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universe_cHere is the first of an ever-increasing number of little shorts that belong to the 5I-verse. Most of them will probably be shippy. Like this one!
Kankri and Cronus are interesting to me because their dysfunctions compliment each other in this way that almost makes it back around to functional, but not quite. Also, it seems like they are genuine with each other in a way that they aren't necessarily other people. Like a lot of pairings in 5I, their relationship is FAR from perfect. But that's ok.
Warnings: Xeno, sexual content, mpreg. Uh, basically all the warnings that apply to all of 5I.
Needs a title before I can stick it up on AO3, I guess. Bluh, titles.
^^^
The most frustrating thing about Cronus isn't the way he hits on everybody but you, or the cruel way he dismisses things when his attention span runs out. It's that you can See all the good he could do for the community and no one else does. Especially not him.
You are the Seer of Blood and it is your responsibility to See these things about people and make them known.
His problem has always been with society, you think. He's tried hard to check his privilege and reexamine his preoccupation with his caste status for you. You know how deeply internalized such societal conventions can be. You try to show him alternatives. He is a Bard and an artist and a dreamer, so you appeal to his imagination. Luckily, human society presents itself as an example, in all its muddled, hemospectrumless strangeness.
He listens to you. Sometimes you think him listening to you is his way of hitting on you, like he can tell how refreshing it is to be taken so seriously. If you can get him to listen long enough, maybe some seed of an idea will take root in his consciousness and he will start to grow.
You don't appreciate how hard it is for ghosts to grow as people until you come back to life.
On this new world, this empty world, you are all given a chance to come together and create not just a new life for yourselves, but a new society, stripped of all the systemic oppression of history. Of course it's not so easy as all that. The minutiae of creating a society turns out to be essentially the same as the minutiae of managing any small group of people, an endless round of defusing arguments and building consensus. You are the Seer of Blood and it is your responsibility to keep this strange, patchwork group of personalities and cultures functioning well enough that no one re-dies of starvation, exposure or random murder-sprees. You can See the fault lines running through and between the four sets of Players, the individuals who might make those fault lines slip in catastrophic ways.
Cronus is one of them, his capacity for the Destruction of Hope as dangerous as his abrasive effect on people or his occasional temper tantrums.
You have known him for untold aeons. By now you understand that the only way to make his good side known is to drag it out of him kicking and screaming. And you can See that it is up to you. The only other person receptive to him is his dancestor, and the pair of them will be bad for each other in so many ways. You can't possibly allow them to become close.
You take time for a little soul-searching on whether becoming his moirail is compatible with your vows of celibacy. You conclude that it is maybe not one hundred percent in keeping with the spirit of said vows. However, it is acceptable enough and necessary.
Getting him in a pile is easy and natural as if you've been doing it forever. He lets you wash all the grease out of his hair and sighs against your chest while you hold him. You don't anticipate how much better he makes you feel, his support for your undertakings as devoted as you could've asked for. He even likes your belt.
You don't admit to yourself until much later that you've essentially been acting as Cronus's moirail for a very long time. If only you'd thought to ask, you could have had this so much sooner. That revelation comes to you in the dizzy afterglow the first time you pail him. You chalk the whole incident up to the wine and make a mental note to avoid it in the future.
Your new, strange, patchwork body makes this harder than it should be. Celibacy was much easier when you were dead, your body and its needs nothing more than shifting memories. The way Roxy breaks out the wine at the slightest excuse doesn't help. Neither does his smooth swimmer's body or the way he always smiles at you like he's genuinely happy to see you. Once, you catch yourself mentally cataloging all the differences between his new body and his troll body with your own fingers twisting slick in your nook.
The way your body is no longer fully under your conscious control is frankly a bit frightening. Corporeality will take time to get used to again, you remind yourself. And this corporeality works differently from the troll body you still remember intimately. Every single person in the village is going through similar adjustments, each at their own pace.
The second time you pail him, the two of you pass out curled together on his human-style respite platform with all its rich purple coverlets and strewn pillows. You have never slept touching another person before. You wake, twice, with your head still spinning drunkenly. His body against you is too warm, strange and dear. He wakes you in the evening with his mouth on your bulge. Your hold on his horns is perhaps a bit rougher than strictly necessary.
You don't talk about it later. You fully expect him to bring it up during a feelings jam, but he never does. All of your carefully prepared speeches go unsaid.
Rose is happy to elucidate the human take on pale and red affection for you. It is a perspective that helps stave off your creeping panic. You can see immediately how the human preference for multiple pale partners creates strong social groupings. It makes perfect sense for a Blood player to fall into such a mindset, with their innate focus on group dynamics. Just look at Karkat, village pale stud and would-be lusus to half the younger Players. Pair that natural outflow of conciliatory feelings with mammalian-style always-on reproductive urges and pale-red vacillation is the inevitable result.
You decide that your moirallegience with Cronus can withstand a few humankin-style, exploratory sexual encounters. Now that you think about it, he has actually been much better behaved since the two of you were first intimate. It helps that some of the people he's worst around, like Mituna, have taken themselves elsewhere. So long as he's improving, you are happy with the way things are.
Later, you will spend many hours wondering how you failed to Foresee getting him pregnant, and wondering if knowing ahead of time would have made any difference.
^^^
“Oh my gog, Kankri, are you drunk?”
“I'm always drunk when I let you-”
“Whoa, whoa. I seem to recall some incidents in which I was the one letting you. Not to mention the rather forceful way you just deposited my fine fishprince ass on this respite platform. Not that I mind-”
“Yes, you never mind. Any port in a storm or other nautical euphemisms to that effect.”
“Fuck, fuck, Kankri. In case you hadn't fuckin noticed, I am so obsessed with you. Like head over gills, stalking your pink ass, carving your lack-of-a-symbol in my arm creepily obsessed.”
“Yes, Cronus, you are a bully and a drama queen. I'm well aware.”
“You know I ain't above takin advantage of you neither, 'specially not with this crisis occurring in my nook, so. Just. Aah-aaah what the hell are you – fuck!”
“Well, don't bite me unless you want me to bite back. Egalitarian relations and so on.”
“That was the filthiest chuckle I've ever heard. Didn't know you had it in you. Fuck, you are going to kill me. I will literally die if you don't pail me right this instant. Come on, make a human woman out of me you red-hot landdwelling pedantic graaah, ah - FUCK!”
“Is this enough of my attention for you?”
“Fuck, no. More.”
“Hmmm, how's this?”
“Nhh, aaah, oh fuck you kinky -AH!”
^^^
After his heat, nothing can be as it was. He is stiflingly clingy now that he's got you corralled into his red quadrant, where apparently he was angling to get you all along. You should be bothered by that. Instead, you want to tear a hole in anyone who so much as looks at him, when you're not wanting to tear into him for daring to look away from you. The violence of your desire for him is equal parts horrifying and addictive.
You don't even have a moirail now, to jam it all out with. When you try to speak with him about it, he declares it “such a fuckin turn-on,” and you end up pailing yet again.
You think you do an admirable job of maintaining normalcy, even as you go completely to pieces inside. Sometimes you can barely think anymore, and it's not like any of your responsibilities have gone away. The potential traumas and shifting relationships brought on by this sudden spate of pregnancies require your attention more than ever, lest some breakdown occur that could have been prevented.
You have an embarrassing minor breakdown in the middle of a Seers' Open Dialog Committee meeting. Terezi calls you an overdramatic wiggler. Rose asks if having a healthy sex life will really make you less yourself. Terezi suggests you dump Cronus if you don't actually want to be with him. They both nod sagely when you explain that breaking up with him would likely set off some of the ugliest drama the village has seen, and that's not even taking into account any Hope-related incidents. When you add that he is yours they say they know. They ask, so why don't you?
Why don't you? You think about it off and on for some time. Perhaps it is a Blood thing, with your focus on the group superseding your awareness of yourself. Karkat does evince a similar blind spot when it comes to his own relationships. Or perhaps it's just that it has been untold aeons since you felt anything so strongly, so viscerally. Perhaps it's that Cronus can be such a complete douche sometimes, you despair of ever fixing him entirely.
And then the distress call comes in and you throw yourself into planning the rescue, balancing the practical necessities of the journey with the delicate interpersonal issues most likely to arise. The community is energized and drawn together by danger to its own, and you can't help but feel like some of your ragged ends are knit back together in sympathy. Your role here is truly important, and this is the reminder you desperately needed.
You're so astounded when Cronus loudly, publicly accuses you of being flushed for Latula that you take far too long to answer him, the wheels in your brain turning furiously. His expression descends further and further into petulant anger the longer you fail to speak. He doesn't know how you feel about him, you realize. But how could he possibly know? You've been dancing around your own thoughts for so long that you barely know how you feel about him.
You are a little bit flushed for Latula, you decide, while you're being honest with yourself. But her power to distract and discombobulate you is nothing next to his, like the Wanderer's rust-pink crescent compared to the high-summer-Bright sun. As soon as the whole rescue party business is sorted out and the crisis on its way toward solution, you take Cronus to your room and explain some things to him at length. It has not been all that many weeks that you have been officially matesprits, but in that time you have learned a catalog of new ways to keep his attention, to persuade and soothe and comfort him. It is, you discover, possible to have a feelings jam while having sex, slow and so intimate you feel torn open. You are left raw and exposed to one another in all your pettiness and stupid insecurity, your confusion and desperation. He cries, but then it's not the first time he's cried while pailing you. He's always been free with his emotions and secretly you think it's kind of sweet. The really strange part is how much better you feel by the end.
The surf is rough the night he has your egg, and the bathhouse is pressed into service as the birthing room, divided with flimsy curtains to give the three mothers an illusion of privacy. Cronus is close to panicking and Meenah is definitely panicking, so it is left to you to soothe both of them in the intervals where Jane and Kanaya are with the others. Skin-to-skin contact has always worked best with Cronus, so you strip down and climb into the stone pool behind him. You hold him as he curses and struggles and keens. You feel so pale for him that it makes you ache, so red for him that it makes you burn. The pulse between you is sharp in your Sight, that deep, throbbing and unbreakable thread that connects you all to each other, but especially you to him, and the two of you to this child that is both of your Blood.
He sings when it's over, a soft cycle of notes that moves like waves, like a heart beat, growing and shifting wordlessly.
==>Next
Kankri and Cronus are interesting to me because their dysfunctions compliment each other in this way that almost makes it back around to functional, but not quite. Also, it seems like they are genuine with each other in a way that they aren't necessarily other people. Like a lot of pairings in 5I, their relationship is FAR from perfect. But that's ok.
Warnings: Xeno, sexual content, mpreg. Uh, basically all the warnings that apply to all of 5I.
Needs a title before I can stick it up on AO3, I guess. Bluh, titles.
Thrombophilia
The most frustrating thing about Cronus isn't the way he hits on everybody but you, or the cruel way he dismisses things when his attention span runs out. It's that you can See all the good he could do for the community and no one else does. Especially not him.
You are the Seer of Blood and it is your responsibility to See these things about people and make them known.
His problem has always been with society, you think. He's tried hard to check his privilege and reexamine his preoccupation with his caste status for you. You know how deeply internalized such societal conventions can be. You try to show him alternatives. He is a Bard and an artist and a dreamer, so you appeal to his imagination. Luckily, human society presents itself as an example, in all its muddled, hemospectrumless strangeness.
He listens to you. Sometimes you think him listening to you is his way of hitting on you, like he can tell how refreshing it is to be taken so seriously. If you can get him to listen long enough, maybe some seed of an idea will take root in his consciousness and he will start to grow.
You don't appreciate how hard it is for ghosts to grow as people until you come back to life.
On this new world, this empty world, you are all given a chance to come together and create not just a new life for yourselves, but a new society, stripped of all the systemic oppression of history. Of course it's not so easy as all that. The minutiae of creating a society turns out to be essentially the same as the minutiae of managing any small group of people, an endless round of defusing arguments and building consensus. You are the Seer of Blood and it is your responsibility to keep this strange, patchwork group of personalities and cultures functioning well enough that no one re-dies of starvation, exposure or random murder-sprees. You can See the fault lines running through and between the four sets of Players, the individuals who might make those fault lines slip in catastrophic ways.
Cronus is one of them, his capacity for the Destruction of Hope as dangerous as his abrasive effect on people or his occasional temper tantrums.
You have known him for untold aeons. By now you understand that the only way to make his good side known is to drag it out of him kicking and screaming. And you can See that it is up to you. The only other person receptive to him is his dancestor, and the pair of them will be bad for each other in so many ways. You can't possibly allow them to become close.
You take time for a little soul-searching on whether becoming his moirail is compatible with your vows of celibacy. You conclude that it is maybe not one hundred percent in keeping with the spirit of said vows. However, it is acceptable enough and necessary.
Getting him in a pile is easy and natural as if you've been doing it forever. He lets you wash all the grease out of his hair and sighs against your chest while you hold him. You don't anticipate how much better he makes you feel, his support for your undertakings as devoted as you could've asked for. He even likes your belt.
You don't admit to yourself until much later that you've essentially been acting as Cronus's moirail for a very long time. If only you'd thought to ask, you could have had this so much sooner. That revelation comes to you in the dizzy afterglow the first time you pail him. You chalk the whole incident up to the wine and make a mental note to avoid it in the future.
Your new, strange, patchwork body makes this harder than it should be. Celibacy was much easier when you were dead, your body and its needs nothing more than shifting memories. The way Roxy breaks out the wine at the slightest excuse doesn't help. Neither does his smooth swimmer's body or the way he always smiles at you like he's genuinely happy to see you. Once, you catch yourself mentally cataloging all the differences between his new body and his troll body with your own fingers twisting slick in your nook.
The way your body is no longer fully under your conscious control is frankly a bit frightening. Corporeality will take time to get used to again, you remind yourself. And this corporeality works differently from the troll body you still remember intimately. Every single person in the village is going through similar adjustments, each at their own pace.
The second time you pail him, the two of you pass out curled together on his human-style respite platform with all its rich purple coverlets and strewn pillows. You have never slept touching another person before. You wake, twice, with your head still spinning drunkenly. His body against you is too warm, strange and dear. He wakes you in the evening with his mouth on your bulge. Your hold on his horns is perhaps a bit rougher than strictly necessary.
You don't talk about it later. You fully expect him to bring it up during a feelings jam, but he never does. All of your carefully prepared speeches go unsaid.
Rose is happy to elucidate the human take on pale and red affection for you. It is a perspective that helps stave off your creeping panic. You can see immediately how the human preference for multiple pale partners creates strong social groupings. It makes perfect sense for a Blood player to fall into such a mindset, with their innate focus on group dynamics. Just look at Karkat, village pale stud and would-be lusus to half the younger Players. Pair that natural outflow of conciliatory feelings with mammalian-style always-on reproductive urges and pale-red vacillation is the inevitable result.
You decide that your moirallegience with Cronus can withstand a few humankin-style, exploratory sexual encounters. Now that you think about it, he has actually been much better behaved since the two of you were first intimate. It helps that some of the people he's worst around, like Mituna, have taken themselves elsewhere. So long as he's improving, you are happy with the way things are.
Later, you will spend many hours wondering how you failed to Foresee getting him pregnant, and wondering if knowing ahead of time would have made any difference.
“Oh my gog, Kankri, are you drunk?”
“I'm always drunk when I let you-”
“Whoa, whoa. I seem to recall some incidents in which I was the one letting you. Not to mention the rather forceful way you just deposited my fine fishprince ass on this respite platform. Not that I mind-”
“Yes, you never mind. Any port in a storm or other nautical euphemisms to that effect.”
“Fuck, fuck, Kankri. In case you hadn't fuckin noticed, I am so obsessed with you. Like head over gills, stalking your pink ass, carving your lack-of-a-symbol in my arm creepily obsessed.”
“Yes, Cronus, you are a bully and a drama queen. I'm well aware.”
“You know I ain't above takin advantage of you neither, 'specially not with this crisis occurring in my nook, so. Just. Aah-aaah what the hell are you – fuck!”
“Well, don't bite me unless you want me to bite back. Egalitarian relations and so on.”
“That was the filthiest chuckle I've ever heard. Didn't know you had it in you. Fuck, you are going to kill me. I will literally die if you don't pail me right this instant. Come on, make a human woman out of me you red-hot landdwelling pedantic graaah, ah - FUCK!”
“Is this enough of my attention for you?”
“Fuck, no. More.”
“Hmmm, how's this?”
“Nhh, aaah, oh fuck you kinky -AH!”
After his heat, nothing can be as it was. He is stiflingly clingy now that he's got you corralled into his red quadrant, where apparently he was angling to get you all along. You should be bothered by that. Instead, you want to tear a hole in anyone who so much as looks at him, when you're not wanting to tear into him for daring to look away from you. The violence of your desire for him is equal parts horrifying and addictive.
You don't even have a moirail now, to jam it all out with. When you try to speak with him about it, he declares it “such a fuckin turn-on,” and you end up pailing yet again.
You think you do an admirable job of maintaining normalcy, even as you go completely to pieces inside. Sometimes you can barely think anymore, and it's not like any of your responsibilities have gone away. The potential traumas and shifting relationships brought on by this sudden spate of pregnancies require your attention more than ever, lest some breakdown occur that could have been prevented.
You have an embarrassing minor breakdown in the middle of a Seers' Open Dialog Committee meeting. Terezi calls you an overdramatic wiggler. Rose asks if having a healthy sex life will really make you less yourself. Terezi suggests you dump Cronus if you don't actually want to be with him. They both nod sagely when you explain that breaking up with him would likely set off some of the ugliest drama the village has seen, and that's not even taking into account any Hope-related incidents. When you add that he is yours they say they know. They ask, so why don't you?
Why don't you? You think about it off and on for some time. Perhaps it is a Blood thing, with your focus on the group superseding your awareness of yourself. Karkat does evince a similar blind spot when it comes to his own relationships. Or perhaps it's just that it has been untold aeons since you felt anything so strongly, so viscerally. Perhaps it's that Cronus can be such a complete douche sometimes, you despair of ever fixing him entirely.
And then the distress call comes in and you throw yourself into planning the rescue, balancing the practical necessities of the journey with the delicate interpersonal issues most likely to arise. The community is energized and drawn together by danger to its own, and you can't help but feel like some of your ragged ends are knit back together in sympathy. Your role here is truly important, and this is the reminder you desperately needed.
You're so astounded when Cronus loudly, publicly accuses you of being flushed for Latula that you take far too long to answer him, the wheels in your brain turning furiously. His expression descends further and further into petulant anger the longer you fail to speak. He doesn't know how you feel about him, you realize. But how could he possibly know? You've been dancing around your own thoughts for so long that you barely know how you feel about him.
You are a little bit flushed for Latula, you decide, while you're being honest with yourself. But her power to distract and discombobulate you is nothing next to his, like the Wanderer's rust-pink crescent compared to the high-summer-Bright sun. As soon as the whole rescue party business is sorted out and the crisis on its way toward solution, you take Cronus to your room and explain some things to him at length. It has not been all that many weeks that you have been officially matesprits, but in that time you have learned a catalog of new ways to keep his attention, to persuade and soothe and comfort him. It is, you discover, possible to have a feelings jam while having sex, slow and so intimate you feel torn open. You are left raw and exposed to one another in all your pettiness and stupid insecurity, your confusion and desperation. He cries, but then it's not the first time he's cried while pailing you. He's always been free with his emotions and secretly you think it's kind of sweet. The really strange part is how much better you feel by the end.
The surf is rough the night he has your egg, and the bathhouse is pressed into service as the birthing room, divided with flimsy curtains to give the three mothers an illusion of privacy. Cronus is close to panicking and Meenah is definitely panicking, so it is left to you to soothe both of them in the intervals where Jane and Kanaya are with the others. Skin-to-skin contact has always worked best with Cronus, so you strip down and climb into the stone pool behind him. You hold him as he curses and struggles and keens. You feel so pale for him that it makes you ache, so red for him that it makes you burn. The pulse between you is sharp in your Sight, that deep, throbbing and unbreakable thread that connects you all to each other, but especially you to him, and the two of you to this child that is both of your Blood.
He sings when it's over, a soft cycle of notes that moves like waves, like a heart beat, growing and shifting wordlessly.
==>Next
no subject
Date: 2012-12-02 05:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-02 03:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-02 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-02 03:40 pm (UTC)So, they set out to fix these things about each other, I think, and try to drag out the other one's hidden side. And it ends up a huge, sloppy red-pale mess. Cronus really wants all of Kankri's anger and sexuality out in the open and preferably directed at him. I hope it's clear that he's really at fault for a lot of their relationship problems.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-03 01:48 pm (UTC)I was thinking this morning also about how cool it is that this look at their relationship is so different from the external POV we got with 5I/Tavros' POV -- all the context and emotional stuff beneath Kankri's surface that other people can't see b/c of the bluster. Clearly it's the same relationship, but the change in perspective shows off how much more is going on there than an outside observer would notice.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 01:05 am (UTC)Ok, I am trying valiantly to contain my squee that you were having deep thoughts about this this morning. Most of the reason I'm writing these little side vignettes is because there were a lot of background pairings and events I wanted to give more attention to than Tavros really allowed. Like the Vriska/Meenah/Aranea situation. And wtf, Eridan and Equius, how did that actually come about?
no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 04:03 am (UTC)mortifieddelightedmortified is Equius at the impropriety of it all?)Also yes best insomnia activity: happy thoughts about beautiful ficverses. ♥