3.

The first half an hour was... something. Eridan was still a little miffed that they had a third wheel, and after failing to fit his big dumb hands in the too-small gloves, Tavros took up bag duty and hauled their trash for them. The beach wasn't terribly messy, but the kelp washed ashore was tangled with plastic strips and scraps of fabric and all sorts of detritus. It made it so they couldn't go a few steps forward without something glittering in the rotting algae and grabbing their attention.

Nepeta was chatty, asking the two of them about their daily escapades. He picked up that Nepeta and Tavros stayed in closer touch, as she asked him about more specific, recent ocurrences. Through osmosis, Eridan learned that he'd lived on a ranch with a fuck tonne of animals and, also, Rufioh, who had a tendency to vanish into the nearby forest for days at a time. It seemed increasingly like they were all cursed to live with their clones, with the acception of people like Karkat, who would have probably committed first-degree murder (a concept which Eridan still found amusing on this planet with significantly less wanton killing) if he had to share space with the older Vantas.

"There's, maybe, one or two foals coming next spring," Tavros continued, waxing on and on about the subject of his livestock's horrific breeding practices. Eridan wasn't sure what the whole appeal of mammals was in the first place, not when decapods and syngnathids were vastly more interesting. "I bet, if Equius wanted to, he'd probably like to see them get born."

"Pawssibly," Nepeta hummed, holding up a discarded brown bottle to the flat grey sky and letting the coloured light hit her face. "They literally only have male horses fur some totally dumb reason."

"Well, they're kind of, uhh, picky," Tavros shrugged. "I'm sure there's, maybe, a mare out there, for the both of them. Hah."

This conversation was quickly veering into nauseating territory, so Eridan let out a completely normal-volume sigh of discontent, which just so happened to attract the attention of his two associates. Too busy tossing an emptied sandwich bag amongst the other refuse to notice any annoyed glances that may or may not have been aimed in his direction, Eridan waited until someone asked him about his hobbies for once. That was normal, wasn't it? A conversation between three people usually involved all three people, right? Maybe he was crazy.

"What about you, Mister Ampurra?" Nepeta took his bait.

"Oh? Hm? Me?" he feigned surprise. "I thought you both were busy painting a beautiful fuckin' canvas of obscene mammalian propagation practices."

"I don't actually think mentioning animal offspring, in general conversation, counts as painting a picture," Tavros helpfully supplied.

"Eridan wants to talk about his own little critters," Nepeta suggested.

"Oh. That's cool."

Finally, something he gave a shit about. "If you must know," he remarked with an exaggerated flourish, "there's a staggering diversity of freshwater sources in my vicinity and I've been painstakingly cataloguing their copepod populaces."

"Oh. That's cool."

Eridan whirled on his heel and fired a pair of daggers at Tavros with the force of his glower. Tavros dodged them both by shading his eyes with a hand, distractedly peering out at some birds on the water.

"I didn't know there'd be gulls out here," he mused.

"Why would there not be seagulls at the fucking sea?" Eridan hissed.

"Oh," Tavros muttered, still not giving much of a fuck. "I guess, that makes sense."

Before either of them could wade further into any incindiary interactions, Nepeta's phone chirped.

"Stop being annoying for a quick second, please, thank mew," they said as they hunted around and fished it out of one of their many cargo pant pockets. There was a single moment where they looked at their screen, squinted, and then let out a weary grimace. Silently, Nepeta turned the screen to the two boys they were chaperoning. Eridan and Tavros both leaned in.

"Ohh, that's probably not very good," Tavros noted.

"I gotta go tend to her," Nepeta sighed, pocketing their phone once again. "Brb."

Alarms went off in Eridan's head. "Wait," he hopped up. "I'll come with."

"Nah," Nepeta barely looked at him, missing out on his gaze that pleaded her to not leave him alone with Tavros. "She's probably being, like, so super loud right meow. I gotta go offur her emotional support and shit. Trust me, it's a whole thing. Plus I'm way faster than you."

"I'm sure we'll be alright," Tavros held out a thumbs up. "We probably won't even get lost, since the beach is a straight line already." Eridan could have strangled his stupid beefy neck with his bare, be-gloved hands. Unfortunately, Nepeta couldn't have cared less about Eridan's rising homicidal urges. Times really had changed.

She got down into a runner's stance before turning to the two guys over her shoulder. "Hey, if I don't get back in time, we can go out afterwards? Yeah? Food?"

"Yeah!" Tavros waved, obliviously cheerful as could be.

" ," Eridan said absolutely nothing.

"Cool! Have fun!" And with a flurry of upkicked sand she was off down the beach, deftly avoiding other scattered groups of garbage collectors. Tavros waved goodbye. Eridan looked to the sky and prayed for a storm. The flat grey clouds did nothing to assist him.

So what had ended up happening after that was Eridan decided they didn't need to continue any sort of a conversation, and it took Tavros about five or six half-hearted attempts to get him talking before the two lapsed into silence, Eridan untangling old briny trash from the kelp and Tavros diligently trailing behind him with the bag.

It was just his luck. He thinks that, maybe, someone shows a bit of interest in him, that he can maybe engage in some harmless little flirting while his stupid boyfriend takes up space in their hive or hits on anything that moves, and the damn universe conspires to fuck it all up. Typical, honestly. This was exactly why this hope swill was stupid. You start dreaming of shit that's not supposed to happen but you still get it on your pan that it could maybe happen. It was the same magic crap that simpleminded wiggler-brained imbeciles got mixed up in their heads that made them believe in dumb fake nonsense and get crushed with disappointment again and again.

He slammed a lost flip-flop especially hard into the bag Tavros held with outstretched arms and made him jump.

"Hah, wow, you really must hate trash," he commented.

Something in the back of Eridan's pan cracked. "What the hell do you even know?"

"Oh," Tavros sniffed, shaking the plastic bag to see how full it was. They still had a ways to go if they wanted to fill it to the max, which they didn't, or to outdo the other groups, which they also didn't. "About, pollution? I guess I don't know more than most people do, uhh, probably. Outside of whatever I overhear. Besides the baseline being that it's, you know, a bad thing."

Eridan pushed the knuckles of his thumbs against the bridge of his nose. "You are so fucking annoying," he gritted through his teeth.

"I'm not, trying to be?" Tavros, for a moment, looked crestfallen. "We can talk about something else."

"I would like to talk about nothing," Eridan emphasised with both hands.

"Not even, uhh," Tavros reached, "isopods?"

Oh, hell no. "Fucking copepods, man! Copepods! Are you stupid?"

"Um," Tavros said.

"Iopods are malacostracans," Eridan continued, pacing in the sand, kicking old seaweed out of his way. "They're, fucking, related to krill and crayfish and shit. It's a whole different order of animal. You know what fuckin' copepods are?"

"Not, krill?"

"They're more than fucking half a' the zooplankton in the damn ocean," Eridan continued. Other groups had started to peer over at the pair, trying to figure out why one of them was yelling at the top of his lungs about microscopic marine organisms. "Anything that filter feeds? Probably scraping up organic tonnes a' these little assholes every freaking day! They're a linchpin in the marine food web, the carbon—the fucking carbon cycle, do you know what happens if that collapses and there's not enough carbon being stored down at the bottom of the bloody sea?"

"Something bad, I assume."

Eridan held out his hands. "Everything. Dies."

Tavros nodded. "Yeah, that's pretty bad."

"Forty fucking times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere already gets leeched out of the sea, and the entire planet boils and everything dies. But before that happens, the whole food web collapses cuz ninety god damn percent of all the food for marine larvae up and vanishes, and that fucking chain reaction kills off everything in the sea—"

"Is this, like, a thing that's in danger of happening?"

"—and that just kills off every living thing on the planet as well, doesn't it? Fucking, a couple thousand species of the most plentiful fucking animals on the fucking planet, holding up the bulk of the planet's biomass with their sheer volume and availability and flawless execution of their niche, and none of you," he pointed a sharp, terse finger in Tavros' direction, "chowderheaded, air-sucking, land filth imbeciles know a fucking thing about 'em!"

Tavros, wisely, said nothing until Eridan had his hands on his knees, panting out the last of his frustrations. He glanced around. The eavesdroppers had gone from watching them curiously to pretending not to notice the scene at all. Across the sea, the gulls were unbothered, hollering about a school of shimmering fish far offshore. Tavros wondered if they knew anything about copepods?

"That was all pretty interesting," he said, finally.

Eridan's head shot up. "I know. So shut the hell up."

Tavros gave him an 'OK' sign and that was that.

Anyway.

The boys decided to turn back early before something bad happened. They hung out by the rendezvous point ignoring each other until Nepeta returned with a snowcone and a shocked expression. Horuss trailed her, looking like he didn't know who the fuck he was without Meulin there. He also was dual-weilding snow cones that melted slowly over both hands.

"You're done!" Nepeta exclaimed, not even pausing to lap at their snow cone. "How'd it go?"

"Great," Eridan said through a hoarse voice.

"We cleaned up a lot of garbage," Tavros said, glowing with pride.

"That's excellent," Horuss beamed, handing each a cone. Eridan's throat was too sore from shrieking like a banshee to reject it.

"How's Meu doing?" Tavros asked.

"She'll be fine," Nepeta answered hastily, smacking Horuss on the arm. He did not budge. "Horhiss is gonna make sure she's nice and cozy! Right?"

He smiled, that inscrutable Zahhak expression behind his shades revealing absolutely nothing about his general feelings. Creep city. Eridan was at the end of his rope, but Horuss declined the chance to join them to get food after their failed outing. It was all well and good. Eridan was certain he was going to suffer an aneurysm if he had to put up with another wild card weirdo in his general vicinity. He was fortunate to have been blessed with two generations of completely bizarre motherfuckers from all up and down the spectrum, with a few aliens hastily thrown in as well. Didn't mean he needed to put up with them in increasingly plural quantities.

He really freaking wished Karkat were here. It was no fun bitching in the confines of his own head. Hell, even Cronus would probably join him in being pissy and irritable for a bit.

Nepeta continued to be their ringleader, dragging him (and FUCKING Tavros) to a seaside restaurant that was absolutely hoaching with diners. They sat by the window and Eridan had his attitude on the whole time. It was slightly alleviated when Nepeta sidled in besides him, giving Tavros plenty of horizontal space in his seat, and gave him another little shoulder check. It unfortunately shot right through him in a way that he wanted to strangle down.

"What's with the sour puss?" she'd asked, and Eridan felt his neck heat up.

"Nothing is sour," he muttered, turning to look out the window.

"Eridan was telling me about copepods," Tavros said. "I think they're probably the most important thing, ever, that's ever existed."

"Uh huh," Eridan grumbled, glaring out the window. "Sure, make fun of me. Real mature of ye."

"I'm not making fun," Tavros almost looked insulted at the very notion. "You made such a big tantrum. I thought it sounded important."

"Oh, the buggies are definitely important," Nepeta played along, poking their tongue out between their fangs. "I missed the whole science lesson, though! I wanna know about copepaws."

"I bet." Eridan directed his enduring ire towards the window. Out on the sidewalk, the scene was hideously suburban. Couples and throuples and starry-eyed wanderers strolled and idled at storefronts. The shore they were on was apparently a popular spot, enough so that people came here recreationally and left their refuse right on the sand. He wondered how many of the locals truly gave a shit, and how many just waited for altruistic fools like him to come and pick up after them. Hadn't he had enough of cleaning after one pretentious jackass already?

Behind him, the air grew steadily more awkward until Tavros decided he needed to use the bathroom, edging out from their little booth.

When he was gone, Eridan released a tension he didn't know he'd been holding, hand at his neck stopping its incessant, nervous rubbing. He turned to the table, finally picking up his water. The cool condensation felt nice against his skin. He really should have put on a sunscreen or something. As casually as he could muster, his gaze made its way to his side to see what Nepeta was doing.

He knew that expression. Little mouth tilt, unimpressed eyes, raised brows. A billion fucking sweeps couldn't erase that annoyed disappointment from his head, and he nearly jumped right out of his skin.

"Don't look at me like that," he snapped under his breath.

Instantly, Nepeta's expression fell, confused. "Like what?"

Eridan leaned in, eyes wide. "Like her."

It took Nepeta a second to register, but once they did, both hands slapped across their mouth. "Oh, shit! I'm so sorry—"

"It's fine," Eridan said, growing increasingly uncomfortable.

"I totally wasn't trying to—"

"It's fine," he stressed, turning his face back to the window. Things had somehow found a way to go further south at mach speeds. Eridan almost wished Tavros would hurry back.

Instead, Nepeta's voice sounded out behind him. "I'm sorry. You're not having fun."

He spun back to them. "No! No, it's not like that."

They had on those big, sad eyes again, shades pushed up into their bangs so their face was uncovered and Eridan had to suffer with it.

"It's, it-it's, it's just weird," he stammered out. Taking a chance, he reached out and draped his hand across her wrist, holding it gently. Fully expecting Nepeta to yank her arm away, it was a complete shock when it didn't happen. Eridan stared at their hands, the glimmer of his jewelry resting over the toughened leather of her signature fingerless gloves. "It's just," he tried to continue, looked back up at Nepeta's face. "It's all, weird. I don't know how to do, this."

She nodded, and covered his hand with her other one, nearly causing him to go into cardiac arrest. "I know, I'm sorry," she sniffed. "You should hang out with us more! So it's easier. It'll be fun."

"Yeah," he answered, feathers still a bit ruffled.

"Really!" they casually pulled their hands back, and it took all of Eridan's strength to not go chasing. "I know it's silly, but I think we can make up for a bajillion years of us being all fractured, you know?"

He wasn't quite sure. "Yeah."

Eventually, when Tavros returned, the energy was back to neutral, though Eridan did try to be a little less morose. He even found his appetite and responded to something Tavros said without want to bite his head off. See? Trying.

---