Work Text:
On one otherwise completely normal Saturday night, at approximately four in the morning (which is when any good encounter happens; you’ve met strange people in the grocery store, strange people in the convenience store, strange people in the Waffle House, ad infinitum, and while none of them have been supernatural beyond the obvious yet, you’re holding out hope), you- KANAYA MARYAM herself, flesh and blood and very tired- wake up in your girlfriend’s apartment.
Now, this is a good thing. Nobody out there is going to claim that waking up in your girlfriend’s apartment after having enthusiastically accepted the invitation into your girlfriend’s apartment is not a good thing. In fact, you are going to gently tap at the fourth wall and ask that appropriate congratulations be administered in the form of a hearty yet classy high-five, a few light, humorous comments that function as a show of support whilst also respecting your boundaries, and then of course a single, powerful, hell yeah.
Done? Good.
Less of a good thing than waking up in your girlfriend’s apartment, however, is waking up in your girlfriend’s apartment and realizing that during the fiveish hours that you’ve been asleep, you have gone and transmuted into the Sahara or the Death Fucking Valley, and that if you do not get water Right Now, Immediately then you are simply going to die. And as much as you would love to provide Rose with the opportunity to break out that Necromancy for Dummies book she picked up god knows where, you imagine that such a thing would put a damper on any burgeoning relationship so you figure it would be easier for everyone involved if you simply took fate by the reins, spat in the face of death itself, and got that damn water yourself.
And so you kick back the covers (carefully), stand up (carefully), slam into the doorframe in your attempts to navigate a darkened and unfamiliar room (carefully), and make the valiant attempt as to the three step journey to the kitchenette, smoothing down your matching pajama set that you do in fact own and do in fact wear because you’re not a fucking animal, Karkat, and also because sleep is no excuse for a lapse in fashion. You’ve very nearly succeeded in finding the damn cabinet when you hear the telltale sounds of the click of the lock and the door creaking open, and seemingly before you so much as blink there’s a flash of movement in the corner of your eye and then suddenly, um. The television is on?
Okay. Okay. So it’s four in the morning and someone is in here and that someone has turned the television on, and you’re not really sure what to do so you just stand there frozen as the ambiguous gaming console Rose has boots up and you are met with a blast of light, a loading screen, and then of course that which existed before all else and will endure long after you are dead and gone, your manifold enemy packed into the marketable form of several cute characters, that simple course of fate that sends you careening off the edge whenever you attempt to follow through on the path which it has set out for you:
Fucking Mario Kart.
Now, the part of your brain that is still somewhat functional is telling you that there are four possible scenarios here:
- Your girlfriend’s apartment is being robbed.
- Your girlfriend’s apartment is being robbed by someone with a very short attention span.
- Your girlfriend’s apartment is being robbed by a robber who is very bad at robbing but very good at Mario Kart.
- Lord help us all. Your girlfriend is being robbed by a gamer.
Oh god, your girlfriend’s apartment is being robbed by a robber who’s a gamer who knows you’re there because you’ve been bumbling around with all the grace of a lesbian in a JoAnns’s storeroom for the past two minutes. Your girlfriend’s apartment is being robbed by a robber that, now that your eyes have adjusted, you can sort of see sitting on the couch, which is to say that the robber looks suspiciously like a blob because you don’t have your contacts in. Hell, maybe the robber is a blob. Please, for the love of god, let the robber be a blob.
Ah, well. In for a penny, in for a potentially life-threatening encounter. If you get killed, Karkat is going to kill you.
“Are you a robber? You can’t be a robber,” You tell the blob that’s possibly a person and probably a robber, because nothing is ever easy. “ I want a glass of water, and if you’re a robber then that would complicate things.”
The blob shifts uneasily on the couch and you stare it down even harder- you’ve been told that to the undiscerning eye (and also literally everyone else) you can come across as a little intimidating, and frankly you could use that right around now. You will will that blob out of existence, if necessary. You will see it undone. You will bury it in the small plot of grass out back, and Rose will help and she’ll think that you’re even cooler and hotter for having committed second degree murder because she is Into That Sort of Thing.
That’s assuming of course that you win that particular fight. So help you god, you are not dressed for battle, and so help you god, you refuse to fight crime if you aren’t cute.
“That said,” you muse, “If you are a robber, and if you aren’t willing to reevaluate your life choices and exit the proverbial stage left in the next”- you check a watch that you are not wearing “-ten seconds, then you’re going to have to wait for ten to twenty minutes to partake in whatever petty theft it is that you’ve been planning because this is my girlfriend’s apartment, and while I can’t have you robbing my girlfriend’s apartment- you understand, of course- I also can’t play the martyr without the nails to match.”
You consider the screen for a moment. The blob that might be a robber hasn’t so much as paused the fucking game.
“Well, the martyr or Mario Kart,” you amend. “But then again whenever my roommate and I play, we tend to take turns sacrificing ourselves to dead last so as to allow the other to come in eleventh for once, so maybe they’re not so different in the end.”
The blob shifts, and you stare. It is much too early for this.
“Good of you,” the blob offers, and you squint because you’ll admit that up until then, you were still hoping that you’d been carrying on a conversation with a particularly technology-savvy wizard statue or a few cats in a trenchcoat or something of the sort, and this impersonal, impatient dismissal of your hopes and dreams is doing quite a number on you. Life is cold and cruel, understand; life is cold and cruel, and that is indeed a person.
“Oh dear,” you say, mournful. “So you are a person. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d much prefer it if you were a blob after all. Less paperwork.”
A beat of silence. Then:
“Is that a threat,” the not-blob asks. “You’re not legally required to tell me if it is, but it’s considered good manners.”
You consider for a moment because despite the fact that you would rather not be carrying on a conversation with anyone or anything at the moment, it is not in your nature to give anything less than your all to any stupid situation you might find yoursef in.
“It might be,” you conclude. “Unless you happen to have a good reason for being here, in which case I’m going to classify it as friendly banter. An oversimplification maybe, but it gets the job done.”
Another beat of silence. You find this one to be a tad derivative.
“I know Rose,” the guy who is still not a blob says, voice flat.
“And I know Jesus,” you respond. “We get up to wacky, sitcom-esque antics. You can claim just about anything with a little bit of confidence, you know, which I learned three days ago when after some careful linguistic maneuvering-”
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” the guy who talks too fucking much cuts in. You ignore him, because frankly between your girlfriend and your girlfriend’s brother and your best friend- all of whom you love so very much - you have built up an impressive tolerance to innuendo, euphemism, and anything else of the sort. Some might say you got lucky.
“-as well as the careful misappropriation of a hardhat and clipboard, I managed to work my way into the storeroom of our local JoAnns. Nothing on earth like it,” you finish, valiantly. And thus: your point! Through adversary, through strife, through sheer force of will and also a lot of lying, we persevere!
“Well shit,” guy on the couch says. “Rose didn’t tell me y’all were pulling some Ocean’s 11 type shit. Careful with that. Don’t wanna lose yourself to the limelight. Don’t let easy access to all that fabric change you.”
See, he says that, but you recognize that particular brand of toneless semi-mockery- that man is absolutely seething with jealousy. He’s also still playing Mario Kart, and though it pains you to admit it he’s holding his own both in this conversation and on that damn track. Some people have all the luck, it seems, to which you have to say: what the fuck, man.
“That said, I bet I could pull that off without the props,” the guy continues, and you bristle because your fake heist plan was perfectly serviceable, thank you very much. “On account of my own linguistic maneuverings being-”
Oh absolutely not.
“No,” you tell him before he can carry on with whatever inane thing you’re sure he was going to spit up. “That will not work on me, and this is not a free-for-all. If you are going to use my words, I expect to be paid by the letter.”
“Tough crowd,” he says, and then shifts the remote and thus Baby Peach goes sailing over the finish line, smooth as anything, and oh, he came in first and oh, there is really no justice in the world is there? “And weren’t you all worried about me being a robber? If so, either your dedication or your sense of self-preservation’s shot because I’ve done nothing to convince you otherwise. Caution’s a big responsibility, you know. You’ve got to feed it and take it on walks and clean up after it when it gets into your store of semi-concentrated anxiety and shits all over the place, and you’ve gotta play with it and honestly it kinda seems like you dropped the ball on that one and look at that, now you’re at the park and it’s starin’ up at you with those big old eyes but the only thing that you were ever gonna do was throw it to the wind anyways, so there’s not much point in playing fetch, now is there?”
He breathes. You are filled with the sudden, horrified conviction that you are speaking with a Strider and an even more sudden, horrified realization that you could very well be stuck here for hours at this rate. Lord, could he not stride on over to talk at someone who hasn’t been meaning to go to sleep for the past five minutes?
“‘sides all that quipping you’ve been doing is like, the exact opposite of self-preservation,” he says, and you mourn the rest of your night right then and there. “It gets messy. And for that matter, what if you were right? Maybe I was here to steal my relative’s girlfriend’s absolutely devastating burns. Maybe I was gonna use your material to start a standup show in Vegas and rocket to stardom overnight. Maybe this is what I’ve been aiming for all along, and you’re playing second fiddle to my master plan.”
“You’re insufferable,” you say flatly. “On second thought, I don’t care what you steal so long as you respect convention and remain quiet while you do so.”
“Impossible,” he says.
“Irrelevant,” you return. “If you have the capacity to carry on the four-dimensional game of chess that you seem so sure you’re playing, then I’m going to assume that you are capable of comprehending common courtesy as well.”
“Jury’s out,” he replies. “Want to settle on weaponized incompetence as a compromise?”
“I don’t negotiate with strange men who break into my girlfriend’s apartment,” you say.
He hums, low in his throat, and picks another track because the universe is apparently not done mocking you and your inability to drive in any medium. You reiterate: life is cold and cruel. You miss your chainsaw, which is also cold and cruel- as a few extremely biased blog posts might attest- but catches you on the upswing on account of being yours.
“What I’m hearing is that it’s not your apartment, which means that the only things you really have to lose are your words, as we’ve already established, or your chains,” he says. “And I’ve backed off the former, so now I’m going to be nice and free you from the latter by telling you that I’m related to Rose, meaning that I’ve got a key to this apartment that isn’t yours and standing permission to do whatever the fuck I want, and you no longer have a horse in this particular race.”
“I’ll let that pass, since we’ve established that you lack either the ability or willingness to learn common courtesy, which I’m going to extend to include basic decency by implication,” you tell him, “By which I mean that yes, regardless of whether anything in here is strictly mine it would still very much have been my problem if you were looking to rob my girlfriend’s apartment, asshole.”
The name-calling is a little treat. Adds a bit of sparkle, a bit of flair. A personal touch.
“Harsh,” random asshole in your girlfriend’s apartment who may or may not know Rose but is annoying nonetheless says. “I have a name.”
“Congratulations,” you reply flatly. “Shall I call the news outlets? I suspect they’ll want to hear about this one. You’ll be on every major channel by sunrise. They’ll do an exposé in Times Magazine- this asshole, the Guy With a Name. The lack of a name in the title is ironic, and thereby a suitable addition to your master plan, I assume. That said, the overall effect is less four-dimensional chess and more four-dimensional Guess Who, so if we’re committed to the whole holier-than-thou thing you seem so attached to we might have to rebrand a bit.”
Irony is like catnip to Striders, and see you know for certain that he is a Strider by this point because while you find chess to be somewhat dull, you excel at Guess Who in any and all forms. Thus: he falls prey to your master plan. Thus: the tables turn, and time goes on! Thus: weren’t you getting water?
“No need for all of that,” the guy who really should’ve stayed a blob says. “I’m thinking that I want all the attention to come more organically, you know? Fame’s a game-changer, as we’ve established with the chess to Guess Who pipeline, and I figure we should put a stop to it there before we’re stuck playing high-stakes Candyland or whatever.”
“Mario Kart,” you offer, and he snorts.
“Little late for that,” he says.
“And yet we carry on,” you add. For a moment, you’re both silent.
“...The name’s Strider. Dirk Strider,” Strider, Dirk Strider says finally, and you don’t even bother to hide your scoff at that one. “And Rose and I really are family, I wasn’t fucking with you. Dave and Rose are half-siblings and Dave’s my half-brother and besides that Rose’s mother married into our side of the family like, twenty years ago and divorced back out of it and then remarried a different member and re-divorced them too, etcetera, and honestly I’m pretty sure that at some point I was my own son so I don’t think on the finer points all that often. The end of it is we’ve known each other forever, so we tend to just say we’re siblings.
“After the whole spiel on the specifics, of course,” you say, and he shrugs, you think. He’s still a blob. It’s a metaphor, understand.
“‘S a good story, if not much else,” he says. “What about you?”
You blink. You can’t for the life of you figure out which part of that you’re meant to respond to.
“I have a sister,” you settle on, as you may not know much but you know that most questions have to be answered at the end of things, in one way or another. “And a mother. Neither of whom know any of you. Not even from an ill-advised courthouse marriage, though I can’t pretend that the both of them wouldn’t find that whole thing really fucking funny so I suppose if you’re ever looking to turn your family tree into a well-organized orchard you can give us a call.”
“I appreciate the proposition, but I’m gonna have to turn you down. I have a boyfriend,” he says. You blink. You imagine that he blinks. It’s very awkward. “And I meant what’s your name.”
That was easily misunderstood.
“That was easily misunderstood,” you say. “But I’m Kanaya.”
“Kanaya?” he echoes.
“Maryam,” you add, “But if you google that, the only things you’re going to find are some rather biased blog postings about an incident that may or may have not occured at the gardening center a year or two back, so I wouldn’t bother. There’s more enjoyment to be found in watching grass grow, or maybe paint dry if you’re feeling a little wild.”
Note for when this internal monologue is inevitably cited in future academic papers: all of your actions in the aforementioned “gardening incident” (alt. “chainsaw incident,” “The Incident,” “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Get Banned From the Local Community Center”) were backed by both morality and the law. You have no regrets.
“Mysterious,” Strider, Dirk Strider says. “I see why you and Rose get along.”
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” you mimic, ignoring the hypocrisy inherent in your mimicking him when you were so very adamant that he not do the same. Consider the following: You don’t care.
“In select states,” Dirk answers.
“For a limited time only,” you reply on instinct, and then wince. Ugh. if he was going to trigger your brain’s autofill, the least he could’ve done was give a warning.
“Get yours today,” Dirk finishes. You stare in his general direction. You imagine he does the same to you. Onscreen, his character falls right off the side of Rainbow Road.
“You should get back on track,” you say. “Or we should. I should? I was getting water.”
“Hey, you were the one who assumed I was robbin’ the place,” he says as you finally, finally get that cup down from the cupboard.
“It was the natural conclusion,” you answer, as you- lo and behold!- finally manage to fill that same fucking cup with fucking water.
By whose standards? I literally unlocked the door,” he says, and you shrug.
“Hollywood’s. Most literature. Basic instinct,” you inform him, as is your civic duty. He starts up another track, and you edge back towards Rose’s room. “Which also, incidentally, is informing me that I ought to go back to sleep.”
“Hey, fair,” he says. “I mean, I’m not one to get between a woman and a good night’s sleep.”
Right.
“Right,” you answer. You are sure- and this is crucial- to phrase this in such a way so as to let him know that you are not, in fact, impressed by what he surely believes to be scathingly witty remarks. It’s a balance, and as with all balances it’s difficult to strike, but you like to think you’ve landed a good hit or two. “This was fun. If I wake up in the morning and find that you have lied to me and done away with either our television set or our lives, then I will haunt you. Enthusiastically. Relentlessly. Enough that you pass into local legend and become the subject of a paranormal daytime TV special, at which point the true nature of my revenge is revealed: the guy who plays you has a shitty haircut.”
In your defense, it is very early, and as you drink your water and find that your thirst drains away (as it should), exhaustion is bearing down on you like Baby Peach on an unsuspecting cascade of copyrighted characters.
“Nothing to worry about on any of those fronts, and believe me, my haircut’s a core component of my character and also kinda hard to fuck up. Sorry to disappoint,” Dirk says. You refuse to parse that, and instead fill up your glass of water to take back with you just in case- as it is, you think that one strange encounter is enough for the night, unless something of a more paranormal persuasion would finally like to take one for the team and answer some questions for you.
(Please?)
(Just a few questions. A couple mild inquiries. Perhaps a query or two. A connotation-stripped inquisition.)
(Nothing? No? Goddamnit.)
“Fuck it,” you answer, when no conviniently undead creature is forthecoming. “I’ll take your word for it. If you’re looking to take issue with me, the apartment, or the world at large, I ask that you wait approximately fifteen minutes for me to fall asleep so as to allow me the excuse of plausible deniability. Goodnight, Strider, Dirk Strider.”
“Goodnight, Kanaya Maryam,” he parrots, and that is that is that- you go back into the room, and you place your hard-earned cup of water on the nightstand and collapse onto the bed (Rose sleeps like the dead), and then you fall back asleep within the minute to the faint sounds of someone swearing enthusiastically in the general direction of a television set.
Eh. Not your problem.
(In the morning Strider, Dirk Strider is still on the couch; he looks like Rose (once you put in those damn contacts) and talks like Rose (you choose not to think on this too much) and you find that he’s somewhat less insufferable in the light of day, right up until he beats you at Mario Kart at which point you decide that getting to know your girlfriend’s family is overrated, actually, and it is not you that is the issue: it is Mario Kart. It is also a cold, cruel world we live in. It’s a cold, cruel world.)