Whatever It Takes |Super Mario Bros. Movie AU|

Part I: Settling In

"So, funny story..."

Was the only thing Mario could say to his parents when he returned to the door with his brother, a princess in a wedding dress, a little mushroom man, and a talking gorilla.

With the pipe destroyed, and with nowhere to go, the brothers didn't think twice about offering their friends to stay with them for the time being. Of course, that meant having to make sure the rest of the family wouldn't mind the extra company. And, as expected, it meant finally explaining everything that had occurred over the last couple days.

And so they did. Sitting all together at the table, provided with a healthy dinner, everyone told their side of the story. Mario went first, explaining how he and Luigi ended up in the sewer and fell through the mysterious warp pipe that separated them in different realms of the other world. He proceeded to go on about meeting Princess Peach and joining her on her journey to the Jungle Kingdom, where he had to fight Donkey Kong in order to earn the army's alliance in the fight against Bowser. But things didn't go as planned once they set out on Rainbow Road, where the army ended up captured, and Mario and DK were split up from everyone else (they later learned this is where they were presumed to be dead). Of course, they managed to return to the Mushroom Kingdom as the fight was going on and rescued all of Bowser's prisoners—which included Luigi.

Then came the part Mario now regretted so deeply; when Bowser ordered a Bullet Bill to destroy the entire kingdom. Mario wasn't thinking clearly in that moment. He saw the biggest bullet he'd ever seen charging straight towards the home of the princess who'd fought so hard to protect her people. So many innocent lives were going to suffer. He had to do something! He ended up making a target of himself just a second before the bullet hit the castle, and lured it into the warp pipe that brought him to that strange place. That strange, colorful, imaginative place that he wondered if he'd ever get to see again.

He had assumed the Bullet Bill's explosion inside the pipe would be the end of it. But oh, how wrong he was. It caused a sort of black hole type suction that sent everyone back to Brooklyn. It must've been the titanic fortress of the Koopa King that destroyed the pipe in the sewer. Considering its size, it made the most sense. Whatever broke it, Mario knew it was his fault regardless.

Luigi went next, and boy, was it hard for him to speak about any of it. Honestly he didn't want anyone to know everything that happened to him, but with all eyes on him he didn't have much of a choice. So he pushed through the mental pain of reliving those horrid memories of being chased by turtle skeletons through a dark forest and over a moat of lava, then kidnapped by strange creatures who he learned were called Shy Guys. Dragged and pulled around by ropes tied at his wrists, he was taken into the mysterious fortress of the evil warlord Bowser; the monster of his nightmares. He was then interrogated, questioned about Mario who was apparently traveling with a princess the king had a crush on. Luigi tried not to give in, but the information was tortured out of him, and he was then thrown into a cage with the rest of the innocent people held captive by that tyrant.

He purposefully left out certain details of his story, such as how much it hurt being tied up and thrown around against his will, how paralyzed he felt all throughout being questioned by Bowser, how fatigued his body was after being trapped in metal with the air hotter than the surface of the sun. And worst of all, the pure terror of being lowered towards his doom all for a ritual sacrifice of a royal wedding. His entire life literally flashed before his eyes when seeing that lava fill up his cage, and all he could do was crawl to higher ground, prolonging the inevitable, as all his childhood memories replayed in his head. His last thoughts would be of Mario, everything they'd been through together, how much he missed him, and how he'd never get to apologize for falling through that pipe and bringing them into this mess.