Chapter Text
The sun here is awfully bright for an underground chamber.
Squiddo raises a hand to block the light from her eyes as she slowly opens them, blinking and stretching like she's been sleeping for a year. Above her is not the dim, sallow light drifting down from the sky into the cavity she helped carve into the earth, and below her is neither cold stone nor the bed she'd certainly die in just a few moments after waking up.
She's not in the guts of a death machine. She's not even underground. She's on a beach.
Her body aches but she feels no immediate injuries. Her core muscles protest as she sits up, as does her neck when she tries to look around. She's not sure if it's stiffness from lying here for so long, however long that may be, or something else.
Something worse.
It's a strange little place. There's no one around and the air settles in such a way that feels no one has been for quite some time, yet some distance away a tower rises high into the air, decorated with an enormous letter R. It's hard to tell from here, but it doesn't seem decrepit enough to imply it's unpopulated. But R for who? Red? Or Roshambo? When would either of them have had time to build such a big building?
Squiddo rubs her forehead, trying to recall any semblance of how she got here. The strike cannon was a failure, and Wemmbu was dead, and oh, of course. Ashswag was coming any moment to execute her, to take her last four pitiful lives away and sentence her to her rightful place in purgatory.
Just moments before, or maybe hours, or days, or weeks, just before Ashswag could spot her spending the rest of her short, pitiful life cowering in the broken getaway chamber, the entire construct had started rumbling. She supposes one final apocalyptic explosion must have ripped through the orbital strike cannon, and…
Then what?
Her skin bears no burn scars, and her bones are not broken. Her glasses and clothes show no signs of wear. There are still four heart-shaped pins on the hem of her jacket, so she hasn't suffered another death for her transgressions, nor for her engineering failures.
But Ash isn't here.
Ignoring the screaming pain in her muscles and joints, she scoots closer to the small waves lapping at the empty beach. She isn't even dirty, save for the sand piling in her shoes and clinging to the back of her sweater, not a fleck of gunpowder to be seen. Nonetheless Squiddo removes her glasses to wipe them on her sleeve, as if to make sure she's not seeing things, that she's really here.
It doesn't make sense. There's no island she knows of, at least not one anywhere near any place she's familiar with. Is it possible the explosion knocked her so far she's found herself in a completely new climate and terrain? But then how could she have kept all four of her lives?
When she pushes her glasses back up her nose, they brush against her left eye.
What? Squiddo crawls just a bit closer to the water, taking a hesitant peek at her reflection. Small, golden-yellow flowers sprout from the gouge where her eye belongs, hindered only by the glass in front of them. X-shaped petals fill the space within each bloom's circular structure and sprinkle what appears to be flakes of gold or even stardust down onto her cheek, like some sort of otherworldly divine pollen.
She must be dreaming. It's the only explanation. She's been knocked out by the explosion, and she's dreaming. This cannot be purgatory, can it? Maybe no one remembers their final death, but surely she would if it was Ashswag taking it from her. Almost like a crab she crawls backwards away from the water; she doesn't want to look at it anymore. Some sort of floral parasite taking over her body, divine retribution for all the suffering she caused.
Sand puffs up around her as she flops onto her back and runs her hands through her hair. She doesn't want to put it into words, she doesn't want to admit it to herself, but Ashswag was no further from the machine than she was when it started to fail. And he isn't here, and she doesn't know where here is anyway.
She takes her glasses off a second time and starts to cry for the man who was going to kill her.
Though she was sure it was all she wanted, she can't find it in herself to be grateful to be alive. There's nothing here for her on this bizarre island. 4Cvit would know what to do, but she doesn't have to check the area to know he's not here. Nobody is. She's alone, just as she was always supposed to be, and everything she worked for is not only destroyed but completely out of her reach as well.
Just to check, she attempts to pull one of her four measly little pins off the edge of her sweater, just as she did all the way back when she was sure Ash would have her, at least as a friend. A little bit of herself just for him, a gift to send him off to a wedding that wasn't hers.
It doesn't come off.
She pulls and pulls, tears welling in her eyes again, cursing and scraping her fingers on the pointed bottom of it, but it doesn't fucking come off. She can't change her life force anymore. She's trapped, and alone, and in pain, and maybe infected with a parasite, and with less than half of the strength she could have possessed if she had just been a little better, a little faster, a little less stupid.
She thrashes her body against the sand beneath her as though it will change a single thing. Once she can't take the pain anymore she curls up and crushes her face in her hands, tugging at the flowers growing from her face with one hand and smearing tears and wet sand across her cheeks with the other. For the first time ever she unequivocally wishes she were dead.
She doesn't care at all how much time she wastes here, but by the time Squiddo is done crying the sun has begun to set. Purple and orange streaks cross the sky above her. What a joke, a real comedian, this universe is.
Squiddo lies back and closes her eyes, or rather, her singular eye. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to die here, slowly deteriorating after days of not eating.
Her aching body tenses as something cold and rather pointy presses against her chest. Her eye flicks open, and this time she doesn't have to squint to see the shape of a man standing over her, slightly blurry through her tears, holding his long sword in such a way that she assumes means he intends to threaten her.
She opens her mouth to tell him to get it over with, but pauses when she recognizes that face, that curly black and purple hair, that warm brown skin, that face, that face, that face.
"Ash! You're here!"
Squiddo sniffs, stares up in disbelief, tries to smile. He's going to kill her. He's going to kill her, but she's alright with that if it's him, she's okay with it if it means she sees something familiar before she dies. She's just fine with it if it means he gets to live another day.
The man's face contorts in a confused frown. "Who are you?"
"It's me. It's, it's Squiddo." Her face falls. "Ash—"
The edge of the sword digs into her chest.
"I don't know anyone by that name."