Chapter Text
You've won. The game is over and finally won and you're standing in somewhere you've never seen before, thick blackness reaching out in every direction. You're suspended somewhere outside of space and time and that lack hurts, deep down in your chest, because without time what are you?
You have your arm around Karkat's chest and it takes both of your combined willpower to hold yourselves up. His breath is a shallow, wet, rasping sound in your ear and you haven't stopped talking to him since you both ended your fight, muttering and yelling nonsense in his direction. Don't you fucking die, Vantas. You'd better not fucking give up. You're stronger than that.
Don't fucking leave me alone here.
He laughs a little every time, but he's still standing, still holding himself together - literally, in some places - and so you keep running your mouth because it's all you've ever really been good at and it's all you know how to do. Every once in a while he groans in pain and you spare a glance in his direction and like every time your breath catches in your throat because he is so far gone its a fucking miracle he's still alive. The hand that's not around your shoulders is clutching at his chest, trying to stop the steady pulse of bright, candy red blood that is oozing out of him with every heartbeat. His hair is ragged, one eye is glued shut with dried blood that you can't even tell the origin of, and his right leg is damn near useless it's such a mangled mess of blood and bone and muscle.
And he's fucking grinning, sharp little teeth poking out over his thin, dried lips, blood seeping down the corner of his mouth and disappearing into the top of his shirt.
"Now what?" He says, and you have no idea, because you're outside of your element now and you ache all over and all you know is that you need to keep going forward in this vast nothingness because that's just what feels right.
"Now we wait for John and Jade to do their part," you say, and he nods and coughs up a splatter of blood. Your chest aches at that because you're not sure how much longer your words and support can keep him alive and if he dies now then the whole thing is fucking wasted. You pull him closer against you anyway, tighten your grip on his waist and keep edging him forward, and you pray to John and Jade and Rose that they hurry up.
You don't even know what they're doing. You were the Knight, you knew your role well enough but that's all you really know. It was your job to stand in the thick of it all and fight. You're a human wrecking crew, and you know it, and Karkat knows it, and that's why you're both here, bleeding and broken because that's just what your class does. You get the shit beat out of you so everyone else can stand a chance.
But he wasn't God Tier. He wasn't ready for this shit, and you tried so fucking hard to help him the whole time but you couldn't be everywhere at once in this place and you want to scream in frustration because a part of you thinks it'll be entirely your fault if he dies now.
He staggers and if you weren't holding him he'd be down for the count.
"Can't," he groans and chokes somehow all at once and you turn to face him and loop both arms around his back and pull him close to you. His head flops onto your shoulder and his arms are loose on your neck. You can feel blood seep from his chest to your shirt and you don't give a fuck that your whole outfit is going to be ruined in candy red blood.
"Come on, Karkles, get your act together," you say in his ear, and he feels so fucking cold in your grasp and oh god don't fucking die you asshole. "You're not that weak and I know it, I saw you back there. You're a damn good Knight and we're both going to get out of this because us fuckups need a second chance to fix the shit we broke." You're spewing nonsense, trying to sound tough and keep your coolkid facade going for normallacy's sake, but your voice cracks halfway through and you just sound desperate and kind of scared. Because that's what you are: a scared kid watching his friend bleed to death in his arms.
"Dave," he says, and that scares you more because he never says your name. You open your mouth to respond, to tell him to shut the fuck up for once and try to focus on not dying, but all the sudden you're getting the air forcibly ripped out of your lungs and he gasps a hard, wet squelching noise and the whole world is being turned upsidedown and bathed in blinding white light.
You think you pass out for a second, because when you next open your eyes all you can see is pearly iridescence in every direction and you're now lying flat on your back. It takes you approximately three seconds before you remember Karkat and you bolt upright, hand blindly reaching out beside you until it connects with Karkat's hand at your side. You immediatley shove your fingers in his sleeve and feel for the faintest of pulses in his wrist and you let out of strangled noise somewhere between a gasp and a sob when you find it's still barely there under his cool skin.
You scramble closer to him to pull him into your arms again because this is your fucking job, keeping him alive is the only thing you have left at this moment and you don't even hear Jade and Rose yelling your name or see them coming until they're almost on top of you. They stop when they see Karkat, though, his broken and bleeding body lying half on your lap and you touching his face and trying to get him to wake up because sleeping is not what he needs to do right now, sleeping is the enemy, and you tell him that in not so kind words over and over again.
Jade drops to her knees next to you and throws her arms around you and she's crying at the sight the two of you must make, two boys sitting on the floor bleeding out of a hundred different places.
"Dave, you guys did it, you did really really good and now everyone is being brought here so we can start over. We get a new world, we get everything back, we get a new home, Dave," she says, and she stops hugging you to look over at Karkat and that makes her cry even harder. That sound makes your heart hurt, and if you weren't trying so frantically to keep Karkat's blood in his chest and wake his stupid ass up you would hug her back, hold her close and tell her she did good, too, because she really did.
When Karkat's eyes start to flutter open it's a fucking miracle and you want to jump up and sing praises to whatever god decided you weren't a completely useless waste of fucking space and deserved to have at least one small victory.
You hear a sound like a loud pop and a gasp of breath that signals someone else popping into existence in this white hellhole you're now in. You glance over your shoulder and see John choking for air and sprawled on the floor, Terezi clutching to his arm so desperately you'd think she was going to rip it off. She moans and loosens her grip so she can sit up, but she pulls John up next to her as soon as she does, putting a thin arm around his shoulders in something akin to a hug.
John sees the group of you almost instantly and yells "hey, guys!" at the same time Terezi catches a whiff of Karkat's thick blood and screams. She's on her feet and sprinting at full force toward you when there's another loud pop and another lump of people appears on the ground with a groan. She swerves past them - damn she's good at getting around - and comes to a skidding hault beside you.
"He's not..." she says, and she trails off because it's a thought she probably doesn't want to finish, and you tell her no, stubbon bastard is still hanging on (but barely, which you don't include because you don't want her to know just how fucked up you both are).
"You're hurt, too," Terezi says, matter of factly, and she kneels down at your other side and on any other day you'd be thrilled to be surrounded by chicks with a guy lying in your lap. As it is now, though, you sort of wish this were a goddamn dream you would wake up from already.
Rose shifts her weight and looks over this time to see who the newest additions are - a huddle comprised of Kanaya and a groaning Gamzee - when there's a final loud snap and Aradia and not-quite-a-ghost-Sollux appear in a heap somewhere near you. You have all of five seconds to process this before the blinding light of the room starts to increase and you wish your shades hadn't broken halfway through the fight. It gets so bright that you can't even see Karkat's face in your lap but that doesn't matter all of a sudden because you realize you can't breath and it feels like someone is ripping out your insides and trying to put them back in in the completely wrong order.
You gasp and clutch at your chest and try to yell, but your instincts and years of training with Bro tell you to chill the fuck out. You try to steady your breathing and deal with the pain, like you've always been taught, but your composure is so fucking shot by the events of the past few hours and it just hurts so bad that all you can muster is not yelling and instead sitting there crying like a little girl or something.
Somewhere in front of you a deep, grumbling growl starts before quickly transforming into the most heart-wrenching, inside-liquifying howl of pain that you've ever heard in your life. Somewhere in the back of your pain-addled brain you register the sound as Karkat's voice. You try to say something to him but no words come out and all you can hear is that fucking howling and your head feels like it's going to explode and the tears are actually falling down your face without any restraint now. You think you both must be dying, that the game is ripping you out of existence because you were both such huge fuckups that there's no place left in this world for either of you.
You wonder if everyone else feels this intense pain, wonder why the only other person you can hear besides what you've identified as your own high-pitched whining is Karkat and his fucking howl. You want to throw up because the combination of sounds and sensations is just so much, and you do gag, but nothing comes out, you just sort of dry heave for a while before your vision starts to fade out and you think "fuck, we really are dying" before blinding whiteness is immediately replaced with nothing.