Work Text:
I told my best friends everything, of course. Well, nearly everything, some details from the orchard weren't meant to be shared. Most importantly I showed them the apple with its fingernail shaped letters and told them of the possibility, of the hope.
When I returned home, after clearing my stuff from their spare room, I made sure to put the apple in the kind of safe place where they could easily find it. Just in case.
It was strange trying to live my life without the escape hatch of the multiverse, like trying to go a day without phone or internet. The urge to escape again was sometimes overpowering and if I still had my splinter I'm not sure I would have been able to resist. Especially as GMR rebounded to choke my lungs and shove me back onto the carousel of medications and examinations.
Still, I managed to make it a good life, I even wrote some versions of my experiences for Dr. Bastille to read. Being a published author was beyond any expectations I'd had for my life.
I made it to thirty four. Not bad for a girl supposed to die before her twenty second birthday.
Then, as I lay in another hospital bed, struggling to breathe, my best friends came to visit carrying a red apple just the shade of poison. They didn't bring my god-daughter, we had those goodbyes a week ago and today was just for us. We had waited as long as we could, my promise to them, but any day now the doctors would want to swap my cannula for a respirator and there would go my chance to bite that apple.
Tears and goodbyes and a bite of the sweetest, juiciest, most impossible red apple.
Darkness and the press of lips against my own.