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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.

Chapter List
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Consciousness kept trying to creep in, worming into the soft, comfortable, numb place deep sleep had brought him. He pushed it away, aware of the fact he was waking and the desire not to, but nothing beyond that came to light. He faded back and forth, easily at first, then with growing resistance, hovering in the gray mists of disconnected semi-lucidity endlessly until a slight jostle pulled him more firmly into the land of the waking. He fought harder to go back. Something in the waking world hurt and he didn’t want any part of it, just sleep until whatever caused the hurt disappeared as well...
But the jostle changed something fundamental about the world. The dark place he’d been resting in was blocked, inaccessible, as if it had never existed to begin with. Only consciousness remained, whether he wanted to go there or not.
Karkat blinked bleary eyes as he tried to get his think-pan functioning. He didn’t recognize the room he was in, though it was familiar enough he knew not to panic. Shifting in the recuprecoon, trying to find something definite to focus on, he became distracted by how weird the motion felt. Moving in a dense liquid like sopor slime had a certain distinctive wet drag to it, a resistance he didn’t feel at all as he stretched despite the sopor tingle still keeping him groggy and unfocused. He tried to make sense of the conflicting sensations, but it left him feeling even more tired for the effort. Karkat closed his eyes again. Whatever awful thing he’d been afraid of didn’t seem to be out there, which meant he didn’t need to worry anymore either. He relaxed, content in his lethargy. He had just starting to drift back to sleep when he heard a familiar voice cut through the silence.
“Look, I don’t give a damn how important you think it is. He’s not available to speak. If it’s a ship issue, forward it to Zahhak. If it’s a security issue, send it on to Leijon. Send it to Makara for all I care, if it can’t wait. ...No, I don’t know when, maybe three cycles... Yes! Three! ...He’s not a fucking barkbeast you can make heel whenever the mood strikes you. Fuck your agreements; he was a kid in duress when you manipulated him into those. And if you think I’m going to let you--” Sollux hissed, a feral, dangerous sound that snapped Karkat wide awake. He focused instantly on where his friend stood, hands pressed into the desk as he leaned over the terminal there.
“Get off my frequency,” Sollux snarled after a few seconds of tense silence, cutting the air with a quick slice of his hand. A flash of colour played over dark skin like light refracting from water, ending in a line of blue light that followed his fingertips. Karkat blinked in surprise. Then he blinked again, unsure of what he’d seen, or even if he’d seen anything at all. It had happened so fast he couldn’t tell if his eyes had been playing tricks on his dulled senses.
The room descended into stifling quiet. Sollux remained hunched over the terminal for several long seconds before abruptly stalking out of the room all together. Karkat remained stiffly alert for a minute longer, then sunk into the bedding he was still cocooned in. The previous night slammed into him with all the force of a sledgehammer. Sollux a helmsman, himself a puppet of the Followers of the Signless, and from the sounds of it, he’d managed to drag several other friends into his mess as well. How many other suffered because of his stupidity? Karkat didn’t want to know. All he really wanted was to sink into the chrysalis and never come back up. Maybe if he ended his idiocy before he did any real damage... The material thwarted his attempt to bury himself in it, adjusting somehow to keep him buoyant without becoming restrictive. After fighting with it for a few minutes, it gave up and poured him out onto the floor instead.
Losing to a piece of furniture, no mater how technologically advanced, should have salted the wounds of the previous night. The sting was negligible under the weight of disillusionment, however. After losing everything else, even the indignity of being bested by an inanimate object meant little. Instead, Karkat trudged toward the ablution block. There might not have been any slime to rinse off, but the habit pushed him into action. Or at least enough action that he ended up under a hot spray before zoning out again. He didn’t even realize he’d curled up in a corner until Sollux found him there.
With gentle insistence, the older troll pulled him from the ablution chamber, getting drenched himself in the process. Habit kicked in again so that Karkat managed to dry himself off while Sollux did the same, then there was more gentle herding back into the main block once dressed. The sleeping chrysalis had been put away and another compartment opened up into a sitting platform. A suspicious looking pile had already formed there, but Karkat made no argument about being bundled into it. He took the proffered food, though it neither looked nor smelled appetizing. Here, Sollux showed some impatience with Karkat’s withdrawn nature even if he still didn’t push. Once finished picking at the unidentifiable meal, his friend tried to give him as much space as the small block could allow. Most of the time Sollux spent clicking away at the terminal in the room, still apparently prone to muttering to himself as he worked. A couple times he stood and circuited the room, spending time going over the bookshelf or sickle display with acute attention. Twice, he left; once to answer some call, the second referred to as some type of maintenance.
All the while, Karkat thought, turning over the ruined pieces of his new reality with despondent care. That his future self had fallen into the FSC’s grasp, while disheartening and painful, actually held little surprise. They’d only been trying to do as such since he’d first touched the internet. Granted, some of their information had proven useful, like how to hide his bloodcolour efficiently and the rules that supported hemoanynomity. The vast majority of the time, however, they’d just been demanding and terrifying under the guise of benevolence. Before contact with the FSC, he’d understood he was different. No one had a lusus like his, no one was as warm as he was, and his horns were all sorts of wrong. It didn’t take long to figure out that all those differences meant something. After being contacted, however, he feared the differences. The visions they painted of his culling still had the power to keep him awake during the daylight hours. Everything that defined him, from his sign to the uniform bluntness of his teeth, became a weapon that could be used against him at any point.
They poked and wheedled and cajoled, tried every manipulation in the book to get him to come into the “safety” they could proved, until the paranoia alone nearly suffocated him. But the pressure backfired, igniting his stubborn nature and warrior breeding rather than making him crumble to their will. He may have come to hate himself for everything that was wrong with him, but he hated the FSC more for making him afraid of it. Anger became a safety net, an anchor, a blade he could ravage others with even as they sought to ravage him. It didn’t matter that his weapon was dual-edged--that was part of the price of safety, or at least the illusion of it.
He had finally earned a reprieve from the Coalition’s attention thanks to the venomous rage he could spit. The last contact they’d made had been about a sweep ago, when they had provided him with a connection code that would allow him to contact them “when he was ready.” He snarled obscenities at the thought, but that code was still tucked away into the depths of one of his books, conveniently forgotten about more often than not nowadays. He told himself it was to protect against the universe’s awful sense of humor; that if he blew it off, his own bad luck would cause them to start their harassment in earnest again. If he was honest with himself (which he had to be now, knowing what he knew), he’d kept it as a last ditch effort to avoid culling.
He must have said something aloud, because then Sollux responded with, “You did it to save lives.”
Karkat blinked at his friend, who had given up his pretense of being otherwise involved and was now partially in the pile as well. “What?”
The other didn’t look up from the data reader he was playing with. “Your decision to join the Coalition. You did it to save the lives of others,” Sollux repeated.
He snorted in derision. It sounded like an overflowing bowl of shit to Karkat, a throwaway comment to make him feel better about a hopeless circumstance. But it piqued his curiosity enough that he didn’t immediately shoot the idea down. “Who?” Karkat demanded instead, sure that the list wouldn’t be impressive.
After a moment of hesitation, Sollux sighed and put the reader aside. “Most of us, actually. TV, KN, TZ, FF...” He frowned and fidgeted. “Me,” he added quietly before hurrying on. “NP’s been involved with them for I don’t know how long and EQ followed her, so I guess they don’t count. But GZ’s conversion alone has probably saved hundred of lives beyond that, and that’s just trolls. Almost every group that forms the Coalition owes lives to you.”
Karkat frowned. It had never occurred to him that he might be able to do something to help others from within the organization. He’d figured being a puppet would be the best he could hope for, a mouthpiece for whatever garbage they wanted to spill into the universe. “But I’m still their barkbeast to call.”
Sollux winced. “You heard that?” When Karkat didn’t respond, Sollux continued. “Some think that, yeah. Setvan is a pretty self-entitled asshole anyway, but because they’re the scholar, they feel even more entitled to try and jerk you around. Spent too much time with their ideal and not with reality. And I know some of the others in the Leadership would rather have a figurehead to boss around, but that’s not what they wanted. They wanted the descendant of a revolutionary, which is exactly what they got, so they can suck it.” He stretched and shifted to face Karkat better. “Trust me, KK. For every awful restriction the Coalition has tried to bind you with, you’ve stuck it to them four times over. For every single asshat who tries to misuse you to control others, sixteen more value your leadership on its own merits. There’s still a shit ton of bureaucratic idiocy to wade through, but things are better. For a lot of people. Because of you.”
When no more questions were forthcoming, Sollux went back to his reader, leaving Karkat to mull over his fate in silence once more. Though he still didn’t quite buy the line of joining to save lives, the need to believe it had him accepting it all the same. The thought of service in the FSC, or really the idea of people following him (willingly or not) for the Coalitions ambition still made him feel ill, but that such service might bring about some good eased a bit of the distaste. What soothed him the most, however, was the idea he wasn’t being kept as a pet, a bauble to be put on display when it was convenient, then tucked away in obscurity the rest of the time. He’d still been trapped--a gilded cage was still a cage, no matter how large or nice it happened to be. Except it didn’t act like a cage, didn’t respond to challenges like a cage, stiff and immutable. If anything, it seemed like an actual contract of service, such as he would have signed to join the Threshecutioner Corps. He’d never thought there could be an equality in working with the FSC before and it shifted the view of his scattered and maimed future.
Starting to feel overwhelmed by the shift in perspective, Karkat’s attention readily turned to a distraction. Sollux had made himself quite at home in the pile he noted, even if his attention was once more fixed up on the hand-held reader. He didn’t initiate more conversation. The silence between them was comfortable, unstained by emotional upheaval despite the constant shifts in Karkat’s thoughts. Sollux also didn’t act as though he was waiting for someone to force the words out of his mouth he was too stubborn to say alone. He was simply there, a comforting presence in a still alien environment. He seemed relaxed, content even, to stay where he was, as though proximity alone was a good enough reason to remain. In another place and time, the setup would have been scandalous, unquadranted and relaxing in a pile together...
...Unless they were quadranted. Karkat’s bloodpusher stuttered at the thought. He’d had feelings for Sollux for longer than he cared to contemplate. The yellowblood had been one of the first trolls that hadn’t been put off by the vitriol of self-hate. Had, in fact, met each attempt to drive him off with either sarcastic indifference or equally hot anger. It had been such hidden relief from the saccharine-sickening responses of the FSC that Karkat hadn’t realized how much he liked talking to someone until he finally said something that did make Sollux go away. The opposite edge of anger turned out to be loneliness and that hurt more than Karkat could have guessed.
In the fumbling sweeps since, other emotions had gotten tangled up in the clusterfuck that was their relationship, mashed into combinations that were uncomfortable and socially dangerous. He wanted to push. He wanted to protect. He wanted to pull Sollux away from the edge he constantly toed. He just wanted. I there had been any sort of normal vacillation between each desire, he might have mentioned it at some point. But it happened too fast, too frequently to be considered healthy. Quadrants were meant to provide stability, something he could never hope to provide given how his feelings kept blurring rather than defining those lines. Never mind the fact that being in any quadrant period was bad for retaining his anonymity. The FSC had been sure to give him that daymare as well--betrayal by a loved one.
But there was no need to protect his bloodcolour here, was there? If the FSC already had their grabby hands on him, maybe the fear they had drilled into him had gone away, leaving room for all those complicated feelings to untangle. And if that happened, maybe they could fall into a quadrant together... Karkat mentally slapped himself. All he really had was a fuck load of supposition based on one flimsy, nondescript action.
Now that the idea had taken root, however, it refused to be dislodged. Karkat stared at Sollux, still absorbed in whatever he was reading, a slow burning desire to do something consuming him. He could--heat flooded his face, hot enough to burn even the tips of ears. Well, no, he couldn’t pap Sollux. That was wildly inappropriate at the moment even if his friend and his future-self shared diamonds. You don’t just pap others out of the blue like that. But maybe...maybe he could touch...? They’d touched before. Sollux had held him twice, three times if both breakdowns on the bridge were counted separately. Certainly a touch wouldn't be awkward or confusing.
He hesitated, though, face too warm and hand suspended in the air as Karkat tried to convince himself a touch didn’t mean anything, or more appropriately wouldn’t be rejected. At length, he pulled his hand back into his lap without doing anything. He was being ten types of stupid and he knew it, making a huge deal out of nothing. Traitorous hands curled into fists, Karkat focused his eyes into his lap, making himself concentrate on ridding his skin of the colour it had taken. For once, he was glad for Sollux’s oblivious nature. This mess didn’t need more complications.
That assertion didn't ease the feeling of disappointment when Sollux stood and left the room again. Karkat didn’t have much time to sulk or berate himself or Sollux before the older troll returned with another round of food. This time there was no subterfuge--Sollux sat right next to Karkat in the pile, handing over the meal of strange green pods with a cursory explanation of how to eat them. It was like popping grub candies from a shell, only smaller in scale, and they tasted very different. Not bad; just different, and Karkat found himself too hungry to complain.
At least until Sollux “accidentally” popped two of the mostly round innards into Karkat’s face. He apologized through his snickering until Karkat nailed him in the forehead in return. Then it was all out war. It wasn’t until much later, ammo spent and resulting mess cleaned, that Karkat realized how easily they had both flopped back into the pile, close enough to touch. Not exactly cuddled together, but the solid press of one shoulder into another. If he craned his neck a bit, Karkat found he could see the reader screen. That felt invasive of the closeness they already shared, so he snuggled down instead, drowsily enjoying the warmth slowly eating away at the dead spot in his chest instead.
***
To be continued.
- 5
- 6
- 7
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~ATH We Part