capeandcowl2020 | Open Post 002

Her heart is hammering in her chest, and she's caught on a wire between hot and cold. Karkat's words practically spat in her face, how close he's standing, it's like having her front to a furnace, while the thin material of her nightdress is no protection against the icy chill of the window against her back, as cold there as against her shoulders.

He's different. That's what his anger tells her, the way he forms his words, the predatory snarl across his mouth. Words dry up in her throat, fear in her fingertips; her head is pounding from noise and fatigue and stress and fear. Her mind is still trying to wrap around the fact that this is Karkat before her now (but what if it isn't, what if this is a decoy, or a trap like he said, what if she's having another nightmare, what if—), it's hard to follow the imagery he's trying to paint.

When he reaches into his sylladex, she tenses, but when she sees what he pulls out, when she sees the broken device in his hand, she's moving before her conscious mind registers what's going on. With the speed of a knife's slash, Ruka snatches the collar from his unsuspecting grip, her hand wrapping tight around it, palm against the interior curve.

The place that spent so long pressed against Karkat's neck.

Karkat is different, yes -- not drastically so, but it's as though the jagged edges of his psyche have been sharpened, certain parts of him brought into sharper focus. He's had to harden much of his heart, and hide all of himself more entirely than he ever had to as a child, as a teen, even growing up a fugitive in this miserable regime.

At Ruka's sudden move, another change in him presents itself: he flinches, tensing as though bracing for a physical blow -- or worse. The recoil is involuntary, and only lasts a split second, but it's enough to allow her to snatch away the collar before Karkat can even realize what she's done, and then--

"Ahhh," he moans, freezing in place.

What she picks up through haptic empathy is everything Karkat Vantas felt for the past six months of his imprisonment. Blanketed over everything, at the root of everything, the most prominent emotion in the overwhelming cocktail of feeling is a terrible, gnawing fear. Fear of your captors, fear of yourself; your own weakness, fear of pain, fear of solitude, fear of death, fear of continued life, fear that paralyzes and fear that drives. The kind of terror that brings you to wake up screaming in the middle of the night and the kind that makes you hesitate. Woven through all of this -- almost as strong, and even more constant is loneliness. An endless, aching sense of isolation, the kind where you would take anything -- a word, a shift in expression, even leap at the prospect of torture if it meant your existence would be recognized, if it meant you would be allowed to interact with someone. The kind of loneliness that would drive someone to talk to themselves for hours. The desperate, hollow longing to see those you love coupled with the despair of the impossibility of that ever coming to fruition. Pain of varying intensity and type is splattered across the emotional tapestry like blood: from a backhand blow across your face to "accidental" failure to properly anesthetize you before a surgical procedure. Despair and defiance wage a furious war against one another, hate and anger fighting to overcome sorrow and futility, neither quite coming out on top. All of this is a mere glimpse of the emotions trapped in that collar.

But -- threading throughout it all, like delicate gold embroidery, thin and easily lost in the storm of emotion, is something else. Something brighter, something that -- while sometimes unacknowledged, or abandoned -- is never quite lost.

Hope. Hope for escape. Hope for death, in his lower moments. But always hope -- always there, and strengthening, the fresher the emotions are, the closer to the present, intensifying and solidifying until it comes to a head, the thrill of escape, the exhilaration of success, and then nothing.

Unfortunately for Karkat, that brightness is inaccessible to him. The feedback loop he gets from Ruka is limited to the darkness alone, and he is entirely unprepared for it. He'd grown used to being without his powers, and he shudders, entire body rigid, swaying in place, letting his past self wash over him.

It is a very good thing the window is closed.

Ruka doesn't think it, or fear that sort of fall. Not now. Not anymore. The remnants of the imprisoned Karkat Vantas has her now, like electricity running up her arm and through her chest, pain and misery jolting around inside her. Her breath stutters and chokes off in her throat.

Her legs tremble and give way beneath her. She skids against the window, the wall, into a half-seated slumped pile of limbs on the floor. The jazzy music in the background is lost to hearing, reflected moonlight lost to her vision. The world around her blurs into darkness, into nothingness, despair and loneliness and longing, day after night after day after week after month after night, pain and misery. The long-drawn heart of seasons is compressed down into seconds; the electric black fries her nerves and senses. Her grip on the collar is tight, like jaws on the throat of hapless prey, and the tortured heart of Karkat Vantas bleeds out over her fingers like they were claws puncturing organ.

She doesn't think to let go—she doesn't think, she can't think, not under hatred and fury and sorrow and misery. Whatever anger she felt before is decimated, whatever fear she felt obliterated in the wake of feelings too great to contain. She doesn't ask herself what she thought would happen, grabbing that collar, doesn't berate herself for the mistake, doesn't let go—she can't.

Her body trembles on the cold floor, arms slack at her sides and her legs bent out at uncomfortable angles. Her face is tense and red, with tears running uneven down her cheeks. Her hand clings tight to the collar.

In the black flood of feeling, Ruka is paralyzed. Her body is reduced, nothing more than a vessel for the fractured heart of Karkat Vantas.

Despite it being overwhelming, Karkat has felt all of this before. It isn't new -- merely intense and unexpected. It dawns on him that Ruka has collapsed, he remembers how the emotions she picks up are permanent, takes note of the tremble in her limbs, and it's the sight of her suffering -- suffering because of him, his stupid need to prove himself -- that yanks him out of the memory of imprisonment.

"Fuck," he gasps, and drops to his knees in front of her, grasping at the collar, trying to pry her fingers off of it, pull it from her grip. "Ruka, let go!"

Edited 2013-03-06 10:17 (UTC)

She doesn't respond to him, in word or gesture or action. Her shoulders rise and fall, and her breathing verges on hyperventilation. They stack on her in cycles—misery and loneliness take root in all the same places as her own, settling into the dark depths, making room for the burden of his fear, filling up her stomach and her lungs.

Gold flickers in the darkness. Warm, distant. A wildfire, growing on the horizon.

A name?

She can't even feel his hands on hers, even as he pries her fingers loose from the broken device.

"Ruka, Ruka!" He repeats her name, growing more frantic at her lack of response. He doesn't want her to have to bear this. She shouldn't feel this. A flash of anger directed at her for inflicting it on herself flares up among the emotions still travelling from the collar to Ruka to Karkat. "Ruka. Ruka. Ruka, come on, Ruka, you insufferable moron, let it go."

He's denied the gold on the horizon she experiences: the impending dawn is hidden from him, as he continues to work at pulling her fingers away from the collar, one by one. It's difficult, what with the way his own hands shake, and he thinks he might be hurting her, but bruised and sore fingers are better than allowing her to continue to absorb his past.

Her teeth chatter and her fingers tremble, and of course there's pain, of course there's misery, an undercurrent's wish for death. Those final six months, compressed into six minutes. Even when the collar finally slips loose from her curled fingers, even with that connection severed, it doesn't erase what's already been taken. It doesn't remove the build-up inside her, still waiting to be felt, to be processed, to be filtered into the reservoirs of her heart, to reside and rot with all the rest.

Fear has her by the throat, but still she breathes in the warmth of that golden fire, growing ever brighter, burning through the darkness.

A strange figure kneels before her, his eyes reflecting so much light that they seem more like mirrors. A voice. A hand, touching hers.

He is going to destroy her.

Once he has the collar away from her, it disappears right back into his sylladex, just in case she were to attempt to try to snatch it away again. He makes a strangled noise of distress at the back of his throat when the torrent of feeling looped from her to him doesn't let up even with the device wrested from her grasp. God, what if this is just too much for her? What if there's a limit to how much she can take in? That would just be fantastic, wouldn't it, great reunion gift there, Vantas. He shouldn't have come back at all.

The hand that still rests on hers curls around it, fingers linking with hers -- the other one he'd used to stash the collar away moves to her shoulder as he scoots forward to kneel beside her.

"Ruka. Listen, it's not you. That's not yours. Ruka. Ruka. That's not you." He repeats her name, trying to call her back out of him, his heart. The longer he does, the more panicked the edge to his voice grows, the more pleading it sounds. "Ruka."

A name. Over and over, pulling through the darkness, but she has to see this through to the end. She has to swallow it down to where her own heart can break it down, or else it'll never dislodge from where it burns her nerves and chokes her breath. Her hand spasms in his, trying to grab hold and flinching away, back and forth.

Fire burns through the darkness, bright and powerful like the sun, somehow more blinding than blindness; the ghost before her seems to grow more solid, light defining more features. It's so hard to recognize anything familiar under fear, but gradually it burns away in the wake of something bigger, something brighter. Less of Karkat Vantas filters back through the loop, draining down. Light overtakes darkness, and in that illumination, everything snaps into place. Her vision focuses on the world outside her.

Hope.

"... Karkat?"

The panic eases when the feedback loop between them does, settles into guilt and worry. When she says his name, though -- for the first time in two years -- his breaks off in his attempts to call her back, words stalling in his throat. His heart throbs; he can't tell if with pleasure or pain. The hand holding hers trembles.

"You idiot," he forces out past the verbal roadblock. "Why would you do something like that?"

It isn't allowed to tremble there for long; he's barely allowed to get the words out before she's moving again, using her hand in his to pull herself up, forward, release, she unashamedly throws herself forward and wraps her arms around his back in an unsteady hug. Her hands make tense fists in the fabric of his shirt, and she doesn't have the strength to keep herself from shaking.

"I thought you were dead." Quiet and shaking, honest, in the way she so rarely is or was. "How could I believe it was you?"

He tenses as an instinctive fear flutters in the region of his stomach when she first throws her arms around him, but it's quickly trampled and overtaken by something stronger, something familiar; that need to be close that moves his arms to embrace her in reciprocation before he even consciously wills it.

"I'm sorry," he breathes, dazed. He's really here. He really made it. He has this back. For a moment, he has trouble believing it himself. His hold on her is likely too tight -- one arm wrapped crushingly around her ribs, the other flung across her shoulders, the back of her neck. He'd forgotten this, this desperation, the way his heart seemed to want to pick up a new career as a battering ram, the way she felt and smelled and sounded like this, in his arms. Or perhaps they'd both simply changed in the interim of separation. He struggles to press closer to her, despite their uncomfortable position on the floor. "I'm sorry."

She'd forgotten just how warm he always seemed to be. He's thinner than she remembers, a little more narrow, and so many of the little things are different, or distorted in the distance of time. He smells different, his hair is too long, his voice hits the wrong pitch, his body's been whittled down so much. It's too much to take in, and she's terrified of waking up.

"I'm sorry," she echoes, muffled words into his clothing. "I didn't believe you." Didn't believe in him, didn't trust him, didn't put any stock into his promises.

"No, don't worry about it," he tells her, remorseful.

Some things never change; Karkat wishes the fact that he only sees clearly in hindsight wasn't one of them. He'd come here wanting a movie-script reunion and expecting a flat rejection -- of course both of those scenarios were impossible, he would have known that if he'd thought about the people involved. That's not Ruka. That's not Karkat. Things are never, will never be so simple as that. He threads strands of dark hair through his fingers, thinks about the bright color it masks.

"I was stupid, waltzing in here out of nowhere and acting like you should be able to just take it in right then and there."

Her arms move, wrapping around him a little different, a little tighter, as if that will keep her from shaking, keep him from noticing. His heart's still rattling around inside her, but so's hers, a chaotic mess soothed from sinking into black depths by his borrowed hope.

"You're always stupid."

She pretends she isn't crying.

It's more awkward than the heartfelt scenes of long-awaited reconciliation movies and books would spin, where everything always seemed to fall back into place.

He shifts over the carpet, shuffling so he is less off to the side, repositioning himself so she is in the fork of his knees, making it easier to hold her. He clings to her, needy and fumbling, unable to decide where his hands should rest, unsure as to how he fits together with her anymore -- inexperienced and hampered by nerves all over again, as if he'd reverted to being a stupid teenager in the span of a few minutes. He wants to say something meaningful, but the words stick at the back of his throat, refusing to be articulated. He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know what to do. He's messed this up so thoroughly already.

In the end, what comes out of his mouth is very simple, after a few minutes of struggle; he doesn't think about how it never ended well to say it before, doesn't even really decide that it is what he should say. It slips out, thoughtless as an exhale.

"I love you," is muttered into the side of her neck, against her pulse.

Edited 2013-03-07 04:41 (UTC)

Don't leave me are the words that catch in her throat, the words she wants to say, but can't. Because there's nothing she can say to make him stay, she knows. He has those people he wants to find, wants to protect and save, and even as selfish as she is, she can't force him to sacrifice anyone else just for her.

It isn't fair, how much she needs him, and how much he needs to be everywhere that isn't with her. It makes her hate him almost as much as she loves him, and she can't say a word for either. She couldn't even admit to them until she'd already lost him, and had known he wouldn't be back.

If she says it now, she's afraid he'll disappear again. Her arms shake and her heart races, and she's going to feel so cold when he finally goes again.

She's going to rip holes in that shirt for how tight she's holding on. Anxiety and fear coil in her arms. "I miss you so much," comes out in a rush, and she doesn't even notice it's still in the present tense.

She might not be able to say it, but the thing is -- she doesn't have to. Not to an empath. I don't want to, is his silent reply. He never wants to leave her. He doesn't even want to let go of her long enough for them to get up off the floor. Nothing is fair about this, Karkat thinks bitterly as her nails scrape at his back through his shirt, as their bodies shift against one another and he inhales the scent of her hair, rubs his hand up and down her back as if he could soothe away any of the things wrong with their lives. Nothing is fair about them.

He never wanted to love her the way he does, never intended to, sometimes wonders if he was never meant to in the first place. He does, though, whether either of them like it or not, and it's not fair that she won't ever say it back, that she won't ever acknowledge it -- he hates her for that, too, sometimes.

They were better off when they were children. Better off when they took each other and their place in the world for granted, before they could even recognize the value of being able to see one another every day. Better off when they cared less, needed less.

"I don't know how to fix this," he tells her helplessly, not even bothering to keep his voice from cracking. He doesn't know how to fix her, fix himself, fix the world. It's not fair.

The crack in his voice is sharp reminder; the suffering she felt was his, years of his, and how fair was it to force him to carry the burden of her heart when he was already so saddled with the weight of his?

This time it's her hand combing through his hair, sweat-damp and stiff with grime, split-ends, but who cares about something like that? She lifts her head, her hands smoothing into flat palms against his back. She shifts in his arms. "You're here," she murmurs, quiet into the shell of his ear, calmer now. "You're here now. That's enough."

No it's not, he wants to tell her. That's not enough at all. They both know he'll leave her again eventually. He'll hurt her and she'll hurt him, and the worst part about it all is it isn't something Karkat can control. The state of the world they live in is out of their hands; what they have now, however screwed up and painful, is the best either of them are able to do. It's not enough.

He doesn't say any of this, though. Merely shivers at the sensation of her fingers brushing against his scalp, her breath against his ear. Deprived of physical contact that wasn't pain for so long as he has been, the reaction he has to the simple touch and affection is almost overwhelming. He doesn't know how to react to it.

He lets out a sigh and pulls back from their embrace -- not by much, mind. Just enough that he is able to look her in the face again, take in the pallor of her face, the tears that cling to her lashes and glisten in streaks down her face, the pull of her brows and curve of her mouth, the shift in expressions. Refreshing everything he'd missed, recoloring his memory. For a while, that's all he does; look at her.

It's gentle and almost hesitant, when he finally leans in to press his lips to hers.

Even that small movement has her heart flickering in mild panic, the one hand tensing on his back. Is he leaving her, already? Is he rejecting her, finally? But he stops, and she freezes, uncertain of what to say or what she said that would cause this now. Her eye skims his face for some clue as to what he's thinking, but she's not an empath the same way he is; proximity isn't enough for her to sense even a fraction of his heart.

The confusion (anxiety fear trepidation) is plain on her face, spiking at movement once more. At contact she freezes for surprise—everything seems to happen so fast, so slow, it's hard to keep herself in the present—but the breath rushes out of her, the tension in her back and her shoulders easing, when she kisses back.

He really is there with her, isn't he? This isn't a dream.

But, she thinks, shifting on pins-and-needles legs and curling her fingers in his hair, that's no guarantee she won't wake up to an empty room, with no sign he'd ever been here in the first place.

No guarantee at all.

Open Post 002

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