Enby they/he 20s - A weirdo dragon. Main blog. I write and draw sometimes. - Multifandom. Currently: TADC, Murderbot, In Stars and Time, and more. Gravity Falls/TAU always. My art and writing tag is ‘99redragons art'. Don’t feed my art to AI. No bigotry welcome. You are safe here :)
saying "question mark?" and "however comma," out loud are game changers. punctuation on the go. and it's always the funniest thing that anyone around you has ever heard
Loop 1.1: Our Energies Are Aligned//Our Infections Are Aligned
Index: (Chapter 1) / (Chapter 2) / (Archive of Our Own Link)
Note: This fic has taken over all of my mental faculties. Please read this like a dog ripping apart a squeak toy.
Second note: The chapter is long, so heed the Read More
Purple stood, hands out in a caricature of crucifixion, as Blue’s scanner roved and probed and sniffed them for the first time, a second time.
“Am I your last scan?” Purple asked. They pretended to focus on the far wall, idly and properly stiff for the scanner, but really they were watching the door.
“No. I still have Lime to scan.” And Blue did not seem all that concerned as they tacked on, “They have… made themself elusive.”
“Does that make you suspicious of Lime?” Purple asked.
Blue shook their head. “Lime has their convictions—ones which make sense to them and ones which I might yet understand. The unwise mate chooses suspicion over curiosity.”
It was a nice sentiment, Purple thought, scanner buzzing at their ears. But suspicion was the dagger held to Purple’s neck by the entire rest of the crew right now. That wasn’t just a guess. Purple had sat in security, watching on cams as crewmate after crewmate toed close to security to fetch Purple, only to think better of it, and fetch a different mate for their scan. How banal, really. How like being chosen last for the gym class dodgeball team.
It had shuffled the scan order. It had left Purple itchy, and awash. It made things less predictable.
Purple couldn’t blame anyone for their suspicion—at least not without being a hypocrite, considering the entire economy of suspicion Purple ran on the ship, the first time. That had been Purple’s role, right? Suspicion-peddler, Green’s best weapons-dealer.
Purple exhaled.
“Do you think it was ‘unwise’ of me to get Green voted out?”
The scanner rolled down Purple’s chest. Purple could picture something needle-like and atomic threading under their skin, reading their organs, their bone. Purple wondered if there was some physical stain on their cells from time-travel, and whether Blue’s machine could smell it.
The silence bristled and nipped at Purple. It made them uncomfortable, though Blue refused to feel it that way.
“I think you are also someone with convictions I might yet understand,” Blue answered.
“Yes. And those convictions are—what I need to do to keep the crew safe, this time.” Purple’s gaze left the door. They dared to meet Blue’s visor, whose expression gave away nothing of their inner thoughts.
“Then you and I share similar convictions,” Blue said.
“I’m just a little harder to understand. I get it...” Purple paused. Blue said nothing. “Would you ‘understand’ my convictions if I told you I’ve lived through this already, and that you die next?”
Blue kept the reaction off their face, endlessly professional in a way that itched under Purple’s skin. They adjusted a dial on the machine, tilt of their head-mirror catching the scanner glint and throwing the light like a stain against the far wall.
“Am I right to guess you are the origin of Cyan and Black’s warning to watch myself?”
“Yeah.”
“You suspected Green, and they’re gone now. Do you believe there is a second murderer among us?”
“Orange,” Purple said. “Green was more dangerous but… Orange is still a killer. The first time through this, they killed Lime. And Green killed the rest.”
“Including me.”
“Green ripped your face off.”
“How gruesome…” Blue commented, and there was an airy wistful lilt to their words, almost as if commenting on a poor spot of weather rolling through. The itch deepened under Purple’s skin. The weather soured in Purple’s mind too: Blue didn’t believe them. Blue was, professionally, humoring them. Of course they were. Who beside Cyan would believe anything as insane as Purple’s claims of time-looping and alien killers?
“I’m sorry you had to witness that.” Blue’s words were softer now, and sincere. “I must have been a sight. It must have been traumatic.”
“Are you getting why I had to be harsh on Green?”
Blue eased the dial to its off position. The electric hum quieted to a yawn. The scanner rings tucked themselves politely away into nothing. “You can step off the machine.”
Purple’s hands folded back down. They stepped off the machine, the grip of one hand to the scanner’s edge for stability. Their grip burned, slightly, and Purple flipped their hand palm-side up to stare at the red burgeoning callouses along their palms from the mop handle, handled too roughly, on purpose, when Purple had dutifully followed the captain’s orders to clean up White’s blood. It had made Purple angry. It had made them helpless. If Purple was not Green’s puppet, then Purple was Red’s puppet, in service of Red’s insufferable ego.
An aching pang struck sudden and wet in the center of Purple’s bone. Mourning. Mourning? No one was dead this time. No one but White, and Purple had been stretched too emotionally thin to feel any grief for White.
“Would you like to sit down?” Blue asked. Purple blinked back to their own awareness, head turning to find the doctor leaning in.
“Huh?”
“You may have subconsciously held your breath while on the scanner. It’s quite common. Any dizziness should pass quickly, if you’d like to take an open bed.”
“No,” Purple said. “You all need me back on cams. You need me watching for--” For what, exactly? The next murder? Blue’s death, witnessed from the comfort of security?
The thought curdled rotten in Purple’s gut.
“What if you came with me?” Purple asked.
“I can escort you back to security, yes.”
“What if you stayed in security with me?” Purple pressed. “I can keep you safe. I’ll have eyes on Orange from the security cameras, and if you’re with me then Orange won’t—"
At this, Blue held up their hand, apologetic. “I appreciate your concern for me. I admire your drive. But much like you, I have my own duties to the ship and the crew, and those duties are here in medbay. I owe it to everyone to get to the bottom of White’s death.”
“An alien imposter killed White. It was Green. We got them.” Purple’s volume rose. “Green and Orange got infected when the storage hull breached. Check the Ore+. There are alien eggs mixed in with them.”
“I promise I will check the Ore+, once I’ve--”
“You don’t have time,” Purple insisted, anger rising and then snuffing under a new sense of helplessness, a feeling like being awash in the ocean. “You die next.”
Blue’s expression was so gentle. “I’ve gathered as much.”
The next words wilted on Purple’s tongue. Purple stared, silent, lost for what sequence of words could make the doctor properly fear for their life.
Blue extended a hand and set it on Purple’s shoulder. “I have a compromise for you. I have scans to finish here with my machines. I have titrations that cannot leave medbay. I have experiments that cannot travel. But I will complete these as fast as I am able. Once I have the data, the printed scans, and the experimental outcomes, I will take my notes, and I will join you in security. You can guard me as you like. We will solve this together there.”
Purple felt just a bit properly dizzy again, but only because Blue had that effect on people.
“Print the scans before you do anything else,” Purple said. Purple placed a hand on top of Blue’s knuckles, feeling the combined weight on their shoulder. Blue was alive, still. Blue could be saved, still. And Orange’s scan was all Purple needed to save every remaining crewmate on this ship. “One of the scans will have no bone,” Purple elaborated. “That’s the imposter.”
…
Purple navigated back to security at a hustle just below a jog, mind abuzz, thoughts forming. They nearly knocked into Black, whose whole body and line of vision were blocked by a stack of Ore+ crates they carried. It broke Purple from their thoughts as they huffed an apology and vanished before Black even had the chance to process the intrusion.
And the longer Purple half-jogged, the more their aggravation built over Blue’s stubbornness. No wonder Blue had been so easy to kill the first time. They were the sort to throw themself on a sharpened blade if it smelled a single whiff like ‘duty to the crew.’
And stewing over stubbornness flipped a new image through Purple’s mind—Red taking the place of Blue—and that same pang of mourning jabbed its elbow into Purple’s gut. Their trot slowed. They picked apart the feeling.
[“Um… are we friends?” “How about coworkers?”]
Right.
Purple picked up the pace.
Blue’s stubbornness wasn’t like Red’s. Blue was not abandoning Purple over a perceived slight of ego. They’d join Purple in security. They’d solve the remaining imposter together—prove it was Orange together. Orange was a far less effective killer than Green. Purple had bought Blue time.
Security reared its head into view, and something else sounded out at the exact same time: a single, sonorous beep with a noise like jagged teeth and a weight that rattled the ship carved machete-like through Purple’s thoughts.
WARNING. REACTOR REACTING.
The next chirp rattled weightier, reverberated in Purple’s bone, crawled like lice on their skin. And it was disturbing not because it was happening, but because it was happening wrong. The pieces did not line up. The first time the reactor tilted critical, Blue had already been dead, and this time—
Purple had gone stiff in the hallway intersection. They stared to their right. The reactor room sat in view, dip-dying itself in a wash of red light at every progressive beep. Purple… wanted to ignore the reactor. Security was on Purple’s left, with the cameras that Purple was downright itchy to get back to—to find Orange, to trace their path, to make sure—
The reactor beeped. Purple’s skin prickled.
Who had fixed the reactor the first time…? Would they fix it now?
Purple stepped into the reactor room. The beast seemed to breathe heavily; gurgling, boiling liquid emulsified in the fine crystal tubes that rung its perimeter and crawled vertically like elongated eyes of a spider. Purple approached until they could no longer see their reflection in the glass, and Purple set a hand to the reactor meter.
The first time… the first time, Red and Green had fixed the reactor. Green was gone now, for the best. And Red was… elsewhere. Purple didn’t know. Purple couldn’t ask them for favors, not with how cold they’d left things. Purple couldn’t rely on any of the other crewmates, not this time around.
The reactor beeped. Purple’s nerves rattled with it.
Purple skimmed a hand over the controls, considering every button and pressing none of them. Did Purple know how to fix the reactor…? Could Purple focus for long enough to make any sense of the problem? The warning beep rattled their brain apart at each fresh, percussive bray. Purple’s focus was shot. This was a frustrated, alarming, new kind of reliving. Here, again, a failing mission, a critical reactor--
“Hey. Whatdya think you’re doing?!”
Purple nearly jumped out of their skin at the clatter-clang eruption of noise from the vent. They whipped around, heartrate explosive, at the sight of Lime peering up like an angered crab from its hole, wrench instead of a claw waggling offensively in Purple’s direction.
Purple’s adrenaline came down. Right. The timeline was different now. Lime was… alive. Lime was alive and not AWOL and not being hunted as a suspected killer and not exploded like an overfilled water balloon by Orange and—
Lime hopped from the vent. Roughly, with prejudice, Lime grabbed Purple and bodily rotated them away from the reactor control pad. Lime kicked open a metal panel just beneath the buttons and crouched to half-climb inside it, ripping at wires like animal entrails.
“Buncha incompetent government stooges wired this up the first time—refurbished—which is what they tell ya when they don’t want you asking questions about where the parts came from. You know anything about the Polus 87 Expedition? Course ya don’t. They disassembled the whole ship and used every part for new machines—it’s the perfect cover-up to hide a whole ship—but the 5G waves still match the signature. I feel ‘em in my bone every time I crawl in here. I’m telling you so when they silence me—”
—and Lime was… the engineer, capable of fixing the reactor, Purple thought, with something like a sigh of relief.
And—Purple’s mind jumped to the next thought like a piranha nipping at a dangled arm—Lime was a conspiracy theorist.
“Oh… Oh, oh, yeah, the uh… The Polus Expedition…” Purple answered, words fumbling. “I think the um… 5G is what I felt brainwashing me to come here and look at the reactor.”
“That’s why you gotta give yourself micro-tears in your cornea. It deflects the 5G refraction and you can look at it without falling for its hypnosis.”
“Yeah, yeah I’ll do that… later…” Purple finished, deciding it was best to not think about that one at all. “H-hey Lime that DOES remind me, I’ve heard—I dunno—a rumor, I think, that might interest you, about the Polus Expedition.”
Lime’s tinkering inside the guts of the reactor ceased. They pulled themself bodily-out, still hunched on all fours. Appraising skepticism burned in their visor as they stared Purple down. “What did you hear?”
“Something about the aliens. On the expedition.”
Lime’s visor narrowed. Sight-unseen, they stuck their wrench back in the reactor’s guts, gave one sharp rotation, and the entire beeping warning system of the reactor cooled into placid silence. The warning dial rolled back to safety. Lime pulled their hand out, visor-contact unbroken with Purple.
“What do you know about the aliens?” Lime asked.
And seeing Lime here, now, bathed in this cool blue light, reactor reflected in their visor, sent a new shiver down Purple’s bone. An overlapping image nipped at Purple’s mind, the sight of Lime gored and torn open, feet from where they currently crouched.
Suddenly, Purple second-guessed their warning to Blue about being the next to die. Blue was meant to die next, that was certain. But that had been Green’s kill, and Green was gone. Only Orange remained, and exactly one crewmate had met their demise at Orange’s hand, the first time.
“What I know, Lime, is that there are aliens out here, and MIRA knows about them, and MIRA wants to cover it up.” Purple got down on one knee, conspiratorially matching Lime’s elevation. Purple put a hand on Lime’s shoulder and looked around as if to ensure no one was listening. “They caused the disaster on the Polus Expedition, and they’ve got their roots in here with us too. What happened to White was no accident.”
Lime squinted. Lime hardly breathed, their attention undivided, boring into Purple.
“White’s death was an inside job is what you’re saying.”
“Y-yes, inside between MIRA and the aliens that can take over crewmates. It’s all because of the Ore+ and it goes… all the way to the top.”
“It always does.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been on… the message boards, about this. MIRA would silence me if they knew I was talking to you, but here’s what I need you to know, okay?” Purple dropped their voice. “Aliens hatch from eggs in the Ore+, and then they crawl inside your body and use you like a puppet. They can’t be defeated by anything except salt and being ejected out into space. Holy water does not work on them, so don’t try.”
Lime’s visor narrowed. They lifted Purple’s hand off their shoulder. “Blasphemy.”
“I-I-I know, right?! I hardly believed it myself but, the aliens—I heard—took down a mate who had a whole jug of holy water.”
“Must not’ve blessed it right. Too many hacks in the field.”
“What I’m saying is don’t try, okay? A-and I’m also saying, they got Orange, and Orange knows that you and I are the most dangerous crew, so I need you to watch yourself, okay? Don’t think you’re safe in the vents, because the aliens use those too.”
“I thought the vents were slimier than normal.”
“What’s a normal amou—YES, yes, it’s their alien residue,” Purple recovered. “Just—Do NOT let your guard down. We have to work together to take the aliens down—from the top—a-and crack this wide open to the public.”
“It’s always a harder battle than you think. The public never wants to believe you.”
“I know! Trust me, I know. But we have to fight the good fight anyway.”
“Every damn day.”
Purple nodded. Their hand hovered, and they settled on giving Lime two firm pats on the shoulder. “Good, good. Thanks for fixing the reactor. Watch yourself, Lime. Do NOT trust Orange. And I’ll… call on you, when the time is right, to bust this whole thing wide open.”
“I like the cut of your jib. But—you should know—you sound crazy. You should work on that. People don’t believe you when you sound crazy.”
“I do. I know. Thanks.”
Purple pushed themself standing, one moment spared to glance at the reactor. It had gone back to its happy, placid burbling, like a mollified petmate handed a bone. And that was a small relief. If Lime remained alive, the reactor didn’t need to be Purple’s worry.
“Oh! And, Lime, I think the doctor is looking for you? To do your scan.”
“PAH.” Lime waved Purple away with their wrench. “If the doc needs me they better be prepared to come in here and get me with their strong arms and bewitching words themself. I’m not going in easy.”
“Right, sure.”
And if Lime remained alive, Purple had a new ally they could possibly trust.
…
Their first time living this reality, Purple had gotten lackadaisical about locking security. The paranoia of a crew’s worth of deaths had thoroughly baked the thoughtlessness out of them. Now the shut-and-lock was muscle-memory, and so security was both appropriately locked and appropriately shut when Purple re-approached their own door now.
Purple fished their keycard from their pocket and offered it to the door scanner to sniff. They jammed the lock-code sequence with the other hand. The mechanism whispered a pneumatic hiss. Its doors peeled open along rusty sliders. Air, cold, spilled out.
Purple assumed their seat, new ideas and new optimism brewing in their mind. They had made enemies voting out Green, that was obvious. But Black and Cyan had taken their side. Blue was willing to trust them. Lime was willing to believe them. There was only Orange left to take down.
Red or no Red on Purple’s side… there was a way to save the crewmates who remained.
The security cams flickered on from hibernation mode—a fizzle and a catch—like a sleeping creature yawning awake and smacking its lips. Purple jabbed quickly through the different camera screens. Cockpit, Red, hands to the controls. Cafeteria, Brown and Yellow, knife teasing apart the twine wrapping a preserved cut of meat. Reactor room, Lime still, finger flicking across buttons, running diagnostics.
Purple hesitated against their own finger pressure on the ‘next’ control, brain marinading in a fresh sense of duty to Lime. The reactor room lingered on screen. Purple exhaled. It was fine. Lime was fine.
Flip. Medbay.
There was an instant and primal notion that carved through Purple’s mind. It was the sense that there was too much on screen. A much, a there, a dark which was most of the screen and nipped and tore with ice-cold teeth into the flesh of Purple’s organs, like a parasite of raw and jagged denial.
“No…” Purple whispered, wounded.
Purple kicked their chair out with enough explosive urgency to smash it to the ground. Purple’s own balance was thrown out into stumble that crashed their knee into the ground. Purple recovered with a scramble, then a full-out sprint of bruised knee and searing thoughts. They moved with the kind of inertia that had already decided to smash through anything in its path. Internally, they cursed themself out with a million warring thoughts. Distraction. Lime, the reactor, all a distraction, and Purple had fallen for it hook line and sinker.
Purple was a flash-flood, unsteerable and singularly driven and incapable of halting for the moment it would have taken to shut or lock the doors behind them. They left the camera view visible to the world in their hazardous wake, security screens projecting medbay, projecting the deep and dark and desaturated gray of a monochrome wash of bloodied floor that dominated most of the view.
And at the center of that view, what remained of Blue’s body languished. It soaked. It felt none of Purple’s urgency, unmoving, back to the camera. Blue’s face was hidden from view, but Purple had already guessed there was no face left to view on the other side of the doctor.
How long had Purple left Blue alone?The question pinwheeled through Purple’s mind, louder, faster, on treadmill as Purple picked up their own pace. Five minutes? Seven? The window of opportunity had been so slim, and yet—
And yet that didn’t matter.
Purple took the right. The next right. The next right. (Try taking 3 rights where Red said to take 10 lefts.) Purple smacked their cheeks. The realities in their mind were converging. They wanted to run to Red for help, but Red was not their friend.
Purple cleared the final corner and found medbay’s doors open, and with breath searing out of their lungs, Purple locked in on another sight they could almost see already in their mind’s eye.
It was Orange. Visor wide, trust ball fallen, toes dipped in Blue’s blood like testing the shallow end of the kiddie pool. The trust ball had rolled to bridge half the distance between Orange and the corpse, steering the faintest rivulet through Blue’s blood like disturbed concrete. Orange looked up at Purple. Purple found their own reflection in Orange’s wide wet visor. And almost, almost, believably, Orange squeaked, “I don’t know what happened.”
“You,” Purple seethed, and they could not seethe another word before the fresh beat of new footsteps swelled in echo from the hallway, approaching fast and faster. A horse-like trot: two crewmates. Purple twisted without letting Orange leave their sight. Emerging from the cut of darkness in the hallway, Cyan and Black unfolded into view.
Purple jammed a pointed finger to Orange, and the strain nearly shook Purple’s voice as they declared, “Orange killed Blue!”
Cyan’s attention dipped low, as did Black’s, both momentarily fixated on the spreading wash of the doctor’s blood lapping outward across the medbay floor.
“Oh man,” Black muttered, which Purple hardly heard at all over Cyan’s scream.
…
Their first day on the Skeld, Purple had been pulled in for their first and only non-emergency meeting.
It had happened with the same sort of process and mechanism and subterfuge that it took to coax a suspicious and well-clawed catmate into its carrier for a vet visit, which taught Purple a lot about how they appeared to the crew, and a lot about how Orange viewed them. Because it had been Orange, come to get them, standing at the security threshold, backlit by the hallway lights as Purple refused to keep the security lights on. Purple had suspected worse things in the moment, because they hadn’t yet known that Orange always spoke like that, when Orange broke out the HR Voice.
A crew meeting! Orange had promised. A fun-tastic and fan-functional bi-weekly half-hour time block meeting. Orange had dragged Purple off cams, conspiratorially, heeled shoes clacking on metal flooring for a prisoner’s march down the hall. Orange was a hummer. Orange had hummed off-key tunes in all the silent moments, which they traded for sing-song promises of meeting muffins, crew-bonding, and important task delegation. They’d bowed their head in against Purple’s, like the Skeld walls might report Orange for impropriety, as Orange had whispered, “You’ll LOVE this crew. The captain does Tuesday trivia!”
Now wasn’t the time for that memory. But it washed through Purple’s body now anyway, unbidden, absurd. It came with the absent thought that—in a different world—cafeteria crew meetings were about status reports, and task logistics, and inventory, and muffins.
Purple sat at a crew meeting now, rust red flakes peeling oxidatively from their shoes, for the only kind of meeting that made any sense to Purple: a dead crewmate, a vote for execution.
It felt like a small blessing, somehow, that it was Cyan who’d called the meeting—less Purple’s own deadly and driven crusade, and more of a different panicked crewmate wailing their way over to the cafeteria to slam the button.
That part had maybe been less of a blessing: the wailing, the panic. Cyan’s horror had been wet and visceral enough to cause water-damage to drywall, and Purple could not shake the gut-curdling notion that Cyan had appraised Purple and Orange equally with that terror. Had it looked that bad? Purple and Orange both crowded, indifferentiable, around Blue’s body.
And now, shaky-voiced, shoes blood-sodden, Orange tried to lead the meeting for which they’d been pinned, and pointed, and accused.
“As many of you may have heard from Cyan’s panicked screaming, our beloved friend and crewmate Blue is dead. The good news! I have explicit permission from the MIRA HR handbook to grant everyone two hours of compensated mourning time!”
“Oh, can it,” Purple bit. And deep-down Purple knew that bite was unwise, but there was too much bile and rage and guilt choking out Purple’s circulation. Blue should have been protected, and saved, and Purple failed them. And with a laugh bitter and internal, Purple could understand how Cyan felt, staring down both Purple and Orange in the crosshairs of blame for Blue’s death. “We’re calling a vote obviously. It was Orange. I walked in on them standing over Blue’s body. We are voting out Orange.”
“Now hold on a moment—” Orange said. Orange sat directly across from Purple at the table, and they made an effort to look anywhere but dead-forward. “I just think that—I would like to encourage everyone to consider skipping this vote, as we just don’t have the evidence to proceed.”
“Oh, so now we get to encourage crewmates to abstain,” Red remarked, and the antagonism in their voice bristled against Purple’s neck.
“I just, think—” Orange fumbled.
“Because when I suggested it last time as captain—"
“If you, as captain, would like to encourage it now, I’d be happy to endorse—!”
“Don’t humor them, Red!” Purple antagonized back. “Don’t make this about your ego now! Another crewmate is dead! You can’t seriously be thinking of telling everyone to abstain.”
“And you can’t be telling me what I can’t be doing.”
“Are youabstaining?” Purple asked Red, acid.
“Are you trying to rope me in to your next crusade?”
“It’s NOT a crusade!” Purple snapped, voice breaking on the frustration. “I FOUND Orange standing over Blue’s body. Cyan and Black can confirm.”
“I can confirm we definitely saw Orange and Purple standing over Blue’s body,” Black said, frostily.
“I got there seconds before you did, and I ran there BECAUSE I saw Blue dead from security.”
“And did you see Orange kill Blue?” Yellow asked. “Since you should have seen all this from security.”
“N-no,” Purple faltered. “But that’s because I was in the reactor room with Lime when Blue was killed! So it couldn’t be me.”
“Some security,” Yellow muttered.
“That doesn’t matter! That shouldn’t matter!” Purple rallied back. “I walked in on Orange, standing over Blue’s dead body. Blue is dead! Orange killed them! There is no one else it could be.”
“N-now if I could just take the talking ball h-here.” Orange pantomimed holding a trust ball. They’d left theirs soaking in Blue’s blood in medbay. “Purple may have seen me over Blue’s dead body, but that was because Blue was dead when I got there!”
There was a shakiness in their voice that grated against Purple’s nerves and sensibilities. It fell out of place with Orange’s ever-unshakeable cheerful demeanor. A new style, something smarter than the their first time around, dumped already in the trash chute, still sing-song, still MIRA’s lapdog.
“You had—no reason at all! To be in medbay! You got scanned already! Only Lime wasn’t scanned.”
“I didn’t go in there for my scan! I had—I just—some paperwork—for Blue—to drop off.”
“You were not holding any paperwork. You’re lying.”
“I mean paperwork from Blue, to pick up!” Orange squeaked.
“You’re getting this, right? You’re ALL getting this?” Purple spread their arms to the crew. “Do I have to spell this out for everyone?”
“Orange, what were you really doing in medbay?” Red asked, and the resentment still burned hot in their tone—an irritated parent, resolving a squabble between children who had both earned Red’s ire.
“I… just… w-wanted to see if the doctor had any spare time to talk about… WORK-approved things…” Orange’s voice dropped to a whisper, “andotherthings.”
“’And other things’” Purple challenged.
“Uh-huh,” Red said, flat. “’Other things’… Isn’t flirting a violation of MIRA protocol?”
“Yes!! And I was OF COURSE going to report myself for a flirting violation! I have the forms on my desk ready to go. But the doctor was already dead when I got there!”
“It’s just not really like you to break protocol,” Red continued, but it wasn’t a rallying of Purple’s point. It was vapid, almost, like empty musing.
“Because that’s NOT Orange!” Purple declared, hand thrusted emphatically to Orange. “That’s an alien imposter! An imposter who is breaking protocol in other ways like, you know, killing crewmates!!”
“I’ve never met anyone more in love with protocol,” Black said. “So that is weird for them.”
“So you get it, right? You all get it? We’re voting Orange!”
Purple’s proposition hung in the air, irritatingly, aggravatingly unmet.
“Lime,” Purple turned, imploringly, to the one crewmate who hadn’t joined the center table. Lime had stayed huddled near the far wall, assuming that spot with aggravated and rambling diatribes about refusing to leave their back open. They faced Purple, with an expression like any address was an invitation to flee, one foot toeing near the cafeteria vent. “Lime, I said I’d call on you—and well—I’m calling on you. This is what I was talking about! It happened just like I said it would.”
The more Purple studied Lime’s body language, the more like a crab they became. Shelled-up in layers of suspicion for everyone, a backwards tilt like they had claws ready to snap at the first intruder to their space. And Purple understood that baked-in stand-offishness was hard to crack. Lime was hard to rally. But Purple held their hope, and their breath, as some subtle motion of acquiescence shifted across Lime’s face.
Lime gave a covert head-nod. They raised their hand. “I hear you, Big Boss. Orange.”
And the vote felt like the rusted cogs of a machine finally shifting. It was a weight easing a fraction from Purple’s chest. Two votes cast now, for Orange. Cyan and Black could bring that to four, and possibly five if Red could shelve their ego long enough to save the crew. And five votes, out of eight, was guaranteed to vote Orange out.
“Cyan, Black, you get it too, right?” Purple asked, attention pivoting back to the table. Purple was emboldened, in motion, set to rally. There was victory a fraction out of Purple’s clutches. There was an end to the bloodbath in sight. “We-we-we can end this here, now, if we just—"
“You’re right, Purple. About what you told Lime just now. This did happen just like you said it would,” Black said.
Purple went still. Their inner momentum snagged, and tripped, and fell off-kilter as Purple felt the chill leak into their blood. They turned to face Black.
Black’s statement was not validation. It was not agreement.
“I’m just wondering what’s more likely,” Back continued. “Blue dying to Orange just like Purple’s psychic precognition said they would, or did Blue die because Purple was just carrying out the murder they already decided to tell us all about?”
“That’s not—” Purple muttered.
“Magician tricks are usually simple,” Black answered.
And after a moment of silence, Cyan ventured, shakily, “Is… one explanation more likely?”
Black made a highly disapproving noise, and their iciness extended to Cyan whose head dipped at the understood shaming.
“I know it seems crazy, but it’s the truth,” Purple answered, but they were shaken from their own footing now. It was a dangerous, biting, bone-chilling accusation that made too much sense to ignore—Purple as a hack psychic and an architect of the murders.
Purple gripped the table, fighting to steady themself without showing the slip in their face. “You don’t have to believe me, actually. Even if none of that psychic stuff is true, the evidence against Orange backs me up!”
“’The psychic thing’ just isn’t really that ignorable.”
When Black’s face remained an impassible wall, Purple turned, imploring, to Cyan. “Cyan, you still believe me, right? You saw my aura, and you know I’m telling the truth. You knew I was right about Green.”
“Were you right about Green?” Yellow’s voice cut in, a serrated blade to Purple’s bone. A new trickle of fear, icy cold, worked its way like a disease through Purple’s veins and they turned to meet the pointed lash from Yellow. “We—and I mean you—voted out that sweet little farm kid, and Blue’s dead anyway. We were wrong about Green.”
“No!” Purple insisted. “There are two imposters. I said that, didn’t I? I’ve been saying that from the beginning!”
“Okay convenient. Just two? Not three?” Yellow jabbed a hand out. “What happens when we vote Orange and the killings keep happening?”
“It’s just two… It’s always been two imposters.”
“Mm-hmm, because you’re psychic,” Yellow said. “You found Orange over Blue’s body. Wouldn’t it have been just as easy to kill Blue yourself and then just wait for the next crewmate to stumble in so you could frame them?”
“That’s not what happened,” Purple said weakly.
“You were the last to get scanned, weren’t you? Right before Orange found Blue dead.”
“I was with Lime! Blue was alive when I left them!”
“Yellow—Yellow is making a lot of sense! That has to be it. That’s why I walked in and Blue was dead,” Orange said, strained, hand raised high. “I vote Purple.”
“I did not kill Blue.” Purple’s heart was racing.
“Green got voted out with no real evidence. Maybe I could have believed it—new kid on the ship, suddenly crewmates are dying, guess we’ve invited a murderer on board.” Yellow’s visor narrowed. “But you’re new too, Purple, and crewmates are still dying. Want to explain that one?”
“I really, really haven’t killed anyone,” Purple repeated, feeling their voice weaken, the less believable they sounded each pass. “I just know what happens. And I know it’s a lot, but I’m asking everyone to trust me—”
“I trusted Gray,” Yellow bit, “when they were our head of security. I don’t know you.”
Purple tilted their gaze over to Red, who was watching with a coldness that sent fresh thrums of terror through Purple’s gut.
“Red… knows me. Red can vouch for me.”
“And I trusted Gray as captain more than I’ll ever trust Red—you know, before Gray was demoted to security to make way for this one.” Yellow jabbed toward the captain, and their narrowed visor focused on Red. “I’ve always wondered why MIRA demoted Gray to give this idiot the keys to the ship. How many bodies you help MIRA bury, Red?”
“None!” Red bristled. “I got promoted to this position because—because I’m a capable captain!”
“Then make a capable captain decision here, and vote out your new security dog,” Yellow challenged. “I’m voting Purple.”
“So am I,” Brown added.
“I’m—I’m abstaining,” Cyan squeaked. “I can’t do this.”
Purple’s insides were cold.
2-3 vote, tilted against Purple. And with Cyan abstaining, it was a best-of-7 vote.
Which all meant that if Red voted against Purple as well, Purple’s fate was sealed.
Time moved lopsided. It moved in jagged starts and stops that Purple’s breathing could not sync to. Emotions moved on fly-trap paper, sticking and writhing and going nowhere. They were too suffocated under the mud-pit consumption of one single feeling.
And that feeling was fear.
It was fear more concentrated and more potent and more suffocating than Purple had felt even when facing down Green the first time. That had been a fight at least—an open-nitrous burn of adrenaline in every scream and thrash and violent bloody evisceration of alien and corpse. That had been with Red, hand in hand…
And now Purple sat, a scolded child, a dutiful MIRA salarymate, polite and protocol-driven at a meeting of everyone Purple wanted to protect, unified in an effort to march Purple to willful execution.
There was no hiding it. Purple was shaking now. Purple’s nerves were faulty-wiring, an electric fire waiting to spark, and ignite them, and burn them down.
Suddenly, nothing else existed besides Red.
“Red… Red, come on,” Purple implored. “I didn’t kill Blue. Red, you know me.”
Red appraised Purple, face unreadable.
“We’re friends,” Purple added, voice cracking.
Purple felt almost sick at the memory of them seated-similar, side by side in the hallway outside storage, bruised and bloodied and alive and asking the question:
“Are we friends?” Red asked it with a scoff.
“Red, please.”
Whatever humor had come with the scoff evaporated off Red’s face. They assessed Purple now with a professionalism that was perhaps lethal, to Purple, in these moments.
“I worked with you a long time ago, Purps,” Red said on a sigh. “I think I’ve maybe been carrying around a bit of a rosy memory about what that meant between us.”
“Red—”
“Would you let me goddamn finish? Your captain’s talking, Christ…” Red muttered. Purple’s heart pounded. They muzzled themself to silence. “Yellow is clearly right about me. Which is to say, I’m an idiot, because I brought you on thinking, maybe, this would be good for both of us. Maybe it’s been long enough to get past things, and fix things, and focus on what matters for MIRA’s mission.”
Purple’s hands shook.
“I should have realized that wasn’t going to be the case,” Red continued. “Because I know you, Purps. You are unpleasant. You undermine everything I do. You think you’re right all the time. You can’t cooperate. You get fixated on a point and you can’t let it go even if it’s gonna blow up in your face, and everyone’s face, and you can’t figure out when you should just sit down, and shut up, and smile, and nod, because sometimes in life that’s the thing you need to do. You are, in fact, a really terrible crewmate.” Red went quiet a moment. And it was a silence like an ocean Purple could drown in. “But I don’t think you’re a killer.”
Red raised their hand. “I vote Orange.”
3-3.
Purple exhaled. They exhaled with enough force to find stars snapping in their vision, and the white death-grip they held on the table was the only anchor point that kept them from shaking apart into a pieces on the floor.
They had nothing they could say through their adrenaline-sickness. Their mind was in gridlock. And maybe an absolute lack of words was the best thank you Purple could give Red, because it gave Red the authority back at their own table.
Red’s lingering gaze left Purple, and with a command and a voice Purple could almost appreciate the solidity of, Red said, “Vote is tied. Can we AGREE... to end this here?”
“Sorry, Captain,” Black answered, hand raised. “One of those two killed Blue. I think we’re better off taking the gamble than letting them both walk back through the ship with us. I’m voting Orange.”
Whatever passed in the pleading gaze Purple gave Black, and the stiff visor-contact Black returned, it did not feel like camaraderie.
“Thank you,” Purple muttered, without an ounce of strength yet recovered from their own nomination to the chopping block.
“Don’t thank me,” Black answered.
“Wait. Wait wait wait…” Orange’s tone sounded wrong. It rattled without their sing-song affectation, without the lilting joy of MIRA-approved cadence. “Are you… Are we… Black, are you sure? I didn’t do it, Black.”
“It doesn’t matter if I’m sure. It matters that I voted, Orange. Don’t protest.”
“Yes..! This is—I understand of course—protocol—entirely to protocol!—I just think—”
“Green didn’t get the chance to beg.”
Orange fell silent. Their gaze wandered like a beaten pet-mate to the garbage chute. Orange had gone disturbingly still, disturbingly silent. And maybe it was disturbing to Purple for entirely the wrong reasons, because imposter Orange hadn’t acted like that the first time.
Black looked across the crewmates, and their visor narrowed in disgust. “Fine, I’ll take the responsibility for what we all just did.” They pushed themself up from their seat, one hand extended to Orange, which Orange took shakily.
Hand in hand, locked in a sort of dead-man’s waltz, Black and Orange moved to the garbage chute.
“I… I really didn’t… I really found Blue dead there…” Orange wasn’t talking to any one crewmate. They might have been talking to themself. They might have been talking just to keep their feet moving. “Wanted to ask Blue for coffee… That’s against protocol—anti-fraternization protocol. I deserve to be reprimanded—for sure—for that. But that’s paperwork. Form 1977-J. It’s on my desk. I didn’t kill Blue. I didn’t. Purple, did you?”
“Come on.” Black pulled the garbage chute open. Orange set one foot into the gaping maw, and seemed to lose the motor function necessary to pull the other leg over. Purple almost moved to help, but gravity beat them to it, Orange tipped until they toppled down.
Orange hit the bottom with a thunk. All noise from them had evaporated.
Purple got up, shaky, duty driven. They made eye contact with Black as Purple approached, and Purple leaned their hand against the chute ejection button. For one single moment, Purple doubted everything. And then they slammed the button.
The garbage ejected with a pneumatic hiss. Emptier, this time, as hardly anything had been tossed down it since Green’s ejection. Purple faced the window. It was a familiar sight now: wayward napkins, spinning outward with an unshakeable angular momentum. Two paper coffee mugs, a mold of crewmate hands preserved in the divots. Orange, tumbling out, visor focused to the far vacuum of space, as if the ship hardly even concerned them in light of the cold and vast eternity that awaited them.
Purple said nothing this time. They only watched, and watched, as Orange’s hands iced over, and their visor spiderwebbed and cracked with the frost, and a few shards of fractured glass peeled from their face to drift like chandelier beads into space.
Orange did not explode. Purple did not have the mental capacity, nor the heart, nor the will to understand why that would be, or what it could mean.
“That’s um… that’s it,” Purple said, dry-mouthed, numb, and the victory felt like nothing. It felt like the dirty and shameful motion of a knife behind closed slaughterhouse doors. “The killings should stop now.”
It felt like being alone.
Purple’s hand drifted down the window glass. They let Orange unfocus from their sight, and they looked over their shoulder. Lime had already smacked back down the vents. Yellow and Brown had taken back to the kitchen. Black helped Cyan up and headed toward the door. And only Red’s gaze lingered, first on the window, then on Purple, before whatever moment of communication idling there snapped closed as Red turned on heel.
“Red!”
Purple saw the stiffen and flinch that pulled at Red’s body. Red paused, glancing over shoulder to Purple. “What? Do you have more orders to give me?”
“No! I just—I wanted to say—thanks. For having my back. For saving me…”
And the probing look Red gave was leaving so many things unsaid. Purple could imagine a million questions Red had locked a loaded, but then the moment snuffed out of Red’s visor, and coldness overtook them again.
“Just don’t make me regret it, okay?”
…
There was something borderline offensive about feeling the chill, and the sting, and the biting rejection of isolation far more strongly on a ship of seven living crewmates than Purple ever felt back when they and Red were the only two limping remains of an eviscerated crew.
But it was exactly what Purple felt as night creeped through the raw early hours, and they swirled a finger in wayward patterns over the oxygen water tank. Heracles followed their motion with passive intrigue. Purple wiggled their finger worm-like, and Heracles reciprocated the wiggle with their tail fin before launching at Purple, their scales catching glints of the aqua light. The glass held them separate. Heracles lost interest. Purple adjusted the focal length of their own vision until they were appraising their reflection in the glass. Purple sighed and leaned a cheek against the glass.
There was still the Ore+ to dispose of, an action which would surely cost Purple their job with the same severity as they were owed on the first time loop. But they could take the fall alone, this time. Red could hate them, and then Red could carry on being captain. Four dead mates—that was hardly a blunder, by MIRA standards.
The ship tremored, and Heracles ducked back into the safety of their grass. The motion dragged Purple’s thoughts firmly to the cockpit, almost obsessively. This late at night, the other mates would be asleep. And if Red HAD been asleep, that wasn’t the case now that the ship was elbowing its way through some slipstream of turbulence.
Purple exhaled.
Red had saved them during the last vote.
And whether or not Red hated them, and whether or not Red would believe them, Red deserved a complete explanation. Purple skimmed one lingering hand over Heracles’ glass before slipping away, exiting into the cold and quiet hallway. Oxygen hissed shut behind Purple. Only the sleep-phase argon lights deep-set into the seam between hallway wall and floor were lit. It felt like navigating by sterile candlelight, but Purple did not need to navigate far. The cockpit lay directly in sight of oxygen.
Purple stepped. Each footfall came with a humming call and response in the metal floor, reverberating to the joints. Was it good that footsteps were loud on the Skeld? Or did it hardly matter, when the imposters could move so quietly?
Purple chose to move loudly. They had no desire to scare Red, approaching them alone, this late, at night.
“Hey, Red?” Purple said out loud, quietly, proffering the walls. “Hey Red, can we talk?” Purple practiced. “Hey, Redsy—” Purple flinched, hands curling. ‘Redsy’ wasn’t here, not this time.
Purple’s steps pattered out like rain. The cockpit swelled into view, along with the vastness of swelling space and littered stars that stole Purple’s attention for all the moments they could afford to stall, and stare through the window, both feet lingering just outside the captain’s quarters.
“Hey, uh, Red? It’s me. Not... trying to scare you. Or kill you, aha,” Purple intertwined their fingers, hand petting hand, self-soothing. They stared at the silhouette outline of Red’s own hand gripped to the yoke. Red didn’t humor them with a response. “I just wanted to talk and… explain things. Can I come in?”
And still Red did not deign to answer, so Purple hesitated, hands wringing, and set a foot over the captain’s threshold anyway.
“I’ll just… start explaining, then. I know my whole thing about—ya know—time-looping the Skeld, and knowing who the killers are, and getting everyone to vote them out doesn’t sound believable at all. And I have nothing to prove it either. So all I can say is it is the truth and… it meant a lot to me to have your support, voting out Orange.”
Purple took another step forward.
“If… you think I used you, or undermined you, I get it. I’m… sorry, actually, really. But the truth is that, I actually trust you. Way more than you’d probably believe. Because I saw the kind of captain you could be when we did this the first time and… I’m actually really sad to lose that. I think I just wanted you to know that.”
And suddenly, Purple’s balance went just a bit dizzy. They blinked, making sense of what had tunneled their vision. The sweep of stars was drifting, and drifting, and drifting. Slanted. It was hard to feel directionality in space, but the off-kilter tilt of the ship made itself known. The yoke with Red’s hand gripped to it wilted down, slackened.
“…Hey, Red…?” Purple asked. They stepped forward. They reached one hand out. For the too-many’th time in the day, Purple’s insides felt like they were eating themselves.
Purple touched the back of the captain’s chair. The disturbance was just enough to tilt the precarious balance puppeted upon the chair. Red’s hand fell from the yoke with a wet splat, and Purple stared at it on the ground for an entire eternity, noticing the wet offense pooled on the floor which Purple had missed, somehow, when entering. It reminded Purple of wading pools, the low and luminous floorboard lighting drawing aqua lines in the puddle beneath the captain’s chair, black as night. And unlike the chlorine of a wading pool, the smell of copper and rust in the air was an assault.
“No…” Purple whispered, wet. “No no no no no no no no…”
Their hand on the captain’s chair was the only anchor saving Purple’s knees from slipping out beneath them. And against Purple’s better judgement, they steeled their feet, and they gripped with their hand, and they pulled until the chair willed to rotate on its piston.
Floor lighting loved shadows. It loved bright gleams of aqua and deep valleys of pitch. The floor lighting painted this with all the love in its heart to the spilling eruption of entrails and popped organs and popsicle-stick bone that sat like a skewer inside Red, like a lame and limping attempt to keep both peeling halves of Red’s body together.
Purple recoiled with a shout that heaved from their stomach. And everything else heaved with it, as Purple dropped to hands and knees, forcefully coughing, their hands now curled and clawing into the wet blood puddle that had spilled like sap down the trunk of the captain’s chair.
And Purple must have looked like a beggar, a hopeless faithful praying when they lifted their neck and craned upward. Their prostrated body was bowed at Red’s chair, as though in worship of the corpse cracked at the spine and opened as a book, all organs free to read.
“How…?” Purple croaked.
Red’s body rejected Purple’s prayer. The rotation had unseated it, the drift of the ship exacerbating its lean, and gravity won its match. One slippery and wet half of Red’s body toppled and took the second down with it, a two-domino mechanism, until Red lay in two halves with the two split plates of their misaligned visor angled into the floor.
“How?!” Purple choked again. Instinct overcame them, and Purple pushed themself away from the putrid and brutal thing that had become of Red. “It’s not possible. It’s not possible.”
Purple stiffened. Head this close to the ground, a sound blundered through the flooring like a metal heartbeat. Rhythmic, louder, footsteps.
“Hey, Captain, I’m sorry to disturb you so late. But one of the Ore+ crates cracked, and Black and I are trying to find the extra c….…”
Purple refused to turn around. But they understood the dying cadence of footsteps, the polite close of Cyan’s unfinished question, the whisper of a crewmate shadow that leaked across the cockpit controls.
“It wasn’t me…” Purple whispered, wet through their own fluids. “This wasn’t me.”
And with no response, Purple dared to look. Even with the low lighting, the horror painted across Cyan’s visor was utterly unmistakable.
“Captain Red…” Cyan whispered.
“Hey Cyan. I found the fold-up crates. You don’t have to wake the Cap—” Purple refused to look as Black’s footsteps swelled and then went silent. Purple had gone back to staring at Red. “Oh… man.”
“M-meeting right?” Cyan whimpered. “We need to call an emergency meeting. Purple killed the captain—”
“I DIDN’T kill the captain,” Purple erupted, explosive, like a burst pipe, a blown gasket, none of this made sense and it showed in Purple’s roving half-crazed gaze as Purple snapped to face both intruders. Cyan and Black appraised them like a freakshow exhibit. “I don’t understand! I don’t UNDERSTAND! I did this already! We saved so many more crewmates this time! We got them—Green and Orange, a-and…” Purple choked. “Why were some things different… Why was the salt different? Why was the reactor different? Why—”
Purple swallowed now.
“—Were… the imposters… different?” Purple whispered. And for being so surrounded by the vast and open vacuum of space, Purple had never felt so much pressure closing in.
Purple pushed themself up, shaky feet teetering and catching their own weight. Purple grabbed a hand to the captain’s chair. Blood slipped down their sleeve, made homes in the divots beneath Purple’s fingernails. Purple stared, consumed, into Black.
“Black… you voted with me. Your vote pushed through Orange’s execution. You pushed through Green’s execution. You voted Green because you agreed with Cyan and… Black hates Cyan. Why would you agree with them…?” Black’s expression was unreadable. Purple sucked in one shuddering breath. “Did you kill Red?” Purple asked.
Black stared back, soaking in the silence. And then they let out one stale huff. It shivered down Purple’s bone—a simple noise, mild distaste, a traffic congestion’s worth of annoyance.
“I really did want to scapegoat you for Red's kill. You're good for that. But... I don't think I want to give you the chance to talk. You might give people ideas.”
A new rumble shook the joists of the ship. Not the off-kilter drift through space this time, and not the beat of footsteps, and not the jitter of the reactor. This was the wet and weighted and bleeding adjustment of Black’s body, tearing along unseen seams to spill loose rose-pink flesh like maggots spilling from a slit trash bag. Black swelled, and loomed, an origami unfolding of teeth-serrated tentacles and chittering shrieks and mass, which quickly bloated to block any chance of escape back through the cockpit entrance.
Purple looked frantically behind themself, and there was no escape there: a vent Purple could not fit through, a dashboard of Christmas-light controls, the hurdling view of space, Red’s body, collapsed.
“I think, actually, you and the captain killed each other here,” Black declared. “You—the murderer of the Skeld—come in here to assassinate the captain. The captain—prepared for this assault—holding their ground with that knife they slipped from the cafeteria.”
Black motioned. Purple’s eyes flickered to the floor. They saw it now, fallen a few inches from Red’s collapsed right hand—the glint of a chef’s knife, the heel of its handle finger-painted in blood.
“It really was cute that they thought that knife could do anything against me,” Black mused.
“Cyan,” Purple croaked. “Cyan, you have to run to the cafeteria and call the meeting! You have to get out of here! You have to tell them all it was Black!”
It was hard to peel their eyes away from Black, but Purple did it long enough to stare imploringly at Cyan, and they held Cyan’s gaze long enough to feel the wash of confusion over how Cyan just… stood. Nonchalant, head tilted, appraising Purple like some curiosity. Slow, rumbling, a chuckle built in Cyan’s throat. It sang out musically. Happy, sing-song, like there was a shared joke inside the captain’s quarters, and all three of them were conspirers of it.
Purple understood, just in time to understand the serrated evisceration of an alien tongue impaling a coin-slot through Purple’s abdomen. The force pinned Purple upward, star atop of a Christmas tree of blooming jagged branches that composed Black’s many-forked tongue. It was a pain Purple almost could not place, for how much it became all of them.
Then all at once, Black retracted their tongue, and Purple’s free-fall broke them against the floor, visor cracked and submerged in blood that could not meaningfully be separated between Red and Purple anymore.
Then gentle, like the touch of a mother to Purple’s shoulder, something pushed and eased Purple onto their side. Black’s tongue, which then snaked down to wrap itself to the hilt of the chef’s knife and—with methodical precision—Black pressed it gooey and squelching into the tongue wound they’d ripped through Purple. Purple let out a note of agony. The blood spilled hotter and faster.
Purple was staring. Their vision was fading. They were watching the two split halves of their reflection in Red’s misaligned visor.
“You know, Purple was right. Black wouldn’t have trusted Cyan this easily.” Cyan—or… the thing that was now Cyan—mused. It was a carefree thought. An observation on a performance in a play. “Black really did hate Cyan.”
“It’s fine. It worked.”
“I’m just glad you and I don’t hate each other. It’s so nice to finally have our energies aligned, partner.”
Black scoffed. “’Energies’, no. Our infections are aligned.”
Noises were spilling down the drain, all the same way the bloodied mop water from White had poured down the janitor refuse pipe. Most things were becoming a rush of water, to Purple. Breathing was hard with blood like mud in their throat and lungs. Purple stared across at Red. Purple stared at Red’s fallen hand. Purple wanted to take it. Purple wanted Red to say something. Purple wanted to hear anything at all from Red right now, even if it was screaming for the trust Purple had squandered, and the fate Purple had dragged them both through.
And some glint caught Purple’s fading sight all anew, just past Red’s fallen body. Cheek flush to the floor, Purple noticed now. The vent was cracked open. Purple was sharing a silent moment with Lime, wide and still and reflective visor staring back. How long had they been there? How long had Lime been there…?
It was fine that Lime’s wide and wordless visor had nothing to say to them. Purple had nothing to say back, not now, not now that the blood had fully filled Purple’s lungs.
Purple tried once again to lift the dead weight of their hand. It came as only a twitch, an aborted attempt to touch the part of Red near them, dead first, gone first, on Purple’s mistake.
Just don’t make me regret this.
Purple heard the words on record skip until everything faded to nothing.
…
…
…
“Oh hey hey Puuurps!!! There you are, Puuuurps. Puuurps.”
It was bright. It was bright in a way that was vast, and open, and everywhere.
“Isn't it wild I'm captain now?”
It was bright in a way that wasn’t suffocating. It was bright without the hot rot and humidity of blood in Purple’s lungs.
“So how's the job I got you?”
It was bright, and Purple could breathe without the crippling spasms of agony that rooted through their organs like a burglar digging through a dresser drawer, pulling and tearing and grabbing and ripping.
“Oh he…hey? Purps, are you okay?”
Purple was breathing way, way, way too hard, because their lungs could breathe again, and the horrid carousel of thoughts and sensations and tearing realities warring for Purple’s every physical sensation could finally force the hyperventilation they’d been denied for every agonizing second Purple was dying.
“Woah. Woah woah—Are you—should I—maybe come back later?”
Purple muzzled their breathing. They fought their own body into control like it was a wild animal under Purple’s tether. They turned around, looked up, at a pizza party where no one was dead, into Red’s perturbed and uncomfortable face.
“Are you… stillll freaked out about the hull breach? Because, if I could just say, that was really the no-est of biggies.”
Red had the party hat on. Red held a punch drink in their hand. Red was a sight that Purple drank in like a desert-bound dead-mate dying of thirst. Purple spared a record-skip of a thought for the idea that it was invasive—perverted, almost—the way they scoured and probed and drank in the sight of the captain.
“Did you… see a ghost or something, haha?”
Of Red. Their friend Red. Their crewmate their captain their friend, sewn back together like a stuffed animal, head crammed with cotton for all the things Red did not currently know, and had not yet experienced. And the drink in Purple’s hand shook itself splatteringly free to the floor for the relief that beat like a drug through Purple’s veins.
“WoAH, hey, watch the Crocs. Should I get Blue or—”
Purple stuck a hand out. They set it out, slow, fighting to control its navigation, giving Red ample time to watch, uncomfortably, before Purple set it down with an absolute weight on Red’s shoulder. And Purple squeezed. And Red was solid. And Red was alive.
“Purple?”
“We are in a time loop,” Purple said. “You and I are in a time loop. There are alien imposters on the ship. They’ve taken over two of the crew. They are going to kill everyone.” Purple’s grip tightened, fingers digging into Red’s stiff shoulder. “And I cannot tell you which two crewmates are the imposters, because I think they change, every time.”
actually the future will be kinda cool i’ll have read more books and watched more movies and listened to more music and written more journal entries. the themes and motifs in my brain will be epic!!!!!!!
You can tell a lot about a person by entering their mind palace and encountering their greatest fears and darkest hopes in a labyrinth reflective of their subconscious thoughts.
inspired: merfolk actually have very different concepts of gender to humans because they’re an entirely different species with their own unique culture
It’s a biological fact that fish do indeed change their sex to keep the male/female ratio balanced in their school population. So this fluidity actually makes more sense from a scientific standpoint than the silly idea that merfolk are born with a strictly assigned sex like humans.
Human: (invites merfolk friend to a boat party with their friends)
Merfolk: oh man, there are a lot of women here. Haha don’t worry guys, I got this :) *changes into a man to keep a balance because that’s culturally polite for merfolk*
In the future, children will think our ways are strange. "Why do old people always grow so much milkweed in their gardens?" they'll say. "Why do old people always write down when the first bees and butterflies show up? Why do old people hate lawn grass so much? Why do old people like to sit outside and watch bees?"
We will try to explain to them that when we were young, most people's yards were almost entirely short grass with barely any flowers at all, and it was so commonplace to spray poisons to kill insects and weeds that it was feared monarch butterflies and American bumblebees would soon go extinct. We will show them pictures of sidewalks, shops, and houses surrounded by empty grass without any flowers or vegetables and they will stare at them like we stared at pictures of grimy children working in coal mines
We will be feeding our grandchildren strawberries and raspberries we grew in our gardens, dragging them along to the farmers' markets for tomatoes and eggs and goats milk and pickles and pecans and salsa and sunflower seed butter and jars of honey, as they complain and drag their feet because Gramma always stands around talking to people for like an HOUR
and we will say "When I was YOUR age, fruits and vegetables came from a supermarket and they were bred to get shipped 1000 miles in a truck and sit on shelves for weeks, and they tasted so sour and watery it was like eating paper compared to these ones. It wasn't even legal in some places to grow your own food"
and they will roll their eyes like yeah yeah just because everything was miserable in the 20s doesn't mean I have to have a smile on my face standing in the hot sun while you listen to that one guy talk about his bees FOREVER
But they will go, because there might be baby goats.
Since I made this post, dozens and dozens of people have left tags telling me that it was the first thing today that made them want to continue living, that it was the first thing that made them consider that they might be okay years in the future, that they might grow old, that it was the first and only post of its kind they'd ever seen—the first post that boldly predicts a future where we make it.
And many other people have been just spitting, foaming at the mouth fucking FURIOUS. How dare I have the audacity to imagine a future where things get better?
Don't I know how BAD things are? Am I not aware of the TERROR and DEVASTATION of climate change and fascism and biodiversity loss? How dare someone be so bold, so callous, as to imagine something other than misery and suicide. How dare someone suggest it will get better. How dare a person propose that there is a future where we will be okay, in the face of so much terror. Hasn't she seen the abyss opening its jaws before us?
vaporwave
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
discoholicmusic
stormborns
tangentwithtanner
yousharknotpass
