You push yourself up to a sitting position. "Bro," you say. "Long time no see." You manage to keep your voice almost totally steady, even. He's sitting cross-legged in the sand, his elbows on his knees, his katana planted point-down next to him. His horns echo the shape of his shades, jagged outward-facing points. You wonder what yours look like, but you think you'd lose points for reaching up to cop a feel of your own headgear. "Come on. We don't exactly have the high ground out here."

"I got you this." He sets a tiny box on the table between you and nudges it in your direction with psionics. You stare at it. It's the right size to hold a human-style commitment-designation ring, which you sometimes think would be a cool thing to have but as far as you know he's never been interested in. "For those times when I'm being a jackass and you need to snap me out of it." A little smile, a hint of the smug asslord creeping back in around the edges of the apologetic matesprit. "Or when you just want a shortcut to getting my attention."

"I need to—" you can't, you can't say it with Mituna there. "It's my mutation," you say instead. "There are complications." "Okay, dude, open the door," Latula says. The knob rattles, and you miss whatever Mituna says next. "Yeah, I know, but he's still one of us. We can't just let him suffer, you know?" (Kankri misses a social outing. Some of his friends come to check up on him.)

"You aren't denying the guilt part," she says happily. You shrug. This was the way you really liked her, alert and predatory, delighted with life and always a little weird. "You could find anybody guilty of something." "That," Terezi declares, "is one of the sweetest things anyone has ever said to me."

You were right about him being passive—well, receptive. Reactive. He doesn't start things, though he's always willing to stop what he's doing for a makeout session, and he puts himself in your orbit more than he needs to. You think that's his way of asking if you're in the mood. It's hard to admit it even to yourself, but you're grateful he's content to take it this slow.