"Kar. Kar, are you serious right now?"
Ampora's shrill voice woke me from a sleep that had been apparently pretty deep. I woke up to find Nepeta and I had cuddled up, we'd fallen asleep together, and she shook her head groggily as she woke up as well.
"What day is it?" I asked, still feeling as if I were half asleep.
Ampora rolled his eyes, and held out his phone, slipping me a glance of the date.
Oops.
An entire day since yesterday, and it was apparently passed 1:00pm, we'd fallen asleep for quite a few hours.
"How the fuck did you get in my house?" I demanded.
"I think I furgot to lock the door when I came in yesterday." Nepeta admitted sheepishly, as she let out a yawn.
We were still cuddled close at this point. I'd somehow gotten my arm around her waist in my sleep, and she had one arm underneath my neck, supporting my head. She was laying on her back, and had snuggled the side of her head up to my chest, and I was curled up on my side.
It was only when Nepeta spoke up did Ampora notice she was here.
"W-what the actual fuck, Kar…?!"He demanded.
"You and her… did you—"
"No! Jesus Christ, no!" I instantly yanked the blanket off the both of us, as a natural reaction to his assumption.
"See? Fully fucking clothed."
Eridan rolled his eyes and crossed his arms, looking extremely agitated with me.
"Sol called you yesterday and you never picked up or called him back." He informed.
"Uh, hello? Sick as fuck." I informed.
"Mew sound better." Nepeta told me groggily.
Yeah, I did feel better.
My throat felt exceedingly better, it didn't feel like I was swallowing a knife every time I attempted to swallow, and I didn't have any chills left.
"Yeah, I think I mostly am." I shrugged.
She smiled, putting a hand against my forehead.
"Your fever is mostly down." She said.
"Blah, blah, blah, times a wastin, you realize that don't you?" Eridan cut us off before we could go on ignoring him.
"Yeah, w-we get it, you're both adorable as fuck, and "in love" or w-whatever…! But I w-wouldn't have come here w-without a reason…!"
Nepeta and I both flushed over red at the "in love" part.
Nepeta quickly pulled her arm away from me, so that we'd no longer be in a cuddling position, and she giggled slightly, embarrassed.
Ampora stood off to the side, really looking like we were testing his patience, which he really did lack quite a bit of.
"You're not sick, right?" I asked her, as she slipped out of bed, straightening her clothes, which had wrinkled seeing as she slept in them.
"Nah, not really. I'm gonna go home and take some vitamin C, and drink tea and try to prevent it befur it happens, though."
I could tell she was rushing out more likely because Eridan had shown up, and found out that she'd fallen asleep at my house, and was probably off to do the walk of shame.
She was sitting in the floor slipping on her shoes as quickly as possible, and then she started running her fingers through her hair trying to straighten it.
"Bye, Karki—" She started to go for the door but I cut her off.
"Wait." I grabbed her by the shoulder, and stopped her.
She turned around looking confused.
"I'll call you later, okay?" I said, looking at her with apologetic eyes, trying to mentally tell her I was really fucking sorry that my friends were so up in my face all the time.
A bit of relaxation rushed through her face, and she got less tense. It was just Eridan, after all.
"Yeah, sounds purrfectly fine." She said, before leaning over and pecking me on the lips.
"Don't strain yourself," She told me as she stood up and headed for the door.
"Mew are still running a small fever."
With that, she left my room and I heard her go down the stairs and out the door.
I suddenly felt like a fucking idiot for not remembering to thank her for all she'd done for me yesterday, but then I figured I'd do that when I called her later in the day.
Eridan was still standing there with his arms crossed, looking half amused.
"What the fuck are you staring at?" I demanded.
"You've gone a bit soft, haven't you, Kar?" He smirked.
"No, I'm not fucking soft, you heinous douchebag!" I grumbled.
"And we'd still be asleep if it weren't for you so this better be fucking good."
I got out of bed, still in pajamas, mind you, which was basically just one of my regular black t-shirts, and a pair of sweat pants, I shoved Ampora out of my bedroom casually, and shut the door.
"Kar, w-what are you—"
"I'm getting dressed, you goddamn perv." I snapped.
"Kar, I've seen you without a shir—"
"Not today you're not, just hold the fucking phone for half a second." I told him.
Eridan grumbled, annoyed to have been pushed out.
I quickly slipped on a pair of grey jeans, and left the shirt I was already wearing and just put a black hoodie over it.
Because, yeah, it was summer, but it'd been raining the night before, and it looked like a mostly mild day.
I opened the door, letting Eridan back in, before sitting on my floor and quickly putting on my red converse.
I picked up a comb and started to go through my tangled messy hair, but gave up before I got really into it because I was too damn lazy.
"All right, what's all this shit about?" I asked, finally.
"W-well, actually, Sol told me that you asked about Gam yesterday, and afterw-wards he started to w-wonder as w-well—"
"Slow down." I told him, as if was doing that obnoxious stutter thing, which he did when he was feeling excitable, or nervous, or whatever the fuck, who even knew why Eridan did things.
Eridan took a deep breath.
"Okay. What I'm tryin to say is that Sol got ahold of Gam yesterday, and he seemed…" He trailed off.
"Seemed what?" I asked.
"Different, I guess." He finished.
"How so?" I demanded, annoyed that he was being so vague.
"W-well, he did tell Sol to shut the fuck up, and then he hung up." He said.
"So? He was probably joking." I said, rolling my eyes.
"It didn't…sound anythin like a joke." He finished.
I didn't know what this guy was getting at.
"Okay, so let me get this fucking straight. You came down here and woke me the fuck up, I was sick yesterday, mind you, to tell me that Gamzee hurt Sollux's goddamn feelings?" I grumbled.
"No!" Eridan huffed.
"Sol, he thought…he thinks that somethin is going on with Gam! And he says when there's trouble with Gam you're the one in charge of solvin it!"
I sighed.
"Okay, okay."
"I'll talk to him."
Eridan nodded, accepting that.
"So, what, is Sollux ranting his problems to you now?" I asked.
"Occasionally." He said.
I groaned, pulling the hood on my jacket over my head.
"Okay, I guess I'm off to go see my doltish best friend, get the fuck out of my house." I told him, as I headed for the bedroom door.
"Kar, w-wait…!" Eridan called after me.
I turned.
"What?" I demanded.
"Your contacts." He said, pointing to my bedside table where I'd left them.
"Oh."
All right, I had to admit, I sort of owed him for that one. He could have let me walk out the door without my color contacts, but he didn't.
He laughed a little.
"I saved ya there, didn't I?"
"Shut the fuck up."
. . . .
It'd been awhile since I'd seen Gamzee, since July now, nearly two weeks had gone by at this point, and that did worry me. Gamzee wasn't the most stable of people, so when Eridan had said he'd cursed Sollux out, and hung up, it bothered me, despite my casual reaction.
It was mild outside, as I'd predicted.
It felt like a spring day, which was a nice change to be honest, I couldn't handle the sun beating down on me 100% of the time.
I'd walked Eridan some of the way home, when the time came to split up, we split up, and that was that. We were talking about meeting up soon to re-dye my hair, Nepeta had been right, my roots were turning grey, it was nearly time to let Ampora deal with the dye again.
I felt like Eridan always liked dying my hair for me, because it was like having a captive friend. I couldn't really storm out.
I didn't often appreciate the town that we lived in, but as I was walking down the sidewalk, with my hands in my jacket pockets, I looked around, and took it all in for once.
We lived in a small town.
Not so small that we had private gravel roads or any of that shit.
Everything was pretty much within walking distance, and the things that weren't there were always buses you could take.
Not many cars went by.
Not too many, and not too little either, it was sort of slightly less than average.
It usually took me about fifteen to twenty minutes to get to Gamzee's house, and Sollux was even closer. He could get to my house in about five minutes.
I suppose not a lot of other teenagers had the ability to see their best friends whenever the fuck they wanted, I felt sort of sorry for those people.
Though, it did have it ups and downs.
(ex: my fucking friends always showing up at my house unannounced.)
I stopped in front of Gamzee's house, his foster parent's car wasn't in the driveway at the moment, meaning they were either all gone, and his parents had stepped out for a bit.
Gamzee didn't often leave the house with his foster parents, so I went out on a limb and figured Gamzee was probably upstairs.
I pulled out my keys from my pocket, pulling out the spare key I had to Gamzee's house. I kept it, not just for myself, but for Gamzee, because he constantly lost his own set of keys.
I couldn't comprehend how agitated I used to get whenever the fuckbag called me up asking me to come bail him out, because he'd lost the goddamn key to his house again.
It had become normal over the years, though, and it'd become a daily thing to check and make sure he had his key when we both separated after school.
But still, it was always good to have it on hand.
I casually opened the front door, and walked right into the house, shutting the door.
All the lights were off in the main rooms, downstairs, and all was quiet.
"Gamzee?" I asked.
"Are you home? I'm already in, all right? So don't freak the fuck out. If you fucking murder me on the assumption that I'm some kind of god forsaken douchefuck here to rob you, I swear to Jesus fucking Christ I'll haunt you for the rest of your useless days, and even into the afterlife."
Silence.
"Gamzee?"
I groaned.
Maybe, for once he had gone out with his parents.
It didn't hurt to check his room, though.
I went up the stairs, casually calling his name every once in awhile, but his room was empty.
But I noticed something was fucking off about it as soon as I saw it.
Usually Gamzee was horrible about keeping his room clean, he'd have week old food laying on his carpet rotting, but, when I opened the door, the lights were out, and I turned them on, revealing that the room was much cleaner, and some of his old things, childhood keepsakes, and whatnot, were lying about in the corners of his room, just as if it were casual.
I walked to the corner of the room, and kneeled down.
Some of his old stuffed animals were lying there. I remembered them from when we were kids, but I fucking paused when I noticed one of them was missing their head.
Startled, and confused out of my fucking mind, I picked up the head of a stuffed rabbit.
"What… the actual fuck?" I demanded, not meaning to say that out loud.
It was in that moment that I heard abrupt, loud, static coming from his TV, that forced me to jump, and made my heart rate speed up to like a thousand fucking miles an hour, and I swung around, with an obvious deer in the head lights, horrified expression, and there he was, Gamzee. Messing with the controls on his stupid TV.
"Hey, best friend."
"Jesus fuck, Gamzee." I gasped, trying to recollect myself. At this point I was angry at him for not answering when I'd called him, oh, I don't know, fifty billion times.
"What sort of shit are you trying to pull here? What looneyblock have you been fucking hanging out on, thinking it's okay to pull this kind of fucking shit on me. You're a dickfucking, lackadaisical, vacuous assho—"
"Shut up."
I froze up.
"Excuse me?" I demanded, startled.
When did Gamzee ever talk to me like that? When did he ever use that tone of voice?
"I said, shut up." He repeated himself, and he did not look like he was kidding.
I told myself in that moment, that any second now, Gamzee would laugh, and put an arm around me casually and say "I'm just fucking messin' with ya, bro" and then I'd yell, and he'd laugh more.
And I looked at him, as if I was waiting for him to do so, burst into laughter not being able to keep up this whole serious act.
"What the fuck are you staring at?"
That was not the response that I'd wanted.
"I—I just…Gamzee, what the fuck? What's wrong with you, man? When do you ever act like this?" I demanded.
"Act like what?" He retorted.
"Like a goddamn prick!" I instantly answered.
"You treat me like an idiot, and you expect me not to retort every once in awhile?" He grumbled, still dead serious, and all I could do was stare.
"Uh, yeah… that's kind of been your thing over the years." I informed.
Then, Gamzee laughed.
But it wasn't the kind of laugh I'd expected, or hoped for. It was a bitter laugh, and then afterwards, he shifted into a glare.
"Do you think that you're the only one with a free pass to be an asshole?" He asked, grimly.
"Oh, my dad's never here for me, my brother went to college, I'm a cynical fuckwad. Boo-fucking-hoo."
He said all that in a mock tone, and he was gradually getting closer to me as this conversation went on. And I was getting more and more fucking annoyed, scared, angry.
Gamzee had never treated me like this before. Hell, this wasn't like Gamzee. This couldn't be Gamzee.
"What the fuck is your problem, man?" I barked, finally snapping at him.
He instantly came back at me, slamming his fist against the wall, startling me, and making me realize all at once that he'd backed me up to the wall.
"You're my problem. And not just my problem, everyone's. You think that you help people by spewing out a shitload of half begrudging advice? Yeah, I think not."
"Gamzee…?"
Okay, at this point, I was fucking terrified.
Who was this? This wasn't my best friend, what the fuck was he going on about. That look that he had in his eyes right then, it was crazed, full of more rage than I'd ever seen in Gamzee.
When the fuck did Gamzee ever go into a full blown rage? And directed at me?
When I uttered his name, my voice was smaller, I noticed.
"Calm down, okay…?"
"Shut up." Gamzee repeated.
"Shut the fuck up."
It took me a moment to realize it, because it shocked me so much, that I almost didn't wanna believe it. It felt like I'd blinked for half a second, and when I opened my eyes, I was being held inches above the ground.
His strong hands were around my neck, and I felt him shifting his weight towards me to hold my body against the wall, hard.
I let out a struggled choke, and I felt my eyes widening, and I couldn't even say a word, all I could do was choke, and struggle, and the more I struggled against his hold, the more force he put against my neck, which choked me even more.
I finally snapped out of the shock that it'd put me into, and when I did, I gathered up what seemed to be the last of my strength, and I smacked him across the face, hard enough that I swore I could fucking hear the sting from it.
That startled him, and right then and there, he let go, letting me fall to the floor.
I curled up on the floor where I'd landed, wrapping my arms around the top of my head protectively, as if to protect myself from getting grabbed again, and I lied there, coughing and gasping for breath, panic rushing through my mind.
I had just been fucking choked by my childhood best friend.
. . . .
I must have blacked out for a moment after that, because I remembered having a panicked realization, and then, feeling dizzy, and then, well, nothing. For a second, I let myself believe that the events that had taken place beforehand were no more than dreams gone horribly wrong, but I proved that theory wrong when I realized, I was on Gamzee's bedroom floor still, and not far off, was Gamzee himself, sitting on his knees a few inches away from me, shaking my shoulder, saying my name over and over again.
When I saw him, something triggered in my mind, and pulled the fuck away from him, instantly, as I saw flashes of him holding me against the wall, and I felt bruises already forming from where his fingers had been around my neck.
"K-Karkat?" He stuttered, looking at me, horrified, as I'd thrown myself into a sitting position, and backed back up towards the wall, smacking his hand away from me.
That look of craze was gone, replaced with a completely horrified, and hurt look.
I opened my mouth to talk, but all that came out at first was a fit of coughing, which made Gamzee flinch and try to reach a trembling hand out to me.
"G-Gamzee…" I started, finally feeling okay enough to speak.
"What the hell…? W-why would you—"
"I'm sorry." He cut me off, looking absolutely terrified.
At this point he had his knees pulled up to his chest, arms wrapped around himself, as he realized I wasn't going to allow him to lay a hand on me.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." He spoke incredibly quickly, and continued to chant "sorry" over and over again, looking slightly crazed, but not filled with rage this time.
He was scared, he was confused.
"Gamzee."
His chanting was making my fucking head hurt.
I had to say it. I had to say what was on my mind.
"Gamzee… are you… off your drugs…?" I asked, softly.
"Are you sober right now…?"
There was no answer for a moment, but then he finally looked at me again, with a pained look, as if he was scared to look at me, and nodded slightly.
"Yeah." He admitted, quietly.
I had suspected, but I hadn't exactly wanted to believe it.
As much as it made me feel like a fucking horrible person for thinking it, Gamzee wasn't Gamzee when he was sober.
He'd been getting high for so long, that the way he acted whilst he was in that state of being had become his true identity.
I felt absolutely appalled thinking that way, but it was the truth no matter what point of view you looked at it as.
I think it was either when I slapped him, or when he just looked at me lying on the ground unconscious that put things into perspective, that made him realize what he'd just done.
I slowly reached forward, with a shaky hand, mind you, and touched my neck, where he choked me, and it made me wince.
I was definitely bruising up there. It was scary to think, but I knew that if it had gone on for much longer, he would have killed me.
And it'd come damn close to that. The bruising was painful.
"I'm so sorry." He muttered again, for the seemingly hundredth time.
"I don't know what happened, I just—please don't hate me, I'll never do it again, I promise."
This was a whole new side of Gamzee.
I wasn't used to him acting like this.
I was used to seeing him as this carefree, useless, stupid son of a bitch who rambled on constantly about the miracles of the world, and was just a little too casual with affection for my liking, always sliding an arm around my shoulders when he saw an opening.
This was new.
I'd seen him practically fucking crazy, full of rage, and he'd gone from that, to a pathetic mess, apologizing over and over, begging me to forgive him, close to tears.
This… I hardly recognized him as my best friend.
"Does it hurt…? Do you have to go to the hospital?" He asked, sounding so fucking ashamed, and small.
Almost, fragile sounding.
I touched where the bruises were forming again, this time slower, and with more hesitance, and it hurt, but I didn't wince, or feel the need to go into a fit of coughing.
It was painful, but doable.
"No, I'm fine." I assured him.
But, I wasn't fine.
Sure, the pain was doable, but inside, I was fucked up. I was confused, scared, feeling more than betrayed, and just, an overall sad feeling washed over me.
I didn't know how to feel.
I had just been choked by my best friend, how was I supposed to feel? Angry? Scared? Every emotion at once? I didn't even know.
"I-I'll never do it again… I swear, I swear to god… I didn't mean to." He told me, sounding teary, but he wasn't crying, he was doing all he could not to lose it.
He reached forward to touch my shoulder, very slowly, afraid to get hit again, and I should have. I should have slapped his hand. I should have been on my feet calling the cops on him right about fucking now, but something stopped me. I couldn't do it.
I allowed him to touch my shoulder, first, and then after he knew I wasn't going to hit him, he got closer and pulled me into a hug, once again, apologizing over and over again.
"It's okay." I said, softly.
"R-really?"
"Yeah."
And with that, avoiding any more talk, I wrapped my arms back around him, returning the hug, in an attempt to comfort him.
I'd just basically accepted that my best friend had nearly choked me to death, and forgiven him for it, minutes later.
I had my arms around the same person who just moments ago, had his fingers around my neck.
And I somehow didn't care.
And the fact that I had so little self-respect, the fact that I couldn't make myself give a fuck, made me feel sick to my stomach.
A/N: It's strange how I can go so quickly from fluff to tragedy in just two chapters, isn't it? Welp, this was one of the things I had planned to happen from the beginning, and I don't see anything that I need to explain about this, so, here you guys go. You get a early chapter in edition to the upcoming chapter next Thursday. -Raiden
Thank you for reading, and review and/or follow if you can. It's my goal to get to 130 followers before I reach the end of the story, so yeah... ;w;
