Work Text:
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Your husktop chimes about halfway through breakfast. It’s barely moonrise, the light in your respiteblock a pale green-silver. Tinkerbull snorts and rubs his nose into your throat while you lean over to look at the screen, lance in hand. You were thinking to practice outside some before it got too cold. If it’s Gamzee wanting to talk you can wait a little, put on a jacket maybe. For the chill. Only the handle on the screen’s not Gamzee’s.
carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling adiosToreador [TA]!
CG: SO I HEAR
CG: H
CG: hhhhhh
Yeah, no, definitely not Gamzee. Definitely not someone you want to talk to at all, even. Conversations with Karkat tend to give you headaches or seriously crush your self-esteem, or both, and you don’t need that right now. You are feeling pretty good! Over the past perigee you’ve managed to settle into a practice strife routine every evening, and your arms ached starting off but now they’re getting lumpy, like, in the good way, rounded when you pull your knuckles in.
But Karkat doesn’t talk to you much. And you’ve never seen him type a lowercase letter. Curious, you put down your lance and drag your keyboard closer.
AT: uHH,
AT: aRE YOU TRYING TO, cOPY MY QUIRK
AT: bECAUSE, uH, yOU GET AN A FOR, eFFORT, i GUESS,
CG: FUCK NO I’M NOT TRYING TO COPY YOUR QUIRK. I’D RATHER GET, SUFFER THROUGH, AND ULTIMATELY EXPIRE OF A CASE OF WEEPING FESTERBOIL NOOKMEASLES.
AT: wOW, tHAT’S, kIND OF GROSS aCTUALLY
CG: HHdkjjjjjjjsadlkj
CG: hhknnn
You frown. Once you read about a guy who had some kind of pan hemorrhage after watching a creepy vid on Trolltube. You always imagined his fruitless messages for help looking a lot like this.
AT: uHHH, aRE YOU OK, oR
CG: I’M EXPERIENCING SOME TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES OVER HERE. YOU HAVE MY MOST SINCERELY RELUCTANT AND INCREDIBLY HUMILIATED APOLOGIES. IN OTHER NEWS: FUCK MY FUCKING LIFE.
CG: BUT AS I WAS SAYING.
CG: SO I HEAR YOU HAVE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE VARIOUS FLAWS OF TROLLKIND.
You are minutely irritated but not surprised. Everyone always seems to only ever associate you with your dumb dead legs. Great. You really appreciate being reminded of those.
AT: oH, uMMM
AT: iF YOU ARE REFERRING TO MY, uHH, dISABILITY, aS IT HAPPENS
AT: aND I THINK YOU PROBABLY ARE
AT: tHEN YES
AT: i AM, sORT OF, pROFOUNDLY SCHOOLED IN THE AREA OF, wHAT I PREFER TO CALL,
AT: dIFFERENCES
AT: oR MAYBE, i sHOULD SAY
AT: “dIFFERENCES”
CG: YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.
CG: THAT IS PROBABLY THE LAMEST FUCKING THING I
CG: I’VE EVER
CG: I
Your respiteblock’s full silver now, bright and brilliant. Probably it’s cloudless out, and that’s rare here this season with the wind kicking in clumps of storms off the coast. If you stay inside much longer you risk losing the light.
AT: kARKAT, uMM, nOT TRYING TO BE MEAN, oR ANYTHING, bUT I HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN LISTEN TO YOU, uHH, tRY TO INSULT ME,
CG: wha
CG: WHAT IF I
CG: WHAT IF I SAID I WAS DIFFERENT.
Wait. What?
AT: dIFFERENT?
CG: GODDAMNIT. FINE. “DIFFERENT” DIFFERENT.
AT: oH
AT: wELL, i’D BE, vERY SURPRISED
AT: bECAUSE WE BARELY KNOW EACH OTHER, aND, yOU WERE ON THE CUSP OF DISSING ME JUST NOW, sO,
AT: i wOULDN’T EXPECT YOU TO BE, uHH, vERY FORTHCOMING ABOUT ANYTHING PERSONAL, iN NATURE
CG: I’M DIFFERENT.
Okay. Okay, wow. You don’t know what to do, or what you’re feeling beneath the sudden surge of extreme surprise and discomfort. Why’s Karkat telling you this? Why’s Karkat telling you anything? What if he’s really having a pan hemorrhage? You cup Tinkerbull instinctively up against your cheek for a second, letting the small, sweet smell of him ground you.
AT: uM, i’M NOT SURE I, rEALLY UNDERSTAND WHY YOU’RE tELLING ME
AT: oR WHY I SHOULD CARE, aT ALL,
CG: I’M DIFFERENT AND VULNERABLE THE SAME WAY YOU WERE WHEN YOU GOT HURT AND I KNOW I WAS AN ASSHOLE TO YOU THEN BUT I NEED YOUR HELP NOW.
CG: THAT WAS AN APOLOGY, BY THE WAY. YOU’RE WELCOME.
AT: tHANK YOU, i THINK
AT: bUT IF YOU NEED HELP, yOU SHOULD PROBABLY, uH, aSK YOUR FRIENDS, bECAUSE
CG: THEY CAN’T
CG: ccccccccccca
CG: CAN’T KNOW. CAN’T. NO. KNOW NO NO NO NO
You agonize. You move your cursor to close the window but you can’t make yourself click out of it, you can’t just leave. You remember what it was like when you had your accident: you remember the pain and the helplessness, but more than anything you remember the solitude, how alone you felt and how scared you were, how your mouth was so, so dry and your teeth too big in it and how you thought you’d die tasting your own blood, that stupid hot sludgy copper.
AT: oKAY,
AT: wHAT CAN I DO
The shadows in your respiteblock shift. Minutes tick by and sweat prickles in your mohawk. Your claws itch. You gnaw at them until Tinkerbull snorts and butts his horns chidingly into your chin.
AT: kARKAT? aRE YOU, uHH,
CG: VN39 17.088 VW180 33.250
The shock of it numbs you more than usual. Coordinates. He’s given you coordinates to his hive. He fucking wants you to come over.
The shadows in your block shift still more, lengthening. Karkat’s handle fuzzes into idle mode and stays that way. You try messaging him a few more times. He doesn’t answer.
There are other names in your list, contacts available and online. Some of them are his friends. Terezi. Kanaya. They’re not your friends but they’re his, and if you told them what’s going on maybe they’d help him. But he said no. He asked you. You, of all trolls. Why did he have to ask you? Why was he that stupid?
You lick your teeth and you taste old blood on your tongue. You remember, almost, what having real legs felt like.
You write down the coordinates. You grab your jacket on the way out. Good thing. It’s cold.
**
You knew he’d be hurt. You just didn’t know how badly.
Now you know. Now you behold him sprawled and split open on the yellow tiled floor of his mealblock, his mouth ajar, his eyes shut. You are pretty sure those are digestive tubes sagging out under his sweater. Squirting through his fingers. You are no stranger to viscera, so, okay, right, digestive tubes. Check. Your metal toes clink on the tile and one of his eyes slants open, and he squares his shoulders up against a cabinet and looks at you. His mouth yawns wider. His teeth are painted red, bright red, red as wrong, red as the floor all around him, red as the ropes he’s holding half out of himself in his hand.
Oh.
You see at least two problems with this situation. You are not sure which one is worse.
“Nitram,” he says thickly, bewildered and staring. His mouth works. The second word he ever tries to speak to you aloud might be help, but you are not the best at lipreading because you have never tried it before and, also, he horks out another glut of that bright blasphemous blood. He goes limp after, twitching some. He’s gangly, a sad little pile of elbows. His eyes burn at you, despairing, furious, like he’s sorry you came, like he’s mad he asked you to.
You skirt the scummy congealing pool of his fluids. You don’t want to slip in it. Not to mention the rest of the mealblock is clean, cleaner than you keep yours, and Karkat might not like it if you track gross globby footprints everywhere. He’s nearer to dead than alive and you’re still worried about what he’ll do to you if you mess up his hive, wow, aren’t you just the bravest?
But you did come here, so.
“Okay,” you say, kneeling creakily next to him, “this is not quite, um, what I was expecting--”
He claws at you. You weren’t quite expecting that either, but instinct has you sweep your horns low the same way it probably has him lashing out in the first place. The blow glances off you, you barely feel it, but Karkat yowls in pain and yanks his hand back. “Fuck, fuck me. Don’t,” he says, “please, I don’t want, please.” Up close he’s hot as a furnace and smells terrible, like a wound ready to fester, and his eyes are glassy and marbled and fixed on you. He’s trembling. His thumbclaw chatters on the tile.
He’s afraid. Afraid of you.
It takes you aback. No one’s ever been afraid of you before. You should be happy he is, you should be proud. Vriska would say so. You’re a lowblood but Karkat’s lower, he doesn’t even count. His color hurts you looking at it. It makes some deep hindbrain part of you tense up, seeing all that red. Your spine’s a nest of prickles and you want to toss your head, you want to turn your horns and gore.
Here’s the opportunity for you to be the real troll Vriska’s always telling you you’re not. You could reach over and snap Karkat’s neck. Or shove your thumb into his mastoid. It would be easy. His head’s small and your hands are huge, how have you never noticed how huge they are?
It would be right. It would be the right thing to do, on principle, for you and for him too. You’ve got shitblood in your veins and you’re metal most of the way down below your belly, but you at least have more of a future than he does. The cherry splatter on the walls says as much. If you try to help him now, if you save him, it won’t matter because he’ll die in another sweep or two regardless. He’ll die painfully, die horribly, die worse than the way he’s dying now.
You’re still leaning over him. Your kneejoint creaks. You don’t want to be Vriska’s definition of a real troll, you decide, and you feel a rill of hot pleasure at the thought of her spazzing out over what you’re about to do. You file your fingers down into the slot between Karkat’s chin and shoulder. His pupils blow wide, and he scrabbles, and you say, “Calm down and just, let me do this,” while you work your claws behind his ear. This is something you’ve done before, over and over. Specifically you’ve done it with barkbeasts. You are not sure about its effectiveness on other species. You figure you don’t have anything to lose by testing it out.
Karkat’s hair’s matted with sweat and blood but you find what you’re looking for, that rough hollow spot just above the crook of his jaw. You rub at it and you pinch the lobe of his aural fringe between your thumb and forefinger; you knead it, slow little circles. Somewhere deep in your chest a noise starts up, a thing that’s not a purr but kind of a close neighbor, like maybe they share hedges, and after a long, breathless moment Karkat’s head bobbles. You feel the uneven kick of his pusher under his skin. He sinks to you, toward you, and you open your arm and fold him in against you.
Maybe it’s a mistake, touching him like that. His shoulders hunch. His face screws up. He sobs, long and low and keening, a guttural choked sound that is the worst thing you have ever heard in your life except for the time you ran Tinkerbull over with your four-wheeled device.
You fidget a little, nonplussed, before you palm the back of his head entire to pet at him, scritching your claws from his hornbeds to his nape. It could be that you are sort of cuddling someone who will be dead soon, someone who is essentially eviscerated, and that is not the most comforting thought you’ve ever had. You shouldn’t be cuddling him, you should be helping him get his guts back into his body. What is even wrong with you?
Your windchute constricts. You tell Karkat, who’s looking at you with an expression that suggests he’s about to lose every part of his shit, “Things stand a good chance of being, pretty okay, I think, if you would take, uh, a few deep measured breaths. And…” You rally. “Please stop crying. Or don’t, uh, start? I, I’m just not sure, what, to do with or about that, exactly.”
The pillar of soothing comforts: it is not you. His chin wobbles. He starts to cry in earnest defiantly, almost, dribbles of snot and blood leaking out his face, his eyes narrow fuck you slits and you say, “Hush,” only it sounds more like shoosh. You bring up your other hand, numb with your own daring. You don’t think. You fold your fingers over his cheek.
He goes stiff. Stunned. You were nervous coming over and you’ve been on cautious, careful autopilot since you shouldered open his door five minutes ago and saw the blood smeared everywhere, this whole time you’ve been trying to keep yourself from feeling too much, but now a sense of crushing horribleness floods through you. You don’t know Karkat very well! You don’t know him at all when you think about it, yet you’re crowding him here as he’s dying, your hands on him like he’s your friend, like he’s important to you, like you’ve ever cared. You don’t care, do you? He’s been mean to you, he doesn’t think you’re worth anything. What are you even doing here?
“Hgggk,” he hisses. Tiny crimson pearls bubble up and burst between his fangs. He shakes his head, just once, as like to throw off your hand, and then his eyes roll back in his skull and he shudders and is quiet. Is still. You’d think he was dead if his breath wasn’t fluttering against your fingers.
For a few seconds you just sit there in his gruesomely saturated mealblock with his soggy weight pressing into you, trying to process. Your fucking life -- your shitty fucking choices. You can’t believe this is happening.
You think you feel ashamed until you realize it’s actually worry that’s gnawing around in your guts. Karkat convulses minorly: you tighten your grip, roll your shoulder under his chin to clear his airway and you understand: you’re worried for him! You are also then immediately worried about being worried for him, which is a complexity you never thought you would have to consider. Is this a quadrant thing? You don’t think much about quadrants and feelings, you’re still half a wiggler. You’re not so stupid that you don’t realize Vriska’s been angling for you pitch, of course, but mostly you prefer to ignore her advances as best as you can. You have better things to focus on, like that moongarden you’ve been planning, or the diversity of your Fidus deck. You recently got your hands on some awesome holo cards--
His breathing stutters and your pusher stutters too, and it hits you: you don’t want Karkat to die. He might not be your friend, he probably won’t ever want to be, but he’s not your enemy either. He’s just a kid. He’s just an unfortunate lowblood kid who never did anything to hurt anybody else, not unless they asked for it first. So: he’s a lot like you.
You can’t just leave him like this. You won’t. You are afire with the knowing of that, you feel it thrum through you.
You gather him up.
**
You’ve mended the wings of cluckbeasts before, splinted the limbs of the various woodland creatures around your hive. They’re your friends! Once you even nursed an abandoned cholerbear cub to adolescence on a foul slurry of grubmilk and hoofbeast marrow. Eventually it tore a chunk of flesh from your thigh, not that you felt it, then tried to kill you.
Karkat is a lot like the cholerbear cub in some ways. As you tuck glutinous viscera back inside him he snarls and thrashes and gnashes his tiny blunt underbite at you. He flails a lot. You think that if he could and if your thighs were still made of flesh he’d be tearing chunks out of them too, trying to destroy you, trying to take you apart. That is a gross metaphor. You wish you hadn’t thought of it. Ugh.
You stretch him out on a table. His table, his mealblock table. It’s got a wobbly leg. A saltshaker. (He knocks it on the floor. It shatters and you apologize to him even though it’s not your fault, because it was cute, shaped like a volcano.) You find a medi-kit under his sink, and you open it and you lean over the hole in his thorax next. There are things moving in the hole. Squishy, squirmy, vital things, things that belong to him. You have no idea what to do.
You use a lot of surgical glue and heavy black thread and tiny precise needles that feel stupid in your big clumsy hands, and when you click on the cauterizing pen to close him up he screams and screams and screams.
**
Later, past dawn and when you should be sleeping, you pick up Karkat a second time and stagger with him through the halls of his hive to his respiteblock. He’s not heavy, just awkward; your legs aren’t accustomed to bearing more weight than yours. With some fumbling you manage to get him into his ’coon. He sinks boneless into the slime, pale but for two pink fevered splotches high on his cheeks. As you scoop goopy handfuls over his hair and horns you notice a ghost of a smile twitch his mouth up. You see a gentle glint of fang, a quiet gleam. If it were a description on one of your Fidus cards it would be something like moonfrost on clouds. You rub at his aural fringe again, kind of awed, and he pushes his head into your hand and you wonder if that smile’s for you, for what you did and didn’t do, or if it’s because of the sopor.
You feel like maybe you shouldn’t wonder.
You don’t know what to do next, really. You’re tired but he doesn’t have an extra ’coon and you’re not about to climb into his with him. What if he dies in the day and you wake up spooning a corpse? What if he doesn’t die in the day and you wake up spooning him anyway? You don’t know if he’ll live. You don’t know what sopor will do to him so cut up and hurt, if it will fry his pan the same as it’s fried Gamzee’s. Maybe you have done Karkat a disservice and made him a vegetable, sinking him deep in slime.
Speaking of Gamzee, that gives you pause. He and Karkat are friends. Friends: Karkat has a few of those, none of them you. Should you call them now? Let them know what’s happened? You think of Terezi and how she reminds you of long, thin knives -- you think of Aradia, so pretty, so strong. You think of how they are both so much more capable than you. Maybe they could help Karkat more than you have already.
You look at him, floating. His sopor’s gone cloudy, almost brown, the filters clearing out the blood with a low metallic whmmmm. Do Terezi and Aradia suspect his problem? Does Gamzee? For all that Terezi’s obsessed with courts and law and justice you don’t think she’d fault Karkat for being off the hemospectrum. You don’t think she’d hurt him. Aradia wouldn’t, you’re sure, Aradia just wouldn’t give any shits, and Gamzee… you can’t imagine Gamzee hurting anyone.
But still. You think of Karkat, shouty stubborn Karkat with his anonymous gray text, and you think of walls and defenses and secrets, how he told you no, they couldn’t know. They don’t know. If he hasn’t told them, you shouldn’t either.
You are on your own.
**
Because dayterrors are a bitch and because Karkat’s couch is the most uncomfortable surface on-planet, ever, you settle for forgoing sleep and cleaning up his hive. You do not actually want to clean up his hive. What you want to do is go home. You miss your lusus a lot, so much, you wish you’d brought him with you. And in terms of lusii, when you go hunting for towels and detergents in the ablution chamber you find Karkat’s custodian locked inside, a massive ivory crustacean with clickity-sharp pincers and every intent of killing you. He rips up your sleeve and chips your left horn before you’re able to calm him down. Doesn’t that just make your day! But lusii are always harder than average beasts to commune with, being so attached to their kids -- you’re lucky you got him to stop at all, you’re lucky you still have all your limbs. Those claws are lethal. Your head really, really hurts.
You show him first to Karkat’s respiteblock, hovering in the doorway while the gigantic crab chirrups and clicks fretfully over his charge lolling in the slime. You expect him to stay there; he doesn’t. Whether because he doesn’t trust you to not fuck anything up or because he’s anxious, it could be either, he follows you out again. Eventually he overtakes you, leading you down a hall toward what you recognize -- with some squinting -- as a hidden side exit. You have a few in your own hive in case of emergencies.
You find the stiffening corpse of another troll crumpled in the escape chute. What’s left of it, anyway. It’s a mess of meat and dull congealed brown blood, darker than yours. Home invader? Kismesis attempt gone wrong? (You think of Vriska and shudder.) A sickle winks in the corpse’s thorax like the most wicked kind of smile, and you feel a stab of weird admiration for Karkat. The dead troll is -- was? -- at least a head taller than him, corded with muscle Karkat can’t expect to get for another sweep. One of its arms is completely severed. You can see the bone inside, rounded in rings the same way trees are.
You are debating how to deal with the body when Karkat’s custodian takes up the severed arm almost delicately and thrusts it between his mouthparts. There is a crunch and a goopy splatter, and more blood on the floor. The lusus eyes you balefully. That could be your arm. That could be you.
“Hey, I didn’t do, uh, any of this, so maybe you could, kind of, lighten up?” You hold your hands up and crouch down a little: submissive posture, soothing. The lusus grates his mouthparts together around the arm. His eyestalks flicker away from you, though, and he settles busily into the business of ingesting the dead troll piece by piece, a process you don’t stick around to watch because hrgh, urgghn.
**
Mopping up the mealblock takes you hours. Washing out all the towels takes longer.
You linger for nights. Three nights, actually. Exhaustion finally drops you into infrequent frail drowses on Karkat’s couch, terrible daymares aside. You graze on his chow and you go to pick up his allowance for him, even, the other trolls in his neighborhood giving you shifty, suspicious glances you try to shrug off with feigned hostile indifference, hostile because you don’t want to look like Karkat’s flushcrush. You don’t want to look like his anything, but if you’re going to look like something it might as well be his kismesis. Maybe if you act like you’re the only one who’s allowed to hurt him, no one else will try to again.
Come moonrise of the fourth day a scuffle rises from the back of Karkat’s hive. You go to investigate and find him out of his ’coon, somehow naked, how did he get naked, crawling across the respiteblock floor with a sickle clenched in his teeth. A trail of alarmingly bloody sopor sprawls out behind him. You are reminded of a caterpillar. A gross, ugly caterpillar.
He spots you standing horrified in the doorway and his expression is comprised of two parts murderous intent and one part something else, something that reminds you of the way he looked when he cried. You don’t think you could stand it if he cried again. You are a tangled nest of worry and nerves and three days of dry sleep. Tears would shatter you.
Before you can go to him, his lusus slams you bodily aside. You sort of watch their reunion half out the corner of your eye, ashamed to witness such tenderness: Karkat does cry and his arms keep slipping off his dad’s carapace, slick with sopor. You feel your own tears threatening because you want your lusus too. You rearranged a guy’s guts recently, okay, on purpose and without malice. You deserve a fucking hug.
Karkat is not going to give you a hug. Karkat only determines to snarl at you, and next thing you know there’s a sickle flying at you crossways from across the respiteblock. You dodge it, barely, and you stare at him as he screams through tears and thick viscous froth, “Go! Fucking -- go! I’ll kill you, I, go, kill you I’ll kill you I swear--”
Despite that you’ve been feeding him fresh roe three times a night and waxing his chitin, petting him ’til he chirrs, Karkat’s dad advances on you too in a rush of pistoning mandibles. You are scared. Beyond that, you are angry and spent and so fucking done. You did your best. You’ve earned your gold star, for all that you’re never going to get it. You ache. You also flee, blind with resigned hurt and familiar cerebral terror, and when you are far enough away from Karkat’s hive that you can’t smell red at all anymore, you charter a shuttlebug and head for home.
**
Karkat’s name pops up in your list again a few evenings later. You’re glad he’s not dead. But you don’t talk to him and he doesn’t talk to you, not again, and you don’t tell anyone what happened. You try not to think about it. Pretty soon you don’t have to try not to think about it because you just don’t think about it at all, and a perigee goes by. Your arms get lumpier.
But then:
carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling adiosToreador [TA]!
CG: I ALWAYS THOUGHT I WAS PRETTY GOOD AT NEEDLEWORK AND RELATED ELDERLY PASTIMES. I MEAN, I HEMMED A PAIR OF PANTS ONCE.
CG: BUT YOUR HEMMING SKILLS FAR SURPASS MINE AND WHILE I DON’T USUALLY GO OUT OF MY WAY TO ACKNOWLEDGE, MUCH LESS RAIN GODDAMN PRAISE ON THE GREATER PROWESSES OF OTHER TROLLS, I JUST WANTED TO SAY
CG: THANKS FOR THE WICKED SCARS.
carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling adiosToreador [TA]!
AT: }:)