Note: Spoilers for season three.

It was the end of the world.

Again.

Fuck, Elliot thought, rushing through his apartment. Flipper looked at him with a quizzical stare, as if the world wasn't falling apart outside of his apartment.

Maybe she had gotten used the sounds of public unrest. Elliot never did. He couldn't, knowing he had been ultimately responsible. When he saw the world unravel and stay unraveled, he didn't know what to do. It had been what he wanted, but he had been wrong.

So he set everything right again. He decrypted the data and waited for the world to fix itself. At least, as well as it could.

That night, after he pressed enter, Elliot leaned back into his chair and sighed. Sometimes you could undo the things you have done, no matter how terrible.

Please be kind, rewind.

He wished he could rewind the decryption.

Fuck, Elliot thought again, feeling his heart racing.

Flipped whined then, and Elliot looked in her direction and felt as helpless as he ever did. More than when he was a child and had been at the mercy of his parents. More than when he had been at the mercy of Mr. Robot.

More than when Darlene had been at the mercy of Whiterose.

"Fuck!" Elliot shouted, grabbing the monitor of his computer and throwing it to the ground. It was useless now. Everything would be.

He heard a knock on his door, and for a moment, Elliot felt the weight of the dying world lift off his shoulders. He rushed to the door, throwing it open without even looking through the peephole.

"Darlene-!" he began, expecting to see his sister on the other side.

But instead he came face-to-face with Mr. Robot.

His alter leaned in, resting his elbows on the door frame and sneered.

"This is why she let you do it," he said. "Decrypt the data. It was all part of her plan."

Elliot shook his head. "No. It's too risky. Her plans-"

But if Elliot were being honest, it made a sick sort of sense. Whiterose had wanted to move whatever was in that plant in Washington Township out of the country. He had assumed it was because she wanted it to stay secret. However, now it appeared as if part of her plan involved setting off a chain of nuclear missiles that hit over a dozen targets all across the country.

One of them had been Washington Township.

"We don't have much time," Elliot said, "I have to find Darlene."

Mr. Robot shook his head. "You don't even know where she was when the bombs went off. She could be anywhere. Even there."

Of the fourteen bombs that had been detonated over the United States, one had been in the New York area. It was estimated that almost a hundred thousand were dead, and as radioactive fallout spread and the taxation on the local medical services became strained, it would be only a matter of time before the city descended into a sort of chaos even the worst soothsayers after five-nine couldn't have foreseen.

"No," Elliot said with a sense of finality. "She wouldn't go there if she could help it."

As soon as she was old enough to run away – when Elliot had graduated high school and left himself – she had left home too. Moved in with Angela's family. Traded a real brother for a pretend sister and a pretend father.

He had visited them once – Angela had seen him in the city while going to class and invited him to dinner. Darlene had been happy there.

Elliot remembered feeling bad about that and slipped out.

That was when he came face-to-face with his mother.

"We pretend not to know each other," Darlene had said, when she had arrived at the hospital with Angela and Angela's father. "It's easier that way."

But what had been easy had turned difficult for everyone. When Magda Alderson had seen Elliot, she had lost her grip on reality. She had been certain she had seen his father and made a scene. Elliot couldn't even remember what it had been, but the conclusion only resulted in Magda's involuntary hospitalization in a mental ward and Darlene taken away by the state.

Angela's father had gotten in trouble for taking Darlene in without the legal paperwork in order, as Elliot's mother had been collecting benefits for Darlene without her even being in the home.

If Elliot could have changed what happened, rewinded his own decisions, he wouldn't have let Darlene's safe and happy home be ruined by this moment. He didn't know what he would do, but he would have done it differently. After that, she hated her mother even more than she had before and drifted apart from Elliot entirely.

She ran away upstate, but because Elliot and Darlene didn't hack each other (at least not before the FBI got involved), he let it happen.

In the eight years before they reunited to hack Evil Corp, he saw her only a handful of times and only in passing when she had been in the city.

Elliot knew she remained close to Angela, and he knew from what Angela had said that Darlene thought of Angela's father fondly, but saw any happy home as a fiction she couldn't be a part of.

"But I don't know where to look," Elliot admitted. "I don't know Darlene as well as I used to."

He briefly thought of Kevin McCallister, of watching movies with his sister, of teaching her how to code so she could feel in control like he did.

But Darlene was more than that now.

A car crashed outside the apartment, somewhere down the street. The chaos was getting closer.

Mr. Robot gave a rattling sigh and walked into the apartment and shut the door behind him.

"Then we wait," he said. "She'll come to us."

The lights flickered and the world went dark, with Flipper letting out a small-bodied howl.

Author Notes

This is a multi-chapter fan fiction that will be Elliot x Darlene, just because I ship them for some strange reason.

Chapters will be short, but hopefully frequent. I have an idea of where I'm going with this plotwise, and I think it will be around 20-40K words, or about 20-40 chapters like this one.

For those of you not aware, I have a trope: apocalypse. That doesn't mean this fan fiction is destined to be a tragedy, only that there are apocalyptic elements that I use to write with.

I hope you look forward to my next chapter!