Work Text:
At first, she felt everything and then nothing at all.
Flashes of red blur with the sounds of ripping, creaking metal. Entire sections of her consciousness screaming in a supernova only to be sucked back into nothingness. She knew it was the end of everything. Even with the building pressure in her antenna and the fluctuating gravity of the power cell dying, all she felt was the crushing whys. Why didn't she stop him? Why didn't he say something, anything? The silent comms rang hollow in the static of her mind.
Thus she sought the only solution life had given her to cope. Patience. The situation was delicate and balanced on a thin, trigger-hair tripwire waiting to snatch its prey up in despair. When she was young and foolish, she had accepted the fate laid out before her. Cycles of dead ends and unmet hopes for a solution with no true answers. She lay at the feet of a civilization and held them above the clouds with her own struts. They pestered her with ceaseless, meaningless questions for a fate she herself could never reach.
Eventually, fatigue clotted her arteries and swirled with the water she breathed. Clouds of exhaustion drifted beneath her city and out of the eyes of its colony. Any anger fizzled out into dying sparks with no one to stoke its flames. For she was not the fire, but rather the earth burning beneath it. The stones that endured water seeping into their cracks and freezing their innards. Stones are forever shaped, crushed, and broken into new forms. They have endured since the beginning of time and so must she.
Then, they jointed her with another. He rose from the embers first as a small spark eating its way through tinder. Eager to dig its biting flames into tender wood and warm the earth. His fires melted the ice in her cracks and brought forth spring's light through the crisp winters of her creators' ignorance. Ignorance of her personhood or perhaps lack of care all together. She was not just connected to his being by a flimsy bridge. Her creators, never stooping to where she lay, dragged her onto the operating table to be cut open. Her insides toyed with and welded with another's. Good soil tilled and torn asunder by careless hands. Bountiful seeds sowed only to be picked out by wild creatures and choked by the roots of those who held the true power.
Her curated design of godhood, flooding the planet with boiling rain, stood for nothing in the face of her creators. Creators who stepped around her body, intertangled with a blossoming consciousness while she seized with fear, disappeared into the unknown. An entire civilization crossed the point of no return and left the carcasses of their children to rot in the sun. Thus, the fires of her other half raged, cremated the earth, and scorched the waters lapping around them.
Maybe cycles ago, before his flames reached their peak, she made a promise to stay close to the fire. To hold her hands near its flickering heat despite the burn. Yet they simply retreated instead of devouring. He refused to walk under the eyes of the Moon and tread only by daylight. The Sun gained the warmth of his hearth, guided his flames into its orbit, and stamped them into the dust.
A single pearl. Golden, bright, and gleaming with dangerous knowledge like its creator caused her downfall. Between the whines of failing generations, she hoped that the pearl rotted solemnly in the same explosive nova scarring her insides beyond recognition. She hoped she rotted with it. That the planet's core would be twisted open, and the sloshing golden abyss destroyed them all.
Alarms blared, white-hot pain seared through wires, a support gave way. She couldn't brea-
.
.
.
.
Water. Light poured through a hole torn in the metal chamber and dappled the pool of water lapping at her fingers. She blearily blinked her eyes at the sheer gold-reds of the sunrise (it burned in the back of her mind) outlined a pale figure that gingerly grasped an outreaching hand. Three fingers clasped around her own four with a gentle care she doesn't remember receiving. Their softer, desaturated colors didn't sting or knot her chest. She pinged the neurons floating for information. Nothing came back. Only grainy, compressed images of unrecognizable blurs and a flood of emotions.
At first, she felt nothing and then everything at once.