us edge over the top of it you don’t even consciously know how to make. Somebody reaches out and you keep yourself from snapping at their hand, barely.  The sudden spike in your growl is harder to hold back, though, and the hand pulls away abruptly.

“What the hell?”  You hear someone mumble, and you should say something, tell them—  Answer.  You can't.  People are milling around you, murmuring in confusion and anger and distress.  “What the fuck's he doing?”

It takes a long couple of seconds for you to get yourself back under control.  But that protectiveness doesn’t go away.  You keep reminding yourself there’s no cameras, there’s no character, the scene is over but you can’t quite force yourself to let go of him or completely cut the growl that’s still rumbling out of you.

“Shit,” you manage to say, through the growl, “—I—don’t—” and then they make another move to get close to you and you snap “Back off!”  Your hands are numb, but when you look at them you see they’re shaking.  Your squawk blister is full of acid, you can taste it like old metal in the back of your mouth.  Sweat on the back of your neck.  Pressure inside your thinkpan.  “Don’t you fucking dare!”

Gamzee groans and shifts.  A cold hand pats your arm. “Ease up,” he mumbles, and lays a shaky hand over yours.  “…Can’t hardly—fucking breathe, bro.”

You hadn’t realized you were squeezing him tighter and tighter, but he’s pressed so hard against you, you can feel him struggling to draw a full breath. 

And he's an actor.  And you're on set, and you're being—  You're acting like—

You let go and stand up so fast he actually does thump his head on the floor this time, backing away.  You don’t know what to do with your hands.  Shove them in your pockets.

“I,” you say.  “I’m.  I need a drink.”

“Oh,” says Gamzee dazedly from the ground, and grins at you as you back away.  “Hey bro, you should get two.  And I’m just gonna lie here and make peaceful aerations real quick.”

“Yeah,” you say, and then you turn and you run the fuck away.

—

By the time you’ve calmed yourself down and gotten two bottles of some kind of shitty flavored water from a trembling little starstruck seven-sweep-old, they’ve moved Gamzee over to the wall, out of sight of the rest of the crew members where he can cough in peace.  He’s got a mirror propped up on his knees; he’s doing up his facepaint again with painstaking care.  He glances up when you come over, grins (goddamn he still looks like he’s about to pass out) and pats the ground next to him.

You sit there in silence while he paints his face.  It’s almost hypnotic to watch; the smooth way the brush slides over his skin, blotting out the smears and the patches where you can see grey skin underneath.  His hands shake ever-so-slightly, but he keeps the brush steady, watching himself in the mirror with more concentration than you’ve ever seen on his face before.  You feel like you’re…watching something special.  Like when you took his paint off, but less intimate.  Bigger.  It’s kind of unnerving. 

He stows the little pots of paint away once he’s done, leans back against the wall and sighs.

“…Real motherfucker of a night," he says, and his voice sounds as haggard as he looks, bruised ragged and hoarse.

“Yeah, no shit.”  You hand him his bottle: he makes a wordless, grateful noise, then winces and presses a hand to his throat.  “I mean, fuck, no wonder nobody else does it like you do."

His eyebrows quirk together, crinkling up his fresh paint.  “…What,” he says eventually, and you roll your eyes at the painfully slow reaction.  Sopor addiction, you remember.  And he’s still sick as a barkbeast.  You're just going to have to wait for things to make it through his fucked-up thinkpan. “What?”

“It’s pretty hardcore of you, that’s all I’m saying,” you say, and take a drink.  “Doing the injuries and sickness and shit like that, I mean.”

“Yeah?”  His voice still sounds scoured raw. "How's else a motherfucker supposed to do it?"

“Most people just, y’know…pretend.”

You see his face crinkle up in confusion under his fucked-up paint.  “What?”

“Y’know…” you make a vague gesture, because you’re not really all that sure you know how ‘normal’ people do it, actually. “…Act.  Pretend.  Get a scratch and paint it up in their color and put some fake ooze on it.”

“But then what the fuck are you supposed to get on your fix of?”  He demands, confused, and you begin to realize that the concept of acting might not even be in this guy’s (stunted) vocabulary.  “If I’m not sick, what’s to fix?  Why'd they even make a motherfuckin' movie of it if you got nothin' to be pale for?”

“If you’re just pretending to be sick, I just pretend to make you better,” you explain, and he stares at you like you’re gibbering nonsense.  “That's—that's the job, right?  Pretending to be..." you make a vague diamond shape with your fingers.  He's still staring at you; at that, his face falls in abrupt distress like you kicked his lusus.  "—Look, this is just how it fucking works, alright, stop looking at me like that.”

“...Pretending.”  He says. 

You nod.  He swallows hard, painfully, and looks down at the bottle in his hands, over at the bustle of trolls around the set.  Back to you, with a helpless, bewildered pleading on his face.

"But I thought," he says unsteadily, and reaches up to thread his claws in his hair, gripping hard and tugging, taking a hoarse, shaky breath.  "But if they weren't..."

Shit.  Oh, shit, no, shit.  You're getting an idea what the fuck's going on here, and it strains credulity but you can't see any other reason he'd be staring at you like that.  Why he'd let them cut him open and then get him so sick he can hardly stand, why he'd cling to you so desperately.  Like it's real.  Like he's real.

“This is fucking news to you, isn't it?” you say, dull with horror.  “Nobody stopped for two seconds to tell you what the fuck acting is?  Shit on a fucking stick. How'd you even— Listen, it's—”

 “…I was motherfuckin’ pale for them,” he says, really quietly, and your bloodpusher drops right out of you.  Whatever you were about to say dies an inelegant death in your throat and comes out a sort of strangled groan.  “I—I wanted—I—fuck.”  And then he looks up at you and his face falls even further.  “So,” he says.  “So you didn’t—you weren’t ever—”

His face crumples.  Its instinct, after two long shoots, you reach out before you can stop yourself and put a hand over his mouth before he can open it again.  He makes a startled noise behind your fingers and stares at you, wide-eyed.

“I,” you say, and then you stall, hard, not sure what to say, and your mouth keeps going without you.  “Okay listen, douchefuck, don’t flip out about this right now, shit. You're gonna start coughing again and blow an aeration sponge, and I can't drag your scrawny ass to a mediculler today."

Wow Vantas, that's the best possible reaction when he’s having a pale crisis.  Uh, what can you possible even say to make this better, fuck. 

“It’s not fake when I do it,” you say, and he stares at you, looking bewildered and upset and kind of pissed off.  “No, shut up, listen.  I don’t pretend to be pale for people when I shoosh them, okay, I am pale for them, I—I get into it so deep, sometimes, I forget—what I was before I started pretending.  Alright?” 

Suddenly it’s really hard to look him in the eyes.  You drop your eyes down to his bandaged shoulder and avoid his face.  “It was too fucking easy, though,” you say, and hate how stupidly inadequate it sounds, out loud. “—Being pale for you.”

He stares at you, mouth hanging open.  You're digging yourself your own cullpit, and if you keep stumbling and blathering humiliation is going to come and kick you into it.  Uh.  Fuck, what are you even trying to say here…

"I mean, you’re really good,” you say, and then feel like an idiot.  “—I mean not that you were acting, okay I know, you, you just said that, I just—fuck, wow! Why do I even fucking talk, all I ever get out's a big steaming pile of—”

“Wait,” says Gamzee slowly, and you grind to a halt, staring at him apprehensively.  He’s squinting somewhere into the middle-distance with an expression of vague puzzlement on his face.  “So…” and then he looks down at you and your eyes meet and your face goes completely red right up to the tips of your ears. 

He looks.  Hopeful.  Well no that’s not the worst part, the worst part is that he looks so gentle, so…pitying.  Fuck.  This sort of shit doesn’t happen to you, what the fuck.

“…Uh,” you say, like a real motherfucking winner.  “Are you free after this shoot?”

He grins so wide at you, his facepaint is barely an exaggeration.  He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but nothing comes out—he just throws himself forward instead, catches you around the ribs and pulls you up against him in a bone-crushing hug.

It’s surprisingly nice, when you get used to the idea.  He's holding on so tight you're being lifted off the ground, and it’s hard to breathe with him squeezing so hard.  He smells like sweat, but his skin is comfortably cool against yours after the hot stage lights.  His breathing is a tight, raspy sound next to your ear, but you can hear the faint hum of a happy purr under it.  This is…nice.  It’s nice.

There’s a moment—just before you finally relax into it—where it looks like both of you are going to move away, it’s just going to be, well, a hug.  A really awkward hug.  But then he doesn’t pull away, and the two of you kind of slide down a little bit until you’re almost lying down against the sacks behind the set. And he still doesn’t let go.  Oh god, okay, this is happening.  This isn’t porn this time, this is happening.

You start to try to do what you’ve always done in your videos—the soothing, the touching—but he’s calm already, he doesn’t need to be calmed down.  He just takes your hands and shakes his head.  When you drop your hands, confused, he pulls you closer and curls up all around you like a big, cool blanket, burying his face in your hair.

You’re vaguely aware that he must be getting paint on you, but next second he starts running his fingers through your hair and rubbing the nape of your neck and you completely forget to care.  Fucking hell that feels amazing.  Why did nobody ever tell you how great it felt to have someone do this for you?  You’ve done it almost every day of your life for sweeps and sweeps and never understood why it melts people under your hands—

Like it’s doing to you, and for a second you tense up, worrying all over again. You shouldn't be letting him do this, maybe, you're at work, you barely fucking know the guy... fuck, though. That feels so good. 

You’ve been bent over him worrying and cleaning and fixing him for hours; your entire back is a mass of knots.  He works his fingers into them hard enough it almost hurts and you catch yourself making stupid little noises, noises you wouldn’t be caught dead making in a normal shoot; little gasps, whines, chirping clicks.  He doesn’t seem to get tired of touching you, even though you’re not touching him back—he just works patiently at you until you’re sprawled and limp and so fucking relaxed you hardly remember your own name.

“Vantas,” somebody says sharply, and they don’t sound pleased.  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

You’re too far away and dizzy and warm to process that, let alone answer it, so you don’t.  Somewhere far off, someone growls.

“Fuck off,” says a voice that’s almost familiar.  “He did all the motherfucking work.  Brother's due to get his rest on, motherfucker.”

“Hush, Makara,” says another voice harshly.  “We have somewhere to be, get up.”

"Don't you motherfucking hush me!"

The murmuring around you goes silent.  You’re bundled up against someone’s chest. You can feel yourself purring, actually purring, your muscles feel like warm clay.  You want the yelling to stop.  You’re always yelling, yelling fucking sucks.  It makes your throat hurt and your head hurt but you’re just so angry all the time and all of a sudden you aren’t.  You don’t have to be angry.  You want this to last, and they keep yelling. 

“Alright,” says the voice, more careful this time.  “Uh…I’m…sorry—”

“Fucking should be,” mumbles the voice close to your ear, and you’re squeezed close.  “Now fuck off.”

—

You date after that, if you can really call it dating.  You quickly learn that Gamzee has no sense of romance whatsoever, and is endearingly awful at knowing when to shut up.  He’s a terrible liar, but a great storyteller once he gets into the swing of things.  He falls asleep at bizarre hours of the day and night and wakes up fast and hard and vicious.  He has more friends than you've ever had, but they're worse friends than any of yours, which is a miracle that's even possible.  You find out that he can sing and he has a strange, sweet, raw voice you somehow like to listen to, but he couldn’t hold a tune if his life depended on it.

You don’t know what he finds out about you.  All you know is that he doesn’t leave.

You don’t ever want him to.

And thus comes the problem.

You think about it for a long, long time before you get around to telling anybody—and of course the first person you talk to about it ends up being Gamzee, because he’s starting to get a sense for when you’re worrying and need to be talked down out of a terrifying spiral of what-ifs.  You don’t think he really understands what’s bothering you so much—the job was never quite the same for him as it was for you—but he just smiles and tells you whatever you want, best friend, I’m chill with it. 

And then all the worry from a week and a half of agonizing lands on your head like a ton of bricks. You kind of flip your shit and cry and swear and yell into your new moirail's shoulder until you pass out.  But nobody needs to know about that.  You’re cool, you’re tough, you’re famous, you’re…

…quitting your job.

You’re on a sweep-by-sweep contract, is the thing—and you haven’t renewed it yet for the new sweep and you can’t, you can’t just go out and pretend to be the other half of someone when you have a real moirail, an actual palemate always at the back of your pan.  You can’t do it.  And you can’t broadcast that shit to the galaxy either, even if the internet would be willing to see you and him with only each other for the rest of your careers.  Those first two videos—well, they’re alright.  It’s not like you knew, then.  You were acting, mostly.  You can let that pass, you can ignore it.  But making new videos, now that you know—now you’re…

You can’t.

Of course they don’t take it well, when you tell them all this.  Not very well at-fucking-all.  Your director, who’s never had much patience for you or your “unconventional” methods, gets pretty pissed off and starts screaming at you about how you’re a useless fucking romantic and you’ll never fucking work in this industry again.  You scream back at him about romance and quadrants and what a useless fucker he was behind the camera.

You get forcefully ejected from the building.

You go to look at Gamzee’s contract while you’re out, and you’re really not surprised at all how much absolutely illegal shit they’ve crammed in there.  You call a friend, who advances on Gamzee’s team with a briefcase full of paperwork, a drawn sword-cane, and a smile like a snap-beast about to come out of the watering hole and drag down some helpless prey.  Gamzee’s contract is quietly, painfully cancelled.

The internet backlash is massive.  You move—and you take Gamzee with you, because those shitwads who contracted him in the first place were just keeping him with them in the shittiest backroom of the studio.  No wonder he was so skinny and dirty and fucked-up-looking even though his videos were making so much revenue; the room was basically a cellar.  Terezi digs a few thousand caegar out of his handlers through undisclosed methods that you aren’t allowed to see or hear, because JUST1C3 1S BL1ND, K4RK4T.  Then she drops a quick little smack of a kiss on your lips, backhands you casually in the face, and strolls off cackling while you’re holding your face and swearing.

You yell “FUCKING THANK YOU, YOU DRIED-UP BITCH!” after her, and by the time she turns the corner she’s cackling to the moons.

You buy yourself a little two-coon apartment with an internet connection and a not-too-shitty view, and start looking for jobs.

It’s one morning, almost midday, and you’ve just come home from a long talk with a store owner that turned into a screaming match over…you don’t even remember, something stupid…when the telecommunication relay device starts ringing.

You pick it up and stare at it.  Phone, you recall vaguely.  Stupid word.  Stupid aristocrats.  You had to talk like a blueblood once for some kind of schlocky period-drama bullshit.  The words stick in your head somehow.  Phone.  Stupid fucking word.

You put the “phone” up to one ear, close your eyes, and sigh so heavily you hope the person on the other end will just hang the fuck up without ever having to be told to.

“I’m not renewing my contract,” you tell them.

“Hey,” says the voice on the other end of the call.  You’re surprised to find that don’t know the sound; you frown at the caller ID, and then frown harder when you read what it says: don’t you fucking dare hang up.  What the hell.  “This Vantas?”

“Uh…sure.” 

“Heard you quit making videos.”

Oh great, it is a pissed-off fan.  What the fuck.  You're not above sleeping in front of the door with your sickles out, if some of your psycho fans are going to start showing up.

“How the hell did you get this number?”

“I got all the numbers, li’l nubs.”

“Hey, fuck y—” you start, and then your pan kind of…nudges you.  You stop dead in the middle of your rant, thinking. 

That shit hot as hell, nubs.  Kelp up the good work…

“Holy shit,” you say.  “No fucking way.”

The voice on the other end of the line just laughs.

“You a shark kid, Vantas.  You know I had a little basshole hang up on me once?  I told him not to and everyfin.”

“What an idiot,” you say, dry-mouthed and jittery with disbelief.  This can’t be real, right?  It’s a dream.  “How can I, uh.  How can I…surf…the empire?”

The laughter is so loud and sudden you have to hold the phone away from your ear.  By the time it dies away, the empress is just giggling—you catch the words “—Ahhhh, I love you, li’l nubs!” and your pusher does a treasonous and stupid fluttery little double-beat in your thorax. 

“No, but reelly,” she says finally, and you can still hear her laughing a little, a brush of static that might be her wiping her eyes.  You feel ten stories tall.  “Hitting you up aboat those videos.”

Oh.

“It…” you start, confidence draining away with every word, “We didn’t…we didn’t mean to disrespect—”

“Nubs,” she says sternly, and you shut up instantly.  “…Nubs.  Li’l nubbsy Vantas.  If you don’t wanna sand vids of you and your morayeel pilin’ it up all over the empire, that’s your lookout, right.  You frygure you got enough money or whatever, gettin’ outta the biz, s’chool with me, whatever.  I got bigger fish to fry.  But I got…an offer.”

You have to swallow hard—and then again—before you can talk.  Gamzee wanders in from the other block and gives you a look; you raise your eyebrows and widen your eyes at him and then shake your head urgently when he starts to open his mouth, brows creasing in concern. 

“What kind of offer?”

“You know how much traysure I got, kid?”

“...All of it…in the empire?”

She laughs again.  “Bingo!  Know what I got to spend it on?”

“Uh…whatever you want?”

“Too clam right!” she laughs out loud again at her own pun, and then all of a sudden her voice is deadly serious again.  “How much those bottom-feeders at your last job pay you?”

“150 caegar per shoot,” you say, almost automatically.  “Extra per thousand views.  Why—?”

“Chump change,” she scoffs, and you imagine her, lounging in her throne, deadly and gorgeous and inspecting her perfect, fuschia claws.  “How’d you like to get a million?”

You can’t answer for a few minutes because you’re too busy trying not to fall down and die.  Finally you manage, almost even, “…I don’t think I know what you’re saying here.”

A sigh.  “Let me make this shrimple for you,” she says.  “And you pick whichwaver sounds more inshelligent to you, buoy.  Option one, you go finned some other job...sweeping floors or sailing grubcorn or whatwaver, get paid chump change and stay in that ratty two-coon aportment the rest of your life.  Or two…” You can hear her grin.  “…You be exclusive to me.  Videos don’t go to no other troll in the galaxsea.  And I make you rich as a motherglubber.”

Gamzee didn’t care, you remember dizzily, distantly.  Gamzee wouldn’t mind at all.  You can do what you want.  You can do whatever you want.

“…Your Condescension,” you say, as evenly as you can, and try to keep the huge grin out of your voice.  “It would be my genuine coddamn pleasure."

Chapter Text

The first day you shoot for the empress, you almost cancel the deal a hundred times.

You don't, because it would be incredibly idiotic to do that; you make a pile, fix the pile, fix it again.  You set up the camera, fix the pile again, go to fix the camera and almost overbalance it twice before Gamzee comes up behind you and wraps his big, cold hands over yours, helping you steady it.  

Your hands are shaking.  You never had anxiety before scenes before, but god, it’s just you and Gamzee and a little, shitty camera, and this is going to the empress, fuck—

“Good thing we’re about to get our pale on,” Gamzee murmurs in your ear, and when his hand shifts you see the light on—the first thing on the recording will be your frightened face, Gamzee’s long arms framing you.  ”You’re all outta your chill, brother.”

"Yeah," you force yourself to say, and start to turn around—Gamzee doesn’t let you.  Just holds you there with your back to him.  He buries his face in your hair; his arm wraps up around you and cups your cheek.  You didn’t realize that your face was burning, but his fingers are so cold.  "Hh—yeah, okay.”  You have to work not to turn to the camera and apologize to the Condesce for what a disappointing display this has to be—you’ll have to edit this out.  Yeah, you’ll…you'll..

You forget about the camera at that point, because Gamzee goes "So breathe, motherfucker," and gets his hands on your horns, and all of a sudden you’re a shivering mess.  You’ve done this so many times to other people, but your horns are tiny and stunted and sensitive and it feels like somebody is replacing your bones with hot wax.

"I—oh," you manage to get out, and flail out to grip his knee, one of his arms, clinging as the world swings gently around you.  "Oh, fuck…”

“Yeah," he murmurs to you, and he helps you back and back until he pulls you down on the pile with him, half in his lap.  You distantly hear a soft whir as the camera moves and follows you, focusing on the two of you; he doesn't give you a second to remember what you were nervous about.  Just curls up around you—keeps a grip on you, stroking and squeezing and petting you, your face, your hair, your horns… "Yeah brother, I got you, talk to me…”

You try, really you do, but all that comes out when you open your mouth is a soft, hoarse whimpering sound.  Gamzee purrs and doesn’t ease up—wraps both his hands around both of your horns and rubs hard and slow until you’re making helpless noises at the warm shudders going through you, the sweet surrender.

“Yeah,” he says again, and there’s a touch of wickedness to his voice now, a hint of something you’re not quite used to hearing from him.  When you get one eye open he’s watching your face, grinning and soft, showing enough fangs it should put you on edge even though it never does.  ”Yeah.  Can’t even get it out, right?  Fuck, bro, you’re so motherfuckin' pretty like this."  He leans down and kisses your forehead, nuzzles into your hair.  "Forget about it," he says, really quiet.  "Don’t worry for a bit, best friend.  Don’t you even get to motherfuckin’ worrying.”

You barely remember the rest of that first video—maybe Gamzee knows that you’re going to worry if he lets you surface, because he keeps you just barely below that fuzzy threshold where you have the pan-power to moderate what comes out of your mouth.  You blurt out all sorts of shit—things you’ve told him before, sometimes, about how you forget sometimes whether you’re pale or pretending, whether you’re genuine or acting.  Things you haven’t told him, how you’re scared you won’t ever be able to go out again in case somebody goes after you for not being their perfect pale fantasy anymore.  How good he makes you feel, how you didn't think you could ever let somebody do this to you.

He gets you to sleep there, eventually, coaxes you off until you’re dozing in hot, fuzzy pleasure.  By the time you come back out of it, he's left and come back—he brought a blanket, which he drapes over the two of you.  He sinks your heat into his cool skin and keeps it from getting too hot under the blanket; you have it on his word that he loves how warm you keep him.  

"…Gotta edit that video," you say dreamily, and nuzzle into his neck.  You should be embarrassed, but you can’t find the spot in your pan where that goes and honestly right this second you don’t miss it. 

"Kinda late now," he mumbles back, and yawns into your hair, snuggling down against you. "Already sent it.”

You don’t talk to him for an entire night.

The reason you finally start talking to him again—no, not because he keeps making big sad eyes at you and edging closer to you making apologizing noises, that has nothing to do with it—is that you get a video message.

You get a video message from her Imperious Condescension.  You see her wave at you and blow you a kiss with long, dark, gold-glinting fingers, the flash of her fuchsia nails.  See her settle back in and the way she focuses in on your video in front of her—there’s a picture of your video in the corner of the screen so you can tell what part she’s watching and everything, fuck—Gamzee pets your hair anxiously, and you’re so tense you completely forget to shake him off.  

The entire thing is like an amazing, horrendously embarrassing dream.  You sit and watch her return message with your mouth hanging open, trying to focus.  That’s the empress, and she has one of her hands lingering on her own regal cheekbone, her eyes half shut and her painted mouth curled almost into a smile as she watches you get shooshed stupid by your moirail.  As she watches you get reduced to a quivering pile of purring mess by his hands on your horns, her tongue flicks out over her delicately-painted lips and her fingertips run over her own regal fins and she shivers.  As she listens to you pour your heart out to him and cups her face in her hands and chews on her lip and smiles like she’s watching perfect scripted romance, not your stammering, tearful confessions.

At the end she turns to the camera and looks straight at you, and even though you know it’s a recording and there is no way she can see you, you feel your face go red.  Her cheeks are still tinted fuchsia, and her pupils are wide and dark and you give an involuntary abashed chirp about the scorching hot nonsense your life has turned into.

“Fuck yes, bay-b," she says, and she clicks her fingers in the air.  Instantly, a window pops up on your screen; FUNDS TRANSFER, it says, and then a number that makes you choke on your own tongue.  How the fuck did she coordinate the transfer with the finger-snap?  Fuck, she’s so classy and great and badass. "You’re bringing the q-whale-ity right now.”

"Yeah," says Gamzee.  You elbow him in the guts, but there’s a big, dumb smile trying to spread over your face.  Your ears feel hot.  "Come on bro, she got it right and all, this shit’s different as fuck as the stuff I did before.  Better."

"—all the time or anyfin," Her Condescension is saying when you stop slapping at Gamzee to make him shut up.  You turn back around, even though she can’t see you, and pretend you were listening professionally the entire time.  She’s not looking at the camera right now—she’s looking down at her hands, picking at her long nails lazily.  She looks so calm, like she could go to the ‘coon, is that because of you?  Oh god, is that because of your video?  ”Maybe once a perigee or so, anyplaice you got time.  Whenever you need the dough just shoot me some cuttles.”  She nods to herself—yawns, all these long, white, perfect seadweller fangs.  ”…Okay, my cute-ass little palebait minnows, this undertowtally badbass gangsta gotta get a good snooze.  Makara, buoy, get him into ‘coon for me.”

"Got it," says Gamzee blissfully, like she can hear, and she smiles almost like she can.  

“I’ll be watching this again later," she purrs, and then winks at you, and the video shuts off.

You stare at the money-transfer on your screen for a minute and a half before Gamzee picks you right up out of your chair, and carries you off to the ‘coon, and you fall asleep with a dumb smile on your face.