Work Text:
Maybe you will always be
Just a little out of reach...
You're my satellite
You're riding with me tonight
Passenger side, lighting the sky
Always the first star that I find
--Guster, 'Satellite'
*
“Captain Vantas,” you say. “This is a really simple concept. You drive your ship, which I am in, to that ship, which I want to hit with my sword, and I hit it, with my sword.”
You show him the helpful diagram you have drawn. He does not seem impressed.
You draw little motion lines around the ships, and then hold it up again.
“This guy here is me,” you explain, pointing helpfully. “And that sword here is the sword.”
“Yes, you’ve labeled it very clearly,” Karkat says. “With three shout poles, even.”
“I just didn’t want you to miss it. Or me, here, this guy here is me. I’m a really crucial part in the whole operation.”
“God help us all.”
“Vantas,” you say, and take his little squidgy face between your hands. He is like a warm and darling coconut, and you squish his bony cheekbones. “Vantas, Vantas, Vantas.” You think for a bit. “Vantas.”
“Yes, Captain Ampora?” he says. He sounds very tired. He should sleep more. You squish his face a little bit harder.
“It’s my wiggling day,” you say, and gaze soulfully into his eyes.
This does not always work with Karkat, because very often it is not your wiggling day and he is bright enough to notice. It’s one of the things you like about Karkat, he’s perceptive as fuck and has a really great ass and remembers that you like extra ketchup on your macaroni surprise. One of the many things you like about Karkat.
But today it is, in fact, your wiggling day.
He sighs, deeply. “I cannot fucking believe myself. Okay, Ampora, you enormous pain in the nook, just this once we’ll go hit them with your sword.”
“I knew you’d come around--”
“One hit. You get one lunatic hit because you are a curse and a plague and a disaster and just this once it actually is your wriggling day, and then we do things the sane way and use the Advantage’s artillery.”
You squeal with delight and kiss him all over his face.
“One hit’s all I fuckin’ need, you’ll see--”
“Get off, get off, I’ll catch something, you walking case of nookrot.”
“You like me.”
“I hold you in nothing but the highest contempt. Go do what you are for whatever lunatic reason compelled to do before I have you thrown bodily down an incineration chute for daring to make my life that much more complicated.”
“Eeeeee,” you manage, and dash out of the bridge.
“And put a shirt on!” he shouts. “Some of us change out of pyjamas before midnight, you know that?”
Karkat is not half bad in the ideas department, to his credit. You detour off to your guest suites to raid your portiwardrobifier for full formal dress whites, with the dashing cape and the reams of braid and everything. Maybe once you’ve wrapped all this up you can talk the little curmudgeon into a gala before he fucking busts a heartvalve somewhere.
*
“Look,” says Karkat, his fist very insistently anchored in the scruff of your cape. “I cannot believe I am expelling these very words out of my frothy fucking wordchute but needs must and for this reason and this reason only do I find myself saying, Captain Motherfucking Ampora, go put on a space suit before you walk out of the airlock into space!”
“Nope,” you say.
“Nope. Nope! What fresh blistering hell is this, that you say unto me nope, you incredible bulgereek?”
“Because,” you say, patiently, “it doesn’t have a cape. If I’m going to hit this spaceship with my sword -- which I am, you promised, remember, I was there -- I want my cape billowin’ behind me.”
“Okay so first off,” says Karkat, “you will choke to death and die and the space whales will all laugh themselves to extinction upon the merest glimpse of your flash-frozen corpse. Two, things do not fucking billow in space on account of sprightly breezes not being a noted feature of pitiless, empty goddamn void.”
“Ha!” you say triumphantly, and gesture your newest adjutant over to your side. “Ha, ha, and also ha, you see, because that is where the psionic comes in!”
“What, Mister Hotshot ‘Flinches’ McGee, here? I thought he was your bulge-buddy, not your making-sure-Ampora-doesn’t-choke-to-death-on-the-endless-vacuum-of-space-buddy.” He shoots your personal assistant a weary, Karkatty assessing stare, a look which has been known to strip paint off bulwarks before, true fact, and the boy flinches right off his feet and hides behind you. You have to pat at him a bit till he stops whimpering.
“Captain Vantas, you are not the only guy in the universe who’s figured out how to glubbin’ multitask,” you say frostily. “Now if you don’t mind, hie your fantastic glutes up to the bridge and steer us in before I expire! I got a ship to fuckin’ discombobulate via a good hot helpin’ a sword and it is getting no less discombobulatable while we’re all standin’ around castin’ base aspersions upon my ability to economize.”
Karkat throws up his hands. “Fine! Fuck! Whatever. If you even think about having sloppy makeouts the roof of my ship I am ramming us all right through the nearest darkmater incursion to slough off our shame -- that’s not a threat, it’s a strategic outline.”
The airlock’s a good deal quieter once he goes grumbling off.
“He really does have fantastic glutes,” your assistant says eventually. “I mean, like, in person-- wow.”
“Fuckin’ tell me about it,” you say. “Come on, Flinches, let’s hop to.”
“Hang on a second, Cap,” he says, and catches your elbow. He sidles up, runs his warm lowblood’s fingers up your face, your sensitive fins, and you go attentively still.
“What seems to be the problem, Adjutant?” you tease him.
He runs a blunt nail across the top tine of one of your fins, and leans in close enough to brush snouts. “It’s your wiggling day, Cap,” he purrs against your mouth. “Maybe I want to give you something nice.”
The zip on your pants goes down with a psionic pop. You grin, and kiss him. He kisses you back with commendable skill and enthusiasm.
“Long as your little gift don’t cost you anything too dear,” you say finally, pulling back. “I wouldn’t want to put you out any, you know.” You’re a little breathless and he looks flushed and endearingly smug.
“Oh, I can afford this, Captain,” he says, licking his lips, and pushes you back against the wall, goes to his knees between your legs.
“Right,” you say, grabbing for his horns, and “yes, good, carry on, Adjutant.”
The intercom crackles to life.
“Ampora,” Karkat says sharply. “Do us all a favor and get your pox-ridden posterior out that airlock sometime this century, if you and your bulge would be so fucking-- oh my God, are you having sex right now? Seriously? We are sustaining heavy fire here and you’re getting your nook licked by a kid who at last count consisted of three elbows and a pint of lemonade, Ampora, your taste knows no fucking bounds, get him the fuck off you and get cracking or I’m steering us right into the nearest sun. What? What? Yes, Navigatrix Malson, I am going to wait till he’s done-- which had better be soon, I’m not joking around here, Ampora, final warning-- and if we all die because someone couldn’t wait half an hour to drain the main shame-vein then I’m sure it will be an incredible comfort to the naval aristocracy and his haunted bone bulge that Captain Ampora died how he lived: screwing each and every one of us over personally.”
“Would you hang on to your hat for one bloody second, Vantas!” you groan, and you throw your head back against the wall. “You want this over with sooner you could stand to sound maybe one mite sweeter!”
“I’m a Captain, Ampora, not a camwhore,” Karkat says. “I cannot believe you. I cannot even believe the least little part of you. You’re paying for the chemical purge and my trauma therapy. Vantas out.”
Your adjutant grabs for your hips, presses his mouth hard and sloppy-wet against your nook and that’s it, you’re done, it’s over. He drinks you down as you shake and squeak, and afterwards he sits back on his heels and the two of you just grin breathlessly at each other, entirely pleased. He’s so good you didn’t get the merest drop of purple on your crisp white pants. You pat your psionic between his pretty horns, fasten your trousers back up. You feel benevolently disposed towards the entirety of the universe and also more than a little wobbly around the knees.
“By ‘Vantas out’,” the intercom crackles back on to add, “I mean tuck your bulge back into your frilly knickers and let’s get going already, shift one of your godforsaken stems! Pick up your left pod and put it down, then do the same with your right pod, and you will have what us in the business of not being completely useless call ‘forward motion’, which is not the hardest concept to master even for your putrefied facsimile of a thinkpan. Don’t do them both at once or you will fall flat on your snout and I will laugh and laugh; a tender and poignant noise not unlike the first tinkling fairy bells to ever chime on a mid-bright season’s dusk. What I’m saying here, kids, is that I can open that lock on remote.”
*
Once you’re up and about, you take some time to admire our new sword against various angles of starfield. It is a gunblade, gaudy and deadly as fuck. Feferi sent it express for your wiggling day. The pommel is basically one gigantic garnet, and also carved into an adorable cuttlefish. When it hits the light just right it kind of goes ting! inside your head.
“If you’re going to spend all your time hitting things with gaudy-ass swords,” Karkat grumbles on the other side of your comlink, “you might as well ask Equius to modify the Corsair into one of those transforming robot anime ships next time we rendezvous with the shipyard.”
“That is a beautiful idea,” you say, startled and delighted.
“Oh fuck you,” Karkat growls. “Did your latest case of bulgerot metastasize to your pan or what, that was sarcasm!”
“No, no, see, my ship could have a cape,” you say. “Vantas, I could put a cape on my ship.”
Karkat’s next remarks upon capes are cruel and unwarranted, and you tune them out entirely.
“Yeah but anyway, no foolin’ around, don’t those anime ships come in groups of five?” you muse, as the Advantage draws closer to your hapless rebel target. “We could find a couple other guys as were interested and all club in-- there’s always a red one, right, which I suppose suits you right down’a the ground. A’course, the outfits are hideous. We’d have to design from scratch--”
“I am not forming the head of your moron mecha,” says Karkat. “God help me.”
“Hmm,” you say. “You could be the codpiece. That’d be well fuckin’ ferocious.”
“Ancillary Fleet Captain Ampora,” Karkat says. “You want to hit the stupid ship with the goddamn fucking sword, go hit the ship with the fucking sword and stop battering my thinkpan with your turbocharged idiocies.”
“Aye aye, First Fleet Captain Vantas,” you say, since evidently you’re playing at ranks now, and you hit the stupid ship with the goddamn fucking sword.
The sword wedges neatly into the small, secret exhaust port you have located, and explodes.
About ninety seconds later, the rebel ship does too, after you’ve gotten well enough away and the chain reaction your sword-hitting provoked has overloaded the powercells and fried the Helmsman’s mind thoroughly enough to send all the ship’s systems into overdrive.
Your cape is rippling in the gentle breeze of your psionic airbubble, your hair has been artfully mussed by the explosion, and you goddamn know your horns look fine as hell against all the molten detritus pinwheeling around the nose of the Twilight Fangbeast Advantage right now. You cock the fingers of your ever-so-slightly crispy hand like a gun and mime blowing smoke. “Still got it, Vantas!”
Over the comlink there is only Karkat’s incredulous, delighted cursing.
*
You talk him into the gala, and even get to throw it in your Squids A Million Fancy Corsair’s prime stateroom, the one with the really glossy dance floor and the friezes of spidergoats all fucking with each other across the ceiling.
Magnanimous with second-hand, baffled triumph, Vantas even gets wheedled into fancy dress whites, the kind with all the extra froofy braid, though the day anyone fits him for a cape is the day they go home without their hands and maybe also their teeth in a baggie, you are a proud man and very charismatic obviously but even you know a line in the sand if it’s dug in deep enough and Karkat gives you a troll-indian burn right on the goddamn wrist and everything. Nonetheless, he looks extremely fucking dashing and his fancy hat is magnificently cute, and he even takes a spin across the ballroom floor with you.
Her Imperial Peixes’s First Fleet Captain Vantas is not the First Fleet Captain for not being good at things, and so he dances as stupendously no-nonsensely as he does everything else. It is kind of like having your center of balance briskly and pleasantly laid waste, though that might also be the extremely fucking fancy wine you have had a lot of, too.
You are having an extremely fucking great wiggling day, until you catch sight of the ever-so-slightly off tint of Karkat’s wine.
“Captain, hang on, don’t drink that,” you say, breaking off your dance with some General or other to run over and grab his wrist.
“What, it’s a good vintage,” he says, finishing his glass. “Get your own.”
You facepalm a little. “Vantas, I think it was doped.”
“Oh.” Karkat examines his empty glass. “Well, fuck. Mind hauling me off to your medical blocks, Ampora? My enemies all like slow poisons, so we should have at least a couple minutes before my bones melt out of my excretionary chute, or whatever the fuck is in vogue these days with the fuckasses that want me dead.”
You pull the glass out of his hands and take a sniff. Your vascular bladders knot up, and then sink hard into your waste filters. “No, Karkat, I mean it was doped.”
He doesn’t even elbow you for using his hatch-name in public, he just hunches into your space.
“Doped as in...?”
“Doped as in it’s Love Lies Bleeding -- a sex pollen, ‘case that still weren’t clear enough for you, and I have had this shit before and it is good fucking shit. Page your bloody matesprit if you don’t wanna pail your way through half the ship, not that I don’t recommend it as a spot a personal recreation but it don’t really strike me as your style... Vantas?”
Karkat’s eyes are very, very wide. He fists his fingers in the sleeve at your elbow as he leans in close.
“Ampora, I don’t have a matesprit,” he hisses.
This is distressing: you never really gave much thought to who Karkat was pailing, but you always just sort of vaguely figured he must be getting one over on someone -- God knew the list of hopeful applicants was lightyears long.
“Welllll...” you try, kind of cautiously, “now’s the time really seriously to think about gettin’ one? You don’t wanna ride this particular little beauty out with a blackrom, rookie’s mistake. It makes you all floppy, they’ll rip you to bits --”
His claws dig in through his gloves. “I’m on a concupiscent dispensation, you assclown,” he snarls.
“You’re on a what now?”
He rubs at his frontpan. “Ampora. You know how I’m a mutant?”
“You seriously think anyone cares about that--”
“My bulge doesn’t work,” he blurts out.
“What?”
“I’m not shy about the achromatic thing anymore, fuck you very much for thinking we’re still six, it’s that a lot of the rest of the shit trolls were supposed to get didn’t make it into my eggsac either! You never wondered why I don’t get scrambled up in everyone’s shipping wars? You thought I just -- that it was just discipline? Self-control? I don’t feel concupiscent desire! There’s nothing there, in my head, I’m broken, I never have, I never could, Feferi got me past the drones when we were nine and I’ve never bothered since and all this time there was a fucking drug that could have fixed me and -- and now it’s -- now it’s too late, weaponized, haven’t thought of trying for a pail in a goddamn decade, more, and I. I just. I don’t, I can’t even -- Ampora, what the fuck is going to happen to me?”
“Uh.” You look at him. He has already started to bead with sweat, and he’s more incoherent than you’ve ever heard him be. “Well, fuck me sideways, Vantas, I really fuckin don’t know. You kinda look standard...” you touch his damp cheek, gently, and he shakes all over. His pupils are dark burning pools, and he swallows hard.
“They can’t see me like this,” he says thickly. “My crew, they -- Eridan, please, you can’t let them see me like this, I don’t know what I’ll do --”
“Hush,” you say. “We’ll go back to my quarters.”
He nods his head fast. There is something obscenely grateful to it. You have seen Karkat exhilarated, and ferocious, and hungry, and tired, and angry, and every now and then you have even seen him be happy, but Karkat is very rarely grateful to anything, he’s mostly striding off to sort the next disaster before he even thinks to be glad he’s put paid to the last one. It’s the kind of look you associate with really late days where you hack into his quarters with his favorite ice cream and rub his feet and watch the Irken remake of Pretty Woman, the one with all the exploding heads, and when he doesn’t think you are looking at him he looks at you like how he is looking now, only less so, because right now he is utterly raw with relief and it is just upright freaky. You tuck him under your arm so you don’t have to look at him looking at you.
He stumbles a few times on the way to your block, and it makes your vasculars twitch up higher into your throat every time.
“We’ll get you in the shower,” you say, adjusting taps, “hot, try to sweat it out faster.”
He strips his uniform off, clumsy with the clasps and the fancy braid, and when you try to help he just claws at you instead.
“Will that work?” he asks. His hands are like brands on your arms, surprisingly soft. He wears gloves for everything, doesn’t let any more skin show in public than he can ever possibly help. Lingering shame over the mutant thing, you’d always thought. A pointed disinvitation, now, it seems like.
“Hope so,” you admit.
“How long will it, um, will it take?”
You bite back who the fuck knows, and come up with, “A while, maybe. In you get, Captain, shift your saggy fronds afore they fall off.”
He gets, and slides slowly down to the trap’s floor. You sit down outside the basin and keep an eye on him and try not to panic, because it’s Karkat and he’s naked and looking quite extremely fuckable and it’s Karkat. Even without having heard the faintest squeak about his concupiscent dispensation you have long since made your peace with never getting a peek into his pants, you had gotten so comfortable with it. Space was cold, suns were hot, and Captain Karkat Vantas was untouchable as a crisp-cut chunk of dark matter. And now he gasps for breath all faint and up against you, clutch-naked and dewed with sweat and shower water, and your thinkpan has gone all squashy with horror.
“‘M still hot,” he says after a while. He’s squirming a bit. “And thirsty. This was a stupid plan.”
“It’ll take more time than a couple’a minutes. I’ll get you somethin’a drink.”
By the time you come back with the cup he’s got his hands hovering around his unsheathed bulge like it’s a stick of uranium, like he’s worried he’s going to blow his fucking fingers off. You almost drop the cup when he looks up at you, hips squirming restlessly. He looks so scared, it burns all through you, he is tiny and wet and terrified and his bulge is flushed to what looks like a painful degree of saturation, bright red and squirming against his hip.
You hand him the cup of cold grubjuice and he drinks it in choking gulps, already gone sloppy-high and spilling half down his neck, his bare chest. He drags fingers through the mess, winces.
“I,” he says, grimacing. “I just. Is this. Uh. Is this what it always feels like?”
“Good?” you venture.
He moans, an awful helpless sound. “Yeah,” he grits out. He throws the cup out of the trap with a savage motion, and he buries his face in his hands.“God, yeah, what the fuck, Eridan -- what is this, please, just--”
“I’ll give you some alone time,” you say, your voice almost a squeak.
“No,” he says, and grabs your wrist. His eyes are so wide. “Eridan, you shithead, don’t you dare fucking leave me in here with myself!”
You are at his side in an instant, your knees smarting from impact. “Easy,” you say, gentling him, stroking his sopping wet hair. It’s Karkat, it’s Karkat, you do not get to fuck Karkat or probably the universe will implode. “Easy, Kar, easy. We got this, right? We’ll ride it out.”
“God, okay, sure, just don’t leave me,” he pants lolling his head against your shoulder. He’s warm as a warp core. “What do I...?”
“Just touch it,” you say. “It don’t bite.” You laugh, kind of strangled and uncontrollable, and feel awful afterwards, for the way he compacts inwards.
One of his hands come up, trembling, and he pats his bulge like it’s a venomous sea slug, all ginger caution. You’d laugh again if it wasn’t the saddest thing you ever saw in your life.
“Stroke it,” you tell him. Your voice comes out a little too husky, you’re a too close to his ear, he half-curls against you and he’s so shivery fucking warm. You are full of a nameless, panicky heat, you want this not to be happening to you, to either of you.
He strokes himself, very very slowly, and moans into your shoulder. You put an arm around his shoulders, easing farther into the shower, and he curls up against you, stroking himself faster, curling his fingers around himself and squeezing. The shower water beneath the two of you is tinting pink as cotton candy. Your bulge is pulsing against the inside of your sticky trousers like it’s got anything to add to this conversation that won’t send everything right to hell.
“Good,” you’re saying, babbling, hugging him to yourself, “Go on, Kar, you got it,” and he’s just panting, wordless, his eyes pressed tightly closed like he can hide from himself. He thrusts up a final time into his fist and comes, and fuck if that isn’t the strangest thing you ever saw, bright red material spilling out between his legs, red as cherries, and he thrashes, out of control, and it’s Karkat. You’ve never seen him lose his shit, not once, not in all the sweeps you’ve known him.
His breath hitches, and he pulls his hands away from his bulge and stares at them, pink-slick and gooey. He’s breathing in awful gulps, and then he very abruptly starts to cry.
You flip straight off the handle.
“No no no no,” you chant, petting his face, desperately, trying to hold him close without getting tangled up at the crotch, “No, Karkat, come on, buddy, hey, come on, you did good, shhh, shhh,” and this is every kind of infidelity against Fef and Gamz but fuck if they can go hang, Karkat fucking Vantas is crying, quiet and overwhelmed. You always thought he was carved out of steel and starshine, and just having to hear his confused, helpless hiccups is tearing you hot little terrified bits. It’s the dope, it’s got to be the dope. You’ve been on it before, yourself -- you’d liked it, it makes everything so real, realer than real, it makes everything sparkly-raw and vast, and Karkat is coming apart from it.
His claws rake furrows down your back, and you just stroke his hair, over and over, try and shoosh what can’t be fucking shooshed. The tears trail off as his bulge starts stirring back to life but the hiccups keep coming, high-pitched and awful, the last bit of him under all the drug still trying to keep it together and losing. He looks up at you and there’s practically nothing left to him but this kind of desperate, resentful neediness. He’s gone, he’s lost, he wouldn’t know you from the greenest Ensign.
You have no idea what to do.
“Shh,” you say, and stroke a dark sodden lick of hair out of his eyes. “Let’s... let’s put you in my recuperacoon?”
He kisses you. It is frankly the worst kiss you have ever had, a painful scramble of teeth, and he’s already jerking himself again, harsh and distracted, and you don’t know what to do, you can’t fuck your best friend, he would be so completely disappointed in you probably but it’s going to be a while yet before he comes back to himself, who knows how long, and he’s going to be hurting the whole while.
Locking him in your recuperacoon -- you don’t know what that would do to him, you just don’t fucking know. What if he aspirated slime and it fucked him up even harder? What if he cried more? If he cries again you are going to have to fucking kill yourself, you are gonna need therapy just for this one time you had to go through Karkat crying on you, you are gonna have scars. You can’t take him bursting into any more tears.
He makes a gut-wrenching snarl of frustration, and bites your face, between your lower lip and your jaw, then again even more off center from your mouth, on your lower cheek somewhere. He snarls again, hoarse and dangerous, and you just -- what if he fucking flips his pan? What if he goes mad? What if you have to be there for him, what would it hurt, would it make anything better for him, poor sorry pitiful fucker, he has no fucking clue what’s happening and you can’t leave him alone. You can’t leave him like this.
You ease his hands away from his bulge. It looks raw already, punished, he hasn’t been minding his nails. “You gotta be easier on yourself,” you say gently, “you’ll rip the poor thing off,” but you might as well be talking to the trap. He just stares at you, his hips still working up into nothing, his bulge coiling restlessly against his hip.
You pin his wrists together with one hand, and carefully -- so fucking carefully -- you stroke his bulge. His eyes flutter closed at that and he gives off a low, relieved moan, and you stroke him again. He seems calmer, now that you’re touching him, the desperate anger leaving his face bit by bit.
You stroke him till he goes all pliant, then push him off you, ease out of the trap slow.
“Stay,” you say. “Stay -- good. Okay.”
You scramble out of the ablution chamber fast as you can, slipping on the tiles, grab the first pail you can think to find. Cheap matte plastic, Fleet Issue, tucked under your workdesk -- not the fancier kind, your First Mate had been by yesterday and she’d made off with an even half-dozen of your favorites, but this’ll do. It’s all in the the technique, anyway, not the tech, isn’t that what they always say? You could show someone a good time with a shotglass, as a point of fucking pride, and as another point you actually have.
God. He’s never fucking done this, he said Fef had gotten him past the drones -- got him past, not pailed him, how do you even do that, but all your ninth sweeps were such a fucking blur of panic and revolution and sleepness days and and instant noodles for every meal and hiding out in the dark spots behind wormholes and maybe that’d been one more blurry, bloody, dirty part of it -- and they’d never said, never told you, all these years and he’s never, not once done this. You’ve never pailed anyone for their first time before, not even your most yolk-eared ensigns come on board without a few points for their fertility scores. When you get back to the trap he’s still there, huddled into himself, his chin resting on the edge of the basin. His eyes flick back and forth between your face and the pail like he doesn’t know which is going to hurt him more.
You shut off the shower. You’re shaking despite yourself and the silence between you is all ragged. You don’t fuck with your friends, you learned that lesson early and you learned it hard. This is all wrong. Your pants are tight enough to hurt, all you can smell is gunmetal and the copper tang of blood, where Karkat nicked open your lip. You are going to lose him for what you are going to do, how could you not lose him? But he told you not to leave him alone.
The pail gets hooked over your arm and Karkat gets eased out of the tub, onto the spongy bathmat, turned around to kneel. He’s pliant, his blind eyes locked stupidly on to your face, his hands straying again and again to his coiling, searching bulge.
“Easy,” you say, spreading his legs apart, the pail between them, his arms folded up against the trap’s rim. He should be comfortable enough, he won’t get raw patches on his knees, you wouldn’t let him get any more hurt than he can help. You come around behind him to stroke his back and he sighs, quietly, lets his cheek rest on his folded arms. It’s the same sigh he makes when he lets you crack his toes and it stings to hear now, like this.
You knead at his back, stalling for time, and he hums and relaxes into it. The long muscles are like taut steel cables under his warm skin, and you wonder if anyone’s ever worked these knots out before. The thought of Karkat unwinding enough to let anyone at his back almost makes you laugh. You dig your thumbs in and he fucking purrs at you, arching up into your hands. Blind faith. He’s so fucking beautiful like this.
You are chewing on your lower lip hard enough to suck blood in through your teeth, and you work your way from his iron shoulders to the trembling tense arch of his lower back as he shifts and squirms beneath you, his face pillowed in his forearms, his bulge making slick wet noises against the juncture of his thigh and dripping lubrication fluid in gut-wrenching little plips and plops into the bucket between his legs and his claws going skritch against the trap’s rim. You’re both breathing too hard, too loud, raspy in the quiet. You should have put on music or something.
“Can I?” you ask, and your hands drift lower along the curve of his ass. “Karkat? You okay?”
He only moans and presses back into you. He’s slick all over with showerwater and sweat, hot as a warp core breach. Everyone’s warmer than you, really, you’re royal as shit but no one’s ever been as warm as Karkat and his funny mutant vasculars, it’s always been right on the border of ludicrous and magnificent and when you watch movies together he lets you put your head in his lap to toast your fins and he pets your head, sometimes, pops twizzlers in your mouth like a fussy lusus and this is just -- this is not good, how hot he is now.
You crook your fingers, minding your claws, and press the harmless angles of your knuckles up against his nook. He wails at that, pressing back against you, and his hands come off the trap’s edge and go scrambling for his bulge.
You bat them away. He’s only going to hurt himself. He rocks against you, sloppy and frustrated, and you blow out a long hesitant breath and flick the catch of your trousers open. The sudden loss of pressure against your own bulge is a relief and a horror all at once, you’re aching from it. Your hands are shaking. Karkat breathes in harsh, miserable gasps, and when you press yourself into him his breath hitches up into a long shuddering keen. He’s so fucking warm.
“Easy,” you plead, stroking him, “easy, easy, there’s a good -- a good guy, okay, we’ll take this slow, come on, buddy, easy.”
He’s already rocking on you, a savagely desperate back-and-forth that’s too much, too soon. You’re not going to last long at all, he’s so fucking warm, nothing like anything you ever stuck your bulge into before, everything has gone kind of lust-fuzzy and urgent. You snap your hips up despite yourself and he drops his head back down to his arms, whimpering and dripping everywhere, sweat and steam and candypink fluid.
“Come on,” you mumble, “easy, God, come on, you’re so good, you’re doing great.” You curl your fingers around his bulge and it curls back, gone almost stiff with oversaturation, and you pump it unmercifully as you drive him fast and hard towards the edge. Karkat howls and bears down all around you, sobbing hard and clawing at himself and you don’t have a hand to spare to stop him. You hang on as best as you can and fuck him till he spills, and he drags nails down his face as he pours a really startling amount of red fluid into the pail between his thighs.
You thrust just one more time -- a stolen, petty luxury, he’s so good -- and then push him off you, though you want nothing more to pound him right through the fucking tile, make him scream till he hasn’t got any more voice and never comes back and you could have him forever, like this, all you want is to spill between his legs, draped over his back, biting his ears, making him yours. You like him like this, is the awfullest part of everything, you want him so badly.
You’re kind of a monster. It really shouldn’t surprise you to re-remember this.
Karkat sags against the trap, turns his head back to stare at you over his shoulder. He’s a hot mess of pink and vivid unreal crimson splashed all over, and he licks his lips as he looks at you, dazed and wondering. His bulge has gone still against his thigh, half-sheathed, and he kneads at it almost tenderly. He might be done. You hope he’s done. Another round this quickly and he might end up passing blood, which defeats the entire point of bypassing the infirmary in the first place.
You crouch over the half-full pail and grit your teeth, force your sweat-slicked fingers up inside yourself. Internal self-stimulation is a bitch with a Captain’s long and formal claws, it prickles and makes you feel all of six sweeps old again, stupid and desperate and unhappy, but you need something inside you so badly, you feel like you’re going to burst.
Karkat snarls at you, reaches out, and you flinch. He touches your face, slow and too hard, dragging stinging lines across your skin with his own long nails and his face is set with a blank and frustrated ugliness. He tries to kiss you, and when you turn your mouth away he bites your fin hard enough to bring tears to your eyes. Your fingers slip out of yourself and you want to cry, to never stop crying ever again.
Karkat shoves you harsh up against the edge of the trap, nearly knocking over the pail, and you realize with a flash of terrible relief that he’s not trying to hurt you, he’s just clumsy and awkward, and you swing yourself eagerly into place.
“I’m going,” you assure him, bending over to your knees, adjusting the pail, “look, it’s okay, Kar, easy, we’re good. Here I am, yeah?”
He huffs, and licks the middle of your spine. Then he braces against you like you’re an exercise beam and heaves himself up and around behind you. When you peer over your shoulder he is frowning at your ass like it’s a tactical dilemma. It would be the same serious problem-solving face you’ve seen in a thousand conference calls if his pupils weren’t blown out into huge dark pools, if his hair wasn’t slathered in sticky tongues all across his frontpan. You want to die for a million different reasons.
“Just stick it in, for God’s sake,” you plead. “Come on, it’s okay, Kar, please.”
He presses his hips up against you and you squirm back as best as you can, guiding him, and you can’t help but moan when he finally makes it in. Fucker’s come twice already but his bulge is as energetic as a fresh cadet’s, it snaps up inside you and you find yourself sobbing with the welcome, twisting pressure of it, crying out, “Kar, oh god, Kar, Karkat, please, God, yes, Karkat --” and there’s a name you’d never thought you’d close teeth around as you’re getting absolutely fucked stupid, never ever, not like this. He snaps his hips up, clumsy and harsh and eager, and sucks on the nape of your neck. His arms are like brands around you, and when his hands fumble across your flaring gillslits you nearly explode.
“More,” you moan, pleading, demanding, “more, Kar, more more please, again --”
You don’t even know if he can hear you. You don’t really care. He uses you brutally for his own pleasure and you roll with the overwhelming, honest force of it, he goes driving up into you till you know you’ll be walking funny all night tomorrow, he’s bruisingly hungry for every piece of you he can reach. He slips out a time or two and bites your shoulders like you did it on purpose, punishing, and you take it. You take all of it, every awful selfish piece of it you can get. His nails dig out angry furrows across your stomach, your sides, bring blood welling up out of your tender gillslits and you mew and choke and let him, you let him do anything he fucking wants to you. You’re not sure if it’s repentance or self indulgence or both, you’re just sure that it’s utterly fucking depraved and you love it -- you love him.
“Ahh,” he finally moans, dropping his head to your shoulder and squeezing your thorax tight and close up to his own chest. “Nnh, Eridan.”
You come hard enough that it whites you out, a wild roar of pressure, pleasure, it takes you away from yourself and all there is is Karkat and how you are his, he said.
When you scoop enough of your wits back into your battered thinkpan to take any kind of notice, you realize Karkat’s still on you. His bulge is twining in slow, almost languorous ripples inside you, and you are tender as fuck, sore and overwhelmed and you can’t help trying to squirm. You are a sopping, frightful mess from the waist down, the bucket half-overturned against your trembling leg and slopping your fluid all over the tilted rim. Your trousers down around your knees are a complete disaster, they are going to need to be incinerated. Karkat has his head tucked up along your spine, and his breath is the ragged, dry-mouthed gasping of the truly exhausted.
You push the bucket clear with shaky hands, far out at arm’s reach. It is more than full enough, even with the spill, the fluid inside tinted to an unnaturally bright fuscia. Weirdest color you’ve ever seen your own shade mix to, but pretty enough. And that’s one mark, at least, for Captain Vantas’s fertility score.
Fuck, you should have brought two buckets. You honestly would never have guessed that he had it in him -- he might be the best goddamn Captain in the Fleet, he might have enough medals to seriously pull his dress whites out of alignment, he might even breathe fire and have angels dance attendance upon his every proclamation, but he also comes up to your fucking armpit.
He’s always surprised you, Karkat has. Right from the very start.
He whines, miserably, and you want so badly to kiss him again. Instead you twist around, and push him off you as gently as you possibly can. He disengages reluctantly, under your tentative fingers, but he suffers to be pulled out of your nook and bundled back into the trap. You are tired as hell and your hands are numb lumps at the ends of your arms, but when you stroke knuckles down Karkat’s weakly twitching bulge he gives a final, sighing quiver and finds what has to be his final climax. He lolls his head back against the wall and licks his swollen, hard-worn lips.
“It’s over,” he says roughly. “We’re done.”
“Yeah, Kar,” you say. Your vascular system has been replaced somewhere along the way with crumpled glass and acid, but you press a last, selfish kiss to his temple. “We’re done.”
He pushes you away, his claws sharp, and you go.
The shower washes both of you clean, and you have just enough left in you to pull him out afterward. He hisses, curls into himself and staggers across the disaster of the bathroom like just looking at what’s happened is hurting him. His mouth is a rictus grimace, his shoulders set up in menacing wings. He won’t look at you, and when you help him into your recuperacoon he cringes away.
“I’m sorry,” you say. “I’m so, so sorry, Kar.”
“Yeah,” he says, “me too,” and sinks under the sopor.
You stare after him for a long minute. You knew this was going to happen, but there’s no way to brace for a blow to the point it don’t hurt when it connects. You go get dressed, careful, neat, a hard furious tremble building up inside your skin. Your finest trousers, your best coat, every one of your medals, you rake your hair neatly back from your face.
In your mirror you look pressed, polished, pailed within an inch of your life, and mad enough to chew sand and spit glass. Your reflection gives you a bitter, torn-up sneer, and you can’t help but agree.
You step outside your quarters. You lock the door behind you, encrypt it for good measure, and then stalk off.
*
Six extremely productive hours later, you’ve got your psionic adjutant behind forcebars in the holding cells. You’re actually not terribly happy about the bars, but they’re keeping you from wrapping fingers ‘round his skinny neck till his head pops off so they do serve their purpose.
“It’s your wiggling day, Cap,” the kid says, earnest and honestly confused in a way that makes you want to scream till your throat’s bloody. “I wanted to get you something, like, really great--”
“Oh, yes, thank you ever so, you got me a fuckin’ disaster,” you snarl, and he stumbles back in shock. “D’you think I ever-- bloody shell, kid, do you really think I need to fuck the unwilling? Me? I’m Eridan Ampora, I can have whoever I flippin’ well want! And do you think I ever wanted to see Karkat Vantas turned into a bit of fuckmeat, you stupid piece of shit, not everyone comes back from what you gave him and it is an upright miracle that he did, the dosage he got!”
You curl your fingers around the bars, lean in close. “You and your little stunt just cost me my best friend, whether or not he wakes up a fuckin’ vegetable,” you hiss, “and it’s a damn good thing I love him so because it means I’m goin’ a be waitin’ to see whether you die slow or really, really slow, so enjoy your last fuckin’ night on the liveside’a things.”
He’s staring at you, wide-eyed and moronic. “Captain Vantas has a hatchname?” he asks numbly.
You hiss at him, and he cowers. “You dare to think you’re worthy enough to say it and I will cut your tongue right outta your seedflap,” you promise. “Right here, right now, kid, don’t you bloody test me!”
He cringes back against his bunk.
“I just wanted to give you something you really wanted,” he says miserably. “I -- I love you, Captain.”
“Next time send flowers,” you snap. “And good luck finding those in Hell.”
There is nothing left to say that isn’t fucking awful and extra stupid besides -- you want to wail he cried, you made him cry, how the fuck could you? -- so you turn on your heel and stride away.
*
You find Karkat slouched at the bottom of the shower again when you get back. Six or so hours doesn’t hardly seem enough to sleep off the kind of damage he’s been dealt, but that’s Captain Vantas for you: you are pretty sure he could get mailed a bomb as a wakeup call and still turn up on time for breakfast.
He’s gone squashy-pink and waterlogged and you have no idea how long he’s been in -- when you lean in to turn the faucet off he sort of looks dazedly up at you, and you drop a towel on his head to get him to stop. You are awash with shame and fear. Your stupidass adjutant wanted to get you something you wanted. How could you have wanted this?
“Fuck me squareways,” Karkat says from under the towel, scrubbing his hair with mechanical, twitchy jerks, “I’m going to have Descendants.”
He’s crying again, furtively wiping pink tears off onto your towel but he’s smiling a little, too, and you feel your bloodgusher give a shocked and shivery little skip at the thought of a dozen candy-red wigglers emerging from the brooding caverns and pupating into fine figures of trolls, the pride of the fleet, a whole new color on the hemospectrum which will still be there long after you’ve seen the last of Karkat Vantas.
You wonder if you could get any of them to wear a cape, though, really, you still don’t like your odds.
You herd him off to your wardrobifier. He goes like a little windup toy, gets the point after a few nudges. He’s on some dazed and freaky autopilot, stares at your device like he’s never seen it before. The last time he looked anywhere near this lost he had found out about the time you maybe sort of accidentally made out with Gamzee a couple times in his Captain’s chair and he had worked his way through that shock by hitting you over the horns with the butt of a nine-eighths compression hypergun.
You are almost positive this is why your right horn’s a few microns shorter than the left. Maybe this time he’ll hit you from the other side and even you out.
You kind of wish he would hit you, and get it over with-- you’d do anything to just settle your accounts, but you’re not really sure how to come right out and say sorry about pailing you the one time you would have pailed a dead stinkbeast even though you’ve said no all the other times I asked if you wanted to pail with me to the point I kinda utterly stopped considering pailing you as even a minuscule probability and thus kinda relaxed enough to fall stupidly in love with you and now I have not the slightest squirt of a clue what to do about any of this mess, my bad.
Maybe you can get it embroidered on a cushion.
You order up Karkat’s regular uniform whites for him, medals in a neat, heavy row, no braid, plain hat. You don’t even take advantage of his abstraction to try and push the issue of how dashing he’d look in a cape. He dresses awkwardly, obviously stiff in even-more-obviously unfamiliar ways, and it takes him two tries to get his hat on straight. He doesn’t look at you. He doesn’t look at his reflection, either. He kind of stares about five yards past anything that actually exists in your respite block.
You poke some extra buttons on your wardrobifier, killing time, study the vivid red scratches all up and down his exposed throat, the bitemarks on his mouth, how utterly trashed he looks. Some pathetic hatchmate to inspiration stirs in you, though, and raises a tiny, hopeful head.
You order a palette of makeup. Your favorite: thick gray concealer, some silver powder, some black lipstick.
“The fuck?” Karkat asks, staring wildly at the paints. It beats the hollow contemplation of some fourth dimension past your knees, that’s for sure.
“Chin up, Vantas,” you say firmly, tilting his face towards yours, “and never let the bastards see you sorry.”
He goes awkwardly still, which you can work with. Gently, gentle as you fucking know how, you paint away all his scratches from his throat to his cheeks, and you bring down the red-flushed swollenness of his lips with a soft sooty coat, you render the dark, heavy bags under his optics a trifle more kind. He blinks at you, like he’s waiting for something, so you turn him by the shoulders to look at his own reflection. He looks perfect: sharp, clean, tired-out in only his own usual brisk and watchful way.
“Spawn of a bitch,” he says. “So it just -- never goddamn even -- you and me, we didn’t -- we aren’t... Ampora. Are we pretending like last night just entirely did not fucking transpire?”
“You tell me, Kar,” you say helplessly, and you spread your hands out. “We’ll play this any way you fuckin’ want.”
He looks you up and down, and he sets his jaw. “Right, then,” he says. You know that face. Things are going to get lavishly and egregiously sorted out and anyone not hanging firmly onto their ass is going to get it chewed right the fuck off.
He turns sharply on his heel and strides out of your rooms. Nervously, desperately, you scramble to keep up.
*
“Flinches!” Karkat says cheerfully. “How the fuck are you doing?”
“C-- Ca--”
“Salute, motherfucker.”
He salutes.
“Excellent.” Karkat snaps his fingers and the forecebars dispel. He cruises right into the holding cell, and paces a slow, thoughtful, predatory circle around the quivering psionic, his hands clasped behind his back. There is not a trace of pain to his walk, of bruise to his mouth, not a hair out of place, and it is decidedly fucking with the kid. He keeps looking back and forth from your clawed-up pailed-sloppy slouch against the wall to Karkat’s... Karkatness, and going a little more twitchy with confusion every time.
Karkat finally takes a bit of pity on him, and clears his throat. “Our good mutual friend Captain Ampora,” he says softly, dangerously, “here has been telling me things. Interesting things! Fascinating things. Just so many incredibly astonishing things about you you do not even fucking know, couldn’t you just take three shits and die of goddamn delight?”
The psionic sorts through many possible responses, and settles on saluting again.
Karkat just nods, amiably.
“Good. Excellent. Right.” He smiles. It’s not a nice smile, it is a shit-eating triumphant snap-trap of a smirk. “Flinches McGee, by decree of Her Imperial Peixes’s First Fleet Captain Karkat Demonfucker Vantas, you are hereby promoted to Prime Adjutant and inducted into the service of the most estimable ship Twilight Fangbeast Advantage, effective immediately, congratulations.”
“You slimy headhunting sneakthief!” you yelp, outraged.
Karkat, damn his smug fucking face, just smirks at you. You dropped the fate of a young, talented, remarkably devious psionic with great legs and a deathwish into Karkat’s lap and the unbelievable man just goes and promotes him right out from under you! You are not sure whether to be impressed, infuriated, or utterly charmed.
“But I--” the psionic stammers. “But I was the guy who--”
Karkat raises his eyebrows, suddenly all sweet milk and honey. “Who what, adjutant? Do you have any additional qualifications I should know about?”
“I. Um. Nothing, sir. Spoke out of turn.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Karkat claps his hands together, rubs them briskly. “Right, then, report to my table at the Advantage’s messblock at, say, oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow evening, and we’ll see about getting you settled in. I run my ship a long sight tighter than Ampora here and I’m going to run you, adjutant, so fucking ragged your endoskeleton’s going to sag out of your waste chute, and once we’ve worked our way through your particularly stunning case of the stupids I dare say we are going to find a sterling young officer and a credit to her Imperial Peixes’s Fleet. Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have breakfast to attend to.”
God, it’s seven hundred hours and some change right now. He will be absolutely on time as per usual, settling into his chair at seven thirty to read the evening’s memo to his crew and break in the new night. Everything that fucking happened between you two has been fitted into his impeccable clockwork schedule without a single missed beat, the drugs and the breakdown and the crying jags and all of it, the first and maybe only pailing in his whole life, slotted into his routine without a hiccup. No one will ever suspect a goddamn thing.
He strides off without even a hint of fucked-raw limp: neat, crisp, efficient, every inch the perfect troll from his horntips to his toes. He could move mountains. He could level cities, go toe-to-toe with demons, rebuild the universe, raise the dead, dupe the goddamn filial motherfucking drones, wage and win a revolution, Captain the best fucking ship in the fleet for an impeccable lifetime, and as point of fact he has. And you’ve never seen him shirk, stumble, or surrender, not once.
The psionic stands, forlorn, in his little open cell. The gears in his head have all locked up in shock and awe. You have seen enough kids shut down in front of Captain Vantas to recognize the tells.
You don’t need to say anything. He will eat hot laser sandwich and die before he so much as raises another finger to Karkat ever again.
You give him a final pat on the ass, warningly, and leave him to the rest of his very interesting life.
*
You catch up with Karkat in the omnivator: you are more than a little surprised to see that he’s waited for you, and he catches your surprise and, in turn, looks more than a little hurt.
“This is going to be awkward, isn’t it,” he says slowly.
“I love you,” you blurt out, and then you wretchedly clap your hands over your mouth but too late.
“Oh,” he says. “I... yeah. Huh. Wow.” He looks at you and his eyes are-- strange, kind of soft with sadness and-- pity, maybe. Possibly. God, you hope.
You cup his head, his strange and precious and totally incomprehensible head, between your hands, and you kiss him with everything you have. You bury yourself in him, and he makes a faint, pained sort of noise, and turns his head away.
He licks his lips, once, twice, like he’s hunting for a taste of something and not finding it. Then he shakes his head.
“Save the chute-spelunking for your new recruit, stallion,” he says. His voice is perfectly level, and between his eyebrows is a sharp crease of pain. “You’re down an adjutant and I know you like to have them try out in big oiled-up batches.”
You really do. You’ve got a special wrestling block just for the try-outs. He knows so much of you and he hates you for none of it and when you pull back to look at him, he’s smiling up at you, sore and tentative and so sincere it fries you up inside.
He’s got his hand braced against your bloodpusher, his thumb just slightly stroking the fabric there, back and forth. You laugh and give him your best smoulder.
“Maybe I was trying to get a bit of practice in,” you purr, and nuzzle playfully at one of his blunt, adorable horns. “Come on, Vantas, you tell me which’a my many obviously attractive attributes I should go and hit them with first?”
“A stack of ashen requisitions already pre-filled out, at a guess,” he laughs, and pops you one in your shoulder, like you’re still friends, like -- more than that, fond and pulled-punch, like he could never really want to hurt you. You don’t want to say flush, you don’t even want to think about matesprit but...
You smooth his medals down, lick your thumb and smarten up his lipstick. He lets you.
The elevator dings. You’re on the connection level where your ship and his are jacked together, and this is maybe where you have to say goodbye --
“Come to breakfast, Captain Ampora,” Karkat says. “It wouldn’t kill you to start the day off with a square meal instead of your usual indiscriminate marathon of bad decisions and carnal acrobatics.”
“Captain Vantas,” you say, “I would be extremely fucking delighted to, the moment you get your acknowledgement on about the point that I could do both at the same time and you know it. Hired any other hot adjutants lately?”
“Get your sticky paws on any of my crew and I’ll cut your bulge off with a wirecrimper,” he says, like usual, and hooks his arm through yours.
“I just fuckin’ love a man with a challenge,” you say, following along. “Or men. Women too. Really anythin’ with a pulse and a generous lendin’ policy regarding spare orifices.”
“Oh my god, you’re incorrigible.”
“You like me,” you say -- not even pleadingly, just the same old tease out of habit, and he always just laughs and says as if, Ampora, or get out, Ampora, or fuck off, Ampora, or that one memorable time he said when I told you I’d cut your bulge off with a wirecrimper, Ampora, I did actually mean it and then he chased you through the entirety of the Advantage’s Engineering block.
Instead, right now, he looks up at you, and he pats your arm. This inanely stiff, tender gesture -- it fills you up with fire and delight, it floats you with how absolutely wonderful everything is, that someone like this amazing little guy should want to stick around and pat your arm.
“I like you,” Karkat says softly. “God help us all.”