Chapter Text
In the early hours of the next morning, Lapis woke up with the feeling that something was wrong despite the pain in her abdomen from her infected wounds dwindling down. She was almost afraid to open up her eyes, scared of what she would find when she acknowledged that she was awake. So she remained where she was for a little while, eyes closed, laying on her back with her numb and slightly sore arms cushioning her head because she gave all of them to Peridot in order to try and keep her comfortable and her breathing slow and calm as if she was trying to make it look like she was still asleep.
Eventually, though, she accepted that she couldn’t just stay still forever, and so - reluctantly, praying that she wouldn’t find anything bad - she sucked in a deep breath and blinked her eyes open. The room looked, for the most part, exactly as it had the many, many previous mornings she had spent in the cabin, and she didn’t know if that was a relief or just made the paranoia and terror of the moment even worse. Lapis just stared at the ceiling for a little while, trying to reassure herself that everything was fine, before she yawned and sat up.
She was surprised to find that the weight of Peridot was still next to her in the bed, but not really; she was pretty sick, but even so she was usually up and about by then, either in the kitchen or on the couch. Lapis’ brows furrowed, and she reached over in order to try and shake her girlfriend awake, not even really realizing that the rise and fall of her shoulders to signify her breathing was gone and she was more still than the older girl had ever seen her in the time they’d been together.
She knew, however, the moment she touched the cold and waxy skin of her soulmate’s shoulder that Peridot’s short life had come to a close. She had died, hopefully peacefully and painlessly, in her sleep from the plague.
She was dead, and Lapis was alone, and to add insult to injury, her recovery from her infection was still happening. She was still going to be alive for God knows how long.
Oddly enough, she couldn’t feel anything. Her heart was thudding quickly in her chest, and she knew that she should be sad, but… she was in shock.
The remaining teenager rolled over so that her feet hit the old wood of the bedroom floor and rose to her feet. She gently tucked the quilt more comfortably around Peridot’s cold shoulders, and left the room in an almost robotic fashion, making her way out of the cabin and into the woods without a clue of where she was going or what she was doing. She was, essentially, working on autopilot as she tried to work out what she was supposed to do with herself; she didn’t know what on Earth was going to happen to her now that she was alone in the world.
She wasn’t truly aware of her destination until she reached the beach.
Lapis stumbled closer to the water and sat in the sand, legs crossed in a lotus style and eyes trained on the tumbling waves of the ocean. She stayed as she was, her breathing slow and calm and her shock slowly wearing off - the numbness of the previous hour or so was gone, and she was struggling to breathe now, tears threatening to spill over at any moment, and she wasn’t entirely sure why she held them back. Maybe she wanted to show to whatever cruel god there was that she was strong.
Instead of breaking down in sobs, though, she came to realize that she was freezing, wearing nothing but the sundress she hadn’t been able to change out of in so long, her feet bare and beginning to sting from walking through the thin layer of snow for so long. She hoped that the cold would kill her; she didn’t want to be alone, she didn’t want to live in a world wear the brilliant and funny and overall good Peridot didn’t exist. She didn’t want to deal with this.
So she came to the decision that she wouldn’t. She wasn’t going to live like this. She didn’t care if suicide wasn’t a good way to go out - she only cared that she wouldn’t have to deal with the pain and loneliness that came with being alone in a barely populated world, and she cared that she would be able to find Peridot again as soon as she possibly could in their next life together. Lapis rose to her feet with a small sigh, forcing herself to turn away from the massive ocean and walk back into the trees.
As she reached the cabin once more, she had to force herself to walk back inside. She tried to figure out how she would do things as she went - doing something in the woods would probably be the easiest, but she wanted to die next to Peridot, not all alone amongst the trees. She had reached her conclusion before she even entered the house, and when she did, her first priority was to make a stop in the kitchen and grab a knife. Her nerves making her heart pound and her head dizzy, she walked back into the bedroom, swallowing dryly when she saw her girlfriend’s corpse in the bed again.
Lapis laid down beside her, grabbed onto her cold hand with her own free one. The teenager pretended, just for a moment, that she was still alive, that she intertwined her fingers and that her skin was as warm and soft as it had been for the time they’d had together. She closed her eyes, steeled her courage, positioned the knife above her chest, slowed her breathing down and tried her hardest not to be afraid and to imagine whatever they would have next.
She drove the blade of the knife into her ribs, immediately feeling something in her chest be pierced, hopefully her heart. Breathing suddenly became more difficult through the pain, and she couldn’t help but feel fear as blood bubbled up in her throat, which she coughed up. Mercifully, her consciousness began to fade as she whimpered in pain, and with blurring vision, she turned her head to look over at Peridot’s face - she looked so peaceful and painless, like she was just asleep. Just the idea of being calm and safe like that, with her girlfriend happy and healthy at her side, was enough to calm Lapis down and allow her to close her eyes and drift into nothingness.
As time went by, the planet recovered. New life bloomed. Plants grew, pollution cleared, cities crumbled. The planet flourished, and eventually new creatures began to emerge and evolve from what remained, similar to the figures from the fairytales that humans told one another before they were eliminated. The Earth became new, very similar but nearly unrecognizable from what it had been hundreds of thousands of years before. Kingdoms popped up. Politics formed. The Earth seemed doomed to live the same events over and over until the sun became red.
A million years after the deaths of the humans Robyn Larissa Lazuli and Peridot, a nymph was born to the queen, and shortly after her, a hybrid was created to become a sorceress.
When they were fifteen and sixteen, they met in a garden behind a rose bush, and the young lovers were reunited.