>Karkat: Put this asshole in his place.
Your brows slam together like a vice and words come rushing out of your mouth before you have time to examine them. “I may not be your mother but I sure as fuck don’t like your attitude,” you snap at him, your voice pitched low with barely suppressed rage. “Of all the times you could have chosen to be an uppity bitch and it had to be just moments after you set a fucking fire in your motherfucking kitchen.”
Your breath comes out hot and heavy through your nose as you shut your eyes and grind your teeth, holding back on the rest of your tirade. You glance back at Teresa, sitting in her chair with dye dripping through her hair, staining the bright colour grey. You look at your hands, which you are holding threateningly in front of your chest, a gesture halfway between reasonable discourse and strangling your boyfriend.
“You’re not well,” you tell Dave, lowering your hands and clutching them at your sides, “none of us are — but I swear to god if something happens to you that I could have prevented, I will die. I will fucking die, Strider. I won’t just give up the ghost, I will fucking banish it, forcefully expel it from my being with the sheer force of the disappointment I will have in myself, for the utter failure I’ve become, I—” You break off, suddenly unsure where you’re going with this rant. The anger is draining away from your body already, though the anxiety remains all the same.
You turn away and return to Teresa, picking up the brush again and trying to pick up where you left off. “Let’s all burn together, then,” you mutter, focusing on her head. “Let’s all go out with smoke under our wings.”
You can hear Karkat’s angry red spiking towards Dave’s ticking turning gears, and it’s a little odd to you. It makes your head feel weird as the jarring grey voice of Dave’s phone cuts through, and hearing that is weird when you think about those red gears again. But whatever. You can taste smoke, dark grey and thick and oily, and it’s clouding your mind a little. You don’t much mind, to be honest.
When you feel Karkat’s hands near your hair again, you sigh a little. “My hair smells like charcoal, Karkat,” you tell him, voice brittle. “Charcoal and a different life and it’s wrong. Why did you get this colour? It’s all different and I’m not the right colour and my eyes aren’t the same as they were and I don’t even have Pyralspite with me.”
You’re not sure who Pyralspite could really be—you only remember a toy from your childhood, a stuffed animal you loved best. A white stuffed dragon, and it wasn’t very girly but you’d loved it the moment you saw it in the store and just had to have it for Christmas, that and a book on mythology and that law textbook from the bookstore that sold used (loved and shared) books. Your parents (no, not even that, your guardians, your foster parents, whatever the right word for them was) got it and you loved the fuck out of it and hugged it and took it on all your adventures. But then his eyes fell off and you pulled two bright red buttons from some old jacket your guardians were taking to a thrift store anyway and sewed them on and tried not to bleed teal (no, that’s not right, you bleed red) onto him as you did. And then he was perfect. Pyralspite was right.
But you feel like that’s not the right Pyralspite. A substitute at best, an imitation of something much better, much grander. You remember bright red eyes to match your own and pretty teal blood like yours and justice to the deserving and a noose, always a noose. You had too many dreams that ended that way, and it was unnerving at times.
But none of that mattered. “It tastes like charcoal,” you mutter, reiterating. Not that Karkat knows or cares. “It’s gross and I don’t like it. Why can’t I have butter-hair like it naturally is? Or even honey-hair. I don’t like the way black tastes… But it’s better than black licorice, by a little bit. But… I still don’t like it.”
"Is there a better time?" And fuck this program can't properly convey the fine trembling of anger lacing your veins. You can feel it in you like a shudder, like a sigh though you keep it held back. There's something refreshing about the way it burns through you, like spicy food clearing your sinuses. "I mean, hey, my best friend just died tonight. No big deal. So small a deal that a chain store would give it a pass, send me along. This shit ain't big enough for an outlet mall, got to see if a mom and pop or a dime store in a downtown strip is willing to give it the time of day."
You could probably be done there, but you're not.
"You can hardly talk, Vantas. Not after that little episode. The levels of not well going around this place is enough to put a blimp in the air and then bring it crashing down from sheer weight."
And you hate how your words are toneless and even because you can't speak them. You hate how you can't put the right rhythm into them, or the right tempo. There's no quick-trip speed and it doesn't match the fury of your internal metronome the way it should. It occurs to you that you're both worried. About each other, about yourselves, about the fall out and the consequences, but right now you're so twisted up and such a mess that you can't even begin to give a shit.
You're jumped off a bridge and hit free fall and the ground disappeared and you're never going to stop. Unless it rears up out of nowhere and you smash into it at a million miles an hour.
You have no idea where this whirling train of thought is taking you, but it's pretty clear it's heading for the station and the brakes aren't just gone they've disintegrated and taken all hope with them.
Another wave of dizziness drives through you at warp speed and you slide down your cupboards to rest on the floor, long legs bent at the knees. It's the only concession you're willing to give.
There's a part of you that suddenly wishes Teresa hadn't gotten to this guy first or had gotten hold of you before, like that time when that Fucker kill Him and She was talking to you and For Some Reason there was nothing but justice in your veins and head but you couldn't do that because no thats stupid what am i saying
You haven't the fuckingest clue what you're thinking right now either, and it keeps slipping through your fingers like water or sand or wind.
