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Karkat counted his official reprimands off on his fingers as he climbed out of the car and stumbled into his hive. Once they reached the double digits he decided regretfully that he really couldn't afford to cause any more substantial property damage in the course of 'investigating shit'. He tried to keep his annual reprimand rate in the teens, at least, as a courtesy to Sollux's hatred for paperwork.
Rose's theory concerning his aggressive tendencies was, despite the extra psychologistical frosting, exactly the same as his own. He was just so very, very sick of dealing with other troll's idiotic shit.
Gamzee greeted him from the door to the kitchen in an honest to god pair of oven mitts and frilly apron.
How he had managed to acquire them, Karkat didn't even want to know. He'd had enough trouble with the explanation for the inflatable bath toys that had found their way into his ablution-trap after Gamzee had been convinced that regular bathing was required.
“You look tired as shit, motherfucker.” He was informed as warm, apple-scented pie was extracted from his oven. He didn't really want to know how Gamzee got his pie ingredients, either. In the end, no matter the itch of morbid curiosity, it was never truly worth it.
“No shit.” Karkat huffed, collapsing into a chair.
“Have some motherfucking pie.” Gamzee told him sympathetically, setting the fresh pie in front of him. Pastry seemed to be his default response to most things. Karkat examined it with a tired poke to the lumpy surface.
“Did you put sopor in this?” His tone was monotonous.
“I ain't used that shit since I arrived.” Gamzee sounded affronted and when Karkat looked up he was reminded unpleasantly that Gamzee was taller than him by about three feet and could likely toss trees around with ease if the mood struck him. And purple-bloods were so damn unpredictable...
“I believe you!” he told him hastily “Um. Just. Why?”
Gamzee frowned, looking so disheartened Karkat made an instinctive, quickly aborted attempt at a pap.
“While I am all kinds of motherfucking aware that I ain't the sharpest cutting utensil in the container of utensils, I ain't got rocks in my pan neither. I ain't doing none of that shit in the home of an officer of the motherfucking law.”
“Oh.” was all Karkat could think to say for several breathtaking moments. Then an extraordinarily unpleasant thought occurred to him.
“Didn't you go through withdrawal?”
Gamzee looked away shiftily, claws fidgeting. As far as emotions went Gamzee was an open book. One of the ones with brightly color pictures that popped up when the pages were turned. And recorded music clips.
“I uh...” he huffed a sigh through his nose that conveyed the weight of a world of guilt. “You were all up and motherfucking busy. So I uh... Yeah, it's all motherfucking cool. Sorry and shit.”
There was a short, deadly pause.
“Gamzee.”
“Yeah, Karbro?”
“Gamzee Makara, did you go through fucking sopor withdrawal in my fucking hive, all on your fucking own, just because you thought I was busy?”
“Uh. Yeah, that's about the motherfucking shape of the thing.”
“And you're apologizing for it.”
“Oh, yeah, and I'm so motherfucking sorry about that load-gaper, I swear I didn't motherfucking know what it was.”
Karkat let his head fall, not realizing until it was entirely too late that the pie was there to helpfully cushion his facial landing.
“Gamzee,” he spoke through a thick layer of apple pie-filling, “I want you to promise me that the next time you decide to do something potentially life-threateningly stupid, you'll tell me.” His voice was garbled but he simply did not care anymore.
When he pried his apple-scented features from the wreck of the pie Gamzee was grinning like a basket of grubloaf in his favorite flavors with extra cream had fallen from the sky.
“Sure thing, motherfucker!”
It turned out that the pie wasn't half bad, really.
~O~
Karkat was used to being dragged out of his recuperacoon at ungodly hours for reasons ranging from his hive being on fire with complications of explosive plumbing to the ever-popular mass murder needing his immediate attention. He'd never quite understood why it couldn't wait till morning. The bodies weren't going to reek any less and the murderer wasn't going to be any less caught with six more hours sleep.
So it wasn't an unfamiliar to be floated out of his recuperacoon in a tide of prickly sparks and dumped unceremoniously on the floor, dripping sopor like a swamp monster.
“Hothtage thituation.” Sollux said brusquely. Karkat's uniform, his nightstick, about four mugs of coffee, and a clipboard were orbiting his head in a complex galaxy of things he really didn't want to deal with.
“Can't it fucking wait.” he groaned, mashing his face hopelessly into the hard floor. Perhaps, if he wished hard enough, it would all be just an awful nightmare.
“Hemothpectrum radicalth.” Sollux nudged a mug of coffee into his blindly groping hand like the savior he was. “You know who hath to be behind thith.”
Karkat lifted himself with a titanic effort and sucked down the entire mug without pausing for breath. Sollux switched the mug with nary a break in rhythm.
“I swear he does this on purpose as a 'fuck you' to me, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.” He chanted, groggily getting his pants on with one hand. He swore and threw the mug when he realized he had done so backwards.
Sollux floated the third mug over without even looking. Karkat tried grimly to ignore the way his shirt stuck to his back and sopor still hung from his hair like the disgustingly green, cloudy crystals of a particularly loathsome chandelier.
“Let's get going.” Karkat mumbled. He hated everything.
~O~
The hostage situation was located in – and increasingly around – one of the dozen half-abandoned churches that had been erected along the river. It had been decades since any true purple-blood, much less a member of the Mirthful Clergy, had preached there. Sollux doubted that any of this egregious bullshit would have gone down if a true priest of the hellwhimsy had been there, but there was no point crying over spilled viscera, unless it was his own.
He huffed a sigh as his partner threw the car door open and fell out with absolutely no regard for the fact they were still very much in motion. He was more distressed by the fact that the open door let the smell in than the fact that Karkat was currently clutching a bleeding head wound. Blatantly suicidal stupidity hadn't killed him yet.
Besides, he operated now under the working theory that Karkat didn't quite feel whole unless there was something to bitch about. He probably enjoyed having a visible reason to be an obnoxious little shit.
There was a large, misspelled banner proclaiming 'Death to the Hibloods!' in dripping red letters strung to the front of the building. It looked to be some poor shmuck's best tablecloth and a batch of house paint. He sighed.
“How many hothtageth are there?” he asked the nearest uniformed officer dully. Karkat kicked a nearby medic in the knee, apparently for offering him a band-aid. Sollux sighed again.
“Three, sir.” came the answer.
“How many kidnapperth?”
“Five, sir.”
“And how many offitherth?”
“Forty-seven last count, sir, which was about an hour ago.”
“I'd athk you why everyone ith thuch a dumbshit but all that would come out of your mouth would be wet farting noitheth, huh.”
“Sir, that's a bit uncalled for...”
“Thorry.” He wasn't.
Turning away from the hapless grunt, he opened his mouth to discuss – argue – courses of action with Karkat and found him to be prominently, distressingly, not there.
Not even Karkat would be such a stupendous moron as to abandon me at this juncture, Sollux thought, but the revelation arrived swiftly and with dreadful clarity on the heels of that thought that yes. Yes, Karkat was exactly that much of a stupendous moron, he was such an idiot that he had rounded the curvature of the world on the power of idiocy alone and should by rights have reached the level of genius purely by accident but no, he was still an idiot. Because he was currently advancing on the hostage situation without him.
It was enough to make an unrequited love interest despair, it really was, Sollux was simply not cut out to be the weeping damsel left in the dust of the action.
He turned to Terezi, who always seemed to be present when no one wanted to need her but did anyway.
“I need Lalonde here, now.” he hissed tightly. She gave him an amused, toothy smile he did not have time for.
“And what makes you think she will deign so!” she asked. Sollux bared his teeth right back, and was pleased to note that he had more snaggly sharpness packed in by the accident of dentistry than her.
“Becauthe she liketh him.” he turned back to glaring holes into Karkat's back.
“Four hostages.” the hapless officer behind him muttered into his radio.
~O~
It turned out that a nearly eight-foot-tall purple-blood striding back and forth in front of the building radiating psychic terror like a sledgehammer to the head was an extremely effective distraction. If Sollux's unmolested entrance to the rear of the structure like a wraith in the night was made easier by this, he had absolutely no complaints.
He was utterly ignored in the mad scramble to move everything and everyone as far from Rose as possible. He reminded himself to send her a fruit basket carefully sans Freudian fruits as a thank you.
He headed towards the most commotion. The source would, invariably, be Karkat.
~O~
The source of the commotion was Karkat.
He was attempting and largely failing to fight with a skinny rust-blood clinging to his right arm and a bronze-blood trying desperately not to hit her comrade with her absurdly large sword. Everybody was screaming but in the midst of the dissonance Sollux could make out Karkat's dulcet tones, shrieking something unprintable about his aggressive tendencies.
Sollux decided that regretfully he didn't have time for that sort of ludicrous bullshit and knocked the troll's heads together in a flash of sparks. It felt immensely satisfying, almost as much so as dragging Karkat over to his spot tucked safely under a pew by the back of shirt.
“You are a fucking moron, I hate you tho much right now.” he hissed, yanking Karkat into crawling after him towards the door under the shelter of the solid wooden bench.
“I could have fucking handled it if you just kept your damn psionics to yourself for fucking once.” Karkat snapped. Sollux felt his sanity slip by inches into the abyss.
“When I get you out of here I'm going to tie you to a chair, that'th what it taketh to keep you thafe, you fucking idiot, do you have a fucking death wish, of fucking courthe you do, why do I even bother.” Sollux chanted under his breath as he crawled cautiously across the aisle and under the next pew. Karkat snickered breathlessly somewhere by his left hip.
“You are one kinky bastard, Sollux.”
“Shut up.”
“I bet you put out on the first date.”
“I thaid shut up!” Sollux managed to inject dripping venom into his tone while still maintaining his whisper, but it was a forgone conclusion that Karkat wouldn't listen to him. He never had. His stubbornness was by turns endearing and complete, hair-tearing frustration. “I'm trying to thave your fucking life, in cathe you haven't notithed!”
“I knew you would.” Karkat somehow managed to snort in an undertone. It sounded like it should have hurt. “I'm not fucking stupid, I knew you'd come in after me. To save little old me.” He fluttered his eyelashes sarcastically and Sollux strangled the urge to strangle him. And then sloppily make out with his corpse, which would be awkward to explain in the autopsy reports. Or to Kanaya.
Or to Rose.
He shuddered. He'd just try his hardest to hold on to the fact that Karkat was bothering to whisper at all, it was more than he usually got out of him. Maybe that would douse the burning desire to murder him, even if just a little bit.
~O~
Twenty grueling feet of pew-crawling later, the front door was in sight.
Sollux stopped, motioning for Karkat to shut up for once in his misbegotten life and sit still. Confused by the complexity of the hand-signal, Karkat did so.
Sollux peeked under the pew and checked the floor. He peeked into the aisle and ascertained it was clear. He sniffed several times and decided that he would never be any good at tracking and also no one was stinking obscenely in their general vicinity. He listened for a long minute and there was no sound but their breathing.
He peeked over the top of the pew and promptly snagged the nearest heavy object – he didn't even bother identifying it, he didn't have the time or the concentration – and whacked Karkat over the head with it.
Hopefully Karkat wouldn't remember that when he woke up but even if he did then at least he'd actually be alive to bitch at him.
What Sollux wanted most in the world was to escape the situation with all bodily systems functioning and all limbs intact, odds that were reduced to almost comically slim chances if this particular troll were attacked. They had lost good trolls in the attempt before, fine officers that really didn't deserve what happened to them. Sollux would be damned if that happened to Karkat.
He was not above insults, however, as they proved to be more of an amusement than a provocation.
“However did I know you were behind thith, Scratch.” Sollux sighed, hefting Karkat on his shoulder. He'd have to tell him later to lay off the pies, he wasn't Equius by any stretch of the imagination.
“Don't be disingenuous, Mister Captor, it doesn't suit you.” Doc Scratch grinned at him, jade suit immaculate as always.
“Go fuck yourthelf.” he was told flatly.
“Quaint. I won't stop you, of course.” With an elaborate and to all appearances sincere bow Scratch gestured to the door. Sollux snarled.
“Thomeday I'll pin you with thomething, you fucking monthter.”
Scratch tipped his ridiculous green top hat with a smile that was... ominously wide.
“I find myself intrigued, Mister Captor. You may, with luck, live to regret it.”
He disappeared into the dark bowels of the building, leaving Sollux nearly sweating with rage and the effort of lugging Karkat's fat ass.
“Thmug bathtard.”