Chapter Text
Years in the past
Beyond the rip current, a shoal of seadwellers play just within your line of sight, kicking sand on each other on a beach under moonlight, ignorant to you and the rest of the world. You watch them with vacant eyes, bobbing in the waves as the surf takes you wherever it wants. You feel no need to get closer. You feel no need for anything.
The attention to which you pay them could be mistaken for interest, if not for the lifeless way the image reflects off your eyes. Thinking upon your situation, you wonder if this is some sort of subconscious demand for companionship, the misaimed attempt of a repressed adolescent impulse genuinely in need of the comfort of other trolls. You don’t know. Either way, it brings you places like this, watching strangers from afar as your legs churn bubbles in saltwater.
But being this far away, this removed from others, it gives you a perspective. You are able to notice what they do not; namely, the fact you are not the only voyeur on this beach.
After a moment of contemplation, you go to investigate.
You swim closer, abandoning your previous occupation and getting a better look at the troll nestled between the razored rocks at the beach’s border. It’s a clown, her ears pricked to the revels as yours was, but her face frozen in pure Duchenne, upper lip raised to reveal the small teeth tucked beneath. They are fangs; canines surrounded by smaller, flatter ones, but the delicate mania across her cheeks does not match that illusion of harmlessness. Her facepaint is frayed like it hasn’t been removed in days, cracking around the edges, save for where the salt spray causes it to melt.
The jetty forms a canopy above the water, shelter where you can slide beneath her without being seen. You are impressed that she has managed to find purchase at all, the rocks jagged and hungry for the cut palms of anyone who dares the attempt to roost in them.
Her pupils are dilated down to mere pricks, fixated on the scene unfolding on the beach. Despite the way she has trapped your attention, you turn, watching as a violet tackles one of his companions. You do not know what holds her interest at first. Not until you see the break in form. A seadweller, the only girl, slips from the others and checks her palmhusk. There is a quiet moment, one where you cannot read her expression from this distance, but somehow you know what’s about to happen before it happens. The violet girl starts to scream, drawing the attention of the others as her howls direct themselves at one boy in particular. You glance up at the clown.
Her smile has draw back more, and you can’t help but marvel at her small teeth, her gill-less face, so different from your own. You’ve never seen a landweller so close before, near enough to study the shape of her paint; white shaped around dark eyes, like a mask, like a skull.
Back at the party, the screaming has gone to blows, wisteria spilling over white sand. They are, like you, of ocean and storm. Things will not deescalate.
“If any survive, they’ll find you,” you say.
She looks down at you, in what later you will come to realize is shock. But for now, you do not know her, and to you her unchanged smile and raised eyebrows make it look like she’s known you’ve been here all along.
“Heh,” she says, like the laugh is caught in her throat. “I doubt it. I’m very good, you know.”
She tilts her head in examination. You know how must look; chin sunk back into the water, hair floating around you like kelp, or perhaps a grim halo, only eyes visible above the surface. You are reminded of movies where the lonely seadweller drags their victims below, snatched from the shore and held under until they’ll keep company for all time. You fantasize of putting claws against her throat.
“You’re not going to tell, are you?” She grins it out.
“No,” you say.
But you have a feeling she already knew that.
She seems confident. Too confident. To you—at this point—it is unearned, dangerous, and the first time you ever feel something that could be generously described as concern.
“Why do this?” you ask. Bait swallowed.
“Why not?” She pulls on the line. “You got a better idea on how to kill some time?”
Months in the future.
“Sure you want to go with something this mainstream?” Sombra doesn’t have to raise her voice over the music, diluted as it is in the cavern of the empty dance hall. She does anyway.
“Of course.” You extend a leg out, stretching across the floor with the pad of your slipper, dragging bits of dust and land-dirt along the way. You breath in, then out, sinking into the fire of the stretch. “‘In Which the Lead Lowblood Female Is Transformed into a Longneckbird, Only to Be Unenchanted by the Empress in so That She Retains Her Troll Form By Day, Proceeds to Make a Flushed Connection With a Male of Royal Blood, Who Betrays Her at the Behest of His Kismesis’, is classic tale.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it is,” she snorts. “The most classic. So classic its title is only like, three sentences.”
“Was this not your idea to begin with?” you ask, rising from the floor and settling into a plie.
An attempt to get you out of your hive. Sometimes you think you spend more time on land than not.
She taps something out on her palmhusk. “Thought you’d do something a bit more out there, ya know? Like ‘Beautiful Women Representing Spring Dance Voluptuously-”
“Ballet is an art of tradition,” you interrupt. You’d rather not hear any of what she considers good theater. “People will come to see what they are familiar with.”
“You’re violet, love,” she says with all the care of a collapsing lung. She smiles, fangs parting the white paint on her lips. “People are going show up whether they’re familiar or not to see a fish dance.”
You turn, pretending the dip upstage is part of your routine. Often you think she’d do better to say less, to listen more. She wears trouble like a cloak, breeds discord until it sticks to her like bubbles on the skin.
It is this quality that irritates you; that, and the fact that, for some reason, you still stick around. In that way, you and the trouble are much the same. It bothers you, the idea that this is not a coincidence.
You resume practice with staunch indifference.
Months in the past.
She brings you to her hive.
This surprises you, of course, and you are primarily expecting to see a sea of grinning purplebloods cloaked in hoods and blood waiting for you as soon as she opens the door. Instead there are plush and pillows, screens and loose cables, all awash with that faint plum glow. She sits cross-legged on a cushion and offers you a bag of chips.
It is more modest than you would have expected—certainly for someone of her blood status—though the sheer value of tech in the room could more than make up for it.
You see no sign of a lusus. You make no mention of it.
She brings you snacks that aren’t poisoned, and the two of spend that first day as friends sitting in her respiteblock talking until the sun rises over trees. Well, she talks for the both of you. It is near impossible to get her to stop, as you will learn as time goes on. You marvel at her openness, of inviting a relative stranger into her hive and casually striking up conversation. Perhaps it is landweller thing; you have hear that the lower castes don’t try to kill each other nearly as often as your ilk. You wouldn’t know. You’ve only met the one.
When you tell her this, she laughs and laughs.
There are many things that surprise you about Sombra. You ask if hacking is not more of a goldblood hobby, and she says you’d be surprised. You ask why she lives in such a place and she says she likes her privacy. You ask—delicately—what purpose she had in inviting you here. She tells you you need a friend.
There is a stuffed toy lusus sitting against a beanbag chair. This, you also make no mention of.
Still, place is not without its stereotypes—she is obviously religious, the paintings of acclaimed minstrels staring down at you from all walls. Charts, those drawn by a madwomen, cross from screen to paper printouts to screen again, connected by fine purple wires escaped from their cables. Bottles and bottles of that horrid clown soda roll around on the floor, and your stomach lurches when you think of what’s inside them. At the very least they’re cancerous, poisoning the many who imbue them by the gallon with each of its chemical components. So then, you don’t even think when Sombra reaches for one and your claw snaps around her wrist.
She looks at you, and for the first time since you’ve met she seems unsure. Her eyebrows arc high, blinking obtusely up at you as you hold her arm in a death grip. Then she laughs, a reactionary chuckle—as though you’ve just told some sort of wonderful joke.
She pulls her arm out of your grasp, still laughing. You stare back. If nothing else, then to not reveal you’re just as surprised as she.
She twists open the bottle. You sink back into silence.
Years in the future.
It goes on like this:
She grows up. You two make friends. Life never seems half so lonely when you follow the shadow like a shadow. She has a way with people, and a way with places, able to get you both in wherever you want to go. The later you think has something do with her particular brand of chucklevoodo; some facet of her that makes eyes skip by and psionics discount.
There is always some place to go or something to do with her—never a moment where she isn’t looking to sneak onto some nobility’s porch and rig their awning to fall. You follow her, of course, and say very little. She winds her way through gangs and congregations, trying to find the shoes that fit. Nothing ever seems to satisfy her, and she settles down only ever long enough to buy new trinkets. She takes up scrapping. She makes friends with an heiress. A bounty ends up on her head.
Again: you follow, and say very little.
Often she bites the hand that feeds her, in that she needles you often that you are still with her despite all the mounds and heaps of reasons not to. You always have something dry to drawl back, and she’ll laugh, mocking you for your painfully blatant flushed crush. An exhased hm is the only response.
Sombra flirts like it is going out of fashion.
By the time you are five sweeps you know what she is to you, although somehow Sombra has retained a complete and impenetrable shield of obliviousness when it comes down to the conciliatory.
Sombra gives you plenty of opportunities, entering into half-hearted caliginous relationships whenever it strikes her fancy. The cerulean girl, the one who built little machines only for Sombra to break them, lasts the longest, and you mediate spectacularly with all those sweeps of practice under your belt. But she eventually grows bored of Sombra’s empty games, sees the kismesisstude for what is and realizes it is going nowhere.
Even Sombra is not immune to childish relationship drama.
Once, as desperate as you were, you even tried to auspisticize between her and her solitary red fling. The tragedy was made even more embarrassing by the fact that Sombra still attempted to fire up black sparks that weren’t there, to your continuing mortification whenever you hung around them. The rustblood boy had been more kind than Sombra deserved; you admire him for that. His patience lasted long enough for you to realize that as harshly as you may judge Sombra for turning everything into a contest of pitched throes, whatever can be said about her goes doubly true for you.
The small church dots the countryside in as much a picture of alternian tranquility as any monument to the Mirthful Messiahs can be, burying within the bloodstains, dried puddles of soda, and—for the night—you. You’ve felt the lethargic stares of the highbloods all through the service, and paid them exactly as much mind as you pay any other non-Sombra landweller; which is to say you pretend like you are very far away and enjoying a nice glass of wine.
It is a rare moment of silence now; a gap in-between different mistrals speaking slow and plodding drivel. None of it makes a lick of sense, but between the drinks you earlier declined to imbue, you think wordcrafting isn’t the point. Your head is lifted to the ceiling, eyes closed while the congregation takes a moment of silence. Sombra has never asked you to come before tonight. It is because of this sheer idiosyncrasy that you agreed.
Without moving your head, you crack your eyes open, and glance down far enough that you can see her out the corner. Her usual facepaint is gone, replaced by a more elaborate skull design, with swirls and starbursts decorating the contours of her face. She has her head down in prayer.
It is strange to see Sombra subdued, and you wonder why this place somehow touches someone like her, a girl who seems to believe in nothing.
The silence breaks. Sombra shuffles to wakefulness, and you close your eyes and let the light cast a rainbow from stained glass onto your lids, drifting off again as another sermon begins.
In a few minutes the tension in the room will come to a head. You are not all together unaware of it, but you have no idea what faux pas Sombra has committed, or understand the extent of what she has done. All you know is that, intent to follow through or not, you will not abide threats made against her life.
So let’s cut to the chase then, shall we?
You slam the last of the clown’s to the floor, your grapplekind strangling his breath from his neck. He slumps, and you are left in the now—mercifully—empty church, dark purple running rivers to mix with the other kaleidoscope of stains. It was a close thing, this fight, for they were many and you are few, (One. Just you, Sombra stood too stark still as you tore through her brothers and sisters in a fury of tooth and claw, eyes wide and paralyzed), but it is you who stands victorious, chest heaving and ignoring the mace-fracture in your hip. Your eyes dart around for more, for other enemies that aren’t they, a line of amethyst dripping from your lip.
Sombra feebly grasps the reigns on her composure, and looks around the massacred church. “Woah, haha. You can really tear shit up when you put your mind to it, can’t you?”
Where, where, your brain is still asking, instincts not letting you accept that a battle is over with no consequences, no call back to the stage. You can hear her swallow from where you are. A limp arm drops from a nearby pew onto the floor.
Then, with your gills still flaring and your grapplekind tight in your hand, she takes a step toward you. Slowly, as though even she isn’t sure what she’s doing it, she appears in front of you and strokes a finger down your nose.
At first you stiffen, but Sombra is good, Sombra is not your enemy, and hesitantly you relax as she draws a palm down the side of your cheek. She fumbles through a few croaking shooshes, as her unpracticed hands rain awkward paps on your face.
You lean into her touch. It is your body betraying you, because although the soft caresses along your cheekbones drag you down from your murder-high, it doesn’t change the fact that it feels wrong. The quake in Sombra’s hands reveal just how unsure she is, and after only a minute you draw back sharply.
“They were a poor influence anyway,” you say, sliding your weapon back into place. You turn and walk to the sealed double-doors.
There is a brief sputter. “Ha…yeah. You’re probably right.”
And then she is beside you. You feel as though this is something you will not talk about again. But now she is coming after you instead of the other way around.
Years more in the future.
“How much longer?”
You sit in the tide pool below her, casting eyes up to where she’s jammed an umbrella into the rocks as to avoid the mid-morning sun. The shadow graciously falls onto the water, protecting you as well as you tread safely within the jetty. Still. The water is a bit too warm for you liking.
Sombra is decidedly more comfortable than she was the last time you two visited this barren beach. She leans out of her lounge chair and lowers her shades. “Why? Got somewhere to be?”
The two of you have known each other long enough that you can follow this dance with your eyes closed. She twists the baton, and you follow the motion.
“Having prior arrangements has nothing to do with preparing oneself mentally for an unpleasant situation.” You splash slightly in the stagnant water. “Also, this place smells like grub piss.”
She laughs, ever the predominant voice. And she will always be, the wind in your sails that takes you where you need to be, even if it is not where you want to be. Without whom you would simply be stuck. Adrift. Left to your own devices you would still be watching the world turn from beyond the waves.
She returns to her palmhusk, lazily waiting for another one her clients, buyers of flagrantly illegal tech. “Relax, you’ll like him. He’s kind of a btich.”
“Like me?” Your mouth makes a hard line.
Hers, forever soft, does not. “Like you.”
So you resign yourself again to patience, perched in protection from the sun, waiting for another passing face.