Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The inside of the apartment is dark except for the light streaming in behind you. There are two crescent slivers of reflective yellow at eye level. You squint and can just about make out a person standing just before the squareish room cut to a narrow corridor.

“Welcome, human,” the person growls. He’s got this low, rough voice that’s really interesting. He spreads his arms, and you see the movement, but can’t make out much else. He’s wearing black.

“Welcome,” he continued, “to the complete disaster that is the destined-to-fail exercise of forcing a nocturnal and diurnal species to cohabit the same premises on a functional schedule without killing each other. I am the unfortunate fucker designated as your co-sufferer. Merry fucking Christmas.”

“Hi Karkat,” you say. In the dark, the person shifts.

“What?” he says, suspiciously.

“That’s your name, right?” you ask rhetorically. You happened to see the log thing when you collected your keys, and you’re pretty sure you have it right. “Karkat Vantas. Or am I saying it wrong? Vantahs. Van-tass? Vantas-tic! Heheheh.”

“Rrrrhhhstt, stop. No. Do not mangle my name with your ridiculous hopbeast teeth. Do not so much as fucking look in my direction, understand, human?”

“Wow, rude. My name’s John, not ‘human’. John Egbert, actually.”

“John human Egbert,” Karkat says flatly. “You overestimate how many fucks I give. I give approximately zero fucks. We stay in the same goddamn apartment because of the integration policy this schoolfeeding facility decided to ram up our wastechutes. We are not, and we will not become, human ‘friends’. At the end of our miserable two sweeps here, we will ideally part ways without so much as looking back. After four sweeps, I want to be able to say ‘who the fuck is John Egbert’ and you will not even recall in the vaguest the name ‘Karkat Vantas’. Are we clear?”

“Karkat?” you say, when you think he’s done. “No offence, but you’re a huge weirdo. Anyway, which room is mine?”

===/\===

Yeah, as usual, your dad sent you a cake. You don’t even know how he does it, but the dorm office called you and yup, you got a homemade cake even though you’re literally a thousand miles from home. Dad is just embarrassing like that.

Its good fruit cake though, not of that mass produced cake mix ugh. You swear Betty Crocker cake mix is evil, you just haven’t figured out how to prove it yet. Anyway, Dad makes fruit cake from scratch and feeds it with an entire bottle of rum over six months. Dave nearly passed out the first time you unwrapped one, it was hilarious.

You get two plates and cut generous slices, and you head over to the dining table where Karkat is typing furiously, in between muttered hissing.

“Hey,” you say.

No response.

“Hey, Karkat,” you say, and you bump your elbow into the back of his shoulders, near his neck.

“Fuck!” he explodes, shoots out of his chair and turns around snarling, eyes all yellow then huge and black and red-orange in the edges.

You stumble back and try to balance the plates. A fork falls off and clatters on the floor.

Karkat’s glaring at you and his hair is all spiked up like a cat.

“Cake?” you offer.

The other fork falls to the floor. Aw, man.

“I’ll get that,” you say.

“I cannot believe this,” he says slowly, and he pulls earbuds from his almost elf like ears. His hair slowly flattens and it really deflates a lot, wow. “I refuse to believe that less than twenty four hours after I SPECIFICALLY told you NOT to have any contact whatsoever, in any way, shape or form, that you would be so fucking obtuse that you would fuck yourself on the border of a goddamn reflex angle. Did I goddamn STUTTER when I said I have no intention whatsoever of becoming human friends with you, John Egbert? Because I meant that I want to be the opposite of friends. I want your existence to have zero impact on my life. Do you understand or are you too much of a PISSPOOR EXCUSE FOR MUTATED PRIMATE MUCUS that you can’t understand the words coming out of my mouth?”

“Oh hey, Rush Hour,” you noticed. Heh, it did help to know that for all the yelling this guy was a dork, the bluster became kind of funny, really. You handed him a plate and his hands automatically came out to hold it. You put your plate on the table and picked up the forks.

Karkat looks like he might accidentally snap the plate in half and his eyebrows are so scrunched together he almost looks like he has a unibrow.

“Yeah, so I figured we have a lot to talk about, since we’re living together, and it’d be nice to talk over cake. There’s a lot of rum in this one though, so … wait, can trolls can take alcohol?”

He puts his plate down and eyes you warily.  

“Is this a really terrible joke,” he asks, flat. “Please tell me this is a goddamn failure of a joke. Haha, Karkat fell for it, now we will proceed with the regular program of not engaging in abject stupidity.”

“Nope, there’s not a lot of trolls where I come from, so I really don’t know. You’re kind of the first I’ve properly met! Isn’t that neat?”

“No. No, it isn’t fucking ‘neat’ or ‘sick’ or ‘swag’ or whatever other human word you think might describe this arrangement in a remotely positive fashion. It MEANS that I have to put up with your blinding ignorance as you attempt to adjust to my lifestyle. Oh, except the part where I don’t give a squeakbeast’s ass about educating you, and you should just fucking stay out of my way!!!”

“Okay, I listened to you, but no offence, I don’t think your ideas are going to work,” you said, wiping the forks on your shirt and handing him one. He glowers at it, and you, and doesn’t take it. Okay, so maybe you should have washed it first but hey, the floor was dry! Besides it totally passed the three second rule.

“Why. Not,” Karkat bites out. You shrug and break off a piece of cake with your fork.

“I mean, look,” you say, waving the fork in a circle at the walls around you. “We’re literally sharing a three room apartment, and one of those rooms is a kitchen slash dining room. We’d definitely run into one another even if we didn’t want to, and doing things your way would be suuuuper awkward. Like, what if my friends want to come over?”

Karkat opens his mouth to argue but you cut him off.

“So, I think we should talk about house rules and stuff and also I think we should be friends! It’ll be hard to be deal with each other being all up in our space all the time if we aren’t friends… So yeah! Think about it?”

Karkat’s jaw goes click. Or at least you think it’s his jaw? It’s too dim to tell.

“Can I make it a house rule to NOT FUCKING TALK TO ME?” he growls.

“Karkat,” you said. “Buddy, we can’t not talk to each other! Like, we need to figure out the cooking and the cleaning and like I don’t know, the rules for the lights and stuff! Otherwise you’ll be yelling at me just for turning the lights on like, I don’t know, twenty minutes ago.”

“Oh my god, you grubfucked moron. Repeat after me, TROLLS ARE NOCTURNAL. It means that it literally fucking hurts my bleeding oculars when you turn on hideously bright lights without so much as a goddamn warning!”

“Alright! I’m sorry already, sheesh. I’ll check the dimmer next time, but I can’t see and I can’t study like this. And I’ll have to study over term!”  

“Study outside!”

“Hey, this is my apartment too, alright? Look, all I’m saying is that we’re going to have to compromise! It’s the same for even regular roomies, so I’m not giving you a hard time just because you’re a troll, promise. Look, I’ll write some stuff down, and you can write some stuff down, and we’ll talk about this again, alright?”

“Why even bother wasting calories moving your goddamn faceflaps at me when you don’t give a fuck about any reply I give, John human? Are you waiting to see how long it takes for me to explode into a white hot supernova of pure cosmic rage? Should I set up a digital clock to keep track of how long it takes? It won’t take very fucking long with the way you’re going, let me assure you.”

“Yes! Obviously I’m doing this just to piss you off, so I can live with someone who is forever pissed off with me,” you say sarcastically. You shake your head. “C’mon Karkat, work with me here.”  

“You,” Karkat says and he’s quiet angry this time, like he’s compressed the anger so tight it’s burning sound, like that time you all watched Gravity and Jade paused Sandra Bullock’s acting to geek out over why a pod re-entering the atmosphere generates heat not so much by friction but by compression.

The light from his laptop shines across his scleras, across the lines in his nose and where his lips pulled back to show the edges of his teeth. He’s breathing slow and he’s watching you, intense and never quite settling on your face in favour of flicking his gaze to your hands.

He steps into your space and he’s a tiny bit shorter than you. Your glasses slip a little as you bring your chin down, half to look at him and half because something screams at you not to expose your throat so close to those teeth. They’re hardly needles but still long and uncomfortably pointed.

The edges of Karkat’s mouth twitch up so slightly you might have imagined it.

“You have no idea what the fuck you’re doing,” he says. It’s low and gravelly and superior and it runs a chill down your spine and a cold burn low in your stomach.

You drag out a chair and smile at the ensuing confused look. Yup, much better because woah, that was way too intense.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter,” you reply, pushing his laptop away from the food. “C’mon, Karkat! Eat your cake and let’s make the rules.”