John/Karkat - Concrete Air

Another story from the kink meme in which I don’t actually write smut but did remember where the prompt was.

http://homesmut.livejournal.com/15023.html?thread=28523951#t28523951

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It’s been too long; this is the last time that you’re going to let John be able to prank you. It took some effort but you managed to get him locked away in the closet, and you really can’t help but smirk at the following theatrics. There are better things to do though, so you swivel on the balls of your feet and begin walking away, you can come back once he’s learnt his lesson.

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It’s been too long, this is the last time you prank them the last time the last time the last time because your mind is a rushes haze and you can’t see anything and you can’t feel anything but the door beneath your fingertips and the crushing weight of the air within the closet you’ve been closed in. Your heart is beating so hard it’s going to come out of your chest you just know it will you yell and yell and scream and yell at the person outside but they don’t answer you are they even there oh please for the love of god let them be there. but they aren’t. They’ve left they’ve left they’ve left leaving you all alone with yourself and the crushing air and the walls the walls that you’re sure weren’t this close this before now they’re closing in they’re getting worse and all you can do is crumple to the floor and choke out a sob.

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It’s been too long; Egbert should have come along and made a complete fool of himself in front of you already, by which you mean he’s late for the movie session you arrange every week. Despite his tendency to show up late after getting distracted, probably by something overtly shiny or related to Nic Cage, he’s never been this late before and you can’t help but be suspicious.

Worry? Of course you don’t worry. Five minutes later when he still hasn’t shown up to greet you worry is nowhere in sight, when you make your way out of the room with a scowl it’s still not there, when your bloodpusher beats  faster as you think over the possibilities worry doesn’t even exist for you. Worried? Of course not.

Not in his respiteblock, he’s definitely left for the meet-up, he just doesn’t seem to have arrived. You thought that maybe he was just making some extra effort this time to bring some grubcorn or something, but nobody turns up in the nutrtionblock either. This game of hide and seek is really starting to piss you off more than anything else, the only other places left are other people’s blocks and the series of hallways littering the asteroid.

Maybe someone else has seen him.

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Oh god, you can’t believe that you’re still here you don’t know what you’re going to do it’s like your mind is closing in on itself slowly slowly slowly like the four walls around you. You sit in the middle of the small closet sit in the middle so that maybe just maybe if you close your eyes you can pretend that you’re somewhere else and that the edges of the room aren’t so close and that there’s so little room here. The air is too thick to thick and musty and wrong and you can’t do it your breathing gets heavier and heavier it’s like your lungs are filling with concrete and you just keep breathing deeply deeply to get as much oxygen as you can but its too quick too shallow too wrong.

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Oh god, you can’t believe you actually have to deal with all of these assholes on a daily basis, the fact you’ve yet to go insane is a testament to the steely status of your sanity, not that it even needed proving. Finally you manage to locate the culprit; apparently it was an excellent fucking idea to lock John in a closet for no discernible reason. In truth you were fully aware of the pranks, but that was just John being John, not really a punishable offense in any sane company. Oh right, you’re pretty much the only sane one here, it all makes sense now.

Displaying no small amount of annoyance you make your way to the closet that Egbert was supposed to have been closed off in, hopefully you won’t get too him too late for it to be worth continuing with the plans.

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What was that? You hear someone walking outside, you think you hear someone walking outside at the very least but at this point it’s probably just as likely that you’re going to be hallucinating the whole thing and this is just your minds way of getting back at you for something you didn’t know you did. Get their attention get their attention move off of the floor and bang against the door stop crying like a moron and just say something say anything say anything before they walk away and leave you all alone again. Your limbs are unresponsive, they just won’t move they won’t pay attention to you they don’t want to be reminded of just how close you are two the walls and how close the walls are to you but you manage to choke out some words, you can’t even tell what they were maybe they were all in your head so you try again louder. You just want someone to help you just want some help you just need some help.

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What was that? You could swear that you just heard a voice calling for help, you might have to start rethinking all of your previous claims on sanity, oh well that was moderately fun while it lasted. You hear the same thing again and it takes you more than a few confused seconds to realize that it’s coming from the closet near the end of this particular hallway, or the closest thing to an end when they all seem to connect to each other like a god damned multiple hive sized circuit board.

You grumble to yourself, at least this whole little game is over now. “Don’t get your panties in a fucking twist Egbert, refrain from dying by the time the door opens and I’ll get you out in a second,” you announce to the wall as you make your way down. It takes a few moments to fumble with the key, you wish it could be said this place was compatible with itself but that only seemed to be the case half the time, finally you open the door.

Before you even get a chance to move out of the way John leaps out of the room and just…collapses on the floor, like if his legs decided now would be a perfect time to take a vacation from working. His breathing is heavy, choked sobs escaping from his mouth with alarming regularity and the arms he has wrapped around himself do nothing to stifle the tremors running through his body. Worried? As if that’s even a thing that has to be questioned at this point.

Without realizing that you had even moved you quickly find yourself down on the floor next to John, wrapping your own arms around him and pulling him in closer. He doesn’t push you away, he just leans into you and shakes, and sobs, and shakes some more, taking in breaths like air had become a foreign concept he was only recently reintroduced to. This isn’t exactly a situation that you’ve had any amount of experience in; you’re forced to try and run completely off of instinct and pray that humans are similar enough to trolls that it won’t make things worse.

Slowly you rock him back and forth, trying to channel the shaking into a more stable motion, more controlled, and less outstandingly pitiful because now really isn’t the time for that. John desperately begins to cling to your shirt; any troll would have cut straight through you with the rushed motions, but this is a human, this is John, so you don’t have to give it a second thought. The only thing left to send tremors through him is the sobbing, sobbing you can deal with.

You move one had up to the back of John’s head, pushing it forward onto your shoulder so he can rest it there, which he does without complaint. Stroking a human’s hair is a lot easier you find, thanks to the lack of horns to get in the way of any movement, from this angle it’s easy enough for whispers to reach the humans ears, so you proceed to give him reassurances, as many as he might need and probably more than he could ever use. 

It seems to be working out quite well, you may not be able to tell how long you’ve been sitting there with John anymore, but that doesn’t matter because you’ve finally managed to calm him down to a reasonable level. The worry still persists within you when his breathing doesn’t return to normal; it continues to be much too shallow and rapid for your liking, so you simply continue your previous actions. Sure enough that too slows down with time, the desperate clinging toned down to nothing more than a tight hug, even if a little clingier than a regular one, finally your bloodpusher can stop doing flips all over the place in a vain attempt to escape and lend a hand that it doesn’t possess.

“Th-thanks Karkat,” he says to your shoulder, muffled by the curious angle and odd positioning of his head and broken by a small sniffle. “Well Jesus I’m not that much of a douchecanoe to leave you there, I guess I’ll just have to make up for it by kicking a few dozen barkbeasts out of spite, huh?” You respond almost automatically, the tone somehow manages to stay at the same softness of before instead of reverting into the rasping growl your usual voice is made of.  “I think that…let’s go watch that movie, shall we?” He asks, clearly avoiding whatever original point he was about to make. You don’t push the issue, now is not the time, and you’re positive that he’ll tell you when he wants to.

You let him drag you back to the movie room with a massive smile upon his face, and a relatively miniscule one on yours, a fact that you will proceed to deny for the rest of your existence.

Or at least around everyone else.