Archive of Our Own

Winter in California was hardly the White Christmas that the songs oozing from the shops promised, but the inhabitants of LA weren't dampened in their holiday spirit. Artificial polymers did what nature could not, sprinkling glittering white on gaudy decorations, and dangling spiraling icicles and star-like snowflakes from every available surface. Palm trees cast their shade over cheerful red-nosed plastic reindeer and beach-goers wore red hats with white fur lining in addition to the usual bikinis and swimming shorts. Throughout the city, a fanciful crystalline wonderland had been conjured into being, dreams of ice and snow and magical toy workshops being brought to life to rub shoulders with the balmy sunshine.

On Alternia's Northern Hemisphere, during the coldest apex of the Dark Seasons, the snow would generally pile up to be at least six feet deep. Every time the thaws came there were a few more dead wigglers- kids who hadn't stored enough food or fuel to see themselves through the perigees of waiting. Even in a hive with sufficient heat and nutrition it was a waking nightmare, the temperature plunging to what felt like absolute zero every night. Karkat had spent those seasons wrapped in at least three blankets at all times, watching romcoms nonstop and arguing with Sollux on Trollian just to reassure himself that the stupid bulgelicker was still alive and okay.

He wasn't sure what was worse; the fact that the humans were apparently so utterly shithive delusional that they wanted to pretend they were living in a snow-bound hellhole, or that the fact he wasn't freezing to death was about the best thing he could say about his life.

No, scratch that. Freezing to death would be a definite improvement over starvation.

Karkat pulled his knees up close, leaving two long furrows in the sand where his ratty shoes dug in. There were fewer people on the beach than he had been expecting, but the young troll couldn't say he minded. It was bad enough just being here and sitting this close to the sea. It was an alien ocean, too bright and too blue, a sparkling expanse that might have looked beautiful and inviting if the light wasn't hurting his eyes, the liquid color reminding him of blood, the salt smell in the air causing every instinct in his body to scream danger! as he imagined seadwellers coming out of the water to cull him and his moirail...

Gamzee tore his gaze away from the smooth blue horizon and took a moment to study Karkat as the shorter troll grabbed his hand. Karkat knew he was shaking and his scowl deepened as he tried to stop and failed.

“You ain't getting to like it here none,” Gamzee said, and Karkat felt sick with guilt when he heard accusation tinting the indigo-blood's voice. He knew how much the beach meant to Gamzee, how much his moirail loved it here. That was why he had agreed to come in the first place.

“It's nothing,” he muttered. “Just some dumb wiggler stuff. You keep right on gawping at the sea; last thing I need is to deal with you flipping your shit off the handle too."

Gamzee chuckled and a shiver ran up Karkat's spine, because it sounded anything but amused. "Think it's all up and being too FUCKING late for that, is what it is," his moirail said, spitting the words out viciously and clenching a fist uselessly in the sand. "Ain't no shit out there but what's being already COLD AND BLACK AND DEAD. You all up and for fucking thinking this motherfucker should keep his wait on?"

Karkat reached out and pulled Gamzee closer, turning his moirail's head away from the ocean and holding it against his shoulder. "Shh," he whispered, resting his forehead in the tangled, knotted mess of hair between Gamzee's horns. "Come on. Don't be any more of a rotpanned maggot-farmer than you already are, okay?" He tilted his head slightly to cast another uneasy glance at the ocean, squinting his eyes against the brilliant reflections that flashed off the waves. "There's fish out there, anyway. And, I don't know, jellyfish and squid and shit. Alive stuff."

"Gonna be dead soon, brother," Gamzee whispered into his shoulder. "Shit's gonna all wash the fuck up and get its rot on all over the motherfucking beach, poison the air and the earth, SPREAD THE FUCKING MIRTH." Karkat felt a knife-edged grin shaping against his shoulder as Gamzee started to tremble with something that could have been fear or anger or laughter but was probably, hopefully, just another symptom of withdrawal. "That’s what’s up and being the WICKED FUCKING TRUTH, motherfucker."

Karkat sighed. “Okay, that’s it,” he said, draping his moirail’s arm around his shoulder and starting to scramble to his feet. “We have spent too much time sitting on this crab-infested shithole of a beach and your pan has officially lost its fucking lid. Time to go before anything else drops out and smears itself across the landscape like an oil slick of insane clown-related musclebeast shit.”

“You think this is being a FUCKING JOKE?” Gamzee hissed, letting gravity tug him downwards and digging his claws into Karkat’s thigh so that standing suddenly became a much more painful proposition. Karkat dropped onto one knee on the beach and kept a hand resting on the back of his moirail’s neck, gritting his teeth against the pain.

“I think that everything you’ve just said is so far from being comprehensible or sane that with clear skies and decent illumination it still couldn’t see either of those things through a military-grade long-range ocular magnification device. I sincerely doubt that any of your fickle-sponge statements could even work out which fucking direction to face.” Karkat reached down and started to gently pry his moirail’s claws out of his thigh; Gamzee stared, but made no effort to stop him. Deciding that a few blood-stained holes in his pants were justification enough to keep rambling, Karkat continued. “I also think that my digestive sac is in serious danger of consuming itself, and unless you feel like swimming into the unknown depths of an alien sea to try and catch some disgusting aquatic organism that’s probably been living on raw sewage, there’s fuck all to eat out here.”

Gamzee said nothing in response, even when Karkat finally managed to loosen the fingers locked around his leg and stand up. He ignored the outstretched hand that Karkat offered him and instead unfolded upwards under his own power, drawing to his full height like a released spring. The grace of the motion was spoiled a second later when he stumbled on nothing and lurched abruptly sideways; Karkat caught his moirail before he fell and let Gamzee lean on him, supporting the indigo-blood as he swayed on his feet.

“Motherfucking SHITFUCKS,” Gamzee growled. Karkat said nothing, silently wrapping the taller troll’s arm around his shoulder and supporting him at the waist as they moved up towards the beachfront. With his moirail using him as an ambulatory support prop, it was devastatingly clear to Karkat that Gamzee was suffering badly from lack of sopor. Not that he was exactly sorry to know that his moirail would have more physical difficulty if he completely lost his shit and went on an unhinged murdermirth rampage, but it still made him worry. This had never been a problem on the ship, although Karkat could guess easily enough why it was now. It had always been blindingly obvious that properly produced sopor taken from a recuperacoon was, despite the inherent dangers of eating the mind-altering slime people slept in, safer in every conceivable way than some green shit in a bottle bought in a filthy back-alley from a human who considered laws only slightly more disposable than customers. The physical withdrawal was just the most decisive demonstration of how utterly toxic the noxious crap Gamzee was consuming was.

Technically Karkat supposed he should be glad that none of the stuff Gamzee had taken to try and fight back the chaos in his think-pan had been bad enough to kill him outright, but the implications of that line of thought were too awful to contemplate. Instead he focused on helping his moirail walk in an approximately straight line, sticking to the edge of the sidewalk so that the milling alien hordes could veer safely around them. Their eyes slipped aside just as easily and that at least was a relief. Karkat knew he was in no shape for a confrontation, but that was exactly what was going to happen if any single one of these thick-boned brown fuzzmonkeys tried to talk to him or his moirail. Gamzee’s head might have been tilted down towards the concrete, but his eyes were darting across every single face they passed in some sort of esoteric appraisal; he had started quietly honking on each step for reasons known only to drug-addled lunatic circus freaks and, possibly, their psychotic murder gods.

The change in the air was subtle enough that Karkat didn’t notice it at first; it wasn’t until the first stiff gust of wind threw a smattering of raindrops across his face that he realized the world had grown cooler and darker. He looked up into a blue-black ceiling of cloud and cursed, loudly and in Alternian. Gamzee followed his gaze and paused to stare with baleful resignation at the storm front. Rather than let him linger Karkat grabbed his moirail’s arm and started to drag him faster along the street, blood-pusher pounding with panic as the humans around them started to notice and head for cover. All but the worst of Earth storms were little more than piss in the wind compared to what Alternia had available to throw out, but getting soaked to the skin and buffeted by wind chill was a whole different pile of fecal matter when there was no warm hive, dry clothes or fussing lusus to return to.

The rain was already hammering down, warm but definitely wet, by the time they reached the mall parking lot. For the last hundred yards Karkat hung onto his moirail’s hand and ran full pelt, feet splashing in rapidly growing puddles as he ignored the loud blaring of car horns and the squeal of wet tires coming to an abrupt halt. The pair of them almost collided with the door, so much water pouring from Karkat’s hair into his face and eyes that he could barely see his own hand reaching out to push on the glass.

The noise and the warmth hit at the same moment, twin walls of almost tangible force that brought Karkat up short and caused Gamzee to walk into his back. In the fraction of a second that they stood still, two separate passers-by bumped into the trolls and kept walking without so much as a backwards glance. Then Gamzee unfroze enough to drag Karkat over to one side, fighting to move through the impossible currents and eddies of the crowd until they suddenly broke through into a couple of feet of clearer space at the side. Both of them backed up against the thin strip of white-painted wall between two shop fronts, and Karkat shrunk from the still-roiling crowd of people less than an arm’s reach away.

“What the fuck?” he asked- or thought he did, at least. He felt his lips move and his vocal chords buzz, but heard nothing over the omnipresent roar inside the mall. It wasn’t the first time he’d ever come here- far from it, the mall was a pretty good place to hide from wet weather and petty thugs- but although it had been busy in the past, Karkat had never seen so many humans crammed into one place before. Fuck, he’d never seen so many people crammed into one place, even on the ship where they’d all been living on top of one another, and even the times that had come close hadn’t been anything like this. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, almost on the edge of panic, and despite the jingle of cheery music and smiling plastic creatures, a thick miasma of frustration seeped into every corner and seemed ready to boil over into violence at any moment.

It was a thousand, a million, a fucking trillion times worse than the beach. Karkat closed his eyes and scrabbled at the wall behind him, claws failing to do more than scratch the painted surface as old, primal instincts began to scream at him to fight or run or roll over and submit. He was surrounded and trapped, an interloper in some strange alien ritual. Any minute they were going to notice he was there and then he would be torn apart. There was going to be a fucking bloodbath, a mad slaughter, and he was stuck right in the middle and he didn’t suck ass in a fight but there were too fucking many of them and he was going to die…

A gentle touch on his shoulder made Karkat start, and he looked round to see Gamzee jerk his head towards a nearby gap between two stores. Karkat nodded, seeing the oppressive crush of humanity reduced to a steady stream of people at the corner. Hand resting in his moirail’s he set off after Gamzee, hugging the wall as closely as possible and blood-pusher hammering as they darted through the almost solid streams of human bodies that blocked the way at the store entrances.

The gap turned out to lead to a ladies’ bathroom and a narrow switchback staircase; Gamzee pulled Karkat over to the wall under the steps then crouched down as close to the risers as he could. Dark shadows flickered across his face as the mall-goers who had tired of crowded escalators and elevators hurried up and down, but as Karkat let himself slide in next to his moirail he had to admit that the illusion of space and privacy wasn’t totally unconvincing. Gamzee’s arm wrapped around him and he gratefully huddled closer, trying to convince himself that the unintelligible roar of the crowds was just ordinary background noise. He mostly succeeded and spent the next few minutes breathing deeply and carefully while Gamzee cradled him like he was made of spun glass and murmured things that probably shouldn’t have been as soothing as they were.

After a few minutes Karkat’s chest stopped pounding as if he had just been running for his life and he pulled his face out of the safe dark space between his arms and Gamzee’s body. The noise and the bustle were still thick and oppressive, but somehow the humans hadn’t all started killing each other yet and now that he was thinking straight Karkat doubted they would. If they had been trolls it would have been a different story- but then, if they had been trolls, they wouldn’t have willingly shoved themselves into the social equivalent of a pressurized thermal hull, either.

“Humans are completely fucking insane,” he told Gamzee, resting his forehead on his moirail’s shoulder. “I don’t even… how the fuck can they do this? Why would they do this? What in the name of any divinely inclined being that has even the remotest speck of interest in this misbegotten world could ever possibly cause this many allegedly sapient beings to decide hey, I know what I’ll do today, I’ll go and crawl around a mall full of angry strangers until I am also exuding murderous intent like a particularly noxious stench.”

“I wouldn’t all up and be getting to bother about it none,” Gamzee said quietly, scratching between Karkat’s horns. “Shit ain’t all to being none of our business any which way on account of what it AIN’T OUR MOTHERFUCKING PLANET and we’re being all the LOOSE FUCKING TRASH what we is on it.” There was a pause as he growled softly and rocked a little, staring up at the risers. “Though, if a brother could be getting some MOTHERFUCKING COURAGE up in him to all up and be dealing with his WIGGLER FEAR OF A FEW FUCKING CROWDS, then this MOTHERFUCKING CLOWN MOTHERFUCKER might be down with all getting something all up in his digestion bladder ALL FOR A MOTHERFUCKING CHANGE.”

Karkat reached up to gently pap his moirail’s cheek. “Okay, how about a deal?” he said, trying to push back the uncomfortable shifting in his own gut that said any plan where Gamzee was left alone right now was the worst plan imaginable. “I’ll troll up and go find something approaching remotely edible, and you… you just fucking hold it together until I get back. Even your empty excuse for a thinkpan can manage that, right?”

The attempt to be scathing dropped into a pause that was slightly too long, the uncertainty underlying Karkat’s words floating a little closer to the surface for every second that his moirail spent staring at him blankly. Then a smile- rigid and brittle and far too late to be real- spread unevenly across Gamzee’s face.

“Sure thing, best friend,” he said, and Karkat didn’t believe it any more than Gamzee did but his own belly was far too hollow and fuck it, there was no way he was asking his moirail to do anything but sit tight and stay calm when he was this bad.

“Back soon,” Karkat promised, leaning up to press his forehead against Gamzee’s. “And you’d better fucking stay where I can find you, bulgemunch.”

Gamzee pushed back against Karkat’s head a little then nodded. Before his nerve could desert him completely, Karkat scrambled up and out from under the stairs, hunching his shoulders over into a defensive slouch as he joined the steady pulse of the river of feet and trying not to worry too much about Gamzee as his moirail faded back into the shadows.

Past experience told Karkat that he wanted to go up a floor, and he let the tide of people carry him up the stairs until he was pushed out onto the narrow path surrounding a wide, painfully lit food court. A low wooden barrier helped separate the shoppers from the eaters, and Karkat foundered up to it and clung on for grim life as he scanned the tables that filled the open space. The surrounding food outlets were doing as brisk a business as every other shop in the mall, and the place was packed. Every table was surrounded by eaters who shouted at each other over the noise and inhaled their food as fast as possible, grabbing their bags and dashing off as soon as they were sated and not even bothering to deliver their trays back to the central collection point when they did.

Karkat focused in one group, a family of five who, despite their immense collective bulk, would have been unlikely to consume everything they had purchased even if they were all secretly tentacled horrorterrors from the deepest, darkest pits of the ocean floor. Slowly he drifted around the barrier until he was only a short dash from their table. Caught up in their own argument they didn’t notice him hovering nearby, and when after only a couple of minutes they got up to leave Karkat forced himself to wait for a count of ten before shooting in and starting to grab what they’d left behind. Working fast, he emptied all the leftover fries into one carton, then shook the cooked meat out of the remains of burgers and hot dogs- fucking indigestible shit, but he didn’t have time to wait around for a troll to show up and leave half a meal behind, especially when no sane troll would eat here- and shoved the fragments of bun into the carton after the fries. There were some dregs of ice-cream and syrup left in one of the tubs and he grabbed that, too, because even if it wasn’t enough to act as any kind of sustenance the taste would still be worth it.

He was just reaching for one of the cups, to check and see if there was any soda left, when a voice yelled over the general hubbub in Alternian: “HEY! YOU!”

Karkat’s head shot round and from across the food court he saw an Alternian woman with ridged, backswept horns and a maroon symbol on the shoulder of her mall security guard’s uniform looking right at him. She was already starting to push her way through the crowd, one hand reaching for her radio. Karkat swore loudly, then did the only thing he could do under the circumstances: he bolted.

For the first time since he entered the mall the hordes of shoppers noticed him, shouting and hurling curses at his retreating back as he barged past. Karkat ducked under grabbing arms and around the occasional outstretched leg, barely even noticing the bags and bodies he slammed into as he shoved his way through the packed mall. A quick glance over his shoulder showed him that the security guard was steadily gaining- of course she was, he had to push people out of the way and she was just following in his wake- and he realized that there was no way he would make it back to Gamzee like this without getting them both caught.

Then again, this wasn't the first time Karkat had been in this situation; the mall was more tightly packed than the corridors of the ship had been, but for the moment at least there was only one security guard and she wasn't armed with anything that would work at this range. At the next shopfront Karkat broke to the side, letting the momentum of the crowd push him into the store and already looking for a place to vanish before the security guard could re-establish a line of sight. A table laden with dismembered piles of clothing provided cover and he ducked down under it; few of the busy shoppers noticed him, and those who did glanced askance at the grubby troll kid then walked away without challenge.

Enclosed by cheap plywood and a moving curtain of legs, Karkat took the opportunity to take a few deep breaths and store the carton of fries and burger bun in the deepest pocket he was wearing. There was no way to do the same with the near-liquid ice cream remnants, but fucked if he was giving up on it now; he shifted his grip to hold the cardboard lid shut over it, and closed his eyes. Maybe he would get lucky. At least one of the customers who had seen him duck under here would try to find security, but it wasn’t like he’d been stealing anything people actually wanted. Maybe his pursuer would just give up if he made himself hard enough to find.

Then, entirely within the confines of his own head, he felt something that reminded him of a sound; a clear, slightly elongated ping. His own thinkpan echoed the feeling and he knew that somehow, despite his utter lack of any psychic ability whatsoever, he was broadcasting the exact same signal back as clear as a metallic resonance instrument.

Fuck psionics, and fuck his life. Karkat didn’t stay put and wait for her to come to him, shooting out from under the table like a scorched purrbeast and hurtling for the exit. A second mental ping made him look around and notice the security guard standing in the doorway at the exact same moment as she saw him. Their eyes met briefly, and then without breaking stride Karkat spun away from the door and deeper into the store, dodging around protesting humans and making for the escalator in the center. People scattered as he raced up the moving steps and there were more shouts of anger and alarm behind him.

He was about halfway up when the second security guard stepped into place at the top of the escalator. Karkat turned away from the human man and saw the Alternian guard at the bottom, trapping him in place between them. Karkat wasted a full second looking from one to the other, then rather than try to fight against the direction he was already traveling let out a low growl and charged the man at the top.

With the momentum of the escalator behind him he barged into the human and very nearly made it clean past him. He was stopped by a hand that grabbed the back of his collar and choked him; there was a tearing sound as the cloth gave way, and in a panic Karkat snarled and lashed out at the man's face with his free hand. He didn't connect, but the human flinched back and gave Karkat an opportunity to yank himself out of the grip and run for the exit, leaving a handful of cloth behind.

"Get back here, you feral little shit!" yelled a voice behind him. Karkat ignored it, ducking around shoppers and through row after row of clothes on racks in an attempt to reach the store exit as fast as possible. The silent ping sounded in his head again and he frantically wondered what sort of range the psionic had with that power. Based on past experience he was usually fairly resistant to psychic powers, but his shitty red blood occasionally could and did let him down badly for a mutation that had also left him without any abilities of his own to compensate.

Running out of the store was like diving headfirst into sopor slime; rather than fight to push people aside, Karkat slipped between them as fast as he could without opening gaps that his pursuers could use. As he went he concentrated on every piece of advice he'd ever seen or heard on how to stop a psionic from getting a handle on your thinkpan. Judging by the regular, steady echo that continued unabated in his skull they were all musclebeast shit of the highest and most rarefied degree; giving up on hiding for the moment, Karkat stubbornly forged a path towards the stairs. Getting caught there would be bad but he'd learned his lesson about escalators at least, and if he could grab Gamzee and get out of the mall then there was shit all the security guards could do about it.

A roll of distant thunder, audible even over the cacophony in the mall, reminded him why he had led them in here in the first place, but there was nothing he could do about that now. As he had expected the press of people was lessened on the stairs and he could dart down at a break-neck pace- literally, if he tripped, which was a very real possibility with how light-headed he was feeling. Karkat’s mind was racing even faster than his feet as he tried to think of another place he and Gamzee could go to shelter from the storm. He was still drawing a blank as he hit the first floor and saw the empty space under the risers where his moirail should have been. His bloodpusher stopped and his thoughts were all replaced by a white, blank scream as Karkat realized that he was entirely alone.

Then someone rested a hand on his shoulder and he lashed out; another hand caught his wrist and pulled him closer and the smell was familiar, as familiar as the tall lanky shape in front of him and the indigo-flecked gray of the eyes looking into his own. Karkat fell forward into his moirail’s embrace and stayed there for a fraction of a second, before another inner ping prompted him to grab Gamzee’s wrist and start tugging him out towards the mall exit.

“Hold it all up in there, brother,” said Gamzee, freezing as solid and immovable as a fucking mile-high granite statue before starting to stride in the opposite direction- and easily dragging Karkat along with him, the shitpanned bulgelicker. “This motherfucker’s all up and been GETTING HIS FUCKING EXPLORE UP ON all in here, found some sweet wicked miracles. Shit’s time for a MOTHERFUCKING REVELATION.”

“I am being chased by mall security, you flap-fondling primordial throwback!” Karkat yelled, trying and failing to tug in the opposite direction. “If there was ever a time for your unhinged cultist miracle-babble, this would be the exact fucking opposite of it! We have to go, now!”

“Ssh,” Gamzee said, glancing solemnly back at Karkat. “Chill, best friend. Shit is under motherFUCKING control.”

Karkat had some objections to raise but before he could speak a feeling of cold dread began to seep into his bones. His breathing grew shallow with the uneasy sense of being followed by something malign and inexplicable, the bright lights and colors of the mall fading into an abrupt and unreal relief. Karkat's thinkpan itched with the irrational but certain knowledge that the whole thing was a paper-thin facade hiding something terrible- something deadly and sadistic that already had his painful, gory death planned out and was eagerly anticipating the experience. The next ping to touch his thinkpan sunk quickly into the cloying carpet of horror oozing through his mind and vanished without trace; Karkat's actual thoughts caught up a moment later, and he looked at Gamzee, glaring to hide the racing panic building in his digestive tract.

"Alright, nubfucker, you'd better tell me right now that this is a fleeting and temporary measure, because my thinkpan is not an amateur hour playground for your subjugglator psionics." Karkat paused to glance around at the nearby humans, most of whom were looking around suspiciously or shivering as they picked up the pace. "Besides, you're leaking, and unless you want to find out what several hundred pissed-off aliens do when you start a panic in the middle of the pack you need to fucking quit it."

"Only up and gonna be all getting my hide on until what she all up and ALL FUCKING STOPS HER LOOKING," Gamzee replied, dragging Karkat past a tall chipboard wall that had been carefully painted with the same scenes of frozen wastelands and creepy colorful antlerbeasts that had appeared everywhere over the last couple of lunar cycles; there was a narrow gap between the enclosure it created and the white walls of the mall, and Karkat found himself being pulled down it. "You all up and trusting me?" Gamzee asked.

Karkat looked at his moirail; Gamzee's eyes were shining fever-bright, the unholy rictus of his grin full of knife-sharp fangs that had left shallow slices in his own lips. His bony, lanky frame was shaking from withdrawal and there were small scars and deep scratches of indigo in the gray skin, places where the troll had turned his claws on himself in a deranged attempt to keep them away from anything and anyone else. The cloying feeling of repressed panic hadn't gone anywhere and although it wasn't visible Karkat knew that Gamzee was broadcasting chucklevoodoos like a cheap radio playing bad music; at this point it was anyone’s guess whether or not he could stop at all.

It was probably the most pitiful thing Karkat had ever seen, and he was reaching out to pull Gamzee into a hug before he even knew he meant to. “Of course I trust you, bulgemunch,” he said, voice muted by emotion as another distant psychic echo was swallowed by the nightmarish impressions dancing in his skull. His moirail smelled like unwashed troll and stale sopor and rotten garbage, and Karkat inwardly cursed himself for being too much of a useless misbegotten waste of air to fix any of it. As if reading his thoughts Gamzee pressed a kiss between his stubby little nubs, which Karkat growled at because, small or not, they were still proper fucking horns and thus demanding of respect, fuck you very much. Gamzee just smirked and then, with a small flourish, pushed on one of the chipboard panels. It swung aside to create a small gap, just big enough for a small or skinny troll to squeeze through. Karkat started to move towards it, then hesitated; his moirail let out what could have been a chuckle.

"Ain't no kind of problem, best friend," he said, letting go of Karkat to start wriggling through himself. Karkat quickly caught the board before it dropped into Gamzee's side, holding it up for the other troll as he passed through the flimsy wall. "This motherfucker all up and saw what was it as went down here. That FAT RED MOTHERFUCKER what was all being up in here for them human wigglers to FAWN ALL OVER ON got him up and called the MOTHERFUCK away. Place is all locked tight and empty all since he's been up and leaving."

Karkat nodded but stayed alert as he squeezed through after his moirail. The appearance of icy decorations across the city had been matched only by the proliferation of humans in fake white facial follicular growth and fat red suits, bright enough to be a humiliating reminder of his own flawed blood. Karkat had avoided the fuck out of them, first because he suspected them of being involved in some bizarre alien seasonal sacrificial ritual- human blood was just as red as his, after all- and second because he had noticed how eagerly the human wigglers ran up to them and he refused to emulate a pan-damaged grub of any species.

Whatever nefarious purpose it was that they served, many of the red-clad humans held court in public spaces, and it hadn’t escaped Karkat’s notice that they were well-guarded when they did. It was hard to believe that one of their pavilions would be left unattended even if its master was not present and so he was apprehensive as he got to his feet and let Gamzee lead him through the area inside the chipboard walls. Inside, they were painted with snow-capped conical trees, very much like the fake ones that had appeared throughout the city. His feet sunk into white foam, spread across the ground in a poor imitation of snow, and Karkat eyed with suspicion the frozen, cartoonish creatures that had been scattered around the enclosure.

A winding pathway led through the middle of the decorations to a small hut in the center. Karkat followed his moirail to the structure, which was plastic trying to resemble a tiny hive made of snow-covered wood. Small colored lights, currently dark, adorned the cabin’s roof. One side was open to receive supplicants, revealing a large but simple throne within. Karkat surreptitiously checked it for bloodstains as Gamzee pulled him down to sit behind the chair, leaning against the plinth it stood on.

“This shit all good for you, brother?” Gamzee asked. His voice was a low growl, full of bitterness, but Karkat knew it wasn’t aimed at him. Gamzee was angry with himself for not having a better shelter to offer, and knowing that Karkat leaned over to snuggle close while he took in his surroundings. The hut was dark, at least by the standards of a human city, and as quiet as he could realistically hope for. Despite the fading thrum of his moirail’s chucklevoodoo Karkat felt his blood-pusher slowing as it dawned on him that they were alone and hidden, safely tucked away from the rest of the planet and all of the insane musclebeast shit it had to throw at them.

“It’s fucking perfect,” he said, and even though it wasn’t, not even close, it was better than he’d been hoping for and that was enough. He closed his eyes and rested his head against Gamzee’s shoulder, reminding himself that he hadn’t felt a ping for a few minutes and trying to believe that any residual fear of being caught was just Gamzee’s lingering psionics instead of a perfectly reasonable response to being hunted like a barkbeast.

Bony and smelly as it was, Gamzee’s shoulder was the most comfortable pillow Karkat had ever felt. He could have spent forever sitting there in the dark cuddling with his moirail, but before long a protesting gurgle from his stomach reminded him of why he’d left the pan-addled idiot alone in the first place. He wriggled out from under Gamzee’s arm and set the mostly empty tub of ice cream on the ground between them, followed a moment later by a carton of slightly mushy fries and burger-bun fragments. Wrapping his arms around his knees, Karkat watched while Gamzee picked up the carton and examined it.

"You coming all up over here and all sharing in this motherfucking miracle?" Gamzee asked. Karkat grumbled something about grievous abuse of language and shuffled closer. There had been a time, back on the ship when rations had first grown dangerously hard to come by, that he would have tried to persuade his moirail he'd already eaten and didn't want any. It had never been particularly convincing to begin with and they had given up playing that game long before Karkat had left their asshole of a human foster lusus lying bloody and still on the kitchen floor. Instead they now took turns to eat something from the carton, chewing slowly to try and fool their digestive bladders before they swallowed and neither bothering to try and convince the other to take more.

By the time they had finished Karkat felt hungrier than ever, and he helped Gamzee lick up the last few dregs of ice-cream and syrup with a hollow feeling in his blood-pusher that he remembered from the journey on the ship. He would have been better off staying on Alternia and taking his chances with the culling drones; Past Him had, as usual, fucked everything up and dumped Present Him squarely in the shit without any external breathing apparatus. Then again, maybe it was just a huge cosmic joke on the part of the universe, dragging out his agonizing humiliation for as long as physically possible before finally letting him drop dead so that it could use his corpse as a plaything instead.

Gamzee let out a small sigh and dropped sideways, his head landing in Karkat’s lap and bringing the mutant troll back to the present moment with a jolt. He briefly stiffened, then relaxed when his moirail turned his face inwards, curling up sideways on the ground with Karkat as a pillow. Through his crossed legs Karkat could feel Gamzee shivering and he reached out to smooth his moirail’s chaotic hair, shooshing the trembling indigo-blood and remembering that despite everything else at least he wasn't alone.

Of course, that meant the best thing in his life was actually a clown-worshiping idiot whose sponge matter was at least equal parts sopor slime and panshattered lunacy. Karkat sighed and curled himself a little closer around Gamzee, shivering a little in his damp clothes. Fucking storm.

“Hey, best friend,” whispered Gamzee, his voice cracking. His fingers picked absently at Karkat's outer layers of clothing. “Ain't all up and feeling so motherfucking great, here.”

“No shit,” Karkat agreed, snorting at the understatement. “But what the fuck do you expect me to...” He broke off when Gamzee tilted his head upwards, pushing his head against Karkat's hand so that it just skirted the edge of his hornbed. “What, are you fucking crazy? We can't do that shit here!”

“Where else, bro?” asked Gamzee, his voice muffled as he turned his face back into Karkat's knee. Karkat opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again. Gamzee had a point.

He still had to push down the paranoia that insisted they were being watched as he moved the hand that was petting Gamzee's hair slightly, brushing his fingertips across his moirail's hornbed. The sigh of pure relief that Gamzee let out matched the sudden looseness that rippled through his body, and Karkat pushed his doubts aside to keep gently massaging the pressure points.

Before long Gamzee was a limp mass of limbs in his lap, eyes closed and with a dopey smile across his face. He was so like his old self that Karkat felt a stabbing pain of guilt that he couldn't do this for his moirail more often. But playing with your moirail's submission reflex just wasn't something you did anywhere remotely unsafe, and if he was being honest with himself Karkat wouldn't even have considered rendering Gamzee so helpless in this place either if his moirail hadn't been one tenuous thread away from snapping completely. Of course, that just meant it was now up to him to protect Gamzee for a while, which sucked because Karkat wouldn't have minded a little enhanced relaxation himself. He couldn't ask though; not here, not now.

He leaned over and pressed a kiss to Gamzee's forehead, then settled back for a long wait. It was nice to be somewhere dark and moderately peaceful, even if he could still hear the roar of the mall crowd nearby. With nothing else to do his thinkpan started pointing out that he was still damp and kind of cold, and that he was hungry, and actually thirsty too now that he thought about it.

Karkat told his thinkpan to shut the fuck up and closed his eyes to shut out the horrifically gaudy images painted on the wall in front of him. He focused on the comforting weight of Gamzee in his lap, the little movements and noises that told him that weight was alive, and started trying to come up with a plan. If they waited out the storm in here, then he could probably give his moirail another hornrub, and that would help with the sopor withdrawal. Food was more of a problem but Karkat figured that they could either shoplift something or try the pitiful cullbait card at the back doors of a few meal provision businesses. If all else failed, then there were always dumpsters; any money they got their hands on was earmarked for sopor right now, and Karkat just hoped that there weren't any unexpected price hikes this time. He wasn't sure he could handle keeping Gamzee within spitting distance of sane at the same time as keeping both of them alive. Not for long.

It was peaceful in the hut and Karkat's focus started to drift; old memories began to mix with the new, the dusty streets of Earth getting jumbled with the labyrinthine corridors of a ship that raced past stars and the familiar hallways and blocks of a hive that, even if it still existed, was too far away to ever return to. The parts of his thinkpan that were still functioning tried to hold onto that image, that safe old place where his lusus was waiting and his life made sense.

As usual, he failed. It started with blood, brightly colored stains on every surface, but trying to avoid them led him right to the corpses and he stepped out of his hive into a patchwork world that burned and screamed and slaughtered. He tried to run, tried to get away from the troll-shaped monsters that were hunting each other but there was no escaping something that was everywhere. Karkat shouted to them, pleaded with them, and his voice was silent. He tried to grab the other trolls, pull them away and save their victims, but his hands couldn’t connect. He was a ghost, unseen and unheard and unable to close his eyes or his ears to the horror. Karkat screamed and struggled and fought to turn his feet around, to go back to hide in his hive, but he couldn’t.

Then he came up against something, a feeling of pressure like a wall in the air, and in a brief flash of lucidity he pushed through it. There was a feeling like shattering glass, a sense of soft fragments raining down around him, and then he was standing on a beach looking out at the sea, a swirling rainbow mass of blood dotted with bodies. A lone figure knelt in the surf covered from head to foot in the shades of the ocean, easily recognizable by his long horns. Despite the unsettling sense of dread that pervaded everything, Karkat walked slowly closer to his moirail's back.

Even from behind he could tell that there was another shape lying in front of Gamzee, and he didn't have to see to know that the other troll was a helpless victim. As he drew closer Karkat could hear a sickeningly organic sound and quiet, pained sobbing. He swallowed the lump of fear in his throat because this was Gamzee, this was his moirail, it was okay, he could do something about this. He opened his mouth to call out and no sound emerged. Karkat looked down and he was translucent- still unreal, ghost-like, ineffective.

Gamzee, he tried to say, but nothing came. The world around them had become darker, shrunk to a single small pool of reality. Karkat reached out to touch his moirail's shoulder in the full expectation that his hand would pass right through. Instead it connected.

Gamzee turned to fix Karkat with a blood-soaked grin, black pits in his facepaint where there should have been eyes. For the first time Karkat saw his moirail's hands; they were stained to the elbow with mutant candy-red.

Karkat woke in a panic, blood-pusher racing out of control. Since falling sleep he had tipped over sideways and now he lay panting in the dark, patting himself with one hand to reassure himself that he wasn't somehow torn open and seeping blood. A comforting weight over his belly proved to be Gamzee's arm; his moirail was pressed against him, making the small growls and lopsided giggles that meant he was still dreaming. Karkat spent a little while thinking furious thoughts at Past Him for being pan-boggling stupid enough to fall asleep anywhere near a murderous clown cultist and his fucked-up psionic powers, before it occurred to him that everything was strangely silent.

Easing himself out from under his moirail’s arm, Karkat tiptoed out of the hut and stood on the queue line of the enclosure. From where he stood he could tell that the artificial lights were dimmer, the only sound in the mall the rain hammering against the skylights far overhead. The blue-black of the planet's sky- always darker than Alternia's night, except in the darkest of the dark seasons on that far-off world- was shot through with reflections of light from the glowing city. As he watched, trying to work out how long he'd been sleeping, a blue-white flash filled the world, followed a few seconds later by a deep growling rumble of thunder.

"Best friend?"

Karkat looked back to see Gamzee leaning against the edge of the hut opening, eyes almost glowing in the darkness. He was about to tell the other troll to shut up and go the fuck back to sleep when Gamzee wobbled over and wrapped him up in a tight hug. Karkat could feel his moirail shaking from more than withdrawal, and something wet seeped into his shoulder where Gamzee's face was resting. With a sigh he raised a hand and fed it into the tangled snarl of hair on his moirail's head.

"Shoosh," he whispered, rubbing the pads of his fingers against Gamzee's scalp. He didn't ask what had upset his moirail so badly. It wasn't hard to work out; the way Gamzee had been throwing out chucklevoodoos right before they went to sleep, there had probably been more than a little leakage in the night, which meant that Karkat's dream hadn't just been his. And experience had taught Gamzee that sometimes the nightmares didn't go away when he woke up.

"I'm okay," Karkat whispered to Gamzee, reassuring him with words as well as actions. "Shoosh, it's fine, you ridiculous slime-panned wiggler. You didn't do anything, it's just a shitty dream."

Gamzee's face, if anything, buried itself deeper into his shoulder. "'M sorry," he said, voice almost hopelessly muffled.

“Sorry for what, dumbass?” Karkat asked. “For having bad dreams? Last time I checked that was totally normal, all part of the lifelong parade of diabolical mockery the universe delivers to anyone daring to be hatched on the glorious shithole of a world that is Alternia. I know you didn’t choose to violently dismember me and I also know you didn’t choose to jam that fucked-up horror sideshow into my pan and give me a front-row seat.” He sighed and briskly rubbed his free hand up and down Gamzee’s back, trying to soothe away some of the trembling. “Fuck, we should probably count ourselves lucky you haven’t reached the dubious achievement of complete psionic incontinence, given what a grub-munched mess it is inside your skull.”

Gamzee mumbled something into Karkat’s shoulder, and the mutant troll shoved at his moirail’s head with a small shrug. Gamzee rolled his face sideways. “I all up and MOTHERFUCKING ROTTED all the shit outta my think-pan,” he murmured in Karkat’s ear. “Made a hole, brother, what’s got all kinds of MOTHERFUCKING EMPTY-ASS NOTHING all on the other side and it’s all up to being where the FUCKING SHIT CLIMBS IN.”

Karkat stared at his own feet and tried to ignore the uncomfortable feeling in his digestive sac. “Yeah, well, you’re a whimsical murderclown-worshiping indigo-blooded asshole who can’t even tie his own shoelaces. I’m pretty sure your thinkpan was a lost cause before it was even formed, sopor or no sopor.” He pressed a small kiss to the side of Gamzee’s eye. “Pity you pale, idiot.”

Gamzee’s claws dug into his sides a little tighter, their tips pricking Karkat’s skin through the layers of cloth. “…yeah. You, too.”

The warmth that blossomed in Karkat’s bloodpusher had nothing to do with any thermal measurement scale. Scowling to hide the smile trying to lift his mouth, he ruffled Gamzee’s hair and stepped back out of the hug. “You thirsty?” he asked, feeling the dryness in his own mouth as his tongue gummed itself to his upper palate. Gamzee nodded and Karkat grabbed his hand. “Come on, there’s got to be an unlocked public ablution block in this hole.”

It was hard not to feel like a wiggler on their first paledate as he led Gamzee back towards the loose panel and out into the mall. The feeling was only enhanced by the strangeness of the deserted structure, vast open stretches ringed by closed and barred storefronts. It would have oddly been less strange if the lights had been turned out; at least then there wouldn’t have been the unsettling sense that the entire building was waiting for something, alert and watching for intruders such as the two trolls who trod softly across the scuffed tiles underfoot. Karkat kept hold of Gamzee’s hand and pressed in a little closer to him, for the sole purpose of providing his unsteady moirail with more support and no other reason whatsoever.

The first public ablution block they came to was the one by the stairs. Karkat hesitated outside and glanced up at the skirt-wearing stick-figure on the doorplate; troll public ablution blocks were divided by hemocaste, not gender, and he still had some excruciatingly vivid and humiliating memories from the first ever time he’d walked through a ladies-only door on Earth.

Gamzee, shameless bulgepoacher that he was, strolled right on past Karkat through the swing door. When no hypothetical human females started screeching from the other side, Karkat hurried after him into an ablution block that was overwhelmingly, obnoxiously hot pink. He screwed his eyes shut briefly against the gander-bulb searing affront to sophont dignity, then put another mental check in the humans are bugfuck insane category and went to stick his mouth under a faucet.

When his throat had stopped feeling like a carpenterrogator had taken grit-encrusted smoothing paper to it, Karkat reached for the soap dispenser and started cleaning the grease and grime and other unidentifiable filth off his hands. The first few rinses came away black with dirt, then gray; Karkat kept scrubbing, working his way up over his wrists and lower arms, keeping half an eye on Gamzee all the while. His moirail had finished drinking too, and was staring into the wide mirror over the sinks with a faraway expression. His fingers were poking at his face, pushing the flesh around like putty; devoid of paint, the three long scars stood out plainly against his skin, obvious even against the streaks of black muck and purplish smears that marred the gray. Gamzee was looking at his reflection as if examining a stranger, and not one he was all too fond of.

Karkat sighed and shook the water off his hands. “Come here,” he ordered, wandering into a stall to grab a roll of gaper sheets. Gamzee obediently followed him back over to the sink and Karkat used a wad of wetted paper to try and clean the worst of the mess off his moirail’s face. The end results were mixed, but about halfway through Gamzee started trying to clean Karkat’s face too, and Karkat snapped at him but Gamzee started grinning and Karkat for some reason ended up smiling back and then Gamzee laughed, and it didn’t matter that it had a sharp edge to it because that wasn’t how he meant it so Karkat ended up just hugging him and Gamzee still couldn’t stop snickering at how ‘adorable’ Karkat was being even when he got thoroughly cursed out for his troubles.

It was nice, and if they were a bit damper at the end of it then they were cleaner too. Karkat was even feeling tentatively optimistic about the world and their chances in it when he pushed the door open, planning to head back to their safe haven in the plastic hut and get a few more hours of real sleep.

The security guard pointing an oddly-shaped gun at his chest proved a stark reminder of why optimism was for grubs and gamblignants. Karkat froze in the doorway and made frantic gestures behind his back that did nothing to quell the low, dangerous hiss coming from Gamzee. The human was old, his leathery face creasing around deep wrinkles, but his aim was steady and more than ready to shoot if one of them charged him through the doorway. Karkat briefly considered doing so and leaving the coast clear for Gamzee, but something about the old man's calmness made him look again and notice the small device tucked in the man's other hand. Karkat didn't know what it did, but it sure as fuck looked like a weapon.

Slowly, the security guard reached down to his belt and pulled loose a pair of thin plastic strips with his fingertips, tossing them at Karkat’s feet. “Here, you just put those on for me, son,” he said in a deep, steady voice that was the antithesis of Karkat’s hammering blood-pusher. “No funny business, now; you just do your friend’s wrists, there, and I’ll tighten yours up for you.”

Karkat kept his eyes fixed on the man as he crouched to grab the two lines of plastic. Turning to Gamzee, he surreptitiously tested one; it was too tough for him to break, and there was no way to check if the same was true of the indigo-blood. His moirail growled as he drew closer and Karkat stopped a couple of feet short.

“Gamzee,” he whispered, narrowing his eyes in warning. Come on, you slime-rotted horn fondler, even you have to realize we already lost this one.

The indigo-blood growled again and continued glaring at the human, but obediently held his wrists out. Karkat breathed a sigh of relief and quickly wrapped one of the plastic strips around them; they had a slip-through fastening that was laughably simple to work out, and he couldn't quite bring himself to meet Gamzee's eyes as he tightened the restraints. Putting the second set around his own hands was difficult- not just physically tricky, although it was, he could loop them before he put them over but he had to pull them tight with his teeth because seriously, what kind of hands would bend that way- but hard to do. Hard not to just throw the fucking things back onto the floor and charge screaming at the human and get himself culled for his trouble.

But that would leave Gamzee tied up and alone with the man and besides, Karkat hadn't spent this much time fighting for survival to throw it all away because his instincts were too stubborn to know when they were beaten. He glared at the human as he walked back over and held out his loosely bound wrists. The security guard sheathed the gun-thing, bringing the other weapon up to bear as he examined Karkat's job and tugged the ties a little tighter.

"Good job, son," he said, and although he didn't exactly sound approving it wasn't exactly insincere, either. Karkat glowered at him on principle for whatever unbelievably shitty alien mindgames he was trying to pull. The man didn't seem to even register the fury being directed at him; instead he put his free hand on Karkat's shoulder and turned to look at Gamzee.

"Alright,” he said, focusing on Karkat's glowering moirail. “What we're going to do now is your friend here will walk with me and my stun gun, and you are going to walk ahead of us and follow my directions, and if either of you look like you're about to do something I wouldn't like he gets a shock to put him down so I can focus my full attention on you. Clear?"

Karkat glared and Gamzee growled, but when the human made a jerking motion with his head the indigo-blood started to walk slowly towards the door. Karkat watched him nervously; for a moment as he passed Gamzee looked up and their eyes met.

Please don't start anything, Karkat prayed. He could figure that a weapon called a stun gun wasn't for killing, and a shock probably meant electricity, but he wasn't eager to find out any more than that.

Gamzee looked away and stalked past them, hunched over and bunched up in a way that spoke volumes about the tension he was currently under. It was like a zone of hatred following him, palpable as it passed, and Karkat wondered again if putting the restraints on him had been a good idea. Would Gamzee stop trusting his moirail if this went badly? Could Karkat handle losing him like that if it meant saving his life?

An increase in the otherwise steady pressure against his back reminded him that he had more immediate concerns, and Karkat grudgingly began to move forwards ahead of the security guard. The man paced along behind him, calling out directions to Gamzee who obeyed sullenly and without even once turning. As they reached a corner Karkat realized that this would be the best chance he got. Tensing up, he prepared to throw his weight backwards into their captor and hoped that the stun gun thing wouldn't hurt like fuck.

The hand resting on his shoulder tightened. "Don't even think about it, son," said the security guard. Karkat felt the weight behind him shift slightly and with a sinking blood-pusher knew that the man wasn't going to be easily overcome by two desperate kids, even if Gamzee was stronger than any human could ever dream of being. Forcing his muscles to relax, he let the man guide him around the corner and walked meekly after his moirail through a door marked "Security- Staff Only".

The door led to a room where one wall was lined with a smallish bank of blocky television screens. There were a couple of black swivel chairs in front of the monitors, and Karkat saw a few grainy glimpses of the empty mall before being half-led, half-pushed over to a battered two-seater couch against the far wall. The dented metal frame was inexpertly covered in mismatched cushions and a couple of blankets that clearly had a far closer relationship to the collection of stained mugs clustered by the kettle in the corner than any of the surveillance equipment. The guard's hand left Karkat's shoulder as he dropped down next to his moirail, and the young troll watched warily as the man stepped back and grabbed one of the swivel chairs, turning it to face the pair of them before sitting down.

"Well, then," the security guard said slowly. "I suppose the fact that there's two of you explains how Halyna managed to lose whichever one of you she was chasing round the food court earlier." He gave the two trolls a thoughtful look which turned from Gamzee to Karkat. "That'd be you, I reckon," he added, with a small nod. "Given her description of the feral kid."

Karkat snarled at the man and barely managed to keep the presence of mind not to lunge at him. "We're not fucking feral!" he snapped, clumsy with the English words that didn't seem to fit in his mouth.

The human shrugged. "Shit, son, I'm no expert. Halyna used the word, I thought it might apply."

"Am I refraining from trying to claw your face off?" Karkat demanded through gritted teeth, pulling his feet up onto the couch and crouching over them on the cushions. It felt a little better to be sure he could dive to any direction if the need suddenly arose. "Have I shown that I understand what the fuck is going on around me in more than the most nub-bludgeoningly simple terms? Am I, in fact, using actual words to express concepts like fuck you, you arrogant douche, rather than making noises like a strangled hunting beast and hissing at you? Why yes, yes I am, because I'm in full possession of my faculties and therefore not a sponge-damaged lunatic throwback under the hysterical impression that I'm some variety of non-intelligent animal!"

The guard regarded Karkat steadily for a moment as the troll panted for breath, seemingly waiting to see if he had more to say. When nothing was forthcoming, the man reached over to the desk and picked up a telephone handset.

"Hey, wait!" Karkat leaned forward on the couch, forgetting his bound wrists for a second and lurching further than he intended. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"Calling the cops," the guard said.

"What?" Karkat yelped, grabbing awkwardly for the metal couch frame as he wobbled. "Why? We weren't even fucking doing anything, just taking some leftovers and looking for someplace dry to sleep! We wouldn't even have caused any fuss if that crazy psionic broad hadn't chased me up and down the fucking escalators!"

The guard paused in his examination of the phone’s numberpad and raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Son, I caught you trespassing on private property, you've admitted to causing a public nuisance, and even if that wasn't true I don't think you boys are old enough to be looking after yourselves. Now, I’ll explain the situation to the police, and they can get in touch with child services for you-“

“NO!” Karkat overbalanced; his shoulder hit the floor hard as he failed to catch himself on bound hands, but he hardly noticed the sudden pain. “Look, I was the one stirring up a shitstorm, okay? So you can hand me over to the law and let Gamzee go. He hasn’t done anything wrong, I’m the one you need, and I fucking swear I won’t cause any trouble if you just free him. I’ll be the best behaved prisoner who ever got hauled off to face His Tyranny, you’ll forget I was ever fucking there I’ll be so quiet, and you can cull me or throw me in a pit or anything else that tickles your humor palate but just don’t make him go with me, not him, please, fuck!”

He was crying, he knew. The tears were too hot on his face and his arms shook as he levered himself up off the floor. It was utterly humiliating that he was doing this and worse that anyone was seeing it but he had to, he fucking had to, because he had not gone through all this shit just to get his moirail culled alongside him or, worse, left in the custody of the first adult who showed up to claim him.

“I’m sorry, son,” said the guard, leaning forward in his chair to look right into Karkat’s eyes. “But I’ve got no intention of letting either of you go, and if I did it sure as hell wouldn’t be the one who's been doing nothing but eye up my jugular for the last ten minutes."

Karkat stared at the human blankly for a moment, then lunged at him.

Seconds later, as his face slammed right back into the floor, he found himself wondering why the fuck he had done that. Momentary insanity, perhaps- it certainly wasn't any kind of reasoned decision on his part. He noticed in a detached sort of way that the man was fast for an old human, not to mention strong.

"Don't even think about it, kiddo," said the man, and hearing a low growl from overhead Karkat realized it wasn't directed at him. He looked up blearily to see Gamzee on his feet and close by, muscles tensed ready to jump on the guard.

"'M okay," he muttered to his moirail, licking at something warm and thick that was trickling down from his cartilage nub and tasting blood. Well, that explained why his face was exploding with little stars of dizzy pain. Karkat closed his eyes and went limp, trying to not give a shit as he was hauled upright and dragged back over to the couch. He watched in bleary comprehension as the guard pulled out another plastic tie and attached his bound wrists to the tubular arm of the frame. The weight on the cushions shifted as Gamzee sat back down next to him, and the soft growl rose in volume as the guard stepped closer to the indigo-blood. The human paused and reached for the small black weapon on his belt.

Karkat groaned. "Fuck's sake, Gamzee," he said thickly, though a slightly red and definitely painful haze. "I'm fine. Except for possibly being a complete grubfucking moron, but that was a pre-existing condition, nothing to do with this asshole- who, in case you hadn't noticed, is fucking armed and has us both captured already."

The growling stopped; the look Gamzee gave the security guard could have been described as outright murderous, but he held his hands out meekly enough. The guard briskly attached him to the other arm of the couch before stepping back out of range of a bite or kick. Karkat could only watch in dismay as the man crouched down to retrieve the phone handset.

A loud rumble of thunder filled the world, and the lights went out. For several brief, blood-freezing seconds the room was pitch black, and then the lights slowly flickered back on and the security monitors phased through static back into the same dull images of an empty mall. The security guard took a brief glance at his screens then turned back to the phone and dialed three digits; Karkat watched as he put the handset to his ear, listened for a moment, then pulled it away to look at it again.

"Hmm," the man said. He peered at the phone cradle, then followed the wire out the back to the wall. Karkat glanced over at Gamzee, but his moirail was busy following the guard's movements with simmering fury and didn't notice even when Karkat jabbed him in the side with his foot. Karkat sighed. He didn't know what the fuck was going on but it looked like some sort of reprieve and he wanted to talk to his palemate, dammit.

The security guard straightened from checking over the wall plug, and looked at them both. "Okay, looks like I'm going to have to go check outside," he said. "You boys sit tight here while I'm gone."

"What the fuck else are we going to do?" Karkat snapped, tugging his hands against the couch frame for emphasis. "Start an assholes-only breakdance and juggling party?"

The man chuckled, his face crinkling up around his eyes in that way that Karkat still wasn't used to seeing even after a year and a half of adults everywhere. Then he was gone, the door swinging closed behind him with a soft click.

“I’m gonna kill him,” said Gamzee, in Alternian.

Karkat looked around, twisting his shoulders uncomfortably so he could see his moirail. Gamzee was watching the closed door over his knees, curled up at the end of the couch like a slitherbeast about to strike, and he was smiling.

“Ain’t nobody gonna be all up and doing nothing to you, brother,” Gamzee said, eyes glinting as they turned to Karkat. “On account of how I’m gonna TEAR ALL THEM MOTHERFUCKERS TO PIECES AND PAINT ALL THE WICKED MOTHERFUCKING MIRACLES WITH THEIR MOTHERFUCKING BLOOD.” The couch rattled as the indigo-blood yanked at the cable tie holding him in place. “Anyone thinks they can TOUCH MY MOTHERFUCKING MOIRAIL I’m gonna SHOW THEM THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING CARNIVAL. I can hear all the wicked truth now, brother, and it’s up to saying as how you’re being mine, and I ain’t all being thinking nothing but how to burn the world for you.”

Karkat tugged experimentally at his bindings, but they were still secure; he wasn’t going to be able to get any closer to Gamzee than he already was. Which was just fucking great. Of all the times to be completely unable to give his moirail a soothing pap- or maybe shove his face into the floor and hold it there until he grew some sense.

“Okay, look,” he said, stretching out in the most painfully awkward way imaginable so that he could at least brush Gamzee with his leg and have some contact. “As beautiful and romantic a sentiment as destroying an entire civilization for me in a remorseless fiery massacre is, it is also completely shithive maggots insane.”

“So?” Gamzee asked, grinning as he reached one of his own feet out to poke at Karkat’s leg. “All I got up in me now is miracles and blessings. You think those MOTHERFUCKING HERETICS ain’t all up and deserving A SHITLOAD LESS THAN WHAT I UP AND GOT FOR THEM?”

Karkat scowled. “I think that you shouldn’t be making promises to murder people, at least not until you stop hearing the sweet siren song of happy clown angels telling you to usher in the fucking apocalypse.” He shifted slightly on the seat, trying and failing to get comfortable. “If I so much as suspect you’re taking advice from those assholes, I will chew my own arms off and come sit on you until your thinkpan grows a functioning rationality lobe or I bleed agonizingly to death, whichever comes first.”

Gamzee’s smile faded and he looked solemnly at Karkat. “Honk,” he said.

“You can fucking well stop that, too.” Karkat tugged again at his wrists, but there was hardly any give at all in the ties. “I’m serious, you whimsical shitsponge. Chill the fuck out and stop that ridiculous auricular sponge-clot assault or I am coming over there to forcibly calm your nubs whether you want me to or not!”

“You ain’t all up and goin’ noplace,” Gamzee said, nodding to where Karkat was yanking and failing to free his arms. “Shit ain’t MOTHERFUCKING possible for a BLASPHEMOUS MUTANT-BLOODED FREAK like all what you’re up and being.”

Karkat growled. “Oh, yeah? Fucking watch me.” He eyed the restraints critically. They were pretty strong, no doubt there- he sure as fuck didn’t have the muscle density to break it by tugging alone. Still, they were only made from some sort of hydrocarbon-based artificial polymer. How tough could it be?

With some little huffs of effort, he managed to edge himself around so that he was in a good position to drop backwards off the edge of the couch. Gamzee watched him dubiously.

“Hey, brother,” he said, hesitantly as if afraid to offend. “You know, I ain’t all up and getting to think as what this idea is so bitchtits wicked and all. This MOTHERFUCKER ain’t gonna be FUCKING PLEASED if you get yourself MOTHERFUCKING HURT.”

Karkat snorted. “Please. Like these things are really going to take my weight.”

“Serious, best friend, THAT AIN’T MOTHERFUCKING SAFE SHIT.”

Karkat rolled his eyes and overbalanced himself towards the floor. There was an organic crunching, snapping sound.

“AAAAAAAOW FUCK SHIT HOLY MOTHERGRUB OF ALL HORRORTERRORS SHITTING FUCK SHIT FUCK!”

Red-hot, all-consuming fire flared out of the entire left half of Karkat’s body. Dimly, he was aware of lying upside-down with his head on the floor and his legs on the couch, of the restraints still biting into the flesh of his wrists, but his sponge matter was occupied entirely with the expanding inferno of pain radiating out of his shoulder. Karkat opened his eyes and saw his left arm stretching over his face at an angle that shouldn’t really have been possible.

“Karkat!” There was a loud, sharp bang and then Gamzee was leaning over him, eyes wide with concern. A pair of hands slid under Karkat’s back and tried to push him back up towards the couch, but as soon as his shoulder shifted Karkat screamed and Gamzee dropped him back on the floor.

“OW! Fuck!” Karkat yelled. “Oh, mothergrub, shit, that hurts! That really, really fucking hurts, oh fuck, I broke it, I’m fucking broken- I take it back, I don’t want to chew my arms off, you can lose your shit and go murder everyone for the rest of forever, they deserve it anyway, I just want to be not broken again! Oh, shit, OW!”

"Come on, brother, ain't no kind of problem..." Gamzee was mumbling and Karkat closed his eyes, digging his fangs into his lower lip until he tasted blood again and the pain in his mouth was distracting him from the horrible radiant bursts of hot agony from his shoulder. It was fine, he could handle this, he had to fucking handle this-

There was a clatter as the door opened. "Shit!" The human was leaning over Karkat before he could even try to push himself away, ignoring Gamzee's growl as he looked over Karkat with quick, almost professional interest. "Okay, son, just stay calm and tell me where it hurts."

English was too difficult to remember so Karkat yelled at him in Alternian, then screamed again as he tried to pull himself into a sitting position and failed.

"He all up and been hurting his shoulder," said Gamzee, speaking halting English and glaring at the human. "On account of how what you all MOTHERFUCKING TIED HIM TO THE MOTHERFUCKING COUCH."

The guard ignored the fury in Gamzee's tone, continuing to look at Karkat. "Okay, kiddo," he said, surprisingly gentle. "I think I know what you've done here, and I reckon I can fix you up, but it's going to hurt like hell for a minute. Think you can leave off fighting back until I'm done?"

Teeth gritted hard enough to make his jaw ache, Karkat nodded and screwed his eyes shut. There were two brief snaps as his bonds were cut, and his arms dropped, prompting another curse as jagged pain fired through his body. Two broad, firm hands settled on his shoulders; he hissed as the human rolled him over like a fiduspawn host plush and settled him against the couch. Blunt human fingers wrapped around his wrist and a palm pressed in just under his injured shoulder.

"Okay, now, this’ll hurt less if you relax," said the guard. Karkat chanced a peek and saw Gamzee huddled a few feet back, watching suspiciously. "So I’m going to count to three, then go. You ready?"

"Yeah," Karkat said, the word tight with pain.

"One," said the human. Karkat took a deep breath and tried not to shake. "Two."

Something pushed on Karkat's arm and the world exploded in red and white sparks. His stomach flipped over and there was a loud noise, which turned out to be him.

"FUUUUUUuuuuuuck!" he gasped, and opened his eyes. A fine veil of red tears shaded the world watery scarlet, but he could still see Gamzee closing in on his right while the guard sat just on his left, four new scratches oozing disgustingly bright red blood on the back of his soft human hand.

Karkat snarled at the man and scrambled crabwise towards his moirail. "What the fuck did you do that for?" he yelled. "You said you'd count to three, you bulgeguzzling ass! Isn't it enough to have us caught and trussed up for culling? I'm already maiming myself, you don't need to fucking join in!"

"How's your shoulder?" the human asked, walking to a green box on the wall and opening it. Karkat was about to snap that it was fucking torture, of course, when he realized that actually it wasn't. Gingerly he tried moving his arm; there was a dull ache all down it, a bone-deep pain that he knew wasn't going away soon, but none of the pan-shattering screaming torment that there had been moments ago.

"Better, I guess," he said, staring at the floor. Two long-fingered hands, still bound together at the wrist, reached out to brush against his sleeve.

"Motherfucking miracle," Gamzee breathed, switching back to Alternian. Karkat snorted and wrapped his good arm across the front of his body, rubbing at the bad shoulder, then jerked back when the human returned to crouch down in front of him.

“Relax, son, I just need to put that arm in a sling for you,” the man said, holding out a bundle of fabric and straps that looked like some kind of nightmare restraint. Karkat shook his head.

“Not a fucking chance,” he said flatly.

“Son, your arm...”

Karkat wiggled his shoulder a little and ground his teeth against the dull ache in the bone. “It'll be fine,” he said. “I'm a troll, not some useless flimsy human. It'll fix itself.” He hoped it would, anyway, but at least the damn thing was moving again.

The old human gave him a thoughtful look, then stood up and bundled the restraint back into the box on the wall. “Okay, kiddo, but you should get that shoulder seen to by a medical professional sometime real soon.”

“Sure, I'll do that,” Karkat said, kneading at his bruised muscle. “You can call one when you're done summoning the cops to drag us off to face justice for the heinous crime of trying to stay dry.”

There was a rustle of plastic as something landed in his lap, and Karkat looked down to see a small, brightly-colored oblong package covered in alien letters. He couldn't read them, but the photo of a small sweet baked consumable on the front meant he didn't have to. Karkat scowled at it, then looked up to see the guard picking through a messy heap of various packaged foodstuffs on the desk across the room.

The man saw him looking and smiled. "Phone lines are down," he said. "This would be a great time to have one of those new-fangled cell-phone things, but I suppose I'll have to tell my daughter she was right some other day." He waved a hand towards the packaged food. "For now, I thought you boys might be hungry. It's all out of the vending machine, so it’s not much of a holiday feast, but it's all we've got and damned if I know what aliens need to eat anyway."

Karkat looked suspiciously between the guard, the admittedly tempting pile of junk food on the desk, and the baked treat in his lap. “Why?” he asked, scooting himself another inch back so that he was pressed against Gamzee. His moirail’s fingers found his and tangled with them behind his back, giving Karkat a reassuring squeeze.

The guard looked puzzled. “Hell, kid, I’m not going to make you sit there hungry, not with the sort of wait we’re looking at.”

Karkat scowled at him, trying to find the words to express the sense of shifting unease in his digestive sac and ignore the empty grumbling that accompanied it. “Musclebeast shit,” he said. "I'm not going to deny there are some humans who are sponge-rotted enough to give handouts to cullbait, but you're not that nook-fondlingly retarded and even if you were we're your prisoners."

The guard raised his eyebrows and crouched down across from Karkat, bringing him to eye level. "So?"

"So you don't have any reason to do shit all for us, which means you want something," Karkat said, forcing himself to keep looking steadily at the human and not try to pocket the small packet that had slipped off his lap and onto the rough, ridged blue carpet when he moved. "And since we don't have any money and you could just take it from us if we did, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that whatever it is you can shove it up your excrement sphincter and swivel on it repeatedly."

The old human's eyebrows did an odd little dance; they were bushy things, luxurious and as gray as the close-cropped hair on his head. "Well, that's some fairly sound reasoning there, son," he said slowly. "But you don't seem to have considered that maybe what I want is for the pair of you to be a mite less uncomfortable."

There was a pause. "That don't even all up and MAKE NO MOTHERFUCKING SENSE," Gamzee said, his voice rumbling through Karkat's torso as he spoke.

"Does it not, now?" the guard said, casting a glance past them at the couch. Karkat turned his head to see what the man was looking at, and twitched when he saw the arm of the frame that Gamzee had been tied to. The metal tube was warped and snapped, the jagged ends twisted up to the ceiling and distorted from the pressure they had been put under.

"I'm thinking that this is going to be a pretty unpleasant night for all of us if I'm having to taze you every few minutes," the guard said. Gamzee turned to growl at him and the man tutted. "Hey, now, son, I know you're tough, but I carry these babies for a reason." He patted the weapon on his belt. "Shoot anything teal or cooler with a bullet and it might kill them, but they won't notice they're dead until they've ripped your head off and jammed it up your ass. Shoot them with fifty thousand plus volts and they drop same as anyone. I'm thinking that’s true of you too, attitude or no."

Gamzee's growl stopped but Karkat could feel his moirail pressed as tense as ever against his back. Karkat started to run his thumb along Gamzee's knuckles, trying to calm him. "So what, we take the food or you zap us?" he asked.

The human shrugged. "I'd prefer not to hurt you at all," he said. "But since your buddy there can break anything I tie him to, and you're willing to injure yourself to get out, I don't have a whole lot of options, do I?" He winked and grabbed the prepackaged baked comestible from the floor, tossing it back into Karkat's lap. "Unless you kids are willing to accept bribery, that is."

Karkat looked down at the snack, and swallowed. "So if we take this, we're promising not to make a break for it?"

"Would you keep that promise if you made it?" The human watched as Karkat stared at the floor in silence, and nodded. "That's what I thought. No, son, this me asking you to stay put for a while. Eat something. Maybe get some sleep, if you can. Call it a truce."

"That is the single dumbest thing I have ever heard in my entire life," Karkat informed him, slowly reaching into his lap and picking up the food. "And I hang out with this vapid asshole here, who is himself a beacon of lucid brilliance beside some of the shambling shit-peddlers who have recently tried to convince me that their particular shithive maggots version of reality is the genuine article." Still glaring at the human, Karkat retreated back onto the couch and started pulling apart the wrapper. Shreds of bright plastic floated down to the floor as he broke the treat in two. As Gamzee settled in beside him Karkat passed half back to his moirail, who sniffed at it before shoving it in his mouth whole. The guard smiled and stood up; Karkat's eyes followed him back over to the swivel chair, but he just sat down and tossed them a packet of gelatin-based treats that Karkat vaguely remembered being called Fruit Gushers.

"So, you're Gamzee, right, son?" he asked, looking over at Karkat's moirail who snarled at him round a mouthful of crumbs. "No need for that," the man said. "I know you can talk." He looked over at Karkat. "How about you, kiddo? Got a name?"

"Not that I'm telling you, fuckass," Karkat said, eating a bite of the baked foodstuff with one hand and using the other to pick through the packet of gushers and remove all the red ones. Not that he disliked the taste exactly, but there was something disconcerting about biting into something that spurted the same color he did and he didn’t want to have to look at each one as he ate it.

The guard chuckled. "Fair enough," he said. "But since it looks like we’ll be seeing in Christmas together, you can call me Bill.”

“What’s that all up and being?” Gamzee asked the human, leaning over Karkat’s shoulder to grab one of the rejected red gushers and stick it in his mouth. Karkat squirmed away from the sound of squishy mastication right next to his ear and wondered if his moirail would ever grasp complicated concepts like personal space, or at least closing his fucking mouth while he chewed.

“Bill? That’s my name,” the human said, still smiling. “William Henry Morgan Junior, if you want the full thing.”

“Didn’t mean your name,” Gamzee muttered. “MEANT THE MOTHERFUCKING CHRISTMAS SHIT.”

Karkat jumped and slapped a hand over his own ear, then yelped as his still-aching shoulder protested. “Fuck! Gamzee!” he yelled, dropping the fruit gushers which fell to the floor and scattered. “Watch where you’re shouting, you shit-gargling grubmunch, you nearly deafened me! I do not want the last thing I ever hear to be your one of your inadvertent yet completely fucking uncanny impressions of a suffocating squawkbeast in a nutrition blending appliance!”

Gamzee regarded him solemnly. “Honk,” he said. Karkat groaned and slammed his palm into his forehead; it hurt, but pain was less frustrating than any of the thoughts he was trying to dislodge, most of them dwelling on how typical it was that Past Karkat had lacked the sponge matter to pale-pity someone who wasn’t a complete and utter useless piece of hornfondling shit and Present Karkat was thus not allowed to cull Gamzee and spare the entirety of existence the ongoing humiliation slitherbeast dance of his continued presence.

Bill the Human Security Guard chuckled and several of Karkat’s thoughts diverted into thinking how nice it would be to have an edged weapon right now and then see who was a laughing-stock. “It’s not fucking funny,” he said, glowering at the man.

“Whatever you say, son,” Bill replied, picking himself a candy bar from the pile of goodies on the desk and tossing over another packet of gushers and two additional prepackaged baked comestibles. For a few seconds the room was silent save for the hum of the monitors, the rustle of packaging, and the shlurp shlurp of Gamzee’s atrocious communal consumption habits, then the human spoke again. “So, you boys haven’t heard of Christmas, then?”

“Of course we’ve heard of it,” Karkat snapped. “Between the obnoxious clot-maiming caterwaul you call music being disgorged by every store in the city and the endless parade of assholes screeching Merry Christmas at one another in public places, we’d have to be not only deaf but living under a fucking rock not to have heard of it by now." He paused and then, feeling something more was required, added; "And before you ask, yeah, I also worked out that it has something to do with the fact that everyone in the city is making the most half-assed attempt at pretense ever witnessed to maintain the collective delusion that it is actually freezing cold, and then covering everything in glitter and gaudy animal pictures. Also involved are the blood-soaked priest assholes who keep waving pails at perfectly innocent passers-by or getting presented over-excited wigglers for scrutiny, which I do not want to entertain the first dream of contemplating the reasons for."

Bill looked at him with something very much like pity, and shook his head. "Son, I've been on this Earth for upward of sixty years, seen some pretty god-damned awful things in that time, and never once in my life did I hear a sadder misunderstanding than what you just laid out for me."

"You sayin' my invertebrother all went up and GOT HIS SHIT WRONG?" Gamzee asked, growling.

"Yes," the Bill human said, and Karkat wondered whether he was stupid or brave to disregard Gamzee's hostility as if it weren't even there. "Sounds to me like you got your head round all the trappings of Christmas, without ever understanding what any of them mean."

"Oh, big fucking surprise," Karkat grumbled, pushing himself back into Gamzee who took the hint and slipped his still-bound hands over Karkat's head to envelop him in a hug. "The idiot who's not even been on this planet a full sweep doesn't understand some weird alien festival full of bizarre nonsense things that suddenly just shows up and is everywhere and makes people who were complete grubfucking lunatics to start with act even more like a bunch of complete rot-panned freaks. Excuse me for playing it safe and expecting the worst so that I don't get my ass surprise culled by a bunch of aliens on a murder-happy party game..."

The bony point of Gamzee's chin poked into Karkat's head, breaking into the flow of words as it settled between his horns. "Shh, brother," whispered his moirail, in Alternian. "No need to be all up and getting your motherfucking worry on. SHIT'S MO- it's all up and being chill."

Karkat felt his limbs tremble against Gamzee's arms, and wondered just how long he had been shaking for. He tried to relax, to let his moirail soothe away the panic that was racing through him so fast that it was tripping over itself, but he couldn't unwind far with one wary eye still turned on the human. Bill didn't seem to mind him staring. In fact, the human calmly turned away from the two trolls, leaning down to take something out from under the desk before fiddling with the small black box he had retrieved and one of the nearby monitors.

"The thing about Christmas," he said, as the picture fuzzed into static and reformed into some sort of human news broadcast studio, "is that I could tell you all about Santa Claus and reindeer, and turkey dinners and spending time with the family, and every last bit of the good word about the baby Jesus, and none of it would mean a damn thing to you." Karkat watched, frowning, as Bill fiddled with the monitor again and the channel changed; he started to flick from station to station, seeming to look for something. "See, every person I ever met had a different way of celebrating Christmas, and I never saw how any of them were wrong so long as they were happy with it."

"What the everloving nuclear-fired fuck are you babbling about?" Karkat asked, burrowing back into Gamzee.

"Figured I might try showing you, rather than trying to explain," Bill said. "Ah, here we go. This should do the job." He rolled his chair back from the monitor and Karkat found himself looking at a camera pan across the pointed rooftops of a strange-looking city. Deep snow was layered across the buildings, which looked almost nothing like the architecture in LA- although in the eerie uniformity of the buildings Karkat could see the human touch.

"Where THE FUCK is that all UP AND BEING?" Gamzee asked, before Karkat could wonder aloud.

Bill shrugged. "Think it's meant to be London, over a hundred years ago," he said. "Not that it matters too much. Where and when it happens isn't the point of the story."

Karkat shifted in Gamzee's arms, curious despite himself. "So, if it's not too taxing on your age-withered thinkpan, what does your vastly inferior human cinema have to do with explaining Earth Christmas?"

Bill chuckled. "Son, this here happens to be the Muppets performing Charles Dicken's classic story, A Christmas Carol. There's plenty of seasonal films out there, but my granddaughter loves this one and I agree with her judgement, so just you boys sit tight and watch."

Before Karkat could ask what the taintchafing fuck a granddaughter was, or who the Muhpits or Charlz Dikinz were, he was distracted by a series of bizarre plush puppets bursting into a song and dance routine on the screen. "No, fuck this," he said, burying his face into Gamzee's shoulder to protect his ganderbulbs. "I know I'm not exactly a glowing paragon of self-respect and pride, but even I am not willing to fall into the inescapable black hole of degradation and utter abasement that is willingly subjecting my unsuspecting sense organs to some utterly inane human musical production full of fucking dancing puppets... why the fuck are you giggling, moron?"

Gamzee grinned into Karkat's hair. "That grouchy MOTHERFUCKER up there what them puppets are all SINGING SHIT ABOUT is making me get my think on all up about you, best friend."

"What the-" Karkat focused on the screen. "Are those singing vegetables? Why the fuck are there singing vegetables? This is completely retarded."

"Mister Humbug," Gamzee snickered, eyes glinting. Karkat growled and elbowed him.

"At least he's not a fucking puppet," he muttered, as the human actor scared away the singing plush hordes and went indoors to get on with sensible, non-musical activities. When it became apparent that there was not going to be any more singing, at least not for a little while, Karkat settled back into Gamzee's arms to watch, opening another package of comestibles. Might as well humor the Bill human, since he was feeding them and all. Bill himself seemed perfectly content to sit back and keep one eye on the security monitors, munching on chips; Karkat caught a few glances heading their way from time to time but he was pretty sure Gamzee had missed them. His moirail seemed taken with the movie, which shouldn’t have been much of a surprise since its target audience seemed to have the mental age of a concussed wiggler just out of their cocoon.

He was still trying to work out why all the puppets and other humans seemed to think that Scrooge was a bad person when clearly he just needed them to take their needy whining assholery and leave him the fuck alone when the puppet ghosts of Marley and Marley appeared for another song and dance number.

"Okay, hold up one grubdamned minute here," he said, frowning as he tried to make sense of the words. "Are they saying that they're doomed to wander as undead vapor hauling chains for the rest of eternity because they were too fucking successful in life? What kind of ass-backwards message is that?"

Bill opened his mouth, but Gamzee got there first. "It ain't all up for being about success," he said quietly, and Karkat was surprised but glad to hear the gentle sing-song rhythm in his words. "Them motherfuckers all went and made up them motherfucking chains one iddy biddy link all at a time what by getting their harsh on to others as what they had some motherfucking power over, you dig?"

"So? It was their power," Karkat pointed out, wriggling out from under Gamzee's arms and giving the latest packet of food out to his still-bound moirail. "Why can't they do what the fuck they like with it?"

"Well, son, that's the lesson Scrooge has to learn," Bill said, tossing him another handful of junk food. Karkat scowled and tore into the packaging, eyes locked on the screen as the ghosts flew back out of the window.

"I agree with Scrooge," he muttered, trying not to feel too resentful that the only sane character in the film so far was apparently destined to become infected with the human emotion of Christmas, which was clearly some sort of extremely virulent and prolific idiocy virus. He shoved a handful of potato chips in his mouth and grimaced, because it was one of those disgusting human flavors that was meant to taste of cooked meat or some musclebeast shit like that. Then, realizing that he didn't have to choke them down, Karkat put the chips to one side and grabbed a different bag; soon he was happily munching through something that tasted sort of like decent grubsauce, only hotter.

After Marley and Marley, the Ghost of Christmas Past showing up to ruin Scrooge's sleep wasn't a surprise, although Karkat nearly went cross-eyed trying to work out if it was a puppet or a human before he realized it was neither. The schoolfeeding institution it dragged him to took another moment to identify, but it had enough in common with the human school Karkat had attended for its purpose to be recognizable. As the other human wigglers began to vanish, leaving Past Scrooge alone in the schoolfeeding room, Karkat felt Gamzee tensing up behind him.

“Where’s his lusus at?” Gamzee asked. “He’s all gonna up and be getting there all soon-like, right?”

Warned by the softness of the words, Karkat twisted his head to look at his moirail; Gamzee’s indigo-flecked eyes were locked on the screen, and there was something wet and purplish shining in them. “I don’t think he’s coming,” Karkat said, blood-pusher aching with pity for his moirail as the film proved him right by showing Past Scrooge age sweep by sweep in the lonely room.

“But he should all up and be there,” Gamzee insisted. “WHERE THE FUCK IS HIS MOTHERFUCKING LUSUS AT!?”

Bill looked around at them. “You doing okay back there, son?” he asked.

“He’s fine,” Karkat snapped, wrapping his own arms around Gamzee’s bound hands and dragging his moirail around him like a blanket. “You’re fine, assmunch,” he told Gamzee in Alternian. “And since you’re flipping your shit over a fictional character I suppose I should point out that Scrooge is fine too. Look, he’s standing right there, next to the Ghost of Reliving Ways The Universe Fucked You Over Already For Shits And Giggles.”

Gamzee’s chin rested back on Karkat’s head. “But the wiggler him, he ain’t up and got no motherfucking lusus all being the motherfuck there for him.”

“So? He’s already getting another inspiring musical ramble from a puppet,” Karkat said, running his hand up and down along Gamzee’s arm. “It’s going to be okay. I mean, obviously he’s not just been completely abandoned…” his voice trailed off as he thought of a younger Gamzee, sitting patiently on a faraway beach under distant stars and waiting for a familiar silhouette to appear on the horizon. “It’s going to be okay,” he repeated, more gently. There was a quiet sniffle somewhere from the vicinity of the back of his head.

Karkat tried to remind himself that it was just a movie, that Gamzee would get over it soon enough, and sure enough his moirail perked up when Scrooge spent Christmas at some sort of mass gathering with hatefriends in what had to be the most simultaneously perplexing and dull scene Karkat had ever had the misfortune to witness in a movie. When the Ghost took Scrooge to see his Past Self having a conversation with his matesprit in the snow, thought, all thoughts of boredom and detachment flew straight out of his thinkpan.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Karkat yelled at the TV. “She’s your flushed partner, you fucking assnugget, tell her you’re sorry and start paying her more attention!”

“Maybe he thinks there are more important things than love,” Bill said calmly. Karkat narrowed his eyes at the man.

"That's completely ridiculous. Quadrants are the most important thing there is, everyone knows that!" He waved a hand to where the older Scrooge was weeping on-screen. "Come on, how can he not know- go AFTER her, you bulgebrained shitsack, don't let her just walk away, you NEED her, you have to know how much this is going to hurt!"

"Of course he knows," said Bill, as Past Scrooge silently watched his matesprit leave him forever and Present Scrooge reached out for her. "But he already learned how to be alone, didn't he?"

"B-but, h-he," Karkat said, gulping back the tears that were threatening to spill over. He failed to hold them in and two hot tracks of water ran down his cheeks. "F-fuck, he's alone, the whole time he should have been with his matesprit but he had to go and be a galactic-sized idiot so he's been alone for sweeps and sweeps and he just c-couldn't s-see it..."

Thin arms pulled him closer and he felt Gamzee's cartilage nub bury itself into his scalp. "Shoosh," his moirail said, and a little piece of the cold emptiness inside Karkat filled in with warm pity. Bill chuckled and got out of his chair, heading for the corner where the kettle sat on top of a small fridge. Karkat watched him go suspiciously, and when he felt Gamzee's head turn behind him he knew his moirail was doing the same.

"What you all up and getting to MOTHERFUCKING doing?" Gamzee asked.

Bill shrugged. "Thought we could all use a hot drink," he said. "Don't see you boys as coffee drinkers, but I don't think Halyna will mind if we borrow some of her cocoa."

"It's stealing if you don't give it back, fuckass," said Karkat absently, returning his attention to the movie as Present Scrooge followed the sound of music and laughter to find a second Ghost filling his living block. At least, it claimed to be a ghost; Karkat thought the huge puppet looked altogether too alive for that, but then maybe the word hadn’t translated right from Alternian. He snuggled back into Gamzee’s chest and mentally girded himself for what he was certain would be another shitstorm of regrets, loneliness and general supernatural dickery for Scrooge.

The new Ghost turned out to be nothing like he expected. Karkat watched in confusion as the whole puppet-infested city turned into what seemed to be one singing, dancing quadrant clade around it. It was a relief in a way to see Scrooge actually enjoying himself after the unnecessary hell the Ghost of Dumb Shit Past had put him through, but something about the whole scenario was sitting uncomfortably on Karkat’s thinkpan. Slowly it dawned on him that in a half-assed, totally incompetent and generally ineffective way, this was what the people of LA had been trying to emulate for the past couple of months. He’d not understood when he saw it in reality because real life had more assholes in it, more people who were too angry or impatient or busy to contribute to the world everyone else was trying to be in.

More people like Scrooge, Karkat thought, and was glad when Gamzee sensed his unease and gave him an affectionate squeeze.

“Here we go,” said Bill, holding out a steaming mug of something brown and sweet-smelling to Karkat. “And… hmm.” He looked at Gamzee. “You going to behave if I let you go?”

Gamzee nodded meekly, and the guard pulled out a small knife and cut his remaining bonds. The human waited a few seconds for Gamzee to rub life back into his wrists before passing him a second mug which proclaimed its owner to be the World's Greatest Dad. Karkat sniffed at his own drink, then tried a cautious sip. His eyes went wide as something hot and sweet and milky hit his taste receptors, and he scalded his mastication muscle trying to guzzle a second mouthful before he'd managed to swallow the first.

"Hey, this motherfucking shit's all up to and being the motherfucking bitchtits," Gamzee said in slightly halting English, his voice back to its calmer ebb and flow. Bill smiled as he sat back in his swivel chair.

"Thought you kids might like it," he said, a little smugly in Karkat's opinion. "Noticed you Alternians have a bit of a sweet tooth."

Karkat spared a hand from the mug he was holding to make a gesture he had seen humans using and was fairly certain equated to telling the man to go suck his own bonebulge. He would have been more vocal, but he was caught up trying to follow what was happening with the movie.

"How are all them motherfucking puppets all up and to be living all in the same wicked tiny motherfucking hive and shit?" Gamzee asked.

"I think it's because Scrooge won't let them have a bigger one," Karkat replied, frowning as he tried to follow it. "And the big green one and the big pink one are being joint lusii to the others, like humans do, which just goes to show how unimaginative and utterly stupid they are because if they let the little green cullbait one die the rest of them would be better off."

"I don't want him to die," said Gamzee, and there was a hint of a growl to his voice. Karkat twisted his head up to see his moirail scowling at the screen. "He's a motherfucking miracle, is what he's all up to being," Gamzee added. "That little Tiny Tim motherfucker- look what he ain't even had no kind of luck, but he ain't even motherfucking thinking none about letting none of that shit get him the motherfuck down. Shit's all motherfucking inspiring."

"He's a nauseating, delusional waste of food, space and affection," Karkat snapped. "All he's contributing to his clade are a few lisped observations on how they should be happy with the shit-all they've got, and those empty-panned pity-spewing bile merchants are just eating it up!"

Gamzee's mug clicked as he set it down empty on the floor, and his arms tightened around Karkat. "People what's all up and getting to care on what's going down with a motherfucker ain't even nothing what's even being like motherfucking shit-all.”

Karkat opened his mouth, then closed it with a snap when he saw Bill looking at them out of the corner of his eye and smiling. The young troll let his head drop back down until his chin was resting on his chest, and stared fixedly at the TV. He had to admit that what the Cratchett clade had didn't seem so bad, and Scrooge seemed to feel the same way. The scenes of warmth and happiness were colored with a tinge of bitter understanding- the knowledge that Scrooge, and Karkat, were just observers of the celebrations of others. It still hurt when the white started to spread through the Spirit's red hair to herald his passing away. Karkat heard a small whimper from Gamzee and wrapped his hand around his moirail's, wondering if there would be more cocoa forthcoming any time soon. Bill seemed engrossed with the movie, though, and Karkat didn't trust himself to make the drink right.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come showed up and despite the fact that it was obviously another shitty puppet Karkat felt a chill run up his spine as it silently pointed a pleading Scrooge onwards through a world that seemed to have suddenly filled with dark shadows and an ominous chill. Being a member of a vastly superior species he saw the poorly-disguised plot twists coming long in advance, but that didn't stop it feeling like a punch to the gut when he saw the empty chair where Tiny Tim had once sat and he shifted to give some reassuring paps when Gamzee started to sniffle.

Bill looked worried at that. "It's going to be okay, you know," he said. "The story isn't done yet."

Karkat glowered at the human, but when Scrooge fearfully stepped up to look at the gravestone covered in illegible human scrawl he was secretly glad that Gamzee asked: "What's that all up and saying?"

"Ebeneezer Scrooge," Bill told them, and Karkat couldn't even bring himself to snort even though he'd fucking known it. He found himself wondering about Scrooge's words to the spirit- the shadows of things that would be, or that might be only? Something about the idea was terrifying, like standing blindfolded at the edge of a sheer cliff, a single blind step away from plummeting and with no idea how to fly or whether he even could.

When Scrooge woke up on Christmas Morning, Karkat breathed a sigh of relief, which turned into a small quirk of a smile as the whole town once again burst out singing and dancing like the Ghost of Christmas Present had shown up in person. He tilted his head back again and saw Gamzee grinning at him, and somehow as everything in the movie resolved itself they ended up beaming at each other like a pair of lunatics.

"Pity you pale, best friend," said Gamzee in Alternian, planting a quick peck of a kiss on Karkat's forehead. Karkat huffed and pushed him off.

"You too, you clown-worshiping nookdelver," he muttered, resettling himself so he was lying across his moirail's lap. "Always."

"And forever," Gamzee agreed. Karkat twitched another fragment of a smile his way.

Bill got to his feet again. "You boys want some more cocoa?" he asked, and chuckled when he was met with enthusiastic nodding. "Alright, alright..."

"What's that?"

Gamzee had looked away from the television they had been watching, which was now showing commercials, and was looking at one of the security monitors. Karkat followed his gaze and saw the otherwise unchanging picture briefly obscured by a storm of static.

"Huh, that is odd," Bill agreed. He frowned and glanced at the phone again. "Might be the electrics, after the lightning, but it's not hit any of the other monitors." He sighed and ran a hand over his hair. "I should by rights go and check it out, but..."

"You can't trust us alone," Karkat finished for him, looking back at where Gamzee had snapped the frame of the couch. Bill nodded. There was a moment of awkward silence, punctuated by a sudden crackle as a second monitor briefly dissolved into static.

Bill muttered something that Karkat couldn't quite make out, but which sounded rude. "Okay, looks like I need to go and see what's causing-" he broke off as a third screen burst into electrical chaos. Instead of clearing like the other two, it remained crackling with snowy static. The security guard looked round at the two trolls and frowned.

Karkat raised his hands. "Yeah, sure, whatever. You go save the empty mall from shitty wiring. We'll stay in here and sit on our hands like good little grubs."

The human still looked doubtful, so Gamzee chimed in. "Shit's all up and being motherfucking dry in here, what with how we ain't all up and being out in the motherfucking storm, and there's all up and being that motherfucking wicked food there," he said, nodding to the depleted pile of snacks and wriggling further down on the couch as if he had no intention whatsoever of ever leaving it.

Bill sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Okay. I’ll be back soon, so you kids just- you sit tight.” Drawing his taser, the security guard headed out into the corridor, pausing for an instant to look back at them before the door closed itself.

Karkat listened until the human’s footsteps had receded, then scrambled up off the couch. “Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here before he comes back,” he said, grabbing a few packages of whatever was closest to shove in his pockets for the road. Gamzee nodded, eyes haunted once again as he helped Karkat take as much of the food as was trollishly possible; Karkat spared a second to give his moirail a brief pap of reassurance, then stuck his head out into the corridor. Seeing nobody, he made the human finger gesture to a security camera and started to jog back out down the way they had come in, all his senses on high alert for danger.

It was still raining outside, the millions of drops forming a loud rumbling drum against the roof of the mall that almost drowned out the occasional claps of thunder. Karkat looked up through the skylight to see the pitch-black storm, and shuddered when he reminded himself that the alternative was to wait for the Bill human to deliver him and Gamzee to the cops. He could survive getting wet for a night, but what he’d done to the Asshole who’d been their foster father wasn’t going to be forgiven without blood and Gamzee couldn’t live in another place like that, especially without Karkat to look out for him.

“Guess he was all up and to being right,” Gamzee whispered, coming up behind Karkat as the smaller troll turned into the alcove and began to descend the stairs. “MOTHERFUCKER COULDN’T GET HIS TRUST ON OF US AFTER ALL.”

“That’s his fault for being a gullible human herdbeast,” Karkat hissed back. “Now shut up. Do you want him to hear…”

A cry of pain echoed through the mall, followed by peals of laughter. Karkat froze, Gamzee stumbling into him from behind and nearly knocking them both down the stairs. Karkat grabbed for the rail, wincing as a dull ache stabbed through his injured shoulder, and made shushing gestures with his free hand which Gamzee acknowledged with a thumb across his lips.

The laughter was replaced by a loud voice. The words were made indistinct by their bouncing journey through the mall, but Karkat recognized the tone; he’d heard it more often than he cared to remember. Somebody who liked to revel in their power over other people had found a new victim to torment, and judging by the accompanying jeers they had an audience for their fun.

Creeping down the steps to the ground floor, Karkat’s blood-pusher was racing at every shout and laugh and yell that filled the air. It had been bad enough to think about trying to sneak out of here with Bill to avoid, and he was obviously another one of those humans like the ones with the CPS who liked to think that they could help you with their meddling. Whoever these strangers were they weren’t even going to pretend to be kindly disposed. Gamzee’s hand slipped into his own, and Karkat gave it a small squeeze as he led his moirail to the edge of the alcove and peeked around the side.

He recognized the huddled lump on the floor as Bill instantly; even if his uniform hadn’t given it away, his brown skin stood out against the gray of the intruders. Half a dozen young trolls close to Karkat’s own age were standing around, each of them wearing a flame-patterned bandana somewhere on their person and a warm-colored symbol proudly over their otherwise rag-tag clothes. Karkat had seen troll gangs before, of course; he'd even considered joining one from time to time since ending up on the street. He would have to be pan-fried not to consider the benefits of having a few more people at his back, regular meals and a place to sleep, not to mention some prospect of actually achieving something- even if "something" in this context was a stolen TV empire. It was a pipe dream, though. Clade-based groups were right out and of the others, Karkat wasn't prepared to deal with the musclebeast shit of a group of trolls fanatic enough to be bound together by a cause- or the unfettered lunacy of an ego strong enough to pull a cult of personality around itself. Humans seemed to work differently but even more so than with trolls there wasn't a gang in the city that would take both him and Gamzee. Karkat wasn't abandoning his moirail for anything, no matter how tempting it seemed on the bad nights.

About two-thirds of the trolls were favoring limbs or holding what seemed to be injuries, but Bill was paying for his competence now. One of the trolls, a skinny girl who reminded Karkat of Sollux down to the sharp little fangs that overhung her lower lip, stepped forwards. The twisting loop of a symbol on her chest was cooler than the others, a vibrant lime green that was reflected in the sparkle of psionics that lit up her eyes.

"You think you strong, human?" she asked in English so heavily accented that Karkat felt embarrassed just listening to her. Just because it was a hideous mutilation of sounds that no decent being had any business considering a means of communication, didn't mean you could just ignore it in a city where it was the default lingua fucking franca.

Familiarity with how highbloods operated led Karkat into expecting that the gang leader would kick the old human, but instead a spark of green energy leaped from her palms and earthed in him. Bill jerked on the floor and groaned in pain. Behind Karkat, Gamzee let out a low growl, and the smaller troll reached back to slam a hand over his moirail's mouth. The other thing that most troll gangs had in common was a desire to ruin one or both of their days, and Karkat had no intention of drawing these fuckasses away from their current entertainment.

"You fuckin' nothing!" yelled the lime-blood, jolting Bill again. "You fuckin' shit, can't stop us, gonna take what we want! You planet dumb fucks, all weak, we gonna fuckin' rule!"

Her followers treated this less than articulate speech as if it was a lexicographical feast from the lips of the Condesce herself, dripping the rich nectar of wisdom and understanding that would save them from the overflowing cesspit that currently occupied their pan-space. A couple of them got overexcited and started to kick at the downed security guard, whose cries were getting weaker by the blow.

Karkat ignored the twitching in his eye, stiffened his jaw to make sure it stayed put, and turned his back on the scene. Gamzee was still holding his hand and there was a moment of resistance as he started to head for the doors to the street. The back of his neck prickled until he turned the corner, putting him and Gamzee out of sight of the crazy lowblood gang. He could sense that his moirail wanted to say something, but didn't dare to while the danger was still so close.

Karkat jerked in shock and nearly gave himself away with a yelp when he saw someone move up ahead of him; his fangs scraped a cut on his lip open again, and blood flooded his mouth as he belatedly recognized his own reflection in the door to the street. The dark night behind the wet glass made a shadowy mirror, an image of him and Gamzee clear enough to startle as the recently unlocked door swung and rattled in the wind of the storm.

"Best friend," Gamzee whispered, mouth close to his ear so that his words could be heard despite being barely more than a breath. Karkat whirled to glare at him, because he knew exactly what Gamzee was thinking and he was wrong. He barely suppressed the urge to grab his moirail by the shoulders and shake him and yell that of course he wanted to go back, wanted to help the fucking asshole who had fed them and given them cocoa and sat them in front of some dumbshit movie full of puppets celebrating bizarre alien pity-festivals like it meant something.

But if they did that- if they turned back- they would have to face a gang who outnumbered them three-to-one, not even accounting for psionics or the fact that Gamzee was still fucking shaking with withdrawal and could barely keep his thinkpan stitched together sober. And if they were successful, then what? The cops, the CPS, justice and foster homes? Fuck that noise. They were leaving, right now, because it was the only sensible decision to make. Karkat turned back to the door and froze at the sight of his reflection.

There was no Alternian word for deja vu, and Karkat had never had the need to learn any Earth-bound terms for the concept. But he felt it nonetheless, a deep and certain understanding that he had been here before, had stood in this place with his head tilted just so and his thinkpan set out in this exact pattern. He had made this same decision and then...

... his reflection stared at him, ghost-like, accusing eyes that he imagined redder than his own burning through his skin. He couldn't look away, imagining that the Karkat hidden in the translucent darkness was taller than he was, older. Angrier.

Lightning flashed and for an instant as it reflected off the raindrops Karkat could imagine a small glowing figure hovering over his reflection's shoulder. A second Ghost, showing a Future Karkat his own Christmas past. He didn't seem to like what he was seeing.

Gamzee's hand brushed his shoulder and Karkat jumped forwards. His reflection became just that, a simple mirror image, but now his thoughts were careening in a different direction. Nobody knew better than him that Past Karkat made the worst possible decisions every single time. If there were two ways a thing could go, Past Karkat would contrive to find a third, infinitely worse option just so he could hurtle down it like an oversized hoofbeast in a delicate crockery requisition store and destroy everything that might possibly have been salvageable about the future. Right now, his thinkpan full of Ghosts and Spirits and a glimpse of something impossible and unreal, Karkat was acutely aware that one day there would be a Future Karkat looking at what he did right now, and judging his choices. Somehow he didn't think he was getting a favorable opinion.

His foot bumped against something as he turned, and he looked down to see the weapon Bill had called a "Stun Gun" lying on the floor. He must have come to the door to investigate the disturbance and been ambushed, dropping the weapon as the gang dragged him out of sight of the street.

Karkat looked round to see Gamzee looking at him with a mixture of confusion, concern, and a twitching shaking anger that wasn't quite real. His crazy, beautiful, pitiful moirail. He had almost gone to cull him that night on the ship. Embracing him had been the stupidest, riskiest, most unbelievably impulsive and least survivable course of action Karkat had ever taken in his life, and it was the best thing he'd ever done.

"Yeah, fuck sensible," he said quietly, feeling a spreading sense of calmness starting to fill him up from the belly out. "I'm going to save the human douchebag from those bulgelicking assholes like the fucking awesome badass threshecutioner I practically am anyway. Not that I need help from a flaky asshat clown, but- you with me?"

Gamzee's eye twitched and he grinned. "Shit, best friend, you all up and got to be knowing I just want to MOT-”

Karkat slammed a hand across Gamzee's mouth before he could yell and give them away. Silently he looked up into the other boy's eyes, two pairs of gray irises flecked with colors that were more wildly different than any artist's wheel would suggest meeting in conference. After a small eternity, Karkat lowered his hand and stepped back, stooping to pick up the stun gun from the floor.

"I've got the leader," he whispered. Gamzee nodded and then grabbed Karkat into a sudden, one-armed hug, burying his face in the crook between the smaller troll's neck and shoulder. For once Karkat didn't try to fight or wriggle out of it, instead closing his eyes to take a deep breath of Gamzee and hold it for a second without even complaining about the damage to his cartilage nub from foul odors.

They pulled apart at the same time and Karkat led the way back to the corner. He paused before stepping out and shared one last look with Gamzee, who crouched down and smiled, eyes burning with predatory hunger. Karkat glanced back around the corner, at where two of the gang were attempting to rip the metal shutters off the front of a shop while the rest stood around the still form of Bill, and the leader paced impatiently to and fro. This wasn't the most idiotic thing he'd ever done, but it was close. Karkat was amazed at how utterly calm he felt about it, like he'd just somehow stumbled across some deep and endless well of peace buried inside himself.

Great, I'm doing something so stupid the panic centers of my thinkpan have actually shut down. Karkat snorted at the thought, adjusted his grip on the stun gun, and strolled out with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slouching to hide how tense he was all over. He got within a few yards of the group before one of them spotted him; a brown-blood with arms wider than Karkat's legs turned towards him, and shouted a warning.

A bolt of green lightning left a smoking crack in the floor just in front of Karkat. He stopped and stared at it, wondering just how nookstuffingly retarded he had been to bring an electrical weapon to a fight with a psionic who threw fucking lightning. He looked back up into six glares, all of the gang members reaching for weapons as their eyes tracked him.

"Hey, stranger," said the leader, and fuck it all because her Alternian was drawling and loaded with the same sort of rough accent that Karkat had heard in crowds of lowbloods on the ship. He guessed that she must have grown up hiding out among the yellow-bloods or something; no way a lime-blood made it as long as she had on Alternia without staying hemoanonymous or registering a fake color. Just like he'd done, once.

"Hey, fuckface," he replied, knowing that his own cozy suburban accent was probably going to ping a little high for them but hoping that his decidedly lowblood vocabulary would keep them guessing long enough. "Is this the way you always extend the celebrational roll-up floor covering for new friends, or am I getting an extra-fucking-special treatment?"

The lime-blood's eyes narrowed. "New friyends?"

Karkat risked taking a step closer and pulled his empty hand out of his pocket, biting into his thumb and holding it up as the first few drops of bright mutant red oozed out. He had to work to crush the flash of inner turmoil as he put his blood on display, the ingrained panic and shame that had grown over the sweeps from that first bitter instant of knowledge of what he was. The branches and roots dug into every part of him now, a reflexive shield from the deadly danger of being a genetic freak on a world where deviation from accepted standards was a capital offense.

A slow smirk spread across the lime-blood's face, but she didn't move a step. “So you're a mutant,” she said. “So the fuck what? You thiynk you can just butt iynto our business, you can thiynk agaiyn.”

Karkat decided to be daring and take another step, lowering his hand and shoving it back in his pocket. “Don't give me that musclebeast shit,” he said, glaring back at her smug face and silently praying that he wouldn't fuck this up. “I can see your symbol from here, bulgemunch, and I know you know what it's like. I'm fucking sick of being nothing, of hiding and running and being treated like shit when I know I'm better than that.” He took another step; still no reaction from the watching gang, but Karkat's blood-pusher skipped a pulse when Bill groaned and shifted on the floor. He couldn't force his eyes to keep looking forwards, so instead he nodded towards the human on the floor. “That fuckass has been making my already astronomically awful day worse. At this point I'd want to join up with you just for the opportunity to express the sheer volcanic intensity of my hatred for his disgusting tert face.”

A chuckle spread through the gang members, and the lime-blood nodded. “You got a name, mutant?” she asked.

Like fuck was he telling her that. “Sollux,” he said, glaring at her as if daring her to challenge him and hoping like fuck that she was too dumb to know the real name of the Helmsman.

The lime-blood took a step back from the collapsed security guard, presenting him to Karkat with a small wave. “Well then, Sollux, be my guest,” she said, snickering. “Consiyder iyt the fiyrst step of your iyniytiyatiyon.”

Karkat stepped closer, swallowing as the other trolls started to whoop and jeer. Bill shifted as he got closer; the man's head lifted a little, just enough for Karkat to make out the glint of disappointment in one dark eye. He hadn't understood a single word of the Alternian speech; Karkat realized that based on tone and body language, it really did look like he was joining up with the lowblood gang. Which was good, of course, because that meant he was convincing. But he felt somehow guilty that he couldn't tell Bill what he was doing.

Not that he won't figure it out in a moment. Karkat strolled up to beside the human and looked down at him dispassionately, still feeling that weird center of calm in his digestive bladder.

“Go on, then!” the lime-blood urged. Karkat looked round at her, then turned his whole body to put her in reach of both his arms.

“Hey, do you know anything about this human holiday crap?” he asked, pulling one hand out to wave at all the decorations in the mall. The lime-blood looked at him for a moment, then snorted with suppressed laughter.

“Who even giyves a shiyt?” she asked, between giggles. Karkat glanced back at Bill, took a moment to hope that Gamzee hadn't wandered off or gone to sleep in the last couple of minutes.

“Yeah, that's what I fucking figured,” he said, in English. His shoulder ached with the speed he demanded of it pulling the stun gun out of his pocket, and the fraction of an instant it took the lime-blood to start reacting made her too late to knock his strike aside. She caught it on her arm, which didn't make any fucking difference when fifty thousand volts plus slammed into her. She dropped like a rock; green lightning crackled around her head and short-circuited when Karkat followed her down with the weapon and shocked her again.

He didn't have much time to be relieved that it had worked, though, not when the other five trolls were producing knives and gripping baseball bats. One of them was starting to emanate a misty brown glow of his very own. Karkat pulled his lips back and hissed at them in challenge, knowing as he did it that the gesture was futile. The moment he stopped holding the stun gun close to the lime-blood he would be the one to get zapped, but if he didn't move then he was an easy target.

The terror crashed down like a tidal wave breaking, a suffocating blanket of delirious horror that knocked the world instantly into nightmare. Karkat's hand shook as he kept it hovering by the side of the lime-blood, her eyes filled with panic as they met his. He gritted his teeth, forced himself to stand steady in the face of the jagged laughing madness that was trying to seep into every corner of his think-sponge.

If it was bad for him and the lime-blood, it was worse for the lower-blooded trolls around them. Karkat heard sobbing and screams of terror, followed by clattering weapons and racing footsteps as the gang turned tail and ran. Silence fell in the mall, disrupted only by the rattle of rain and the occasional peal of thunder.

Footsteps came towards them and Karkat froze his limbs in place, fighting not to turn or run. His captive had no reason to be so controlled, and her eyes widened as she looked past him to see Gamzee walking up.

“Traitor,” she hissed in Alternian, spitting in Karkat's face. He wiped the glob of green saliva off his cheek with the sleeve of his free hand and jabbed her with the stun gun again. She whimpered in pain as her jaw locked up.

“That's my moirail, grubfucker,” he told her in English. “And you are fucking ruining Christmas.”

A thin hand with long, sharp fingers reached down past him and twisted in the front of her t-shirt. Karkat slipped to the side as Gamzee bodily hauled the lime-blood to her feet, ready to strike with the stun gun again if she so much as twitched wrong.

Gamzee brought her face up close to his, giving her a lazy smile that belied the waves of cloying fear that still rolled off him. “Motherfucking humbug,” he said, eyes glittering madly. “GET THE FUCK OUT.”

He tossed her to the floor and she landed hard, grunting on impact before levering herself up on her elbows. Karkat narrowed his eyes and tried to hold the stun gun menacingly, which was fucking difficult with a little black box thing. Gamzee chuckled and his chucklevoodoos swelled as he took a step forwards.

“Fuck!” The lime-blood scrambled to her feet and started running for the exit. Gamzee whooped and took off after her, chasing on her heels but very carefully not catching up until she slammed through the glass door and vanished into the storm-wracked streets of LA. Gamzee stopped on the threshold and watched her go, snarling. Karkat walked slowly up behind Gamzee, circling round him before reaching up to put a hand on his shoulder. Gamzee looked down as if only just noticing he was there and growled. A jolt of psionic fright ran up Karkat's spinal column.

“Shoosh,” he whispered, making himself look directly into his moirail's confused, hostile stare. Gamzee's pupils were narrowed to almost nothing, thin slits of hatred and fury that were hardly even troll-like any more. “Shoosh,” Karkat repeated, putting his other hand on Gamzee's waist.

Slowly at first, gathering speed like a toppling tree, Gamzee fell onto him. Karkat gently lowered himself to the floor with his moirail, shooshing him as he jerked and thrashed in perfect silence until the only movement Gamzee made was a slight trembling.

“Hooonk,” Gamzee whispered. Karkat shooshed him again and moved one hand up to pet his head.

“It's okay,” he said. “You did good, grubmunch.”

The sound of footsteps alerted him again. Karkat looked up to see Bill approaching; the human was limping slightly, but smiled as he drew close.

“Thanks, son,” he said. Karkat blinked at him tiredly, then reached into his pocket and tossed something to Bill. The security guard caught it and raised his eyebrows in surprise as he saw what it was.

“A cellphone?”

“That crazy limeblood bitch was carrying it,” Karkat said quietly. He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against Gamzee's. “You wanted a phone, right?”

The man looked down at the cellphone again. “You know, I need to call the police about this,” he said, waving back in the direction of the vandalized shopfront. “I got the impression earlier you didn't much want to meet them.”

Karkat shrugged. “We'll figure something out,” he lied, knowing that even if he was in a fit state to come up with a plan Gamzee wasn't going to be doing much of any use for a while. “We've made it this far.”

Bill nodded. “Well, I guess it's a real shame that the security tapes all got fried by that electric girl,” he said, sounding nowhere near disappointed. “In fact, if the cops didn't see you here, the only way they'd know you were ever here was if I told them.”

Head shooting up, Karkat stared at the man. To his astonishment, the human winked. “You boys better go hide in the grotto,” he said. “I'll get a blanket from the security office for you.”

“I-” Karkat started. The man shook his head.

“You didn't have to do what you did, son,” he said. “Now, I don't know why you're so set on avoiding police attention, but I think I've seen enough to make some guesses, and enough to know that I'm happy to give you a hand anyway.”

Karkat didn't miss the way the man's eyes flickered to Gamzee when he mentioned guesses, but he decided not to correct the false impression. He got slowly to his feet, helping his moirail up and setting out back towards the plastic hut that he presumed to be the grotto Bill meant.

An arm blocked his path, and he looked round to glare at the human. Bill smiled. “I'm going to need the stun gun too, son,” he said. “If for no other reason than the need to make sure that our psionic friend back there did what I'm saying she did.”

Karkat swallowed, then nodded in understanding and passed over the small black device. Bill gave him a brief salute then turned and headed back for the security office, presumably to start destroying strategic amounts of evidence. Karkat supposed he was going to blame the damage to the couch on the gang, too, which meant making a mess of the place; it was a good thing there was plenty of blood and electrical damage out in the mall, because if they were lucky the cops wouldn't look too far past the obvious.

Gamzee was practically a dead weight as Karkat dragged him back towards the grotto; fortunately Bill had opened up the hinged door section at the front of the makeshift wall, because Karkat couldn't see any way to get his moirail through the loose board in this state. It was different, walking up the queue line now; when he looked at the fake snow and ice, he saw the thin layers of white that had shaded Scrooge's cold past, and the cheerful plastic animals and warm decorations were clear signs of the joyful spirit of Christmas Present.

It was still completely grubfucking retarded, of course- who tries to chase off deadly, lonely cold with a few bright colors and lights, even if they don't associate those things with blood and death? But it was all less threatening now that Karkat knew what it was supposed to mean. He couldn't help a small smirk as he laid Gamzee down in the back of the hut and realized that it was meant to represent a shelter, a haven from the brutal weather outside. It sure as fuck was that now, if not in quite the same way as originally intended.

Gamzee's fingers brushed his cheek. “You're all up and looking like you got your think all on, best friend,” he said. His voice was too quiet, too steady, and Karkat shooshed him again as he lay down next to his moirail and wrapped an arm around him in the dark.

“Just thinking this human Christmas shit isn't so bad,” he said. Gamzee chuckled.

“MOTHERFUCKING RIGHTEOUS,” he said, turning his head so that his nose was in Karkat's ear and then going still. Karkat lay there a little while longer, listening as his moirail's breathing grew slower and faded into sleep. Small pulses of chucklevoodoos ran down his spine, but Karkat shrugged them off.

He was tired, but not hungry; about ten pounds of junk food in his gut had seen to that. He'd dried out while watching the film, he was warm, he had his moirail and even though his life still sucked diseased horrorterror bulges and didn't look like it was getting better any time soon, he felt pretty good about saving the pathetic human asshole. It didn't make any sense, but there it was; Karkat was happy.

The feeling of warmth and comfort spread through Karkat's thinkpan as he closed his eyes, pushing back Gamzee's stray psionics and filling his dreams with strange thoughts. Karkat was on a world he'd never seen before, a dim bluish sun casting a strange light over the garden he stood in and outlining the edge of what had to be a vast gas planet hanging in the purple sky. He looked around, recognizing some of the plants as terrestrial and some as Alternian, and wondering at some of the stranger ones as he wandered through the garden. It took a while for it to occur to him that everything was too big, looming over him as if he were still a tiny wiggler.

There was a path in the garden, leading uphill to a towering hive that sprouted from the garden like one of the plants, painted in strong blocks of black, red, and tyrian purple. A glittering indigo sea was spread out behind it and Karkat hesitated, feeling distant pangs of sadness and fear for reasons he couldn't quite place.

“There you are!” He turned to see a wiggler running towards him, a girl no more than two sweeps old and the same diminutive height as he was if you didn't count the two horns that rose from her head like a pair of outward-facing parentheses. Her black curls didn't disguise her seadweller's fins, and her chubby face was split with a wide grin.

Karkat moved with his body, following the only natural path through the dream and turning towards her just as she collided with him and knocked him down. The two of them sprawled out on the path and Karkat yelped in pain; raising his hands, he saw that the palms had been scraped raw and red.

“Urgh,” the girl said and he looked over to see her examining a hole in the knee of her trousers, tyrian blood seeping from the skin. Something distant in him fluttered in panic, but in the dream he only grinned as she looked up at him.

“Wuss!” he crowed, jumping to his feet and running for the house- for the hive, it was a hive, why would he think house?

“No way!” his playmate yelled, giving chase. “Like I'm letting you beat me to dinner!”

Karkat laughed as he reached the doorstep, turning for a moment to celebrate his triumph. “Watch me!” he shouted. “Merry Christmas, sucker!”

The girl shouted a rude word and increased her pace as Karkat turned to go through the door, certain in the knowledge that there was someone inside to clean his hands and pass him treats before dinner even though he wasn't supposed to fill up on snacks.

He woke up suddenly, filled with a familiar sense of hollow loss that immediately made his eyes water. Karkat pushed the feeling down and sat up, the emptiness giving way to panic as he realized that Gamzee wasn't there. He jumped up, hardly noticing the two layered blankets that fell off him, and charged outside only to be brought up short when he saw his moirail sitting cross-legged on the fake snow of the grotto with the troll security guard from yesterday- Halyna, Bill had said her name was- and a man in a fat red suit, all talking softly.

Halyna looked up as Karkat approached and smiled, waving him closer. “Hey, brat, guess who came to visit?” she said, in nearly flawless English. The man in red turned to face him and Karkat stared, because behind the fake white fluffy beard and the oversized hood the human was obviously Bill.

“Ho, ho, ho!” the human said, getting to his feet awkwardly with all the stuffing shoved down his front. “Nice to meet you, Karkat!”

Karkat shot a glare at Gamzee, who shrugged. “Shit, brother, I ain't all up for saying a no to the motherfucking fat man.”

Bill-the-costumed waved a finger at Gamzee. “Now, now, son. Let's have none of that language. What did I say about the naughty list?”

“Said I motherfucking ain't on it this year,” Gamzee replied smugly. “And my motherfucking miracle bro all ain't up and being on no motherfucking wicked naughty lists neither on account of all up and being big motherfucking heroes.”

“What the taintchafing fuck is a naughty list?” Karkat demanded, claiming a spot on the ground next to his moirail and sinking hesitantly down to sit on it. “And why are you wearing that bulb-scorching monstrosity of a suit?”

“Well, son, I'm Santa Claus,” the man said. “Something like the Ghost of Christmas Present, except I keep a list all year of all the boys and girls and whether they've been naughty or nice.”

“Yeah?” Karkat said, deciding that it was probably better to play along with the delusional human- not least because Gamzee seemed beside himself with delight at the entire thing. “What do you do, cull anyone who doesn't meet your standards? Is that where the red comes from?”

Bill frowned. “No, son, I travel across the world at Christmas and give presents to all the good boys and girls.”

Karkat snorted. “And you think we're good?”

“You saved the life of my dear friend and colleague Bill Morgan last night,” said Halyna, not even looking at Bill as he sat back down next to her. “And you didn't have to do that, y'know? In fact, as I heard it, you had some pretty solid reasons not to.” She smiled at them, her eyes crinkling with good humor. “Now, I'll admit I ain't an expert on human Christmas, but I don't think that helping him was naughty.”

Karkat's eyes shifted to the colorful sack lying next to Bill and felt a small flicker of excitement. “Presents?” he asked, mildly ashamed of himself for acting like an excitable wiggler.

The beard wiggled as Bill beamed at him. “Well, of course, son!” He reached into the sack and started to pull something out. “Now, I'm sorry that this isn't wrapped, but there wasn't much time,” he said, passing Karkat a backpack. The young troll took it and nearly dropped it when it turned out to be heavier than he had expected; a second backpack appeared and was passed to Gamzee.

“It's all a bit last-minute,” the troll woman added. “There's not many places open early on Christmas day.”

Karkat opened his backpack and pulled out a warm fleecy blanket; underneath, he saw clear plastic boxes filled with food and packets of snacks, and a balled-up garment that when pulled out and shaken proved to be a thick hoodie to replace Karkat's torn one.

“I helped contribute the food,” Halyna added, as Gamzee dug a new pair of sneakers out of his backpack. Karkat scooted over to peek and saw a second pair for him, next to Gamzee's new hoodie and a small stack of what looked like wiggler books.

“You should learn to read English,” Bill said when Karkat pulled one out. Karkat nodded absently and tossed it back into the pack, wondering if there was anyone he knew of who would buy wiggler books.

“Thanks,” he said, pulling out one of the containers of food to examine it more closely. He saw raw red meat and fragments of chipped bone, floating in a golden, sticky sauce. Things that no human would ever think of eating, and which had become almost impossible to get hold of since leaving Quarantine because, big fucking surprise, human food outlets didn't like selling troll food.

“We also looked up the address of a shelter,” Bill said. “Specializes in Alternians, so you don't have to worry about food you can't eat and crowded rooms you can't sleep in.” He looked between Gamzee and the spot where Karkat was rubbing his still-aching shoulder and smiled, although his eyes were worried. “There's even a clinic attached, if you need it.”

“The thing is, it's the only one in the city like it,” Halyna added. “And it's probably going to be crowded.”

“So we thought, since it's Christmas, that you might want to spend the day with us here,” Bill said. “Halyna's got some more food for the three of you waiting in the office, and I don't think we can call you kids educated on Christmas until you've seen It's A Wonderful Life.”

“And we'll have a word with the rest of the guys,” Halyna added. “So if you ever need a place to hide out from the rain again, we should have you covered.”

Karkat opened his mouth, then closed it again, then looked over at Gamzee. His moirail beamed back at him; he was still shaking, but Karkat knew that his palemate was in control of himself for the moment at least.

“Sounds like it's all up and to being a pretty motherfucking bitchtits offer,” he said. “And I checked, bro- there ain't even being no kinds of strings attached, on account of how it's all up and being that Christmas thing.”

Karkat chewed on his lip, looked over at the two security guards. It didn't seem real, to be getting so much for nothing.

But it's not nothing, is it? he reminded himself. You did this. Last night, when you saved the human instead of leaving him to die. Looking at it like that, all this was just the least that Bill owed them- but somehow Karkat didn't think that was the reason he was being so kind. After all, he'd been decent to start with, even when he'd had them as prisoners.

It really was “that Christmas thing”, Karkat realized. Being randomly nice to people for no fucking reason whatsoever, and trusting that somehow the world would become a better place because of it. Sounded like complete pan-fried lunacy to him- but it had worked, hadn't it? Because if Bill hadn't been good to them, he would have been facing that gang alone last night, and if Karkat hadn't been good to Bill, he and Gamzee would be shivering in an alley or huddled under a bus shelter right now rather than warm, dry, and the proud owners of a decent blanket, new shoes and clothes, a fuckton of food and a shiny new bolthole.

So maybe- just for one day- it was okay to believe that someone gave a shit.

“Alright,” said Karkat, getting to his feet and giving Gamzee a hand up. “I'll go along with this shithive clown convention and have a Merry fucking Christmas on one condition.”

“What's that?” Bill asked. Karkat narrowed his eyes at the man.

“Lose the fucking Santa Suit.”

The empty mall filled with laughter, and not caring that winter in California was far from snowy white, or that Alternia's darkest and coldest seasons were half a galaxy away, Christmas arrived like the motherfucking miracle it truly was.