Chapter 2
Sollux slouched over his desk, staring absently over the remaining assignments from that day. With a sigh he lifted his upper body up again and stretched his arms, he knew he wouldn’t get any more actual work done tonight. He tapped on his phone screen to reveal the time, 8:30pm. This meant that CA would be streaming right now.
Sure enough, as Sollux clicked on CA’s profile he saw the red ‘LIVE’ icon glowing. Sollux navigated himself to the SBURB discord and joined the video call lobby CA was occupying.
“Ayo dickweed” Sollux greeted.
“Hi, TA” CA replied, tone concentrated.
“What’s the plan for today? We on the Alternia server?” Sollux asked, loading up his minecraft startpage.
The SBURB group had made a survival game realm named Alternia, where they liked to spend a majority of their streams. They had created a whole different roleplay-esque universe within that server, complete with a species of trolls segregated by blood colors. The series grew major popularity, boosting some of the group who had main roles like TG and CA to gain Millions of twitch follows. The Alternia server itself had become a fandom of it’s own that people enjoyed drawing photos of or writing about. Sollux could actually hardly believe it’s ever growing success.
“Uh-huh, I’m makin’ myself a sea ship” CA remarked.
“Awesome, Can I help with that?” Sollux grinned, knowing the proposition would annoy the other man.
“You’d make the whole fuckin’ thing red and blue” CA groaned.
“Red and blue is better than purple. Fuck purple. Red and blue literally MAKE purple… they’re like the parents of purple, deeming them obviously superior” Sollux stated “Chat, you agree with me here right?”
The chat flowed in with a dozen of ‘YEAH’s and messages to that alike. Sollux chuckled smugly.
“TA I could not give a single fuck about red or blue. I am makin’ my ship purple” CA argued, determined.
Sollux’s grey avatar loaded into the world and he immediately took action to find where CA was building his ship. It wasn’t hard to find, the idiot was building it right in the middle of the oceanic area of the server.
“Looks shit so far” Sollux remarked, moving his avatar towards the vessel.
“I’ve barely started it, asshole” CA huffed. Chat seemed to take a lot of pleasure in his obvious annoyance.
“Look, look. I can totally make this epic… Like beyond all levels cool.” Sollux claimed, breaking some of the purple wool at the sides.
CA’s avatar quickly moved over and began to hit Sollux’s with a diamond sword. Sollux backed off.
“Hey hey hey wait a second I'm trying to help” Sollux insisted.
“Keep off my stuff, dick. There’s hundreds ‘a different people I would ask about buildin’ shit before you” CA returned.
“Whatever, at least I'm not British” Sollux grinned.
“Atleast I can say the letter ‘s’ “ CA replied.
“Bold coming from the guy who cannot say ‘w’ or ‘v’ without stuttering” Sollux reflected, moving his avatar closer to the build again.
“Americans are insufferable. Fuck Americans” CA groaned. The British side of chat whole-heartedly seemed to agree with this, while the American half angrily tried to compete over why they were better.
“Well, you’re the one that has to fly to America when we all meet up. If you hate America so much just don’t come out” Sollux commented.
“The sacrifices I make for this damn group” CA grumbled.
This gained a genuine chuckle from Sollux. He glanced over at the stream chat and saw a mild freak-out ensuing. Oh yeah, the meetup wasn’t public info yet.
“That is, if we even do meet up. Not sure if i really do wanna see an ass like you in real life…” Sollux pondered.
“You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if you saw me in real life. You’d probably cower in the corner or somethin’ “ CA declared.
“Yeah? You think? Oh boy guys here comes the British guy - holy shit let me hide!” Sollux mocked.
“Exactly like that.” CA hummed, voice playful “Or you’d just fall head over heels in love with me over my handsome face”.
Sollux pulled a disgusted face despite the fact that nobody could see it.
“Hell no. Gross” Sollux remarked.
“Bein’ homophobic, TA? Not cool.” CA claimed.
“Hell no, being gay is cool or whatever. I’m just not gay. Even if i was you’d be the last person i’d turn” Sollux replied, tone defensive.
“Says the same guy who went on about how ‘not bad on the eyes’ Leonardo di’caprio was in Romeo and Juliet? Somethin’ here is not addin’ up” CA responded. The asshole was obviously just trynna piss Sollux off now.
“I’m allowed to be straight and agree over how nice a man can look, Fishdick. It was also like 4 in the fucking morning for me at that point and it was ages ago. Let it go” Sollux declared, leaning back on his chair.
CA laughed loudly and resumed his building. Sollux didn’t even wanna switch tabs to read the chat, he knew it would be something annoying as fuck. He knew some fanpages would clip that several times and spread it, trying to prove his sexuality or some shit. Fans seemed to love shipping him with whatever other guy there was in the group - especially CA. Sollux usually didn't say much about it though as it helped bring a bunch of traffic to his profiles.
The two managed to get into their usual flow of things as they continued to bicker over CA’s ship. Every so often Sollux would leave a snide comment about an addition CA would add to the structure while CA argued over how his building skills were better. Chat egged them both on from the sidelines, quoting them over and over any time they misspoke or said something funny - and as always, time passed very quickly during streams. Sollux had already come to realise this after his first few streams yet he would never get over the feeling of time passing so naturally and swiftly. Being able to stream with his friends probably helped a lot too, as it meant he always had somebody to joke with when the pace of the stream slowed down. In that regard, CA was probably the perfect person to stream with as he effortlessly brought in audience interaction from his constant arguing and disagreeing.
“Alright, chat. It’s extremely late for me so I’m goin’ to end the stream” CA announced.
Sollux and CA had finally finished their ship build. It had become a rather impressive purple cruise with red and blue decorations surrounding it (much to CA’s displeasure). Sollux could feel his hand beginning to cramp up and was rather relieved the stream was at its ending.
“Make sure to follow me at twinArmageddons!” Sollux exclaimed, trying his best to rake in any last follows he could before they stopped for the night.
CA let out a sigh at the self promotion but let it slide, giving his last ‘bye!’s to the chat as he concluded his stream.
The call was silent for a moment and then CA spoke up.
“I highly regret startin’ my stream at 2am. I'm exhausted” CA complained.
“Holy shit! I completely forgot it’s literally like 6am for you now, British time is so weird” Sollux replied, sympathising with the other mans awful sleep schedule.
CA let out a small hum, signalling to Sollux that he heard him. There was some rustling from CA’s side off the call.
“I'm goin’ to leave now, gonna get some rest. Thanks for joinin’ the stream” CA mentioned.
“Yeah, no problem. Chat seems to love our arguments” Sollux responded.
This earned a small chuckle from CA as he disconnected from the discord, leaving Sollux alone in the call. Sollux sat staring at his discord for a while, before eventually stretching his arms out and getting out of his chair to move his cramping arms and legs.
He heard the sound of a user connecting to the discord call he had forgotten to leave and returned to his computer to check who it was.
“Oh, Hey TG. I was actually just about to leave” Sollux greeted, placing himself back into his yellow gaming chair.
“No problem dude, I was just checking to see what you were kicking about doing in a call all alone” TG replied, his Texan accent clear.
“CA was streaming so I was talking to him, He left about 15 minutes ago.” Sollux explained.
“Gotcha. Yeah I was just talking to Karkat about shit too and he also upped and left about 20 minutes ago” TG stated.
“Karkat?” Sollux asked.
“Ohh yeah CG. You knew his name, right? I keep forgetting who knows what at this point.” TG remarked.
“I have the world's shittest memory ever so if he told me I probably just forgot” Sollux commented. This wasn’t infact a lie, Sollux could not remember things for the life of him, but he knew that CG had probably not mentioned his real name to him before.
“Yeah man I get that. I don’t even know if you know my name at the point which is fucking crazy since we’re friends and all.” TG mused.
“Yeah I dont think it's been mentioned” Sollux replied.
“Fuck man that’s weird. Im Dave” TG stated.
“Im Sollux” Sollux returned.
“That’s the coolest fucking name ever. I'm stuck with Dave over here man” Dave complained.
Sollux smiled. He usually wasn’t the greatest fan of his name and had often gone by many other aliases on social media when he was younger. Having a unique name as a child meant he couldn’t get a lot of those cool personalised toys and pens and he couldn’t even count the amount of times he wished for a more average name like ‘Dave’.
“Makes me sound like a real fucking alien and shit” Sollux remarked, grinning.
“Hell fucking yeah dude!” Dave agreed.
Sollux looked over at the clock on his wall and grimaced at the time.
“I’m gonna have to head off now man. I have class tomorrow” Sollux stated.
“Yeah no prob. I'm an hour ahead of you so it’s even later for me - I should head off too.” Dave observed.
The two said their goodbyes as Sollux finally disconnected.
Sollux checked through his social media once more on his phone as he prepared himself some late night food. As expected, there were clips from the stream that night posted on fan accounts with captions such as ‘this was so funny!’ or ‘i love them!’. Sollux left a few likes on the more creative posts, such as fanarts or edits that had popped up about him or his friends. The one thing he would never get used to was the shipping tags and accounts. The fandom had several ‘ships’ they adored, such as #turntechgeneticist and more weirdly #twinaquariums. It was an out of body experience for Sollux to see so many posts of him with someone like CA, especially when most of them were definitely meant to present them as more than friends. CA was barely even Sollux’s friend to begin with and the majority of their interactions were childish squabbling. It was bizarre for their duo to get so much fan coverage.
However, this didn't stop Sollux from often scrolling through the twinaquariums tag late at night to see what all the fuss was about. Many times there were cropped clips of them from streams where they happened to act slightly more civil towards each other than their usual bickering. These clips were supposed to present ‘proof’ that Sollux and CA were in a romantic relationship. For an outsider, perhaps, these clips may seem decently sweet - but for anyone who knew CA and Sollux they would know that the clips had zero meaning. Sollux guessed the fans wanted to clutch at straws for a chance of their ‘ship’ happening in real life. Sollux didn’t particularly mind the art and edits of CA and him, as it gave him a lot more publicity, but at times he didn’t know how to feel about it. Did the public really see how he acted towards CA as flirty? All he ever did was tease him, how was that at all considered as a romantic pursuit?
Sollux decided that it was for the best if he just closed his social media for the night.