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“Scientifically, they’re known as the medusa”, you tell Troy on your first date, while both of you are gazing out into a dense cloud of spectral tendrils and pulsating bells, “Jellyfish, I mean. And what’s interesting about that, right, is that when they lay eggs, what grows from them isn’t a new medusa, but instead a sort of gelatinous growth – that one’s called a polyp – that attaches itself to a rock and splits off new medusae from itself.” You pause briefly, for emphasis, or perhaps because you ascribed this little piece of trivia some greater importance than it had, really. “It’s funny, ‘jellyfish’ only look the way we commonly think of them for every second generation born.”
Troy looks at you, with the amused sort of fondness that he tended to, when he managed to get you rambling again. His right hand is tucked into his blazer, the tacky one with the elbow patches that you had joked made him look distinguished that one time. He’d known exactly what he was doing when he’d asked to take you to an aquarium.
“So like the xenomorph”, he says, after a moment.
You furrow your brow at him, caught off guard. “Yes, actually. Exactly like the xenomorph.”
Some two decades later, you watch Troy Lament get shot in the chest by Clef. (The fucked up thing about this is that it won’t be the last time you see him alive, technically.)
Clef doesn’t notice you, watching the two of them from the shade of the giant crystal flower that will be the only thing to survive the end of the world, except for you, and he won’t until it’s too late, because he’s gotten old and slow and, perhaps, in some mystical, preordained way, because he’s not supposed to. You could never kill Lament yourself (despite the fact the two of you hadn’t been talking much, these past few years. Some things just got lost along the way, you supposed), but you are willing to let him die by Clef’s hand. If there’s a hypocrisy to it, to having Clef do this last thing for you right after having sent him for Kondraki, it doesn’t occur to you. You’ve never been good at reading people, and Clef is little more than a bitter old man to you.
Clef laughs when you slit his throat, high and obnoxious and concealing fear, until he’s not laughing anymore but rather sort of gurgling, spitting blood onto the front of his shirt. He meets your eyes before he goes limp in the chains that hold him up, and for a split second you’re sure he knows it too, the horrible truth that you’ve had to come to accept over these last few weeks of watching the world in its death throes;
Both of you have been here before. This was all happening again.
How does one go about describing the sensation of a universe collapsing in on itself around you?
It’s intense, for one, and you can feel it tearing at you, like it’s still hungry, like it doesn’t quite want you to persist after all. It’s also unimaginably bright, even through your squeezed-shut eyelids. Your vision is blurry for hours afterwards, and your ears ring. They find you, in that small, underground chamber carved into the earth around the heart of the Bloom, still covered in Clef's blood, blind, deaf, and puking your guts out.
It takes a few days, and several dozen interrogations, to convince them not to just lock you up. Carrying a handwritten letter of recommendation from O5-2 helps, even though the interviewer frowns at you through the thick, bulletproof, insufferably ostentatious glass partition and says: “There is no O5-2."
“Yes”, you say, feeling unimaginably tired, “That’s the point.”
There is no scar across the face of the young college student that you watch hold onto the arm of her lover as they wait in line for some cruddy but cozy repertory cinema. Alien, coincidentally enough, the first movie, Mars had joked, to pass the Bechdel test. You had giggled at that, in that too-loud, dainty way that you would have resented anyone else hearing from you, even Troy, but you had been young then, and Mars had been so grand – all studded leather jacket and bright red hair and big ideas, making you feel like the two of you could change the world after all. Even now, she’s breaking your heart, just by being there.
You wonder if she had been there, the aging woman with the tattered yellow umbrella watching from across the street, when it had been you who still had three years left before Mars would burn to death in front of you. You can’t remember for the life of you, but you certainly hope you aren't this pathetic every time around. There really is no point in you coming here, things would have to run their course for the young lovers, the way they had for you, even if you were the only person in the universe with the power to stop it.
There would have to be someone to press the reset switch on the world at some point down the line, and there wasn’t anyone you trusted with the job but yourself.
In the face of the yawning, utter meaninglessness of everything, what can one do, except grow a garden? Watching your flowers die with the first frost each year feels, in it’s own way, like you're finally coming to terms with the ephemerality of things. Diligently, you collect their dry seed pods, and just as diligently, you sow them back out come spring.
This isn’t the fate of every plant of yours, of course. Your ferns, hardy little things they are, can usually make it through the winter just fine if you prune them right beforehand. You have a particular penchant for ferns, plants whose spores grew not into fern plants themselves, but heart-shaped little gametophytes that would then provide the base for the fern plant to sprout from. Something awfully familiar about that, you think, wryly.
You, too, will die one day, and despite your advanced age at this point, you’re quite sure your body giving out on you won’t be the reason for it. The letter of recommendation, the one composed by yourself, sits tucked away neatly into your work desk, in an unremarkable manila envelope sardonically labeled DOOMSDAY PREP.
You feel bad, at times, for the woman now running Project Alpha-9, still so determined to prove herself, still so convinced she will change the world, even in absence of the two people she, you can admit this to yourself now, with several decades between them and you, had loved, well and truly. She has no idea what’s in store for her. She won’t, until it’s too late.
It really is very nice out today, despite the summer nearing its end, the coming fall turning leaves brown and mornings cold and foggy. You sit in an old wicker chair, knitting on your lap (Troy would have teased you for it, how perfectly you’ve come to embody the picture of a little old lady, but you deserved the peace, after everything, is what you would have told him in turn), letting yourself be warmed by the sun. A gentle wind brushes through the flowers at your feet.
In the midst of your perfect garden, you sit and wait for the world to end.