#in which baby trolls are basically huge hideous ticks

[curlicuecal]

O+n the Care and Feeding o+f Wigglers (Porrim & Kankri)(6/6)

OR: Porrim Maryam’s Field Guide to Dealing with the Blood-sucking Parasites in Your Life

the final chapterlet in the story of how Porrim came to accidentally adopt a creepy blood-sucking mutant parasite baby troll :3

<previous

Rule No+. 6: Always secure yo+ur sleeping arrangements

“Ow,” you say, too sleep-groggy to react with more eloquence to sudden wriggler teeth in your shoulder.  “Kankri, no.”   You squint one eye open, brightening your bioluminescence until you can better make out the small grub gnawing sleepily at your arm.  Why is there even a small grub gnawing sleepily at your arm?

A quick look around shows a tangle of shed swaddling at the base of your makeshift dry ’coon.  Kankri appears to have snagged the cloth on the point of one of the garden shears protruding from your pack and then struggled and clawed until he worked his way free.  You have yet to decide if your blood-feeding companion parasite is very clever or just very persistent.  Perhaps it will be easier to tell after he pupates.

You turn your eyes back to Kankri, tapping him between his mutant red eyes so that the protective lens flick over them and he releases your arm with a squeak.  He rolls awkwardly, little clawed legs working furiously as they lose their purchase, ending on his back.  He’s fat like an oblong nutriment roll these days, blood-plumped and awkward, and he rocks a bit on his carapace as he kicks his graspers in the air and frowns at you.

"What did I tell you?  We don't eat people."

“Skreee,” says Kankri, rocking indignantly.

"Well, yes, I know technically we do eat people, but we can choose not to." You drag yourself the rest of the way to a sitting position, scrubbing your sleep-tangled hair out of your face to tuck behind your horns.  Is it even dark outside yet?  Whatever the time, you are certain it is much too early to be having philosophical conversations with your adopted parasite and/or yourself. 

Kankri clicks and squeaks and hisses and finally succeeds at rolling to his front.  You roll your eyes at him.  He’s so round his little legs hardly touch the ground, the integument stretched between his chitin plates swollen from the perigees' worth of blood meals you’ve been stuffing into him—mostly stray lusii, hunted from the dangerous herds roaming the plains of Alternia, sans small grub charges of their own.  You're good at hunting.  You'd almost forgotten that, underground. 

Kankri wriggles resolutely in your direction.  You scoop his plump little form up with the ease of long practice, holding him out at arm's length as he squeaks and flails.  Even his cheeks are puffy, flushed red with indignation and good health.  He’s a far cry from the hungry, sleek-bodied little grub that ambushed your ankle outside the brooding caverns that night. 

"Please go back to sleep,” you direct him, firmly. 

Kankri chitters back at you, a long string of nonsense noises that is starting to take on a distinct, imitative cadence of speech.  Uncooperative speech.  He does not look like a grub that is going to put himself to 'coon anytime soon. 

Ugh.  You should never have brought him with you. You make terrible life choices.

You find you're smiling.  Rolling your eyes at him again, you kick free of your blanket pile and tuck him into the bonebend of one arm—pinned so he can't get that ring of teeth into your skin.  "Sleep," you insist as you grope with your free hand for the swaddling cloth.   "I know you're not really hungry.  And some of us were out past dawn ensuring that you'd stay that way."

Out in the air and the light and the green, growing things.  Above ground and free—but not alone.  Because maybe, sometimes, if the world doesn’t make you a space you like, you just have to make one for yourself.

You don’t have to steal your time in the sun anymore.

…Just your sleep.

The main cause of said sleeplessness squeaks and squirms in your hold, offering token resistance apparently on principle.  You murmur distractedly back at him and wait, because you’ve learned a few things in the past perigees and you know how this game goes.  Sure enough, it’s only a few minutes before Kankri’s settling himself into the blood-warm crook of your body, lured by the heat and shelter and moon-white glow, cuddling up instinctively like he might to a real lusus. What an odd pair you make: imperial deserter, absconded from your service to the mother grub, and a mutant, off-caste grub. Both of you ought to be culled.

You absently pat a little fluff of dark hair back into array where it is tickling your side and can't find it in yourself to care.  Best of luck to anyone who tries and all that. Your sincerest condolences to their quadrantmates.

Kankri’s still chittering, a grumpy babble of defiance that continues even as his legs fold sleepily to his thorax.  The fat, squishy balloon of his abdomen tries to curl in on itself, but can’t manage much more than a slight curve.  It’s kind of cute, if you don’t think too hard about it.

Definitely don’t think too hard about how he’s starting to look like something that might pop, messily.

Ick.  Grubs.

Yawning, you set about re-wrapping him in his fabric sleeping cocoon, a task you can mostly accomplish by feel these days.  You make drowsy plans to trade for some more cloth the next time you come across a market fair.  Time to sew up a new one for him.  This one hardly fits anymore; no wonder he got loose.  He’s grown so fast.

There’s no reason for that thought to pang you.  Playing lusus is hard. With any luck that increasingly blood-swollen abdomen means Kankri will be pupating soon—and even a new-molted troll, still figuring out how to use two legs instead of six, must be an improvement of a ward over a squirming, skittering, blood-sucking wiggler.

No reason at all, you think, but as you settle back down to sleep, Kankri a warm, contentedly chirring bundle beside you, you find it does pang you a little after all.

He showed you the way into the light.  He made you believe things could be different.  

You suppose you don’t really mind if he takes his time growing up.

Ten minutes later, you wake to tiny wiggler teeth in your arm again and you yelp and flail and start the whole midday ritual over again and inform him severely that you hope he grows up tomorrow.

#porrim maryam #kankri vantas #dolorosa & signless #wigglers #homestuck #grubfic #ccwritings #in which baby trolls are basically huge hideous ticks #and porrim adopts one anyway

[curlicuecal]

O+n the Care and Feeding o+f Wigglers (Porrim & Kankri)(3/?)

OR: Porrim Maryam’s Field Guide to Dealing with the Blood-sucking Parasites in Your Life

guess what I dug out to add another snippet to

<previous next>

Rule No+. 3: Learn to+ identify varieties which po+se the greatest risk

It’s a nice night out.  A nice night in which you are plagued by parasites, but what can you do?

“Let’s look at this practically,” you say to the wiggler, as you pick your steps carefully by the glow from your sandaled feet.  “I would really be doing you a kindness to cull you.”

The grub emits an inscrutable squeak, somewhat muffled by the layers of cloth you have swaddled it in.  Those layers represent a substantial portion of what was formerly one of your favorite skirts, but you’ve reconciled yourself to the sacrifice.  Clean up the hems, neaten the slit now running up to your hip, and you are confident you can rock the abbreviated length as if you designed it that way in the first place.

You’re heading down the path to the drop site, gravel crunching under your feet, stars wheeling high in the sky.  You have at least two more supply runs left to complete, a cranky mutant wiggler bundled up in a sling on your chest, and you are hashing your way through a sudden attack of moral… indecision.

“No, truly.  Hemotype mutation means you’ll never find a lusus to host you or collect suitable host-prey for you.  You’ll starve slowly.  Or you’ll try to pupate without a sufficient blood reservoir and get stuck halfway through. Or you’ll get desperate and attack something far too dangerous for you that you probably can’t digest anyway.”  And starving grubs, mutant grubs, can, themselves, become a danger.  Anything can, when cornered and deprived of what it needs. 

“Like me,” you add. “I am too dangerous for you.  And I refuse to be eaten.  And I think I am ethically obliged to stick a sharp fork into you until you are dead.  We have fundamentally incompatible goals in this interaction.”

In its sling, the contents of your strange bundle squeak again, a shrill, high noise that sets your fangs on edge.  The sound is less disturbing when you are not actually touching it.  Many things are.

“You raise a thoughtful point.  But if I killed everyone I encountered who was hostile and desperate and kind of horrible to be around I would have to kill… far more people than I really want to.  It’s not a very nice world.”  You sigh, tilting your head back.  You do enjoy the opportunity to be out of the stifling, earthy black and into the open air.  It’s a nice night, at least.  You wonder if this is the wiggler’s first time out of the caverns. 

The grub squeaks another nonsense commentary into the silence.  It peers at you, only its head and first pair of legs visible amid the engulfing folds of fabric.  Two tiny horns, as short and blunt as its fangs, almost disappear in the tuft of dark hair.  Below, the rudimentary features of its face are small enough to make the insectile, gleaming eyes seem even larger and more unnatural.  Mentally, you try to superimpose the face of the future troll he could become.  You assume you do this because you like to make your own life difficult and uncomfortable.  And maybe you feel as if you owe it to him.

“This world isn’t kind to people that step out of their place.  And you don’t have one at all.  Except maybe as someone’s dinner.”

You get another one of those uncomfortably high pitched squeaks.  His liquid, red insect eyes catch the stars and shine them back to you.  Soon, you’ll return to your caste-kin and the Mother Grub, swallowed back down into the ground by your duties.  Soon, this world will devour the little mutant, too, either in mercy by your hand or in suffering later. 

You draw in another long breath of unconfined air, steps slowing beneath the stars.  You’ve loitered this long about your errand already--you suppose your duties won’t come to harm from being more overdue. 

And it is a very nice night.

“You.  Are very dangerous, too.  Little squishable mutant grubling.”

“skreee.”

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next>>

#grubfic #porrim maryam #kankri vantas #dolorosa & signless #in which baby trolls are basically huge hideous ticks #and porrim is having SUCH a night #ccwritings

[curlicuecal]

grubfic snippet (1/?)

this thing’s coming in fits and starts and still very much likely to change substantially in editing, but. snippet? :)

O+n the Care and Feeding o+f Wigglers

or: Porrim Maryam’s guide to dealing with the bloodsucking parasites in your life

Rule No+. 1: Avo+id tall grass and brush

You first encounter Kankri when he bites your ankle. 

“Ow,” you say, because this seems like the most appropriate response to anonymous teeth in your body parts. There’s always the slim chance whoever is attempting to eat you will be filled with contrition and desist.  “Let go, please.”  Your attempt to appeal to the sympathetic tendencies of your would-be devourer does not work.  It hardly ever does.  

You shake your foot a little, rustling the brush, but whatever wiggler has found its way into the thick vegetation just outside the brooding caverns remains steadfastly attached to your ankle.  You are going to have such a welt.  Gritting your teeth, you hike up your skirts and return to wading through the clinging vegetation.  You know better, you really do, but you’d dallied in the sunlight until nightbreak caught you with your errand still half complete.  You suppose this is your just desserts for taking shortcuts.

…Wigglers are so very hard to pry off once they latch onto a blood meal.

You tamp down on the small, utterly ridiculous urge to flail and jump around a lot until there is not a largeish parasite attached to your leg.  It would not be helpful and you have had more time to acclimatize yourself to the reality of wigglers than most trolls.  There is no need for nerves and squeamishness.  They are just a perfectly natural part of the cycle of life.  They are future people, you remind yourself.  Future people who need a lot of energy to pupate and are very hungry.  Very, very hungry.

Yes, this line of thought is definitely not helping.  You remind yourself that wigglers pose no real danger to a troll that is not foolishly incapacitated and also that you have no room to judge.  You, yourself, enjoy a small blood meal from time to time.  It brightens you right up.  And in these sweeps since you joined your rainbowdrinker cohorts, tending the Mother Grub in the darkest recesses of the brooding caverns, you have sometimes felt so alienated from the outside world.  Set apart. Changed.  The wigglers and their sanguinary appetites remind you that you are also still just a perfectly natural part of the cycle of life.  In a way, you feel quite grateful to your tiny bloodsucking kin.  Close, even.

There is, you reflect, such a thing as too close.  You dig out one your narrower boning knives, the one you use for cutting seams sometimes.  Maybe you can lever the damn thing loose by the jaws. Maybe you will just stab things. 

Kicking your way free of the last grasping tendrils of stickerbrush, you look down at the grub gnawing on your ankle.  The bright red grub.  The very, unnaturally bright red grub.

“Oh, you are just determined to complicate my life, aren’t you?”

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next>>

#ccwritings #ficlet #in which baby trolls are basically huge hideous ticks #but we love them anyway #i guess #porrim maryam #kankri vantas #dolorosa & signless #grubfic