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Harmmony should mace Dolphin to the damn face when she spots her at the edge of her render distance. She glares as Dolphin starts making her way towards her and thinks about how very nice it would be to slime her out.
Then exhaustion hits her. It's not worth the effort. Especially not worth the inevitability that Dolphin might want to talk to her.
So she swaps to the Speed effect and does her best to lose her trail in the nearby woods.
Of course, despite Harmmony's best efforts, Dolphin is a sweaty little tryhard, and she catches up to Harmmony within five minutes.
"Shaun!"
Harmmony rolls her eyes. She doesn't respond, just keeps running. She windbursts to try to get some more distance between the two of them, but Dolphin is on her in less than a minute, grabbing at the back of her chestplate.
So Harmmony spins around and smashes Dolphin with her mace.
"Bro—" Dolphin is knocked back, eyes wide with shock. She backs off a few more feet and quickly eats a gapple. "What's with you— wait, are you still Harmmony?"
"Shaun wouldn't want to see you either," Harmmony snaps. "Just leave me alone." She turns her back on Dolphin and moves to head further into the trees, hoping Dolphin will take the goddamn hint.
Dolphin does not take the hint.
"Why are you still possessing her? Get out of her."
Harmmony scoffs, walking a little faster. "Why are you still following me? Didn't you say you didn't want to get attached to me again? Didn't want to deal with me? Was that about me, or was that about Shaun, by the way?"
"Bro." Dolphin says. "Come on. That's got nothing to do with—"
Harmmony windbursts and tries to smash Dolphin again with her mace. Doesn't quite hit, but she likes how Dolphin quickly moves under the cover of a tree to avoid another hit. Surprising that she doesn't equip her own mace to kill Harmmony in retaliation. It's something Dolphin has plenty of practice at.
Harmmony windbursts again to get on top of the tree and tries once again to get the hell out of here.
"Harmmony! Bro, come on, we're a team here."
"I'm leaving the team," Harmmony says. "I'm betraying. Bye. Have fun with Pika and Sharkilz and Sharooh."
"You can't just— you're stealing Shaun away," Dolphin says, still following. This is starting to give Harmmony a headache. "Get out of her."
"Nope," Harmmony says. She starts windbursting up a cliff. "Don't want to. You killed her, anyway."
She had dropped the anonymous mask for that last standoff, herself unarmed, defenseless, backed into a corner while Dolphin still talked down to her like she was the wrong one. Called her a snake, bragged about how she was going to win with Midnight, how that was her plan all along. How Harmmony— and Shaun— were never a part of her goal of winning the second experiment. Just a pair of bloodied stepping stones.
And Dolphin still slashed her axe deep into Shaun's body like all their years of friendship meant nothing. Killed her with a single crit, because there's no universe where it will never be so easy to kill Shaun.
"I wouldn't have had to if you weren't possessing her!" Dolphin shouts.
Harmmony wheezes out a laugh. As if Shaun would want to stay with Dolphin even after all of that. She was happy to let Harmmony take over, and it hadn't taken long for her voice to go silent inside Harmmony's mind when she connected to the server for the second session.
"Whatever bro," Harmmony says. "Quit following me."
"I'm not following you, I'm following Shaun," Dolphin says. "And I'll only stop if she's the one who tells me to stop."
"Good luck with that," Harmmony mutters.
She presses a hand against Shaun's chest. She still can't feel her. She knows Shaun has to still be somewhere inside, but she has no clue how to find her. She's tried— she'd been taking a break after trying for hours to put herself back into a physical body of her own again when she spotted Dolphin— but she just can't get herself to leave Shaun's body.
"Harmmony!"
This freaking guy. Harmmony stops halfway up a craggy mountain covered sparsely with shrubs and trees.
"I'm gonna kill you if you don't stop following me," Harmmony says.
Dolphin makes a face. "Don't say that while you're still in her body. It's freaking weird."
Harmmony narrows her eyes, weighing her mace carefully in her hand. She knows how crazy it looks using Shaun's face to make expressions like this. She'd seen what it looked like in her reflection in a placid pond one evening while she was still on Project Unknown, and the image was just… so unlike Shaun. Normally, Shaun has a way of emoting her face when she's upset or angry that just makes other people feel bad for her. She's just… too much of an angel. Both figuratively and literally.
"Either you kill me or I kill you," Harmmony says.
Dolphin finally takes out her own mace. "Why are you doing this?"
"Cause I hate you."
Dolphin actually flinches at that.
Good.
"So you're gonna pull Shaun into this too?" Dolphin says.
"Yeah," Harmmony fires back. "She's already a part of this. You know, she asked me to possess her."
"No, she didn't."
"She did. She said she couldn't stand being teamed with you again."
"Stop it. She didn't say that."
"How do you know?" Harmmony says. "Because you know her so well? You told me to my face that you didn't want to deal with me. Is it really that hard to believe that Shaun picked up on that before? That you see her as a burden that you have to take care of, that she holds you back when you're trying to win?"
Dolphin backs away. "You're— that's not…"
Harmmony hits her with the mace. Dolphin lifts up her shield a fraction of a second too late, and the hit knocks her down the mountain. Harmmony continues racing up the mountain.
This time, Dolphin doesn't follow.
⋆ ☾ ⋆
Harmmony ignores the direct messages from her former teammates. She wouldn't be surprised if Dolphin is using them to try to get her to respond. She really doesn't care. Sharooh and Sharkilz and Pika can send her all the messages they want, but she's not reading them.
She digs a shallow space under an unraided village several thousand blocks away and sets up her enderchest and a bed stolen from one of the village houses. Nothing meant to be permanent, just a space for her to try and focus.
She sits on the bed, closing her eyes and allowing the distant sound of idle footsteps along the dirt path overhead to fade into the background.
"Shaun?" she whispers.
No answer. Same as the last hundred times she tried talking to Shaun. Clearly the brief scuffle with Dolphin didn't shake Shaun out of whatever place she's put herself into deep within herself. Of course, if that was going to work, Harmmony probably would have heard her a bit more often while she was still on Project Unknown.
Shaun is still there. Somewhere. She has to be. Harmmony just needs to find her; she just needs to bring her back so they can… so they can move on. So Harmmony can go back to being herself. So she can have Shaun back, and maybe Shaun can tell Dolphin with her own voice to fuck off.
She breathes out. Tries the other approach.
She finds that source of power inside Shaun. It's easier this time now that she knows what to look for. Pink light envelops her body, and four wings appear out of the air, half curled around her. Harmmony leans into the feeling, and the wings extend, flapping once before stretching to brush against the walls of the impromptu bunker. Harmmony brings them back to mantle on either side of her. The light grows brighter.
"Shaun," Harmmony says. Her voice echoes in the small space. "Can you hear me?"
The angelic energy ripples through her body. It's starting to feel more familiar now that she's tried this a few times. It still doesn't quite feel like Shaun, but it's close. It's that addictive goodness that Harmmony has always associated with her. It feels like the aftermath of Shaun's expressions of love, the kindness and gentleness in her actions that somehow leave Harmmony feeling like she's cozied up beside her watching the sunset despite emitting no tangible warmth on its own.
And despite feeling the shadow of Shaun's energy, Harmmony still can't feel Shaun within it.
"Shaun, please," Harmmony whispers. "Please come back. It's over. It's done. Dolphin killed me, but I'll be okay. Just… just come back."
The pink light ebbs and flows and sparkles around her like dappled sunlight through tree leaves. Harmmony watches the light shift as the longing grows in her heart.
"Shaun…"
She looks down at her hands. Once again, she tries to remember how she possessed Shaun in the first place. It was so damn easy. She should have been more careful. She should have been more wary of the potential that it wouldn't be so easy to split apart afterwards.
She had just… she had just wrapped her energy around Shaun. And that was enough, somehow. She tapped into some latent demonic ability of hers and before she could even think about what she was doing, she was looking at the world through Shaun's eyes. It felt like the easiest thing in the world, possessing her. For those brief, beautiful moments, she could feel Shaun, lovely and perfect, swathed somewhere within.
And then, sometime between that moment and the first day back on Project Unknown, she slipped away into silence.
Shaun said she trusted Harmmony.
Harmmony closes her hands. She lets the angelic energy fade back into herself.
She still can't feel Shaun anywhere.
This might actually be a serious problem.