Chapter Text
Gem slowly sipped a cup of dandelion tea that Sausage had made. It wasn’t great, but it was warm and that was something. Sausage and Jimmy had a small house near the border between their empires, and small as it was, it was bigger than most of the other homes that surrounded them. fWhip was talking with Sausage, and they were going back and forth, catching up over lost time.
Lost time indeed, Gem mused to herself. She and fWhip had been gone for six days, and nine months had passed in the Empires.
In that nine months, the remaining citizens had formed a new Empire, the people of Yarrow, they called themselves. They’d buried their dead and built new homes, new families, even.
There was no longer fresh water anywhere near this new Empire called Yarrow, but a flower from what used to be House Blossom, and it provided endless clean, drinkable water. However, the lands that surrounded it continued to burn fiercely, with fires that refused to be put out. It was inhospitable to any life, but that odd, magical flower, so every two weeks there would be expeditions to the flower, where they would milk the flower for as much water as two caravans could carry, then they would head back.
The fastest way to House Blossom, through the Gilded Hylenthia, was not an option. Everything built had withered to the ground, turning dark and fragile and crumbling to dust, and the ground was dry. Anyone who entered would emerge out with parts of the wither marked on their flesh, and they would soon fall ill.
So they would travel through the desert, a longer, and more exposed route.
Due to some unusual luck, the ground where the swamp had once been was incredibly fertile, and the perfect land to grow food.
“We haven’t had much meat,” Sausage had explained. “It takes up so much more space, and requires so much more wheat.”
Nine months had passed.
The second explosion that fWhip was anticipating wasn’t exactly an explosion.
“You had told me to run, you said it would happen again, that everyone needed to leave, but I wasn’t fast enough,” Jimmy had recounted. “I tried to fix it, I thought I fixed it, I’d taken the fish out and washed the systems with water.”
It worked, in a way. There was no explosion that killed everyone. Instead, there was the Cloud. It was orange, and large, and it killed most of the people of the Grimlands, the Crystal Cliffs, and some of Rivendell, their lungs weakened from the smoke that had hovered over the Empires, the Cloud was a toxic gas that caused the weakened lungs to expand, sometimes so much that it broke ribs and tore muscles in the way. They all suffocated.
They’d been dead for nine months.
To Gem, the horrifying part wasn’t that the people had died. Her people, her people had died. The horrifying part wasn’t the death, no, it was that there were still survivors left to grieve. It would have been so much easier if it was only her and fWhip left to know the weight of the end of the world, but instead, there were a hundred or so people left to feel the fall out.
Everyone had lost someone. It wasn’t an exaggeration, everyone had lost someone who was their everything, and if they were lucky, they only lost one everything. Few were so lucky, if that could even be said.
Did the lucky ones die in the Cloud? Surely not, suffocating on your own lungs is not a pleasant way to go, surrounded by others, dying the same.
Did the lucky ones die in the first wave? With the smoke and the rubble and the disaster’s bared teeth growling as it awakened from its depths? Gem doubted it.
No one was better off, Gem came to the conclusion, dead or alive, there was only brutal desperation left over from it all.
Time may heal, but there wasn’t much healing to be done when what you need is cauterizing, though Gem figured that enough flames had burned here, if even the fires in House Blossom were yet to extinguish.
The conversation, mostly between fWhip and Sausage, reached a pause, and Jimmy spoke up, looking pointedly at Gem. “You’ve been awfully quiet, Gem.”
“Yes, I suppose I have.” Gem nodded politely, unsure at what he was getting at.
“You usually have opinions on this sort of thing,” Jimmy started, swishing his tea around in his cup. It was mostly empty. “Nothing on your mind?”
“We missed nine months in six days, Jimmy,” Gem drawled. “It’s a bit to process.”
“Do you think this means the others will come back?” Sausage asked, mostly to Jimmy. “Katherine, Pix, Shrub, they could come back, missing time, just like Gem and fWhip.”
“Shrub probably went to find her people,” fWhip sighed. “I don’t know if she’s coming back without answers. And Pix? Well… you know how he is. Guilt complex and all.”
“Katherine’s a wild card,” Sausage mused, pouring some more tea for himself and Jimmy. “She always has been.”
“She’s never faced loss like this before,” Gem’s eyes were at the floor, staring at her shoes, a muddy brown color staring back at her, instead of her usual, purple flats, she was wearing a pair of work boots that Katherine had let her borrow when she taught a class at Gem’s academy. Gem had never returned them. “Who knows how she’s handling this?”
“I wish Lizzie was here,” Jimmy muttered, fidgeting with his hands. “She would be so much better at all of this.”
fWhip and Gem looked at each other. Neither of them could imagine life with the other gone, and Jimmy was going through their worst nightmare right in front of them.
“She was a freak, but she knew how to focus, and how to make things right,” Jimmy continued, glassy eyed, and looking at the wall like there was something behind it that he couldn’t quite see. “I wonder what she’d do, if she was here.”
Sausage put an arm around Jimmy, pulling him close. “She’d tell you that she was proud, and that you were doing everything you could. She’d say you’re doing pretty good for being the small egg, and that you’re doing your best, and she’s so proud.”
Jimmy leaned into Sausage, breathing out. “I hope so.”
“We couldn’t find her after the Ocean left,” Sausage explained. “We never found a body either but…”
“I can’t feel her,” Jimmy said quietly, not yet pulling away from Sausage. “She’s not… I can’t feel her. It’s like she’s detached from me. She’s dead, she must be.”
“I’m so sorry, Jimmy.” Gem’s voice was soft. Her hands found her pants, corduroy and comfortable, she had borrowed them from fWhip, and she squeezed the soft material in her fists. “I can’t imagine.”
“Joel’s gone, too,” Jimmy continued. “We found him in front of his broken palace. At first we thought the Cloud got him, but there was no damage to his lungs or chest. It looks like he had a heart attack, or something.”
“His people are… gone, too,” Sausage added, matching Jimmy’s quiet tone. “It’s like they’re all frozen, their bodies still stiff and lifeless, stuck in the middle of whatever they were doing last.”
“Like statues?” fWhip asked, leaning forward and setting his tea down on the small wooden table.
“Yeah, like statues,” Jimmy agreed, humming softly. “Like their soul has been sucked straight out of them, leaving their fragile husks behind.”
“What about Scott?” Gem questioned, wondering if there was anyone that Jimmy loved who was still alive. She took a sip of her tea, still warm, and still not great. “Why isn’t he here?”
Jimmy sighed and he stood and drank the rest of his tea in one swallow, before extending a hand to Gem. “Do you still have your wings? It’s probably better to show you.”