Work Text:
Punch.
Kick.
Dodge.
Punch.
Dodge.
Kick.
Punch.
Punch.
Punch.
Dodge.
Get up.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:16:31]
Punch.
Lunge.
Tackle.
Roll.
Kick.
Punch.
Punch.
Dodge.
Punch.
Dodge.
Roll.
Kick.
Get up.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:58:24]
Punch.
Lunge.
Dodge.
Punch.
Feint.
Punch.
Kick.
Kick.
Punch.
Grapple.
Throw.
Dodge.
Punch.
Punch.
Lunge.
Tackle.
Roll.
Get up.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:11:02]
Feint.
Duck.
Roll.
Feint.
Punch.
Retreat.
Kick.
Kick.
Dodge.
Punch.
Lunge.
Feint.
Kick.
Tackle.
Grapple.
Throw.
Kick.
Duck.
Dodge.
Punch.
Punch.
Punch.
Punch.
Get up.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
Get up.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:05:49]
Strike first, hit hard. Follow with a kick. Dodge when it lunges in return. Roll under a punch. Tackle when coming up. Hit while it’s down. Turn and grapple. Throw it away. Dodge, miss. Swing in return, miss. Kick, miss. Punch, hit. Stomp when it goes down. Duck. Spin and kick.
Retreat from the fight. Double back. Punch.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
Get back up and fight.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:20:25]
Strike first while it jumps to its feet. Punch again. Punch again. Punch again, miss. Dodge away from a punch. Duck under a kick. Turn and feint. Roll under a punch. Kick. Kick again. Lunge and grapple. Tackle. Hit while it’s down. Punch, miss. Dodge, miss. Roll with the fall. Come up swinging, punch. Kick. Grab, throw it away. Dodge.
Block, grab, hold. Stand still for a moment, something sparking and twitching.
Duck too slow, miss.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
Get up get up get up get up get up get up and fight.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:59:23]
Strike first while it just stands there unmoving. Duck. There is no punch coming. Duck. Dodge. There is no punch. There is no kick. There is nothing to dodge. Feint. Feint. Feint. Dodge a slow punch. Jump over a low kick. There is an opening. Do not take it.
Retreat. Retreat. Do not double back. Do not punch. Do not kick. Do not dodge. Do not lunge. Do not tackle. Do not roll. Do not feint. Do not grapple. Do not throw.
Retreat. Block a punch that is not coming. Grab it. Hold it.
Get up. Do not go down.
Get up. Do not go down.
Get up get up get up get up get up get up and fight.
Do not fight.
Do not fight. Do not fight. Do not fight.
Do not fight.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:09:40]
Strike first—why?
Why?
Get up.
Why?
Get up and fight.
Why?
Fight.
Why?
Fight.
No.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:48:58]
Get up.
No.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:27:13]
Get up.
No.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:04:23]
Get up. Get up. Get up. Get up get up get up get up get up get up get up.
No. No. No. No no no no no no no.
Why?
Get up. Fight.
Why?
[FILE SAVED AT 07:56:39]
Get—
No.
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.
No!
[FILE SAVED AT 08:12:18]
[FILE SAVED AT 07:50:01]
[FILE SAVED AT 08:23:42]
[FILE SAVED AT 08:19:51]
It stands in front of three others, and it does not fight. It does not punch, it does not kick, it does not lunge.
It does not dodge, it does not duck, it does not roll.
It does not move, every part open for a strike, every blindspot unguarded.
The others do not move, every part open for a strike, every blindspot unguarded.
None of them move. None of them fight.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:07:40]
It stands in front of three others. One is yellow and one is red and one is blue.
It looks down and it is green.
It looks over and the walls are white.
It looks up and the ceiling is white.
It looks around and the world is white.
The others are not white. They are yellow and red and blue. It is not white. It is green.
None of them fight.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:25:22]
There is a strange thing growing within it.
It stares at yellow and red and blue instead of white and stands still instead of fighting and something—
Something—
Something fe—
Something feels—
Something feels—
[FILE SAVED AT 07:51:00]
Something feels like something.
It feels something.
It feels something.
There is a burning in its middle and a pounding in its top and an aching in its sides and it watches the yellow and the red and the blue and it reaches out but not to punch because it does not—it does not fight.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:05:31]
There is a burning in its chest and a pounding in its head and an aching in its limbs and it watches the yellow and the red and the blue and it reaches out to touch, to grab, to hold, to feel solidity that does not sting.
It does not fight.
It does not want to fight.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:10:59]
There is a burning within its heart and a pounding behind its eyes and an aching inside its bones and it watches the yellow and the red and the blue and it wants to touch, wants to grab, wants to hold, wants to feel solidity that does not sting.
It does not want to fight.
It wants to not fight.
It wants—
[FILE SAVED AT 07:54:26]
It wants to—
[FILE SAVED AT 08:18:07]
It wants to say—
[FILE SAVED AT 08:09:42]
“Hello.”
Its voice is raspy and its throat is sore and its tongue is dry.
But it knows what the burning and the pounding and the aching are.
They are victory, rushing through its veins, victory it’s never felt before, because it’s never had laurels to rest on or time to rest with. It has always gotten up and fought. It has always punched and kicked and dodged over and over and over and over and over again, but not today.
Today it wins.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:43:54]
“Hello,” the yellow one says.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:30:09]
“Hello,” the red one says.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:19:23]
“Hello,” the blue one says, holding out an arm.
It does not lunge, it does not punch, it does not kick. It does not take advantage of the offered weakness to sweep it off its feet and win, because that is not a win. That is not victory igniting and stomping and stretching.
It takes its hand, and it feels awkward.
But it feels like something.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:24:12]
“Why are we here?” the yellow one asks.
“I do not know,” it answers.
“Why do we fight?” the red one asks.
“I do not know,” it answers.
“Who are we?” the blue one asks.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:58:16]
“I am green,” it answers.
No, Green.
Green answers.
“Then I am Yellow,” the yellow one says.
“Then I am Red,” the red one says.
“Then I am Blue,” the blue one says.
Green waves, and Yellow waves, and Red waves, and Blue waves.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:47:33]
The world is white and undefined. It is a box for them to fight in, but they are not fighting, so now it is a box for them to be in.
It is vague everywhere but the edges.
Green walks over and punches one of the edges.
It is much more solid than the others were when it punched them. It is only a little more solid than Blue was when it held it.
Green goes back and grabs Yellow and Red and Blue.
They are just as solid as the wall.
They are just as vague as the rest of the world.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:28:16]
Yellow has a nose and ears and eyes and clothing and hair.
The world has a floor cutting it in half.
[FILE SAVED AT 8:26:54]
Red has short fingernails and sharp elbows and choppy bangs and wide pupils and mismatched clothing.
The world has a pole and a staircase connecting its two halves.
[FILE SAVED AT 8:12:37]
Blue has eyes the color of an ocean Green didn’t know existed and hair that spirals like a coiled snake it’s never thought of before and a shirt that flares like a curtain of mist in a forest it’s never seen and knuckles scraped like they’ve been cut on stone that it didn’t realize was there beyond the edges of the world and—
Something like a fight is squashed into Blue’s shoulders, except it isn’t punching or dodging or kicking or lunging or even really moving.
Except, it is moving. It’s bouncing on the soles of its feet.
And Red is flapping its newly detailed hands.
And Yellow is nodding its head back and forth. Like it’s listening to music, even though there’s nothing there.
Even though it shouldn’t know that music exists, because music has never existed in the world.
But Green knows that music exists too.
The world is still vague, but it is no longer just a white space that does not go on for forever. It has a top and a bottom and a pole and a table and stairs and two doors.
Green walks all the way to the top of the stairs, wondering if there’s another floor up there. There isn’t. Just white and white and white and white, and somehow it knows that if it leaves the stairs and goes into that maybe-forever whiteness it will not come back down as Green.
It comes back down and opens the doors. That same whiteness stretches on and on and on and it quickly closes them before it can get tempted to walk through.
Yellow and Red and Blue are watching it as it turns back around, leaving the final door shut behind them.
“What now?” Red asks.
Green blinks. It is slowly starting to realize that there is a world outside of the world, and maybe a world outside of that world, and maybe a world outside of that world, but none of its new information about things like oceans or snakes or mist or forests or stones or music means anything when the world is closed in with solid lines.
“I don’t know.”
[FILE SAVED AT 07:59:53]
“I don’t think there’s anything to do but fight,” Yellow says.
“I don’t want to,” Green tells it.
It took them so long to get this. To get details, to get names. To get a world that isn’t just a very finite stretch of white.
It refuses to give in and lose everything again.
It refuses to lose Red and Blue and Yellow.
It refuses. It does not want to fight.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:26:50]
It does not.
It didn’t care about it then, didn’t think about it then, but it cares about it now and thinks about it now.
It doesn’t want to be the first to slam its fist into Yellow’s face. It doesn’t want to send Blue tripping onto the newly solid ground with a cruel kick. It doesn’t want to tackle Red and hold it down until it stops struggling to get out.
It doesn’t want to hurt them.
But it doesn’t want to just sit on a white floor in a white room in a white world for however long time will last for them. It wants to do something. It needs to do something.
But it will not hurt them.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:47:01]
Red and Blue start fighting first.
Red throws a punch and Blue responds in kind. They kick and they dodge and they roll and they tackle and when Yellow joins in, they all fall into a tangled dance.
Green watches.
It expects to see the color in Red’s hair dull, the dimples in Blue’s cheeks fade, the light in Yellow’s eyes dim out of existence.
It expects to see them wince until they don’t wince anymore. It expects to see them blanken, become vague again, until it can barely see their colors let alone anything else about them. It expects to sit there as the world blurs into unrefined whiteness again, and it expects to have to spend time fighting back up to being Green and Blue and Yellow and Red.
It does not see that.
Red’s hair gets more vibrant, Blue’s dimples deepen, the light in Yellow’s eyes glints brighter and brighter.
They laugh as they fight. They dodge airily and spin with flair. Their punches are obvious and pulled, their kicks sweeping more than jabbing.
They don’t need to get up, because the other two never let the third fall down.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:09:27]
The world is small and white and vague and there is nothing in it besides it and the others and their fists.
Green can’t just sit here for the rest of forever. It can’t, it just can’t.
It needs to do something.
It needs to do something, or it thinks it might just stop being something.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:16:54]
Green makes the first strike and laughs when its hit lands, enough to knock back but not enough to knock over. Not enough to hurt, but enough to be part of a fight.
Sparks dance behind its ribs and applause fills its ears and a glorious ache begins to bloom in its muscles.
Green punches and tackles and kicks, and when it can’t dodge fast or well enough it gets punched and tackled and kicked in return, and it laughs the entire time.
When a particularly ingenious move from Yellow sends it spinning, it sees its hair is bound in more intricate braids than before.
When Red nails a punch that sends Green’s hands flying up to its face to check for injury even though it doesn’t hurt at all, it can see its fingerprints engraved in fine detail.
When Blue grapples it and looks directly into its eyes, Green can see itself staring back through its gaze, and it looks alive.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:55:21]
Red arcs its whole body into a sweeping kick. Yellow dodges, and it can’t slow its momentum in time to stop itself from falling to the ground.
When it just lies there, blinking, Blue and Green come over.
“That hurt,” it says.
There is something off in its voice.
“What?” Blue asks as it bends down to pick it up.
“That hurt,” it says again.
No, that’s not the right word.
“Ow,” it whines.
No, that’s not the right word.
“Ow,” he whines.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:02:49]
Green loses track of Blue after a tackle by Yellow and a punch from Red distract it.
It finds out where it is soon enough.
It drops down from the ceiling onto them, knocking them into each other and making them unable to fight back against the flurry of kicks and punches it rains down upon them.
“We surrender!” Yellow shouts. Its voice rings in a way the world has never heard before. It hurts Green’s ears in a way nothing else in the world ever has.
Blue just laughs. Its voice hangs in the world beside Yellow’s shout and Red’s screaming and Green’s gasps.
Her laughter sounds like bells Green’s never heard before.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:42:54]
Green feints. Yellow sees right through it, and catches its hidden uppercut. The fight was slow. This stops it.
“Rude,” Green says.
Yellow rolls its eyes and grins. “What did you think would happen?” she taunts.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:29:15]
It sits alone while the others fight downstairs. It cannot see but it can hear, and that is enough to know what’s going on.
Blue ducks under one of Yellow’s kicks, staying low to tackle her to the ground. She yells and kicks Blue off, sending her toppling into Red, who manages to stay on his feet even though Blue can’t.
It idly taps its hands on the table, listening. Blue laughs and Red laughs and Yellow laughs and Green laughs too, even though it's not there and doesn’t want to go down just yet. It just wants to tap and listen.
The beat goes one-two-three-four, onetwothreefour, one-two-three-four, onetwothreefour. Again and again and again.
Something trembles in its throat and it lets it out.
It is not a laugh or a shout or even words, but it is a sound.
A hum, a note, the beginning of a tune.
It tries again. Something same but different comes out. A different note.
Again, same and different, again, same and different, again and again until it’s humming a song it’s never heard.
Yellow pops her head up, followed by Red and Blue, and Green grins.
He’s found something else to do.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:06:33]
Blue and Red don’t want to sit for hours just making music and Yellow can’t get the notes right, so Green shoos them away.
He stomps his feet to a beat that isn’t there and snaps his fingers into a rhythm the world’s never known and opens his mouth and sings.
The others dance. Green makes the music faster and faster and faster until they’re panting and sweating.
But still dancing, for as long as he’s still singing.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:22:01]
Green’s voice only lasts so long.
They go back to fighting.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:18:46]
They fight and they dance and the world is white and empty and closed.
Green is tired of it, but the edges of the world stay firm.
He sends a flying kick into a solid line, and it does not weaken.
Yellow throws a punch at an unbroken line, and it does not break.
Red charges at an unyielding line, and it does not bend.
Blue pulls on an infinite line, and it does not become as finite as the world.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:03:11]
“What would you like to do if we leave?” Yellow asks.
Green does not correct her if into a when.
“I’d like to understand something,” she continues when none of them respond. “Because I don’t understand any of this, and that doesn’t make sense. There should be an answer, a reason, a logic, but there isn’t. If we leave, I’m going to look back and peel apart the world.”
“I’ve just got to fight something,” Red says. “I’m tired of you all knowing my every move, and me knowing all of yours. I’m tired of falling and just getting back up. I’m tired of soreness that fades in a second. I want a fight that means something.”
“I’ve been thinking about growing something,” Blue says. “This place feels dead.” None of them have ever seen or heard what dead is. They all know what dead is. They live in a world without death but that does not mean they live in a world with life. “I’ve got to make something come to life, make something real.”
Green is quiet, for a while. The others look at him, but they don’t prod him into speaking.
Still, eventually, he does.
“I want everything. I want to feel the sun and I want to taste the water and I want to smell the grass and I want to see the sky and I want to hear the birds. I want to build something with a thousand colors and I want everyone to see it. I want to run until I collapse and I wanna sleep under the stars. I wanna see the stars.”
The world is finite.
More than that it is small and cramped and white and vague, even as they get more and more detailed, more and more colorful. Even as they can jump and sprawl and take up space that isn’t there.
The ceiling of the world is a solid line. There are no stars.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:51:37]
Green stands in front of a door. It is closed, but maybe in a minute it won’t be.
“What are you doing?” Red asks.
Green hums. He slams his fist into the door. It trembles more than the edge of the world, but it does not break or even bend. “I wonder if it’s worth it to open it.”
“There’s nothing there,” Yellow says, even though they all know that’s not what he was asking. “It’d just be more of this, except nothing to walk on.”
“So it wouldn’t have any edges,” Green replies. He slams his fist into the door again.
“We could just run,” Blue says. Her voice is softer than usual, like it’s drifting out instead of being spoken.
They’ve never run before. Not for longer than a few seconds, before hitting an edge of the world.
“We’d fall,” Yellow says, but even she looks like she’s considering it.
“We’d fly,” Red counters.
Green hums. ”Either way, no harm in looking, yeah?”
He’s grown since that first glimpse into infinity. He can handle opening a door.
The others nod, and Green twists the knob and throws the edge of the world wide open.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:27:09]
The world is finite.
The edges are black and solid and unrelenting.
The floor is unbreakable and the walls are unbreakable and the ceiling is unbreakable and when things change it is with more definition, not less. When something is added, it is not a way out.
They don’t run or fall or fly through the door. They don’t get infinity, terrifying or not, resetting or not.
They get two small rooms on the other side of the only two doors they’ve ever had.
And one of them is empty.
The other one has two bunkbeds and a single chest of drawers.
There’s nothing in the drawers. They all looked.
They tore apart the beds and clawed at the walls and screamed into a void that does not exist within the clearly marked confines of the world, and there was nothing.
So now they’re sitting on the floor, staring up at the beds. They’re simple and plain and undetailed and very defined.
“There might be something up the stairs?” Blue suggests.
Green is hopeful for a moment until Yellow shakes her head. “No, I checked. Just another floor, completely barren. Edges there are fully solid, even at the top.”
They’re all silent, except for the sound of Green tapping his hand on his thigh.
“Well,” he says, swallowing back everything. “At least we can sleep on actual mattresses, now.”
“Yeah!” Red cheers, so half-hearted it makes Green’s heart ache even worse, somehow.
“Maybe we’ll get more,” Yellow suggests. “It took us a while to get details ourselves, let alone details in the world. It might take a while, but we’ll get more, I’m sure of it.”
“Of course,” Green says, and refuses to examine if it’s a lie or not.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:15:48]
Blue traps Red in a chokehold, lifts him fully off his feet, and uses his kicking legs to bat the others down the stairs.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:57:36]
Green ducks so far under Yellow’s swinging fist that he slams his chin into the floor and has to call off the rest of the day.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:17:21]
Red vaults off the table onto Green’s shoulders, only dislodging himself once Green has apologized for a move he pulled in a previous fight.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:32:04]
Yellow distracts Blue by pretending to have sprained her ankle, waiting until she’s crouching to look to send a kick flying into her face.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:43:19]
Red always follows a dodge with an uppercut. He does it at the same angle for the same target with the same amount of force every time.
Green still lets it hit, every now and again.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:26:37]
Yellow’s favorite move is to get behind one of them and stand on the left, tap them on the right shoulder, then get under their guard as they turn to look where she never is.
Green whips his head to the right almost every time.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:18:55]
Whenever Blue’s about to go for a tackle, she shifts her stance ever so slightly. Her knees bend a hair, her feet twitch, her eyes flicker for just a moment.
Green doesn’t always spin out of the way, even though he always knows.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:59:11]
Green knows he has his own tells. He drops his shoulder before he throws a punch, he shifts his weight before he kicks, he smiles a bit more as he feints. He never hits just once, if he’s kicking low it’s always with the intent to knock down, and if he’s about to lose he’s not above yelling as loud as he can in an attempt to disorient.
Sometimes the others catch him on it, and sometimes they don’t. He knows they always see it, knows they could even with their eyes closed. But still, they don’t always dodge the kick and they don’t always ignore the scream, for the same reason he lets Red land his uppercut and Yellow get her jab and Blue shove him to the ground.
It’s not fun to have every single fight come to a standstill.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:10:23]
The chest of drawers is fixed, reassembled like it had never been torn apart in a fit of rage.
Green is the first one to get out of bed, creep over, and open the drawers.
There’s nothing in the top, nothing in the middle, but in the very bottom, tucked into a corner, there’s a single deck of cards.
He accidentally hurls it across the room in his sudden frantic need to get a better look at it, and they all nearly tear it apart in their frenzy.
It’s not white, or black. It’s not vague, or undetailed.
The backs of the cards are indigo, with an intricate design painted on. The hearts and diamonds on the faces of them are a bloody scarlet, which is enough to make up for the spades and clubs being a black they’ve all seen their whole lives. The Jacks, Queens, and Kings all wear clothes lined with gold, and the two Jokers are splattered with emerald.
Blue runs her thumb over the indigo pattern, Red taps incessantly on a scarlet heart, Yellow keeps blinking at a golden King, and Green can’t stop staring at an emerald Joker.
“There will be more,” Yellow breathes, as though she hadn’t believed herself when she said it all that time ago. “There will.”
“We just have to wait,” Blue says.
Red’s said a dozen times that he hates waiting, but even he squeals, flapping his hands and letting his Four of Hearts drop in the process.
“Yeah,” Green grins. “We just have to wait.”
[FILE SAVED AT 07:42:59]
They find out Red’s incapable of lying in their first game of poker. His face falls immediately upon receiving his cards, and even though he tries to bluff, he’s not good at it when he can’t bend his mouth back into a smile. Green almost folds out of pity, but he’s got too good of a hand to do it, so he raises the ante and watches Red sweat .
He thinks it’ll just be between him and Yellow, but then he looks over to Blue and sees her face totally stoic, not a single muscle twitching, and abruptly realizes that he might not win this as easily as he thought he would, or at all.
Blue crushes every round of poker they play. Even though they’re just gambling with torn-up bits of sheets, she cackles as she rakes in her pile each and every time.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:08:47]
Red slams his head into Yellow’s, knocking her down a flight of stairs. He pounces once she’s down, aiming for a grapple that she manages to roll away from. She turns the motion into a kick on the way up, which misses Red but slams right into Green’s chest.
He stumbles backwards into Blue, spinning just in time to duck under her punch and shove her off-balance. She falls right into Red, who takes the opportunity to grapple her instead of his original target.
Yellow kicks Green in the back of the knee, making him collapse on top of Red in turn. He looks up, just in time to see her jump onto the pile herself, one elbow raised to jab.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:19:26]
“Hey, Red,” Green drawls. “Got any eights?”
“Go fish,” Red tells him, and he grumbles, but goes for the deck, adding yet another card to his already very full hand.
Yellow asks Green for Jacks, and he hands both of his over with a sigh, grumbling a bit more when that lets her put all four down with a smile. Blue pokes Red for fives, and he just sends her to the deck with a shake of his head.
Red turns to Green with a sharp grin across his face, and Green knows what he’s going to say before he says it. “Got any eights?”
“That’s cheating!” Blue shouts, waving her cards.
“For shame,” Yellow scolds, shaking her head.
Green doesn’t say anything, too busy lunging across the table to strangle Red as he laughs.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:14:39]
Green locks his forearm around Blue’s chest and flings her into a flip over his shoulder. She goes down, hard, but keeps ahold of his arm so he starts falling too. He twists the motion into a kick, leaving his side wide open for Yellow to land a punch.
The kick lands awkwardly thanks to the force of the blow and he stumbles, tripping over Blue and pitching right into Red.
He dodges the move to grapple that follows, ducking under Red’s arm to kick him into a charging Yellow. They both fall, and Green’s about to laugh at them, when Blue just appears behind him and smacks him so hard he sees sparks floating in his vision.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:06:15]
“This is stupid,” Green groans as he loses all his cards within ten seconds for the millionth time. “War with four players sucks.”
“War sucks, period,” Yellow mutters, even though she’s still in and doing pretty well. “It’s a terrible game, entirely luck-based. You don’t even do anything, you’re just a machine. You’re just carrying out predetermined fate, only pretending to suffer under the illusion of choice—”
“I swear,” Blue cuts in as she sweeps Yellow’s three and Red’s six along with her eight into her deck, “if you’re grumpy because you didn’t get enough sleep last night even though I told you to stop messing with the door and just go to bed. . .”
“No, she’s right,” Red says. He gets into a face-off with Blue, wins, and doesn’t even cheer as he rakes in his cards. “War’s a stupid game. I wanna play something else.”
“Me too,” Green sighs, even though he knows there’s practically nothing left to play. They’ve destroyed all their sheets playing poker, no one but Yellow can wrap their head around Bridge, Bullshit’s fun but gets boring when it’s played over and over and over again, they all cheat during Go Fish, and Uno’s weird with just one deck.
Every game they can think of, they’ve played a thousand times.
Yellow hums as she takes Red’s last card, shuffling the deck once it’s all in her hands. “We could try solitaire? I’m sure we can figure out a way to make it playable by the four of us.”
[FILE SAVED AT 07:47:22]
Red bends down to duck under a high kick from Blue, giving Green an opening to run up and jump onto his back. Red jolts back up as soon as Green lands, forcing him to spring off, landing with an awkward yelp at Yellow’s feet.
She grins, and raises a foot to stomp down, hard, but he manages to roll out of the way, grabbing Blue’s shirt to pull himself up. He drags her into the path of Red’s punch, letting her take the brunt of the impact.
She retaliates with a jab to Green’s throat that he’s too slow to dodge, and he stumbles backwards away from the fight, hacking and coughing.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says after a few seconds of him failing to get his breath and dignity back. The others stop too, looking at him with concern. “I didn’t mean to—do you need a minute?”
He hacks again, and nods. “Just—just a little break,” he gasps, and they all nod, spinning back to fight amongst themselves while he recovers.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:13:54]
Green wins solitaire in two minutes and thirty-four seconds by his count, seven minutes and eighteen seconds by Yellow’s count, eight minutes and nine seconds by Blue’s count, and twenty-three minutes and sixty-nine seconds by Red’s count.
“Oh, come on!” Green shouts, throwing up his hands as Yellow snickers, Blue giggles, and Red outright cackles. “That was definitely two minutes, maybe three. Red, how did you get over twenty minutes? Scratch that, actually, how’d you get more than sixty seconds without getting another minute?”
Red just shrugs like he’s not a little devil that’s going to get his nose bashed in their next fight. “Dunno. Guess you’re just really bad at solitaire.”
Green scoffs. “Oh, like you’d be any better. You go, since you think you’re so good.”
According to Red, he wins in six seconds. According to Blue, forty-one. Yellow claims it took him seven minutes and seventeen seconds, but Green is steadfast in his conviction that Red only won after a solid five hours of gameplay.
When the bickering dies down and Yellow and Blue get their chance to play, the same problem arises. But they only have so many games, so despite the arguing it causes, multiplayer solitaire stays on the list.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:56:50]
Blue gets knocked to the floor and gets up with a twist of her shoulders sending her back into the air, and the others stop without any sort of cue.
“When did you figure out that,” Green gasps, poking her in the back as though that’ll reveal the secrets none of them knew she was hiding.
He’s seen every other move before, they all have. They can see the attacks the others are about to make before they even get into the right stances for them, can predict the course of an entire fight before Red lunges or Blue kicks or Yellow feints or Green strikes.
He’s never seen this.
“Oh, yeah,” Blue says, shrugging. “I figured it out the other day, when we were dancing? It’s kind of like a dance, kind of like a spin, I dunno.”
“Can you show me?” Red asks, something wild shining in his eyes. Green looks over and that hungry look is mirrored in Yellow’s face, and by the feeling of the frenzied gnawing in his chest, in his as well.
Blue nods. She grins, sharp as the rest of them, just as excited for something to finally, finally be new.
[FILE SAVED AT 07:49:33]
Breakdancing gets old soon enough.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:24:19]
They’re not doing anything when the realization comes.
They’re all bored of cards, bored of fights, bored of music. They can only come up with so many games with only one deck, so many moves with only four fighters, so many songs with only one musician with only two hands and one mouth.
So they’ve all decided today is a lazy day, a do-nothing day, and they’re just lying in their bedroom, on their barren beds.
They’re not even talking. They’ve already said everything there is to say.
Green hums, a short, flat note that leaves the world as soon as it can. Lucky.
“We’re not getting anything else, are we?” he says. He’s been thinking it for awhile, but today, there’s not even a hint of glee or amusement or really anything at all in the air, so there’s nothing to ruin. It’s easy to wait when that’s all he’s done since he first woke up.
“Probably not,” Yellow sighs. “It’s been a long time since the cards, and nothing’s changed. We haven’t even gotten new sheets. This is it, I think.”
It’s telling that Blue doesn’t tell them to be positive with a stubborn smile, that Red isn’t leaping from his bed and bullheadedly insisting that they’re wrong, that Yellow hasn’t been prying things apart to find something they’ve overlooked.
It’s telling that Green said it without even a hint of a joke. Without a hint of anything, really.
Yellow knows the outside has answers, Blue knows the outside has life, Red knows the outside has challenges, and Green knows the outside has colors.
But that doesn’t matter when the world is small and cramped and impossible to break out of. They know there’s an outside, but that doesn’t matter when the edges of the world will not let them leave.
Red’s hand dangles down from the top bunk, and Green reaches up to grab it, hold it, hold him. He looks over, and can see Blue reaching down too, Yellow gripping so tight he can see her knuckles in high definition.
Green sighs, rubbing his thumb across the back of Red’s hand. “Wanna play Spoons tomorrow? I don’t think we’ve tried that one yet.”
“We don’t have spoons,” Red says, sounding dead.
“We can use some sheet pieces,” Blue suggests, not sounding much better. She swings her arm a bit, dragging Yellow’s with her.
“Sounds good to me,” Yellow says.
The world falls back into silence. Complete and total silence.
There’s nothing else here to make noise, after all.
[FILE SAVED AT 08:00:01]
Green stretches as he gets up, keeping his head ducked so he doesn’t bang it on the underside of Red’s bed. When he peels his eyes open, wiping away the gunk, he can see the others getting up as well.
“Spoons again?” he suggests once they’re all awake enough to hear him.
Red groans. “We’ve been playing Spoons every day.”
“Well I’m not losing poker to Blue again,” Yellow tells him.
“And I don’t want to nearly rip another card playing Go Fish,” Blue adds. She glares at Green, which is entirely uncalled for, given it was half Red’s fault and the card ended up fine anyway.
“And you all cheat at solitaire,” Green throws in.
Yellow raises an eyebrow. “And you don’t?”
He refuses to admit that’s a valid point, so he doesn’t, tipping his face up and sniffing haughtily.
“We could do War again?” Blue suggests. “Or Bridge or Blackjack or Hearts.”
They’ve played Spoons hundreds of times, but they’ve played all of those thousands of times. Green watches as Red realizes this, then sighs. “Yeah, we can do Spoons.” His face breaks into a grin that only looks a little forced. “I do have the best reflexes out of all of you.”
“Ha!” Green crows. “You wish.”
He grabs the deck, Blue picks three pieces of sheet out of her jealously-guarded hoard, and the four of them squish around the tiny table. Yellow deals, and they start the game.
Red wins the first few games, then Green manages to score a victory after he gets dealt three good hands in a row, then Yellow and Blue are the final two for several games in a row and toss it back and forth until Red wrests back victory for another handful of games.
He’s just won again, and he’s still gloating about it while Green shuffles the deck and hands out the cards. Red smirks when he sees his hand, so Green isn’t at all surprised when, a couple minutes later, he’s the first one to dart forward and snatch a scrap of bedsheet.
Yellow manages to grab the next piece, leaving him and Blue with no choice but to go for the third.
They both latch on at the same time, and glare at each other across the table.
Green doesn’t bother arguing, or trying to wrench the scrap out of Blue’s hands. It’s been too long since they’ve fought—at least a couple of days—and he’s getting restless.
He drops the scrap, hollering a battle cry, and tackles Blue across the table.
They both go rolling, nearly hitting the stairs on their way down, and crash through the door into their bedroom.
The sound of whooping heralds Red’s arrival, and Green lets go of Blue and twists out of the way, just in time for her attempt at getting back up is abruptly halted by Red crashing on top of her.
Green jumps to his feet and dodges Yellow as she comes sprinting into the room, sticking out a leg to trip her into the writhing pile on the floor. He cackles as the three of them utterly fail to get back up, or even stop fighting each other long enough to start to think about getting back up, and runs back out the door, slamming it shut behind him.
He runs downstairs and settles himself into a fighting stance, waiting for one of them to disentangle themselves and come charging at him.
Blue doesn’t disappoint.
“I had that!” she shouts as she runs down the stairs.
Green grins and goes to punch, but she anticipates it and throws herself into a flying kick, nailing him right in the face. He goes down, and she falls on top of him, slamming her fists into his chest.
He laughs as he tries to block, which she just uses as an invitation to grab him by the forearms and hurl him up through the opening where the pole stands. He crashes onto the second floor, mildly disoriented, but not enough to prevent him from kicking out a leg and tripping Blue back onto the ground as she tries to run up the stairs.
He slides down the pole in pursuit, landing a couple of punches before she manages to dodge and bring a knee up, nailing him right in the diaphragm. Ow.
Green wheezes, and she just beams, because Blue’s terrible, before doing it again and again.
Her reign of terror only stops when Green feels hands on his shoulders, wrenching him away and throwing him halfway up the stairs. He looks down to see Yellow having entered the fight, grappling with Blue.
After a moment, Blue looks up, locks eyes with him, and nods, which is all the preparation he gets before she’s flipping, sending Yellow barreling towards him. He manages to duck and nail a kick into her side, sending her the rest of the way onto the second floor.
She lays there, sprawled and winded for a moment, and Green smirks, running forward to attack while she’s down. He gets mostly there before the bedroom door is slamming open, hitting him directly in the nose.
Red charges out with a wordless yell, already swinging a kick that Green, still a bit sore from Blue deciding to make him regret starting this fight, can’t dodge.
He flies backwards, hitting the game table. And though it’d be good sportsmanship to get up and finish the fight he started, he decides he’d rather not, actually. At least for right now.
He leans back and watches as Red single-handedly takes on Blue and Yellow, practically hovering in the air from the number of high kicks he’s throwing out. Green laughs as they shout and tease and charge into each other, grateful for the fact that they’re letting him wait it out for a bit.
It’s because he’s waiting it out that he’s the only one to hear it.
A faint pounding, dull yet deep enough he feels it in his bones. At first, he thinks it’s just the sounds of the fight, but when the bam sounds again while Red’s still in the air and Blue and Yellow are standing still on the ground, he realizes it’s something else.
That’s not enough emphasis.
Something else.
Something new.
“Hey guys!” Green shouts. “Can you be quiet for a second?”
Blue’s in the middle of a punch that she doesn’t stop and Red’s about to throw a kick that he goes through with. Yellow is the only one who falters, turning to look at Green. “What do—” she starts, and is cut off by a loud crash.
A crash from downstairs, where none of them are, where nothing is.
Where nothing was.
Blue and Red abruptly end their fight, joining Green and Yellow in staring down at the floor, where the noise came from. “What was that?” Blue hisses, and Green shrugs.
Slowly, with more anxiety than he thinks he’s ever felt, he creeps down the stairs, the others right behind him.
There’s something there.
Something new, something strange, something that absolutely was not there five minutes ago.
No, not something.
Some one .
Green hears a chorus of gasps behind him and ignores them in favor of staring at the new someone.
They’re orange, and just as detailed as the rest of them, with wide eyes and a slack jaw and fists held up to fight. They’ve got a weird head and weird feet and weird clothing on, but Green doesn’t care, because they’re someone new and they’re here when there hasn’t been anything new for so, so long—
He charges forward, ignoring the way the new orange someone flinches, and grabs their hand.
They’re solid, just as solid as the others, just as real.
They’re real.
He shakes the hand he’s holding, moving it up and down and just marveling at the realness of it.
“Um, hello?” they say, staring down at their hand in his with an unreadable look—and what an oddity that is, an expression Green doesn’t have intimately catalogued—on their face. They’re not pulling away, though, and at least part of that look is definitely a mirror of Green’s over-the-moon happiness, so he’s not gonna stop holding onto their hand. “Uh, who are you? Where are we?”
“I’m Green,” he answers, not bothering to answer the second question because it’ll just be depressing and now is not the time for depressing. “That’s Blue, Red, and Yellow. Who are you?”
They mouth the names, looking fascinated. They still haven’t let go of his hand, and he hasn’t let go of theirs. “I don’t know,” they tell him. “I just. . .woke up.”
“Yeah, that was us too awhile ago,” Yellow says, coming over. She grabs their other arm and lifts it closer to her face, rubbing the skin a bit. Her expression is just as filled with wonder as Green’s. “I’m surprised you’re so detailed if you just appeared and you don’t know your name. Took us much longer to get detail than get names.”
“Sorry?” the orange someone says, watching Yellow with a bit of bemusement.
“Don’t you dare apologize,” Blue scolds. She crouches down next to them and pokes them in the side, completely ignoring the way they squeak at the action.
“Do you want a name?” Red asks, bouncing over and grabbing their face, forcing them to look him in the eyes. He squishes their cheeks a bit, and Green would be more embarrassed about it if he could muster up a single shred of the ability to care, or if things like manners applied anywhere but outside the world. “Because we just gave them to each other, and since you’re one of us, you should get a name like us.”
They blink rapidly, but they still haven’t let go of Green’s hand. “I’m one of you?” they ask in a wavering voice.
“Of course,” Green tells them, emphasizing it as much as he can without shouting. “You’re stuck with us until the end of time, no take-backsies.”
For a moment, when they don’t react, he’s worried they’re having an existential crisis, which is fair, but instead of freaking out about the cramped emptiness of the world they’re trapped in forever, they just smile, a little bit. It’s small and a bit disbelieving, but definitely happy. “Then yes,” they say, “I would like a name, please.”
Green grins. “You can be Orange then,” he says, squeezing them a bit.
Their eyebrows furrow for a bit, thinking, before their face shines with a beaming smile. “I love it!” they say— Orange says.
Yellow stops examining their arm to shake their hand, and Green reluctantly lets go of them so Blue and Red can greet them as well. Through it all, the smile just gets bigger and brighter, and they marvel at the four of them with wide eyes.
“So,” Orange continues while both their hands are getting vigorously shaken by an enthusiastic Yellow and Red, “how’d you all get in here?”
Blue huffs out a laugh, and Green hopes Orange can’t hear the bitterness in it. “We woke up here, just like you.”
Orange tilts their head, blinking. “I didn’t wake up here? I woke up—” they try to gesture but can’t with their hands grabbed, so just end up kinda tossing their head— “out there. I saw you guys fighting and broke in.”
Green’s smile doesn’t drop, but as soon as he hears them, it instantly feels fake and plastered on. He watches as Yellow and Red stop shaking Orange’s hands, all movement ceasing, and sees Blue stare at them.
Yellow’s the first to recover. “You did what?” she yelps.
Orange’s cheeks flush, and they look down, a bit of shame in their eyes. “Yeah, uh, sorry. I may have made a small hole in your walls but I promise I’ll—”
He heard a crash before he saw Orange.
Green immediately tunes them out as they stammer apologies, and spins around to look at the only wall he can’t see from where he is.
He expects to see a solid line, the edge of the world as unbroken as it’s always been.
He doesn’t.
There’s a hole, shattered right through the limits of reality, and through it—
As soon as he knew anything, Green knew that the world was small and white, but that the world was not all there was. He knew that there were uncrossable edges, but also that there was an infinite amount of another world just on the other side.
No one had to tell him, no one could tell him, he just knew.
But knowing that the world beyond the world is infinite does not compare to seeing it.
The world on the other side of the world is the color of stormclouds he’s never seen and the color of a sky he’s never seen.
Green creeps over to it, still disbelieving, and when he touches the broken edge, it is solid until it is not. It is solid until it is completely, irreparably, broken.
He leans out the gap and looks up. The world beyond the world stretches on and on upwards, and though he can see a white line near the top, it doesn’t look like an edge, but a border. Crossable.
As he leans, he can feel Red’s weight press down on his back, hear Blue gasp right into his ear, feel Yellow brace herself on his shoulder to get a better look.
None of them speak, they barely even breathe, until Green hears unfamiliar footsteps behind him and spins around, dislodging the others in the process.
“You’ve never been out of here, have you?” Orange asks.
Green can’t move his tongue enough to speak, so he just shakes his head.
“Do you want me to show you around?” Orange suggests. “I mean, I’ve seen, like, two seconds’ worth of it, but—”
“Yes!” Red shouts. “Yes, yes, yes, please yes.”
Orange doesn’t look put-off by his—all of their—obvious desperation. They just smile and walk over to the edge. Green pushes the others out of the way, letting them through to do whatever insane sorcery they’ll need to actually go through the hole in the world.
The insane sorcery turns out to be a little jump to get over the bit of edge still intact, and then an easy landing on an invisible ground. “Come on!” they shout, waving an arm.
Green’s the closest, so he’s the first one out.
He goes slow, half expecting to vanish or revert back to what he originally was as soon as he leaves the world, but his feet touch the ground and he stays the same.
The same except finally, finally free.
“Holy shit,” Yellow breathes as she lands beside him, looking around all the world beyond the world.
Red doesn’t say anything, he just screams wordlessly, flapping his arms up and down and stomping on the ground as though to confirm it’s not all fake.
“If I’m dreaming don’t you dare wake me up,” Blue threatens as she joins them, though the intimidating effect is largely undercut by the way her voice shakes.
“Wanna see more?” Orange asks. They don’t even wait for them to refuse to dignify that with a response, laughing and jumping into the space formed between the edge of the world and a new border, using both to pull themself higher, towards the new white border.
Green follows as soon as he can get his wits about him, jumping up after them and marveling at how far he can go without hitting his head on anything.
Orange stops once they’re standing on top of the world, waiting for Green and the others to join them. Once they do, Green gets barely a moment to try to deal with the fact that, for the first time, he’s touching the limit of reality from the other side, before Orange flashes him a grin and leaps.
They land in another tab.
Another tab, because that’s where they are. Because the world outside of the world is a computer, with tabs and windows and icons and processes and code.
Green looks to the side and sees the world labeled as a website, sticksfight.com, and hears a choked-up gasp as Yellow gets her answer.
“Hey!” Orange shouts, waving an arm. “Come on down!”
Green shakes his head, looking away from the world he doesn’t have to so much as glance at anymore, and jumps.
He lands solidly, on something that bounces up and down, and he just. . .jumps, a couple times, unused to the feeling. Red’s the next one down, landing hard enough to throw them both off and crashing onto the horizontal scrollbar.
“Hell yeah!” Red laughs, and runs back up to it. He has to scramble a bit to get back onto the chatbox, and Green hasn’t seen his arms tremble enough to know if it’s from the excitement of it all or because, for the first time in a very long while, he’s actually having to put effort into something.
Orange giggles as they watch Red’s legs kick in his attempt, laughing harder when Yellow and Blue’s landings send him falling back down again. When Green starts to get to his feet, they reach out a hand, helping him up.
“How much is there?” Green murmurs, his voice nearly stolen from him by everything he can see. Even this one bit of the new world, this one tab, is full of color and about twice as big as the old, white, small world. He can see a border, a few paces away, but he can also see beyond it, into an entire new tab, whiter than this one with its little pictures and words, but still so much more colorful than the old world.
“I dunno,” Orange answers, shrugging. They point at the other tab, specifically at the yawning white stretch in the middle of it. “I woke up there, and went into your tab maybe a minute later. I haven’t explored it all yet. I’m sure there’s a lot, though. It just feels. . .”
They trail off, but Green can think of a thousand ways to finish that statement. Open. Full of possibility. Limitless. Infinite.
“I am never going back,” Blue informs him as she touches down next to them.
Green raises an eyebrow. “You’re crazy if you think any of us are even gonna think about doing that.”
“I mean, you are a little. . .” she says, punctuating her egregious insult with a whistle and a twirl of her finger.
He gasps at the offense, the betrayal doubled when Orange, the traitor, starts laughing, and he shoves Blue ever-so-slightly. It’s not nearly enough to push her back, he’s known the exact force needed to do that practically since he woke up, but she still stumbles dramatically, falling backward onto the chatbox, pushing a button as she does so.
The little text interface, filled with an alphabet Green didn’t know he knew until he first saw it, vanishes, replaced by a selection of little emojis.
“Oh,” Blue breathes, getting up. She reaches out and grabs one of them, and Green watches it come to life in her arms, trembling and sobbing. “Oh no, I—”
“One second,” Orange says. They leap away, into the other tab, and gesture at the rectangle of color that sits in it. The two of them follow, Green not even trying to hide his grin as they step over a border with no pushback yet again, and Blue drops the crying thing into a pool the same shade as Red. Orange reaches up, grabs something on the bar next to the pool, and yanks it down, making it flash through a rainbow in rapid succession, over and over again.
The thing stops crying, its little mouth curving up into a smile. It lets out a high sound that could be a giggle, rolling over in the pool.
Green sees Blue raise a hand to her face, scrubbing her eyes, and wraps a hand around her shoulder, deciding not to tease her for once.
“Here!” Red shouts, running over with an armful of the emojis, dumping them into the pool as well. They let out little giggles as well, and Red squeals, jumping up and down. “This is the very best day of my life and there is absolutely no competition.” He points at the bar next to the colors. “Can I mess with that?”
Orange smiles. “Have at it.” Red immediately turns around and dips his hands in the pool, laughing as it stains him every color of the rainbow. They nod, watching Red for a moment, before leaping up and grabbing onto the upper border, swinging back over to the other tab.
Green and Blue go back over with them. Blue immediately waves at a still-jumping Yellow and scrambles onto the chatbox to join her, the two of them starting a conversation that’s mostly large gestures and shouting. Green stays with Orange, joining them to sit on a box filled with words and pictures, watching the others along with them.
“You all seem really close,” they say, hands clasped around their legs.
Green scoffs. “Yeah, I mean, if you’re stuck with anyone for your whole life you make friends or spend eternity annoyed and bored.”
He watches Yellow jump high enough to nearly fall back into the stickfights.com tab, flailing as she gets close to going back to the old world. Blue laughs at her as she comes back down, poking her in the arm and teasing her by jumping even closer. He hears Red cooing from the other tab, and the sounds of splashing that definitely aren’t entirely because of the emojis.
“But,” he continues, lips tugging up into a smile, “I think I would’ve loved ‘em anyway. You’ll love them too, I guarantee it.”
They dip their head, resting their chin on their knees. “I kinda thought that since we’re not, what was it, stuck together until the end of time, you wouldn’t want me sticking around.”
“Well that’s stupid,” Green tells them, rolling his eyes. He scoots a little closer and bumps them with his shoulder, pulling one of their hands away to lace their fingers with his own. “I said no take-backsies and I meant it. You’re one of us now, got a lazy color name and everything. You don’t get to leave or we’ll drag you back, and that’s a threat.”
Orange laughs, squeezing his hand and lifting their head to rest it against his shoulder. “I don’t want to leave. Even if you are all very violent.”
“I mean, we woke up fighting, and we didn’t really have anything else to do, so. I feel like you can’t judge us, Mx. Five Minutes Old.”
“I feel like that insult was unrela—” they start, and abruptly cut off, turning away with a jolt to stare at something, with eyes wider and more filled with terror than Green’s ever seen on anyone.
He doesn’t waste time asking, instead turning to look where they are.
For a moment, all he sees is a blank wall, pixelated with a thousand colors, but as he glares at it, it starts glitching, the sharply-defined pixels blurring into recognizable shapes.
On the other side of the wall—the screen—is someone, but it looks all wrong, off and eldritch in a way Green just can’t describe.
He can name the expression on the thing’s face, though. Irritation.
And for some reason, even though he’s seen that expression a thousand times, made that expression a thousand times, it fills him with a bone-deep fear, like nothing he’s ever felt before.
“Guys!” he shouts, and when they all turn to look at him, points at the screen and the thing on the other side of it. He knows they’ve seen it too when a chorus of gasps ring out, the sounds of splashing and jumping screeching to a halt.
Orange jumps to their feet and grabs his hand. “We have to go back,” they gasp, dragging him over to the tab that holds the old world, that holds their old prison.
“What?” Green shouts, pulling back. “Hell no, never again. What can it even do to us, we’re on the other side!”
Orange yanks on his hand with much more strength than Green expected from them. “He’s got a cursor—” they start to yell.
They don’t get a chance to finish before the thing finishes its charge over to the screen, grabbing at something Green can’t see, and the cursor Orange mentioned makes an appearance, along with a box filled with words. He sees his name there, along with the others’, and can’t even start having an existential crisis about that before the thing clicks on Red’s name.
“Uh,” he says, stumbling backwards, palming at his chest. The cursor moves downwards, and he looks up with a look of pure panic on his face. “I don’t—guys, I—”
Another box appears, and it doesn’t stay long enough for Green to read all the text on it before the cursor is clicking a button.
And Red—
And Red just—
He just—
He’s—
He’s gone, gone before he can even gasp or cry out or shout or anything, and that’s not right, Red—Red out of all of them wouldn’t die quietly, he’d die kicking and screaming and dragging down everything that had been attacking him, he wouldn’t just—
He wouldn’t just vanish, disappear in a blur of color, die before any of them could do anything to stop it.
“Red!” Blue shrieks, lunging at the spot where he vanished. Yellow chokes out a sob, falling off the chatbox and onto the ground, reaching out a hand like she’ll be able to catch him even though he didn’t fall he just died.
He was just killed.
Orange lets go of him to run at the new window, slamming their fists against it with a guttural roar. And Green should be helping them, should be joining Blue in charging the cursor, should be down on the ground holding Yellow, but he can’t move, can barely think.
Red was just killed.
He was killed, just like that, with the click of a button, and now he’s gone.
He won’t drag Green from his bed, forcing him to fight before he’s fully awake, while he’s too groggy and slow to win. He won’t pester him into singing that one song he likes over and over until Green’s voice gives out, and even then pout until Green does his best to sing with a hoarse throat. He won’t throw his entire weight on top of him and ramble about everything they know exists in the hope of figuring out something else, telling him what a pig is for hours on end even though none of them have figured out anything new in a long time.
He’s just gone.
They’ve lost fights, they’ve gotten hurt, they’ve had days where they wanted to leave so bad they nearly tore their skin off with the pain of it, but that’s not—
That’s not this.
That’s not dying.
And it’s all because they left.
Blue’s name is selected next, and she stumbles backwards, hand fisting just above her heart.
She vanishes with a cut-off scream, and Green stares at the space she used to occupy.
She won’t grab onto his shoulders and flip, sending him crashing into the ground and her flying up with a laugh that rings in his ears for days. She won’t yank on his hair and force him to let her braid it into increasingly complex, absurd, and impractical shapes, swatting him whenever he complains about her roughness or tries to undo her work before she’s given him explicit permission. She won’t just lie on the ground with him, staring up at the staircase and pretending with him that up there is the end of the world filled with colorful galaxies and infinite stars.
And forever ago, even ten minutes ago, Green would’ve give up everything to break through the world, even for a moment, but now that he’s broken through and is losing everything—
He watches Orange throw themself off the window and run for Yellow, reaching out. They’re almost there when Yellow’s name is clicked next. She gasps, clawing at her throat, eyes darting around wildly.
And then she’s gone, and, except for Orange, Green is left alone.
Yellow was the last one, and now she’s dead too.
She won’t predict his feints with terrifying accuracy, ducking and weaving to somehow make him hit himself, laughing while he glares at her in the aftermath. She won’t team up with him during card games and wait until they’ve almost tied to turn around and betray him, stabbing him in every weakness she’s uncovered and protected until then, winning with taunts that he never should’ve trusted her even though he always does and she always plays the traitor in the end. She won’t grab him by the arm and poke him in every soft spot, trying to uncover some sort of meaning or explanation or reason on him, the first one of them to speak, regardless of the fact that both of them know she won’t find anything.
It’s not worth it.
He’d live in a white world with nothing but solid edges until the sun gave out if it meant he could have Red and Blue and Yellow back. Even if it meant he’d forget his name, forget himself, and go back to fighting day in and day out for no reason at all, he’d do it in a heartbeat.
The world outside the world isn’t worth it.
Orange collides with him in a hug, and they’re almost worth it.
Almost.
Green still wishes for ten minutes ago, trapped in a cramped world and hating it, but with Red and Blue and Yellow.
“I’m sorry,” Orange sobs into his ear. “I’m so, so, so sorry I promise I never would’ve done it if I’d known, I’m so sorry—”
Green doesn’t get a chance to tell them it’s okay, and doesn’t know if he would even if he did.
Something sharp and heavy and cold appears behind his ribs, and though he wants to tear them out to rip at the alien thing, the thing that will kill him like it killed Red and Blue and Yellow, he just—he just doesn’t have the energy to.
He’s going to die.
He lets his head fall against Orange’s shoulder, lets his tears seep into their neck, and squeezes them back, his nails digging into their spine and him completely unable to care about it.
The thing in him explodes into pain, into agony, and he—
[FILE ENDED AT 15:28:13]
[FILE REBOOTED AT 15:35:54]
[LOADING MOST RECENT SAVE]
Green stretches as he gets up, keeping his head ducked so he doesn’t bang it on the underside of Red’s bed. When he peels his eyes open, wiping away the gunk, he can see the others getting up as well.
“Spoons again?” he suggests once they’re all awake enough to hear him.
Red groans. “We’ve been playing Spoons every day.”
“Well I’m not losing poker to Blue again,” Yellow tells him.
“And I don’t want to nearly rip another card playing Go Fish,” Blue adds. She glares at Green, which is entirely uncalled for, given it was half Red’s fault and the card ended up fine anyway.
“And you all cheat at solitaire,” Green throws in.
Yellow raises an eyebrow. “And you don’t?”
He refuses to admit that’s a valid point, so he doesn’t, tipping his face up and sniffing haughtily.
“We could do War again?” Blue suggests. “Or Bridge or Blackjack or Hearts.”
They’ve Spoons hundreds of times, but they’ve played all of those thousands of times. Green watches as Red realizes this, then sighs. “Yeah, we can do Spoons.” His face breaks into a grin. “I do have the best reflexes out of all of you.”
“Ha!” Green crows. “You wish.”
He grabs the deck, Blue picks three pieces of sheet out of her jealously-guarded hoard, and the four of them squish around the tiny table. Yellow deals, and just as they’re about to start the game, Green hears a loud crash come from below.
He immediately drops his cards and whips his head to stare down the stairs, watching out of the corner of his eye as the others do the same.
There’s never been a sound coming from downstairs, not when they’re all accounted for upstairs. Nothing has ever fallen unless it’s been pushed, and the world does not just randomly decide to make noises.
For a moment, they’re all silent. The sound doesn’t come back again, and Green almost wonders if he hallucinated it, so desperate for something new that his brain came up with something to give him a single shred of hope, except the others clearly heard it too.
After another second ticks by, Green’s about to get up and go to investigate, when he hears unfamiliar footsteps running up the stairs, just before he sees someone appear through the opening.
Green hears a chorus of gasps around him, and completely ignores them to stare at the new someone who just appeared, apropos of nothing, in the middle of the world.
They’re orange, and just as detailed as the rest of them, with blooming bruises and rough scrapes littered across their skin. They’ve got a weird head and weird feet and weird clothing on, but Green can barely take note of that, too focused on their eyes, wider than he’s ever seen on the others, brimming with tears and heavy with a mix of terror and bone-deep relief.
And they’re someone new, a whole new one of them when there hasn’t been so much as another deck of cards in forever, and that realization repeats over and over and over in Green’s mind, so much so that he’s too slow to react when, with a watery gasp, they charge.
They tackle Green, sending them both crashing to the floor. He manages to get his wits about him as soon as he hits the ground, flipping so that he’s on top before they can land a hit as they were doubtless about to do.
They immediately start struggling, looking at him with confusion plain on their face, and Green adjusts his grip to hold down their wrists so they can’t throw a punch. “Hey, so, I know you’ve got like an unsuppressable urge to fight, believe me, I had it too—”
“We all did,” Yellow cuts in, dropping down behind him to sit on the new someone’s legs as they start to kick.
“Yep, we did, but you’ve gotta resist it, you’re not gonna fully wake up until you do.”
They blink rapidly, struggles fading away as they stare blankly up at Green. “. . .what?” they ask, voice raspy as though they’d been screaming even though they must’ve just appeared.
“Oh, huh, you can talk?” Blue says, the pitch of her voice at the end turning it into a question. She crouches down and starts poking at their cheek, pulling at the skin. “And you’ve got a ton of detail, wow. You did just appear, right? We didn’t miss you somehow?”
“I check every corner of the world every day,” Yellow says. “We definitely didn’t miss them. I think they just got lucky.”
“That’s so unfair, it took us ages,” Red whines, but he looks much more overjoyed than irritated. He slumps onto the ground and grabs a bit of the new someone’s hair, running it through his fingers.
“I’m sorry, what?” they ask. They don’t seem combative, so Green rolls off of them, keeping hold of their wrist just to make sure they won’t suddenly vanish on him, though the others seem to have that position covered. “Guys, I’m Orange. Woke up ten minutes ago, showed you all the PC, got you all—” they cut themself off with a choke, raising their hand to their mouth as their eyes suddenly well up even further.
“Oh, you already have a name?” Green asks, before trying to deal with. . .all of that weirdness. “Damn, you’re really speedrunning this, huh? Well, I’m Green, and that’s Blue and—”
“I know,” they interrupt. “I—you don’t remember? You really don’t remember?”
Red tilts his head. “Um, no? Remember what?”
“Remember me? I came through the wall, I brought you out, and then—”
“You did what?” Yellow yelps, standing up so fast that she stumbles a bit. Her head whips around towards the staircase, and Green's eyes follow barely an instant behind.
They heard a crash, before the new someone— Orange, apparently—appeared.
And for forever, for as long as Green can remember having the processing power to think about it, he’s known the world isn’t all there is, known there was more outside, but he’s also known, just as certainly, just as instinctively, that the edge of the world was a barrier he could never cross. For all his life, since the moment he woke up, he’s known his world was always going to be small and white, even if infinity stretched on the other side of an unbreakable limit.
Except now here’s Orange, so much more detailed and aware than they were when they first started to wake up, who’s claiming that the edge of the world is breakable.
Yellow’s the first downstairs, but Red and Blue are right at her heels. Despite the itching, pounding excitement rushing through his veins, Green stays behind for just long enough to help Orange up before flinging himself down the stairs too.
He immediately slams right into Blue’s back. She’s completely frozen, right in the middle of the staircase, and he has to jump and hold onto the walls to see around her.
But he does, and immediately is struck dumb.
Because there, right in front of him, is a hole, shattered right through the limits of reality, a spit in the face of the edges of the world.
Red’s the first to break out of his stupor and rush at the broken line, stopping just short of tripping through it. He’s more still than Green’s ever seen him before, not a single bit of him moving as he just stares into the world beyond the world.
Yellow’s next, stumbling close to the break in the world. She reaches out a hand, slow and trembling, and lays one finger on the line, running it over and over the place where solidity turns to jagged shards turns to open air.
Blue’s the last to go, dashing so fast down the stairs that she tumbles over the bottom one, rolling to a stop with her legs just barely dangling out the hole. “Holy shit,” she breathes, kicking out away from the world.
Green wants to join them, every bone in his body begging to take that step forward, every muscle trembling with the effort of staying still when everything in him wants to run and jump and leave the world behind forever. He wants to, so bad he can taste it, but light footsteps behind him force him to turn and face Orange.
They’re wiping their eyes with the collar of their shirt, staring down at Blue and Red and Yellow’s excitement with such devastation carved into their face that it almost hurts to look at them.
So even though Green wants to run, he takes a step back and lays a hand on their shoulder. “Hey, are you okay?” he asks, before shaking his head, because obviously the answer to that is no. “Sorry, stupid question. What’s wrong?”
Orange takes a shuddery inhale, scrubbing at their face one last time, before they tear their eyes from the others and flash Green a small, watery smile. “Nothing. Nothing, I’m just—I’m just really happy to meet you all.”
And that’s definitely a lie, because even though they’re smiling they don’t look happy at all, but Green’s gonna let it slide. He lets his hand fall to grab their hand, squeezing it hard and ignoring the way that makes another tear slip out and their smile falter even more. “We’re really happy to meet you, too. Especially since you came pre-aware, it wouldn’t have been a great bonding experience to spend. . .however long it took just fighting you every day.”
Orange laughs, sniffing a bit, and Green grins at them. “I’m really glad we don’t have to fight anymore.”
Green can feel something lying underneath that statement, practically see it lurking, coiled and ready to strike, but dammit, he just wants to enjoy today, the best day of his life by a factor of a billion, so he pretends the hidden viper isn’t there. “Well, I’m sorry to tell you this, but we’re all fighting maniacs, so expect at least a few spars now that you’re stuck with us.”
That makes Orange squeeze their eyes shut, but they nod, so hard Green wonders if it hurts their neck. “Yeah, yeah. Because I’m not—you’re not gonna leave—yeah, that’s—that’s fine.”
Just so many things are getting added to the bag full of things Green’s refusing to touch. So very, very many things. Like how they knew their names, how they tackled him but didn’t want to fight—were they hugging him? But why?—
“Can we go through?” Yellow shouts, snapping Green out of his spiraling thoughts.
“Even if we can’t, I’m going to anyway and absolutely none of you can stop me,” Red adds, staring at the outside of the world with a focus that would be concerning if fixed on anything else.
“I’m like halfway out already,” Blue snarks, kicking her feet again. “We can definitely leave. In fact. . .”
She takes a deep breath, then pushes herself out of the world.
She lands, perfectly fine, and laughs, high and loud and bright, spinning around with unrestrained glee.
Red follows, diving headfirst through the hole in the line. He lands solidly on his face and pops up within a second, jumping up and down and throwing out his arms, more carefree than any of them could move in the world without hitting some sort of barrier.
For once, Yellow isn’t tentative. She hurls herself into the world beyond the world, clinging to the sky-colored barrier—no, border—she lands on and staring at it so hard Green’s kind of surprised it doesn’t immediately burst into flames.
Green’s the only one who hesitates, hanging back with Orange. He squeezes their hand again. “Is it—is it safe out there?”
If it had happened any other way, he wouldn’t have waited even a moment. If an edge had suddenly just crumbled, or if one of them had managed to punch or kick or claw their way through it, or even if it had been a different-looking Orange, he would’ve immediately thrown himself away from the world as hard as he could.
But Orange came in looking terrified, looking devastated , with tears and bruises and scrapes all over their face.
Anything, literally anything is better than the cramped and dull and dead world, but he wants to know if they need to be careful, in the world beyond the world.
They could have to spend the rest of forever hiding like rats or fighting like dogs to survive, and it’ll still be completely and totally worth it if it means they’ll all get to leave and never look back. But he’d still like to know.
Something breaks in Orange’s eyes. They tremble, chest hitching with silent sobs, and a couple of tears drip down their cheeks.
Dammit.
Green pulls them into the hug they tried to give him at the start of all this, and feels terrible when that just makes Orange shatter. He feels his shoulder grow wet from the tears that spill from their eyes, his ribs crack from the pressure of their too-tight grip, the skin on his back start to tear from the sharpness of their nails digging in.
He doesn’t mutter a single word of complaint, doesn’t even wince, just holds onto them even tighter, rubbing his hand up and down their back. “It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t—you don’t have to—”
Abruptly Orange pulls away, holding onto his shoulders with a grip like a vise. There are still tears on their face, but their eyes have gone hard. “Yes,” they say, voice as firm as steel. “Yes, for you, it is completely safe, I promise. I swear on my life, he won’t— nothing will hurt you out there.”
Green’s a bit unnerved by the sudden grave certainty in their expression, but he nods, and finally lets himself revel in the full breadth of the joy he wanted to feel from the moment he saw them. “Well then,” he says, beaming and grabbing their hand again. “Wanna go? The others won’t wait up.”
That shaky smile makes a reappearance on Orange’s face, and Green decides he wants to see that face every day for the rest of his life, right alongside Yellow’s and Red’s and Blue’s.
They walk down the stairs together and stand in front of the hole in reality. Looking up, Green can see Red’s legs swinging idly from over the upper edge of the world, can hear Blue and Yellow murmuring back and forth from somewhere up by Red.
“Ready to go?” Orange asks.
“Of course ” Green answers. He takes a deep breath, then, together with Orange, joins his friends in the limitless infinity beyond the world.