don't be afraid

[reassures]

Who| Nill and Karkat
What| A couple different things. Mostly meeting up and then dying, oops.
Where| Throughout the station.
When| End of week 2.
Warnings/Notes| Character death, gore, crying, and obligatory Karkat Warning™. There'll probably be another prompt for that stuff, or it'll just be one huge long thread.


To say that the Arena had been unkind up to this point would be an understatement. The first day hadn't been all that bad, generally speaking. For a few minutes she thought she might even survive long enough to make sure that someone she loved made it out of the Arena alive, to never enter one again. It was a goal. It was something to keep her going in an experience that she would rather have never lived again, even if it was better than sitting back with cigarettes and the Giant Wall of Child Death. She had found people she cared about. She kept them alive.

Even now, nearing the end of week 2, Nill would still maintain that being in the Arena was better than watching it. While close to a comforting thought, it could only do so much in the wake of all the deaths that occurred during Week 0, or the ones that followed it. It did little to help with the images in her own mind.

Being in Beth's head as she died, managing her pain so it was just a little bit less awful as she faded away. Watching Kurloz be cut in half in an instant. Seeing the face of a dark-haired boy in the stars. Kankri, Clementine, Davesprite, Gary; those were just the faces she'd seen when she had the willpower to look for them.

Despite all of that, Nill was holding her own well enough for a little while. She ate almost nothing, stuck to mostly water when she could find it. Once or twice she'd tried the dehydrated food, but she hadn't trusted it to do more than have it when she really needed it. She began to look gaunt and dehydrated, but it could have been worse. It remained that way until she found the Orb with the Initiate's voice, and it was all downhill after that. She'd cried out most of the moisture left in her system, couldn't bring herself to eat much of anything after it, didn't make a point of looking for water so much as just taking advantage of it if she came across it. Before the Mirth Core Nill still moved with purpose. She still looked like she might accomplish something if she tried. Now she mostly just looks miserable.

But hey, having to deal with an outbreak of Xenomorphs can do a lot to keep a person on their toes. They're not too hard to avoid right now, but it's tricky when they notice you, and Nill has had a few too many close calls this week. She leans her back against a wall, ignoring her wings entirely, so that she can actually catch her breath while keeping an eye on the halls around her, knife held tightly in her hand. The place was going to hell so much sooner than she expected from what she'd seen of other Arenas. How was it already this difficult? How had any of the kids she knew survived in other Arenas?

There was no way this could keep going for much longer.

Comments

[reassures]

It's a good way to say it without raising the kind of suspicion that the Capitol seems to get from most things if they squint at it just right. Her smile quirks up at one side, appreciative of wording, even if she doesn't indicate as much.

"Someone tried to ask me something very personal on the network there. That Karkat made sure they knew why it wasn't okay."

Though her expression doesn't seem bothered by the memory. If anything, she almost looks a little fond, both for the people who had been on her side at the time and the dumbass doing the asking. It doesn't necessarily seem like a bad memory, at least.

"That was Siren's Port, Canada. The world with the monsters in the dark. At the time it was the third world I had been to." She stops to consider for a few moments, as if not completely sure of the details, before she adds a little more hesitantly, "This is the fifth."

[crabmunicator]

He lets the first bit pass without comment. Some network junk, okay. He might care more if it weren't so minor, but when he has the problems of the past self who was here causing bigger problems, it's hard to worry much over a brief exchange with a version of him she was never close to. He's just glad enough it won't cause more issue.

Besides, the issue of other worlds is much more important, and her combined answer shocks him silent for several moments. Eventually he mutters, "Holy shit," but it takes him a stretch still before he can find something better. "Five? How... how did they work?"

Everything where he came from was linked up somehow. Beforus was just a different Alternia; Earth was part of a universe they made; and Sgrub and Sburb were alternate versions of the same game that they all played on purpose. It was all part of the same reality anyway, on some level, not this... disconnected whatever-it-is he and everyone else have been drawn into. The thought of more places that could yank people out of their home realities isn't unthinkable after this, but it's a shock nonetheless, and not something he naturally considered.

[reassures]

It was actually a much bigger deal at the time than Nill wants to let on, but that's because it's not the sort of thing you can just bring up. How do you tell someone you had to publicly turn down a marriage proposal? It was a nightmare at the time, but loss tends to color memories a little differently than how they played out. And she's not sure she can manage to discuss her losses right now.

"The first world was mine. It was..."

Even now, she hasn't found words to really explain what her world was like. She hadn't disliked it, but it was responsible for a whole slew of awful on it's own.

"The second world I visited was similar to it. None of them have been similar since then. NeoGenesis was a city with three levels and very cruel people. Siren's Port was an island that was impossible to leave that mutated Newcomers. Exsilium was a version of earth much further in the future than the other worlds."

And then, here, which she certainly doesn't need to explain to him. After taking another moment to consider, a slight frown creasing her brow as she thinks over her information, she continues, "I think I was fifteen the last time I was in my own world. I should be older than twenty now. Is that three sweeps?"

[crabmunicator]

He doesn't push her when she can't explain the first world. This is her past, her issues, and it's not his place to pry more than she'll give when she's opened herself so much already. The worlds she does describe he's never heard of and never been to - at least, not this version of him. She may feel a hint of fear flicker over him as he considers that, but he doesn't press further into that line of thought.

Instead, what sticks with him is the weight of seeing so many places, of being so long gone from where she came from, and of the threat that it could happen to others too.

At the end, he reaches for her hand again, to hold it firmly.

"Two and a half, maybe three," he says, though his voice comes out distracted. "A sweep is a little longer than two years. I'm seven and a half - mid-teens, I guess."

A part of him just wants to give her a hug for all she's been through, but he doesn't know how it would go over. Besides, she's standing and he's sitting, and they're both sore and tired.

All of this is just so heavy to think about. He may have had a complicated life, one that's long since left his home behind, but it doesn't match up like this. It's not about him, anyway.

"I don't know what to say," he admits. "But if you need to talk more, or want to ask things, or just sit together--I'm here."

[reassures]

She doesn't hold his hand back quite as firmly, but she does hold on to it, her grip light and gentle, but her expression conveys the gratitude she feels for the gesture, as well as the tone of the voice in his head.

"Thank you."

She wouldn't be opposed to a hug, but she's not sure either of their injuries would be fond of them for it. Even that thought she's appreciative of, even as she considers her words, how long a sweep is, how old Karkat and the Initiate are comparatively.

"I guess it's been a long time," comes the voice, also distracted. "Sometimes things get a little hard to remember when you move between worlds. I don't know how long it's really been."

Nill has no intention of actually resting, but everything aches dully, and the weight of that admittance, soft and a little off-handed as it may have been, drags on her. She lets go of his hand, but it's only so she can put a hand against her side for support again as she slides to sit down, probably bending or snagging several feathers in the process. The sigh of relief she lets out is barely audible, but he might still catch it.

"...I can't talk about this outside the Arena. I don't want them to try to bring the people I love here."

If ever he asks her a question that she can't answer, it's not because of him. She's tried so hard, and so many of the people she's loved are dead and gone. It would be more than cruel to mention them only for them to be brought back into a place like this. All avoidances outside the Arena are with the intent of protecting, and little else beyond that.

[crabmunicator]

Karkat lets her take her hand back and watches the slow process of her sinking down to sit. He has to wonder how uncomfortable it is for her feathers to drag like that; he winces a little in watching, but doesn't stop her.

"Life shits on everyone," he says quietly, after a moment has passed. "I've been through a lot of awful things, and seen it happen to others, but all I've dealt with isn't like what you must have been through. We still had goals to work for. We..."

A thought catches him. Every place he'd been to had some link to another, apart from this one, and that connection gave meaning. Being dragged around from world to world is harder to imagine. Has anyone been brought with her before? Was it just her, alone, having to deal with it each time?

"... What do you want, now?" He looks at her directly, finding her eye. "What would make you happy?"

[reassures]

It's genuinely rare to ask a question that Nill isn't expecting. Between trying to generally be prepared for most conversations, and her time as a telepath, most of the time Nill can tell where a conversation is going, even in just the general direction.

Somehow though Karkat manages to ask her a question that she not only didn't expect in the slightest, but that she has no idea how to answer. Normally she tries not to make it obvious if something like that happens - she tries to cover, to make it seem like there are a dozen options, but this time Nill can't help but to openly stare at Karkat, and to look, just for a moment, completely and utterly lost. So much so that she can't bring herself to hold his gaze for very long.

"...I don't know," She finally admits, because she can't think of anything better to say, and even if she could, a very small, exhausted part of her doesn't want to.

"Before now I always tried to stay with my friends or get back to them."

The implication there being, of course, that the preferred course of action is no longer an option.

[crabmunicator]

Her surprise is easy to read, and it's probably the first time he's seen her this shocked. He didn't think it would be quite as big a question as it is. Still, he doesn't take it back; hard or not, it's important, and he cares enough to want to know.

Some part of him hurts for her again when she can't stay looking at him, and when she has no real answer. He knows what he might like even if he doubts he can have it, and that's more than not knowing. Before now seems to speak to a broken hope, or a giving up - an abandonment of that course of thought.

It takes a moment before he can even issues the non-answer of a sighed out, "Fuck."

He glances to her again, and this time his impulse wins out. "Come here," he murmurs, and he goes to drape his arm across her shoulders in a loose hug. It's easy enough to pull away from should she not want it, and with any hope light enough to not be too harsh for their sore bodies. He's not one for gestures like this, usually, but the harshness of the circumstances weighs out.

"I don't know how to fix this," he admits. "I'm not even close. This is too much for anyone; it's unfair, and it's crazy, and I hate that it has to be happening like this. But if there's a way, I'm going to fucking find it." His voice is solid there, certain and determined and unwilling to give in. "You deserve to have a life you want."

[reassures]

The hope is certainly broken, but Nill didn't give up. Not this time at least. She did at one point, after she lost what was the equivalent of her moirail. Without him around she started on a long and downward spiral that eventually got her killed, and then she ended up here, but she didn't give up this time. It's just that everyone she had ever tried to get back to was gone now.

Gilbert still existed somewhere, but if he went back to his own world he might not know her, and she wouldn't be able to handle that from him. Maybe, some day, if she got to leave she could go and find Kanaya, but it seems like such a strange thing to do, and perhaps not a kind one. While she loved Kanaya dearly, their relationship had primarily been around fixing the world they were in. How would Kanaya take it if she just showed up one day?

(What if she tried and Kanaya was dead too?)

It's not often that Nill finds herself the one receiving comfort instead of giving it, and though she doesn't give any sign of not wanting it, she's not sure what to do with it at first. They're both still sore everywhere, and if she twists around to return it probably it's going to hurt more than anything, but she's not unappreciative. After a moment she finally lifts a hand to put it over his, and leans just slightly towards him, not enough to actually put weight against him but to be a little bit closer. It's nice, and it doesn't feel like he's doing it out of obligation, which does happen at times.

"I'll help. We have to find something eventually."

She tilts her head a little to get a better look at him, and after a moment of uncertainty, the voice asks quietly, "What would make you happy?"

[crabmunicator]

Nill's gesture isn't anywhere near as dramatic as hugging him back, but for the circumstances they're in, it works. It's kind, a clear return. It doesn't hurt them, and perhaps that's all the more suiting for how things are. They have enough hurts in their hearts without adding on physically.

He nods to her first. As much as he wants her to be happy, he has no delusions of being a singular, solitary hero to earn all the glory. He's a leader, and her skills are as worthwhile as anyone else's.

It's the question that stops him up.

Nill gets no surprised look like she gave him. Instead Karkat's gaze draws down, brow furrowing just so as he thinks it over. The goals he had in mind before this place come to mind immediately, but the conflict of what's happened since draws into question whether he can have it. So if that's the case, then what? If he is doomed, he can't just wish it away.

His lips press together as he mulls it over. That fear isn't one he's admitted to anyone yet. And while he could brush it over, what would be the point when Nill has opened up to him as much as she has?

Slowly he draws in a breath then lets it back out. "I had things I wanted to do before I came here," he admits, words slow. "But if I went back somehow, I don't think I'd be able to do them. You see, time is complicated there. If even one thing goes wrong, even something small, that timeline is doomed. And the thing is, I had no clue about that other me who was here before I showed up. No memory, no hint, no sign. Nothing warned me or gave any clue that I was going to get sent somewhere else when they brought me here. It's... I can't shake the feeling that this is all unrelated to everything back there, just this big anomaly, not part of the plan at all. If even dumb, incidental stuff can doom a timeline, then something this big..."

He shakes his head. Calm though his voice is, this is hard. It's one of the fears that came up when he ran into the Initiate before: irrelevance. The thought that he doesn't matter to the main timeline at all. Back on the meteor he had a big moment about this, about how arbitrary everything is, and how unfair that even doing something right could mean dooming everyone if it wasn't what Paradox Space needed to happen.

Here the thought that he might be doomed was only a nagging idea at the back of his mind, but how can he write it off when he lays it out logically? Even if he'd never know until he went back and saw the results for himself, the chance of it being anything else seems vanishingly small.

It takes a moment before he can continue.

"Part of me still wants to know if we'll ever fix things back there, and I don't know if I'll be completely happy until I do. But if I can't go back and do it myself, then... I have friends and teammates here." He looks to her again, holding her eyes, because he means her as much as the people he already knew. And even after what he's already said, it's too important not to emphasize even now. "I want the chance for us to live. To have something good, you know? This isn't where I wanted my life to go, but it's what I'm stuck with regardless, and I'm not going to give up just because I'm not the alpha Karkat. My own shame would dislocate itself from my body to disown me entirely from any conceptual existence of a Karkat worth recognizing if I did."

[reassures]

Nill doesn't interrupt him as he talks, even as he has to stop a few times to consider it more. It's obvious she's listening, but she waits for him to finish, and she squeezes his hand lightly.

She remembers the clusterfuck of alpha and beta timelines, what it meant for the people in them. She remembers someone telling her that sometimes even in the alpha timeline not everyone actually got to make it to the end and how bitter the thought had made her, that for all the suffering and all the time and doomed timelines it took to get things right that in the end not everyone could live.

"If you do fix it someone from that timeline should be here eventually."

It might not be as comforting as she'd like for it to be, but places like this didn't only bring in people from the bad time periods, even if sometimes it seemed like it. And especially with just how many people here seemed to be from Alternia, eventually there would need to be someone from a point where things were better. It would be awful for them, but it would make sense if it happened eventually.

"I think we can make this place better if we have enough time."

It was going to be a long time before they managed it, but it could be possible. And if nothing else, it was something that she intended to work towards. It wasn't just the tributes of this world that had it rough. It wasn't a small group of outsiders that wanted to make this place into something less awful than it was right now, it was an entire nation. Time might not be on their side just yet, but numbers were.

"If we can make this place better then maybe we can make your world better too."

[crabmunicator]

Karkat's heart sinks hard at that thought, and it's obvious from the tensing of his muscles to the fearful look on his face. He's glad Nill can't speak it aloud, because god, what if the Gamemakers heard that? They would drag them right in and fuck them over, too. His voice is emphatic as he tells her, "Don't even think that."

He slips his arm away from her as he thinks over the rest. Making Panem better is all well and good, and that's what he hopes to be able to do so long as he's here. But his world isn't something he can imagine fixing like that, and he shakes his head. "No. If I'm doomed, then there's absolutely no way that trying to fix Paradox Space would help anything. Even if you try to do something that would be good and productive, if it's not the thing that's 'supposed' to happen then everything is doomed. That's just how it works, no matter how unintuitive and infuriating it might be."

[reassures]

Nill realizes a moment too late that the thought was incredibly cruel. In other worlds people usually took comfort from the possibility of their loved ones showing up, and some took even more if they were able to tell them that their world was alright. The same can't be said for this place at all. More people showing up just means more people dying.

"I'm sorry."

The look she sends his way is quiet and apologetic.

"I know. It takes very little to doom a timeline."

It's more than just infuriating, it's cruel, it's awful, it's part of why Nill hated the man she'd met who claimed to be god. Why would anyone create all of this if it was only pain and misery?

"Even in the right timeline not everyone gets to live."

[crabmunicator]

Karkat calms progressively, though his frown is still set, and his mind still worried. Even without prompting, there's always the possibility that the Gamemakers could bring in yet more of his friends--and people besides, from his world or others, who probably deserve this no more than anyone else. It's cruel and it's unfair, and it bugs him, and he has a feeling it will continue to do so.

For now, though, he leans back against the wall and sighs. "That's the worst thing about it. Even if you try your best and save what you can and do what the timeline is 'supposed' to contain, there's still going to be people who couldn't be saved. And it's so arbitrary--a person has to die this way, at this time, in this place. Not this other person, not some other way. It has to go just so, and it's stupid."