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~ATH We Part	By : grimreaperchibi Category: Web Comics > Homestuck Views: 2607 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck, nor the places, people, or objects within. I make no money writing this.

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Consciousness returned like an armoured boot to the head. Nothing seemed happy with his existence, least of all him. Having excessive experience in dealing with this kind of anguish, more than could be considered healthy, Karkat didn't try to move, or breathe, or even think at first. He laid as still as possible wherever the hell he happened to be, content to wait for the blaring signals of pain to taper off. Once assured he wouldn't black out should he do something stupid, he took stock of his body's condition. Nothing felt broken, but from the way a few places radiated denser depths of unhappiness, he'd bruise beautifully instead. Physical status confirmed, he tried to focus on what things might be around him. The quiet hush spoke of safety, and when he took a deeper breath, the smells were a familiar-foreign thing that confused him. Still, if it wasn't an Imperial holding cell, it couldn't be that bad...
Red eyes blinked open. The metaphorical armoured boot quit kicking in his skull long enough to stomp down on his chest instead. He remembered this room, the respite block of his hive, as clear as he remembered the last time he'd been there, hurriedly packing the few things he absolutely couldn't leave behind. Though it had always been the right choice to make, the pain of nostalgia lingered on as he stared at the past come to haunt him again.
The seconds stretched until he shook himself and rolled to his feet. The memories and what-ifs needed to wait until after he figured out what the fuck had just happened. His body ached in protest, muscles spasming, the familiar twinging sensation telling him they were about to lock up. He'd endured worse, so the quick twist-and-stretch to ensure functionality remained untempered. He scanned the room like it was enemy territory as his mind turned to piecing together his scattered thoughts.
He recalled finishing preparations for sleep and noticing Sollux still online when the other should have already retired as well. He'd stepped up to the terminal, ready to browbeat the moron into compliance. And then...the visible arc of electricity that struck him before he touched the keyboard, growing sharply until he could feel the sparking in his teeth. Twice his life, he'd experienced that unique sensation. Once, when Sollux had unleashed the full extent of his psionic power. The other had occurred sweeps before that, when another poor judgement call had almost fried his ass. His eyes finally settled on the husktop running in front of him. He groaned.
Son of a grubfisted lusus licker, why did past him always have to be such an incompetent jerkoff?
Resisting the urge to beat his head into something solid, Karkat acknowledged the message that an error had occurred. He snorted at the inadequacy of the statement before turning his attention to the code that had prompted his current predicament. He sort of remembered what he'd been trying to do with it, though he already know it wouldn't do him a lot of good. Having already lived through the other half of this fiasco, he remembered being told that this time's Sollux would be the one to find the bug that would return him and his younger self to their appropriate places. That assurance had meant a lot to his past self. Now he chaffed at the thought of having to admit to such an idiotic fuck-up. He still didn't have much skill as a programmer, but maybe this would be an easy fix. He winced; he didn't believe that. His pride merely demanded he try and wasn't it pride that always screwed him over in the first place?
He'd spend maybe five minutes picking at the mess that had the nerve to call itself code when the noise from Trollian began to grate. Judging by the timestamps, this little case of temporal displacement hadn't taken much real time to accomplish. He didn't bother to read any of the previous text before starting to type a response.
CG: CAPTOR
Karkat paused. The gray text staring back at him seemed both very right and very wrong at the same time. He'd given the iron colour up as part of the pact he'd made to get the help he needed a long time ago. Besides, hemoanonymity didn't mean much when the list of crimes against the Empire ran twice as long as he was tall. He rolled his shoulders and continued typing.
CG: CAPTOR, I AM HAVING ENOUGH ISSUES AT THIS MOMENT THAT I COULD GIVE THEM AWAY BY THE FISTFUL ALL NIGHT AND STILL HAVE A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER LEFT OVER. SO UNLESS SOMEONE IS ABOUT TO DIE AND THEY'RE ACTUALLY IMPORTANT, LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE.
TA: ii warned you kk
CG: WHAT?
The silence shattered as a loud "Hey!" broke free from the speakers. Karkat pushed away from the desk hard enough the chair almost tipped over, half expecting the husktop to explode. Several tense moments passed with nothing spontaneously combusting. The "Hey! Hey! Look! Listen!" however, continued to repeat without any clear looping point. He tried to escape out, shut down, something to make it stop, but each keystroke only made the noise louder.
"Motherfucker!"
In the end, he had to perform a forced shut down to make the racket to stop. He didn't dare try to reboot; knowing Sollux, the damn script would start right back up as well. Forget how awful his past self was, Sollux's past self remained worse in every way. When had he forgotten what a ripe boil his friend had been as a kid? Probably when-
He growled at himself. Action now, regret later. He didn't have a choice anymore. If the code that started this mess was to be fixed, he had to take the husktop to Sollux, if only to get the damn thing functional again. A glance to the window showed actual daylight fast approaching. How far away was Sollux's hivestem again? He worked as he calculated routes and times, bundling cables and hardware into something more transportable. Then he ransacked the room, looking for anything he could use to protect his skin. Long sleeved shirts were still the norm for him and he slept in his combat boots these days, so all he needed was something to protect his hands and face. A pair of socks turned into gloves well enough, but he wasn't as sure about the drying plane masquerading as a headscarf. Last but not least, he picked up his favorite sickle. He'd outgrown it sweeps ago, his hand too big for the handle and the blade too small for effective use, but it was still his favorite and he needed to be armed with something more than sarcasm and stubbornness issues.
Slinging the husktop against his back, Karkat paused. There wasn't any time to spare if he wanted to beat the sunrise. His eyes wandered over the room anyway, re-imprinting the sights and smells to memory. He closed his eyes and took a breath against the sudden hammering of his bloodpusher.
He regretted a lot in his life; missed opportunities, forced choices, whole destinies that could have been changed if only he'd said the right thing instead of the wrong one, things that had never been in his power to change in the first place. This, however, he would never regret, no matter how many times the universe made him do it.
Karkat turned and walked out the door.
***
Despite the number of obstacles between him and his goal-breaking daylight, questionable memory, large distances to transverse, being an adult on a planet forcibly inhabited by only wigglers-the trip from lawn circle to hivestem remained one of the easiest treks Karkat had ever made anywhere. He'd experienced harder struggles trying to secure first meal than he had making his way to Sollux's place. Not that it had been a comfortable journey to make. His eyes felt dry and irritated despite the moisture running from them. Between fatigue and having to squint the majority of the way, he had a massive headache to add to the remnant throb of electrical shock. His clothes were too thin to make sure the light couldn't reach his skin, the stinging warmth in several places a tangible reminder of how damn lucky he was. Still, he'd take a victory, no matter how small, whenever possible.
Ducking into the building brought a sigh of relief, but he didn't start to relax until he stood in the lift, rising towards Sollux's section of the stem The morning quiet remained undisturbed as Karkat keyed himself into his friend's unit. Memory didn't throttle him quite so hard this time, replaced instead with a creeping sense of deja vu as he removed his make-shift sun gear and looked around. The entry block, per typical of Sollux, remained crowded with items various service drones had dropped off that had yet to be retrieved. Past that, the recreation and the nutritional blocks stood, shuttered dark, still and stale. Back further, the obscured ablution block and the still brightly lit respite block, its door cracked open just enough to let the buzzing of the apiary frames and Sollux's mumblings spilling into the hallway.
Being less inclined to stand by any sort of formality now than ever before, Karkat simply kicked the door all the way open with a bellow that usually sent people scrambling for cover. "Captor!"
"Jesus fuck, KK, the script doesn't run that long. You could have showed some patience for a change, rather than stomp your way out here to yell at me."
Sollux didn't turn around to deliver the admonishment. His fingers hadn't even slowed their incessent ticking on the keyboard. He remained engrossed with his husktop screen as if he could code the very universe into something better if only he could find the right command statement, a million miles away from the world immediately around him. Karkat thumped his husktop down to a clean piece of floor with a disdainful noise of his own. He hadn't expected much different as far as responses went. It still irritated him.
"We've got bigger problems than your poor excuse for a goddamn joke."
"No, you've got problems if you think I'm going to fix that outdated hunk of junk again. I'd be doing you a favour by blowing it up, seriously. Besides, I don't have time to play in the wiggler's pen tonight. I still need to code a cover for that virus, though honestly I should just dump it since I can think of about sixteen other things that would be like two hundred percent more effective against this asshat. It's not like they'd know a good piece of programming from month old grubloaf. Why waste something so ingenious on them? Now go away, KK, I've got shit to do."
Karkat rolled his eyes. "If you'd quit fucking around with equipment that doesn't belong to you, then maybe you wouldn't need to fix so much of it in return." Sollux didn't deign to respond with words. A dismissive hand waved a couple times, then went right back to typing. Usually when someone ignored him, Karkat punched them in the face until he knew he had their undivided attention. Here, however, he realized had a better opportunity. One that allowed some overdue payback, even if it technically hadn't happened yet.
"Sollux," he crooned, teeth baring in a grin as he stalked forward. The other continued to blatantly ignore him. If anything, the typing became more pointed. Karkat loomed up behind his friend, waiting the handful of seconds it took to ensure he'd been written off again. Then he grabbed the chair Sollux was enthroned in. It spun at the same time his other hand slammed down against the workstation top, trapping the other up close and personal with the only thing scarier than an Imperial Drone-a full adult.
His friend didn't disappoint. The startled yelp transformed into a strangled squeak as he jerked away instinctively, then further when it registered what exactly was leering in on him. Psionic-glazed eyes widened in surprise and horror as his limbs folded in, trying to minimize target space. A pop-fizzle of power burst in Karkat's face. Used to the scare tactic, he didn't so much as blink in surprise. His grin widened as a look of visible terror dawned on Sollux's face.
Some of the satisfaction withered away when his friend did nothing else to defend himself. The grin faded to a frown, then a scowl as Karkat straightened up. Now he understood how powerful psions got taken without much of a struggle. "A pissant response like that will get you in trouble one day," he grumbled.
Alarm morphed into shock as Sollux gaped at him like a landed seadweller. "...KK?"
Karkat huffed a bit and crossed his arms over his chest. Final maturation hadn't changed nearly enough on him. His frame did finally fit his musculature and another fifty pounds of muscle had gotten thrown on top of that. He grown taller, though not as tall as he'd wanted, and his horns had decided to remain nubby things that threatened to get lost in his hair. Everything else was cosmetic in nature. His irises had filled in with vibrant, heretical red. His skin had darkened to a healthy shade of charcoal befitting his age. Teeth and claws had hardened and sharpened, and he'd let his untamable hair grow long in defiance to the legacy he was supposed to be carrying. Otherwise, he was as he'd always been.
"Right in one, bulgehumper. Now before you ask the obligatory questions of when and how, I'm going to state once, and only once, that past me is a blistering moron who in all honesty shouldn't have made it out of the brooding caverns. But he did, and that means I have to fix the problem he managed to create. Only I can't because some asshole hyped on on his own self-importance-that's you, nookstain-decided to screw around with the husktop protocols and crash the system I need to return to my own place in the time-space continuum. So congratulations, you get to not only unfuck the hardware, but help me unfuck the timeline, too."
The younger version of his friend closed his mouth and blinked a couple times, his mania-powered pan already flying through facts and implications. "You compiled that shitty code of yours, didn't you?" he asked, his tone saying he already knew the answer.
A warning sound rumbled in Karkat's chest. "What did I just say."
Sollux scrubbed at his face with a moaning whine. "I told you-"
"You're bitching at the wrong guy. As far as I'm concerned, this horrifying display of stupidity is six sweeps behind me, buried but obviously not dead." Karkat leaned in, hands bracing against the chair's armrests so that he could corner his friend better. "I have three nights to figure out what the fuck went wrong with a pile of code I only half remember and I can't even start doing that because you locked up my machine with hell's own chorus screeching away for twenty minutes every time I miss a goddamn keystroke. I have neither the time, nor the skill to screw around with this. Now are you going to help me, or do I have to get creative with the incentive?"
Sollux had pushed himself as far into the backrest as possible, eyes going wide again. From the way the tiny muscles jumped, Karkat guessed those eyes were darting around, watching for other signs of aggression. There was also a rising flush of colour coming to ashen skin, which had him some what concerned about how long the other had already been awake and active. It might have just been a trick of the lighting, too, he couldn't tell. In any case, he needed compliance and he wasn't above terrifying someone for it. He arched an eyebrow when the other failed to respond. Sollux startled again and swallowed awkwardly.
"So you admit you're a suckass hacker..."
Karkat stiffened. As far as barbs went, that one was pretty mild. It still struck with the force of a sucker punch. He looked away as he tried to sort the guilt from the remorse. Being a programmer was a redundancy he didn't have the luxury of time to pursue, let alone the ability. Too much depended on his other skills. Too many people depended on him. Yet one more thing on an ever growing list of shit that hadn't turned out the way he'd hoped. He stood up, still avoiding his friend's gaze. "I've had other things to worry about."
That response earned him another wide-eyed look. Karkat braced for the inevitable questions about his timeline, but they never came. They sat in awkward silence instead, until Sollux cleared his throat and asked, "So, uh...three nights, huh? What happens after that, you turn into a pretty princess at dawn or something?"
Praise the horrorterrors for Captors and their unfailing snark. "Hell if I know, but that's how long it took when I was on the other end of this catastrophe. If I don't want to completely fuck over my timeline, that's how long I've got." He side-eyed Sollux, then added, "And fuck you for implying I'm not already a pretty princess. I'm the prettiest fucking princess you'll ever meet."
Sollux chocked on his tongue for a second before sputtering into a laugh. "Whatever you say, KK. Now where's the shitbox you call a husktop? We're wasting moonlight."
"Daylight," Karkat corrected. "It's been daylight for a while now, actually. And since I've already put in more than a full day's work before getting fried by past me's idiocy, not to mention having to haul ass here before the sun finished the job, I'm going to make my last sane decision of the day and demand sleep. And since you are running hot, I'm going assume you haven't slept in two days, either. So I suggest you get your ass into the coon and sleep some before attempting anything."
The look of indignation that crossed Sollux's face would have been hysterical if any of this had been a joke. "You can't be serious. You expect me to sleep after you drop this shit in my lap? I thought you said you had a deadline!"
"I'm as serious as a culling drone. Don't tell yourself otherwise. But what I need is a peak performance from you, Captor; I won't get that if I let you run wild through this upswing of yours. Which means your choices are willingly trying to rest for a while now, or I throw you in and hold you under until you pass out. Make a decision."
Sollux sputtered until Karkat moved like he was going to pick the other up. "Okay, okay, fine! I'm going! Fucking hell..." He popped up from his chair and shot past Karkat without stumbling much. "You're not my lusus, you know."
"Nope," Karkat agreed without pause, "just the pan-rotted fool who thinks you're worth having around."
A look was cast his way, but whatever Sollux meant to say, he thought better of it. Karkat took it as a sign there would be no further argument. Satisfied, he walked into the ablution block, which looked like it needed a wash of it's own, to inspect the still tender sunburns while the other got ready to sleep. A part of him wanted another shower, but a glance at the trap itself told him he wanted to be more disgusting than it before climbing in. Satisfied nothing needed direct medical attention, he returned to the respite block. Sollux had made it into the recuprecoon already. Whether it was defiance or practicality, he continued to drone to himself as he wrote down lines of code on the surface behind the coon. The sopor at least seemed to be helping slow him down, even if it couldn't stop him completely. Karkat knew that was the best he could hope for while the other remained caught in mania's grip.
A surge of confused pity wash through him as he watched; too protective to be pale, too soothing to be flushed, and wildly inappropriate either way. He wanted to slide into the sopor behind his friend and nuzzle and pet him until he slept, chase away the voices with his own so that Sollux had a little peace in his own mind. He'd always wanted that, despite the fact he'd never acted upon the desire. Knowing what he did about what was to come next only made the feeling push at him harder. It was also too late. He had another diamond to worry about, one that was instrumental in keeping a lot of people alive. Despite everything that said they should have ended up with some pretty pink diamonds between them, he couldn't risk going to Sollux now and fucking shit up worse later. So, as usual, he shook off the feeling and focused on something else instead.
His fingers skimmed though the sopor in the other half of Sollux's coon. When was the last time he'd touched real sopor, let alone slept in it? He might be able to fit in the unused half, but his boots would never be the same again. Taking them off to sleep wasn't something he felt comfortable doing, even relatively secure in the knowledge that nothing would happen during his sleep cycle. It seemed a crime to be so close to the stuff and not use it, however. In the end, he settled for smearing it across his skin, layering it thick across the burns and bruises under his clothes. Then he turned down the lights and wandered out to the recreation block, stretching out on the platform there to sleep.
A part of him already regretted choosing the platform over his friend. The rest of him just felt like a two-timing creep. He sighed as he stared at the ceiling. It was going to be a long three nights.
***
To be continued.
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~ATH We Part