Another submission for Karezi Week in July of 2016! Today's theme was 'Couch'.

I had a pretty difficult time with the previous ones, mostly because I think I was trying too hard to the point that it wasn't easy and it was kind of difficult to get it going. This time I decided to try a brief cute snippet instead of something more complex, and it worked a lot better. Interestingly enough, I feel like I got a good handle on their relationship this time!

Disclaimer: I do not own Homestuck. This story is purely a work of entertainment without monetary gain.


The couch was big, the couch was squishy, and the couch was quite possibly the most comfortable couch to have ever existed. Can Town had at least twenty. By astonishing coincidence more than half of all the young gods who had survived SBURB and it's variants (including the people who had been resurrected in the moment Can Town had existed, much to their bewilderment and Vriska's frustrated disappointment at not dying a totally kickass death) had all alchemized incredibly nice cushions, chairs and other such things at various times.

In the beginning of Can Town, as they figured out which of their alchemized gear to recreate as the most useful and easily understood technologies, their IMPOSSIBLY NICE CUSHION technology had quickly become industry standard. (If they had industries. They didn't yet.) Consequently, everyone had a couch, sofa, mattress or cocoon equally fitting the title of the most comfy thing in existence.

Terezi and Karkat had one sized up for their particular specifications. It was big enough for Terezi to sit in, and the cushions so soft that Karkat could just sit on them and start sinking in. In fact he'd actually adopted the human customs of a mattress and used his couch cushions as a baseline for them. The problem was, Terezi worked out, that the cushions were so comfortably and squishy it was easy to slip when moving around on them if you weren't careful.

She was being careful at the moment, but not with the media-shrine remote. It slipped from Terezi's hands as she did her best to scoot closer to Karkat without him noticing. She didn't drop it on purpose but she was doing her best to squeeze up with him without actually looking like she was doing it and that would have been tricky enough with a troll roughly her size. Given the package of mutations that made Terezi who she was (and was apparently bundled up in the Pyrope package, based on her ancestor's own garb and teenage self), this generally would only have been a Peixes, maybe an especially large indigo or violet. Karkat, on the other hand, was small. So very, very small.

He was so small that it actually worried Terezi a lot just how startlingly small he really was. The first time she'd met him in person, it sincerely scared her that he was so small and built so frail, almost like what she now considered human levels of 'how have you even survived this long'. Thin limbs and blunt claws and a body so compact it was like he was constantly curling in on himself. Prickly hair still too soft to defend from bites. An armored skull, his nubby horns the largest of accumulated lumps (And on his ancestor, a crown of thorns) and that was probably the hardest point on him and still so miserably thin.

It was important that she didn't actually let it show in front of him; Karkat was about as defensive as the little shelled claw-monsters he'd modeled himself after and he did not like shows of pity outside of closed doors, she'd worked out just how long he'd hidden his painful little secrets away from anyone and vulnerability just still plain scared him. Terezi understood the feeling. It was less than a shout's distance from weakness, like putting a target in the back of your head and screaming for anything in a uniform to go murder-stabbing cull on you.

Terezi hadn't been scared of being culled, exactly. She'd calmly worked out that she would probably be culled the moment they found her; maybe they'd decide that her blood was enough to get her a slight reprieve, maybe her smell-based acuity was better enough than sight to let her off. Probably not and she'd die or find another way out. (Fantasies of leading a revolution against the condescending tyranny with Karkat as her loyal and shrieking matesprite had figured prominently.) But Terezi couldn't remember ever really being scared and it bothered her a lot. Like hearing noises in your appliance that meant it was already broken and you didn't understand it enough to know that maybe there wasn't any point in trying to fix it, ever.

Karkat hadn't ever worried about being hatched broken, even if he'd been born scared and destined to die if he didn't flee from tyrian sights. She didn't know if she actually admired that, envied it, or had other feelings she didn't have words for. It was probably mushy and disgusting in that horrible sappy way she didn't like to admit she felt on a more or less consistent basis. She had a reputation to maintain. Karkat possibly panicking and skulking away in dread of serious relationship woes was another factor.

Terezi licked her lips nervously. Her snout wrinkled and her hairs rose up and down her back like quills. She fancied maybe also like a dragon trying to settle it's wings. Carefully she slid closer to Karkat and tried to do it without eclipsing him, actually touching him and ruining the whole plan, or pushing him off the couch. In the resulting muscular concentration, the remote slid away from her hands and bounced between the cushions, where it was lost forevermore. (Or until they asked Rose to find it. Light shone forth even in mysterious cushion depths.)

Karkat was glancing at her, trying to keep an eye on what was actually happening on the TV. It was tricky: Terezi's proximity tended to draw his focus, and likewise. He was vaguely sure that there was a commercial. Something to do with a big sneaky-looking robot hawking... God he didn't even know. Some kind of sausages? Delivered straight to your door and Karkat didn't want any no matter how simple the delivery, those were some suspicious looking sausages and probably made from former customers by the look of the salesbot, he'd seen enough of these commercials to overhear the name 'Swindle' and god if that wasn't a suspicious name, oh wait Terezi was definitely leaning over a with a fierce look, welp there went his ability to concentrate on shifty salesbots.

The remote sank into the mysterious depths of the couch. Perhaps there was a portal there to strange realms and eldritch mysteries, and there the remote was taken by the denizens thereof and attempted to be made a weapon. Rose never did elaborate on it. Thereafter, it passed out of their recollection until Rose brought it back, and bore no more relevance to the things transpiring upon the couch.

Karkat straightened up, supportive strain of exoskeleton flexed stiff while Terezi almost slipped on the impossibly smooth cushions. Her hand slammed down next to him, pushed deep, and with an effort she moved herself up into a sitting position again, much closer to him. She wasn't sitting straight up; she was so much larger than Karkat that if she did he wouldn't be able to reach her face, or she bend down to his level. Thus were the complications of troll romance.

Delicately, like he was made of gossamar-thin glass and gemstones as easily broken as eggshells in a hurricane, Terezi put a hand beside him. She considered how to approach it, and delicately grasped his thigh, her heavy palm lightly touching him, almost supporting her as she leaned down like she was going to lay her head on him.

Their horns tapped together as she raised her head up, face to face with him. Her horns were not especially big relative to her, and they were quite light, perhaps with hollow chambers through their considerable length. Her horns were growing exceptionally longer as she got older and Karkat had declared himself the one solely responsible for trimming her horns so she didn't get stuck in doors like Tavros did. His horns, though; they were short but they were thick, compacted like plates of armor around their layers, and when their horns touched it was with an audible click and pleasant vibrations in the cranial plates on their foreheads.

Terezi considered a lick, spying through the turns of decisions to see if it was a bad idea or not. Karkat firmed himself up and kissed her cheek, blushing furiously the whole time.

A small teal flush spread on her cheek where his mouth had. The brilliant heat of his body met with the coolness of her high blood. Her blind eyes opened wide in a stupefied blink and Karkat wiggled in his seat, sinking deeper into the cushions with abject and possibly terminal feelings of 'how do we proceed'. Perhaps for the best, instead of shying away with bluster like he might have when he was younger, he stayed there and waited.

Terezi lowered her head, nuzzling him horns-to-horns. "These levels of cuteness are positively illegal, Vantas," Terezi murmured, Karkat shifting his head peacefully so that the blunt edges of his horns scraped nicely against the bases of the small hornlets swelling along the sides of her horns. Bits of molt fluttered down around their necks.

Karkat sighed dreamily, sidling his side into her arm and resting against her as much as he was into the couch. "It's adorabloodthirsty, thank you."

"You're about as bloodthirsty as..." Terezi chuckled cruelly as she dug her horns into a particularly stubborn molt spot. "Shit, Egbert."

Karkat might have actually been offended even as recently at the meteor. He'd grown up a lot since then. "Like I care," he mumbled, his usual inability to stop a full-blown ramble halted in his tracks but the warm sensations going in his head and rippling down his back, causing his hairs to wave like tides in motion.

Terezi tilted her head up as Karkat shifted his face against her neck, kissing the join of her jaws with only the slight nick of his massive blunt fangs. She barely felt it and what little she felt, seemed natural. He hugged her arm as tightly as he could, and she drew as close to him as she could.