Chapter Text
Your name is Karkat Vantas.
Your life is unnecessarily complicated.
You vaguely and distantly remember a time when acceptance used to be a little easier, back before everything completely went to shit. Hell, the hardest thing you’ve ever had to accept and face up until now was the death of your Lusus, and even that was easier to cope with than this. You aren’t sure how you’ve been keeping it together, honestly. Somewhere deep down you really fucking hate to admit it, but you’re starting to think that having the humans around makes everything marginally more tolerable. To a certain degree, anyway. Maybe it’s their naivety – they’ve gone through a lot already, but it’ll take sweeps on top of sweeps on top of sweeps to even measure up to all of the bullshit that you and your like-specied comrades have had to wade through. The humans still have a spark in them, a really weird sort of innocence that keeps them held together when everything around them is trying desperately to fray their edges. You gather that it’ll probably happen eventually, but for now, keeping an eye on them and watching them as they continue to act like things might still be okay someday, maybe even someday soon, is like breathing in a little bit of fresh air. …when you’re not in a particularly sour disposition and wishing them straight into their graves, at least.
Lately a lot of what you feel is dangerously reliant on your mood. And lately, your mood has been pretty fucking wretched.
You tried blaming it on a sort of cabin fever. You tried telling yourself over and over, like a mantra, that this is ALL the meteor’s fault because you miss plant life and grass and familiarity, and you’ve come to loathe the stagnant, musty smell of pretty much every single room you’ve been in, and you miss your stupid hive like you wouldn’t believe and somehow along that train of thought you spiral straight into really missing your Lusus. It’s the worst, when he comes to mind unexpectedly. And there’s only so much you can do to distract yourself from the endlessly vast size of the rock you’re stuck on, and from the fact that most of your friends are now dead, and from the fact that the only one you still genuinely feel like you can even partially connect to goes missing for days at a time.
To practically everyone else, he’s been missing for the entirety of the trip, and that’s been… totally fine by them. Even after shit seemed to calm down, his presence was fucking unnerving, and everyone seemed to struggle to get past what he did, what that stupid crazy asshole fucking did. You know for a fact that if Kanaya caught him lurking around, she’d likely want to take care of him all by herself with her own bare hands. Can’t blame her for that. Can’t blame anyone for what they feel anymore, even while you’re trying to.
Since the murders, you’d had a really hard time figuring out why you’re so needlessly worried about him. Eventually, you stopped trying to figure it out, or explain it to anyone. You stopped bringing him up and whenever someone else did, you kept the topic as short and clipped as you could. You’d think that after everything, you may have hardened up a little more, right? Of course not. Somehow, in some ass-backwards way, it only made you soft. Vulnerable.
You’ve mulled over this for awhile. You’ve had all the time in the world to do so. You’ve been through all of the self-loathing and the uncontrollable anger issues and the overwhelming, massive waves of sadness that seemed to blindside you out of the clear fucking blue (or black, as it were, seeing as you’re currently traveling through absolutely fucking nothing); once all of that started to ebb off and you felt yourself adapting to your problems instead of barely managing to cope with them, you were able to sit down and rationally surmise that this all must be your equivalent to post-traumatic stress. There’s really no other fucking explanation, is there?
You can honestly say that when everything went down, when you were dragging the bleeding, broken, useless bag of bones that Sollux calls a body deeper into the lab, you have never, never been more genuinely fucking afraid of anything in your life.
And you never want to feel fear that ice-cold and suffocating again. This encounter with it has scarred you in places you didn’t even know existed.
Cutting yourself off from everyone else for the majority of your time HAS had its benefits, though, however twisted and pathetic they might be. Kanaya and Terezi (especially Terezi, fuck) have both been really hard to talk to lately, and while you CAN tolerate Dave’s presence to a certain degree now, you always reach a point when he starts to grate your already delicate, nearly shattered nerves with his mumbling and his scribbling.
Now that you’ve made excuses not to spend time socializing with the other sorry sacks that are stuck here with you for who knows how much longer, you’ve been able to take up talking to the vents.
So far, nobody’s caught you, you don’t think.
You can tell when he needs to talk (if you wanted to be strictly literal, it’s really not so much ‘talk’ as it is ‘say something’; it’s been awhile since you’ve actually TALKED and carried on some sort of conversation that lasted longer than ten or twenty seconds) by paying attention. You’ve guessed that so far nobody else has noticed – or admitted to noticing – the noises that drift through the multiple scattered ventilation grates. The only reason YOU know to listen for it is because you mentally trained yourself to. You noticed it on an accidental whim the first time; the noise scared the absolute shit out of you and almost made you throw up just by association alone. But since then, you’ve known to keep a sharp ear open for it. And since then, the noise stopped making you feel nauseous. It sounds so, so fucked up, but it’s actually started to make you remember better times, when all people needed to worry about was being toolbags to a bunch of fucktarded human kids over a messaging system, and how loud you were going to be that day.
It makes you remember him. Before all this.
- - -
You’re stopped dead in your tracks on your way down one of the fourteen fucking million twisting hallways that somehow you’ve managed to at least partially memorize. The sound is always way too quiet at first, feels like your mind is playing some sort of nasty trick on you. You have no idea if it’s him being tentative, or if he starts trying to catch your attention way too soon, when he’s not close enough to the grates yet. This time, though, you are absolutely sure from the fucking start that you heard it, and it wasn’t your imagination.
You’re trying not to be instantly pissed. The asshole’s been doing whatever the fuck it is that he does and hasn’t bothered to make his presence known in the past couple of days. You don’t like worrying to begin with, but worrying about him really knots up your stomach.
You turn toward the nearest vent and you stop moving, still as possible, waiting for the telltale second signal. When it comes, it’s abrupt and you jump a little; not because you’re scared. Just startled. It IS a very intrusive and unexpected sound, after all. Sometimes it’s like the asshole makes a fucking game of it, switching between vents that are too close to one another and YOU’RE the dipshit who needs to figure out which one to talk at.
Not this time. He is being very straight forward with you, and you can tell he isn’t fucking around. He’s being as serious as he can while wielding a fucking stupid, doofy horn.
You move closer, check your surroundings to confirm your solitude, sink down onto your hands and knees in front of the grated opening and squint hard to try and see inside. You don’t see much at first, just black, but then the black shifts and you realize you’ve been staring into a black mop of matted hair. His head lifts, and you see his eyes.
You shift back a little. Again, not scared. Just jumpy. Lately you’re always fucking jumpy. And even though the horn really doesn’t freak you out the way it used to and the way you thought it would for the rest of your miserable life, his eyes are still a little unsettling. Still a muddy, light kind of amber (they always seemed a little darker than everyone else’s; you’ve always chalked it up to some kind of reaction to the shit he kept packing into his system or whatever, you had no idea) and still half-lidded but not like they were before. Not like when he was completely blazed off of his stash of garbage and mellowed out. There’s something eerie about it. You feel like someone as sober as he is now shouldn’t be wearing an expression like that.
His eyes look tired but that doesn’t seem to be affecting him much. You wonder offhandedly how long it’s been since he’s fucking slept, and the idea of him being awake at all hours, creeping through everyone’s walls and ceilings while they manage to get some sleep, is more unnerving than the steady eye contact that you are now maintaining with him.
For a minute, neither of you say anything. You just stare at each other. It’s not common for him to get this close to the openings of the vents, close enough to actually see details of his face.
“Gamzee,” you finally croak out and your voice sounds like you haven’t used it in days.
He doesn’t move, just blinks slowly. To anyone else, he probably looks absolutely fucking horrifying right now, just these creepy, lazy looking eyes the colour of stale piss, one of which having barely escaped getting gouged out and as a result graced just over and under with a thick, ugly scar. But you see deeper than that. You see deeper than the unfaltering gaze and all of the screws coming loose behind them. You see past the fact that he’s been communicating with you through a fucking ventilation system because everyone he knows wants to kill him and he apparently has better things to worry about than trying to dodge a deathblow out in the open. He’s insane, he’s got blood in every colour of the fucking spectrum on his hands, and he doesn’t act like he could give two shits less, but you know that’s not ALL there is to him. He’s your moirail, for fuck’s sake. You’re supposed to know him better than anyone else, even if you don’t understand him.
“I haven’t seen you in days, you shit.”
You say it without venom.
He gets that.
You scoot a little closer to the vent again, after another quick look-around. Your temper is threatening to bubble up and you’re really making an effort NOT to give in to it because he’s Gamzee and he looks fucking pathetic to you right now, trapped in his dark little prison, alone. Something about him is off, too, you could sense that as soon as you approached him.
You give yourself a beat or two to wrangle your anger back down.
“What’s going on?” you finally ask him, keeping your voice quiet and level.
He makes a gesture that you can just barely make out, a quick jerk of the head and his eyes sliding toward the same direction. He meets your gaze again but only for a second, because then he’s gone, disappeared back into the shadows, moving.
He wants you to follow him.