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

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[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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Alain hasn't left his own room since returning most of two days ago. He's been sitting there, cross-legged on the bed, staring at a blank point on the wall and doing something that's halfway between meditation and madness.

At last, near the end of the second day, he decides he has to make a move. He's lingered too long already (too slow, maggot, Cort's voice tells him in the back of his mind, that was ever your fault in training and in life) and it does no good to anyone to waste away in a too-bright room, staring at a wall.

Around nine o'clock that night, he knocks on Karkat's door. He holds himself very straight and tense, his hands clasped behind his back, his shoulders back. "It's Alain," he calls, taking a half-step back from the door. "Seems to me we ought to talk."

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?"

It's been too long since Phil saw Karkat but he had a good idea why the troll was hiding. This Arena, everything that has happened sucked the soul right out of everyone who participated in it. This time around, the Mentor knocked on the door, offering not just his company but some food to lift his Tribute's energy. There was so much to talk about, so much that needed to be explained and more importantly, Gray had to assure his friend that he could not shoulder the blame for Maglev's and Sheen's deaths alone.

"Karkat, please let me in," Phone Guy spoke against the door in a voice edging on a whisper spoken out of regret than fear of being heard. He's just doing his job now, nothing suspicious here. "I haven't seen you in a while now."

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?"

Can't run forever, can he? Not that he's even trying that. Running is something active, and here he's hidden away, bunched up alone whenever he has the choice to be. Still, the thought that Phil would come eventually is one that's held true. He's his Mentor, after all. He'd have to in time.

It's that feeling of inevitability that gets him up to answer, if not promptly.

He doesn't have anything harsh to say, but neither does he look at him, gaze only sliding over the food before settling somewhere beyond him. His posture is stiff, his expression tight, trying for blank but failing where stress shows through. "You didn't have to bring me anything."

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)

The first day Roland'd been in no state to think on it, and there had been that party, that time and talk with Signless to try and clear his head. Then there'd been the arena footage to go over - difficult when Roland can't make out the images on the screen, and he still hasn't decided whether it's more kind or cruel to be able to hear those things without seeing them, but Signless had been there then, too. He's here now, and they've worked out a very rough strategy which consists mostly of the idea that Roland should be as honest as possible. Which he'd been planning to do anyway, but it's good to have confirmation from the person who, in his estimation, knows Karkat best.

He gives a couple solid, brisk knocks on the boy's door. Roland's voice, when he speaks, is heavy and solemn, but not nervous. Apologizing is a thing which does not intimidate him, and he has plenty of experience with it. Even if he's never exactly had to apologize for this. "Karkat. We ought to speak, the three of us. I'll do it in the hall, if you need, but I'd rather not have to."

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!"

"I know but I haven't seen at the District commonspace so I know you haven't eaten," Phil pointed out as he offered Karkat a sympathetic look, "I haven't seen you at all really."

The troll could hide away but his Mentor could not, he had to assure sponsors and the public that things were all right. Even if it was an outright lie. "May I come in? I don't want to make you walk over to my suite but...this is best done behind closed doors." And away from the prying eyes of the public.

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."

Part of him wants to argue he's not hungry, but it would be a lie, and a transparent one at that. For not the first time he thinks of Nill. She would have made sure he ate.

"Alright." It's more giving in than agreeing, but he steps back and opens the door for him to come inside.

He's got his crying out of the way for now, the only sign a wastebasket stuffed with tissues. The room isn't even messy; he hasn't had time for apathy to impede him much yet, and it would be more trouble than it's worth to go destroying his 'gifts'. There's a desk if Phil wants to set the food down, but it's the bed Karkat sits on once the door is closed.

"I'm not really feeling up to chatting, so just get to the point."

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."

Even after his talk with Alain, Karkat hasn't sought out Roland. He almost did a time or two, thought it over and hovered near the elevator, only to go off to something else. Their talk might have given him some reassurance, but it came with an uncertain note, too. Alain couldn't tell him that Roland wouldn't have done it, and though a part of Karkat holds hope that it was the same as with him - that the anger wasn't normal, wasn't natural - there still held too much fear that it had been.

And with Roland, too, comes the issue of his ancestor. It's not hard to guess that's who the third party is.

He seizes up.

Sure, he wants to know what Roland was thinking then, and what he thinks now after the fact. He misses the Signless and doesn't want yet another wedge coming between them. But what if that's all this is? What if Roland's come to berate him again, make him out as a coward again, and brought Signless for some kind of backup? He killed him--killed his friend, his ancestor's quadrantmate, and couldn't find a way out. If he had just tried harder...

And what does he say to this? He can't just sit up and invite them in like it's normal. A conversation through a door is twelve layers of stupid, but the knot of anxiety that burrowed in during things with Alain tugs tight at the thought of opening it. Any sharp or flippant response seems to invite more of the vitriol Roland gave him in the arena, and flat out refusal likely the same. It's stupid. He used to the be the one who would spit out hate and bile like nothing, like it didn't matter, like anyone bothered was the one at fault for it, and now the thought of a little hate stops him up. But what would it mean? He's the one who couldn't do anything properly: couldn't fight him properly, couldn't push him away, couldn't kill him until he had no choice about it--and even then, that had to be his fault, too, for not avoiding Roland's efforts.

It never came to this before, is the thing. He never killed anyone outside of Panem, and the times he wanted to were to save other people, to cut off a problem that shouldn't have happened in the first place if he'd just paid attention and put in more effort. Here, what good did he do? A District kid gone for good from anger after Maglev was already dead didn't save anyone. He couldn't live up to whatever Roland wanted in his death. And Alain--Alain may have said he's no killer, not the way the kind trained for it are, but what point did killing him have, anyway? It didn't prove anything, and even if Alain's anger wasn't his own, why shouldn't he have taken his payback?

Why did he keep going if that's how the arena turned out?

It's stupid. He's a troll. He shouldn't care; he should have done better; he should have been culled from the start. Too many people dead for a stupid mutant who can't live up to his own culture. Didn't the Grand Highblood make that point to him back in his dream? Stupid, just so stupid, and here he is freaking out about it like an idiot all over again.

"Just--make your point. Get it over with," he calls over finally after a too long gap, in a voice too rough for simple bad mood. He's shaking and he hates it, and he buries his head under a pillow as though it will get him to stop.

Edited 2015-11-27 02:20 (UTC)

Signless looks sideways at Roland, eyebrows drawn down low in worry. That response doesn't make him feel all that optimistic about this discussion, though it's very much the response he was most expecting. He doesn't want this to have to be an uphill battle more for Karkat's sake than anything. The poor kid doesn't need any more stress and pain than he's already probably feeling.

Still. Getting right into it is probably the best way to make it clear to Karkat that they're not here to attack him but rather just to come to terms with what happened and move on. After a moment he nods, tipping his head toward the door with a 'might as well' sort of expression. It's best if this comes from Roland's mouth. He's the one who died.

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[closed] it's a circle, friend

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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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I didn't expect to vomit angst words everywhere, but here they are

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