From: @pomegranate-belle
The point of view ended up hopping around a lot while I wrote – wait is that a rabbit pun? – but I’ve got them labeled. Fingers crossed I got all the route details right. Hope you enjoy it, and Merry Christmas!
The final result flashed up under Alice’s name. Betray. Everyone looked down at their own bracelets, not quite able to comprehend what had just happened. Then Sigma stumbled, and collapsed onto the floor in a heap.
[Phi]
“Sigma!” Phi shouted, her face suddenly as white as her hair. “Sigma! Hang on!”
Her hands twitched and flexed. She wanted to run, wanted to find a way to fix—but there was nothing, and she would have to watch him die this time. She would have to— The urge to jump away was strong, but she couldn’t, couldn’t just…
She couldn’t leave him.
[Clover]
“Oh no! Sigma!” Clover gasped out. “Get up!”
If he could get up, they could get him to the infirmary, and… And… He couldn’t die, it wasn’t fair! It wasn’t— The thought of her brother dying, of thinking he had died, rattled in her skull and shot like ice down her spine. They had all made it so far, without dying. Even with the bombs looming over their heads, still…
The warehouse was like an echo chamber, everyone calling Sigma’s name. And then there was Luna with her hands clasped in something like a prayer. Her expression was devastated.
“No…” she murmured. “Why…?”
As he lay on the floor, Sigma’s head lolled to the side, and his eyes fluttered open.
“Al…ice…” he murmured, almost too low to hear.
Clover’s head shot up. And there, in the doorway of the second AB Room from the left, was…
It looked like Alice, but… Clover wasn’t so sure. Because the expression she wore was… It was just…
Sigma’s bracelet clattered to the floor.
[K – Akane]
Akane took a deep breath through the nose, flexing her fingers inside Kyle’s metal suit. Closer. He had gotten closer, at least. His mistake had been… Picking Ally in the first round. Yes. She was sure that had been the cause. But the river of her new Nonary game was so complex. He was closer than he had been, that was the point. He could try again. He would try again. But for this timeline… Akane tipped her head back and closed her eyes, seeing a vast explosion against the backdrop of her eyelids. Yes, of course.
And all around her, little more than background noise to the horrible symphony of time, the others were reacting. Sigma was dead, the story was over. But no one else knew that. No one but Luna, who was nonetheless fluttering through the beginning stages of human grief anyway.
[Luna]
“My fault,” Luna said softly as she stared down at Sigma – or rather, the body of Dr. Klim. “It was my fault, I… I should have known, I…”
The redhead covered her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Sigma…”
She’d known only what she was supposed to. Even if Ms. Kurashiki had known about this outcome, she wouldn’t have told Luna anything of it. And yet, and yet… She was stuck in the wrong timeline. The wrong—
Somewhere out there in time and space was a Luna who would see a successful, casualty-free ending to the Nonary Game. But it would not be her. Luna pressed calm into her features and opened her eyes. There was nothing more she could do. Her part in the game was over. She could only watch as Phi knelt down, gathered Dr. Klim’s upper body into her arms and laid his head on her lap.
[Clover]
Clover searched Alice’s face, desperate for any sign of her mentor.
“You killed him!” Phi shouted. “What the hell is wrong with you, you killed him!”
She wouldn’t let go of Sigma’s body, not even as Luna and K tried to lift him from her arms and off the floor. Alice just stared at them all with dead eyes, swaying on her feet. A noticeable shudder rippled down her spine, but she didn’t answer Phi’s accusations. Just stood there, brow slightly furrowed, as if the world was a dream she couldn’t quite make sense of.
“Alice,” Clover said, voice thick.
She reached out a hand, not even sure what she meant to do with it – soothe, or accuse? Sigma was dead. They could all see it. He was unnaturally still, skin pallid, his grey hair lying across Phi’s lap in a sickly halo. Even when her eyes were trained on Alice, Clover couldn’t find a way to be unaware of his…
His corpse.
“I,” said Alice at last.
And then she broke into a run.
Dio dodged for the [9] door, but Alice’s feet carried her past it and through the Cyan door instead. Phi was still kneeling on the steel floor, trembling. No one seemed to be able to think of anything to say. The silence echoed in Clover’s ears, an endless ringing.
How, how had…? How had this…?
“We should,” said Luna in a deceptively calm voice for the way she was twisting her fingers, “take him to the Infirmary. We can’t just leave him here.”
K and Dio hefted him off Phi’s lap and seemed to have things well in hand, but she wedged her shoulder under his torso and helped anyways.
[Luna]
When they reached the infirmary, Quark was still unconscious, with Tenmyouji next to him, stroking his hair. But when he saw their burden, he leapt to his feet.
“Is it radical-6?” he demanded. “We don’t have any antidote left…!”
No one answered him. His gaze immediately fell to Clover. She met his eyes for a second, and shook her head. It was then that Tenmyouji seemed to notice Sigma’s bare left wrist.
“No!” he shouted, an instinctive exclamation, an instinctive denial.
“Alice, she,” Clover tried to explain.
“His BP,” continued Luna when the pink-haired girl faltered. “It… It dropped below zero.”
Tenmyouji’s face hardened. Anger filled every line of his old face, but Luna could still make out a flicker of guilt in his eyes.
“Where’s Alice?” he all but spat.
No one answered him.
“Where is she?!”
Again, there was no response. Tenmyouji picked up a tray of medical supplies and flung it across the room where it buried into one of the large screens. Many of the others in the group flinched back, but Luna had seen from the start that the trajectory of his throw would not come near anyone human… The living or the dead.
“I told her about, I told her everything! I told her the vote was still going on!” Tenmyouji shouted, and though his eyes were narrowed in anger, Luna could still see the telltale glisten of tears unshed.
Dio and K settled Dr. Klim’s body onto one of the infirmary beds. Not, Luna noticed, the one Alice had been lying on. Then Dio straightened up and gestured back over his shoulder with a thumb.
“I’m gonna go back and guard the [9] door,” he said. “Alice could get out anytime with that bracelet of hers. She might double back to fuck us all over while we’re in mourning.”
No one protested his leaving, and he vanished out the door quickly. But the suddenness of Dio’s comment had at least broken up the tension in Tenmyouji’s shoulders, even if his eyes still spoke of anger and regret.
“What now?” he asked, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
[Clover]
“We have to keep playing,” said Clover quietly. “Don’t we?”
“And the bombs,” added K. “They are still…”
Clover nodded, hugging herself as a sudden chill overtook her. The bombs… It had to be, the Myrmidons. It had to be. So, that meant one of the other players was her enemy. But who? She’d been trying to puzzle it out before, but hadn’t made much progress.
She needed to find Alice. No matter what, that would definitely… They still needed to stick together. Alice could help. She had to. And so, Clover set off alone into the twists and turns of the building, looking for Alice.
It took her half an hour of their allotted eighty minutes. But, at last, there was Alice sitting on a bench in the B. Garden.
“Alice,” she said quietly, approaching the wooden bench but not sitting down on it.
It was a strange feeling, to be taller than Alice. To look down at her, she suddenly seemed… Frail. And then Alice looked up, dazed, a little lost. And yet… Determined.
“He was supposed to pick Betray, he… I knew he would pick…”
But Clover didn’t believe her. And maybe Alice saw that on her protégé’s face, because her expression turned intense and pleading. She grabbed Clover’s cold hands in hers, and warmed them gently – a calming tactic that had been standard for the two of them nearly their entire partnership.
“I’ll get out of here,” Alice said. “I’ll get out and get help. For you, and for all the rest of them too.”
Clover opened her mouth, but then closed it and shook her head.
“I will, Clover, you can trust me! I’ve only done what I thought was right!”
Clover shook her head again.
“No,” she said. “We all get out. We have to. Those bombs…”
“We don’t have time to wait fifty minutes until the white doors open!” snapped Alice. “If I get out now, I can get help much faster!”
“And what if we’re in the middle of a desert, like last time?! If you leave me here, I might… I could…”
The hurt on Alice’s face was visceral. But not moreso than the fear curling in Clover’s gut. She would never see her brother again. If she died, he would never know what happened to her.
“Clover,” Alice tried again, but suddenly Clover didn’t feel like trying anymore.
So she just ran.
[Phi]
In the end, no one could agree on what to do. That was hardly shocking. Alice tried for the [9] doors. Twice. The second time, Clover was the one to stop her. Violently. That was, perhaps, a bit shocking given how close the two of them had seemed. But it didn’t matter. Not really.
For her part, Phi stayed quietly in the infirmary by Sigma’s side. Quark awoke during the confusion, and that was good for him, but… Sigma’s hand had gone waxy and cold, and somehow that seemed much more important. She sat there next to him and waited while time slipped past.
They could try again. She would save him. They would try again. They would fix it. They would fix everything. The two of them would make it out of the game alive. They would. She just had to try again.
Phi’s eyes closed just as the white of the explosion engulfed the warehouse.
And then she jumped.
ZEcret Santa 