Work Text:
About four beers in you start to wonder if this was really a good idea after all. Karkat is sitting across from you, hanging on to the edges of the table for dear life, staring at the wall with as much focus as he can muster. He takes a deep breath and shifts his gaze, looking you over.
"Why the fuck do you wear those stupid things on your face all the time?" He blurts, for the tenth time in the past fifteen minutes, and you wave a hand at him and pop open another bottle of beer. You slide it toward him and open another for yourself, taking a quick drink. He stares at the bottle for a moment, as if he is processing its existence, before taking a drink himself. You know as long as you keep drinking he will try to keep up, considering that's what started this whole mess in the first place. You smile at him (a little crookedly, you may have higher tolerance than him but man you aren't starting to feel this, four beers in an hour is hard, goddammit).
"'Cause they are part of my trademark, dude. I have to keep up my image, I've told you this like a hundred times leave me alone already," you say, taking another drink and rubbing your forehead with your free hand. Things are harder to focus on and you aren't really sure where this conversation was going before this. You sit in silence for a moment, watching Karkat sway on the chair, before you get to your feet. You have to steady yourself against the back of the chair but once you do you walk over to his side and offer him a hand.
"C'mere, let's move to the couch. I don't wanna pick your ass up off the floor after you drunkedly tumble to the tile and crack your head open and bleed all over the place in some kind of scene from a horror movie or somethin' stupid like that," you tell him, and he glares at you and grasps your hand and pulls himself to his feet with a clumsy stumble. You wrap your arms around his shoulders and he leans against your chest with a sigh.
"Steady there Karkitten, you're not even that drunk yet dude you've had like four and a half beers that's not that many at all," you tell him, and he calls you a fuck and an idiot and several other lewd things in a muffled breath against your chest. You laugh at him and that encourages him to straighten out, putting an arm around your waist without much complaint. You grab his beer off the table and, keeping one arm steady around his shoulders, you make your way to the living room couch. He falls onto it with a pout, leaning back against the cushions and watching you warily as you sit down the bottles of beer on the coffee table.
You slide his beer closer to him and he takes another stubborn drink and tries to hide from you the fact that he spilled some on his lap. You choke back a laugh.
"Sit down and stop staring at me, you ass," he says, indicating the free spot on the couch at his side, and you take a seat next to him. He immediately pulls you closer, situating himself in your arms and against your chest, and you lean your head against the top of his. It helps with the spinning a little.
You sit in silence for a while before he lets out a shaky little sigh.
"Dave. Humans are stupid bulgemunching fucking morons and I hate them," he says, as serious as he can possibly be, and you look down at him and try not to laugh at the completely devastated expression on his face.
"I'm a human, dude," you tell him, and he smacks you in the leg with a groan before attempting to lean forward to grab the beer again. You help him reach it and he takes another drink and this time doesn't even spill any on himself. You grab your own, finish it off in one go, and sit the bottle out of his sight so he doesn't get the idea to try the same. You think maybe it's time to stop trying to get him to keep up, he's starting to seriously wobble with every attempt at moving.
You pull him snuggly back into your arms, half for his sake and half because having something to hang on to seems to anchor you a little bit, and you press your face against his hair, above his ear. You plant a kiss on the side of his head and tip of his ear and he doesn't even seem to notice, too caught up in whatever it is that's bothering him. You sigh.
"Why are humans stupid?" You ask, and he makes a noise something like a growl but closer to a whine and drops his head back against your shoulder in annoyance.
"Because. Also you are a moron too so you aren't excluded from that statement Strider, you're just a different kind of nooklicking moron," you interject with a "yeah I am" and he elbows you hard in the ribs and flushes a bright pink. "But John, John is the stupidest of all the moron humans in the whole entirity of paradox space between here and the remains of my dignity. He's just. He's so dumb. I thought I was black for him but now I think I'm waxing pale but he's so dumb he just doesn't get it at all and it sucks and no matter what I say to him he just doesn't understand."
You sit in silence for a moment, pressing little kisses to the side of his head in a drunken haze, before you realize that there's something damp forming on your chest. You think about that for a moment, try to find an explanation, before you suddenly make the connection.
Oh god.
"Dude, are you seriously crying on me because John won't be your hate boyfriend or soul mate or whatever quadrant you want him in?" He makes a noise somewhere between a drowning cat and a hissing tea kettle, a wet little pathetic noise, and tries to pull away from you. You tighten your grip on his shoulders, lean back against the couch and take him with you, lay him down along your side. He has one arm over your chest and a leg tangled with yours and he's trying as hard as he can to not look at you so you can't see the pale pink tears.
"Shut up, Dave, just shut up, I don't even want to hear it from you," he starts, and you press a finger to his lips (okay so you hit somewhere on the corner of his mouth but he gets the point) and shake your head.
"Dude you are so pathetic, seriously," you say, and despite it coming off as a bit harsh you say it with a gentle tone. You tuck your hands around his cheeks and hold his face in front of yours and he rolls the little bit to be laying more on your chest rather than the couch. You press a kiss to his cheekbone, miss your mark a little too far to the right and hit somewhere near his nose, and he laughs at you in something that almost sounds genuine if you didn't know any better.
"Jus' makes me pity you more," you say and you realize that yeah, you are pretty fucking drunk, look at you slurring these words like a pro, but that doesn't make you any less sincere. "John is a moron, he'll either eventually come around or he'll just remain oblivious forever but either way I ain't really going anywhere so I'll just make up for it, I'll fill every quadrant 'cause I can and you'd be so sick of seeing me but whatever, I can do it, man. We can make this work."
You aren't sure any of that made sense, but Karkat has stopped looking so horribly miserable and is actually sort of smiling at you (even if it looks all stupid and wrong with those teeth of his) and you figure that's an improvement over his crying from earlier.
"You're a moron, Dave," he says, and he leans the little bit forward to kiss you and you sigh a little and kiss him back. He slips his tongue in your mouth and presses his hips down against yours and tangles his hands in your hair. He pulls back and leans his forehead against yours.
"Pity you, too," he says and you roll your eyes at him and kiss him on the mouth again. He kisses back for a long moment before he groans, pulling away and leaning his head against your shoulder.
"What's wrong, babe?" You say, and he groans again, reaching up to press his hand against his eyes.
"Ugh, I don't feel that great any more, this was a horrible idea," he says, his brow creased in frustration and that distinctive look of "I am trying as hard as I can to fight off this wave of nausea but it's not really working" set firmly on his face. You panic, helping him sit upright as slowly as possible.
"Okay, Karkitty, let's move this party to bed. Where you're gonna sleep this off and not throw up all over me which is really not something we want so please don't throw up all over me," you say, and he looks at you with the most pathetic and half-hearted little glare you've ever seen him work up.
You get him to his feet, holding him up with an arm around his waist and your free hand hanging on to his, and you get him undressed and settled into bed with little fuss. He spends the night in varying degrees of complaining about nausea and complaining about how terrible of an idea this was before finally falling alseep, back pressed against your chest and hands tangled up with yours.