[closed] it's a circle, friend

[crabmunicator]

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.

Comments

[crabmunicator]

His eyebrows knit at the title; it sounds more like something Rose would read, her need to thieve his romance novels aside.

"What was romance like where you were from, then?" he asks. "Gentle has its place, but it gets boring when that's all there is. Especially next to what trolls have."

[atouchofka]

Alain laughs, sheepish, and rubs the back of his next. "I'm the wrong man to ask. I've only seen that light reflected from someone else. But it's... a kind of k-k-damn." He slaps the heel of his hand against his temple as if that will shake the foreign word off his tongue in spite of the censoring chip. "This world won't let me say it. I... it's sharing the road you're on, sharing what we call the waters of fate. And that's not easy. It's not kind or gentle, and it never stops, not even when you die. But you take that road together, and you never know until it gets there whether you're drawn together to be friends or foes, each other's solace or each other's doom. And I would give my eye-teeth," he adds, with dry frustration, "to be able to talk about this without tiptoeing around the words I need to express what I mean."

[crabmunicator]

Karkat's eyes don't go bright, per se, but a sort of light has entered them as he listens. He doesn't mind the verbal stumbling, having heard it enough from Roland, and it's fascinating to the point that he doesn't interrupt. At the end, companionable as anything, he scoffs and says, "They don't even allow me my native language."

But the rest... That he lets settle a moment.

"It's not the same thing, but it kind of reminds me of something our species had. We called it serendipity--this idea that fate and coincidence would convene together until, through some twist, you met the right person you were supposed to be with. Obviously we had quadrants, so it was multiple someones, but it was supposed to be this big, grand, written in the stars type of thing." He pauses, gnaws his lip a little. "No one ever bothered to say what came after that. Maybe your k-word is it."

[atouchofka]

"Maybe. It's..." Alain frowns, considering his phrasing. "The flow of things. Like a river, they say, like a whirlwind. We have another word - in the High Tongue, it means 'water'. That's what you share, with friends, with enemies, with lovers. Your streams converge and diverge, like currents in a river, every one a part of a greater whole. That path is set out for you - it isn't kind or cruel or good or bad, it only is - but a raindrop can't see the river's end. And you can't see the path fate sets you. All that's certain is where it ends."

Then, with a rather self-conscious smile, "I'm better at philosophy than romance, I'm afraid."

[crabmunicator]

"Oh, fuck, now I get it," he says, and the frown is as much in his voice as on his face. "It's the same spirit of bullshit that shapes whatever Paradox Space 'knows' about how time is supposed to go. Yet more reality frowning down on my long-suffering life, telling me how it's supposed to go and why for reasons I can't fathom but might as well be a fancy order written out with a calligraphic 'Because.'"

He pauses, taking a bite of his sandwich with all the roughness that it might earn if it had wronged him personally. The moment of chewing allows him to sort his words.

"It is a long fucking story, but the general idea where I come from? Is that no matter what you do, fate has its own path planned, with all its twists and turns and stable time loops and whatever else has to happen just so for things to be as they're supposed to. The long and short of which is that any of us who happen to fuck up and do the wrong thing--which, mind you, we are almost always never aware of before it happens--then every single one of us is doomed to death because the timeline isn't right. And I bet you anything that's why everything went to bugfuck bananas crazytown the last time I was there."

[atouchofka]

Alain listens closely, interested, but he's frowning too. "No. No, it isn't the same. Yours can go wrong. Yours sounds less like a river, more like a general commanding his troops. What I know as fate is... it's not a path, exactly, it's a pressure, pulling you to a certain route. If a drop of water runs out of the river, the river doesn't suffer. It just goes on flowing, downhill. To the Tower. Or from it."

He isn't being argumentative. Nor does he disbelieve what Karkat is saying - why should he? The few times he's had his Touch back, he's been aware that ka flows differently in this world, so why not in Karkat's? He's just interested, the philosopher in him deeply curious to know the similarities and differences in their understanding of the world.