Chapter Text
There’s a new killer in Alternia City.
Your name is Karkat Vantas, and technically-speaking, not every criminal this damn city spits out is your problem; the Skaia Network isn’t a police force, not even its significantly rough-and-tumble Alternian branch, which you’re Director of for your many fucking sins. Technically -speaking, you’re supposed to be a relief organization, an investigative agency, an oversight for police and governmental forces, a support team for the average joe schmo off Alternia’s foggy streets.
Realistically-speaking, you’re all of those things, of course—but also at least 75% citizen’s militia. So fucking sue you. The cops in Alternia city don’t care to clear the radioactive alligators out of the sewers, or do exorcisms for people, or help with the goddamn food drives for that matter. You’re a tough badass with a heart of steel but there’s a lot of people who need help in this city—your city—and you’re only human.
Or at least, you used to be.
Nobody in your line of work stays 100% human for long. You made it to eighteen, a stupid kid with big dreams about being some big military hero, before you ignored every warning from the smarter people in your life and signed up for a program that promised to make you special. Paramilitary, very hush-hush, not for normal soldiers. Best and brightest only. Everything your stupid ass ever wanted.
The Skaia Network dug you out of a holding cell two years later, halfway feral, furious and terrified by your own mutant body and in a pretty significant amount of constant pain. You probably could have joined them then, if you’d given them time to make a pitch; instead, you’d bolted into the night as soon as somebody took their eyes off you. Back to Alternia, where everybody’s a freak, and the constant cloud cover left you some shadows to hide in. And you’ve stayed here ever since.
Alternia doesn’t act like it gives a shit about you, and that’s why you hate it, and why you love it. Nobody in Alternia asks you prying, kind little questions about what kind of experimental bullshit you signed up for fresh out of boot camp. Nobody cares what you let assholes do to you, high off of promises about military conquest and national glory and whatever the fuck, or who you killed when you found out it was a load of bullshit that they never actually expected you to survive. Alternia City didn’t give a shit what had been put on you, forced into you, fused around you. What kind of being the flexing armor of spiked crabshell carapace on your skin came from. It didn’t matter you could taste the rot on your tongue sometimes, or hear the echo of the dead thing that was part of you, now.
This fucking awful city took you in regardless. And you loved it for that. So you’d clawed your way back to humanity, one burning inch at a time, and found your friends, and set out to fix it.
It’s definitely gotten easier, in the years since the Skaia Network took notice of your dirt-poor vigilante squad and deigned to reach out. You’d already had the team; a scrappy group of Alternia-born assholes, freaks and bastards. Skaia gave you the rest. Money and power, expert advice, backup, a good reputation. You trust them, despite yourself—you don’t know what the military had planned for you after you savaged the asshole excuse for a scientist who’d been experimenting on you, but you’d been locked up in a holding cell long enough to think of some pretty horrific possibilities, and you had no reason to think anyone would come and bail your ass out.
SkaiaNet didn’t even give you shit for bolting, which was awfully fucking generous of them, considering you know for a fact you were the only living evidence they had for their raid and you must have made a lot of days harder when you vanished into the night. They would have been pretty justified to hunt you down back when you escaped, even; they had no way of knowing the red-eyed, raving, biting kid covered in dried blood was five years from being offered a partnership in their organization. But they didn’t. They got you out, and let you live your life. So. That’s worth a little respect, you think. Just a crumb of trust, at least.
With SkaiaNet behind you, you’ve gone from a handful of kids doing haphazard vigilante shit out of a condemned shithole office to eleven kickass agents of justice doing much less haphazard vigilante shit out of a repurposed brownstone. The cops still don’t like you, but they don’t try to arrest you anymore. When you set up a community outreach, people trust it’s not going to be an organ-harvesting scam.
When some kind of supernatural asshole starts murdering people and the cops aren’t getting shit done about it, people look to you to do something.
You don’t know the Apostle yet, what kind of bad news he’s going to be, but you sure as fuck know the bastards he works for; the Scratch are one of the worst gangs this shithole has to offer. They’ve terrorized Alternia for more than a decade; murdering, stealing artifacts, kidnapping people and doing god knows what kind of experiments and rituals with them. They seem to have their own agenda, whatever the fuck that might be—as long as you continue to smack them away from every possible win you can, you don’t give a shit.
You owe the Scratch an ass-kicking. They owe you—
You don’t think about the things they’ve taken from you. You just fucking stop them. However, whenever, whatever you have to do.
The Apostle doesn’t look like one of the Scratch’s masked goons, in their stupid green suits. You only have one picture, despite weeks of Sollux trying to put a file together; it’s a blurry cellphone shot from a long way away, of a skinny, shirtless figure halfway through punching someone through a window. He looks almost skeletal, maybe a little lighter brown than you, and his hair’s dark; that’s about the most you can make out.
The tabloids were the ones who called him the Apostle, because if you know nothing else about him at least his M.O. is pretty damn consistent. He comes after a specific person, popping up out of nowhere on the twelfth of the month, immediately frying any camera that could catch a picture of him. Then he threatens his victim, and anybody else caught in the crossfire, into saying some kind of fucked up prayer—whatever thing he works for, however he does it, that shit seems to fuck up their heads, because so far none of the survivors have been willing or able to give any details about him or about what he said. Just that he had them pray.
His target, and the ones who don’t pray, he executes. Then he scrawls the familiar fanged-skull symbol on the wall, in paint or blood or whatever comes to hand, and fucking vanishes.
“Whoever this asshole is,” Sollux concludes, and flips past a crime scene photo of the latest case. “He doesn’t like cameras. I’ve started tracking outages and shit, so we’ll at least have a warning when he shows up, but there’s going to be a lot of junk data if that’s all we’re going on. If we’re going to stop him, we gotta get ahead of him.”
You’re in the briefing room on the ground floor of the brownstone; Sollux and Equius ripped out part of a wall years ago when you first moved in, and set up a screen, and there are eight or ten mismatched chairs set up in front of it like the world’s shittiest movie theater. It’s rare that all eleven of you are back at base at the same time; this is serious shit, and right now there are nine of you crowded in, with the blinds pulled down so the gray, rainy light from outside doesn’t wash out the screen.
“The other Scratch thugs don’t care about cameras,” you say, and Sollux snaps his fingers and points at you. “And it doesn’t look like he’s got anything on his face in that picture, unless it’s the same color as the rest of him. None of the poor sons of bitches he fucks up can tell us what he looks like, but nobody’s completely invisible, not even in Alternia—why the fuck does he care if people know what he looks like?”
“Ambush predator?” Nepeta suggests, and her tone is bright but her eyes are fixed on the Apostle in the picture like a cat watching its prey, taking in every detail. “If people know what he looks like, they’re ready for him.”
“Or, uh. He could be someone people would recognize…?” Tavros says, tiredly. He just came back from Skaia City, where it’s apparently much sunnier than it ever is in Alternia; his brown skin looks sunburned across his nose and cheeks, and his prosthetics have rubbed sore, pink lines across the stumps of his thighs. “If he doesn’t want anybody to see him, and uh. He does something to the witnesses’ brains. Has anybody, uh… Anybody people would recognize, have they gone missing? Recently?”
“Or not all that recently,” Eridan says. He has his feet up on a table, and he looks like he’s trying really, really hard to look casual, but his arms are crossed over his chest and between his ridiculous number of rings you can see that his knuckles are white with how hard he’s digging his nails into his own arms. “Takes a while, turnin’ somebody into a killer, let alone a halfway-decent one.”
“We don’t know he’s a prisoner, either,” Feferi says, and you see one of her hands slip out, subtly, just to touch the back of Eridan’s neck. He twitches and then takes a deep breath, and his shoulders relax a fraction of an inch. Feferi smiles, but much more tightly than usual. She’s always pale, but whenever the Scratch comes up, all the color she does have drains out of her face. She says, “I mean, we’ve never figured out for sure why the rest of the Scratch do all wear masks! We’ve been trying to nail down whether or not they have sleeper agents outside their hideout, we don’t know this guy isn’t out in public right now.”
Kanaya says, “...Was the man he killed in this photograph very short?”
“What?” says Sollux. “I mean…I don’t know, I’ll look. Why?”
“Because the posture and movement he was photographed in make it hard to tell,” Kanaya says, without taking her eyes off the photo, brows drawn down like she’s irritated with it for lying to her. “...But I think the Apostle must be at least half a head taller, standing upright. And unless his victim is quite small, that means our culprit is significantly taller than average.”
“I mean, not…” Sollux starts, and then squints at the picture again, head on one side. Sparks flash around the implants on his cheeks and temples, and things move on the computer screen, roughly sketching the two bodies and then straightening them into an estimation of a standing position. “Well, shit. Good eye, KN. The guy he killed was five-eleven…Ass-postle’s probably more than six-five. Could be more, damn.”
“We’re sure he doesn’t have a pattern?”
Terezi is remote-calling from one of the safehouses, far across Alternia’s seedy, reaching sprawl; she’s been listening with interest, and now she’s tapping her cane against her chin thoughtfully.
She says, “He’s consistent on his timing. Once a month, on the twelfth. That implies there is some amount of plan, which makes it hard for me to believe that the rest of the details are simply drawn from a hat. Humans don’t tend to work that way, you know!”
“We are already well aware that whatever is running the Scratch seems to be hardly human, though,” says Kanaya. She’s fiddling with her lipstick, turning it over and over again between her fingers. “Perhaps complete randomness is the point?”
“And we already know how hard they are to track,” Feferi says, voice uncharacteristically hard and quiet. One of her hands rises to rub absently at her bare arm, tracing the fading white lines of scars across white skin. “If they had a pattern…” she trails off. You don’t look at her.
If they had a pattern, you would have found them already. If they had a pattern, you would have found—
“Nothing hangs together as a pattern,” Sollux says, and mercifully fails to tell you exactly how many different ways he ran the data—you haven’t let him tell you what an algorithm is in all the years you’ve known him, and you’re not inclined to let him talk about it now. Wildly badass self-experiments aside, Sollux is still the biggest fucking nerd you know and you make sure to tell him so frequently.
If this was just a series of break-ins, or some kind of self-aggrandizing would-be supervillain creep in a mask, you’d be ragging on him about it right now. For some fucking reason, serial murder has you in a much less sunny mood.
“Community connections, career, socioecon and religion were my big guesses, and that got me jack-shit,” Sollux says, immediately proving you wrong for giving him the benefit of the doubt. He waves a hand; red and blue sparks crawl across his eyelashes, and a few feet away the keys click untouched on his laptop. On the screen, files scroll by, faces flickering past. “Most of these guys are just, private fuckin’ citizens, a lot of them barely even live in the city! As far as we know some asshole’s picking off a randomizer just to keep people scared. Just your fuckin’…once-a-month murder.”
“How many are we at,” you say. Your head is aching, a sharp point of pain behind one eye. You buckle down, and ignore it. “How is this getting to us now? ”
“Eleven,” Sollux says, and flips absently through a few more cases. “Started a year ago. And of course the fuckin’ cops didn’t notify us until month five, and wouldn’t hand over their case files until month nine. I’ve been trying to sort out their good data from their dead-end garbage ever since—”
“Wait,” says Tavros. “Go back a picture.”
Sollux flips back; Tavros sits up sharply, frowning, staring at the photo on the screen.
“I know that guy,” he says. “That’s, uh, Mr Kapoor, he ran the corner store down the road from our old apartment. He was a friend of my dad’s.”
“…Huh,” says Sollux, slowly, and flips to the next photo, leaving it up. “Dolores Kellemarcy?”
“That’s—oh,” says Kanaya, and covers her mouth with one hand. “…I know—she’s one of my uncle’s ex-wives. I never knew her well, I didn’t know she—”
Sollux flips through more slowly, this time, reads off the names, the employment details—every face or name, eventually, sparks a memory. Some of them closer, some of them more distant; one for every person in the room. Even Aradia, from wherever—whenever—she is; a tall, imposing woman in a suit comes up on screen, and an email notification pops up at the same moment.
That one is for me
-A
Sent 292024 days ago from my ???
There’s quiet for a second after Sollux finishes scrolling through. Then Kanaya sits back in her chair, hands folded very still in her lap, and says, “Fuck.”
“Yeah, fuck, ” you agree, and push yourself up, pacing, trying to work out the sick, angry jitters in your stomach. Fiddling absentmindedly with the ring on a chain around your neck, feeling out the gold band and the three settings, more familiar than the back of your own chitinous hand. You’d heard, a year ago, that your high school guidance counselor had died—you hadn’t heard that it was murder. The fact that it could be because of you, because you liked him, because he knew you—your stomach is churning. “This is a message, it’s a fucking message, it’s gotta be.”
“He’s already killed someone for each of us,” says Equius, slow and heavy and deliberate. “Eleven months. Eleven deaths. If there was a time to draw something from this pattern, it’s already passed.”
There should be twelve of you. A few faces glance at you—you don’t look back at any of them, because why the fuck would you?
“If we do know anything about the Scratch, their bullshit fake-ass god likes making a show,” Vriska says, from Terezi’s video call. “I bet they try something big, since it’s been a year. But this time, we nail this showoff punk to the fucking wall!”
Things tend to come true, when she says them that confidently. You have to fucking hope.
“Well, we’ve got two days,” Sollux says. “If he hits the same day he has been. I’ll hand what we’ve got to the cops, whatever good that’ll do. And I’ll see what I can do about monitoring for power cutoffs—” he sighs, working the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Looks like another all-nighter. If I call code red, we gotta scramble. Got it?”
“We’ll be ready,” you say. “I don’t like Terezi and Vriska being on their own with this shit going down. Tavros, go back them up. Everybody else, stay sharp.”
“My sweet chocolate cherry, you do care,” Terezi coos, and you find the wherewithal to at least flip her off before she cackles and hangs up.
“Sir, yessir,” says Eridan morosely. He wears longer sleeves than Feferi, but by the way his hands are rubbing slowly up and down his arms, he hasn’t forgotten about the scars any more than she has.
“Equius, help Sollux with whatever the fuck he’s doing to the power grid.”
“Yes,” says Equius, and nothing else. You catch Nepeta’s eye and nod in his direction, and she sighs and nods as well, heading over to rub a hand gently back and forth over one of Equius’s huge, scarred shoulders. Equius breathes out, and leans minutely into it.
“Kanaya, can you get all this reported back to HQ?”
“I’m sure Rose will be awake,” says Kanaya. “I’ll have her pass it along.”
Rose Lalonde always seems to be awake, no matter what hour you contact HQ—but also it’s the middle of the afternoon, and there are plenty of people at HQ who would also be awake. Kanaya’s cheeks are too deep of a brown to show a blush, but she’s avoiding your eyes. You follow the ancient hallowed rules of bro code and don’t fucking comment.
“Karkat?” says Feferi.
You didn’t hear her get closer, in the sound of everybody moving around and pushing chairs away; she’s standing at your elbow when you turn, watching you from just a little too close. Her eyes are still wrong, even after all these years, irises wide and reddish-purple in her milk-pale face, pupils a little too square and oblong and reflecting light wrong. The color of her blood went back to normal eventually, she stopped being so…empty. But only because something stepped in to fill the hole.
“Eridan and I can try to get more information,” she says. “If you want.”
You glance at Eridan; he’s standing a few feet away with his arms still crossed and doesn’t look pleased, but he’s not arguing either. His eyes are a little bluer than Feferi’s, a deep violet, and his pupils are the right shape but there’s a thin, white glow of light around the edges of them, brighter in the dimness of the room. When you meet his stare, he thins his lips and looks away.
You don’t know exactly what it means, when Feferi makes this offer. She doesn’t do it often, and you know she doesn’t do it lightly, but the few times you’ve taken her up on it her information has always been good. Whatever is in her now, it makes the carapace grafted to you groan and ache and grow thicker and spikier, and you sure as fuck don’t like being in debt to it, but…eleven months. You have to stop this motherfucker. Whatever means necessary.
“Whatever you can get me, Peixes,” you say.
“Eridan will spot me!” Feferi says, chipper and sweet and still staring at you, blinking way the fuck less than she should. She’s wearing ear cuffs shaped like masses of silver tentacles, today. She says, “They’ll help us if they can. They don’t like the Apostle. They don’t like his prayers.”
“Okay, cool,” you say, and step back out of the creep zone. “Good. Well, go get that done then.”
Feferi takes Eridan’s arm—he leans down as soon as they’re out of earshot and starts what looks like a furious whispered argument. Feferi shakes her cloud of thick dark curls out and laughs her unbothered, Disney-princess laugh, and you get just a flash of weird, cold pressure before the door closes behind them.
--
You don’t get much, for a few days after that. The cops try to drag in a couple of guys for being tall and a vaguely similar shade of brown to the figure in the photo. Terezi sniffs into them and gets them almost immediately released. Sollux gets a package of tech from Skaia HQ and heads out to a bunch of different generators and power hubs to put his monitoring system into action. Feferi sits in her apartment up on the third floor, in the dark, with Eridan holding her hands, and neither of them comes out.
You’re not like them—well, you are like them. But you’re not. You can feel them talking to something, even three floors apart; you hear singing, a choir in discordant harmony, a rumbling bubbling growl like a deepsea earthquake. The margins of the chitin fused into your skin itch and ache. You don’t know what the thing you were fused with used to be, and unlike them you don't exactly have a good way to ask it; you call it the Cancer, in your head, to yourself, but some part of you knows it’s a whole fucking lot older than the concept of names. It died so long ago, there wasn’t a word for death yet.
Any of its corpse that washes up into your reality is just skeletal detritus; the assholes who experimented on you couldn’t find any consciousness to bore into your skull like the Scratch did to Feferi and Eridan. They had to fuse it into your flesh to wring power out of its remains, and it’s only through some hideous joke of luck that it took and you’re still alive to bitch about it. For whatever fucking reason, you were the one who had what it took, unlike every single test subject they suckered in before you, who ended up a rotted, mangled corpse in an unmarked grave.
The guys who recruited you almost seemed surprised you were pissed, when you found out about that little wrinkle after the fact. You regret a lot of shit in your life, but savaging the asshole who killed dozens of other stupid kids before you isn’t one of them.
You don’t know who has it worse, really. Feferi and Eridan don’t show much sign from the outside that anything was even done to them—but for all the double-takes you get on the street, you don’t have to listen to voices and whispers. There’s no living, scheming forces trying to push you to do anything, there’s just a vast, echoing emptiness in the back of your head. Sometimes when you sleep, you find yourself in the place where it lives—or where it died. An endless, quiet walk through an empty shell the size of a thousand cathedrals, rotting and half-consumed.
Whatever it was, it can’t tell you shit about what’s going to happen, and Feferi and Eridan aren’t coming out of Feferi’s room. It's the night before the day someone’s going to get murdered, and there’s not a single fucking thing you can do about it except trust your team.
You pace the hallways, and pummel a punching bag until your arms ache, and try not to think about what day the Scratch chose to send out their pet murderer.
HQ calls you, that night—specifically, Jade calls you. Probably because all the old farts on the board of directors know full-fucking-well that you don’t like them to interfere with your shit, but you can never get too mad at Jade.
“We’re worried about you guys,” is the first thing she says, when you’re done exchanging whatever passes as pleasantries in a conversation with you. “We’re supposed to be mostly a humanitarian organization, Karkat, our budget up here for battling eldritch gods vs community outreach programs is 25/75, tops !”
“You’re supposed to be a humanitarian organization,” you correct her. “We told you when you recruited us, we weren’t going to be able to just run food pantries and fund shelters and shit. In Alternia if you want to run a food pantry you have to exorcise the imps and turf out the mutant rats first.”
“I mean, I know you live in basically Gotham,” says Jade. “But sometimes Superman comes down from Metropolis to help out, that’s all I’m saying!”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Bullshit, you’ve never read a comic book?!”
“I’ve been busy, Harley.”
“What, when you were thirteen you were too busy for comic books?”
“Yes.”
“Uuugh, fine,” says Jade, and rolls her eyes. “You are the night, or whatever. I’m saying, your city is a weird cloudy dark nightmare zone, I get that. But you still don’t have to handle that stuff alone! I’m worried about you! All of us are. Dave sure is!”
“Why the fuck would I care what Dave thinks,” you say, and she gives a huge, overblown shrug and rolls her eyes again. Your face feels warm, which is stupid. “We’ve got it under control. If you send your prissy, squishy, half-trained squad down here, Alternia will chew them up and spit them out.”
“SIGH,” she announces—but she softens, when she sees your frustrated scowl. “Okay. Okay! Well, the offer’s going to stay on the table. Rose knows some stuff about, y’know…” she wiggles her fingers in the air. “—Spooky bullshit.”
You’ve seen Rose Lalonde and Feferi interact. You’re not inclined to see it again if you can avoid it. “We’ll handle it,” you say, and rub at your eyes. “Tell—tell Strider to jam his worry right back down whatever hole it crawled out of. We’re fine.”
“Sure,” she says, and her voice is gentle enough to set your teeth on edge. It’s June eleventh. You know why she’s looking at you like that. “Well, try to stay that way.”
–
Feferi shakes you awake at three in the morning, and you immediately throw yourself up to the side of the bed ready to run—but there’s no alarm going off, nobody’s scrambling. Just Feferi standing there in the dark, reflecting two little blue-green chips of light back at you from her eyeballs like something out of a horror movie.
“Jesus fuck, Feferi,” you say, and collapse back on the side of the bed, dragging your hands through your hair.
Feferi says, “They’re scared of the thing that sends him.”
This isn’t helping the spooky horror movie vibes. You reach over and turn on your bedside lamp, and she goes from a shadow with glowing eyes to a marginally less horrifying young woman with a mess of wild, dark hair and a pale, freckled face and a weird, fuchsia stare.
“Are you going to explain shit in a logical, straightforward fucking way, for once,” you say, “or do you have a bunch of spooky bullshit half-clues for me.”
“They only ever give me the second thing,” says Feferi. She really needs to learn to blink more. Fuck. “So that’s what I have for you.”
“Okay, great, cool,” you say, and grope out to grab a notebook off your bedside table, pulling out a pen and flipping to a page without notes already scratched into it. “Go.”
“They’re afraid,” Feferi says again. “Afraid of the one who sends him. Like them but no longer of them. Their darkness is the darkness of deep places. His is the darkness of black holes. He’s hungry.”
Spooky bullshit. Great. Par for the course. “Hungry for what. Blood, sacrifice?”
“Yes,” says Feferi. “No. They’re not sure. Fear? Worship? Converts? Territory? Anything. Anything. The hunger must be sated.”
That fits with the prayers. “Great,” you growl, and rub at your eyes, blinking. Fuck, you’re tired. “Anything on how to stop him? Or this Apostle motherfucker?”
“Just that he’s coming,” she says. “As we changed, when we were sent to the dark, he has been changed. The hungry one and its hollow and howling shadow live within him.”
“This is a great conversation, have I mentioned how much I’m fucking enjoying this?” you say. Your skin is prickling, your chitin itches. You shake it off and scribble out a couple of notes. “Great. Hungry one, thinks it’s a god, wants prayers and converts. Did…something, to the Apostle, more of Scratch’s bullshit experiments. Got it.”
“It has taken much from you, raging child of the Ancient Pulse,” Feferi says, and it’s not her voice, this time. It’s a layered, humming, bubbling thing, coming out of somewhere deep in her throat. A trickle of something thick and dark escapes the corner of her lips, tracking down her chin and throat like tar. She stares down at you, and it’s something else speaking through her, something looking you in the eyes and puppetting her slack, dripping jaw. “Your armor of stolen bones will not protect you. Much will be taken again. It will never have enough.”
“I’m not scared of it,” you say, through teeth that feel sharp enough to break bone, feeling your eyes burn red. “I’m not scared of you.”
“Then you are a fool,” it says, and a drip of black trickles out of her nose, too, down her upper lip, gathering on her chin. “Echo of the first, long-dead. Spawning-place. As we all came to be from the food of your body’s rot, he will feed from your fear—”
Your stomach knots, nausea and rage and the overpowering taste of death on your tongue. You push up off the bed and give Feferi’s shoulders a rough shake.
Feferi gasps, blinks, takes a deep breath, and her eyes focus again.
“Karkat,” she says, and reaches up to her mouth, dabbing her fingers cautiously at the dark line trailing from the corner of it. She swallows convulsively and scrubs it away with a hand. “What did I say? Are you okay? I knew I should have brought Eridan, but he was so tired, I couldn’t wake him back up again—”
“Fine,” you say, harsh, and shudder. It has taken much from you . You don’t have to look at a clock to know it’s past midnight. It’s the twelfth. Much will be taken again…
“Oh, no, it’s not fine, is it?” Feferi says, and reaches out to grab your hands, squeezing. “Karkat, please. What did I say?”
“You said the thing we’re up against thinks it’s a god,” you say, and you don’t have the strength to pull your hands away. “Your…sources, are scared of it. It wants worshipers. It… that’s all I got.”
She blinks at you; her eyelashes flutter, her eyes unfocus. Fuck.
“They say it’s going to hurt you,” she says. “Something was taken—”
You see the realization on her face. Fuck, you don’t have a way to get out past her, but you don’t want to hear her say it.
“It’s the anniversary,” she says.
She forgot. She works to forget, you know that. She tries so hard to. You’re happy for her, you guess, that she gets the option—she’s alive. She came back.
“Six years,” you say, brief and harsh. Six years since she pounded on the door with inhuman purple-red blood all over her wild face, half-carrying Equius, supporting Eridan on her other arm. She’d started crying when she saw you, already apologizing, barely standing. He was right behind me, she’d sobbed, and clung to your hand, blood cold as ice water dripping from her torn knuckles. He was right behind me, Karkat, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry.
You’d stayed there frozen when she collapsed, when the rest of your team came running and helped her past you, rushing her off to the medical suite. You’d stayed at the door, looking out, waiting for him to come stumbling through the door behind her. Waiting for him to come home.
He never came.
“It’s been six years,” you say again, and your voice comes out rough. “I’m over it.”
She just looks at you, eyes gleaming that weird, fathomless purple-red in the dark. “…No,” she says, gentle and tired, “Karkat, no. I don’t think you are.”
It would hurt less if you couldn’t feel her in your chest, reaching out to you. Her secondhand pity throbs behind your lungs, and you snarl at her and feel your armor creak and sharpen, but your armor doesn’t stop you from fucking feeling her. Looking at you like she knows jack-shit about you, or what you’re feeling—
She does know. Knowing that only makes you angrier.
“So what, huh? So fucking what. Wow, Peixes has got a functioning brain and eyes, somebody call the mayor and give her a fucking medal! Alternia’s first recipient of the It’s None Of Your Business award—”
“It is my business!” Feferi says, sharply upset. “Karkat! We all love you too—I know it’s not what you had, not like he loved you—”
You don’t mean to flinch, but it stops her talking, at least. Fuck, he loved you, the past tense, it shouldn’t feel like a punch in the gut. A boot on your windpipe, pressing down.
Almost as bad, Feferi must see it in your face, because the loud, pressing ache of her grief bears down on you even harder, thins her lips and brightens her eyes like she’s trying not to tear up. Regret, frustration aimed inward—she didn’t mean to say that, she didn’t mean to hurt you. Fuck, you hate this.
“I’ll…” she takes a wavering step forward, raising a hand, and then steps back again, staring around the room, looking lost. “I’ll go get Kanaya. I’m sorry, I’m not good at this kind of—”
“Wait.”
The word doesn’t break, but the effort of keeping it steady feels like sandpapering your throat, a hot, boiling ache from your chest all the way up to your eyes. Feferi waits, biting her lip—you know she knows what you’re going to ask, but she waits for you to say it anyway.
“Tell me again.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Feferi says, but you can already feel her resignation. “You don’t have to do this to yourself.”
“Feferi.” Her name breaks your voice, knowing the pain you’re about to put yourself through like a fucking chump, knowing it won’t change anything. Knowing it won’t bring him back.
Feferi wraps her arms around herself—pale lines of scars striped along them, shiny and pale through her freckles. Shifts from foot to foot, and then groans and takes a deep breath, steeling herself. You’re already moving closer even before she nods; reaching out, gripping one of her arms.
“He couldn’t sleep, the last night,” Feferi says, picking her way through the words like someone walking on a cliff’s edge. She turns her hand and grips your forearm back, linking the two of you together like shipwreck survivors. Like if one of you lets go, the other one might never come back up for air. “He was having…second thoughts.”
You can imagine his face, faded like hers used to be, ashy from the warped color of his blood. You can imagine the way he used to worry at his lip when he was scared. How wide and frightened his eyes would have been. She’s told you they broke his nose that day. You can see the blood on his nose and lips, smeared on his hands from wiping it away, more clearly than you should, as the connection between the two of you turns open and raw.
Every time she tells you the story, you can see his face again. Just for a minute, you can see him.
“He said he didn’t know if he could do it,” Feferi says, and you cling to it, selfishly, like a fucking parasite; the brief glimpse of a sharp-edged wide-eyed brown face turned purple-black with bruising and grey with the Scratch’s evil drugs, a long-fingered, raw-knuckled hand buried in dark curls. “...Escape, I mean. We knew it was dangerous, we’d been trying to map our way out since we woke up, but. They came to give him his shot that morning and he panicked, and they—didn’t like that.”
You can’t see the beating, but you can feel it as she remembers; the familiar percussive, wincing spikes of distress and frustration, watching each blow come down. Feferi’s grip on your arms is tight enough to bruise.
“He said we could just wait,” she says, and her cheerful, bubbly voice is barely a whisper; she knows how bad this part hurts. “He said…you’d come for us.”
The stab of guilt is an old friend, by now. You clench your jaw and nod, and don’t let yourself lean away from his face in your mind, the desperate hope. It burns, exactly like it fucking should.
“Karkat,” Feferi says, and starts to loosen her grip. “You shouldn’t—”
“Keep going.”
“But—”
“Keep. Going.”
“...Okay,” says Feferi, almost gently, and sniffs, then gathers herself and pushes on, faster now, determined to get through. “Okay. I told him we couldn’t wait. I told him you’d be safer if we just…”
“You told him to do it for me,” you hear your voice say, distantly, and she winces like it’s a condemnation.
“I’m sorry,” she says, miserably, and her nails dig into your arms— you’re there, with her, running. A staggering desperation, ferocious white-hot protectiveness of I’ll get you all out, we’re getting out of here . “We had to. And Equius jumped us out the window and hurt his leg, and one of them knocked Eridan out, and they were— He was right behind me—”
One of the scars she shows so fearlessly is a pale, shiny gouge across her right flank; when they realized their prisoners were getting away, the Scratch’s men opened fire. You know how the rest of this story goes.
“I couldn’t…” Feferi starts, aimlessly, and she doesn’t look like some kind of human night terror, now. She looks like a woman your age, struggling to do something she hates because you asked her to, tugging her arms away from your grip and wrapping them around herself instead. Her cheeks are going a mottled pink, she’s holding her head high but her lips keep trembling. “I’m so—I know, you know, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I turned around and he was already—”
And because it’s been six years, because it’s not fucking fair—hell, because your eyes are burning too, and you don’t want her to see your face—for the first time in all the times you’ve gone through this stupid, painful charade, you step in and wrap your arms around her.
Feferi gasps sharply, an ugly, wet noise—then she lets out a single rough sob and melts into the hug, ignoring the spikes of chitin that have to be digging into her arms as she squeezes you.
“He told me he loved you,” she says, a cracked whisper into your hair, and you go still in her grip, startled. “I don’t know if I ever—when I asked him if he could try. For you. He told me he loved you. I know that’s not enough—”
“Shut the fuck up, Peixes,” you say, and thump your head against her shoulder like the prickle of your spines can hide how your voice wobbles.
The hurt is too fresh and sharp to put words around, too deep and familiar to cry over. You let her hold you, for once, caught between two kinds of pain, and don’t cry, or scream, or curse at her. For once. It’s been six years.
“...I miss him,” you admit, finally, fighting yourself over the words, and Feferi makes a soft noise and then shifts and puts a hand very gently on your hair, petting over it, down the back of your neck. The touch is cool, muffled through the armored plate over your spine.
“I know,” she says tentatively. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop—stop fucking apologizing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what, Peixes? Nothing, that’s what. Goddammit.” You squeeze one more time, and then step back and shake yourself out of her grip, scrubbing the softer heels of your hands into your eyes until the dry, tearless ache dies down. Say, to your ceiling, “...I just. I don’t know why the fuck it hasn’t stopped hurting yet.”
Feferi gives you a wet, rueful twist of a smile, opens her mouth to answer—
And then lurches in place, pupils flash-dilating to reflective pits. The thing inside her makes a noise that no human mouth should be able to produce, a bristling, warning wail, like if whalesong had fangs behind it—and then Feferi’s back, shaken and pale, staggering, staring around with wide-eyed horror.
“Karkat,” she says, “Something’s—!”
The BOOM shakes the floor underneath of you. Both of you stagger; a cup falls off your bedside table, a picture falls off the wall. You jolt apart, staring around; in the apartments around you and on the floors below you, you can hear feet running and people shouting.
“Downstairs, now! ” you snap, and bolt for the door; punch a code into the lockbox next to it, grab your gun and take off on Feferi’s heels toward the stairwell.
You reach the top of the stairs to the ground floor just in time to see Sollux go bowling backward into the foot of them. His headset sparks—he just barely catches himself, inches from slamming headfirst into the steps. One of his arms is at the wrong angle as he crashes into the ground on his back, groaning and swearing.
“Sollux!” Feferi takes the steps down to him three at a time and drops to her knees next to him, hands fluttering over him like she’s not sure where to touch. “Are you okay?!”
“— Kkhff— ” Sollux rolls over and groans, coughing and wheezing—when he spits, there’s blood and—oh fuck, he spits a couple of fucking teeth onto the ground. “ Ffffuck— FF there’s—somebody here—blew through the fucking wall —”
You have just enough time to curse at that, heart pounding, before the whole building rumbles with another explosion, closer this time. Through the wall, you hear Equius bellowing something and then a shriek of rage and pain that might be Nepeta, Eridan yelling in that piercing FOLLOW MY ORDERS NOW tone he uses when he’s really scared, a thrumming harmony to his voice that hurts your ears even through the walls. Sollux is trying to get back to his feet, swaying and wobbling—his leg won’t support him, his arm dangles limp and crooked. You ignore Feferi’s gasp of “Karkat, be careful!” and take off toward the source of the yelling, flicking off the safety on your gun as you run.
The entryway is in chaos when you get there. People are running, shouting—Eridan is down, not yelling anymore, wheezing and clutching at his side. As you falter, staring down at him, someone gives a cracking howl of laughter and something explodes, shoving you backward with a concussive slap of force. You hit your knees on the ground, and shattered chunks of concrete and rebar spin past you across the floor. Equius comes flying through the space where the wall used to be and lands on his back, sliding across the tiles limp, bloody all down his chin.
You get on your feet with an effort, ears ringing—the air is choked with dust, the ground is treacherous and rough with rubble from the shattered hole where the doors used to be. The lights beyond the hole flicker and go out, leaving the room lit only by the flash and crackle of broken wires.
A towering figure looms out of the dusty dark, stepping over the rubble and stalking toward you down the hall, back-lit harshly by the spitting wires in the blasted-open wall. You can’t make out a face, but sometimes in a bright flash you think you see a gleam of wide eyes lit up from the inside and bared teeth, dark curls of hair and a skeletal, gangling body.
You aim for a leg, squeeze the trigger—
Your bullet cracks into the floor where the Apostle used to be. He closes the distance so fast you didn’t see him move, and a cold hand tears the gun out of your grip, sending it spinning away across the floor. When you lash out, you hit a bony chest as solid as a brick wall. Not enough—you need more, harder, you need to hurt this motherfucker. You snarl, feel your eyes burn red and slam a chitinous, armored fist into his diaphragm, and this time the Apostle gives a winded grunt and staggers back.
Someone yells your name and you hear a gunshot; the Apostle lurches to the side and gives a sharp, cracking shout that sounds more angry than pained, but he does falter for a second, and blood like ice water splatters across your arm and your stomach. It prickles and stings where it touches your skin, and the taste of rot rises on your tongue and comes out as a scraping snarl. You can feel your eyes burning, red enough to glow.
“Heretic, ” snarls the Apostle, a hoarse rasp that barely sounds like a human voice, and he takes a swing at you with—fuck, you don’t even know, rebar or broken pipe, something heavy and jagged-looking with clinging lumps of concrete. The asshole’s arms are fucking long, and you don’t have time to duck all the way back, but you turn your shoulder away from it and the metal hits carapace with a bruising impact, pitching you to one side with a grunt of pain.
Things move fast after that, too fast to process; he keeps trying to corner you, herd you away from the others as they try to find openings to help. You usually aim to grapple, get your claws somewhere vulnerable, get enemies to stand down, but he’s stronger than you, taller and quicker on his feet, and as many times as you pummel his ribs and stomach he doesn’t bother to guard himself and barely slows down.
Somebody takes another shot that goes wide and cracks into the wall; the Apostle glances back, and in the split second of distraction you close the distance under those long arms and hammer him in the stomach twice, and then gag and fumble your move to sweep his legs as the searing, redoubling force of his rage pours over you, welling up in the back of your throat like acid, mixing sourly with the Cancer’s taste of rot. The Apostle whips back around to you, gives a tearing howl of rage and body-slams you against the wall—no technique, anymore, no thought for feinting or aiming, just a berserk rain of blows, every one of them hard enough to break bones. Coming down over and over and over—
You manage to block and deflect a dozen times in the span of breathless seconds, before luck turns against you. The metal catches on a spar of chitin, splintered up off the battered armor plate on one of your forearms; the force of the blow whips your arm out of the way, and the Apostle’s next wild strike comes down against your jaw like a fucking piledriver, so hard your ears ring and it spins you to one side on the slick tiles.
You stumble, numb, head ringing. Go to get your guard back up—
The Apostle twists, almost elegant, one fluid whip of a motion, and brings the metal and concrete down on your shoulders so hard you hear something crack.
Everything goes white for an endless second. When you come back it’s to wet, cold tile under your cheek, rot and rage and the hot metallic taste of blood in your mouth—a bare foot stamping down on your back. The Cancer’s carapace goes from your hairline to your tailbone, you’re hard to crush, but this asshole’s making a good attempt at it. You're close—the wall, at the base of it, you grope out and catch cold metal, fumbling your gun back into your hands, almost dropping it as he bears his weight down with rib-cracking force.
“FUCK OFF,” you get out, eyes burning Cancer-red, voice screeching and raw in your throat, but the Apostle only flinches back from the command for a split second before he snarls again and stomps down on you.
“I’m not yours! Foul fuckin' rot-mouthed traitor—! ” he pants, and you try to jerk around, aiming your gun blind over your shoulder—his knee comes down between your shoulderblades like a ton of bricks before you can fire, and as you yell in pain an ice-cold hand snatches the gun away from you, tearing it out of your grip again; not throwing it across the room, this time. His voice is distorted, twisting around itself. Too loud and too quiet, too low and too high, it fucking hurts to listen to. “I’m not yours and you don’t fucking order me! ”
Feferi shrieks something rasping and inhuman—it’s too late. You know it’s too fucking late. There’s a cold gun-barrel pressing against the nape of your neck, right where the armor doesn’t cover, grinding your face against the floor.
“My god, as you command,” the Apostle rasps, and you can feel his icy blood dripping on the back of your neck. His body isn’t the only weight pressing down on you. Intent, murderous hate pins you to the floor as sure as the gun against your head. “MY GOD, AS YOU FUCKING COMMAND! ”
And then there’s a crack, and the buzzing chatter of a taser. The Apostle makes a sharp, pained noise—your gun hits the ground and goes off so close to your face you feel the bullet graze past your cheek. You scramble after it as his weight leaves your back, and your fingertips brush metal and send it spinning away into the dark, fuck —
A body slams down on top of you. The Apostle makes a rough noise, close enough to your ear you can feel the cold rush of his breath; Sollux yells something, and the body on top of you twitches and shudders and then goes limp in a sparking snap of ozone.
“Karkat!” Footsteps. Your ears are ringing. People grab at you, dragging you out from under his weight; you hear the click and rattle of handcuffs, and then somebody gasps—stumbling footsteps, people moving, a strangled half-scream of shock, and then voices start cursing and yelling, words your ringing brain can’t process right now.
“Nnh,” you say, coherently, and kick the body the rest of the way off you, rolling away, scrambling to your hands and knees. Someone flicks on the lights, sudden and blinding, flickering dizzyingly, and the blurry mess of yelling voices gets even louder. “Where, wh. We get ‘im?” Kanaya is in front of you—she grabs your shoulders hard when you try to turn back, holding on so tight it hurts. “Ow, fuck—wh’s happening? What happened?”
“Karkat, you shouldn’t—” Kanaya says, staring past you over your shoulder, eyes so wide you can see the whites all the way around. Her hands are trembling on your arms, and when you jerk free of her grip she’s too slow to stop you turning. “Karkat, no —"
-
His back is a smooth brown arch and when you reach out and run your fingertips down it he rolls over in bed, mumbles and winds a long arm around your waist to pull you closer
–
The Apostle is on the ground, still shuddering from the taser and whatever Sollux did, unconscious in a broken scatter of limp limbs—a protruding spine over the collar of a ripped, filthy shirt. Bizarre, purple-blue blood spattered down grey-brown skin.
-
“Best friend,” says your best friend, smiles a goofy smile at you like a slice of sun and holds out a ring-pop in an origami box. “I need you more than the moon and motherfucking stars. Hey, let’s hitch up.” And when you open your mouth to yell at him for being an unromantic piece of shit he pops the ring-pop in your mouth and pulls out a ring set with rubies and amethyst and
-
A slack mouth, bloody lips, a bleeding, crooked nose—
-
“Karkat,” he says, and leans down over you to take your face in his hands and kiss the tip of your nose. His hands are soft, his eyes are warm, you just washed his hair for him and when you reach up and squeeze the back of his neck for a second the curls are thick and soft between your fingers. He says “I’ve gotta go, love,” the last thing he ever said to you, and shrugs off your hand. “Don’t you even fuckin’ worry about me. I’ll be back before you know it.”
–
His face is skeletal, harsh, starved angles, his hair is a matted tangle to his shoulders. You know it's him, though—you’d never not recognize him. You know his face better than your own, even with harsh, dark shadows carved under his eyes and scars streaked pale across every inch of his skin. There’s a bullet wound in his thigh and the blood that’s oozing out of it, across the floor, down his chin, is a cold, unnatural purple-black, thick and dark like ink.
“… Gamzee, ” you say, numb, and reach out for him as Kanaya catches your shoulders again. “But— No, get off me, get the fuck off— Shit, he’s bleeding, we have to— Fuck, oh my god—Gamzee? Gamzee! ”
Eridan and Nepeta pull him upright—his head lolls back and shows a long, bare stretch of throat and chest through the front of the ripped, filthy shirt somebody’s buttoned him into. There are so many scars, so goddamn many, on every inch of his exposed skin. You reach for him, and Kanaya pulls you back but not before your fingers touch his skin. He’s cold as ice.
They’re dragging him away. You fight to go after him, make a stupid, broken noise of protest, no don’t not again please— Kanaya is trying to hold you still, look at the bruises and pounding aches where you hit the ground. You couldn’t give less of a shit. It’s him, he came back —
Gamzee coughs, shudders. You wrench free of Kanaya’s grip and start forward at a stumbling run, and then pressure comes roaring back up around you, throbbing behind your eyes. Hate and hunger, kill you crush you eat you to the marrow I’ll kill you kill you KILL YOU— Gamzee’s head jerks up, eyes flashing vivid, unreal indigo. The noise he makes is inhuman, a shrieking roar of fury that makes your head feel like it’s going to crack open. Nepeta’s eyes wash over the same flashing purple as his and she gives an awful, strangling scream and lets go of him, staggering away, tearing at her hair; Eridan shies back and then makes a noise like a whole choir of screaming, the most perfect, dissonant, terrible chord you’ve ever heard—
“No, ” says a voice. “Naptime, asshole.”
Sollux is standing behind you when you turn, leaning heavily on Feferi’s shoulder—he’s got a sparking hand out, and behind him there's a flickering figure in a ragged red dress, eye-wateringly shifting as you look at her. A floating skeleton, a hovering child, a young woman with intent, dark eyes and a cloud of thick, dark curls.
Sollux and Aradia’s hands both spark, and Gamzee’s scream cuts off in a strangling grunt. He goes limp again, and the pressure in your head cuts off like a rope breaking, snapping so abruptly you sway.
Sollux gives a wet, victorious bark of a laugh, and then startles and whips around when Aradia touches his shoulder; his face goes blank with shock and then lights up with realization, agonizingly relieved.
“AA!” he says, and tries to reach out; you’d swear he’s right next to her, but his hand somehow manages to fall short.
“I’m sorry, Sollux,” says the shade of Aradia, and her voice is hardly human, ticking and crystal chimes. “Can’t stay. This time is—” you lose the words, and she shimmers and shudders. “You only had minutes. Secured Gamzee. I’ll try to—”
She flickers, and then she’s gone.
“AA,” says Sollux again, to the sudden, terrible silence, painfully startled and hurt and lost-sounding—and then he shakes himself and says, “Fuck. Fuck. You heard her! Get him downstairs, move!”
–
The staff medbay is on the ground floor, thankfully not on one of the walls that Gamzee blew through to get in. Kanaya makes you sit down there, and looks you over—a couple of bullet grazes and a lot of nasty, bone-deep bruises make themselves known as the adrenaline wears off, burning and throbbing as Feferi bandages and Kanaya sews. Once you’re fixed up you take stock of the situation, and it’s—fuck, it’s not good. Equius is conscious but concussed, Nepeta is gritting her teeth as Kanaya stitches up a nasty gash in her arm. Eridan is slumped on a bed with a hand pressed to his ribs, head twitching back and forth, light flickering under his eyelids. Sollux is sitting on the next cot over, getting his arm set—he knew Gamzee too, before. You keep glancing at each other and away again.
They can’t keep you away anymore, after that. Kanaya hovers next to you as you get up, painfully slow, leaning on her arm as the hip you landed on protests. You limp out past the broken front wall, the cops just now starting to arrive—Nepeta comes out of the door behind you, hisses through her teeth and immediately splits off to talk to the twitchy-looking officers slowly advancing on the front of your building. You ignore them and head to the stairwell, down toward the basement.
You don’t know if Skaia HQ knows you have holding cells in your basement—they probably wouldn't like it, if they did. But you live in Alternia City. Sometimes the people you patch up have another knife you didn’t find, or a curse on them, or just a goddamn death wish. Sometimes you need a room or two that locks from the outside, where people can cool their heels for a while.
The rest of your team is filtering down after you. You should be listening to them as they talk, debriefing, talking over your next moves; you’re the leader, it’s your job. But you can’t. You can’t do anything except stand at the observation window and stare.
Gamzee was always thin, no matter how much you tried to feed him up, but now he’s fucking gaunt. The beds in the holding cells are just inset bunks in the walls with mattresses riveted down onto them; the cuffs attached on either side of them aren’t long enough for him to leave the mattress, but he’s making a solid fucking effort, thrashing and struggling at them, making vicious, animal sounds of fury. His eyes are washed over featureless purple, his lips are cracked and chapped bloody, the soft brown of his skin has gone a pale, ashy gray-brown except for the blotchy purple flush of rage on his cheeks.
“Motherfucking cowards! ” he screams, and slams against the cuffs, wiry muscle straining in his arms and chest, tendons standing out in his narrow throat. “You’ll die and DIE AGAIN, you walking corpses! My mission is holy! MY MISSION IS HOLY, MOTHERFUCKERS! I won’t be fucking swayed from it! You’ll live to watch my Lord eat the marrow from your bones, he’ll boil you fuckers alive in your own filthy motherfucking blood!!”
“Fuck,” says Eridan, heavy and thick with horror. There’s still red smeared across his lips, and he’s leaning hard on Feferi’s arm. “Should’ve been able to take him. Woulda been able to take him before. Fuck.”
Gamzee is laughing now, horrible, harsh barks of laughter. You don’t answer, because how the fuck could you? What the fuck would you say?
“This is what they wanted to turn us into?”
“Eridan,” says Feferi, tightly.
“Fuckin’, berserk murder machines—”
“Eridan. ”
Eridan presses his lips together into a thin, unhappy line and looks away, sniffing hard.
“This will fade,” says Feferi, and you wish you couldn’t hear the uncertain, pained waver in her voice. “Eventually. We just…need to be patient.”
“You think I don’t feel you out there?!” Gamzee snarls, and twists, thrashing at the cuffs again. They were made for the others, when they came back from the Scratch—the shed chitin of whatever you’re fused with is worked into them, and they don’t give. Gamzee howls in fresh rage and stares wildly at the one-way mirror, eyes round and blank, nothing behind them but light. “Smell you,” he hisses. “Taste you. Scared of me, motherfuckers, as well you fucking should be. Scared what hell you’ll be sent to when I dig your hearts out with my hands and make you fucking eat them—! Oh I taste it already, brothers and sisters, repent, it won’t fucking save you—”
“I can’t believe that’s him,” Kanaya says—quietly, flat and soft. “What have they done with him?”
Whatever the fuck they wanted, you guess. Six years. Six fucking years.
“This's what Scratch's poison does to you,” Eridan says. His eyes aren’t glowing anymore, but the light is gathered around him wrong, and there’s half a strange harmonic under his voice when he says, “...Makes an angel of you,” disgusted and reverent and regretful and pained. “Turns petty little meatsack humans into fuckin’, insects. Something you step on.”
There's a long, horrible silence, after that. Then you say, “...Someone’s going to have to stay on guard. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“You need to report to Skaia,” says Feferi, and winces as Gamzee breaks into another howl of laughter behind her. She looks determined, though, her jaw is set and her eyes are narrowed. “He won’t take us by surprise again. Go call.”
Fuck. She’s right. Shit. This 100% has to be reported, and it’s 100% your job.
“I’ll be back,” you say, and back up a few steps. Gamzee is slumped back, catching his breath, panting through his teeth like a cornered animal. You can’t take your eyes off his face. “I’m— I’ll— Fuck. I’ll be right back.”
--
John fucking Egbert picks up when you call HQ. It’s not really a surprise—fuck your entire life, right now, of course he would—but it’s another little piece of indignity on top of the screaming tornado of bullshit you’re trying to cope with, and you glare at him immediately.
You don’t hate John. You don’t. He just—knows too much. About you. Skaianet broke open the compound you were in, after you savaged the military asshole who buried god-bones in your skin. And John fucking Egbert himself personally carried your body out of there like some kind of stupid twinkly-eyed bonehead prince charming.
You’d repaid the favor by ditching Skaianet as soon as they nullified your military contract and heading straight for the darkest bolthole Alternia had to offer without so much as a “thank you”. For some reason, John never seemed to hold even a little bit of a reasonable grudge about that. Stupid fucking handsome goddamn John fucking Egbert.
“Hi, Karkat!” John says, and grins his stupid, charming, dimpled grin at you. “Jade said you guys were having a tough time down there! I mean, not like we’d know. You never call, you never write…”
“I’m— Fuck you,” you say.
“Aw, buddy, never change,” he says, laughing—and then pausing, and looking intently at your face, eyes widening in sudden concern. Fuck. “You look kinda, uh.” He gestures at you, and you bother to look down for the first time, to your own call preview; there’s dust on your face and in your hair, and a splatter of Gamzee’s cold, indigo blood on your cheek. “Is everything, y’know. Good?”
You open your mouth to curse the air blue. What comes out instead is, “Gamzee’s alive.”
“Huh?” says John, and then his eyebrows rise to his hairline. “Oh, shit. Your, uh, friend? Husband? Friendhusband?”
“Fiancé,” you say, before you can stop yourself, and the word tastes like ash in your mouth. “Yeah.”
“Oh, shit!” he says again. “I know you guys totally thought he was, uh— Well, shit, cool! Congratulations?”
“Yeah,” you say flatly, because that’s all you can get out of your mouth.
“…Oh,” says John.
“Yeah,” you say.
“He’s not okay, huh.”
“The fuck do you think.”
John blows out a sigh through his stupid buck teeth—by his expression, deeply wishing somebody more qualified had picked up the call. Well, fuck him. Nobody’s getting what they want, tonight.
“He broke into our base,” you say. “That’s all I wanted to report. He broke in, we got him. Several injuries, no casualties. You’ll get a write-up soon.”
“He broke in?” John repeats, and you can practically see the moment the little switch in his brain flips from Friendly Bucktoothed Nerd mode to Field Captain Egbert mode. His eyes are always way too blue, but now they’re also sharp as the edge of a fucking knife. He says, “He’s compromised?”
“He’s hurt. ”
Even in combat commander mode, that makes John wince and soften a little. He looks at you for just a second too long before he says, “So he can get better, then.”
“Of course he’s going to get better,” you say, grating the words through a throat so tight it aches.
“Of course he is!” says John, brightly, and just like that he’s a dumb goof again, grinning at you encouragingly. “It’s gonna be fine, Karkat! Trust me! And uh. I’ll update everybody.”
“I don’t give a shit who you tell.”
“Yeah,” says John. “Yeah. I’ll tell Dave, though.”
Gamzee is still screaming when you come back downstairs, in fits and starts. His voice was already a hoarse rasp; he’s losing it the longer he yells, turning airless and ragged. He runs out of breath and slumps back, panting, as you come down the stairs—when you step forward toward the glass, his head jerks up, craning sightlessly in your direction, and he starts thrashing all over again.
“My mission is holy,” he gets out, a wheezing croak of a thing. “I feel him, fucking hand him over, motherfuckers, you can’t keep me from him! Let me the fuck outta here—”
“Kar,” says Eridan, and pushes himself up. He slumped in a chair while you were gone, and he looks like trampled roadkill, but he bustles over to you anyway and starts doing an officious little shuffle back toward the steps. “You gotta let him wind down. He can tell when we’re out here, just—let us watch him. Until this wears off. Go on. You gotta sleep.”
“You can’t order me to do shit,” you growl, and then feel like an enormous tool when Eridan winces away from the edge to your voice, the rot on your tongue. You swallow hard and then say, painstakingly human again, “...I can’t just fucking leave him, Eridan. Not now.”
Eridan’s face does something painful, pitying. “Fuck, I know,” he says. “But he’ll hurt himself if you stick around, Kar. You heard Fef, this—this’ll wear off. You can see him then.”
“C’mere, motherfucker,” Gamzee croons behind him, and when you glance past Eridan’s shoulder his eyes are searching the one-way glass, aimed at you, narrow like he can almost make you out. “Come on, heretic, rotted empty husk of a motherfucker, lemme pop you outta that shell, I’ll crack you in half and my Lord will eat that juicy meat right off your fucking bones. Come on in here, I don’t fucking bite. ”
“Karkat,” says Kanaya, and steps up by Eridan’s shoulder, closing the gap, blocking Gamzee from your view. There are faint, darker shadows under her eyes, an exhausted tension in her shoulders, and her mouth has a hard, miserable set to it. “Dear. Please.”
You swallow, and turn, and you run like a coward.
The apartments are empty, when you get back up to yours. You pick up the cup that fell when Gamzee blew through the wall. You set everything back on your nightstand, moving in a daze. Then you settle down on the mattress, very carefully, stare at the wall and just…think.
Gamzee. Here. Back. Alive. Hurt, sure, hurt as fuck, and who knows how bad it’ll be when he comes out of this feral bullshit, but… alive. He’s alive.
You’ve spent so long mourning, so much time and energy trying to make things normal again, you can’t seem to fit that thought in your head. You should feel something, shouldn’t you? Fuck, you loved him so much, and you thought he was gone forever and now he’s back, doesn’t that mean anything?
You sit and stare at the wall, aching on the outside, numb on the inside, until sleep finally drags you under.
--
You wake up a few hours later, barely after sunrise, from a bad dream that you don’t remember. Your head is throbbing, and when you move you hear a ripping noise—you got spikier in your sleep, and the jagged chitin along your cheeks is catching at your pillowcase, tearing the fabric. You untangle yourself, cursing, sit up and then swallow hard on a fucking tsunami of nausea as the whole thing hits you all over again.
The urge to sprint down the stairs and lay eyes on him again, just to make sure it isn’t some kind of dream, is overwhelming. You swallow it down with an effort, curse to yourself and struggle to put your thoughts in line.
Gamzee knows when you come down there. Whatever’s in him—whatever’s in you—he can feel you and it sets him off, struggling hard enough to hurt himself, screaming that awful, horror-movie bullshit. You sit there breathing for a couple of long seconds and then, moving carefully slow, you fumble an earpiece comm off the bedside table, pull up a screen, and call Feferi.
She’s still downstairs when she picks up. She looks fucking exhausted, miserable and stressed; when she sees you calling her, she sighs.
“He hasn’t slept,” she says, without preamble, and flips the screen you’re calling her on. You can see Gamzee through the window; his struggling has slowed down, but he’s still pulling and twisting, in spasming jerks. His voice has broken to a shredded croak, but he’s still talking, praying now. His hands are raised as far as they’ll go in their cuffs, his voice is a cracking whisper you can’t make out, his eyes are cast up to the ceiling. Feferi turns the screen back to her. “He calmed down when you left, and his eyes look…better. The light is starting to fade. But I don't think he's going to stop until it wears off.”
“Someone else should spell you,” you say, and she sighs again.
“Eridan’s sleeping right now,” she says. “Equius can come down when he’s steady enough. Somebody with a…guest...needs to be down here, though, and it can’t be you, Karkat. It really, really can’t.”
It can’t be you. You swallow, rough, and nod. There’s other shit you can do. There’s other shit you have to do.
“I’ll tell Equius,” you say, and end the call.
There’s construction going on at the front of the building. Extra security, some kind of early-warning system you don’t have the technical chops to understand. The sky overhead is a bog-standard cloudy Alternian gray, and there’s a flat, miserable drizzle coming down on everybody. In between the contractors fixing up your wall, you can see Sollux limping around with his arm in a sling, setting up cameras and lifting things with red and blue sparks; when he catches sight of you, just like every other asshole you’ve seen today, he looks at you like you’re a dead man walking and greets you like you’re made out of spun glass. You shove his good shoulder, and keep moving before he can work up the gall to ask if you’re okay.
Equius, at least, doesn’t try to ask. You tell him you need him to head downstairs as soon as he’s available, and he sends you back “Yes.” with no useless embellishment. Sometimes it’s nice to have people just follow your damn orders.
Once you get to your office, there’s a welcome distraction waiting for you; the cops need handling, like they always fucking do. Nepeta got them to put their guns away and get off your ass last night, but holding a high-profile prisoner in your base is definitely kind of outside the realm of what your organization is expected to do. Somebody has sent you a very cold, technically-polite email, requesting that you transfer him to police custody as soon as possible.
Police custody, where he can either get shuffled into a high-security solitary cell to go crazy or just vanish and never get seen again. Yeah fucking right.
You never took Gamzee’s name off the Skaianet MIA roster. You send the cops a viciously polite email back, informing them civilly that this is an internal employee affair—AKA none of their fucking concern—and press SEND so hard you hear your keyboard creak.
…That means you have to send an Employee Incident form to Skaianet. Fuck.
You haven’t pulled up Gamzee’s old profile in years. You’re still just as much of a self-destructive sack of shit, but also Sollux always knew when you did it, and started looking at you like you were an unmarked package that had just started ticking. You’d stopped, just to get him to stop looking at you like that. Everything is the same as it used to be; stuck in time, preserved. Gamzee’s birthday, his employee ID, his weight and height and eye color—one for three, now. Fuck knows he won’t let you weigh him, but he’s nothing but muscle and bone, and judging by Feferi and Eridan’s eyes you doubt his will ever be dark brown again. His supernatural distortion analysis from the last annual before he went missing; Relative Low Risk. A 1% SIC, no notable or provable powers. No notable or provable negative mutation, deformity, or curse. His family contacts—empty. His emergency contact, you.
You’re supposed to inform family if team members are incapacitated or killed in the line of duty. Gamzee’s grandpa’s money got him through school, despite half your foster parents doing their best to bleed the account dry, but the old man’s long-gone by now. And if you couldn’t find Gamzee’s dad to give him a fatality notification, then you’re not going to find him now.
“...Gamzee’s back,” you say to yourself, the only emergency contact he’s got, and click vengefully on the notified box.
You don’t know whose inbox this will start out in, but you know John’s in charge of team rostering and even though he smartly keeps his fucking nose out of your business, he still sees your notifications. You can’t bring yourself to type up some obfuscating little note for him to pick over; you field-check your way down the list, instead, watching selection options populate ahead of your cursor and trying your fucking hardest not to think about what you’re selecting. Employee MAKARA, G. update to census; RECOVERED, from PRISONER OR HOSTAGE incident: suspected origin SUPERNATURAL. Noted damage…
You hover over the boxes, poison churning in your stomach, thinking about that furious, blank-eyed stare, and then check, PHYSICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, METAPHYSICAL. Prognosis…NEEDS REHABILITATION/RECOVERY.
…Requisitioned resources or personnel…
You didn’t need their help before, and you don’t fucking need them now. You select NONE, and send the form.
Your ear comm crackles.
This frequency is for your team, and nobody else, but every so often somebody accidentally hits on it with some rooftop home-broadcast shit or doomsday device or something. Whoever it is, this is really not the damn time for radio interference. You sit up and fiddle with it, frowning—there’s a voice on the other side, trying to say something, and you’d swear it sounds familiar but it doesn’t sound like any of your team. You can’t place it.
“This is Skaia Alternia,” you say, “Come in?”
More crackling. The voice says, “ —sxxchkarkat—radio check? —For backup. Gamzee—”
Your heart leaps into your throat. “Who is this?” you say sharply, and pick up your phone, fumbling for Sollux’s contact. If he can trace where this call is coming from— “Say again, over.”
“Oh, shit,” says the person on the other end, and then the call goes dead.
You’re still sitting there, listening to the silence, heart pounding, when the door bursts open. Tavros comes hurrying in, on his prostheses today, wearing a white button-up that’s soaked down the front under his open coat and looking harried. There’s rainwater on his face and his hair is falling in damp curls over his forehead.
Much hay could be made over Tavros Nitram in a wet, white shirt with rain in his eyelashes. You, fortunately, are too smart to fall for his whole sweet disarming country boy routine, and definitely too smart to fall for his big brown eyes and offensively good shoulder and chest muscles.
Gamzee was never as smart as you about giving his heart away. Or as good at trying to keep his hands off things he wanted. It was a long, complicated mess of on-again-off-again, which from your end featured a whole lot of Tavros agreeing to do shit he didn’t actually want to do, or Gamzee assumed he wanted to do, or both of them thought the other guy wanted to do, and then freaking out and ghosting, and then creeping back to cautiously be friends again, and then repeating the stupid cycle over again. You’re pretty sure they settled on “off again” in the end.
You used to be pretty pissed at him about that whole thing, if only for the amount of confused moping Gamzee would do about it, but—shit, they’ve been friends for years. You definitely should have told him.
“Karkat,” says Tavros, and closes the door so fast he almost catches it on the toe of one prosthesis. “Shit— What happened? Feferi said Gamzee’s…” he waves his hands around vaguely, whatever that’s supposed to bring across. “Where, where is he? Is he okay? Are you okay?”
“Am I okay,” you say, flatly.
“Yeah,” he says. “It was a stupid question, I guess. I just. Uh, huh. Wow. Shit.”
“He won’t stop screaming about torturing us to death,” you say, and you’d be lying if some part of you wasn’t saying it to see him flinch, to see somebody else hurt even a fraction as badly as you are. “Specifically, me. So! How do you fucking think I’m doing, Nitram? Take a goddamn guess.”
“Fuck,” says Tavros, and combs his fingers back through his hair. “So, I shouldn’t…did he recognize you?”
“I don’t know.” The urge to tear shreds off him is overwhelming. You grit your teeth on it. “I didn’t talk to him. Yet.”
“Should I go, uh, go see him, or–”
For all the fucking good it does, seeing him. “I don’t fucking know, Nitram.”
“Okay,” says Tavros. “Okay. Is he…downstairs?”
You nod, and he nods, and stares around at your office, raking a hand back through his damp hair.
“Okay,” he says, for the hundredth time. “Uh, okay. Uh. I’ll…I just need to see him. I won’t talk to him yet, but. I’m gonna go see him.”
He doesn’t wait for an answer, just hurries off and vanishes down the stairs.
Nothing will have changed in an hour and a half that didn’t change overnight. You don’t call Feferi, or get up to walk to the stairs. Gamzee will come back to you when he’s ready.
You wait.
–
It takes Gamzee two and a half days to stop screaming.
He’s fading, near the end of it—you call whoever is on guard every four or five hours for an update, and you watch the flickering purple light start to die down to just his irises, and then dim, and then, finally, fade. His threats turn into voiceless noises, his thrashing turns into twitching. In the last few hours he starts coughing, and then convulsing, and then retching, over and over, dry-heaving. When he spits, it’s like he has a mouthful of indigo ink. Purple-black smears across his chin and the mattress, across the walls where he braces himself.
And then, finally, he passes the fuck out.
You’re allowed back down, after that. Feferi leads the charge, with a basin of water and kits for sutures and IVs; Gamzee doesn’t jerk up or scream at her, this time. He moans faintly when she puts the IV in, shivers when she cuts the remains of his shirt away, and then goes still again.
You knew he was covered in scars. You find yourself cataloging them, as you stand there and watch. Some of them just look like the scars you get on the job, haphazard burns or cuts. Some of them look more…intentional. A series of short, parallel slices lined up along one of his collarbones, a set of notches carved into the shell of his ear. Somebody made those, deliberately, carefully, just to hurt him.
You have to step out of the room for a few minutes, at that thought. Feferi won’t say anything, but you can’t control the chittering snarl in your chest, and you can see her wincing from it, tense like she’s ready for a fight, grip very tight on the roll of gauze in her hand.
You stop thinking about the scars. Instead, you watch her put him back together, and you think about motive.
You’ve been waiting for the Scratch to send someone after Gamzee, in the three days since you brought him in; so far there’s no sign that they intend to. As soon as Gamzee passed out, Sollux gave him a thorough tech-scan head to toe, and there’s no signs of bugs or tracking devices. For all intents and purposes, it looks to you like those bastards dosed him up and sent him in with all the finesse of an animal with a bomb strapped to it, intending to take out as many of you as he could on his way out.
And specifically, you.
You’re not surprised the Scratch are pissed at you. Fuck knows you’ve messed up enough of their robberies, rituals and takeover attempts. Some part of you is almost flattered, that they want you dead this badly. Damn right they should.
You’d be happier about it if they hadn’t torn your boyfriend apart at the fucking seams to get it done.
Now that you can, you spend a long time sitting there and watching him, after Feferi has everything bandaged and the IV dripping. Unconscious, he looks even worse than he did when he was screaming at you. He’s clammy with sweat and breathing harshly; every so often he shudders in his sleep and coughs more of the inky indigo bullshit, oozing and crusting around his chapped lips. His wounds leak it too, a constant, slow drip of deep purple-black blood.
Feferi gets him cleaned up over and over, looking tired and upset. The bullet that did hit him went through his thigh near the hip, and came dangerously close to hitting his femur, and it bleeds constantly and persistently no matter how many times she holds pressure or bandages it up. She doesn’t tell you how bad shit is when she looks him over, and you don’t ask her. Just sit in the observation room and watch the slow drip of fluid through his IV.
You want to stay awake, watch over him, keep an eye on him—you’ve hardly slept since the briefing five days ago. You fall asleep in your chair, still watching.