Chapter Text
The doorbell chimed and Karkat flinched hard enough to hit his head against the table he was crawling under. “Fuck!” he spat, quickly shuffling out from underneath the desk on all fours, abandoning the mountain of receipts that had spilled on the floor. He hastily left the dark storage room, slamming the narrow door behind him, and slid back into position behind the counter of his gas station. His totally empty gas station. Karkat swallowed; this place got creepy often enough even without ghostly doorbells. He scanned the tiny shop with its white tiles, meagre selection of snacks, drinks, cheap souvenirs, and fried pies. Said pies were sitting sadly in the greasy glass vitrine, untouched as ever.
Karkat rounded the counter and took another look behind the single aisle in the shop, confirming that there was no one there. Then he looked out the window, checking whether anyone had stopped to get gas and peeked inside only to find the counter unmanned. No cars, no trucks, not even a lonely motorbike was standing at the pump. Karkat walked up to the door, pushing it open with the familiar jingle and craning his neck outside. He almost missed the green Forester parked in the employee spot, but there it was. A thermo window cover was plastered on the windshield and, with its inconspicuous green coat and overall dustiness, the car blended so politely with the parking lot and lush nature beyond that it was almost invisible. But Karkat was not born yesterday; he was born almost two decades ago and had lived through the continuous downfall of this godforsaken country, the ravages of an opioid epidemic along the curling stripe of the Mississippi where he and his father had settled shortly after rental prices in St. Louis soared violently.
Karkat knew when someone was living out of a car and trying to avoid paying a parking ticket in town. He strutted up to the driver's seat, barely hesitating before rapping his knuckles against the covered window. Nothing happened. The birds chirped, the forest on the other side of the road emitted the humming of a spring afternoon, and Karkat's tension evaporated. He stood dumbly by the empty car and opted to look back at the road. The sun was illuminating floating pollen and critters in the air, making them look like embers. A breeze was drawing a gentle rustling from the woods. If it wasn’t such a shithole, he’d love this place. At least he had the shop to himself these days. While it remained unclear how his father was okay with letting his 17-year-old son run a gas station in the woods by the Mississippi, Karkat was fine and dandy as long as he was left to his own devices. Usually, there were only a handful of customers a day and barely any work: cleaning the floors, restocking once in a while, throwing out the old fried pies and making new ones (aka moving them from the freezer to the tiny oven in the vitrine). The rest of the time he spent reading, napping in the storage room, sometimes smoking cigarettes on the lawn chair at the back of the gas station that looked out into the grassy forest. For all this, he got paid a humble wage that went directly into a savings account and had the quiet to himself.
“Can I help you?” Again, Karkat nearly jumped out of his skin, promptly knocking his elbow painfully into the rearview mirror of the intrusive Subaru. He swung around, ready to scream at this prowling creep but stopped in his tracks when he saw a shaggy-looking boy stalk through the high grass towards him. The guy, still a teenager judging by his ratty jeans and t-shirt, crossed the remainder of the lawn and came to a halt in front of Karkat, laying a protective hand on the roof of the car. “What’s up?”
Karkat’s mouth was still ajar and he snapped it shut with a click only to open it again. “What are you doing here?” It came out as a statement. Blonde brows appeared above the rim of the stranger's sunglasses. “Parking.” A familiar heat spread on Karkat’s face. “No shit, you absolute clod!” The eyebrows rose even further. “What are you trying to do here?” he continued. The intruder raised his free hand, attempting a pacifying stance. “Dude, chill. I was taking a leak in the woods, tried to buy some fried pie before.”
“No, you weren’t!” Karkat spat.
“I was!” the other protested, his voice rising.
“No one buys fried pies here!” Karkat shot back without missing a beat. This stunned the guy for a moment.
“Who even are you? The gas boy? The pie master? What’s your deal?” Karkat could hear the laugh in the other’s voice, but there was no smile on his face. Blustering, he stood up straighter. “There’s no such thing as a ‘gas boy,’ nor is there a ‘pie master,’ you lunatic. I’m,” he paused, distressed at the lack of intimidating job descriptions and blurted out, “the co-owner.”
The guy was starting to look decidedly uncomfortable now. Good.
“Look, I was trying to buy some breakfast, no one was in the shop and I went to take a piss. I just left my car here so it wouldn’t be in the way. Honestly.”
Karkat considered this and decided to back down, but not without a scoff. “Alright, well, I’m here now.” With this, he turned on his heel and strutted back to the shop, trying to radiate just how utterly unbothered he was. Shaggy followed behind, only to break the silence when they entered through the open door.
“So, you work out here all alone?”
Karkat clenched his jaw, ignoring the question, and shuffled back behind the counter. For lack of a better solution, he reverted to employee handbook vocabulary. “Good morning, how may I help you?”
The guy still had his sunglasses on and appeared to just stare incredulously at Karkat. Suddenly, he shifted his weight and, with an alarmingly southern drawl, responded, “Good morning to you too. I’ll take some of these fried pies, one of each, and I don’t know if you’re aware, but you have an awfully rude young man hanging 'round the parking lot. Ya might want to give your sheriff a call if you don’t mind me sayin’.”
“A wha—” Karkat cut himself off before falling ass over face for the ruse. Instead, he narrowed his eyes, leaning across the counter. “Well gosh darn it, we can’t have that!” he said in a sickly sweet voice. “I wonder if it’s the homeless dopehead who’s parking his junkyard on wheels next to my shop.”
The stranger's mouth fell open and Karkat briefly wondered whether he would finish his shift with a black eye or two. Instead, the guy started laughing, loudly. “You’re wild for calling that beauty a junkyard,” he wheezed and reached his hand across the counter. “I’m Dave.”
Karkat scowled at the hand but shook it anyway. “Karkat, and, for the record, I’m not calling the cops but I might give someone else a call if you try to sleep in my parking lot.” Who this hypothetical someone else might be was unclear since Karkat had no friends, much less scary ones, in town.
The Dave character laughed, shaking his head. “What’s with this strict parking policy? Not like anyone is using the space. Unless your bike needs the whole lot?” If it had been someone else, Karkat would be getting uneasy now, what with Dave knowing that he was entirely alone at the shop without even a car. But Karkat had gotten a better look at the guy and saw that Dave was lanky and intentionally messy-looking in a spoiled city kid way and not, as he had guessed at first, gaunt and neglected like the friendly but nonetheless unnerving crackheads he encountered around town. Dave’s blonde hair wasn’t unkempt but very clearly styled for a rugged, grungy look.
“My shop is not a campsite,” Karkat said curtly and got to work with the fried pies. One of each warranted a whole box, but no one in the history of fried pies had ever ordered “one of each” so paper bags would have to do. Dave remained quiet, finally, and shuffled on his feet, gazing out the window towards his car. The, in Karkat’s opinion hilariously insane, “God Bless America” painted in blue on the windows was probably blocking it out of Dave’s view. Apple, blackberry, pineapple, chocolate, vanilla, pecan, and, his personal favorite, apricot. Karkat put an extra apricot pie in the last bag and punched in the numbers at the register.
“Twenty-five dollars. The last one’s for free because I yelled at you.”
“There’s that southern friendliness,” Dave muttered, pulling out a wallet from his jeans.
“I’m not even from here,” Karkat blurted, immediately regretting the confession.
“So, where are you from?” Karkat had gotten himself into this ridiculous exchange of private information and felt even more ridiculous refusing to answer. “We used to live in Caracas.”
“Venezuela?” Dave asked.
“Well someone didn’t go to public school,” Karkat snarled, refusing to let the other see his surprise at the immediate recognition. This was apparently entertaining and Dave laughed that same breathy laugh, shaking his head again.
“Barely went to school at all, actually,” he mumbled as he pulled out the crumpled bills.
Karkat refused to take the bait and waltzed on. “Either way it’s none of your business and now,” he shoved the paper bags into a larger plastic one and set it on the counter, “you’re finally free to go. Hope that kid outside don’t bother you again.”
Dave took the bag and smiled, looking Karkat in the face. Or so he thought; the sunglasses made it hard to assess whether the guy was even awake. “Sweet.” A brief pause. “So, can I leave my car here for the night?”
Karkat ground his teeth and inhaled deeply through the nose, closing his eyes for just a moment. “Alright, whatever.”
Dave was smiling widely now, slapping the counter enthusiastically with his free hand. “Oh yes, baby!”
“But!” Karkat raised his finger warningly. “We gotta ask my dad if it’s alright when he gets here for the evening shift.”
Dave, still smirking, nodded and ducked out of the shop wordlessly. Karkat was left to stand stupidly in his stupid dusty shop, wondering about whether the gas station had a new permanent resident and how his dad would punish this particular crime. A quick glance at the clock behind him revealed that he still had about three hours until said fatherly figure would show up. Karkat groaned and let his face fall into his hands. After a few minutes of hiding from the world behind his fingers, he sighed heavily, slowly straightening his back. He returned to the storage room to finalise the high-priority task of picking up the pile of receipts that had slipped out of the January 2022 folder onto the floor earlier.
After spending enough time crawling across the dusty linoleum, he returned awkwardly to the counter. It bothered him to no end how Dave could easily guess that Karkat had nothing to do in here, no customers to attend to, no tasks to fulfil, and was just standing around. It aggravated him even more that he wasted even a second of his time worrying about what this ragged-looking CPS case thought of him. The fact that Karkat was anxious about being judged by some hipster living out of his car was a worrying indicator of how desolate his social life had been since moving down here with his father. The average age of his neighbours was about 65, and most of the kids his age would be staying by the Mississippi River for the rest of their lives and didn’t get to have Ivy League opportunities delivered to them on a silver platter.
No, Karkat had a whole new life coming his way, a life of studies at Columbia. With the help of a dedicated teacher, a few writing awards, alright grades, and his dad’s humble income, Karkat had made his way into a full-ride scholarship for Literature and Creative Writing. At the start of September, he’d show up in some dormitory with a heavy suitcase and would have to start over in a big, foreign city his father spoke of wistfully from time to time.
A ping from his phone reminded him that he wouldn’t be totally alone. Terezi would start her law degree, and Kanaya would finally live close by. Karkat had met both of them back in Chicago, along with a list of other friends, most of whom drove him mad half the time. Only a few years into high school, and despite the fact that he and his dad had liked living in Chicago, they ended up fleeing from things like “bad job markets” and “surging real estate prices” to St. Louis until they fled from there as well and ended up in Can, Missouri, where rent never rose because no one wanted to live there, and the job market was shit but never got worse. “Can’t get any worse,” his dad always joked, usually roaring with laughter, sometimes deeply melancholic.
For Karkat, it meant that most of his friendships took place online, with the exception of Gamzee, who sometimes came by the shop, stoned out of his mind, and Sollux Captor, who had also moved to Can with his dad and brother. Their fathers were currently collaborating on what would be the second most important business in town: an auto repair shop. Not a summer job Karkat could take on. Neither would Sollux, who had bigger plans that still involved sending Trojan horses to their old high school administrator, playing shooter games, and forever mourning Aradia.
Karkat flung himself off that train of thought and decided to have a cigarette in the back while possibly spying on the Subaru and its owner.