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Sometimes Karkat couldn’t decide if he was a really shitty auspistice or if his ashen leaves were just the worst fucking people alive.
Maybe it was both! A regular two for two. Maybe Karkat was a bullshit auspistice and had the awful luck to be ashen for the two stubbornest, most frustrating motherfuckers to ever be brought back to life on Earth C. That would fit right in with his general track record of bad life choices and worse destinies. Being the ineffectual middle leaf of two shit-spewing drama-mongering bulgelicks of truly epic proportions would be the perfect cherry on top of the shit sundae that was Karkat’s life, though admittedly things had been getting better since his escape from the interdimensional torture chamber known as SGRUB.
Still. Not being in constant danger of violent death was a bullshit standard for improvement.
He honestly wasn’t even entirely sure how he had ended up in this situation. Alive and well (for a given value of well) long past the age he thought he’d make it to, off Alternia, with basically everyone he’d lost back alive and in varying stages of healing, but tragically forced to have feelings for the two most idiotic nookchafes on the brand new planet’s surface.
Okay, sure, maybe there had always been a little bit of tension between him and Sollux, a nebulous undefined sort of thing that had led to some deeply embarrassing back and forth in their younger years and never resolved into anything before they did their half-death separation. But Eridan and Sollux? They’d hated each other with viciousness for a long time, but back on the meteor there hadn’t been anything romantic in it. It had been pure nonsexual murder-hatred, much more common than pitch feelings, the kind of general violence that got you gutted instead of kissed. And then, with what had happened… Karkat had thought there’d never be room for anything between them but rage and guilt, even with everyone alive again.
No one could really understand the game other than those that had lived (or not lived) through it, so those bonds weren’t easy to shake. Some of them (Feferi, for instance) seemed determined to take advantage of their newly granted adulthood and chance at a life in a less violent world, in the form of getting the gang back together (to the fullest extent they could manage) and then Dealing With It. But even when they were shoved into the same room, Karkat had figured too much had gone down between Eridan and Sollux for them to even be friends again, let alone anything romantic.
He had been partly right. Sollux and Eridan’s animosity hadn’t tipped pitch until after they had forgiven each other, after reincarnated proximity and the people they had in common forced them to hash shit out.
Well. For a given value of forgiven.
And that was the problem, really. There was forgiveness, of a sort, for shit that had gone down when they were younger and fucked up and scared out of their pans, forgiveness that worked to a certain extent, but there was still so much ugly, messy, painful history, all knotted up like scar tissue, and that would never go away. There was a reason you didn’t see Sollux trying it on with Vriska, and it wasn’t just because he still loathed her. There was too much under the surface. Eridan and Sollux were chill, now, or as chill as the two of them could ever really be, but things would always be a little too messed up in the background for them to be trusted in a normal blackrom. Even if things were mostly good, the damage that could result in the off chance things slipped out of control was too big of a risk. They were both too powerful, and they all had been given more chances than they should have already.
So. Enter Karkat. Ashen for the both of them to a truly unfortunate extent, and doing terribly at it.
There were two main problems when it came to acting as a proper ashen leaf for Eridan and Sollux.
1) They never fucking shut up. Was that a little hypocritical, coming from Karkat, as the president of the Fucking Hell I Literally Can’t Stop My Mouth From Moving Someone Please Gag Me With My Own Spleen club? Maybe, but it was true nonetheless. Those assholes could go on literally forever, fighting about nothing at all until the very last star in the miserable universe burnt out. They could start back up at any time, anywhere, with no warning.
2) They couldn’t keep their fingers off each other’s bulges for shit, even when Karkat was literally in the room.
That was the main reason he was a shitty fucking auspistice. He wanted to be with them, he had the right feelings in the right places (and some others, besides), he wanted to be a proper ashen third and do his job and keep them from tearing into each other, but not a single fucking thing he did made any difference.
It usually went like this:
The three of them would meet up. The location didn’t matter. One of their hives, a movie theater, someone else’s hive, a diner. Things would start out normal, even good: banter, and laughter, and video games, eating their weight in grubsauce-smothered fries (one of the better inventions of Earth C’s mishmash of cultures). And then, as it literally always had, some of the conversation would turn to idiotic arguments. That was a staple, it was part of troll culture, it wasn’t like they could be expected to keep themselves from having dumb arguments! But more often than not, Eridan and Sollux would keep pushing, and the arguments would get more vicious, and the next thing Karkat knew they’d either have their tongues down each other’s throats or their claws in each other’s skin. Karkat would yell himself hoarse trying to get them to separate, and they would just ignore him, like he wasn’t even there, and eventually he’d throw up his hands and stomp his feet and give up, and then he’d leave.
The next time he saw them, Eridan and Sollux would usually be wearing matching black eyes and apologetic expressions, and they’d promise to try harder next time, and it never worked.
Despite all of this, Karkat kept trying. God only knew why. Dave, who was technically a god and wouldn’t let Karkat forget it, implied he was subconsciously atoning for something. Or maybe just a masochist. And that was usually the point when Karkat tried to smother him with a couch cushion.
Tonight, the three of them were camped out on Karkat’s couch, with Karkat planted firmly between Eridan and Sollux. He’d hoped that maybe the fact that they were in his hive would force them to have some sense of propriety, which he knew wasn’t fucking likely — but more importantly, he couldn’t exactly back down and leave them to it in his own apartment. He was determined to make it work today.
He wasn’t sure how, though.
So far, things were actually proceeding as he’d planned. It was difficult for Eridan and Sollux to fuck or physically fight each other with Karkat squished in the middle, forcing them to make room for Troll Jesus. They were watching a movie, which was a stationary activity, and they could only do so much arguing before he had an excuse to bark at them to shut up. And movie discussions seemed unlikely to trigger the type of blow-out fights they liked to have, anyway.
Karkat had popcorn ready, and a comfortable couch, and a stack of truly excellent films with no blackrom sex scenes, and he was finally doing it. He was going to have a normal fucking ashen date that ended naturally, without anyone storming off.
Karkat was strangely aware of Eridan and Sollux when they sat like this, pressed between them on a couch that probably wasn’t entirely big enough for three adult trolls. He could fit a lot more people on it when his human friends were over. Proximity to Sollux always made Karkat’s skin prickle, the slightest tingle of leftover static from the lightning that shot through Sollux’s veins. Along with Aradia, he was the only one that even came close to running as hot as Karkat himself did. Eridan, on the other hand, was cool all over, not quite cold enough to sting like ice. It was a strange combination. It wasn’t bad, but he couldn’t imagine what it was like for them when they touched each other like they did.
He probably shouldn’t imagine it, as their auspistice, so it didn’t really matter.
They were about halfway through In Which A Pair Of Matesprits Obtain Troll Serendipity (which was a goddamn classic, in fact so goddamn classic that Karkat was the only one on this new planet with an existing copy, taken via captchalogue from Alternia to the meteor to Earth C) when Sollux stole the remote from its place on Karkat’s thigh and paused the movie.
“Hey!” Karkat bit out, twisting in his seat to hit Sollux with the full force of his glare. “I was fucking watching that, asshole, even if you couldn’t give two shits.”
“Chill, KK,” Sollux said, with one of his most irritating sniggers. “I just want to grab more popcorn, dipshit. We’re out.” He shook the empty bowl at Karkat, rattling the few hard kernels left inside.
“Ugh,” Karkat said, with more annoyance than he actually felt. “If you must interrupt this cinematographic experience for the boundless, gaping void of your digestion bladder, I suppose I’ll allow it.”
“Your graciousness knows no bounds, oh bulgeless one.” Sollux performed a mocking little bow, and then unfolded his pile of skinny limbs from the couch and headed towards Karkat’s kitchen, levitating the popcorn bowl behind him. Karkat didn’t come up with a comeback in time, so he hissed at Sollux’s retreating back instead.
“I’m actually gonna head to the ablution trap while we’re stopped, Kar,” Eridan said, pulling himself to his feet much more gracefully. He nudged Karkat on his way past him, gentle and ineffectual. “I gotta piss.”
“Thanks,” Karkat griped. “I really needed to know that. Fine, asshole. I’ll just sit here.”
So he just sat there.
And sat there.
And sat there.
After a while, Karkat was pretty damn sure popcorn should not take this damn long. Suspicion and anxiety slammed into him like a freight train, and the next thing he knew he was on his feet, so fast he didn’t remember moving.
The kitchen was empty.
Fuck. Fucking hell, that bastard. The popcorn was in the microwave, fully popped, so Sollux hadn’t been lying, but the kitchen was empty.
There was a bang from the hallway.
Karkat was going to kill them.
When he emerged into the darkened cavern of his hallway, Karkat didn’t need to wait for his eyes to transition to darkvision to know what was going on: Sollux had Eridan pressed into the wall, their bodies a startling interruption in the long line of the hall. A low growl was reverberating from someone’s thorax, but Karkat couldn’t tell whose, only that it was dark and pitch and bone-shaking. And then his eyes did adjust to the low light, and Karkat was all fury, his claws digging into the meat of his palms, even as the image of Eridan scraping a bloody line down Sollux’s lower lip made something hot and tight throb in Karkat’s gut, in his sheath. They were grinding their hips together even though that couldn’t be doing much for either of them with their jeans in the way, like they couldn’t stop gouging each other bloody long enough to even get their pants down, and fuck, it’d only been like fifteen fucking minutes, what was wrong with them? What was wrong with him, with Karkat, if he couldn’t even get them to keep apart for one fucking night, if he couldn’t do the most basic thing an auspistice is supposed to do—
Karkat wasn’t sure what his plan was when he lunged forward, but if he couldn’t do this much, if he couldn’t even try, he had no fucking business being their auspistice at all.
With a snarl in his voice and on his face, Karkat used all his strength and anger to try and yank the two of them off each other.
In the next instant, with a crackle of bright electricity, his head was slamming up against the door frame, and his wrist was dripping candy red from a swipe of Eridan’s claws. Pure instinct. This happened with auspisticism, sometimes — trolls were violent, and territorial, and even on Earth C, where there was less to be violent about, anyone getting in the middle of a blackrom pair in the throes of it ran the risk of getting hurt. Karkat had known that when he had gotten into it, but he didn’t usually intervene physically, so he hadn’t had to deal with it yet. Still. He knew what he was doing. Karkat grit his teeth and prepared to try again.
What he didn’t expect was for both Eridan and Sollux to turn to him instead, shoving away from each other. The pitch growling in the room came to an abrupt stop.
“Oh fuck, KK,” Sollux was saying, his pupil-less eyes gone wide. “Fuck, Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“You’re bleedin’,” Eridan said, sounding just as shocked. “Oh, hell, did I do that? Lemme see.”
Sollux elbowed Eridan in the ribs, pushing past him. “Like fuck you’ll see, you’re the one who made him bleed! I’ll take a look. I’ve dealt with more injuries, anyway.”
“I’ve actually died,” Eridan sniped back. “So I don’t think you got a monopoly on gettin’ injured.”
“Oh, sorry,” Sollux said, his voice gone faux consoling even as he reached a hand out for Karkat. “Did you bandage up the place where your legs separated from the rest of you? I must have missed that part after you blinded me.”
“Fuck!” Karkat said, entirely confused but no less irritated. “Stop it, both of you! You can’t cut it out for a goddamn minute?”
“Sorry, Kar,” Eridan said.
“Yeah,” Sollux said. “Sorry, KK.”
Karkat felt his brows knit together. He wasn’t expecting them to actually listen. This was the easiest they’d listened to him in… well, maybe ever. Not just in the course of their ashen relationship, but the whole course of their friendship, too. Usually these bastards had to be argued into submission. And the way they were looking at him, like they were both actually worried — it was kind of weird, being the focus of so much attention, both of them staring him down with big concerned eyes just because he’d gotten a little scratch. It made him feel over-warm and a little liquid inside. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done worse to himself even just while practicing with his sickles as a kid, and they both knew that. It wasn’t like he couldn’t handle it. They’d never seemed to care this much before.
Was it just because this time they’d been the ones to do it?
Karkat took a deep, steadying breath. Okay. He could work with this. If all the normal, natural routes of being an auspistice weren’t working for him… Maybe he’d try something a little unnatural. It wasn’t as if old Alternian culture was here to tell people the right way to do quadrants, it wasn’t like the drones were on their way. Karkat felt an idea forming, hard to catch as smoke, something that could slip away if he just let it end here, if he just stomped off again and let the cycle they were in keep on turning.
He wanted to break the cycle.
He reached for them both, hauled them a little closer by their wrists, watched them both soften like fucking — ice cream left out to melt.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Karkat said, surprised by the low, gravelly sound of his own voice. “I am going to be the one to tend to my own goddamn cut, because I’m not a wriggler. And then the two of you are going to come with me, and we are going to have a talk about how this relationship is going to work going forward, because what we’re doing is clearly not fucking working, and if I can’t keep you idiots off each other I might as well be the one to ensure it doesn’t go too far.”
Eridan and Sollux looked bemused, but they nodded, easy as anything, easy as things ever was with them, and followed him to his first aid kit like ducklings, only shoving at each other a couple times along the way, stopping when Karkat turned to glare at them.
Alright. Okay. Maybe this could work.