#edit: only like 7% voted for the second option aww y'all

[palestporn]

Karkat: try to let yourself have something nice for once

This time when Gamzee reaches out he goes straight for the bruise on your forehead, and you grit your teeth and let him, steeling yourself for when it starts to hurt. By the way your pan is aching, you have to be bruised all the way to the root of your horn.

When he touches the place that hurts, though, it's so light you hardly feel it. He makes an unhappy, hissing little noise through his teeth, and takes his hand away again; when it comes back he's got the cloth you used to clean his face off, dabbing with almost ludicrous care at the lump on your skull.

"You're gonna turn all motherfucking sorts of colors," he murmurs, and works his way down your cheek, back up again, to the dried mess sticking your eye halfway shut. "Close this for me, brother."

You try. You seriously do. But when his claws come near your eye, you twitch away on instinct and snap your fangs before you can get a hold of yourself. It hurts, centering in your horn and out like a spiderweb, spiking and flaring in your jaw as you grit your teeth--

Gamzee's hand settles on the horn that doesn't hurt, and gives a slow, hard squeeze.

It feels so fucking good. For just a second, your body and your thinkpan both unclench and go loose like a muscle cramp giving way. The pain in your head sinks down to something manageable as your jaw untenses. His bad arm is wavering, but he's cleaning the blood away quick and gentle, careful around your swollen eye. You just want to let him--

Threshecutioner Vantas: The MISSION. The mission, your moirail, PROTECT HIM.

--You can't, you can't, you still need to finish cleaning him up, put a pressure wrap on his leg, he's going to start having pain again soon, and you want him in sopor before that happens, and you have to send your mission report to the empress--

"Ohh, beloved," Gamzee says, soft and sleepy, and pulls you inexorably forward, ignoring your tense resistance, rubbing slow and steady at the base of your good horn, filling your pan with the sense of him. There's an extra edge to his voice, a whispering hum, when he says, "You're all tangled up, best friend," and you look up at him in time to catch a slow pulse of purple light through his eyelashes. "I smell it on you--"

"Keep your creep powers the fuck out of my thinkpan," you say, and he sighs and blinks the light out of his eyes. The hum of his holy chucklefucker voodoo bullshit dies out of your horns, whatever he was doing fades, and you feel--bad again. Worse again. "Are you done? We're clean, we're done, let's get out of here and get you in a recuperacoon."

"I'm done," he says, and scratches his claws slow and gentle through your hair, pressing and kneading at the root of your horn, still talking to you in that quiet, steady voice like he's trying to talk down a panicking lusus. "Still some stuff you gotta let go of, though."

"I don't need--" Fuck that feels nice. "No. No, I'm-- If you're feeling better then we're done here, Gamzee, I have shit to get done."

He nods, considering that. "Well, I'm not a threshecutioner," he says, and you know the tone he takes when he digs in his fucking heels. Goddammit. "But you schoolfed me pretty good how this works. if you wanna get some shit off me, motherfucker, you're gonna have to give me something back." And he leans forward and rests his forehead on yours, locking the nubs of your horns against his. This time when his eyes start to glow, you can feel the hum right down through your horns. He's coaxing at something, trying to draw it up.

Karkat: How bad is it?

==> It's going to hurt you. You want it to. ==> It's going to hurt him. He wants you to. ==> It's going to hurt both of you. It already has.

[Start Over]