Work Text:
Kristen Applebees was soaked to the bone, half dead (okay, a little more than half dead), and currently regretting her decision to come on deck. Yes, Gorgug had needed healing and obviously she was going to help keep him up, but there really wasn’t any good reason she was still on the ship’s deck being hit by every kind of breath weapon she could imagine.
“Why was I up here?” She had asked herself as she ran back down the stairs.
There wasn’t a good reason, but there was a reason. The reason she had come out into the rain and the dragons and danger was because of something that had happened two years and however many months ago.
“Remember when we died?”
How could she ever forget? It was her first day of school, surrounded by people she barely knew, and suddenly she was being attacked by animated corn. The irony had not been lost on her, but it was only months later she had found that particular joke funny.
Back then, she’d been Helio’s chosen, cheerful and naive.
He’d been some boy with a tin flower that had tried to sing to stop being mad.
Now, she was the saint of Cassandra, he was a rockstar and the world’s first barbificer. They’d both gotten girlfriends and gone through breakups. She brought herself back from the dead and he sent a satellite into space. They were the Bad Kids, saviors of the world.
And all of that had almost never happened.
It all nearly ended there, in the school’s cafeteria on the first day.
Gorgug had gone to hell. She’d gone to heaven. Neither of them liked what they had seen there. It was only because of one mad wizard and his phoenix paramour that they weren’t trapped there for eternity.
It was strange, that one of their first shared experiences had been dying together. Stranger still was how much they had continued to share. They’d both gotten girlfriends in freshman year, tried to save that relationship as sophomores, and gone through a breakup before junior year. It was one thing for someone to be able to empathize, and another to be able to look at someone and know they were going through the same thing.
There was one thing that they didn’t share.
Kristen had died in the forest of the Nightmare King, and she had died alone.
It wasn’t that she wished Gorgug had died too. She never wanted any of her friends to die. But dying without him felt wrong , like she should apologize for doing it without him. Like she had almost left him behind.
There wasn’t any good reason for her to be here. She was nearly dead, and she wasn’t completely sure what would happen to K2 if she did die so there wasn’t any guarantee she’d come back. Her dexterity was too low to avoid the damage, and she couldn’t tank it like Gorgug.
“It may happen again!”
The reason that she was on the deck of the ship was because there was only one thing that scared Kristen more than dying.
And that was Gorgug dying without her.