FIC: pheres dysseu, allegiances

[xihe]

 PHERES DYSSEU | 16 years old / 7.44 sweeps

SIPARA NZINGA | 15 years old / 6.92 sweeps

Sipara’s sprawled out across the floor of your cart, her head nestled into the bony curve of your lap. She’s gone and ruined her headfluff again since the last time you’ve seen her, combed and pressed and perm until it flows thin and straight through your fingers, and you don’t have the slightest idea how you can fix this sort of damage.

If she’d stay with you long enough, then you could deep-condition it. Give it a protein treatment, see how it responds. Trim the ends, maybe –

But she won’t, anymore than you’ll stay with her. Being near Sipara means dealing with ID, and being near you means dealing with Malaya and the rest of the troupe. Better to just sneak moments like this when you can then to deal with the stress of clashing with each other’s quadrants.

(Friends. Whatever the troupe is to you.)

 

So for now, you’ll have to content yourself with merely combing her headfluff. Your fronds are working their way through, and it’s much more difficult than normal: it’s matted in the normal tangle that she lets it fall into, but there’s scratches in there, too, and blood, slick as oil under your fingertips.

When you inspect your clawtips, you discover it’s blue.

She’s half-dozing under your attentions, rumbling away like a purrbeast. You flick a horn to get her attention, your digestion sack coiling with distress. “Sisi,” you murmur, “what have you been up to?”

She opens one orange-streaked eye and shifts until she can peek at you through the frizz. “Dude.” Her face is drowsy with sleep, and her words are slurred with amusement. You pap her just on instinct, and she laughs, nuzzles her face into the palm of your hand. “You don’t even want to know.”

How Sipara spends her nights is a mystery to you: she does her fights, but you know there’s other things, too, things that require new hives each perigee and act as a constant depletion of your bank account. She dismisses it as part of her prosthetics business, and you’ve never pressed further.

With blue on your fingers and scratches on her face, you remember why.

(“You don’t want to know,” she says, but you know what she means: she doesn’t want to tell you.)

(That’s fine. There’s things you don’t tell her, either.)

She butts her head against you, already asleep again and still purring away steadily. Quietly, so you don’t wake her, you go back to her hair.