Chapter Text
Red fell first. Then Green. Then Blue. And then Yellow.
With Yellow being the last to fall, she was the last to float over the disintegrating bits of her code, floating away in horrifying red flecks caused by the blade.
She looked down at her hand, now translucent and changed her attention to her friends, gathered together in shock. She half walked, half glided over to where blue looked like they might burst into tears and placed a hand on her shoulder, overwhelmingly relieved when she made contact.
They wordlessly watched The Dark Lord approach Orange and flinched when he shoved the black and red blade through their body. Green stepped forward, preparing to greet Orange when they two inevitably passed into this strange state of death.
But their code wasn’t falling apart. And The Dark Lord glared at Orange in confusion as they landed a weak hit on his face. The recently killed sticks also looked on in confusion, but a bit of hopefulness. Maybe they would pull through? Maybe they would get the chance to make it out.
Except, The Dark Lord kept attacking. Slash after slash, impaling them, and they didn’t die. They followed along with what was going on in various levels of distress. Red was yelling for them to keep fighting while Blue shrieked for them to run, flee, get away while their code was still together.
Neither suggestion did much, as it was evident that Orange could not hear them.
The Dark Lord finally smashed them against the side of the cliff, a massive crater left from the impact behind them. They watched The Dark Lord float back to where she was about to destroy everything. They had lost. The Chosen One was alive, but defeated, almost the entire gang was dead, and they were all about to be dead, probably followed by the rest of the digital world.
The ghosts all peered at Orange, the most wounded out of all of them. They all had retained their stab wounds in their ghostly form, and it seemed Orange might just have a few more stab wounds than the rest of them. That was okay, it wasn’t like they ever worried much about how different they were.
Orange’s gaze was unfocused, but fixed on their forms for a few seconds, as if able to see them. They smiled faintly at their worried faces and shuddered through the pain.
“I love you guys,” they whispered before their eyes closed. It was somber. They were all ready to welcome them into their death. They were prepared to rush to them with hugs and comfort after being absolutely brutalized by The Dark Lord. Even if they were all dead, at least none would have to live without the others.
Except Orange didn’t pass. Their code didn’t fade the way it had for the rest of them. Instead, their eyes snapped open, blaring a brilliant and bright lime green that sealed their wounds without a trace.
“Woah, woah what?!” Green shouted in shock, which was then doubled when Orange teleported out of the crater that had been created by The Dark Lord slamming them into it.
Effortlessly, from the other side of the bay, they handled every single one of the virabots about to wreak havoc before teleporting behind The Dark Lord, waiting for her to turn around to figure out what was behind her, and slammed a powerful hit over her head to knock her down toward the water.
“Holy shit!” Red shrieked. “They’ve been holding out on us! Go Orange!”
Despite their own sad situation, they forgot it for a moment while watching their friend. It was like they were watching Saturday afternoon sports, when a big game was on and the team they cheered for was doing well. Red was clapping and shouting “go go go!” while Green was miming punches they were landing on The Dark Lord. Yellow was squealing and had her arms around Blue, who was also clapping. They all knew Orange was good at fighting. They didn’t know they were this good.
This was a different kind of good, sure, but still.
Yellow kept track of each of the powers they displayed in a flurry of attacks. Healing, flight, teleportation, super strength, some kind of electricity/force power, telekinesis of some kind that also had to do with the lime electricity, and to top it all off was a massive laser that none of them would have wanted to be on the other end of.
All four of them were sobered up quickly when Orange charged up a laser attack to shoot at The Dark Lord and they blew up a mountain.
Okay, so Orange definitely killed The Dark Lord, that was something. They barely even reacted. The ghosts all wondered how aware they really were, the usual energy they had even when fighting, in which they would weave their attacks the way they would come up with their art, the same determination to make it as good as possible was gone, replaced by an unsettling and apathetic power.
Orange floated over to the desktop in the lab, and the ghosts followed him closely, all having gotten over the quiet shock of just how much power Orange—no, The Second Coming—had.
“So did anyone know they could do that?” Yellow asked, slightly dazed. Everyone shook their heads, still floating behind Orange.
The group watched in intrigue as they hovered a hand over the desktop, causing it to emit the same lime green glow they had used to kill The Dark Lord. None of them knew what they were intending and Yellow leaned over their shoulder invisibly to see if she could tell what was going on.
“Some kind of reconstruction?” She murmured as she watched numbers and letters fly across the screen in rows impossibly fast, all blurring together into that green color. “It’s too quick to tell.”
“oH!” Blue shrieked from where she was watching what The Chosen One was doing. “Guys, Guys!” She floated backward a little, and Green, Red, and Yellow moved forward to where she was pointing.
Down on the divot of the cliff, where all of them had died, the impossible happened. Lime particles all collected and quickly Yellow, Blue, Green and then Red were standing there again, checking themselves over for the injuries that killed them.
Except Yellow, Blue, Green and Red were still ghosts. Orange passed out and all hell broke loose.
“What the fuck!” Green yelled, and floated down to where the “revived” versions of themselves were, followed closely by Red. Blue slowly watched over Orange, as if expecting them to become a ghost alongside all of them. Yellow was trying to catch the last of the bits of code that had stopped glowing from the desktop screen, slightly grabbing at the edges of it even though her hands passed through it.
Alan’s cursor appeared over the window in the lab. Blue weakly waved at him, hoping to catch his attention. Maybe he could see them, Alan did see more than the rest of them sometimes. She felt her throat bob a little when Alan moved right past her, not even acknowledging her with a micromovement. He picked up Orange and Blue slightly reached for them, unconscious as Alan carefully brought them back down to the fake versions of the ghosts.
Blue felt Yellow place her hand on her shoulder and the two of them looked at each other. Yellow’s eyes held something in them that said she knew what had happened, and Blue was forming her own quiet understanding.
“Let’s go find the others,” Yellow murmured, and they floated down after Alan and Orange.
Red and Green were trying to catch the attention of every single “living” individual there. All of them were hugging each other, similarly to how they had greeted each other into ghosthood. Green had tried to see if The Chosen One could even see them. He couldn’t.
Blue and Yellow rejoined them. Green went right over to Yellow.
“What happened? Did you find out what happened?”
Before Yellow could open her mouth to answer, Orange woke up, drawing the attention of both sets of the Color Gang. They seemed surprised to the fact they were alive.
“You’re—But I saw you as—You’re here—You’re alive! How?”
“No, we’re not!” The translucent Red responded while the living one reassured Orange they were fine. “That’s not us! You’ve got to know that!”
Yellow piped up.
“Our code must have gotten copied somehow,” she said quietly. “In every other sense of what is going on, they are exact replicas of us just before we died. Memories and all. They didn’t revive us. They copied our code and brought it back into existence. And they don’t even know it.”
“But that’s not us!” Red argued back. “Surely they can tell the difference! We’re still dead!”
“That’s just the thing,” Yellow responded, her voice slightly detached but calm. “The only difference between us and them is that we’re dead and they’re alive. Everything else is exactly the same.”
Orange was hugging the physical versions of the Color Gang, and none of them were fully watching, all keeping an eye on what was happening out of the corners of their eyes. They were probably talking about getting back to the PC or something.
“There has to be a difference though,” Green said, almost asking Yellow to come up with a difference out of thin air. “There has to be. It’s not fair! Why does a fake get to live and we don’t! We’re the ones who fought The Dark Lord, not them!”
“They think they did though,” Blue said quietly. “Those copies—clones of us. They think they did. They remember fighting and dying, not-Red was checking on where you, Red, got stabbed. They just don’t remember being dead. They went through it too, just in their memories.”
“Whose side are you on?” Green accused and Blue looked away.
“I’m not saying I’m happy about it,” she whispered and turned her face away while fighting off tears. All of them were, well, not really Yellow, but no one doubted she was also experiencing the implications of all of this.
“Well, it sounds like you’re on their side!"
“I’m not!” Blue snapped back. “I’m just stating what is happening! Don’t get mad at me for telling the truth!”
“Stop fighting!” Red yelled. “We can’t be—just stop!”
Blue and Green did stop and murmured quiet apologies to each other and Red.
They directed a bit of attention to where Chosen was bowing to Orange, probably as a result of the display of power. Orange was just giving him a confused look and exchanged it among The Livings while shrugging in confusion.
“They don't remember,” Yellow said. “They don’t know about their powers.”
“Let’s just follow them. Maybe there’s something we can do! Maybe there’s a way to contact them and tell them!” Red said.
Blue looked down and glanced at Yellow with a silent communication of knowing there would likely be no way to tell them, or even that there was a point. Green was more encouraging with Red.
“You okay, Yellow? You haven't really reacted much,” Blue asked.
“...It is what it is,” she said, her voice tight with restrained frustration. “I just want to make sense of it.”
They were all at different places with this, but all of them wanted to linger around Orange. Just because they were dead and replaced, that didn’t mean they had to abandon their connection to their friend.
And who knew what would happen next?