Work Text:
> Karkat: Celebrate Troll Valentine’s Day
You cannot celebrate Troll Valentine’s Day, because there is no such holiday. Indeed, the very notion strikes you as preposterous. Pray tell, what would this involve? Some heinous preacher’s execution and his devoted devotee, no doubt, or something equally as ridiculous and fake as that.
Nevertheless, as you are feeling uncharacteristically agreeable today, you will carry out the spirit of the request by celebrating a day that a completely hypothetical alien civilization might foolishly consider to be analogous to their Valentine's Day despite its many meaningful distinctions and general all-around superior quality. Because troll culture is so great, you even have two options that might prove sufficient: Flushed Affirmation Day and All Quadrants Day.
There are four days of the sweep that are set aside to celebrate one of the four quadrants. Flushed Affirmation Day, which comes along on the first Roseate Perigee of the sweep, celebrates the warmest quadrant, Matespritship. There is also a fifth holiday, All Quadrants Day, which sits squarely in the middle of the solar sweep, irrespective of lunar orbits and their consequent perigees, and is set aside to celebrate all of the quadrants at once.
After thinking about it for hardly any time at all, you decide to celebrate Flushed Affirmation Day.
> Karkat: Celebrate All Quadrants Day instead
No. Absolutely not. Anyone who thinks that you might want to celebrate All Quadrants Day has a thinkpan full of hot, sizzling shit and clearly does not understand the immense logistical requirements of planning a celebration with all of your quadrantmates, each of whom is also planning a celebration with all of their quadrantmates, and so on.
You are pretty sure that All Quadrants Day is just a way to trick lowbloods into coming together into large, easily-culled crowds.
Besides, your pale quadrant is embarrassingly empty at the moment, so you wouldn’t be able to properly celebrate All Quadrants Day to its fullest extent even if you wanted to. Which, as we have established, you do not (although it would be nice if you could figure out how to remove your strut pod from your ignorance shaft in time to apologize to Terezi in time for Pale Day, but that would be another story altogether).
> Karkat: Refocus
Your quadrants are not as completely filled as you would like, but there’s no reason that you can’t celebrate this holiday in particular, because you definitely have a matesprit, and he doesn’t even live in Troll Canada. Sollux Captor is the best matesprit (except when he is the worst, which is still alright because then he is the best kismesis). It sort of started when Sollux destroyed his beehouse mainframe after ordering the wrong kind of debugging tool, but in retrospect your own attempts at programming had been pretty pitiful to him for a long time and it wasn’t like he was such an unsorry guy himself, so the beehouse incident was sort of just the dried cereal stalk that broke the two-bulged musclebeast's torso pillar.
This means that you need to get him something.
Folk legends speak of Jacque Pastel, the steady half of countless ill-fated, blood-soaked flushed romances and the subject of just as many romantic horror films, like My Bloody Flushed Affirmation Day (it's a very old movie, from the days when films were all in gray and dark gray). All year long, Jacque Pastel would obsessively shadow a host of potential romantic interests until, on Flushed Affirmation Day, he approached just one hive in order to leave a gift of land oysters and romantic solicitations written in the blood of past lovers, whose company the recipient would surely join as it all went wrong in the space of a single day.
This was usually a story for grubschoolers to scare each other with but you always secretly liked the idea, because there was something to be said for the idea of a troll who could know all your deepest secrets and still like you (until it all went wrong), and even after you were older and better-adjusted there was still a kind of nostalgic thrill there.
Also, land oysters are pretty good. They are definitely an acquired taste, but the thing about living on an imperial children’s stipend as a mutant like yourself is that sometimes you have to be a little creative and acquire some acquired tastes in order to stretch out the budget from perigee to perigee.
Anyway, notwithstanding the horrifying story of Jacque Pastel, it became the basis for a reasonably tame holiday, just like a theoretical day about demons and monsters walking around and demanding supplication might turn into a similarly flippant observance, or a less theoretical festival of pleasant indulgence and greasepainted performers could actually be quite terrifying and treacherous in practice. On Flushed Affirmation Day, the traditional thing is to exchange gifts with your matesprit, and the most traditional gift is some kind of attractive flora.
You don’t have a green preaxial digit, just two ordinary gray ones, but you do have a greenblooded (well, jadeblooded) friend with a garden and it turns out that even a numbthumbs like yourself can grow a peccant pricklebush if somebody walks you through it. Kanaya sent a few seeds to you last sweep, and you have a whole bunch of them growing right now on a planter box affixed to the outside of your respiteblock’s gaze pane. You decided to grow them there because then you don’t have to step outside where you might accidentally cut your literally but also figuratively gray digits on a pair of shears and reveal your awful mutant blood to everybody and their lusus.
Peccant pricklebushes don’t have flowers, but they do grow unsightly yellow pustules that explode and shower slime in every direction when somebody touches them too hard. That might sound terrible, and in a lot of ways it is, especially when you’re trying to package them and instead you’re getting slime everywhere, but the slime is also the exact same shade of yellow as Sollux’s blood, and the relevant authorities (i.e. your favorite films) agree that resemblances like this are pretty romantic.
It takes about an hour to get everything ready, and then it’s time to send off your gift. You don’t have mail, which you might say is almost as useless as fancy poetry except that poetry is sort of an expected part of the season, and it is maybe slightly possible that you picked up a few tips from all of the romantic comedies that you have studied, and less probable but still within the realm of possibility that you have in fact written a poem for this sweep’s Flushed Affirmation Day, which could just possibly — if all that is so — read as follows:
FIVE-PETALED CERISE VEGETABLE GENITALS ARE RED,
RENIFORM-LEAFED SPUR SHRUBS ARE BLUE,
I HATE FANCY POETRY,
BUT I PITY YOU.
But even if all that were the case (which…it is) you still definitely don’t have anything to do with mail. If you're going to send a bouquet of horrible yellow pustule thornbushes to Sollux (and you are) then it will be by way of a small, flying, autonomous package-delivery machine, which is entirely a different thing to mail. Sollux lives in a nearby stemcluster to your own subgrub, so he’ll get the package before today stops being Flushed Affirmation Day and starts being the next day.
(Blood pushers are also a traditional gift, but you're not any kind of fancy hunter or anything like that, so you just saved up for a bit and ordered a nice big one from Butcher Box)
> Karkat: Make a surprise Flushed Affirmation Day visit to Sollux if you live that close to him
Absolutely not. You couldn’t possibly walk there by sunup. When you said that Sollux lived nearby that was meant in a relative way, like “compared to the other fucking side of the planet.”
It would be possible for you to take a motorized track-riding vehicle into the stemcluster, you suppose, but you don't want to do that. You don’t like groups of strangers all that much. Maybe it has something to do with being a veritable shut-in for most of your life for some obvious reason. That isn’t to say that you and Sollux have never met in person before, but mostly it’s him visiting you.
After you clean up enough of the slime that your husktop isn’t mucky and sticky anymore, you log onto Trollian and send Sollux a little program that you made. It's supposed to show a sketchy animation in pink, red, and dark pink and then display that poem that you wrote. None of that is particularly good — definitely not anything like what Sollux could code — but it is pretty pitiful, which sort of makes it wrap around to being good after all.
Sollux still isn’t online…
You cannot open the Pesterlog, because you aren’t pestering trolling anybody, because, as has just been established, you are waiting for Sollux to log on and he still hasn’t shown up.
Furthermore, you aren’t entirely sure whether you could open the Pesterlog even if Sollux were online. The more that you think about it, the more it seems to you like there isn’t an actual Pesterlog after all, just a bit of junky code intended to simulate a Pesterlog. The words haven’t even changed to “Close Pesterlog,” like they ought to! This is all a scam, and a part of you thinks that maybe you should just move on to a better story, or at least to the next part of this story (such as it is).
And shouldn't this be a Trolllog??? But no, you checked, it's a Pesterlog, at least until it's a Dialoglog.
> Karkat: Be Sollux so that you can log onto Trollian
You can’t possibly be Sollux because obviously Karkat is too busy waiting for Sollux to log on.
> Karkat: But that’s exactly why you need to stop being Karkat and start being Sollux
That isn’t even a command. Shut up. Go away.
Why are you arguing with yourself like this?
No wonder Sollux pities you when you’re a dumb fucker who talks to himself like — Wait wait wait, he’s online he’s online!
> Karkat: Talk to Sollux
You are going to do just that.
If, speaking entirely hypothetically, your actions thus far had been witnessed by a bevy of unknown and unknowable observers, you might be even more discomforted than usual to know that they were about to read a sappy, pitiful conversation with your matesprit. Fortunately for you, however, it’s already been established that the Pesterlog isn’t working, so you get to have some privacy.
Your entirely hypothetical audience will just have to content themselves with the knowledge that it was sappy, and pitiful, and great.