thearena | don't be afraid

Entry tags:

don't be afraid

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.

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Part of him feels he deserves it, but still he argues, "I'm not dying here."

He looks from their clasped hands to her face to her wound, colored all painful and disturbing. He sniffs and blinks hard; he doesn't want to be crying, though he knows there's bound to be more.

"I have a knife. I can fight. I'm fine." He looks back up. "Don't make me leave you, Nill." His hand squeezes back. "I'm--I'm responsible for this. I can't fucking run away like a coward because, because it might be dangerous, not when you're hurting and can't even stand anymore. Who do you think I am? I've said it too many times: I'm not leaving."

No sobs clog his voice, but his tone creaks with the effort of making words past the hurt of this. He's so tired of friends always dying, of things going to shit, of his own inescapable mistakes. It doesn't matter that she's the one telling him to do it; leaving would still be running from things.

His head tips as he asks of her, "Nill, please."

"You're not responsible for this. You're not."

The desperation is still there, the need for him to leave, to at least know that he'll be safe when she sees him go, but this is a battle that she's losing quickly. It still hurts, everything hurts, and she can feel her heartbeat pounding in her temples, though she's sure it was never that soft before or that fast. The world tilts depending on where she looks, and Nill knows that she's dying, she can feel it.

But the ways she died before this were so awful, and this was awful too. She doesn't want to die alone again. She'd done some bad things after she left her world, some of them even awful things, but it's so unfair, and she's always hated being alone.

The tears she's been trying to hold back finally make their way onto her cheeks, and Nill's lips tremble as she tugs on his hand a little, to get him to look at her again.

"Promise. Promise me you won't die here."

"I am," he insists still. This whole damn thing is his fault, and that's a habit it will take more than this to shake him of. Blame himself on every failure: if there's a way to turn the picture to set it in that view, he'll find it.

But he looks up still at her tugging hand, and now she's crying. He feels more tears slip down his cheeks, hot and translucent-red, almost pink against his ashen skin. He goes to sniff again and pulls a hiccup of a sound into his chest.

"I promise." No looking down this time, his eyes holds her solidly even as they keep welling up. "I won't let myself. Just please, don't make me go."

Terezi dying was different, sudden and sharp like a knife in the chest. It wasn't all instant, but it happened faster, without this kind of prelude. Nill's wound is in the wrong place for her to bleed out all at once, and there's no failing systems to compensate and draw the curtain. It's got to be slow and awful, painful and gnawing, and he hates all of it. He can't let her have that alone.

Even if she wanted to keep trying to convince him to go - and she does, she really does, him dying here is about the last thing in the world she wants to happen - she doesn't have the resolve to keep asking him to do it. Not when the second-to-last thing she wants is to be here alone and just wait to die.

"Alright."

She's already got a headache from it already. She sniffles, and blinks as if to ward away the tears, but more just fall instead. At least it's not like she'll be around long enough to die from dehydration at least, even if she has the headache to go with it already. Blinking several more times proves just as useless, so she stops trying.

"I won't ask again."

She straightens a little, and though that inspires another grimace she stays up.

"Could-- can you help me move a little?"

She hates to ask it. She hates that he has to do anything, but like this just moving hurts, and she'd rather not be stuck with her legs under her like this when she dies. Having her back against the wall would be better, even if it'll make her wings stiff. She just needs a little extra leverage to make it easier, which mostly just involves holding onto his hand.

A breath falls out of him, the sound caught somewhere between a sob, a laugh, and a puffed out sigh. He's relieved but overwhelmed, and doesn't know any better than before what he should do.

But her asking help to move gives him a task, and he nods. "How do I help?"

He hopes despite everything that it won't be hard, that the aid she needs isn't too much, but he worries too what comparative ease might mean. How fast is she dying? How close is she now? He's never died a slow death; Jack blew up Prospit, Jane impaled him, and the animatronic tore him apart. How hard is it going to be for her? How hard is it for a human?

But he can't know yet, only offer his hands and wait for direction.

"Let me hold on to your hands when I need to. I think I can do the rest myself."

Hands also tend to be easier to hold on to than a spaceport wall, especially since he'd be holding on, too. She uncurls her arm from around herself and braces it against the wall so she can pull herself up enough to get one leg out from under her.

It must hurt though. The minute the first leg is moved she's back to leaning all her wait against the wall, a hard shudder going through her that Karkat can probably feel just from holding her hand. But she's determined to actually get this done so she won't need to start moving again too much after this, and before he can try to say or do anything she does the same to get her other leg free.

Like the first time she shudders again, teeth grit and eyes squeezing shut, and she sort of falls more against the wall this time than leans into it.

"Almost done," she tells him, as if to brush off any concern that might already be forming in his mind. She's fine. Really. Outside of the dying and pain thing, anyway, which comparatively wasn't too bad at all when she wasn't doing the moving thing. In a moment she can do the rest, and she won't need to do that much again, which she's sure she can manage. She just needs a minute.

Karkat nods again. It's easier in a way to let her do the moving, to just offer support when he doesn't know what would make her hurt more. There's something horrible and anxious about watching her like this, fearing for her and knowing what's to come but not when, and having to observe the frailty of someone weaker through no fault of their own. He can't blame her for any of it, and it hurts him to see her so worse off. His jaws clench tight for every shudder that goes through her and for the way her body finds itself back against the wall.

It's not even that she needs the support, but how much she needs it. How is it that she can be so weak that she can't even do this much at once? Things were bad for him after the Cornucopia, but then he had injuries bigger and more dramatic than a little hole in the side: a broken leg, blood in his lungs, a hard knock to his head that bled and left him disoriented. This is so slow and strange, and a part of him wishes that if it has to happen, that it would be quicker. There's something cruel in how it draws out.

"Nill..."

He wants to do more, but doesn't know what. She's hurting and all is a struggle, and it's horribly, terribly unfair.

He blinks hard to clear his eyes again and bites out, "Stop acting like you're alright, for fuck's sake."

It's mostly where the wound is specifically that makes every movement hurt, every twitch tug at torn skin. Using her arms to sort of lift herself has all her weight from the waist down pulling on the wound. Turning her torso twists the skin. Lifting her arms isn't too bad, provided that she's careful about it, and it's not too difficult to be careful when she's tired anyway. As far as movement with injuries go, there are a lot of places that she could have been hit that probably would've killed her just as slowly without restricting her movement so much.

"I'm sorry."

She means it. She's never had to worry about talking with someone while she was in the process of dying. She's never even had to worry all that much about her friends watching her die, either. The first time it ever became a possibility she hightailed it out of there. The result was watching some of her own friends die, and then dying horribly, alone. None of them had ever seen it, and they never asked.

Slowly the tension starts to go out of her again as the flare dies down to a more bearable pain level. Her jaw unclenches, she opens her eyes again. She doesn't try to sit up again quite yet, but she will soon.

"Walking hurt less, but I don't have the energy to walk more. This is less work, but it hurts a lot more."

Her wings shifts a little against her back before settling again into a more comfortable position. At least that doesn't hurt.

Karkat stays where he is, watching and waiting, frowning still. He doesn't say anything to her apology. He doesn't know what he would say if he tried.

A fleeting thought does seize him as she goes on: what if he carried her? But it dies just as quick. Trying that would slow him down and take up his energy, and make it harder to react to oncoming threats. He doesn't know how to optimally carry another person, much less someone dying slowly from internal bleeding or god knows what human organ damage. He'd have to drop her if something attacked, and what good would that do?

He wants to sit beside her, but he doesn't dare move before she's settled fully. He wants to give up, frankly, if this stupid game just means more friends dying, and more of his mistakes causing it. But everyone keeps doing something, saying something, wanting him to do this or that or run or get safe to survive and live, and even if he hates this, he can't turn his back on that wish. Especially not when given in these circumstances.

"How bad is it?" he asks at length. "How much it hurts, I mean."

He wants to ask how long it's going to last, her sitting here in pain before she dies, but how the fuck do you ask someone that?

"Bad."

There's no real point in lying to him by now, is there? She wasn't to begin with, but she'd also made a pretty good effort in downplaying things. She's still dealt with worse, but those things usually killed her, and she can't exactly make comparisons by trying to say it's not as bad as dying. It's exactly as bad as dying.

"It might get worse."

She really hopes it doesn't, but Nill has nothing to gauge that against, no experience with this kind of injury. All she knows is that it hurts more now than it did when she got hurt, and that means it might hurt more before this is over with.

Nill doesn't seem willing to linger on it for long. Shoving that thought aside she sits up again, and twists herself around with some effort so that she can finally lean her back against the wall, and draw her knees up a little. It doesn't seem to have hurt as much, but she still lets out a shaky exhale when she's done, eyes squeezing shut again.

The voice is soft and hesitant this time, close to a whisper for all that it isn't real sound. She can't hear anything coming their way, no monsters in the immediate area, no tributes ready to come down the hall. For a few minutes at least they're safe, and it hurts enough that she doesn't feel as bad as she might otherwise to ask it.

"Will you sit with me?"

So she doesn't know much - that's what it sounds like. Not in the way of how it will go or what exactly will happen. It makes him worry for her more, and he hurts with it. It's all so stupid and unfair. He can't keep it from his face either; as she moves to finish settling, he squeezes fresh tears from his eyes with a tight blink.

He nods when she asks her question. He's already begged her not to make him leave; he has no reason to refuse. It takes him only a fraction of the time to settle his back against the wall beside her, close but not touching. His left hand has taken hold of his knife in the process, and he clutches it tight as he stares straight ahead.

"I hate everything," he murmurs, and he doesn't have it in him to sound mad.

Nill's own knife is on the ground near her legs, though she's made no point to try and grab it. What up until now was one of the few things that made her feel safe now mostly just seems pointless. She wouldn't move fast enough if something tried to attack them. It would be easier if she just used what telekinetic ability she had, and if that knocked her out, then at least she would have done something right in this Arena. About the only thing she has done right was making sure that Karkat wasn't the one sitting here bleeding out.

The flare of pain from moving again subsides. She's in a better position for it now - it tugs at her skin to sit this way, a constant, tense burning, but there's no weight on the wound, and it's easier to breathe. She could even lift her arms without much difficulty if she wanted to.

Nill's never been one to crave physical contact. The desire for it was stripped from her at some point along the way, save for the occasional hug, or holding someone's hand, but every so often it becomes something that's more comforting than uncomfortable, something good. Nill blinks her eyes open again, and wipes at the tears that roll down her cheeks when she does, before tilting herself to the side a little to lean her shoulder against Karkat's.

"I do too."

Karkat has sat himself to the left of her, so his knife is at the outside. When she leans against him, though his right hand is the burned one, he finds hers to carefully hold. A little discomfort is worth it if he can offer her... not reassurance, not at this point, but a return of that contact. She's hurting far worse than him, besides.

What's he supposed to do, now? It's not like he can say anything nice to make it easier. It would be empty if he tried, as good as an at least it's not raining when your friend's lusus is deathly ill. He can't say things will be better next time, because he has no way to guarantee it. One if not both of them will have to die then, too. And there's nothing better he could be doing now, no job he's supposed to, no chores. He's hungry and thirsty and tired, but it matters so little. Everything's tiny and irrelevant next to Nill.

He settles finally on saying, "... I'm sorry. For all of this."

"It's not your fault."

She gets the feeling she'll be telling him that for a long time, even after this Arena has ended and she's died and been brought back all over again. But she'll do it as many times as she needs to, every time he tries to blame himself, even if he never believes it.

Though that's not exactly what he's getting at this time, is it? He's sorry she's dying, and in pain. Her gaze drifts down to their hands, and she holds his carefully, never squeezing it for worry of giving him more hurt than he already has.

"...I'm really glad you're alright."

'Alright' is sort of relative, and he's in pretty bad shape, but he's not dying from his wounds. If he found food and water he'd probably be pretty okay for awhile longer, actually.

"Usually the people I care about die before I do. I'm glad you didn't."

He doesn't answer the first part. Indeed, it's not what he meant in that moment, but the matter of not blaming himself is more than can be solved with a few repetitions of that phrase. Even if she's the one dying, even if she has the best position to decide whose fault it is, it's simply too ingrained in him to let it go.

But now as much as before, what gets him about her is her kindness. She's suffered so much: her life's been shit, taking her from place to place with familiarity in all sense lost, only to wind up here dying next to him. Even before she was unnecessarily nice to him, but here when he'd willingly take the blame for her death without being asked, she finds it to be glad he's comparatively okay. Who does that? Since when does he deserve it?

He can feel more warmth rolling down his cheeks, and it's with the absurdity that comes in the worst circumstances that he laughs. "I am the worst excuse for a troll there is, you know that?" He looks back at her finally, a sideways glance. "Here I'm sitting and crying and feeling sorry for someone who's dying, just literally sitting here with you while we wait it out. A proper troll--a proper troll would have left before you even said it, or finished you off himself to keep from being slowed down, or--or killed you when he first ran into you. How did I ever think I could make it to be a threshecutioner?"

He sniffs, laughs again, and looks down to their joined hands. He doesn't know if now is the best time to be rambling about his own species' standards, but if nothing else it offers something to pass the time.

"You're not even the first," he admits. "When I got burned, it was because some tribute--I wasn't paying attention, and I ran into him and he summoned these flames out of nowhere and attacked me. And this woman, I don't know who but she knew me, she ran in and fought him off and told me to run, and not that long after the death alarm went off.

"And then--" And he knows he's rambling, but it's like some stopper has been loosed from him, letting it all flow out. "And then I ran into Terezi. She's--she's a teammate of mine, a friend, and it was fine until the systems fucked up and failed, the gravity and air and everything. She got me to the door, whatever you call it, and pushed me through, but when I went to pull her after me her arm got caught in it. And she--she died like that."

He's crying harder for it, remembering it all: teal blood, that horrible realization, and the heavy weight of guilt.

"Now you. And just--I shouldn't care, I should move on, I should actually kill someone on purpose, but I'm just crying like a grub with a stubbed leg. I should be some brutal, murderous machine and I just don't have it in me."

He sniffs hard, then looks at her again. "Why do you people want me to live so much?"

Edited 2015-01-23 14:56 (UTC)

This Arena has been more hell than not for Karkat, and Nill's heart aches with it. The guilt and sorrow practically comes off him in waves, and it actually hurts, something physical that she can feel in her chest and what must feel a thousand times worse for him. There's so little she can actually offer him to make this better somehow, and even less when she herself is adding to the number of lives lost he's seen in this place.

But she can listen, and she can try, for as little as that can actually do for him. She has to blink back her own tears a few times so she doesn't start crying again too, which is hard enough. By now part of her never wants to stop crying. It would be so easy to give in to that.

"I can't speak for the woman that saved you. I can't speak for Terezi, either. I don't really know what they were like." Even though she knew Terezi, even though Nill had been with her earlier in the Arena. But most people don't make a point to save others unless they care about them. They wouldn't have done it if Karkat didn't mean something to them, even if he didn't know it.

Nill manages to twist in place a little, just enough that she can lift her other hand and rest it on Karkat's cheek. She even manages not to grimace, though pain rockets across her side like fire.

"To me you're important. You're my friend. I'm dying and you're staying here with me even though I told you to leave."

Several tears roll down her cheeks, but she actually smiles, and there's nothing insincere about the expression.

"I'm so much happier knowing that you're still alive."

His own body turns, and though he can't sit in front of her like this, it's still an effort to make it easier for her. A hand to the cheek - yes, it could have meaning of a different kind in different times, but it's not what matters right now. The two of them are hurting in their own ways, and even if he knows cameras are watching and people are profiting off their moment, he'll still take the comfort. There's a small clatter as he lets go of his knife to lay his hand over hers. He's warm already, warmer still in the face for crying, and her skin is so cold.

He can't smile for her, but he takes hers still.

"This is all so stupid," he says. "I've known you, what, two months? Less? Barely anything, and you've been nothing but nice this whole damn time. You broke up that fight, you let me take your bed, now this. What did I ever do for this? I'm doing this now, but you're the one who was nice to a grumpy jackass like me in the first place."

He'd like her enough if things were normal, but everything is made sharper, all the fluff pared down to the essentials in a situation like this. There's no point to pretending he doesn't give a shit when she's dying, and he's always been one to cry over a friend's death. He can form a friendship within a day and miss the other half deeply even years later; this is extreme mode, and it's awful.

"The funny thing--no, actually, the fucking awful thing--I should have been the one dead a long time ago." He squeezes at her hand, then goes to pull it and his slowly down. "You can see I've got red blood, right? On my wounds, in the color I'm crying. It's normal for humans, but by troll standards I'm a mutant. I only survived as long as I did because I hid it, and later it stopped mattering, but on my planet I would have been killed if anyone found out. And yet here I am, half my team dead back in my world, and three more people dead or dying here for my sake. It's like something out a tragedy, except if anyone penned it they would have been culled for it."

"When you think of yourself you see all of the things you don't like."

It's quiet and gentle the way she says it, because if Karkat's aware of the behavior in himself then it certainly hasn't changed anything, and if he's not then it might be too startling a thing to hear. It's not even that she knows it from listening in on his thoughts - it's obvious in almost everything he says about himself. You don't need telepathy to see that.

"You're a better person than you think you are, and you've been a good friend."

Sure, she might have offered him her bed, but he was worried about her for it and how much she slept too. She enjoyed his company a lot, and he tried to generally make sure she was okay too.

But even if she were to ignore that, brush off those things, Karkat grew up in a world where killing was a societal norm, an expectation. He lived in a place where he would have been killed the moment anyone found out about him, and instead of that making him into someone that hurt others just to distract from his own mutation, instead of becoming someone that hated everything around him, he couldn't hurt anyone. That's a lot more amazing than he knows.

"I know you don't think you're worth that, but you are."

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."

Edited 2015-01-24 14:16 (UTC)

"You're hurting more than I am, Karkat."

As much as this hurts, it's only a physical pain, which will inevitably subside; the fact that it'll subside by killing her is largely irrelevant. Later, if the Capitol brings her back to life again, Nill knows that there won't be a mark left on her, and any pain that she feels will be entirely in her head, phantom pains because even after two deaths for some reason her mind is still slightly incapable of recognizing that because the wounds are gone it shouldn't be sending pain signals out anymore. Even those will pass, and she'll be fine again.

But Karkat is never going to forget this. He cares too much for that. There's a certain brand of hell that comes from being completely incapable of helping someone right in front of you, crueler and more painful than any wound, and Nill would rather take an injury like this a dozen times over than be the one sitting in Karkat's position right now.

"Don't you know that?"

Now that catches him off guard. Never would he ever have expected her to say that. As much as there's not a normal tone to her voice with it being spoken straight into his mind, she gives him no reason to think she's being sarcastic or dishonest. She sounds, however much that means anything, like she means it.

What does she even mean by it?

Of course he's not happy, and of course it hurts to see her suffering like this, but... but that's different. It's not physical, not of 'real' consequence, not the way her injury is. He searches her face as she asks confirmation, but he can't give her it.

"Nill, you're dying," he says, as if somehow she's forgotten it herself. "You're sitting here suffering and the best I'm doing is just passing the time by whining like an asshole. I should be helping you."

"I've lost a lot of the people that I cared about. It destroyed me every time." The admission is soft, as quiet as a whisper might be if the voice had sound, but it doesn't. Instead of comes out strangely muted, just barely within his reach to register the words properly.

She glances down at her wound, at where it's obvious there's blood pooling under her skin. Every time her eyes drift too far the world begins to tilt, and it's a struggle to get her vision straight again. She can't pass out. Not yet. Who knows what he'd get himself into if she did.

"I would rather die than watch someone I care about die. It's so much harder to sit and watch."

Thankfully she's been lucky enough that she's never had to do that, and she would trade almost anything to make sure she never did. She can only imagine how awful it is for him.

"It's not passing time. It's staying here with me."

The softness of her voice is strange, prompting him to look at her as if it might make the words clearer. But it's a thing he can understand. He's been there; he told her already how he's lost so much of his team. Earlier in this arena there was Terezi. He's cried openly over people dying, not just a few small tears, and has missed even the worst of them. He thinks about Sollux bleeding out from the Vast Glub, about Feferi and Kanaya murdered in front of him, about Sollux dying again to save them all... And those were just what he saw.

They were all awful in their own way.

Maybe it is easier to just die. Jack blew everything up; Jane stabbed him; and even as terrible as being mauled in the mini-arena was, at least it was quick. But here there's so much waiting, and he hurts for her because of it.

"It's both. It is staying here with you, but all this babbling is filling up time between now and whenever..." He bites his lip. "Whenever it ends." His gaze travels across her face, then down to her wound, trying to judge just where things stand. "If we had some kind of timer at least we would know, but like this we're just sitting, jabbering while you hurt, and it's not fair that you have to go through this."

There's a very obvious distraction there, just for a few moments, while the images flickering by in his head come to focus. Terezi, whose death she'd already seen in his mind. Sollux, who she had known very briefly - he was awkward in a different way than Karkat, but she liked him well enough. Feferi, whose face she knew even if she didn't know her mind.

Somehow Kanaya's face is the last to register in her mind. Nill is sure, watching it as she is, that the Kanaya in his mind is younger than the one she'd known. She must be, she has to be, but it still shoots through her like a bullet, watching the shot from Eridan's gun go through her. It hurts so much more watching it through Karkat's eyes, because if she'd watched it in person it would have been almost as horrible for her.

She wants to ask. For one awful moment she wants to ask more than anything what happened, if Kanaya was okay, if someone killed that purple-blooded asshole, but there's no way to do that without making the situation a lot worse than it already is. No matter how much she might want to, she can't, even if she probably won't get the chance to ask again until the next time they allow abilities in an arena. She doesn't know if she can live with that, but she'd need to try.

Despite herself a few tears roll down her cheeks, and finally she looks a Karkat again. She most she can do is offer him another smile, though this one is more halfhearted.

"I'm not sure there is another way we could do this."

The wound shows no immediate signs of worsening; much like how long it took her to succumb to the pain, it could be hours more before the wound actually kills her. Maybe even a day. There's no real way to tell for sure.

"All we can do is wait."

Kanaya is definitely young, there, younger than Karkat is now. Depending when Nill met her and the path of the timelines, the lack of a glow might be a clue - and then again, it might not. So long as Nill doesn't ask, he doesn't even know her worry. Her tears are easy to take as coming from something else, given the situation they're in.

Is it pain? Is it upset at her position? Hell, it could be both. Her smile doesn't carry enough weight behind it, and he can't take any comfort when she says what she does. Waiting--just waiting. His lips press together. He knows, too, how long it took that things even progressed this far. He knows she's weaker than a troll, but that still doesn't tell him any estimated time of death, just that she can't walk this off.

"You're sure?" he asks, stubbornly hoping still.

It's the unfairness that sticks with him still: both that she has to die, but that despite its inevitability it still has to take so long. It means pain for her, and danger for the both of them as they wait--no matter how superfluous that might be in her case.

But if something came, then what? Tribute or monster, it would put him in danger, and he'd have to worry for her--but is there any point in defending someone so near death? Safer though it may be to let the hypothetical take her and buy himself safety with it, that would be a coward's out, too cruel. He could never do it. But he'll need to move eventually if just for food and water, yet he can't leave her, either. He couldn't carry her without more danger, and the only reason they're here is because she can't walk anymore.

Unfair, unfair, unfair, it repeats in his head. It shouldn't have to be this way.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

don't be afraid

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