MSPA fan-fiction

[DocBeard]

Sushi, not to be a negative nelly, but I feel that Rose got that done way too easily. It is a neat idea but I feel like a pesterlog was a weak vehicle for the moment. Rose got to be too much of the ultra-competent, always in control young woman she desperately wants to be seen as and not enough of the terrified, angry little girl she is. Magic is all about suffering for wisdom; have her have to steal part of John's corpse or have a little breakdown from the fact that this is not her friend but a hunk of ectoplasm she charged with his memories so she can consult his wisdom or have John reveal that he faked not knowing who directed his favorite movie and played 'idiot john' because he knew it'd put Rose in her comfortable voice of reason position or scream at the pain the necromancy inflicts on his soul or something because a young lady's first dip into the bubbling tar pit of necromancy should not be as simple as it comes off here. It undermines the motivation of Dave's desire to reset the game to just have ghost John go, "Hey, being dead's fine! Good luck guys!"; it gets everyone involved off way too easily.

Of course, you could be letting this come back to haunt Rose later, in which case my face, she is red.

Anyway, keep on trucking. You're doing good work.

PS; Paul, really dug the meeting bit, though I think Jade being sprite and girl is a bit of a cheat. Then again sburb's all about cheating in increasingly outlandish ways. Also in case my last post didn't make it clear, I dig what you are doing with Showtime.

[Bardic Feline]

This one is shorter. Originally part 3 was going to include this bit but I split it up.

And We Come to and End (Part 4)

(Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)

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“Tavros, I’m done here, ok? Lets go find Equius and- Tavros?”

Nepeta looked up and down the hall but no one was there. Where could he have gone? And why would he leave? Greasy wheelprints indicated he had gone someplace in a hurry. She listened, but could not hear the squeaky wheelchair or the soft patter of Baticotti’s wings as she hovered. Was Baticotti even in there when she talked to Vriska? Nepeta sniffed the air. It seemed like he went back to his room? Terezi was so much better at this. She started walking. Right now it would be better to go get Equius.

“Or would it?” she said aloud. “If Equius was the killer that woule be like walking into the bears den covered in nuts and berries. Mmm... Berries... But once Vriska was proved safe then Equius could be mind read and we would know if he was the killer. Unless he altered the data somehow so-”

The cat girl jumped as the lights flickered and shut off. The hallway was nearly pitch black except of the the occasion glowworm that infested the building. Nepeta flattened herself against the wall, claws at the ready. When nothing happened, she relaxed slightly. Another blackout?

While her senses were better tuned than most trolls due to years of hunting, sight was still her main source of getting around, and there was barely enough light to tell where the walls were. With Tavros and Baticotti gone she’d have to feel her way around. Would it be better to go get Vriska’s help? Her robotic eye might have night vision or something.

“Vriska might in the clear, but it's still a risk. I’d better go find Sollux,“ she said to herself and cautiously walked down the dark hall. Sollux was the only one who understood how this place worked, although Karkat would claim it was all his idea. Sometime the two-minded troll would draw so much power for some big project that everyone else would be fumbling around in the dark like a fresh hatched larva.

Not the best thing to do with a killer around.

The smell of honey was getting closer. Nepeta started moving faster. If-

-Slam!- she tripped over something large and squishy on the ground. The cat girl rubbed her head and reached out to pick up whatever it was. Wait, was this... a horn? She squeezed softly and heard a timid honk. There was a lot of hair here too. Something had... chalk on it?

Nepeta licked her finger. This was makeup! “Gamzee! Why are you sleeping on the floor? Come on, get up!”

No answer.

“Y-you just passed out again, right? Playing a chill joke? Gamzers?”

She touched his cheat. He wasn’t breathing. “Come on Gamzee! You’re taking this way to far!”

The troll’s head rolled to one side and Nepeta smelled grapes. “Gamzeeee! You b-better has just spilled that F-Faygo or s-something!” But she knew it was a lie. That wasn’t grape juice or grape Faygo or grape anything like that.

It was blood. Gamzee was dead.

She would not cry. Someone was killed her friends and right now it was up to her to figure who it was. They trusted her as the Detecicatour to see the killer found and justice served. It’s like Equius told her. Crying was for the weak.

“I’ll come back when the lights come back on, ok? You just eat your pies and be c-chill and we will make sure you are put where you wanted. Remember? We’ll put you out to sea.”

The honey smell was strong, meaning she was near Sollux’s room. Ah! there was a light coming from under a door! Leave it to that hacker to make sure his room always had power. Nepeta pushed the door open slowly. Gamzee dead near this place was too much a coincidence. The killer had to be near.

Sollux’s room was a mess of wires and game grubs repurposed for whatever he did with the network. A few leftover hives were in the corner, being gently compressed to extract that last drop of the valuable yet deadly mind honey. The bees had died in the move between worlds. Still, yellow honey covered the walls, as usual after one of Sollux’s rages. And he had a lot to rage about right now. A few tables were behind privacy walls to avoid getting splashed and sticky. Nepeta peeked behind one and saw a light gun they had used against Equius’s denizen. Looks like Sollux was trying to amp up the power for some reason. She picked it for future use.

“Sollux?” she called softly. No answer, but she could sense he was in the room. She wasn't sure if she wanted him to answer or not. There was one more pricavy wall.

“Sollux!” There he was, staring at his computer, head bearly sticking up from the backrest of his chair. Nepeta readied her claws.

“Sollux, Gamzee is dead! Did you do it?! Are you the killer?!” The cat girl bounded over to his chair. “Tell me the truth!” She spun it around and gasped.

There was a reason why she could smell the honey so strongly. There was a reason why she sensed him in the room. There was a reason why he didn’t answer her.

The only part of Sollux in the chair was his head.

The rest was all around her.

Next part is being outlined. Man, I never used to use outlines, what gives?

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I hope people see this despite being near the end of a normal 25 post page.

This is getting pretty creepy. O_O At this rate, the entire cast is doomed. I'm beginning to wonder if Sovereign Slayer somehow get into the Troll's base or something...
can't wait to see what happens next!

@nV: Ah haah ha! Great illustration! >w< Absolutely brilliant.

And thanks for the comment! That is kinda how I'm trying to write Vriska at the moment...a confused, angsty, easily excitable, self contradictory, and slightly silly teenage girl, albeit one who has actually had a difficult life (and thus some legitimate things to complain about), what with being raised to be so aggressive and all.

[Sushi Database]

Sushi, not to be a negative nelly, but I feel that Rose got that done way too easily. It is a neat idea but I feel like a pesterlog was a weak vehicle for the moment. Rose got to be too much of the ultra-competent, always in control young woman she desperately wants to be seen as and not enough of the terrified, angry little girl she is. Magic is all about suffering for wisdom; have her have to steal part of John's corpse or have a little breakdown from the fact that this is not her friend but a hunk of ectoplasm she charged with his memories so she can consult his wisdom or have John reveal that he faked not knowing who directed his favorite movie and played 'idiot john' because he knew it'd put Rose in her comfortable voice of reason position or scream at the pain the necromancy inflicts on his soul or something because a young lady's first dip into the bubbling tar pit of necromancy should not be as simple as it comes off here. It undermines the motivation of Dave's desire to reset the game to just have ghost John go, "Hey, being dead's fine! Good luck guys!"; it gets everyone involved off way too easily.

Of course, you could be letting this come back to haunt Rose later, in which case my face, she is red.

Anyway, keep on trucking. You're doing good work.

PS; Paul, really dug the meeting bit, though I think Jade being sprite and girl is a bit of a cheat. Then again sburb's all about cheating in increasingly outlandish ways. Also in case my last post didn't make it clear, I dig what you are doing with Showtime.

Yeah, I agree, actually. I dont want to steal too much attention from the Dave storyline, but... it's implied that there is a price to be paid for bringing John back for that conversation, and we don't see it here. I don't intend to show it in Shenanigans because it doesn't really fit the theme of the arc.

But I'm thinking my next story will be a Rose-themed Bad End story that picks up where Shenanigans will leave off and address the consequences of this and the other liberties she has taken with the laws of physics. We're only six weeks into the "Bad End", after all... Dave and Rose still have two and a half months to suffer through alone on LOHAC and LOLAR. So, this plot thread will be picked up, just... not for a little while.

EDIT: I should note that I didn't think of any of those particular plot twists you mentioned. :O And I kind of like them. I already know what price Rose will have to pay, but I wasn't really planning on putting Dead John through the ringer. Hmmm...

[Tenebrais]

Windows: Part 5

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-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling twinArmaggedons [TA] --
CG: hey sollux.
TA: hii KK
TA: waiit
TA: diid you hiit your cap2lock button by mii2take
CG: no, i just don’t feel angry right now.
CG: hey, you know all those times i made fun of you for crushing on aradia so hard?
CG: well
CG: i’m sorry.
TA: uh
TA: okay
TA: apology accepted
TA: but that wa2 almo2t a 2weep ago
TA: why 2ay that now?
CG: i just saw how she died.
TA: oh
TA: iid rather not talk about that
CG: yeah, okay.
CG: i’m just sorry is all.
CG: WHY THE FUCK DID I LET VRISKA ON MY TEAM.
CG: FUCK, I EVEN ASKED HER TO JOIN.
TA: becau2e you needed her
TA: 2he2 not that bad anymore apparently
TA: that2 what equiiu2 2ay2 anyway
CG: WHEN DO YOU EVER TALK TO EQUIUS?
TA: ii dont
TA: but NP liike2 two talk about hiim
TA: to TZ
TA: who tell2 me
TA: iit2 a weiird 2ort of chain
CG: YEAH.
CG: WELL I’M STILL ANGRY ABOUT VRISKA.
CG: I’M GONNA GO LOOK AT SOME OF HER EMBARRASSING PAST
TA: 2ound2 liike fun.
-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling twinArmageddons [TA] --

======> SWITCH 5


It wasn’t uncommon for settlements, even quite large ones, to dwindle in size if there is a particularly violent troll around.
In this case, it was a particularly violent lusus.
The village on rocky wasteland had once held forty, maybe fifty hives and kids. Now, it was down to three, and a lot of ruins. Soon there would be only two.
That third hive belonged to a kid with a passion for war, and weapons. He was ready for the colossal spider’s attack. He’d been preparing for months, cleaning and repairing all of his military memorabilia and fortifying his hive. Machine guns hung out of every parapet, hand grenades stuffed into every cupboard and closet. His strife portfolio had been filled as well as he could afford. He was determined to survive.

When the spider, ten times the height of his hive, came within range he unloaded everything he had upon it. He managed to injure its forelegs, forcing it to slow down, but there were still six more. Gushes of azure blood painted the ground.
This is not the honour of a soldier.
You should fight her hand-to-hand.
Or... hand-to-mandible.
Voices in his head. He tried to ignore them and focus on stopping the terrible beast.
Or at least get a 8igger gun.
Don’t you have a missile launcher?
Why not fetch that instead of wasting your time on pea-shooters.
Yes, the missile launcher. That could hurt it badly. It was buried in the basement, and would take time to dig out, but it could turn the tide of battle in his favour! He scurried downstairs and dug through the huge ammo stockpile.
No longer being sprayed with bullets, the spider charged forwards as fast as six legs could carry her. Closing the gap took several minutes, but the boy did not return.
Where is it? Where is my missile launcher?
The spider reached the hive, and tore down several turrets, burrowing through the architecture.
Damn! I’ve lost my... my... missile launcher. I don’t have one, do I?
The spider broke into the basement.
Fuck you, Vriska Serket.

The spider, sated, returned to its huge crag in the cliffs some way from the village of two. Vriska had led it back and watched it eat. Equius, following a trail of green blood, came to meet her.
“What is your plan now, Vriska?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“You and I are the only people left. Surely you’ve noticed that. You will either find a new way to feed her, or you will let her die.”
“That sounds like an order.”
“It is necessary. There are no other options. You cannot buy any more time.”
Vriska wasn’t listening, just watching her lusus. She only felt truly safe when it was eating. She wanted to enjoy those moments, not have to think about the fact that there might not be another.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I ain’t letting her die.”
He peered over his glasses. “Then I hope you know what you’re getting into.”

A week passed. Vriska had largely forgotten about her lusus. She always tried to ignore its diet. All she had done was make it clear that Equius, as her friend, was out of bounds. But recently it was getting agitated - it needed food, and could not hunt. There was no other food for miles around. Vriska knew, and did nothing.

Two more days passed. This time, the beast could wait no longer. A screaming, hissing roar erupted from the plains as it bore down on the two remaining hives.
Vriska ran out to meet it and begged, pleaded it to stop. It couldn’t eat him. But it ignored her, almost trampling her in its haste to find food.
Equius watched from his window. He had been expecting this. Vriska had betrayed him. It was just what blue-bloods do.
Aurthour stood between the hives and the creature, bearing a long spear. He would defend Equius with his life.

When Vriska caught up, the two lususes were fighting. The musclebeast was too strong to be batted away like every other lusus that tried to defend its ward. The spider was already bearing several spear wounds. She couldn’t decide whether to feel sympathy or scorn.
“Equius!” she cried out, praying he could hear her. “She’s out of control! Pleeeeeeeease get away while you still can!”
Silence from the huge hive. Had he got away already? Was the musclebeast only fighting because it could not retreat? But no, the boy emerged from his hive, a large pickaxe in his hand held as though it were made of foam. He roughly pushed Vriska aside, badly winding her, before taking position in what was once a lawnring. He raised the pick high above his head, gripping so tight his fingers left an impression on its shaft, and brought it down to the ground.
There was a loud rumble as the rocky ground cracked. Equius brought it down again, and again, making the crack longer and spreading out. Like a cobweb. The cracks extended beneath the heated fight beyond - blood in two shades of blue was splattered around the battlefield.
A sixth mighty blow, and the ground started to cave in. Vriska had to leap aside, retreating from her hive. Equius sank into the crevasse he himself had made. The two lususes fell in.

The boy leapt from below, grabbing his custodian around the waist, and landed on the edge of the cliff. Aurthour scrabbled for purchase on the brink of the precipice, and, desperately flailing around, clutched onto one of Equius’ pointed horns. It snapped under the weight, but, biting back the pain, he caught his guardian by the hand, and finally pulled him up to safety. They looked over the edge. The spider was trying to climb up the cliff, but the sides was too steep and smooth. It was trapped below.

Vriska found a new tunnel under her hive. She followed it, and it emerged at the bottom of this new canyon. There she found her lusus, desperately trying to eat a broken piece of horn. It turned to face her, rage in its numerous eyes. It bore down on her, lifted her as she screamed in protest.
“No! Please don’t! Please! Help! Equius! Someone!”
She was helpless, caught in the arachnid’s grip as it brought her close to its face, to its mouth. It shrieked angrily at her, and she stared straight into its throat...
“Please, no! I can find more people! I will feed you! I promise!”
It lowered its head to look her in the eyes, eight to eight. She was still gibbering promises. It would not eat her. Not yet. Slowly, it lowered her to the ground. She slumped to the floor.
“Please... don’t eat me... I don’t want to die...”

Vriska broke into a sob. Until now, she had managed to not think about the death her lusus had caused. Now she would have to kill for it.
She wouldn’t be able to live with herself. But she had no choice.


Karkat pressed the button again. He didn’t know what to think. Seeing Vriska so terrified and distraught was satisfying, but he also pitied her. Many trolls hated themselves on general principle, himself included, and Vriska was certainly no exception. But it was uncommon to hate yourself for the same reasons everyone else hated you.

[Solaris]

Agian.
STOP WITH THE EMOTIONS!
THEY MAKE ME FEEL

God Damn, Aurthour is badass.
Best Lusus.

[DocBeard]

But I'm thinking my next story will be a Rose-themed Bad End story that picks up where Shenanigans will leave off and address the consequences of this and the other liberties she has taken with the laws of physics. We're only six weeks into the "Bad End", after all... Dave and Rose still have two and a half months to suffer through alone on LOHAC and LOLAR. So, this plot thread will be picked up, just... not for a little while.

Okay! That's cool, I'm looking forward to it. As my mildly morbid suggestions may imply, I dig magic and the things it can do to a person.

And I'm glad they got a chuckle out of you. I just figured, with what happened to Aradia, Dead John has to be suffering something.

[Red Pen]

Aurthour vs Spidermom. Yessssssssss.
Had Equius not interfered, there is no doubt in my mind that Aurthour would have won. He is simply the best there is.

(Also have I told you that Windows is awesome yet? Because Windows is awesome.)

[Domoz]

Oh man, i just started writing another fic, and then you posted more Windows.

Then I realized that my fic is based off of yours pretty heavily. I don't really know if I should continue now.

Of course writing a fic based on yours means I'm enjoying Widows a whole lot. Keep it up!

[Bardic Feline]

Authour and Equius were pretty badass right there. That was a pretty good explanation for Equius's broken horn...and the idea of him making the pit for the spider makes me happy. SO MANLY, HE CAN CREATE A CANYON IN A MATTER OF SECONDS WITH LITTLE MORE THAN A PICK AXE AND HIS BARE HANDS. I firmly believe this to be true.

And poor Vriska...I've always imagined her having a conflicted relationship with her spidermom...like, she loves her to some extent, and respects the power she represents, but is still utterly terrified of her, and for good reason.

Also, loved the conversation between Karkat and Sollux at the beginning. Especially Karkat's sincerity mode typing, and Sollux's explanation of his chain of social contacts.

[VagabondRaiser]

Whoo-hee. This one took a little while to write, not the least of which being that I wanted to find a few romcoms to focus on. As is my usual habit, I got a little crazy with the idea, but I managed to wrassle it down enough that it can stand on its' own.

To be honest, the hardest part of writing this was figuring out how to work a number of quotes from Hitch into it. Originally I was going to have it just randomly quoted at points. Eventually, I scrapped that idea and went with something a little more... blunt. Like a certain pair of nubby horns.

For the record, this is a response to a request by northernVehemence, to write a story around this picture:

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in my immutably saccharine shippy style.

So, without further blahbitybluh:

Life Imitating Art
OR
The Right Broom

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Something just wasn't right.

It felt... unnatural. Something about the whole situation bugged him.

Maybe it was just because he never thought of her as the kind of person he could go to for this. After all, he had always been rather terse with her. She was cute enough, even if her roleplaying habits were just a little disturbing.

But maybe... maybe things were meant to be this way.

She was amicable enough. She understood why he wanted secrecy; it was one thing to discuss the subject matter, another entirely to view it. Her enthusiasm was mildly infectious, even. He almost felt he could relax a bit in her presence.

"Hey Karkitty? Pass the popcorn."
"Yeah."

Not tearing his eyes from the flickering monitor before them, he picked up the half-empty bowl and handed it over to Nepeta, for the first time that evening not objecting to the pet name she'd picked for him. It hadn't stopped her the last dozen times, and (some small part of him felt... fuzzy... to think of it) he found himself growing fond of the nickname.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have a relationship like one of those in the movies they were watching. With her? Why not? The world was fucked up as it was. Maybe something could turn out right in their little slice of hell. Maybe if he got lucky, things would work out.

The first night was a rough one. It had been hell dealing with the humans, watching John as he fucked up spectacularly, going backwards to try and find the point at which everything went to hell. He had needed some sort of break. A way to unwind.

A deal with Sollux had netted him an extra computer in his room. Sure, he had to procure some extra junk for the two-toned sssibilant, but that was no big deal. After the experience of working with the carcinogenetic clone maker, he had a fucking Ph.D. in Appearifier manipulation.

Beyond that, after he spent a little time playing with it, he'd figured out how to gain access to human television, and shortly, human movies. It amazed him that the pink little monkey-bastards hadn't been through so many movie titles that they became descriptive.

He was absolutely floored to find that they still produced romantic comedies, even up until the time of the kids' SBURB session. In minutes, he had a simple streaming set-up going. He could watch every romcom humanity ever produced, all from the comfort of his room. And so it was, seated on his bed (strange things, these padded platforms, but they somehow evoked the same clear-mindedness that sleeping in sopor slime provoked, without the annoying cleanup), wrapped up in a blanket and munching popcorn while watching Romancing the Stone, when Nepeta burst through the door and slammed it shut behind her.

Karkat stared at her like a deer caught in headlights, a fistful of popcorn halfway to his mouth. It dropped listlessly from his grip, kernels bouncing about down the front of his shirt.

Nepeta's eyes took a moment to adjust to the half-darkness, but when they did, she saw his face contort, saw him take a deep breath, and could practically feel the radiating fury. She was across the room in an instant, her hands clamping over his mouth as she gave him her best kitty-eyed expression.

"Please please please don't yell and scream at me Karkat I promise I won't tell anyone but I made Equius angry about something or at least I think I made him angry and I'm hiding from him and he was chasing me and this was the only place I could hide so please don't make any loud noise that could make him come in here I promise I won't say a word please please PLEASE--" She wheezed, started to draw a deep breath, but stopped before she could say anything else as Karkat's hands came up to grip her wrists and pull them away from his face. His expression was a combination of confusion, suspicion, and mild shock.

"What the fuck did you do to piss off that musclebrained asshole so much that he'd chase you?" he hissed, low and accusatory. At his silent statement, she relaxed visibly, uttering a sigh.

"I... kinda... pointed out how Aradia was even better suited as a redrom for Sollux now that she was not-a-sprite-but-not-a-ghost. Since he's the only one that can physically touch her when she's not inhabiting the robot, I mean? And then he went all BLUH RAWR SWEATY ANGRY and started screaming at me, and I ran away, and I got scared and I started looking for a place to hide and I couldn't hide in my room because he'd go there and Terezi's in the computer room so her room is locked and--" she found a hand clapped over her mouth almost immediately, and her eyes (which had been darting about as she started rambling nervously) flitted back up to Karkat's face in time to see his eye twitching.

"Look. Just... calm down. It's fine. Horsedongs will get tired of looking for you eventually. If you need to hide, you can hide in here. Just don't bother me. I'm busy," he added, guardedly.

Nepeta nodded, slowly. Karkat seemed to relax. "Good. Now--"

Something wet and warm slithered across the palm of his hand.

With a noise like a strangled duck, he snatched his hand away from her mouth, and she grinned sheepishly, licking popcorn butter-salt from her lips. "Sorry," she mumbled, and shied away from him as he grumbled angrily to himself, wiping at his pants leg ineffectually as she shuffled to one side, curling up on the bed and resting her head on his knee. He glared down at her.

"What the hell are you doing?" he growled. She only nuzzled her head against his knee lightly and reached up to dig a handful of popcorn from the bowl in his lap, munching it happily as she watched the movie. Karkat rolled his eyes and crammed another fistful in his mouth angrily, redirecting his attention to Michael Douglas and his attempts to woo Kathleen Turner.

---

From that day, it had become something of a ritual for the two of them. After Karkat got done trying to figure out how best to explain to John what a complete and utter idiot he was, he would adjourn to his room, make popcorn (yet another small deal, although this time it was with Equius-- a deal he never planned to consummate if he could help it), pick out a movie, and two hours later, Nepeta would show up. After the third night, he stopped protesting when she'd sit leaned up against him.

They would enjoy a romcom together, maybe two if they weren't particularly tired, and even spent one night into the wee hours of the morning talking about the movies, even once dozing off during a movie (he refused to admit that waking up sprawled out with her like that was mildly pleasant, even to himself).

Their interactions outside of his room were no different from ordinary, or so they thought. He'd be just as vinegar-pissed as always, even to her, and she would be her usual playful self. But the others saw something hidden there-- perhaps a little less vulgarity in his complaints to her, a little bit of a longer attempt to garner his attention.

At one point, he even went so far as to help her back up when she tripped on a stray cord (although he berated her the entire time about her retarded clumsiness and how the fuck does someone trip on something so damn close to something anyway, for fuck's sake I mean it's practically attached to the damn table, just be careful next time).

Equius wasn't blind. He could see there was a connection forming between the two. A part of him wanted to step in; to interject before she made a mistake. Another part of him silently applauded her broadening her friendship with others, rationalizing that here in the Veil, there was a need for friendship when all they had left was the twelve of them. Besides, Vantas certainly acted like he had the blood of a higher-born, even if his guttermouth got away with him sometimes.

A brief accident in the kitchen, however, brought about a change of heart.

The duty of cleaning up after the day's nourishment consumption had fallen to Karkat that evening. Complaining as he always did, he piled the dishes together into the basin and filled it with hot water and soap, rolling up his sleeves and setting to work with a dish-rag; he couldn't get done fast enough.

That evening they were due to watch Hitch. He'd already seen the troll version of the movie before; it was one of the posters affixed to his wall back in his respiteblock, before the whole SGRUB fiasco. He had enjoyed the hell out of that movie, and he was going to enjoy it that night.

So caught up was he in his stupid damn daydream that he accidentally cut his hand with one of the cooking implements. Looking about furtively, he uttered a few choice curses under his breath and held his hand under the flowing tap, cleaning the cut while digging in a drawer for a bandage.

It was a small cut, not worth bothering with under ordinary circumstances, but even something that small would betray his blood anonymity. He carefully applied a bandage to the injury, oblivious to a single drop of blood that landed on the floor. Quickly finishing the dishes as best he could with a bandaged hand, he left them to dry and shuffled out of the kitchen, already planning the evening.

He didn't notice Equius entering the kitchen from the other doorway. Didn't see the blueblood notice him leaving.

Didn't see him noticing the candy-red blood spot on the floor, drying rapidly.

---

Nepeta was actually already waiting in the room with the popcorn ready when he arrived. He would've been bothered had it been anyone else, but he felt strangely... happy about it, for some reason. He pushed it aside as anticipation for the movie. Less planning, less waiting, and he could watch the movie sooner.

Halfway through the movie (and the popcorn bowl), and they had shifted from shoulder-to-shoulder sitting to practically cuddling. It was a subtle change, one that neither had really noticed; one little scooch here, a nudge there, and in very little time, Nepeta was lightly hugging his arm, her head propped on his shoulder. He found himself inadvertantly resting his own head against hers, mindful of her horns.

Will Smith was hopped up on cough medicine on the monitor. They shared a laugh at his drunken antics.

Then the door came off its' hinges.

Both of them jumped at the sound of Karkat's door being torn free. Nepeta's immediate reaction was to try and hide behind Karkat; to his credit, his reaction was to go for his sickle, but no, it was hanging on a rack among the rest of them across the room, along with Nepeta's hat. The light flicked on with a distinct crack, and the switch fell to the floor, having been snapped by the simple movement Equius used to turn it. At the sight of him, Karkat bristled.

"What the fuck are you doing? That was my goddamn door!" He stood up from the bed, glaring up at the taller troll, but was nudged roughly aside with a squawk.

"Nepeta, we are leaving at once," Equius said, reaching out and gripping her coat. She yelped in surprise as she was roughly hauled up off the bed, but to her credit was able to resist a little, pulling against him.

"Oww! Equius, that hurts!" She gripped at his hand, trying ineffectually to dislodge his grip. "What's going on? What's wrong?"

"I will not have you fraternizing with this trash-blooded imbecile. I forbid it." Equius turned and pulled again, but abruptly felt the wind get knocked out of him. Releasing Nepeta, he clutched at his stomach, an incredulous look on his face as he stared at Karkat, standing before him with bruised knuckles.

"You dare to strike me? You, who have the lowest blood of us all? Do you have any idea how foolish you--" he didn't finish the sentence. In a blind rage, Karkat balled up his fists and lashed out-- a right-handed uppercut to the stomach, followed by a left hook across the face. Equius' glasses flew off from the impact.

Before the strong troll had a chance to gather his wits about him, another blow landed across his face, this time to the left. Each impact heralded a cracking of bone; each strike shattered Karkat's knuckles a little more. But he kept swinging anyway.

"BLUE-BLOODED... SELF RIGHTEOUS... FUCKING POMPOUS... SON OF A BITCH!" Each hit was punctuated with another angry shout. Winded, unable to swing any more, he let his arms hang limp, gasping for breath. Equius was seated on the floor against the far wall, his nose misaligned, a few more teeth missing, and a look of profound shock on his face. Rivulets of blue ran down his lips from his nose, and one eye was beginning to swell.

Karkat's hands were a swirl of blue, red, and purple from the cuts on his fists as he raged at the stunned troll.

"I don't give a fuck what color your blood is, you bulgesucking cockmonger! News flash! NOBODY FUCKING CARES! WE'RE THE ONLY FUCKING PEOPLE LEFT ALIVE IN THIS FUCKING GALAXY!" Karkat's face was turning red. He felt as if he was going to explode. Grabbing a chair, he hoisted it over his head. "FUCK your GOD-DAMN BLOOD CASTE BULLSHIT!"

A whimper, soft but frightened, halted his swing. The color drained from his face, and he let the chair fall to one side as his arms swung limp. Turning, he found his own surprised gaze met with Nepeta, wide-eyed and scared half to death, curled up in the back corner of his bed and shaking like a leaf. He had scared her. What's more, he had scared himself.

It was about that point that the adrenaline rush hit its' peak. The color drained from his face, and with a whimper and a crash, Karkat hit the floor in pitch darkness.

---

Any guy can sweep any girl off her feet, he just needs the right broom.
What the fuck?
Like I always tell my clients: 'begin each day as if it were on purpose.'
That sounds like... no, it couldn't be.
It's not longer your job to make her like you. It's your job not to mess it up.
You can't judge me! I... wait... what?
That's what people do. They leap, and hope to God they can fly. Because otherwise, you just drop like a rock, wondering the whole way down, why in the hell did I jump?
...why did I go ballistic on him like that, anyway?
I need you to wrap your head around this.
...it wasn't because he was spouting that stupid blood-caste shit again.
Try harder, stupid.
It was because he was hurting her.
One dance, one look, one kiss, that's all we get, Albert. Just... one shot, to make the difference between happily ever after, and oh, he's just some guy...
It wasn't because somehow Equius figured out about my blood. It was because she was scared. It was because I didn't want her to have to put up with him any more.
Since when do we get anything right the first time?
I was so caught up in my anger that I scared her. I was no better than him.
Oh! So that's, like, a metaphor?
No... I am better than him.
Well, that's for damn certain.
I guess I like her after all...
Oh, Karkitty...
Nepeta... I...
"Karkat, wake up!"

---

The world was a haze of light, all trying to get into his head at once. He winced as his eyes focused to the bright glare coming from somewhere to his left, and held up a hand to shield himself from the light. Somewhere above him, he heard a voice-- Nepeta's-- utter an exclamation; his pillow abruptly shifted itself, and the light flicked out, leaving him in near-darkness.

"What... ow..." he muttered, trying to flex his hands. Both of them felt like they were wrapped up in gauze, and for good reason: they were. He lifted them to his face, staring at the faint red splotching on the fabric dumbly. A pair of hands gently took his own, and his attention was drawn up from the hands to her catty smile above him.

"Feeling better?" She asked. He started to sit up, but only got halfway before the world decided to do a loop. He decided it would be better if he stayed down for a bit.

"Nepeta... I..." He couldn't find the right words. His mind was still hazy. She just smiled at him, gently stroking his cheek. "It's all right," she whispered. "Take your time."

After a few minutes, feeling that his thoughts were collected enough to try speaking straight, he sat up, slowly, and turned so that he was sitting adjacent to her. They were on his bed, and it was at that point that he realized he had been using her lap as a pillow. Looking around, he saw the dark smudges on the floor from his fight... but he couldn't figure out how the door had gotten back onto its' hinges.

Nepeta seemed to follow his train of thought. "Equius screwed the hinges back on. They were still intact, he had pulled the door so hard the screws snapped out." He turned a quizzical eye to her, and she blushed a soft green, averting her eyes.

"After you passed out, he told me that in light of your exceptional strength, he would overlook your blood color for my sake. He helped me get you onto the bed. Then he fixed the door and left," She added, fidgeting with her hands in her lap. "I went and got gauze and bandages to fix your hands... I've had to bandage him up often enough in the past that setting the fractures was easy. You'll have to avoid doing too much with your hands for a while though."

Karkat dumbly stared down at his hands for a moment or two, before looking back up to her abruptly, mouth opened to say something. "Nepeta, I--"

The world went blank. A taste, foreign, sweet, unique...

She parted the kiss after a few moments, and his brain came crashing back down from cloud nine as she did so. "I... buh... you... bluh..." he stammered eloquently.

After a moment of silence for the remaining family of the slain apology, she looked up from her lap with a sheepish grin.

"You... do know you talk in your sleep, right?"

"...huh."

Life's not the amount of breaths you take. It's the moments that take your breath away.

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I don't think Equius is invincible. Strong, certainly, but with the right amount of RIGHTEOUS FURY, even steel can--and will-- bend to your will.

[Sushi Database]

(Part One)
(Part Two)
(Part Three)
(Part Four)
(Part Five)
(Part Six)
(Part Seven)
(Part Eight)


Shenanigans, part nine

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Five minutes to two hours. Dave summoned his timetables and stared at them. If this failed... if he failed... there'd be no one left to save this session. Rose would probably die alone... of old age, if nothing else. He was gambling everything on this. The session, his friends, and himself. It wasn't too late to turn back. To walk away. If he wanted to, he could accelerate out of this, tell Rose to forget the whole thing.

But if he walked away... he'd have to live with himself. All the himselves. And maybe they wouldn't know what he'd done and maybe they would. But he would know. And that wasn't the kind of person he was, after all.

TG: hey, rose
TG: there's this weird bridge ahead of me
TG: made of long sheets of interlocking metal
TT: And you want me to drop whatever I'm doing and scry for you?
TG: not really
TT: Then why are you bothering me about it? I'm kind of busy.
TG: just
TG: so you make a mental note of the time i mentioned it
TG: in case it should come up in the future
TT: Just to be clear, are you implying that it will come up in the future?
TG: maybe
TG: okay yes
TG: about two hours from now
TT: In your past, I take it?
TG: yes
TT: I see. Do you want to pass a message to your past? Is that what this is about?
TG: no
TG: wait yes
TG: tell me
TG: tell me not to bother asking because the information wouldn't be helpful
TG: and would just make this already idiotic situation more idiotic
TG: and that i should feel stupid for asking
TG: seriously stop trying to find out about the future asshole
TT: What's on the other side, incidentally?
TG: you know what rose
TG: you can find out the slow way too
TG: but act like you do know just to piss past me off
TT: Are you trying to use me to troll yourself in the past? I'm not sure how comfortable I feel about this.
TG: whatever, i'm just trying to keep the timeline stable
TG: talk to you once you understand what all this is about
TG: probably in about a day and a half

Dave drew Caledscratch, and with a satisfying yell, brought it down on his timetables.

~

Dave Village had been on high alert since Dave Prime had broken out.

No one knew how he'd escaped. Hephaestus was found lying unconscious against his own forge. One Dave had decided that he could escape too, and had ran for the barrier. Hephaestus... regained consciousness pretty quickly, after that. That Dave was still alive but in critical condition.

"Listen," Davesprite shouted out to a crowd of Dave Striders. "Just... stay calm, everybody. If Dave... Prime, did find a way out, and we can duplicate it, we will investigate it. No one is giving up her. The important thing is that we all just take this one step at a time."

"You said there was no way through the barrier, even with timetables! What the hell, dude!"

"You lied to us!"

"I did say that," Davesprite responded curtly. "And it was the truth. We don't know what Prime did, and until we do-"

"We're tired of listening to you, bro," another Dave said, pushing to the front of the crowd. "I think you know a way out! I don't care whose session this is, we all have sessions too! We have Johns and Jades and Roses waiting for us back home and I'm not going to stand here and listen to you tell us there's nothing we can do!"

Shouts of agreement echoed through the crowd. Davesprite gritted his teeth. "All of you. Back. Off. We will look into the incident and by tomorrow, if we find there's a way out-"

"That's not good enough!"

There was no way to tell which one of them threw the first punch. It probably didn't matter, since they all looked pretty much the same. But once that punch had been thrown, there was no going back. Dave Village was a brawl. Many of the Daves were attacking Davesprite, but as many were just attacking each other. Davesprite was holding most of them off with his sprite lasers, but it was only a matter of time before the Daves started drawing swords.

[s]"You want to know how I left?!"

The Daves froze. Acting as one, they turned.

"I walked out the front door."

They were all silent. Davesprite sputtered. "How did, I mean... what is this, dude? What... what?"

"I walked out the front door," he repeated. "And that's how we're all going to leave. As soon as I kill you."

Davesprite's feathers rose as fists shook with rage. "You've ruined everything. How. Tell me how."

"There were inconsistencies with the situation," Dave said. "Coincidences, and contradictions. It didn't make sense that all of these Daves would be brought specifically here as a result of their timetables exploding. Why here? A rift kind of implies a hole in space and time, and there's nothing special about this place, so why would all those holes lead here? Doesn't make sense. But if it had been done deliberately... that makes sense. But I didn't know how and I didn't who until you gave me a contradiction.

"You claimed that when you arrived here, Calsprite Dave was the one in charge. But that isn't what happened, is it? You were the first one here, there were no "other Daves" when you arrived. until after you brought Calsprite Dave here. And you made sure to keep everyone alienated from each other, so that no one would even try to find out the truth. They just had to ASK, but with each new Dave you convinced them that the other Daves were not to be trusted. You drove us to become these, these assholes!

"YOU left behind your friends and ran away to a session you thought was empty! YOU reprogrammed a Sburb defense system by prototyping it with ~ATH code! YOU appearified every Dave with a broken timetable here, because you knew they wouldn't be escape!"

Dave drew Caledscratch and extended it to full unbroken length. "Before I kill you, I want you to tell me why you did it."

Davesprite shook his head. "You wont live long enough to find out. None of you will! HEPHAESTUS! MY SPRITE! DEFEND ME!"

There was a booming sound from the Forge of Hephaestus, low and rhythmic. Hephaestus was coming. The other Daves just looked at each other, unsure of how to react.

"Dave!" Dave shouted. "Dave Strider! Are you all going to just stand here watching?! Get out your weapons! Fight alongside me for what has been taken from you! You are the turntechGodhead and you are the Knights of Time and Bro raised you better than this!"

One by one, nods came from the crowd. Caledscratches and Snoop Dogg Snow Cone Machetes and even a few Scarlet Ribbitars were drawn. Davesprite looked across the crowd, seething. "So you all turn on me! Of course, I cant expect any of you to understand! I'll- erk-"

Davesprite was frozen in place, his limbs held by orange threads. "Hahahaha, Dave, I'll hold him, you guys take- hoohoohoohooooo!- ...Hephaestus. Do you, hehe, have a plan?"

Dave nodded. Hephaestus was stomping down the steps from the temple, swinging his massive hammer. "I'll just check in on my teammate and then we'll go ahead with it."

TG: rose
TG: are you ready
TT: Is this... Future Dave?
TT: Back in the village already?
TG: what do you mean already shit took like 30 hours
TG: hiding and setting this business up
TG: let's talk later
TG: are you ready?
TT: Charges are set, yes. I'll detonate them on your mark.

Hephaestus roared. He was here.

The Daves tore in, boxing Hephaestus in with sword slashes. The giant was slowed down by them, but not stopped. As many Daves that charged into the fray were thrown across the battlefield, smashing through huts and into each other. The three Davesprites flew around Hephaestus, laying down air support and keeping him dazed with a steady stream of sprite lasers. The air teemed with cackling Calsprites, hitting as many Daves with their proboscalypse of puppets as they hit the enemy. It was chaotic, but Hephaestus wasn't moving forward.

"Go for his limbs!" Dave yelled. "Pin him down!"

They didn't seem to get it, or were too busy to hear him. Dave charged into the fray, doing a pirouette off the fucking handle and onto Hephaestus' shoulder, knocking him off guard. He raised his Caledscratch and brought it down viciously, driving it through Hephaestus' upper arm and into the ground. "Pin him to the ground! Just hold him in place right there!"

A few Daves looked a little squicked out at this, but most of them got the picture. Slashes turned to jabs, and soon Hephaestus was struggling to move. The giant roared helplessly, but with all the Daves on top of him, he couldn't rip his limbs free.

"Alright, I'm going to count to three! When I reach three... get clear of him! 1!"

TG: rose do it

"2!"

TG: do it now

"3!"

~

Rose shouted, channeling energy out through her needlewands. She was a conduit of pure destructive force. It was exhilarating. Every hair on her body stood up, every nerve in her body tingled. She was lightning, she was the spell. By will alone she responded to Dave's message without touching the keys.

TT: We're doing it, Dave!

The timetables arranged around Rose's observatory were bombarded by magic until they finally broke under pressure. Chronal energy shook her house, threatening to shake it apart. Rose gritted her teeth.

TT: We're... making it happen!

~

The Daves could only watch in awe, having gotten to safety a few yards away, as a large portion of Rose's house appeared in mid-air and fell on Hephaestus. The giant grunted when the building hit, then was silent.

They had done it.

"NOOOOO!" Davesprite shrieked helplessly. "You bastards, you idiots!"

"It's not dead," Dave said, walking to the sprite. "I only prototyped it a second time. It's still immortal. That lowered the barrier. And when I kill you, the ~ATH code that brought all these Daves here will be reversed." Dave raised his sword to Davesprite's throat. "Now. Tell me. Why."

"You- you know what I had to go through!" Calsprite Dave released Davesprite, and the sprite rubbed his hands, a look of pure spite on his face.

"Yeah. I had to go through it too. I'm doing it now. Losing my world. Losing my friends. MOST of us had to go through it."

Davesprite raised an arm and its own Caledscratch appeared in it. "The world? My friends? You dont understand at all, do you? How could you? I lost my humanity, Dave! I brought them here to replace it- to replace what Sburb took from me!"

"Fuck you," Dave said. "Fuck you for me just hearing that. Yeah, I'm concerned about what's going to happen when I become a sprite. But what are you even bitching about? Wings? Being orange? Is the sword a little too phallic for you?"

"It violated my mind! Changed the way I think!"

"No, you violated your own mind by letting it drive you into becoming a crazy psychopath. Calsprite Dave, HE was violated. He can't even talk without laughing hysterically. Constantly. You don't even caw, you brainless feathery asshole."

"Raaagggh!" Davesprite swung at Dave's head, his strike parried away. Dave jumped back, then struck low as the two began to melee in earnest. "This is the way it always ends for us sprites, if we make it far enough into our session! This is what you will become!" Their blades grinded against each other, each threatening to snap the other. They were equally matched. "Either you die here, today. Or you go back, all the way back, save John, and... become me."

"I'm not going to become you."

"Then you will let John die. You will let Jade die. And eventually you will die of old age from time travel abuse, leaving Rose alone in this session to die as well."

"I'm not going to let them die."

"Then what's your plan, Strider?!" Davesprites eyes flashed red against his orange skin. "You think you'll just be... different?! Prototyping changes everything! I'm not human anymore, none of us are, really! We're just... we're just... we're part of the game!"

Dave lunged forward suddenly, knocking Davesprite off guard. Davesprite hopped back, glided, and landed agilely a few feet away. "You think I wont do it?"

"I don't think you can do it."

"You wouldnt be the first Dave I've had to kill," Davesprite growled. Dave's face didnt show a flicker of emotion at this admission. "Sprite programming makes you perfectly loyal to the player. But every rule of Sburb can be bent. I HAD to stab through him to kill Jack Noir! The player has a duty first to complete the game, and second to protect themselves! I served him even in his death!"

Dave spoke slowly and carefully. "...Is there anything you do thats not falling down these flimsy rationalizations?" He spit on the ground. "Shithead."

This was too much for Davesprite. Wings spread wide, he launched himself at Dave. Dave ran forward, sword held in a tight fist. They both swung their swords, facing away from each other.

Blood trickled down a sword.

Orange blood.

"Kuh-..." Davesprite exhaled and coughed up more blood. "You cant win your session, D-Dave... Th-there was never... really anything... we could do..."

He slumped over.

"C...Caaaw..."

~

The other Daves had vanished the instant Davesprite fell down. Back to their own sessions; their own Johns, Jades, and Roses. They would realchemize their timetables, perhaps. Or... not. It was no longer in his hands. It had taken him fifteen minutes and the help of Calsprite to captchalogue the FEAR NO ANVIL, but he knew John would be able to put it to good use. Someday.

At least some good had come out of all these time-hopping shenanigans.

TT: You're alive.
TT: How did it go? What happened to the other Daves? And the sprites?
TG: we won
TG: beyond that what happened in this village is a matter for daves
TT: Don't act like I didn't play a role, Dave. You know what I had to sacrifice to get that code.
TG: ...
TG: yeah
TG: but we'll deal with that when it comes around
TG: together
TT: That's the kind of people we are, huh?
TG: so it seems
TG: I'm walking home to make a new set of timetables
TG: catch you in your future

AURTHOUR'S NOTES

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So if it isn't obvious by now (DURR DURR), this story started out about being the FEAR NO ANVIL but quickly became about self-prototyping, loss of identity, and the character development Dave needed to become the cool-but-slightly-war-weary Davesprite we see post-Accelerate. I wasn't sure exactly how the village of Daves would work out when I began (I didn't even know the Davesprite Mayor was the Big Bad until part 4). I'm not completely happy with all the parts, but I am happy with the finished product, so, whatever.

Shenanigans is over.

But Rose Lalonde and Dave Strider will return in The Esoteric Adventures of Zazzerpan the Learned.

[Sushi Database]

Whoo-hee. This one took a little while to write, not the least of which being that I wanted to find a few romcoms to focus on. As is my usual habit, I got a little crazy with the idea, but I managed to wrassle it down enough that it can stand on its' own.

To be honest, the hardest part of writing this was figuring out how to work a number of quotes from Hitch into it. Originally I was going to have it just randomly quoted at points. Eventually, I scrapped that idea and went with something a little more... blunt. Like a certain pair of nubby horns.

For the record, this is a response to a request by northernVehemence, to write a story around this picture:

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in my immutably saccharine shippy style.

So, without further blahbitybluh:

Life Imitating Art
OR
The Right Broom

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Something just wasn't right.

It felt... unnatural. Something about the whole situation bugged him.

Maybe it was just because he never thought of her as the kind of person he could go to for this. After all, he had always been rather terse with her. She was cute enough, even if her roleplaying habits were just a little disturbing.

But maybe... maybe things were meant to be this way.

She was amicable enough. She understood why he wanted secrecy; it was one thing to discuss the subject matter, another entirely to view it. Her enthusiasm was mildly infectious, even. He almost felt he could relax a bit in her presence.

"Hey Karkitty? Pass the popcorn."
"Yeah."

Not tearing his eyes from the flickering monitor before them, he picked up the half-empty bowl and handed it over to Nepeta, for the first time that evening not objecting to the pet name she'd picked for him. It hadn't stopped her the last dozen times, and (some small part of him felt... fuzzy... to think of it) he found himself growing fond of the nickname.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have a relationship like one of those in the movies they were watching. With her? Why not? The world was fucked up as it was. Maybe something could turn out right in their little slice of hell. Maybe if he got lucky, things would work out.

The first night was a rough one. It had been hell dealing with the humans, watching John as he fucked up spectacularly, going backwards to try and find the point at which everything went to hell. He had needed some sort of break. A way to unwind.

A deal with Sollux had netted him an extra computer in his room. Sure, he had to procure some extra junk for the two-toned sssibilant, but that was no big deal. After the experience of working with the carcinogenetic clone maker, he had a fucking Ph.D. in Appearifier manipulation.

Beyond that, after he spent a little time playing with it, he'd figured out how to gain access to human television, and shortly, human movies. It amazed him that the pink little monkey-bastards hadn't been through so many movie titles that they became descriptive.

He was absolutely floored to find that they still produced romantic comedies, even up until the time of the kids' SBURB session. In minutes, he had a simple streaming set-up going. He could watch every romcom humanity ever produced, all from the comfort of his room. And so it was, seated on his bed (strange things, these padded platforms, but they somehow evoked the same clear-mindedness that sleeping in sopor slime provoked, without the annoying cleanup), wrapped up in a blanket and munching popcorn while watching Romancing the Stone, when Nepeta burst through the door and slammed it shut behind her.

Karkat stared at her like a deer caught in headlights, a fistful of popcorn halfway to his mouth. It dropped listlessly from his grip, kernels bouncing about down the front of his shirt.

Nepeta's eyes took a moment to adjust to the half-darkness, but when they did, she saw his face contort, saw him take a deep breath, and could practically feel the radiating fury. She was across the room in an instant, her hands clamping over his mouth as she gave him her best kitty-eyed expression.

"Please please please don't yell and scream at me Karkat I promise I won't tell anyone but I made Equius angry about something or at least I think I made him angry and I'm hiding from him and he was chasing me and this was the only place I could hide so please don't make any loud noise that could make him come in here I promise I won't say a word please please PLEASE--" She wheezed, started to draw a deep breath, but stopped before she could say anything else as Karkat's hands came up to grip her wrists and pull them away from his face. His expression was a combination of confusion, suspicion, and mild shock.

"What the fuck did you do to piss off that musclebrained asshole so much that he'd chase you?" he hissed, low and accusatory. At his silent statement, she relaxed visibly, uttering a sigh.

"I... kinda... pointed out how Aradia was even better suited as a redrom for Sollux now that she was not-a-sprite-but-not-a-ghost. Since he's the only one that can physically touch her when she's not inhabiting the robot, I mean? And then he went all BLUH RAWR SWEATY ANGRY and started screaming at me, and I ran away, and I got scared and I started looking for a place to hide and I couldn't hide in my room because he'd go there and Terezi's in the computer room so her room is locked and--" she found a hand clapped over her mouth almost immediately, and her eyes (which had been darting about as she started rambling nervously) flitted back up to Karkat's face in time to see his eye twitching.

"Look. Just... calm down. It's fine. Horsedongs will get tired of looking for you eventually. If you need to hide, you can hide in here. Just don't bother me. I'm busy," he added, guardedly.

Nepeta nodded, slowly. Karkat seemed to relax. "Good. Now--"

Something wet and warm slithered across the palm of his hand.

With a noise like a strangled duck, he snatched his hand away from her mouth, and she grinned sheepishly, licking popcorn butter-salt from her lips. "Sorry," she mumbled, and shied away from him as he grumbled angrily to himself, wiping at his pants leg ineffectually as she shuffled to one side, curling up on the bed and resting her head on his knee. He glared down at her.

"What the hell are you doing?" he growled. She only nuzzled her head against his knee lightly and reached up to dig a handful of popcorn from the bowl in his lap, munching it happily as she watched the movie. Karkat rolled his eyes and crammed another fistful in his mouth angrily, redirecting his attention to Michael Douglas and his attempts to woo Kathleen Turner.

---

From that day, it had become something of a ritual for the two of them. After Karkat got done trying to figure out how best to explain to John what a complete and utter idiot he was, he would adjourn to his room, make popcorn (yet another small deal, although this time it was with Equius-- a deal he never planned to consummate if he could help it), pick out a movie, and two hours later, Nepeta would show up. After the third night, he stopped protesting when she'd sit leaned up against him.

They would enjoy a romcom together, maybe two if they weren't particularly tired, and even spent one night into the wee hours of the morning talking about the movies, even once dozing off during a movie (he refused to admit that waking up sprawled out with her like that was mildly pleasant, even to himself).

Their interactions outside of his room were no different from ordinary, or so they thought. He'd be just as vinegar-pissed as always, even to her, and she would be her usual playful self. But the others saw something hidden there-- perhaps a little less vulgarity in his complaints to her, a little bit of a longer attempt to garner his attention.

At one point, he even went so far as to help her back up when she tripped on a stray cord (although he berated her the entire time about her retarded clumsiness and how the fuck does someone trip on something so damn close to something anyway, for fuck's sake I mean it's practically attached to the damn table, just be careful next time).

Equius wasn't blind. He could see there was a connection forming between the two. A part of him wanted to step in; to interject before she made a mistake. Another part of him silently applauded her broadening her friendship with others, rationalizing that here in the Veil, there was a need for friendship when all they had left was the twelve of them. Besides, Vantas certainly acted like he had the blood of a higher-born, even if his guttermouth got away with him sometimes.

A brief accident in the kitchen, however, brought about a change of heart.

The duty of cleaning up after the day's nourishment consumption had fallen to Karkat that evening. Complaining as he always did, he piled the dishes together into the basin and filled it with hot water and soap, rolling up his sleeves and setting to work with a dish-rag; he couldn't get done fast enough.

That evening they were due to watch Hitch. He'd already seen the troll version of the movie before; it was one of the posters affixed to his wall back in his respiteblock, before the whole SGRUB fiasco. He had enjoyed the hell out of that movie, and he was going to enjoy it that night.

So caught up was he in his stupid damn daydream that he accidentally cut his hand with one of the cooking implements. Looking about furtively, he uttered a few choice curses under his breath and held his hand under the flowing tap, cleaning the cut while digging in a drawer for a bandage.

It was a small cut, not worth bothering with under ordinary circumstances, but even something that small would betray his blood anonymity. He carefully applied a bandage to the injury, oblivious to a single drop of blood that landed on the floor. Quickly finishing the dishes as best he could with a bandaged hand, he left them to dry and shuffled out of the kitchen, already planning the evening.

He didn't notice Equius entering the kitchen from the other doorway. Didn't see the blueblood notice him leaving.

Didn't see him noticing the candy-red blood spot on the floor, drying rapidly.

---

Nepeta was actually already waiting in the room with the popcorn ready when he arrived. He would've been bothered had it been anyone else, but he felt strangely... happy about it, for some reason. He pushed it aside as anticipation for the movie. Less planning, less waiting, and he could watch the movie sooner.

Halfway through the movie (and the popcorn bowl), and they had shifted from shoulder-to-shoulder sitting to practically cuddling. It was a subtle change, one that neither had really noticed; one little scooch here, a nudge there, and in very little time, Nepeta was lightly hugging his arm, her head propped on his shoulder. He found himself inadvertantly resting his own head against hers, mindful of her horns.

Will Smith was hopped up on cough medicine on the monitor. They shared a laugh at his drunken antics.

Then the door came off its' hinges.

Both of them jumped at the sound of Karkat's door being torn free. Nepeta's immediate reaction was to try and hide behind Karkat; to his credit, his reaction was to go for his sickle, but no, it was hanging on a rack among the rest of them across the room, along with Nepeta's hat. The light flicked on with a distinct crack, and the switch fell to the floor, having been snapped by the simple movement Equius used to turn it. At the sight of him, Karkat bristled.

"What the fuck are you doing? That was my goddamn door!" He stood up from the bed, glaring up at the taller troll, but was nudged roughly aside with a squawk.

"Nepeta, we are leaving at once," Equius said, reaching out and gripping her coat. She yelped in surprise as she was roughly hauled up off the bed, but to her credit was able to resist a little, pulling against him.

"Oww! Equius, that hurts!" She gripped at his hand, trying ineffectually to dislodge his grip. "What's going on? What's wrong?"

"I will not have you fraternizing with this trash-blooded imbecile. I forbid it." Equius turned and pulled again, but abruptly felt the wind get knocked out of him. Releasing Nepeta, he clutched at his stomach, an incredulous look on his face as he stared at Karkat, standing before him with bruised knuckles.

"You dare to strike me? You, who have the lowest blood of us all? Do you have any idea how foolish you--" he didn't finish the sentence. In a blind rage, Karkat balled up his fists and lashed out-- a right-handed uppercut to the stomach, followed by a left hook across the face. Equius' glasses flew off from the impact.

Before the strong troll had a chance to gather his wits about him, another blow landed across his face, this time to the left. Each impact heralded a cracking of bone; each strike shattered Karkat's knuckles a little more. But he kept swinging anyway.

"BLUE-BLOODED... SELF RIGHTEOUS... FUCKING POMPOUS... SON OF A BITCH!" Each hit was punctuated with another angry shout. Winded, unable to swing any more, he let his arms hang limp, gasping for breath. Equius was seated on the floor against the far wall, his nose misaligned, a few more teeth missing, and a look of profound shock on his face. Rivulets of blue ran down his lips from his nose, and one eye was beginning to swell.

Karkat's hands were a swirl of blue, red, and purple from the cuts on his fists as he raged at the stunned troll.

"I don't give a fuck what color your blood is, you bulgesucking cockmonger! News flash! NOBODY FUCKING CARES! WE'RE THE ONLY FUCKING PEOPLE LEFT ALIVE IN THIS FUCKING GALAXY!" Karkat's face was turning red. He felt as if he was going to explode. Grabbing a chair, he hoisted it over his head. "FUCK your GOD-DAMN BLOOD CASTE BULLSHIT!"

A whimper, soft but frightened, halted his swing. The color drained from his face, and he let the chair fall to one side as his arms swung limp. Turning, he found his own surprised gaze met with Nepeta, wide-eyed and scared half to death, curled up in the back corner of his bed and shaking like a leaf. He had scared her. What's more, he had scared himself.

It was about that point that the adrenaline rush hit its' peak. The color drained from his face, and with a whimper and a crash, Karkat hit the floor in pitch darkness.

---

Any guy can sweep any girl off her feet, he just needs the right broom.
What the fuck?
Like I always tell my clients: 'begin each day as if it were on purpose.'
That sounds like... no, it couldn't be.
It's not longer your job to make her like you. It's your job not to mess it up.
You can't judge me! I... wait... what?
That's what people do. They leap, and hope to God they can fly. Because otherwise, you just drop like a rock, wondering the whole way down, why in the hell did I jump?
...why did I go ballistic on him like that, anyway?
I need you to wrap your head around this.
...it wasn't because he was spouting that stupid blood-caste shit again.
Try harder, stupid.
It was because he was hurting her.
One dance, one look, one kiss, that's all we get, Albert. Just... one shot, to make the difference between happily ever after, and oh, he's just some guy...
It wasn't because somehow Equius figured out about my blood. It was because she was scared. It was because I didn't want her to have to put up with him any more.
Since when do we get anything right the first time?
I was so caught up in my anger that I scared her. I was no better than him.
Oh! So that's, like, a metaphor?
No... I am better than him.
Well, that's for damn certain.
I guess I like her after all...
Oh, Karkitty...
Nepeta... I...
"Karkat, wake up!"

---

The world was a haze of light, all trying to get into his head at once. He winced as his eyes focused to the bright glare coming from somewhere to his left, and held up a hand to shield himself from the light. Somewhere above him, he heard a voice-- Nepeta's-- utter an exclamation; his pillow abruptly shifted itself, and the light flicked out, leaving him in near-darkness.

"What... ow..." he muttered, trying to flex his hands. Both of them felt like they were wrapped up in gauze, and for good reason: they were. He lifted them to his face, staring at the faint red splotching on the fabric dumbly. A pair of hands gently took his own, and his attention was drawn up from the hands to her catty smile above him.

"Feeling better?" She asked. He started to sit up, but only got halfway before the world decided to do a loop. He decided it would be better if he stayed down for a bit.

"Nepeta... I..." He couldn't find the right words. His mind was still hazy. She just smiled at him, gently stroking his cheek. "It's all right," she whispered. "Take your time."

After a few minutes, feeling that his thoughts were collected enough to try speaking straight, he sat up, slowly, and turned so that he was sitting adjacent to her. They were on his bed, and it was at that point that he realized he had been using her lap as a pillow. Looking around, he saw the dark smudges on the floor from his fight... but he couldn't figure out how the door had gotten back onto its' hinges.

Nepeta seemed to follow his train of thought. "Equius screwed the hinges back on. They were still intact, he had pulled the door so hard the screws snapped out." He turned a quizzical eye to her, and she blushed a soft green, averting her eyes.

"After you passed out, he told me that in light of your exceptional strength, he would overlook your blood color for my sake. He helped me get you onto the bed. Then he fixed the door and left," She added, fidgeting with her hands in her lap. "I went and got gauze and bandages to fix your hands... I've had to bandage him up often enough in the past that setting the fractures was easy. You'll have to avoid doing too much with your hands for a while though."

Karkat dumbly stared down at his hands for a moment or two, before looking back up to her abruptly, mouth opened to say something. "Nepeta, I--"

The world went blank. A taste, foreign, sweet, unique...

She parted the kiss after a few moments, and his brain came crashing back down from cloud nine as she did so. "I... buh... you... bluh..." he stammered eloquently.

After a moment of silence for the remaining family of the slain apology, she looked up from her lap with a sheepish grin.

"You... do know you talk in your sleep, right?"

"...huh."

Life's not the amount of breaths you take. It's the moments that take your breath away.

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I don't think Equius is invincible. Strong, certainly, but with the right amount of RIGHTEOUS FURY, even steel can--and will-- bend to your will.

:3 My Karkitty cravings have been appeased. I really like the idea of Equius gaining respect for Karkat after getting the shit beaten out of him. Equius may be a blueblooded snob, but at his heart, above all else, he loves being strong.

[Solaris]

The Esoteric Adventures of Zazzerpan the Learned.

If you are serious, I will tell you that more Zazzerpan is always good.
Also, there had better be some more Jaspersprite next time around.

[Sushi Database]

If you are serious, I will tell you that more Zazzerpan is always good.
Also, there had better be some more Jaspersprite next time around.

I am. I'll give it a little time to read the backlog and draw up an outline, something I didn't do this time and sorely needed.
Jaspersprite is likely to be a lot more prominent than Calsprite was in Shenanigans, since I'm unsettled by Cal and love Jaspers.

[Bardic Feline]

Whoo-hee. This one took a little while to write, not the least of which being that I wanted to find a few romcoms to focus on. As is my usual habit, I got a little crazy with the idea, but I managed to wrassle it down enough that it can stand on its' own.

To be honest, the hardest part of writing this was figuring out how to work a number of quotes from Hitch into it. Originally I was going to have it just randomly quoted at points. Eventually, I scrapped that idea and went with something a little more... blunt. Like a certain pair of nubby horns.

For the record, this is a response to a request by northernVehemence, to write a story around this picture:

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in my immutably saccharine shippy style.

So, without further blahbitybluh:

Life Imitating Art
OR
The Right Broom

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Something just wasn't right.

It felt... unnatural. Something about the whole situation bugged him.

Maybe it was just because he never thought of her as the kind of person he could go to for this. After all, he had always been rather terse with her. She was cute enough, even if her roleplaying habits were just a little disturbing.

But maybe... maybe things were meant to be this way.

She was amicable enough. She understood why he wanted secrecy; it was one thing to discuss the subject matter, another entirely to view it. Her enthusiasm was mildly infectious, even. He almost felt he could relax a bit in her presence.

"Hey Karkitty? Pass the popcorn."
"Yeah."

Not tearing his eyes from the flickering monitor before them, he picked up the half-empty bowl and handed it over to Nepeta, for the first time that evening not objecting to the pet name she'd picked for him. It hadn't stopped her the last dozen times, and (some small part of him felt... fuzzy... to think of it) he found himself growing fond of the nickname.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have a relationship like one of those in the movies they were watching. With her? Why not? The world was fucked up as it was. Maybe something could turn out right in their little slice of hell. Maybe if he got lucky, things would work out.

The first night was a rough one. It had been hell dealing with the humans, watching John as he fucked up spectacularly, going backwards to try and find the point at which everything went to hell. He had needed some sort of break. A way to unwind.

A deal with Sollux had netted him an extra computer in his room. Sure, he had to procure some extra junk for the two-toned sssibilant, but that was no big deal. After the experience of working with the carcinogenetic clone maker, he had a fucking Ph.D. in Appearifier manipulation.

Beyond that, after he spent a little time playing with it, he'd figured out how to gain access to human television, and shortly, human movies. It amazed him that the pink little monkey-bastards hadn't been through so many movie titles that they became descriptive.

He was absolutely floored to find that they still produced romantic comedies, even up until the time of the kids' SBURB session. In minutes, he had a simple streaming set-up going. He could watch every romcom humanity ever produced, all from the comfort of his room. And so it was, seated on his bed (strange things, these padded platforms, but they somehow evoked the same clear-mindedness that sleeping in sopor slime provoked, without the annoying cleanup), wrapped up in a blanket and munching popcorn while watching Romancing the Stone, when Nepeta burst through the door and slammed it shut behind her.

Karkat stared at her like a deer caught in headlights, a fistful of popcorn halfway to his mouth. It dropped listlessly from his grip, kernels bouncing about down the front of his shirt.

Nepeta's eyes took a moment to adjust to the half-darkness, but when they did, she saw his face contort, saw him take a deep breath, and could practically feel the radiating fury. She was across the room in an instant, her hands clamping over his mouth as she gave him her best kitty-eyed expression.

"Please please please don't yell and scream at me Karkat I promise I won't tell anyone but I made Equius angry about something or at least I think I made him angry and I'm hiding from him and he was chasing me and this was the only place I could hide so please don't make any loud noise that could make him come in here I promise I won't say a word please please PLEASE--" She wheezed, started to draw a deep breath, but stopped before she could say anything else as Karkat's hands came up to grip her wrists and pull them away from his face. His expression was a combination of confusion, suspicion, and mild shock.

"What the fuck did you do to piss off that musclebrained asshole so much that he'd chase you?" he hissed, low and accusatory. At his silent statement, she relaxed visibly, uttering a sigh.

"I... kinda... pointed out how Aradia was even better suited as a redrom for Sollux now that she was not-a-sprite-but-not-a-ghost. Since he's the only one that can physically touch her when she's not inhabiting the robot, I mean? And then he went all BLUH RAWR SWEATY ANGRY and started screaming at me, and I ran away, and I got scared and I started looking for a place to hide and I couldn't hide in my room because he'd go there and Terezi's in the computer room so her room is locked and--" she found a hand clapped over her mouth almost immediately, and her eyes (which had been darting about as she started rambling nervously) flitted back up to Karkat's face in time to see his eye twitching.

"Look. Just... calm down. It's fine. Horsedongs will get tired of looking for you eventually. If you need to hide, you can hide in here. Just don't bother me. I'm busy," he added, guardedly.

Nepeta nodded, slowly. Karkat seemed to relax. "Good. Now--"

Something wet and warm slithered across the palm of his hand.

With a noise like a strangled duck, he snatched his hand away from her mouth, and she grinned sheepishly, licking popcorn butter-salt from her lips. "Sorry," she mumbled, and shied away from him as he grumbled angrily to himself, wiping at his pants leg ineffectually as she shuffled to one side, curling up on the bed and resting her head on his knee. He glared down at her.

"What the hell are you doing?" he growled. She only nuzzled her head against his knee lightly and reached up to dig a handful of popcorn from the bowl in his lap, munching it happily as she watched the movie. Karkat rolled his eyes and crammed another fistful in his mouth angrily, redirecting his attention to Michael Douglas and his attempts to woo Kathleen Turner.

---

From that day, it had become something of a ritual for the two of them. After Karkat got done trying to figure out how best to explain to John what a complete and utter idiot he was, he would adjourn to his room, make popcorn (yet another small deal, although this time it was with Equius-- a deal he never planned to consummate if he could help it), pick out a movie, and two hours later, Nepeta would show up. After the third night, he stopped protesting when she'd sit leaned up against him.

They would enjoy a romcom together, maybe two if they weren't particularly tired, and even spent one night into the wee hours of the morning talking about the movies, even once dozing off during a movie (he refused to admit that waking up sprawled out with her like that was mildly pleasant, even to himself).

Their interactions outside of his room were no different from ordinary, or so they thought. He'd be just as vinegar-pissed as always, even to her, and she would be her usual playful self. But the others saw something hidden there-- perhaps a little less vulgarity in his complaints to her, a little bit of a longer attempt to garner his attention.

At one point, he even went so far as to help her back up when she tripped on a stray cord (although he berated her the entire time about her retarded clumsiness and how the fuck does someone trip on something so damn close to something anyway, for fuck's sake I mean it's practically attached to the damn table, just be careful next time).

Equius wasn't blind. He could see there was a connection forming between the two. A part of him wanted to step in; to interject before she made a mistake. Another part of him silently applauded her broadening her friendship with others, rationalizing that here in the Veil, there was a need for friendship when all they had left was the twelve of them. Besides, Vantas certainly acted like he had the blood of a higher-born, even if his guttermouth got away with him sometimes.

A brief accident in the kitchen, however, brought about a change of heart.

The duty of cleaning up after the day's nourishment consumption had fallen to Karkat that evening. Complaining as he always did, he piled the dishes together into the basin and filled it with hot water and soap, rolling up his sleeves and setting to work with a dish-rag; he couldn't get done fast enough.

That evening they were due to watch Hitch. He'd already seen the troll version of the movie before; it was one of the posters affixed to his wall back in his respiteblock, before the whole SGRUB fiasco. He had enjoyed the hell out of that movie, and he was going to enjoy it that night.

So caught up was he in his stupid damn daydream that he accidentally cut his hand with one of the cooking implements. Looking about furtively, he uttered a few choice curses under his breath and held his hand under the flowing tap, cleaning the cut while digging in a drawer for a bandage.

It was a small cut, not worth bothering with under ordinary circumstances, but even something that small would betray his blood anonymity. He carefully applied a bandage to the injury, oblivious to a single drop of blood that landed on the floor. Quickly finishing the dishes as best he could with a bandaged hand, he left them to dry and shuffled out of the kitchen, already planning the evening.

He didn't notice Equius entering the kitchen from the other doorway. Didn't see the blueblood notice him leaving.

Didn't see him noticing the candy-red blood spot on the floor, drying rapidly.

---

Nepeta was actually already waiting in the room with the popcorn ready when he arrived. He would've been bothered had it been anyone else, but he felt strangely... happy about it, for some reason. He pushed it aside as anticipation for the movie. Less planning, less waiting, and he could watch the movie sooner.

Halfway through the movie (and the popcorn bowl), and they had shifted from shoulder-to-shoulder sitting to practically cuddling. It was a subtle change, one that neither had really noticed; one little scooch here, a nudge there, and in very little time, Nepeta was lightly hugging his arm, her head propped on his shoulder. He found himself inadvertantly resting his own head against hers, mindful of her horns.

Will Smith was hopped up on cough medicine on the monitor. They shared a laugh at his drunken antics.

Then the door came off its' hinges.

Both of them jumped at the sound of Karkat's door being torn free. Nepeta's immediate reaction was to try and hide behind Karkat; to his credit, his reaction was to go for his sickle, but no, it was hanging on a rack among the rest of them across the room, along with Nepeta's hat. The light flicked on with a distinct crack, and the switch fell to the floor, having been snapped by the simple movement Equius used to turn it. At the sight of him, Karkat bristled.

"What the fuck are you doing? That was my goddamn door!" He stood up from the bed, glaring up at the taller troll, but was nudged roughly aside with a squawk.

"Nepeta, we are leaving at once," Equius said, reaching out and gripping her coat. She yelped in surprise as she was roughly hauled up off the bed, but to her credit was able to resist a little, pulling against him.

"Oww! Equius, that hurts!" She gripped at his hand, trying ineffectually to dislodge his grip. "What's going on? What's wrong?"

"I will not have you fraternizing with this trash-blooded imbecile. I forbid it." Equius turned and pulled again, but abruptly felt the wind get knocked out of him. Releasing Nepeta, he clutched at his stomach, an incredulous look on his face as he stared at Karkat, standing before him with bruised knuckles.

"You dare to strike me? You, who have the lowest blood of us all? Do you have any idea how foolish you--" he didn't finish the sentence. In a blind rage, Karkat balled up his fists and lashed out-- a right-handed uppercut to the stomach, followed by a left hook across the face. Equius' glasses flew off from the impact.

Before the strong troll had a chance to gather his wits about him, another blow landed across his face, this time to the left. Each impact heralded a cracking of bone; each strike shattered Karkat's knuckles a little more. But he kept swinging anyway.

"BLUE-BLOODED... SELF RIGHTEOUS... FUCKING POMPOUS... SON OF A BITCH!" Each hit was punctuated with another angry shout. Winded, unable to swing any more, he let his arms hang limp, gasping for breath. Equius was seated on the floor against the far wall, his nose misaligned, a few more teeth missing, and a look of profound shock on his face. Rivulets of blue ran down his lips from his nose, and one eye was beginning to swell.

Karkat's hands were a swirl of blue, red, and purple from the cuts on his fists as he raged at the stunned troll.

"I don't give a fuck what color your blood is, you bulgesucking cockmonger! News flash! NOBODY FUCKING CARES! WE'RE THE ONLY FUCKING PEOPLE LEFT ALIVE IN THIS FUCKING GALAXY!" Karkat's face was turning red. He felt as if he was going to explode. Grabbing a chair, he hoisted it over his head. "FUCK your GOD-DAMN BLOOD CASTE BULLSHIT!"

A whimper, soft but frightened, halted his swing. The color drained from his face, and he let the chair fall to one side as his arms swung limp. Turning, he found his own surprised gaze met with Nepeta, wide-eyed and scared half to death, curled up in the back corner of his bed and shaking like a leaf. He had scared her. What's more, he had scared himself.

It was about that point that the adrenaline rush hit its' peak. The color drained from his face, and with a whimper and a crash, Karkat hit the floor in pitch darkness.

---

Any guy can sweep any girl off her feet, he just needs the right broom.
What the fuck?
Like I always tell my clients: 'begin each day as if it were on purpose.'
That sounds like... no, it couldn't be.
It's not longer your job to make her like you. It's your job not to mess it up.
You can't judge me! I... wait... what?
That's what people do. They leap, and hope to God they can fly. Because otherwise, you just drop like a rock, wondering the whole way down, why in the hell did I jump?
...why did I go ballistic on him like that, anyway?
I need you to wrap your head around this.
...it wasn't because he was spouting that stupid blood-caste shit again.
Try harder, stupid.
It was because he was hurting her.
One dance, one look, one kiss, that's all we get, Albert. Just... one shot, to make the difference between happily ever after, and oh, he's just some guy...
It wasn't because somehow Equius figured out about my blood. It was because she was scared. It was because I didn't want her to have to put up with him any more.
Since when do we get anything right the first time?
I was so caught up in my anger that I scared her. I was no better than him.
Oh! So that's, like, a metaphor?
No... I am better than him.
Well, that's for damn certain.
I guess I like her after all...
Oh, Karkitty...
Nepeta... I...
"Karkat, wake up!"

---

The world was a haze of light, all trying to get into his head at once. He winced as his eyes focused to the bright glare coming from somewhere to his left, and held up a hand to shield himself from the light. Somewhere above him, he heard a voice-- Nepeta's-- utter an exclamation; his pillow abruptly shifted itself, and the light flicked out, leaving him in near-darkness.

"What... ow..." he muttered, trying to flex his hands. Both of them felt like they were wrapped up in gauze, and for good reason: they were. He lifted them to his face, staring at the faint red splotching on the fabric dumbly. A pair of hands gently took his own, and his attention was drawn up from the hands to her catty smile above him.

"Feeling better?" She asked. He started to sit up, but only got halfway before the world decided to do a loop. He decided it would be better if he stayed down for a bit.

"Nepeta... I..." He couldn't find the right words. His mind was still hazy. She just smiled at him, gently stroking his cheek. "It's all right," she whispered. "Take your time."

After a few minutes, feeling that his thoughts were collected enough to try speaking straight, he sat up, slowly, and turned so that he was sitting adjacent to her. They were on his bed, and it was at that point that he realized he had been using her lap as a pillow. Looking around, he saw the dark smudges on the floor from his fight... but he couldn't figure out how the door had gotten back onto its' hinges.

Nepeta seemed to follow his train of thought. "Equius screwed the hinges back on. They were still intact, he had pulled the door so hard the screws snapped out." He turned a quizzical eye to her, and she blushed a soft green, averting her eyes.

"After you passed out, he told me that in light of your exceptional strength, he would overlook your blood color for my sake. He helped me get you onto the bed. Then he fixed the door and left," She added, fidgeting with her hands in her lap. "I went and got gauze and bandages to fix your hands... I've had to bandage him up often enough in the past that setting the fractures was easy. You'll have to avoid doing too much with your hands for a while though."

Karkat dumbly stared down at his hands for a moment or two, before looking back up to her abruptly, mouth opened to say something. "Nepeta, I--"

The world went blank. A taste, foreign, sweet, unique...

She parted the kiss after a few moments, and his brain came crashing back down from cloud nine as she did so. "I... buh... you... bluh..." he stammered eloquently.

After a moment of silence for the remaining family of the slain apology, she looked up from her lap with a sheepish grin.

"You... do know you talk in your sleep, right?"

"...huh."

Life's not the amount of breaths you take. It's the moments that take your breath away.

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I don't think Equius is invincible. Strong, certainly, but with the right amount of RIGHTEOUS FURY, even steel can--and will-- bend to your will.

AWESEOME! *Applauds* That is probably my favorite Nepeta/Karkat fic I think I've read so far. Ahhh...Karkles gets so few opportunities to be truly badass...>w< It's kinda nice to see.
Hee...Equius may not be able to completely let go of the blood thing...but the guy can respect an impressive show of strength. And a willingness to protect his lady...I bet that was a factor, too.

[Metaflare]

Vagabond, NepetaxKarkat is my otp and you just hhhhnnnnngh SO AMAZING.

[Shadow of the Lotus]

@VagabondRaiser: That was an awfully cute Nepeta x Karkat. I think it really fit in with the picture well and that Equius decided he'd be ok with it in the end.

@Sushi Database: Wow, you sure wrote all of that really quick. I enjoyed reading all 9 parts. Interesting way to explain how Dave got the hammer and I think my favorite part over the 9 parts was John being stupid with ghost busters stuff from beyond the grave.

[Sushi Database]

@Sushi Database: Wow, you sure wrote all of that really quick. I enjoyed reading all 9 parts. Interesting way to explain how Dave got the hammer and I think my favorite part over the 9 parts was John being stupid with ghost busters stuff from beyond the grave.

Yarp, I'll probably write the next part about Rose a little slower just so I have more time to plan things out. :3 Hopefully people liked Shenanigans, though. ...My first concept of it was like maybe two parts and it obviously became a huge thing on its own. I'm not really used to fanfics but I'm a lot more confident with them than when I started I guess.

ANYway, for now I'm getting drunk with my best bro so I'll probably post here more than is essentially necessary. (Sorry!)

[northernVehemence]

Oh my god you guys. The last three fics have been fucking awesome.

@Tenebrais: awesome as always. You're amazing. You're just....amazing. I love that you portray Vriska as a sympathetic character whose lusus is more of a curse than a guardian -- I think that's probably the main reason she's so fucked up. There's been so much Vriska-hate floating around lately; it was really gratifying to see her portrayed like this.

@VagabondRaiser: Words cannot describe how happy I was to read that. Oh my god. I need to lie down.

@Sushi Database: The ending was great. You write Dave so well! And I loved the line "Bro raised us better than this!"

[boper9]

oh man I just skimmed that segment of windows and now I really need to sift back and read it.

Anyway, I wanted to write some rom-com-y Vriska/Karkat situations, but I wanted to do them AU style, so I wanted to write a prequel to why it's even going on, and it turned into a monster movie. I watch too many movies.

Bosom of the Beast

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Vriska brushed the sparse hairs flat on her lusus’s carapace. Her chelicerae’s fangs clicked against each other once, then blue bile and blood spilled forth as a liquid death rattle. Vriska wandered through the maze of webbing to fetch her three missing legs, dragging each of them back and arranging them just so next to the corpse. Finally she climbed back onto the sacrificial ledge, and sat on it with her legs swinging over its edge. Crowcadas began to circle and drift down into the chasm, their wings rubbing out loud, vibrato ‘caw’s. But they hesitated to begin their feast with the young troll watching, and she stayed her spot to give her lusus a few more moments of dignity.
She stared at the black eyes, still so wide open and gleaming in the morning moon. No difference from hours before. If she didn’t look at the carnage, she could shiver at the idea that the monster in front of her was just keeping suspiciously still. While remembering what brought the beast to its bottom line, she shifted and caught her reflections in the mirror of the dead spider’s eyes.

She had gotten Tavros to come to her house. She had no idea why he had consented: promising to let him teach her how to play Fiduspawn was such a suspicious turn of her interests that Gamzee would have caught the lie. But he lived so far away, and none of his other old game friends were in any state to play a physical, visual card game. Plus Vriska was the one with the rocket boots. She’d strapped him to his chair, a bit too roughly and and with more physical contact than he’d preferred, and flew him back to her hive. Flight was enough for Tavros not to question why they had to do this at her house.
They’d arrived and it was almost as if a signal of helplessness was broadcast down into the ravine. Vriska was learning about the hostplushes and actually having fun. It wasn’t often she could actually respect Tavros, not often that he was better at and more confident at something than her. That was the one warning came, a sharp tap at the window. The next jab by the spider’s talon burst through in an explosion of glass and stone. Her chelicerae had worked out a sizable hole in the wall by the time Tavros came unfrozen. Vriska had his wheelchair halfway to the closet when he grabbed her by the arm, yelling at her to stop. He’d curled in on himself, eyes closed, rocking back and forth in concentration. The lusus began to whimper, twitching and almost falling from her footholds in the side of the building and cliff. Eventually, her motions sluggish and zombie like, she backed down to the bottom of the canyon and fell into a deep sleep. Vriska had watched the process in awe from the hole in her wall. When she’d turned back to Tavros, he gave her a frightened but relieved smile before passing out, body slumping to the side and almost falling out of his chair with the imbalanced weight of his horns. She re-strapped him to his chair, hands shaking much too hard to sneak in the feel of his shirt or the crook of his arm, and quickly flew him back to his hive.
Once the horror had worn off, the wound it left in her was quickly defended by her consistent anger. She’d been brimming with rage, breathing forcefully in between clenched fangs, hands missing things they grabbed for she stared daggers at something off in the distance.

She focused again ahead of her, at those eight reflections. She just couldn’t conjure that cauldron of fury now.
She looked down at her hands, flexing them to get the drying arachnid blood out of the crevices. Still, some remained in the joints of her robotic hand. She picked at it, thinking of her elusive contact. They’d made up over the incident just a week ago. He said he wasn’t the type to hold grudges, not when he would be stuck monitoring her planet for many more centuries. He also wasn’t one to hold back all his prophetic nonsense, not when she couldn’t care less about the future of her race.
The metal hand had been built for her by her neighbor. She looked up at his dwelling, craning her neck drastically at her angle, and wondered how he was faring after the incident. Something flickered in the corner of her good eye and she whipped her head back to monitoring the corpse.
She threw a rock at the scavenging inset that had first descended, just about to bite into the soft flesh at her lusus’ bloodied waist joint. She threw a rock at it, but it just fluttered back behind a leg, where she couldn’t hit it. She went to reach for another rock, but by this time the swarm was descending. Tens, twenties, maybe more, of compact black forms dived, landing all at once and seeming to bounce off each other as they all searched for soft spots with less perspective than they’d had in flight. Rolling about on the smooth surface of the exoskeleton, black and shiny in the low light of night.

She’d kicked the eightballs in front of her like a heard of so many ballistic soccer-balls, some full of answers, others full of food. She’d typed a cryptic message to Kanaya not to worry about her, to Tavros an apology and a promise that nothing of the sort would ever happen again. She’d turned, her actions emotionless and calculated by that point, and locked the bathroom door behind her.
On the first night, she’d rationed her food and drink. All the while she could hear her lusus rummaging around outside, upturning her desk, tearing at the posters on the wall.
The second night started with more rummaging, but by the sounds Vriska had heard through the heavy metal door, the spider’s movements were less coordinated. Often she’d heard the whole body of the beast fall heavily against a wall as hunger and weakness caught up with it. By the end of the night, she was hearing strange noises from under the door. A loud, close skittering noise and the sound was closer. Vriska had leaned down, chin to the floor and horn to the door, and identified it as the sound of the spider’s mandibles. They were working furiously, and closer to her head than they’d ever been in her life. It had wheezed out a pitiful sound, incapable of any louder vocalizations, and she felt the warm air from it on her cheek as it flowed under the edge of the door.
She’d jumped back, arms and legs scrabbling for purchase and pushing her along the floor with whatever they could reach. Her back had hit the opposite wall, her arm still locked against the bowl of the load gaper and trying to push her body back farther, but it wasn’t enough. She could still hear it, the incomprehensible begging. But she’d known her lusus better than the spider had assumed. The giant arachnid would have been unable to hold back, especially with how long it would take to get it a proper meal. She would have died the instant she opened the door.
By the end of the second night she’d finished off all her food, the sound of chewing and swallowing the food loud enough to block out the slowly dwindling noise.
When she’d woken up on the third day, she had reached for the light switch, but nothing came on when she flipped it. The monster must have gotten at the power veins. She’d then turned the tap, testing the pipes. Nothing. The spider must have kept at her durring the day, unable to sleep with the hunger gnawing at it. She’d prepared herself for a confrontation at the end of the night, but she didn’t make it that long.
She’d noticed the silence next, and had her ear pressed to the door for hours when she heard the magnificent crack. She’d known where it had to originate from. Nothing else could have made such an organic crunch.
Walls had been as surprising as the new rubble and piles of scattered objects in the pitch black of the hallway. It wasn’t as if tripping over things was new to the young troll, so she had arrived quickly at the original hole in her respiteblock, only to have to shield her eyes from the bright light the it allowed in. Once her pupils had contracted to the right diameter, she looked again, and the spider had finished climbing back up the cliff-face under Equius’s manor. She’d seemed disoriented, likely from a blow to the cephalothorax, and there was a small fracture near the back of her abdomen, probably from the loud fall. Vriska recognized the floating motions of Aradia, even in her new metal body. She was surprised, for a brief moment, that Equius had actually taken seriously her offhand joke about building the Areis troll a new body so he could posses her. But it really wasn’t looking like he’d be the one possessing her, seeing as he was flinching away from her brutal movements. Vriska focused again on her lusus, who was by this time missing two legs, with the undead robot girl ripping off a third and flinging it away in a fit of passion. She dove back to twist off another, but the large arachnid no longer had enough claws to keep herself stable on the ledge. She flinched away from the in coming automaton, her weight shifting and sending her sliding back over the edge. Her limbs flailed for purchase, sending out lines of dust they scratched up on her way down. She’d hit the ground spinnerets first, abdominal segment pressing its way up into the one above it, fluid gushing from the ripped and crushed joint between the two. Somehow, she’d stayed in one piece, at least enough to turn and crawl feebly back towards the Serket hive. She was obviously disoriented, stumbling into her own webs as she dragged herself back towards the sacrificial ledge. She reached into the cave and scratched at the staircase, the staccato click her normal plea for Vriska’s attention. Vriska looked over at the vengeful spirit vehicle and its maker, not even knowing if they had noticed her watching the fight, but they had seemed distracted enough with each other that she felt she could leave the past unresolved with Aradia and go be with her guardian. She’d run down just in time for, well, the end.

And the beginning. Vriska stood abruptly, causing the crowcadas that were digging into the corpse’s ocular delicacies to momentarily retreat. Shiny and black, and large enough to only fit one to an eye, they wriggled and tore and gave the illusion of returned life in those dangerous eyes. Vriska couldn’t watch anymore. She ascended the steps, leaping over the scratches in the lower stairs with hardly a glance. She was so intent on ridding herself of the sick feeling in her stomach. She’d just starved her mother to death, and even from the inside of all the horror of their life together, it wasn’t something she’d ever claim to be proud of. But she’d had to do it, she had been making progress in the one area of her life she wasn’t happy with, and then the spiderbitch had taken it away from her. Yes, she thought as she hastily rewired the electrical veins her mother’s fangs had sliced through - yes, that was how she would have to think about it, that she’d murdered her guardian for a valid reason. She mumbled her conviction to make it valid over and over as she righted her desk, plugged and patched all the tubes of her computer, and turned it on. She pondered her Trollian options. From the three nights worth of panicked messages from Kanaya, she was too emotionally involved to offer her overbearing help. But if her mother had to die so Tavros could be hers, then she’d bound herself to actually getting him. So there was no shame in contacting the master of these things, just duty.

-- tarachnidsGrip [AG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] at 05:13 --

AG: Hey Karkat!
AG: I reeeeaaaally h8 to admit this, 8ut
AG: I need your help.

ps sorry about all the spider terms, they should all be in this wikipedia article. Very educational.

[Bardic Feline]

oh man I just skimmed that segment of windows and now I really need to sift back and read it.

Anyway, I wanted to write some rom-com-y Vriska/Karkat situations, but I wanted to do them AU style, so I wanted to write a prequel to why it's even going on, and it turned into a monster movie. I watch too many movies.

Bosom of the Beast

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Vriska brushed the sparse hairs flat on her lusus’s carapace. Her chelicerae’s fangs clicked against each other once, then blue bile and blood spilled forth as a liquid death rattle. Vriska wandered through the maze of webbing to fetch her three missing legs, dragging each of them back and arranging them just so next to the corpse. Finally she climbed back onto the sacrificial ledge, and sat on it with her legs swinging over its edge. Crowcadas began to circle and drift down into the chasm, their wings rubbing out loud, vibrato ‘caw’s. But they hesitated to begin their feast with the young troll watching, and she stayed her spot to give her lusus a few more moments of dignity.
She stared at the black eyes, still so wide open and gleaming in the morning moon. No difference from hours before. If she didn’t look at the carnage, she could shiver at the idea that the monster in front of her was just keeping suspiciously still. While remembering what brought the beast to its bottom line, she shifted and caught her reflections in the mirror of the dead spider’s eyes.

She had gotten Tavros to come to her house. She had no idea why he had consented: promising to let him teach her how to play Fiduspawn was such a suspicious turn of her interests that Gamzee would have caught the lie. But he lived so far away, and none of his other old game friends were in any state to play a physical, visual card game. Plus Vriska was the one with the rocket boots. She’d strapped him to his chair, a bit too roughly and and with more physical contact than he’d preferred, and flew him back to her hive. Flight was enough for Tavros not to question why they had to do this at her house.
They’d arrived and it was almost as if a signal of helplessness was broadcast down into the ravine. Vriska was learning about the hostplushes and actually having fun. It wasn’t often she could actually respect Tavros, not often that he was better at and more confident at something than her. That was the one warning came, a sharp tap at the window. The next jab by the spider’s talon burst through in an explosion of glass and stone. Her chelicerae had worked out a sizable hole in the wall by the time Tavros came unfrozen. Vriska had his wheelchair halfway to the closet when he grabbed her by the arm, yelling at her to stop. He’d curled in on himself, eyes closed, rocking back and forth in concentration. The lusus began to whimper, twitching and almost falling from her footholds in the side of the building and cliff. Eventually, her motions sluggish and zombie like, she backed down to the bottom of the canyon and fell into a deep sleep. Vriska had watched the process in awe from the hole in her wall. When she’d turned back to Tavros, he gave her a frightened but relieved smile before passing out, body slumping to the side and almost falling out of his chair with the imbalanced weight of his horns. She re-strapped him to his chair, hands shaking much too hard to sneak in the feel of his shirt or the crook of his arm, and quickly flew him back to his hive.
Once the horror had worn off, the wound it left in her was quickly defended by her consistent anger. She’d been brimming with rage, breathing forcefully in between clenched fangs, hands missing things they grabbed for she stared daggers at something off in the distance.

She focused again ahead of her, at those eight reflections. She just couldn’t conjure that cauldron of fury now.
She looked down at her hands, flexing them to get the drying arachnid blood out of the crevices. Still, some remained in the joints of her robotic hand. She picked at it, thinking of her elusive contact. They’d made up over the incident just a week ago. He said he wasn’t the type to hold grudges, not when he would be stuck monitoring her planet for many more centuries. He also wasn’t one to hold back all his prophetic nonsense, not when she couldn’t care less about the future of her race.
The metal hand had been built for her by her neighbor. She looked up at his dwelling, craning her neck drastically at her angle, and wondered how he was faring after the incident. Something flickered in the corner of her good eye and she whipped her head back to monitoring the corpse.
She threw a rock at the scavenging inset that had first descended, just about to bite into the soft flesh at her lusus’ bloodied waist joint. She threw a rock at it, but it just fluttered back behind a leg, where she couldn’t hit it. She went to reach for another rock, but by this time the swarm was descending. Tens, twenties, maybe more, of compact black forms dived, landing all at once and seeming to bounce off each other as they all searched for soft spots with less perspective than they’d had in flight. Rolling about on the smooth surface of the exoskeleton, black and shiny in the low light of night.

She’d kicked the eightballs in front of her like a heard of so many ballistic soccer-balls, some full of answers, others full of food. She’d typed a cryptic message to Kanaya not to worry about her, to Tavros an apology and a promise that nothing of the sort would ever happen again. She’d turned, her actions emotionless and calculated by that point, and locked the bathroom door behind her.
On the first night, she’d rationed her food and drink. All the while she could hear her lusus rummaging around outside, upturning her desk, tearing at the posters on the wall.
The second night started with more rummaging, but by the sounds Vriska had heard through the heavy metal door, the spider’s movements were less coordinated. Often she’d heard the whole body of the beast fall heavily against a wall as hunger and weakness caught up with it. By the end of the night, she was hearing strange noises from under the door. A loud, close skittering noise and the sound was closer. Vriska had leaned down, chin to the floor and horn to the door, and identified it as the sound of the spider’s mandibles. They were working furiously, and closer to her head than they’d ever been in her life. It had wheezed out a pitiful sound, incapable of any louder vocalizations, and she felt the warm air from it on her cheek as it flowed under the edge of the door.
She’d jumped back, arms and legs scrabbling for purchase and pushing her along the floor with whatever they could reach. Her back had hit the opposite wall, her arm still locked against the bowl of the load gaper and trying to push her body back farther, but it wasn’t enough. She could still hear it, the incomprehensible begging. But she’d known her lusus better than the spider had assumed. The giant arachnid would have been unable to hold back, especially with how long it would take to get it a proper meal. She would have died the instant she opened the door.
By the end of the second night she’d finished off all her food, the sound of chewing and swallowing the food loud enough to block out the slowly dwindling noise.
When she’d woken up on the third day, she had reached for the light switch, but nothing came on when she flipped it. The monster must have gotten at the power veins. She’d then turned the tap, testing the pipes. Nothing. The spider must have kept at her durring the day, unable to sleep with the hunger gnawing at it. She’d prepared herself for a confrontation at the end of the night, but she didn’t make it that long.
She’d noticed the silence next, and had her ear pressed to the door for hours when she heard the magnificent crack. She’d known where it had to originate from. Nothing else could have made such an organic crunch.
Walls had been as surprising as the new rubble and piles of scattered objects in the pitch black of the hallway. It wasn’t as if tripping over things was new to the young troll, so she had arrived quickly at the original hole in her respiteblock, only to have to shield her eyes from the bright light the it allowed in. Once her pupils had contracted to the right diameter, she looked again, and the spider had finished climbing back up the cliff-face under Equius’s manor. She’d seemed disoriented, likely from a blow to the cephalothorax, and there was a small fracture near the back of her abdomen, probably from the loud fall. Vriska recognized the floating motions of Aradia, even in her new metal body. She was surprised, for a brief moment, that Equius had actually taken seriously her offhand joke about building the Areis troll a new body so he could posses her. But it really wasn’t looking like he’d be the one possessing her, seeing as he was flinching away from her brutal movements. Vriska focused again on her lusus, who was by this time missing two legs, with the undead robot girl ripping off a third and flinging it away in a fit of passion. She dove back to twist off another, but the large arachnid no longer had enough claws to keep herself stable on the ledge. She flinched away from the in coming automaton, her weight shifting and sending her sliding back over the edge. Her limbs flailed for purchase, sending out lines of dust they scratched up on her way down. She’d hit the ground spinnerets first, abdominal segment pressing its way up into the one above it, fluid gushing from the ripped and crushed joint between the two. Somehow, she’d stayed in one piece, at least enough to turn and crawl feebly back towards the Serket hive. She was obviously disoriented, stumbling into her own webs as she dragged herself back towards the sacrificial ledge. She reached into the cave and scratched at the staircase, the staccato click her normal plea for Vriska’s attention. Vriska looked over at the vengeful spirit vehicle and its maker, not even knowing if they had noticed her watching the fight, but they had seemed distracted enough with each other that she felt she could leave the past unresolved with Aradia and go be with her guardian. She’d run down just in time for, well, the end.

And the beginning. Vriska stood abruptly, causing the crowcadas that were digging into the corpse’s ocular delicacies to momentarily retreat. Shiny and black, and large enough to only fit one to an eye, they wriggled and tore and gave the illusion of returned life in those dangerous eyes. Vriska couldn’t watch anymore. She ascended the steps, leaping over the scratches in the lower stairs with hardly a glance. She was so intent on ridding herself of the sick feeling in her stomach. She’d just starved her mother to death, and even from the inside of all the horror of their life together, it wasn’t something she’d ever claim to be proud of. But she’d had to do it, she had been making progress in the one area of her life she wasn’t happy with, and then the spiderbitch had taken it away from her. Yes, she thought as she hastily rewired the electrical veins her mother’s fangs had sliced through - yes, that was how she would have to think about it, that she’d murdered her guardian for a valid reason. She mumbled her conviction to make it valid over and over as she righted her desk, plugged and patched all the tubes of her computer, and turned it on. She pondered her Trollian options. From the three nights worth of panicked messages from Kanaya, she was too emotionally involved to offer her overbearing help. But if her mother had to die so Tavros could be hers, then she’d bound herself to actually getting him. So there was no shame in contacting the master of these things, just duty.

-- tarachnidsGrip [AG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] at 05:13 --

AG: Hey Karkat!
AG: I reeeeaaaally h8 to admit this, 8ut
AG: I need your help.

ps sorry about all the spider terms, they should all be in this wikipedia article. Very educational.

Vriska/Karkat, eh? Haven't seen that one yet...could be an interesting pairing.
At any rate, this is a really neat AU so far. I guess SGRUB doesn't exist in this universe, or works differently? That's the one point I'm confused on, because I didn't think Aradia could have a robot body if she weren't prototyped with the frogsprite in medium...or something.

[boper9]

Vriska/Karkat, eh? Haven't seen that one yet...could be an interesting pairing.
At any rate, this is a really neat AU so far. I guess SGRUB doesn't exist in this universe, or works differently? That's the one point I'm confused on, because I didn't think Aradia could have a robot body if she weren't prototyped with the frogsprite in medium...or something.

SGRUB won't exist for a long time, so Doc Scratch is just chilling until then, meddling a bit. And Aradia was still a spirit without a visible body before prototyping, the frog was just to get BQ to not keep her ring on. Or that's at least how I read those parts of the story. But there's still game mechanics, since they always seem to be there way before SGRUB/SBURB goes into effect.

THIS IS VRY IMPORTANT HULLABALOO TO READ?!?

[Bardic Feline]

SGRUB won't exist for a long time, so Doc Scratch is just chilling until then, meddling a bit. And Aradia was still a spirit without a visible body before prototyping, the frog was just to get BQ to not keep her ring on. Or that's at least how I read those parts of the story. But there's still game mechanics, since they always seem to be there way before SGRUB/SBURB goes into effect.

THIS IS VRY IMPORTANT HULLABALOO TO READ?!?

Oh, ok, I follow you! (Exactly how long before the advent of SGRUB?) For some reason, I got the impression that if Aradia just prototyped herself alone that the Aradiabot would be prototyped, too, rather than serve as a spirit vessel. Or something. IT MADE SENSE IN MY HEAD, OK? Bluh.

Oh, forgot to mention how much I liked that bit with Tavros...terrified out of his mind, but still able to mentally fend off, and pacify Spidermom. Vriska should have kept him around, but I guess she didn't want to put him in any further danger.

[beesmygod]

pchoooo just finished reading

Bosom of the Beast

aw yeah

I should, like actually post in this thread and critique people instead of just reading stuff and never responding to it like a jerk.

]Vriska brushed the sparse hairs flat on her lusus’s carapace. Her chelicerae’s fangs clicked against each other once, then blue bile and blood spilled forth as a liquid death rattle. Vriska wandered through the maze of webbing to fetch her three missing legs, dragging each of them back and arranging them just so next to the corpse. Finally she climbed back onto the sacrificial ledge, and sat on it with her legs swinging over its edge.

Okay, I really like what you're trying to do here, namely Vriska attempting to show her dying lusus some respect by solemnly arranging the corpse. It, right off the bat, makes Vriska more relatable because she's being a decent human (troll?) being for once and shows her at her most vulnerable. However, I think it could use a quick rewrite, right now reads too much like "Vriska did this. Then she did this. And then this. And then-" The idea is good, but as an opening it's a little stale and wooden. Too passive.

Crowcadas

Haha YES

While remembering what brought the beast to its bottom line, she shifted and caught her reflections in the mirror of the dead spider’s eyes.

Ahhh Vriska reflects on herself literally and her actions figuratively. Clever! I just caught this the second time around.

She had gotten Tavros to come to her house.

Something about this sentence is bugging me but I think it's the choice of "gotten". There's probably a more expressive word to use. With Vriska it probably would be something like "convinced" or "manipulated". Maybe the former if told from Vriska's point of view where she thinks (at least at the point in your story) that she can do no wrong.

Okay but the idea of vriska and Travros playing troll pokemon together is making my cold hateful heart melt and fjehrkgjuher now i have diabetes

Flight was enough for Tavros not to question why they had to do this at her house.

Awwwwww.

Okay then there is some really cool crazed spider destruction where you demonstrate that you are pretty much awesome when it comes to tense scenes with action where the narrative changes to reflect the sudden intensity of the scene whoo!

She threw a rock at the scavenging inset that had first descended, just about to bite into the soft flesh at her lusus’ bloodied waist joint. She threw a rock at it, but it just fluttered back behind a leg, where she couldn’t hit it. She went to reach for another rock, but by this time the swarm was descending. Tens, twenties, maybe more, of compact black forms dived, landing all at once and seeming to bounce off each other as they all searched for soft spots with less perspective than they’d had in flight. Rolling about on the smooth surface of the exoskeleton, black and shiny in the low light of night.

jesus christ how horrifying

In a good way! Ew could you imagine a horde of huge bugs descending out of nowhere to eat your mom's corpse ewewewew

By the end of the night, she was hearing strange noises from under the door. A loud, close skittering noise and the sound was closer. Vriska had leaned down, chin to the floor and horn to the door, and identified it as the sound of the spider’s mandibles. They were working furiously, and closer to her head than they’d ever been in her life. It had wheezed out a pitiful sound, incapable of any louder vocalizations, and she felt the warm air from it on her cheek as it flowed under the edge of the door...She could still hear it, the incomprehensible begging.

Oh god okay this is freaky aaaah!

Yes, wow that's where this story definitely peaks and plateaus where it is a very good ride the rest of the way. It's nice to see a likable not entirely terrible Vriska making a really hard decision and nearly losing everything because of it. Boper that was really cool thanks for linking me to it! Sorry I'm all verbose and bluh!

[sarasvati]

I am so behind on my reading augh, when did this thread start going by so quickly??? I'm not complaining but shit guys you are the most productive sons of bitches ever. I LOVE YOU, LET'S HUG <3

Blame reclusiveAmateur for this one; I got all inspired by her second-person Dave-centric fics that goddamnit I wanted to write one too, so here it is! (notes: indeterminate amount of time post-sburb, dave/jade, implied john/rose)

we drive by braille

show spoiler

hide spoiler

one.

It hits you out of nowhere in your junior year of high school, when you take some joke religious comparison class for a decent place to sleep after lunch. Eventually the teacher moves into mythology, though, and then Greek mythology, and that's when you sit up and pay attention: Ceto, Echidna, Typhon, Hephaestus; names you know attached to things you've seen with your own eyes. You remember Ceto's convoluted mindgames, and Echidna's hollow dead leaf laughter, and Typhon's glib, stolen grin, but most of all you remember Hephaestus because he was so much like you it hurt.

You wonder if any of the others ever decided to do the same thing, but it doesn't really matter, because, as you find out, it's kind of personal. You don't know why it took you so long--okay, well, maybe you do, and maybe you just didn't want to revisit it, or maybe you just didn't want to know how deep it really goes. But the time is long overdue, so one miserable winter evening, you hit the internet up for research on your denizen.

The basics are obvious because everyone knows them--smith-god, artisan, volcanoes, etcetera. A god of dual elements, fire and earth, the twin virtues of creativity and persistence (twin vices of molten anger and slavish devotion); born imperfect and thrown from the mountain, he found belonging in a craft (sound familiar, beatsmith?, you think and immediately unthink), honed it like no one else before him because being the best was all he had. And as you click through the pages, as it sounds more and more like you, you remember those years ago: the red furnace glow, the rhythm of time kept with a blacksmith's hammer, walls of moving copper, and a man who could've been you in another life hunched solemn and joyless for all the beautiful things he makes.

And still you keep going. You read about Hephaestus winning back his place on Olympus, all that power and all those gods laughing at him behind his back.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You read about the fall of Typhon, how Hephaestus built his workshop on top of him, how his forge was powered by the breath of a dying god.

(at your strongest when your best friend's at his weakest)

You feel a little sick to your stomach, so you x out of the browser and that's that. You start sleeping through your religion class again, and when it's time to pick a topic for your final, you go with Hinduism. Years later, when you're signing up for classes your sophomore year of college, you have the choice between religion and history. You choose history.

two.

You're a picky eater. It was fine growing up, with your brother bringing home an endless rotation of TV dinners for the nights he wasn't going to be around (which was most nights). Everything was neatly labeled, flash frozen, and compartmentalized, and it didn't matter how many times bro told you to man up and eat your vegetables because he was never there to bitch when you dumped them in the trash.

But then the real world came along and made you try to eat things that weren't pizza rolls and hot pockets, and that's when you got fussy. You hate the texture of pork, and you hate it when the food on your plate mixes; you hate sushi, Indian food, shellfish, anything with ketchup or bell peppers. You try to avoid situations where people might cook for you in case you have to push away your dinner and deal with the aftermath of being an offensive houseguest.

(“I was half expecting dog food,” you tell Jade in your usual deadpan, leaning awkwardly on the kitchen island; bad joke and you know it but you can't seem to tell any different kind with her. The way her shoulders hunch confirms it, but you soldier on anyway because that's just what you do, even as she scrapes a mangled chunk of salmon into the garbage and gives you a wounded, kicked-puppy look. You're kind of a jackass and a little insufferable sometimes, and you can't argue that, but no one would ever accuse you of being heartless--except for now, maybe, as she leaves the room with little more than a glance back and you stand there with parted lips, poised to say words that won't come out.)

Lalonde watches you over the weeks, notices how finicky and repetitive you get with your meals, and tells you with that unbearably smug little Harvard grin of hers that it's a control issue.

She adds: “Not the only one, I'm sure.”

You look down at your plate, organized by color and type--starch and green on one side, protein and yellow on the other, all separated like it's quarantine--and set your fork down. “Quit watching me eat,” you say, folding your arms. “Shit's weird.”

three.

There aren't many true things about yourself that you like to show to the world, but how much you like words is one of them, and anyone who isn't comatose can see it for themselves. Freestyling is a goddamn artform and you're good at it, because if there's anything in this world you can do, it's pull all the right things together at exactly the right time. You have the vocabulary for it, and--god help you, it's the dumbest shit and it sounds too much like Rose, but something like the soul of a poet, too. There are deep, winding nuances to language that you feel comfortable in, and you guess it's the most obvious similarity between you and your sister. You can laugh all you want at her reams of poetry and fanfiction, but it doesn't stop you from understanding why she does it.

The rap, the freestyling, the hip-hop: it's a strange manifestation of your interests, strange enough that nobody asks because they think they know, and you're fine with that. You don't have to explain it to anyone. Middle class white kid from Houston--total joke if you think you can relate, pretentious hipster douchebag, an insult to the culture. And they can keep thinking that, because fuck if you're going to waste your time justifying it; that it wasn't always this way, that cinder block and particle board furniture wasn't always just a statement, that it wasn't always a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood. Before his bro hit the right niche, things were a little tighter, and those were the nights you spent in bed with a hand-me-down CD player, finding something to relate to in the music you looped: Rakim, NWA, The Fugees, Public Enemy, over and over and over until you could mouth the tracks by memory. It made things seem a little more bearable, making order out of chaos.

But you didn't always have the CD player either, so before that, it was books. The library became a babysitter when your brother couldn't pick you up from school, at first just for the air conditioning, but then you decided somewhere along the way--why not? You started picking through the shelves and that was it, really. The start of a secret love affair that never really stopped, with an emphasis on secret. Dickens and Burgess didn't exactly gel with your pridefully--painfully, meticulously--constructed don't-give-a-fuck attitude.

(Seven years old, thumbing through cheap thrift store books, and you pick up a dog-eared, moth-eaten copy of East of Eden; “Isn't this a little much for you, man?” your brother asks and you shake your head, because it's not about the stories, or the characters. You don't have to understand those and you don't pretend to try. It's about all those words that sit in those pages just waiting for you to collect them.)

Years and years later, you still never let your collection grow larger than what you can hide under your bed, and it rotates out every couple of months: Tolstoy, Alighieri, Camus, Orwell for now until you wrap up War and Peace, find some time off to dump them off at a used bookstore, and pick out replacements. There's a kind of enjoyment in the ritual now; you can hunch in the aisles and pretend you've got better things to do all you want, but you aren't fooling anyone, least of all yourself.

(You slide into the booth across from Jade, ten minutes late--feeling every last aching second of it between the store and the restaurant, made worse knowing she doesn't have that long in town--and you give a quick apology, explaining about lines and traffic; she's just glad to see you. Then, because she's weird and there are parts of her that the mainland can't crush, she sniffs the air and says, “You smell like books.” When you give her a noncommittal shrug, and she adds: “I like books.”

You can't help yourself and maybe you'll regret it later, but then again, maybe it could be a good thing if you let it. With a secret little half-grin hidden behind your menu, you look at her over the top of your shades and say, “Me too.”)

four.

You find--or found, really, because it's been years since you've had it--something satisfying in your title. Not the time part, because it's hard not to be a little smugly satisfied at being placed in charge of so much power and it's so fucking undeniably cool, but the knight part--and you had trouble admitting it at first, when you were under siege by John's well-intentioned jabs and Rose's instant, unsolicited analysis. You denied, denied, denied until they finally gave it a rest and you could take a good, long look at it yourself.

You're not prim and proper, and you're not polite, and you're not really all that chivalrous, but there are still pieces of you that shine beneath the layers of stony indifference and practiced jerkass. If you can't ooze charisma and a winning personality--because even you can admit you'll never be the golden boy (respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted), not like John--then you can at least tell the god's honest truth whenever you can, even if it hurts--maybe especially if it hurts. If you're not going to open doors for women, then you can sure as hell throw a couple punches for one when it's 2 AM and some drunken frat fuck won't leave her alone. It happens a few times, and the night ends with bruised knuckles and the taste of blood in your mouth, but you always get your point across with blistering clarity.

You're not the guy with flocks of friends, never will be, and you don't want to be, not really. For however much it aches to know you'll never belong, it narrows down the list of people you'd feel obligated to take a bullet for.

And when it comes down to that--well. It has before, where you had to make that choice, except it wasn't really a choice, not for you, and you stepped in front of that sword, that gun, that blast of fire every. single. time. For all the kinds of men you aren't, that's the kind of man you are, and that's what's so satisfying. When the game ended and everyone got on with their lives and all that's left of Time is no need to ever wear a watch again, you can still say that yeah, you're a knight in your own way. That's something that'll never change.

five.

You're chronically, habitually, hopelessly bad at women.

It's not getting them that you're bad at; you're attractive and you know it, because you're fastidious about your appearance to the point of compulsion and you never leave your apartment without looking like you could buy the town. You're the skilled musician dripping with arrogance, indifferent to the existence of other people, and girls go fucking crazy for it. It helps, you think, that apparently there's something mysterious about you, something a little dark and intense, because, well--you've seen war and nobody comes out of that without a little bit of baggage, and they love that. You're the guy they want to take home and kiss better and stitch back together with force of personality. You're the guy they want to fix so you'll love them.

You don't, though, you don't even come close, and you suppose that's where the point of contention is. A week, two weeks, sometimes three, and it's smooth sailing--but then she'll want your apartment key, or she'll want to meet your friends, or she'll drop hints about moving in and you're fucking out of there. Sometimes you're out of there sooner, for stupid reasons: there was Jenna, the poli-sci major who couldn't shut up; there was Ashley, who accidentally ran into you everywhere and you're pretty sure she was stalking you; Madison had too many piercings, Olivia reeked of nicotine, Nicole kept asking about your parents. They're just the start of your list. It extends way, way beyond them. You tell John that they just weren't right; you know for yourself that you just weren't trying.

(Her name is Mira and she's a righteous bitch, you decide, and you wonder why you're even here, fumbling around her apartment in the dark looking for where you dropped your damn tie, when you got sick of her two weeks ago and got sick of nights like these a week after that. You know she's watching you from her bed, face contorted in that nasty little scowl of hers, but you can't see her and you don't really want to.

“I don't know what your damage is, Strider.” You hear the rustle of bedsheets and her soft footsteps on the hardwood and you don't dignify her nagging with any sort of response. “Do I look too much like her? Not enough?”

Mira--beautiful, horrible Mira, with her tan skin and her long black hair and her serpentine calculation--has a way with words that reminds you of Rose, if Rose were even more of a frigid cunt. You feel a sort of cold fury rising up in your gut, old and familiar because that's just always how it starts with you, ice first and fire later. “Finish that thought,” you say, and you know she will, because she doesn't back from a challenge. She's dating you, after all. “Go ahead.”

“Wait, I'm sorry. She has her hair cut short now, doesn't she? I think I saw her in Forbes last month. Cute. Like a pixie. Shame you won't let me meet her.” She follows you as you stalk down the dark hallway, into the living room, where you swipe your keys from the coffee table. “Or maybe she just hasn't come back into town yet. Is that it? I wouldn't know, you never talk about her.”

She's on your heels even as you grab your jacket, and you still don't have your tie but fuck it, better to buy a new one than put up with this bullshit. “Poor you, all lonely because your rich little heiress girlfriend left you behind. Do you miss her? Is that why you said her name?”

You'd never hit a woman, not in a thousand goddamn years no matter how much she might deserve it, but as she blocks the doorway, sheet pulled around her and that fucking scowl on her face as poisonous as the rest of her, you come so, so close. “Get the fuck out of my way,” you say, and it's all you have to say, because--

Well. She liked you because you were a little dark and intense and broken, but actually seeing you like that isn't something she can handle.)

“Dude,” John says and he doesn't even try to hide his amusement as he chews on his straw, the smug bastard; you regret calling him even though it's what you always do when you have a problem. “Your life's kind of gone to hell you're trying way too hard to compensate.”

“Bullshit. I'm not compensating for anything,” you say, but you aren't so good at lying anymore, because John only laughs at you, at your half-eaten plate of sorted, organized food.

six.

Okay, so you have some fucking control issues. You get it. People can just get off your dick about it already because you know, they don't need to keep reminding you. You're enough of a reminder to yourself. Yeah, so you had kind of a crappy childhood and a brother who was never home, and when he was, he was putting you through shit a kid shouldn't have to go through, all 'it's for your own good's and 'you'll thank me when you're older's and 'pay attention, you're gonna need to know this someday's. And yeah, maybe it affected you more than you'd like to admit, and yeah, maybe you didn't have any control at all and you reacted with trying to force everything around you to make sense.

And there's that other part of your title that still rides along with you, the one that was so fucking cool until you learned what happens when you have to become the get out of jail free card for your friends. (It's almost hilarious, you think, striving all your life to be the best and then finding out that only the best are ever offered up for sacrifice.) You were the one who made it through the game, but you can't help but think of other timelines, all the other pockets of failure that another you had to fix at his own expense. If you were another man, it might make you bitter, but you're not. You're more bitter at yourself and how you're dealing with the leftovers.

You still feel time a little too intimately than you'd prefer, but it's not under your control anymore, so you force it in other ways; you went after music with a kind of terrifying fervor as soon as you realized your personal timeline was static again, learning instruments, collecting vinyls and samples by the thousands. It's that rhythm, you know, and they call it keeping time but it means something entirely different to you; it's the way you can sit with your mixing equipment for hours, making tiny, exacting changes for perfectionism's sake, finding what's wrong and fixing it, making sense out of the chaos. And when you're on that stage with that guitar and that microphone, you've got a crowd's attention locked onto you, a show of force through skill and determination. You're not the golden boy and you never will be, not like John, but you can make people listen.

And you'd say it's fine but it's not, not really, when every night you get all dressed up with nowhere to go but around, around, around, the dance that went out of style years ago with partners who don't know what's going on until you're gone. You don't enjoy it, and maybe that's what scares you--that you faced an image of yourself when you were thirteen that you swore up and down you'd never become, only to become it anyway. Metronome for a hammer and here you are, hunched over joyless and solemn for all the beautiful things you make.

(respected but never loved, tolerated but never wanted)

You're not a drinker--control issues, the voice of Rose echoes in your head, and you've been drinking just enough to laugh at that, just enough to flick through your phone's address book, looking for a name and a number and a reason. Around the middle of the list you realize you've only come up with two out of three, and that'll have to be enough.

As you listen to it ring, and ring, and ring, and ring, you become dimly aware that it's 3 AM and you're kind of an asshole when a groggy, girlish voice picks up.

“Dave?”

You lick your cracked lips, close your eyes, and your voice curls her name into a question: “Jade?”

“What's wrong?”

Your shoulders shake in a chuckle made out of pure fuck it, and from the silence on the other end of the phone, you can't help but wonder if she thinks you've gone crazy, and--well. Shit, maybe you have, and maybe that could be a good thing if you let it.

“Everything,” you say, and it's not the whole truth, but it's a start.