The first time he saw snow that was not oddly realistic data was on the morning he found himself waking up in a dork's room. The first time he saw snow and nearly had a panic attack because he thought he was within the game again after they'd won was on that early morning in the winter. The first time he saw snow and was able to touch it without thinking about any consequences of an imp or other beast popping out of the blanket of crunchy sounding white to attack them was on that morning.
And John was beside him.
But it wasn't just the sight that had him toppling to the bottom of the stairs and screeching, scaring all inhabitants of the house awake in the earliest hours of the morning, which notably earned him concerned and angered looks and a swift, light bop upon the cranium. He scrambled to cover every unnaturally sensitive inch of his gray body, the candy corn-dipped nubs protruding from his right and left hemispheres included, and stumbled out of the front door without even so much as an apology.
He needed to touch that fucking white shit.
For the first time since Sburb, Karkat was seeing, feeling, tasting human snow in the little flakes that papped his face. He noticed that, although humans weren't all that different than Trolls in many respects and yet were in many others, he had yet to determine by the climate how different their worlds were. And this was his best chance at it since it was in early "December" and it was finally snowing, just like John had promised him it would. How John knew this, he had no idea and made a point to ask him later on, to which John would only reply that it was because of some mechanisms that humans had built into themselves in their infancy and somehow developed well past the second nature rung. But of course, John was only fucking with Karkat. He had watched the weather, and it usually snowed in December in his general area. But he wouldn't let him know that. The expression of disbelief and wonderment on his face when he had made it outside and stared into the sky to watch the snow fall was just too priceless, in both a humorous and endearing sort of way.
John was only a step behind the Troll, snug in the brown jacket his resurrected father had bought for him just a week before for the impending wintry weather, a pair of haphazardly thrown on sweats and his sneakers as well as an overbearing brown and beige striped scarf, and he carried an equally overbearing scarf of crimson and emerald to drape around the boy's shoulders. When he managed to do it with absolutely no resistance, John looked at Karkat with a quirked brow through the glasses and then at the sky where Karkat was staring. Above them was a sheet of billowy gray and the flecks of white dusted farther onto the surface world that it cloaked from the sun's rays. Nothing besides the gray, and at first, John had no idea why Karkat was so damn transfixed on the sky until it hit him. So long in the game, Prospit dreaming and waking to briefly glance past Noir's shoulder and see the giant blue Skaia only to be slaughtered thereafter with all the other Prospit Dreamers and Derse following as if on cue.. it must have been strange to see a mass of gray as opposed to the ephemeral sight of Skaia, the darkness of a meteor, the strange mazes of Dream Bubbles with Dancestors and, of course, their own most likely cherished, and now eradicated, Alternian sky. The expression on Karkat's face became more curious than angry, as if taking in the sight of the gray into careful consideration and, John thought as he gazed into the now crimsoning irises, he saw a tiny flicker of fondness, as if it were a memory long past.
It was after the snow had gathered in clumps no higher than an inch along the soles on his boots that the gray lips parted to speak. When he did, his arms lifted to grasp his elbows and he slouched a bit, but there was a very small, nearly nonexistent smile upon his visage and his tone was light and wispy, like the lightest of breezes. His cheeks stained the hue of his eyes in the lightest of shades when he felt the flakes hit and dissolve on them. "Alternian skies looked a lot like this. I had only seen snow a few times during the hallowed perigees with my lusus, and those instances were during my childhood, I suppose you could say. I liked the snow then, even if it was a bit dryer than yours. Sometimes, Crabdad would neglect searching for food just to spend those days with me, to help me build snowtrolls and the like. Sometimes, he would make a sculpture with the snow, although he was clumsy so I'd had to help, and he would tell me stories about the life he used to have and about other creatures that resembled him, other Crabdads, if you will..." At that point, Karkat's gaze fell from the sky to his coal-hued boots, feet shuffling to remove the heightening snow and to disguise the hurt that was growing more and more apparent in his tone.
If John hadn't noticed right away, he would have been a terrible matesprit.
His hands slid from behind the other, who was surprisingly still much shorter than John himself, locking at the front of his carapace in an embrace while his cheek found solace in being pressed against the coarse ruffles of the Troll's hair. The sapphire irises were concealed behind both lenses and fleshy lids alike, the embrace tightening a bit, a reassuring gesture on John's part. Karkat accepted the embrace by leaning into it just a bit more than he usually did and sighing away the ache in the blood-pusher, returning his gaze to the gray cumulus. They stood there for a few more minutes, John content in the presence of his lover and Karkat half registering the other and half zoning out on thoughts of his closest paternal figure. But it was when John remembered he could still control the winds to a degree, thanks to the retention from Sburb, that he jostled from his near nap and pointed up at the falling snow. Karkat's attention broke off to gaze at the pale digit pointing upward, and he would have been lying if he'd said he wasn't curious to the point behind it.
"Karkay, watch."
It was all he needed, and suddenly, the snow came spiraling downward almost like a blizzard, to a foot just in front of his half-hugged body. Within moments, there stood a small sculpture, more wide than tall, with a ton of different shapes and multiple spheres that floated just above the snow figurines. It was sloppy. He told John this but quickly hushed him by telling him it was all right, because sculpting wasn't necessarily his forte either. It took no resistance for Karkat to remove himself from the embrace to kneel in front of the sculpture, but it took all of his will and resistance to not begin bawling like an overemotional shitface. The snow had formed, albeit sloppy, figures of the Trolls and humans, Jack Noir, the Lord of Time, the Muse of Space, a few nubs on each side that he assumed represented the Prospitians and Dersites, and the spheres hovering above the sculpture were the best rendition of Alternia, Earth, the Green Sun they'd created, and the many planets that they had inhabited at the beginning of their sessions. Noir and Lord English were squashed beneath the thick pedestal of snow created to hold the heroes, all of them, Alpha Team included.
The pinkish tears that had accumulated at his eyelids stung from not falling and almost freezing in place. John took notice of how Karkat hadn't spun around to curse him nor praise him nor even make a snarky remark and when he approached his lover, knelt beside him in a mimicking posture, he felt a brief pain in his heart and then an overwhelming relief. He hadn't been with the boy all that long, less than a year, but he already knew when his tears were of joy, regret, lamentation, fury and so on. Right now, his face was scrunched up in the same way that it was when he witnessed a sappy moment in one of his silly romcoms and the tears he was trying to hold back only emphasized the restraint he was showing. John had to bite back his giggle and comment, and instead pressed a kiss to the warm beanie just beneath his right horn, a sure-fire way to snap him from his reverie. Karkat hissed a bit, but was immediately distracted from his thoughts, just as John had predicted, and it was then that he seemed his most vulnerable, even more so than when he cried after a nightmare into John's chest and spilled his guts over the matters that he feared most before being consoled so wholly that he'd sleep again. But there was not a single obscenity that passed his lips nor a curse of some sort; although the flush was in place, Karkat exhaled slowly once and the inhaled once more, as if that could kill the red that dipped across his features so elegantly, and murmured a soft gratuitous 'thank you' toward his dear matesprit.
Karkat knew why John had made the sculpture, and what he intended to do with it thereafter, without ever asking once what it was for. That was how strong their bond had become.
The rest of the day was spent with Karkat and John making more sculptures and telling one another stories. Whether they were historic or invented on the spot didn't matter. What mattered was the few hours they spent simply enjoying their freedom as the children they never really got to be: John as the sensitive jokester with the soft coo to his words and Karkat as his more human self, and with every minute that passed, they felt more connected and more free. Their fun lasted only until noon, when they both decided it was time to eat something lest they collapse from their hunger. They left their sculptures as they were, but the first had been replaced by a semi-sphere with everyone on top like chopped needles, the resurrected dead as well, and Karkat smiled at the sight just before he followed John into the house. That night, when he was curled against the warmth that John provided, Karkat dreamt of his lusus and their stories, and the next day, he woke with a smile.