thecapitol | [closed] it's a circle, friend

Entry tags:

[closed] it's a circle, friend

Who| Karkat and Phil, Alain, Roland and Signless
What| How to deal with the fact that you just murdered your ancestor's boyfriend and his friend/comrade, and that other murder earlier, and the person you couldn't save, and...
Where| Karkat's room.
When| The week between the end of the arena and Crowning.
Warnings/Notes| Description of gore and killing, allusion to or discussion of suicidal ideation.

Return from the arena sees a whole lot of shit to deal with. Roland and Alain each died because of him, and even if Alain killed him, too, it does a whole lot of nothing to make the burden easier. It was stupid and desperate and violent, one after the other, and Roland wouldn't let him do anything else.

(He thinks about it anyway, what if he'd done something different, what if he'd gotten the chair, what if he'd knocked him unconscious.)

Maglev and Sheen still haunt his memory in thoughts of what can't be undone and responsibilities failed. Sheen wasn't the first time he ever wanted to kill someone, and wasn't even the first he did it to. Gamzee and Eridan went murderous on the meteor, and Gamzee went worse over after the trip to the new session was done. He tries, then, and got killed for his trouble. And there was Nill in the space arena, a slow death looming over her if not for mercy. Even then, he had to use his teeth.

Now Nill is gone, too. If she were still here loops in his head, but he can't make her come back, and would feel too guilty to ask comfort if she did.

Then there were his rewards from the youth program.

He went to his room directly once he got back to the tower, ignoring reporters and media and fans, anyone in the halls to get there. They sat neatly laid out on his desk, merit badges and papers about his appointment to Jr Peacekeeper and graduation from the youth program, and some letter back from Drusus he couldn't bother to read more than a few words of. There were gifts: some kind of wind chime with little charms of his sickles and sign and lusus, and a model of the red, claw-like one he used in the last arena, contained within a glass case. Worst, though, were the replica hare's foot - Jackie's, that is, Maglev's token - and the video from Cable.

By the end he's shaking, breathing left an afterthought. It takes all his willpower not to destroy the things he's been given, and it's as if the effort exhausts him, for he collapses into his bed.

In this way he spends his free time over the next days. He leaves when he has to; there's no backing out of Peacekeeper training and duties. But he hides from his districtmates, hides from the media, and emerges only briefly for necessities.

The few times he's seen, he looks haunted.

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He kind of expected this to happen. Only a matter of time, right? One of them would either run into the other in passing, or come directly to him seeking... something. He doesn't know if it's better or worse that it's on purpose like this, or that Alain has come before Roland. They were both awful in their own way, and he hates himself twice over.

He can see the door from where he's laying. It's a debate whether he was trying to sleep by lying here in bed, and he's not sure of it himself. Being awake means the well of thoughts he's been stuck in the past two days, but sleep promises nightmares more than rest.

The quiet stretches near too long before he calls back, "Why?"

Edited 2015-11-24 23:56 (UTC)

Alain is quiet for a long moment himself. "I've come to cry your pardon," he answers at last, and looks down, taking a deep breath. Staring at a door doesn't feel so different to staring at a wall, when all's said and done. "I did you wrong. Let myself be guided by anger, said and did what I ought not to have. I forgot the face of my father, and we both died for it."

His... pardon. Karkat lifts his head then, and not long after Alain finishes his answer, he sits up entirely. He considers the door, but it seems too much yet.

"But I killed you. I killed you and him both," he protests. "Why do you want pardon from me?"

"I've fought a lot of men who wanted to kill me," Alain says, "and I know damned well you weren't one of them." There's another long pause, and then he says, "This talk would go a great deal easier without a door between us. Can I come in?"

The door. Yeah. Embarrassment passes over him as Alain calls attention to it, but it passes quickly with other things to think about. He gets up and heads over, and then the door opens.

"Here." He motions in. His room is relatively tidy, but in the present it falls to circumstances and timing more than a will to keep it so. His bed is the exception, covers bunched and rumpled, but they hardly matter now. "Take the chair." There's one at his desk. After closing the door, Karkat sits back on the side of his bed.

"... I don't know what to say," he says eventually. "You're really... You really don't hate me for it?"

Alain is quiet for a moment, turning the chair to face Karkat before sitting down, his hands clasped in front of him. It takes a little while to find what he needs to say. He's all right with that. He isn't Cuthbert; he's used to taking time to find the right words.

"Before I came here," he says at last, slowly, "I died. The Capitol showed it, a few weeks before the Arena. Two shells, shot in the dark - one winged me, the other took me right between the eyes." He doesn't even wince as he says it. That's progress, if anything is. "Cuthbert fired one. Roland, the other. I don't hate them for it, and I don't hate you."

He looks up at Karkat now, running one hand over his mouth. "When a dog goes rabid, you shoot it. When a horse kicks anyone who comes near, you put it down. When a gunslinger turns on you, loses all his sense and reason and honour, why should it be any different? Doesn't make you cruel, it makes you sane."

Edited 2015-11-25 01:11 (UTC)

That's how? Karkat stares with mouth set ajar. "I didn't see... I must have missed." It's sympathy on his face, though, threaded through every inch. He's been killed by friends before, and even the act of having done it doesn't change that reaction.

It pulls quickly into a sharp frown. "But you weren't. You--you found me after I murdered Roland. I tore him open. My sickle--it still had, had pieces of him on it." And here a wave of nausea, but he keeps going. "I did it to someone else. If anyone was a rabid dog, it was me. I killed someone just like that--Go, look at the tapes, I did it to a kid from the Districts because I couldn't fucking think. You can't tell me I'm not cruel after that." It's not even close to boasting, and by the end pink is pricking up at the corners of his eyes again, same as in the arena.

"Yes. I can." Alain meets Karkat's eyes, holding them as best he can. "You may not believe me - perhaps it's not time for you to. Perhaps you never will. But I can tell you that, and I do. At your core, you are not a killer. Take it from one who is."

He looks away again, down at his hands, and is silent for a moment. "Roland is my commander, and I love him as a brother. But I loved plenty of others who were killed, too, and without the comfort of it being temporary, and I did not let it rob me of my reason. The posse under my command the day I came here - I watched them fall, and I was angry, and I grieved, and I turned my back and rode like hell to leave their killers behind. Because I had a duty. Because I remembered the face of my father. I forgot it in the Arena, and I fear I may not recover it for a time." Leaning over, he puts out a hand cautiously to touch Karkat's arm. "Roland and I, we are gunslingers. We were raised to take such things in our stride, trained to know when not to kill just as much as we were trained to know when we should. We learned our lessons on the training ground and in the battlefield, and chief among those lessons was to hold ourselves from being led by the rashness of the moment. We should have known better." That last bit with a fresh intensity; he makes eye contact again, and holds it. "And if we were taken up in the rashness of it, we who trained from infancy to be cold and clear-minded, you cannot expect me to think that you doing the same - once, only once! - was cruelty."

Karkat doesn't break his gaze, but his own is twisted under heavy brows. Alain looks sure, sounds sure, speaking words he couldn't believe otherwise. Whether he does now is a question more complicated than yes or no, but there's room enough, heard from one of those he killed, for him to at least listen.

He doesn't refuse Alain's hand.

It's strange hearing the whole. Here, a human reassures him that he's not cruel, that he's no killer, like he's the one who would know it. And he does, perhaps; Karkat's not the one to question it. But here, isn't Karkat the troll who was supposed to be brutal? He thinks of his old desire to be the threshecutioner, how here he's threshed lives too. He's a Peacekeeper in training now, yet only hate and guilt come of it.

He's already known for too long that he's a failure of what a troll should be. He's the one who shouted it at him, isn't he?

Those threatening tears spill over, and before he can catch himself, Karkat starts laughing. There's more to think on with what he said, that unusualness that Alain should lose his temper, but here in the moment some absurd, ridiculous relief steals over him.

"Fuck," he says between sniffing and laughs, "I'm not supposed to be glad to hear that. I'm supposed to be brutal." With the heel of his palm he wipes at his eyes, and his clean hand reaches to clutch Alain's. "You don't understand--I'm the biggest mistake trollkind ever made."

But as he looks at him again, there's something like a smile on his face.

Edited (better wording) 2015-11-25 02:17 (UTC)

Alain takes his hand, and squeezes it gently, shaking his head. "I don't care what your people breed for. K-k-k-fate doesn't make mistakes. What you are is what you are supposed to be, and there's an end to it. And what you are may be someone who has killed, but not a killer." He frowns, digging in his pocket and proffering a crumpled kerchief. "If you were, you would not have acted as you did with the dragon. You would have fled and left me, or fought with greater purpose." Then, with a little half-smile, "You saved my life then. Saved it once, and took it once. I call that even."

It's another strange thing to hear. Fate and mistakes, it reminds him of Paradox Space. There he died, others were dead or dying, and the rest seemed on the way to the same fate the last time he was there. But he is here, isn't he? Alive despite everything. He wonders if he's still caught in the purview of those forces, or if this is outside them--or if Alain's right, and it doesn't matter, because something says he's meant to be here anyway.

He wants to believe he has purpose. He takes the kerchief and dabs his face.

"We're not even," he counters, but his voice is much lighter than it was. "I will carry this like a surgically attached ball and chain until I feel good and ready to have it removed, and I am going to keep saving you or finding other ways to keep your pale human husk alive until that day comes." He points a finger at him. "Do not even try to argue me on that."

He squeezes his hand back, then lets ago.

"You were saying, though... You said you lost control. That your emotions got the better of you. No shit you were angry and upset at me--I was the one who was there to get the sharp end of it--but what do you mean? What was it like, going through it?" His expression has bunched down into something complicated but curious. He's not quite sure where he's going with it, but there are two points on his mind: Sheen's death and his fight with Roland. Both were unusual in their own way, fed by fury, but in different context and execution.

Alain frowns. When he answers, it's slow and careful, putting one word in front of another like a man building a bridge as he goes along it. "I've never been angry that way," he says at last, and his frown deepens a little. "I've been angry, sure. Everyone has, some time or another, and I've been given plenty of cause for rage in the last few years. Aye, I've been angry, angry enough to kill. But not that way."

It takes him a moment to find the words for the next bit, and his hands half-rise from their place in his lap, as if he's trying to describe with his movements what he can't with words. "I don't know how to put this to someone who doesn't have the Touch, say true. Feelings are hard to describe. My anger's... slow. Cold. Blue? It takes time to build and time to fade, and I've never lost my head, not the way I did with you. My anger's like water; that anger was like fire. It flared up in a second, and burned too bright to stand. It wasn't mine." He only knows it as he says it, and curses himself for a fool for not seeing it sooner. He repeats it, almost incredulously: "It wasn't mine. Oh, those fatherless sons of bitches!"

Karkat listens carefully, and watches with the same intent as Alain makes his half-gestures, taking all what he can. Somehow this is going to help him, is all he can think to it - all he can hope.

It's strange and hard to follow first, even so. Alain's anger is not like his own. The colors are nothing he'd put to it, and indeed he has nothing like the Touch at all, but as Alain goes he gets the idea of it. It's different from how his manifests, at any rate. It's at the end, though, where he's truly struck.

"Alain!" He reaches forth, looking to put his hands on his shoulders, not to pull or push but as if fearing his attention will slip away if he doesn't hold it there. His eyes are unwavering, wide but focused. "You're sure? You're dead fucking positive that it wasn't?"

He doesn't answer for a long moment. Not until he's sure of the answer, sure that he isn't just desperately trying to push responsibility away. Fault lies in one place, Cort's voice echoes in his mind, with him weak enough to lay blame. Is he laying blame? Putting it aside from himself?

"I'm sure," he says at last, and presses his lips together. "It doesn't absolve me. And it doesn't mean I wasn't angry. I was. I am. But..." A deep breath. "I've never wanted to hurt someone that way. Not even Farson, and I hate him a good sight more than I hated you even then. I've killed, and wanted to kill. But if it had been me, only me, I would have put a knife through your throat and called an end to it. I... get angry. I don't rage."

Karkat draws his hands back, and after a second sits back down, too. Farson isn't a name he knows, but that doesn't matter next to the point. His reaction has slid to more of a quiet shock now, and his eyes look more beyond than at Alain. Not his rage. Not his.

He comes back to himself after not too long, because there are things still to ask.

"Alain, you know Roland. When I fought him..." His lips press together, then he starts again. "I literally ran into him when running from a monster down there. He came with me, we locked ourselves in that room, and then he started getting weird at me. He... He was mad that I wasn't fighting harder, that, I guess, I wasn't putting enough 'effort' into surviving. It didn't feel like him. Not any part of him I know. I tried to make him leave, but he kept..." He swallows, blinks, looks down and side. "I killed him, but he didn't give me any other option."

Finally he looks back. "Does that sound like him at all? Have you ever seen him act like that?"

Alain's silence is a little too long, and a little too deep. Then he sighs, shaking his head. "I wish I could tell you no," he says, his voice quiet and regretful. But he remembers Roland after his man's test, bloody and unremorseful; remembers Steven, too, kind but pitiless. Remembers how Roland felt to him in the last Arena, when he had his Touch back. He could tell Karkat no, but it would be a lie.

"I wish I could," he says again, and means it. "I wouldn't have expected it of him, that much is true. But there was a germ of it in him even when we were boys, and I don't know him well enough now to say it's grown out of him."

Something nervous settles in his gut, and when Alain's answer finally does come, it sets about making its home there. Karkat bites his lip.

"It was different than he was earlier," he says, a bit helpless. His lips press again as he considers saying more, but the memories there are tender, and what would be the point? At best, he'd be trying to argue into getting the answer he wants.

He almost says, 'I'll have to see what he says,' or, 'I'll talk to him later,' but they don't have much point either.

Instead he looks back up. "I don't hate you for what you did to me. I don't know how to feel about this rest of this, hut you should at least know that."

Alain is quiet for a long moment, then smiles. It isn't an easy smile, or a particularly happy one; there's a sadness behind it that looks too heavy for his age, a solid weight of grief and guilt.

"Thank you," he says, his voice low. "I wish I could say the same. Whatever their role in it, whoever brought that anger on, it was my hand that wielded the knife and my memories I vomited out at you. And I who failed Roland, again." He sighs heavily, and shakes his head, pushing himself to his feet. "Still. Thank you. And I'm sorry."

A bolt of worry shocks through him first. Alain may have reassured him before, but so geared is he to blaming himself that he thinks first it might mean Alain hates him after all. But the rest of the words clarify, and Karkat sighs.

"No, I get it. You're talking to me like I'm not dragging a whole herd of boulders behind me formed from the crystallized excretions of my overworked guilt duct. That arena was..." He scrapes about for a metaphor close enough, but in the end frowns and says, "It was agony."

He shakes his head and stands too, then holds his hand out for a shake, if Alain will take it. "We're both sorry, and we both feel like crap, but at least we both get it. But so long as I have my own mind to do it, I'm going to make up for it by attempting to be somewhere half near decent from here on out. I'd rather have an ally than let this fuck that up for us when it doesn't have to."

Alain hesitates, but only for a moment, before taking Karkat's hand and shaking it. "I'd be a fool to argue with that," he says, with a little half-smile. "And I'd be glad to fight at your side in future. Not only in recompense, either. You're a good man."

A good man. The words settle in and sit. They don't fix all what's on his mind, but in the moment they're a help and something he needed to hear.

"I'll try to live up to that," he says mildly.

"I won't keep you chained here, though. You probably have other shit you need to do, and I need to figure out... what I'm going to do with the rest of this mess." His lips purse, but he moves on. "I'll have your fabric square cleaned and get it back to you later." The handkerchief, he means, which he lifts up to indicate.

"I've spent two days staring at a wall," Alain informs him mildly, though not without a wry, self-deprecating twist of humour. "Though I guess I should talk to Roland one of these days."

By his tone, it isn't something he looks forwards to. That used to hurt, but now it's settled into just being the way it is. After all, the distance between them isn't going anywhere any time soon.

"Keep the kerchief, if you like," he says, after a little thought, and shakes his head. "I have another."

"I haven't done much better," he admits, a touch sheepishly. "I don't know how I'm going to talk to him yet. Hopefully you have better luck than I do. You should." You didn't kill him goes the unsaid rider.

The kerchief he stuffs into a pocket. For not the first time, he misses his sylladex.

"But hey, if you don't have anywhere to be... You want to grab a sandwich, maybe?" He motions loosely at the door. "I don't want to hang around out where the media can hassle us, but we could get something from the restaurant near the lobby, then haul ourselves to the roof and eat there."

Alain considers for a moment, then nods. "Sure. I'd be glad to. You don't smoke, do you?" He's never seen Karkat smoking, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. And there's only a couple of cigarettes left in the pack in his jacket pocket, so if Karkat does smoke, he'll have to pick up some more cigarettes in the lobby.

Does he smoke?

If one were to ask from a simple, factual perspective, the answer would be no. He tried it once early into his time here, now a year passed, and decided promptly it wasn't for him. Who put that stuff in their lungs?

Nill did. It was her who introduced it to him, her who told him about it, who went on to etch out a pity-soft hole in his heart called moirail. And then she was gone. But she'd carried that scent around her, and the sight of her lighting a cigarette now and then became familiar. some people use them to calm down read her words when he asked.

He looks at Alain, looks at his hands, then says, "Sure. I'll smoke." His fingers run through his hair without straightening it. "Come on, let's head downstairs." And he steps toward the door.

Edited (left out a word, whoops) 2015-12-07 21:05 (UTC)

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oh godddd I'm gonna hurt when that happens in canon (meanwhile Karkat continues to be a mess)

sorry - I didn't want to spoil but also it kinda felt ooc not to in this case?

it's understandable! I'm not upset in this case (also oh god Alain I'm emotions)

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beep beep underaged smoking yet to come for whoever's reading this and cares