Title: An Olive Aberration
Fandom: Homestuck
Rating: 18+
Pairing: Unrequited Nepeta<3Karkat, implied Karkat<>Gamzee
Length: 1681
Content notes: Choose not to warn.
Author notes: For the "ghosts and gore" challenge.
Summary: He thought he was prepared for her ghost to show up. He was wrong.



You wake to a soft purr, and for a blessedly forgetful moment, before your pan starts working, you think, She's okay, thank fuck.

Then you realise the body curled around yours is too cold to be green, too cold even to be purple, and when you force your eyes open, the horns beside you in the pile are stained deep olive.

"I meowssed you while you were dreaming, Karkitty!" You're definitely not dreaming her voice, or her solidity, or the smell of her bloodstained wool coat, and if your sponge is capable of coming up with a catpun as awful as that, you're going to go find Kanaya right now and have her chainsaw your speech centres right out of your skull.

"Where the fuck were you?!" When she looks up, she has enough of her face left to look confused, and you elaborate quickly to spare her your otherwise inevitable horrified silence. "Ever since we left our session, I've been up to my nook in dead douchebags who won't stop gabbing about robots and "radness" and why I shouldn't say any goddamn words ever and it's only now I'm supposed to be awake that someone I actually like bothers to show up?"

One of her eyes blinks. You take care not to notice what the other one does. "You like me?"

Ohhhh fuck, that's her hopeful voice and now your face is hot and you hope you're not blushing. "No! I mean yes, but not like - I mean we're friends, I thought you knew that, but that doesn't mean... although given that our ancestors are all so terrible that even the goddman platonic ideal of terribleness is hiding its face in embarrassment just being around them, even Eridan would be better company, so you're nirvana in comparison." You hesitate uncomfortably. "Get the fuck off me, though, because this is really goddamn creepy." You try not to feel a pang at the disappointment in her ruined face as you squirm out of her hold and climb out of the hornpile, and find yourself still shivering.

"Fuck, it's freezing. Did you come in from one of Rose's fucking snow dreams?"

"Duh, of course not," she says, staring up at him without moving. "...is what AC says, twitching her tail in confusion at Karkat's antics!"

"Don't." You can't handle her roleplaying now, not when her head is a cross-section of itself. "Don't do this."

She frowns, and you flinch as her eyebrow draws itself down into the ruin. "The furrocious kitty stretches and... scatters the hornpile efurrywhere!" She acts out her words as she says them, and her arms bend in ways you're certain they're not supposed to, and something inside you says Run, but this is Nepeta, for fuck's sake, and you owe her this.

"She crawls out of the remains and begins to stalk her unsuspecting prey!" Broken armbones grind harshly on themselves as she pushes herself to her feet, and you can't think she didn't fucking do that on purpose. Nepeta Leijon doesn't need her hands to stand up. She never has.

"Nepeta..."

"The lioness corners her prey against the wall of his metal cave, and uses one mouth to lick his face and the other to -" her voice drops to a whisper and she punctuates her words by drawing her tongue harshly across your skin - "ask him - if - he - knows - her sneakret!"

She giggles, and you don't remember when your back hit the wall, but ghosts are douchebags like that and hard to say no to. It's not long before her icy tongue on your cheek is enough to trigger your fuck-off-and-leave-me-alone reflex anyway, and you struggle to shove her away. "The fuck? That doesn't even make sense, you don't even have two mouths - " Something's dripping on your shirt, you realise, and you can't stop yourself looking down to see the purple blood on her hand, and your protest stutters and derails. "I - when did you..."

She finishes her business of covering your face with gross Leijon-saliva, and draws back, raising an open palm to display the green and purple mixing to dull brown on her skin. "AC wonders if it's really pawsible Karkitty got that stupid while she was dead! Who do you think gave Gamzee those scars???"

You stare at her. "...oh."

She folds her arms and glares back, an unnerving sight with so much of her skull clubbed out of shape. "You didn't think about that at all? I'm very hissapointed, Karkat!"

You keep staring, and out of nowhere the pieces come together. The other ghosts you've met didn't carry their deathwounds (you even heard rumours that Tavros has been seen running), but Nepeta looks as though she's spent thousands of sweeps bleeding to death, millions with Gamzee's blood slow-drying on her claws, and suddenly you realise you're shivering harder than even the cold of the furthest ring could make you, and this...

...this isn't a dreambubble.

It's a haunting.

After Eridan's rampage, you promised yourself you wouldn't be paralysed again, you wouldn't let fear reach into your spine and freeze you still and leave you helpless. But you still remember everything you thought you knew about ghosts before the game, before you found out the truth about Aradia and decided all the ghost stories were as fake as Eridan's wizards, and you remember how all of those stories end. But this is Nepeta, the least frightening person you've ever met, and instead of ripping out your throat and using it to floss her remaining fangs, she just stands there looking at you as reproachfully as a troll with half a head can, and your terror drains away, leaving behind the old familiar guilt that molests your thinkpan so persistently that you figure you might as well just get a room with it and consummate your loathing. After all, her plight is all your fault.

"Sorry," you say awkwardly, and you know your shoe isn't meant to get the brunt of your apology but the alternative is to look her in the crumpled socket that was once an eye. "I should have thought. It's just... the others aren't like that. You're supposed to be whole, sort of - a projection of what you were before whatever killed you happened. Or maybe you're not and whoever's supposed to be enforcing the ghost rules is just as arbitrary and stupid as whoever designed this fucking game in the first place."

She hms and tilts her head a little further than she should be able to, and your bilesac lurches. "AC wonders if there is anything else Karkat would like to tell her?"

The next thing that happens, you blame on habit formed over the last few weeks of running away from your ancestor, because it certainly can't be Nepeta who causes it. A broken ghost catgirl waiting trustingly for you to say the right words is definitely not what dries up your mouth and freezes your tongue and makes the words scrape painfully across your squawk blister when you try to say them.

You say them anyway. "I don't really know what there is to say, Leijon, except... I guess I can say I'm sorry. I sent Equius to his death and you know that's not what I wanted but I still did it and I got you killed too and I can't apologise for the shit I did up on the roof because serendipity is serendipity and you of all people get that, right?" You're almost pleading, and when she nods, you feel like the ground underneath you has solidified from quicksand to wet mud. "But I guess I could say, 'Sorry for not doing it sooner' or some dumb-sounding shit like that."

"I'm hearing a lot of stalk about apologies, Crabkitty..." she says, looking dubious, and for a second you freeze up again because the penalties for displeasing a ghost are supposed to give subjugglators nightmares.

It's just Nepeta, you remind yourself, but you still shiver as you go on. "Yeah, okay, I'm getting to that, I. Uh, okay, I'll just do it. This is me saying, right this moment, that I'm sorry. I'm really sorry I got you killed and I guess for whatever else I did that means you're still," oh god how do you even describe her, "...like that, because you know it's got to be my fault somehow like every awful stupid shitty thing that's ever happened to us, so -"

Without warning, she lunges forward and grabs your hand, wrapping her icy fingers around yours, and you'd pull away, but she's stronger than you, and she holds fast. "Like this?" she asks, and she shifts her grasp to your wrist and lifts your hand to lay your fingers on the edge of her shattered skull. You bite your tongue as the sharp bone slices open your skin, you flinch at the terrible softness of the tissues underneath, but you let her lead you along the line of the break, and you watch the green mess turn a richer brown than on her hand as your blood leaks into her pan, and when she allows you to lift your hand away, the whole world is red and wavering.

"Like that," you agree softly. "Nepeta, I'm so fucking sorry."

This time you don't see her move, and you don't know what she's doing until you feel cold lips against yours, and you kiss her back because who are you to deny her?

When her lips recede, yours are so cold you don't feel it. You only realise when she whispers, "Thankyou, Karkitty," and when you open your eyes and blink away your tears, the walls are grey again, and you're alone.

--

You wake shivering in the hornpile, the lingering warmth of a body beside you, and your palm still smeared with green and purple. It shouldn't make you feel better. But it does.