Chapter Text
“Let’s start with something simple,” she says, taking a pencil from behind her ear and pressing the tip against the notepad. You’ve spent enough time here to know that everything in your cell and the lab is recorded. She doesn’t need to take notes. It’s infuriating.
“Full name?”
“Karkat Vantas,” you answer, only hesitating for a moment. Answering her questions feels unnatural. It makes your stomach turn in guilt and disgust.
“Rank?”
“Treasonous piece of shit.”
Her eyebrow quirks up, but she seems more amused than annoyed.
“Previous rank,” she amends.
“Lowblood scum.”
Her expression flattens and now you think you’re bordering on annoyed territory. You roll your eyes.
“I’m not fucking with you," you say, then think. "Mostly. That’s about as close to a rank as anyone bellow yellow is gonna get. I mopped floors and took messages. You don't get a fancy-ass title unless you're a pretentious fuck higher up on the spectrum.”
Or you have crazy-ass powers. Then you just become a weapon.
She makes a note of this, apparently satisfied.
“How old are you, Karkat?”
“Nine,” you respond automatically. You watch as her eyebrows jump just a fraction in what you think approximates surprise, then settle down into a muted display of understanding.
The fascinating micro-expressions of Rose Lalonde.
“Nine of what units?”
“Oh,” you say. “Sweeps. That’s uh…”
You try to remember the conversion in your head, but you can’t pin down the exact number.
“A little over two Earth years?”
She seems more satisfied with this.
“Is there an age of maturation in troll culture?” she asks.
You shift.
“Adult molt hits around ten sweeps if that’s what you mean,” you say, bitterness seeping into your voice. It’s a sore topic for you. You have the feeling she’s going to be poking at plenty of those for as long as you decide to comply.
“What does adult molt entail?” she asks.
You roll your eyes. Mammals.
“It’s your last chance for growth, first off. Your skin comes in darker. Depending on where you are on the spectrum, your horns might get a lot bigger too. Your, uh,” you clear your throat, “eyes fill in.”
“Fill in with?”
“Your blood color,” you say curtly.
She makes a little note at that. You grumble, but she just ignores you.
"You can't honestly tell me you haven't seen any adult trolls," you say, the thought suddenly occurring to you. "There's not a lot of them running around Earth, sure, but they're here. You have to have seen some fucking pictures at least."
She looks just a bit surprised again.
"Well," she says, shifting so her legs are tucked up beside her. "We had our suspicions, but we weren't certain that they were adult trolls. There's so much differentiation, especially between blood castes, that we couldn't be sure they weren't some class of their own."
You don't know what exactly to say to that, but the realization that you're alleviating some pretty solid ignorance here hits you suddenly, and you're not sure how you feel about it. The best you can pin it down to is an unfortunate assortment of various flavors of bad.
“How long is the average troll’s lifespan?” she asks.
“It depends,” you say, a little sharply.
She gives you a flat look.
“Natural lifespan. I appreciate that you’re frustrated, but obstinance will only serve to prolong this process.”
You snarl.
“Yeah well fuck you too. I’m not an absolute bulge-chafing moron—I know what you meant. Like I said it fucking depends. Rusts are somewhere around twenty sweeps, fuchsia's practically a goddamn eternity, and everyone else is somewhere in the middle.”
She doesn’t seem phased by your retort, seeming to find the information satisfactory enough. She tilts her head curiously.
"And where would you fall on that spectrum?" she asks.
You laugh darkly.
"How the fuck should I know?" you say, a little hysterically. "I'm not even on the bulge-splintering thing. For all I know I'll drop dead tomorrow and the batshit rules or whatever the fuck governs troll biology will be perfectly satisfied. Your indiscriminate guess is as good as mine."
You think it's about the most useless answer you've given so far, and yet you end up watching Rose scribble in her notepad for the longest period yet. You wonder just what the fuck she's writing.
It makes you uncomfortable.
Before you can politely ask her about it (by which you mean loudly complain) she changes the subject.
"How did you come to learn English?" she says, her eyes lagging on her notes for a moment before settling back on you.
"I learned it on the way to Earth," you say. "Everyone does. It's basic fucking protocol, learning the language of whatever planet it is you're about to conquer. Why the fuck wouldn't we?"
She tilts her head thoughtfully.
"You realize English isn't Earth's only language. Many would find the implication offensive.” The way her mouth turns up tells you she’s teasing you.
"Yeah of course it's fucking not. Because you're all a bunch of masochistic dunderfucks who don't give a shit about basic communicative functionality."
That seems to amuse her.
"How many languages does Alternia have then?" she asks
"One," you say, flatly. "Because we're not insane."
Her mouth quirks upwards again. You're getting the general impression that she finds your answers—and, by extension, you—amusing. It irks you that she's not taking you seriously.
"Do you know any other of Earth's apparently dysfunctional diversity of languages then?"
"Just English and Español. We learn whatever major languages are spoken in the region we're deployed. If on the minuscule sliver of a chance I survived long enough to see this region conquered, I would have learned whatever gratuitous clusterfuck of language is popular there."
"And you're fluent in both?" she asks, curiously.
"Uh, yes?" you say, giving her a look you hope communicates how stupid the question is. On the other hand it doesn't really matter if it does, because now that you've fully committed to being a species-betraying shit smudge you're free to communicate this fact with your mouth. "I'd have to be a blithering dipshit with viscous utility slime clogging my pan not to."
Words. It's nice to have them back.
Rose ignores your colorful language in favor of looking curious and asking (you guessed it!) yet another goddamn question.
“What does the language acquisition process look like for trolls then?” she asks.
You frown.
“I don’t know,” you say. “We watch a bunch of videos and then we fucking know it. What else do you want me to say?”
You don’t get why she finds this line of questioning so fucking fascinating, but whatever. At least she’s not asking about your blood anymore.
“And how long does that take?”
“A few weeks?” You shrug.
She seems impressed. It makes you uncomfortable.
“What?” you say. “How absurdly long does it take humans to complete the basic fucking task of learning a language. A goddamn human Earth year?”
That’s a ridiculously long amount of time for such a simple fucking skill, and you expect her to call you out for being ornery again. Instead, she just smiles.
“Many,” she admits.
You stare at her blankly.
“How the absolute nook-chafing fuck,” you say slowly, “is such a laughably incompetent, developmentally wriggler-staged half-apologetic excuse for a species holding its own against the Alternian fucking Empire?”
She actually gives you a goddamn grin, and it’s probably the most unnerving expression you’ve seen on her yet.
“We were hoping you might be able to provide insight on that matter yourself,” she says.
You return a spiteful grin of your own.
“Sorry, but if you’re looking for military secrets you’re fresh the fuck out of luck. The idea that anyone would tell me shit is beyond laughable.”
“That’s alright. You might be surprised at how useful the information that you can provide is to us.”
That sobers the smug right out of you. Guilt twists in your digestion sack. You would say you can’t believe what a useless sell-out you’ve become except that you totally can believe it. Because the thoughts and feelings that have led you down this particular path… well they’re not entirely new, are they?
Rose looks at you thoughtfully, and you think she must sense the way you’ve drawn in on yourself.
“Perhaps a little quid pro quo is in order,” she says. “I’m sure you have plenty of questions yourself. Why don’t we exchange information?”
You eye her warily. You’ve been wondering about a number of thing actually, but you didn’t expect to have the opportunity to just… ask. You guess after gleaning information under the radar for so long the idea of getting straight answers to your questions feels a little unnatural. And suspicious.
After all the more you know, the more of a liability you would be if they ever decided to… but you’re not even going to let yourself hope for that so fuck it.
“Who the fuck are you people?” you ask, against your better judgement.
“Like I said, we’re Skaianet labs.”
You know she knows you won’t be satisfied with that. She’s fucking with you. You snarl at her smug little smirk.
“And that doesn’t mean shit to me,” you say. “Are you part of the human government or whatever convoluted excuse for a system of leadership you have on this clusterfuck of a planet? Because nothing about this shitfest reads 'official protocol' in any capacity."
The limited knowledge you have about Earth leadership systems boils down to "bureaucratic as fuck." And while you're certainly no expert on what that entails, something about this whole situation just feels… off. They've taken too many risks.
Rose appears to think. “Appear” being a generous euphemism for “pretends to as if she doesn’t already know exactly what to say but can’t pass up the apparently perfect opportunity to fabricate drama.” You know. Half—scratch that—pretty much all of the friends you’ve ever had are just as slutty for theatrics.
"You could call us… government adjacent," she says. You scowl. She elaborates before you can complain. "We have some connections that allow us to operate outside of certain supervisions and regulations. In return, they're guaranteed some of the best results they could hope for."
You chew on this.
"Well that sounds shady as fuck," you say after a moment.
She just smiles.
"Perhaps."
So, unless she's lying (which you don't think she is; she's clever, but you tend to think yourself pretty adept at sniffing out horseshit) you're in the hands of some incredibly powerful people who are in no way obligated to keep that power in check. They're essentially highbloods, and you're at their mercy.
This shouldn't surprise you, but you find yourself just a little more nervous regardless.
"Can you tell me more about the different troll blood castes?" she asks. Apparently it's her turn to ask questions again.
It's not one of your favorite subjects to discuss, but you do your best to give a bare-bones rundown of the hemospectrum, pointedly avoiding your personal relationship with it. She seems to find the topic fascinating, but doesn't stop to make many notes. You're starting to glean that she's not taking down information as much as keeping track of her own thoughts, and that most of those thoughts have to do with you rather than whatever you're telling her. You don't love that you're her favored topic of analysis, but there's something just a little reassuring that she has to write down her thoughts to keep track of them. It makes her just a bit more… organic.
You get to ask another question after that and unfortunately can’t resist the urge to squander it by asking how much time has passed. It’s still a relief when she confirms your assumptions that it’s been six days since your capture. You think it would have freaked you out more than you’d like to admit if you had missed a day or two in there. Or if you were operating on some totally arbitrary day-night cycle with absolutely no accurate grasp of how much time has passed.
She asks you more questions about troll society. Some about the military, but mostly always coming back around to your culture. She seems to find it morbidly fascinating, which you don’t really have much of a response to. You know human society is squishy soft and coddling, so you sort of get where she’s coming from.
She lets you ask some more questions of your own, and seems to answer them fully, but you find it curious that you always end up spending much more time answering her questions than she does yours. Especially because you barely notice it happening while it does. She’s good.
You’ve been talking for what feels like forever, and you skipped your first meal and you think she notices when you transition from your normal level of irritability to actually just so fucking done because she flips her notepad closed and gives you one last assessing look.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” she says eventually. “I know this is a difficult situation for you but I hope you understand where we’re coming from in taking the measures we have. That said, is there anything I can do to make your situation more comfortable?”
You laugh bitterly.
“How about letting me out of this fucking cell?”
She smiles and it’s so plastic it hurts to look at.
“Unfortunately we can’t do that,” she says robotically. “But if you continue to be as helpful as you have been today, there’s a distinct possibility we’ll be able to consider it in the future.”
And that makes you angry.
Your lip twitches and you roll your eyes.
“You don’t believe me?” she asks innocently.
And. You can’t just.
“You realize I know exactly what you’re doing?” you seethe. “You’re going to placate me with little comforts and pleasantries, holding the root-vegetable of freedom over my head until you’ve wrung every last drop of even marginally useful information from me, from my body, and then when your voracious appetite for incriminating evidence you can use against my species is finally satiated, you’re going to kill me. And if I know anything about you bleeding-bloodpusher, facetious, squeamish humans, you’ll find some incidental way to do it that lets you conveniently shirk any remote guilt or blame you might otherwise be inclined to pathetically indulge in over the whole miserable affair, even if it means a slower, more painful death on my end. So fucking forgive me if I refuse to pretend to be the vapid ignoramus you clearly want me to be. You can dissect my biology, pick apart my psyche, drill me for information all you want but don’t fucking insult me by lying to my face and pretending that all of this ends with us shaking hands and amicably parting ways when you know goddamn well it fucking doesn't."
You're shaking.
Rose's face is blank. Completely inscrutable. She says nothing.
A moment passes.
You deflate. You avert your eyes and stare avidly at the floor. You're so fucking tired.
"A blanket," you say eventually, quieter. "And something to read. I'm bored out of my fucking mind."
Your voice comes out hoarse. You put it through a lot after such a long period of disuse.
You see Rose nod out of the corner of your eye.
"I'll see what I can do," she says.
You don't watch her leave.