Karkat == Be the traitor

You are now the traitor.

Actually you have been the traitor for a while. Three years to be exact. That's how long the cranking of the gears within your own rattling carcass has kept you awake at night. You can always hear the metallic parts grinding in the hollow of your chest like your own teeth when someone is stressing you out enough to pull out clumps of your own hair—which is surprise, surprise: 99% of the time. But the big joke is, you don't hate hate anyone more than you hate yourself. No one can inspire as much disgust in you and no one reminds you more of that deep repulsion with mere sounds.

Not even that bulge-sucking jackass.

But he's definitely the second biggest contender.

You, the traitor, are bowing to him now on one knee, with the knuckles of your fists digging into the soft surface of the red rug below you. The rug trails vermillion all the way up to the throne, a bloodied hunting track, guiding your eyes. The throne doesn't fit him as well as it should have. He is awkwardly tall and gangly, while still retaining some amount of childlike softness in his face and hands even after adolescence. It comes merely from eating dinners that have always contained meat, a luxury most in your homeland were never afforded. Though he may be a King now, he is not at all regal and the crown he hardly ever wears does not quite fit over his ears. His messy hair sticks out in strands all around it like the pelt of some flea-bitten stray attempting to be endearing.

What you hate the most is that sometimes he actually succeeds in that.

Though...not now. Now, in these moments, you could have killed him happily as you prostrate yourself to him in front of two other people, His Queen and His Knight. It is a gesture of submission, of soft-bellied vulnerability. Every time you need a Key Turning, he forces you to undergo this ritual... And every time you do it some of that dusty aggression rears its ugly head again like a poisonous snake hiding in a rucksack. You taste that old, bottomless well of dark, brackish rage in the back of your throat. You feel yourself almost shaking with the trembling coldness of your own anger. With a painful, longing ache, you remember the night you tried to slit that pale throat of his. You remember his hair in the wind as he turned toward you, genuine fear flashing in those wide blue eyes for only a moment before...

Before, without nearly as much grandeur as an angel, you fell. Three years ago. Fell metaphorically, yes, but more to the point, you fell physically from a gaping fuckhole in your chest. And you hit the ground. Hard.

It is for this reason your heart is no longer an organ, but a clockwork contrivance fashioned by the King's very own bat-shit crazy sister. Before he leaves the throne you could not have taken him seriously, never could you have imagined the depths of sacrilegious cruelty buried in that jelly-skulled head of his.

However, by the time he is standing up and walking slowly to you, you see the same coldness even in the measure of his steps. You saw the coldness the first time you woke up in a confused, painful haze after your injury and at first thought it was some form of hallucination. His pale face was hovering above you, not with that detestable optimism you loathed so much, not with the warm empathy you hated even more, but with a shrewd calculative kind of stare, otherwise unseen. It was the stare of someone worrying over an animal and wondering whether it'd be more profitable to have it put down. For these few moments, and only these few moments, he insists that you degrade yourself to exemplify your loyalty. It is a testament to the fact that no matter how much time passes, no matter what you do, your clock will run down and he will be the one who has the last say in life or death. This imbecile is your slave master. This idiot is your God.

You rise mechanically when he meets you, and you see the flash of the key, drawing light in a blinding yellow flash to his hand. He very slowly lifts your shirt, cold half moon nails grazing over scar-twisted flesh, rudely exposing the darker skin of your ancestry like a child caught at pick pocketing... Until he finds the indention and you sense him grow still for a moment. A second later, you feel the painful bite of metal nose intrusively inside you, so surreal as it slips and then locks into place. It finds the position where it can churn the mechanisms guiding your veins. You take a tortured gasp of air when cants his wrist and turns the key. For a shocked couple of seconds, everything seems to blacken around the edges.

Then, blindly you drink in the relief and humiliation greedily, in one gulp of gifted breath, like a jilted aristocrat swallowing poison. His sky blue eyes then meet yours and you can physically feel your rage close around you like a blanket when the sympathy returns into them.

Everything after that spike of pain and embarrassment is always a blur. Sometimes you only sleep for one afternoon- sometimes it's days. It depends on how run down your clock was before you made it back. Your body takes the offered rest greedily and without question. No one stops you, so you drift in and out of subconsciousness.

When you awake you breathe a few times just to test how easy it seems. The gears turn more fluidly, your chest doesn't rattle and wheeze. While your last days are spent in desperate agony, your first few moments are always blissful. an accursed golem still getting used to its legs. You roam clumsily without purpose until some well-meaning help finds you and settles you down enough to attempt to give you food. You usually, however, scare the squawking females away with dirty looks, gnashing teeth, and a string of sharp words. You devour everything like a half starved hunting hound and no one expects you to thank them.

It is only on perhaps the third (or fourth- you're not exactly sure) night that you become lucid enough to truly dream. And when you do that is, of course, when you reluctantly decide to join the world of the living again. It's no paradise but it can't be as bad as...other places you've been.

Eventually you are able to dress yourself and the feeling returns to your fingers, buzzing with erratic energy that keeps you awake after many nights of uninterrupted sleep. The first place your feet find themselves tramping to is the sanctity of the palace gardens. You don't entirely hate them, not as much as you hate everything else.

You anticipate the hot gust of air when your boots crunch grass underfoot. It's the height of mid-summer but still unseasonably warm. The Wind is still there, ever- present as it is over the border, but it's hot, like breath. The wizened fuzz of swollen storm-clouds on the horizon don't leave much guesswork regarding the reason. Predictably, it is wet and sticky outside and you do a sheer beeline for the tiny foothills. You don't even traverse the carefully-lit paths because you know the grounds well enough to make a short cut. The dirt is wet, but fertile and soft, cultivated. Quite unlike the rest of the wetlands in the Kingdom of Wind and Shade, it isn't drowning. It has been sheltered so the wild dark vines don't choke it, like they choke everything else and the strange glowing mushrooms don't pop up except in tiny clumps. The old, wizened gardeners are continuously ripping and laying them out in large piles to be chopped up later for salads. Babies compared to their monstrous counterparts in the wetlands and jungles, you reflect dimly. Droplets hang on every leaf you push past and by the time you get to where you wanted to go, you can't tell whether your clothes are damp with perspiration or humidity. Big fucking deal, you've spent the better part of your year deep in the sweaty asshole of a swamp... To you this is tame.

You settle down on the hill, getting a view of the Palace of Breath lit from far off, each window a comfortable burning circle. You survey your territory, already dividing sections where squares of purple and pink flowers needed to go. The hill can have a ring of red and at the top, here, at the crest, you will plant white. From above it would look like a tapestry. You glance upwards into the cloudy night sky and catch yourself wondering what he's up to, as you always do when you consider the bird's eye view. Then you hiss harshly at your own stupidity and get up again, intent on finding some better use for your time. The King needs your concern like he needs a hole in the head. If you have to worry about someone...there are better people you could worry about. Some who actually does have a hole in their think-pan.

In the days that pass, you keep the gardeners busy. You're pretty sure each and every one of them hates you but you couldn't give a salamander's greasy gallbladder one way or the other about their opinions. You're the one with the creative vision. If it was left up to them, this place would look like a bigger pile of shit than it already was. You enjoy ordering them around but you also do a fair share of the work yourself: hands on your knees, elbows scraped and chapped from thorns, pants covered in grass stains, fingernails scummy with dirt. There's nothing like it. You yell yourself hoarse at the tiny green shoots because how else are you supposed to fucking wake them up?

Apparently the noise you were making attracted some unwanted attention and you cut your eyes upward only to find yourself staring into a fluffy oblivion of white petticoat. As soon as you realize what the fuck you're looking at, you start wondering if stabbing yourself in the face with a pair of garden shears would be too much of a dramatic way to end it all. Before you can decide to act on it, however, she blessedly bends her knees and instead you have to look at her round, soft buck-toothed face. It's a very hateable facial structure, you have decided recently, largely and universally hateable.

She adjusts her glasses, her somewhat beady green eyes behind them make her look crazy and owlish just as a Witch would be expected to look. And a bit cute, by some cosmic abortion of logic. Just a bit, and not nearly as much as she thinks she is.

"I see you're hard at work, huh?"

"What're you talking about? This is relaxing." The sad part is, you're being honest.

"You know, when I taught you how to garden, I wasn't really thinking about the long term repercussions of giving you any kind of power over other people," she said teasingly, probably thinking she was being so adorable right now. That fucktard with the goggles would probably eat it up, but you've come to know better. She's a witch and that involves sometimes boiling small children in cauldrons.

"These morons have it easy all year! When I'm not here they can just screw around and cut grass like they're in lala-land. I challenge their sensibilities a bit. Is that a fucking crime?"

She sighs. "No, I guess if it makes you happy there's no real harm in it. I guess. Just try to go easy on the help, okay? They're all terrified of you."

You can't help but twist up a little smile at that and she snorts. "Karkat, that's not a good thing!"

Well there is her opinion and then there's yours.

"Are you just gonna stand there or are you going to fucking lend a hand? If you're not then go chirp at someone else, I'm busy."

She frowns. "If you want me to stick around, then ask politely." She gives you that trademark Swamp Bitch look that says 'I'm not gonna take any of your crap'.

You mull it over. She's kind of the heathen goddess of gardening and apparently has dark magic plant-powers or some bullshit... Basically she taught you everything you know, including your techniques for encouraging growth. Though of course she sticks with 'singing softly' while you put your... Unique spin on things, as always. With her help, anything you do will turn out 99 percent better and that's not hyperbole. It's just a fact. So it might be worth giving over your pride just a bit. Not that there was much left in the first place.

You force sickening sweetness off your palate. "Please help me out then, Princess?"

She smiles, presumably because you're the only one, besides her brother, that still calls her that. Simply put, the title has become something of an obnoxious inside-joke between the two of you. You further strain your facial muscles by offering a less aggressive grimace-smile in return. Then she speaks and the moment is ruined. Big fucking surprise.

"Sorry Karkat, but I actually have a reason for being here that kind of doesn't involve gardening."

You glare daggers at her. "You set me up."

"All is fair in love and war, fuckass" she says sweetly. She covets material like this just for these special visits of yours. You should consider yourself lucky that you are audience to these eloquent gems of conversation.

Apparently your mental-dagger trajectory was a bit off because she promptly begins picking up your gardening tools in that anal, meddling way of hers. The only detail she doesn't seem to notice are hate rays burning out of your eyes and in her direction. She just giggles. "Only a little. Come on, you need to wash up. I have to check out that ticker of yours."

"You mean that scrap of noisy junk you planted inside my chest in a fit of poor judgment?" You gripe, not at all happy with this turn of events. "...Fine."

You and Princess Jade (or as most of the Kingdom knows her: The Swamp Witch) are "friends"... Sort of. You're about as friendly as any person who horribly maimed and wounded the other person can be. She did save your life too, though. You're not falling all over her dainty little feet in gratitude, however, as most of what she did she just did to see if she could. She didn't really stop to think if she should either... You're alive after all, so you guess you can't complain too much but... No fuck that, you will complain all you damn well please. At that point, your life was about as meaningful to her as that of a lab rat or... Fuck, in her case... A frog.

Weird shit goes on in that swamp of hers. You hear tell of croaking... And explosions. You don't ask questions. You don't wanna know.

It's the usual routine. She tells you to hop up on the table and you hop on the table. You remove your shirt. Good boy. She listens to your "heartbeat" as carefully as a field mouse, paying close attention to the intervals between infernal grinding of the gears. She examines what veins are visible, pokes around the indention that only the key John wears can depress. It's a bit awkward, all in all, and you're almost thankful when she opens her mouth to chirp at you again... At least until she decides to say the most mind-numbingly imbecilic thing possible. It's like she can't even help it. It's in her blood.

You know immediately something's wrong when the chattering stops. You tense, bracing yourself for impact.

"...Have you seen John?"

It's even worse than you thought. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table. "Are we done here? I wanna get back to work."

"Karkat," she frowns and tries to touch your hand. "Please just listen to me, okay?"

You swipe it away and curl your fingers into a fist. You'd never hit her, but there's no harm in imagining it. Your pretty sure she'd just fuck your shit up again anyway. You've learned your lesson before. But once again, imagination is a powerful thing.

"No Princess, I think I'm done listening to your magical rejuvenating fountain of utter bullshit. Did you really need to inspect that old ticker of mine or were you just trying to coerce me into giving that buck-toothed fuckass the time of day?" Your sick of these fucking mind games.

She bares them at you. "I have buckteeth too, Karkat!"

"Yes, and you're a fuckass too. Being a prodigy doesn't make you any less of a fuckass and it doesn't exempt you from judgment."

She shifts a bit and then starts pretending to busily put away her equipment. "If he wants to see you, you know he will eventually, Karkat. He's the King. He can see who he wants to see when he wants to see them."

"Fuck you Jade, I'm not talking to anyone unless I feel like it. Especially not him."

She sighed. "Now you're just being a big whiny baby."

You grind your teeth so loud you can almost hear it over the ticking. "You weren't there, were you? You got into town maybe yesterday? You're never there when it happens. You don't know what the fuck it's like."

"I'm trying to understand and … On a level I do … That's why I don't like to watch it but-"

"What the hell would a girl who ran away to avoid being controlled know about being controlled? Your the biggest fucking hypocrite I've ever seen. You live in exile, in a SWAMP for the gods' sakes."

She goes quiet for a minute and purses her lips. You can tell you've hurt her feelings with that one statement- it's so easy to tell with both of them. But you don't feel bad, your blood is up and she knows what you're like. If she can't take the heat then she shouldn't have brought you here under false pretenses, shouldn't have broached the subject, shouldn't have assumed-

"John's not as stupid as he seems."

You raise your eyebrows. If she was searching for a great opener that one was not exactly breathtaking. But she presses on anyhow.

"He knows you can't forgive him, Karkat. He'd never ask that of you either. He knows what he's doing is..." She wants to say 'wrong' but can't quite articulate it because you know that even she is still unsure of your motives. That's not something you blame her for. Just like you don't blame her for putting a big gaping hole in your chest. You tried to kill her brother.

But then they took it to the next level and made it unnatural. There's a difference between an honorable death and enslavement. There's no honor in enslavement because slaves have no honor of their own. Maybe considering all the things you've fucked up... You don't deserve honor. That's viable. But you can't just live with yourself like this either, and you definitely can't pretend it makes you happy. Not while you're working for their table scraps like a dog and your former "employer" spends his afternoons staring at rain puddles just so he can 'watch the motherfucking colors'. What do they expect from you? Sunshine and daisies? That just isn't going to happen.

Well, okay the daisies might happen in lieu of your recently acquired hobbies. But definitely not the sunshine part. Outside the no-holds-barred-beat-down raging inside your think pan, Jade is still talking.

"-Questionable... And he knows it hurts you, but he doesn't want to do it. You don't know how many times he's ..." She paused, biting her lip then hurriedly continued, in slight agitation as if she couldn't make the words tumble out any faster. "Look just trust me on this, it doesn't give him any pleasure. He has to. You know why too, and I'm not saying knowing why helps the strain but," she pants a little and tongues the gap between her teeth searchingly. "You can both make it easier on yourselves. You know you're friends so there's no need for more pressure..."

"He is not my friend," you snarl witheringly. It's as if she just accused you of something obscene and disgusting.

She rolls her eyes "B.S!"

Ugh, not this shit again. You HATE this shit.

"He's not!"

"Whatever."

You make an inhuman sound of frustration, suitable for jackals and head injury victims. "Gods damn it, Jade..."

You bite your tongue to hold back a spew of hateful words as she sighs and smooths her dress down needlessly. You know she just needs something to do with her hands. Fidgety. Twitchy. Just like her brother. Drives you up the wall.

"Well whatever you say he is to you.. He is a least decent enough to cordially invite you to eat dinner with him tonight."

"He didn't say it like that." If those pudgy pink lips ever formed a sentence that well constructed, you'd probably die of shock.

"Well...no... he said 'Karkat and I should chow down together tonight, it'll be fucking awesome!'" She shrugged. "But isn't that just as good?"

You exhale. He's pretending that he doesn't know you're mad at him. Typical freaky Kowasite mental manipulation tactics.

"Okay I'm done. Whether you're going or not is up to you," she huffed. "But please just consider it? Please? Even if it's only to yell at him, at least you'll be doing something other than sulking."

You feel oily, downright unclean just at the idea of it. Everything inside is screaming FUCK NO! BACK THE FUCK OFF! But it's the Swamp Witch... And she's got this sensitivity thing going on (big difference between she and her brother who has all the sensitivity of a rhinoceros on opiates). You can't even twist your mouth into articulating a more polite way to say 'no' so what you come up with is a noncommittal grunt. The worst part is that it leans more towards sounding like an affirmative.

So, of course, she runs with it and gives you a quick hug around the neck, like a child squeezing an old hunting dog. All you can do is sit stiffly and uncomfortably until her childish urges are satisfied. Then she pulls back and fixes you with the trademark English-family Sympathy Eyes. You feel your gag reflex kicking in but she doesn't just stumble into it... Her voice is soft and somewhat cautious, tiny wrinkles appear just above her eyebrows as if she's not sure what she should or should not say.

"So how is...how is he feeling?"

Your mouth is dry and your voice is flat. "Fine. About the same."

She bites her lip. "I'm wondering how you can even tell over the haze."

You sigh. You know she means well but it doesn't stop you from feeling dull anger. Not quite at her, but at the entire situation. "I've known him a long time, okay? He's...changed. The drugs are just for the headaches...and the night terrors."

She pauses, nods curtly, and then for some reason she feels the need to hug you again. Just like the first time, you put up with it. You don't hug back. You never do.

She tweets a quick goodbye at you and flounces off, her home-wrecking complete apparently. Now that she's done fucking around with your social life, you suppose she's off to facilitate her own.

Ugh, as long as you're not around to watch them 'macking on each other, it's all the same to you. In the jungle you've seen bigger snakes trying to eat smaller ones and you can't really think of a more apt description for how they slobber on each other. Disgusting. You're pretty, mostly 100 % sure they do it just to piss you off. And it works swimmingly.

After that, you consider going back to the gardens but you've lost your will to work today. There's really nothing else for you to do in here. As comfortable as you feel on the grounds, the palace itself is a bit... awkward. Really, you can go anywhere you please and the inside will always stay cool and breezy, no matter what the weather is like outside.

But...

You just aren't used to having walls around you anymore. They press on you and the more you wander in silence, the more the grinding inside you starts to become more prevalent. You need a distraction. You need to block out the noise.

Well...while you're in the neighborhood, it couldn't hurt to pay that friend of yours a visit. You take a wrong turn on the way back to your room, but your steps are slow and unhurried. You don't expect much change.

He wouldn't be awake now... this friend of yours can't really do nights yet. He's scared of the dark now. And he's got headaches that no small amount of alcohol and opium can abet. Despite your best efforts, you don't see him much... And yet you're always watching.

When you poke your head through the crook of the door, you see him the way he usually looks to you now. He's sprawled on the bed, all limbs and joints and unruly hair, slack jawed and dead to the world. His room always lit with at least one candle to break the dark. Sometimes you peek in early enough to catch a maid pulling a blanket over his sleeping form, sickly and pale against the yellow glow. That's all you need to see. It's what they call a decaying situation.

The best you can do for him is give him what he needs to get through the night and hope he has a good day. He usually does. He hasn't got much to worry about these days anymore and in some ways, you suppose he might be lucky... Stupid fucker certainly considers himself lucky. There's no guilt, no tension in his mind...only his body seems to remember anything about what occurred. You, however, can remember enough for the both of you.

You withdraw, feeling nothing except the inclination that you yourself could do with a little not-remembering. Not such a heavy dose of course, but just a nip.

Of course, this means creeping into the kitchen and procuring it for yourself because, honestly, you don't feel like scaring a house-keeper into submission at the moment. Nursing your drink (whiskey- like anyone with a bulgesack would) you keep glancing at the clock as dinner looms closer and closer (though your stomach gives much more indication than the clock could ever do).

As six o' clock draws nigh, you give up trying to ignore the quarreling (screaming) voices in your head. You finally have to address them, as both your past and present selves refuse to come to terms on the matter of the King.

So what the actual fuck are you going to do, anyway?

The easiest and most logical answer is to ignore his request. You know he won't make you come if you don't want to. He can of course, but he won't, because he's a nook-whiffing idiot. But if you do ignore it, he'll most definitely come looking for you and you can hardly imagine anything more unbearable. Your combat experience hasn't taught you much about matters of the heart (haha, fuck you), but it has taught you that it's better to opt for offense than defense when the opportunity presents itself.

John Egbert Fucking English. Excuse me King John Egbert Fucking English. What a fucking joke. It sounds more like a tongue-twister than a title. Any decent Alternian warlord from times gone by would've laughed himself silly at the idea of John as a leader.

Somehow though, somehow, the people do love him. It's not the kind of mindless "divine right" hero worship they gave King Jake either, it's different. It's sympathetic. You don't understand it, the culture shock is perhaps, too great.

You picture him now whether you want to or not. Him with his extremely punchable oval face glowing with stupidity and false hope, in the middle of digesting a whole stomach full of word-vomit he's just dying to project in your direction. But you're not about to be intimidated. You're the fucking Knight of Blood... At least that's what they used to call you.

Title or no title, the fact remains that you're a fearsome son of a bitch and John, even on one of his better days, couldn't scare a particularly fierce tulip.

Why were you ever worried? You've got this in the bag. Like a bag full of kittens you intend to toss off a waterfall. He won't know what hit him.

You dress yourself to the nines and pull your collar high and tight fixing your face with the gnarliest scowl you can summon. You think it's time to visit the sovereign ruler of the Kingdom of Wind and Shade...

And crush his spirit like an insect with your big black shit-stomping boots.

The setting is a steampunk humanstuck AU SuperCatGirl and I are working on called Clockwork Melody. This is just a part of a much larger story arc. If you like it, please tell me what you think and if you'd like to see more.