Homestuck Oneshot Compilation

past dirkkat - polaroids

a/n: im not back, just writing cause i got insp. probably ooc since i havent been active in the homestuck fandom + havent written hs in over a year. im in a good mood but still wanted to vent a little, so here's a rather self indulgent contemporary au where dirkkat broke up and have moved on. mostly.

most days, karkat isn't mad anymore.

it's hard to be mad at someone who isn't your world anymore, or even in the same solar system as you. sometimes your worlds still crash painfully together, reopening old wounds, but at the end of the day, his world is rarely visible in karkat's skies these days. karkat's skies are filled with wholly new stars.

some days, he is angry though. (but karkat holds grudges. he doesn't know how to forgive others or himself, so he supposes that it's only natural that some days, he still wants to deck dirk in the face and call him on the phone just to word vomit every thought he never had the balls to say out loud.)

those days are thinning out though. the rage of thousands of suns in his skies are dying; his skies are more peaceful now, something karkat never could dream would happen to him.

these days, he mostly remembers dirk through polaroids and 244 pixel by 244 pixel flip phone photos.

those photos are locked away where karkat usually never sees them. he's slowly deleting more and more of them; not out of hate, but because he can let go of one or two images. maybe a third.

kanaya soothes him and tells him she's so, so proud of him whenever she notices. letting go is hard, but it's becoming easier, especially with her soft words and his own peace of mind as reward.

when he does find his polaroids, though, it feels as though he is a new man again, different than the man he was with dirk.

not a man. a child.

dirk was only a child too, he has to remind himself.

he's given so much raw hate and tears to this child, and so, so many cries that have ripped their way out of his lungs and chest and throat.

it's hard knowing that someone so small and guarded and fragile has done so much harm. it's hard knowing that he's graduating high school in a year, yet this boy he met at thirteen still owns a part of him that hasn't come back.

it's scary knowing that he still hasn't gotten that last puzzle piece back; he still hasn't felt like himself since things first started slipping downhill and all of his happiness drained out like sand in one's fingers, or the remaining water drops in a sink slipping, slipping, slipping into the void of a drain.

maybe that's just how it is with the loss of your first love. maybe the impacts last that long for everyone else too. maybe karkat is too sensitive, more sensitive than he wants to know and can bear to admit.

but at least karkat's skies are calmer, even if it feels like his childhood and first few years of high school never happened.

as much as he hates to admit it, dirk isn't fully responsible anymore. during those angry days, he's nothing but a scape goat for karkat to blame all his fucked up issues and depression on.

they were just children.

and both of them should've never played god and assumed that the other was all they needed to fix all of their problems.

anyway. the polaroids.

karkat doesn't want to touch them again, doesn't see the need to. his therapist taught him to accept thoughts of dirk whenever they come, however, and karkat's thoughts are reaching for the polaroids. so he looks.

the two of them were thirteen, on a school field trip to a museum and cosplaying like the weeaboo dirk had dragged him into becoming.

fuzzy polaroids awaken crisp memories and karkat wants to fight it. but he doesn't have to anymore, and the thought of dirk opening up enough to smile still makes him smile. dirk wasn't exactly a ray of fucking sunshine, but he was an absolute dork behind all of his walls and barriers and karkat loved him. maybe karkat still loves the boy dirk was before things went so wrong. karkat remembers the feeling of their hands slipping together for the first time as they got coffee (and pretended to like the bitter taste because they both couldn't risk losing face or pride), wishes he had the heart to hold someone's hand again. wishes he didn't keep pushing others away.

dirk had to fight his way into karkat's heart, and karkat's heart had scarred so heavily that no one else had been allowed back in.

karkat genuinely wonders what he's learned, looking at all of these shitty, blurry photographs.

don't trust people?
don't fall in love?
don't bother anymore?

maybe he could move on if his scrambled head could figure out the point of all this. it's been two years of high school and a whole new man, a whole new karkat, after the incident, after the split, and he still can't figure out what it all says.

kanaya never has the answer. no one he's ranted to ever has. the small smile of the boys in his polaroids never have the answer, either, so he tucks them softly back in the box of memories where they belong.

perhaps...perhaps karkat should push himself more to trust someone. he has to do it, he won't move on otherwise. it's mind bogglingly idiotic, but maybe if he hasn't learned his lesson, he needs to go back to the way he was before he met dirk. trust a little easier, like he somehow did when he met dirk.

he doesn't get the point, the message in the polaroids are lost to him. those two boys' universes don't even make sense to him anymore. but perhaps it's time to let those boys go and forget and love as though that boy never hurt him.

love more carefully, but with the same passion and fire he used to embody.

he can't find dirk anymore. their accounts have been blocked and changed usernames and deleted so many times that their strings together are finally cut.

the polaroids remind him of the universe he saw in that boy before that boy's skies darkened and collapsed.

maybe he needs to live in the reality where that universe never died, and where karkat never truly learned to hate.