thecapitol | [open] and the stains coming from my blood tell me

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[open] and the stains coming from my blood tell me

Who| Karkat and anyone currently around the Capitol
What| Died like a loser at the Cornucopia, now back in the Capitol. At least his leg's fixed?
Where| Tribute Tower + out in the city
When| Evening the day after the start of the arena + the following days.
Warnings/Notes| Mild wound reference/description, but nothing big planned.

God damnit, really?

It's been about a day since Karkat's untimely death post-Cornucopia, and he wastes no time lingering about the cold room he wakes up in after every death. He's whole and hale again, his leg free of so much as a scar to hint where he'd been shot, and it feels good to be able to walk around without hurting. Doesn't hurt after his death, either; whatever that was, it sure wasn't a comfortable way to go. Speaking of, how did he go? His memories are jumbled and vague, and he mostly remembers a bang and then being carried somewhere by Shepard. Where, he doesn't know; he doesn't think he made it that far.

A. Tower Lobby

He makes a stop in the lobby, not planned, but because he catches the answer to his question. There on one of the various screens playing this arena's games is his own body, rushing on up to the pyre that served as the Cornucopia. There's others around him, some familiar and some not, and is that the douchebag he ran into at last Crowning? He looks different without all the glitter and LEDs, but he's positive, and--

Holy shit, that is lightning. A commentator rattles in the background, explaining how the charge radiated outward, hitting not just Gary but a number of nearby tributes. He sees himself laying there, and--wow, yes, this is about him, huh? Because the footage sticks on him as Shepard comes up, telling him to hold on and how they're gonna move, and how he better not puke on her. To his credit he didn't, but man, he really couldn't move, could he? And he couldn't hear a word. But she walks, carrying him somewhere, and...

"Are you kidding me? I died just like that?" He gestures at the screen, as if whoever is blathering about the moment can hear him. "That is the lamest, most watery nooked excuse for a death I've ever been through! Even worse than that time with the fork! Didn't I do anything? There were sickles that time, come on--"

The camera zooms in as Shepard, having realized his death, now fishes for the necklace he wore as token. She grips it and gives a hard yank.

"She broke my fucking necklace!"

B. District 6

It's after he's vented his anger at his arena performance (and gotten away from whoever might have found him there) that Karkat finally hauls up to his district. He's grumpy still and not real keen to be back, but he wants to change, and he figures he'll need to talk to some people. Which is to say, his mentor and escort.

It's after he's switched into something comfortable and familiar that he heads out. If any other tributes have the misfortune to be here already, they might spot him, but otherwise he makes his way to bang on Stephen and Linden's doors.

"Guess who's dead!" he shouts through the barrier by way of greeting. He hopes they're around. He is not in the mood for an untamed honkfowl pursuit.

C. Training Center

It's in the later days that Karkat gets back to training. With his body fully healed again, he's able to actually work at it like he wants to, and make up for what he missed after his return from jail. Well, maybe not 'make up' properly with the way bodies reset around here, but it feels like it anyway, and he's glad to be able to work out again.

In a way, he feels like he owes it to Shepard to keep up with the regiment she put him on. So for all she's still in the arena, each morning bright and early he brings himself down to train. Running, practicing forms, and generally keeping at old habits is part of it, but another is honestly a good chunk of angry sickle training.

He's really mad he didn't get to use one in the arena. He's going to stay mad. His training dummy, innocent and sweet, takes the brunt of this anger.

D. The Capitol

The best thing by far (apart from the healed body sweet mother grub hell yes) is that with his return from the arena, Karkat is finally free of the tower arrest that kept him cooped up after the mess with the Initiate. Better yet, that second point means he can go out and walk to his heart's content. He downright refuses to stay in, and he goes everywhere, from parks to that favorite pastry shop he hasn't visited in a month to just random paths down the streets. In a rare sight, he can even be spotted talking animatedly to fans, bitching to them too about how unfair it is that he died in such a lame way. They are sympathetic to his plight, and a good few are eager to hear him boast about the sickle skills he could have shown off.

But whether his path takes him to restaurants or bookshops, gardens or city streets, it's not hard to find him somewhere.

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The moment the door to Signless's room opens, mini-crabdad is there. He circles around Karkat's ankles and nips at them in friendly greeting, oblivious to the serious subject matter the two trolls are discussing.

"I can imagine," he says, stepping into the room but not sitting down just yet. "Just seeing him must be incredibly painful for you." It is for him too, but in a very different way. He doesn't say so. This isn't about him.

"At least you know he can't do much to hurt you now. They've very thoroughly declawed him."

It's weird still sometimes seeing the copy of his lusus do this. The real thing was too big to ever nip anywhere near his ankles. He's still looking at him as Signless speaks, but the change in his expression is hard to miss even then, going harder, more distant.

It takes a moment before he can say, "He's... not the same."

The roof idea is gone, forgotten, because Karkat is sitting down right there on the floor in open invitation for crabdad to take a seat on his lap. He already gave his ancestor a hug, and doing much more feels too intimate, too much like talking things out like a moirail. Maybe it should be Nill he's telling this to, but the Signless holds a spot different from her, one of someone who's held past feelings for a Makara. He's another Vantas betrayed.

He pushes a hand through his hair.

"I can't... I can't get mad at him the same way. I am mad, but I... How the fuck do you deal with this?" He looks up at last, head turned toward him. "I can't just get over everything because he's not even a person anymore, not the same way."

He sits down across from Karkat, putting enough space between them to ensure that this conversation stays comfortably platonic. He can offer a listening ear and advice without it being a pale overture but there's no point in pushing up against that line more than he has to.

"I deal with it in the same way I deal with most things here. I take all my hurt and my anger and I put it in a box and put that box on a shelf far back in the back of my bloodpusher. It's still there, but it's out of the way instead of somewhere I'll trip over it constantly."

He knows it's not the healthiest way to deal with his problems but in Panem so many things simply can't be fixed because they can't be talked about. Until he can unpack all of those boxes and openly discuss their contents, he has to save them somewhere they aren't going to weigh him down.

"This isn't something you can just get over. I wish it were. I wish there was some easy solution I could give you."

Karkat watches as he comes over to sit, but his answer has his look hardening. It takes a moment of thought before he finds his words, saying, "That shelf is going to collapse under its own weight someday, Signless."

But he leaves it there, not his place to go further. He looks back down. Crabdad's a safe target, and he sets to rubbing lightly at a neck joint that would surely earn a stranger a lost finger.

"When I ran into him, I wound up breaking down right in the middle of the hallway like a punctured water balloon. Good on me for stepping up from that rung of embarrassment, right?" He snorts. "I'm just sick of Makaras screwing me over. Gamzee murdered my friends, then dumped me, then tried to murder my other friend, then killed me... It's enough without this douche betraying everyone." His tone actually softens at the end, weighed down with his own emotions.

Then his gaze flicks up. "But here I'm bitching when you're the one who lost your moirail this time. And I've been there, so why am I talking over you?"

"You aren't," Signless says with a minute shake of his head. "My hurt doesn't make yours any less valid, and anyway, I've lost so many moirails here that I'm used to it. They go on that shelf along with everything else."

He can't let himself get weighed down. He can't. Who would it help if he spent all his time sitting around feeling sorry for himself? No one.

"If anything it helps to know I'm not the only one who's had extended trouble with a Makara. I thought I'd finally found stable ground with him and now this." He waves a hand vaguely, as though to gesture at all the recent bullshit.

He kind of wants to protest. He is talking over him, he totally is and he's a jackass, but the Signless goes on with sympathy and commiseration and the complaint melts out of him. He decides at least not to ask about past moirails; they aren't really the point, and the topic of Makaras is depressing enough.

Speaking of.

"God, yeah, I know how that is. In a way, I mean--Gamzee was more..." He trails off, lips pressing together, before he suddenly looks back. "Was he ever here? Or--or did Past Karkat tell you about him?"

He shakes his head.

"Past Karkat didn't talk much about him, or at least not beyond a passing mention. I think he was from a time before you were quadranted, because until you mentioned it and how badly it had gone for you I didn't know."

Technically Gamzee has been in Panem before, if only briefly, and in that brief time Signless managed to completely avoid meeting him. That was back when he and the Initiate were still on the outs.

"Past Karkat mainly told me that he was strange, and that he was kind of an annoying asshole -- but Past Karkat said that about all of his friends."

"Before we were..." His lips press together, but he listens to the rest, and holds silent still for a moment after.

Eventually he says, "Yeah, he was. He was this dopey idiot. He ate sopor all the time like a rotpanned slurry spill, baked it into fucking pies, and--" He stops himself. "The point is, he was easygoing and dumb and thought his moronic epilepsy flasher of a modus was miracles--thought everything was miracles, and didn't want to hear a word of science to spoil it for him. But then on the meteor he ran out of sopor, and I guess he realized how much it had been wrecking him, and it coincided with some weird ass crisis of faith that, that apparently ended with him deciding to kill people, and..."

His memory has slipped back to it. Hiding in the halls, fearing every little noise, sending Equius after him like he might be able to stop him when he should have known he'd just succumb to his stupid caste bullshit in the end. And Nepeta--god, Nepeta.

He runs his hand over his face. "Everything went to shit then, absolutely everything, and I couldn't keep everyone together and stable and steady like I fucking should have. Like three people went murder-crazy, and Aradia blew up, and Kanaya revived as a rainbow drinker and killed Eridan for killing her..." A heavy sigh.

"We caught up to each other on the roof eventually, and he found us. And I just... shooshpapped him down to calmness, and we hugged it out, and I thought it was going to be good. That we would be okay. And I guess for a while we were, but he stopped listening, stopped caring, got all sanctimonious and high on his cult bullshit and dumped me. After that... you know how it ended."

Edited 2015-09-03 11:06 (UTC)

It's good to finally know the whole story from more or less start to finish. Signless mulls it over and isn't surprised to find he sees a lot of himself in it: the need to lead and to protect, the self-blame, the feeling of being overwhelmed by the sheer scope of how badly things went wrong.

"What he did was not your fault, Karkat, any more than what happened with the Initiate was your fault."

His jaw goes tight. To anyone else it might be reassuring, but in him it flares up doubts and rejections, memories of everything he could have done different.

"No. I wasn't good enough at what I did," he protests. "I should have kept an eye on him and Terezi better, or--or confronted him when he started getting distant. If I hadn't gone off to be a mopey, lonely asshole in the last leg of the trip then maybe I could have pulled everyone else out of each other's chutes in the runaround drama knot that they all tangled themselves into. I mean, fuck, if I had been more on the ball when we first got on the meteor, maybe half my team wouldn't be ghosts stuck in an abyss of stupefying social inertia.

"And Initiate--" He's gesturing now, hands flying out. "That was my fault. I didn't trust him when I first met him, and I should have trusted my instincts because what did he do? He turned around and as soon as I gave him a chance, as soon as I sat down and agreed to talk for Terezi's sake, he reached into my head with his slimy mind hands and twisted my thoughts into something else, and now here I'm reaping the consequences."

He turns to him, eyes wide and earnest as he insists, "It is my fault, every fucking bit of it, because I'm an idiot who never stops to fucking think about anything until it's too late. The damage happens, everyone draws away, and I'm left whining when if not for my mistakes we could have avoided it in the first place!"

Without really thinking about it Signless reaches out and puts a hand on Karkat's shoulder. The moment he does it he considers pulling it away again, but if Karkat doesn't want the hand there then he'll say so. Probably loudly. Until then, it stays.

"There is always something you could have done differently. There is so much in my life that I wish I could take back. Acknowledging that -- acknowledging a mistake made and moving on and learning from it -- is part of being a person. I still don't think it's fair to blame yourself for the actions of other people. You can wish you had been able to stop them, but the fact that you didn't doesn't put the guilt of what they did on your shoulders."

The touches tenses him, and his expression is almost deer-in-the-headlights as the Signless argues back against him. Mistakes, sure, that's the point. That's the whole thing he's getting at. The point of blame, though...

"But," he protests, helplessly. "But they're still hurt from it. I didn't do enough, and they have to deal with the consequences, and I can't change it. I can't go back and fix any of it, and I hate it." He still hasn't pulled away, but his shoulder trembles under his ancestor's hand.

"I end up feeling so... powerless about it all. I'm doomed back in Paradox Space, Signless. I'm dead, Dave's dead, Jade's dead, Terezi was on her way there--and these timelines, it's always one little thing that sets it off wrong. If I don't do everything right, everyone dies, because that's how time works. And even if--even if it's not how it works here, I don't know, there's just so much shit..." Pink has been beading up in his eyes, and now it spills over, quiet and detached from the rest of him.

"This is all I have left," he says. "So much has gone wrong already. How am I supposed to not put it all on myself?"

Edited 2015-09-20 05:05 (UTC)

"It isn't your burden alone," Signless says, and he tries to keep his voice as gentle as possible because he knows what he's going to say will seem accusatory otherwise.

"The fate of the universe doesn't hinge solely on you, Karkat. All of your friends had their own parts to play along timeline and their own mistakes to make. Would you blame Dave or Jade or Terezi for not doing enough to work toward the proper outcome? If you could trace it back to someone other than yourself -- and I don't doubt that you could -- would you be so quick to place the enormity of that blame on their shoulders?"

"No, but..."

He looks down. Of course he wouldn't blame other people, because it's never been about blaming them--not without big, obvious things like murders. He was ready to kill Eridan then, and tried to send Equius after Gamzee for the same thing... Though neither of those turned out well in the end. For better or worse, Eridan helped him here, and Gamzee turned into his own set of issues.

He still, in his way, found things to blame himself on for both of those.

"I'm the leader," he says at length. He wipes at his face with the end of his sleeve, not minding the pink marks left behind. "I have to take responsibility for my team." This time he says it not like an argument, but a statement of fact. To him it might as well be.

"No, you don't. Their actions are still theirs."

He runs a hand through his hair, less in sheer frustration and more because he knows what Karkat is feeling. Really, he does, and he knows that it hurts.

"There are trolls who, hundreds of sweeps after my death, will use the words I spoke and the philosophy I tried to teach as an excuse for hate and genocide. In my name, they will try to wipe out all highbloods because they think somehow that kind of intolerance will help create peace. I used to think that was my fault, that if only I hadn't spoken out in the first place I might not have caused thousands of trolls to die. Looking at it now that seems ludicrous, doesn't it? What they did, their use of my words to justify their hate and fear, wasn't anything I could have prevented. It would be ridiculous to hold myself accountable for someone else's choices.

"You are responsible for your team in that you can offer guidance, structure, a strong foundation. You are not responsible for what they choose to do with that."

Edited 2015-10-12 02:46 (UTC)

Karkat looks up at him in the middle of this, wanting to protest. Of course Signless isn't responsible. Those people were assholes and idiots, and he wasn't there to guide them anyway. How could he do anything when he was dead? Which is why it's different for him, because he is here, because he could do something and--

He catches himself before he can start to put the words out of his mouth.

"We aren't getting anywhere like this." His voice is soft and sounds like giving in. "If we keep going, we're just going to keep debating until our aeration sacs give out and leave in protest."

It's depressing that this is how their first real conversation after things with the Initiate has gone. Signless can mean all the good in the world, but his sense of responsibility is weighed down by stone after stone, too heavy for one conversation to lift off.

Karkat stands, and crabdad chitters complaint as the move dislodges him from his lap.

"I'm going to go find something to take my mind off this. I'll see you around, yeah?"

Edited (okay now I'm done) 2015-10-14 20:36 (UTC)

"Alright," says Signless, though it's clear it's not exactly alright. It's less that he wants to win this argument and more that it hurts him to see Karkat struggling under the weight of so much blame.

He also knows better than to insist. If anything, he's proud of Karkat for having the maturity to know when to walk away.

"I'll see you."

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[open] and the stains coming from my blood tell me

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CLOWN PROBLEMS

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aaand done i figure