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Your name is Karkat Vantas and you thought you knew what pale felt like before.
Your giant clown stares around the rooms you walk through like he hasn’t been somewhere light and warm in sweeps, and you are filled with an utterly disgusting amount of pity for him. He looks even worse in the light. He’s a mess of bruises and cuts, looks like he’s been thrown into a pile of broken glass a few times—
You catch yourself turning red at the thought of the word ‘pile’ and shake it off hastily. You leave Sollux’s soon-to-be matesprit at the door—she gives you this kind of knowing look and giggles as she goes, that weird little watery sound that makes your hair prickle for reasons you don’t really understand.
It reminds us of our ancient enemy, whispers a voice in your head. In the presence of this highblood, you are more vulnerable to my misgivings. I apologize.
You mentally scream the voices in your head into submission, and lock them firmly away. You made peace with the fact that there was some kind of freak consciousness in your head a long time ago, and maybe it even belongs to the Signless Sufferer, like it says it does. Whether it’s true or not, he’s not going to watch this. This is between you and your
…moirail?
You just thought of him as your moirail. Don’t even fucking deny it. You met him hours ago and you just thought of him as your fucking moirail!
You wonder, sudden and horrible, whether Gamzee even has the slightest fucking clue what being pale even is. Did anyone explain basic quadrants to him, between fighting and living alone and being trained to fuck up people’s pans beyond repair? What if he doesn’t feel the same way about you as you do about him? What if—
“…hey.”
You jump, and Gamzee is bent down to look you in the face, and he looks confused and worried and you think you are going to puke from feeling too much all at the same time. This has to be some kind of serendipity, right? This can’t just be you fooling yourself, not a feeling like this.
Some of what you’re thinking must show on your face, because he kind of hesitantly reaches out and pats your head, like he doesn’t know if he’s doing it right. It is utterly pitiful how unsure he is. You pretty much melt, and by melt you mean straighten up and grab him and haul him off into your block.
“So,” you say, because it’s that or think about things, “—I don’t suppose you have any replacement clothes in your sylladex?”
He barely has to jog to catch up with you—just kind of lengthen his stride a little. Fuck, he’s enormous, his legs are freakishly long. “Nope,” he says, and the air flickers full of colors for a second—you squint and think maybe he’s rifling through his sylladex, but before you can try to catch a glimpse of what he’s doing the flickering vanishes again.
And then he kind of shrugs and shit shoots all over your room. You yelp and then curse a lot, and he stares around at the shit that he’s emptied out of his sylladex; another club, which you captchalogue along with his other two while he’s not looking, a couple of things that look like fish skeletons, a…wow, a whole fuckton of what looks like pure golden jewelry, with a lot of purple gems set in everything. A lot of empty glass bottles. A few pieces of colored glass. A lot of long, white feathers. A spoon. Something that…might have been clothes a long time ago; a long robe with wide sleeves and a bright purple symbol embroidered into the collar and the sleeves. But that’s tattered and filthy and not wearable at all. You’ll have to just find him something else.
“What the fuck are you doing with these?” You ask, and he kind of shrugs. He follows you a few steps behind wherever you go, like he doesn’t want to be too far from you. You would complain if anyone else did that, but you don’t want to get too far from him either. You sigh and try to think clearly around the hyper-pale part of you that keeps noticing every time his hands twitch or he winces and shakes his head like he’s hearing something he doesn’t want to.
God you have got it so bad.
“You have to clean yourself up before these get infected,” you say, and don’t meet his eyes or say ‘we’ or imagine yourself cleaning him up at all because that is the sort of thing that happens in diamond porn and one-night pale hookups, not to real people with responsibilities and real lives. “My ablution block is through there.”
He looks from you to the door for a second before it seems to hit him that he’s supposed to go where you’re pointing. He kind of peels away from you, reluctant, then winces back towards you, then straightens himself up and steps away from you again and heads for the block.
In the meantime, you try to find him something to wear. You don’t have much success; you have worn the exact same outfit pretty much every day since the day you enlisted, more than two sweeps ago, and all you really have is your uniform and an ancient pair of battered pants you sleep in. And your uniform is carefully tailored to your proportions, while you basically come up to Gamzee’s chest when he slouches and you stand at attention.
You are examining something worn-out and golden from the back of your garment organization chamber—you think it might actually belong to Tavros or Sollux, because it would be enormous on you—when you hear a sort of quiet noise from the door you sent Gamzee through. You turn and look, but the door is still closed. But you know you heard something—sort of like someone trying to call, but without…making any noise.
When that thought comes to mind your guts twist up like something is squeezing them. You drop the clothes on a chair and sort of edge forward to the door, not like you’re spying or listening in or anything, just because hell, you don’t want anything nasty to happen in your block. You notice suddenly that you can’t hear water running, and are immediately simultaneously suspicious and worried.
You all but have your ear pressed to the door when you hear it again. It’s this little unhappy, kind of cut-off noise, like someone starting to say something and then cutting themselves off, thinking better of it.
Your hand reaches out, barely under your control, and pushes the door open.
Gamzee looks at you, strange and out of place in your ablution block, just standing there in a gawky mess of bare, battered limbs, terrifyingly lost and confused and he just manages to get out “…I don’t…don’t really motherfucking know how to—” before you cross the room faster than you’ve ever gone and pull him down so you can wrap your arms around his neck.
“Goddammit,” you growl at him, and he hunches down so you don’t have to stretch up. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, just fucking tell me. Moron.” You are briefly aware he is naked, but you are even more aware that he is still filthy and battered and covered in injuries. Somehow the fact that he isn’t wearing anything doesn’t really matter right now. “What the hell. Haven’t you ever used one of these before?”
He shakes his head a little bit, and you sigh and pull him over. Your block is way too big for you, you don’t really use it that much if you can help it. In the militia, the supplies were severely limited, water heating nonexistent, water pressure patchy at best. You are still ill at ease with your huge ablution block and hot showers.
“Don’t they have these at the Big Top?” You grumble, and he kind of shrugs. “Or back at your hive?”
“Kinda…splashed off sometimes,” he says. “Pipes in my hive didn’t work a lot. And the water in the Top, it…it was all sorts of colors not motherfuckin’ natural and it…kinda…smelled weird…” he trails off, and you decide that you don’t really want to know what it smelled like. By the look on his face, you wouldn’t be surprised if it smelled mostly like that horrible sugary drink they’re always drinking over there. Or blood. “Just used whatever water was there. And on my island I just…I fished and dirt didn’t happen. Weren’t even a thing.”
You hesitate for a second, but he is staring at his feet and he looks miserable and there is a gash right down his spine that you think still has splinters imbedded in it that you are itching to fix, and then he kind of glances over at you and away again really fast and you give up. Let your life be a porno then. Fuck it. You start stripping off your jacket.
He watches you like he’s not sure what you’re doing and you strip off like you’re getting ready for a military med examination and push him into the ablution chamber in front of you. You have plenty of room—for the first time, you are actually glad of that. Even with your shoulders taking up all this space and him filling the place with arms and legs and elbows, you have enough space you don’t have to touch each other unless you want to. He still hasn’t said a word.
You turn your back on him to turn the water on, and try not to think about how nobody has seen you naked since the field surgerippers who sowed you up before you were honorably discharged. You are not self-conscious about this, fuck-dammit—
“Wow,” he says, and you freeze for a second, thinking he’s going to object to this, thinking you actually are going too far, too fast. “…fuck, my brother, these are downright terrible to look on.”
You’re about to ask what he’s talking about when a hand touches your back and you jump so hard you almost leave claw-marks in the wall. His fingers trace lines on you that you forgot existed and all of a sudden you remember how a blue-blood’s short-sword raked your back, ripped through your uniform and left a line of white-hot pain that you were too frenzied and panicked to feel. How those scars he’s looking at now were left by bare claws, tearing at the back of your neck as you wrestled in the mud and blood and some faceless enemy clawed your face and searched for your eyes—that one, an arrow through your shoulder. That one was left by a pike, trying that jab and flick move that would have pulled your guts out in pieces and hacking deep into your side instead. A graze from a spiked flail, cracking two ribs and tearing open skin…
You do your best not to shake, and when you get yourself together enough reply, your voice hardly trembles at all.
“…they weren’t too much fun to get, either,” you say, and whatever he takes a breath to say in reply is lost when you turn the water on and he actually yelps like a startled wriggler. He lashes out at it like the water is something he can fight, panicking, and long limbs and water go everywhere. You turn around and immediately duck on blind instinct; his hand slams into the wall above your head as he flails. “Hey! Hey, it’s just water—calm down, god! Shoosh. Shoosh.”
As shooshes go it is severely lacking in any kind of soothing quality, and it comes out more like an order, but it seems to work. He freezes and stands there looking confused and kind of wretched in the spray. The water runs straight into his eyes and he doesn’t blink, which is fucking weird to see until the water soaks some of his hair flat and you see something that looks almost like a ragged, stunted fin stretching from one thin cheek to the crest of his tattered ears.
Well fuck. Maybe this is where the myth about mertrolls came from.
“You okay?” you manage eventually, when he doesn’t look like he’s going to move from his frozen-up, miserable hunch. He tries to shrug again, and winces. You glance down at your feet on either side of the drain and get hit with a jolt of shock; the water streaming down skin and spiraling into the drain is real, deep, dark purple. The more you look at him, the more places you see that are bleeding, now that all the dirt and blood are washing away. The water has to be stinging where it’s hitting those cuts and scrapes—no wonder he doesn’t want to move. Oh, shit, and you’re so hot-blooded, too, if this water feels hot to you then he has to be boiling. You are the worst moirail. It’s you.
You turn the water down until it just feels sort of warm to you, and he finally relaxes a little and starts to unwind some. You stand back in your half of the spray, brush your dripping hair out of your eyes, and give him a business-like once-over.
He’s something to see. For one thing, his hair is wildly, gravity-defyingly curly—even when it’s plastered flat against his head and wet there are random locks of it sticking out at angles. When it was dry it was just a mess, straggling halfway down the back of his neck, but with most of the curl straightening out it falls to his shoulders in some places and it looks like it hasn’t seen a comb since he was hatched. Now that his hair isn’t swallowing the bases of his horns you can see they’re even longer than you thought, spiraled and wickedly sharp. For a moment it’s horrible how much they remind you of the Grand Highblood’s horns—but his were massive, and his face was painted and masked and this is just…Gamzee. Just some pathetic troll caught in the middle of coming sober, with a fucked up pan and no decent upbringing to speak of.
“Turn around,” you say, and he kind of shuffles around, wincing a little bit when the water hits his back. God, yeah, he’s fucked himself up pretty badly back here. But he’s not actually too bad, under all the blood washing away. Nothing fatal. You can see a lot of small scrapes and shallow but painful cuts, but only a few really bad injuries; the deep gashes on his back where it looks like he slammed himself into splintered wood over and over again (you wince and wish you’d gotten there sooner, then devote your energy to not doing anything stupid like hugging him again) his badly torn up wrists and something that might be a cracked rib.
You have to pick out the wood splinters in his back, and that gets you flashes of the highblood you saw on the island. He doesn’t like the feeling of you digging around in his injuries, and he twitches and flinches and snarls curses under his breath in that weird tone of voice that makes your bones ache. In the end you have to pap him with one hand and work with the other, and by the time you’re done he looks pacified but completely miserable, your hands are stained purple and you feel like you’re repeatedly kicking a stray baby barkbeast.
But that’s the worst of it done. You get him turned back around and he has his eyes squeezed shut, his lip pinned between his teeth to stop the snarls, bruises and claw marks all over his face and hair hanging in his eyes. He is skin and bones—you can see the muscles under his skin in almost disturbing detail when he moves and fuck you are pale for this miserable mess of a troll.
…Good god.
You are cleaning up a palemate you met less than an hour ago, and he didn’t even object to this even though you’re a nubby little angry freak, and what if he doesn’t know, doesn’t know how ridiculous this is and how this is something you only do after seasons—perigees, sweeps of being pale? What if he doesn’t know? What if you’re taking advantage of—
“…brother,” he says, kind of quietly, and you blink and realize he’s unwound some while you were worrying. He’s staring at you again, brows furrowed like he’s solving a puzzle. His vague face actually becomes a lot more fearsome when he’s concentrating, and not in the same way as he was fearsome on the island where you found him. You feel picked apart, and you resist the urge to stand even smaller than you are and huddle back against the wall.
“Seems to me you are thinkin’ about this altogether too motherfucking much.” He says, and gives you a look that is wholly too shrewd. You recalculate your mental profile of him automatically. It’s not just the stare. There’s a sharpness under his general easy-going confusion, a mind you’d do better not to underestimate, because the troll who underestimates his moirail is the one whose story ends a tragedy. “…listen. I don’t know too much about diamonds—”
Your blood-pusher plummets to somewhere on the next floor down. You open your mouth to start talking—yelling, or swearing, or maybe apologizing for being scum—but he reaches out and he puts one bony finger over your lips and he shooshes you. You—
…okay, you kind of make this stupidly happy kind of chirping sound at that. A little bit. Just a little. You didn’t even know you could make that noise and you don’t think you could do it again, not that you would want to because that is fucking embarrassing. You’re pretty sure (you hope) he couldn’t even hear it over the sound of the water. And then you just kind of wait, pinned where you are by expectation and more than a little bit of fear and humiliation.
“I ain’t much for knowledge,” he continues, finger still over your mouth, eyes still sharp on yours. “…but I can get a guess goin’ even in my rotted-up thinkpan that this is a thing of motherfucking import. Best friend.”
You are the worst fucking person who has ever fucked up the universe by your very continued existence and you absolutely cannot deal with him calling you that right now, because the guilt is about enough to make you attempt gnawing your own head off so you don’t have to suck at every-fucking-thing anymore. You sort of nod, eyes squeezed shut.
…and the way the water hits you changes, and all of a sudden his bony hands are holding your face, long thumbs splayed across your burning cheeks. He leans down to you until your foreheads bump together, and you know if you weren’t such a nubby freak your horns would click together—which doesn’t help the heat that won’t leave your face, you don’t even want to think about horns right now. You’re so close you can smell him; salt and something rich and kind of…slow. He smells ancient and strange and you just kind of stand there with your face in his hands and try not to shake with how out of your depth and stupidly pale you are right now.
“—and you’d up and do that, just for this stupid, pan-dead motherfucker, all because I ain’t know how to do my own motherfucking ablutions,” he mumbles, and he shakes his head a little, never leaning away. “…motherfuck, I knew you were a miracle already by way of your blood, brother, but that is upright motherfucking romantic.”
You thought you were blushing before—you know by now you must be scarlet. You start to open your mouth, not even sure what you’re going to say—
…and then what he said catches up with you. You jump about a mile and pull away from him, staring. He stares back, looking confused.
“…what?”
“My blood—” you blurt out, and then you bite it off. You don’t know what you should do. Is he going to attack you? Did he even mean what you immediately assumed he did?
“Sure,” he says, and he cocks his head to one side and gives you that look again, the one with thoughts behind it that you can’t read. “…clear as light when you look at me straight on, brother.” He reaches out, and you are completely paralyzed when he runs a finger along the ridge of your eye socket. “…you got candy red miracles inside, brother, it is motherfucking amazing. All grey and then secret miracle blood up and pumpin’ away inside, who even told it that color? How’s it…?” He’s staring at your eyes—his thumb twitches, pressing at your lower eyelid, and you jerk away. He blinks and seems to come out of his daze a little bit.
“If you try to pull my eyes out because you like the color,” you say, much, much shakier than you mean to, “…I’m going to—”
…but you have to stop there, because you can’t think of what you would do, what you could do, and he seems to realize how badly that scares you because he kind of twists his arms up behind his back and shuffles his feet.
“…couldn’t do that,” he says, and then, even quieter, “…was going to. Just motherfucking couldn’t.”
Self-control. Huh.
You file that away for further consideration, then sigh and reach into the pile of random ablutions shit that someone leaves here for you every time they clean your block, and that you never use. There’s a comb in there—good, there are a couple of combs in there. You get the feeling just one isn’t going to be enough.
“Lean down a bit,” you say, and pick up a bottle of something that you think—by the label on the bottle—is supposed to make your hair do what you want. “…this is going to fucking suck.”
—
You get him dressed afterwards with as little wincing and growling as possible, all injuries bandaged and hair brushed into some semblance of…
…well, it’s never going to be neat, not even if you shave it off like they do in the military, but at least it’s not tangled and matted anymore. It’s already starting to spring up from its semi-subdued state and poke off in random directions. You’re going to have to get him to brush it every day or it will go shithive maggots, you can just tell. There were fish bones in there.
“Okay,” you say eventually, when you’re both dried up and pretty much clean, and he glances up at you. He’s trying to towel his hair and not doing very well. “…let’s…that didn’t happen, okay? And…and just maintain a modicum of fucking decency in public, like, don’t…you can’t hang on me all the time. And don’t tell them…who you are.” You take a deep breath and let it out again, and tell yourself your eyes are just stinging because you got water in them, not because of the thought of what might happen if he does. “…let me do the talking, okay?"
He tilts his head slowly to one side, gives you this long, long look, and then grins and nods.
“Okay, brother,” he says, and you get the distinct feeling he’s humoring you. “—I mean, this is pretty motherfuckin’ weird, right, I know that, bein’ that you just met me and all, but I got no shame about it. You just tell how it is whenever you want.” And then he leans down and hugs you so hard your feet lift off the ground and with your ear right next to his bony collarbones you can hear the soft rumble of an almost-purr in his chest. “…pale for you, bro.”
“Oh my fucking god,” you say, and instead of doing the smart thing and swatting at him and yelling until he lets you down, instead of listening to your common sense like you have all your life, instead of choking down the weird, thick prickly feeling in your throat and pulling away…
…you somehow end up holding on.