monthly word count - october
TOTAL: 31 065
not bad, not bad. :333
POSTED
-Girl Genius - Nuée sequel: Pyroclastic (four chapters, complete) (12 002 words)
-Crash Standing chapter 17 (6 165 words)
-Demon Patrol chapter 25 (5 421 words)
WIP
-Girl Genius - Nuée sequel: Sorin/Veli porn (3 636 words)
-Demon Patrol chapter 25 snippet i didn't use (152 words)
-Covalent 'verse: Calliope/Kanaya/Caliborn ashenness (1 975 words)
-Battlefield Terra chapter 9 (1 621 words)
--
GirlGenius Sorin/Veli porn
--
"Boo."
"Bed hogs don't get a right to boo."
"Hy iz not bed hog, hy iz bed warmer." He strikes a sexy pose, flutters his eyelashes.
"You realize you're still under the blankets, right?"
Veli grins. He thinks he's starting to defrost, but it might be wishful thinking. "Trying to entice hyu to unveil me. Working yet?"
He knows he looks silly as hell, hair wet and all over his face, hat askew -- he takes it very carefully off to hang it beside the bed; it starts dripping onto the floor instantly. Sorin snorts quietly, smiling at him.
"I think you should give it another half-hour. I've got to finish these, anyway, or I'll forget where I stopped and completely lose track of everything. You go and hog the bed."
"Dat vos mine evil plan all along," Velimir says, eyes already closing. "Muahaha."
He's not exactly sleepy, but the warmth is knocking him into a daze. He curls up for fifteen minutes or more, soaking it up, before he stretches his legs out and wiggles the toes of his hooves against the sheets.
Before he can get unfolded all the way he bumps into a little compartment thing into the wall, that clicks open with the impact. "Whoops."
Okay, time to tunnel under the blankets, then. (He can hear Sorin failing not to laugh. Success.)
The drawer didn't spill anything much; it's a simple matter to nudge it back into its rail and push it... closed...
"Shackles?"
He thought Sorin didn't like working for -- well, for anyone who might plan to use shackles on anyone else. Of course if the customer insists enough Sorin would probably rather make them a pair, if he can't refuse without risks, but. Velimir frowns, lifting them out of the drawer. The edges have been sanded down to a smooth finish so they won't dig into skin, and they...
They're pretty big, aren't they. He's pretty sure most people's hands would slip through them, with enough force and stubbornness.
Also there's this strange little latch on the side...
He looks up at Sorin, who is staring back at him and looking utterly mortified.
"Okay, first things first I want you to know it was just to see if I could, because the mechanism was a pain. And I could, it was a great triumph."
He closes his mouth, teeth clacking a little. They stare at each other.
"De second thing?" Velimir presses delicately, heroically keeping a monster fit of laughter contained.
"... What?"
"You sez first things first. Okay, und second things?"
Sorin groans, hides his face in his hands. "Oh, just laugh and get it over with!"
Veli is grinning and doesn't think he can stop anytime soon. "Hyu know," he says, lifting the shackles, eyeballing the diameter, "Hy iz fine vith playink vith de non-tricky shackles, too. So long as de key iz not akseeduntelly lost."
Sorin lifts his head to glare at him for his weaponized use of Old Mechanicsburger accent. Veli makes sure he can see him place his wrist in the open shackle, makes sure he's staring short of breath and stiff with surprise before he closes it with a snap.
He hopes Sorin was right and the release does work, because he might be going around with a fun bracelet for a little while otherwise. Oh well.
The noise that comes from Sorin next is a thin, aspirated, nasal whine. Velimir bursts out laughing.
Ach, his poor lover. Veli imagines him, lonely one night, bored, having thoughts... lots of indecent thoughts, bad enough that his so proper, so easily embarrassed lover actually gets up and builds the thing.
It is hilarious. It's also the sexiest thing he's heard in a long, long time.
"So hyu like these things, huh?" he says, musing, lifting his wrist to inspect the manacle. It's nicely heavy, and he was right, not a single edge inside to catch his skin. A human might bruise wearing something so unyielding and heavy, but ...
"You're the one who mentioned them!" Sorin splutters.
Velimir blinks. "Hy did? Vhen?"
"I quote, oh no, you have me at your mercy now, what will you do, sexy torture?"
Velimir stares for a second, three, twenty.
That... was from the very first time they were together, the first time, in that stupid transport.
Huh.
Hee.
"Hyu has been thinking ov it ever since?"
Sorin gives him an anguished look. "No!" A pause. "Maybe. Not, not often. Just. Anyway someone reminded me at the bar with a particularly bad ribald joke I won't repeat and. Auuugh."
He crumples in his chair, face hidden in his hands.
Velimir contemplates the situation. Not for long; he's a jaeger, he's good at going with the flow. He jiggle the chain, just enough for Sorin to look up, despite himself, like his eyes are magnetized.
"Hyu vill never capture me," he says, all soft and intense, shifting his weight so that the blankets slide and fall off his body.
The chair crashes to the ground. Sorin just tackled him.
--
Covalent: CallieKanCal
--
"--Hey! Let go, you big fat glowy green--"
"Do you want clothes, or not?"
He twists his neck to glare at her, eyes still a perfect adolescent gray. The broken edge of his horn scratches her wrist. "Not!"
Kanaya can already tell that this visit is going to be an exercise in juggling, and she isn't even allowed to handle them too visibly, and they have no manners at all. Clearly their lusus was not from a gregarious -- oh. Right. No lusus. Well, that explains everything.
"Oh?" she says, trying to sound innocent. Rose or Vriska would burst out laughing at how badly she does it. "But I thought you could tell that swimming in too-large clothes only makes you look much smaller and thinner. You should look into clothes that maximize your width and show off your shoulders."
Caliborn stops wriggling, though he stares at her doubtfully until she feels like she ought maybe to release him, if only because it's getting awkward holding him like this.
She lets go. He doesn't try to tackle anything. Good enough.
"... How the fuck. Do you mean that."
"Come with me, and I'll show you." Kanaya runs a professional eye down his frame. Certainly it's not going to be easy, but.
But he knows next to nothing about troll culture. At worst, she'll add dulled spikes on his jacket shoulders, and won't tell him anything about how try-hard and defensive and half-feral-to-tame it'll make him look.
Feeling quite sneaky and maybe mildly evil, she herds him up to her sewing room. Calliope follows, hands behind her back, the picture of friendliness and innocence.
Kanaya digs out a catalogue of pitch fashion (she laboriously printed it herself off the internet image after image; fashion isn't something that grabs at enough trolls that the drones have any ready-made to deliver) and shoves him at it, picks up an armful of clothes for Calliope, and for ten minutes or so it's... it's quiet. Sometimes one of them will demand her attention, look at this, can you make me something like that, no, why not, and she will explain how this or that shape will work with (or often, against) their body types, but whenever one of them tries to get her attention when she's already talking to the other one, she just clears her throat, and Calliope relents, Caliborn pretends he wasn't done looking anyway.
It goes well until she has Calliope on the little dais for ease of taking her measurements.
Then Caliborn gets bored.
At first he just wanders aimlessly, stares at her trinkets with a gimlet eye, and Kanaya tries to keep an eye on him, but she has a mouth full of pins and hands full of measuring tape, and as long as he isn't trying to leave or break anything...
"I didn't peg you for someone who'd post her pornos in public," Caliborn says, behind her, and she pricks herself on the thumb. Calliope winces when she sees the beading blood. "Good going!"
Kanaya turns around and Caliborn has taken a picture off the wall and is peering at it with a strange, intense look -- delighted and shocked both, like he's enjoying being shocked.
"What are you talking about?" Kanaya asks, taking a forcibly slow and measured step closer.
She recognizes the frame, though. Her and Rose -- taken back when Kanaya's matesprit was still human, but the Game trollified her features on the way out and the way their horns brush together is, um, well. Not that risqué!
"What on Alternia are you talking about?" she asks, and reaches for the picture.
Caliborn whirls to keep it out of her reach, nastily triumphant. "Look at that! Your arms are all around that rotund bitch's waist."
Kanaya's face flushes. "It's true that the hold I have on Rose is rather -- rather intimate, but there's nothing indecent in there either, we are both fully clothed--"
"In that cuddly woolen cloth? Oooh, nasty. And the fatter bitch's chest pillows are spilling all. Over. Your arms. This is obscene."
He's making the kind of noises a troll usually utters only with his matesprit or with a good flushed porn movie.
Kanaya steps in with the sudden speed of a daywalker and snatches the picture out of his hand, and when he turns on her, snarling -- she leans right into his face, and she says, eyes thinned into slits, "I do not enjoy hearing you calling me or my matesprit bitches. Actually, I don't enjoy the word at all. You will stop using it."
"Or what?" he demands, crackling with eager tension. Calliope starts moving off her dais to intercept.
Kanaya waves her back, without looking. The day she needs someone to intercede on her behalf...!
"Did you think I was joking about cutting you in two at the waist?"
--
BT chapter 9
--
RM: heyo johnnyboy
RM: u anywhere near karkat atm?
JH: yes? i'm in his bedroom, actually.
RM: kk cool my source did not fail me ;)
RM: k can u tell our esteemed guest id love a quick checkup to get a baseline from his post sleepdrugged state
RM: idk what the chemicals in it do but prty sure they do smth & wd love to know for sure
JH: apart from making him all mellow and smiley?
RM: WHOOOaa srsly??
RM: did we slip him alien marijuana or
RM: oh what a tricky young man ur dad will disapprove so hard
JH: pff.
JH: it's not THAT bad, he still gets snarky if i push the dumb too far.
RM: the world has not ended yet! coolness.
RM: now can u relay the question plz, i gotta do other shit 2day
JH: yeah, yeah.
RM: like say, your dad ;D
JH: OH MY GOD, ROMY LALONDE.
JH: just for that i should grab him and go camping around the island!
RM: hey if i dont get a romantic getaway for cause of things keeping on happening in this job u dont get one either, u feel me
JH: rauuuuurghg. this joke is really not as funny as you dumb butts seem to think it is!!!!
RM: wheres ur sense of humor bub, did it fall down a mine shaft or did u sit on it & its lodged somewhere painful & inaccessible now? brb getting proctologist diploma 2 handle ur buttmad
JH: you know what would make me really happy with you today?
JH: if you could, like, turn down the morning after giggles from boning my dad.
RM: kid, i hate 2 tell u this but this is NOWHERE near the first time i boned ur dad :(
JH: RAUUURGRHGH.
"Zhann. Zhann. What the fuck your head is wrong why."
"... Why is your face wrong," John reworded helpfully, though not without a tired groan.
"Yes. Why."
"My face is not wrong!" John stuck out his tongue and glowered, deliberately over the top.
"I have the eye I can look your face, and you no." Karkat snorted disdainfully.
He was seated with his legs splayed, the tablet propped up on his knee. John was in an unfortunate place not to have his eyes directed straight to the apex of his legs.
He wondered if Doctor Lalonde would tell him what was up with Karkat's crotch arrangements, in preferably technical and boring xenobiology terms.
Probably not, and then she wouldn't even need to tell him off for even asking, he'd tell himself off just fine with a single quelling look. Hell, he was telling himself off just now merely from wondering.
Karkat made an annoyed clicky noise and growl-grunt-muttered to himself for a sentence or two there. "Speak."
"Yeah, yeah, sorry. Uh. Doctor Lalonde wants to look at you? To see what the..." he pointed at the tub of goo, "what that did to you."
A short growl; Karkat's irises flicked huge and then tiny. "It did sleep."
"You can say no, if you want," John reminded him, voice gentling a little. "You're an ambassador now, not a prisoner."
Well, not super-officially with the letters from his own government and everything, but. Yeah.
"I think..." Karkat paused, chewed on his lip for a moment, looking down at the tablet. "I think she need my body thing, when my people come here." Quieter; "When they come prisoner."
"... Yeah, probably."
A brief, deep sigh. "Okay. Tell her okay."
JH: he's waiting for you.
"Come here in your room?" John asked, to make sure. "Or do you want another place?"
Karkat shrugged carelessly and climbed to his feet. John was briefly struck watching his bare feet against the floor. It was funny the way his toes gripped, the claws almost brushing the floor. Also the way his hips swung for balance --
Okay. Okay, no. He needed to stop thinking about that... that. He bounced up on his feet, bent down to pick up the box with the folding screen, popped it open. "Oh, cool, it's already put together! Where do you want it?"
Karkat waved toward the bath. "So people come in and not see me," he groused, sending John a pointed, but more amused than irritated look.
"I said sorry already!" John spluttered. "Also you've seen me naked a ton of times before!"
"Maybe I do not want see you naked!" Karkat retorted, a hand flung up. "Maybe my eyes are wurghgh no bad now, because I see your weirdo thing, and now my horns see things like, wall and door and thing because my eyes not and I blam on walls. My eyes like jello headband thing and it's hot on them, makes water and fall down the floor! Aliens," he finished like a swear word.
John started laughing, because the alternative was to whimper and expire on the spot. The image of Karkat's eyes melting and running in fat globs like it was strawberry jam was especially gross. Much better a thought than the nakedness. Why did it keep coming back up anyway, couldn't the topic just die already?!
not bad, not bad. :333
POSTED
-Girl Genius - Nuée sequel: Pyroclastic (four chapters, complete) (12 002 words)
-Crash Standing chapter 17 (6 165 words)
-Demon Patrol chapter 25 (5 421 words)
WIP
-Girl Genius - Nuée sequel: Sorin/Veli porn (3 636 words)
-Demon Patrol chapter 25 snippet i didn't use (152 words)
-Covalent 'verse: Calliope/Kanaya/Caliborn ashenness (1 975 words)
-Battlefield Terra chapter 9 (1 621 words)
--
GirlGenius Sorin/Veli porn
--
"Boo."
"Bed hogs don't get a right to boo."
"Hy iz not bed hog, hy iz bed warmer." He strikes a sexy pose, flutters his eyelashes.
"You realize you're still under the blankets, right?"
Veli grins. He thinks he's starting to defrost, but it might be wishful thinking. "Trying to entice hyu to unveil me. Working yet?"
He knows he looks silly as hell, hair wet and all over his face, hat askew -- he takes it very carefully off to hang it beside the bed; it starts dripping onto the floor instantly. Sorin snorts quietly, smiling at him.
"I think you should give it another half-hour. I've got to finish these, anyway, or I'll forget where I stopped and completely lose track of everything. You go and hog the bed."
"Dat vos mine evil plan all along," Velimir says, eyes already closing. "Muahaha."
He's not exactly sleepy, but the warmth is knocking him into a daze. He curls up for fifteen minutes or more, soaking it up, before he stretches his legs out and wiggles the toes of his hooves against the sheets.
Before he can get unfolded all the way he bumps into a little compartment thing into the wall, that clicks open with the impact. "Whoops."
Okay, time to tunnel under the blankets, then. (He can hear Sorin failing not to laugh. Success.)
The drawer didn't spill anything much; it's a simple matter to nudge it back into its rail and push it... closed...
"Shackles?"
He thought Sorin didn't like working for -- well, for anyone who might plan to use shackles on anyone else. Of course if the customer insists enough Sorin would probably rather make them a pair, if he can't refuse without risks, but. Velimir frowns, lifting them out of the drawer. The edges have been sanded down to a smooth finish so they won't dig into skin, and they...
They're pretty big, aren't they. He's pretty sure most people's hands would slip through them, with enough force and stubbornness.
Also there's this strange little latch on the side...
He looks up at Sorin, who is staring back at him and looking utterly mortified.
"Okay, first things first I want you to know it was just to see if I could, because the mechanism was a pain. And I could, it was a great triumph."
He closes his mouth, teeth clacking a little. They stare at each other.
"De second thing?" Velimir presses delicately, heroically keeping a monster fit of laughter contained.
"... What?"
"You sez first things first. Okay, und second things?"
Sorin groans, hides his face in his hands. "Oh, just laugh and get it over with!"
Veli is grinning and doesn't think he can stop anytime soon. "Hyu know," he says, lifting the shackles, eyeballing the diameter, "Hy iz fine vith playink vith de non-tricky shackles, too. So long as de key iz not akseeduntelly lost."
Sorin lifts his head to glare at him for his weaponized use of Old Mechanicsburger accent. Veli makes sure he can see him place his wrist in the open shackle, makes sure he's staring short of breath and stiff with surprise before he closes it with a snap.
He hopes Sorin was right and the release does work, because he might be going around with a fun bracelet for a little while otherwise. Oh well.
The noise that comes from Sorin next is a thin, aspirated, nasal whine. Velimir bursts out laughing.
Ach, his poor lover. Veli imagines him, lonely one night, bored, having thoughts... lots of indecent thoughts, bad enough that his so proper, so easily embarrassed lover actually gets up and builds the thing.
It is hilarious. It's also the sexiest thing he's heard in a long, long time.
"So hyu like these things, huh?" he says, musing, lifting his wrist to inspect the manacle. It's nicely heavy, and he was right, not a single edge inside to catch his skin. A human might bruise wearing something so unyielding and heavy, but ...
"You're the one who mentioned them!" Sorin splutters.
Velimir blinks. "Hy did? Vhen?"
"I quote, oh no, you have me at your mercy now, what will you do, sexy torture?"
Velimir stares for a second, three, twenty.
That... was from the very first time they were together, the first time, in that stupid transport.
Huh.
Hee.
"Hyu has been thinking ov it ever since?"
Sorin gives him an anguished look. "No!" A pause. "Maybe. Not, not often. Just. Anyway someone reminded me at the bar with a particularly bad ribald joke I won't repeat and. Auuugh."
He crumples in his chair, face hidden in his hands.
Velimir contemplates the situation. Not for long; he's a jaeger, he's good at going with the flow. He jiggle the chain, just enough for Sorin to look up, despite himself, like his eyes are magnetized.
"Hyu vill never capture me," he says, all soft and intense, shifting his weight so that the blankets slide and fall off his body.
The chair crashes to the ground. Sorin just tackled him.
--
Covalent: CallieKanCal
--
"--Hey! Let go, you big fat glowy green--"
"Do you want clothes, or not?"
He twists his neck to glare at her, eyes still a perfect adolescent gray. The broken edge of his horn scratches her wrist. "Not!"
Kanaya can already tell that this visit is going to be an exercise in juggling, and she isn't even allowed to handle them too visibly, and they have no manners at all. Clearly their lusus was not from a gregarious -- oh. Right. No lusus. Well, that explains everything.
"Oh?" she says, trying to sound innocent. Rose or Vriska would burst out laughing at how badly she does it. "But I thought you could tell that swimming in too-large clothes only makes you look much smaller and thinner. You should look into clothes that maximize your width and show off your shoulders."
Caliborn stops wriggling, though he stares at her doubtfully until she feels like she ought maybe to release him, if only because it's getting awkward holding him like this.
She lets go. He doesn't try to tackle anything. Good enough.
"... How the fuck. Do you mean that."
"Come with me, and I'll show you." Kanaya runs a professional eye down his frame. Certainly it's not going to be easy, but.
But he knows next to nothing about troll culture. At worst, she'll add dulled spikes on his jacket shoulders, and won't tell him anything about how try-hard and defensive and half-feral-to-tame it'll make him look.
Feeling quite sneaky and maybe mildly evil, she herds him up to her sewing room. Calliope follows, hands behind her back, the picture of friendliness and innocence.
Kanaya digs out a catalogue of pitch fashion (she laboriously printed it herself off the internet image after image; fashion isn't something that grabs at enough trolls that the drones have any ready-made to deliver) and shoves him at it, picks up an armful of clothes for Calliope, and for ten minutes or so it's... it's quiet. Sometimes one of them will demand her attention, look at this, can you make me something like that, no, why not, and she will explain how this or that shape will work with (or often, against) their body types, but whenever one of them tries to get her attention when she's already talking to the other one, she just clears her throat, and Calliope relents, Caliborn pretends he wasn't done looking anyway.
It goes well until she has Calliope on the little dais for ease of taking her measurements.
Then Caliborn gets bored.
At first he just wanders aimlessly, stares at her trinkets with a gimlet eye, and Kanaya tries to keep an eye on him, but she has a mouth full of pins and hands full of measuring tape, and as long as he isn't trying to leave or break anything...
"I didn't peg you for someone who'd post her pornos in public," Caliborn says, behind her, and she pricks herself on the thumb. Calliope winces when she sees the beading blood. "Good going!"
Kanaya turns around and Caliborn has taken a picture off the wall and is peering at it with a strange, intense look -- delighted and shocked both, like he's enjoying being shocked.
"What are you talking about?" Kanaya asks, taking a forcibly slow and measured step closer.
She recognizes the frame, though. Her and Rose -- taken back when Kanaya's matesprit was still human, but the Game trollified her features on the way out and the way their horns brush together is, um, well. Not that risqué!
"What on Alternia are you talking about?" she asks, and reaches for the picture.
Caliborn whirls to keep it out of her reach, nastily triumphant. "Look at that! Your arms are all around that rotund bitch's waist."
Kanaya's face flushes. "It's true that the hold I have on Rose is rather -- rather intimate, but there's nothing indecent in there either, we are both fully clothed--"
"In that cuddly woolen cloth? Oooh, nasty. And the fatter bitch's chest pillows are spilling all. Over. Your arms. This is obscene."
He's making the kind of noises a troll usually utters only with his matesprit or with a good flushed porn movie.
Kanaya steps in with the sudden speed of a daywalker and snatches the picture out of his hand, and when he turns on her, snarling -- she leans right into his face, and she says, eyes thinned into slits, "I do not enjoy hearing you calling me or my matesprit bitches. Actually, I don't enjoy the word at all. You will stop using it."
"Or what?" he demands, crackling with eager tension. Calliope starts moving off her dais to intercept.
Kanaya waves her back, without looking. The day she needs someone to intercede on her behalf...!
"Did you think I was joking about cutting you in two at the waist?"
--
BT chapter 9
--
RM: heyo johnnyboy
RM: u anywhere near karkat atm?
JH: yes? i'm in his bedroom, actually.
RM: kk cool my source did not fail me ;)
RM: k can u tell our esteemed guest id love a quick checkup to get a baseline from his post sleepdrugged state
RM: idk what the chemicals in it do but prty sure they do smth & wd love to know for sure
JH: apart from making him all mellow and smiley?
RM: WHOOOaa srsly??
RM: did we slip him alien marijuana or
RM: oh what a tricky young man ur dad will disapprove so hard
JH: pff.
JH: it's not THAT bad, he still gets snarky if i push the dumb too far.
RM: the world has not ended yet! coolness.
RM: now can u relay the question plz, i gotta do other shit 2day
JH: yeah, yeah.
RM: like say, your dad ;D
JH: OH MY GOD, ROMY LALONDE.
JH: just for that i should grab him and go camping around the island!
RM: hey if i dont get a romantic getaway for cause of things keeping on happening in this job u dont get one either, u feel me
JH: rauuuuurghg. this joke is really not as funny as you dumb butts seem to think it is!!!!
RM: wheres ur sense of humor bub, did it fall down a mine shaft or did u sit on it & its lodged somewhere painful & inaccessible now? brb getting proctologist diploma 2 handle ur buttmad
JH: you know what would make me really happy with you today?
JH: if you could, like, turn down the morning after giggles from boning my dad.
RM: kid, i hate 2 tell u this but this is NOWHERE near the first time i boned ur dad :(
JH: RAUUURGRHGH.
"Zhann. Zhann. What the fuck your head is wrong why."
"... Why is your face wrong," John reworded helpfully, though not without a tired groan.
"Yes. Why."
"My face is not wrong!" John stuck out his tongue and glowered, deliberately over the top.
"I have the eye I can look your face, and you no." Karkat snorted disdainfully.
He was seated with his legs splayed, the tablet propped up on his knee. John was in an unfortunate place not to have his eyes directed straight to the apex of his legs.
He wondered if Doctor Lalonde would tell him what was up with Karkat's crotch arrangements, in preferably technical and boring xenobiology terms.
Probably not, and then she wouldn't even need to tell him off for even asking, he'd tell himself off just fine with a single quelling look. Hell, he was telling himself off just now merely from wondering.
Karkat made an annoyed clicky noise and growl-grunt-muttered to himself for a sentence or two there. "Speak."
"Yeah, yeah, sorry. Uh. Doctor Lalonde wants to look at you? To see what the..." he pointed at the tub of goo, "what that did to you."
A short growl; Karkat's irises flicked huge and then tiny. "It did sleep."
"You can say no, if you want," John reminded him, voice gentling a little. "You're an ambassador now, not a prisoner."
Well, not super-officially with the letters from his own government and everything, but. Yeah.
"I think..." Karkat paused, chewed on his lip for a moment, looking down at the tablet. "I think she need my body thing, when my people come here." Quieter; "When they come prisoner."
"... Yeah, probably."
A brief, deep sigh. "Okay. Tell her okay."
JH: he's waiting for you.
"Come here in your room?" John asked, to make sure. "Or do you want another place?"
Karkat shrugged carelessly and climbed to his feet. John was briefly struck watching his bare feet against the floor. It was funny the way his toes gripped, the claws almost brushing the floor. Also the way his hips swung for balance --
Okay. Okay, no. He needed to stop thinking about that... that. He bounced up on his feet, bent down to pick up the box with the folding screen, popped it open. "Oh, cool, it's already put together! Where do you want it?"
Karkat waved toward the bath. "So people come in and not see me," he groused, sending John a pointed, but more amused than irritated look.
"I said sorry already!" John spluttered. "Also you've seen me naked a ton of times before!"
"Maybe I do not want see you naked!" Karkat retorted, a hand flung up. "Maybe my eyes are wurghgh no bad now, because I see your weirdo thing, and now my horns see things like, wall and door and thing because my eyes not and I blam on walls. My eyes like jello headband thing and it's hot on them, makes water and fall down the floor! Aliens," he finished like a swear word.
John started laughing, because the alternative was to whimper and expire on the spot. The image of Karkat's eyes melting and running in fat globs like it was strawberry jam was especially gross. Much better a thought than the nakedness. Why did it keep coming back up anyway, couldn't the topic just die already?!