A/N: the result of a dare from two annoying little brothers. shut up. written last year.
The strange thing about being underwater is how much faster sound seems to travel, if you have the right ears, and are listening.
Groans and moans and nasty, haunting noises are swept up with the current and drawn throughout the entire ocean, penetrating even the thick glass of the Tree Dome. It's the only safe haven now; everything else has fallen. Gone, and the remains of Bikini Bottom are left floating in the waves as masses of debris and drift wood. Do they know what they've done, those humans on the surface? Do they realize that their pollution and poisons and nasty toxins have destroyed an entire civilization, no matter how primitive?
Do they realize that they've destroyed his entire life?
He huddles within the tree that grows in the Dome, underneath a thin blanket, and listens to the argumentative voices that fight in the other room. Squidward and Krabs at it again, as usual. Arguing over when and how to get supplies, over security measures, over everything under the sea. They argue like they never have before, and the violent sounds mingle with the moans of the drifters.
As he lies there, listening with a silence so uncommon to the yellow-squared creature, he attempts to close his eyes, and fall asleep. Where dreams will take him out of this marine nightmare, where he can go back to times when he'd work at the Krusty Krab, and run in the fields with a laugh and without a care, where he'd drive his neighbor absolutely insane and play the silliest of games with Pa…
Spongebob's eyes snap open at that, and he stops that train of thought before it can go any further. Before he can remember his name.
The curtain to the small bedroom snaps open and he jumps unwittingly, almost comically; its Squidward in the doorway and his usual scowl is in place. "Get up," he says sourly; the detestation he holds for the other sea creature is visible in the vertical red pupils of his eyes, narrowed and hostile. "It's time to head out."
That's right. Spongebob remembers what day it is now. It's time to head out of the shelter of the Tree Dome and go into the city to scavenge for supplies. Something in the back of the sponge's mind stiffens, and thus his entire body goes rigid. This will be the first time any of them had gone out since she died.
There's a picture on the dresser, a squirrel with a flower in her hair and a smile on her face. It was the one thing they hadn't bothered to clear out of the room when they made room for supplies. He is grateful for that. This way he won't forget her smile.
It isn't very often that they go out. It's risk enough going out only a few inches to make sure they have enough water to keep their helmets filled. So, stepping from withered grass to soft, shifting sand of his homeland is eerie. Familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
Spongebob thinks they both would've been proud of him. He thinks he can hear his idiotic but meaningful cheers, and her encouraging shouts.
Squidward leads, with a machete and a map (they need a map to find their way around the town, that shows just how long it's been since they went into town). Krabs is directly behind him, with a tire iron and some old army hat from the navy over his shelled head. And Spongebob is last, with a bat in his thin, scrawny fingers, bright blue eyes darting about for any drifters that come to close.
They encounter their first one of the trip just as they entered the litter-strewn streets of Bikini Bottom. It's a blue fish, with once adorning navy straps and tattered brown pants hanging from its scales. Its salty flesh now hangs off its thin bones in tatters waving in the current, it has teeth that shouldn't belong to any living sea creature, and its eyes are completely black, with molten pupils. The constant open position of its jaws make it seem as if the drifter holds an eternal grin, and just as Spongebob screams, Squidward cuts off its head with a grunt and look of indifference.
They continue on.
They hit a dozen houses and fill their backpacks with food, weapons, supplies. They walk into homes and see TV's still fizzling with static, snails starving and driven mad, worms that lunge from closets bearing their fangs. Pets driven to madness after the death and turnings of their masters. Spongebob is forced to kill a snail that tries to rip into his chest. He tries not to think of months before, holding Gary in his arms as the small creature meows painfully at the gaping hole in his gut.
Spongebob tries not to think of it, but it's hard not to. He sniffles, and moves on with the others.
Their last stop is the Krusty Krab. The roof is gone and the glass walls smashed in. It's really just a skeleton of a building, and looks rather similar to the oldest, skeletal drifters from the beginning days of the Turn. Krabs spends five minutes running a claw over the rusted, empty little machine that sits in the front boat.
And then he turns away, and doesn't look back.
There used to be an old controversy that the humans on the surface still ponder, and that is whether time moves differently when you are underwater. Its sometimes slower, sometimes faster – its why some fossils found deep in the ocean are still intact. At this point in time, Spongebob has never believed that more. It's all so fast, a blur, lost in the wave of shock that came when the school of drifters came through the back door, seeming to fly above the ground instead of walking as a life fish does. Spongebob screams once more, but this time, so do the others.
Krabs is first. If only he hadn't gone back for one last longing touch along the cash register; if only he'd said no to the old temptation. Maybe there wouldn't have been the sickening CRACK of his shell being bit into as if it were flesh instead of a crustaceans armor. The scream that is ripped from the crab's throat is the worst sound, along with the smashing and crunching as the ravenous school begins to tear through the shell to reach the soft flesh inside.
Spongebob is in the kitchen and he sees it through the window as Squidward tries to get the door to the freezer unlocked and open. Krabs' shell is nothing but fragments now, and the old sailor is now naked and pink and soft and vulnerable as he howls in pain and tries to claw his way across the floor with three drifters latched onto his body, tearing and biting and chewing. Krabs screams something unintelligible, something along the lines of a cry for help, and he screams loudest of all when Squidward finally opens the door and screams for Spongebob to get inside or die.
"Don't leave me, boy!" Spongebob hears the strangled, gnarled scream as he turns away, and he pinches his eyes shut, torn between going back there to help and to run as Squidward screams with anger.
"Spongebob! NOW!"
"DON'T…!" Krabs' voice is quieter now, strained, gurgling.
Spongebob's eyes open slowly, wet, blue eyes amplified with horror and grief. "I'm… sorry… Mr. Krabs," he murmurs in a strange tone, one that speaks of the loss to come.
Spongebob and Squidward run into the freezer and shut the door just as Krabs gives out one last scream.
It only took five minutes for the drifters to begin banging against the weak door. Squidward, in a panic, starts searching for a way out while Spongebob sits in the corner, listening to the drifters' growls. He only snaps back to the present and out of his thoughts (thoughts of him and her and now Krabs) when he hears Squidwards victorious cry.
He's found a vent in the freezer roof. They can escape. Squidward is already halfway inside.
Spongebob mechanically, numbly, gets to his feet to follow him. He casts one last look at the drifters he can see through the freezer window. Red and yellow eyes glare hungrily at them. Spongebob stares longer than he should.
He only turns back when he hears a strange banging sound.
And the sound of screws turning in place.
Suddenly frozen in terror Spongebob turns quickly to see Squidward, in the vent, turn the last nail to seal the vent entrance in place. The sponge's mouth hangs open as the squid slowly lifts his gaze to look at him, and for the first time, Spongebob sees something that might just be regret flicker in his eyes. They don't say anything. They don't have to. Both know what's happening.
The best chance to get away from the hungry monsters, after all, is to feed them. Spongebob sees the logic in Squidward's eyes. He was just the faster one, that's all.
And Spongebob wasn't.
"Squidward no!" he finally shouts, desperately, shocked, when the squid suddenly crawls out of sight, out of the vent, out of the Krusty Krab. "No!" Spongebob climbs the crates as he hears the door creak, and begin to give into the weight of the drifters. He claws at the vent, pulls at it with all his weight, screams for Squidward to come back, that he's sorry, that he'll do anything at all. Just let him in.
Just as the door crashes across the room does Spongebob think of trying to squeeze himself through the bars. He only gets halfway when a mangled fin grabs his ankle.
Now this is the time when things seem to slow down, instead of going faster. The fall down to doom, to death, to whatever lies after that, appears to take a life time. In reality, it's only a few minutes, but if feels like years. He closes his eyes, and thinks of Patrick. And Sandy. And Krabs. And Gary. He thinks of Mrs. Puff, and Plankton, and he thinks of Squidward.
He doesn't feel angry. He doesn't feel scared. Surprisingly, he almost feels peaceful.
It'll all be over completely, soon enough.
Maybe after this, he'll get to rub Gary's belly again, and laugh with Patrick, and kara-teh with Sandy. Maybe he'll get to say sorry to Mr. Krabs, and get his old job back.
Maybe, for the first time in months, he'll be happy again.
But life is never that simple, is it. Spongebob's eyes are closed, and they stay closed for several minutes. Until he realizes what's happening; his lids fly open and suddenly he sees that he's not half eaten and on his way to the afterlife. No, he's lying on the ground, a piece of his arm lying a few feet away, but it doesn't even hurt. And the drifters… the drifters are leaving.
Eyes wide, brain in shock, mouth open, Spongebob sits up and watches the monsters leave; and some part of his mind knows why. Suddenly, he knows why he's lasted this long, why he has had to live without them while they are in peace. Why he can't just have it ended, and go to where happiness is eternal.
He's a sponge. The drifters eat flesh, not regenerating pores.
They won't kill him. They won't hurt him. They won't end it.
Spongebob doesn't move for several hours upon this realization, that he's finally alone, that it'll never end for him. Even when the sun begins to set and the drifters are long gone from the skeleton of the Krusty Krab, he doesn't move. The only reason he does eventually is because its impossible for him to stay still in one place more than eight hours at a time.
Quietly, without a sound, a perfectly blank expression on his face, Spongebob starts to walk. Out of the freezer and out of the Krusty Krab. And he doesn't head back to the Tree Dome, no, there's nothing left there. He takes the road that leads out of Bikini Bottom, and he walks silently. The drifters are nearby, but they seem to know. Somehow, they've communicated with each other. None even bother to go near him.
One hour after he started walking, Spongebob sees a lump lying on the ground, covered in red, unidentifiable. But he sees the little pieces of brown cloth strewn around, and one lump of eaten flesh is the shape of a tentacle.
He keeps on walking.
Its midnight, and he's still walking. The drifters sometimes walk near him, with him, and they don't try to stop. Neither does Spongebob. He doesn't feel tired anymore. He doesn't feel anything. When the moon is high in the sky, he started to cry – but less than five minutes later the tears turned into laughter. Hysterical, manianicle, pure laughter. It's a sound that echoes through every wave and every shift in the current. It fills the entire sea.
Still laughing, Spongebob starts to sing.
"Let's hear a story, folks!" he cries out to absolutely no one, in a happy tone that doesn't match the dead look in his eyes. "Are you ready kids?!"
No one answers.
"I can't heaarrrrr you!"
This time, he imagines up a reply.
"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…. Whoooo…"