Work Text:
“I killed my lusus, you know.”
You’re sitting at the foot of your bed, knees pulled to your chest, making your way through a questionably-alchemized granola bar, oat by oat. Across from you, Karkat sits propped up against the headboard. His book is still cradled in his lap, fingertip marking the last sentence he was on, but he’s looking up, somewhere vaguely over your shoulder. His gaze is glassy, unfocused, like he’s watching something only he can see. You have to resist the stupid urge to turn around and try to see it, too.
Instead, you just pick at the corner of the granola bar, watching as it crumbles into your open palm, and give a little affirmative hum under your breath. Karkat has a look on his face that tells you he’s only half in the room with you right now.
“I ran the code,” he says, blinking slowly. He looks like he’s trying to wake up from a dream but can’t fully manage to open his eyes. “Killed everyone’s lusus, really. Not just mine.” He frowns, brows smashing together. “At least, I think it did.”
You uncurl a little, stretching your legs out until your feet rest against Karkat’s shins. He feels warm through your socks, body running a few degrees higher than average human’s. You feel him shift against the touch a little, silently deciding whether to pull away, whether it’s one of those days or not, before setting the book aside and folding his hands in his lap, staring down at him.
“Think or know?” you ask, and set your granola bar aside, too. It crumbles some more as it hits the bedsheets.
Think or know. It's a game the two of you play, the endless process of one fact-checking every scathing bout of self-hate the other can come up with. What are you saying that's true, what are you saying that feels true because you've been told it has to be, what are you saying that feels true because you don't know what else is?
Personally, you prefer Crazy 8s. You prefer your perspectives to go unchallenged—you've made it this far thinking the way you think about shit, you reason, so what's the point in switching it all up now? You're all going to die in a year or two, anyways.
But Karkat is different. When he gets like this it's all you can do to stop yourself from launching into a twenty minute tirade as to why he needs to stop being so insufferably set on hating his own guts and get with the program that he's a bang-up dude who's done a bang-up job of taking care of the people around him. Put out the fire before it gets too strong, before the whole meteor is up in flames and Kanaya is glaring daggers at you from across the wreckage, the silent question dancing through the smoke-filled air: how did you let this happen?
You know that's not the move, though, as obviously correct as it feels, as much as you want to. He doesn't want to be counseled or corrected—you don't either, you get it. You get him.
He just wants to be listened to. So you just listen.
Karkat turns his palms over, studying them like they’re some sort of priceless artifact he’s just dug out of the ground after a billion and one years of searching. His gaze is still distant, unfocused.
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve killed a lot of people,” he says, and there’s something about the clench to his voice that makes your heart hollow out for a second. “I’ve killed a lot of fucking people.”
“That wasn’t you.”
“I let it happen.”
You slide across the bed to him, sitting so your knees press together. After a second, he kind of slumps forward, forehead bumping against your collar bone. His breath is faint against the crook of your neck. You watch his hands twist in his lap.
“That wasn’t you,” you say again. You press your cheek against the side of his head, feel his hair tickle your eyelashes every time you blink. “You did everything you could to save everyone.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
Karkat sounds tired and miserable. You can’t think of a nice way to tell him that sometimes that’s going to happen: you’re going to try and try and try to save everyone you can and it’s still not going to be enough; people are always going to die all around you because that’s just how the game worked, because that’s just how life works in general, and you're about to just say it like it is, but then you remember that if there’s anyone who needs this message imparted upon them, it sure as hell isn’t Karkat Vantas.
You get it. He gets it. It's why it works.
So you just keep quiet, press your face into his hair some more, and close your eyes.
***
When you were twelve years old, you had this recurring dream almost every night for six months straight.
It always started off the same: things would shift into focus with you standing in the center of your bedroom. The curtains were always half-opened, pools of orange sunlight spilling across your floor as the sun sets outside your window.
In your hand, there was always a bat—one of those beat-up wooden ones you always saw the kids who lived in the lot next to your apartment complex playing baseball with on summer afternoons where the air was so thick with humidity you could feel almost feel the oxygen molecules sticking to the inside of your throat. You can still remember all the tiny details about it: blueish-grey striping along the side the had started to peel off with age in some places, the dents and chips at the head of it, the leather grip with fraying strings trailing down from it like little tassels.
It had always weirded you out, that you had a bat. Out of all the assorted weaponry scattered around your apartment, out of all the shitty swords and ninja stars, you don’t really ever recall seeing a baseball bat. You had thought about procuring one, sure; you always figured you could just steal your neighbors’ one, or take one from the sports equipment bin at the rec center you used to skulk around in whenever the security guard’s back was turned. But that plan had never been executed, mostly because you were almost certain that if you did something like bring a fucking bat home to try and use in fights against your bro, or even to just put under your bed for safekeeping, you would’ve gotten your ass handed to you on a cheap paper plate in record timing. And not without good reason, really. What was a smoothed-out stick of wood ever going to do against the katana your bro spent more time sharpening than he ever did holding conversations with you?
But regardless of how bizarre it had always felt, in the dream, you had a baseball bat. You would always be white-knuckling it, holding onto the thin end of it like your life depended on it and then some, and your grip wouldn’t slacken in the slightest as you crossed your room and pushed your door open.
The thing would creak. It creaked in real life, and you sometimes thought that it was a purposeful design flaw, something done just so your bro would always know where you were, always know when best to intercept you.
But unlike real life, the house would be dead silent as you stepped out onto the landing in front of your bedroom. There was no sound of the TV blaring, no video game noises, no fingers clacking against a keyboard as your bro stood at the kitchen counter, banging away at his computer as he edited his most recent smuppet video. It would always be quiet as the fucking grave, so quiet that you’d be able to hear the sound of your grip shifting on the bat, hear the sound of your feet sliding against the carpet as you walked out of your room and down the landing, hear your own breath rasping in the back of your throat.
You would make a beeline to your bro’s room. It was down the hall, the last door on the left, right across from the bathroom and right next to his weird pseudo-office that he once broke your nose for trying to get a peek inside when you were eight.
The thing never healed right, and you sometimes still can’t breathe when you lay on your left side for too long. In the dream, though, you wouldn’t be thinking about that as you crept down the hallway; the only conscious thought you remember having on your mind was that you had to get to your bro’s room, and you had to get there fast.
You were never sure why, and it wouldn’t hit you at any point, not even as you made it to the threshold and slowly cracked his door open, your palm splayed out on the wood paneling in front of you; you’d position your hand below the knot in the wood you always thought looked like the storm on Jupiter each time like clockwork, a little ritual your dream self kept up for no apparent reason. As you pushed the door open and stepped inside his room, the sound of his heavy, irregular snoring filling your ears at once, you knew that was the point in which you should start panicking. There was a reason you had tried to snoop around in his office and not his actual bedroom itself. The former would get you a busted up face. The latter would have you splayed out on the floor, Bro standing over you like some archangel from the wrong side of the tracks, rewriting the definition of no holds barred with every blow he landed. Logically speaking, you knew that the second he woke up and saw you there, you’d be dead meat.
And yet you were never scared, not even a little. You just gripped the bat tighter and made your way over to stand at the side of his bed, hovering over his sleeping figure. Maybe it was the lack of his shades, the lack of his stupid beat-up baseball cap, the lack of the permanent frown etched into his face every waking moment of the day, but you’d always be hit with some weird, intangible feeling in the center of your chest, the sudden realization that, when he was out cold like this, he looked small.
Young. Fragile, almost.
Human. Painfully fucking human.
Then you would raise the bat above your head, every muscle in your body gearing to bring it smashing down onto his face. You’d always wake up before you did anything. You could never tell if this was a disappointment or a relief, and you still can’t tell now.
You think you might want to keep it that way.
***
You weren’t mad when Jack killed your bro.
You weren’t mad, and you weren’t particularly sad about it, either. If anything, the only feeling that slammed into you the second you came into that clearing and saw him lying there, spread-eagled, neck jerked to one side at too awkward an angle to be medically healthy in any respect, was pure, undulating shock.
In every single fight the two of you had, he had wiped the roof deck with your sorry ass. The only times you managed to overpower him were when he either wasn’t paying enough attention, or he didn’t care enough to stop you. Even then, the times you did manage to get the upper hand were always on his terms, always because he chose to let you get the last punch in, so it’s probably a fair thing to say that he never lost to you.
He just let you win sometimes, and those aren’t the same thing, not at all.
So it wasn’t hard for you to start assuming that he was indestructible, in a way; at the very least, you always figured he’d be able to hold his own in any fight he got into, or be able to fight his ass out of a situation if things looked like they were going to go too far south for him to handle. You thought he was strong enough to do that, and you thought he was smart enough to, as well.
You don’t think it was ever a question of immortality. The recent knowledge of weird time shenanigans and ecto-bullshit that’s been vested upon you aside, you had always grown up with the understanding that your bro was human, as human as you were, as human as anyone else was. Batshit up the fucking belfry, sure, but no less human, no less impermanent. Of course he could die. You weren't a idiot; you knew that. Really, you think the question came down to subverting expectations. In your head, there was only ever one course your life could take: him taking it too far one day, and you getting killed. Grim but true. In your head, you were always going to be the kid who died at sixteen in some embarrassingly unceremonious way like getting kicked down a flight of stairs, and he was always going to be the guy to carry on.
And yet he died. Jack killed him, easy as that. There he was, hole in his stomach, blood beading at the corners of his lips, eyes open wide behind the cracked shades, totally and irreparably and irre-fucking-versibly dead.
You can conjure up every single detail from your memory of seeing him. You can recreate every crease in his shirt, every tuft of grass growing between the cracks in the rock he lay on, every drop of blood pooling from his body until you have one giant mental tapestry of the scene that’s so vivid it's like you never even left the scene. You have your own personalized IMAX theater you can relive the event at whenever you want, except instead of popcorn and soda all you get is an ashy, sick taste in the back of your throat. Sometimes you really do relive the experience—mostly in your dreams, with every single step playing out on loop at the forefront of your mind the second you close your eyes. You can live the experience over a million times, and then you can relive it a million more just for good measure. Just for the hell of it.
But you don’t feel sad. You couldn’t make yourself feel sad even if you wanted to.
Even though you do.
***
It only happened sometimes.
Really. You’ve sat through as many episodes of Law and Order: SVU as you could stomach, seen just how nauseatingly bad it can get sometimes. Kids stuck with no way out, passed around like a bad cold, doomed to that shit forever. You know on paper it’s bad to compare stuff like this, not fair to anyone involved, but if you’re being realistic, you had it so much better. Sure, the strifes were nasty, but it’s not like they didn’t help in the long run. You’re still standing after a game that wiped out half the trolls, no sweat, and try as you might to ignore the fact, you know you owe at least a decent chunk of that to Bro.
Plus, he’s dead now. No coming back from that one, at least you hope not.
And even if there is, you’re so far away from where you left him that it doesn’t even matter. No amount of flash-stepping can catch him up to you.
And it was good. Not always, not most of the time, but he had his moments. He could be funny, smart, unreasonably cool. Plus, you learnt everything you know from him. It’s like he’s built into your hardwire, or something, that’s how deeply it feels like he’s ingrained in you.
And it only happened sometimes. So, really, what’s there to complain about?
***
You break swords when you spar.
It becomes a habit you can’t kick. First to quell the boredom—really, there are only so many times you can watch Love, Actually in a week before even you start to feel like you're going insane—and then to quell the tight, itchy feeling that picks up in the center of your chest when you find yourself with too much time on your hands. It's a weird thing. You didn't do shit in Houston—didn't go to school, didn't have a job, barely had any hobbies outside of fucking around on your two-bit computer and staring at the plaster cracks on your ceiling—but it always felt like your schedule was jam-packed, somehow. Maybe it was. Maybe the waiting around feels too familiar, like you're back on the roof, sun beating layers of skin off the back of your neck as you sit on the wall and bide your time as best you can until the inevitable sound of boots on the stairs reaches your ears.
Maybe you never left. Who knows.
So you alchemize swords, and you alchemize practice dummies, and you spent hours upon hours every day faux-sparring with them until your head is pounding and your hands are raw and the swords have snapped clean in half from overuse and Karkat or Rose or Kanaya has to march up to the observation deck you’ve commandeered and turned into a training ring and drag you down to your room to get some sleep. It becomes a game, almost. Seeing how many blades you can break, how many blisters you can pop, how many bland smiles you can flash at Rose before she finally corners you and snaps.
It happens less often than you'd think. For a while it sort of feels like she's just given up on you. Then you realize that's not fair: she's trying, they're all trying, you're just the one making it impossible to do anything about. Karkat corrals you into movie nights and Kanaya drags bags of bandages and antiseptic wipes up the stairs and Rose pulls you aside at meals— no, seriously, Dave, she'll say, as close to upset as you've ever seen her, are you okay? —and you just keep going back up there all the same.
“Do you think this is healthy?” Rose asks you one day over dinner. Your sparring equipment is on the table beside you, towel and water bottle and recently broken sword all piled into a heap, its presence so dominating you somehow feel as if it’s creating a gravitational pull in the space-time continuum around it. Rose has been shooting the mess filthy glares throughout the whole of the meal like it’s done some sort of grand injustice to her. You have half a mind to move it out of sight, if only to prevent her from throwing it out the nearest airlock, but every time your hand so much as twitches in its direction, Rose gives you a look like she's trying to telepathically blow your head up, so you just eat your cold mac-n-cheese in complete stillness.
“I think I’d be bored as shit without it,” you say, stabbing a noodle. It doesn’t even come close to answering her question.
“Dave.” The bite to her voice is apparent. Sometimes she's so predictable it hurts.
“Rose,” you fire back, because you’re tired and sore and sweaty and the only thing you really want to think about right now is moving your fork from your plate to your mouth in as quick succession as possible. It's funny: you hate it when she believes your bullshit, you hate it when she doesn't. Nothing ever works.
She exhales loudly through her nose as she stands, scraping her plate and cup up and carrying it to the kitchen. There’s the clang of ceramic on metal as she sets it down in the sink. You watch over the rims of your glasses as she pauses there for a moment, hands braced against the edge of the basin, lips pressed together into a thin, severe line.
It’s funny how old she looks sometimes, how many years past fourteen.
“You’re running away,” she says. Frustration clouds her gaze, a building thunderstorm, but her tone isn’t harsh, exactly. Instead it’s just flat, heavy with a sort of conviction that somehow hurts a million times more.
Hate when she doesn't. “Says you,” you snap back. Hitting where it hurts.
But she just shakes her head, loose coils of hair falling into her eyes. “I can’t—”
“Can’t what?”
You want her to fight back. You want her to get up in your face, blistering anger, unforgiving stare, and tell you just how much of a piece of shit you are. You want her to break your nose and throw your ass down a stairwell and do something, anything, you can call familiar. You are so sick of her forgiving you, again and again and again, because it has to end at some point. People don't work like this. It has to, and you don't know what it's going to do to you when it does.
Rose just sighs again, this one somehow more defeated than the last and, yeah, you know what, you probably deserve that one.
“Turn the lights off when you leave,” she says.
And then she turns on her heel and leaves, footsteps fading as she heads down the hall back to her room, leaving you and the broken sword to sit there in silence.
***
-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at ??? --
TG: hey
TT: Hello.
TT: Someone’s up late.
TG: yeah
TG: had this absolute doozy of a dream where i was locked in a padded room but then the walls turned to penises and freud popped out from the floor and gave me a blowjob
TG: or something
TT: That sounds deeply factual.
TG: it wasnt
TT: I see.
TT: Are you okay?
TT: You seem less verbose than I’m accustomed to. Usually you would’ve drawn out the penis dream for at least another two paragraphs.
TT: Three, if the gods in charge of my life were feeling particularly malignant that day.
TG: all good
TG: just tired
TT: You should sleep, then.
TT: That’s the recommended course of action for when one is feeling particularly worn down. Or so I’ve heard, at least.
TG: youve never given it a shot then
TT: Of course not. It’d be detrimental to my brand.
TG: all about the pr image
TG: gotta set some good standards for yourself so everyone in the new universe is fuckin terrified when they meet you for the first time
TT: That’s the plan.
TT: Seriously, though, are you okay?
TT: I don’t mean to pry.
TG: you always mean to pry
TG: thats kind of your whole thing
TG: rose lalonde without prying is like a chicken without a head
TG: might work for a few seconds but after that houston we have a problem
TT: Sometimes I mean to pry, but in this instance, I ask out of genuine concern this time.
TT: I know I’m in the habit of pulling your leg in your more sensitive moments sometimes, but you can always talk to me about things. Both as part of a greater unit and individually you’ve been through a significant amount. I know I’m not actually a functional replacement for longterm professional care, but if there’s something I can do in the interim period to make things a little less terrible, I want to.
TT: Even if that’s just listening.
TG: wow
TG: someones feeling fuckin sentimental
TT: Just trying to be helpful.
TG: yeah
TG: sorry
TG: weird evening
TT: The penis dreams will do that to you.
TG: ha ha ha
TG: hey can i ask you a question
TG: or like
TG: can i just say a few words and then ill decide at the end if i want you to say something or not
TT: Go ahead.
TG: or actually
TG: forget it
TT: No, wait.
TT: What’s going on?
TT: If I can be of assistance, I want to.
TG: think that ship mightve sailed
TG: literally
TG: or if were being super literal i think that ship mightve been blown up and then had its remains sucked into a paradoxical black hole
TG: and then the universe the black hole was in just like fuckin disappeared
TG: or whatever happened
TG: you get the idea
TT: Feeling weird about Earth?
TG: sorta
TG: i guess
TG: broadly that is what is going on in my mind right now
TG: feeling weird about earth
TG: feeling weird about the people on earth
TG: some of them
TG: you ever seen mysterious skin
TG: the movie
TT: Can’t say that I have.
TG: watched it with karkat earlier
TG: fucking sad as shit rose
TG: poor kids
TG: fuck
TT: Can I ask for the premise, or would you rather not get into it?
TG: im just like
TG: fuck
TG: i dont get how someone could do that and just be okay with it you know
TG: like i dont get it at all i think that shits disgusting but when its fucking kids its just like
TG: how do you live with yourself
TG: how are the kids supposed to live with themselves
TG: and man like i know he said he had a reason for everything and it was all part of my fucking training or whatevee and were all here and alive and that cant be said for half the people who went through the game so i guess that means he knew what he was doing and it was all for the right reasons in the end
TG: cause i wouldnt have survived this shit without him
TG: but like
TG: fuck
TG: i just dont get it
TT: Is this about your brother?
TG: you know sometimes hed get all plastered and come into my room and just stand in the corner crying for like fucking hours
TG: all like
TG: im so sorry dave im such a bad person ive screwed you up so much you must hate me blah blah blah
TG: and then hed just do it all over again the next time and not say a word after
TG: and its just like well if you fucking felt so bad whyd you do it in the first place
TG: man all i wanted him to be was my fucking brother
TG: i used to dream of the day thatd id wake up and haul my sorry ass down into the kitchen and hed just be sitting at the counter right as fucking rain and thatd be it
TG: no more training
TG: no more puppets
TG: no more of the other shit
TT: Other shit?
TT: Dave?
TT: Dave I am researching the plot of this movie and not feeling particularly inspired as to what you mean by "other shit."
TT: What other shit?
TG: never mind
TG: im being a pussy forget about it
TG: just need to get some sleep
TG: you can get back to doing whatever shit you get up to at assfuck o’clock in the morning
TT: Dave, wait.
-- turntechGodhead [TG] is now offline! --
***
“I watched it,” Rose says at breakfast the next morning.
You pause from mushing your cereal into a pulp to look up at her, feeling oddly as if someone has just ripped your chair out from underneath you. She’s assumed her customary stance by the sink, back to you, staring off at the wall like it holds all the secrets of the universe.
You swallow your mouthful—it tastes exactly like what you imagine actual sand must taste like—and do not say anything.
“The movie,” she carries on, never one for awkward silences. “That you were talking about.”
You have half a mind to ask her if she got any sleep last night. All the words curl up and die in the back of your mouth as the full implication of what she’s saying hits you.
There's a joke here, somewhere. You close your eyes for a moment, half-wondering if that'll help you find it more.
“I—” Rose starts, then stops. You can hear her mouth snap shut with an audible click. “How long?”
You aren’t even sure how to begin answering that one. “It’s fine,” you say instead, carefully sliding your cereal bowl away from you, appetite mysteriously gone. “Seriously.”
“Dave.” She sounds like she's begging you.
You swallow back what feels like a golf ball and wave a hand. It feels like pulling a stick through concrete. “Rose, c’mon. This is the kicker for you? It was a thing when I was little. Barely even remember it now. I just saw the movie and freaked. It’s fine.”
She doesn't say anything. So you keep going, because, honestly, what else are you supposed to do?
"And, like, okay, it's not as if it was, like, all bad. Dude was, like, freshly fucking eighteen about to go off and start his life and then, boom, gets saddled with his snotty little kid brother all of a sudden. You know how many guys would've just dumped me in a trash can and fucked off without a second thought? Like—" You swallow. "Like he fucking cared, right? Enough to stick around, at least. So he did some weird shit, y'know, so he—"
Your breath catches in your throat, an embarrassing hiccup that echos around the kitchen like a gunshot. Your whole body is buzzing. You only half-register the figure of Rose moving towards you until she's stopped at the other side of the table. She's just a mass of shapes and colors until she opens up your mouth and speaks:
“You were a child.”
And then everything switches off. The indecipherable emotion building back in your throat shrinks down into a hard ball, its absence almost worse, somehow. Rose stands before you in frightening clarity. You can feel every atom in your hands as they drum against the tabletop.
You have never wanted to disappear more in your life.
“It’s fine."
“No, it isn’t.”
She looks so pissed you're almost scared for yourself. You fight back the instinct to back away, put a room of distance between the two of you. That's stupid. This whole thing is so stupid.
“Rose,” you hear yourself say.
“No one did anything," she grinds out, an already-answered question. “Not your teachers, not CPS, not—” Her mouth twists into an ugly grimace. “—not your fucking friends. No one even noticed.”
“I—”
“And I knew. I knew how bad it was and I didn’t do—anything. I laughed about it. I laughed about it to you, I—Dave, I am so sorry.” She shakes her head. “I am so fucking sorry.”
The world around you stalls, the sorry punching a hole clean through your chest. “You didn’t know,” you say, head pounding. “That was the whole point. You didn’t know.”
”I knew well enough. Fuck, you were a kid.”
The floor underneath you suddenly feels like it's not entirely there. You can't lie: there is a part, a small, scummy little part of you that wants to agree. That wants to shove your chair back and haul yourself to your feet and say you're right, you did nothing. That shit went on for years and no one fucking did anything.
Years, days. Once or twice. More times that you can bring yourself to remember. What does it matter, really? The kitchen around you feels like it's caving in on itself. Rose is still staring at you, eyes glassy, and you just can't.
You feel your hand shake as you bring it up to comb your hair out of your face. It wasn't her fault she didn't do anything, of course. No one could've done shit about it except for Bro. That's the kicker.
"It's fine," you say again, throat tight.
Rose looks like she's about to start crying, or screaming, or both. “No, it isn’t fine. It’s—”
You’re sure she’s about to say something nice. Really. For her roleplaying as a cracked-up armchair psychologist, she’s good at talking to people, and she’s good at saying the right thing when she wants to. And, judging by the looks of it, she has a lot to say right now.
Too bad you’re already halfway out the door.
***
You’re on your third practice dummy and fifth sword when Karkat comes up to the observation deck, towel in one hand, bottles of water in the other.
You have the sneaking suspicion he’s been talking to Rose, but if he has, he doesn’t let it on. Just gives you a baleful-sort of once-over before sighing loud enough for you to hear it across the roof deck.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he says emphatically as he pulls to a stop behind you. You’re buried hilt deep in one of the dummy’s stomach, little bits of fiber and cotton spilling out around you, chest rising and falling with the effort. It takes you a second to fully focus on him standing behind you.
You leave the sword where it is, surrendering yourself to either a vicious tug-of-war match with the dummy’s desecrated corpse later on or just alchemizing another set of swords tomorrow, and turn to face Karkat. He holds the towel out for you; you accept it with a grunt.
“What’s the body count now?” he asks, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Five fucking billion and twelve?”
You exhale into the towel. It smells cold and dusty. “Huh?”
“The dummies, idiot.”
You spare a look at the one you just finished with, now awkwardly slumped forward, propped up by the hilt of the sword. There’s something about looking at it that makes you feel a little nauseous.
You hold out a hand and Karkat passes one of the water bottles to you. “What about them?”
“You’ve been running those stupid things through non-stop for, like, a pedigree straight.”
Another side-eye to the dummy. For a moment, you see polo shirts and clean-cut shades. Rose’s voice plays out in the back of your head, all shaky and sad-sounding: you were a child. You were a kid. You blink and the world turns normal again.
You really were, weren’t you? Fuck.
“Yeah. And?”
Karkat isn't Rose. He matches you blow for blow most of the time, taking every one of your cheap shots and pointing it right back at you. You call him nosy and insufferable and self-important; he barely blinks before firing right back. You're an asshole, you're a baby, you're impossible to deal with. You don't give a shit about anyone enough to even pretend to be genuine around them, do you? he snarls at you one time, and that one really hurts, not because it's true but because it isn't, because you can see, so painfully, why he thinks that.
This time, though, the bite to your tone barely seems to phase him. Instead of peeling his lips back in the beginning of a sneer, eyes narrowing in the way they do right before you really get into it, he just gives you a look. A Look, really, capital L and all, and you have a feeling that you’re supposed to know what it means. You have a feeling you do. “Generally speaking, when people go around brutally massacring practice dummies—”
“I’m not brutally massacring anything, dude; they aren’t even fucking alive —”
“—it means something’s wrong with them. In the head.” He arches an eyebrow at you. “Psychologically.”
“Thanks.” You unscrew the cap of the water bottle and knock back a mouthful, wiping your face with the back of your hand. “Always know what to say to get those butterflies in me all fired up again.”
Karkat just snorts, reaching to pull the towel back from where you’d slung it across your shoulder. He starts to fiddle with it, folding and unfolding it in his hands, staring up at you unblinkingly while you chug some more of the water. After a few moments of silence, the back of your neck starts to itch in the way it always does when someone watches you for too long, and you throw a glare over at him.
His jibes sting in all the right places, like rubbing hand sanitizer on an open cut, but it's the softness that truly makes you miserable. Sometimes in those moments, you think of every awful thing you can say to him, every deep-set insecurity to pick at like a half-healed scab, every verbal punch you can throw until he's staring at you like he wants you to dissolve into ash, like you're the worst thing that could've ever happened to you. Anything to get him to close up and turn away, leave you to stew in your own shit alone.
Other times, you just want him to take care of you so much it makes you feel sick.
“Dude,” is all you say.
He returns it with full force. “What?”
“Stop looking at me like that.”
Karkat huffs. “Like what?”
“Like—” You wave the bottle in his general direction, some of the water splashing out over the rim and onto the concrete below. For a second you swear it sizzles, and it takes you a second to keep yourself from being catapulted back to the rooftop and the tarmac and the sound of metal on metal on skin on skin on skin on skin on— “—that. You know. All concerned, and shit.”
“I’m not concerned,” he says, glare going a shade more baleful.
“You are so concerned.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re spending too much time with Kanaya.” A funny taste starts to build in the back of your mouth; you wash it down with another gulp of water. It tastes tinny and cold and a little fake. “Give it another month and you’ll start carrying a chainsaw around and draining a pint of blood from Rose every other week.”
Karkat huffs again, the sound low in the back of his throat. You watch him watch you for a while, before he silently breaks the unofficial staring match to look down at his boots, scuffing the ground with them a little.
“Maybe I am,” he mutters.
“What, drinking Rose’s blood?”
“No, idiot.” He shoots you a look through the hair falling into his eyes. “Concerned about you.”
And there it is. The million-dollar sucker punch, right to the stomach. I don't need your fucking pity, a part of you wants to say. Quit treating me like I'm fucking fine china, asshole.
The other part sort of just wants to lay down next to him for a long, long time.
You wonder, a little dully, if it’s normal, always feeling like you’re walking into a trap when conversations like these start. It doesn't take a genius to determine that Karkat is nothing even remotely resembling awful or cruel or even a little unkind; he’d be the last person to mock you, to belittle you, to do anything bad to you, even if you did something completely crazy and also embarrassing as anything like talk to him about whatever’s on your mind. Out of anyone you know, anyone you’ll ever know, you can talk to him. You know this.
And yet just the very thought of it feels like a door slamming at the top of a flight of stairs, a broken light flickering out on the inside of a fridge, a camera light flashing at you as you raid the medicine cabinet in your bathroom for painkillers. It feels like a locked door, hands on your neck, fingers tight in your hair, pulling. It feels like a million metaphors, a million thoughts and pictures and images you still don’t know how to make sense of—don’t even know where to start doing so—and sometimes you can’t help but feel like it’d be easier if you just didn’t start all of that.
With him, with anyone, with yourself.
“Dunno why you would be.” You shrug. Your voice sounds normal. The muscles in your neck feel tight. “I’m all good, dude.”
The look Karkat gives you is so wholly unbelieving your stomach aches for a second. “You don’t have to be, you know.”
You wonder, even more dully, if there will ever be a point at which you believe that.
“I know.”
***
-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at ??? --
TG: im sorry for running out on you like that
TG: you were trying to be all nice and shit and you totally were
TG: i just freaked
TG: its a sore subject i guess
TG: well all of it is a sore subject so its like the sore subjects sore subject you know
TG: im sorry though
TG: are we cool
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] is now online! --
TT: We are cool.
TT: I’m sorry, too.
TG: for what
TT: We have known each other since we were eight years old, Dave.
TT: I was made aware of your less than ideal living circumstances maybe weeks into that. Not once did I ever stop to think just how severe things were, and just how warranted an intervention on my part would have been.
TG: what would you have done though
TG: realistically
TG: like sure you could have kidnapped me and carted my ass up to new york or something but i dont think bro wouldve let that fly even for a second
TG: hed come and get me back and then id just be in even more shit than before
TG: and you were a fuckin kid too lalonde like come on
TG: not your fault that you at the ripe old age of eight to thirteen didnt know how best to rescue me from smuppet hell like itd be crazy for me to hold that shit against you
TG: you didnt know what was going on
TG: hell i didnt even know what was going on
TG: half the time i thought the shit he was doing was totally normal average cool older bro stuff and the other half he had so many insane fucking master plan justifications for that i didnt bother to think twice anyways
TG: like i dont think i wouldve even believed you if youd tried to say something was particularly off
TG: so im not pissed at all that you didnt call me on that
TG: shit wasn’t your job
TT: Still.
TT: Someone should have done something. Someone should have helped you when you needed it.
TT: You were asking for help the only way you knew how. Even if realistically, I couldn’t have done anything, I still should have noticed. Someone should have.
TG: aw cmon man
TG: i give you shit for everything under the sun but you do help
TG: and you did then too
TG: like
TG: i dont know
TG: shit was so bad i couldve counted the things that held me over on one hand you know
TG: and not to be all gross and sappy or whatever but you definitely get a finger
TG: like yeah you were obnoxious and pretentious and talked like you ate a fucking merriam webster for breakfast and then promptly shat it out all over your chat client but i kinda needed stuff like that to take my mind off things you know
TG: cause then otherwise it wouldve all been bad
TG: it could be a shitty day but i always had you bugging my ass about some trivial shit to come back to
TG: and when it was really rough that shit was honestly a lifeline
TG: cause i knew that if i just disappeared or something at least youd notice and care
TG: and be super fucking annoying about it to
TG: it wasnt all bad
TG: i promise
TT: Okay.
TT: I really am sorry, Dave.
TT: To do that to anyone is unthinkable. To do that to a child is so far removed from anything I even have the words to condemn.
TT: It was his job to keep you safe. To make you feel loved and protected and valued and safe.
TT: And I am so sorry he not only failed to fulfill those responsibilities, but actively went out of his way to make your life as miserable as possible in all number of ways.
TT: You deserved so much better.
TG: yeah
TG: guess so
***
You don’t remember your first strife.
It’s funny, because when you think back to your childhood, back to the years you spent suffocating half to death in your tiny corner of Texas, the strifes were the only things that felt important, as shitty as it sounds. It’s not like there wasn’t other stuff—good stuff, too—because there was, and you cling to that shit so tight you feel like you’re going to break your hands sometimes. But when you look back to what stuck—what still sticks, more than you want it to, really, but that’s sort of a moot point—it always comes back to the strifes.
And yet you can’t remember the first one. You can’t even remember when the first one took place. There was no come-to-Jesus moment, no light switch flip, no monumental shift between your life being relatively well-adjusted to whatever the fuck it was by the time you turned thirteen. Your whole relationship with your bro was strifes—hell, your whole fucking life was comprised of them, the periods in which you weren’t getting your ass beat into the pavement more interim spaces than anything else.
As far as you can tell, you might’ve just been born this way. Born to live this way, at least.
Wouldn’t that just be fucking poetic.
***
Karkat doesn’t spar with you anymore, but he’ll still come up to the observation deck to keep you company slash babysit you, whatever kind of day it is for him. Sometimes he brings his books. Sometimes he brings his husktop and spends the whole time banging away on the keyboard, muttering under his breath. Sometimes he just sits there, knees pulled to his chest, arms wrapped around his shins, and watches you.
Today he’s doing the latter. You can feel his gaze burning a hole through the back of your neck as you have at it with yet another practice dummy, blade slicing through the air with faint hissing sounds, the slap of metal on fiber echoing around the space at regular intervals. Sweat beads on your brow, dripping down the sides of your face, stinging your eyes. It’s never hot on the meteor—you’re pretty sure deep space can’t even get warm, never mind hot enough to work up a sweat doing anything—but you always find yourself slipping between dimensions, between universe, between homes when you spar. You always find your grip on the reality you've tried to cement yourself in weakening, so much so that you feel the images around you start to blur until they take the shape of Houston.
If Rose was here, she would say that the brain’s ability to convince itself of things that are not there—such as the Texas sun on the back of your neck, the hundred-degree heat, the heavy, sticky air filling your lungs every time you suck a breath in—a suitably self-impressed smile covering up any hint of genuineness to her words. You're beat, she's gotten you again, hat's off to Rose fucking Lalonde. But it’s Karkat, not her, watching you right now, and when you finally pause, turning to face him, chest heaving, the only expression on his face is one of tight, tense concern.
Sometimes it stings, that he doesn't even bother to hide it anymore.
“‘Sup?” you say.
Karkat tips his head to the side, brow furrowing. There's a heavy pause, then— “How’s the sword?” he asks.
You get the feeling that wasn’t what he wanted to ask at all.
“Alright,” you say, giving it an experimental bend, the point pressing into the ground. It feels tenuous but still strong enough to be usable— hah, you think bleakly, metaphor. Another few rounds and it’ll probably snap with wear, but you’re not super bothered by that. You think. “I’ll probably finish up for today now and just toss this one, or something. Gonna be useless in a little while, anyways, so might as well just quit while I’m ahead.” You toss the hilt from hand to hand, the starlight from outside glinting off the blunted edge. “You know?”
Karkat nods, humming a little under his breath. You can feel his gaze go straight through you.
“What’s up?” You rest the sword against the dummy and walk over to him, tossing yourself down on the bench beside him, knees bumping together. “You all good, dude?”
Divert and distract. Make it about him. You know this game.
For a long moment, he just sits there, staring down at his hands like they’re the most fascinating things on the face of the goddamn meteor. You can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s thinking, thinking long and hard about what he's about to say next. Honestly, him doing that always scares the shit out of you; if there’s anything that’s guaranteed to make you feel worse than a Karkat who’s talking off the top of his head just to get under your skin, it’s a Karkat who’s putting every once of brain power he has behind choosing what he wants to say next.
Sometimes, you'd rather he just punch your lights out. That you can manage.
“Karkat—”
“How long are you going to fight for?” he asks suddenly, voice snapping to life, and you get the sick, awful feeling in the pit of your stomach that he isn’t just talking about sparring here.
You open your mouth to respond, find absolutely nothing to say that makes even the vaguest amount of sense, and close it with a snap.
Karkat keeps looking down at his hands. “I don’t—” He cuts himself off, frowning, biting the edge of his lip for a second. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to, you know. If it’s an issue about—fuck, I don’t know, proving yourself to me, or to someone else on the meteor, or to yourself, Dave, I—”
He shakes his head. You feel inexplicably like you are about to be sick, and you aren't entirely sure why.
“You don’t have to.” Karkat blinks. “Prove yourself, I mean. With this. With—with literally anything.”
The sick feeling gets worse. You realize you’re holding your breath and make a conscious effort to release it in the most normal-sounding way possible.
“You don’t have to prove yourself,” Karkat repeats. “And you don’t have to keep fighting. Not if you don’t want to.”
You think about Texas, about the strifes, about the notes on the fridge heralding the start of another Dave Strider epic beatdown session. You think about your constant attempts at warding off Rose’s questions about how much you had eaten that day, or Egbert’s pleas for you to ask Bro if he could come spend a week with you over the summer. You think about the broken noses and black eyes and concussions, the scars on your chest that had made Karkat suck in a breath the first time he had seen you without your shirt off. You think about Jack and the sword and the blood on the ground, red on blue, the dizzying patterns etched into the backs of your eyes until the day you die.
You think about the worst stuff, about the way Karkat had looked when you had finally broken the news to him, like you’d just presented him with the corpse of his best friend. Except you’d seen his face when that had actually happened, and that was nothing compared to the way he had looked at you then.
You still feel bad about that, even now. Even though he’s told you time and time again that you have no reason to be.
The fight, then, it seems, has been ongoing. You’re not sure at what point it ends.
And you could try and articulate this—really, you could—but he wouldn’t get it, not in the way you wanted him to. Or he would, completely and utterly so, because he’s Karkat Vantas and getting it is all he does with you sometimes, so much so that you feel selfish and guilty, like you're taking something you don't deserve, a kid stealing cookies from under the table.
And you're honestly not sure which one is worse.
You're weak: you drop your head into his shoulder in silence. After a moment of pause, you feel his cheek rest against the top of your skull. His hand finds yours, and when you lace your fingers together, he squeezes, hard.
***
The bad days are bad.
The bad days are so bad, in fact, that retrospectively, you’re a little embarrassed. Once upon a time, you would’ve sworn up and down that Bro had beaten the tear ducts out of you, made you into a real Strider, a real man. It might’ve been a mostly ironic gesture at the time, but like all your ironic gestures, not without a grain or two of truth. Or a whole pile of them.
As you discover, though, that is in fact not the case. Not only are your tear ducts still resolutely in their correct place, but they actually function very well, and are a little eager out of the gate sometimes.
Meaning you cry. A lot. Sometimes it’s because you’re sad, sometimes it’s because you’re pissed off, sometimes it’s because Terezi is just so stomach-achingly funny you don’t know what to do with yourself.
Sometimes—and this is the real kicker—it’s because you’re happy. You’re having a good day curled up on your bed, Karkat’s head on your stomach. Impending doom is on the horizon, but still far enough away where moments like this don’t feel forced. You realize you are so genuinely relaxed, sitting here playing around on your computer’s mixing software, listening to the sound of pages turning every minute or so as Karkat breezes through another one of his trashy troll romances. You realize that today is a good day, and it hits you then, that your good days are so numerous now you’ve stopped identifying them as such. Back in Houston, a good day was when there was enough food in the cupboards for you to go to bed full, and Bro was either out of town or too busy to hand your ass to you in a strife. The chances of those two things coinciding on the same day were near-negligible, so every time they did, it felt like an occasion to celebrate.
Now, you’re safe and well-fed all the time. The only injuries you sustain are your own fault, and when they happen, you have what feels like a whole army of chronic worriers to fuss over you for at least a few straight hours.
You realize all this, and then you realize your cheeks are wet. And then you realize you can’t breathe.
Suddenly you are doubled up, crying so hard it feels like something is trying to force its way out of your chest, Alien-style. You are vaguely aware of Karkat on your periphery, a hand on your back rubbing up and down, another one in your hair. He is trying to help, and for some reason this only makes you sadder. Where was this when you were little, you want to ask. You are so unfathomably lucky now—where was all this good fortune when you were starving and sore and too scared to sleep some nights in case Bro wanted to come in and try some funny business?
You try to say this out loud, and all that comes out is, “I was a kid.” Over and over again you spit it out, hunched over, sobbing like there’s no tomorrow. “I was a kid. I was a fucking kid.”
“I know,” you hear Kakat say, softly. “I know, baby, I know. I know.”
He is so nice it makes you want to throw up. Instead you just twist yourself sideways and press your face into his chest. His shirt is going to get soaked, and you know he won’t care about this, and for some reason that makes you cry harder.
“I loved him so much,” you force out at some point. “Why did he do that shit? Why didn’t he feel bad? I was a fucking kid.”
“I know,” Karkat just says again. “I’m so sorry.”
There is nothing else to say.
***
You alchemize a baseball bat and keep it in your room, tucked under your pillow. Sometimes at night when you can’t sleep, you’ll roll onto your back and pull the thing out, cradling it to your chest. It’s a weird, disturbing habit, one that Karkat does not fail to pick up on quick enough. He even asks you about it one day, in the strangely tactful way he’s started approaching these things.
What’s with that thing, he demanded, flapping a hand in the direction of the handle poking out from behind your pillows. Some sort of demented human teddy bear?
A bat, you had said, suddenly feeling indescribably small and stupid, like you’d just been outed as someone who still sleeps with a nightlight or sucks their thumb—and, really, isn’t a bat under your pillow just your own weird little version of those things?—even as Karkat looked up at you, face completely devoid of judgement. You know, for, like, baseball and shit.
You’re going to play baseball? With who? Fucking Terezi?
The baseball was an example, dumbass.
Okay, so why do you have it?
Cue the obligatory pause in the dialogue. Sometimes some questions are harder to answer than others, especially when he looks at you like that, like he already knows what you're going to say.
You could be honest with him if you really wanted. You could tell him that you sleep with a bat under your pillow because sometimes you have moments where you are entirely convinced that the universe is playing a giant trick on you. You are convinced that one morning, you are going to open your eyes to cracked plaster and water stains, not permanently-clammy stone, and there Bro will be, standing in the corner, waiting. Whether he has a katana in his hand or a beer can—or even nothing—won’t matter, what he plans to do with you won’t matter. All that matters is that, one day, he’ll get to you again, and whatever he decided to do, it’s going to fucking hurt.
And what better to protect yourself with than a bat? Fat lot of good the swords did you back then.
I don’t know, dude, what if that creepy ass clown comes knocking? I don’t think it’d count as a heroic one, but death by getting my brains bashed out of my skull by a bowling pin-wielding whackjob like him doesn't exactly sound all that fun, either.
It’s comforting to know—the way that slamming into the ground after falling a hundred feet might be considered comforting—that there will always be repeated motifs in your life. Heat. Broken shitty swords. Baseball bats.
That’s moronic.
Fine, well, if the clown goes after your ass, you better not start knocking on my door begging for help.
After a while, you start having nightmares again. They start the same as the ones you had when you were a kid—you in the center of your room, you in the hallway, you hovering over Bro's bed, your newly minted title of judge, jury, and executioner immortalized in the form of the bat you’ve been white-knuckling the whole time. Except this time, though, you go through with it. You bring the bat crashing down onto his face and blood sprays everywhere, staining your face, your hands, your shirt, the floor, the bedsheets—everything—and a part of you can't help but think no, this is wrong, this is too much blood, there’s too much blood here. But even then, it doesn’t matter, because you are hollow and cold from the inside out, your face slack, eyes shut as you hit him, over and over and over again.
You kill him and don’t feel a single thing.
You wake from one of the dreams in a cold sweat one night, cheeks damp, and it’s the final straw. You take the bat to an airlock at the very back of the meteor and shoot it out into the space around you, watching as it fades from view in just a few seconds, a tiny speck among the tapestry of planets and galaxies and dying stars surrounding you.
The dreams don’t stop, but the vindication you get helps, just a little.
***
When Bro's birthday comes around, you do not come out of your room all day.
It's not as if you're doing much—or anything, really, unless staring blankly at the ceiling and carefully directing your thoughts like the world's most uptight traffic controller ever—but still, you can't help but feeling like you've been interrupted when you hear a knock on your door.
Your own private ritual. How lame is that?
You mumble out "come in," hoping whoever it is won't hear you and will think you've just gone and thrown yourself off the side of the meteor, or something. Of course, the vague remnants of the universe still around hate you, and the door creaks open a split-second later.
"Hi," says Rose, one hand on the doorframe.
You resume your staring match with the ceiling. "Hey."
"Can I come in?"
"What if I tell you I've contracted the most deadly virus known to man, and I'm hiding in here to protect everyone from certain doom, nobly agreeing to die alone if it means all of you will be able to continue on our quest and one day avenge my name?"
The door shuts, and you feel the side of the bed dip as Rose sits down.
"Your funeral," you mutter.
"I wanted to make sure you were okay."
You snort. "Peachy."
Rose hums. You steal a glance at her quickly. She's staring vaguely at the corner of your room where your sword is propped up, gaze unfocused.
"I've been doing a lot of research," she says after a pause.
"Oh, great. That's reassuring."
She flashes you a look. "I'll admit it, this is an area in which I have little knowledge. I know a lot about other types of abuse. Sexual is not one of them."
"Oh."
"Quite."
"I'm sorry."
She gives you another look. "For what?"
You can't come up with an answer to that, not one that makes sense, at least, so you say nothing.
She goes back to staring at the sword. "I think it goes without saying that you have nothing to be sorry for, but I hope the reiteration helps all the same. If I were you, I'd probably be eyes deep in the most poorly-alchemized alcohol this sorry universe has ever seen, so I'd say you're behaving remarkably, all things considered."
"It really isn't a big deal," you say. "Like, at all. I'm just—I dunno, not in the mood for things today."
"That is perfectly understandable." Rose says. "And I think this is a very big deal, Dave."
Your chest aches a bit.
Above you, Rose keeps talking. "Most of my research was centered around the pathology of it, in a way—why people do things like this. A good portion as well was dedicated to figure out how to mitigate the fallout, so to speak." She sighs. "How to help."
"What'd you find, doc?"
She's silent for a moment, worrying at the bottom of her lip.
"I have a lot of things I could say," she says, finally. "And I've been weighing the varying helpfulness of them throughout the course of the day, with no such luck, I'm afraid, as I'm not you so I don't know what will make you feel better. I guess I could tell you that if there was a way I could go back in time knowing what I know now, I would walk down to Texas if that's what it took and wouldn't take my hands off him until he was dead. But I'm not sure if that's what you want to hear. I could tell you that I think you might be the bravest person I've ever met. But I'm not sure if that's what you want to hear, either."
Your throat tightens.
"I think it's somewhat trite," she carries on, "and I'm sorry platitudes are the best I have to offer to you right now, but it's true. I can't think of many things that are less survivable than that, and I think it's a true testament to your strength that you're still here despite it all. That's lame, I know, but—"
She trails off, half-shrugging.
"No, yeah," is all you get out until your throat closes like a steel trap. For a moment, the two of you just sit there, silently staring off into space. When your voice returns to working order, you can't think of anything else to say in except, "Sometimes, I'm so happy he's dead."
Above you, Rose's mouth twists. "Me too."
***
“Li’l man,” he says, and just like that you know it’s bad, you know it’s one of those nights, the nights he wants to talk and talk and talk, staring straight through you all the while instead of letting you fuck off to your room like you always do, like you want to more than anything right now.
“Li’l man,” he says again, words slurring together, accent blurring the lines between vowels and consonants until the only way you’re able to recognize the phrase he’s saying is because he’s said it to you a billion times before, because you have this script, this dialogue, this scene of the horror-comedy-box-office-fucking-failure that is your life. “D’you think you’d kill me?”
You sit at the kitchen table, dead silent, gaze on your hands. The tab of his beer pops like a gunshot. You count the knots in the wood and recite the state capitals you memorized in school the last time you went—eighteen months and ten days ago, but who’s counting, really—and focus on the feeling of each individual atom of air entering and exiting your lungs.
You do not engage, because that will never help. Neither will staying silent, but at least this way you don’t risk running your mouth into dangerous waters.
“Do you?” Bro says again, the enunciation painful, a conscious effort on his part that makes your stomach flip over and then harden. How expertly he toggles between moods, how fast he has you backed into a corner, breath hot on your face, palm pressing down on your collarbone hard enough to break it—he could, he could if he wanted to, and isn't it mercy that he doesn't? “If y’had the chance, wouldja?”
You shrug, and the motion feels like pulling teeth, harder than anything you’ve ever done in your life up until this point. The lights from overhead, the busted fluorescent bulbs he refuses to change even though they’re in danger of breaking any second, even though every single thing in this apartment is in danger of breaking twenty-four-fucking-seven, glints off your bro’s glasses and right into your eyes.
“Couldja?”
The question hangs over your head like a dagger poised to drop. You don’t know what to say that will get you out of this, so you just say nothing.
His stare makes your skin crawl. Some invisible pressure starts to build up in the pit of your stomach.
After a while, he just sighs, pushing his chair back with a scrape that sets your teeth on edge, his face is ever the wall of impassiveness, ever inscrutable no matter how hard you try to read him, but you think you can see some disappointment written into the lines around his mouth, and it hits like a punch to the stomach.
“Roof,” he says, voice gravelly, reverberating around the inside of your skull like an air horn blast. “Now.”
The pressure builds. You breathe around it, air whistling through your teeth.
“Now,” your bro says, and suddenly his tone is crystal clear, sharp as the kanata he’ll be holding to your neck in twenty minutes tops. “Get your ass up, little man.”
And you do. What other option has there ever been?
***
“He brought me takeout sometimes.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“He taught me how to scratch. How to make music. How to take photos.”
“Doesn’t matter, Dave.”
Karkat’s palm is warm on the top of your head. The blankets you’ve buried your face in make it a little hard to breathe right, but that could be other things, too. Namely the constricting feeling working its way through your chest, wrapping around your rib-cage and squeezing until you have to spit your words out in order for them to make sense; blood onto the pavement, the Texas summer sun and the door at the top of the stairs and the scraped-up knees from the tarmac and the blood and the blood and the—
“It doesn’t matter.” Karkat’s voice cuts you off, a knife through butter, and you cling to it, allowing him to wrench you out of whatever you’re tumbling into, grab the collar of your shirt and hold you back from the edge even as the precipice below you crumbles away. “Even if he was nice to you, even if he sometimes did nice things for you—Dave, that shit doesn’t matter. You can’t let that be a justification for all the awful, awful things he did to you.” His fingers comb through your hair, tactility to a degree of sentimentality you’re unused to, but you don’t have it within you to convince yourself you hate it right now. “That’s not fair to yourself, Dave. That isn’t fair.”
You swallow back something heavy; it drops into your stomach like a rock in a puddle. Your head spins.
“Sometimes I don’t hate him.”
Above you, you hear Karkat inhale and hold it.
“I want to.” You swallow again, the back of your throat dry, ashy, bitter. “I want to all the fucking time, but—”
Something inside your nose starts to burn. Karkat’s fingers shake just a little, just for a second, a split second.
“—but I—fuck, I mean, he was my best friend. He was all I had for years. And it’s like, yeah, he was a total piece of shit, he was the worst guy ever to me, but he also wasn’t, you know? And I don’t know what to do with that. I—shit, Karkat, sometimes I swear I miss him, like, how stupid is that to say? Dude didn’t give a fuck about doing anything good for me, and I fucking miss him, like—I—”
And maybe this is all you’ll ever be. Maybe you’ll forever be stuck here in this moment, hanging between certainties—Bro the hero, Bro the villain, Bro the dude who ruined your life so systematically, so persistently, so without even the vaguest regard for what he might actually be doing to you at any point in time—forever destined to float in the liminal space in between.
Because isn’t that poetic, too. Aren’t you just so poetic.
“—I don’t know,” you finish, and it sounds lame even to you. You don’t even want to think about how embarrassing this probably is for Karkat to have to sit by and watch.
“Sorry,” you mutter. It’s half-assed, worlds less than the justification he deserves from you, but it’s the best you can come up with right now.
“You don’t have to say that,” Karkat murmurs, leaning down to press his lips to the crown of your skull. "You have nothing to be sorry for. Okay?"
The worst thing is he sounds like he believes it. Like he means it, too. You blink, hard, before realizing it doesn’t matter; Karkat can’t see your face right now, and even if he could, the only person that’s ever cared about you crying is a whole universe away, lying in a clearing somewhere with a sword sticking out of his chest, dead.
***
“I didn’t kill my bro, you know.”
You’re sitting on the edge of one of the observation decks, legs dangling over the edge, feet swinging from side to side. Your fingers are locked loosely with Karkat’s; his grip tightens the second you start speaking, the second you say your bro’s name.
The times you talk about him are few and far between, those that you will only bring him up yourself even less so. But, hey, when in Rome, or whatever.
“Yeah?” Karkat says, prompting.
“Yeah.” You nod. “Jack skewered that motherfucker before I got there. Found him dead as a fucking doornail, like, hours after the fact.”
Karkat hums again. His thumb swipes over the ridge of your knuckles.
“I don’t really know how this makes me feel,” you say, slowly. Then, “I don’t really know how my bro makes me feel. I don’t know what to do about everything.”
“I think that’s okay,” Karkat says, just as slowly, and you’re both learning, aren’t you? “To not know, I mean. It’s a lot of shit to unpack.”
“I know. I don’t really know where to start with that, either.”
Karkat looks over at you for a second. “You can start with me.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Always. I don’t think I have all the answers, or that I can even offer that good of advice sometimes, but I’m always here. I want to help.” He swallows. “I want to help you get better.”
You nod, head bobbing. Something feels like it’s opening up in your chest, but for the first time, it doesn’t hurt, not that much. “I want to get better, too, I think.”
Karkat smiles, the expression lighting his face up in a way that makes your heart flip over in your chest.
“Thanks,” you say, and it’s a poor summation of what you actually mean, but the look in Karkat’s eyes tells you he gets what you mean, truly.
And for right now, maybe that's enough.