#its a plot point

I fucking love Sage. She hits all my tropes and all my sweet spots and I think she is an incredibly strong, powerful, nuanced character and genuinely one of the best written ancient aliens out there (at least in cartoons).

I also absolutely adore writing how grief stricken, guilt ridden, and horrified she is by what she's become. How the warping and loss of her memories has left her with only a glimpse of what she's done, and that glimpse is dark, and coated in the gore of broken open red sentients and their spilled anti-matter. How she tries so hard to be better to fight.

She's dying, you know.

The mobi slows it, but it doesn't stop it. She's dying. They know she's dying. Every week the glowing gash in her chest gets a little brighter, a little bigger. She doesn't remember how she got it. (We can guess)

She doesn't know how she survived (she will).

She doesn't know why she survived (and she will, we know, and we will understand more than we were ever given).

She is grieving and mourning and broken and damaged and weak weak weak. She is not enough to save them. She is not enough to protect them.

(No matter how many times they say she is not broken, that weakness and illness are not brokenness, that health is not worth, she does not listen. sentients are supposed to be perfect. she is not perfect. why can't she be perfect.)

She was never supposed to care. They were supposed to be replaceable. But they include her. They teach her games. They tell her jokes.

They love her.

The tell her that they love her. And they show it. In every action. In every word.

And by all the stars in the multiverse, she cannot deny that she loves them too. She loves them so much it hurts. She would do anything for them. And that terrifies her. She's never loved something as much as her people before.

They are not her people. But they want to be. And they want her to be theirs.

When she is healed, when her mind and body are whole again and the pieces she lost to her brother are returned (they are not. the ones that come back are broken and gritty, and there are some she'll never get back. she'll never be a perfect sentient again. how can she protect them if she is not perfect?), she finds herself with synthetic tearducts that bleed a glowing light Spinner calls stardust. She is the only sentient she has ever known that can cry, and she now remembers many sentients.

She almost cannot stomach how appropriate it is, in the face of everything.

But before then, when she is still broken (you're not broken, sage, please, believe us. you're okay) and dying, when she is begging them to keep going without her, she has to learn to live with this feeling of love. They refuse to leave her. They refuse to let her die. They fight as much to protect Earth as they do to find a cure and save her. They don't want to do this without her.

And as the time she can spend outside her charging bubble shrinks, and the things she can do begin to slip away (she cannot float anymore. her feet refuse to leave the ground. she cannot call things to her. she must ask someone to get them.), she curls into herself and pleads to every power in the multiverse that they find a way to save her.

She doesn't want to die. She wants to live. To laugh. To help them win.

She doesn't want to die.

And when the chance is there, to get it all back, to save herself, to be with her friends, to be able to help, to feel worthy again -- can you blame her for taking it? Can you blame her for ignoring the warning signs?

She had weeks, if not days. She knew the price was high. She knew it would be a cost she might not be able to stomach.

She didn't know it would be Krytus, stars believe her, she didn't know it would be Krytus.

And she'll never forgive herself for that.