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When it starts, Karkat greets the development with no less than his usual arsenal of epithets, but he knows that if they hadn’t figured out how to install recuperacoons on the meteor, he would be completely fucked.
The cracks start small, near his joints; places where his chitinous epidermis has started to wear and flake, catching infuriatingly on his clothes with every motion, creasing on his face until it is nearly literally stuck in his trademark scowl. The small ridges surrounding the base of his horns start to feel raw and achy as they start their first growth spurt.
He takes to spending so much of his time in ablution trying to scrub himself out of his skin that eventually Dave bodily removes him, hauling his damp ass over his shoulder, citing him as “being a worse fucking neat freak than his bro.”
Fighting physically and verbally, he discovers, only aggravates the condition, and Karkat isn’t about to go confer with anybody to find out why this might be. All he knows and all he cares is that everything is scratchy and painful when his skin is literally falling off at every turn, and that the fucking humans have got their shit way too fucking easy, despite how touchy Strider gets when anybody looks too long at the red marks or the light hair on the side of his face.
Karkat doesn’t emerge from his respiteblock for days when he first catches sight of the vermillion in his iris (even having fucking announced its discovery to everybody within earshot), not until Terezi complains at him about it being his turn to make spaghetti. It’s one of the only things they can consistently alchemize more of from the inhabitants of Can Town, and Rose has enough of a passing understanding of its preparation that she has taught everyone, more or less.
“Oh, come off it, Karkat. I thought we’d already covered everything when it comes to your stupid blood insecurities, and I don’t know why you insist on being so completely insufferable about the whole issue!” She raps her cane impatiently, though she doesn’t need it to navigate his respiteblock. She hardly uses it anyway, having become so familiar with the lab. “If you’re going to sulk because you failed to address this on your own when you knew this would happen, it doesn’t have to be my problem and it’s not like it’s still a secret, anyways!”
“Oh, that’s fucking easy for you to say, your eyes are never going to fucking change!” The slam of his door upon her exit doesn’t quit reverberating in his think pan for hours, and he knows that even venting at Past carcinoGeneticist won’t prevent him from running his mouth and lashing out again.
The dead tissues coating his everything make it difficult to handle cookware effectively, but a lifetime of meticulously concealing his blood on pain of death means that he escapes without any scratches.
That meal, he puts half of his bright red sauce on her plate. He can’t tell if she notices.
Days and nights have lost all meaning with no light cycle to regulate them, but the next time Karkat’s circadian rhythms lead him back to the recuperacoon, he knows it won’t be much longer until he holes up inside it and escapes the meteor for a good chunk of a sweep. He’s been hacking up scraps of the violet secretion that he’ll seal himself in with, and it is fucking revolting as hoofbeast refuse. He doesn’t tell anyone when it makes him feel sick and nauseous, even though skipping too many meals at this stage means that he’ll starve to death while pupating.
With a sinking dread he realizes that sleep will only find him back in the dreambubbles they’re already drifting through in his waking hours. But nothing can really get worse at this point (don’t think about Terezi) so he bears it like everything else.
When he knows it’s time to shut in, his eyes still have bands of juvenile onyx, but his horns have a sturdy new ring of color at the base. It’s still not much to be proud of, and it still hurts like new bone breaking through the tough (dry, cracked) skin of his scalp ought to hurt. The vestiges of his second grub-limbs, little more than areas of toughened flesh on his sides where they used to be, have been especially irritating, the hardened plates grating the sensitive new skin that would show underneath when they were totally gone.
After the game, after the ensuing and continuous drama and occasional strife, he is ready to just do nothing but rest for a while. He huffs a tired ‘later’ at Terezi, and she knows what he means—she’s taken to abandoning her teal bodysuit in favor of borrowing Karkat’s or Dave’s looser clothing while she begins the uncomfortable process herself.
Lowering himself into the sopor is always relaxing by design, but as the fluid seeps through his sore skin and the hormones and chemicals in it diffuse through his bloodstream, he thinks that spending the next few perigees in here isn’t going to be totally awful.