You're on the meteor, in a storage room where you feel almost isolated from everyone else on board even though you're not really that far away from them, and you're leaning your back against a crate of who knows what and letting decidedly unmanly tears drip down your cheeks and wishing you were someone else. Someone who didn't have to look in the mirror each morning and feel a sense of wrongness, someone who didn't have to go through the embarrassment of explaining what the red in your pants was when your period leaked through (pads are surprisingly hard to alchemize, and even though your knight outfit is self-cleaning you've only got one pair of underwear that came along with it), someone who could just have a flat chest and a dick and be a normal guy for once.
Not that you've ever been normal really, and even if you didn't have to deal with dysphoria you still wouldn't be normal, because normal guys go to high school and have friends and go to college and get a nice desk job and grow up and get married to the girl next door.
Instead, you've destroyed the world (at least you don't have to go to high school) along with your three best friends, discovered an alien species, and gotten yourself in a relationship with a guy from the planet a couple hundred million light years away instead of with the pretty woman who lives a few houses down from you.
Who, by the way, still doesn't get why you're uncomfortable about your body, because his species doesn't have a concept of gender in the first place and because nobody's bothered to explain to him that your species has one at all.
Speaking of the devil, or at least someone with horns close to one, that particular alien has found you. He's standing in the doorway to the storage room, arms crossed, looking like he's got a rant just waiting to burst about how he thought you were dead again and why don't you ever tell anyone where you're going.
You look up from where you're sitting and wave weakly.
"Yo, Karkat. I haven't seen you in what, three hours?"
Karkat rolls his eyes and storms over, then gently lowers himself down next to you.
"You can't just fucking do that, Strider. Nobody knew where the hell you were! You could have been dead, you could have been bleeding out somewhere, you could have been sitting in your room having a fine fucking time painting happy little flowers or a great big steaming pile of shit, I honestly don't care, but you could have been doing abso-fucking-lutely anything and who would know that? Who would know that you were fine and just having a little depression session in a godawful dusty storage room Terezi didn't even know existed, and by the way, she's the one who mapped this fucking meteor, if she doesn't know where you are I don't fucking have a clue who does, and you have to let me know so I don't run around in circles like some idiot lab rat trying to get to totally inaccessible food because it's hidden behind a giant fucking filter of 'I'm totally fine' like some asshole I know!"
He goes on for a while more in a similar vein, and you can't help but crack a smile at the endless torrent of word vomit coming out
of your weird-maybe-datefriend's mouth. (You'd discussed this before, and though Karkat uses he/him pronouns, he's more comfortable with nongendered everything else.)
The tears you'd been unsuccessfully holding back earlier have dried, leaving streaks down the sides of your face, and the salt they left behind crack as you smile and shift yourself so you're standing in front of him. He's still going on and on when you pull him into a hug, and you squeeze him so tight because you don't want to let him go because really, he's one of the few people who understand you, even if they don't get everything, and you'd never give him up for anything in the world.