
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/773639.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Homestuck
  Relationship:
      Sollux_Captor/The_Psiioniic
  Character:
      Sollux_Captor, The_Psiioniic
  Additional Tags:
      Masturbation, sexual_awakening, Body_Horror, extremely_explicit_body
      horror, helmsmen_-_Freeform, Tentabulges, Nooks
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-04-25 Words: 3125
****** When They Come For You ******
by temporalDecay
Summary
     In which Sollux Captor deals with himself, his body, his powers, his
     ghosts and his future as a helmsman.
Notes
     This is the fic that will send me to hell. Also, seriously. Mind the
     warnings, the body horror is off the charts in this one.
See the end of the work for more notes
They will not be kind, when they come for you.
They will come and take you from your hive, from your unruly lusus and your
hardworking bees, and they will not care how smart or sneaky or skilled you
are.
They will take your body and wash away your mind, scrub your skull clean of
every speck of you, and make you serve them like mindless beast.
They will not be kind, when they come for you, and by the time they are done
you won’t even want to be saved.

===============================================================================

The world unfurls around you in neat sets of two. The world was coded in
binary, because the world is made of choices and decisions and saying yes or
no. You see the past and the future and hear the howling of the imminently
deceased, but you hate having to explain it like that. Those are empty words,
grey and lifeless and cannot hope to explain the vast, vibrant world you live
in. In red and blue, everything pulses with will and will not, did and did not.
Contrary to popular belief, you do not think you’re god, no matter how good you
are at what you do. But you’re certain, more than certain, that you are god’s
intended audience, because you can see the lines of code that make up the
universe. Where the if and then and else articulate delicately with do and loop
and repeat. The walls of your hive, the rhythmic fluttering of your bees, the
waning of the moons. The world was made out of code, but just because you can
see the code doesn’t mean you can change it.
If you could change the code, you would make yourself anything but the giant or
clause that you are.
A definitive. Something certain. Something other than the perpetually
vacillating mess of yes and no and maybe that you have been all your life. The
only certainty you have is that you’ll change your mind eventually, because the
world was coded in binary and for every yes there must be a no.

===============================================================================

They will not be kind, when they come for you.
They will cut you open with utmost care, peeling skin and muscle, and press the
wires into your nerves, until your body – tired and screaming and wasted –
accepts them for the sake of making them stop. They will be relentless, but not
foolish. They will make you bleed and cry and despair, but never even close
enough to endangering you.
They will trim away the edges, getting rid of all that is unsightly and
unnecessary, and leave you a sleek, quality piece of machinery, made with the
most thoughtful precision by the most experienced hands. Along your arms and
your legs, you will be branded, given ports to be hooked onto your future
grave.
They will not be kind, when they come for you, but they will be tender and you
will wish to die.

===============================================================================

The ghosts are good company.
The screechy, senseless ones, at least. They’re not ghosts so much as future
echoes of the choices yet to be made, who grow stronger or weaker the more
likely or unlikely their existence is. You like the ghosts that howl and cry
and rant and rave. The angry ghosts that lash out at their unfair demise. The
heartbroken ghosts that tear at their faces about their gloomy luck. The
deranged ghosts who can’t even form words or remember their names. They make
good white noise, to help you concentrate while you work.
You have even learned to appreciate the ghosts of yourself and your friends.
The more they reach at you, tugging and begging and demanding, the more you
meddle and provoke and try to tip the scales. Then they vanish, once you’ve
averted their fate, and you allow yourself to fall back into obscurity again.
You like your friends, they make a nice collection of colors in your trollian
roster. Together you make a set of twelve, which is six times two, which fits
the theme in many ways and pleases you because of it.
You reckon, however, that you like the idea of your friends a good deal more
than your friends themselves, because they don’t see the world in twos and red
and blue and for all you try to reach them, you can’t quite make your words
work the way you want. You can make miracles with a command terminal, but you
don’t know how to make your friends smile and laugh and not feel alone. They
might like you better, if you could, but they still like you enough to keep the
neat set in your trollian roster.
You have screeching ghosts and friends you only talk to when you need to keep
them from dying and the symphony of the world in red and blue.
And then there’s him.

===============================================================================

They will not be kind, when they come for you.
They will lay you on the altar of their cruelty, and slice open your back with
excruciating slowness. They will pull skin and flesh and bone, until your spine
glistens under the lamps like the pulsing metaphor of your soul. Then they will
unravel the rope of nerves, one by one, cell by cell, like an infinitely
graceful drill, and make space for the cold, metal sockets that they will press
in, one by one, until you’ve torn your throat and you cannot scream anymore.
Then they will wind your nerves around each ring, grafting them into you until
you can no longer remember what it felt like, when they weren’t there.
They will not close you up, but keep you open. Open to their words, their
commands, their mocking laughter, their obscene pride. You will be made into a
trophy, an artistic piece of engineering, the pinnacle of their ingenuity. You
will be a thing, a tool, a necessity. But you will not hate it or yourself or
the world, because you will not be yourself anymore. And by the time they press
the dripping wires, phallic and tentacle-like, into your open wounds, you will
be little more than a puppet being fitted its strings.
They will not be kind, when they come for you, and you will pass on into the
legion of the forgotten, the unnamed and the unimportant on whose back the
Empire rests.

===============================================================================

He is strange.
Even for a ghost. Even for an echo. Even for you.
He follows you around and smiles and frowns and looks at you, like none of the
others ever do. You don’t remember where he came from, when he became such an
intrinsic part of your world. He talks, sometimes, in a low, tired voice that
is as dry and torpid as your own. He brushes his hand across your brow, playing
with your hair when it’s grown long enough you can do nothing else but cut it.
He never makes demands of you, never tells you what you need to do to save him.
You never ask. You never talk with your ghosts, if you can help it, because all
of them leave eventually, whether you save them or not, moving onto the void or
the afterlife. He’s stayed the longest, solid enough to even manifest in color
– in red and blue and yellow – and let you feel the faintest tingle when his
hands slide against your skin.
He is you, older, withered, tired. His horns and his eyes and his crooked
fangs. Even the weird slant of your ring fingers, the way they overlap your
middle fingers a little when you stretch your hands out.
You do not talk to him, not a single word, ever, and yet you know he
understands. Because he’s you or the closest thing to you one can be without
being you. While you’re riding the waves of a high productivity spell, cleaning
around the hive and feeding the bees and your lusus; he’s there, following
around and sometimes offering stray words that always feel like exactly what
you need to hear. When you’re caught in the whirlpool of a depressive slump,
lying on too old sopor and thinking about all those things you could be doing
if only you could force yourself to move; he’s there, fingering your hair and
smiling thinly with the knowledge of how you feel.
You don’t talk to him, because he flickers sometimes, like he’s going to vanish
except not, and you see the grey limb-like wires crawling up his spine, like a
loving embrace that makes your gastric sack tie into knots and threaten to make
you lose your lunch.
You don’t talk to him because you want to know, more than you want anything in
the world, and you’re afraid of what will happen if you ask.
You’re as terrified of him leaving as you are of him telling you his secrets,
so you focus on your coding and your friends and the ghosts that don’t make you
ache with yearning to the marrow of your bones.

===============================================================================

They will not be kind, when they come for you.
They will hang you up a slick, living shell, tying up the wires into a sturdier
mass of bio-neural conductors that exist only to sync up with the connections
grafted into you by then. You will feel your body melt into it, feel a strange
soothing pleasure as you are assimilated and the first lines of code flow in to
fill your pan and overwrite what little smear of tangled thoughts-feelings-self
remains in it. They will raise you up, not quite standing, not quite floating,
tilted forward so you look like you’re offering yourself to them, like you
would willingly let them do this to you.
And while they hold you up, secured, they will cut you open from throat to
groin and watch disinterestedly as your innards spill out onto the floor. Pain
will flood your senses, but there will be nothing to react to the pain, nothing
left to tell muscles to flex and tense in the presence of pain. Even if they
decided to afford you anesthetics by then, they wouldn’t make a difference at
all.
They will not be kind, when they come for you, and it will be the end of your
being and the beginning of their corruption of your being.

===============================================================================

Two perigees before you turn six, you wake up to find your body invaded by an
alien toxin named lust.
It scorches everything in its path, blood curdling in your veins as your body
blooms into a singularity of want. You make yourself get out of the
recuperacoon and trail sopor all the way into the ablution trap. The pounding
of water on your back wakes you up entirely, but does nothing to quench the
lust. You look down your body, water echoing against the tiles, and see your
bulges engorged and completely undeterred by the shower, writhing for attention
between your legs.
You are strangely pleased to see they’re two, because everything will always be
twos with you.
Then the moment passes and you find yourself unsure of what to do. You’ve never
unsheathed before, not even when you were four and precocious and scourged the
internet for every possible permutation of sex available to trollkind. You know
the names of each part – you know every possible name for every part, the
polite ones, the common ones, the insulting ones and the ones they only use in
porn and are supposed to be hot but you always found funny instead – and you
know how it works and what goes where. But it’s still somewhat strange, to
realize it actually happened to you.
You still stand nearly ten full minutes, waiting for the cold shower to do its
magic, and end up having to touch yourself with trepidation, fingers awkward
and claws sometimes digging too hard. You touch one bulge and then the other,
trying to classify the sensations and rank the sensitivity of each area, but
halfway through your second stroke on the second one – twos, twos, always and
everything in twos – you choke on a breath and feel your nook clench and a
strange, slimy warmth dripping down your thighs. It’s pale, nearly translucent,
and resists the pull of water so you have to scrub it off as your bulges go
limb and bloodless before they fold away back inside you. Only once you’re
clean, it occurs to you to taste it, like you’ve seen countless people do in
movies, but it’s too late and your curiosity is not strong enough to make you
try to arouse yourself again.
You dry yourself and dress in freshly laundered clothes – there’s nothing nicer
than the scent of dried soap trapped in the fabric – and for some reason, avoid
looking at him as you go about your routine.

===============================================================================

They will not be kind, when they come for you.
They will rearrange your organs, add shortcuts and replace the obsolete. Four
ribs will be sacrificed for the sake of a more efficient system to pour oxygen
directly into your veins and a vessel where they’ll pour preprocessed nutrients
for your disfigured body to absorb so that there will be little to no waste.
They will cut and twist and reshape, patiently pressing slick flesh into a
well-practiced arrangement to streamline every function and make it easy to
maintain.
When they’re done, they will stitch you up around valves and displays to help
monitor each function. They will not touch your groin, however. Because by the
time they come for you, you will have offered two full pails of genetic
material to the drones, but that will not be enough. They will leave your groin
intact, even leave the little clusters of nerve endings that serve as pleasure
centers, because they will come and harvest you, from time to time even as you
hang off the engine of a ship. They will use you for their pleasure and ensure
yours so that there’s a chance come next time, in the newest clutch of eggs in
the caverns, more like you are hatched. Tiny wigglers who will slowly grow and
build a sense of self, with likes and dislikes, capable of pity and hate, and
thought and feelings, who will one day see them when they come and not cry
until it’s far too late for them to understand.
They will not be kind, when they come for you, and even while they destroy you,
they will ensure there will be more of you to destroy, even once you are gone.

===============================================================================

By the time you’re six, you’re comfortable with the feeling of your hand
between your legs and a knee hooked up on the armrest of your chair. You’re
comfortable with the occasional need for relief – of stress, of boredom, of
lust, of frustration – and don’t really care if he’s watching while you do it.
You still won’t talk to him, even if you moan and whimper, approaching pleasure
with the same tenacity you crack coding. You stroke and press and flick and
rub, for the sheer grand reason that you can. That you’re still yourself.
When you’re done, you clean up and go back to work, decoding the glyphs and
typing never ending strips of commands and variables that very slowly begin to
resemble an executable file.
You talk to your friends more often, used by now to make your words sharp and
callous, content because at least they reach them well enough. You don’t bother
to explain about the world in red and blue, about the voices or the ghosts. It
doesn’t matter.
You’ve learned, in detail, what the future has in store for you, but you cannot
decide if you should fight it or not. You remain an or in the great web of
universal code, tangled in indecision, wrecked by guilt and shame and all those
things you hide behind snide, smartass remarks.
What does it matter, in the end? What does it matter, if you’ll save the world,
when the world is very much not worth saving. What does it matter, if they pity
or hate you, when you know now that they are waiting for you, have been waiting
for you the moment you were hatched. You are the vacillating clause, that can
go one way or the other and never sets on one, but the future itself is made of
stone, immovable and certain like you’ve never been.
You will get certainty, when they come for you.
And, as you always suspected, in certainty you will cease to exist.

===============================================================================

They will not be kind, when they come for you.
They, the nebulous, shapeless figures who are hands and scalpels and nothing
more, will not be kind, because kindness has no value to one like you. You are
inherently broken. You must be. To see the world the way you do, to know all
that you’ve learned, to feel all that you’ve experienced, and yet, destined to
be theirs in the end.
You touch yourself and imagine sometimes that someone else is doing the
touching – the wordless, secret plea, pleasure coming from the one ghost that
is actually strong enough for you to feel – and lay in your cradle of sopor and
childish hopes, dreaming of the time they’ll come.
They will not be kind, when they come for you, but you are almost eager for
their touch, their cruelty, their ownership. You hate and love yourself, in
turns, the two prongs of each or, and fantasize about the blessed release of
certainty.

===============================================================================

They will not come for you, he tells you, the ghost of past-future you sitting
on your desk.
He caresses your hair and your face and leans in even as you feel your world
imploding. The code is corrupted. There are gaping holes now, absurd
imperfections that cause the whole thing to collapse in on itself.
They will not come for you, he tells you, as the insides of your pan boil with
static and you feel tiny capillaries burst under your skin, because you are his
match.
The voices are gone now, abruptly silenced after weeks of growing crescendo.
The world is ending. Everything is dying. You’re dying.
They will not come for you, he tells you, the last words you hear before you’re
swallowed by the gaping void, because they came for him, so it follows that
they will not come for you.
He was the Helmsman, you will be something else.

===============================================================================

Your name is Sollux Captor, and you will live.
You don’t know for how long or to what purpose, but you will live.
And you will endeavor, in this second life of yours, to not be foolish enough
to fall in love a ghost.
End Notes
     Written as a birthday gift for the lovely and talented tAs:
     tatterdemalionAmberite and titianArchivist. Late, because I suck, but
     it's Captors and Issues and Body Horror, so here's hoping you two
     enjoy it.
Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed
their work!
