Your name is Kankri Vantas, and you are three sweeps old.
In your short life, you have known a steady trickle of visitors in purples and blues and ceruleans, with smiling faces and soft words. They ask how you are, what you're doing and if you need anything, always with a solicitousness that makes you feel oddly uncomfortable at times. You say nothing of your discomfort, however, because you get the sense it would be impolite, or ungrateful, or simply something that isn't done. By the age of four, the visits taper off, though they don't stop completely. By that age, you understand their purpose.
Your lusus accepts these strangers into your hive with dissatisfied clicks and grumpy skrees. When one of them drops in, he crouches in a corner and watches them with baleful eyes.
"Simply an instinctual reaction," one cerulean explains to you once. "Lusii are ultimately primitive in mindset and don't understand the finer social distinction between an interloper looking to harm their wriggler and a well-meaning visitor."
You nod shyly and look down, slightly ashamed of your lusus's behavior. You don't think Crabdad is primitive, you know he's really, really smart usually, but you don't dare contradict your visitor. He's a coolblood, and everybody knows that coolbloods are smarter than most everyone else because they live so long. You're a wriggler, what do you know?
You turn on the movie, and your friend immediately recognizes the intro music.
"Oh, this one? I've seen it," she shrugs. "A bit too much about the blue blood's burden for my tastes, but the action sequences are pretty awesome."
You shrug, because you don't talk much usually, and you settle in to watch the movie.
Later, just out of curiosity, you open up your husk top and do a search on the phrase "blue blood's burden". You worry at your lip as you read the definition over and over. Your mind is not used to thinking in these terms, and it rebels. But a few things click into place, and you begin to understand... something.
You are five sweeps old, and your lusus still doesn't like the cerulean blooded adult who regularly drops in to see if you're doing well.
You are old enough to know that Crabdad is afraid you're going to get culled—that the adult will take you away to live with him and you'd never see your lusus again.
You are old enough to say, "I don't need your help," and for your voice to barely shake at all.
He looks at you strangely.
"But it's my duty to help," the adult replies. "My responsibility."
"I can take care of myself. Why can't I be responsible for myself?" you say back, as you practiced in front of a mirror. "I do just fine when nobody else is around."
He is momentarily speechless.
"I—we all—want you to have the best possible life you can."
"I have it already. On my own. Without your help."
The ceruleanblood's expression darkens. Inexplicably, you feel like you're doing something awful by rejecting his help. You feel guilty. You feel like an awful person. Who are you, to respond to this nice adult's kindness with such words? You feel your resolve failing a bit. You didn't practice dealing with these feelings in front of a mirror.
But the adult gets up and nods.
"Very well, Kankri. I can see you are going through a rebellious phase. We will talk some other time."
You are struck speechless by this reaction, and remain so until long past the adult's departure. That night, you sleep on the floor, your lusus curled around you protectively.
A week later, the adult returns, all smiles, like your conversation never happened and all the words you told him had been spoken only to the mirror.
You feel it then, the hot curl of an unfamiliar emotion. It's a bit like humiliation, and a bit like indignation, and it's hot and piercing, and makes you slam the door closed so hard that the foundations of your hive shake.
The adult returns again a week after that. Crabdad chases him off.
In a fit of childish pique, you do a search on Gruble for 'how to make coolbloods leave me alone'. The results are mostly questions to advice columns from warmbloods who don't want to be romantically pursued by coolbloods but don't know how to let them down easy. You're momentarily sidetracked by these articles, because they don't fit the narrative you've so often seen in movies, of dutiful coolbloods who are pursued relentlessly by warmbloods, and the tragic way they eventually give in to their desires only to inevitably outlive their romantic partner and angst about it for the rest of their lives.
The articles talk about "fetishization" and "objectification" and how some coolbloods are enamored more with the idea of having a tragic romance than by the warmblood themselves. It's all a bit above your head and you think romance is boring anyway, so you return to the search.
The second page, you find a link to a forum for culled warmbloods. It's mostly full of a lot of complaining. Your mind momentarily reels at the notion that culled trolls have anything to complain about. Your schoolfeeding has made it quite clear that culling is a mercy and a necessity and a culled troll's life is vastly improved by it. You can feel the rift between what you intellectually know about culling and what you feel about getting culled, and it makes you uneasy.
But you remember that cerulean adult's patronizing smile, and the white-hot rage you experienced, and you start reading. There are thousands of threads, and you spend five night reading them, on and off.
Here is an ochre complaining about her blue custodian wanting her to account for every minute she steps out of the hive, even if it's just going to the corner store. Here is a burgundy recounting how his barkbeast lusus came to seek him out, how the barkbeast spent a whole day throwing himself against the fence until he was ragged and bloody, and all his purple-blooded custodian did was kick the lusus to scare him him away. This story had you bawling for two hours, and you spent another day sleeping on the floor with your lusus after that.
And there are other stories, big and small. Not always as bad as the lusus stories, but the way the culled trolls describe the pain and humiliation they feel, you can sense that these things still matter.
Then, the day before the cerulean is due to come back, you sign up on the forum (your username in anonymous gray, because there is no option for bright candy red), your hands shaking, and create a new thread.
H9w d9 I av9id getting culled?
You go to get yourself a drink, and when you return, there is no response. The thread is only three minutes old, but you already feel ridiculous for asking this question. Nobody is going to respond. Everybody already hates you, and you are awful.
You go to bed, even though you don't sleep half the day because of the embarrassment still burning bright in your mind, and when you wake up the next evening, you decide not even to check the forum.
But when you open your email client, you suddenly have twenty-three new messages. You're flabbergasted by this, until you realize that you'd checked the option to be notified by email if there were any answers to your thread.
You open up the forum and at first don't even read, just skim over the thread to see all eighteen responses, from ten different people. Long responses filled with links, or short words of encouragement and support, or jokes.
You feel euphoric. You feel, for the very first time, like someone is truly helping you, and it isn't a coolblood. It's burgundies and ochres and ambers and even a yellow-green.
You read through every response, and at the end, make another post, thanking them all and praising them on their kindness (for a bit longer than strictly necessary, probably, because you tend to be a lot more verbose online than in real life).
You click through every link, opening multiple windows and reading several articles at once, until they all blur together and you need to slow yourself down to process the information. It's almost midnight when you finally recall you haven't eaten yet, and you bolt down to the food preparation block and make yourself a stack of sandwiches and bring it back up with you.
Resources. Articles on proving self-reliance. A Problematics 101 article, another on the abridged history of warmblood-coolblood relations, a site providing legal advice to trolls who want to contest culling. You're even redirected to a subforum named "What Your Schoolfeeding Never Told You About Culling", filled with a lot more links in the same vein as those offered on your thread.
In a few hours, you check up on the thread again, and there are a dozen new responses: people welcoming you to the community, a few joking around with you, and one rude fellow who asks to know your bloodcolor but gets reprimanded by a mod for it.
You're elated. You go back to the food preparation block and drink half a bottle of fruit juice because you ate all your sandwiches and forgot to drink anything since waking up.
You realize the cerulean adult hasn't made his appearance yet, even though it's almost dawn, and you start feeling a bit silly for bothering the nice people on the forum for nothing. But they're all so knowledgeable, and so helpful, and so comfortable to be around, that you don't regret joining the forum at all.
The next night, you roll out of bed and fire up your husktop almost automatically. It's really early when you wake up, and it's early still when you hear the doorbell.
You are loathe to answer the door in your pajamas, so you quickly pull on the clothes you wore the previous night. The doorbell rings for the third time just as you reach and open the door.
The cerulean adult is there, and he's flanked by a stout teal and an aloof purple-blood.
Alarms go off in your head, and you feel like an idiot for thinking the danger had passed.
"Hello, Kankri," the cerulean greets him. He has the same soft smile as always, but you know how to recognize condescension now.
"Hello," you reply slowly, wracking your thinkpan for the advice you received just the other night. The only piece that floats to the surface is 'be polite, but distant'.
"I'm sorry, did we wake you?" he continues.
"I was getting up anyway," you say, and then force yourself to stop talking. 'Answers should be short and to the point.' That was part of the advice too. You remember now.
"Might we come in?" he asks.
You stare at them wide-eyed. There was advice about this too, for when the culling inspectors requested to enter your hive. You know the gist of it was 'don't let them', but you can't recall how you should act or the exact words you should say. You're tempted to ask 'why', but you know they'll spin you a nice, long answer that sounds perfectly logical and would make you feel like an unreasonable individual for refusing them entry. 'Remember! It's your hive and you are not obligated to let anyone in!'
So you blurt out "No."
The cerulean's smile fades a bit, but the disinterested purple-blood has suddenly gotten a lot more interested, and turns to stare right at you. Her fins flare. You avoid looking at anyone but the cerulean.
"Why not, Kankri?" he says. "I asked my friends to join me today on my visit. Surely you wouldn't want to disappoint them?"
You feel the prickle of sweat down your back, but the sensation is distant, coming at you through miles of compounded fear and anxiety. You forget the forum's advice. You forget that you need to act mature and in charge and polite. All you know is that this adult is one incredibly presumptuous b-bastard (there, you thought it. You wouldn't say such words out loud, but you can certainly think them).
"You invited them to someone else's hive?" you retort, filling your voice with as much righteous indignation as possible. "That's... so rude!" (Bastard, bastard, bastard). "That's incredibly rude, in fact, and I feel incredibly embarrassed for you, and I regret the fact that you have friends so oblivious that they wouldn't stop you from committing such an atrocity against good taste and manners." (Bastard.) "This incident only serves to convince me further that ending out association was the correct course of action on my behalf, seeing as your behavior has tended towards the inconsiderate for quite some time now." (Bastard.) "Your repeated returns after I have denied you entry to my hive have now begun to border on harassment, if indeed they do not qualify as such already, and your presumption that I would—or that I should—stand for it is insulting both to my intelligence and to my sense of autonomy. I will please ask you to depart the premises at once and cease any and all attempts to contact me ever again." (Bastards.)
The three adults gape as you shut the door in their face, and you're up the stairs and inside your respiteblock within seconds. You feel a rush, not just of fear anymore, and your hands are shaking so hard that you don't know what to do with them.
You've never had so many words pour out of you before. You are giddy, so giddy, and even after you realize that the cerulean might have been an empath and probably heard you swearing at him in your mind, you find this knowledge amusing and not mortifying. You pace around in circles, giggling and repeating bits of your rant to yourself, even though you can't remember half of it anymore. Bordering on harassment, if indeed not already qualifying as such... atrocity against good taste and manners... ending our association was the correct course of action...
You feel powerful now. You feel in charge of your own destiny.
When you calm down enough, you sit at your husktop and recount your tale of bravery to all your friends on the forum.
They laugh and cry and rage with you, they praise you for standing up to them, they assure you that you are absolutely awesome.
You bask in the glow of success, and feel like you finally belong.