[OPEN] If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain

[honeyedwords]

Who| Sherlock Holmes
What| Midnight mopery
Where| In the park by the shopping district
When| Right about now
Warnings/Notes| References to (kind of ongoing) drug abuse

Sherlock had spent much too long avoiding the Capitol. It had seemed reasonable enough to take whatever excuses he could to stay away from the place; after all, what was the point of marching all the way out to the killing fields just to watch two children from his district get slaughtered by careers, year after year? (Well, he supposes it's not necessarily children anymore, but uninvolved bystanders from across time and space isn't much better.) Drugging himself into a stupor and allowing Beetee or one of the other competent ones run the fool's errand of trying to bring someone home always seemed the better option.

That particular dodge wasn't an option anymore, though. Not if he wanted to actually get anything done ever again. There isn't anything useful about hiding away from all your problems forever, anyway. Might as well stop being a coward and go already.

He's seated on a bench towards the edge of the park, as the fountain is too much of a gathering place for his likings and he'd prefer not to be gawked at today. Anyone who passes by receives a particularly severe scowl and precisely zero eye contact for their troubles. His manner of dress is characteristically shabby, from the fraying sweater to the worn jeans. This on top of the thin sheen of sweat on his brow despite his shivering and the dark circles under his eyes all contribute to making him look like an absolute wreck.

Comments

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat mostly goes into the city at night--unless he has to buy something with his cull money, since humans and their weird diurnal thing means that the stores are mostly just open in the day. Luckily, though, they are perfectly fine having their movie hives play films at a more sensible hour.

It was a good movie too, about a playboy District Two Career Victor who only slept with so many Capitol girls because he'd been in love with his Escort since he was reaped and she still thought of him as a scared fifteen-year-old. The lead actress even looked a little bit like Troll Meg Ryan. The only annoying part was how he'd had to sit way at the front of the theatre in the nosebleed section because too many dickheads with large (fake) horns were sitting in the middle rows. Humans.

Some of the fake horns were really fucking ridiculous too. Not everyone seemed to have realized that horns only came in orange fading to white, so Karkat had seen way too many fake horns in totally stupid colors like pink and electric blue. He'd even seen someone wearing a pair of rainbow horns, their shape modeled of the initiate. Gamzee would have loved those stupid horns, Karkat thinks.

Fuck, he misses Gamzee. He misses every single one of them really. It's probably worst with Sollux and Gamzee and Terezi. Sollux and Gamzee because of the Helmsman and the Initiate reminding him who they aren't all the time and Terezi because... she was Terezi.

In fact, Karkat is too busy missing people that he forgets to pay too much attention to the path ahead of him. And it turns out that when you bang your nubs against the wrought metal sides of a Capitol park bench it really fucking hurts.

"FUCK!!!"

[honeyedwords]

The rather percussive interruption on Karkat's behalf earns him a very wary raised eyebrow. Sherlock's plenty familiar with the phenomena of being too wrapped up in yourself to be bothered to think about anything else, and this grey, pointy young man's got the right look about him for it.

"You might consider looking into improving your multitasking ability," he says, calmly. "Might save your life one day."

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat glares at the guy on the bench. He's a little plain-looking for a Capitol citizen, but what the fuck does he know, all these humans kind of look the same anyway? "I can multitask perfectly fine," he says huffily. "And I've already died once so your help is too fucking late."

[honeyedwords]

"Oh, so did you intend to walk directly into a solid object while appearing to be lost in thought?" Stranger things have happened, but somehow Sherlock doubts that's the case. It probably has something to do with the startled swearing and brief pained expression, but it's only a hunch, of course.

"And you're right, how silly of me. I forgot that dying a single time condemns one to die again and again regardless of any attempts to improve so why bother? Thank you for reminding me." He gives the man a mock good-natured nod and smile, looking him up and down as he does so. Yes, this is one of the few tributes he'd paid some mind while watching the recent games in passing.

"Karkat Vantas, District 1. Strong preference for melee combat, a field in which, I note, it is very important to be able to pay detailed attention to multiple things happening around you at once."

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat is ready to respond with Maybe I fucking DID, shitbucket, but then the rest of the stranger's words register and he instead gives the man on the bench a once-over of his own. For a Capitol citizen, he looks pretty shabby. But if he were a tribute he'd have been stuffed into something fancy by now, so he's probably not one of those either. What the hell is he?

"You a fan or something?"

[honeyedwords]

Sherlock makes a huffing noise that's almost a laugh.

"No, hardly," he says. "Sherlock Holmes, one of the victors -- if you can really call us that -- from before the Capitol started recruiting people from across the multiverse to join in their games. Of course I'm not from the same district as you, so it's probably inadvisable for me to tell you much of anything, but you really should look into learning to think and walk at the same time. Useful skill."

apology for brevity

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat glares at him.

"So what district were you in, dipshit?"

[honeyedwords]

"Three," he answers. "Electronics. We don't win often, at least not in comparison to some other districts I might name, but I suppose that's just what we get for being assigned an industry that means factory work instead of manual labor or wilderness survival. Not that district assignment bears much relevance anymore. I suppose it evens the odds, to an extent."

Sherlock smiles mirthlessly. So many excuses for why it's alright to use unaffiliated outsiders as tributes when the Hunger Games were initially meant to punish the districts for their rebellion, so little time. It would almost be funny watching the Capitol scramble to cover its tracks if the consequences weren't so great.

[sleeplessinalternia]

"Was my district any good at this shit?" Karkat asks, curious in spite of himself. He sits down on the bench, making sure to keep some space between him and this Holmes guy.

[honeyedwords]

"District one is luxury goods," Sherlock replies, glancing around briefly. Of course the Capitol is good enough to hide its bugs and cameras well out of plain sight, and a wooded park is positively bursting with likely hiding places. Still, he feels the ambient noise from the drones gathered about the fountain and bustling to and fro between the nearby stores are about enough to drown out pertinent details. Best to keep the conversation away from anything too sensitive, though. He lowers his voice slightly.

"Wines, furs, other things this lot could live without but don't want to. Not as practical a sort of labor as, say, lumber, where you learn to swing an axe as soon as you can walk but it made them the Capitol's favorite lap dog. Afforded them certain privileges. Enough food rations to feed their growing children properly. A blind eye turned to anyone who thought to teach their young how to kill in preparation for the arena. So the rest of us sent in starving, terrified boys and girls while One, Two, and Four had trained killers queued up to volunteer."

This is obviously a particularly sore subject for him, and one he's spent a lot of time pondering, drafting little speeches and tirades addressed to no one in particular.

"Of course it all served the Capitol's purposes. A handful of skilled murderers makes for a more entertaining games, and if the districts start to hate each other for being able to prepare for the games, then they stop hating the Capitol for making them in the first place." He sniffs, frowning. "Rotten stuff, all of it. But now we've dropped it on your shoulders instead, so all's well! No need to get righteous about it anymore."

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat shrugs. "Yeah, well, what do highbloods care about lowbloods anyway? I mean, okay, technically you humans all have the same color, but it's pretty obvious where everyone is here metaphorically."

He leans back against the bench, looks up at the sky. It's hard to see any stars, the city's too bright for them. "I guess they put me in the right District, then. I've been training myself to fight and kill for sweeps. You pretty much have to back home if you don't want to die yourself. That's why I don't get a lot of these human tributes, how they act like these games are these awful, unthinkable things, but back home we already had reality television shows like them--and in those nobody got brought back to life. I mean, it's not usually on such a huge scale, but."

He shrugs again. "Hey, what's twelve do, then?"

[honeyedwords]

This actually gives Sherlock some pause. He knows trolls tend to be a brutal species as a whole, but the fact that they have similar games is. Well. It's something. He feels like he shouldn't be glad that they're not the only species capable of this sort of thing, but here he is.

Sherlock sighs. There's not much use in dwelling on it right now.

"Yes, well, unfortunately humans tend to raise their own young in family units and thus get rather attached to the idea of not letting them die. I'm sure you have some placental mammals back home, and if they're anything like we're meant to be they're fiercely protective of their offspring. Between our social method of raising children, slow rate of maturation, and low rate of reproduction, humans are somewhat hard-wired to try to preserve the lives of our kin whenever possible. It's because of this that the idea of someone putting a load of people into a box until one agrees to murder all the rest is so morally repugnant to us."

"District 12 is Coal. I assume you ask because of your friend, the one who looks like you? Signless, was it?"

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat nods along. He isn't all that surprised that the source of the humans' weirdness about the Games is their freaky mammal biology. He briefly wonders if part of Signless' own weirdness is that he had a troll mother instead of a proper lusus--but it was probably just as much those freaky past-life dreams as anything else. "I'd ask why in that case the Capitol Humans don't give a fuck about making everyone kill each other for shits and giggles, but as we already established they're the highbloods here." Highbloods were highbloods, after all, no matter the species.

"And yeah, Signless. He's... sort of my ancestor, which is still weirding me the fuck out, because I never actually believed in ancestors. They were just some bullshit highblood belief, not applicable to the rest of us."

[honeyedwords]

"Unfortunately, it's very easy to condition a population to think of outsiders as lesser, inferior, and not worthy of empathy, much as I assume your highbloods do to all the rest."

The whole caste structure stratified thing is awfully fascinating, and one of the reasons Sherlock has been paying closer attention to the trolls than most of the other tributes. It is, however, also horribly depressing. As Karkat said, the Capitol maps all too well to their highbloods.

"Your ancestor?" he asks, genuinely curious. What with trolls not being raised socially and the competitive nature of their society, he would have assumed genetic relationships wouldn't be considered all that significant, but he supposes there's always room for sentimentality even in the least opportune of times.

[sleeplessinalternia]

"It's what they call it when you and another troll from sweeps in the past have a ridiculously close genetic make-up," Karkat explains. "The idea is that you've got such close genetics because of them contributing their own genetic material to the slurry. And supposedly if you're the descendent you have to finish whatever unfinished business your ancestor had. I always figured it was complete beastshit, but..." He shrugs. "Signless has the exact same genetic make-up as me." Even if it wasn't because of anything to do with the slurry.

[honeyedwords]

"And your Signless's unfinished business was his message of peace? It's what he's gained the most notoriety for here, certainly. A little incongruous with what I understand of the rest of troll culture, but I suppose that has something to do with why it's still unfinished."

Sherlock doesn't mean that in a biting way, but most would be forgiven for taking it like that. He's never been one of the greatest communicators of his time, nor has he attempted to be. Bluntness has been his closest companion, year after year, and he's not about to abandon it yet.

"You, meanwhile, seem to fall much more in line with the zeitgeist."

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat shrugs. "If you don't want to die, you learn to fight and you learn to kill. I don't want to die."

He leans back on the bench to gaze up at the sky, but the familiar constellations of home are nowhere to be found. He can't really see any stars due to the lights of the Capitol, but there's a moon: a single, small grey moon.

"He had some other unfinished business that I almost did finish before I came here."

[honeyedwords]

"Certainly a practical philosophy. It will serve you well enough here, I think."

It's certainly one of the common ones adopted by victors who actually wanted to be victors. Somehow, though, he thinks Karkat may not fit in with the other careers quite as well as one might think. There's more to him than fighting and killing, though perhaps that's only because that's the baseline for most if not all trolls. Holmes makes a mental note of it regardless.

"And what is that, if I may be so bold as to ask?"

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat doesn't say anything at first, just staring up at the lone moon. It's too small, too pale, too colorless, too alone.

"I played a game," he says finally.