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crabbygreymalkinShould I just keep that series title? It really is starting to grow on me...
Title: To Place His Right Hand
Ships: Karkat<3John, Karkat<>Gamzee, John<3Feferi, Karkatc3<(Terezi/Vriska)
Summary: Karkat wants to save the worlds. He also wants an alien prince's heart. The horrorterrors seem to think these two goals are the same goal, but without his voice and with John's alien views on sexuality in the way, someone else might beat him to it.
Notes: Second fic for the Fairy Tale challenge - The Little Mermaid + orange.
Notes 2: Okay, look, it's Karkat as the Little Mermaid, if you're expecting to find no distressing content in here, then you're thinking of the wrong fairytale and also the wrong troll. This is your warning. Tread carefully.
Also, there are about ten minutes left of February in my timezone, I will make another pass through for typos before I repost it to AO3 (probably tomorrow), but for now, if there are any left, I apologise and I will fix them later.
When Karkat crawls out of whisper-haunted dreams into consciousness, he finds the prince still asleep. Which is a good thing, given that the moment he wakes up is the first goodbye, and Karkat doesn't want to miss a second of this final day. Today, after all, is a day of rejoicing for everyone in the castle except him.
Today is Prince John's wedding day.
---
He's two and a half sweeps old when he stops talking about his dreams and begins raiding the paper stores instead. Paper can't snap at him not to be a stupid wriggler, or stroke his hair and lie to him that everything will be okay, or begin having daymares itself just from listening to his. So instead he scrawls all his fear and desperation out in awkward, angry capitals, takes it out to the shore, and tosses it into the water. He settles on a protruding rock that juts out into the black sea, and watches the ink run as the pages curl up and sink, dragging what's left of his words to the bottom.
He hopes, when he comes back emptyhanded and near-scorched at dawn, that it might make them go away. But all it does is make his ancestor sigh at his recklessness in that infuriating way that makes Karkat wish they weren't related, so he goes back to outlining his rants on the walls until the traders come by again, and the horrors come right back the next time he closes his eyes.
---
He doesn't get up. The prince likes to know his page isn't sleepwalking, so the beginning of Karkat's morning routine consists mostly of cocooning himself in blankets and watching John breathe, which still feels needlessly intrusive when he has no pale intentions towards him, but this human concept of being intimate with only one person is... well, he's still figuring that out. Besides, it's John who lets Karkat sleep in his bed, who kisses the top of his head when he says goodnight (always where his horns used to be, as if he remembers, which he doesn't), so if anyone's to blame for what Karkat's learned are some horribly mixed signals -
John's eyelids flutter, derailing Karkat's exhausted train of thought, and instead he thinks, Well, that's that then.
---
Once, on his or her eighth wriggling day, a troll of the Afteran Northlands is allowed to cross the rift into Ard, and wander the human world for a night. Karkat waits with increasing impatience as all his friends come of age: first Gamzee, returning with a new pie recipe that chills him out harder than sopor, and, he claims, is less rough on his pan, then Eridan, then all the others one by one and sometimes two by two. All of them bring back stories, treasures, and in Terezi's case, third-degree burns and a left eye as red as the sun.
That last gives him pause, but when he wakes at midday plagued by dreams of a hornless alien with bright blue eyes and a pitiful lack of guile, he doesn't care. (When he wakes again at dusk, the dreams have faded. The desire has not.)
---
"I had the weirdest dream," John says, and Karkat fixes his eyes on him and listens intently because this is another last, and it's a good thing he's not counting them or he'd be maggotshit by the end of the day. Oh wait, he is counting them. Fuck. "I dreamed about the night I woke up in the temple, you remember, I told you about it? Just before you showed up? Only in the dream, it was you looking after me, instead of..." He blushes. "You wiped the sweat off my forehead and tied up my wound and your hands were really warm... it was actually kind of nice."
Karkat lets himself be hugged when John reaches for him, and returns the prince's sad smile with his own. He knows better than to hope. Tomorrow morning, John's new bride will take Karkat's place in this bed, and at least this is one goodbye he doesn't have to make on his own.
---
Terezi goes with him to make sure he gets his timing right - they don't need two half-blind trolls in their cohort, she cackles, and he doesn't know why he thinks of Sollux with a vicious stab of self-loathing. Then she pushes him across and after a brief feeling of panic, of tentacles wrapping around him and the sharp stink of photon emissions, he doesn't have room in his pan to worry about anything but the glare of the still-lingering Ardhan daylight.
"Fuck!" He tries to blink away the pain, and squints through a veil of pink for a moment before giving up and just running for cover until the terrible brightness fades away. He doesn't know how long he remains curled up under the nearest shrub, but he opens his eyes to clearer darkness, and wipes them gratefully on his sleeve, still cursing Terezi as he gets gingerly to his feet.
When he looks around, the first thing he notices is how much green there is - the Afteran plants were flowering when he left, a rainbow of snapping blossoms and poisonous petals and hallucinogenic (at best) pollen, but on this side it seems to be one of the later summers and everything is jade and olive and lime and teal and a dozen more shades he doesn't have names for. The second is the openness of the cloudless sky, deep blue fading slowly into black, along with its single moon, pale as diamond, whose light marks a path among the rocks that seems as good as any. The worlds won't be close enough for him to pass back again until almost sunrise, and he didn't come here to spend all night - his only night in the human world, and twelve hours isn't enough, it's not fucking fair - standing around gawking at a few goddamn plants.
He casts a last glance back at the rift, barely visible now with the odd yellow sun below the horizon, and starts to climb.
---
"I know you'll be happy for me," John tells him as they dress - or rather, as Karkat dresses John, adjusting buttons and smoothing epaulets into place, a prince's war-uniform that seems oddly appropriate for a coupling ritual in a way that makes him wonder if their two species aren't so different as everyone keeps telling him, and as John dresses Karkat, coaxing him into a stiff new tunic, which is a waste, he wants to tell him, he's only going to wear it once, and he hopes it won't take John too many sweeps to forgive him when it dissolves into foam.
They inspect each other in the mirror, and John yanks another elf-lock out of Karkat's hair.
"I know you're happy for me," he repeats, and Karkat wonders which of them he's trying to convince.
---
He's found his way onto a real path, and has been following it for several hours to see if it goes anywhere (dangerous, Cronus's tales whisper in his head, he could be caught and eaten, dissected, made a sex slave, have his endoskeleton stripped to make chair-legs, and everything else that everyone knows humans do to unlucky trolls), when he finds the boy. And by "boy", he means "dangerous alien", and by "finds", he means "almost trips over a shadow on the path when he realises it's not a log".
Well, probably not a log. The stories he's heard about this planet are weird enough that he wouldn't be surprised to find out logs can feel pain here, but he crouches down to turn the figure over anyway, and finds bright blue eyes staring back at him from a pale, hornless face covered in blood. He bites back a cry, caught between the urge to flee and the delirious, pitiful look in the human's eyes - this kid couldn't hurt him if he wanted to. He's weak and wounded and Karkat could just finish him and flee, as long as he could keep out of sight for the next - he glances at the moon - six hours or so, he'll be fine, right?
The human blinks at him, and tries to talk, and without thinking, Karkat reaches to wipe the blood off his lips, and then freezes, staring at the scarlet on his fingers. No. He can't leave him.
He'd forgotten that the humans he dreamed of had red blood.
---
Sunrise is always John's favourite time of day, and Karkat dutifully lets himself be dragged out of the castle to watch the big terrible ball of fire make its way above the horizon. Today's show doesn't disappoint, the sky painting itself fierce orange, bright and beautiful and terrifying as the Empress he sometimes dreams of, and he shivers in fear and homesickness. Selfsickness. Maybe they're the same thing.
John mistakes it, as usual, for superstition. "It's alright, Karkat," he says, laughing, putting his arm around his companion as if to protect him from the sky and its portents. "If the horde comes, Dave and Jade will take them all down in a second!"
Karkat tries to smile in return, because he's already learned that John doesn't actually think his fear is funny. He's laughing only because he doesn't believe in the invading fanged, clawed, yellow-horned army that his serfs perform fierce rituals to keep away from the village (Karkat watched them once, dancing drugged at midwinter, raving in their fear and hatred, and he burrowed, shivering, into John's side, while John stroked his hair and whispered meaningless reassurance). It's a supreme irony, one the insufferable prick of a knight-captain could only dream of reaching, that Prince John of the Royal House of Egbert does not believe in trolls.
---
Karkat tears his shirt for a makeshift bandage and drags the human as far as he dares, until he sees the spires towering over the trees, one of those weird human hives they call... castles? Or is this a temple? For all the arguments he loses with Aradia over human artifacts, he knows nothing about their architecture, only that this structure looks cruel and alien, a clawed hand reaching for the sun, and as he reaches the edge of the trees, he stops, pulling the human under a relatively safe-smelling bush. Might as well have some semblance of a hiding-place while he works out what to do next.
---
It's not just trolls he doesn't believe in, Karkat has discovered (mostly by means of listening to his supper-conversations with his sister, who gives Karkat the same deja vu shiver up his spine that John and his knight-commander do). It's gods and ghosts and reincarnation, omens and other worlds and thinking automatons, anything he can't see or touch or smell.
He does, however, believe in beating Karkat at chess at every opportunity.
"Rook to Queen's Knight Three!" he announces now, sliding the damn thing over to pin Karkat's own knight, leaving him unable to protect his king from the other side. Karkat moves his last pawn, and winces as it's snatched gleefully off the board. He's going to lose.
---
By the time the moon sets, the human's settled some, blue eyes sleepy instead of bright, and he's humming softly instead of mumbling frantic snatches of what sounds half like helmsman-code and half like some demented lovesong from a terrible epic involving rabbits and ancient flying machines. Karkat's not sure if his own broken singing and awkward strokes of the human's hair had anything to do with this or it's solely a result of the fact that his bleeding seems to have slowed. Either way, it's theoretically an improvement.
---
"Heheheheh," is what John's laugh sounds like, and it reminds Karkat that there's one thing about his voice he doesn't miss. His own laugh sounded like a rusted airlock, the rasp of someone who's been wandering the desert for a hundred sweeps and has forgotten how to speak. Since his transformation, he's learned to laugh silently, and let his prince make enough noise for both of them.
Now John giggles as he moves his queen down to the back row and announces, "Shah mat!" When Karkat grins ruefully and tips over his king, John pats his hair affectionately, and Karkat shifts his head to be stroked on his horns - he instantly regrets it when the prince's fingers rub painfully on unmarked scalp. He pulls his head away, trying not to grimace, and starts to reset the board, stroking each faithful black piece in a silent goodbye as he places them back on their squares.
"Maybe I should let you play white next time, huh?" John offers, and Karkat shakes his head. He's always played black, even in his nightly games with Eridan - Aradia called him sentimental, Vriska called him deranged, Gamzee called him an adorable motherfucker that everyone needs to all step off and let him play chess at the way he motherfuckin wants.
Truth is, he just never felt right killing the black pawns. If that's needless sentiment, he's okay with that.
---
By the time the human closes his eyes, the air is half a degree lighter, and Karkat makes up his mind. He can risk getting the kid a few metres closer, but he has no intention of burning for him. He drags him down to the temple gate, kisses him on the forehead, and flees back to the rift.
He only realises when he stumbles back into Gamzee's waiting arms that he left his bloodstained shirt behind.
---
Any other day, he wouldn't mind helping with the cooking. It's the only way he can earn his keep in a world without terrible ballads that need to be torn apart and their bleeding guts laid out on parchment so that no other troll in the province has to suffer through them like he did. If he had his voice he could be a storyteller like Aranea, he thinks, or if the humans had paper mills and book binders and a fucking printing press he could at least write them down, but there's not much he can do in a province where even unwieldy vellum is so precious that the king's clever mother spends half an hour every week scraping another layer off the newsscrolls so they can be reused. Or if he had any sort of past in this world, he could apply to be a knight, but Strider won't take a foundling with no credentials into the castle guard, even if Karkat has spent every goddamn moment since he came here proving his loyalty.
So cooking it is, and serving as John's valet, and warming his bed in a frustratingly nonconcupiscent way, and being side-eyed by the fucking knights every time he practises his Afteran martial arts in the courtyard because horrorterrors fucking forbid that he should know how to protect his master in a pinch. He only saved his fucking life, after all.
But John never helps out in the kitchens, and every second Karkat doesn't spend with him today is spilled water in the desert.
---
He comes back to the hive without a story to tell. The rest of his clan hate humans, fear them, tell horror stories about them to make each other shiver in the heat of summer. If he tells them he saved a human's life he'll be on the end of Terezi's noose before the air disturbed by his last word settles.
---
He can't shriek when he smells the pancakes burning, can't yell at the girl who was meant to be watching them, he only turned away for a second, goddammit, just long enough to check the taste of the weird Ardhan blueberries and make sure they were usable, and when he pulls the crepes out they're black and bitter, and without the ability to direct his six-and-a-half straight minutes of swearing anywhere but the inside of his own sponge, he finds himself struggling not to burst into tears. He just wanted to make something familiar for once, something from home, even if he has to use alien fruit and alien flour and cream that's still mostly milk.
Fuck it. He has time to make a second lot. Dave can have these.
---
His dreams are getting worse again. He's always dreamed of ships and monsters and meteors and living chess pieces and a game he had to lose all his family to win (he may have to again, say the gods, and he refuses to hear it), but now he dreams of the human playing it too. He dreams of Ard, but different, less green, covered in stone and metal. He dreams of a cheery alien girl with huntbeast ears, and another girl wrapped in horrorterror darkness and an infuriating boy he thinks he once loathed, and most of all of his wounded rescuee, healed and gleeful and floating like a blue feather against the black sky.
He dreams of warm alien kisses, and wakes feverish.
"Gamzee?" he murmurs, and the cool body draped around him shifts.
"What's up, palebro?"
"When you crossed... did you meet any humans?"
Gamzee's silent for a moment, stroking his hair, and Karkat feels a chill, before the answer comes. "Depends what you call "meet". There was this one motherfucker, I went and saved him from a motherfuckin mob that wanted to all string him up for those pretty orange eyes of his, only they were all at motherfuckin clumsy about it... Kissing him was like lickin up on the edge at the motherfuckin sun."
"You pailed him?"
He laughs like a rusty bicycle horn, hideous and comforting. "Motherfuck, no. Even an outcast like him weren't ready to trust his soul to someone he only got his know on of for a couple motherfuckin hours. And don't you fuckin get through your motherfuckin sponge that I don't got the knowing of what's all already makin' its heretic way through it, either. Ain't gonna happen for you anymore it did for me."
He wants to ask, What if I stopped being a troll? but the words stick in his chute. He can't do this to his moirail, his family, his friends. He doesn't even know where the thought came from.
But the horrorterrors have been chattering to him about this alien for longer than he can remember, and if he doesn't at least try, he's going to go mad. Hell, he's not sure he isn't already.
---
The princess arrives in the afternoon, wearing enough gold to bankrupt a whole human province, and Karkat doesn't want to meet her.
John drags him out from under the bed, his mouth a hard line. "You promised you'd play nice."
Karkat decides maybe he shouldn't have been quite so obvious about the pancakes, and follows meekly.
---
He's been to the crash site once before. He was only just three, and Nepeta had dragged him there thinking it might be a good setting for a game, but at the first sight of it they'd both immediately decided no fucking way were they bringing their friends anywhere near this place, even if nowhere else within walking distance was nearly creepy enough to lend a proper atmosphere to the new Glowsprint Psiioniic Expansion. But he still remembers the way. The ship sits deep in the forest on the other side of the river, half-buried in the soil where it crashed, so long ago that not even the oldest of his clan can remember, and he flinches back from the hull as he discovers it still sparks, red and blue fireworks that remind him uncomfortably of his nightmares, his visions of Sollux burning himself out over and over again in inglorious sacrifice.
He's never going to be this, he reminds himself. They stopped kidnapping psychics for the fleet a thousand sweeps ago. He still shudders as he ducks under the twisted arch that used to be the airlock and steps inside.
---
Princess Feferi is kind enough, he supposes, but her hairclip bears the mark of the sea-temple where he left John that first morning, and her eyes are a frankly intimidating shade of purple, and his heart shatters when John's eyes light up at the sight of her. "I know you, don't I?" he says. "They didn't tell me you studied at the temple, that's awesome!"
She laughs, a carefree giggle like John's and he'd thought he was done with his fucking deja vu but here it is, back full force, and she looks at the prince with her Tyrian eyes and holds out her hand. "Then I suppose I'd betta introduce myshelf properly this time! Feferi of the House of Peixes, First Tier Ambassador to the Horrorterrors!"
"Wow! That's awesome! Don't you think that's awesome, Karkat?" John turns to him, and he did promise to be good, so he nods hastily, trying to look interested and not scared out of his fucking mind. "Sorry about my page," John grins, apparently not having noticed him staring. "He can't talk. He's really clever though, and a really good cook, you'll see!"
Feferi smiles and extends her hand again. "I'm looking forward to knowing you." Karkat flushes and tries not to hate her.
---
He was expecting a Witch - he dreamed of her, he thinks, tall and terrifying and long-horned, in a neon-green dress - and he's not prepared for the ship's only inhabitant to be this orange-feathered crowboy who looks at him like he just failed to spell a two-letter word in front of the whole eastern fleet.
"Okay, just gonna start by establishing that you're a goddamn idiot and get that out of the way," the sprite says. "But I guess this day was always coming, huh? That's the trouble with Vantases, you both spilled something in your boot sector and now you don't fuckin' reformat properly. So before you ask, yeah I can make you human, but if I felt anything resembling pity for you psychopathic grey douchebags, I wouldn't. Because I can tell you now, all the stuff you're imagining about the pilot stuck back there? Not a patch on what this is gonna feel like."
Karkat glares at him. "Okay, one, this all-knowing crowsprite hoofbeastshit you've got going on? Stupidest racket I've ever seen, and I live with a fucking clown cultist. And two, if you actually knew as much as you pretend to, then you'd know I have to ask anyway. I don't even see the big deal, can't you just cast a spell and - " He motions vaguely with both hands.
"Wow, you're even more stupid than I remember, I didn't think that was possible. Congratulations, Vantas, your existence is even less likely than the fucking tooth fairy, what kind of techlevel did that greenskinned shitsucker stick you with this time round anyway?"
Greenskinned? Karkat bristles, wants to protest, wants to say get the fuck out of my sponge, but the sprite is already talking again.
"Sorry to disappoint, but no, it ain't nearly as simple as me waving a magic wand and yelling "Homo" or whatever the fake-Latin for "still a douchebag only with less in the horn department" is. It's more a problem of coding. I can rewrite your DNA, but before Megido Senior disappeared, she decided to fuck with our pair of new worlds in ways I can't figure out workarounds for yet, which means I need a little help to make it stick."
Karkat clenches his fists. "Then you can't help me."
The sprite's wings flutter, in distress or annoyance, or both. "Did I fucking say that? Thing is, there's a reason you guys can't stay on Ard for long periods and it's the same reason humans can't come here at all, your whole molecular structure's gonna be unstable as shit and your body'll break down, unless..." He hesitates, and spits out the rest of the sentence as if it were rotting grubloaf. "Unless you marry a human. Which doesn't make any goddamn sense, but that's what you get when you let tentacled alien starfish with no sense of boundaries make up the rules - anyway if you marry the Heir and become his matesprit, then you get, uh... you get some of that part of his essence that lets him live over there."
Karkat frowns, thinking of Gamzee's words. "You mean like... his soul?"
"I guess, yeah. If that's how you wanna think about it. Sounds dumb, and it is dumb, but it works. But you'll never be able to come back so you've gotta be sure."
He doesn't hesitate. "Do it."
The sprite caws in what's definitely annoyance this time. "No, really, I know thinking's hard for you, but stop being a moron for one second and give it a try. You're giving up everything here - your planet, your future, your family, whatever messed-up thing you've got going with the juggalo prophet dude, everything you are, for a guy who will not, in this universe or any other, notice you. Trust me, Vantas, I fuckin' tried to get Egbert's attention for years, he just thinks - fuck, nevermind."
Karkat feels cold. He knew what coming here meant. He'll never see his moirail again, or his ashmates, nothing will ever come of his tentative blackflirting with Sollux, and it's not like he doesn't have flushed prospects here, and responsibilities as the clan leader's descendant, but it feels different to hear someone else say it out loud. But his dreams have told him for so long that...
"I know. I know it's stupid, I know it's the stupidest thing I've ever done, but I can't... I've been dreaming about this. About him. Like something's wrong with... with everything, and I can't fix it without him." He glares at the crow accusingly. "And you know that. You were counting on it. You know that I have to do this or..." He stops, fumbling for words as he realises with a shock he doesn't even know what the consequences are, just that they'll be terrible. Just that the hundred-mouthed gods in his dreams demand it.
"Yeah," the sprite says gently. "I know." He shakes down a ruffled line of feathers, and his smirk is visibly forced, but Karkat still wants to punch it off his face. "So before the gods get bored with your waffling and eat us all anyway, how about we get down to jamming 'bout how you're gonna pay me back for my ridic generosity."
---
Feferi's brought oranges to the wedding-feast, and even John pales as she places a bright sphere in his palm. He digs his fingers in and strips off the thick skin as she told him, and the courtiers watch nervously as he gingerly bites into it. When he's not immediately abducted by randomly teleporting trolls, Jade relaxes and takes one too.
Karkat makes a face at their stupidity, and for his part, is delighted to find the fruit's flesh is the same rich colour as the rind. He ends up eating three of them, and manages a brief but genuine smile for Peixes.
---
He falls through the rift, away from the chittering gods and into sunlight, clutching the potion in his hand, and opens the bottle with shaking hands. He downs it as fast as he can, and can't even scream as he burns.
---
Feferi drags John off to get "acquainted" before the wedding, which is far from traditional, but all the king does about it is puff on his pipe in a thoughtfully troubled way, and who else is going to argue with her? Certainly not John, who doesn't need to waste any time learning the ways of his soon-to-be-wife, or Jade, who looks like she wouldn't mind some private time with the foreign girl herself, or Dave, who seems to think showing surprise at anything is against his code of honour.
Even Karkat has to admit that it's just a meaningless ceremony now. John was lost to him the moment Feferi stepped into his line of sight.
---
He wakes in someone's shadow, and panics, and then panics again when his attempt to roll out of his assailant's range and to his feet results in shrieking muscles from every part of his body and no actual movement whatsoever.
"Hey, are you okay?" asks the shadow's source, and Karkat looks up into concerned, curious blue eyes and wonders if he should start believing in coincidences. He opens his mouth to answer before remembering he can't, and attempts to work out how to nod without pulling his neck muscles instead. "It's alright," the boy tells him. "My castle's right over that hill, we'll take care of you. I'm John, by the way!"
He remembers not to try to talk this time, and something in his new abdomen flutters uncomfortably as he manages to roll over and begins to draw his name in the dirt.
The human - John - stops him before he finishes the first A, and he wants to scream, let me finish before my goddamn fingers cramp up too. "Can't you talk?"
Karkat shakes his head, his breath catching as he wonders how humans treat the mute. He hadn't even fucking thought about it, it's not an impossible disability to get around on his world, what with psychics and the old military sign language, but...
"It's okay," John says again, his voice gentle. "I told you, we'll take care of you. I'll take you as my page, there's got to be something you're good at, right?"
Karkat wants to bluster and boast, wants to give him a half-hour rant on everything he's great at and how he was going to be the best captain ever and fly to the edges of the galaxy and romance a hundred greenskinned spacedudes and spacegirls, but all he can do is nod again, and let John help him up as he tries to get used to this weird human musculature.
When the sprite had said it was hurt, he'd thought he only meant his body. The more fool him.
---
He brushes his fingers softly against Jade's as he helps her put up the banners, covering the hall in purple and indigo and azure and green and yellow and red. It's the best he can do for a goodbye.
---
Turns out, as far as pain goes, the arsehole crow skimped a lot in counting the ways. The fire in Karkat's skull where his horns used to be dulls to a quiet ache within a few nights - days, it's gonna take him forever to get used to the human ways of marking time - but he feels blindfolded and numb, and his balance remains off for weeks. If only that numbness extended to the other side of his skin - human skeletal structure is just different enough from what he's used to that every movement he makes pulls a joint or a tendon the wrong way, and he curses the damn sprite most for taking away his ability to scream.
Then there's the temperature of his blood - in his place, any other troll's veins would be burning, blazing painfully with human fire. Not him. Without the unnatural heat of his mutant blood, he's freezing, and the humans laugh at him when he seeks out extra blankets and the company of the strange blue fire even in the heat of summer (Jade puts herbs in it, he's told, to change the colour, and when she explains why, he turns away to hide his pallor, and spends the night curled into himself miserably by the fireplace).
But now and then, John takes his hand and he remembers why he came back.
---
Dave's slouched against the outside wall of the chapel, staring stonily at the orange in his hand, when Karkat finds him, and he holds out his own hand in apology. The knight's brother was orange-eyed, he remembers, and he thinks of how everyone stops talking whenever the subject of Dirk Strider's disappearance comes up, how fierce Dave is in his loyalty, as if trying to compensate.
Dave looks at him and makes a snotty remark that won't even matter anymore in a few hours, and Karkat snatches the orange and peels it for him before handing it back, half-wishing he could pass on Gamzee's tale - there can't be that many mutants like the Striders around, after all. But watching him nibble, birdlike, at the fruit, he thinks instead of the crow.
---
There are other things for him to learn - the first time he cuts his hand open on a rock while exploring the forest with John, he doesn't have time to panic at the fragility of his new skin before he feels something warm and wet and frantically closes his hand, placing his fist stubbornly at his side before turning to flee, the old warnings screaming in his pan, never show his blood outside the clan, never, never, never -
"Karkat?" A hand grabs him from behind, and he freezes, still fighting down panic as John's hand lifts his own and pries it open, staring. "Oh man. You really did a number on that!"
He's still on the verge of flight, of tearing his hand away and disappearing into the forest, when he looks up into the human's concerned, unstartled eyes, and his world shifts abruptly once more. Slowly he dares to look down at the cut, watching his blood ooze from the wound, the same ugly scarlet as always, but still new and different against his brown skin.
The prince, he realises, hasn't noticed anything wrong at all.
"Better get you back inside. There are trolls and witches and everything out here, they say, heheheh!" John's giggle makes it clear he doesn't believe it for a second, and for that reason alone, Karkat's glad he can't answer.
He lets John lead him back into the castle, and feels just a little safer.
---
When John finally emerges from his room, Karkat flits desperately to his side, only to be pushed away. There are only a few hours until the wedding, and still so many things to do.
"Later," John promises, and Karkat sighs and tries not to break his hand on the wall.
---
The dreams are worse without sopor, and since John and Jade and Dave all set them off as badly as any of his clan did, the visions become so strong that they're just another source of pain. He can't even wake up babbling of green fire and chessboards and eldritch queens and the Mirthful Cherub and how they're all going to die - he just wakes up thrashing on his pallet by John's bed, and he might still try to share them if John weren't such a terrible guesser.
After the third night, he takes Karkat into his own bed. It doesn't stop the dreams, but at least it dulls their edges enough that he can function the day after.
---
"I know you're happy for me, Karkat!" John says, giggling, distressingly sincere. "It's gonna be great, the three of us altogether, don't you think?"
Karkat forces a smile, and for the first time he's glad his tears are colourless.
---
"It's just political, you know," John says casually when the news first comes. "No one expects me to love her, and if it really gets bad, then Jade can carry the line on instead... truth is, I don't think I could love anyone but that temple-girl."
Karkat looks at him questioningly, and he grins.
"Ohhhhh, right, you weren't there! I got hurt, a few months ago, in the woods - never did remember who did it, probably the same guys who hurt you, since it was only a couple of days before you showed up - and I woke up in the sea temple, down by the bay. Shook me pretty horribly, gotta tell you!" He laughs, and underneath there's a hint of fear. John doesn't believe in trolls, but deep in his sponge where no one can see but Karkat, he believes in horrorterrors, just a little. "But there was this girl... she was a priestess - not far off becoming an Ambassador, you know?" Karkat nods hesitantly. Ambassadors, in his world, were the queens who mediated with the gods, kept them from devouring Afterus and its moons whole, but they disappeared millennia ago. The continuing existence of the troll species since is a puzzle, but his dreams keep feeding him clues, and he doesn't like the picture he's putting together. "And she saved me. Found me in the forest around dawn, carried me in, brought me back to life. So I couldn't give my life to anyone else, I think. It's funny, though..."
He puts a hand to Karkat's cheek, and the former troll tries not to lean into the touch.
"I don't know what it is, but you kinda remind me of her? Like, not in looks, or attitude, but... there's just something. It's one of those weird things, like deja vu." He laughs, and the moment's gone. "If you were a girl, though..."
Karkat turns away, and tries not to wonder what John remembers, and whether he should have asked the crow for another transformation altogether.
---
He digs his colourless blunt claws into his palms as the priest speaks, unable to focus. The words mean nothing to him anyway, human superstitions and promises of an afterlife that won't welcome him. His soul is the wrong shape, and he can't get another.
---
On the eve of the wedding, Karkat wanders. He doesn't remember turning his steps towards the Rift, but he figures the scowling blueblood with her hands at her temples might have something to do with it. And the other blueblood with her mouth drawn into a hard line might have even more to do with it.
Fuck. All he needs to complete the guilt-trio is Gamzee, looking sad and abandoned and so high he can't even manage to dress himself properly -
"I didn't tell him," Terezi snaps, and he's actually missed the annoying way she can track everything he's thinking. "I thought about it, since it might be the last time any of us will see you, but I didn't - I didn't think he should see you like this, what were you thinking, Karkat, going off and becoming a monster like this? Have you completely taken leave of your senses?"
I love him, he wants to say. I miss you. I'm sorry. But he can't say any of it, can't even ask if Gamzee's okay, if someone's taken his...
A hand slaps him across the face, and he's not surprised to see that it's his own. "We need you, dumbass!" Vriska snarls. "Gog, I should just drag you back home and make that stupid sprite fix you! Pity I can't control you long-distance or I'd do the fucking job myself!"
Job? He goes cold, trying to step away, but finds himself frozen, and Terezi doesn't even move to help him. "We're just trying to rescue you, Karkat! We can't make you do it, but..." She directs a hard frown at Vriska, and there's something wrong with it, with both of their faces, but he can't get a grip on it before she thrusts something into his hand, and his fingers curl around it, automatically adjusting for her uncharacteristically bad aim, and he doesn't have to look down to know the curved blade he holds is sharper than a coldblood's fang, and it's only now he sees it, her right eye as red as the left behind her glasses, and Vriska's new eyepatch to finish the tale, and oh god, he'd almost rather they'd torn each other apart without him than let the sprite blind them for his sake, god, no -
"All you have to do is kill him! Easy as piiiiiiiie, Karkat, and then you'll be a troll again and you can come home!" Vriska sounds way too excited about this, and he shivers. "Tell me you're not gonna wuss out like a lame little pupa!"
Kill John? No. Fuck no. He's Karkat's matesprit, even if he won't recognise it, the other half of his heart as Gamzee is to his soul, and he can't -
"Vriska, go back," Terezi says abruptly, sniffing in his direction in a way that is really beginning to creep him out.
Vriska hesitates, and growls. "Only if you swear you'll bring him back, Pyrope."
Terezi tilts her head towards her, a corner of her mouth turning up in that dangerously familiar way, and it's not his place anymore but he can't stop himself from jumping between them as Vriska whirls on her, slapping the psychic's hand down, shoving his own over Terezi's mouth, and fuck, those fangs are sharp. He pokes Vriska in the thorax and points toward the shifting light. Go.
She does, with a glare at them both, and he dares to lift a hand from Terezi's mouth, refusing to look at his torn hand as she reaches up to splay her own fingers over his face. "You're not coming back," she says, and he shakes his head, making sure to turn far enough for her to feel the movement. "This is horrorterror business."
He hesitates. Yes and no.
"Do what you have to," she tells him after a long moment, and kisses his cheek.
---
John's taking Feferi's hand in front of the altar, and he still could do it. He'd have enough time to run, and no one here knows the Rift exists, he could make it home before anyone even thought to try that direction, and maybe he doesn't even have to use the sickle... He could go home.
No one sees him when he slips away.
---
He wakes in his bed, and the Scourge are gone, but the sickle's still in his hand, cold and hard and tempting, and John is snoring beside him.
He marches to the window and tosses it into the moat before Vriska can attempt a long-distance assassination after all.
---
The rift foams where it touches the air, and his hand does too when he places his fingertips on the edge, the light already beginning to penetrate them. This had better work - as light as his head is, this slow dissolution still hurts, the pain digging deep into his bones, and if he's to spend the last of his existence as quantum foam, paradox space can at least have the decency to kill him quickly.
He closes his eyes before he can change his mind, and throws himself in, rainbow-stink and eldritch singing filling his senses, and wonders how much of his pan has to dissolve before the pain stops.
You'll have to be happy for both of us, John.
If the tentacles reach for him, he doesn't feel it.
---
"Will it hurt?" he asks the orange crow, gripping the bottle so hard it almost cuts his palm.
"Every second."
Title: To Place His Right Hand
Ships: Karkat<3John, Karkat<>Gamzee, John<3Feferi, Karkatc3<(Terezi/Vriska)
Summary: Karkat wants to save the worlds. He also wants an alien prince's heart. The horrorterrors seem to think these two goals are the same goal, but without his voice and with John's alien views on sexuality in the way, someone else might beat him to it.
Notes: Second fic for the Fairy Tale challenge - The Little Mermaid + orange.
Notes 2: Okay, look, it's Karkat as the Little Mermaid, if you're expecting to find no distressing content in here, then you're thinking of the wrong fairytale and also the wrong troll. This is your warning. Tread carefully.
Also, there are about ten minutes left of February in my timezone, I will make another pass through for typos before I repost it to AO3 (probably tomorrow), but for now, if there are any left, I apologise and I will fix them later.
When Karkat crawls out of whisper-haunted dreams into consciousness, he finds the prince still asleep. Which is a good thing, given that the moment he wakes up is the first goodbye, and Karkat doesn't want to miss a second of this final day. Today, after all, is a day of rejoicing for everyone in the castle except him.
Today is Prince John's wedding day.
He's two and a half sweeps old when he stops talking about his dreams and begins raiding the paper stores instead. Paper can't snap at him not to be a stupid wriggler, or stroke his hair and lie to him that everything will be okay, or begin having daymares itself just from listening to his. So instead he scrawls all his fear and desperation out in awkward, angry capitals, takes it out to the shore, and tosses it into the water. He settles on a protruding rock that juts out into the black sea, and watches the ink run as the pages curl up and sink, dragging what's left of his words to the bottom.
He hopes, when he comes back emptyhanded and near-scorched at dawn, that it might make them go away. But all it does is make his ancestor sigh at his recklessness in that infuriating way that makes Karkat wish they weren't related, so he goes back to outlining his rants on the walls until the traders come by again, and the horrors come right back the next time he closes his eyes.
He doesn't get up. The prince likes to know his page isn't sleepwalking, so the beginning of Karkat's morning routine consists mostly of cocooning himself in blankets and watching John breathe, which still feels needlessly intrusive when he has no pale intentions towards him, but this human concept of being intimate with only one person is... well, he's still figuring that out. Besides, it's John who lets Karkat sleep in his bed, who kisses the top of his head when he says goodnight (always where his horns used to be, as if he remembers, which he doesn't), so if anyone's to blame for what Karkat's learned are some horribly mixed signals -
John's eyelids flutter, derailing Karkat's exhausted train of thought, and instead he thinks, Well, that's that then.
Once, on his or her eighth wriggling day, a troll of the Afteran Northlands is allowed to cross the rift into Ard, and wander the human world for a night. Karkat waits with increasing impatience as all his friends come of age: first Gamzee, returning with a new pie recipe that chills him out harder than sopor, and, he claims, is less rough on his pan, then Eridan, then all the others one by one and sometimes two by two. All of them bring back stories, treasures, and in Terezi's case, third-degree burns and a left eye as red as the sun.
That last gives him pause, but when he wakes at midday plagued by dreams of a hornless alien with bright blue eyes and a pitiful lack of guile, he doesn't care. (When he wakes again at dusk, the dreams have faded. The desire has not.)
"I had the weirdest dream," John says, and Karkat fixes his eyes on him and listens intently because this is another last, and it's a good thing he's not counting them or he'd be maggotshit by the end of the day. Oh wait, he is counting them. Fuck. "I dreamed about the night I woke up in the temple, you remember, I told you about it? Just before you showed up? Only in the dream, it was you looking after me, instead of..." He blushes. "You wiped the sweat off my forehead and tied up my wound and your hands were really warm... it was actually kind of nice."
Karkat lets himself be hugged when John reaches for him, and returns the prince's sad smile with his own. He knows better than to hope. Tomorrow morning, John's new bride will take Karkat's place in this bed, and at least this is one goodbye he doesn't have to make on his own.
Terezi goes with him to make sure he gets his timing right - they don't need two half-blind trolls in their cohort, she cackles, and he doesn't know why he thinks of Sollux with a vicious stab of self-loathing. Then she pushes him across and after a brief feeling of panic, of tentacles wrapping around him and the sharp stink of photon emissions, he doesn't have room in his pan to worry about anything but the glare of the still-lingering Ardhan daylight.
"Fuck!" He tries to blink away the pain, and squints through a veil of pink for a moment before giving up and just running for cover until the terrible brightness fades away. He doesn't know how long he remains curled up under the nearest shrub, but he opens his eyes to clearer darkness, and wipes them gratefully on his sleeve, still cursing Terezi as he gets gingerly to his feet.
When he looks around, the first thing he notices is how much green there is - the Afteran plants were flowering when he left, a rainbow of snapping blossoms and poisonous petals and hallucinogenic (at best) pollen, but on this side it seems to be one of the later summers and everything is jade and olive and lime and teal and a dozen more shades he doesn't have names for. The second is the openness of the cloudless sky, deep blue fading slowly into black, along with its single moon, pale as diamond, whose light marks a path among the rocks that seems as good as any. The worlds won't be close enough for him to pass back again until almost sunrise, and he didn't come here to spend all night - his only night in the human world, and twelve hours isn't enough, it's not fucking fair - standing around gawking at a few goddamn plants.
He casts a last glance back at the rift, barely visible now with the odd yellow sun below the horizon, and starts to climb.
"I know you'll be happy for me," John tells him as they dress - or rather, as Karkat dresses John, adjusting buttons and smoothing epaulets into place, a prince's war-uniform that seems oddly appropriate for a coupling ritual in a way that makes him wonder if their two species aren't so different as everyone keeps telling him, and as John dresses Karkat, coaxing him into a stiff new tunic, which is a waste, he wants to tell him, he's only going to wear it once, and he hopes it won't take John too many sweeps to forgive him when it dissolves into foam.
They inspect each other in the mirror, and John yanks another elf-lock out of Karkat's hair.
"I know you're happy for me," he repeats, and Karkat wonders which of them he's trying to convince.
He's found his way onto a real path, and has been following it for several hours to see if it goes anywhere (dangerous, Cronus's tales whisper in his head, he could be caught and eaten, dissected, made a sex slave, have his endoskeleton stripped to make chair-legs, and everything else that everyone knows humans do to unlucky trolls), when he finds the boy. And by "boy", he means "dangerous alien", and by "finds", he means "almost trips over a shadow on the path when he realises it's not a log".
Well, probably not a log. The stories he's heard about this planet are weird enough that he wouldn't be surprised to find out logs can feel pain here, but he crouches down to turn the figure over anyway, and finds bright blue eyes staring back at him from a pale, hornless face covered in blood. He bites back a cry, caught between the urge to flee and the delirious, pitiful look in the human's eyes - this kid couldn't hurt him if he wanted to. He's weak and wounded and Karkat could just finish him and flee, as long as he could keep out of sight for the next - he glances at the moon - six hours or so, he'll be fine, right?
The human blinks at him, and tries to talk, and without thinking, Karkat reaches to wipe the blood off his lips, and then freezes, staring at the scarlet on his fingers. No. He can't leave him.
He'd forgotten that the humans he dreamed of had red blood.
Sunrise is always John's favourite time of day, and Karkat dutifully lets himself be dragged out of the castle to watch the big terrible ball of fire make its way above the horizon. Today's show doesn't disappoint, the sky painting itself fierce orange, bright and beautiful and terrifying as the Empress he sometimes dreams of, and he shivers in fear and homesickness. Selfsickness. Maybe they're the same thing.
John mistakes it, as usual, for superstition. "It's alright, Karkat," he says, laughing, putting his arm around his companion as if to protect him from the sky and its portents. "If the horde comes, Dave and Jade will take them all down in a second!"
Karkat tries to smile in return, because he's already learned that John doesn't actually think his fear is funny. He's laughing only because he doesn't believe in the invading fanged, clawed, yellow-horned army that his serfs perform fierce rituals to keep away from the village (Karkat watched them once, dancing drugged at midwinter, raving in their fear and hatred, and he burrowed, shivering, into John's side, while John stroked his hair and whispered meaningless reassurance). It's a supreme irony, one the insufferable prick of a knight-captain could only dream of reaching, that Prince John of the Royal House of Egbert does not believe in trolls.
Karkat tears his shirt for a makeshift bandage and drags the human as far as he dares, until he sees the spires towering over the trees, one of those weird human hives they call... castles? Or is this a temple? For all the arguments he loses with Aradia over human artifacts, he knows nothing about their architecture, only that this structure looks cruel and alien, a clawed hand reaching for the sun, and as he reaches the edge of the trees, he stops, pulling the human under a relatively safe-smelling bush. Might as well have some semblance of a hiding-place while he works out what to do next.
It's not just trolls he doesn't believe in, Karkat has discovered (mostly by means of listening to his supper-conversations with his sister, who gives Karkat the same deja vu shiver up his spine that John and his knight-commander do). It's gods and ghosts and reincarnation, omens and other worlds and thinking automatons, anything he can't see or touch or smell.
He does, however, believe in beating Karkat at chess at every opportunity.
"Rook to Queen's Knight Three!" he announces now, sliding the damn thing over to pin Karkat's own knight, leaving him unable to protect his king from the other side. Karkat moves his last pawn, and winces as it's snatched gleefully off the board. He's going to lose.
By the time the moon sets, the human's settled some, blue eyes sleepy instead of bright, and he's humming softly instead of mumbling frantic snatches of what sounds half like helmsman-code and half like some demented lovesong from a terrible epic involving rabbits and ancient flying machines. Karkat's not sure if his own broken singing and awkward strokes of the human's hair had anything to do with this or it's solely a result of the fact that his bleeding seems to have slowed. Either way, it's theoretically an improvement.
"Heheheheh," is what John's laugh sounds like, and it reminds Karkat that there's one thing about his voice he doesn't miss. His own laugh sounded like a rusted airlock, the rasp of someone who's been wandering the desert for a hundred sweeps and has forgotten how to speak. Since his transformation, he's learned to laugh silently, and let his prince make enough noise for both of them.
Now John giggles as he moves his queen down to the back row and announces, "Shah mat!" When Karkat grins ruefully and tips over his king, John pats his hair affectionately, and Karkat shifts his head to be stroked on his horns - he instantly regrets it when the prince's fingers rub painfully on unmarked scalp. He pulls his head away, trying not to grimace, and starts to reset the board, stroking each faithful black piece in a silent goodbye as he places them back on their squares.
"Maybe I should let you play white next time, huh?" John offers, and Karkat shakes his head. He's always played black, even in his nightly games with Eridan - Aradia called him sentimental, Vriska called him deranged, Gamzee called him an adorable motherfucker that everyone needs to all step off and let him play chess at the way he motherfuckin wants.
Truth is, he just never felt right killing the black pawns. If that's needless sentiment, he's okay with that.
By the time the human closes his eyes, the air is half a degree lighter, and Karkat makes up his mind. He can risk getting the kid a few metres closer, but he has no intention of burning for him. He drags him down to the temple gate, kisses him on the forehead, and flees back to the rift.
He only realises when he stumbles back into Gamzee's waiting arms that he left his bloodstained shirt behind.
Any other day, he wouldn't mind helping with the cooking. It's the only way he can earn his keep in a world without terrible ballads that need to be torn apart and their bleeding guts laid out on parchment so that no other troll in the province has to suffer through them like he did. If he had his voice he could be a storyteller like Aranea, he thinks, or if the humans had paper mills and book binders and a fucking printing press he could at least write them down, but there's not much he can do in a province where even unwieldy vellum is so precious that the king's clever mother spends half an hour every week scraping another layer off the newsscrolls so they can be reused. Or if he had any sort of past in this world, he could apply to be a knight, but Strider won't take a foundling with no credentials into the castle guard, even if Karkat has spent every goddamn moment since he came here proving his loyalty.
So cooking it is, and serving as John's valet, and warming his bed in a frustratingly nonconcupiscent way, and being side-eyed by the fucking knights every time he practises his Afteran martial arts in the courtyard because horrorterrors fucking forbid that he should know how to protect his master in a pinch. He only saved his fucking life, after all.
But John never helps out in the kitchens, and every second Karkat doesn't spend with him today is spilled water in the desert.
He comes back to the hive without a story to tell. The rest of his clan hate humans, fear them, tell horror stories about them to make each other shiver in the heat of summer. If he tells them he saved a human's life he'll be on the end of Terezi's noose before the air disturbed by his last word settles.
He can't shriek when he smells the pancakes burning, can't yell at the girl who was meant to be watching them, he only turned away for a second, goddammit, just long enough to check the taste of the weird Ardhan blueberries and make sure they were usable, and when he pulls the crepes out they're black and bitter, and without the ability to direct his six-and-a-half straight minutes of swearing anywhere but the inside of his own sponge, he finds himself struggling not to burst into tears. He just wanted to make something familiar for once, something from home, even if he has to use alien fruit and alien flour and cream that's still mostly milk.
Fuck it. He has time to make a second lot. Dave can have these.
His dreams are getting worse again. He's always dreamed of ships and monsters and meteors and living chess pieces and a game he had to lose all his family to win (he may have to again, say the gods, and he refuses to hear it), but now he dreams of the human playing it too. He dreams of Ard, but different, less green, covered in stone and metal. He dreams of a cheery alien girl with huntbeast ears, and another girl wrapped in horrorterror darkness and an infuriating boy he thinks he once loathed, and most of all of his wounded rescuee, healed and gleeful and floating like a blue feather against the black sky.
He dreams of warm alien kisses, and wakes feverish.
"Gamzee?" he murmurs, and the cool body draped around him shifts.
"What's up, palebro?"
"When you crossed... did you meet any humans?"
Gamzee's silent for a moment, stroking his hair, and Karkat feels a chill, before the answer comes. "Depends what you call "meet". There was this one motherfucker, I went and saved him from a motherfuckin mob that wanted to all string him up for those pretty orange eyes of his, only they were all at motherfuckin clumsy about it... Kissing him was like lickin up on the edge at the motherfuckin sun."
"You pailed him?"
He laughs like a rusty bicycle horn, hideous and comforting. "Motherfuck, no. Even an outcast like him weren't ready to trust his soul to someone he only got his know on of for a couple motherfuckin hours. And don't you fuckin get through your motherfuckin sponge that I don't got the knowing of what's all already makin' its heretic way through it, either. Ain't gonna happen for you anymore it did for me."
He wants to ask, What if I stopped being a troll? but the words stick in his chute. He can't do this to his moirail, his family, his friends. He doesn't even know where the thought came from.
But the horrorterrors have been chattering to him about this alien for longer than he can remember, and if he doesn't at least try, he's going to go mad. Hell, he's not sure he isn't already.
The princess arrives in the afternoon, wearing enough gold to bankrupt a whole human province, and Karkat doesn't want to meet her.
John drags him out from under the bed, his mouth a hard line. "You promised you'd play nice."
Karkat decides maybe he shouldn't have been quite so obvious about the pancakes, and follows meekly.
He's been to the crash site once before. He was only just three, and Nepeta had dragged him there thinking it might be a good setting for a game, but at the first sight of it they'd both immediately decided no fucking way were they bringing their friends anywhere near this place, even if nowhere else within walking distance was nearly creepy enough to lend a proper atmosphere to the new Glowsprint Psiioniic Expansion. But he still remembers the way. The ship sits deep in the forest on the other side of the river, half-buried in the soil where it crashed, so long ago that not even the oldest of his clan can remember, and he flinches back from the hull as he discovers it still sparks, red and blue fireworks that remind him uncomfortably of his nightmares, his visions of Sollux burning himself out over and over again in inglorious sacrifice.
He's never going to be this, he reminds himself. They stopped kidnapping psychics for the fleet a thousand sweeps ago. He still shudders as he ducks under the twisted arch that used to be the airlock and steps inside.
Princess Feferi is kind enough, he supposes, but her hairclip bears the mark of the sea-temple where he left John that first morning, and her eyes are a frankly intimidating shade of purple, and his heart shatters when John's eyes light up at the sight of her. "I know you, don't I?" he says. "They didn't tell me you studied at the temple, that's awesome!"
She laughs, a carefree giggle like John's and he'd thought he was done with his fucking deja vu but here it is, back full force, and she looks at the prince with her Tyrian eyes and holds out her hand. "Then I suppose I'd betta introduce myshelf properly this time! Feferi of the House of Peixes, First Tier Ambassador to the Horrorterrors!"
"Wow! That's awesome! Don't you think that's awesome, Karkat?" John turns to him, and he did promise to be good, so he nods hastily, trying to look interested and not scared out of his fucking mind. "Sorry about my page," John grins, apparently not having noticed him staring. "He can't talk. He's really clever though, and a really good cook, you'll see!"
Feferi smiles and extends her hand again. "I'm looking forward to knowing you." Karkat flushes and tries not to hate her.
He was expecting a Witch - he dreamed of her, he thinks, tall and terrifying and long-horned, in a neon-green dress - and he's not prepared for the ship's only inhabitant to be this orange-feathered crowboy who looks at him like he just failed to spell a two-letter word in front of the whole eastern fleet.
"Okay, just gonna start by establishing that you're a goddamn idiot and get that out of the way," the sprite says. "But I guess this day was always coming, huh? That's the trouble with Vantases, you both spilled something in your boot sector and now you don't fuckin' reformat properly. So before you ask, yeah I can make you human, but if I felt anything resembling pity for you psychopathic grey douchebags, I wouldn't. Because I can tell you now, all the stuff you're imagining about the pilot stuck back there? Not a patch on what this is gonna feel like."
Karkat glares at him. "Okay, one, this all-knowing crowsprite hoofbeastshit you've got going on? Stupidest racket I've ever seen, and I live with a fucking clown cultist. And two, if you actually knew as much as you pretend to, then you'd know I have to ask anyway. I don't even see the big deal, can't you just cast a spell and - " He motions vaguely with both hands.
"Wow, you're even more stupid than I remember, I didn't think that was possible. Congratulations, Vantas, your existence is even less likely than the fucking tooth fairy, what kind of techlevel did that greenskinned shitsucker stick you with this time round anyway?"
Greenskinned? Karkat bristles, wants to protest, wants to say get the fuck out of my sponge, but the sprite is already talking again.
"Sorry to disappoint, but no, it ain't nearly as simple as me waving a magic wand and yelling "Homo" or whatever the fake-Latin for "still a douchebag only with less in the horn department" is. It's more a problem of coding. I can rewrite your DNA, but before Megido Senior disappeared, she decided to fuck with our pair of new worlds in ways I can't figure out workarounds for yet, which means I need a little help to make it stick."
Karkat clenches his fists. "Then you can't help me."
The sprite's wings flutter, in distress or annoyance, or both. "Did I fucking say that? Thing is, there's a reason you guys can't stay on Ard for long periods and it's the same reason humans can't come here at all, your whole molecular structure's gonna be unstable as shit and your body'll break down, unless..." He hesitates, and spits out the rest of the sentence as if it were rotting grubloaf. "Unless you marry a human. Which doesn't make any goddamn sense, but that's what you get when you let tentacled alien starfish with no sense of boundaries make up the rules - anyway if you marry the Heir and become his matesprit, then you get, uh... you get some of that part of his essence that lets him live over there."
Karkat frowns, thinking of Gamzee's words. "You mean like... his soul?"
"I guess, yeah. If that's how you wanna think about it. Sounds dumb, and it is dumb, but it works. But you'll never be able to come back so you've gotta be sure."
He doesn't hesitate. "Do it."
The sprite caws in what's definitely annoyance this time. "No, really, I know thinking's hard for you, but stop being a moron for one second and give it a try. You're giving up everything here - your planet, your future, your family, whatever messed-up thing you've got going with the juggalo prophet dude, everything you are, for a guy who will not, in this universe or any other, notice you. Trust me, Vantas, I fuckin' tried to get Egbert's attention for years, he just thinks - fuck, nevermind."
Karkat feels cold. He knew what coming here meant. He'll never see his moirail again, or his ashmates, nothing will ever come of his tentative blackflirting with Sollux, and it's not like he doesn't have flushed prospects here, and responsibilities as the clan leader's descendant, but it feels different to hear someone else say it out loud. But his dreams have told him for so long that...
"I know. I know it's stupid, I know it's the stupidest thing I've ever done, but I can't... I've been dreaming about this. About him. Like something's wrong with... with everything, and I can't fix it without him." He glares at the crow accusingly. "And you know that. You were counting on it. You know that I have to do this or..." He stops, fumbling for words as he realises with a shock he doesn't even know what the consequences are, just that they'll be terrible. Just that the hundred-mouthed gods in his dreams demand it.
"Yeah," the sprite says gently. "I know." He shakes down a ruffled line of feathers, and his smirk is visibly forced, but Karkat still wants to punch it off his face. "So before the gods get bored with your waffling and eat us all anyway, how about we get down to jamming 'bout how you're gonna pay me back for my ridic generosity."
Feferi's brought oranges to the wedding-feast, and even John pales as she places a bright sphere in his palm. He digs his fingers in and strips off the thick skin as she told him, and the courtiers watch nervously as he gingerly bites into it. When he's not immediately abducted by randomly teleporting trolls, Jade relaxes and takes one too.
Karkat makes a face at their stupidity, and for his part, is delighted to find the fruit's flesh is the same rich colour as the rind. He ends up eating three of them, and manages a brief but genuine smile for Peixes.
He falls through the rift, away from the chittering gods and into sunlight, clutching the potion in his hand, and opens the bottle with shaking hands. He downs it as fast as he can, and can't even scream as he burns.
Feferi drags John off to get "acquainted" before the wedding, which is far from traditional, but all the king does about it is puff on his pipe in a thoughtfully troubled way, and who else is going to argue with her? Certainly not John, who doesn't need to waste any time learning the ways of his soon-to-be-wife, or Jade, who looks like she wouldn't mind some private time with the foreign girl herself, or Dave, who seems to think showing surprise at anything is against his code of honour.
Even Karkat has to admit that it's just a meaningless ceremony now. John was lost to him the moment Feferi stepped into his line of sight.
He wakes in someone's shadow, and panics, and then panics again when his attempt to roll out of his assailant's range and to his feet results in shrieking muscles from every part of his body and no actual movement whatsoever.
"Hey, are you okay?" asks the shadow's source, and Karkat looks up into concerned, curious blue eyes and wonders if he should start believing in coincidences. He opens his mouth to answer before remembering he can't, and attempts to work out how to nod without pulling his neck muscles instead. "It's alright," the boy tells him. "My castle's right over that hill, we'll take care of you. I'm John, by the way!"
He remembers not to try to talk this time, and something in his new abdomen flutters uncomfortably as he manages to roll over and begins to draw his name in the dirt.
The human - John - stops him before he finishes the first A, and he wants to scream, let me finish before my goddamn fingers cramp up too. "Can't you talk?"
Karkat shakes his head, his breath catching as he wonders how humans treat the mute. He hadn't even fucking thought about it, it's not an impossible disability to get around on his world, what with psychics and the old military sign language, but...
"It's okay," John says again, his voice gentle. "I told you, we'll take care of you. I'll take you as my page, there's got to be something you're good at, right?"
Karkat wants to bluster and boast, wants to give him a half-hour rant on everything he's great at and how he was going to be the best captain ever and fly to the edges of the galaxy and romance a hundred greenskinned spacedudes and spacegirls, but all he can do is nod again, and let John help him up as he tries to get used to this weird human musculature.
When the sprite had said it was hurt, he'd thought he only meant his body. The more fool him.
He brushes his fingers softly against Jade's as he helps her put up the banners, covering the hall in purple and indigo and azure and green and yellow and red. It's the best he can do for a goodbye.
Turns out, as far as pain goes, the arsehole crow skimped a lot in counting the ways. The fire in Karkat's skull where his horns used to be dulls to a quiet ache within a few nights - days, it's gonna take him forever to get used to the human ways of marking time - but he feels blindfolded and numb, and his balance remains off for weeks. If only that numbness extended to the other side of his skin - human skeletal structure is just different enough from what he's used to that every movement he makes pulls a joint or a tendon the wrong way, and he curses the damn sprite most for taking away his ability to scream.
Then there's the temperature of his blood - in his place, any other troll's veins would be burning, blazing painfully with human fire. Not him. Without the unnatural heat of his mutant blood, he's freezing, and the humans laugh at him when he seeks out extra blankets and the company of the strange blue fire even in the heat of summer (Jade puts herbs in it, he's told, to change the colour, and when she explains why, he turns away to hide his pallor, and spends the night curled into himself miserably by the fireplace).
But now and then, John takes his hand and he remembers why he came back.
Dave's slouched against the outside wall of the chapel, staring stonily at the orange in his hand, when Karkat finds him, and he holds out his own hand in apology. The knight's brother was orange-eyed, he remembers, and he thinks of how everyone stops talking whenever the subject of Dirk Strider's disappearance comes up, how fierce Dave is in his loyalty, as if trying to compensate.
Dave looks at him and makes a snotty remark that won't even matter anymore in a few hours, and Karkat snatches the orange and peels it for him before handing it back, half-wishing he could pass on Gamzee's tale - there can't be that many mutants like the Striders around, after all. But watching him nibble, birdlike, at the fruit, he thinks instead of the crow.
There are other things for him to learn - the first time he cuts his hand open on a rock while exploring the forest with John, he doesn't have time to panic at the fragility of his new skin before he feels something warm and wet and frantically closes his hand, placing his fist stubbornly at his side before turning to flee, the old warnings screaming in his pan, never show his blood outside the clan, never, never, never -
"Karkat?" A hand grabs him from behind, and he freezes, still fighting down panic as John's hand lifts his own and pries it open, staring. "Oh man. You really did a number on that!"
He's still on the verge of flight, of tearing his hand away and disappearing into the forest, when he looks up into the human's concerned, unstartled eyes, and his world shifts abruptly once more. Slowly he dares to look down at the cut, watching his blood ooze from the wound, the same ugly scarlet as always, but still new and different against his brown skin.
The prince, he realises, hasn't noticed anything wrong at all.
"Better get you back inside. There are trolls and witches and everything out here, they say, heheheh!" John's giggle makes it clear he doesn't believe it for a second, and for that reason alone, Karkat's glad he can't answer.
He lets John lead him back into the castle, and feels just a little safer.
When John finally emerges from his room, Karkat flits desperately to his side, only to be pushed away. There are only a few hours until the wedding, and still so many things to do.
"Later," John promises, and Karkat sighs and tries not to break his hand on the wall.
The dreams are worse without sopor, and since John and Jade and Dave all set them off as badly as any of his clan did, the visions become so strong that they're just another source of pain. He can't even wake up babbling of green fire and chessboards and eldritch queens and the Mirthful Cherub and how they're all going to die - he just wakes up thrashing on his pallet by John's bed, and he might still try to share them if John weren't such a terrible guesser.
After the third night, he takes Karkat into his own bed. It doesn't stop the dreams, but at least it dulls their edges enough that he can function the day after.
"I know you're happy for me, Karkat!" John says, giggling, distressingly sincere. "It's gonna be great, the three of us altogether, don't you think?"
Karkat forces a smile, and for the first time he's glad his tears are colourless.
"It's just political, you know," John says casually when the news first comes. "No one expects me to love her, and if it really gets bad, then Jade can carry the line on instead... truth is, I don't think I could love anyone but that temple-girl."
Karkat looks at him questioningly, and he grins.
"Ohhhhh, right, you weren't there! I got hurt, a few months ago, in the woods - never did remember who did it, probably the same guys who hurt you, since it was only a couple of days before you showed up - and I woke up in the sea temple, down by the bay. Shook me pretty horribly, gotta tell you!" He laughs, and underneath there's a hint of fear. John doesn't believe in trolls, but deep in his sponge where no one can see but Karkat, he believes in horrorterrors, just a little. "But there was this girl... she was a priestess - not far off becoming an Ambassador, you know?" Karkat nods hesitantly. Ambassadors, in his world, were the queens who mediated with the gods, kept them from devouring Afterus and its moons whole, but they disappeared millennia ago. The continuing existence of the troll species since is a puzzle, but his dreams keep feeding him clues, and he doesn't like the picture he's putting together. "And she saved me. Found me in the forest around dawn, carried me in, brought me back to life. So I couldn't give my life to anyone else, I think. It's funny, though..."
He puts a hand to Karkat's cheek, and the former troll tries not to lean into the touch.
"I don't know what it is, but you kinda remind me of her? Like, not in looks, or attitude, but... there's just something. It's one of those weird things, like deja vu." He laughs, and the moment's gone. "If you were a girl, though..."
Karkat turns away, and tries not to wonder what John remembers, and whether he should have asked the crow for another transformation altogether.
He digs his colourless blunt claws into his palms as the priest speaks, unable to focus. The words mean nothing to him anyway, human superstitions and promises of an afterlife that won't welcome him. His soul is the wrong shape, and he can't get another.
On the eve of the wedding, Karkat wanders. He doesn't remember turning his steps towards the Rift, but he figures the scowling blueblood with her hands at her temples might have something to do with it. And the other blueblood with her mouth drawn into a hard line might have even more to do with it.
Fuck. All he needs to complete the guilt-trio is Gamzee, looking sad and abandoned and so high he can't even manage to dress himself properly -
"I didn't tell him," Terezi snaps, and he's actually missed the annoying way she can track everything he's thinking. "I thought about it, since it might be the last time any of us will see you, but I didn't - I didn't think he should see you like this, what were you thinking, Karkat, going off and becoming a monster like this? Have you completely taken leave of your senses?"
I love him, he wants to say. I miss you. I'm sorry. But he can't say any of it, can't even ask if Gamzee's okay, if someone's taken his...
A hand slaps him across the face, and he's not surprised to see that it's his own. "We need you, dumbass!" Vriska snarls. "Gog, I should just drag you back home and make that stupid sprite fix you! Pity I can't control you long-distance or I'd do the fucking job myself!"
Job? He goes cold, trying to step away, but finds himself frozen, and Terezi doesn't even move to help him. "We're just trying to rescue you, Karkat! We can't make you do it, but..." She directs a hard frown at Vriska, and there's something wrong with it, with both of their faces, but he can't get a grip on it before she thrusts something into his hand, and his fingers curl around it, automatically adjusting for her uncharacteristically bad aim, and he doesn't have to look down to know the curved blade he holds is sharper than a coldblood's fang, and it's only now he sees it, her right eye as red as the left behind her glasses, and Vriska's new eyepatch to finish the tale, and oh god, he'd almost rather they'd torn each other apart without him than let the sprite blind them for his sake, god, no -
"All you have to do is kill him! Easy as piiiiiiiie, Karkat, and then you'll be a troll again and you can come home!" Vriska sounds way too excited about this, and he shivers. "Tell me you're not gonna wuss out like a lame little pupa!"
Kill John? No. Fuck no. He's Karkat's matesprit, even if he won't recognise it, the other half of his heart as Gamzee is to his soul, and he can't -
"Vriska, go back," Terezi says abruptly, sniffing in his direction in a way that is really beginning to creep him out.
Vriska hesitates, and growls. "Only if you swear you'll bring him back, Pyrope."
Terezi tilts her head towards her, a corner of her mouth turning up in that dangerously familiar way, and it's not his place anymore but he can't stop himself from jumping between them as Vriska whirls on her, slapping the psychic's hand down, shoving his own over Terezi's mouth, and fuck, those fangs are sharp. He pokes Vriska in the thorax and points toward the shifting light. Go.
She does, with a glare at them both, and he dares to lift a hand from Terezi's mouth, refusing to look at his torn hand as she reaches up to splay her own fingers over his face. "You're not coming back," she says, and he shakes his head, making sure to turn far enough for her to feel the movement. "This is horrorterror business."
He hesitates. Yes and no.
"Do what you have to," she tells him after a long moment, and kisses his cheek.
John's taking Feferi's hand in front of the altar, and he still could do it. He'd have enough time to run, and no one here knows the Rift exists, he could make it home before anyone even thought to try that direction, and maybe he doesn't even have to use the sickle... He could go home.
No one sees him when he slips away.
He wakes in his bed, and the Scourge are gone, but the sickle's still in his hand, cold and hard and tempting, and John is snoring beside him.
He marches to the window and tosses it into the moat before Vriska can attempt a long-distance assassination after all.
The rift foams where it touches the air, and his hand does too when he places his fingertips on the edge, the light already beginning to penetrate them. This had better work - as light as his head is, this slow dissolution still hurts, the pain digging deep into his bones, and if he's to spend the last of his existence as quantum foam, paradox space can at least have the decency to kill him quickly.
He closes his eyes before he can change his mind, and throws himself in, rainbow-stink and eldritch singing filling his senses, and wonders how much of his pan has to dissolve before the pain stops.
You'll have to be happy for both of us, John.
If the tentacles reach for him, he doesn't feel it.
"Will it hurt?" he asks the orange crow, gripping the bottle so hard it almost cuts his palm.
"Every second."