Chapter Text
So apparently Latula knows the people who know these people? Or something. There is a chain of people-knowing going on and the net result is it’s all a misunderstanding and everybody’s hatefriends and nobody murders anybody else just at this moment.
They let you up.
You snap churlishly at the hands that release you and retreat to huddle in a corner and try to settle the ridiculous amount of feels that are rampaging around your pan like clumsy trunkbeasts. You’re (red) ashamed and (blue) aggravated and the process you coded to quiet your metal mind only partly worked because now you’re buzzing with backed up alarms and sensory data and a dozen dozen updates about the positions of various drones around the city.
It has been a very long night.
Latula casts you one concerned glance, bright with pity and question. You flash your fangs at her without even thinking (blue, blue, blue, leave me alone) and she backs off immediately. Not like she’s scared, but like she takes you seriously, like what you want has weight. Like you get to decide. It sends a thrill of warmth and shame all through you. (Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean it.)
But, you consider, as she and the carapacian and the little human cy disappear back down to the secret level—you did decide. You still have your helmet and the things Latula gave to you to keep safe for her. And if you didn’t do much actively, you very non-actively did not let loose your grip on your power and did not kill anyone you didn’t want to. You chose and you did it.
Or maybe didn’t do it.
Both at once.
Eheheh.
By the time they come back up from the other lab, you feel nearly settled again. You’d very much like tonight to stop being a thing that keeps happening sometime soon, but you’re—steady. For now. You can hold your selves all together and keep deciding for a while longer.
You make your wobbly-limbed way over toward Latula, circling wide so that you can stand closer towards her and point your ganderbulbs at the other two. The carapacian is deep in conversation with Latula, white eyes narrow and gleaming behind the cloth around his face, point-tipped fingers flashing unfamiliar gestures in occasional emphasis to his points. He bristles with weapons, but you go on deciding to be unhappy with that in a very non-active way.
Hell yeah, you are fucking boss. Suck it, world. And brain.
The little human cy stares directly at you as you linger on the fringes of the conversation. His gaze is fixed and unembarrassed, at least so far as you can tell with his eye protectors in place.
You stare back at him. Staring continues. There is so much staring going on right now; your processors can’t even keep it on the charts.
“You’re a cy,” the wiggler says, finally, fingers going up to gesture at the sides of his head in the position of your interfaces.
You roll your eyes and scoff. “Dong, dong, donk! Fvan-falking-testilc dilldicktion.”
“Like me,” he adds, still watching you with that blank, up-turned face.
You contemplate this assertion. “I’m tallder.”
If your backchat is ill-advised, the human cy doesn’t let any annoyance slip. “Mm,” he says, like he’s giving serious consideration to your point, tipping his head a little to one side. “I can grow now,” he adds, in bewildering non sequitur.
“Gould four you?”
He flashes you a thumbs up. He cocks his head inquisitively the other direction, and if he keeps going back and forth like that, you’re going to get seasick. “Can you hear?” he asks. The question takes you a minute, but he is evidently still examining the round lumps of interfaces you have in place of any actual fleshy external auriculars. The mechanized hopbeast ears in his human-pale hair perk farther forward.
“Yalss, but I galt no bulgel-chainfing clue four how.”
“Cool.” This is a strange conversation. Even among your strange and limited sample of conversations, which have mostly been with Latula. The human—other cy?—goes on helpfully. “I can hear really well.”
“I balt.” Snickering, you flap your hands atop your helmet at him like half-assed bunny ears.
The wiggler doesn’t laugh, exactly, but he covers his mouth and bounces his shoulders in a gesture that looks like the shape of one. “I’m pretty great,” he agrees. “So great.”
It’s said in tones of cheerful assurance, partly a joke, playing along, but partly just… serene confidence and security. You wonder where he acquired that. You twinge jealously and like him a little better all at the same time.
“I caln assplode you make wilth my brain,” you tell him.
Head tilt. “Cool,” he says again, with apparent sincerity.
Very strange. You screw your brows together in consternation even as your lips stretch into a grin. Aren’t wigglers supposed to be vulnerable and needy? Maybe this one is defective. That would give you something else in common, you note, and your grin stretches a bit wider.
“Kankri says trolls can’t be cy.”
“Alm shitbalds rea-llllly donkers at both.”
He twitches those hopbeast ears—in interest, or just puzzling through your garbled diction—then nods seriously like he’s digesting a schoolfeed. Maybe that’s the difference about wigglers. They’re still caching data into their brains. All open connections for upload, unprotected. Soooo, in this analogy that would make lusii, what, firewalls?
You wonder for a moment if you were ever small or if you had a lusus or where any of the things in your brain come from anyway. But that feels like a dizzy, unbalancing kind of thought, so you don’t wonder about it for long.
“Aeii, ’tula,” you say instead, then shrink back and curl your claws a little when your erstwhile carapacian captor turns his attention towards you as well. He just blinks at you. You look at Latula instead and finger the side of your helmet until her sylladex ejects from where you slotted it. It bounces off your grasping hand, but ha ha, you are prepared for that by benefit of having two fucking frond-limbs. You bounce it off your other hand as well and get it trapped between the pair of them.
You release the captured item dramatically over Latula’s waiting hand and she shares a grin with you. “Thanks, Tunz.”
The human cy leans in, ears tipping forward. “What’s in it?”
Latula eyes him for a long, thoughtful moment, spinning the sylladex between her fingers, before turning away to pop it back into place. “The other bits of that mad giganto technorelic from downstairs,” she says, and turns back to the carapacian, pointing. “Fine. Compromise. You hang onto your half of the gizmo and we’ll hang onto ours.”
She flashes him a toothy grin. “And we’ll both go round properly about this ridic ‘storage and transportation fee’ you dreamed up later.” When the carapacian looks ready to start arguing again she speaks over him. “Press the pause button on that for now and let’s get out of here. I don’t think you wanna run into the Bone Queen’s agents any more than we do.”
The carapacian stares at her with narrowed eyes, then shrugs scrawny shoulders and turns toward the little human cy. Black-shelled hands flash symbols you don’t know.
The wiggler shakes his head. “Mn. It wouldn’t turn off.” He opens his mouth, pauses—his ears flick flat back for a moment as silence stretches—and when he continues it comes out like he’s thinking about each word carefully. “It might—stick. If I break it.” He searches for words again. “I think.” There’s another little pause and then he says much more confidently. “Bro can do it.”
“Uh huh,” Latula says. “And where’s he when he’s at home? And where the heck is Kankles? I wanna get out of here while skedaddling’s still an option.”
“Um,” the human cy says, ears swiveling, glancing around like they might pop out of the crumbling ceiling tiles. He shrugs uncertainly. “It’s all quiet down here.”
You gnaw your frondtips and grumble to yourself. You could wish you had that problem. The lab below had been something like quiet, all the metal voices except Latula’s fading in and out of registry. Up here you have again a moment-by-moment update on the position of every troll and drone and sigil-chipped imperial vassal in local networking range. It flickers across your helmet’s visor, picked out in lines of red and blue text by the code you’re slowly building into your metal mind, diverted but inescapable. Latula’s a reassuring, contentless static nearby while around the fringes of the city a precision march of information from the fucking bucketbots bangs steadily at your pan-casing.
Nobody’s asked your opinion on the continual sensory download, and you’d sure as hell like an opt-out button, but if you still can’t figure out how to process the overflow, you’re at least slowly working out ways to manage it.
(Right now you’d kind of like to manage it by going down that ladder and going to sleep for the day in the dark and quiet. Preferably with Latula.)
You pinch your face up against a growing headache and reroute another portion of your attention to fiddling with your damn glitched-as-fuck overloading internal processes. Maybe if you re-work the code…
(Maybe if all those fuckstupid imperial drones would go away and let you think.)
The carapacian flashes hand symbols again, trading them back and forth with the wiggler in quick-fingered gestures you couldn’t hope to wrangle out of your fronds. Some kind of discussion happens with Latula. You don’t really catch it, but next thing you know you find yourself following her and the other two back up the stairs (shit dammit) towards pre-dawn moonlight. Caught up in your own thoughts, you missed the reason—finding the much discussed missing troll and human? You’re distracted.
Latula’s hatefriend, you think, is a troll.
That’s not good.
Distress coils in your gut and you’re so tired, it’s a struggle not to give into the wave of soft, unhappy feelings, all red. You hurry your feet along, using your hands to scramble up the last few stairs to draw even with Latula. She glances at you and falls into step in the twisting hallway, letting the other two draw ahead.
“’Sup?”
You blow out a breath and grimace elaborately at her, all frustration, then almost as quickly fall back into unhappiness. Your lips pull down. “Dong be mad. Bald. Sad.”
“’Mad-bad-sad ’bout what?”
“The fuckfork what tholcked ongers you liked.” Okay, what even. “The throll you bulgel-hamped. The shult-ranbing death salper. The onzer.” Coherency has abandoned you. You cast pitiful eyes at Latula through your visor and she stares at you for a long moment.
“Kankri?”
She is made of miracles and lightning bolts. You want to kiss her. Wait, oh, but—your shoulders slump and your claws dig short, ochre tracks into the flesh of your opposite hand. Right, her hatefriend, the other troll. The one she knows, the one that isn’t broken like you, the one she must trust, if he’s here, for this mission. You don’t think Latula trusts very often.
Latula stops completely, watching you with something just a little guarded on her face.
Your pusher clenches uncertainly. You don’t like that look on her face--the closest thing you’ve seen to a mask--but you like even less the thought of other looks she might wear. You wonder if she is very hatefriendly with this other troll. Maybe even in a quadrant.
Your pusher rolls over in pity for her.
“Ey donk hyear halm,” you tell her, all in a rush, and cringe, expecting—something. The world to fall down maybe. Latula to be sad.
Should you not have told her? Should you have told her sooner? Stupid, stupid, stupid. You can hear every imperial vassal in the city and you can’t hear him and in your experience the metal voices only stop when they’re dead. (Sorry, sorry, sorry.)
You scour her face, gone utterly blank and startled. You’d keep anything she shared with you safe, anything that mattered to her, except this one was already gone before you even knew it might be important. Before she knew it might be in danger--and you haven’t known Latula long, but you’ve seen how much she’ll sacrifice for the things she values; you’ve seen her put her own neck in the noose and still come out smiling and determined and pretending she hasn’t gained scars.
Her face changes, but not at all the way you’re braced for. “Ha, babe--you wouldn’t hear Kankri. He’s not sigil-chipped.”
Your tired minds come perilously close to bluescreening. You give Latula your most baffled grimace.
“He’s--well, I mean.” She taps the paired curling scars of the libra on her wrist. “Obvs there’s trolls and then there’s trolls, but Kanzers never got a sign, so technically,” she draws the word out in syllables, “he’s not a troll. Legally speaking. Which is cool ‘cause I’d be hella sad to have to cull him. And Porz would be sad. And chainsaw me into little pieces. And be sad about that, too, because it’s mad unchill to PK your moirail.”
You blink, compiling these many new pieces of information. What kind of troll doesn’t get chipped as a grub? You’re a defective-brained mutant routed to the research labs and you have an imperial sigil chip in your arm, the double lines of a gemini sign scarred into your skin above it. How could he… in the brooding caverns… huh. The riddle makes your head hurt.
Also Latula has a moirail? And a scaryass chainsaw-wielding moirail it sounds like.
…Hot.
“Prrrrowr,” you inform her, solemnly. You choke on the end a bit, but your grin succeeds in being sleazy as fuck.
Latula waggles her eyebrows. “Believe it. Hot damn my girl is rad.”
Your heads are together, snickering, when you hear a shout go out up ahead. A crash and a shuddering bang follows, a sound like a wall crumbling. You and Latula stand briefly frozen as the building trembles and settles around you.
“Welp.” Latula frowns down the hallway in the direction the human cy and carapacian went.
“Wanna bet a caegar that’s Kankri arriving with the cavalreapers to rescue us?”
There’s noise outside like an oversized trunkbeast shrieking. The walls shudder around you again, flaking plaster down from the ceiling.
“Ohmigod, they’re going to bring the hivestem down, what even.” Gathering her staff, Latula sets off toward the disturbance in a silent, deadly lope.
You follow her.