Chapter 3: Feeling Blue

Two Months Later…

"Remind me again how we ended up here?"

"You know very well how we got here. You and Eris lured me into a black hole. I took you two with me."

"No, no. How we got HERE, into this apartment."

"Oh…." Samus stopped washing a pale white bowl cereal bowl in her hands, looking at the ceiling and thinking for a moment, trying to recall her memories. She still hadn't totally woken up, even after breakfast.

"We ended up here because it was all the three of us together could afford… With help." Dark Samus-now legally registered as Eris Aran, twin sister of Samus-responded for her. "Or rather, the best Samus and I could afford, since our resident dragon just got fired for the second time this month." Said dragon shook as two angry female glares pierced yet another hole in his ever-shrinking ego.

"In my defense, it was worth it." He said, trying to maintain some measure of dignity.

"Are you kidding me?!" Samus yelled, forsaking the bowl in her hands. Dark Samus watched it fly across the room in shock, and tears started forming in the corners of her eyes when the bowl shattered against his forehead, knocking him out cold. "Who the hell steals french fries from their customers' trays?!"

"My- my point-five hours of work… smashed over someone's head…" Dark Samus whimpered, falling to her knees and turning white, as if her soul had been ripped out. Samus cocked an eyebrow at this display, still dumbstruck over this being her clone's real personality without Phazon corrupting her mind. As if that thought weren't important at all, the memories from two months before came back to her mind.

"Oh, that's right…"

"Bleuugh…." Ridley felt as he looked. His head was in the toilet, regurgitating the shellfish that he was now discovering himself to be allergic to. Samus and Dark Samus stood over him, the former with her hands on her hips and the latter with her arms folded over her chest. Both wore rare sympathetic faces as they watched Ridley rid himself of his poison.

"I always imagined seeing Ridley's head in the toilet being more satisfying" Samus piped up. "Not this utterly depressing."

"I never saw to anything involving him until he became the guardian of his leviathan. He'd just crashed at the bottom of a reactor shaft and didn't look nearly as pathetic as he does now." Dark Samus added, as Ridley pulled his head from the toilet, pale as a ghost.

"Why don't you two s-URRR-!" Ridley's cheeks puffed out a bit as he almost threw up in his mouth. His head was over the toilet again so fast that Dark Samus was afraid she may end up hearing his neck snap. "Why don't you two shove it? You've both looked just as bad… HYUAAUGH!" He finished his sentence just in time to get rid of yet another course of seafood. Dark Samus started laughing, suddenly enough to make the original spring into action, stepping back and raising her right arm level with Dark Samus' head. Samus' fingers were shaped such that her middle, ring, and last fingers were held together, while the pointer and thumb were out on their own – the standard hand positioning for the Tallon Chozo Plasma Beam.

Failing to realize that she wasn't in danger, Dark Samus screamed and backed herself into the stall's wall, sliding down on weakened legs, the pupils of her blue eyes so small, one would think they didn't exist. Samus looked down at her arm and panicked, putting two and two together to realize her own blunder: Her power suit was gone, and therefore, so was her Plasma Beam. Dark Samus realized this later, and heaved a sigh of relief, clutching her hand over her chest. Her heart was pounding with the adrenaline shot her new body just gave her.

"ARE YOU TRYING TO GIVE ME A HEART ATTACK?!" She suddenly burst out as Samus turned red in the face, turning on her heel to hide this fact.

"O-of course I am! I- I knew all along that I can't use my Plasma Beam anymore!" Samus turned back to the floored woman and kept talking, trying to distract herself from the intense humiliation. "I was trying to scare you instead! And it worked too! Ah… Ah-ha-ha-ha!" Trying to avoid tripping over her words and further damaging her pride, she continued this crazed, deliberate laughter for very nearly 15 seconds before Dark Samus got off the floor and slapped the blonde across the face. In full retaliation mode, Samus used the kinetic energy from the slap to spin the rest of the way around, grabbing Dark Samus' arm and twisting it in a hammer lock behind her back, much further than even the GF Police Force were known to do while grappling with dangerous humanoid criminals. Dark Samus' pained groans turned to screams as the tendons in her shoulder extended far past what her body could handle. Unable to listen any longer, Samus suddenly released her hold, and the clone dropped, face first, onto the bathroom floor.

"You're brutal… have I ever told you that….?" She said, her voice sounding as if there was sand in her throat. Interestingly, her first inclination was not to get her head off the bathroom floor, but to tend to her shoulder with her uninjured arm. After massaging it out of the 'shooting pain' stage, she sat up, leaning back against the tile wall, right next to the sinks.

"No, but others have." Samus swiped her palms against each other. "Hurry and get up. We're getting out of here. That goes for you too, Rid….ley…." she turned to look back inside the stall, seeing the space pirate passed out, his head still in the toilet. Samus rubbed her temples, pressing her eyes tightly shut. "Damnit! Damnit! Damnit!" She stomped to punctuate each curse.

"Language!" Dark Samus cried.

"Don't even pretend you have virgin ears!" Samus yelled in response.

"GAH! I just can't remember how we got into this apartment after that! I just remember waking up here!" Samus yelled, falling backwards onto a beige couch. Eris, who by this point had recovered from the shock of a bowl breaking, was sitting at the small fold-out dining table and drinking a glass of blended vegetable drink, something neither Samus nor Ridley could understand her tolerance for.

"Well, may as well leave it. Don't you need to get ready for work?" Eris said, looking at the clock. Samus groaned and took up a lazy position on the couch.

"It's my day off. Leave me alone. I don't make enough on what I do." She complained, leaning back and stretching.

"You make $20 an hour!" Eris said, rather loudly.

"You're making 35!" Samus retorted.

"It's more than enough for what I have to deal with!"

"You don't deal with screaming kids!" Samus yelled. She was a day-care worker, while Eris worked down at a nearby sports bar.

"You don't deal with drunk people!" The conversation stopped there as both turned their gazes on the only male in the apartment, who was still out from the bowl that hit him earlier. The two looked at each other in dead silence, stood up, and went to the too-small-for-two-people kitchen. Samus got the glasses out, Dark Samus located the liquor Ridley had hidden, and the two sat at the table.

"To bartending." Samus said.

"To day care." Eris responded as their glasses clinked.

The time was 7:42 in the morning when Ridley recovered, five minutes after the girls passed out at the table.

Edit 1.0.1: Replaced fake Chozo curses with ordinary curses. They were bugging me from the beginning and felt pointless. And let's face it: It wasn't entertaining.

A/N 9/14/16: I'm getting back to writing this story. I'm not dead, I promise, and neither is this. I've just been stupid busy with classes and whatnot. Expect inchworming updates.