Sorry this took so long. I've been hells of busy (from Tuesday to Thursday I was writing the first chapter of "Rewriting the Terms," the sequel to "Coming to Terms," so if you haven't read that, I suggest you do, then duty on Friday, and this is Saturday's update. Sunday's update is also about to be posted). I am really tired right now... We're underway all this week and won't be back until Friday so expect an update for this on Saturday or maybe Sunday if I'm too tired to write on Friday night (that's when I'll update "RtT," which is now in my update rotation).

Many thanks to FanficFinatic2, Sgt. Red, TH4TON3GUY, and Toaneo07 Ver2.0 for your reviews to the last chapter!

The Young Highblood

His first indication that something important had happened came when the Battleship Condescension appeared over the horizon, hurtling toward his hive at top speed. Feferi! he thought happily. It hadn't been as long as last time since they'd seen each other, but it still felt like too long. True, she'd developed a habit of dropping by unexpectedly, but she was never unwelcome. He was always grateful for a visit from his moirail.

But when the roar of the Battleship Condescension's engines died down and the portal opened, it wasn't Feferi but Her Imperious Condescension who descended. Gamzee waited patiently until the portal closed again, his nose pressed against the transparent watcher, hoping against hope that she would appear, until it became obvious that she wouldn't. He sighed dejectedly. She wasn't there. If she were on the Battleship Condescension, there was no way she would remain aboard, not with him so close by. Disappointment flooded through him.

But The Condesce was here for a reason. She didn't just drop by. And if something had happened, something that caused her to pay them a visit, it was the first Gamzee knew about it. Kurlas was keeping something—some things, probably—from him. The disappointment he felt at Feferi's absence was quickly swept away with a white-hot anger. She couldn't just withhold information from him—he was her heir! Didn't she trust him?

Apparently not, not that he would blame her for it. After all, he and Feferi were biding their time, just waiting for the perfect chance for them both to claim their respective thrones. It would have to be done in tandem, of course—an immediate regime change, both the Baroness's and The Grand Highblood's thrones changing swiftly. It would be a coupe. The Condesce wouldn't stand for it if Gamzee rose up against Kurlas, and Kurlas herself would be so enraged over The Condesce's death—and possibly, rightly, suspect Gamzee of plotting against her—that she might just kill him in retaliation.

But Kurlas didn't know any of that. She might have still held out some hope that he would prove himself a worthy heir, but she had no idea that she'd already lost him.

He played his part well, though. He feigned submission, acting docile and compliant through the help of stolen sopor pies and Skaianet chats with Feferi. They never spoke of anything important over Skaianet, either—he was too smart for that. Either Kurlas or The Condesce herself could have been monitoring them, and after one of their video feeds had gotten hacked a few sweeps ago (they never found out who did it), they learned their lesson. Any planning they did happened during only face-to-face encounters, deep inside the walls of his hive.

He waited for close to ten minutes for Kurlas to summon him to the throneblock, but she never did. She should have summoned him to receive The Condesce herself, and the fact that she didn't angered him further. No matter. He knew ways around the hive at this point that would ensure he would escape detection.

He slipped between the walls of his own block and ventured past nearly two dozen blocks, turning to follow the angles of solid walls until he settled himself in the back wall of The Grand Highblood's throneblock, far behind his sister's throne. Fortunately, it echoed, and both her voice and The Condesce's voice were loud enough to carry.

"Where the glub are they? I got a glubbin' schedule to keep," Feferi's sister said.

There were minimal Defenders stationed around the perimeter of the block, and The Director was nowhere in sight. Gamzee didn't trust him, either—he practically ruled in Kurlas's stead, and he wasn't convinced that he didn't want the throne for himself. The Director would have to go through him first, though, and Gamzee wouldn't make that fight easy. But he wasn't here, meaning this was an unofficial meeting. Practically a secret.

"Not so motherfucking loud," Kurlas chastised her. "The Soporite's been motherfucking wandering around lately. He hears things that he motherfucking shouldn't."

The Soporite? Who—? Then he understood. Him. She was talking about him. He hadn't heard that title in a long time—the Defenders were good about keeping him from hearing things like that—and he'd almost forgotten about it. His blood boiled, and for a half a second, he contemplated bursting out of his hiding place and killing them both.

But he couldn't. He was still unsure if he would actually be able to kill Kurlas when the time came—not for any emotional reason, but in pure strength and combat experience, she had the upper hand—but he definitely wouldn't be able to with The Condesce there. The Defenders would try to step in, but before they could, she probably would have already skewered him on the end of her 2x3dent.

The Condesce sneered. "Water you waitin' for? Someone else to tell him you netted The Signless?"

It felt like a punch in the gut. Something else that had been kept from him, something important. The Signless had been captured. Suddenly, the whispers of Darkleer's visit the day before made much more sense. He'd probably been the one to catch him.

Gamzee didn't stick around to hear the rest of the conversation. He already knew where The Signless would be—in the prison blocks.

Through a crack in the mortar, he was able to see seven huddled figures. There was one on either end separated from the other five with one cell between them each. One of the five in the middle cell was pacing the floor, rubbing his arms, and looking everywhere but at the other four. He stopped pacing after a few moments when the portal to the blocks opened and a small knot of Defenders entered.

The lone figure to Gamzee's far right stood up and went right to the bars of his cell. "Don't you fucking touch them!" he snarled.

Gamzee squinted. He knew this one from somewhere—he could feel it. He'd seen him before, but there was a haze in his head that blocked out his identity.

"We're not here for them. Their time will come later," a Defender replied coolly.

The prisoner's eyes widened slightly as comprehension dawned. He immediately looked to the side, toward the other lone prisoner, who had also approached the bars of his own cell. "You're here for us," the second one half-guessed. He lisped, and Gamzee knew that he'd heard it before, but he kept drawing a blank.

"You can't take them!" someone else screamed. She practically flew at the bars in the center cell, knocking the pacing man aside. In the dim light, he could see that her cape had jade-green trim. "They're our friends—you can't do this to us!"

The Defenders ignored her. Six went to the cells on either end, opened them up, and dragged out the lone occupants. The one on Gamzee's right struggled, but the two blue-blooded Defenders were strong and managed to extract him quickly. The other prisoner made it four steps before he collapsed, and Gamzee caught sight of both the sweat rolling down his face and the bandage around his leg. Two more Defenders flanked him and half-carried him out, and while he was a bit taller than average, the Defenders on either side of him made him appear much smaller.

"Come on," one of them growled, hoisting him a little higher. "You're no use to anyone half-dead."

Both prisoners were pulled into the light and Gamzee could see that they both wore odd collars around their necks, silver and slick with blinking red and blue lights. Even more odd about them was that they looked identical—the same strange red-and-blue glasses, two pointed horns on either side of their head, the same mustard-yellow symbol on their shirts. Neither of them looked older than the other, and damn it, Gamzee just knew he'd seen them before, but it must have been sweeps and sweeps ago because these two still looked young and were clearly lowbloods and they would have been practically wigglers the last time, but their identities never came to mind.

The woman in jade green wept while the other two prisoners were led out. It wasn't until the portal slammed closed though that she dropped to the floor and rested her head against the bars. Another smaller figure approached her and curled up next to her while the one male—he looked to have a splash of olive-green on his otherwise black clothing—curled his hands around the bars and sighed.

"What do you think is happening to them?" he asked quietly, appearing to address no one in particular.

"It's got to do with their powers. I know it," said another voice, a different voice. Gamzee couldn't see him, but it calmed him down strangely.

Calm was a bizarre feeling for him. It usually only happened through the assistance of Feferi or, more commonly, sopor pies.

He knew by now that he wasn't supposed to eat them, but at two and a half sweeps old, he didn't know it. All he'd known was that it made him less angry, and that anger had scared him. He'd practically been a wiggler with a sister who ignored him and a lusus who was never around and scores of servants and slaves who were too afraid to even approach him, and one day, he'd just snapped.

He couldn't really remember what happened—he seemed to recall a crash of some sort, a loud clattering, and the breaking of sustenance discs, but he couldn't figure out if that had been before or after he lunged at that worthless rustblood and attacked, and somehow, even at two and a half, he'd been able to take down the fully-grown rustblood.

A lot of the attack was a blur, too. He remembered a splatter of warm dark-red blood across his face and the other troll's pathetic cries for help and the utter apathy he'd felt for the servant's life. He reveled in the screams and continued attacking—he may have been unarmed, or he may have grabbed something. He later learned the word bludgeon and it was an accurate description of what happened. He bludgeoned the servant, actually feeling a bit of disappointment when the rustblood finally fell silent and stopped twitching.

And then Gamzee had come back into his head and he stopped and stared at the blood on his hands and the bloody mess that once been a servant and he ran, tears starting to stream down his face. He ran to his block and slammed the portal behind him and pretended he couldn't hear the commotion outside. They'd probably discovered the man's body, but he didn't go out to check. He climbed into his recuperacoon and continued crying and shaking. He'd never been that angry before in his life—he'd never killed anyone.

He stayed in there for days. He grew hungry but he didn't dare venture out. Eventually, he turned to eating the slime in his recuperacoon and that was it. Suddenly everything felt better and he stopped caring about anything really. He was able to pretend it never happened, and by the time he reemerged almost a week later, it really seemed like it, too. True, the servants skirted away from him nervously from then on, but Kurlas made no mention of it even though he was sure she knew about it. The dead servant had been cleared away and no one ever spoke of it, even if they all knew. But the sopor slime worked its magic and clouded his think-pan and kept him calm and stupid.

Kurlas tolerated that for only a couple of sweeps until she discovered what exactly it was that was causing his sudden docility, and then he removed his recuperacoon from his block and brought in that bizarre sleeping mat for him.

He was afraid of himself at full rage like that, but as the sweeps passed and he grew to understand more what he would have to do as The Grand Highblood, he realized that this was how he was supposed to be. Down into his blood, he was a culler. He didn't want to be, but he was.

"What about us, though?" a different female voice asked. "If they wanted to cull them they would have done it with us... right?"

"I hate this waiting," the olive-blooded male said bitterly. "I wish they would just execute us and get it over with."

"Shoosh!" snapped the jade-blooded female. The kid—he was only about six sweeps old, maybe a bit older—curled up to her had let out a whimper. "No one's getting culled, darling," she whispered. "We're all going to be fine."

The child shook his head, and though he spoke quietly, Gamzee could hear what he said, carried across the block. "No. We won't."

Gamzee backstory! Character death in the next chapter! SUCH EXCITE!