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It feels like the world is ending. More, these days, instead of less.
Karkat doesn't know why he dared expect better, or even different. So they made it through to this world, re-Scratched their sessions, came out the other side like victors. So what? So the game stripped them of their specibi and their enemies and left them floating in a pointless purgatory of in-betweens. That didn’t mean it was over.
That would be too easy.
And it wasn't obvious, either. Couldn't come out with it, give a little warning, don't start licking your wounds yet, you dumb grubfuckers, you've got another thing coming. And another and another.
Karkat doesn't lament, not really. He spent his wriggling doing plenty of moping and whining and he got shit-all out of it. Fuck that noise in its every undulating orifice, he doesn’t have time for it anymore. So this end wasn’t The End, after all. So the game's not done fucking them, just switched positions. So all the deaths they died weren't good enough. So. Fucking. What.
He's got bigger problems. Leaderly shit, very important, gotta round up their now more-than-a-dozen flatfooted bulgemunchers, get them in line, keep them from eating each other alive again. It's like he's got an auspiticizing fetish, the way he's always got his frond in a knot over somebody's bullshit. No, no, play nice, that's a good wriggler, no biting, no scheming, you take that iron out of the fire or so help me god.
No time to waste wanting rest. Wanting respite. Even days like this, he doesn't hate the lousy world they landed in, doesn't curse the game for playing them, doesn't wish it were fucking over already. Not even a little. He's got his hands full, literally and rhetorically, so he doesn't even pause.
He cards his fingers into Gamzee's tangled hair. Hands full. God, he's tired.
"Shushh, just shush, Gamzee, I've got you." Too tired to think of how unfair it is. Too busy to berate himself for not doing better. Bigger problems. Bigger problems. "Hush, okay? Shhh."
Gamzee shakes his head. Karkat holds him tighter. Motherfucker, you will shush. He hasn't even gotten started with the papping (and with all the practice he gets, Karkat could get gold in the Papping Division of the Pale goddamn Olympics). "No, brother, I ain't- not gonna-"
"Shut it. Hushhh. I am not hearing this from you. I will pap your face, I swear to god. Shhhh. Hush."
Gamzee’s been doing this thing, lately, making this face like he doesn't know whether to snarl or sneer. It's awful. Moirallegiance is awful. The whole thing is awful, and Karkat can’t even let himself think about it. Bigger motherfucking problems. "Could take you to bits, motherfucker, and I should, I fucking should-"
"Shut your gaping yap, like you could take me, like you'd want to-" and Karkat kisses him, across his forehead and his cheeks, and Gamzee groans like it's hurting him. He's holding Karkat so tight around the waist that when he squeezes, his shushing gets wheezy.
"-and I know what you'd taste like, your motherfucking insides, red like hurting, red like pity-" Gamzee rambles on, clawing the small of Karkat's back.
He shushes him, and shushes him, and kisses him quiet again.
They're falling apart, all of them. Sollux mumbling doomsday in his sleep, Aradia startling new ghosts like fresh dust. Even Strider can't keep still, tap-tapping his fingers, tick-ticking, something awful counting down.
"Not fair," Gamzee whispers, and Karkat agrees. Shushes him instead. "Not motherfucking fair, I came out cut clean, came out right, messiahs put in me all the blessed benediction-" shush, shushh- "should have stayed right, got my pan scrubbed-new shiny-"
"Shhh, Gamz, you're okay, shhh-sh-"
"I AM NOT MOTHERFUCKING OKAY." For a second his face twists and his arms clench tight and all Karkat can do is hold him down hard- "shush, I said shush, Gamzee, shhhhh-" and then he goes slack, goes quiet.
"Ought to be. Set me right, set me quiet. Screwed my head back on, you did." He smiles, a ghost of his old self, bleary and painless. "Oughta paint you up, call you saint, Mirthful and Most Holy-"
Karkat laughs, bewildered, humorless. Kisses Gamzee's forehead, tender as a bruise. "The fuck are you talking about."
"You, brother, pale as starshine - you're the last miracle left, keep me righteous-"
"Shhhh." He's rambling. God, he's lost. "Shh, okay? Just shush."
"Keep me in faith." He sighs.
Katkat does, too.
This is moirallegiance. How stupid was he to wish for it? This, tangled and barbed like a knot of fish hooks in his aerating sac, shredding his innards whenever Gamzee looks at him.
This is what winning looks like. The paradise they died for. Shangri-bullshit-La.
This is it.
Why isn’t it over?
[Humans name their days, count them in the stupidest fucking ways – why sevens, when everything else is ten? – but it’s begun to stick, like everything else has. Karkat’s trying to think in years, in miles, even catches himself using their pretentious highblood words for blood and body. Heart and lungs and all the rest. Humans name everything that doesn’t matter.]
Gamzee and Terezi came to blood last Tuesday, and it wasn’t even black.
Kanaya and Vriska were enough to pull Terezi off him, shrieking and thrashing; Equius had to restrain Gamzee, who broke his nose for the trouble.
It might have been fatal.
(No, there’s no use deluding himself. It would have been fatal, if Karkat hadn’t been there.)
He resigned himself, a long time ago, to seeing Gamzee die first this time. Karkat loved him, loves him, but he loves the rest of them, too. And so Terezi didn’t have to say anything, although she might have – he wasn’t listening – when Karkat knelt before his moirail and took his face in both hands. A word, a nod, and Equius could have broken Gamzee’s neck, or his skull, or-
“Do it,” Gamzee hiccupped, paint smearing the agony in his face into a grin. Indigo blood ran down his chin. “Just fucking do it.”
And from behind him, Terezi, finally audible over the fuzz of static shutting out everything that wasn’t Gamzee’s voice – “Please, Karkat-”
“Will one of you GULLIBLE BILGE-SUCKERS UP AND MOTHERFUCKING END THIS?” Gamzee roared, and tipped his head back to catch his horns in Equius’s sweat-damp shirtfront. His eyes rolled back and caught Equius’s.
He trembled.
They both did.
“Ain’t so motherfucking long since I done CHOKED YOUR LAST LITTLE PEEP OUT YOUR GULLET.” Gamzee grinned, then, stretched and horrible. “Wouldn’t be such a thing, GUTTER-BLOOD, that I ask – that I ORDER YOU – return the favor.”
“Gamzee,” Karkat hissed, squeezing his shoulders.
Gamzee kept his eyes fixed on Equius. Neither blinked. “Or let me up and roam. Let me up and fucking WANDER. And maybe I’ll catch the sweet serendipity off my best little bro here. GET REAL WICKED PACIFIED.” He arched, obscenely, into Karkat’s hands. “Or maybe the next time I get itching to BUST HEADS I’ll catch your darlin’ kitty-girl and YOUR UNWORTHY LOWBLOODED SELF WON’T EVER TASTE SERENDIPITY AGAIN.”
“You fucking move, Equius, I’ll gut you myself–”
“I,” Equius stammered. “I- I’m afraid that…”
Gamzee’s head lolled to the side, his expression exhausted, disgusted. His gaze never met Karkat’s. “Or you, spider-baby, when’s your last kill? How long since you ROLLED THEM FUCKING DICE?” (hush, Gamzee, you shut the fuck up-) “Think your luck’ll hold till next time this CRAZY MOTHERFUCKER HAS A CULLING FIT?”
“Shut up, shut up Gamzee look at me-”
He was panting, shallowly. Kanaya wouldn’t meet his eyes; hers were fixed on Karkat. And that just left- “Terezi, TZ, Terecita, babe-”
“Don’t,” she hissed, sagging in Vriska’s grip. “Don’t, Gamzee. The prosecution rests.”
Katkat cupped his face again. He jerked away. “Gamzee, please.”
A long, low moan rattled out of him. It was a wonder he didn’t slide out of Equius’s sweaty grip. “Oh don’t, don’t you all PITY THIS POOR CRAZY FUCKER ALL AT ONCE, he’s out of his rotten sober skull, he JUST CAN’T TAKE IT-”
“Please, please, please-”
Gamzee looked at him. Really fucking looked.
“And you,” he purred, sarcastically syrupy, pouting his bleeding lips, “my darlingest darling, my candy-blooded palebro, go and cry them pity tears on my motherfucking shoulder, I’ll end you, I’M ALL THE END THERE IS-”
“I know.” It was all he could think to say. “I know, Gamzee. I know.”
“And you’d let me,” he laughed, and he hiccuped, and he sobbed- “you’d come to it quiet, little motherfucking bleatbeast, pale as the moon on this godforsaken rock – I should rend you to bits and eat up the scraps, you know, you know-”
Karkat got hands on him, then, gnarled tight in his hair, yanking him down, “I do, I do, I know, Gamz-”
“I know,” he heaved out, and twisted, bent into Karkat’s shoulder, “I know, I know you know, you shouldn’t, shouldn’t ever-”
“Hushhushhush, ohh, Gamzee, oh,” and Karkat held him, and Gamzee, Gamzee curled in on himself, and he cried, and he cried.
But he has his good days.
What counts for good, anyway.
He’s got to tally something, he knows, or it’ll all be marks against him: Gamzee, not threatening, not angry, just smiling and calm and looking Dave crisis-of-faith Strider in the face and saying just you wait, motherfucker, just you wait.
Gamzee, sitting alone in the dark, rocking himself and singing.
Gamzee waking up shrieking in the middle of the night.
They all have nightmares, and Gamzee’s hardly the only troll to ever wake himself screaming. But he’s the only one Karkat worries for. The rest of them will lie shivering, or weeping, or maybe click on a light and try to find a distraction.
Gamzee does none of these things.
Gamzee slides out of bed, silent as any laughsassin but without a scrap of mirth, and he creeps, eerie and awful, through the house. Karkat only misses him once: usually he makes a point of sleeping beside his moirail, stifled and uncomfortable and soporless, smothered in blankets but together, at least. Together, and he can catch Gamzee when he wakes, stroke him back to sanity, shush the night-terrors out of him.
But once, Karkat misses him, for Gamzee wakes in silence and leaves in silence and who knows, really, what might have happened if there hadn’t been Kanaya.
Willowy and wan, and pristine at every hour, Kanaya does not sleep anymore. Kanaya is freshening her lipstick while the rest of them sleep fitfully, longing for recuperacoons they’ll never see again.
Gamzee is silent, when he interrupts her nightly vigil, a shadow whispering through the halls. Perhaps Kanaya is not.
Karkat will never know. The sound of their tussle wakes him, finds him alone and cold and knowing, all at once.
Gamzee is as still as Karkat’s ever seen him, lying on the floor with jade-green blood on his face. Kanaya is glowing, statuesque, with her knee on Gamzee’s throat.
Neither raises their eyes when they hear him come in: they are locked dead on each other. And though Karkat (his own profession be believed) is great at dispensing romantic advice, he is hopeless at actually following it. He cannot auspiticize between them.
“Kanaya,” he says instead, a sleep-hoarse croak. “Please don’t. Please just don’t. I’ll take care of him.”
He knows, he knows, or her cool tone might offend him: it masks a longing loneliness that he dearly, shamefully wishes he could soothe. “Yes,” she says, without looking away from Gamzee. “I believe you will.”