Chapter Text
“Whoa, whoa. Don’t tell me GrubHub got bought out by trolls! There’s not gonna be grub in my taco, is there?”
Karkat allows a sigh to escape him, if “allows” is taken to mean, “releases in a distinctly audible and obviously frustrated manner, directed pointedly at the fourth xenophobic asshole to end up on the receiving end of his delivery schedule that night and likely the first to discover what happens when he finally snaps.”
Said asshole doesn’t take the hint. “Like, okay, I get that ‘grub’ here does not refer to, like, grubs,” he begins, “but that’s like if humans had a dish called, fukin’, babyloaf or something, you know?”
Karkat does, in fact, know. This was hardly the first human to go on the exact same inane spiel about grubs and babies and human sensibilities, as if people in their country didn’t keep barkbeasts as pets, yet regularly consume oblong meat products known as “hot dogs”. The human continues rambling. “You’re sitting down at the table with Aunt Marty and Uncle George, you’ve just introduced them to your adorable little newborn, and they ask you if you want a serving of babyloaf, auntie’s special, and you’re like, oh, yes, I absolutely love to eat baby—”
“Holy jegus on a salted carbohydrate circle, can you just shut up and take your goddamn tacos?”
He pulls a face. “But the grubs—”
“They’re regular. Fucking. Tacos,” Karkat says flatly. He shoves the bag toward the customer, who is looking suspiciously like he’s about to start talking again. Karkat makes the (highly intelligent, in his opinion) decision to beat him to the punch. Somewhat less intelligently, he finds himself baring his most recent sob story to the obnoxious stranger.
“And before you get your bulge-covers in a twist, GrubHub is the same misleadingly-named human nutrition delivery service it has always been. In fact, it doesn’t even serve troll food! On this current day! In this current year!” Karkat is vaguely aware that he is getting louder, but this fails to deter him from his rant. “The only reason I ended up with a fucking job here is because troll companies won’t hire me on account of my mutant fucking blood color! So much for escaping hemochromatic oppression, am I right? Out of the circular oil-based-cooking platform and into the combustion reaction!”
There’s a split-second where the human almost looks taken aback—as he rightly should—but it quickly subsides into the infuriatingly blank expression he had been wearing throughout their encounter. He’s about to say something when he’s thankfully cut off by another human, who appears behind him.
“Dave, are you harassing the delivery person again? I heard yelling,” says the newcomer.
Dave puts his hands in his pockets, then takes them out again. “I was only pointing out how fucked up it is that grubs can refer to babies but also to food,” he responds after a beat, tone flat.
The other human gives Karkat’s customer—“Dave,” which he’d technically known, though he had somewhat been hoping that the asshole who’d answered the door had been someone other than the person who’d placed the order—an exasperated look. “Dave, you love grubloaf. You literally ate some for lunch,” he says.
Dave seems to turn a bit pink at the statement. He starts to mumble something along the lines of “C’mon, man,” but the other human keeps talking. “You know pretending to be xenophobic for edgy irony points stopped being cool right around when it stopped being cool to pretend to be racist?” he says. “That is to say, it was never cool.”
Ah, how the dining platforms have rotated. The friend-human looks at Dave with a mixture of disappointment and expectation, like he’s hoping for an apology that he knows will almost certainly never come. Karkat, for his part, feels his mood shifting from exhausted frustration to indignation—regular assholes were one thing, but people who decided to be assholes for fun? He did not tolerate that shit. Well, not from anyone except Sollux.
He’s just about to truly lay into Dave when the other human startles him by awkwardly reaching for the delivery bag with an expression that’s probably intended to be apologetic—or perhaps pleading—but comes out more like a grimace. He pats the bag awkwardly, like it’s a proxy for Karkat’s arm. The situation is, somehow, drifting toward something that feels almost ashen, and boy is he not interested in that. He releases the bag and takes a step backward.
“What the fuck ever,” Karkat sighs, more to himself than anyone else. “Enjoy your grub-free fucking tacos.”
He turns with a huff, heading for his car. Even as he tries to tune him out, he can’t help but hear Dave start up again behind him—“Do you think that’s like, ‘fucking tacos,’ like tacos that fuck?” he’s saying, as if he could get even more asinine than he already had been—and then a quieter “Ow, dude,” accompanied by what was likely the sound of him being elbowed by the other human.
Karkat is so focused on keeping himself from turning around and letting him know exactly how much of a mistake it was to choose him as the butt end of his poor sense of “humor” that he nearly fails to notice the sound of footsteps approaching behind him. He whips around, only to find that it’s Dave. Maybe he has a death wish?
“You, uh,” Dave starts, “left before I could tip you?” The words are barely discernible, which only ticks off Karkat more. He had admittedly been a bit miffed when he saw that he order hadn’t included a tip—after all, there’s no guarantee the customer will actually tip in cash when the time comes—but being tipped under the present circumstances was somehow even worse than getting nothing at all.
He snatches the $15 Dave is holding out with such a vengeance he’s surprised the bills don’t just rip in two. “$15 for a $35 order? What, you think bribing me is gonna make up for your fake-or-maybe-not-who-knows-haha bullshit xenophobic nonsense?” he seethes, waving the money in the air. “Why would you even care? I’m just some nobody mutant, joke-butt extraordinaire.”
“Hah. Joke-butt,” Dave repeats weakly, glancing to the side. He clears his throat. “No, I just, uh, try to always use cash. And um, give a little extra when I can. Cause, I mean—” he looks back to Karkat with a shrug—“y’know, if you do it through the website, who knows how much they’re skimming off the top? Letting everyone feel good about helping the drivers while in reality it’s going to some exec or something so they can get a second yacht and continue not to pay a reasonable wage?” Just as he gets going, he seems to run out of momentum. He looks down. “And well, I guess it’d usually be more like $5 for something like this, but also, yeah, it was kinda messed up to open with a grub joke like that. So I guess that’s what the extra $10 is for?”
It comes out sounding like a question even as the words train into nothingness. Dave fiddles with his pockets again, putting one hand in, then taking it out again, only to then place both hands in. Karkat isn’t really sure what to say, and for better or worse—probably worse, Karkat thinks, since that’s how it seems to have been going so far—Dave eventually keeps talking. “I guess I just kind of looked at you and thought you’d be fun to mess with? Wait, that sounds bad. I mean fun to mess with in a ‘you seem like a cool dude’ sort of way? Fuck.”
Karkat scowls. “Maybe wait until you’re at least friends with someone before joke-harassing them? And even then, maybe just don’t?” he chides, before he can really think about what he’s saying. He crosses his arms. “Plus, the whole ‘grub’ thing is just a translation error. Get better material, bulgesucker.”
“Is that an invitation?” Dave asks in response, half-smirking.
Karkat balks. “Fuck you,” he grumbles, stalking over to the driver’s side of his car.
As he’s getting in, Dave calls after him. “I was talking about the friend part, man, I don’t do hook-ups.”
Karkat slams the door and leaves.
---
It’s only a few weeks later that Karkat manages, somehow, to run into the pan-rottingly idiotic human again. He’d taken to café-hopping (and sometimes, bar-hopping) on the weekends as a strategy to get himself to work on his most recent dead-end creative writing project, which, between lesson planning, grading his students’ papers and taking care of administrative bullshit, he barely had any time for in the first place. Unfortunately, it was only upon seeing the human’s stupid face that he’d realized he was in more or less the same area of town as where he’d made that regrettable taco delivery.
“How’s everyone doing tonight?” Dave—or at least, Karkat’s pretty sure that’s what his name had been—asks. “I’ve been playing around with this new little toy,” he continues, holding up what, as far as Karkat can see, is just a small box with some knobs on it. “Doesn’t look like much, but it can make some crazy sounds. So, I thought I’d give 'er the real test and see how she feels live.”
He starts fiddling with some other device—this one mostly composed of buttons—and a mellow beat fills the air. Karkat usually avoided places that did live music, since he tended to find it distracting; unfortunately, by the time he’d realized that this cafe was one such place, he’d already ordered his usual—a macchiato with an extra shot, despite it being nearly nine in the evening—so he had figured that he might as well settle down and try to write rather than go somewhere else and be forced to order another drink. The café had some comfortable chairs, at least—plush, but not so much so that it was difficult to use a laptop—and it wasn’t so crowded as to be noisy.
Karkat manages to write through the first couple of songs before running out of steam. He leans back from his laptop with a sigh, stretching his head backward until he gets his neck to crack. The macchiato, forgotten on the table beside him, has grown cold, and he downs the remaining half with a slight grimace. He really needed to stop forgetting to actually drink the coffee that he orders. He’d given up on ordering lattes a long time ago precisely for this reason, but as the bitter taste of cold espresso lingers in his mouth, he wonders if he’d be better off forgoing milk entirely and consuming coffee in shot form from now on.
At some point between staring unsuccessfully at his latest paragraph and wondering if he should get a second drink, Karkat finds himself watching Dave, instead. His movements are as fascinating as they are incomprehensible, as he alternates between his laptop the various boxes laid out in front of him. At one point, he looks up, and they end up briefly making eye contact before Karkat can manage to look away, fiddling with his things in an attempt to look thoroughly uninterested. Had Dave recognized him, he wondered? If he had, he gave no indication—not anything Karkat could have discerned through his douchebag sunglasses, anyway—and after a moment continues to tinker with his strange sound-making machinery.
Karkat, for his part, returns to staring at his own laptop. His writing stares back. He blinks at it a few more times, as if this will cause any of it to magically transform into something worth anyone's time, then closes the computer with a groan. If the music hadn't been distracting him before, it sure is now. Hell, a second ago, he'd been watching that asshole do whatever the fuck it was he was doing on purpose. It was far too close for comfort to exactly the kind of thing he might write in his own stories. Local grub-for-brains troll keeps running into human who never outgrew wiggler humor, they reconcile their differences and fall in love, and they live happily ever after. As if Dave—why did he still remember his name?—could do anything to make up for that shitshow.
It takes Karkat everything he has to not walk over there and start ripping out cables left and right. Instead, he downs the rest of his macchiato with a grimace and stands to gather his things. No scenes tonight. Nope, not making them. Not that he has ever made a scene before.
As he walks out the door, he drops a $10 as inconspicuously as possible in the donation box sitting to the side of Dave's station.
God fucking dammit.