thecapitol | (OPEN) at least he's not dead now

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(OPEN) at least he's not dead now

Who| Karkat and whoever runs across him.
What| Now that he's out of the mini-arena, Karkat's exploring the place he has to live.
Where| All across the Training Center.
When| After his death in the mini-arena ~ a few days after. Anywhere around then.
Warnings/Notes| Karkat is pretty foulmouthed and irreverent, but nothing else. Feel free to use prose (whichever tense) or action; I'll adapt with you.

Of all the ways Karkat would wish to be welcomed someplace new, this was not one of them. Thanks to the arena, which they'd shoved him in with only minimal explanation, he'd suffered his second death in as many days. Wasn't it enough for Jane to fork him before he showed up? Did he really have to get...

He didn't want to think about it. Maybe it was better that it was something from the arena rather than a fellow tribute, but it didn't make being killed by an oversized, animatronic cartoon beast any better.

Even after, being alive was strange. Back during Sgrub and everything else before Panem, at least there were countless mechanics to explain why someone might revive. Here he didn't know what they did. Something technological? It wasn't unthinkable when they'd brought him here from another part of reality, and while he was glad to not be dead permanently, it was unsettling to think they had such technology at their disposal.

Now he was... not free, but at least somewhere safe. Not subject to the current edition of the Hunger Games, at any rate. He learned his district and what that meant. (District 6, transportation, here's your floor and your room.) He learned that the tower was host to tributes and the various mentors, escorts, stylists, and whoever else served part of this entertainment machine. Night would bring curfew, but days would be relatively open, giving him the chance to feel out his surroundings.

A.
One place he'd definitely find himself was the actual training center, the floor from which the building got its name. Being here would mean needing to be in shape and on his game, and while he had skills still left over from Sgrub, they would do no good if left unpracticed. If he could find a sickle amongst the weapons provided there, he'd be practicing with that. Otherwise he might check out the other stations. Learn knots? Sure. Learn edible plants? Worthwhile. And then there was regular old relief of frustration: he may not have been a fistkind user, but that didn't stop him from taking things out a punching bag.

B.
Night of course would leave him confined to the District 6 area. Unused to a bed, lacking sopor slime, and still rattled from the arena, he didn't sleep much. It didn't help that his species was naturally nocturnal, but even during the day he sought little rest. At least the common area had a TV and games to play, and the kitchen helped for hunger or thirst. It wouldn't be hard to spot the look on his face: tired and grumpy, with perpetual bags under his eyes.

C.
During the day again, he more than once found himself up on the roof. Here the atmosphere was less stifling, with fresh air and an actual sky to see, unlike the darkness or the void or luminescent shapes of dream bubbles back on the meteor. It wasn't his sky, not the one he knew from Alternia, but if it had been he wouldn't have been able to stand the sun. This was tolerable - relaxing, even - and it gave him a space from everything else.

D.
But beyond the rest, he wandered. The tower was big, and he knew well enough that people he knew had to be around. He'd heard mention, or seen a flash of horn in the arena he couldn't stop long enough to identify, and he had run into Eridan while he was still in there. It meant teammates or friends were here, and these above all else he sought out, carrying him through common rooms or the lobby or across hallways and elevators throughout the tower. Feasibly anyone could run into him; though short, most people weren't grey with horns, and it made him stand out.

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Terezi almost forces a laugh at the mention of the animatronics. Those things were ridiculous. And terrifying. Ridiculously terrifying. But it never makes it past her lips. The name Eridan comes up, and for a brief moment, there's a tight-lipped expression that crosses her face. It doesn't last--mostly because she's on her feet to check on the cocoa on the stove that is audibly boiling now. She busies herself with pouring the cocoa into cups and adding those tiny marshmallows before bringing them over to Karkat.

"Careful, it's hot," she warns, as she takes her seat again. "And thanks. I didn't really expect that you wouldn't, but it's nice to hear." It's nice to know were they stand for now, before things get too complicated between them again. "I've got your back if you need it, too."

She's still not pleased about Eridan, though, and it's a struggle to figure out how to broach that topic as she frowns down at her cup.

Karkat's not sure what to think of Eridan yet, himself, but in the moment it didn't really matter. Too much going on, too much chaos, and in spite of everything he missed him, like he missed all their asshole friends. Until Terezi asks he holds back on it, though, and lets her go to get the cocoa.

"Thanks," he murmurs as he takes his cup. He watches the little marshmallows as he holds it, waiting for the moment for it to cool some. "For both things. It is nice to hear. Even spread across different points of the timeline, I'd like to think we're still a team."

What all that means here he's not sure yet, but if he can help her and be helped by her, it's a good start.

Still a team. There's a bit of uncomfortable silence in that, which Terezi tries to mitigate by swirling her cocoa around in her cup. Just something to look like she's not just sitting there unoccupied. There's more than a few things that he's said to remind her that she still doesn't know what point he's from. But she knows what point she remembers him from, and also all the trouble that it caused.

"Are we?" she asks, after a moment. The Eridan issue can be set aside for now. This is more important to her, to know exactly where she stands with him. "Are we still a team?"

Karkat's lips tighten to something flatter for her silence. Even if she's fiddling with her cup, it's a long, obvious pause - and his concern proves warranted.

"Yes," he says, prompt and firm. "We... So we were scattered and disparate, and almost everyone was up to their stems in interpersonal drama, but we were still a team and I want us to be one here too. Even if we're not all here - hell, because of that - I want to at least have some kind of..." His hand motions, searching the air for the right word. "Rapport, ability to rely on each other, to at least know we aren't going to turn around and stab each other in the back as soon as it's convenient in the arenas."

And outside, but even he's quiet about that kind of planning, for as little as it can be called such at present.

It all sounds so nice, when he says it like that. It makes her miss that part of him that she'd forgotten about: That impassioned leadership. That moment where you realized that he didn't just want this just for the sake of tactics or politics, but because he actually cared about people. He cared about making sure that his 'team' stayed together in one piece.

She doesn't even mind the twinge of guilt in her chest when he mentions not stabbing each other in the back in the arenas. It does take her a moment, though, to remember that he wouldn't know about that.

"Alright. That sounds like a plan."

When Terezi answers, he breathes out slow through his nose, not quite a sigh, and lets his posture ease. Now finally does he drink from his cocoa, a long sip that ends with him licking half-melted bits of marshmallow from his lip.

"Good. I'm glad." The relief is present in his voice.

He straightens up now. "I realize I'm kind of coming in in the middle of shit. There's people who know me who I don't know, and apparently some kind of..." He makes the searching motion again. "... past drama that escapes my sphere of knowledge. Like, the Makara bulgebiter mentioned something about you when he went off on me a while back, and I don't know what else has happened. Pretty much everyone's been around longer than me - this me - so it's like wading into a mound of broken pottery and trying to figure out what shards got shattered off of what."

Terezi was fully prepared to start filling Karkat in on the drama around the Tower, as soon as he mentioned coming into this place in the middle of shit. It would be difficult to figure out where to start, but catching him up to speed would be best--

At least until he recounts the incident with the "Makara". She's torn between correcting him on Kurloz's proper title and being alarmed that there had been a confrontation already. Ultimately, her alarm wins out first and foremost.

"Wait, hold up. What do you mean he went off on you? When was this?" The cup held between her hands is all but forgotten in the wake of this revelation.

This time Karkat does sigh, a heavy, frustrated thing as he dredges up the memories. He meant to ask her about it anyway, sooner or later, but talking with her about other things was... complicated, honestly, but nicer. Better than the subject of this douchebag.

"A few days ago. It was big and stupid and he threw a giant goddamn wiggler fit for reasons I still don't understand, but the end result is him slamming me against the wall and telling me to thank you that he didn't do anything worse - not that I would have doubted him to try if not for Nill interrupting." He'd cross his arms but for the mug in his hand, so he settles for tightening his hold. "I don't know if you know her, but after she talked to us separately even she agreed he went too far, and that was after she'd taken his side first."

It should be apparent by Terezi's expression that this was not a story she expected to hear. The fact that Kurloz had already made his aggression known, even before she could manage to get out of the hospital didn't bode well. To be honest, she might have to find this Nill and thank her for intervening.

What she couldn't understand is what would set him off like that, after he had promised her to avoid rather than confront. It sounds wrong, and while she doesn't want to doubt Karkat after the touching moment they'd just had, she can't help but feel there's something missing here.

"What did you say to him? Before he went off on you?"

A grunt answers her first, irritated but unsurprised. "A number of things. It was complicated."

After a shorter sip from his cup, he sets it aside, even if it means having to put it atop another seat.

"So first off, I'm in the lobby. I hear this voice from behind say 'not motherfucking you', and first I think it's Gamzee, but I turn and the hair's wrong and shit. So I think, maybe it's his dancestor, and I ask but I get his name wrong somehow. Can you really tell me Carlos and Kurloz sound that different? So he corrects me all pissy about it and expects me to know about some 'understanding' him and past me had. I tell him to calm down and that I don't know him--and okay, so I'm not gentle about it, but I wasn't being any worse than he was.

"Anyway, basically he tells me that we stay away from each other and things are fine. I tell him fine, I'll go on my way, but he explodes about how I supposedly 'ordered' him," he says with mimed enclosure talons, "when I did nothing of the sort. I call him on it because where the fuck did that even come from? I agreed with him about avoiding each other, for shit's sake. So you know what he does? He grabs me by my shirt, slams me against the wall, smacks his fist against it beside my head and says to thank you for him not doing any worse, and after that, like a nice little farewell tells me to enjoy the games."

His face is incredulous by now. He's still shocked by the ordeal even after the fact. It can't just be his attitude, he thinks, because he's rude like that to everyone. The Initiate treated him no better.

"That's where Nill came in, though. She got between us, made him back off, and warned me about the peacekeepers. So I left, she talked to him, and then I talked to her after I got back, and she barely seemed to know why he got so mad either."

Terezi listens quietly, not making any attempt to interrupt as Karkat tells his story. There's a few times that he gets a visible reaction out of her--a wince at the word 'ordered', a sigh at the violence that Initiate showed. She wants to put her face in her hands and bury her head for a while. This was certainly not the best way that they could have met.

But where does she begin? She knows that Karkat is only paraphrasing, that there must have been some specific word or phrase to set Initiate off. But he clearly doesn't understand what he did to provoke that, and honestly she wouldn't expect him to. With what she's heard so far, she can imagine it was some kind of lash-out from his time spent as an Avox. No one would want to be even remotely given an order after that. It still hurts her sometimes, when she asks him to do something and he complies just a little too quickly, a little too rigidly. That conditioning is still in there, and she can't imagine what that must be like for him.

"I'll talk to him," she says first and foremost to mitigate any more ill feelings. "I know you didn't mean to say anything harmful. But with him... it's complicated. They've done things to him here that were horrific, and you probably touched on that in something you said."

She doesn't bury her face like she wants to, but she does rub her hands against it, as if she can rub the weariness away. "You were never on the same side of any interpersonal drama that cropped up, when your--when the other Karkat was here. I had to ask the both of you to keep to yourselves, and in addition, he promised me that he wouldn't hurt you. He wasn't kind about it, but... He wouldn't have done more than that."

Not the best way is definitely right. Maybe if someone else had been there to let things go smoother, before that presence was outright necessary as an intervening force. As it stands, surely neither of them have a good opinion of the other, and aren't likely to think better anytime soon.

This is the second time someone's said they'll talk to him. Karkat eyes her for it, thinking and listening and frowning all the while. It sounds like she's defending him, and it pulls his expression tighter for it, until at the end he meets her reassurance with a noise of disbelief.

"Seriously? He picked me up by my shirt and slammed me into a wall. If Nill hadn't come in he probably would have done worse until a peacekeeper could pry him off, and then we'd both probably be taken." Such is the impression Nill gave him. Security's jumpy lately, she said.

"I don't care if I touched on something. I had no way of knowing, I told him I didn't remember anything, and he's the one who took things too far."

"And you're telling me that you didn't provoke him in the slightest?"

She's trying to be neutral, she really is. But with such a heavily biased story, she knows that it can't be right. She knows that Karkat wasn't nearly as innocent as he claims to be, even if that's the way that he sees it. Because she knows just how volatile his own temper is--and more importantly how volatile his mouth is.

"You just finished telling me that you weren't kind about telling him to back off. On top of that, you couldn't even bother to correctly remember his name--which you shouldn't be using anyway. And somehow he's the only one that overstepped his boundaries here?"

It gets under her skin just a little, as much as she doesn't want it to. She knows it's not easy coming up to speed with all of this so quickly, but just once she wishes that Karkat would take a moment to understand the situation before trying to throw his bravado around like he has something to prove. It didn't matter in SGRUB, where it was only the twelve of them and they could just ignore his antics, but this is different.

"You're right that he shouldn't have check you against the wall," she does manage to concede, trying to at least give him a little ground. "And I can't say anything for what the Peacekeepers would have done, but don't call me a liar over him. He wouldn't have done more than that, intervention or not. He doesn't break promises."

Is this really how she's taking it? Karkat's eyebrows press in together, and his mouth hangs a space open. Everything she says just catches at him more, digging into the tangle of ire he feels over the whole thing and pulling it back to the forefront, with more knots added for each tug. By the end of it he's sunk against the back of his chair, looking nearly shocked for the whole of her reaction.

"You're defending him. You're actually defending him." It's not a question. She may have given her concession at the end, but it feels like a token, cheap and useless after the rest.

"He didn't even tell me his supposed title, and he never said he had the same name as Kurloz; he just got pissy about a measly little pronunciation error. And why the hell does he have a title in the first place? He looks, what, a sweep older than us?" He's still sore over that.

"And so what if I was rude? I'm like that to literally everyone and you know it, and I didn't even start out that bad. Are you going to tell me it was wrong to tell him to calm down when he got all mad and I didn't even know what his problem was? And I didn't order him when I said I did! I agreed that we should avoid each other! And sure, I was pissed, but I didn't order him into anything then."

Eyes squinting, he asks, "Why do you trust him so much, anyway? You weren't even there. You didn't hear him, you didn't see how he looked - and what about that 'enjoy the games' thing he said? For all I know he might just come after me in the arena, and then what? Are you going to tell me it's my fault then, too?"

You're defending him, he accuses, and Terezi has to fight not to wince. She is, and there's really no explanation for it that would be logical or reasonable. She sips at her cocoa instead, trying to let him finish with his indignant reaction before offering any sort of explanation.

"Karkat. Don't put words in my mouth." She fixes a look on him, flat stare and thin-pressed lips. She really doesn't have the patience for his wild leaps of logic. Nor does she have the emotional fortitude not to inwardly cringe at the way that he mentions Initiate coming after him. Funny, that one.

"I trust him because he's important to me. And because he knows that I won't tolerate him hurting my friends. That is also important to me, which makes it important to him." That's a safe line of logic, she thinks. Terezi really doesn't want to go into the particulars of what he means to her--or where Karkat stands in that regard, either.

"He is not going to touch you in any arena--and I expect the same from you. If you can't get along, then just do me a solid and just avoid each other. Okay?"

Karkat's swelling anger burbles and steams as she answers him, until at the end he explodes, "I already said I'm going to avoid him!" His hands fly out, and his look is mad and incredulous as ever. "I'm the one worrying about what he might do, and you just give me platitudes and come at me about what I might do? I never touched him. I never did anything. How many times do I have to say he's the volatile grease smear who came after me when I agreed with him on avoiding each other?"

He shoves his chair back now, slips off the seat, and sets to pacing. The cocoa he set aside is well-forgotten now; he can't even think to want it anymore.

"When the fuck did your lobe get shoved so far up your ass, Terezi? You tell me not to put words in your mouth, and yet you don't even listen to me. You trust him, the violent, explosive, paint-huffing cultist over the guy he attacked when I never even implicated I wanted to go after him at all. What is with you and clowns?"

His steps have carried him back and forth, hands gesturing broadly and emphatically along the way, but it's here at the end that he turns back. His expression is helpless in a sense, beyond the exasperation and aggravation forming the most of it.

"Don't tell me you're chugging the Faygo with him too."

It's not even close to a sensitive way to ask, but he's too mad to put it nicely.

Edited 2014-11-24 03:53 (UTC)

It is clear in Terezi's posture that she's not happy with the turn that this conversation has taken. Her shoulders drawn in, bristling at the accusations that he's throwing at her. He's angry, and it's never easy to reason with him once he's like this--but it's far too reminiscent of their past fights for her taste.

When he shoots off that final comment about Faygo, through, she slams her cup back down onto the counter with a clatter.

"Do not. Make that comparison in front of me again." Terezi very nearly hisses the words, her eyes narrow dangerously and her jaw clenching in anger. "I don't care what you or anyone else thinks about him. He is nothing like Gamzee, and he never will be."

"Initiate Fraysong--" She uses his name deliberately, emphasizing it to make a point. "--has been here just as long as I have. That volatile grease-smear, as you put it, is my best friend. He is not some monster ready to lash out and kill at a moment's notice. He's a person. Temperamental, yes, but kind. And if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't even be here, so maybe you should step back and sit down."

It's the truth of the matter, even if Karkat doesn't know it yet. Even if she doesn't know how to explain it to him. She's not sure that she could even explain it to herself--how much he means to her, except in the most simplest of terms. But she's not about to hunker down with Karkat for a feelings jam about the nature of her relationship with Kurloz.

She does takes a deep breath, though, trying to rein her temper back in. She's mad, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't care. "I told you that he shouldn't have done that. I said that I would talk to him, and I will. I am not giving you platitudes, Karkat. I don't like that he lashed out at you, whatever the reason for it. But don't expect me to sit here and commiserate with you about what a horrible cretin he is, when you don't know one lick about him."

Of all things Karkat feels about this situation, happy is as far as it gets, and his mood doesn't change for her displeasure. That's not to say she has no effect at all. The slam of her cup earns a startled cringe, but her hiss and her look and her words keep his anger right where it is. Her denial and pointed use of the Initiate's title add irritation to the hefty stack of grievances he's working with, and it still feels far too much as if she's taking his side. What concession she made isn't good enough anymore. How can she claim he's not ready to lash out after what he did? How can she call him kind?

For as little as he knows of everything, his opinion is too skewed and too biased by other things to even consider her point of view. Clowns bring no good in the long run, not to him and not to her. He keeps picking at the details of what happened in counter to each good word she says, like the treatment towards him would shape everything. Or maybe not - he's not quite that stupid - but it feels still as though she places more trust in him than he deserves.

"Fuck this," he hisses, irritated but suddenly tired with things. "Talk to him if you want, I don't care. But I'm not going to stand here and listen to you defend Makara--" Like her, the choice is deliberate. "--after everything that happened." Not just to him, but to the her he knew. If she told him her feelings about him he'd only lodge more firmly into his opinion.

"I'm leaving," he says instead, and turns pointedly to head for the elevator.

There are a number of things that Terezi could say. A good number of those things are either hurtful or stupid. Being responsible means that she knows well enough what she should and shouldn't say in this situation, but the urge to bite back with something cutting is there. Thankfully, she doesn't.

But she doesn't like feeling dismissed, either. It feels like being back at square one again, all those months ago. He says he's leaving, and Terezi doesn't stop him. She waits for him to go, tight-lipped and frowning, before finally bowing her head into her hands. Her fingertips rub at her temples, and she exhales slowly, trying to ignore the heavy weight in her chest. The first time was hard enough. She doesn't want to do this again.

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(OPEN) at least he's not dead now

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