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Prompt: karkat and sollux have both had terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days. while normally they’d take it out on each other, the extent of the day’s badness is such that they kind of flip over into ‘i know that feel bro’ land and end up taking care of each other instead. they’re exhausted, frazzled, and flailing vaguely toward some kind of mutual comfort, and it’s reached the point where it’s just funny. (red, pale, or just best friends is up to you, although i am fond of exhausted-giggling makeouts.)
~
The second time he dropped the carrier bag containing that semester’s final project, Sollux became convinced that someone or something truly did have it in for him and he wasn’t imagining things. (The first time he could have put down to random chance; the second time, involving as it did a puddle of opaque grey-brown streetwater and an ominous crack from inside the bag, definitely counted as the iron fist of fucking Nemesis.)
The day had started auspiciously with his horrible piece-of-shit car refusing to turn over. That could either mean his horrible piece-of-shit battery needed replacing or if you wanted to go super fucking expensive his horrible piece-of-shit alternator needed replacing, neither of which could be done that day even if he’d had spare cash to throw at the problem, because he needed to get the hell downtown in a hurry if he wanted to get this goddamn project handed in and have any hope of a decent grade. The Geo’s indisposition meant that he was stuck with the bus, and Sollux hated the bus with a deep and grinding passion that probably had something to do with the fact that he always felt sick on buses even if he sat way up near the front.
Then it had come on to rain.
Riding the bus was always worse in the rain because the air went all foggy and hot and smelled six times as bad and the windows fogged up and he couldn’t see outside and ngh, okay, he managed not to actually puke, but by the time he got to campus he was feeling pretty goddamn gross, and then he nearly got run over by some asshole in an Escalade and in scrambling to get out of the way he dropped the bag for the first time.
Then it had rained a lot more, one of those heavens-opened-solid-curtains-of-water downpours you got in spring, and he hadn’t of course brought an umbrella because what the fuck, that would have made sense or something, and so he’d had to run the rest of the three blocks to the arts and policy building with his stupid fucking project cradled to his chest hoping like anything it wouldn’t get as drenched as he was. He’d arrived out of breath and sopping wet and promptly slipped on the curb and dropped his fucking project in the puddle, and at that point Sollux had basically thought fuck this day, it can’t get any worse, right?
That was when he realized he’d left his notebook, with the printouts of his other final project, sitting on the kitchen table back at home.
He preferred to forget the next couple of hours, really. The lecture from his professors on being responsible and handing things in on time was bad enough; the fact that his carefully-constructed model of the fucking caffeine molecule had, in fact, broken in transit was worse; but the fact that he had actually managed to fail to check his email and notice that the time for the horrible English final had been changed won the Fuck-Awful Goddamn Aspect contest of the day hands down.
He’d actually felt his throat thicken with the threat of tears when he realized that one.
And on the way back home the bus broke down.
And he thought he might be getting a cold.
He was still damp all over when he finally, finally let himself back into the shitty little apartment he shared with Karkat. His English notebook sat smugly on the kitchen table, the carefully typed notes he’d meant to hand in peeking out from its blue-red cover, and Sollux snarled wordlessly at it and flung himself into a chair, shivering all over.
He was so not going to fucking make dinner. They better have some fucking beer, that was all. And he thought maybe he could unquit smoking for one goddamn evening, jesus christ what an unbearably shitty day it had been.
Where the fuck was his goddamn roommate anyway. KK was generally good for spouting off annoying bullshit sufficient for Sollux to unload his pent-up aggravation all over the guy, he was pretty cool like that, but right now the only thing he could take his mood out on was the fucking notebook and he didn’t feel like pretending to be the Hulk and ripping it in half. There were still usable pages left in that thing, he wasn’t made out of notebooks.
Keys rattled in the door and it slammed open, bouncing off the wall and deepening the dent in the plaster left by the knob every time Karkat made his entrance with that level of brio. “Jesus motherfucking haploid Christ in a Block 1 Apollo fucking module, fuck everything in the entire universe including fucking tardigrades to fucking death.”
Sollux twisted around to be met with the edifying sight of Karkat Vantas, twenty years old and barely five foot five, also drenched to the skin and seething with even more apparent fury than usual. “You would not fucking believe the day I’ve had, Captor. Your feeble little bipolar brain is not even fucking capable of comprehending the profound and astonishing shittiness of my day.”
“Do not even fucking talk about bad dayth, KK,” he growled. “You have no fucking clue how thhitty mine hath been.”
“Oh yeah? Did you get fired from your abysmal shitstain of a campus job and then spend the next three hours dealing with the utter incompetent clusterfuck that is the bursar’s office because they lost your forms and because they lost your fucking forms you don’t exist and can’t register for next semester even though you’re right fucking there and you exist but unless you can register for next semester you’re not fucking eligible for fucking financial fucking aid?”
“No, did you fucking break your final project that you’ve only thpent an entire fucking week building, fail to thhow up on fucking time for your other final, forget to even fucking bring half the thit you needed to hand in for it, and did your piethe-of-thit car fucking die on you thith morning?”
Karkat leaned against the door and ran his hands through the snarled mess of his hair. “....Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Sollux agreed.
“Really break the project?”
“Yeth. Not jutht a little crack or thomething. Fucking broke off an entire CH3 group and got it all fucking groth and wet in a puddle. --Really get fired?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck.” Sollux sneezed. “...And I’m getting thick.”
Karkat stared at him, and after a moment snickered helplessly. He scowled.
“What about my mithery ith funny to you, athhole?”
“It’s just....ah, Jesus fuck, Captor, I don’t even know why shit is fucking funny--” He started laughing again, and slid down the door to sit in a heap of wet clothes and spiky hair and enormous shitkicking boots on the floor, giggling like an idiot--and after a moment Sollux couldn’t help joining in. It was funny for no goddamn good reason--he was so tired and his head hurt and he was still fucking damp all over and his GPA was probably fucked and the damn car needed to be fixed and KK’s student account was all borked and he needed to find another job and....goddamnit, he couldn’t stop giggling.
“Thith day ith the wortht day,” he managed.
“It’s the fucking platonic ideal of worst day,” Karkat said unevenly, wiping at his face. “Wow. Wow. Fuck. You get caught in the rain too?”
“And I had to ride the buth. And the buth broke down.”
“Aw, fuck, Captor, you didn’t get carsick, did you?”
“No, but it wath a near fucking thing. At that point it would’ve been a legitimate ecthprethion of my feelingth to fucking thpew all over the plathe, I with to point out.”
That sent Karkat into further transports of mirth. “Fucking right. Oh, man. Oh, man. You look like ass, by the way.”
“Tho do you, jerkhole. You’re all bedraggled. Like a baby duckling that got itth featherth wet.”
“Fuck you go die, Captor,” Karkat said amiably. “I am not a baby duckling, I am a one-man embodiment of unending fucking fury, that is what I am. I say we order pizza.”
“Hell yeth. And beer. We need beer.”
“We need lots of beer,” Karkat corrected. “If you handle the ordering of the pizza aspect of this deal I will even be a fucking angel and go down the corner liquor store to source the booze, because I am just that goddamn awesome.”
“Fuck, KK, you are that awethome,” he said, and hauled himself out of the chair, going over to give his roommate a hand up. “And you’re freezing.”
“You too, jesus,” Karkat told him, scowling up at him from under the hair. “Go put on some fucking dry clothes before you catch pneumonia, you idiot.”
“Probably too late for that,” Sollux said dolefully, and got a punch to the shoulder for his pains. “--You’re fucking thoaked too, anyway.”
“Yeah, but it’s still raining, so I might as well just go get wetter before I change. Go on, Captor, don’t make me fucking fuss at you, I’m not cut out for it.”
This was so astonishingly inaccurate that he couldn’t immediately think of a good response, so he just shut up and let Karkat give him a shove in the direction of his bedroom.
~
It was the good kind of pizza because Sollux had braved the assholes on the phone at the good pizza place--the less good pizza place never had trouble with his lisp but the good one always seemed to take a lot of pleasure in making him repeat himself multiple times--and it was the good kind of shitty cheap beer because Karkat knew from shitty cheap beer. And they were pleasantly surprised to find a MST3K marathon on the TV, so as long as Sollux didn’t think about all the other events of the day he found himself pretty goddamn contented, settled beside KK on their horrible couch wrapped up in blankets.
He’d explained some of the more amusingly godawful aspects of his journey to and from campus, and Karkat had illustrated with gestures how he’d come to lose his awful job (turned out bookstore customers didn’t take kindly to being told they were assholes with great pomp and eloquence to their faces, who knew?) and the astonishing incompetence of the bursar’s office, and both of them had ended up laughing like drains again. At one point Sollux had collapsed against Karkat’s shoulder helpless with giggles and been unsurprised to find that he smelled good and that the wild mess of his hair was actually very soft to the touch.
They were sleepily watching a bunch of upsettingly skinny Italians pretending to be Floridian biologists and running around after a creature that looked like a cross between a Dunkleosteus and a shark. “What I don’t get is what’s going through the minds of the people who greenlight shit like this,” Karkat was saying between yawns. “Bunch of absolute fucking loonies.”
“I dunno, maybe they had thuper preththient powerth and knew it wath gonna be a fucking hilariouth epithode of Mythtery Thience Theater one day.” Sollux finished his last slice of pizza and settled back against the couch, comfortably full. He had the beginnings of a sore throat and he thought probably in the morning he’d have a full-blown cold--he caught cold at the slightest provocation, shit was seriously annoying, but right now he didn’t care.
“Mmh,” Karkat said, and wriggled a little, and after a moment wriggled a little more so that he was mostly lying with his head in the heap of blankets that was Sollux’s lap. Sollux looked down at him, but didn’t say a thing.
After a little while one of his hands drifted up to Karkat’s shoulder, and then he let his fingers work through the black feathers of his hair. Karkat made a soft little noise and huddled closer to him, and he didn’t stop; just reached over to haul the spare blankets over his curled-up roommate and went back to petting his hair, not thinking about classes, not thinking about anything at all: for once his buzzing self-destructive mess of a head seemed to have chilled the fuck out and found somewhere calm and sort of wonderful to be.