A few things I forgot to mention in previous chapters: this does start off blackrom but flips to redrom. So if redroms aren't your thing, well, sorry, but this has a redrom ending. Another thing: remember the story Equius told Aradia about how he and Nepeta became friends? A girl lost her eye (Vriska) and another classmate, a boy, had to use a wheelchair for awhile (Tavros). Tav can walk now. No wheelchair anymore!
Many thanks to fangirl4you, iDreamBig, RandomAnonymous, scone, CatastrophicAquarius, YaoiOverlord, obsessed01616, Kerra-Chan, thepeopleofthecrysis, kab, BlOo KiSsEs, and LinkinPark X for your reviews to the last act!
Four hours later, Eridan was dumping water into his new aquarium, two washed-out gallon containers of milk at a time. Cronus walked back into the apartment halfway through and watched him with amusement, crossing his arms over his chest and kicking his feet up onto the coffee table. "Whatcha doin' there, daddy-o?" he asked.
"Shut up," Eridan grunted, hefting two more gallons of water into his room.
When he came back out, Cronus was still sitting on the sofa with a grin on his face.
Four more trips passed before Eridan finished filling up the tank. He poured two milliliters of dechlorinator solution into the water and set the bottle down on the desk. Then he attached the oxygenator to the side of the tank, poured in enough purple gravel to line the bottom of the tank with about two inches of rock, and stuck the lighted hood on top of the tank. He stared at it all for a moment, the water gurgling and running through the eighteen thousand filters, and flipped on the light. The whole mess—the quiet hum of the oxygenator, the gentle bubbling, the purple rocks—already had him calming down. Even without the fish swimming around (he'd found out at the PetCo that he'd have to wait at least a week before adding any fish to allow the water to become habitable, which disappointed him, but the clerk named Rufioh had set aside three bright yellow fish for him to pick up next Wednesday), it was already worth it. He was already thinking of all the other little accessories he could put in there—seaweed, a castle, maybe a few plastic treasure chests. He wanted his fish to be happy.
He set the remainder of the gravel in his closet and sat down on the edge of his bed. He wondered if a seahorse or two would be happy in there. Maybe that would make the tank too crowded. He'd have to talk to Rufioh again next week.
There was a knock on the door, but before Eridan could yell at Cronus to stay out, the door opened and his brother stuck his head in. "Oh, tuff, daddy-o! You got an aquarium!"
"No shit, Sherlock," Eridan grumbled. Note to self: burn his copy of The Outsiders. "Don't fuck with it."
"Cool it, I'm not gonna mess with anythin'." Without even looking at him, Cronus crossed the room and peered into the aquarium. "No fish?"
"Not yet," Eridan said. In spite of the disdain he held for his brother, he did want to talk about this. "The guy at the PetCo said I can't add any yet. That's tap water in there. The fish'll die since the water ain't habitable yet."
Cronus nodded, and Eridan got the impression he was only half-listening until he said, "What kind a' fish you gettin'?"
"Uh. Yellow ones?"
His brother laughed and straightened up. "Terribly specific. I hear the yellow ones are boss."
"Yeah."
Cronus lurked there for a few more moments, staring into the fish tank. The reflections from the water played across his face, turning the blue-purple shade of his eyes into a pure blue. Then, just as abruptly as he'd entered Eridan's bedroom, he straightened up, stuck the cigarette that had been tucked behind his ear into his mouth, and mumbled around it, "You hungry, daddy-o?"
"A little," Eridan admitted. "You shouldn't smoke," he added. He'd told his parents over the weekend that he was trying to get Cronus to quit, but that had been a lie. This was the first he'd ever mentioned to his brother that his smoking bothered him.
The elder Ampora looked briefly surprised. "I know," he said after a moment. He shrugged. "You probably shouldn't drink so much joe."
Eridan rolled his eyes. There was a difference between coffee and cigarettes in terms of health damage.
"My Sophie's been tryin' a' make me quit, too," Cronus murmured.
"Your what?"
Cronus rolled his eyes. "My girlfriend. Get with it, square."
Eridan groaned and rubbed his temples. "Newsflash, bro: it's 2013, not 1956. You 'get with it'. I didn't even know you had a girlfriend."
"Surprise, surprise. Dolls don't completely hate me." The cigarette was still poised, unlit, in Cronus's mouth. "I was gonna order a pizza. You like pepperoni, right?"
He couldn't believe it. For a second, he wanted to believe that he and Cronus were about to have a brother bonding moment, and he'd somehow completely ignored the fact that Eridan was at least a vegetarian. "Uh, bro? I don't fuckin' eat meat."
"You're a vegetarian?" Cronus seemed genuinely confused. "Since when?"
"Since like the tenth fuckin' grade, moron! Come on—it's been four, five years by now!" He scoffed and hopped off his bed. "Forget it. I'm goin' out to eat," he snapped. He snatched up his keys and headed to the door but froze with his hand on the doorknob when Cronus said softly, "Wait."
Eridan turned around and crossed his arms over his chest. "What?" He couldn't believe he'd once looked up to this guy. Cronus was three years older than him. Until the age of fourteen, he'd been Eridan's idol. Then Cronus started slipping deeper into his obsession with the greaser heydays and speaking practically a brand-new language. Even their parents were confused, but they were used to it—they'd been teenagers in the late fifties and early sixties. But for Eridan, it had been like he'd lost his best friend, and even before Cronus had moved out, they lost contact. But this one little fact, something Cronus probably should have realized since Eridan had been living at his apartment for a year and a half now, had completely escaped his brother's notice. How could someone live with another person for that long and not realize?
"Look, I'm sorry. I guess that was stupid of me," Cronus admitted. "So, okay. No pizza. We can get somethin' else. What're you hungry for?"
"Um." Eridan wasn't quite sure what to say. "Uh, there's an Italian place, Big Rico's—they got some pretty good eggplant Parmesan," he suggested. He set his keys down.
Cronus smiled. "Sounds good. They deliver?"
"Yeah."
"Good. I'll order somethin'. Stick around." Even though he was only an inch taller than Eridan, he ruffled his younger brother's hair (as well as he could, considering Eridan's hair was, as usual, coated in product to defy gravity) as he pulled out his phone and left his brother's bedroom.
Eridan watched until the door closed and he sat back down on his bed again. Weird. He went back to staring at the fish tank.
Sollux reluctantly gathered up the few articles of clothing that littered his bedroom floor, tossed them in his laundry basket, and eyed the plastic container disdainfully. He absolutely hated braving the apartment complex's laundry facility. No matter what time of day (or night) he went down there, there was always someone there. He just wanted to be left in peace as he did his laundry, but inevitably, whoever was down there would try to make conversation. Sollux considered writing "FUCK OFF" on his forehead in marker but deemed that too subtle for some of the people in this building. Most of them were college students as well, and under normal circumstances, they might leave him alone, but for some reason, doing laundry brought out the chattiness in people. Dave Strider would probably keep his mouth shut if he saw Sollux, but Sollux had never had the fortune to do laundry with Strider.
His utter distaste for doing laundry here caused him to only do laundry once every two or three weeks. He had enough clothes to last that long, but it didn't help much because every excursion to the laundry room was enough to make him want to climb into his basket of clean clothes and hide and never come out. He suppressed the instinct, though, hefted his laundry basket onto his hip, and headed downstairs.
He peered around the laundry room. Aside from a couple in the corner, the room was deserted, and Sollux very nearly breathed a sigh of relief. He knew better than to actually express his relief, though—that was a sure way to jinx himself and cause the building's chattiest resident to appear with four loads of laundry and nothing to do but talk to him. It wasn't that he necessarily didn't like talking to people, because he did. It was just strangers that bothered him, and people he saw randomly at school halfway across campus still counted as strangers.
He chose a washing machine as far away from the couple as possible and started tossing clothing into the drum. He paid two dollars and fifty cents for a packet of soap, emptied that into his washer, and started it up. For a few moments, he watched the colors swirl together before growing bored and taking his Nintendo DS out of his back pocket. This was usually a better indicator of "I don't want to talk to you" than texting (or pretending to text) someone. Everyone had their phones, and somehow the implication had become "I can multitask by talking to you and texting at the same time, so talk to me!" Generally, actual video games were better at getting people to leave him alone.
One half of the couple in the corner let out a giggle, and Sollux cringed and tried to make himself smaller. He slid off the bench he'd been sitting on and sank to the floor in the corner, wedged between the wall and his washer. There was pretty much no way anyone would get through to steal his clothes without attracting his attention (he'd learned the hard way his first week not to leave laundry unattended. It was a lesson he only needed to learn once—his Gemini shirt had been among the items that had been swiped, and he hadn't found another one like it).
He was halfway through a replay of a previously-beaten world in Super Mario 4 when the buzzer on the washing machine went off. Sollux stashed his Nintendo and switched his sopping wet clothing over to the nearest dryer, holding it awkwardly away from his body so his shirt didn't get wet as well. After paying another dollar and fifty cents for a small package of dryer sheets (he only ever used one but somehow the package managed to vanish in the two or three weeks between loads, and he had to buy another pack), he started up the dryer and huddled next to it, staying out of the sight line of the couple. The one was still giggling, but they were making out now, too, and Sollux desperately wished he wasn't there. There was no way they didn't know he was in the room with them, but they clearly didn't care.
He was forcibly reminded of Eridan as the couple came up for air and both of them laughed. He wasn't sure why Eridan suddenly came to mind—he wasn't even sure he'd ever heard the guy actually laugh. But the idea that somewhere, Eridan could be doing his own laundry and avoiding exactly the same kind of social interaction as him made him want to crawl into a dryer and spin until he had a concussion and didn't have to think anymore. He knew his face was burning and, not for the first time, he silently cursed himself for having the worst judgment in the world—both for crushing on a guy who didn't even like other guys, and for crushing on that particular ass-wagon.
The next half an hour dragged by agonizingly slow, but the couple left about ten minutes before Sollux's laundry finished tumbling and five minutes after one of the few elderly women in the building shuffled into the laundry room. He kept himself as hidden as possible, hoping to avoid detection until his clothing was dry. Once the dryer buzzed, he yanked open the door, scooped out his clothing, and nearly sprinted to the elevator in record time.
Now, though, he wasn't sure which was worse: the prospect of being corralled into a conversation with a total stranger, or the knowledge that tomorrow, he'd somehow have to face Eridan Ampora and pretend that nothing had changed.
FILLER FILLER FILLER FILLER but also importance in the filler.
Next chapter to have some plot thrown in for good measure (sorry I gave you basically two filler chapters in a row I AM SO EXHAUSTED FROM WORK).
