Work Text:
You… Like that moronic asshole.
… Well it’s not like you really think about it much. In fact you go out of your way to not think about it too much because in all honestly it’s a jumbled mess of stupid terms like best friend, like, and tolerate, and that shit just ends up gifting you a migraine for your troubles.
So you’re just going to like him, maybe a little more than you like the other people who you’d consider friends.
He needs you, you know it, and fuck if you don’t know you’re the only one who would try to help him.
You’re the only one who’s stupid enough to try.
It’s a lot better than most people might think it could be, and it’s not like you’ve got much else to do between classes and the pittance of work you’ve clung to, not like that latter is huge anymore.
And your other friends, as pitiful an amount you managed to get, have their own colleges to attend.
You were never good when it came to making friends; you only have like, four total, and just like a lot of other things in your life, that problem can be traced back to two major issues:
Ocular albinism and the vile she-demon who birthed you.
And she almost decided to skip the whole birth thing in favor of more parties and fun.
Thankfully, your dad is a respectable human being who’s always deserved a better lot than the one he’d gotten, and managed to convince her not to.
Of course, she didn’t want to stick around for more than a moment afterwards.
When you were young, you spent a lot of time with your uncle. You don’t remember him much, but he was rude and crass; taught you words-- words you later found out were profanity-- that made your dad yell at him. Your dad had to work a lot to support the two of you.
But for a while there, you were pretty damn content with yourself, even if you couldn’t see very well and you couldn’t go outside much because the sun was harsh and made your already shitty vision even shittier.
But then kindergarden started.
Before then you’d always had thought your red eyes were cool, despite how they limited you, but you hadn’t yet known how cruel others can be to the alien and the different.
It’s not like you were hard to notice, get singled out, and systematically excluded from from all the little games little five year old shitslike to play. Impressive displays of intolerance of what’s not ordinary, for kids.
But for the most part you were still content with finger painting and playing with legos, even if none of the other kids would talk much with you, since your bright red eyes hardly gave off a warm inviting glow.
First grade wasn’t any better, it was just the same core of kids who excluded you before spreading the childish rumors about how you had cooties and that’s why your eyes are always red, or whatever they were. You remained the five year old pariah. You tried being nice to the other kids, and that just didn’t work; all that did was make them run away squealing to their little playmates about how you were going to spread your red eyes to them.
By third grade, you’d learned to isolate the sympathetic looks the teachers gave you, and loathe them. Many times you’d been partnered up with a kid for a coloring activity or whatever, and all that did was throw you into sitting in awkward silence with someone you didn’t know who likely made fun of you behind your back.
By fifth grade, you’d become more than familiar with the term bully. All the other kids were growing, but you were still a bit scrawny. You weren’t athletic because your vision was still a hinderance, and the specialty corrective lenses were too expensive (you know your dad felt horrible about this, but making ends meet was about all he could manage) to help remedy this. Frequently you would be shoved around by complete morons who had nothing better to do since they were on a one-way track to failing the class. It gave you a certain sense of accomplishment to get better grades than anyone else in your class, but it still took you the longest to finish the quizzes and tests, so you were ridiculed anyway.
Sixth grade, you were introduced to a new set of kids.
Elementary school had left you bitter, far more bitter than a fresh sixth grader really had much of a right to be. It was in sixth grade, you met Sollux.
His eyes were arguably more fucked up than yours, said he had something called heterochromia, which made his eyes two different colors and he has this stupid lisp that made it sound like he was talking with a small buzzsaw in his metalmouth of braces.
Naturally, you two became friends. You were the only ones who know what the hell an atom was in science class, and it gave you no greater amusement to have the leg up on them for once; to be on the top with someone to watch your back.
Sollux had a friend named Terezi, who after hanging out with Sollux while you were around, sorta became your friend too.
She was partially blind, said she only got a blurry picture of the world, she cackled like a hyena, teased you, and gave you impossible large piles of shit on a practically religious scale of devotion.
You had such a crush on her.
You might still have it, but that’s some personal fucking information, so there’s no way you’re going to confirm these asinine claims.
For a while, things were pretty good, actually. In highschool you met a girl named Kanaya in your English class, and somehow wound up as her friend too. She was a lot less of a freakshow than Sollux and Terezi, and that made you feel kinda normal yourself.
High school was probably something of a high point for you, as you could watch the ones who used to torment you, a decent amount of them at least, crash and burn while careers slip through their fingers one after another until they had almost nothing to work with.
You don’t believe in karma, if only to avoid propagation of the stereotype (that, and life is hardly ever fair and you’re a delusional peon if you actually think the scales are balanced at all times) but if karma was real, you’d think it’d probably work like that.
But then you graduated.
Sollux and Terezi both had to go across the country to their colleges, while Kanaya skipped over the border into Canada for hers.
But you got stuck local, same goddamn city and everything.
You all kept in touch, but your schedules seemed absolutely intent on clashing at every amount of free time that could be considered substantial.
That was a disappointment sure, but you could live with it. You had intended on focusing hard on college anyway, that just made it a little easier, or at least that what you were telling yourself.
It was hardly a week before you planned to move out of the house into a shitty apartment closer to your school when it happened. You had found a not awful little place near your school that was a better value than the fifty or so dilapidated shacks compressed into one gigantic worn building they called the dorms. You were packing things up, completely minding your own goddamn business, when /she/ showed up.
The detestable shrew that you know never wanted you, actually had the gall to waddle herself back onto your doorstep, not to beg for your forgiveness for her complete ineptitude as a parent, or maybe even offer a hello to you.
Nah, she was just strapped for cash and begging your dad for some money.
She didn’t even ask about you.
It’s was weird, considering how you’ve hated her guts since your dad had explained the situation that caused her to not be present at all times (a horrible case of libido, and the lack of the ability to grow the fuck up.) But like all humans, you were subject to the need for acknowledgement, you maybe even a little more so, having only been acknowledged as a target for a good portion of your most impressionable years.
But in true form, she still doesn’t want you or anything to do with you.
But you tell yourself that’s just fine because you don’t want anything to do with her either.
College comes. It’s a bitch, basically, and dealing with college and school at the same time is not exactly a picnic, but you’re fine, you tell your dad. A few months in, you fall into a rhythm. You’re doing well in school, you’re making rent, you’re well fed, even if your diet seems to have shifted towards the cheap food flying low on the scale of edibility. It’s stressful at times, but you can deal with a little pressure.
February rolls around, and everything’s going good for your new norm. Then, out of nowhere, this asshole who’s been in your class for months, suddenly started giving you shit. You’re entirely convinced that it’s because he’s gonna be flunked by the end of the semester on account of him having an intellectual capacity that was low by even troglodyte standards, but that doesn’t stop it from getting under your skin like an enthusiastic hookworm.
This lingered on for an entire fucking month, and you were absolufuckinglutely done with his existence permeating into your life. He bothered you right after class lets out like always. You don’t even remember what the fuck he said, but you snapped.
Next thing you know, he’s whining like a little bitch about how you went crazy and for someone to get you off him (even though you already had two people grabbing you by the arms.) Later you find out that you messed up his face pretty well for the visually impaired.
Still doesn’t change the fact you’re fucked.
The school shuffled you off to this feel-good hippie shrink in dire need of a calendar so he can realize the sixties had passed. It doesn’t exactly take him long to label you as inches away from erupting into a rash of stomach ulcers. If it wasn’t already ridiculously obvious to anyone in the classroom, you were not nearly as alright as you told yourself.
No work, no school and nothing ‘stressful’ for two weeks, because in his bizarre alternate universe shirking your responsibilities is supposedly a de-stressing experience. Basically you’ve been suspended with a note.
A week passes, and you’re pretty sure you’re more stressed out than you were when you started-- okay you are beyond sure. Sure had been the first day when you were constantly triple checking your finances to figure out if you could positively make rent this month with no issue.
You were trying to kill some time across town to no avail, and by the time you got yourself back to the train you were about ready to do another beautifully executed freak out like you’d been possesed by a deranged ape on withdrawal. But instead the piece of shit train decides that it’’s about done and the power is cut before you could faceplant into a fit of frothing hate.
You could see the room a little better without the enhanced bloom of the fluorescent lights, courtesy of your sad excuses for irises, and as it turned out, you weren’t alone on that train, and you’re pretty much certain that while at the time it may have been the worst possible situation, in the long haul it was the best.
Out of nowhere, a fucking giant mediterranean-looking guy, who reeked like a forest of pot, with /clown face paint/ smeared all over his face, flopped right next to you like he’s known you for years and he was approaching a friend.
He says his name is Gamzee.
You tell him to fuck off.
He does not comply.
It doesn’t take you long to realize that your usual song and dance of vitriolic words and toxic glares isn’t going to repel this guy. He’s blitzed out of his head and any ability to read people (which you found out later he was not exactly good at no matter what) was out the window so you just humor him. You talk to the giant stoner clown sprawled all over the seats next to you, hardly capable of sitting upright. Especially after he took the hit off his vape.
What has your life become?
You probably spent a good thirty or so minutes talking to him, it’s hardly intellectual conversation, but he was nice, for a pot head at least, and he didn’t even crack a grin when you said you liked romantic comedies. Most of all, he listens, really listens. That surprised you, since you figured he’d get distracted by some pretty color or something and then tune you out, but he actually seemed to make a decent effort to hold onto the conversation.
Soon enough, the train starts back up, blinding you in the process.
And soon enough, the train fell silent again; he seemed to have no problem staying quiet then, for whatever reason, until the train reached your destination.
Of course, you two had to get off at the same stop.
And of course, the idiot had to lack the brain cells unoccupied by marijuana to know when to quit, so he couldn’t walk ten feet without falling flat on his face.
With a great amount of regret (at the time) you helped him home.
It was a shitty place in one of the seedier parts of the area, definitely not the best place to be wandering around at night, which it just happened to be at the time.
And him living in one of the seedier, more dilapidated areas in town doesn’t really seem to stop him from having the worst place to live, ever.
It’s an abandoned auto body shop, with a maybe five foot tall chain link fence around it, the lock for which is broken and popped open after you jiggled it. The building is covered in spray paint, smells musty, and is probably disturbingly cold in the winter and were it not for the power he had, or the fact he mentioned bills, you would have thought that he was squatting here.
He had a little light dangling in the reception room turned hallway, just dim enough to be comfortable for you. The main floor of the shop appeared to be where he spent most of his time. There were fast food wrappers everywhere, a disgusting looking ratty couch that seemed to have been excavated from the London blitz and no one bothered to wipe it off, and in one of the trenches, a small plantation of pot was flourishing.
You weren’t as impressed as he seemed to want you to be.
You carry his sorry ass to a gigantic washroom, which appeared to be made to accommodate about five people comfortably. He washed the clownish sludge off of his face, poorly, and it takes you a bit to notice that he has a gigantic scar streaking across his face. You ask him about it, but he’s quick to deflect.
For some reason, he baselessly claims you his best friend after knowing you for maybe two hours. You’d think it was sarcastic were it not for sarcasm being beyond his capabilities at that point of his intoxication.
Once you got him settled he passed out on the ratty couch in record time.
You go home, and you’re infinitely grateful you’re never going to have to deal with him in all of his slack-jawed blitzed wonder ever again.
It’s only three days before you go back.
You don’t know why, exactly. Maybe it was boredom, maybe it was your way of making a new friend,or maybe you had a contusion and your logical thought process was destroyed. You really don’t know what wormed it’s way into your mind at the time that you somehow passed off as reasoning.
You almost didn’t knock, just walked up and walked away from the place (which somehow managed to look even more dilapidated in the day) but you didn’t want to be that guy who almost managed to be decent but failed miserably.
It almost takes him a minute to get to the door.
He looked like he was hit by a truck. He’s disheveled, his eyes were bloodshot and bleary, stubble was poking out of a poorly applied facefull of clown face paint, and it looked like he just lost his best friend. Of course, you learned later on that he was serious about this best friend nonsense he spouted at you the other night.
After a moment or two, he looked like an over excited puppy being presented a T-bone steak. He hugged you in a way that could rightly be called bone-crushing, and kissed both of your cheeks, like how friends might greet in some foreign country. You did not think of this at the time, (as that turned out to be exactly the case) so all you mange to do is stammer for the appropriate harsh words when he lets you go.
All you came up with is idiot and he laughed as he ushered you inside.
A few weeks pass, you’re back to school and work, but you still visit Gamzee on an almost daily basis.
He’s an awful host, smoked senseless more than half of the time, still high when he isn’t senseless, and sprawled on the couch just about all the time. But he’s nice, you guess, he takes a marginal, if not shallow, interest in you, and he doesn’t bug you too much if he sees you doing homework or something, but holy shit trying to talk to him is more frustrating than opening a walnut with feathers and industrial strength glue. He was a little bit better when he wasn’t as high as he could be, but whenever that happened he seemed to want to get high faster than you could talk to him. He often spaced out halfway through a fucking sentence half the time to stare at the corner, because apparently it’s a lot more interesting company than you.
Despite this, the two of you shamble together something almost akin to plans to go see a movie together. Some romantic comedy you’re pretty much sure he doesn’t give a damn about, really, but he says he’s looking forward to it, in some grammatically reprehensible way, and it’s pretty easy to believe him.
That is, until you show up to his place and he’s so high he doesn’t even remember the fact you two had plans to go see a movie that was happening in an hour.
You were just about fucking done with the pot.
You instantly rationalize halfway that it’s for his own good. No one should be high all of the time, he’s hardly a functioning person when he’s smoked senseless half the time, what kind of life is that? But really, you know you’re doing it because you’re angry and there is nothing that you hate more than someone who blows off their responsibilities, plans, or anything they should be owning up to.
You light all of his pot on fire.
All of it.
Thankfully it’s safe in the pit so you only need to find a fire extinguisher (not hard, one was on the wall in the lobby.) before you’re ready.
He wakes up from his halfway nap in the magical world of marijuana. You tell him in no simple terms that he’s a deplorable person when he’s high and this will be for his own good.
You didn’t expect him to punch you.
Or slam you up against the wall and put his hand at your throat, not choking, but far from what you would call comfortable.
You never realized he could look so upset.
Not angry, upset. Like there were warring factions in his mind and he couldn’t keep up with what was going on and he was getting more frustrated by the minute.
He let you go and starts ranting in the most disjointed fashion you’ve ever heard. listening to it is the equivalent of wandering through a maze and slamming into the walls every five seconds.
He said he thought the two of you were friends, and despite how upset he was there was no hiding the sadness in his tone.
It didn’t really hit you until now, but he had never not once had anyone over other than scumbags who took advantage of him to score free pot. He was only called for pot, all that seemed to matter to everyone he knew sans you seemed to revolve around getting pot.
You knew his parents are dead.
Rather abruptly, you realized that you’re his only friend in the world.
And it fucking guts you to see him like this.
And it guts you twice over to realize /you/ made him like this.
So in a moment of surprising tenderness and admonishment, probably brought about by the romcoms you watch en masse, you hug him. You don’t know what came over you but you did, because you know that feeling of not having friends and you know that when your dad hugged you as a kid it made you feel a little better.
Surprisingly, he hugged back. In fact he clings to you like a rock in the middle of a typhoon to keep himself from being blown away, and he starts bawling.
You had no idea what the fresh hell was going on, but apparently you did something right at some point against all functional laws of the universe.
You stay over that night and talk to him all night long. He tells you about his paranoid schizophrenia, how he was filtered in and out of juvie throughout his teenage years, though he doesn't go into it, which you can understand. He tells you pot helped to calm him down, but only if he smoked it in inordinate amounts, and he sure as fuck didn’t hold an ounce of trust in medication. He talks to you a lot, until eventually, you both end up passing out.
You ended up waking up with your head on his lap, and you’re only halfway sure he put you there, halfway sure you just managed it on your own in your sleep, but either way you’re kinda irritated about it. You accused him of doing it and he laughs.
You keep visiting him as the weeks pass on. He loved it. He was very keen to ask you questions then, like he wanted to know everything about you down to a science. You learn that when not smoked immobile on a couch, he’s a very tactile person, hugging you whenever it’s loosely applicable to the situation. It doesn’t help that his idea of loose would qualify Portland as similar to Mt. Everest on account that they’re both located on earth.
So he hugged you on an almost a non-stop basis, much to your irritation.
You’ve started to notice things though, little signs once he was off the pot. On occasion he’d turn to look at something as if someone had called his name, but be met with nothing. He isn’t one for crowds, they make him feel nervous and it shows.
These were just the little signs that a shitstorm was brewing on the precipice and it was about to his full force and drag you along with it.
A few weeks after you burn his small forest down, you get a call from the police.
It’s Gamzee.
He rambles through the conversation, talking faster than you can fully comprehend, let alone think he was capable of. You have to tell him to slow down about ten times before he actually gets on topic away from the purple prose he was spouting at breakneck speeds. You manage to draw very little from the conversation other than he’s at the police station and he’s not alright with this, or at least you think he said something along those lines, his words were dotted with him expressing his disdain in various new ways and saying he can’t go back to being locked up again.
You say you’ll be there.
The police officers fill you in. Turns out he’d been taken in for breaking the peace over his knee and stomping it’s shattered remains into fragmented oblivion, and he was not exactly helping the situation when he got down and refused to cooperate.
You tell them his name (though it boggles your mind how they could have gotten him in such a state he was unwilling to give even that) and explain his condition. They seem skeptical at first, which you thought was sickeningly obnoxious and completely unnecessary, but after they checked his medical files, they seemed to get the picture, despite all odds.
You manage to convince them to release him into your custody, though he’s got a pretty nasty fine to pay, which maybe you should have been more worried about at the time, since you had no idea how the hell he was going to get the income to pay for it. In hindsight, you’re glad you didn’t worry needlessly like that, considering he’s so loaded he doesn’t know what to do.
When they take you to see him, he’s struggling in vain in a restraint chair, he seems to relax marginally when you tell him he needs to, but holy hell does it takes forever for him to finally get his shit cooled enough for you to drag him back home.
You didn’t realize how bad he really was until you finally get home and everything sinks in like it should have since you got the call, but instead it just hits you like a truck, especially when he’s hugging you, like he’s trying to apologize and thank you, but he doesn’t make a sound.
In spite of his surprising vocabulary, he was really a helpless child with his words.
You stay up late, that night.
You’re lying in your bed staring blankly at the ceiling when you decide that he fucking deserves to not have to deal with the whole charade again. You can’t cure his disease, and he’s pretty adamant that doctors are all demons that skin humans alive and wear their flesh as day suits as they dole out poison at their victim’s dime, but at least you can buffer him from having to get arrested again.
But there’s no way that you could do that as it stands, he lives like thirty minutes away and you can’t depend on him calling every time he has an episode like that. From what he’s told you, the one today wasn’t nearly as bad as it can get for him.
No, this is only going to work if you can keep track of him at all times.
And that’s only going to happen if you move in together.
He doesn’t really react at first when you propose the idea, in fact, he seems kind of sullen for some reason that you are completely baffled by, because he does agree to the idea.
The first place he’s not too fond of, and neither were you really, it was cramped.
The second place you think would be perfect; a nice loft with enough space for two people, and he does too, you can see it written all over his face, even if it’s smothered in face paint. Even still he doesn’t seem to say anything.
You go out with him to get some food while you look through the paperwork, or at least make a dent in it, because you had no idea how the fuck you were going to handle it at the time without robbing the first national bank.
Out of fucking nowhere, he starts crying. Loudly. His face paint is smearing from his tears and you have no idea what the fuck is going on. For a second you think he’s having another episode, but it only take you a second to realize how stupid an idea that is and restrain your hand from accidentally slapping your face.
No, it doesn’t click right away, but you figure it out soon enough that the events have stalled on him just like they had on you and he’s finally realizing that the two of you really are going to be moving in together.
You place an arm around him and he leans into you and give you a hug, which basically confirms your thoughts.
You lean in close to him and offer what few words of comfort will apply, and eventually the tears stop and the hug wants to linger. You don’t really mind.
Why would you mind? It’s only natural for two friends to want to make the other one feel better, No matter how embarrassing or difficult it is.
And you’re absolutely determined to make him feel better.
You like this moronic asshole after all.