Chapter Text
You’re sitting on the porch of Sollux’s house when the car pulls into the driveway. Sollux hops out of the back seat before the car has even come to a full stop. You can hear his mom yelling at him for it. He rushes over. “Bro!”
“Hey, dude!” you say.
“How long have you been sitting here?” he asks. His face is way tanned from the sun and glistening with sunscreen and he’s wearing a white tee with a big Adventure Camp logo on it that’s clearly too big for him. He looks like a complete doofus, but you’re so happy to see him again.
“A while,” you say and stand up. You put out a hand and Sollux immediately does as well. Up, down, front, back, left, right, bitch slap. The secret handshake. “It’s been so fucking boring without you, dude!”
“That sucks,” Sollux lisps. “Adventure Camp was really fun, though. It was so cool. There was wallclimbing and we had a whole disco on the last day with snacks and music and shit like that. It was epic, dude, totally epic.”
“I wish I could have been there,” you say.
“Sollux Captor!” Sollux’s mom says with a subdued, ‘mom’ kind of rage in her voice. She grabs Sollux’s shoulder. “We do not get out of the car while it’s still moving. And we do not run off when the car still needs unpacking and everyone needs to help. Do you hear me?”
Sollux startles. “Sorry, shit-”
“Sollux.”
“Sorry,” Sollux repeats. “I was just excited ‘cos Karkat is here.”
Sollux’s mom smacks her lips and makes a sound of frustration. Then she turns to you with a massive smile. “Karkat! It’s so nice to see you. Having a fun summer vacation?”
“Yeah,” you say awkwardly, because whether or not it’s true, it’s the only thing you could say. “Could Sollux and I go and hang out, please?”
“Please, mom,” Sollux says awkwardly.
Sollux’s mom considers this for a moment and then rolls her eyes. “Fine. Go on then, boys.”
“What?” Kuprum squeals like a piglet indignantly from the doorway, carrying a heavy-looking duffel bag. “Mom! That’s so unfair!”
“Less whining, more carrying!” Sollux’s mom says, her voice fading behind you as Sollux grabs your arm and the two of you run off.
-
“Do you really think this will make me look cooler?” you ask, sitting awkwardly on a chair in Kanaya’s bathroom. You have your eyes shut tight and you can feel the uncertain movements of the eyeliner pencil around them.
“Yes, it’ll look great,” Kanaya says. “Hold still. Ugh, Karkat, it’ll come out better if you stop scrunching your eyes.”
You try your best to not scrunch your eyes, but it’s really hard when Kanaya is sticking a pencil directly into them. You don’t know if this is how eyeliner is supposed to be, or if she’s just bad at it, but part of you really wishes it was Porrim or literally anyone else doing this instead of Kanaya. Then again, you would never live it down if you had to sit still so that Kanaya’s sister can do your makeup. Yeurgh.
Eyeliner barely counts as makeup, in your opinion, but that wouldn’t stop Eridan from tearing you apart if he found out about it.
“Okay, look,” Kanaya says. You blink your eyes open and look in the mirror. It’s… well, it doesn’t look like you imagined. Kanaya grimaces. “You don’t look happy.”
“It’s…” you say. “It looks kinda bad, doesn’t it? I look bad.”
“No, you don’t!” Kanaya says. “I think you look really cool. Maybe, if your hair was straight, it would look better. Should we straighten your hair?”
“How do we do that?” you ask.
“Porrim has this metal thing that gets really hot - like, hot enough that it burns your hands if you touch it directly - and then you put it through your hair and-”
“No, holy shit!” you say. “I don’t want to burn off my hair.”
“It doesn’t burn off your hair,” Kanaya says. You grumble and push your hair back from your face so you can look at the eyeliner closer. Well, technically, it’s guyliner, which is different from eyeliner, because eyeliner is for girls and guyliner is for guys. It looks weird with your eyes. If your eyes were better, it would look better, you think. And your skin is too dark for it. It looks fine on Kanaya, though, even though her skin is darker than yours, so maybe your skin is just the worst possible shade. Or maybe Kanaya did it wrong. You try to put your hair over your eyes like you wish it would go naturally, and it actually looks kind of okay.
“Okay,” you say. “I guess it’s not that bad. I guess it looks fine. Doesn’t it look kind of okay?”
Kanaya nods excitedly. “I think it looks cool! You look just like PiercedAngelWings.”
“You really mean that?” you ask.
“Yeah!” Kanaya says. “You look like that one photo of him- Wait, hold on, I’ll show you.”
She takes your hand and drags you through the upstairs hallway of her house to Porrim’s room.
Porrim’s not there right now. She’s at a track meet or band practice or whatever cool shit it is high schoolers do all day. And while Porrim isn’t here, Kanaya is about to use the computer. Also, it’s only for a few hours every day, but this won’t count, since you’re here.
“Okay, hold on,” Kanaya says, sliding into Porrim’s chair and booting up the computer. You stand next to her for several minutes while she boots up the computer. Kanaya’s family is fancy enough that Porrim’s computer doesn’t even need to dial-up. It just works. You wish you had a computer that awesome. Sollux has one, too, but you always need to listen to the horrible noises every time you open it.
The browser sits there as a blank white window for a while before the screen eventually loads and Kanaya opens Troller.net. She logs into Porrim’s account and clicks through to PiercedAngelWings’ page.
“Here,” Kanaya says. She pulls up one of AngelWings’ pictures – he’s looking up at the camera, with heavy guyliner and his fringe hanging completely over one half of his face. He has this loose T-shirt and a red bandanna around his neck. “This is the one I mean. You look like this, kind of.”
“The lighting is so bad in that one,” you mumble while she looks back and forth between you and the photo, comparing you. “Look at how dark it is around the edges.”
“That’s on purpose, Karkat,” Kanaya says. “It’s called a vignette. It’s actually really artistic. Look, Porrim used in this.”
She clicks back to Porrim’s profile and pulls up a photo of Porrim standing in her room. The edges of the photo are darkened, just like in AngelWings’ picture.
“I think she did it to hide me,” Kanaya explains and points to the screen. In the dark part of the image, hidden in the pixels, you see Kanaya. Only a sliver of her face is visible - a single, red eye is looking up at Porrim with confusion.
“Why didn’t she just crop you out of the photo?” you ask, and Kanaya shrugs.
“Maybe it’s a formatting thing,” she says. “Maybe it’s already the right size, and cropping it would have messed with that.”
“It’s not particularly well cropped anyway,” you say. “You really think I look like PiercedAngelWings?”
“Well, yeah, I can kind of see it,” Kanaya says, looking you up and down. “If I had to pick one person you looked like from online, that would be it.”
“Thanks,” you say.