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John doesn’t have an issue with the routine. Routine is what wakes him a minute before the alarm goes off, routine is what puts the bunny slippers on his feet at 5:30 and it’s what keeps his hand steady as he shaves at 5:45. It’s the first deep breath in front of a freshly opened window, it’s the kiss on a snoring Karkat’s forehead before the morning coffee’s brewed.
It’s the folding of his hands beneath his chin as Karkat finally comes downstairs and makes his way into the pantry. It’s predicting how Karkat will always reach for the gross box of Special-K-with-dehydrated-strawberries that John purposefully placed on a higher shelf the previous evening. It’s the inch of skin revealed by the rise of Karkat’s sweater when he tip-toes.
It’s the damn sweater.
There’s a difference between thinking fashion is stupid and having fifty different versions of the exact same piece of clothing with each one less slightly-altered than the last, an unfortunate consequence of having a fashionable vampiric enabler as a close friend who casts a gaze that rips you in two if you did so much as think uninvited criticism too loudly.
The point is that John, long-time friendboy matesprit extraordinaire, has never seen Karkat without one on. Whether they were picnicing at the beach or stuck at home smack-dab in the middle of the hottest summer day with a broken AC, Karkat would always have one of his high-necked sweaters clinging to him. Sweaters with his mark in bright red rather than grey for the confident days, sweaters with miniature flashing LEDs sewn around his symbol for Christmas. It was ridiculous, really! As if he’d freeze to death if he wasn’t constantly buried under three pounds of cloth.
(John briefly imagines Karkat taking his sweater off and turning into an ice statue like Arnold from that one Magic School Bus episode, but decides there is a 99.9% chance of that never happening.)
(Right?)
“Karkat, if you turned into a giant ice cube, what would you want done with your body?”
“I don’t fucking know.” Karkat slumps into the chair across from John. “Melt me down into a watering can and use me to plant a tree right in front of your front fucking door so that in fifteen to twenty years I could still manage to present somewhat of an inconvenience to your day to day life.”
“Hey, Karkat, know what kind of tree you’d be?”
“A crabapple tree.”
“A CRABapple tr--wow I thought we were friends.”
That manages to drag a smirk out of him.
(A smile within the first five minutes of the day! New record.)
Karkat rubs his head and his hair sticks up in places it shouldn’t, which is to say his morning hair is almost identical to his normal-looking hair, at least until he runs a comb through it once or twice and makes it nike-swoosh the other way.
The troll blinks asymmetrically and pours milk into his bowl without making eye contact. “Do I have something on my face?”
“No.”
“Then why the fuck are you staring at me like I have one of your disgusting human pustules throbbing on my cheek.”
“They’re called zits, Karkat.” John goes back to picking all the shitty cereal pieces out of his Lucky Charms and piling them on the table. “And I will have you know zits aren’t half as bad as the skin you shed like, literally everywhere.”
Karkat scratches his elbow in a completely non-self-conscious manner. “Molting is a perfectly normal part of troll development and you fucking know it.”
“So are zits! For humans, I mean.” John scoops up a spoonful of milk-soaked marshmallows. As the magically delicious mixture of rainbows and clovers swirl around his mouth, he wonders what Karkat would even look like without his sweater on. Maybe Karkat really did have problems conserving body heat and he had to keep wrapped up at all times. Or maybe he had something he was embarrassed about under there. Like a third nipple. Or a fourth nipple. “How many nipples do trolls have, anyway?”
“Sometimes I want to rifle through that think pan of yours in a futile attempt to comprehend exactly what stream of consciousness you undergo to jump from the topic of zits to the topic of nipples while I’m here trying to eat my goddamn breakfast, but then I think, you know what? There’s a shitton of more useful fucking superpowers I could wish for. Like knowing exactly when to remove food from a microwave.”
“Or knowing when every store closes.”
“Tearing perforated paper perfectly every single time.”
“Knowing everyone that is going to be on a plane before you buy the ticket. Including babies.”
“Being able to travel one minute into the future in exactly fifty-nine seconds.”
“Karkat, why won’t you look at me when we make love?”
Karkat chokes on his cereal.
John laughs. “I’m just messing with you, man! My real question is how come you never take your sweater off? Like, ever?”
The troll eventually gets the dehydrated strawberry out of his lung.
“What’s with all the random fucking questions--I don’t fucking know!” he coughs, diving back into his breakfast. The cereal sounds like gravel under his spoon. “It’s not a thing I worry about.”
“Bullshit you don’t worry about it! You worry about it all the time. Even when you just come out of the shower, you have it on before you leave the bathroom.” John folds his arms. “What are you hiding under there, Karkat? Is it a horrible genetic mutation? Did you have a great big hole shot through you like what happened with Kanaya? Is it a gnome? Do you have a siamese twin on your chest who is also a gnome? Because I would still love you, Karkat. I would love you and your gross chest gnome.”
“Congratu-fucking-lations, John, you figured out the mystery. He whispers cryptic shit in the middle of the night about freeing Mars and he said that if I sent him into space he’d unlock a fucking achievement for me.”
“Sounds like one awesome mutant gnome twin to me. Can I meet him?”
“If you can figure out a way to do it without taking my fucking sweater off, sure.”
John tilts his head and ponders into his cereal bowl. He nudges the marshmallows around until the milk turns green.
He already had a couple of ideas.
-
They end up stumbling onto the living room sofa because Karkat finished breakfast late and John wanted to see if he still tasted like strawberries.
There’s the gentle tugging of shirt fabric, hummed noises of happiness, a brief sting of pain when someone lands on an armrest the wrong way, but it’s not until John feels Karkat smiling against his lips when John decides that, yes, this is definitely, definitely one of the better ways to whittle down the minutes of a late morning.
Karkat does that weird thing with his tongue against John’s neck that makes John blush and gigglesnort and bite his bottom lip. Being the master opportunist he is, John steals the moment to touch Karkat’s side.
*Under his sweater.*
Karkat breathes sharply and straightens his back. “Jesus fuck, your hands are cold.”
“Shit, sorry.”
John pulls back and cups his hands around his mouth, intending to breathe warmth into his palms, but Karkat takes John’s wrists instead. Karkat squeezes both of John’s hands in his own, transferring soft heat before leaning up and kissing each one of John’s fingertips.
John curls his hands up; the heat rising in his cheeks is very distracting to his current mission.. “Dude, what is it with you and my hands?”
“Fuck if I know,” he shrugs, pressing his lips to John’s palm, “I just like them, okay?”
“Oh. Okay.” John tugs them away and wraps his fingers along the sides of Karkat’s waist ( **under his sweater** ) before giving Karkat the most suave expression he could muster. “How do you like them now?”
“Better,” Karkat sighs, “but could you quit doing that fucking thing with your eyebrows, you’re killing this for me.”
“Can’t control the eyebrows, dude. They are wild no-nonsense renegades on a quest of ultimate seduction.”
“I will rip them off myself.”
“You know these threats are, like, eighty-seven percent less effective when you deliver them smiling. Just saying.”
“Shut up, dingus.”
John is careful not to tug Karkat’s sweater up when he walks his fingers further up the length of his body. Troll skin is much firmer than human skin, yet another mechanism specifically designed to protect them from the dangers their outside world had to offer, so John puts more effort into his movements until he’s sure Karkat can feel every touch. John is already well-aware of Karkat’s lack of an obvious tickle spot, what with Karkat’s ramblings about how disadvantageous it would be in battle for a troll to be immobilized so easily, but when John reaches the spots by Karkat’s underarms he can’t help but rub his fingers a little. The action makes Karkat’s bright red eyes drift shut. Quiet little chirps start spilling from the bottom of his throat. John does well to stifle his glee.
“I still don’t get why you don’t like taking it off,” John mutters, his fingers tracing the indentations along Karkat’s sides. “Is it because you’re embarrassed of these?”
“No, that would be fucking stupid. They’re vestigial slots left over from my first cocooning when I lost my grub legs. Every troll has them.”
“From when you lost your grub legs? So they’re, like...grub nubs?”
“Vestigial slots.”
“Grub nubs is catchier.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“You need new insults.”
John adjusts himself; his face morphs into a more focused expression.as his hands continue exploring. “Is it ‘cause of your pudge?”
“My--what?”
John proceeds to pinch Karkat’s stomach.
“...are you actually fucking doing that right now.”
“Yep.”
“I swear to god, the meaningless bullshit you fixate on--”
“Dude, it’s fine! I have pudge too, see.” John proceeds to lift up his shirt and poke his own stomach. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It makes you squishy.”
“I know there’s nothing wrong with it, you impudent shitsmear, that has nothing to do with it, either.”
Pouting with frustration, John lowers his shirt and slides his hands back up Karkat’s sweater. John goes into full blind exploratory mode, kneading his fingers against Karkat’s stomach and chest, before he realizes just how peaceful Karkat’s expression has become. Karkat places his hands on John’s sides and John’s nerves tingle static beneath his shirt; Karkat’s claws poke at him, too softly to hurt but hard enough to keep John in place, to keep John’s hands moving, to keep his fingers rubbing lines and circles into leathergrey skin. John hits a spot just beneath Karkat’s collarbone, and the tiniest hint of a scowl taints the troll’s face as his back arches half an inch off the couch cushions and he sighs, warm and great and big.
John can’t help but kiss him.
There’s something strangely intimate about all this, being encouraged to touch a part of him he actively keeps hidden from the rest of the world for a reason John still isn’t aware of. John has him pinned beneath lip-christened fingertips, he can feel the troll’s chest rise and fall with every breath, he flattens his palm and he catches the rhythm of Karkat’s heartbeat, the same as his own.
“Can I...”
“Can you what.”
“Kiss you under your sweater.”
John expects something along the lines of get the hell off me, or knock yourself out, moron, or even a fine just get your weird human intimacy traditions out of the way, asshole, but what he gets instead is a very small shrug he’d be verbally whipped for even considering to be “shy”.
John presses a tiny kiss to the absence of Karkat’s bellybutton.
“So trolls don’t have nipples, huh?”
“We aren’t mammals, what the fuck would we need nipples for?”
“I don’t know what I was expecting.”
When John looks back up, he realizes Karkat has his face buried in a hand. John hugs him and lays against his chest and imitates his weird crickety noises when he starts idly stroking the back of John’s head. There’s a laugh in Karkat’s voice when he tells John to fuck off.
“You shouldn’t be ashamed of whatever it is,” he mumbles, “you are one hundred percent gnome-free.”
Karkat stays silent as he combs his fingers through John’s hair.
-
Routine is what slips the bunny slippers off at 10:45, and it’s what tucks him it at 11:00.
It’s 11:16 when he wakes up to the covers being tugged and the mattress sinking with the weight of Karkat shimmying himself in.
Karkat’s arms wrap around him from behind as the troll’s bare chest rests flush against his back.
The traces of light within the room allow the marks along the lengths of Karkat’s forearms to be visible in the shadows, scattered and uneven. They look like they could be from an in-game battle, or from accidents during self-training with a certain Kind Abstratus as a certain troll looked like a doofus by himself in his room, or from one of several other possible scenarios John aches just thinking about.
He gently runs his thumb along a ragged line.
“...can I?”
There’s a pause before Karkat nods against his shoulder.
John kisses every scar and feels Karkat squeeze him tighter with each one.
The following morning, John wakes up a minute before the alarm, turning to look at Karkat’s expression before breaking into a grin.
(A smile within the first minute of the day!)
(Ultimate record.)