[For this segment, TW for violence and abuse - specifically for mentions of trollfighting, blood, mind-control and disfigurement.]
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You spend the rest of the day relaxing in the parlor - you love calling it that, because it makes the fact that you spend most of your downtime there lounging around in your pink kitty PJs even more hilarious - with Gamzee in a pair of clown pants and a t-shirt finger-painted with one of his silly symbols. He's more relaxed than you've seen him in years, as he sits down and talks about the mellow old man, the first guy he ever remembered seeing.
"Those were good times," he said once, "just up and motherfuckin' good times, the old man and me. He'd take me out to sea in his little boat and fish and just talk to me 'bout just about everythin', and we'd go back and clean his fish and eat. Didn't go to the city much - old guy said he didn't much care for those motherfuckers in their safe little houses, talkin' about whatever motherfuckin' bullshit the man told 'em to think. Whoever the fuck that man was, he just didn't care about whatever he fuckin' said. Just stayed out and grew his own plants in his house and made these awesome-looking motherfucking cigars that he'd never lemme touch."
Well, you think privately, that explains a lot. Hopefully he'd never mentioned that detail to the Society. "He took good care of you, huh?"
"Oh, yeah, he was a motherfucking awesome guy. Taught me how to paint an' everything. Motherfucker loved to watch me paint," he says with a huge grin on his face, sloshing his martini onto his shirt.
You wince slightly - you do hate to see perfectly good alcohol go to waste! "Gamzee, dear," you object. "Your drink!"
"Oh, yeah," he says, and grins sheepishly. You figured that the drinks might help him loosen up - you've heard that trolls don't have much of a tolerance, but that it's safe enough as long as you don't give them too much. "Sorry. Didn't mean to up and motherfuckin' waste your stuff."
"Oh, it's all right," you say, as friendly as possible. "I'll mix a new one if you'd like."
"Naw," he says, shaking his head. "You want me to be motherfuckin' honest, I ain't too fond of this stuff. These green things are pretty motherfuckin' tasty, though."
"The olives?" You blink, then grin at him. "I've got a whole jar of those in the fridge! Just give me a second...."
By sunset you're on your third drink, and Gamzee is halfway through the enormous jar. He's gone through a lot of stories about the old man, but now he's quieter, like he's not sure what else he's got to say - like he's gone through all of the good memories, and the bad ones are really starting to get to him, and he's not sure what to do. You don't want to push him - you've made a promising start, anyway.
Later, when he's asleep, you go out and buy the biggest jar of olives you can find. You have the distinct feeling you're going to need them.
---
It's Sunday afternoon when the last few stories about the old man finally run dry.
"So there I was," he was saying, "playin' out by the water, paintin' up a storm for the old man, an' then these two guys... they're comin' up the road in one of their big black vehicles. Comin' up to me, all up and askin' where my owner was. I told 'em he was in there, and he was tired, and he'd told me to paint him the best motherfuckin' painting I've ever done. They weren't listenin' though." He sighed a bit, closed his eyes. "They went in and came back out and said the old man was motherfuckin' gone, and I had to come back with 'em...."
He falls silent. You put a hand on his shoulder - he really loves it when you touch him, and you wonder if all trolls like it so much - and he leans back, eyes staring up at the ceiling. "You can go on if you want to," you say quietly. "You don't have to."
"Ain't much to say," he said. "I mean... it ain't easy to just up and talk about."
"Will it make you feel better to try?" You try to smile at him. "I promise I won't make you do it, but if you want to... I'm here."
He looks at back at you - he's still not wearing makeup, and his eyes are shot through with indigo streaks. Maybe you need to check the sopor in his tank. "Promise you won't take me back there," he says, very quiet. "I know I've fucked up a lot, but I -"
"Gamzee." You gently reach out and pap him on his cheek, then pull his head into your lap - the horns are a little uncomfortable, but you don't mind. "Whatever happened to you wasn't your fault. I believe that, okay? So nothing you tell me will make me feel worse about you." Your voice hardens a little bit. "Although it might make me wish I could bring that creep back to life so that I could put a few more holes in him."
"Heh." He smiled just a little bit. "You ain't gotta worry 'bout that, miracle sister," he said, slowly and a bit sleepily. "The mirthful messiahs went and decreed that he deserved a bad death, an' the motherfucking universe up and agreed."
He's never mentioned anything about mirthful messiahs before. You file it away for future research. "Good."
It takes a few more minutes of quiet and another half-dozen olives before the whole story comes out. "I went back to the shelter," he said, staring off into space. "Took a little while, but some big motherfucker came by and took out a couple of us, includin' me. Didn't talk much, but I guess they didn't really care too much. Said I was gettin' old enough they weren't gonna ask too many questions.
"He took me home in a big van with the others. Said we'd never have to up and motherfuckin' go back to the society, or the research colonies. Said that as long as we did what he said, we'd have fun." I guess," he says, after a lot of long silent contemplation, "that first thing I remember 'bout it is when he took me home. Said I'd never have to motherfuckin' go back to the research colonies, never have to be sent away. All we had ta do was what he said for us to do.
"He took us to this big house, and... well. There were an awful motherfuckin' lot of trolls down there," he said, his eyes very far away. "They kept us penned up, didn't feed us right. Heard some of 'em beggin' for more, and then he'd up and take 'em upstairs, and I never motherfuckin' saw 'em again."
You don't say anything. Nothing you say feels like enough right now. You just rub his arm and wait for him to talk.
"It was..." He looks so broken, so much smaller now. "It hurt, okay? It motherfuckin' hurt. I was... he made me mad and trained me, gave me clubs and put me up in that motherfuckin' arena that was full of all kinds of motherfuckin' blood stains, and he made me fight other trolls. Only fed me if I killed someone. If I did really well he'd leave me the body, and I'd just... use the blood to paint in my cell, 'cuz I was goin' motherfuckin' crazy in there, all alone.
"It was motherfuckin' brutal. I had to be the best at killing, I had to be motherfuckin' angry all the time, full on murder mode day in and day out... you couldn't have gotten too close to me or I would've up and torn out your throat! I was a motherfuckin animal!"
You drink the last of your martini and put the glass aside, back behind you, out of Gamzee's reach. Better safe than sorry. "Is that what happened to him? Did you -"
He laughed bitterly. "No. No, it wasn't me. Wish it had been, but the messiahs had another plan. Guess I can't go an' complain to 'em, huh? Not after what happened to him."
You nod and give him another olive; he takes it, slowly, and nibbles the pimento out of it before he goes on.
"So he gave us these motherfuckin' decoys sometimes when we did good," he starts slowly, eyes tightly shut. "He called 'em baiting trolls. Dunno where he motherfuckin' got 'em, and I don't motherfuckin' wanna think about it. The way they stared at us when we..." He falters and stops, pops the rest of the olive in his mouth and chews it to mush before he composes himself well enough to go on. "We were supposed to use 'em for practice, right? The people who watched us liked it when we killed each other with motherfuckin' style, so we were supposed to kill the easy ones so that we could do it better in a real fight. He'd let us eat 'em, too, and... well, sometimes I couldn't motherfucking help myself, I was so motherfucking hungry. So... one day I'm in the ring with this kid, okay? Real short guy with long horns, had the sweetest face I've ever seen in my fucking life, and he's got his fists up while I'm holding my clubs but you can see he's motherfucking scared shitless. And, y'know, I just couldn't fucking do it. I just... threw down my clubs and turned away. And he just stops, and then I hear him hobble closer to me...." Gamzee sniffled a little. "Sweet little bro puts his hand on my shoulder and says that he's sorry they hurt me so much like that, he's real sorry. A few motherfucking seconds ago I'm about to crack his skull, and all he can say is he's motherfucking sorry they hurt me! You believe that?"
You can't say much to that. All you can do is nod. You've heard of stuff like this happening with trolls, part of that social structure the scientists keep talking about, different sorts of relationship patterns that they followed that differed from human patterns. The sociologists and psychologists went crazy for stuff like this.
"After that, well, I was so motherfucking flushed you could see the red right through my paint, man, I'm not even motherfucking lying. I just took that sweet little kid and hugged him and I wouldn't let him go, even when the sonofabitch tried to take him away. Yelled at me for not killin' him and I didn't fucking care, nobody was gonna hurt him, not while I was around. That kid, he was a motherfucking miracle, you know? I just wanted to grab onto him and keep him safe, thought that it wouldn't be so bad if he stayed with me." His laugh was like nails on a chalkboard now, or like a bike horn scraping against the road. "I was so motherfucking stupid. Guy figured it out, used him like he used food with the other kids. Motherfucking kept him separated from me until I had a good fight, then shoved us in the same pen for a while. No motherfucking privacy, but I didn't care, I was just so glad to be with him."
"What happened to him?" you ask. "I could try and find -"
"No. No, you motherfucking can't." Gamzee grimaced, his eyes squeezed shut. "He's motherfucking dead, my motherfucking little miracle -"
"Gamzee," you say, alarmed, reaching out - but he claws at you and you barely pull it away in time. "Gamzee, please," you say.
"He's motherfucking dead," he repeats. "Another troll he picked up, a blueblood, real mean lady, decided she wanted some time with my little miracle. Tried to fuck with his mind so that he'd go, but I wasn't gonna up and let my best thing go. I knew what she was motherfucking doing, I could feel it, even though she couldn't get to me..." He grinned a nasty, scary grin. "So I motherfuckin' up and did her back. Send her chucklevoodoos the sopor couldn't do a motherfucking thing about. Made her real mad.
"So instead of fighting me back, she...." He choked up, His voice was starting to go down again under your relentless shooshes, but it's nowhere near back to anything resembling normal. "She took control of his mind. Made him throw himself of of the wall around the arena until he finally landed wrong. Poor little bro couldn't motherfucking up and move his motherfucking legs, so the big guy took him away. Said he was gonna have him... destroyed." He jumps up fast enough that you can't stop him, pushes you to the side and starts pacing. He's making this weird noise, almost like he's crying now.
"It's okay, Gamzee. It's okay -"
"He was gonna motherfucking destroy him! Like he was fucking nothing!" He's screaming now. "I snapped. I motherfuckin' snapped. I don't remember a motherfucking thing, 'cept he was draggin' me away at the end, and that bitch was bleedin' at my feet, her arm beat to a motherfuckin' pulp, and if he hadn't grabbed me I wouda done the same to him. Why the motherfucking fuck would a brother do that? Why would anyone motherfucking hurt a guy like him? Why?" That noise isn't crying, you realize then. It's something else, because now it's a hell of a lot louder now and he isn't crying. His eyes are bulging out, his fists are balled up, his mouth twitching hard. "Why?" he's screaming, now. "Why the fuck are you people doing this shit to us!?"
You jump to the side just in time to avoid a hell of a sucker punch. Fist goes pretty deep into the sofa, tears through upholstery, comes out full of fluff. He spins around again, slashes at the poor abused loveseat with a handful of claw. It goes through the cover like it's made of fucking butter. Gamzee's shaking so hard you can see it, and his teeth are practically digging into his lips.
"We didn't motherfuckin' do anything wrong," he's yowling. "It wasn't our motherfucking fault! Some motherfucking warmongers decided to do a motherfucking thing, and you treat us all like monsters! Is that fair!? How is that motherfucking fair?"
"It's not!" you say, although there's a pang of guilt behind it - you think of Janey, crying her eyes out and clutching a photo of her granddad, and letting you hug her for the first time in forever. But you can't help it. You can't think about that right now - all you can think about is getting this guy calmed down. "It's not fair, Gamzee, it's not, let me help you -"
"Motherfuckin' liars!" He reached for her, grabbed her arm hard. "You're all a bunch of motherfuckin' liars! The messiahs are gonna come down, gonna up and come down and motherfuckin' bring you to the big black carnival, and you motherfuckin' liars are gonna pay!"
You've got a split second. You can break free, you can push him back, you can risk gettin' a face full of those razor-sharp claws. You can kick at him but you wouldn't know where to kick him, it was all in that writing, and you've only just read the first few basics. You weren't expecting him to go completely apeshit on you -
You pull back and yank back as hard as you can. It throws him off, and he honks even more loudly as you both fall back onto the sofa, barely missing the hole in the cushion, him curled up in her lap. The two of you are tangled up together, and he's let go of your hand, and you could punch him out and leave him, talk to him later when he's calmed down.
You're not going to do that. You bend down, kiss him on the back of the head, stroke his hair. "It's okay," she said. "I know it's not fair, I know. I'm sorry, honey, I'm so sorry -"
"I never wanted to hurt anybody," he says, voice muffled by the couch cushion. "I didn't. I didn't wanna."
"I know, honey," you say. "I'm here now and I'm never gonna make you hurt anyone again."
"Never?" he says. He reaches out, takes your hand. "Never?"
"Never," she says. "I promise."
He's still honking when he's curled up in your lap, and you're pretty sure he's crying too. So you stroke his hair, and you hug him as he cries, and when you feel his claws against your arm because he's holding you too tightly you don't complain. When you pick him up and carry him to his pod, he doesn't say anything, just holds your hand after you put him in, until he falls asleep.
It's horrible, you know, but all you can think after the worst of it is over is that the worst of the damage, thank goodness, is on the loveseat.
Re: Separation Anxiety (Roxy+Gamzee, AU, ownership, M, 3/?)
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You spend the rest of the day relaxing in the parlor - you love calling it that, because it makes the fact that you spend most of your downtime there lounging around in your pink kitty PJs even more hilarious - with Gamzee in a pair of clown pants and a t-shirt finger-painted with one of his silly symbols. He's more relaxed than you've seen him in years, as he sits down and talks about the mellow old man, the first guy he ever remembered seeing.
"Those were good times," he said once, "just up and motherfuckin' good times, the old man and me. He'd take me out to sea in his little boat and fish and just talk to me 'bout just about everythin', and we'd go back and clean his fish and eat. Didn't go to the city much - old guy said he didn't much care for those motherfuckers in their safe little houses, talkin' about whatever motherfuckin' bullshit the man told 'em to think. Whoever the fuck that man was, he just didn't care about whatever he fuckin' said. Just stayed out and grew his own plants in his house and made these awesome-looking motherfucking cigars that he'd never lemme touch."
Well, you think privately, that explains a lot. Hopefully he'd never mentioned that detail to the Society. "He took good care of you, huh?"
"Oh, yeah, he was a motherfucking awesome guy. Taught me how to paint an' everything. Motherfucker loved to watch me paint," he says with a huge grin on his face, sloshing his martini onto his shirt.
You wince slightly - you do hate to see perfectly good alcohol go to waste! "Gamzee, dear," you object. "Your drink!"
"Oh, yeah," he says, and grins sheepishly. You figured that the drinks might help him loosen up - you've heard that trolls don't have much of a tolerance, but that it's safe enough as long as you don't give them too much. "Sorry. Didn't mean to up and motherfuckin' waste your stuff."
"Oh, it's all right," you say, as friendly as possible. "I'll mix a new one if you'd like."
"Naw," he says, shaking his head. "You want me to be motherfuckin' honest, I ain't too fond of this stuff. These green things are pretty motherfuckin' tasty, though."
"The olives?" You blink, then grin at him. "I've got a whole jar of those in the fridge! Just give me a second...."
By sunset you're on your third drink, and Gamzee is halfway through the enormous jar. He's gone through a lot of stories about the old man, but now he's quieter, like he's not sure what else he's got to say - like he's gone through all of the good memories, and the bad ones are really starting to get to him, and he's not sure what to do. You don't want to push him - you've made a promising start, anyway.
Later, when he's asleep, you go out and buy the biggest jar of olives you can find. You have the distinct feeling you're going to need them.
---
It's Sunday afternoon when the last few stories about the old man finally run dry.
"So there I was," he was saying, "playin' out by the water, paintin' up a storm for the old man, an' then these two guys... they're comin' up the road in one of their big black vehicles. Comin' up to me, all up and askin' where my owner was. I told 'em he was in there, and he was tired, and he'd told me to paint him the best motherfuckin' painting I've ever done. They weren't listenin' though." He sighed a bit, closed his eyes. "They went in and came back out and said the old man was motherfuckin' gone, and I had to come back with 'em...."
He falls silent. You put a hand on his shoulder - he really loves it when you touch him, and you wonder if all trolls like it so much - and he leans back, eyes staring up at the ceiling. "You can go on if you want to," you say quietly. "You don't have to."
"Ain't much to say," he said. "I mean... it ain't easy to just up and talk about."
"Will it make you feel better to try?" You try to smile at him. "I promise I won't make you do it, but if you want to... I'm here."
He looks at back at you - he's still not wearing makeup, and his eyes are shot through with indigo streaks. Maybe you need to check the sopor in his tank. "Promise you won't take me back there," he says, very quiet. "I know I've fucked up a lot, but I -"
"Gamzee." You gently reach out and pap him on his cheek, then pull his head into your lap - the horns are a little uncomfortable, but you don't mind. "Whatever happened to you wasn't your fault. I believe that, okay? So nothing you tell me will make me feel worse about you." Your voice hardens a little bit. "Although it might make me wish I could bring that creep back to life so that I could put a few more holes in him."
"Heh." He smiled just a little bit. "You ain't gotta worry 'bout that, miracle sister," he said, slowly and a bit sleepily. "The mirthful messiahs went and decreed that he deserved a bad death, an' the motherfucking universe up and agreed."
He's never mentioned anything about mirthful messiahs before. You file it away for future research. "Good."
It takes a few more minutes of quiet and another half-dozen olives before the whole story comes out. "I went back to the shelter," he said, staring off into space. "Took a little while, but some big motherfucker came by and took out a couple of us, includin' me. Didn't talk much, but I guess they didn't really care too much. Said I was gettin' old enough they weren't gonna ask too many questions.
"He took me home in a big van with the others. Said we'd never have to up and motherfuckin' go back to the society, or the research colonies. Said that as long as we did what he said, we'd have fun." I guess," he says, after a lot of long silent contemplation, "that first thing I remember 'bout it is when he took me home. Said I'd never have to motherfuckin' go back to the research colonies, never have to be sent away. All we had ta do was what he said for us to do.
"He took us to this big house, and... well. There were an awful motherfuckin' lot of trolls down there," he said, his eyes very far away. "They kept us penned up, didn't feed us right. Heard some of 'em beggin' for more, and then he'd up and take 'em upstairs, and I never motherfuckin' saw 'em again."
You don't say anything. Nothing you say feels like enough right now. You just rub his arm and wait for him to talk.
"It was..." He looks so broken, so much smaller now. "It hurt, okay? It motherfuckin' hurt. I was... he made me mad and trained me, gave me clubs and put me up in that motherfuckin' arena that was full of all kinds of motherfuckin' blood stains, and he made me fight other trolls. Only fed me if I killed someone. If I did really well he'd leave me the body, and I'd just... use the blood to paint in my cell, 'cuz I was goin' motherfuckin' crazy in there, all alone.
"It was motherfuckin' brutal. I had to be the best at killing, I had to be motherfuckin' angry all the time, full on murder mode day in and day out... you couldn't have gotten too close to me or I would've up and torn out your throat! I was a motherfuckin animal!"
You drink the last of your martini and put the glass aside, back behind you, out of Gamzee's reach. Better safe than sorry. "Is that what happened to him? Did you -"
He laughed bitterly. "No. No, it wasn't me. Wish it had been, but the messiahs had another plan. Guess I can't go an' complain to 'em, huh? Not after what happened to him."
You nod and give him another olive; he takes it, slowly, and nibbles the pimento out of it before he goes on.
"So he gave us these motherfuckin' decoys sometimes when we did good," he starts slowly, eyes tightly shut. "He called 'em baiting trolls. Dunno where he motherfuckin' got 'em, and I don't motherfuckin' wanna think about it. The way they stared at us when we..." He falters and stops, pops the rest of the olive in his mouth and chews it to mush before he composes himself well enough to go on. "We were supposed to use 'em for practice, right? The people who watched us liked it when we killed each other with motherfuckin' style, so we were supposed to kill the easy ones so that we could do it better in a real fight. He'd let us eat 'em, too, and... well, sometimes I couldn't motherfucking help myself, I was so motherfucking hungry. So... one day I'm in the ring with this kid, okay? Real short guy with long horns, had the sweetest face I've ever seen in my fucking life, and he's got his fists up while I'm holding my clubs but you can see he's motherfucking scared shitless. And, y'know, I just couldn't fucking do it. I just... threw down my clubs and turned away. And he just stops, and then I hear him hobble closer to me...." Gamzee sniffled a little. "Sweet little bro puts his hand on my shoulder and says that he's sorry they hurt me so much like that, he's real sorry. A few motherfucking seconds ago I'm about to crack his skull, and all he can say is he's motherfucking sorry they hurt me! You believe that?"
You can't say much to that. All you can do is nod. You've heard of stuff like this happening with trolls, part of that social structure the scientists keep talking about, different sorts of relationship patterns that they followed that differed from human patterns. The sociologists and psychologists went crazy for stuff like this.
"After that, well, I was so motherfucking flushed you could see the red right through my paint, man, I'm not even motherfucking lying. I just took that sweet little kid and hugged him and I wouldn't let him go, even when the sonofabitch tried to take him away. Yelled at me for not killin' him and I didn't fucking care, nobody was gonna hurt him, not while I was around. That kid, he was a motherfucking miracle, you know? I just wanted to grab onto him and keep him safe, thought that it wouldn't be so bad if he stayed with me." His laugh was like nails on a chalkboard now, or like a bike horn scraping against the road. "I was so motherfucking stupid. Guy figured it out, used him like he used food with the other kids. Motherfucking kept him separated from me until I had a good fight, then shoved us in the same pen for a while. No motherfucking privacy, but I didn't care, I was just so glad to be with him."
"What happened to him?" you ask. "I could try and find -"
"No. No, you motherfucking can't." Gamzee grimaced, his eyes squeezed shut. "He's motherfucking dead, my motherfucking little miracle -"
"Gamzee," you say, alarmed, reaching out - but he claws at you and you barely pull it away in time. "Gamzee, please," you say.
"He's motherfucking dead," he repeats. "Another troll he picked up, a blueblood, real mean lady, decided she wanted some time with my little miracle. Tried to fuck with his mind so that he'd go, but I wasn't gonna up and let my best thing go. I knew what she was motherfucking doing, I could feel it, even though she couldn't get to me..." He grinned a nasty, scary grin. "So I motherfuckin' up and did her back. Send her chucklevoodoos the sopor couldn't do a motherfucking thing about. Made her real mad.
"So instead of fighting me back, she...." He choked up, His voice was starting to go down again under your relentless shooshes, but it's nowhere near back to anything resembling normal. "She took control of his mind. Made him throw himself of of the wall around the arena until he finally landed wrong. Poor little bro couldn't motherfucking up and move his motherfucking legs, so the big guy took him away. Said he was gonna have him... destroyed." He jumps up fast enough that you can't stop him, pushes you to the side and starts pacing. He's making this weird noise, almost like he's crying now.
"It's okay, Gamzee. It's okay -"
"He was gonna motherfucking destroy him! Like he was fucking nothing!" He's screaming now. "I snapped. I motherfuckin' snapped. I don't remember a motherfucking thing, 'cept he was draggin' me away at the end, and that bitch was bleedin' at my feet, her arm beat to a motherfuckin' pulp, and if he hadn't grabbed me I wouda done the same to him. Why the motherfucking fuck would a brother do that? Why would anyone motherfucking hurt a guy like him? Why?" That noise isn't crying, you realize then. It's something else, because now it's a hell of a lot louder now and he isn't crying. His eyes are bulging out, his fists are balled up, his mouth twitching hard. "Why?" he's screaming, now. "Why the fuck are you people doing this shit to us!?"
You jump to the side just in time to avoid a hell of a sucker punch. Fist goes pretty deep into the sofa, tears through upholstery, comes out full of fluff. He spins around again, slashes at the poor abused loveseat with a handful of claw. It goes through the cover like it's made of fucking butter. Gamzee's shaking so hard you can see it, and his teeth are practically digging into his lips.
"We didn't motherfuckin' do anything wrong," he's yowling. "It wasn't our motherfucking fault! Some motherfucking warmongers decided to do a motherfucking thing, and you treat us all like monsters! Is that fair!? How is that motherfucking fair?"
"It's not!" you say, although there's a pang of guilt behind it - you think of Janey, crying her eyes out and clutching a photo of her granddad, and letting you hug her for the first time in forever. But you can't help it. You can't think about that right now - all you can think about is getting this guy calmed down. "It's not fair, Gamzee, it's not, let me help you -"
"Motherfuckin' liars!" He reached for her, grabbed her arm hard. "You're all a bunch of motherfuckin' liars! The messiahs are gonna come down, gonna up and come down and motherfuckin' bring you to the big black carnival, and you motherfuckin' liars are gonna pay!"
You've got a split second. You can break free, you can push him back, you can risk gettin' a face full of those razor-sharp claws. You can kick at him but you wouldn't know where to kick him, it was all in that writing, and you've only just read the first few basics. You weren't expecting him to go completely apeshit on you -
You pull back and yank back as hard as you can. It throws him off, and he honks even more loudly as you both fall back onto the sofa, barely missing the hole in the cushion, him curled up in her lap. The two of you are tangled up together, and he's let go of your hand, and you could punch him out and leave him, talk to him later when he's calmed down.
You're not going to do that. You bend down, kiss him on the back of the head, stroke his hair. "It's okay," she said. "I know it's not fair, I know. I'm sorry, honey, I'm so sorry -"
"I never wanted to hurt anybody," he says, voice muffled by the couch cushion. "I didn't. I didn't wanna."
"I know, honey," you say. "I'm here now and I'm never gonna make you hurt anyone again."
"Never?" he says. He reaches out, takes your hand. "Never?"
"Never," she says. "I promise."
He's still honking when he's curled up in your lap, and you're pretty sure he's crying too. So you stroke his hair, and you hug him as he cries, and when you feel his claws against your arm because he's holding you too tightly you don't complain. When you pick him up and carry him to his pod, he doesn't say anything, just holds your hand after you put him in, until he falls asleep.
It's horrible, you know, but all you can think after the worst of it is over is that the worst of the damage, thank goodness, is on the loveseat.
---