Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are alone.
It's always been like this, an unbending, absolute truth, from the moment you hatched with candy-red blood coagulating in your veins (veins you've wanted to open so many times, quit prolonging the inevitable.) You live in brief bursts of sensation and futile attempts at making yourself remembered— even 'the asshole who has no brain-to-mouth' filter is better than nothing— but you know deep down that you are nothing.
The truth is that your lifespan is pathetically short, compared to the rest of your friends', a sorry little horsefly whimper. Feferi will hurt much more, watching you drop one by one while her own existence is a wasteland with no end in sight, yet you shrivel thinking of just how soon it'll be lights-out. Flashes before your eyes, all the time: Vriska's firebrand smirk, the way Nepeta twitches her ears when she's excited, the nasal hitch of Sollux's lisp, Terezi's tongue flicking out tauntingly as she looks at you. These are the things you can keep, the things you can take into the dark, and you would be resigned to your lot if it weren't for a giddy gleeful fucking dipshit burrowing his way inside places he was never supposed to enter, places he's not allowed.
(That dipshit also has a name, and it is John Egbert, and he refuses to let you be alone.)
John— John is pure and gleaming and good, an almost holy being that you were first reluctant, then desperate to sully. Get your dirty, lowblood hands all over those crooked grins and that unfailing optimism, before atrocious romcoms and actual warm emotions start seeping through the cracks of your self-loathing—
he still hopes, unlike the others in your pathetic motley crew. You're going to escape the session, because you might struggle and suffer but that's just a minor roadblock in the way of your happy ending. You're going to smile at his terrible jokes, and you're going to stop toying with razorblades, and you're going to fall asleep with the ghost of his lips on yours. Your life is going to be so so so brief, but when you see him throw his head back and laugh, it will not seem meaningless.
And you think very hard about all of this, threatening to burst out of your skull like too much too strong sunlight, and decide that what you feel for John Egbert, human, fool, god, can be very neatly compartmentalized into one category: hate.
Hatred is simple. Hatred is comfortable and familiar and easy. Hatred has no nuance, it does not make you weak, it does not make you ask unnecessary questions. If you hate John, you can still have him, snarls and bared teeth, but you can also pretend that he has not altered you. Has not inserted himself into every thought, every memory— every dream.
— your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are alone, and you know the reason why.
(You were not meant for love.)
(Coward. Tick, tock, tick, tock.)