Chapter Text
Golden hour - sun twenty degrees above the western horizon
She falls from the heavens, calmly at first and then with growing panic as she realizes that she doesn't have her wands, doesn't have her sylladex, doesn't have anything. She screams and screams and screams and her voice is swallowed by the wind howling in her ears as the ground jumps up to meet her, and then she hits, and the sand leaps in the air and leaves a crater in her wake.
Easterly wind - 12mph
He wakes up aching all over and knowing that he shouldn't be alive. He can't stand; can't even move, and his face is pressed to something soft and gritty that shifts when he breathes. He can see sand packed against the splintered panes of his glasses and nothing else, save for a tiny sliver of brightness out of the corner of one eye. He's lying broken and bloody facedown in an impact crater, and he thinks maybe he's going to die here, flung at last back to his own desolate planet by a scratch gone horribly wrong.
Latitude: N 0°*57'*20.7576" Longitude: W 174°*45'*34.2756"
She doesn't know how long it's been, but finally she's able to stand. It's pitch black out save for the stars, winking and shimmering far, far above her, and she stumbles blindly through the darkness, her knees shaking and her hands outstretched, calling out into the night.
"Bec! Bec, I can't see anything, I don't know where I am! Bec, please be here, please have come with me, please, please, please..."
At last her hands brush up against stone, and when she looks up the Frog Temple is silhouetted blackly against the sky and she knows she's home. Except it isn't home, not really, because as she curls up with her back to the temple and hugs her knees and whispers Bec's name over and over again, her eyes adjust to the faint starlight. There is no island, and no towering house, and no ocean. Only sand, stretching out endlessly in wavy dunes to the distant horizon.
She wonders if she should cry, but then decides that Bec and Grandpa wouldn't stand for that. She's smarter than that, and stronger, and she's got a stash of food and weaponry hidden away in the Frog Temple from when she accidentally dumped her sylladex out, four hundred years ago. She'll survive.
4:13 pm - US Central time
And survive he does, as he traverses the skeletal remains of what he assumes was once Houston, although time and weather have scoured it and made the once familiar streets strangely alien. At first he can only think about water, need water, have to find water, gonna die without water. The sun beats down on him and his lips are cracked and bleeding.
He finds a soda machine in the remains of a hotel lobby, and he tears into it with weak arms and a steel pipe salvaged from a pile of wreckage. The plastic advertisement on the front cracks and the rusted metal easily gives way, and he reaches inside and pulls out can after can. But they've been here for four hundred years, their insides crystalized and syrupy and sticky, and they only worsen his thirst.
He lies in front of the machine for a while, licking blood off his lips and feeling sorry for himself. Writes "dave was here" on the floor in his own blood. (Why not? He was.)
He realizes by looking at the shards of plastic on the ground that the machine also dispenses bottled water, and so he pulls himself upright dizzily and reaches inside again, and this time he gropes until he can feel the smooth ridges of a plastic bottle. It's stagnant and disgusting and he'll probably get sick from it later, but he doesn't care because to him it's heaven.
Gloaming - just before moonrise
She's gone several nights now without a shelter, and she's learned that the heat of the desert vanishes at night, to be replaced by an icy, chilling cold deep enough to kill her in her sleep if she isn't careful. She spends hours every day traversing the dunes in search of building materials: chunks of concrete and slabs of brushed metal propelled from Skaianet Laboratories after the meteor impact. She drags them away as best she can. They cut up her hands and make her arms and legs burn from the effort, but she's getting stronger (admiring her arms, the way she can see the muscles moving beneath the sunburnt skin), adapting to a world where she can't make things happen by magic.
At last she's made herself a hovel, and dug away at the sand inside so that she has a hollow to curl up in comfortably and fall asleep. It keeps some of the chill away, especially when she stops up the cracks and corners with bits of cloth torn from her own ragged dress, and by day the sun strikes the metal and heats her little shelter like an oven. She's oddly proud of the small, ugly thing, that she thought to make it and that she did so with her own hands.
She makes another, smaller structure, and it's easier because she's gotten stronger in building the first. She stockpiles food and supplies: the Skaianet building seemed to have been full to the brim of non-perishables, canteens of water, strange, edible pastes in toothpaste tubes. All she has to do is search. It won't last her forever, but it might last her long enough. (She wishes there were books; oh, if any thing could survive the apocalypse, why couldn't it have been a novel.)
Truthfully, she's working not only to stay alive, but to keep herself from thinking. She worries about what happened to the others; if the scratch killed them or deposited them somewhere else on this desolate world, or even worse, worked perfectly, and the only one missing was her.
Southeasterly wind - 14mph
If they're here, he's determined to find them. He recognizes his old neighborhood, the concrete foundations where once there were pristine suburban houses, the smooth depression in the sand that used to be Pipe Lake. He even finds, of all things, one of his dad's ceramic harlequins lying in shards in the sand. And if he's wound up back at his own front door, maybe they're at the craters where their own respective houses used to be.
He knows the addresses, and so he draws himself a crude map of the world. (Crappy, sorry, he writes to himself, and gets a laugh out of it and knows Rose would too.) He'll go after Dave first; he's closest, and then the two of them will find Rose and the three of them will find Jade. He marks Rose's waterfall, Dave's city, Jade's island, and draws arrows and tries to get his bearings from the sun so he can commit the directions to memory. (You'll forget, you know you'll forget. You'll mess up somehow. This whole idea is stupid.)
In the early evening, when the sun is low in the sky and the air is finally beginning to cool, a light breeze blowing around his shoulders, he sits on the cracked cement front porch of a house that's no longer there, eating powdered cake mix out of a foil-and-paper package. He points again and again to the horizon, telling himself repetitively: Rose's house, Dave's house, Jade's house...
He packs in preparation, loading himself down with as much food and water as he can carry, scrounged from the deserted neighborhood. (This is stupid. You'll get lost.) He's long ago made himself a sleeping bag, having found what might have been a plastic tarp and folding it on its side to tie the corners together. He wraps everything in it and laments that he's not strong enough to carry more, but he can scrounge for supplies on the way.
A few days later his sand-shrouded neighborhood is empty, and he's a hundred miles away, trudging exhaustedly along and leaving a wide trail in the sand as he drags his tarp behind him.
(This is stupid.)
Latitude: N 0°*57'*20.7576" Longitude: W 174°*45'*34.2756"
No one is coming for her. She lives too far away, and even if one of her friends did come looking, there would be no way to cross the barren ocean-turned desert between them. She doesn't blame them for it. She understands why it has to be this way, and she hopes they at least find each other.
One day she checks her supplies, and the last of the water is gone.
At last she goes out searching, although she's not sure what she expects to find, until the Temple is nothing more than a distant speck on the horizon. She's always careful to keep it in sight, so that she can find her way back. She travels at night and returns to the Temple by day. It's better than the heat of the day, and she keeps moving to stay warm.
She keeps looking, setting out in directions at random, and as one day and then another passes by, dehydration begins to take hold, and her vision won't focus and her head is pounding and her legs won't move the way she wants them to.
She finds herself lying in the sand and staring at the stars, and she can't remember how she got there. There is a little green lizard on her nose.
It makes her giddily happy, even through the thirst and the headache, to think that something so tiny and green and shimmery can exist in an empty world, and she lets it skitter up and down her arms. It's only after lying there for several minutes while it runs playfully up and down her body that it occurs to her: lizards need water too.
She gets to her knees (the sand is coarse and prickly even through her skirt, and the lizard is climbing happily through her hair) and rakes her fingers through the sand, digging up great handfuls of it in a doglike motion until finally she touches dampness.
The ocean is still there.
It's gritty and tasteless, salt filtered away by sand, and she drinks to her heart's content and fills herself with lovely and wonderful water.
She names the lizard Dave, for no reason she can think of, and takes it home with her.
12:15 pm - US Central time
Food and water will never be a problem; he knows that now. The city is his, and he saunters through the streets, followed by a million reflections in the dusty, broken windows. He tells himself it's great. He can do what he wants, go where he wants. He uses his pipe to smash up a few twisted streetsigns, and he scratches his name on every wall, just because he can. He finds which buildings are stable, and he makes a game out of seeing how high he can climb before the stairs or fire escapes crumble beneath him. He breaks into a jewelry store and dresses like a king for a day. He's the ruler of a broken world.
There are still cars in the streets, most broken down, twisted and smashed and turned on their sides, and all buried almost to their roofs by sand. But after a few weeks he finds a parking garage. It's whole and full of untouched vehicles, and for a while he simply stands and stares around at them all, unsure of what to do with them.
He's going to drive to Jade's. He knows it's a stupid thought, and she's a million miles away and there aren't any roads or gas stations and he doesn't even know which direction to go, but suddenly he doesn't care. He's going to go pick up Jade and drive her back to his city, and the two of them will dress like kings and queens and climb on the crumbling ruins and carve their names in everything, side by side, his sharp lettering next to her flowery curlycues.
He picks a red car. It's locked, but he just breaks a window. He thinks he knows how to hotwire it; he's seen plenty of movies. He tears out the wires and electrocutes his fingers painfully, but there's a mechanical roar and the dashboard light flickers to life. His heart pounds in his throat. (I'm doing this, man. I'm making this happen!) He works the headlights and the windshield wipers with a wide grin, and then he puts it in reverse and floors it.
The engine dies.
He's never realized gasoline was perishable. But it is, and it doesn't last for four hundred years. He has an entire parking garage full of cars, and nothing in their tanks but rust and dead weight.
The horn blares as he slams his hands against it, shouting, "No, no, no! It was working! I was going to go get her!" Shouting doesn't bring the car back to life, and so he climbs out and takes his pipe to it, and then the rest of them. There is an odd wash of catharsis as the cars buckle and the windshields smash under his strikes, and he feels better afterwards. It was a stupid idea anyway.
Her signature starts to appear next to his regardless, in imperfectly copied, flowery handwriting. He can't be sure if he's the one writing it, or if he's just seeing it there when it's not, or if some ghost is haunting him and following him around, writing her name everywhere. jade harley!!! jade harley!!! dave and jade were here!!
High noon - shadows nonexistent
The shelter is deserted and falling apart, the food gone, the site of the laboratory vacant. She's miles away by now, somewhere in what might have been Pennsylvania, if state boundaries still exist. She can't take it anymore, she can't be alone. She has to know.
For more than a month she's been walking, following the sun as it sets, knowing that if she just keeps going west she'll find John's house. She has an atlas. She found it in a little town along the way, spared by the meteors if not by the desert, and while the roads it marks are long since buried, the towns and cities are not. She navigates by them as best she can, and she's constantly checking her map. (Have to keep calm, have to do this logically, can't afford to stop, can't afford to think.)
She can build a shelter in half a day now, and two days ago she killed a snake by stomping on its head, and then she ate it. Some part of her is aware of how eerily well she adapts. If one of them was going to seek the others out, it might as well be her. She's hardened out here, and the desert isn't much of a challenge anymore.
In the remains of Pittsburgh she finds an alchemiter. It sits on the edge of a crater, just outside the blast radius. The last dreg of some failed session, some kid who didn't get into the Medium quite fast enough. Her first thought is to see if it works, perhaps create something more efficient for travel than her own two feet, but she has no cruxite and no sylladex, and so almost immediately she gives up on the idea and instead just sits on the platform to rest her feet.
It could have been John. (Could have been any of us.) If they'd been just a second slower, this could have been his alchemiter and his crater. Her cheeks are wet, but suddenly she finds herself laughing, because the very fact that she's sitting here means that she's alive, John's alive, Dave and Jade are alive, and it doesn't matter where they are or whether or not they're together, because things could be so much worse. And they aren't. And she's alive.
Easterly wind - 26mph
He's lost. (Stupid stupid dumb idiot stupid stupid.) He's gotten turned around somehow, and he doesn't know how far he's gone or if he's even going in the right direction anymore, and he's almost out of supplies and he hasn't seen a city in weeks, and for all he knows he's a million miles from everywhere.
He hurt his leg somehow. He thinks he pulled a muscle, because it's painful to walk, and his limp is slowing him down and making him go in vast circles. He won't give up. He has to keep going to find more food, more water. Rose's house is due east, Dave's southeast, but he can't seem to remember which direction that is anymore, and so now he's just walking randomly. Pointing vaguely in this direction and that, not sure anymore, his arm wavering to the left and to the right. Rose's house, Dave's house, Jade's house...
He keeps the wind at his back because it seems like the right thing to do, and it helps a little, cooling him off and pushing him forward. It's scorching hot and he wishes he could travel by night, but he relies too heavily on the sun for navigation, and so he trudges on, sunburned and so heavily drenched with sweat that it's fogging up his cracked glasses. He isn't going to give up. No matter how far he has to go or how many mistakes he makes or how much it hurts, he can't give up.
He wants to give up. (Stupid boy. Made a stupid mistake and they were waiting for you to find them and now you never will. Stupid stupid stupid.)
The sun beats down, and he stops at last. (His leg burns, it burns so badly.)
(Stupid boy. Stupid failure, stupid wanna-be hero. Give up.)
He glares up at the sunbleached sky and shouts rawly, "Hey! I know I'm supposed to give up! I know I'm supposed to just curl up and die! But I won't!"
A step, and then another, and then he's walking again. "Did the Messiah crew give up when all the nukes on earth couldn't stop the Wolf-Biederman comet? Did Cameron Poe give up when Cyrus 'The Virus' held a gun to the bunny's head?"
(Stupid boy. Stupid stupid stupid. They'll all die because you couldn't find them.)
Even through the heat and the pain, a grin is spreading across his face. "Did Brian Arthur Stevenson give up when Eric was taken to the monster world? Did the Ghostbusters give up when Gozer was gonna destroy New York?"
(Stupid boy. They'll all die. They're probably already dead.)
"DID PROBLEM SLEUTH GIVE UP WHEN DEMONHEAD MOBSTER KINGPIN GREW A MILLION HEALTH METERS??"
(Stupid boy.)
"NO HE DID NOT!" He punches the air and the sand whips around him the wind. "And I won't either!"
(Stupid bo-)
"SHUT UP."
He's lost, but he keeps on walking, and he doesn't know where he's going or what he'll find, but he knows he can't give up. He is the crew of the Messiah, he is Cameron Poe, he is Brian Arthur Stevenson and the Ghostbusters and Problem Sleuth, and he doesn't give up. Not ever.
A few days later the wind shifts, and he finds the buried remains of train tracks.
Latitude: N 0°*57'*20.7576" Longitude: W 174°*45'*34.2756"
Something is wrong with lizard-Dave. He lies still all day, and hardly moves when she prods him. She tries to feed him some fruit from her little cache, but he isn't interested and turns his tiny head away.
"Come on, Dave," she insists, moving the apple slice so that it's in front of him again. "Stop trying to act so cool. Lizards eat fruit, don't they?" She doesn't know if they do or not. She tries feeding him other things, to no avail.
"Dave, please eat something." She picks him up and puts him on her shoulder, but he doesn't skitter around or play in her hair. He just lies there, the scaly skin of his throat moving rapidly in time with his breathing. "Are you... sick? Maybe you have a fever." A finger is pressed to the little lizard's forehead, but his skin is pleasantly cool to the touch.
After a long while, she puts him on the temple floor again and stares at him worriedly. "Dave, don't... don't die on me, okay? Don't leave me alone."
8:41 am - US Central time
He thinks maybe he's losing his mind.
"Stop it!" he shouts at the city, and his own voice rebounds back, echoing off the hollow buildings. "Stop it, Jade! I tried! I wanted to come and get you, and I couldn't! I don't know how!"
Dizziness envelops him for a second, and he doesn't know if it's the sun or something he ate or just his own insanity taking hold. He doesn't want to find out.
He is the king of a city full of crazy. It's scrawled across the walls, scraped into the decaying mortar by his bleeding fingernails. jade was here!! jade harley!!! daveandjadeanddaveandjade forever!!!
Twilight - belt of venus on the horizon
In an abandoned apartment building somewhere in Indianapolis, she curls up under a ragged blanket and peers through the gloom at her map as she settles down for the night. It's been an eternity since she began, and still she has more than half the continent to traverse.
She's tired and lonely, and her cheeks are wet again. She misses John and Dave and Jade, and she doesn't know anymore whether she wants to find them, or whether she wishes they were still safe and sound in the Medium. She's not sure they'd want her back if they saw her.
She's going wild; she can see it in the shards of windows that catch her reflection as she walks by. Her hair is getting long. It goes past her shoulders now, and it's a ragged uncombed mess. Her clothing is shredded. She has scars and callouses on her hands, and her skin is sundark and her muscles are too defined for someone her age. Maybe she's good at surviving, but she looks like an animal.
While staring at the map, invisible now to her in the quickly deepening darkness, she runs her hands through her hair and tries to tear away the knots. She isn't an animal. She's a human being.
If the human race even exists anymore. If she isn't alone.
Southerly wind - 31mph
He limps along between the rails of the massive open-air station, staring around at the huge metal drums of the cargo-carrying railroad-cars. Electric locomotives, without power, deisel locomotives, their fuel stagnant and useless... He knows without trying that none of them will run.
But he finds it at last, at the back of the station. An old steam-powered engine, sitting on a roped-off section of the tracks, kept as a historical curiosity. It's even got a car full of coal hitched to the back of it to complete the scene. He climbs up eagerly (wincing as his leg protests) and sees the myriad of black-painted iron levers and the door to the furnace and there, just up top, the valve for the boiler.
(Don't be stupid. You'll never get it to run.) He doesn't know how, but he plans to try. He'll fill the boiler with water; he'll fill the furnace with flame, he'll move the levers and find out what they do and learn the ins and outs of this thing until it moves and breathes steam into the wind. He's sure Jade would be able to do it. And he can do it too. He has all the time in the world.
Latitude: N 0°*57'*20.7576" Longitude: W 174°*45'*34.2756"
She holds a funeral for lizard-Dave. It's small and simple, and all she really does is place his little, unmoving body gently on the ground around the spot where she found him, and scoop sand over him until he's hidden.
He needs a tombstone, she thinks, and so she marks the spot with one of her shoes. She'll regret it later, but for now she doesn't care. She can give up a shoe for Dave. He's her best friend, she'll give up anything for him.
"We gather here today," she says to the empty space, and the flat desert of an ocean and the dark, star-strewn sky, and the shoe, "to mourn the loss of Dave Strider, who was a lizard. He was a good lizard, and he liked to climb on things and lie in the sun, and he died because he wouldn't eat an apple."
She wipes her eyes. "He was my best friend. He was really cool, the coolest lizard I know, and he drew the best pictures and made really funny comics, and when we played Sburb together he was a really great fighter and he saved my life when I died..."
She sits down in the sand and wraps her arms around her knees, eyes watering.
"...and I couldn't save his. I let him die because I didn't even know what to feed him."
The desert night is silent and still, drinking in her voice like it drank away the ocean.
"I'm sorry, Dave."
8:00 am - US Central time
It's odd. He's too hot even in the shade, and he can't manage to lift his pipe anymore and he sways when he walks and his vision swims. He stumbles aimlessly between the buildings, and he can see her name and hear her voice laughing from just around every corner. He's not sure when he stopped turning those corners to look for her, but he knows she isn't there. What would he do if she was? Hug her or smack her for torturing him like this, one or the other. His hands are bleeding. Jade's name is scrawled in blood across everything. Did he do that? Can't remember. Head hurts. Too hot.
Maybe all these months of eating questionable food and water are finally catching up to him. Maybe he's dying. He doesn't care.
In the distance he can hear rumbling, and when he looks up at the sky between the skeletal skyscrapers he can see what look like clouds swirling and curling up from the horizon, but they waver and fade in and out of focus, so maybe he's imagining that too.
He's dizzy, so dizzy, and he's hot, and he can't see straight and he just wants Jade to stop laughing because he can't come find her right now. In a few minutes, perhaps, he'll start rounding corners to look for her again, but right now he just needs to lie down in the middle of the road and... and close his eyes for a second...