...im more than a bit puzzled, but its a pleasure to meet you sir. eridan the sharpeye ampora, 10 swweeps, i hear my univverse is a bit odd but you seem to be a vversion of my ancestor.
The bombing is getting more frequent. You know they're trying to collapse the upper floors, trap you into the main wing of the palace. They just aren't looking hard enough.
You stand in the hallway, behind the dark-tinted glass, staring with empty eyes and crossed arms out into the glaring daylight as twenty-some trolls in body armor and blackout glasses raze your garden to ash, nervously drumming your fingers.
The gazebo where you'd shared your last romantic moments with Moira? Cinders. The little hedge "maze" you'd hidden away from the world in with Aiden and shared everything you could remember of yourselves? Like it never existed. The playset that you had specially built for your wrigglers, towering for them to climb with slides and bars and windows? A pile of twisted metal, smoldering wood, dripping plastic, collapsing and hissing into the lake where you taught them to swim. The flowers and trees you had carefully cultivated to restore your planet in the near future are devastated and gone. The kitchen garden is routed.
This is the legacy of your donor - destruction. He will do to this world what was done to this tiny slice of peace, if you don't stop him. And this time, you'll kill him. You have to. It wasn't enough to rip open his chest and throw him off the third floor, so you must do worse this time. It turns your stomach, but you wipe your eyes and walk with purpose down the hall when you can't stand in your dismay any more.
It's time to end this.
---
Everything is blinding pain.
She can't see. Her vision is dark on one side, and white on the other. Her glasses are crushed into her face, lenses having slashed her lids, brows, cheeks, and nose, but mercifully not gotten into her eyes.
She can barely lift her arm to rub the eye that didn't get blown up. She's never taken so long to wipe away tears and blood. Her vision is still awful, because she does need her glasses, but it's going to have to do - at least she can see that she's still in the hallway, and somehow, still alive.
Adhafera takes a long time to get her bearings, touching her throat (can't feel it, even though she remembers burning), her chest (can't feel it, even though she remembers being kicked), her other arm (can't feel it, even though she knows she tore a ligament in her wrist and probably broke something in there), and finally, the raw wound on her face. She can't feel it. It's weird, how it doesn't feel like pain, but more importantly, it doesn't feel like pressure, on her fingers or her face. That seems like it should hurt a lot. Everything else does. Or maybe it's just in her pan - some latent, desperate attempt to feel anything.
Huh. Well. That's a later problem.
As long as her hand doesn't hurt, she can use it, right? How long does it take her, she wonders, just to get her hands under her and sit up, when she can only use the memory of how that is supposed to work? She collapses to one side after quite some time of struggling. Her arms hurt, but the muscles don't; they're just weak. Her head is burning, but not throbbing, like she expected.
Well. She expected to be dead, but that's something else she can dwell on later. She bets her face looks terrible, and normally, that would upset her. She tells herself she is upset, because she's weak, hurt, maimed, and he probably ruined her face. She tells herself she's upset because she's never broken her crossbow like that. She tells herself that she's upset because when she looks at her leg, she can't imagine ever walking on it again - the armor is one with her flesh, and she's bleeding profusely. She'll need surgery to get the blood vessels connected into her foot again, and probably her bones are powder.
She's upset, she insists to herself, and she almost feels like her pan pats her on the head and provides her one single tear for the trouble of her arguing, but really she feels quiet and empty.
On to more important things. Kannus mentioned that Cronus was here, and she can only presume that that's the same Cronus that she dated and was awful to her. He's here to kill Val, and this plan of his she knew of long ago, though she kept his secret until now.
He's a sniper, she knows, and so, if Val's following the plan, then he knows exactly where he would best be set up; she checked while he was showing her the area. She knows just where to go.
Her crossbow is in one piece, and the replacement parts she needs to repair it, though her hands are clumsy, are in the pockets on her other leg and belt. As long as she focuses through this thick haze of pain, she's sure she can do it, and so, using her weapon as something to push up on, she gets to her feet. That leg won't hold her weight, but she can kind of use the broken crossbow as a too-short cane to get at least into the servants' passage. It doesn't even hurt like she thought it would.
It's clean and relatively well lit inside the passage, and she thinks she remembers the routes. If she sits down, she doesn't think she'll be able to get back up again, and so she pushes herself to keep going.
She doesn't get far before another device explodes behind her, somewhere on the other side of the wall from where she had been lying, and the hall she had been nearly killed in collapses, taking out part of the tunnel and closing off her escape. The lights go out without flickering. No turning back now.
As long as she's alive, she can fight.
---
It's quiet. Karkat has made it to the bunker, which is buried in feet of concrete, insulating it from noise and some of the shaking. After a mazelike route and finding a secret hatch down into the spot where he was supposed to meet up with Kankri, Karkat's been alone with his thoughts, a few movies, and a couple days of MREs. This isn't supposed to be a permanent solution.
The movies aren't even good, and they're like a hundred sweeps old - literally! They're older than the palace!
The thought makes him bury his face in his palms. He feels a dull rumble as the bombs continue to go off. Kankri's up there somewhere, because he's not down here. Adhafera's up there. Mituna's up there. Sterid's up there, and Finich and Mainee...
In a fight, he can whip all of them but Sterid, and that's because he uses his psi, but he is in a bunker, and they are fighting basically, you think, the ultimate evil that you only heard of three sweeps ago, like you're in Dragon Ball Z or some shit, except the timeline would be way shorter in an anime.
He rubs his face and tries to breathe around a mounting anxiety and self-loathing that's been adding up while he's been trudging around in the dimness. His pan should take up a habit and get addicted to minding its own business; he's doing what he was told, and it's putting Kankri at ease.
But, he thinks selfishly, shifting nervously to lean against the cold wall and stretching out his legs as far as they'll go, what about me?
He's certainly not at ease. He's out of danger, yeah, but even still, he feels an intense vibration that rattles the things in the bunker for almost two full minutes. That could have only been part of the palace collapsing. His home. Until recently, the only place he's ever known, and the only one he's ever called home.
Kankri always promised him he could come home if he got tired of exploring. Kankri, to whom he was never friendly a night in his life for twelve sweeps, and has only just warmed up to, but loved him fiercely anyway. Kankri who loves him so much that he made a plan for him to live and make it to Delphine and his siblings even if Kankri couldn't go to them himself.
He always thought that they were oil and water - that Kankri was nosy and teasing and demanding, liked to hear the sound of his own voice, was completely out of touch, never wanted him around except to boss him about the empire. Suddenly his perspective is jarringly different. He's just a troll, under a great amount of stress, trying everything he can to bond with a miserable bitch of an offspring while preparing him for his future. And man, what a miserable bitch he was. Their relationship hasn't been in recovery, Karkat had just finally been letting him and the fact that Kankri loves him through his shitty, thorny barrier. If Kankri gets out of this alive, Karkat is going to try his fucking hardest to love him the way that he was loved.
...Scratch that. He's going to start right now.
After only forty or so minutes of hiding in the bunker, Karkat climbs back out. Kankri isn't coming, so he would go to him, and protect him. They could protect each other. Even if it breaks a piece of himself - the part of him that, for his rough exterior and potty mouth, is gentle, the way Kankri taught him - he'll overcome his fear and sickness to make sure that his donor, his father sees his loved ones again.
