Chapter Text
It's been clear to you since you were both too young to know more about moirallegiance than the euphemistic tripe about cuddles and gentleness that you read in wrigglers' books – you've known forever, since you stormed out of the castle at some long-forgotten childhood slight and she held on to the beginnings of your horns and stroked your face, all tiny hands and strange noises, and you hovered for a moment of the edge of calm but then stormed right back in again and doubled some tealblood kid who got in your way over your fist – you've always known that Aranea Serket could never pacify you.
Tyrians thirst for moirallegiance, you're taught; the right conciliator can mean the difference between a thousand sweeps of peace and utter carnage. Be tame, they tell you, be humble. Find your moirail and learn to be taken in hand, learn to have the rumbling voice of something feral and darksome and pestilent shooshed over and stroked out of you. You tell them to glub off, of course, but there are times when even you tire of yourself, moments when you want to... But every time your best friend comes to you all big-eyed and scared and trying so hard to act detached, as if she could will or reason away what she feels for you and - And you're terrified every time that if you don't fall into the pile with her, if you pull away too hard when she starts with the senseless, utterly unsoothing unraveling and retwining of your braids, that someday she'll succeed. You don't know what to ask of her, how to make this better, so you just bring her useless trinkets bought with stolen palace treasure and seethe, too proud to run your hands over your own face at night. Because you do pity her. You pity her when she talks until she forgets what she is trying to say under the avalanche of her own words; when she studies until she falls asleep in a pile of schoolfeedingwork on your bedroom floor; in the dragging interminable sweeps of the game when she has so much to offer but no one but you will give her the time of night. Yeah, you pity her, but when she starts to paint her lips blue and you stare at her mouth all goddamn day and all you want to do is smear -
Falling flushed for Aranea is like this: Wanting to stop her trying to fix you, stop her trying at all just for a while, get her fussing papping hands pinned up in one of yours – and she lets you try, but – it doesn't matter that you go to pieces over the span of her hips, because she stills like she's halfway trying not to be here and even when you can get through to her body, it's never what you so want to give her.
She keeps your secret, even when it could mean chaos and ruin and the end of empire. And you kill your friends because it is necessary - but you enjoy it because there is no one to stop you.
When you wake up after sweeps of death it's all infinitely worse, the body you no longer have somehow voracious after a hibernation it never went through and you crave her, you pun and leer and tug at the hem of her dress and make like it's all still a big joke but inside you're riddled with it, the swell of her arms as she tries to hold you and the elegant arch of her eyebrows and the unconscious upward swings of her chin while she talks that sweep her hair feather-thin over the slope of her shoulders... but still she's so sincerely, so cleanly pale for you, and you only ask a handful of times, when you're desperate; take very nearly her whole hand up your nook and kiss her throat; beg, just once, until she lets you get your mouth between her smooth full pearl-gray thighs.
You actually have a pale fling with Kankri, of all people, as though – as though everyone thinks so little of him that it doesn't count, somehow – since abandoning your kingdom you've gotten good at not thinking about things like this, shutting off when you break trust. You ball your fists up in his sweater and sob into the fabric, his short thick fingers shocked-gentle-hesitant along your horns, expecting nothing, hardly even caring, the perfect counterpoint to Aranea's calculated, demanding kneading into carefully researched pressure points, the frantic undercurrent every time of need this to work, need you to be better for me – Kankri rambles on about privilege and responsibility and couldn't give a glub what you do as long as it doesn't make him look bad, and it isn't perfect, but it helps. You don't even try to hide it from her – even without her senses in your head, it's pointless, she knows you – but still she acts like she doesn't see, and for all that she passes herself off as detached, mature, wiser than the rest of you these days, Serket will always deceive when it's convenient for her. You tell her every intimate detail of it just from spite, just to watch the ugly jealousy and desperate wounded pity smear across her sharp-nosed pretty little face. Oh, you know that deep at the very center of the intricate woven-folded self she's spun trying to be someone she can live with she is just like you, vicious and out of place and you pity her for it hot and all-encompassing. She lets you take her on the floor of your dead palace that night, her eyes on the pockets of shadow in the vault of the roof when her nook pulses around you, oceanic cerulean spreading over delicate tile in an uneven stain - lets you knowing you'll give in to her fruitless shooshing in the evening, too proud to apologize but too deeply lost in pity to ever refuse her, her smooth endless analyzing voice, her precise infuriating thin-boned hands. And you will stomp and fume at your worthless ragtag army and bridle for the fight...
By the time the the man with the blank white face comes to you and tells you what you have always known, you are wrath-simple, bloodshot, roiling, avaricious, deprived. You are a wolf raised among lambs, he tells you, forever ravenous but never taught the killing bite, sentenced by birth to slow starvation on a planet of bounty. And you go with him, easy, into another time.