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Who: Karkat & YOU
Where: An ASSORTMENT OF PLACES (see below)
When: Backdated a few in-game days, I think, but pretty much any time between then anddd let's say Valentine's Day
What: getchur Karkat here, assorted
Warnings: almost definitely imaginative swearing

It takes a couple of days after CONDOR agrees that housing Feferi alongside Sollux and Karkat in the West Coast Trailblazers' HQ was the best option – someone with her political value against the Alternian Empire's current regime is definitely best kept where they could see her – for Karkat has finally accept in his heart that yes, he can leave both of them unsupervised for long stretches of time. Feferi might be extremely weird and in need of some ... gentle guidance, when it comes to Earth customs, but she isn't about to go on any kind of weird amnesiac rampage or get horribly lost or accidentally hurt civilians or something, and with her around neither is Sollux.

It is a massive weight off his thorax: Sollux's recovery is no longer his responsibility. While he's not enough of an asshole to just totally leave all of this in Feferi's hands now that she's here to take it, he knows she's way more comfortable taking that kind of role with Sollux than he is. That's not the kind of friendship he and Karkat have – and it's certainly not the kind of friendship he wants them to have. And he hopes with Sollux's matesprit around it won't be so long before they can go back to comfortable bickering and shit flinging, like they used to.

For now, though – and the 'now' here spans a couple of weeks, at least – he is just appreciating the fact that he's more free to do whatever without worrying about whether his best friend is OK without him than he has been for the last couple of months.

He ends up going outside a lot more than he usually would, just because he can, so if you are a member of the public you may spot him slouching down the street, or maybe a park, with as much of a spring in his step as he ever has, as if it's never occurred to him before to explore – or in a shop, perhaps your shop if you work in one (u kno who u r), probably looking kind of disdainful or disapproving about whatever it's selling, as a default, in spite of his mostly good mood.

(He's always in civvies, of course, because he is not allowed to fight crime on his own. He's usually wearing sunglasses when he's outside, though, which isn't wholly uncommon for Alternians in the daytime – Earth's sun is a lot less dangerous than Alternia's, but his species is nocturnal by habit and somewhere as sunny as LA can be a bit much. Honestly Karkat would be pretty OK with it by now, he's had a lot of time to adjust, but the arrival of his old friends has reminded him that he needs to keep his identity secret for a reason, and the sunshine serves as a convenient excuse.)

He certainly isn't spending all of his time outside, but he is in general spending more time out of his room. Fellow Trailblazers may find him sat on the floor by the TV, re-categorising his small but steadily growing collection of Earth movies (almost exclusively romance, of course), practising with his sickles in the gym, or, if they are unlucky, cooking something that smells completely and utterly awful. He seems in a good mood, if perhaps sort of thoughtful. He may even smile at you.

(IF your character would not actually approach Karkat under any circumstances suggested here but you would like a thread, feel free to just throw in a tag of them going about whatever they're goin about, and as long as it takes place either where Karkat lives or somewhere public I will find some reason for him to get up in your business, deliberately or not.)

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"– No," he says insistently. "No, bullshit – it's not stupid." He frowns, hesitates. "... Sometimes I want to stay here too."

She closes her eyes and exhales slowly. She wants to be calmed than she is, but she can't seem to stop from going down this path.

"Would you be leaving anyone behind if you did?" she asks. Though it's obviously loaded, it's genuine too. Maybe he would be.

"Only like a shit ton of people who think I'm the second coming of troll Jesus," Karkat mutters. He's quiet after that, though, thinking about it, and not for the first time – about the friends who left with him, and the ones who didn't, and how he knows where two of them are now, but that's only two. The others...

"... Most of my actual god damn friends left with me, and I lost them, so who the hell knows. But I –" He breaks off, and frowns, at the floor. For a moment he bites his lip. Then, not looking at Katniss, he admits, "I think if I go back and we overthrow the corrupting regime and all that shit then... they can come home. But then, fuck, I don't even know if it'll still be home if we overthrow it, right?"

"...I guess that would depend on what made it home in the first place," she says. It could be hard to imagine what life would be like without the Capitol. That's probably why she had never actually been that good of a revolutionary. She mostly just wanted people to stop dying.

"... I dunno," says Karkat. He's silent for a moment, but then he lets a fist fall against the wall with a dull thud and mutters, "Fuck. Who am I even joking. I want it to be the same as when I lived there but I'd just be dead. We'd all be dead. Whole point of the entire place was just fucking each other over and I miss it because I'm a moron."

She finally turns around, looking at him over her shoulder. The anger from before has mostly left - she's increasingly thoughtful, now. Maybe a little bit gentler.

"Why do you miss it?" she asks. "Do you even know?"

She misses her home, but she doesn't miss life in the districts. It's hard to articulate what the differences between the two are.

He looks up at her in slight confusion. Why wouldn't he miss it?

"You miss the future, right?" he replies, but he's thinking about it, now.

"Not really," she says. "I miss my family. My friends. The ones I managed to keep, anyway." She wets her lips uncomfortably. "I miss hunting with Gale before all of this started. But...I don't miss the fact that we had to hunt because otherwise the Capitol would have let our families starve to death. Or that everything we knew could be wiped out so quickly as soon as we outlived our welcome."

She looks up at him again, after having let her gaze wander.

"That's the difference, isn't it? I miss the things I had in between everything else. But if it kept on going the same way that they always had...the worst part was how easily they could take those things away from me."

His ears fold back, and he nods.

"... Right," he says. His mouth feels dry. What does he miss? He misses – culture. He misses feeling like he belonged – no, that's bullshit. He misses pretending he belonged. He misses knowing all the rules for how things were supposed to go so he could follow them slavishly in the hope of living up to something he intrinsically could not be. He misses movies and games that told him that he and half of the people he cared about were expendable at best. He misses it and he's scared of the fact that it needs to be destroyed.

What a jackass, he thinks miserably, but that doesn't make it go away – the feeling that if he could he wouldn't make everything okay for everyone, he'd just make himself normal. He feels kind of sick.

"So..." He stares at his shoes. "... Not worth it, right."

"Right," she says, after a beat. She falls silent for another few moments. "...Is it really that different on Alternia?"

He shrugs, slowly. "Well... yeah. Everything on Earth is... not soft, feeling, you know, to touch, and your adults live with your children, and human blood is all the same colour and nobody lives past like forty Alternian solar sweeps, and your grasp of romance is backwards and inept, and you don't have any horns, and you're all... kind to each other."

Katniss exhales sharply - something that would almost be a sneer if she could bring herself to be cruel over this.

"No we're not," she says.

Karkat tucks his ears back a little guiltily and says, "Yeah, okay, I know you're all not. But it's like the default with you guys, right."

Karkat's logic here is confusing to her, but she's genuinely trying to understand, so she keeps the sass to a minimum.

"And that's something you don't like?" she clarifies.

"No – no," he replies, "it's not – it's just different. I don't know."

"But wouldn't it be better if other Alternians would accept you without you having to change?" she asks. She feels like they are navigating some labyrinthine territory in Karkat's mind here, but if all she has to do is keep asking questions...

He opens his mouth and then closes it again, visibly uncertain. "No," he says, "I was never – I mean – fuck, I don't know, that's not even the issue, that's not what they want to fix."

She hesitates. Okay, so...maybe she doesn't understand this business at all.

"It...isn't?" She frowns. "I thought it was all for equality and peace...that sort of thing."

"Yeah. No caste, no violence, blah blah." 'Blah' always sounds kind of awkward and not quite casual enough when Karkat says it. "But that's for everyone else not me. Maybe they won't kill me after they revolt but I'll still be – weird – and I'm probably going to die before it's finished anyway."