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There is no way you would ever EVER use your chucklevoodoos on your best friend.
With you off the slime for good and most of your friends culled, all you really have is each other. Using your fear manipulating powers is not something best friends do, not something you could do to your best bro, especially when Karkat might be concealing some fears of your good motherfucking self, but that’s nothing to be worrying about right? Brother isn’t perfect, and you can be awful scary sometimes. Before you two became moirails, you took down a good two-three trolls who just looked at you funny. But now Karkat is with you, and you shouldn’t have any more of those dark impulses right? Yeah, you and Karkat are close, CLOSE, and you wouldn’t want to do anything that could EVER bring you two apart.
…
There is no way you would ever EVER use your chucklevoodoos on your best friend.
…. At least, not that he would know of.
You know you need to be subtle about this. Wait, why do you have to all and be worrying about being found out? You aren’t even doing anything, just trying to figure out Karkat’s fears. For his own good. If you know his fears, you can work on not being as motherfucking scary. And finding out how to sense fears would be a useful skill. You could learn how to function better in society, and if you function better in society, then you won’t get motherfucking culled. But other trolls won’t be happy if you are getting your look on into their mind, so you gotta learn to be subtle.
You decide to wait until Karkat gets his z’s on. After all, your voodoos are stronger when a motherfucker is sleeping, and you should be at the top of your game. It also means that any funny business Karkat might suspect can be easily explained by having dreams. But that thought never even crosses your mind.
When you first start trying to get into Karkat’s mind, you don’t like how it feels. Your voodoos feel like a tentacle, wiggling through each little crevice and curve of Karkat’s soft mind. The brain is a fragile little thing you find, and responds to the slightest touch of your psychic power. You are only here to find out Karkat’s fears, not fuck him up, and definitely not be noticed. So you try again and try and shape your voodoos to be a motherfucking flybeast. You find you can take that form quite easily, but now getting in is the trouble, since you can’t just wiggle your way in.
You sit at the edge of Karkat’s mind for a few seconds before you feel yourself being carried into the mind by a small worry- about how you’re doing, actually. How motherfucking cute. The brain doesn’t react; it’s as if you are part of the thought itself. As you cling to the circling worry, you watch other worries swirl round and round around Karkat’s mind, and find yourself getting dizzy trying to follow them. As you keep looking, you see Karkat’s actual fears- parasites of the mind; they grow on the brain like a fungus. The worries seem to be orbiting around certain fears like spores, no doubt because the worries spawned from them. The fears themselves look like dark patches and globs- hyou think you even see one or two bubble.
There are so many motherfucking worries and fears it is a wonder your best friend survives day to day. He fears his blood will get discovered, he fears he isn’t doing a good enough with you, he fears you’ll get culled someday, that he’ll get culled, that he’s a big failure in every way, that someday you’ll fuck up and go back on the slime, or worse, go back to rampaging murderously and put everyone else in danger, and then a little about being scared that when you snap you’ll kill him. There are others like being scared that his friends hated him for not protecting them, that their deaths are his fault, that he’ll lose everything he’s trying to protect now. It just breaks your motherfucking heart. You want to do something but you are here to observe and nothing more, and you are new, you could so easily mess up. No, you won’t be messing with your best friends mind.
…
…You really don’t know what came over you.
Weren’t you not gonna mess with your best bros fears? But you were trying to help him! The fears were so dark and prevalent across Karkat’s mind, and the fears were absurd! Karkat should not be motherfucking doubting his efforts with you. He’s the best friend a brother could ever motherfucking ask for. And it should’ve been all easy to just get rid of the fear. You found Karkat’s fear of not doing good enough and clung to it, trying to become an eraser. Hey, if you could take the form of a flybeast, why not a simple motherfucking object? And erasing it was the simplest way to get rid of it. You might have hurt Karkat’s precious mind if you tried anything too complicated. But as you tried to erase it, it only seemed to smudge the fear across Karkat’s mind more. The fear wasn't even gone a little bit; it just became more and more embedded into his psyche. You fled out of his mind, terrified of your own power and lack of control.
You aren’t going to mess with Karkat’s think pan any more.
Every night you and Karkat talk. He yells at you about how annoying you are, how he can't imagine why he's your best friend, tells you to do something productive with your life, blah blah blah. He's lucky you can see past his guise and notice the smaller things, like how he always asks how you are and if everything's ok, and worries about you being safe. Even if all those are between insults and rants. Tonight is different. Tonight there is little ranting and insulting. He constantly asks if you are ok, if you are calm, and tries to start rants. The rants feel so tense and forced, like he's trying to keep a mask on, a costume up. You try and comfort him the best you motherfucking can, but you cannot bring yourself to admit what you did last night. He would do a motherfucking flip, and it wouldn’t help his fears at all. He’d probably just blame himself and fear he was doing something wrong. No, you’ll keep the one time you decided to mess with his think pan a complete secret, and make sure it stays one time.
By the end of the night, Karkat has completely broken down, and you'd swear he's crying on the other end of the computer. There are no insults or ranting, just worry and care. You have not seen his mask break since Sollux was taken away to undergo the training required by the helmsman before they are put in the ship for life. Nothing new has happened today, and yet you have not felt so close to Karkat’s soft side in so long. You have to remind yourself that it was your fault. You made him like this. You changed him.
You will not do it again.