Chapter Text
She doesn’t know how long it’s been when he finds her again. Days and nights bleed together when you don’t sleep; if she didn’t know any better, she’d say that it’s been one long, awful, hallucinatory day and she’d hope that she could sleep soon.
She and Tilly are at the top of a tower. She doesn’t remember building this tower, really; it’s part of that horrible haze. One moment, she’s scratching rock from the earth with her bare fingertips because her pickaxe is broken but she can’t stop the compulsion that draws her to take more, more, MORE—
Once upon a time, she thinks she would have sunk an axe into someone’s head to get that compulsion to shut up.
Once upon a time, she thinks she would have sunk an axe into her head to get tha—
Tilly jumps onto her hindlegs and presses down on her shoulders with all of her weight, and she is brought out of the bleariness that ravages her mind and bleeds her identity from herself. She feebly pushes the red away (and she is red now, after being struck down in vengeance after dashing another’s soulbound on the ground, after collapsing as her heart split in two by no fault of her own) and takes a deep breath in, releasing it slowly. Tilly pushes her way into her arms and whines, a single high-pitched noise that echoes through her skull, and it grounds her enough for her to take a single choking breath, and then another, and then another.
She recites objective truths to herself. Her name is Pearl. She has a perfect, amazing dog named Tilly. She is red, but she’s not red because she’s not sprinting across the plains and through the trees to kill like the rest of them are (and she watches them from afar, those murderous ants that scream at each other and fall down violently). She lives in a tower with all of her belongings that no one’s tried to burn down or destroy yet, perhaps because they’ve forgotten about her or perhaps because they think she’s all but lost her mind after Impulse and BDubs were killed right in front of her. Maybe they’re right, but that truth isn’t objective so she doesn’t count it.
It’s fine. It’s fine because she’s fine, and she’s fine because Tilly is helping her keep the haze at bay and letting her cower in her fortress in the sky as she watches her peers succumb to it and set upon each other.
“Pearl?”
She all but shrieks as suddenly Scott’s voice sounds behind her, and she twists around even as she lunges towards a wall. He’s climbed all the way up her ladder— maybe she got too invested in watching the others—
Scott looks… well, he looks fine. Normal. Human, even with the red sheen to his eyes— and Pearl gives herself a moment to be put out that Scott hadn’t even considered using her gift once . It’s one thing to give someone the equivalent of a Chekhov’s gun. It’s another for them to not shoot it.
“Pearl,” he says, his hands moving in a weird way that she takes a second too long to figure out that it’s the gesture she had once used when coaxing Tilly to her. A gesture a human gives to calm a wild beast that might snap at their throats.
When did she go from person to animal?
Probably when you lost track of how many days you’ve been awake for, the curling cynicism she’d always held whispers to her. She used to ignore that sarcasm as much as possible, but it’s the only thing keeping her tied to being herself , now.
“Pearl?” he says one last time at her ragged, silent breaths. His accent twists her name, pushes vowels around. Peril , it sounds like he’s calling her. Maybe that’s more fitting, the dark wash at the back of her head snickers.
Peril : noun. A danger. Something that you soak yourself in when you’re being brave or being stupid or near death either way.
Pearl : noun. A precious sphere torn from the mouths of inconvenienced mollusks.
Surely, one of these is more fitting. She decides it’s her green name, for now.
“What do you want, Scott?” Pearl asks. Her voice is hoarse. To be fair, she hasn’t used it in a while.
Scott hesitates. Perhaps he wasn’t expecting her to be such a wild thing. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the golden apple that she gifted to him so long ago (so few days ago).
“I was hoping,” he says cautiously, “that you would share this with me.”
Pearl can’t stop the bark of laughter that splatters out of her like vomit or perhaps poisoned blood expelled from the body. Scott takes a step back at the explosive sound, tinged, no doubt, with some hint of her insanity.
“You can’t be serious,” she says. Her voice is a rasp, mere sound that she tears from herself rather than the words she used to be able to twist into persuasion and humor.
“I’m completely serious,” Scott says, and he sounds too earnest to be lying to her.
“Scott, look at me,” she says scornfully, her violence and disgust and redness echoing in her words. “I’m the Witch of the Tower or whatever the ants down there are calling me now. You’re better off eating that yourself and throwing me off.” As dismissive as she tries to make her words sound, there’s some part of her that’s terrified that he’ll take her seriously and do just that.
Scott stares at her. Pearl can easily tell that he’s fighting with himself over something, though she’s not sure what it is until he raises shaking hands, unclips his armor, and lets it fall off of his body with a loud CLANG! Pearl feels herself gaping at him, but he squeezes his eyes shut and throws down his axe and sword as well.
If she wanted to, she could leap at him right now and tear his innards out of his body.
“There,” he says, voice shaking. “I– I’m unarmed, I’ve got no armor— I’m completely helpless.” He manages to look up and seems encouraged by the sudden unease Pearl can feel washing over her. “Is that enough proof for you?”
Pearl swallows, and then she swallows again when her mouth is still dry. She feels Tilly growl more than hearing it, but the dog settles next to her without any nudging and that doesn’t help her decide what she wants to do next at all.
Scott reaches into his pocket and takes out a dull knife, though it’s more a shard of a broken sword with leather tied around one end than a formal knife. He carefully lines the blade up with the side of the apple and slowly begins to cut it into slices. Golden skin holds firm before giving way under the blade, and though the slices of fruit are a bit clumsy the apple splits as readily as if it had just been picked.
He holds out one of the slices to her. Pearl stares at the fruit in his hand.
“I haven’t poisoned it,” he says, exasperation finally leaking into his voice.
“Why wouldn’t you have?” she says back, an accidental aside spoken out loud.
Scott hesitates before eating the apple slice himself. Pearl watches him chew on it, swallow, and waits to see if he collapses, his mouth foaming.
Nothing happens. He keeps sitting on her floor, a partially cut apple in his hand.
When he holds out another slice, she shakily raises a hand, takes it, and eats it.
The apple tastes like summer and winter and every single sweet moment that she’s ever shared with Tilly. It snaps in her mouth like the wind that brushes against her eyelids and stings her throat, it tingles with the magic of shooting stars at midnight, and it’s over too quickly, washed away into her body.
Suddenly, Pearl realizes that she hasn’t eaten in ages.
Scott cuts another slice and passes it to her. She takes it much more quickly. When he holds out a third, she gives him a strange look.
“Why aren’t you eating?” she asks.
“I ate before getting here,” he says, but when she doesn’t raise a hand to take the apple from him he rolls his eyes and eats it himself.
Pearl tries to keep track of how many slices they each eat, but her mind falls victim to that part of her that reminds her of her starvation and she soon begins to eat every slice held out to her. In a matter of minutes, she’s staring at the core, a hunger still clawing at her, though her mind feels clearer than it has for a while.
“We’re the last ones, you know,” Scott says.
Pearl blinks. “They never tried to come kill me,” she says.
“I know. I didn’t let them.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “Cleo died. Martyn was the one to do it.”
Pearl winces.
“It was— I know you’ve been up here for a while,” he says, “but watching them— collapse. I think it put a lot of things in perspective.”
“Why didn’t you eat it before?” Pearl asks. The unspoken question echoes in their minds: Why didn’t you kill me already?
“I didn’t want to, Pearl,” he says. “I never wanted you dead.”
He says it like an obvious truth. She takes it like a revelation.
She wipes her nose with her bare wrist. Scott wrinkles his nose in disgust. “Gross.”
Pearl glares at him and blows a raspberry at him.
They settle into a personable silence.
“Well,” Scott says, and there’s a strange reluctance in his voice. “That sort of settles it for me.”
“Settles what?”
Scott hovers by the door in her floor. He glances down and two wires finally cross.
“No.”
“Why not?” he asks. “I’ve done— I’ve done a lot to get here, Pearl. I’ve killed a lot of people, and their soulmates along with it. You’ve just been— here. Trying not to kill. Trying not to die. It feels nobler than whatever I tried to accomplish.”
“Nobility doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Pearl tries to say. “You don’t deserve to die.”
He hums. “I also don’t deserve to live,” he muses.
“Don’t say it like that ,” Pearl says.
His eyes slide over to her dog, who stares at him with a strange light in her eyes. “What did you say your dog’s name was, again?”
Pearl blinks at the sudden change of topic. “Tilly.”
“Tilly. Fitting.” Scott hesitates before opening the trapdoor. Pearl wants to run over, but acknowledging her starvation and exhaustion has pinned her to the floor, and she couldn’t crawl over in time if she wanted to. “Could you do me a favor?”
Pearl hesitates before nodding.
“Remember me like this,” he says. “Remember me as the person who shared an apple with you, not as the one who left you on a hill.”
Pearl nods again, numbly this time. There’s a ringing noise in her ears. The clouds are filling her mind. She shouldn’t allow this, she should go over, she should push him away from the ladder— they’re the last ones, they can live together in this world that no longer holds any danger—
But it does. Even now, the red claws back at her awareness and whispers to her to push him off herself.
He gives her one last smile. It’s half of a thing and tinged in his terror, but it’s resigned and warmer than any he’s given her in this world. “Tilly death, Pearl.”
He takes a deep breath.
He closes his eyes.
He stands on her ladder.
He
lets
go.
He
falls .
There’s a lance of pain that shoots through her, something that feels like breaking ribs and a neck hanging loose, and she coughs so hard that she expects blood to splatter out from her mouth. Tilly whines lowly, trying to wiggle into her arms, a grounding force as always. Pearl clings to her fur as she sobs from the pain, from the confusion, from the comprehension of what’s happened.
She shakily opens her communicator.
<Grian was killed by Smajor1995.>
<GoodTimesWithScar died.>
<ZombieCleo was killed by InTheLittleWood.>
<InTheLittleWood died.>
<Smallishbeans was blown up.>
<Etho died.>
<Smajor1995 fell from a high place.>
Winter and summer lingers in her mouth.
Pearl stares at her communicator for a while longer, wonders when the pain will soon overtake her, because her soulbound pair died. He died, and that means she should die, but she hasn’t died yet?
Sweetness clings to her lips.
His last request: Remember me as the person who shared an apple with you.
And apparently, the person who gave her her life back. She didn’t know how much of that apple she’d eaten, but clearly it was more than Scott had.
She breathes in and breathes out. Soon, she will climb down the ladder and sit by Scott’s broken form. She will mourn him as she once mourned their bond, and she will bury him in the ruins of the home he built with Cleo, and she will see if the barrier holding them into this infernal piece of the world has fallen, and she will find something else . The red in her awareness is a quiet murmuring brook at the back of her mind now, simply the reminder that this is it , that she’s snatched life out of the rules of this horrible game she signed up for.
Tilly keens and she’s shaken from her thoughts.
Pearl breathes in. Pearl breathes out.
She’s alive .
What a wretched, beautiful thing.