[The assessment of Vriska gets a small snort, but he's in no state to follow it up with sarcasm or other cutting remarks with Dave massaging his scalp like that. He's brought out of it a little when the touch trails over his absent horns because it's still fucking weird to feel anything there at all, but it's a momentary lapse, not worth noting.

The hand on his jaw is expertly timed, too; Karkat is already melting but not so much that that question wouldn't have made him start to freeze up again. As things are... that was basically a pap, right? Or close enough? Fuck it, he doesn't care, he's going to say it counts.

And... right. That question.]

... I've been thinking about them a lot lately. All of them.

[Tavros and Vriska. Nepeta and Equius. Feferi, and even Eridan. He doesn't say the names, but he's responding, at least. He isn't shutting Dave out.]

And talking about them. With Ashley, mostly, because it's easier to just... use them as examples.

[There's a brief pause, and he covers the pair of still-linked hands with the only one left he has available. Dave had better not fucking stop touching him; he's not sure he'll get through this without that unspoken support.]

But then we started talking more about them as people, and I don't know how I'm supposed to deal with that.

[At least before, he'd been able to wait for a dream bubble or go to sleep and maybe get a chance to see one of them or their doppelgangers, but here, on this world, that option didn't exist. They're all gone and yet he feels closer to them than ever, what the fuck even is that? They're not even all from his timeline, so why?]

I'm being stupid, right? It's been three years.