"The first watch keeps the correct time. Always. Terezi tried starting out of sync the third time they played this game, but without that one thread of the right beat to cling to, the grating wrongness of the other watches knocked Dave out of the mood long before he could hit trance state." Terezi/Dave, idiosycratic forms of bondage.

Looking into mirrors has always messed with your head, but this is nothing like a mirror image. It’s like looking at yourself distorted even further, sharper, the bare bones and skin shaped into something more solid, but still thin and tense and narrow.

eridan is so tolerable when he can't talk

Problem: the drones induce pailing via chemical stimulus that boosts concupiscent instincts and dampens higher brain functions. Problem: pinning your matesprit to the nearest available surface is a concupiscent instinct, and using psionic power is a higher brain function. Problem: pinning your matesprit to the nearest available surface is a concupiscent instinct...and controlling your freakish physical strength is a higher brain function. Problem: being anywhere near Equius come pailing time is 100% likely to kill you. Solution: apply higher brain function ahead of time.

When you ask if you can tie Karkat up tonight, he’s basically not surprised at all. It’s not an all-the-time-always thing, but it’s pretty standard! So he’s not surprised, no, but he still goes bright red and shrugs with one shoulder and says sure, he guesses he doesn’t have a problem with it (like you can’t totally see just how hard he’s blushing). It’s pretty dang adorable.

The two of you pretend to ignore them for a moment longer, until you just can’t hold in the laughter anymore and both lose it. While you’re catching your breath (and maybe still nibbling on Latula’s throat), she says, “So, dudes. You want in on this pants party or what?” They both say, “Yes,” at the same time, and they’re too distracted to do more than try to elbow each other in the ribs without taking their eyes off you, and it’s pretty much the cutest thing ever.

"I ain't opposed to getting my wetware wet," she says. You think you could almost make out the words just from the movements of her lips against your ear, and that gets all down your spine even as part of you writhes in annoyance at a seadweller without any modifications beyond the cosmetic using the word wetware. Fuck it, it's still hot.

Why the Beforan equivalent of yourself didn't appear here, you're not sure, though you suspect it has something to do with direct and indirect transference and the extent to which each of you had contact with game code prior to this remix of the universe; the Ancestors from Alternia had vague memories of being their Beforan selves, so both versions re-instanced, but as far as you know you're the only version of Sollux Captor the game was aware of. Poor Sollux, you jeer internally, all alone in the world. If you were to quadrant yourself, you're not sure whether self-hate or self-pity would be the dominant emotion, but either way, you're getting off on it. God, you make yourself sick. You hold your bulge like you're trying to restrain it, but who the fuck are you kidding. It wraps around your fingers, both tendrils snaking and coiling harder the more you try to will them to stop, like don't-think-of-a-trunkbeast, and you rub at them distractedly because you can't stand not to. Sollux Captor, system architect of the new universe, reduced to thinking with his bulge by two copies of his ancestor being obnoxious at each other. Fuck your hot life.