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It’s just another fight. It’s what Knights do, fight, and so it is even less remarkable than it could be.
But it still means something.
They fight together. Not just in in the sense of being on the same side, although even that had taken them some time. They fight side by side. When Dave’s sword breaks, Karkat’s scythes hold the ogre back until he gets another from his strife deck. When Karkat stumbles, fighting four imps at once, Dave is there, cutting off one imp’s head and then returning to his own opponent flawlessly once Karkat has regained his footing. Karkat is at Dave’s back, keeping the imps from his blind spot; a second Dave appears to block the strike Karkat missed. They fight together.
And then, after, they heal together. They go back to one of the many half-destroyed buildings of LOHAC, the tallest one, which Dave has claimed as planet-base. Both are wounded, and they help each other out of clothes that are scorched and torn to treat the injuries beneath – Karkat’s battered black sweater, fading to gray now, Dave’s ridiculous god tier cape.
God tier, but those powers don’t heal him. Mutant, but he bleeds as easily as anyone.
Karkat has a set of clawmarks down one arm courtesy of a particularly feisty imp and a cut on his leg from another that thought it was funny to grab a piece of the broken metal that lay scattered across LOHAC and try to saw his leg off with it. Dave’s dislocated a shoulder from when an ogre grabbed him by one arm, and bruises are starting to bloom on one side of his face where he landed after said ogre threw him by said arm.
Karkat twists Dave’s arm back into alignment, and he doesn’t pass out. Dave bandages Karkat’s cuts, and he doesn’t flinch. They are Knights, after all.
But they are more than just Knights. They were kids who played a game, but that’s in the past, even for Dave. They were loners who didn’t want to be alone, but now even Karkat can say that he has someone. Blood was always a thing for Karkat (freak mutant monster), and Dave manipulated time even before he became a Knight (music has a beat that belongs to time but is also its very own). They were children, brave and red, but they aren’t anymore, and that isn’t related to how long Dave has lived in his back-and-forth time-skipping or how Karkat believes he will be the first of the trolls to die – if they ever get to die by blood-lifespan, and don’t all get killed in this stupid game (red must be lower even than rust, after all).
They are more than all this, though. More than the sum of their blood-weary, time-worn parts. More than an anonymous gray sign or blank black shades, more than poker-faced raps or incoherent rage-rants, more than sharp sickles or broken swords.
After all the time they’ve been through, after all the blood they’ve spilled, they’ve grown up, just a little.
Karkat doesn’t hate himself quite as much anymore, and his blood is just blood. Dave has learned to show his emotions a little more openly, to stop walling himself up.
One could say they saved each other. They both hid in plain sight, Karkat his blood, Dave his heart. But even though they aren’t even of the same species, it was finding someone like them that saved their lives. Without Dave, Karkat might have hated himself to death, blaming himself for everything until his impossible red blood just boiled up and away. Without Karkat, Dave might have fought and worked and protected until even time travel and god tier couldn’t save him.
They saved each other. And, sitting in a burned-out building on a game-constructed planet full of lava, caring for each other’s wounds, they both know one certainty – they will continue to save each other, to protect each other’s blood, until the end of time.
They are Knights, after all.