a/n: something experimental. i've always thought that karkatgamzee has always been a rather dark ship, and i've been wanting to write something like this anyway.
{how the moon screamed}
.
The first boy you ever ask out is John Egbert, a rather dorky-looking human who aggressively asserts that he is completely heterosexual whenever you imply otherwise. He gets all flushed in his cheeks and, with his chipmunk-looking teeth nibbling on that lower lip, chastised and also frantic, he looks almost-cute.
You come to him because you think you won't be intimidated by the prospect, but shit, this is the first time you've done this and by the time you are facing each other, you are secreting sweat through your pores at a dangerous rate. Something lodges in your throat, and you realize that it is a confession, heavy and thick and phlegmy in its tenacious refusal to budge.
"John, I-"
He looks at you through his thick glasses, black hair splayed across his forehead like grass, expectant.
"Yeah, Kar?"
You swallow. You can't do it. Something about John, something about him and his goofy smile and the easy-going way with which he and Dave chatter amiably and that big blue hood prevents the words from coming out and you know, without a doubt, that this will be the last time you attempt to broach this subject. The plea falls flat.
"Nothing."
Gamzee is bizarre, enigmatic, a slopping plate of fuck-up and screw-the-rules, with a bravado and sauntering swagger that must be admired or attributed to stoned braggadocio. You think that it is 100% the later, give or take a nonexistent margin for the possibility of the former.
Nothing about him is definite; he is as fluid and malleable as water, swaying and tipping like a drunkard and drawing no emotional response from the most poignant provocation besides a sleepy yawn and a sleepier smile. He shambles around, leaves bits and pieces of himself smeared on walls like a bad paint job, his breath saccharine and reeking of the Faygo he always drinks. Gamzee, he is tipsy like uncertain architecture, bed-head and sharp horns protruding from his skull, raccoon-eyed with purple makeup and an obscene grin on his face at all times.
Sometimes, you try to play nicely together but it always ends up with Gamzee cackling away like a maniac, blood spurting from a bloodied nose, while you shriek, fists flying. The fucker just takes it like a ragdoll, lolling around, laughing limericks from his crocodile teeth.
"Shut up!" you will shout, trying to be heard. "Shut the fuck up, Makara-"
And he, he will retort (oh yes) with his droll words, rolling over you like the truth.
"But you don't want me to."
Punches will be thrown, insults exchanged, the clown will still giggle like a deflated balloon when the dust clears.
Your race are subscribers to hedonism of the most sublime refinement; you war, you rage, you fuck, you kiss fallacies onto each others' lips and then you start the cycle all over again. Your daily conversations are laden with vulgarities, your bedtime stories gruesome parodies of Earth tales, your lovemaking hurting and furious and powerful. Fingers winding around horns, beautiful gray flesh aglow, you spit and snarl and hiss like an enraged bull, something untameable, and they shove you down with their vitriol, eyes blazing with rancor, they tell you to "burn in hell, Karkat", or something along those lines, anyway.
Damn, does it hurt like a bastard when those nails dig into your coiled arms, snake around your biceps, caress you all in the wrong places and urge you on. On the field, you exact your vengeance on not-quite-full thoughtforms and products of your imagination, singing that too-familiar battlesong, and you come home with your hands red and there is no way to distinguish if it is your blood or theirs; the boundaries had blended together like soup long ago.\
This, this is your anthem:
"We are wild, we are reckless, we are young. We do not give two shits and we will fuck around as we please. We are dangerous and we are bad for you."
They are the types of people, you reckon, that would be judged by those picturesque Earth mothers of that bygone age in which people actually behaved politely and dressed up for dinner in their middle-class regalia. Now, you are rotting and you have trained yourself to embrace the pain, live only in extremes.
Therefore, it hurts that much better when you see him, Makara, with an arm slung over Tavros' slender shoulder, the two of them chuckling like old pals; somewhere within your body, a heartstring snaps, and more go, like a series of too-taught tensions discharging.
It hurts like a sonofabitch and yes, you see it: you, your hands, the skinny boy's neck.
You are fighting a Lusus - his Lusus, to be exact - and fuck, you might be losing for the first time in, well, ever.
This does not happen to our kind, your mind rationalizes as a tail swings towards you (your mind calculates it to be traveling at a speed of 5 feet per second). This is wrong and this does not happen, should not happen.
Your 'friends' rattle off their pomp, psychic power and arrows and slashes and reality-warping and gunfire and magic, and you are standing underneath the shadow of the great colossus, the Big Goatdaddy, with your little sickles, and that shadow is closing down on you, down down down-
Out of the blue, he flies with what could be willpower and what could be otherworldly, stepping on invisible planes suspended in the air, juggling his multicolored clubs with something gleeful written on his mouth, fangs bared in open defiance. He leaps off of a theoretical cliff into nowhere, grabbing at space and finding solid handles to hold onto. It is magnificent, superb, worthy of a savant, these circus actions, and he whirls and brings the batons onto the sea goat's head with a spellbinding thunderclap.
Later, perhaps, you will wonder about all of this, about the first spark of rebellion and the troll you fell in love with so humanly, on that warzone with bone shards and brain matter littering those crayon tips, and the boy was staring at the ground and that caved-in skull remorsefully.
Every part of him, every part of you, had wept so bitterly that Frabjous Day.
Instead, you mutter a humbled, "Thank you," try to minmize the extent of his rescue and treat it like some minor inconvenience that you could have easily avoided. Instead, you glance up at him, at the dilated pupils, and see something bestial and feral and adoring and worthy of adoration. Instead, you say,
"Thank you"
with more strength than intended for a second time, and he looks at you and smiles.
Impossibly, you slip further into the paradox, Gamzee Makara at the edge of the tunnel.
There is a deeper part of your being that understands that something here is wrong, but you deny that precious intuition and allow yourself to bury your tender little head in the crook of his neck. You let him do the same of you, curled together for solace against those bitter planetary winds, the relentless orbit, the worlds that collided.
Your fallacy was this:
-you let him hold you
-you held him
-you let him kiss you
-you kissed him
-you let him love you
-you loved him
One night, he comes in through your door in a riotous storm of sound, bearing trumpets and horns and all manner of things, and buckets filled with ice and chilled sodas, and a cart carrying those green cesspools he calls pie, and he invites you to eat with him.
You agree, humoring his whims, and the two of you dine on what seemed like a feast back then: syrupy sweetness slides down your parched throat, the clown hums a discordant tune and you laugh freely. You were not always so carefree; before, you had guarded your secrets so closely, so deviously. Now, you toss around your emotions like die and he, gambler, vagabond, wild child, he takes them and spins them around and sees how they land and that is your fate.
You had loved him so dearly, let him cry on you, dribble his saltwater tears onto your chest, laid him open and torn him limb from limb. You held him with such protectiveness while also regarding him with an utter lack of compassion, driving him up walls, provoking him, inspiring him.
His heart, it was in the palm of your hand. You wore it around your sleeve like a trinket.
He tells you many tales. Most of them are about himself. His consciousness arising, those first thralls of early life, your years together as playmates, and then now this. This climax.
"Do you love me?" he whispers, and he is so bare, face clean of the garish paints and pastels, eyes watering. He is not used to this.
"With everything I have," you whisper, and press a kiss onto his cold forehead.
The next day, you will wake up and he will be gone. The curtains will be rustling oh-so slightly.
It is through little snippets of the truth that you begin to learn about the Happenings. They are given discreetly, through hushed voices and whispers and slipped in between dark corridors, lit only by a single solitary streetlamp leaning disconsolately in its corner, chastising you for your secrecy.
Why? the structure groans. You have kept so much, hoarded so much, no more room in your heart for gold-
Shut up! you hiss, and silence its wailing with a slice to its metal neck.
These secrets, they are written on paper, daubed on walls, imprinted in the spaces between your fingers and your toes when you wake up. They all say the same damn thing.
You wake up and find a head mounted on the ceiling, mouth agape, buzzing with decay.
Obviously, as is the instinctive reaction, you scream. You scream until your tongue is dry and your throat burns and there is nothing coming out, only the rasp and the crackle of your lungs.
With trembling legs, you get out, pull on your turtleneck, look at the face and the hair and the horns, the fucking horns. It's Tavros Nitram's skull that's been nailed a mere ten feet away from your own.
Orange litters the floor, your posters, everywhere but the wallpaper. It has been written, crossed out, erased clumsily, but it is refined and elegant and reeking of poetic narration. These lines, they flow, they bend, they do not break. They dance.
No, they are not his, but they are his words all the same.
The message reads:
:o)
i Am CoMiNg
He is leaving you for last. A psychological maneuver. It will not work.
You hammer this desperately into your fevered brain, trying to repel the onslaughts of despair and maybe call back that fleeting glimmer of redemption.
You are a hedonist, a debaucher of the highest grade. You roll in extravagance. You luxuriate in it. To do so otherwise would make you a pig, something lower than a human. This, you say to your shivering ribs and your spine and your sharp, tiny wrists clinging to the scythes.
You are a king, and you will win this game.
Now, he stands before you, prowling, snarling, sometimes nipping playfully. There are scratches across his nose and his face and they bleed sickly emerald. He has painted the signs of war under his eyes: smiles and niceties and platitudes. His footsteps make the earth crunch and the moon scream.
"Did you love me?" he asks again.
You hesitate.
"Answer me truthfully," he pleads, tilting his head to the side and baring a mouthful of incisors. "I'd rather cut the bullshit, y'know what I mean, brother, Karkat?"
You gulp. Stammer.
"You fucker." He spits them at you, the words. They sting so much more than they did before, when it was your slings and arrows you threw at him. "You piece of dung. You were always a filthy boy, Karkat, a filthy motherfucker. Piece of shit. Fucktard."
At last, you find your voice in the chaos.
You bellow, "No!" and the sound echoes, travels, makes him fall a little off-balance. For a second, you see him, the real him, and it is wounded and raw and damn, it hurts like hell.
"You bastard," he moans, "you took advantage of me, you sick little fuck-"
But then, that weakness resolves into the mask of the debaucher, cunning a lethal, and he shrieks,
"WELL, I NEVER LOVED YOU BACK! HOW'S THAT FOR A PLOT TWIST, HUH, SHIT-FOR-BRAINS?"
There is a hollow thud and a ripping and your arm, flopping lifelessly on the ground. You collapse, withering already, while he stands above you. You are in his shadow now, and you sink into it, this abyss.
The arm raises. The sun is blotted out.
"I-"
You die with an unspoken prayer drying against your teeth.