it's just me and you
— pearlnamorio drabble
"Can you just please tell me what's wrong?" Pearl begged, demanded, questioned as Namor turned his back on her again, distraught and lost with the threat of having the waters exploited once more.
"Kuya, you have to tell me what's going on!"
"I will not drag you into this."
"I am already dragged!" She raises her voice and he stills, stopping in his tracks and he looks at her. "I am your sister! Let me help you!"
He shakes his head firmly, "no."
She gasps, he never tells her no, he made sure nobody tells her no so why is he being like this now?
"You know damn well I'll end up by your side fighting whatever troubles the waters, so might as well tell me!" She walks to him and turns him around forcefully, "she let me live again for this very reason—"
She stops herself when she sees his eyes glisten with threatening tears.
"And that is what I am afraid of."
"Of what?"
"That she will take you afterwards." She blinks as if refusing to recognize her sister can be that cruel. "You don't know her like I do, Pearl."
"I've survived worse, kuya, you know that." She says, gentler this time at his now refusal that the eldest can be this kind, "this one won't be any different."
"But I feel it!" He hisses and she almost back away with the fury in his face, not because of the cause but because of what might happen. He sits at a bench, "I can feel her."
Her shoulders relax, demeanor calm, "it's because I will give her new bodies."
He scoffs at her attempt to appease him, she sits beside him, hugging him and leaning on his arm as if to imprint her warmth and presence on him.
Like she is immortal like him.
"What's stopping you from doing it? It's been long overdue anyway," she rests her chin atop his shoulder and he glances at her, like looking at her hurts, like she's a memory, "your war on the surface world should've happened way before."
He takes her hand and puts it on his cheek, not minding that the hand that cause deaths after deaths is what gives him life.
"You're right," he tells her then looks at her bright face.
"Lay it all out," she smiles, "it's just me and you."
———
The price Namor paid to permanently keep his oceans and people safe is the price he never expected to make.
As he holds Pearl's bloodied face, her body almost torn apart, her hand limp on her open abdomen, a signal that she tried bending her blood and body back together.
He hiccups as he scoots closer, the light in the eyes of the light of his life slowly escaping her.
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
It wasn't supposed to be her.
"Pearl? Kiik?" Gentle, for the last time he would hold her. "I'm here." Like it's supposed to be a comfort.
He tries tilting her head to his direction. And she fights to focus, to look at the reason why she even lived in the first place, why she was granted this, but she can't.
She can feel her.
Looming. Waiting. Patient.
"It's okay, we're okay," A lie to comfort no one, he caresses the hair out of her forehead, the place he always kisses to assure her. Pearl's head limps to the other side but he brings her back to look at her.
His heart. The only one he's certain he loves. His last link to his humanity and past.
He blinks back his tears, he can have time to cry and mourn her later. He can't even tell her that they have time, that she can catch her breath, that he will take her to the healers and her scientist friends to patch her up.
He will always have the time. He, however, will never have her again. And she made sure of it.
One thing about the three of them is that they will and could never lie.
To even think that he will have to mourn Pearl, his sister who will do everything for him including dying, kills him all the same. Take me with you, he longs to beg, to scream.
But can he really even demand her to live again? She cannot even keep her body together any longer.
He tries to smile for her, and it feels like it was only yesterday when she was a toddler, when she allowed her her last life, trying to copy his smile when he laughed at something she did. Pearl seemed to be steady at the sight of his smile.
He further cradles her face, as if his warmth is enough to repel Death from taking what is long overdue to be hers.
"Will you look at me please?"
It took Pearl's last fading strength to do so, Death walking closer to relieve her of her pain, Namor seeing the green all around her.
"It's just me and you."
She took her then.
The life of his life leaves her body, and with it, her light that shone so brightly in Namor's life.
His world is dark again.
———
Pearl looks down to her body, gasping to see it whole and intact.
"You're finally awake."
She turns around quickly at the sound of her voice.
Then it dawns on her, I'm dead.
Her shoulders slumped, thinking of the brother she had to leave. Again. All alone in the world she sacrificed to keep him and his oceans safe. She intakes the air, new and clean, her heart beating inside her.
The feeling of fighting to breathe and look seems so foreign to her now.
Pearl stands up and faces her sister.
They never knew her as fair. Namor never regarded her as such despite being king of the underworld. And yet she thinks Death, Rio is just.
That despite it all, Pearl is glad to be able to look at Rio's face longer than the eldest ever allowed.
She waits until the acceptance sinks in the youngest's face. The face she did not want to stare for far too long or else she would've taken her earlier than she's supposed to, the sister she could not wait to have but have to lend to her brother whose destiny is to bring her right back into her doorstep.
"It's me and you now."
Pearl's eyes sparkle at the acknowledgement her sister made, but her smile is sad, knowing the cost to be with her sister after so long is leaving her brother behind.
Her light will now shine the below he could never access.
"Come."
She follows.