always love a good scheherazade reference, what do you wanna share about that fic?
I actually had a really specific and detailed plan for this one that I still remember. It was going to be a Gam<>Kar No-SGrub AU of the general genre where adult Karkat initiates a revolution against HIC and remakes Alternian society in a more equitable way, etc. Only, this is from Gamzee's POV (who never knew any of the other trolls growing up), after he's become unstable sort of similar to what happened during Murderstuck, and basically locked up and given convicted (or "convicted") prisoners to kill, which is what usually winds up eventually happening to most trolls of his caste in this worldbuilding. One day, the prisoner he's given to kill is Karkat. I did write this opening for it, which is the only thing I actually wound up writing out:
"Now what motherfucker are you supposed to be?"
He still looks ready for that fight, but you can tell he knows there'd be no contest; they never would have let him keep his strife specibus otherwise. He's got his sickle up and beared like a one motherfuck of an uncomfortable security blanket, but you can't feel his fear and that is almost uncanny. "I'm your new 'moirail', of course," he says. You can hear the enclosure talons without any help from his fingers.
"Don't you know how this works?" His mouth quirks into a dark sort of smirk, a faint patina of japery layered on top of sweeps of bitterness and hopelessness. You'd be a liar if you said you didn't know it well, from the inside and the out; some of these fuckers have a great sense of gallows humor about the whole thing, and it's well worth it to string them along for a while to see how many ways they got to make their own executions motherfucking hilarious. Ain't nothing too sacred for mirth, you learned that long ago. "When the pet indigos get too into murder for murder's sake, they have to be pacified. If I pacify you, they've got their tame killing machine under control. If not, well. Saves them the cost of my trial."
"Ain't no murder nor killing in here," you remind him. "It's culling when it's for the good of the motherfucking Empire."
"You really believe that, do you?" He raises his eyes to yours, and damn if they aren't just a little too bright to be rust. Must be some genetic engineering going on that they don't tell you shit about. His blood'll make a nice addition to your colors if it matches.
"I believe that I don't give a shit about the good of any Empire what's not inside this room," you tell him. "What are they hoping for: pale or dead?"
He radiates grim certainty and an odd determination; his emotions are the palate cleanser between the bouts of pain and terror. "They would shit themselves in pure unadulterated relief if I were to die quietly without standing a public trial."
"Would they now?" You casually send a spike of mortal terror his way, an experiment to see if it takes. He sets his jaw and grips his weapon tighter, but he digs in his heels and powers through. He knows what you're doing, and he knows it's just a passing feel, but watching his pysche convulse like a bug pinned to a board while he keeps on looking like an unflappable tough guy is the most beautiful thing you've seen in such a long motherfucking time. He'd probably make someone a good moirail, and more's the motherfucking pity. You grin at him, show him all your teeth. "I think I'm starting to feel pacified already. I think this might be the motherfucking serendipity right here."
(Presumably this takes place on some planet that isn't Alternia, since adults are banned from there, but since most of it just takes place in Gamzee's cell, I never really wrote anything about what kind of planet it was.)
Anyway, in subsequent chapters, Gamzee would sort of think about killing him again, and then Karkat would tell him a story about one of the other ten canon trolls, and their life in the Empire as an adult, and the ways HIC had fucked them over, etc., and it would calm Gamzee down, and he would decide not to kill Karkat. This continues until all ten of the other trolls have had their stories told, and Gamzee gradually genuinely falls in pale, etc. Then Karkat somehow disappears, but when Gamzee asks his handlers about it, they don't actually know who Karkat is.
The next day, someone smuggles Gamzee out of the cell, and he winds up face-to-face with Karkat and all the other canon trolls and they explain: Karkat is raising a revolution, etc. and as part of that, he wants to reach out to every single blood caste and show them all how HIC is bad for everyone, and, to that end, he is collecting a story from someone from every blood caste illustrating this, but he ran into a snag where he wasn't actually able to meet any adult indigos until he was finally able to sneak in to Gamzee's cell. And now they want Gamzee's story.
Gamzee tells them his story, gets smuggled back into his cell, is morose for a while about how the pale thing wasn't actually real, but then the revolution happens and Gamzee gets busted out and there's a scene that I have in my notes as Troll Ending of Fight Club, Basically where Karkat is like, I'm sorry I lied to you but you see it was for a good cause, right? Do you want to... start over from the beginning with the pale thing? And Gamzee is like, ...yeah.
And that was the story. It was going to be called "Operation Scheherazade".
