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Like this, Quirrel can almost pretend it isn’t her at all.
After it, it kind of… isn’t. Hasn’t been, for a long time now. Not for… He isn’t sure how long. A long time, surely. So long that her image blurs in his already cluttered head, even in memory (slowly, painstakingly) regained. So long that should she have been able to speak again, he knows he wouldn't be able to recognize her voice.
Not that she will speak. Not ever again. She gave that up just as long ago. They gave it up. For this. For a chance of things to be better. For the sake of not letting it get worse.
Monomon stopped existing the moment Quirrel crossed the border into the unknown, losing everything to him, of him, within it. She stopped existing the moment she shed her mask, the face which had for so long marked her to him and to all of them–– teacher, protector, friend–– and became this esoteric… thing. This amalgamate form. This twitching and swaying object in the acid of an abandoned chamber-turned-tube. A faceless, unknowable, utterly unalive object of nothing but idle fascination. A mind asleep. A body faceless. A lock to a cage holding nothing and no one, the key thrown away.
Quirrel’s hands tighten around the key.
He can't speak. He can't stop looking at it. At the thing that had once been someone so, so very dear to him.
It isn’t her. It isn’t. It can’t be, and so it is not, and so it won’t be.
(And it will, and he can't stop it.)
The little knight turns.
“Did she call you too, then?” Quirrel says, and he can’t for the life of him feel the words leave. The noise is unfamiliar in his body, both in and out. He can’t speak them even as they are spoken. He can’t hear them. The cheery, unaffected tone is as strange and foreign as the faceless void that looms over him. “I realize it’s no coincidence we arrive together.”
It was. It wasn’t. It never could have been, because it called for him–– calls for him, now, even as he stands meager feet from what was once her old chambers.
“Though much of my memory is blank, this place I recall.”
He can only wish he did not.
“Within these chambers the Teacher sought to store the Kingdom’s knowledge, and at its core, she stored…” Quirrel casts his stare down. The movement was jerky for all it was slow. The worn shell bracing the back of his neck cracks and creaks like trembling bones. The little knight looks up at him. Staring. Waiting. Listening, Quirrel knows, and yet his eyes stick on the polished hilt of his friend’s sharpened nail like honey, rancid and thick. “...she stored herself. To save Hallownest, the Teacher willingly became a seal.”
Her face, in his hands. Her discarded visage. Her body. Her mind. Her ghost.
The last lingering memories of laughter, light and dusty, tremble in his ears. Quirrel grips onto those bits of her ghost with both hands. He would bury his teeth into them until his jaw aches, until it bleeds, if it means they would stay.
He knows better.
The proof stares accusingly up at him.
She was not herself, without her face. It took the spelled mask to collect her fragmented self behind a contained visage. Her eyes were that which was carved. Her voice that which echoed out from beneath the rounded shell. What was a performance without a stage with which to stand upon, a light to illuminate, a space that carried?
“Though I cannot recall its happening…”
What was an auditorium without a performer?
The mask was empty of purpose. Empty of soul. The carved eyes only stare, vacantly, at anything and everything and nothing at all. Unseeing of anything. Not of her experiments, abandoned to her assistants quickly sickened and gone. Not of her acid, bubbling dutifully in her voice. Not of Uumuu, left vacant and rotting in its wake of protection. Not him, bereft.
Bereft of her. Abandoned. Worse then, even–– armed and sent out to forget. To die and yet not. To rot and still breathe, progeny cursed.
None of her poise. Her wit. Her cleverness. The quick whip of her word, though she often burbled with the softness of bubbles rather than the bite of acid. Her playfulness among the seriousness of their tasks. Her duty to her mind. To all of theirs. To all of them. Her drive, pushing her ever onward to greater, glowing horizons none of them could even dream. That none of them dared to, that she led them in continuous march towards. That she sent Quirrel onwards when all others failed, condemning him forever.
(Her face overtop his. Her mind a shield upon his own, a guiding light in the wastes outstretching away from the King's influence, and yet not his curse, the spell which stalled. Her mask carried the fragments of that spell. That immortal stillness.)
(If it hadn't chosen to call him back, he would have simply wandered forever. Without even knowing that the nail he held, the mask he wore, did the very opposite of protecting him–– only prolonging the grief he never even knew he bled from.)
“I played a part in that,” Quirrel whispers. “I played a part in that feat.”
None of her left. Just an empty shell. Just a husk. Just a corpse, held cold in his hands.
Quirrel had never once denied her a single thing. Not her company, not her companionship. Not the warm glasses of honeyed tea, nor the cool, damp touch of her tentacle overtop his shoulders. Not the sword on his hip nor the memory on his head. Not the journey that took every single thing he had ever loved from him.
He does not drop her corpse. It is a very, very near thing.
“She called me here, now, to reverse that protection.” To desecrate a grave. “All in aid of you.” And I am sorry, I am so, so sorry, but I cannot forgive you for it.
Quirrel did not wait. He had never done much waiting, he didn’t think–– he knew, now. Waiting was for the undetermined and the dead. Was for failed experiments, forgotten memories, and foolish travelers. She had liked that, in him. His eagerness. His fearlessness. His readiness to learn more, matching her pace for pace, moment for moment. It was his greatest asset. It was his fatal flaw.
(If he could have just waited a little longer, ignored the call a little bit further. If he would have had his nail rust and the spell fray. If time could have let him die out in the wastes, far beyond the reach of distant song and pulsing magic and little blank-eyed knights––)
He raises what was once his teacher’s face and he lets it go.
The mask did not burst. The chamber did not explode. Quirrel's heart cramps as if it had, fast as a fleeing maskfly as the shell burns acid-hot in his hands. as it glows and hisses and crumbles into bits of soul-bright light, spell work unraveling, reconnecting something that never should have been separated.
Quirrel watches without a single vacant thought as Monomon looks down at him. Her towering stature looms into view, returning from a blurry, acid-washed visage into his friend.
It's not her, Quirrel reminds himself. Don't pretend that it's her. It's not her. You can't make me think that that's her.
Monomon stares at him. The mask he was unable to properly look at even upon his own back froze on him with exact, painful clarity. The achingly familiar slant of her eyes, the rounded carving, the nicks and scuffs of his travel decorating her face. Spell work, no matter how tightly woven, could only do so much. It had saved his life time and time again. He would have perished in the wastes long ago without it–– would have been slain by the red-cloaked Protector upon return without it.
Now... now, he wishes she had. Maybe it wasn't too late, still.
After all, he wasn't protected anymore.
The warmth of the acid washed over his bared shell. The sickly green light of her tube glowed dim in his eyes. He it numb to it all. It happens around him. Before him. Not to him. He has nothing to do with this. With any of it, anymore. He just... is here. Standing. Looking at it, untouched by it all. A thing that died when she did. An object with no more purpose. Lifeless things, vacant and empty. Like teacher like student.
Her body moved within the tube. If he would turn away, he would mistake it as restless. The circulating current of the acid makes her tendrils sway, rippling across her gelatinous flesh and royal cloak. The glow of it lights her up in monochrome. A gentle green, unobtrusive and soothing compared to the vibrancy of Greenpath. Contained, spelled, she was utterly the same. Not a hint of viscous orange or the swollen bloat of illness. No withering to the healthy weight of her bell.
It's not her. It's not her. It's not her.
Monomon looks... alive.
That can't be her. She told me to leave. She left me. She left all of us. It was all for nothing, anyway.
As alive as the day he left. Even more so, maybe, impossibly, suspended in acid like a wet specimen.
She wanted this.
Quirrel turns, finally, a jerky move that nearly trips him right off the top platform. He stares at the Knight with wide eyes. "Do not hesitate," He breathes out quickly. It comes out unnaturally. Strained and desperate. He can't help it. Can't even focus on it for more than a second. "The choice to reform was hers, not mine!" Never mine. "She k-knows what you would do and seems to––" He glances back, a feverish, uncontrolled thing. He sees the tip of her tendril wave in the tank. It presses against the glass. Quirrel recoils, heart pounding. "––welcome it."
It's weak of him. It's traitorous. It's a betrayal to–– to him. To him. To only him. Because she did want it. She does. She called... She calls him here, right back to her side, just to do this.
It hurts. It burns. There is acid on his back. There is acid under his shell.
Do it, he bites back, and it is a cowering, begging ask. He swallows it like a handful of needles and chases it with a shot of acid. Do it. Just end this.
The Knight looks at him and Quirrel can't help but cringe away. Their mask, so pale, washed in green, bears nothing. Barely a face, for all that it's meant to resemble one. Empty eyes with only darkness beyond the carved holes. Quirrel's breathing picks up, harsh in his ears. He feels as though Monomon's spell unraveling has unraveled him too, ripping him slowly up until it's too late to notice he is dying. As if he's burning up where he stands, shredding from inside out.
He is a pinned bug between corpses. He can't even find it in him to mourn. He's going to join them soon. Maybe it'll be peaceful. Maybe she'll be real when he does.
Anything would be better than this.
The Knight looks at him. Looks through him. Looks at nothing at all. "Please," Quirrel begs the Knight. "Please."
Ghost turns and leaps off the platform.
Quirrel is frozen. A second noise rings out, a light thump, and he lunges for the edge of the platform and looks down. Ghost stands below him. The little vessel stops on the lowest platform. They look up at him. Their face is utterly devoid of any discernible emotion. They only look at him, and him them––
His mandibles are stiff and slow. "Why do you hesitate?"
They look up at him. They stare. They jump again.
What. Quirrel leans precariously over the platform. The Archives have rules for a reason! He knows better than to do that, his body pulls instinctively back, but he digs his claws in tight around the slippery metal and calls out, sputtering, "Where are you going?!"
There is no response. Ghost splashes down into the acid below and Quirrel ducks to the side, trying to see them around the lower platforms, but they don't look back. A couple awkward paddles with their paws and they swim beneath the walls. He can barely stretch over the platform enough to make out the trailing ends of their cloak drift out of his sight completely.
...They're gone.
Quirrel... Quirrel sits up. He sits up and he... he sits there. He just sits there.
It's just him and Monomon, now.
He doesn't know what to do. It takes a lot of effort to get into the Archives, now. Not to mention through them. The many safety mechanisms, made for ease of use for non-acid-repellent bugs, were all tucked away. Left to dust in locked up rooms he can't remember how to unlock, much less find in the first place. His recovering memory can only do so much. His legs are covered in burns from one too many close calls with the acid. There's still glass in his foot from where he walked over the broken remains of a shattered text-tube while he was lost in the memory of a whole one. There is no easy way in. There's certainly no easier way out.
That doesn't mean there isn't a way out, of course. Quirrel didn't... fully remember the Archives, but he knew it once. He... knows it now. He knows it. There is always a way out. It was a safety measure... for in case of emergencies. Not all of them could be immune to acid. Research came with risks. Especially when you worked with an Archivist who created jellyfish that explode.
If he wanted to leave, he could. He would, too.
It's just him and Monomon.
"Ghost...?" He hesitantly calls. There isn't a response. Not even a distant splash.
Quirrel sits there. He stares at the platform. He stares at his hands. He stares at his hands, braced on the platform.
It's just him and Monomon.
He could leave. He could do it. He knows he can. He's survived this long. He knows this place. Knows it more than the nail on his hip. Knows it more than the shell of his own hands. Every moment he spends in it, he only knows more and more. He can name the doors. The things they stored. The purposes they had, once. Some of the test tubes he was reciting before it finished circulating the text encoded within.
Nothing was stopping him. He could leave. He was going to leave.
Quirrel looks up at her. His teacher stares down. Her gaze isn't warm. The Archives are always warm, he knows better. It's only a trick of the acid. She isn't looking at him. She wasn't alive. Not even her mind returning to her could wake her up, now. She is as good as dead.
Monomon watches him. He can imagine the tilt of her head, the flutter of her bell as she giggles. The pealing bubbles of her laughter and her voice, fondly calling his name. He can almost remember it. If he could just focus enough, he's sure he could hear it. It's there. It's right there.
She's right there. Here. Next to him.
Quirrel slowly sinks back on his haunches. He lets his legs dangle over the precipice. It wasn't as if he would fall. He looks up at his teacher. His friend. The person he forgot.
She doesn't judge him for it. She never, ever has. She never will. Even if he deserves it.
Quirrel leans, slowly, sideways. Until his shoulder bumps the glass of her tank. The hum of acid rushing beneath it sends a shiver up his shell. It makes something tense in him relax.
He can leave whenever. Will leave, whenever. He'll just... rest here, a while. Monomon doesn't judge him, she appreciates the company. She always has.
Ghost will come back eventually. He'll just leave when they do. He'll wait for them. It won't be long at all. They'll have to come back. It's inevitable. He's lucky they gave him this. He'll have to remember to thank them, when they return.
Quirrel sinks further against Monomon's tank. The hissing almost sounds like a purr. Her tendrils wave in the corner of his eye, pressing against the glass as if attempting to curl over his shoulder. He presses his cheek against the warm glass and shuts his eyes.
It's just for a moment. Ghost will be back soon, and this will all be over.
It's just him and Monomon, for now.