Chapter Text
Kanaya: Watch.
He seems more lucid towards the mornings, you think. It’s been three nights since he collapsed in the lab and brought the even tenor of your existence to a shrieking halt and he has yet to come completely out of it and recognize where you are. How long can a troll go on burning this hot before there’s simply nothing left of him?
Had he come through the Game--brought the rest of you through the Game--only for this?
Most of the time he’s quiescent, breathing shallowly, propped against the heap of pillows Rose had alchemized. That’s almost worse than the fits of desperate strangled coughing or the times he won’t stop thrashing around and fighting against the hands trying to steady him. It’s worse because you have to keep checking that he is breathing at all.
Rose says it’s almost certainly the humans’ fault, which doesn’t surprise you, really. Alien germs are such an overdone trope that you think it would have been impossible to avoid some form of this situation. He had been so stretched and worn to tatters by the Game, living on nerves and terror alone for weeks, unable to keep anything down, unable to sleep even if he’d allowed himself to try, tired beyond the possibility of rest itself, that whatever he’d caught from them had blazed up into this like a spark falling into dried grass.
He’d been coughing dryly for a couple of nights, grimly ignoring any remarks on the subject; then the cough started getting deeper, sounding more and more painful, and you could tell he was having some difficulty getting his breath. You’d point-blank told him to go and rest and throw it off before it could get worse, and he had done exactly what you expected of Karkat and told you to go fuck yourself with your own chainsaw. Terezi had had a go, and Sollux, and Gamzee, but not even Gamzee could get through to his moirail even as Karkat had to pause in yelling at him in order to cough so hard he was almost sick. None of you had any idea what to do; Equius had been the closest thing any of you had had to a physician, and Equius was gone, along with Vriska and Nepeta and Tavros and Eridan and Feferi.
In a way it had come as something of a relief when he’d finally not been able to stop one of the fits, doubled over with his hands pressed to his chest, desperately struggling to breathe between spasms of coughing, and staggered up from the table only to sway helplessly and crumple into a small heap of grey and black on the floor.
“That was gross,” Dave said into the sudden silence, and that got everyone on their feet and crowding around the unconscious Karkat. You’d taken his head in your lap--jegus, he was on fire, how had he managed to stay upright this long?--and now that he wasn’t scowling in his touch-me-not default expression he looked so desperately ill you were afraid.
You are still afraid.
One of you--at least one--has been with him ever since he collapsed. It had been very, very difficult to get Gamzee to agree to go get some rest before he, too, came down with alien death pneumonia or whatever Karkat has; eventually Terezi had managed to get through to him. Rose has been...wonderful, through all this. You are grateful for her despite the fact that she’s partly and accidentally responsible for this situation: you think, on the whole, if it hadn’t been alien death pneumonia Karkat would have caught something, exhausted and strung-out and desperate as he was. Who knows what weird pathogens are lurking in this maze of a lab complex?
Even Dave, whom you’ve never really understood as an abstract concept, let alone a person, doesn’t seem to have anything nasty to say; he takes his own turns at watching, and you’d peeked in on him more than once to see he was intent on the duty.
Karkat shifts under the blankets you’ve piled over him and makes a small unhappy noise, his eyes opening a little. They’re starting to fill in, a little, round the edges, a haze of bright scarlet over the wriggler grey.
You reach over to push the damp hair back from his face--god, he’s so hot, you need to get the icewater again--and he turns his forehead into the curve of your palm, pressing against you, wanting your coolness. “K’naya?” he murmurs. His voice is a mess, tattered by the cough.
“It’s me,” you say, and the eyes close, reopen, the fringe of black lashes resting for a moment against the smooth grey of his cheek. He sounds as if he’s a long way away.
“Ampora says to tell you,” he says, little words like bubbles drifting on the air of the room. “Says to tell you...he’s sorry. About...the...the wand thing.”
You lean closer. He’s drifting, obviously, he’s back before you chainsawed Eridan in half. Unless--but no, you are not going to think about the dying being able to speak with the dead. “Um,” you say. “That’s...”
“Says he’s...pretty sure...you still hate him.” Karkat has to take his little shallow sips of air between runs of words. “Pathetic...if you ask me.”
“Karkat, what are you talking about?”
“He’s here,” Karkat says, as if this is obvious. His eyes are fixed on a space just beyond the end of the bed.
“Karkat...”
“He’s doing...that stupid thing...where his top half...isn’t aligned...with his legs,” the little breathless implacable voice goes on and you want to cry, you want to cry, you want to tell him to stop frightening you. “Fucking...untidy. You’d disapprove.”
“Well, tell him it’s all right, I’m over it,” you hear yourself say. “Karkat, I need to get your temperature down, you’re...you’re not making sense...”
“Shh,” he says, he actually tries to shoosh you, and one hand absently spiders over the blankets to try and find yours and pat it. “Shh....K’naya...it’s all right. Everything is...just fine.”
Everything is fucking awful. He smiles a little disconnected smile not quite at you; can he even see you now? You want to take him by the bony shoulders and shake him until his stupid nubby dull teeth rattle and shout at him to stop sounding like that and start making some fucking sense already and quit it with the goddamn spooky smile, but in fact he starts to cough again and you have to help him sit up and lean against your shoulder because these fits only seem to let go if someone is holding him and rubbing his back--or thumping his back with the side of their hand, that sometimes works when it’s very bad. You hold him and you lend him what you can of your strength, because his is almost entirely gone.
When it finally passes he’s slumped in your arms, gasping, thin red tears livid against the pallor of his skin. His eyelids are translucent, you can see the darkness of the eyes beneath them, and you are suddenly struck by how desperately fragile he is. How fragile he always has been, in some ways, under the blustering anger and the rapid wit.
“...let go,” he gasps. “‘m so tired, Kanaya...so fucking tired. Of fucking up. Of ruining everything. Just...let me go.”
“I am not letting you go,” you tell him, sharply. A cold stone has settled in the bottom of your digestive sac; you hold him tight against you. He’s shivering. “I am not letting you go, Karkat, you are staying right where you are and you are going to get better, damn you, do you hear me?”
He doesn’t reply, lying against you, an ember in the shape of a troll. You give him a little shake, and his head wobbles on your shoulder, but he doesn’t reply, and it’s only because your hands are still on his back that you can feel him breathing at all, shallow drifts of breath like slow ripples in a lake. Pulling back a little you can see that his eyes are closed and his face is very, very still.
You yell for the others.
~
Dave: Watch.
You’ve seen a fuckload of people die just recently, most of them you, and while that was understandably somewhat fucking distressing, you got used to it. Oh, another dead Dave, better toss him in the lava, unhygienic to leave dead versions of yourself lying around all willy-nilly. But those dead yous had died quickly, for the most part, and by blades. You had not been prepared for how fucking difficult it was to watch Vantas try to resist your efforts to keep him alive.
Kanaya had shouted something and those of you who were awake had scrambled to see what the fuck was up, and she was sitting there on the edge of the shitty bed you had originally alchemized for yourself because fuck sleeping on piles of stuff on the floor, that shit was for punks and aliens, holding a limp Vantas against her shoulder. You’d never seen her look scared before. It’s kinda hard to tell on someone who’s glowing white like that, but she looked honest-to-motherfuck terrified.
You thought he was dead.
You thought he was dead and you thought the last thing you’d said to him was probably along the lines of you’re an asshole, Vantas and it makes you feel like a complete and utter shit.
Then he coughed a little--fuck, he sounded terrible, like something was tearing loose inside him--and Rose elbowed you aside and bent over her alien girlfriend and a moment later was snapping orders: you, go get ice water right now, you, run to her room and fetch her bag, you, go wake Gamzee up, maybe using a stick to prod him from a safe distance. Lalonde could rap out the orders like a fucking drill sergeant when she wanted to and you flashstepped to the kitchen for the water, grateful as fuck to have someone tell you what you should be doing because you had not the tiniest little idea.
The next several hours had not been among those you would count as Best Of in a director’s cut of your shitty-ass life hereto. Vantas had fucking almost glowed with his fever, flailing around weakly when they got to work on him with the ice and making noises you don’t want to remember because they don’t fit with him at all, they’re noises you’d rather never have heard
short, nubby-horned, explosively furious, hilarious, secretly a little impressive
Karkat Vantas make. His freaky murderclown cuddlebro had been holding him down at one point, and you aren’t sure because of the stupid juggalo facepaint shit but you thought he’d been crying.
You sent your mind away when he started talking about the dead trolls like they were right there in the room with you, because that shit was entirely too bad-80s-horror-flick for you. (Egbert would no doubt have named the very scene that reminded you of, you thought, and a stab of vicious unhappiness went right through you at the thought that you wouldn’t get to see his derpy fucking face for three whole years.) Then the talking turned into pleading, and then into hoarse breathless screaming, and you thought he was dead again when he fell silent, but Gamzee made this bizarre kind of chirping sound that snapped your attention right back to them and you saw that Vantas was lying still with his eyes closed, running with sweat, grey-red in two high spots on his cheeks standing out against a face almost as pale as Kanaya’s, but he was breathing.
After that shit had gotten less terrifying.
Rose said he was over “the crisis” whatever that meant, but that you would have to keep watching over him anyway in case he decided to change his mind after all and go die or something, you weren’t paying real close attention. Gamzee had growled at the rest of you when it was suggested someone else take the first watch, and yeah, nobody wanted to argue with the murderclown growl. He’d stayed with Vantas for hours, and you were pretty shocked when he came out of the room and said quietly that he thought his Karbro was gonna up and be motherfucking okay now and he was going to go get his fucking sleep on.
What the hell, you said, and you slouched off to take his place beside the bed. Aradia looked like she wanted to say something, but she just let you go.
Vantas has been sleeping so completely still that you’ve had to lean in a bunch of times to make sure he was still breathing, but even that sounds better than it had, less of that weird wheezing crackle shit. You wish you had something to read, something to take up your attention and stop it focusing on the grey kid in the bed who had managed to keep his crazy murderhappy bunch of hatefriends together through a version of the Game three times as fucked-up as yours was--they prototyped twelve fucking times to your four--and come out the other side. The kid who drove you batshit insane regularly with his fucked-up troll romance bullshit lectures and his incredible grasp of how to be a complete shitbag in every single way. The kid it was so much fun to wind up over pesterchum, get him spewing out those hilarious fucked-up grey walls of flaily spastic allcaps invective.
“Strider,” he croaks. You blink and are very very glad of the shades for a moment. He can’t actually know you’ve been staring at him.
“Sup, Karkles. How you feeling?”
“Don’t...call me that. Asshole.” He closes his eyes again, and you wonder if they really are going to turn bright red throughout. “What...happened?”
“Uh, far as I recall three days ago you had a real good shot at hacking up a lung, or whatever you aliens use for those, and fell over.” You count on your fingers. “Then a whole lot of nothing.”
“Three days?” he demands, and it starts him coughing and you curse and are about to go fetch one of the others but he gets it under control, hands pressing his chest. Sounds like that shit hurts. You remember a real bad flu when you were little, how it had ached all the way down when you coughed. “Fuck. Get me some water or something, I’m...fucking dying here.”
And again you see the weird look on Kanaya’s face when she had yelled for help.
“What?” He’s looking at you funny.
“--Nothing. Glass of water coming right up, your majesty.”
You have to help him sit up to drink and he’s still too hot, heavy with the weight of helplessness, and this means you have your arm around his shoulders and he’s leaning his head back against you with a tiny very tired little sigh, and what the fuck, Strider, what the actual fuck.
“You’re being nice,” he says after a moment. “What the fuck, Strider?”
“I am nice. I am a fucking saint to put up with everything and keep my demeanor sunny and fucking bright, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”
Karkat coughs. “Shut up, asshole.”
You shut up purely by coincidence. It is also coincidental that you aren’t moving from your weird position half-sitting on the bed beside him, especially when he drifts into a doze and his head droops against your shoulder, one of his nubby horns bonking your collarbone. Motherfucking serendipity, that’s all that is. You’ll move when you feel inspired to.
~
Aradia: Provide missing information.
You weren’t entirely surprised when Dave volunteered to take the first shift after Gamzee. Karkat had claimed that John was fated to be his kismesis, but you think--you always have thought--it would be Dave if any of the humans ended up with Karkat.
When you tap on the door several hours later to relieve him you are extremely unsurprised to find the Knight of Time settled on the bed beside the Knight of Blood, the latter drooping against his shoulder in an attitude of extremely pitiable vulnerability.
“Dave,” you say, and he flinches and jerks a little and you know he’d been asleep as well, despite the faceless mask of the shades. You can practically see the expressions by now anyway, you don’t even need to see his eyes to know what he’s doing with them. Right now he’s thinking first of absconding from his compromising position and denying everything, and--yeah, there goes the second option, remaining put and claiming irony as a defense.
“Hey.”
“It’s my turn to watch him. Go get some sleep.”
“I’m fine,” he says automatically, because he’s Dave, and you fold your arms, and he sighs. “Fuck, fine, all right. Sorry, Karkles, you gotta quit drooling on me, Megido wants your hot bod instead.”
Karkat murmurs something, but he’s easily enough disengaged from Dave and settled back against the pillows. God, he looks so small, you think. So breakable. He never made god tier; he’s finite, he’s mortal. You can see all the timelines and sometimes you would really rather not be able to. You sit down--in the chair beside the bed, not on it--and a pale hand briefly rests on your shoulder before Dave and his cape are out of there.
He sleeps the profound sleep of the exhausted or the very young, and you think this is probably the best thing for him, but when he does wake himself up coughing several hours after Dave leaves--and looks around sleepily as if he’s wondering where the human got to--you are awfully glad to see he’s lucid.
“...ow goddamnit this fucking hurts,” he says, rubbing his chest. “Aradia? What...?”
“We’re taking it in turns to keep an eye on you,” you explain. “Lalonde’s orders. For a human she can snap fairly effectively when called upon to do so.” You refill the water glass beside the bed and you rearrange his pillows so he can sit up a little more. “Here.”
“Keep an eye on me?”
“Yes,” you explain, “because you almost died, and we’d rather not leave you alone right now.”
At died he starts to cough again and you have to take the glass away before he spills all of it on the bed, and after a moment or two you do Kanaya’s back-rubbing thing to get it to ease off. When he can breathe properly he wriggles out of your arms, staring at you with wide shocked eyes that look way too big in his thin face. “What? I don’t...All I remember is shit going kind of illogical and...fuzzy...and then there’s a bunch of this crazy dreambubble stuff and then I wake up here feeling like sixteen kinds of deep-fried shit and Strider’s come over all cuddly.” He reaches for the water: you hand it to him. His hand shakes but he’s got it. “Fill in the blanks?”
You tell him about how you’d all known he was getting sick, how irritatingly in-denial he’d been, how it had finally been too much for him. And how frightening it had been for the rest of you. As he listens his eyes get bigger still.
“Oh,” he says, at length, in a small voice. “Um. Shit.”
“So yeah, we’re all kind of glad to see you’re over the worst of it,” you conclude. “Even if we’re annoying the hell out of you by being all worried and hypervigilant.”
Karkat closes his eyes, looking evanescent. “It’s not...I’m not annoyed.”
You say nothing, and after a little while you can tell he’s drifting again, and you settle in to watch.
~
Karkat: Be not annoyed.
You are having a very fucked-up night.
The last thing you remember with any clarity is shouting at Dave about something or other, no doubt he’d deserved it, when doesn’t he, and oh but you had hurt all over and your chest and throat were raw with the stupid fucking cough that wouldn’t go away no matter how much cold water you drank, and you couldn’t breathe properly and then everything went very strange indeed.
After that your memory is a series of flickers, still frames from a movie you are very sure you do not want to watch: you were on fire, instead of iron shackles round your wrists it was red-hot iron bands clamped round your chest and the roar of the crowd as you hung from the flogging jut turned into the hiss-crackle of static over a lost connection; blurred faces swam in and out of your vision, people were saying something very far away and now you could not get warm despite the burning in your chest, cold had sunk into all your bones and you shook helplessly, terribly, and then time faded and shifted like it does in dreams and you were somewhere else entirely and all the dead trolls were talking to you at once.
It was dark; some vast cavern, grey mist curling round your feet. They were standing a little way away from you, the other side of a sort of dim indistinct river, and you thought you could probably wade over without much difficulty, it didn’t look that deep, and...you were so tired, and you hurt so much, and you just wanted to tell them again that you were sorry for being such a spectacular fuckup of a failure and getting them all killed.
The shadow water or whatever it was numbed your feet instantly as you walked into the river. You thought maybe if you just let it flow over all of you it would make you hurt less, and this seemed like the best idea you’d had in fucking sweeps. And then something horrible had speared into the greyness where you were standing and there were hands all over you and cold, burning cold like acid biting into your skin and the dead trolls were growing indistinct, fading, and you fought to get free because you wanted to go and talk to them but whoever was holding you refused to let you go; and soon, very soon, you were somewhere else entirely.
You woke to find Gamzee watching you, and you smiled a little at him and drifted away again; and the next time you opened your eyes he’d turned into Strider, which was odd but you’d seen a lot of odd things just recently and when he put his arm around you it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to lean your head against his shoulder and enjoy the simple powerful comfort of being held, of the alien’s weird heartbeat and his oddly soft skin, so unlike yours.
The third time you woke he was gone and it was Aradia watching you. The story she told was one you could honestly have done without, but you couldn’t understand why they were all doing this, you’d been a raging assboil to the whole lot of them for nights and nights, why weren’t they leaving your stupid fucked-up self alone and getting on with whatever they did for fun on this shitty rock?
You say as much. Talking hurts, breathing hurts, but you can tell something’s changed; it’s a different kind of hurt from the ominous hot throbbing of before. You are just so tired.
“Karkat,” she’s saying. “Karkat, stop being an idiot and listen to me.”
You can’t stop being an idiot, but you can at least open your eyes and stare at her.
“I can’t believe I even have to say this, you are the most deliberately obtuse troll in this entire universe, but we care about you, okay? We all do. You are our friend.”
She spaces out the words as if she’s talking to a wriggler, or someone who’s hard of thinking.
“That means we are concerned for your goddamn welfare. Obviously you aren’t, so it’s a good thing the rest of us can step in and take up the load.”
“I’m an asshole,” you point out.
“You are an incredible asshole. That doesn’t change a thing.”
Suddenly and terribly you want to cry, but you have made enough of a fool of yourself for the time being and you push it back as hard as possible, and maybe Aradia sees the effort because she shuts up and just reaches over to relocate a bit of your hair. “We care, deal with it.”
“I don’t...really know how?”
“Well, you can start by not asking silly questions like why are you doing this. --Do you want anything to eat?”
You suddenly realize you’re starving.
~
Dave: Be nice.
You are nice.
You are also a coolkid of legendary but not infinite patience and Vantas is getting on every last nerve you own. Sure, it’s got to be boring as fuck stuck in bed and not getting to stomp around the meteor like a small grumpy thundercloud, but jesus christ the guy is annoying.
Rose says he can’t get up until he’s been “afebrile” for like two days or something, and you guess that means until he’s not running a fever, and he’s still kind of hot.
To the touch, you mean. In no other senses whatsoever.
Fuck you, that is totally uncalled-for innuendo.
The third time he throws a pillow at your head and lets fly with a rasping, hoarse stream of invective you have had e-fucking-nough and you throw the goddamn pillow right back at him and you stomp out of the room and slam the door behind you because you are too cool to deal with this shit, it is not your cup of disgusting oily coffee in the least and fuck you feel like an asshole again.
Exactly fourteen minutes and thirty-two seconds later you knock on his door again and then open it without waiting for a reply, and therefore you’re treated to the spectacle of Karkat Vantas curled up on his side in the tightest little knot of troll you’ve ever seen. He’s like the troll equivalent of roundcat. Fucking impressive.
As soon as you come in he uncurls and glares up at you through the messy spikes of his hair. “What do you want now?”
“I brung you something,” you explain and settle in the chair beside his bed, revealing what you’ve been holding behind your back. His eyes go wide and he catches his breath just in time to stop himself from coughing. “I am not gonna read the title out loud because fuck a bunch of that shit, let’s just call this A Group Of Trolls Have Weird Relationships And Eventually Fuck, okay?” The novel is the size of a Houston phone book and you don’t want to look at the cover, but you think you can pretty much stomach reading this out loud if you tell yourself really hard that you’re doing it ironically.
Karkat is still staring at you and there’s a look on his face you haven’t seen there before, and he just sort of snuggles down under the covers and looks at you with that weird expression and you have to clear your throat pretty hard before you start reading the weird jagged Alternian script. You must be coming down with whatever he’s got, obviously. That is also why you feel so weird in general right now. And why you can’t help noticing things like how goddamn beautiful his eyes are with that faint red shine creeping into the irises, how he’ll look when they’re scarlet all over just like yours.
You are halfway through the first chapter when a weird sound filters its way through your mental static of what the actual fuck is with this book, and you look up. Karkat’s curled up again, but not in that tight unhappy little knot; he’s still catlike but this is the drapey curve of a cat that thinks any flat surface is its for the sleeping on, and he’s...yeah, he’s actually fucking purring. Out loud. Not much, but it’s there, a little rhythmic rumble.
You are so totally definitely getting sick because listening to it makes your chest feel really weird.
He looks so fucking peaceful. It’s astonishing. You’ve never ever ever seen him anything other than focused and ticked off or miserable. The revelation that his face can do things other than scowl or gape in horror is amazing, and you are staring, and he sort of wriggles a bit until his head is almost on the edge of the bed where your knee is resting, and a small round candy-corn horn nudges you. The horn is...well, it’s kind of cute, okay? Sue you, you can totally notice cute when it’s prodding you in the kneecap.
When you reach out with a tentative fingertip to touch it his purring changes tone slightly, and when you give it a very careful rub the noise goes so simply contented that you don’t think you can bear to stop doing whatever is making him make that sound.
Rose finds you a little while later and you can just see the lecture she’s prepared on the subject of borrowing books she’s in the middle of reading evaporate on its way to her lips. You are sitting on the edge of Karkat Vantas’s bed with his head resting in your lap and your fingertips petting both of his horns. You don’t blame your ectosis for blinking.
“Sup, Lalonde?” you inquire, utterly deadpan.
“...I see you’ve made off with my book,” she says, rallying magnificently. “I am now going to steal it back.”
“Be my guest. I gotta say I think certain aspects of the plot are somewhat fucking implausible, but eh, troll novels, what do you expect?”
“You still do not cease to surprise me, Strider.”
“Nobody gets me, babe,” you agree. “I’m like the wind.”
Rose waggles her eyebrows at you, grabs the book, and withdraws; and that’s okay, that’s just fine, because these adorable fucking horns need your attention right now.
~
Kanaya: Be unsurprised.
You are unsurprised. You are also somewhat relieved, and you are hoping very much that whatever this is does not crack to pieces when Karkat is back on his feet and stomping around being Karkat. You also hope that Dave and Gamzee can refrain from killing one another, and that Dave can comprehend the difference between flushed and pale feelings for someone. But from what Rose says it...doesn’t seem likely to be an issue.
Dave is, whether he knows it or not, red as the candy-colored blood the pair of them share for Karkat Vantas.
Now you can relax. Now you can let go of your nagging concern and you can focus your attention on your human, lying curled against your side, pale hair reflecting your lambence.
“It’s going to be an odd three years,” Rose mumbles into your chest.
You kiss the top of her head. “But perhaps not entirely unpleasant.”