Archive of Our Own ^beta

There is only a finite amount of things one can remember after all, and you’ve already re-read everything your admittedly impeccable memory has to offer. The last visitor had not brought anything worthwhile with them- for you, at least. Cronus had been rather taken with some strange books lately but you are trying not to pry into his business as often as you have been wont to do as of late, and in doing so you have removed the only source of mental stimulation more taxing than just laying on the grass and staring at the clouds. 

They’re lazy clouds. Almost as lazy as you, laying about with nothing to do but run through a list of triggers connected to the topic of your latest essay and try to find strange shapes in the puffs of white water vapour. 

So with that said, and the general insipidity of the dream bubbles expounded on, you were quite surprised when your little cloud-watching expedition was rather violently interrupted. 

You are aware that visitors to your particular bubble tend to have some issues in the ‘landing on the ground’ department, not that you’re shaming them for their lack of coordination and/or ground locating abilities- nevertheless, you are aware of that fact, but you were still not expecting a rather heavy body to fall right on top of you. Again, not that you were trying to weight shame of all things, but when an object falls from quite a height, the speed collected makes impact that much more forceful and laws of physics also tend to apply to people. 

“Karkat?”

For indeed, the person who had relocated from the sky to your stomach was, in fact, your dancestor. 

“Karkat, while I am quite pleased with your eagerness to rejoin me for another lectu- lesson in various tags and triggers, I do wish you would consider-“

You are quite taken aback when you are shoved rather roughly back to the ground, Karkat gripping two handfuls of your sweater tightly, thin fingers trembling. 

“Kankri.”

His voice is harsh, cracked and pained, and for a moment you are actually shocked into silence. 

“Kankri, for the love of the Sufferer please shut your bromidic, trite, repetitious fucking mouth. I am not in the mood to deal with the banal shit you spew from every orifice like some sort of goddamn social justice fire hydrant.”

You open your bromidic, trite, repetitious, fucking offended mouth to spew some trigger warnings in your ancestor’s direction, but there’s a soft noise, like a choked off sob, something harsh and primal and painful. Something that makes your stomach twist and your heart ache, something that makes you freeze with your hands hovering awkwardly over your dancestor, because you are not in any way prepared to deal with this. 

Karkat’s shoulders shudder, and a small, translucent drop of red lands on your sweater. Then another, and another, until you can no longer convince yourself he is not crying, because it is so blatantly obvious that even your skill in denying the glaringly evident has met its match. It has met its match in the undeniable event of Karkat Vantas crying egregiously red tears into your egregiously red sweater. 

“Oh,” you say, the soft sound slipping from your lips before you can hold it back. When you sit up, he slides to your lap, and you can’t help but wrap your arms around him despite his triggers regarding contact and the breech of personal space. He goes willingly when you pull him to your chest though, and when you squeeze in what you hope is a decent facsimile of a hug he responds by clutching you even closer so you think your contravention of etiquette can be forgiven, at least this once. 

“Karkat, whatever is the matter?” you ask, careful to keep your tone calm and soft. You speak to him like you would a wounded animal, or perhaps one triggered by loud noises, and you ghost one hand ever so lightly through his hair. You think you remember Porrim doing such things to comfort you, once upon a time, but it had been so long that even your stellar memories had faded, leaving you with nothing but the vaguest idea of what to do when confronted with a distraught individual. Due to your blood, you were never really considered the assertive partner on the rare occasion you allowed yourself to dabble in conciliatory matters; you were always the pacified, never the one doing the pacifying, so you are afraid to admit you are completely out of your comfort zone, you are completely, horrifically lost-

And then he looks up. 

He looks up, looks at you, and oh, his eyes! His beautiful eyes, once flecked with red, are now as white as your own and you feel like you’ve been hit in the stomach. 

“Oh no…"

He doesn’t say anything, just buries his face in your chest and cries, cries like he never has before, and maybe he hasn’t. You aren’t trying to be obtuse or shameful in any manner, but Alternia was a much harsher, much more violent place than Beforus, and such societies came with their own set of rules and customs. 

Maybe no one has ever held young Karkat like this. Maybe he’s never been given a safe place to vent his fears and sorrows. It saddens you that such an opportunity has only graced him in death. 

“Oh, dear, shh, shh,” you sigh, running your fingers a bit more firmly through his hair, “It will be alright, cry as you need, I shall be here when you wish to talk. I’m sure you did your best, Karkat-“

“If I’d done my best I wouldn’t fucking be here!” he snarls, but his voice is distorted by both the material he’s hiding in and his thick, watery sounds of anguish. 

“Not so. There are many who do their best, only to perish. The circumstances cannot always be changed, Karkat. I am positive you have done the best you could possibly hope to achieve, and I am just as positive that your timeline is better for it.”

Much better than yours had been, assuredly. 

Curled in your arms as he is, you are reminded how shockingly young Karkat actually is. His head fits neatly under your chin, and his body folds so easily into your lap... He’s so small, so young, still a child! Children playing war games, children dealing with horrors and fear that even adults would be hard pressed to process, children being in charge of the fate of universes, and it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to Karkat, it isn’t fair to his friends, it isn't fair to anyone, that they have to cope with such horrible things. 

You and your team had been older, more experienced in the ways of the world, if not with fighting or violence. You’d been more mentally prepared to deal with the things you’d faced- and in no way were you shaming your dancestor and his team for their youth and inexperience; it wasn’t something they could help, it still isn’t. Experience is gained only through living, and those children had not been given a chance to do so. 

“You did what you could with the situation you were presented with, and you did the best you could have done, that I am sure of.”

He clutches your sweater in his hands and just shakes his head and cries, soft and broken and so very devastated, inconsolable, and all you can do is hold him close and bite your lip because the last thing he needs is you rambling. 

Contrary to popular belief, you can be self-aware when the situation calls for it. You know what the people around you think of you and your sermons, and you know in particular how much Karkat hates the speeches you tend to rattle out when you're unsure. It’s slightly offensive that they think so little of the things that you truly care about, but that is neither here nor there at the moment. 

The only thing that matters is the little child sobbing his heart out in your arms, the child that is in desperate need of comfort and not of lecturing. 

You croon low in your throat, a wordless, instinctive sound, and brush your hand down the tight, tense curve of his spine. You can’t do anything else for him. You can’t make him calm, can’t make him less sad or hurt, you can only try to sooth him the best you can and hope that it’s enough. 

You don’t know how long you sit, the only sounds being your humming and his muted crying. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours or days- time runs strangely in your bubble, sometimes moving too slow or too fast- but eventually he stops, his tears giving way to subdued, hitching breath and little sniffles. He relaxes in your hold, his strained, taunt muscles loosening, his grip on your shirt going from white knuckled clinging to a gentler embrace. 

Triggers and tags are the last thing on your mind when you bend and press a soft kiss to one of his horns, just as he and his comfort is the first thing on your mind when you say, quietly, “I am proud of you, Karkat.”

“What?”

“I am proud of you,” you repeat, burying your face in his hair, “So very, very proud of you and the way you’ve handled yourself and led your team. You have done such a wonderful job.”

“I killed people,” he says, bleak and sad, numb, “I let people die, I killed people because I wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t good enough-“

You shush him gently, and he goes quiet, shaking his head. 

“You saved lives. Many more would have died, if not for you and your efforts. I do not expect you to understand or even believe me, but I will continue to say so until you stop blaming yourself for things that no one could have prevented.”

You stroke hand down his back, and you can feel the heat of him through his thin shirt, the jagged protrusions of his spine and the rough ridges of scars and you marvel, again, at how much he’s survived, being a mutant on a planet where such a thing was punishable by execution. 

Just a child, and already so marked by the hatred and discrimination of another time, another society. 

Just a child. 

“Kankri,” he says, and he sounds like a child, everything is just pounding that knowledge further and further into your brain, “Kankri-“

And you know what he needs even if he doesn’t know how to ask for it, so you cradle him close to your chest and croon; he chirps back, the sound small and pained, and allows you to comfort him. 

“I am proud of you, Karkat, and, though my opinion might not mean much to you, I believe you did the very best anyone in your situation could have done.”

He sighs, leans against you, and doesn’t refute your statements. 

“Let yourself rest, Karkat. You’ve been through far too much,” you say, and he closes his eyes obediently, tucking his head up under your chin and chirring quietly as you smooth your hands over the muscles of his spine, and you hum in response, soft, repetitive tunes you hope will lure him to sleep. 

Because he is a child, ever so young, he drifts off with the ease of a youngling put to bed after a day of rough play, little breaths ghosting against your neck where he leans against you. There are no recuperacoons in the lands of the dead, but you pick him up and hold him close, making your way to your own hive where an imagined bed will be waiting for the both of you. 

You know that you have not even begun to patch the holes he holds in his heart, but you hope you can try to at least help him repair some of his shattered self esteem and make him see that he is not a failure, no matter what he may think.