Chapter Text
==> Karkat: Be an alien.
It's not exactly waking. You don't think you were asleep. It's more like being gathered in, an explosion in reverse, thoughts and memories first and then a sense of your body being there, as if it wasn't before. Your weight; the press of the ground against your back. A tickle like grass, air moving on your skin. Why is that feeling so strong? It's like you're made of nothing but nerves.
Just breathing is such a big damn deal right now. Opening your eyes might be a bad idea. The light on your eyelids is warm and yellow, the kind of light the humans like.
Those fucking humans. You remember. They won. They won everything. They even won you. Won all of you back from your dead-end fucking universe and took you with them into their reality-spraining victory. Cheating nookstains didn't even fight; they won by 'shenanigans', that peculiarly human trick of winning-by-not-playing. And in that inside-out, backwards way of theirs, they never even considered keeping all the spoils for themselves.
It should be so humiliating. It was humiliating in the moments between hearing what they intended and watching it start to happen. You were so fucking angry you wanted to rip your own fucking skin off and strangle yourself with it.
Where'd the rage go?
Later. Is the time for worrying about that. Now is the time for shielding your eyes so you can open them. The light makes you squint and blink, but it's not really painful. Not at all, in fact, after your eyes have had a few moments to adjust. Which is absurd, because that is definitely daylight shining through shimmering leaves, definitely a pale blue sky above the trees.
And then you notice your hand.
"What."
Your hand is... pink.
"What the actual fuck." You sit up abruptly, stick your hands out in front of you and stare at them as if you can turn them normal by glare power. They stay pink. Your skin is as thin and translucent as a human's. No wonder it's so sensitive.
Your hands fly to the top of your head. Horns, please still be there -- you gasp in relief as your fingers find them. But your hair is weirdly soft and limp, and your ears are round, too high on your head, even more sensitive than your hands. You probe your teeth with your tongue. The front ones are flat. You have stupid flat omnivore teeth, and you can only thank the sticky dregs of your luck that they don't jut out and retardify your face like John's do.
What the nonsensical bulgesucking crazyfuck is going on here?
Your surroundings are not exactly chock full of answers. Trees, grass, bizarrely non-burny sunlight. The new world the humans created. Their idea of paradise. Which... is your idea of paradise too, really, because it's a whole lot like their world, which the twelve of you made. It's kind of nice to know they appreciated it enough to want to make one so much like it, you guess.
Nothing weird seems to be going on with your feet and legs, at least, so nothing keeps you from exploring in search of answers. Answers, not friends. You're not quietly terrified that something went wrong at the last instant and you're the only one here. That hot twist in your stomach is just... hunger. Or a virus or something. Maybe it's where your rage is hiding.
And when you spot a familiar pair of horns silhouetted against the brightness of a clearing, although you break into a sprint, it's not out of sheer relief. You're just in a hurry to do some reality-checking, that's all. "Tavros, holy shit, please be real."
Who said that last bit there? Was that you?
"Hi, Karkat," he grins, trotting to meet you. Trotting like a silly little wiggler, not rolling in a chair or lurching on robot legs or lying around being dead and
why are you sudddenly hugging him
there's nothing quadranty about it but it feels good like
like
you don't even have a goddamn analogy, this makes no sense but never mind that, "Why are you fucking brown?"
You release each other from this weird derpy human-hug, and he bounces back enough for you to look each other over. Tavros is sand-colored like you're pink, thin colorless human skin with the brown blood showing through. His horns are the same as they were, but his front teeth are flat and his ears are round. He's been halfassedly humanified just like you.
The yellows of his eyes are white. Not yellow. (You're going to need a word for that part eventually. Not the 'whites' of his eyes, though, that's just dumb.) The irises are copper brown.
"Oh shit," you say. "What the hell do my eyes even fucking look like right now? Actually wait. No. New plan. You don't tell me and I just pretend they're normal."
Tavros beams like a doofus. "We're, aliens!"
Fuck. He's right. You're aliens.