I'm so sorry that this act is a fucking mess but I'm tired, I watched The Great Gatsby on the lawn this evening, and I have duty tomorrow, so I couldn't make you all wait until Thursday for a damn update. I tried, I really did, but I realized halfway through that basically all that ever happens is *emotional event* *Eridan confers with Feferi* *Sollux confers with Aradia* *Feferi and Aradia tell Eridan and Sollux that they're being stupid* and I just ARGHHHHH. So I tweaked some things.

Many thanks to Rand0mAn0nym0u2 (YAY YOU FINALLY GOT AN ACCOUNT GOOD), thepeopleofthecrysis, Hiram McDaniels, KeeperOfTheMind (you are an absolute sweetheart), obsessed01616, grimjaws, crimsonkoteto, CatastrophicAquarius, and Bitblondetoday for your reviews to the last act! And, of course, I really disliked Vriska before I wrote Intermission IV but after I wrote it, I realized what a shitty life she's had and now I feel bad for her. So yeah. I guess I'm sort of doing my job well.


In all the chaos that Saturday afternoon brought, no one noticed the hickey Sol had left on Eridan's neck except the two of them and Fef. It helped that almost immediately after showering, Eridan put on a collared shirt that half-hid the bruise.

Well, Cronus noticed it, too, but since he knew exactly how Eridan had come by it, he didn't comment on it. He had other questions for Eridan before he and Meenah took off that afternoon.

"So, uh, that girl you like," he said with a grin. "You tell her?"

"Shut up."

"No, seriously, I wanna know."

"It—fuck, I didn't like her all that much."

"But Sollux...?"

Eridan sighed. "Sol is a different story. I don't really... it's complicated, I guess."

"We've all been there," Cronus said reassuringly, affectionately mussing Eridan's hair—or trying to, anyway. Eridan had put his hair up again.

"Shut up."

Cronus shrugged. "So was this whole shindig worth it?"

"Yeah, it went pretty well."

"What was the occasion?"

"Occasion?" You mean besides a huge spider-bitch who happens to be the mutual ex-girlfriend of four people here returning suddenly to our lives to torture us all, causing us to band together for moral support? Nothing, no occasion at all.

"Yeah. For the party."

"Uh. W-well... So there's this girl Vriska—"

"Serket?" Cronus asked suddenly, his expression growing extremely serious extremely quickly.

"Yeah—you know her?"

"She have a sister named Aranea?"

"Yeah, I think so."

Cronus leaned back against the kitchen counter, crossed his arms over his chest, and scowled. "I know Aranea. She was in my class in high school, not that she was there half the time."

"Neither were you," Eridan pointed out, who had been a freshman when Cronus was a senior.

"Yeah, for good fuckin' reason. I was with her."

Eridan blinked. "What?"

"Yeah, I know. Well, I guess you didn't know Aranea, but that gal was crazy. Manipulative little bitch—sharp as a tack, but she could hurt you worse. Anyway... few weeks before the end a' school, she broke up with me, said she never wanted to see me again, I was the worst thing to ever happen to her. It took me..." He sighed. "Shit, must a' been two years to recover. Lemme guess, Vriska did the same to a few a' these cats?"

Eridan nodded slowly. "John, Tav, Kan... me," he added quietly.

"She—what? When?"

"Senior year a' high school. We'd been datin' for a few months but never told anyone about it—she didn't want me to. Said her mom would kill her or somethin'. I asked her to prom an' she just laughed in my face... Like, I kind a' expected it since she was always a massive bitch to me, but it still hurt. I never even told Fef," he added quietly. "She didn't know about me an' Vris until like last week. Shit, I never told anyone about that, but she... she just transferred to our college out a' nowhere an' she like came up to me on Monday an' started harassin' me an' she brought it up like it was no big deal. So now I guess everyone knows."

"Sollux know?"

"Yeah. He was there when she showed up. He heard everythin' but... I don't know, he was just pissed at her."

"So I'm guessin' she did the same thing to the others. Hurtin' them an' makin' them feel like crap."

"Yeah, basically. So this thing was just a few people with a mutual ex gettin' together with some friends to commiserate."

"It's like Scott Pilgrim in reverse. Unless you're plannin' on formin' a league a' evil exes," Cronus half-joked.

"Nah, I'm pretty sure Vris wronged us all more than we did her."

"Pretty sure that's what Gideon Graves thought, too," Cronus pointed out. "You'd make a pretty good Gideon, actually."

"Fuck off. None of us actually want her back anymore, least a' all me."

"Yeah, you got Sollux now."

Eridan rolled his eyes, although a small smile threatened to light up his face.

"Well, anyway, Vriska probably did you a favor by cuttin' you loose. She sounds like a real piece a' work, just like her sister."

Eridan nodded. "Yeah, maybe, but it fuckin' destroyed me at the time."

"That, I don't doubt. I think Vriska probably took lessons from Aranea. It wouldn't shock me at all."

"She probably did."

Cronus nodded, glanced out the window to the front yard, and then looked back at Eridan. "Alright, little monster, Meenah wanted to leave here pretty soon, so we're takin' off. Behave yourselves tonight. Make sure you all get back for school tomorrow—an' clean up the damn basement before you leave."

"Yes, Dad," Eridan said sarcastically.


But his conversation with Cronus had left him with a feeling of unease. After he and Meenah left, he lingered in the kitchen, chewing absently on his lip.

Vriska hadn't talked about her sister all that much—only that she had one and that her name was Aranea. Cronus had never mentioned her either in all the time he said they dated. Eridan would have only known her for one year, but he'd never even thought about her since he'd barely known Vriska at the time.

Vriska definitely hadn't mentioned that her older sister and his older brother had a thing, but he strongly suspected she knew.

He swallowed, wishing he had something else to focus on. Had it been intentional, the way they'd targeted him and Cronus? It would have been an elaborate plan, and he didn't doubt that Vriska possessed the malice for something like that (and, by extension, Aranea), but he did doubt that Vriska had the patience. She'd waited three months to destroy him emotionally, but he really didn't think she had the capacity to wait three years.

Unless it was under Aranea's instruction. He didn't know anything about her besides whatever Cronus told him. He wouldn't be too terribly surprised to find out that she'd instructed her sister to mess with her ex-boyfriend's younger brother, but he had no idea why. What would either of them gain by hurting them? It didn't make any sense.

"You awake?"

Eridan jerked around so fast, he nearly gave himself whiplash. "Y-yeah, I'm fine. Sorry, just a little distracted," he told Fef, rubbing the back of his neck.

Which immediately drew her eyes to the hickey on the front of his neck.

"Holy glubbing Hell, Eridan, what the—is that—?" She charged forward, arms outstretched, and before he could say anything, she was tugging down his collar to get an eyeful of the mark Sol had left. "Oh, my cod, did he really—?" She looked up at him, grinning her face off.

"Um." He grinned, slightly embarrassed but more pleased than anything. "Yeah. He did."

"Ooooooh, someone's got a boyfrond!"

"W-well, not exactly."

Confusion replaced the giddy grin on her face. "What do you mean?"

"I mean... w-well, I like him an' I told him an', w-well, based on this—" here, he pointed to the hickey "—I'm assumin' he likes me too, but w-we hav-ven't really discussed much else in terms a' our actual relationship," he admitted. "It's probably gonna take me awhile to get used to likin' a guy, let alone datin' one. I never really contemplated it before, is all."

"I'm sure he'll be patient. You are going to glub with him about this, right?" she asked sternly.

"Yeah, a' course. We just didn't really get the chance to earlier."

"Why not?"

"Well, I told him I liked him an' then he kissed me an' then Cronus walked in, again, an' shooed us out. That was when we came back to the pool."

"Oh." She thought it over for a moment. "I can probably come up with a reel good distraction for everyone, allowing you two to casually sneak away—"

"I appreciate the offer, but I can't keep askin' you to act as a runner or a distraction. I should just be able to talk to him, right?"

"It's just beginning, though! It's okay to be nervous!"

Eridan bit his lip again. "I guess so. But I just wanna wait right now. Like... I'll talk to him tomorrow. Baby steps."

Feferi nodded. "Yeah. Baby steps are good."


Eridan blasted dubstep through the house shortly after Cronus and Meenah departed for good, leading Aradia to refer to him as "Gatsby" for the rest of the night. A few in their party danced raver-style for awhile, but they all grew hungry soon enough and they ordered food and put on HBO. After Nepeta passed around her bottle of Everclear, the plight of the Starks seemed a lot funnier, and they started playing a Game of Thrones drinking game—"they" being Feferi, Dave, Nepeta, and John. Aradia and Equius were otherwise occupied and Rose and Kanaya were sharing a glass of wine.

Eridan kept biting his lip and glancing over at Sol, wondering if he should talk to him now. But then again, maybe that was a bad idea—it wasn't always about whatever was going on with them, after all. He felt like lately, it was all he thought about, and while there was a significant reason for that (that reason being the acceptance that he probably wasn't as straight as he thought he was), it couldn't really take up all of his conscious thought, could it?

Sol ended up falling asleep halfway through Season One anyway, slumping across the arm of the sofa. By that time, it was after eleven, and though he'd woken up fairly late that day, he'd also been awake late. Eridan didn't blame him at all for falling asleep and, in fact, reached over to rub his back. No one noticed that, either, except for Fef, who nudged him half-playfully, half-drunkenly, and gave him an overly-dramatic wink.

"Yeah, you get it," she joked, causing Dave to let out a manly giggle and stifle his laughter into a pillow.

"Shut up," Eridan replied, but he couldn't even pretend to be upset when Sol murmured something and switched from leaning against the arm of the couch to leaning against him.


When Sollux woke up next, it was all dark and everyone was asleep. He stretched and wondered why he'd woken up before realizing he had to pee, so he carefully disentangled himself from Eridan (he didn't know why he'd ended up drooling on Eridan's shirt, but the shorter boy was out cold) and picked his way over the sleeping forms of Aradia and Equius and Nepeta and John all snuggled together, passed Feferi and Dave at the other end of the couch, and crept by Rose and Kanaya in the recliner to get to the basement bathroom.

For the second night in a row, he paused by the door. There were noises from the bathroom, but not typical bathroom noises like a sink or a toilet flushing. It took him a few tired, sleepy seconds for him to realize those were sex noises he was hearing, and he straightened up, suddenly awake. Who the fuck...? He took a mental head count from the TV room in the basement and was pretty sure he'd seen everyone, but apparently not.

He glanced back toward the bathroom door and groaned internally. He would solve the mystery of who was fucking in the basement bathroom later—he really needed to find one of the upstairs bathrooms and pee. Fortunately, he remembered where one on the main floor was and headed off to it instead.

When he came back to the basement, he counted who was there—eleven, including him. Two people were still missing, which made sense, considering when he drew close to the bathroom door again, he could still hear the sounds of sex from inside. He went back to the couch, waited a beat, and then snuggled up next to Eridan again, taking one last look around his cluster of friends to figure out who wasn't asleep right now.

Just before he drifted back off, he heard the bathroom door open and he managed to keep his eyes open long enough to see Terezi and Karkat reappear with half-embarrassed, half-satisfied grins on their faces, and she was fighting giggles. Both of them looked distinctly disheveled.


I knew the two of them (Karkat and Terezi) were going to finally get together at some point, but they were like the only two fully sober ones so I was like, sure, have at it. I ship them pretty hard.

Also surprised no one commented on "arachnid's grip" in the last chapter... *sad panda*