Fool Me Twice
oOo
One
It is some time before your mind begins to notice the pinpricks of pain in your balled fists. It is even longer before you think to unclench them; your fingers are stiff yet trembling, and your nails are freshly tipped with bright, irreverent red.
This is not the first time you have drawn blood in this way, nor the first time you have felt a flicker of irritation at the absurdity of its color. Not the first time your long-suffering sweater has come in handy as you covertly wipe your hands on its sides. Not the first time you have stared at the crescent-shaped indentations on your palms and wondered why.
This is not the first time you have stumbled across yourself. Fallen over your own thoughts. Flailed for words, for reason, and found nothing but a blind rage.
Your name is Kankri Vantas. Her name floats around her, laughing at the sky, crumpling the sand: Latula, Latula.
Latula Pyrope, the air whispers.
You feel yourself stand and begin to walk away; it's a slow, painful thing to do and probably even more so to watch. In your mind—your frightened, rage-fogged mind—you can hear her calling after you. Wait up, KK! Leaving already? Where are you going? You smile to yourself, fully aware that she never saw you watching in the first place.
It is some time before you are completely alone again, and even longer before you realize that you had been alone from the start.
Again...
I'm lost again, yet again, you think.
A bewildered sort of crash rings out behind you in the distance, followed by a stream of fluent cursing. Mituna has fallen down again. Again Latula will kneel beside his prone, twitching body with that impenetrable smile and grasp his shoulders and help him sit up. Again they will cling to each other, uncaring of the several hundred universes that are sewn into the patchwork of the afterlife, uncaring of who sees, who notices, who has been watching from behind the trees.
This is not the first time any of this has happened, and you are beginning to feel lost again; lost in the meaningless cycles, repetitions, iterations; lost in the untethered twirling of your current existence; lost in anger and despair and very real fear.
Somewhere in the endless expanse of memory bubbles, you see Damara raise one trembling hand to her face.
She has been crying, you think. For a few moments—or is it months, or twenty untold sweeps? Time has long lost meaning—it seems like an agreeable course of action for you to take as well; it is an intense thing to do and would provide you with much-needed distraction from yourself and your festering thoughts. However, your blank, white eyes remain resolutely dry. You cannot shed a tear no matter how you struggle.
I suppose one needs relative sorrow to cry spontaneously... but I have felt this way for so long already, maybe my heart has ceased to identify it as pain?
Is it pain... this hollow numbness, this anger? Is the burning in your chest, the dizzy chanting of your mind, the same as the prickle in your bleeding hands?
It could be just boredom.
It could be fear.
It could be pure rage with nothing behind it.
Or it could be pain. Again you return to yourself and you are now on the ground—when did you sink to the ground?—your back against an enormous tree and the grass soft, yet crisp, against your skin. There are trees everywhere, now that you think to take a look around you; you have not come this way before, and you are immensely relieved.
This is my first time here...
You should not be surprised. The afterlife is impossibly vast and you have done little by way of exploring, preferring to remain in places you were familiar with on Beforus, but you allow yourself a pleased smile nonetheless as the forest sighs gently.
Firsts have grown rare.
I need to get away from this... this madness... this blind monotony will kill you a second time if you do not do something about it, you are sure, but... what do I do?
I'm an old troll now; old in a still young body and in desperate need of a death that will never come.
What an existence, Kankri Vantas. How... triggering. How triggering indeed. You offer the forest a wry, unamused smile, and the empty air smiles back.
"Trigger warning", you mutter absent-mindedly. "TW for intense boredom and mentions of suicidal tendencies."
A voice among the trees clearly says, "Fuck."
...Karkat?
You could have sworn that that had been the voice of your young descendant; there are few others like it, so keen-edged and petulant. Before you decide to process the reason he had sounded so upset, you are already calling out, in sore need of fresh company. "Karkat, that is you, isn't it?"
It's not the first time I'm seeing him either, anyway. Even if he decides to run, he's nothing new either at this point.
So you welcome the astonishment when you see the sullen face emerge from the green darkness below the trees. He's always scowling.
Bless him. Karkat is still a change.
"I didn't know you were here", the younger troll is saying irately. "I came this way looking for somewhere to be alone and this place is normally deserted. Sorry. I'll leave."
"Well, I wouldn't mind if you were to join me", you begin, but the abject horror on Karkat's face causes your voice to die away, and a cold little blot begins to take root in your stomach. So he doesn't like to see me either. "I can just leave if you'd like", you finish, your voice steady. To be honest, I'm not in the best of shape to be talking at length.
"Why'd I want to make you leave?" Karkat only looks further annoyed by your suggestion. "You found this place." Though I wish you hadn't, the brittleness of his words tells you. He is turning to go when you find your voice again, though it sounds quieter than usual and rather dispirited to your own ears.
"If you want to sit here, you can talk all you want and I won't monopolize the conversation."
Karkat stops, but he doesn't look your way again. "I don't want to talk." Not to you, at least, you clearly hear.
"Good", you say tonelessly. "Neither do I."
There's a moment of strained silence in which the unending world beyond you drifts serenely by, you sink a little further, and Karkat's glower washes over your furrowed forehead in a way that is both unpleasant and not. Then the black-shoulders rise and fall in a resigned shrug and he makes his way into the little clearing, his scowl firmly in place.
"Let's just pretend", he says jerkily, flopping down beside you, "that I'm not Karkat and you're not Kankri—let's pretend that we don't know each other. I don't want to deal with people right now."
Let's pretend that we don't know each other, you say...
"We don't, though", you mutter.
"What?"
"We don't know each other." You steal a sideways glance at the younger troll's expression and give up this train of thought as a bad job. "It's alright, I understand what you're saying. If it helps, I'll pretend."
You receive only a grunt in response and for a few—minutes? Hours?—the air is empty again.
Your mind, however, is not. It rattles on tirelessly as you regard the grass blades with a weary eye before shutting them out altogether; in the darkness of your eyelids you search for peace, for an end, and find only the dazed ramblings of your living memories.
God, I am tired.
"You're talking out loud", Karkat says swiftly and you bite your tongue, mumbling an absent-minded apology. In the split second before you lapse into silence again, something pokes your arm.
You open your eyes to see your descendant glaring at you with a defiant mix of curiosity and frustration that you have never seen before. Taken aback as you are, it is a wonderful first.
"I'm going to regret every nook-sniffing moment of this, but—what's the matter with you?"
"I'm sorry?"
"You—" he pokes your arm again with one slender finger, so similar to your own, and you stiffen automatically. "What happened to your fucking sermons? How are you even sitting here without tagging trigger warnings for grass abuse and objectifying trees?"
"Don't touch me." You make a show of being very unkind indeed to the grass as you scoot away to a distance where he cannot comfortably reach out to poke you again. "Trigger warnings are not jokes, Karkat, and I do not use them lightly." You should be angry, you know, or at the very least offended... But somehow your very emotions have exhausted themselves. All my fuel reserves are burning up and I still have to go on.
Your name is Kankri Vantas and you have never been more tired in the entirety of your existence.
"Triggers are specific phrases or topics that can set off unwanted emotional responses in sensitive people", you hear yourself saying; your mouth is beginning to overtake you again. "It should be everyone's objective to avoid causing others inadvertent emotional suffering in the event of them having such triggers, and while the rest of my friends chose to eschew this undertaking I—"
"Kankri."
"Ah, I'm sorry", you say immediately, now feeling nothing short of miserable, "I'm sorry I keep getting carried away, I just—"
"If you don't stop talking, I am going to go out of my way to trigger both of us."
You stiffen further; your irritation, previously numb and dormant, is beginning to surface with unexpected rapidity. "I am lucky enough to not have any ostensible triggers that I know of, Karkat, unless you plan to violate my personal space, which I'll thank you not to do—"
"Pyrope."
The world stops turning; the afterlife melts.
Your voice drops and then dies.
Karkat is breathing heavily, his eyes aflame. "Pyrope, fucker. Now stick that in your sanctimonious little piehole and smoke it." As he gets to his feet, angrily brushing at the little bits of grass that still cling to his pants, he mutters, "At least we have that in common."
And his footfalls fade away into the trees, and you are alone again, once again coming to terms with the realization that you have been alone from the very start.
