Chapter Text
Chapter 1. Everything Stays.
There is a fence. Small. Wooden. Somewhat rickety. Out of everything, that’s what Karkat can’t tear his eyes from. Not the waving of the tall, soft grasses. Not the perfect, puffy white clouds milling by in a sky you only get with a sun that isn’t hatefully scalding. The new world unspools around him like curtains drawn back from a window to let in the view, and that goddamn muddy fence line is all he can see.
Coming out of the flash-forward is disorienting. Several hundred years pass in a single beat of his bloodpusher as the scene around him changes from a flat, dead, empty rock plain to the lush field a mixed crowd of trolls, humans, and a lone cherubim so suddenly find themselves in. Karkat’s left reeling from the shock of it, wheezing as the universe expands around him like an embrace that’s only matched by the tight grip of Dave’s hand in his.
More details filter in through the glare. A low stone wall, a simple latched gate, and footprints pressed into the rich mud of the lane. John takes off at once and circles the group of them to check things out, the long blue end of his hood like a banner in the breeze. Jade follows him eagerly into the air, ears pricked with excitement at the empty field they’re standing in, at the telltale markers of civilization stamped so naturally onto the scene around them. There’s even birdsong in the air.
Karkat feels the breath he’d been holding since he was six escape him in a wheeze as he beheld the new universe they had created.
It's beautiful. Fingers of the soft breeze ruffle through his hair as Karkat waits for the other shoe to drop, for something awful to happen, for something to go wrong and it be his fault all over again but the featherflapper song doesn’t stop and he’s maybe clutching Dave’s hand like a lifeline but the human isn’t letting go.
The new world around them keeps being beautiful.
This is what winning looks like. The thought keeps hitting, again and again, as Kanaya basks in the sunlight and Rose laughs like he’s never heard her laugh before and even Dirk gets roped into the fun when Roxy drags both him and Jane and Calliope into a squealing group hug. The feeling crawls up his throat, swelling behind his eyelids. It’s overwhelming. It’s beautiful. This… this is what winning looks like.
And then Dave lets go of his hand.
…
It was easier, in the beginning, to make things stay the same. He’s had over a sweep to get used to the idea of living with Dave and he’s not sure either of them knows how to unlearn that behavior. It’s expected between them, almost, so when they end up in a hive on the outskirts of the Troll Kingdom it ends up being a relief to Karkat.
It’s one piece of something normal in the new world he’s found himself in. He might not know how to best preside in this mashed-together, mixed-up planet, but he can handle Dave living in the respiteblock down the hall from him.
It’s easy. It’s routine. It’s fucking normal, and right now he needs normal before he starts tearing at his hair and screaming at the hivering neighbors for being nosy, spying bitches.
No one knows they’re gods. Rose felt the need to make that rule immediately and Terezi backed her up when it became apparent that winning upgraded everyone to Godtier like a contingency prize. The hivering neighbors are nosy, spying bitches, but they’re the type of nosy, spying bitches that come with the curiosity earned by buying a hive outright with a pile of identical bricks of gold with the caveat that the seller not ask questions.
And its fucking weird being inside a hive that is so clearly troll-coded but not Alternian. The dim lights are perfect for his eyes but the windows aren’t tinted to block radiation so everything stays brighter regardless. There’s no Empire-regurgitated bullshit on the walls either— not a whisper of the Hemospectrum in sight— but the thin etching around the doorframes reveal tiny suns stamped into the aged copper.
‘For luck,’ the seller had said, slapping at the sigil with a wink.
And so it goes. Dave keeps the curtains pulled across every window in the hive no matter the time of day. Karkat’s well-used to the other Knight’s habits, knows he’s got some kind of hangup about being watched, and seeing the human make his way around their shared hive like he’s walking an active minefield and ducking to avoid sightlines makes something tight ache through his bloodpusher.
There’s supposed to be nothing to fear here. They won.
The idea is still new enough to feel like bullshit, unearned as the new set of Godtier wear in crusty red crammed in the back of his closet.
Karkat’s claws curl around the ceramic mug in his hands. It’s empty and it’s cold against the pads of his fingers. There’s a countertop between them enforcing their personal space in a way he feels keenly as a knife as Dave ghosts through the kitchen just to stare at the fridge like he’s not sure what the fuck it’s doing inside a kitchen in the first place.
Karkat’s heard this joke before. He can’t believe he ever found it funny.
It’s been a fucking week of this. Between the two of them, Karkat’s not sure who’s been acting the most unhinged. His new Blood powers are easiest to handle when he ignores them utterly, vigilantly stamping out any hint of classpect fuckery.
He hasn’t really been sleeping. He doesn’t think Dave has been sleeping either but the human’s always so good at hiding this type of shit from him. Even now the Time player’s face is inscrutable but Karkat’s had over a sweep and a half to learn how to decode the micro-expressions behind his shades and read the way the line of his shoulders never turn to put his back to a window.
Karkat’s never been good at keeping his mouth shut, so he says, “I could go out and talk at them again,” in reference to the nosey, spying bitches who probably think their new neighbors are weird hermits who hate other people.
Karkat’s lived as the weird hivering hermit who hates other people before. The idea of a repeat tastes sour on his tongue.
Dave just snorts at him, yanking open the fridge door by the handle to stare inside it. Cold air pours out. “It wouldn’t help anything,” he says. “Might make it worse, actually. You go out and make a scene yelling at the neighbors and now the whole kingdom knows the best way to score an audience with the two new strangers is by littering our front sidewalk with their pestering glad-handling welcome schemes. Can you imagine checking the mail that way? Fending off Jessica Trollface with her legally-binding troll HOA agreement when all we’re trying to do is fetch the fucking power bill without caring about what fucking color the front curtains are.” Dave closes the fridge without getting anything out of it.
“What the fuck is a power bill?” Karkat asks, and Dave just stares at him.
The stare goes on for a while. Neither of them move. The refrigerator hums softly. It’s the loudest sound in the world.
In the beginning, when the grief was fresh and the meteor haunted and victory so very far away, the thing that worked best became something of a ritual between them. A truce. Karkat offers it again now, holding the words tightly in the back of his throat. “Do you wanna watch a movie?”
…
It’s the same scene he’s lived so many times before. There’s a couch. A shitty movie he gets way too invested in because if there’s one thing to thank the new universe for it’s their extensive new collection of romcom media for him to obsess over. Dave’s right next to him, close enough to reach out and touch.
As far as movies go, this is a good one. Karkat almost regrets that. He thinks Dave enjoys the shitty ones better, where the tropes are all cheesy and the petty conflicts minor enough he can jabber comfortably through the entire thing without ever approaching anything resembling an introspective thought because he doesn’t need to. The feelings are fake, the relationships shallow and uncommitted, and even Karkat has to laugh at how badly the characters fuck everything up.
But not this one. Karkat’s absorbed in this one, eyes wide as on-screen the romcom unfolds. He knows Dave’s getting drawn in as well once the time player stops critiquing their wardrobe choices and falls silent. And it’s nice, it’s normal, it’s nothing they haven’t done a thousand times and the air between them burns with how badly Karkat wishes he would scoot closer, bridge that gap between them.
It’s happened before, when sometimes, late into their movie binges when Karkat’s eyes would droop and the screen would blur into pleasant static, he’d feel the gentle brush of Dave’s knee against his own. A shifting would occur, wordless, like Dave could only ever relax enough to fucking settle once Karkat was halfway unconscious first. Once, when he was mostly asleep and leaned back against the couch with one arm out along the back, he’d even felt Dave tentatively lean into him like he was testing the invisible boundaries of whatever nameless thing he was struggling with.
But Karkat’s not asleep now and nowhere near drowsy enough to expect that same treatment, not with things so new and the other Knight so flighty. So he sits there, eyes wide at the screen, taking in the film as the air at his side burns with the nearness he doesn’t dare reach for, trying to distract himself from the new way his classpect abilities prompt him to catalogue the bonds of each character on the screen, which is something the actual godtier powers can’t help with because these are actors and everything is scripted.
It’s a beautiful movie with an emotional ending, a happy one, and Karkat feels his traitorous eyes water up. He’s instinctively rubbing them to erase the evidence, ashamed of the color.
“Does it piss you off?” Dave asks suddenly. “The ending?”
The words startle him from his sneaky erasure. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The ending,” Dave clarifies. “They bring up all these good as fuck reasons why they can’t be together, and then none of them ever end up happening. That’s the only reason why the movie got its happy ending— they didn’t have to go through any of the bad shit they were worried about. None of it even happens.”
Karkat frowns. “Did you want them to have to deal with the drama of their business getting bought out and losing their hive or that, what was the title, fucking mother-in law’s nasty prying?” It’s still weird to him, having the Gift of Gab drop new words directly into his thinkpan, essential as it is to navigate the tongues of this new world’s mish-mash of troll, human, and carapace words.
“No,” Dave says, but there’s enough emotion in the word to put Karkat’s hackles up.
He turns to the human expectantly. Dave’s baseline tone is flatlined as a dead frog under a scuttlebuggy— this degree of inflection means he’s really worked up about something. “So what exactly about the movie has got you so pissed off?” he asks curiously.
He’s not really expecting an outright answer; Dave never does that either, but most of the time his deflections are revealing enough. This time, though, the direction is more provoking than dismissive, a 180 subject change more damning than any long-winded metaphor.
“Why do you still do that?” Dave asks. “Hide your tears? It’s cool to cry at good movie endings— they want you to. That’s kinda the entire point of them, happy or sad. Whole industry is jacked with these tear-jerker movies driving up the cost of tissues everywhere, theatres filled with the sniffly noses of a thousand teary-eyed sons of bitches watching the ending of the Troll Notebook or some shit. Fuck. What was this movie called again? See you at the end? Hell, just from that overly-pretentious title alone you knew this was going to be a tear-jerker.”
“Dave,” Karkat says, knowing exactly what the human was trying to say without having to force himself into outright saying it. And maybe he’s a fucking hypocrite because there’s dilute red on the sleeve of his black shirt, faint enough to miss in the half-light from the TV screen. “We don’t have to hide anymore.”
“There’s so much shit we need to hide, Karkat,” Dave tells him. “And I get most of that’s game-stuff that I totally agree with no one else ever knowing. I trust our two Seers to steer us right in that regard. We can’t have the neighborhood realizing who they have bunking a few houses down from them. Image what that would do to their property taxes— shit would look worse than Palm Beach.”
Karkat answers the question Dave’s verbally wandered away from, knowing exactly what the other Knight is actually asking here. “I guess it’s habit,” he shrugs. “I know there’s no hemospectrum here. And I’m inside the privacy of my own fucking hive so who the fuck should care what color I’m crying, but,” he pauses on the words before ploughing forward. “Shame fucking lingers.”
Dave doesn’t tell him bullshit about it either. The time player doesn’t try to change his mind. He just says like shit’s simple, “that it does,” all quiet-like and halfway under his breath.
Karkat turns to him. The scrolling light of the TV’s end credits drags itself across the reflection in Dave’s shades. The look between them grows into something teetering. Karkat feels fucking unbalanced by his want to close the distance between them.
Dave doesn’t move a muscle. Karkat barely dares to breathe.
“I’m going to bed,” the other Knight says, abruptly standing to pull a quick abscond up the hallway and into his respitblock, quick enough to nearly be a true flashstep.
Because he’s pathetic, Karkat slumps right over on the couch. He can feel the warmth of where Dave had been quickly fade and he’s instantly battling back another round of teary sniffles that have nothing to do with wholesome romcoms and everything to do with his flighty hivemate.
Maybe Dave will hold him at arm’s length forever. Maybe this orbital dance of safe stability is all he gets. Maybe he needs to punch Dirk in the face hard enough to break those stupid pointed sunglasses and hope it ends up meaning something.
Hating himself, Karkat blinks until the world around him dissolves into shades of red crisscrossed with brilliant bloody lines of scarlet light that pulse and glow and shift. LOPAH was a vicious, ugly place and he doesn’t miss those blood-hazed skies, but there’s no reflexive disgust for the blood-tinted air he’s looking through. Laid out before him are a series of red chains he’s quickly come to know as well as his own claw prints.
There’s a line for Jade, pulsing with respect and friendship and trust. A line for John, strong with mutual respect even if it’s colored with his inborn jealousy of the other team leader. The line tying him to Kanaya is solid as a rock, unshakable. Terezi’s line runs straight and true, even if parts of it lie knotted with past events. And some lines lay broken and dull, trailing off to frayed ends of heartbreak and grief and regret. Like this, he can see each and every one of his personal bonds laid out in a row, whether they represent friendship or teamwork or long-term habituation via forced proximity and various degrees of trauma-bonding.
Dave’s line is an unshakable chain weaving endlessly over itself between the two of them. It throbs like a heartbeat, red and pulsating.
It’s beautiful. And he wants it so bad it hurts.
Karkat lets the Blood ability fade back to something that doesn’t haze across his vision. He’s not a fucking Seer, after all. The relationships he reads are a vivid spectrum of interactions and bonds and emotions, and the carefully-enforced distance between himself and the Time player hurts all the more now that he can see the exact shape and size of the want between them. It was bad enough just to guess, knowing his feelings weren’t as one-sided as he feared, but that had been before they won the Game when Karkat was still mostly convinced he’d never see anything like a new universe or the winner’s platform or the Vast Croak. His potential and near-certain death made ignoring the ache easier, especially when Dave was a successful godtier and Karkat a broken hold-over from a lost session.
The warmth from Dave’s spot on the couch has long faded when Karkat recovers enough to make his way to his own respitblock. He’s always been a Hero of Blood but now he’s a god when he’s not even eight sweeps yet.
The world outside his thickly curtained respitblock window is new and strange and beautiful, and time feels like it’s unspooling before him in an unbroken string of opportunity he’d never dared to imagine.
The thought keeps hitting. They won. They won.
Karkat curls up on a human-style bed because trolls in this universe figured out how to stop the screaming daymares without sopor. He stares blankly up at the shadowed ceiling and his focus swims in and out until the roof of his new hive looks identical to the ceiling of the meteor and his heart thuds and his chest aches with stale grief. He’s alone.
This doesn’t feel like winning.
Karkat squeezes his eyes closed and tries to sleep.