Splat

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"Hee-hee-hee! Zap! Boom! Rip apart... rip it all apart! Heeheeheeheehee!"

"That's nasty-"

"Aha, a voice of dissent! Shazam, bitch!"

"Aieeeeeeeee..."

"Uwaheheheheheheheheheeheeheeeeeee!"

On that day, the world was changed forever...

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She floated through a void of darkness, twisting and groaning uncomfortably for reasons she didn't yet know. Vague, fleeting images flurried through her mind's eye - chaotic, violent, upsetting.

Suddenly, sunlight began to filter in... sunlight? But...

Grunting at a discomforting stab in her abdomen, Celes Chere stirred and slowly slid her eyes open. A gasp and a rustle sounded from somewhere to her left. Fuzzy, shapeless blobs of color began to swim toward each other as her surroundings slowly cleared into focus... a familiar flash of bright yellow caught her eye...

Ahh, who was that again?

"Ce... Celes?!" the yellow spluttered, taking the towel he'd been wiping his hands on and tossing it to the side. "You're awake?!"

"Hnnn..." Celes grunted weakly, her throat dry and parched. She parted her cracked lips and wheezed out a soft name, the first true word she'd consciously spoken in far too long: "...Cid...?"

Ah, so that was it. Cid Del Norte Marquez... Cid? So, he was still alive! So that meant... that meant that the world... perhaps it had only been...?

"You've been... out for a while," Cid sighed, sitting down next to the bed Celes was in and casting a very weary glance at her. His face had become very thin and ashen, and his hair, once a vivid, freckle-spattering commie red, had become shot with liberal bolts of steely, godless gray. Still, he was no less recognizable as the shadow of a soulless ginger.

Celes hadn't fared too terribly, herself. Though her once shiny and lustrous blonde hair was now a matted, greasy, oily tangle rivaled only by the chaotic and hellish mess further down below, though her eyes were dull, her muscles atrophied from extended disuse, her ribs sticking out, and her skin covered in sores and scars, she still had functioning organs, and her nipples weren't too big.

The course of this descriptive time-out had run long enough for Celes to consider how long "a while" had to have been to put her body in such a condition. That didn't mean she had taken advantage of this opportunity, however, so she simply asked:

"How long?"

Cid slapped her. "You slut! You whore! It's been a year since the world was destroyed and all you can ask is-oh... oh... I - I apologize."

Celes was used to getting smacked around by men, however, and dismissed it in light of recent revelations. "It's been a whole year?! I've been asleep for... for... so it really did happen... the world is-"

"In ruins," Cid finished solemnly. "At Kefka's doing... I don't know what lies beyond this island, but everything around here has wasted away. The forests have died, the animals have mutated... we're the only two survivors left of those who washed ashore on that day... the rest lost hope... most of them killed themselves... one even flung himself from the cliffs to the north..."

In the back of her mind, Celes took note of the convenience of this. "So... so, you've watched over me... this entire time..."

"I have." Cid nodded, averting his guilty eyes and absentmindedly rubbing his hand on his faded, battered jacket. "I feared you'd be the next to leave me, and-" His words were cut off as he began to quiver, hack, and cough violently. Blood shot from his nostrils, his eyes bulged out, and he reached into his throat with his bare hand and pulled out a dripping, quivering ball of disgusting slime, a gelatinous ball of mucous dripping with blood.

"Cid!" Celes gasped, climbing unsteadily out of bed. Her head throbbed and the room began to spin as her knees buckled beneath her, her body and sense of balance having to grow re-accustomed to even an act such as standing.

"I-I'm fine!" he wheezed, before coughing up a bullet of dark blood that splattered against the floor. "I-I just nee- I just need something to e-eat..."

"I'll get it, I'll get it!" Celes insisted, her worry fueling her movements as she helped Cid into bed, covering him with the moldy blankets. "We're... we're on an island, right? Are we near the beach?"

"Yes..." Cid breathed, his eyes sliding shut as he sighed into another violent hack. "It's... right out the front door..."

"I'll see if-if there's some fish!" Celes promised, rushing out of the dilapidated little shack they now occupied and stumbling through the dead, patchy clumps of grass and brush dotting a wasted, barren landscape. As she made her way down to the beach, being pulled by the sound of the waves, she noticed an odd feeling in her bottom, a sort of stretched, distended, uncomfortable sensation... as if someone had, for the past year, routinely been sticking their whole hand right up her-

Ah, but that was of little import right now! There it was - the beach! The water sparkled, brown and filthy, polluted, but still... it was water nonetheless. And where there was filthy, polluted water...

Thanks to the weak rays of sunlight trickling in through the thick, deep orange clouds clotting up the sky as far as the eye could see, Celes was able to spot schools of fish swimming a reasonable distance away from the shoreline. Some were fast, agile, shiny. Others were slower, duller, but fatter... yet presumably more filling and nutritious. More meat meant more nourishment.

Celes unfastened her cape, suspiciously still actually wearing it a full year later, and checked for large holes before folding it appropriately and laying it across the muddy shore.

With grim determination, Celes set to work loading her cape up with all the fat, dull, slow fish she could grab, her gloved fists clenching tightly to their slippery, wriggling bodies as she tossed them mercilessly onto the cloth to die, gasping for water.

She began to sweat, teeth clenched, as she worked through the sunset, the rank evening wind blowing her tangles about. Finally, she threw the last fat, slow fish she could find onto the top of the considerable pile and began to work to tie it all up into a nice sack.

As she prepared to drag it back up to the shack, a gleam in the mud caught her eye. stooping down, she brushed the filth away and clapped a hand to her mouth as she lay her gaze upon a shard of Magicite.

"How did this...?" She picked it up and slid it down the top of her leotard, feeling its warmth pulse against her bosom, upon which it rested. She didn't know who it had been in its life. For all she knew, it could have been the remains of Terra's father. Terra...

Celes shoved the door open and dragged the fishy sack inside, noting that the shack had grown dark in the evening.

"Cid? ...Cid!" she called, dragging the sack over to the bed in the corner. "Cid, I'm back, I've got plenty of-"

Fish.

Not that Cid was any longer in a condition to care what she had plenty of. He lay still, silent, his chest not rising and falling with even the slightest of breaths as it normally should. His eyes were shut. He did not stir, even when Celes screamed his name and shook him roughly by the shoulders, slapping him repeatedly and asking what was wrong with him as tears flowed down her gaunt face and snot flowed from her flared nostrils, her flesh becoming red and splotchy. Celes was not a pretty crier.

"You... you can't die now, what am I going to do now?!" she shouted, barreling out of the shack, leaving the smelly, wriggling sack of fish to rot and die uneaten, when there were starving kids in Africa who would've loved to have a taste.

Most of them killed themselves... one even flung himself from the cliffs to the north...

Cid's words rang strong in Celes' mind, and she found herself running blindly to the northern edge of the island, passing twisted, horrible feeble creatures that merely dropped dead for no reason as she passed them.

Her footsteps thudded and echoed throughout the murky night as she made her way up the twisted path leading to the top of the cliffs, her boots catching and slipping and stumbling along the way, hitting rocks and snarled stumps and tree roots jutting from the ground. Finally, she reached the top of the cliffs and looked out upon the vast sea surrounding her... reaching forever into the horizon... no land in sight...

She was all alone in the world now.

Her tears still flowing, Celes snorted back a load of mucous and spotted the collapsed body of a bird nearby... even it had given up hope, even it had been claimed by this sick, horrible destruction...

Locke was dead... Cid was dead... everyone was dead, except possibly Kefka. Kefka... the focus of every problem, the reason for all of this death, this hurt, this madness... the pain in Celes' behind, why, the bastard had probably come to the shack every night while everyone was asleep just to stick his deranged clown god hand up her ass! It all made sense! Didn't it?

Celes shook her head and stepped to the cliff's edge. A shattering of her bones on the ground below, a sickening crunch... with just a lap, she could erase her pain, finally sink into the comfort of eternal rest...

She leapt.

Her boobs glowed.

Eyes widening, Celes landed with a soft flump on the back of a... something. An Esper! An Esper... the Magicite...?

It was a large bird, soaring through the air, spiraling higher and higher...

Was this... was this her... escape? Her way out? Her messenger of hope, to take her beyond what she now knew and show her that not all was yet lost?

Perhaps...

Celes, invigorated by the sensations, felt her heart swell as she was carried to dizzying heights, her eyes seeking and straining in the dark and barely making out - ah! Land! Distant mountain ranges! The faintest light of a bonfire! The soft gleam of a city! Life! Life... there was still life... she just knew it. Thus, there was still hope...

The Esper spoke into her mind:

I am Quetzalli...

"I'm Celes!" she shouted. "Thank you! Thank you! I... I believe again..."

You wished to jump... I am here to help you. Quetzalli's eyes gleamed, and suddenly, he winked out of existence.

Celes began to fall, screaming, back toward the island... beyond the cliffs.

"No... noooooooooo!" she shrieked, her hair whipping across her face as she sped towards the ground. "I... I don't want this, I wanted to live, I-"

A sickening crunch as her bones shattered upon impact, a horrid thump as her face smashed against the dirt and her skull exploded, her brains shooting across the beach. Celes lay there, whimpering and helpless as the life slowly drained out of her, knowing there was nothing she could do now. Her rashness had cost her.

As she expired, her final thought was that maybe Cid had stuck his hand up her butt all the time. Dirty old fuck.

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~Fin