There are no smiling faces waiting for her. No light to sustain her but the dim flickering of evercandles in the far corridors beyond her resting place. The air is cool and stale in a way that makes it easy not to care about anything. Impossible means impossible, doesn't it? Just let her rest. And they do. It would be a simple thing to sit here forever, waiting quietly for the end of everything. Her body does not itch with excess energy; even the idea of tapping her foot seems bothersome and exhausting. She has no real desire to move around, to explore, to speak, even to open her eyes and find out where she is. Her neck lolls without interest and her head bounces off of her shoulder in a brief sting of burning pain, but that soon settles into a dull ache. That's good. She can ignore that. She slumps further to one side and sleeps with her wrist jammed backwards against something smooth and round and cold. And this is everything. Forever. Drip. Drip. Drip. She moans her annoyance. The girl can feel her ear twitching to catch each little plip of liquid as it splashes down from somewhere into a puddle of something else. Not quite rhythmic enough to fade into background noise, and just on the edge of too constant to fade in between splashes. She grits her teeth. Every time she hears it she twitches. The sound makes her feel dirty, like the sensation of it was somehow covering her in wet, disgusting slime and layers of grungy, melting something or other. She does not know, and does not wish to know. But her eyes open. She has to see what's doing it, has to stop it if she can. If she stops it, she can sleep again. Just one more time, and then impossible will finally be over. As dim as the light is, it still blinds her. She hisses and wrenches her eyes close to shut again, but now that she is paying attention the light shining through her eyelids is a pale substitute for darkness. It hurts as much to ward it off as to just deal with it. Her hiss becomes a sigh, and she moves as if to stand. Her world fills with the sound of clinking glass as dozens upon dozens of empty wine bottles scatter and roll from her position like a lotus of dominoes, just before her nose crunches against the hard metal floor of the ship. She sputters and chokes on a cry of pain, but all she has the strength to do is roll onto her back. At least like this the light is less blinding. She can look around. She sees shattered vacuum tubes. Broken consoles and banks of whirring machinery that will never move again. On the far wall, a dent and a trailing bloodstain that fills her heart with fantastic terror. Hello? She has no voice. Hello? She can't even work her jaw correctly. Hello? Is anybody there? But she is alone. The ship tilts violently, and the floor shifts underneath her. With an almost silent cry she tumbles helplessly out of the room and into the hallway beneath her. Her head impacts the wall and she falls limply into the pool that had been making that terrible noise. All at once she is aware of the sensation of crawling, terrible wetness and it fills her with disgust. She tears at her body and thrashes about, this desperate, clumsy, and violent attempt to get clean, to get to safety, to feel anything but... this. She feels the weight and the muck fall away and she does not know if it is clothing or flesh that she discards. She does not care. The girl does not understand how she managed to gain her feet. All she knows is that they are bare and they are pressed flat against the cool floor as they support her weight. She feels at once too heavy and too light, all weakness at war with the idea that some essential part of her is missing. But what could that be? She coughs, and feels something moving in her throat. Vile. It takes minutes for her retching to end. There is nothing left but a desperate desire to be somewhere other than here, and in this more than anything she finds the strength to move. Clutching at the wall for balance, the girl stumbles away in search of answers. What greets her at the end of her journey is an old and ruined kitchen. Once upon a time, this had been a place of ruthless creativity and competition. She can tell from the arrangement of the cooking stations, which are too individually well equipped and spaced too far apart to have been part of a unified, professional setup. This had also been the site of an incredible bounty and a harvest, once, enough for even an amateur chef to prepare a feast that could delight the very gods. But now there is only ruin. The girl breathes in the air and the wilted grasses bring only the smells of desiccation and neglect: a muted symphony of too-old spices under layers and layers and layers of dust and dryness that bring her halfway to sneezing and all the way to gagging. Vegetables in every conceivable size and shape lie ruined on the floor, long since shriveled beyond the point of edibility. There is no color here but grey, possibly with vague bits of brown mixed in somewhere if she could be bothered to scan for it. There's a clatter to her right as a table overladen with ancient, half eaten food collapses under its own weight. She feels her ears crush flat against her skull to shield her from the terror of it, but even then the overwhelming sensations pull a stinging wetness from her eyes and choke her breath until she gags as badly under the strain as she had in the horrible pool she'd come here to escape from. She flees in terror, and finds only ghosts. Everywhere she wanders there are signs of haunting. Room after room in rusted out disrepair still host a smattering of poorly thought out hobbies and useless crafts attempted by someone who was the farthest thing possible from a master artisan. Musty old paintings with the colors too faded to be able to tell how well they'd captured their subjects, implying but not showing clearly various stages of inspiration, clumsiness, frustration, and completion. These give way to rows and rows of makeshift mannequins draped in ugly dresses still clinging by the meanest of dried out and fraying threads. Benches dedicated to hideous metalwork and clumsy children's jewelry. All of it pitted, all of it tarnished, all of it ugly. Much of it surrounded by shattered furniture now little more than rotting splinters or piles of claw-torn metal where the craftsperson had broken down in frustration and despair at their own lack of ability. The girl glides through the mausoleum without a sound. Her wet hair and fur falls away from her in chunks as she passes memory after memory after memory. Aha, she thinks, I must be dead. This must be my punishment. What a disappointment this had turned out to be. To have come so far only not to be able to see it through to the end. To have suffered so much and never come close to balancing the scales. Had she really been so terrible a person, so horrible a friend and sister and leader that she couldn't even find out how the journey was meant to end? This was worse than just falling short: this was getting sent back almost to the start. Her arms have begun to itch. She rubs at them with claws that flake away when they make contact, and it only spreads the itch up to her fingers. Her grunt of frustration is trembling, but filled with the real hints of her voice she's heard since she first woke up. She throws herself against the wall and rubs against the corners of the hallway and the bolts securing various braces and doorways, but there's no relief in any of it. She is burning up. She is crumbling to ashes. She is going to claw her own fucking nerves out if they don't leave her alone! She finds a nest of blankets tucked into the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the detritus of a hundred different snacks nobody had ever bothered to clean up long after they'd been reduced to crumbs and sugar scraps and crumpled packaging. More bottles of wine, all of them empty, roll around underneath her feet and fill her world with sad, hollow clinks. The girl feels a brief pang of temptation to fling herself inside this place, which at least feels haunted by some more soothing memory, but there is nothing here to soothe her body. She'd robbed this place of everything it was worth long, long ago. She slinks away in search of something more. The hangar is empty when she arrives. No ships to carry her away, not even so much as an escape pod to shoot herself off in and take her chances on a planet below. Not that there are any of those to be seen either, in all the vast technicolor emptiness of space that stretches past her vision from the bay she stares out from. There are a great many welding tools and signs of work having once been done, but all of these have decayed into the same rusty uselessness as the rest of the ship. There is no music here to distract her. There is no hint of perfect, comforting cinema other than the now-collapsed projector that had come unscrewed from its tripod and shattered where some force or other had knocked it over. The girl turns her head sharply all of a sudden. There is a vague rumbling noise coming from somewhere above her. She cannot place it. She cannot understand it. She waits in terror, she waits in desperation, she waits in increasing impatience for it to explain itself, but the rumbling just repeats. She turns away, and feels something crunch underfoot. The girl swallows: a sharp and uncomfortable motion that wrenches her jaw tight and burns every muscle in her throat as if she'd been force fed a stone. Her eyes are consumed by the maw of space, which for the moment at least feels less terrifying than the prospect of looking down and seeing what she's standing on. She turns away from everything, instead. Away from the stars and the nebulae that are making her stomach churn, away from the still crunching object that is making her heart pound staccato against her ribs. Everything hurts, everything burns, every part of her feels destroyed and brand new at the exact same time. Enough. She's had enough. She'll take the blankets after all. But the door is gone. There is nothing but the hangar now, nothing but space and a broken projector and herself. Still shifting restlessly on top of the source of her terror. Alone but for the horrible noise, now peaking in her ears like thunder. She clamps her hands on top of her head and screams. When her legs collapse from underneath her, that is when she sees. The reel of film bleeds where her toe claws have punctured it. She! But..! Tears fall in earnest from her eyes. Her lungs squeeze as if in a vice with real and actual effort to find the air to give a voice to her emotions. Her wail is tiny and shaky to begin with, but it rolls across the room like a wave. And like a wave it soon swallows everything. She tastes salt and snot and blood and all of it only brings louder cries, as if to drown out the hideous noise that's only growing more insistent at her screams. "Bella. Bella? Bella!" Bella sniffles, and she blinks. Behind her, the hangar begins to rust. With terrifying rapidity, her resting place is falling to pieces. Not giving way to the cold freedom of space, but to crushing infinite blackness. To nothing whatsoever. She clutches at the broken, bleeding film reel and holds it to her breast. As if it were some precious piece of her she cannot lose or replace. "Bella? Bella?!" She turns. The voice is coming from the stars. What else can she do? That'll kill her for sure, but it's the only real thing left. The only way to go, if she's going to get anywhere before she dies. She's so sorry. She's so sorry for everything. Is it enough, at least, to want to save this broken little piece of her? Is it enough to pray for that at least she can preserve it somewhere that won't disappear, somewhere somebody else might find it and fix it and love it in a way she'd never deserved for herself? It has to be. Her legs seem to have shattered, so she has to drag herself. Inch by painful inch across an infinite hangar, barely faster than the encroaching darkness. No, slower than that. She is being swallowed. She is too late. Her left arm won't move anymore, so she tucks the reel against the locked elbow and pulls with just the right instead. She can't see anything. She can't tell if she's moving in the right direction anymore, or if there's even a right direction to go. But the only thing she has left is this little prayer. Her arm lifts. Her claws dig into the floor. She bends, and tears muscles open, and drags her heavy, limp body across blood slicked, disgusting wetness. "Bella? Come on, Bella! Don't you dare give up!" It takes more than everything she has to lunge just one final time. And then suddenly, she is falling. The light is so bright it blinds her. It's so warm...