Chapter Text
By the time they’re done clearing up the last of the disaster, the sun is almost up.
On the bright side, the beach looks almost back to normal. Scott’s always been a skilled builder; he tells Pearl that her terraforming abilities are second to none, too, and she has no choice but to believe him. Together they’ve managed to sweep the crater of their latest double-explosion back to being a mostly-intact cliff face and a slightly uneven sandy floor. If you hadn’t seen it before, you might be convinced that the Archipearlago had always looked this way.
They’ve talked, too. Scott is still a little unsteady on his feet from the sudden influx of a second, a third lifetime’s worth of memories, and so as he digs and shifts and replaces he keeps asking scattered questions. Pearl answers everything she can as patiently as she can. It’s not exactly comfortable, shuffling back through the worst six weeks of her life to explain what the thing about the snow was, or why she used to wake up every morning to a sharp shooting pain in her heart, and what exactly that has to do with the fiery-haired figure he’s never met before but who sits constant in both of their recollections like the souring aftertaste of a sweet drink… but it’s necessary.
(And besides, Pearl won’t back off from a little thing like reliving bad memories. She’s not so weak. She can stomach it, and so she does.)
So they’ve made the beach look good as new again, and they’ve covered the gaps in Scott’s still-raw memories, and as she kicks the last of the sand over a jutting spike of cobble she declares that enough to be getting on with.
Scott’s reluctant to leave, of course. This guilt that he’s become fixated on, the neverending well of remorse, has had him spontaneously apologising over and over again all night like he can’t stop himself from saying it whenever it pops back into his mind. Knowing everything he did and making sense of it must have made the compulsion even worse than before, because it feels like half the things he says are “sorry”. And he keeps looking back over at her, paws - hands - half-reaching like he wants something from her.
She figures it out before too long. These hugs aren’t exactly what she’d fantasised about at her lowest points in the old world, shivering and huddled up next to a half-starved wolfdog with a yellow collar, but they’re better than anything she could have hoped for back then. At least Scott actually wants her now.
He says he’s never going to abandon her like that again. That she deserves better, and that he’ll be here to give it to her. That (and he’s hesitant, here, but he says it anyway) he wants to be her best friend, properly this time.
Pearl would be a fool to not accept that offer.
(She’s probably a fool either way, but at least like this she’s a fool with someone’s arms around her.)
But he does need to sleep, and so does she, and so they part with bittersweet smiles in the end. Pearl doesn’t take her eyes off of Scott until he’s disappeared all the way round the side of the mountain.
Then she sits on the sand and she watches the rest of the sunrise.
The ocean is her only soundtrack. Its music is familiar, rhythmic and comforting - the same ebb and flow she heard each night before she left on her desperate attempt to shake off a man who only wanted closure. The same quiet shushing that lulled her to sleep more than once in the old world, cut off though they were from the wider expanse of the world. She’d like to play, for old times’ sake, to an audience of nothing but the fish and the kelp and the coral.
Her guitar’s in Gobland, though, and her bass and horn still tossed on the bed in that Chromian tavern room. She’ll need to fetch those sooner rather than later.
The dogs are in Gobland too, which is maybe a more urgent concern than that; Pearl doesn’t want to make Sausage do any more hard work than he has to looking after her pups. She’ll go get them first. As soon as she has a new house and a new bed - somewhere for them to settle.
Pearl stands up and goes to grab some of that extra cobblestone. Starter shack it is, then. Can’t be as ugly as Box.
The morning is bright and calm. The future feels clearer than ever.
Pearl is warm.