Chapter Text
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You tell Karkat a little bit, just what you're able to stand talking about.
He listens. It's not as hard as you thought it might be to bear. He tells you things, too.
Life goes on, and it goes on, and it goes on, like it’s supposed to.
Rose turns sixteen. Kanaya invites you to an elegant soiree in Rose’s honor.
The party starts in the library with you, Karkat, Rose, Kanaya, and the Mayor holding twinkling glasses of iced tea while playing the troll version of Monopoly, which involves a lot more public game-piece torture than you remember from the human version. By the time Terezi arrives with an armful of nasty-ass snacks (dragging Vriska behind her), the party has escalated to a high-stakes Dramatic Literature Reading contest involving a mashup of troll and human fare, Rose’s most intense wizard fanfiction, and that one screenplay of Karkat’s that he refused to let you read two months ago.
You interject with some truly sick improvised rhymes. For once, nobody stops you.
The party ends with Kanaya being declared the evening’s winner. At the end of her poetic victory speech, she lifts Rose, bridal-style, into her arms, and kisses her solidly.
You cheer so obnoxiously loud you think your lungs could burst. Rose throws you the finger, lovingly.
You turn sixteen, too. Karkat brings you a carton of juice wrapped with an oversized, black bow.
“It’s not apple,” he tells you. “For some inexplicable reason, the alchemizer couldn’t handle that flavor. But it’s juice—Rose says it tastes pretty close—”
“Oh my god,” you say. “Oh my god, Karkat. Dude. This is so nice of you.”
Karkat shrugs, looking pleased. “Rose said you loved apple juice.”
“You have no idea, man, you have no—shit. This is like, the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
“It is not,” Karkat says, but his expression softens when he sees your face. You are legitimately on the edge of literally crying over a bottle of juice. Probably has a lot to do with the ongoing sleep deprivation, but still. Fuck.
“You’re the best,” you say, making him snort and turn red. “I’m serious,” and because a tiny, painful part of you still screams THAT’S GAY, you pull him into your arms and add, “full homo, my man.”
Karkat, for his part, only pecks you on the mouth and says, “Of course, you should know god damn well by now that I’ll only accept the full homo.”
He accepts a lot more than that, of course. You are getting better at squashing down the part of you that thinks you don’t deserve it.
You enter the kitchen mid-wrist-phone-conversation to find Terezi standing, with a blank expression, in front of the drink alchemizer.
“What are you doing?” you ask.
“I am attempting to make scalding leaf fluid,” she says.
Karkat, from your wrist phone, yells, “WHAT WAS THAT?”
Terezi sighs. “Everyone’s got a novelty wrist communication device except me.”
“You want a foam ass phone?” you ask. “I can make you an ass phone.”
“No, I don’t want an ass phone.”
“I can make you a Lemonsnout phone.”
Terezi considers. She presses a few buttons on the alchemizer, which—you know from begrudging late-night treks to fetch your sister tea—aren’t the right ones. “It would be putting his remains to good use after his public execution.”
You reach around Terezi to press the correct button on the alchemizer. What you hope is the kind of tea she wanted pops out with a little electronic ding.
“I CAN’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING YOU’RE SAYING,” says Karkat, from your ass phone.
You hang up after a quick reassurance that you’ll catch him up later. You hand Terezi the tea. She sits at the table.
You pull a package of pop-tarts out of the cupboard. Terezi keeps sitting.
“I’m sorry you never got to meet your dragon mom,” you say, eventually, after the burn in your fingertips from handling the pop-tarts too soon out of the toaster has subsided. Then, in the interest of cultural sensitivity, “Sorry, I meant your lusus.”
Terezi looks startled. “Me too,” she says. “What made you say that?”
You shrug. “Doing a lot of thinking lately.”
“Don’t hurt yourself.”
You make a face at her, remember she can’t really see it, and then decide you don’t care. “It just seems like it must have sucked.”
Terezi sighs, long but not mournfully, and hoists herself up from her seat with her free hand braced on one thigh. Her previously-injured leg is still a little stiff. “Well, I guess it did,” she says. “It’s not something I talk about much.”
Terezi very rarely genuinely talks about herself. You always figured it was because she was far more interested in yanking the truth out of everyone else. “Not even to Vriska?”
Terezi shrugs. She still hasn’t taken a single sip of her scalding leaf fluid. It’s got to be lukewarm at best, now.
“Maybe you should,” you say.
Terezi grabs her cane and starts for the door. “Maybe,” she says. “See you for practice later, Dave.”
Your name doesn’t sound as jarring in her mouth as it used to. “Yeah,” you say, watching her go. “See you later.”
You and Karkat talk about what’s going to happen between the two of you once you get off the meteor. Then you argue about it.
Karkat says, with a look like he wants to tear out his hair, “You’ve got other friends you’re going to see who you haven’t seen in over a sweep, and you’ve made it more than clear that you’re nervous about it.”
“I’ve made it more than clear?” you say, your voice squeaking a bit as it rises in pitch, which probably doesn’t help your case much. Forgetting Sarah Marshall plays vaguely on the husktop, which neither of you have looked at for at least twenty minutes, and Karkat has contorted himself over one of the computer chairs in frustration. You almost feel like doing the same. “So fucking what, dude? Yeah, okay, I’m nervous! I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve changed just a bit in almost three goddamn years and John and Jade barely even got to see me in person before this—”
“That’s just it, you changed!” Karkat shouts. “Why are you allowed to be nervous about it and I’m not, exactly?”
“I have literally never once said you’re not allowed to be nervous, bro, I just said you can’t project your insecurities surrounding this onto me.”
You slump down on the couch and go back to scrolling through your phone, aggressively. Karkat stands over you with his hands on his hips like someone’s overbearing nanny. “I’m sorry, but I think there is some precedence here for my completely legitimate worries.”
“Karkat,” you groan, “we have, like, two months left on this meteor, bro, can we just spend it doing our usual stupid stuff and not having dramatic fucking arguments every two seconds?”
“Oh, so my concerns aren’t valid, is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m just—fine okay, fine, what precedence? What are you talking about?”
Karkat, radiating smugness, says, “For starters, you clearly had a flushed crush on John before the game, the way you’ve talked about him.”
That throws you. “What?”
Karkat only raises his eyebrows and purses his lips in a way that makes you want to throttle him. You think about this genuinely for a moment, trying to see it from his perspective, trying to see it from your own relatively new accepting-your-sexuality perspective. “Okay, sure, maybe I—I can see how you’d think that,” and you don’t really want to tell him that you were so pathetically desperate for affection at the time that you probably would have developed a crush on every single one of your friends at some point, even though you think he’d understand. “But so did you, Karkat, and you barely knew him and it’s been almost three fucking years—“
“I had a blackrom crush on him—"
“Oh for the love of—it’s the same fucking thing, dude.”
“It is not that same thing!” Karkat howls. “You know it’s not the same thing, and I’ve been fully over it for at least a sweep.”
“Oh, you’re over it?” you say, throwing your hands up in the air. “You’re over it? Huh? I can’t get the same benefit of the doubt? He was my best friend, Jade is one of my best friends and I had a big fucking nasty crush on her too, why can’t I still be excited to see them again?”
“You were a different person before,” Karkat mutters, arms crossed so tightly he looks like he might pop. It’s true, he’s right, you were, but not as much as he thinks and it’s also not fair.
This is getting you nowhere. You toss your phone onto the empty couch cushion. “You keep saying that and I still don’t understand what you actually mean. So what, you think I’ll revert back to—to Douchecanoe McNoFeelings when I see my friends? You think I want to go back to that? To, what, low-key hating myself in a dank void of complete lack of self-awareness, furiously marking my irony points on my own dick while holding a giant ‘no homo’ sign? Is that it?”
Your voice is shaking a bit. You clench your jaw so hard it starts to hurt. You will not totally lose your cool over something this stupid, you will not.
Karkat’s eyes are very wide. “No,” he says, “of course not. Of course not. I changed too. I just...”
“What?” you snap. Karkat throws you a full-on glare, which honestly hasn’t happened in quite a while now.
“Well!” he yells, standing and throwing his arms up in the air. The chair he’d been leaning on tips over and lands in a pile of duplicated throw pillows beside it. “I was nothing to you before all of this, wasn’t I?”
“Are you kidding me right now? Everybody is nothing to somebody else until they’re not. You could say the same fucking thing about what I was to you.”
“It’s not like you had many choices, is all I’m saying,” Karkat says. He looks genuinely miserable.
God, you want to either smack or kiss that look off his face so hard it hurts.
“Is that really what you think this is for me?” you say, trying very hard to keep your voice gentle and your blood from boiling. Sadness makes you angry these days, empathy makes you angry, everything makes you angry. It’s tiresome. “Some kind of—of temporary fucking around until our trip ends and I get my ‘real’ friends back? After all the sweaty indecisive bullshit we both went through to even get to this point?”
“No,” Karkat says, roughly.
“Are you thinking of dumping me the second we leave, then?”
“No,” Karkat says, forcefully.
“Then what, Karkat?” you say, aware you’re probably being too confrontational in the face of his genuine sadness but unable to stop. “Why are we arguing about this? What do you actually think is gonna happen? I really want to know. I really want to know your honest opinion, so I can do something about it.”
“Just forget it!” Karkat shouts, slumping against the arm of the couch, and when you try to grab his hand he swings an arm and hits you in the side with a throw pillow. You make a sorry “oof” sound, and some of the tension dissipates. “Just forget I said anything, you—you—ugh. Dave.”
You have those words bubbling up again, the ones you never seem to know how to say without sounding overwhelming. The ones that go along with the white-hot feeling that sometimes gets lodged in your throat whenever you look at him the way you are now.
You relax back against the couch. Then you pick up another pillow by the corner, and swing it at his knees.
Karkat grunts at the impact. “Okay, I am making an executive decision right now, and that is that we both need to calm down.”
You slide down to the floor, your back up against the couch, and throw one hand up to rub at the bridge of your nose. “Agreed. And I still really need to fucking sleep.”
“You do,” Karkat agrees, joining you on the floor. “Dave, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be sorry,” you say, suddenly guilty.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, yes I do.”
“Shit, I’m sorry, too. I should be building you up and being all like, reassuring and stuff, not getting offended like some soccer mom who’s mad that her friends won’t join her pyramid scheme.”
Karkat doesn’t say anything. When you turn to him again you see that he’s got the throw pillow wrapped in his arms, and his eyes look suspiciously watery. You sit up straighter. “Oh no. Are you okay? Karkat, man, I honestly can’t imagine not wanting you around once we’re done with this. What exactly am I doing wrong here that makes you think I’d come anywhere close to wanting you to fuck off once we’re off this rock?”
Karkat shakes his head. “I know you care about me,” he says in his soft voice. You want to ask him why that knowledge makes him want to cry, but you think you get it. “I know that. I don’t know why I do this.”
You scooch closer; bump his shoulder with your own. “Wanna have a feelings jam instead of picking a fight? Come on, you love those. I promise I won’t laugh.”
Karkat makes a noncommittal sound, but bumps your shoulder back. “God, you’re gonna think I’m a lunatic,” he says. “I’m... extremely invested in you, is the thing. It’s kind of scary. But this is what I do! I get too invested and wedge myself in where I’m not wanted like a.... like a mold infestation.”
You decide to ignore the self-flagellation. You look at your shoes. “Who ever said I didn’t want you to get invested?”
There’s a beat. Karkat shifts to face you, sitting back on his knees. You look up at him from over the top of your shades, feeling like a schoolgirl at her first dance.
“That’s the other thing. When you say things like that,” Karkat says, slowly, picking nervously at the frayed ends of his throw pillow, “I’m not sure you actually understand how it sounds to me.”
His eyes are still wet. You look back at your shoes. You start drumming a soft rhythm against the floor with your fingertips. “Pretty sure I know what I’m saying, dude.”
Karkat... looks at you, like he has a hundred times before. Your heart is beating a restless rhythm in your veins, and you don’t know what to say that will truly articulate what you mean without being Too Much. Even after all this time, this kind of sincerity short-circuits your brain in too-high doses—it’s like you reach a threshold after which you’re physically unable to communicate it without sounding like some nasty edgelord who laughs in the face of real feelings, except the laughing is actually a stoic quirk of the lips so imperceptibly small that it can only be seen under a microscope.
But Karkat knows you, and you think he gets it. He’s smiling again, at any rate. “It helps when you remind me,” he says.
You smile back. “I want to show you the good parts of earth, when we get there, if it’s still there. Just because I’m nervous about how to tell them doesn’t mean I don’t want John and Jade to see me with you, you know? I just—I want you to be with me, dude. Who fucking cares if it’s weird to anyone else or not?”
You’d still like to be able to tell him what you really mean, someday, but maybe for now this is enough.
Rose is still there, sometimes, in the room where you train, when you decide to go in the middle of the night. Tonight, she drops her knitting needles at your yelled greeting, then bends in a hurry to snatch them back up, looking suspiciously flushed.
As you get closer and Rose brushes her hair out of her face with a heavy hand, you realize what it is about her flush that looks suspicious. “Wait a second, did you—were you drinking?”
You sound really fucking disappointed even to your own ears, and make a mental note to reel it in a bit, dad. Rose looks like she might actually cry.
"I had a single glass,” she snaps, “a small one, and I’m very ashamed of myself, allright?”
“Okay,” you say.
Rose struggles, for a moment. “And I came here to find you, because I—I went through all of that—symbolic nonsense—and then in the end I couldn’t even follow through. I thought I’d come here and, I don’t know, exercise out all of my guilt.”
“And to tell me you slipped up,” you say.
“Clearly.”
You peer at her—her disheveled hair and flushed, slightly sweaty face. She doesn’t look or sound drunk, but she does seem genuinely upset. “Where’d you put the rest of it?”
“What do you mean?”
“The rest of the bottle. I’ll get rid of it for you after this.” You pause. “Uh, if you want.” Shit, maybe that’s enabling? “Or if you don’t want.” Now you just sound kind of controlling.
Rose adjusts her god-tier robes. She looks away. “Yes,” she says. “I think that would be best. It’s—behind the broken computer in the rec room. Um. There’s two, actually.”
“Okay,” you say, and then you don’t say anything else, because why twist the knife? She looks humiliated and it’s not like you aren’t intimately familiar with being disappointed in yourself.
As you start warming up with some overhead raises, Rose just looks at you. “You don’t want to know why I did it?”
You move on to your wrist exercises. “Do you want to tell me?”
“No,” Rose murmurs.
You start practicing through the tired-fog in your head, because it’s what you came here for, and after a while Rose sits down some distance away and starts what looks like a meditation. The room fills with the sounds of breathing, and footsteps, and you can tune everything else out for a while. When you’re done and you head down to the rec room to do what you’d offered, your brain feels clear and focused, and your limbs don’t shake at all.
“I think I’m scared,” Rose tells you very quietly sometime later, sitting prim and proper in a chair in the library. You wonder how long it took her to work up the courage to say it. “I think that’s why I—um.”
“It’s okay that you are,” you tell her, seeing how many books you can balance on your head. “So am I.” You think you’ve been scared for most of your life, actually, but somehow you’re still here. You’ve got to keep believing that you’ll still be here, in a few months.
Rose hums as she adds another book to the stack. You know this isn’t news to her. “But you’re not running back into the warm embrace of alcohol like a security blanket.”
“Yeah, but I did run back into the warm embrace of a lot of other self-destructive shit. You watched me do it.”
Rose adds another book. The stack on top of your head sways, a bit, but doesn’t fall. She says, “So what do we do about our mutually self-destructive Strider-Lalonde tendencies?”
You take a few careful steps. Your balance is still good. “I guess we’re gonna have to help prop each other up, be all, like... accountable. Kinda like we have been doing, except we can’t keep beating around the bush about it like self-important assholes, you know.” The stack wobbles. You crouch to redistribute your weight. “But you have to actually talk to people for that to work, Rose. Doesn’t have to be me, I guess, but you know I’m here.”
You take another step. Two of the books topple over and you swear under your breath, but Rose stands and floats and steadies it with a hand flat on top, until you can regain your balance.
“I’ll try,” she says, which is all you’ve ever really wanted from her. Her smile is small and weary, but it’s there.
When the books do finally tumble, a few minutes later, you clean them up together.
You wake yourself up in a full-on panic.
Your heart beats too fast and your hands start to go numb and you can’t get enough air, and as sleep fades away from your brain you try to remind yourself that you know what this is, you’re fine, you’re not going to die, you just have to get yourself to breathe. You should focus on something. There’s a bright orange mug cozy that Rose made you lying on the floor, never used; you focus on that, on the neat rows of stitching, and count your breaths. Eventually, they even out.
Your eyes burn so bad. You think, staring down at the stupid mug cozy, that what you could probably use right now is a good cry, but you only just let yourself do that fairly recently, and the thought doing it again makes you kind of nauseous.
You want to message Karkat. You resist the urge.
Then you think, a moment later, why the fuck are you resisting the urge?
So you message Karkat. He’s already awake, trouble sleeping himself; he tells you he’ll be right over. Ten minutes later he knocks on your door, just like he said he would.
“I think I’m actually going insane,” you tell him when you open the door, and it isn’t as funny coming out of your mouth as you thought it would be. Your voice cracks. “I’m so fucking tired, man.”
“Me too,” Karkat says, looking resigned. He comes inside, a bundle of blankets in one arm, and yawns as he closes the door. “You aren’t going insane, Dave. I’d definitely tell you. What is it?”
“I,” you start, and you try to say something, you really do, but nothing comes up. Your guts flip over in your stomach. “I don’t—it’s not really anything, nothing’s going on, it’s all the same shit I told you about that I thought I was over already. I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Karkat gives you a long look. He’s still standing by the doorway, holding those blankets, and you’re struck, suddenly, by the line of his collarbone. He’s got his normal pants on but he’s only wearing a t-shirt on top, because he’d been trying to rest, except you’d asked him to come over and he had, without hesitation, like it was important to him. Because you are important to him.
“Do you want to talk?” Karkat says, tilting his head slightly to catch your eye. His words move to you slowly through the sudden thickness in the air. His eyes are very dark. “Or, um, do you...?”
Your hand raises without your permission to touch Karkat’s arm. “Can we...?” you say, and you’ve kissed this dude hundreds of times by now, why the hell is your heart pounding so loud? He must be able to hear it, it’s probably freaking him out—
But Karkat leans forward just a moment before you do, and a few seconds later he drops all the blankets and drags the rest of you in by your shirt with a confidence you aren’t used to, and a part of you actually fucking melts. You step further into the room together, uncoordinated. Karkat’s hand at the hem of your shirt starts pulling it up and up and then you have to stop to help him pull it over your head entirely, and when he returns to kissing you with both of his hands on the sides of your face, your brain short-circuits.
Good, you think a little wildly when it comes back online. Good, good, good, good, good, and then, thank god I showered last night.
Karkat tells you later, when both of you are wheeze-laughing like lunatics under your tented sheets, nestled in the pile of blankets Karkat brought, that you’re cute. Cute.
He smiles when he says it and then he has to hide his face in his hands at your resulting startled laughter. The thought of it is a bright, joyous marker on the landscape of your memories, one you revisit again and again and again.
Rose doesn't yell in the night, not anymore, but she does come knock on your door.
“Bad dream?” she asks, a well-educated guess, when you stumble out of bed and slap your hand against the button to open the door. She still has her sheet half wrapped around her pajama-clad body.
“Yeah,” you say, groggily. “I’ve had worse, though.”
“I can't sleep,” she says. Then amends, “I don't want to sleep.”
“Let's fuckin' party, then,” you tell her.
'Partying', of course, means grabbing a far too large bowl of alchemized gummy grubs and chilling out on the edge of your favorite observation deck. Terezi doesn't come up here anymore, but you do. You sit with your legs swinging over the edge and watch the lights of distant dream bubbles passing by in the darkness. In about a month, your trip is going to end.
“It’s weird that gummy grubs are actually the same fucking thing as gummy bears,” you muse. “Three years of cultural-exchange dinner nights and this is the only food that’s the same as on Earth, or like, probably not the only food, but the one I was least surprised by based on its name, and now that’s just weird to me. Aliens, man.”
“I hope Jade and John are okay,” Rose says, very quietly. Her upturned face looks tired and a little worn from these three years that she’s been trying so hard.
“Yeah,” you say, “me too.”
“I expected that I’d be able to... well. That I’d be able to see them by now,” Rose goes on. “To check in, so to speak. It’s not how my powers work, apparently.”
You swallow a gummy. "Do you think John's gonna be upset about me and Karkat?"
Rose gives you a sideways look. "Why do you think he'd be upset?"
You shrug. "You know, since John and I were best bros and now Karkat and I are best bros."
Rose gives you a sideways look. "I think your relationship with Karkat is a fair bit different than your relationship with John ever was."
"But do you think he'll be upset is what I'm asking, Dr. Lalonde."
Rose shrugs, shakes her head vaguely. "Do you think Jade will be upset about my relationship with Kanaya?"
You make a loud buzzer noise, tossing a gummy in Rose's face. She tries, and fails, to catch it in her mouth. "Out of bounds, answering a question with another question. Bad sportsmanship."
“I’m illustrating a point.”
“That’s a red card in rhetorical sportsball.”
“It’s an out-of-bounds at most.”
“I’m not sure I want to leave,” you say, staring straight ahead. There’s another large dreambubble on the horizon directly in your path, probably the last one you’ll experience before your trip is up. “Is that stupid?”
Rose’s eyes follow your gaze. She says, “No, it’s not.”
You give Karkat his not-wriggling-day-gift on your anniversary, while you’re holed up in your bedroom, after the movie ends but before Karkat starts his usual post-movie cool-down rant.
“Anniversary?” Karkat says. “What’s an anniv—” and then he sits up fast, pulling the blanket he’d been wrapped in with him, and he looks crushed. “Oh my god. Oh my god. I forgot.”
You might make a play at acting offended, but his expression is actually so heart-wrenchingly distraught that you can’t. You can only laugh. “It’s allright, dude.”
“No it’s not, Dave, it’s our human anniversary and it’s important to you and I fucking forgot! I’m so sorry, I keep forgetting the—the time, with humans, it’s years—”
“Dude, I know, it’s okay.” You can’t stop laughing. “I could have reminded you like eighty times and I didn’t. I figured you can do the big-deal-important-first-sweepiversary thing when I inevitably forget, okay?”
Karkat makes a bit more of a fuss over the fact that you knew and you didn’t fucking remind him (which you put a pin in for profuse apologies later, because whoops, you didn’t realize how genuinely bothered he would be), until you grab the gift from under your bed and shove it in his face.
“A can?” Karkat says, inspecting it. “Oh, a house? A can house.”
You can’t quite keep the childish excitement from your voice. ”Yeah man, it’s your house! I mean, I figured maybe, when we get out of here, when it’s all done, maybe then it could be your house. Not this actual can, obviously, I mean—you knew that, but you could design it like this. If you want.”
“Whoa, there’s stuff inside,” says Karkat.
“Yeah, I’m not the best at sculpting.” the Mayor has redone enough of your can town efforts for you to know that. “So uh, this might just kind of look like a blob to you, but look! It’s you.”
You point into one of the tiny can windows. Karkat peers inside. He laughs. “Are those my horns?”
“I tried.”
“And there’s another—is that you? Why do your fucking asshole sunglasses look better than my horns?”
“I captured your eyebrows pretty well though.” You’re grinning, you can’t help it.
“You—” Karkat stops, still looking through the little window, and then he swallows, and oh boy, here it comes. Your heart thunders. “You put yourself in there, too.”
You force yourself to keep your face pleasant, even though you feel kind of like you’re going to throw up, just like when you made him the song, last year. “Yeah, man.”
Karkat’s eyes shift to your face. He swallows again. “Do you live there, too?”
You shrug. “Only if you want me to.”
Karkat, to your great chagrin and delight, looks like he’s about to cry. Your resolve to play this cool and collected crumbles.
“I know we’re actually still really young,” you babble, “and I know it’s only been a year, but I figured, I mean, we’ve been best friends or for like almost three years now, and yeah we’re young but it’s not like we’re all going to fuck off and live alone after this, I mean we pretty much already, like, live together, and we’re creating a whole new universe—”
“Yeah,” Karkat interrupts, wiping at his face with one arm. “Let’s do it.”
The wind knocks itself out of you. “You can change your mind.”
“I know.” Karkat’s smiling at you. His eyes are still watery.
You manage, with the two teaspoons of oxygen still left in your lungs, “I don’t think I want you to change your mind.”
“I probably won’t.”
“But it’s an option. I won’t be mad. You’re not stuck.”
“Dave,” Karkat says, “I know. You lunatic.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Stop ruining this,” Karkat says with a kind of unhinged laughter in his voice. He pulls you in forcefully, but not before setting the can gently to the side, where it won’t be knocked over.
Can Town is sprawling and glorious and, after many renovations and crafting reinforcements, is nearly ready for public viewing. Tomorrow, there will be an art-gallery style showing for the meteor residents. Today, you’re completing the finishing touches.
“Well, damn,” you say, standing up at last and brushing errant chalk from your god pajamas. “Look at that. It’s all done, isn’t it?”
The Mayor pats you on the arm and looks proudly out over his beautiful creation. You think, in his odd carapace-man way, he might be tearing up.
“Congratulations, dude,” you murmur.
It’s odd, seeing it finally done without Karkat here, but the Mayor had only asked for you. Karkat, however, is in charge of organizing the completion celebrations for later tomorrow, a task he is simultaneously taking far too seriously and just seriously enough.
There is tons of leftover junk to throw away to really tidy the place up, of course, so you and the Mayor walk, arms full of bits and bobs, to the edge of the meteor.
You set down your piles and, one by one, you throw the Can Town leftovers into the abyss. Space junk, you think. Maybe one day they’ll be the constellations of your new universe. Maybe you’ll look up at a sky of entirely new stars, and point, with Karkat or Rose or Terezi or John or Jade, and say, that one’s a rusty can of asparagus.
“I think I’m ready,” you tell the Mayor, turning your back on the vast emptiness of your travels. It’s a lie, but it doesn’t really matter whether you’re ready or not, so you might as well start acting confident now. “I’ve got my welsh sword and everything.”
From your side, the Mayor hands you the last piece of chalk. You turn again and toss it in a wide arc, and together you watch it fall, a bright mark of creation against the darkness.
In every way that counts, this is the happiest you’ve ever been.
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