Karkat Vantas (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sleeplessinalternia) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thecapitol2014-03-07 08:28 pm
sleeplessinalternia) wrote in thecapitol2014-03-07 08:28 pm
lord have mercy
Who| Karkat and OPEN
What| Afternearly half a sweep a year away, Karkat's back in the tribute tower. He's not happy about it.
Where| D1 suite, elsewhere in tribute tower, in the capitol itself
When| Week 6 and beyond
Warnings/Notes| I'll be putting up some prompts in the comments for the three locations, but otherwise feel free to make your own wildcard prompt! JSYK, Karkat has been revived a week or so after he died (roughly concurrent to when Kankri got resurrected from his) and looks roughly a year older than he was last time anybody saw him. As for warnings... there will be language, probably references to Karkat's death and a little bit of Homestuck spoilers.
Familiar overhead block surface.
Karkat blinks his occular orbs in dismay. He-- he fucking knows this place. Memories come flooding back. Panem. He's in fucking Panem. Held captive by the fucking Capitol humans. Here he was, half-a-sweep older, and now, now, he knew what a fucking travesty that really was.
"We made you," he mutters under his breath. "You should be worshipping us, not fucking turning us into reality television."
There's a paper container of mixed goods next to him on the resting platform. Karkat shakes it out onto the thermal retention fabric. A bottle of what proved to be some kind of artificial scent. A hat in the shape of a gelatinous sea creature. Rubber bouncing spheres in the shapes of his, Signless, and Kankri's heads. A pendant with an enameled picture of a hamburger on it. Gummy candies in the shape of hamburgers. A black shirt with the word DEAD written in his own blood color. A toy figure of himself whose head came off when you squeezed it.
Karkat stares down at the assorted goods. "What the fucking fuck?"
What| After
Where| D1 suite, elsewhere in tribute tower, in the capitol itself
When| Week 6 and beyond
Warnings/Notes| I'll be putting up some prompts in the comments for the three locations, but otherwise feel free to make your own wildcard prompt! JSYK, Karkat has been revived a week or so after he died (roughly concurrent to when Kankri got resurrected from his) and looks roughly a year older than he was last time anybody saw him. As for warnings... there will be language, probably references to Karkat's death and a little bit of Homestuck spoilers.
Familiar overhead block surface.
Karkat blinks his occular orbs in dismay. He-- he fucking knows this place. Memories come flooding back. Panem. He's in fucking Panem. Held captive by the fucking Capitol humans. Here he was, half-a-sweep older, and now, now, he knew what a fucking travesty that really was.
"We made you," he mutters under his breath. "You should be worshipping us, not fucking turning us into reality television."
There's a paper container of mixed goods next to him on the resting platform. Karkat shakes it out onto the thermal retention fabric. A bottle of what proved to be some kind of artificial scent. A hat in the shape of a gelatinous sea creature. Rubber bouncing spheres in the shapes of his, Signless, and Kankri's heads. A pendant with an enameled picture of a hamburger on it. Gummy candies in the shape of hamburgers. A black shirt with the word DEAD written in his own blood color. A toy figure of himself whose head came off when you squeezed it.
Karkat stares down at the assorted goods. "What the fucking fuck?"
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"It's about Terezi," he says, "and-- and the fucking Initiate and how she's still fucking friends with him after everything he did to me-- how she only waited, like, a week to make up with him. He fucking tortured me and she barely even waits a week. And-- and I know I should be grateful she even wants to still be friends with me after I treated her like shit for a whole fucking perigee-- and I am grateful-- but after what he did to me-- after what he fucking did to me-- I saw some clips from the arena, her telling him about Vriska, about all kinds of shit she wouldn't tell me because of the stupid timelines-- how can she fucking trust him?"
Karkat's voice is ragged. He sounds very close to crying. "I mean, fuck, I was awful to her for a perigee when she was only trying to protect me, I fucking know that now, but doesn't it matter what he did to me? Shouldn't it matter?"
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"And I don't think that she just doesn't care. I think she's trying to balance caring about things that are difficult to care about all at the same time. But I can't speak for her. I don't know, really."
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He's shaking a little. "And-- even if she does care, it's fucking killing me to see her with him. Like-- like someone ground up glass and poured it down my windpipe. That's how I feel every fucking time I see them. And I fucking hate it."
One of his hands snakes around to cling to Signless' back. "But, like, I can't fucking tell her this shit, she'd think I was trying to arrange her relationships again, like when I made that stupid chart." Not that he'd been able to tell her even before he lived through making the stupid chart, but still.
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Signless hopes it does. He wants so, so badly to make up for the distance that's been growing between them. He knows it's a failure on his part that Karkat didn't feel comfortable enough to come to him with his problems, and the only way to fix that is to make himself as available as possible.
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He slips his other arm around Signless, fully returning the hug. "Is there any shit you need to tell me?"
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"I still don't know where I stand with the Disciple. I haven't ever since she arrived and it feels like every time we're almost how we were on Alternia, it gets strange and bitter again. She already had to watch me die once, and then I made her go through it again, and she should hate me but she won't let herself, and even if we're so much better than we were I'm still worried that... I don't know, that we'll never be as close as we used to be. That she's going to realize that and leave me like he did."
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He bites his lip. "Sorry. I'd hoped I'd have better advise for this shit, but my quadrant novels have failed me. Maybe you should talk to her about it some time after she gets back."
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"I'll talk to her. That's all I can do, really. Talk to her and be there for her, so she won't feel like she's alone. She's already felt what that's like, knowing I'll never come back. It's worse, for her. That's not her fault."
It just hurts, knowing that every time she looks at him she's reminded of watching him die, reminded of her exile, of everything she lost and all her guilt and pain. And that's not her fault, not any of it, but he still wishes he knew how to make it go away.
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"Everything fell apart," he said. "The demon--fucking Jack Noir, that's who he was, another session's Jack prototyped with the queen's ring--he killed our dreamselves and we discovered that the aliens on the world we created had their own session, the one with the Jack demon, and then everyone turned on each other. Eridan flipped the fuck out and killed Feferi and Kanaya and fucked up Sollux bad. Vriska killed Tavros and she was going to do something stupid to get everyone who was left killed so Terezi had to kill her. Kanaya came back as a rainbow drinker and got Eridan. And--" His breathing is stuttered now and he's holding Signless extra-tight. "And Gamzee freaked out too after he went into sopor withdrawal--I told you how he ate that shit, it was so stupid--and decided that weird puppet thing that one of the girls had found was talking to him and also that it was time he acted like a real indigo and killed everyone, so I sent Equius to take him down, whatever he had to do, and he killed Equius--and Nepeta too, I think she attacked him, he's got scars from her claws now. And-- and it was my fault they both died, because I could have made him stop, he was pale for me and I knew it but I was too fucking scared to try. And even-- even though I did stop him before he did anything to anyone else, it was too fucking late anyway." He swallows hard. "And then Sollux burnt himself out piloting our asteroid away.
"So you see," he says in a very small voice, "you should never have been proud of me."
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"Don't you tell me I can't be proud of you," he says, pulling back to look Karkat in the eyes. "You accomplished a lot, Karkat, you did, and you tried to hold things together even when they fell apart, and that's all anyone could have expected you to do. You made mistakes and you acted out of fear but that's because you're a person, not some abstract ideal of what a leader should be. I'll be proud of you if I want to be."
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He rubs lightly at the base of one of Karkat's horns.
"It's horrible that the one thing you had left broke down the way it did. It's horrible that you couldn't instead band together with your friends and take comfort in everything that you did accomplish. But that doesn't mean the other extreme is all you have. Only you can make peace with it and move forward, and I don't expect it will happen now, or even soon, but it needs to happen sometime, for your sake. I worry about you."
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He holds tight to Signless, listening to the thumping of his pumpbiscuit, and then lets himself go limp in the other troll's arms. "I should I have found something for them. I thought I had for a while. But it didn't matter, not in the end. And-- and we're completely fucked as a species now too. Eridan destroyed the matriorb."
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"Think of it this way. You have friends here. Some of those friends are even ones you lost, alive again, or ones you never would have made at all otherwise. You can make a life here, if you want, instead of dwelling on what's back on the meteor. It might be best for you to give up on going back. I have. It was killing me to hold onto it."
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Signless sighs. It's hard to get this across the way he wants, especially when he feels a little hypocritical considering how he was not long ago. But doesn't that mean he just knows better than anyone what a terrible road Karkat is walking down, thinking the way he is?
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