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The moment before the plug is pulled, she is triumphant.
It’s finally over—they’ve won. She’s alive. He’s alive. Despite all odds, despite everything, they both made it. He’s by her side, as battered and beaten and bruised as she is, but he’s here, a hand on her shoulder and that stupid, cheeky smile on his face, and for a moment, she feels a flare of hope, of giddiness, of relief.
When the floor disappears from beneath her, she finally remembers what winning actually means.
It’s not just the floor. It’s the whole ship. She should’ve realized—erasing everything that MeLife has ever created would entail the ship, wouldn’t it? But regardless, suddenly, she’s falling, and every ounce of happiness she was just feeling turns to rot.
She’s falling. That fact takes another few seconds to register. The wind is screaming in her ears, the sky is tumbling around her in dizzying blurs of pink and orange and the brightest gold she’s ever seen, and the ground is twice as close as it was a second ago. And the realization settles in, cold and terrifying.
This is it. This is where everything ends. This is where she dies. Tears build in her eyes, but they don’t even get the chance to roll down her face, torn away by the wind as soon as they attempt to fall. She’s trembling, frozen, paralyzed with terror, unable to even draw a last breath—
A hand. Trembling faintly, impossibly warm against the frigid air, and oh-so familiar; it clamps down, clutching her side with a vice grip that would be painful if she could feel anything but fear. It’s difficult to find a sense of direction in this horrific freefall, but she manages to turn just enough.
Her eyes meet his, and it’s like time stops for a moment.
He’s crying. She’s never seen him cry before, she realizes. Not when it was revealed that their existances were nothing more than scraps of a child’s imagination. Not when she’d fought him, mere moments ago, leaving him scuffed and scraped and breathless. Never, in all the years she’s known him, has a single tear fallen from those sharp eyes.
But now, they’re falling as freely as her own. Flying away into the sky like poetic little raindrops. He’s shaking, too. She can feel it, despite how hard his grip tries to be steady and firm. And despite it all, he’s smiling at her. It’s a weak, fragile thing, barely more than a terrified grimace—because he is terrified, no matter how much he tries to hide it for her—but it is real.
It’s going to be okay, he doesn’t say, because the empty reassurance would do nothing for her. We’ll be fine, he doesn’t promise, because he knows how she hates a liar.
Instead, as she stares into his dark eyes, which bore right back into her own, she sees something else. An apology, maybe, or maybe a goodbye. Maybe it’s all the apologies he’ll never get to make, all the goodbyes he’ll never get to give, all the last words he doesn’t have a second to get out.
Or maybe, it’s just an I’ve got you.
And then time starts back up again, and despite it all, she feels her lips split into her own hysterical smile. The ground grows closer and closer, but she only has eyes for him.
The last thing she sees is that beautiful smile, and maybe that’s a poetic ending, but she won’t be around to appreciate it.
(“Come on. Show’s over. We’re going home.”)