Chapter Text
Around noon Karkat comes to get you for school.
“So I heard that you got a roommate Rezi, who are they?”
“It’s the new kid who was bleeding in the hallway yesterday,” you answer him, “Her name is Vriska, she’s missing an arm and a eye, she likes pirate stories.”
“I can’t believe you finally got a roommate, I thought you would never get one. I’m surprised your parents aren’t here complaining about it.”
You frown, “I don’t like my parents, I hope they never come and visit.”
“Aww don’t be like that Terezi, you shouldn’t just dislike your parents, you should hate them too, don’t ever half-ass things.” You cackle at that. “But really Terezi your parents fucking suck, they don’t want to raise you just because your blind, they aren’t real parents if you ask me. If my brother and his boyfriend had the chance, they would take me home in a heartbeat… hey! I bet they would take you home too! You could be like my sister, that would be fun!”
“Don’t get your hopes up Karkles, besides we’re both stuck here until we turn 16, the rite of passage for any of us hospital kids, if we can live til 16 then we can go home.” If you could see you and Karkat would be looking at each other with knowing eyes, most of the kids here don’t live to see the age of 10, you’re lucky you’re only blind, some of the children here have cancer and other nasty things that kill people. Even Karkat isn’t really safe, sure he may be stable now, but who knows what could happen to his lungs in the future, that’s why they keep him here, to monitor him all the time so he doesn’t die. You’re just the blind girl that takes up extra space.
As you and Karkat make your way to the lesson room you listen to everything around you, it’s a habit, you have very strong hearing, makes up for being blind you guess. You can here hospital machines beeping, nurses shuffling about, and you’re pretty sure you can here someone crying? Weird, you tap Karkat with your walking stick to get him to stop.
“Hey Karkat, what’s going on over there,” you point in the relative direction of the crying.
“Oh um, I think that’s that one kids mum crying? Ya know the one who had a brain tumor? He probably passed away last night because when I walked past his room this morning on my way to get you it was empty. Too bad, that guy was kinda nice, way nicer than the stupid roommate he had for a while, Sollux I think it was? That troll had issues; speak of the –insert idiotic word to desirable someone here-,” Karkat doesn’t even finish his sentence, you can smell Sollux approaching.
“Nice to thee you too KK,” Sollux says, with an ever prominent lisp to his voice.
“The fuck are you doing here again Captor,” Karkat grumbles out in his shouty voice, hopefully the nurses didn’t hear him swear, they don’t like the fact that a seven-year-old has such ‘colourful language’, as they call it.
“My parentth caught me in the act of not thleeping, and then they found out I haven’t been thleeping for four dayth now, tho it wath back to the thick bin for me.”
“I swear you’re the biggest idiot to ever exist Captor! You’re not even really sick, yet you keep showing up like a stray meowbeast that someone feeds on their front porch everyday. Oh by the way, your roommate died last night I guess.”
“Damn that thucks, that guy wath fun to talk to, oh well I guethth I get the room to mythelf. Anywayth, ready for thchool guyth?”
You nod and Karkat makes another grumbling noise as you all head into the lesson room.
~~
School here kind of sucks, all the kids are in one big room and kind of separated by grade level, it’s really loud and hard to concentrate; not to mention the face that your teacher is very annoying.
You, Karkat, and Sollux take the three seats in the very back corner of the grade school area. Grades 1-3 get put here. There’s the kindergarten and preschool area, the grade school area, the elementary area, the middle school area, and the high school area. The high school area really doesn’t exist as far as your concerned because most of the kids here really do die before the hit their later teens. In all of your seven years here you can’t ever remember someone who actually got to leave at 16, most of them are terminal, and the one’s who aren’t still have complications, or their parents move away so they go to a different hospital. There are some really bad cases where the kid has weeks left and they just let them go home because there’s nothing the doctors can do but make them feel comfortable. Sometimes you’re glad you and your friends are stable.
The teacher starts off the lesson with some reading and writing, your two least favourite things. It’s not because you don’t’ like to read and write, you actually love it, it’s because the teacher -and this is where the annoying part jumps in- tries to baby you; just because you can’t see.
“Now Ms. Pyrope, promise me you won’t lick the books today,” he says as he sets a book down in front of you and places your hand on it like you’re stupid and you can’t find it yourself. Everyone here treats you like your stupid, especially this guy, when there’s nothing wrong with you, being blind doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you feel really bad about yourself when they do stuff like this.
“But teach’ licking the books is the best way to read ‘em,” you reply with a cackle, but you still comply and flip open your brail book. You don’t really like brail books, it was a struggle to learn how to read brail, and it still is. You wish that people would just let you lick and sniff everything.
After an hour of Sollux texting under the table (you can hear his fingers hitting the buttons) and Karkat intently reading at his super fast pace (you can hear him flip the pages like there’s no tomorrow), while you sit there and pretend to read, reading and writing time is finally over; you guys didn’t write anything today thankfully, writing is a whole different ballpark of annoying in this class.
The rest of the class time is math and science, it wasn’t an art or music day sadly, those are Monday thru Thursday, and then it was recess before dinner. There was no P.E. for the children here because most of them cannot muster up the strength to play sports. The only time you get P.E. is when you’re scheduled to meet with an OT or PT person, or when you’re cleared for using the workout room. You can use them if you want to, but you don’t because Karkat can’t and you think it would be unfair. There’s also playground time at the playground across the street, but you only go if your sister comes to visit because again, Karkat can’t go.
After recess and dinner you go back to your room and are happy to smell Vriska there.
“Heyyy!” You say in her direction with a cheerful voice.
“How did you know I was in here,” she asks as you approach her bed.
“I can smell you,” you answer as you point to your nose with a grin.
“That’s… not strange at all.”
You snicker, “Well when your eyes don’t work you find that everything else works ten times better to make up for it. So how were your tests?” You ask her as you stand next to her bed.
“They were interesting, I met the genius son of the doctor so he could look at my arm. He’s only seven! Same age as me, and he’s a robotics genius. He says he learned a lot of stuff from this really cool guy who wears stupid anime shades and an orange hat. I can’t believe that a seven-year-old is making me a new arm!”
“Oh you must be talking about Dr. Zahhak’s son, Equius. Yeah he’s like super smart, too bad he’s kinda sick.”
“What do you mean he’s sick? He looked normal to me.”
“Well he looks normal, but he has a mean side?” You try to find the right words to describe it, “His dad calls them ‘rage episodes’. Equius has a really bad temper and when he gets angry things break and get thrown around. Karkat describes it as something like ‘the Hulk’. And he loses his teeth a lot, but they always grow back… apparently that’s weird?”
“That does sound really weird.”
“Yeah, but as long as he doesn’t have a episode he’s a cool guy. I’m sure he’ll make you a great arm! He made new legs for my friend Tavros who fell off of a cliff when he was five.”
“That’s good to know then. So I was going to ask you if you knew where to find any books around here.”
“Of course, I love to read, I know kind of ironic because of the no vision thing, but I just lick them and read them that way. I can get you any book you’d like right now before lights out if you want.”
“That would be great, I’d love it if you could find me something about pirates, or the future.”
“Sure,” you say as you smile at her and leave the room.