Chapter Text
Your name is Karkat Vantas, and your life is hell. You’re stuck with your uncle in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. Your uncle is, well, an asshole. He’s always been that way, for as long as you can remember. But he’s your only living relative and he’s better than the adoption system your country has to offer. You just have to survive until you’re old enough to get out of this hellhole town.
You live in Prospit, a small rural town that mostly consists of tumbleweeds and tractors. Tumbleweeds and Tractors, by the way, is a good name for a Prospitian folk-rock band you never want to hear about. The whole of the town consists of a diner, a few stores, and a church you only go to because you like not getting beat the fuck up in your own house. Luckily for you, Prospit has a school as well. The perfect place to be convinced of how much of a social outcast you are!
You'd have offed yourself long ago, but you never got around to it. Now you’re seventeen years old. You’re this close to finishing high school and getting a scholarship to some college across the country. You want nothing more than to leave Prospit to rot behind you. You’re a good student. Abrasive to teachers and the opposite of popular among students, but still, you bring home nothing but As and Bs. Studying is a good way to distract yourself from all the shit in your life. Plus, when you were younger, bringing home good grades used to get your uncle to loosen up even a little bit. Not anymore though, obviously.
“An A- from chemistry? What am I raising, a cow?” he says with poison in his voice, sitting at the kitchen table as you carry the laundry basket across the living room.
“A cow with a higher IQ than yours,” you mutter.
“What’d you say?” he growls. The tone of his voice communicates that he had a bad day at work. You’d be better off pushing his buttons today. Actually, you’d be better off not breathing today. The dust that you create in the house by being alive might be too much for his liking.
“Nothing,” you say loudly, slamming the lid of the washing machine closed. It whirrs to life and thankfully drowns out your uncle’s insults. Your living arrangement is simple. If you do your chores, he’ll limit the amount of time he spends yelling at you and slamming your face to the wall to about two hours. With the clothes washing and the dishes done, you have a bit of free time. Time which you will spend doing homework.
You hear your uncle relocate to the living room to watch TV, so you sneak out of the laundry room and up the stairs. The house is too small for you to have a real bedroom, so your den is the attic. Cramped, dusty and crawling with bugs. You feel real good about living here. A crappy cot covered in blankets and pillows in one corner. An even crappier desk standing precariously on four thin legs in another. Every wall is plastered in movie posters and every open surface covered in romance novels. A faintly flickering lamp and some textbooks sit on the desk. On the bed, a black backpack that’s going to cause you lasting back problems. On the ceiling above your bed is a hatch. You can just about reach it and open it if you stand on your tippy-toes on your bed. If you do, a rope ladder falls. You can get to the roof with it if you ever need to.
A forgotten, half-broken VHS player, your uncle’s old TV and a collection of romance movies on VHS lie beneath the desk, collecting dust. Through the large open window, you see the forest behind the house. You used to go in there and walk around when you had time, but now you don’t have the energy anymore. Now you just rewatch your cassettes over and over and dream of what it would be like to have that kind of romance. The kind where someone would save you, someone equally as broken. Someone with whom you could run away and leave this town in the dust. The cold November sky outside is covered in thick, pale gray clouds.
The light flowing into the room is weak, but it’s strong enough to illuminate the final wall of the room. There, a thin table leans against the wall with a complex miniature of the whole town on it. With no friends and no hobbies, stuck in your room, you needed something to do. You ended up starting a project. You took old plastic containers your uncle wouldn’t miss and spent what little savings you had on Legos and fake grass from the crafts store. And so, a tiny Prospit was built in your room, little by little.
At first, it was just your house and the surrounding forest, each tree and path carefully constructed from cut-up cardboard and twigs. Slowly, you expanded to the school, the playground, the old people’s home. You built the train station and the tracks and the bridge where the highway crosses it. You built the old mine at the edge of town. As the years passed, the miniature Prospit grew more and more complex and realistic. You made miniatures of familiar faces from school and placed them in places you knew they hung out without you. You walked for hours tracing the route of the creek in the woods and adjusted the miniature to match. And, in a fit of desperation, you marked down locations you knew your uncle couldn’t find you, places you could hide on the day he finally snapped.
You sit down at your desk and open one of the textbooks in front of you. You’ve barely managed to do so when a voice calls your name from the first floor, followed by lots of cursing. Cursing which sounds like it’s rapidly approaching the attic door. “Your selfish fuckery has gone too far, kid- Does an old man have to live in this day and age without some goddamn milk to put in his coffee, huh? You fucking-”
The milk. You knew you forgot to buy something when you went to the store today. You scramble up and realize you forgot to lock the door of your room. Your uncle barges in, rage in his eyes, face red and an empty bottle of beer in hand. Oh, shit, he’s been drinking, too? This day is not going well for you. He throws the bottle at the wall and it shatters. You’re going to have to clean that up, you think for under a second before his hand descends on your face.
You fall to the ground, face stinging while he spits venom at you. His favorite team lost at sports and you forgot his milk at the store and you only got an A- and blah, blah, blah. You try to sit up, but he kicks you in the stomach. The air rushes out of you and you lean your head against the desk, unable to do more than sit up. Your uncle grabs you by the front of your sweater and pulls your face to his. His breath smells of alcohol. Looking at his eyes, you know this isn’t normal anger. He’s out for blood right now.
Those locations you marked down might be needed sooner than you’d thought.
“You gonna apologize, kid?” he growls. You scrunch your nose at the stench.
You stutter breathily, angrily, trying to get him off your case without giving him what you know he doesn’t deserve. He drops you to the floor, knocking the air out of you again. The back of your head hits the edge of the desk painfully. As your uncle keeps ranting things you can’t hear, you struggle to stand up. He hits you over the back of your head and you stumble to the window. A sharp gust of cold air on your face does nothing to soothe the pain. You turn around and try to brace yourself for a hit you know is coming.
You fail. His hand comes to a death grip around your neck. You gasp and struggle to no avail. He holds you with your entire head hanging out of the window, mumbling something violent and incomprehensible. You’re going to black out. You can’t let him get that satisfaction. You use your last strength to kick him in the balls. His hand comes away as he yells. In the scuffle, he pushes you forward. You barely have time to realize it before your center of gravity is outside of the window.
You scramble to grab your uncle, the curtains, the window frame, anything-
You’re in a freefall for just a few seconds, but it feels like forever. There’s no life flashing before your eyes. Just the realization of what’s happening. Cold, stinging air whizzes in your ears. Strands of black hair in your face. Your legs above you. Your uncle’s face, rage being hidden under a layer of shock. Nobody’s going to miss you. They won’t even know you’re gone.
Sharp pain in the base of your neck.