Karkat: Experience Motherhood
You are Karkat Vantas, and you are SO FUCKING PISSED that you are currently neck-deep in babies. But these aren't just any babies-these are the babies that, apparently, will grow up to be you and your friends. Each of these twelve babies looks like a brightly-colored grub with one of your friend's shrunken heads attached to it-most of the time, adolescent and adult trolls never see even one wiggler, let alone twelve. You'd never seen one before in your life-well, not since you were one yourself. You are disgusted with them, just like you usually are with everything else.
You curse your bad luck with programming and computers as you smash buttons and try to get the strange ectobiological equipment to work so you can send the troll babies off to the right place in the timeline. The wigglers cry and squabble and chew on your foot-common sense dictates that you should be kicking them off but for some reason you can't bring yourself to do it. You kick the equipment instead and it makes a whirring noise like feral blender unleashing a threatening growl.
And your stomach is growling too. Maybe you should eat one of the wigglers-it seems like the trollish sort of thing to do, and well, who ever needed Tavros around anyways. But instead you find yourself unwrapping a Mars bar a few minutes later-and all around you, there are wigglers, drooling wigglers, staring at your candy bar with big sparkle sparkle kawaii desu eyes like they want one too. Your keen mothering instinct notifies you that they might be hungry, seeing as they've never eaten before.
A few minutes later you are still hungry, and you are sighing heavily as you watch the tiny grubs devour the leftover crumbs of the Mars bar you devided twelve ways. You are a chump.
Your nutritional break ruined, you opt to get back to work trying to send the little bastards on their way atop flaming asteroids, and good riddance-when hark! What should you hear but a high-pitched shriek of pain and terror.
The Gamzee grub is apparently one vicious motherfucker-right now he's got one of Equius grub's tiny legs in his miniscule mouth and seems keen on biting it in half if his still-nubby teeth and weak jaw muscles would just let him. At first you're surprised and horrified and have no idea what to do-how could Gamzee be like that as a grub, he's like, the most peaceful troll you know. It vaguely crosses your mind that maybe he's not really all that peaceful without sopor, and you consider finding some sopor and drugging the baby version of Gamzee up so he's as stoned as the adult version.
It then occurs to you that you could drug up ALLLL of the grubs. All of them. And then they would all chill out in a corner licking the walls and staring at lightbulbs and you could get shit done.
You decide this is the best idea you have ever had in your life, and you aim to do just that-as soon as you get Equius' leg out of Gamzee's mouth.
Despite their diminuitive size this is the most horrifying prospect ever. You draw your arms up to your chest and stare at the purple and blue wigglers with shock and awe. Carefully, you extend a hand toward the ball of wrestling fighting biting and mayhem-and whack Gamzee smartly in the head.
"Ggggnnuurrruuuurrrr!" the purple grub complains through a mouthful of leg.
"SKREEEEEE! SKREE!" the blue grub pleads.
You bite your lip, wince, and stick your fingers in a tiny grub mouth, holding it open so the trapped leg is freed-Equius grub bolts off like lightning and you are being gnawed at and there is slobber and nubby teeth everywhere and it is HORRIBLE and stings slightly and Gamzee grub won't let go and you are weeping in terror. You shake your hand but that just pisses him off more and now he just won't detach himself from your person. The urge to scream for help fills you but you can just picture it, Sollux or Terezi or anyone showing up to your plaintive wails thinking you're being attacked by Jack or something and they find you being gnawed on by a WIGGLER.
You would never live it down.
Never.
Man is Gamzee pissed though. You've never seen him like this and the notion that maybe he's got that much rage trapped in him as an adult is a little bit unnerving. The most mortifying idea crosses your mind-sopor keeps him calm in adulthood but well, this is a baby. Maybe you could just-
You pull the angry baby grub into your arms and rock it and go "shhh shhh shh" and pat its head like you've heard humans do with their young-you feel like an overbearing cluckbeast with a chick and you are so furious at the indignity of the matter and everything is stupid. Why did you think this would work, this is the stupidest-
The Gamzee grub stops biting you and looks at you with big sparkly eyes and coos. It is so cute it's disgusting. You hate everything. You hate everyone. The grub capriciously starts biting you again and clawing at you with tiny prickly icky feet but you keep papping its head and shooshing it. You want to scream in fury at the long-suffering condition of your person and all the horrors you have endured, this being just the cherry on the icing-you never had anyone shoosh you and pap your head when you were a baby, this is just infuriating the amount of attention this grub is getting right now, why, it should be left to fend for itself in the brooding caverns-and then you realize it will be, all of them will be, as soon as you get this weird technobabble bullshit to work and send them on their way.
And that somehow makes your shrivelled black lump of a blood pusher twinge with unreasonable amounts of guilt. Your mind is suddenly filled with a vision: you could keep them and raise them as your own and be their mommy. You could dress the girl grubs up in frilly outfits and the boy grubs would get little suits. You could teach them to play baseball and take them all for a stroll in a carriage on a Sunday afternoon and you would be the proudest father. It would be you. You would smoke a pipe in the evenings, and they would bring you your slippers.
But it's not to be, because that would cause a massive paradox. You weep womanly tears and bang your fist on the machinery in outrage, making the Gamzee grub jump from its soporific stupor and start wailing too. Panels light up and the equipment is suddenly ready to go as if by magic, just at the one moment you didn't want it to-why, it's a motherfuckin' miracle. You bite your lip and place the grubs in a pile and press buttons-there is a flash-and then they're gone, sent off to thirteen years in the past on flaming asteroids.
You are Terezi Pyrope, and you walk into some random room just in time to see Karkat collapse to his knees and scream "MY BABIES!" to no one. He's completely in tears, and there's no one else in the room. You just stare.