This is how you survive

by Melime

Summary:

The poison is the final piece of the puzzle, turning hope into certitude. Blue now can be sure of who made her ill when she was young, and she knows that this was a step in assuring their survival.

Notes:

• For wilfriede0815.

She grows so sick that what little awareness she has left, it’s spent thinking of how she’ll die. As her illness worsens, no one knows what’s wrong with her. She’s cut off to keep her from hurting anyone else, to keep her contained before she can spread the contaminant that’ll claim her life. She’s in pain, like every cell in her body is fighting with one another, but above all she’s alone. She would do anything not to feel this alone, and wishes the agent who made her sick would at least have stayed long enough to watch her die.

She experiments with poisons because she wants to understand, and it will be a poison. Red has to kill her, or she’ll be the one killed. Blue won’t be the cause of her death, but she has no intention of ending her own life either. So, she experiments, until she can understand how the poison will attack her, and how it would spare Red. It’s a delicate chemical balance, a work of art, a dance of interactions at a molecular level. There is only so much theory that can be made before the experiment has to be tested in practice.

It reminds her of being ill when she was young. It’s only with the final poisonous berry that she knows, that feeling and hope turn to certitude. She’s dying, every cell in her body fighting, the slow decline of her youth now a rush to death, but she understands now. In taking Red’s final, desperate letter, the words that begged not to be read as they killed her, she knows who came to her so long ago in such a distant future. Red doesn’t know it, but Blue does, and she’s sure then that this isn’t the end of them.

She has to hide in strands that no one thinks to visit, stepping sideways into places and times so othered that even she didn’t know about them until she started to explore. She has to stay out of the way until she can recover, or she’ll never be able to save Red. What Red did to her, giving Blue something of herself at the cost of taking into her something of Blue, saved her life, but it didn’t spare her from illness, from being so near death that her body was indistinguishable from it, and had to be brought back.

She finds a strand that dies before leading to either of them, one of so many. With the planet on the brink of destruction, humanity set out to the stars, only to die in the coldness of space, in ships that would never land on another planet. She hides in a spaceship, sick and in need of aid, and there she begins the long process of returning from the brink of death. She’s sick for so long that wonders if it wasn’t enough, if after all of this she won’t be able to save Red, but she needs to survive.

What she is of Red means that she can do what Red did to reach her, and that’s all she needs. If she can reach her without being detected, then they can find a way to leave together, and this will finally be all over. There will never come a time where they don’t need to hide, where they aren’t hunted, where they can have a life without constantly having to run, but it doesn’t matter. At the cost of everything else, they could buy their freedom to be together, and that freedom was worth even the highest of costs.