Chapter Text
The smoke pushes past your lips slowly and your eyes follow it upwards until the thin grey cloud has entirely dispersed. You take another drag, tasting fire on your tongue before you breathe down its comforting heat into your lungs, holding it there as you hear your name being called out.
“Strider!”
You release, turning your head slowly in the direction of the voice as you savour the light headed rush take effect from your cigarette.
“Yeah?”
It’s one of your ‘friends’ from your English class, his name slipping your memory because to you they all looked the same. All of your ‘friends’ were labelled so loosely, each of them members of the football team with more brute than brains and more popularity than personality. But then again, your friendship with each of them was nothing short of a business exchange. They kept you company and followed your orders whilst you promised them entry to all the best clubs in the area, courtesy of one DJ brother.
He’s grinning at you, lumbering in your direction with all the cocky confidence only a douchebag like him could possess and you have to stop yourself from rolling your eyes behind your shades.
“Got a spare cig?” He asks, leaning against the wall beside you and you push your shades up your nose out of habit.
“Maybe.” You take another drag, tipping your head back against the wall to breathe the smoke out towards the sky.
“Aw come on, man. Don’t be such a fag and give me one.” He says and you flinch just slightly at the word, careful to keep your face expressionless as your heart picks up a pace in response. You would have thought that you were used to it by now. They used those kinds of insults all the time and you often wondered what would happen if they knew the truth. The conclusions were never pleasant.
You reluctantly pull the packet from your jeans pocket, offering him one before you let your eyes roam out over the scene before you. It was just a typical high school. Clusters of noisy kids making their way up the path from the road to the entrance of the school. It was enough to bore the living crap out of you and you took a long drag in response, slender fingers flicking away the ash that had built up at the end of your cigarette.
“Ha. Check out Vantas.” The guy next to you retorts as he lights up his own cigarette, nodding in the direction of the path.
Your attention snaps across, eyes tracking the short teen as he made his way quickly towards the school doors, his shoulders hunched and his hands shoved deep into his hoody pockets. His hood was up, hiding his face from view as he approached closer.
“How’s the demon doing, Kar?!” The footballer shouts across the courtyard and it’s obvious that he hears because his walking slows just slightly, head turning to send a glare in your direction. He pulls a hand from his pocket, lifting a middle finger in response, lips pushed into a thin frown.
The guy next to you bursts into a fit of laughter, head dropping forward and his bulky shoulders shaking heavily. And you know you should join in. But you can’t.
Because the small teen is still looking your way and it seems as though his eyes are locked right on yours, making your stomach twist unpleasantly as you furrow your brow back at him. It was sickening to look at him, physically painful to see him stare at you with those eyes that were the exact same shade as your own.
“Fucking freak…” You hear beside you in between laughs and, at last, you find yourself able to agree, nodding your head slowly as your lips pull down in distaste. You extinguish the rest of your cigarette roughly against the wall, watching him disappear among the crowds into the school.
“Yeah, fucking freak.”
…
The first time you had seen Karkat Vantas was a memory that still seemed so fresh to you that you thought you would never forget it.
The hair was the first thing you had noticed, shockingly white and messily untamed on his head, as though he was constantly running his fingers through it and leaving it flicking out in all directions. It fell askew across his forehead, giving way to two bright ruby eyes which seemed to be fixed in a permanent glare, ringed with skin that seemed slightly bruised compared to the rest of his ivory complexion. As though the kid never slept at all.
Wide eyes, nervous, teeth chewing at the pale pink lower lip; everything about him was hideously beautiful.
It had been a complete shock to the system to see him stood at the front of the classroom, introduced as a new student with a strange name and an even stranger appearance. In fact, the whole class had been stunned into silence by the albino kid frowning back at them, their eyes following him as he took his seat and sunk down self consciously.
For them, he was novel and strange, the unfamiliarity of him so tempting they practically fed off the sight of him. And it pained you to know that you were isolated in that way. Because the reason he had caught your attention wasn’t his strangeness, but his scary familiarity.
Red eyes you were so used to seeing every morning in the mirror, white hair you had always shrugged off as being blonde to anyone who asked. He was everything you kept hidden from the world and everything you hated all in one. It sent your blood boiling just to look at him, grip tightening against the edge of your desk and your mouth pulled into an uncharacteristic frown.
All it took was a few minutes for you to come to the conclusion that everything in your body and soul hated Karkat Vantas.
And it wasn’t long until you found a way to release that hate. Because, like anything strange or different, after the novelty wore off, only cruelness was left behind. And so the taunting started within days of him moving to the school.
It was mostly the people you knew who started it, which was to be expected considering the type of guys that they were. It had happened with plenty of other poor kids foolish enough to try and stand out from the crowd. Except you never usually got involved. You just let them do what they wanted like a pack of animals, judging them just as much as they judged the kids they bullied.
It was different with Karkat though. In fact, you could say you were the leader of the pack when it came to shouting names at him in the corridor, making up rumours in the classroom, and occasionally you even turned it physical. Hitting, tripping, throwing things. It was all so easy to get at him.
And he always reacted so strongly as well, never giving in to you without a fight or a curse in your direction; eyes alight with anger and hurt which brought you the greatest rush. The ultimate feeling of control and power over something you had previously felt so helpless about. Every time you drew blood from his pale skin or hit a nerve with a cruel nickname in the corridor, it was a release of everything you felt against yourself.
Hurting him was your ultimate form of self harm.
But with every form of self harm, the rush is always followed by the come down. And over time you found it happening more and more often where you would lie awake at night, his face invading your thoughts with such an intensity that all you could do was break down and cry. Painful, desperate sobs you drowned in your pillow out of fear of your Bro hearing.
And the thoughts never went away, but only grew in intensity with each passing week until he was all you could think about. It was as though he possessed you in the same way you joked demons possessed him.
There was one particular memory you thought about the most, like a disease infecting your mind to which you had no cure.
…
Your fingers grip the edge of the sink hard, forcing your eyes upwards to look at yourself in the dirty mirror hung up in the men’s toilets. The sight of yourself disgusts you, the only relief gained from the fact that your eyes were hidden by your shades.
You breathe in sharply, face breaking its expressionless mask to send yourself a hateful scowl. Because you had fucked up again. Bro had been gone for several days and you were sure that it was because you had let him down again in some way. Maybe this time he wouldn’t come back. Which was all you deserved anyway for being so pathetically useless.
You squeeze your eyes shut tightly, trying to get a grip on yourself in case someone walked in and saw you this way. Except it was difficult, and you were too far gone in your own self hatred that it was all you could do not to scream the whole school down.
You curl up a hand into a fist, your eyes opening to hit your reflection and this time it’s enough for you to pull your fist back and send it crashing into the mirror. You feel the glass shatter and break beneath your fingers, cutting you and distorting your image with jagged lines. Blood drips down your fingers and you bring your hand upwards to observe it blankly. Red against white.
Suddenly, one of the cubicle doors behind you is thrown open loudly, making you jump and swing round to face a wide eyed Karkat. His face is red, eyes slightly puffy so that you know he’d been crying, but he’s sure as hell trying his hardest not to show it, mouth scowling at you fiercely as his gaze flickers from the broken mirror to your bleeding hand wordlessly.
For once, you haven’t got it in you to say anything to him, and he doesn’t seem to want to say anything either. The two of you stand in stunned silence for a few seconds before he makes a move towards you. He grabs at your wrist, yanking you over towards the sink that wasn’t full of mirror shards before turning on the tap and shoving your cut fingers into the water.
“What kind of stupid fucker punches a mirror?” He mumbles, mostly to himself as you let him clean away your blood wordlessly. Your eyes are fixed on him, taking the opportunity to soak in his details whilst there was no one around to judge you.
He had the most amazing eyes, so much more appealing to look at than your own, framed with long thick blonde lashes that matched the mop of hair curling gently against his neck. His lips were fixed in his permanent frown, stained darker in certain patches from where he had bitten away the skin obsessively. It was at that point that you forced yourself to look away, realizing exactly how long you had been looking at his lips.
He’s cleaned away most of the blood, releasing your wrist and then stepping back away from you with a wary glare. You haven’t said a word yet, your skin tingling from where he had hold of it only moments before.
“Why?” You finally say, careful to keep any emotion from showing in your voice.
“Maybe because not everyone is as much of an asshole as you, Strider.” He says in his gravelly voice, sending you a final frown before he quickly turns and stalks off out of the toilets, mumbling incoherent words to himself as the door slams behind him and leaves you in silence.
For a moment you just stand and stare at the place where he had stood, your hand reaching out to lightly touch at your wrist where he had held you. Then you slowly start to move back, pieces of mirror cracking beneath your sneakers before your back hits the wall, the solidity of it comforting.
Eyes slipping closed, and suddenly all you can see is him. The curve of his jawline, the contrast of the dark bags beneath his eyes against the pale white of his skin, the small crease that appeared between his eyebrows when he got really angry.
Why couldn’t you stop thinking about him?
The way his fingernails were bitten right down, the shade of red his cheeks turned when it was too cold or hot, the lips, his lips, his lips. Oh god.
You let yourself sink slowly to the floor, head falling forward to rest on your curled up knees as though in defeat. You want to cry but you won’t let yourself give in to that kind of weakness.
Because it had suddenly all become horrendously clear.
Everything in your body and soul hated Karkat Vantas, but that didn’t prevent you from falling hopelessly and helplessly in love with him.