A/N: Inspired by an absolutely amazing fanart that I will eventually link to on my profile but also will try to link to here where the bolded o's are dots: gamegrl o co o vu [slash] post [slash] 76911527013
That said, warning for violence and character death.
This isn't actually what's happening, Nepeta had been thinking. Any minute now Equius will reach out and at least shove Gamzee off him, or Gamzee will stop, one of them will do something. These things she insisted, ever the optimist, listening to what Equius had told her, staying out of sight, not interfering, always believing the best in her furiends–
This is hardly the time for those silly puns!
What? But–
Equius collapsed fully to the floor, a muffled thump echoing along the hall with so much more finality than any noise his body had ever made when she tacklepounced him to the ground in delighted affection, and her thoughts stopped.
His face was bright blue, his mouth open, his tongue and eyes bulging out. His dark lips had tinted a paler blue-black.
His leg had stopped bleeding.
Nepeta could taste her heart in her throat, feel a burn rushing through her as her heart beat faster, sadness and anger coursed through her. Her claws unsheathed and the vent grille collapsed away in front of her as she leapt hissing upon the enemy.
There was a cold hand on her wrist and nothing else.
It made no logical sense, but then she could feel the skin splitting beneath her lovingly-sharpened claws as the hand guided them, letting them drag. They were shallow wounds, barely deep enough to bleed. The sound it all made was so subtle it might have not actually existed, imagination almost drowned out by her quick, light breaths and his deep, measured ones, punctuated with huffs that didn't quite cross the line into laughs but did just as well to convey condescending amusement.
Sweeps of learned reflexes reinforced by instincts she created for herself made her twist without conscious thought as she was flung through the air, landing on her hands and feet, and fear made itself known. She wanted to rush him, do something to actively make him stop, but she wanted to start running and never look back.
The expression on Gamzee's face arrested her, caught her torn between the two conflicting desires, holding her frozen in place, no matter how much she knew she needed to move, to do something other than crouch here as he honked towards her, a wide grin splitting his face in half. Too many ideas washed through her, thoughts of sitting still because surely Gamzee would come to his senses before he crushed the other half of the diamond, because none of this was like the goofy forgettable guy she had grown distantly fond of. Optimistic as she tended towards, though, she knew deep down that wasn't going to happen, and she sat there frozen, useless.
Then the scent hit her.
Through the rush of the world around her it took a moment to fully register what it was, though by the time she could consciously identify it a new thrill had already made itself known.
Blood.
Nepeta was a mighty huntress with a mighty nose, and usually she could identify the different blood colors solely by scent. But through the haze, she couldn't discern whether what she was smelling was the slightly more sour flavor of Equius's indigo or the slight bitterness of Gamzee's purple.
Bloodscent stirred her instincts mercilessly, the context of the moment doing nothing to quell the sudden learned desire to hunt the blood, and every thought she had left that didn't desire prey to kill was overtaken by an all-consuming rage at the gall of this slayer to make it so that she could not discern the deathblood of her precious pale prince and the lifeblood of his killer. This joker actually thought he was the one at the top of the food chain here.
He was wrong.
Nepeta and Equius had balanced perfectly together, above everything in ways Equius had never seen. A diamond that would have tipped over had it been in any way unbalanced. They would never have worked if they could not handle each other fully in every aspect.
Equius's failing had been his complete subservience to those with purpler blood, but Nepeta had no such beliefs. She had laughed at the idea of Equius or anyone else being somehow better than her just by virtue of existing, rather than earning that inconsequential label themselves. She would be laughing now if she weren't so angry.
She could not truly fix anything, but she could do the one thing she knew best: she could hunt. She was raging, and it yelled out to her, a cold turning white-hot – no, blue-hot – and screaming out to every cell in her body that the sole and most important thing left for her to do was to make him pay.
The subtle sound of ripping flesh echoed even louder through the hallway, the gush of blood flowing stronger. This time when her claws met skin, the blood and vital tissues giving way beneath her touch was so much more satisfying than the scrapes Gamzee had allowed her before.
Equius had always sharpened her claws for her.
He dodged, of course he dodged. He tried to overpower her. Obviously he fought back. But Nepeta had spent sweeps playing games for herself, taking on more and more challenging hunts just to see if she could, even when the food they netted her was less than she would have gotten from something more lumbering. She didn't waste, but neither had she been in the habit of letting herself be held back.
The only way Nepeta could have lost is if she didn't play at all. She loved games.
But even as she slammed his head against the wall, broke one of his long, thin horns in half to stick the tip between his ribs and pry them apart with a satisfying crunch, gored his soft belly with her claws, pulling and yanking so he could see his own waste-creating tubes, Gamzee continued to smile between honks, as if he was enjoying this, as if his loss was a victory because he knew something she didn't.
Blood gushed out of his mouth as she turned his insides to mush. But through the blood the smile remained, and though he was only a solid sedimentary lump's throw away from death, Nepeta wasn't satisfied. The rage she felt wanted her to keep slashing until his eyes were glassy with death, but she didn't care, he was practically dead anyway, she needed to erase that superior, content smile forever. With a squelch, Nepeta slowly pulled her claws from their spots in his stomach and where she had been pinning his shoulder down. She curled up most of her hands but left the indicator fingers extended, and as Gamzee choked beneath her, she rested the tips of her claws on the corners of his painted purple-stained mouth.
They made eye contact and Nepeta dug the edges in and pulled down.
When Gamzee's final breath left him, it was through a mouth gaping open in a permanent frown.
It wasn't relief that Nepeta felt when the last residual honks ceased to echo down the long hallways surrounding them. It wasn't disappointment or happiness, how could she be happy when she only just lost her palemate? With time, of course, but there was no happiness now. What she felt now was… satisfaction. She had done right. She would have done righter had she dissipated the confrontation before it could occur, but this was not a time for looking back on the flaws and assumptions of the past as corpses lay strewn around her.
It occurred to Nepeta that she'd barely glanced at Equius's remains before facing off with his murderer. She got up from where she had been straddling the bloody clown and turned.
Seeing Equius like this was not satisfying. She had thought looking at him would be fulfilling, or maybe just melancholic, but it was like looking at a gross caricature. He looked nothing like himself, horror and surprise permanently painted across a swollen face. He had none of the seriousness or reluctant playfulness of the boy she had so loved, and it was… sad. Wrong. Scary. It seemed like every emotion she had ever felt was rushing through her, knowing she had avenged his death but even that could not bring back her meowrail.
This really is no time for a childish thing like puns! something tried to insist.
Something, some faint feeling, a thought, an idea, peaked out over all the others. Nepeta laughed. No, this was exactly the time for puns. It was always the time.
She was a mighty huntress, she had lost her meowrail, she had just slain her prey, and she could do whate-purr the fuck she wanted to do.
Exposing purple-stained fangs in something far from a grin, Nepeta grabbed the clown's remaining horn to drag him up to the nearby wall, gathered up some blood on her fingers, and began to draw.
Karkat stumbled upon them a little while later, his eyes taking in everything. To Nepeta's side was Gamzee's mutilated corpse, and behind her was Equius, a blood-stained arrow and broken bow lying beside him. It was obvious he had been asphyxiated. A diamond was drawn on his cheek in a small smear of olive green blood. The vent grate lay a few feet from Equius's legs, and Nepeta herself was covered in purple, staring at the wall, claws extended, muscles tense, a hand still clenched around Gamzee's horn, admiring her handiwork. Quickly assessing the scene and finding the danger to be minimal, Karkat stepped forward to see what she had drawn. Scrawled across the wall were familiar double-mouthed cat faces interrupting blood spray, and a single word was written repeatedly in bold, bitter purple:
meow
Nepeta turned to him and didn't smile.