Work Text:
Something's wrong here. You can't shake the feeling, the knowledge of it that rattles in your marrow. You came here to make a heroic shitty last stand, you came here to immolate yourself in the sick fires of martyrdom, you came to make headlines tomorrow that'll be forgotten a week from now. You came here to become a footnote in the history books—if you're lucky.
You came here to die. You're not dead. Instead you're standing at the edge of a pool of sickly fuchsia, such the wrong color that you can't even register it as blood. Fucking aliens, man. They ruin everything.
You flick your sword and send troll juice flying. Your sister frowns as it splashes across her skirt—she's already covered in the stuff from needlepoints to elbows where she made the last killing thrust.
“You missed a spot,” you say, shrugging.
She rolls her eyes at you and you start to smirk, and then start to laugh, and then you can't stop. “Talk about fucking irony,” you gasp.
Rose wipes her needles clean on her ruined dress, her lips primly pressed thin. “I didn't come here to lose,” she says. “Did you?”
“Me? Maybe,” you reply between wheezes. “I don't know. This wasn't supposed to happen.”
“But it has. Congratulations, Dave Strider,” she says, dry. “You were a bad enough dude to save the president.”
You were just starting to get yourself under control, but that sets you off again. She watches you for a moment, bent over and clutching at your stomach, and then she starts to laugh herself.
--
You've always had an impossibly accurate sense of time, but now it's—stopped. It nags at you as you fight your way out of the White House the same way you came in, through robots and legions of juggalos.
A sense of doom roils in your guts as you cut down one guard after another. Still, you should count your blessings. You're not dead. Maybe you'll still have a chance to see your brother before you kick the bucket. Maybe you can take a real shower for the first time in years, one with actual water instead of gross heated faygo.
“That's definitely what I went through all this trouble for,” you shout to Rose over the din. “I just wanted one last goddamn real shower. Let no one say that I'm not an easy man to please.”
“I was looking forward to adding to my memoirs,” she yells back. “This will make for a wonderful chapter, don't you think?”
“Like your memoirs need any more padding. You just like to hear yourself ta—”
You stumble, and your sentence stalls. The ground is starting to shake under your feet, badly enough that it's hard to stay standing. “Earthquake?” you ask her.
Her face is pale. “No,” she says, “something worse.”
You look up and see huge cannons rising from the ground all over the city. The sky, too, is filling with an army of alien warships, their vivid red shapes blocking out the sun.
“Oh, fuck,” you whisper. “She put in a kill switch, didn't she?”
Rose says, “If she can't have Earth, no one can.”
Your sense of time is fraying inside you; panic and rage war in your throat. You've failed. You've failed everybody.
“Guess I was right after all," you whisper.
Silently, Rose reaches for your hand. You squeeze it, hard—and then the world goes white.