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He’s small and delicate and you haven’t let him see the moonlight in... in... huh, look at that you can’t remember. He used to count them, the sweeps, the motherfucking perigees, but he stopped. You can’t remember when. He still smiles when you come to see him. You don’t do it often, not as often as you’d like. But he hates it when you turn up covered in blood. He hates it when you come in and the motherfucking messiahs are all up in your think pan, and sometimes... sometimes he’s angry, and you can feel it boiling up from his room, feel all this fury and hatred and it’s all for you and you’re scared of him then. You couldn’t go to see him then. Not with him so angry.
You’re a bad moirail really, but you keep him safe. No-one else has seen him in sweeps. No-one else has seen the motherfucking miracles he keeps inside him, no-one else is ever allowed to touch him; you’re all he’s got and when he isn’t hating you – and he hates you less and less often as the sweeps pass – he loves you so pale it makes your motherfucking bloodpusher break.
You open the door. It creaks ominously, just the way you like, and he looks up from his four legged platform. He smiles all tired like, and waves you over. He’s all greyer than usual, and his eyes – there’s something up with his eyes, but you can’t be motherfucking figuring that out – and when you’re close enough he pats your hands.
“Hey Gamzee,” he says. His voice creaks like the door. He only uses his words when you’re up and about and you haven’t seen him in. In. A long time. You think. The walls outside are painted in the rainbow, rust through indigo, and you think you broke open a seadweller’s think pan only a while ago because the purple’s still bright on the walls and the last time you saw him you came down crusted in blue blood. He’d thrown you out for that, until you’d come back scrubbed clean and he’d cried red red tears when you’d even taken off your face for him. He’d painted it back on himself, his fingers shaky, and he’d muttered all the way through calling you fuckass and dipshit and insane stupid clown but he’d kissed your fingers after and said “There, now you’re Gamzee again,” and pushed your hair back from your face.
He’s the only one who calls you Gamzee anymore. You’re the Grand Highblood to most everyone else. Maybe just Highblood to some, and Subjugglator to others, but only he calls you Gamzee. You’d’ve forgotten that was your name if he didn’t say it over and over, and even then some perigees you forget and when he screams Gamzee over and over again you don’t even motherfucking know why.
“Gamzee?” he asks, squeezing your hand. “You want a feelings jam?”
“Yeah, bro,” you reply and you pile all these blankets and pillows up – there’s nothing hard in the room, not even any of your horns, but you do the best with what you have – and you pick him up and carry him on over. He fits in your lap like he’s still a wiggler, and he’s so light you could almost forget he’s there.
“You see anyone recently?” he asks, and when you tell him how you tore an insolent olive blood clean in half he just hums in agreement and asks, “Did you make a nice painting?”
He likes your paintings. He says he does, and you can’t hear the motherfucking lie, so you talk about them. You talk about how you want to get a rainbow painted special just for him, but you can never get the colours right, and it has to be motherfucking perfect for your moirail.
“Soon, yeah?” you say. “I’ll come on down and I’ll paint you a motherfucking picture for these walls,” and he smiles like you’ve told him you’re throwing him a wiggling day party.
But you have to leave soon after, so you carry him back to his four legged platform and you tell him the drones’ll be by with dinner soon and that you’re so motherfucking busy but you wish you could stay, and he smiles like he never used to, like you’re something precious and his eyes – his eyes–
“See you soon, Gamzee,” he says and he waves.
It’s not until the sun’s rising that you hear it. It’s not until you’re in your ablution trap, washing off the remains of mustard blood that you feel it.
Your bolt. You run fast as you’ve ever motherfucking run, and if any motherfuckers get in your way you run right on over them, you put the fear of the motherfucking messiahs in their think pans but you have to get there, you have to, you have to because he’s he’s he’s he’s-
He’s grey haired and his bones are brittle and his blood’s thin and his voice is broken and his horns are worn and when you slam into his room his eyes don’t see you but he still smiles and he still says “Gamzee, Gamzee,” and you wrap him up as motherfucking gentle as you’ve ever been and he says “Shoosh, shoosh now,” and his breath rattles in his chest and his bloodpusher stutters so loud you can motherfucking hear it and you say “Nonono, don’t you motherfucking dare, don’t you motherfuck,” and he smiles sweet as his candy red blood and wipes his finger over your face and says “You’ll be okay, Gamzee. You’ll be just fine,” and then he sighs and says “I’m going to sleep now, fuckass, and don’t you dare wake me up.”
And it’s always so easy to do what Karkat tells you to, so you put him back on his four legged platform – not the recuperacoon now, he won’t want the sopor now – and his eyes droop shut and you sit there and you listen and you wait and his blood pusher gets slow and even and then.
It stops.
You make a noise, you think, but you don’t even know what it was. You think you make a great and terrible noise but he just carries right on sleeping now, sleeping where you can’t see him and when the rage takes you he isn’t there to calm you down so you just keep on raging, keep on breaking and smashing, keep on painting and all those other motherfuckers they get right on out of the way, because you’ve got the messiahs singing to you and ain’t nothing left on this shitstain planet that can bring you down.
The walls are a rainbow when you come back. Rust and bronze and mustard and olive and jade and teal and turquoise and blue and indigo and purple and even a motherfucking splash of tyrian, dragged on special from the stores of the ancient dead, and you’ve made his dark drab room shine like the motherfucking moon he hadn’t seen in more sweeps than you can remember and he carries right on sleeping and you promised you wouldn’t wake him, you promised.
Some motherfuckers come eventually, some motherfucks who know the messiahs right off, and they reach for him on his platform and you bite their fingers off and paint their blood across his walls and then they send others, over and over and over, and you rend and rip and tear and you paint rainbow after rainbow but he never does wake and you get to thinking that he might never will.
You press your lips to his and he’s cold as the Empress when you do, cold like fire, and the messiahs sing and sing and sing and you-
You sit up straight before him and you tuck him in tight and then you walk right on out of his room and you go to watch the world burn.