[fanfic] Of Noble Heroes
Title: Of Noble Heroes
Fandoms: Hetalia World Series, Homestuck
Characters: OC!Female!Philippines, Karkat Vantas
Warnings: This is a crossover, obviously. Also, OOC-ness, plot holes, grammar slip-ups, the usual. Here you could also make me attempt to write another character whose mouth should be washed out with soap, so...yeah.
Rating: PG (This is also the reason why Karkat is OOC - he doesn’t swear here as much as he usually does.)
Summary: In which an errant mutant-blooded troll finds himself encountering a human-looking being that actually represents a Nation and her obligatory chocolate-flavored confectionery; including passing mentions of other trolls and Nations, occasional nods to their respective canons, and explicit, painful devouring of innocent chocolate cakes.
(Also known as my actual 612 piece. Enjoy.)
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“Who the everloving piece of eternal shit are you.” He asks this of the woman in the room with no change in tone or inflection or tone whatsoever, which is not much of a surprise seeing as his sentence was more of a shout than a question to start with.
“Ay, ako ata dapat magtatanong nyan.” Centuries of existing and an impressive record of ‘supernatural sightings’ have made the woman - let’s call her Maria - apathetic to just about everything, however, even if right now she is faced with what seems to be a young man with yellow eyes and gray skin and what seems to be horns sticking out of his dark hair. One hand goes to her pocket, however, fisting around a well-worn rosary, and the other hand remains gripping the lighter she had been using to light candles when she saw him. “This is my house kaya. So it should be you indentifying yourself first, don’t you think?”
“Oh, haha, nice try, don’t think I’d fall for that one, missy. Many a troll have fallen for the many intricate ruses you humans painstakingly concoct for no other reason than to ‘play with’ alien species you consider to be underneath your superiority as ‘rational animals’, but unfortunately for you, I am not that kind of troll.” He puffs up his chest, probably thinking himself some war-worn knight in great need of reverence. “It just so happens that you have been saddled with dealing with the troll who happened to be blessed by the Mother Grub with the most functioning and sizable think pan in existence, which could only obviously exist in a species that is clearly more superior than your pink-skinned hornless own.”
Maria shakes her head, clearly not pleased with her uninvited houseguest’s manners, or rather lack of them. “It’s not a ruse, okay? I really need to know. I’d like to know who you are, because that way I could find out whether I am supposed to scream bloody murder, call for the police, hit you upside the head with this conveniently-placed broom, or help you find your way. But you know what?” She sets the lighter gingerly down on the table, spreads out both arms in the universal sign of openness in the sense of ‘see, I’ve got no weapons, so please stop being aggressive’, the fact that the male in front of her happened to have razor-sharp teeth and a pair of sickles notwithstanding. Besides, if worse came to worst, surely those puny little blades won’t do much against a Nation, won’t they? Even if the Nation was one so small as the Philippines.
“I figured you won’t believe a girl who’s all strategically poised to set fire on you, so...ayan. No arms. If you charge I won’t even fight back or anything, not that anything will happen, syempre. It takes a lot more than simple sickles to take down a Nation, even if they were wielded by those of a class as ‘superior’ as you say you are. So go, go ahead if you still don’t believe me, huh?” There is a tinge of challenge in Maria’s voice, the tone that only revealed itself when she demanded her proper respect as a Nation.
As would be expected, the male’s hands loosen, dropping both his sickles on the floor. Let it be known that Maria dela Cruz was never a coward.
“Fine, fine, there.” Her unexpected houseguest hurries to retrieve his weaponry, setting it on the table next to Maria’s lighter. “You like peaceful conversations, okay, I got it. What kind of scumbag-wielding leader would I be if I shied away from proffered interspecies olive branches like how Tavros Nitram acts around other trolls? A worthless leader not worthy of anyone’s attention, that’s what.”
He spills himself on one of Maria’s dining room chairs with as much grace as England after a long night at the pub, which is to say not many. Maria doesn’t know what this man leads over, nor does she know who Tavros might be, but she thinks that they may have just undergone an agreement to forfeit all weapons and actually be some sort of civil. She sighs. “Buti naman. You do know you never told me your name, though?”
“Damn it, lady, does everything in this godforsaken blue planet have to be on your watch, or am I just overreacting?”
“Haay, you are overreacting. I just think it’s only proper for me to know the basics about strange alien beings who happen to just sprout out from the corners of my own house, di ba? This applies especially when said alien being happened to be wielding a pair of sickles and super-sharp teeth, ready to charge at me if I so much as looked at him wrong. Now, again, I would like to know your name, for a start, so help us God.”
“...”
“I honestly just want to know your name so I can help you.” Maria tries to look at him from a different angle, trying to catch his eyes from the direction from which he has averted his gaze onto. She finally decides to use the tone of voice that may or may not have ‘convinced’ Alfred to give her an iPad for her last birthday. “Please?”
The room is silent, save for the rain outside and the rustle of the male’s nails (...claws?) over his clothing.
“...Karkat Vantas.”
Maria sits across Karkat then, momentarily pondering on the thought that in some societies and belief systems from her past, knowing one’s name meant having power over them. Was this why he was so pointedly ignoring her requests for his name? “Hmm, Karkat, huh? Sounds rather Indian to me.” He makes the face that tells her he has no idea what an Indian is and why Maria is using it to refer to his name, and so she remembers that her guest may probably be from another world and carries on. “Anyway, I’m Maria dela Cruz. Don’t worry, Karkat, I really don’t have bad intentions towards you - that is, unless you have any against me?”
“Haha, keep on dreaming, darling.” The way Karkat refers to Maria just outright drips with sweetly saccharine sarcasm, and she makes a frantic wish that he just calls her normally instead. If what little of her luck held out, the normal way trolls call other people did not have to equip sarcastic pet names. Hopefully. “You’d have to be pretty loathsome to even think of attracting my pure and sacred abhorrence, and from the looks of it you don’t fit the criteria, what with all your stupid pacifism and blind sense of courageous bullshit. Like I keep saying, this new universe us superior sentient lifeforms have made has failed; how dumb would a human have to be to thrust oneself in the trajectory of a potentially murderous troll like a flutterbeast thrown in front of a flaming torch?”
“Hay naku, I’d personally prefer if you’d stop with the long-winded similes already and just talk to me normally so we can know why exactly why you are here and how I can help you, but it seems that may be too much for me to ask, a.” There is a resigned look on Maria’s face as she sighs, takes the lighter she tossed away and lights the candles atop the almost-forgotten cake beside her. Karkat notices the cake’s existence just when Maria closes her eyes and mumbles something before blowing the candles out.
“Heh.” She chuckles, though Karkat doesn’t have to be much of an empath to know that Maria finds nothing funny about what she had been thinking. “Happy birthday, I guess.” Her sullen look suddenly dissipates at a speed so fast it brings to mind numerous wordy metaphors regarding speeding tickets to Karkat’s mind as Maria turns to him. “Would you want some cake?”
Karkat is a well-educated troll, and so he knows full well to not accept random alien delicacies from random females of different species who he happened to meet due to events out of his own control. But the cake slice is right there, right in front of him, just begging to be showered with proper love and attention, and the chocolate cake is just so moist and rich and decadent, the frosting gleaming in the artificial lights with a captivating allure. It would only be a matter of minutes before he succumbs.
Maria sighs, poking at her own slice of cake with a fork. Chocolate was not her favorite, but she didn’t want to think about details too much right about now. “Help yourself, I guess.”
They eat in silence, forks clacking against china more precious than Maria’s entire house. This goes on until the cake is mostly a pile of insignificant brown crumbs and the rain outside has long since stopped, until there is nothing but a night sky blanketed with stars as far as Maria’s windows can see. She is looking outside with the stars dancing around in her eyes, and Karkat’s breath did not hitch, no, he did not remember the two Heroes of Space he had begrudgingly become so close to, the ones who could make him realize how small and yet how important he was in the face of the entire universe. He does not remember a certain Maryam or a certain Harley, and so when he speaks it is not so she would look away from the stars and stop reminding him of them.
“Today’s your wriggling day?”
“If wriggling day’s your way of referring to birthdays, e di may tama ka!” Maria laughs to herself, probably making some obscure reference Karkat obviously does not understand. “Oo nga. Today’s my birthday. Or, at least, that’s the birthday I was given. I am a hundred percent sure the concept of birthdays works differently for people than it does for us Nations.”
“Don’t even start playing a catgirl’s silly make-believe games with me, okay, dela Cruz? You look like a human, sound like a human, and what do you know, I am sure you have the same mind-numbingly horrendous thought processes as other humans, seeing as you find it necessary to pretend to be something better than a mere human to gain my minimal amount of respect.”
“...fine. It really doesn’t matter to me if you believe in me.” Another humorless chuckle escapes her lips, and for some reason it chills him down to his very bones. “I’m used to having people doubt me anyways. Still, would you mind if I go on.”
Suddenly Karkat finds himself thinking he would agree with anything if it meant this human-looking woman would not make that horrifying laugh again. A great part of his mind is chanting ‘this is stupid’, but he tries to make his instinct take the back burner for now. Just for now, of course, since such a thoughtless occasion was monumentally exceptional for him. “Whatever.” He mumbles, and it comes off less brash than he originally intended.
“See, in our planet we have land, right? And the land which mostly has people in them is divided into continents, with the occasional sub-continent, which are subdivided further into regions, into nations.” The whole time she had been tracing circles into the tabletop with her finger, and when she says ‘nations’ she looks up from the table to give Karkat a little smile that could almost be called ‘resigned’. “And that’s where beings like I come in.”
She stands up and busies herself with what Karkat vaguely recognizes as a tea set. “I don’t really remember when I first came into existence. I just...just knew I was living, I guess? I remember a time before Lapu-lapu, and I know you don’t know him but my personally knowing him is kind of symbolic to this story. How old are you, Karkat?”
“Six solar sweeps. Or, as I had to translate for a certain grubmuncher we should most probably refer to as ‘John Egbert’, around thirteen of your pithy Earth years.”
“Thirteen’s a very young age, if you ask me.” Karkat makes this face at Maria that clearly states that he does not like where this conversation is going, and is about to say so. “I just alluded to you that I have lived long before the first hero of my history waged war against a group of foreigners daft enough to land in his territory, which would be 1521. The present year is 2012. Feel free to do the math, and remember that I had been living long, long before 1521.”
Karkat does the math, firmly comes to the conclusion that again, this is stupid, and finally settles on remembering that Maria is apparently an old person in human terms. “So you’re old. We have this Empress over at Alternia who was apparently alive and kicking long before all those blue-bloods’ ridiculous tomfoolery of Ancestors were hatched. She’s still up and going at it now, unluckily enough for any other species that crosses her way. And for any deficient members of our species who had the outright gall to keep on existing.”
His hands are in his lap now, fisting so hard that if one were to look close one would see how his veins pulse and how they hold a blood so red Terezi would probably cry. He swallows down the ever-present feeling of damnation, the permanent realization that he is nothing more but a mutation, a horrible crime to all trollkind, an error just begging to be picked up and deleted. He feels this every goddamned Alternian night, but as it seems he can’t help but feel it more strongly right here, right now.
“Talaga? Well, things don’t work out that way for humans. They’re naturally less hardy than other species, like, say, yours, and even if civilization and modernization has helped strengthen people’s lifespans, technology can only hold out a person’s life for so long.” Maria comes back with the tea set, offers him a cup. “My life doesn’t work out that way. I am tied to a Nation, and as long as my Nation exists I will do so as well. It seems that I will be holding out for as long as there are people living in my area of responsibility, seeing as I was actually existing before I became an official nation.”
Karkat doesn’t reply, seeing as he is currently mixing enough sugar into his tea to make it at least as sweet as Maria’s birthday cake, if not sweeter. Maria keeps this in mind as she carries on, pointedly not looking at Karkat for the time being. “Being a Nation is hard.” It’s hard and no one understands, Karkat’s treacherous mind supplies as he goes on with his sugar rampage. “It’s like, all of a sudden, you’re saddled with just so many people, and you have to coddle them all and please them and go through efforts to raise them. It’s very tiring, sa totoo lang. It’s like being a mother with too many children.”
“A mother, huh.” Karkat sips his saccharine drink, and reflects on how trolls don’t have mothers, and how the closest he may have gone to knowing about a mother-like figure would be in whispered stories of a troll with the same blood as Kanaya.
“It’s tiring, and it’s heartbreaking, being able to know exactly what everyone needs, being able to know exactly how to fix all the problems, and yet only being able to see things get better or worse at the discretion of forces beyond my own control.” She blows on the surface of her tea cup, sending small whiffs of steam.
“Today’s my birthday. If it had been normal people’s birthdays being celebrated, there would be parties and presents and the full ten yards. My people have always been very fond of celebrations.” This is apparently an odd concept for Karkat, seeing as he makes that face again, that poster child for incomprehensibility. “Siya nga pala. What do you guys do for your wriggling days?”
He sets the tea cup down on his saucer with a resounding clink, eyes aimed squarely at the tea pot in between the two of them. “Trolls use it to refer to the day of their larval awakening. We spend that day sitting down on some obscure corner of our planet to stare off into space and grieve over our existence. The day itself is basically one big excuse for useless shitsponges like past me, future me, current me - hell, all iterations of me - to sit back, relax, and remember that the world we lived in would have been a much better place had I not suddenly hatched and graced them all with my useless, pathetic being.”
Maria is suddenly very silent, or at least she is before she looks at Karkat once again.
“Would you believe me if I told you that I used to feel the same way?”
“No shit. I thought you humans celebrated birthdays?”
“I’m a nation, silly.” Her laugh is once again humorless, and once again it gives Karkat the chills. “Pwede ba, can’t you at least pretend to believe me for once?”
He doesn’t say anything in response, so Maria continues. “My birthday represents something that a lot of higher-ups didn’t want to have. I used to be a colony; you’d recognize that term, right? I was like one of the alien planets your world’s Empress conquered, back then. Nothing of grave importance. My colonizer did not like the idea of me going off on my own; it’s downright ironic how I actually thought of him as my custodian - as my father pa nga e.” Tears threaten to fall down right about now, and Karkat is grateful to all the deities he does not believe in that Maria has the good grace to wipe off her tears herself and continue normally. This is mostly because Karkat knows he is not the best at quelling tears, whether they be from a human or from a troll.
“This date was, like every other part of me, dictated by forces beyond my control, but there’s more to it than that.” There is a distinct sadness in her voice that Karkat cannot fathom, and he starts beginning to believe that there may be more to this Maria than meets the eye. “My people gave everything up to secure this date in my history. They didn’t specifically choose a date that looked pretty with numbers that meant anything. All they knew was that they were going to sacrifice everything for my sake, even their lives, just so this one date, whatever it may be, could be celebrated by our people, by my people, some day.” She smiles at Karkat with tear-rimmed eyes, and suddenly his mind finds nothing there is to say.
“Maybe I’m just baffled by how your species traditionally celebrates the birth of its young, but I know enough about the world to say that if you keep lamenting your existence, nothing will come out of it. Sure, it may be true that had I not existed, Jose might have not died, and Emilio, Andres and all the others might not have done so either. The world would have been free of my corrupt politicians and my dirty streets and my ravaged seas. The world could have been a better place without my international slip-ups and my misunderstandings, without my hot temper and my weaknesses.”
“But had I not existed I would have not been able to have this feeling, and I know that they would have regretted not having this feeling as well. I don’t know if it exists over at your end of the universe, but over here it goes by many things. Some call it loyalty. Some call it patriotism. Some call it love.”
“Whether you be a troll or a human or a tikbalang or some sort of mystical being, I don’t think it even matters. All of us are born with a greater purpose, and what do you know, the bad things that happen in our lives, all our deficiencies and mistakes, they play us right into that purpose as well! It all boils down to this: had I not existed, they would not have loved me, and I would not have loved them. You may think this is all very stupid, seeing as your race favors strength in all aspects of life, but. Come on. Surely you understand what I am saying.”
Karkat had long been lost in an epiphany, but he decides that now is the time for his chitinous windhole to start working again, damn it. “Troll relationships don’t work that way, dumbass.”
“Oh, talaga? How does it work then?” Maria’s tone returns to what seems to be her normal tone of voice, the breezy trill of a voice like wind chimes a perfect antithesis to her earlier comments that led Karkat’s bones to freeze.
“We have matesprits we’re hopelessly head-over-horns and want to steal the moons for, moirails we basically can’t function without, kismeses whose guts we have to hate at least once in any given day, and auspistices whose job is to basically stop kismeses from killing each other. A far, far cry from your silly wriggler’s view of this thing you call ‘love’, for sure.”
“I actually beg to differ.” Maria smiles at Karkat almost patronizingly as she stands up to clear the dishes. “The way you speak of them, I’d have to say that all of those are love, Karkat. And all those quadrants are some of the reasons why it’s not worth to lament your existence.” She raises an eyebrow at him, momentarily returning to her usual silliness. “You’re a leader, di ba? Have you not realized that, had you not existed, your group would never had the honor of having you as a leader? I don’t know what you’d think about it, but I think that it would be a shame, really.”
“I guess I could agree with you on that. Whereever would those poor grubsucking sacks of skin that call themselves trolls be without my astounding brilliance and exemplary leadership qualities?”
“See, told you you’d see things my way eventually.” When Maria chuckles this time there is actual warmth to it, and Karkat’s bones find themselves refreshingly un-frozen. “Now, let’s talk about how we’re going to get you back, ha?”
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fin.
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A/N: Happy Independence Day, Philippines. Happy Wriggling Day, Karkat Vantas.
It cut off so abruptly because...well, just because. I am sorry, yet again.
Title comes from one of the English versions/translations of Lupang Hinirang.
I do know that Cancer starts after June 12, seeing as it only encompasses June 22 - July 22 on the zodiac without Ophiuchus, and July 20 - August 10 on the one with Ophiuchus (or at least that’s what Wiki wants to tell me...), but as it turns out a patron troll is not necessarily the troll whose zodiac you share, so...yeah.
I just wanted to write something with these two with a ‘things will get better’ mindset. It didn’t exactly play out exactly how I wanted it to be, seeing as it turned out to be less silly than I intended. Definitely has to be one of the most self-indulgent things I’ve ever done. Still no regrets about this, though.
I tried writing them in the style of Clovers Burnt Into Ash, which is hopefully an upgrade from my solely-descriptive style. Also, I fervently hope you guys liked this, somehow. >_<