Work Text:
Anonymous asked HHCOD:
Please, just, Kanaya being comforted by someone. I feel like I see nothing with that happening since she’s one of the default ‘I’m-responsible-caring-and-have-myself-relatively-together” characters. Maybe being a rainbow drinker isn’t everything it was chalked up to be and Karkat has to coax her along. Maybe there are Space Player Problems and Jade calms her down. Maybe she’s just plain old sick with something extra horrible and Rose takes care of her. Just please, Kanaya as the comforted.
~
This part wasn’t in the books.
Nowhere in In Which A Young Reporterrorist Conducts An Interview With An Attractive Long-Haired Rainbow Drinker Who Tells Him All About His Attractive Escapades With His Attractive Long-Haired Rainbow Drinker Kismesis In An Attractive Fashion, &c does it cover the fact that when you bite someone you have to be jolly careful where you bite and that if you do it wrong you are going to get arterial spatter all over the place including up your nose, and if you choke on it the resulting mess is both unbelievably embarrassing and also hell to get out of clothing.
After that episode—thank the Mother Grub for Rose’s kindness and understanding—you haven’t really had the nerve to bite holes in anybody else, and while you know you’ll have to at some point you are putting that point off as long as you possibly can.
You’re pretty sure you’ve convinced her that you’re fine and she needn’t worry about you, unlike her strange alien vampires you don’t need to drink all the time to stay healthy. You have the book to work on, of course, you have other things to think about than blood (and you’re not sure her thin scarlet blood is even good for you, it had been so sharp and heady you’d felt quite drunk afterward, and how strange it had been to see that bright red contrasting with her deep lavender eyes, how other she had seemed, how very far away from anything you’ve ever known).
You sleep, and dream: you are in a land of brightness and moving color, drifting veils of color over an iridescent sea. Misting rain touches your face, jewels your eyelashes, slips cool between your lips and down your throat; spreads through your body, moves through the darkness of deep veins, sparkles in the interstices of your marrow. You can feel it drawn through you like a tide: you are a delta, a floodplain. You float and are drowning, and all around you in pale bubbles of light you see yourself reflected, a tiny jadeblood doll. You dream you are the body of some vast lusus, deliquescing in the deep. You dream you are dying.
The fourth night you go without feeding Karkat finds you in one of the deep labs and demands to be told what the fuck you think you’re doing.
“Meditating,” you tell him. You are very tired, and your blood pulls and drifts in your veins: you sway ever so slightly with the ebb and flow of it.
“Well, quit meditating and come tell your unsettling alien matesprit to chill the fuck out, she’s driving me shithive maggots,” he says, and then in a different voice “Kanaya?”
“Mm,” you say. Just for once it would be nice if they could leave you alone. You are everybody’s go-to sensible troll and it is more than you currently feel up to being.
“Kanaya, fuck, what’s wrong? What is it?” He rests the back of his hand—warm, shockingly warm—against your cheek, your forehead. “You’re freezing.”
“Tired.”
“And you’re not glowing like a goddamn neon sign, either, is this…is this some kind of rainbow drinker illness I don’t have the shitty literary background to diagnose?”
You make a little noise that’s probably a laugh, not a sob, but it’s difficult to tell. Karkat consigns everything on the meteor and the meteor itself to the deepest squirming mucopurulent sphincter of a horrorterror’s wastechute, and hugs you so tightly your ribs creak.
He’s warm, he’s so warm and you can feel the blood just under his skin, you can smell it, hear the gentle thudding of his heart. “That’s it, isn’t it?” he says. “You haven’t been feeding. Do we really taste that awful?”
You rest your face against the tangled mess of his hair, breathing in that warmth. It’s so difficult to think. “No,” you manage, eventually. “No. It’s. I. I just. Don’t want to.”
“Well, that’s too goddamn bad, cause you need to,” Karkat says, firmly, rubbing your back. “I’m an incredibly patient troll but there is only so much of Lalonde’s fuckery I can take without losing what is left of my mind, so, Maryam, this is a direct order I am about to give you: bite me.”
You huff a tiny laugh, as he meant you to. “I’m serious. Unless mutant blood is, like, poisonous or something. Shit, is mutant blood poisonous? Would Terezi be better?”
“No,” you say. “No, please, Karkat, don’t…”
“Then you’re going to bite me. Or if you don’t do that I will…have to use something sharp because my teeth are hilariously fucking useless, as is thematically consistent, but you are damn well gonna drink my blood.”
You lift your head and he looks at you and the awareness of the utter absurdity of the situation rolls over you both. He starts to laugh at the same time you do, and the two of you hang on to each other in the dim laboratory, shaking with stupid stress-ragged laughter. You can feel something lift from you, something heavy and viscerally unpleasant, like a cloak of beetles.
“I’m, ah, not very good at it,” you finally admit, wiping at your face. “There was…a mess, last time I tried.”
“Shit, you mean you weren’t immediately perfect the first time you tried something that’s gotta be tricky at best and awkward as fuck to practice? I am disappoint, Kanaya.”
You can feel a faint green flush rise, and clear your throat. “Yes, well, it…I’m afraid to, Karkat.”
“So am I, so let’s be afraid together.” He takes your hands firmly in his. “It’s okay. It’s just me. No one else is watching, you don’t have to be perfect.”
The sheer kindness in his voice makes you want to cry again, but you swallow hard. “If…if you’re sure.”
“I am very sure, now just get on with it, would you?” He pulls the collar of his shirt away from his throat, and, wow, yes, you can feel-hear-smell bright blood just beneath the surface of his skin, so near, and your mouth waters helplessly—and you take him in your arms and you tilt his chin just so and there, there is the vein, the great slow vein beside the pulsing artery, and you lean in and his skin is so warm against your lips and your fang slides in so smoothly, so sweetly, and your mouth is full of hot sweet scarlet pleasure.
Oh, you think, somewhere beyond the immediate somatic sensation, oh, this is what the books were on about. Karkat breathes a slow sigh as the sedative-amnesiac compounds in your saliva take hold, relaxing him, and you hold him close, his blood spreading brilliant warmth through your body. You are so thirsty and he tastes so good that it is very difficult to make yourself slow down.
You are Kanaya Maryam still, underneath it all, and so you do slow down and you do press your tongue to the warm little wound until you taste the sharpness that means you’re secreting coagulants. When you pull away the bite is already mostly closed.
Karkat is slumped in your arms, breathing deeply, but when you dab the tiny trickle of blood away with the end of your sash he blinks and stares up at you.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m…fine,” he says. “Wow. That. That’s the weirdest goddamn feeling.” His hand goes to his throat, feeling at the tiny punctures of your fangs. “Was it good for you?”
Now you can’t help laughing properly, and you hug Karkat close and kiss the top of his head and you feel so much better it’s unbelievable. “I think the meteor moved,” you inform him.
~
Despite the fact that you just sucked out a decent helping of his blood Karkat insists that you need to rest, and maybe he’s right; now that you’re full you’re feeling wonderfully sleepy. He takes you up to your respiteblock and gets you settled in your pile.
“Wait,” you say. “Stay with me?”
“Lalonde will bite my head off,” he points out.
“No she won’t.” You think there will be…awkward, probably very awkward conversations in your future, but you can’t mind very much. “Stay. You need rest too.”
Karkat sighs and settles into the pile beside you, and you wrap your arms around him, warm and sleepy and so stupidly grateful. After a moment he presses closer; his face fits nicely against your neck, his arm draped over your side, and he gives a little sigh.
You are not used to being comforted, and the novelty of it is rather wonderful; it warms and soothes you as much as Karkat’s blood, and together they wrap around you and draw you down into a dreamless, restful sleep.