Hungerstuck AU Plot Drabble Part Two
Because I’m a masochist who can’t make up her goddamned mind.
The room they put you in after the ceremony ends is cold. You sit in the wooden chair they provide you and gnaw at your ragged nails, wondering if they would allow you a goodbye after the scene your brother had pulled, watching the air swirl with dust and stale wind. You hear the family of the girl who had been chosen -- Nepeta, the hunter’s daughter, of course -- speaking in low tones on the other side of the flimsy walls. You can’t make out any words, but you can tell there’s no crying, no tears. Some of the eligible were trained just in case this had happened, because an attempt at survival was better than nothing.
Nothing, however, was what you had. Your father and brother hadn’t taught you to fight -- your father was too busy working behind the scenes and your brother faked being a pacifist, so you’d had nothing to do but learn on your own. You’d had your fair share of bully fights and hidden sessions throwing the sickles around when you had the wheat fields to yourself, but you knew these skills wouldn’t compare to any form of actual training. Your life was hanging by the thread of a prayer ... and you had no idea who was praying.
You don’t look up when you hear the door opening, but you can tell from the heavy thunk of footsteps that they’ve allowed your father in -- and your father, alone. You drop your hand from your mouth and curl twin fists over your knees, waiting to be scolded or thanked for taking your brother off of that stage. For saving your district at the cost of your own life. But nothing comes.
His footsteps stop, and silence fills the room. It’s not until the guards tell you that you have five minutes left that you lift you head to meet you father’s eyes, and find your startled yet again by the fact they look nothing like you’d been expecting. The words, whatever they had been, die on your tongue at the look.
“Karkat,” your father says, breaking the silence with the sliver of a whisper. “Karkat.”
You stare at him, frowning, fighting back a sudden rush of tears, because you had always been the crybaby of the family. Always the one so quick to tears. When he doesn’t speak again, you do, but no louder than him: “Dad?”
The name seems to startle him, and he looks at you -- lost, confused. Frightened. You’d never seen him look like this before, and you wonder if this had been the expression he wore when you had lost your mother. He wears the emotions for a moment, a beat long enough for you to see and feel, then dissolves into something broken, and the next thing you know, his arms are around you and your face is nestled into his chest. Somewhere it hadn’t been since you’d been a young child, crying over a feeling of loneliness and terror you could never explain but always felt so clearly it hurt.
“It had to happen,” you tell him after a few too many breaths, choking over the sentence. “Kankri couldn’t leave the district, not with everything happening. Everyone needed him to stay. You saw them, they all wanted this. Now Kankri can live, and I can go in his place. They wanted this.”
“I never wanted this,” he protests, curling you closer. Shocking you. “You mean just as much to me as your brother does. You’re my son, Karkat. You two are all I have left.”
You feel your heart in your throat, the horror of realizing your loss hadn’t been what everyone, everyone had wanted. But then you remember the looks, the relief of everyone else, and you press your cheek to the rough stubble of your father’s. “Kankri will save you,” you say softly, hugging close, then pulling away. Your father doesn’t let you move, but you continue to try. “Kankri will save everyone.”
It’s with that that your dad pulls away from you finally, his face a mixture of tears and brutal anger. Before he can speak, the guards push in, and whatever he had been about to say is changed to the pleading of “no” and “not yet” and “please”. You can do nothing but watch as the guards haul him away, telling him the time was up and there was nothing more than could be done. Just as he’s slipped through the doorway, he yells to you a reminder that he loves you, and he’s gone before you can tell him the same.
You’re left to stare at your hands while the guards seal you off from the outside until they’re ready to move you, trying to reassure yourself that what you had chosen had been the right decision. It had to have been, because Kankri had the plans. He knew what to do, and how to do it. He was the key to changing the world you lived in, the world you were about to fight to live in.
Kankri would save them all. But he couldn’t save you.
That, you would have to do yourself.
