Chapter Text
Sollux Captor stands in front of the glass windowpane to the convenience store he walks by everyday. There isn’t much to scan for, it’s practically the same everyday. It was his father’s idea of “getting him involved in the local community.” At the very least, he would “know what’s going on around him.” Nothing there has caught his eye in the years he’s been reading this.
It’s part of his daily ritual at this point. See what’s faded. See what’s gone.
His eyes move downward from the top, uninterested. There’s something new pinned up on the glass, held there by four strips of clear tape, right below his eye level.
It’s a missing poster.
Clean layout. Black and white text under a heavy red banner. Trying hard to seem urgent without seeming like a eulogy. Sollux leans in, squinting.
There are 3 pictures printed on it, one of the boy in his yearbook picture, another of him in a selfie, and one clearly cut out of a family photo. He’s rather pretty, in a distant way. A little androgynous. Green downturned eyes contrast dark, tan skin. A white streak runs through his curly brown hair like a scar.
His eyes look unfocused in the family photo. Slightly glazed over.
MISSING
ERIDAN AMPORA
Have you seen this person?
DOB: 2/14
Age: 18
Sex or Gender: Male
Race: Caucasian (MENA)
Eyes: Green
Hair: Dark Brown, White Streak
Height: 5’7”
Weight: 127
LAST SEEN 3/11, EXITING SKAIA HIGH SCHOOL. ERIDAN WAS LAST SEEN IN A BLACK SWEATER, NAVY CORDUROY PANTS, WIREFRAME GLASSES, AND BROWN LOAFERS. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION REGARDING HIS DISAPPEARANCE, PLEASE CONTACT THE NUMBER BELOW.
Sollux blinks at the name. Skaia High. That’s his school.
This gives him pause. He had no idea he had gone to the same school as him. Nevertheless been in the same grade.
They’d gone to the same school, were the same age, and were maybe even the same grade, and he’d never even seen him before.
It’s not like he feels anything significant for this stranger.
Maybe he’s saddened a little by the thought of it. Just a quiet, slow discomfort.
A little scared that they were in similar circumstances. That could’ve been him. He feels selfish, thinking that. Making his disappearance about himself.
He notices his breath is fogging up the glass, and gets slightly embarrassed when he notices the cashier inside looking at him. He quickly straightens himself up, turning to the right and continuing his trek to school.
Derse isn’t a beautiful city. It’s big, urban, a little gray, sprawling out like a busted circuit board. The district where Sollux lives is older than he is. He’s very familiar with the run down buildings with flaky paint and sagging windows. No one’s had the budget to renovate since the 70s. He’s lived in the same cramped second floor apartment with his brother and father his entire life. (Well, his brother moved out a couple months ago. Their formerly shared room is no longer symmetrical.) Sometimes he jokes that just walking down the street he might get shanked.
But he likes living there. If you live somewhere your whole life, you grow to love it as your home. He’s memorized the sharp lines of the streets leading to his favorite places.
He’s staring down at his phone the entire time, kicking rocks and whatever else he can do to make the walk more interesting. He’s been dribbling the same rock between his feet for the past 12 minutes, but he’s interrupted by the beep of the crosswalk. He hadn’t even realized he’d arrived at the intersection.
He’d apparently made it too late, too. Just late enough to hear the droning beep of the pole asking him to wait.
Sollux stops, pulling his headphones halfway down from his ears. One side rests on his collarbone, the other futilely stretches towards his ear. He glances up, then down the street, even though there’s barely any traffic this early.
One old Sedan rumbles past, windows fogged, a forgotten paper coffee cup resting on the roof.
After confirming there’s no one else coming, he crosses, undeterred by the red hand lit up above him.
A woman and her dog walk cross him for a couple seconds, coming from the other side. The dog is wearing a tiny vest that says “EMOTIONAL SUPPORT” in stretched out letters. The leash twitches as they move past him, and Sollux shifts to the side automatically.
The wind picks up mid step, whipping through his sleeves. He buries his hands deeper into his jacket pockets, the rock forgotten by him, left on the sidewalk.
The sky is still that sickly cold pale color it always is on Derse mornings, and the streetlights flicker like they’re half awake too. They’re due to go off soon. Sollux likes to race them, see if he can get to school before they turn off. He passes a bus stop with no one in it. He sees the poster plastered up on the clear plastic wall. Someone’s left an open notebook on the bench, pages fluttering. He doesn’t stop to look.
He takes the same route everyday. Three blocks east, past the auto shop that smells like rubber and metal, past the boarded up pharmacy that gains a new tag everyday, left at the stoplight, past the convenience store, then through the back alley that cuts into the parking lot.
Everything is in its place.
Sollux dislikes change. Heavily. His father tells him not to use a word as harsh as hate, but he may truly
hate change.
Unfortunately change doesn’t care what he likes. It happens constantly. Endlessly. Quietly. Or all at once. People leave, they move apartments, drop off the face of the planet. Grocery stores remodel. Teachers quit mid-semester. Someone he never noticed disappears from school, and now his face is printed on copy paper and taped to bus stop walls.
He doesn’t know why that keeps nagging at him.
All he can do is control what he can.
If the world keeps rearranging itself, at least he can walk the same cracked sidewalk to school that he does everyday.
His routine is tight. Wake up, microwave oatmeal, one shoe on, then the other. He wears them mismatched because he likes it. Check the same four apps. Walk the same route.
He’s adapted. He has to. Maybe that hate isn’t hate, more a mild allergy. His brain doesn’t sit right when things shift without his permission. He can plan around change by now.
He’s good at planning.
He turns into the alleyway, gravel crunching beneath his feat. The school comes into view. He can only see behind it, but the flagpole out front still peeks out above the outdoor classrooms. Skaia high is a big slab of bricks painted light blue, framed by chainlink fences and patchy grass. A long faded banner hangs at the top of the double doors. “HOME OF THE KINGS.”
Students drift towards the back entrance, huddled, nearly all of them have jackets and earbuds in. He does too.
He sees the usual people. The girl who wears a hoodie with thumb holes. The guy whos backpack makes him look like a snail. The group that plays their music too loud from a speaker inside someone’s backpack. He shifts his headphones back into place, preparing to join the crowd.
He catches a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye. It’s the brown tabby cat that hangs around the dumpsters behind school. The cafeteria workers feed it, even though they’re not supposed to. Sometimes it comes up and lets you pet it.
Its ear is clipped. Aradia told him that it means that it was spayed or neutered. They don’t know what sex it is. It freezes, tilting its head at him, then makes its way back behind the dumpsters to take a nap.
Sollux adjusts the strap of his backpack and keeps moving. He falls into the crowd without a word. Everyone’s too tired to talk to each other right now. Most people are.
Slotting into place like this satisfies him. If only people would leave him to his own devices more often.
He quietly arrives to his homeroom class, just before the bell rings.
“Terezi, fucking stop it already!” Karkat and Terezi are sitting at their desks. Like every day, Terezi is irritating Karkat.
He says she annoys him sometimes Sollux knows better. He knows he likes it.
Right now she’s flicking the remnants of the cafeteria muffin she got for breakfast at his pimply forehead. He gives Sollux a distracted wave, focused on sweeping the crumbs on his desk into his hands so he can throw them away.
“Sup.” Sollux sets his bag down on the checkered linoleum flooring.
Terezi is the first to answer. “Hey!” She draws out the end of the word playfully. She stops flicking the crumbs at Karkat, instead, balling up the wrapper and throwing it in the trash with surprising accuracy.
“God, Sollux, finally. You’re late.”
“I am?”
“You told me you’d come early because you had something for me. Am I imagining things?”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Got distracted by something on the way here.” He fishes a 2ds out of his pocket.
“Really? That?” Karkat seems a little unimpressed. Terezi tilts her head. “What are we talking about?”
Sollux shoves it into her hands. “My sweet, sweet, modded 2ds.”
The morning show comes on in the background. Karkat seems less focused on the console.
“What do you have on it?” Terezi wiggles the joystick around like a fidget toy.
“Shit ton of stuff. World Ends With You, Ace Attorney, Mystery Dungeon, Tetris, loads more.” Terezi scoffs.
Karkat interrupts the two, chiming in when he hears something interesting on the announcements. “Shit, you guys hear about that? I was wondering where he was. We talk all the time.”
Sollux’s attention flicks towards the smartboard, he sees the same poster he saw earlier this morning. The voice of the announcer (some nerdy dude with glasses, he’s met him after doing tech support for the av club) dubs over the text. He looks directly at the screen.
“Eridan Ampora went missing March 11th. He was last seen exiting through the front double doors, walking to his car. Some of you might know him as the volleyball captain, or the vice president of the history club. If you have any details about his disappearance, please contact the number below.” Sollux internalizes the new information about him.
He’s athletic. He likes history.
Sollux is making up an identity for him. Speculating about this guy who he never knew.
“You talked to him?”
“Yeah. You’ve never seen me with him? We both like movies.” He likes movies.
“Uh, no, not really. Maybe I just didn’t notice.”
“He’s a nice guy. Little bit of an asshole sometimes. He stopped texting me on the 12th.” Karkat seems torn up about this. He’s talking like there’s something in his throat. He’s always been emotional, now isn’t any different. It’s horrible to see him like this. Something directly affecting him. “... You seem invested, did you know him too?”
Sollux rubs the back of his neck. “No, just… interested. He seems familiar. Saw the poster earlier.”
“Huh.”
Terezi seems uncomfortable.
The rest of the 20 minutes of the period goes by in awkward silence, and Sollux quietly picks up his bag at the end of it to make his way to chemistry. He has his itinerary planned out for today. Lunch with Aradia, 4th period with Feferi, go home and eat some leftovers and then fall asleep. Maybe he’ll treat himself to a little Omegle once he wakes up.
His day slinks by with all the sluggishness of wet concrete.
First period is calculus. He’s prepared. He actually likes math, intently taking notes the entire time. Second period is history, much less interesting to him. He nearly dozes off even though it’s 11 in the morning.
His first reprieve is lunch with Aradia. It’s always predictable in a good way. They sit at the farthest table from the cafeteria in the courtyard, cracks run through the concrete underneath them and weeds grow through it. It’s never at threat of being stolen because it’s disgustingly rusty. Aradia doesn’t mind it.
Her knees are pulled up on the bench and she’s tucked them into her chest like a child. Sollux sits down across from her, craning over to look at what’s in her lunchbox. Pickled vegetables, rice, and fresh fruit cut in the shape of a smiley face.
“You’re thinking about the missing kid.” She gets straight to the point.
“Yeah. I guess.” Sollux eats his square, slightly plasticky pizza. He picks a piece of pink pickled daikon to rest on top of his pizza. It looks ridiculous. He knows Aradia’s fine with him taking her food. She takes one of the diced peaches from his plate like a bird picking at the ground for a caterpillar. He continues, mouth full of food. “You knew him?”
She shrugs. “Kind of. He was in student council and came to everything, checked up on all the clubs. He was the only male cheerleader last year.” She prods at her food, attempting to find the best bite.
“It’s like he’s following me around even though he’s gone. Everyone’s been talking about him all day. Shit, that’s a little selfish to say of me.” He wiles his mouth of the marinara sauce on it.
“You’re noticing the shape of the hole,” she says, framing Sollux with her fingers. The shape of the hole? He thinks for a little.
“Uh, yeah I am. It’s been nagging at me all day. I didn’t even notice him until he was gone. I mean, it’s not like I care all that much. Why are you making me talk so much about myself??” Sollux takes a swig of his chocolate milk. The joys of not being lactose intolerant.
“It’s an interesting topic. I wanted to see how you felt about it.”
Sollux pauses, looking down at his styrofoam tray. “Ok, well, why are you so invested? Did you know the guy?”
“You already asked me that. And no. We talked once, real passionate guy. He liked alternate history and things like that. Seems like he wanted to be right all the time.” Sollux catalogues the information in his head. Eridan is stubborn.
“So pretentious in a committed way. He didn’t half ass anything. You’d appreciate it if it wasn’t annoying.”
“Sounds like a blast. How come everyone knew this guy but me?”
“I think sometimes people fall through the cracks. Not necessarily in the ground. It’s foggy to me. I’m surprised the school took this long to say anything. They’re not saying something.”
“Because it’s private?”
“We can both be right.” She’s nearly finished now, setting the white of a hardboiled egg on Sollux’s plate.
Sollux stuffs it into his mouth. “Did it seem like he would disappear?”
“No one seems like they’re going to disappear. That’s the point. No one seems like they’d just dissipate into smoke.”
Sollux doesn’t speak. Aradia looks right through him. “You’re obsessing again.”
“... No I’m not.”
“You definitely are. You have that look you do when you’re going weird about something.” She tilts her head at him curiously. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” He’s abrupt, firm, almost like he’s cutting her off. “I mean, no, sorry. Let’s talk about literally anything else that isn’t this missing guy.”
He shoves the rest of his lunch in his mouth, looking down through the gridded metal holes of the table.
“How about that thing your mom made you go to?” Sollux doesn’t meet her eyes.
“What, the festival? It was fine. My favorite part was the drive. It was 3 hours long and I got to stare at fields and point out cows the entire time.” Aradia finds beauty in the little things. Sollux wonders if that’s why she still hangs out with him. He pushes the thought down.
“She made me drive.”
“Really? That’s evil. That’s like, evil parenting.”
Aradia smiles, picking up a thin matchstick of pickled carrot with her fork. “I was really good at it. No curbs jumped, no breaks slammed.”
“Congratulations, gold star for you.”
“Oh, yeah, I got something for you.” She pulls out a little keychain. It looks handmade. Crocheted? Knitted? He doesn’t know the difference. It’s a little fish.
“Huh. Cute. Why a fish?” He takes it from her, inspecting it intently.
“The other ones looked weird.” She closes her lunchbox, zipping it up and throwing her plastic fork into the trash.
“It’s okay to be curious,” she says out of nowhere. “It doesn’t make you a bad person.” The bell rings. He gives her a wave as she walks off, looking mortified.
Fourth Period. AP Bio.
Sollux slinks into the classroom, the air is already humid from the stuttering HVAC and whatever halflife of frog dissections still lingers from a previous period. It smells faintly of ammonia, wet paper towels, and whatever chemical the janitor uses to mop the floors. He heads straight for his usual seat near the back lab bench.
Feferi’s seat is empty.
This catches his eye.
Feferi Peixes is allergic to being absent. She once hopped her way over from the other side of the school with a broken leg because she didn’t want to be marked tardy. The teacher told her she wouldn’t have marked her tardy anyways. She’s never absent, not for headaches, rainstorms, or snowstorms. She’s always volunteering for things she isn’t prepared for.
He slouches slightly. The class’s eyes shift to the front, Ms. Mendicant is fiddling with her desktop, screen open to a PDF with ten too many poorly scaled graphs. She doesn't notice Feferi gone. Her mouse jitters around on the screen.
Someone speaks behind him, half whispered and pointed. “They were really close. Eridan and Feferi.” He doesn’t turn around, instead, intently listening.
“Oh my god, obviously. They’ve known each other since, what, Kindergarten? She’s probably freaking out.”
“No, but like, close-close. You don’t get it. People joked they would get married.”
“What? No way. Eridan’s super gay.” The two voices laugh behind him. Sollux files that away. Flamboyant? He could gather that already. Close friends with Feferi.
The laughter dies quickly as Ms. Mendicant snaps her fingers, drawing their attention to the board. His brain is still putting pieces together when it wasn’t his duty to begin with. Childhood friends. Still Close. Liked movies, volleyball, and cheer. Gone now.
And Feferi isn’t here. He hadn’t thought about her in this context yet. She’s just Feferi. Bubbly, brilliant, scattered. They’d split on great terms. He comes over sometimes. She talks about things and just makes everyone else lively by proxy. He’s seen her go quiet, too. Times when her smile stiffened, when she chewed her pen caps like she intended to swallow them. She stopped chewing the ends because once it broke and ruptured bright pink ink all over her.
He looks at her seat again. It’s slightly pushed out. She was never here in the first place.
Ms. Mendicant’s voice drifts over the class. Something about gene expression and regulatory mechanisms.
Something sharp twists in his guts. This is still nagging at him for some unholy reason. He wishes Aradia were here. She’d probably give him some good advice. “You think there’s something in the static. What are you looking for?”
The hole is getting bigger.
The final bell is shrill and lasts for too long. Sollux shuts his notebook, shoving it in his bag and sluggishly leaving his chair. He files out with the rest of the student body like a cog in a dusty machine. Everyone moves like a flood in slow motion. Slogging. Sticky.
His phone is warm in his pocket from leaving it on all day unwittingly. There are a couple of notifications from groupchats, none which he feels like checking. Something about an upcoming tournament. Someone’s being annoying again. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t acknowledge the hallways humming with noise.
He exits through the same way he entered. The brown tabby is gone, just a wet leaf stuck where it was last resting.
The wind is louder in the afternoon, funneled by the narrow street as he turns into the alley. Gravel crackles underfoot. His shoes scrape the pavement the same way they always do, but something about the sound annoys him today. Like a mosquito buzzing inside his skull. His jaw tightens.
Three blocks west, past the convenience store, he doesn’t look at the window. For his own good. No more obsessing over this random boy.
He kicks the same rock from this morning. It waited for him. That’s the kind of thought that would usually make him feel stupid for being sentimental, but right now it just lands somewhere deep in his chest and stays there. He dribbles faster.
The boarded-up pharmacy looms like a dead tooth. Someone’s tagged a new piece on the wood. It’s not a name or a gang symbol this time. Just the word “HONK” in huge, dripping purple letters. It’s an eyesore.
He doesn’t realize he’s stopped walking until he’s staring at the sky, standing beside the same flickering streetlamp from this morning.
The sky's gone that weird, burnt lavender color it gets around 4:30. That Derse purple, as his brother used to say. He hadn’t noticed how early it was getting dark lately. The clouds feel too low, pressing down like a ceiling. His feet keep moving.
When he reaches the apartment, the key has trouble unlocking the door. He stumbles in once it does.
It’s not messy by any means. His dad keeps it clean, almost obsessively. It’s just cluttered. The space doesn’t feel big enough for the two of them. There’s a note taped to the fridge, something about his dad taking a late shift and how there’s leftovers in the fridge. Of course.
The living room is silent. Still uneven. His brother’s side of the room still looks weird without him. That imbalance gets on his nerves. He stares at the blank space on the wall where a poster used to be.
Sollux trudges into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and grabs a Tupperware of rice and chicken. Pops it into the microwave. The hum is loud. The light flickers. He watches the food spin.
50 seconds. He doesn’t think about anything while it’s spinning, he doesn’t let himself. He knows it’ll just drift back to what he was thinking about earlier.
The microwave beeps.
He doesn’t get up right away.
When he finally eats, he doesn’t taste any of it. The rice is cold in the middle.
Later, he drags himself to his room, sits on his bed. A thought crosses his mind.
He has this habit, maybe a bad one, of going on random chat sites when he’s feeling weird. Not to talk, really, just to scroll. Sometimes he ends up on video chats with strangers who say nothing. He likes the anonymity. It’s just to kill time. To decompress. There’s no expectations, no one knows who he is or what school he goes to or that he wears mismatched shoes on purpose.
Through his grainy webcam lens, he thinks he looks handsome.
Sollux types in the web address to Omegle, hunched over his chair. It’s easy to kill time on there, he can take the chance of being flashed.
He straightens up, checking what his webcam can see, making sure it’s not egregiously messy. He brushes some of the residual adhesive off the lens.
He types in a couple tags for the interests. Volleyball, Snapchat, Instagram, Tech, and Video Games.
His first encounter is a girl.
“You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi! You both like Snapchat!” He doesn’t really like Snapchat. He hardly uses it. The tag is just easier to discover people his age through.
She looks around his age, if not younger. She has blonde hair, with egregiously tanned skin and clumpy mascara.
Stranger: hiii
You: hi.
Stranger: asl?
You: 18 m derse.
Stranger: derse? lol wtf is that
You: city.
The stranger disconnects.
His next encounter is an older man on his phone, it’s positioned at an unflattering angle.
“You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi! You both like video games!”
He also immediately disconnects, looking uninterested at Sollux. He wonders why. Too young? Too ugly? Not young enough? Or is it just the fact that he’s visibly a guy.
He brushes the thought off and immediately searches for a new person.
“You’re now chatting with a stranger. Say hi! You both like!” Odd. The interest tag is absent. Sollux looks towards the video feed.
It’s him.
Sollux thinks he looks even more striking live. He sits in the middle of a lavish room, it looks like something a royal would own. It’s maximalistically decorated, though he can’t make out coherent details of anything.
Eridan gives him a short wave, confused if Sollux is frozen. He eagerly waves back. Eridan looks the same, though more of him is visible here. He’s wearing the same thing described on the poster. His wireframe glasses sit upon his aquiline nose like they were sculpted for it.
There’s a pause.
“Are you real?” Eridan’s camera feed looks dreamy, hazy in a way that’s hard to describe. He’s just sitting there. Like he was never gone.
“Of course I’m real Sollux. I can’t wait to meet you.”
His cursor hovers over the disconnect button. He doesn’t press it.