Sollux signs off, and suddenly you become excruciatingly aware that the two of you are alone together in your respiteblock. It's as if Aradia was acting as some sort of buffer between you, despite being present only as a string of deep red text; now that she's gone, you don't want to be anywhere near his personal space. You retreat to the far side of the block, placing your recuperacoon squarely between the two of you, and eye Sollux warily.

The chair scrapes against the floor as he pushes it slowly back from your computer station. He stands and turns halfway towards you, one hand resting diffidently on the back of his neck, his gaze fixed somewhere off to your left. "I think," he begins uncertainly, "I'm supposed to write some sort of program to save our civilization?"

You swallow the sarcastic retort that jumps to your lips regarding the reasonability of that statement and remain silent. You aren't sure how cool that was, Aradia selling him a heaping pile of additional morose bullshit the way she just did. You aren't sure how cool it was for you to stand by and let her do it. But you stupidly lost your temper and retreated right at the worst possible moment, and by the time you got back, the damage had already been done. Aradia was nub-deep in her macabre fantasies, and Sollux was eating it up like grubcake, as usual. You really blew it. Again.

But you aren't going to try to talk him out of believing any of it, because, sad though it may be, at least her stories got him up and moving again. In the end, anything's better than Sollux languishing indefinitely on your hive floor because he thinks he has no reason left to live.

He glances up and catches you looking at him, and both of you immediately swivel your heads away in embarrassment. The awkwardness hangs so thick in the air you could cut it with your sickle.

"I, uh…" Sollux trails off, then clears his throat and tries again. "Sorry about your hive, dude. I'll fix those." He's looking at the huge cracks in your walls.

"Can you?" you ask, startled by the offer.

"Yeah," he says tiredly. "Give me two minutes here." He goes over to the nearest blast hole and leans in to inspect it carefully, running his fingertips over the edges. Then he straightens and closes his eyes. You look on impatiently as he lifts one hand and takes a deep breath.

Then he snaps his fingers, and a blinding flash of red and blue fills the room. It's there fore a mere fraction of a second, but it's bright enough to leave trails seared into your vision.

"Okay," he says. "Check it out."

Eyes narrowed suspiciously, you approach. Sollux gets out of your way with the same urgency you felt earlier when faced with the prospect of being physically near him. You peer at the place where the largest crack used to be. There's…there's nothing there! If you hadn't been staring at the sky through those gaping holes all day, you wouldn't believe they had ever been there in the first place.

You whirl toward Sollux, your astonishment momentarily outweighing your embarrassment. "How?" you demand simply.

"Eheh." He smiles wanly. "You could say I have some practice." He laces his prongs together nervously and stares at the floorboards. His voice comes out in an awkward deadpan. "Um. Would you mind if I use your ablution trap? It won't take long."

"Fine." You look him over critically. "If you drop your clothes down the chute, I'll wash them."

"Okay, cool." He turns and steals off quietly up the stairs.

It gets much easier to breathe as soon as he's out of the room. You heave a huge sigh and sag against the side of your cocoon. Now that Sollux is awake and more or less functional again, the tension that drove you through the night and the first part of the day has broken. In the wake of it, you find yourself feeling…empty. Drained, exhausted and empty. The way that deadlock came to a close feels almost anticlimactic after all of the fear and stress you went through leading up to it. You aren't sure exactly how you imagined it ending; maybe with another signature Captor emotional meltdown, maybe with more holes being punched through your hive walls, maybe with an epic feelings jam that would end with you hugging it out like bros; you don't know. But definitely something, some big event worthy of all the drama that preceded it. Not nothing, as had actually come to pass. Not Sollux simply rolling to his feet and resuming normal operation as soon as you said the magic word.

The magic word, as it turns out, was Aradia's name. It still hurts, how willing he was to talk to her when he wouldn't talk to you even after a whole night and day of cajoling. She's his true matesprit; of that you can no longer have any doubt.

You hear the soft whooshing sound of clothing sliding down the chute and into the cloth slosher, and you dredge up enough energy to push away from your cocoon and trudge into the laundering block. You glance in the slosher and wrinkle your nose; his clothes are a mess of dried, flaking red and yellow blood. You grimace as you close the lid and start the cycle.

You lean back against the machine, clicking your claws idly against the metal rim as you wait for it to finish. You hear the trap running above you, and your thoughts are yanked inescapably back to the shower you took after last night's debacle. You have managed to avoid contemplating it until now; in fact, you have avoided thinking about anything that happened last night, so fixed were your thoughts on Sollux and how to bring him back from his state of catatonic despair; but now that he's awake again, you can no longer avoid it. Your cheeks flush bright crimson. How you wish you could forget what you did during that shower. But you don't deserve to sweep it under the decorative floor covering and pretend like it never happened. You have to face what you did head-on: your crowning moment of depravity and shame when you jerked off while Sollux lay sick and unconscious on your respiteblock floor.

But before you can really get wrapped up in what promises to be an unparalleled wallow in misery and self-loathing, the thought crosses your mind that maybe it wasn't entirely your fault. After all, the only reason you needed to get off so urgently while he was in such a sad state was because he flipped from sex to meltdown in the space of a single beat of a blood pusher. He bears at least some responsibility for the terrible timing, doesn't he?

You shake your head. What was he doing coming on to you like that when he was half a step away from a complete mental breakdown?

Actually, there's an even bigger question than that. You just finished concluding that he and Aradia are still matesprits; what was he doing coming on to you at all?

The slosher dings, bringing you a welcome distraction from the disturbing implications of your train of thought. You pop it open and glance inside, and your eyes widen in dismay at the sight that greets you. His shirt has, quite literally, fallen apart; it is now little more than patches of fabric tangled together by fraying threads. Definitely unsalvageable. You fish out the bulk of the mess and take it to the waste receptacle in your living block.

Then you return to the slosher to retrieve his pants, and you blush when this reveals his underwear sitting beneath them. You quickly squeeze your eyes shut. "Damn it, Vantas! You pathetic fucking wiggler!" You talk to yourself like this a lot; it's a habit evolved over a lifetime spent being your own only company. "You have about as much spinal column as a jiggling puddle of green gaper slime. I'm ashamed to know you, much less to be you!" This really should not be a big deal. It isn't as if you've never seen them before. In fact, every time he stays the night, Sollux ends up wandering around your hive in a pair of his ubiquitous yellow boxers while he's getting ready for cocoon. But today you find the garment's presence mortifying. Truth be told, you forgot that underwear were a thing that existed when you offered to wash his clothes for him.

"Keep it together, Vantas!" you hiss. You take a deep breath. Then you dart forward, pick them up with a leg of the jeans and quickly roll the whole thing into a ball so that the yellow fabric is safely out of sight.

Challenge successfully negotiated, you sigh in relief. Your cheeks are still burning. "That was a fucking embarrassment," you mutter accusingly. But although there's no denying that you just made a complete ass out of yourself, at least this time you managed to do it in private. No one else ever has to know.

You grab his socks and return briefly to your respiteblock for a roll of gauze and one of your spare shirts. Then you go upstairs and lay the whole pile on the floor next to the ablution block.

You rap on the door sharply with one knuckle. "Hey!" you call. "There are clothes out here for you!" There is no response, but you hear the trap shut off, and you quickly return to your living block so that he has privacy when he opens the door to retrieve them.

As you settle yourself on the couch, you hear the door open and then shut again. Your blood pusher kicks up a notch and your digestion sac starts to churn with dread. He's going to come out soon, and that means you'll have to actually talk to him. What the hell are you going to say? What can you say after the events that transpired last night?

You chew on your lip nervously as you try to figure out how on Alternia you're going to face him.