[HS][Fic] Handling Zombies (Kanaya, Karkat, Vriska)

[wallwalker]

Title: Handling Zombies
Fandom: Homestuck
Characters: Implied Karkat♦Kanaya, Kanaya♦/♥Vriska
Rating: SFW
Length: 1029 words.
Content notes: Talks about chatting and quirks without actually showing them. Set before Hivebent, not long before SGRUB properly starts. No warnings.
Summary: Dealing with zombies is easier than being a kid and growing up.
First posted on fan_flashworks.

Your name is Kanaya, and you occasionally must deal with zombies.

It is not something that you chose to do, since actually going to seek out and hunt them is very close to suicidal. But your hive rests in a location that is thick with the walking dead, and as they come out to bask in the hot Alternian sun they often congregate around your hive.

It is your own fault, you suppose - mythology claims that the walking dead enjoy bright colors as much as they love bright light, because their eyes were so scorched by the sun when they awoke as shambling horrors that you cannot see anything that is not bright. And you are stubbornly unwilling to do anything to tone down your hive - you are too attached to every banner and garden that you have overseen, every topiary and flower bed that you have planted and shaped. Better to defend them than to let them be destroyed, you say. The corpses of the walking dead make good fertilizer, once they have been thoroughly dismemebered.

You will not admit it to anyone, but you honestly enjoy it, sometimes too much. You sometimes must stop yourself from going further, seeking out more than the occasional shambler who comes to nibble at your banners. But there are other things that you have not yet accomplished. You owe a debt to your lusus, for one, and... well. There are always the dreams. But you still will go out and handle the ones who directly threaten you, as a matter of pride.

Your friend Karkat grumbles about it, but Karkat grumbles about practically everything. "You should let me come and join you," he says, shouting from your husktop screen in his customary gray text. He stays up to talk to you sometimes. "Let me get some threshing practice in, okay? You know I'm up for it."

You always smile at the thought, and he tends to tense up when his feed catches up to it. Your morail says your smiles are terrifying - that you look like you're about to go on a rampage - but he doesn't seem terrified at all. Not by you, anyway. "We live too far away from each other, Karkat," you type in your customary fashion, carefully emphasising each word, so as not to come across as being as pushy as he does. "You would not be able to get here in a single night's journey."

"I could crash somewhere," he argues, and there's something on his face that you don't (musn't) recognize, something wistful. "Hell, Sollux's hiveblock is somewhere between ours, and that grubpuncher could use some company once in a while, besides his own fucked-up thinkpan - um. Sorry."

"You need not apologize for swearing in my presence," you answer, bemused. He would never apologize if this were one of his ridiculously charming memos that he sends to the rest of his and your cohort, but it seems different when the two of you are discussing something amongst yourselves.

"Yeah, I know. Just forgot myself a sec. But, look, point is I could figure something out if it meant you wouldn't have to fight alone."

"That is very kind of you, Karkat," you type, but you do your best to ignore the tender feeling that swells somewhere beneath your pusher. "But I would not wish to take you away from your studies for too long. Becoming a threshcutioner is prohibitively difficult, as you yourself have said."

"Yeah, but this would be practice," he protested. "I could study at night, or whatever -" Finally he shook his head and sighed. "Okay, fine. You don't want me to come help. I'm not gonna guarantee that I won't just show up anyway, but whatever."

You raise an eyebrow. The feeling has just gotten a good deal harder to ignore. "I do hope you would not take such risks only to spite me," you type back.

"We'll see." He actually smiles a bit as he types, and you rush to hit the screencap key before it fades. You actually caught the tail end of it that time - you'll send it to him later, when he's rambling about how he never fucking smiles because everything's way too messed up, including him. He'll swear at you and then apologize for swearing, while still stubbornly refusing to admit that he was wrong - "It was just a glitch, Kanaya, you've gotta get that feed fixed. I'll bug Sollux for you if you don't have the globes to do it yourself!" And then all will be right in the world again.

Karkat didn't stop typing while you were screencapping, though. "So what about somebody else?" he asked. "Why won't your crazy morail go and slaughter some zombies with you, anyway?"

"Because," you type, and there's more, but you can't seem to say it. The idea of bringing Vriska with you on a hunt and putting her in danger washes over you like ice water. For a moment an old flight of fancy comes back to you with haunting clarity, Vriska lying dead in your arms, you leaning down to kiss her (on her cerulean lips, at last, where you've wanted to kiss her for so long but never dared) and beg her to come back, only to see her lying terribly and unnaturally still -

The screen beeps at you, and you look back up and realize that your eyes are full of tears. "Yeah?" Karkat's asked, and he's peering at you with the kind of belligerent concern that he's far too good at. Your pusher does a sort of flip....

"I am sorry," you type, keeping your eyes open so that he doesn't see them. That would be allowing this friendship to go too far. "I have to go."

"Okay," he types, but his brow is furrowed. "Um. I'll... be here if you come back. Not much going on lately."

"Thanks," you respond, but then you have to blink, and a couple of tears run down your cheek before you can cut the connection.

You're looking forward to dawn, you think, angrily wiping your face clean. Handling zombies is much easier than thinking about these things.