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Every week. Same night. No exceptions. Sollux leaves his communal hive stem and just... flies. Swift and quick and invisible against the Dark Season's sky. On his side of the world, it's quite literally about as black as it can be during these moonless months. Nights like this, with clouds obscuring even the brightest of stars, were perfect for nighttime flight.
It was incredibly relaxing. He didn't have to think about anything, no analyzing or coordinating or planning. No wires, no servers, no coding or compiling or hacking of any kind. Just the sky and the wind and within it, himself: a bullet in the clouds to punch a hole in the condensation, soon refilled thereafter.
He would always take the same leisurely route, a hodgepodge zig-zag of the planet that took him all over to fly above the homes of his friends. Terezi's gigantic treehouse, almost indiscernible from the other trees until he flew low and saw all of her lynched scalemates, hanging with their button eyes from the limbs of the trees guilty of not much at all. Normally he would psychoanalyze the whole thing to get a rise out of her, but whenever he was just flying it only brought an amused smile to his lips. He chuckled as he went on to the next house on his mental itinerary.
~~~
Somewhere in the dark, a blind girl who was just sleeping cast her cane about and mumbled unheard fragments of accusation, then fell back asleep.
~~~
He did a few quick loops around what he called Mount Snootymanor: the two castle-like towers that comprised Vriska's and Equius' houses. The name was childish but frankly nobody else was ever going to hear him say it, so to hell with them and he'll laugh at his own jokes. Except in all honesty he cared about his friends a great deal, and on occasion even these two blue-bloods. But he never lingered here very long; the bad luck eminating from Vriska's hivetower and the robot debris that spilled at random from Equius' abode, along with the nightmare spider that watched him with careful, hungry eyes below-- he had all the reason he needed to just fly on by as fast as he could.
~~~
Vriska was getting ready to go to sleep when she saw a shadow fly past her window with staggering speed, and her one eye widened in surprise. She took out her dice and decided to roll to see if she would check it out. The roll came out as low as it could possibly go, but she didn't see it. She was already dozing slightly in her recooperacoon before the dice even came to a stop.
~~~
Nepeta's cave was off-limits, but he flew above the dangerous wastes anyway, because it was always pretty easy to tell if everything was okay down there. He wouldn't risk anything more than a brief swoop in the space above her home lest her lusus come pouncing out, both pearly sets of teeth bared.
The land beneath him gradually became more and more lively as he flew over it, dirt and rock and sand turning to grass and moss-covered stones, a red-green gradient that he would sometimes loop around just to see again.
And after that came Tavros' windmill-topped residence. It was one of the nicer houses, he thought. Though he himself wound up higher than some in the whole blood caste system, he preferred to live in his communal cluster. He needed constant stimulus to really concentrate, and living in a building with a bunch of other trolls served that purpose very well. It also meant that these trips out were sometimes necessary, because he never much got to take his mind off of things except for when he was all alone in the sky.
If he had to live somewhere other than his ever-buzzing hivestem though, it would definitely be Tavros' place. It was... serene, simply put. The wind brushed over the grass in that way that makes it look like waves, and every time he flew by he was compelled to just dip down and hover along the flat meadow with his back to the ground, hands just barely brushing the blades of green--
But he never does. Because every week, on the same night, Tavros is awake. Seemingly there are no exceptions to his routine either; he always came rolling out of his house with strident pushes against the wheels of his chair. Sollux didn't know what to think of it after he first saw the bemusing scene; it hadn't been that long after what happened to Tavros when he started doing this regularly. He never really knew where the wheelchair-bound boy was off to, but every morning he was inevitably already at home, having slept for at least some amount of time. The only time Sollux had ever indulged in the urge to hover along the grassy plains he had to shoot up as fast as he could because he had almost gotten caught by the big-horned troll bursting out of the door.
Sollux had gone home that night, however; he watched Tavros long enough to see that nothing was wrong and left before he was spotted. This time his curiosity got the best of him and he flew a careful distance above and behind Tavros, watching from his spot in the sky as the troll beneath him rolled along the grassy slopes. He rolled on and on and on, picking up speed and leaning into the wind like a racer as he went... where, exactly? Sollux's face scrunched up with confusion as his eyes shifted from Tavros to what was up ahead--
"TAVROS!"
Sollux bolted down like lightning, hoping to get to the big-horned idiot in time--
Tavros turned his head slightly, letting momentum carry him forward as he took a cautious glance behind him-- undoubtedly wondering who it was-- and Sollux saw his lips say his name without the lisp, and the look on Tav's face was incredulous.
Had Sollux thought about it at all, he could've just used the same powers he was using to fly to stop the wheelchair and Tavros in place. In fact there were a lot of things he could've done instead of what he was doing, but he flew not to think but to forget about his troubles. So he didn't notice that Tavros wasn't headed for a cliff at all, but instead a very steep hill. And by the time he did, it was already too late. Sollux realized all at once that he was flying way too fast and without thinking let go of flight entirely, essentially throwing him right at Tavros.
Tavros' face suddenly set with a wide-eyed expression and he grabbed the arms of his chair and pulled it up with him as best he could as he hopped into the air. Sollux yelped as he felt all of the momentum leave into strong hands, hands that had caught him in mid-air. He opened his eyes, not scarcely believing what he saw: Tavros had snatched him out of his trajectory, and he was now staring up at the wheelchair-bound boy from his lap, legs hanging over the side. Tavros simply looked down at him and grinned a gigantic, goofy grin, asking him something he couldn't hear against the wind.
"What?," Sollux asked in reply.
"I said, are you ready?"
"For what?"
Tavros just grinned harder and closed his eyes as, to Sollux's utter horror, they barreled over the top of an incredibly steep hill and went rocketing down it. Sollux shrieked in abject terror and grappled at Tavros' neck for support as his legs went up in a half-hearted attempt to curl into a ball and be somewhere much safer and calmer than all this.
Tavros just pumped the wheels as fast as he could, and above everything Sollux could hear him making a loud, ridiculous call: "VROOOOOOOOOM!"
Sollux just stared at him blankly, his face frozen in complete shock. This can't even remotely be happening right now, he thought. It's not possible. But something inside him felt the same as when he was flying; that same feeling of his insides being pushed against himself with the sheer speed. It was that same exhilarating feeling, but he was experiencing it in a whole new and massively frightening way. And though he was never sure thereafter if it was a voice inside his head or Tavros in his ear, he heard something say: "Don't worry so much. It's all downhill from here."
Sollux screamed and Tavros yelled and both went speeding down the hill with nothing at all on their minds.
~~~
At the bottom, Sollux rolled out of the other boy's lap with a massive exhale of breath that he hadn't known he was holding. At first all he could do was babble, and when he looked up at Tavros he saw that same confused expression return. He couldn't really answer him, not right now--
Then, slowly, Tavros started to laugh.
It started out soft, and Sollux's babbling petered out as the laughter went on. Tavros' cheeks were starting to color a light brown, the laughter only escalating, and Sollux found he was laughing to despite how scared he had been a moment ago, and soon both of their chests were aching with the sound.
Beneath a clouded sky, the two friends laughed like that for some time.
"Tavros, if you don't mind me asking... what are you doing?"
The big-horned troll just laughed, a little bit of his usual nervousness creeping back into the sound. But he knew that Sollux was curious. He would be too, in his position. So he shook his head and told him. "Well, every now and then... w-well, just about every week, really, I like to get out and feel like the old days, you know? Like when I used to roleplay and fight monsters and stuff. A-and... this is kind of like that. It's exciting, y'know?" Tavros looked up to meet Sollux's eyes, and saw his disheveled glasses, the windswept hair: yeah, Sollux probably knew that now.
"But that hill..." Sollux looked past him and at the sharp incline they had went careening down, still ridden with wheel-marks from this time and times past. He must have figured out pretty easily that it would take him forever to get back up the hill. "Why would you go through that much trouble getting back up there just for a half-minute's worth of excitement?"
Tavros wheeled himself back and to the left, rubber making the sand beneath them crunch softly. His eyes were almost closed, and he looked long at a spot further down along the beach. It seemed like he was staring at one spot, and at the same time staring far, far past it.
"This is... just down there is where I... I-I fell."
Sollux's mind went completely dark for a moment, remembering what Vriska had done. Not only that, but he was the one who had to go and find him. He didn't want to; not because he didn't want to go through the effort or anything like that, but because he didn't want to see his friend like that. He frowned somewhat, and looked up to ask Tavros the obvious question.
"So why do you come back here? It can't bring you too many good memories."
Tavros chuckled, turning back to Sollux with a soft smile, surprisingly. "No, not really. When I first came back here, I was really angry. I couldn't even speak. I didn't even want to p-play Fiduspawn for a while, if you can believe it." Sollux laughed a little; it was definitely hard to believe but he did, and he didn't want to laugh too much lest he accidentally hurt Tavros' feelings. The big-horned boy's smile hadn't waned anyway. "But I kept coming back, and for a while I didn't really believe it. It was like it had always been this way. And now it's... it's kind of like it happened to somebody else."
Sollux couldn't help but see his friend in a different light, seeing him talk so freely about the incident like this. It was mind boggling that anybody would ever be able to give up all the anger and hate that must have welled up from that one thing. But Tavros was sitting in front of him in his chair, laughing about it. He opened his mouth to say something, but Tavros didn't notice as he had closed his eyes for a moment. Sollux paused, wondering what was going through his head.
Tavros tilted his head back, looking at the sky with something like a grin, and for a moment Sollux panicked, wondering if his friend had ever seen him shooting through the clouds. Tavros sighed with something like happiness in the noise.
"It's not really about the memory anymore, though. It's more about where I've gotten because of it. It... it's not really about all this down here. It's more about what how much fun I have on the way down."
Sollux was stunned. He had never thought it would be so simple as that. That somebody could just be happy because it's better to be that way. And as he stared down at the sand, dumbfounded, an idea started to form in the back of his head.
"You know," he replied, "that ride down really was kind of fun."
"R-really?" Tavros sounded extremely pleased, though more enthusiam than he would have liked came through, causing him to retract into his chair with a bashful smile.
Sollux smiled more brightly at that, though no less sincere, nodding. "Yeah, really.
"Want to do it again?"
And with Sollux using his powers to push the chair and Tavros back up the hill, the two of them went down that hill over and over again until the sun rose, neither of them wanting to give up the simple fun they had found.