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Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you're hosting a movie night. You guess.
Your good-for-nothing moirail is taking up the entire multi-person seating stub when you come out into the entertainment block, with his fronds hanging off one end and his head dangling off the other one. Having a movie night at a time humans can tolerate means getting up early, and Gamzee’s been whining about it ever since you pried him out of the slime. Which isn’t too surprising, all things considered—he never had a lusus to train him to get up at sunset, the pitiful lazy bastard.
“You know we’re going to have guests, right?” you say, and reach down to shake him by one horn. He cracks an eye and growls a little. “There’s still slime in your hair, and your paint looks like even more of a fucking disgrace than it always does just by existing. You need to take ablutions, and eat something.”
“Squishy little motherfuckers got no business out around and about this time of the double-damned motherfucking afternoon,” Gamzee says grumpily, and snaps his fangs at your hand, too slow and distracted to be more than a cursory expression of how cranky he is. You dodge the bite handily and hook a hand under his chin to catch his throat, a much firmer expression of how cranky you are and how you’re not going to take his shit today. He tenses and then grumbles, a buzzing hum of irritated surrender against your palm, and goes limp. “Fine, motherfucker, fine, I’ll get my move on. Fuck.”
“Yes you fucking will.” You pinch one of his ears, still a fading, sunburned purple from the little daytime walk he decided to take a few nights ago, and he chirps in discomfort and flicks it away from your grip. “Come on, up! March!”
“Threshecutioner tightasses missed out on you, best friend,” Gamzee says, but he sways himself up vertical, apparently without needing to use his arms, and slouches off toward the ablutions block, dragging his fronds and mumbling dire-sounding religious mumbo-jumbo under his breath.
That taken care of, you survey your entertainment block.
It’s a fuckton more nicely-furnished than the one you grew up with; for one thing, as much as you miss your dad, having a giant carapaced lusus resulted in a whole hell of a lot of wear and tear on your living quarters. For another thing, you’re here specifically on the sanctions of the new empress, and so even if you technically don’t fill any official ambassadorial roles, the embassy seems to like treating you nicely. Humans in the thick fabric outfits called “sutts” keep nodding at you when you walk around outside, and only meaningfully putting their hands on their guns as much as any troll would passing another troll on the street.
You have zero interest in impressing the sutt-wearing humans, though, and you do actually want to make a good impression on your matesprit and his clade. Or, human boyfriend, and his friends. Whatever. Clean and impressive. Human snacks. Only a reasonable amount of mirthful paraphernalia lying around getting underfoot.
…Literally. You catch yourself a step away from accidentally kicking a horn against the wall, growl at the ablutionblock door, and shove the horn under the extended sitstub with a foot. The big, colorful altar in the adjoining block isn’t exactly something you could get cleared away in a hurry, even if Gamzee would do it, which he won’t. He’s got a sermon to listen to later, the huskpad is already out and set up. You’re going to have to make do with a clean floor and…some non-highblood backup.
Speaking of which.
CG: SO YOU’RE COMING TONIGHT, RIGHT?
GA: For The Hundredth Time Yes Karkat I Am Coming
GA: In Fact, I Am Already Well On My Way And Will Be There Shortly
GA: For A Cool Guy With Cool Alien Friends You Are So Cool About You Still Fuss Like My Lusus
CG: HEY FUCK YOU TOO, UNINVITE YOURSELF IF YOU’RE GOING TO YANK MY BULGE ABOUT IT.
GA: I Would Never Dream Of Yanking Any Part Of You But I Am Definitely Telling You As Your Friend That You Direly Need To Chill The Fuck Out Before Your Internal Sphincters Seal Permanently Shut From Clamping So Tightly
GA: Please And Thank You
GA: Also Open Your Front Door I Am About To Get Out Of This Human Scuttlebuggy With A Lot Of Packages
CG: FUCK, YES, RIGHT, OKAY.
CG: THIS IS GOING TO BE FINE.
CG: WHY WOULDN’T IT BE FINE, RIGHT? I KNOW HUMAN STUFF, I HAVE A HUMAN MATESPRIT FOR FUCK’S SAKE.
CG: AS LONG AS GAMZEE’S GOOD, AND THEY DON’T HAVE TERRIBLE FUCKING TASTE IN MOVIES, AND WE DIDN’T ACCIDENTALLY BUY FOOD MOST HUMANS FIND REPULSIVE
GA: Karkat Please Let Me In
CG: FUCK, YEAH, SHIT.
CG: COMING.
For how much shit she’s given you about being worried about having alien guests over, Kanaya comes the fuck through. The armful of boxes and packages she has with her turn out to be lots of human snack food, mostly grains mashed up into different shapes and dusted in flavoring powders, as well as a couple of different types of drink. Humans can metabolize sucral compounds like it’s nothing, apparently, and hardly feel even a twinge of mood alteration—instead, if they want to be intoxicated, they drink alcohol.
“Like the kind you would use to polish a husktop screen,” Kanaya says, with a grimace of distaste, and delicately sets down a bottle of Alternian nectar and then a few varieties of human alcohol, carefully separated by several inches of empty counter. “Apparently if you let many different plants and grains rot long enough in the correct circumstances, they make alcohol. I wasn’t aware.”
You also weren’t aware, because if you drank alcohol you would messily expire in pretty short order. You scoot the bottle of nectar and the bottles of human drinking alcohol apart from each other quite a bit further, and then on further consideration, pull out a piece of paper and scrawl out GAMZEE IF YOU TOUCH THIS I’M BREAKING UP WITH YOU, BECAUSE YOU’LL BE DEAD and prop the sign again them.
“So,” says Kanaya, and unpacks the last of the hardened, flavored grain-slats in their crinkling bags. “I assume that we’re in for only the finest of the Karkat Vantas Romantic Classics Collection?” You can almost hear the escalation scaling on the initial sounds, every rattle and chirp set down so deliberately they click. “I hope you know already that Dave is unlikely to want to snuggle on the couch with other humans present.” She gives a slightly melancholy subvocal chirr. “...Humans are…reticent creatures.”
“I didn’t even invite him,” you say, doing your best not to let your ears pin defensively back or a damning blush spread over your face. “I invited Jade, because she’s actually got a thinkpan and a healthy interest in cultures more advanced than hers, and apparently everybody is just inviting themselves along. But. She wanted to know more about quadrants, so.”
“...I thought that the basic details were publicly available, at this point,” Kanaya says.
“Yeah, well.” The bottles of alcohol and nectar are suddenly really fucking interesting. “She’s not going to learn any real stuff from the shitty one-verbiage-block briefing the empire handed the humans. She wants to know what they’re actually about. And I happen to have outstanding taste and a sizable collection of high-quality research material for her.”
Kanaya is damningly quiet behind you, waiting expectantly.
“Anyway,” you say, into that viciously hungry silence, “...Gamzee likes her. And it’s not like he’s going to have an easy time making hatefriends around here. So.”
“Allow me to see if I am understanding this right,” says Kanaya, in that tone of voice that makes you preemptively wince in hot-horned embarrassment. “You, the person who spent fifteen minutes cursing the moons dark when I asked if humans kiss in a troll-compatible fashion—”
“Hey—”
“You, who gets self-conscious when I try to design him a shirt-collar that doesn’t come up to his chin,” Kanaya says, louder, flattening your voice like a psionic flattening a sandhive, “—You plan to explain the sordid details of every quadrant. To Jade. She’s as curious as an oliveblood and as high-handed as a seadweller.”
“She,” you start, and then trail off into a clicking grumble, because you know she’s fucking right, of course. This is going to be wildly embarrassing at best, and deeply inappropriate at worst. “...Rrr. Just because you’re jealous of my rumblespheres doesn’t mean you have to bring them up every time I do something you think is stupid.”
“I wouldn’t, if you would let me design you more flattering clothes,” Kanaya says, with a teasing little rumble of a fake growl that doesn’t go all the way to her thorax. “If not for me, then for your matesprit! Human males tend to like rumblespheres, you know. As well as…some females.”
“Some females, right. Like Rose?” You throw a meaningful look at Kanaya’s outfit, which is cut to show a whole lot of temptingly bare throat and stomach, pulse-points and kill-spots daringly exposed, as well as a generous amount of her chest. “You’re showing plenty of skin for both of us, thanks. I don’t do cleavage.”
“You could if you weren’t a coward,” Kanaya says, and preens at her shirt a little, settling the drapey open collar a little more open and settling her rumblespheres to better showing in their holster. “Which I am not. I am a troll on a mission, Karkat, I am making bold moves on flighty broads.”
“Yeah yeah, alright,” you say, and straighten your own much more modest sweater. “Well— Not tonight.”
“Humans are very shy in the flush quadrant,” Kanaya muses. “I suppose it’s the only one they have, they put all their insecurities in one carrying container.” She pauses, clicking her fangs pensively to herself. Even her hesitation hisses have a delicate little rolled chirr to them, dignified as the stuffiest seadweller. “Trrrss, quadrant subtleties aside…does Jade even know about troll biology? I think I may still have that ‘Wriggler’s Guide to First Adult Pupation’ schoolfeed book my lusus insisted on showing me, somewhere in my sylladex.”
“She…knows body parts? I think. Shit, maybe she does need a book. The rudest thing I’ve heard her say is ‘genitals’, and she doesn’t seem like she holds back in human language.” You consider for a second, and then say, suspiciously, “Why the fuck did you have that in your sylladex?”
“As a memento of my dear and sadly-expired lusus,” says Kanaya, stone-faced. “Obviously.”
You narrow your eyes at her and cock your horns interrogatively in her direction. She narrows her eyes as well and tilts her own considerably longer, sharper horns right back at you.
“Okay!” you say, giving in. “Okay, fuck Karkat and open communication between hate-friends who are alone on a bullshit new planet, I guess! Give me the book.”
“Gladly,” says Kanaya, and hands it over. “If you would like to have deep and emotional conversation about the depths of your bloodpusher and the emotions therein, might I suggest your moirail, who is presumably lurking somewhere around this hive like a maladjusted sopor-hallucination demon.”
“Oh, shit, right,” you say, and stare around, like Gamzee might have popped up from nowhere. “Hey, yeah, where the fuck did that huge waste of air go? I sent him to clean himself up, is he still in the ablutionblock?”
Kanaya does you the courtesy of not giving you the Kanaya Look about that. “Perhaps you should go check on him,” she suggests instead, with dry amusement in every precise click. “I’ll stay here, and listen to some quite loud human music on my palmhusk.”
“Fuck off,” you say, but your horns and ears are burning. “I’m just going to go make sure he didn’t…drown himself in the ablution trap, or something. I’ll be right back. Shut up.”
–
Gamzee hasn’t drowned himself, it turns out; he’s just picking his way lazily out of the ablution trap when you come in, combing his claws through his hair and yawning. He twitches to turn his unpainted face away when the door opens, and then sees it’s you and grins at you instead, wide and dopey. Without the paint on, you can see the speckling across his knife-sharp cheekbones, landdweller sunspots mixed interchangeably with luminous seadweller flarepoints,
He still flushes slightly purple at the ears and horns and straggly little sunburned fins, letting you see his bare face—you ignore it like a champion, because you are not in here to fucking…canoodle. No matter how many meaningful looks Kanaya gives you.
“Hey, best friend,” Gamzee says, and stretches up to his full height for just a second, tall enough his fronds can press flat on the ceiling overhead, bones popping up and down his thoracic column. The empty gill-slits along his sides flare, and the not-quite-seadweller strip of fin along his back flutters before he slumps back down to his usual lazy hunch and stops looming. “Man, I’m not ever gonna stop getting downright spiritual on hot motherfuckin’ water. Shit’s coming outta those pipes just motherfucking perfect, how’s it even do that?”
You do have to admit, if nothing else, humans seem to have a lot of the basic amenities you would hope for in a moderately civilized species. They do have good plumbing, if nothing else. But if you encourage him in his rhapsodizing, you’ll be here all night.
“Let me guess,” you say, dry as a desiccated desert daycorpse. “Miracles.”
“Oh, brother, you fucking know it,” Gamzee says, delightedly ignoring your unimpressed tone, and crosses the whole block in two long strides to scoop you up in a long, skinny arm. You’re abruptly pressed up against a lot of cool, bare skin over an intrinsic strut system that—despite all your best efforts—is still clearly defined under his wiry excuse for flesh-padding. No matter how much you make sure to feed him up, he only ever seems to grow up and out, never broader around.
You’re interrupted from your thoughts about that a second later, because Gamzee takes a deep breath against your neck and goes still, sniffing more intently.
…Shit.
“Best friend,” he says slowly, and sets you down to look you over in more detail. Shit. He's apparently woken up enough to be paying attention to his surroundings again—and woken up enough to notice that you undoubtedly smell as nervous as you feel, and that you’ve been absently chewing at the places the chitin of your claws meets the hard skin of your knuckles, and now it’s chipped and red. An expression of slowly-dawning displeasure comes over his face like moonrise.
“Karkat, ” he says, and the reassurance in the hum of his thorax has a distinct tone of wary, I won’t let them hurt you growl to it. “What’s got your hackles up, motherfucker? You think those alien motherfuckers are gonna start shit?”
“What?” you say. “No!” But he’s already tense, fins flaring on his ears and the nape of his neck. Fuck, he always picks up on it when your stupid body is reacting like there’s a threat—and it does, all the time, for no fucking reason, even now that you’re well out of the empire. Gamzee notices, and then he’s worked up, and you know pretty well by now that he’s got zero sense of reasonable response to a threat.
Back when you were wrigglers, that was because he was so sopored up he wouldn’t have recognized a threat if it came to chew his throat out. Now that he’s sober, it seems to be 50/50 if he laughs and shrugs it off just like he used to, or if he jumps straight to “I think the messiahs want me to do some physical comedy, actually”.
“If you don’t want these motherfuckers over, we’ll close off and hole up and they’ll never motherfucking get by me, you know that shit. You know—”
“We aren’t under siege, Gamzee, for fuck’s sake. Rein your shit in.”
Gamzee sniffs the air again, and gives you a familiar stubborn, suspicious look. It hits harder, somehow, stupidly, without his paint on; you fidget, and he doesn’t say anything. Just frowns at you, ears pinned and horns dipped right toward you.
“I’m worried,” you admit, under this further scrutiny and interrogation. “Humans are so stupid and soft, you could draw blood fucking breathing on them. You saw what a couple of cuts did to Dave, and he’s tough, for a human. We’re on their planet, I just—it’s stupid. I just want to have a nice fucking night, watch some movies, and not do anything too…alien.”
Gamzee says, “Alien like how they had you get down and huddle up together on your matesprit’s fuck-cushion with all his hatefriends around, best friend?”
“They didn’t make me sit on the damn concupiscent platform!” You say, even though your ears and horns have immediately gone hot. “Humans sleep on them! It’s normal for them to sit on them, it’s not—it was fine.”
Gamzee curls his lips back from his fangs in distaste, and then huffs and gives you that weird, dopey look he gives you, the one that looks lazy and vague but also cuts straight through you like an impaling spike.
“…We’re on their world,” he says. “Yeah. Lucky motherfuckers still get to have it, it’s still theirs, sure. But they came to our hive on it. Some kinda other motherfucker I’d have to be, the night I’d let any single soft heathen little hornless alien motherfucker foul up my bro’s good time in his own double-damned hive. They better check their shit, is all I’m saying.”
He shrugs, and just like that, the growling, paranoid highblood sinks back down again and he’s grinning again, leaning down to drop a kiss on one of your horns. “…I don’t give half a laughing shit if they think I’m an alien, anyway, being all as how I sure the fuck am one. So mellow out, motherfucker. I’ll alien my shit up until they forget you even got horns.”
You don’t exactly melt against him, at that, but you want to, and he can definitely tell because he gives a little almost-purring croon and doubles himself way down to kiss you properly, on the lips and then on the forehead, and then on each horn, so delicate his fangs don’t even glance on the keratin.
“So,” he says, “You can get your relax on.”
You catch the intent tone of his voice, the rumbling underneath it turning slow and coaxing, a second before he scoops you up again. The enormous bastard. You yelp and manage to pretend you’re growling, but know as you do it that he can easily tell you’re not serious and he’s never in a million sweeps going to put you down just from that.
“We don’t have time for this,” you say, weakly, and swat at one of his bony shoulders. It bounces off him like a raindrop off a mountain, and he laughs into your ear and then kisses the side of your neck.
It would be very bad for your self-control if he opened his mouth and set his fangs on your throat, like he did at Dave’s hive the first time they met each other. You kind of deeply want him to, fuck.
“Kanaya’s already here,” you say instead, responsibly. “I need to go and—”
Gamzee’s claws find the spaces between the bones of your posture column, one claw-tip to each dip, and you choke off into a faint, squeaking chirp. If he dug his claws in with his full, ridiculous highblood strength, he would sever your innervation cable and leave you paralyzed or dead, and both of you know it. He grips a startling amount of your thorax with both hands and presses barely hard enough to sting, rumbling protective and delighted in the base of his throat.
You’re embarrassingly aware that it’s a good thing he picked you up, because the double-shock of threat, get away and trust him, safe is strong enough it definitely would have buckled your fronds out from under you.
You say, “Kanaya’s already here,” again, without a whole lot of force, and aren’t all that surprised when he makes a vague noise of acknowledgement and totally fails to stop kneading his claws at your posture column and nuzzling at your horns. You muster your remaining pan-matter, and manage, “You’re the one who just threatened to go cull-crazy on my hiveguests, how the fuck am I the one getting his kill-spots fondled right now?”
“I’m cool all the way horns to frondtips, brother,” Gamzee says placidly, and the low, throaty drawl of the chirr in brother hums against your horn and relaxes muscles you didn’t think you were even tensing. “Told you I’m not gonna let any motherfucker fuck up your night, and that’s you too. You get twisted up around yourself, I’ll settle you down right the fuck there. Those alien motherfuckers wouldn’t know pap from shoosh, and even if they did I don’t give a shit, bro. Neither would you, about the time I got finished with you.”
He's not bluffing, either. You’re self-conscious about public conciliation, because you’re self-conscious about anything and everything under the moons, but Gamzee’s attitude seems to be half “if somebody gives a shit they can go fuck themselves” and half “if somebody wants to watch then let them watch, that they should be so motherfucking lucky”. The kind of shameless, hedonist hoofbeast shit you’d expect, from a troll who always knew he was a highblood but also lived like some kind of uneducated, half-feral abandoned recluse until he was nine. It’s both infuriating and deeply pitiful.
“That,” you say, and the firm, steady tone you were going for cracks embarrassingly into a sharp, wobbly chirp. “You don’t have to—I don’t need, I’m fine. You pushy high-horned pervert son of a cholerbear. I’ve got it on lock, okay? Take a good whiff, you won’t smell even a hint of my shit, it’s locked down so fucking tight. Chill the fuck out.”
“Just for you, best friend,” Gamzee says, and kisses the nearer of your horns, huffing into your hair. “Guess I’ll get my watch on at early service tonight.”
–
Your name is Jade Harley, and you came armed!
Not with weapons, although you do always have your gun with you, because a lady never leaves her house without one. You’re armed with an inventory full of books about the human body, and a whiteboard with markers, and a notebook you’ve already filled a significant chunk of with notes and questions.
The house that the embassy gave Gamzee and Karkat is bigger than Dave’s apartment, even if it’s not the size of John’s house, and definitely nowhere near the size of your grandpa’s lab. From the outside, it looks pretty normal! But as soon as you walk in, you’re in an exciting new world.
…Sort of. At least, you’re in a pretty normal apartment, but full of weird alien shit. The furniture is definitely imported from Alternia—big, squishy couches in a weird, matte purple that doesn’t seem to have seams, a normal human DVD player next to a box full of wires that lead into a big wicker basket full of what look like curled-up grubs twice as big as the biggest grubs you’ve ever seen on earth. You want to get in there and put your hands on everything.
“Hello!” you announce, as soon as Karkat lets you in, and hold out the present that your grandpa shipped to you, which is a big container of edible grubs from Australia. You thought they were pretty big until you saw the kind of grubs trolls are used to, dang! “I thought you might miss grubs for food, so I brought you a present!”
Karkat clicks in surprise and takes the container, looking them over through the plastic lid. “Huh,” he says, or the troll equivalent—a kind of little prrt? noise that you are working really hard at all times not to mentally compare to the noise Rose’s cat makes when you wake him up. Because it might cause a diplomatic incident if you go “aww” and squish somebody’s face and get your guts clawed out.
Karkat pops the lid, takes a sniff, and his ears perk up. “Weird!” he announces, but happily. “Shit! Thanks. I missed…ts, grub-food, grubloaf? I missed her a whole fucking lot. Gamzee can make Earth grubloaf.”
“Aw man, delicious grubloaf, just like Bro used to make,” says Dave, and slips past you, taking advantage of the pileup outside the door to duck down and give Karkat the fastest kiss humanly possible. Karkat gives an involuntary-sounding little chirp, which is deeply adorable. Dave immediately backs up and pretends they were never touching, which is also pretty cute.
“Jade, hello,” says another voice, and Kanaya appears around the door to the kitchen. She’s got a long skirt on that’s slit up one leg, with some dangly sashes around her waist to keep everybody from seeing too much thigh, but her shirt opens way far down her chest and the top underneath is pretty much a bra. Behind you, you hear Rose say “Thank you for the warm welcome, Karkat, I’m sure that—” and then stop dead in the middle of the words. You don’t blame her, they’re pretty good boobs. Dang.
Kanaya says, “Oh, Rose, hello,” like she had no idea Rose was going to be here too, and reaches up to flick her claws at her hair. “How nice to see you.”
“Yes,” says Rose, sounding a little bit strangled—but only a little. Striders and Lalondes, their poker faces really are something else. “How lovely. I seem to be under-dressed.”
Karkat chuffs to himself and mutters something under his breath. “In,” he orders you and Dave, and marches past you. “Come on, in. There’s human food.”
The couch turns out to be a texture you’re not familiar with—you were half expecting to touch it and find out it’s warm, alive somehow, and it does feel kind of like a big grub, too, squishy and firm. But it doesn’t have legs or hairs or eyeballs on it, and it doesn’t move when you poke it, so if it’s alive it’s not alive enough you have to worry about it moving or biting you, probably. The grubs in the basket do move a little when they’re disturbed, but not much, and they stay firmly curled up. The coffee table has six spidery legs instead of four. Fascinating.
You get distracted from poking at furniture after that, because you look up and see an archway in the corner behind the troll TV; Gamzee is in the next room over, sitting on a big, squishy-looking pillow in a cross-legged sprawl. Sitting down like that, it’s really clear how his legs don’t bend in the same ways a human’s legs would—and it’s also clear, for the first time, that troll feet are padded like their palms. You hadn’t thought about it—the chitin claws cover almost the whole toe the same way they cover pretty much the whole finger, and they don’t seem to spread a whole lot, so it’s easy for your brain to read them as hoof-like and move on. But there’s little beans down there!
Alien contact really is just the gift that keeps on giving. What a good night already!
Fuck this is exciting. Someday, you're going to get a look at an actual troll spaceship—you've thought about a million times of ways you could sneak into the incredibly off-limits landing site up north in the desert, and thought even more wistfully about how cool it must have been to be the first people on the scene, to meet the trolls' cool new empress and start hammering out the basics of communication with an entirely new species... John's dad told you once that the people collaborating to make translations are working with actual alien telepaths, who can beam meanings right into their heads and transcribe meanings out of their brains, and for a second you got so excited you did the thing your grandpa used to describe as "a little fit of the vapors" and had to go wrestle John until your brain slowed down.
"Meet a real alien psychic and get mind-probed" is on the list now too, under the subheading "get hired as the world's youngest interstellar explorer/alien diplomat". You have big plans! And step one is to have a kickass movie night, and learn approximately...everything.
Karkat doesn't seem likely to answer any questions right now; he's occupied bustling and hustling around greeting people like the bossiest little mother hen—(And take off those, the fucking foot-clothes, my hive is clean, don’t you put shit and dirt on the ground! Put them here, by the, tss, the, damn…in-and-out place!)—so you stroll over into the other room and lower yourself onto the floor to watch whatever it is Gamzee’s looking at.
You kind of thought maybe he’d started movie night early, but he doesn’t seem to be watching a movie. He’s sitting in front of a broad, low tabletop with a polka-dotted cloth spread out over the top; on top of the cloth, there’s a collection of stuff you recognize, and stuff you don’t. A couple of bike horns, a couple of little carved statues, some kind of tealight boiler with a dish over it that looks like it’s splattered with paint, full of something that smells faintly of sugar. A scattering of silk flowers in shapes and colors you haven’t seen on Earth, a handful of what looks like chocolate coins, a bottle of glittery sand that’s also been liberally sprinkled on the tabletop. A lot of candles that are burning in crackling colors, a couple of multi-colored balls, and in the middle of it all, the troll version of a tablet, playing some kind of video.
You’d come over to look even if nothing was playing—troll tech is fascinating, their touchscreens are some kind of weird non-newtonian fluid they drag their clawtips through like a stylus, semi-fluid when they scroll or drag, solid when they tap—but the video that’s playing under the multicolored candlelight is obviously some kind of livestream from back in the troll empire, and you’d never pass up a chance to poke your nose into that.
Gamzee glances up at you when you scoot a cushion over and kneel cautiously down next to him; his eyes narrow as he looks at you for a second, and his ears flick, but you don’t get growled at or warning-shot bitten or anything, so it seems like if you’re committing a faux pas it’s a pretty minor one. The live feed turns out to be of an enormous room—practically a cathedral, with a sea of dark-haired troll heads and hundreds of different shapes and sizes of horns. Over their heads, there are thousands of dangling, multi-colored lanterns, and hanging banners of stylized trolls all dying in different, interesting ways. At the head of the group, there’s a huge, wiry guy who looks like he has to be at least eight feet tall, making what seems to be a pretty impassioned speech.
“[—(A sentence subject you must have missed) is the funniest (warning-shot danger) motherfucking make-mess the (something)s could do to make want,]” is the first thing you hear him say, succinctly proving to you that Gamzee is not the only troll who seems to think more words is default better and sentence structure is a pointless invention. The guy talking doesn’t sound exactly the same, but he stretches his hums and chirrs and growls out and piles his clicks together in a really similar way. “[We’re all (body parts?) up in the air, down in our (whole/entire) motherfucking horns in dirt. (Some kind of noun with the food-descriptor ‘sweet’ in it) on our (body part again? It sounds like a compound word of ‘face’, sort of) and that isn’t a motherfucking mistake. It’s no motherfucking mistake, brothers!”
Gamzee says some kind of emphatic imperative verb—in a polite, subordinate inflection, which is pretty unusual for him from what you’ve seen. On the screen, a few other people do the same thing, mostly saying words you don’t know—one of them you hear says “[Say it, motherfucker!]” and another one says “[Yes, brother, yes!]” with the heaviest subordinate inflection you’ve ever heard. Somebody else honks a bike horn.
…The bike horns seem…weird. But you’ve been in Texas before on Dave-visits, and you’ve seen big groups of humans listening to one guy talk and saying things like that with their hands up. That, and the conversation you had at Dave’s apartment about miracles—
“Oh!” you say, more loudly than you mean to, and then lower your voice when Gamzee’s big, long fuzzy goat ear flicks toward you and he darts you another brief, narrow-eyed look. “Is this—I mean. [Is this a—]” and then you stall abruptly, because not only do you have no idea how to say “church service” in Alternian, you don’t even know how to go about talking your way around it. “Uh. I mean, tss…[miracle-talk?]”
Gamzee perks up and makes the little rolling chirr that trolls do instead of ‘uh-huh’ or ‘yeah’. “Rreh, [brother, you eyes, (question-trill, ‘huh’), motherfucker? It’s (adjective). Makes (troll-descriptor adjective) out of your (adjective you think?) motherfucking (noun).]”
“...Hm,” you say. You wouldn’t have guessed he could get less easy to understand—you know a lot of words about basic day-to-day stuff by now but this is pretty clearly some intense jargon that you have absolutely no starting point to begin interpreting.
…Yet. Fuck, this is so exciting. You knew going to their hive was a good idea.
“Jade!” Karkat says, and hustles over. “He’s busy. We’re in the movie room.”
“[Motherfucker, no,]” Gamzee says, and waves a hand at him, back in an opaquely amused socially-neutral vocal posture again. “[Little brother wants to see highblood (adjective)-talk, that’s make a good for her alien-ass (noun).]”
Ah, a single noun on its own. An in! “[(Noun)?]” you repeat, and pull out your notebook, jotting down your personal shorthand of the pronunciation. “[What’s a (noun)?]”
“Oh, fuck is sakes,” Karkat says, apparently disgusted. “[(Noun)] is. Tsss, fucking, ts. You that’s inside you, that…what you said, at Dave’s. Up-sky assholes.”
“Gods?”
“Yes, gods,” Karkat says, and thankfully he’s picked up exactly how your mind works, because you’ve barely opened your mouth when he says, “In troll-words, it’s [gods]. [(Noun)] is the you gods think is in there, that they get when you die. That’s [(noun)].”
“Oh a soul,” you say, and jot that down. “[Soul,] okay. Oh, that’s fun! I didn’t know you had a word for that.”
“Clowns,” Karkat says, apparently in disgust. “‘Tssall’, sss, sssul, bullshit. You can’t see her, you can’t feel her. It's all Gamzee's stupid fucking shitty miracle bullshit.”
“Rrrh, miracle,” Gamzee agrees cheerfully, because he definitely didn’t understand any of the rest. “Zzzhhzh, [the (some kind of very respectful title) hasn’t made finished yet, motherfucker. Let us watch.]”
–
Jade gets a good and quiet sit down to watch the whole motherfucking sermon, which only raises up your liking of her even higher than that motherfucker already was. She’s got a little writing kit out and she’s making scribble and scrabble at it, listening intent while the Grand Highblood delivers holy word on the unexpected and the divine, the holy joke and how the ways of world and troll and settled rule sometimes have to give way in hilarious motherfucking mess.
Karkat comes idling over once or twice; he makes no sound, but you feel him in your horns. Sweet little motherfucker thinks you’ll get wild and forget to play nice at your new little squishy human hatefriend, and the both of you know it. You make like to pretend you don’t note him watching, and he vanishes off again to chill in the nutrition block and leaves you be.
Jade waits patient until the last horn is honked and the screen cuts dark again, and then she takes her papers and says “(Wow!)” A word you don’t know, but a tone you’re pretty sure you get plenty well.
“Good shit, huh?” you say, and she laughs and nods her forward horn-jabbing nod with her hornless round little head.
“Good shit!” she bounces back at you, and turns her ass on her cushion to give you that look, like a legislacerator on the hunt. “I have questions! Word questions.”
“Figured some motherfucking way like you might, yeah,” you say, half-laughing. Little sister has a want to know like a feral with its fangs in a corpse, and that motherfucker does not let go. Still and stubborn, she also talks at you like an equal, which you're starting to figure she'd maybe do even if she had her know on of exactly how cold your blood is. Gutsy like that, you can't help but soften your pusher for. “Sure, sister, make with the asking.”
She mumbles and mutters to herself a second, breath-noise words and high, flat little hums in just one note with no rattlebox, and then goes “ah!” and taps her paper. “I know ‘messiahs’. Very, (uhh) important, good word to know, to…understand this?”
“Sure.”
“Your words, (hm).” Jade frowns, chews on what she means to say, looks at her papers again. “Trolls, you take small words, and…” she makes a move of her fronds like she’s squishing and crushing at something between them. “Makes big words! Long words. It’s harder for me! But fun!”
She’s learned her shit a little since the last time you talked—’fun’, she says, meaning a little laugh of a joke between hatefriends, not a real holy riot. You think the wordy shit she’s up to sounds mad motherfucking boring, but it’s not your business how a motherfucker gets her globes off, you guess. You nod and wait for her to get around to the point of her point.
“So,” Jade says, marching on ahead with her list like a determined little artilleripper, tapping at her papers. “The…Dark Carnival.” She sounds it out every part one after the other, ‘fatal-funny cullpit of the messiahs’, like how a corpse dismembered and all laid out turns into pieces instead of a whole troll.
“Dark Carnival,” you say, putting the corpse back together to show her, fast and fluid how it’s supposed to flow.
“Dark Carnival,” Jade repeats after you, choking just a little on the shift of chirr into click. “Okay! Say me what does that mean?”
Turns out it’s harder than you would’ve figured, making explanation of this shit. You’re called on to clear up “cullpit”—the explaint of that one makes Jade wrinkle up her nose in human disgust, not peeling up her pink strange lip from her flat teeth, but otherwise a whole lot the same as a troll would do. Then you take apart “Grand Highblood” for her, and the names he was given, the things called out by the congregation. King of Colors and Holy Hilarity and Mirthful Majesty.
“King,” she repeats, and breaks it up like she breaks apart everything, dismembers it in her flat plant-eater fangs, making shapes in the air with her clawless hands. You never will quite get used to the way these squishy little motherfuckers bend an extra time in their extra fingers, how they’ve got just flat little chitin plates instead of claws. “Little he-empress?”
You never did think of how those pieces fit together. She’s sure as shit not wrong though. “Damn, yeah,” you say. “Guess so, sister.”
Jade seems all manner of delight over that. She laughs big and fearless so it shows all her flat plant-grinders, and yells something out to the other room, something with your moirail’s name in it. Karkat’s head pops around the corner so quick you know he’s been fretting himself up in the next block over—the other humans show up too, and Jade says something in Human, sprinkled-in Alternian words like sparkles of stardust mixed in dirt. Empress and King and King but broken into its pieces.
Strider and his blue-eyed flighty buddy raise brows and make faces that make you laugh as much as Jade did; the human Kanaya’s preening at covers her mouth like too polite to show off my fangs and laughs too, saying something at Kanaya that makes her turn a shade of green and preen her claws at her hair and horns.
“Okay, okay, we've already allotted an absolutely shameful amount of this night to gawping about miracles,” Karkat says, and clicks his claws at you like his lusus would, bossy demand. You let yourself feel the good shit you feel about that, how it endears and delights your pusher and not all the other stuff about lusii and…shit. “Time for quadrant schoolfeed, come on.”
Kanaya and the other humans head back off into the other block, and you can feel the static hissing in your horns as the media-viewing system starts up. Karkat hangs back to glare, waiting watchful for you.
“Yeah yeah, motherfucker, I’ll shift my ass,” you say, and pull your clubs, plant them barrels-down and bow your head to the far-off church, the curve of your nugbone to the frondgrips of your clubs. Ask, to the vast empty of the world and empire and vastest universe, “Put a good punchline to my joke. Put a funny ending to my enemies.”
Jade says, “Should I…?” and settles herself back down by you, not laughing now, just watching you. “Would that be, (uhh), good respect?”
“You seriously don’t have to play along with his fucking—” Karkat starts, and you wave him off and consider her. Teaching you miracles in their soft-flapped language, watching sermons and laughing delight even at shit you think is the most boring that shit could be…
“...If you want to pay respects,” you say, thoughtful. “Sure.”
“(Okay),” says Jade, and pulls out a long and heavy long-distance human gun, ballistic hollow chamber instead of a power channel, polished and used.
You guide her to set the butt on the ground, bow her head down to it and wave a frond at her to make with the respect. She laughs a little while she does it, and whatever she says is in Human. But you’re not struck down, so you figure they must find it funny enough.
Funnier yet is how you snag up one of your horns off the ground and put it under her ass, so when she sits back on her heels from her bow, it gives a hell of a motherfucking HONK. She jumps up and whips her gun up into her arms, saying a bunch of human words that gotta be curses, and you get a good motherfucking laugh about it.
“Gamzee!” says Karkat, hissing and sharp, bossy top-bitch snap of his fangs turning your name into a highblood's scold instead of a polite little lowblood entreating at you. He’s looking at all this like he doesn’t know if he likes it—you didn’t make to up and ask him if he liked it, but you did promise him you’d be good, so you only laugh at her a little, and Jade puts her weapon back away and laughs too, and punches you good and hard in the frond—not hard like a troll would, but plenty hard for a squishy little alien.
She makes a realizing noise, as you start to walk on through, and catches your frond, tugging at you. “I didn’t remember,” she says, “I wanted a question! Why do you call me ‘kin’? You know I’m a girl.”
Bewilders and bemuses, this little motherfucker. You blink at her, waiting for her to make sense.
“Kin,” she repeats, and waves fronds down at her body. You look it up and down obedient; it’s midblood-sturdy, thick alien-brown arms with darker sun spots, good rumblespheres and strong-looking walkstruts with thin dark animal fur and little stumpy flat flap-fronds planted flat at the ends. How these motherfuckers even run with their heels way down there flat on the ground you never do stop from getting all bewilderment about it. Fuck.
...But all together it's about as alien as the bodies on all the other aliens you’ve seen. If she was making complaint on how she can’t be kin with you for her animal-blood soft-body alien shit, you’d maybe get like how she was talking, but what she’s arguing is nonsense and nothing, so much you’re all but inclined to figure she’s bullshitting you on purpose.
“You’re a girl,” you say. “Yeah, so, motherfucker? Kin is kin. Him—?” you point at Karkat. “Brother. You? Sister. Or whatever a motherfucker’s called, shit’s the same. It’s all kin.”
“(Ohhh,)” says Jade, long breath-thrumming noise from down where she’s got whatever humans have instead of a squawk-blister. She says something in human to herself, and then at you, like you’d have any shot at getting what the fuck she’s saying, and then scribbles around in her book some more like she’s taking that shit down too.
“Good?” you say, and she looks all up and down her big list of scribbles, and then over at Karkat, and then sighs and nods. “Yeah, alright, motherfucker. Let’s make with the motherfucking movie night.”
–
The rest of your friends are waiting for you on the couch when you get out into Karkat’s living room; John has found himself a container of something that you think is normal human popcorn, and he’s clinging to it like he’s worried somebody’s going to take it away and replace it with a bug. He does look excited, though. “Oh hey, there you are,” he says. “So, are we gonna watch movies, or what?”
“We will watch movies,” says Karkat, and picks up a huge grub, picks up a wire and plugs it directly into the grub’s back. On the screen, a menu pops up; Karkat presses some spots on the grub, and selects an option that’s pretty clearly “play”. “Sit down and close all your fucking mouth up. This is a, tsss, a, a movie everybody has to watch.”
Gamzee snorts, which at least curtails your questions about if he means literally. You’ve heard some stuff about the way troll society worked before the current empress took over.
“A classic,” you say, and Karkat gives you the familiar expectant look. “Something that’s a classic is like…it’s old, and good, and you think it’s so good everybody should like it too.”
“Tktktk,” Karkat goes, in realization. “Clsssk. Yes! This. We have this shit too. [Classic.]”
“The movie is starting,” Kanaya says, pointedly. “If it is a classic, we should watch.”
“Shit, yes,” says Karkat, and sits down on the end of the couch, flopping down into the cushions. Gamzee goes to sit down next to him—and then Dave flickers in out of nowhere and drops down between Karkat and the rest of the couch, really casual, like a cool dude. Gamzee twitches back, and then flattens his ears and gives a low, rumbling growl, like Bec when you start to reach for his food while he’s trying to eat. Dave doesn’t budge, just looks up at him and cocks one pale eyebrow.
“Gamzee,” says Karkat sternly, and makes a noise with no words in it that you can make out. It must mean something though, because Gamzee huffs and retreats with bad grace to flop down next to you instead, looking sulky.
“Aw,” you say, and pat him on the knee sympathetically. He bares a fang or two at you and gives a half-assed growl, but stops as soon as you take your hand away, and looks a little less pissy. He looks back at the TV, considering the drama happening on the screen.
“[Humans, you have mssprrt, yeah?]” he says. “[This part you know, motherfucker?]”
“Uh—[Yeah, pretty much!]” you say. On the screen, a troll who looks a lot like Steve Carell is having a tense conversation with a troll who looks a lot like Julianne Moore, except if they had big alien eyes with yellow sclera and wiry black hair and horns and a whole lot more teeth and kind of the wrong shape of skull under their gray skin. So not much like those people at all, really. “[Two people who like each other, and they—]” you run up against a word you don’t know, and make a smoochy face.
“[Kiss,]” Kanaya contributes, from her end of the couch.
“[Make out,]” Gamzee says—you’d assume, because it sounds a lot like the word Kanaya said, but with “fuck (a troll)” slapped in there.
“[Kiss,]” Kanaya repeats, more firmly.
“[And fuck,]” you say, partially just to be clear, but also because you hear Karkat make a choky little noise on Gamzee’s other side. Gamzee laughs and nods—or does the troll equivalent of nodding anyway, which is a kind of rounded circling motion with his head. He's polite enough about it he doesn't even dip his horns directly toward you, either, which is pretty cool of him actually.
“[Yeah, little sister, and fuck,]” he says, good-humoredly. “[Or, you say it like, ‘bucket’ (verb).]”
“[Gamzee!]” Karkat snaps.
“[You told her ‘fuck’ (up the ass)!]” Gamzee says. “[She’s a big, grown (word you don’t know), can know words and motherfuckers can’t make her quit.]”
“Wait, I thought trolls were like. Gnnahgh, rrah, kill kill kill,” John says on your other side. He hasn't learned more than a word or two of Alternian, no matter how many fascinating fun facts about vocal postures and nonverbal communication methods you tell him, and instead has been staring narrow-eyed at the subtitles on the screen as the hapless main character strikes out badly at a rowdy, crazy-looking, insectoid bar. “Is this a romcom? Are we just gonna sit and watch romcoms all night?”
"Romcom," Karkat repeats, frowning. "I don't know that. It's a good movie. What you're complaining about? Good movies are good fucking movies."
"Romcom is a shortened term for 'romantic comedy'," Rose says idly, from her end of the couch.
"Tkktktkt," says Karkat, in realization, and then glares at John with renewed irritation. "You don't like romcom? Well put it in your holes and suck on it."
"Ew," says John, delighted.
“I know Karkat,” says Kanaya. “There will certainly be war movies later. They will also be romance...tic. But there will be war in them. It is his hive and he will pick the movies. Now, please hush and watch.”
You watch.
Troll romcoms are a lot like human romcoms, but with a lot more threads to tie up. The first movie is mostly straightforward, mostly about two main couples that are “flushed” for each other, matesprits—although Karkat has to do some explaining about pale relationships too, and “quadrant vacillating”, a phrase he enunciates in English like a guy defusing a bomb. “Auspistice” and “Kismesis” have a pretty evocative amount of warning hiss in them, with an underlying rumble you know is threatening, but which you don’t really have the parts for. “Moirail” and “Matesprit” come with a humming chirr like they imitate a purr. Fascinating.
You already know matesprits, because that’s what Karkat and Dave are—alien boyfriends, the closest thing trolls have to what humans have going on. And humans definitely have hate-fucking as a concept, although it’s really weird to see people all excited for the characters and congratulating them on having somebody to bite and bitch at.
…Sometimes they’re excited, anyway. Sometimes everybody seems to arbitrarily agree it’s a bad idea.
“Look,” Karkat says, half an hour into your second movie, and points at the screen, then taps your whiteboard authoritatively with a claw, pointing at the little grid he made halfway into the first movie. The corner with a suit of clubs drawn in it. “Look. These two. They fuck bad...ly. Go and, tsssss… [This fucking useless language. They do damage (intended fatal).] Hate can be wrong, can be too much.”
“So someone interferes,” says Kanaya. She sounds very steady and detached, like she usually does, but when you glance over at her she’s watching intently as the hunky butch lady on the screen elbows her way between the two arguing people and growls at both of them, and the tips of her ears and bases of her horns are turning faintly green. “Steps in, and fix the problem.”
The amount of biting and violence pre-clubs looked about the same in both couples, as far as you could see. It’s putting Karkat biting Gamzee’s hand the other day into a new light, seeing how willingly trolls will just full-force chomp on each other and hearing Karkat dismissively rule it a [bite (warning shot)]. Biting without drawing blood seems to be more unusual and embarrassing than the alternative; when the flushed side-couple hook up, there’s a shot of one of them gently scraping her fangs over the other guy’s throat that makes Karkat make a squished little noise in his chest and clear his throat loudly.
On the screen, the would-be-couple are still getting scolded. There’s a slow shot of one of the middle lady’s hands lingering on one guy’s collarbone as she pushes him back and says "[I said sit down]" in a sharp, superior inflection with her other hand on the lady’s shoulder. Slipping up onto her throat, okay.
“...This is getting a little bit steamy, huh?” you say, taking a shot in the dark, and you can tell by the way Karkat’s forehead and Kanaya’s ears flush that you hit the nail right on the head.
“It's a good movie,” Karkat says, defensively.
“Oh—no, I mean, it’s fine!” You really didn’t mean to embarrass anybody, shoot. You switch to Alternian, trying out an apologetically subordinate tilt to your head, making sure to show your teeth as little as possible. “[Your movies are very good. Thanks for showing me!]”
“[Movie bullshit she rolls over for?]” Gamzee says, ears flicking like he’s irritated, and Karkat reaches over and pats his knee. Gamzee grumbles and subsides.
You all watch in relative quiet, for a while after that. Dave has managed to very quietly get an arm around Karkat’s shoulders, and Karkat has deigned to let him. John is rolling his eyes at most of the romance stuff, but occasionally laughing at the jokes, or whenever a troll does something startling and alien. You have to admit it is pretty funny to watch a guy walk into what looks like a bedroom, and then climb into a big tub of goo as casually as somebody would flop down onto their bed.
It takes you a while to figure out what’s bugging you. It isn’t until the movie is starting to wrap up, a big group scene out in a square, with snow falling over rolling, purple-blue hills of grass in the background, that you look at the crowd and say, “...Do you guys just not put kids in your movies?”
“Prrt,” says Karkat, like the question’s startling somehow. “What? Ktss. Kids.” And then a clicking rattle of realization. “Tktk’k, [kids]. No. Why we like to see kids make bullshit quadrants, and shitty at it.”
“I mean, sure, maybe not as the couples,” you say, “But there’s kids around, right? I haven’t seen a single one in any of the movies so far, I don’t think!”
“Probably they all live in caves,” John says.
“No,” says Karkat, “And fuck you.” And then, grudgingly, “...Sometime. Little grubs, they make hive in cave sometime until the, tssss…[trolls(-weapon ending?)] build them hive.” John pumps a fist and Karkat growls at him. “Sometime. We have hives, we live up in—rrrss, in places like this! But not close near, near, ssss, tss. Near big trolls.”
“Adults?” you say. “Grown-ups?”
“Adatts,” says Karkat, and you see him visibly consider trying to make the word “grown-ups” with his mouth, and then grimace and move on. “Yes. Adults. They can’t be on the planet, now. They go when we're old like me and Gamzee, and don’t come back. But movies are still…” He rumbles in his throat, a different kind of discontent than the grouchy irritation you’re used to—troll faces are hard to read, sometimes, but for a second there’s an expression on his face that looks heartbreakingly close to homesickness, looking at the dark, looming houses and strange, snowy hills.
“Movies are still created to…trss. Appear that they happen on the ground,” Kanaya says, when Karkat doesn’t finish. “Adult trolls do not have places on [trollplanet], now. But they wish it.”
“In movies, you get quadrants, and it’s perfect, and shit like that,” Karkat says, strangely subdued. “In movies everybody has hive. All of them live back where we did before.”
Rose says, “I suppose you must miss it, however flawed it was,” and you can tell she’s trying to sound impersonal and clinical, but one of her hands is resting on Kanaya’s thigh, so she doesn’t really carry it off. “Our human saying is ‘home is where the heart is’.”
“Home,” says Kanaya softly, and then clears her throat and straightens up. “You have only hearts for your quadrants, I suppose. It makes sense.”
“‘The heart’ doesn’t mean a person you’re in love with, that time,” you say, because this is a great moment but your brain is completely wound up on education mode. “It’s just like…the heart! The place you care about a lot.”
“...The meat that pushes blood?” Karkat says, frowning.
“That’s what a heart is, yeah!”
“What?” says Kanaya. “Both of them? That is…trrsss, how do I say. Confusing.”
“Heart is quadrant,” Karkat says. “Blood-meat is [blood-pusher].”
“Oh!” You say, and then consider one or two of the troll idioms you’ve heard him use. “...Oh, huh, okay.”
There’s a few seconds of mutually-confused silence, over the noise of somebody on the TV saying something snarky about their commanding officer, who’s been crushing hatefully on them for most of the movie and is standing right behind them. Then Karkat perks up like something just occurred to him.
“Tktktk, wait,” he says, and you can tell by the way the air flashes he’s reaching into his sylladex. He pulls out a book, a big, soft-cover one with Alternian writing on the cover, and reaches over Dave to present it to you. “Kanaya had her. For you to…have, and find things with.”
You hold the book up, looking at the cover—and then remember and flip it over instead, to look at the actual cover instead of the back. You’re not nearly as good at reading Alternian as you are speaking it, but the title, when you parse through it, is something like “Baby’s Guide to First Change-Growth.”
“You may keep it,” Kanaya says, from the other end of the couch. “I am aware of all my own biology, as well as its function.”
“Oh my god!” you say, delighted, and immediately flip it open. On the first page, an illustration of an adorable little troll kid with big buggy eyes and tiny little baby-small horns is looking confused and saying something in a speech bubble that the narration seems to be replying to. “Oh shit! Guys, I could kiss you!”
Kanaya raises her eyebrows consideringly and then glances at Rose, and then says, “...No thank you.” Karkat gives you a deeply confused look, and then looks at Dave almost exactly the same way. Dave shrugs at him.
“Hot,” he says. “But we got a movie to watch and there’s like five people on the couch in between y’all so maybe put a raincheck on the liplock.”
Karkat makes the slowest and most dubious agreement chirr you’ve ever heard, and then settles back on the couch and goes back to watching the movie while you flip through the book. The writing is pretty big and there are a lot of pictures—you learned about puberty from real life experience and the internet, but it would have been pretty helpful to have a book like this about it, you think!
The illustrations are pretty relatable and cute, too, which isn’t usually the case when you’ve had the chance to look at troll stuff. The little troll avatar is measuring themself getting taller, complaining about body aches and being sweaty—oh, pulling up their shirt on one side to show off little bug legs sticking out of their flanks, okay, that’s different. Apparently, when you soldier through the text on that page, they’re aching and itching, because they’re leftovers from being grubs, and they’re going to come off soon.
The next spread of pages almost gives you whiplash. The cute illustrations are apparently not helpful enough, because the double-page spread is two full illustrations of dissected troll bodies surrounded by anatomy diagrams, both of them realistic enough they were definitely drawn from life. With the throat flayed and the chest cracked open, you can see all the different little sound-producing structures up and down the inside of the respiratory tract, apparently not developed yet in the smaller version.
You scribble on your notepad, does my Alternian sound like baby-talking because I can’t chirr? and pull out one of the human anatomy books you brought with you, finding a model of a human body with a cutaway into the body cavity and laying it down next to the troll book to compare.
Gamzee has gotten distracted from the movie by looking over your shoulder, as has John on the other side. Both of them are staring at the diagram of the other species, looking fascinated and kind of grossed out.
“[That motherfucker,]” says Gamzee, and points at the lungs. “[The fuck is that?]”
“Lungs,” you say. “They, uh. [They—]” You mime a deep breath in and out.
“Tkktk,” says Gamzee, and says a noun, tapping on a series of weird lobes in the troll illustration’s chest.
“[Lungs,]” you repeat—or whatever the hell that troll equivalent is—and then point to a mess of tubes. “[Those?]”
“[Acid-sac, that motherfucker,]” says Gamzee. 'Acid’ seems to be ‘burn-liquid’, which is honestly charming. “[That’s how a motherfucker gets up on her make to eat some shit.]”
“What’d he say?” says John.
“I think that’s a stomach,” you say. “Or a couple of stomachs? It looks like they have more than one of whatever it is. Maybe there’s detail stuff on the—”
You flip the next page, and there’s a full diagram of alien genitals directly in front of you.
“What,” says John, squinting at it, bewildered—and then his eyebrows go up and he makes a sputtery choking noise.
“Tktktktk,” Gamzee clicks, and looks the picture over with mild interest. “[There’s know-feeding slat-clades (flat surfaces, conjugated as a bundled group—oh, books) on that shit?]”
“[Of course there are, you pitiful piece of shit,]” says Karkat, distracted from the movie by frowning at him. “[They were in your (‘troll’ but as a weapon again?)-delivery item-demand list. You didn’t look?]”
“[Only ever made like to (verb) down so far as like how a motherfucker needed to find the (noun you don’t know),]” Gamzee says carelessly, and Karkat makes an expression like that’s the saddest thing he ever heard and gives a rattly noise that Gamzee waves off.
“...[Noun]...?” you say, tentatively, and Gamzee blinks and then looks to Karkat.
“Slime,” Karkat says shortly. “A troll needs it, it makes her sleep.”
“Okay?” You don’t see what’s so sad about that, then, but Gamzee’s making an expression you unexpectedly recognize from when Dave accidentally says something Rose and John think is really sad and fucked up, and he really wants to not be talking about it anymore. So it seems like probably that’s not a fun alien cultural thing, and furthermore would be a huge fucking bummer to dig into more.
“Tsss, [well, so,]” Gamzee says, and proves you right by waving off the topic almost hastily. “[I know motherfucker, he has circle-metal in this motherfucker here.]” He taps an illustrated piece of anatomy with his claw, labeled—you squint at it—pleasure nub, very straightforward. “[Wild crazy shit motherfucker, that brother is.]”
“[(Exclamation you’re not familiar with),]” says Kanaya, raising her eyebrows. She doesn’t seem all that fazed by the big illustration of a whole reproductive system—even Karkat, who’s a master of getting embarrassed by shit, just snorts and grimaces faintly before looking back at the romcom shenanigans happening on screen. He looks more bothered by the fact that you aren’t glued to the movie. Dave glances over, and you can’t see any shift in his expression but when he looks back ahead again his pale face is going very pink.
“[Humans have this?]” Gamzee says, pointing at the very clinical illustration of something that looks vulva-adjacent as casually as a guy asking about fingernails or something. “[Way how you don’t even fight, the most of you don’t make like you got any (oh that’s the body part he mentioned when he invited you over), soft not-troll motherfuckers.]” He gives you all a kind of challenging, grinning look at that, especially Dave for some reason, and Karkat gives a short huff of a growl.
“[Gamzee!]” he says. “[Rude.]”
“Humans do have them,” Kanaya says, and then turns bright jade green when Dave gives her a look, pale eyebrows showing over the tops of his shades. “It is, how do I say— Tss. Trrrrss. Well.”
Gamzee raises his eyebrows, head cocked a little on one side, provoking smile falling like he’s not getting the response he thought he would and he doesn’t know why. You don’t have any idea how to tackle whatever multi-way misunderstanding is going on here, so. You suppose you’ll have to take the question in the spirit it probably wasn’t intended.
“[Some of us have those!]” you say, and Gamzee’s ears perk up and then flick, brow furrowing. “[Some of us have a thing like it, I mean?]”
“[Some of?]” Gamzee says, and wrinkles his pointy noise, which peels his upper lip back from a lot of fang. Trolls can pull their lips way back from their fangs, like wolves and horses can, and it’s startling but very cool every time. “[What the others motherfucking have? Big (bodypart you don’t know) like a (something)-beast?]”
“[Gamzee!]” says Karkat again, without looking over.
“Prrt?” says Gamzee, in apparently innocent confusion.
“[Fucking rude!]”
Gamzee clicks and shrugs, with the expression of a guy who’s pretty sure he’s being scolded for no reason but also is willing to take it on trust that he has to apologize anyway. “[I’m wrong,]” he says at you and John, casual enough you’re almost sure it’s idiomatic—’my bad’, maybe?
“Oh, no!” you say, and pull out a different human book—flip through it, and lay out a few reproductive diagrams of your own. John makes a strangled noise—you slap haphazardly back at him without looking. “It’s fine! I mean, uh, [no! Humans don’t talk about those things much, that’s all. But I want to know! Here, look.]”
“Oh my god,” says John, and gets up to go get more popcorn.
Discussion of reproductive systems gets you through most of the movie; a breakup, another breakup in a different quadrant, a vacillation from flush to pitch, and then a timely intervention from somebody’s moirail that flips the pitch couple into ashen with the addition of somebody’s ex-matesprit. Trolls sure do have a lot of extra steps involved in reproduction, it turns out, although you have to admit the concept of never having to worry about getting pregnant is a pretty neat one! Gamzee looks outright queasy when you show him a diagram of how pregnancy works, and compares you to several different animals in a row that you’re not familiar with before Karkat actually breaks away from the movie and snarls at him.
You put all the books away again as things on-screen start to wrap up—you’ll go through and work on your reading later, but Karkat is getting increasingly cranky the more people fail to pay attention to his ‘classics’ and you don’t want to be rude.
You’re sure learning a lot of things, tonight. The thing you keep idly coming back to, watching various attractive trolls break up and hook up on the screen, is how much extra work must go into making sure that everybody ends up happily ever after. It’s so funny, seeing the characters talk idly about mauling and murdering people over minor disagreements and bite each other hard enough to draw blood as part of friendly conversation, and know that they spend at least four times as much time as humans thinking about romance.
After the third movie, it’s well past sunset and your stomach is rumbling, so you’re more than happy to get up and lead the gang into the kitchen to dig into the variety of cross-cultural snacks and drinks available. Alternian food is heavy on meat and insects, although there’s also some tough-looking vegetables and some kind of bark-looking jerky that looks more like a rawhide chew than a food. Dave brought beers, and Kanaya brought bottles of wine—although it turns out trolls don’t drink wine, or any kind of alcohol at all. When Gamzee sniffs at your cup of wine thoughtfully, he’s already recoiling before Karkat makes an urgent, warning noise and yanks at his arm.
“[NO,]” Karkat says, while Gamzee rolls his lips back from a really startling amount of fangs and makes a low, throaty rising and falling noise that sounds disgusted even to your human ears. “[Have a cup of (noun, gesturing at whatever’s in the wine bottles with troll labels on them) or something!]”
“[Shit smells like straight-up like (something),]” Gamzee says, with enough of a curl in his lip to make it clear the comparison’s definitely not positive. He reaches over to snatch up one of the bottles Karkat pointed him toward, popping the top off with a careless twist of his wrist and taking a much more appreciative sniff. “[Fuck yeah, that thing right there, that’s the shit. Good shit like that makes motherfucker to have a good (fatal) time.]”
“[You’ll do good (warning shot) time at worst,]” Karkat says sternly. “[And not with human cleaning-liquid drinks. You would die. Die fast—and boring, not funny, not fun, got it? Humans drink cleaning-liquid to get (troll-descriptor).]”
Gamzee chortles. “[I bet the fuck they do get!]” he says, apparently delighted. “[And then get (the fatal form of “funny” but flipped around to be a descriptor? A new construction, excellent) funny-dead real quick for because of they’re nasty.]”
“What are you guys drinking, then?” you say, and reach over cautiously to the bottle Gamzee’s holding; he growls possessively, apparently just as a warning that it’s his now, and then gives it up and watches you hold it up and take your own big sniff. It doesn’t…smell toxic. Sweet, mostly, in a weird, thick, smothery kind of way that makes your nose burn a little.
“It is human safe,” says Kanaya, before you can ask. “I believe you don’t feel…tss. Intoxated, by it. But she is still very strong for you, differently.”
That’s all you need to hear. You pick up one of the glasses and pour some out for yourself—it’s just a little thicker than water, a pure, light gold color, and when you take a sip it’s like getting punched in the sinuses by a sugar cube the size of a building.
“Oh, fuck,” you say, and swallow with an effort. Your eyes are watering; your mouth feels aggressively candy-coated. “Whoof. Wow!”
Rose is laughing at you, just a little—not out loud, but you can tell by the way her eyes are creased and her lips are quirked up at the corners. “Yes,” she says. “Nectar requires some getting used to. Trolls cannot metabolize alcohol but they are…quite sensitive to sucral compounds.”
“Give it,” Gamzee says, and gestures insistently to have his bottle back. When you hand it over, he reaches past the nice wine glasses to pick up a distinctly human red solo cup and dumps a hearty half-cupful of nectar into it, then pulls a bottle of something that looks exactly like faygo with alien writing on the label and dumps a generous measure of that in on top of it.
“[You can have one of those,]” Karkat says, looking appalled. “[You (something)-less piece of shit. One, got it? What the fuck is wrong with you. And you’re not kissing me until you clean your teeth. I’ll get (descriptor) off your fucking breath.]”
Gamzee grins hugely and runs his tongue over all his fangs in Karkat’s direction, then tosses back a big mouthful of his mixed drink and gives a happy shivering rumble from the pit of his chest up to his throat, fins fluttering and claws kneading delicately at his cup.
“You want?” he says in English, and holds it out at you, grinning exactly like he did earlier when he snuck a horn under your butt, or when he asked if you had some kind of genitals—like this is the kind of joke that has a winner and a loser, and he’s pretty sure he’s already won.
“Jade,” says Dave. “He’s bein’ a dick. You know you don’t have to take shit from this guy, right?”
“I know!” you say, and reach out to take the cup from Gamzee’s hand, holding eye contact in a way you’re pretty sure is kind of socially unacceptable. Karkat starts “Jade—” and then you take a deep breath and throw the cup back.
The colossal sugar-cube monster that punches you this time is also carbonated, and the combination kind of makes you feel like somebody’s funneled pure syrup into your sinuses and eye sockets. You ignore it, and swallow, and keep swallowing, and when you lower the empty cup and burp, Gamzee’s grin has gone from shitty and daring to delighted. When you hand the empty cup back to him, he throws his head back to laugh and goes “Hell motherfucker yes!” in raucous, troll-accented English, and then slaps you on the back so hard he almost knocks you over. “Sister, so motherfucking good shit! You motherfucker, you got motherfucking [pit/depression/ingress-troll-body-part]!”
Your eyes are watering so hard you have to take your glasses off to rub them, but you also feel like you just won at something, and the revelation that trolls seem to say ‘you’ve got pussy’ instead of ‘you’ve got balls’ is fascinating and funny, even though you feel like you just burned through a lot of the brain cells you would normally use to process it. You grab the plainest chips you can find and a glass of water, and retreat a little to rest on your laurels, swishing water around your mouth until every breath stops tasting like syrup.
Gamzee laughs at you again, but a lot less meanly this time, and goes to slosh more nectar and alien faygo into his cup. “Rrrreh,” he says, “[I said it real, you motherfucking sister, you got some of it! Made a more good job than (you’re assuming that means ‘most’ or ‘some’?) getting a (verb, said as a definitive title) first time.]”
“[(Verb)?]” you repeat, and Gamzee raises his cup demonstratively.
“[It’s how highbloods call that drink,]” Karkat says wearily. “[Means, a thing that (verbs) you.]” He must see on your face you don’t know what he means, because he grumbles irritably and then just reaches out to poke something invisible in the air and makes a startlingly accurate BZZT of electricity with some part of his throat and chest. “Like that.”
“Like, a shock,” you say, and then put together ‘verb, definitive article’ in your head and give a completely undignified snort.
“Care to share with the class?” says Rose, over the sound of you laughing like a thirteen-year-old.
“I’m just an amateur alien ambassador!” you say. “But also, I’m pretty sure Gamzee just told me that cocktail’s called The Shocker.”
Dave laughs like it’s getting punched out of him. John starts laughing as hard as you did, and that sets you off again, and then Rose breaks down and starts laughing too, and then all four of you humans are laughing like idiots while your alien hosts look at you in polite and not-so-polite incomprehension.
“What the fuck,” Karkat says, when you finally start to wind down.
“Y’know,” John says, and throws up The Shocker with both hands.
Karkat gives him a look of absolute confusion and irritation, pivots neatly on one foot, and faces Dave instead. “I’ll say it again: what the fuck?”
“Two in the pink, one in the stink, my man,” Dave says.
Karkat’s mouth moves silently, brow furrowing like he’s trying to run through all those words in his head. Then he turns and looks at you, glowering. “Harley,” he says, “Tell me in real and not bullshit words.”
“Oh, so,” you say. “It’s a human sex joke! It’s like, uhh… [Two fingers in the vagina and one in the butthole!]”
Karkat click-rattle-sputters and goes red from his horns down to his throat in one startling rush. Gamzee laughs so hard and so abruptly the noise wheezes silent, leaving just a hitching rattle-hum from somewhere deeper in his chest than his lungs. Kanaya gives a pretty charming startled burst of laughter and then covers her mouth and pretends she’s not giggling.
“Bad!” is the first English word Karkat manages to find, which doesn’t help you stop laughing. “Fuck you! Human fucking bad shitty—fucking— Fuck you!”
“It’s okay if you’re jealous you don’t have enough fingers,” says Dave, and Karkat hisses and snaps his fangs.
“That’s—” he starts, and waves his hands, searching for words, then points at you, demanding. “It’s, kkkhh,” he mimes a dramatic, disgusted grimace, peeling his lips back from his fangs and sticking his tongue out. With all the teeth and the slightly too long black tongue, it’s startlingly reminiscent of the face Rose’s cat makes before he throws up.
“Gross!” you say. “Disgusting? Nasty?”
“Yes,” says Karkat vehemently, and then falters, frowning. “...Those are all same?”
“They’re all pretty close!”
“And they’re not the same…how?”
“Oh, uh…I don’t know! They feel different?”
Karkat grumbles and chitters. “Why?!”
“I don’t know! Gross is like…” You make a blech face. “And disgusting, I guess, that’s more like…” You make your best impression of the face Rose makes sometimes when she’s being extra classy and snarky and disapproving, a haughty kind of sneer. “And nasty is, uhh…”
“Krrr,” Karkat says, rolling his eyes. “I find out: I don’t care. Stupid bad shitty human words, you have too many.” He smacks John’s hand down. “No ‘sshckrr’. Eat and drink your flat human crunch food. Then more movie. Why I am friends with you.”
“Aw, Karkat, we’re friends?” says John, and gets hissed at. “Okay, okay. Dave, what kind of beer did you bring?”
You demolish a good chunk of the snack food standing around in the kitchen, but eventually everybody migrates back to the living room, carrying cups and glasses and bags of chips. This time, before anybody can even get to the couch Gamzee reaches down and scoops Karkat up off his feet exactly like somebody bothering a cat. Karkat growls and grumbles and tweaks one of his ears, but whatever Gamzee mumbles back makes him sigh and settle, with the angriest possible resigned dignity. He’s not quite small enough that it looks right, seeing him get hoisted like that, it’s kind of funny to look at, but Gamzee doesn’t seem like he’s working all that hard to hold him up and once Karkat stops fighting he looks comfortable enough you can tell he’s probably done this before, plenty of times.
Dave doesn’t even look in their direction, because of course he doesn’t. He lets you take the spot next to them, though, when you all get back to your seats, and wedges his narrow butt down in between John and Rose, which gets him briefly glared at by Rose and smiled at politely by Kanaya.
The next movie Karkat puts on turns out to be sort of a war movie, and sort of a horror movie—it’s about a soldier named Rezhik who’s gotten stranded on an alien planet during an invasion. There’s a mysterious monster in the woods, that’s pretty clearly another troll in spooky makeup with dramatic angles and lighting, and it’s dragging her fellow soldiers off into the woods one at a time and—you’re pretty sure it’s implied that they’re getting eaten, which is pretty horrible, although the trolls barely seem to be interested in those parts.
Nothing quadrant-related seems to be happening yet, but you have plenty of questions anyway; there are trolls with psychic powers in this one, which it turns out Karkat knows frustratingly little about. He has more to say about the military and societal hierarchy, and about the cultural undertones of the conversations happening between Rezhik and her fellow soldiers, although you have to get your explanations interspersed with growling arguments with John. Dave is actually paying attention, watching with interest as the soldiers try to set up increasingly desperate traps and the movie turns into a survival horror kind of situation; Rose and Kanaya are murmuring to each other and not really watching. John is very clearly bored, and is making it Karkat’s problem.
“[Little motherfuckers really don’t have a (the relationship Karkat drew a spade for) up in her shit?]” Gamzee says eventually, after another explanation has gotten derailed by one of John’s cheeky interjections. You can’t see his cheeks, because he’s still got that funny clown paint on, but he’s finished his entire second cup of alien cocktail and his big, long, goaty ears are kind of lopsided, going purple at the tips. He looks a whole lot less twitchy than he did, and he’s watching Karkat and John snipe over top of you with lazy eyes, blinking slowly. “[Fucking (warning shot), and shit?]”
“[Not like you do!]” you say. “[Why?]”
“[Your (descriptor word you don’t know) blue motherfucker is sure does make (noun) at my moirail, is all,]” Gamzee says, and Karkat sputters and cuts off whatever he was saying to shoot a glare over his shoulder.
“[He’s not,]” he says.
Gamzee makes that acknowledging trill noise, low and drawn-out in a way you can’t help but hear as sarcastic; by the way Karkat bristles, you think you’re not wrong. “[Okay, sweet-(some kind of body part),]” he says. “[Sounds true.]”
“[What’s (body part)?]” you say, and Gamzee blinks at you and then holds up a hand and taps one of the dark pads on his palm. “Ohh. Fun!”
“I know you’re talking about me,” John says, and reaches over you to shove Karkat’s shoulder. “You wanna share with the class? Huh?”
“I’m pretty sure Gamzee says you’re flirting!” you say, and Karkat hisses at you through open fangs, like an angry cat. John laughs, disbelieving, and then pretty clearly sees by Karkat’s face that he’s not joking, and makes a really funny coughing, choking noise.
“Oh, gross,” says Dave, like a hypocrite, and John growls at him and dives over to try to get him in a headlock, which Dave pretty effortlessly avoids. On-screen, Rezhik screams and fires her gun into the dark as one of her fellow soldiers is dragged, shrieking, into the forest. The trolls glance over at the noise, and seem about as disinterested in that as they did in the genital diagram.
“[Where’s all the good shit,]” Gamzee grumbles, distracted from the flirting by the noise of screaming, and apparently disdainful about it. “[Goes and all takes off all them away, no motherfucking blood. Playing (some kind of descriptive phrase you can’t make heads nor tails of), shit’s not even funny.]” ‘Not-funny (fatal)’...so boring it’s trying to kill you? Well, fuck, you know that feeling! And all it took to find a concise way to describe it was an alien invasion and learning a whole new language from scratch.
“[Shut the fuck up, you rude-mouthed (exterior/outward/egress-troll-body-part—oh) dick-wound,]” says Karkat, and Gamzee chortles, a bleating, hitching chitter of a noise. “[You existing is a fucking (noun) on my life and I scream at your (animal)-shit ‘gods’ every day to hit you fatally with lightning and save me from your (???)].”
“Zzzhhe, [You (god-speak—pray?) for me every motherfucking day, brother?]” says Gamzee, and ruffles up his hair, squeezes one adorable nubby horn and narrowly avoids getting snapped at again.
John is staring at them again instead of the movie, looking grossed out but also blatantly entertained. Dave is looking straight ahead at the movie again—although you can’t really tell if that’s because he’s into the whole horror-movie chase sequence that’s happening now, or because he seems to be allergic to looking at Gamzee and Karkat in the same place. He can’t fall back on bothering Rose and Kanaya either, because Rose is looking wine-drunk as hell and delicately feeling out the embroidery on the low hem of Kanaya’s top, while Kanaya holds forth about all the different needlework techniques and how texturally fascinating they are.
Dave’s saved from his romantic agonies a minute or two later, because the forest monster finally shows up on screen, cornering Rezhik up against a dead end; it’s another troll, because of course it is. A giant, limping, mostly-naked troll with an artistic amount of scars, dirt and blood all over them, snarling and panting like an animal. All of the trolls are abruptly paying attention, and even Gamzee’s low, lazy ears perk up at whatever harmonics are in the growling.
“So,” starts John, and Karkat holds up an authoritative hand and hisses sharply, eyes fixed on the screen.
“[You’re a troll,]” Rezhik says, and you aren’t great at tones in Alternian yet, you can’t tell if she’s realizing it or trying to remind the monster or both. “[How long have you been here?]”
The camera lingers on a broken-off weapon that’s halfway through the monster’s shoulder—you honestly can’t tell if it’s special effects or if the actor is actually impaled, but there’s a lot of blue blood oozing down their bare chest and stomach. Troll boobs are slightly different-looking from human ones—why? Also you’re starting to get used to the gender neutral boobs thing but. Can the trolls on the couch tell what gender this troll is by looking? You’re not going to ask right now.
The monster-berserker doesn’t answer, just hisses and makes a lunge at Rezhik—she dives out of the way, but she isn’t drawing her sword. The camera flashes past her face, her eyes noticing something; the berserker’s protruding ribcage, shaped wrong for a human, standing out against their skin, and the fresh, wet blood around their mouth.
Karkat is sitting almost on the edge of the couch, watching with wide eyes; his ears are perked up, his mouth is hanging slightly open and—oh shit, his pupils are dilated out like a cat looking at a christmas tree, holy shit. There’s absolutely no way to take a picture without him noticing, but man you want to.
On Karkat’s other side, Gamzee is lounging back against the arm of the couch—not watching the movie, you realize, after a confused second, and not just staring into space. Watching Karkat, blinking very slowly, ears low and flushed and eyes just about as dark as Karkat’s are.
There’s another sharp flash of movement from the screen, and the music flares to an aggressive crescendo—and then goes dramatically quiet, as Rezhik side-steps a claw-swipe and comes face to face with the berserker, one hand resting on their cheek.
“[You don’t have to kill me,]” Rezhik says, low and commanding, a superior inflection but a gentle tone. The berserker snarls like a chainsaw and bites at her—this time their teeth catch the side of her palm, and Rezhik hisses in pain but doesn’t flinch away, just makes a soft, buzzing sound in her chest—the same one you heard Gamzee making, the first time you met him, when Karkat wouldn’t stop scolding him.
You glance over down the couch again, and this time when you move Gamzee’s eyes flick over and catch you looking.
It turns out trolls wink the same way humans do—when Gamzee does it, though, there’s an extra eyelid flicking across sideways, a paler flash over broad purple irises and sideways goat pupils. Rezhik says “[You’re not going to kill me,]” and strokes the line of the berserker’s jaw, leaving a trail of blood from the bite mark on her hand, and Gamzee leans down and hooks an arm around Karkat’s waist again, pulling him over halfway into his lap, leaning down to nudge his face behind one flicking, red-flushed ear.
The berserker is still growling, but they’re not biting anymore. Rezhik rumbles zzzhhh, zhhzhhhzhhh in her chest, and their panting slows down, their claws un-crook and go loose. The moon rises over the dead-end ridge Rezhik was trapped against, and the score swells as the moonlight hits their face; the blank, snarling mask flinches, and then softens into a tired, angry, confused-looking troll, still soaked in blood and grime but blinking slowly, shoulders slumping.
Gamzee murmurs something, a low clicking croon you can’t make out, and Karkat sways just a little and then straightens up, shaking his head like he’s shaking something off, clearing his throat.
“Zzhso,” he says, hoarse and chittery, and then clears his throat again and manages, “So,” in a much more normal human voice. “Tss. So. This is how the big stories for moirails goes. Talks at her, makes better. Tells her ‘you did bad, fix up all your shit’! One angry, and she needs tssss, you see,” he gestures at the screen, at the way Rezhik is petting the big berserker’s face and the noise she’s making. “Zhzzh…ing.” He looks to you. “[(Verb-ending sound)], it’s ‘ing’?”
“Yeah!” you say, delighted. “So it’s…ssshush—shooshing?”
“Tsssyes,” Karkat says. “But, it’s not shhhh.” He taps a few claws to somewhere deeper down in his throat, demonstratively. “Zzzhzhhzh.”
Gamzee’s claws spread and then clench, kneading. “[(Verb you don’t know)s me, the way you do that, best friend,” he says against Karkat’s ear, quiet enough you wouldn’t have heard it if you weren’t sitting next to them, and Karkat huffs and elbows back at him.
“And that works?” John says, and looks back up at the screen, where Rezhik is petting the berserker’s face under the mist of the waterfall.
“There are things trolls…feel,” Kanaya says, and as usual she manages to make her hesitation over the words sound like delicate phrasing instead of talking around a word she doesn’t know. “When something is done, they will feel things that humans won’t. Like…a button, to push, but humans do not have this button. A troll button, only.”
John opens his mouth, already grinning. You elbow him hard in the side.
“Yes, sure,” says Karkat. “Zhhzh, good…sounds, good…tss, voice? Rrrr. Rrh. A good voice, it makes a troll… Tss, makes…” He gnashes his teeth and mutter-grumbles to himself, then settles on, “It makes a feeling in her, just the noises. And I am a good voice. You will see it—would, could? [Ugh, fuck me backwards with a (you have no idea what that is)]. Here. You can look.” He turns back to Gamzee. “[You said you didn’t care who looked at what,]” he says, “[Show Jade your (body part you don’t know)]”
“Rrreh?” says Gamzee, and snorts. “[(Some kind of exclamation), sweet-grub, make slower with your go, you could make a motherfucker purr.]” But he scoots over and—oh, and brushes his hair back away from one ear, so you can see the side of his throat and the strip of speckly-stripy purple fin that grows halfway up the upper shell of his ear, down onto the corner of his jaw. As you stare, fascinated, he flicks that ear at you and flares the fin wide, grinning toothily.
Behind you, Dave turns his whole body in the other direction and asks Kanaya something about fish. You try to listen for a second, but you’re too busy trying to figure out the very slight shift of light and shade on Gamzee’s cheek when his fins shift, like there are tiny muscles in there to control them. They don’t look textured like most troll skin, but they don’t look slimy like fish fins either—would it be rude to ask to touch them? Probably. You scribble it on the maybe column for later, without looking down.
Karkat grumbles something at Gamzee, full of troll descriptor words that don’t sound very nice at all, but he turns back to the couch, furiously red again now, and says, “Good zhzhhh, makes your. Body. Be good again. Does…inside stuff I don’t know, with your…tsssss, blood-pushing meat and eating-meat and—all the meat in there, inside, it calms off. Here, look.”
He nudges Gamzee’s chin up just a little; there’s a flash of lighter, purpler skin, a patch about the size of a thumbprint under the very corner of his jaw, half-hidden by fin. Gamzee’s smile goes a little tenser around the edges, you’re pretty sure, but he doesn’t do anything about it, just sits there and lets you all look.
And then Karkat says, “If he doesn’t like, you can see—” and pinches one of Gamzee’s skinny thighs sharply, claws-first. Gamzee yelps and then hisses and swats at him like an angry cat, and all the humans on the couch jerk back, but you can see what he’s pointing out, now that you’re looking. Gamzee’s fins flare into a wide, quivering spread and the subtle little patch of purple darkens abruptly to a blackish-grey like the rest of his skin, vanishing.
“[Motherfucker!]” says Gamzee, in the tone of voice of a guy who’s definitely about to say more, and Karkat gives a sharp, clicking hiss of hey, eyes on me and then makes the cicada shooshing noise again, this time with his whole chest. The noise isn’t all that loud, but it’s startlingly powerful; when he does it like that you can hear extra layers to it, the surface zhhhhhh, zhhh, and then a rising and falling counterpoint of half-musical buzzing, weaving in and out, and a slow, continuous inhale-exhale with no pause in between that makes the whole thing throb like a heartbeat.
You knew you were talking about alien instincts, but it’s wild to see in action; Gamzee’s ears go from perked and high to low and loose in twitching little drops, his fins go from a tense, fluttering quiver to slow waving. The patch of purple under his jaw fades back in, and for a second it’s visible all the way down the inside line of the slightly-wrong muscles in his throat; you’d swear you see some of the little spots you assumed were freckles give a weird little glitter before Karkat stops making the noise he’s making and the light vanishes again.
Gamzee blinks, slow and dazed, and then goes “Huh?” a couple of seconds late, in an alien little trill.
“There,” says Karkat, and pats the place he pinched, like an apology. Turns back to you, looking embarrassed but also proud and pleased with himself. “You see it?”
“Wow, when you said there was a button I didn’t know you meant like, a real off-button,” says John, and makes a gargling, shushing noise in his throat, trying to imitate the sound for all of a second or two before he breaks off in a laugh, self-conscious. “Okay, no, that’s so weird. How many throats do you guys even have?”
“It’s not ‘off’,” Karkat says, irritably, and waves at the screen. The happy couple are kneeling by a lake, and Rezhik is wiping blood and dirt off the berserker’s face. “You saw pale, in the other movies. It’s not for shut her off like a grub. Pale is…tsss.” He waves his hands around for a second, searching for words.
“Trolls that are broken, broken bad,” he starts again, finally, “They’re angry over things, small thing, big thing, they’re—” He puts on a voice, a heavy, rumbling growl rolling around in his chest under the words. “Rrrr, rrah, fight me, rrrr, kill you. Make a mess and all their shit fucked up.”
He glances back meaningfully at Gamzee, who obviously doesn’t understand the words but seems to get the message; he gives Karkat big, sad purple doe eyes and makes a big show out of turning his horns penitently away and baring his throat in surrender.
Karkat growls at him and clicks his fangs once or twice like he’s threatening to bite, then looks back at you. “Moirail makes you—” He interlocks his claws, clenches his hands together into a fist and squeezes. “Keeps your, tsss, your head, good, and right.”
Gamzee is trying to sneak a long, skinny arm around his waist again. Karkat swats at him.
“Yuh-huh,” says John, and considers the screen for a second. “…When does the goo happen?”
Rose clears her throat like she’s trying not to laugh. Karkat growls. “It doesn’t happen,” he says. “Not all of troll things is, fucking, goo. I don’t talk shit about humans and how everything is, tss, fucking, tss, rocks, and melted!”
“Melted?” says John, distracted from whatever he was about to snark back about by looking genuinely confused.
“Melted,” Karkat repeats, and chitters angrily at the looks on all your faces. “Melted! It’s hard, and it’s for swords and you see your face in it.”
“Oh, metal,” says Dave. “Yeah no shit we make stuff outta metal, metal kicks ass.”
“It’s way better than goo, anyway,” says John, with relish, and Karkat actually starts to move toward him, horns down and shoulders squared, before Gamzee reaches out with one really, really long, skinny arm, and reels him right back in.
“Zhhhzh, [motherfucker,]” he says, and Karkat huffs and twitches an ear at him, then settles grumpily back.
“Shut up and I hate you,” he growls, in response to John’s grin. “It’s a bad shitty not-trying joke.”
“[He thinks he’s funny],” you say, and Gamzee perks up.
“[We telling jokes (fatal), best friend?]”
“[Funny (nonfatal)!]” you say, hastily, and Gamzee makes a huffing, chirring noise you’re pretty sure is disappointed and slumps his face down into Karkat’s hair again.
The movie winds down relatively quickly, after that, to the sound of general lazy bitching; Rezhik and her new moirail bring down an enormous alien animal and drag it back to camp as some kind of peace offering, and the other trolls are wary but seem startlingly ready to accept that Rezhik has both of their shit under wraps and the water is under the bridge.
“Yes?” says Karkat, when you point that out, like you’re being an idiot for asking. “She has a moirail. They need big, mean, hrr. Assholes. On place like this? Bigger and meaner is better, and now she has her moirail. They can use her again.”
“She killed like eleven people,” John says, and Karkat gives him a bewildered look and then makes a clicky, rattling noise that you don’t really know how to interpret.
“Yes,” he says, patiently. “She has her moirail now. It’s…” he frowns, hissing thoughtfully, and then looks at you demandingly. “Something good, tktktk, good! Could have not happened.”
“...Lucky? Good luck?”
“When things happen how you want? Good luck?”
“Yeah!”
“Rrss. It’s good luck, no trolls there have quadrants she killed. If they did, maybe they would still fight.” Karkat shrugs. “But they need her, big mean asshole. So maybe not.”
“How pragmatic of them,” Rose says dryly, and Karkat gives her an impatient look.
“[High(blood)-flapped she-aliens and their (some kind of animal)-shit,]” he grumbles to himself, and very deliberately turns away from her without asking what the word means, looking at the screen instead as the credits start to roll. “New movie. You want more war? It’s all pale and pitch in war.”
Gamzee doesn’t wait for anybody to answer, just unfolds his body up off the couch and sinks down into a wide squat next to the basket of grubs, sorting through it and making little considering chittering noises. Karkat clicks his fangs a few times and grumbles something about “[Krrss, this guy!]” but doesn’t move to stop him. “[My movies, Gamzee, not yours!]”
“Zzhe, [but motherfucker come on,]” Gamzee protests. “[Just little boring killing and their see-balls they’re hiding like grubs. Let me make look them some real motherfucking jokes (fatal), it’ll put a turn in their horns.]”
“[They don’t need to grow a turn in their horns, they need to have a nice movie night!]” Karkat snaps. “[No.]”
Gamzee growls irritably, but waves a hand apparently in surrender and sets aside the armful of grubs he was poking at with exaggerated care, like, here, look at me doing it, asshole. Karkat growls back at him, and then turns back to the rest of you and gives you a demanding glare, which you’re getting the impression is the Karkat version of a polite host’s smile.
“Well, I think I’d like another glass of refreshment,” Rose says, and starts to get upright a lot less gracefully than she usually would, deep pink in the light from the TV. Kanaya sits up, reaching after her, just in time to catch the back of her skirt and tug her back as she sways. Rose goes tumbling back onto the couch again, and coincidentally manages to fall back into Kanaya’s side.
“I can keep her here,” says Kanaya, to the rest of you. She’s looking kind of wine-drunk, herself, and there’s an empty glass of nectar balanced really precariously on the arm of the couch next to her. “For. Friendly reasons. Too much human…wine? It makes things very much, and not safe, I think.”
Gamzee makes a noise of satisfaction, fishes out a grub and plugs it in. There’s no previews or menu on this one—the movie just starts up, a little shaky and badly-lit like it was shot by hand. A big guy is stalking around a big, empty, fancy house with a bunch of very alien-looking furniture around and a big pink moonrise visible out of the windows. Then he elbows out of the door, and heads out into a street full of other trolls.
It’s a pretty underwhelming opening for a movie—but it makes Karkat sit straight up and say “Gamzee!” in a sharp, growling hiss. “[How did this get—?]”
“[She wants to get make a know-eating on for about moirails?]” Gamzee says, and turns to glance back at you and Karkat, with the same smug, sneaky grin he gave you when he handed you that cocktail earlier. “[Well, she can eat some motherfucking know.]”
Alternian is pretty straightforward and modular, overall—“know-eating”, huh? “Eat” is broadly used a lot for taking or getting things, so probably that means “learning” and he thinks this movie is going to be educational. So far, not a whole lot is happening; this one doesn’t have subtitles at all, even auto-translated ones, but it seems to be following a big, scary guy down a dark street while he growls and snarls at people and is generally kind of a scary dick.
“[You,]” Karkat says, and chitter-sputters a little. “[This—you—! Fucking piece of—! How did you even—]”
“[You left it out here (some measurement of time), brother,]” Gamzee says, and comes back over to the couch to drop back into his spot again, pulling Karkat firmly into his lap. “[Are you going to feed little sister her knowing or you want me to make it?]”
“[I want you to not be a rude (body part) full of (noun?) and bad choices,]” Karkat growls, and does his best to throw an elbow back at Gamzee, working his jaw like he’s thinking about biting. On the screen, a plucky little guy in yellow and black is cautiously advancing on the big guy, doing a sidling slink that’s halfway between a wary prey animal and a stalking cat. There’s some very tinny, alien-sounding music in the background.
“Zzeh, [brother,]” Gamzee says, and sinks into a murmur that’s all barely-audible subvocal chest noises. Whatever he says makes Karkat hiss and slap at one of his thighs.
“[Because I’m not a rude troll-mess fuck-up whose (‘troll-older-than-me’ but with the animal-descriptor ending) never taught him better. Asshole!]”
It’s not that much meaner than most of the things he says basically all the time, but Gamzee gives a sharp wince that only looks half-joking and hisses softly between his teeth. Karkat winces too, because he’s so rude but kind of like a cat who keeps swiping at people and then being shocked and upset when somebody he claws acts hurt—he goes still for a second, like he doesn’t actually know what to do now, and then pats awkwardly at the knee he just slapped. Gamzee squeezes him, rumbles in his chest and drops his face into Karkat’s hair, so none of you can see it anymore.
“[You’re still shit,] Karkat says, but not like he means it, and he turns back to the rest of you like a guy who’s facing a firing squad. “Gamzee did something shitty, for joking,” he says. “This movie is. Tsssit’s…not for watching like us now. All here. It’s for alone. But. If you want to see pale things, learn pale things, you’ll learn them. Or, I change it.”
You take in the shitty production values, the way the two guys on the screen are circling each other—the bad, tinny music. The way Karkat’s face went bright red when he recognized what you were watching—oh. Oh!
“Oh shit, this is going to be educational!” you say, delighted.
“This is porn,” says John, because apparently he doesn’t realize the two can be the same thing. Dave is looking straight ahead, but his face is going really pink around the ears. Rose and Kanaya are making intense eye contact and not looking at the screen at all, so who knows what’s up with that.
“It's for moirails,” Karkat says, frowning. "I think—I thought, 'porn' is for fucking?"
“It is, for humans!” you say. “But humans don’t have moirails.”
“No,” says Karkat, and drops his face into his hands to click-growl something too muffled for you to make out. Lifts his face again to say, “[No, humans sure the fuck don’t have fucking moirails, huh?!]” Apparently just in general aggravation, to the world at large.
“I’m sure this will be very…good for your knowledge,” Kanaya says, in the delicate way she says everything. “But I think I will give this some…alone space.”
“Mmhm,” says Rose vaguely. She doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to the movie, or the rest of the couch. You can’t tell if she’s looking at Kanaya’s mouth or Kanaya’s boobs, but it definitely seems like one of the two. “Yes, why don’t we… We could go…discuss book club.”
“Yeah, alright,” says John, like a coward. “Uh. Yeah. I’m gonna just.” He jerks his head toward the door, glances one more time at the TV in weirded-out fascination, and then shakes his head at you and hops up to head for the kitchen.
“Huh,” says Dave. “…I mean, man, you know I’m always down for weird sexless cuddle-time with my boyfriend and his boyfriend Bobo The Deathclown, but last time I got fresh with the whole moirail thing, Jizzmo got fully up in my grill and rattled around in there. Seems like we got it pretty clear last time if either of us tried any shit somebody was gonna get their dick bit off.”
“Hot,” says Kanaya, with laser-guided, vicious precision and perfect English enunciation, and Dave goes abruptly the color of a tomato. Rose actually giggles, and then covers her mouth and tries to clear her throat like she thinks you’ll all buy that it was a hiccup or something.
“Fine,” says Karkat, and then glances at the screen, rapidly flushing darker and darker red, as the big, mean guy snarls something in a superior inflection with a whole lot of (fatal) verb conjunctions. “Okay, okay, so, tss, so, go and—” He shoots you a look, almost shy. “Jade wants to know what it is, pale, and moirail. She can be here if she wants. You other fuckers, fuck off.”
“Don’t mind if I do!” you say, and settle in.
“Is this…appropriate, in troll culture?” says Rose, surfacing from what looks like a deep contemplation of Kanaya’s mouth, and Kanaya makes a very alien noise.
“Trrsss,” she says, and hesitates for a long second. Her cheeks are faintly green. “...Well. Being with a moirail is…often a thing people will see. But this, it’s…very much.”
“[Bro, are they going to talk all night?]” Gamzee says, over Karkat’s shoulder. “[It’s gonna get good in a (some amount of time, diminutive ending).]” He looks at the rest of your friends, and waves a hand authoritatively. “[All of all of the you,]” he says, in a single mushed-together rolling noise, and you’re abruptly struck by the realization that you think you just learned how to say “All y’all” in Alternian. Karkat glares at you when you laugh, but Gamzee doesn’t bother to acknowledge it, just finishes, “[Make move your motherfucking asses out.]”
“Jade,” says Rose. “Are you certain you’re comfortable with this?”
“Huh?” you say. Rose is making very drunk and very intense eye contact, like she’s trying to beam something into your brain. Like she’s not the one who’s probably writing her name in her diary next to Kanaya’s surrounded by hearts! She’s not the only one who’s ready to explore bold new frontiers. Especially if there’s not going to be any sex, which it doesn’t sound like there would be. As far as you know, nobody’s done very much research on if troll bodily fluids are like, super toxic or likely to carry weird alien superbugs. But moiraillegiance seems to be really light on the bodily fluids, so you don’t even have to worry about that!
“I’m so comfortable,” you say, and gesture at the TV, where the little guy is making some careful advances, tightening the slow circling, looking wary. “I mean look at this! This is going to be great!”
Dave’s mouth presses into a line for a second—he looks past you, points two fingers at his sunglasses and then points them at Gamzee. You glance back just in time to see Gamzee snort and imitate the gesture with a saucy lopsided wiggle of his ears. Karkat growls and pinches his thigh again, and Gamzee chortles to himself before drawing himself up and snapping off what looks like some kind of salute in his direction—pressing all three claws to the base of his throat in a rigid spread and whipping his hand away again.
“[Yes, Commander,]” he says, and it takes you a second to recognize why the voice he’s putting on sounds so familiar—it sounds startlingly like Karkat’s. Lighter and hoarser, without the accent you're just starting to get used to, words in order and clicks hit so hard you’d swear you can see whatever he uses to make them in his throat, a popping shift a little lower than the adam’s apple would be on a human. “[Take a motherfucking (noun) to my (body part?), I’ve been bad, sir!]”
“[You’re the worst troll,]” Karkat says, and looks back at your friends. “So? You’re going?”
Kanaya sighs and stands up, dusting her skirt off; the rest of your friends follow suit, with more or less reluctance.
Karkat relaxes a little when you’re the only other person in the room, but not by much. His face is still red, and his eyes keep darting over to you. You pretend you don’t notice, and pull your notebook out again as the trolls on the TV circle each other.
Gamzee doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to you at all—he’s looked back to the TV, and he’s watching with every sign of lazy interest. But he’s also grinning, now, and one of his hands is rubbing little circles on Karkat’s stomach.
“Tss, so,” Karkat says, after a second or two of awkward, settling silence. It’s hard to read troll tones of voice, but he sounds hilariously strained. “So, this, this big asshole. To trolls, he’s a, tss. Looking bad. Has all his shit messed up, wants a fight with everything. But, trolls who want fights, is trolls who want somebody to not…” he fumbles the words, waves his hands in frustration. “To…to, rrgh, want, somebody to take their fights…out of them?”
On the screen, the yellow troll gets too close and has to dodge back to not get clawed as the big guy swipes out at him, growling. Karkat licks his lips—you forgot troll tongues are black, it’s so wild to see.
“[Calm down before you hurt yourself, idiot,]” says the guy in yellow, and then there’s a couple seconds of quick, violent movement and a grinding snarl, and he’s pinned up against the wall by his collar.
“[I’m not scared of getting hurt,]” the big guy growls. “[I can take it.]”
“[You’re scared of something,]” says the little guy, low and intense—still in a neutral inflection, which seems pretty sassy of him, all things considered. That’s probably part of it? Like, I’m not going to take your shit. Little guy says “[You’re going to get yourself (killed by execution) culled. Now—]” And he flips abruptly into something really close to a superior inflection, as one of his skinny little hands darts out and gets hold of one of the big guy’s horns. “[Put me down.]”
“...The trolls who make mmrrl porn,” Karkat says absently, eyes fixed on the screen. “The, fuck. [Hands, palms (pads? The word Gamzee just taught you, you don’t know if there’s a distinction)] they’re soft. Tss, very…[not-troll].”
You’ve never heard a troll use that descriptor in a way that wasn’t really negative, but Karkat doesn’t look disgusted or mad about it.The video sure is zooming in to get a whole lot of the little guy’s hand gripping that horn, and the way the heel of his thumb rubs into the base of it.
“That’s good, for moirail stuff?” you say, and Karkat’s ears flick.
“[Sometimes,]” he says, and trails off in a weird little rattling noise you aren’t familiar with. “[Sometimes, it’s. (Adjective)—tss, not-soft, I mean. That’s good, too.]”
“Tkktk, [that a fact is?]” Gamzee says, and the hand on Karkat’s stomach twitches up and abruptly grips his neck. You jump, startled and kind of worried even though you know trolls are—oh. Karkat’s pupils just blew way the fuck out. Huh.
“[All growl, no biting,]” says the little guy on the screen, and makes a sharp demanding kind of thrum in his throat, keeping his grip on the horn he’s holding as the big guy lowers him slowly back to the ground; he angles his wrist and squeezes, which you get a loving close-up of, and the big guy makes his own alien noise, not quite a growl, and then gasps and crumples down onto his knees. “[Are you that (some kind of troll-descriptor)? Growling like a (you know that’s some kind of animal, even if you can’t remember what one is) and then (verb?)ing like a (okay, that one you have no idea.]”
“[...Brother wants it,]” Gamzee says—to you or to Karkat, you don’t know, but it makes Karkat blush all over again. “[See. Eyes all (something to do with the sun? Must be idiomatic), motherfucker could bite but doesn’t make to do that shit.]”
“[He looks pissed,]” you say, and only realize when Karkat makes a grumbling noise that you don’t actually know if you’re talking about the porn or about Karkat. Gamzee laughs.
“Zzeh, [the thing and other thing can both have true, little sister,]” he says, and gives Karkat’s neck a little squeeze. “[He can growl and motherfucker wants still a (that word that isn’t exactly ‘fuck’]. Make a big noise, get himself fear in himself about (over?) letting soft get on him (make him dirty? Stain him? Paint him? You still don’t know what the fuck to do with that verb). But still he’s troll. Wants touched, motherfucker.]”
On the screen, the big guy’s pupils have blown out like Karkat’s did, and his face is going weird, rich blue. His eyes keep starting to unfocus and his growl keeps trailing off into a weird, low chirring noise.
“Huh, okay,” you say, more to yourself, and take a note. Your face feels pretty warm. “So, they’re not going to fuck?”
“No,” Karkat says, very firmly for a guy who looks pretty flush and breathless, himself. “We don’t, have—tss, we’re not, for trolls, fuck your moirail is something that’s…” More impotent hand-waving. “It’s a…a way to do moirails, other trolls are ‘what, why, gross’ to you for it.”
“...Kinky?” you offer, and Karkat gives you a familiar, impatient look. “Perverted? Uhh…[way to fuck] or, hm. [Or (not-fuck) weird.]”
Karkat is distracted from getting manhandled by making a thoughtful chirring noise. “Tss, reh,” he says. “Word is, ‘k’ki’? And, ‘prr—ft’td–’?”
“Kinky.”
“Knnkee.”
“Sure! Perverted—I think I heard you say it in your language, before. I think that’s uh… [fucks-wrong (troll descriptor)]? Or [(moirail not-fuck)s-wrong (troll descriptor)].”
“Ttktktk!” Karkat clicks, brightening up. “Yes, I need—good! Say again.”
You have to laugh. “He’s perverted,” you say. “He’s a pervert. And we don’t have quadrants, so in our language there’s no [fucks] and [(moirail-related not-fucks)]. It’s all just ‘pervert’.”
“Yes,” Karkat says, determinedly, and straightens up, enunciating his vowels with an impressive effort. “We don’t fuck,” he says, “But. My mrrail is still kinky asshole piece of shit show-off [highblood] bastard perverted.” He glances at you, and you give him two thumbs up and nod. “Good. Good fucking words! Thank fuck!”
You burst out laughing. Gamzee obviously didn’t understand most of that, but he’s been paying attention ever since you said the moirail version of “pervert”, and when Karkat says “highblood” he perks up and starts grinning like he definitely knows he’s being talked about.
“[(Moirail) pervert I guess I am, but how I get in at your business and make you (verb) I know makes you hot in a motherfucker’s face,]” he says.
“You are blushing really, really hard,” you say, and when Karkat gives you a confused glare you wave at your own cheeks. “So red!”
“Fuck off,” says Karkat, with great ceremony. “And fuck you. You, all of humans, get me do shit. I’m kinky shit, now, here, fuck. I’m touch my matesprit pale when he hurts and Gamzee’s watching, I’m, fucking, tss—” he stumbles over the words, and gives you that self-conscious, shy look. “I’m here, and, like this, with you here watching too,” he finishes, and shrugs, a startlingly human gesture, bright red and avoiding your eyes. “Dave said ‘cuddle slut’, maybe he’s true. I’m kinky pervert. It’s me.”
“We can all be kinky perverts,” you say, laughing. “It’s a crown for three!”
You reach out to pat him on the knee comfortingly—and then realize a second later, when Karkat’s eyes go wide and Gamzee’s eyebrows go up, that patting people comfortingly on places seems to be a really big part of the quadrant they’ve already got going on. Oops!
…Neither of them is growling at you, though. And you don’t not want this to turn into a threesome, if they’re actually prepared to swing! Karkat does look really cute when he turns all red.
On the screen, you’re getting a closeup as the little guy’s claws run point-first under the line of the big guy’s jaw, very delicately. The points look just as sharp and deadly as every other troll you’ve met, but he’s being so careful they barely leave faint blue lines over the big guy’s throat.
“[You look like you need (a pile of objects, but positioned in the sentence like a verb?),]” says the little guy, and Karkat’s throat visibly moves as he swallows really hard. His eyes dart back over his shoulder, toward Gamzee, then back to you, pupils blown out huge again. “[But I don’t let (wild? Feral?) animals into my pile (a noun this time, you’re almost positive you’re translating that word correctly).]” He slips superior again, and you see Gamzee’s mouth move as he says the line at the same time, against Karkat’s ear. “[You need taming, first.]”
“[Fuck,]” says Karkat, a grinding click of a noise, and covers his face with both hands, making a clicking, chirping noise at length—not words, you don’t think, just wordless expression sounds. Gamzee grins down at him, an expression that still has way more teeth in it than you’re used to, and then looks up at you and gives you a look that feels really…calculating.
“[You mean to play nice with my (???), sister?]”
The word he says is ‘moirail’ at face-value, but in the diminutive, with a rolling rumble under the word that’s pretty clearly a more intentional imitation of a true, involuntary purr. You think you get the idea, some kind of endearment, but—damn. You have no idea how to translate that. It’s like trying to give somebody directions and realizing they move in four dimensions instead of three. Curse your stupid human lack of a purr reflex!
“[I’ll play (benign verb-form, you don’t know if it’s needed but you’re not fucking around) very nice, very soft, if you two say I can,]” you say, and Karkat coughs up a sort of strangled chirping noise and click-rattles into his hands some more. “[Please], uhhh, [feed me some knowing.]”
“[More good than those human motherfuckers playing highblood, brother?]” Gamzee says, to Karkat. He always trails his chirrs and croons longer, but there’s a thrum under everything he says, now, and you can see Karkat shiver and untense a little just at the sound. “[Not for whole big room of pink aliens getting look at you on for know-eating, like those fake-highblood motherfuckers asked for, but one little (fang-flapped, you think, he probably means ‘smart-mouthed’, now doesn’t seem like the time to ask) brown motherfucker who’ll watch you get disemboweled/ripped open (benign ending???) for me? You like that?]”
“[Shut up,]” says Karkat, a harsh rattle of angry clicks.
“[No,]” says Gamzee, with a little fluting chirp on the end you think corresponds to the bright, too-cheerful tone you’ve taken before when another human made a demand you were delighted to ignore. Gamzee says, “[...All growl, motherfucker (diminuitive), no fangs.]” and Karkat growls at him and then looks deeply embarrassed and hunches up again when he realizes he’s proving the point.
Gamzee laughs and—oh, nuzzles down into Karkat’s shoulder to kiss the side of his neck. And then looks up at you to smile again.
Well, shit. It seems like you’re going to learn a lot of stuff today. But also, before that—
“...Somebody asked you to do a demonstration?” you say, because you just put that whole couple of sentences together in your head. Karkat wrinkles his nose at you, and you think through what you said and painstakingly simplify to, “Somebody asked if you would show them what moirails do, for everybody to look at?”
“Tttktk,” Karkat goes, in understanding, and grimaces, giving a derisive toss of his horns. “Yes. Stupid, shitty. I know they want to know, things to make— How trolls, tssss, shit. How we make another angry troll zzzhzh, so in case the, ss, empire? [Empress].”
“Empress?”
“Rreh, this. If the empress wants fight, kill you all, that shit, they want to know.” Karkat curls a lip, snorting—not derisively, really, but something like it. “It’s a shitty, stupid lie, telling ‘happy times and, ts, and learn about you trolls so we all hold onto hands and rub horns and you come and [(whatever the moirail equivalent of ‘fuck’ is)] your moirail for a whole fucking big lot of humans’! For learning and knowing! Not for killing you, no, not ever! Who, us?’!”
Gamzee rumbles a little, pretty clearly not tracking any of that and looking just as clearly displeased by the growly edge Karkat’s voice is taking on. “[Brother,]” he says, a clipped little disapproving click that cuts the word in half—bro—and opens his enormous, deep-sea creature mouthful of fangs to nip at the side of Karkat’s neck.
Karkat makes a sharper, more startled version of the chirping prrt noise and his pupils, which were starting to shrink to weirdly boxy, square little dots, blow right back out again.
“[More know-eating, less motherfucking rrrhrrr rhh,]” Gamzee says, and the hand that had gone slack on the base of Karkat’s throat slips up to take his chin instead, gripping firmly and pushing it up for you. Gamzee looks at you expectantly; you scoot closer, and Karkat growls as you get closer but it’s a thready, light noise from high up in his throat. You’re 80% sure that’s where show-growling comes from. Sure enough that you’re willing to gamble.
What if you just sort of…reach over?
Karkat twitches when your fingertips touch his neck; you can feel his pulse under his skin. It’s slate-grey all over, but the place he showed you on Gamzee’s neck is slowly fading in red, a much brighter, more vivid version of the faint ruddy flush on his ears and forehead. Gamzee nods, and you brush a thumb over it; you hadn’t realized the subcutaneous chitin made as much difference as it did, but the place without it feels as delicate as a baby’s pulse through the hole in their skull, a fast, jumping beat under your fingers. Karkat makes a noise you’ve never heard before and squeezes his eyes shut, as you pet your fingers over the weird, densely downy texture of his skin.
“Shhh,” you say, trying it out, and he flexes his claws, kneading at Gamzee’s knees like a cat—his claws are sharp enough you know you’d be wincing, but Gamzee doesn’t seem to notice.
“[You heard her,]” he says, and curls a claw alongside your fingers, scraping a tiny, razor-thin line of red across Karkat’s bare throat. “Zhhhhhzhh…”
“[Fuck,]” Karkat gasps, a thin, rattling click, and twists a little, tugging at Gamzee’s grip on him. Gamzee buzzes somewhere deep in his chest and grips harder, and Karkat goes still again, panting.
“[Now still scared has its motherfucking claws in you?]” Gamzee says, and you consider your options and then daringly slip your hand up and imitate the motion you saw on the TV a minute ago, stroking a hand up Karkat’s cheek and across his cheekbone. Karkat blinks at you, looking startled—when you repeat the motion, he mumble-clicks something you can’t make out and shivers, going a little looser in Gamzee’s grip, head lolling forward to press his cheek into your hand.
“What?” you say, and Gamzee laughs.
“[He says, your (palms?) are good and soft,]” he says. “[Thought I got you picked you rightly. She make you feel good (with some kind of twist or inflection you can’t catch), brother?]”
Karkat makes a noise you’re pretty sure doesn’t have words in it, and starts to turn his head, trying to take a ponderous snap in the direction of Gamzee’s cheek—you don’t mean to firm your grip, but you’ve wrangled Bec a lot of times when he was feeling nippy, and the instinct to catch him by the jaw is stronger than the instinct to jerk your hand away. Karkat makes a startled noise, and his eyes snap wide and stick on your face, then unfocus and soften, falling half-shut.
“Zzzeh,” Gamzee croons, and presses his face against the base of one nubby little horn, claws kneading with one big, thin hand over Karkat’s heart and one on his belly, slipped under his shirt. “[Shit but how this makes you so motherfucking pretty, brother.]”
“[Fuck,]” says Karkat, and blinks at you slowly; his pupils are blown out like a cat in a cute internet video and there’s a whole thin red line down the side of his throat now, from that spot under his jaw, down the lines of where the chitin plates under his skin are. You kind of want to dissect him. You kind of want to hug him like a lifesize plushy. You kind of want to imitate some of the moves the guy on screen is doing to the other guy’s horns.
A whole wealth of new information is waiting for you! You scoot closer on the couch, and dive on in.
–
Your name’s Dave Strider and your boyfriend’s getting busy in the other room while you eat Doritos.
Pretty sure you picked the right choice not sticking around; Gamzee seems to put up with your ass a lot better since whatever Karkat said to him when you got stabbed, but he sure the fuck does make a lot of eye contact and grin at you a lot, and you’re no Jade Harley but you know enough to know that’s troll-speak for come get some if you think you’re hard enough.
You’d kinda like to take him up on that, some time. But Karkat wouldn’t like it. So here you are, in the kitchen, eating Doritos and pretending not to keep your ears peeled for any noises from the next room over.
You don’t know exactly what you were expecting when you went over to your boyfriend’s house for movie night, but fourth- or fifth-wheeling in the kitchen while your other friend got “hey me and my cuddle-flavored dom saw you across the bar and we like your vibe”-d out of left field by your boyfriend was not the plan.
Not that you’re jealous, or anything. You’re pretty happy with the quadrant you’ve got, and Karkat’s huge scrawny goat-anglerfish boytoy can keep his claws out of your personal business. You’re just…not exactly wild about the fact that for some reason he’s decided he’d rather get up close and personal with Jade instead.
Rose and Kanaya are offering plenty of distraction, if by “distraction” you mean “just a different flavor of alien softcore”. Rose prematurely going full wine aunt hasn’t made her any better at imitating all the weird-ass chittering, rumbling, chirring noises that trolls make like they’re getting paid by the trill, but goddammit she’s trying, and apparently either she’s got the moves or Kanaya’s standards are low enough that it’s working. They’re practically in each other’s laps.
“Man,” says John, and reaches a hand right into your damn doritos. You don’t reach for a sword or flashstep into the nearest closet, because you’re not a kid and there’s plenty of food and it’s just a fuckin’ bag of Doritos—but you do just flick his hand out of the way and toss the bag into your other hand real quick, because—because they’re your damn Doritos, is why. He can get his own. John doesn’t seem to give a shit, anyway, because he never does—just laughs and reaches over to swipe his own bag of chips off the counter.
“So, uh,” he says. “Dad’s here to pick me up.”
You’d be lying if you said you didn’t feel kind of betrayed. Just a little. “Way to be a team player, Egbert,” you say, like a cool guy, not bothered, just giving him shit about it. “Leave me with the xeno hentai squad—”
“No, dipshit,” John says, cheerfully, and tries to kick you in the ankle, which he doesn’t manage, of course. “That’s what I’m saying. Nobody’s paying attention, they won’t care if we just get out of here. And if you’re around, you can get dad to take us through a drive-through instead of going—” he straightens an imaginary hat and puffs an imaginary pipe, frowning sternly. “Son, we have food at home, bluh bluh.”
…That does sound a hell of a lot better than hanging out here sulking and drinking beer.
“Sure,” you say, and John perks up and grins his stupid bucktooth grin and pulls his phone out to start tapping out a text. You do the same thing, not that Karkat’s going to be checking his text messages right now, probably—but ditching without saying anything seems like a dick move, no matter how much xeno funtime he’s having.
Rose and Kanaya have vanished in the two seconds you were talking. Great. Very cool. You crunch another Dorito, and shove your phone back into your pocket.
Mr Egbert doesn’t look surprised when you come out of Karkat’s house with John; he opens the car door for you even, like an old-timey chauffeur, and tips his hat at you.
“Hello again, son,” he says, at John, and gives him a big, fatherly hug that John struggles and complains about. Which you would too. For sure. Weird stuff. Yeah. “Are any of your other friends coming?”
You know you’re not the only one who has to bite your tongue real quick. John’s face goes all kinds of red. “Uh, no!” he says. “Nope! They’re all—”
“Asleep,” you say.
“Dead,” John says at the same time, like a fucking goober, and then groans and puts his face in his hands. “They’re not— They’re good! Everybody’s good. Let’s go.”
It’s weird. It’s chill. Being around humans again, and just humans. Mr Egbert’s just as much of a fuckin’ jokester as John is, and you can never tell exactly how much of what he says is him giving you shit and what’s for real, but as long as he keeps the burgers and fries and normal human shit coming, you’re not inclined to look a gift dad in the mouth.
“—Anyway, so I guess trolls get extra horny about like. Petting each other, it’s a whole kind of extra boyfriend,” John says, and takes a huge bite of his burger. “Mmf. Th’ve go’ so many bug noises ‘bout it! ‘N so much goo.”
“Common themes in the culture of the noble Locusta Astralis, I’m led to believe,” Mr Egbert says seriously. “Use your napkin, son.”
“Pale’s not the goo one,” you say, because you’d like to not think too much about what kinds of goo might be going on with Jade right now, wow. That’s a lot of shit you’re not down to tackle right now. “It’s the—here, fuckin’, lord of grease—”
“Bleh,” says John, and tries to smear his greasy face all over your hands. “Ha!”
“Boys.”
It’s a pretty mild stern fatherly disapproval, and you definitely feel real normal about it. And keep breathing and don’t flinch or—why would you. You’re good. John winces, but like it’s a joke, and finally swallows and swabs his greasepit face off. “Sorry, dad.”
“Mr Strider, please continue,” says his dad, and gives you a warm, polite smile that might be a little too gracious not to be a joke. Who the fuck knows, with these guys. “Pale…?”
“Yeah, so, anyway,” you say, and reach out to John’s face, aiming for the cheek instead of the smeary grease on his jaw. “Pale’s not about goo, it’s like. Uh. Shhzzzhhh. Shzhuh. Man, maybe they do have three throats. Uh, pat pat. Chill the fuck out, bro.”
“Oh, Mr Strider, my virtue!” says John, because he’s always down to play the joke, and swoons against the seat back. “I won’t go murder-nuts ever again! You manly stud!” He bounces back up, grinning, and reaches over like he’s trying to steal one of your fries. “Kinda like that.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, really does it for ‘em,” you say, and kick at John’s leg as he keeps going for your fries and chortling about it. “Knock it off, you little wiener—”
“You knock it off, dipshit!”
“Boys.”
“Sorry, dad!” John sighs and—tips three or four extra fries over into the pile on your lap. Like a peace offering. Like it’s no big deal—because it’s not, so, that’s cool. So that’s— Cool. It’s cool. “It’s kinda dumb, but the movies were pretty funny.”
“It sounds like a stirring friendship between two young people,” Mr Egbert says, totally straight-faced. “How admirable.”
“Bluh,” says John, rolling his eyes at you. “It’s weird alien stuff, dad, don’t be so—y’know, weird about it!” He snorts and eats one of his fries, then perks up and grins. “Oh hey Dave, you wanna sleep over? We never finished our Razor Racers tournament the other day.”
You do, actually. Mr Egbert makes the most fucking insane pancake breakfasts you’ve ever had, and his house is quiet and neat and chill and. Yeah.
“Yeah,” you say, and flick one of your fries back over in John’s direction so he can laugh and pop it in his mouth. “Why not.”
–
TC: hey sister.
TC: WHAT’S MOTHERFUCKING GOOD.
GG: hello?
GG: who is this?? oh my god is this a hangover? this is so much worse than a hangover XB
GG: uuuughhhhhh how did i even get home?
TC: HAHAHA HONK HONK.
TC: you got shocked motherfucker.
GG: uuughhghhhhh
TC: ;oD ;oD ;oD
–
CG: KANAYA.
CG: KANAYA WHY IS THERE LIPSTICK SMEARED ALL OVER MY RESPITEBLOCK.
CG: IN MY FUCKING RESPITEBLOCK?! YOU IMMODERATE BAG OF BULGES, I HAVE TO FUCKING SLEEP THERE!
CG: ALSO COME AND GET YOUR HEFTHOLSTER IT WAS BEHIND THE RECUPERACOON.
GA: Only If You Promise To Tell Me How Last Night Went
GA: Mister Quadrant Overflow
CG: DON’T FUCKING SPEAK TO ME. HOW DARE YOU LEVEL THAT KIND OF PRESUMPTUOUS
GA: Mister Empires Most Pappable
CG: I’M AFFRONTED YOU WOULD EVEN
GA: Mister Not Actually Hard To Get
CG: AND FURTHERMORE GO FUCK YOURSELF!!!!
GA: …
CG: UGH WHO THE FUCK AM I KIDDING I FEEL SPECTACULAR. HOLY SHIT.
GA: Spill
CG: BRING OVER ANOTHER BOTTLE OF NECTAR AND WE’LL SEE.
GA: Done
–
CG: YOUR FRIENDS ARE FINE.
CG: THEY SEEM FINE I MEAN, THEY’RE COOL. IF THEY EVER WANT TO COME OVER AGAIN.
CG: SHUT UP.
CG: <3
TG: lmao gay
CG: I’LL RAGE-PISS ON YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU HOLD DEAR.
TG: lmao also gay
CG: ):<B
TG: oh come on man what am i supposed to do when you make it so easy??
TG: spill my big squishy heart out all big <3s all over the damn place is that what you want from me man?
TG: next time we should have movie night just for us and you can get hauled off for macking on by a different quadrant that doesn’t have barracuda teeth is that what you wanted to hear??
TG: that im jealous or something of your wet and wild threesome action with gasmask the nightmare jester?
TG: well guess again bucko
CG: GOD MY TASTE IN MEN IS TERRIBLE. YOU’RE LUCKY I FEEL FUCKING PHENOMENAL TONIGHT.
CG: YEAH FINE, NEXT MOVIE NIGHT I’ll OFFLOAD GAMZEE SOMEWHERE AND WE CAN GROPE EACH OTHER’S DISGUSTING BODIES ON THE ELONGATED SEATING STUB LIKE WRIGGLERS TO WHATEVER ALIEN PORN YOU SQUISHY MAMMALS MANIPULATE YOUR BIZARRE GENITALS TO.
CG: NOW, I SAID <3 YOU FREAKISH SOFT-SHELLED BASTARD. JUST TYPE IT BACK ALREADY.
TG: …
TG: <3
CG: GOOD BOY.
TG: what
carcinoGeneticist [ CG] is an idle troll!
TG: hey wait