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“Karkat? Hey, come on! Stop that! I need to go to sleep!” You groaned, batting weakly at the communication bot circling your head. “I’m tired!”
“Sleep is for the inferior. Get your ass up and entertain me. You’ve been sleeping for hours and I fear your mushy human thinkpan will coalesce into a useless pile of squishy pink stupidity if I allow you to go any longer without the proper stimulation.” The bot made Karkat’s voice sound funny, all squeaky and high like he had sucked down a balloon full of helium. It used to make you laugh hysterically, but after almost a decade of talking through the bot you had grown used to it.
You groaned, loud and low and wounded. “Oh my gosh, why? Dude, just let me sleep for a few more minutes. We humans need our beauty sleep. Just ask Dave.”
“I don’t care what the Dave human tries to teach you, moron. We both know he’ll make up all sorts of bullshit just so he can do whatever he wants.” The communication bot flew straight into your face, flashing its light in your eyes torturously. “Get up, nook kisser. I’m bored.”
“I’m not your babysitter!”
“The hell is a babysitter?”
With a groan, you slung an arm over your eyes and made a face that must have looked pretty hilarious if Karkat’s chirruping, communication-bot-ruining laughter was anything to say about it. You waited until he calmed down again to speak. “It’s okay, Kitkat, you can admit you’re just too nervous to sleep.”
“Nervous?” He squawked. “Screw you. I’m not nervous about anything. Why would I, Karkat Vantas, mutant survivor of the wreck formerly known as Alternia, be anxious about meeting my long-distance matesprit-slash-moirail-slash-kismesis that I’ve been communicating with through communication devices since the tender age of one sweep?”
You made another face. “Oh my gosh, please tell me you’re not bringing your weird troll quadrants into this. You know I don’t like them.”
“Shut up. You don’t get a say in the quadrants.”
“That doesn’t seem quite right. You can’t just say someone is your boyfriend without asking them first! That’s not how it works!”
“You’ve never denied any such claims before.”
“Yeah, because I’m interested in being your boyfriend. Not your best-friend-with-benefits or whatever, or your hate-boyfriend, or your weird we-can’t-be-friends-but-I-still-want-to-kiss-you-and-have-sex-with-a-bucket-with-you!”
“I did just say you were all three, didn’t I? That’s like the best of all the worlds. In fact, knowing the fuck-up that is my life, you’re probably my auspice too! Hear that, Egbert? You get all four quadrants in one roll! Lucky you, you get to court a mutant troll freak in every possible romantic fantasy he could ever have! Congratu-fucking-lations.”
“You are much too bitter, Karkat, and totally nervous about our meeting tomorrow!” You announced accusingly, pointing at where you thought the communication bot was now hovering, though you couldn’t be sure with your arm over your eyes. Karkat didn’t laugh, so you assumed that if nothing else, you were pretty close.
“That is blasphemy and you know it. I’m not ‘nervous’ or ‘anxious’ or ‘afraid’ or whatever other completely wrong adjectives you might come up with.”
“Yeah right! I can hear it in your voice! You are totally scared.”
A distorted, almost cute growl came through your bot, causing you to do this really embarrassing snort-giggle-thing that turned your whole face red with awkward humiliation. Thankfully, Karkat didn’t comment on it.
“If you won’t stop making a complete fool of yourself, I guess I will do you a mercy and log off before you humiliate yourself in ways that even I can’t comprehend. Good day, Egbert.”
Oh yeah. You always forget that while the two of you typically sleep at the same time, Karkat was nocturnal, so it was daylight wherever he was at the moment. “Good night, Karkat. Sweet dreams.”
He grumbled something, but you couldn’t hear him, and you didn’t get the chance to ask him to repeat it before he logged off. Your communication bot’s light fizzled out and it lowered itself back to its charge station on your end table, quiet and dark now that it wasn’t in use. You grinned up at your bedroom ceiling, whispering an unheard, “I love you too, Karkat,” before closing your eyes and surrendering to the darkness of sleep.
~
The rendezvous point was a small planet called LOWAS, though what that could possibly stand for, you didn’t know.
LOWAS was the sort of place that held a dark, dangerous beauty to it that wasn’t mirrored anywhere on Earth. Its land and trees were all a deep royal blue, rivers and lakes and streams overflowing with a black, tar-like substance instead of water, the villages and settlements full of a child-sized salamander-like populace that blew bubbles and interacted like a town of citizens on a kid’s television show. The sky was dark, clouds of flashing blue and white drifting lazily past, fireflies and stars the only true light here.
It was gorgeous, even as strange as it all was. Looking around, you couldn’t help but feel your heart swell, growing hot and tight in the limited space behind your ribs. The anticipation was killing you; you had never actually seen what Karkat looked like before—or what he actually sounded like—but you had met other trolls, ones from all over the hemospectrum, though none have ever had the unique color that Karkat told you about. You wanted to meet him now, wanted to touch his face and kiss his supposedly normal horns (his moirail and Rose’s something-or-the-other, Kanaya Maryam, told you otherwise) and kiss his fanged mouth.
When his ship finally landed, one roughly the same size as yours, but darker, sleeker, and somehow more advanced, you yelled and started jumping up and down because you had never claimed to be mature.
The ship’s exit door slid open with nary a sound, revealing a hole that remained dark and empty for only a second before a body was clamoring through, a black, skin-tight armor stretching and shifting metal-made scales across taut flesh, a horned head (and gosh, look at those cute little nubs!) raising so the face beneath those dark bangs could be seen. Crimson eyes locked with yours, a sharp, alien face naturally deadly, biting as a razor’s edge. This troll was taller than you; even from a few yards away you could tell it was so, maturation to the seven-feet of adulthood already well underway.
You screamed giddily and threw yourself at Karkat, who grunted as he caught you, sinewy arms wrapping around your back and keeping you pressed against him, trapping you more than holding you. You couldn’t say you minded, not really, not when you were too busy yelling his name and hugging him and then kissing all over his face and neck and talking a mile a minute about how awesome this was and wow, you didn’t expect him to be quite this attractive and look at all these cool weapons hanging from his belt and gog were you glad you could see him for real.
He didn’t seem to be able to respond, whether because he couldn’t get a word in edgewise around you or because he was shocked speechless, you didn’t know, but it made you a bit anxious. You kissed him even more to make up for it, frantic and desperately trying to communicate, Is this okay? Am I okay? Do you still like me now that you know what I look like?
Unfortunately, you ended up running out of air and were forced to pause, taking in great gulps of air to refill your empty lungs. Karkat seemed to think this was an exactly time to speak himself, and with his one-of-a-kind eyes boring holes into yours, he declared, “John, you have the stupidest fucking teeth I have ever had the misfortune to direct my gander bulbs to.”
You couldn’t help it; you laughed. “That’s not very nice! Jeez, is that what you say to all your dates?”
“I’m assuming you are referring to yourself as my significant other or quadrant mate and not the actual event itself, so the first thing I’m going to say is fuck you, and the second thing I’m going to say will point out that you are the only quadrant mate I’ve ever had besides that one incident I told you about in which I never had the chance to throw insults and commentary like I wanted.” You could tell that he was every bit as awkward and unsure as you were just from that little snippet of monologue, and for whatever reason, it relieved you to no end that you weren’t the only one who wasn’t sure what to do.
“Good! That means I get to be special!” You beamed up at him happily and watched him turn an interesting shade of red and look away, mumbling under his breath about how much of an idiot you were.
But that was okay, because you were pretty sure that right there was a very good sign that Karkat was very much alright with how you looked. Whew. Thank goodness.