Title: Price
Words: 4000
Pairing: John/Karkat
AO3 Link: here
Warnings: Yes. Hover to read, or skip to the endnotes.

Notes: This is a companion to Prize. It will not make sense unless you’ve read that first.

Summary: It is an awesome thing, to be loved by a god.

*

*

The monument is blue. It rises thirty yards into the evening sky, and tiny flame sticks are embedded in its outer shell: flickering vortex trapped fireflies. They cover the entire surface, all the way up, thousands on thousands on thousands of lights. Too many to count. Too many, and the image flips. You are lying on your back and staring at a galaxy of quickening suns, you are tumbling towards their reflection in a distant ocean below. The ground slips away.

There is a hand at your shoulder, holding you in place. You do not fall.

It is the first day of the windy season on this world, when cropseeds are passed up from the undercontinent in a long cycle. Each gust that pushes the tower lights to flicker is met by cheering from the people thronged through the streets of the city. They are dancing. It is a Holy day.

The monument rises in lumpy levels. A beehive sitting hollow in a dark room, and the crunch of tiny dried out wings under your heel as you approach. A carelessly rendered birthday cake, viscid splats of icing smoothing out the harsh angles.

The hand around your shoulder tightens.

“John.”

He’s watching the festival with a flattened expression - narrowed eyes, narrowed mouth. You say his name and he grants you his attention, rotating on the axis of himself. Instead of the aliens, he calmly regards you, weighing the most entertaining response to your inadequacy.

It’s for you to speak in your defence. You know so many of the wrong things to say. Don’t and Stop and Isn’t it enough that they love you?

You say, “If I wanted to watch you behave like a wriggler claiming an oinkbeast’s prolapsed asshole as its hive, I could have stayed in my block and put on the director’s commentary of A Remake Of The Movie In Which A Large Asteroid Is Discovered To Be On A Collision Course With An Inhabited Planet, And Since None Of That Planet’s Trained Space Farers Are Prepared To Destroy The Threat It Instead Becomes The Responsibility Of A Motley Drillaging Team; Interpersonal Conflicts Develop Due To The Romantic Lead’s–”

“You mean Creamsicle Alien Armageddon,” John interrupts.

“Right,” you say. Dusty sweetness of overturned sand as John transports himself in a gust into the center of the scene, and orange scale creature Bruce Willis grimacing reflexively under a humourous hat. Flat glare of sun burning the scene into an indistinguishable white haze.

John’s breath huffs, amused, into your hair. “That’s not the point, Karkat,” John says. “I told them what I wanted. I used very clear instructions! They were the ones who decided to build this annoying thing instead, even though I created a universe for them and everything. It is not very grateful.”

Stars picking out the path around you. The crisp, verdant smell of lilypads in medium. “I created your universe,” you say.

“Yeah!” John says. “And I really appreciate that. Is there something you want from me?”

“I–”

You want…

You want to not be. Here. To leave this quaint and incorrect ritual. People had wings, on this world, but the storms proved too fickle and treacherous. Now they have opposable digits, but they still jump and pirouette into the wind. Their blood remembers it had been their birthright to fly.

The dancers’ feathers glint in a thousand million pinpoints of fire light, and you want to turn away.

The whirling feathers are the sweeping arm of a spiral galaxy, gold silver pathway leading through. Are a waterfall of stars crashing down. They are the pool the water fills. They are the frog that lives in the pool. They are the frog’s bright and hungry tongue as it pulls you in, insignificant plucked fly creature, no wings to escape. It swallows. You are inside. You are falling along a spiral armed waterfall. At the bottom of the universe is a pool.

John laughs. He says, “I am not keeping you anywhere! You are a free man! Or a free goofy alien bug person, I guess? But you’re right, Karkat. It is time to end this party.

"And I’ll do it your way, buddy, and only remind them how things are supposed to go. I am totally a generous and forgiving god!”

John lets go of you, but Space tethers you to the surface of the world. You do not fall.

As a stage, John picks a high stone altar before the monument, and the people know him. They stop leaping and whirling, but the cheering grows louder, becomes prayer chants and victorious shrieks.

John offers his audience a cheerful wave and a wide grin - long row of flat, shearing teeth. The voices increase until John tires of them and swallows the noise in a strengthening gale. They think John summoned himself because he is pleased with their celebration. They are waiting to see how he’ll reward them.

He chooses one of the aliens and brings it to him with a puff of wind. It’s smaller than most of the other members of its species; John is drawn to newness.

He reaches, very gently, and takes the child’s hand. It looks to him with eyes that are larger than John’s and iridescent in a way that dizzies you: gold eyes blinking slowly in a reflection. The feathers on its shoulders tuft up in every shimmering colour of godblood, blue and pink and green and red. Toy satin scalebeasts glinting under a weak, false sun. A furred green hand laying gemstones at your feet, polished and cut to brilliance. You step forward and they tear through your skin. Your footprints paint the path as you walk it.

The glistening skin of the frog you chase in water, your body off-balance and compensating for pants that refuse to stay hiked to your knees. Your hands are edged with golden flametips that flicker in the underwater currents. They turn over, five and five, images in an uncracked mirror.

You place your hand over John’s and carefully unwind each finger. John doesn’t resist you. He observes with mild confusion as you take away the child’s hand and cover his palm with yours. The child is no more concerned by your presence than John’s. You have belonged to his story before you made each other.

“Karkat?” John says. The storm swallows the voices of the crowd, but his words are the whisper of air between your horns. “What are you doing?” he says, and –

– Empty air under your blade, flesh evaporating before metal touches. You land badly, your ankles folding and the floor hitting your knees.

What are you doing? John says, and the carpet is soft beneath your legs. John likes everything soft, lacking points, edges filed down to nubs. In the beginning, you thought he had been made for you. John holds your wrist above your head and frowns at the contents of your fist. Weighing.

The blade is a pointed silver crescent. He unwraps each of your fingers from the handle and lifts the weapon away, but he doesn’t let your hand fall. His thumb is a line of warmth under your palm.

He climbs down to kneel with you. John smiles at you with fondness and radiating warmth, and you admit the truth. I don’t want to hurt you.

Aww, buddy. You don’t have to worry about that! I would never let you. Sharpness in your chest, and John says, I get it. Sorry, man.

I know that stabbing people is just a way of saying “hi” in your culture, but I need to be fair to my subjectpals. It would look like I was playing favourites if I let you get away with - he giggles, hehehe - murder.

I’m going to have to teach you a lesson, so that you remember.

He presses his lips to your horn and moves down, wipes tears off your cheeks, raises your weaponless hand and kisses the innermost point on your wrist, where arteries run close to skin. Your pulse shudders beneath his lips. Breath and blood.

But I still forgive you, okay?

– John is shuddering, doubled over, clutching at the marble statue rendition of his own thigh. Tears run from under his glasses; shadowed spots bloom on god blue fabric. He is laughing.

What are you doing? you say, and John waves at the corpses scattered between him and you. They sprawl inelegantly, beak mouths open to gasp. Heavied eyes in green furred faces and hands twisted, talons stabbing into dirt.

Oh geez, dude, didn’t you hear them? So great.

They breathe oxygen! Like you! But I– John stops to expel a harsh line of giggles –I replaced the entire atmosphere with helium!  He removes his glasses and wipes his eyes with his trailing god hood. I can’t believe you missed it. When they realized something was happening, it was all Ahhh! and Nooo! and What the fuck! oh no oh no help! His voice is pitched high, and it cracks as he laughs. It was my best prank so far!

Although it was over pretty quick. Maybe next time I should change it more slowly, what do you think, Karkat?

You take a step backwards and stumble over a body, mouth open in gasp. Green fingers limp on carved roadstone. No. These are acid-burned, orange scale hands. Are a billion glutinous tentacles, deflating in a wet, buzzing chorus. You lose your balance, rushing through air to ground.

You do not fall. John catches you. His arms cinch your body to his chest.

You are saved.

– The infinity door swings open. On the other side is blackness and newly hatched stars. You are screaming and irrational, but John says patiently, Of course you are coming, Karkat. There’s no reason not to bring you. He says, I would not ever leave you behind.

You cross the threshold of a universe, and arriving is not velocity, not direction. It is expansion of space. Infinity swells around you, rushing out from the center.

From the inside, you are so very small.

– You’re watching a movie. Matthew McConaughey is a universal constant. There is a piece of popcorn in your hair, scratching against your horn, but you don’t stop hugging yourself to brush it away.

John wraps an arm over your shoulders, friendbuddy style, and you threaten to snap it off and shove it down his throat. He backs off easily, entertained by your grumpiness; although he does not stop prodding you at good parts.

Run, and you’re pushed back into the couch. The air presses you down, a force implacable as gravity.

Beside you, John goes quiet and stares at you. Weighing. The conversation has been a blur of horns pounding pressure, but his considering silence is dropping into freefall.

You’re wrenched into your corner of the couch. The cushions are soft beneath your legs. John unwraps your hand from your chest and you don’t fight him, but lips pressed against your wrist startle you into reacting. He winks at you. He brushes his mouth over your knuckles, presses his tongue to the sensitive base of your claw.

What are you doing? you say.

John snickers. Aren’t you curious about sloppy interspecies makeouts? I have decided that I am totally curious.

What the fuck happened to your human gay thing? you say, and John flops backward. He watches you, bright eyes under long lashes. Pfft. It’s not the same thing. You’re not really a boy, right? You are an alien. It doesn’t count.

Taste of bile against your teeth, even through the freezing clench of fear. John bounces over to your side of the couch. His shirt is a day-blue canopy.

John clambers over you like a trap closing shut. He takes the piece of popcorn away from your horn and sticks it in his mouth, gnashing the husk messily with his backmost, grinding teeth. Swallows. His neck is long and deceptively fragile.

He says, What’s wrong?

And across the room, the screen goes to credits. Movie night is finished. Anyway, I thought you wanted to kiss me, John says, and what you want more than anything else is to keep him here with you. With only you, no one else in his reach. In this moment, where nothing is changing.

You wish desperately for more

Time.

– You unwind John’s grip and replace the child’s hand with yours.

“What are you doing?” John says, and the sky is purple the sky is green is orange is black the sky is lighting your eyelashes from behind in a tower of distant sunrises.

“You never think this shit through,” you say. “In a hundred generations, the bones of some random feathery asshole aren’t going to be proof of anything but that a god-drunk priest got murder happy and decided to illustrate a fairy tale with his own rancid enema squirts. If you want them to do this right, you have to give them something to fucking remember.“

John’s eyes are tight at the edges. He’s been immortal since the beginning, skating over time without being changed by it, and he can no more comprehend mortal motivations than you can stare down a microscope and empathize with the microscopic creatures swimming in your blood. But for you he will try, and watching him struggle aches.

You hold his palm more tightly. "It’s okay,” you say. “I promise. You have to trust me.”

“Of course I trust you, Karkat,” John says. “You’re my best friend.” He leans his forehead against yours. The gale buffs the hair at the back of your neck, but the air is calm between you.

“Pinky swear,” he whispers, and you laugh, smile cracking in answer to his grin. You roll your forehead across his, tips of your horns brushing through strands of hair, and John kisses you.

Then he kills you.

*

John lays you down on the polished blackness of stone. His lips brush your horn; the warm surface network of capillaries are constellations you have mapped with every piece of yourself. Galaxies dance around each other like brilliant feathered aliens unaware of how fast they’ll burn through, but John is a constant.

He carries down, exploring carefully as though you are something precious and novel.  Your horn, your mouth, the inside of your thigh, the empty yearning muscles along your back that will never support wings.

He opens you with gentle reverence. John peels back the front plate from your thorax and presses his lips to your platelet sponge. He smiles, and his mouth is stained red as biting through, red as you snapping fangs into his tongue, backed against a opaline corridor wall and hissing - John looking up from the hand at his lips, frustrated and offended. He is trying to comfort you, but you don’t understand and trolls are sooo fucked up!

John unwinds the dark ribbons of your digestive tubes and places them around you, and your body has never learned to die.

Thick organ blood seeps over stone and your body fights for itself, bloodpusher pounding, reflex muscles twitching. Worshipers dance behind you with feathers splayed and sparkling. They are gas giants spinning, they are nebulae dying. They are the winking of vibrant blue eyes.

John takes out your bloodpusher last and it shudders in his hand, spilling crimson. The trailing side membranes flutter, wings straining at last into freedom.

John presses his lips to your heart, and where he touches, you are sacrament. You are Holy. You are whole.

*

Your first hatching is a joke of causality. There is no slow quickening of egg yolk into larva, merely a difference of one quantum tick between nonexistence and a bright sack of protein and skittering legs.

Your second hatching you fight for with half-hardened claws and four less legs by count. Other trolls emerge alongside you, all of you sticky and navigating the world with strange senses, balanced on untested limbs. You’ve lost teeth to your cocoon, but the remainder are new and sharp. You are hungry.

Your third hatching is a stillbirth into green flame.

This is every one after. You know nothing but thirst. Taste of life in your mouth, pushing your throat open, and you are greedy for it. Your airsacs expand into the chasm in your thorax; you are an infinite, unfillable void.

John pulls his mouth off yours and you chase him, arcing up with creaking, almost-mended bones. Between his thighs, your leg stings with the rawness of flesh unused to skin, and you grind into him helplessly, begging contact.

John swallows your lips and exhales the rest of your life, and the return hurts the way becoming always must. Fire behind your eyes: impacting pressure of a soul crammed into a few dozen ounces of cranial space.

You exist. You are. You remain.

John grins down at you. His weight is a warm heaviness draped over your hips, and his thumb traces the shape of your hand from knuckles to fingertips, radiating out to four thick points of claw and the smooth stump of half-finger. Click of flat teeth slicing down, the grinding crunch of bone. But I still forgive you, okay? and John’s smile dripping, red as dying.

“Hi, Karkat,” John says.

“Worthless human,” you say, and John smooshes his lips happily into your eyebrow.

“Yep, that’s me!”

The block around you has been filled with buildings, massive and left to decay into ruins, but you see the shine of a preservation field where starlight hits the horizon. The city has been dead eight centuries or eight thousand centuries, dormant and waiting for John to become bored of your absence. You see no feathered beings: they have destroyed themselves or recovered flight in the form of powered engines and left for new worlds. They’ve discovered the seeds of the Game and ascended. They’ve learned better than to tread near sacred spaces.

The blue layer-cake blasphemy is replaced by a smooth rectangular monolith reaching into the sky. Four impaled circles glow above it like distant gold moons.

You smile up at John, eased and vindicated. “I knew they would listen. You would be happy. But remembering… it’s so hard.”

“Huh?” John’s eyes flick to the tower behind you. “Oh, right!

"Yeah, thanks Karkat, that’s great! And also it is time to get up now, because there is something I would like to show you.”

John pulls on your shoulders, rolling you up from the slab. The stone is weathered outside the protection of your bones. You waver and stumble as John brings you over a wide circle of crimson flower petals in halted decay, but you are supported in his grip. You do not fall.

He leads you away from the altar. You walk, and the glow of the tower fades. The sky darkens. Blades of vegetation crush wet and fragrant between your toes. Plantlife keeps low on this world, in the valleys where the wind comes, its roots gripping tight to the soil.

John points into the sky. “Notice anything different?”

You don’t. This is every black and speckled sky. You follow his direction: living sails twisting through the center of a gas giant’s ancient storm. Or those have perished with the cooling of their solar system. Or that world could have been anywhere.

John grasps your horns and steers your gaze to a particular piece of sky. It is darker than the rest of the night, but there is still a sprinkling of faint, famished white dots, and overlaid on them a brighter pattern. You fill in the imaginary lines between the stars: two circles, trailing lines like the ellipse of a shared orbit. A face grinning at you with reflection-grey skin and lips painted John’s-eye blue, brandishing a page from a yellowed book: illustration floating on a sea of faded text. The sketched man’s face twists in spider lined agony, pinned eternally to the page by red-inked chains.

“Do you like it?” says John. “This is my testament to the guy who created me.”

Green static and jewel flower lilypads. Red leaking under cracked black carapace; scepter and crown. “I created your universe,” you say.

“You totally did, buddy.”

“Oh.” The stars glimmering in the atmosphere are swirling feathers in candlelight. The shine in a frog’s eye. “Thank you,” you say.

John lets go of your horns abruptly, but as you collapse, he wraps his arms around your abdomen and pulls you tightly to himself. He eases both of you down, and you’re curled together in the wide leaves, looking up at a universe.

"I found this really great planet with movies that last a hundred years. When you become an actor, you are required to pretend to be your character forever, even if they are a ghost or an alien or an evil baby eater - no offense! And if the writer says you get married you really have get married and do, you know, love scenes and stuff. And if they kill off your character you actually get shot or poisoned or a piano dropped on your head and you die! For real! It’s awesome! Score players follow you around and do sound effects.

"I told them I was going to come back with my best bro Karkat! I told them all about you, dude. They’re going to love you. And then I gave them a godly friend-commandment to have more shows about people kissing because those are your favourite. I don’t think they really understood the quadrant thing though.

“And there is even a Hollyworld alien Dane Cook! If we hurry he might not be completely old and dead yet.”

You are resting against John’s chest. His words flow around you, but he desires more of your attention. John pokes you in the horn, a sharp twinge down freshly woven nerves. “Hey, Karkat, you should make that hilarious noise. The one that sounds like the time you swallowed a chainsaw, remember? Here, like this…“

Your breath thickens in your throat and changes direction, rattling through your lower thrum box. Your whole thorax vibrates in a low, purring hum. In the beginning, John plays a giant keyboard and his denzien changes the world. You are a less complicated instrument. John plays that you are safe and loved and comforted, and it is truth.

His chin tucks warm against your scalp, and he laughs. "When I hug you, my teeth rattle!”

“Oh man, and on our way to Hollyworld, we have to stop at this other planet. I replaced their moon with a giant ball of apple juice ice cream as a prank, and they are due to develop space travel any time now. I cannot wait to see their faces!” He giggles hehehe, chest shaking with amusement, and trails into quiet. The night breeze settles. Silence of medium as John reaches for a door handle. On the other side is Everything, still distant and pristine.

“I missed you, Karkat,” John says. “The universe is a really empty place when you are not in it.” In the calmed air, with only his voice to push it, his voice rings out small and lost. Your speech parts are being otherwise used, so you draw close and nuzzle under his ear, at the softest part of his throat. John clutches you like an anchor.

Above, the universe is huge and cold and vastly, incomprehensibly young. There is so much left of it for you to see.

*

*

Notes and Warnings and Extras and Stuff:

The first draft of this was written a year and a half ago, as a punchline to the question of “exactly how great is tumblr user odditycollector’s ability to decipher context cues.”

You see, a year and a half ago is when urbanAnchorite posted a tumblr meme about THINGS THAT ARE NOT OKAY in otp ships.

I, naturally and reasonably, assumed that the highlighted list items were the NOT OKAY things, and therefore the unmarked items were perfectly acceptable.

In case you haven’t clicked on the link, this was the entry on John/Karkat:

And that is why I found myself, several minutes later, frowning at the computer screen and muttering “these shipping opinions are BULLSHIT…

…because how can you HAVE non-con necrophilia WITHOUT acknowledging sex as a thing that happens?”

I did realize my mistake eventually, but by then it was too late. I had decided writing the Perfect John/Karkat Fic As Described Above was a personal challenge. No edgy content like direct references to sex, porn, or breakups. Just a simple ship fic about the rest of that stuff.

It was pretty easy, as it turns out. I had a head start with “Prize”, after all. Making it postable, OTOH, that was super hard. Many thanks to edictalis and inkstrangle, for telling me both “yes, you should post it” and “but not yet.” It would still be a drawerfic without their help.

Also, as an extra, one time I ended up procrastinating on editing this thing by making a fanmix instead? This was not really helpful to the cause, but I have uploaded it to 8tracks anyway.

Link Here - http://8tracks.com/odditycollector/myths-wrongly-interpreted (Tracklist below)

8tracks makes you use a cover image, so here is a john nebula.

(Which I am happy with, but still think it looks cooler in Small:)

1.   
Without Mythologies by The Weakerthans
and forever be able to run away without contending/ with myths wrongly interpreted/ with Pain/ a harsh wind

2.   
The Night Descending (live version) by Iron & Wine
Black hair, the night descending/ Baby never puts her trust in/ Tight black tie too quick to laughter/ Ain’t no telling what he’s after

3.
Psalms 40:2 by The Mountain Goats
In the burning fuselage of my days/ Let my mouth be ever fresh with praise

4.
The Water by Wax Mannequin
You climb in my body/ Fight with my empty body/ Power and glory, showered with stones

5.
White Words by Eliza Rickman
White winds blow, drifting over the inside/ Cold breath flow, chill a soul on the outside

6.
Keep Me High by Adeline
Oh my love/ See my blood red for you/ A dried sponge/ Suddenly wet from you/ My red lips/ Soft and ready for you

7.
Never Look Away (live, piano only version) by Vienna Teng
If you’re a stranger to your soul/ I’ll bring you to your birthright/ I want the storm inside you awoken now/ I want your warm bright eyes

8.
Possession (piano version) by Sarah McLachlan
And I would be the one/ to hold you down/ kiss you so hard/ I’ll take your breath away/ and after I wipe away the tears/ just close your eyes dear

9.
And You Shall Know No Other God But Me by Thea Gilmore
You’ll be biting your lip/ But it all comes down to this/ I’m the shadow you chase/ I’m the sting when you breathe/ And you shall know/ no other god but me