You're awfully glad the society is open on Saturday, at least for a little while. You don't have to try to call them from work, wondering what Gamzee's destroyed this time. It would be so much easier to contain if you could keep him in his room, or even in his coccoon, but he's too good at breaking down doors to risk it, and... well, locking him in the tiny sleeping space feels so cruel! You've been told that some trolls are cocoon-trained - some people say it's actually healthier to do that, because they actually like small spaces - but you can't bear to do that to Gamzee.

Even so, you've been kept on hold for a very long time, and it's stupid how many people must be calling them first thing Saturday morning! It's not unusual, though, from what you've heard. The society isn't a very popular organization, and they apparently get a lot of hate mail and prank calls. There are a lot of people out there who think that after what the trolls tried to do to humans, being studied and kept as pets and whatever is too good for them - even the little troll-owner memos that you frequent get a lot of flames! But the society keeps going on about research opportunities and the need to study their fascinating social structure and whatnot, and apparently the powers that be still agree with them enough to allow the compromise to keep going, for now.

A lot of them are probably culling requests, too. It's sad, but after some of the stories you've read you can understand why some of them have to be culled. You just hope you can help Gamzee before he's that far gone.

After what feels like forever the music stops, and a perky voice answers the phone. "Good morning, you've reached the Trollian Preservation and Research Society, how can I help you?"

"Yes, hello there!" Whoever this is sounds far too cheerful to be a real person. You wonder if it belongs to an AR. If it is a robot, well, its programing had better be up to date. You hate dealing with the ones that aren't. "My name is Roxy Lalonde and I adopted a troll from your shelter a few months ago - oh, where is that number?" You rummage around a bit in your purse. "Ah!" Finally you pull out a scrap of paper, reading off the half-faded numbers.

"One moment..." There's a pause. Either it is a human, or an AR programmed to pause for as long as a human would. Dirk couldn't have done a better programming job, and that's saying something. "Yes, we have your information here, Ms. Lalonde. This call is relating to Gamzee, indigoblood, six sweeps old, correct?"

"Yes, that's right." Six sweeps? You'd forgotten he was that old! That was nearly a teenager!

"Has he posed a physical danger to yourself or to any other human?"

You guiltily quash the memory of the pet-sitter. "No," you say, "he's just being very destructive of my property. I think it might be separation anxiety."

The voice paused. "What are the outward signs of his anxiety?"

"Well, he's torn up a lot of my furniture and books, and when I'm home he just huddles in the corner. It's like he knows he's done something wrong, but when I'm not here he can't stop himself -"

"Hmm." The voice interrupts you. "Yes, this does sound like separation anxiety. Let me look at Gamzee's records. Please hold."

Again? You're about ready to throw something across the room! You don't, though, if only because it would wake Gamzee. "Yes, thank you."

More music. When it stops again the voice has changed to a timid-sounding young woman. "Um, thank you for waiting, Ms. Lalonde. Um. You were asking for information on Gamzee?"

"Yes, I want to know why he's destroying my house! I do my best to take care of him, but he keeps damaging everything!"

"Yes, er, we believe that it's partially due to a personality change brought on by sopor withdrawal."

"Sopor... what?" you echo. "But he sleeps every night in a whole tank of the stuff!"

"Yes, well... cooking it changes its chemical makeup and has a very strong psychoactive effect. Our bloodwork indicated that he was given high dosages of cooked sopor for an extended period of time before he was captured and taken back to the shelter."

You gape. "But he was fine when I first brought him here! Didn't you clear him for adoption?"

"Being drugged for that long causes personality changes that take some time to fade," the representative answered timidly. "It was all in the liability release paperwork and consents to research that you signed, Ms. Lalonde. I have records of it here, with your signature."

"That's not the point!" you snap, mostly to cover your embarrassment over the fact that you weren't really paying attention at that point; you were just getting through it as quickly as possible so that you could take Gamzee home.

"Well, um, since you signed the release of liability, we can't be held responsible for any damage. But we can send you over some information, um, on how to best deal with the syndrome. And you should probably check his history again and see if there are any triggers for his, um, his destructive behavior -"

"Yeah," you say, resting your head in your hand. "Fine. Send the information to my account address, it's still good."

"Yes, Ms. Lalonde, we will. Um, I'm awfully sorry about this!"

"It's fine," you say, a bit nettled. You can't help yourself, though; under your breath you find yourself muttering. "I liked the AR better," you say.

"Um, Ms. Lalonde, I am a -"

You roll your eyes and hang up before she can finish.

Sopor withdrawal? Really? You guess you had best read those documents that you've ignored for three months, if you can even find them. You think you know where they are, anyway, somewhere in that drawer you reserve for important things.

---

You find the packet of documents after a while, although it's a bit dicey; it had somehow gotten shuffled under a couple years' worth of tax forms and a couple of citations for public intoxication. They gave you your pet's history in a big plain manilla envelope, when it's starting to seem to you that they should have given it to you in a flashing neon red folder with the words "READ ME" written in lime green glitterpen. Not that you would've read it anyway, but at least you might've figured out it was important, and to ignore it at your own risk. And boy, did you ever - maybe if you'd read this earlier your furniture could've been spared.

The notation about the drugging is, in fact, in there, along with a lot of other things. There's a few pages about his first owner, an old fisherman who took Gamzee out on the ocean in his fishing boat and took care of him. Apparently he'd been birthed by a feral mother grub - probably set free with a group of trolls by a well-meaning owner who'd thought that they should be allowed to live free, and who hadn't properly processed the idea that unidentified trolls were usually culled on sight and that identification records were deleted when they were declared permanently lost. The feral children never lasted long, anyway; by the time the old man had found him, most of the others had already died of exposure, and the indigoblood grub was the only one left alive. He'd taken the little guy in, had him registered with the society, and took care of him until he fell ill and died. His family in the city hadn't been interested in keeping a troll, and he'd declined too quickly to make arrangements for Gamzee's care. It was all very sad, you think, what happened to him; you've read that trolls bond to their first caretaker very strongly. That man was practically his father.

Then you turn to the pages about his second owner, the man who rescued him from the shelter after the society reclaimed him, and start reading.

In a few minutes, your blood is practically boiling, and you have to take a break and mix yourself a very dry martini just to get through it. If there hadn't been a note near the end that the man was already dead, well, you'd probably go out there and kill him yourself out of sheer rage. You're barely a troll-owner at all, you've only had one and that was for a few months, and you're still so mad at the guy that if you could get a bead on his skull you'd probably shoot him anyway, even it was just a skull...

You hear a faint honk behind you - the bike-horn you'd bought for your pet in the hopes that he'd destroy them instead of your house, not that it ever helped - and turn around, trying to compose yourself. Gamzee is standing there behind you, dressed only in a pair of boxers with hand-painted smiley-faces on them - your favorites, and you definitely notice that. He looks so forlorn without his makeup, his mouth too small for his face. "Hi," he says, voice quiet all over again.

"Hey, sweetie," you say. "What's wrong? Did you have a nightmare?" Maybe she needs to look at his sopor mix. They say that the cooler bloods are more prone to nightmares on the memos, and it might be making this whole thing worse.

He shook his head. "I just wanted to try to mo- to make things right," he said, voice rasping. "I know I've been up and doing a lot of horrible things lately."

"Gamzee, I -"

"Naw," he says, interrupting you. "I'm a - a bad troll. And I don't quite know how but I wanna make it up to you somehow, wanna paint a kick-ass picture or something. Something that'll make you smile. You've been so good to me, and I -"

You get up and shoosh him, in a hurry. "Shhh," you say, rubbing his back and looking up at him - it's hard to reconcile him being so tall with these childish moods of his, but you're starting to get used to it. "I'm thinking that we can just talk for a while, okay? That would make me feel better."

"Yeah, sure," he says, with a small closed-mouth grin. "I'm a great listener -"

You shake your head. "I know," you said, "which is why I think it's my turn to listen for a while."

"Your turn?" he says, cocking his head to the side, confused.

"Yeah." You smile, put your hands on his shoulders. "I mean, you never talk about yourself, Gamzee! Maybe I wanna know a little more about you. That's not weird, is it?"

"It ain't something anyone's asked me before," he says, frowning. "I mean, the people at the shelter up and said everything was in that little folder, and I didn't have to tell nobody anything because I didn't want to up and scare 'em away."

"Well, that's over now, right? Because I have you now, and I'm not going to get rid of you." You would've done it after the second destroyed chair, you think to yourself, but you're afraid saying it would hurt his feelings and that's not what you're trying to do here. "So you can go ahead and tell me about your life, and I won't be scared away. I'd be happy you told me, in fact."

"Huh." He smiled a little bit wider - you can see the edges of sharp teeth. "So... I can up and tell you anything? You ain't joking with me and you ain't gonna get mad?"

"Sure ain't!" You hold up your martini glass, even though you're pretty sure he won't get the joke. "Souse's honor."

He actually laughs a little at that, if only because he apparently notices that you're joking and figures that he ought to do something. "Well, ain't that a miraculous thing," he says. "All right. But lemme up and get some proper clothes on, if that's okay? A brother can get real cold in here."

The thought of why he was coming out to talk to you in his boxers in the first place crosses your mind, and you ignore it. You two have some important conversations to have, and you just can't dwell on that right now! "Okay," you say. "I'll meet you in the parlor when you get changed. Oh, and Gamzee - you can swear as much as you want when it's just you and me, okay? I can guarantee you I've heard worse."

"Sounds like a motherfucking sweet plan to me," he says, and he's almost relaxed as he turns away. It's progress.