Startling? Please. Karkat hears it and laughs, sudden and caught off guard, but not the way she thought he might be. "You don't even know, Nill."

He could tell her about the black crush he had on himself, or the countless arguments he had through trollian. He hates himself more than anyone - more than he hates another, or more than anyone happens to hate him, in both senses.

But she follows up with kindness (always kindness), and that quiets him. People see him better than he is, or see what he can't--he doesn't know. She hits the mark again at the end.

"I don't know," he sighs at the end. "I wish I was better."

The thing is, he tries to hate everything. And a part of him does have that - a lot of anger, a lot of outrage, and a lot of drive born therefrom. But he's soft underneath all that, too soft to be a proper troll, and that's why he tries to cover it in thorns. It's why he gets so upset when something goes wrong and a friend gets hurt, and why he can miss even the worst of them years later. He's got a heart too big for the life he was born into, and he turned into a mess to compensate.

"This is stupid, you know. You're the one hurting here, and you don't even tell me to shut up when I bitch about my life."