This almost didn't get finished last night BUT IT DID HUZZAH SIGNLESS TAKE THE WHEEL. (I got my five new Homestuck shirts today and I'm wearing Eridan's right now!)
Many thanks to Rand0mAn0nym0u2, obsessed01616 (it was Terezi), thepeopleofthecrysis, Bitblondetoday, DarkBlueMahogany, CatastrophicAquarius, and iDreamBig (who is having/did have surgery today, so good luck and I hope everything goes well!) for your reviews to the last act!
Sollux yawned and stretched his arms over his head, very nearly smacking Eridan in the face. Slowly, he disentangled himself from the other boy, who fell over onto the sofa and continued snoring. Apparently, he was a pretty heavy sleeper.
Sollux rubbed the bridge of his nose and groped for his glasses. Sometime last night, someone had probably woken up and taken off the glasses of everyone who wore them—him, Eridan, Terezi, Dave, Equius, John—and set them on the coffee table. That was nice, he supposed, especially considering he really didn't want to end up with broken glasses a week after Equius and his brother had made them, but it made him feel weird, too. It wasn't that he'd been touched—it was that he didn't know who had touched him.
Still, he'd slept surprisingly well last night. There was a deep satisfaction to waking up that morning that he rarely felt at home, and he wondered why.
Then his gaze fell on Terezi and Karkat sleeping under her teal blanket and, again, he wondered why. He knew they liked each other and everything, but he thought they were only friends. Apparently they were more than that, though, if they'd actually fucked in Eridan's bathroom.
Classy, he thought, as if he hadn't done worse with Karkat.
He picked his way around the bodies strewn on the floor, grabbed his duffel bag, and picked out a T-shirt he hadn't worn in the last two days, a black one with the Gemini symbol on it in yellow. It had come in a bunch of colors, but the black on yellow had spoken to him at the time, plus it reminded him of bees. It had been good enough for him.
Aradia had picked up a similar shirt, except with the Aries symbol in a dark red. She seldom wore it, though. She said she had nothing that went with it, which made Sollux roll his eyes and think, Jeans! very loudly in his head.
Today, he was the first one awake, so he slunk to the kitchen to see what kind of food he could eat that didn't involve dirtying up two hundred dishes or something crazy like yesterday morning. He knew he had to find some tea, first—he was pretty sure he hadn't had anything the morning before and he had a headache just thinking about it. He had gotten halfway through searching through the cupboards when Nepeta, blinking sleepily with her short hair tousled and her pajama pants—they looked massive on her, had they been Equius's at some point?—nearly falling off her butt, wandered into the kitchen and yawned. Sollux wondered if she practiced at looking that catlike or if it just came naturally. She appeared to have unusually sharp teeth.
"Morning," she said, scratching her side. "Did you sleep good?"
"Pretty good," Sollux said. He closed one cupboard and opened another, locating a mug to use for tea. "Kinda weirded out when I heard KK and TZ going at it, but—"
"Going at what?" Nepeta asked suddenly, looking immediately more awake.
"At... um..." He set down the mug in his hand, made a circle with his thumb and index finger, and put his other index finger through the circle.
Her eyes went wide, and for a second, he was worried she was about to attack him.
She didn't, but she did pounce on him, bunching her fists in his shirt and dragging him down to look right into her eyes. She was over a foot shorter than him, so it was awkward. She was surprisingly strong, though. "They did not," she said, and he still couldn't tell how she felt about it. Her eyes were still wide and her voice was a frantic whisper.
Unable to suppress the feeling that he was taking his own life in his hands, he nodded. "Unless their idea of a good time is making sex noises in a bathroom while everyone else is asleep..." He let his voice trail off, and she let go of his shirt.
Suddenly, she was jumping in a circle. "That is too purrfect! I can't believe it! Are you sure it was them?"
"They were the only two awake at the time except me," Sollux confirmed.
She giggled and began to spin around him excitedly.
He quickly became dizzy watching her, so he closed his eyes before taking an abrupt step to the side. "So. You're wide-awake now, I'm guessing."
"Yep!" She hopped up onto a chair and perched there. "I had a pretty good night of sleep, too, but uninterrupted by the canoodling of our furiends," she joked.
"That's good," Sollux said, feeling awkward. He located a tin of gourmet tea and nearly dropped his forehead to the counter. These rich people couldn't have tea in bags like normal people, could they?
"Speaking of canoodling," Nepeta said suddenly, innocently, and he had a feeling he knew where this was going, "Mr. Ampurra has a very interesting mark on his neck. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"
This time, he actually did drop his head to the counter, with a loud thump that was more sound than fury but still hurt his noggin. "Um." He turned to face her, feeling his face heating up. "Maybe."
She stuffed the sleeves of her hoodie into her mouth to stifle her giggles. Once she stopped laughing, she withdrew her sleeves and straightened up. "Well, good! I'm glad! I mean, making out beclaws of a dare is one thing, but actually, legitimately kissing is about a hundred times better!"
He rubbed the back of his neck, grinning in spite of himself. "Uh. Yeah, it is." He shelved the box of tea but remembered where it came from. He'd ask Eridan or Feferi, whichever one of them woke up first, what exactly to do with loose tea leaves. He had a feeling that he wouldn't like it, though—somehow, he imagined that smothering gourmet tea in honey would be seen as a sacrilege.
His stomach growled, but he hadn't seen anything simple like cereal in the kitchen throughout his searching. It was pretty apparent that the Ampora kids probably didn't spend too much time here anymore. He recognized the signs of an "empty nest"—neither he nor Mituna lived at home anymore, after all. All the teenager-friendly food like snacks and cereal and Hot Pockets and microwave meals vanished from the kitchen, the senior pictures on the walls only resembled their subjects in an abstract, passive way—apparently, Eridan had started dyeing that streak in his hair purple only after high school, because it was white-blond in his senior picture—all the recorded TV was shows like Law & Order and Wheel of Fortune, and everywhere, signs that parents were trying to find new hobbies now that they didn't have children to look after.
Long story short: unless he wanted to bust out the frying pan and test his next-to-nonexistent cooking skills, he would have to wait until someone who actually could cook woke up. He'd offer to do the dishes, of course—he didn't want to, but if someone was cooking for him, he'd clean up afterward.
But first, someone actually had to get up here and cook. He could do basic food like grilled cheese, and he supposed French toast wasn't completely out of the question (that would be easy and he could still smother it in honey, strange looks from Dave be damned), but he was also very lazy when it came to food. He preferred to expend his energies on other things, like school and adamantly denying he had problems.
Nepeta had rested her elbows on the table and leaned forward. "So..." she said in a way that was meant to be deliberately leading.
"Yeah?" he asked, only half-paying attention. He'd opened the fridge and begun to scan the contents thereof.
"This is probably a dumb question, but how much stock do you put in astrology?"
"Not much." He crouched down and opened the bottom drawer. There was fruit there, but the day he willingly ate an orange was the day the world ended.
"Didn't think so. I don't really, not much, but there are some things that are a bit eerily uncanny."
"Like?"
"Even before I saw your shirt, I could tell you were a Gemini. You have the attitude."
"Great."
"And Karkat's a Cancer—he's tough on the outside, but soft and squishy inside. He really cares about John and Dave, for example."
"What about AA?"
"Pretty sure she's an Aries."
Sollux nodded. "She is. Born April sixteenth."
Nepeta grinned. "And Eridan is a clawsic Aquarius."
"Okay, and?" He straightened up and pushed aside a neatly-stacked column of Tupperware containers with perfectly-portioned leftovers inside them. He felt incredibly awkward suddenly, realizing he was going through a stranger's fridge.
"And... well, like I said, I don't swear by astrology or anything, but those who do, say that Gemini and Aquarius are made fur each other."
Sollux blushed again and closed the refrigerator door. "Ah. So is this your way of saying ED and I are meant to be or something? Because no one can tell something like that from one kiss or one day even. Besides, I don't believe in that soulmate crap anyway." It would have been nice to believe that he could have that kind of connection with someone, but he knew the world didn't work that way. He'd be lucky if he could find someone who could tolerate him and who he could tolerate in return for six months, let alone for the rest of his life.
In a romantic way, anyway. He already knew that Aradia would be his best friend for a good long time. He knew that kind of bond was possible. But true love was crap.
"Well, he seems to like you a lot," Nepeta said, her tone gently chiding.
"That's not true love, that's hormones."
"I can tell the diffurence."
"Apparently not," Sollux snapped before he could stop himself.
Nepeta gave him a condescending look, but to his surprise, she didn't storm off. "Look, I can tell you've probably been fucked over a lot, right? People you thought were going to be there left. People you cared about, people you loved as more than friends. But that doesn't mean everyone will do the same. Some people can be devoted to the right person." She straightened up. "He's been hurt too, you know. That's why we're all here, remember? He remembers what that feels like—I can see it on his face. He wouldn't willingly do the same to you."
"That, I don't doubt. But unwillingly? Maybe. Up until Friday, he insisted he was straight, and then yesterday he admitted that he's basically gay for me. I don't know." His voice softened. "I'd like to see where it goes, but I don't want to expect too much from it right now. He even admitted already that he doesn't know for sure. So I can't imagine that everything will be perfect right from the beginning when any day he could turn around and tell me he was wrong and he doesn't actually like me like he thought he did."
"Anyone could do that, though. Equius could do that to Aradia, or vice versa. Gamzee and Tavros. Rose and Kanaya."
"There's a difference between 'I don't like you because of you' and 'I don't like you because you're a guy and I'm not into that.' The latter hurts a lot more, trust me."
"Personal experience?"
"Yeah. And I'm getting myself into the same mess again. Except this time, I like him more, so it'll hurt worse. "
"But you do like him."
"Yeah." Sollux sighed. "I do."
There was a few moments of silence before Nepeta got up from her seat and gave him a hug. "That's good. He probably likes you just as much, but he doesn't know what to do about it. Just let him have time—you've had awhile to accept your sexuality. He's two days in to admitting that he's not as straight as he thought he was. I think if you let him figure this out, it'll go really well, okay?"
He nodded slowly. He really did like Eridan. The stupid, hopeful part of him wanted this to work, but he knew he couldn't allow himself to hope too much—not right now.
But he definitely needed to talk to Eridan, and soon.
Oops Sol was supposed to talk to Terezi but that didn't happen CAN YOU SAY SIXTY ACTS OMFG.
