#quick au explanation for ya: basically; amelia winds up winning BUT theres a caveat

[doodlebeeberry]

umm the hugging 10. prompt with maybe scentdapack pls 🥲

heyyyy sorry for sitting on this since october and also only writing something vaguely related to the prompt (in my defense, they don't have necks), but! here you are :]

10. hiding their face in the other’s neck

hope you like aus and also angst

As a general rule, Amelia tried to avoid the waiting room.

Which, to be honest, was a bit of a challenge, given that it was literally the only other place she could really go. An endless peach void that shimmered and sizzled with each footstep, it was undoubtedly a pretty place. She had, as a matter of fact, spent quite a lot of time there just after she’d won for that very reason. It wasn’t cramped, wasn’t crowded with screens and equipment, it felt so much warmer and friendlier than the master control room did, despite being none of those things.

But with that warmth came quiet. Came emptiness, and loneliness, the kind that wormed its way deep, deep into her bones and up her nerves to choke her and make her eyes blur and burn. It reminded her that this was her fate. This was her future. Immense power, but no purpose. An eternity stuck in limbo, all by herself.

Truth be told, the master control room wasn’t much better. It was dim, lit mostly by the massive array of screens lining the far wall. The corkboard on the back wall was empty when she’d arrived—though she imagined it’d once been plastered with notes about nothing, Airy seemed like that kind of person—and over time she’d stuck a few things up there. Mostly reminders, stuff she’d begun to forget with the isolation: her name, where she was from, odd little anecdotes from her life, rough doodles of people she’d once known. Those were the hardest to look at. She’d so many times contemplated throwing them away, or waving them out of existence, or dropping them down onto the empty plane below, but she never did. They’d hover over her shoulders as she watched streams from all manner of other worlds, little snapshots into the life she could never have again. There was no escaping her fate, god knows she tried, but, as much of an invasion of privacy as it was, it helped her forget for a while.

She slept too, when she could, and tried to dream her way into a different situation. Sometimes she’d succeed, but the places grew blurrier as time went on and her memory of them faded, and the faces transitioned from those of people she knew to strangers she would watch live out their lives. A grocery store clerk, a painter, a teacher. A travel guide, a musician, a helmsman on a cargo ship, on occasion she’d dream she was living out their lives. It was kinda strange, to live so vicariously through them—or the image of them in her head, anyway—but it was so freeing, so exhilarating, so amazing just to talk to someone, even if they were never really real.

Sometimes, rarely, she’d dream someone was visiting her in the waiting room. One of the other past competitors, to be more specific. They were always like ghosts, unable to touch her, but they’d sit with her and talk about life and the outside and everything and nothing. They made the emptiness feel a bit less alone. She couldn’t decide, upon waking up, if she loved those dreams or hated them.

Regardless of her feelings on it, she still dropped into the waiting room from time to time, if only to walk around and stretch her legs somewhere with significantly less stale air. On this particular occasion, she’d left her observations of a dog park somewhere in New York at the bidding of a strange feeling in her gut. Restlessness, she guessed, begging her to take a lap to the (now abandoned) chairs and back, above everything else. Which, to be fair, wasn't much; there was only a single person to watch—a book-like object with a little puppy, chatting on the phone with what seemed like a work friend. So, she did.

She let her mind wander to those dreams along the way, the dreams with visitors and people she knew. She’d looked in on friends and family a few times, but, much like the waiting room itself, the sight was often too much to bear. The first people she’d checked on had been her parents, still grieving and searching, thinking her dead, and she had nearly been sick with grief of her own. She’d seen her friends move on with their lives, and felt something between frustration and anger and hurt and shame all rolled into an emotional ball she couldn’t well describe. The only time she watched people she knew these days was after those visitor dreams. Watching them made her feel some small resentment— what she wouldn’t give to be hurting, perhaps, but accompanied and free—but mostly she’d just feel relief. They were living lives, going and doing as they pleased, to a reasonable extent, with whomever they wanted. They could visit markets or swim in the ocean or sleep out under the stars. If it meant everyone—both that was and would ever be—could have that, then, Amelia had decided long ago now, she would endure eternity here alone.

But that didn’t mean she had to be happy about it. That didn’t mean she couldn’t dream.

“Amelia”

Speaking of which.

She hadn’t even realized she’d fallen asleep. She almost laughed. God, she thought, that phone call really must have been boring.

She turned, somewhere between the chairs and the control room, then and there, loneliness and boredom, forever in a never-ending now.

Two people stood several yards away: a green backpack, and a soda bottle with a red label. The most frequent visitors in her dreams, if she were to guess. They stared her down, and she debated whether or not she should put off the inevitable and just wake herself up.

“Amelia!”

She hadn’t even realized they had moved until they were on her. In a single motion, Backpack—no, no..Liam, that was his real name, wasn’t it?—wrapped his arms around her and spun them both in a half-circle, stumbling. He nearly knocked her back completely, but—

Wait.

He was holding her in a vice, pressing her close, like she’d crumble away into dust or sand or water, dripping out of his grip.

Wait.

Soda—she, ashamedly, had never actually learned his real name—was a bit less intense, kneeling beside her, setting one warm palm on her back and another on her hand, running a thumb across her knuckles. She wasn’t exactly sure when they’d moved to the ground. Her ears were full of static, sizzling.

Wait.

“Amelia?”

She hadn’t even realized they’d been speaking to her. Their eyes were soft with worry, shining with tears. She heard several pop against the floor.

“You alright?” Soda asked. His voice sounded so different, so novel, so painfully familiar, so painfully clear. They were never this clear in her dreams.

She lifted her hand, trembling, from under his grasp. Slowly, hesitantly, so desperately, she set it against his cheek.

Plastic. His label, so quietly, crinkled.

She turned to Liam, reaching out another hand, shaking hard. She could hardly breathe.

He took it gently in his own hands and pressed it against his cheek.

Fabric. It shifted, so subtly, as he smiled.

They were warm, both of them. They were alive.

“Hey.”

Liam’s voice wavered. Her own was hardly a whisper.

“You’re here.”

Soda’s voice shook too. He leaned a bit into her touch.

“We’re here.”

Her vision blurred.

“You’re here.”

She pulled them close, burying her face into them. She swore, with all that she was, that she could feel their hearts beating, feel them shift, feel them breathe against her, so steadfastly there.

And when they wrapped their arms around her, pulling her closer, holding her tighter, as though daring reality itself to even try ripping them apart, she was alive.

For the first time in eternity, she was finally alive.