FILLER FILLER FILLER. Basically, I think I'm gonna stop this madness at 75 acts and call it finished. After NaNoWriMo, I will attack "When Blood Sings" until I finish it or whatever, and then will come the sequel to this (there will basically have to be a sequel) which will most likely be called "Reworking the Terms." It'll probably be a main focus on either RoseMary or PB&J as opposed to Erisol but there will most likely be more Erisol smut in it anyway (along with other smut I guess...?). So brace yourselves. Two more acts and then THIS is finished.
Many thanks to CatastrophicAquarius, FanficFinatic2, Kerra-Chan, Bitblondetoday, and can we not for your reviews to the last act!
Halfway through Finding Nemo (yet another movie Eridan had a bizarre passion for, and a welcome reprieve from strange and semi-scary movies), Sollux realized he'd never actually checked the text message he'd received. He was pretty sure it was from Aradia (they'd been in the middle of a conversation at the time, after all), so with Eridan curled up next to him under the blanket clad in only a pair of sweatpants that Sollux had found in his dresser, Sollux reached for his phone to check what had happened.
um h0ney d0 y0u kn0w h0w incredibly weird that s0unds like breathe s0llux its 0kay y0u guys have 0nly been dating f0r f0ur days 0r whatever. falling in l0ve takes time
i think the fact that y0u are still t0gether with him when a week 0r tw0 ag0 he was c0nvinved he was straight is definitely g00d news t00 l00k he definitely likes y0u and i kn0w its pr0bably n0t what y0u want t0 hear but y0u need t0 just take a step back and enj0y what y0u d0 have with him
y0u there s0llux?
shit im s0rry i didnt mean t0 upset y0u 0r anything 0_0
Sollux sneaked a quick glance at Eridan before responding. The other boy looked to be about half-asleep, drifting somewhere, and Sollux couldn't help but envy him slightly. you diidnt up2et me 2orry we were out at rubiio2 for diinner and we 2tarted talkiing whiich dii2tracted me and then we—he paused, struck by indecision. Should he say anything about what had happened between him and Eridan? Probably not—that should probably stay with them. He was okay with that, though. —started watchiing another moviie but um yeah youre riight and the conver2atiion me and ed were haviing made me feel better about the whole thiing ii gue22 2o iim okay
"You're not watchin'," Eridan murmured, nudging Sollux sleepily.
"Sorry. AA sent me a text awhile ago and I never got to answer her."
Eridan nodded in acknowledgment and cuddled closer to him. "Okay. You answered her. Now put your phone away—we're on a date," he added, half-teasing and half-serious.
Sollux grinned at that. This was an actual date, wasn't it? They'd watched movies and gotten dinner and fooled around and started watching another movie. It was nice to just sit here and be with Eridan—the two of them fit well together. Plus there was the ring Eridan had given him—just thinking about that made him want to hide his face and giggle—and the impossibly sweet delivery.
He spun the ring around his finger with his thumb. He was actually really surprised it fit as well as it did. Upon closer inspection, he discovered it was Eridan's class ring from high school. The band was yellow gold and the stone was something deep, ridiculously purple (it almost matched Eridan's eyes) that Sollux was pretty sure was an amethyst; on one side of the band was etched Eridan's name and on the other was 2012, the year they'd both graduated high school. Sollux's first instinct was to ask for a ring that wasn't obviously worth so much—he wasn't planning on losing it, after all, but it was always a possibility and he didn't want to lose something so valuable, both in monetary value and sentimental value—but when he glanced over the other rings that Eridan had dropped on his nightstand, he looked to be hard-pressed to find something that fit that criteria. He reminded himself that Eridan was really rich—his house last weekend had proven that—so it wasn't unexpected that his jewelry probably all came from actual jeweler's stores, but still. It looked like the class ring might have been the least expensive one there.
But part of him was really happy about it, too. Sollux's own class ring was back at his mom's house because he didn't want to lose that, either, but it had a lot of sentimental value attached to it. He didn't have a lot of great memories of high school, but they weren't all terrible, either. He wasn't quite at the point where he was nostalgic for high school yet (he hoped he never was—he got made fun of way too often for his lisp and his heterochromia and his general nerdiness to really feel like he'd ever miss it), but some things weren't so bad. He almost missed the days when he and Karkat had been best friends, although if the general weirdness between them had never happened, he probably wouldn't have gotten so close with Aradia later.
And it wasn't like Karkat had been a bad friend, either—he'd been just as supportive as Aradia, actually—but Aradia was more gentle than him. She didn't yell all the time whereas Karkat's first instinct to show he cared was to yell at you until you felt bad. It was a nice change of pace to not immediately be made to feel guilty or something. Plus, when Aradia fucked with him, he knew it was all meant to be lighthearted whereas you never really were quite sure if Karkat was serious or not.
He wondered how long Eridan and Feferi had been friends. He didn't think they'd ever really talked about their pasts (aside from what the huge spiderbitch had done to Eridan), and he couldn't help but wonder. "Hey, you still awake?" he asked quietly, shaking Eridan's shoulder slightly.
"Hmm? Yeah. Watchin' the movie."
"Your eyes were closed."
"Shut up."
"How long have you and FF been friends?"
Eridan turned his head, giving him a slightly puzzled look. He'd put his glasses back on when they started watching the movie, and he took advantage of them to peer over the frames at him. "Random question."
"I had a train of thought. I started thinking about how this is your class ring and I can't believe you're letting me wear it since I'm so paranoid of losing my own class ring that it's at my mom's house, and then I thought about my high school years and they weren't the greatest and KK wasn't a bad friend back then but he yelled a lot—fuck, he still does—and I think AA's a better friend for me than he was. And then I started wondering about when you and FF became friends, I guess. Like we don't really talk about stuff like that."
"Hmm." Eridan stretched under the blanket for a moment. "Yeah, I guess we don't. But with me an' Fef, there's not a lot to tell, really. We met... hmm, I think it was summer between third and fourth grade. My family already had the pool in the backyard, but my parents liked to take me an' Cro to the public pool anyway since we probably wouldn't socialize otherwise. Neither a' us were all that popular when we were little."
"I'd have figured rich kids would be really popular."
"Meh—our whole neighborhood is rolling in money. In terms a' my classmates, we weren't all that rich. Money wasn't the popularity thing—it was all about who you knew an' how you looked, an' I was a weird-lookin' kid," Eridan added with a laugh.
"You're still weird-looking."
"Shut up." Eridan reached up and tugged Sollux down by his shoulder to give him a quick kiss. "I meant weirder than now. I kind a' grew into my looks a few years ago, but back then... not so much. Anyway, back to this story.
"So that summer, we went to the pool almost every day. One a' our parents almost always went with us for the first few weeks, an' then they decided that since Cro was eleven, twelve years old at the time, he's old enough to supervise me, plus there was adults an' lifeguards everywhere, so no big deal. That was where I met Fef—at the pool. She'd just moved to the neighborhood like a month before summer vacation started an' I think her mom had the same idea that my parents had since she went to the pool with Meenah even though they had a pool at their house, too."
"That's it?"
"Well, I think there was some splashin' involved an' she tried to drown me once, but after that, we just kind a' stuck tight. I went back to school with a friend finally an' since I didn't really have friends before that, I didn't even care if my only friend was a girl since she was way cooler than most a' my other classmates anyway. An' then we went to the same high school, an' in high school, things changed since it was one a' those big schools with kids from all over goin' there, so suddenly bein' rich was an advantage an' I was finally lookin' less like a swordfish an' more like an actual person. So we both got other friends in high school—I think that hangin' out with me in grade school an' middle school made her a social outcast by association since I was her only friend, too. It's weird, since she could a' easily made other friends if she stopped bein' friends with me since she's such a nice, likeable person, but she chose to stay friends with me anyway. So that was really cool. I probably wouldn't have made it through the Vriska mess if she hadn't been there."
"I thought FF didn't know about what happened with you and VS."
"She didn't, but she could still tell somethin' was buggin' me I guess. She asked a few times but I didn't tell her, but she still did what she could to cheer me up, an' it actually helped. So I guess to answer your question, we've been friends for eleven years now."
Sollux ran his fingers over Eridan's hairline. His hair was still stiff with product, but Sollux still felt like touching it. His hair looked good, but it was a pain in the ass when Sollux wanted to stroke it. He didn't like not being able to just touch his hair without a big fuss, plus he had a feeling he was pulling uncomfortably on Eridan's hair when he tried. "Better track record than mine, I guess."
"Yeah, you an' Ara have only been friends since college, right?"
"Yeah, after the crap that went down with KK, I avoided people for awhile. We've really only been friends for like a year since before that, I was just tutoring her. We became friends from that."
"What about when you were friends with Kar?"
"Well, we're still kind of friends, just not as close. But... I don't know. We were both kind of hated in high school. People shoved him into my locker since he would fit and I wouldn't, but I got more of just the name-calling since I've always been taller than just about everyone. It's easier to beat up KK since he's so short, but... fuck, I think I would have preferred that."
"What did they call you?" Eridan asked quietly.
Sollux shook his head. "Lot of stuff. I don't... I don't really want to think about it."
"Sorry."
"It's okay. They didn't get me in the end. That's what counts. Besides, being in high school but not actually at school wasn't so bad. Mituna and I liked to fuck with people for awhile by switching places and going to each other's classes. Only a few people could really tell us apart—I already had the contacts at that point, so people couldn't use my eyes to figure it out—but whenever Mituna talked, pretending to be me, he would give it away pretty quickly since he kept fucking up my lisp, whereas if I make an effort, I can actually sound normal."
On the TV screen, the blue fish (Sollux knew she was voiced by Ellen Degeneres, but he didn't know the character's name) was saying something heartfelt to the clownfish. Sollux could kind of see why Eridan liked this movie—the obsession he had with water and fish made sense. "I don't want to forget," Ellenfish said.
"I'm sorry, Dory. But I do," the clownfish said sadly.
"What did I miss?" Sollux asked.
"Wow, you haven't been paying attention at all, have you?" Eridan said obnoxiously. "Okay, Dory—the Blue Tang—has short-term memory loss. She forgets things almost immediately. Except that she found the goggles that the diver who took Nemo dropped an' the diver's address was on the goggles an' she could read human language so she read the address an' for some reason, she remembers things a little better—like the address—when she's around Marlin. Marlin is the dad clownfish," he added."
"Okay, all that sounds a bit familiar."
"Oh, dear, Lord," Eridan muttered. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Anyway, Marlin wants to leave an' go back home since he thinks Nemo is dead an' he's just leavin' Dory to fend for herself really which is a dick move since she's basically mentally handicapped an' in a strange place a really long ways away from her actual home, but yeah, when he leaves, she starts forgettin' things again an' she doesn't want to forget, but he does since Nemo was the only family he had left."
"Oh, right, his fish-wife and most of the fish-babies got eaten at the beginning."
"Pretty much, yeah."
"This is Pixar, right? It has a happy ending?"
"Of course it does. Plus Finding Dory is comin' out in 2015 I think. Just fuckin' watch the movie, Captor."
Sollux laughed and tightened his arm around Eridan. "Whatever you say, Ampora."
At least I'll be getting more sleep tonight.
Aradia knows what's up.
