Spongebob Help Needed. Dark Fanfic Rewrite.

Chapter 1: Welcome Aboard

Scene 1 – SpongeBob's POV

SpongeBob (narrating):

They call it Bikini Bottom. But if you ask me, it's more like the bottom of everything. A place where dreams come to die, swallowed whole by the corporations, chewed up, and spit out. This city—no, this corpse of a city—is where people go when they've got nothing left. I never should've moved here.

(He shudders, his thoughts slipping backward, a flash of memories bursting through the fog of his mind.)

Flashback

I can still see the dark figures—their faces hidden beneath the shadows of their gas masks, the glint of guns in their hands as they set fire to my house. The flames rose, licking the walls of my pineapple home, charring the wood to ash, even though we were underwater. How was there a fire? Even now, I ask myself that. We're underwater... how could there even be fire? But it was real, too real. And that's how I ended up here.

Cut back to reality. SpongeBob wakes up in his room.

I shake off the memories, sitting up in my slime-covered room. The stench of rot clings to the air, the faint smell of seawater mixing with decay. My bed—the purple-flowered one my parents bought me years ago—isn't much more than a filthy mattress on the floor now, covered in the remnants of sea muck and years of neglect. There's nothing else. No furniture. No keepsakes. Just this space that feels more like a grave than a home.

The dishes in the corner haven't been touched in weeks, maybe months. I don't even remember the last time I had fresh food. Abject poverty, that's what they call it, right? The kind you can't climb out of, no matter how hard you scrape.

SpongeBob's eyes fall on the pictures on the wall, faded and crumpled.

I turn my head to the wall, where a few tattered photos cling to the damp wallpaper. One is of my parents, smiling, back when life wasn't so... this. The other? It's of Patrick. I stare at his face, remembering the days when we'd sit around, not a care in the world, back before everything turned sour. Patrick... where did it all go wrong?

Gary appears, emaciated, barely alive.

From the corner of my eye, I catch sight of Gary, slithering weakly across the floor, his shell looking more like a burden than anything protective. He's thin—stick-thin. Every rib, every part of him, looks like it's just barely holding on. He catches a rat-like fish, something that slinks through the cracks in the walls, and clamps his jaws down on it.

I walk over, kneeling next to him, and gently stroke his eye stalk.
"Don't worry, Gary," I whisper. "I'll try and steal something for you today."

SpongeBob starts preparing to leave the house.

I shuffle to the corner of the room, where a few nasty, half-rotten burgers sit in a pile, left over from who knows when. They're barely food, but it's all I've got, so I stuff them in a ragged cloth, tying it off and slinging it over my shoulder. Survival—that's all that matters here.

As I step out the door, the weight of the slums bears down on me.

SpongeBob stands outside his home, staring at the landscape of the slums.