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Three whole years on this meteor sound like the endless, impotent whir of a timeless air-circulation system and a quiet, constant whooshing noise that you can never really get rid of. Silence is hard to come by around these parts, and generally speaking, you like it that way. It takes off some of the pressure to fill the dead space between the six of you with-- well, with whatever.
When you make the mistake of thinking about it, the crushing reality of spending some of your most formative years locked in an incestuous institutional nightmare of the same faces and the same drab walls day after day-- after endless fucking day because time has no meaning in this place, and it's almost like losing a sense you didn't even know you had-- seems like a serious developmental setback, until you realize that actually this is probably what high school is like for most people anyway. Congratulations Dave, you're experiencing disenchantment with your peers and your surroundings and a longing for some nonexistent "real world", although the reason why it fails to exist is a little different in your context-- in other words, something not completely unlike a normal human milestone.
Except for the part where pubescent trolls smell a lot worse than human teenagers, which is fucking saying something. That's just when you get close enough to smell them, which isn't as often as you thought it might be. Originally you had kinda thought that you and Terezi would be painting the walls of this place with psychedelic comics and handprints, whipping yourselves into a manic fervor and scrawling unintelligible sermons of the gospel of your own egos-- written on the walls instead of spoken aloud because your only Disciple is the Mayor, and that dude might be cool as hell but he isn't one for note-taking, he's more of an ideas guy-- in some sort of day-glo-infused extended hallucination-slash-fugue-state fueled solely by Baja Blast Mountain Dew (which was shockingly easy to alchemize) and an endless pile of Twizzlers. Yeah, you had thought that. Yeah.
Might've been nice.
Instead you're alone in what passes for the nutrition block, listening to that dull, endless whooshing noise that your brain barely registers except for the rare moments when it stops, just briefly, just long enough for you to get used to it being gone, before kicking back on and making you wonder how the hell you've been living with that much racket.
You think you've got a while to spend alone, just you and the ventilation system and a bowl of Froot Loops, but then Karkat stalks in, all limbs and matted hair and half-dead eyes, and he slumps into the chair next to you. Like, directly next to you, not across the room or even across the table. You'd shift a little to the left if you could get it up enough to care.
Just then, your old friend the air conditioner kicks off. At first it isn't so bad, because your cereal is still crunchy and the sound of it resonates through your head, but the moment you stop chewing, you can hear him breathing. Sometimes, when it's quiet like this, you can hear a high-pitched whistle or whine in a troll's breathing pattern, like they've got some kind of turbine way up high in their respiratory passages. Shit, maybe they do. You've never asked.
"You want?" You ask, nudging the cereal box in his direction, and he looks at you for a moment like he didn't realize you were even in the room. Then his expression shifts and he looks at you like you might look at a smear of dog shit you didn't know you were tracking across the carpet.
"That depends. What is 'froot'?"
"It's a mystery," you say shortly, not really in the mood to go off. Well... Then again, you reconsider your stance on going off. It hardly takes any effort these days anyway. "It's a legal loophole in a way, I guess. Okay, so check it, here's the deal. Froot is the cloying, sloshy inside of every Gusher and the elastic polymer that holds the Air Heads together. Froot is lovingly, chemically refined to trick you into thinking you're eating something that might have actual vitamins in it, but really it's just a carbo-blasted sugar bomb waiting to light up your nervous system like Tokyo after sunset. Froot is the MSG of the fruit world, a sleeper cell that seems inconspicuous enough until you realize that the quiet, unassuming fruit flavor that's been living two taste buds down the hall from you your entire life is actually an artificial spy, a fake, a phoney, to steal a line from my pal Holden. It's a lie, Karkat. A delicious fucking lie, brought to you by the same people who thought that the best idea in the world is to market the cheapest, least nutritious food to the population of humanity that probably needs wholesome food the most. Do you want some or not?" Yeah, talking shit was clearly the right choice. You could do this all day. You could do this for the rest of your lives.
Maybe one or even two years ago, Karkat's empty sigh that follows wouldn't have broken your heart a little bit. It makes you sick to think that you might actually pity him, but you don't have any other word for it. You definitely would never tell him that, because he's just the type of guy who invites reasons to believe that someone is hitting on him in some obscure quadrant that you couldn't give less of a shit about. Still, at some point along the way, it started bothering you when he did that, and not just because it was irritating in its obviousness. Possibly it was because he did it without venom these days, which was disconcerting to you in a subtle way. It was almost like a paradigm shift that you were sure Meant Something, but you had no idea what it could possibly mean.
"What?" you ask. You let go of your spoon and let it sit there in the bowl among the remaining Loops, which are probably getting soggier by the second. The smart thing to do would be to ignore him and keep eating, just keep the loud crunching up until the air comes back. And you're a smart dude, but you're also kind of an idiot. It nags at you.
"I don't know." He looks stretched and transparent, half-ghost, half-insomniac. It probably wasn't all that far from the truth, and the only evidence to the contrary was the fact that he definitely still had these jaundice-ass corneas and black irises with small flecks of red that had started gathering near the edges if you looked closely, which you suddenly realize is exactly what you're doing. Fortunately he isn't looking at you. He's staring intently at the Froot Loops box, which he grabs abruptly and rips open with his claws.
"Dude. There's-- it's just a tab at the top. Jesus, nevermind. Just go to town." Not that he's waiting for your permission or anything before he jams his hand in the plastic bag and brings up a handful of multicolored Loops, which he scarfs down dry.
At some point he must realize that you're staring at him with a look you usually reserve for when Rose pulls out a shockingly astute observation about your sexual proclivities that you had thought you'd kept pretty well hidden, sometimes to the point of not even being consciously aware of them. That is to say, you're giving him the look that comes out when you know you shouldn't be shocked by something, but somehow you still are. "What?" he asks, mocking you, and there's a bit of a growl to it near the back, which puts you at ease for some reason.
"You've got a Loop in your hair, dog." It's true. There's a blue one caught in a bit of matted hair near where his sideburns would be, if trolls had them. You resist the urge to pick it out.
"I do not," he quickly dismisses your comment and pulls another handful of cereal out of the bag. He's in such a hurry to get it down whatever passes for his stupid troll gullet that pieces of it fall out the corners of his mouth, collecting in his lap and on the metal slab floor like bits of confetti at the shittiest little birthday party that ever got thrown.
You rest your elbow on the table and your chin in your hand, your own bowl of Loops forgotten (probably for the best-- they're definitely soggy now), and you watch, rapt with attention, as the rainbow oat breakfast kibble apocalypse unfolds before you. Cereal dust collects on the sleeve of Karkat's sweater, painting it in muted pastel splotches, and the association tugs at something in your mind for half a second before it gets overwritten by the fact that Karkat literally has not only half a dozen more Loops in his hair than he did a moment ago, but also one on the tip of one of his horns.
You bite the inside of your cheek, but something starts to rumble low in your gut. It builds slowly, shivering up your torso, constricting your throat and making you set your jaw. Your whole body is wracked with the Herculean effort of containing the Vast Snort that wells up inside of you.
Fuck. This is not going to end well.
Something breaks, either your willpower or your expression or maybe just your ability to control your diaphragm, but suddenly you're laughing. You fill the room, the silence, the dead, empty, slightly smelly space between the two of you with deep belly laughs that feel like they're coming from as far down as your knees, scraping out your insides and leaving you husked and empty. It's a clean empty, though. It feels good. It goes on for so long that the tables turn, and instead of Karkat being the one engaging in a blindly self-absorbed and personal moment, you're the one forgetting where you are, who you're with. Nothing exists except the air being forced out of your lungs and the burning in your chest.
Shit, you needed that. You decide to say as much out loud. "Shit. I needed that."
Now Karkat is the one giving you a look, and it sorta suggests that you're the insane one in the room. "What the bulge-braiding, rumblesphere-twisting mother of fuck." The way he says it, it doesn't really sound like a question at all. Still, it seems to invite a response, so you pull out your iPhone and snap a picture. He's staring at you blankly, like he isn't quite sure what the phone even does, although he's seen you use it numerous times.
You pull up the photo from the camera roll and hand the phone over. "No. No, with your clean hand. The other one. Oh my god they're--" Both of his hands are covered in Manic Pixie Loop Dust. "Man, just take it." You shove the phone into his hands, reminding yourself to alchemize some Windex later to clean it off.
He stares at the photo for a minute as though he's never seen such wizardry, even though the dude has a fucking speaker crab wristwatch (god what an ugly piece of shit that thing is). Then he brings a hand up, knocking a few Loops loose from a particularly gnarly knot of hair near his temple. They clatter audibly on the floor in the unnerving silence. Happy fucking Birthday, they seem to be muttering in their dying moments before inevitably someone steps on them and grinds them to powder. Just more fodder for the insatiable pixie dust monster.
"Do trolls have birthdays? Actually, why am I even asking, I bet I can guess. What with all this corpse party bullshit, you probably have some kind of ritualistic birthday dirge that you sing to lament the passing of another arbitrary unit of time. I should ask someone who isn't under the psychoactive influence of that much sugar and red dye number 40." You're rambling idly, but Karkat isn't paying attention to you at all. He's combing through his hair-- as best as he can anyway-- with his fingers, massaging his scalp and sending bits of cereal flying. Jesus Christ, how did he even get that much up there? "You missed one," you say when he's done.
"Have I ever told you how amazing it is when you talk out of your waste chute instead of doing anything helpful like telling me where the errant piece of sugar-infused puffed seed product might be? I get this cheap thrill somewhere near my pity gland when you start spewing such pointless, vapid observations that you obviously pulled out of your nook instead of your thinkpan. It would literally be the best thing in all of paradox space if you could just continue exactly what you're doing, right this moment, so that I can extend this near-erotic high for as long as possible. God knows I could use an excuse to fondle myself." His rant isn't backed by the same bite, the same passion, that it used to be. Honestly, he kind of sounds like you right now. Like he's trying so hard to care about what he's saying, but he just can't, so the words keep coming of their own accord.
Instead of replying, you succumb to the urge to pluck the remaining Loop off of the tip of his horn. This seems to startle him, to the point where he actually opens his hand when you grab his wrist to deposit the Loop in his palm.
He clenches his fist when you sit back in your chair, crushing the Loop to dust and then letting it sift between his fingers, into his lap. Then, a strange thing happens. You hear a noise, something like the whinnying of a horse, coming from Karkat's chest. It's quiet at first but it gets louder, sharper, more shrill. Jesus fucking Christ, what is even happening right now? Is he having an asthma attack? Do trolls even have asthma? Is that a thing? They probably call it something stupid like Self Imposed Defense System Inflammation Of The Upper Breathing Tunnel Portion Of The Wind Bladders or something like that.
"Holy shit, are you okay?" you ask when Karkat bends over, resting his forearms on his knees and facing the ground. His eyes are closed and his face is bright scarlet, contorted in some unreadable expression, but he waves a hand at you silently as his body shudders and the noise gets louder.
Then it hits you.
Karkat is laughing. This is what troll laughter sounds like. You realize you've never actually heard it before, especially since Terezi never really laughed when you hung out. She giggled in this weird way where she actually seemed to literally be saying H3H3H3H3 all the time. But Karkat is… fuck. There's no mistaking it, no matter how alien and obscene it sounds.
You have absolutely no idea how to react to this, so you start laughing too. You're still pretty husked out, but he just looks so ridiculous that you dig deep down and find a few spare chuckles left tucked away in the corners. He comes down from it slowly, the horse whinnying slowing down to something like an alligator with a bad cough, and from there to this soft, slow wheezing.
When he finally sits back up straight, his face is even brighter scarlet than before, but his eyes are soft. Relaxed instead of fried, for the first time in-- actually you don't know if you've ever seen Karkat without eyes riddled with red and lined with dark, tired grey. While you're considering this, he looks over at you, and you make eye contact for a brief moment before the momentarily relaxed atmosphere breaks and shatters, forcing the both of you to rapidly avert your gaze. Wow, something very fucking interesting is happening over in the vicinity of the thermal hull all of a sudden. Wouldn't wanna miss this.
You drum your fingernails on the table, knowing it betrays your thoughts but unable to stop yourself from doing it. Similarly, his feet start to shift across the metal floor, sneakers loudly grinding stray Loops into powder. You think about saying something-- anything, really-- and he opens his mouth and takes a breath like maybe he's going to speak too, but before he can, something happens. The air circulation engine starts up again, filling the room with a neutral but barren white noise and filling the space between you with Void and the palpable stench of a missed opportunity.
You might have said something, perhaps something to loop this whole thing around to the beginning, when you were thinking aimlessly and a little pathetically about your earlier fantasies of painting the walls bright, garish colors with someone else, someone the both of you had lost in different but also similar ways, and how instead you're sitting here dusting the floor with pastel fairy oat powder with the person you least expected to be spending the bulk of your time with, but the moment is gone. The longer you sit here, the truer it is, so you stand up. Immediately he stands up too, his knees bumping into yours on the way up like he was just waiting for you to move so that he could jet out the door.
You point at one door silently, all like yep im totally gonna go this way please dont follow me because that would be awkward as hell, and he gestures at the other door just as pointedly, his eyebrows pulling together in the middle of his face, before turning his back to you. You think he hurries out as quickly as possible, but to be honest you have no fucking clue because you're hauling ass in the other direction.
Your sneakers clap loudly in the hallway, the only counterpoint to the endless, timeless background noise just like the endless, timeless everything else about this miserable fucking journey. You had a moment there, you guess. A moment where you didn't feel tired and apathetic, and maybe you even felt a little good. You stuff your hands in your pockets and remember your phone, which you pull out, welcoming a distraction, but when you unlock the screen all you see is that fucking picture of Karkat's startled face, hair riddled with cereal. His eyes are so wide that they seem to take up half of his face, and the resolution is so crisp that you can see the red flecks in his irises. God damn.
One last chuckle rises to the surface as your blank expression breaks into a reluctant smile. Okay. So this was progress. About fucking time.