"Thanks, Sollux!" A gritty Sollux Captor turned to look back at his recent work; helping Aradia fix up her hive. He smiled at her waving, watching her hair bounce happily as she retreated back into her new home, a grin placid to her face. And the way her eyes were sparkling at him. Wow, he thought. Their little expedition had made his day, and right now he was heading home, for he had an important meeting with his gaming systems to attend to.

He floated aimlessly up the stairs in his communal hive stem, all the way up to the top floor. He actually didn't know how many floors there were, though last time he had checked, there were more than twenty. But even then, the yellow-blood hadn't minded counting them all.

He landed softly on his doorstep, turning the knob and gently pushing the door open like he always did to make sure it wouldn't fall off of its hinges. To his surprise, he saw his angry little fellow of a friend sitting on his couch, toying with one of Sollux's electronic devices. The intruder just barely looked up to accommodate his gaze and then turned back to his little do-hickey.

"Welcome home, fuckass." Sollux blinked and adjusted his glasses slightly, brushing some of the dirt and dust off of them.

"KK…? What're you doing here?"

"What's it look like I'm doing? I'm here to greet you, asshat, or would you rather me kiss your feet and swoon?" A soft, yellow coloring appeared in Sollux's cheeks. He'd wanted Karkat to like him forever ago, but, seeing no return in feelings, he was with Aradia now, and he was happy. Though sometimes, Karkat would still tease him about it, which would usually get him worked up. He let it pass, though, he had stuff to do.

"Thtow it, KK. If you're here to try and hack my codeth again, you might ath well thtart. But I've got to thower firtht, we finally finithed AA'th hive." Sollux walked in further and Karkat went to sit by his computer setup, complete with more than five monitors, and quite enough computers.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm gonna upbeat your codes a million times fold, Captor." Karkat began typing something into a computer, which opened the program on all of the monitors.

"Whatever you thay, KK." Sollux stepped away into his bathroom, making sure his door was locked tight before taking off his dirty clothes. He slung a towel over the top of the shower, stepping in afterwards. Once the water was turned on, every outside noise grew quiet. Even the voices hushed up a bit, which was the one part of showering he liked best. He also knew that showering never took long, 5-10 minutes maybe, so he could get out quickly and make sure Karkat didn't mess up anything important on his computers.

A couple minutes in, he felt the ground start to tremble underneath his feet, slightly at first, but then growing so hard as to make him stumble and slip. It subsided pretty quickly, and the Gemini cursed to himself for his god-awful lusus. He'd have to feed that damn thing when he was done as well.

A few minutes later, he turned the water off, pulling his usual mustard-colored towel over onto his head. He dried himself off with ease and pulled on some fresh clothes, hanging up the towel afterwards. Picking up his heterochromatic glasses, he placed them neatly on his nose and opened the door. He stepped outside, humming slightly, and then blinked. His smile faded.

The sight that greeted him was horrific. Everything that followed happened in a blur. It seemed ever so quickly that he was down on his knees, trying to suppress the sobs racking his chest. His eyes had filled up with tears so quickly, he hadn't needed to look any longer. He'd only seen a few things. Bright light, rubble, a good amount of yellow, and red. Shit tons of red. Candy red.

He touched his face softly with his hand, which was covered in the blood of his companion. He didn't understand. Why had this happened? Why had he let this happen?

He crawled over some of the rubble to come across the mangled body of Karkat, completely dead and bleeding everywhere. His lusus was there too, easily killed in the collapsing roof and dripping yellow all over the place. His setup, his wires, his bees, all gone. One thing remained intact. A single computer monitor, reading the remainder of a code, one Sollux knew well.

~ATH (U1) {

~ATH (!U2) {

} EXECUTE ( ~ATH (THIS) { } EXECUTE(NULL) ) ;

} EXECUTE ( ~ATH (THIS) { } EXECUTE (NULL) ) ;

[THIS, THIS] . DIE ( ) ;