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Your name is Karkat Vantas, it is pitch dark outside and you are completely alone in your hive tonight when you hear knocking. You can't help but tense. Though you know this isn't Alternia, though you know this is not the drones 6 sweeps late to cull your unworthy mutant self like they should have all those perigrees ago. Despite knowing, your hair still raises and your bloodpusher pumps all the same it did when you were a grub.
You smell troll blood.
Whipping out your husktop you scramble to check if you somehow missed any messages about some catastrophic shit that just went down. Nothing, not even a response from Terezi after you so kindly yelled at her that she needed to take a fucking break from her futile wild honkbeast chase if she didn't want to get herself killed trying to find a spider in an infinite number of dream bubbles. Nobody appreciates the shit you do for them these days. Not that there ever were days in which they did appreciate your attempts to scramble their shit together but your efforts go more unappreciated now more than ever.
A new smell creeps into your sniff canals, not strong but just a whiff enough for you to notice the smoke.
You rush to the nearest window, glued to the wall peeking through the gap between your curtains like that would make the difference between whether you live through the night or not. Smoke trails into the starry sky far along the horizon, at least you see no fire, yet.
The knocking is getting even louder. You are starting to regret having built your hive right dab in the middle of nowhere so you could have some fucking space to yourself for the first time in your miserable cullbait life. Husktop heavy in your hand you think about messaging one of your god tier friends, Jade could be here with a click of her heels and the flick of her wrists or whatever it took to use her busted radioactive dog powers. But if you woke her up because you were pirouetting off the handle for no reason at all you would never hear the end of it.
And gog that was an annoying knock! The pattern was all erratic and incredibly fucking loud, like it was purposefully designed in a lab with the intention of how most to piss you off. Fear gave way for something you were much more comfortable in, anger. Someone was fucking with you and you were not going to give them the satisfaction of seeing you scared.
You stormed to your front door in a huff, loud heavy stomps through your hive so they would know to prepare for your arrival to have verbal hellfire unleashed upon them. The knocking stopped and you slammed the door open with so much vigor the hinges threatened to snap. You wound up your breath ready to dish a lethal takedown of whoever thought they could fuck with you tonight.
There at your doorstep, bleeding onto your "FUCK OFF" mat from the spattering of bullet holes that littered his entire torso, towering over you was someone you thought you'd never see again in your life.
"Sup, motherfucker" sputtered out Gamzee through a mouthful of indigoblood.
You slam the door in his face so hard the pictures on your wall shake.
"No. I am not dealing with this shit. There are not enough boondollars in this piss filled bloated frog belly of a universe we live in that could pay me to deal with this steaming pile of flaming moobeast shit you just dropped on my doorstep. Fuck off Gamzee fuck right back off to your psycho skeleton death cult. I don't want to see your ugly mutilated mug in my face ever again."
This was your ex-moirail, the one who had broken up with you because he didn't need you anymore with his shiny new clinically insane person religion to latch onto instead (not that you were still bitter). Showing up at your doorstep when the rest of the entire planet was asleep oozing blood from more holes than an earth noodle strainer. Like the most cliche over the top palebait it would circle right back over into making you pitch for him instead.
No. You were better than this. You were not taking your ex back in any quadrant no matter how empty they were. You never had and never would take another moirail in your life ever again, you knew better now.
A muffled honk came through the door, and though you didn't hear him leave the knocking did not start again. Instead, you heard what sounded like him slumping against your front door and sliding down it, streaking his blood down the length of the entire thing. Fuck him. Fuck this asshole. You knew exactly what he was doing.
He was sitting in front of your door blocking your exit with his stupid huge indigoblood body. When the fuck did he get so big seriously? You used to be able to reach the top of his horns on the tip of your toes (and make him melt into half-solid half-liquid clown putty with the way you'd- no stop, don't think about that right now) but now the top of your horns just barely met his collar. Just one more thing he did to piss you right off.
Either you'd have to climb out your own window and hope you can scare him off, cause useless wankstain that you are, can't be sure you could fight off even a half dead highblood. Or play his idiotic game by waiting him out and let him get bored or die on your doorstep. You'd pull up your husktop to search "how long does it take for an indigoblood riddled with as many holes as regional curdled milk food to bleed out" but you don't want to end up on whatever watchlist that would put you on.
You ask yourself the worst question you could have asked yourself in this situation. How long could Gamzee possibly wait before he got bored and went to die on the doorstep of someone who would actually give him the time of day?
Because you knew just how long he could wait. How long he had waited back in Alternia for his jackass lusus to come visit, how long he went without proper food, killing himself so he didn't spend a second away more than he had to for his endless wait, like that was the only purpose in life he ever had.
Fuck. You were the stupidest motherfucker in all the timelines. If this got you killed all the other dead Karkat's in the afterlife would gather to come crown you the biggest moron of all your infinite amount of selves.
But you could not live with yourself if you let Gamzee die waiting for someone to care about him. And hopeless palesick fool for everyone you'll ever meet that you were, you may well be the only one in Gamzee's entire pitiful existence that ever actually cared about him once upon a time.
"Move over dickhead" you kicked the door. Heard a surprise honk, then after a moment some shuffling. You squeezed through as much of a gap as you could make between his body laid across the ground "Get up. Come on get up on your feet right fucking now"
"Karbro I- No... Van-" Gamzee choked out through his own blood.
"Nope. Shut the fuck up. Whatever you have to say I don't want to hear it. Whatever you think this is, it is not and never will be. I am going to take you inside to patch you up and the millisecond you can walk without leaving a trail of indigo for whatever unfortunate sad sack you stumble upon to follow like an alien kid with a barkbeast in her basket and three nooksniffing friends she makes along the way right back to my hive expecting me to be at the ready in wizard hat and robes to impart some life lessons so deep into them they’ll still feel the throbbing into next pupation. No, after you stop leaking all over the place I want you gone. Now stand the fuck up."
To his credit he shuts his mouth and tries to lift himself back onto his feet, he can't quite manage it alone though. You click your tongue against your fangs and push down any pity you have for this clown who has and will try to ruin your entire peaceful life, and help this pathetic troll to his feet so you can bring him into your hive.
He smells like a retch-inducing mix of smoke, faygo, sweat and gunpowder that covers the stench of salty indigo blood just enough to make it bearable to hold him up without making yourself dizzy. You barely recognize his scent without the lingering of the ocean that always clung to him or the thick oily grease paint smell that used to waft from his face when fresh.
Laying him along your too small for highbloods lounge slab, he's K.O’ed as soon as he hits the cushions. You grumble but figure this will only make things easier for you and wipe away his blood so you can tend to his wounds with your first aid supplies.
You don't lick at the bullet wounds, you don't even know why you thought about licking them better but you don't because you have some degree of standards thank you very much. They all go clean right through him, you don't know how he's not dead, stupid highblood genes don't know when to give up even when it's good for them. Just a little salve over them and you swear you see them tighten shut right before your very eyes.
Gamzee wakes with a hiss, rousing from his sleep from the pain of medicine being slathered onto his open wounds "Mmmm.... brother..."
"Shoosh" You don't mean to say it, instantly regret saying it but move along hoping he's too out of it to realize what a hopeless idiot you just made out of yourself "No talking shit for pans."
"Mm No. Brother, I have something I need to be telling you... The messiahs-"
"You." You're pretty sure you dig your claws into the soft meat of his stomach with the way he winces. You decide you did mean to do that after all.
"Did not come all the way from the other end of the galaxy just to preach your stupid fucking cult shit to me all over again like nothing ever happened between us" You stand up, knocking the first aid kit to the ground along with you. The sound of it hitting the ground makes you think damn right, good, that better have broken everything in that box and made them all useless.
"You. Do not get to waltz right back into my life and tell me it's just another motherfucking miracle the same way you fucked off right out of it. Your new mirthful messiahs could descend from the skies to suck my bulge and feed my own genetic material back to me like a chirpbeast shoves earth worms down the eagerly awaiting proteinchutes of its bald featherless disgusting ugly offspring and I'd still call you a pandead moron for believing in this shit. You're done, you had your chance I'm not being dragged into whatever the fuck you've converted into. Did the last dipshit you try this on mow you down with a gun? Is that why you showed up with more holes on your body than a horrorterror could pail? Whatever. I don't care anymore. I don't give a fuck about any of this. You can have my hive, burn it down for all I care, do whatever you want with it. I would rather start over from nothing on the deadest most uninhabited planet at the other edge of the galaxy then listen to what you were about to say to me. Bye. See you never. Stay the fuck away from me."
You don't mean it but you walk away like you do. He doesn't stop you, doesn't grab your arm to keep you in place and call your bluff. You know he wouldn't have even if he wasn't woozy from blood loss.
"Please... just wanna make it up to you" his voice is so quiet, only meant for himself to hear. But you hear it too.
Fuck everything you brought into this entire world.
Forget the crown, they'll be casting your body out of solid gold and worshiping you as the god of complete and utter morons. Whose acts of stupidity were so unbelievable to the unwashed masses that they mythologized him into godhood, idiocy to the degree any other dead Karkat could only delude himself into thinking he could achieve.
You turn back towards him and laugh. Barking out the most obviously fake of laughs you have ever barked in your life. Barked so hard it would make Jade blush. "Oh. This will be good. I changed my mind. I'll need something to laugh about on my journey swimming through the aforementioned bloated piss belly that is our cosmos."
He bites his lip with those razor sharp fangs of his and you wonder if maybe you've been too harsh kicking him while he's down like this. When he speaks his voice is rough and strained, “I was wrong. best friend. Got myself caught up in the wicked blasphemies of double death, though there was no salvation to be found with those most false of motherfuckers.”
“Shocker! Let me pry my jaw off the fucking floor before I swallow any more waste drones from how surprised I am to hear that! Who could have foreseen this! Definitely not the troll who told you it was total moobeast shit from day fucking one!” You pantomime exaggeratedly to him because you just can’t help yourself.
He hung his head, his exhale whistled through his teeth “It’s a wicked shame on me motherfucker. Let the heretics get between me and the most righteous of truths. Listened when was told it was a sin for a believer to have a moirail, that it was a danger to the faith to have one left converted and whole. Followed those blasphemous words like a fool, blind to the sins against our most miraculous of moiraillegiances.”
Lifting his head his unfocused eyes met yours and shot deadly sincerity out of them like a mustardblood overloading on psionics shot out deadly lasers that could eviscerate you instantly. It was not fucking fair that a troll of the wear-stupid-outfits-and-fuck-your-whole-entire-shit-up caste could plaster a look on his face like that.
“I’m sorry Karkat, laid all that wrong on you when I never should have. Been getting my regret on every motherfucking day since my ganderbulbs opened to the most righteous of truths that were staring me in the face all along. Can almost see the mirth in what a motherfucking joke I’ve been all these sweeps” Gamzee apologized. He told you everything you’d wanted to hear out of him sweeps too late from when you’d most needed to hear them.
You tensed, arms curled in on yourself defensively. “Fuck. Is that what you stalked my hive down from across the universe like a knifekind wielding psycho to say? Do you seriously fucking think that’s good enough? That everything would be fine between us and that we can go back to being best friends after you got your motherfucking apologizing on?”
“Never my most miraculous of motherfuckers. See I ain’t even got to the best part yet, the righteous truth revealed to me which shone its holiest of spotlights on my every wrong! Motherfuck I was such a pan rotten wiggler to not have seen it all along.” Gamzee groaned as he sat up clutching his stomach. Exuding a ramping up of manic energy that told you that you were not going to like whatever ‘truth’ he was about to share with you.
“It’s you, motherfucker!” he beamed.
“Me? What- Stop. Stop doing that, lay your clown ass back down. What the everhating fuck are you talking about Gamzee?”
He plowed on with his mad raving gleefully kneeling before you. “Was mistaken to be always looking for the messiahs in the mirthful, that blasphemy made me blind. Should have been making my messiah get their motherfucking mirth on instead. Won’t make that mistake ever again, you have my wickedest of words. My miraculous messiah, it is this fool of a motherfuckers birthright to bring you mirth.”
“What.” You pause, balking at what had just been said to you like this is the weirdest daymare you’ve ever had from too many days of sleeping dry and not a real thing that was actually said to you. “What the actual fuck? Gamzee, what the fuck? How the fuck-”
“You’re the second coming of the one and only messiah who got the suffering of all trolls on his own back. Wore it right on your chest and I never even realized! The Sufferer brought you into this world as his parousia to save all trollkind and you motherfucking did! You are the most special and miraculous of trolls there ever was, even more than the first coming! Vantas you brought me into this world with your very own prongs, molded my ectoplasm to serve your most miraculous of pilgrimages and I went and lost my way. Fucking up the one fucking thing I was made for! Can you believe that motherfucker!?! ” he grabs at your shirt where your sign is yelling, he laughs manically like this is the funniest of all the shitty jokes he’s ever told you.
“Fuc- Let fucking go of me you deranged psycho freakshit!” You scramble to get him off of you but he lets go easily, clasps his hands together and looks you dead in the ganderbulbs, bright and dazzling. “Holy fucking transport container sized mountains of shit. Well fucking done your crazy moobeast shit has finally thrown me completely off, no amount of clown fuckery could have ever prepared me for this. I have no words, you get the last laugh because no one else in the cold miserable corners of the universe could ever get a laugh out of this!”
He has the audacity to actually look hurt at your words. “Not getting my joke on messiah, want to be making you mirthful but be meaning all this devotion coming right from my motherfucking bloodpusher. I will prove myself to be true to you motherfucker, took far too long but whatever you ask of me to get my proving on I will messiah.”
“I genuinely cannot fucking believe this, this has to be by far the stupidest thing thats ever happened to me. You might as well have crash landed through my fucking roof with a bucket half filled with genetic material harvested from whatever caste of troll you’re keeping in your thermal hull nowadays, announcing you’ve come to milk me dry for drone season and that would still be less stupid than everything you’ve said today.” You force yourself to breathe. “Just. Fuck! Just give me a fucking second to understand what the fuck is going on here!”
Gamzee nods at you silently, intense gaze not leaving you for a second. You hide in your hands and let out a dramatic sigh. “How the fuck did you even remember the ectobiology thing in the first place? That was sweeps ago and you had no fucking clue what was going on the entire session! How did you even pull that out of your wastechute as a reason for. Whatever the fuck this is?”
“Ah, wicked embarrassing to admit but I ain’t gotten my reading onto the holy texts yet. Read through all your messages and memos instead, found the gospel you’ve been preaching in them” he scratched at the back of his head and indigo blush creeped through his long since faded paint like he was a wiggler admitting to his flushcrush instead of a grown ass troll admitting to having recently dug up records of the most embarrassing moments of your life and combed over them in a religiously devoted manner.
You want to scream. “Mortifying. Drones cull me now. My messages from when I was a shitmaggot wiggler are now being taken as the word of god. I’d ask what I’ve ever done to deserve this but if I had to list every fuck up past Karkat’s done we would be here until the death of the universe. I don’t fucking understand, what do you even want from me? Spell it out for me like I’m a pan rotted grub instead of your maniac cult riddles for once in your fucking life or I’m going to recuperacoon and pretending like this never happened.”
“Been telling you, not wanting nothing but your guidance. This motherfucker is the one who needs to be giving you mirth, I ain’t worthy to be asking of you messiah. Take whatever you’ll give to me” Gamzee shakes and wavers on his knees but does not look away from your face for even a second.
“Great! That makes everything clear and isn’t just as mind numbingly baffling as every other thing you’ve said tonight! Goddammit just. Give me a moment.” You pinch the bridge of your nose, close your eyes and think things over quietly in your head before you speak for once in your life.
You don’t agree with him of course, can’t agree with him that you are something special. The idea that you are anything but an ugly bright red shitstain on the cogs of the well oiled war machine that trollkind was meant to be, waiting to be scrubbed off like the unsightly egregious offense to the eyes you are should itself be considered blasphemy.
And yet. With Gamzee on his knees looking up at you like you were the most mirthful gold coated pile of excrement modeled into the shape of a false idol. And not the 3rd? 4th? He’d give his entire self to, only to be devastated when he was once again let down. It makes something stir within you, something that makes you freeze rather than to pull back and squash this before you’re both worse for it than you started.
You hate yourself, not only in a pitched way you’d crawl back to your own memos at your most pathetic of times but you hate yourself in a deeply unsexy way too, you know yourself to be worthless. Delusions of grandeur never once veered into believing you were the second coming of a long dead martyr no matter what your crabshit lusus had tried to schoolfeed you, you never even believed this shit once you were revered as one of the gods of the new world. You knew your place, that you were less than no one.
Taking your attempts to hatefuck yourself back from their aside and placing them right in the middle of the fucking table like the gobblebeast centerpiece to the feast of the most inane of human holidays. You only wanted to blackrom yourself because you knew better than to ask any other poor sap to deal with your mountainous piles of baggage.
And you didn’t want to treat yourself right either. Fuck no. If you had the clone to do it with (you’d always wake up before you could get anywhere with your dream bubble ghosts) you would be desecrating every orifice on your disgusting body and making a few more to desecrate just for good measure.
That’s when it clicks that to desecrate something it must have once been considered sacred. That’s when it clicks that to hate yourself with your whole entire being you must be absorbed in yourself with your whole entire being.
You are no miracle, you are no longer even a mutant error in this world where mutant redbloods are a dime a dozen, you are not even special anymore. The only thing blinding about you is how far your own head has securely lodged itself into your own ass, and the one who would find themselves guided by that light was someone who just as stubbornly made themselves get left behind in a perfect utopian world.
You were fucked up, your entire being was wrong and it felt like you interacted with the world through a glass pane the way nobody would acknowledge that about you anymore. Your fear and tenseness became unnecessary, schizophrenic, not based in reality bullshit (gog you must sound exactly like your insufferable fucking ghost ancestor to everyone) that everyone (understandably) got sick of waiting for you to get over yourself about it.
Rather than promptly getting over yourself about it after making that miserable realization you instead realized you wanted someone to acknowledge it much more than you wanted to change it. And Gamzee in his own twisted hopeless dogmatic ways was acknowledging what a deviant freak you are, and more importantly he was offering you a space where you didn’t have to get better. That was what he was asking from you too, to take him as he is and not ask him to change his ways or grow in the ways anyone even gazing a passing glance over in his direction would know he desperately needed to grow.
Worship was a strange, frightening offer but you could see it for what it really was now. Moiraillegiance of the egos, a promise to keep each other's senses of self safe through the stormy seas of time that threatened to change them for the better. To trample on anything that could ever grow within them and lay in each other's company until the natural conclusions of your pathetic lives.
You were regretting even thinking about how that sounded nice , or awful in a way both of you deserved. You’d definitely regret taking it. And yet…
Because you decided that the perfect time to actually take a cold hard look in the cracked funhouse mirror that is your attempts to blackrom yourself without a fist around your bulge for the first time while a highblood was eagerly awaiting your next move. You look down at him nervously, expecting annoyance or anger to have twisted its way into his expression. Worse than that the glimmer in his eye did not waver even slightly as he gazed upon your own internal self indulgent prattling.
You knew what you had to say but for the first time in your entire lifespan, with not a thing obstructing your proteinchute you could not get the words that normally seem to spill out from you like a virgin bulge that thrusts less than halfway into a nook before it needs to pull out and empty it’s entire seedflaps worth of genetic material into the nearest bucket, you could not get the words to come out.
Instead you snatch his hand and put it where you now allow him to be, pressing his cool hand against your burning mutant heat. He flexes his hand, basks in your heat but stills and looks up at you not expectantly but hopefully. Suddenly you’re scared again, you’re scared that he won’t revere without your permission and that if you pull away now he’ll rend your soft lowblood chitin with his razor sharp highblood claws.
And you’re really not fair to him because only once you have cornered yourself can you even try to get the words out. “Fine. If you have pirouetted so motherfucking hard off the handle that the only thing left to get your rocks off for the sake of whatever nooksniffing messiahs you have chosen to follow off a cliff like the most moronic of earth rodents is lowering yourself down to mutantblood level. Then who am I to deny you of making a complete and utter fool of yourself.”
“Not lowering myself at all brother not one bit, being raised up from the pits of sin I’ve gone and buried myself in. If you so choose to get your forgiveness on if a motherfucker is worthy. Messiahs no, never the same level as you my righteous brother. Holy Vantas red is the only thing that can wash a most blasphemous of brothers clean of all the motherfucking wrongdoing he committed” Gamzee beams.
You flounder immediately, “Do you even understand in your rotten pan how absolutely insane this is. Who the fuck am I to forgive you?! I- Whatever, yes, I am the most hopeless idiot any inhabited planet has ever known and I can’t hold a grudge even after all the shit you did because I can’t see you barely functioning to exist around me without choking on my pitybulge for you. I forgive you because being fucking pale for you has made me a complete moron and not because I am some sort of spongedead messiah saviour.”
“Motherfuck, are you serious?” his eyes widen in surprise and you start wanting to die inside again.
“Fuck, don’t tell me I read that wrong or I’m actually going to cull myself. Are you high again? Is that why you think showing up at my hive halfway to knocking on the handmaiden’s doorstep like a whimpering barkbeast would look like anything other than you begging for pity pale to any troll with even a single foot in reality. Forget it, forget everything I’ve said I’m going to explode from my own stupid fucking persumptuousness that anyone would ever want any sort of pity from a disgusting mutant like me-”
“Bro, get your calm on. If my messiah wants me as a moirail again then fuck if I won’t be the most faithful moirail in all Alternian history!” Gamzee paps at your chest awkwardly with the hand you put there yourself.
“Oh great. False alarm everyone. Put away your dust receptacles and sweep implements there will be no need to pick vile red giblets off the ceiling from when the swillblood explodes because I have nothing to be embarrassed over anymore now that I can rest assured the gaping cavern between your skull selectively teleports away pieces of information like earth pumpkins to the veil where any poor sap could come across them because you clearly did not fucking listen to what I actually said. Let me just tuck my embarrassment into the sleeping platform and slobber on its forehead like a lusus for the day because you don’t even actually want to be my moirail with me you just think I am your extremely pathetic god who just ordered you to be his moirail.”
You think you see orange creeped into the edges of Gamzee’s eyes, his fist tightened around the sign on your chest again and you expect him to rally his voice into a yell again but his mouth fills with blood instead of words, the holes in his chest bleeding bright indigo again.
“Fuck! Shoosh! Fucking shoosh! Holy shit you’re a landfills worth of mess I bet you’ve got more maggots flowing through your body than blood by now. Look it doesn’t fucking matter if we’re not on the same page about it right now we’ll rehash all this dumbassery to shangri fucking la and back when you’re not literally dying!” You drag him back onto the lounge slab, scrounging together the contents of the first aid kit that past Karkat had tossed aside because past Karkat is a complete and utter tool and you’ve never hated anyone more than you hate past Karkat right now.
“Taking care of me?” He chuckles through the pain to ask, whole demeanor flipping on a dime.
“Yes you dumbfuck clown. You pass the fuck out and have fang rottingly sweet dreams while I play doctorturer with not even a bit of schoolfeeding for the rest of this god awful night” you press a finger against his lips. He hummed pleased to hear this like you weren’t about to be slathering the last drops of coagulating gel directly onto his open wounds.
He passes out again before you’re finished tending his wounds and you find it’s a lot easier to play doctorturer when your patient is too passed out for you to drop everything you’re doing to have bad bedside manners at them instead. Unfortunately because nothing ever works out for you and it’s always your fault you run out of coagulating gel before that point too.
The wounds on Gamzee’s chest stay sealed with its rising and falling, those on his stomach still dribble wet indigo droplets from their angry puckered chitin onto your lounge slab. You hadn’t lied that you’d never had any doctorturer schoolfeeding but you had done some threshecutioner schoolfeeding back when you thought maybe you could make something out of yourself. When a fellow threshecutioner was injured and there was no doctorturer yet on site it was standard for the lower caste threshecutioner to lick their wounds, troll saliva had the coagulating properties troll blood lacked.
You thought about waking Gamzee up and making him slather his hand up with his own spit and rub it onto his wounds instead, fuck knows he needed to learn even the barest of minimums about how to take care of himself. But damn if he didn’t look so pitiful sleeping peacefully on what should be his deathbed.
For minutes you stand there working up to do it, what’s one more overtly and excessively intimate pale gesture to make right at the restart of your relationship with him? You didn’t even have a crowd this time, past Karkat did it with a crowd and you weren’t about to that idiot show you up were you.
You barely flick your tongue over his stomach and get no reaction, done so lightly you can’t even taste him so you stop being a nook about it and properly drag your tongue along Gamzee’s wounds.
Okay yeah fuck that it tastes vile, you completely regret that and want the taste of salty bitter blood topped with a heavy sprinkling of gun powder and a kick of sickly sweet faygo out of your mouth right this second. But you really don’t want to have to give it to past Karkat so you grimace and go in for another lick hoping it won’t be as bad the second time.
Gamzee’s stomach starts to shake in reaction to the tickling of your tongue over his chitin and you realize he is awake and he’s laughing at the sight of you debasing yourself like a slobbering loyal barkbeast all over his open wounds. The taste is just as bad the second time for good measure on how much you regret thinking licking bullet wounds was a good idea for a grand pale gesture.
“Don’t. You. Dare. Say. A. Single. Fucking. Word” you growl.
Gamzee brought his large hand over to his mouth and made a zipping motion before letting it hang over the side of the lounging platform. He waits there expectantly and you commit because sticking it to past Karkat is the only morsel of dignity you can still get out of this situation. Of course he couldn’t help but laugh silently as soon as your tongue touched his skin again.
“Stop! Gamzee stop- quit fucking laughing I’m trying to help you here!”
“Sorry palebro, you got a tongue like a purrbeast” he chuckles.
You can’t tell which part of that makes heat rise right to your face and you don’t want to know that about yourself so you shriek, “What did I say! Not a fucking word that’s an order! Don’t talk don’t laugh don’t move don’t do a single fucking thing. Just. Go back to sleep!”
His stomach tenses under your tongue, the effort obvious but effective for your purposes. And when you feel it lax once again you know he’s gone back to sleep. As you finish your grim task you find that focusing on the flexing of Gamzee’s stomach under your tongue had pushed the awful taste to the back of your mind.
Once done you lay your most expendable snuggle plane over his body in case he starts to bleed again and go wash his blood out of your mouth in the ablution block. You swish water in your mouth and watch the swirling of your diluted candy red spit with his watered down indigo blood go down the drain. The pale colours never mix, dancing along the wash basin at each other's sides till the moment they wash away completely.
You’re exhausted as all fuck now, you’ve been sleeping dry out of habit for a while now but think about heading to the recupracoon for a good day’s sleep. But when you think about Gamzee waking up all alone on the lounge slab in pain you feel like a shitty moirail for having even thought about it and deserve whatever back pain you might get sleeping at his side.
You can’t tell when waking up starts for you because the warmth of a sunbeam against your head and a gentle hand stroking your horns makes you feel more dreamlike than any bubble you’ve ever been in. When you wake up properly you’ll think about how you two definitely should have actually fucking talked before doing anything like this, the both of you are rushing into moiraillegience again without understanding what it really means to one another. Not now though, you click and purr as he handles your nubby horns, right now you hope you feel like this forever so you’ll never have to regret how you went about things at all.
“Brother, did you know when the wicked sun gets its shine on your hair it turns rust? Miracles. You are the most miraculous thing I’ve ever known, every shade of the hemospectrum would look bitchin on you my messiah” his voice bleeds fondness and alarming ardent wonder off of every syllable. You cling to the musty pheromones oozing from him, find the pale in the prayer and allow the tones of your moirail’s voice carry you back into sleep.