Chapter Text
The Other World - or was it really? - glistened like gasoline under the sun. With its hazy quality, everything Karkat Vantas saw danced like a mirage… but wasn’t everything in this world a mirage, anyway? She didn’t know. The borders between her body and her consciousness had blurred long ago.
Thus stepped Karkat into the expanse before her, boot-clad feet seemingly floating on the translucent floor. It was iridescent, smooth like a polished opal (how did she even know that?) - maybe this was her personal mindscape, she thought, in the disquiet. There was wind far away, she knew, but she couldn’t hear it. She could focus on the minutiae of her own body - thundering heartbeat, clammy hands, buzzing mind - but she chose not to. Closing her eyes, Karkat sank further in the opalescent ground: A mindscape inside of another mindscape… full of memories that weren’t her own.
The edges of Karkat’s skin glitched - she was floating between memories, trying to listen, to feel, which one pulled her in. The past two years, she’d honed her skills with Sollux and Terezi both - the previous ten years, with rust- and goldbloods in the Rebellion-
Then red, red, candy-red like legacy and burden, washed the gloss out. A slow drip like honey, chains weighing her wrists - she couldn’t do it. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want this anymore.
She yanked her hands out of the shackles and focused on the Other World - the part that was outside this pool of mirages, the part where wind blew and she could see the Haunted Bachelor Pad floating over the woods-
Her heartbeat. She was here. She was now. Her hands clammed with cold sweat; she clapped them together, rubbed them on her pants. Thighs. She had thighs, wrapped in new jeans. Her hand descended to her knees, to her toes, and then up in a butterfly hug-
Sensation flooded every inch of skin and fabric she’d touched, and so the red dripped in reverse- reverse - gasoline and opal shooting her up - and she saw stars and darkness for a while, curled on something hard but ticklish.
Grass. Garden. She was out of the mindscape inside the mindscape. Karkat gasped for air, shooting up to a sitting position - and scrambled. Scrambled to look left right eyes darting to find her home, her new home here-
The Haunted Bachelor Pad floats reassuringly in the distance.
Her phone buzzed inside her pocket. She fished it out and saw a message.
Ran: karkat, do you wanna hang out?
A deep breath shuddered inside her. Slowly, she typed a reply - she needed to… not be in her visions so much. Right?
Right. She knew getting lost in visions fucked up Sollux a lot. Even fucked up Terezi a lot. Karkat didn’t know if she could keep herself so sane; one of these days she’d start going on a rampage like that fucking spidergirl- Right.
Karkat: YEAH :D
So she took the elevator to the Bachelor Pad.