Some fuckin terrible JohnKat fic

Who tf uses chapters not me heres the whole story in 1 chapter yer welcome

Since the humans had arrived in the Veil, Karkat had come to have an increased appreciation for how hard the job of a Lusus was. He'd already had a pretty high opinion of them after the hours he'd spent herding ectobiological wrigglers around, so that was saying something. Playing Lusus to the humans in a desperate attempt to keep them out of trouble felt an awful lot like herding wrigglers.

To be fair, Strider and Lalonde annoyed him, but could be trusted not to do anything that had the potential to blow up the asteroid or lead Jack to them or engage in any other life-and-death stupidity. Mostly.

Harley and Egbert were another story.

Especially Egbert.

"Don't touch that," Karkat snapped for at least the third time in the last ten minutes. "Can you not keep your disgustingly soft prehensile appendages to yourself for one god-damned second? Am I going to have to tie them behind your back?"

"I'm not hurting anything," John protested, pouting. Fucking pouting at him, what the actual fuck. "The equipment is all inactive, anyway."

"For the moment it is, but the whole reason we're down here is that we're trying to find something that is working," Karkat pointed out caustically. "Preferably something that will give us some damned supplies."

"Well, what if we walk right by the machine that might save us because it was in hibernation mode or something, and we didn't poke it to wake it up?" John asked in what he probably thought was a reasonable tone.

"And what if we find the machine that might save us and you fucking break it before we can realize what it is?" Karkat countered. "Shut up and keep looking. And for the last fucking time, don't touch anything!"

With only ten hours or so on the timer until whatever was going to happen to the asteroid, none of the trolls had been worried about the fact that they had no source of food. Now that Dave had taken the eight remaining players far into the asteroid's past, however, they found themselves with pretty much unlimited time on their hands. That was great in that it gave them time to come up with some kind of plan, but not so great in that it meant they were all going to starve to death if they didn't find a solution soon.

Karkat had a sneaking suspicion the trolls would outlive the humans if it came down to that - and it had nothing to do with which species could go longer without food. He'd rather avoid them turning on each other, if at all possible.

"I'm sure we'll find something," John said with a confidence Karkat wished he could share. "After everything we've all survived, I refuse to believe we'll die of something as lame as lack of food. Oh, hey, what's that over there?"

Karkat followed John's pointing finger, and his eyes widened as he saw blinking lights on a computer console in the next room. "Finally," he said, picking his way quickly through the lab to the next doorway. "I was starting to think we'd come back so far in time that nothing was working at all."

As they approached, the rest of the equipment came into view and Karkat identified it as one of the many ectobiology stations scattered throughout the labs. He let out an annoyed breath. "Well, that's helpful," he said, rolling his eyes. "So if we want to create more mouths to feed, we can start experimenting with combining our clones. Of course, we could have done that with the equipment upstairs, without having wasted three hours searching first!"

"At least we know some things down here are still working," John replied, as cheerful as always. He moved closer to the equipment, peering at the console. "Huh. This doesn't look quite the same as the one I used to make our paradox clones."

"No, you're right. This is more like the stuff Kanaya and I used to breed frogs," Karkat agreed, moving closer as well. "Only sized up to be big enough for trolls. Or humans, I guess."