[OPEN] If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain

[honeyedwords]

Who| Sherlock Holmes
What| Midnight mopery
Where| In the park by the shopping district
When| Right about now
Warnings/Notes| References to (kind of ongoing) drug abuse

Sherlock had spent much too long avoiding the Capitol. It had seemed reasonable enough to take whatever excuses he could to stay away from the place; after all, what was the point of marching all the way out to the killing fields just to watch two children from his district get slaughtered by careers, year after year? (Well, he supposes it's not necessarily children anymore, but uninvolved bystanders from across time and space isn't much better.) Drugging himself into a stupor and allowing Beetee or one of the other competent ones run the fool's errand of trying to bring someone home always seemed the better option.

That particular dodge wasn't an option anymore, though. Not if he wanted to actually get anything done ever again. There isn't anything useful about hiding away from all your problems forever, anyway. Might as well stop being a coward and go already.

He's seated on a bench towards the edge of the park, as the fountain is too much of a gathering place for his likings and he'd prefer not to be gawked at today. Anyone who passes by receives a particularly severe scowl and precisely zero eye contact for their troubles. His manner of dress is characteristically shabby, from the fraying sweater to the worn jeans. This on top of the thin sheen of sweat on his brow despite his shivering and the dark circles under his eyes all contribute to making him look like an absolute wreck.

Comments

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat nods along. He isn't all that surprised that the source of the humans' weirdness about the Games is their freaky mammal biology. He briefly wonders if part of Signless' own weirdness is that he had a troll mother instead of a proper lusus--but it was probably just as much those freaky past-life dreams as anything else. "I'd ask why in that case the Capitol Humans don't give a fuck about making everyone kill each other for shits and giggles, but as we already established they're the highbloods here." Highbloods were highbloods, after all, no matter the species.

"And yeah, Signless. He's... sort of my ancestor, which is still weirding me the fuck out, because I never actually believed in ancestors. They were just some bullshit highblood belief, not applicable to the rest of us."

[honeyedwords]

"Unfortunately, it's very easy to condition a population to think of outsiders as lesser, inferior, and not worthy of empathy, much as I assume your highbloods do to all the rest."

The whole caste structure stratified thing is awfully fascinating, and one of the reasons Sherlock has been paying closer attention to the trolls than most of the other tributes. It is, however, also horribly depressing. As Karkat said, the Capitol maps all too well to their highbloods.

"Your ancestor?" he asks, genuinely curious. What with trolls not being raised socially and the competitive nature of their society, he would have assumed genetic relationships wouldn't be considered all that significant, but he supposes there's always room for sentimentality even in the least opportune of times.

[sleeplessinalternia]

"It's what they call it when you and another troll from sweeps in the past have a ridiculously close genetic make-up," Karkat explains. "The idea is that you've got such close genetics because of them contributing their own genetic material to the slurry. And supposedly if you're the descendent you have to finish whatever unfinished business your ancestor had. I always figured it was complete beastshit, but..." He shrugs. "Signless has the exact same genetic make-up as me." Even if it wasn't because of anything to do with the slurry.

[honeyedwords]

"And your Signless's unfinished business was his message of peace? It's what he's gained the most notoriety for here, certainly. A little incongruous with what I understand of the rest of troll culture, but I suppose that has something to do with why it's still unfinished."

Sherlock doesn't mean that in a biting way, but most would be forgiven for taking it like that. He's never been one of the greatest communicators of his time, nor has he attempted to be. Bluntness has been his closest companion, year after year, and he's not about to abandon it yet.

"You, meanwhile, seem to fall much more in line with the zeitgeist."

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat shrugs. "If you don't want to die, you learn to fight and you learn to kill. I don't want to die."

He leans back on the bench to gaze up at the sky, but the familiar constellations of home are nowhere to be found. He can't really see any stars due to the lights of the Capitol, but there's a moon: a single, small grey moon.

"He had some other unfinished business that I almost did finish before I came here."

[honeyedwords]

"Certainly a practical philosophy. It will serve you well enough here, I think."

It's certainly one of the common ones adopted by victors who actually wanted to be victors. Somehow, though, he thinks Karkat may not fit in with the other careers quite as well as one might think. There's more to him than fighting and killing, though perhaps that's only because that's the baseline for most if not all trolls. Holmes makes a mental note of it regardless.

"And what is that, if I may be so bold as to ask?"

[sleeplessinalternia]

Karkat doesn't say anything at first, just staring up at the lone moon. It's too small, too pale, too colorless, too alone.

"I played a game," he says finally.