Awww, man, it cut you off, but all of the hearts for this one: the James Cameron Tribute Fic, Blue Light Burning. 

I saw The Abyss when I was still very small, probably ten or eleven or so, and I still so clearly remember watching the green cursor blink on the black screen in Deepcore as Bud typed out his last message to Lindsay:

KNEW THIS WAS A ONE WAY TICKET

BUT YOU KNOW I HAD TO COME. 

LOVE YOU WIFE

I’d played with other bits of that film before with Eridan and Equius—one of the HHCOD fills featured Equius rigging up a tank full of perflubron for a pneumonia-stricken Eridan—but this was the first time I got to really do the descent into the black cold depths concept and it was so stupidly appealing that I kind of skipped over the middle of that story so I could go right to the fun part. I intend to go back and write the bit where Sollux does his infiltration part and they figure out where and what Leviathan is and how to fix its little red wagon, but I wanted so badly to have Eridan go to the bottom of the world knowing he wouldn’t be able to come back and doing it anyway, doing it because it needed to be done—or they thought it needed to be done. Gl’bgolyb showed up and surprised me, but then I remembered how it worked in the film, and of course it had to be the unknowable alien creature who saw and rescued the little morsel of surface life from the deeps—and it was fun writing her slow vast thought process. 

This bit, though, this bit was better than even the ONE WAY TICKET part, because this bit came to me completely unplanned and I had in no way intended for an Erisol moirallegiance to develop. I just liked the idea of Eridan’s and Sollux’s mutual snipy dislike changing over the course of this entire mess into something paler and more heartfelt, and I didn’t think Eridan would be able to handle Equius at his bedside waking up from what he’d thought would be the last time he closed his eyes. The grandiose self-sacrifice of his gesture had pleased him deeply when he’d been pretty sure he wouldn’t have to deal with any fallout; the realization that in fact, no, he would have to deal with it, and that it would suck, knocked his whole worldview out of balance. He’s freewheeling at this point, he doesn’t know what to think, and Sollux is there and Sollux is crossly watching over him and Sollux for some unknowable reason seems to give a shit about him. 

Eridan in this hyperbaric chamber is not the Eridan we met first in All the Way Down watching Equius fall out of his comically ill-suited boat. This is an Eridan who’s grown up a bit, even if he doesn’t really understand what that means just yet. 

Oh my god. That would be TERRIBLE. Equius would probably end up depressed as fuck and Eridan would KNOW it was because of him and augh augh augh.