Work Text:
“Shut up,” you say, to forestall him. It works as well as it always works, which is to say not in the least. He wriggles on the couch, arranging himself more comfortably in his horrific fucking blue Snuggie with the white puffy clouds all over it.
“No, you have to do the voices, Karkat. You said you’d do the voices.”
“I never said any such thing and all claims to the contrary are lies and fucking slander. I am not going to do the voices for The Scarlet Letter.”
“Kaaarkat,” he says, and now he’s squiggled all the way upside down, head drooping against the front of the couch, his goddamn hair getting all over the place. “I need a full textual immersion experience here, how else am I supposed to write this paper?”
You sigh.
He looks at you, and nobody ought to have eyes that blue unless they’ve paid for them. You sigh again and turn to the introduction.
Egbert’s glasses are okay for shit like basic walking around and not bumping into things, and not great but functional for taking notes in class if he sits at the right distance from the board, but close shit like reading makes him either take the glasses off and stare at the book at the range of a couple inches or keep them on and try to read at arm’s length. You hadn’t really realized this until you’d known him for a while.
He never mentioned it, of course. It was just that after some time you noticed he always went to find some aspirin after he’d been studying, he always took his glasses off and rubbed at his eyes when he thought you weren’t looking, he did that thing where he tilted his head to look over or below the frames to try and bring shit into focus.
What he needs is a goddamn exam and a new prescription but it is not as if the gods just hand that shit out for free, even if he could take a day off classes to go sit in a little dark room and have shit done to his eyes. You’ve heard him talk about it, the yellow fluorescein drops that go with the anesthetic and whatever dilates his eyes, how he’s got neon yellow eyeboogers the rest of that goddamn day, and the thing they do to test for glaucoma where you stare at a point of red light and they blow compressed air at your eyeball hard enough to make you blink and wince.
(You rarely think about the fact that you can see properly. It’s only when you notice that he can’t that it occurs to you.)
And so after a particularly awkward night where he’d been doing that weird lizardlike head-duck thing to get his eyes closer or further away from the printed page you’d just said “hey, asshole, want me to read it to you?” and the look of sheer relief on his face had taken away a lot of the awkwardness.
You’ve read all the shit he needs to be really well acquainted with. Stuff like study guides or whatever, he can handle on his own, but texts that he needs to be able to cite are your provenance. It’s…you never thought it’d be remotely okay to be reading somebody’s textbooks to them out loud, but it feels a little tiny bit like you’re participating in his earning his degree, as if in some infinitesimal way that’s partly you that’s going to walk across that stage.
Which is selfish as all fuck and you should have known better than to explore that line of thought, what the fuck, Vantas.
You turn your attention back to the book and you begin: “‘A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.’ If these are the hats I’m thinking of ‘steeple-crowned’ is not so much apposite as ‘fucking hilarious,’ but I guess I’m not the target audience.” He gurgles with that totally unscripted laughter that makes you go stupid in the stomach.
It is not lost on you, having skimmed through this chunk of literature before you had to read it to John, how very much Hawthorne’s Puritans resemble your own world’s canon.
He’s settled back on the sofa wrapped up in his goddamn fleece thing and he looks so stupidly peaceful but you know that there are things going on behind that derpy smile, and you want so badly to kiss him for a moment that it physically hurts. But you have a job to do, and there’s an awful lot of this story to get through before morning, and you squash the useless desire the way you’re used to squashing useless desires, and you just pick up the thread of the story and go on.
You go on: that, for now, is just about enough.