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There are a few trolls that you don’t bother lasciviously spouting your native language at. One of them is Kurloz Makara. He just blinks at you and smiles, his mouth stretching around his stitches. You learn that he can really say a lot without saying anything which, you guess, is just as well. When you tell somebody that you want them to crush your body during coitus in words they can’t understand, you’re getting the better of them. If you’re only going to be forced to scratch and claw lamely by another highblood, what’s the fucking point? It always feels like he has a secret, and you only like those if they’re yours, too. Nobody has kept anything from you for as long as you’ve been dead.
His secret is your secret, it turns out, but for different reasons. His corridors cut into your corners. He's carved into the bubble underseam, where the lining is so taut you can hear horrorterrors whispering, though you’ve long lost interest in anything they’ve got to tell you. These tunnels are always shadows and temple pillars and the slow, circulating noise of whispers and echoes. You can smell extinguished candles and the must of dogma lost to oblivion.
The coldblood wardens in the Beforan temples spoke to you slowly and patted you on the damn head and treated you like you were barely out of your cocoon. You understood that, maybe, you would never have progressed beyond that if even if you’d lived out your full life as you thought you would.
It was all a blip in the grand scope of everything. Kurloz perpetuates it, anyway, and wraps the end of reality itself up in prayer and philosophy. His prayer and philosophy, though, and not yours. Even if he could tell you that, he probably still wouldn’t. You are the redblood licking from his hand of charity, except the charity is that he lets you help with the destruction of reality. Though the one he pats on the head is Meulin – you’ve seen him brushing his fingers around the bases of her horns as she stares in a half-dazed stupor. He’s never treated you the way he treats her.
Turns out you didn’t need to tell him to get his stitched mouth into your nook to have started fucking him in the shadows. Rufioh gave you a hollow cold, Meenah pulled you sharply around corners for reasons that were only tangentially to do with you, at all. Kurloz gives you a constant, low buzz of irritation and nothing really changes, though you haven’t felt any of that same kind of mood whiplash since you were alive. Since you’ve had the privilege of looking a very different you in the face, you’re not sure you mind if you’re just flatlining.
You fuck him in his memories of worship and he makes gargled mews in the back of his throat and then swallows against them without pulling his stitches. So you end up pushing until he's a knot of strained tendons against you. Afterwards, as a mixture of his purple and your burgundy drips down his thighs and dissolves into the bubble, he slumps. He twists his semi-clad body to look up at you and then smiles. It’s a smile you know from long ago.
He bests you if you don’t rip his stitches, you guess. You’ll try again. The Lord of Time needs no coldblood piety.
He brings another troll into your dark underbubble, who has Kurloz’s own sign and hemotype scrawled across his shirt. You watch his chest rise and fall underneath that, and listen to the sound of the breath leaving his lungs. Everything is so thin and still around him, including the two of you.
Gamzee is a skinny, gangly clown with the same long, twisting horns as his dancestor. Lines of scar tissue disrupt his face paint from near the very left of his hairline down to where his cheek slopes into his jaw. He was some priest or other on Beforus and Kurloz looks at him with wide, curiously bright eyes. Gamzee snarls his response and you don’t care what he was – you were the servant of the Lord himself in another universe. Gamzee has a little half-worm of a life behind him and large dull-yellow eyes and he gives you a fanged grin when he sees you. He’s better than broken stitches, so you’ll take him. Kurloz has presented him with a ridiculous god tier codpiece, you know.
The kid is a quick bristling schism of life against your eternal existence. You don’t care what kind of shitty envoy he’s supposed to be. Being alive just grants him the ability to be able to leave the bubbles.
Gamzee’s voice wavers in pitch and the walls of the bubble seem to ripple when he first starts speaking, although you don’t know if that’s not just your surprise at hearing a voice down here. He growls and hisses a lot, especially when Kurloz is around and you look at his sparse, wiry frame and the scars on his face and you think about what you know about Alternia.
He gives in, quickly. You undo the clasps on his hood that fasten around his horns and thread one hand through his thick, unwashed hair. You slide the other down beneath his codpiece – and for anyone else, you might have had a comment about that. His sheath pulls apart easily and exposed, delicate flesh is slick under your fingertips.
You slip your fingers down over his wet, spreading nook and it’s clear that he’s willing to give up on any vow of silence he might have taken. The shadow of the bubble curls itself around every sound a troll could possibly make. But that makes so much sense because he’s young and alive. You feel the writhing of his bulge against your wrist and, even though it’s been no time at all, you could slip your fingers right inside him.
But you don't. You withdraw your hand from between his thighs and take a good look at him. On the insides of his splayed legs, you can see dark purple begin to soak through the material of his pants. It takes you a moment to realise that the bubble is flickering around you and that you’re on the edge of the coast, sand shifting under your feet and waves lapping about a foot away. The void looks speckled with stars, now, and there’s a second moon – a green one. That, and you grew up in a place that was decidedly urban.
He bares his teeth at you and a growl swells from his chest. Like that, you find him more amusing than he would be in any clown-car trapeze ritual or whatever. When you were four or five, and had just moved to West Beforus, you saw a street carnival with Rufioh. What remains there as part of the memory, now, is how some of the clowns gave you sweet drinks in tiny plastic cups.
As that slides through you like ice, the bubble gives you the colourful parade tent you remember. The round ache of his empty nook doesn’t keep your clown from turning his head to look at the ghosts of sparkling banners. You saw enough of Alternia to know that it was different enough, so you leave him watching the spectacle offered, although the bubble starts filtering back to the temple ruins as you leave.
His fluid stays on your fingers and it's grainy and cool and nothing like a memory. Memories of the tangible vanish, at least, unless you want them to stay. This serves to make it clear to Kurloz what happened, and with more clarity than merely telling him how the bubble actually shifted around you when his precious emissary squirmed like a grub, his stupid, stupid holy fools outfit all dishevelled. He just tilts his head at you and smiles, wryly. You guess he has the choice of a hundred different smiles at his disposal. And, as for you, you think that this might actually be his own personal equivalent of your speaking crude nothings.
When you see Gamzee, he’s six, seven, seven and a half, and all at different points. You haven't felt the twist of malleable time for a while and here, you’re the one stepping forward second by second, stationary in your line, such that it is, now.
You think the earliest is when his face is raw meat and there's a perpetual shake to him that you know will gradually still as his time moves on. Kurloz never seems quite so reverent than he does when Gamzee is like this. That only proves a lot to you.
You aren’t involved in whatever they do, here. When Gamzee’s face is purple, he gives you a sickly, open-mouthed grin, his teeth hanging against the dark of his throat. He feels half formed to you, hatched out into the cold air too early, still streaked with the membrane of his egg. His eyes are bright and bloodshot, his pupils blown. You leave him alone. You know how much brute strength he has in his scrawny limbs but you could, somehow, also believe that he was brittle beneath his shaking. His face paint just smears and runs at this point and, after the bubble shifts again, you leave him to watch the glitter of banners and the shadows of acrobats. The new cracks in the void begin to shine in the distance.
You decide, anyway, that it’s not worth seeing how the bloody child shatters.
He gets fractious and wry as his face begins to mend. He runs out of energy, quickly, which means you can’t quite make him fall short. He whimpers and snarls in tandem when you’re fucking and his hissing in your ear is a barrage of garbled, jagged insults. Your dress tears and claw marks make blood bubble to the surface with an old sharp ache. You watch as it fixes itself. You end up with his torn sleeve, too, which you take.
Sometimes, he's calm and babbling. This is punctuated with chirps and purrs and, even if it weren’t, you don’t give a shit, anyway. Whether he notices or cares that you don’t, he continues talking. You decide to fuck him, your bulge slow and twisting, until the rambling dissolves into needy keening. He’s happy to go on for long enough that you can pull out at your leisure instead of trying to beat him to the end. Almost as soon as you do pull out, he plunges his own bulge shamelessly into his nook. You could just pull his bulge back out, again, and let it curl agonizingly around your fingers, but you choose to just let him continue and watch him wriggle and writhe to his own end.
He finishes with a beatific smile and you leave him there. Maybe Kurloz will find him.
At his most lucid, he’s either dressed in clown pants or purple jammies and he doesn't seem to care so much that you get his purple and your burgundy all over either. Whether his purple garb is real or not, they seem to clean up and fix quickly. You know, you’ve seen them much worse. You guess that there’s more satisfaction in them starting out clean.
He isn’t terrible company, here, and something about realising that makes you want to parade him around the bubbles in full view of everyone you know. He tells you a little about Alternia, about the way he lived and worshipped. He doesn’t know much about your pre-scratch self when prompted, which feels a little like a barb, although you can’t be sure if it really is one. This is the only time where you bother trying to provoke him, verbally. He listens intently, and gives a cryptic grin, and you don’t know if he really understood.
But he crouches over you like a lanky spider, his skin prickling with sweat. His claws carve along the skin of your thighs when you wrap your legs around his waist and his bulge squirms and jerks inside you, thick and sluggish. His breathing is round and wet and his heartbeat is a slow, constant rhythm, and he doesn't stop chirping and growling in the back of his throat. You realise that you haven't been seven for a very long time, and you aren’t nine, anymore either.
He slumps against you, afterwards, his head between your breasts and you lean back so that his horns don’t catch you and cause an inconvenience. He shivers, fidgets, sighs over an underlying purr. You pull yourself out from underneath him. You are not seven and neither is anybody on your team.
On another occasion, he's vacant and silent and nothing. He sags like a stuffed wiggler toy. The only thing you do is run your fingers across his face and slip your paint-stained fingers into his mouth. His teeth are as harmless as a milkpaste knife, and you drag your fingertips across his slack tongue. You score through the dark under his eyes and the off-white along the ridge of his cheekbone and then, again, slather it over his tongue and along the dome of the top of his mouth.
His teeth slide gently along the back of your fingers and strike against your knuckles but, without the force of a bite, it’s nothing more than a graze. He stares, his eyes glassy and heavy-lidded, and doesn’t react at all. You might know what that is.
You gently press his mouth shut, paint still smeared across his mouth. You stroke his throat until he swallows like he's a purrbeast taking a capsule. And then you let him go.
You see him come through gutted and bloody, his breath rattling with a bubbling purr. It’s none of your business what he’s done or what was done to him. He’s somebody else’s favourite monster, and you don’t care, anyway.
Still, it doesn't hurt to slip your hand inside his gaping chest cavity. Although by the way he grapples the inside of the bubble, you think it might hurt, just a little. Beyond him, it’s clear, and you can see out into the void where cracks now spike right across it, thrumming with the magicks of time. You can take hold of his heart and cradle it in your palms, even as it stays rooted to him by artery. You hold the pulsing, gelatinous muscle and he scrabbles against the surface behind him. The bubble dips beneath his fingers and you think it might threaten to tear. He’s so incredibly solid against it, and you haven’t seen anything like that.
His bloodpusher is slick and fragile as it beats, the gaps between your fingers clogging with thick arterial blood. He trembles and it’s quick and frantic against his slow coldblood pulse. The gristle and the soft meat shift against your hands in its rhythm. You look up - he's at his tallest, now - and his eyes are wide and watering. You don’t let go of his heart, not even when he gives a whimper of a snarl that curls out from the back of his throat.
He bleeds from the mouth and you watch it drip down his chin. The bubble films over as something old unfolds in your pan. Gamzee is suddenly clawing at a construct of your own game session. The blood between your fingers is growing sticky and is starting to congeal and his breath continues to rattle.
You wonder how he would feel if he met himself. If he could compare the redness of his eyes and how he bleeds and how he breaths. You feel so still, and so old, and so finished.