Chapter Text
Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are determined to be a good moirail. And being a good moirail sometimes means that you have to stay strong in unstable conditions for your unstable clown, and even though that doesn’t mean “ignore circumstances completely”, for the purposes of today you will pretend it does. (You are very good at that; pretending, for example, that you aren’t a hideous mutant deserving to be culled, or pretending you’re a competent leader, or pretending that your angry words actually have any effect at all.)
For today, you will pretend that there is fond mocking coming from all directions, as there would be if all was well and normal, voices going “You haven’t even had your first pile yet? Wow, disgraceful!” or “Time to put all those romcoms into practice, eh?” You will pretend to be disgruntled, reluctant, giving in to those voices, because all your friends who are still alive and near you are too busy with various emotional problems of their own. You will, in following their suggestions, gather up the necessary ingredients for a non-disaster First Pile: piling materials that aren’t fucking horns; your elusive, potentially-still-feeling-murderous moirail; yourself, slightly less falling-apart than usual; and a place where you won’t be disturbed by nosy humans or revenge-bent jadebloods with chainsaws.
You will take a moment to compose yourself in the corner of a spare block, because unlike some of your friends, you don’t actually hear any voices and you don’t wish you do - you wish they were all alive and here and, well, while you’re wishing futilely, what you really want is to go back home.
By the time you’ve gathered most of the things on your list, an hour has passed and you have no clue where Gamzee is. The last time you saw him was three days ago, because Kanaya has taken to pacing the hallways to avoid Rose, and he’s already flinchy enough as it is. You don’t want to wander the meteor looking for him, because you don’t want to bump into anyone else yourself.
You sit on your mostly-pillow pile and wait.
Another half-hour passes, and you discover through shifting impatiently that a spare horn managed to make its way in here anyway, and you are pretty much done with the entire endeavor when a honk echoes from somewhere down the hall.
Footsteps, too. You peek out around the door frame and oh, shit, of course it has to be Kanaya. She’s the only one actively moving at any given time, so it’s only reasonable, but seeing her tense back heading in the same direction of the honk does not exactly bode well for you.
She doesn’t open closed doors, though, so if you can somehow get Gamzee in here without her noticing - there’s a vent opening in the room, but how would he know to come this way…?
Aw, fuck. You sigh, turn and close the door, and rummage through the pile for that horn.
Honk.
You know from experience that following honks around on the meteor doesn’t get you anywhere, and Kanaya isn’t so eager to see Gamzee to potentially intrude on you or Terezi or either of the humans. And so it is that a few minutes later the footsteps are gone and a hesitant painted face emerges from the wall.
“Hey, brother.” He starts off quiet, and unreadable, and nothing like the troll you knew who would message you every single night to tell you he’d nearly exploded himself again, or he’d found an interesting colour of shell, or some other bullshit you rarely tried to understand. “Are we all getting our motherfucking pale on at in this block? Up and proper-like,” he comments, noticing the pile.
“Yeah,” is all you say in response. He curls himself out into the open, arms tumbling over legs and horns and landing somehow neatly, sitting next to the pile. He looks at you. He looks at the pile. You notice the scars on his face all over again, and gulp when you remember who they’re from. His fingers are so underwhelming, though, claws gnawed to ragged ends and knuckles sticking out awkwardly, that you can’t quite bring yourself to reconcile them with the two corpses lying in some other block.
“Yeah,” you repeat, and take him by the hand to pull him into the pile, and when he smiles at you through his clown-paint mask and you still can’t read him, you desperately hope you aren’t making some kind of mistake.