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It's a truism that trolls take after their lusii, but you always thought that was more myth than reality. Or something that only turned true because certain people (by which you mean Vriska, and maybe even Sollux, the idiot) worked to make it true. For example, Feferi and Gl'bgolyb? One girl even you had a hard time staying mad at, versus one ravenous monster of the deep? Or even Equius with his temper and his stupid hemospectrum pride, versus that absurd and patient centaur of his. Similarity, what similarity?
The clincher, you always thought, was Gamzee. His lusus had a worse temper than you did, was fucking dangerous as shit to be around (even to Gamzee, sometimes), and could abscond faster and more thoroughly than any living thing had a fucking right to pull off.
Funny how that pretty much describes Gamzee these days. It's enough to make you wonder if Nepeta saw a side of Equius nobody else would have believed, and to start retroactively worrying about what kind of Empress Feferi might have turned into.
But mostly you wish it wasn't so hard to sneak off and spend time with your moirail. And not just because you worry what he might do without you around to apply the brakes. It's easy to forget with how undeniably fucked up Gamzee is, but moirallegiance works both ways.
He needs you to talk him down. You need him to touch you.
Gamzee won't answer messages on any of the computers scattered around this meteor. He won't come into the public areas even when you swear that Kanaya's off researching with Rose and can't stalk him with her chainsaw. (He tends to laugh at that, an explosive snort of bitter amusement. You're still not sure if that's because he thinks he deserves punishment or because he thinks Kanaya has no chance against him now that he's expecting her.) He just filches supplies from hidden rooms, zips around like a demented ghost with his sylladex full of corpses, and occasionally slips notes under the door of your respiteblock telling you where he'll be for the next few hours.
Kanaya is merciful enough not to follow when you slip away to meet him. Strider tried sticking his nose in once or twice because he's a bulge-licking fuckhead, and the excitable little mayor carapace idiot tagged along because, see above re: idiot, but you scared off the latter and either Terezi or Rose knocked sense into Strider. So now it's an open secret when you sneak off to hang with Gamzee, and you don't bother hiding your trail beyond the first five or six random transportalizers.
Gamzee's in one of the abandoned labs today. He's decanted the decaying corpses of your friends into giant cylinders of greenish fluid, and he's leaning against Nepeta's tube watching his sylladex cards do their seizure inducing shuffle.
"Hey, Gamzee," you say as you appear in the far corner of the vast and shadowed room. The green fluid glows a bit like pre-dawn moonlight, the purple moon's absence warning that daylight is gathering itself to pounce and fry you. Gamzee's sylladex glows like a lamp showing the way to his hive and shelter from the sun.
"Hey, best friend," he says, gathering the cards and tucking them away.
You sit down and lean against his side, relaxing only when he wraps one arm around you and tugs you in close. Your hands are in your lap, pinned between your legs to keep them from wandering all over him, but your head rests on his shoulder and you can feel him breathing, deep and slow.
The knotted ball of fear and rage and helpless worry starts to untangle from around your blood pusher. Seeing with your own eyes that Gamzee's alive, hearing the faint shift of fabric over steel as he crosses his legs, smelling the traces of old blood and greasepaint that hover around him... yeah. This is good.
His hand lifts from your shoulder and starts to play with your hair, fingertips occasionally brushing the root of your right horn. That's even better.
"There's a vent running all right up and past Strider's refuge," Gamzee says after a long, timeless space of nothing but silent contact.
"Yeah?" you say, drugged and slow from the comfort of his touch. Then the implications hit you and you lean in to bite the nook-munching idiot where his shoulder joins his neck. He tastes of unwashed sweat and grime, but who the fuck cares.
"No," you tell him. "No stalking the humans allowed. No matter how much that asswipe deserves it. No nightmares either."
"I can't even be leaving him a present?" Gamzee says a little forlornly, fondling that hideous puppet which, when the fuck did he pull that out of his sylladex? You have to work on your own speed so you can keep track when he starts that flash-stepping hoofbeastshit. If you can't see what he's trying to pull in time to stop it, what use are you?
"Absolutely not," you say in your best stern leader voice. "Now put that creepy alien thing away. We're obviously way overdue for a feelings jam."
"Ain't got no pile for us all around in here, brother," Gamzee says, but he's smiling under the death mask of his facepaint, and he obediently stows the horrifying puppet away.
"We'll improvise," you tell him, and you climb into his lap, resting your forehead against his chest with your horns up against his neck. They're too blunt to really hurt, but anybody else would shove you away instinctively, reacting to the implied threat: I am close enough to kill you and I'm here because you let me in. Gamzee goes still under you for a sickening second -- that tangled ball in your chest winds tight again -- and then he sighs into your hair and wraps his arms around you like letting go might physically hurt.
"So what's all up in your thinkpan, best friend?" Gamzee says. His breath ruffles your hair, and you can feel his voice buzzing through the airbox in his windhole. "More dreambubble timeline afterlife shit? Man, you know it ain't no motherfucking thing, not like you paint it all out to be -- it is what it is and this world's what got us together. That's all the bitchtits miracles I need to know the universe isn't completely upside-down. But if you need to talk it out, I am here and down for listening."
And yeah, it's good to know that at least one person on this sorry excuse for a road trip will listen to you rant, even if he doesn't agree with your conclusions, but that's not what you really want right now.
"Later," you say into Gamzee's shirt. He seriously needs to do laundry; the cloth is all stained with his own blood and other, less mentionable things. But it smells more like him (like home) than the rest of this dusty, bubbling lab, and you can feel his ribs pressing against the inside of his skin. He also needs to eat more. Next time he leaves a note, you should remember to bring some food with you. Maybe feed it to him, let him get silly and lick your hands for crumbs and laugh when you get ticklish and squirm away.
"Just... touch me," you say now. "Please."
"Ain't no thing, palebro," Gamzee says, so very, very soft and gentle, and his hands stroke up and down your back as he rests his chin between your horns. "Whatever you all up and need, I'll give you. That's what for this motherfucking miracle of moirallegiance is about. You just sit calm and let me set you right."
The breath you've been holding comes out as a shuddering sigh and you release your death grip on Gamzee's shirt. Your knuckles practically creak as they untense, and it's amazing how you never realize how much your lower back fucking hurts from being wound up all the time until Gamzee starts to pap you down.
"Hey now, shoosh now, only us here now," he's saying, one hand rubbing warm circles under your shirt and the other pressing on your shoulders, keeping you close. "Let it go, Karkat. Let it all go. World can get on without us for a while, motherfucking miracle machine like that doesn't need two fuckups like us telling it how to run. Shoosh, bro. Breathe in, breathe out. I'll keep the squid gods away from your thinkpan."
He tips his head down and kisses the base of your left horn, right on the sensitive ring where keratin joins skin. An embarrassing noise hums in your throat.
"Yeah, like that. Motherfucking diamond miracles," Gamzee murmurs. "Pale for you, best bro. Best thing that ever happened to me, you are."
"Same to you," you manage to say, words stumbling sopor-drunk out of your suddenly lazy airbox and mush-numb lips. "So much." Your life is a shitstain on the floor of the universe, an object lesson in the curse of predestination and personal failure, but somehow that universal sewage system coughed up this one, perfect thing, and you will cling to it to your last breath and beyond.
(You know you will. You've seen your dead selves around his dead selves, and if you hadn't believed in serendipity before, seeing them together would convince you that some things are meant to be.)
You cuddle into your moirail's embrace and let the world fuck off for a day.