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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.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"None of them ever gave a damn about what I thought," she snaps, smacking her bottle down on the ledge, barely restrained anger in every movement. "If they were going to leave me to die alone they should have just left me in the arena."

Edited 2014-02-22 07:47 (UTC)

He looks up, at that, frowning. "It isn't alone. I mean – you're not."

For a moment, she almost feels guilty at that. It's cruel to make it all sound so discardable, so undesirable - everything she's built since she was left here. But even a vacation feels like misery when you're homesick, even though she's well aware that her real home is gone and is never coming back.

But she doesn't actually want to hurt him, even if all she feels like she wants these days is to burn everything to the ground. He doesn't deserve that any more than Peeta did.

At a loss for any actual direction to take with this, she slumps back against the wall, staring into space.

"No one here understands," she says. "I'm living in luxury while everything else burns."

"I get it," he says. "My best friend is fucking tortured for a year while I'm here dicking around in a cape, shit I get it." He watches her for a second, and then, with a dismal sigh, leans against the same wall, although not too close to her. "It's like everybody else you're supposed to be watching out on, either they are going through shit you can't do anything about when you should help them or they're out there actually making some difference or something and all you do is stop some jackass from getting their cell phone in a mugging. Bullshit."

She doesn't argue with him. He's right, if she lets herself think about it half reasonably. Ever since she met Karkat, it's been almost unnerving at times how much their situations have in common. After all, it was his sudden good fortune that made her realize how much her own story was lacking.

"The same thing is happening to him," she says, finally, her voice soft and rough. "Is going to happen. Already happened. Whatever." She looks away as if ashamed. "I look at Sollux and that's all I can see right now. And all I can think about is how I'll probably never know."

Karkat glances at her for a moment, and then, nodding, lets his gaze drop to the floor. "Maybe. I thought I was never seeing any of these guys again, for an entire year, and..." He trails off, sadly. How it's worked out for him isn't really much of a comfort. "I guess you'll only ever know when you go back."

"If I ever do, yeah," she says quietly. "I guess so."

She pulls away from the wall, shifting her bow pointlessly for the purpose of making a conscious effort of straightening herself out. Like brushing dust from her knees after a fall.

Of course, if she ever lets herself value things here too much, it will be devastating if she is ever forced to go. It really feels like the worst of all worlds.

He starts to lift his hand, but thinks better of it and lets it fall back to his side, still leaning against the wall while Katniss straightens up, watching her back.

It's kind of scary, the more he thinks about it. The only thing he can think for her to do is to just accept that her old life is gone, like he had, but then even if she did she could end up being wrong. Would there even be any warning, if they did take her back? Would she get to say goodbye? Or would she just be there one minute and then summoned back into the future in the next, and then that's it, forever?

He stares at the floor.

"Shit," he murmurs.

She likes to imagine that going home would involve someone coming to pick her up, that she would at least have some kind of choice, if only in theory. But if she's honest with herself she doesn't really get how the technology works, and they didn't explain much either. She's spent many hours over the last five months wondering about time travel, and if there are any rules they'd have to follow to come back to her. Is it automatic, like pulling back a fishing lure after casting it into the water? Is it possible they'd have to keep the timelines in sync by only returning to her after the same amount of time had passed where they are?

"I'm not sure what's worse, sometimes," she says, actually voicing part of her worry out loud for a change. "Even if it was up to me."

Karkat looks at her, a little surprised. "Staying here or going?"

She doesn't look back, but she can sense that tone. Already, she can feel herself mentally backtracking.

"It's stupid," she says, trying to cut off any exploration of the subject. It makes her feel dirty just thinking about it. "I don't know what I'm talking about."

How could she even be thinking of just leaving them all to that? Leaving them to die in a firestorm she started.

"– 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.