Chapter Text
________________________________
"-still have not been able to locate her whereabouts-"
"-enty-thousand caegars, which is, if you ask me Forenk, absolutely outrageo-"
"-stigators have uncovered new evidence suggesting that the protestors had cerulean blood backe-"
"-an't assume that! You're forgetting, you're... you're ignoring the legislatu-"
"-an you give us any insight into the background of this guy? He seems a little distu-"
"-on't know about you, but I think tighter security is quite uncesse-"
"-ere with a witness who says she's never seen anything more romantic in her lif-"
"-oin us at the top of the hour for more of this sensational case."
Terezi Pyrope is on her way to work, half hanging outside of a trolley car with her nose upturned to inhale the evening rush. One arm and leg wrap around a pole and the rest of her flutters in the wind, brilliant mango pants and cocktail stripe sweater and gently flipped hair, under a bubblegum moon that is bright bright bright. It makes the smoggy city taste like sugar dusted soot and she loves it. She grins and brushes the hair out of her mouth, nose out for the shining lemon letters of the Nightly Times.
She has slept extraordinarily well the past three or so days. Days that followed a week and a half of zealous coverage of a scandal involving a blueblood busineslayer and a locomotive company’s inexplicable “accounting error”. A team of overworked and underpaid employees were culled for the missing sum of money that could best be described as vast, but Terezi’s incisive words hitting the front page night after night drew out the true culprit, who came forward and confessed it all. To top it off, the next day was spent gorging on coffee and donuts with Nepeta Leijon. Nepeta had a day off from the butcher shop, and it was their best date yet.
Oh yes, Terezi slept very well this week.
She hops off of the trolley before it stops, smacking the ground smartly with her kicky little loafers, and strolls up to the paper’s offices with memorized raps of her cane. She pushes open the double doors as if she owns the place and the ocean of early evening chaos greets her like a warm embrace made of conversation, shuffling into elevators, taking off hats and coats. She spins and laughs as trolls of all kinds stop and greet her, sharing quick gossip, compliments, and good evenings.
“Terezi!”
“Yes Mr. Sweet Potato!”
“Fine work on smoking out that two-bit bastard last week.”
“And a fine job done on the beach murder yourself! I appreciate the dedication to sensory detail, though I fear I smell like fish.”
“S’probably just the horrendous linoleum. Who the fuck designed this place anyhow?” interrupts a dry and scratchy voice that makes Terezi spin and light up like Eve leavings. She can immediately smell the drab stale coffee and barbeque sauce plaid, two strips of licorice suspenders over badly ironed marshmallow, and a whole lot of the candy red stare she had loved since it first started filling in. “Got dropped too many times as a wiggler, I’ll bet.”
“And a most scrumptious good evening to you, Mr. Strawberry Fruit Tart,” she says with a grin as they step into the packed elevator.
“Says who?” But he’s smiling a little one-side-of-the-mouth smile, sockets bruised with sleeplessness, hair clean and combed. He missed a spot, as usual. Forever trying to be crisp and cutting, but always comes up just short. Terezi licks her palm and smooths down the curl.
“Says me! And I’m always right.”
“Sure, Terezi.”
She winks and lets him brush past her as the doors open, smacking her cane against his calf. Were the hall less crowded she would have aimed a bit higher, but this is a professional establishment and she is a professional! She happily sniffs in the lemon meringue chairs and the almond desks and the watermelon leaves of the office plants that sit next to the windows. The room already swirls with movement and the relentless demand to get things done, yesterday!
On her desk is a stack of spit-crinkled notes, massive reference tomes, and a box of brightly colored markers and pens. She scoots the box aside and plants herself on the wood, driving the point of her cane onto the floor, “So! How was your date?”
“It wasn’t a fucking date, and you know it, harpy,” Karkat fires back, dropping his hat onto the desk.
“Bullshit.”
“He fixed my car, just like he always does when it breaks down. Which is infuriatingly, but coincidentally, often. It’s called a professional customer relationship, not that you can even pretend to know what that entails.”
“Bull. Shit.”
“Eat mine.”
“Fine!” she said and threw up her hands dramatically. “You exchanged currency for mechanical services rendered. Platonically. Without any underlying incentive whatsoever.”
“Exactly,” he punctuates with a nod and sits in his creaky chair, leaning back with his hands crossed behind his head. After a moment he leans over and says, “How was your date?”
“It wasn’t a date.”
“Bullshit.”
She grins and slips into her chair, "Coffee, Karkat! My mug won’t fill itself!”
“Yeah yeah,” he rolls his eyes and grabs her soup mug. He backs away and gives her a sarcastic bow. She just smiles.
She rubs her hands together and reaches over to stacks of papers covered in sticky-notes of all different colors for degrees of intrigue; from red for most deliciously enticing all the way down to plain old watered down lemonade for slow news days. She sniffs through and finds an orange zest; the pile goes back in her tray and she spreads out the folder, grabbing her box of markers. Scandal with a seadweller and investment fraud! Excellent.
She proceeds to scribble through page after page, downing mugs of coffee like oxygen. Karkat grumbles in between each refill, but faithfully keeps her excellently caffeinated as the night stretches on. He takes pages that she thrusts out, deciphering her colorful written language with aplomb, absently smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke to the side, away from Terezi’s desk. This is part consideration and part fear of a drubbing for mucking up Terezi’s sinuses. It only took him one time to get that figured out.
Editorial is laughter and gossip, trash-talking rival papers, and a thick haze of smoke. Terezi fans the air in front of her face clear with yesterday’s paper and her cackling can be heard throughout the whole office. Her story was a hit. When is it ever not, she says with the toothiest of grins and Karkat rolls his eyes. She thwacks him with the paper and everyone is told to get the fuck back to work. The Times doesn’t write itself!
“Don’t think I don’t appreciate your excellent note-taking and editing expertise, Red Delicious Butt.”
“You mean squinting at your cluckbeast scratch to find a handful of barely usable phrases? May god have mercy on this paper on the day they don’t have me to translate your rainbow vomit.”
She shoves him another stack of spit streaked rough drafts and says, “Back to work, Babel.”
He flips her off, but can’t hide that smile from her nose.
They’ve got most of the article typed up for tomorrow’s run when an excited coworker slaps his hands on Terezi’s desk. She caps her marker, crosses her arms, and looks up slowly.
“You are under arrest for harshing my flow, Mr. Granny Apple!”
“You’ll thank me later. You gotta hear this, kids. It’s big.”
“Bigger than your custodian’s ass?” Karkat says, flipping through folders of documents.
“Bigger than your bulge-sucking seedflap.”
Terezi pounds his outheld fist and then waves for him to get on with it.
“Just been a double homicide on Fifth and Main.”
“And?” Karkat says, unamused, still stabbing the keys on the typewriter. The greenblood waggles his eyebrows and holds up two fingers.
“Two highbloods. Blue and purple. It’s a real fucking mess.”
At this Karkat and Terezi freeze, all light-hearted teasing suddenly dissolved. Terezi looks up, “Who?”
“Report said, um... Blue’s ‘Zahhak’ according to the name on his uniform, and purple’s... Somethin’ like ‘games,’ I forget. But man, you shoulda heard the message. Can’t even recognize them, apparently. You should get out there, take some notes, eh?”
“Zahhak?” Karkat says all of a sudden, shooting out of his chair to grab the man’s arm. “Equius Zahhak?”
“Uh...” he starts and then nods. “Yeah. I think.”
Terezi and Karkat share one silent, petrified glance and then he grabs her hand. Purple blood, name sounds like “games...” And Equius, Karkat’s drinking buddy and mechanic friend. Both dead.
Down the elevator and on the sprint to his rattling old car, Karkat’s hand is so warm and painfully tight.
- - -
There’s a barricade cutting off the intersection where the fight took place, so Karkat has to park nearly two blocks away. They jump out of the car and run; Terezi’s notepad is left on her seat. Her jacket too, and it’s cold out, but she’s burning with a deep and gnawing fear. She will not believe it. She won’t believe that Gamzee motherfucking Makara is dead until the smell of his blood wafts all the way up into her thinkpan and she sees that his eyes are unfocused; until then the information is unreliable. Only trust your own nose, first rule. Only trust what you smell yourself.
She slows to a nervous walk, slammed by the flashing police lights reflecting off of a crowd of dark coats. There’s a faint whiff of a splatter painting of dark blue blood, glittering in the dim orange light of the street corner lamp up high. The wall of people can’t mask the blue. The smell creeps through the air like a slow wave, but when it hits, it hits and Terezi feels it gather cold in her gut. Karkat freezes behind her.
“I can’t-”
“Then don’t,” Terezi says and walks forward to push through the onlookers and lingering police waiting for a clean-up crew. She flashes her media badge, nods absently as a few officers recognize her, and then she stops just an inch outside the mirrored pool of grape juice viscera.
It is not dignified. Not like she has always pictured Gamzee’s final moments, in which he glares furiously at her because she’s backed him up into a corner and he knows it’s checkmate. Seeing him twisted awkwardly, slashed like a cheap set of tires... It’s anticlimactic. It is a thoughtless, gruesome end to a cunning mind and she has to turn around to spit out the foul taste in her mouth. Not that it helps. Turning back only fills it back up with sickly grape. Though she’s down a notetaker, she is glad for Karkat’s absence. Though the very thought sickens her a little, what he had with Gamzee back in the day had been serious; serendipity while it lasted, or so everyone said. He would surely break down at the sight of his ex cleaved and motionless, that ridiculous makeup violently smeared and cleaved. Better that he only see it secondhand. How the mighty have fallen, but those are just words. Words are strings of letters. Bile rises in her throat. She spits to the side again, and then looks over at the other body.
He is unrecognizable. He towered over her and Karkat like a burly wall, hunched over a little, with sleepless bruises under his eyes. His eyes when he saw Nepeta were bright as stars, and just as pale. He was true to her. Now he’s just a spilled sack of blueberries, smashed to a pulp at one end. One of his legs bleeds, but it’s a pinprick compared to the beaten skin of his face and neck. Gamzee’s hand and shirt sleeve are soaked with blue blood.
“How many shots were fired?” Terezi asks.
“One that we know of, ma’am. Only did find one casing. Could be there’s another in blue’s head though, what with all the... the tenderizing, and all.”
One shot, just a fucking around bullet. The gun is gone, dropped in a plastic bag for evidence. But one gun couldn’t do all this damage to both corpses.
“And the other weapon?”
“A meat cleaver, ma’am.”
“Meat cleaver? That is awfully specific.”
“Well, the suspect is in custody. Never took off, just got found kneeling next to ‘em. Crying. Crime of passion, we’re thinking. Tiny thing, she was. Pretty impressive though, offing two big ‘ol highbloods though, if you ask me.”
Terezi spins and grabs the officer’s arm, “She?”
The officer starts and eyes Terezi. She nods and holds out a hand at Terezi’s eye level, “Yeah. Little greenblood.”
“A name?”
“Dunno, sorry Pyrope.”
Terezi looks once more at the bodies and catches the faintest streaks of familiar olive green; she lunges and shoves her way out of the scene. Karkat is waiting just outside the crowd, gripping his notepad hard enough to bend it, staring with wide eyes. All the lights make his face unreadable. Angry, almost. Horrified, or anguished. Maybe all of them. It’s Karkat, nothing is simple with him.
“Small greenblood suspect in custody, murder weapon is a meat cleaver.”
“Terezi...” he says, and he looks down at her shoes. She dreads this, wants to both cover her ears and shake it out of him. Wants to go home and fall asleep on her couch, and wants to go back and tear through the bloody scene for answers. Karkat’s face goes all pained, and then wipes away to a forced blankness that she knows is a lie. He looks up and, “Terezi, it’s Nepeta.”
She will remember this very second for its scent. Thick humidity before a storm, bright flashes of mixed berry from the useless ambulance, and Karkat, all coffee and grey and hard candy red.
