Chapter Text
"At least, uh, it isn't culling," Tavros says, looking down at the shackles in his lap.
"Fuck you," Karkat says. His digestive sac feels like it's trying to turn itself inside out, and he'd probably be attacking the potential buyers if he weren't shackled himself. There are no fucking words for how not okay this is.
Tavros seems to shrink into his four-wheeled device a little further. "Um, sorry," he says.
Karkat hisses. "Would you fucking cut that out!" he says. The new Empress has been reforming the culling laws, but they're not outright abolished—Alternia's real undesirables, the ones that none of the highbloods find a use for, will still get dragged out to the culling fields and gutted after the auction is over. Their only hope right now is that somebody in the auction hall wants to buy them, and Tavros doesn't have good odds. "Just...stop cringing so much. You don't want them to think you're that worthless, do you?"
"Right, I, okay," Tavros says. He'd be more convincing if his voice didn't shake. "Thanks, Karkat."
"Whatever," Karkat says. He's watching the auction block, where the first lowblood is being brought up for bid now.
Most of the trolls being auctioned off are pretty obvious culling cases—physically damaged like Tavros, or else orphaned and feral, fighting their chains and hissing at the auctioneer. Karkat shouldn't be here. He's stable, he's fit, he's managed to survive to adulthood on the grueling endurance test of Alternia's surface. He's a perfectly functional young adult troll and ought to be working out his relationships and his military career and his own fucking future.
But last month he got caught up in a stupid fight in public, where somebody saw him bleed.
Fucking genetics. Shitmunching brainless mother grub, crapping out a bright-red-blooded little mutant in the first place. Nooklicking maggot-humping troll society in general, so fucking obsessed with the fucking hemospectrum, as if bluer blood ever made anybody more noble instead of just more psychopathic.
One of the ferals gets sold to a nasty-looking blueblood in the dragonhide armor of an archeviscerator. Karkat wonders if she's destined for anything better than just being hunted down and shot for sport.
Then the next troll gets dragged up there, and Karkat stops worrying about the feral: this time it's Sollux, the poor stupid fuck, stumbling a little like he's been sopored, his mismatched glasses askew. The drones probably caught him during a bad swing and decided his instability wasn't fit to pass on. "Stupid, pitiful bastard," Karkat mutters, fists clenched tight enough that his claws feel like they're gouging holes in his palms.
Tavros glances over at him, but Karkat ignores him.
A woman in the rose-and-gold livery of the Empress bids for Sollux, and he goes fast. It looks like a lot of the other highbloods don't want to bid against the imperial house. Too obvious a challenge to her authority, or something. That shouldn't be too bad, right? Working in the Empress's household? She's supposed to be a lot less bloodthirsty than her predecessor. Maybe he'll do okay there, if he can just meet somebody who knows how to deal with his stupid moods.
As Sollux gets dragged down off the podium, he glances back toward Karkat. For a second it feels like the ghost of a hand punches playfully at Karkat's shoulder, and Karkat sucks at reading lips but he's pretty sure he doesn't need to actually read them to guess what Sollux is saying right now: Top that, fuckass.
"You insufferable douche," Karkat says, and squeezes his eyes shut so they won't sting so much.
He doesn't know any of the next three trolls who go up to bid—two sold, one dragged off snarling and frothing at the mouth—and then it's Tavros's turn. Karkat tries to be ready for the worst. Tavros was a shitty troll even before the accident that left him crippled, and now he's both damaged and ridiculously spineless.
Highbloods turn out to be even more fucked up than Karkat realized, though. There's a small bidding war for Tavros, between some musclebound creeper with a broken horn and a grinning psycho with a robotic arm. The bids get outrageous, making some of the other assholes in the audience start cheering as Tavros squirms in his seat and stares at the bidders in pure terror.
Just as it's looking like it might turn ugly—if there's a riot in the auction hall, what are Karkat's odds of getting away?—the psycho's arm starts to freak out on her, spitting sparks and twitching wildly like it's turning on her. She flips out, trying to get it under control, and the other guy wins the auction while she's distracted.
Tavros looks completely terrified, watching the guy come down to claim him. The drones buzz back and forth like they can't figure out how to get Tavros and his four-wheel device down to audience level, but the buyer looks calm about it. He beckons for Tavros to come closer, and Tavros rolls up to the edge of the platform. Karkat braces himself to watch the blueblood drag Tavros down out of the chair—but instead the guy reaches up and takes hold of the four-wheel device's frame. Metal creaks, and he just picks up the whole thing, with Tavros still sitting in it—and gripping the armrests for dear life—and sets it down at floor level.
Fuck. Tavros is doomed, isn't he?
Karkat doesn't have time to worry about that right now, though. The auctioneer is beckoning for him, and then a drone is marching him forward as the auctioneer tells the highbloods that the rumors they've heard are true, that they have a mutant to offer, a blood color no other troll can match. That gets the crowd going, and Karkat blushes hot with anger. Treat him like a fucking novelty, will they? They'll be lucky if he doesn't kill whatever shithead buys him and run, and—
Then what? Be a fugitive for the rest of his (nasty, brutish, short) life? He sags a little, glaring out past the crowd into the dark at the back of the hall. He needs to get control of himself. He won't put on any more of a stupid show for them than he has to.
Bidding goes pretty well, he guesses. It sounds like at least some of these putrid bulgehuffers are excited about it. He doesn't really watch the bidders. Fuck them, anyway. It's just a game for them, isn't it?
This is better than culling, though. Tavros was right about that. The drones' pikes are vicious, jagged and sharp. Whoever makes the winning bid, they'll keep those sharp blades from scattering his guts for scavengers. That's...that's something.
He doesn't get a really good look at his buyer until the guy comes swaggering down to the front to pick him up, and then Karkat makes two observations pretty much simultaneously: one, he's been bought by a seadweller; two, he's been bought by a raging, grubreaming douche.
"Wwell?" the guy says. "Get dowwn here."
Easy for him to say. Karkat climbs down from the platform awkwardly, the stupid shackles in his way. He stands there glaring. The douche looks weirdly pleased with him, like he's a new toy or an exotic fucking pet.
"On your knees, slavve," the douche says, and Karkat bites down hard on his lip so he won't have a snickering fit at the accent. The douche is beckoning one of the drones over. "Removve his shackles."
The drone bows, joints whirring. It extends metal claws to grasp the lock on Karkat's shackles, and it starts to speak as it does so. "Her Imperial Condescension, in glory like the storm, in mercy like the tide, has spared you the culling you deserve." The words must have been written for it. In glory like the storm? No way a drone came up with that. "This is a suspension of your sentence, not a pardon. Should you flee the custody of," brief pause as the drone accesses its memory banks, "Lord Ampora, you may be culled on sight by any drone or any citizen. Acknowledge."
Karkat's claws fit into the already-sore welts in his palms way too easily. "I acknowledge," he grits out.
The shackles come off his wrists, then off his ankles. Douchelord Ampora grins like a wriggler on Twelfth Perigee's Eve. "Come on," he says. "Followw me."