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You are ABSOLUTELY FUCKING EXHAUSTED. You, as in, KARKAT VANTAS, the non-god-tiered KNIGHT OF BLOOD. How the fuck did your session lack blood; that is so stupid, so frond-blendingly stupid, you want to scream. Lots of things make you want to scream. It has been A FEW HUMAN MONTHS since the end of your session. You are ON THE FLOOR.
You think on it, and suppose your session didn’t lack real blood, but moreover the binding aspect of blood - the unity, the cohesion, look, you aren’t an idiot by any means and you understand that your session merely lacked metaphorical blood but it still sounds fucking stupid! And you didn’t even god-tier.
You didn’t even GOD-TIER!
You scream loudly into the floor - the floor that you are on.
Dave god-tiered, that smug jack-ass, and how he even managed it is a mystery to you. He probably just stumbled into it ass-backward. Ugh, and he’d probably admit it, too! That’s something else you hate about him. Really, you hate everything about him.
He’s so annoying, and you’re pretty sure he knows it. He’s probably enjoying every second of disdain your bleeding thought-sponge spews out of your gaping trashophagus. And that understanding just makes you hate him more! Which just makes him more of a smug, shit-eating douchenozzle! Ugh!
And this is just the tip of the ice-berg. There’s those stupid fucking shades he never takes off, and his fuckass ‘irony’ that he never shuts up about, and all that redrom hoofcrap with Terezi - which, honestly, is the main reason he’s still rattling around in your ideaglobe.
Those two have been spending so much time together it makes you want to throw up. If Dave’s neurons could finally have one successful synapse jump; if he could just accept that Troll culture is different to his own, maybe then this wouldn’t sting so badly. He can have her in red, fine, but black? Black?! He can’t even try to be pitch with her, he’s incapable, inept! And granted, you’re not all that pitch for Terezi, but you fucking could be! You COULD BE, GOD DAMMIT! HE COULDN’T!
But it’s not just Dave, and it’s stupid to say it is. Really, what were you thinking, getting so hung up on him? He’s as important as the dust that is your homeworld. That is to say, completely unimportant, because the planet is dead and gone, and not incredibly important as it may once have been; hang on, don’t misconstrue your own thoughts, fuck, FUCK, GOD, STOP THINKING! STOP FUCKING THINKING ABOUT DAVE STRIDER!
> STOP THINKING ABOUT DAVE STRIDER.
You cannot stop thinking about Dave Strider. This makes you scream. You are now screaming into the ground like you’re mentally challenged, which you are, because you’re screaming into the ground.
“Yo.”
Your reaction to the sudden intrusion of sound upon your poor, violated hear ducts is much like the screech of a dying mother-grub - visceral and full of grief. The man responsible?
“Fuck off and die.” You declare, rationally.
Dave turntechGod-FLARPer Strider has joined the pity party.
“Can’t.”
“Then I’ll kill you.”
“Won’t be just, won’t be heroic, sorry dude, no dice.”
You’re silent for a moment as your face contorts. Just where in paradox space did he get those made-up conditions from? Is that how it works? Being a god? Just making shit up to justify your own godhood? Some unending joint roleplay of one-upmanship? Nuh-uh, you can’t kill me, it wasn’t good enough?! Oh, bullshit! His death would be as just as The Condesce’s great banishment! You nearly say as much - but on second thought, you don’t even want to indulge him. You’re not in the mood.
“Fuck you.”
“Gross, man, no way. I really don’t need to know what’s in your pants.”
Ew. What? Ew. Ew. Rather than continuing to indulge whatever-the-fuck that line of conversation is gearing up to be, you instead do the mature thing and groan loudly into the concrete. That seems to shut him up for a second. Thank fuck, peace. It’s glorious. Maybe in a second he’ll finally leave and– Wait, what the fuck is he doing?
You hear footsteps approaching you, and you groan louder.
“Strider, I am not in the mood.” You offer, diplomatically.
“Good, cuz I wasn’t tryina reverse-psychology you into getting down and dirty with me - that wasn’t irony,” He suavely continues, “My body is a certified troll-free zone, dude, no bulges allowed.”
Imbecile.
“Oh, fuck off!”
“Nah, gotta talk to you.”
Ugh, what a nookhuffing time-waster. Or, not nookhuffing, based on those prejudiced, xenophobic views of troll anatomy. The words of Skaia’s very own Asshole of Time ring in your auricular sponge clots like tinnitus.
You remove your face from the concrete, peering skeptically at the ignoramus dope with his shades on like a developmentally stunted 8-sweep-old hipsturderer. (1)
(IT’S A FOOTNOTE FOR THOSE OF YOU TOO IGNORANT TO PICK UP ON THE NUANCES OF TROLL VOCABULARY. THANK ME LATER.)
“Talk to someone else!”
“It has to be you, dude.”
“No the fuck it doesn’t!” And you stand up.
And he lies down.
“What are you doing.” You say; it comes out of your snark tunnel before you can stop yourself, and it comes out more like a statement than a question.
“Can’t a guy lay on some concrete once in a while?” Dave asks, turning his face to you slowly like he’s whacked out on slackerplant. (2) (YEAH, ANOTHER ONE. START SCROLLING.)
“You look like a dumbass.”
“You were literally just here. You’re the OG dumbass, I’m the 2000’s instant-classic reboot that won the culture war. Like Christopher Nolan’s Batman, dude, I’m Heath Ledger’s Joker, you’re Jack Nicholson.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Nah,” He looks at the ceiling, absently, “Scratch that, I’m not gonna go down in the history of paradox space as that asshole who called himself Heath Ledger’s The Joker, that’s lame as hell.”
“Dave, what the shit? What does any of this fucking mean?!”
“See, now you want me to talk. Like it or not, we’re all aboard the Strider express, choo fuckin’ choo,” You stare with disdain at the piece of shit in front of you. “Please remain seated while the train is moving ladies and gentlemen, we’re gonna be stopping briefly in jokeburg before cruising straight through angertown and into discussionville.”
You don’t blink. You stare harder.
You’re both quiet for a moment.
“Jeez man, give me something. Like, a frown, o–”
“I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR IMBECILIC TRAIN STOPPING AT A CLUSTERFUCK OF NON-EXISTENT LOCATIONS! LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!”
With that, you storm off. What a prick! The way he always babbles an endless string of cocky, self-aggrandizing wordplay like he’s the hottest shit in the room; like he’s got any more credentials than being barely six sweeps old and slightly more attractive than the average guy. Or, at least, that’s what he must think, because you do not find his pink, fleshy meat-sack attractive in the slightest. Your body tenses at the thought, obviously a physical reaction to such a heinous possibility. It’s not a possibility. SHUT UP! You reach to slam the door, but-
“It’s about Terezi.”
Dave blurts it out quickly, all at once. His register is lighter; his voice higher and urgent. You stop.
“And—” He stalls. “Quadrants.”
The word makes you straighten your back like you’ve just gotten a knock from an Imperial Drone.
You turn around, slowly. He's up, facing you.
“What about them?”
Dave is looking at you with hesitance. Those shades don’t hide much in the way of nerves - it pains you to admit it, but a lot of Dave’s chill demeanour is in the control of his body language. You’d call him much more of a faker if he wasn’t so suave with it. Now would be the perfect time to stick it to his dumb face, but…
“Uh, black rom?”
You feel the tendrils of PITY creeping around your well-defined HATE. You groan loudly. God-fucking dammit, must he always appeal to your stupidity? Your eyes narrow in suspicion.
“Let me get this straight, Strider. You want to enter a kismesis with–”
“No, no, she– Uh… I think she’s… in, one?”
Your pupils blow out. Your mouth gapes.
“WHAT?”
Dave winces. “Dude, close the fucking door if you’re gonna scream, this whole meteor uses you as an alarm clock.”
You scoff at him. (And then close the door.)
As you turn back around, you consider what advice you can give here. He’s a human. He’s Dave fucking Strider. And he’s a prick! What advice do you give to the object of your hatred - in a totally non-pitch way, get your think-pan out of the gutter - fuck, what were you thinking about? Dave, pitch romance– Oh, FUCK! TEREZI’S PITCH ROMANCE! You insolent shit sponge, you were giving advice! Ugh! You look towards Dave and–
“With, uh, Makara.”
WHAT. THE. “FUCK!”
That can’t be true. Your eyes angle downwards to the floor, horrified, with your expression-wrigglers knitting above them in mirrored confusion. Your cranium is imploding under the ginormous pressure of your actively collapsing idea secreter. Your moirail is waxing pitch with the woeful subject of your vacillating advances and your world is ending twice in a row. Fuck. Fuck!
“FUCK!!!”
Your pupils are pinpricks as you look back at Dave. He snickers. You barely even notice; your lips move before you can give the words any thought and your palm-pads come up to your temples in horror.
“HOW COULD I NOT HAVE SEEN THIS COMING?” You question aloud, frenzied, “HOW COULD I HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? WHAT THE FUCK? ARE YOU LYING?”
“Not lying.”
“FUCK YOU!”
“Dude–”
“NO!” You cut him off, prongs falling to the front of you in a defensive stance, “STRIDER, YOU HAVE TO BE LYING. THIS BLACKROM IS HORSESHIT AND YOU KNOW IT. THIS IS HOT GARBAGE ONLY AN ILL EDUCATED HUMAN LIKE YOURSELF COULD COME UP WITH–”
“Dude!”
You’re cut off from your hysterical ravings by Dave’s slightly raised tone. Immediately, you shut up. You don’t know why. You definitely know why, actually, but fuck off, you’d much rather continue the conversation than monologue needlessly to yourself about how quickly you respond to this asswipe’s social cues.
“Why the hell would I make this up?”
Easy.
“Because you’re a solipsistic lumpwringer who takes personal joy in my suffering and pain, that’s why!” You assert, crossing your torsal appendages with especially pronounced aggravation.
Dave is silent for a moment. One second, two; you watch each other intently in the aftermath of your outburst. At four, his face crinkles with annoyance, and at five, he sighs and looks away.
“What?” You pry, the insecure bastard that you are, “WHAT?!”
“Look,” He looks back to you, “I’m not gonna lie to you, you’re pretty funny when you’re talking about dumb quadrant shit,” And even though it’s obvious there’s more to this sentence, you don’t want to hear it.
“So you DO just want to–”
“Dude can you just do me a really big favor and shut the fuck up for like, 15 seconds?”
You grit your teeth and stare.
“Great. I don’t have a hate boner for you, or for anyone, actually, that’s the problem. That fucked up, schizophrenic dating schedule you tried to make–”
“Hang on a fucking second, just because you can’t fathom possibilities of–”
He holds his prongs out, palm up. “9.7 seconds to go man, stay with me,” Ugh, “Yeah I’d take the schedule - she talks about him like she wants to rip open his corpse, and at first I didn’t really give a shit but now I’m–” He falters slightly, “I’m starting to feel really fucking weird about this whole sexed up hate thing. That, for the record, is already really fucking weird.”
You’re quiet for a moment. So is he. Then…
“‘Went over by two, but…”
Ugh. “... Gamzee.”
“Yeah.”
“Gamzee. Makara. And Terezi Pyrope.”
“And Dave Strider, all starring in the hit new musical ‘Phantom of the Meteor’. But like, Gamzee is the fuckin’, Phantom, and I’m the, uhhh…”
Your muscles relax slightly as you offer, against your will: “Raoul?”
“Raoul, that dude, her man, yeah.”
You snort, but quickly scowl to cover it up. Your endlessly spewing opinion flap barks loudly in an effort to out-trivia Dave Strider.
“This is nothing like Phantom. For starters, I would be a much more fitting candidate for Raoul than you. Christine and Raoul were friends since they were wigglers.”
“Nah, I’m totally Raoul,” He defends, “Creepy guy in the vents is trying to get with the girl I’m dating and the worst part is I feel like the weirdo.”
You snicker. Fuck, no hiding that one. You feel a violent desperation to change the topic away from musical theatre.
“Fine, whatever,” You look to the side, feeling your vile mutant blood begin to bubble hotly against your facial skin sacks, “What do you even want me to do? I can’t pull her out of a quadrant just because you don’t like how troll romance works.”
Despite his admittedly impressive musical knowledge, Dave must be a true ignoramus to not understand how important caliginous romance is to troll culture. Sure, even if it can be a bit uncomfortable to stay at someone’s throat at all times, or if the searing hate you’re meant to feel for your kismesis unconditionally actually comes and goes and doesn’t ever seem to stick around long enough for you to feel secure about it – that’s just how the system works. How it’s intended to work.
Vacillation is the way around it, and Dave had flat out refused to try it when he’d been given the chance. Now, here he is, still unwilling to compromise like a stubborn bullbeast caught between migration routes. Compromise is all you’ve ever known when it comes to romance. Why does he get to complain about it like a little bitch?!
“I don’t know.”
Oh. Huh.
What?
“What? Then why–”
“I just wanted someone to talk to.”
You make some kind of uncomfortable noise. It catches in the back of your throat, and you don’t have the words to recover. This doesn’t make sense. He starts pacing.
“I tried talking to Rose about it, but she doesn’t have to deal with that shit. Kanaya is down bad, don’t ask me what that means, I don’t really know either, anyway, the important part is that Rose is never gonna have to deal with this and she can’t help. She just can’t.”
You go to open your mouth, but he’s barrelling through his words and you know that whatever you want to say isn’t actually that important.
“Kanaya… couldn’t give me advice. And I’m not talking to Makara, I haven’t seen that guy– ever, actually? I don’t even know what I’d say to him, he’s Patrick Bateman with a clown fixation.”
You ignore the last comment you can’t decipher, and try to offer something.
“So why don’t you–”
“Because we’re not a thing,” He stresses, facing you, words uncomfortably heavy, “We’re a thing that isn’t really happening because neither of us really want to– Or know how to- call it… anything. It’s nothing. So, it’s… Nothing.”
You can’t look at him anymore. Your thoughts drift back to how you and Terezi were before the game. It wasn’t clear how she was waxing for you, or maybe it was, but you were psychotically obsessed with making the relationship fit into a quadrant you weren’t even sure about. Nothing ever happened. Nothing good enough. You lost her.
“You had something with her, I think, and I dunno, man. I just…”
You sigh. You feel like you owe him a candid response, even if it makes you want to vomit.
“It’s stupid to ask me when whatever I was doing obviously didn’t work.”
He laughs, barely smiling. You want to punch him in the face.
“Okay, you pompous piece of shit, don’t ask me to talk if that’s how you’re going to react!”
He talks over you; laughs over you. He looks to the side as though you can see through his shades to his eyes - you can’t. You want to.
“No, no- no, no, that’s, uh, the reason I asked you.”
“To mock me?!” The words feel wrong when they come out. Needlessly defensive and cowardly like you always are when it comes to your feelings.
“Haha, no dude, because you’re over it.”
“What?”
You are not over Terezi. You are fucking perplexed, drowning in glorious humiliation at the idea of admitting this to the man in front of you. Even weirder, this seems to comfort him, like–
Oh.
“Wait, wait,” The words shoot from your mouth like bullets, “Are you trying to get over her?”
Dave is quiet for a moment, mouth open like he’s about to speak but with nothing coming out. He errs.
“I guess?”
Now you’re both quiet. Fuck, this is awkward. You need to fill the silence, but with what? Congratulations, join the club, it never gets better?
“Look,” Oh thank fuck, he’s talking, “If she wants to get down with the clown and exit stage right from Can Town that’s… That’s all good, I just, can’t do that.”
You swallow. You feel disturbingly guilty. No less than five minutes ago you were spiralling into psychosis about this jackass’s ‘successful’ relationship with Terezi - paradox space is undoubtedly fucking with you. And now you’re just staring at him like he’s eaten your lusus. Good job, shit stain, way to make the situation worse!
“Uh,” What the fuck are you even trying to say? You really need to cull yourself, “Yeah…” NOW, DO IT NOW, JUST SLAM YOUR HEAD INTO THE WALL, “Shit.”
He smiles at you.
“Shit.”
You realise that you’ve never seen him smile before. Not like that, anyway. It fades as quick as it appears, replaced by something disgruntled.
“And I can’t just, like, ghost her. That’s shitty.”
You don’t respond immediately. This is probably the quietest you’ve been around him - a notion that makes your skin crawl with embarrassment you can’t quite place.
“Well,” You finally say, “Sometimes you just drift apart. And you don’t actually have to…”
When you’d first met Terezi, you felt like you’d finally understood the quadrant system. Not like you hadn’t studied it ruthlessly beforehand, but in practice, it made so much more sense. Or at least, it did initially. You quickly realised you weren’t wired right when it came to expressing those feelings. Every flushed advance was taken as caliginous, and every attempt to steel yourself into kismesis was side-tracked by your inability to hold pitch for more than a week. You fucked it. You really fucked it. More than you’d ever thought was possible, which is saying something, because you know that you are capable of fucking shit up to truely depressing degrees.
Now, you two barely talk. Whatever you had burnt up like Skaia, your planet, and your life. You’d lost her to Dave. Or, apparently, to Gamzee. And in retrospect, your anger was possibly a bit misdirected. It was never about Dave, or Gamzee, or even Terezi herself. Just about your pathetic inability to navigate the system you claim to know so much about.
You never had to tell her that you thought things were going wrong.
You never told her they were going right in the first place.
“Oh, shit.” Fuck. “No, I mean, like, I get it?” How much time did you waste self-pitying? Fuck!
You look back up - despite not knowing when you’d started looking down - and give Dave a half-affirmative half-judgemental look.
“Okay, I don’t- get it, get it, but…”
“No, it’s fine.”
It’s quiet again. He’s studying you, just like you’re studying him. Your anger has entirely dissipated, and has been replaced with…
You’re not really sure.
“So you’re not–”
“No.”
You tried to clarify, but shut him down instead. Wow, this fucking sucks. You’re both quiet for a moment, until you see him start to smile again.
“Uh, check-mate, liberal?”
Huh? “What the fuck does that even mean?”
“I…” Dave exhales through his nose bemused, “I… actually don’t really know. Look, it’s like, a future-other-timeline-universe thing,” He dismisses, waving his prongs around like he’s lost control of his limbs, “I just know it, dude, okay, it’s a sick ironic diss, like, and, I’m not a Seer or anything but I know my shit, so like, why are you getting all up on my cultural references?”
You stare, agape. “Because I’m not from your culture, dipshit?”
He snorts.
You do too.
Dave might be funny.
“Check-mate, lib–”
“Oh shut up!”
Or not.
(1) Portmanteau of the nouns ‘hipster’ and ‘murderer’: a subculture group consisting primarily of young, flannel-donning young-adult trolls who claim to be unique and authentic, but actually adhere to the commodification of subculture itself. They also kill people, but they’ll tell you all about how ironic it is that they’re doing it in Alternia’s current social climate!
(2) Weed; Pot; Cannabis; Mary Jane; Wacky Tobaccy; Etcetera.