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Emmet didn't know how long he'd been on Undar. He knew his legs still hurt, so it couldn't have been that long. It was cold and dark, and he couldn't move, but Emmet's hope didn't falter. He filled the emptiness by having conversations with himself. He’d been his own company before, it wasn’t too hard to fall back on that for the time being. At least this way the conversations were always pleasant. When he couldn't think of something to talk about, he would sing. The echo that carried his voice was hollow and dim. Still, Emmet knew it wouldn't be long now. His friends were fighters, they'd escape from the Systar System and come for him soon.
*****
The Dry-Ar System was vast and lonely. Emmet wished he could at least explore, but his legs still wouldn't move. They’d stopped hurting now - that was something. Though, it also meant quite a bit of time had passed. Conversations started repeating themselves.
“Nice weather on Undar today, huh, Emmet?”
“I'll say, Emmet! It’s cold and dark again, and I'm loving the consistency!”
Really the only sense of days Emmet could get was when the sliver of a view he had of the outside galaxy went dark. That was his night, though it seemed a little inconsistent. In daylight, he sometimes strained to get a clear look at the Systar System. He couldn't quite tell what was going on in there, but if it was taking his friends this long to get to him, it had to be something truly sinister.
If I'd been tougher this wouldn't have happened, he thought. Lucy was really going to let him have it when she found him. If she found him.
Emmet's chest tightened at that thought. He brushed it away but part of it sunk into the back of his mind, refusing to let go. If, if, if.
*****
For a period, Emmet tried to focus on being found by anyone . When he sang, he sang until his dust-filled lungs gave out and then pushed even harder than that in desperate hope that someone would hear him.
“EVERYTHING IS AWESOME… EVERYTHING IS- * cough* - COOL WHEN- *cough cough* - YOU'RE- * cough* -part of… a team…”
Every word burned in his throat. That was when it hit Emmet that he could hardly remember the last time he'd heard the actual song. He couldn't remember what the music sounded like. That had to mean over a year. Longer, even.
Emmet stopped singing. He stopped speaking at all. He pulled tight into himself, hugging his arms. More dust blanketed over him as time continued to pass. How much, he still didn't really know. This loneliness was getting harder and harder to stomach. Emmet didn't know how much longer he could take it.
Emmet knew he was a little clingy. He knew he could be a bit much at times. He knew sometimes his friends got… tired of him. But really he was just so afraid of being alone again. He’d met these people who, though it took some time, really seemed to like him. He’d never had that before, so he clung. He clung so they wouldn’t leave him.
He didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to think that his friends had all decided to dump him the first chance they got, but that doubt nibbled at the back of his mind. It refused to let up. All he could do was try to focus on having faith in his friends, so the doubts wouldn’t consume him.
Undar was really his worst nightmare.
They'll come, he promised himself. Lucy, Unikitty, Benny, MetalBeard, Batman… They'll all come. Any day now.
*****
Emmet clung as tight to his hope as he could, but the longer he lay in the dark the harder it got to hold on. He missed his friends. He missed Lucy most of all. He missed Lucy so much it ached. There was a hole in his heart where she belonged and he hadn't realized how big it was until she wasn't there anymore. He thought about seeing her again, how all he wanted to do was hug her and never let go again. And he would, if she ever came for him.
When. When she came for him. He kept having to correct himself. He knew Lucy would come eventually; she was missing him just as much as he missed her! She wouldn't stop looking until she found him, not Lucy. Lucy didn't give up. No matter how long it took, she was going to come for him. She wouldn't just… forget about him, right?
But it had been so long.
The tears stung at Emmet's eyes before could stop them.
No, no, no, don't cry, not now. Not here.
Those last slivers of hope fell from Emmet's grasp. He kept trying to convince himself it was still there, but part of him knew. Part of him deep in his core, that lay festering as he sobbed in the dust.
*****
Nothing was anything on Undar; it was all just darkness. Darkness reaching through emptiness, trying to find something, anything to grab onto. But there was nothing.
Emmet sank into the darkness until he became part of it, and it part of him. Soon he couldn't remember how to separate himself from the black. It swirled around him, inside him, spreading through every part of him until all he could feel was the cold. There was nothing here. He was nothing. No one. Just a dusty piece of plastic, lost forever.
*****
Time. How long had it been now? How many daylights had passed? How long had he laid here, waiting in the cold, for someone to come for him? Too long.
His voice was different when he spoke again. Harsh, dusty, low. Fraught with something unfamiliar, something he'd felt building in him for a long time.
“They're never going to come for me.”
He'd known for a while, he'd just been too stubborn and naive to admit it. That thought of if had eaten away at the back of his mind for ages until it became consuming. If, if, if.
Never, never, never.
They'd left him. No one back home cared, obviously. They never had. But the only people he'd thought truly did care all his life had left him. Lucy had left him. They weren't in danger in the Systar System, they'd been having fun all this time. And they'd forgotten him.
Lucy forgot him.
That feeling grew stronger. He felt his arm start to twitch, and before he even knew what was happening, he'd slammed his claw fist into the floor, shaking all of Undar and leaving a massive crater in his wake.
“...Woah.”
He didn't know he could do that. Well, he probably couldn’t have before. Those softer emotions of his had really been holding him back. With all that sentiment out of the way, he could probably do a lot of things he hadn't been able to do before.
Screwing his face up, he focused on letting this newer feeling consume him. This bitterness, this anger . Anger at himself for not being strong enough, anger at fate for taking everyone he'd loved from him and for throwing him here, anger… No, seething, white-hot rage at his so-called “friends” who'd left him to rot alone on this lousy, dismal, awful planet. It gave him strength, a power to move he hadn't had before. Finally, for the first time in ages, he managed to sit up. He got to his feet. He took a step and fell back down, but managed to get up again. He admired the crater he'd left with pride.
“Hmh. Nice work, E-” He paused.
Emmet. That didn't feel right anymore. He'd been nothing for so long he hadn't even thought about his name. Now he felt like he'd become something else entirely. Something that Emmet didn't fit. He needed something new, something to suit this destructive personality he was embracing.
Something tough.
What was tough?
He thought back to every glimpse he'd managed through the veil to the Man Upstairs’ reality as he'd waited. The TV was in his line of sight, so he'd seen some cool-looking things. Movies about action heroes, space explorers, time travellers. The common appearance in a lot of them was weapons. Weapons were cool, but he couldn't very well name himself Gun, could he? No, that would be stupid. He had to think of something else, at least for his first name.
One movie he remembered seeing a few times was about dinosaurs. Now dinosaurs were tough.
The coolest ones were velociraptors, obviously, but no part of that really rolled off the tongue as a name. After that the T-Rexes were pretty neat. Hm. Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Tyrannosaurus...
Rex.
He chuckled a bit and smirked, cocking his head back.
“Nice work, Rex.”
He liked the sound of that.
Rex escaped the Dry-Ar System on his own. He found a new purpose, a way to belong by himself. Rex would be everything his old friends had wanted Emmet to be; tough, dark, brooding. Not held back by empathy or attachments, or any of the stuff that had made him so weak in the past. No, Rex was stronger now than he’d ever been before, and he’d show everyone who’d left him that he didn’t need them anymore.
Rex didn’t need anyone but himself.