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See, this right here, this is why you don’t go to sleep unless you really have no other choice. At least you don’t go to sleep alone, and that is problematic because you are fucking thirteen years old--no, shit, are you fourteen by now, you can’t even remember with the time shenanigans you’ve pulled--and it is Egbertian levels of uncool for you to want to sleep in your sister’s room because you’re scared of the monsters under the floor.
You think you’ve managed not to make enough noise to wake anyone, jerking out of the familiar dream again, shaking and sick and sweating with remembered horror. You know intellectually that it’s just a dream and the statistical likelihood of homicidal juggalo aliens crawling into your room in the darkness and taking your pretty scarlet eyes for their personal collection is very low, but this cuts little ice with the sheer atavistic fear your brain can’t avoid in sleep.
At least this time you don’t think you’re gonna puke. The times you haven’t been able to wake up before the monsterclown’s claws clamped down on your face (he smells of rotting flesh, rancid blood, things gone fulsomely bad in the darkness) you hurled like a goddamn hero and then you had to tiptoe around cleaning up after yourself because fuck if any of the others are ever, ever, ever going to find out about this.
(You wonder sometimes why watching yourself die over and over and over and over didn’t bother you as much as the clown does. Maybe it’s because you always knew how the bits with you in it were going to end, whereas he’s an unknown quantity, and you have definitely heard a faint echo of honking in the corridors when it’s very quiet--and sometimes, you think you might be imagining it, but sometimes you hear a sort of fibrous hushing sound as of something heavy being dragged along the floor.
And a sort of clotted, gurgling chuckle.
Fuck.)
You are not gonna get back to sleep tonight. Today. Whatever. The trolls still insist that days are for sleeping and you still insist that they are full of shit. Shivering, you slide out of your shitty alchemized excuse for a bed and you wrap your cape around yourself for warmth--you sleep in a t-shirt and boxers--and creep out into the corridor. It’s dark, it’s always dark, but at least you know where you are and it’s not far to the kitchen and...
fuck
you just heard something you just heard something and you are fucking disgusted at yourself, you’re the Knight of fucking Time, what even is your stupid deal being scared of imaginary bullshit in the dark, you faced Bec Noir, how much worse could the boogeyman possibly be, and...you run.
The moment you turn on the light in the kitchen you’re sure you were just imagining the noises in the dark corridor, you are turning into the spazziest fucking spaz ever to fucking throw a shitfit and it is just not the way of the Striders. Your Bro would be so very, very disappoint.
Still, you feel better, and you get yourself a drink of water and lean on the counter and will your heart to slow down to a normal goddamn pace already.
“The fuck are you doing?” inquires a nastily familiar voice. And you haven’t got your fucking shades on goddamn everything to hell.
Vantas is leaning in the doorway with his arms folded, scowling at you, and wearing...what the fuck is he even wearing, it looks like a ratty grey bathrobe. You do your best poker face.
“Can’t a guy get a fucking drink in the middle of the night, Karkles? Or are you dorm supervisor now?”
“Don’t call me Karkles,” he says, automatically. And he’s frowning at you now, instead of scowling. It’s a very subtle difference but you are used to his variations on the Not-Pleased facial expression by now. “You’re shivering.”
“It’s cold, okay? Fuck. Go away, Vantas, I’m not in the mood for you.”
He doesn’t go away; in fact he detaches himself from the doorway and comes over to frown at you from close range. His hair is sticking up all over the place, more than usual, and his eyes are heavy with sleep. Did you seriously wake him up crashing around in the fucking hallway just now?
“Is it Noir?” he asks, and he sounds more tired than angry.
“Huh?”
“Your horrorterrors. My personal favorite is the one where I watch him kill all my friends one after the other, but the one where I realize the whole Bilious Slick thing is my fucking fault is also a quality classic.”
“Vantas, what the fuck are you talking about?” Your voice is...a lot less acerbic than you’d meant it to be. He sighs, rubs at his face.
“Sit down, Strider, cold water isn’t gonna help. Go on, get out the way.”
You have never seen him like this before and you don’t know what to do about it but something in the way he’s casually ordering you around actually seems to strike a positive note--it’s a lot more compelling than his shouting ever manages to be. When he puts a hand on your shoulder and gives you a little shove toward the kitchen table you just obey, watching him with wide eyes.
He puts a kettle on. “It’s different for everybody. I think Aradia’s the only one of us who doesn’t get them, must be super fucking nice to be her. Terezi keeps killing Vriska. Sollux keeps killing Aradia. Kanaya tries to stop Ampora from hopesploding the goddamn matriorb. Gamzee--well. Gamzee’s not in a good place right now.”
“What the...” you start and you just stare at him. “How do you know?”
“Because they have all done exactly the same shit you’re doing right now,” Karkat tells you, and rootles around in the cabinets. “Well, okay. Not Gamzee. He just sort of howls. The others, though, fuck, I’ve lost count.”
He’s putting stuff into a mug. You watch dazedly. “He’s not really dragging dead bodies round the corridors after hours, is he?”
“What?” Karkat looks over his shoulder at you. “Fuck, is that yours? Gamzee coming after you?”
Your face goes hot and you strive mightily to maintain your expressionless expression against the flood of mocking you expect. “Fucking murderhappy alien juggalos roaming free in the corridors strikes me as kind of a legitimate concern, Vantas.”
“No, seriously, is that it?”
The kettle boils and he mixes up something that actually smells pretty good: sweet, a little peppery. “Drink that and listen to me, Strider, this is some vital information I am about to lay down here. No, go on, it isn’t fucking poisoned.”
He slides into a chair across the table from you. God, he looks so tired. “Gamzee is not going to find and murder you. He is not going to paint the walls with your blood or do anything else particularly shithive maggots with you. He is very likely going to go on doing what he’s been fucking doing, which is hiding from the rest of these chucklefucks, especially Kanaya and her goddamn chainsaw lipstick thing.”
You try it. Oh. Wow. That’s...that’s kind of awesome, whatever it is. It makes you think of those goofy fucking chai latte things, spicy and sweet and hot and stupidly comforting. It’s...a struggle to keep this from showing on your face.
“There’s a lot of things you can be perfectly justified in flipping your shit about, Strider, but he isn’t one of them. Not right now. I got him, okay? He’s my responsibility.”
“Your weirdass cuddlebro thing.”
“My moirail,” he corrects. “I’m serious. You don’t need to worry about him.”
Maybe if he was acting mad at you you’d have an easier time not believing him, but he’s...just...he’s so matter-of-fact about this shit. And he seems a lot older, somehow, than he does when you’re all up and about and having fights over Can Town and shitty troll romance novels and capes and so on. He seems like he actually knows what he’s talking about.
You don’t say anything, just wrapping your hands around the heat of the cup and breathing in the steam, and all at once you feel kind of as if something really fucking heavy has been taken away from you, something heavy and loathsome like a cloak made of beetles, and although you swore not so long ago that you’d never fucking sleep again you are drooping over the table with your eyes half-lidded.
“You put something in this?” you ask him.
“I put a lot of things in that. Go on, Strider, drink up and go the fuck back to bed. No murders for you tonight.”
It’s probably because nobody else is there to see, but your control slips a little bit as you get up and you think for a second you might have maybe kind of smiled gratefully at Karkat. It’s possible, anyway. You will deny any such thing ever happened.
He gives you a look that has tired, wry empathy all the way through it, and wow, you can’t really look at that for very long cause it does weird things to you, so you just...slope off back to bed, leaving him alone in the kitchen, and you don’t hear a single honk even once you drift back to sleep.