Chapter Text
Your name is SOLLUX CAPTOR and your hearing is probably never going to be the same again.
You have a hard time making out voices unless they're near to you; a muffled deep timbre or a high trill, but no words, just murmurs. Even when they're close enough to hear, the sensation isn't far off from when you would get pool water stuck in your ears and couldn't get it out. You can recognize familiar voices, and slowly, very slowly, you learn to recognize the pitch and rise and fall without being able to hear the words.
The few times you've ventured from the hospital bed, the diagnosis of your balance being shot is confirmed. Your body feels light, like if you don't hold on to something you're going to slip out the cracked window and in to the clouds hovering just out of your reach. But this makes you under-compensate for gravity and sends you sprawling more than once. You can hear the nurses whisper that it's a terrible pity that someone so young is going to spend the rest of their life walking with a cane, but what else could you expect with the kind of pressure damage his organs were subjected to?
The stark whites of the room and your hospital gown are so glaringly different from the purples and blues and pinks, luminescent and gleaming, that when flowers find their way in to your room, it loosens the knot in you stomach despite how "girly" it would be misconstrued as. You would ask the doctors for some more color, a painting, a photograph, even a shitty movie poster, but that would mean breaking your self-imposed vow of silence.
When you were resuscitated, the needle in your arm filling your veins with bliss, they asked where you had been; you'd been on the missing persons list for months, and had been given up for dead. The words poured from your mouth, the castle and the people and the cuttlefish and before you knew it they were injecting something else in to the IV bag, the dark hands of sleep hauling you mercilessly down.
The tight-knight woman who visited you every day spoke volumes about what they thought of what happened to you. She poked and prodded, asked about your relationship with your foster parents, your biological parents, your school life, everything she could think of to get the truth from you. But you just sat there, her voice little more than a hum in your damaged ears, twisting the ring around your finger until the skin was raw.
It didn't matter how real it was. The damage done to your ears and brain are consistent only with people kept under water pressure for as long as you had been, but sea dwellers and a magnificent underwater society just isn't the explanation "rational" people are looking at. Never mind the still-healing wound on your chest, or the fact that the stone set in your ring is worth more than your foster parents make in a year. Never mind the small scratches on your hips or the faint black staining on your finger tips or the fact that no one else has any other ideas. They think you're crazy, and despite your one physical token, the only connection you have, you're starting to think that you may be as well.
The doctors come and go, your foster parents have come once or twice (but you're pretty sure that the shrink is keeping them at bay), but no one stays except the girl who saved you.
She sits an arm chair, legs tucked up underneath her, sketch pad in her hands, talking in a voice that is just outside your ability to make out. You're almost positive she does it on purpose, but her voice sounds so sweet, almost like Feferi's, and you let it wash over you like warm water. She sounds happy, just sitting next to you while she draws or does homework or plays with her phone, babbling about inane things that neither of you seem to care about. It doesn't seem to bother her that you ignore her, eyes fixed on the window or the place where the paint has chipped off the wall to look like a spider. She becomes the only constant in your life, and one of your few pleasures.
One day, the routine changes. Your head doctor has left, the same frustrated look in her eyes at a million watts behind her stuffy brown glasses. Jade always has to leave, but she's never long in returning. She flops down in the chair, a large folder tucked under her arm that you've never seen before. She doesn't bother to get comfortable, pulling her hair from the ponytail she had it tied back in as she withdraws a thick piece of paper, setting it face down on the blankets covering your legs.
The back of the paper is slightly smudged with black; charcoals, you think. You've never gotten a good look at what she spends all her time drawing, so it's with trepidation, but mostly curiosity, that you take the paper in to your hands and turn it over.
His hair is matted to his head in a way you know that would mortify him, the purple streak not even visible in its disarray. The points of his teeth are more pronounced with the way his mouth is open, gasping for breath, and the grief in those endless purple eyes has the paper crinkling under your tightening grasp. The fins on his face are flared, just slightly, an instinct you know that rears its head when he's afraid, and you know that if his torso wasn't submerged in the aquamarine water his gills would be flaring as well.
You feel the bed dip as Jade sits next to you, her words truly audible to you for the first time. "I didn't get to see him for very long, so I'm sure there are some details wrong," she says, leaning her head against your with a soft little knock. "And I'm sure you'd prefer a happier looking picture, but I don't know if he was a very happy person to begin with, so…"
You remember the snarls and glares and exasperated sighs, mixed with his fingers soft against your face and his lips against the back of your neck, and it makes you smile despite the tears running down your cheeks. "Thank you," you whisper, and your voice is so cracked and dry from disuse that you're unsure if she heard you, but a warm arm wraps around your shoulder, and it's the first comfort you've had since you got here.
"What's it like?" she asks tentatively, and you remember that she was there when you woke up, sitting next to an elderly man with a truly fantastic mustache. There's no disbelief in her voice, no sarcasm or indulgence, just pure curiosity. She believes you. She doesn't think you're crazy or trying to make things up for attention or to hide something truly horrific. She saw him, remembers him, captured him in a way that shows that she was just as fascinated by him as he was with you.
You think of the bioluminescence in the coral, the sound of the water lapping against the floor of the Pocket. You think of the cuttlefish and the books, the colors and smells of the Concourse, the glowing orbs. You think of Feferi and her laughter, the light in her eyes and the gentle curve of her mouth. You think of Eridan, his body warm against yours, the slick-silk feel of the webbing between his fingers as it brushes against your palm.
"It's beautiful."