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Desiderata	By : grimreaperchibi Category: Web Comics > Homestuck Views: 1781 -:- 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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*Additional Disclaimer* Please read with caution. This fic is tagged as Xeno for a reason. A complete definition of terms and practices can be found here: grimreaperchibi.tumblr.com/post/50076499276/xenobiology -- consult this list if you have any questions about who's sticking what where. There is also non-erotic, medical practice fingering in a later chapter, as well as mentions of erotic fingering after that. Said chapters will be tagged again with any other warnings that might come up along the way.
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AA: what are you doing tonight?
TA: wonderiing why iit ii2 that ii can flawle22ly compile over two thou2and liine2 of code yet am never 2mart enough two 2mell the miilk two 2ee iif iit went ranciid iin the meantiime.
AA: :) so you are out attempting to conquer the ever dreaded land of sales and foodstuff
TA: more liike the land of 2creamiing kiid2 and biitchy old ladiie2 but yes ii am out and iinteractiing wiith the world.
TA: arent you 2o proud of me?
AA: i have always been proud of you
AA: i would be prouder still if that foodstuff included more than instant noodles and cereal
Sollux sighed as he sipped his coffee. He supposed he deserved that particular prod. Yes, he was out and about interacting with the world, but only because he had to and Aradia knew it. Just as she also knew that his pantry included a lot more food than either instant noodles or cereal. It was just that the last time she’d come to visit him, it had been a while since he’d been shopping because he absolutely hated the chore and that had been all he’d had left. And like the good moirail she was, Aradia would never let him live it down.
To be honest, he really did like the city he’d come to live in. Large enough to have everything he could want or need almost literally at his fingertips, yet not so large it felt like everyone was living on top of each other. It was also strategically placed so that even though there were definite seasons, none were severe. The people he chose to remain in contact with were close without being constantly on his doorstep. There was a balance here that didn’t seem as right elsewhere. He didn’t think as much about everything that was still the same, yet so very different. Like how there was only one moon in the sky, brilliant magenta when full, but otherwise waxing and waning in pearlescent pinks. Or how the things he ate tasted no different than what he’d eaten as a child, yet now came from animals known as cows, chickens, and pigs. The easy translation of words—hive to house, think-pan to brain, perigree to lunar month—was what tended to unnerve him the most because while the words sounded correct in his head and when he spoke, there was still the underlying notion that he shouldn’t know them in the first place.
He understood what had happened and why. That was the price of living. The compromise that came with the ordering of paradox space demanded that both sides explicitly understood each other. Better to spend their years after The Game dealing with the normal societal assholes and bigots than in inadvertent war because of a stupid language gap or a misunderstanding of protocol. They had more than earned their resolutions without having to fight through them as well. Still, the dichotomy tended to bother him, so Sollux would put off any chore that required interacting with his new world until he absolutely had to do it. It had gotten easier over time, as true familiarity had settled in, and even easier after final maturation had kicked in. The truth of the matter, however, was that he now found himself at a point he never thought he’d be—alive. He’d never carried the hope that somehow, they’d win. He’d fully expected to die somewhere along the way, had multiple times in fact, yet never to a permanent enough degree it seemed. There was always some loophole, some exception that could be made. After being the plaything of Fate for so long, he hadn’t really been surprised to wake after the last battle, nor had it been all that strange to blink and find his sight restored or his psionics once more crackling around his horns. Dismaying, perhaps, and certainly disheartening in the long run, but not surprising.
“Maybe you don’t want to be as dead as you think you do,” Aradia had told him once when the ennui had been particularly bad. Given that he knew better than to question existential reasoning, Sollux had given up asking “why?” in favor of simply plodding along with however this life decided to play out; something that was easier done when locked in his apartment and staring at a computer screen than out in public.
Figuring that he’d spent enough time procrastinating, he drained his cup, set aside enough cash to cover his bill and a tip, and continued on with his errands. Considering how rarely he went out, he tended to make an event out of the nights he did. He’d already bypassed the more important tasks for picking over the new release game titles, arguing about graphics versus storylines with some of the employees there, splurging on a couple totally unnecessary upgrades for his husktop, then schooling several idiots failing to fix a simple reboot error, and now, dinner. Seeing as how the current time was three AM, the grocery store should have been relatively free of old ladies, who somehow gave him more of a headache than squalling pink children. The early spring night was nice, though, and he still wasn’t all that interesting to braving the nearly deserted aisles of foodstuff, so he decided to take the long way back by wandering a bit.
For as uncomfortable as it could make him, there were perks to this new hybridized world. On the grandscale, it was the destruction of the hemospectrum, the now optional donation of genetic material to the Mother Grub, and the press-ganging into military service had ceased. Granted, a lot of trolls still went that route because their violent tendencies had been curbed, not eliminated; it just wasn’t the only career path anymore. It was still possible to get culled, but only if you were a dumbass who started a fight you couldn’t win. However, it was the small scale stuff Sollux found himself enjoying more. Like coffee, the concept of window shopping, and bean bag furniture. There was something liberating about being able to walk down a warmly lit street. No hurrying, no scuttling, no desperate prayers to remain alone and head held high because you were looking at your surroundings and not being defiant or intimidating.
And because he was looking around, Sollux saw something he hadn’t seen in a long time: nubby horns.
“KK?” The question was lost to the noise of the street, the other troll continuing on his determined path through the light crowd without a moment’s hesitation. For a minute, Sollux thought that maybe he’d been wrong. After all, it had been quite a while since he’d physically seen his friend. Karkat was a still a mighty and formidable force online. They regularly irritated each other via texting and online gaming, but they hadn’t occupied the same space since The Game ended. Then the other stopped at the corner, turning this way and that like he was trying to remember which direction he needed to go. A glimpse of a profile and the familiar gesture of aggravation when he got bumped aside by crossing traffic confirmed those nubby horns were indeed owned by Karkat Vantas. The acknowledgement felt stupidly good and before he really realized what he was doing, Sollux was trying to catch up.
It took two blocks and a near miss with a car before he was close enough to give the other a psionic shoulder tap. He stayed a few steps back, fully expecting a swing of a sickle to meet the gesture. Instead, Karkat came to a full halt, shoulders curling in defensively. “Fuck off, Eridan,” he growled, sounding tired. “You said your piece, I said mine, and there’s fuck-all else to discuss. Matter closed. Now leave me the hell alone.”
There was a flash of —pain? anger? regret?—which prompted the response of, “Fish-dick lives here too? Fuck, now I have to move.”
Karkat turned sharply, eyes wide. “…Sollux?”
Most of the good humor had abruptly vanished at the mention of Eridan, but Sollux scrounged up something of a smile. “Hey, KK.”
The greeting was met with a groan. “Look, I’ve had a really long night, so if you’re looking for a verbal dancing partner, go somewhere else. I’m not in the mood to dice words with anyone.”
It was definitely a dull prick of pain that had him snapping back, “If you weren’t such a stubborn shit about everything, I’m sure you’d find your argument quota dwindling.” Sollux raised his hands in a pacifying gesture before the other could retort. “Calm down. I didn’t play in traffic trying to catch you so that we could argue, okay?”
“Then what do you want?”
Good question. Whatever he had been expecting, this wasn’t it. “We haven’t seen each other in sweeps. Is it so bad to want to talk face-to-face with my best friend after all that?”
The chuckle Karkat gave was colourless and exhausted, drawing attention to how colourless and exhausted he appeared. He somehow looked worse than any of those insomniac days spent on the meteor, even the ones right after waking on Prospit only to die immediately thereafter from Bec Noir’s wrath. Final maturation had been nice to him, helping him grow tall and lean even if his horns remained stubby things that liked to get lost in his hair. He didn’t look quite right, though. They weren’t old enough yet to have their skin start darkening, still the almost childish ash grey, but even so, Karkat seemed to be exceptionally sallow. His blood colour had taken over the once grey irises, making his eyes bright, though it seemed like the wrong kind of brightness. His arms were crossed impatiently over his chest while his hands picked restlessly at the long sleeves of his shirt. Even the perpetual anger that drove him forward seemed to be floundering, more show than substance. Sollux wanted to ask if he was all right. Doing so would probably only lead to an argument, which he had already promised he wasn’t going to do. So he chose something else.
“Where are you going?”
“Home. If I can find the fucking train station.”
“I can take you. To the station,” Sollux added quickly when Karkat glared at him with a mixture of vehemenet anger and honest panic, lips curled back in a silent snarl that spoke louder than any word that could be shouted. Whatever was wrong obviously hadn’t impaired his friend’s willingness to pick a fight. He was exceptionally paranoid about the location of his hive, more so now than he had been when he’d still been hiding his mutant blood colour. At this point, it might have been a better idea to simply step back and forget the whole thing had happened. The moment Sollux decided to do exactly that was also the moment Karkat relaxed, rubbing at his eyes, all signs of aggression now smothered under the predominant weariness.
“Would you?” he asked quietly. “I’m so turned around right now it makes a conversation with Lalonde and Kanaya seem straightforward and sensible.”
Sollux gestured in the right direction with a snicker and fell into step with the other. He was unreasonably pleased to see that he was still that much taller than Karkat. They walked quietly for a few blocks as once more they settled into the comfortable feeling of friendship. Then Karkat spoke up again.
“To answer your earlier question, no, Eridan doesn’t live here. This was just a convenient meeting place. He lives a lot further north, out on the coast somewhere when he’d not playing escort to Her Imperial Luminescence.” Almost immediately, he stopped short with a guilty look. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay,” Sollux replied smoothly. Time had definitely worn the pain of another failed matespritship thin, so he could ignore the small stab of pain that still showed up whenever someone mentioned Feferi. “We were both kinda fucked over by the end of it all. The decision was mutual. And if she’s happy, then I’m happy for her.” They started walking again, and after another block or so, he gained the courage to ask something that had been bothering him. “So how come you came out of hiding to see the asshole fish, but not me?”
“You never asked.” Karkat shrugged. “I didn’t want to see him either, if that makes a difference. But he got on my case and wouldn’t shut it until I agreed to meet with him. So I did, and those are five hours of my life I’ll be very happy to never see returned if it means I never have to do something similar again.”
“And what turned his gills inside out?”
“Everything, as usual. Mostly complained about how nothing was the same anymore, but he got pretty pissy when I wouldn’t tell him where I was or what I was doing these days. The whole thing started to give me a headache. I finally told him if he wanted someone to agree with him about how ‘good’ the old days were, he should find Equius and left. He, of course, tried to backtrack.” The other troll shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore; just go home and call it a night.”
“I think it’s one of the constants of the universe. Life, death, and ED being a douche-canoe. And you can go home because here we are.” Sollux made a flourish with his hand as he gestured to the terminal they now stood outside of. He snickered when Karkat gave him a friendly shove, secretly pleased he’d managed to lighten his friend’s mood some. “Seriously, though. If he keeps bothering you, just tell me. I’ve got this great new idea for a virus that begs to be tested on the most aggravating asshat I can find.”
“You’re going to send it to him anyway. Why should I offer you another reason?”
“Because I might have bought two copies of a certain new game by accident this evening and could be persuaded to hand one over if suitably compensated for it.”
Karkat stared hard at him for a moment, then held his hand out expectantly. “The idiot linked his personal computer to his work one. The firewall hasn’t been updated since it was installed and the anti-virus only protects the workstation. He’s horrible about changing his passwords and keeps a list of them in the trash bin. There’s an ungodly amount of female-on-female human porn shoved into a subfolder just off the main drive—I think he’s developed a flush-crush on Lalonde. Light the motherfucker up.”
Sollux grinned as he handed over the game. “As a token of my gratitude, I’ll give you two nights to unlock as much as you can before challenging you to a strife.”
“How magnanimous,” Karkat scoffed, filing the game into his sylladex. “I can thrash you without any special weapons or power-ups. But seeing as how you want to get schoolfed on the art of war, I’ll be sure to repeat the lesson often and at high volume. Wouldn’t want you to miss any of the finer points, after all.”
“Your thoughtfulness never ceases to amaze me, KK. You are truly a bodhisattva of kindness and understanding.”
“Try to kiss my feet and I’ll kick your teeth down the sewer drain.” He hesitated as he turned for the terminal doors. “Hey. …thanks.”
With a careless wave, Sollux shrugged the gratitude off. “Two nights, nook-sucker. Then I’m going to start looking for you.” Karkat rolled his eyes and extended a middle finger, but there was a ghost of a smile on his face as he finally turned and entered the building.
There was an immediate impulse to follow. Karkat seemed to know where everyone else had ended up, but no one knew where he’d finally put down roots. The closest anyone had gotten to an answer as to why was that after spending almost two sweeps crammed into such close quarters with a bunch of idiots, he had endured enough interpersonal interactions to last him the rest of his life. Sollux had found it hard to push after that, given his own self-imposed exile. But if he found out which train his friend was leaving on, he might not be able to trace it all the way back, but it would give him a direction and relative distance, and—
He mentally smacked himself. Karkat had already had one inconsiderate prick trying to invade his privacy tonight. Though there were dozens of reason to both advance and turn away, Sollux turned on his heel and walked away for no other reason than he refused to associate with Eridan in the slightest. It didn’t matter how piqued his curiosity was, he would not pry where he was so obviously not wanted.
The night lost its charm. Now all he wanted was to go home as well. He sighed and cursed himself as an idiot for not completing the main tasks for his night first. Taking the shortest route he knew to first the grocery store, then the pharmacy, he made it back to his hive stem in record time. The task of making everything he’d just purchased fit into his kitchen helped burn through the rest of his agitation. Listless, but not tired, he flicked on his console to start trudging through the single-player campaign of his new game. He might have given Karkat extra time to become familiar with the controls, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t take advantage of that time, too. Then they would see who schoolfed whom.
***
To be continued.
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Desiderata