"Did you find it yet?"

"No, and I won't unless you get off my fucking back. Are you sure it's here?"

"I heard it go under the bed."

"Fuck. Alright."

"Let me have a look."

"No, shut up. I'm going to find that button even if I have to go form a posse and hunt it down with torches and pitchforks. I will rile up that mob until they're frothing at the mouth with righteous rage against the button, and we will tear through this room like savage aurochs through the forest, uprooting everything in our path until there is naught but splinters and rent earth left in our passing, and that button will learn the meaning of stark cold pants-shitting terror if it's the last thing I do in my short and ignominious existence."

"...You know, they say you get more bees with honey than with vinegar."

You sigh and re-emerge from under the bed, throwing John a withering glare. He's sitting at the table, playing with the three other buttons in his hand. He's dressed again. Mostly dressed, but it's sort of late and he said nobody would be awake to see their lord walk down the hall while holding up his trousers. Still. It's the last time you try something out of a romance novel.

"Why don't you try finding it, then?" you suggest.

He shrugs and puts down the button, lowering himself to the floor to peer under the bed. You step away, preparing to sit down and wait while he gropes around blindly for half an hour or so. Humans can't see for shit in the dark, so if you haven't found it, he's not bound to have much more success.

"Found it," he announces almost immediately, and produces the button. "What did I tell you?"

You sputter.

"Where the fuck—okay, I call bullshit. There's no way I missed it. You're trying to trick me. Where was it really?"

"Right here, behind the leg."

He gets back up, casually brushing dust off his clothes.

"Bastard," you hiss.

"Hey, it's not my fault I'm lucky."

"Not you, the button."

John laughs.

God, you hate his guts. They always say that when serendipity happens, you'll know, and you do. You really do know.

This is the best night you've had in perigees.


Perhaps it's because you're emotionally overwrought, but you sleep very little that night. The little sleep you do get, however, is unusually restful, and you have barely any nightmares to speak of. You wake up earlier in the morning, long before the sun rises, when the servants are just getting up to go about their day.

You wait until the sound of steps outside your door lessens, but even so, you run straight into Jade the moment you go out.

"Remember to wash up," she tells you in passing, and by the smirk she gives you when you glare at her, you get the feeling she's teasing you.

Still, it's a good idea, and you find a basin of water and a washcloth waiting for you in the washroom. Perhaps this early in the morning, nobody is in the mood to pump water and wait for it to heat up, because the water in the basin is ice cold and probably no more than melted snow.

You go to the kitchens, but hover in the doorway nervously when you get there. The servants—half a dozen or so—are gathered around a long table, having breakfast together. They're laughing softly and talking in low, sleepy voices, but their easygoing camaraderie sends a spike of inexplicable longing through you.

There's no reason for it. You don't even like these humans, and you're fairly sure none of them like you.

"Karkat, I see you're up."

You flinch away from the voice and hunch your shoulders when everybody turns to stare at you. Jane comes in through the same doorway as you.

"Yeah, I'm up." You inch closer to the wall.

"Join us?" she offers with a smile.

"No, there isn't any room, I'll just come back later," you say, waving your hand.

"Nonsense, old chap, I was just leaving," one of the men from the table says and gets up, still holding his bowl and shoveling the off-white gruel into his mouth as he slowly walked towards the opposite door.

"Jake, what have I told you about eating on the run?" Jane sighs.

"Sorry, Miss Crocker, I'm late for my patrol," he says, pouring the last contents of the bowl into his mouth and throwing it into a large trough by the door. A patrol implies he is a guard of some sort, and now that you notice, he is wearing a light and rather battered set of leather armor.

"No you're not," another man from the table calls out, but Jake is already out the door and away.

"Oh, let him go, Aimes," one of the servant women says. "He's very dedicated to his job."

"No, he isn't, Pearl," Aimes grumbles. "He's just stupid and reckless and looking to get in a 'scrum'."

"There hasn't been any trouble around these parts since the war," a wan-faced middle-aged servant remarks while picking at his seats you in Jake's place, between this last servant and a quiet girl perhaps no older than fourteen human years. She gives you a tiny smile before looking back at her food. She is also blushing for some reason.

You're handed a bowl of the same substance the servants are eating, but it isn't as awful to the taste as you'd expected. It's sweet and the texture is very smooth. You'd compare it to grub sauce, but it doesn't have the tell-tale crunchy bits, and anyway, there aren't any beige-blooded grubs as far as you know. At any rate, it's very filling.

The subdued chatter continues around you, and you learn nothing more except that the girl you're sitting next to is named Serenity (and that's just the kind of fucking disaster that happens when humans are allowed to name each other), and the age-worn man on your other side used to be a soldier of some sort.

Everybody finishes before you, and you're left alone with Jane, helping her clean the table and put everything in the washing trough.

"You don't have to bother," she says, "this isn't exactly why you're here."

It stings, the way she phrases it, but you don't let it show. It's not worth it.

You go to the library. With all the lamps off and only the milky pre-dawn light peeking through the windows, it's comfortably dark in here. You curl up on a sofa with your book, and concentrate only on trying to make sense of the human lovestory presented therein, which manages to be both laughably simplistic and unnecessarily convoluted at the same time.

Humans muddy their quadrants together in the most idiotic fashion, and then wonder why none of their relationships work out. You know the answer. It is because they are, to a one, imbeciles.

And then you put the book aside and realize, with some horror, that humans don't have quadrants. The remnants of your post-coital glee fade like the last drops of water under the desert sun, because you've just realized that your breathless joy at having a kismesis was ill-conceived, when John couldn't even spell the word, much less understand what it entails.


"You're up early."

John's voice startles you but you cover it up by putting your book aside.

"What, is there a law against it? Thou shalt not wake up earlier than the most indolent asswipe of the house?" you snap at him.

He only grins.

"Why are you sitting in the dark, anyway?" he asks, as he turns on one of the lamps. You wince at the sudden light.

"It's not dark unless you're a visually impaired meatsack with the compulsion to hang pretty glowing stuff on every inch of your wall lest you go for five minutes without being distracted by a fucking shiny light."

"Oh, you mean you can see in the dark?"

"Better than you can, anyway."

"That's so amazing! So if I turned off the lamp—"

"Then you'd be bumbling around and stubbing your toes on furniture until the sun came up," you interrupt him. "Leave it, I don't mind it nearly as much as I mind your inane prattling." You narrow your eyes and wait to see how he will react to your mild black flirtations.

He snickers and walks up towards you, sprawling down on the sofa a little distance from you. He picks up the book between you and flips through it casually.

"Why are you reading books for girls?" he asks, raising an eyebrow at you.

"I'm not," you growl. "I'm reading a story dealing with the complexities of human romantic liaisons in times of great upheaval."

"It's a story about some airhead girl who only ever thinks about kissing some boy despite the fact that there is a war going on around her."

"So you've read it then."

He blushes and closes the book with a resounding thunk.

"I thought it was about... something else, alright?" he defends himself. "But you seem to know exactly what it's about."

"So do you," you snort. "The war isn't even mentioned until page fifty-two. The first thirty pages are just graphic depictions of the protagonist's daydreams." Which read more like pale longings, what with all the intense ruminations on hand-holding and hugging, but you were rapidly disabused of this notion once innocent little Mariel started picturing some fairly graphic pailing scenarios.

"Maybe I skipped ahead."

"Uh-huh."

"Or maybe I just skimmed it."

"Uh-huh."

"Shut up." He folds his arms and sticks out his bottom lip like a petulant feel incredibly smug about getting to him. It's easy to enjoy the black stirrings he produces when he's in this state.

Just because humans don't have quadrants, doesn't mean they can't experience the same feelings as trolls, you assure yourself. Maybe it's something worth looking into. You'll need more of these human romance novels to start your research. You're sure you're on to something here. You can... you can make this work, somehow. You're sure you can. It's not like you have any other prospects for your quadrants. This might be your only opportunity to know how having a kismesis feels.

Right now, though, you just want to kiss his stupid pout.

"Karkat, what are you doing?"

You're kneeling up on the sofa and leaning towards him, coiled and ready to pounce. He turns towards you and leans back a bit, and that show of weakness is all the provocation you need.

He falls back easily as you tackle him, and when you start kissing him, it takes him only a few moments to get his bearings and kiss back. His arms go around you and he holds on tightly as you set a relentless pace.

At one point, as he comes up for air, he huffs warmly against the side of your face, like he's trying to whisper in your ear, "Karkat, we really shouldn't be doing this here." You growl and catch his lips again.

When the door opens you almost don't notice, but for a slight movement in the corner of your eye. John makes a choked sound and you both look to the new arrival in various states of startled and sheepish. You are frozen in place by sheer mortification.

"No, don't mind me," the amused blonde woman in the black dress says. "I didn't mean to interrupt, I was only looking for some light reading. Ah."

She walks up towards you and picks up your book from the floor, where you must've knocked it down at some point during your... your shameless snogging. She reads the title, and the corner of her lip lifts slightly more.

"This shall do nicely," she says, and shuffles off, noiselessly closing the door behind her.

"Told you," John says quietly.

"I was still reading that," you mutter unhappily.

"Oh, well, I'd like to see you try getting it back from Rose now—"

You shut him up. You shut him up a lot.