Chapter 2
You've been crying the whole time you've been out of it—you know that even before you wake up enough to open your eyes. That's the only thing you're really sure of at this point, since you have no clue where you are, how you got here, or who it is you're curled around and clinging to like a grub grieving his lusus.
Whoever it is is actually holding onto you, so maybe you're not about to get in another fucking fight. You're not really sure how you feel about that, though. Part of you just wants to either hurt someone or actually get culled; one way you get to take out some of the unpleasant emotions you have going right now, the other...
You wouldn't have to think about Dave.
Dave.
Okay, you're awake enough for a grating whine to rise from the middle of your chest at the thought of him. It starts out fairly quiet, but the person holding you still jerks and shifts and grabs for your wrists again.
"Karkat? Hey. Karkat. Open your eyes."
That's Dirk, probably. Or Hal. They fucking sound exactly the same, you don't know. Also you're not doing that. Opening your eyes. Fuck no.
"You need to not scream right now, Karkat, you're going to get us kicked out—"
"They can't kick us out, dumbass, they have our brother—" Okay, that's Hal. Dirk never sounds that upset.
"Yeah, and we're two minors who've spent a solid hour dodging questions about where our parents are, so just maybe we should lie low until Dave gets out of surgery?"
"They're buying the whole D thing, it's—"
"If you guys are gonna argue with each other, lemme have Karkat before you get him started crying again." Can Roxy not see that you're already crying? "Here—Dirk—"
"Yeah, okay." Dirk's hands leave your back, go to where you're clinging to his neck. After a second spent futilely prying at you as you hold on that much tighter, Hal's hands join Dirk's, managing to break your grip so Roxy can pull you over to her instead.
"Karkat? Hey, Dave's gonna be okay." When you just whine and curl into a tighter ball—that's a fucking lie, you saw him, you saw the fucking blood—she sighs and threads one hand through your hair, soft fingertips just barely brushing your horns.
You fucking hate that that contact is enough to still your heartbroken whimpers for a second. Stupid fucking biology.
"Dirk," Roxy says, "you checked to see if he got hurt, right?"
"Of course we checked him, Roxy—Hal zapped the shit out of him, we weren't sure he was still breathing—"
"I didn't mean to! He bit me, you know pain makes me lose control—"
"I'm not attacking you, Hal, jesus. But he's not hurt—Dave took both the bullets."
He did, didn't he? The noise that comes out of you at that reminder is significantly louder than the ones you've been making so far; Roxy hugs you up to her chest in response to it, shushing you like she's palecrushing really fucking hard.
That concept actually makes everything worse. Fuck.
Someone else's hand comes down on your head, actually seeking out your horns to quiet you that little bit. Again, you absolutely hate that it works.
"My turn," Rose says, calm and level and right next to your ear, like she's kneeling beside the chair Roxy's sitting in instead of sitting in one next to you. "Karkat?"
Unlike the others, she's not going to get distracted and let you sink back into yourself. You have to actually answer, and not in the wordless warbling growl that comes out instead of words on your first try.
"Fu—fuck off..." Will that work? No.
"Do you understand what's going on right now?"
Of course you fucking understand! You're not a just-hatched grub, for fuck's sake! "He's dead."
"He's not dead. He got shot; you saw that, correct?" Rose's fingers hook into your hair and very gently pull until you give up and open your eyes. The patient look on her face makes you want to close them again, but you guess you shouldn't do that. "Which caused damage, of course it did, but he stopped time for himself almost immediately, so he couldn't bleed out."
At this point you're willing to just fucking accept the idea that Dave can fuck with time. Sollux can power alien technology with his mind, why the fuck not add this shit to the mix? But. "He—wasn't breathing."
"He is. Just...slowly. Wade might be able to tell you what the ratio is, when he comes back."
"Where—"
"Trying to bully someone into letting him into surgery with Dave." Her violet eyes go amused for a second. "Since he left his weapons outside, it's not going to work."
"Surgery." That's not a word you actually know. Thanks to the tech that Sollux exploited to get all of you over here, most English words line up fine with Alternian. This is an exception, apparently.
"Um..." Rose hesitates, frowns, and looks over her shoulder at Hal. "You have Sollux online, right?"
"Yeah, one sec." Hal's shades are hooked into the neckline of his shirt; he pulls them out and slips them on, mouthing words for a couple seconds before he pushes them up onto his forehead, ignoring the faint yellow text that you can just barely see scrolling across them. "Sol says it translates to, quote, 'mediculler shit'—"
Fuck. You don't actually need to hear any more of that sentence; that's more than enough to make you let out another distressed wail and twist around to bury your face in Roxy's shoulder again. You're pretty sure people are looking.
"Jeez, Hal, tell Sollux he fucked up his translation—"
"I'd like to keep my shades in one piece, thanks!" Another hand joins Rose's on your head—you cannot fucking believe that you have three people trying to calm you down at once. Like what the fuck? "Look, the end meaning is that they're fixing him, okay?"
"Fixing?" Are they fucking stupid? You twist away from Roxy's hold, overbalance, and topple off her lap and onto the floor. Dirk makes a decent attempt to catch you, which ultimately fails because your instinctive reaction is to bare your teeth and snarl at him. "They're going to cull him, what the fuck is wrong with you!"
Everyone goes silent, at that. It's very fucking intimidating—you're sitting on the floor with four humans looking down at you with expressions you can't fucking read because apparently this specific human family has fucked up ways of showing emotions! For all you know you just violated some fucking taboo that's going to get you and/or everyone around you culled—
Dirk pushes his shades up and slides off the chair he's been sitting in, kneeling in front of you. His eyes still fuck you up as much as the first time you saw them; they're white where troll eyes would be gold, yeah, but the caste ring around his pupils is almost-not-quite the color that your sclera are. You know that humans' caste rings don't fill at adulthood, but fuck, it's weird looking at him.
"Karkat."
"What!" Fuck, you've lost what little ability to modulate your volume that you had.
Dirk winces at the volume. "Okay. Let's just...figure this out. Why exactly do you think the doctors are going to kill Dave?"
"He's a fucking mutant!" Your voice goes soft on that word, at least; nice to know you still have some small sense of self-preservation. "He can't go to medicullers, they'll see his blood and they'll just fucking—they—"
Hal darts down behind you, wrapping one arm around your shoulders and clamping his other hand over your mouth, muffling the distressed wail that's already started in your chest before it can make its way out. That's probably a good thing, but you can't help biting him.
At least he doesn't shock you this time. Maybe it's because you don't quite draw blood. Then again, it has to still hurt.
"Blood." Wow, Dirk looks more baffled than usual.
"Alternians have a variety of blood colors, from common to—" Rose supplies, her eyes widening in what looks to you like surprise. "Oh, god—Karkat, he's not that kind of mutant. We all have red blood, the same as you."
You reach up and pull at Hal's hand until he relents, and spit out, "Of course you fucking do! You're mutants too, you've all fucking told me—"
"For fuck's sake." Roxy rolls her eyes, grabbing Dirk's arm and pulling him along as she rises to her feet. "C'mon, Dirky."
"Wait, where—"
"I'm gonna distract somebody, you're gonna get a syringe for me, okay?"
"Roxy, what the fuck?"
"Try and calm Karkles down for a sec, okay? Be right back."
She's out of the room and out of sight before you can protest that stupidass name. When Hal shifts his grip to scoop you up and lift you back into a chair, you can't find the energy to complain.
Roxy comes back twenty minutes later, according to the clock on the far wall. No one's tried to kick you out of here yet, which is nice. You suspect that whatever Roxy's planning on doing with the needle-tipped container that she's holding might change that, though.
As she glances around the other few occupants of the room, Dirk comes back over to sit down in the same chair he vacated with an obviously irritated huff, holding out his arms until Hal lets go of you. You guess you could be an asshole and refuse to move, but what's the fucking point?
By the time you crawl across to Dirk and lean up against him, Roxy's leading a very fucking confused looking human over. It's a guy (you think) about the same age as you or Dave, with short hair that's a shade of teal you associate with a certain blind idiot.
"This is Martin!" Roxy lets go of his hand, switching the needle thing from her left hand to her right. "Do me a favor and tell him what you told me, okay?"
"Uh...I'm here because my mom had an allergic reaction to dish soap?"
"The other thing."
"Oh. I'm not a mutant."
"Cool, lemme see your hand." When he holds it out to her, Roxy jabs the tip of his middle finger with the needle. Apparently Martin was somewhat expecting, because he flinches but doesn't jerk away, and you see a bead of red well up almost immediately. "See? Normal?"
"Ow." When nobody moves to stop him, Martin sticks that finger in his mouth for a second, then pulls it back out to examine it. "I though you were kidding—"
Roxy cuts him off by handing the needle thing over to Rose and grabbing Martin's shirt, pulling him up so she can smoosh her lips against his. That only barely looks like your definition of a kiss, but the guy seems satisfied; once Roxy lets him go, he gives her a confused smile and lets her shove him back towards the side of the room that he started on.
"It's normal," Hal says gently, as Roxy settles herself back in the only empty chair in the circle. "It's okay. They won't hurt you. They won't hurt him."
You're crying again, as you nod. When you shift to rub your face against Dirk's shirt, you almost immediately feel multiple hands on your head and back, all four of the humans trying to calm you through this.