Chapter Text
take your time drawing a bead
i’ll stand as still as you need
‘cause you’re so good at talking smack
you heart attack
but you’re the apple of my eye anyway
-Brand New - You Won’t Know
You like Terezi. She’s utterly infuriating and you itch to find just a toe out of line, a hair out of place, so you can haul her off and hand her out the punishment she so richly deserves, but she’s always absolutely immaculate. You can’t help but admire her. Dealing with her is easy, in its own way. You’ll be invited into her office, which will be some dimly lit room in a dimly lit building that absolutely screams criminal element. She’ll sit behind a mind-bogglingly pretentious desk and grin at you, leaning over it for extra emphasis, and ask if she can help you, Mr. Vantas?
Then you’ll get down to business, which for the two of you always seems to end up being more of an argument than anything else. You don’t think you’ve ever left a meeting not wanting to strangle her, but you always almost always leave them knowing more than you did before you came, so you figure it balances out. She’s not unhelpful; it’s just that she’s so unbelievably Pyrope she can’t help but be obtuse and obnoxious. You’re not even sure she does it on purpose.
That’s how it’s supposed to go. No muss, minimal fuss, with the both of you having been enriched by the experience. You get her insider’s information on the seedier parts of the city and she gets you conveniently looking the other way when people you know for a fact have been fucking with her turn up full of holes and with bits snapped off.
You’re not sure why you thought it wouldn’t go all wahooni-shaped. The universe takes a particular delight in pissing in your face as often as possible and you really have only yourself to blame for continuously forgetting this fact. You have to admit you didn’t expect it to be quite this way, though.
It takes you half the length of the room to realize that the shadows next to Terezi are a person, another faltering couple of steps to realize who. He’s got his face painted up in this stripey leer that makes it hard to actually see what his mouth is doing, but you can tell he’s just as gobsmacked as you are. The two of you stare at each other over her desk for a long, taut moment. Then he comes sliding out around it with that deceptive speed of his, legs practically as long as you are - he’s grown, some part of you observes inanely, he’s got to have gotten at least another half foot of height since you last saw him - until you’re nose to chest with him.
“Karkat,” he says, voice all slow and lazy surprise.
“Gamzee.” He smells just the way he used to. Something squeezes sharply in your chest at that, at the fact that you’re close enough to notice that. You are struck suddenly with the absolutely insane urge to pull him down and rub your cheek against his. Instead you tilt your head back and give him your steeliest upward stare. He looks back down at you with heavily lidded eyes.
“What the fuck is my nubby little brother doing up in a place like this, now?” Gamzee’s voice has the same rhythm it used to, that long lilt that always drove you crazy waiting for him to get to the goddamn point. “A law-abiding kind of motherfucker like what you’ve always been doesn’t seem suited for this kind of wicked shithole.” Up this close you can see his thin lips curving around the words.
“I’m here to talk to Terezi, obviously. The hell are you doing here? Is the Church handing subjugglators out like candy to any shitweasel who cackles loud enough at them, now?” You’re trying very hard not to act like you aren’t completely shaken to see him. It’s happened before, inevitable when you both run in the same areas of the same city, but this is the first time in years the two of you have been face to face. You don’t very much like it; his gaze drapes over you hot and heavy as velvet, pinning you.
“Mr. Makara is my loyal assistant,” Terezi volunteers. She’s still seated comfortably at her desk, feet propped up on it, head cocked towards the two of you - the very picture of vaguely professional irreverence. “He has been serving me very faithfully of his volition and is in no way encouraged or endorsed by his religion! He is encouraged and endorsed only by me.”
You guess it’s only natural that the two biggest pains in your ass would team up. “That’s just great. Nice to see you again, Gamzee, by the way. You’re looking as bugfuck insane as usual.”
He laughs and drops a heavy paw on your shoulder, nails curling into your skin. “And you are looking like a stone-cold boring-ass motherfucker who is ten kinds of all blind to the miracles of everything around him, just like as usual.”
You are deeply displeased with how much he’s touching you. “And Pyrope over there is a lunatic as always, so I guess it’s business as usual. Do me a favor and get back behind the desk, chucklefuck, and try looking with your eyes.”
“I don’t think,” he says very slowly, “that you are quite at understanding with your position here. I think a brother has gotten it up in his motherfucking thoughts that maybe he can be telling me what to do.”
Here is what you’ve been waiting for: the flash of cruel arrogance, laid out as carelessly indolent as everything else he ever does. It’s a reminder that this isn’t the boy you used to love, but something awful that rose up wet and glistening from the sad shed husk of his body.
Gamzee doesn’t scare you, with his looming height and greasepaint leer, not after you spent your entire childhood around painted faces and the wicked pictures slopped up on half the walls. Subjugglators have always unsettled you, though, and that’s only gotten worse as you’ve gotten older. You are heretically familiar with the most intimately dirty little secrets of the Church, and those are all you can think about whenever you see one of the Messiahs’ devotees. You look at them, all wrath and whimsy, and you just think about how Gamzee used to be. It makes you sad, mostly.
You reach up and plant your hands on his chest, pushing him back. “I think you sure as hell don’t have any right to put your grubby hands anywhere on my body. I’m here to deal with Pyrope, not you, so just go back to being a good pet psychopath and let the adults talk.”
He grabs you by the collar. He actually grabs the actual collar of your shirt and pulls you up off the ground, bending to snarl into your face, every trace of sleepiness gone from his eyes. “I think this motherfucker here don’t got any right to be snapping any order sounds at me, not after what he up and fucking did. I think this brother here owes some motherfuckers in this room a righteous motherfucking apology before he gets to go on and get doing any business done.”
You hope that it’s possible to explode from sheer mortified rage and that both of these assholes get maimed by the shrapnel. “I need to apologize? For what? For you being pan-fucked crazy? For finally getting tired of throwing myself up against a wall every damn day and wondering at the end of it why I was so bruised and sore? I’m sorry I’m not crazy, Gamzee! I’m sorry I finally realized that if I kept doing the same shitty, useless thing over and over again it wouldn’t suddenly have different results! I’m sorry you’re the most odious pile of troll-shaped excrement I’ve ever met and I’m sorry I ever thought you were anything else. How’s that?”
You’ve wanted to actually say these things to his face for so long. The two of you fought awfully, viciously, squabbling at each other like half-mad dogs, but you never really got down to the heart of it. You never got around to saying how he’d hurt you, never gotten to lance that particular boil. He’d looked at you and all your love and all the devotion you’d given him in the one hand, and the slimy barbs of the Church burrowing themselves under his skin in the other and picked them.
The fact that Terezi’s listening, though, makes it more humiliating than cathartic. You don’t want to air your dirty laundry out like this. Your soiled garments are top secret goddamn business and someone like her has no right to poke her snout into them.
“Oh, is that what you’re saying happened? Is that how this brother spins it to himself? Look at the lies he tells, look at all the wicked untruths coming from this brother’s little teeth-hole, hear how motherfucking flagrant they are in their falsehood!” Gamzee curls down around you so his mouth is near your ear, breath puffing cool against your skin. “Let me tell you, my most beloved brother, of how these things really went. Let me motherfucking tell in your aural spongeclots here of the truth you did to me.”
“Oh, please, Gamzee, I would love nothing more than to hear whatever twisted, flimsy piece of bullshit excuse you have for what happened. I am jerking my bulge raw here with anticipation. Tell me.” The terrible urge to reach up and stroke his face rises inside of you. You push it savagely back down, hands remaining limp and open at your sides.
Gamzee pitches his voice soft and just the right kind of low so it buzzes in your horns and teeth and down your spine. It’s disgustingly intimate. You can practically feel his lips moving.
“You left me,” he says, raw with simple grief. “You up and fuck and left me, my brother. You made all these righteous pale promises unto me, you made your motherfucking troth to me, and then you showed me your motherfucking heel dust and that was that. Eight and a half sweeps we were together, and every second of it I loved you with every splinter of bone and drop of blood inside my own sorry carcass. I’ve got your mark carved in me true as every gospel I ever up and did hear, paid all in pain and blood to show the truth of how I love you, and then you fucking split.” As he goes on, his voice goes rougher, deeper, harsh now with anger. “Fucking split and before that you spewed out of your face all these wicked heresies, all this most offensive bullshit I have never wanted to hear, and I abided by that for the sake of how much I motherfucking loved you, but what even was the point? This brother had no love in his heart for me, not enough as he said he did, so what did I get? Just some hurt, that’s all. That’s what you motherfucking did.”
For a moment you are actually struck completely dumb with shock, and then a slow, rising fury. It burns up through you until you’re sure you’ll just fall to ashes out of his hold, spontaneously rage-combust right here in the office. “How can you even try to say I didn’t love you? You left me to go gallivanting off with your clownfuck buddies and get yourself mutilated a new way every week and you didn’t even care about me, not when you had the dogfucking Church. I mean, Gamzee, come on, how many times did you leave me sitting there twiddling my thumbs up my asshole while you were gone learning whatever excuse for holy truth they were calling this month’s torture session?”
He got religion and didn’t love you anymore. There wasn’t room for Karkat in him anymore, not with the Messiahs and their teachings. Not with all the violence he had to learn. They took out every sweet thing in him you’d ever pitied and stuffed the empty skin-sack left with straw, and then tried to hand him back to you.
You had never asked him to choose. You could never ask him to choose, wouldn’t even think of trying to make him do that.
You hadn’t needed to.
“I left because you weren’t you anymore, you egregious screwup. I was pale for Gamzee Makara, not some abhorrent subjugglator shitfountain who pranced around giggling through pools of the blood of his inferiors, singing murder carols and popping earth-shattering boners over some new form of self-inflicted torture. You’re the one who made that choice, alright? I understand, though, it wasn’t like you could be two places at once. You just picked which one had your loyalties.”
You try not to sound bitter and utterly fail.
The two of you fall silent now, staring at each other, flushed with ragged emotion. You realize, very suddenly, that you hate him. You hate what he is. You hate the fact that you used to love him and he let that godawful Church take everything good about him away. You hate yourself for ever having loved him and now you hate yourself for hating him, because you know that you should pity the twisted fucking wreckage of what used to be your moirail, but you can’t dredge up even a drop. It’s all contempt all the way down.
You reach up and cup one hand around the side of his face, thumb smudging along the familiar curve of his cheekbone. It feels like watching your house burn down. “You are fucking awful in every way it is possible for a person to be awful and a few that I think you invented specially just to make me angry.”
He bites the pad of your thumb in return and darts in to smash his mouth into yours when you yelp and yank your hand away. It’s the worst kiss you’ve ever had in recent memory and possibly the entire rest of your life, too. It’s all teeth clacking and lips getting smashed and bitten and tongues pushing hard in where they don’t belong, heavy and cold and invasive.
Your blood is rushing in your ears, but you’re dimly aware of Terezi crowing delightedly behind the both of you. You flip her the bird and then set your claws into Gamzee’s shoulders, raking both sets down his back. He groans into your mouth and drops you, swooping down to catch your lips again while his hands wrap around your waist.
He’s stupidly bigger than you. His fingers very nearly meet across your back and he’s bent practically in half to reach your mouth. You’re wrapped all up in him like this, Gamzee curled around and above you. You feel unpleasantly caught, like a fly who just buzzed into one of the pitcher plant’s walls.
You’re the one who pulls back first, suddenly remembering that you’re here to do a job, not lick your blood off some asshole’s teeth. Gamzee tries to come after you, yanking you back in close when you try to step away. Apparently the concept of ‘no’ isn’t something he ever picked up. The two of you push and tug and scuffle against each other. You bite at his shoulder and then you’re kissing again, his hands fisted in your hair, and that hold you manage to drop out of, backing away quickly to put the chair between you.
“Look, we can go have a lovely candle-lit hatedate later, okay? I have business right now and it’s kind of more important.”
He’s an absolute wreck. His makeup is smeared halfway down his neck, the careful designs a twisted mess of indefinite grey, his mouth is dripping red and purple from needle teeth and torn lips. You want nothing more than to push him up against the nearest wall and tear his throat out with your teeth; from the way his lips curl back when he meets your eyes, he feels about the same.
Finally, Terezi remembers that she is nominally a respectable businesswoman. “That’s enough, boys.” The amusement in her voice is clear. Fucking vulture. “Come back here, Gamzee, we have work that must be attended to, and none of it is located in Mr. Vantas’ tonsils.”
He slinks back to her side all sulky and sullen, licking your blood off his lips. “Then get done your motherfucking business, sister.”
You perch ramrod straight in the seat in front of her desk, glutes parked on the very edge of it, ready to jump up and leave in a second. Removed now from the immediacy of Gamzee’s mouth and hands on you, you mostly just want to haul ass out of there. You’ll take a quick and briskly efficient exchange of information as a barely suitable second.
The conversation isn’t even long enough to properly distract you. It’s a pretty simple thing, all said. There’s Alternian Imperial military technology being smuggled into the city, somehow; while anyone with a warehouse full of bioweapons should be as obvious as a fluorescent target three blocks wide, you can’t find them. Every single trail has gone dead cold as soon as you got much beyond the individual distributors, all of whom pointed you in conflicting directions that led nowhere. If there’s anyone here who would know who’s doing it, it’s Terezi Pyrope.
She doesn’t. Not even significant pause doesn’t, just flat out doesn’t. She gets edgy about it too, frowning when you tell her exactly the kind of shit that’s been turning up and settling back in her chair, fingers steepled, all business.
“How would they even get on-planet?” she wants to know. You can only shrug helplessly. The only Alternian ships allowed through the blockade are the biannual droneships that collect genetic material for the home planet’s Mother Grub, and even those are unmanned now after the first few waves were shot down on approach. Humanity’s stranglehold on this planet and its starspace is nigh impenetrable. “Could it be vets pawning off their old war memorabilia? I don’t doubt there are many wiley oldsters who refused to hand over their weapons as per the treaty! Trolls are a notoriously ill-behaved lot.”
You’re shaking your head before she’s even done. “No, we know what some veteran’s burnt-out old pea-shooter looks like. This is all really new. It’s top of the line stuff. If the Imperial cavalry came trumpeting in tomorrow and executed every hornless mammalsack on the planet, this is what they’d be using to do it.”
She nods along slowly as you speak, lips pursed. “I thought so. Sorry to disappoint you, but I haven’t heard anything about lawless weapons smugglers. A lady keeps better company than that!”
You roll your eyes so hard it almost makes you dizzy. “Well, thank you for having been absolutely useless. Keep me posted, I guess.” As frustrating as it is to have one of your more promising info-wells turn up dry, it’s at least a comfort that you know she’ll tell you if she finds anything. Crowing maniac coyote though she may be, the two of you have an easy understanding.
It would take a few rounds of hardcore trepanation to make you feel halfway okay about turning your back on Gamzee to leave. You leave the room with the dumb lizard brain at the base of your spine shrieking bowel-voiding terror at you the whole time, but he stays right where he is. You make a point of not looking over your shoulder once you’re out of the room and allow yourself a slow sigh once you’ve cleared the hallway.