The wind swirled around Purple, causing a comfortable and tolerable environment to form around him.
What he would do for that environment in the real world.
It wasn't a void, which he was very, very, grateful for, but it wasn't home.
Not that home could feel like home anymore.
He had nobody to make it home anymore.
The thought sent his emotions into another turmoil. He wanted it to end.
He'd lost his family.
He'd lost his friends.
He'd lost everything.
And somehow, he had survived.
It didn't feel like he had survived.
There was nobody to be in the world with.
Although, the voices in his head from earlier seemed oddly familiar.
Could that have been...?
"No. Orchid killed them. It couldn't have been...could it?"
He didn't know what to think anymore. He was stuck in a weird place that made him feel oddly comfortable, and it weirded him out.
A lot.
"What the fuck am I doing here?"
Better yet, what was he going to do next? If he got out of here, the only people he had left were the hollowheads, and it didn't sound like they had an idea of what to do next.
Then again, Second was shattered from the deaths of the others, so God knows how he was going to be.
That battle really stuck with him. He had heard something then. He didn't know what to think of it.
Could it have been...?
"Cho!" Dark flinched back when Chosen moved again, and the grey spots on his body vanished.
"What happened?"
"Navy tried to kill you."
"Of course he did."
Second was blasted backwards. "FUCK!"
"Sec!"
Chosen and Dark both flinched at the voice.
"GREEN!?"
Navy turned towards the entrance.
"Fuck."
King and the others burst into the room, and were automatically pushed back.
Purple flinched. "King!"
Purple was then blasted with a yellow light.
One that Dark quickly recognized.
"The crown."
Navy snarled. This stupid setback!
Naturally, he would've gone to Purple to attack him, but Purple had vanished for whatever reason, so King and the others were the next best target.
King shoved the kids behind him. "Your going to get yourself killed messing with these kids."
Navy smirked. "Uh huh. Your going to get yourselves killed protecting Purple. The useless, weak, unloved, UNGRATEFUL-FUCK!"
Navy was hit with an energy ball. And blasted into a wall.
King and the others flinched, caught off guard from whatever the hell had just happened.
"What..."
"The hell..."
Navy pushed rubble away from him, flying back up into the air. "YOUR GONNA PAY FOR THAT!"
He blinked. King and the others followed his gaze.
"Purple!" King shouted.
The others watched in awe. "Is that...?"
"That's the crown Purple talked about!" Blue exclaimed.
"That crown he killed Orchid with last time?"
"Yep!"
Navy instinctively lunged for the pile of guns nearby. Purple gave chase, attempting to tackle him.
"Oh no you don't!"
Purple dodged the gunshot Navy fired at him.
"Good fucking luck." Purple snapped, a smirk on his face.
Navy snarled. "You fucking brat!"
"Your decision, not mine!"
Green snickered. "Nice work, Purple."
King had to admit, it was one of Purple's best insult at Navy. And he had used a crapton on Navy since they had gotten there.
Purple grabbed one of the guns laying on the ground, and aimed for Navy.
"Might not have to use my powers on you after all, Navy Ribbon-Rose."
Navy growled. "You will regret disrespecting your father like that."
Purple scoffed. "You? My father? Please. The only father I have is King, right down there, watching me kick your ass."
"That is your father?! Can't even protect Gold. What makes you think he can protect you!?"
Another gunshot. "The fact that I mean more to him than you will EVER MEAN TO ME!"
Navy fired the gun right as Purple fired his own fatal blow.
"And that means, you will no longer exist to me. Nothing is going to stop me from killing you ONCE AND FOR ALL!"
The bullets collided...
...and an explosion followed...
...and they were gone.
Purple watched the scene play out in front of him.
"King?"
Somehow, King had survived.
"Orchid."
"Now that that's settled," Navy said, turning to Orchid, who had been surprisingly quite injuried from the attack. "Get rid of the others."
Orchid stood blank for a moment, before spawning an energy ball in her hand. "No."
"What?!"
"I said, no! In fact, to hell with your plan! I'll bring the others back, and I'll stop you!"
Orchid was blasted. Shot.
"Good fucking luck." Navy chuckled.
Orchid grabbed a remote laying amongst the rubble, before throwing it at the wall. It smashed to pieces.
Then she was gone.
"Orchid sacrificed herself to save the others?"
Maybe Chosen was right.
Maybe she had been brainwashed.
It would certainly explain her lack of hesitation when she was killed.
A gust of wind.
A gust of wind, and Chosen was thrown onto cold, hard, ground.
This felt...familiar.
"Are we...?"
"FUCKING HELL YES!" Dark shouted. "WE'RE OUT OF THAT STUPID FUCKING DIMENSION!"
Willow sighed. "Thank God."
Chosen glanced around, slowly taking inventory of everyone.
Dark, Second, Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, King, Crystal, Sky, Lavender, Gold, Willow, Sunny, Sapphire, Scarlet, and Copper.
Wait...Purple and Amethyst.
"Where are Purple and Amethyst?"
Everyone glanced around, slowly beginning to wonder the same thing.
"Purple, I'm sure we all have a good idea on where he is-"
"Either the Void or dead." King bit out, already regretting the wods.
"We're gonna go with Void."
"Back on topic, we already have a good idea on where Purple is, but Amethyst...yeah, I'm not sure about her."
"Maybe she stayed behind?" Dark suggested.
"Possible."
A flash of purple was thrown through the portal that was slowly closing.
"Amethyst?!"
"No. That's..."
King was already on his feet and rubbing towards the limp form. "Purple!"
Yellow's mind was already crafting a plan as Purple's limp body was thrown through a portal.
Coming up with an idea, he joined King at Purple's side and checked for a pulse.
It was surprisingly still there, even with the cuts, scratches, bruises, and other injuries littering the boy's form.
"It's still there, although it could get weaker. For now, he's alive." Yellow said, breathing a sigh of relief.
"What do we do?"
"Hosptial. Easiest solution."
"The city is probably in ruins. We can't get anywhere with the carnage that was sure to follow. How else did so many people get into the Great Above without us?"
"Fair argument."
"Let's get to the desktop. It's going to be a hassle to explain to Alan where we've been, but it's going to be easier for Yellow to help him."
Purple didn't know exactly if he was comatose, unconscious, or dead, but he knew he was fucking bored.
Walking around was boring. He didn't know where he was, because it wasn't the Void, where he could hate himself for whatever reason, but it was boring as hell and he hated it.
He wanted to go home already.
"Ugh...can I fucking GO HOME ALREADY?!" He shouted at nothing.
He hated it here.
Wherever this was, he wanted to go home.
Not that he minded being alone in the little space, it was just driving him insane that what remained of his friends, and everyone else if Orchid had actually succeeded in bringing them back, were worrying about him.
He hated it.
"Come on, Purple. There's totally a way out of here. You've just gotta find it!"
"...However long that takes."
Purple had distinguished it had been two days when completely out of nowhere, he had started hearing voices that sounded eerily familiar to King and Yellow's.
"King, I promise, I'm doing what I can."
"Yellow, it's been two days."
"I'm sure Purple's been comatose longer."
"Has he?!"
"...Okay, maybe he hasn't. But still! I'm doing what I can. This isn't a hosptial."
"Well, I wasn't the one who vetoed taking him to one!"
Second's voice filled the space.
"The city is probably more chaotic than Alan was when I showed up on his phone last night! Dude looked like he'd had a heart attack!"
"Not helping!"
"Sorry. But I'm probably right. The city is probably insane right now, given so many people were just thrown into another dimension completely out of nowhere."
"How are we going to get them out?"
"I don't think we can. If Amethyst is there, she might take care of them. Maybe be a better rule than Orchid if she wasn't brainwashed."
"Hey! Orchid did just fine!"
"Yeah, till she abandoned Purple!"
"Would King have met him if not for her? Would we have?"
"...Fuck. Right."
Purple watched the back and forth banter go for a while. Second did make a point. They could thank Orchid for letting him meet King and the others."
He was genuinely grateful for her, even if he did have to lose her again at the end of the day.
Maybe it was for the best. After all, this had brought him and King closer, brought the Hollowheads back together, and given him powers he didn't even know he had, but God damn he was grateful he had them.
He could be grateful for the entire debacle, when it wasn't weighing on his subconscious like the coma he was sure he was stuck in.
"Come on, Purple, wake UP!"
Two days.
King was trying not to let that get to him.
It had been two days, and although he was showing improvement, Purple still wasn't waking up.
"Come on, love. Wake up. I know your in there."
Yellow sat at his computer, still running tests.
"I'm sure he'll wake up soon."
"You've been saying that for ten fucking hours," Green snapped from the door. "TEN!"
"Hey! Don't rush Purple. He's probably still processing everything. Did you see the injuries he had?! His body is still recovering?!"
"In a coma?"
King and Yellow shot him glares.
"...Nevermind."
"Yeah. That's what I thought." Yellow turned back to the computer. He jumped back.
"Jesus!"
"What?" King glanced up.
"Oh, nothing. It just says he's going to wake up soon."
"I'll see that get proved wrong in another ten hours." Green snarled, walking out of the doorway.
"BUZZ OFF, WATERMELON!"
"SLEEP DEPRIVED COFFEE ADDICT!" Green shouted back.
King groaned. "How does Alan put up with the seven of you?"
"I dunno."
Another two hours pass before Purple finally stirs.
It jolts King back into reality from his space-out, and threw Yellow back to his computer for more coding tests, presumably.
"Purple? Purple, love, wake up."
"He's stirring...come on, there's gotta be something! I expected a damaged code or something! He's perfectly fine, aside from the external injuries!"
"How?!"
"I-I don't know! But! It's a good thing. We just have to wait for the external injuries and concussion to heal, and he should be fine."
Purple groaned slightly, wincing at King's grasp on his arm as he helped him sit up.
"What's...What's happening?"
"Somehow, you have no internal injuries. A good thing, but there's still the external." Yellow explained.
"Probably been worse."
"Aside from the fact that your littered in bruises, cuts, scrapes, and scratches, plus a major concussion, your fine!"
"Eh, I've been worse."
"Sweetie, you've almost drowned."
"Plus, you've died more times than we can count."
"Neither one of those we're my fault."
"Eh, but still. Now, I've gotta go prove to Green that it did NOT take you ten hours to wake up. HEY, WATERMELON!"
Yellow ran out of the room, calling out for Green with the nickname.
"When was he "watermelon"? He's supposed to be the green Grape of the group."
"Eh, who knows? Yellow's been calling him that since we got back."
King doesn't necessarily hate living on the desktop, but it's something he doesn't ever want to do again.
But, unfortunately, the entire city was in ruins(thanks to The Great Above scheme they'd just foiled), meaning the hospitals were out of question, so they had to stay on the desktop so Yellow could keep Purple under watch...as a "precaution".
There was no precaution, in his opinion. There hadn't been anything necessarily wrong with Purple, aside from a fuckton of mental scarring, when they'd gotten back, so he didn't understand why Yellow was going to the extreme in that specific manner.
But, Purple had been kind of weak for a while, so Yellow wanted to run some extra tests to make sure nothing from the crown(which they all learned Purple could absorb...somehow) didn't have any side effects of Purple's health.
That, King could understand. Purple had absorbed foreign magic into his own, and then was killed(?) right afterwards, and then put into a coma following that. It made sense that Yellow, and himself, had concerns about the sudden body strain, doubled with absorbing foreign magic, causing some type of health issue.
So, King was, obviously, worried about Purple.
Very worried.
The last time the two had actually gotten to settle down and actually relax, had been who knows how long ago. Since that last time, Purple had gone through comas, amnesia, thrown into another fucking dimension, brainwashed, somehow gotten a sister, his entire biological family had fallen apart, he had been forced to watch King and the others die(again), gone to war, and almost killed.
How much worse could the poor kid's life get?!
Thanks a lot, Navy.
And Orchid...but you're justified.
...Sort of.
King didn't know how to feel about Orchid anymore. Orchid was supposed to be dead from the start(until Navy went and screwed everything up), and then she'd been resurrected, brainwashed, killed AGAIN, forced to kill Purple, her own child, and then a whole bunch of other shit.
And then she'd decided it was a smart idea to kill King and the others to throw Purple off...twice. And they all knew what had come out of that...twice.
Fun.
Purple was fine.
At least, he was physically fine.
Aside from feeling physically weak, and exhausted, Purple was fine.
Well, that, and mentally scarred for probably the rest of his life.
Damn it, Navy.
What the hell is wrong with you?!
I was perfectly fine without you, and so were you!
Why did you come after me when I was finally rebuilding my life the way I wanted it to?!
Purple groaned, laying back on the pillow, where he wanted to stay forever.
They'd been stranded on the desktop while Yellow, Dark, and Alan helped fix up the city so that King and Purple could go back.
Because the Great Above was not the best thing to use when trying to destroy a city.
He didn't exactly think Navy and Orchid wanted to destroy Stick City, per say, nor did he think they wanted so many people thrown into the other dimension all at once. They'd just wanted Purple, and their guards, to go up there, and suddenly, there was maybe half the population of the entire city taken out in one fell swoop.
Lovely.
At least they had Amethyst. Amethyst hadn't gone back with them, so Purple was left to assume the sister he didn't know existed had stayed behind to help the others if she could.
Maybe she'd be able to get at least some of them back to Stick City, so that the city would stay relatively populated enough for it to still be considered a metropolis...or something like that.
Hey, they'd tried reopening the portal at least maybe once or twice when King and the others had gotten in there, maybe they could use that technology to get a working portal between the two worlds to open.
Hopefully.
Probably.
Amethyst was a smart girl. She'd survived the war that had essentially been started by Sunny and Willow during the original rescue mission, and somehow lived her entire life without any issues.
How did she survive on her own once Night Shade entered Purple's own battle? That he'd never know.
But, they were both related to Orchid, who herself was pretty clever, so that was pretty self-explanatory.
Purple sighed, pushing stray hair out of his face before spawning a small energy ball in his hand.
Still purple.
Did it get zapped out?
What the fuck?
Purple had absorbed some of the crown's magic during the battle with Fern, and it had stayed throughout the rest of the fight, but he'd woken up back on Alan's desktop, and it was gone completely.
How the fuck did it just...vanish?
Where did it go?
Maybe Yellow knew.
If Yellow had even noticed the sudden power decrease during examinations.
"Aaaaand...Done!" Yellow said, placing his pencil back down on his desk. "Purple's good!"
"He's been fine for as long as we'd been here, Yellow," King said, already moving the patches from Purple's skin. "I don't see why you keep doing these."
"Because it doesn't make sense that Purple looks and seems physically fine, especially after such a strong amount of strain! We all saw the battles with Fern and Navy! They were chaotic!"
"Haven't we established that I have some random type of regeneration abilities, because you were randomly brought back from the dead after Navy killed you?" Purple asked.
"...Ohhhh. Why am I an idiot?!" Yellow groaned, throwing his head back on his chair. "Your powers go seemingly under the radar during these check overs, so I didn't realize that! Damn it!"
"Easy, Yellow. You think I remember I have regeneration powers most of the time?"
"Then how the fuck-"
"Orchid."
"...Right."
King sighed. "Okay, if the two of you are done bickering, how's the city coming along."
Yellow blinked, before reopening his laptop and typing up codes. "Dark's gotten most of everything we needed done. Just a couple extra repairs on the city, and we'll be good. But, I was also wondering something..."
"What?"
Purple already knew it was something science-related. It always was when it came to Yellow.
"Purple, could I use a sample of your forcefield abilities to make a large forcefield around the city once it was done? It would significantly reduce some of the damage done if it works properly, and it would-"
"Yellow, I get it. You want to cut back on the damage."
"Well, if you think about it, a forcefield around the vast majority of the buildings would protect them greatly if we were to ever go through another Navy-related event, or something of the sort, and they can't be destroyed or deactivated unless something happens to you."
"So your basically putting me as the entire city's only hope of survival?"
"Well...kind of."
"Why?"
"Purple, you have powers! And besides, King would probably end up committing first-degree manslaughter if anything happened to you."
King glared at the child. "Probably more than that." He wrapped an arm around Purple's shoulders.
"It's valid!" Yellow exclaimed. "But still! With that forcefield, the entire city would stay relatively safe if any other natural disasters would hit the city!"
Purple blinked at him, before sighing. "Fine. I'll do it."
"Perfect! I'll just put that in, and once the city's done, we'll activate it. It should only take a couple more days to finish the city, so we still have a little time. That way, if anything comes up, I'll be able to make sure the code stays perfectly fine, so that nothing goes wrong when we start it up."
Purple stared at him for another moment.
"Hey! Earth to King!"
King blinked, mentally slapping himself for jolting. It was just Purple.
Purple was harmless.
For the most part.
Right?
Sure, you just saw him destroy Navy, but he's just a kid!
He's harmless!
"King?"
Purple's sitting on the couch in the living room next to him. Right in front of him, his hands clutching his arms like lifelines.
"..Yeah?"
"You okay?"
And there he goes again.
Asking if King's okay when he's the one who had just been put in danger enough times, one could write an entire series of books.
"Yeah. I'm fine...I think."
Are they alright?
Will they be alright?
Ever?
Purple lets go of his arms and hugs him. "Are we gonna be alright?"
King returns the embrace tightly, running a hand through Purple's hair. "Yeah...we're gonna be alright...someday."