See? See? I Told You I Would Be Back!
Though I didn't get as much views and appraisal as I wanted out of 'Last Transmission', it came to my attention over the conversations I had with fellow Wall-E fans, fan fiction writers, and readers about the preferred fandom: the eternal romance between Wall-E and Eve, not the consequential downfall of Buy N' Large and it's incompetent leader that created the chain of events that lead to the story of Wall-E.
Well since I wasn't going to get much out of the last oneshot about the dark and tragic beginning of the Wall-E universe, here is another oneshot (my third Wall-E fanfic), that might make up for it but would still be in the same down-tone of the last story I wrote, sort of, just a bit more...morbid.
We've all seen in the movie and the humanization that how far Eve had went to save Wally from death. We had all experienced the tension, dread, and ultimate heart-shatter when Eve believed that she had lost the one she loved, and held his lifeless hand to at least give him the one thing he always wanted, even though he was no more. Then, the miracle happened when we see his hand perfectly intertwined with hers as he is brought back from the dead, thus unleashed were the wonders, the tears, the joy, and the love shared by the moment when our hero awakens to see his most cherished dream of holding the hand of Eve, the beautiful savior and love of his life at last. And we all, especially Wally and Eve, live happily ever after.
And now, here is something else to add to change all that; Something that a lot of writers thought about in all stories and fanfiction alike, and is the primary questioning motive of all speculative story telling:'What if'.
Here in this one-shot, is a question about something that juicy love WallyxEve fans have feared and fled from beyond reason, as the deep romance writers have divulged into that no one fond of tragedy would like:
What if...Eve could not save Wally?
Where in a point of divergence in the story leading to a different sequence of events in the humanization, she was too late to revive him from suffering permanent memory loss as well as bodily function loss. How does Eve feel of not being able to save the one she loved? How does the passengers of the Axiom go about recolonizing humanity on Earth without a guide? And most of all, how does Eve continue on without him?
Well, we are going to find out here in my first AU, and third expansion of the Novelization: Humanized! fanfic. If you want, you could make it Epilogue Part IV of the Novelization, or Chapter 34 or 33A, whatever, since i've had to be picky with a choice of title since it is connected to the Humanized story. But the important thing remains of it: it may not be the happiest of endings, but at least we see just how deep and how far love can really go, perhaps even deeper and farther than life, death, space and time itself.
DISCLAIMER: I, Whodarep08, does not, has not, and will never, own the rights to 'Wall-E' and Pixar Studios.
-WAITING FOR YOU, A WHOLE LIFE LONG-
The Alternate Ending to 'WALLY: The Novelization, Humanized!'
Defib Memorial Hospital, Hope City, Earth/ 2300Hrs, November 28th, 178 A.X. (2983 A.D.)
It is a dark and peaceful night, being able to see the stars and the Moon without clusters of satellites nor carbon monoxide haze of pollution fogging up the chill air as it did so long ago. Not a single cloud was in the night sky to filter out the serene silver moonlight, and the soft glowing golden lights of populated and interconnected closed-environment colony cities spread across the face of the Moon from Tycho crater to Fra Mauro to the Sea of Crisis; lunar ground based and orbital habitat lights so bright even on the lunar day side that could be seen from Earth, and has exemplified the wonder of seeing the Moon not in the same why as man always has. But the real wonder of this night was the twinkle of the millions upon billions of distant stars close together forming the interstellar cloud-disc of the Milky Way's spiral arms. So sharp and clear as if one was looking straight into the cosmos from the vacuum itself.
This was the first entirely natural atmosphere the night side of the world had not experienced since before the fire and smoke of humanity's first rise of a primitive yet functional civilization in the Industrial Revolution, over a millennium ago when the first marks of man's impurities had tainted the Earth before it nearly destroyed it entirely. Now it was as clean and unspoiled as it was since then, the Earth restored and humanity redeemed of almost abandoning its home world to the stars, now back on its solid ground to marvel the night sky humanity once aimlessly sailed. It is a very beautiful sight to behold, one that no one should take for granted. Especially for her, for this spectacular sight could be the last to ever come by for her.
She lay back in her bed, alone, facing up into the starlight of an astronomer's favorite night through the transparent roof of her room in Defib Memorial Hospital of Hope's city center, whose urban-light wasn't bright enough to spoil a clear night like this.
Despite the beeping of her holo-heart rate monitor and her raspy shallow breathing through her life-supporting breather tube, Eve lay peacefully and painlessly unmoving in her hospital bed as she had in the last few days, looking up to the sky with her extremely tired eyes; vividly crystalline blue eyes that once belonged to a very different and feminine face she had, one so smooth to the touch and so warm and full of life that it looked as if she were an angel incarnate, and framed with long and beautifully bright white hair that fluidly waved through air with the luminosity of solar fire.
But not anymore. Now the face she had was pale, liver-spotted, and wrinkle-worn with age and illness, and riddled with emotions ranging from great awe and joy to extreme remorse and sadness she had not felt for decades. Her hair now grayed was thin enough to see the skin of her scalp, coarse and filthy from not being bathed in a long, long time. Her body was not the same as it was, perhaps even worse off. She was no longer blessed with the seductive, curvaceous womanly features of her slender athletic form from her younger years; now she was rail thin, almost skeletal, and too fragile to even stand on her own two feet without snapping her legs like twigs.
Her bed was surrounded with medical equipment; everything from cardio-monitors, neuroscanners, oxygen-food life support systems, biowaste collectors, IV solution injectors, emrgency defibulators, autosurgens, etc. All of them with a line or tube that traveled into her veinious and frail body. These things nearly blocked her side view of Hope city outside the window panes. Even in the 30th century, medicinal technologies had yet to evolve from the bulky masses they are from the time of their creation before the Buy N' Large era.
She had been bed-ridden for weeks efven before ending up here in the hospital, not able to walk, stand, move, not even eat on her own, not ever again. For after living such an impossibly long life has left Eve with a elder, weathered, and failing body that requires external and unnatural means from all the necessary machines to keep her alive, and just that.
At being 200 years old last month, Evelyn Knight has become the oldest human being who ever lived, not even including her time as a vegetation scout when she spent months in suspended animation back in the day. She had outlived everyone she knew; McCrea, Jon, Mary, Hannah, Moe, Burnie, Defib, her sisters, even the newborns from the return of the Axiom came and went just like the volatile changes the Earth had made over her long years. But notably is that she had also become one of the most influencial people in civilization for having witnessed and partook in so much of the changes the world had made since the Axiom had first touched down, to the point when the last of the BnL Starliners had been successfully made contact with and had finally landed the last of humanity back on it's homeworld, repopulating the Earth to pre-Buy N' Large times. Eve had brought such progress and growth to the human settlement of the restored continents, and received more praise than even the ancient and infamous Shelby Forthwright and his once-global corporatocracy's legacy on this world now all but forgotten from her persistent and tireless effort to revive the beautiful blue planet, as if BnL never left its mark.
Eve had seen the future of the Axiom's recolonization become history as she lived through so many social, cultural, political, and technological revivals and conceptions born out of the efforts to settle humanity back on Earth, and even to lead the human race to expand back outwards in space; ironic as it seemed that they all came from space, abiet enclosed ships, back to Earth and now seek to return to the vastness it sailed without destination for seven hundred years. It was still mankind's destiny to grow above and beyond Earth to prosper, and she showed them how to do so, the right way. From turning the Axiom from a space-faring city of a starship into a ground-bounded superstructure of an actual city (which is now the capital city of Hope) that has left almost no trace of being such a ship, to building the lunar cities from the raw mooncrete and regolith of the Moon itself that she now gazes up at, to colonizing the Solar System one terrestrial planet and Jovian moon at a time; Eve had in her lifespan helped humanity turn from a scattered fleet of lazy space-dwellers into a self-organized interplanetary society, as what it should have been all along.
To further add to her fame and idiolizm to help contibute to humankind, she had grown unsettled with seeing Head of State leaderships rising and falling over the years struggling to keep the territories of Sol functioning properly even if it means use of violence against opposition; thinking after the whole race was reunited just for more in-fighting, she took matters into her own hands and she herself held the responsibility of being the de facto leader of human civilization. Despite the weight of the burden to govern entire worlds that spanned astronomical distances apart to keep a prosperous and outgoing society going while still keeping the planet she was on in it's original glory, she had kept everything from Earth to the edge of the Sol System working and prospering for several generations. Until the day she was deemed no longer fit for leading as it was required of her, then, to here after the effects of age, space-adaptation sickness, and osteoarthritis had claimed her body, and nearly soon, her life.
But truth be told, she wasn't at all welcome to the thought of living to this age to marvel all of her accomplishments, for she never wished to make it to this time of not knowing anybody from the early days that meant so dear to her. But of one thing she had always held in thought and in memory, a very dreadful and life-altering memory she wished an googolplex times over turned out differently, the memory of one person who she so tearfully wished could have lived to share all of this with her.
She only wished she didn't have to outlive...him.
If he lived on that fateful day...the historic day of the Axiom's landing, when humanity who had sailed into deep space had finally set foot back on Earth after seven hundred years. The day that her life, the lives of the Axiom, it's descendents, and the lives of the human race was forever changed not because of Eve, the leader of humanity.
People say that she was a god(dess), a human being who has lived way beyond her natural limitations, has become the ultimate leader and all-wise being that Shelby Forthwright never was, and has been given the title by historians as the 'greatest human who ever lived'. As far as she was concerned, she considered herself only as a martyr of humanity, not a hero.
The mere thought of those saying she was the one who saved the human race was a blind-sighted and heartless statement that overlooked the true hero. That true hero was a man that has now almost passed out of all knowledge, save for the only person still alive who knew him personally: Eve herself.
Everything that it is now in her civilization, was all possible because of a cleanup worker. A totally alone man who has suffered and survived so much from the deepest hellhole on Earth to the farthest reaches of the galaxy to the Axiom to just earn a place in her heart to quell his longing for companionship. A journey for her love that turned into their quest to save the human race, and ultimately, became his tragedy.
He gave everything to bring that ship back to Earth, including his life to a murderous mutineer whom was under centuries-belated orders to never allow that day to ever happen; and after traveling half-way across the galaxy she tried to bring him back...
...
(flashback)
Wally's truck, June 28th, 0 A.X. (2805 A.D.), just moments after the Axiom had made planet-fall in Sector NA-001...
Once, Eve would rejoice of this day of completing the ultimate directive of finding life sustainable on Earth, and it was her's life's dream to even bring the ship back to Earth to recolonize the planet, and go down in history for it.
Now it was irrelevant, for she was disregarding the once-desired fact that she had completed her ultimate directive and dream of return the ship to Earth that just happened, Eve couldn't care less at the moment. For her newfound life's reason to live, Wally, the love of her life, crushed by Auto just mere minutes and thousands of light-years ago, was dying before her.
Ignoring the Axiom's immediate post-landing evacuation procedures for the passengers, she had rocketed straight after his truck, to the spare parts for his dying artifical heart.
It took her a few minutes to find the truck, blindingly shooting straight out of the ship without doing a complete scan of the cityscape to find his home. Her desperation fueled her drive to save him no matter what. She heard pleas from Moe and the rejects to slow down and wait for them, but she doesn't care for anything except for the man dead or dying in her arms; the love of her life.
Everything around her was not important to her anymore. Not her old recolonization directive, not the Captain, not the ship, not the Earth, only Wally, the being who loved her more than life mattered to her now. She will not let him fall into the abyss without telling him that she loves him back, that he will not die so early without ever feeling the wonder things he never had while he was alive. How it felt to be held, to be kissed, to have a dream come true, to be loved a whole life long. She will see him open his eyes to her again, she will tell him she loves him.
Once she made it to the truck she worked frantically to restore his body, his circulatory lines being refilled, repairing his torn muscles and shattered bones, severed nerves, blood vessels, destroyed organs, even his dysfunctional heart and bleeding brain with the most advanced regenerative medicine availiable on the field. Using embryiotic stem cells to rapidly seal the numerous open gashes and burnt flesh to ensure he didn't bleed out, the injections included his cranium, and the splinted spinal membrane in his back.
Within a few minutes time, after reattaching his rebuilt prosthetic arm, extracting the broken shards of shattered Wally's glasses from his face, and final patches of biofoam to his incisions and lacerations, the pummeled pulp of a garbage collector was now fully healed.
One last thing to do to bring him back.
Eve prepares a wireless defibrillator, rubbing both electrodes for a charge. Both pads in hand pinged fully charged and she takes a deep breath; this is going to be the most important moment in her life.
She places the pads over his heart, she mentally prays for this to work…
"Clear!"
…and shocks Wally's heart, sending the electric shock to jumpstart his pacemaker.
Wally's pacemaker was activated; its blood distributor was pumping his new blood. Eve gently presses two fingers to his carotid artery, but no pulse came from his heart…
Time slowed to a crawl, every nanosecond felt like an hour.
…Eve her held her breath for every second that passed…
...she waited…
...and waited…
...and waited...
...
…thump thump…
..thump thump…
A very faint heartbeat echoes in Eve's ears as loud as music to her.
Wally stirs, his eyes open slowly and he remained on the floor unmoving, starring at her.
Eve remained wide-eyed seeing her deceased lover suddenly awake. She couldn't believe she actually resurrected him. She let out all the air she held, her whole world fell back into place and back to normal. All her pain disappeared seeing him alive and well again.
Now she could give him the thing to make everything complete, to hold his hand. "Wally…" She speaks in her sweet voice, removing her blood-stained gloves and holding her slender and loving hand out to him waiting for him to take it.
Wally just stares at her. Eve isn't the least bit confused, he's right in front of her, waiting to give the happy ever after he always dreamed of. Wally doesn't reach out for her hand; he just sits there unmoving, starring blankly at Eve. Something about his eyes…
Wally moves, his organic hand brushing past Eve's arm. Eve expression goes from rejoice to bafflement. What is he doing? Wally lays himself on his belly, like he's trying to crawl like a baby. Eve turns him over to get him to face her.
"Wally. It's me, Eve!" She points to herself, using her sweet voice to emphasize herself to him.
Again he just stares at her with a blank face, as if he doesn't know who she is. Eve could only speculate amnesia for his bizarre behavior, the concussion he had must've temporarily knocked out his memory.
Working with that theory, she looks around; maybe something could refresh his memory. "Oh." She picks up the Rubik's cube and the light bulb, the bulb shined as she touched it. She puts the trinkets in his hands; hopefully he remembers how much he liked finding these things.
He barely turns his head to look at the unknown objects in his hand. He had no idea what they are. Eve gets the lighter from one shelf, maybe he will remember the night she was with him in this truck. It was one of his greatest memories he had of sheltering her and sharing his treasures with her.
She flicks the lighter on in front of him, but Wally doesn't seem to acknowledge the tiny little flame; he doesn't even register the soft glow of heat radiated from the flame.
"Wally?"
Eve was slowly becoming worried. Why didn't he recognize things they way he should after she just restored him? Something's missing…
"Oh! I know!" Of course, something was missing. Eve rushes over to the VCR, pushing the play button to Hello Dolly!
As Put On Your Sunday Clothes played its cheerful tunes, Eve looks back at Wally expectant to see him be himself again. But Eve's eyes shot wide open in shock and confusion instead.
Wally was flailing his arm at the junk filled shelves, he couldn't even try to control his arm's extremity functions like his fingers or joints even though he can. He couldn't even move his lower body, as if he was paralyzed, he even drooled uncontrollably.
He tries to crawl with his limp arms like some primal, brainless creature.
"Wally?"
Eve stares at Wally, her confusion quickly turning into panic. WHAT IN FORTHWRIGHT'S NAME IS WRONG WITH HIM?
Hal sniffs his revived master, but barks at him as if he didn't know the person at all, not the master he knew.
Why was this happening? Paralysis? No cognitive senses? No memory…
"Oh no…"
A dark realization came over Eve. She checks her timer to see how long Wally has been clinically dead for. If more than 15 minutes of passed, then that would mean he's…
…her chronomter read 22 minutes have passed since he was crushed. At this point, without oxygen flow to Wally's brain for that amount of time…
"No!...NO!...NOO!" Eve cries out in disbelief, but unable to quell the dreadfulness brewing up in her as the realization sank in.
HE CAN'T BE!
She rushes over to his twitching body at the bottom of the ramp, turning him over and propping him up to face her. The look in his eyes shocked Eve so much she refused to believe her sight.
There was nothing in his eyes; the total absence of his innocent being in those large spheres was relevant in his now fully dilated pupils. He no longer had the most caring and loving hazel eyes that longed for Eve and that she longed to see into.
The pupils of his eyes were darker than the blackness of space itself. They were void. Soulless.
With the realization of something else she forgot to do while bringing him back, Eve hesitantly pulls out her holopad to run a neuro-scan on Wally's brain; she couldn't believe this was happening, this is a nightmare. But deep down she knows it's too true to deny.
The neuro-scan pings completed and Eve reads what's wrong with his mind.
All of the hope Eve clang onto, her last drop of happiness, the faint light at the end of the tunnel for saving the one she loved...was shattered as she read it; her worst fears now confirmed a reality.
There was blood flow to Wally's brain, but his nero-cortex showed no signs of cognitive bioelectric activity, all the membrane cells in his nervous system have already died from necrosis; a lack of oxygenated blood for, irreparably, too long.
Wally was clinically brain-dead.
"NOO! WALLY!" Eve broke down in tears as she shook his body, slapping his face as if to wake whatever was left of the man she loved from a mindless sleep he will never wake up from.
"WALLY!...DON'T LEAVE ME!..." She sobbed through her desperate pleas for him to come back to her. She held his face as tight and as loving as she can, screaming for him.
"...WALLY! WAAAAALLLLLYYY!"
No force on Earth or Heaven was listening to her begging for his life.
It was too late. Wally's memory, his mind, his consciousness; in essence, his very soul; was gone. Just gone.
She lost him forever to oblivion. Eve starred into the empty eyes of the soulless body that was once Wally. She looked at him in silence for what felt like forever, her heart pounded in dread as what happened sank in.
Finally, she broke down, all the emotions that built up inside her heart flowed out of her in soft sobs. Though she was mostly silent, Eve cried like she never had in her entire life.
She let out all of her tears of immeasurable pain, and immeasurable love.
Her tears flowed freely like a waterfall until her eyes reddened and stung, unable to tear anymore from crying too much; her sobbing faded into painful, choked whimpers like she couldn't breathe.
All was quiet again; the only sound breaking the silence of loss was the soft howl of the wind, and the steady breathing of the late-Wally's vegetative body.
Even though she got Wally's body functioning again, it is not him anymore; its just his former exterior shell, but with no life-force left in him. His brain damage was irreversible, his consciousness ceased, not too different from clinical death. For the time it took to bring him back and try and store him, not even the injected embryotics could reconstruct his mind, for human consciousness is far beyond the ability of restoration as it was known.
Eve's mind ceased to register everything around her for her whole world shattered into nothingness. She couldn't save him, the man she loved more than life itself no longer existed.
There's nothing left here anymore, but Eve couldn't just leave. There was nothing to go back to. The life she knew has been altered forever because of him, because he had put so much importance on her and everything she worked for.
Its ironic on how much her thoughts of this lonely, humble man had changed so dramatically. When she first met him, she pointed a plasma rifle to his face, all because he wanted to take in the first human being he had laid eyes on in untold years of isolation. And she tried to ignore him for being such a child-like innocent nuisance, hoping he would just go away. She even tried to blame him for her problems. And she tried to kill him herself for the problems he never caused to her. He still kept following her with those longing eyes like a lost puppy through everything she put him through.
What she wouldn't give to have him come back to her right at that moment.
Even through her mistreatment of him, he had done incredible things for her. He brought the plant to her, he had protected her, he had showed her unthinkable treasures and taught her things that no one else could comprehend; the secrets of life long forgotten by humanity: emotions, understanding, moments, dreams, and affection. He had brought humanity back to its home world because of the sequence of events created by everything he had done for her out of the humble goodness of his golden heart.
And he gave his life for it, for her. Because he loved her.
Eve's pain endlessly swelled in her shattered heart, she wanted to cry so hard, but she had no more tears or strenght left to do so; she was suffering an unimaginable loss, it hurt her more than dying. There was nothing left she could to do.
But...
There is one thing she can…want to...need to... must do. The last thing that she could do for Wally's memory, to give him something for everything he had done for her. The one thing he always wanted, something he traveled through hell, space, life and death for.
Slowly, she pries open his lifeless hand with her own, intertwining her slender, silky fingers with his calloused, scarred fingers.
Eve brought her other arm around his vegetative body and held him close in utter silence, closing her eyes and touching his forehead with hers; her angelic white hair enveloped his blank yet peaceful looking expression. She then, out of somewhere from the deepest parts of her, quietly and tenderly hummed the sweet tune of his favorite song, It Only Takes A Moment. One that taught him the thing he always dreamed of charishing.
She held his hand, the one thing that Wally deeply wanted; to love her and be loved.
It hurt her that he never lived long enough to actually savor the thing he survived, suffered, and died for; to see his wish come true. Where all his pain would end with this magical moment of intimacy with her, letting him know that he is no longer alone in the universe, and that it did only take a moment to be loved a whole life long.
As Eve rhythmically hums the last notes of the song she cups his cheek with a delicate hand, and plants a soft kiss on his now cold and rigid lips, finishing his song.
She starred back into his darkened eyes starring perpetually into nothingness in some false hope that maybe what little was left of him could still be there, to feel what she had given him. But she knew she was only still trying to absorb the fact that he is now a conscious-less mass of functional fleash and bone. She felt like crying out of pity as much as loss to be stuck in such a void of a nonexistence of a vegetative body.
But still she wondered how he should continue to exist without awareness? Could she bear it to free him from this if he indeed could no longer return to her. Eve couldn't let him, or what was left of him, be trapped in the bodily shell that no longer functioned.
Perhaps, if he was still trapped in that body, she could free him. She had potassium cyanide capsules...she could use them to...
The dark though entered her mind, but it made her freeze in a burst of emotions inside her from repulson, to fear, and dread. She couldn't possibly bring herself to do what could be the only thing left for Wally.
While she handled taking lives during the battle against Auto and his army of clones, to protect her dying beloved, even though there was no reason to hope for it to begin with. But she never though of actually considering the thought of euthanasizing the one she loved after everything that happened out of mercy.
Could she live with herself like that? Would Wally truly be free if he died in peace and not live a life inprisoned in a lifeless body? Or if the very act be considered murder?
She shivered at that thought, and on top of being reminded that she had almost killed him intentionally on several occassions. And now she was actually contemplating on actually doing so.
Not out of blind-anger, she remembered. But out of mercy for him...for her love for him.
She shook her head at this, thinking desperately for solutions that don't exist other than depriving an innocent being of a chance at a happy life he never had.
'But...then he really isn't alive.' she thought, knowing that his body no longer has a conscious brain, it's just a body. But, it was her Wally's body...
Her emotions tried to sort out an answer for the false hope that what ever is left of the man she knew can still be salvaged, but her logical side always showed the truth, ungodly or not.
Considering the irreversability of this and the fact that the only way to know if he really wants to be freed, and that he no longer has any use for his body since he was technically dead in his mind, she makes her decision.
Out of her pack, she pulled out a small pea sized bead of film-thin glass, and within it's center was a tablet of cyanide.
A suicide pill.
These were among the most undiscussed items ever to be handed to Eve, but because of the mortal risks of being an E.V.R.E., she knew its purpose if needed: if she were ever marooned on a distant world on her scouting missions and had no means of escape or survival, rather than slowly and painfully die off of to starvation or exposure to the hostile planet's elements, this was the last resort.
And now this was the last resort to save Wally. Not from death, but from a life of just existing without consciousness. So in a way, her mind thought of how she could justify this, she was saving his life.
Before she could bring herself to do this horrendous act, there was one last thing she must do for the sake of his memory.
Back on the ship, when Wally fought to keep the holo-detector from disappearing, she recalled even through her despair of saving the passengers over him, he mouthed something to her before he was crushed. She saw that those were his last words meaning to convey something he always wanted to share with her. Now she felt to return those feelings, even if she was too late, she had too.
She kept her eyes closed; her voice choked with sadness, and Eve let out three little words that were quieter than the softest whisper humanly possible.
The words she let out were for Wally's last words he had said to her before they returned to Earth. And she was saying the same words to what ever was left of his spirit in his body, and wherever afterlife his consciousness went; the three little words that Wally had waited an ended lifetime to hear.
"I…I l-love you."
Her hands trembled as she took the capsule and placed the glass bead in between his teeth, containing the deathly drop of poison that would free him almost instantly.
Cuping his lower jaw to ready to free the man she loved, she almost couldn't bare to do it. But she had to.
She looks one last time into his void eyes staring into space, hopping that whatever is left of his lifeforce sees her as the last thing that would make his eternal sleep seem as painless and comforting as possible.
Whimpering, she says her good-bye quietly, 'I'll never forget you, Wallace.'
Forcing her hands to move out of spontaneously applying pressure to his jaw, the glass-bead capsule breaks in his mouth and the poison is released.
Then...with a sharp exhale, he goes still.
The pacemaker ceases its function without resistance and feels the sudden released tension of all his joints and muscles. His head slumps backwards and the already empty eyes roll back into is skull then and forever. His face relaxed into that of a weary soul finally at rest.
Wallace Burtt was no more.
...
It made her tears return, out of the pain of what she had done out of pure love, and that a life, one who had suffered so much to just feel all the wonderous experiences of a single human emotion as love, had just simply ended right before her own eyes...and by her hand.
For the second time, she cried unlike anything she has felt in her existence.
…Minutes go by as slow as hours, just holding him. Remembering him...
Her grieving slowly subsidded, but it has not ceased, and might never will. She was left with terrible reluctance to leave his body let alone move or think clearly of anything else, but the sight of his cold and lifeless body was even more unbearable.
Not entirely forgotten, Eve figured that sooner or later the people of the Axiom will come looking for her, and him.
She no longer cared about them anymore, nothing important was left for Eve; her directive was completed, Earth was habitable again and humanity has returned home, but… now what?
Eve felt a void growing in her heart out of the feeling of being useless without a direction in this new world, she felt so lost without the one she loved; and the irrelevance of the people that she brought to Earth didn't seem like they posed any significance to her. For the first time in her life, she felt totally and utterly, alone and without purpose.
She wonders if there we're any reason for her to go on without him now.
Maybe she could follow him into oblivion as he onced follwed her wherever she went, to join him and be with him forever...
NO!
She can't do it, she can't even think about it.
She would condemn herself if she ever thought of suicide to just be with him. She had to live, it's what Wally would've wanted.
Eve hesitantly tries to get up from her embrace of him, a first step to a very painful goodbye. She will never forget him as long as she lived; and neither will the rest of the Axiom. No one could've possibly amount the courage Wally had to sacrifice everything he pursuded and his life for humanity, and everyone who now resides on Earth and their future generations owed him everything; they will all remember him.
She sets that to be her thought from now on. She couldn't bring herself to think of another dark thought that entered her mind about what to do with his body since he had no consciousness left. She had to go, but she will come back for his body, for everyone will want to know everything.
She pulls away to painfully leave but her hand was still clutching onto Wally's hand. She gets slightly jerked back, snapping her out of her depressive thoughts. She tries to shake her hand loose. But her fingers were still stuck in Wally's cold and stiff corpse grip; no matter how hard she tried. Eve quickly looked back into Wally's eyes. Maybe he'll be him again. Somehow.
Wally's eyes were still forever blank, dead as she made it so just moments ago. Eve's hopeful expression drained out of her eyes, defeated by desperate dillusions to see him again; she couldn't let go of him that easily, that's why.
After a few minutes of trying to get past the denial, she slowly pried her fingers free one by one and Wally's stiff hand simply rested on the ground, not a trace of his him left in that corpse to disturb his peaceful slumber. Before she leaves, she very tenderly closes his eyelids before placing a final kiss on his temple.
Very slowly, Eve simply stood up with her mind blank and headed back to the Axiom, unwillingly to take another look behind.
Shortly thereafter Moe and the rejects caught up to the slope of the bridge where the truck was. They stopped dead in there tracks when they saw Eve slowly stepping towards them with her eyes downcast, blank, and her cheeks moist of her crying. Instantly all the energy of chasing her and hoping for the best vanished into dread they never wanted to believe; but upon seeing Eve, they knew.
As she wordlessly walked past them towards the Axiom, everything went dead silent for them, until Perdie began to softly whimper, and Moe even began to well up tears in his eyes, and momentarily removed his cleaner's cap, moarning the loss of his friend.
They stood there for what felt like ages before slowly and silently returning to the ship with Eve, all of the rejects downcast and saddened as much as Eve. When they returned, the Captain with a group of children and with Jon and Mary at his side were about to dig a hole for the booted plant to go into the ground, to begin the recolonization and restoration of Earth. When they sighted Eve returning, without Wally, the realization of what had happened immediately swept throught the crowds of deboarding passengers of the starliner. Without saying a single word, but just looking at Evelyn Knight without the man she loved safely at her side, and shaking her head in acknowledgement of that, everyone knew. All the excitement and rejoice of this historic moment of finally returning to Earth evaporated into silence more noticable than the howling wind of the deserted sector.
Captain McCrea respectfully removed his cap, and without having to be told, everyone held a moment of silence for the man they barely knew for a day, who yet brought them back to this planet, and was the only one now who could no longer cherish it.
...
Even as she lay in her bed nearly lifeless, Eve's eyes watered and warm tears streamed down her cheeks. A lifetime, if not two, had passed since the day he was taken from her, and she remembered every ounce of pain she felt sif it were yesterday.
It was a race against time that she lost and had weeped over for more nights than she cared to remember. She felt she was unworthy at times, for even after almost two centuries of helping human civilization revive it's home planet and expand to other worlds, she couldn't revive the one she loved so dearly all those years ago...
...
A few days had passed since Wally died, and the recolonization was almost at a halt in light of the tragedy.
Eve, along with a few others, returned to the truck to tearfully explain what happened, to bring Wally's corpse back to the Axiom, and most uncertainly, to contemplate about what to do with him.
They wordlessly hauled him onto a hover-tram and covered him with a blanket, and brought him to the Axiom with everyone mourning as they watched the tram pass.
They brought him to medical center's morgue, the most unnerving room of any vessel. A dark and silent room of the ship that was completely automated for the purposes of space-burials of generations after generations of passengers and crew dying and being prepped to be let out floating indefinitely in space, and going about the processes of consolation and assestment to the dead's families. But they weren't in space any more, and in Wally's case, as far as the faintest historical records went and for the lack of any surviving cleanup workers, Wally had no family. But after everything that has happened, everyone was affected by his heroic actand his loss, so it meant that something had to be done for him in return for his ultimate sacrifice.
The closest thing Wally ever had to family or more thereof a loved one, was Eve. It was her choice for what to do, and how to honor him. So at her request, she said to have him cremated.
It was originally thought that they should follow the old custom of burying the dead in the ground as their ancestors did, but given the fact as a cleanup worker Wally had been, the men and women of that occupation who were left behind on this planet to die in the mountains of garbage to bury them seemed, in a metaphoric way, indignifying. The least that could be done to honor those humbled souls as well as Wally's was to give them the noble honor of floating within the heavens with his body burned and scattering his remains, as such to release his spirit for him to forever rest.
And so it was carried out, with Wally's body was flash-incinerated in the morgue's makeshift furnace using vented plasma from the ship's fusion engines; his flesh and bone reduced to fine powdery regolith similar to moon-dust, and his prosthetics turned to molten slag. His charred remains were placed in an urn and given to Eve. She hardly could bear the fact that she was holding her beloved in a container. It seemed sickening.
Eve, alone with McCrea, Moe, and Wally's ashes and the automated Axiom Reconissance Vehicle, lifted off into high Earth orbit to disperse him into the celestial heaven of space, as the way she would have wanted him to rest in the place where she and Wally shared most of their connection and the remainder of his life in this empty but wonderous expanse of tranquility.
Eve could barely get her suit on for the EVA, with her hands trembling and her eyes watery and ready to tear; but it had to be done. With one last good-bye she opened the hatch and with the suction of rapid decompression, opened the urn and released Wally's ashes into the vacuum. Eve watched from the open airlock as the dark gray cloud slowly dissapated into nothingness against black of space, his burnt remains fading into invisibility as dust and micrometeorites; and as the cloud of her lover evaporates further into the expanse for the rest of time, all of his very essense will be subatomic particles very much like that of all matter that expands throughout the cosmos, becoming one with the rest of the Universe.
Now and forever more, he exists in peace.
The offical memorial service was held at the Axiom's boarding terminal, July 16th, 0 A.X. on a calm, starlit night to reflect the sheer scale of the events that transpired of his journey that lead to the salvation of humanity and finding his place within Eve's heart after their experience that took them halfway across the galaxy, but even astronomical distances were nothing compared to the void between life and death.
Everyone wore their BnL jumpsuits in a matte black color, learning of the custom to mourn the dead. While it was often practiced for a space funeral during the seven hundred years in space, but it was never on this scale, and on such emotional one as well.
An eternal flame was placed at the base of Wally's home as a memorial, the location of where he spent the majority of his life and the very location he last set foot on this planet before his fateful journey into deep space before he died. A holographic portrait of him floats over the flame, it was Eve's most treasured image of him holding the plant out to her as a gift when she first meet him and found the plant, the finest example of how people could see the love, sincerity, and innocence in the lonely man that saved the Axiom, and ultimately mankind, through his love for her.
A plaque rests at the base of the flame and portrait, that reads:
"When once you have tasted flight you will always walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward: for there you have been and there you will always be." – Henry Van Dyke
To the loving memory of
Wallace Burtt
June 28th 2775 A.D. – June 28th 0 A.X. (2805 A.D.)
"This is where he last touched the Earth and entered the void of space, and where he was returned to forever rest in the infinitum of peace."
...
More nights than she cares to admit, Eve would look up into the night sky filled with sadness and sob uncontrollably, losing all coheret thinking that would unfortunately spread such pain to others around her. Forever after, she wondered what she could have done differently, how she could have recognized Wally's affections for her earlier in her old directive to find life on Earth, if she could have instead given up her directive to just be with him. Or if she could have saved Wally from his horrifying death from the Holo-detector; while they could still be cruising through space if not for his efforts and surrendering to that monster Auto, she could have at least held him once again. Or if she had done a better job in trying to revive him, if she had been five minutes faster, he could still be alive today, safely by her side and have had a happy ending to their journey.
She often wondered how their life together could have been if he had lived. If they could have shared their love, and spent the rest of their lives together. If only...
Progress was slow with the re-colonization efforts of Sector NA-001, with the hostile sandstorms, and harsh heat and sunlight making staying outside unbearable for most of the passengers. And with only their wits and archieval knowledge on survival, the passengers and crew of the Axiom slowly but surely set up an outdoor community made out of the ship's escape pods as homes that served as adequate shelter, but to the finding of resources and exploring the forgotten city would be alot more difficult than imagined.
Though Eve had to participate in the efferts of building a new society, Wally's absence had left too much of a wound to close up for having to be reminded of him everytime the colonists had trouble adapting to their new yet hostile environment without a guide who spent most of his life in this place. No one talked about it, to not remind themselves if not Eve of what was lost, but it was impossible to ignore.
For almost every night in the first few months of the recolonization, Eve would return to the site of his truck and look around the cramped and crude inert machine he had called his home for most of his life. She figured the more she thought of him, the more it might help her ease the pain of his passing; though she didn't know exactly what to feel after every visit to the memorial.
The sight of all his trinkets that most people would call garbage that were his most prized possesions made her memory of Wally more curious and appreciative of how he could see things of so much wonder in things so mundane that children would find them too infantine to fit them. Anyone else would've considered anyone like Wally an outgrown child, but Wally wasn't like anyone else, he was a feral child born into a world long dead and inhospital to any inhabitant. She could only imagine what he had lived to fight so hard to just stay alive long enough to set eyes on her, and collect every broken bit and piece of a civilization that left him, his bretheren, his family, and all the hard-working laborers before him, for dead.
The thought and prospect of living such a life that was foresaken seven hundred years before he was even concieved in a place no different from Hell...she shivered in a mixture of pity, sorrow, and even fear in ways she couldn't possibly imagine. Wally the way she knew him was the curious, harmless, all-loving and lovable worker more innocent than the youngest child, but she had to wonder about all the unknowns there were about him that made him the way he was, his development shaped by here of all places in the cosmos. 'What was his life like?' She would wonder, 'Who were his mother and father?', 'did he even have parents?', 'What were the causes of his prosthetics and injuries?', 'how did he live for so long without falling into insanity?', 'had he ever felt loved before?', 'was he ever loved?'
It was as if she could picture Wally, from since he was but a small child spending most of his existence in these enclosed containers of broken down trucks as all the sanctuary he could ever get from the hostility of the Earth. Fighting for survival without any paternal nurture and tortured through the hostile work, crying his pain away in here, and whistfully trying to rest his relentless exhaustion from the binding work he was destined for as was his ancestors, cleaning up after the ignorant ship-born who never even knew existed, all alone, tired, and frightened by God-knew-what was on this planet before she came along, and she may never know; as far as the possibilities of horrid unknowns went, it could be best to never know.
He may have never experienced what it was like to be loved in his life right until it ended, what justice of fate could cause such a tragedy? Was he a soul left to be tormented and deprived of the most intimate human needs and wonders until he died?
She looked around plagued with heart-shattering thoughts centered around how he lived before he meet her, what was it like for him to live in such a place in the condition he was in, and on a somber thought, how he coud still be alive even if they had not stayed together. They may never created their connection if not incredible seperation from what she was thinking at the time, but he would still have lived.
Again, she would wonder on several possibilities Wally had to just leave or be free of his accidental journey to the Axiom that would have spared his life. If he had not stowed away on the ARV, or maybe if she had forced him back to Earth in that escape pod, even if he was truthfully innocent that he didn't steel the plant from her to drive her out of her way to rid of him, and she was especially depressed and frustrated about how he could possibly have given up on just being with her instead of dying for the stupid plant where he could have just surrendered to Auto and spared of being electrocuted and crushed; sure as they would never have come back to Earth but they could have been together, with him not-so-well but still alive and in her arms.
But whatever could have happened, was irrelevant now. For the absence of his warm and loving presence tearfully reminded Eve that Wally was dead and she can never undo the past.
For the zenth time, Eve would break down in tears, and look up into the sky for the unlocatable place he was dispersed for his burial. She so wished she could just find his spirit up there, sympathetically and longingly watching over her weeping his loss, just as wanting to be with her as well.
Eve wished she could just fly up to see him one last time, like flying up towards the stars, to just be in the same place as he was. But she had lost her reason and will to go back up into the infinite, for he was as unreachable by the boundaries of the universe itself.
...
As time went by, visits to the memorial became fewer and fewer as people learned to move on with their duties to rebuild the world, and their new lives to establish, as the man who died for them to walk this Earth would've wanted them to do.
Even Eve had tried to slowly move on with her life as everyone else did, and had learned to embrace the idea that she would do honor to Wally's sacrifice as she helped the colony of the Axiom and it's settlers adapt to this world. And the struggle to establish a new society has brought about all new challenges to Eve and the people of the Axiom that would made them seem to overcome Wally's death, to replace their grief with duty and accomplishment as the memories of the return slowly became ancient history. Though still remembered truly by her and some others, the tragedy of Wallace Burtt became something of the past to the rest of the world.
And one that will never fade in time, was the pain that Eve had carried deep within her that continued to make her cry and her heart bleed for the rest of her life; the pain that reminded her of what she to him so much, and what she had lost.
...
On one night, on a wild act of trying to help herself heal and remember after a few years of trying to coup with his loss, Eve decided to watch "Hello Dolly", Wally's most treasured movie that planted the seed of his understanding of human companionship, and his determination to travel the cosmos to her heart.
The quality was extremely poor considering the age of the film and the crude playing device he constructed, and as she watched through the scenes of the cheesy and ancient musical acts Eve wondered how did Wally get so hooked into this as his whole world, though it did seem to have a nostalgic feeling.
When the scene 'It Only Takes A Moment' began to play, Eve could just imagine that this very clip of cinema was the source of Wally's idea of 'love', and the root of his inspiration for his odyssey. She imagined Cornelius as Wally himself, trying so hard to win over the heart of the beautiful woman Irene, Eve's parrallel in this case, through a journey across the hard-times of life to feel sanctuary within each other.
To her it seemed Wally imagined that was what it should've been like for him to try to fall for Eve, just like in a movie, plain and simple. Though he never understood the world outside the destroyed one he knew, and like how she knew that no matter how hard one tries, movies do not provide to be exact replicas of how the life events played out for someone by just watching it, and thinking the plan will go along with the script of a movie. Eve felt so sorry he never understood that concept, felt he didn't deserved to go through so much of the unexpected from traveling thouands of lightyears to save a starship, only to die close to the one he cared so much for.
Eve felt her pain return again, the unfairness of believing the motives of falling in love like a movie to be true to just end up killing him were just too ghoastly to bear.
"It only...takes a moment...for your eyes to meet..."
In her hand she held a BnL zippo lighter. Not just any lighter, it was his lighter. It was all that was left of him that he gave to her as a gift, the little flame it sparked represented as the ultimate manifestation of the warm and comforting light that her existence had brighten the dark and lonely life he had.
"...and then...your heart knows...in a moment...you'll never be alone again."
She lit the lighter, the click of the ignitor lighting the spark that send immediate warmth into her skin.
"...and that is all...that love's about..."
The glowing warmth of the tiny flame shined a memory that had not represented itself ever since the last time she was in this truck with him. The last time when she saw Wally trying to take hold of her hand, too frightened to try without hesitation and too shy to ask, but he did try nonetheless and she saw it all from the corner of her vision. Seeing his closed eyes, waiting for her to either pummel him to a bleeding pulp or to embrace him with all her heart. At the time, she really didn't know how to react if he did even if she sense he felt something for her, but rather just surprise him; not just to scare him, but because she was uncertain of what she felt for him too.
She use to think of him odd in that kind of way evem though he grew up so feral and alone, but seeing him do that with such sincerity and longing for her as a god-sent saint in his eyes was among the sweetest things she's ever seen in him, and to try to express his feelings in the most simplest way always brought a smile out of her, especially when she remebered how jumpy and terrified he was by her reaction pretending to wonder what he was doing, and how cute his clumsy fumblings and his well-meaning, self-less watching over of her were.
And it was of how different he was, so attentive to her sake and anyone elses, and how he can see wonderful things in everything, even in her, is what lit the spark within her to feel she harbored something special for him, and it wasn't until when she saw those recorded images of him so selflessly and lovingly take care of her, relized that she loved him too.
"...and we'll recall...when time runs out..."
She lets those images of Wally replay in her mind, revisiting the moments he gazed at her in awe and how he tried to place his hand over her inert one, and tell her that he loved her.
Her empty heart felt as if it were slowly began to fill again by the picture of Wally in her mind, and by the deep devotion to her. Eve lifted her hands over her heart, and closed her eyes and tried to remember more of him, to feel his presence as if he were right there holding her hand with her, like how Cornelius and Irene happily take each other's hands finally finding their place in each other.
"...that it only..."
Even though he may be gone forever, it may not necessarily be so much of a bad thing. For after living for so long and so tormented for life, he deserved to be released and rest his weary being, and above all, he deserved happiness. And though he never may be with her, Wally knew that she loved him back; and that was all the sanctuary in the universe he could ever want, feeling belonged to her heart.
"...took a moment..."
Eve opened her eyes as Wally came to life inside her, as if appearing before her mind. Her bleeding heart warm as this comforting vision helped her heal, and feel the fullness of his love for her.
"Wally..." she whispered, her voice crackled with tears of pain and happiness, something she has not felt since she saw his love for her presented in her security recordings, since she kissed him on that spacewalk. Those treasured memories meant that Wally was in a way still alive, in her every thought, her every laugh, cry, the pain and the joy she felt is Wally's love that still exists for her; and he would never cease to do so.
For the first time since he held Wally to her so tightly while floating space as the Axiom was still sailing across the farthest reaches of the galaxy, Eve smiled.
"...to be loved...a whole life...looooong."
...
She kept her hand to her heart, her eyes closed and content, seeing Wally as she always had throughout most of her life. In her hand, its chrome covering corroded and fluid long since burned away after decades of being kept only to herself, was the Zippo lighter Wally gave her almost a hundred and eighty years ago.
Since that night in his abandoned shelter, she always looked forward to help rebuild civilization, and became the great leader humanity should have had from the beginning. From the efforts to make humanity a prosperous society, she choose to have the world rebuild down to the last trash pile cleaned up, so that Wally's efforts and his sacrifice along with all those before him were not in vain. Though almost no one in this generation even knows about the significance of Wally's sacrifice and that they all take the restored world somewhat for granted, it didn't matter too much to Eve as she knew fully and appreciated that the world she helped create had indeed become possible for what he had done.
It was a difficult and long life she had lead to fulfill her duty to humanity and commemorate Wally's legacy after being seperated by untold barriers of worlds, voids of space and time, even the threshold between the living and the dead after the Axiom's return by just remebering him; but she was glad to have lived it. Even if she physically lost the man she loved, Eve always felt that Wally was with her.
Eve let out one last sob as she felt the pain and the love flow through her heart, but she failed to notice that her heart-rate monitor flashed an alarm.
At her current age, Eve's continuous weeping had induced serious psychological effects forcing her heart and mind to fluctuate and fail when the traumatic experiences overtook her, almost to the point at which would be the end of her deteriating mind along with her body. She had been hooked up to life support to stabilize her, but her repressing memories is contributing to her demise. If she was about to enter a near-death state, she could be revived and awaken but her mind will suffer too much to remember anything. Or worse...
The pain in Eve's heart magnified as her crying seems to get impossibly painful as her heart stopped and started again. But she didn't care, for she remembered well that the pain of lossing and remembering Wally felt no different. Only now, she was about to die, and through the cacophony of grief, she wished so dearly that he may still be within her consciousness, if he does not exist outside her own mind.
The heart rate monitor flatlined and Eve could feel the pain slowly dulling out within her. So this was it, after two centuries of building and grieving, Evelyn Knight was about to pass into the void as darkness surrounded her vision.
Relieved that she will finally be released from her broken shell, Eve was scared of what lay beyond death. If she will either live as a non-interactive being in an afterlife, or simply be nonexistant in a void just like the space between heavenly bodies. It scared her that if the latter was true, if her mind and all of her experiences of all that existed to her faded into blackness, then the memory of Wally's existence in this universe would seem to have never have happened.
Though it may not be entirely that way, hopefully enough that she may even see his spirit and finally be reunited with him rightfully after so long.
But as Eve crosses the threshold she realizes that she will never know, for her mind will nolonger be self-aware to learn the answer.
Finally embracing the end of her and her memory of Wally, and her fate for whatever it is or what she wants it to be, she slowly lost consciousness to either fall asleep from the pain of her weeping and wake up without recall of anything...or never wake up at all.
Though Eve couldn't move or do any one last thing with her body, she grasped the cotton bed sheets with her aged and fragile hands to process the last piece of information that will ever be interpreted by he rbrain, and felt the sheets rest comfortably in between her fingers...
...turning into rugged, callused, ugly, and damaged fingers that contorted perfectly in her beautifully aged and slender hands.
She knew immediately the sensation of those hands, and who they belonged to. But the one thing that seemed odd was if those hands were of who she thought it was, they weren't just raw and loving; they felt radiantly warm and smooth.
Eve could barely see through the warped pinprick of her tunneled vision, and her hearing all but faded into total silence, and all her senses no longer registering anything as her conscious self slowly seperated from the world around her. But she knew that someone was holding her hand, and it was someone glowing bright through the darkness of the void between life and death. Someone she knew, and from what she could feel, it seemed to raise an old memory...
It hit her then. She must be dying, or maybe she was just dreaming her greatest dream of a memory; but however the cause of the sight...he was right next to her.
Laying right next to her in the hospital bed, was Wally. Still the same thirty year old garbage man from nearly two centuries ago.
As Eve looked through near-death awareness, even though aged and slow, her eyes widened in incomprehensible disbelief and her mind shot up as she didn't know if she were to feel any emotion from joy, sadness, or bewilderment at the sight of the man she knewand remembered for so long.
But he was not so battered and covered in soot as she remembered him. No, he shone an elegant illumination of skin that felt so warm and welcoming that he could have been made of light.
There was not a single scar nor imperfection that riddled his figure so hideously, no marks of old wounds that him so weary as she remembered, no prosthetics of his missing armor unfinished heart, and not a trace could be found of Auto's torture on him. He was as if untouched and pure to the core.
And as Eve could see him, or at least a manifestation of him in this nondimensional experience, she looked into his eyes and new then and there that all she needed to know of this being was the one she knew as the being of Wally she knew. His eyes were the most translucent of hazel that could ever be: pure, bright, innocent, beautiful, and loving. The perfect reflection of his very soul.
"Evah..." It was the most wonderful sound. His voice was more of an echo that resounded into an incomprehensible realm of nonexistence, as if her name, the way he always pronounced it was the most beautiful word.
It was him, the Wally who had await her for so long as much as she did.
"Wally..." Her crackled voice released in this infinity broke the tension in her. Eve realized that she had missed him almost two lifetimes, broke down and tried to embrace him with all her fading might, releasing a hundred-and-seventy-eight years worth of pain and grief and joy through a muffed cry that would've rung throughout the cosmos. A hundred and seventy eight years alone after she spared him from a doomed body inprisoned in the world of the living, Wally too had began to weep as he held her to never dare let her go, or risk the end of space and time if he did.
He wasn't perplexed nor cncerned to see his beloved Eve so impossibly old and broken, for he was finally reunited with the angel and love of his life whom had lived long and happy with what she had done in life, withstanding the test of time as much as he did; for here, there was no beginning nor end, only infinity.
Eve felt she could stay in this peaceful nothingness forever, floating freely in this space between states of existance in as much as she could forever sleep with her beloved; her eyes moist and closed in content with the spirit of Wally now in her strong grip, never to let go.
The realization of her knewfound sense of bliss and freedom from any relevant pain, made her look down at herself and no longer saw the 200 year old woman she was. No wrinkles, no weakness, nothing that made her appear so old. Now she was as eloquent as she was when she first meet him. She was as luminous as the white haired angle she was, and always will be in his eyes, even if she was so old.
The overtaking warmth of her with Wally before her and beginning to transcend into whatever was beyond made her leave her every thought behind, including her nagging ones wondering if she had just died or if this whole experience is all a desperate last fantasy.
It was irrelevant now, she is finally with him again, free of everything that bounded her to the living world, from her torments to her crude pleasures of her body that was no different from the matter that composed all things in the cosmos. Now here where their was only them, just him holding her and sharing their first and last kiss, as they had been waiting for what may have been eons. And will forever more, as the conscousness of both beings begin to fade into nothingess.
They are together finally at last, floating freely as they had during their treasured space walk, only now it is a relived memory as wonderful and cosmic as their love itself. The two souls were always natural explorers of their own worlds before they meet, and no human-bound word can do justice to the elation of what they will look forward to find in the infinite.
Consciousness fades away at last into oblivion as the two souls of Wallace Burtt and Evelyn Knight embrace, passing together into the expanse stretching farther then the continuoums of space and time; leaving the Earth, the stars, and the very edge of the known universe behind to the Heavens, and beyond.
~FIN~
Very depressing, yet happy ending as always. After reading all the reviews from the novelization about how close Wally came to dying, i couldn't help but succumb to the temptation of the idea of killing off Wally, even at the hands of Eve herself! Evil aern't I?
A/N: Below is a little poem i wrote that gave me a little inspiration and the wording to help write the ending, out of conversation of shared dreams of what beauty the universe is to the perception of self, sparked by the insight of the cosmic mind, Blank Existance:
"i yearn for the same goddess incarnate, A woman whose lively mind, spirit, and body is as gracefully beautiful as the clearest night sky can be; skin whose softness and warm light would bring life to even the most barren souls it touches; the brightness of her white hair glowing long and wavy like solar fire, burning lust and lovelorn into any mortal. yet above all, She takes my breath away as i stare into heaven: the blue orbs of her eyes, portals of wonder beyond words, the entrance into the spirit that harbors the secrets to life and the universe herself. She is a driving force for a dream of acquisition of a goal or belonging. She would rule my thoughts to pursue a life for myself and for her, til her heart is mine and mine alone. And we ascend together into the heavens, leave Mother Earth behind and spread life...spread love...to the stars and beyond."
If it were not for Blank Existence, the conception and inspiration to help finish this story and to pursue more ideas may never have come to be. So thank the chain of events of the universe leading to the creation of Earth, humans, our ancestors, all the way to Blank for all your help and intellectual sharing of your gift of a mind. Thank you, good friend:)
Hope you've all enjoyed my latest installment to the humanized epic of Wally, Happy Holidays and I will someday see you all again in another pre-se-quel!
~Whodarep08