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In retrospect, getting Karkat wildly high when he was only running on a few hours of sleep may not have been your best idea. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, you live and you learn, blah blah fucking blah.
You mean, it wasn’t your fault that he was looking so goddamn pitiful with those big bags under his eyes and his hair all disheveled like he hadn’t slept in days (you found out later that he actually hadn’t.) And it’s also not your fault that you happened to have weed and he was tense as all fuck, shoulders pinched up to his ears and eyebrows crashing together up on his forehead like they were long lost lovers.
Maybe it was your fault that you let him smoke so much, but could you really help yourself when he was looking at you with his big doe eyes like you held the fucking key to the universe?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: hell no.
Longer answer: you’re weak.
He’s looking at you again. You bring your bowl closer to your chest and shake your head. “No man, you’ve had enough.”
He pouts at you, and his expression is almost reminiscent of the faces he normally makes when you piss him off, except he’s too lucid to gather the energy to actually look mad. “Nuh-uh,” he argues.
“Yeah-huh,” you counter. “One more drag and you’ll be drooling on yourself.”
This makes him laugh, but it’s more of a snort. He stands up, “Are you hungry?”
You lift one shoulder, grunt noncommittally. You watch him rifle around in the freezer, sifting through HotPockets and frozen pizzas, apparently finding nothing to satisfy his hunger and then moving to the pantry instead. He ends up grabbing some Pop Tarts, and contemplates the design on the box before asking, “Why do they call them Pop Tarts?”
You look up from where you’d taken to staring at his back. “Dude, what?”
“They don’t pop,” he explains, perplexed. “And they’re not tart.”
“They do so pop.”
“No they don’t.”
“Yeah, they pop out of the toaster .”
“ Oh. ” He looks back down at the box, and then snaps his head up again. “But they’re not tart.”
“No dude, tart is like,” you make a few circular gestures with your hands, “another word for a pastry or whatever.”
He nods. “That’s stupid.”
You shrug. “Bring it up with Kellogg. Write them a strongly worded letter about their destructive misuse of common synonyms. Tell them English isn’t your first language and that their packaging confuses you, I’m sure they’ll give you a lifetime supply of Pop Tarts as compensation for your daily struggles.”
He’s not listening to you. “Do you want one?”
“Yeah.”
You watch him put the pastries in the toaster and then just bumble around the kitchen a little, adjusting things here and there, opening and closing cupboards. He’s moving differently, easily and fluidly, such a stark opposite from how he usually is. You can literally see how all the tension has seeped out of his body, replaced by relaxed and carefree movements. His shoulders aren’t up by his ears anymore, and his back isn’t rigid with stress. Even his wrists and knees are looser, bending effortlessly instead of being stiffened straight.
Maybe you should get him high more often; it looks like it’s doing him some good. The amount of stress he constantly puts himself under isn’t healthy, but at least with the help of your Friendly Neighborhood Cannabis™ you can worry a little less about his heart giving out.
The toaster pops and it visibly startles him. He makes a small noise in the back of his throat and goes over to it, taking out the first Pop Tart with his hand. “Ow.” He takes the other one out the same way. “Ow, fuck.”
“Careful,” you call from the couch. “Those might be hot.”
“Thanks for the memo,” he grumbles.
A minute or two later he joins you on the couch with two plates, each holding a single Pop Tart.
He hands one to you and you take it with a laugh. “Thanks.” Then you notice the fork in his hand. You squint and point at it. “Why the hell did you bring that?”
He looks at you like you just insulted his mother. “Because I wasn’t raised in a fucking barn?”
You raise your eyebrows and watch as he picks up the fork and just kind of… presses it into the middle of the pastry so it’s sticking straight up. He purses his lips.
“Hm.” He picks up the fork and tries to turn it around but ends up accidentally flinging the tart across the room where it hits the corner of the TV and falls onto the floor. He looks up at you, eyes narrowed. “Don’t,” he warns.
But it’s too late. Your finger has already gently caressed the play button on your phone. Serene music begins to waft through the air.
“ Mmm watcha say… ”
The sneer Karkat had been mustering up quickly dissolves into a little grin that he tries in vain to suppress.
You let the clip you downloaded for purely ironic purposes play a few seconds longer before setting your phone back on the couch next to you. “Here,” you say, handing your plate to Karkat. “Try not to use this one as a projectile this time.”
“Yeah, fuck you,” he replies half-heartedly, already eating the pastry.
You just shake your head and go put the drugs far, far away from him, back in the closet in your room where they belong. When you come back to the couch Karkat has finished the Pop Tart and is flipping through channels on the TV. He doesn’t seem to notice when you sit next to him.
You stretch out on the couch, letting your back and neck crack with your movements. Your arm hangs over the back of the sofa, not quite around Karkat but not quite not around Karkat either. He pays no attention to it.
A relaxed sigh escapes through your nose as you settle into the cushions. You’re feeling pretty chilled out now as well, though not nearly as faded as Karkat. You’ve smoked enough weed in your life to not be as affected as him, but you have to say you’re surprised he’s never smoked it before, considering who his best friend is.
“Hey, how come you never smoked with Gamzee?” you ask, voice lazy and hardly adding enough inflection to your statement for it to be considered a question at all.
Karkat turns to you with a cheeky grin and starts to laugh, as if you just asked him why he’s never jumped off a cliff.
“Are you kidding?” he says in answer. “Gamzee’s stupid.”
You huff a small laugh. “Yeah, and?”
“I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him,” Karkat continues. “And, you know, I can’t even pick him up! So, basically…”
He seems to be struggling with his sentence, so you pick it back up for him. “You’re saying you don’t trust him to make sure you don’t do anything stupid while you’re high?”
Karkat considers this for a few moments then nods. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah, that’s… I mean I love Gamzee and everything but he has the intelligence of like… a particularly dumb rock so…”
You raise your eyebrows; Karkat’s insults are not nearly as creative and scathing when he’s high. You mark that down in a mental note to remember later.
“You trust me though?” you ask quietly.
“Yeah of course,” Karkat answers quickly. “You tell me when I’m being a dumb asshole all the time,” he laughs, “you wouldn’t let me, I don’t know, call Terezi and leave an embarrassing voicemail or something.”
Something at the bottom of your throat pinches and you have to swallow to clear it. “Sounds like a pretty specific example,” you implore.
He groans a bit. “Yeah that was a clusterfuck,” he says with a slanted smile. He doesn’t seem too beat up about it.
“I’ll keep you from making a massive tool out of yourself, don’t worry,” you reassure. “That’s just for tonight though, I can’t make any promises for when you’re by yourself. You’re pretty much a massive tool all the time, constantly.”
“Yeah, says the massivest tool in the fucking state,” he prods playfully. “And you know, Texas is full of tools. It’s basically a… what’s that word?”
“What word?”
“The one that means a place to hold tools?”
You pause. “A toolbox?”
“No, no.” He waves his hand around. “It’s bigger than that.”
“A… garage?” you try.
“Yes!” Karkat’s hand flings upwards in victory, very narrowly avoiding a collision with your face. “A garage! Seattle is like a garage full of tools but you’re still the biggest one! You’re like a fucking… chainsaw or something.”
“Wow Karkat, you got me there,” you drawl slowly. “That insult really cut me to the core, you know? Here I was thinking that we were friends and you hit me with something like this? God damn.”
Karkat shoves his elbow into your side. “You’re dumb.”
You dramatically bring a hand to your chest, letting out a small gasp. “Another one? I’m wounded, dude. Why you gotta hurt me like this?”
He just shakes his head and goes back to the television. He puts it on some kind of documentary about space travel and you start to tune out.
You pull out your phone instead and look through a few of your social media feeds, checking messages and responding to a few that you have clever answers for. While scrolling aimlessly through some comments on a post you made last week you hear Karkat say something to you in Spanish. Your Spanish is god awful so you turn to him and raise an eyebrow, but he just says it again, slower.
You vaguely gesture to your face and body as if to say, “I’m too white for this,” and he seems to understand.
“Let’s go outside,” he says.
Despite him speaking English you’re still confused. “Literally why would we do that?”
Karkat points to the TV, and you eye the space documentary warily. “I wanna look at the stars.”
“In Texas?” you ask incredulously. “At night? During the summer?”
You nearly ask him if he’s fucking high before you realize yeah, actually, he is.
“Dude if you wanna go outside and get eaten alive by mosquitos then be my guest,” you finally say. “But fuck if I’m gonna do that.”
You resist telling him that it’s pretty fucking gay for two guys to lay outside and look at the stars together, but you hold your tongue.
Karkat shrugs and stands up defiantly. “Well I’m gonna go look at the stars,” he declares.
He takes a blanket off the couch and walks out the front door, only to immediately come back in. At least two bugs find their way into your house in the time it takes him to close the door.
“Gave up that fast huh?” You shake your head. “I warned you about the bugs dude. I told you dog.”
“It’s cloudy,” he says, pouting. He tosses the blanket back onto the couch. “It’s also fucking hot.”
“That’s good old Texas for you.”
Karkat plops down next to you once again and turns the volume up on the TV. He seems just upset enough to make you feel a little bad so you stand up and sigh.
“Let’s go to my room,” you offer. You turn the TV off and start walking until Karkat follows you.
Once in your room you open up the drawer in your desk where you keep all the photos that didn’t make it onto your wall or in your portfolio. You pull a few out and start handing them to Karkat, who takes them gently.
“These are from a few months ago,” you say, rifling through the drawer. “I was trying to take pictures of the meteor shower but I couldn’t get the exposure right so I just took a bunch of random pics of the stars. Kinda lame.”
“Dave, these are--” He stops mid sentence to point at a specific photo. “This is cancer!”
“What?” You look over at him, trying to make sense of the jumble of stars he’s pointing to. You don’t really know any of the constellations, put you’re guessing the one his finger is on is cancer. “Oh yeah, I guess so.”
He flips through the photos in his hands. “I think I saw andromeda somewhere around here.”
After finding the picture he was looking for he starts to talk about the lore behind the andromeda constellation. You don’t really listen to him, just kind of stare at his face for a second. You knew he was into space and everything, but you had no idea he knew so much about mythology and shit too. It’s weird enough to see him so calm and relaxed, but seeing him talk about something he’s passionate about too is definitely throwing you off. He’s like a completely different person.
Your thoughts are interrupted when Karkat moves over to your bed and you lose your view. He sits down and looks up at you, having gone through all the pictures.
He points at the drawer. “Can I see the rest?”
“Uh.” You rub at your neck, self conscious. The reason why those pictures are in a box in your desk is because they aren’t good enough to be anywhere else.
You turn around, shifting through the other photos in the box, trying to decide if you really wanna show them to anyone. You don’t know if it’s the weed talking or if you’re having a momentary lapse in judgement, but you take the box out anyways and bring it to your bed.
Karkat’s moved to lay on his back and you join suit, putting the box between you. He seems delighted to look at them and asks you about each one.
A lot of them are just pictures of random objects or the sky, but there are a few of your friends. There’s one of John and Jade from a party last summer, and one of Rose from when she first adopted her cat. There are actually an embarrassing amount of cat pictures....
In most of them though, everyone’s faces are obscured. You tend to only photograph hands, or the backs of people’s heads, or you take the picture at an angle where you just can’t see anyone’s face. You’re not really sure why you do that; you’d say it’s just an artistic choice but you’re not really sure.
“Is this me?” Karkat asks, bringing you back to the present. He’s holding a polaroid taken from over someone’s shoulder, capturing their gray sweater and the book in their lap.
“Uh, yeah it is,” you answer. “I think that’s from a few weeks ago? When you and Sollux came over to play Tekken.”
You say “I think,” as if you don’t remember the exact day that you took the picture. You suddenly feel weird and exposed, like Karkat’s going to rip all your pictures in half any moment.
Karkat smiles. “Yeah I remember that,” he muses. “Sollux only wanted to play so he could brag about how good he is at video games and kick my ass.”
“To be fair, you’re pretty bad at them.”
He glares at you, but it’s tired and soft. “At least I actually have decent taste,” he sends back. “Before Sollux and I intervened all you had were three different pirated versions of Tony Hawk’s skateboarding games.”
“Hey listen, don’t diss my Tony Hawk games.”
His eyes widen. “One of them crashed your XBox! Twice!”
You have nothing clever to say about that so you keep your mouth shut. You watch Karkat go through some more of the pictures and pay attention to the expressions he makes when different people show up. He ends up yawning several times in a few minutes and you raise your eyebrows.
“You wanna go to bed?”
He nods but doesn’t make any move to get up. The photos make a scratching noise as he shuffles through them, blinking slowly. After you see him yawn another two times you gently take the pictures away from him and put them back in the box.
“Alright,” you say, standing up. You bring the box back to its place in your desk drawer and turn around again to see Karkat looking at you.
“What?”
“There weren’t any pictures of you,” Karkat say quietly, rubbing his eyes like a child. “In the box.”
You squint and wrinkle your nose, memories of all the embarrassing selfies you took in middle school coming back to you.
“And you couldn’t even see anyone’s face,” he adds.
You shrug. “Yeah, so?”
Karkat mirrors your shrug, though it’s a little subdued from him laying down. “Aren’t pictures supposed to be for faces? To capture memories and people and stuff? It’d be sad if in twenty years you only had memories of people’s hands.”
If it was anyone else telling you this you’d be upset. But this is Karkat, and he has a habit of over-romanticising everything and you guess he’s kind of right? His suggestion that in twenty years all your friends are gonna be gone for some reason and you’ll only have pictures of them is depressing, but you see where he’s coming from.
“You just want me to take a picture of your face right?” you joke. “Wow Karkat, so self-absorbed that you take advantage of local talent and don’t even pay me a commission? I’m appalled.”
Karkat snorts and turns his head so half of it disappears into your pillow. “Right, because I’m the self-absorbed one in this room,” he says sarcastically. “Don’t think I forgot about all those dumbass selfies you took when you were thirteen.”
You shake your head. “Even then, my composition and use of lighting was fantastic,” you say. “How can I be ashamed when I have all this raw talent? But good try though.”
Karkat rolls his eyes, stretching a little on your bed. “We should take a picture,” he suggests.
“Of what?”
“Us.”
You pause, tongue working into your cheek. The digital camera you normally use is sitting on your bedside table and you pick it up, handling it nervously.
“I dunno dude,” you voice casually. You join him again on your bed. “Not really my style.”
He slides up next to you once you’re situated, lifting his head up to get a closer look at your camera. “You can just put it in your damn box then,” he says. “Or give it to me.”
“You are truly the master of convincing people to do things,” you retort.
“I am the master,” he confirms. “It’s me.”
You turn on the camera and hold it up, trying to find a halfway decent angle. “Man the lighting is ass in here,” you mutter. “And the camera won’t even focus on me, dude. Sorry, secret’s out, I’m actually a vampire, no pictures tonight.”
“I thought vampires just couldn’t use mirrors?”
You purse your lips. “Isn’t it both?”
“Fuck if I know, Dave.”
You have to move around a lot to get the camera to recognize your face and you end up much closer to Karkat than originally anticipated. The only thing keeping you from being nearly chest to chest is Karkat’s arm.
You look up at the display on the camera. This definitely isn’t the best you’ve ever looked, but it isn’t necessarily the worst either. You and Karkat have been in your pajamas basically all day, and he looks just as disheveled as ever. Your shades have been off for hours, sitting on your desk instead, and seeing your own tired eyes on the screen is kind of bizarre.
Karkat smiles up to the lens, soft and sleepy. “Should we say cheese?”
You huff out a laugh. “Absolutely not.”
You finally move to take the picture and Karkat smiles wider, more pointedly. You look at his image on the screen and press the button.
You take a few more, changing the angle a few times, but Karkat has stopped looking at the camera. He’s looking at you instead.
You put your arm down and bring the camera closer, showing Karkat the last photo you snapped.
“You like it?” you ask.
He keeps his eyes on you but hums out an affirmative sound. His hand is curled up in the front of your t-shirt, nervously rumpling the fabric.
You drop the camera onto the bed when he kisses you. The weed from earlier has made him so calm that you can feel it in the way he kisses you, like he’s in no rush. He takes his time, brushing his lips against yours in several small pecks before pushing any further.
Karkat bites down on your bottom lip, not hard enough to hurt but enough to get your attention. Your hand finds his side, fingers skimming up under his shirt to lightly scrape against his skin.
He’s still a little high and you’d feel wrong for trying anything else with him, so you just kiss him with as much self-control as you have. He pulls you closer and your forgotten camera gets stuck between you until you push it away.
You’re not sure how long you lay there together, but Karkat eventually slows down and starts sleepily nuzzling his face into your neck. He falls asleep within a few minutes and you do the same, body tangled with his.
The next day you print out the pictures you took together, and put them on your wall.