Chapter Text
==> Be Karkat
You are waking up not to your obnoxious 4 pm alarm, but to a loud, obnoxious ringing at 7 in the morning.
“Motherfuck what...shit.” You are buried in your recuperacoon, but it's only been a couple hours that you've been asleep. Who the hell is calling you in the middle of the day? You poke your head up, your eyes no more than tiny slits.
“Oh my gog, this better be fucking important, what?” you croak into the phone. It takes several tries before the human wriggler on the other end gets his request out. “Oh fuck no, I just closed last night, fuckass! What the... shit! Okay, fine. Fine but if the boss is not there by twelve, I'm going to go to your house, haul you out of bed, pull your intestines out of your fucking nose and hang you with them!” You slam the phone down and haul yourself out of the recuperacoon, feeling dizzy and a little sick. You don't sleep well to begin with, and the less than three hours sleep you've gotten is nowhere near enough.
“FUCK!”
Twenty minutes later, you have your combat boots laced, your hoodie on over your horns and still-damp hair, and sunglasses because fuck the sun is too bright for your eyes. At least the light in the store will pretty much be the same. You get into your truck (gray-primer color, you've never had the money to get it painted properly) and drive to the Quick Stop, a small convenience store over on the other side of town.
You unlock the front door of the shop, but when you try to get the metal rolling doors to go up, you find that someone has shoved chewing gum in the locks. Putting the key into that will be disgusting and damaging and you have no desire to go trying to clean gum and saliva solution off of keys or locks. “Fuckin' barbarians,” you mutter, your mood most definitely not improving by the minute.
Problem was, the store still looks closed. You sigh and get the tarp out of the back of your truck, the tarp that you usually put over John's bike when you bring him home nights, and you write with your hand dipped in shoe polish: YEAH, FUCKASSES, WE'RE OPEN! You hang the sign over the metal doors to the front of the building, then go to wash your hands. And then you curse again, get the shoe polish out a second time, and put the Alternian letters underneath the English ones, because you’re a bilingual motherfucker.
Fucking shoe polish.
You make the coffee, and put out one of the newspapers the store sells. You get a quarter out of the till and go to a neighboring store and clean out the newspaper dispenser of all the other newspaper that your store is supposed to carry, but never seems to be delivered. Stupid dispenser. So easy to steal from...
You sigh again and stand behind the cash register, which has a cheery sign posted: If you are going to shoplift, please let us know!
You aren't even supposed to be here today...
The assholes start coming in strong today, and by 8:05 you're done being pleasant. You take money and make change and if you growl, they're just going to have to deal with it. And humans just don't know how to deal with trolls. Well, they're going to have to learn because you've been here for a long time and you'll be there for a long time to come.
Sometimes, for shits and giggles, you'll smile at humans with all your pointy teeth. You like to freak them out a little. It's because you hate your job, really.
But you don't know what else to do, so you stay there. And you need the job, now. You hang your life on it like a fucking human Christmas tree.
You were meant for something different. Something better. But you're damned if you know what that is.
Someone slaps a huge package of Fruit Gushers down on the counter. You know who that is. You smile briefly, a little less pointy because it's a real smile. But it also doesn't last long. Your real smiles never do. Your friends all know this.
“Hey, Egderp. How's school, fuckass?”
You call everyone 'fuckass', whether they're friend or foe. Sometimes you only say it internally.
John Egbert grins idiotically at you. “It's good! It'd be better if you were there, though...”
“Fuck, Egbert, don't nag.” You know you should be doing something else. But damned if you know what...
He sighs. “I know, I know. But I wasn't expecting to see you here today! I mean, you dropped me off last night, and I was expecting to see you next around five today for movies!” It was Friday, after all. Movie night! He was always so excited for movie night...
“You'll still see me around for movies. And Terezi too, probably. I should be out of here by noon, cause the boss should be in by then. Then I can be bored to tears by your human excuse for movies...”
“It’ll be good to see Terezi again! Aw, come on, you're just teasing. You know you love my movies...” He stopped, sniffed the air. “What smells like shoe polish?”
“Hoofbeast shit,” you snap at him, but you've had this argument so many times you both have it memorized. (And you don’t mind his movies that much...by now it’s just tradition.) “I made the sign out of shoe polish. Smell won’t come off...”
Just then, a customer comes into the store, slamming a DVD case down on the counter. “Do you know when the fuck the video store is going to open?”
John winces. “Um...maybe I should go... I got a class. See you around five, then?”
You growl a bit. “Yeah.” You turn to the video store customer as John leaves. You have to be somewhat polite sometimes and you try to reassure the customer that the store will be open as soon as the video store clerk gets there...
Gogdammit Strider, where the hell are you?
Just then, the store's purrbeast leaps up on the counter, purring and rubbing up against the customer. “Hey, cute cat, man. What's his name?”
“Fuckass.”