Bit by bit, you let your guard down.

It starts out innocently enough. In fact, at first you think it's not going to start at all. You have Rose and Terezi, and his voice grates on your ears. He's a maggot-eating shit panned nooklicker who never shuts his god damn talk blaster.

(At some point you realize you've started using troll terminology. Fuck everything.)

But despite your best intentions, things change. You're not really sure /when/ it starts, exactly. It's kind of difficult to pinpoint the moment you stopped hating someone. Platonic hate. Obviously. You're not... yeah. But you did get on each other's bad sides almost immediately.

"This is what we've begun using as the meal block," Kanaya is explaining, the first day that you're trapped on the meteor. She sounds calm, but you notice her glancing up at every little noise, and she still hasn't put away her lipstick. "Or as I believe you humans call it, a 'kit-chen.'"

"Yeah, fucking great," Karkat says from the corner. "So while we're stuck here for... what was it, three of your human Earth years?"

"That would be correct," Rose says. "Or as I believe you trolls call it, nearly one and a half of your 'sweeps.'" She raises an eyebrow at Kanaya, and you roll your eyes under your shades.

"Right," Karkat says. His voice is loud and exasperated, and you can't imagine listening to it every day for the next three years. "So while we're stuck here for one and a half /sweeps/, at least we'll have somewhere to sit down and eat! Thank the gods of this shit-forsaken universe for that, because that was my number one concern when I heard we'd be stuck on this rock! I'm sure the humans have been on edge this entire time, a single question lingering in the front of their think pans: 'do they have a meal block?' I know that's the first thing I would want to know!"

When Terezi frowns, she looks uncannily like the one emoticon she always uses. "Karkat, no one said you had to come on this tour. This is for the humans, not you, dummy."

"Yeah, Karkat," Vriska says. You feel an instant dislike toward her which definitely has nothing to do with your conversations with Terezi. "Stop being such a wiggler! We don't need you to tell us we're getting a bad break here. As long as we're on this meteor, we may as well make the most of it!" Terezi looks uncomfortable. You remember that she tried to kill Vriska just before you got here.

Karkat shoots her a dark glare. "Oh, sorry, am I showering acid all over your idiotic fun-time march? Excuse me for showing the tiniest iota of negative feelings!"

"Karkat," you say, and he turns his glare on you. He looks terrifying, all sharp teeth and piercing yellow eyes, and your heart races briefly. "I'm loathe to agree with Vriska, but I think she's right - we all know that this fucking sucks. I don't want to be on this meteor with you for three years either, but if that's what's gonna happen then I actually am kind of interested in knowing what the food situation is here. I mean, I guess I'm immortal now but considering I'm starving I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean that I get a free pass on eating."

"You think it sucks for you, Strider?" His voice cracks. "At least you'll actually get to see your friends again after the three years are up! You know, before we're all killed by Jack or whatever!"

"Whoa," you say, because you're not sure how else to respond to Karkat's outburst. "Dude, listen."

"I don't have to listen to another word out of your ignorance shaft, Strider. It's obvious I'm not wanted here. Enjoy your ridiculous tour, I can't take this."

He storms out.

You exchange glances with Terezi. "Is he always this fucking volatile?"

Her voice is softer than you expect. "He's been through a lot."

Vriska snorts. "Everyone in this room has gotten a bad break, and I don't see anyone else running off to go cry! Unless one of you wigglers wants to leave with him." She sweeps her gaze across the room. No one says anything. "No one? Let's continue this tour then. I believe Kanaya was explaining something."

"Oh, yes," Kanaya says. "I suppose Karkat is already familiar with this area, so we may as well continue without him. Although I am somewhat concerned."

"He's fiiiiiiiine," Vriska says. "He'll find something new to rant about by the end of the day."

You stare out the doorway where Karkat disappeared, only half-listening to the things Kanaya is saying.

The next time you see him is in a couple of days. It turns out to be very easy to miss people on the meteor. Especially people you don't want to see in the first place, although you've also been having a difficult time getting in touch with Terezi. You've already started to wonder if she's avoiding you for some reason, but she says she's just busy. Busy with what? you ask her on Pesterchum. But she's too busy to answer.

You're heading toward what Kanaya referred to as the "kitchen." To be honest, it's barely recognizable as one; there isn't even a troll fridge. It's also filled exclusively with weird troll grub. You mean that literally, unfortunately. You and Rose didn't exactly think to bring a bunch of human food on your suicide mission, which you deeply regret now. For a little while you feel sort of lucky that you're used to barely being able to eat anything.

You see him when you reach the kitchen, frowning at what looks like some kind of cellphone while ignoring a plate of what you're pretty sure one of them called grubloaf. He doesn't notice you immediately, and you're contemplating turning around and coming back later (it's not like you're not used to ignoring your hunger) when he suddenly glances up.

"Oh, it's you," he says in a low, growly voice. "Go away, Strider, I don't have the energy to deal with your idiocy."

You hang back in the doorway. It's still tempting to walk away, but getting bossed around by irate trolls isn't really your style. Although you briefly think it might be kind of funny in a stupid ironic way if you actually flipped around and walked right back out again without a word.

"Hey, I have as much right to this room as you do," you say instead of doing that. "Besides, I don't think we can completely avoid each other for three fucking years, so you may as well get used me right now. Unless you want to write out a schedule so we're never in here at the same time. You can have the kitchen all to yourself in the morning so you can glower down at your weird troll food with all the privacy of a kitchen shared between six people. Wait, sorry, make that seven, I forgot the little chess guy. Wonder where he's gotten off to. Actually I wonder if he even eats. Someone might want to check on that." Karkat is staring at you with an increasingly hostile look, but you can't seem to shut up. "I get the common area in the morning, so you have to take the long route around to the kitchen if you want to avoid meeting me in there. If one of us wants to change the schedule we can just leave little passive-aggressive notes around the meteor."

"Oh my god, do you ever shut up?" He shoves his phone in his pocket. "We're not scheduling our time spent around the meteor, that's completely moronic."

"Then I guess you'll just have to deal with occasionally running into me," you say.

"Ugh," he says, and it sounds like a growl. "Why are you even here?"

"Uh, the same reason as you are, I'm guessing," you say. "It's a god damn kitchen, dude, and a really fucking lackluster one at that. There aren't too many different reasons why someone might come in here."

"Well, yeah," Karkat says, "that's what I thought when you first came in, but now you're just standing there babbling incessantly about inane bullshit for some reason. If you're here for food, then get your food already and get out."

"Yeah, yeah," you say, suddenly impatient. You walk toward the cupboard. "I only started rambling in the first place because you told me to get out. You're distracting me."

Karkat stabs his fork into the grubloaf, which is making you a little nauseous now that you really look at it. "If the very act of acknowledging your presence is distracting, that's hardly my problem."

You grab a couple of things at random out of the cupboard without pausing to see what they are. You should probably start alchemizing this shit yourself, but you can't quite be bothered to go look for an alchemiter yet. You've already forgotten where the one Kanaya showed you was. "Okay, fine, I'm leaving. Have fun glaring at your phone." You wonder if /he's/ talking to Terezi.

"Just go already," Karkat growls.

It's when you're several halls away that you slump down against the wall, having temporarily lost the motivation to finish walking back to what passes for your room in this dark place. After a few seconds you realize you're shaking, and you don't know why.

You hate everyone on the meteor.

Okay, you don't hate Kanaya and Terezi. Actually, you don't hate Rose either. You haven't really talked to her enough to have a very strong opinion one way or another. She seems kind of pretentious, but not outright irritating.

Vriska you can't stand. She seems somehow even more unbearably smug after John saved her in that stupid clusterfuck series of events that you still don't understand. At least, she did the few times you've actually seen her over the past few weeks that you've been on the meteor now. When everyone was still alive, it was crowded here. You could hardly walk two feet without stepping on someone else's toes. The emptiness now feels like it's pressing down on you every moment you spend in this place.

It doesn't help that the others are already obviously separating into their own little groups. Rose and Kanaya keep happening to bump into each other somehow. You see them chatting in the halls about who knows what, or you run into them eating together in the meal block, or one of them will ask you oh-so-casually if you've seen the other one.

You've pieced together from little hints they've inadvertently given you that Vriska and Terezi, of all people, are hanging out again. You thought it would be you and Terezi. Or you kind of hoped it would be. You thought you were close. Even after she started showing a flushed interest in Strider. But she's not talking to him much, either, as far as you can tell. She's not cold, exactly, just... distant. Or "busy," as she keeps putting it.

You thought you were close to Kanaya, too, but she barely has time for your messages now. Or when she does, it's only so that she can transparently gush about Rose.

Those factors combined leave you constantly running into the other person on the meteor you really can't stand.

"Goddammit," Dave says when you walk in on him sitting alone in the common room. He pulls his headphones down around his neck. "We have got to stop running into each other like this."

"It's not like I plan this!" you find yourself shouting. You don't even know why he pisses you off so much. "Where the hell is everyone else? Every time I walk in on someone, it's always you, walking down the hall, or sitting alone with your husktop."

"I don't even know, man," Dave says. "Maybe they're avoiding you so that you don't yell at them about some stupid shit."

"Oh, come on! As if you've been doing much better with social interaction. You're always alone! And I don't fucking yell at everyone all the time!" You feel your nails pressing into your palms.

Dave raises an eyebrow up above his idiotic shades. "Dude, it's been nothing but nonstop shouting since the moment I first talked to you. I'm starting to think your volume setting is just broken. And your emotion setting, I guess, since you're always pissed off no matter how inane the subject you're pissed off about actually is."

"Maybe I wouldn't be angry all the time if I wasn't surrounded by ignorant shit panned morons who can't be bothered to look past their own cartilage nubs to notice that everything here sucks fucking bulge! I guess they're all too busy having fun, or whatever, it's not like we're not stuck here for one and a half sweeps with two of the people who murdered all of our friends, who cares about trivial details like that! I mean, at least we have an official goddamn meal block, that's what really matters!"

Dave stands up. "Why is it that you go off on me every time we're in the same room? And are you really still on about that tour thing? That was like a month ago now or whatever, Jesus Christ."

Fuck if you know, you've been wondering the same thing for half a perigee. "You do the same fucking thing! Every time we see each other, you can't keep your goddamn mouth shut! I would almost think..." You cut off just before you can say what you're thinking.

Dave just looks at you, and his expression is as infuriatingly blank as always. "You'd almost think what?" he asks.

"You wouldn't understand it anyway," you say. "Considering your think pan assumed the most ingratiating posture of surrender imaginable whenever the subject comes up!"

"Wait," Dave says, and you wish you hadn't said anything.

"Stop, it doesn't matter," you say.

"You mean the quadrant thing?" Dave asks.

You bury your face in your hands. "Of course you choose now to actually pay attention."

"Are you saying you think I'm hateflirting with you or something?" Dave asks slowly. "Because honestly the whole hate romance thing is kind of disturbing to me and I'm definitely not hitting on you."

"I know that!" you shout. "You're not a troll, you're a fucking human, of course you're not hateflirting! I'm just saying, that's kind of how your actions come across in troll culture, which I know perfectly well you didn't actually realize until just now, which means I'm also fully aware that it doesn't actually mean anything!"

"I'm also kind of not... uh, you know."

You groan. This is exactly the kind of conversation you didn't want to have again, which is a large part of why you didn't want to bring it up. "You're not what, Strider?"

He sounds uncomfortable. "I'm... not really interested in, you know, dating other, uh, guys."

"Yeah, I kind of figured, since apparently the majority of humans are like that, for whatever fucking reason."

"It's basic biology, dude. I guess for trolls it doesn't really matter because you do that weird grub mom thing, but humans don't work that way."

"I know that!" you say. "I do have a basic understanding of human biology, because unlike some people I actually care about being culturally aware!"

"Okay, so, uh." Dave sets his headphones down on the table next to his husktop. "Are you hitting on me? Like, blackways or whatever."

You freeze. "What? No! I just barely finished saying that I know you're not actually interested!"

"You also just barely finished saying all this arguing basically reads as flirting to you," Dave says.

You sigh and it comes out as a growl. "I'm just going to turn around again like I should have fucking done in the first place." You start to do just that.

"Uh," Dave says. "Is that a yes?"

"That's not anything, it's fucking nothing, none of this is anything because I know you're not remotely interested so please just drop it already."

"Right," Dave says.

"Who here is the expert on troll romance again?" you ask. "Oh, that's right, it's not you! Your accusations are baseless conjecture and are completely meaningless coming out of your ignorance shaft, so shut the hell up for once in your shit forsaken life, Strider."

"Okay, so just to clarify," Dave says, "that entire thing you just said was totally platonic?"

You throw up your hands and storm out of the room without saying anything.

Later you wonder if he's right.

You stop fighting with Karkat, but instead of constant arguing, things are incredibly awkward between the two of you. You try even harder than usual for a while to avoid him, and you spend all of that time completely freaking out. You knew he hated you. You hated him too. But god fucking damn it, not like that.

You had actually been building up a good repertoire, though, and in a way it was the only thing on the meteor that was even mildly entertaining. You had started to look for Karkat on purpose, and you were pretty sure that he had been doing the same thing. So now that you're back to actively trying to avoid him, and now that the times you do meet up are filled with awkward silence until one of you leaves the room, you find yourself with absolutely nothing to do, and the boredom is somehow just as painful as the flipping out.

Eventually, you run into the mayor. Or rather, you run into one of his stacks of cans. Actually, you trip over it one day when you're not paying attention to where you're going. A black chess guy with "mayor" written across his sash scolds you with gestures and looks, so you sit down and start picking up the cans. You feel a little bad for the poor guy. If you've been bored and lonely, you can't imagine how he's felt, considering that as far as you know no one has ever bothered to talk to him.

So you start hanging out with him. It's something to do on this gross, dark meteor. He doesn't talk, but he directs you on what to do through hand motions that you slowly start to build up between the two of you.

Inevitably, Karkat walks in on this one day, while you're in the middle of drawing some trees around the new museum. You stare at him. He stares back at you with the yellow eyes that you've been getting used to after spending so much time looking at his angry troll face.

"What sort of stupid inane game is this?" Karkat asks. "Why are there nutrition cylinders everywhere? Where did you even get those?"

"Nutrition cylinders?" you echo. "Dude, where I'm from they're just called cans."

Karkat rolls his eyes. "You can criticize my usage of troll terminology all you want, Strider, but the fact remains that this entire thing looks completely ridiculous. What is that idiotic collection of lines you're drawing on the floor here supposed to represent?"

You feel a twinge of discomfort at his tone. Okay, maybe more than a twinge. "Karkat, I know you're super hate gay for me or whatever, but I'm not interested."

He gives you a blank look at first, and then his eyes widen. "Oh my god, calm the fuck down. I'm not hate flirting with you every time I say something provocative or inflammatory. In case you haven't noticed, that's my usual style of speaking to pretty much everyone the vast majority of the time. It's a lot more complicated and nuanced than that. I would attempt to educate you on the subject, but I've come to the conclusion after hours of dealing with you maggot panned humans that it's essentially physically impossible for any of you to sit still through even five seconds of exposition on troll romance without shitting all over yourselves in confusion. In fact, you've just proven my point by somehow understanding even less after what I said to you a while ago! But back to the question I asked before you completely derailed me with a completely unnecessary preemptive rejection - what the fuck are you doing?"

"Uh," you say. You're thrown off now that you don't want to give him mixed signals by arguing back. This shit was so much simpler before he said anything. "Drawing trees. Or at least that's what we call them in human terminology. I have no idea what they are to you trolls, probably something dumb like... tall plants."

"I know what a tree is! That's not what I happen to call them, but that doesn't mean I don't know the word! Those don't look anything like trees, they're not even green."

"Yeah, we don't have any green chalk for some reason."

"That's ridiculous," Karkat says. "How are you supposed to accurately depict this human city you seem to be drawing without green? You might be able to manage a troll city, if you're not missing some other stupid color."

You shrug. "The trees are just gonna have to be blue. What do 'troll cities' look like, anyway?"

"Way more sensible than your human ones," Karkat says. "To start with, we don't..."

You interrupt him. "Okay, wait, let me stop you right there." Karkat opens his mouth to say something else, but you continue. "I don't want to listen to an in depth explanation of troll society or some shit, just draw it."

He looks a bit taken aback. "Draw it?"

"Sure, why not?" you ask. "I mean, that's what we're doing here. Just draw one building or something." He's about to say no. "It's not like you have anything better to do."

Karkat does a long, drawn out sigh at that. "Alright, fine. But only because there really is absolutely nothing better to be doing on this shit forsaken rock. And I reserve the right to leave if you say anything stupid."

"Yeah, yeah," you say. "Come on, I think there's a space over here that might work."