((For clarification, this takes place with everyone a bit older, in a sort of humanstuck thing, or at least, one without blood castes or horns and such. Please enjoy.))
Somewhere down the line, Eridan knew his life went haywire. Everything crumbled and decayed, like one of so many ruins in his history books. He was only just starting to figure out where it went wrong, but he had a few assumptions. Either way, he knew the main core problem; his rut, his cycle.
It's not like he had always been like that; Eridan was, in fact, the type of guy that went into a relationship for love, not physical satisfaction. Not that he had many. In Junior High, he was very much alone, and he made all he could of it with his dramatics, successfully driving away the only two real relationships he ever had. This may have been the cause of it all, really. The day his long time girlfriend Feferi broke up with him.
They had been dating for some time, much longer than his first relationship with Vriska had gotten, and near the end of junior high Eridan had finally decided on bringing up the topic of a more serious, more physical relationship. The day he was going to ask, though, she decided they weren't meant to be. It broke him. It tore him up more than any fake drama could. He had really loved her.
That night there was a party, which he had been planning on inviting Fef too. He was miserable, and Roxy was drunk off martinis she got from the host's basement. It started with talking about wizards, it ended up in the bedroom of someone he didn't even know with Roxy moaning and Eridan wishing it were Fef.
He was depressed. He was disappointed. it was a mistake. Withdrawal. Fallout. He wanted to leave that day behind him, and never talk about it again. He didn't bet on Roxy drunkenly telling everyone that Eridan Ampora, the so hated and desperate man he was, was really good in bed.
It didn't matter that he had never done it before. Maybe it was instinct, or just all the 'research' he had done (he was a boy, after all). But suddenly everyone knew. His first year of high school, people were suddenly paying attention to him. they were flirting with him. And for once in his life, Eridan thought he was popular, he was liked, and he was loved.
But after about two months, he knew it was the opposite. He wasn't loved at all. Sure, people were all over him now. He had a new classmate every week, wriggling under him and melting under his fingers, but soon they were gone. He had had guys and girls alike, all hearing from word of mouth and testing to see whether the rumors were true. He knew everyone's little quirks; the vulgarity, the purring, the moaning and screaming and clawing; the sudden weakness and obedience, the sudden take-charge focus and brutal command; the helplessness, the neediness, the begging that started to make Eridan cringe. He had heard a hundred names screamed out that were not his own. Once the denial finally started to fade and the fireworks went out, Eridan could see it plainly; they didn't love him. If anything, he was more lonely than he was before. they were manipulating him, using his desperate nature, toying with his feelings and his body and his long for an escape. They were manipulative, abdominal cur, horrible scum of the earth. He began to hate these people. hated them like a king hated the peasants, like a high-one hated the low-ones, like a God hated the ones who praised and begged at his feet. But suddenly, no matter how much he hated them, he was so dependent of them. He was soon having sex with these people to cope with the hard, grueling facts of his reality, his loneliness, his betrayal and servitude towards the wretched fools. He had unwittingly become their slave even as they treated him like a deity. He became addicted.
He was more woken up when Sekret came, the first of his only two real relationships. They never really had a strong bond, but it was a bond all the same, and it brought back at least a few pleasant memories. So when she came over to him suddenly, after so long, it really wasn't hard to get fooled all over again. He gave her her way. Out of all the manipulators, she was the most manipulative of them all. But she was different. Sure, it was the same old night, but when he woke up she was still there. She let him make her breakfast, He thought, maybe, someone was finally going to save him from this horrible existence of suffering and hiding.
But of course not.
"You do realize you're like, a common whore now, riiiiiiight?" She let him clean the dishes. "And you're not even legal. You could go to jaaaaail~!" Somehow, her amusement at the whole thing was both infuriating and endearing. he just wanted her to wrap him up and say she would take him out of this wretched cycle. But she wasn't. She was still the same bluh bluh huge bitch as junior high; but at least she didn't lie about it. She had calmly got up from Eridan's kitchen table, gave him a sad, yet cocky sort of smirk, and told him she had just come to see if her little Erdian had really become a sex maniac. There may have been a bit of pity, he wasn't sure. After a few more sip;s of coffee and a hearty laugh, she left his house.
Eridan didn't know how to get out. People kept coming to him. he couldn't say no. Even the ones who he would never guess would be so desperate were. He was lowering his standards. He was making himself a mat to step on. He was becoming the pathetic prince. Sometimes he still dreamed Feferi would come back, maybe even out of a new-found curiosity like the others, but stay with him, and fall in love again, and save him. But he knew it wasn't going to happen; not with the looks she gave him, the sad, disappointed ones. He liked to think some were even guilty, but he may have been kidding himself.
He was still the laughingstock, just like back then, but now it was for something so much more humiliating, some much less ignorable. He had changed. He wasn't the childish, desperate, dramatic kid he was in junior high. He was a man who hid his heart in a shell to mold in the darkness, who wore a fake smile, he didn't feel strong, brave, or powerful. He felt pompous only as a defense, he felt chained by the world he loved so much. He was so consumed with hate, so much more than junior high, where he would make doomsday devices but never employ them. now it was the other way around.
And he couldn't save himself. He was far too deep in it now. Too caught up in the cycle, too wrapped up in the starvation, too hungry to lift himself from the hole he had dug.
He needed to ask someone to save him, but he didn't know who to trust, Not when everyone was a potential offender.
It was already winter of his freshman year when any new hope came to him, although he didn't recognize it. It came in the form of an extremely antisocial boy who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Someone caught up in a cycle oh his very own, one completely formed around himself.
Someone Eridan had grown to hate a long time ago.
((Hey guys! This is one of few times I've tried doing something that spans more than one chapter, and one of my only AUs, so I may need help with this! If you have any ideas for how the story goes, please review. I hope you support me in this sort of unconventional story exploring the deadly chaos within both Eridan and his 'friend'. Thank you so much for reading! I do not own Homestuck.))