It was nearly two weeks after his near collapse that Kankri Recovered.
It wasn’t so much a gradual kind of ‘5 stages of grief’ business as much as it was things shifting suddenly and immediately. One moment, everything was just Wrong, and there was no doubt in his mind the meaning; Kankri didn’t have a single existing connection to his instincts left, but he knew what it felt to have your pusher cleaved in two. He knew his brother was Gone.
It was two weeks of pushing himself through to work in a suspended state of horror, of despair. Of finding himself so despondent he couldn’t bring himself to try currying Schdar’s favor, of finding himself not needing the money anyway for how little was eating. Of looking and feeling like a ghost ship in and of himself, sailing through water cold and black. Of finding the last, foolish fancy of a hope he’d kept alive sputtering dead.
Two weeks of that, and suddenly not. Suddenly bolting up in bed while sun still pooled at the bottoms of the light blocking curtains as, like a dislocated limb, life clicked back into place.
For two weeks, Karkat Vantas had most surely been Gone. And now, quite suddenly, he was not. Was he too baffled to rejoice?
Baffled, or maybe, intimidated. He had not woken up alone.
She shadowed the corner like she had never not been there. Yet how the air changed around her, darkened and near warped at a time when the sun should have been warming the room—that could not have been more alien, nor more unwelcome. No playful glint to her eye or slouch in her stance; no dripping ribs, no What does a ripe little cherry like you have to offer to me? Don’t you know we bad girls suck pretty things like you dry?
Today she carried herself like Aries herself, draped in death. Kankri found himself feeling a trespasser in his own (?) house.
“Kankri Vantas.” She spoke his name with no pleasantries, and a weighty edge that set him cringing into his sheets. This was no good news. “I come to fulfill contract. As it was agreed, so it shall be.”
“Wh—if there—if there were stipulations in our contract, I hadn’t been informed—” Brain scrambled by sleep, he too was sent scrambling.
“Not yours.” Her voice hit like a shot through the chest—venomous yet dismissive and a clear unspoken ‘You are not wanted here.’ Until exactly the moment her scorn carried through to him, he hadn’t realized how much her appraisal had meant. “Karkat Vantas has made contract with me. And so I have come to collect.”
The name rung, coins to stone. “From—me? Karkat’s—for what?”
“For you.” She said, and the bottom fell out of everything. “Karkat Vantas has gained a compass that will always tell him of your location. He knows of your survival, and your profession.”
Through his body Kankri’s blood continued its deep freeze as she spoke. “He knows of your falsehoods, and your comfortable lifestyle. He knows of your betrayal to your blood, your abandonment, your lavish indulgences. He knows this all, as his payment—his blissful ignorance was the price for his boon, and he is using it now to find you. And he will find you, and do with you as he will.”
Karkat knew. Karkat knew. Karkat knew. And Karkat was going to find him.
He heard the Witch’s words as if from a distance. “You have now paid the price, in your ignorant peace, and have gained your boon.”
“What boon?” He croaked. His throat was suddenly so dry.
“Time. To settle your affairs, before he arrives.”
Not a spark of warmth to her voice. When she wordlessly faded, she left the cold of icy sweat and bloodless veins in her wake.
Hardly any wonder, perhaps, that the very last thing on Kankri Vantas’ mind had been the Internet.
romaincrisis
dededos
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
turnnoffyourmind
andulkaphoto
