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Your name is Karkat Vantas and things are going okay. Relatively speaking. Correction, things are going better than they have been, which has been pretty fucking terribly ever since you got on this ship with two exes, a Chainsaw-Happy vampire you kind of know whose every spare moment seemed to be taken up with being enamored by her often-soporific human wizard datemate, and your enemy (not in a spades way. No, because that would be too satisfying. Human enemy). And whatever the fuck the mayor is, but he’s not much in the ways of company given your complete lack of a shared language or motivations. It’s usually least painful for you to spend your time alone, because at least you have some control over how much you hate yourself and what you say to your past self/future self/current self in your weird, pathetic selfcest chat rooms.
Things are going better than the first few months (maybe weeks, time gets weird when the sun never sets) of your own personal hell because after a while, your not-quite-spades enemy stopped being quite so not-quite-spades towards you. In the sense that he turned the spades knob a bit closer to the much more comfortable zero, as opposed to ratcheting it up to a more titillating 100. In a moment of startling candidness, he communicates something along the lines of hey, can we drop the whole hating each other thing, I’m kind of exhausted by it and I think we’d both enjoy this shit more if we tried to get along. By “startling candidness,” you mean that you only need to translate through two layers of irony, nudges and winks to get at the sideways allusion a few hours after the conversation.
Of course, when you agreed to it, you hadn’t done so with anything approaching frankness, either. You’d told him that you still found humans on the whole to be a soft and repugnant species, but you were curious about they managed to get so far in their evolution. How were they not wiped out by the first hint of a predator? Translation: I think you’re okay, and I’ve decided to give you a chance in the friend arena. Here’s a neutral talking point to start with. Dave had responded with some fascinating lessons about human evolution, most of which you couldn’t imagine were remotely true (and you told him as much, every time something struck you as absurd, and a few more for good measure).
-
“Have you ever actually looked around this thing?”
“Of course I’ve looked around it, what kind of useless wiggler wouldn’t check their surroundings as soon as they-“
He floats off in that annoying god tier way (you’re not jealous, gravity is a perfectly good law that you are glad to adhere to, thank you very much) and moves a panel on the side of a wall and it. Moves. You pick your jaw up off the floor before he turns back to face you.
“So yeah you’ve probably seen this like four hundred and eighty two times already, but there’s some areas I haven’t checked out yet if you wanna come.”
The two of you travel down multiple dark, tight, dank hallways that seem to go on forever. The walls are clammy and disgusting when you accidentally bump into one.
“What the hell is this place made of?”
“The wishes and tears of newborn babies, probably.”
“It’s gross enough to be at least partly human baby.” You shudder and wipe your hand on your pants again, trying to get the tacky residue off.
“Would trolls be less disgusting building material? Little horns poking out of the concrete mix, push that shit back in there unless you want to impale yourself on a dead baby-“
“Oh my god, please, I don’t actually want to think about dead wrigglers jutting out from the floor, that image is going to haunt me whenever I close my eyes.”
“Shit, dude. It’s not so bad. They were donated to science, it’s not like they-“
“Stop!”
“Anyway, there’s a room over this way, hurry up.”
He leads you to this weird enclave with a bunch of rooms, glowing from the light of built-in windows that reflect the eerie, ever-shining sun outside. You note that he actually does stop talking about the weird baby shit, and doesn’t bring it up again. You’re pleasantly surprised and incredibly relieved, because that conversation was legitimately starting to creep you out, and he actually just let it go.
The two of you come up with a sort of game pretty quickly – that is, decorate the creepy, barren mystery room with whatever the hell you can think of from their alchemiter. You don’t tell the others about it because you’re awkward and selfish and like having this quiet, semi-private cranny. You don’t know why Dave doesn’t tell anyone, and you don’t ask. You rib each other for your decorating choices. His aesthetics are unspeakably horrible – clashing colors and styles, nothing working in tandem with anything else, almost aggressive randomness. He gives back just as good as he gets. You don’t know what “emo” means, but you’re pretty sure it’s an insult and nothing close to what your style is, and you hate it on principle of the smirk he has on his face when he calls you it. Both of your styles together in the shared room is … pretty fucking ugly, to be frank, but you find yourself weirdly charmed by it. With each awful addition, the place grows on you more.
He eventually stops tensing when he runs into you, which is strange to notice, because you hadn’t realized he was tensing up in the first place. He’s still guarded, always, but less than before. He seems significantly more guarded than any of the other humans you’ve encountered, and you know that the labyrinthine way that he communicates is unusual for his species. But you don’t know what to make of that.
Dave installs a “turntable” in the shared room one day. It plays music that he changes with his hands through some kind of weird human technology. You’re sure you could understand it, it’s probably beyond elementary, but he refuses to explain what he’s doing. The two of you make songs together. You don’t understand jack shit about the machine, so you sing what you want to have happen in the song. Dave’s eyebrows raise the first time you do and you see a hint of smile.
“Wow. I didn’t know you could actually control that. Does that mean you talk the way you do on purpose? If so, why? Please explain, I’ll accept a short essay or one minute speech-“
“Shut up and make it happen in the song.”
He presses a few buttons and the song changes, and it’s good. He nods in approval and does something else to it.
It’s not a bad way to pass time, making songs together.
At some point he records your voice and mixes it into a song. It’s awful and cringey at first because god, is that really what you sound like? It’s so much better in your own head, and you hate to think this is what other people hear. It’s so high and small and pathetic.
“Delete it, it doesn’t work, it makes song audially stink like festering dog shit.”
Dave doesn’t delete it, but he tweaks it. He applies a few filters to it until it’s barely recognizable. And that, you can work with.
“Better?”
“Yeah. What did you do?”
“Ancient Chinese secret, young one.”
“What the fuck is Chinese? No, let me guess, is it another Earth reference I have literally no hope of understanding?”
“You know it, dog, the most Earthiest of all Earth references, earthier than a potted plant growing into the ground, loamy taste of mud between your teeth, crunching sound of roots growing without a state of anchor-“
And he’s off. There’s no stopping him when he goes off. But he’s in rhythm with the song, and you’d be lying if you said you weren’t hella impressed by how easily he seems to bend words together in a way that’s so much more enjoyable to hear than the laughably cacophonous screeches you sometimes try out when you’re alone.
-
One day you're mixing a song together, combining Alternian pop influence with a genre that Dave calls "funky time blues." You have no way of knowing if funky time blues was a real Earth genre or he’s just fucking with you, but it doesn’t really matter, because both of your planets are fucking gone anyways. And the mix between Alternian pop and human funky time blues, it’s not bad.
Dave hits some buttons and the baseline pitches up, up up up into something ridiculous and awful. You cover your ears and groan in mock pain.
“God, Strider, less of whatever the fuck you’re doing, for the love of everything that’s good and everything I’ve ever cared about.”
“More of this, you say?” he asks and turns it louder. It’s starting to border on painful.
“No, you masticating wad of fecal refuse, turn it down!”
He smirks and turns it down one notch, and it’s all you can think about. Smartass with his dumb smug grin, he knows exactly what he’s doing. You punch him on the shoulder and tell him to cut it out, he goes complete still. The grin falls from his face. Without speaking, he shuts the turntable off and gets up. Something’s wrong.
“Uh, Dave?”
And he’s gone, without a word, blinked out of your vision with time bullshit.
Why?
It couldn’t have been the insult, you’ve called him much worse in the past. Was it the punch? It seemed like it was the punch. But it doesn’t make sense for it to have been the punch. As far as you can tell, that was a completely appropriate time for a punch to happen. Trolls use physical force to communicate pretty frequently, and in troll culture, that was a perfectly acceptable – but Dave isn’t a troll, you fucking numbnuts. Fuck, it was probably the punch. Humans didn’t have that social code, and you probably just communicated something like the human-black attraction, where you don’t actually want anything except to murder each other. You should go tell him that’s not what you want to do.
You make your way down the creepy, damp hallway back to the main area of the ship, and knock on the door to his room. He doesn’t answer. You call his name, but he doesn’t respond.
You really fucked up, didn’t you?
You leave him be for now. It’s clear he wants nothing to do with you, and you’ll probably just make things worse if you try to force it.
-
The next few days suck. You try to distract yourself but you end up spending most of it thinking about how badly you’ve fucked up with the only person who can stand you. You think about asking Lalonde for some advice, but you’re pretty sure that would burn to a crisp what chances you have left to possibly fix things with Dave. So you wait.
You bump into him once. He doesn’t seem to see you.
“Dave. Listen-“
He tenses up like a deer in headlights. “Can’t, actually, I’m late for something that’s super fucking real, the realest shit you’ve ever seen, you can’t fucking believe how real this engagement is,” he says, and he’s gone in a split second.
You. Really fucked up.
But you’d be lying if you said you weren’t pretty fucking pissed that he won’t tell you how you fucked up. This is what always happens, isn’t it? You start to trust someone, then accidentally figure out how to upset them the most, because you are a useless excuse for a breathing lifeform that is doomed to a solitary death.
Fuck this. It sucks. Fuck it.
-
About a week passes before he talks to you again. You’re hanging out in your room alone – you’ve had plenty of time to do that lately, like the lonely, pathetic sack of shit you are, having alienated literally everyone on the fucking ship, some of them multiple times over, with your blithering ineptitude – trying to watch one of your favorite movies, Perennial Bridesmaid Jane Is Distraught As Her Younger Sister Tess Snags The Man That Jane Secretly Loves, Prompting Jane To Question Her Role As A Perpetual Wedding Planner; Meanwhile, A Charming Reporter Named George Sees Career Potential In Jane’s Unusual Story; Much Hilarity And Heartwarming Pathos Ensues As George And Jane Dance Around Each Other And Eventually Consecrate Their Flushed Quadrant Attractions For Each Other. Then there’s a note on your lap. You pause your movie to read it.
meet me in the mutual room for a jam sesh if you want
ps this movie is unforgivably awful and the fact that youre watching it alone of your own volition has made me lose what little respect i had for you
Your heart hammers in your chest with hope and dreadful anticipation, so much that you don’t even really care about his dig at a fan-fucking-tastic piece of filmic art. You throw the note to the side of your makeshift couch, then hurry to the shared room.
Dave still stiffens when he sees you, and you still feel terrible. Terrible enough that goddammit you don’t let him speak first and goddammit you don’t let him draw this out longer than it has to be drawn out.
“Can we talk about what happened?” You force out. It … you don’t like speaking this candidly. You really, really hope the two of you can sort this out soon, because it’s painful and weird and wrong.
Dave takes a slow breath through his nose. “Do all trolls just punch each other out of the blue? Or am I special?” He tries to play it off cool, casual, like a joke, but his whole body is tense. He seems just as uncomfortable as you, but he’s talking to you, which is. Good.
So, it was the punch.
“It’s a thing with trolls. We punch each other. I thought you would be okay with it.”
He relaxes a bit.
“Did it hurt that bad? I didn’t think it was that hard.”
And he tenses back up.
“Nah. It doesn’t matter. Anyway. Been working on a new song.” He presses play before you have a chance to respond.
Translation: I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Do not bring it back up or I will leave.
Dave plays the song, and you listen.
-
Over the few days, you piece together something that starts to make sense. Of course, you do have to piece it together, because Dave is cagey at the best of times and now he’s stressed. But you’re able to string together bits and pieces to form a bit of a picture. You get the impression that he wants to tell you about something, but for whatever reason, it is incredibly painful for him. So you wait, and you fit together the pieces he gives you. Little phrases, apropos of nothing, blink-and-you-miss-it, half mumbled half the time.
Also, you do. Not. Hit. Him. Again.
You piece together that human lusi are called “family,” and his was weird by human standards. They don’t tend to hit each other, but your pretty sure his family hit him, a lot, and before he had any hope of defending himself. Honestly, you can’t really wrap your head around it. You feel like you’re missing a lot of the pieces you would need to make sense of it, missing the context for human ward-guardian relationships. A lusus killing its own ward was rare, awful and horrifying, but it was a known occurrence for trolls. But you can’t fathom what would make a lusus attack its ward if it didn’t want to cull them or train them. It seemed especially cruel, like a purrbeast that wasn’t taught to kill batting a mouse around just to listen to it scream in terror. The pieces seemed to be pointing that Dave’s lusus treated him like that. And … if that was the case, you can see why he doesn’t like to be reminded of it.
“Is it safe to say your guardian was kind of fucking terrible?” you ask him one night, when it’s playing on your mind and you’re tired enough to let it slip by your filter. You’re incredibly nervous when you realize what you've said. You've talked around it before, but never this directly, and you’re not sure Dave won’t just leave rather than answer.
Dave laughs weakly. “He … yeah, maybe. Yeah. Shit. Yeah.” There’s a beat of silence, but before it lingers more than that, he cuts it off. “But check it, if you look at the water damage on that wall at this one angle it kind of looks like a dick.”
-
Gradually things settle back to a pre-punch normal again. You’re both back to talking mostly in vague allusions and riddle, but there was something really comforting about knowing that, if the worst thing happened, you guys could, theoretically talk about it and actually address it. As uncomfortable as it would be, you could do it. It was possible.
And on your end, it’s kind of an overwhelming relief that you’re allowed to mess up, and that Dave won’t just. Leave. He might take some time to himself if he needed to, but for some reason, he thinks you’re worth dealing with enough that you can reach a middle ground. It takes a weight off your back that you hadn’t known was there, but without it, you just. Life is easier, somehow. Things aren’t as painful.
Dave seems to be more relaxed, too. You’re not sure what exactly was so cathartic for him, and you can’t ask, but you feel like you’re both more comfortable actually talking about shit (cloaked like an onion in at least four layers of subterfuge). You’re curious what he’s thinking. You want to know what in particular went through his head, what was so upsetting and why, but you can tell that’s not something Dave has the remotest interest in touching, maybe ever. And when a wound is as open and throbbing as that, it’s best to leave it alone to close up before you try to poke it. You hope he can open up to you about it someday. But if he doesn’t, well, the two of you will figure something out.