Chapter Text
"It lives while the code is shifted, and they live with it, always Going Home."
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."
-Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
Detective Karkat Vantas sits at his squelching desk in the too-small bullpen of the Chytrid station and wishes, not for the first and probably not for the fucking last time, that he'd gotten out of this business when he had the chance.
The air is clouded with spores thick as smoke- another rupture in the lines two streets down, according to the day shift stragglers as they rushed home before lights out- and the station's shitty air purifier can't keep up with it. As far as Karkat knows, it wasn’t ever meant to; it’s old and boxy, its lines inelegant and inorganic, and only the slightest fuzz of mildew clings to its smooth edges. It rattles with dying, wheezing breaths as it works to do shit fuck all. Karkat’s impressed it hasn’t broken completely yet, but they don’t have the budget for a new one. At least he knows who to ask to fix it when it comes down to it.
He squints through the dusky haze, so much like the Alternian city smog he remembers staring out at through the round window of his hiveblock, but that was a poisonous, soporific green and this is a dull, sulfurous yellow that only makes his nose itch. The spores, at least, don’t make his eye sting and threaten to film over his mind.
Apparently he's fucking lucky that they don’t usually, humans and highbloods can't stand this noxious shit; the two of the former in the office are masked up, tattered bandanas wrapped around the lower half of their faces like it'll help with fucking anything. Karkat will grant that it’s probably better than nothing, and that human airsacs are fragile enough to warrant the attempt, but it’s easier to be angry about it than it is to be resigned. His fellow officers look like less like detectives and more like the two-bit vaqueros on the grubby posters plastered on the alley walls these days, promising dusty, wide-open plains, musclebeasts abound, and freedom under the skies. Only jackasses would think that was better, which in retrospect explains why Zahhak up and left.
Karkat can't even fucking imagine that much open space. The city is claustrophobic and close, with a thousand skittering, sprawling alleys anyone can disappear into. He can't even imagine the stars after ten years in this place, just the glow of the ever-present mycelium snaking across the softly thrumming ceiling of his respiteblock. Almost enough to feel like fucking home, alien enough to make him feel worlds and worlds further away than he is.
Karkat snorts, and shoves the report he'd been half-heartedly working on clear to the other side of his desk. He'd wrapped up the case quick enough- stolen purse, recovered from a dumpster not a mile from where it was taken, bereft of the strange, paper boonbucks they use here but the empty, useless shell of it still full of all the sentimental shit the owner had cared about. It hadn’t been hard to find, just work in a more disgusting slog than usual. He’d gotten lucky that the thief had tossed it aside so quickly; still in the district, too, so he didn’t need to worry about permits and crossing jurisdictions over a fucking purse and wallet.
The woman had yanked it open as soon as he’d given it to her, rifling through it to count through what was left. And she’d clutched the ratty, stinking picture of her kids to her chest and thanked him, tears in her eyes, and Karkat had went home that day thinking he'd at least done something fucking good today. Every good deed matters, Kanaya would say, or some shit like that. He misses her with a sudden, fierce ache in his pumpbiscuit, one he has to shove away.
She's not gone. Just- different. Just further away. Maybe he'll go stop by after work; he'd be cutting it close to the daylight, with how far her block is from the office and his beat, and he doesn't care much for the city outskirts- they're fucking weird as shit and creepier, all a lush, overgrown tangle of jungle and jabbering plants-, but it'll be good to see her. It's been a while. Or maybe the weekend would be better, give him enough time to make the trip properly, and give her enough notice that he doesn’t feel like the worst obstinate nookstain for dropping by unannounced and inadvertently making her feel like a fucking shitty host for not having tea and biscuits or what the fuck ever laid out for him.
Yeah. That sounds like a good plan. Worthier of his day off than anything else he does.
He draws his mug of cold caf to his lips and grimaces at the taste. How humans stomach this swill is fucking beyond him- but how humans eat half the shit they do without vomiting is beyond him. Caf's not the worst thing out there, it's all the fermented vegetative matter that makes him grimace- they drink it, they eat it, they grow it themselves and call it Scoby like a fucking pet rather than something that has to be fished out of the drainpipes every month on the regular. At least the caf's plentiful and the bitter taste keeps him awake some on nights like this when work is slow and his mind threatens to wander because of it.
He looks to his left. The small stack of paperwork that’s been on his desk since his earliest days looks back accusingly. Not literally, this time, but some days he feels that hindbrain prickle at the back of his neck like he's being fucking watched, like he's back on Alternia and one misstep in public is enough to get him culled. Here's the same sometimes, except it's equal opportunity. It could- and does- happen to anyone.
Today doesn’t feel like that. Today’s been alright, shockingly, and Karkat's not fucking paranoid like some of the guys that have been here since the station was founded, carved out of the heart of an building so overgrown it was impossible to tell what it was to begin with. There's a betting pool in the office, based on what they excavate whenever someone steps wrong and goes knee deep through the spongy floor, revealing half-rotted human artefacts Karkat has not a fucking snowball's chance in hell of recognizing.
It always pays to watch your step in this part of town.
He downs the rest of his shitty caf, grimacing at the taste, and pulls the files towards himself. Unsolved cases, the kind the humans call cold for no good reason. Nothing for the detectives that ticks over to the light; Karkat likes his invisible desk mate well enough since they don't make a huge fucking mess of his shit, but he holds the same general opinion of them that everyone else does: The day shift does jack fucking shit. They have it easy. Karkat knows it's true, even if he doesn't have the same heavy resentment behind it that some of the old-timers do, or the yearning that a couple of the new kids talk about it with, like they're still hoping to see it.
The night shift suits him fine. The city by day is too loud, too noisy, too much, a riot of human and inhuman life that makes Karkat flinch away and old instinct rear its idiot head. The city by night is a different creature, a lurking, stalking thing, and Karkat knows how to deal with that better than most. He finished being afraid when he left Alternia, when he didn’t have to look over his shoulder because every single troll on the planet would have him culled in a blink even if they didn’t want to, but he knows that the edge of that leftover habit has kept him alive.
Kept him showing up, night after night, and kept him from joining the ranks of the scant few in these files.
He flips the folder open, worries at the rounded corner of it with a claw. There's already a tear there; the damp card gives way easily and sticks to his finger. He grimaces and peels it off, flicks it onto the floor to be absorbed like the rest.
Nothing fucking paper lasts around here in the pervasive damp, he'll need to get new copies soon. Strider likes to say that they'd better get back to writing cuneiform script and carving shit onto stone, and Crocker always smacks him upside the head and says that she will not be fielding complaint forms made of stone, thank you, and Karkat always stands there torn between gratitude that you sometimes work with them and irritation at his laconic bullshit. Or his bullshit in general. But Crocker and Strider are good, the best in the business, even, and Pyrope joining up with them's only made it better. He doesn’t know how they even got into it- neither of them are affiliated with any offices, which makes them dangerously free operatives, and is fucking dangerous in itself-, and he also doesn't give a shit enough to ask. The tirade of horsefuckery he'd get from Strider alone makes it a subject worth avoiding. Karkat’s glad they did, though. They’re useful and vaguely competent.
And they’re the only ones on these missing persons cases, except for him. They specialize in them, and he’s sure they’ve got a stack much bigger than what’s unsolved at the Chytrid office, since one of his is on loan from them. Him and Crocker and Strider and Pyrope are the only ones who give half a fucking shit about these people that just vanish into nothing and don't write it off as a hazard of living here.
Ishtar's got a habit of chewing people up and not spitting them out, and it's only gotten worse in the past couple of years. Karkat isn't a fucking bleeding heart hero, he knows he can't save everyone, and he's not trying to, but he can get answers. It's what he's for. It's what he's good at.
He's already memorized the contents of these files; the slow unfurling orange of lichen that obscures the upper corner of the first sheet of paper isn't an issue. It's fucking gross, and annoying, but it's not an issue any more than the bloom of mildew that sticks the pages together and makes them difficult to unpeel. It's been two weeks since he printed these again. At this rate, Karkat'll need to get another batch tomorrow. Maybe take it home with him, see if he can keep it better there.
He probably can, on account of how he knows how to fucking clean his hive and actually gives a shit about not breathing in spores every hour of his life. It's not a uniquely Alternian thing; there's plenty humans who rebel in their small ways against the city's sink into decay and rot. Some of them can even move, find better districts if they can afford the permits and aren’t too deeply entrenched, or follow the posters on out to the plains if they can't. Karkat wishes he could believe that's what happened to these people.
Jade Harley, the first one. An old woman, vanished one night leaving nothing but a swirl of gleaming death caps in her bed. Her grandson filed the report and then left that same week. He peels off a strip of lichen from the place where her picture ought to be; the paper comes away with it, tearing away the left side of her face. She'd been a scientist, founder of the Skaia company, long before Karkat's time. It's bankrupt now, with her vanished and her grandson fled, and whatever promises they'd made for the future left unfulfilled. Hers was the first file he’d been handed when he started here; he’d learned it was supposed to be a fucking joke, some kind of bullshit hazing. Karkat kept the file. And once he had a couple big cases under his belt- as big as they get here, anyway-, enough weight to throw around, he made sure no other rookie got saddled with that shit. It’s a small blessing the grandkid’s gone, it’s shitty to give families false hope by saying there’s fresh blood on the case, when fresh blood doesn’t know better and is going to drop it in a month when they get real work. He scowls down at the paper, but smooths it out gently afterwards anyway. It’s not Jade Harley’s fault those jackasses were like that.
The borrowed file is next, from the hands of Jane Crocker herself. John Egbert, his face beaming up at the camera for whoever had taken it. The details of his disappearance are faded, the words eaten by a fine blue dusting of miniscule mushrooms. Karkat knows what they say anyway: stepped outside for a smoke in the Diamond District, disappeared leaving only a cluster of false bluebells behind. There's a drawing of those too, which would be nice if it wasn't so fucked up. Karkat brushes the sheet off impatiently; half the paper goes with them. He grimaces and wipes his hand on his pants- dark, so if it stains, he can dye it black all over again.
He sets John's file neatly over Jade's, and sighs at the state of the last one. Two, technically, but they’re almost glued together, a damp, mushy mess dusted in blue and gold and red. They must’ve touched the desk directly. The ink is blurred illegibly, the portraits succumbed to a coating of black mould, eating away at the faces. Not that there was much there, anyway; the fresh pictures are always grainy, out of focus. Kids, light hair, human. A boy and a girl, by what they measure those things as, both of them solemn, short-haired, and unsmiling. One with a sly look, the other almost mutinous. He remembers a spray of freckles across one of their cheeks, the stubborn set of a jaw, arms crossed in a defensive posture. Like these two wrigglers knew what was waiting for them when the picture was taken. But that's just memory- who knows if the clean photographs even look like that? Or if the originals have been lost to corruption too, turned to grey, forlorn smears of nothing.
The words are similarly useless, a paragraph if fucking that of anything useful. If Jade Harley and John Egbert are ghosts, these two are beyond that. The Lalonde twins, R and D, at the heart of all this, vanished young in the heart of Ishtar on the cusp of change.
Their case is oldest, the first, in what Strider and Crocker and Pyrope are all convinced is a pattern going back twenty years, before the Shift. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except Karkat always thought conspiracy theorists weren’t a close-mouthed bunch, and those three act like it’s the biggest fucking secret around.
He has a hard fucking time believing this place was anything other than what it is now; it's immutable, its horrors vast and eternal. Their file's been in the station since Karkat was still a fucking wriggler on another world, dreaming of being a threshecutioner, but he'd pulled it when he was looking into Jade, his first case, and Strider had gone all distant in a way that meant it was important, after all, when Karkat had showed him. Establishing a pattern, he hears Pyrope say, her raspy voice right at his ear. And then come suspects, and then comes a motive, and then you have evidence and guilt, your honor!
Karkat doesn't fucking know about that anymore. Evidence is hard to come by on the streets, when a ring'll sprout up within minutes after it rains, haloing the place where what's left of a corpse lies. Or stands, sometimes, statuesque and vegetal, transformed into something that makes Karkat's life a fucking headache, and justifies the mortician at the station only being there part time. The mycologist's there full-time, of course, but she's fucking distractible.
He puts the papers away and stands up. There's no new leads to chase up with these, no people to interview, barely anyone even remembers these four humans existed anymore. But there's no new cases for him tonight either, which means something bad's probably right fucking around the corner. Ishtar has a way of turning people into pessimists, but when it's quiet, it's only ever the calm before the storm, and Karkat doesn't fucking want to get rained on.
Suddenly, the station feels suffocating.
"I'm going to get some fresh fucking air," he announces, to a shudder of vague amusement from the hazy forms of his coworkers. Yeah, fair enough. Outside's not much better than this shit, but at least it's been a dry couple of days. Lowers the chances of something nasty sprouting.
It's a relief to step outside the station and into the comparatively cooler night air. The street is dimly lit, shot through by the green-gold glow of hyphae snaking through the sidewalks and radiating upwards in fractals on some buildings. There's a few holdouts who scrub their places clean at night- Karkat waves to one now, just one block away from the station.
"Detective Vantas," comes the chittering voice of the baker, her gnarled fingers clutching a scrubbing brush held to the bricks of her shop. "Out on patrol this evening?"
Karkat slows to nod at her, his hands shoved into his pockets. She's got a smear of color along her temple, curls of mossy green visible at her wrists, but she's not so affected as some of the humans Karkat has seen. Or some of the trolls, who get in a bad way in the lower districts.
“Only for a while," he adds, polite as he can manage. Better than saying he was sick of staring at paperwork in the fucking office and choking down shitty caf. She respects him, somehow, and he can only figure his job is part of that. He doesn’t want to disillusion her. "Do you need help?"
She shakes her head immediately. "You're a strapping young fella, but these old bones won't give up so easy. I've got a ladder to manage the top of the window, I'll be fine. You go on your way keeping us safe, and stop by before you head home. There's grubloaf for you, it'll be fresh from the oven by the time your shift's done."
"You're too fucking nice," he says, as he always does. "Someone's going to take advantage of that shit."
"Ha. I'm the one taking advantage of you, son. I need a taste tester before I try to bring in more trolls and corner the Alternian market." She laughs, waving him on. "I'll see you this morning, then. I think I've got the texture right this time."
Karkat has his fucking doubts about that- it's not like there's Alternian grubs around to put in the loaf, but there's enough chitinous lifeforms around that it might not be completely fucking unpalatable if she'd listened to his feedback last time.
"We'll see. If it's any good I might need a couple loaves this weekend," he says.
"Going to visit a sweetheart?" There's a sly glint to her filmed-over eyes, and Karkat grimaces, feeling his entire body heat in a traitorous flush. Yeah, as fucking if. He knows humans don't get quadrants, but it still feels fucking weird to have someone call him out for having a moirail in the wrong goddamn terminology. He's tempted to explain it, but standing around talking about romance not even a minute's walk from work is a catastrophic fucking concept. He'd never live it down.
"What? No, fuck no. Just a- friend. I haven't had the chance to visit in a while, she's down in Extil."
The baker's face twists. "You be careful down there, you hear me? Strange things have been happening. My boy's been there for years now and he swears the spring ain't ever been bad like this before."
"Bad how?" His brow furrows. Maybe he should be more worried about Kanaya- she moved there after the incident, he knows that place didn't cause it, but they've been talking less lately. He'd just assumed it was the change, and the stress of moving after that, but-
"Doesn't do to talk about that here," she answers firmly. "Just be careful. It's nothing that can't be weathered, as I tell little Tom, keep your head about you and you'll be fine in those woods."
"...Right," Karkat says slowly, unease settling in the pit of his stomach. He'll send Kanaya a message when he gets home, she'll see it when she wakes up. He has to anyway to tell her he’s visiting. "I'll see you in the morning, then."
He might even look forward to it- he likes Mrs. Elliot, he likes to sit down with her and hear her talk about her night and her life. He even likes the smell of baking bread that suffuses every inch of her bakery like a good-luck charm. She says that the yeast protects her, and Karkat has no fucking idea what that even means, but he's not about to tell her she's wrong.
He gives her another wave as he continues on his way, aiming for the very edge of the Chytrid District. The boundary between districts is stark, and these days people commute between them less and less, the network of trains running through the loamy soil of the city slowing to a stuttering, unreliable halt. Trains. Karkat's been on one once, and he hated it. He likes being underground well enough, the scent of rich soil thick in his nose, tugging at the old memories of the brooding caverns before he knew what danger was. Those were the fucking days, alright, though his ignorance didn't save him shit. He just got lucky that Crabdad took him in.
Karkat grimaces. He hopes his lusus found another troll to take care of, afterwards. He'd been getting old, having trouble moving, towards the end. But he'd have made it back to the caverns, Karkat's sure. And if he didn't- Karkat doesn't wan t to think about that, either.
"Get it the fuck together, Vantas," he hisses to himself, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. Hard enough that his claws prick at his skin. "You're fucking working, it doesn't matter if sweet fuck all is going to happen right now." He pauses. That feels risky, like he's fucking asking for something to happen. He adds, "Or, you know, if past me didn't just jinx the fuck out of myself, if something does happen, you need to pay some goddamn attention."
He has to quit muttering to himself when he passes someone on the street, their face shadowed, and they mumble out an, "Evening, Detective," before scurrying on. Just Fred, his worn green jacket wrapped tight around his frail body. Karkat debates following him for a second- it's a shitty thing to do, but Fred's got a knack for getting himself into the kind of trouble you need to be very lucky to get out of. But luck's one thing he seems to have in spades.
Karkat watches him go, turn a corner that'll get him to the convenience store, and decides against it. There's some people in this place that he worries about and he knows he's right to. There's others that he worries about but that have proven almost fucking impossible to kill, a luxury that's almost unknown in Ishtar. Karkat's not insane enough to consider himself one of the second type, he's just a little more durable than most, and he also possesses actual fucking common sense, which goes a long way.
He keeps walking, his head tipped up slightly to look at the human dirigibles floating in the sky. Huge, air-filled bladders carrying people during the day and cargo at night, because no one wants their fucking view spoiled by some idiot dragging a balloon's worth of protesting, screaming moobeasts up to the Slaughterhouse. There's plenty worse than that going on by cover of night- and day, too, because Serket's bold like that and Karkat's fucking relieved that she's not his problem to deal with-, but they're still a more palatable way of getting around than risking the train, or walking.
They go up, and up, to the tallest, luridly colored towers of the Diamond District, bracketed with flowing lichen that's nothing more than fucking decorative. Karkat's been once before, when he got here, since there used to be an Alternian Embassy. It crumbled into nothing the day the Empire did, and Karkat's never had to go back. Good riddance.
His feet stop him just at the street that marks the end of Chytrid and the beginning of Apheldia, the divide between the two districts stark as day and night.
Karkat still isn't used to how different things are, here. On Alternia, there were the cities and then the sprawling, dangerous areas outside them, lands claimed by highbloods. There was the land, and the sea, two realms alien from one another, but Karkat had never once been to the shore, not even to visit his moirail at the time.
Here, it's different. Precisely halfway down the street, the lichen changes, the hyphae go from green and gold to a cold, haughty blue. There are more mushrooms, sprouting from cracks in the sidewalk, coating trees in that same indigo light, entire shelves of cyan-frilled caps forming a fire escape on the apartment building directly opposite where he's standing, where the one behind him is coated in a thick layer of powdery rust. There's no spores in the air there, except those that drift over from his side. There's no streetlights or lanterns either.
Jade Harley used to live in that district. Karkat knows it from the file. Chytrid used to be part of it, even, until about five years ago when some bullshit weather shift or the other caused a whole upheaval of the mycosphere and led to the secession- Karkat doesn't pay attention to that shit, no matter how much Aradia likes to talk about it. He'll catch the spore forecast, and he knows how to estimate time of death from fungal decay, roughly, and which sproutings he'd better fucking avoid if he doesn't want to find himself on a roof in the middle of the day, the sun beating down on him, blindingly bright.
He wonders what it looked like when she was there; it must have still been fucking common for people to disappear, with how little fucking fuss there was about it, but Apheldia feels strange and remote. He could cross the line, but Karkat feels like it's enemy territory now. Which he knows is fucking ridiculous. Offices get territorial, some detectives can be shitheads about their patrols and their districts and all that shit, but they're not enemies.
He'll chalk it up to all that fucking blue, he decides. That's never been a color that's a good fucking sign for him; if it was fuchsia, he's pretty fucking sure he might explode from cognitive dissonance. That's a color that doesn't even belong on dry land.
He doesn’t care much for blue, either, if he’s being brutally fucking honest.
Karkat hugs the border as he walks, leaving a quickly-swallowed trail of footprints in the springy moss behind him. He can tell where he is in the city based on how the ground feels beneath his feet- loamy and teeming with life, crumbling and fetid, coating in thick moss or hard, crackling chitin that feels like he's stepping on bone. Humans have this expression about putting yourself in someone else's shoes- Pyrope loved it, when they were working together, before she decided to fuck off and strike out on her own with two humans, she thought it was the dumbest shit she'd ever heard.
Karkat doesn't agree, exactly, but he doesn't disagree either. He can't put himself in Jade Harley's shoes, for all that he knows about her. She was apparently brilliant, took no shit, cared about her grandkid even if he didn't care enough to stick around too long after she disappeared. She was interested in the city, in everything around her, Karkat's been told. At least he can relate to that- his entire job, his whole fucking life, has been looking at the details. John Egbert's even further out of reach- what would a guy like that even have in common with Karkat, beyond a shared five mile geographical radius? He doesn't know what fucking frondcovers either of them would wear, but they sure wouldn't fit him.
And the Lalondes speak for them-fucking-selves. He can't even chase up anyone who knew them; in the whole upheaval they disappeared in, anyone they might've known did, too. They could walk past him on the street and Karkat knows fucking well that he wouldn't recognize them- what they'd look like now, what they'd even act like. It's a bad idea to feel like he would somehow know them, just because he's spent a handful of hours a month for years looking at their lives distilled down to two sheets of paper. Actually, it's just fucking stupid of him to feel that way. That's not how this works, that's not how he works. He's not a genius detective like the humans like to read about, he doesn't magically know shit because he sees a suspicious mudstain on someone's hem or whatever. He works hard, he grinds away at the pieces until the puzzle starts to fucking come together, and it's entirely too possible that he's too goddamn close to these cases to see through to the other side. If there is one.
Great. Now he sounds like Pyrope.
Karkat scowls up at the passing red light of a dirigible, the glare stabbing his ganderbulbs for a second. This is why he hates slow days: All he has time to do is think, and he's been informed at fucking length by every prying busybody he's cursed to have as a friend that thinking isn't good for his mind. But if he's thinking about his cold cases- his obthethions, according to Captor, who gets the Harley and Lalonde records for him like clockwork whenever he asks for fresh copies-, he's not worrying about all the other shit that's going on. The fungal growth creeping closer to his apartment, the sickly algal bloom that's stained his shower water abhorrent lime for two fucking weeks now in a way that feels like a brand and an accusation. The sense of being watched and followed some nights on the job, as he weaves through alleys to chase up his latest lead, the way it sometimes persists even when he's back at his fucking hive. And Kanaya, on the far-flung outskirts, no longer within easy shooshpapping reach.
He makes a sharp left into an alleyway that wasn't there yesterday, its snaking darkness more alluring than dealing with the slow-flying airbladder above him. At least there's this to show for his outing; Karkat was never going to be carterrorgrapher, but part of his job here's to map the changing streets, and this'll make a tidy report to round off the rest of his shift. He keeps a hand on his piece as he walks through it, cataloguing colors (green-gold, safe and home here, unlikely to be an incursion), shapes (all organic, nothing sharp and jagged, nothing that looks humanoid), scents (like fresh earth, like the world right before it rains), the squelch (wet, gross) beneath his boots. He doesn't bother with his flashlight; he can see fine in the dark.
Wariness mounts as he moves through the alley, probably the first one through it with how it clings to the soles of his boots, threatening to seep through them. The walls are freshly slick too, like how he's told the smallest wrigglers are in the cavern. Even the shoots that are springing up around him slowly are slender and pale green, still curled at the tips. He's careful not to step on any, the kind of care born from navigating through Kanaya's cramped garden when she used to live in Glomus and her sharp glance when he accidentally tripped over one of those fucking hellvines and yanked it out of its pot. On a whim, he kneels down and presses his claws into the damp soil, making a slow circle as he uproots the plant. It pops softly, the sound of hyphae and root breaking, as he pulls it out and cups it gently in the palm of his hand. He has to pick the loam from under his claws after, and its earthy scent will linger for days, clinging to the whorls in his skin.
It takes him five hurried minutes to get back to the office- the alley was a shortcut, might even be a useful one if none of the superstitious officers hear about it-, where he dumps it in his empty caf mug while he painstakingly writes out his report. The Lalondes, Harley, and Egbert are all at the back of his mind still, but quieter now for the work.
He gets back to his shitty hiveblock with warm, too-light grubloaf tucked under his arm and the plant in his hand just as the first rays of golden dawn start to break over the city. It glitters in the fine-spored particulate that hangs thick in the air. It's thick today, enough to make Karkat's nose run, to make the humans stay the fuck inside unless they have to be outside. T
he first thing he does is put the plant in a chipped bowl, with water in it for the roots. The second is to tear off a hunk of grubloaf and eat it while he sends a message to Kanaya on the mycomm hyphae that blink slowly on the far wall. It takes longer than it should- he has to pick his way through the threads for the right pheromone cues, he fucking misses Trollian-, but when he wakes in the crepuscular glow of the bioluminescence outside, there's a message waiting for him, drenched in her familiar florals.
Of Course It Would Be A Pleasure To See You This Weekend If You Have The Time For The Trip. I Actually Have Something Important To Tell You So I Was Thinking Of Coming To See You But It May Be Better This Way Around. You Can Get Some Fresh Air And Visit The Garden Now That I Have More Space For It. It Is Good News By The Way So You Can Stop Worrying. I Have Missed Hanging Out And Look Forward To Seeing You. I Will Try To Cook Something But Maybe You Should Order From That Place You Like And Bring Some Just In Case. My Mealblock Skills Are Maybe Still Lacking.