#both of them got a lil decapitated around the chin

[yogoblog]

a couple of real crusty months old playdough dannies that i made and then forgot about

[curlicuecal]

Let’s Be Outcasts (ch 13/?)

Part 2 of cyber!bunny Apocalypse ‘verse (tumblr)

ch: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

read on AO3

Kankri/AR, Latula/Mituna, Lil Seb, Aimless Renegade

Summary: Divergent AU where AR and Li'l Seb get kicked into a new universe with some snazzy new cyborg bodies. They’re still working out the bugs.

In which AR discovers that kidnapping rarely solves more problems than it creates, Mituna breaks out of a lab (with some help), and Seb continues to take good care of his Bro.

----

Ch 13.

You’re intent on following Latula, but you’re also not quite dumb enough to run face first into a fight. You have discovered exactly two settings in yourself: “helpless” and “accidentally killed everybody.”  If you can get a few of your more experimental body-hack programs out of beta you hope to someday unlock more.  Tonight is probably not that night.

You turn on, just a bit, a background process that you think will help keep the metal part of your mind from overloading on data quite so much.  It’s your best plan for staying in balance without actually resorting to a biohack.  You’re not super confident in the whole theory, but at least you think it’s the program most likely to fail non-life-threateningly for everybody in the room.

For now you hope for the best and flail your way up a ladder after Latula and her mystery assailant and flop onto the floor of the first level.  The flopping’s accidental, but it puts a bunch of benches and other debris between you and the tussle ahead, so you go with it.  Kicking your way along the floor, you slide on your belly until you reach one of the floor-to-ceiling glass tubes.  The liquid inside the growth chamber twists the scene beyond into crazy colors and abstract shapes, but you can make out the red and teal blob that is Latula, wrestling with a smaller figure in tan and black.  The latter shape seems to be doing most of the wrestling—the Latula blob hardly moves except in quick, precise counters, but the other figure is a furious frenzy of limbs and rattling hisses.

You hump forward one more scooch, clanging your helmet as you peer around the growth chamber.  The thrashing figure reveals itself as a smallish carapacian, black shell flashing as he claws and snaps at everything in reach, furiously ignoring both the shaft of Latula’s staff pinning him by the neck and the handcuff locking one wrist to some nearby tubing.  

Latula conscientiously smacks his head into the floor.  “I can do this all night, buddy-o.”

The carapacian responds with an angry outburst that takes you a long few seconds to process as a “go the fuck away.”  His free arm sweeps blindly for the stray ammo shells scattered on the floor. A variety of armaments and other items poof into existence as his fingers brush them, only to go skittering out of reach as Latula twists her staff sharply.

“���Can’ does not mean ‘want to’,” she adds, words gritting with effort.  “Settle your tail down and start talking.  Who.  Sent you?”

Another rapid-fire string of syllables, right at the edge of your hearing range, so that half the sounds fall out.  Latula is a criminal lunatic and he hates his job and this isn’t even his job.  

Her eyes narrow.  Her smile tilts up.  And suddenly the hand not pressing her staff into his neck is brimming with knives. “’Job,’” she repeats, in a tone that doesn’t so much invite elaboration as strongly encourage (with sharp edges).

The carapacian starts to say something else—and then Latula curses and rolls, as another small figure comes skimming fast and low around a counter, tattered cloak barely rustling.  Her carapacian hostage tumbles the opposite direction, fetching up hard at the end of the handcuffs as the new figure barely missing connecting hard with Latula.  You’ve got a squeak caught halfway out of your throat, your claws blunting themselves on the concrete flooring in an uncoordinated attempt to move, to help, to do something—but Latula’s already found her feet again, bouncing off a nearby lab bench even as her darting assailant sails past.  

Her staff lashes out with vicious precision at the figure’s back. Hits.  

—does not hit?

It’s a freeze frame series of images, printed across your ganderbulbs: The cloak implodes inwards in a flutter of empty cloth, a small white disc zipping free from the falling garment even as Latula’s balance tips forward, her body already turning the fall into a roll—

You don’t see the small human blur into view.  You just see the frozen moment when his form hangs in the air behind her, face blank and pitiless, sword raised to the highest point of its swing, already beginning his strike back towards Latula’s neck.

That panicked yelp still hanging around in your throat turns out to be super useful.

Latula pivots on a caegar, narrowly avoiding decapitation.  Sliding across the floor on her back, she brings her staff around two-handed to catch the next lightning quick strike of that sword.  She flings the smaller human back and the fight dissolves into a rapid exchange of blows, both figures blurring in and out of view as they shift for any advantage.

For your part, you slump against the growth-tube, hands and helmet pressing against the glass to keep you up, while you breathe entirely too fast.  You can’t look away, and you can’t stop your bloodpusher hammering like a fist in your chest, and you can hardly feel the inside of your skull for all the rapidly unfolding analyses you’re running through simultaneously in your head.  You can feel your psionics pulsing from your frond tips to the base of your horns, there for the taking, maybe, if you reached for them—but you can also see a thousand, thousand, thousand ways you could make this so much worse.

You think about a lab full of dead people while your programs output predictions about the building’s structural integrity, Latula’s speed and reaction times, the decaying halo radius of your power.  There’s a rapidly diminishing window of opportunity before your adrenaline-charged body is going to make the decision for you.  

No, no, no—

—no.  

You catch your breath and hold it until your pusher slows a few percentiles. Not as thorough a solution as your untested biological shutdown protocols, but with the advantage of not being a complete fucking wildcard of an experiment in biohacking shit fucking hell.  You want those programs, yes you do.  You want to be that troll Latula keeps acting like you are.  The one that has opinions; the one that can make decisions. The one that is not a damaged product or a useful tool.  You want to be the person and not the machine.  Your red mind trills fear and concern for Latula and your blue mind snarls outrage and defiance at everything around you and you—walk the path between them.

Maybe it’s okay if you lose your balance sometimes, as long as you get back up again.

Fading the noise in your brain further to the background of your attention, you gulp one breath, hold a second time, and let your eyes actually process what they’re seeing.  It’s been bare moments, but the dynamic of the fight has already shifted.  

The human—wiggler?—is still a darting, nearly invisible blur of grey cloth and bright metal, striking in silence and then flashing away to strike again faster than you can track, but you think his attacks have gained urgency. Fast he might be, far faster than Latula as far as you can calculate, but she moves like oil over water, changeable and precise, blocking him at every turn like the principles of physics enacted upon the world.  And with every block she drives the smaller fighter back another length, working at angles and using the reach of her staff to harry him into the corner formed by two stripped lab benches.  Eyes slitted in concentration, she grins like a maniac as she fights.  

Okay.  So. Maybe don’t flail around wildly, frying everyone in the room and possibly bringing the building down.  In retrospect, you’re not sure why that seemed like a viable option.

(It’s yours; it’s your power; it’s--you; and even when it scares you silly, even when it doesn’t answer any better than the rest of your body, it still feels like a limb you should be able to reach out with.  A clean binary of choice that’s yours to make.  Yes/no (…maybe?))

A clink of metal across crumbling tile, a sword goes spinning past you, and Latula makes a low, exulting noise that goes right to your bulge.  Okay, maybe not relevant right now, but still. You sway forward like a magnet on a string, leaning out around the growth chamber to get a better view of whatever’s happening.

She’s got the human—wiggler—are those cybernetic hopbeast ears?—she’s got the very small cy-type person pinned with a knee to his chest, his back flat on the floor, the knife at his throat strongly discouraging a struggle.

His face is surprisingly blank for someone with a blade to his neck, and though his small hands are tight on her wrist, he stares up at Latula from behind small, point-tipped shades with what might be fearlessness or indifference.

Something scuffs behind you.

Alarms trigger in your helmet, way too fucking late to be anything but the backdrop to your panic attack as a hard-shelled arm clamps around your throat, yanking you backwards off your feet.  Your vision tilts wildly, your mind tilts equally wildly, and some small fraction of your attention notes a sprung pair of handcuffs across the labs, short one carapacian.

Titty-fucking shitwaffles.  

It appears you’ve made the classic mistake of turning your back on the body.

The carapacian’s arm drags you down, the barrel of a gun presses up under your chin, and even as he calls a sharp, rapid command across the room to Latula, your power flares, your brain sparks red-blue-red-blue-no-no-no-no-no—

You are not going to pull this ceiling down around you, you literally just made that decision, it was a great decision, and you decided it all on your own; fuck this noise.  Fuck it right in the fleshy proboscis, you think—and you tip yourself into that feeling.

You curse a whole fucking lot.

You can’t be sure, but you think even your carapacian captor is a little thrown by the vigor and loquaciousness of your profanity.  With some distant, automated portion of your mind you are aware of Latula freezing over her own captive, her knife to the pinned human’s throat, her face flickering through surprise and alarm and back into a little quirk of a smile that’s a blank, blank, blank mask.

The carapacian shifts to get a better hold on you, nudges the gun harder under your noggin, and clicks another rapid-fire stream of words at Latula.  

Hilariously, his words run right along the same lines as your own, which are pretty much wedged onto the theme of ‘let go let go let go let right the fuck go right now.’  Yours have more swears mixed in.  And are also way less coherently enunciated.    You curse some more, because you are a cobalt blaze of fury and spinning out in this one, chosen way is so far fulfilling its function of helping you keep control in all the higher priority ways.

“You let go first.” Latula’s so, so still, holding on to her prisoner as she watches your carapacian captor through bright, intent eyes.  That little edge of a smile stretches wider in a way puts you in mind of her dragon lusus. “…You really don’t wanna play this game with me.”

The gun twitches against your neck as the carapacian’s fingers tense—and then relax with a notable effort.  You call him a nook-gorging tunnelvermin-fucker and try to bite his thumb.  Still focused on Latula, and the little human with the knife at his throat, the carapacian speaks again, lower and more measured, a begrudging agreement followed by a carefully neutral challenge.  (Are you Latula Pyrope?)

You can see the words strike home even before your brain parses more than her name.  Latula’s face goes, if possible, even blanker.  “Who’s asking?”

“Oh.” The human wiggler, silent and unresponsive this whole time, perks suddenly, leaning up to peer at Latula’s face, heedless of the knee on his chest or the knife digging into his neck. Those mechanized hopbeast ears perched on his head swivel to tilt toward her with interest.  “I’m not supposed to kill you.”

“…Is that so.”

“Mm.  Kankri wants us to rescue you,” the cy kid says, face still blank, words bright-toned.

Latula blinks.  She stares down at the wiggler, flicks her eyes up to where the carapacian is still holding you uncertainly at gunpoint, flicks her eyes back to her attacker-turned-hostage, staring mildly up at her with her knife at his throat.  

The crack of her laughter bubbles out into the air.

“Wow, glam rescue.  Max points on execution.”

--

>>

[corvid-knight]

Demon Eyes - chapter 12

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13740258/chapters/32108052

"I got blood on you," you tell Karkat, as you (reluctantly) let him go. And you did; kind of a lot of blood. Looking at the stains on his shirt sets off a chain reaction of association—blood on Karkat, blood on the white sheets, Dirk's shirt soaked in blood—

"Dave. Hey. This isn't my blood." Karkat makes a deep soft sound, hands coming up to cup your face and make you look him in the eyes. "Dirk's fine, right now. Do we need to go see him before you clean up?"

"No." I believe you.

Karkat's proud of you for that answer, you realize as he lets go of your face. That knowledge feels...good. Really fucking good.

"Sit down for me," he tells you, gently pushing you to sit on the lid of the toilet. "I think I'm going to cut your shirt off; you'll get blood on your face otherwise, and I really fucking doubt we need to handle that right now."

But he doesn't move, and you sit there confused for a minute before you figure out that he's not just telling you what he's about to do. He's not just giving you warning, he's asking for permission.

You can't find your voice to give it to him, but you nod. Go for it, man.

When he leans forward with that sickle, though, you have to close your eyes. Sharp metal near your skin while you're unarmed and helpless isn't something you're okay with seeing. You can feel Karkat hesitate, try to dip into your mind and check to make sure you're still all right; he doesn't move to cut your shirt until you think reassurances at him.

When he does move, though, all you feel is a little tug at the neckline, hear a quick sharp tearing sound, and then the clink of metal as he lays his sickle down on the counter. You open your eyes again so you can kind of squirm out of the remains of your shirt, even if Karkat still does most of the work.

This leaves you shirtless, though, nothing on your upper body but smears of blood, and god damn but there's the panic again. You have to take a breath, watch Karkat as he opens cabinets in search of a washcloth, and remind yourself, he already knows what scars I have; he saw them the first night when he healed me in the hotel. And this is Karkat; he won't use my fucking weak spots against me—

"Scars don't mark weak spots, anyway." Karkat shakes his head and runs water from the sink over the washcloth he's found, then takes your hand, wiping your wrist and arm clean. The blood comes away easily, maybe because he knows how to wipe and maybe just because he's the one with dominion over blood and he wants it to. "If anything, they're strong spots. Nobody wants to get fucked up the exact same way twice."

...he has a point. Although if you were given the choice of being hurt repeatedly in one place, or of just taking the spread-out patchwork of marks you actually have, you'd take the former. "One really bad patch of scars'd be better and easier to hide than this shitshow."

"Yeah, but you get hurt in the same place often enough and you get so you can't stand to be touched there." Karkat taps the back of his own neck with his free hand, before moving to your other arm. "Right?"

You remember how you shuddered when he touched you in that spot before, and almost shudder again. "That one, that's a...a memory thing, for me. Association. Not like it was the worst I ever got hurt..."

"It still counts. Even if that wasn't the most painful thing, you're stuck associating it with the other shit." Karkat shrugs a bit, moving to start cleaning off your chest and immediately stopping when you can't help but flinch away from his hands. "Dave? Do I need to—"

"Just give me a sec." You close your eyes and take a deep breath, relaxing a bit as he takes your hand instead of touching you anywhere else. "Can't handle touching if you wanna talk about Bro fucking me."

He winces. You can feel it in your head. "Sorry." That could be an apology for bringing it up, for it happening at all, for anything at all. The vagueness is nice. Means you don't have to reply to it. "...do you want me to heal your hands?"

"Not if it's gonna make you pass out." And only if you want to.

"It won't." He snorts, adding, of course I want to, dumbass. Then, "This is a little thing. And I just ate; even after closing Dirk's wound I've got energy to burn."

His fingers trailing across the raw spots on your hands feels like grabbing a handful of dry ice. "Ow, shit—ate?"

"Three of those weirdass hybrids." At least he moves fast; he lets go of your hand and moves to the other in less than ten seconds. "Did you see what they were, or...?"

"I saw—" Dirk. John. You. Bro. You have to check that Karkat's still there even though he's holding your hand in both of his, and you get your eyes open in time to see him wince again.

"Fuck, Dave."

"What'd you see?"

"Not that." He pauses, thinking for a second, then puts one hand under your chin to get you to look at his face for a moment. When he blinks, for just an instant you see a snapshot of a being that's definitely not a siren—something hairless and almost skeletal, low cunning but not much actual intelligence written on its greyish-skinned face. The damn thing's mouth doesn't close properly over its jagged teeth, and one hand has claws that're significantly longer than its fingers.

"Holy shit, 'kat." Nasty.

"Since they can fuck around with humans' minds, 'nasty' doesn't even start to cover it." He shakes his head, letting go of your chin and brushing his fingertips across your shoulders, finding a set of spots that sting at his touch. That'd be where the beast that looked like him grabbed your shoulder, right? "You almost got hurt really fucking bad...next time, we don't split up."

There will be a next time.

Maybe you should feel—worried? Concerned? Resigned?—about that, but you really don't. You're used to hunting; it's been your life since Bro decided you were old enough to handle a gun.

(Eight. You were eight. He guided your hands to aim and fire at a demon lying bound and bleeding in a summoning circle. Perhaps because he was the one holding you steady, the bullet took the demon almost dead-center in the forehead; it made an ungodly mess but killed him fast. Bro dug the deformed bullet out, laughing at your unwillingness to watch him doing it, and got it made into a charm that was almost always either around his neck or dangling from the rearview mirror. Lucky charm from my lil' man, he called it, and you hated the memories it brought up but never dared tell him that. You're sure he knew anyway.)

There's always been a next time, after every hunt. And yeah, that knowledge has made you feel hopeless before—you don't have control, you don't know what you'll be expected to kill next, whether Bro is going to make it quick and clean or drag it out for hours, whether you'll have to watch or even participate, whether it'll be one who's a true danger or some poor innocent bastard.

But now? Karkat's the one partnering you here, and he has some fucking idea of the difference between a monster and a demon. Bro doesn't.

"Didn't," Karkat murmurs as he drops the washcloth in the sink.

"Oh. Yeah." Past tense is...hard.

He nods and touches your cheek again, light and gentle and gone before you can even try to lean against his hand. "I'm going to go get you clean clothes. Your pants are fucked too; you can wait until I come back and let me help, or clean yourself up while I'm gone." I'm okay with the latter, but I know you might not be.

"Thanks," you tell him, because you don't know how to say you're right, I'm not, I'm sorry.

Maybe Karkat gets the meaning of it even though you don't think it at him either, because he pats your cheek again, smiles, and then leaves you alone in the bathroom.

Ten minute later you're dressed, mostly presentable (well, as good as you're going to get without the shower you can't handle taking right now) and heading into the kitchen with Karkat close enough behind you that you feel his body heat. The only person there is Hal, who's got two laptops open on the table in front of him. He's typing into an open chat on one, but seems to have his focus mostly on the other; it's hooked up to what looks like some kind of storage device or external hard drive, with four videos playing at once in split-screen.

You lean over his shoulder to look at the latter. Top right is what you're going to guess is a real-time stream of Dirk, laid out in bed, unconscious and with his bloody shirt gone. The other three are footage from the little devices Hal put on your shirt—and Karkat's, and Dirk's, and Jake's. Jake's cam isn't displayed, but the rest of them are.

Damn, those bastards are ugly, you think, watching yourself decapitate one. Did you really do that?

"Are you going to be all right." Hal's voice doesn't rise at the end of the sentence, and it takes you a second to realize that he's asking you a question. Especially since he doesn't look up.

"Shook up a lil, but fine. Karkat, uh. Did some damage control."

"Oh." Hal nods, relaxing just a tiny bit. He still doesn't take his eyes off the text onscreen, though. "Jake, um. Jake might need 'damage control' as well. And Dirk."

Karkat reaches out to tap the screen. "You're keeping an eye on Dirk—where's Jake?"

"John's cleaning him up. He's fucked up; I don't know if you really spoke with him—"

"If he's anything like Dave was, I don't fucking need to." Karkat growls quietly, crossing his arms. "Did you get those fuckers ID'ed yet?"

The shikigami shakes his head. "Nobody I've contacted has seen anything like them before—which isn't surprising, since I'm fairly sure they're some kind of hybrid. Possibly a new species, if they bred true—"

Karkat's growl is louder and more unhappy this time. "Yeah. They probably did. You don't get that many from one fucking litter, not from sirens or vamps, and they were luring in guys. The one that went after Dave first was pretty obvious about what it wanted."

Huh. Okay. You already can only kind of remember that. Like, you know it happened, you remember Karkat—well, not Karkat, the hybrid demon—and you remember killing the damn thing, but the details are already going soft in that memory.

Karkat's watching you curiously when you look up at him. You alright? he asks

Can't remember that shit. You open your mind to him as well as you can, will him to see the weirdly vague memory.

Surprisingly, he grins. Good.

Hal taps a few keys and glances over at the other monitor. "Well,now they're an extinct species. Fuck them. A cleanup team's on its way. It'll be a day or two; I asked for Rox instead of anyone closer, which is a bit of a security risk but I don't fucking care. I want her here."

He's scared, you realize. You don't quite know why.

Then he says, "Is it possible for you to fix whatever's fucked up in Dirk's mind now, or do you have to wait until he wakes up." And you get it. Hal's worrying about Dirk, because that's what normal fucking families do.

Karkat, you can fix him, right?

Not exactly. But I'll make sure he ends up okay, I swear. "He'll sleep for a while longer. Keep an eye on him and don't fucking leave Jake by himself, all right? Do you guys keep chalk around, or do hunters not bother to do that anymore?"

"Top drawer on the left." Hal points without looking, and pulls the laptop with the chat back towards himself, beginning to type again.

Karkat mumbles a thank-you and yanks the drawer open, getting what he wants and then heading for the door. You trail behind him, slightly confused.

What're we doing?

I mean, I'm summoning a demon. Well. Assuming you'll give me a hand, since there's this stupid fucking loophole that won't let demons summon their own kind.

Okay, you have no idea what he's planning. Oh well. "Cool, never done that before. Lead the way, 'kat."

Karkat spends ten minutes drawing the circle on the concreted portion of the backyard. You feel like it's there precisely for this purpose, or something kind of like it.

Technically, what he draws is a double circle, one within the other. You sit in the grass and watch as he adds lettering in the space between the two—some of it's Latin, some runes, and the rest symbols that you don't recognize. They have meaning, though; you don't doubt that for a second.

"Hey." Karkat sits back on his heels, dropping the half-used piece on chalk and looking over at you. "Come here and test this for me."

He sends you an almost-image of what exactly he wants, so you know to get up and step closer to the circle, cautiously putting your hand into it. If there was a summoned demon in there, this'd be dangerous as hell; you can feel the tingle of magic as the circle's temporarily broken by having you bridge inside and outside.

"It's complete," you tell him, and pull your hand back. The feeling of magic reminded you of a question, though. "There's a barrier around the house, remember? Won't that—"

"Fuck this up? No." Karkat shakes his head, putting a hand on your shoulder to pull you back a few steps. "I asked John about that—it's not even for demons at all; it's a ward against curses and ill-willed magic. He said they use this place as a safehouse for hunters who've ended up with especially bad fuckers—the kind with access to more powerful magic—after them." He glances at you, the corners of his mouth twitching up for a second. "A barrier to stop demons would be a fucking hassle; poor Hal's demon enough to trip it. He'd be stuck either in, or out."

You can just imagine. "And pissed over it too, huh?"

"Exactly." He snorts and moves to stand behind you, hands resting on your shoulders. "Are you ready to try this out?"

"I still don't know what I'm doing, but...yeah."

"Okay." It's simple. I'm going to put the words you need in your head, you speak them. As long as you trust me, it'll be easy. His hands tighten, just a little. Anxiety, you think. "Do you trust me?"

"Hell yes." Breathe in, breathe out. This'll be a cakewalk. Let's get this show on the road.

He snorts out a soft laugh, and starts feeding you words.

It's weird, doing this. For the first couple seconds you can't figure out how to keep up with his pace—it's too quick, maybe you can speak that fast but there's a lag between your mind and your mouth that screws everything up.

Then you realize that all you have to do to minimize that lag is open up a little more to him. Let him in your head just a bit farther.

You have almost no problem with doing that, even if it makes you stumble over a syllable as you do it. You can feel Karkat's relief that you came to this conclusion, as he settles in your mind and starts speaking the words of summoning through you.

(It actually occurs to you that he's pretty much possessing you, right now. It's a mark of the kind of shit that's happened in the last week that instead of being worried, you find that funny.)

(Also pretty damn nice. Means he's close to you.)

So you just relax, and you let him make you do what he wants. There's a lot of words that go into calling a demon, apparently, because it's at least ten minutes before Karkat pauses, you feel something twist in your chest—some measure of power leaving you—and in the circle, something changes.

Someone arrives.

You only get a flash of red and the impression of a startled face, though, because your sight immediately wavers and goes blurry. Karkat seems to know what's happening, maybe expect it, because he catches you before you can do more than start to fall.

"Karkat," whatever you've summoned says reasonably, "if you've harmed that boy—"

"Shut up for a fucking second, Kankri," Karkat growls.

Your brain's too fuzzy to remember why you know that name. Eh, you'll figure it out when you wake up...