This one was originally written for Karezi week earlier in January, where each day had it's own theme; owing to the dearth of consistent Karezi work from the fandom as a whole, it was set up for a whole week of Karezi things for the starved fandom, but I was only able to do a couple of things for it. I decided to plan for a full-length story to make up for it, but in the meantime I'm posting the two fics I managed for Karezi week.

The theme of this one was 'Tree Houses'.

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck or any copyrighted fiction present in this story. This is a work of entertainment without any monetary gain.


The recycling drone crawled thunderously through the plains, tearing up lumps of dirt as it went. It was certainly possible to follow it's swaggering, wandering trail across the plains and see where it had been; it walked like it wasn't entirely sure how it was moving at all, and the trail left behind zigzagged in an uneven wave, the occasional rock or isolated skeleton in its way consumed for recycling and making it's path even easier to follow if you looked for empty space right through hills or lusus corpses.

It was a bumpy ride; a small balcony had been affixed to the back of the drone's low-slung abdomen, following the outer swell of it's shell. And over this was a thick canopy, essential in the daylight they were moving in; the sun was bright and high, but it shielded them from the sunlight, but they kept bouncing around; Karkat held to a shaft probably meant to be a guard rail but made a good safety hold, staring grimly out across the plains through a sun visor shaped so that he looked like he was squinting angrily. Just as insurance, his compact body was totally shrouded in a heavy daylight cloak to protect him from any sun burn or accidental overexposure.

Terezi was wearing a similar set of gear even though the sun couldn't do much worse to her: she had no desire to be burned any worse. She was also sitting next to him, and Karkat's lusus looming behind the both of them and one heavy leg curled around Karkat and Terezi. It still wasn't totally safe: the balcony had been adjusted to Terezi's height and width and not Karkat's, and since she was nearly twice his size, as a consequence his legs dangled dangerously above the ground while her's were fairly close to the ground. She sat a little closer to the back of the ride than him, positioned so that she could reach out and pull him back in an instant if she needed to. She hadn't mentioned any of this, and he hadn't complained about the arrangement; if he had a problem with it, or thought it was just her being a highblood that didn't think a weak lowblood like he pretended to be could take care of himself, he wasn't confident enough in himself to say anything.

Terezi couldn't see anything, of course, but she was following Karkat's set of body and stance, and he was looking unhappily across the plains, to the smoldering ruins where his hive used to be.

She thought about telling him she was sorry for him, and decided that she couldn't think of a good enough joke for it or a way to say it at all without upsetting him. So she remained silent, and watched and waited.

Karkat kept looking in the direction of his old hive, glancing suspiciously at a few of the neighbor's houses they passed but mostly staring at his home. At the ponds and lakes flowing out of caves, the copses of woods he used to hunt in. Garbage piles laid high with the ruins of weapons and devices he cobbled together to trump his lack of physical size and strength that his blood promised he'd never have. Ancient bones and entire skeletons as big as an entire hive and older than any troll still on the home world, and even here he could see the little scratches and abandoned weapons left behind by newly limbed wigglers who had played there just as he had.

It was a whole lot of places he'd probably never see again. It would be too dangerous now, this place wasn't home for him anymore.

Karkat lowered his head, a solitary whimper not stifled in time. He buried himself up in his cloak so Terezi couldn't hear him. She could smell him though, the flush of his blood and the subtle changes in his eddies of pheromones. Not so much a change though, just something hidden coming out and being loud about it. She could feel him shaking a different way from the rickety balcony, just barely heard the muffled sniffling and buried howls. The huge crustacean lusus keened softly (and even soft his voice was a wailing high-pitch, a booming screech like some promise of violence even if that lusus didn't have a mean strain in his whole shell, and there was the secret of Karkat's personality all in one: loud and mean on the outside, sweet as candy on the inside, and just watch him deny it).

His lusus curled a leg around him. Karkat tried to adjust himself so he was nestled into the leg, like he could let himself be hugged and not feel so terrible, but he couldn't let go without probably sending himself tumbling down onto the grass in broad daylight; they were high up enough that a fall like that could hurt. He shook inside that cloak, it was many sizes too big for him, and Terezi just knew that he was crying under it.

Her insides twisted up. Everything she'd learned growing up told her that she should shun that weakness, hate it, loathe it, smash it like a little twisted bug. She knew what she actually wanted, but the idea scared her, worse than what she was positive would be coming some day soon.

Go on, a not-quite-voice said somewhere in the back of her head, like the call of her lusus or the echoes of her own mind, grown great and mighty inside her like a promise of what she could be if only she was good enough for it. A mirror she'd never measure up to. You know you want to help him. Hug him or something like that, do the sappy and gross thing. Be nice for once.

Terezi felt small and weak herself. She reached a hand towards Karkat and almost instantly snatched it back the second she thought of him flinching or something.

Karkat, still trying to hide his misery under the cloak, didn't notice. His lusus did though, and turned a massive head towards Terezi. She couldn't see but she could feel those big eyes, bony brow shading them like a scowl, stare intensely at her like blazing coals set into the side of a cliff. The mouth opened, a beak with teeth built into the sides, and keened urgently at her. She felt like something was being demanded of her, and the big crab gave her an insistent poke with a claw nearly as big as her whole torso.

She just knew those demanding eyes were red. No wonder Karkat kept that crab lusus hidden now that he was older and could hunt for himself; he couldn't risk anyone finding out that his blood was just as impossibly red. Had kept him hidden, Terezi amended.

Even redder than her own shades, as red as the shades her ancestor had worn to look into the eyes of a dragon without being burned by them. Terezi swallowed, feeling in someway that not doing something as simple as following the commands of her friend's lusus was letting down her ancestor. Hesitantly, her arm felt up along the rail, jerky twitches inching along. Her claws touched against heavy fabric, nicking tiny tears in them, and her palm touched down against blazing bright heat, and she was cool enough that it was a shock to her. Not a bad shock, it was nice and good and made her guts feel weird in ways that made her suddenly really glad she was already sitting down.

She was touching his arm, Karkat's actual arm. She also felt Karkat's muffled cries subside, and his body stiffening in shock. She noticed, in a distant and bemused kind of way, that his arm was only a bit wider than her palm. Her fingers could close around the softness of his arm and her claws touch (though that wasn't so easy) and the smallness of him, especially in relation to her own size, made her feel suddenly dizzy.

He was so small. So easily breakable, hell the whole world was out to break him the instant they found out what he was; no wonder he'd turned all snappy in defense.

Karkat tensed. Terezi's hand was happy where it was, she was happy with her hand on his arm, feeling his head and the contrast of his burning-hot blood, hotter than torture irons, against the coolness of her just barely high enough teal. It was probably forbidden, like that, and cull her on the spot but she liked it. And she was absolutely certain that Karkat was going to scream at her to get away from him and she'd jump away from him in an instant, but she really didn't want to.

But she would, if he wanted her to. It was only fair that he get that little bit of autonomy.

The cloak turned, a glimmer of light on the sun visor under the hood. Terezi felt the weight of Karkat's stare on her, hot and bright and fierce. But not angry, exactly. She heard his breathing stop for a moment, speed up when he caught it, and then calm down. She hadn't expected that; no one in his position should calm down with a highblood clamped around their arm.

He did hiss, but it was entirely perfunctory, just a bit of hostility he was obliged to. He did seem uncertain, so Terezi swallowed what nerve she had and said, "I got you. So's you don't, I dunno, float off into the sky if you don't let your lusus grab you or something."

The fabric around Karkat's face wrinkled in a way that she knew his ridiculously pretty face was sneering at her. Not, she imagined, that his teeth were showing. There wasn't any more bite there than he had for anything else, really. Her grip moved, sliding over his shoulder and holding him firm. "If you're going to bother doing that," Karkat said, slowly and apparently choosing every single word with care not to give something away. "Then get closer or I'm gonna slip off."

"Smooth," Terezi drawled, scooting closer so that her hip bumped Karkat from side to shoulder with a little indignant squeak from him. "Pretty sure there's a law against flirting that bad."

"I heard that line in a musical," Karkat retorted (and squeaking slightly as she scooted fully next to him, her weight settling as she grabbed a rail to steady herself and put her arm entirely around him, shoulder flush around one side of his body and eclipsing him, holding him tight, and wasn't flush just the perfect word for it). "That automatically makes it a classic and you damn well know it."

She stuck her tongue out. It obscured the lower half of her face and some of the railing. "Please, I've heard some of the musicals in your library, classic is not the word I'd use!"

Karkat hissed, more in surprise than hostility. "Holy hell on a gross-as-shit highblood art show how the hell do you fit that into your mouth!?"

Terezi stuck her tongue back in, adjusting her abnormally flexible jaws. "Legislacerator secret," she said blandly.

Karkat's lusus had silently watched the back and forth with a mysterious expression, as much as his inflexible face was capable of expression (and it was hard to tell exactly what goes on in a lusus' mind, anyway). It seemed approving now, and in any event Karkat had calmed down, he always got shouty when he was feeling better. (Not feeling good. He wouldn't be feeling good for a long time, now.) A rumble came from him and made the whole drone shake as they passed a hive, making the kid living there seriously nervous. If drones could have feeling about it, this one gave no apparent sign of caring about shaking like that. Terezi turned around to see the lusus scooting closer, the soft and fleshy underbelly pressing against them like a cushion and various legs thicker around than either of them pulling them in, anchoring and cuddling them at the same time. Huge claws snapped, dangerously close to Terezi's head.

Terezi became a paler shade of gray. "Aw, shit. Am I going to die?"

"Nah," Karkat said, a bit more muffled even than earlier because now he was leaning into his lusus' proffered leg and Terezi as much as she was leaning into him. It was awkward to look at, like the slightest upset would put them both somersaulting off the drone. "He just gets grabby when he's affectionate."

"Oh." Terezi wasn't sure what to say about that. "Um. Good."

Both her and Karkat were feeling fairly sober about it. Every single bit of romance or other fiction published since the beginning of time or something like that said what it meant when your flush's lusus liked you and got cuddly.

Flirting was fine. Helping was fine, and a sign of growing mature enough for real quadrant shenanigans. Someone else's lusus welcoming you like it's own wriggler was serious business. Both of them weren't exactly comfortable with that kind of implication.

And in the brief gap of distraction, Karkat looked back to where his hive had been, far in the distance. He smelled alright; gloom radiated from him, sharp from sudden emotional shift, but not very deep or overpowering. "Miss my hive already," he mumbled, with a fresh rise of anger in it.

"Sorry," Terezi said without thinking.

"Why? You didn't do it." Karkat looked at her, squinting. "Or did you? Is that it, Pyrope? Is this some kind of twisted scheme to get me into your claws and messed-up tree house, away from help and rescue? Oh, I see where this kind of thing goes, your script here is completely messed up. Freaking highblood fetishes."

Terezi chuckled nastily. "If it is, scheme's working good!"

Karkat snorted. He did give her a mildly worried look. "You... didn't actually burn my house down?"

Terezi blinked. "What?! No!"

"Oh. I figured." He moved at her in a way that at least felt somewhat guilty. "...Sorry."

"It's okay," Terezi said, mollified. She detected movement and turned her face in the direction of yellow; a mustardblood, one of Karkat's neighbors, and her scent built up an image for her; a hive, somewhat grander than Karkat's hive but nowhere as elaborate as her own tree house, and atop it a troll kid, older than her or Karkat, silently staring down at them with a general air of apprehension and surprise.

A tealblood carting off a presumed lowblood to parts unknown. She wondered how it must have looked. She also wondered if the troll looking at them had done it. Burned down Karkat's house while Karkat was lucky enough to get out and lucky enough to rescue his lusus from the wreckage, and quick enough to message Terezi. That was maybe surprise, Terezi supposed, that she had shown up on the scene with a drone to salvage what was left of his house and take what things he had left and leave.

It wasn't safe for Karkat here anymore. Terezi suspected that someone else here knew what he really was. The threat he posed to the Empire's entire existence, the carrier of the same forbidden path that she secretly followed. Terezi idly thought about what sort of death would be appropriate for the troll looking at them if he was guilty; burning, probably.

Karkat shivered next to her. He knew her moods. He did notice the troll staring at them and hissed angrily; the troll retreated from them, into the shade of his own hive. Karkat glowered and said, "Lucky bastard."

Terezi almost said that he should feel happy, he got to move into a totally kickass treehouse, and some lingering shred of restraint made her stop. They were having a good moment here and she really didn't want to be the one to ruin it.

They continued onwards, the carpenter drone eating anything stationary in it's way and it's mysterious digestive processes recycling whatever it ate as raw materials for future construction projects, particularly the one set out for it. None of that was thankfully alive, but Terezi somehow doubted that would have mattered to the drone.

And the trees began to grow taller, the trees around them more numerous, and the foliage was thicker. The character of the land began to change, and as the two trolls did their best not to think about how their lives were going to have a big shift neither of them felt really ready for, the drone took them with it into the forest.

It was, geographically speaking, probably one of the more impressive forests on Alternia. The planet in general tended towards extreme environments, and the forest was vast despite being a fairly temperate area, growing over a bumpy and ridged ground that Terezi privately suspected for being either a lost city or the site of a flogging jut that the Empress had wanted forgotten and buried. It expanded over the size of a genuine city, like what Alternia had boasted until the Empress had commanded all trolls to serve on the fleet once they came of age. And it was still a peaceful place, huge but lacking in the kind of outright dangers troll children normally had to deal with. Alternia had become even more wild in the ages since the exodus of the adults; this kind of peace was highly unusual for a troll kid.

More than a little lonely, Terezi had to admit. Karkat was a lot more perceptive than he let on (though not as much as he pretended he was).

And before them was one of the largest trees in the forest, perhaps the biggest one; certainly it was the oldest, with a patch of sacred ground at the very center of where it grew, and higher than some communal hive stems. Around it's branches and the trunk, nestled in the canopy, was the different modules of Terezi's hive; more elaborate by far than any of the hives they had seen on the way up or the one Karkat had lost, it clustered around the tree like barnacles on a ship or the hives of ordinary eusocial insects, the windows yellow and access pulleys swaying extremely slightly in the wind. A number of chimes hung on the branches made a nice music; she'd hung them up to lure in the carpenter drone so it knew where to go, but it also happened to make a nice sound effect.

Karkat hadn't actually visited her hive before, though he'd seen pictures of it. "Holy shit, your hive is huge," he said, grudgingly impressed. He paused, noticing something else and squinted. "What are those little things up there...?"

Terezi cackled. "The wicked, dancing on air as befits their crimes!"

"What?" Karkat's lusus screeched a translation. Karkat looked up again and made a twisted up expression. "Gross, those are the toys you play with!"

Terezi shrugged. Dozens of scalemates hung from nooses overhead. "Don't disgrace them so lightly, Mr. Vantas, lest you join their numbers!"

"...Considering I'm moving in with you, that was really creepy and ominous."

"I do my best," Terezi said, with a ghoulish grin like someone had mixed up the contents of a knife drawer and a shark tooth collection. Karkat didn't say anything, remaining quiet and a little pensive. Terezi's grin faltered. "I, uh." Aware that she was still cuddling him and that didn't exactly fit the moment anymore, she started to draw away."

"Stop!" Karkat yelped. Terezi froze, and both her and him were still for a second. "Uh. If you want to keep a steady hold so you don't fall off. I mean. That's cool."

Terezi put her arm back around the entirety of her body, and felt once more at peace. "Pfft. If you say so."

Karkat grumbled. "Don't complain just because you're super-clingy."

Terezi snickered at the blatant irony of that, which Karkat was probably also aware of. "So, still sure you won't miss living out with a whole bunch of other trolls."

"Probably." Karkat shifted uneasily against her. It was nice. "I just was thinking-"

"You didn't hurt yourself, did you?" Terezi put on a good act of mock concern.

"Bite me! What I meant was that it figures, all those years of trying to get you into a proper lawn ring and mine burns down, and now I'm going into your freak tree house of creepy execution fetishes and roleplaying weirdness and who knows what kind of gross shit. The irony is despicable!"

Terezi shrugged. "Them's the breaks, deal with it."

Karkat snorted, but left it at that. He did deal best with people who challenged him head on, or brushed his hostility aside like they honestly didn't notice it.

The drone stopped near her tree. "Here's our stop too," Terezi said, starting to heave herself off the ride. Karkat's lusus moved first, nudging his beak underneath the two of them and lifting them right off the ride and onto his head, and carefully navigated a way off it, slowly lowering himself and them onto the ground.

The two of them were then neatly deposited near one big root. Terezi hadn't noticed that she was still holding Karkat; owing to the difference between their statures, he was now at least nine or ten feet off the ground and he wasn't even aware of it. Which was odd, considering his insistence on personal space, but it had been an bad day for him and that wasn't exactly on his mind.

In the meantime the carpenter drone was climbing up Terezi's tree, for a set of relatively near branches to build a new set of hive modules with Karkat's specifications (not an easy feat at all for them to get the drone to do, but Sollux had his ways of talking to the drone on its own language). The two of them watched it work, both of them having other things on their minds.

"...Terezi?" Karkat said after a moment, gravely.

"Yeah?"

"Um." He wiggled a bit in her arms. "...Thanks for letting me move in."

"No problem."