The hand doesn't fall. He stays frozen where he is, his horns locked with yours, his red eye dominating your entire field of vision. Your eyes dart back and forth as you try to figure out what the hell is going on. Is he toying with you? Drawing out the moment? Or is that a hint of indecision you detect behind that forbidding red orb?

"Sollux, please!" It comes out as a terrified whimper, and you don't even care. "Not like this," you plead. "Not like this!"

The seconds drag by with torturous sluggishness. Then, abruptly, he lifts his horns from yours and returns his hand to the safe territory of the floor next to you. You blink rapidly as you try to focus your eyes on him. Have you been given a reprieve? He's on all fours above you, staring down at you with an intense gaze. He still has you pinned with psionic ties; the hornlock was a mere formality, and you both know it. You are still very much at his mercy. You search his face for any clue as to what will come next, but you can't divine anything from his inscrutable expression. There is nothing there; no hate, no lust, no anger, nothing. His face is now just as much of a blank slate as those uniform, glowing eyes.

The tension is unbearable. "God damn it, Sollux!" you exclaim in an anguished howl. "What the fuck are you trying to do?" All of the little things that have been off about him today – the strange things he said, the unusual calm, the brazen forwardness, all of it – have crescendoed into a fever pitch. This isn't your Sollux; this isn't any Sollux you know. Suddenly, that nonsense he was spouting earlier about how everything has changed since his wriggling day sounds a lot less crazy. You wish you had listened. Why didn't you listen?

"This isn't you," you whisper hoarsely, staring imploringly up into his eyes. "What the hell is going on with you?"

Sollux narrows his eyes and his lip curls. "Oh," he says. "So now you want to know? Suddenly you're all auricular sponge clots?" He snorts and cocks his head at you. "Are you sure you don't want to just call it bullshit and tell me to evacuate it out my protein chute again?"

"No no no, I believe you, I totally believe you, I do, yes!" The words come pouring out of you in a confused jumble as you trip over them in your haste to get them out before he does anything even more terrifying. "What happened, tell me, on your wriggling day when you turned six?"

"Eheheh." He giggles, a high-pitched, frenzied sound that sets your nerves on edge. He rests his forearms on your chest and settles himself comfortably, bringing his face close to yours. "I saw the future, KK," he murmurs. "That's what happened. I saw all of the terrible things that will happen to us…" His eyes go unfocused as he stares into some unknown and unknowable inner landscape. "There are…there are so many of them," he says dreamily. "We are all going to die, you know. Me, you, TZ, AA, everyone…" His eyes once again focus on yours. "The sky is going to fall, KK. It will be the end of the world. Armageddon."

"Wh – what?" you gasp, staring up at him in bewildered shock. This latest twist, coming as it has right in the midst of caliginous hornlock, is too much; you simply cannot process it. Your brain feels like it's tearing itself in half; he has sucked you right into his madness. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the future." He smiles brightly, and there's a horrible, manic glint in his eyes as he continues that makes you shudder. "I'm a true prophet of doom now, KK. Just like the blind prophets of legend."

You gape at him. Out of the heaping pile of irrational assertions that he has just dumped onto your nutrition plateau, your mind seizes on the low-hanging fruit. "You can't be a blind prophet, Sollux," you say. "You aren't blind!"

"Not yet," he replies ominously.

You shiver as you stare up at him. He's so serious.

"Sollux, no – " You shake your head emphatically, both in denial and in an attempt to clear it of his disturbed ranting. "Come on, bro, this is frothing looneyblock nonsense even by your standards!"

"It's the future, KK!" he snaps. "I've seen it all in my visions." Then he smiles and twirls one finger lightly through a lock of your hair, for all the world as if this is pillow talk. "I will be the first one to die. There's going to be…" He takes a breath and expels it in a soft sigh against your lips. "Oh, there will be a lot of blood, KK. Did you know that bleeding from your eyes is an actual thing that you can do?" He grins again, an expression so at odds with the things he's saying that it makes your stomach turn. "You can. And I actually will! I will do it twice. It's really, really, really…" He takes a shaky breath. "…really a painful way to die. I always hoped I'd get something quick and neat, you know? Like being sliced in half by an Imperial Drone – "

"Stop. Stop! Sollux, stop it!" In his distraction, he stopped pinning your arms, and now you rest your hands on his shoulders in what you hope is a placating gesture. "Just stop. Listen, I don't know what you think you saw, but it isn't real, okay? It's just a mutant brain thing! You're just – you're having one of your moods! You know how you get sometimes!"

He stills and his eyes narrow dangerously. "What are you saying?" he demands. "How, exactly, do I get sometimes?"

"Y – you know what I mean!" you say. But the blank expression on his face says he doesn't, and suddenly you find yourself contemplating the awful possibility that maybe he's genuinely unaware of it. You swallow hard, fighting down panic. "You know! You get a little bit…kind of…well… sort of…" Crazy. "Moody," you finish aloud.

Rage flashes across his features, and you cringe back in fear. "Moody?" he says incredulously. "You're talking about my fucking moods?" Then the anger vanishes as quickly as it appeared. "The fact that I'm going to die," he says evenly, "is an immutable fact that I am stating for the record. It doesn't mean that moodiness is what is happening here."

"Okay, cool, whatever you say," you say, trying to keep your tone soothing. "You're not being moody, then. But that stuff you said, none of it's real! You – "

"Fuck you!" he shouts, jerking upright and pounding on your chest with both fists in frustration. "This shit's more real that Kraft grubsauce! Why don't you ever listen to me? You are the worst fucking friend to have, all you're good for is shouting at the top of your lungs and being a complete asshole that I hate in every way!"

"Okay okay! You win, okay?" There's no point in trying to reason with him right now, that's obvious; he's clearly lost it. He still has you trapped, and you are acutely aware that he could squash you like a bug if he so chooses. You are up excrement brook without a propulsion slat here, and a single false move could be the end of you. Your only hope of getting out of this in one piece is to appease him. "I believe you, Sollux," you say, doing your best to look earnest and guileless as he glares mistrustfully down at you. "Seriously. You're right and I believe you about all of it!" Then you subside into petrified silence and wait to see if he will take you at face value.