#I wrote the majority of it pre-oay as yk. wish fulfillment and then never finished it until I was hit with inspiration at 2 am last night

[happi-tree]

pietà (in three days, i will rise)

Strong, familiar, gauntleted hands - they’re shaking, and they're reaching out to her.

“Sasha,” she tries to say, but something blocks her mouth, and she chokes on something viscous.

Or: Marcy Wu, between life and death, between the real and the unreal.

TW for dubious character death.

Marcy Wu is dead, except that, somehow, she isn’t.

By all accounts, she should be - she remembers the sharp and sudden numbness of the burning sword that cleaved her chest in two and broke her heart in more ways than one. Recalls the intense heat of its flames as it sliced through her armor like a hot knife through butter, boiling her blood and cauterizing the newly-torn hole in her chest - the warm yellow glow that exuded from it, casting her final moments in flickers of brilliant ochre - the sudden chill she felt when Andrias, once her friend, her confidant, her not-quite-f… drew it back out of her torso.

It had been so, so cold and she was so, so numb. The absolute certainty that she would die here, alone and newly friendless in a foreign world at the young age of thirteen, had halted her quickly-dimming mind from its endless pace. 

A mumbled apology, barely audible past the ringing in her ears, had slipped briefly through her lips, and the weight of it - not enough, not enough, how did you ever think you could be enough - had filled her bones with lead and sank her to the ground.

The cold-numb feeling remains, even now.

Marcy should be dead.

But then why does the cavity in her chest still send hot-cold pain through nerves that should no longer feel anything?

Why is it so dark? Why does she feel the sensation of suspension, why does every cell in a body she shouldn’t occupy whisper wait, something’s coming?

She is not dead, then. She knows this with the surety that Earth’s sun will rise each morning for at least 5.4 billion years more, though she knows not why or how. She is resting, static. Biding her time, perhaps, floating in this void, her own personal purgatory.

Alone, she waits, calling out to the unanswering blackness, filling it with her regrets and her shame and her memories for several long, infinitesimal eternities.

The void waits with her.

Nothing happens. 

A grating groan, echoing loudly through the nothingness, fills her ears. Something gives in, collapses close enough for her to feel a shockwave of sensation against her skin. 

The sound of rushing water follows. 

Marcy opens her eyes and immediately squeezes them shut again on instinct. She’s underwater somewhere - her eyes smart and sting like she had just tried to see through the chlorinated pool water from back home. 

The sensation of pruny fingertips tells her that she has been submerged for quite some time, but a dry itch is burning white-hot in her throat, hoarse or maybe parched. 

Something in front of her (glass?) fractures, fissures spreading, shattering, streams of pressurized water leaking from… wherever she is. A tank?

With a final shudder, the spiderwebbing cracks cave in, and suddenly Marcy’s body is so, so heavy. She opens her eyes again, blinking excess water from her lashes.

“Oh, thank frog, you’re alive,” comes a voice, feminine and slightly raspy and laced with exasperation and relief in equal measure, and Marcy recognizes it far before she makes sense of the girl before her.

When her vision returns, she sees eyes glowing magenta in the green-tinged low light, fading quickly to their normal brown. Cherry-blossom-pink hair returns to bottle blonde. 

Strong, familiar, gauntleted hands - they’re shaking, and they're reaching out to her.

“Sasha,” she tries to say, but something blocks her mouth, and she chokes on something viscous.

“Oh god, okay, hang on, Mar-mar, I’ve got you,” Sasha says, and Marcy feels tears tracing down her cold, waterlogged cheeks as Strength herself is brought to her knees over the prone, weak form of a friend.

Sasha’s hands, made sure and steady with military-grade urgency, make quick work of whatever is covering her mouth - some demented feeding tube, maybe, for once in her life she doesn’t really care about the details - and Marcy gags, coughing up glowing orange sludge. 

She looks up and can only stare in awe, still a bit breathless, as Sasha pulls dual swords from their sheathes at her sides in a smooth, practiced motion and decisively severs a series of tubes connecting Marcy to - she’s not going to think about that right now, because it’s Sasha and she came back for her.

Sasha, in a word, is relentless. She always had been that way, from the day they met. She’s perseverance personified, a battle cry in the form of a girl, and it shows now in the flash of her eyes and the furrow of her brows and the determined line of her mouth and the fluid, furious arcs of steel blue and rose gold. 

“You found me,” Marcy doesn’t realize she says it, but Sasha’s head turns sharply as the final tube falls to the wet floor, untethered.

“‘Course I did,” Sasha replies just as simply, just as dumbfounded, and to Marcy, it sounds like salvation. “You’re my friend. I’ve spent weeks looking for you! Feels like I’ve scouted out every single corner of this godforsaken place. Frog, I missed you so much.”

The tears haven’t stopped flowing down Marcy’s cheeks, saltwater joining the water staining her clothes, beading atop the broken glass, spilling onto the floor. 

Sasha steps past the shattered barrier of the tank once more and bends low, sweeping her up into a hug so fierce it lifts her off the ground for a moment. The embrace is cold - which makes sense, Marcy’s nerves are probably shot and this creepy room is downright frigid - and a little awkward between all the weird wires protruding from Marcy’s wetsuit and the cavity in her chest, but it’s solid and grounding, and it’s enough for both of them. 

She rests her head into the divot where Sasha’s neck joins her torso - an action so familiar (one borne of countless movie nights and sleepovers, one she wasn’t sure she would be able to live out again) that she nearly collapses, but that’s okay because Sasha supports her immediately. Marcy feels the rapid, certain staccato of her best friend’s pulse where her ear presses against the side of her neck, below her jawline, and every tireless thump seems to say I’m here, I’ve got you, I’m not going anywhere.

“Where are we?” Marcy asks after a while, and it comes out cracked and misshapen, her vocal chords scraping the inside of her throat, rusted with lack of use, and ow, maybe she should rest her voice. Sasha makes a shushing noise, rubbing small, comforting circles onto her shoulder blade.

“Andrias’ basement, or something.” She says it in that false-casual way she used to talk about school gossip, but Marcy hears the bitter venom underneath it.

Andrias?

When she looks up at her, eyes wide in alarm, Sasha reads her panic like an open book.

“Oh, don’t worry about him. That old newt has much more pressing matters to attend to right now.” The response to her unasked question is punctuated with a knowing smirk - the kind that spells trouble and mischief, the kind that makes a deadly scythe of her smile, the kind that skews to the right, wrinkling the scar Anne had left on her cheek - and Marcy knows that they’ll be alright. 

“Think you can stand, Marce?” asks Sasha. Marcy tries to get her feet under her and fails, her whole body feeling heavier than a bag of rocks. She shakes her head sheepishly.

“That’s okay,” her friend assures softly (her voice hasn’t gone that soft in quite some time, Marcy thinks, and she can scarcely believe that she was the reason for her tenderness). Just as gently, Sasha rearranges her arms - one under the backs of Marcy’s unsteady knees, one across her trembling shoulder blades, mindful of the tubing - and hoists her up effortlessly.

“Comfy?” she asks, and Marcy nods once against the chainmail of Sasha’s armor. It scratches at her cheek. 

“Good.” Marcy’s body is pale, cold, and impossibly heavy, and she rests as a marble statue in the arms of her beloved friend. 

A breathing corpse taken down from a cross of water and wires, complete with a gaping, mottled hole where a conquering centurion had probed between her ribs.

For a while, they just stand there, two bereft girls attempting to affix their raw edges to each other once more. Their heartbeats align, and the quietude is so complete that a static whine softens the edge of Marcy’s hearing. She moves slightly with the rhythmic rise and fall of Sasha’s chest, and for a shining moment, a warm dawn breaks in her heart, golden and shot through with copper. 

“Where do we go now?”

“To conquer the world, my Wit.”

Marcy’s comfort-hazy vision darts to the face of her childhood friend. 

There are too many eyes, and they glow an incandescent orange as they gaze with saccharine affection upon her. 

Marcy’s eyes are opened - not with the weariness of sleep, not of her own volition. 

And there are too many eyes, too many points of view to reconcile, and her sight is tinged with a film of sickening vermilion. 

And she cannot open her own mouth to scream as she had in that basement so long ago. 

#*kicks down the door* hello amphibia fandom! first fic I've ever posted for y'all so enjoy ig? #it's been. uh. a hot minute since I posted any fic 😅😅😅 #so. is this anything. #ashdhasdjasdhjsgdgs this has been sitting in my drafts for AGES #I wrote the majority of it pre-oay as yk. wish fulfillment and then never finished it until I was hit with inspiration at 2 am last night #you know how it is *shrugs* #anyway. not completely happy with this as a whole but I think I like some of the lines so! here it is #also. amphibia: *shows the trio going to catholic school* me (a queer who spent 13 yrs in catholic school): ah. I can work w this #happi scribbles #writing #fic #cartoons #amphibia #sasharcy #(kinda. it's up to interpretation bb) #marcy wu #sasha waybright #'long post' #tw death #skdhbfhsfsjs sorry if this is like. super disjointed lmao