Work Text:
I
It is your twelfth year on your island in what you assume to be the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You were too young to remember the exact age you were when your grandpa died, but that’s enough to know how long you’ve been living here alone.
Well, not entirely alone.
You have Becquerel. You have the taxidermied remains of your grandpa (as unnerving as it can be, which you won't admit) and his trinkets and blue ladies to watch over you.
Even better, you have Prospit. You spend a good amount of your time sleeping. There’s just so much to be done there! Dogs to be walking, mailwomen to be greeting.
But most of all, you have your three best friends living in the continental United States. You love your island, you really do, but you wish living here didn’t mean never seeing another living person. Especially your friends, whom you’ve never met. Though the clouds of Skaia suggest it is not much longer.
Yeah... You guess you don’t have it too bad.
II
It is your fifteenth year raising yourself in a solitary apartment unit in the ocean of what used to be known as Houston, Texas.
Well, not entirely solitary. The apartment, yes.
You, on the other hand...
There’s the Auto-Responder. Though you hardly quantify an AI copy of yourself as another person. You have Squarewave and Sawtooth. Though, again, you’re not sure how much two rapping robots count for quality company. That’s not to say those two dudes aren’t the most righteous of metal men, but they aren’t humans.
Speaking of humans, the only other living human in the present time is about 1,900 miles away, and your other two friends? Four-hundred years in the past.
That leaves you, yourself, and more orange soda than one teenage boy can cope with, waiting for that fishy cunt to finally get around to killing off you and Roxy once and for all.
Houston, Atlantis.
III
You killed him with your negligence.
You know rationally that nothing you did directly caused your brother and best friend’s deaths… but you’re an omnipresent god. There must have been something you could have done.
There is still something worth fighting for. Right.
As long as you don’t think of the ashes of LOWAS under your fingernails, there is still something worth fighting for.
As long as you silence flickering JUST ; HEROIC disturbances in your mind.
As long as you forget how utterly alone you are. In the interdimensionary medium you find yourself in.
You try not to let the emotions of having just met your ectobiologically related brother a few hours before handling his tiny ashes crush you. You try and you fail.
Doomed timelines cross your mind every now and then- you must be in one. But the thought is too painful to linger on. It just makes you think of Dave-he would know-but he isn’t here , is he?
It’s your fault they’re dead.
There is still something worth fighting for.
IV
You failed them.
Your brain synapses can barely transfer impulses well enough to form that thought through the corruption glitches disrupting your very being.
You’re an insistent little fucker, but you think you’ve made your decision upfront this time. You’ll wait here until the artifacts slowly displace the fabric of reality, and you with it, until you die.
You have seen enough.
After you surveyed every demolished planet and shook every fresh corpse, you quickly deduced that it was over. Your sixteen years of self-training for some kind of tactical purpose rendered useless by a curse of time. Just a little too late.
You consciously accept your fate in time before reality breaks down around you, and ceases to have ever existed.