Chapter Text
No wonder, you’re so stubborn
Nobody ever made you dig deeper
No wonder you’ve got demons
Everything you ever did is coming back around
-- From ‘Our Demons’ by The Glitch Mob
(x)
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Miracle is going all systems critical.
Karkat grasps frantically at the manual systems override switches for the Mech, trying to ignore the blood that spatters the console. The contrast of candy red and dark purple turns his stomach, but he fights through that and the pain in his numerous wounds, trying to compensate for the energy spike.
“Right arm’s dead and gone, my brother,” Gamzee groans from his harness, Karkat turning to look at him. His helmet’s been ripped off and he has several deep gashes across his face, his blood dripping purple onto the rest of his suit. “Coolant’s leaking, shit be flashin’ on the console like it’s twelfth perigee’s eve up in here, we gotta bail out.”
“We can’t!” Karkat grunts through clenched teeth. “That piece of shit horrorterror is still alive and we’re the only ones still up and fighting!”
The comms are crackling, Sollux yelling at them through the static. “Miracle, you are going critical, you need to eject, Karkat, Gamthee, EJECT!”
Karkat hears the shrieking sound of claws scraping against metal, feels the spray of the ocean rise up through the hole the horrorterror has just torn in their Mech’s head and slam him against the side of the cockpit, cables snapping and armor tearing.
Gamzee is yelling at him but he doesn’t need to, Karkat can feel him through the Drift, telling Karkat everything is going to be okay, he is starting the eject sequences, they’re gonna get out.
And Karkat watches, pinned helplessly against the hull, as the beast drags his co-pilot out of the cockpit with its impossible nightmarish tentacles, leaving Karkat alone and in agony. His ears fill with the screams as he feels Gamzee’s fear, panic, horror, silence, as he pathetically pilots Miracle away from the fight alone, everything cacophonous noise and dissonant shrieking of alarms and tearing metal, and suddenly everything begins to fade to black. He spins in the darkness, trying to yell but unable to make a sound. Gamzee’s face is suddenly in front of him, blood pouring out of his mouth in a wordless scream, his face split with diagonal gashes, claw marks from the spines along the horrific tentacles. He smiles, his teeth purple-stained and broken, and his voice is part agonized, haunting laugh, part scream:
“You couldn’t save me, brother. How can you save yourself?”
“FUCK!”
Karkat jerked awake, sopor falling with a wet ‘slop’ noise over the side of his recuperacoon. It took him a few minutes to get his bearings, trying to remember where he was, what had happened, though reality returned to him quickly. The Assault on the Breach. Miracle getting destroyed. Gamzee…
Two and a half sweeps and he was still having nightmares. Fucking great.
He groaned, climbing out of his pod and stumbling across his respiteblock. The too-bright Earth sun filtering through the window made him wince, but he managed to find his clothes and drag them on. If the sun was out, he was running late for work, which was fucking fantastic. Just another kilo of shit to throw on the pile that was his life. At least he hadn’t thrown up this time.
His temporary quarters were less than a mile from the construction site and he walked quickly, pulling his thick coat up over his shoulders to brace against the freezing wind. He could see the skeletal frame of the incomplete wall from the doorstep of the building, all thick metal beams and hanging wires visible through the falling snow. He was coming up on two Earth months in Alaska, and he was pretty sure he was never going to get used to the cold.
He punched his time card and headed for his locker, gearing up while ignoring his fellow workers. A good percentage of them were troll refugees also, other survivors of the Assault on the Breach, but nobody ever seemed to be comfortable around him, especially not the humans. Karkat couldn’t blame them. He was short for a grown troll, but ‘short’ still meant six and a half feet, and the bright red of his eyes (and his blood) meant even the other trolls avoided him. Nothing like that refugee-mutant times two combo to make a guy unpopular.
The foreman, a squat human man, scowled at him as he headed for the ladders up to the wall’s midsection, his voice muffled by a thick beard. “Vantas,” he growled. “You’re late.”
“And you’re a sack of pink meat and fucked up mammalian biology,” he snapped, shoving his goggles onto his head. “What is this, State The Obvious day?”
He heard the foreman laugh. “‘Sack of pink meat’,” he chuckled. “That’s a good one, keep ‘em coming, your creative insults are a bright light in this shithole.”
Karkat snorted. “Things are that bad?”
“Wind’s getting worse,” the foreman grumbled, rubbing his hands together in a futile attempt to get warm. “Already lost three guys at the top of the wall today.”
Karkat winced. That was high, even when the weather was this bad. “Guessing you had three more guys lined up to take their place though, right?” He didn’t mean to sound callous, but he’d been building this damned wall up and down the Pacific coast for a sweep, he’d gotten used to the way things worked.
“Always do,” the foreman shrugged. “We gotta work if we wanna eat.”
“Story of my life,” Karkat grumbled. “At least on Alternia it wasn’t this fucking cold.”
“Price you pay for freedom, my alien friend,” the foreman gave him a thumbs up.
“Yeah, yeah, fuck you too, shitsack,” Karkat replied, though with less venom than the words would normally inspire, and started climbing the ladder.
His work assignment for the day had him midway up the main section of the wall, soldering sections of support structures together, and he buried himself the process, the vibrating instruments and biting wind keeping him in the moment, holding the memories and the nightmares at bay. By the time his mandatory break rolled around he was focused, the past firmly where it belonged, and he rappelled down the massive steel beam to the ground, ready to get out of the cold, however briefly.
A crowd had gathered around the foreman near the front of the site and Karkat joined them, though he couldn’t figure out the source of the commotion at first. Ration distribution was always a massive rumpus asshole factory, but nothing this extreme, workers were yelling and threatening to throw things, for fuck’s sake.
“What’s going on?” he asked the nearest troll, a bronzeblood he’d shared a worksite with back in Nome, he couldn’t remember the guy’s name for the life of him.
“Beats me,” the guy shrugged. “Heard there were three more deaths up on the top of the wall today.”
“Me too,” Karkat grimaced. “News like that doesn’t usually rile the masses up this hard though. There’s gotta be something else going on.”
A human standing in front of them turned around at their conversation. “There’s been another Kaiju attack,” he said, the fear evident in his voice. “In Sydney. Foreman just got word, they’re trying to get the newsfeeds working, but everyone’s losing their shit about it.”
Karkat felt like his stomach had filled with ice. Up ahead he saw the foreman hit a dusty old projector with a wrench, making it hum to life and illuminate the screen rigged up by the site’s entrance, displaying a newscaster mid-sentence.
“-live from the devastation in Sydney, where a Category Four Kaiju broke through the Coastal Wall in less than an hour!” Karkat watched the footage, the horrorterror huge and smashing through metal and concrete, people screaming, and felt simultaneously ill and utterly numb at the sight.
Around him his fellow workers were restless, scared and angry at the news, their voices suddenly rising in exclamations of dismay, of fear.
“It broke through the wall?”
“It’s supposed to be impenetrable!”
“What the hell are we even building this thing for?!”
The newscaster continued. “The Kaiju was finally run to ground by Law and Order, a Jaeger from the recently founded Interspecies Defense Program.” The footage cut to the fight, the horrorterror shrieking as the massive Jaeger smashed its head against the edge of the Sydney Opera House, its red visor glinting in the sunlight as it swung a weapon that looked to Karkat to be part cane, part sword. A few of the others in the crowd cheered and clapped, and Karkat felt his teeth clench involuntarily, remembering the days when people had cheered for him. He saw Gamzee’s face in his mind’s eye again and felt sick to his stomach.
Karkat shoved his dead moirail out of his mind, focusing on the projection again. The program had cut to footage of an interview with one of the pilots, a tall cerulean-blooded troll woman wearing a cocky smirk. Karkat vaguely recognized the caste sign emblazoned on the breastplate of her armor, and he wondered if she’d been part of the team that had come through the Breach during the Assault two and a half sweeps ago. It wouldn’t have surprised him - all of the pilots he’d rode with back then had been exceptional, especially the ones that had survived, and most of the survivors hadn’t gone running away from the fight at the first chance they got either, like he did.
“The Interspec program’s gonna save this planet from getting wiped out,” she said, flipping her long black hair and flashing a smile that clearly displayed her fangs. Her attitude was characteristic of those in her position in the hemocaste, and even though Karkat tried not to judge people by hemospectrum stereotypes, this pilot was making it difficult. “Law and Order has ten kills on record after today, and we aren’t gonna stop until every last Kaiju Horrorterror is wiped out.”
“Ranger Serket,” the newscaster said, brandishing a microphone. “What do you say to reports that you and your co-pilot have an especially volatile relationship that’s uncharacteristic and even considered unsuitable for pilots of your species?”
The troll gave the newscaster a scathing look out of her one good eye. The other was covered by an eyepatch, of all things, making her look like even more of an arrogant shithead. Granted, both of those qualities were common in Mech pilots. “Don’t know where you got those reports, but you can tell them to-” she devolved into a string of buzzing Alternian curse words that made all the trolls in the crowd gasp and mutter amongst themselves before the program cut to a different reporter. Karkat wasn’t impressed, having used worse language daily since he’d pupated, but the looks of confusion among the humans entertained him.
“Trust me,” he muttered to the human workers in front of him, making them jump slightly. “You don’t want to know what she just said.”
The sound of the newscast was drowned out by a loud droning sound above them, and Karkat joined the rest of the crowd in looking up, seeking the source. A pair of military helicopters passed overhead and hovered, one of them touching down just outside the construction site, making the already strong winds roar even more violently. His fellow workers crowded through the open gate, hoping proximity would inform them, but Karkat didn’t need to join them. He recognized the spirograph logos on the choppers even at a distance and felt his chest tighten, his lips pressing together to form his mouth into a grim line.
It had finally happened. Two and a half sweeps of moving around, keeping a low profile, not drawing attention to himself, but the inevitable had finally come to pass.
They had found him.
A pair of heavily-muscled humans in blue fatigues thinned out the crowd with stern shouts and threatening waves of nightsticks, clearing space. By the time Karkat had made it out of the gate and into the snow, the crowd had been dispersed and the chopper’s passenger was on the ground, standing facing the construction site with his arms behind his back and his face partially hidden by a pair of pointed sunglasses.
He saw Karkat in the crowd and gave him a nod, the wind making his white-blonde hair whip around violently. “Mister Vantas,” he called, his voice carrying across the cleared path. “You’re a hard troll to find.”
“Dirk Strider,” Karkat replied, his helmet tucked under one arm as he stepped forward, examining the new insignia on his jacket. “Looking sharp. Deputy Marshal, huh? Guess they finally promoted you.”
“That’s what happens when time passes,” Dirk shrugged. He looked almost the same as the last time he and Karkat had met, though he had a few more scars on his face and neck and some telltale strands of grey in his hair despite still being under fourteen sweeps. It was easy for Karkat to forget that they were practically the same age. “How long’s it been?”
“Two and a half sweeps,” Karkat said, trying to keep his face neutral.
“There somewhere we can talk?” Dirk asked, taking a few steps forward. The blades of the chopper had stopped spinning but the wind was still howling, making it difficult for either of them to speak in anything softer than a shout.
Karkat gestured towards the gate into the construction site, shrugging. “It isn’t much but at least the wind isn’t fucking shit up in here.”
The two of them walked through the gate and Karkat made his way to the lockers, the few remaining workers clearing out. They knew better than to lurk when a Deputy Marshal from the Defense Corps was in the area, no matter how curious they were about the circumstances. Karkat leaned against one of the old worktables, pulling off his gloves and putting them down next to his helmet before folding his arms and giving Dirk a scrutinizing look. “So,” he said after an awkward pause. “Guess you tracked me down, huh?”
“It wasn’t easy,” Dirk said. He was leaning against one of the lockers, still wearing his shades. Some things really were universal constants. “Hard to find a man who travels with the wall. I’ve been through Anchorage, Bethel, Nome. Even someone as …” he looked Karkat up and down, making the troll scowl. “Unique… as you, is tough to find if he’s chasing shifts to make a living.”
“The fuck are you even looking for me for anyway?” Karkat growled. “I’m retired. Out of commission. Grounded. Opting out.”
“We’ve spent the last six months remodeling and upgrading what’s left of the last original Alternian Mech,” Dirk replied. “Retrofitting it with human Jaeger tech, integrating the firepower with the troll Drift technology so they can be repurposed for the Interspec Program.”
Karkat’s eyes widened. All of the Mechs that had gone through the Breach during the Assault had been destroyed, he’d been there, he’d seen it happen. Except for the one he’d dragged to the frozen Alaskan shore alone after he’d lost his co-pilot.
“Miracle,” he breathed.
Dirk gave him a slight nod. “We used what was left of her to make a new Jaeger,” he said. “Still runs like the old Alternian models, but we gave her few upgrades to work with our systems.” He paused, looking Karkat up and down before continuing. “Needs a pilot.”
Karkat scoffed, disbelief evident on his face. “And what, I’m your first choice? Really?”
“No,” Dirk’s arms were folded. “You’re my only choice. Every other troll pilot who came through in the Assault on the Breach five years ago is either already working with us or they’re dead.”
Karkat swallowed, reflecting on the gravity of that statement. He’d known things were bad, and it had been two and a half sweeps, but really, he was the only one left? He thought about the Assault on the Breach, the army of stolen Mechs they had used to take down as many horrorterrors as possible before they got to the coastlines. Gamzee’s blood-spattered face rose unbidden in his mind and he felt sick again, his hands involuntarily gripping the edge of the table.
“I was still in the Drift with Gamzee when that horrorterror ate him, Dirk,” he said, finally. “I felt it eat him. My…” he swallowed hard, forcing himself to stay calm. Tears wouldn’t be even remotely helpful in this situation and he’d become well practiced at keeping them at bay. “My moirail, my best friend. I can’t have anyone else in my head like that again.”
Dirk sighed. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, Karkat,” he said, an edge to his voice. “But the straits have never been more dire. If I’m here, talking to the guy who I know swore to never set foot on the battlefield again, that means we’re in last hope territory.”
“Things seemed like they were going well in Sydney,” Karkat replied. “I saw the footage.”
“Vriska Serket is a talented pilot with a flair for both bravado and the dramatic,” Dirk said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “That cannon is both loose and rolling down a hill at ludicrous speeds. It isn’t just Sydney under attack either, it’s all up and down the Pacific Rim. Increased Kaiju attacks, just days apart, in Vladivostok, Lima, Seattle. They’re escalating faster than we can beat them back.”
Karkat looked across the room at the human and it struck him exactly how tired Dirk looked. Karkat was plagued with regular nightmares but even he looked well rested compared to Deputy Marshal Strider, who was visibly exhausted even through his inscrutable eyewear. “I didn’t know it was that bad,” he said, softening.
“It’s the end of the world, Karkat,” Dirk said, his tone indicating that he wasn’t exaggerating. “Do you wanna die here building a glorified band-aid, or do you wanna go down fighting?”
Karkat continued to stare at him, remembering when the two of them had first met, in a different spot along the Alaskan coast, the human looking so alien and strange to him as he’d dragged him from the wreckage and spoken to him in a language he couldn’t understand but with a tone that he could. Earth wasn’t Karkat’s original home, and he hadn’t stayed in one place since he’d arrived there, but he’d come to it a furious rebel mutant ready to burn everything the Condesce stood for to the ground before she’d take it as her own.
That was still in him somewhere, once he got past all the bullshit and the pain. He was still a resistance fighter. That was what this planet needed. Earth was a place for warriors, not construction workers.
He set his jaw.
“Fuck it,” he said. “I suck at welding anyway. Let’s go save the world.”