Chapter Text
Another day, another failure.
Plankton threw his body against the front doors of the Chum Bucket with a groan, the exhaustion enveloping his body making the task more difficult than it should have been. The taxi ride back - of course he took a taxi, even just looking at the boat decked out for that sham wedding made his stomach churn - did not help his mental state at all; the heavy silence served only as encouragement to stew in his misery.
"Karen, I'm home!" he croaked out, stumbling past the insultingly empty tables in the restaurant space and into his real base of operations. Plankton winced as his eye adjusted to the blinding florescent lights of his lab, making a halfhearted attempt to search for his wife before hopping up onto a workbench and slumping over. The cool metal felt like heaven against his aching limbs, and it almost distracted him from the absolute disaster that tonight had been. Almost being the key word. He grumbled and hoisted himself up into a sitting position, foul expletives bouncing off every corner of his brain. This plan had seemed like a long shot at best, but it had been going so perfectly he couldn't help but push forward blindly. He had been this close, this close, to pulling the Krabby Patty Secret Formula out of Krabs, but, thanks to an admittedly poor design choice, it all blew up in his face in the end.
"Just like it always does," Plankton mumbled, an edge of self-pity slicing into his bitterness.
"You're back."
"ACK!" Karen's blunt acknowledgement startled him right off the bench and into a rather undignified faceplant, and he just knew a pixelated smirk was lighting up her screen as she rolled over to him with the irritating squeak of wheels on tile.
"'Ack' to you, too, mister," she said with a dry chuckle, peeling him off of the floor and placing him into the palm of her hand. He looked away from her with a grimace, his pink-tinted checks doing little to hide his embarrassment.
"That was completely uncalled for, Karen. Couldn't you have just responded to me when I came in?"
"Sure, but where's the fun in that?" Plankton didn't even bother to respond, instead choosing to hop off her hand and pace fervently across one of his lab tables. Karen's monitor swiveled back and forth as she watched him, her neck creaking slightly with every turn. "Yeesh, I need to grease my joints. Did you pick up that mechanical oil yesterday like I asked you to?"
"The formula was right in my grasp, Karen!"
"Yes, okay, but that oil-"
"Krabs was about to hand it to me on a silver platter!"
"Plankton, my neck really hurts, and-"
"I"—he paused his agitated stride to jump up and down like a petulant child—"was"—out of breath, he slowed down to an immature stomping—"this"—back to jumping up and down he went—"CLOSE!"
"SHELDON!"
Plankton flinched, taken aback as Karen screamed in his face, her face twisted in anger and her hands clenched at her sides. "What is it, baby? Was it something I said?" He figured that, in all his ranting and raving, something slipped out that had upset her. These days, it seemed like he couldn't get through one conversation without setting the woman off.
"Something you-something you said?" she scoffed incredulously. "How about what you didn't say. How about what you never s-"
"Alright, sweetheart, I get it! I'm sorry!" he said with a grimace. Karen's response was simply to sputter indignantly for a few more seconds before her screen went completely dark, and all Plankton could see was his own sorry reflection. His grimace deepened; he hated when she got like this. When she turned off her simulated facial features that made him feel like he was conversing with a flesh-and-blood sea creature, when she even refused to display her typical audio pulses, it made her feel so...unalive. It made him feel so alone. He hated that feeling. That's why he had built his Neptune-forsaken wife in the first place!
"Karen, will you just say something!" he snapped desperately, his eye screwed shut. He didn't want to look at his reflection anymore. A few more excruciating seconds clawed away at him, then—
"So, how'd your plan fail this time, genius?" Karen said, rolling towards the main monitor taking up an entire wall. Even in his relief at the silence being broken, he couldn't help his eye from twitching in irritation. Neptune, the rattle of those wheels really got on his nerves sometimes.
"There was nothing wrong with the plan itself," he spat, scampering after her. He leapt onto the control panel beneath the monitor and jumped from button to button until a blueprint of the Cashina robot took up the entire display. "The plan was going flawlessly, thank you, up until the crustaceous cretin exploited this" —with a single swipe he zoomed into the gaping hole that was her open-mouthed smile— "absolutely abhorrent design flaw. Really, Karen, didn't I say there should have been a way to keep the mouth closed at all times?"
"No, you didn't."
"Whatever," he said with an eye roll, turning to face her with an impressively ugly pout. "Everything went to pieces because that soppy sea creature couldn't keep his tears to himself!"
"Rght, because who would've thought he'd go and do something like that?" Karen deadpanned, simulating the world's largest eye roll.
"Even after discovering my clever ruse, the fool still couldn't put a cap on the waterworks! What was he even blubbering about, anyways?" Plankton said, scratching his head in abject confusion.
"Oh, I don't know, maybe he just has emotional depths that go farther than a puddle."
"I know that tone! What in the Pacific are you getting at, woman?" Plankton turned around indignantly, preparing himself for another argument, but all he saw was the back of her monitor. She seemed to be staring out into nothing, but he couldn't really glean anything with her screen turned away from him. He figured she was as bored of arguing as he was and was about to redirect his attention back to his main monitor when, out of nowhere:
"He's always been braver than you, Sheldon."
Plankton froze. A single second seemed to rip into a thousand years as he slowly craned his body back in her direction.
"What...did you just say?"
No response. A second more, and she wheeled into their shared bedroom without so much as another word. That might have actually been a good thing for his already fracturing sanity, as before he even had the chance to fathom what she was implying, his swirling thoughts were broken into pieces by that Neptune. Forsaken. Rattling. He winced as each roll produced another Neptune. Forsaken. Rattle.
Another roll.
Another rattle.
That
Neptune
forsaken
rattling
was going to
drive him out
of
his
mind.
And then Karen was gone, the door of their bedroom slamming shut behind her. Plankton blinked, taking a moment to completely push everything that just happened to the back of his mind. Without sparing another glance at that closed bedroom door, he turned back to his monitor. Yes, he might be tired, but there was work to be done. If he just came up with one more plan, he would certainly get that Krabby Patty Secret Formula, and his life would be perfect. He would be happy.
With a click, he pulled up a half-finished blueprint for a sesame-seed-sized gadget that would commandeer a Krabby Patty all the way to his lab. A grin began to spread across Plankton's face at the genius of this newest plan, he-
"Plankton, are you saying it was all just a scheme to you? You felt nothing?"
He smacked his head against his palm, practically forcing the memory out of his mind. Groaning with a mixture of exhaustion and a variety of other unfamiliar feelings, he slumped back down against the keyboard. He didn't want to remember Krabs's stupid watery eyes and stupid pout and stupid tuxedo and stupid...stupid... Plankton let out another groan.
This was going to be a long night.