vatheon | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Who: Sufferer and whoever wants to ~~mob~~ join him
When: September 24th, early afternoon
Where: in the Plaza to start
Style: whatever you like!
Status: totally open

In the beginning, there was pain.

The arrow that pierced his side was not the least of it, but only the last. By the time its barbed head sank into his flesh and hit something deep inside, sending a torrent of cherry blood spilling over his hip and down his leg, blood that looked almost black in the bright light of Derse, it was almost an annoyance and nothing more. Hardly a little pang, after the constant burning on his wrists, and the way the flesh crackled and turned black under the heavy irons. He had lost feeling in his hands long ago, the nerves dying under hot brands and his fingers curling inward towards his palms, and the hot blood that ran down his arms felt almost cool by comparison.

And then, after his blood--his cursed, mutant blood--gushed away from his body and left a sticky, clotted pool under his feet... then, there was nothing.

No neverending light, no peace, no absolution. Just darkness, and emptiness, and a million years crying soundlessly into the void.

And then there was a jolt, and a return of the pain, and he was lying face first on cobblestones, soaked through, and this was all very familiar.

Sufferer looks up, his hair soaked and falling in his eyes, his bare back exposed to the air and still slowly running with blood. His eyes blur, and refocus, and he's next to the fountain, in the Plaza. Vatheon. He's back in Vatheon.

Struggling, he tries to push himself to his knees, but he's hindered by the arrow protruding from his side, its shaft slick with blood and its blue (b100) feathers tacky and standing up like little brushes. His hands are useless; blackened, melted things on the ends of his wrists, and the chains he wore when he died, his shackles... they're still there, turned a cold, sullen black instead of pulsing red, and it's hard to tell where the chains end and his wrists begin.

His mind whirls, remembering Vatheon, images coming to him in fractured, fragmented half-memories--Karkat, growling crabbily after getting a hug... Dualscar's fins, moving under his fingertips... Sola, asking questions with that plaintive look on his face... Zelda... Johnny... Jacob... Dave... Disciple... Spider... Psii...

Psii.

He tries again to get to his feet, but his wounds and the chains on his wrists are too much, and he topples forward again, groaning as the arrow digs deeper into his side. He's worthless, useless, he led them all down the wrong path, everything he told them was wrong, he's a failure, he's failed them all...

Sufferer looks up at the bubble's dome, his eyes so bloodshot they're red almost all the way through, and his jaw works, his teeth grinding together and the tendons in his forearms standing out as he tries to clench his hands into fists. His voice is raspy, his throat raw and choked from the last time he spoke, centuries and seconds before.

He throws his head back and screams at the bubble's dome. "FUUUUUUUUCK!"

His voice ripples and echoes back to him, distorted, animalistic, the cry of a brute instead of a savior. Slowly, he bends back over his chained wrists, resting his forehead on the irons, and the red that stains the cold steel is not blood this time.

"...fuck."

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"Augh!" And all of ~~the~~ a sudden, Karkat is squirming and shoving like he can't get away fast enough. "Damnit Gamzee, stop--stop rubbing--I hope you choke on a bulge, shitwringer!"

For all it ends soon, he's still left to glare after his moirail. Lousy douche clown. Pile forgotten for the moment, he stomps after him. With any luck, he'll overtake him and lock him out of the ablutionblock while he cleans his own face.

Edited 2012-10-13 04:31 (UTC)

Hasn't Miss Pyrope taught you anything? Luck doesn't matter! Not when you have legs that are roughly half a mile long. Gamzee beats Karkat to the ablutionblock easy enough, but he leaves him enough room at the cleaning basin to scrub himself clean of paint. He's mostly doing a quick scrub of his own face, the kind that leaves minute traces of paint worked into his hair line and around the turns of his ears, but it is clean enough, right?

Edited 2012-10-13 04:37 (UTC)

Motherfucker. Karkat screws his face up into a scowl at his leg-gifted compatriot, and stomps the last steps up to the basin anyway.

"Asswipe. Give me that." He snatches for the washcloth, and if he can snag hold of it, he'll then set to scrubbing away the last bits of paint Gamzee has overlooked. His own face - one cheek is a smeary mix of greys beyond the base tone - can wait for now.

Gamzee has no objections when Karkat plucks the ash cloth from his hands and very helpfully slumps his upper body down so Karkat can actually reach his face to scrub it clean without fetching a step ladder. His smile, in fact, is perfectly content and a little dopey. Once Karkat is done, he quickly plucks the wash cloth from his fingers, cleaning it for a moment under the stream of water, before catching Karkat by the jaw, slowly, languidly, wiping the paint he left there himself off one cheek. "There, motherfucker. Now ain't we fuckin' bare as sin all here."

Of course Gamzee would do the same in return, after that. To his credit, it does get Karkat to relax a little, even if he does spend the whole time frowning up at him. Then again, how often is it that he isn't?

He grumbles, "As bare as your pan is of any shred of intelligence. Are we done now?"

Gamzee leans in again, pressing his cheek to Karkat's again, but no matter how much he wriggles there is no paint getting stuck anyway now! "Yeah, we done."

Karkat heaves a slow sigh, but does not actually shove Gamzee away from the nuzzling now. His cheek is safe from paint-related atrocities.

When he pulls back, though, he aims to pull Gamzee with him by the hand. "I hope you know it's your fault I lost my extra time to set up the pile, so you better help me with it. You are one of the morons who set them up for dumb reasons in the Veil. Come on."

And if he follows, it will be back to his block.

"Means more if you get on the fuckin' construction of that miracle together, bro, I don't mind." Besides, Gamzee is indeed skilled in the ways of making a pile. Though his horn pile might have been filed away in his sylladex for a while now --since Equius came back full of fright of horns and he has no taste for testing how good it is now-- he did keep his skills top notch by ever so often heaping clean warm laundry together in giant piles for napping on.

He scowls. "You could have said that instead of making me go through the whole thing with the paint, you know."

With a motion of his hand, however, Karkat beckons him to join in constructing this thing. Blankets, pillows, whatever's soft: he grabs them one by one, leaving it to Gamzee to organize the pile shape proper. He can handle that, right? At one point he drops down to dig two plushies from under the bed: twin stuffed ~~crabdads~~ copies of his lusus, one obviously handmade. It provides more for the pile that way, and out of anyone, it won't hurt for Gamzee to see them.

Gamzee understands. He has a stuffed plushie of his lusus too.

He takes each thing Karkat hands him, quickly building a rather competent (and nicely soft) pile out of it. He fusses a little with the blankets, giving a crabdad plushie a smile before placing it somewhere, before he leans back. Yeah, this is good. As good as they can make it with just the stuff from Karkat's room.

Reaching over, he catches Karkat's arm, tugging him towards the pile. "Come on. Get the fuck in here with me."

Better something soft than something composed of hard metal edges and constant honks. With the pile complete, and Gamzee tugging, Karkat easily goes over to flop onto the piled mass. The hard part is not just closing his eyes after he's down there. It's infrequent that exhaustion gets the better of him, but it's been threatening to since earlier - which brings them to the whole purpose of this.

Though the moment he spends to get comfortably positioned is partly just for that, it's also to buy time to think. "... I don't even know where to start on this," he says eventually, giving up on a bit of blanket he fussed at.

Excuse you, the honks are very relaxing.

Gamzee waits for him to stuff fussing at the pile, tucking himself a little bit closer so he can wrap one arm around Karkat. Not just to comfort Karkat, but also to calm his own nerves that have been left a little too frayed after this whole day. "Wherever you start is a start. We can figure it the fuck out."

The arm is welcome at a time like this, and Karkat places a hand to his bicep in turn, thumb rubbing soft over the edge of his sleeve. It's a small gesture, but not one without meaning.

"It's just a lot to think about, you know? Even after sitting in that stupid clinic for all that time I've barely gotten anywhere in sorting it out," he begins. His gaze has settled around the collar of his shirt. "But I guess that makes as good a point as any. I know you had to be worried for him, and they helped him, but... They had to take his hands. Amputate them, I mean--there wasn't... anything else they could do about it. You saw them yourself. Before I did, too."

That comes as a little bit of a surprise, but not as a shock. And the surprise only stems from the fact that Gamzee had very much not let him dwell on Signless' hands. They had looked a mess, but he was no-one who knew medicine beyond the very common 'how to put a bandaid on a scraped knee' and as such he had had no idea what the doctors would've been able to do with that. Maybe miracles. Who knows.

"He'll be okay, you'll see, brother. Gonna be right as the motherfuckin' rain. We get to getting him some all of those robotic motherfuckin' prongs what our bros does like to build and he'll be chill as all fuck with them."

For all some knowledge of first aid has been a necessary skill to Karkat, having the blood he does, salvaging the Sufferer's hands is beyond anything he could ever imagine. That the doctors couldn't? Not a surprise in the least. All the same, he's obviously not glad, even if the loss is far preferable to outright dying.

The idea of robotic prostheses is in turn an obvious one, but it deepens his frown. "From who? We've only got, what, Equius and Darkleer around, don't we? The grubfucker who executed him, and the grubfucker's descendant," he seethes, not holding back one drop of hatred from his tone. "Do you really think he'd take help from them?"

Gamzee lets the hate wash over him without a reaction. For all he understands Karkat's feelings, he doesn't share them, but it really isn't the place to argue about it. Wouldn't get either of them any more chill. Instead he shifts his arm, raising his hand to stroke his cool fingers over the side of Karkat's face.

"I dunno know, we'll gotta have to fuckin' ask him, speak on it and shit." He combs his fingers through Karkat's bangs, pushing them aside. "Else we find some other motherfucker what can. Loads of different peeps here at all to be possessing skills what we ain't even can get our imagine on for. Maybe one of them can help."

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