For my friend Aewin on tumblr. She knows what she's done.

As a body-mod enthusiast, I cannot stress this enough. Please do your research before attempting any form of body modification. While it is a great form of self-expression, much of it is irreversible and if improperly cared for, can lead to serious health complications and death. Talk to your piercer or artist, get to know their business practices and clientele. Ask questions. And if they don't have time to answer all of your questions/are reluctant to say anything/do not have an active interest in you, then get the hell out of Dodge. Some states have health code regulations-learn them and make sure they're followed. Even if you live somewhere where it's not regulated (like me), make sure that at the least blood born pathogen containment protocols are followed. There is no excuse and zero reason to get work done from anyone who says otherwise.

Like most things between you, it starts with an argument. This instance is about pain tolerance. Karkat maintains he has the higher threshold given his combat training. You call bullshit because there is no pain greater than a psionic-fueled migraine, which you work through on a regular basis. Since there's no practical way either of you can ever actually endure the other's particular course of pain, thus proving superiority, it becomes something of a minor bickering point, only dredged up when one of you wants to needle his partner.

Or at least, it was until the night Karkat showed up missing small chunks of his earlobes. It looked like someone had taken a grommet puncher to his ears. Considering it had been Gamzee performing the deed, that was entirely possible. In any case, Karkat now has small holes in the soft part of his aural sponges about three millimeters wide, pierced and held open by a ring of metal. He delights in showing them off, going into appropriately gruesome detail about how they came to be—and how he endured the pain of the piercing and subsequent gauging. When you finally gain a chance to play with them, they're predictably sensitive, but not in the manner you imagined they'd be. Despite being less than two weeks old, Karkat moans in pleasure, not pain, when one of your fangs caught on the new metal and pulls it. The kind of moan that goes straight to the bulge, which would have had you halfway out of your clothes if you hadn't already been buried nook deep in your partner at the time. Instead, you're pumping Karkat full of your genetic material long before you'd intended to, prompting a spat about hair triggers and bulge dysfunction. The second time around is still as much of a rush as the first; you're just better equipped to deal with it.

Thus the bar is set. Now it's your turn.

You go to Aradia for many of the same reasons Karkat had probably gone to Gamzee. The two of you talk about what would work the best now, later, and the time interim because there is no way this isn't going to escalate further. The plan starts off with two small rings getting shoved through the hard cartilage of your ear, both on the same side. It didn't have the size Karkat had gone for, but the placement is in a tougher spot and proximity means the pain will echo from one to the other. The process is recorded for posterity. It does sting a bit (though you'll never admit to it), but nothing worse than any injury you've given yourself working with the agriframes. Any and all discomfort is totally worth the look on Karkat's face when he notices the additions anyway, even if it's a little disappointing that the additions are discovered almost as soon as you see each other again. At least you don't moan like a bulgeslut when they're tongued, no matter how good it feels.

After that, it becomes an arms race of sorts. You press your meager advantage by putting four more holes into your ears, down in the soft lobe area like Karkat's. The plan is to stretch at least one set out, which means they need to be healed sooner than just about anything else. Retaliation comes in the form of two rings curled tightly to the outside edges of Karkat's nostrils. He then ups the ante by introducing his own helix piercing, imitating your own. With your ears still needing time to heal, not to mention needing to answer the unspoken challenge of placement, attention switches to the face. The amount of courage it takes to let a needle that big get that close to your eyes in order to insert the new jewelry in your eyebrows draws even with fact the two piercing in Karkat's lower lip now give him the illusion of honest fangs when he bares his teeth in self-satisfied pleasure. You also note that the original holes in your partner's ears are larger while the look in his eyes says he's already planned this out in finite detail long before he got the courage to actually do it. Jesus fuck, that's hot.

You're falling behind and that isn't acceptable, though. The original plan calls for a bar to be put through the undamaged cartilage shell next, but you side-step it in favor of putting a bolt through each side of your naturally bifurcated tongue. It wreaks havoc with your lisp until you get used to the feeling and even then, it takes time to find something that doesn't feel like you'll swallow it on accident. It's still impressive that Karkat got a piece of metal shoved through the skin right above the bridge of his nose as well as collecting another ring through his cartilage. But considering he's never made that particular sound before when you shove your tongue into his nook, it's pretty obvious who won this round. The added gauging to your ears is all icing when you get him to make that sound several more times. After that, the originally planned-for bar through the ear and the stud that appears between Karkat's nose and upper lip are something of a letdown. Not even noting the holes in his ears are now nearly big enough to thread a pencil through sparks any kind of dissatisfaction. The game has become stale and it will take something drastic to refresh the rivalry.

Karkat's response to "drastic" is to put down a serious amount of ink. Big and bold like the owner, it sits about mid-back, which makes it hysterical to watch him flail and curse as the healing skin began to itch. In the end, though, it works out much better than your plan. Having relatively large holes punched through the cartilage sounded like a good idea at the time—you were physically removing chucks of your ears, after all. There's little that's more extreme and even fewer places it can be done safely. But where Karkat only suffered with some itchiness after the initial sting, your ears remain insanely tender and prone to infection no matter how you clean them. That only makes Karkat's gloating over yet another ring in his ear all the more insufferable, locked as you are into a prolonged healing period.

The situation doesn't improve much when you also turn to ink. The two comparatively small designs that now rest on your shoulders aren't even in the same league as the two other pieces that join the first on Karkat's back, trailing over his hips, curling around his grubscars and even starting to reach over his shoulders. And he knows he has the lead because he keeps pushing, letting the design start to flow across his chest, its own thing, yet smoothly integrating into the whole. You try getting your own skin stained with ink again, this time dedicating the whole of one forearm to the project. It turns out well, but ultimately becomes too little too late as Karkat continues collecting metal in his ears at the same time. The time seems right to do the nigh unthinkable and concede defeat when Aradia shows you a newer type of piercing, one that fits under the surface of the skin and could go anywhere. Individually, they won't be of much help in your game, but en masse and in the right places…

You get sixteen placed, eight on each side of your spine, with the surface baubles retrofitted to look like various electronic ports, mimicking the initial setup of someone slated to join the ranks of the Helmsmen. It's a fate you only managed to avoid because Karkat had gotten into your face about it, demanding to know why, if you were such a great hacker, you couldn't crack the Imperial Database and change all your files, erasing any trace of the records citing you as a high-level psion. Of course, it was a little more complicated than that, but when had Karkat ever let something like details stop him from simply forging ahead? The ensuing argument left the two of you hacking into the Database for almost two weeks straight, making sure you didn't end up as nothing more than a living piece of machinery after final maturation hit. (In the brightest parts of the day, when he's decided to stay over and you know he's asleep, you very quietly admit you're glad he got bitchy about it in the first place.) Considering you know better and still manage to unnerve yourself when you look into the mirror, Karkat is going to fucking short circuit. That will help even the score more than a little.

The nubby horned troll does not disappoint. In fact, he's shocked into complete silence once he rips your shirt off and sees all of the faux ports lined up in their correct locations. But before you can even start on the barbed taunting, Karkat's meltdown explodes in the opposite direction. He's panicked. Instead of triggering reproach or maybe even straight-up disbelief, he becomes frantic, demanding answers you can't even make up because you're so dumbfounded by the terror in your partner's eyes. It's ridiculous and painful to see. Karkat is a Threshecutioner, a highly ranked and decorated one at that, and that doesn't just happen to trolls who let any sort of fear show. It's why the two of your have been slinging pitch since practically the night you met online, barely four sweeps old and so ready to leave a few marks on your world. He's bold, brash, and fiery, not content to wait for the culling fork or the laurels of glory, yet not such an overbearing asshole that it's impossible to deal with him; that perfect blend of hard enough to fight without remorse and soft enough to still care.

All completely undone by a joke you're only now starting to realize overstepped the line between taunt and blatant threat, and it's still running strong. Any questions you've ever harboured about the intent behind the prodding to hack the Imperial Database are answered by every agitated movement Karkat makes as he rampages around the room, gathering items, looking for recording devices, and spouting half-formed plans to get you off-world and into treatment before the wires can actually fuse to your nervous system. The reaction might have annoyed you (after all, a fault in the hacking would be squarely in your lap too) if he hadn't been talking about flat out treason to save your stupid ass from an imaginary circumstance. Even as one of the most loyal wardogs of the Empire, he'd be branded a traitor and executed on the spot without the formality of a trial or the humiliation of the irons for simply thinking what he was thinking, let alone saying it aloud or trying to follow through with it. That he's obviously going to do more than simply follow through makes something clench in your chest as a hot wash of pity floods through your system. It's one thing to cosign your worthless carcass to torment and death, but you aren't going to be responsible for someone else's. Not again. Not Karkat.

Twisting one of the false ports free from its anchor in an attempt to show him it wasn't real (because nothing you said is getting through) only brings hysterics to the party. And holy bulgeshitting fuck if making him cry isn't the fastest way to make yourself feel like the scum all other scum refuses to associate with due to objectionable morals. You have to restrain him with your psionics and make him watch as you remove another before he starts to understand it was all an elaborate ruse. He punches you once he's free to move again and you take it with grace because you deserve it. Then he gathers you as close as he can, face buried in your neck, just like a wiggler clinging to a favorite toy after a particularly horrific daymare, which, all things considered, probably isn't too far off the mark. Karkat never makes any actual sound while the two of you sit huddled together on the floor, but your skin is wet and shimmering red when he finally relaxes enough to let you shift even slightly away. You let him remove the other ports, feeling like an even bigger ass every time those calloused fingers ever-so-gently brush against your back.

It takes four nights to reassure him that no, you aren't being cultivated for the helmsblock. The entire time, he touches you in one way or another, light, brief things that occurr randomly and without any other context. You try to reciprocate as much as possible and say nothing. What finally gets him to stop staring at you with that wrenching look of loss, though, is handing him a scalpel and letting him remove the mounts hidden just under your skin, essentially promising in blood to never joke about such a thing again. Because both of you are champions of ignoring shit, it becomes just another one of those things both of you silently agree to never speak of again, the faint scars you know he still sees no matter how much he may pretend he doesn't the only proof left behind.

At that point, you consider the contest over. There hasn't really been a clear victory for either of you, or even a muddled one scraped together from your usual clusterfuck of rivalry. Nothing in paradox space is worth revisiting your most recent fuck-up, so until that memory dims somewhat, you remain on your best behavior, keeping it clean and civil like you're courting again while everything heals. And no sooner has the last scab finally been itched off than the smug prick walks in with new ink still glistening on his chest and a challenging twist to the smirk on his lips. (Dear dead gods, is it any wonder why you're blacker than pitch for the fucker?)

Like hell you were going to let that taunt go, but retaliation isn't swift. Where Karkat went bold and wild, you go small and detailed, transforming your other forearm into an intricate and damn near realistic tableau. It takes much longer to accomplish, but in the end, it's also a hundred times more impressive than all your partner's ink combined, even the new things he has immortalized onto the backs of his hands. The more than a few issues he has with the placement and subsequent infection are equally gratifying. It also doesn't stop Karkat from actually inviting you to the session where an inch wide band is put down around each thigh. Watching him blithely trade insults with you while a needle hammers at some of the tenderest skin on a troll's body has you unsheathing faster than you want to admit to. The only place that might hurt worse would be tattooing the bulge itself, and there sits Karkat like he's relaxing at his hive with some sort of sweet drink and the newest trash romance to hit the newsstands. You can't beat that, but you can match it. While he stands there and pretends his legs aren't killing him, you have four lengths of metal inserted under the skin above and below your collarbones. Where he had been blasé about the procedure, you make sure you're quite vocal about how good it felt. Considering the two of you barely make it somewhere a little more private before he jumps you and spends the rest of the night licking and sucking at the new adornments, you think he was left as hot and bothered as you were.

The time it takes to get your arm finished pretty much leaves you swearing off any more tattoo work for the foreseeable future. You could have done more to your ears, but Aradia advises against it, saying it would undo the effect you had now. The two of you toss around ideas until you finally come back around to trying the dermal mounts again. Not in the formation or numbers as the last set had been, but rather strategic placement of a few for aesthetic effect and maybe a little more. A limit of four is agreed upon, two of which now sit along the back of your neck in innocuous positions, one she talked you into placing about mid-sternum, and the last that rests at the base of your throat. Surprisingly enough, the one on your chest feels damn good when played with while the two on your neck ended up over spots that make your knees go weak in the first place.

The one both you and Karkat enjoy the most, however, has to be the one sitting in the hollow of your throat, especially when you chose to wear a slave ring. His eyes never leave it from the moment he walks into the room and his fingers never stop playing with it once he gets close. There's something unbearably sexy about Karkat when he thinks he's the one in control even though you're the one pounding him into the floor. And when you get him almost to the point of release but still come first, a vicious sense of satisfaction washes through you as his eyes roll back and he releases this low, almost gutteral groan as he takes your genetic load.

The feeling doesn't last. As you pull back, triumph turns to apprehension because you're used to making a huge mess of him, but there's too much red on the floor under him and it's opaque rather than translucent. His breath is coming in short bursts, his skin's gone pallid, and when you shake him a bit to get his attention, his whole body just sort of ragdolls in your grip without any other response. Apprehension takes a flying leap out the window, transforming into outright concern as it hits the ground along with your stomach. You know he just got back from his latest tour of duty. You also know that a thorough medical evaluation is mandatory before returning planetside. Karkat practically breaths military protocol, but he's been known to flout it all the same when he thinks he can get away with it. Did he get wounded while cleaning out some backwater planet and either forget about it or not think it worth mentioning? Given his profession, you always half-expected a drone to show up at your door with a notice of death whenever he was gone from the internet for more than a few days. That, you think, you could handle. But having him in your arms, dying…

You mutter death threats and temporal/anatomical impossibilities even though all you really feel is a cold hand tightening around your blood pusher. The ever disconnected part of your pan is oh-so-helpfully reminding you of all the cues you missed before; the strained look on his face, the lackluster fight that left you on top, the grunts and hisses of discomfort you interpreted as harder, faster, more. It's all you can see or hear as you coddle your partner with your psionics and wipe his skin clean, trying to find the source of the blood before all of it finds a way onto your hive floor. What you eventually discover is not a stray infected slice or two, or even a couple pieces of shrapnel working their way out. No, what you find is a section of Karkat's back that has been shredded, the fragile scabs splitting further because of the round of rough sex. As if that wasn't enough to make you sick, it gets worse when you realized the cutting is deliberate. What other explanation was there? Someone miraculously managed to stab him in the back over two dozen times without once hitting somewhere outside the carefully laid line of the tattooing already there?

The sickness, panic, and fear simmer inside you until Karkat finally came back around. He actually has the gall to ask you what happened. That's when it boils up and over, a violent, vitriolic expulsion that once started refuses to stop. He probably doesn't even understand half of what you say because the words keep tripping over themselves in their rush to get out, only to be mangled further by your still too large fangs and the inescapable hiss your lisp produces when you're beyond agitated. You don't know what's worse, the fact you can't remain still during the diatribe or that every movement only makes you feel that much closer to heaving your guts onto the floor.

Only when Karkat finally catches and stops your aggrieved momentum do you realize you're crying. He peels your claws out of your own arms and holds you while you shake and fall apart. You're mad, and scared, and oh fuck, it hurts so bad you still want to puke. You probably would have if your damn lungs would stop getting in the way because these fucking feelings need to get out of you before you simply combust. That's not happening, so you try to hold it all in instead, but Karkat won't let you, making you hold on to him. You hate that he won't let you claw whatever is overwhelming you out of your skin. You hate that you can't stop yourself from digging your nails into him, causing more pain and bloodshed. You hate that you need the security of his arms around you, his body heat to ground you, and his voice to fend off all the others now clamouring for your shattered attention. You hate Karkat (but hate yourself more for breaking in the first place) and love him dearly for not shoosh-papping you, or justifying what is happening, or doing anything other than holding you while you struggle to process the internal shitstorm.

He never once complains when you finally get your act together and start fussing over him, bandaging up his back, making him sit on the couch, and eat what in retrospect had to be the worst meal ever created by troll hands. He purrs whenever you needed to hold him until the voices go away again. He puts up with the strict care you provide for the gashes and the second tirade you go on when he admits it was a planned scarification. At this point, you both agreed the contest is over. You've both managed to scare the shit out of one another and the retaliatory efforts are getting out of hand. As Karkat's back heals, you begrudgingly admit the bright red scars left behind add a gorgeous flare to the inkwork surrounding it, which should have been enough to let Karkat claim the victory needed for both of you to move on. Apparently still remorseful, he abdicates victory to you, revealing that the now six helix piercings in his ears are how his regiment celebrates decisive conquests in the field. With those six now out of the running, you technically have done more to yourself in the name of the game.

You won.

(You pay him back for his honesty by leaving him a writhing, unfulfilled mess for two nights. It's probably some of the best pailing you two ever have.)

Every now and then, he still has to lick every last scar along your spine, like he's paying reverence to some god for keeping you out of the helsmblock. When you're still drifting through post-pailing contentment, sometimes you find yourself gently stroking the ridges and hollows of numb scar tissue left decorating your partner's back. Instead of taunting one another about pain tolerance, you give him shit about the holes in his ears, which are now an inch in diameter, and how he still moans like a bulgeslut when you play with them. In turn, he slips a finger through one of the slave rings and holds you in awkward, but hot as hell positions as you fulfill your concupiscent duty and more. And though other caliginous couples might scoff that none of your games are nearly as physical anymore, both of you already know where that particular line is drawn and what happens when you cross it. There's nothing left worth arguing about.

For those who weren't keeping track, here's the full list.

Sollux: 25 mods total. 21 piercings (2 helix, 4 lobe, 2 eyebrow, 2 tongue, 1 industrial, 2 cartilage punches, 4 surface bars, 4 single points) and 4 tattoos (2 shoulder cap, 2 forearm).

Karkat: 25 mods total (technically only 19). 14 piercings (2 lobe, 6 helix, 2 nostril, 1 earl, 1 set of snakebites, 1 philtrum), 10 tattoos (3 back, 3 chest, 2 hand, 2 thigh), and 1 scarification.