You shift your weight from foot to foot on the front step, flinching as a scuttlebuggy swoops along the street behind you, honking incessantly. This has to be it. You've only been here once before, but the towering form of the upper floors and distinct little hexagon print on the doormat are both unmistakeable.

You are Karkat Vantas, and you are trying to find your friend. To the best of your admittedly shitty knowledge, he lives in this impossibly tall hivestem, and with any of your equally shitty luck, he might be home.

If they didn't have a million better things to do than watch some raggedy anon-blooded troll hanging around the entrance to a psionic-run hivestem as if expecting someone to answer, some of the passers by might notice that you are shaking more than fidgeting. You would tell them they are most definitely wrong. You are fucking fearless here, with no doubt as to your hatefriend's integrity or whether he even remembers you exist. Or, at least that's what you tell yourself.

You've considered a lot of fucked up scenarios in your day, but none were quite like this.

After a moment, you summon up your nerve and knock. And by knock, you mean bang on the door like you've got drones on your tail and let out a screechy 'Anyone home?!' that would make your lusus blush with pride.

Several seconds pass before a section of the door slides open with a sharp scraping sound.

"Password," barks the squinty rustblood peering through the narrow slot.

Oh, fuck. You didn't have to give a password last time -- Sollux had for once been bothered to answered the door himself -- and you had yet to spontaneously develop any telepathic ability that would let you access the password from anyone's head.

"Look, asshole, I don't have your goddamn password. I know someone here. Sollux Captor? He lives here!"

An awkward pause leaves you both silent as the rustblood's eyes sweep over you with utmost suspicion. "Liar. Captor's an ass with no friends. Now fuck off."

"Listen, I know him, you slurry-slurping shithead! He's a douche who cloisters himself in his impossibly cramped hive division on the top floor of this godforsaken hivestem, because apparently he has nothing better to do than writing line after line of the incomprehensible fucking drivel known as ~ATH and fucking with noobs who are either so bad at coding they don't deserve his attention or whom he just decided to fuck with for shits and giggles."

Finally, she takes a step back, not particularly impressed with your tirade. She rolls her eyes. "Ugh, whatever. Wait 'ere."

After you shoot her one last glare that you hope looks more threatening than it does immature, she heads back deeper into the hivestem itself. You step closer to the door to listen better.

"Oi, Captor!" you hear her shout. "Got a visitor kid, says 'e knows you. You know 'im?"

A familiar voice responds with a baffled "Who?" and your pump biscuit skips a beat. After a few more seconds of footsteps and background chatter, a pair of familiar orbs glowing red and blue appear at the slot in the door. Your friend's eyes glare at you from the darkness, a dim bicolored light washing over your face outside. He sneers and narrows his eyes.

"Who the fuck are you?"

Oh hell no.

======

You woke up late in the evening, practically midnight. The stars shone through the fog of pollution, and dim moonlight filtered through your block's thick glass windows.

The first thing you heard was your lusus, clicking and rattling at you from a distant corner. You slowly rose out of the 'coon like a crusty-eyed leviathan from the depths, grumbling and groping for a handhold on the outer rim of the opening. Crabdad looked up to see you slipping off the outside carapace of the 'coon, and promptly rushed over to help. He was undeterred by your half-hearted cursing, and even pointed to your time-tracking display atop a storage structure when you made noise along the lines of 'What time is it?' instead of screeching at you.

Well, technically he still screeched at you, but helpfully.

The tiny numerals of the time-tracking display on your open husktop swam before your eyes, but you got the gist of it. Late.

The message alert tone for trollian pinged at you, and you opened up the chat window before you even registered the chat handle.

Your fingers are clumsy on the keys of your old husktop (it's smaller than you remembered), but you type out your message well enough. After a typo or two.

Growling to yourself, you yanked the strip of tape of your husktop's camera lens and snapped a quick picture of your face. The wave of embarrassment at your own childishness that swept across your cheeks in a warm, bright red rush afterwards did little to sway your furious intent.

You shoved away from your desk, panicking. Oh shit. Oh shit. You'd known your eyes would eventually turn as you grew older, but by the time you'd gotten onto the meteor and actually started waiting for it to happen, it didn't really matter anymore. Assuming you were really back on Alternia, you'd just slipped on an exotic fruit peel into a serious pile of hoofbeast manure.

The file sat there on your desktop, beckoning. You glanced around, checking for anyone watching (as if any spy worth their salt would be so easily spotted, or actually bother with spying on you), and opened it up.

Fuck.

Your eyes weren't just coming in to their color like in adolescence. They were dangerous, bright red, filled in to form a thick crimson ring around your pupils. You tried not to cringe. You were going to have to do something about that.

Thankfully, the rest of you hadn't changed much. You looked a bit older, but not by more than half a sweep from what you remember.

It said something about your situation that half a sweep of spontaneous aging barely even fazed you, but with all the weird time shit and memory problems going on, you honestly didn't care.

You looked around your room, noting the layer of dust over the rest of your device support plateau. The posters plastered on your walls were faded and peeling. You could see Troll Will Smith's face curling in on itself, and another poster hung in two pieces with a massive rip down the middle.

The little details all quickly erased themselves from your mind to make room for the numerous dried bloodstains on the floor.

You knelt down to take a closer look, and just as quickly stood up again to escape the stench. You didn't remember seeing adult trolls in films ever recoiling from the smell of blood, but the scent of the colorful splatters was enough to make you stomach churn. You didn't even know whose it was.

Holy shit, had you done that? You remembered nothing about the Karkat who lived in this hive, presumably for the last two sweeps, but you could tell already that none of the blood was yours. Your floor was stained several different shades of rusts, greens and tealy-blues, including at least a few streaks of what looked like purple. What the fuck had you been doing?

You looked at your own hands, noticing how weird they were now. None of the scars you got from fighting imps had been preserved, but they'd been replaced with a scattering of new marks you couldn't name the origins of. Some of them were still new, scabbed over.

After a moment, you found your eyes drawn to a pair of black gloves on the desk. They were the only thing besides your husktop not coated in dust, and you saw marks in the fake beast-hide to match other-Karkat's scars. Maybe that was how he'd hidden his blood when he got hurt?

You decided the put on the gloves, just for safety's sake, and got dressed the rest of the way. Other-Karkat's wardrobe hadn't changed much from yours, and you were glad to see the same comforting grays dominating your clothes as usual. After much deliberation over how to cover your eyes, you added a pair of stupid looking gray-tinted goggles you suspected you owned for just that purpose.

As you approached the door, Crabdad clicked at you, anxious. You brushed him off. As freaky as your bedroom was, you had more important shit to do.

You had a nerd to find.

======

Sollux Captor, formerly your best friend, stares at you through the slot in the door. "Well, athhole?" he adds.

"Sollux, it's me, goddammit," you begin. "Karkat? Your hatefriend? The asshole who's been sending you terrible code and yelling at you over trollian for the last four sweeps of your worthless life?!"

He snorts. "Nope. Not ringing a bell, dude."

Your face twists into a snarl. "Oh, come on. We've known each other since schoolfeeding started! For fuck's sake, we're hatefriends, and you are not going to just quit and forget me so easily now, you shitmunching dweeb! You know who I am! You coded the fucking game! You know how it works to the tiniest goddamn detail, and you are not going to just pretend like you totally didn't see this steaming pile of bullshit coming! Of all the people to forget the basic shit of who they fucking are, I can not fucking believe that that dumbass could possibly end up being you!"

"Wow. Dramatic much?" His expression has barely changed since you last looked. He smirks, eyeing your bared teeth and grayed-out symbol. His eyes narrow at the latter.

"Wait a thec." His eyes (inscrutable as they are) don't seem to move from your chest. You mostly get a sense of where he's looking from where the vibrant psionic glow is concentrated the most, combined with some practice at figuring this out in your months interacting face-to-face in SGRUB.

You don't answer. You already know your shit is fucked. Sollux whispers to the rustblood girl, and you catch a few words -- "maybe" and "old acquaintance" and--

Wait. Old acquaintance?

The bolt on the door slides in the open position with a loud click, and you can hear the tiny parts rattling as someone unlocks the door.

"C'mon then," the rustblood says. She pulls back the door, gesturing for you to enter. You hesitate for a moment, then step inside, and she shuts in behind you.

The hivestem's bottom floor is packed with trolls of all ages from barely past their first pupation to nearly conscription age. All of them seem to know each other, and all of them are clearly psionics. Few of them acknowledge you, and fewer seem to care. They're all too busy chatting amongst themselves. You see a midnight meal laid out on one of the tables near the back, with an impressive spread of grubsauce and noodles. Someone actually went to the trouble of cooking those, and judging by the number of trolls crowding around the table, it's probably pretty good.

Your own food-sack growls a bit at the sight of warmed slices of grubloaf on the side table, but you say nothing. Can't risk mouthing off like an ignorant sack of bulges as usual and jinxing it.

Sollux leads you up to a door deeper inside, pulling you along. He almost has to drag you away from the food, but you fight the urge to help yourself to the delicious grubsauce-coated noodles and follow him.

The door does not lead to his block. It leads to a tiny, cramped space that looks like it would be best used for winter garment storage. You're about to ask if this is some kind of joke when he grabs you and shoves you inside. He may be a wimp, but you're too off-guard, and you think he used his psionics to help.

Cheater.

The door slams shut, leaving the two of you in what is, in fact, a winter garment storage. Something clicks shut, and it sounds an awful lot like a lock. It's too dark to see much, though, and all you can make out is the bar of light bleeding in from under the door, and the bright twinned glow of Sollux's eyes.

"Alright, dipsthit," he hisses. "Tell me why you're really here."