Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You find it first because the forest all around it is dead.

Of course, most of the forest undergrowth is dead anyway right now—it’s fall and you’re the only one out, a flash of red and orange through the red and orange trees—but not like this.  This is rot.  Destruction, not natural death. 

You pick your way through the mess of snapped branches and crushed plants; there are rotted handprints on leaning tree trunks and heavy footprints like the cloven hooves of a goat but much, much bigger.  The intruder didn’t take much care to cover their trail.  You try to heal one or two of the handprints before you give up; it takes too long, and you don't have the strength to fix it all.  Besides, whatever left your forest in disarray like this, you have a feeling you'll need all your strength at hand to deal with it.

The trail leads to a crooked heap of rocks by one of the streams that cuts through the woods.  The stones have been shoved together into a rough lean-to; there's something thick and wet and deep purple smeared across them, dripping down toward the hungry earth.  Your plants drink it in, and say it tastes like blood. 

You slow down, edging closer; you're fast, almost as fast as other forest spirits, useless wings be damned—but desperate, wounded creatures can be fast too, and unthinkingly violent.  The last thing you want to do is startle whatever this thing is and get your face torn off. 

You have to crouch at the entrance of the cave to see in.  The darkness seems deeper than it should be, in there, and there's a darker shape in among the shadows, huddled in on itself.  You can make out the dark, smooth curve of a back, skin a deep slate grey.  What looks like a pair of long horns, a long, flicking ear and a lot more thick, purple ichor.  What you can see of its back and side is striped with long stripes of raw, bleeding flesh.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t move when you block the light from the entrance. It doesn’t breathe.  Maybe it staggered here to die—maybe it’s already dead…

“Hello?”  You try.  "Are you alive, or—?"

LEAVE ME ALONE

The voice almost knocks you flat on your back.  It’s not something you hear—it’s a thought, shoved gracelessly into your mind at skull-shattering volume.

“Ow,” You say, dazed, and shake your head, ears ringing.  "Damn.  Is that a yes?"

I SAID LEAVE

“No.”  You edge closer again, ignoring your instinct to take off into the trees and leave this thing to whatever fate finds it—your head hurts and your ears are ringing, and just being near it is making the leaves that grow across your scalp and onto your cheeks and ears wilt a little.  But it's also bleeding, and you knew it was wounded already.  If its lashing out is just going to be in your head, you can cope with that.  “You're bleeding all over my godsdamned forest.  What happened to you?”

There’s silence for a second, and then the being in the cave finally shifts and rolls itself painfully around to glare out at you. 

Its face is stretched and flattened, and its legs are bent and goatlike, with hooved, cloven feet.  Its eyes are a baleful gold-orange with a thin, eye-searing ring of bacchanalian violet and one of them is swollen almost shut under one of the three deep, bloody gashes that cut across its face, like something clawed it open.  One of its wrists and one of its legs are broken and crooked.  There’s blood on its face and hands and back, and it makes an attempt to glare at you, squaring its shoulders and lowering its twisted, goat-like horns defensively before shuddering in pain and slumping again, just staring at you.

WHAT ARE YOU

Its voice is quieter, still painful but not nearly as bad as before.  Its mouth is a mass of jagged fangs—it cocks its head to one side and looks at you with those big purple and gold eyes.  Its pupils are sideways, flat like a goat’s. 

“I’m a nature spirit,” you say, and flex your wings in demonstration—its eyes follow the tattered webs and then flick back to your face.  “You’re rotting my forest.”

It blinks at you slowly and doesn't respond.  Entering another spirit's domain without permission or respect is already an insult—refusing to apologize afterward is a grave offense, and your hackles are already up, which is probably why your temper gets the better of you in the face of that blank stare.

"So?" you say.

SO

"So!" you repeat, and flare out your wings, flesh-wooden fingers and tattered red webs, in a pretty blatant show of intimidation.  "So apologize!"

It twitches, and its flat face doesn't show much feeling but its ears flatten and pin and its eyes narrow. 

APOLOGIZE

“Yes, apologize!  Say you’re sorry for intruding on my territory!  Coming in unwanted, destroying my trees, rotting the undergrowth—you owe me an apology!”

I DON’T KNOW

HOW TO DO THAT

That's horseshit, and you get very close to telling it so—except from the way it's looking at you, you're suddenly, startlingly aware that it might actually be telling you the truth.  Gods, spirits, fae, you don't often lie to each other.  Especially when you obviously think you're superior to whoever you're talking to.  Why bother?  What are you, humans?

It doesn't know how to pay respects.  It doesn't know how to apologize for the slight.  Screaming at it about that would be pointless, so you're not going to scream at it.  You are not going to scream at it.  Yet.

"You're hurt," you say, and wave a hand at its entire bloody, broken body.  It looks away sharply and curls up around its crooked arm, and you can feel it, like a snapped branch; wrongness, disconnect.  It's not part of your forest, but it doesn't matter.  Your fingers itch to fix it.

"I can help you," you say, against your better judgment.  "What do you need to regrow?”

It snarls.  

HUMAN SOULS

You hit it on the back of the head. 

“I don’t know what you are,” you tell it, and it hisses between its teeth and stares at you like it can’t believe you just dared to lay a hand on it.  “But we don’t eat souls here.  That’s dark magic shit, and if you want to do dark magic, you can do it outside of my forest.”

I CAN’T LEAVE

CAN’T DEPART THIS FORSAKEN PLACE

MY LEG

“I know,” you say, "So you'll have to eat whatever else you eat, because human souls aren't on offer.  Ask for something else."

It huffs air through those sharp teeth, but this time it sounds less like a snarl and more like a sigh.

YOU’RE PUSHY

FOR A THING SO BITE-SIZED

FINE THEN

BRING ME FLESH

MEAT

AND FOOD OF MY CLOVEN BRETHREN

YOU KNOW WHAT A GOAT EATS, BROTHER

“Yeah, I do,” you say, because you’ve had goats loose in your part of the forest before.  “Basically everything, that’s what goats eat.”

BLACKBERRY

THE PLANT THE SACRIFICES CALL HONEYSUCKLE

NETTLES AND MUSTARD AND MULBERRIES

NIGHTSHADE, BROTHER, AND FLESH

BRING ME THESE

“Fine, fine.” You ruffle your leaves—they’re definitely crisper than they should be.  You hate having that bright dying-harvest-season color on your head and your wings like a splash of blood, but you don’t want to lose all your leaves either.  But before you go… “Here.  Your arm."

It recoils and snarls at you.  You roll your eyes at it.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” you snap.  “I'm going to set the bone, so it stops splintering and heals right.  Like a broken sapling.  You know what bone-setting is, don't you?”

It blinks at you some more, and then shakes its head.  It seem to be having trouble with the idea that you want to help it.  Its eyes are already strangely wide, but at the moment the expression looks a lot like confusion.

“Gods' sakes, give it here,” you demand, and even though it has to be a lesser god of some sort and you have absolutely no right to be ordering it around, it pins its ears back and painfully lifts its arm to offer it to you.  Moving it makes it whimper.  You feel…okay, you feel kind of bad about that.  “Good,” you tell it, feeling stupid, and are surprised when it relaxes a little at that, and shifts over so you can reach its arm more easily. “That’s…good.  Now, this is going to hurt, but it’ll be better when it’s done."

You said it wasn’t going to hurt

Its voice is quieter than it’s ever been, almost frightened.  You sigh and press your fingertips as gently as you can over the swelling on its arm, feeling out the break.  It’s snapped in three places and the bone is truly wrecked, what did it do to itself?  Even if it's a lesser god, to be hurt this badly it must have angered something old, something powerful.  You have to hope at this point that whatever being did this isn't coming after it, because you're definitely committed to fixing this thing and you'd rather not get your entire forest wrecked because of it.

"This is going to hurt only as much as it has to," you clarify, picking the words out carefully.  "And afterward, it'll be better."

Even with the warning, it howls and tries to jerk away when you start to lay the bones straight.  Sickness is trying to settle into the pieces of its bones, and you chase that out as you go, and then pick up a branch and set it against the twitching, quivering mess of its arm, ignoring how it whines in pain.  The dead twigs of the branch tremble and twist and then twine out like vines, wrapping its arm from the fingers to the elbow in solid, flexible wood.

Its mouth isn't made for words, but its making so much noise inside your head and out it makes your skull ring.  You make sure the wooden brace is solid and not too tight, and then let go, and the cacophany of hissing, spitting snarls and wounded howling dies away as it pulls its arm to its chest and scrambles back away from you, letting out a snarl like no animal you've ever heard before, glaring at you with wide, wild eyes. 

I SHOULD SLAUGHTER YOU FOR THAT TRICK

YOU WING-BROKEN FREAK

You flinch despite yourself, and then remember how angry you were and draw yourself back up again, glaring right back.  "I'm doing you a damn favor," you remind it.

It tries to lunge at you.  You move back fast and the forest moves in response, roots lunging out of the ground and lashing around it, dragging it back and down, slamming it to the ground.  It gives a strangling whine of pain again, fights at the roots and then goes limp, panting.

"You can hardly move," you say, like your heart isn't pounding in your skull with leftover alarm.  "I could leave you to bleed out hungry on the forest floor, and I should!  You invaded my forest and didn't even apologize for it!  But I'm trying to help you, you absolute blight on my patience, so why don't you settle down and let me do it already?!"

you hurt me

"You were already hurt.  Sometimes fixing things hurts all over again, that's not my fault."

It doesn't answer.  Moving made its wounds bleed fresh; your plants drink up the slow drip of another god's ichor as it trickles steadily down the thing's side and soaks into the dirt.

"...Look me in the eye and tell me your arm doesn't feel better," you demand.

It doesn't answer.  It doesn't meet your eyes.

"That's what I thought," you tell it, and dust yourself off, flare and settle your wings fussily like one of your birds.  Mulberry, blackberry and hemlock, it said.  If it's going to behave itself, then that's something you can do.  "If I leave you here, are you going to accept my hospitality, or are you going to disgrace yourself more?"

It hesitates a long second, snarling softly under its breath again.  Then, reluctantly, it shakes its head.  By green growth, this thing sulks like a new spirit.  But you offered it hospitality, you said it outright, and by those rules, you have duties to take care of.  You sigh and rub at the back of your neck, feeling the places your flesh turns to root and wood at the base of your wings.

"Are you thirsty?"

There's another long, reluctant pause.

…yes

You lean down and coax the roots to shift; they let your new guest go and sink back into the ground, churning and digging for you, and the water from the stream flows into the new rivulet you formed for it, forming a wandering loop around its makeshift cave.  You're being hospitable, so damn hospitable, it doesn't even have to leave where it lies on the ground, it can reach right out and drink.  It stares at the water, and then starts to move forward without so much as a word to you.

“Now you say ‘thank you’,” you remind it—or instruct it, since it seems like it has no idea what it's doing.

Another long, sulky pause.

…thank you

PUSHY MOUTHFUL

Well, that’s going to have to do.  You turn your face to the scent of meat and nettles and mustard and berries, and start walking.

Chapter Text

You don’t meet anyone as you flicker from branch to branch, searching for the plants you need.  You do see some humans, and in that at least fortune is in your favor; you perch in the trees above them, out of their sight, and make the trees rattle and the roots writhe.  They drop the deer they killed and bow in terrified reverence before leaving the clearing at a run. 

Some other local deity might end up getting the offerings for that, but you've never exactly expected worship out of your humans, so that doesn't phase you much.  What matters is that you have the flesh of a healthy young doe, and you didn't have to find one recently dead or dying and purify its corpse of whatever killed it.  You can't kill one of your own beings, in your own forest; the thought is abhorrent, and what it would make of you is unknowable.  So in other words, getting your hands one some fresh, tender meat is a real struggle, sometimes. 

You pull the body onto your shoulders over your wing joints and start walking again.  She’s not heavy, really—weight doesn’t matter to you like it does to humans—but you’re small for a spirit and the body is unwieldy, and by the time you get back to the cave with an armful of bundled stems and leaves and the body dripping down your shoulders, you're very ready to be done being hospitable already.  The wounds left on your forest lead you back to it easily, slowly beginning to heal around the edges.

It’s moved a little from where you found it; it’s half out of the cave, dragging its bad leg and leaning on its good arm to bring its face down to the water of the tributary you made for it. 

It startles when you get close, and looks up at you like it’s been caught doing something it shouldn’t.  It hisses softly—then as you come closer it retreats in earnest, pulling itself away from the water and starting to edge back into the darkness of its cave.

It makes it a few feet before its broken leg catches on the uneven ground, and it gives a hissing, bleating cry of pain and slumps, breathing hard and fast through its ludicrously fanged mouth and refusing to look up at you.  Stupid, prideful creatures, gods, even lesser ones—ordering you around in your own territory, flaunting all rules of hospitality, and now making a big shamed, angry display out of letting you see it in pain.

You're in pain most of the time, and you don't have a lot of patience for pride.  You put your burdens down on the ground, pick up another piece of wood, and dart over to kneel over its broken leg, grabbing it with both hands and lashing another sturdy splint to it.  It howls and tries to kick at you with its other hoof—you lash that leg to the ground with a thick root and burn the infection out of this broken bone as well.

It's over in a few breaths—you're not kind, but you've got no reason to be cruel.  Its eyes are running, and when it kicks free of the root you bound it with it doesn't lunge for you this time, just gives you a baleful glare that mostly looks furious and hurt.

"Stop that," you snap at it, and it growls.  Yes, alright, fine, maybe a good host would have handled that better.  You sigh, and throw your hands up in capitulation.  "Alright, alright, fine.  I'm sorry.  There, see?  That's an apology.  Remember that."

It hisses at you, but it looks more sulky than furious now, visibly distracted by the body of the deer on the ground.  Its tongue darts out over its horrifying mouthful of teeth.

“How do you eat?”

COOKED

CHARRED FLESH

OR RAW

MY PARTICULARITY GOES AS FAR AS YOU JUST GETTING THAT SHIT INTO MY MOUTH

NO FURTHER

“Okay.” You don’t like starting fires any more than you like trying to hunt down edible meat, but you are partial to the outcome—humans had a good idea when they came up with cooking flesh before they ate it.  But before that… “What do you say when you want something in another spirit's domain?”

The response is immediate and unhesitating.

GIVE IT TO ME

“No.”

It blinks at you.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN

NO

“I mean the thing you say when you’re asking someone for something is ‘please’.”

It sneers—as well as it can with that lipless mouth. 

Gods

DO NOT

PLEAD

“Do gods want to eat?”

It huffs through its nose.

“Well?”

PUSHY

ALWAYS PUSHING AND PUSHING

YOU’LL PUSH TOO FAR

YOU’LL GET TO THINGS YOU AREN’T OF WONT TO SEE

WINGLESS MOUTHFUL

“I can just eat this by myself if you would like,” you say pointedly, and settle down next to the doe.  You draw your curved blade out of the air, and set about cleaning the body.  “You’re not going to get any by taking cheap shots at my wings either, noseless.”

It looks vaguely affronted.

I got a nose

“No you don’t.”

DO SO

“And I’ve got wings!”

Broken ones

“Yeah, well, your nose is flat.”

YOU’VE GOT BLOOD LEAVES LIKE A FREAK

“Your blood is purple!”

It starts making a hacking, choking noise and flops over instead of answering.  You look over, alarmed, and start to stand as it keeps hacking at you—then it lifts its face up and you can see the corners of its lipless mouth are drawn back, and its round eyes are crinkled up in delight.  It's laughing.

You’re funny

I LIKE YOU

A fair bit more than I’d credited

PUSHY LITTLE

“No, okay.” You cut it off, and wave your bloody blade at it.  “I’m not a ‘pushy little mouthful’, I’m a powerful, dangerous nature spirit and you’re in my forest.  This is my place.  And my name is Karkat.”

Karkat

FUNNY NAME FOR A FUNNY

Spirit

Well, that’s better than it comparing you to some form of food, at least.  You seek out pieces of dead wood, pile them up and concentrate until they burst into flame.  It watches hungrily as you slice off thin pieces of meat and dangle them above the fire to sizzle and drip.  It smells amazing.  Even if you get nothing else out of helping this ingrate of a demigod, you’ll get a hot venison dinner. 

“I bet your name is funnier than mine,” you say eventually, more idly than nastily this time, and make another smooth cut.  It smells like blood and cooking meat—the plants around you turn their leaves and beg and you chop of little pieces of meat and drop it to their roots, letting the rot creep into it.  Their roots curl around the food and they twine up towards the light.  “What are you called, then?”

It makes a noise in your head so sudden and loud and horrible you drop your knife and cover your ears with both hands. 

The noise stops.  You uncover your ears and glare at it.

"What was that for?!"

You asked for my name

I GRANTED YOU THAT

“Well your name feels like blight and root-rot!” You rub at your skull—wow, humans sometimes have problems hearing the true names of spirits, but he really is from some bad stock if your head hurts that much from hearing it.  “I’m giving you a new one I can actually say without burning my mouth. What’s that word—yeah.  I’m going to call you ‘Gamzee’.”

It cocks its head to one side and frowns at you with its eyes.

…GAMZEE

“It’s a human word for ‘goat’.”  It huffs through its teeth.  “Oh come on, it’s not like there are going to be any humans around to laugh at you.  You look like a goat.  You’ve got feet like a goat.  You called them your brethren.  So yeah, I’m calling you Gamzee.”

MORE OF YOUR KIND

Know the human words

THOSE WHO’LL SAY

He takes the name of an animal

 “Nobody is going to make fun of you for the name, great good growth.”  You roll your eyes.  ‘He’, huh?  Okay.  “Okay then, Gamzee, all you have to do is ask politely and you get some of this.  Otherwise I’m finishing it off myself and calling over some friends who’ll be a lot politer about it.  So do you want some or not?”

He rumbles low in his chest.

…YES

…please

You tear off a piece of the roasting meat and a branch of the mulberry you brought and hand them over.  He tears into them like he’s been starving for a season.

“You’re welcome,” you tell him—he ignores you.  Well, you’ll fight that battle later.  You glance up at the sky and snag a roasting slice of meat; it’s delicious.  The sun is setting through the tree trunks, and you can feel flowers and plants curling themselves away for the night around you.  “You want help getting back in the cave for the night?”

Gamzee growls.

WHY SHOULD I TAKE SHELTER

He sounds less angry in your mind now, at least.  The food seems to be making him sleepy; he picks up a branch of nightshade and chews on it idly. 

“I don’t want your horrible face stunting the growth of the new plants that I need to bring up to replace the ones you wrecked,” you tell him bluntly, and frown at him.  “You should clean those cuts up before they get sick, too.”

He cringes a little.

Why should i

His voice is doing that thing again, where it goes a little bit soft, almost shaky.  He sounds very vulnerable when he does that, for all his ferocious snarls and his pride, and you wish he didn’t because it makes your stomach feel strange. 

“Because otherwise your face will start to rot and I’ll have to do what I did to your broken bones to your face.” You put a thick chunk of meat up to cook and throw a few more dead sticks on the fire, so you don’t have to look at those wide, violet-gold eyes.  “…you remember what it felt like when I burned the sickness out of them?  You want that on your face and all over your back?”

He flinches.

No

I DON’T WANT YOUR CLAWS NEAR MY BLEEDING SELF EITHER

And then, soft again,

I don’t like things that hurt

“Nobody does.” You could go out hunting, but you don’t want to walk away from the fire—you put a hand to the ground and reach with all your might, and a soft stem of silver-green, downy leaves springs up between your fingers.  You pluck a few of them and hold them out to him.  “Here.  See this?”

He hesitates, then reaches out and takes the leaf from you, running his darkened, calloused fingertips over it.  His ears perk up. 

What is that

GROWN OUT OF DIRT AND ROCKS BUT SO SOFT

What kind of plant feels like this

“Human’s call it ‘lamb’s ear’,” you tell him, and his lipless mouth twists a little like he’s smiling.  “I can use that to clean up your face a little bit, and then you can get some actual sleep and I won’t have to deal with your face oozing all over the place because of all the foul things you got in the cuts.  Alright?”

He hesitates, then dips those massive goat horns in a nod. 

“Good.”  You pluck some more of the largest leaves—you have them growing almost as large as your hand—and dip it in the stream water.  “Sit still, and don’t snap at me.”

His skin is cool when you touch it, but warmer around the cuts—you frown, and he whines when you dab at the place the middle cut splits deep into the bridge of his nose.  The skin there is dark and surprisingly soft, as soft as the herb in your hands when your fingertips rub across it.  You linger there, and catch yourself, and hate yourself for it—you can't decide if you hate yourself more or less when his eyes unfocus and soften and he leans minutely into your touch.

By the time your careful wiping and scrubbing gets the worst of the crusted purple blood off his face the sun has almost finished setting.  You give him some honeysuckle and the cooked haunch of venison as a reward, and he slumps in relief and takes them from you, hunching over them.  Then, sudden and quiet, 

Thank you

You jump a little and stare at him, and he stares back, ears perking up in alarm at your reaction.

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT

“Nothing.”  Huh.  You didn’t even have to prompt him.  “Okay, big tough demigod, turn around and I'll clean up your back.  What did you even do to yourself?”

His ears flatten.  He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t complain either, just shuffles awkwardly around and lets you run trickles of water over the scratches and cuts on his back.  Those go by without too much of a hitch; they’re mostly on his shoulders and his spine, and he’s certainly not happy but he only twitches and makes little warning snarling noises when you have to lift his wild hair out of the way to wipe blood off the back of his neck.  Good gods, Kanaya makes fun of you for how wild you let yourself grow, at least your leaves stay neatly on your head and don't work themselves into massive, unmanageable tangles.

You've worked your way across his shoulders and started down his back, when he tenses all over and shivers.  You didn't think you were touching anything especially painful; there's a silvery patch of skin under your fingers, like a scar but smoother, and when you poke at it again, he growls.

“What is this?”

A brother can’t walk around all dressed up all the time

CAN’T GET HIS REVEAL OF HIS GODLY MIGHT SO SIMPLE NOW

Can’t carry around real wings in these tiny places

REAL WINGS LIKE YOU HAVEN’T GOT

But a body remembers where they’re at

WHERE THEY’RE PLACED WHEN THEY’RE GETTING THEIR REALNESS ON

And you’re touchin’ it awful familiar and you can’t comprehend

CAN’T BEGIN TO GET YOUR KNOWING

On how strange it feels to have your claws on the inside of something

THAT I DON’T FOR THIS BRIEFEST SECOND TRULY HAVE

You’re touching something that ain’t there

SO QUIT

“You have wings?”  You poke the spot again.  He growls again, louder.  “You can just…send them away and bring them back?”

You think I walk around with one face always the same

YOU THINK I’M BOUND LIKE YOU TO A SINGLE SHAPE

Brother this is not the face I wear alone

THIS IS THE FACE OF A GOD

“You don’t normally look like this?”  He shakes his head.  “Well what do you look like then?”

That face is mine

MINE ONLY

He lowers his horns, and even though he’s not looking at you the threat is clear. 

IT IS NONE OF YOUR BLIGHTED CONCERN

And just like that, the conversation is over.  You finish cleaning up the last of the cuts, making a bit of half-hearted effort of avoid the places where his wings aren’t, tell him to sleep on his side, and then curl up by the fire, pointedly not watching him.  You feel his eyes on the back of your neck, until finally his breathing evens out to a low, steady rhythm and you close your eyes and drift off, dreaming of flight.

Chapter Text

When you wake up the next morning, he’s still there.   And he keeps still being there, through the next day, and the day after that, and the days after that—when you work through the deer, as the forest he wrecked grows up and starts to lose its leaves in the cold, as frost starts to silver you and your forest as you sleep.  And you find out more and more about him as his bones so-slowly knit together and the wheals on his back gradually start to heal.  He takes to sitting outside the cave; he whittles away at strong, hollow reeds, binds them together and you discover he knows how to play pipes, although he has to change his face to do it and he stops and hastily changes back again as soon as you come close enough to see.

"You don't even have lips half the time," you say, after the second or third time you catch him sitting up by the river making soft, meandering tunes to nobody. "I don't know why you bothered to learn."

He makes an insulted little bleating huff of a noise.

it's token of my nobility

many things a lord of the laughing stones has to know outside your ken

“Killing, hunting, sacrificial slaughter, and pipe-playing?” You nod sagely.  “Well, all gods forbid you don’t know how to make bizarre aimless tooting noises through broken sticks. That would be uncivilized.” 

He gives that snorting, coughing laugh and turns away from you, and you catch the slightest shift of his jaw as his face changes, before the pipe music starts again.

He doesn't show you his face, but he tells you more about himself as time passes steadily on, warming to you as the days grow colder.  He makes off-hand mention of his clan, and by the way he talks about altars and revelries and wild, drunken dances, you get the definite impression they're even more worshipped and feared than you originally thought.  He tells you, just once or twice, voice lowered to a hushed murmur at the back of your mind, about the only person with right to rule over him; a god-king, a wild chaos-god creature that the humans build churches and sacrifice to.  Animal blood, and sometimes...other kinds. 

You've never been near to the larger cities, further in-land from the woods and mountains.  Gamzee nods when you tell him so.

Never do, he tells you.  SHADOWS GROW LONG AT FOREST'S EDGE

Shadows reach out of the standing stones and what they take, they keep

flesh and blood and bone and all

You're starting to get the unnerving impression that your guest is as close to a demon as he is to a god.  But he doesn't try to hurt you anymore, even when you have to touch his broken limbs to refresh the wood of the braces.  He lets you bully him into the river when he starts to smell like unwashed animal, and when you go after him for a few days he even lets you undo the matted plait in his hair, comb out the knots and rebraid the wet curls into something approaching presentability.

He sits very still when you start the braid; by inches, he moves closer to you, relaxing.  When you reach the level of his jaw your fingers brush the nape of his neck, and he makes a strange, soft, shivering sound and presses back against your touch all in a rush, all but climbing into your lap and flopping the whole huge weight of his upper body onto your folded legs to butt his head demandingly into your hand. 

You don't mean to allow it, or to keep allowing it, but every time you try to settle down outside the cave to meditate on your forest, he pulls himself out of the shadows and drops into your lap or drapes himself over your back, ignoring your grumbling.  He grooms absently at your leaves, sometimes, like he's trying to return the favor—eventually he discovers that any leaves he plucks out immediately start to regrow, at which point you have to start smacking him away to keep him from plucking your entire head for his own amusement.  The last thing you need as the nights grow longer and colder is a big, balding patch of young leaves shriveling in the cold. 

And it is growing cold.  Outside your forest, the humans harvest; you're no powerful demigod, but you have believers enough, and they leave offerings as lavish as you ever get at the edge of the forest.  You bring it back to the cave and the stream and start your careful fire, and you and Gamzee eat under the falling leaves.

It's been a matter of weeks, and the sun is setting weak and gold through the trees, when you come back and find him waiting for you, sitting up outside the cave.

"Took longer than I thought," you tell him, in response to his wordless, unreadable look, and drop a sacrificial wicker basket of rabbits and a sheaf of slightly withered mulberry branches onto the ground.  "There are wild horses of all damn things running around in my forest scaring off the humans.  They've got to be from the mountain over in the south, but normally the forest spirit on his slopes keeps him under control, I don't know why—" he's just staring at you.  "What?"

Come over here

“Can it wait?” you grumble, and reach out for the first rabbit.  They even cleaned it for you, sometimes you love humans.  “I was going to start dinner—”

Come here

I need you to look on me.

…please

You have no idea what’s going on, but he said please.  You shrug and nod, drop the rabbit back in the basket and come over to settle down in front of him.  He looks jumpy—you’ve gotten very good at reading his strange face, and you can see the nervousness in his eyes. 

“Okay I’m here,” you say, and nudge one cloven hoof with your bare foot.  “What’s so important you can’t wait till after we eat?”

He doesn’t say anything.  He just takes a deep breath, and changes.

His flat, goat-skull face shifts and morphs and the golden-red of his eyes lightens to pure, light gold.  The purple rings widen and the gold around his pupils shrinks to a thin ring.  The fangs recede as his mouth changes, half-hidden behind scarred lips, and his ears shrink, half-vanishing under his hair.  He blinks his strange new eyes at you and rubs a hand over his mouth, feeling out the new shape.

"There," he rasps, very quietly, and his voice out loud is so different from the voice you're used to in your head, you almost look around to see who's talking.  "Told you I—" he coughs roughly, voice cutting off in a rusty squeak.  "Didn't—look—"

You're still lagging much too far behind to start unraveling any of that.  Great rotting hell.  “I,” you say, coherently. He’s looking at you, and after getting used to the minute changes of his still, unreadable face, it’s odd to see him look so nervous and hopeful and strange.  His noise is a little shorter, a little less flattened, but still flat and dark.  His fangs are still long and sharp, but smaller, over dark lips.  For a second you don’t know why his eyes look so different and then he frowns at you, worried, and you notice his strange, round, purple-gold eyes have short, thick eyelashes now, and under the hair that hangs in his eyes he has eyebrows.  It’s bizarre how much difference that makes.  “I thought you said I wasn't allowed to see your face.”

He tries to talk again and flinches, half-raising a hand towards his throat. 

you weren't

YOU MET FACE OF FEAR AND FRENZY AND SACRIFICE

My god face

COULDN'T JUST LET IT GO FOR ANY STRANGE SPIRIT I MEET

face i wear alone and asleep and with family

FACE NOBODY KNOWS BUT ME AND THE WILD LORD WHO SHAPED ME TOGETHER

And now you

He sort of smiles at you, but he’s had that lipless, leering face on for a long time now and the smile comes out sort of rusty and crooked.  It still makes your chest seize up.

“So that was...a mask?" you hadn't realized it was an effort for him to keep up the way he looked.  "This is the real thing?”

"They're all my face, brother," he says, small and rasping, and rubs a hand at his throat, wincing. 

Rotting hells that hurts

“Then keep doing it," you say, and he gives you the wide, sad eyes, this time with the addition of a plaintive frown.  "No, don't give me that look.  You haven't used your mouth to speak in half a season, no wonder it's not working.  Keep talking.  I..." you stumble on the words, not sure what you're going to say next.  Your chest feels...strange, hot on the inside, like it did the first time he laid down in your lap and let you touch his hair.  "You've never shown anybody else?"

He shakes his head, coughs.  Then says, quiet and croaky, "Just you."

Your eyes are prickling strangely.  You can feel all your leaves stirring and rustling in a nonexistent wind, your wings shifting and resettling and wrapping around you like they can cover the flush of your face.  He makes a coughing, rasping noise, and then it softens and smooths, and you recognize it, however changed it is.  So that's what his laugh really sounds like.

"Come here," you say, and reach out to lay a hand on his throat.  He just lets you, doesn't snap at your hand, just tilts his chin up and lets you lay a palm on the long, stone-silver arch of his throat.  You can feel the knotting of muscles, like knots in wood, and the rawness like bark stripped off; he keeps swallowing, trying to clear the dry, aching roughness, and the cramps keep tightening. 

He gasps and coughs when you reach in and undo the knots, like straightening a warped branch; he goes still but he never turns his claws toward you, and then it's done and he slumps and sighs with relief.  It's strange to hear the sound, without the whistle as it comes through his fangs.

"Karkat," he says, and your name, spoken out loud by another spirit in the heart of your own forest, hums to your power.  His voice is just a voice, ashy and soft and a little hoarse, still, but something tugs you forward a step.  You want...

You don't know what you want.  It feels like standing in your forest, a bone-deep defensiveness, a part of you outside of yourself that you need to fix and protect.

You shove that feeling as hard as you can to the back of your mind, and when you clear your throat, your own voice comes out only a little bit strangled.  "Yes?" you say, and cross your arms.  "What."

He grins at you.  “Just wanted to say it,” he says, and leans down from his towering height to bump his forehead against yours. “Let a brother get introductions on—for real, for hearing.  Karkat.”

You eat your dinner with his shoulder pressed against yours and the firelight strange on his new face.  When you lie down to sleep, he doesn't go back into his cave; he settles down by your back, close enough you can hear him breathing.  You fall asleep to that sound, feeling one of his hands rest close enough to the back of your neck to feel the warmth of a touch just a hair's breadth away.

Chapter Text

Gamzee’s different, with a new face on. 

Not just because he has lips and eyelashes and eyebrows now, although that helps a lot—after all that time learning to decipher his expressions without them, now he’s as easy to read as the lines of your own palms.  But he’s also…different.  More reasonable, less proud.  He laughs more.  He used to have to bow down, almost kneeling, to fit under the low ceiling of his cave—now he just has to bend his head a little to walk under it with you.  He heals faster, too—you feel his leg mend more in a week than it has for the last five. 

But he’s also weaker.  He never showed a sign of chill before he changed; now he shivers when he thinks you can’t see him and huddles more and more inside his cave.  Hibernation time is coming for you and he is going to be far from his people’s tents and fires.  You worry about him.

It's only a few days after he changes that he starts asking you to take the braces off his arm and leg.  “I got things to deal with,” he tells you, “—I have to pay something back.”  You knock hard on the wood around his arm and he winces—you let him go and raise your eyebrows at him and he growls and gives up.  But he asks again, and again, until after a week you've finally had enough.

“Look,” you tell him, and he crosses his arms and frowns at your tone.  “I don’t know where you came from, except you’re from the other side of my forest.  Even I can’t cross my forest in less than a week and I can taste the snow coming.  You’re not even completely healed yet, I’m not letting you drag yourself across my land through the snow and break your leg again!  You remember what that felt like, right?”

He nods.  He’s sulking again, even though he knows it doesn’t do him any good. 

I know

Oh, he’s talking straight into your head again even though he’s got a perfectly functional mouth.  That’s cute. 

“Quit sulking,” you instruct him firmly, and then glance up abruptly at a soft, icy sting on your cheek.

Tiny, pure white snowflakes are drifting through the barren trees.  They bite and burn where they touch your wings; you fight the urge to fold them tight and cringe, and spread them out instead, gritting your teeth.  Better to get this over with faster than slower.  You just wish the first snow of winter could have been heavier.

“What are you doing?” Oh, Gamzee’s given up brooding for the moment, that’s nice.  You open your mouth to say something sarcastic and then just go “Gnnh” when a really big flake lands right at the crook where your wing joins with your back.  The blood-red web hisses softly and melts away, turning black and skeletal like the skeleton of a long-dead leaf. “What’s—Karkat—”

“I’m fine.”

“But—”

“I’m fine.” You take a few deep breaths, and manage to get yourself back under control.  “This is normal, okay.  This is just something that—hhh—hhas to happen.  Part of the forest dies in winter.”

“Dies—?!”

“I’m not actually going to die, you idiot.”  Ow.  “Just the…the leaf parts, the forest parts—” You flex your wings—it aches, but the skeletal sections fold and bend.  As healthy as you could expect.  "This is normal."

"It's hurting you," he says, growling like he intends to fight the entire concept of winter.  He steps forward and hesitates there, fidgeting.  It's hilarious, really—he's still huge, at least an arm's length taller than a human even without the horns, and he's just standing there shuffling his feet.  "Can't I…anything I can do?”

“You just…” you shudder again—ow.  “No.  I just have to relax, and get it over with, and it'll stop eventually.”

You close your eyes, and do your best to pretend he's not there.  You're halfway through a long, deep breath, when something touches your face and shock flares your wings out in a painful, crackling jolt.

"Easy," Gamzee murmurs, and touches your face with strange, cold hands.  He's always colder than you, even though you're caught in perpetual autumn, but he's not as cold as the ice on your wings, and he's touching you with the smooth backs of his claws, meticulously careful.  You lean into it before you can stop yourself, and let it distract you as he touches you carefully, across your cheeks and eyelids and the bridge of your nose.  It gives you something to focus on, and you steel yourself and then spread your wings all in a rush, letting the snow drift gently, agonizingly across them.  Little flares of pain dance up and down your spine—it feels like the sound of bells, sharp and high and almost sweet.  You lean your face into the crook of his shoulder, the knotted line of a scar, and let him soothe you.

After an endless time, you lean back and breath out. The leaves on your head and the back of your neck don’t hurt like your wings do, but you run your fingertips over them and you can feel they’re black and dead as well, skeletal.  Your wings are like black spiderwebs, aching.  But you take a little pleasure, like you do every winter, in the fact that forest spirits across the land are feeling the same thing.  This is the one time of year your wings don’t mark you as a freak, and you’re no more flightless than anyone else. 

Gamzee is staring at you like he expects you to fall over dead any second. He seems to have forgotten completely about the argument you were just having—which is good, because you don’t feel up to fighting him over this right now.  It’s like the sting of the snow set something off in your head; you’re so tired all of a sudden.  You just want to slump back over on him and close your eyes again.

He touches your face again, and this time you have the presence of mind to realize there's something different about the way his palm cups your cheek.  You reach out and catch one of his wrists, and he lets you turn his hand over and stare at his fingers.  You have to squint—focusing is very hard, all of a sudden. 

"You changed your hands," you say.

He looks at his fingers too; they're long and thin and as human-ish as you've ever seen them, barely clawed, and the dark, hoof-like callouses are gone from his palm and fingertips.

"I didn't want to hurt you," he says, like that's a novel thought, and flexes his hand.  It turns back to a more familiar shape, long, deadly claws and rough pads; when he touches you with them, they soften again, like he can't help himself.  He says, "Never wanna hurt you, brother."

“Oh,” you say.

You fall over on him.

The world moves slow after that.  Half-frozen-river slow, growing-tree slow. You curl up your wings around you and go hard and still, and things move in long surges of cold distance; the low, soft heartbeat of winter.

Sometimes, there’s a fire.  Sometimes there’s someone talking.  Someone singing, pipes playing.  A high, sweet noise like a bird cry or whistling wind.  There’s distant shrieking of blizzards and there’s snow.  Always, there’s snow.

And then there’s rain.

The first time you realize you’re awake, there’s a fire lit and thunder booming somewhere far away.  Your wings are still wrapped around you and you’re curled up inside them like a cocoon.  You try to move and hiss softly under your breath—there are rough, creaking aches all through you.

You turn your head, one grinding little twist at a time.

You’re in the cave—Gamzee’s cave, your mind supplies fuzzily.  There’s rain pouring down on the low stone roof, a thin trickle of smoke like an upside-down river flowing up the slanted slab of rock and out.  There’s a deer skin hung at the entrance of the cave, and another heap of skins in the corner—

The pile of pelts shifts and groans quietly as you watch.  And you see a dark-toed bare foot and realize with a jolt that the shape you thought was a smooth grey river-rock stuck in the wall of the cave is the curve of one of Gamzee’s shoulders.  His horns are a soft glint of reddish gold in the firelight, and his face is slack and tired and strangely worn. 

You want to crawl over and curl up next to the fire with him.  You want to do stupid things like wake him up every morning and keep him from ever having to look that tired and upset again.  Make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.  Make sure he doesn’t hurt anything else. He's a wild god, less than a stone's throw from you, he’s probably eaten the flesh of hundreds of humans, half-dead and badly injured he still managed to crush a swathe of destruction through your forest, he’s proud and easily angered and he could probably kill you with no more effort than it would take for you to grow a sapling.

And you want to take care of him.

You twitch at the thought and groan as much from the ache in your joints as from the embarrassing presumption—take care of him, right.  Once he’s healed he’ll be a hundred times more capable than you of taking care of himself.  Hells, right now you can’t even take care of yourself—you can barely move.  You’ve got nobody to take care of you, and you’ve always been just fine.

And when he goes again, you’ll be just fine.

With that in mind, you set about the stiff and painful motions of getting yourself unstuck and upright.  You’ve never had this much difficulty waking up after winter before; you suspect the fires Gamzee built to keep himself from freezing made a mess out of your natural cycle of hibernation, and you’re angry at him for all of about three seconds before you imagine him huddled next to the fire watching you lie there in stasis, worrying at his lip and shivering and scared for you, and the anger slips out of your hands like water.  Damn him. 

You get your legs under you and manage a sort of crooked kneeling position; the side of you that was closer to the fire is slightly more flexible, but the opposite leg won’t straighten, and you just sort of kneel there, skewed and stiff, breathing hard. 

A quiet noise echoes around the cave and you jump—and make a wordless, choked noise as every muscle in your body protests.  Gamzee jumps as well, and then yelps as his horns scrape the side of the cave.  You both sit there and shudder, groaning for a few seconds, and then he raises his head and stares at you like he can’t believe his eyes.

“Hhhnnnhhh,” you say accusingly, “—kkkhhhhh.”

Wow.  You swallow a few times, painfully, and take a few deep breaths.  He jerks forward and pulls himself over towards you, ears pinned back, reaching out but not touching you, like he’s scared he’s imagining you.  Your chest creaks and groans as you let the air back out and try again.

“…Ss’lll…hhh—hhere?”

“I—yeah,” he reaches out and touches your face—you imagine him doing that when you were frozen, how your skin must have been as cold and hard as sleeping roots.  You should have warned him.  “You okay?  I…you…”

“Mmm.”  You start to straighten up a little; he jolts forward like he thinks you’re going to fall and you glare at him.  You can turn your head without your neck catching, now—you bend your arms and flex them again, working the knots out. “Told you I—wasn't.  Gnnh.  Gonna die."

He doesn’t answer, and you glance up at his face.  He’s…staring at you.  Just staring.  He looks like someone stabbed him in the guts and he’s very pale and a lot thinner than you remember and you wonder how much he’s gotten to eat while you were hibernating—your chest twinges horribly.

“Sorry,” you say, and you really do mean it.  “Didn’t think about…this.  Forgot.  I’ve never…had…” Your throat throbs.  You cough and then almost laugh—you did something totally unexpected and now your throat is knotted up and he’s worrying about you, this all feels much too familiar.  You need a drink.  The rain is slacking off outside, but the sound of the water is still strong and inviting…

You start to get to your feet, numb and wobbly, and he makes an unhappy whining sound and jumps up too, still not daring to touch you.  “No—hey, just—” He hovers over you—he looks ludicrously worried and you snort and wobble forward a few steps.  Gods and hells.  You have to figure out some way of never doing this again. 

“…’M fine,” you inform him, mostly truthfully, and wave him off again—your joints pop from your wrist to your fingertips.  “—nnngh.  Fine.  ‘M fine.  Go…go, ahh…go on, ‘ll be right behind you.  Can’t do this w…with you hanging over me.  Go.”

He makes another displeased noise, but you glare as menacingly as you can and make a little shoving motion and he hisses between his teeth and backs away, ducking out of the cave.  He knocks the skin off the mouth of the cave as he goes—grey-white storm light pours in, bringing a gust of wet air with it but no actual rain.

You do manage better without him staring at you and panicking—you bend and stretch and then finally grit your teeth and spread your wings out in the cramped cave.  You flap them once or twice and no, you’re not going to get lift like that, but you send off a strong enough wind it blows out Gamzee’s small fire.  There are little traces of fall-red leaf starting to grow at the roots of them already, covering up the skeletal framework.  You straighten your back and shake out your leaves, and you actually feel up to following him out and facing the chilly new world.  A few hobbling steps toward the light—

And then there’s a howl like a wild animal, an unholy, shrieking roar, and the sun goes dark.

Chapter Text

You scramble out of the cave and Gamzee is grown tall and hunched and vicious again, growling—a tearing, visceral sound so deep in his chest it’s humming right through your bones.  There are flickering shreds of black mist snapping and curling around his tense shoulders—you catch the shape of a spiny finger and a thin, flexing web for a split second and realize that his wings are flickering on the bare edge of existence.  You pull your sickle and shoulder up next to him, ready to fight whatever intruder's come into your forest when you've barely had time to thaw—

"Karkat!" says the intruder.

“Nepeta?" you say, and Gamzee sticks a long arm out and shoves you back, still snarling.  Nepeta hisses and bristles and starts to circle him like a predator about to pounce on its prey; Gamzee rears up in front of you and makes another one of his horrible noises, a whining, sneering keen.  His face has flattened and gone feral, lips pulling back away from his fangs, warping his scars.

“Karkat, get away from him!”

DON’T YOU TOUCH HIM

“Hey, hey hey!” You spread your dead wings and grow to your greatest height; your trees clash and rattle around you, shaking icy water off their bare branches, and both of them jump and stare at you.  “Settle down!  Both of you!”

“He tried to kill me!” Nepeta snarls.

But I didn’t

KILL YOU

DID I

“You tried to kill her?!”

He hisses. 

I DIDN’T KILL HER.

“I noticed!” You step forward between them, flaring your wings, keeping them apart.  “Tell me what happened.  One at a time.  Nepeta?”

“Those awful goat-demons south of Equius's mountain caught me when I was out hunting!” Nepeta says, snarling, and Gamzee gives his own low, rumbling growl at the slight.  You knew something was going on to the south; you had wild horses roaming through your woods for most of he autumn.  You didn't have any idea it was because Nepeta had gone missing. For about the hundredth time, you realize all over again you should really start going to caucus.

WISE SPIRITS KNOW BETTER, Gamzee says, in your head, WISER FAE KNOW WELL TO STAY AWAY ON SOLSTICE

"I don't care if it was solstice or not!" Nepeta says, bristling, slit-pupilled.  "Other spirits aren't prey, and we aren't sacrifices, and you had no right!"

YOU WEREN'T SACRIFICE

OUR LORD DEMANDED ENTERTAINING

OUR LORD DEMANDED BLOOD

"Entertaining?!" Nepeta shrieks, and starts forward, only to shy back a second later as your roots churn up the half-frozen ground between you.  "Karkat!  He tried to beat me to death, for—entertainment!  For nothing!"

Gamzee starts up, growling—you hold up a hand.  “I think you've said enough right now,” you snap at him, and he grumbles and growls, pacing restlessly back and forth behind you, but doesn't argue.  “Let her finish.  What happened?”

“He broke my arm!” she says, “And my leg, he got inside my head!  I only made it out because he stumbled on the deathblow!"  Gamzee huffs through his nose, affronted, and Nepeta bares her fangs at him and then looks back at you, tail lashing.  "We were at the edge of the circle—I broke out.  I ran.  East, until I could reach Tavros's territory, and I followed the river north until I finally found a place that wasn't crawling with humans.  I had to come southwest to even get to your forest!”

Gods and spirits.  No wonder she wants him dead.  You turn back to Gamzee, and find him practically buzzing with unspoken rage.  "I don’t suppose you want to change back?” You ask, and he snarls.  “Alright, fine.  Maybe just enough you can talk? Gods’ sakes. You’re not doing anyone any favors.”

He snaps his fangs, sharp and vicious, but his face shortens a little and his teeth withdraw enough for him to at least shape words.  "Showed you some shred of mercy, little doomed beast," he spits, "The thanks I get, all insults, the thanks I get a broken damned body!"  He holds up his braced arm, and Nepeta hunches, ready to spring at him.  He rears back in response, flaring his wings out in a rush of dark mist, wide and dark and blocking out the sun. 

You stamp hard, and the ground shakes around you with the force of your anger.  Fighting in another spirit's domain against their wishes is stringently against the rules; both of them settle again, breathing hard, fangs bared.  

"He demanded blood," Gamzee says, "Demanded entertaining.  His order lays on me like an oath.  Our existing is blood-oath to serve him, and he demanded blood, do you not hear what I'm saying?!"

"You liked it," Nepeta spits, and you glance back at Gamzee and see his eyes dart away to one side, half a guilty flinch.  "Don't lie to me!  You laughed the whole time, you wanted to do it!"

"Why didn't you?" you say.

Gamzee's wings mantle defensively over him.

Felt someone in there with her, he says, quiet enough you know it's just for you.  Went in her head to feel her fear of me, and found fear of leaving someone behind. 

we don't love like that, brother

what we love we as soon devour

WHAT WE LOVE WE'RE AS LIKELY TO TEAR TO PIECES SO WE CAN HAVE IT TO THE CORE OF IT

never felt shit like that before

held my righteous execution seeking to hear it plainer and in my weakness she ran

"I thought you said you were under oath," you say, and he hisses through his teeth and hunches around his broken arm.  Your eyes fall on the claw-marks across his face—the hand that put them there must have been huge.  The thing that broke his limbs must have been old and powerful...  "What.  He wasn't happy she got away?"

He hisses again, and his wings flap and mantle around him.

"Gamzee," you say, sharp and authoritative, and feel the whole forest press down with you, all the newly-waking power of spring, churning the earth and rustling the trees.  "Tell me the truth."

"He," says Gamzee, and falters on the words, swallowing them, ears pinned back and horns angrily lowered.  He spits out, "He broke me.  You wanna hear me say it?  Old man called me oath-breaker.  Broke me and whipped me and threw me away like offal, and I crawled off to bleed in whatever corner felt best to die in, how's that for you?!  HOW'S THAT DO FOR YOU.  That what you wanted to hear—?!"

"Gamzee," you say, and he snaps his fangs at you, stepping back from the hand you reach toward him.  He glares at both of you another second, and then turns with a hiss and stomps off toward the cave, bristling and snarling to himself.

"Karkat," says Nepeta, and darts forward as he turns away, catching your arm, trying to pull you behind her.  Her claws are as deadly-looking as Gamzee's are, and her spine seems too long, her form is too fluid, like she's halfway to her other shape—the huge, milky-white wildcat.  "We need to go."

"No we don't," you say, and glance back.  Gamzee's out of earshot, pacing and kicking at the dirt by the riving, arms moving like he's ranting to himself; his wings are still mantled over him, you can't see his face.  "He's different, he's learned how to be different."

"He's lying," says Nepeta.  "He hunted me here!"

"He's been living in my forest since autumn!" you say, and she blinks, startled out of her rage at that, and gives you a look so incredulous your face heats.  "He's—look.  He wasn't hunting shit, alright?  When I found him he was curled up in that cave with his face turned to the wall, bleeding out in the dirt.  Whatever that thing is that made him, it broke his arm and his leg before it threw him out, and he didn't even know what a splint was.  He's not—"

You don't know how to say all the things he's not.  Or the things he is, or the things that have happened.  You shake your head instead.

"He felt how you feel about Equius," you say, keenly aware as you say it that Gamzee wouldn't want you to tell someone what he said.  But it finally makes her stop bristling, and the dangerous slits of her pupils widen slightly.  "He didn't understand it.  That's why he pulled the last hit."

"Not because of mercy," she points out, and folds her arms over her chest.  "Not because he wasn't happy to do it."

"I know!  I know."  You rub a hand at your eyes.  "I know.  But I've been taking care of him since the first week of harvest. And he is changing.  I swear.  On my life."

The trees sway at the oath, branches murmuring.  Nepeta looks up at them, then back down at you, and groans, dragging her hands down her face.

"Fine," she says, finally, and settles back into a more human form, barefoot in scraps of leather armor, dark hair cropped roughly around her jaw.  She says, "if I sniff out a single whiff of your blood on the air—if I see him come near the mountain without a token from you—"

"I know," you say.  "Thank you.  You should keep heading south—get Equius and his damned horses off my land."

"Oh, no," she says, but there's a melting, warming softness in her eyes.  "He's been trampling all over your forest, hasn't he?  He's such an idiot."

"Yeah, he is," you agree, and she laughs.  "Look, I'm...glad you're okay.  I swear, he's not going to hurt me."

"Mm," she says, but she turns away, with one last smile over her shoulder, and vanishes in a flash of snowy-white fur.

There's silence for a long time after Nepeta has gone off into the woods.  Gamzee shrinks slowly back down, wings vanishing way in wisps of black fog, but his face doesn't settle again.  it stays flat and animal, cold. 

He jerks his head up when you start toward him, and gives you a look that stops you dead in your tracks.  He raises the arm with the brace on it, and clenches his hand into a fist—the wood wrapped around his arm creaks, and he barely winces.

Take these off me.

"But—"

His hand twitches, and his fingernails sharpen to claws.  You swallow what you were going to say, step slowly close enough and reach out to take hold of the arm he's giving you.  The brace has already lived long past its normal life; you release it, and it shrivels and rots to dust, falling away.  Gamzee bends his arm, flexes his wrist—turns away, and brings his wings back in a rush, flapping them in long, testing strokes as he starts to walk, purposefully, south.

"Wait," you say, and hurry to catch up with him, stepping in front of him.  "Wait.  You're even, alright, leave her alone."

He blinks at you, and then snorts derisively through his teeth and shakes his head. 

not her I mean to pay back

MIGHT EVEN OWE TO THANK HER

reminded me I've got debts to pay

DISHONOR TO PAY BACK IN BLOOD

"You what?!"  You stumble, gaping at him, and he shoves past you and keeps walking. "You mean your—Gamzee, I saw what he did to you, he'll rip you to shreds!"

His ears flatten.

old man had a rage greater than mine, he says in your mind, a low, crooning snarl.  not anymore.  NOT ANYMORE.

forgot what I am a while with you

FRAGILE LITTLE MOUTHFUL IN A PETTY LITTLE FOREST

all but forgot the anger in me

"You can't go down there," you say, and he bares all his teeth at you, bristling.  When you try to grab his wrist he jerks it away, and it's stupidity and desperation that drives the words out of your mouth, "You can't, you're my—"

You catch on the words, not sure what you even meant to say.  You don't know what he is, what you are, what the way you feel means.  He twitches back from the words, and gives you a look like he did when you forced his broken leg straight, furious to be hurt.

Your what

YOUR

WHAT

That what this has been

ALL ALONG WHAT YOU WANTED

A pet god

A GOD ON HIS BACK

YOURS

“No, you don’t—I don’t—!” You can’t figure out what it is you do want, and it’s so frustrating, not being able to say what you mean, because you’re always able to say what you mean.  “I just want—!”

WHAT

“I just want to keep you safe!”

The words hang in the air, and your wings are flared out and twitching, your face is the same color as your leaves.  He stares at you, mouth hanging open.

…what

“I want to be…yours,” you say slowly, and the words feel right even as they make no sense.  “I want to be yours, and I want…I want to keep you safe, I just.  I want to have you, but not like that, like you…just…” You reach out to the air, hold on to something invisible—you don’t know what you’re reaching for, but it almost feels like you find something, between you, something that slips through your fingers like fog, as impossible to grip as the warmth of sunlight on your skin.  Your throat hurts, your throat feels…strange.  Tight.  You say, “I don’t want you to go.”

He softens.  Lessening, shrinking, wings melting away.  When he steps forward to you, you almost flinch back, but the hand he reaches out to you is barely clawed, and he bends down to bump his forehead against one of your stubby wooden horns.

“Oh, beloved,” he says in your ear, and wraps an arm around your shoulders.  “I’ll be okay.”

He’s cold.  He’s still limping a little bit, his right hand trembles on your shoulder and he still winces when he bends his fingers to comb his rough-calloused fingertips over your scalp.  He’s barely even healed yet, you shouldn’t let him go.

But you can’t stop him.

“What if you aren’t?” You mumble, and he does that huffing sigh that means you’re being stupid.  You aren’t being stupid, it’s dangerous, you're frightened for him and for once in your life, growth blight him, you can’t shrug off the fear or fix it yourself.  This is why you never get attached, this is why you don’t care about people, because you can’t control them and it hurts and you’re scared.  “You idiot, last time you barely dragged yourself here, you would have died.”

Last time I was a kid

“I was too proud for him.”

He thought it would teach me a lesson.

“I learned a lesson.” He nuzzles at your hair, lifts you up a little bit off the ground to bundle you up in his great, long arms, and you wrap your wings and arms around him and hold on. “He don’t have to know he wasn’t the one who taught it.”

Oh gods and beings, you’re going to cry like a human child.  You bury your face in his shoulder and his skin is cool and scarred and the soft, half-there billow of his wings closes around you.

You don’t know how long he holds on to you, but after a long while, and he lowers you back down. You didn’t cry, if anyone asks you you’re going to beat the shit out of them, but your eyes are horrible and swollen and your chest still hurts. “I’ll be okay,” he tells you again, and doesn’t quite take his hands off of you, not yet. “I’ll just go and come back.  Brother.” He tips your face up and nudges his flat nose against yours. “You’ll see me back by summer.”

“I’d better.” You still don’t want to let go—but it’s not your job to take care of him.  It’s not.  He feels like he has to do this, and you should let go of his hand.

You’re going to let go of his hand.

You look at each other, and then at the exact same second you look back down, take the same long, slow breath, and let your hands fall.

“Get going,” you tell him, like you’re not absolutely terrified.  “Just, don’t…” go back to who you were, don’t rot, don’t die—  “Don’t do anything idiotic.  Okay?”

He tosses his head—flicks his braid over one shoulder and sneers at you in a mocking imitation of the arrogance he showed when you first found him.  His wings are forming again, solidifying, black like his hair and leathery as bat wings. 

You would command a GOD

“Oh for growth’s sake.” You swat at him, and the stupid, helpless laughter chases out some of the dull pain in your chest, the foreboding.  “Get a move on.  Go around the mountains, alright?  Find shelter after dark, and don’t pick any fights.”

He crinkles his round purple-gold eyes in a smile, crouches, spreads his wings…

…He’s gone in a gust of cold evening air, vanishing into the cold, stormy spring sky.

You can’t follow him, but your useless wings wrap around you like they can keep you warm, and you wish you could.

Chapter Text

You miss him. 

Missing him is possibly the stupidest thing you have ever done, and you know it.  He was violent and proud and he got angry over idiotic things for no reason and calming him down when he was upset was a pain.  He was a human-eater and he almost beat one of your best friends to death for entertainment.  He ate a ton of food, played pipes late at night and messed up your hibernation cycle. 

You know all of this, but you miss him anyway, because you’re stupid and he was stupid and he was getting better and he stayed with you through the winter.  He held you when you got angry and curled up next to you when you were tired.  He makes it far, far too easy to miss him.

You get angry at him for making him miss you, then he’s not there to mess with your leaves and calm you down, and that makes you sad again.  Leaves you sitting around thinking up maudlin comparisons, like the forest misses springtime, like life misses death, like I miss him goddammit—it’s pathetic. 

You bring home more meat than you need by accident, catch yourself about to light fires you don’t need, and you miss him like a pathetic chump.  Another human festival comes around; the humans give you excellent offerings and you’re morose enough you can’t bother to be angry with them, so instead you give them flowering trees and gardens and watch from the outskirts of the forest as they ooh and ahhh over the colors. 

Gamzee would like those flowers too, blight him to rot and ruin.

You’ve never had a place you always return to before, but this is another side effect of your pointlessly vague, deep-set longing—you spend your extra time at the mouth of the cave, growing grass and flowers and tree roots up over it slowly, making mockeries of the humans’ ‘stained glass windows’ with your flowers and outdoing their architecture with arching, woven branches. 

Word starts to spread; as the spring eases towards the growing seasons the humans gather in your clearing.  Without Gamzee there to protect, you let them find it and come in, and they murmur and stare at the woven walls and flower-hung treetops.  You stay in the treetops and listen, as they leave their offerings and pray to you for safe passage through the woods, or for a good hunt or plentiful gathering.  A few people surmise that this is the cave where you sleep in the winter, which is surprisingly accurate, and they all pick their way around it with appropriate levels of awe.  Someone starts to wind a bunch of impressionable young humans up with a story about how you once impregnated some ancient human here, who founded their town, and you drop a tree branch on him.  The stupid story dies out very quickly.  You settle back in, and grow yourself some wistful purple crocuses.

The flowers are a vanity.  You have no excuse for them.  But at least they keep your mind occupied, and the forest grows peacefully as the sun arcs higher and hotter over the trees.

You’re sitting there in the treetops one day, listening to the whispers of your trees and your worshippers, when someone yells. 

That’s not a thing that often happens—whatever else making this place has done for you, it has at least reduced the amount of yelling and stomping around that humans do in your presence—and you sit up and open your eyes just in time to see your worshippers run screaming out of the grove as a swarm of stinging hornets and bumblebees whirr towards them and herd them away. 

Oh.  It’s him. You refuse to do him the courtesy of getting up or greeting him, so instead you settle stubbornly back, cross your arms and close your eyes again.

“Karkat!” yells your intruder, and a bee lands on your leg in a tickle of tiny wings.  Not stinging, yet.  "I know you're up there!  Get down here already!"

You turn grudgingly and swing your legs over the branch you’re sitting on, looking down at the empty clearing.  Sollux is still reconstituting, a blur of gold and jet-black chitin and humming, buzzing energy, but he’s already turned to look up at you, grinning.  He looks in an uncommonly good mood.  You loathe him for it.

“What do you want?!” you yell down, and he shakes his head as the last few whirring black and yellow bodies melt into his skin. 

“You should have told me you were having a feast!” he calls back—feazzzzzt.  Heh.  He still can’t talk.  “You never did flowersss before, KK, what’s up?” 

The bees that aren’t part of his corporeal form scatter across your clearing, and you feel the distant tickle of their life on the petals of your flowers.  It’s a strange sensation, distant and impartial but strangely intimate, and you shake it off with an effort. 

“What, I can’t do a little shock and awe for the mortals?” You call down, and Sollux shrugs his bony shoulders. 

“Shock and awe izzz one thing, KK, flower castles are totally different thing!  Get down here!”

You rolls your eyes, but slide forward off the branch and drop down.  The tree roots whip up to meet you, and carry you down to the ground slowly until your feet settle onto the earth as gentle as a butterfly on one of your flowers.  It used to be a strain to do that, but you’re stronger now, bizarrely strong.  You feel terrible, and great, and mostly just confused about it, but you could make a tree pull its roots out of the ground and dance like a human without breaking a sweat.  You feel strong.  It's terrible.

Sollux lets you settle to the ground before he starts clapping sardonically, and you take a break from feeling pleased with yourself to bite your thumb at him and then swat his bees away from your face. 

“So,” says Sollux, “I heard you had a visitor.”

You don’t dignify that with an answer—which might not be your smartest option, because that makes him smirk like you’ve confirmed his suspicions. 

“Nepeta didn’t say who,” he says.  “Where are they?  I want to zzzzee whoever can make KK grow flowers all over his drab-as-dirt forest.”

“I’m not making them for him!” you snap, incensed, and he wiggles his eyebrows at you until you feel your face turn dirty brownish-red.  “Shut up.”

“FF says when she sees a domain change like this it means you’re in love.”

“Sollux.”

“She’s seen you on the sea-border looking all contemplative.”

“Stop.”

“Come on, where is he?”

“I’m not—!”

“KK, just spit it out!”

“He’s gone!”

It’s been weeks but you haven’t said it yet, and saying it feels like tearing something inside you.  You’re breathing harder than you should be, heart beating fast and stupid and almost human-strong in your chest.  Sollux has been buzzing with glee, flying high—he goes still.  Stares at you.

“Oh,” he says.  “Oh.  I’m.  Uh…shit.  Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“No it’s not.”  He’s buzzing again, but not happy this time.  You recognize the tight set of his scrawny shoulders and the downturn of his fangy mouth—shit, here he goes.  “You don't have to act like I didn't mess up, dammit—I’m such a—”

“Sollux.”

He takes a deep breath or two and drags his hands down his face.  Flakes of chitin crumble away where his nails score the plates on his cheeks—they transform back into wasps, buzzing in circles around his head before morphing back into him and healing away the scratches. 

“Okay,” he says finally.  “so…I guess you’re not happy, then.”

“Not really,” you say, even drier than you meant to, and he winces.   “I’m just sprouting flowers all over the place.  Just for the hell of it.  Why not?  I mean, it would make him happy, I bet, he likes colors—liked.  He.  Liked colors.  Would have had to keep him from eating people who showed up here, though, it would have been a pain, that enormous ass.  I’m—glad.  He’s gone.”

“Yeah, right,” he says, but he doesn’t push you about it.  You were angry at how happy he was, but you’re angrier about the way he’s slumped down now, crumpled up like a withered leaf. 

“Well,” you say finally, when he has nothing else to say, “Are you gonna take advantage of the endless goodness of my heart or what?  Get your stripy rear ends in the air and pollinate some flowers.”

“Yeah, fine,” he says, and at least he stops hunching.  You punch him in the shoulder and it feels weird how he almost-sort-of gives way under the pressure, like he’s going to scatter, then solidifies again when you take your hand away.  He looks less upset, though.  This is familiar ground. “That’s not why I’m here though, KK.”

“You said—”

“I said I saw your flowers and thought it was weird and then I messed up and said a bunch of shitty things,” he cuts you off.  “That’s not why I’m here.  You never come to caucus, so they sent me all the way over here to tell you there’s a lot of trouble down South on the forest’s edge.  Something’s stirred up down there.”

“Why is that any of my business?” You say, like your wings didn't just shiver and your mouth isn't dry.  “Equius cuts off anything that comes from the south, you’ve seen his whole I AM GOD OF THIS MOUNTAIN, THIS MOUNTAIN REMAINS STRONG AND UNSURPASSABLE routine—”

“Equius didn’t come to caucus either.”

That takes you a second.  You think you heard him wrong, but he just stares at you, perfectly serious, and nods. That’s…not right.  If there’s one thing Equius never does it’s miss a caucus, he always comes through to glower at you and make barely-veiled attempts at ordering you to go.  He didn’t…he didn’t come through this year, did he?  And you were so busy moping and growing flowers, you didn’t even notice.

“He…no, he always—”

“Yeah, I know.”  Sollux hisses through his teeth—really more of a buzz—and shakes his head.  “He hasn’t been around.  The humans have even noticed, they’re praying to everything they’ve ever believed in and staying in at night.  And if the mortals sense something is wrong, there’s something seriously wrong.  And.  You’re the next closest to the forest border.  So just…” he hesitates, already dissolving into thousands of tiny, buzzing shapes.  “…juzzzzzt…take care of yourzelf.”

And then he whirls away, and the swarm he gathered to host him buzzes aimlessly off to your flowers.

It’s the same summer morning it ever was, but somehow overhead, the sun seems dimmer, and when you look out over the empty southern mountains, there’s an empty chill like winter in the air.  

Chapter Text

The days grow colder.  Darker.  It should be midsummer and instead it feels as cold as autumn.  Dark clouds boil up from the south, and when rain falls from them your trees groan and your flowers shrivel and crumble.  Sollux’s bees stop coming.  Everyone stops sending messages, huddling in the centers of their own territories, and you know from the prickling on the edges of your senses that they’re raising barriers, setting up defenses.  You don’t blame them—you’re isolated, you never talk to hardly anyone, but even you can feel it.

Something is wrong.

You grow trees in shapes of protection and repulsion at the borders of your forest, you watch your worshippers lock their doors and close their windows at night.  They can feel when you’re unsettled.  They have senses as dull as a rusty blade, but they’re not completely blind, and all the brilliance you spent all spring making throughout your forest has died in less than a week. 

You do all you can and then, as the clouds loom right at the border of your forest, you settle down, as prepared as you will ever be, and you wait.

And then, the next morning, they’re gone.  

Whatever force was spreading them, far down in the South past the mountains, it…snaps.  You feel it, late in the afternoon; something howls, rings through your spirit more than your ears, and then the clouds seem to shiver like a field of wheat in a sudden gust of high wind.  Less than an hour later, the storm has melted away.  The forest is bright with sunlight.

You watch a red and orange and purple-blue sunset, not a single dark cloud in sight, and you wonder.

--

The night is silent, once the sun goes down.  You walk your forest’s border for a little while, unbending some of the trees that you shaped for protection.  Not all of them—but the ones left should be able to deal with any spirit that might have a grudge on you bad enough to come all the way up here in person.  You actually go up to the edge of your town and look down over your humans, and for some reason their stupid dirty faces stir something up in you, something deep down and old and fierce.  They’re idiots, but they’re yours.  They’re gone as fast as cold autumn mist, but they’re yours while they’re here.  You’re…you think you might actually be glad that nothing is going to happen to them. 

It’s been a few hundred years since your humans moved in and started populating these little clearings and planting their little fields on the edges of the trees, and you only just realized that you don’t mind having them there.  You blame Gamzee for all of this, this is obviously all his fault.  (It’s easier than realizing that you already depended on them, cared about them even, that when something came into your forest from outside to prey on humans your own self-interest wasn’t the only reason that you drove it out.)

You’re crossing back through the forest again from branch to branch, thinking about humans—offerings and how they looked up at your trees when you grew flowers, little human sprouts and their half-formed prayers of thanks for your bounty—when something twinges inside you, sharp like a wasp sting.  You stop, flinching; it wasn’t any actual part of your body that hurt, you take stock and feel around for the pain and you find it in the part of you that is outside of yourself, in the trees and the ground.  Something is hurting your forest.

You turn, closing your eyes, feeling for it, and hear something in the distance—a low rumble, like thunder.  An eerie, echoing kind of noise, high and wailing.  You wince again as a jolt of pain goes through you—something is hurting your forest, the wood is breaking and the ground is shaking.  It feels like…a stampede?  Hooves pounding, getting closer and—

The branch you’re standing on twists and groans and rots out from underneath you.  Something swats you out of the air and slams you into a tree trunk so hard you and the tree both go crack and you see a whirl of feral, stony-grey faces and wild hair full of beads, feathers, bones. 

The wild gods are huge.  There has to be at least two dozen of them, trailing dark wings behind them like smoke, cackling and whooping as they crush your forest out of their way—filthy, sweaty bodies, matted ropes of hair, bright painted colors and massive, thundering hooves.  One of those hooves slams into your leg as you struggle to get back to your feet and there’s a crack as you break like dry timber.  It doesn’t even seem to notice it hit you, but then you let out a single tiny, pained noise and one of them pauses and looks down at you.  The shape of its face, its flattened nose, sneering mouth—it’s different, it’s not him, but it’s so horribly familiar.

It calls out, a jagged howl of words you don’t understand, and the satyr gods all turn and slink back towards you, hunched and leering.  You try to get to your feet again and stagger onto your knees—your leg won’t bear your weight, your wings are useless as ever, and one of them grabs you by the throat and drags you into the air.  They gather around; the one holding you makes a hissing, burning sound, and all of them shiver and snarl and let out a barking, roaring sound that’s barely a laugh. 

LITTLE LEAF SPIRIT one of them croons into your head, and your whole body jerks and thrashes out of your control, your head throbs.  You didn’t realize how soft Gamzee was keeping his voice, this feels like steel scraping over stone.  KEPT A PRINCE

KING OF LAUGHING CHAOS SENT US TO VISIT PUNISHMENT FOR YOUR WANDERING HANDS

KEPT OUR PRINCE AND MADE HIM SOFT

LITTLE LEAF SPIRIT WENT AND PUT THOUGHTS UNHOLY IN OUR PRINCE'S HEAD

TURNED HIM AGAINST FATHER GODMAKER AND BECAUSE OF YOU WE WON'T EVEN GET TO WATCH THE KILLING

HE'S DEAD BY NOW LITTLE LEAFLING BUT YOU KILLED HIM FIRST

One of them grabs your wings in one brutal hand, and you don’t even have time to beg no please, please gods no before there’s a wrenching crack and your entire existence is a howl of agony.  They’re laughing again—the one holding on to you shakes you hard and you claw weakly at its hand but its skin is tough as leather.  One of them lashes out with something—a rough length of weighted cords, you think—it’s strong enough the rope cuts you like blades, tears through your flesh.  It’s a different pain from your wings and the two in combination are terrible enough to drag a terrible noise out of you.  Your broken leg hangs all wrong and your head spins. 

COME ON LITTLE LEAF the one holding you croons, and it grabs your face in one huge hand—shakes you a little again, and you can feel exactly how easy to would be for those fingers to squeeze and snap your neck.  You hadn’t realized you were crying, but there are tears flowing down your face, your breath won’t catch.  Your teeth caught on your lip when it shook you; there’s blood in your mouth. DON’T BE ALL DOWN NOW, NOT ALL THIS BLIGHTED WEEPING

SOLSTICE COMES WITH ALL ITS FESTIVAL AND MIRTH

THE SACRIFICES ARE BLEEDING ON ALTARS

WINE AND BLOOD FLOWING LIKE THEY ARE YOUR FACE DISGRACES US

SMILE

The word is more than an order, it’s a compulsion.  It goes straight into the core of you like a white-hot brand.  Something forces its way into your head, heavy and icy and slimy-wet like rotting leaves and rotting corpses—your face twists up into a smile and the face in front of you grins back at you, bares all its fangs and crinkles up its gold-on-black goat eyes.  When the laughter comes it feels like being stabbed, something tearing open your chest, and you hang there and wheeze out horrible, whining, grinding laughs, over and over and over again.  It’s just so gods-damned funny, he told them where you were.  He left you for his pride and he died for his rage, he—

He told you he’d be back by springtime.

LEAVE HIM howls another voice, and they circle around you, laughing their terrible, barking laughs.  WE GOT MORE TO CRUSH BEFORE DAYBREAK

The hand around your neck lets you go.  You drop to the ground, slam into the shattered root of a tree and roll to a stop in the cradle of its roots, and they laugh and roar and their hooves make the ground shake under you.

And then, finally, they’re gone. 

You lie where they leave you; you can’t move.  Your trees are shattered, you’re bleeding scarlet, your wings are gone and you’re still laughing.  As their roars and jeering fade away the forced laughter turns into just noises, shaking jags of sound, and then their sick magic fades out of you and you’re crying instead, sobbing into the churned mud and the dying grass. Somewhere far away you can feel them smashing through your forest, headed south again, back to their churches and their stone circles.  He'll be dead by now.  We didn't even get to watch the killing.  That idiot.  That godsdamned idiot.

You don’t know how long you lie there, twisted over on your side, one side of your face pressed into the cool, churned and broken earth.  The forest stays shattered around you, and its pain is all through you—time is immaterial.  You’re immaterial.  You hardly feel real.  The sun burns your face, but your trees are too broken to use its warmth and its power.  You lie in the sun like a dead thing until even your inhumanly tough skin burns, and when the sun sets the tight, hot throb of your side and your back join your pain in your forest and your shattered leg.  Days and nights, blurring—

And then, after an eternity of timeless pain, something touches you. 

You make a wild sound of shock and thrash, but you’re weak as a human and they hold you still with a hand on your burned shoulder.  For a second you think the gods have come back, that they thought better and decided to kill you after all, but you’ve got nothing left to struggle with.  You can only hope they make it fast.  You’ve been drifting—you find that it’s night again, but gods only know how many days and nights its’ been since you were broken. 

“Oh gods and spirits,” gasps a voice—light, female, corporeal in a way only the voice of a human can be.  Your entire body freezes up in shock, you suddenly don’t understand anything at all.  Human. You’re being held by a human.  Your throat is burning with tears, your face is wet—did you ever stop crying?  Have your tears stopped since that night?  Your wings are somewhere trampled on the ground or kept as some satyr-god’s trophy, and a human is holding onto you with warm, solid hands. 

She says “Oh no, um…shh, no shhhh, it’s…it’s alright!”

Your forest is broken and Gamzee is dead and nothing is alright.  You snap your fangs and sob in weak, pointless jags of breath, tearing at your raw throat.

“Are you the forest spirit?” The human rolls you over a bit, a strong thin little arm under your shoulders—

Her arm bumps the shattered remnants of your wings and it doesn’t hurt but the sense of broken wrongness is worse than agony.  You scream like a wild animal, senseless, wordless.  The human gasps.  “Sorry!  I’m sorry, I won’t touch them again, oh no…” a rough, light human hand strokes your leaves, trembling.  Slowly, slowly, you settle.  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.  Can…can you talk?” 

(what happened to you? Are you okay?) (I’m going to call you Gamzee.) (beloved, you’ll see me back by summertime…)

“Leave me alone,” you hiss at her, breathless and hoarse.

“What—?”

“LEAVE ME ALONE!”

You’re weakened but furious, and the power of your voice makes her scream in pain—but she doesn’t let go of you, and the words take the last of your strength away with them.  The human doesn't take advantage of your weakness, though, she doesn't hurt you and she doesn't run away.  She just holds you there, rocking you a little back and forth, murmuring “Shhh, shhh. I’m not leaving you.  Is there…what can I do to help you?”

“Kill me,” you spit, and in that moment you mean it with all your heart and it's everything you want.  “Please—just…kill me—”

She gasps softly, and then lets the air out, long and slow.  A little at a time she turns you over, careful of your wings, ignoring the blood on her hands.  And then she’s looking down on you, face to face.

She’s got eyes the color of spring leaves and a waterfall of hair like jet and midnight skies.  She’s got square hands and dirt on her nose and even though she’ll live for a century or less, a handful of years, you look at her and you feel…transient, she’s as solid as the earth.

Oh gods, what’s wrong with you?  You’re dying.  You’re dying.  That has to be what this is, you are dying.

“Do you really want me to?” She asks you, and her eyes are so green and you can see her staring at the bright red of yours.  “Do you want to die?”

“No,” you get out, choking on the word, and she smiles.  She has stupid rabbit teeth, she really could kill you right at this second but instead she’s holding you and taking care of you and your chest hurts.  You want to cry again.

“What happened?” she asks you, and she searches around and picks a few leaves off a half-trampled plant.  When she presses them to your side it burns, but she trickles something from a flask over the leaves and the burn fades to cool numbness.  “They sent for me as soon as it started, but the forest wouldn’t let us in, nobody could bear to get near the trees—do you know what hurt you?  They said it was like watching a hurricane, they saw…shapes, huge, dancing shapes, and there was this awful sound…”

“Wild gods,” you rasp, and she helps you sit up a little at a time, avoiding your wings.  “Satyr…gods.”

“Oh—oh dear,” she says weakly, and her big green eyes widen with realization.  “Wait, then…” she lays you down and your head is on something warm and soft—oh.  Your head is in her lap.  She takes out a bottle of something that smells like ice and throws it out around you in a rough circle.  "That should take care of it if they try to come back,” she says, and caps the bottle, slipping it back in her cloak.  You don’t see where it goes.

“Mmngh,” you say, and shift your weight.  (Your wings, gods, your wings…)  

“You’re welcome,” she says, and goes back to laying leaves and numbing liquid on your lacerated stomach.  “I’m Jade.  I’m a…well, I suppose you could say I’m a scientist, and a magician, sometimes, and I do some alchemy—” She stops herself when she notices you staring at her, and her face turns a little bit red.  “And I talk too much,” she says, apologetic, and reaches into her cloak for another little bottle.  “Do you have a name?”

“I…” she runs her hand over your stomach, hip to shoulder, smoothing down her makeshift bandages, and you shake.  Being touched is the worst thing right now, but you don’t know if you’d live if she took her hands away, whether you’d just shatter apart.  “…Karkat.”

“Karkat?” She giggles weakly and smooths a leaf over your cut cheek—you barely feel it burn.  “That’s a strange name.”

(FUNNY NAME FOR A FUNNY…spirit.)

The anger and pain are a red-hot lump in your stomach.  You make a quiet noise—you mean it to be a sort of soft, warning growl, stop talking, but it comes out more like a whimper and she returns it with her own human noise of distress and strokes your face again.  It feels good.  It feels stupidly good.  Your eyes fall on where you were lying; where your body was, there’s a nest of soft, green growth, cushioning where you lay.  Where your tears fell, there are tiny, silver wildflowers.  You press a hand to the battered turf of your home and try not to cry.

Out in the darkness, something breaks a half-dead branch.

You feel it more than you hear it; your head snaps around, and you stare out into the darkness, searching blindly with the senses you barely have.  The human—Jade—sits up as well, suddenly tense.  “What’s the matter?  Karkat?”

“Shh.”

The thing moves closer.  You can feel it, you can smell it, fur and sweat and blood.  Something big, that doesn't belong to your forest.  Something hungry, something terrible.  You're shaking again. Jade is mumbling to herself and pulling more things out of her cloak; the things she's putting down make your head spin and your senses waver.  You throw yourself up onto your knees and stare around, ears flicking; you can hear it breathing.  In the shadows of the woods, watching you.

And then there's a flicker of movement, and a massive, burning flare of pure white light.  You yell and jerk away—it's the circle Jade made on the ground, the wet soil is sparking and flashing and the light shapes a rough barrier over you and then fades, leaving spots on your vision.  Jade draws a long knife out of her cloak, made of cold human iron and worked with something that makes you feel sick to be near. 

"Stay back!" she calls out, and the dark spots start to fade from your vision as you scramble up to your feet; you can see it now.  It looks like the gods that destroyed your forest, but it's bigger, a hulking shadow with huge, clawed hands that could pick you up like a doll and wings that blot out great swathes of the stars.  It howls like a thousand screaming animals and batters at Jade's flashing barrier, clawing at it, slamming into it with its wings.  Jade screams too, and throws a glass bottle from inside her cloak; whatever is in it is spicy and chemical and you and the god howl in pain at the same moment as the plants wither and burn with it.  The god staggers back, pawing at its face; it's whimpering in pain, and the noise takes your chest and squeezes it to breaking.

Jade draws back an arm to throw another flask of whatever poison she just threw, and you reach out and catch her arm.

“Wait,” you choke, and when she tries to jerk her hand away you snarl at her and shake her a little.  “—WAIT.”

She freezes.  The light starts to dim—the smoke she made starts to fade away and the ringing in your ears fades as well as the plants reach clean air.  The light of Jade’s lantern casts golden light through the clearing, and casts stark, wavering shadows over the shattered trees.

And over the face of your attacker.

“Oh my gods and great good spirits,” murmurs Jade, “…what is that thing?”

The creature crouched outside the circle has hands big enough to wrap around your chest and gut you with one claw.  Its wings are deep, bruised black-violet and its horns spiral out of its wild mane of hair, heavy and notched and almost as long as your arm.

There are three clear, deep scars on its face.

Gamzee cocks his head to one side and snarls at you; his eyes are almost pure gold, his pupils are tiny, horizontal slits and there’s no trace of comprehension in his eyes as he circles the warded circle, panting.  He comes closer, more cautious this time, and rakes his claws down the barrier between you; when it doesn't give way he tosses his head and roars in frustration, and you can see scars you recognize.  On the side of his neck, on his shoulders, on his hip, wounds you cleaned and took care of and worried over. 

“Karkat,” hisses Jade—she sounds anxious, fearful, but not terrified.  She’s got guts.  “What’s going on?  Should I hit it again?” 

“Don’t hurt him,” you say, as firmly as you can.  “He’s scared.’

“He’s scared?!”

“Shhh.”

You limp forward, as close to the circle as you can bear—it burns at you, being close to it, and you don’t try to touch it, to feel that blazing light for yourself. 

“Gamzee,” you say, as clearly as you can—your mouth tastes like sap and blood.  “Where were you?”

He shudders a little and blinks at you.  Makes another low, rolling snarl, deep, deep in his chest.  His eyes are still blank.

“Gamzee.”

“Karkat?” Jade whispers.

“Shh!”  You glare down at the impassable ground in front of you.  “Break the circle.”

She gasps.  “Are you completely insane?!”

“BREAK THE CIRCLE.”

“Don’t you take that tone of voice with me!”

“I need to calm him down!”  You slam a fist into the force between you—every muscle in your body knots and tenses with the urge to throw yourself away from it but every fiber of your being is pushing against it, he’s so angry he’s so scared look at the look in his eyes he’s scared— “He must have—come—looking for—” you stagger.  Your leg is barely healed enough to stand, but you grow roots up from the ground with all the strength you have and wrap them up to your knee, support yourself on them.  “He broke in,” you mumble, and sway—the world is spinning.  “Broke my borders, ‘s why it…let you in…”

“Karkat!”

Gamzee lunges forward in a blur of dark fur and white teeth and something dark comes between you and him.  There’s a meaty thud.

For a single, breathless moment, silence smothers you all, and you hear a tiny, breathless, choked gasp.  And then Gamzee rears up and howls, and Jade’s limp body is dangling from one of his massive clawed hands, trailing her cloak like a shroud.  He takes a thundering step towards you and sniffs the air around you and something catches the light, a flash of bright red in the glow from jade's lantern.  One hand holds on to Jade’s body (dead or alive you can’t tell humans are so fragile but you just met her and she was so kind to you she can’t be dead she can’t be dead) but the other one he holds close to him, protective, and in between his fingers you can see folds of brittle red leaf and spindly wood, familiar as your own hands.

He’s got your broken wings in one huge hand, and he stares at you with wide, wild eyes and holds on to them like they’re made of spun glass. 

“Gamzee,” you say, and hold up your hands.  He snorts and tosses his head; his braid is undone and his hair hangs in his face.  He’s wearing paint—or his own blood—smeared across his face and bare chest in wild patterns that hurt your eyes to look at and there’s red, human blood smeared across his mouth and down his chin.  His wings are flexing and flapping, sending gusts of old blood, rotten meat, sweat and wet fur over you.  “Gamzee, it’s okay.  You came back, you found me, you’re okay…”

He roars and lunges forward at you; you stand your ground because you’re too weak to run, and he rears up, growling and huffing, pulls away and paces in front of you like a circling animal.

Jade’s body is limp in his huge hand.  You watch her, and see her eyes open a crack, her hands clench and unclench at her sides. 

“Don’t move, Jade,” you say, as calmly as you can, and you take another step forward.  You could reach out and touch him from here, even though every part of you is screaming at you to run; he’s massive, even bigger than the other gods were, and you don’t even come up to his waist.  “Gamzee, put her down.  Put her down now, shhhh…”

He looms down over you, and you come up to his stomach when he kneels, his hand is big enough to wrap around your chest.  He sniffs the air around you and growls, but he doesn’t snap at you and both his hands are full.  To snatch at you he’ll have to drop Jade or your wings or both.

“Gamzee,” you say again, because it’s all you can say.  “You said you never wanted to hurt me.  Look at me.  Listen.  Shhh…”

You lay a hand on his face.  He goes stiff and still all over, not snapping at you but tight as a bowstring.  His shoulders heave in great, animal breaths, and the hot stench of fresh blood and flesh hit you, so strong your stomach turns.  He’s missing a fang, you notice all of a sudden—under the layers of blood and dirt and hair he’s badly bruised and there are more cuts on his face and his bare arms.  His wings are terrifyingly huge, shadows that block out the faint glimmer of the moon, but one of them isn’t the same shape as the other one—snapped and oddly twisted, warping the web.

“What the hell did you do to yourself this time?”  You ask him quietly, and you dare to move your hand, just up and down, feeling the strange contours of his bones under his skin.  “Shhhh, you found me.  You’re okay.”

He makes a growling, whining sound in the back of his throat; his fingers loosen on Jade’s body, and she drops a few feet to the ground and lies perfectly still.  You can see her staring up at the two of you with wide eyes as Gamzee hunches down, his wings slowly folding up, strange, wide eyes easing shut. 

“That’s it…” there’s a feeling to your voice, you don’t know how you’re doing it but you lean into him and sigh out the noise of the forest at peace, the pure sound of leaves rustling in quiet wind, water trickling, things growing and settling back into the earth to embrace the tree roots. 

He growls and struggles for a split second before you lean up and press your foreheads together and hush him one last time and he finally collapses forwards toward you.  His massive claws come up, shaking and delicate, and wrap around your shoulders. 

“Show me your face,” you murmur to him, and hope like hell you’ve got the right words.  He’s still snarling, catching himself, snarling again, and you keep your hands on his face as he squeezes you.  “Show me your face, your face, show me Gamzee, come on.”

You didn’t realize that there was a strange, painful roaring in your ears, or that your heart was beating so fast you could barely breathe, but you notice them by their absence.  All of a sudden you can hear the sounds of creaking wood and your own thundering, easing heartbeat.  You can hear Jade’s stifled breathing. 

Gamzee…diminishes.  No part of him that you’re looking at seems to change, but as you aren’t looking he somehow becomes smaller.  His arms are the right size, smooth and scarred, instead of massive, furred claws.  His legs are thin and silver-skinned when a second ago you would have sworn they were massive, recurved goat’s feet.  His face changes so subtly it might almost be caused by the changing of the moonlight through the trees, but it does change, and his eyes go from gold on black to purple on gold on black to hazy purple on gold. 

He looks at you for a second, wraps his wings around the two of you like a clumsy embrace, opens his mouth like he’s about to say something—

…and collapses on the ground. 

His wings melt away like fog under sunlight, and he just lies on the floor of your forest like a corpse, all bare, blood-daubed skin and wild, unplaited hair.  Your roots let you go as you drop down after him, terrified suddenly that you messed something up—but as soon as you move, whatever you were channeling, whatever certainty or power or whatever it was that got you onto your feet, it drains out of you.  Your strength drains away into the ground, the air, the world rolls and pitches—

And then it goes black.

Chapter Text

The first thing you’re aware of is pain.

Not pain from any part of you—forest pain, and some part of you tells you it’s better than it was even though you can’t quite remember yet what ‘it’ was or why it hurt at all.

You manage to get one eye part of the way open; you see a familiar stone-and-dirt ceiling, your flowers hanging from the entrance. The day outside is dark purple-gray, full of the sound of heavy, spattering rain. You’re awake—for now—but all you really want to do is close your eyes and drop back into the blackness you just came out of.

“Karkat?”

You don’t jump, because you’re too tired to move that fast. But you do tense up and then groan in pain. Your trees are cracked, there are new saplings between their roots but they’re not big enough to be your forest yet. Your forest is wounded.

“Karkat,” repeats the voice again, and you realize that your eyes have fallen shut again. You force them open, and you see a round, brown face and round, bright green eyes.

“I’m so glad you’re awake,” says Jade. “I have so many questions!”

You groan, close your eyes, and try to pretend you don’t exist.

“...Or I could wait a while,” she corrects herself, and you nod and make incoherent grunting noises of appreciation for that idea. “I was worried when you passed out, do you normally do that?”

...you passed out.

You were. In your forest, Jade was with you and then you were...you...were...

Something crucial clicks into place inside your skull—you force yourself to sit up, eyes widening.

“Gamzee...!“

“His claws almost punctured my stomach!” says Jade brightly. “But that’s okay, I put some sealant on it and stitched myself up, and it’s healing nicely. There’s an aura of power around here, did you know? It’s increasing my usual healing time by at least double!”

“Uh,” you say, and blink up at her. “...Nnh?”

“Oh, but I suppose you probably want to know more about how you’re doing!” She picks up something made of worked human metal, holds it up to one eye and squints at you through it. “Your network is clear at least! Waking up seems to have pushed out the last of whatever they did to your spirit.” She grabs your arm, and you barely have time to make a protesting noise before she cuts a little slice into your thumb and catches the bright, red-orange blood in a glass vial with practiced ease. She pulls something in a dark bottle out of her cloak and adds a drop of it to the blood; it turns white and cloudy. “And no little sickness creatures, either!”

“What—the—”

“Little sickness creatures, they get into your body and cause sickness,” she explains. “I’m not sure they’d work on you, but I’ve been testing every so often—I’m trying to think of a better word for them! I’ve been going back in the older languages and I think microorganisms might—oh damn here I am talking about my research again!”

You have nothing to say to that, but she seems to be writing your half of the conversation in her head, so you just blink up at her in a daze. Her eyes are a really nice color. It looks like grass. Or leaves. There are golden human ornaments hanging from her ears and the green and the gold look nice together. It’s nice. You feel...nice.

Little green and gold flowers start to grow from the room of the cave behind her, hanging around her head as you stare at her in a daze and she keeps talking, all flying hand gestures and excited rabbit-toothed grins.

“—I was worried because for a while there you were, well—dead!” she’s explaining, and you blink at her and just wait for her to explain what she’s talking about. “You died! And then for a little while you stayed that way, but then you started to sort of...crack, and then your skin started to pull away and you were inside! Inside of your own skin! Like, like, like a cicada or something! Your leg was healed and everything, It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen—I made sketches and collected some of the slime that was inside the cocoon—well, your skin, your skin was the cocoon—and I got a fragment of it to take a look at and then I made you comfortable and—oh! Your wings are back, too!”

That part gets through to you. You twist around weakly—there’s a flash of red and brown at your back again, still-tender leaf membranes and slightly green branches.

You could cry. Gods. You flop back down, careful not to bend your wings, and take a few deep breaths and concentrate on not crying in front of a mortal.

And then you realize your question never got an answer.

“...Gamzee,” you say again, louder and firmer. “Where’s—Gamzee.”

“I laid him out in the sunshine,” says Jade, and reaches down to get an arm under your shoulders, helping you to your feet. You feel shaky and incorporeal—and young. You feel like you remember feeling, hazily, back in the beginning of your existence. Your legs shake like a newly-born fawn’s. Your eyes can’t quite focus on what you want to focus on. “He kept trying to lie in the sun, even when he wasn’t really conscious. But that means that I can’t really bring him in when it’s raining either, so I just made a temporary canopy over him with some oilcloth and sticks!”

“What...are you?” You croak at her, and she giggles and doesn’t answer the question. “No, ‘m. Serious. What the hell are you.”

“I’m human!” Jade reaches down and takes you by the arm as though you’re human too, like she has nothing to be afraid of here at all. “Come on. Let’s go see your friend.”

She helps you up, and you don’t have the energy to jerk away from her and yell at her for putting your arm around her shoulder and taking most of your weight off of your feet like you’re some sort of human invalid. The two of you hobble out into the rain together.

Gamzee is a dark figure under the makeshift shelter of canvas and wood. You duck under it—it’s surprisingly tall and spacious, big enough you could reach up over your head and not touch the fabric, and you wonder for a second how the hell a human managed to put this together without any help before she unhooks your arm from her shoulder and folds you gently but irresistibly down onto your knees next to Gamzee’s unconscious body.

The first thing you notice is that he’s covered in blood again. The damage that had been done to his wing, you saw—but you missed things as well, in the dark. These don’t look like the careful, neat lashes that he had when you first met him; they’re vicious, torn and crusted in dirt and muck as though he was rolling on the ground with a wild animal clawing his sides. His legs are battered and bruised almost black; clear and high on one thigh, distinct from the mass of bruises, there’s a terrible, swollen, purple and black and red spot in the shape of a huge, cloven hoof.  His arm on the same side as his broken wing is bent oddly above the elbow. There are two lengths of wood bound to it, holding it straight, tied with woven human bandages.

“I managed to finish putting an emergency splint on his arm and then he started growling in his sleep when I went near him,” says Jade, and helps you down to the ground again, close enough you can crawl forward to get a look at him.

“He’s going to be so mad,” you say, distantly. “I’ll have to fix his arm again. So mad...”

You lean forward, hesitate a second, and then brush some of his long, wild hair out of his face. It’s come out of its braid, and there’s blood in it, catching at your fingers—smaller braids that you didn’t put into it, and stones and feathers that you didn’t notice in the dark. The vague smears of some kind of facepaint. Little, glittering purple stones almost the same color as his blood. Someone else has been painting his skin and taking care of his hair for him and it makes some part of you hurt with aching, possessive anger.

And then one of his eyes cracks open. He shifts and then stiffens. “Shhhhiiiiiit,“ he groans, and then tries to breathe in and goes very, very pale under the blood and muck and paint. “Be blighted and damned—!”

“Don’t move.”  He keeps moving. You grab a hold of one big, spiraled horn and shake him a little. “Don’t move. Gamzee you’re a mess, will you just lie still already? Gods.”

He jerks a little at the sound of his name; he groans and his eyes crack just slightly wider, looking around for the first time. “...Karkat,” he says, bleary and wondering, and then his eyes snap wide. “—Karkat!” He jerks upright and lets out a terrible, agonized, keening howl that sets your teeth on edge and makes Jade cry out in pain. His wings try to spread and support him; he screams again, and you can see his face starting to flatten and go feral, a terrified response to the sudden pain.

“Gamzee!” He doesn’t seem to hear you. You duck his flailing good wing, throw yourself forward and get your hands on his face again, hold onto his horn to hold him still for you. “Gamzee, shhhh. The pain will get better if you just stop moving, you big idiot! Now you do as I’m telling you right this second, stop yelling and thrashing around and making it worse and just LIE. BACK. DOWN.“

He doesn’t lie back down, but he does stop struggling, finally. His chest is heaving and every time he breathes in he winces, but he doesn’t seem to give it too much notice. He’s staring at you like he’s never seen you before.

“You’re okay,” he says, numb. “You’re okay?”

Okay is a bit of a strong word, but you nod anyway, because the last thing he needs right now is more worry. “Sure,” you manage, and then just swear a lot, because he reaches out with his undamaged arm and reels you in to hold onto you like he’s afraid you’ll vanish if he ever lets go again. You can feel his heart pounding through his chest, feel the clawed gashes in his skin under your hands, you’re getting sticky with blood and he smells absolutely horrendous and you grab him back and hold on tight. Noises in your ear, almost comforting, fragments of words; I’m here I’m here blighted plague won’t come here again I’m here you’re okay I’m here like you’re the one that needs soothing right now, the stupid hysterical idiot.

You pet his tangled hair as best you can, and he squeezes you so hard you have to groan. Your bones are new and fresh and pliant but the last thing you want to do is test how far they’ll bend. Swatting at him yields very few results, but when you do finally get him to let go enough that you can see his face, you’re less surprised than you ever would have expected to see that he’s crying again.

“Stop that,” you tell him, but it comes out a lot gentler than you intended it to. He sniffs, scrubs at his eyes, but it hardly helps. When he makes muffled sobbing sounds they sound ever-so-slightly goat-like, and it would be funny if you weren’t so overwhelmingly, sickeningly, stupidly glad to have him here. You pat his face awkwardly, like you did when you pacified him before you both passed out; his lower lip trembles and his eyes well up with fresh tears all over again. You have to laugh, but you also have to sigh, so you kind of do both and hug him again so he can hide his face in your shoulder. “Oh you big baby,” you say into his tangled hair, and he half-laughs wetly, muffled. “...I’m fine. It’ll take more than a few demigods to finish me off.”

“I was so angry,“ he says, and as you smooth your fingers over the joints of his wings, the undamaged one starts to melt away. The wounded one stays, and you wonder if it has to heal before it can go again, whether there are laws to his transformations that you don’t know about. You’re willing to learn. “He told them—go wreck you, kill your trees, I couldn't—“

“Who?” You’re obviously missing crucial parts of this story. You remember the dark clouds to the south, how they vanished again just before the satyrs came to your forest. “Gamzee, what happened?  How did you get away?”

The question makes him shudder. “...Godmaker,” he says, barely audible, and shudders all over.  "I told him where I'd been at, it was stupid, I was stupid, I messed up, made trator tongue and blighted, just—" he makes a furious noise, clawing his hands back through the mess of his hair.  "He sent them away and he was on me before I could stop them, he sent them off to hurt you and—"

“Shh.”

He nods and squeezes you like a real actual human baby with a comfort toy. You sigh and pet him. Jade is standing by, eyes wide, watching the two of you—you give her a “what, really?” look and she turns red under the brown of her skin and turns her back.

“Is he going to send more?” You ask when it finally looks like he’s calmed down—you don’t want to set him off again, but that’s kind of important. You have things you would need to do, to set up, people to talk to. But he shakes his head. “Gamzee, don't lie to me, I need to know.  Are you sure?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath.

“...He's dead,” he says, very quietly. “...Killed him. He’s dead.” You stare at him, suddenly breathless, and he seems to take your silence for judgment; his hands are shaking suddenly, almost imperceptible, but clear from where you are in his arms.

“If I was king,” he starts, aborted and pleading, like he needs your forgiveness for this. “—if I was king I could tell them, tell them not to—tell them leave off of you—”

He killed his sire.

He killed his sire for you.

“But he was damned strong,” he finishes, wretched. His words are getting more and more mixed up the longer you search silently for words, his voice gets softer and shakier. “Couldn’t, it—days and nights, I don’t even know how long, just fighting, and when I was done and he was dead they were too long gone and I—couldn’t—remember—couldn’t get a single thought on of what to do so I just ran, just followed them—”

“You must have met them coming back,” you fill in for him, finally, and he nods slowly, uncertainly. “You...remembered to take my wings back from them, though. You had them when you found us.”

“I did...?” He sounds almost hopeful. Then his breath catches. “They took—?!” His hands run up your back, touching the young wood of your wings. “Oh hells, oh, beloved no, what did they—?!”

“They’re back now, I’m okay. Gamzee, listen to me.“ He’s shaking. Great green growth, you’re both such terrible wrecks right now.  But at least as much as he’s panicking he isn’t going to let go of you. He won’t let go of you. If he did, you don’t think you’d be able to stay calm either. “I. Am. Alright. Now. Shh. It was terrible, but it happened and now it’s done. No—Gamzee, gods’ sakes. Quit. Think about something happy, I don’t care, just stop—doing that. It’s not your fault.”

“I told him where—”

“That part is a little bit your fault,” you allow, and he makes a noise that’s half a laugh and half a sob. You remember the proud, arrogant spirit you met half a year ago and you almost laugh; he’s battered now, bruised, scarred, his face contorted with the force of his sobs and dripping all over everything and he won’t stop trying to pull you back in so he can hide his face again. He’s such and idiot and he’s a murderer and a monster and he’s so precious to you, you just want to die. “Stop,” you tell him sternly, and he whines and nuzzles at you. He’s smearing tears all over you—and worse, but you focus on the tears. “Gamzee, no. No. Stop. Listen, get your shit together, you’re a king now. What do kings act like?”

He sniffs. His voice is reedy and hoarse from crying. “Uh—”

“Exactly, not goddamn well like this.“ You have no idea what you’re talking about—you’re pretty sure a king of spirits can act like whatever the hells he wants, although humans seem to hold most of their rulers to higher standards. “Pull yourself together. Come on. You look terrible.”

“Nnngh,” he says, and slumps on you. You pat his head a few times, then pull him away again, ignoring his complaining whine.

“You’re making me smell like a human barnyard animal,” you inform him. “You stink like a wet goat.”

“...Am a wet goat,” he says, miserable and solemn, “...’m the king, brother. King of all those wet, godblighted goats.”

You look at each other for a few seconds, frowning seriously, before you both break down into terrible, wet snorts at the exact same moment and just slump, laughing grossly into each other’s shoulders.

“I missed you,” he says, thick and choking and horrible, and your eyes start prickling and you have to swallow hard.

“I know. Me too.”

Chapter Text

Eventually you have to get up and remember that you’re a highly dignified forest spirit with a shitload of responsibility and dignity and stuff.  You squirm your way out of Gamzee’s skinny arms again—he growls, but only half-heartedly. 

Brother, his voice says in your head, don’t—

“Pull yourself together,” you tell him, not as nastily as you meant to, and he grumbles to himself.  His eyes flicker over your shoulder to Jade’s back, still turned toward you—his face lengthens subtly, slipping into his second form.  The one you first met him in—great  gods was that only a few seasons ago?  Feels like an age.  You should yell at him for being so cagey around her—she’s not all that bad, okay, she helped you out a lot and you don’t know if you would have been awake to calm Gamzee down without her there to clean you up and make you think again.  But you can still remember the night he first told you you’re the only one who’s seen this face and you refrain from yelling.  Just for now.  Not that you’re selfish or anything.

a sacrifice, he says in your head, and he narrows his eyes at Jade.  HOW COMES SHE HERE, BROTHER.

“Human,” you say sternly.  “The word is ‘human’, you lummox.  She woke me up and closed some of the wounds your—” You stop as he winces, and adjust hastily, “…she fixed me up, okay?  I owe her.  If you can’t be civil, at least just…don’t be an ass.”

I thought you named me ‘goat’.  He sounds sulky.  now an ass, am I?

“Oh for gods’ sakes.” 

Jade huffs.  “Can I turn back around now?”

no

“Yes.”  And then you pull back and look at him and frown.  “Actually—oh, blighted hells.  No, actually no.  Listen, can you—just—go somewhere?”

“Um…” she glances at you, half turned around, frowning.  “I could?”  She looks suspicious.  “Are you going to be here when I get back?”

“I don’t know where the hells else I would go.”

She squints at you for a long time, and then slowly nods.  “Okay,” she says.  “I need to go back to town and get some food anyway!”  She starts to turn—looks back at you.  “Oh!  Do you want anything?”

“Anything what.”

“From town!”

You stare at her.  “What the hell would I want from a human town?”

She shrugs.  “Something shiny,” she says.  “A couple of baskets to carry things in!  You wouldn’t believe how much easier it is to gather herbs and flowers and bones and things when you have a basket.”

“I don’t want any gods-damned human baskets.”

“How about some meat you don’t have to go out and find for yourself?”

You start to yell and then stop for a second.  You are…really really hungry.  You don’t want to go and have to find meat, because it always takes you forever to find meat that died naturally (especially enough to feed Gamzee, he eats so much).  And you don’t want to leave Jade alone back here with Gamzee either, especially as long as he’s still calling her a “sacrifice”. 

“Get us a deer.”

She stares down at her hands, flicking out her fingers like she’s counting something, then nods.  “They owe me enough for a deer,” she says, and straightens up.  “Okay!  Venison it is.”

She throws her belongings over her shoulder and turns.  You can feel her scratching the bark on your trees as she goes, little prickles like bug-bites on your soul.  You ruffle your leaves and shake off the little stings.  It’s not like she’s hurting anything.  You actually don’t mind too much if she finds her way back.

You turn back and Gamzee has shrunk again.  One of his wings is gone—the broken one still hangs, ugly with brokenness, over his shoulder.  He smiles at you, almost shyly, and kind of edges closer.

“Why’d you send her away, brother?”

“I have to fix your wing.”

He flinches, smile falling flat.  You haven’t even touched him yet, but he’s already morphing back toward his second form defensively, growing even as he shrinks down in on himself.  brother no

“Brother yes.” You reach out for his crooked wing—he pulls back and then groans as the webs of his broken wing catch the air, dragging at it painfully.  “Come on.  Shhh, it’ll just hurt for a bit and then it’ll start to feel better, you know it will.”

don’t want it

IT’LL HURT

“I know it will.  And then feel better.”

IT’LL HURT

“Shush.” You reach out and stroke his long, unkempt hair (you’re going to have to put it back in its plait for him, you’re not sure he even knows how, this massive disaster—) and he quiets just a little.  “Do you want it to just stay broken and crooked and wrong?”

He huddles down.

…no

“Here.” You grab him by an arm—pull him over to one of your strongest, thickest trees and prop him up facing it.  “You can maul that however much you want, help you deal with it.  This won’t take more than a minute or two.  You think you can deal with that, big strong wine-sopping god like you?”

He doesn’t answer, just makes a miserable noise and holds onto the tree-trunk.  You look him over closely for the first time; the wing is bent oddly near the shoulder, and the web above and around it is torn.  You think that’ll grow back if you can fix the damage enough for him to banish and re-summon his wings, but the broken bone is a warped, evil wound, full of the foul rot-magic he used to destroy part of your forest once upon a time, and it keeps his wing here.  One of the delicate finger-bones is also snapped, but that’s a clean, fine break—it should heal pretty easily.  You’ll brace it, but it doesn’t need much.  The rest of him is a battered mess, and his right leg has started to tremble under even a little of his weight.  His claws are already digging into the bark.  His eyes are squeezed shut. 

And then you take a deep breath and take hold of his twisted wing and his eyes snap open.

“Ow,” he croaks, and his hands dig into the tree’s bark.  “Ah—!” and his physical voice keens and snaps into inhuman noises, his mouth changing shape and choking off his words, but in your head they’re perfectly clear, no no no that HURTS

“Almost there.”  Gods, you can hear the crackle of bones moving when you straighten his wing out and he howls, his wings try to jerk out of your hands to batter at you and the pain of trying to pull free chokes his voice off to a hoarse, whimpering gasp.  “Shhh, shh—”

HURTS IT HURTS he drags his claws through the bark and you can see him starting to grow taller and heavier and his claws curling and splintering the wood, his body changing as it fights to defend itself but you’re almost done almost done—

stop stop STOP

Your head pounds at the force of the command, your muscles twitch to obey and pull away, but you grit your teeth through the awful noises he’s making, press a piece of birch-bark to his wing and unfurl it like a silver scarf, layering over his wing near the shoulder, stabilizing the worst of the break.  He shudders against the tree as the bark thickens and then stills—his howls die to groans and whimpers that die to wretched, awful panting.

He twitches when you come up and pet his hair, and he growls weakly but doesn’t pull away.

not ever again, he groans in your head, voice small.  not EVER again

“If I hadn’t fixed it, it would have hurt for a lot longer and healed wrong,” you say, and he lets you squeeze one horn and run your fingers through his hair, keeps his eyes squeezed shut and breaths in harsh, long breaths against your shoulder.  “You probably wouldn’t ever have been able to fly again, alright?”  And there’s some selfish part of you that pangs a bit at that, godsdammit, some part of you wishes he was stuck down on the ground with you.  You shake your head and try not to think about it.  “If you want me to stop splinting things, you have to stop breaking things.”

I

I didn’t break SHIT

“Had me down,” he says against your shoulder, and you can feel him going smaller as he gets himself back under control, as the pain dies away. His voice is muffled and slurred, but it clears as his face changes shape and his mouth forms itself back to a more familiar shape. “Had me down on the ground, brother, and he got his hoof on my wing—“

didn’t feel it then when it snapped

ALL HELLS BUT I FEEL IT NOW

You imagine Gamzee as he looked when he came to your forest, and try to imagine how a god that much bigger and older would look as they fought—holy shit, your mind can’t even seem to make sense of the idea, it’s incomprehensible.  The hoofmarks on his lags, the clawmarks on his sides—you’ve never seen satyrs fighting, but you’ve seen wild animals try to tear each other apart before, battering each other with all four limbs, snapping their fangs for each other’s throats. 

“Shhh,” you say in the meantime, and he sighs.  “It’ll stop hurting eventually.”

all things do

You blink down at him, but he’s not looking at you—he’s staring morosely off into the trees, still huddled down into your arms. 

“Wow,” you say, and he jumps and looks up at you.  “By all that’s good, that sounded almost wise.  Are you sure you didn’t hit your head on the tree just now?”

ha ha ha ha, says his mind dryly, but his body betrays him by snorting with actual laughter.  He pulls his hands away from the tree; there’s a darkened, rotted patch where he was touching it.  shit

You reach out past him (his back is cool and shaking against your chest and you want to hold him) and press your hand to the bark—it would have been a strain, a while ago, to grow the bark into that cast and then fix the rot so quickly afterward, but there’s a familiar strange ache in your chest and the rot is already vanishing even as you reach for your power.

He blinks at you.  you grew, he says, surprised.  that shit was far from your power when it was last I knew you

(FF says when she sees a domain change like this it means you’re in love)

“Shut up,” you say, and shove yourself up and away from him.  “Don’t mess with your wing, but keep trying to send it away every couple of days.”  You fight with your selfish, stupid side for a few minutes, and then force out the words, “It would heal faster if you’d change down.  Use your real face.”

that face is for you

YOU ONLY, NOW

best beloved

Your face burns.  “Well,” you say, and it’s exactly the thought you were trying not to think, but it’s him saying it, not the selfish voice in the back of your head, and you kind of want to hug him some more. “Well.  Yeah.  Well.  Whenever Jade isn’t here, change down.”

“Gladly,” he says, warped through half-changed lips, and settles into his first form like the shadow of a face shifting in smoke.  He rolls the shoulder with the broken wing, wincing—his shoulder joint pops and creaks and cracks like a branch in ice.  “Ow.  Son of a thousand festering—“

“There you are!”

Gamzee changes so fast he slams his head into a branch right at the root of one horn.  He drops down, holding his head and whining, as Jade comes bouncing into the clearing.  The sun's setting, now, golden through the dissipating clouds; it's light enough for you to see, still, but Jade has lit her lantern again, swinging on the end of her staff. 

“I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you again,” Jade says brightly, and swings a bag off her shoulder. It clinks and clanks.  “I brought some cooking things, some spices, some chemicals—”

Gamzee hisses at her.  She looks up, notices him crouching down, and waves.  Gamzee, finally upright and awake for the first time, doesn't seem to scare her at all.  What in all hells is wrong with this human?

Gamzee edges forward, head cocked on one side, snarl easing away into curiosity as his nose twitches.

WHAT’S THAT YOU’RE BRINGING

human feeding goods

HUMAN THINGS FOR HUMAN NEEDS

affairs of the body all

CARNAL

and why would my best beloved have need of them

“Wow!” says Jade, “Are you talking into my head?  How—”

ANSWER ME LITTLE MEAT THING

“You make it sound like I’m bringing him brothel-wear or something!”  Jade says, and laughs.  You and Gamzee glance at each other, equally confused, but both of you are tired as hell and neither of you ask.  “I didn’t think you needed them or anything, but you have to admit they would make things easier!  Besides, it sounds like you’re not…entirely unexperienced!” Jade winks broadly at Gamzee, like they’re sharing some big secret.  “With…affairs of the body.” 

Her tone is teasing, there’s not even a touch of fear to it.  Gamzee hesitates—his ears perk up a little bit. 

…no, he says, and cocks his head to one side.  not entirely

little meat creature

“Jade!” says Jade brightly, like it doesn’t worry her at all that a satyr almost half as tall as her again with jagged fangs sticking grossly out of his mouth is calling her meat.  “What do you mean?  This sounds like a fun story!”

Gamzee perks up even more, and you would swear you can feel him preening inside his head—vain son of a bitch. 

it is

YOU WANT TO HEAR IT

little stone-named one

“And I’ll go grow you some more dinner?” you say sourly.  “You attention-hungry bastard.”

He frowns.  aw brother

don’t want to—

“No, don’t give me the big sad eyes,” you say, and you glance at Jade, step forward and pull him down to you, wrap your wings around the pair of you.  For a second, his face flickers softer, more familiar, he smiles at you behind the shield of your wings. 

“Just,” you start to say, and stop, unsure of what you’re trying to say.  “I mean—”

“Shit’s gone strange,” he says quietly, and you sigh and nod because it has, it’s different now, so much has happened in so little time.  “But it’ll be whole again, beloved.”  He bumps your noses together—you can feel the velvet on the bridge of his nose, the knot of the scar that crosses it.  “Pick me some flowers.”

“Pick your own damned flowers,” you say, and know when you get back you’ll have a handful of flowers.  “Bugger you.”

He snorts and stands up straighter, and his face changes smoothly back to his god-face. 

begone from us

PUSHY LITTLE MOUTHFUL

The familiarity actually forces a smile on your face, and Gamzee crinkles up his eyes at you and then flops down on the ground next to Jade.

what do they say of us where you come from

LITTLE STONE-NAMED ONE

You leave them to it.

--

By the time you come back, Gamzee looks considerably more relaxed and Jade is sitting cross-legged across from him, laughing at something.  Gamzee’s eyes are crinkled up and he’s making a really truly disgusting noise like he’s choking on something, the sharp khakhakha of his laughter.  You slow, vaguely unsettled, looking around the clearing; there’s a fire by your cave, much bigger than you would have built, with what looks like the entire deer roasting over top of it.  The smell is unbelievable.  Your mouth waters.

“No,” Jade is gasping, and she pushes her big glass eye-frames out of the way to wipe her eyes.  “Oh gods, no, you’re lying to me!”

A whole oak tree, Gamzee says in your head, and even in your head his voice sounds shaky with laughter.  I went and gave her up my place in festival for that, sister deserved that much—Karkat!

“Karkat!”  Jade echoes, and smiles at you like she’s actually happy to see you.  “Hello!  Is that honeysuckle?”

Gamzee makes a pleased noise and springs up, sniffing at you eagerly—he makes a happy crooning sound when he smells the honeysuckle, and reaches out for it.  You pull away.

“You’ll get some when the meat’s done,” you say, and he groans and gives you the pleading eyes.  You stand firm.  “No.”

Brother…he whines in your head, and then you glance back at Jade and he follows your gaze and remembers she’s there.  His face colors—he straightens up and shifts his feet uncomfortably.  What?  His body language seems to say.  Me?  Whining like a newly-formed godling?  Ridiculous.

“Don’t worry,” says Jade brightly, and gets up on her knees to waddle ungainly over to the fire and poke at the meat.  The meat crackles.  “It's almost done!  They’re kind of scared of me down there in town for some reason, they gave me the best they had!  And grandfather taught me how to cook deer, so you are in for a treat!”

She pulls out some of her big human bottles full of dead, dried-up plants—they smell different when they’re dried, spicy and strange enough they make you want to sneeze.  She sprinkles her plants copiously over the deer, wets her fingers in some kind of liquid from a jar with silver and steel hanging all over it, and then claps her hands sharply.

This time the flare of magic really does make you sneeze.  Gamzee bleats and flares his wings in shock, then hisses in pain.  Jade either doesn’t notice or doesn’t want to comment, because she hardly even glances at you.

“What the hell was—”

“It’s a marinade spell!”  Jade claps again, focusing on the deer over the fire—you sneeze again.  Gamzee’s ears flick.  “It sinks the spices into the meat and flavors it, and the ash-water makes it juicier.  It’s a family secret!”  She claps a third time.  “There.  Supper is served!”

“Alright,” you say, very slowly, and settle down closer to the fire.  It really does smell good, now the too-strong smell of the plants she sprinkled over it has settled down a little bit to a bearable level.  “It’s not going to be any better than the way we make it, though.”

--

“…That was the best thing I have ever tasted,” you say an hour later, and lick your fingers clean as Gamzee makes a wordless noise of agreement and tears off another haunch to stuff into his big, fangy maw.  “And I’ve existed for…” you try to count up in your head.  “…A long damned time,” you conclude, and lie back.  Jade finished eating long before you—humans need so little and fill so quickly, she didn’t even eat an entire haunch.  She looks satisfied though.  She’s taken off her big, heavy cloak for the first time, and she’s counting bottles and writing down mysterious series of symbols on a piece of hide. 

“I told you you were in for a treat,” she says, and finishes off another string of symbols with a flourish.  “I’ve never done it for something as big as a deer before, but I knew it worked wonders on rabbit, even stringy plains hare!  I thought we’d have some left for tomorrow though, hm.”  She frowns at the mostly-demolished deer.  Gamzee finishes stripping a legbone with relish and tears another chunk off with his claws, obviously enjoying every second.  Alright so maybe he’s eating a lot really fast.  Even gods have their limits.

“Gamzee, you’re going to make yourself sick.”

He shakes his head and says something through his half-transformed, very full mouth.  It’s completely incomprehensible.  Deer meat goes everywhere.  You swear at him and he swallows and hunches a little, ears flattening apologetically. 

fight with my sire did sap and suck my strength off me, he says.  i need this.

“Well at least take a break and get a drink then,” you say, and he sighs and jams the last of his meat into his mouth, slinking over to the little stream on all fours to drink.  The sun set a while ago; the air is cool and the very first firebugs of summer are starting to rise out of the grass and hover, glittering, over the wrecked wood and slowly-growing saplings of your forest. 

“Karkat?”

You blink and look back at Jade.  She’s looking down at the ground next to you, and when you follow her gaze you see small silver-blue flowers springing up around you in thick, cushioned banks.  You didn’t so much as think about making flowers, and there they are.  Shit.  You turn your face away from Jade and pretend you never heard her say your name.

“…Karkat…”

Wow the trees overhead sure are interesting.  You did a great job growing them, good for you.

“Karkat.”

“What?!”

She doesn’t look intimidated by the way you snapped your fangs.  She looks…enchanted.  That’s the word for it.  She looks enchanted. 

“Do you make these when you’re…happy?”

“I’m never happy,” you say immediately, and then glower when she laughs out loud in your face.  “Sod off.”

“I’m sorry to break this to you after you’ve lived without knowing it for so long,” she says, and she reaches out and for a moment you think she’s going to put her hand on yours.  Then it just comes to rest on the flowers next to yours, feeling the velvety carpet of them under her rough palms.  She looks up at you, and her eyes gleam green and fiery through her lashes.  A bright red poppy springs up next to her hand.  “…But you’re happy.  You’re really, really happy right now.”

And she sounds so gods-damned sure, as she smiles at you and Gamzee comes wandering back over to the fire—she says it so firmly, you can’t find the right words to argue.

--

Two days later, they send somebody to your forest.

It’s Nepeta, of course, because her forest is closest.  She lives in the evergreens to your south, and never was as careful as she probably should be, even as a god—she’s so reckless sometimes you think she must have been human once.  Not that humans are the only reckless ones, as you’re so graciously reminded of every time you have to look over Gamzee’s clawed and battered sides and vividly-bruised legs for him. 

She brings company.

You know who it is as soon as they come into your forest—when Sollux came a few months ago you didn’t notice him, but he’s hard to track and hard to catch, especially travelling as a swarm, and anyway you were lax then.  Now you have wards up everywhere you can build them.  You’re not getting caught off guard like that again.  Even if Gamzee assures you any of his tribe will listen to him unquestioningly now.  Jade tells you it’s like a human whose home has been robbed.  You tell her her petty human metaphors pale in insignificance next to your might and authority.  She laughs at you.  So does Gamzee, the filthy traitor.  You can’t even reach the back of his head to smack it.

He notices a little bit after you do, as they’re starting to get closer—you can’t feel Nepeta, so used to travelling through forests and walking lightly, but you can feel him, marching through your forest on those great, clomping hooves and crushing undergrowth and young saplings.  Gamzee sit up when they get within a quarter-mile, sniffing the air and quirking his ears to listen.

Smells like HORSE

“Yeah,” you say, and concentrate on growing your trees.  At the very least, this place is going to be impressive as hells when he gets here.  He’s going to look down his nose at you anyway, but you’re not going to give him any more opportunities than he’s already got.  God you hate him.  “They aren’t the kind you can eat.”

He looks mildly offended, like impugning his ability to shove any given horse into his mouth is legitimately insulting to him.  You can eat ANY KIND OF HORSE, brother

“Not this kind.”  You think about it for a second and the correct grudgingly, “Well, you probably could, but Nepeta would slaughter you.  Besides he probably tastes disgusting.”

He?

“You’ll see.”

By the time you hear cautious footsteps, your trees have grown up to at least a respectable height and width for a minute’s walk in any direction from your clearing.  Jade has been relocated to the cave—the last thing you want is for her to get caught in some kind of godly business and get hurt, stupid curious human.  Gamzee is sprawled in the middle of the clearing as you climb trees to check branches and dart around their bases to check how deep their roots have grown, with one of his weird cut-off-reeds instruments, making aimless music that’s not bad to listen to except for its persistent lack of a cohesive tune.

You’re away from the main clearing, high in the top of a tall tree, when you see Gamzee sit up straight and put aside his pipes.  A voice calls out “…Karkat?”

“He went out,” says Gamzee, and then Nepeta hits him going so fast you can’t see her and bears him straight to the ground.

Gamzee makes an ungodly shrieking noise as he lands hard on his back and his wing hits the ground with a sharp jolt—Nepeta hisses “WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HIM?!” and there’s a thundering noise and a volley of sharp twinges as branches snap and hooves pound roots—

You throw yourself forward, get between Gamzee and Nepeta and spread your wings to their full spread—which might be more than it was before you cocooned actually, damn.  Wow.  You haven’t really played around with them since then, you never give too much thought to your wings.  What’s the point of spreading wings you can’t use to fly?  They just take up space.  But they do also make a really nice screen between your—Gamzee, and Nepeta.  She’s a vast mountain cat when you push her back, all dappled golden fur and ropey muscles under immaculate pelt, but she straightens up as you spread your arms and wings wide in front of her, melting back into a more human form. 

“Karkat!”

“Nepeta!”  You echo back to her, and move over as she moves, keeping your wings between Gamzee and Nepeta.  “What do you think you're doing?!?”

She has the decency to look a little bit chagrined.  “You weren’t here,” she says.

“You looked around for all of ten seconds before you—”  You take a deep breath and let it out.  Doesn’t matter.  Goddammit, you don’t even want to get in a fight with Nepeta, and not just because she could tear you to shreds.  “You brought your…friend.”

“Oh.”  She knows how you feel about him.  She glances back at the sound of crunching branches and winces.  “Um…yeah.  He wouldn’t stay behind, sorry.  He’s gotten really protective since I came back!  But he’s really—”

“Nepeta!”

“Oh gods,” says Nepeta under her breath, and turns back to call over her shoulder.  “Equius I’m fine!  Please stop crushing all of Karkat’s trees!”

“This forest is inconvenient,” says Equius, and completely fails to stop crushing your godsdamned trees as he shoves through the last few branches into the clearing, leaving a trail of snapped branches in his wake.  Your bones ache from the snapping impacts, but you steadfastly refuse to wince or show any sign of discomfort.  Sod this guy.  “I much prefer your forest, Nepeta, the trees are so much more—oh.”

“Equius,” you say, as insolently as possibly, and Equius paces forward slowly into the clearing.  His lower half is pitch-black today, massive as ever, all stomping hooves and rippling muscle.  He could probably kick you to death without noticing.  “What do you want.”

He snorts—his tail swishes.  “Nepeta wished to—”

“We were just checking in to see if you were alright!”  Nepeta says hurriedly, before her…partner, whatever they are…can say something unbelievably offensive and stupid.  “After all the…well, the things that happened, I didn’t know what was going on, so I came to check!”  She lowers her voice and glances past you at Gamzee, who's getting back on his feet with angry little mind-mutters.  It feels like somebody standing a few inches behind you and breathing just loud enough to hear.  It’s creepy as hells.  He doesn’t seem to know how to get up with one wing that he can’t use—he keeps starting to flare it out for balance and then bleating and folding it again.  “…It was them, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” you say, like it’s no big deal, but you can see by the look on her face that your casual tone of voice wasn’t very convincing.  “He figured it out, okay?  He told them where I was by accident—”

“Oh my god—”

"Nepeta," says Equius, with intense control evident in every single gods-damned word.  "Is this—"

"Oh," says Nepeta, and fidgets.  "—Um..."

You turn and look and Gamzee is finally upright, no longer shielded by the spread of your wings, way too tall to stay hidden from the intruders into your clearing.  He’s almost on a level with Equius, even with the massive horse body—taller than he was before he went down, definitely.  You wonder if he did that on purpose. 

hey, says Gamzee, and even inside your head his voice sounds kind of unsure.  He pauses a second, like he's trying to remember what he's supposed to do next, and then kind of ducks his head a little in the worst possible approximation of a bow. 

...i'm gamzee

"Nepeta," Equius repeats, voice rising dangerously in volume. 

"Well..." Nepeta glances at you, and you don't know Zahhak very well but you can guess by the look in Nepeta's eyes what's going to happen if you just tell him the truth flat out. 

“He’s a friend of mine,” you say, as loud and clear and angry as possible, and hope like hell it works.  “If you have a problem with him being here after everything he’s done for me you can get out of my forest.  I owe him a hell of a lot more than I owe you.”

Hey I heard of you, says Gamzee’s voice in your head, and you curse internally because dammit you are almost completely sure he’s about to wreck whatever kind of imposing image you just managed to salvage—little sacrifice-meat turned godling, you

LITTLE HUMAN WHELP FUCKED WITH THE QUEEN OF THE GONE-BY

proud little human knight thought he could make iron cages for the queen of bones

Got himself CHANGED

Equius’s face goes blotchy red.

“I,” he says, and sputters a little bit.  “That—I don’t appreciate—”

You don’t look down at my best friend for SHIT and there’s the pride again, the haughty tone of command he tried to use on you when you first found him.  But instead of telling him to shut up, Equius is going more and more red in the face.  Him I killed my king for

HIM I WOULD KILL YOU FOR

“Okay, settle down!”  You turn your back on Equius, not really giving a shit whether he reads that as the flagrant insult it basically is, and grab Gamzee by the arm.  His face has gone flat and hostile again, all teeth and mad eyes.  “Calm down, and do not kill anybody.  You hear me?  Hey.  Eyes down here!  Do.  Not.  Kill anybody.”

"You—killed your king?"  Equius sounds a little bit choked.  Gamzee, still looking bristly and defensive, looks up past you and nods. 

"Oh."  Equius stares at him.  There is something going on behind that face, god only knows what it is--no, hell, even the gods don't know, you are a god and you haven't got the slightest clue.  "...Oh."

They stare at each other for a long couple of minutes, and then Jade says "Are you a god too?"

You jump about a mile and Jade ducks to one side as your wings narrowly miss her face.  She’s staring past you at Equius with the same look on her face she had when she looked at your wings.  She has one hand on the hilt of her knife too, not that you think she’s intending to fight him.  She’d have to be suicidal, he’s enormous. 

“Jade," you snap.  "Godsdammit I told you to go and—”

“Nobody seemed to be dying or getting hurt,” Jade says dismissively, and waves you off.  “Settle down, I followed your orders!  Wow!  An actual centaur!”

Equius stares at her.  Nepeta stares at her too, although she looks kind of weirdly delighted and Equius looks like somebody just shoved ginger up his ass.

"—Is that a human?"

"Yes," says Jade, "I am!"

Equius blinks again, and you almost have to laugh at how obviously he doesn't know how to react to a human that talks to him directly.  After the murmurs you've heard about his past and how he ended up a mountain spirit, you guess you're not surprised.  He wouldn't want to be too closely associated, would he? 

“No, wait,” says Jade, and walks right up into his space.  Gamzee shifts uneasily at your shoulder, like he wants to grab her and pull her back.  “No, I think I’ve heard your story!  Are you…the Knight of the Iron Cage?”    `

Equius freezes.  “Are you addressing me, mortal?” 

It’s a pretty flimsy pretense of ignorance, and Jade doesn’t even really justify it with acknowledgement.  Nepeta is looking from Jade to Equius and back now, eyes wide and pupils slitted.  The dark spots on her skin shift as she breathes. 

“You tried to build an iron cage and trap a fae,” says Jade, and you shudder a little at the thought.  The last people you would want to mess with.  “The stories say you caught the queen of the fae herself!  And that it didn't end well for you.”

“How dare you?”

“And I guess that means you must be the huntress!”  says Jade, with completely suicidal brightness, and Nepeta cocks her head on one side and gives her a long look, then bares a couple of really white, sharp teeth.  It’s…probably a smile?  “You were both humans once, right?  Oh, there are so many things I want to talk to you about—your friendship is legendary!”

Nepeta blinks and then smiles again, a good deal more genuine.  Equius is still red in the face and looks utterly offended, but he’s not going to say anything about it, especially since every time he moves you hear a low growl rise in Gamzee’s chest behind you.  You wonder if they would have gotten along better some other time, when Gamzee wasn’t already on edge—when he gets in his snippy godly mood he gets so godsdamn stubborn.

“So you’re just here to see if I’m okay?”  You spread your wings and fold them again, showing off your new wingspan and the fall-leaf red of the membranes, which are tattered as ever.  “As good as I ever was.  Are we done here?”

“Well, that’s not the only reason!”  Nepeta has come to stand between you and Equius , like she wasn’t even thinking about doing it—you standing in front of Gamzee, her standing in front of Eqiuus, and Jade in the middle looking fascinated and curios and completely unconcerned with the argument going on over her head.  “Terezi has called for another caucus.”

You stare at her a second, and then open your mouth—she cuts over you.

“I know!  You never come.  But this time you should!  You need to introduce…” she waves at Gamzee, and to her credit she does manage to all but the smallest hint of distaste out of her expression.  “…And tell everybody what happened.  And everybody can actually come, for once!  Even Feferi, and you know how hard it is for her to get up to Terezi’s place when she has so much to do and she has to come so far.  It would be really sad if everybody but you was there!”

You hesitate. 

…But you haven’t gone to caucus for at least a hundred years, and that you from the past was a bitter little sapling who couldn’t deal with not getting what he wanted.  You’re a mature…full-grown…you can handle it now, is the point.  Sod that past you.  And besides...has Gamzee ever seen a hot spring before?  Would he like it?  You bet he would, he’s always soaking up the sun and curling up by the fire.

You completely ignore the warm little happy feeling that blossoms in your chest at the thought, and then another happy thought occurs to you and you actually find yourself smiling. 

“Alright,” you say.  “Bugger it.  Fine.  I’ll be there.  But I have one condition.”

You look at Jade, and she looks back at you with wide eyes, weird and solid and fleeting and human. 

 “You wanted to see more gods, right?”