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That afternoon, Karkat knelt on the roof of their new shed, carefully slotting in each new black asphalt slat. Then John looked again, and he lay in a crumpled heap in the grass amongst the discarded shingles.
John bolted outside. “Oh my God, are you alright—?”
Poor Karkat’s right arm had an extra bend in it. It hurt just to look at.
Dave was outdoors in an instant as well—and together, they lifted Karkat to his feet.
“C’mon buddy—let’s get you inside.”
Karkat sat forlornly at the kitchen table, bright direct sunlight from the window falling on his right arm, which was gingerly cradled in his left. Meanwhile, John scrambled to find his license, phone, and car keys. Even as a god-tier Earth C overlord—he still needed a license to drive. Dave emptied the freezer and placed a package of peas by Karkat’s placemat.
“Where are you going?” Dave asked wildly.
Karkat was heading up the stairs. “I just wanna be alone right now. Is that too much to ask?”
“Dude, are you insane? You have to go to the hospital.” Dave looked at him with eyes as large as saucers.
“Karkat. I know you’re not a fan of doctors, but you need to have that looked at. Seriously. Do not go back upstairs,” added John worriedly.
“Okay! Geezus Christ, calm your grub glands, both of you.” He thumped down to the landing, and the three headed to John’s car.
“What the hell are they gonna do?!” Karkat could be heard sniffling in the back. “I just wanna be home. In my bed. The arm, it hurts like hell.”
Things got quiet and awkward for a minute. “They’ve got pain medicine at the hospital,” John said weakly.
Dave started, “I’ll never forget the day when I was ten and broke my wrist. Twice, actually. Looked just like that. Brutal. Don’t underestimate the kind of pain he’s in, bro.”
“Well—sorry, I just—thought that since the Alternians lived the rough-and-tumble life, I assumed that maybe their pain receptors are just not as sensitive as ours are,” John replied.
“You did not break your wrist,” Karkat scoffed.
He sat in the back with Dave, while John panickedly drove. Dave said coolly, “Mm, the doctor seemed pretty sure that I did.”
“Dave. You’re not making him feel any better,” John said admonishingly.
The car slammed to a halt. Karkat howled in pain. Red lights all around blared through the front windshield.
“Fucking Christ—what are you doing?!” Karkat hissed.
“C’mon, Egbert. Focus,” urged Dave.
“I’m sorry!! I’m just—I’m really sorry,” John answered.
Karkat began again, “But you don’t have this.” He traced a lightning bolt shaped line with his finger along Dave’s wrist. He made a gruesome face. “Yours is completely straight.”
“Yeah, it’s because they set it, and cast it,” said Dave obviously.
One of the first things John noticed upon finally meeting the trolls, was that Karkat’s right leg was crooked, and that he walked about with a prominent limp. That wasn’t the kind of thing you knew about someone, until you met them in person. He never talked about why or how it got like that—so everyone, trolls included, presumed the topic was simply off-limits. Maybe it was a mutant thing—a birth defect. Maybe he’d narrowly escaped the drones. Maybe he’d contracted Alternian polio as a boy. In private, John and Dave speculated.
“Karkat, did you break your leg when you were younger?”
He shot Dave a dubious look. “Yes. Is that not obvious enough?”
It should have been obvious—Dave and John exchanged looks on the rear view. But both of them had thought it best not to broach the subject before now.
“Why didn’t you ask me about it, if you were all so curious?” Karkat asked curmudgeonly when the other guys admitted to the group curiosity.
John replied sheepishly: “We—figured you were sensitive about it. Like you were with your blood color, and stuff.”
“Oh, please. You’re not gonna hurt my feelings by asking. God,” Karkat said, tutting. “What do you take me for, a friggin—snowflake, is that what they call it?”
He told the others about how when he was five sweeps, he ran straight off a stone cliff, hit his thigh on a rock.
"And then it never healed right," said John. “Oh Karkat, that must have been awful.”
“Well, it healed how it broke. That was how the chips fell.” He crossed his bad leg nonchalantly over his good one.
“This time, they’ll make it right,” John assured him cheerfully. “The doctors will set it, and cast it, so you won’t even know it was broken.”
Whenever John spoke about what they were gonna do once they got to the hospital, Karkat grew tense and fidgety in the back seat. Dave noticed, and tried to distract him, to little avail.
When they finally arrived, Karkat had to go alone to the operating suite. His pale face stared back at the two of them, still as a stone, as they wheeled him in.
“He’ll make out just fine,” Dave said before John could even comment.
Dave knew John, and he knew that John’s heart broke easily for other people. That look on his face while they hauled Karkat away…geezus.
“He’s just…not accustomed to doctors, Dave. It’s not fair,” he prattled worriedly.
“Life on Alternia overall didn’t seem very fair,” Dave said.
Karkat was in there but an hour. When he came out, he was practically bouncing with unbridled excitement. His arm was bandaged close to his chest in a sling.
“…How’d it go?” John asked cautiously.
“Everything went as planned, with no complications,” the doctor pushing his wheelchair answered.
“They kept telling me not to look, while they literally just—finagled it back into place. Like, what the fuck,” said Karkat, floored.
“They…kept you awake?” John asked, horrified.
“We utilized a local nerve block just above the elbow—”
“Yeah, they numbed it, so I don’t feel a fucking thing,” said Karkat happily. “Doc here took a video on my phone. The white stuff is my bones—”
“That’s okay, dude,” Dave said, dismissing him. “I don't need a visual.”
“Whatever. Kanaya will find it interesting,” Karkat said reproachingly.
“I’ve assured your friend here that once the fracture properly heals, he should regain full functionality and the fracture will be virtually unnoticeable,” said the doctor.
“Oh, Karkat. You thought it was gonna be stuck like that forever,” said John consolingly.
Dave said, “You seriously have to be the happiest person ever coming out of an operating room.” Although, based on further conversation, the doctor made it seem like this wasn’t an uncommon course of reactions for the numerous trolls he’d treated in the past for this very thing.
“Do you blame me? My leg is stuck like this forever. Shame no one like you was around at the time,” Karkat said flatly into his lap.
“It might not be too late to do something about,” the doctor said carefully. “It would be a major surgical procedure, and the recovery wouldn’t be easy. But—that leg has a lot more years it’s gotta carry you through. So, it’s something to think about.”
Karkat’s countenance fell into uneasiness.
John quickly chimed in, “It’s not like you have to decide on that today—”
“Here.” The surgeon handed Karkat his business card. “My nurse’s name is Uldira. Tell her we spoke, and we can fit you in—if, and when you are ready.”
Karkat pocketed it, and he smiled a private smile.
The three boys drove back to the house. John repacked the freezer, while Dave went outside to clean up the shingles on the grass. Outside his window, Karkat watched him work, curling up with one of his romance novels. It was hard to turn the pages with only one hand.
“Hey Karkat?” John appeared at the door. His face fell upon seeing Karkat. “Oh. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” muttered Karkat. “I’m just…hurting, that’s all. I think the numbing medicine is wearing off.”
“Before you get too far into that, you wanna have lunch?”
“Right,” Karkat replied. With all the excitement, he’d forgotten all about it. He withdrew the business card from his pocket, stuck it into the pages, and followed John down the stairs.