Work Text:
"Hey. Are you doing okay?"
“Karkat.” You force your fingers to unclench from your sewing--Kanaya’s been trying to teach you to embroider—and give your unexpected guest a small, restrained smile. "Still checking up on everyone?"
"If I didn't make fucking hiverounds you'd all trip over your own frond nubs and drown in your nutrition discs, you know you would. You humans are all a panscrambled tumblefuck mess. So yes, Docterrorist Karkat is in the hive, please step into my examination block and tell me all your problems; as it turns out my whole sorry function in life is basically to serve as a repository for inept aliens to pour their blathering ceaseless stupidity-hatched complaints into my needy auditory canals. This is the pinnacle of my existence and fulfills my every desire. I’m a fucking feelings-jam philanthropist. Step right up, take your medicine, and if your palms start feeling wandery I promise my morail won't maim you probably hardly at all."
You raise one eyebrow. Your expression has warmed several degrees—you can’t help it. "Well with that incentive... I'm quite well."
Karkat looks extremely unconvinced.
You elaborate. "I've assimilated an alternate self before, you know, when Davesprite merged the timelines. This alpha universe version of myself may have been more divergent, but she still died fairly young and quite long ago. Meta-temporally speaking. She’s… a very vivid dream. I hardly notice it at all anymore.” You’re exceptionally lucky your girlfriend has such excellent reflexes or you’d have taken her eye out with your knitting needle the last time she startled you.
You try to look reassuring and composed. Self-possessed. “We’re adjusting."
"Really," Karkat says flatly. "And that's why you haven't visited Roxy at all."
"As a matter of fact, I have," you say and derive a smug curl of satisfaction from the evident surprise on his face. "Several times." You don't tell him that Roxy cornered you that first time, or that you said things you regret and also things you always wanted to and even things that the part of you you know as yourself wasn't responsible for at all. You don't tell him that you cried, later, alone. That’s not something you’ll share.
…But it’s still nice to be asked.
"Oh," he says, the wind gone out of his sails. And then, "Oh. That's good." He's so sincere. Not on the surface--he's still arms crossed and glowering--but down under the gruff tone of his voice, and in the focused intent of his eyes as he tries to read past your mask.
He cares too much, and too obviously, so you let him see as much as you can when you reply. "It is good." You even mean it. Most days. You set your sewing aside and stand up, smoothing out your skirt. You make your tone brisk. "May I offer you some tea?"
Karkat follows you into the kitchen, scowling around at the appliances like they've personally offended him, and stands in the middle of the room, simmering.
You put the kettle on the stove and make a bet with yourself as to which will reach a boil first.
Of course it's Karkat. "Rose." He barks it like a command, but you can hear the underlying question in it.
You turn away from the cabinets, give him your best encouraging therapist's face.
"...Dave's going to be okay, right?"
Ah ha. "Do you mean ‘is Dave going to be all right’ or ‘is Dave going to continue to be Dave’?"
Karkat drums his claws on his arms, shifts his weight restlessly. "...That other orange sprite guy that got stuck in his head--"
"--is also Dave." You cut him short with a severe glance. "I can't say it won't be distressing for them--or him, to be precise. Moreso than for the rest of us, even. But drawing distinctions and picking sides as to which part of him gets your support won't be helpful to either of him as he is now."
“I know.” Karkat has directed his glare down to the floor tiles. Today is not a favorable day for your kitchen. “I just… I don’t know how to talk to him.”
“May I suggest speaking loudly in his direction until you elicit a suitably interesting reaction?”
“Ha. Ha,” he snaps. “Do you see my carefully verbally expressed amusement? My hilarity sponge is about to fucking burst all over these walls, that is how impressed I am by your extremely sensitive and helpful answer. Sure, let’s ignore the fact that my best fucking friend looks at me half the time like I’m a total stranger; clearly the solution is to just run my jolly fucking trap at him like a mentally deficient larva and hope something useful falls out. That will solve everything!”
You keep your expression unimpressed. Honestly, if anyone’s earned the opportunity to succumb to a full on verbal panic attack slash cathartic meltdown it’s certainly Karkat, but you aren’t confident in your own ability to maintain your equanimity for the duration. Besides. This is a hurdle that needs to be addressed and moved past. You select your verbal nudge carefully. “Karkat. Is there a reason you are addressing these concerns to me and not to Dave?”
“Obviously because he’s your fucking morail.”
Caught off guard, you move to retrieve cups and saucers from the cabinet and cross the kitchen for the sugar bowl. “Humans don’t have moirails,” you correct him calmly.
Karkat gives you a flat look. Troll eyes, black set in yellow. His irises are just starting to pick up his blood color you notice. They are also slightly too discerning. “Human-siblings, morails, genetically-designated-freakish-non-piling-palemates, call it whatever you want. Fine. You are diamonds-free-serendipitous-platonic-multiverse-crossing-space-chums-forever. You still have the best idea what’s going on behind his stupidly punchable sunglasses-wearing face.”
You shake your head but don’t press the point. “Very well. Then as Dave’s ‘diamonds-free-serendipitous-platonic-multiverse-crossing-space-chum-forever,’ believe me when I say there is no version of Dave that isn’t, in essence, very much Dave. A fact which I find by turns unsurprising and philosophically extremely unsettling.” This is a lie. Dave’s constancy is your touchstone. Kanaya is precious to you because you found her on one path of many, a rare fortune. Dave is precious because he’s walked with you on all of them.
When you wake from nightmares about another life, surrounded by friends you don’t know, it’s a dark comfort to remember that there’s one other person who has dreamed in parallel.
Your forgotten sugar spoon is pressed into your hand. You pull yourself from your thoughts and look up into Karkat’s concerned face. Brows furrowed and arms crossed, he leans a hip against the counter next to you, watching with ferocious intensity like some sort of very solicitous tea-preparation overseer. Karkat does have his own methods of anchoring people in the present.
You shake the mood from your shoulders and push the alien sense of another life to the back of your mind. "Dave will adapt. As will we all. And of course he has his brother." You hate that tiny note of jealousy in your voice. You push past it, twist it into dry humor. “Several times over, in fact.”
Karkat growls, a derogatory noise, pushing off the counter to pace the confined space of the kitchen. "Fucking Striders. If they're not collapsing two existent personalities they're subdividing into half a dozen new ones. Old-Strider, robo-Strider, fucking wiggler-hopbeast-Strider. What next? Banana-flavored-Strider? Why the fuck would we ever need that many Striders?"
“Yes, I’m sure this must be very distressing for you.”
Karkat turns, spinning slowly on one foot. He levels a silent stare.
You wiggle your eyebrows.
“Oh, fuck you, Lalonde. Fuck you and your presumptuous, pan-rotted, completely unfounded insinuations in every orifice.”
“Now, Karkat, I think of you as a platonic-diamonds-free-space-friend-forever.” He’s still snarling, face gone quite red, as you pour the tea. Because you are a kind person, you provide him another outlet for his embarrassment. “Perhaps you should take these impulses to… what was it you suggested you might be looking for? Someone ‘banana-flavored’?”
There’s something of an explosion. A very therapeutically interesting explosion.
You set two cups of tea on the table, take your seat, and prop your chin delicately on both hands. Karkat’s rant stumbles and falls into a fuming, flustered silence under the weight of your encouraging smile and raised eyebrows.
He glares.
You grin more sharply. "Do go on."
“You are abso-fucking-lutely terrifying and I am participating in this chucklefarce platonic feelingsdump only under duress,” Karkat grumbles, and yanks out a chair.