awakener | (no subject)

(no subject)

Karkat had dreamed of the Sufferer before, times when he'd stayed up all morning over scripture and his subconscious had taken over with gory cinematic guilt-riddled speculation; none of it ever quite made sense, the things he'd read blurring over into his own experiences and fears.

This was different. It was clearer, less dramatic, more coherent. More real. When he spoke, the words came from somewhere else, with a passion and sincerity he'd never quite felt, but which now seemed second nature. Everything was familiar but strange, and detailed in a way he wouldn't have thought he had it in him to imagine, and when he woke up he felt lost. He couldn't remember where he was, and the recuperacoon seemed empty with just him in it.

It took a moment for the noise at his door to reach him, and another for it to occur to him that that must have been what woke him up.

It took a few more for him to realise he should probably do something about it.

His head emerged from the recuperacoon very slowly, glistening greenly and squinting.

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It still managed to surprise him, sometimes.

Not the nightmares. They were familiar - almost comforting. At least he was dreaming about something else, somewhere else, about people who weren't him. A few more lives snuffed out in space, but ones that he could comfortably say that he had nothing to do with. Without an upcoming battle, he has the leisure of mere inaction once again.

What did surprise him, some evenings, was the way he could move when he woke up. The freedom of wandering thought. Opening his eyes to see something other than shadows and light, to feel the waking movements of fingers of tone.

He'd expect flesh, hope for flesh, and he'd find something less. But it was better than nothing, better than what he remembered. That was the worst part, every time. Having to remember, all over again, having to recall that none of this had been a dream. Any eagerness to be awake was gradually done away with as his thoughts played catch up - at least until the point there he reached that he subjectively recalled to have been the last few hours before he fell asleep.

Karkat, he thought. His vascular pump stalled in his chest.

"Karkat?" he said out loud, only a moment later, without ever fully thinking of why he still bothered.

He was out in the hallway moments later, bundled in his oversized hoodie, robot feet cold on the cold floor. Not many were awake, in this section. It was too quiet, way too quiet, and he couldn't stand it. What was his room number? Had that even been real?

Fuck. Fuck. Why had he told him to go away?

Then he was clumsily running down the hallway on unsteady legs, rifling through his mind for a number. He thought he had it. He had to have it (right, as consistent as hallucinations tended to be, wow) and when he got to the door he had very little patience left.

He knocked on the door. He barely waited a manner of seconds before he'd reached out psionically and wrenched the door straight open.

He blinked, slowly, the only sound the plip-plip-plip of the slime gently dripping off his hair into the recuperacoon as he stared at the figure in the doorway.

"... Sollux," he said, fuzzily, as if needing to confirm this – for a second he'd thought of a different name, but he'd already forgotten what it was.

The Aerolith stared back at him, with the expression one would have after seeing a ghost. Of course, the more reality started to click with his brain, the more shame began to slip in and replace that fear.

"Sorry," he said, haltingly, taking a step back but still too stunned to move. "Never mind."

He was thinking very hard about running.

He blinked again, trying to focus but still failing completely to make sense of the situation even as he started to wake up properly.

Eventually, resigning himself to the surreality of it all, he just shook his head. "No," he said, evidently baffled and still a little sopor-slurred, "it's cool, I mean – it's your fucking ship, right."

He looked back at him, long enough to stare for a few solid moments, like he was trying to verify that what he was seeing was real.

"I should go," he said without prelude, and turned to start walking away.

Edited 2012-09-10 07:01 (UTC)

"What," he said, and then, "What?? Dude. No. Wait." He got as far as pulling his arms out of the recuperacoon before he realised he probably couldn't just clamber out and go after him with no clothes on, so he decided to just stay put. "What the hell, man, what are you doing."

He had already moved out of the doorway by the time the Awakener started calling him back, and he almost didn't stop. But he did. A few steps down the hall he paused, shoulders shaking with the anticipation of his own next move.

He waveringly hauled his way back to the entrance, but he didn't look at the other troll as he spoke.

"I was checking something, it doesn't matter."

He looked around the room, brow furrowing, and then, questioningly, back at the Aerolith.

And the door frame.

"...I would've let you in."

"I didn't..." And he looked at the door frame too, almost like he hadn't remembered doing it in the first place. His head shrunk down into his shoulders, and he fumbled out, like he was just trying to get it out of the way: "I didn't know if you were here, that's it, whatever."

"... Oh."

He frowned.

"Okay. Yeah. I'm here. I think." His expression still a little bit puzzled, but more tired concern than anything else, he reached out a hand as if to gesture him over – which in practice just meant dropping his arm against the side of the recuperacoon. He pushed slime out of his eyes with the back of his other hand. "Is that all, like, did you want to talk or – I can get a shirt."

Well, at the very least, he could take heart in the fact that he'd never hallucinated something quite this roundabout before. He thought about saying that really was all he needed before trying to go back to sleep, but...

"Can I stay here?" he asked.

Despite having just offered to talk, that reply seemed to surprise the Awakener, but he he didn't question it.

"Yeah. Sure. If you put the door back."

"Thanks."

He stepped inside the block, and the door wrenched itself back into place just as easily as it can been removed. They'd see how well that worked out later. For now, Sollux was headed over to the resting slab with hardly a pause, keeping his arms bundled up in his clothing and his hood shielding his face like he wanted as little of him to be seen as possible.

He sat on the slab, bringing his legs up with him, and being still. Maybe the Awakener would just go back to sleep.

The Awakener watched him curiously, pausing only to yawn. He was quiet for a while, but it was mainly because he was expecting him to say something, and when it became clear that he wasn't going to he started to get a little bit worried.

"... Are you okay," he tried.

"Yeah," he said, too automatically to mean much. He turns his head just enough that his face could be seen a little bit better, eyes glowing faintly in the dark.

"You don't have to stay up," he added, similarly after realizing that he wasn't just going to go back inside the recuperacoon.

He frowned.

"Oh."

He was sleepy; it was hard not to be when you'd been woken up suddenly and were still waist deep in sopor slime, but...

He shook his head.

"Dude, are you saying you came over here and broke my door down just so you could, like, sit on the resting slab in the dark while I sleep."

It sounded crazy when put like that, and he had no intent on denying it. It felt pretty crazy, too. He sank down a little more.

"Just until I can sleep again," he said, quietly.

The Awakener gave this due consideration.

"...Okay," he said, and subsided back into the slime.

A few seconds later he stuck his head out again, frowning. "Hey, no, wait, this is dumb. You can't go to sleep there if you're all... you'll just get messed up dreams, that's stupid."

He just shook his head, shrugging his shoulders.

"I wasn't using a recuperacoon anyway."

"... Why?"

It wasn't like the Awakener hadn't gone without on many an occasion in the recent past, but if anything the abundant experience just made him more confused about why anyone would choose not to bother with it.

"...It just...reminds me of stuff," he after a delay, trailing off there as the stuff in question lingered in his mind. He tried to shake it off, by adding, "and it's a pain in the ass to clean out the robotics, and it's not like my dreams aren't going to be horrible anyway so why even bother..."

"...Oh."

Shit, it was like every time he even exchanged words with Sollux it was to find out that he was exponentially more fucked up than he'd originally anticipated.

He scrubbed a hand over his face, which more or less only served to get slime all over his eyebrows.

"Shit. Sorry. Are you sure you're okay."

Edited 2012-09-10 09:03 (UTC)

Sollux stared down at his hand and feet, tucked in close to his body. He thought about some of the stuff the Awakener had said to him earlier, since that had apparently actually happened. He'd been honest with him, hadn't he?

"No," he said, finally. "But I mean...I'm not less okay than usual, so it doesn't really make a huge difference."

The Awakener rested his chin on the edge of the recuperacoon, looking at him kind of thoughtfully, but mostly sadly.

"Do you want to talk about it," he said, at last. "I won't say anything awkward or shitty or stupid."

He didn't even know where to start with that. Talk about what? About his sleep problems? About why he wasn't okay? The latter issue was such a vast topic that they'd be there for nights. His impulse was to clam up and not talk about anything at all, or to say it made him too uncomfortable. That usually got people to leave him alone, when he wanted them to.

But then he thought about how scared he'd been when he thought that the Awakener might not have actually been there.

"I just feel like if I go in there I'm not going to be able to get out again," he started.