In which more terrible fish puns.
Many thanks to grimjaws, Bitblondetoday, cherrylipbalm, Wolfen Artist of Hetalia, iDreamBig, obsessed01616, crimsonkoteto, LinkinPark X, thepeopleofthecrysis, Bear, theWANTING, and marshmallowgilbird for your reviews to the last act!
When Sollux woke up the next morning, the first thing he did was check his phone. He was surprised to see fifteen missed calls and two new voicemails, but even more surprised to discover that every single one of those calls had been from Eridan, and they'd all arrived in the hour and a half or so he'd been prowling around the neighborhood the night before. For some reason, none of the notifications had arrived until now.
He listened to the first message. "Hey, Sol, it's Eridan. Uh, look, you're not... You seem to hav-ve v-vanished. Just w-wonderin' w-where you are. Um, I'm gonna look around the house an' see if I can find you. I'll giv-ve you a call back if I can't. Yeah, um, bye." The worry in Eridan's voice was almost tangible. What the Hell? He deleted the message and went to the next one.
"Hey, Sol, it's Eridan. Looks like you took off. Security system shows someone leav-vin' about tw-wenty minutes ago an' I'm guessin' that w-was you. Um... Look, I dunno w-why you left but I'm comin' to get you. It's fuckin' cold out there right now-w. Stick tight, I'll be there soon. An' call me back as soon as you can, okay? Okay, bye." Sol chewed on his lip. He had a feeling that Eridan's worry had been tempered with not wanting to be seen as clingy or overbearing. He couldn't even imagine what he would have sounded like if he hadn't cared about that perception. It was kind of sweet, though. Well, he cares a little bit, at least. He felt kind of bad for running out the night before, but there was nothing he could do about it now.
He looked around to see that just about everyone else had already woken up. Only Nepeta and Eridan remained asleep, she in a ball on the sofa with Equius's blanket still over her, and he with his limbs splayed out on the floor and snoring softly. He almost looked like a hipster starfish.
Sollux amused himself with imagining what kind of antics a hipster starfish might get up to before crawling out of his sleeping bag and hunting for a bathroom. He felt funky and in desperate need of a shower.
When he finished, he felt a lot better. He sat down on his sleeping back and looked from Eridan to Nepeta and back. Both of them were still sleeping soundly, and he didn't really want to wake Eridan up, no matter how much he wondered what he was going to say. But maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he would pretend there wasn't anything to say. He pushed that thought out of his head, though—it was too early for emotional crises, no matter what time his phone said.
He contemplated going back to sleep—he could have definitely used a few more hours—but he'd smelled food cooking while he was in the shower and his stomach demanded audience with whatever sustenance he could find, so he followed the scent to the source.
In the conjoined kitchen and dining room, everyone save Eridan and Nepeta was either eating or getting ready to eat. Cronus was hovering over a pan of what smelled like frying bacon, poking at it mournfully while Equius glared at a griddle of pancakes that weren't quite ready to be flipped over yet. Cronus looked up at Sollux's approach, and his face broke into a wide grin. "Hey, little monster," he said. "You feelin' better?"
Sollux didn't quite know what to make of the question, so he nodded. Aradia shot him a puzzled look; he would talk to her later and tell her what had happened the night before, but for right now, he was just really hungry.
"Bacon?" the elder Ampora offered. "Eq here's makin' more pancakes since we just ran out."
"We will need all we can get. Once Nepeta awakens, I'm certain she will be starving. She usually eats a lot of pancakes."
"Yeah, I'll eat them," Sollux said. "Bacon, too." As Cronus pulled a plate out of a cupboard, Sollux hoped he wasn't about to start talking about the night before. He'd been sober enough to know he'd embarrassed himself pretty thoroughly with the drama bomb he'd dropped. He didn't want to relive it.
Fortunately, Cronus didn't say a word about it, and handed Sollux the plate piled with three massive chocolate-chip pancakes and about five strips of crispy bacon. He drenched his pancakes in honey he'd located in another cupboard, sat down next to Aradia, and started eating while the conversation around them slowly resumed.
"So what happened?" she asked conspiratorially. "You throw up?"
Sollux shook his head. "Later. I'll tell you later."
Eridan finally stumbled into the kitchen a half an hour later. Sollux and Aradia were still at the table, Aradia waiting for Sollux to finish working through his pancakes, along with Equius, John, Dave, and Kanaya. Everyone else had wandered away, doing what, Sollux could only guess.
Eridan rubbed his eyes and yawned. "Thought you said you couldn't cook," he said to Cronus. He went over to the stove, running his fingers through his hair—which, Sollux was surprised to see, had absolutely zero product in it. One chunk hung in his eye, and the rest was tucked back behind his ears. Sollux had never seen Eridan's hair in any way other than anti-gravitational.
"I'm bein' taught," Cronus answered. "Bacon? I'm just kiddin', little monster," he added with a grin. He tousled Eridan's hair. "You want a couple a' pancakes?"
"Sure."
Sollux hurriedly went back to his food, pretending he hadn't just been eyeballing Eridan. He certainly didn't want to come off as creepy.
But Eridan took his plate, hopped up into the counter, and continued talking to his brother. Sollux glanced up occasionally, unable to keep himself from admiring the way Eridan's neck looked in that purple V-neck shirt he wore. It was actually quite distracting.
"When are you cats headin' back home?"
Eridan shrugged, yawned, stretched. "Probably tomorrow, unless someone wants to go back tonight. I don't really care."
"Better have the basement cleaned up before then. Don't leave it for Mya."
"I'm not that much a' a' asshole, Cro. It's not that bad, anyway. Five minutes a' work, tops."
"Furniture's gotta be moved back, too."
"We got Eq," Eridan said with a grin. "No problem. So when are you goin' back?"
"Tonight, most likely. I got work in the mornin'."
Sollux couldn't hear the rest of the conversation since John picked that moment to start recounting how thoroughly he and Nepeta had trounced Dave and Karkat at beer pong the night before (it actually was a pretty impressive feat, but Sollux had seen most of it and wasn't interested).
Morning melted into the afternoon and when Nepeta finally woke up around one-thirty, she killed the rest of the pancakes so summarily that their wives and children didn't even have time to mourn before they, too, were destroyed. Everyone else had migrated back into the basement and begun watching The Boondock Saints, a particular favorite of Tavros's, and while Sollux was consumed with curiosity with what Eridan wanted to talk to him about, he didn't look ready to say anything, so Sollux wasn't about to push him. Instead, he and Aradia hid on the floor behind the bar and he told her what had happened the night before.
"It's a long story."
"We have until the end of the movie."
Sollux nodded, peered out from behind the bar to make sure no one was listening, and started talking. "So I woke up and I really had to piss so I went to the bathroom. But ED and FF were already in there."
"Together?" She sounded scandalized.
He nodded. "Yeah. And... well, I saw them kissing, so I just kind of... left. I grabbed my phone and ran out of the house. And then I got lost."
"And you called him and he found you?"
Sol grimaced. "Uh, not exactly. More like, I wandered the neighborhood like a creeper until I found a park and then I stayed there. I didn't get any calls, which is weird since I woke up to fifteen missed calls and two voicemails from him but I guess I wasn't in a good service area or something. But I guess he realized pretty quick that I was gone 'cause he... well, he said he searched the house for me and I was gone and so he woke up Cronus and they ended up finding me just after three." He bit his lip.
"And?"
"And... well, I didn't really want to go with him at first 'cause I was pissed off at him. But he told me that... that when he kissed her, he realized he didn't actually have feelings for her anymore."
"Then what?"
He shrugged. "Then he said we'd talk tomorrow—today. An' I got in the car and we came back."
"That's it?"
"Pretty much."
"'Pretty much' is not everything."
Sol turned a little pink. "I... may have fallen asleep in his lap."
She grabbed his upper arms and leaned in. "What." It was probably meant to be a question, but it sounded like more of a statement.
"Yeah. ED had his arm around me and I kind of... leaned into him an' the next thing I knew, we were back at the house and I guess I fell asleep with my head in his lap. He was playing with my hair, though."
Aradia's grip on his arms tightened and her eyes widened. "Sollux. He is so gay for you. Do you realize this?"
"I..." Eridan hadn't said anything about anything yet. Sol didn't want to get his hopes up for something that might be completely wrong. "I'm not sure." He'd certainly hinted that maybe he really did like him, but until he said it with actual words, Sol was going to keep his hope locked down.
"I am. I am absolutely positive. When he kissed you last night, he almost looked relieved. Like he'd been fighting it for awhile and now he had an excuse to."
His heart beat a little faster at that. He felt that she was right—it made sense, after all—but he couldn't rule out the possibility that they were completely misconstruing everything. "Maybe. But I'll wait to believe it until he tells me. We still need to talk, so... hopefully it'll be something I want to hear. But I can't let myself expect it, okay?"
She sighed and nodded. "I'll believe it enough for the both of us." She kissed his forehead and they crept out from behind the bar to rejoin the cluster watching the movie.
Equius jumped into the pool after the movie (he had been prepared for the eventuality of a pool) and Nepeta quickly joined him. That led to John, Karkat, Terezi, Aradia, Sollux, and Tavros jumping in as well. Kanaya said she'd had enough of the pool the night before and Rose rolled up her jeans to dangle her feet in the water. Dave lounged on one of the deck chairs, listening to his iPod and coolly observing them all, and Eridan nearly charged out the back door to cannonball into the deep end until Feferi grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back.
"Ow! Fef, what the Hell?"
"Have you glubbed with him yet?" she asked innocently, still hanging onto his arm to keep him in the house.
"Who?"
She gave a sharp yank. "You know who."
Eridan shot a glance through the glass door. Aradia was shoving Sollux's head under the water and he was far more preoccupied with knocking her off than what was happening inside. "Uh. Not yet."
"Eridan. You need to. What happened, anyway? Where was he?"
"The park. He saw us kissin' an' he freaked out, I guess. He... I think he was a little jealous," he added with a small smile.
"No—not cute. Bad. What did you tell him?"
"The truth."
"You want him?"
"Not that. That there's nothin' between us."
Fef finally let him go, sighing. "You have to glub with him soon. You told me you would."
"An' I will! I just need to... figure out what I'm gonna say."
"'I like you.' Hey, look at that! Easy!"
"Not that easy."
"Only because you're mackreling it not that easy."
Eridan winced. "That was a reel bad one."
She giggled. "I know. And they're only going to get worse." She fluffed her hair and slid her goggles over her eyes. "I'm going to send him in here, and you're going to glub with him."
"Fef—"
"The longer you wait, the worse it'll be. Besides, this is a perfect distraction. Everyone else is busy in the pool. No one'll notice... except maybe Aradia, but she's his best frond. Shell definitely notice. You'll never get a better chance."
"An' I did tell him I'd talk to him today," Eridan said slowly.
"Sea? Perfect!"
He sighed. "Alright, fine. I'll talk to him now."
She grinned. "Exshellent!"
"That was horrible."
Feferi charged out of the house and plunged into the pool, splashing everyone who was already in as well as Rose who quickly scooted away and into a deck chair. When she resurfaced at the other end, she took advantage of the cover of Equius and Nepeta's splash war to sidle up to Sollux and whisper, "Eridan wants to glub with you."
Sollux swallowed, nodded, and got out of the pool. He took a moment to towel himself off, wrap it around his waist, and grab his phone before heading back to the house. This is it. In a few minutes, everything could change, or nothing could change, and he just hoped he wouldn't be devastated by the results.
Emotional confessions and maybe more fun business in the next act. Also I thought about taking out the last bit but I love leaving you on a cliffhanger.
Projects for the weekend: snippet of my pre-Hivebent fic and a small series of oneshots in this 'verse featuring the meowrails because I fucking ship them so hard now. I bought a Nepeta shirt in men's small, an Equius shirt in ladies' small, a Gamzee shirt in men's small, and two Eridan shirts, one in ladies' small and the other in men's. Yaaaaaaaay.
