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“I am trying,” Karkat told Gamzee evenly, “To drink my coffee.”
Karkat's morning routine was centered entirely around maximum caffeine consumption in minimum time. Showering, getting into uniform, and collecting whatever crime-scene files he was coerced into pretending to study all took a backseat. Occasionally they were ignored entirely. And presently Gamzee Makara was leaning his cheek on Karkat's shoulder, interrupting the precious moments of caffeinated bliss.
“Go the fuck away.” Karkat hinted further when Gamzee didn't react. The clown laughed his awful, honking laugh.
“What's a motherfucker doing on such a miraculous motherfucking day?” he asked, thankfully taking a step back.
Karkat took another gulp of coffee and glared suspiciously.
“Why?” he asked when lengthy glaring produced nothing but Gamzee's customary placid grin.
“If a motherfucker had a thing to do in an hour it would be mad motherfucking serendipitous.” Gamzee glanced sideways from under his hair at Karkat. He was trying to be subtle, Karkat could tell, it was almost painful to watch. For his part, Karkat simply gaped.
“Are you telling me.” He began slowly, then had to stop to open and close his mouth speechlessly a few times. “You are fucking telling me,” he finally managed, “That you want me out of the house in an hour.”
“Not that a bro wants you to feel all and motherfucking pressured or no shit.” Gamzee shook his head hastily, eyes agonizingly sincere. “It's just, I got a hot date and we got to be in our own romantic space, you feel?”
Karkat pinched his arm. Then he pinched his other arm. Then he punched himself in the thigh and promptly started swearing and hopping on his unbruised leg.
Gamzee watched with a vaguely puzzled, apprehensive expression.
“You okay, Karbro?” he asked hesitantly. Karkat's volume rose several notches and he spared a hand from keeping himself upright to flip him off.
Gamzee smiled, reassured, and sat back.
“You want to go on a fucking date? A flushed date?” Karkat asked when he finally had enough hopping around and swearing to feel better about himself.
“That's it, motherfucker. A bit motherfucking difficult to get some flush-dates on with a bro's moirail around.” Gamzee looked immensely pleased. Karkat was far too busy trying to reconcile the situation in his mind to care.
“I can't fucking...” He trailed off, sounding strangled. “Fuck, fine, whatever you want, you impossible moron. I had work anyway.”
Gamzee grabbed him and wrapped him up in a hug before Karkat could properly evade. In the ensuing struggle – Gamzee seemed to grow about seven extra arms and three extra legs when he wanted to hug, likely for maximum gripping power – it took Karkat far too long to realize he was being herded towards the door.
“Gamzee, what the fuck-,” was all he managed before he was ejected out the door and into the fresh evening air.
“Should be all clear, time a motherfucker gets off work.” Gamzee told him cheerfully one hand on the knob of the door. “Have a great motherfucking day!”
The door clicked shut with odd finality. Karkat stared at it, feeling oddly abandoned.
After a few minutes spent on fruitless glaring at the impassive door Karkat turned and trudged off toward the precinct. He could have gotten back in, it was his hive after all, but he doubted Gamzee would even notice and anyway the whole thing was a little too petty even for him.
~O~
“Gamzee.” Sollux diagnosed as soon as Karkat stuck his nose guilty around the entrance to the precinct. Karkat scowled and sulked his way over to his desk.
“Not everything that goes to shit in my life is caused by Gamzee, bulgesucker. There's you, after all.” Sollux made a rude gesture, but he was more amused than anything. Karkat looked so disconcerted.
“I'm right, though, aren't I?” he asked, and didn't even bother waiting for Karkat's grudging nod. “Of courthe I am. What did he do.”
“He doesn't do anything, he keeps getting me to do things, I have no fucking clue how.” he groaned in self-pity. “I ate pie a few days ago, fucking apple pie, I just can't say no to the ridiculous bastard.”
“Lookth like he'th got you all figured out.” Sollux commented, eyebrows raised. Karkat scowled and kicked at the leg of the desk.
“Why do I even bother talking to either of you?” he complained. He didn't sound as indignant as he really probably should have, and Sollux started considering that maybe the weird clown was actually good for Karkat.
“When you dethide, let me know.” Sollux told him blithely. Karkat glared for a beat before dropping his face onto his arms.
Sollux spent a moment examining him.
“Ith that all he did?” he asked cautiously. A sour green eye emerged like a sunrise to give him a baleful look.
“...No.” Karkat managed finally. The words came out sounding like he was chewing on nails and Sollux was reminded all over again how much Karkat did Not Like Feelings.
“I'm not fucking Lalonde, Kk, I can't read your mind.” He told him irritably. He really wasn't Karkat's psychologistician, thank god. The thought made him shudder.
Karkat sat up like a shot, both middle fingers upright and nearly twitching with how stiffly they had been extended.
“What makes you think I want your nook-tainted help?” he demanded.
Sollux sat back and stared calmly at Karkat. It took almost six minutes for the fingers to finally fold back into fists and the complaining and swearing to be reduced to murderous muttering.
“Well?” he asked. Karkat's glare was poisonous.
“Gamzee's going on a date. A flushed date.”
“And you're worried about him.” Sollux summarized. The way Karkat shifted was distinctly uncomfortable.
“That would be goddamn ridiculous.” he scoffed. Sollux decided not to waste time arguing the point and instead to focus on the more obvious issue.
“Where would Gamzee even find thomeone to date. Doeth he even leave your hive?” Sollux asked slowly. Karkat shrugged helplessly.
“Fuck if I know. The bastard obviously goes somewhere and does something but he's always home when I get there.” Karkat paused, expression turning brooding. “I need to find out where the fuck he gets his pie supplies.”
“We'll probably never know.” Sollux shrugged uncomfortably. He couldn't quite bring himself to trust the clown. Not yet. “And on that dithturbing note, we have a job. It'th your favorite. We're cleared to take in one of the hemoradicalth for quethtioning.”
Sollux waved an address under Karkat's nose. Karkat moved to follow it like a barkbeast on the scent.
“You couldn't have just mentioned this first, christ on a pony. Who?” he asked with a certain bloodthirsty interest.
“A troll by the name of...” Sollux consulted his paper and smirked. “Wilard Romnee.”
“Sounds like a douchebag.” Karkat frowned.
“I've never met a nithe hemoradical.” Sollux pointed out reasonably. Karkat shrugged and conceded the point.
~O~
The life of Wilard Romnee was characterized primarily by his endless dissatisfaction with the state of the world - i.e. that he was not ruling it - and secondarily by his spectacular lack of any discernible self-preservation instincts. In a troll of more... palatable political beliefs these traits might have been considered admirable but sadly they remained within a troll that was, irrevocably, Wilard Romnee.
Hemoradicalism did not, it turned out, pay very well. Rabble-rousing was all well and good, and Wilard prided himself on his ability to turn a crowd into a mob within a few sentences, but mobs were god for mass property damage and not so much for fund-raising. That was how he rationalized his residence in a decaying warehouse.
He didn't receive many visitors, which made the knocking at his door so incongruous.
The knocking was particularly vigorous, and accompanied by muffled cursing. Wilard took a moment to sit back and stare at the door. It seemed the best course of action.
At the second knock Wilard stood up and moved closer, the cursing becoming more audible as he did so. It was, he noted, very creative.
The third knock made Wilard lean closer, laying an earfin against the door to better hear what the people outside were saying.
“-nooksniffer doesn't have the decency to answer his fucking door!”
“You can knock on the door all night, Kk, he'th not opening it. Let me open it.” Came a lisping answer. Wilard frowned. He wasn't sure who was out there, but he didn't like the sound of that.
The fact the he had turned away from the door to plot a quick escape was likely the only reason he survived the psionic blast that splintered his door moments later. As it was, the force of it sent him rolling ass-over-teakettle across the room to fetch up against the far wall.
Before he had quite managed to shake the dizziness off a pair of hands hauled him upright, propping his back against the brickwork and dusting him off with a briskness that bordered on a roughing-up. The sight that greeted him when he blinked his vision back was not a pleasant one, not by any stretch of the imagination. A pair of cops. Both miles beneath him in blood-color.
Wilard instinctively flinched back but the wall was regrettably in his way and he only managed a few seconds of awkward scuttling.
“Hello, you horrible little grubfucker of a troll.” The short troll leaned forward, the grin on his face awful. “My name is Officer Vantas and this is Officer Captor and we are here to put you away so far under your ass will never see moonlight.”
The skinny piss-blood behind him slouched over to the cluttered desk and began shuffling through Wilard's papers. Out of the corner of his eyes he watched several start to float around hm in a cocoon of speech notes and pamphlets.
“You have no right-,” he began indignantly.
“Thith ithn't even encoded.” The psionic interrupted with zero regard for Wilard's words, neatly lining up the floating papers and nudged them against Officer Vantas's shoulder. “Cut and dry, Kk.”
Officer Vantas took them and gave a perfunctory glance, smile widening.
“Thanks, Sollux.” he turned back to Wilard, reading over the papers. “Sedition, sedition, implied treason, incitement to violence, likelihood to disturb the peace, sedition, more incitement. You, Wilard, couldn't be more stupid if you had forcibly removed you pan and put it through a fucking meat-grinder.”
“Wow, Terezi'th going to love getting her clawth in you.” Officer Captor jabbed a finger over Officer Vantas's shoulder at a particular section of his speech. Vantas raised both eyebrows.
“Color me impressed.” He tilted his head. “Not physically possible, but fucking creative.”
He shuffled the papers decisively and handed them back to Officer Captor
“Do you have anything else to say to incriminate yourself, you unspeakable asshole?” He smirked and Wilard found the last spark of indignation and haughty pride within himself to pull himself to his full height.
“I can hire legislacerators-!”
“Really?” asked Officer Vantas, transformation into the predatory sudden and alarming. “Because Terezi will eat your puny, limp-bulged legis-bitches, and I hope she fucking chews.”
Wilard's heart dropped into the toes of his shiny boots with the force of a medium-sized grenade.
“Madame Legislacerator Pyrope?” He asked hopelessly. Officer Vantas grinned his horribly disconcerting, blunt-toothed grin. Officer Captor didn't even glance their way, feigning deafness as he sorted the papers.
“Her Ladyship of Justice herself, bitch.”
“Oh.” Wilard said faintly. He wondered, in the miniscule portion of his brain currently not on the verge of panicked shutdown, if he was going to throw up.
“Wilard Romnee! You are advised to remain silent! Anything you say can and will be used as evidence for you guilt.” Officer Vantas sounded disgustingly pleased with himself. Wilard's heart dribbled out of its resting place in his shoes. “In light of evidence of treason you case will be tried by Madam Legislacerator Pyrope. Do you understand?”
The only noise Wilard could manage in response was a whistling exhalation, verging on a whimper. Apparently this was enough to be considered an answer, as Officer Vantas proceeded to grab him by the arm and haul him bodily out of the room. Officer Captor followed them in a halo of sparkling psionics and hemoradicalist pamphlets.
Wilard Romnee resigned himself to his likely death and began concentrating on not crying. Death with dignity, or something like that.
~O~
When they pulled up to the precinct building Terezi stood haloed in the light from the front entrance, her arms flung akimbo, bearing no small resemblance to the antichrist.
“Hello, Wilard!” Terezi sang out, sounding inordinately pleased. “I see we are feeling litigious today!”
Wilard made a noise that could have been politely called a sob.
“Take him to my personal interrogation suite, if you would be so kind!” Terezi called back into the building. There was a momentary scuffle, the familiar sound of a group of people fighting to avoid being in the Legislacerator's vicinity, and a pair of hapless trainees were ejected into the night.
As they carefully edged around her and collected Wilard from Sollux, Terezi leaned in to mutter menacingly in Karkat's ear.
“I knew you were keeping secrets, Officer Vantas! Next time your so-called informant deigns to show her face, I will be the first to know!” she paused and drew back a few inches. “Nitram is in your office pitching a fit, by the way!”
She turned on her heel in a flare of clashing skirts and strolled back into the building after her prey. Karkat stared after her.
“What the fuck. I guess we go find out what Tavros wants?” he asked uncertainly. Sollux shrugged and started inside after Terezi.
~O~
Tavros was, indeed, pitching a fit. In his own way. Karkat thought that he had seen more aggressive fits pitched by wigglers. The papers on his desk were slightly askew and the chairs had been tipped over, carefully, and pushed out of the way of Tavros's frantic pacing.
“Nitram.” he said carefully. An enraged Tavros was completely new territory for him.
Tavros shrieked and whirled. Karkat had to repress a snicker.
“Officer Vantas.” he sighed, obviously in relief. Karkat had to exchange surprised glances with Sollux for a moment.
“Why are you here?” he decided to ask bluntly.
“It's about, um, Gamzee Makara? We had plans today and-”
“Wait a fucking second, you're Gamzee's flush-date?” Karkat asked incredulously, interrupting. Tavros went bronze and shuffled his feet awkwardly.
“I, er, yes?”
Karkat choked for a moment. Sollux took over with enduring patience.
“Anyway, you had planth and?”
Tavros fidgeted. Karkat made more faint choking noises. Sollux patted him on the back, somehow conveying his patronization through the gesture.
“I went you your hive and he wasn't there. There was, um, blood? On the floor? A lot of it.” he went pale. “Some of it was his, at least, I think? It was the right color.”
Karkat had frozen about halfway through Tavros's explanation. As he finished, he began flexing his claws quietly.
“I came here since you were his moirail and I knew you would help me.” Tavros said quietly after a moment of silence. Much to Sollux's surprise, Karkat didn't bother objecting to the term.
“It's Scratch.” he said quietly. His hands were fists at his side and Sollux didn't think he'd ever seen him so angry.
“Yeth, but, Karkat-” he began.
“We're taking him down.” Karkat turned away and strode out of the office, in the direction of Terezi's interrogation suite. Sollux hope he was imagining the mutter of 'if I don't murder him first'.
He gestured to Tavros and followed the irate troll, picking around the shards of coffee mug in his wake.