Somewhat Clear

Title: Paint it red
Fandom: Homestuck
Pairing: Karkat Vantas, OFC
Rating: NSFW
Warning: AU, dubcon, fuck or die (more or less), pheromones/heat cycles/pailing shenanigans
Wordcount: 3499
Summary: Pailing season officially started on the evening someone of the crew shook him from his light sleep by swearing loudly from the ablution blocks: everyone had a different reactions to the first bout of hormones, but the most common were crankiness and the thankfully temporary disability to control the loudness of their voices, for god knows what reason, so there.
This season was Revnee's turn to function as the snappiest and most unbalanced wake up call in the history of paradox space. Wonderful.
Note: Revnee wasn't supposed to jump Karkat. I don't know why it happened.
I'm posting this part because I didn't post anything this month and it pisses me off.


Trolls didn't exactly have a mating cycle. They didn't feel any urge during the light seasons like mammals that lived on Alternia did.
It was purely a coincidence that the drones collected genetic material during those periods of the sweep, lead by the smell of young lowbloods who were just hitting the verge of puberty (which hadn't nothing to do with Karkat spending so much time in the ablution trap scrubbing away at his skin - just to be on the safe side - that he swore he had started to develop fins and gills and a snobby attitude).

Trolls didn't have a mating cycle, but even when they were on the ships, millions of light years from their birthplanet, they exactly knew when they were supposed to contribute to the slurry (of course, it might have been due to the pheromones that were discreetly poured through the ships' venting systems every half-sweep, as Karkat had come to know last pailing season from one Plaart Alreke, technician, who had slurred about it while blindly trying to get his bony, clumsy fingers up Karkat's nook).

Trolls didn't have a mating cycle, but drones did, and Karkat was starting to feel nauseous as the pailing season got closer.

Maybe because his mutation had fucked up his metabolism with his blood, but it seemed like he was affected from the pheromones earlier than the others; he hated it. While everyone still functioned perfectly, he found that breathing didn't come as easily as usual, he shivered when he pulled his uniform boots on every evening, because the plants of his feet felt ridiculously sensitive for no reason, and his stomach was starting to feel swollen and soft. By now he knew that it was a sure sign that he was breathing pheromones, because it meant that his body was readying itself to produce genetic material, a reaction that in nature would have been triggered by interacting with a potential kismesis or matesprite for a number of days. Or something.

Pailing season officially started on the evening someone of the crew shook him from his light sleep by swearing loudly from the ablution blocks: everyone had a different reactions to the first bout of hormones, but the most common were crankiness and the thankfully temporary disability to control the loudness of their voices, for god knows what reason, so there.

This season was Revnee's turn to function as the snappiest and most unbalanced wake up call in the history of paradox space. Wonderful.

There was no way Karkat could go back to sleep, so he decided to climb out of the recuperacoon, feeling sleepy and too warm, to greet the cursing troll. He quietly slid next to Kamede's and Geluna's 'coons, entering the ablution blocks while Revnee came out with a fluffy towel around her middle, rubbing an elbow with a pained and pissed expression on her face. Wincing in sympathy, Karkat greeted her with a silent nod. She didn't even give sign that she had seen him, but he let it drop.

He quickly cleaned himself under the cleaning jet. He had set it on the coldest temperature, in attempt to remove a bit of the warmth that always clang to his skin like stale sopor during the mating seasons, and to wake himself up faster. If he had to speak with Revnee, he had to be at his most lucid; she was an evening person, and really disliked the general grogginess of the team just awake.

He toweled himself off, wrapped his towel around his waist and slid back to the front of the respite blocks, in the changing atrium, where Revnee was getting dressed, fixing her top in the full length mirror on the wall.

"Good evening, Lord Vantas," she said formally, putting on her uniform jacket. Her tone was fairly even, even if she sounded like she was grinding her teeth.

"Good evening, Lady Kodnet," he replied, equally formal. He reached for the wardrobifier, squeezing himself between Revnee and the wall, but he brushed against her hand with his naked back anyway and chirped. He managed to swallow it back for the most part, but they were so close that there was no way that she hadn't heard that. Fuck.

She blinked, slightly taken aback, and quirked an eyebrow. "Already that sensitive?"

"Apparently." It was his turn to grind his teeth now. It was embarrassing as fuck, but when you lived in close quarters with your squad all the time, you got to know all kind of things about everyone.

It was really surprising that only Kamede knew about your blood, really.

"Well, that sucks," she winced in sympathy and made room for him to move into wardrobifier range. He touched the settings saved under his name, and the contraption printed him on his usual clothes. Uniforms had all the same basic color scheme, but the design could be tweaked to suit one's tastes, even if generally trolls didn't care much about appearance; it was mostly for comfort. Karkat for example preferred to wear a turtleneck under the jacket, while Revnee wore a sleeveless top and Kamede a v-neck shirt. He knew of some threshes that even changed the regular pants with skirts and drapery-like stuff.

Only the jacket couldn't be modified, but nobody would ever wanted to: that jacket was what made a real Threshecutioner.

He picked his from the hanger in the closet and slipped it on, cringing when the weight of the fabric almost set off another embarrassing chirp. It was becoming ridiculous very fast, this season.

"Fuck. Is it just me or this season is hitting us much more heavily than the last one?" Revnee said, conversationally, stepping slightly back to search something in the drawer with her name taped on.

It was. Karkat didn't want to think too much about it though.

"I guess."

"It sure hit you hard, if you're reduced to that few words, Karkat," she joked.

Karkat froze. A feel of uneasiness settled into his stomach, while he moved before the mirror to fix his bangs.

He wasn't usually nervous around Revnee. As a rule he tended to avoid being too much around indigo bloods, excepting Gamzee for obvious reasons, because they tended to be quite violent towards the lowest bloods, but she was ok.

She was really cool-headed for a indigo, especially for someone with such powerful chucklevodoos. Gamzee had told him that she was part of the Church, but she got tired of their bullshit and left the paint. She was indifferent to the hemospectrum, and hated assholes and those who did a sloppy job of their mansions, so she decided to become a Threshecutioner to fix everyone's shit up.

She had just a weak point: pails' season. She usually dealt really well, but she was subject to violent swing moods. Karkat happened to witness one of them, a couple of seasons ago: she was having a black fling with Kamede at the time, and he saw her going from I'm-bashing-your-motherfucking-head-in violent to redcom's-main-protagonist's-interest-A pitiful in a few minutes, without warning. It had been his first radical flipping in real life, and it had made him rethink about which tropes were realistic or unrealistic expectations of relationships.

She was acting mostly normal, right now. She was maybe a little more relaxed and playful than usual, but maybe she was just in a good mood, because there were no groggy assholes all up in her dressing cubicle.

Even though that thing she just said, especially with that tone, sounded like. Flirting.

What the fucking hell, thought Karkat. He sneaked a look in the mirror, and caught her eyes fixed on the nape of his neck. He decided to ignore her. She was just being friendly! And he probably had the collar of the jacket all inside-out, nothing to see.

Right?

He quickly thought about a reply.

"I just feel kind of foggy, I think my sopor needs changing. It felt like sleeping in a 'coonful of rotting snot, last day."

At that, she laughed. Not her usual discreet chuckle, a barely audible roll of clicks, a full laugh, hard and trilling, with a faint chirping in the undertones, where her cartilaginous thoracic box rattled in resonance with her shaking body. It was surreal.

"That was really gross, Karkat," she scolded him, with the same playful tone of before, stepping a bit closer to look in the mirror over his shoulder, maybe to polish her horns or something. Karkat wasn't really paying attention to anything aside the fact that they were so close they were almost touching, and he was starting to feel a bit claustrophobic. And a bit wet, too.

Well, fuck.

"Well I'm sorry, Lady Kodnet, if you still haven't learnt in two sweeps that I'm a gross rude asshole I can't aid you in that matter," replied Karkat. Oh fuck, did that sound suggestive? He really hoped not. It did sound just slightly suggestive maybe, but not enough to sound like a come on, right?

Pailing Revnee Kodnet wasn't in his plans, and if had a saying in the matter, he would have preferred those plans remained unchanged. He already had a indigo blood in his quadrants, he really didn't need another. Also, he never pitied her that way.

His fucking traitor body on the other hand didn't mind at all the idea of getting close up and personal with a fucking highblood.

"Listen to you, all formal. I was kidding when I called you 'lord Vantas', you know. I really like the sound of our titles, but you can call me Revnee when we're not on the job," she said, almost purring.

She was definitely too close, and Karkat was definitely spending too much time pretending to fix his hair in the mirror.

"Do you need something?" he finally asked.

"Hmm?"

"You're. Very close. Do you need me to move?"

"Oh no," she thrilled, "you're exactly where you need to be."

From the sound of her voice, Karkat could tell that she was smiling. He wanted to try and catch her expression in the mirror to check, but he couldn't look away from his own pale and uneasy face. He told himself that he didn't look scared: he was just really uncomfortable, and whatever was going on needed to stop.

He felt a hand on his waist and whimpered. It wasn't a pleased sound. It was a noise that a prey could have made when cornered by a vicious predator, knowing that it was going to be toyed with before it was eaten. His body was so stiff it hurt.

On the other hand, his nook didn't give a fuck about his fear, and twitched in anticipation, reading every tactile sensation as a sexual stimulus.

Karkat was so angry.

"Oh, are you scared?" she whispered, feeling the rigidness in his muscles. "Karkat, I'm not going to hurt you, I swear. You're really cute, you know? I would feel bad if I hurt you in any way."

Her hand wasn't moving, cool and still on his waist, just sitting there. She wasn't even trying to undoing his pants yet. She was just feeling the fabric on his side, smoothing it down with tiny movements. It almost felt pale, so similar to the way Gamzee rested his big, bony, clumsy hands on his body, without moving, because he was afraid he didn't know how to be gentle.

But her fingers were slim and elegant, soft and strong at the same time, purposeful and heavy in the lightest way possible.
If she had stuck her hand down his pants, it wouldn't have felt more intimate and threatening.

"You're hurting me," choked out Karkat. He hated his voice, how it sounded broken and weak, thick with fear and misplaced arousal.

"That's a lie," she replied candidly, "and you're hurting me now! I'm not that bad! I'll be honest, I'm a bit twitchy when I get it on, but nobody ever complained about being hurt. Not my matesprites, at least. I had my good share of them, I'm older than you," she rambled. She wasn't probably completely in control of her own actions, from the sound of it. She seemed half-drunk.

"If you don't stop, you're going to hurt me," repeated Karkat, more firmly. He was still shaking, but he sounded much more assertive now. Good job, Vantas.

She stilled and kept quiet for what seemed a long time. Karkat hoped that she finally made up her mind, but then she spoke again, even more quietly than before, velvety and sympathetic, her voice so rich with pity that he felt he was going to puke, and he knew that she definitely wouldn't have let him go.

"Is this about the 'let me use the ablution trap alone or help me god' thing, Karkat?"

It was an alarming question. It meant that she actually put thoughts in why Karkat didn't let people see him naked.

It wasn't uncommon that some were shy about nudity, but living shipside quickly healed it, since a lot of people just discarded the uniform after a particularly heavy day, and nobody even blinked at those who came in the canteen practically naked; the fact that Karkat kept being stubborn about it was suspicious.

She probably believed that there was something wrong with his junk or lower body, since he didn't have problems going shirtless, and even if technically even that kind of thing would have had him culled, nobody was actually that stupid to call the drones to kill of someone because they had a weird junk, as long as it worked. And it worked really nicely, thank you very much.

At the same time it was reassuring; she was hitting on him, so whatever malformation she thought he had, she didn't really care. Maybe she wouldn't have cared even if she found out that he actually had a blood mutation, but his blood color was just part of why he was so reluctant to pail with her. He just didn't fucking want to pail with Revnee Kodnet.

Not that he was going to have a choice. She didn't look like she was going to change her mind. It wasn't going to be a long time commitment, probably: the rom-com were careful to not mention it, but one-time flings were the norm, on the ships. Matesprites and kismeses for those two-three weeks of pailing, and then everyone went back to their old routines.

Certainly she's not going to be worse than Alreke, Karkat thought, wincing at the memory.

Poor Alreke. He probably had never found out about the sopor that Karkat dumped in his coffee, who attempted to make him fall asleep before he could trying anything more than flirting. It didn't work, but Karkat is pretty sure that at least the technician didn't have any memory of that morning, aside from a very real half pail of genetic material in his room, ready for the drones to be collected. Karkat had decided that it was of a ruddy enough hue that nobody could have identified it as mutant.

Unfortunately Karkat did remember going back to his room, with a limp and a deep pain in his gut, where clumsy Alreke had clawed up his nook. Never Again, Absolutely Would Not Reccomend.

That time he had forced himself, because he needed to fill a pail anyway and really didn't look forward to ask Gamzee another favor; his moirail was luckily very much familiar and easy with the concept of casual sex enough to not mess up their quadrant, but Karkat couldn't help but feel uneasy when they pailed. It just felt wrong.

Accepting Revnee's advances certainly would have saved him the bother to go looking for someone to pail. If he could make it work with someone like Plaart, having sex with her wasn't really an issue. She was probably not going to shred his nook to ribbons. As long as she was willing to put up with his mutation without messily killing him, which was kind of worse than a wounded nook.

He needed more time to think, and he really didn't need to feel that uncomfortable wetness between his thighs.

"What if I said yes?" asked, trying to stalling a bit longer.

"You can trust me, Karkat," she promptly reassured him, squeezing his waist gently.

"Can I?" wheezed Karkat, with a breathy chirp. She was usually gentle but firm, and hearing her being all soft and pliant and condescending was strange, like she was acting out a part.

He almost snorted out a giggle, part hysterical and part genuinely amused, when her mood abruptely changed.

"Now you're just being a nookchafing tease," Revnee growled suddenly. She clamped down on his hips, digging the claws in the fabric just to be felt on his skin. His body reacted, but Karkat felt just cold. He was scared, his turtleneck clang to his clammy back and he really wanted to get away from that corner. He started whimpering, scared out of his mind that she had drawn blood, and found that he just couldn't stop.

Luckily the thin gasps that escaped his throat seemed to make her snap out of the sudden fit, and she went back to that odd, peaceful and overly caring Revnee that had cooed him only a few minutes before. She closed her arms around his torso in a somewhat awkward embrace, holding him to her chest, rumbling soothingly deep in her thorax.

"Oh dear, I didn't want to scare you. I won't hurt you ok? I will make you feel good. I don' want to hurt you, I just want to make you relax. You always look so tense and uptight, Karkat, that can't be good for your body and your mind. I know it seems like I'm a huge bitch but I'm really not, ok? We were all so worried when you went down like that on the new planet, I was so sorry, I felt so guilty. I thought, it would be a nice way to apologize? Making you feel good. It was so nice in my head, but you're ruining it! You're being so difficult and tense, when you could be calm and loose and feel really good," ranted Revnee, almost a whine.

She sounded so honest. That was the worst part, to Karkat's ears. He wanted to be convinced with all his being, he wanted to pretend that he was the protagonist in his favorite rom-com and have a highblood flush for him like that, but he couldn't stop thinking that he was going to die.

He was going to die. He was so going to die. If not right away because an unbalanced troll on pheromones couldn't stand a rejection, in a couple of minutes, because the same unbalanced troll had noticed that his pailmate's genetic material was a good deal of shades too bright to belong to a rust blood.

Die now, or die later?

Karkat pressed against her arms, disentangling himself from her embrace and turning slowly on the spot, facing her. He hadn't lived almost ten sweeps to waste a few minutes of survival. He risked a step back, and found himself with his back against the cool mirror. Revnee looked hungry, excited, curious, trying to understand what he was going to say or to do.

"O-ok," breathed out Karkat.

She squealed, and in half a second was on him, nuzzling at his neck and at his jaw, inhaling deeply, and caressing his torso with twitchy hands. She was much taller than him, so she was somewhat curled in what must have been a uncomfortable position, but she didn't seem to mind, busy in her olfactory exploration.

She appeared to not care that they were in a semi-public area of the respite blocks of their team, and in fact Karkat suspected that she didn't give a flying fuck about it. Literally. He did, though.

"You smell so good," she sighed, happily, before he could even try and tell her something about it.
"You smell wet. Are you wet yet, Karkat?"

It was a rethorical question apparently, because her hands started travelling down his hips and his ass, where she copped a generous feel, which didn't make him squeak, thank you very much, clearly on mission; she was going to find an answer herself, if Karkat hadn't stopped her.

He had kept his arms down his arms for the time being, his fingers still somewhat sticky from hair products, but he now clasped firmly her wandering hands, catching her attention.

"Lady Kodnet," started to her questioning expression, formally, trying to keep his voice even. "I gave you my consent to fuck me, but I didn't gave you the permission to fuck me in the open, where anyone could see ."

She pouted at that, and Karkat wanted to groan. On the long list of things he didn't need to know about Revnee Kodnet, he could now put that she enjoyed public sex and she was probably an exhibitionist. Luckily she didn't insisted or anything, and stepped aside so he could exit the cramped space of the changing block.

TBC