(Untitled)

[seeingtwofold]

WHO: Sollux Captor and Karkat Vantas.
WHAT: BFFers reunite and discuss things too special for the network.
WHERE: Truth or Consequences. Sollux's motel room.
WHEN: At some point during the afternoon after this.
WARNINGS: Swearing. Trolls. Karkat.

Comments

[hate_actually]

It turned out to be closer to fifteen minutes than ten, if only because Karkat didn't want to seem like he was in too much of a hurry. Admittedly, having been stuck here for two earth months, knowing that whatever chance there was that anybody he knew might still be alive was down exclusively to complicated interdimensional time paradoxes, was more than enough reason to be really, really glad to see his friend, but hell if he wanted to have to argue the point.

He gave the door handle a rattle when he reached room 102; when it didn't open, he thumped on the door perhaps a little harder than was necessary.

[seeingtwofold]

Maybe he'd been too busy staring out the window listessly, but Karkat's knock somehow managed to startle him. The difference between ten and fifteen minutes was mattering a hell of a lot more than it probably should have, and Sollux had already been well on his way to constructing an elaborate fantasy where their online encounter hadn't actually happened when solid physical evidence showed up.

He all but stumbled off the bed at the point, throwing the door open with much more than the unecessary amount of gusto. Then, of course, he found himself suddenly face to face with the friend in question and things got a lot more complicated.

He stared for a second, as if unsure of how to follow that act.

"Hey."

[hate_actually]

Karkat stared back.

It had been a long time since he'd so much as clapped eyes on another troll anywhere outside the grubby mirror in the motel bathroom. He knew that, but he hadn't expected to feel quite this relieved.

"... Hi."

His frown wavered a little.

"It's good to see you haven't died horribly, I guess."

[seeingtwofold]

Things really shouldn't have been so difficult. According to his personal timeline, he'd seen Karkat only a few hours previous, back in the Veil. But after having been pretty sure he was dead during that time, realizing that Karkat had been living with that same reality for the past two months was kind of killing him. It was all so depressing.

"Yeah," he replied, letting himself relax a little. "You too."

He moved out of the doorway, gesturing that Karkat should come in, and busying himself with figuring out what to do and say.

"Are you...okay?" Vague enough to work, maybe?

[hate_actually]

Karkat shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped sideways into the room, nudging the door shut with his shoulder.

"Me? I'm fine. I'm not about to burst into a torrent of liquid eye excretions and clasp you to my heaving chest in some overemotional display of friendship, if that's what you mean."

[seeingtwofold]

For once Karkat's curmudgeoning actually made life easier, as Sollux let out a tension releasing sigh.

"Damn, KK. How could you deprive me of your weird excretions all over my torso." Okay wow that sounded creepy, moving on.

"What have you even been doing all this time?"

[hate_actually]

"Literally fuck all," Karkat replied, "obviously because I haven't had anyone to weep melodramatically on. Also because there's actually less to do here than there was in the Veil, I'm not even kidding."

He was wandering around the tiny motel room as he spoke, scrutinizing its shabby decor.

"I guess I've been learning about the fascinating intricacies of human culture, which is basically every bit as asinine as any of us ever thought it was. Possibly more so. Do you know how many goddamn holidays they have?"

[seeingtwofold]

"Kind of hard to imagine that. But I guess at least you all had the human players to obsess over while you were there." Sollux, personally, hadn't been doing much at all during that time besides dicking around with those computers.

He just kind of raised an eyebrow at the 'holidays' comment.

"Yeah, people were kind of flipping their shits about 'Christmas' on the network. I assumed it was something stupid. Guess I was right."

[hate_actually]

"Hey," said Karkat, turning back round to face Sollux, "I wasn't obsessing, I was gathering important information that was vital to our understanding of what went wrong with our session, okay. I wasn't one of the ones getting their hypercompetitive psychotic murderflirt on over them."

He scowled, or at least scowled more than he'd been scowling already, and folded his arms.

"And, yeah, Christmas is like their shitty human equivalent of 12th Perigee's Eve," he explained, "except about a million times more pointless. And it's not just this one holiday. Before that it was this Hanukkah thing, I don't even know what that was, and before that there was Thanksgiving, and Halloween - it's like there's one of these things every couple of weeks and basically every time one of them happens everyone completely flips out and decorates everything. It's nauseating."

This was obviously something that had been bothering Karkat for some time.

[seeingtwofold]

Sollux blinked, listening to explanation with a mystified, neutral expression. By the end of it, he opted to sit down on one of the beds, shaking his head.

"Wow. That's some dedicated time wasting." He looked at the floor. "But if that's the most excruciating thing this place has to offer then it could be a lot worse."

Such as the whole being hunted down and murdered thing.

[hate_actually]

"Yeah, I guess like all the natives here could have a massive pointless grudge against anybody who isn't a useless human, or they could have implanted microchips in our arms that administer lethal electric shocks to anyone who tries to leave, or there could be something so massively wrong with the fabric of this universe's stupid reality that completely nonsensical bullshit happens without warning on a regular basis while everyone's still spending all their time shitting their bifurcated leg garments over what kind of party decorations they're going to put up this week. That sure would suck a lot of fleshy human reproductive nozzles."

Karkat huffed a weary sigh and sat down on the end of one of the other two beds. "Oh no, wait," he said, "Those are all things that are true."

[seeingtwofold]

At first a groan of frustration was all Sollux could muster in reaction to that, leaning forward and holding his head in his hands. However, as his wrist passed by his face, it caught his attention. Speaking of chips.

"Some guy on the network said that it was possible to get rid of them. The chips, I mean." He stared at his wrist, tapping at the skin where he'd felt the chip enter thoughtfully. "Maybe we could figure out a way to do that."

[hate_actually]

"Yeah, maybe," said Karkat. He sounded tired, and not very convinced. "As far as I know you have to be able to either set yourself on fire and not die, or cut it out of your own arm without getting fried by the electric shock or bleeding to death." His shirt sleeve hid the scar on his own wrist, but he found himself covering it with his hand anyway. "I guess there are some people who can pull them out with their mutant mind over matter shit without getting electrocuted somehow, but I'm not about to trust your brain with surgical precision."

[seeingtwofold]

"Well, then maybe i'll just try it on myself and you won't have to trust shit," Sollux snapped, a lot more aggrivated by that comment than he probably should have been. "Then when I blow off my arm or whatever you can sit back and bitch about how right you were."

[hate_actually]

"What? Fine." Karkat rolled his eyes. "Maybe I should let you do mine too, at least if I lose my entire fucking arm my chip will be gone and I'll be able to wander off into the desert without getting electrocuted before I pass out from blood loss."

[seeingtwofold]

"Great," Sollux shot back, refusing to lose momentum. "Then maybe we could both just die, which is apparently preferable to living here!"