Work Text:
Karkat passes you the joint and you take it, dully. The two of you lie in silence in your shared foxhole, surrounded by the unending forest din that means safety, for now. You're alive; some of your men aren't. You try to feel grateful but all you've got is emptiness.
You breathe in and hold it, thinking about the weight of the smoke in your lungs so that you don't have to think about anything else.
“Hey, Eridan,” he says after a while. He doesn't call you Captain, or even Cap; he's the only one who doesn't. You tried for weeks to break him to the habit and then gave it up as a lost cause. It wasn't the first time his stubbornness overcame your tendency to stand on ceremony, your growing apathy.
“What,” you say after a delay.
You pass the joint back and feel the rough scrape of his dirty fingers as he takes it from you. There's a long silence. You're covered in insect bites and mud and shit and god knows what else; your eyes feel itchy, overtaxed. A frog croaks somewhere.
“Happy birthday,” Karkat says.
You think about that for a minute. “Last birthday, I went out with my girl,” you say.
“Yeah?” he says.
“I took her out to the diner, then drove out to the lake. We went skinny dippin'. I thought we'd get caught, but we didn't. We were out there for hours.” It's like it was yesterday: the feel of her warm skin in your hands, the flash of her wet limbs under the moonlight. You try to remember Feferi's face, and can't. “She let me kiss her for the first time,” you murmur.
He passes you the joint and you stare at it, thinking about the seal of his lips around the paper. Then you lift it to your mouth.
For all that Karkat's a loud-mouthed asshole, he knows how to shut up and listen, too. That's why he's your favorite. He looks at you like you're more than a piece of shit officer leading them all to certain death, like you're a friend.
“She broke up with me last month,” you say.
Karkat knows this already, had to hold your head to muffle your crying the night you got the letter. “Sorry,” he says anyway.
You lean over and kiss him, a small and misguided brush against the side of his mouth. He just looks at you. Then he takes the joint and takes a hit, never breaking eye contact.
“It's my birthday,” you say. “I forgot all about it. What kind of fuckin' awful birthday this was.”
“Yeah, well, you're not dead and you're still in one piece, mostly. Seems like a pretty fucking great birthday to me,” Karkat says dryly, his words wreathed in smoke. Then he stubs out the joint, tucks it safely back into his pocket.
“We should sleep,” he says.
“Yeah,” you mutter, eyes already drifting closed. You turn in opposite directions, burrowing down into the loam and the dirt, tucked up against each other. You count the sharp press of each of his vertebrae against your back, letting the numbers certify his existence, letting his existence lull you to sleep.