Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It's been a while since his stamina has been reduced down to its dregs.

He's on his last legs, at this point– running is more rote than an actual, conscious decision, and it's less running than stumbling awkwardly wherever his feet manage to carry him. He's not safe to be around people. He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that his hunger would take control immediately– and then there would be torment, and hurt, and agony. He'd be sated, but at what cost? No, he has to keep moving, away from people, into the farthest reaches of the universe he can find, until–

Until–

Until what?

Grian, for the first time in days, stills. The hunger claws at him, twisting not just his stomach but wringing him inside out, no longer drowned by the sensation of his exhausted, pumping legs. He doesn't have a destination. Never has, except away– where he can't hurt people, where he can't be seen.

But that's not really sustainable, is it?

He has to stop at some point. Preferably before the hunger snaps him and he goes, clawing and seeking for a chance to feed. And then what? People will die. Maybe not permanently, but they'll wish they had. He'll hurt people.

It doesn't help that he knows, with the deep, intrinsic knowledge of a wounded animal, that he's being chased. He's felt flickers of their presence on his tongue these last few days; hasn't dared probe too deep, in case he's right. It makes sense the Hermits would want revenge, that blacklisting him hadn't been enough. They're good people, and he's dangerous. Something like him shouldn't be allowed to roam the world.

And, Grian realizes, with a flicker of– of something undefinable (he can't say it's excitement, because he isn't actually keen to die– but it's something. A bit like hope, a lot like loss, in the shape of grief and threaded, ultimately, with desperate relief)– that if he dies between servers, it will be permanent. The starry planes he lopes across are not meant to harbor eternal life. If he dies here, then he dies forever, code unraveling and recycling itself back into the universe. And that, he thinks, is probably as good a way to go as any.

Certainly easier, and faster, than waiting for himself to starve.

Abruptly, the fatigue drops him. Grian only barely manages to get an arm underneath him before he crashes, panting and shivering, as his legs turn to lead and his stomach wails. He can feel it, now, the tendrils of unreason clawing for purchase in his mind. If he waits much longer, emaciated as he is, then he'll break. He'll break, he'll feed, and then he'll run, disgusted with himself and the trail of pain that will inevitably follow him. And the cycle will begin anew.

He has to break the cycle. The thought rings clear as a bell in his head, parting the muddy fog that has dogged him since he was banned from Hermitcraft. It's up to him to do this, to keep himself from hurting people– and it's up to the former friends chasing him as well. Doing this alone isn't an option; he needs insurance. And he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that one of them will step forward and end this miserable game for all of them.

It shouldn't be as much of a relief as it is. Grian hopes, desperate, sobbing, that Scar is within the party hunting him. He hopes it's Scar who strikes the final blow. He hopes Scar will be kind enough to hold him as he slips away.

Grian curls his arms around his waist, shivering. He needs to– to help. In any way he can. He can wait for them to catch up, but he's still too strong. He needs– weakness. Weakness potions, at least three, which would be fatal for a normal person and is, indeed, dangerous for himself in this state.

But it would help them. He wouldn't be a threat anymore.

Mind made up, Grian staggers to his feet. Clumsy, swaying; the stars churn in front of his vision, a dizzying map of light and void. Xisuma must be with them, he thinks faintly, if they're able to chase him to this place. Only Voidwalkers and other Watchers are able to traverse these planes.

He hopes Xisuma is alright. Taking people with you into the void is no small task.

His powers are watery and weak like this, but he spreads his awareness out in front of him anyway, and to the sides– not behind. He cannot bear to look behind. Servers– singleplayers, multiplayers, hubs and cities– all roll back from the darkness like galaxies splayed before him, brilliant and wavering. Grian stares at them, exhaustion plucking at him with insistent fingers. He wants nothing more than to sink to the ground (whatever counts as ground here, in this great nothing) and simply stop– but it's not safe. Not for his– his friends. Even after all of this, he can't help but think of them as his friends.

Grian swallows, and turns his Attention to the nearest singleplayer world.

It's not too far off– and the risk is minimal. Still dangerous; if he isn't careful, if he isn't perfectly precise in how he does this, a stranger might get trapped with a hungry monster. But if he can log in quickly, maybe while the owner is asleep... they might have potions. And even if they don't, Grian knows how to make these like the back of his own hands.

He's in luck when he pierces the protective code surrounding this singleplayer world. Nobody is online– the owner must be off-world, which isn't uncommon. Grian had had a singleplayer once, though it's long been abandoned now, perhaps even subsumed by the universe. His heart pangs at the thought: it's been so long since he's thought about his past as a player, as a person. In all technicality, that title has never even belonged to him; he was born of copied code and implanted memories, a parasite that shredded its host on the way out. Is he really Grian? Certainly not the one who had died for his creation, even if they do share the same memories.

He appears at what this world's spawn must be. It's a lovely place– all lush trees and flowing water, meadowgrass filling the air with the heady scent of spring. After so long in darkness, it makes his eyes burn with the adjustment, his senses flooding him with a deluge of new information. Grian trembles, curling his hands into fists, and begins to walk, following the vague trail that this server's owner has left for him to follow.

He finds their starter base not long after. Or, at least, he assumes it's their starter base. Hard to tell after so much time spent in Hermitcraft. It's a humble, medium-sized building, mostly spruce and a bit of mossy stone. There's the shape of something here, something that makes Grian itch to build again, to chisel at the marble until what comes out is a masterpiece. But there's no time for that kind of nonsense now– he needs weakness potions. He hopes, a bit wryly, that whoever owns this server doesn't indulge in chest monsters.

The inside is musty, quiet– its owner hasn't been here for at least a few days. Grian's in luck. His legs shake with every step he takes, and his stomach clenches in regular, gut-churning swoops, but he forces himself to take this slow, methodical. First a sweep of the lower floor, checking the label of each chest, checking inside if they aren't marked. Then the upper floor, curling his fingers under the lid of an enderchest before remembering it will be useless to him. For some reason, that thought is what threatens to break him– his vision grows cloudy as he sniffs, furiously swiping away the heat bubbling in his eyes. No, no time for that– he can't indulge in self-pity, he has work to do, and time is running out.

Just a little while longer, and all this will finally be over.

He doesn’t find any weakness potions in the stranger's chests (and they do have a chest monster, albeit smaller than any hermit's), but he finds the ingredients spread out across several chests, and a brewing stand in the bedroom. Grian gives in to the weariness then; he sits down on the bed as the potions bubble, unable to keep himself upright. Instead he topples, collapsing at the foot of the bed with his thin arms as a pillow, and takes a moment to simply breathe.

It hurts. Plain and simple– existing hurts. He's been running from the hunger as surely as he's been running from his friends, each faltering step only delaying the inevitable. Grian had known, the moment they blacklisted him from Hermitcraft– he wasn't going to survive this. He'd fought anyway, of course, instinct coursing through him, directing his Eyes and mouth. But it was never meant to last, unless he gave in and rejoined the ranks of his fellow Watchers. And that, Grian thinks, familiar terror thrilling up his spine, is something he will never willingly do.

It's tempting to sleep. Fatigue already has its hooks in him– he could just close his eyes for a moment, surely. Just a moment. Thirty minutes, maybe, or an hour– what difference does it make when this world's inhabitant has gone? If he could just take a second to rest–

Grian jolts back up, heart thumping its painful song in his chest. No, no, what is he thinking? The owner of this world could come back at any moment, and it's– he hates to admit it, but it's better if he stays weak and exhausted. He'll be easier to handle, that way. Safer, for everyone.

Grian presses the heels of his palms against his eyes, feels the responding pressure. For a moment, it's all too much; comes crashing down on him like a tidal wave. Embarrassing– crying has always embarrassed him, but especially now, when he's done everything to deserve this grief.

He cries anyway, because no matter how hard he tries, he can't get his eyes to stop. Can't force his chest to smooth out its fitful stutters, to calm the hitching sobs in his lungs. The devastation yawns in the deepest pits of his heart, in his very code, and threatens to tear him apart at the seams.

At some point, finally, the tears run dry. Grian is left wrung-out and shaky, breath trembling out of him; he wipes his nose on his sleeves, which is disgusting, but he doesn't exactly have a handkerchief lying around. The potions have been done for some time now; he collects them with shaky fingers, stows them in the loops of his belt, and takes one last glance at the quiet home around him.

"Thank you," he croaks, voice scraping the inside of his throat. It feels important to say that. This stranger has done more for him than they'll ever know.

He leaves the way he came: swift, stealthy, and without a trace of his presence beyond two single, scrambled lines of code in the game chat. Only a few stray birds bear witness.

It's only when Grian returns to the void-plane that he finally lets himself peer towards the direction of his friends.

It's a tentative kind of probing. He's not sure how much of it Xisuma will feel– the void is vast and dark, and carries within it countless eyes that could be watching. He's not sure if Xisuma will understand the difference between being watched, and being Watched– so he keeps it light. Gentle. A soft, quick series of glances, darting forward and registering the code of his former friends before dipping back. He needs to know their distance, how long it will take to reach him. He needs to know the exact point when he can take these potions without risking any of them.

He falters, though, as his Gaze scrapes over the party hunting him. Xisuma is spear-heading it, of course– they'd be lost without his voidwalking. But– but Mumbo is there. And Pearl. Tango. And...

Scar.

Grian flinches back from the familiar code. Oh, Scar, he thinks helplessly, and curls in on himself, a little ball of misery. Some of his closest friends are here to kill him, and–

Well. It makes sense, doesn't it. He betrayed them. He hurt them. Violated their trust. Of course they would take offense. Of course they would be the ones to hunt him down.

He's distantly curious about Tango, though. Would've figured Bdubs or Cleo would be here instead, thirsty for revenge. He remembers their disgusted fury, the boiling fear in both their eyes as they regarded him in a new, hideous light they had every right to flinch from.

But Scar is here. Grian's not sure whether he's truly grateful for that or not. Out of everyone in the server, he's injured Scar the most.

Out of everyone on the server, it's Scar who he wants most to strike him down.

It's a challenge not to stare longingly into Scar's code, the very essence of his being. Grian aches with the urge to run his eyes over it, See Scar in ways Scar can't even dream of. But he's never really had the right to do that in the first place, so he shuts his Eyes and takes a deep, unnecessary breath to recenter himself. Time is hard to measure in this place between worlds, but he estimates he has maybe two hours before they find him. The wait tugs at him, hooks vicious claws in the lining of his lungs to make them stutter. They're so close. So, so close. Close enough to See, to Taste–

Grian yanks himself back from that thought, eyes burning. No, no, he won't. He can't. This is the end of this wretched game he's been playing for years. He won't hurt anyone anymore. Not more than he already has.

Grian grits his teeth, then lifts his hand and opens his mouth, sinking them into the base of his thumb. Copper sings on his tongue; the spike of burning pain forces his eyes inward, drawing his attention and keeping it there as blood fills his mouth, thick and tacky. Grian's breath hisses out through his nose in one great exhale, jaw tightening. Soon. It'll be over soon. He just has to hold out a little longer.

When they're close enough that the taste of their fear, their anticipation, soaks through the haze of blood and pain, Grian rips his hand away from his mouth. Two crescents mar the skin there, blood welling to the surface and falling back into the void. Methodically, he rips the corks from each weakness potion, letting them scatter from his hands, and hefts one of them in the well of his good palm. Then, with only a second of hesitation, he lifts it to his lips and knocks it back.

The liquid is syrupy, too-sweet and cloying on his tongue. Grian fights the urge to gag and swallows it down, wincing with each mouthful. Too late to pause now, though– he drops the bottle and moves onto the next, grimacing as he drains it. He has to wait for a minute after just to retch, breathing heavily as if he's just completed a race– then it's onto the final bottle, pinching his nose to try and mitigate the taste.

When it's drained, Grian lets the empty bottle fall from his fingers with a soundless clatter. The weakness is already creeping through him, spreading through his veins and amplifying the exhaustion that's dogged his steps since he was forced off Hermitcraft. Grian shuts his eyes, taking a deep, laborious breath– and then lets himself slip sideways, wings jerking before he settles into as comfortable a position as he can. It weighs in his bones, turning them to lead, and the stars go hazy as he blinks, too tired to even shudder. The wave of sudden dizziness stuns him, and Grian sinks in on himself, awareness shrinking, and knows in a deep, distant part of him, that the potions have done their job.

His friends will be safe from him now. Everyone will be.

He's not sure how much time passes after that. With his awareness narrowed so harshly, he simply floats in the black abyss– nothing to tether him as he drifts. He doesn't think, or sleep, or dream; only exists, the hunger a distant tangle in his gut, the aches and pains of the past few months fading away into mere whispers. He's so tired. It's so peaceful. If only he could drift a little further, into the soft, clinging edge of darkness–

Something, some prickle along his spine, alerts him that he is no longer alone.

Grian's eyes flutter open.

His former friends stand in a ragged semi-circle in front of him, too far to reach, but close enough to study. Xisuma, as he'd assumed, is in the front; his expression is inscrutable behind the helmet. Maybe if Grian weren't so tired, starved within an inch of his life, he'd be able to tell what Xisuma is actually feeling. But he can't– can only taste the faintest aftershocks of horror and fear, too far from his reach to even try and feed off of, so he lets his tired eyes slip over everyone else.

Mumbo and Tango stand together, eyes wide, with Pearl slightly behind and to their left– all three of them stare at him like they've never seen him before. Grian supposes that's fair; he hasn't exactly seen anybody for months at a time, but he knows he's atrophied fast: bones sticking out of skin, wrists too thin, cheekbones hollowed out. Ribs showing beneath the sweater that now hangs off of him, swamping him in cloth that never feels warm enough anymore. Grian's eyes slide to the right, then, and– there. There he is. Even the weakness potions aren't enough to keep his heart from jolting when it sees Scar.

Grian blinks at them all, noting the careful distance, then sighs and lets his eyelids flutter shut.

Somewhere in front of him, Mumbo actually swears. The rapid rustle of cloth is his only warning before hands are on either side of his face, lifting his head and grazing into his hairline. "Grian?" Mumbo's voice is sharp. "Hey now, you– come on, open your eyes, alright? Don't be a spoon about this, please. You're not– come on. Eyes open. Grian, listen to me."

It's so automatic, to follow what Mumbo asks of him; Grian forces his eyes half open again, struggling to keep his friend in focus. Mumbo is kneeling in front of him, face very pale against the pinprick stars of the void; Grian still can't read the expression on his face, but it's tight, pinched around the mouth and eyes.

Despite his obedience, the tension creasing Mumbo's face somehow deepens. "That's it," he says, and there's a strange cadence in his voice that speaks of halting encouragement, reassurance– though who he's trying to reassure (and why), Grian has no idea. "Perfect, just like that. Can you–" he falters, swings his head back to look at Xisuma. Whatever he sees must spur him on, because he turns to look back at Grian with uncharacteristic seriousness. "Right. Um, can you talk, G? Tell us what's going on?"

Grian blinks back at him. Isn't it obvious? He fumbles with his own potion-thick tongue, the muscle clumsy in his mouth; he can't quite wrap it around the words he wants to speak. He blinks again, longer this time. It'd be so easy to slip away into that safe darkness again, give in to the heavy weight of exhaustion and let it drag him down, down, down, until nothing hurts anymore and he can be free. But Mumbo makes a panicked noise in the back of his throat, fingers tightening around Grian's face, so Grian forces his eyelids to lift again.

If they want him to face his death with eyes open, it's the very least he can do for them.

Another rustle to his right: "Grian," another voice pipes up, and Grian's heart does that funny, agonizing flip again, because Scar's voice is shaking in a way he hasn't heard before. He sounds scared. "Grian, hey– hey. Look at me?" Grian looks at him, struggling to focus, the fog clouding his mind in one thick blanket. He's unfairly lovely with this backdrop of stars, and his face is pale too. "Grian, what are these?"

He's holding up one of the empty bottles. All at once, it clicks– they think this is a trap. And why wouldn't they? Grian hasn't exactly proven his trust to them. He swallows, a painful, heavy drag of his throat, and cracks his jaw open to whisper. To set this right.

Weakness, he tries to rasp; it comes out garbled, so he sucks in a long, slow breath and tries again, lungs trembling with the effort. "Weak– weakness."

Scar drops the bottle like it's burned him. "You took three weakness potions?" he chokes out, and that seems to break whatever trance Xisuma, Pearl, and Tango have been in this entire time. They rush forward, eating the distance between them in rapid strides, until they're all crouched around Grian.

Grian shuts his eyes again, before remembering he isn't supposed to do that. He wants to say sorry. What he says instead, is: "It was– safer. Like this. For you."

It amounts to about the same thing.

In front of him, Mumbo blanches. "Gri," he says, and now his voice is urgent, "Gri, how long ago did you take these?"

Before Grian can formulate an answer, Xisuma nudges Mumbo an inch to the side, carefully crouching down next to him. "What do you mean, safer?" he asks with measured calm.

Grian breathes in. Breathes out. Counts the beats of his heart, however many are left. "If you kill me here–" he breaks off, has to take a second to breathe. "If you kill me, I won't– respawn." The faces around him swirl dizzily, wavering like ripples in a pond, and Grian has the absurd thought that maybe he's just hallucinating. He doesn't have the strength to shake his head and clear it, so he settles for another purposeful exhale, eyes falling shut again. "Didn't want to– didn't– I can't hurt anyone like this."

Somewhere by his head, Pearl makes a noise like a wounded animal. "Grian, we're not– we aren't killing you," she chokes, and the sheer appall in her voice is palpable. "Oh my god, Grian."

Scar also makes a strange noise, like he's been punched in the throat. "Grian," he says, rapid and urgent, "we've been trying to find you for ages, make sure you're okay– we don't want to kill you. We've been worried sick." Then: "Grian? Grian? Hey– hey, c'mon." A nervous laugh, trailing off into sticky silence. "G, can you open those big ol' eyes for me?"

He's slipping back into that dark place. The quiet one, where everything that makes him ache is a distant torture. To his credit, Grian does try– his lashes flutter, but he can't quite make them part. A hand lands on his shoulder, jostling him slightly, then with more urgency.

Xisuma's voice, this time: "Grian," he says, low but tinged with rising alarm, "stay with us, alright? You're alright, we've got you, but you have to stick around for just a bit longer–"

They do have him, Grian thinks with a swell of sudden relief. And if he can just fade enough to not feel it when he dissolves– that's all he wants. No more pain. No more hurting people on accident. A chance to set this right, in the only way he truly can.

Voices rise around him in a cacophonous symphony, but Grian no longer has the strength to parse them. He sinks, dribbling into the abyss like molasses from a bottle. The darkness consumes him. He does not dream.

Chapter Text

He wakes.

It's a slow drift into consciousness– his awareness flickers and fluctuates at indeterminable points, registering the mumble of voices and soft warmth before fading back out again. A hand brushing against the backs of his fingers. Cool air ruffling past his ear. Whispers too low to catch more than the faint rise and fall of tone.

But eventually, he begins to surface. The first thing he truly registers is temperature; the void between worlds is a nothing-place, where code is boiled down to its barest components. There is no concept of hot or cold– there simply is, and is not, in between the smatterings of what could be stars but are actually player servers. Grian can't remember when the last time he'd felt temperature was, but he's feeling it now– the warm caress of sunshine, bleeding over the paltry heat his own body tries to supply. There's a weight over him, too, a soft but steady pressure: blankets. Grian shifts, restless; he's lying on his side, wings trapped beneath the covers, and the ambient warmth is beginning to stifle him.

His limbs feel like they're made of lead, but he rolls his shoulders anyway, dislodging some of the blankets to let cool air slip between his feathers. Grian sighs at the sensation, and some of the tension stringing throughout his body eases. He's not sure where he is, but for the first time in months, in almost a year, he's– comfortable.

He's comfortable.

Grian's not sure what that means.

The clichéd thought, of course, is that he's dead. Grian muzzily turns that idea over, mind slowly booting up from whatever dark recess it had been hiding in. It's a possibility, he supposes. But not a likely one– Grian's seen what code-death looks like, and he's Seen a consciousness dissolve from it, melting to join the rest of the code that makes up their universe. No, to die would mean giving up his individuality, merging with everything else, rejoining the collective– Grian still knows himself as Grian, and therefore he can't be dead.

The thought is strange. Hadn't he wanted–?

And that's when Grian realizes he doesn't feel hungry.

Or– he does. Very hungry, still. But it's less severe than he's felt in such a long, long time, that it almost doesn't register. This hunger is a low rumble deep at the core of him, steady in the same way one might test a newly healed bone. The kind of fragile after a respawn, when your skin has knit together but the echo of pain still lingers. It doesn't hold him hostage anymore– he can muster the strength to look past it, and that, out of everything that's happened to him over the past year, is what's most frightening.

Grian's eyes fly open at the same time as he lurches to one elbow, frantically trying to sit up. His balance is off– he reels with drunken stupor, still sleep-fuzzy and weak. It takes a few tries to successfully get himself propped up; by the time he manages it, he's gasping, wings twitching uselessly against his back. Dragging himself into a proper sit is– hard. Harder than expected. His spine bows with the pressure, and he has to take a moment to just breathe, head hanging low over his lap and eyes closed.

After a moment, Grian cracks open an eye again, lifting his face. The room he's sitting in is unfamiliar– a sort of bare-bones interior with mismatching wood for the walls, as if it had been constructed very hastily. There's not much in it aside from the bed he's laying on and a double chest, as well as a chair to the left of his bedside. No real decorations– not even carpet. Grian lets his eyes trail over the room, confusion warring with the exhaustion still clinging to his bones. Where is he?

The last thing he can remember is– oh. The void. The potions. His… friends, if he has any right to still call them that. The way they had gathered around him, their eyes round and wild, fingers grasping. The way he had slipped into darkness as he waited for that final, necessary blow.

Grian reaches up, fingers shaking, and tells himself it's only to rub the sleep-grit out of his eyes. The frustrated tears slipping from them are– his eyes are just watering. From the grit. It's fine. He's alive, for some reason, and the hunger is ignorable for now, and Grian can't help but wonder if, in the space between those two truths, he's managed to do something terrible.

To die in the in-between place is a permanent code-death. If he hurt them, after all he'd tried to do to protect them from himself…

Grian is saved from that horrible train of thought by the quiet tap of footsteps outside the plain spruce door that blocks his room from the rest of whatever base he's in. Grian sucks in a painful breath, lungs flexing– instinct wants him to taste, to Look, to pull answers from the fog like a seeking lighthouse. These are the baser instincts he's spent years trying to dull, though, to avoid burning the precious energy needed to keep himself alive. While it doesn't matter so much now, habit stills his wandering eyes before he can even open them.

The footsteps pause just outside his door. Grian's heart jolts in his chest; he has half a thought to dive back under the covers, feign sleep and buy himself more time to gather information. But the door creaks open before he can so much as twitch, moving on hinges that screech in protest.

Grian blinks, all thoughts fleeing to the back of his mind in favor of pure shock– because the person entering his room, eyes pinned to the comm on their wrist, is Tango.

It's like all the breath in his lungs freezes. Grian freezes too, leaden wings going stiff behind him– of all the people he'd expect to walk through the door, this is one of the last. In truth, he hadn't even been sure his friends were here, but– Tango is. He looks tired, behind the dull wash of his comm light. Stress lines crease under his eyes as he scowls at the screen, jabbing it a few times before sighing and scrubbing a hand through his hair. His shirt has a light stain on the sleeve– coal. Not redstone, but coal.

And then Tango is looking up, eyes meeting Grian's, and the world stops.

For one breathless moment, neither of them move; trapped in amber, Tango's expression is unchanged, uncomprehending. Then, all at once, it shatters; Tango's eyes widen to an almost comical degree, twin flares that spark in the space between them.

The noise that escapes his mouth is not unlike a startled foghorn. "Oh!" Tango yelps, backpedaling a few steps. "Oh! Oh, Gr– you're awake! Wow, I-I didn't think– I wasn't sure when you were gonna be up!"

The spell holding Grian's breath breaks too– he inhales sharply, cringing back from both the noise and the presence in front of him. His wings are still dead weight; despite this, they twitch, feathers bristling as if sheer force of will might bring them up in the protective mantle Grian wants to make.

He's– he's glad to see Tango is alright. But that means he shouldn't be here, where Grian is alive, awake, and dangerous. If he knows what's good for him, he'll abandon Grian and leave.

Tango clearly doesn't get this message. Instead he jerks forward, brows furrowing in concern. "Shoot, sorry, okay– yeah, that was a little loud, sorry. But it's cool, man, we're good, you're good." His smile goes a little lopsided at the edges. "It's just me, promise."

Grian stares at him for a long, bewildered moment. He can't quite bring himself to speak.

Tango's face falls slightly, but he doesn't comment on it. Instead, he carefully continues forward, grabbing the chair along the wall to plop it in front of Grian's bedside. "You must be pretty confused, huh?" he says, clearly trying for upbeat and missing it by an anxious mile. He settles into the chair, comm forgotten, attention entirely fixed on Grian. "I can catch you up to speed, if you want."

Grian hesitates. Then, he nods, careful and slow.

Tango's brow furrows. "Right, cool," he says, leaning back in his chair slightly. "Uh– oh man," his chuckle is strained. "Where do I even start?"

Somehow, that's what manages to crack Grian's jaw open again. "Where–?" he tries to ask; his voice comes out thick and hoarse, rasping against his esophagus. Grian chokes on it, the way the word falls from his throat like a lump of raw iron– he has to clear it several times before he can start again. "Where are we?"

Tango brightens at the question, just a bit. "Oh, we're in this little– okay, so technically it's a single player world. Or it was, anyway– X did some fancy code-i-ficator thingy and set it to a locked multiplayer. I think?" His nose scrunches. "I'm not the best at that stuff," he admits, "but the important part is it's nice and safe. And pretty cozy, too, for a new world."

That's… odd. Grian looks down at his hands, the way they rest listlessly against the sheets. The exhaustion is starting to creep back up his spine with a vengeance; abruptly, the only thing he wants is to sink back into that quiet abyss, let it pull him under until nothing else exists but him and the quiet. But Tango is watching him, something cautious but hopeful in his eyes, so Grian speaks up again after clearing his throat once more.

"How did–" he starts, then pauses, because he's not sure how to ask. How did we end up here? A straightforward question he has no answer to, unless he asks it, but something in him hesitates. He can't fathom why he's here, why they didn't strike him down when they had the chance. He'd done everything to ensure they'd be safe, that they'd have an opportunity to end this. And now he's awake.

He doesn't understand why.

Tango must take pity on him, because he doesn't wait for Grian to articulate the rest of his question. His voice is uncharacteristically solemn when he speaks. "Oh, yeah. Um. After you… passed out," he says, tense, "X brought us here so we could– y'know– make sure you didn't. Uh. Die." He pauses, eyes searching, sweeping over Grian's face for answers he's not sure he can give. Whatever he finds makes his jaw tighten by a noticeable fraction. "Not gonna lie, G, you kinda scared the crap out of us. Scar was convinced you were gonna croak. Everyone was, actually."

"I didn't take enough to actually kill me," Grian rasps before he can think better of it. "That was just– a safety precaution." To keep you safe, he doesn't say, but it hangs in the air between them, dark and festering.

"Right," Tango says, quietly. "Safety. Yeah."

The silence that settles between them then is thick and suffocating. Grian isn't sure how to proceed. How to ask the real question– the why am I still alive question. It tickles the back of his throat, urges to sing through the air, but he bites it back. Instead he swallows, darting glances between Tango and his own hands.

Tango is back to watching him with careful eyes. "So, uh," he says, faux cheer ringing through his voice, "do you– feel up for anything? Like– do you need to stand, or… water's good, right? I bet you're super thirsty right now, you've been out for like a week–"

"Wait– a week?" Grian blurts, startled.

Something in Tango's eyes shutter; his lips press together in a thin, bloodless line. "Uh, yeah, buddy. You were knocked out for a while. We really kinda thought that was it for you, but– I dunno. X worked some magic, I guess. Or something." His eyes soften. "You got real lucky."

He doesn’t feel lucky. If anything, he feels alarmed– because it’s starting to come together, the reason why the edge of hunger has dulled, why it's only closer to a tickle against his senses compared to the thunderous roar from before. Horror wells up his throat. He must've somehow been feeding on them– it's the only explanation for why the hunger isn't subsuming him now. Even unconscious, he can't stop himself from being a monster.

Tango's voice shatters his train of thought once more. "Seriously, though, do you want some water?" An awkward pause. "You… do still drink water, right?"

It's such an absurd question that Grian almost chokes on a bitter laugh. He forces it back down his throat instead, swallowing it like razor blades. "I–" he croaks, wincing absently at the rasp of his voice– "I mean, yeah? But you– you don't need to–"

"No, no, man," Tango says hurriedly, rising from his chair. "It's okay, I can get you a water bottle, we've got some in the kitchen– gimme a sec and I'll go grab you one, okay?" The skin around his eyes tightens briefly. "Just– stay here."

Grian refrains from telling him he doesn't think he'd be able to move anyway. Instead, he watches Tango bustle back out the door, the soft click of the latch echoing through the sparse room like a peal of thunder. Tango's footsteps beat a hasty retreat from it, and Grian slumps against the wall, ignoring the uncomfortable way his wings bend behind him.

The exhaustion settles in, makes a home in his bones; Grian tips his head back until it too connects with the wall, sending a hollow thunk reverberating throughout the wood. Now that he's aware of it, he can feel the thin, seeking tendrils connecting him to his friends– resonating against the fevered anxiety of their minds, echoing it right back to them. A slow, residual drip of food that threatens to grow into a river now that he's awake. Grian shuts his eyes tight, the pit of his stomach squirming. Instinct rebels against severing the connections keeping him alive, but he has to. He's hurting them, amplifying and extending their fear and pain and hope (for what? What are they hoping for?) for his own selfish need. They deserve better, and he promised.

It takes a moment to center himself enough to cut the cords; with a cruel, mental yank, Grian rips them out, reeling them back into himself with jerky motions. The hunger deep in the pit of his stomach instantly builds to a rumble again, a low ache that spreads until it reaches the center of his chest, stuttering his lungs. Grian lets out a harsh breath, slumping where he sits. If he was exhausted before, he's not sure how he's still conscious now, and his eyelids flutter before he forces them back open into thin, hazy slits.

Through them, Grian takes in the room's construction again. There are small gaps between the logs making up the walls– clumsy wedges have been driven into some of the larger ones in an effort to plug them. Grian doesn't have the energy to scrunch his brows, but the urge twitches at them; this isn't the kind of construction he's familiar with from the hermits. Even their starter houses are more polished than this, more carefully fitted. He wonders, abruptly, if this is a used singleplayer, and if they'd just taken up residence in the first finished base they'd come across.

He doesn't have time to ponder long before Tango's footsteps are back, padding with measured steps across the floor from somewhere deeper in the base. Then they stutter; Tango's voice is just close enough for Grian to make out his tone and how it rises, confused, surprised, but not quite alarmed. He can almost taste it, airy on the back of his tongue–

No. Grian yanks that thought back just in time for Tango's footsteps to resume their previous course, and this time, another set joins them.

Grian's heart flips in his chest. He hadn't heard a door open– while he isn't sure on the layout of this base, he can tell he's in an outer room from the cool caress of air coming in from the tiny gaps. He should have heard someone coming, felt their approach– which means it's only one possible person.

When Tango opens the door again, Xisuma steps in with him.

The dread that pools in Grian's stomach is a black, gurgling tar, spreading viciously through his veins– ice-cold and numbing, until he can't quite feel his hands enough to tell if they're shaking. He curls them into the blanket just in case, grip tight but careful not to tear the wool. Instinct screams to flatten himself into a corner, mantle his wings, run as far and fast as he can until the year-old memory of Xisuma's remote voice can no longer reach him. It doesn't work like that, of course– Grian will be hearing the death knell of his blacklisting for the rest of his short life, however long it has left.

And on some level it feels silly to be this afraid of Xisuma. Most of his face may be obscured by his helmet, but his eyes are crinkled with undisguised worry; he isn't approaching Grian's bed with anything but quick, purposeful steps. He doesn't appear ready to hurt him. But this is the voice and face that sealed Grian's death sentence, and Grian can't help but shrink from him as much as he can when he's so weighed down by leaden limbs and a whittling hunger that pares him to his very bones.

"Grian," Xisuma breathes, stopping maybe a foot from the bed. He hesitantly settles one hand on the back of the chair, hovering as Tango slips past him with a water bottle in his hands. "How, um– are you feeling alright? You gave us quite the scare."

With great effort, Grian forces his hands to move, accepting the bottle from Tango with stiff fingers, though he makes no move to uncork it. Instead he lets it rest in his lap, one finger idly tracing the thin reflection of light coming in from the window that plays across its surface. He's so tired. He just wants to get this– whatever it is– over with.

After a beat of stretching silence, Tango and Xisuma glance at each other. Tango grimaces. "I'm just gonna be, uh… in the kitchen, actually," he says, and it's poorly disguised but Grian can't help the small bolt of relief that shoots down his spine at the excuse. Tango retreats back out the door, calling, "Holler if you need anything!" over his shoulder before shutting it softly behind him.

Then it's just Grian and Xisuma, and the shattered energy between them.

Xisuma slowly rounds the chair, sinking into it with careful motions. "Right," he says, with false cheeriness, and brings up his own comm, swiping to the admin panel and fussing over it for a moment before turning his eyes back toward Grian. "You've probably got a lot of questions, ah– I assume Tango's filled you in some, already?"

Grian nods slowly.

"Good, good." Xisuma's foot taps a rapid beat against the floor. "Right, okay. Then I guess I don't have to start with the basics–"

"Where is ev–" Grian cuts himself off at the last second, biting into his cheek hard enough to taste blood. He's not sure he's allowed to ask.

"The others?" Xisuma correctly interprets his bitten off question. The skin around his eyes softens slightly. "Out gathering resources– it's early world after all, still pretty new. Pearl volunteered to round up more animals, and we've got Scar and Mumbo out caving for iron right now. And other things but– well, you know how it is." Xisuma rounds it out with a shrug.

Grian can guess. Gold, lapis, redstone– diamond if they're lucky. All necessary resources, but ones that imply… they're settling in. He's not sure what to think of that. He's not sure what to think of any of this.

Xisuma shifts in his seat, that worried sheen passing over his eyes again, sharpening them into something hawkish. He stares at Grian for a long, frozen moment, then clears his throat. "As for me, well, I've been on server duty. Been keeping the place from collapsing in around us." He chuckles, but the sound is anxious. "Bit of a feat, but I've got it handled. Absolutely nothing to worry ab–"

"Xisuma," Grian interrupts finally, and he is so tired, hidden weights bowing his neck beneath them, fingertips falling still against the glass in his lap. It's too much– he hasn't heard another person talk in maybe weeks; too busy racing through the in-between, away from everything living, and against the constant tick of his own internal clock. Even now, he can feel the blade of the second hand digging into his neck. "Why am I… still alive."

It doesn't quite come out like a question. Instead it falls uselessly into Grian's lap, rolling off the blankets and falling dead to the ground at Xisuma's feet. Grian can't quite bring himself to care– he'd worked so hard to keep them safe, and he doesn't know why they've spared him. Because they have spared him, for whatever reason– it's not like them to keep him alive just to kill him later. The thought is tinged with bitterness; he'd thought, in that dark plane, that maybe he could finally… that he could be free from all of this. The pain, the hunger, the unending misery.

Instead he is saddled with all of them, pulse a rapid song between his teeth. His stomach cramps, and he shakily curls his arms around his middle, pushing down the curdling emptiness that rises with its gurgles.

Xisuma rocks back in his chair. "That's… quite the question," he says weakly, and Grian can almost taste the sick flare of concern behind the words. He pulls further into himself; cuts off the wriggling lines eager to curve into his friends and suck them dry. Xisuma, for his part, reverses direction and leans forward, elbows braced on his knees. The command display flickering idly in front of him disappears, no longer under the attention of its admin.

"Well, you– I mean, you really had us convinced you weren't going to make it, for a minute or two." Xisuma's voice is sober. "I wasn't sure how to–" he waves a hand, encompassing Grian's entire body– "stabilize your code, so instead we tried to get you to a server to set a spawn point. Just–" he sucks in a sharp breath, breaking off. "Just in case."

A moment of silence. Then: "Grian, you… you said some things, in the void."

Grian can't help the bitter half smile that twitches against his lips. "Yeah, I guess you could say that."

Xisuma doesn't rise to the bait. Grian gets the impression that he's biting his lip, brows pulling together and stress lines crinkling under his eyes. "You said it was safer," he says finally, "for you to– when you told us why you took those potions." For a moment he pauses. When he speaks again, his voice wavers around the edges. "Why on earth you would take that many at once is b– it's beyond me, admittedly. I mean– Grian, that was incredibly dangerous."

"That's because it was safer," Grian says, and he wishes that he could summon more life into his voice, infuse it with the righteous indignation it deserves. There was a time when he could have fought over this, voice high-pitched and squawking, a blazing fire behind it. It's extinguished, now– all that's left are a few smoldering embers cradled within the ashes. "I don't see what you're missing here," he continues, eyes slipping down to the water bottle he still hasn't uncorked in his hands. "You know what I'm capable of. That was the best way to… make it safe to approach."

It hangs heavy in the air between them, that confession– but it's not like Grian can avoid making it. Xisuma might never have been pulled into the Life games, but he's the one who ultimately kicked Grian for the good of the server. He should know. Shouldn't he?

But Xisuma's shoulders take on a distinctly uncomfortable cast as he shifts in his chair. "I… don't, actually." His helmet gleams in the dusty light as he glances away. "Not really, anyway. I know it's been quite some time, but we… I might've been a little hasty." Armored shoulders slump. "At the very least, I should've spoken more in depth with you, before…"

He trails off, and Grian can't even blame him for it– Xisuma has never been particularly fond of conflict, or community management beyond what the paperwork dictates. He'd left that to other hermits, hermits who were better at organizing than he was: Joe, Scar, Ren– even Grian himself. Almost a year ago, facing down Xisuma's steely eyes with a stomach starting to ache from hunger, Grian had tasted how overwhelmed he felt. Had liked it. That, ultimately, had been why Grian hadn't made a case for himself. How could he? After everything, after stripping himself down to his barest essentials, the only thing left in the mirror was a monster.

The plain truth is this: suffering tastes good, and Grian has hurt too many people to get a taste of it. Nothing else matters.

"You did what you had to," Grian croaks.

One of Xisuma's hands comes up to rub his arm; the edges of his discomfort nibble at Grian's consciousness. He forces himself back even further, winding tighter and tighter into his own head until the resulting pressure starts pounding at his temples. He can't make that mistake again. He can't.

"But I didn't do it very well, did I?" Xisuma is saying, and he sounds tired. Exhausted. Grian can only imagine how much sleep he's been getting after cramming six people into what had originally been a singleplayer, and then babysitting its code for a week. "I should've asked more questions. There were a lot of things nobody had real answers for, and that was… pretty hard, on a lot of hermits."

The turbulent writhing in Grian's chest settles into absolute, icy stillness. He takes in a slow drag of air, lungs wheezing with it; his body is on the verge of code collapse, and it shows in the struggle to stay upright, the anvils tied to his limbs, the limp way he cradles Tango's water bottle in his lap. How his ribs stand out underneath his sweater. When he speaks, the words are forced, dead things– fish floating belly up in the river. "Is that why I'm still alive? So you can– get your answers?"

Xisuma's head snaps up; the glimpse Grian gets of his eyes are wide and startled. "What? No– or, well, I mean– yeah, everyone here wants answers, but– that's not why you're alive." His voice takes on a strained note. "Grian, we were worried. When we fou– you gave us a right scare, y'know, when we found you. I know I've already said that, but it's true. We're glad you're okay."

Another heavy pause– then, slowly, Xisuma's hands lift to the latches of his helmet. Grian stiffens as they release with a click; he can count on one hand the amount of times he's seen Xisuma without his helmet on.

He takes it off without fanfare. Beneath the helmet, Xisuma's face is lined with exhaustion, bruises painting the skin beneath his eyes. He looks like he hasn't slept in a week– he probably hasn't. And written in the creases of his face is an urgency so pronounced, so anxious, Grian doesn't need his Watcher senses to feel its palpable presence. Xisuma holds his helmet with shaky hands like it’s an offering, and says, earnest and pained: "You're alive because we– well, we've done our best to keep you alive. None of us want you dead, my gosh. We've all been out of our wits, waiting to– to see if you'd wake up. We weren't even sure if you would."

Grian stares at him. Something in the words lose their translation when he turns them over, picking apart each syllable for a glimpse into their real meaning. He can't reconcile the dissonance– he's hurt people. He's hurt them. How can they want him alive after that? After everything?

"I think," Grian says, slowly, wearily, "you've made a mistake."

Xisuma winces; the motion is sharp and jarring without his helmet as a barrier between them. "I know," he says, and there's a layer of shame and regret running thick over the words. "I… I hear that. I wasn't thinking with my head when we– when I kicked you. It was–" he makes a nebulous gesture in the air before letting his arm fall again– "all such a big mess, it got away from me." His lips tilt up in a slight smile. "Like it always tends to."

"No, no– not that." Grian sighs, does his best to ignore the tight band closing around his chest. His eyes flutter shut, just for a moment; he can still hear Mumbo's urgent voice pleading with him to keep them open. "You made a– kicking me was for the best." He lifts tired lashes again, staring Xisuma down with as much conviction as he can muster. "But you should've just killed me when you had the chance. I was trying to help you."

The words drop from his mouth like beads of glass. They shatter as they hit the floor, and for a single, small eternity, Xisuma stares at him with blank eyes.

Then the world starts to spin again, and Xisuma physically recoils.

"Grian," he breathes, "you can't actually mean that. And– help us? What does that even mean?"

"It means I'm dangerous when I'm like this." He doesn't mean to let the bitterness drip from his voice, but it comes out anyway– thick and vicious, painting the air in broad strokes. "Every time I pulled people into those games, it was because I was hungry. And people– people got hurt for it. People died over it, and they were tricked into thinking it'd be permanent–" he breaks off; his breath is beginning to come fast, chest expanding and contracting in a rapid cycle. "I did that," he says, and it feels like a punch to the gut. "I shouldn't be– I can't let myself ever do that again, X. I can't be trusted."

"But you shouldn't die over it." Xisuma sounds pained. "Grian–"

"I'm already dying," Grian tells him bluntly. "It was either let you kill me or finish starving, and I wanted it to at least be– you. One of you. Scar, actually, when it comes down to it."

Xisuma pales. "Don't say that," he says, with a soft, creeping kind of horror. "Grian."

"What? It's the truth." Grian closes his eyes again. They're getting heavier; he can feel that dark place sinking back into his bones, pulling him closer with inky fingertips. He's so, so tired. "I don't know how much time I have left, but it's not much. Honestly, at this point I just… kind of want to get it over with."

"You're not going to die," Xisuma says, but an edge of pure fear runs along the words, razor sharp and stinging the roof of Grian's mouth. "Just tell us what you need, alright? We can figure something out."

"Absolutely not." Grian's eyes snap back open– he wrenches himself back as far as he can get, the shivery weight of his wings a dead mass behind him. "No, no– I am done playing that stupid game. I'm done hurting people. I won't do it, not again."

Familiar words; Grian had spoken them to himself after each Life game, after every nightmare he put his friends through just to feel full again. They ring as hollow now as they had back then, and the utter disgust at himself burns right through him. He'll never change, will he? Even now, it's a struggle not to worm his way back into Xisuma's emotions, drink and drink until his code has replenished itself. Grian bites his tongue hard enough to taste copper, just for a distraction.

"Grian, ple–" Xisuma starts, but he's interrupted by the door flying open with a slam.

Both of them jump. Grian shies away from the reverberation, eyes wide; Xisuma's hands fumble his helmet, almost dropping it. As one, they twist their heads to stare at the open door, still shuddering on its hinges.

Framed in the doorway, covered in stone grit and cave dust– hair mussed and eyes frantic– is Mumbo.

Chapter Text

Mumbo looks ill.

That’s the first thing Grian really registers about him; his face is drawn and haggard, stress lines carved into the spaces beneath his eyes, between his brows, around his mouth. He’s paler than a skeleton, which would be funnier under different circumstances. Have you been outside for even a minute this last week? Grian would've teased him in a better life, but in this world the question stalls in his throat, buzzing and hollow. It's not like he even has the energy to voice it, anyway– it's taking all his strength just to stay upright under Xisuma's careful scrutiny.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he notes the stiff way Mumbo holds himself, the burnt edges of his sleeves, the smear of soot staining his forearm. The full picture slots into place as Mumbo stumbles forward through the doorway, almost falling against the frame as he rushes inside. Hot on his heels is Tango, alarm clear in the cast of his eyes, one hand outstretched as if ready to snatch him back.

Grian registers it all through a wall of glass. The exhaustion lingering heavy in his mind and limbs splays out, blanketing his thoughts until they muddle together into one tangled ball of muted apprehension. He wants to worry; all he can summon is a dull, aimless ache. Mumbo, he recalls, had begged him to keep his eyes open in the void. Had held his face and shaken him to try and keep him awake.

Grian had failed. But he'd hoped, in those last few seconds of consciousness, that this failure would be the last.

“I– I came as quick as I could,” Mumbo says in one breathless rush. He trips over the words; he's clutching his own hands, wringing them together in a gesture Grian knows far too well. In the low light his comm flashes– if he squints, Grian can just make out the scrawl of text indicating world chat: [Mumbo Jumbo tried to–] “Tango said–”

Mumbo pulls up short as red-rimmed eyes finally fall on Grian. Behind him, Tango backpedals so hard he skids, pinwheeling to retain balance so he doesn't slam face-first into Mumbo's back. For a long, suffocating moment, nobody says a single word.

“... You’re awake,” Mumbo finishes, looking a little lost.

Xisuma coughs into his fist; with one smooth motion, he slips his helmet back into place, the metallic snap of its latches catching against the rest of his suit and reverberating through the barren room. For some reason, it sets the hairs on Grian’s arms standing on end.

“Yes, ah–” Xisuma clears his throat again, voice wavering by several fractions. “I was just…” he lifts one hand up, gesturing at nothing– “catching Grian up to speed, with what’s been going on while he was… out.”

“Oh,” Mumbo says. Stares; eyes flickering over Grian's face, cataloging, hunting something down– though what, Grian has no clue. Once, he could have read Mumbo like an open book. Now it’s like they’re speaking two separate languages.

Whatever Mumbo finds makes him inhale sharply. “Good," he says, taking a halting step forward. "That's– good. Great news, actually." A strained smile tugs at the corners of his lips; it doesn't meet his eyes. "How're you feeling, bud?"

Grian blinks. Hesitates. Without permission, his eyes dart to Xisuma, who watches him with poorly concealed worry, and then to Tango, who's visibly wincing as he settles against the doorframe to watch.

"Alive," he croaks finally, once the silence has stretched past the threshold of uncomfortable. He can't bring himself to disguise the palpable disappointment pulsing through his voice.

Mumbo's face does some complicated gymnastics before smoothing out again. "Good," he repeats, and this time his next step is deliberate. When he speaks again, his voice is controlled, a forced note of levity keeping it upbeat– but Grian can taste the tension riding underneath. "So you know exactly how much stress you've put us under for the past– however long it's been. Week. Month. Year."

Beside him, Xisuma stutters. “Well, I– I don’t think that– um. Maybe we shouldn't–”

A muscle in Mumbo's jaw jumps. He ignores Xisuma entirely. “Because I hope you know, mate, that we’ve all been worried sick about you."

The last time they spoke– actually spoke, not whatever happened in the in-between– the light in Mumbo's eyes had shuttered, warmth bleeding from them like an open wound. A corpse replacing the full body of their friendship, tucked in the spaces between grief and cold, hard betrayal. He hadn't said a word while the other hermits argued over what to do with him. He hadn't needed to.

Grian shuts his eyes against the burning memory and breathes in, then out, slow. "Can't imagine why," he says into that cavernous darkness, dry and weary. "I don't reckon I've got many friends left back h– on Hermitcraft."

When he opens his eyes again, Mumbo is staring at him, mouth set in a thin, pale line beneath his mustache. "Well, you've got that wrong," he says, clipped. "Considering we're literally standing right in front of you."

It's Grian's turn to grit his teeth. The air roils rich with a tumultuous mix of emotion– trembling anger and the desperate copper tinge of fear; his fingers tremble around the smooth glass of Tango's water bottle as he shakes away the hungry tendrils that beg to latch on and drink. "X said you wanted… answers," he says finally, in lieu of a response.

"Yeah," Mumbo says, blunt as a hammer, "I do, frankly. Starting with that–" he sucks in a sharp breath, struggles with it for a minute; his mouth works without a sound before twisting again, casting shadows under his eyes. "You wanna tell me what the hell that was?" he demands finally, waving an agitated hand in the air. "Back there in the– void, or whatever? With the potions?”

Behind him, Tango straightens from his cautious slouch, an abrupt, alarmed noise bubbling from his throat. “Uh, whoa, hang on–”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve just– just– letting us find you like that, G, I mean, honestly–” every word Mumbo speaks grows more incensed, trembling through the air and threatening to crack in half. “I-I don’t even know what to say! This is– what were you even thinking? You could have died!”

A stab of something ugly twists through Grian’s stomach. “That was kind of the plan, yeah.”

Something undefinable flickers over Mumbo’s face, there and gone in a flash. The pressure building at Grian’s temples begins to throb; a sickly, piercing ache that drills into each side of his skull. It takes every ounce of willpower he possesses not to chase that glimmer of emotion, hunt it down and amplify it until he can roll its subtle flavor over his tongue. Instead, he swallows, throat bobbing, and lets it go before he can even begin to identify it.

“That’s not funny,” Mumbo says.

“Good,” Grian says, weary. “‘Cause I’m not joking.”

The words come out leaden; this isn’t the first time today that he’s wished he was still unconscious, but right now the desire swarms him, billows through his veins and makes a home inside the black, gaping chasm that should be his heart. Maybe that’s why saying them feels good, in a vicious, mean sort of way. Like cutting him open to find a lake full of poison, leaking noxious fumes into the air– anything to get them all to understand what they should have done in the first place.

“Now hang on,” Xisuma says, clearly nervous, half-rising out of his chair. "This– is this really the best time–?"

They both ignore him. “You can’t be serious,” Mumbo says, rocking back on his heels. “We– Grian, I don’t know if you noticed, but we sort of tried to save you–”

And there's that fire, the hint of a spark lying deep within his consciousness. Grian’s lips curl over his teeth as he speaks. “Yeah, and I’m having a lot of trouble figuring out why. I gave you the tools, I-I did everything I could to make it easy, and you just– you just didn’t! Do you have any idea how stupid that was?” He grits his teeth, jaw aching. “You’re all in a ton of danger right now, and if you’d just listened to me from the start–”

“Listened to you.” Mumbo’s voice is flat and empty. “Listened to you asking us to kill you, you mean.”

“Yes!”

“Grian,” Xisuma tries again, sounding pained. “Mumbo– we really don't have to–”

“You do realize how messed up that is, right?” Mumbo’s face is terribly pale. “Asking us to do that?”

“A lot less messed up than what I did to all of you.”

Mumbo’s face contorts; he’s vibrating, fists balled at his sides. “Well, a fat load of good dying would do for anyone at this point, bud, I hate to tell you,” he snaps, taking another stilted step forward. “It’s not like that’s going to fix the– what happened in those, those games–”

“It’s not about fixing,” Grian says, and he’s surprised at the misery that throbs clear through his voice. “I can’t– I know I can’t fix it, alright? That’s– it’s about preventing it from ever happening again.”

"Uh," Tango says, tentatively, "guys–"

"Oh, that's rich." Mumbo's upper lip curls. "Real rich of you to say, when you haven't even tried–"

Grian recoils, a spear of ice shooting through his heart. "I didn't try? You think I– I did all of that to everyone– on purpose?"

"Well, I don't know, Grian, because you won't tell us!"

Nobody moves in the silence that descends after that. Grian stares, frozen, at Mumbo's tense silhouette, the way his fists clench at his sides– no longer tangling into each other with the force of his worry. He can count on one hand the amount of times he's actually seen Mumbo this irate.

None of them come even close to now.

Slowly, Grian unsticks his tongue from the roof of his suddenly dry mouth. "Does it even matter, at this point?" he asks, and it slips out more subdued than he intends. "You really think I deserve to live after– this?"

Mumbo's breath hisses through his teeth. Some of the rage blooming high and red on his cheeks flakes off, leaving behind a distraught, twisting pallor. "What I think is that you need to stop– this!" he exclaims, throwing a hand up in the air. "Whatever this is! Because it's not helping anybody, Grian– and least of all you."

“So,” Tango cuts in abruptly. Grian jolts; he'd forgotten he was even in the room. When he glances over, Tango is standing at the door rubbing his upper arm, brilliant eyes flickering between Grian and the rest of the room in rapid succession. “If you can't control your… discombobulator-thingy, then– why not tell us in the first place?”

Grian shudders. Closes his eyes; reels himself further in. “You’re not listening to me,” he says, terse and shaky. “It’s not that simple–”

“Then tell us,” Xisuma’s voice urges. “Let us help you, Grian.”

When he opens his eyes, a sliver of light is pouring through one of the cracks in the ill-fitting wall. It slashes across Mumbo’s face, painting the skin around his eyes with gold– highlighting every bruised vein, each miniscule worry line, every crease around his mouth. There’s a choice, here, lying in the space between Xisuma’s words and where he rests on the bed. An olive branch extended to unworthy hands. A fork in the broken, muddied path best left untraveled.

“No,” he croaks, and sinks back against the wall, shivering. “No. I just want–” his voice catches in his throat for a moment. Grian swallows, tries again. “I just want to get this over with already.”

He’s already dying. There’s no point in trying any longer.

They should have killed him right from the start.

“Right,” Mumbo blurts. His voice is shaking; his face red, spotty, eyes wet and rimmed when Grian shoots him a glance. “Right, I can't– I'm not doing this today, actually.”

And with a twist of his heel, Mumbo shoulders past Tango and rushes back out the door. It slams shut behind him with a reverberation that rattles the entire doorframe.

The silence that descends in his wake is thick, heavy, and suffocating. Grian slumps as that trembling fire at the core of him extinguishes once more.

Finally, Xisuma clears his throat. “Well, that, uh. That was a bit… exciting, I suppose.” Another loaded pause; Grian glances up at him to find his eyes distant behind the glass of his helmet. After a moment, they refocus, boring into Grian’s before skittering away again. His tone is rueful. “I guess we should let you rest, then, huh?”

“Might not be a bad idea,” Tango remarks softly. “Come on, X." He opens the door with a gentle creak, then pauses, turning back over his shoulder. "You need anything, G?”

I need you to listen to what I’m saying. I need you to kill me. “I’m fine,” Grian rasps, fingers spasming against the water bottle in his lap. “It’s fine.”

It’s not fine. It won’t be fine until this finally comes to its terrible, inevitable conclusion, and what’s left of Grian is recycled back into the Greater Code. But he can’t say that, because no one will listen.

Tango’s brows furrow, dubious; the look he exchanges with Xisuma is long and searching. After a second, he nods, and sighs. “Welp, call me if that changes,” he says, and pads out the door on silent cat’s feet.

After a beat, Xisuma stands, shifting to hover over Grian’s bedside. His fingers tangle together; loosen; tangle again. “We’re trying to help, Grian,” he says softly, reaching out to gently squeeze one boney shoulder. “Just– remember that, alright? Let us know what we can do.”

The contact burns. Grian forces himself to stay absolutely still underneath it, gaze downcast, tense as a bowstring. “How could I forget?” he says bitterly, and closes his eyes before he can watch Xisuma walk away too.

The soft wisp of a sigh. Footsteps; the door clicks shut with far more grace than Mumbo’s abrupt exit. When Grian opens his eyes again, he’s alone.

It shouldn’t sting so fiercely. He’s spent almost a full year by himself, with nothing but the hunger, guilt, and his decaying code to keep him company. But beneath that layer of cultivated numbness is a raw, scraping wound, freshly torn. It’s only now, with the solitude pouring back into his cracks, that he can admit how much Mumbo’s anger stings.

With trembling, tentative motions, Grian slides back down the mattress, shuffling until he can wrangle his limp wings into a more comfortable position. Even that minute adjustment leaves him gasping, eyes squeezed shut and limbs leaden– how long does he even have? Days, maybe. Another week, at most.

The thought is almost comforting. Another week, he thinks, and holds onto it like a lifeline. Another week, and everything will finally stop. He just has to be patient. He just has to bide his time.

In a vicious mockery of those final moments from the in-between, the darkness swarms up and consumes him, dragging him back down into its endless depths. Grian floats.

And like a rusted anchor, the hunger sinks.

He wakes abruptly to the sound of voices.

Unlike the slow rise to consciousness from before, this time Grian jolts back into awareness; only the ever present exhaustion keeps him from physically flinching. It takes a moment before his brain begins to parse the sounds floating all around it– when it does, an icy arrow pierces straight through his heart.

Scar.

“–aid he was pretty, uh–” Scar is saying, quiet and sober. “Well.”

“I mean, yeah.” The ache spreads twofold; Pearl. Her cadence is off, stilted– a thread of unsteadiness weaving between the words. Her tone, however, is plain. “Doesn’t exactly get better after a week-long nap, now does it?”

“Yeah, I guess not.” Scar falls quiet; something shuffles by Grian’s bedside, a rustle of cloth he can track perfectly with his eyes closed. In his mind’s eye, he traces the way Scar shifts his weight to the other hip, crossing his legs at the ankle in an attempt to keep the pressure off his knees. Bad pain day, he thinks, unbidden, then very carefully doesn’t think at all.

A beat of silence. Then Pearl sighs– a short, sharp huff that carries a wealth of emotion in it. The heavy, tangled weight of it settles thick on Grian’s tongue, and it’s at that point that he realizes he’s somehow managed to start feeding off of them again.

Grian yanks the mental hooks away from them before they can truly sink in, shivering with the effort. The urge is there, rooting deep within his chest– to bring their darkest emotions up to the surface, drink and drink and drink until something deep within them cracks. A treacherous part of Grian’s mind whispers how easy it would be, too. How simple. How little effort it would take to trap them on this isolated world, and hunt them, and–

“I’m gonna go feed the cows,” Pearl says, abruptly shattering that train of thought before it can sink its claws any further. “See you around, Scar.”

She leaves quietly, footsteps crisp against the wooden floor; she must be wearing diamond boots. Scar hums an absent note in her wake, a wordless acknowledgement, and then silence falls back over the room like a pall.

Grian hesitantly opens his eyes.

Scar has indeed occupied the abandoned chair next to Grian’s bedside. He leans forward in it now, body angled toward Grian but head still facing the door, eyes middle-distant. One finger taps the handle of his cane to an unheard beat; light, just this side of soundless, a steady rhythm betrayed only by the slight tremble in his hand. Grian tracks it– up, down, up, down– and without permission, his breathing slots into place alongside it.

Then Scar glances down, meets his eyes, and jumps almost a mile out of his skin.

“Oh!” He fumbles for a moment with his cane, snatching it before it can clatter to the floor. “Oh my gosh– Grian.”

“Hi,” Grian rasps.

“You scared the bejeezus out of me, oh my gosh.” Scar presses a hand to his heart, eyes wide. “You can’t just go around startling a man like that, you almost gave me a heart attack!”

Something about the lighthearted banter brings the ghost of a smile to Grian’s lips. It’s so familiar, so natural– as if nothing has changed between them. As if they’re right back on Hermitcraft, and Grian has done nothing more egregious than play a particularly successful prank on him. “Pay more attention, then,” he says, in a desperate bid to keep it, to preserve this playful atmosphere that obscures the divide between them. “You get too distracted and anyone can sneak up on you, steal your diamonds.”

“Hey, I spent a lot of time caving for those diamonds!” To his credit, Scar recovers quickly, a small grin spreading across his face as he wags a finger at him. “Don’t you go stealing them behind my back, mister.”

“I’m not making any promises,” Grian shoots back, then falters at the beat of silence that descends in response.

A sick flare of concern begins to slink around the room, beating at the edges of Grian's periphery like a moth against flame; none of it shows on Scar’s face as he leans back in his chair, shifting his weight again with a carefully hidden wince. "So," Scar says after a beat, voice deceptively casual, "I'd ask you about your beauty sleep, but you kinda look like you've lost a few rounds to a ravager recently."

That startles a hoarse bark of laughter out of him. "Well it's not like I've been on vacation," Grian replies, wry. He glances down at himself and his tattered red sweater, the way the sheets paint a skeletal picture of his body, and swallows. "I've been sort of… busy."

The skin around Scar's eyes tightens slightly, but his smile doesn't falter. "Yeah, you were pretty tough to track down," he says, far too light for the worry that winds its way around Grian’s shoulders. “I didn’t know you could be that slippery!”

“I’ve had lots of practice,” Grian says without truly thinking about it. Fractured memories sear behind his eyelids in response: the backlit flash of a dozen flaring wings; the serpentine shape of Watchers in pursuit; the eerie shimmer of a rift torn from within the Greater Code–

Grian shakes away the memories. Instead, he tries to prop himself up– but this time he doesn’t have the benefit of pure adrenaline boosting his efforts. His arm can’t support his weight; Grian falls back with a shaky hiss, stomach curdling.

Scar's brows pinch together. "Need a hand?"

For a moment, Grian seriously considers telling him no. That little spark of pride crouches inside his chest, still smoldering– and then it gutters, and Grian lets his breath rush out in a ragged gust. "Yeah, if you don't mind," he mutters.

The concern radiating from Scar spikes, but he says nothing as he leans forward to slip one arm around Grian's frail shoulders. It settles beneath his wings like a warm anchor, radiating a soft, comforting heat Grian can't help but lean into. With slow, cautious motions, Scar helps prop him up into a sitting position; his calm, friendly smile slips closer to a grimace as Grian's back muscles and wings shiver at the change of elevation.

A wash of grey static floods Grian's vision once he settles fully upright. The warm arm around his back retreats abruptly, only to return in the shape of a hand steadying him by the shoulder. Grian takes a deep, measured breath– then another, and another, until the grey filters out, leaving behind nothing but the bland, mismatched planks of his room, and Scar's tight, anxious face.

"Whoa there," he says, and Grian almost huffs another laugh. He's not a horse. "Take it easy, G."

"I'm not sure how much easier I could be taking it, right now," Grian replies dryly. He drags one leaden hand up to rub at his eyes, then drops it to consider Scar for a moment. Something nags at him, pressing thick and urgent on his tongue. After a second, he gives in to the urge, and blurts, "How did you find me, actually? I was sort of… trying to stay away from other servers." From other people, he doesn't say, but from the pinched look on Scar's face, he catches it anyway.

After a second, Scar retracts his hand; its absence leaves a cool mark against Grian's skin, sending a rolling shiver up his spine.

"Well," he begins a bit tentatively, "we sort of– okay, well I sort of– maybe– kind of– just a little bit pressured Xisuma and Scott into helping track you down?"

Grian stares at him, waiting for the words to fall into an order that actually makes sense. When they don't, he says, blank, "Sorry– you what?"

Scar's mouth flattens into a straight line. "Yeah, that was about–" he sucks in a breath between his teeth, then lets it out in one great sigh– "three months ago? Hard to tell with all the server hopping we did."

Grian's head reels. They had tracked him for that long? "Three?"

"Well, like you said– you're kind of a hard fish to catch." Scar shrugs one shoulder– like this isn't a monumental statement. Like it's a perfectly natural thing to do after everything Grian's put him through. His voice takes on a more thoughtful note, eyes unfocusing as he speaks. "You know, I thought Scott would give us more trouble about it, but he wasn't really hard to convince– which is weird, now that I think about it, but–" another shrug. "I guess he thought it was a good idea, too."

"It was a bad idea," Grian interjects, nausea climbing up his throat. "Scar– you get that it was a bad idea, right?"

Scar falters. Then that salesman's smile snaps back into place, complete with a sparkling, gently chiding undercurrent running through his voice. "What are you talking about? Of course it was a good idea– I wanted to check up on you! See how you were doing, make sure you were alright! There's nothing wrong with that."

Maybe it's the way he turns, tilting his head, but suddenly all Grian can see is the exhaustion. Deep circles bruise beneath Scar's eyes, worry lines wavering between his brows. There's a smudge of dirt staining one cheekbone, and the urge to reach up and gently wipe it off burns clear through Grian's entire body.

He winds his fingers into the blanket instead. "Nobody will give me a clear answer on that, actually." A sour tinge coats his voice. "I don't– what's the play here, Scar? Hunt me down, ask me some questions, and then scurry off back to Hermitcraft? Leave me to die? Or am I supposed to just–" a pulse of frustration closes his throat. Grian struggles with it before slumping back, heedless of the way this position presses against his wings. "I don't know what anybody wants," he says, helpless.

Scar's expression tightens, eyes sweeping over Grian's face. "Is it really that unbelievable that I'd be worried about you?"

"After all this?" Grian shoots him a flat stare. "Yes, Scar. I just can't understand what the goal here is when I'm maybe a week from total code collapse."

Scar remains silent for a moment, quiet and sober. "Okay, we'll get back to that in a second," he says at last, "but– Grian." A deep breath, as if bracing for something. "Look, as far as I know, everybody's got their own motivations for being here. But we all have one thing in common, and it's that we care about you."

A loaded pause. Scar's eyes soften by palpable degrees. "Grian, I've missed you. And… okay, I haven't exactly run this by anyone else yet, but… I– I really want to bring you back. I just think you– I want you to be able to come back home." Then, with an aching sincerity that squeezes the breath from Grian's lungs: "It's just not the same without you, G."

Grian's blood freezes. "You're not serious."

But Scar only looks at him, something both sad and knowing in the glitter of his gaze. "For what it's worth," he says softly, "everyone here has missed you too."

"Scar." The rush of adrenaline leaves him feeling lightheaded; Grian's heart rabbits in his own ears with shocked, terrified beats. "Scar, okay, you– you can't just do that, Scar. I got banned."

"You got kicked," Scar corrects him. He shifts again, something unreadable crossing his face. "It wasn't a blacklist."

It's only thanks to the fatigue weighing him down that Grian doesn't leap out of bed right then and there to shake him. "Are you even listening to yourself right now? Nobody wants me back. And they shouldn't! It's not safe– Scar? Scar. Listen to me. This is a monumentally bad idea."

Because even now, he's struggling not to feed. Even now, his mere existence is a burn mark in the fabric of the universe; even now, as the clock ticks down, Grian finds new ways to hurt the ones he loves.

The rush of dread crashes over him like a wave. From a distance, he watches Scar's lips part, mouth working around the first shape of a syllable, but the sound doesn't pierce through the static crawling in his ears. Inside his mind is nothing but the white hiss of a creeper, curling like pale smoke.

If Scar really is this determined to drag him back– and he can see it in his face, read it in the emotion pulsing through him– then he can't risk letting him put everyone else in danger. He’d made a promise– and he’s made many promises over his life, and broken most of them, but this one he’s determined. Grian had made his peace with death a week ago, but that was peace– a passive, downy understanding. He can't afford that gentleness anymore.

No. If nobody will listen to him, if nobody will understand the grievous errors they've made– then Grian will have to fix this himself. Walk headfirst into the gaping maw of death and make a home there; claw apart the monster with his own bare hands. Deep inside his chest, some wailing thing crumbles; he'd hoped he wouldn't have to die alone.

It's a selfish thought, but Grian is an expert at selfishness. Without thinking, he shifts, wrapping one hand around his wrist to feel the pulse hidden inside.

Its hours have always been limited, but now there’s an end he can finally see. And if he wants to keep his promises, he'll have to orchestrate that end himself– in whatever way he can, before they drag a starving Watcher back into the middle of a potential feast.

Whatever else Scar tells him, it slides right through Grian's mind without sticking. Instead, he sits, thrumming with that violent, starbright potential, and rubs one thumb over his pulse-point in deadly promise.

He won’t make the mistake of asking anyone else to help him this time. No– no, he won’t make any mistakes at all. He simply can’t afford to.

Grian shivers, and under Scar’s watchful, fretful gaze, carefully begins to plan.

Chapter Text

The thing is, he isn't even sure where to start. It's hard to think, let alone plan right now– every moment awake is a battle to stay awake, and not fall back into the endless depths that tug at him. Grian fails about three-quarters of the way through Scar’s visit, mid-word; one moment he’s awake, eyelids fluttering, and the next he’s blinking them back open to warm sunlight peeking in through the window. Or, more accurately, through the rough-woven squares of fabric hanging in front of it– someone must have tacked them up while he was sleeping.

For a long moment, Grian stares at them, mind as fresh and blank as new snow. It feels like he’s circling something, drawing inexplicably closer to its event horizon with each new revolution– like any minute now it will pull him in, and he’ll fall, forever tumbling to regain his balance.

Then the moment passes; Grian blinks, and the curtains are just curtains again.

When he attempts to sit up, it comes easier than it did yesterday– no grey static, although his heart pounds with the simple motion. Grian fumbles upright, fingers digging into the mattress, spine shaking as he slowly draws his legs in and crosses them at the ankles; he has an aching, awful suspicion as to why he’s feeling marginally more solid today, and it’s confirmed when he tugs on the mental hooks that keep slinking forward to sink into his friends.

Feeding again. He’s still not sure how he’s doing it in his sleep, but it must be some Watcher reflex, a last ditch effort for survival. Grian yanks them out one by one, meticulously, and hunches forward another inch with each snapped connection.

By the time he’s done, it’s all he can do just to breathe: even that simple in, out, in, out burns. The urge to pull up his knees and press his forehead into them is immense; he doesn’t bother trying to move. Bad enough that he’s panting just from sitting up– even thinking about movement right now turns his limbs to lead.

He stays like that for a long time, wings folded uselessly behind him, neck and back aching from his posture. Honeyed sunlight gradually slips down the wall adjacent to him, creeping over the simple blankets and illuminating them with gold; when he glances down, a drop has pooled onto his knee. Mindlessly, Grian shifts to trace its circumference, and for reasons he can’t explain even to himself, tries to keep his hand out of the light. It catches anyway, slips through his skin to glow red, highlighting an intricate highway of ribboned veins in each finger.

He rubs them together absently, staring at each whorl of his fingerprints. Once, these hands had built; they’d carried bricks, stone, and every colour of concrete under the sun. They’d tended to moss and formed good callouses, caught hard-working dirt under their nails. They’d held their friends.

He hasn’t held anything for a long time now. He wonders if he’s even still capable of it.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. These hands won’t exist after he’s done with them. All he has to do is figure out a method before they try to drag him back.

His legs are starting to cramp; with herculean effort, Grian shifts his weight, tries to settle in a more comfortable position. Maybe that’s why the footsteps catch him off guard– they beat a tentative rhythm, as if their owner is doing their best to stay quiet. Tension ripples up Grian’s spine, but this time he faces the door head on. No sense in hiding. They know he's conscious.

The door creaks when it opens, loud enough that the person on the other side hisses a chagrined, bitten-off curse; Tango again. It’s eerily like deja vu: Tango locks eyes with him and jumps, although this time he recovers far more quickly and with less screaming.

“You have gotta stop doing that to me, man,” Tango says, pressing a hand to his chest. “You’re gonna give me a heart attack.”

Unlike the joke with Scar, this makes something dark and tar-like curdle in the pit of Grian’s stomach. “I wasn’t–” he starts, then breaks off, curling in on himself. Behind his eyelids dance three separate Tangos and a long waltz of betrayal, echoed rage and fear so vast they nearly consume him. “I wasn't trying t–”

Tango’s eyes widen. “Oh, no, no, buddy that’s not– I didn’t mean that literally, it was just a joke!” He laughs a bit sheepishly. “You’re good, you’re good. You didn’t–”

Tango breaks off abruptly, and the skin around his eyes grows pinched. The beat of silence that drops around them brims with unsteady things.

“– do anything wrong,” Tango finishes, but it’s stilted, and Grian can taste the falsehood lying underneath.

“Anyway,” Tango says quickly, stepping further into the room, “I’m glad you’re awake, uh– d’ya need anything? You didn’t, um… touch your water yesterday.”

He gestures to the floor, and Grian follows the stretch of his arm to the side of his bed. Blinks. Resting against one wooden leg is the water bottle Tango gave him, glinting bright and benign in the sun.

It’s the same slow spiral he got from the curtains. Grian’s next breath shudders, just slightly– just by a tremble. Such a small thing. It’s not even on a table. But someone had placed it within easy reach anyway, and every inch of Grian threatens to shatter.

They’re all so stupid.

“You should probably drink that,” Tango says quietly. “Y’know, keep your fluids up and all that.”

“That’s not really how it works for me,” Grian replies without thinking, voice a hoarse scrape in his own throat. Reluctance simmers in his blood; even looking at the bottle cracks some vital function in his chest. And the energy it would take just to reach for it–

"Wait, but yesterday you said you could drink it." Tango sounds audibly confused. "So is it not– like, essential? How does that work?"

Grian freezes. "It's… complicated," he says eventually, heart beating hummingbird fast in his chest. Would it even matter to explain? He leans over as far as he dares before Tango can ask anything else, fumbling for the water bottle. The glass is cool and smooth in his hands; when he turns it over, light catches on the faint residue left by multiple sets of fingerprints. He could map them, find out exactly how many people have touched this bottle– read its code and composition, each thread of data left behind.

Instead he bites clumsy nails into the cork stopper and tries to work it out of the bottle. Quick, jerky motions; his hands are too weak to make much of an impact, and within seconds his fingers start to cramp. Grian grits his teeth and keeps at it, struggling to twist it out–

A hand lands on his forearm, stilling him in place. Grian’s eyes flick up; Tango has come to stand at his elbow, expression unreadable. Slowly, carefully, he pries the bottle out of Grian’s weak fingers. Uncorks it. Then, without ceremony, he presses it back into Grian’s hand. Water sloshes against the lip of the bottle as it tilts, and one bright, burning drop falls to saturate Grian’s tattered sleeve.

A familiar, hollow ache blossoms underneath his sternum. Grian sucks in a long, trembling breath, then brings the bottle up to his lips before he can do something as truly embarrassing as cry.

The water inside is lukewarm and a little dusty from sitting out, but it soothes the cotton rasp in his mouth, eases the slight soreness at the back of his throat. Grian blinks, thrown; he hadn’t even realized he’d been thirsty. He tilts the bottle back again, drinking faster, and it doesn't even matter that his mind is violently replaying what happened the last time he chugged something– water has never felt so good before. Within seconds the bottle has been drained dry, and Grian stares down at its empty depths, studying the play of light against what miniscule droplets still cling to the glass.

"Man." Tango whistles; when Grian jerks his head up, he's got both eyebrows raised. "You really chugged that thing, wow." Abruptly, he claps his hands, rubbing them together eagerly. "Okay, so– do you want me to grab more, or are we good? I can get you anything you need; food, water, supplies– I'm your guy."

Grian turns that over for a moment, still caught in the refraction of light against water. Supplies… "What kind of supplies?" he ventures.

Tango's expression does a complicated little twist. "Uh, like– I dunno, clothes and stuff? Extra blankets? Healing potion or two? Wait– do those even work on you?"

It's like a bolt of lightning going through him. Grian sucks in a tight breath, fingers spasming around the bottle before relaxing again. Potions… of course. He can use potions, just like before. The weakness ones were survivable, but something as harsh and fast as harming…

It only takes a few simple ingredients to invert a healing potion. All he needs after that is a little time to brew them, when nobody else is looking.

As far as ways to die go, it's probably one of the worst. Incredibly painful… but he's felt pain before. Certainly doled out his fair share of it. If this is what it takes to keep his friends safe, then he'll do it a million times over.

"They do," Grian says slowly. "They just– take a lot." He hesitates, then says, a little stilted: "I could… probably use some, yeah."

"How much is a lot?" Tango's brow furrows. "Like, what amount are we talking here?"

"Three or four." Grian keeps his face carefully neutral. "I dunno, maybe five?"

"Five? Jeez, that's a– a crazy amount." Tango's watching him with something that could be either mild horror or amazement. Knowing him, it might be both. "Yeah, okay, I can see if, uh– Pearl, maybe? Pearl can go out and get some ingredients– we don't really have a brewing stand yet, and we'll need lots of blaze powder…" his voice trails off into quiet, half-spoken murmurs.

It's a familiar tic, and the aching thing in Grian's chest spiderwebs out in fragile fractures. He's never enjoyed lying. Half-truths, sure, and he's always loved a good loophole– but outright lying? That's not his normal style. Tango is right, five is an absurd number– it's a miracle he's even entertaining the thought.

But five will be enough to make sure. No last minute resurrections, no sudden rescues. Just himself, the void, and the universe they all belong to.

He wonders if it will sing to him as his code falls apart.

"Hey," Tango says suddenly, breathing his train of thought clean in half, "are you feeling up to walking right now?"

Grian's head snaps back up, startled. "... I don't think I could get very far," he says finally, and he means it to be wry, but it comes out brittle and wobbling instead.

Tango's face tightens at the edges, but he doesn't call him out on it. He never does. Instead, his lips curve into a small, reassuring smile. "It's just down the hall. Figured you're probably already tired of seeing these walls– built by this handsome and talented face, by the way–" he winks, voice heavy with irony– "so we could, I dunno, get you set up on the couch or something. Just for a change of scenery. That sound cool?"

It… does, actually. He's only been awake for a day, but the familiar itch to move, to keep going, has begun to scratch beneath his skin. He's spent so long running that it feels foreign to do anything else– the idea of sitting still in an empty, undecorated room is basically akin to torture.

Still, the actual act of moving is a bit beyond him right now. "Yeah, sure," Grian murmurs anyway, and slowly shuffles toward the edge of the bed, taking each movement one increment at a time. He feels fragile, delicate– like one wrong move will make him shatter. It's very possible that it could.

Tango watches him with pinched eyes. "Hey, if you aren't feeling up to it, that's okay–" he starts, but breaks off when Grian shoots him a frustrated glance.

"No, it's–" Grian sucks in a deep, slow breath, then eases one foot off the edge of the bed. "I want to," he mutters as he plants it on solid ground. The wood beneath him is cool and rough– freshly hewn from the tree. "I want to go now."

There's a long beat of silence. Then Tango sighs, and takes a step back into Grian's space. One arm loops around his waist; the other pulls his right arm up over Tango's shoulders, and with some carefully applied leverage, Grian is– for the first time in a week– finally on his feet.

The world threatens to tilt out from under him immediately. Grian sways; without Tango's support, he would have promptly collapsed. As it is, both of them stagger, until Tango plants his feet and cautiously takes more of Grian's admittedly meager weight.

"You weigh like, nothing, dude," Tango informs him, and there's a little hitch in his voice Grian doesn't want to parse. It makes something in his chest shudder and curl up, tight and cold. "What the hell."

Grian doesn't bother responding. He knows he's all bones at this point, skinny to the point of emaciation. Tango's just the first person to point it out, and Grian has to wonder who noticed first. If they have any real inkling as to why. He never did explain himself, back when he was first found out.

It never felt right to do so.

Tango hadn't been lying– the distance from his room to the couch is relatively short, but by the end of it Grian is panting in sharp, shallow breaths that sting hard against his side. Tango darts him worried glances every few seconds as they stumble down the hall; Grian does his best to ignore them, staring ahead at their destination with burning eyes. By the time they make it to the couch, his muscles have gone watery and numb, struggling to keep him upright.

He collapses heavily on the couch the minute Tango lets go of him, wings pinned and eyes slipping closed as he sucks in an aching breath. It's a cold, hard kernel of truth at the core of him: he's been running on borrowed time since the beginning. And now that he's no longer running, it's almost impossible to get back up again.

Footsteps fade back into Grian's room; he cracks open an eye when they return, gazing up at Tango through his eyelashes. He's got Grian's blanket and pillow tucked under one arm, and in the other hand is the empty water bottle. Thick concern swirls around the room, coating the back of Grian's tongue– it's everything not to sink his teeth into it, stoke it into a panic he can feast off of.

He knows the taste of Tango's panic. He knows.

"Sheesh, dude," Tango says at last. He sets the pillow and blanket down by Grian's lap; after a second of hovering, he drops without ceremony to sit next to him. Grian eyes him as he tilts his head until it thumps against the back of the couch, then redirects his gaze to drink in his new surroundings.

It's a light, airy sort of space. Not quite a living room, not quite a kitchen– it appears to function as both. Furnaces spill into the corner, stacked on top of each other, and a cauldron of water takes up space beside them. Grian spies a bucket lying on its side underneath; they must be carting water in from a nearby lake or river while they sort out the plumbing. He wouldn't put it past– past Mumbo to be drawing up a system already.

On the other side of the room are two windows, a tiny table, and two wooden benches. Simple things, basically glorified logs that have been sanded down on one side. It's the couch that takes up the bulk of the room: a long line of leather painted dusty cinnamon by the sunlight pouring in from the windows. It's been stuffed with wool; vaguely, Grian recalls Pearl's voice, and something about cows. Right. Xisuma had said she was on animal duty.

He wonders where she is now. He hasn't seen her yet, and the absence– it's better this way, safer for them both, but the absence still stings.

"Pretty nice digs, huh?" Tango asks, and Grian's eyes flick over to him. His smile is slightly lopsided, and it doesn't seem like he expects a real answer, so Grian closes them again and focuses on breathing. When his muscles feel a bit less weak, he shifts, freeing his wings from their containment, and leans against the couch's arm.

"About how many cows died for this?" Grian asks finally, aiming for lighthearted. He must make it, because Tango grins at him with a relieved shimmer in his eyes.

"Oh, like, fifty. Pearl had a lot of fun murdering them in the face."

"Fifty." Grian echoes flatly.

"Okay, well, that's a total exaggeration, but you know me." Tango shrugs. "I'm the– the exaggerator, I guess. It's funnier than just saying three."

Grian's chuckle is a small, reluctant thing, breaking in his throat midway, but Tango's entire demeanor brightens as if he'd burst out into howling laughter. Something swells in the air around them, and it takes a moment for Grian to pinpoint that feeling as hope.

It makes a part of him balk. Hope is for people who deserve it, who have earned that kind of love and compassion. Not him. Not– whatever horrific monstrosity he counts as. And it feels unfair, for Tango to harbor that kind of emotion for him. Hope? What hope? He lost the last dregs of that months ago, the moment they rightfully slammed the server code in his face.

He's practically a week from unraveling back into the Greater Code; if his plans with the potions come through, he'll make it sooner. Tango shouldn't have hope. None of them should.

Maybe it's the knee-jerk fear that makes Grian do it, the bone-deep terror that this will somehow pollute his resolve– or maybe it's just cruel impulse. Either way, this question has been spinning in his mind ever since they found him in the void, and Grian blurts it out before he can swallow it back down. "Why are you even here?"

Tango's bright smile falters. "What– what do you mean?"

"Just– I mean, here," Grian says, frustration oozing into his voice. "I-I can't figure it out, why are you– what made you come find me, after I got kicked? Why–"

The words lock in his throat. Why you and not Impulse, he wants to say, but even that feels like a step too far.

Tango's eyes shutter briefly. He takes a deep breath, gaze flicking down, and one hand reaches over to encircle his wrist. For a long moment he says nothing.

Then his shoulders square. "You can't laugh," Tango tells him, point blank.

Grian blinks, thrown. "W– okay?"

"I'm serious, man." Tango sets his jaw, then heaves a sigh, glancing up at the ceiling. One foot taps anxiously against the wooden floor. "It's… okay. Okay, I’ll admit it. It's actually because of Jimmy."

It takes a beat for that to sink in. When it does, Grian’s eyebrows rocket into his hairline, incredulous. "Tim?"

But Tango only looks mildly uncomfortable; the hand wrapped around his wrist drags up to scrub the back of his neck. "Yeah, uh, him. It's– don't laugh, okay– but it's just… without you, we wouldn't have really… met? And, um, I really like the guy!” Something fond tugs at the edges of Tango’s lips– something warm. “He's– he's great, a real stand up dude, so… yeah. That's technically why."

Grian stares at him, stunned speechless. "You came because… of meeting Tim. I'm sorry, what?"

Tango's eyes abruptly flare. "I said don't laugh–" he starts to snap, and Grian backpedals, throwing up leaden arms in a quick gesture of peace.

"I'm not," he says quickly. "I'm not, I swear, just– that's your reason? I just… that's a little weird, Tango. That's a little– no offense, seriously, but… after the– the games… that being your reason is a little hard to believe."

Tango glances sidelong at him; his eyes still burn, bright and scarlet, but the fire inside them is easing back again. "Look, don't get me wrong," he says slowly, "I am… uh, really not happy about the games. But… you w– you’re also my friend, okay? And, hey–" he shrugs, an oddly delicate motion for someone so stocky. "Silver linings, right? Got a boyfriend out of it."

Grian snorts before he can contain it. "If you want to call it that, sure," he says, exhaustion swamping him once more. His shoulders slump, and he turns away to stare back out the windows; beyond them he can make out tall spruces, patches of podzol here and there between grasses. It must be midafternoon– the sun spills gentle and inviting between leaves, dappling the shadows underneath. Someone has left a small, shallow path leading out from the base; it turns beneath another tree, leading out in a different direction.

After a long moment, Tango sighs beside him. "He's doing okay, by the way," he says. "Uh, Jimmy. We've been keeping in touch."

Grian blinks, glancing back over; Tango's face is slightly red. "That's… good," Grian says uncertainly.

"Yeah." Tango scrubs the back of his neck again; it's a gesture Grian's never seen from him before, and in another situation, the awkwardness would be charming. In a distant sort of way, he's glad Tango is happy. Glad Jimmy is happy– or at least, he can guess he is.

He wouldn't actually know. They haven't spoken.

"Actually, he's been asking about you," Tango is saying, and Grian snaps to attention. "I told him we found you– hey, don't freak out, it's fine, I haven't given him many details– but he, uh, he said he wants to talk to you." His voice grows quiet. "If you want."

Grian looks down at his hands. Swallows. Then he forces his gaze back up, letting a wry smile slip onto his face. "To give me a piece of his mind?"

"Nah." Tango shifts, crossing one leg over the other. "He just wants to know you're okay. He's been worried about you, too."

There's a story there, in the stiff way Tango holds himself, in the discomfort coating the back of Grian's tongue– something Tango isn't telling him. Grian can't even begin to think of what it is, so he doesn't bother trying to chase it, and instead lets his eyes dip to the comm on Tango's wrist.

The sigh that eventually ripples out of him is resigned. "It wouldn't be a good idea." For many reasons; most of them involve his own impending death. No reason to start a conversation he never intends to finish.

"Why not?" Tango offers cautiously. "Like– he's willing to talk to you, why not just give it a shot?"

An itch crawls up Grian's wings, making them twitch and shiver. His eyes dart back to the window. "I don't know if you've noticed," he addresses Tango dryly, "but I don't exactly have a comm anymore."

There's a beat as Tango processes that, and then Grian watches from the corner of his eye as he jolts forward. "Whoa, hang on, what? Wh– you mean you lost it?"

Grian shrugs, a single, incremental lift of his shoulders. "A few months back, yeah."

Tango makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. "What happened?"

Grian hesitates. "Dunno," he says at last, and it's not… quite a lie. "There was a lot happening all at once– I sort of… looked over, and it was gone."

When he glances back over, Tango's eyes are wide and distressed. "Dude, that's serious. How are you gonna do anything? You don't even have an inventory like that!"

Well it's not like I'm gonna need one, Grian thinks, with a twist of dark humor. He keeps his jaw shut, though– he can sense the anxiety curling around Tango's shoulders, and it makes his mouth water. Very carefully, Grian leans back into the couch, letting it take his weight as he beats back those hunting tendrils. Another shiver runs through his body as the pressure coils in his head.

Beside him, Tango is audibly fretting. "Is this why you just dropped off the map? Oh, man, that's– we gotta get you a new one right away." His eyes suddenly brighten again. "Hey, wait, do you want me to make you one?"

"What?" Grian stiffens, eyes widening as his head snaps to the side. "No–"

"I'm serious! I can make you one, I've made one before– I mean, it'll take a while, and a lot of uh, skadoodler-ificator– thingies– but I totally can–"

"Wait a mi–"

"– and then you can talk t–"

"Tango, I don't want–" Grian snaps, but doesn't get any further before a new, but terribly familiar voice echoes out behind them.

"Oh. Is this, uh, a bad time?"

Grian freezes in place. He almost doesn't want to look; his neck moves without permission anyway.

Standing in a doorway he hadn't noticed earlier is Pearl.

Her face is swathed in shadow– she's wearing the red hoodie she'd worn in the last game Grian had forced them all to play, and the sight makes his heart flip in his chest. It's been repaired since he last saw it; all the rips and tatters have been patched up, sewn with neat little stitches. He wonders if she got someone else to help her– he doesn't remember her sewing ever being so clean.

Despite how her face is hidden, he can tell by her body language that she's tired. Tired, but alert– there's a tension humming through her shoulders that he's unfamiliar with. The look she grazes over the two of them feels oddly reserved.

Tango is quicker to recover than Grian. "Oh, hey Pearl!" he greets, and he sounds so genuinely glad to see her that it makes Grian's ribcage clench. "Actually, you have the best timing– you down to keep Grian company while I go talk to X about something?"

Pearl studies him for a moment. Then she steps forward, and the light streaming in from the windows alights on a smudge of dirt running across the edge of her cheekbone. "Yeah, sure," she says finally, glancing in Grian's direction. Her eyes linger on his for a moment; an uncomfortable prickle squirms up Grian's spine at the unreadable look on her face. "We'll make it a party."

Something about the way she says it sets the hairs on the backs of his arms on end. It's an innocuous statement, but– her cadence is just barely off. Wobbling, the slightest bit unsteady. But then her spine straightens, the odd posture relaxes, and Pearl takes another few casual steps forward until she's rounding the other side of the couch.

Tango chuckles as he stands, but a note of tension runs beneath the sound. "Don't do anything I wouldn't while I'm gone."

"Me?" Pearl asks innocently. "Never… You can trust me, Tango. We definitely won't throw a rager and trash the whole house while you're away with 'suma."

"Oh, no, see, that's totally something I would do," Tango says, "so I'm not worried at all now. I'll see you guys later!" And with that, he's striding out the same doorway Pearl had entered from.

After a long moment, Pearl settles down in his place. And, like the lengthening strips of light along the rough wooden floor, the silence between them begins to grow.

Chapter Text

The problem with Pearl, Grian thinks, is that he never truly knows what she's thinking.

Not to say he doesn't know her, and can't make an educated guess, it's just— Pearl has always kept her cards close to her chest. Despite how long they've known each other, neither of them have ever been keen on sharing secrets; instead, they'd mutually, silently, opted to respect what was left unsaid and live only in shared moments without asking.

They'd almost broken this unspoken rule the day Pearl joined Hermitcraft. Almost— at the last second Pearl had swallowed her fear, her anger, the unmoored grief still swimming inside her, and haltingly told him never to disappear on her like that again. Punched his shoulder. Looked like she was about to cry. Grian had given her a hug and a half-hearted smile in return, told her I'll do my best, and they'd never spoken about it again.

Grian remembers those words like a thorn in his heart. Another lie, another broken promise; he's full of them these days.

In the growing afternoon light, Pearl's profile is crowned in dust and swirling gold motes. She still hasn't taken off her hood; the light catches on a patched seam, almost indistinguishable from the rest except for the dark blue thread that stands out like a neatly stitched scar. Something about it makes Grian's stomach curdle, so he casts his gaze back out the window, tracing leaves with a tight knot slowly gnarling in his chest.

He can't figure out what she's feeling— or, more accurately, she's feeling so many things at once that they're hard to separate out. Pearl's always been a whirlwind of a person; it takes everything Grian has not to poke and prod at her in order to understand. He wants to. Desperately wants to know what she's feeling, the best way to respond— how to start the damage control before things get any worse.

Not that they haven't already. Not like he isn't currently planning on making things worse.

"Wow, this is a nice couch," Pearl says brightly into the thick silence.

Grian startles, casting his gaze sideways. "What? Oh— yeah." It is a nice couch; plush and comfortable, though the material is still a bit stiff, hasn't been worn down yet to that butter-soft, smooth texture that hallmarks well-loved leather. The frame is supportive, put together with steady hands. If Grian had to pin a guess on who’d made it, he'd put all his chips on Scar.

"Yeah," Grian says again, mostly to fill the unsteady silence, then frowns at her. "Wait, how have you not sat on this yet?"

"Been busy," Pearl says with aplomb. She shuffles forward, elbows on knees. They’re dirty around the edges, soil crushed between the fabric folds. "Mostly with the cows. And the sheep. And the pigs! Lots of pigs, Tango keeps making us bacon in the morning, yum-yum-yum."

"Right," Grian says hesitantly. It should be normal. She sounds normal. But the emotions swirling beneath the surface taste like ash, feel like fault lines, and make him dizzy with how fast they roil. Like steam without a pressure valve. Riptides without a shore. Something loose and endlessly spinning, that event horizon he'd felt himself circling earlier, spiraling in until it vanishes to a thin, needle point. Pearl is a maelstrom, Grian the eye, and at some point between his ignominious exit from Hermitcraft and subsequent rescue, they'd become two separate storms living as people.

Or whatever passes for them, at least.

"Tango said you killed fifty cows to make this," Grian says abruptly, trying to suffuse his voice with a little wry humor. It falls flatter than he likes; Pearl doesn't laugh.

Instead, she shifts, a subtle turn-without-turning, and the corner of her eye peeks out from beneath her hood. A thrill runs up his spine; cloaked as it is in shadow, it appears darker than it should. "Did he now," she says, with a soft, tuneless hum.

Grian falters. "Yeah," he says awkwardly, then lets out a halfhearted chuckle to cover it up. "He, uh, it was... it was a joke. Funny joke. That's all."

Pearl is silent for a moment. Then, in a voice much lighter than before: "Oh, yeah— I've got, like, dozens, we weren't gonna miss fifty for a little old couch."

The laugh barks out of Grian before he can stop it, sharp and bleating. "Well don't tell that to the cows. They'll start to think that's all they're good for."

"Hmm, yeah, and we wouldn't want that now, would we?" Pearl replies, and this time her words hold the same razor edge as a diamond sword.

An answering beat of silence curdles between them. Grian shrinks back from it, and the stiff way Pearl is holding herself— tense as a livewire, potential energy gathered at the base of her spine. The posture of something preparing to pounce.

"I, uh… I guess not," Grian finally stammers.

Pearl cocks her head like a bird, still eyeing him from beneath her hood. Then, abruptly, she turns all the way to face him; the sun strikes her full across the bridge of her nose, slashing a line of gold from temple to jaw. Grian startles, jerking back as if shocked before he can force himself still.

Her irises are red.

A dark red, specifically— the colour of wine, of burgundy. Not the eerie glow of a red life, but something dulled down, closer to natural. Without the help of the sun, they could almost pass as brown— but here, they sear, a mixture of bloodied earth and banked embers. A trickle of ice flows down Grian’s spine as he stares into them, tracing each weaving vein of stroma, and behind his own eyes a dozen memories drenched in scarlet well up to the surface.

When Pearl beams at him, it stretches over her face like it shouldn’t fit there anymore. Something about it lands closer to a grimace, thin-lipped and scabbed over— the barest flash of bared teeth. “Do you still eat bacon, Grian?” she asks.

Grian stares at her, mind blank as a fresh layer of fallen snow, and says, “What?”

“Y’know? Pigs, bacon— we were talking about bacon earlier, Grian, you gotta keep up. Come on, now.”

“W— I-I guess?” Grian’s voice rises in pitch despite his best efforts; it’s a struggle not to try and back away, press his useless wings further into the couch. He can't even move on his own right now, where would he even go? “What does that— why are we talking about this, again?”

Pearl shrugs; the motion jostles her hood, slipping it back from her head, and with an impatient brush of her fingers it drops away entirely. In its place is an expression Grian can't parse beneath the crackling smile; something worn, something weary. Something ready to bite down. "Just checking, that's all. I kinda thought the only thing you ate these days were brains.”

Grian’s entire body plummets into ice.

“Like a zombie,” Pearl adds helpfully, either unaware or uncaring of the way he’s stilled. She makes a playful little growl in the back of her throat, hooks one hand into a claw in front of her face to demonstrate. None of it— not even the honeyed light slipping in through the window— touches her dark, dark irises.

"You changed your eyes." It's not quite a question, but it tumbles out of Grian's mouth all the same, a tangle of syllables and tight, bubbling dread. He can't quite feel the tips of his fingers anymore, he notes distantly— the world has muffled, slightly woolen at the edges.

Pearl blinks. "What, you don't like 'em? I think they're cool! Besides, blue was getting a bit boring."

"But why?"

Pearl's brows furrow as she pulls back slowly, lowering her hand to rest once again in her lap. Her posture is stiff. "Hey now," she says, deceptively light, lilting, "I thought we weren't supposed to ask questions like that."

And all at once the tingle of apprehension running along Grian's neck tightens into a noose.

He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out— Grian lies dead in the water, eyes wide and lips working as the writhing mass of emotions emanating from Pearl solidifies into a single, targeted beam. Like a scalpel cutting flesh, it slices clean through anything Grian could possibly say, stripping him down and leaving him raw, vivisected, on the table.

It takes a moment to cobble together a coherent response. “Well, I— I mean, Pearl, that is kind of a pretty big change for you—”

“Yeah, it is!” Pearl interrupts, lips stretching. “But, y’know, I didn’t ask when you came back all different and changed and stuff.” She purses her lips, expression thoughtful. “But I guess if we’re asking questions now, then I’ve got a few I’m really burning to get answered, y’know?”

Pearl on red, he thinks, hadn't just been a storm; she'd been a hurricane, a natural disaster made flesh. This Pearl holds that same inescapable gravity— the black hole, the whirlpool ready to drown— but without Grian's hooks spiraling her emotions to a fever pitch, her eyes remain cool and focused. Calculating. The spear of panic that bolts Grian’s voice back into his throat is familiar, brittle, and crawls out of his tongue in a clumsy bid to deflect that inexorable attention.

“Now, hang on," he stutters, "we— we don’t have to— let’s not—”

“Not what?” Pearl asks flatly. “Talk to your good ol’ friend Pearl? PearlescentMoon? Your buddy, your pal?” She sucks in a thin breath between her teeth. Lets it out, long and slow. “I gotta say, Gri, that’s pretty cold. Even for you.”

Some hot star, unexpectedly stung, burns to life in his stomach. Small but coalescing, erecting rapid defenses over his soft underbelly. His wings rustle uselessly behind him, as if preparing themselves for flight— except Grian is all too aware of how grounded he really is, pressed like this against the arm of the couch. How helpless— and how deeply, utterly alone. There’s no escape from Pearl’s newly dark, reproachful eyes; he wouldn’t be able to run even if he tried.

So Grian does what all cornered animals do best: he bites.

“I’m not really sure why you’re surprised I’m not better company right now,” he snaps, bristling. “If you came here to antagonize me, then I don't know what you're doing, Pearl. It's not gonna net you that much."

Pearl lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug; it’s an oddly delicate motion. A spear of sunlight catches on her cheek as she shifts her weight, highlighting old freckles and glittering dangerously in her eyes. “Hey, maybe I just wanna know the truth," she says. Considers him, fingernails tapping against her thigh. "Maybe," she says, "I'm a little done with not asking questions.”

“Maybe,” Grian says, still sparking and sore, “you shouldn’t be wasting your time.”

Pearl’s gaze sharpens. Beneath the surface of that manufactured focus unfolds something tar-like and heavy, a dark counterpart to the hot coals simmering in Grian's stomach. Her eyes narrow as she leans forward, just an inch into his space— but it's enough. He has to fight against the urge to scrabble backward.

“Just how many cows were we to you, Grian?” she asks silkily, a cruel, sour note gliding through the air between them. “Did you ever really care about us as people? Were we ever actually friends?”

Grian recoils so fast his flight muscles spasm, sparks shooting through his cramped wings. Abruptly, the world around him grows blistering; the blanket is a stifling weight pinning him down to the burning couch. He curls his fingers into it until his knuckles gleam white and his hands stop shaking. “You— w— I did everything I could not to hurt any of you! That’s why this all happened in the first place!”

Pearl’s laugh is an ugly, grating thing, tearing from the back of her throat to cleave him in two. “Well, you did a pretty poor job of that, no offense, Grian.”

Grian flinches before he can stop himself, pulse flaring in his ears. "Wow, it's almost like I knew that already," he spits, and now it's his turn to bare teeth. An ache crawls up his back, hunches between his shoulders as he takes in a deep breath, then another, and tries to still the tremors running up and down his spine. He doesn't succeed. "I tried. I tried not to do it. I didn't want to, how can you not believe me?"

The sunlight over Pearl's face slowly slides down her shoulder, fluttering golden fingers over the edges of carefully stitched patches and torn seams. The red swirling in her eyes slows, then stills, and Pearl crosses one leg over the other to balance her elbow on it. She cups her chin in one hand, watching him calmly. "I mean, can you really blame me? That's kinda ha— I mean it's a little hard to believe."

“Pearl. Pearl, I tried, I swear. I did, okay? But I—”

“No, no, I think I get it now.” The timbre of her voice bleeds sarcasm. “You were just so hungry for our brains. Desperate for a chance to gobble ‘em all up, right?" A pause. "Were they at least a little yummy? That's gotta be a special treat right there, mm, brains.”

And for some reason, that's what snaps him. Because Grian knows the taste of her fear, her panic, her rage. It slips under his tongue like a bitter pill, hard to swallow; an undulating mix of emotion interspersed with desperate grasps for stillness, reason— only for another explosion to set off more ripples, leaving her off-balance and frightened. He's tasted that, and even now his hooks crawl toward the feast, because Pearl's layered feelings are a meal of their own, a complex medley that melts in his mouth whenever he catches a hint of a taste.

The raging star in his chest bursts, igniting coal and ashes and flaring embers, and Grian's voice rises with the conflagration. "I WAS STARVING, PEARL!" he shouts, and his ears ring with the echoes.

It's an admission he's made before, but not with such force. Grian snarls, chest heaving, wings clawing desperately to rise up and mantle, make him look large. "I've been starving this entire time! From day one of Hermitcraft, I was starving to death, and not one of you even tried to notice!" A sharp spark of pain needles into his palms; it takes him a moment to realize his hands have released the blanket to curl into fists, nails biting down hard enough to draw blood.

It's only in the beat of ensuing silence that Grian goes still and cold, ice washing over his body. His mouth slams shut; like cut puppet strings, the tension snaps out of him, morphing into a slow-churning dread that begins to squeeze vices around his lungs.

Pearl arches an eyebrow. Her voice is clipped, emotionless; chilly. “Yeah, you wanna explain that one to me again? ‘Cause ‘suma said that, and Tango said that, but I don’t think anybody’s gone and asked what all that actually means. Mind giving me an explanation?” A beat. "And maybe while you're at it, you can tell me how you've apparently been starving since you joined Hermitcraft."

Hidden between the lines is an echo so soft Grian wonders if he was meant to understand the throughline; what happened to you? Where did you go?

Questions he isn't keen to answer. Questions that shouldn't matter, because he doesn't plan on staying alive long enough to answer them anyway.

Grian keeps his mouth shut, and doesn't say a word.

Pearl cocks her head. “What, you’re not gonna tell me?” A note of steel rides beneath her inquisitive, casual tone. “‘Cause I’m not gonna stop asking, Griba.”

The old nickname hits like a punch to the face; Grian sucks in a breath and holds it, until his lungs shiver and his pulse thunders in his chest. Then he lets it out; one explosive breath. “Pearl, you’re wasting your time here. Don’t— there’s no point to this, just leave. Leave me alone.”

“I’m not doing that,” Pearl says, and beneath the words a sudden layer of genuine regret coats the back of his tongue in cold, syrupy sweeps. Her mind sparkles with it, piercing him, nailing him to the couch like pins in butterfly wings. “You left me twice, and— and both times I thought I’d never get to see you again. You get that, right? I’m not going anywhere. Like it or not, you’re stuck with me now.”

A flicker of alarm creeps under Grian's skin. “Pearl. Go away.”

“Nope.”

“Pearl.”

“I said I’m not going, Grian.” Pearl’s voice is a harsh slap to his ears. “I’m sitting on this couch until you tell me why.”

The alarm balloons into panic, something that trembles down his spine and sets his hands to shaking. Grian stiffens, drawing himself up as much as he possibly can. “Pearl,” he says slowly, “I mean it. Leave me alone. Stop ta— I’m warning you, right now—”

This time, Pearl’s laugh isn’t just coarse— it’s derisive. “About what?” she asks, scooting forward again, until their knees are pressed together. The touch scalds, sends animal fright rolling through his veins. Pearl’s eyes are intent, two scarlet spotlights in a sickly afternoon, and he can’t escape. “You can’t even move by yourself right now, how are you gonna take me on all by your lonesome?”

Grian finally gives into the urge and leans away, eyes wide. “Pearl. Leave me alone.”

Pearl’s mouth twisting is his only warning before the temper in her eyes finally flares, blooms out from beneath her focused facade. Before he can blink, one hand shoots forward, grabbing his shoulder and digging nails into the threadbare fabric of his sweater. With one short, choppy motion, she gives him a furious shake, rattling his teeth. “Just talk to me, Grian!” she shouts.

Grian fumbles back so fast he almost falls off the couch.

Abruptly, everything goes still. Pearl, Grian, the room; the warm summer light pouring in from the window. Nothing breathes except the dust motes, rotating in their eternal dance, cascading over the two of them in waves.

A flicker of guilt sparkles over his tongue. Pearl watches him for a long, long moment, gaze unreadable once again, but shoulders rigid, spine snapped perfectly straight.

Then, slowly, she lets go of his shoulder. Eases back an inch; a giving of ground that turns her body halfway, eyes pinwheeling across other parts of the room. Eventually they land middle-distant and settle there, hovering over something only she can see.

Grian, heart pounding in his throat, doesn't move.

"It's weird, right?" Pearl says softly, directed to the opposite wall. "I feel like I should be more scared of you than you are of me."

Grian says nothing. He doesn’t think he can; every nerve in his body is firing alarm signals, numbing his face and pumping adrenaline into his veins. He’s trapped. He’s trapped, and Pearl is teeth and axe and claws, a whirlwind with intention, and he can't leave—

Pearl inhales sharply. “Y’know, I remember being like that,” she says at last, and her voice tips over itself, abruptly unsteady. “Red lives can get pretty lonely, right?”

For Grian, loneliness had never really factored in. His red lives had always been consumed with a haze of blood, of aching, of thirst so potent he could drink and drink and still be greedy. If loneliness had often kept him company, he’d been too busy chasing death to see it.

(Except once. In a desert with nothing but echoes and a body still bleeding out on the sand behind him: he’d been alone, then. And he’d choked on it, suffocated; teetered between two gravities before tipping his center to the one that promised home, in any form or fashion. Anything to escape the shackles he himself had crafted, had burdened himself with.

Grian remembers that. And Grian will do everything in order to forget.)

Pearl curls up, heedless of placing her boots on the couch, and folds her arms around her knees. “Yeah,” she says thickly, as if he’d spoken. “Yeah. And then you’re always so scared.” She shudders, curls up tighter; a little red ball of misery. The laugh that barks out of her cracks in the middle, and for a moment Pearl buries her head in her arms, thick, long hair cascading down her legs. “Gotta— cuddle up to your dog, ‘cause that’s the only thing in the world that loves you anymore.” There’s a long moment of silence; eventually, she glances up through her hair, looks at him sidelong and bleary. “I remember that. ‘Cept you don’t have a Tilly, do you? That’s a shame. Tillys are real nice.”

It takes a moment for Grian to gather the scattered pieces of his voice again. When he does, they shake; hoarse, crackling, but whole. “Get out.”

Pearl’s head snaps up. “Well, now, hang on— I’m supposed to be watching you, remember?”

“I said get out, Pearl.”

For a long moment, all Pearl does is stare at him. Eyes red, red-rimmed; red, red, red. Then she nods— a sharp, jerky motion— and detangles herself, unfolding to rise from the couch on swaying legs. “Fine,” she says. “But I’m not going far, and I’m not going forever. I’m not leaving you alone anymore, you got that?”

Grian shakes. “Just go away.”

Standing like this, Pearl towers over him. It makes him feel oddly small, despite having a wingspan twice the size of her own, when she bothers to code her moth wings in. It leaves him vulnerable; the back of his neck itches, sharp and heavy, like knives pressing into the quick. It would be so very, very easy for her to ignore him.

Instead, Pearl tracks that assessing, unreadable gaze over him one last time. “I’ll be out in the hall,” she says finally. Then she turns on her heel, and just as quietly as she had originally entered, slips out the open doorway.

Grian slumps into the couch’s arm the minute she crosses the threshold, heaving for air. In, and out— heart flinching between his ribs, eyes slipping shut in the sudden absence of the heavy weight and presence that had been sitting right beside him.

When his erratic breathing slows, he keeps them shut. The endless darkness is a haven, a sarcophagus enfolding him and keeping him safe. A promise. Better to drag the blanket up with shaking, uncertain hands than look directly at it; he collapses with his back to open air, forehead pressed into the curve of the cushion, wings hanging limp behind him.

He doesn’t want to see Pearl sitting out in the hall.

He falls asleep like that, eventually; when the discomfort in his wings grows too great to ignore, he shuffles further onto his side, curling his arms tight around his midsection. The dark place he keeps sinking into beckons him, and Grian, mind numb and burning with static, tumbles into it gratefully.

The reprieve unfortunately doesn't last long. Grian stumbles back to consciousness to the sound of hissed conversation somewhere behind his head; after a moment of bleary blinking at the couch’s back, the voices finally register— it’s Scar.

And Mumbo.

“— just saying,” Scar says, in that quiet and affable way meant to put someone at ease, smooth over ruffled feathers— "it might be— and hey, maybe I'm wrong! I could be wrong— but that jungle we passed by a few days ago wasn't too far away, so it might be eas—"

"Scar," Mumbo says, and Grian tenses automatically; there's an undercurrent of clear annoyance— almost bordering on hostility— in his tone that Grian can't recall ever hearing from him before, even in the life games. Nor is Mumbo as clearly conscientious of Grian's sleep: his voice carries further, much clearer than Scar's soft baritone. "I don't know how to tell you this, mate, but you don't need to mother me. I— look, I know what I'm doing, okay?"

"Okay! Okay." Grian can picture Scar raising his palms in supplication with perfect clarity, just through the upward pitch of his voice. "I'm just trying to look out for you, that's all."

Mumbo gives a derisive snort. "Look out for someone who needs it, then, because this is— I have it all under control. Alright? This is all under control, going exactly according to plan—"

"Okay, yeah, yeah, okay, that's great." A beat of silence, as if Scar's biting his lip, weighing the words on his tongue before he speaks them. "Just— take it easy, okay? You… I think you're running yourself kinda ragged, is all—"

"I'm perfectly fine," Mumbo snaps, much louder than before, and that's when Grian realizes he's been feeding on him.

He rips the cords out so fast his head reels, stomach revolting as the slow drip of food cuts off, harsh and without warning. The cavernous ache in his stomach opens back up, yawning wide— he can feel it in his code, the way the unintentional resonance has reinforced it, given him building blocks to mend his own structural code. He waits, breathless and dizzy, lungs hitched, until slowly, the meager padding begins to dissolve.

Only then does he exhale, slow and shaking, and slump back into the couch.

Mumbo is still speaking, words rushed and heated. "—aybe you should stop sticking your nose in my business, and let me get our materials so we can go back home sooner, to— to our nice redstone machines! And our— functioning gold farms, thank you very much. I'm fine, stop trying to babysit me, and let's all focus on getting Grian—" His voice cracks on the last syllable; Mumbo has to clear it a few times before continuing, rough and uncoordinated, "Let's just focus on getting Grian better, so then we can take him home."

Sharp, staccato footsteps punctuate that harried statement, echoing against rough floorboards; Grian senses more than sees Mumbo storm out of the room.

A short beat of stunned silence follows in his wake. Then Scar sighs. "Oh boy," he murmurs under his breath, and it's so defeated that it tugs the jagged edges of Grian's raw heart.

With some effort, he half-turns, ignoring the burn in his neck as he cranes it to peer over his wings and shoulder. Scar is gazing at the doorway with lost, worried eyes, one finger tapping absently on the handle of his cane. The sunlight from early this afternoon has slowed to a thin trickle running along the floor, throwing his sensible boots into stark relief against the slow-burning darkness. Someone's also lit a lantern over the empty furnaces; a few shadows mingle lazily with the walls.

When Scar's gaze inevitably flicks over, Grian's ready. "Don't freak out," he says dryly, as Scar's hand flies to his heart.

"Oh my gosh," Scar groans. The hand clutching his chest moves up to cover half his face, partially muffling his words. "Dude— you cannot keep doing this to me, how many freaking times is this gonna happen?"

"Well, maybe if you stop staring at me like a creep while I'm supposed to be sleeping…" Grian trails off, and lifts a meaningful eyebrow.

"Hey, hey, mister, you're on public property over here! It's not my fault you're sleeping on the couch!"

"You're right; it's Tango's." Grian cautiously levers himself up, and then pauses, a knot tangling in his throat. It's easier this time. It's getting easier, and that's— that doesn't bode well for any of them. His lips pull back in a grimace; Grian slowly drags himself up the rest of the way until his back is once more angled into the couch's arm. The familiar position makes the skin of his neck prickle— Grian deliberately keeps his eyes from swaying toward the adjoining hall. "What, uh, what time is it?"

Scar's already glancing at his comm. "Just hit sundown," he says, striding forward to plop himself next to Grian. He props his cane up beside his leg, then tentatively crosses the other one over it. No wince; Scar immediately relaxes, flashing Grian that swift, salesman smile. "I do believe you are fashionably late for dinner."

"I'm afraid I'm not going to be eating anything," Grian says, forcing light and air into his tone. Then, before Scar can prod at that too closely, he says, "Was that—?"

Scar winces theatrically. "Mumbo? Yeah… not sure what's gotten into him, poor guy, but he hasn't been acting like himself at all. He's been all sorts of crazy since yesterday. Oh! But don't you worry—" Scar's stiff smile melts into something a little more genuine, rounded at the edges; his gaze is warm, sparkling, as he lifts one hand to hesitantly place it on Grian's forearm. The contact burns right through him, but Grian doesn't flinch; this is Scar.

"He'll come around soon," Scar continues, soft, and gives Grian's arm a little squeeze and a pat for good measure before pulling back. "Nothing keeps the good ol' Mumbo Jumbolio down for long, I'd say!"

Not even me? Grian thinks wryly, then sighs. Glancing out the window reveals nothing but dark trees and the last dying embers of the setting sun. If Mumbo had left the base entirely, he's long gone now. "What was that all about?"

Scar worries at the edge of his lip for a moment before responding. "Oh, he, uh… he was going out to get those healing potion supplies for you, since Pearl ended up being… busy. But, y'know— one project turned into two, and then into three, and before you know it he's automating an entire gold farm— which isn't working, by the way, I think it keeps jamming on him— instead of hunting down some melon seeds."

He says it with a fond smile tilting the edges of his lips, but Grian can taste the tension, the nibbling worry underneath. And not just for Mumbo; Scar's too good to make it obvious, but Grian knows his tells in the subtle angle of his body, in the way Scar rubs forefinger and thumb against the ankle seam of his trousers, twisting the fabric absently as he trails careful eyes over Grian. To anyone else, they might mistake it for polite attentiveness. But Grian understands them as they really are: warning signs.

Scar's getting nervous, and Grian can't exactly blame him, considering his own private plans.

"What's Pearl up to?" Grian asks abruptly, steering himself from that train of thought. Scar knows his tells too, after all— best not to give anything away if he can help it. "I don't— I think I fell asleep before she left."

Scar's slow to respond; his voice comes out hesitant. "Y'know, she hasn't shown up to dinner yet. Nobody's seen her since this afternoon— you wouldn't happen to know anything, would you?"

Grian glances up sharply, but Scar's expression is open, neutral— a carefully crafted, non-judgemental expression. Grian's throat squeezes briefly as he swallows, then he carefully looks away, aiming his gaze past Scar's shoulder to a whirl in the cabin's wood grain.

"No," he says, and it's a bad lie, but Scar has never called him out on those before, so he likely won't start now. "Nope, um... No idea, really."

Scar studies him for a moment, then makes a small, malcontented noise in the back of his throat. "Well— she's probably fine," he says, but his chuckle is a little strained. "Probably just got sidetracked with the cows again."

"Yeah," Grian agrees softly, and they both lapse into silence.

Unlike the ones he'd shared earlier with Pearl, these are marginally more comfortable. Scar settles down next to him, fidgeting and humming and otherwise sitting as still as he possibly can— which is to say, not very. But he doesn't speak to fill the silence, and the result is a strange, almost unsettling calm that washes over them.

Importantly, it gives Grian room to think. His mind turns back to those mental hooks, the leeching and heightening of Mumbo's anxiety— it's the kind of agitation Grian has never once wanted to cause in anybody, let alone his— ex-best friend. But he had, to the point where Mumbo had lost his temper. Again.

It's not a good sign. Despite its unintentional nature, Grian is once again breaking another promise, and it makes his chest hitch, lungs spiraling, mind cold and numb. One promise, he thinks, with an edge of desperation so urgent and pleading it resounds through his head like a scream. Just let me keep one promise before I go. Please.

He can't let himself fall asleep anymore. The realization sings through him, the correlation perfectly clear— when Grian sleeps, his body feeds, in some last-ditch biological effort to stay alive. And that's hurting people. Complex problem, simple solution; Grian curls in on himself, shuddering— as if the growing shadows from outside have reached their dark fingers into his chest and plunged them into both ventricles.

This is easier said than done. Grian knows himself well enough to understand that, like with all things, he eventually won't be able to resist the siren's call of sleep.

But he can at least try.

Beside him, Scar shuffles, then stretches, a slow tune of quiet, spinal pops. When he turns, his smile is broad and cheerful despite the weight lingering beneath his eyes. "Well, if you're not gonna join us for dinner, what do you think about heading to bed?" he asks. "I could help you get back."

Grian hesitates. On the one hand, less stimulation to keep him awake. On the other, privacy; in the end, it's not much of a choice at all, and Grian's considering nod is slow.

Scar beams at him, a startled, pleased tilt appearing at the corner of his mouth. "Y'know, I bet that bed is a lot cozier than the couch, anyway."

"The couch was nice," Grian says, automatically defensive. "It's a good couch, Scar, don't be rude— you're gonna make it upset."

Scar blinks, then bursts into a cascade of slightly hysterical giggles, tipping his head back to let them float through the air. "Oh! Oh! I am so sorry, Mr. Couch, that was very insensitive and unkind of me." With the help of his cane he stands, then extends one hand to Grian, batting his eyelashes outrageously. "Do you think he'll ever forgive me?"

Grian's lips twist into a tiny, fragile smile of his own. "I think he'll have to mull it over," he says, accepting Scar's hand, and lets Scar help pull him up.

The walk back to his room is less exhausting than it was the first time, but only barely. Grian's back and legs burn by the time he collapses into the bed, and Scar casts him a poorly disguised, concerned look after he leaves and wanders back in with Grian's blanket and pillow.

"Can we talk?" Scar blurts without warning, as he hovers over Grian. The blanket sags in his grip; he lets the pillow drop from under his arm onto Grian's ankles with a soft, muffled noise.

Grian's stomach plummets with it. "Depends," he says slowly, but his chest is already constricting, ropes winding around his heart. A phantom hand grips his shoulder, nails digging in, rattling him— "What exactly did you… want to talk about?"

"Not right now," Scar backpedals hastily, pulling back with a raised hand. "Not— right now you're getting a good night's rest, okay, that's your official assignment from me. Just— soon. Tomorrow?" His voice dips lower, smoother, more painfully intimate. "I just wanna make sure you're okay, G. And— I wanted to talk to X, about… you know."

A knot of tension curdles in Grian's stomach, crawling into his throat. "Scar…"

"I know! I know!" Scar raises his other hand up to join the first, then blinks at the blanket still clutched in it. Smoothly, he drapes it over Grian, removing the pillow from his legs in favor of handing it to him directly. "Look, you get some beauty sleep, and we'll talk in the morning, sound good?"

Grian's fingers sink into the pillow's plush stuffing, tense and white as he clenches his hands into fists around it. "Sounds like a plan," he says bitterly, and barely refrains from pointing out that what it doesn't sound like is that he has a choice.

Scar hesitates, swaying forward like he wants to reach out— then thinks better of it. "Alright, I'll see you tomorrow," he says, cane clicking rapidly against the floor as he beats what Grian would consider a tactically sound retreat. His words come in quick strides, that familiar, rushed cadence flowing out of him like water. "Goodnight, goodbye, sleep well Grian!"

The door shuts with a soft, quiet click, bathing the room in darkness. The sun, Grian notes, has slipped completely behind the horizon now— only thin moonlight makes it past the swaying, makeshift curtains tacked to the wall.

Grian stares at them for a long, long moment before sighing and releasing his death grip on the pillow. His hands feel emptier without it; he busies himself by fluffing the pillow back out again and setting it behind him, propped up against the wall. With meticulous motions, Grian sinks against it, ignoring the fluttering protest of his aching wings.

He's got a long night ahead of him. He settles in, and he waits.

Chapter Text

It takes all of Grian's strength— and then some— to stay awake during the night.

Sleep kneads at his eyelids with sweet-tempered fingers, catching his lashes and weighing them down until they come to rest softly against his cheeks. This is a familiar game: Grian blinks, and the blink grows longer, until his chin starts to dip and his breathing begins to settle. Then the loll of his head jolts him, and he flutters, uncertain and grasping, back to awareness. Enclosed on all sides like this, the darkness is a blanket, curling around him with silken threads.

He tries to focus on little things. Scant moonlight skittering up and down the far wall. The highlights of slivered gaps in the wood. The faint susurrus of mobs creeping outside through leaf litter. The heavy, sluggish thump of his own toiling heart. He stiffens and relaxes his muscles in rhythmic waves, swaying forward on an intangible wind— each time, his synapses light up like bonfires, carrying the crystalline surge of true clarity— then the static crawls back in, and the game resets.

For a brief moment, he entertains trying to pluck his feathers. They're a filthy, heavy mess, just like the rest of him: dirt and powder-down coating the spaces between unkempt plumage; the tough, shattered remains of neglected sheaths; ragged barbs along grimy vanes. Moonlight is a merciful bleach, washing them clean and pure between fluttering shadows— but Grian knows better than to believe silver lies. The meat around each quill aches, tender and stiff from disuse. Every inch of them is a leaden burden to carry. The urge to tear out each feather until he feels something approaching clean again is a deep yawn within the pit of his stomach, stretching wide and gaping.

It would, at the very least, help keep him awake.

Instead, Grian releases a long, slow breath, leaning back until his head knocks against the wall. The rough-hewn wood scratches at his hair, catching it hungrily; when he shifts, it pulls at his scalp, threatening to tear. Even the thought of touching his feathers right now drains the strength from his limbs. It's not worth the effort; with any luck, he won't even have to deal with them for much longer— not when he plans to slip, ephemeral as mist, through these good-intentioned but misguided fingers.

Grian closes his eyes, thoughts tumbling and churning over each other before settling into a veneer of smooth glass. Beneath it rests that warm, encroaching darkness; that ultimate, final resting place. The universe itself.

The universe, he knows, is kind. It will recycle his bones and blood, the fraying code barely holding him together at the seams. Cupping him with tender hands, it will whisper: You have played the game well enough. Rest now. No more dreams.

He'd give anything for that. Anything to finally wake up.

Grian's head slips from its position against the wall. His eyes flutter back open, and the cycle continues.

This fantasy carries him through the rest of the night, past false dawn and into the early onset of staccato birdsong. Grian stares blearily at the bleeding warmth creeping in through the window; gentle golden hands that march over the floorboards and press their palms against the walls. They're less frenetic than the moonlight had been— the shadows here are dappled, innocent things, splaying over stripped bark and playing in the whorls within planks. They breathe depth into this tiny, wooden box, shifting slowly under daylight's cautious curve into the sky, until scintillating rays curl like shackles around his wrists.

The advent of the sun brings with it a renewed determination, deep and ebullient in its satisfaction: the victory cry of a battle hard won. Grian smiles. It trips along the edges of his mouth— more a vicious baring of teeth than anything vaguely mirthful.

Checkmate, he thinks. For today, at least, he's won.

He's not sure when the outside world begins to stir, but eventually, the creak of a door opening permeates the walls, and footsteps begin padding down the hall. Tango, Grian thinks. The cadence is a familiar skip-and-step, as if he has too much energy to walk in a straight, reasonable line. Xisuma's is next, by virtue of his heavy boots, and then the click of Scar's cane passes him by, soft and unobtrusive.

It pauses outside his door— a split-second hitch in stride. Then it resumes, and Grian drags in a belated breath, lungs shivering.

One by one, the hermits wake, presumably to congregate around the kitchen; soon enough, the quiet chatter of their voices trickles in from under the door, along with the smell of cooking meat. Grian floats above it all, dull seafoam scattered across a grey ocean, eyeing the gap beneath his door with something approaching idle curiosity. Too far to hear what everyone else is saying, but if he strains, he can catch the faintest traces of tone. Up, down, spikes of low laughter laced with intermittent silence. The door between them has never felt quite so intrusive a barrier, but he can still imagine the clinking of cutlery against plates, the backwards way Mumbo holds his forks, and how Pearl— and his flinch comes unbidden— cups tea in her palms like it's the last stand between her and an untimely morning.

Throughout it all, Grian waits. At this point, it's all he knows how to do.

By the time he catches the faint scrape of chairs against floorboards, the world has taken on a hazy, dreamlike sheen, airy and porcelain— like even the slightest touch might shatter it into fragments. For a moment, the encroaching footsteps don't register; he lives in the ticks between breaths, caught in sunshine and spun-sugar fog. Then the click of Scar's cane comes to an unceremonious halt outside his door, and just like that— the soap bubble pops.

He's too tired to jolt when Scar raps lightly on his door, but his wings do tense, back rippling as he freezes in place. Even the air stills; dust motes at the window twine around each other in an endless waltz, and Grian's lungs seize, clawing for air he can't quite drag in.

He has to fight for a moment to eke a word out. "Hello?" he croaks eventually, because come in feels too presumptuous. This may be his room, but it's only his room because they've deigned to keep him in it. He's under no illusions as to whom this base actually belongs.

"Hello, hello!" Scar's muffled, cheery voice is belied by the jitter of anxious nerves oozing under the doorway. "Is there, perhaps, a Grian awake?"

Even now, with the threat of this impending conversation Scar had alluded to last night hanging over his head— with the tension in his wings, the sleepless grit still caught within his eyes— it's instinct to try and banter back. "You just missed him," Grian calls; it falls slightly flat, but Scar doesn't call him out on it. "No solicitors, try again later."

"But then who will I sell my wares to?" Scar cries dramatically. Grian can perfectly picture the wide, sweeping gesture he's probably making. "Please, good customer, at least give me a chance to get my foot in the door! It's all I have!"

Grian snorts without meaning to, then claps a hand over his mouth, something ugly coagulating in his heart. He doesn't deserve this kind of laughter, this reluctant amusement simmering in his chest. It burns him from the inside out, scorching the back of his throat; hot coals between clenched teeth. Grian inhales embers, exhales ash, and summons every spare ounce of willpower at his disposal to keep his voice from shaking.

"Alright," he drawls, as if he's making a show of considering it. "I suppose it is the neighborly thing to do."

A creak; the door opens by an inch, one green eye peeking impishly at him from behind the gap. "That it is, good sir, that it is! Nothing finer than a little neighborly selling of wares. Between neighbors, of course."

"Of course," Grian echoes dryly. "Pretty sure you meant scamming of wares, Scar."

The door opens further on whining hinges. Scar has the gall to actually look offended, eyebrows raised and one hand delicately pressed against his chest, fingers resting in the hollow of his collarbone. "Me? No, no, no, I would never."

Scar punctuates it by letting the door swing open until its handle thunks against the wall, sending soft reverberations rippling through the wood. He steps through the gap with aplomb; his cane taps confidently against the floorboards, heels smart, free arm already gesticulating, and—

— and Xisuma edges into the room behind him.

The automatic repartee wilts on Grian's tongue, dry, desiccated, and rotting. Abruptly, the shadows in the room slink closer, heedless of sunlight where before they had flinched; cruel and hungry, they crowd him, snagging sharp claws into the frayed sleeves of his jumper.

Stupid of him. For a moment, he’d almost forgot.

Xisuma's nervous voice is a shock of cool water running down his spine. "Well, uh, good morning, Grian! Is— how are you feeling today?"

Frozen solid, it takes Grian a breathless moment to recenter himself, drag in enough air to free his spasming lungs. Tension coils beneath his shoulders, in the aching muscles of his back, up to his head where those invisible hooks stand at attention. Like roots seeking water, they writhe and twist, slithering forward to latch into the fizz of apprehension that pops and bubbles within Xisuma's mind.

Grian yanks them back with a savage, mental twist, then winces as a spear of lightning bolts through his head in response. "Fine," he says, and the word comes out clipped, hedged, sprawling on the floor at his feet. A slow, syrupy ache spreads through the rest of his skull, tangling it in a vice; from the corner of his eye, Scar takes a single half-step forward before wavering back in place.

Xisuma also falters. "That's… good, yeah, that's great. You sleep alright? Need any water?"

It's a struggle to keep his tone even as the vice constricts. Grian exhales in one harsh breath, then flutters his eyes closed, swaying in place. "No, no, nope. I'm all good," he lies. Then, tacked on as an afterthought: "Thanks."

Scar, a consummate businessman, swoops in before Xisuma can respond. "And of course, you know we are at your immediate disposal, should you need anything like that— and I do mean anything," he says smoothly, and tops it off with a florid bow, cane planted firmly on the floorboards. He looks ridiculous like this, bent at the waist, hair mussed and sticking up on one end; Grian wonders, idly, if anyone's pointed out yet that he looks like a sleep-rumpled cockatoo.

When Scar straightens, his eyes are warm, crinkled at the edges— but it's belied by the tension riding underneath. He tastes it in the air, coiling thick around the room; when Scar crosses over to him in a few ground-eating strides, the hard set of his shoulders betrays him.

"Mind if I sit?" Scar asks brightly.

Grian regards him with a tight, reluctant half-smile. "Go for it."

Scar sinks into the foot of the bed with a soft, relieved sigh, leaning his cane against one knee while crossing his legs at the ankles. He's the very picture of composed; polite, self-effacing, the traces of a benign smile curving across his lips. It's a pretty effect; it makes Grian's gut plummet all the way down to his lap.

When Scar is bracing every inch of himself like this, Grian can only assume that whatever he’s waiting for— it's must be bad.

If Xisuma shares similar reservations, they're concealed behind the tinted visor of his helmet. "Right," he says, closing the door with a gentle click, and ambles in to perch on the abandoned chair by Grian's bedside. Hands folded tightly in his lap, he's the mirror image of two days ago; the sudden burst of dread ties Grian's throat in knots. "Well… like Scar said, just, uh, let us know. Tango's out for some fresh air today, so it's just us here at the moment." A nervous laugh. "I guess that's a good thing, though, right? Scar had something he— you wanted to have a little chat with us in private, is that it?"

An artificial gloss coats Scar's nod. “That was the general idea,” he says, still deceptively cheerful— but the sheen in his eyes is overbright, just this side of red-rimmed. Easy enough to miss, if you don’t know what to look for.

But Grian has spent countless, blistering days under a desert sun, watching Scar’s every move with hawkish eyes; his pulse rockets into his ears, pounding a familiar, war-drum beat that he hasn’t heard since the day the hermits appeared at his base, demanding answers. Abruptly, the two-day-old, faded imprint of Scar’s voice echoes through the back of his mind, snaking around his skull in time with his migraine:

I just want you to be able to come back home.

He should've known it would come to this. Scar had practically outlined his entire plan two nights ago, a relentless barrage softened only by the dead certainty that Grian wouldn't be alive to see it. And now here they are— balancing on a knife's edge only he can see, with Scar's weight tipping him back in the opposite direction.

Scar is still speaking, an urbane lilt running along the edge of his words. “I just thought a little privacy would be beneficial, y’know, since this is kind of a sensitive topic— and, I know Tango is a bit of a shut-in, but he still needs to get out sometime, right? It just—”

Grian’s tongue moves before the rest of him registers it, sharp as the tip of a netherite sword. “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying it," he snaps, harsher than he intends. "What’s this really about, Scar?"

The words slice right through the air between them, cleaving a massive chasm where the bedspread ripples and arcs. Scar freezes mid-speech, mouth hanging open in a way that could be comical in any other situation. There was a time when Grian would have been unbearably smug about that— it’s not every day you render silver-tongued Scar speechless. Now, all he can summon is a low, rolling trepidation; a gut-clenching thundercloud on the horizon, steel-grey and devouring the sky.

To his credit, Scar recovers quickly, jaw snapping shut and brows coming together to form a soft, malleable valley. His laugh is a forced, stuttering thing; plastic. “Well, now, okay— give me a second, here! I'm getting there, I'm getting there. You know, patience is a— a vulture, Grian."

"It's not actually a virtue here, either. Get to the point."

Scar's hands, poised midair like a conductor's, fall slowly back into his lap. "Virtue, virtue, right," he says, light and airy, but instead of singing, it lands with an unceremonious splat against the floorboards. Scar’s grin stretches, thin-lipped and grimacing. "I knew I was saying that wrong. You know how my tongue always gets tied up in there with all that phrasing." A careful, deliberate pause; Scar's expression morphs, a rapid choosing and discarding of masks, until it settles on something just this side of heavier. Just a little more real. Where the flickers of humor hold a bitter taste, acrid on Grian's tongue; where Scar’s shoulders bow, just for a second, under some great, unknown pressure.

“Alright,” Scar says, spreading his hands once more, “maybe you’ve caught me. Maybe I was stalling. But only a little!” He takes in a measured, deliberate breath; Grian watches his lungs flex, some detached and curious part of him observing the subtle shift of muscle beneath cloth. It’s an odd thing to remember, but— he emerged from that pulsing cocoon, once. Fragile and young, coiled between two pumping lungs; cradled within soft, red meat. Splintered bone. Red blood. The delicate outward spirals of pink, stringy flesh. Red blood. Red blood. Red blood—

“So,” Scar says, snapping the memory clean in half, “a few days ago, if I’m remembering this right, you… kinda mentioned something about a— a code-collapse? Now—” and the light in his eyes takes on a brittle, strung-out gleam— “I’m not exactly the smartest guy around here, but that seems, uh, pretty bad!”

"It's definitely something we're… concerned about," Xisuma agrees with measured tones, and Grian jolts, head snapping back around just in time to catch the way he sways forward in his seat. It's only the barest suggestion of proximity, but it's enough to make an itch burst beneath Grian's skin, crawling within the subcutaneous tissue. Outside, the sun shifts; a fiery glint obscures Xisuma's eyes, but the weight of them pins Grian to the wall behind him. "Do you mind telling us more about that?" Xisuma asks, setting elbows to crossed knees, intent and focused.

Grian studies them both for a long, long moment. Then his eyes slide over to the far wall, landing somewhere middle-distant; molten honey dribbles down its surface, highlighting wood grain in a gilded imitation of last night's vigil. Even his best efforts can't disguise the exhaustion dripping from every syllable as he speaks. "I mean… seems a little cut and dry here, fellas. I don't know what you want me to say. I'm dyin'. Code's a-collapsin'.” A pointed pause. “Pretty sure you both already know what that means."

From the corner of his eye, Scar's expression twists— the tiniest fraction of a flinch before smoothing back out, barricading itself behind a wall of distant congeniality. "Sure," he says, "abso-lutely. Everybody knows about that— which, and let me tell you—" an artful pause; Grian's eyes flick back to him of their own accord, catching how he flicks his shoulders in one quick, dramatic roll— "real shivers up my spine just thinkin' about it." Now it’s Scar’s turn to pin him down with gaze alone; something sharp and urgent presses along Grian’s skull, begging for a taste. “But, y’know, you never really told us what’s up with that— is it like a glitch? A virus?”

It takes all of Grian's strength not to descend like a carrion bird on top of that spark of alarm, rile it up into a dread so great it would collapse Scar entirely beneath its gravity. For a moment, the idea rolls over his tongue, flits around the gilded, constricting cage of his mind; something to pick apart and chew. Something he can sink his teeth into.

Grian shudders, and pulls himself back as far as he can within his own body. The cords stay coiled; the low, piercing throb continues to hammer at his temples.

"... I think everybody would know if it was a virus," Grian rasps at last, throat tight.

“Not so!” Scar shifts in place; the bed frame creaks beneath him in protest. He takes the time to shoot it a sportive, scandalized glance before refocusing on Grian, aimed and intent. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a virus, have you, X?”

From the corner of Grian’s eye, Xisuma shifts uncomfortably. “I… can’t say I have,” he says slowly. “Not up close, at least.”

“See?” Scar rewards him with a gracious nod. “We’d have no clue— unless you told us, of course.”

“It’s not a virus.” Despite himself, Grian scowls, caustic impatience boiling in the pit of his stomach. “Look, it’s— Scar, why do you even want to know?”

Scar’s eyes widen. “I just care about you, that’s all! Come on, G— work with me here, give us something to go off on.” He leans forward, voice lowering until it smooths into melted chocolate, warm, sweet, cajoling. “At least tell us what’s going on, so we can know.”

It sinks into the marrow of Grian’s bones, lingering and dark, a gentle tug for truth. This isn’t some act— Scar emanates earnestness, the fathomless depths of his concern, in a wave that threatens to bowl Grian over beneath its crest. He's struck with the flashbang image of Scar kneeling in waist-high water, arms spread and voice slinking around Grian's ankles, curving over the hilt of a bloody diamond sword. He knows this siren song, in all its honeyed glory— and Scar knows it, too. The familiarity hovers just within reach, urging him to clutch at its iridescent hook.

Xisuma’s hesitant voice, however, buoys him back above deep water. “Grian, you aren’t… actually dying right now, are you?”

Grian grasps the distraction with both hands, letting it pull him away from danger. The banked embers in his chest flare, not quite hot enough to spit venom— but close. “What sort of— are you saying you don’t believe me?” he demands, forcing himself to break eye-contact with Scar.

Xisuma physically backpedals, jerking in his seat the moment Grian's head swings in his direction. “I-I mean, you did say quite a lot to me when you first woke up, Grian,” he says rapidly, the words running together until they trip over themselves. Xisuma lifts a hand, as if to curl it protectively over the back of his neck; when it meets armor, he jolts, then carefully lowers it back to his lap. “I— well, that is to say— I mean I’ll be honest… you were pretty worked up. I wasn’t exactly sure if—”

“— If I meant it when I said it,” Grian finishes for him, flat. His head swims. Reality is a thin, translucent plate, splintering into a thousand glittering pieces as his mind skims across it. Each one scatters to a different corner of the room, glinting hazily like diamonds in a mirage. “Well, there’s your mystery solved, then. I definitely meant it.”

Almost idly, his gaze falls to rest on his hands. They’re cracked, chapped; knuckles red and bones on display, beneath what remains of old builder’s callouses.

He hasn’t been kind to them. He hasn’t wanted to be. These hands once wrapped around Scar’s soft throat and squeezed— a corrupted, starving blur, bathed in blood. He’d feasted that day, when the sun rose on Scar’s body, just before it burst into scattered particles and the desolate remains of Grian's own grief.

He'd killed himself right after. Fitting, that Scar is here as he plans to do it again, one last time.

Frigid uncertainty bleeds into the room's atmosphere. From the corners of his periphery, Scar and Xisuma exchange a loaded glance.

“You said you had a— a week?” Scar blurts abruptly. “When you last checked?

Grian’s head snaps back up. He blinks, licks his lips. “I-I mean, I didn’t exactly—” He has to stop; something about Scar’s question wicks away the moisture in his mouth, crunches sand between his teeth. His voice hiccups on a rasping burr. “That was more like a… rough estimate. I couldn’t tell you for sure— not unless I took a look at my own code.”

“Oh, that’s neat!” Scar says, with far more enthusiasm than Grian can actually taste off him. When he catches them, Scar's eyes are brimming with tightly-controlled anxiety, held together by a single, shimmering thread. “So how about let’s do that right now, see what we’re working with.”

Inhale. Exhale. Lungs a useless thrash inside his chest, a neat counterpart to the stranglehold around his head. “I can’t.”

“Grian…” Scar starts, devastation in every wavering letter, and something in the pit of Grian’s stomach violently curdles.

“No,” he says quickly, heart hammering within his teeth, pulsing over his tongue. “No, I mean, I literally can’t. It takes too much—” he fumbles for scattered words, tries to slot them into place within the great, buzzing static that's taken over his mind. Anything to wipe away that subtle crack, the broken hitch in Scar's voice. He has to make him understand. “Let’s call it energy. I-I don’t—”

For the second time, he pulls up short, tiptoeing back from the edge of divulging too much information. They both know each other far too well for this kind of dance. One inch and Scar will take a million miles; for some reason, he's deemed Grian worth saving.

Grian’s fallen far past that point of return though. The only problem is, Scar hasn’t quite caught up with him yet.

“If I try now,” he says finally, “it’ll only accelerate the damage.”

Scar jolts forward. “So it is a virus—”

“It’s not a virus, Scar.” With trembling fingers, Grian reaches up and presses one hand over his left eye. The darkness behind it is complete— within the afterimages swirl countless colours, mutating into abstract shapes that flicker and dart beneath his eyelids. “It’s just… how Watchers work.”

There’s a long moment of damning silence. From the foot of the bed, a black hole unfurls: something so dark, empty, and hopeless that it threatens to suffocate him completely. He spirals around its center, a helpless orbit that begs for a feast, dragging him closer and closer to its inevitable event horizon.

Then, tentatively, Xisuma leans forward again. “Alright…” he says haltingly, as if weighing each word on his tongue before letting it roll, falling into Grian's lap with soft diffidence, “now, I wouldn’t normally ask this of anyone, Grian, but— circumstances being what they are… do you… do you mind, if I take a little glance at your code?”

Grian stares. The words sail right past him, burying themselves in the wall over his head. “... Pardon?”

“Since you can’t,” Xisuma clarifies carefully. Another beam of early morning sun catches his helmet, briefly bringing his eyes into view. They’re pinched at the corners, brows drawn together— dark circles bruising under his eyes. Absently, Grian wonders just how much sleep he’s been getting, with Grian now awake. Whether phantoms have been spawning over their little cabin in the woods, scratching at the slats, raking boney nails down the window panes. “Like I said," Xisuma continues, "I wouldn’t normally ask, but…” he lets it trail off into the distance, past the little eddies of dust motes hovering between them.

At his other side, Scar straightens, but says nothing.

Grian, for his part, worries at the flesh of his lower lip. It’s still dry, cracked in places— his teeth catch parched skin and pull, stripping it in stinging trails. His tongue pauses over the beginnings of a split, nudging at the metallic hints of copper; Grian hesitates, hanging suspended over both sides of the knife.

To show them his code— his structural code… that’s not something done lightly. A massive, unmistakable show of vulnerable underbelly; something that can never be undone. His past as a Player sings with reticence, a deep, wailing note unspooling at the very core of him.

But… to show them the damage…

Well, there’s a small, but not insignificant chance this can convince them his code is unrepairable.

“Fine,” Grian says at last; the word tears itself from his throat, leaving sickly, nerved particles in its wake. “Sure. For however much good it’ll do you, I guess.”

To his credit, Xisuma moves with the speed of molasses— slow enough that each individual motion can be tracked. Enough that Grian could reach out, change his mind if he wanted to. One gloved finger taps over his comm; fragments of code flash against the top of Xisuma’s tinted visor before clearing again, blank and pristine. Xisuma glances up, hesitant; that same finger hovers, fluttering across the display panel— then, when Grian doesn't protest, he inputs a few commands, turns his arm, and passes it gently over the length of Grian’s body.

Long strings of white-on-black code begin sprawling across the comm’s display. Grian forces his mind still, observing as Xisuma squints, clearly trying to parse it; with every second, his brows furrow deeper, carving ravines between his eyes.

“Well this sure is… different,” he says eventually, leaning back. His eyes dart over another code block, scanning it once, twice, a third time— all without comprehension. “I’m…” A baffled, stupefied beat. “I’m not really sure what I’m looking at here, to be honest.”

Grian can’t contain his snort. “I didn’t think you would. It’s not like Player code.”

“No, it certainly is not,” Xisuma murmurs, scrolling further. “This is… unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” The knot tying his brows tightens; a muddle of consternation begins to leak from underneath his helmet. “I-I don’t even know—”

The words halt so abruptly that their echoes shiver in the air, bouncing between each of them in turn. Xisuma stops mid-motion, finger poised over his comm display as he stares at something with startling intensity.

The bed creaks again as Scar shifts, craning his neck. Tension begins to spiral through the line of his shoulders. “What?”

There’s a glimmer of clear alarm in Xisuma’s eyes when he looks up. They bypass Scar entirely in favor of honing in on Grian, something taut beginning to finally fray. “Grian… are these—?”

Again, he breaks off. A thick, roiling dread begins to seep into the air, polluting it with its fervor; Grian’s throat threatens to clog, another bolt of tension tightening around his head. He grits his teeth, curling his useless body in on itself— a protective hunch, tugging at his own hooks before they can dig.

“What?” Scar demands again. He leans forward, cane poised as if to stand up, urgency sparking and catching on the threshold of a conflagration. “What is it?”

“These look like—” Xisuma cuts himself off a third time; that oil-slick puddle of horror begins to grow, spilling across the ground to pool around the bedposts. It laps at him, a slow-building lake, a current of cold, stark, realization as Xisuma connects the pieces Grian has strung together for him. Even the most inexperienced admin, gazing at a foreign code structure, can recognize this for what it actually is. “Now, I don’t know what’s, um, what’s normal for you, but— this looks an awful lot like…”

“Broken code-blocks?” Grian finishes, when it's clear Xisuma can't. Grim satisfaction curls inside his chest— another victory. Even if it doesn't feel like it. “Yeah. Like I said: code’s collapsin’.”

“This is— that’s— that is a substantial amount of damage, actually,” Xisuma stammers. “And I don’t even know what your code is normally supposed to look like—”

“Not like that, that’s for sure,” Grian says, and it bites, singing through the air with cruel finality. He can’t stop the way each syllable sharpens as he speaks. “So when I tell you I’m dying, maybe you should believe me.”

He glances over at Scar before he can stop himself, drinking in the way his eyes dance between Grian and Xisuma’s comm. They've grown wild around the edges, deep lines etching into his face. “Okay,” he says, and it bursts out of him, a tangle of a word, tumbling over itself. “Okay, so— bad. Really bad.”

“Well it’s definitely not good,” Xisuma says; a tinge of panic leaks through his tone, gouging it into a higher octave.

“That's what I've been trying to tell you this whole time,” Grian says, abruptly weary. The tension that's been running along his back, his neck, his wings, finally drags him down— until he’s swaying backward, limp and watery, into the wall behind him. His chin sinks against his chest; Grian's lashes flutter, brushing his cheeks in time with the jagged beats of his heart. “My time’s been up since the beginning, unfortunately. That’s just how the game's gotta end for me.”

And for a moment, that’s all there is: the dark, the quiet, the yawning abyss of Scar and Xisuma as they grapple with the full weight of this new reality. Marbled veins of red and maroon, light and shadow from the window, flit over his closed eyelids. Grian sighs— a soft, unhurried thing, warm air slipping past his lips to drop into the cradle of his own lap, curling cool and gentle between slack hands.

Without warning, Xisuma’s voice cracks through it. “There has to be a way to get you stabilized,” he says, and running beneath the words is a note of determination so fierce it sets off fireworks at the base of Grian’s spine.

His eyes snap wide open; the sun has shifted once more, concealing Xisuma’s expression from him, but his back is ramrod straight, hands tangled together. “If I can have a bit more time—” Xisuma continues, rapid and spiraling, twisting his fingers into an anxious cat's cradle— “and, and maybe if— I mean, if anybody can weigh in on this, it’d be Doc, right—" he glances at Scar. "Maybe Zedaph?”

A flicker of movement at the foot of the bed; Scar is nodding along with approving beats. “Zedaph’s an entire mad scientist,” he says, and it— it should be a joke, something to laugh about with friends. But a layer of seriousness glosses over it, coating it in thick strokes; a kernel of nausea begins to climb up Grian's esophagus. “He’d think of something." Scar hesitates. Do you think…?”

“I’ll whisper them,” Xisuma says, and flicks away the command display on his comm. “We have to try.”

The nausea blooms, into an alarm that foams up between Grian’s lips. “Now, hey, hey, hey. Hang on, fellas, that’s—”

“I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about that… other thing I mentioned,” Scar says over him, with a sudden lilt that matches the bubble of hope ballooning in his chest. Grian balks, flinching into himself; just like with Tango, it’s an undeserved, unfitting emotion— vines winding between his ribs, squeezing the chambers of his heart until it shudders to a stop.

“I think you’re right,” Xisuma agrees; he glances back at Grian, and the tilt of his neck suggests a rueful smile playing across his lips. “I don’t know how much Scar has told you about his idea, but—”

Incredulity scours the roof of Grian's mouth. “About— taking me back to Hermitcraft?”

"That sounds about the gist of it, yeah."

“You can’t.” Black tar, harsh and reeking, spills from his mouth. Grian scrabbles for purchase, any kind of ground, as the temperature in the room plummets. "Scar— Xisuma. You can’t do that.”

Xisuma’s voice carries an apologetic note. “I think I’ll be the judge of that,” he says, quiet and steady— but the words twist themselves into the terrible shape of a noose, rough and fibrous as it slips around Grian's neck. “This is a pretty big deal, Grian. And I’m not letting you die in front of me again.”

“Again—?” Grian chokes out. “I didn’t die! I’m still here!”

“But for how long?” Scar’s voice is equally sober; when Grian claws together the courage to look back at him, his expression is solemn, pale and drawn. “You’re telling us you’re dying, and you don’t know how to stop it—”

Spontaneity is, Grian knows, a trait he possesses in spades. He plans— of course he plans— but he’s always been a creature of chance, of lunging for opportunities with claws out and both hands extended. At his best, it’s an advantage: Grian’s always known how to roll with the punches, how to bend in the wind. A kind person would call him flexible; Grian calls himself for what he truly is. Impulsive.

The dam he had so carefully built around the truth, around his heart, around the tenterhooks digging into his friends, crumbles like fine ash. His voice cracks as it rushes out of him, a strangled flood, the last acts of a desperate man drowning. “I never said I don’t know how to stop it, Scar," he snaps, "it’s just not a feasible option!”

The moment it escapes his mouth, he freezes, so still he can’t even tremble. Even his wings fill with static— an endless, grey rush, mounting further with each pin-drop second of silence, until his entire body is washed away in an ocean of blank, white horror.

Across from him, Scar sits equally motionless, eyes wide and palms half-raised from his lap. His cane wobbles as he breathes, falling from his knee to the side of the mattress. Scar makes no move to gather it back up; instead, something miniscule shifts in his expression— a sharp, clinical gleam. Cataloging, dissecting; the same assessment Pearl had regarded him with yesterday on the couch. Gooseflesh rises along his arms, the back of his neck; Grian’s gaze skitters back to his hands of their own accord, pulse rabbiting in his throat.

“So what do you need, then?” Xisuma asks into the sudden quiet. “To get better?”

The spell shatters; Grian breathes once more, a sharp inhale that stutters in his lungs. The muscles in his back begin to shake, keen-edged movements that rattle his teeth. “Look. It’s not— it’s a bad idea, okay? It wouldn’t end well.”

Scar, this time; a familiar stubbornness weaves ribbons around his words, a coordinated, two-prong attack. “Well, tell us what it is anyway. Maybe we can figure out a solution, some kind of a— a work-around.”

“There is no work-around,” Grian hisses; his wings twitch, bristling in place. The sudden urge to run, to hide, swamps him, digs his hands further into the blankets covering his legs— as if throwing them over his head might block them all out, stop this nightmare from playing.

Even he knows better than that. “If you take me back, here's what's going to happen, okay?” Grian sucks in another ragged breath, bordering on a gasp. For some reason, the air's growing thin— the way it does when he’s brushing against the inner dome of a server's barrier code, skimming clouds and letting the condensation dew across his feathers. “You take me back— me, a hungry Watcher— to a server full of people who have some pretty strong feelings about me as a person—”

A wave of dizziness reels at him. It's too horrible of a concept to entertain for longer than a second; numb and icy, his fingertips grasp for the meat of his legs, digging unforgiving nails into the blanket's thick fabric. He can't feel them. He can't feel anything at all. “That's a disaster just waiting to happen," he breathes. "Scar, Scar, look at me.” Urgency drums through his ribcage; Grian leans forward, but his limbs are still too weak to close the gap. He settles for grasping again at the blanket, curling both fists until his knuckles gleam white and bloodless. “You think the games were bad? Those'll be a walk in the park compared to what might happen if you let me loose on that server.”

A potent cocktail of frothing emotions perfuses the air of the room like blood in water, clamoring at him, voiceless despite the way it keeps screaming. Through it all, Scar sits rigid, statue-esque; his eyes piercing, a great and horrible trench opening up in the bed between them.

Despite everything, the day Grian was kicked from Hermitcraft, Scar had still watched him like someone he knew. Now, he stares at Grian as if he’s never seen him before.

When Scar finally speaks, it’s with the slow, rolling cadence of wheels turning. “Y’know… Pearl said something pretty interesting to me last night, about you.”

The air takes on a new, glacial chill. “... Is that so?”

“Yeah. Said something about— eating brains, and that you were starving.” Scar finally moves, grasping for his cane. One telling finger taps incessantly against its carved handle. “I couldn't really make sense of it at first, but… it’s all related, isn’t it?”

A blossom of pure, cold fear unfolds from the center of Grian’s chest. His mouth opens; he doesn’t make a sound.

In one, smooth motion, Scar suddenly stands, planting his cane firmly against the floor. “You never did tell us why you made those games, or what they were even for," he says, easing past Xisuma's chair to walk further into the room. Click, click, click. Scar turns, eyebrows arching into his hairline, and points a single, accusing finger at the center of Grian's chest. "And, look, Grian, I’m sorry, but— that's just not your style to put us through something like that for no reason." Like water rushing downstream, the words pick up momentum, that complicated tangle of emotions unraveling into a thread that shines crystalline and clear. "I never believed you would, not even for a second.”

“Scar—” Grian sucks in a sharp breath.

“Don’t act like I'm wrong.” The glance Scar tosses him is gently reproachful; Grian flinches, and the expression softens, rounds out by degrees. “It's— that's what helps you, isn't it?” Scar’s voice turns in on itself, thoughtful. “The games. Or… something in them. You used to get really tired every month, at around the same time—”

That stuns Grian enough to jog his voice again. “I— you— what?” he stammers. Next to him, Xisuma makes a small, aborted noise in the back of his throat.

Scar steamrolls past them both, pacing back toward the side of Grian’s bed. Click, click, click. "I noticed. I always noticed, but, y'know, everyone gets tired, and nobody brought it up— so I figured it was fine. But then—” and here he pauses, eyes narrowing, focusing on Grian’s with the precision of a drawn arrow, dawn rising in the wefts of his stroma. “All those times you made the games,” he says, slowly, “you'd been really tired for a while.”

Dumbfounded, Grian can only stare.

Scar's eyes track it all; whatever he sees in Grian's face, it must be enough. Triumphant, his cane clicks forward, free hand rising to encompass the entire room. “And that's why, isn't it?” he says, but it’s not a question anymore. He knows. “You needed the games to get— I don't know, you said energy, earlier, right? Like food?” For a moment his brow wrinkles— then smooths, so fast Grian’s head spins. “Either way, it messed with our emotions, our heads— but it healed you.” Scar’s voice takes on an awed note— as if the simple act of slipping past Grian's defenses for the missing puzzle pieces changes anything between them. Soft as drifting snow, he whispers, “And that's why you won't let us help.”

Abruptly, Scar pushes forward, rapid and urgent; with a grunt of effort, he sinks to one knee, cane clattering to the ground as both hands grasp for one of Grian’s. With reverent motions, Scar lifts it up, cages it between his own. At any other point, his palms would be a warm, grounding weight, laced with familiar lines and calluses; now, all Grian can focus on is the inexorable tilt of his entire world's axis as it falls apart.

“Grian,” Scar breathes, and it spears right through his chest, leaves a spiral of scarlet gore behind it, “let us help you. It doesn’t have to be like this." Gently, Scar smooths a thumb across the back of Grian's knuckles, sweeping a warm trail of tingling nerves behind it. His eyes are pools of green glass, beaming the silhouette of Grian's emaciated reflection right back at him. "There's gotta be something else that'll work.”

Thick silence follows, settling over them in a smoking pall. Trapped, the ley lines along Grian's bones begin to fracture, lungs flooding with seawater. It drains the blood from his face in a low, cruel swoop; Scar's fingers tighten, as if they alone can keep him together, hold him firm and fast.

Xisuma speaks in a slow, considering tide, washing through the room with inexorable waves. “Look, Grian— I don’t want to overrule you, but… if that’s true, that’s… that’s some pretty important context we were missing.” A beat of silence; a note of regret, of belated censure, bleeds through the jumbled symphony collapsing his room. “You could’ve told us.”

“That I’m a monster?” The words rip themselves from his throat without permission, halting and hoarse. They scrape on the way up; he retches on them, crackling and tattered, the coarse lines of a broken mirror that no longer fits together. “That I— feed on people’s suffering?”

Scar’s fingers spasm around his. “Hey, hey, no—” he says, audibly appalled, then falters, plastering on a thin, practiced smile. Shoring up behind salesman walls, Scar weakly chides, “What are you talking about, Grian? You’re not—”

Grian flips his hand over so his palm faces up, and curls his fingers against Scar’s. “I hurt you,” he grates out. Scar's jaw shuts with a sharp, abrupt snap. “I hurt all of you, so that I would feel better. And I kept doing it.” His fingers press down, biting against Scar's knuckles. Deliberately, Grian digs them in, hard enough to bruise, then rasps, “Tell me that doesn’t make me a monster, Scar. Go ahead.”

Scar’s fragile smile crumples, flaking away like so much cheap paint. “You aren’t a monster, Gri,” he whispers. “It— I won’t lie to you, that wasn’t okay. But you— I’m right, aren’t I?” Beneath the vice of Grian's fingers, his thumb trails over chapped skin again, this time tracing his life line until he reaches the pulsepoint at Grian's wrist. There it hovers, the filed edges of Scar's short nails grazing blue veins, mapping out the wavering patterns of his heartbeat. “You weren’t doing it to be cruel. You were just trying to survive.”

Xisuma cuts in as Grian flounders, quiet and introspective. “This… actually explains quite a lot, really. And also changes the situation.” When Grian looks up, Xisuma is watching him, oddly steady despite the mournful tang that runs through his voice. “I just wish you’d told us before we kicked you, Grian. I would’ve listened. I promise.”

“X,” Grian pleads. A million sobbing reasons they can't do this hover in his throat, lock his larynx until all he can do is shake. “X, It doesn’t matter why I did it, it just matters that I did.” Full-bodied shivers ripple along his wings, raising each feather. Fluffing them out, a last-ditch effort to make himself big. He shakes his head, ignoring the way Scar's hands cage him in, attempting to pull him close. “Look, if you know what’s good for you— for all of you— you’ll leave me here, and you won’t come back.”

Xisuma studies him, long enough that the silence tips past natural and into something distinctly uncomfortable. “Unfortunately, that's not an option for me,” Xisuma says at last, and it's firm, brooking no argument. One hand lifts to the front of his visor; Xisuma scrubs at something only he can see, before sighing in one, harsh, muffled exhale. “I don’t have the tools handy to find a way to stabilize you right now,” he admits with slumped shoulders, “but back on Hermitcraft— well, that's where we'll have the resources to put something together.” Then, quieter, more conciliatory: “I’ll get Doc and Zed on board, and we’ll work this out, alright? At the very least, we'll do our best to get you back to full health.”

“We’re not leaving you behind, Grian,” Scar murmurs, squeezing Grian's hand. It constricts all the way up to his chest, pushing the air right out of him. “Not this time.” His head shifts as he peers over his shoulder at Xisuma. “So when’s the earliest we can go?”

Xisuma fidgets in place, tapping the edge of his comm. “Well, I'll need to talk to Doc first, but… I’d say as soon as possible.” His head dips in Grian's direction. “Once you can walk again on your own, I suppose.”

Blackened teeth sink into Grian’s stomach, shredding it with harsh, septic motions. His mouth moves without his input, distant and flat. "So I don’t get any say whatsoever in this, then."

Xisuma, at least, has the grace to pulse with remorse. “I’m afraid not, Grian. I’m sorry, I truly am, but y—” a helpless little pause, before Xisuma sighs again, as if every inch of him is weighed down. Whatever he's feeling, Grian can't taste it past the thick, heavy layer of snow blanketing his senses.

“You’re not well, right now,” Xisuma settles on finally. He punctuates it with an uncomfortable chuckle, awkward and self-deprecating. “I understand you feel bad about how things turned out, and— well, I mean, I’d be a mite concerned if you didn’t— but it’s not… this changes a lot, okay. And…” A hint of steel enters his voice; the words come out with surprising force for Xisuma, brimming with a conviction that rattles Grian’s bones. “You need help. Hermitcraft is the safest place for you right now— at least until we can figure all this out.”

Grian sucks in a breath. Two. A third one, final and gasping, and with it his heart plunges right into the floor. All those victories, all that effort, and it never even mattered; Scar always did have a winning streak with wars. With stiff motions, he withdraws his hand from Scar's grasp, easing away from the proffered warmth into something colder, heavy with desolate frost. Despite the blank haze of cool glass separating him from everything else, his voice comes out bitingly sarcastic. “Right. And I’m sure everyone else is gonna feel the exact same way.”

Xisuma’s wince is visible even through the helmet. “… We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” he says, after an agonizing beat. Meticulously, he rises, pushing his chair back from Grian's bedside. Then his helmet tilts, glancing down at where Scar's hands still clasp empty air. “Need some help, Scar?”

Scar’s gaze is searching as it tracks over Grian's face; the longer he hunts, the more it grows bleak. “No,” he says at last. “I got it.” Carefully, he reaches down, fingers wrapping around the shaft of his cane; then, with a sharp inhale, he braces it against the floor, pulling himself back to his feet. His empty hand falls limply at his side; a cruel, baseless part of Grian bares its teeth, and snarls good.

Scar hesitates, entire body swaying back and forth. “You… do you need anything, Gri?" he asks— begs. "Water, blankets— we set up a bathtub, actually, if you want a bath.” A strained laugh barks out of him, labored and uneasy. “No offense, but with your wings— I bet you’re super itchy right now.”

“No,” Grian says. It falls from his tongue with all the grace of a corpse.

“Oh,” Scar says. “Okay.” Disappointment swells in the spaces between each vowel, but no surprise lingers there. Scar knows him, after all. And out of everyone here, Scar is the most intimately acquainted with the true cost of what comes with victory. “That’s okay. Just… it’s there if you need it. Let me know.”

Mechanically, Grian shifts, until his gaze locks with the window, angling his chin so only the barest sliver of his face is visible from the door. Blankly, he stares out at the old growth of the taiga outside, wraps himself in the whisper of wind through gaps in the walls. Breathes in, then out— a slow, listless motion. Lifeless.

He does not cry, despite the wet heat that blurs across his vision. It smears everything together, a kaleidoscopic storm of sounds and colours and flickering shadows— cut to the unique, inescapable sting of personal betrayal.

When the door finally closes behind Scar and Xisuma, Grian shuts his eyes, and imagines the universe cradling him close.

Chapter Text

There was a point, thousands upon thousands of days ago, when Grian— another, better Grian— had been a Player. The memories still linger, astringent and sour, burnt smoke from a soul fire; they wreath around his tongue with a regret so sharp it cleaves him in two, cuts a path from clavicle to stomach. Those had been easier days— when Grian’s only crimes were harmless mischief, and pranks that leaned on the edge of a little too mean before he apologized and helped clean up. It’s a distant feeling, locked behind misty, tinted glass, but he’d been happy then. Eager. Bright-eyed and still learning, churning through his server milestones. Iron, check; Nether portal, check; diamond gear, check. Find the stronghold, complete the End portal, slay the dragon… pending.

Well, it had been at the time. There’s no use in dwelling on what came after, but he finds his mind stalling like a broken record, skipping notes over the same rotten scratch. Almost experimentally, he prods at the lesion— traces it with the same exploratory motions one might associate with a pulled tooth, gummy and still-tender. What would it have been like, if the Watchers hadn't chosen him for their experiment? To skirt past the edge of death and fly, a blind and unwitting moth, toward the bright, unspoiled future?

He spends what must be the next few hours in a stupor over it, numb and dizzy, staring blankly out the window as the sun hovers silently in midday witness. Then, inexorable as the tide, it begins its descent, crawling back toward the horizon and the darkness beneath. Something undefinable in Grian falls with it; cracks and splinters, a one-sided shatter, as the crushing weight of reality finally slams full upon his chest.

Trapped. Just like before, he's trapped, and Scar and Xisuma were the ones to put him here. Grian sucks in a strangled breath, hands shaking, fingers worming their way through individual fibres in the blanket and stretching the weft until it distorts. The pale honey drizzling in from the window does nothing to warm him; instead, he shivers, chest hitching as his spine curls in on itself.

There comes a certain paralysis when staring out from inside the bars of a cage— the freeze response of a startled deer; fierce talons gripping the tender, trembling flesh of a rabbit. It coats everything in a wash of staticked grey so consuming that Grian's entire body locks, tumbling beneath its scend; in this moment, he is both river and person, the turbulence of churning water sweeping him away beneath a layer of solid ice.

His lungs squeeze for air. The last time he’d felt this breed of raw helplessness, he’d been crammed into a miniscule section of an unknown server, hemmed in on all sides. Studiously monitored as his body began collapsing around him, with nobody but the Watchers for paltry company. That long, trembling monotony… The area he’d been corralled into had been too small to do much more than miserably wait in, riding out full-bodied glitches as the parasite they’d implanted ripped through his code, and destroyed him from the inside out.

Inhale. Exhale. Grian heaves and strains over them both, wings shuddering as they beg to inch forward. He is a raw, weeping wound made flesh; within his ribcage, a whirlpool opens, spinning vast and endless in this sea of unrelenting static.

His fingers finally release their death-grip on the blanket's weave; they rise through dreamy syrup to latch onto his face, concealing him from the weak bands of light that fall against his covered legs. Braced like this, elbows against knees, fingers digging into his scalp, it's hard not to feel hunted. A wailing, ravaged keen rises up from the core of him— he just wants to die! He just wants to die. There is a parasite in him, and he is the parasite, and isn't that enough? Can't they just make it stop? Curb the guilt and fear, ease the burning hunger? The miasma of miserable dread curls delicately around his throat, snaking its way from underneath his door in thick, bubbling strokes.

Grian latches onto it without thinking, digging claws and teeth into a dribbling cut and ripping it clean open. The desperation expands, ballooning inside his chest— he is lapping at the gash, intangible tendrils piercing through both sides to hold it wide; skin shuddering with the assault of fresh code, patching over the holes in his own; Scar tripping, stumbling briefly beneath the onslaught; Xisuma sucking in his own, helpless gasp—

Scar? Xisuma?

With a strangled yelp, Grian physically jerks away, ripping out the tendrils that had so insidiously sunk inside of them. The mounting panic he had mistaken for his own immediately fades away; Grian is left panting, shaking, hands pressed into his face as he breathes in soft, shuddery circles.

No, no. He'd been trying so hard— had kept himself in check for so long he'd grown complacent with it, and he'd just— he'd just—

Someone knocks on his door.

Two short, perfunctory raps, but it's enough to freeze him again, still and small, cradled within mussed blankets. Disquiet leaks out from beneath the door— a creeping, crawling notion that the world no longer makes sense, fits poorly around one's shoulders. Like a worn, childhood coat, stained with the devastating loss of innocence. Grian breathes in shallow bursts, throat tight and gnarled, as the anxiety begins to bloom again.

“Grian?”

His head snaps up from the well of his palms, narrowing in on twin shadows pooling out from under the door's low gap. Not Scar, thankfully; not Xisuma either. This is someone else, someone boiling in their own muddied apprehension, shifting from foot to foot with a high-strung impatience that can only be one person.

Mumbo.

Grian can almost picture it, clear as peering through crystal glass: fingers tangled, tie crooked, suit creased— streaks of coal or redstone running across his face and hands. The mustache, inexplicably, without a single hair straying from its immaculate place, and the shoes— despite the paces they're put through— somehow polished to a near-perfect shine.

After a long, breathless moment, Mumbo knocks again— another short burst that reverberates along Grian's stiff spine. "Ah, Grian?" His voice quavers on the last note, cracking at the edges. A muffled throat clears— once, twice— before trying again. "Are you— Xisuma said you might— um, you might be awake right now? Possibly?" A microscopic pause, tentative and uncertain. "Maybe?"

Grian huddles further in on himself, the muscles in his shoulders, his arms, his back going taut. His voice is a dry, airless gasp in the back of his throat; he couldn't open his mouth and force out words even if he wanted to try.

Mumbo's uneasiness tingles along the roof of his mouth, muzzy and sweet. "Look, mate," he says, low, then stops, the sentence petering out before he audibly rallies again. "I'd just like to— I know the, um, this morning didn't go… very well… but… if I could—"

He breaks off. Grian watches, motionless, as the shadows outside his door fall into a back-and-forth, back-and-forth, restless pattering motion. Mumbo cycles aimlessly out in the hallway, and Grian tastes the trip of his pulse on the back of his tongue, as Mumbo weighs each word like he's crushing his teeth around a heart.

"Oh gosh," he mumbles eventually. "This is— a lot harder than I thought it would be… Um. Grian. If you're in there, and you're awake…" he trails off again, helpless; when he finally speaks, the words come tumbling over themselves in a graceless rush. "Could we just talk for a minute? Please?"

Lightning spears through Grian's chest in response, ribboning outward in a fierce, plasmic spiral. His wings rustle as they strain to lift: furious, matted weights that attempt to mantle in a protective curve over his back— as if that will do anything to actually shield him. But for the first time since he's woken, they're easier to shift, and by more than just mere fractions; Grian's stomach churns with stones as they flex forward, grizzled primaries snagging against the unsanded floor.

"Grian, please."

Grian stays quiet. The silence suffocates them both.

After a long, weighty pause, Mumbo sighs. In his mind's eye, Grian watches as his shoulders deflate, and that fragile, shimmering hope carried fitfully under his ribcage extinguishes like smoldering charcoal. Good, he thinks, but it's a rote sentiment, not half so vicious as it had been only hours earlier.

It's about time Mumbo learned to stop betting on losing horses.

"Right," Mumbo mutters at last, tinged bitter and forlorn in his defeat. "I— yeah. Probably should’ve— I guess I should've expected that."

Footsteps beat across the floorboards; in a matter of seconds, his jittery pace vanishes back down the hall. From outside, the front door swings open, then shuts itself with the finality of a resounding, muffled thud.

In the ringing absence, Grian shuts his eyes.

The wake of Mumbo's retreat brings with it a much needed clarity, a release of roiling tension that leaves him sagging against the wall, a puppet with cut strings. His wings curl closer, trembling with the effort; Grian shunts himself sideways until he falls into a loose, watery ball of feathers and limbs, fingers stretching for any possible purchase.

They catch nothing but open air; slowly, Grian retracts his hand, pulling it back until he can tuck it against his chest, where it hovers in silent guardianship over his sternum. Inhale, exhale, once again: breaths so deep they strain his lungs, air whistling past parted lips as it circulates through him. This is different, he reminds himself as his lungs even out, easing away from their violent hitching. This box they've locked him in is not enforced by impenetrable server code; instead, only a simple wooden door blocks his escape.

But gravity is a thick, heavy sheet pushing him down, tying his limbs to the bed; even stolen energy can't make up for that. With rhythmic, mechanical motions, Grian curls and uncurls his fingers, ignoring the way his eyes flutter and block out the molasses shift of light.

It's a searing sting to his brain; he should sit up, start planning, think. Gather his wits and resources, everything he'd never had the first time he— well, when Grian, the real Grian— had died. In a war, every small advantage is a vital one, and no matter what, this is a fight he can't afford to lose.

In the end, though, the opportunity to reopen his eyes slips right through his fingers. Starving hands reach out from the depths of his mind to pull him back, stumbling, under that dark waterline. Without a chance to fight it, sleep billows over him in soft, woolen waves, and Grian tumbles into it endlessly.

His eyes shudder back open to a sunlight tinged ruddy, brilliant squares of fire scorching across the wooden floor. For a moment, Grian can't place himself, where he is— he's lying comfortably on his side, hands curled to his chest like a child and braced over his heart. The world is still glazed over with that dreamy, sleep-deprived tint; nothing more than a mass of unrefined shapes and colours, articles that hold no true meaning. Bleary, he casts his gaze up to the ceiling, mapping out random splotches of birchwood and the cobwebs already stretching from between supporting beams.

Grian squints, tracing their fluttering edges as they shift in the faint breeze. Despite the cool air, his body is warm, and when he shifts to glance down, it's to the sight of a new, cyan blanket, covering him up to the shoulders.

Oh.

His soul plunges deep into the floor. Sucking in a sharp breath, Grian begins the laborious task of levering himself back up, wincing at the crack of his elbow as it adjusts from its cramped position. His shoulders and arms are stiff, the muscles around his wings almost painfully tight, but Grian ignores them both in favor of kicking the blanket all the way down to the foot of the bed, where he can't quite reach.

He shouldn't have fallen asleep, not when he'd worked so hard to avoid it— but he can't spark the fire necessary for that familiar, blistering hate. Instead, all that seeps through him is a thick, clinging disappointment, cold and viscous. It's expected, at this point— he's pressed a knife to every promise he's ever made since the day he emerged, digging into sinew until each fitful thread snaps. His existence lies in the shadows of these distorted fractures, jagged hopes and dented dreams, forever fated to cut his hands on the fragments. Holding them together has never been a permanent solution; all it ever does is make him bleed.

Blank hopelessness drapes around him with the familiarity of an old cloak, banking everything until nothing remains, not even ashes. Only the great, circling chasm, a raw abyss that opens up to swallow him within its gravity. Grian sags beneath it; when the door creaks open without warning, he doesn't even jolt.

A familiar head of wild hair pokes through the widening gap to peer out at him anxiously. Tango's face is drawn tight, worry lines creasing his forehead— a cloud of unease hanging over his shoulders with palpable presence, coagulating into a black shroud.

Ah— the feeding.

One slip up and he'd already forgotten; slowly, methodically, Grian snaps each cord where it attaches to Tango and everyone else. Almost immediately, Tango breathes deep, as if the mere sight of Grian is enough to erase the distress crawling through his body.

“Oh, hey,” Tango says faintly, stepping forward to lean against the doorframe. He lets out an exaggerated sigh, shoulders dipping as the stress-creases lining his face begin to dissipate. Grian doesn't have to imagine the naked relief coating his voice when he says, “You’re awake! Man, do you always sleep that still? You were out like a— a light, dude, that was crazy. I kept having to check on you to make sure you were still breathing.”

The statement tugs at him oddly, winds fingers through his ventricles. Squeezes them until his heart mangles into a bloody pulp, wet and dripping cruor along the floor. There's nothing he can say that wouldn't merit as torment— this would all be so much simpler if nobody cared. But they do, because they're good people; mechanically, Grian skims his gaze down, settling on the blazing patches of sunlight that march in steady inches across the floor. The facade of tranquility around them begins to shiver.

From the corner of his eye, Tango takes a faltering step further into the room. “Hey,” he says, much softer, and a distant part of Grian rankles at the tone. Like he’s fragile. Like he’s not the universe’s personal abomination. “You okay?”

"Fine." The word falls flat and lifeless into his own lap; he can’t quite bring himself to care.

A newer, brighter concern swells up over the event horizon. Hesitantly, Tango takes another step, eyes like flares in the descending darkness. Trained unerringly on Grian, he says, with the cautious tiptoe of a man unsure: “I mean… no offense, but you don’t seem fine.”

Astute. Grian offers him a silent, half-hearted shrug, then lets his eyes flick back up to the window, where the sun blazes in streams so thick he can't make out anything beyond the glare. It doesn’t matter whether he’s okay or not. Soon enough, there won’t be a him to care.

He senses more than sees Tango level him with an appraising look. As if Grian is a redstone problem in need of solving, of only finding the right tinker to make him function again. Oily discomfort begins to leak into the air, clumping in Grian's throat. "So…” Tango tries, bouncing on his toes, “probably obvious, but I was just coming in to check on you again— and I figured, y'know, since you're awake…"

He trails off leadingly; when Grian doesn’t reply, he obligingly continues on his own.

“D’ya need anything?”

Gilded dust motes dance between the ground and the ceiling. Grian lets them swirl in silence.

A hint of strain echoes through Tango's voice. “Some water? I know you were pretty thirsty yester—”

“No,” Grian interrupts.

It’s a soft, weary refute. He’s not sure he has the voice for anything else— not when it might too easily be ignored.

“Oh.” Grian flicks a glance over his shoulder just in time to watch Tango sink in on himself, brows drawing together to form a deep canyon. One hand begins to fidget with his comm, opening and closing the world chat screen with obsessive taps. “Okay, yeah, that’s cool… What about, uh—”

His gaze falls on the blanket pushed to the foot of his bed; Grian watches with lidded eyes as he visibly shifts tactics. “Bath!" he crows, a hysteric edge running along the word. "Baths, right, yeah! Do you want me to run you one of those? Mumbo and I, we uh, we got some of the essential plumbing all sorted, and Scar said y—”

Whatever he sees on Grian's expression has him stumbling mid-sentence, words shriveling. “Well. Um." An awkward lull unfolds; to his credit, Tango does his best to bluster past the sore subject haunting the fringes of the room. "I can— nobody’s around right now, 'cept little old me, so… now would definitely be the best time, if you wanted one.”

Grian shoots him a flat look, then turns back to the window, wings tucked so tight against his spine that the muscles begin to burn. “No thanks.”

“Okay!” A note of desperation burbles in Tango’s voice as he grasps for purchase. The concern is beginning to morph into a low, droning note of helpless anguish that sours between Grian's teeth. “Yeah, that’s fair, uh… You— you sure you’re okay, dude? You seem pretty…”

He doesn’t bother finishing that sentence. Instead, Tango glides forward another few steps, until he's fluttering right at the edge of Grian's bedside. Clearly at a loss, he sucks in a sharp breath, then releases it in one gusting wave; Grian flinches slightly at the warm air that ruffles the back of his neck.

“Hey, uh…" Honeyed rays begin to shift again, revealing the faint outline of a discomfited Tango. One hand lies extended, hovering only scant centimeters above Grian's shoulder; it lowers with the light, until it too falls, stiff and white-knuckled, back at Tango's side. "So… we finally got that stuff!”

That piques a distant flicker of interest. “Stuff?”

“Yeah. The, uh— the healing potions! We’ve got enough ingredients for, like, twenty-billion-something-or-other.” A little pause. “Pearl kinda went crazy on the netherwart.”

For the first time since the door shut behind Scar and Xisuma, a spark of hope begins to stir, spiderwebbing fine threads through the rubble of Grian's devastation. "Oh," he says somewhat lamely, lungs hiccuping inside his ribs. "That's… good."

“Yeah,” Tango says, and his reflection begins to fiddle with his comm again, a nervous tic that sets Grian's teeth on edge. “You said those would help, right?”

Grian turns, just a little— just enough to put a sliver of Tango's face into view. The thin garrote of his own lies wraps around his throat, distended and threatening to suffocate. "A little, yeah," he says, and tries not to choke on it.

Tango relaxes slightly. "Okay, okay, cool. Solid. They just got back with the brewing stand, so we can get those handled tonight and ready for you tomorrow, how's that sound?"

Grian hesitates. It's somehow both sooner and later than he'd thought he'd have, but… he can make it work. He has to. "Sure. Sounds good."

"Great, awesome." It's Tango's turn to hesitate; he lifts his comm almost up to his nose, fussing with it for a few more moments before lowering it back to a more reasonable level. His eyes remain fixed on the screen as he says, in cautious degrees: "Hey, so… what do you think about going outside tomorrow?”

Grian glances up sharply. “Outside?”

Tango shoots him a tentative smile. “Yeah, y’know, fresh air, breeze, that green stuff we call grass—” He breaks off with a self-deprecating chuckle, absently scratching at his hair. The strands wisp away like flagrant tongues, fiery and entirely heatless. “Just ignore the hypocrisy for a second, okay? But really, getting out might help just a bit. It’s not good to stay cooped up in one area all the time…" His eyes crinkle at the corners. "... Or so they tell me.”

A wreath of daggers settles along his throat. “Just how much of a choice do I have in this?” Grian asks, and doesn't bother to disguise its bite.

Tango's eyebrows bounce up into his hairline; he rocks back on his heels, the air around them curdling violently with the force of his surprise. “I mean, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, G," he says, stung. "Choice is yours.”

Is it? Grian almost mutters. Instead, he exhales, long and slow. Relaxes his jaw. Then says, measured: "Sure. Why not."

Tango balks, just a bit. “You sure? You don't seem real keen—”

“It’s fine.” One last day in the sun before it's all over. One last chance to enjoy what little he can before he makes his final amends. That can be enough.

It has to be.

Still, Tango hesitates. "Listen—" he starts, and Grian can taste the way his uncertainty writhes, wrestling against what Grian might want and what Tango thinks is best for him. But in the end, it doesn't matter— whichever fork they choose, the outcome remains the same. Grian will die, and eventually, his friends will move on. If this makes one of them happy, it's the least he can do to help heal the wounds he's already caused.

He speaks before Tango has a chance to concoct a reasonable counter-argument. "Actually, I've changed my mind about that water; you wouldn't mind grabbing some for me, would you?"

It's a poorly disguised diversion, and Tango blinks, clearly thrown by the change in subject matter; he stares him down as if to ask, uh, are you serious right now? Grian pastes on a conciliatory smile in response, tugging up the corners of his mouth like a fish on a hook, and with just as much sincerity.

Tango's breath leaves him a conceding sigh. "Yeah, sure thing. I'll be right back, just gimme a second."

He doesn't bother shutting the door all the way; it swings softly on rough hinges, sending a thrill of electricity up Grian's spine as he stares hard at the wavering gap. Anyone could pass down the hall and take it up as an invitation to enter; there are precious few he's willing to see right now. Don't come in, he thinks— prays. To the void, to the universe, to fate itself; it doesn't matter. Anything to keep the last remaining shreds of his privacy as he shudders, leans back, and— for the first time in far, far too long— opens his Eyes.

Strictly speaking, of course, they aren't really eyes— not in this form, at least. He isn't seeing so much as sensing, peering through the Greater Code and into the universe around him. It's an extension of awareness, between strings of data and the code blocks they build; a subtle comb through the ripples everything makes as it moves in conjunction with everything else.

It's a form of perception he'd always had to curb while on Hermitcraft. Watching takes more energy than he can usually afford; he'd bitten off this extra sense, stuffed it beneath the floorboards, and let it gather dust until his body mostly forgot. But he needs it now, and so he peels them open in reluctant beats, reaching out in a slow, tentative crawl that taps gently over his immediate surroundings.

Spruce, oak, patches of birch on the roof. Empty chair and empty chest. The data twines around him, absorbing into his memory code and cataloguing itself as Grian sweeps his Gaze into the hall; there’s another door set opposite and to the side of his own, one he must have missed during his blind shuffle to and from the living area yesterday. Grian hesitates, flitting around the code of the doorknob— copper, mined by Scar, smelted by Mumbo— before moving on in search of Tango's familiar aura.

He's plodding down the hallway toward the kitchen, steps drawn-out and stuttering as he casts periodic glances back. Behind him runs a cloud of reticence, welling thick and acrid in Grian's throat; below it, the marks of Mumbo's earlier presence dust the floorboards. There are faint imprints here as well, downy and fluttering, from the other hermits— Pearl paced this hall three days ago, waiting for him to wake up. Scar's speaks of lingering pauses and limping strides, Xisuma's of hurried steps, and beaten beneath them all is Grian's own stumbling passage. Each trodden into the floor; all speaking a hidden language that only he has access to.

He swaps his Gaze back to Tango just in time to emerge into the living room; his Eyes automatically dart to the leather couch's code, inspecting it curiously. Scar had constructed it— traces of him linger in the material, pockmarks in skillfully tanned hides. He pulls back to skitter invisible fingers across the furnaces as Tango stops beside the cauldron, puttering around it and opening barrels one by one until he finds the glass bottle he needs. With methodical motions, he dips it into the cool water, letting it fill up slowly.

Grian's Eyes wander further, tracing down, down, down. Despite the distance and heartbreak between them, Grian knows how the hermits work. And he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that somewhere in this room there has to be a storage space.

And— there. Hidden right beneath Tango's feet: a trapdoor, set so smoothly within its surroundings that Grian had completely overlooked it.

He prods at it, ignoring the stream of data curling past his wake like water parting around stone. Beneath it is a ladder, formed of sturdy rope; Grian reads the tangles in each knot, notes the clever fingers that crafted them (Pearl), and arrives in the basement proper at the exact moment Tango's unmistakable cadence begins to make its way back up the hall.

Grian snaps into himself again with a gasp. His head tips forward without input— a good half of what little energy he'd gained earlier has burned out, draining from his structural code to leave him trembling like a leaf. Grian forces a deep breath in from his stomach— through the nose, out his mouth— in a desperate bid to calm the frantic yammer of his racing heart.

He catches his breath just in time for Tango to push the door fully open once more, striding in with purposeful steps. "One bottle of water, comin' right up," he says, brandishing it in front of him like a shield. His eyes glimmer in the sunset haze, a dancing pair of will-o'-the-wisps that shift as he hands Grian the bottle— only to pause, arm falling back a few inches.

Tango gives him another one of those long, appraising looks. Then, before Grian can unclench his jaw to ask, Tango pulls back altogether, bringing his other hand up to twist the cork. It frees from the bottle's mouth with a musical plop, and without the faintest twitch in expression, Tango smoothly offers it out again.

It has no right to sting the way it does, but the world is thin and nettled, thorny vines prickling the hems of any kindness. Grian grits his teeth as he accepts it, curls his fingers around the smooth glass until his nails scratch its unblemished surface. Imagines it melting within his grasp— water evaporating, glass oozing into molten gobs, dribbling over his hand until the flesh smokes and blackens and boils.

He doesn't drink it. Instead, he offers another plastic smile. "Thanks."

Without a glass to occupy him, Tango hovers, awkward and unsure. "That, uh, that all you needed, G? 'Cause I can get you whatever else—"

"No, I'm— I'm fine." Despite his best efforts, Grian's smile begins to fray at the edges. A cold, sharp ache begins to needle through his stomach— for the first time during this entire conversation, he finds those intangible tendrils frothing forward, begging once more to sink in. With monumental effort, he winds them tight around his own head, ignoring the telltale flare of a burgeoning migraine. "Thanks. You— thank you for the help."

"And you're sure." Tango's voice is uncharacteristically serious. "About going outside tomorrow. Because you don't have to, if you really don't want it."

"Positive," Grian says, and it slips out harsher than he intends; a white tooth sinking into pale, red meat, digging in until it bleeds. The throb in his head expands, encompassing his skull with the pounding heat of a conflagration and engraving technicolor lines across his vision.

"Okay…" Tango's shoulders hunch, but then he smiles, a tentative curve of his lips that displays a flash of razor-white teeth. "I'll be up a little longer, so, you know the drill. Yell if you need anything."

"Sure," Grian agrees, strained, and waits quietly until Tango retreats, shutting his door behind him with a soft, unobtrusive click.

In his absence, the quiet surges back, pressing in with gelatinous fingers. For a moment, Grian languishes in it, lets the lonely atmosphere roll across his tongue and settle back into his bones, until the migraine finally tempers.

Then, slowly, he tips the bottle against his lips. Runs once more through the inadvertent map Tango had carved directly toward the storage room's location.

It's going to be another long night.

Chapter Text

The thinnest hours of the morning creep in slowly, stealing into the hermits' base with a calm patience Grian wishes he could emulate. Instead, his nerves jangle in his wrists, flexing through his fingers when he stretches them out and gives them a hard shake. The water bottle Tango had given him hours earlier lays cool and listless in his lap, balanced carefully to avoid spilling; he's been sipping at it slowly as the night crawls on, trying to savor every last drop. After all, it’s the little things: the crisp slide of water down his throat; moonlight scattered across fraying threads; chipped nails rasping over the mattress; the subtle burn of his eyes as they shift, resolute and unblinking, around the room.

He won't have this for much longer, and so he dedicates himself to appreciating it all, for as long as it lasts.

The others have long gone to bed; even Pearl slunk in like a mulish cat some time ago, shutting the door softly behind her. Four sets of footsteps, four separate bodies retreating into the room across the hall— the only person missing is Mumbo.

It's impossible to tell where he is— not without burning through precious energy reserves— but it still itches at Grian's conscience, snags against his mind like the irritated sting of a swollen hangnail. Knowledge is foresight is power; whether Mumbo is still out wandering the night, or happened to sneak back in while he was still sleeping, is ultimately irrelevant. Grian can't pinpoint his location, and so the chess piece remains off the board, a bishop in hiding, camouflaged against his opening gambit. For all Grian knows, he could be standing out in the hallway right now, waiting for Grian to open his door.

The idea runs a hesitant creak through his bones, clammy sweat pooling in his palms where they've returned to white-knuckle the bottle in his lap. Some secret alarm system trips beneath his skin, hidden within the meat; its claxon wails through his body now, a steady stream of freeze, freeze, freeze laced with rabbit-terror. A crawling, nervy insistence that to be caught is synonymous with everything coming undone. It's right, of course. If anyone were to find him tonight…

But pools of silver huddle tight in the spaces between shadows, and the moon has risen high enough that Grian's certain everyone's fast asleep. He can't afford to wait anymore; witching hour is beginning to sink its teeth into his neck, and the promise of false dawn lies not too far behind it.

If Mumbo isn't already here, then the chances of him coming back now are slim. And Grian's got too important of an itinerary tonight to continue stalling; he tips the bottle against his lips one last time, drains its contents, and discards it to nestle within the cyan blanket still shoved to the foot of his bed.

His slide to the edge of the bed is a tentative one, though far easier than it had been the day before. Both feet make contact with the floor at the same time; the frigid planks shock through him with all the potency of an electrocution, dragging violent shivers up his spine. Some thin, translucent specter of self-preservation pointedly reminds him of the nice, warm bed huddled behind him— but Grian grits his teeth against it, scooting forward to let his heels fall to the ground as well.

He has to bend at the waist then, breathing in sharp and deep. The energy he’d expended just to find the storage basement earlier has already destroyed some of his repairs; it manifests in his bowed spine, the arrhythmic beats of his heart, the fatigue swamping him as he slowly eases his weight from the bed. He’ll have to be more careful. This base isn’t so big that a single misplaced step won't immediately alert the hermits— let alone a full-bodied stumble. Jaw clenched, Grian folds his wings flush against his spine, and cautiously draws himself to his feet.

The world greys out in an instant. Grian gasps, swaying dangerously— he has to turn and fist his hands in the bed to keep from plunging to the floor. Static swarms him in a single, monochrome wave, a high-pitched whine flooding his ears with all the grace of a white-cap, and—

— and Grian breathes in deep, forced, controlled. Exhales just as slow; his vision clears in fits and starts, until only silver and shadow are left behind, and the ringing fades away.

He releases his death grip on the mattress slowly. The muscles in his legs are weak, watery— trembling from disuse. Already his back and wings are beginning to cramp. But he can walk. He can. Cautiously, he even demonstrates it to himself: slides one foot forward, wincing at the rough chafe of skin against wood.

His balance wobbles, but Grian brings up one hand to the adjacent wall for further support, then shuffles his other foot to join the first; gradually, his equilibrium settles. It's his first step alone in over a week— it feels like walking over a tightrope, limping forward with his center of gravity pushed out by the awkward weight of his maltreated wings— but that in itself reeks of triumph. There's an almost perverse pleasure in finally walking on his own— an exalted, ruinous tribute to his own free will. The grin that spreads across his face is fierce and toothy, unbidden, even as he forgoes the straightforward path to clutch at the wall instead, taking each mincing step with dutiful vigilance.

The door, when he reaches it, opens with a soft creak that nonetheless explodes in the tepid darkness. Grian freezes in place, ears straining for a single rustle, but— there’s nothing. Only the hushed snuffles of Pearl's familiar snores rolling out from beneath the hermits' door, undercut by the whispers of wind and mobs outside.

Slowly, the tension unwinds from his spine, and Grian resumes his gradual, unsteady shuffle forward.

Keeping his gait soft, however, is far more strenuous than anticipated. The deliberate lagging of his pace only does so much; every floorboard that groans beneath his weight is a firecracker, filling the silence with sparkles of incriminating noise. He sticks to the wall as close he can, digging fingernails into every crevice and anchoring himself there. The logs here in the hall, ironically, have a tighter fit to their construction— the hermits must have taken more time with it.

The thought gives him pause for a moment, past the breaths that tremble from his lips in soft, strained puffs. Xisuma and Tango had given him the clinical version, but he has to wonder what he’d missed, that first week when his body failed him. An absent curiosity lingers there, cobwebs of thought drifting through the breeze; was this where they had originally landed? What had they done first— who had organized them? Answers cradled between code chunks he could dredge up from the ground, if he wanted. And certainly, while the hodgepodge of materials making up this base suggests they’d gathered supplies quickly, the level of care in these walls gives the impression—

It doesn’t matter, he thinks firmly, and shakes his head with a sharp jerk to dispel the thought. He isn’t here to think about things like that; he has a job to do, and every second wasted is another second his plan hangs in the balance. Breath somewhat caught, Grian stutters forward, resuming his slow march toward the kitchen.

Time dribbles around him in a molasses slide, pouring down the side of an invisible hourglass. At some point during his nine month exile, he’d beaten an inexorable rhythm into his legs— a mindless and instinctive urge to move, keep moving, do not rest. Do not stop. He sinks into it now, a familiar tempo that’s easy to compress pain, cordon it off in his mind as his legs shake with the effort of drawing forward: one step, two; left, right; repeat. The air in his lungs rushes in, only to immediately heave its way back out, in a series of breathless gasps that border on the edge of a cough. They numb his brain and narrow his field of vision, until all that registers is the faint, watery gleam of starshine tumbling in through night-frosted windows.

The living room looks alien like this, stripped of warmth and limned in silver. The contours of the couch glint at him, a supple shine spreading across freshly tanned hide— an almost malignant transformation, burning hostile shapes into the otherwise innocuous gloom. Grian shivers, clawing at the wall to steady himself as his feet stumble past the threshold. Keep moving. His eyes lock on the cauldron at the far wall. Keep moving. His knees wobble— keep moving— threatening to collapse.

They give out just in time for Grian to catch himself on the cauldron's rim, fingers dipping briefly below the waterline as they scrabble for something solid. Hungry ripples spread out indiscriminately across its surface tension; Grian stares, wide-eyed, arms shaking, as his reflection shatters and distorts beneath the cut of a thousand shimmering shards of glass.

It’s been a long, long time since he’s looked in a mirror.

And with good reason. The Grian in the water gazes back at him with round, sunken eyes, noticeably pale even without the bleached light streaming in from the window. Cheeks hollow, neck so thin it scarcely supports his head… his chest heaves beneath a jumper that swallows him, extends wrists made of scarecrow-sticks out from its sleeves. Sick, nauseating fascination takes over: Grian's reflection reaches up with one hand to map a trail from jaw to jutting cheekbone, digging fingers into the raw edges— like a piglin's tusks, protruding rudely through the flimsy stretch of flesh draped over it.

By contrast, his hair lies limp and dirty over his forehead, clinging to the veneer of cool sweat he's kicked up just by walking this far. Ragged feathers swarm the outlines of his wings, curving behind his shoulders in a taut arc that screams of heavy neglect. The rush of shame that floods through him is thick as tar, and just as black, curdling in a tight ball that sits right underneath his sternum. Trembling with the exertion, Grian traces the jagged lines of his own silhouette with one helpless finger, white-knuckling the edge of the cauldron’s basin.

This Grian isn't just a stranger. This Grian is an aberration.

It’s almost a mercy when the strength to hold himself up drains right out of him. Grian sinks, slithering down cold iron to puddle in on himself against the floor. Every inch of him trembles— for a moment, all he can do is close his eyes and breathe, painful rasps that strike matches to his lungs. Ever an opportunist, the darkness presses in on all sides, bundling him tight enough to suffocate.

He can’t lie here forever, though. Blind, shaky, Grian paws at the floor until his fingers catch on the edge of a near imperceptible seam. It hovers a scant few centimeters above the rest of the boards— virtually invisible when masked by darkness— but the sensitive pads of his fingers make up for the lack. He scrabbles to pry it open, lifting it up inch by sightless, straining inch— until at last the trapdoor springs free, bouncing in the cradle of his unsteady palm.

His heart is a wild hammer slamming against the inside of his ribcage, throwing itself at the porcelain with sharp, relentless strikes; when he swallows, it’s thick, throat bobbing as he hefts the trapdoor in a cautious, creaking swing. Beneath it is the dim silhouette of a hole— lit from deeper within, only the barest scrape of light bounces off the cauldron beside him, throwing itself in muddy imprints over his face, chest, and arms.

A swell of unexpected giddiness sweeps over him as he gazes down at it— kindling at the base of his spine, fevered hiccups bubbling in his chest. Grian’s lips shiver up into a small, wry smile, ironic and satisfied. Like a kid stealing cookies from the jar, he thinks dryly, and peers down into his unlikely prize with lidded eyes.

The ladder leading into it is made of stiff rope, thick and fibrous. Grian's smile slides off his face as he contemplates it; it looks sturdy enough, and if it’s being regularly used by healthy Players, then it should easily hold his meager weight… but if he's being honest, that's not where his real concern lies. The reality, he thinks, lips twisting, is that there's a very real chance his watery, shivering legs won't be able to support him all the way down.

Or, more pressingly, when he has to pull himself back up.

A soft, subtle groan grinds out from somewhere deep within the base. Timbers settling, no doubt; the sullen rasp of wood scraping over itself as it shifts. But it lights up the base of Grian's skull like a firework flare, and the immediate spike of panic nearly sends him toppling forward into the storage room. He catches himself at the lip before his balance does more than skew— then darts a swift, wild glance over his shoulder at the jet-black imprint of the hallway's entrance.

Empty. Nothing more than a sooty rectangle, teeming with shadow.

Grian forces himself to turn away. The basement is a hazy beacon below him, flickering in time with the rapid tattoo of his heart. A fulgid lighthouse: both promise and warning, with the rope a tantalizing dangle in between.

Grian eyes it critically. The more he considers it, the more he’s certain climbing down is a bad plan. His limbs are too wobbly, his balance too strained; with his luck, he’d fall and crack his head, or end up with his legs tangled in the rungs. But— his gaze sharpens. The fall isn’t far, relatively speaking: five, maybe six feet at most. He’s dropped farther distances without incident. Cautiously, he flexes his wings; the muscles are tight, a few ticks too slow to respond, but they’re strong enough to sweep forward and curtain him on either side despite their frequent tremors.

Right. Plan B then.

Jaw tight, Grian scoots forward, dipping both legs into the opening below. For a moment, the suggestion of weightlessness is a lurch that crams his stomach all the way up into his throat. It’s an alien sensation— even before he’d gained wings, he’d never feared heights. Had welcomed them, even, with adrenaline bristling between his teeth and an itch crawling through his blood. Wings were the only real boon the Watchers ever gave him, and they readily twitch beside him now, shivering with the effort of supporting themselves.

“I’m losing my marbles,” he risks whispering to himself, rough and croaky. “Since when was I freaked out by a piddly little jump?”

Since I lost the strength to fly properly, he answers himself dryly, then takes a deep, soothing breath, lets it swirl in his lungs and settle his pulse. “Alright.” His lips firm, pressing into a thin line. Another bracing breath. “Count of three. One, two—”

In one fast, decisive motion, Grian tucks his wings and pushes himself into the hole.

He spreads them again the moment his shoulders clear the storage room's mouth, a movement so ingrained it’s been sanded smooth by both muscle memory and time. And for a moment, he is the mottled wings of victory itself, a hawk in mid flight— powerful, and dark, and polished as a netherite blade rasping from its sheath.

Then his left wing cramps, a flinching, starburst stab that contracts his flight muscles away from their full extension— and without warning, Grian’s entire world tilts dizzily on its own axis.

He has less than a second to brace before momentum spins him directly into the opposite wall.

Ribbons of lightning crack out from the arm of his wing as it slams against packed dirt, swallowing his yelp in an impact that rattles his entire chest. Grian chokes as the air punches from his lungs, crushing his left wing flat to his side— the scarlet ricochet of his skull against the wall twists the room into a sequence of manic, kaleidoscopic colours, and Grian plummets gracelessly to the waiting floor below.

He hits it with arms and uninjured wing extended, still clawing for the chance to right himself; all three buckle beneath the raw inertia of his tumble, spreading a deep, dark ache through abused muscles as his body buckles and collapses. The motion jars another bolt of electricity through his injured wing, mapping out the thin, needle points of snapped feathers and disarrayed plumage. Grian works his mouth in a soundless gasp, struggling to breathe past the black suddenly tunneling his vision.

It takes a small eternity to catch his breath again. Slowly, muscles shivering, he levers himself up— digs a trembling elbow into the ground, turns his numb gaze to the rest of the basement around him. It’s bare, as far as spaces go: thin and rectangular, walls carved from coarse dirt. A few patches of stone linger in one corner, craggy where they jut from the soil. At the back of the room hunches a lantern, warm light bobbing on top of a closed barrel; the candle inside scrawls shadows across the walls to dance in merry confusion.

But it’s along the right-hand side of the room that Grian focuses the bulk of his bleary attention.

Two rows of chests have been crammed together against the wall, some supported by sturdy shelves. They huddle close, squeezing into every available inch of space; their lids swarm in a sea of scintillating latches. The effect is hypnotizing— for a long moment, Grian tracks each reflective glitter with blank interest, flicking between sparkle and shadow. It’s only when the lantern gutters that a swift slice of clarity reminds him why he’s here.

His left wing flares in voltaic protest when he tries to shift. Grian hisses through his teeth, nails biting into the dirt beneath his palms; he waits until the cruel spark subsides to move again, a cautious, slow roll to his hands and knees that ignites a simmering burn in his back. That’s not a good sign, he thinks weakly, then promptly tucks the thought away into some distant, fuzzy corner of his mind. Adrenaline and natural stubbornness do the rest; Grian grits his teeth and pushes forward, ignoring the way one wing drags behind him as he crawls across the floor to the nearest chest.

It opens with a jagged creak that blooms in his ears like thunder. Grian shuts his eyes against it, bracing himself on the lid as he sways; another ice-pick bolt shudders through his wing in response. Just like the rest, he folds it away, sinks its message beneath a billowing fog so thick it muffles his thoughts, eases the world into blurry, rounded shapes. Then, lashes fluttering, he sets to work.

The first chest is, ironically, filled to the brim with nothing but discarded dirt— presumably from the basement itself. Grian shuts it with a sharp snap, throwing his gaze across the rest of the row with pinched brows. Mob drops, he needs mob drops, not— building materials. But the next few chests bring more of the same; rummaging through them yields nothing more than wood and leftover stone, blocks of coal and a few precious ores. “Come on,” he breathes as he moves steadily along the first row, lungs hitching, searching and discarding chest after chest. “Come on…. Come on….”

Frustrated lava pops burst to life under his skin, scattering through his hands and burying the razor pulse of his wing under a scalding surge of impatience. Of all the times for the hermits to have a chest monster, he thinks, lips curling over his gums in an ugly snarl. Once, the thought would have mingled with affection, a gentle and ironic rib against friends. Now, just like himself, it festers— a septic urgency that clots in his blood and shakes his hands where they rifle past leather boots; a dented chainmail helmet; a few spare bundles of wool….

Within the detritus his hand abruptly brushes glass. Grian wraps his fingers around it, jerking the item out from under its pile to reveal a jar, cool and smooth to the touch. A handful of dark, spherical objects rattle inside it, glinting darkly in the fitful light of the lantern. The shape of a strained, triumphant smile chisels itself from Grian's mouth; with a sharp twist, he opens the lid, and shakes out two poisonous spider eyes.

They land solid in the well of his palm, hefty, weighted like a nutshell. It’s a strange texture; Grian lifts them both to his own eye, stares at the solid, dusky masses with something akin to trepidation. Experimentally, he shakes it— and almost drops it entirely when something sloshes inside, a minute churn that shifts their gravity within his hold. Grian doesn’t swear, but it’s a near thing as a roll of nausea corkscrews through him. He’s never been one for brewing— his last brush with weakness potions notwithstanding— but this goes beyond a simple distaste: for a moment, every block of code in his body rebels, recoiling from the subtle death song of the liquid hiding within.

He shoves them into his pocket before he can think about it any longer, then caps the jar and sets it back within its nest of rubbish. Then, meticulously, he rearranges the other items on top of it as best he can.

The lid snaps shut with a quiet click that vibrates in his fingers. Grian sighs, sagging; victory is a rotten scab picked over, blood welling up from the cut. He’s not finished just yet.

Mushrooms. Sugar can be pilfered upstairs, where they’re no doubt storing the brewing stand, but with any luck, he’ll find some brown mushrooms down here as well. And perhaps a spare crafter, if only to make the fermenting process easier— anything helpful in an arms race where time is a vital essence.

He flinches his way to the final chest in its row, spine curved and wing blazing with each bump and jostle. This one's contents come up empty; Grian sits back on his heels, shaky and uncertain as he closes the lid again. Peers up at the other chests above him, squinting through the slow pulse of a headache beginning to bore at the side of his head. The basement is cool, but Grian shivers enough to rattle his teeth— he has to fight against the swelling, full-bodied urge to tuck his limbs and lie down, curl into the smallest feathered ball he can create and wait out the night. Fatigue drifts across his shoulders like flecks of snow, sagging them beneath their fresh-fallen weight.

Grian’s eyes slip shut as he kneads his forehead with the very tips of his fingers. Think. They're in a taiga. Surely there are mushrooms everywhere— surely someone would have managed to pick some up. They could be hidden right above his head, if he just had the strength to look. But even Grian is game enough to admit when he doesn't; not with the white fire slicing through his left wing every time it twitches, or the molasses pound in his head, or the way the candlelight claws piercing nails into his eyes. Victory and defeat come in turns, a push-and-pull cycle that's as routine to him as breathing; he begrudgingly sets this one aside, curving the fingers of one hand across his face to shield it from the light.

Would searching the rest of the chests even matter? Grian mulls it over in his head, thoughts tattered and muddy, fumbling to follow the track of it. Tango had told him they'd be going outside; all he really needs is a stolen moment from there. Some privacy to enjoy the morning, perhaps, and a place to sit near a patch of brown mushrooms.

Simple enough, really.

Relief is a cool wash running over his body, trickling down his spine and coalescing into a puddle at his feet. He has one-third of his prize; he can leave, sneak back with the proof of his progress, and lick his wounds in the relative comfort of his own bed. Rocking forward, Grian braces his hands on top of the closed chest, straining to push himself to his feet.

The hammer-strike of sizzling nerves against injured feathers collapses them before he can so much as stagger. Grian slaps a hand against the whine of pain that rushes to his lips, strangling it right between his teeth. Microscopic splinters snag on the ragged fibers of his jumper as he sinks back against the chest’s lid; Grian has to take a moment to catch his breath, lungs rasping, in and out, as the muscles in his thighs wobble and shake.

A prickle of panic begins to burble under his skin. Get up. He squares his shoulders, wills his legs to unfold and catch his weight beneath them; nothing but a lethargic twitch greets him in response. Both wings droop, every limb sullenly leaden— and with a horrified start, Grian jerks his gaze over to the rope ladder all the way across the room.

He doesn’t have to look at his code to know the pitiful energy reserves he’d gained just this morning have finally burned out.

He’s trapped. Again.

And this time in a snare of his own making. Like a deer bleeding out, Grian’s heart jolts, threatening to shake itself into a million hummingbird pieces. With frantic sweeps, he searches all four barren corners of the room for— something. Even he's not sure. All he knows is the numb buzz settling over his skin, a frostbitten slink through tangled veins that plummets the temperature of his blood; every sense firing in an overbright explosion of synapses; the fog in his brain churning in cold, relentless strikes.

He almost doesn't hear it. Almost.

But a creak, a groan from upstairs— outside— filters through the crawling static. Wood compressing beneath secondary weight; footsteps, followed by the soft click of a latch. The low whine of hinges swinging. Grian's stomach flips as the whole world freezes over, plunging him into an ocean of the sharpest, deadliest ice.

Eerie silence descends; the beat before a shot hawk sinks. The last breath of autumn before the scorching freeze. Grian doesn't so much as twitch when the snickt of the front door closing rebounds into the basement; someone shuffles above, careful motions that root him to the floor and suspend his breath. A paralyzing tension coils through him as the person upstairs turns, takes a step forward… and makes a muffled, consternated noise of surprise.

If possible, Grian's gut drops even further.

Mumbo.

Chapter Text

In the end, it’s the lantern that betrays him.

Its light spills out from the basement’s mouth, staining the walls in faint, ruddy streaks. He’d left the trapdoor open as an escape route— had assumed, ridiculously, that Mumbo was either already here, or was occupied with something far too fiddly to abandon any time soon. Clearly, he’d been wrong— the balloon of Mumbo's confusion leaves a tacky residue on the back of Grian's tongue, centered directly on that dim, emanating glow.

Distantly, his mouth wells with water; the hooks seethe from between his teeth, but they fumble in their hunt, stumbling over themselves with thick, disoriented motions before they can latch onto their target. Grian pins his eyes to the soil-crusted boards of the storage room’s ceiling, fighting back a wave of dizziness. If he's exceptionally lucky, Mumbo will assume the trapdoor was left open by accident, close it, and be on his way— none the wiser. If he's supremely unlucky, which is statistically far more likely for him—

He'll be caught red-handed.

There's nowhere to hide. The chests are packed together far too tightly, the lantern’s barrel is far too small to conceal his wings. Grian swallows against the twist of manic nausea that ricochets into his throat as the cautious tread of Mumbo's footsteps slink ever closer. Think. He rattles himself violently. Come on, you've been caught during pranks before—

— except this isn't a prank. What Mumbo is about to walk into is devastatingly real—

But Grian hasn’t honed his improvisation since he first Spawned in for nothing: the idea strikes him with the ceremony of a curtain peeling back, water parting for a rock in the stream. He scrabbles forward, biting back a hiss against the violent stab in his dragging wing, and opens the lid of the chest he'd stolen the spider eyes from. No time to mask the creak of the lid; he can only pray that Mumbo rounding the entrance to the basement disguises it. Then, clutching at the pair of leather boots he'd discarded as junk just minutes earlier, he arranges his expression into one of carefully shocked chagrin— just in time for Mumbo's wary head to pop through the mouth of the storage room.

His friend— or whatever strained, rope-frayed thing they count as now— startles so hard he bangs his head on the basement's ceiling. "Ow! Oh, oh my gosh!" The yelp echoes around them with catastrophic, ruthless abandon; Grian's cringe is an automatic flinch he can't quite abort, but Mumbo's too busy spluttering at him like an indignant cat to notice. "Grian?" he chokes out, rubbing at the back of his skull. "What are— what are you doing?"

Stay calm. Play it cool. "Hi," Grian offers lamely. "Um. I can explain?"

Mumbo gawps down at him some more, mouth working like a fish. "What— what? Explain how? What are you doing down here?"

The wince Grian graces him with is as calculated as it is artful. "Midnight snack?"

"In the basement?"

Grian winces harder. "... Midnight basement snack?"

Mumbo stares at him for a long, disconcerted moment, wide-eyed with the weight of his fluster. Then, abruptly, the expression dims— something shutters in the well of his pupils, closes off, and stiff, stony composure surfaces to replace it. His lips thin. Slowly, he withdraws his head; a series of little rustles from above are Grian's only warning before Mumbo's lanky legs begin clambering down the rope ladder. He drops to the ground with a muted thump, the sharp heels of his shoes kicking up a small cloud of dust in his wake, then turns to face Grian once more, unreadable save for the rattled tumult leaking into the air.

Grian doesn't have to fake the nervous way he draws back. "Look, I ca— I can explain. Really."

"I didn't even know you were up," Mumbo says, and despite his guarded tone, the words ring with an underlayer of true concern. It scours the roof of Grian's mouth in honeyed strokes, gumming up his throat and seeping between clenched teeth. His head pounds. "Or that— you could get up," Mumbo continues more hesitantly. "I-I thought… didn't Tango have to help you out, the other day?" A pause. "At least, that's what Scar told me, anyway."

It's Grian’s turn to stare through the ice pick buried in his skull, chest squeezing. It hadn't even occurred to him that Mumbo would be keeping tabs through the others; his absence had been a razor-edged cardboard cutout Grian had forced himself to turn away from, plug up with thick, woolen batting until it passed for whole. He'd assumed, by virtue, that Mumbo was keeping himself out of the loop. Apparently not.

"Grian, what are you doing down here?" Mumbo's eyes are unwholesomely sharp; his gaze darts from Grian, to the floor, and finally to the open chest in rapid, bouncing succession. The pale line of his lips twists under the mustache; Mumbo inhales, shoulders hitching— the clear precursor to a full interrogation.

"Boots," Grian blurts, and punctuates it by lifting them up on perfect cue.

Whatever Mumbo had been preparing to ask deflates in a glittery pop of pure bafflement. "Boots?" he repeats, and the force of his confusion snakes around the room, coiling in Grian's ribcage.

He swallows hard against it. "I wanted— boots. Um. I was looking for boots." Grian pointedly jangles them in his hands, tracking the bewildered bob of Mumbo's eyes. "And, well… I found them!" Despite his best efforts, his voice cracks on the last note, high and faulty.

"And why were you looking for boots?" Mumbo asks, voice climbing into the exact same unwieldy register.

Grian hesitates.

It's an unintentional giving of ground; he doesn't like lying. He especially doesn't like lying to Mumbo, who's watching him with a warring mixture of mystification and disjointed suspicion, brows furrowed and tying themselves together in knots. The longer Grian remains quiet, the stronger that suspicion grows— a tiny stone in the pit of both their stomachs, picking up speed as it trips down a mountain, threatening to trigger the avalanche.

So Grian does what he always does best— he deflects attention.

"Okay," he says, and draws it out, morphs it into a reluctant confession. Slumps his shoulders, pulse thumping clumsily in his tongue. "Look. Maybe I'm not— it's a little stupid, alright? Don’t make fun of me for this, but earlier Tango said something about going outside, and I…." He trails off with a meaningful glance at his bare feet, then lifts his eyes again, glancing just over Mumbo's shoulder with a sheepish baring of teeth. "Well, in case you haven’t noticed, I don't exactly have shoes."

"I-I— I mean yeah, okay. I can… definitely see that," Mumbo replies after a beat, a little off-kilter, but it works: some of the wariness clouding around them begins to clear, burning down into an ashen, sickly relief.

Grian keeps his gaze aimed at the back wall, the bitter pill in his chest overflowing with poison. It's better this way. A relieved Mumbo is a Mumbo protected against someone he can't save. Ignorance is his friend, his ally— because deep at the core of him, Grian knows none of the hermits see this problem the way he can. He alone remains the objective observer, following that bright, clear line all the way down to its inevitable conclusion. No one else is prepared to accept the mercy a quick death will bring him; only Grian is willing to embrace the razor glint of those sharp, obsidian teeth.

"Okay," Mumbo continues at last. "Okay, but that doesn't explain why you're down here at… whatever-it-is in the morning."

Grian parries the pseudo-question right back at him with the grace of a master fencer. "I think I could ask the same of you, Mister Jumbo."

"Me?" Mumbo blinks at him incredulously. "I've been out at the gold farm, I was tweaking the design— again— and— wait, did you even know we had a gold farm?"

The scoff that claws its way out of Grian's throat is as acrid as it is full of sarcasm, dripping venom from every bitten-off syllable. "You think anyone is telling me anything when they’ve got me all locked up in that nice, empty room?"

The basement descends into a sticky, sullen silence at that. In the wake of it, Grian falls empty, hollow, absent— the embers of his temper abruptly disintegrating in his hands. Without it, the memory of Mumbo's trembling, furious tenor from two days ago drifts up to the surface, billowing in his ears like ink, like blood in the water. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how hard he scrubs at the memory until it's rubbed bright and raw, its malignant stain on his mind lingers. He just can't wash it out.

When Mumbo speaks, his voice is softer, a low and concerned crest that layers over sharp ghosts. "Grian, why are you down here?"

Grian's flinch comes unbidden; beyond the starving tendrils still reaching out, the spikes stabbing deep into his head, and past the daggered blaze of his left wing— even through the background hum of Mumbo’s echoed ire— Mumbo sounds like— he sounds like—

Well… he sounds like a friend.

"Told you already; boots." Grian takes the opportunity to glance down, hide the inevitable twitch of his face as he reels himself in as tight as he can; he shifts the boots into his lap, playing absently with their leather laces through the rolling thunder of his migraine. His gut clenches as the words drop with all the viscosity of pitch. "For outside."

"And you couldn't have let anybody else get them for you?" Mumbo demands.

"Didn't want anyone else getting them," Grian snaps back. His voice is mulish, sulky, even to his own ears. "I'm not— I wanted to do it."

He shuts his mouth again, letting that simmer between them. Mumbo's back to staring at him; Grian can almost taste the slow gears turning in his head.

"Right." Mumbo's voice holds an odd cast to it— equal parts aggrieved and amused, fighting for which emotion he plans to tip forward into. "So, you've found your boots; now what?" He waves a hand at the rope ladder still swaying slowly behind him. One eyebrow arches— the unspoken question is clear.

Two high points of heat flare to life in Grian's cheeks. "Um…."

"You're stuck," Mumbo says, "aren't you."

"I'm not stuck!"

"You are absolutely stuck," Mumbo says, and this time it's with the hint of a smile, fragile and tugging at the corners of his lips. "You— I mean, you look pretty stuck to me, mate, that's all I'm saying. But if you're not, I can just, um— I can go, if you'd like? Leave you to it?"

Grian's jaw drops. "You'd just leave me down here?"

"If you're not stuck, then sure," Mumbo says, with an airy lightness that shimmers on Grian's tastebuds. He takes a single, deliberate step back; his cheeks twitch, eyes crinkling right at the corners. "It's like, past midnight, the sun's coming up— I've gotta get to bed, I've got beauty sleep to catch up on. You know how it is. So, I guess if you don't need my help, I'll just get g—"

"Wait, wait, wait!" Grian blurts out, and like an idiot, drops the boots in favor of launching himself forward.

His left wing seizes so abruptly that Grian's vision splotches with black, shrieking with the force of its protest. Every nerve ignites in a cacophonous blaze, tumbling him mid motion right back to the floor. Grian catches himself only by the grace of his hands, a tinnitus-whine spinning through his ears and blotting out everything else as his awareness narrows down to those hot, myriad points.

A hand materializes around his upper arm, latching on and squeezing hard. "Grian?" Mumbo's voice is a piercing blare through the haze, alarm spiking around them in sharp, coppery peaks. "Grian? What's wrong?"

Grian breathes in, thick. Holds it. Focuses on the rolling scorch in his lungs until he can't anymore; exhales in a massive gust only to suck another dazed breath back in. "I'm fine," he says, from somewhere very, very far away.

"This does not look fine!" Mumbo’s squeak carries just over the clamor in his ears. "You— what happened, did you— what did you do?"

Slowly, the blind smoke clouding his vision eases back, smudges out from over his eyes. Grian flicks his gaze up; Mumbo is hovering over him, pale as a sheet and just as fluttery. "Uh—" he manages, pasting on his brightest, most cheerful grimace, "maybe I could use a hand getting up, actually."

He's in too much pain for proper embarrassment, but it still whispers through him, a hot, muddy anguish boiling underneath his sternum. Grian shudders with his next breath, counting each second in between as he waits for the maelstrom to subside. But the world has compressed itself into a series of strident, turgid streaks, sound and sight and tendrils tangling— beyond Mumbo’s steadying grip, he can’t quite comprehend up from down.

As if on cue, Mumbo’s fingers release his upper arm, only to begin skating up and down in some shaky semblance of comfort. "Yeah, no kidding!” he frets. “Can you even stand right now?"

"Guess that depends on if you decide to help me," Grian grits out.

"Oh gosh." What little of Mumbo's face he can make out blanches in the dimming lamplight. "Yeah, that— that makes sense. Alright then, come on— let’s get you out of here."

Any lingering heat from Mumbo’s hours spent in the Nether have long since dissipated, but Grian imagines it coats his hand when he shifts to grasp it, drawing through his palm to gnaw at the ice crystallized in Grian’s veins. With meticulous care, he strangles the urge to jerk his hand away from it, from that protective warmth he doesn't deserve. "Thanks," he forces himself to mumble instead, gaze dropping to bounce against the hard dirt floor.

Mumbo's grip tightens on his for the briefest moment, a here-and-gone reaction Grian would be tempted to assume he'd imagined if the abrupt, stumbling falter in Mumbo's mood didn't match it. He doesn't comment, though— just slides his hand further up Grian's arm, clasping soot-stained fingers around the skinny, bird-like bones of his wrist. Then he plants his feet, firms his grip once more, and heaves.

For as skinny as Mumbo is, his frame holds lean, wiry muscle— he puts far more power behind the gesture than either of them anticipate, and Grian rockets up with enough momentum that he careens directly into Mumbo's face. The shift in gravity jolts him all the way down his spine, dragging white-hot claws through his injured wing as the muscles rattle; Grian has to clamp his jaw around the urge to scream.

He settles for breathing out in one dizzy, world-churning hiss. "Oh, goodness gracious me," Mumbo bleats, grabbing him by the shoulders before Grian's watery legs can collapse under him again. "Sorry, sorry, that was— um. Wow. When'd you get so skinny?"

It's said with the brittle humor of a rug stretching over saw-toothed dripstone, meshed across a ragged gap in the floorboards. A pit so caliginous it swallows all light, all hope— the gaping maw of reality preparing to bite down. Grian sucks in a fragile lungful of air, unable to respond; he's not sure what he would say even if he could. Some mindless reassurance? There is no reassurance here, no honest consolation. This is his truth, cold and ugly and oozing out from every pore: Grian is not something that can be saved. Grian is going to die.

In this moment, with the diaphanous threads of Mumbo's hope wrapping around his shoulders, he almost feels guilty about it.

His left wing is still drooping behind him, frozen at the halfway point between tucked and extended; his balance sways. Mumbo must sense the danger, because he moves almost too fast to follow— one hand shifts to loop around his waist, while the other anchors itself at Grian's wrist, preparing to draw his arm up and over Mumbo's shoulders. Ginger motions, meant to settle him at Grian's side, provide vital support. Except—

— in his left pocket lie the distinct, incriminating outline of two spider eyes.

"Not there!" Grian bursts before Mumbo can gravitate too close, then bites his lip, worrying at the skin in sharp, chagrined nips.

Mumbo freezes, an arrow of bright, raw panic arcing through the room. "Sorry?"

"I—" For one, crucial moment, Grian's brain stalls; he jogs it urgently, raking through any excuse he can think of. What he settles on, ironically, is the truth. "I— I fell. Um. On that side, when I… got down here. The wi— it's all a little tender."

Mumbo practically marinates in the beat of silence that follows. Thin wisps of disbelief and concern paint the inside of Grian's mouth, coalescing into sweet water; with a start, Grian reels into himself again, batting away at the instinctive urge to hunt it, rile it up into something he can feast on. The storage room threatens to spin from the answering groan of strain.

"You fell?"

"Well don't say it like that," Grian says, a little desperately.

"You didn't break anything, did you?"

"What? No! 'M just… sore, is all."

"Really," Mumbo says, finally stepping back. It’s just far enough for Grian to make out the flat line of his eyebrows; a rush of cool air fills the space Mumbo had just occupied, wringing a shiver out of him. "Because— okay, yeah, now that I’m actually looking at it— that wing of yours really isn't looking too good, dude. Do you want me to take a look at it?"

Grian stares at him, eyes watering; something dark and unseen is beginning to pry his skull apart like the shell of a nut, digging out gore and fatty tissue, spraying it in fine chunks across the ground. "What?"

An incredulous snort gusts from Mumbo's nose. "Your wing, Grian. You just said you fell on it."

“Oh,” Grian says blankly. A queasy undulation tilts through him, spreading out from the spear hammering ceaselessly into his skull. The tendrils in his mind shiver, once again unsure of their target. “No, it’s— it’s fine. I’m good. I’m all good.”

The thought of anyone putting hands on his wings right now infuses his lungs with fine ash. Grian chokes on it, another shiver wrenching through him, the abrupt retraction of adrenaline chattering against his teeth. No— there’s no point in forcing Mumbo to labor more than he already is; soon enough, it won’t even be a problem on the list.

“You’re sure.” Mumbo’s voice is flat, infused with doubt and a healthy dash of skepticism.

Grian’s sigh is a sour mist in the chill basement air. “Just help me get out of here, please.”

Whatever other comments Mumbo might be holding onto are visibly swallowed; he scoots around to Grian’s other side, lifting his right arm and muscling himself under the bulk of Grian’s dead weight. Together, they limp back to the rope ladder— a slow, torturous pace that fans through his half-extended wing with the savagery of a solar prominence. Realistically, they only have a few feet to cross— but within that jumbled morass of exertion, every mincing step takes its own small eternity.

By the time Mumbo halts in front of the ladder, Grian is already panting. "I might not have fully thought this through, actually," Mumbo says, tipping his head back to contemplate the ladder’s vertical pitch. “I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting here. Like yeah, yep. That’s a ladder. That’s a ladder, and you can barely walk.”

A slight, hysterical edge runs along the words; it fills Grian’s throat with bubbles, giddy and urgent as they cascade on the tail end of a humorless wheeze. "Yeah, I’m—” Pause; breathe. “I don't— I’m not sure how— we're going to do this, admittedly. You've— I’m kind of at a loss."

“I mean, I’ll tell you, this seemed like a good idea at the time.” Mumbo hesitates. "I could… maybe try lifting you up?"

Grian shakes his head, grasping for another lungful of air and falling just shy of it. "Can you even— reach that high—?"

"The reach isn't exactly the problem, G, it's your weight." Mumbo shifts restlessly beside him, tightening and loosening his grip on Grian’s wrist in absent, rhythmic waves. The effect is oddly soothing; Grian’s head dips forward, lolling toward his chest of its own accord. "Which, I'll be honest, is kind of the opposite of a problem— a-at least, in this situation. You are frighteningly small, right now."

Grian hums, an absent, tuneless noise that resonates inside his chest. It flickers and jolts, spreading through him with the same relentless vibration of a cat’s purr. “Thanks, I’ve— I’ve been trying to keep a trim figure.”

“W— now wait, no, no, do not misconstrue that,” Mumbo says, scandalized.

“Too late.”

“Grian.”

The fragile half-grin that had spun into existence melts from Grian’s face like snow in full sunlight. Much like with Scar, it’s almost too easy to fall back into the banter of before— when the ground beneath them stood firm, solid, stable. Unyielding. The staunch pillar of a lifelong friendship intact.

That pillar teeters now, beneath the weight of Grian’s lies and the axe lingering against his neck. A cracked and splintered slab— but still it beckons, breathes promises of the past in his ear. He can’t afford to lose himself in that. He can’t afford to let himself forget.

So he clamps his mouth shut, jaw tight and eyes steady, pinned on the rough fibers of the rope in front of him. The hush that descends in lieu of his response thrums with all the ceremonial silence of an unexpected stumble into bastion remnants.

A charged pause, stretching out over the horizon of Grian’s expected response. When nothing forthcomes, Mumbo huffs through his nose— a nettled, brittle noise. "Well, I hate to break it to you," he says eventually, "but I think this really might be our only option." Another pause, this one heavier, laden with unspoken censure. "Unless you want me to wake up the other hermits, and they can figure out how to get you out of here."

A spike of alarm pulses from Grian’s head to his hammering heart, coiling barbed wire around his lungs. “Absolutely not,” he chokes, with enough force that it cracks his voice, leaves him lightheaded and gasping. “Do not, under any circumstances, do that right now.”

Beneath him, Mumbo tenses. Just by a millimeter. Just enough for the sharp planes of his body to contract into new angles, a brief and tidal sway from Grian’s wobbling side. When he speaks, his voice is crisp, almost mechanical in its enunciation. “Yeah, we’ll see about that.”

For a moment, an arctic chill spills out from beneath Mumbo’s feet, flooding the basement and misting between Grian’s clenched jaws. Then, just as rapidly as it had appeared, it recedes; a lukewarm tempering, icemelt barred behind a hasty dam. "Alright, uh—” Mumbo says, much lighter again, “I guess I can just… toss you up? Can you catch the, uh, the top, without breaking your hands or something?"

A beat, as Grian flounders beneath the abrupt surge and retreat of Mumbo’s raised hackles. The hooks give lumbering chase, streams of water bleeding for the ocean; after a moment, the question registers, and Grian allows himself a snort. “I’m not that delicate.”

"I dunno, mate, it kinda seems like you really are," Mumbo replies, tone soaring high and faulty. "Like a— a china cup, or— something else, I don’t know. Stop being so fragile, Grian, it's really starting to freak me out."

"Sure, yeah, I'll get right on that." Sarcasm rolls off his tongue, dripping from his voice and pooling on the floor. Grian holds in a flinch by the very tips of his fingernails as Mumbo disentangles himself out from under him, only to crouch at calf-height and wrap both arms around Grian’s legs.

Back in those golden days on Hermitcraft— and even further than that, when a better Grian had monopolized Mumbo’s time— they’d sometimes carried each other for fun. Or, Grian had carried Mumbo, who tended to sink beneath the additional weight when their roles were reversed. Even half-starved, Grian had been stronger, and he'd delighted in it; had grabbed Mumbo and hefted him up at a moment’s notice, just to hear him squeak.

Scar, too, once they’d gotten to know each other better. It had developed into a language uniquely their own, a microcosm of Hermitcraft’s dogged hospitality, and for a time, that had been what happiness tasted like.

Then Grian’s control had slipped, the games had begun, and Grian started cringing back from once-welcomed touch. He hasn’t lifted— or been lifted by— a friend in a very, very long time. It shows in the way his spine draws itself up into one taut line, muscles tight enough to cramp. Unconsciously, Grian’s lungs flutter, sucking in a breathful of air only to brace and hold it.

“Right. Okay. If this goes wrong, it is not my fault, are we agreed?” Mumbo says.

“I’ll have my lawyers contact yours,” Grian replies, droll despite the breakneck drum of his heart.

“This is not inspiring my confidence.” And that’s his only warning before Mumbo hoists him into the air with all the force of a rocket taking flight.

The startled noise that tears from Grian’s throat explodes in the darkness; gravity retracts its talons, leaving nothing but the sick swoop of his stomach turning over itself as Mumbo’s arms boost him up toward the top of the ladder. He has just enough leverage for his head and shoulders to clear the basement’s entrance— his wings jerk back against his spine to make room, a gut-wrenching, flurried motion that ignites another wave of white-hot starbursts boiling out from his left-hand side. Grian chokes on it, clawing at the living room floor with his fingernails; underneath him, Mumbo repositions, contorting to provide his feet with an extra boost.

Wood digging into his stomach, Grian scrabbles forward and out, sucking in ragged breaths that swim through his head. Every inch of him is a charred wound, blackened and shriveled, sunken in on itself; collapsing is a matter of when, not if, and he does it gracelessly: limbs sprawled, wings limp, head beating a dull, hard thunk against the floor. After another small eternity, the groan of ropes stretching announces that Mumbo has crawled out to join him.

A soft, strained wheeze rings out in the tepid darkness. “So let’s hopefully agree to never do this again, please?” Mumbo’s voice catches. “This has been far too much excitement on my nerves tonight, let me tell you.”

“Sure,” Grian manages to rasp past the rolling tempest that’s replaced his lungs. He doesn’t bother lifting his head, not when the shadows dance like this; instead, he clamps his eyes shut to let them settle, curling in on himself as best he can without disturbing his injured wing.

Something thumps next to his nose. Grian’s eyes snap back open of their own accord— but without time to adjust to the moon’s thin light, all he can make out is an impenetrable wall of black. “What—?”

Dirt-crusted leather, an earthy tangle in his nose; it takes a second to parse the scent, but it’s the boots— the ones he’d dropped in the basement. Grian blinks at them, uncomprehending, then darts his gaze up to the best approximation of where Mumbo’s face might lie.

"Look, okay, you did go through a lot of trouble to get those," Mumbo stammers, and a wisp of air near Grian’s face informs him of his pointed gesture. "So I sort of thought— I mean, I-I-I know you said— well I wasn't just about to leave them."

A wave of unexpected heat wells in Grian’s eyes; abruptly, the careful veil of darkness is a blessing, concealing how his vision blurs, how his breaths shake with a new and quivering urgency. The vice around his lungs tightens, cinches shut, and Grian counts backward from ten, until the burn forces him into another shaky exhale. “Thanks,” Grian chokes out, more pathetically than he likes.

Mumbo remains silent for just a moment too long, unreadable despite the soft slink of discomfort running along the floorboards. Grian snatches the hooks back before they can sink in too deep. "We should— probably get you back in bed," Mumbo says finally, stumbling across the falter.

Grian doesn’t bother fighting— why would he? He’s stolen what he came here for, and every inch of him has been pounded into the dirt for it, a pyrrhic victory at its finest. He really does feel like he’s gone ten rounds with a ravager; the very concept of bed, of rest, is such an ephemeral longing that it sobs out from the core of him, a translucent wail that rings through every shuddering block of code in his body.

With surreptitious motions, he brushes the pads of his fingers against the lump still lying in his left pocket. The spider eyes remain nestled where he’d shoved them, solid and— thankfully— still intact. His hand drifts back, slow and gentle. No sense in carelessness now— his vision has finally adjusted to the muzzy illumination still founting in from the window, and Mumbo in particular has always had sharp eyes.

“Think you can stand?” Mumbo asks after a beat, and the taut coil of uncertainty in Grian’s chest eases.

“Think I’m gonna have to try, regardless,” Grian tells him, and when Mumbo reaches down, he accepts the soft-edged silhouette of his hand.

Their journey back to his bedroom takes on the pace of a crawl, a creaking stumble against deadened weight as they steadily limp forward. By the time they step through Grian’s door, Mumbo is supporting all but a fraction of it; Grian’s breath is too busy sawing in and out to register much more than the vicious tremble of his lungs. Spine shaking, heart a rapid tattoo in his clammy palms, Grian drags himself forward, step by step, under Mumbo’s guidance— until at last his knees collide with the bedframe, and with an unceremonious tumble, Grian collapses into the mattress.

He lands in a tangle of uncoordinated limbs; a bolt of white, hot fire sears through his wing in response, echoed in the needle-jab of a migraine behind his eyes. Acid chewing through his nerves, a bonfire surging in his veins— the world is devoured by a thin, ringing whine, and for one long, uncountable moment, Grian’s existence is a narrow suspension in between them.

After a moment, it begins to dissipate; Grian breathes in deep, sucking lungfuls of air with the greed of a drowning man. The pyre he burns on glows righteous, reverent— Scar may have won their first battle, but Grian is well on his way to winning the war.

"What was that about not being fragile?" Mumbo’s voice is muffled, as if he’s asking from a great distance.

Buried within the unkempt nest of his jumbled limbs, Grian lifts one hand to offer Mumbo a violently trembling thumbs up.

"I don't thi— that’s not a response, Grian," Mumbo objects faintly. When Grian finally cracks open an eye, it’s to Mumbo hovering fitfully near the center of the room, fingers worming together to form a fluttery, indecisive cat’s-cradle.

The boots, Grian notes, have been deposited right in front of the empty chest. He lets his head loll back again, corralling his lungs into something resembling a coherent response. “What are you talking about? That’s— that’s totally a response— you’re acting like you’ve never seen a thumbs up before.”

“Grian,” Mumbo says, and it’s jagged around the edges, a note of strain weaving through the syllables. A flash of tight frustration strikes flint and steel against the air, sparking under his tongue; once again, his mouth waters, but the exhaustion draping over him is an all-consuming tide, a torrent of lead-lined gravity dragging his limbs down into the mattress. He couldn’t feed right now even if he wanted to try.

Abruptly, Mumbo straightens from his nervous slouch, fingers clenching in place before rising to fiddle with his tie. One meticulously-trimmed nail traces its edge, mapping a spiderweb of ridges and valleys across the fabric. “Um, so, I dunno if you noticed earlier,” he rushes out, “but, today— yesterday? Is it yesterday, now?” He shakes himself before Grian can reply. “Actually, no, that’s— that sentence doesn’t make any sense. And that’s not even the point! The, er, the point is, I… I wanted to talk to you. And, well, I tried. I did try. But, well….”

His voice trails off, and in its place wells the brutal bite of unvarnished hurt, a wound still dribbling. It hangs around his shoulders like the scarlet spool of a war banner: tattered, flying, a virulent warning to any who might draw too near. Grian swallows it with heavy, bitter motions— the knot drowns slowly in his esophagus, clumped with bone shards and ash, blocking his access to air. Nobody should have to endure the raw, naked bereavement scrawled across Mumbo’s face, pinching his brows and tightening the skin around his eyes. You’ll get a headache if you keep on like that, the ghost of another Grian in another life breathes, and the Grian of today opens his mouth before he can even register the movement.

“I was… asleep earlier,” he lies. “Um. I-I don’t think I heard you, actually. Sorry.”

The words peel from his tongue in taffy stretches, swollen and distended. Obvious. He’s never been an effective liar, not directly, and it shows in the bald crack in his voice, the flinching pauses as he haltingly tunes the truth into something more palatable. But Mumbo….

Mumbo stops. The flow of distress falters, ebbs back a few paces as he sways on his heels. “Oh.” It’s said on a tremulous exhale, catching just so in the middle. “Oh. Alright then. That—” and then, like the morning sun rising, he offers Grian a fragile smile— “yeah, that makes sense.”

The war banner lifts, mollified. The wound begins to scab. Just like that, Mumbo casts the frayed edges of his trust onto the pyre of Grian’s lies, and doesn’t bother to watch it disintegrate.

The twist of his stomach is sick.

Grian plasters his own false smile over it, burying the nausea deep in his belly with a cheap imitation of Scar’s salesman smile. “So… what did you want to talk about?”

Mumbo’s shoulders slump. It takes another skin-buzzing moment before he sighs, posture fully uncoiling, and strides back over to the chair where it hovers against the nearby wall. He drags it closer, heedless of the high-pitched scrape of wood on wood, and when he falls into it, it’s with the moldered relief of a puppet’s cut strings.

“I don’t want you to get me wrong,” Mumbo starts, and twists the tip of his tie between shaky fingers.

Grian’s stomach takes a rapid swan dive back toward the basement.

“I don’t— please, please do not misunderstand me here, okay? I just… I wanted to—”

He cuts himself off, and that icy coil of dread continues to spiral around the base of Grian’s spine. Some thin, wispy part of his soul detaches, walls itself off behind a pane of solid glass— until the tips of his fingers numb, and wool blots out everything untouched by the rising static. Disconnected, he floats, and awaits whatever will come from Mumbo’s judgement.

"Look— I-I'm sorry."

For a moment, the words don’t sink in. Then Grian blinks. "Sorry…?"

“Yeah. For, um, shouting at you. When you woke up.” Mumbo’s eyes dart to the tops of his gleaming shoes, then fix there, staring doggedly as if willpower alone will scuff out whatever marrs their shine. Teeth worrying at his bottom lip, he tilts his head, scraping right past Grian’s eyes to aim for the ceiling as a reluctant shimmer of guilt unfurls in the air around them, delicate as the membrane of allay’s wings. “Don’t get me wrong!” he tells it. “Do not get me wrong, I am still so, so angry about this, dude, and— and worried, and— look, my two braincells can barely handle things as it is!" A self-deprecating laugh. Mumbo blows out a long breath as it trails off into silence, then lowers his chin, and finally, finally, meets Grian head on. His eyes shine, dark and earnest, in the paltry luminescence. “But that wasn’t very fair to you,” he admits, quiet. “And it didn’t exactly help anything, either. So— I’m sorry. I am very, very sorry for shouting, and I’ll try not to do it again. That’s a— a Mumbo guarantee, right there, so, um. Yeah!"

He punctuates it with a wry, apologetic smile that tilts all the way up into his mustache. Grian’s chest cinches, biting his lungs until they squeeze.

When was the last time Mumbo properly smiled at him? A true smile, not one tinged with these rueful traces; it’s been so long, the memories have begun to decay. Abruptly, Grian wants to cup them in his palms, stall their quicksilver seepage out from between his fingers. To draught from them like cold mountain water, to catch those fatal curls of smoke in his chest— he wants, so utterly and with such unyielding, yawning desolation, that which he knows he can never partake of again.

And this, the sawed-off twist of Mumbo’s tremulous lips: he can’t bear to let even this miniscule offering disappear. Already, the seconds tick by— Mumbo’s expression slips, twisting under the knife of his own boiling uncertainty.

Grian wets his lips, forcing air through his lungs and out his throat in a croaking rasp. “It’s—” His voice cracks too harsh to make out, so he clears it, hunting for the silhouette of whatever will grant Mumbo the clemency he doesn’t truly need. Because in the end, it all comes down to Grian. It always has. “That’s— fine. Um, you’re all good. I understand.”

Mumbo stares at him for what could be both eons and the quarter of a heartbeat, before every inch of him goes boneless in his seat. “Oh, oh thank goodness,” he laughs, the snowmelt of his relief sparkling throughout the dark room. It chills Grian down to his very bones, permafrost digging into marrow. “I’m so— oh, gosh, I'm glad that's over. You would not believe how hard that was to get out."

"I can imagine," Grian says, on pure autopilot.

"I mean, I've been thinking about it since yesterday, and let me tell you, I was so stressed. Scar even said—"

"Can we not talk about Scar right now," Grian blurts without thinking.

It pulls Mumbo up short. “Oh,” he says, clearly startled. An uncomfortable pall coalesces over them, sinking down in spiderwebbed veins across the lines of Mumbo’s face. “Oh, yeah, sure. Sorry, um— I, I guess I— yeah. Yeah… we can do that. Whatever, um, boats your goat. Float. What was the saying again?”

“Floats your boat,” Grian replies, strained.

“Right. Yeah. That one— although honestly, I think I like the goats one better.”

“Yeah, yeah, that was pretty good.” They both lapse back into thick, molasses silence. Grian takes the opportunity to disentangle himself, easing his way into a position marginally more comfortable, and slides his absent gaze along the wall. There’s a symmetry to it, in skittering across these moon-ridden boards, catching cobwebs in the faint gleam of false dawn. Witching hour has come and passed, and Grian settles in its absence, curling up through the needling twinges of his left wing, with a prize too cruel for words burning in his pocket.

Without warning, Mumbo leans forward, the heels of his shoes skating backward into the chair with a thunk. “You— you do get that, right?” he asks, baldly earnest. “That I’m just worried? I mean, this—” He falters. Spreads out both hands to encompass everything lying in front of him: the urgent conductor to a dying orchestra. “This isn’t you,” he finishes, and Grian reels beneath the fervent weight of his belief.

Because… it is. This is Grian, in all his splendid glory: a hideous gap in the fabric of the universe; a cold, bloated corpse still bleeding; a knife in the hands of murderers. Cut from a cloth woven of destruction, fear… Mumbo, with all this hapless hope, basks in the memory of nothing more than a tapestry of deceit.

What’s one more to add to the blackened tally?

Grian is no true liar, but for this, he draws on Scar— a memory drenched in gold, in heat and blistering sand. The irony is not lost on him; each word falls cautiously shaped, burbling from his lips like a silver spring, though they lack Scar’s polish. But he tries. For Mumbo, he tries.

“I know. And I— I’m getting better, I promise. Or— I’m trying. I swear to you, Mumbo, I’m really trying.” He pauses. Draws for ragged breath. Beneath his sternum, his heart hammers, beats out a hummingbird pulse in his teeth. “And… for what it’s worth… I’m sorry too. About… about freaking you out.”

Mumbo remains silent for a long, indecipherable moment. “That’s a mild way of putting it,” he says at last, but flickers of wry humor lick the edges. His mouth quirks up at the corners; when Grian risks a glance at his eyes, they’ve softened, shining dark and liquid in the dappled moonlight. “But— good.” It slips out like a prayer, hushed and reverent. "That's— that's really good, mate, that's— I'm glad you're getting better. That's really, really good to hear."

Fine tremors run along Grian’s tendons; he clasps his hands around his wrists to still them, digging the edge of one bitten fingernail into the skin there. “I am, yeah. Um— Tango said, uh, he mentioned the health potions to you, right?”

“He did, actually, yeah. That’s what I was out there in the Nether for.” Mumbo blows out a long, misting breath. Sinks lower in his chair. “The, uh, gold farm… it’s to make glistering melons.”

Oh.

“Has anybody ever told you you’re a really good friend?” Grian asks past the cocoon of numb static slowly enveloping him. Colour bleeds from the world in thick, trickling streams, worming out of his vision until he’s left with nothing but the hollow gossamer of moth-eaten lace.

Mumbo, however, brightens. “Oh, well, I mean— I try. Nice to be recognized once in a while, though. It’s—”

A careful beat of silence. With hesitant motions, Mumbo reaches out across the gap and claps a hand over Grian’s shoulder, radiating muzzy warmth. “It’s good to have you back, G,” he murmurs, so heartfelt it burrows between his ribs. Mumbo pats his shoulder one more time before finally drawing back and away, weight shifting, the glass shards of his relief pinpricking the floor.

He’s climbing to his feet when Grian locates his tongue again. “Hey, Mumbo—” he starts, then dithers, floundering against the prospect of a night too frozen to endure without staunch company. It takes a moment to catch his teeth on the edge of a topic that will bring him back down into Grian’s orbit— one last time. “Tell me about it?”

Mumbo blinks, already halfway out of his chair. “About— what?”

“About the— um, the redstone?” Grian’s voice gutters abruptly. He swallows, tight; clears it. Nearly gags on his own thick tongue. “Talk to me about the gold farm,” he rasps finally. “I wanna know how it works.”

Mumbo’s surprise is a honeyed tingle along his tongue, prodding at the roof of his mouth. And there— there it is. That smile Grian had forgotten; a smile brimming with chocolate warmth and abashed, embarrassed delight. The subtle twitch of his mustache. The crinkles spreading out from beneath his eyes. Mumbo sinks back into his chair as if gravity itself has speared him to it, and says, "Oh! Oh, yeah, sure. I can do that, totally.” He settles back, clearing his throat and crossing one leg over the other, all the time in the world at their leisure. “So, it's actually quite simple, I started with…."

The technical rush washes over him, a stream of information running river stones clean. Grian lets his head drop, pillowing against his shoulder and drinking every detail the moon will grant him as Mumbo gesticulates, growing more and more animated with each component he lays out.

Tomorrow. It’s a frayed, solemn thought, one that drapes over his shoulders with downy reassurance. Tomorrow, when everyone is asleep— then, he can rest. He can make that final step, repair those countless pillars he’d so callously broke…. He’ll need to say goodbyes. They deserve that much— for him to swallow his pride, to part from everyone somewhat closer as friends again. Deep in the depths of his mind, Grian plucks at the notes of silken words, and begins arranging them into one final, repentant rhapsody.

Whenever Mumbo’s eyes catch his own, Grian gifts him a tentative, fragile smile, and pretends the heavy press of spider eyes in his pocket belongs to someone else.

Chapter Text

It’s only as dawn begins its dove-soft advent on the horizon that Mumbo’s voice halts in its tracks.

There’s no taper, no sleep-heavy stumble of a warning; Grian, teetering on the barest knife’s edge of a proper doze, jolts back to full awareness within a heartbeat. Mumbo’s precise, meticulous cadence had been a balloon, swelling up to satiate the room with nostalgia; without it, everything— from the ill-fitting planks in the walls, to the thinning shadows scurrying over themselves across the floor— shrinks back in, creeping forward until the very air threatens to suffocate him. When Grian finally musters the energy to glance up, Mumbo’s eyes pin him right back down to the mattress, brows arched and leaping for the summit of his hairline.

“What?” Grian rasps after a moment, dragging his head back from the tender pillow of his shoulder. Pins and needles explode from the ball-joint; Grian bites back a hiss as his blood resumes flowing, jittering with each sluggish pulse through his veins.

The corners of Mumbo’s lips curve down by a fraction. “Dude, this is like, the fifth time you’ve yawned in a row. Why aren’t you asleep, I’ve been—” and the chuckle that escapes his throat bubbles up like cool water from a fresh spring, saturated in good-natured chagrin— “I’ve literally been trying to bore you to sleep right now, this entire time!”

Grian blinks rapidly; a lingering fuzz has painted itself in thick streaks across his vision, blurring details the longer he fights to keep them in focus. The effort of propping himself up is enormous, but Grian gives it his most valiant try; shuffles each loose, heavy limb until they fall into some semblance of order; flinches, as a wave of violent protest spasms down the left arm of his wing in response. Elbow digging into the mattress, right arm braced underneath his ribs, Grian heaves himself up by a few meager inches— and immediately rewards himself with the white-hot sear of a migraine swelling back into his temples.

He contorts his wince into the practiced lines of indignation just in time. “Wh— hang on, no, but I wanted to listen!” he squawks; the sound reverberates, tattooing itself to the inside of his ears in harsh, jagged beats. “I asked you to— you were talking! I wasn’t just going to fall asleep.”

“Grian.” Mumbo’s voice breaks on both sigh and reproachful laugh, a caramel curl of fondness that tumbles to the floor before scrabbling up the side of his bed. It draws itself in hasty circles around Grian’s chest, then settles, curling in the shape of a warm noose cinched tight around his heart. “Grian, bud— I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t even be awake right now; I mean, I’ve kept you up for long enough as it is. Don’t tell me you— look, we both know you’re exhausted—”

“Exhausted? Who’s exhausted?” Grian infuses each syllable with as much dry humor as he can; it wavers as his elbow threatens to buckle. “Now that doesn’t sound like me at all.”

Mumbo’s snort is an indelicate thing, punching the air in one sharp burst. “Oh, yeah, ‘course not. Silly me— now why would I think a thing like that?”

It’s spoken without bite, but embedded deep within the syllables is a razor-thin wire, stretched taut and ready to snap. Despite the midnight hours of their hushed reacquaintance, fault lines still linger in between them, corrupting the very foundation Grian rests on with fresh, conciliated cracks. One wrong move and the entire base might quake itself apart— collapse in a bone-rending shatter of dust and debris, rubble and wreckage, and, inevitably, take the last crumbling scraps of Mumbo’s friendship right with it.

When Grian swallows, it goes down heavy, thick— oily. Unctuous at the back of his throat. He wouldn’t survive bearing witness to that a second time. He won’t.

Mumbo is still speaking. “—vermind that you can hardly walk, ‘cause that’s definitely normal—”

A hiss tears past Grian’s lips before he can cage it back in, bar it shut behind clenched teeth. “Ouch. Bit of a low blow, Mumbo,” he murmurs.

The shadows still coiling in the corners of his room shift again, retreating high above the crossbeams as the sky sweeps forward, pressing matte, steely blue over every inch of Mumbo’s face. His answering laugh falls just this side of frenetic, hitching and helpless, shrilling in the middle. “But it’s true!” he giggles breathlessly. “It— it’s totally true! You are— I dunno how to say this, mate, but y— you are kind of a mess right now.”

As if that isn’t common knowledge, churning like smoke in the gutters of this room. As if the sweet, honeyed remnants of Mumbo’s apprehension don’t still tug at his teeth, cloying the inside of his mouth; as if the mere act of swallowing won’t tear wide the depthless gorge of his trembling stomach. As if the very house of cards damming up his self-control are made from nothing more than spun-sugar and glass.

Grian draws his lips back into the blank, hollow impression of a smile. “Guess you’ve got me there.”

If Mumbo notices the insincerity, he makes no comment on it; his eyes are wells carrying an equal amount of distance, a glossy stare that gradually eases his hand up to the bridge of his nose. He rubs it up and down with halting, spastic motions. “Look, okay,” he says finally, after a long beat of dredged silence. “I’ll be honest. I’m not exactly, uh— I mean, I’m ki—” a sharp inhale— “I’m… not really doing much better? Um. I mean, I haven’t slept either, not since yesterday.” Another pause, longer than the last; Grian counts the ticks between words with straining lungs and bated breath, heart clenching. Conversely, Mumbo sucks one in; a careful brace. “So… I should… probably get going?”

Despite their burgeoning strength, the wafer-thin rays filtering past his curtains give way to a flinch, a brief roll of darkness. Ice curls in Grian’s gut. “Do— do you have to?” he asks before he can stop himself, and each word lands as a pathetic flop in between them.

Mumbo’s lips purse; his fingers pause in their oscillations, then slide to a rest against the ridgeline of his brow, scrawling wary lines into the flesh. “I mean… yeah, bud,” he says, “I really think I do. I’ve still got all this gold to drop off, clogging up my inventory— which I didn’t do, by the way, because you decided you wanted to be adventurous—”

He breaks off abruptly, but that mercurial core of bright, bubbling fear within his mild tone has already pressed itself against Grian’s mouth, seeping in to coat his tongue with a glacial fizz. The clawed end of a hammer begins methodically prying behind his eyes; Grian winces, drags himself back by the scruff before he can attempt to drink it in. Belatedly, he drapes the motion with a thin veneer of sheepishness— pretenses are pretenses, after all. “Sorry.”

A half-beat: Mumbo’s voice stumbles over itself, tongue fumbling as the hand at his brow detaches, fluttering through the air. “Look, not a big deal— I mean, okay, I don’t— maybe don’t go wandering off again, in the middle of the night?” Another pause; Mumbo sucks in a deep, slow breath, then points one unerring finger right at the center of Grian’s chest. “The point is,” he says firmly, “you need rest, I need rest, and I also need to— to get those healing potions started up for you. So we can finally get you feeling….”

Caution lies in the sweep of his gaze, a steady, acidic froth pushing at Grian’s patience. He holds back by the tips of his fingernails, clawing for purchase against the hooks coiling their way toward steady water.

“... Better,” Mumbo finishes, one precise beat after the silence stretches past the event horizon of distinctly uncomfortable.

The ice flow in his stomach stills, burnishes into a mirror; it catches the word and refracts it, shatters the syllables until they begin to mangle, shuddering back to composite parts. Better. Better. Bet-ter. A fitful echo ricocheting out from the very core of him, filtered through Mumbo’s voice and rapidly losing all shape and meaning as it distorts.

What is the definition of better? For years, Grian had balanced that word between precarious teeth, digging porcelain into the vowels and stripping it down to consonant bone. Better was an atonement. Better was an easing— the simple act of lining the pockets of his hunger with scraps: a laugh here, a sigh there, the faded remnants of a song. Better had been unearthed, tremulously, through the bright, shimmering brim of his friends’ mischievous dreams… until Grian had spat it all for ashes. Before he’d trampled the truth of it bare, gleaming, an ugly scatter of enamel in the mud— and where it had breathed to him, soft and inexorable as sand falling out from the hourglass: there is nothing left for you here.

Better had been less than a lie. Better had been a pipe dream.

Grian clenches his jaw, and once again catches it between his molars, grinding it down until it lays as dust across his tongue. Each lie costs him, a point of bubbling, bloody friction for the matchbox that forms the roof of his mouth— but he can keep what comes out of it clean. Simple. Palatable. “Right,” he says, and holds all waver of incrimination at bay, until only the thinnest sheet of his own resignation glosses along its surface, like frost hovering over the deep, still waters of a lake.

If he could freeze any snapshot in silver, it would be this one— where the first true rays of the sun plummet from window to scuffed, hardwood floor, carving through negative space to strike colour into the tanned hide of Mumbo’s shoe tip. Where the arctic chill of night begins to soften, make way for a glimmer of tentative warmth; the exact moment when watery amber begins to drizzle through the trees, pooling at the back of Grian’s neck to soothe its impending cramp. This, he would develop, preserve, and trap forever in the confines of this cheap wooden cage. Here, they could simply talk; Mumbo in his chair, Grian a splayed corpse on the bed, and the advent of morning a blanket, smothering all the gaps in between.

But no matter how comely, a cage is still a cage— and this time, Grian has found his gap in the fence, has a leg he’s prepared to gnaw on. Sometimes, he knows, letting go is the kinder option; sometimes, in order to be released, you have to let go first.

So Grian clears his throat with a harsh jog, unwinds his fingers from where they’d unconsciously dug into the thread-worn fabric of his trousers, and says: “So… this is goodnight, then.”

When Mumbo laughs, it’s a quiet, fragile sound, a crystalline fracture through the growing silence. “Well don’t make it sound so— so morbid, jeez, Grian.” One long finger taps at the edge of his knee, curling and uncurling as he fidgets; as the sun steadily climbs, the room grows deeper, bleeding detail into the lines of Mumbo’s face. Revealing the soft, lavender bruises that ring the skin beneath his eyes. “I dunno if you can even count this as night anymore, to be quite honest with you,” he says at last, “but, uh… yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.” The quicksilver flash of a smile tilts across his lips. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Oh, yeah, of course.” Grian matches him ghost for ghost, the corner of his mouth wisping up by a single degree. Around his heart the noose tightens further, strangling his ventricles until their already tepid beat dims, giving way to a cold, muted pulse. “Well, this was… pretty nice, actually. Catching up. Hearing you try to bore me to d— uh, tears. Which didn’t work, by the way, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Oh, no, I— I-I— okay, well I almost got you, you can at least admit that much.”

Grian’s lips twitch higher, inching into a rueful flash of teeth. “I think you’ll find that I don’t gotta admit to nothin’.”

“Sure, sure, then I guess I’ll just have to ignore how you were starting to snore.” Heavy irony slinks from Mumbo’s mouth, puddling along the contours of each miniscule crevice in the floor. A lush, gamey tingle creeps over Grian’s tongue in response; it teases the muscles of his jaw, begs itself as morsels. But— there is a threshold to what Grian can latch onto, and the hummingbird meter of Mumbo’s mind has already relaxed, settling into a familiar lassitude brought on by little sleep. With the slow, gentle sway of a toppling tree, Grian sinks back into the mattress; his fingers spasm as the bones in his injured wing grind, setting off firecrackers through the distal map of his nerves.

His reflexive, daggered breath is drowned out by the sharp squeal of Mumbo’s chair scraping back. “Well, clearly I’ll just have to try harder next time, I guess,” he continues, and slaps a hand against his knee, fingers digging into the stiff fabric of his slacks. Mumbo rises without fanfare or ceremony, in stilted motions that tap against the sullen, mismatched wood beneath him. The chair is harried back along the wall; Grian’s leather boots are snatched and deposited well within arm’s reach. Mumbo swipes a hand over his brow, smearing a sooty line from forehead to temple, then turns to regard Grian once more, eyes deep and liquid-soft in the begetting sunlight. “Goodnight, Grian,” he says, after a short, stuttered moment— it drifts between them with the cadence of a feather, downily sinking. “I’ll, um— talk to you in the morning? Or, er— I mean. Well, it’s already— look, I’ll see you sometime later, how’s that?”

And Grian—

— breathes. In through his nose, out through his mouth: a controlled billow that draws his lungs tight, crowds the corridor of his throat with their swelling until his vocal chords threaten to snap. Later is the rope by which he hangs, limp and listless as a bird caught in the jaws of a wolf; every raw, bleeding farewell that springs forth to his lips hinges on it, on later as a promise, a vow, an assurance that never again will he bring ruin to the doorsteps of those he once called friends.

It does not— cannot— allot for Mumbo. This paltry gift, a one-sided conversation spanning the most frugal hours of the night, is the level best he can do.

Grian drags in another rattling inhale, dips his gaze to the floor, and croaks: “Sounds like a plan to me.”

A starburst bloom of warmth perfuses the air in response, burnt-sugar-cinnamon that blisters the roof of Grian’s mouth. He doesn’t bother glancing back up; the contours of Mumbo’s grin, the crinkle of his nose as his mustache quirks, have long been etched into his mind. Instead, he tucks his head in like a child, ignoring the burning strain of taut tendons pulling at his neck, and tracks the soft, staccato footsteps consuming the distance between Grian’s bed and the door.

A reedy creak; the knob whines as it turns, easing the door open on shivering hinges. For one breathless, ephemeral moment, Mumbo does not cross that lightless threshold.

Then, with a hushed click of the latch, he’s gone.

In his wake the room greys out, desaturates— even the light from his window spills with newfound hesitance, advancing on furtive cat’s-paws across the floor. A gelid chill sinks its teeth into his bones and down to marrow, racking his frame with uncontrollable shivers; each surge jars his wing with more force than the last, stoking it into an electric conflagration that threatens to shred him down to his very last line of code. It takes far too long to pull together the strength he needs to raise his head once more; when he finally lifts his neck, spots of black have begun to swarm at the edges of his vision.

Grian shakes them away with dizzied, impatient motions, shuddering as the room begins to spin. Without a distraction, the throbbing in his skull redoubles, brands his temples with white-hot iron. But he can’t risk motion— not yet. Breaths shallowing, ears straining, body tense as a livewire, Grian waits as Mumbo’s footsteps peter out from across the hall, punctuated only by the quiet squeal of another door falling shut.

A long beat of silence.

The air rushes out from his lungs in one, heaving burst, so violent it explodes in a coalescence of mist that scatters mere moments after it forms. Without permission, Grian’s muscles unwind, cutting their tension off at the roots; spine relaxing, shoulders clicking, a heady slump that scours the weight right out of him. Drawing himself back up is a challenge illustrated in shaking arms and tremulous legs, a precarious and flinching twist to bury his knee deep within the mattress. With mincing motions, Grian settles himself at the edge of the bed, legs dangling as he hunches over his own washboard ribs— elbows to knees to bent, skinny wrists, like the shadow of a wraith draped in tatters of its own rotting flesh.

The spider eyes gleam when he dares dig them out from his pocket, poisonous oil-spills that wreath their glossy surface in sick, wavering rainbows. His skin buzzes at the contact; they lay in the meat of his palm with the heavy, solid mass of reinforced deepslate, a desolate heft that, somehow, holds far more reality in the reborn light of day than they ever did in flickering lamplight.

He’s going to kill himself. The thought cuts through his mind with the swift, precise incision of a scalpel, slicing everything away until only those few burning words remain. He’s going to kill himself, and this time, he’s going to succeed.

Contrary even to himself, the pulse still thrumming within the confines of his aorta begins to gallop, breaking tempo into something rough and uneven. An unsteady giggle hitches in his chest; Grian chokes on it, the way it jaunts to his throat, a sandpaper catch that sets his lungs to gurgling. He’s going to kill himself. He’s going to kill himself. He’s going to finally die.

Days before, when he’d brewed those weakness potions, the relief had been double-edged, straddling the line between restless surrender and a begging, blinding release. Now, all of it has been washed clean, leaving nothing but giddy light-headedness— he floats on soap bubbles, pressing a hand flat against his bony chest to feel its intermittent kick. If he funnels the universe through its finest sieve, then paws through the reliquial code blocks, will it once again lay its gentle dirge at the door of his ears?

He supposes, in a few short hours, he’ll have to find out.

With a cautious twist, Grian scoops up the rumpled edge of his pillowcase, parting it from the feather-stuffed cushion within and slipping the spider eyes right underneath it, stuffing them back until they disappear from even the vague possibility of prying eyes. Then, blood humming, he turns his gaze up to the window, where the makeshift curtains illume with candent radiance.

He’s never been more grateful to greet the sun.

Chapter Text

Grian, when it comes down to it, is many things— a patchwork quilt of stolen code, copied memories, disparate ashes lifted from the last dregs of fire and pressed back into a mold; the facsimile of a Player. Of his own borrowed faults, he cradles many: stubborn persistence, reckless impulsivity, a cruelty born of his own capricious fractals. All gnash their teeth against the speckled woodgrain of Grian’s self-control, a gnawing beast at the distal roots of rotting trees.

With the sun’s tempered ascent limning every raddled board in the wall, what wells up between his gums and teeth now is impatience. Last night’s fall had been snake eyes in a roll of the dice, paid for in the hot, tender pulses at the back of his skull, collected tenfold in the blossom of bruises swallowing his skin beneath the jumper. The warm, giddy buzz thrilling in his chest has begun to cool somewhat, making deferential way for a wash of numb static; blinding, a little stupid— lutulent where he stares blankly at the wall.

Blink; the world falls prey to a hazy fog, twin cotton veils tumbling over his eyes. Blink again; it peels back at the corners, a wince in the early march of morn. Caught between two maligned realities, Grian traces the muzzy halftones where they curve and melt into the floor, and follows each crevice in the wood until his eyes begin to burn.

How can there be so few hours within a day, yet still so many? Each passing moment presents a burr, a nettle itch clawing at the underside of his skin, demanding kinesis, motion— but in the wake of last night’s misadventure, all he has left to give is the molten quiver of his mutinous left wing. Muscle scorches beneath the burgeoning sun, an icy-white strike from halting humerus all the way to the trembling base of his spine. The nerves within it seethe, a conflagration so intense it borders on arctic, glacial; Grian’s upper teeth pierce the tender flesh of his lip in one harsh stroke, choking off the involuntary whine scoring deep inside his throat before it can bubble past his lips.

Instead, he bows, folding forward beneath the weight of fervid, fractured bone. Breathes. In— slow and purposeful. Deep. With herculean force the jag of his lungs smooths out, faltering their fits and starts in a hasty, scrabbled lull before they can begin to betray him. These are misplaced messages, insignificant warnings blaring with sharp impotence; leftover signals still yowling danger. He can bear them for another petty handful of hours. He can.

Caught in the undertow of his own body’s revolt, Grian almost misses it: a rustle, straddling the very edges of sound. An ear-pricking susurrus that projects itself past the wayward hiss of burning undead outside; even the air stills, frozen in a parody of serenity as it wisps through chipped gaps in the wall’s logs. Boxed within the scarlet haze of his wing and his head, Grian angles himself to that murmur of motion, honing every muscle to the tentative scuff of feet on wooden tread. His feathers bristle, breath catching sore and ragged in the back of his throat.

Beyond the confines of his prison: the soft click of a latch. Quiet bootsteps. The ring of aquine crystal.

Pearl.

The turbid churn of her mind strikes him in one swift, belated beat— resonates as a thick, ugly squelch in the Greater Code. Muddied as it is with the last dregs of sleep, Grian can’t paw any meaning from it; it simply rests, a black, bloated boil thrumming in the field of his cognizance, curdling as it pauses from just inside the hall.

Floorboards whine as her weight shifts, a rhythmic back and forth that ignites the morning in a series of thin, operatic shrieks. With the slow, coiling tauten of a prey animal cornered, Grian’s muscles stiffen, threaten to ossify— his vision constricts to the thin strip of air between the door and hardwood flooring. Within that space blisters a stygian shadow, painted in code fragments and the desolate threads of still-fresh memory: I’m not leaving you alone anymore.

Stuffed deep within the recess of his pillowcase behind him, the spider eyes begin to smolder.

Another shrill of wood breaches the threshold as the planks beneath her feet groan, locked beneath deliberate, deliberating pressure. Grian’s blood crystallizes, congeals to ice as the glister of her boots begins to pace—

— past the trajectory of his closed door. Pearl strides away in cold, measured lockstep, cut to the toll-beat of diamond boots ringing out against inelegant hardwood, and with all the rigid precision of a soldier preparing for swift-commencing war.

And Grian is many things, many stolen fault lines and riddled hairline fractures— but at the beating heart of him, measured in each line of caustic code is a raw, distended nerve still bleeding for those he calls home. All at once, the coiled spring of his ribcage shatters, makes a wild leap from his heart to the impossible edge of the door; their last parting was so strained, and he has less than a day before he kills himself— and if there were ever a time for last wishes, it would have to be now.

His lips part before his mind can overtake the action, two paces ahead and already shaping the syllables that will pull this ship back to harbor. “Pearl,” he calls out, pitching his voice just low enough to snake it under the door. “Is that you?”

A startled, peppered spike of adrenaline jabs out from the hall and right into his skull in response; Pearl’s feet pause, infinitesimal in their hesitation, before snapping back on their heel, approaching his door in cautious, mincing steps. Her lanky shadow rolls back to a halt just underneath it, a writhing mass recoiling from the torrent of pale sunshine pouring in from his window. Slowly, in a tone reminiscent of long-past slumber parties, Pearl whispers back: “Ye-e-es?”

Grian’s lungs spasm. He has to— if he can just see her, one last time— “You, uh, you mind comin’ in here for just a second?”

He waits, breathless. For the span of a single, ambered eternity, his oldest friend does not respond.

Then, delicately, the knob turns— a metallic chink— and the door swings open, revealing Pearl in all her early, rumpled glory.

She’s foregone her hoodie, this time— in its stark, burning absence the gilded rays of morning sigh wistfully across her collar, illuminating stray strands in the messy cloud of her unbrushed hair. Like this, the cut of her silhouette shrinks; she huddles at the threshold with shoulders hunched, arms crossed in a shield over her chest. For one shining, calcified moment, the sheer vulnerability in her poise punches Grian’s heart clean out the other side of his sternum.

Her eyes flash— twin burgundy flares squinting him up and down in turns from the darkness. “How’d you know it was me?” she demands.

Below her voice winds a wary crackle, burbling sweetly through the air. Grian blinks, curling his tongue around it; has to clear his throat, drag the words past the bloodied pulse of his head before his hooks disappear in the cloying dance of her reticence. “... You do know you walk different from everybody else, right?”

He settles that morsel of truth on the bedcovers, fanning it out to play in the light. An olive branch, of sorts. Bait, of another. At its core, a begging invitation for what was never said to her the first time: goodbye.

Pearl churns over that, ruddy eyes narrowing to sundogs, a binary orbit around the halo of her cheeks. “Wait, hang on, you knew it was me just because of my footsteps?” The palest flicker of a smile abruptly twines itself across her lips, twitching up by degrees at each corner. “That’s uh, a little creepy, Grian, I’m not gonna lie.”

“Well, I’m not trying to be creepy,” Grian says, punching eager claws into the ancient, playful instinct welling between them— anything for a shred, a single scrap of normalcy. Anything to reinforce that smile. “I just— you just walk weird, that’s all. Anybody could tell it’s you if they were really paying attention.”

“I walk weird?” Pearl echoes, eyebrows snapping up into her hairline. Her spine straightens from its miserable slouch, incredulity scorching the air between them in one bright, ribboned stroke. The curve of her lips climbs by another meagre fraction, tilting and lopsided.“Well, excuse me! I think I walk perfectly fine, thank-you-very-much.”

A selfish, molten glow begins to unfold beneath his skin, veins fluming with it: gilted whispers of the past, the truncated promise of an empty future. “No, no, it’s definitely weird,” he insists, warming to his subject. A laugh, now, a laugh— if he can just get her to laugh— “You get— look, nobody else walks like they’re hunting a character in a horror game, is all I’m saying—”

The thin, sportive lines of Pearl’s face gutter so rapidly they fall back into a mask— one smooth, blank canvas, eerie in its affixion to her flesh. Plastic and cutting, the fragile smile that had tripped along her mouth curls, freezes into a rictus, and the snap of Grian’s jaw as he shuts it explodes in the sudden, pin-drop silence.

Stiff quiescence drapes itself down from the high beams, swaying slow on an invisible breeze as a volley of frost buries its teeth full in the marrow of Grian’s bones. He cringes, grappling the reflexive urge to press himself back against the cabin wall as the nubilous waters of Pearl’s mind begin to swill. Her exposed teeth glint as the light cants, digging grooves into clean enamel; when she speaks, her voice is casual, still plucking at the lilting strings of old banter— but the back of each word is coated in ice.

“So— just to be clear, then, that wasn’t one of your weird little, uh… brain-eating thingies? Telling you who I was, earlier?”

This time Grian does duck his chin in a flinch, eyes darting down to the dizzying display of gold dappling his blankets. Ripples churn as the fabric draws taut, stretching between his tortive fingers. “No, no, I, uh— I’m not. I’m not doing that now.”

As if on cue the hooks wriggle, hooking nauseous claws into the lining of his stomach. Hollow, it gurgles, begs to scrabble its way into Pearl’s head— her heart— and drink, until her code collapses and the universe subsumes what remains of the dust. This ugly, gaping maw at the core of him yawns, endless and black, less a hole and more a pit that scratches, over and over, for a chance to reach out from the darkness and feed until there’s nothing left.

“I promise,” he finishes belatedly, lips numb and buzzing. It is the only one he will ever keep.

Pearl’s heart-searing eyes dart across the sparse circumflexions of his face, studying him, cataloguing. “You sure do promise a lot,” she says, and draws it out, a deadly slink that curves around his shoulders to reveal the pristine contours of a knife. Her nod is iron, and just as sharp. “Alright then, I’ll bite,” she continues, snuggling her shoulder up against the wooden door frame. She leans into it, chin falling to rest against the right side of her collarbone. One eyebrow shifts, clipping shadows into the outline of her nose. “So, what’s up? What’cha want?”

… Surely here, in the bleating tremor of this last scrap of a life left to lose, there’s something still salvageable. Just for today. Just until tonight. In these final hours between his next breath and his last, Grian hesitates, glancing back at the blinding incandescence that spills from his window. His eyes catch on a whorl in the wooden sill around it, tracing a labyrinth all the way to its heart before flicking back up to hers. “Look, Pearl,” he says, and the words trip, stumble, clambering over clumsy, half-bared teeth, “are you— I need your help with something. Can you— do that for me, maybe?”

A budding stormcloud descends over Pearl’s eyes, snaked through with lightning. “Depends on what it is, but sure, go on.” One hand breaks off from its protective cradle, extending with fingers wide open, an invitation outstretched. “Lay it on me, big guy.”

Grian sucks in a deep, shaking breath— and comes up grasping, empty. Every word lodged in his throat, buried like the hilt of a dagger in his trachea; frantic, he fishes for them one by one, rolling them in his mouth until they well with enough force to spit past the porcelain gates of his teeth. “I just— uh—”

Wait. The brewing stand. The sugar.

This, he can use.

Both pieces fall into place with a sharp, staccato snap. “I just need a little help,” he rushes out, faint, breathless, heart hammering a violent tattoo beneath his chest. “To the, uh. Th— the kitchen?”

A beat; Pearl blinks, and the acerbic weight of her caution falters, begins to slip from her braced shoulders with the grace of a loose stole. “The kitchen,” she echoes slowly. Within the syllables gleam a thin wire of curiosity, spinning out from the spool of her bright, gleaming mind as she mulls them over and over.

Eventually: “... What for?”

“Well, let me put it this way,” Grian says, right on cue, and doesn’t bother disguising the sheer, brittle note of humor that threatens to snap his voice like glass, “if I have to go a single second more, cooped up in this empty room, okay, I’m going to— I’m—” He bites the inside of his cheek. Copper wells in the corner of his mouth; just another caustic ember sparking in the ruined battlefield of his body. “I am going to lose my marbles, Pearl,” he says at last, succinct. “All of them. And let me tell you, I’ve never had too many of those in the first place.”

Another guarded beat, punctuated by the brisk leap of Pearl’s eyebrows as they arch. For one long, scrutinizing moment, she says nothing— only studies him, eyes flickering across his face, mapping out the lines there as if to paint each innumerable fault in burning red across his skin. At last, she drawls out, “Yeah, okay. I guess I can see why you’d want outta here. So….” She stops, and the last coils of cinnamon skepticism, wary and pungent, float forward to wreathe around the tender hollow of Grian’s throat. He swallows on reflex, stomach gurgling; her eyes track the motion as the flavour swells, sweeping dust into his too-dry mouth. “Why the kitchen, then?” she asks.

It’s Grian’s turn to falter; hope is a dull swoop in his chest, an invasion, a pestilent fever pillaging the fragile muscles of his heart. He picks each word with care, cut to the phantom tune of Scar’s aureate voice breathing instructions in his ears. One beat, two. “Just— I’unno,” he mutters finally, flinging his gaze out to the section of hall framed diligently by her pale shoulders. No matter the effort, he’ll never emulate Scar’s gilded cadence with perfect accuracy— but he can invert it, coat his own tongue in lead to sell a better story. “I, uh.” Another wince, this one appended with the deliberate brushstrokes of self-conscious chagrin. “I kinda just really wanted, um—” sugar, sugar and a gentle goodnight— “some tea?”

Silence flutters. Grian braces himself between heartbeats for her verdict.

“Wait.” Pearl’s stare is a hook, glittering in the lambent wells of dayspring. “That’s it? All that stuttering and stammering for a little bit of tea? Seriously?”

Grian breathes in sharp, bordering on a hiss. “Look, okay— it’s not like there’s other rooms to go to either, Pearl. I’ve kinda got limited options here. I dunno what your plans for today exactly were, but—”

“Oh, I was actually gonna come and visit you,” Pearl says, mild, “right after I got a spot of breakfast.” Her eyes flash, razor-edged above a fixed, pleasant smile. “‘S just surprising, I guess. You’re not normally in the habit of making my life easier, these days.”

Grian blinks, limbs stiff, tongue a swollen parasite in his mouth. He swallows it down, slips its weight back into his throat to dam up the breath threatening to swoop from his lungs. “Oh,” he says at last, lame. The word tumbles out in a pathetic heap at Pearl’s feet, a bundle of strained vowels wreathed in chagrin. “Well, uh. Guess that works out, then.”

The smile still stitched across her lips stretches wider, revealing a glimpse of bright, pink gums. “My, don’t you look surprised,” she says brightly, leaning down and plucking absently at the hem of her trousers. “What for? I did say I was gonna come back.”

Danger. The klaxon rings through his mind like a clarion bell, and Grian shrinks once again, tightening his grip once more on the blankets. They shudder and compress, threatening to rend the weave. “I— I guess?”

Thin lips, white teeth; Pearl beams at him, far too chipper for the starburst of seething spite that roils out from her. “And I guess I can’t blame you for doubting me,” she says, with all the keen slice of an axe tipped beneath his chin, hovering close and nicking at loose veins. “It’s not like you’ve got the best track record with your own promises, now do you?”

It’s both freeze and flinch, the jolting of his spine; jogged from their torpid rest, the twitch of his wings— an instinctive bristle, the prey-animal urge to threaten, to expand— scorches right through him, razing every last nerve to the smoldering ground. His muscles lock as one, a deer in honeyed headlights braced for impact.

It never comes. Whiplash is a metallic creel, tires screeching protest as the driver makes a different choice; Pearl claps her hands together, stepping forward as the whirlpool fractals of her mind abruptly still, drift down like dense sediment at the bottom of a lake. “Well alrighty, then, let’s get you outta here!” she says, and crosses the room in three hearty strides, eating up the distance between them faster than Grian can blink. “I can get you set up at the dining table.”

Hunted, haunted, Grian stares up at her, a sheer, white canvas in the face of last-minute mercy.

Pearl wiggles her fingers at him. “C’mon now, we don’t got all day. Start gettin’ up!”

The spell shatters. “Right— right, okay,” Grian says, and the words bounce, rebound off the dark inner planes of his mind, crystal shards of dizzying truth lodged deep beneath his sternum. He doesn’t have all day. Just these few paltry hours, an offering held up on beseeching hands to build one last, ramshackle bridge across the fissures yawning wide between them. Just until tonight. “Let me, uh— I’ve gotta—”

The last crumbling dregs of adrenaline boost him sideways in a slow, calculated shuffle, angling his body toward the head of the bed. With cautious, rolling motions, Grian tilts, one hand digging into the mattress for purchase while the other gropes blind for the leather boots Mumbo had left by his bedside just hours earlier.

A low swoop in his gut is his only warning before gravity claws at him, dragging him forward on an invisible tide— his wings. They tip the careful scale of his balance over the mattress’s edge, and Grian sucks in a sharp, involuntary breath as his fingers contract, tendons rubberbanding. A rapid, branching line of condensed heat shrieks through him; the broken arm of his left wing is tugged too harsh, too fast, as Grian finds himself reeling between the last shreds of his stability and yet another tumultuous crash against the floor.

Pearl’s hand forms an abrupt, iron vice around his upper arm, dragging him back as he lurches. “Hey now— hey now,” she says, and the heady thrill of her alarm cleaves past his jaws, laced with sugar and still fizzling. Grian gasps as the bones of his wing grind together in response, a push-and-pull rattle that alights his nerves and cramps his muscles into complex, juddery knots. “Don’t go fallin’ on me now, okay? I don’t wanna have to lug all those feathers down the hall on my lonesome.”

Blooms of ink bruise the corners of his vision; when he shuts his eyes, the veins ribboned behind them pulse scarlet. “Sor— sorry,” he chokes out, then hacks a little laugh: rueful, rough, barking. “Just— uh. Just got— got a little dizzy there, for a second.”

“Yeah, sure mate… happens to the best of us, right?” The air beside him shifts, a brush of warmth branding the very edge of his shoulder as Pearl hesitates. “So…” she says slowly, and between them a cherry-hot stone sinks, hissing symphonic steam into his ears, “where'd you get the shoes from?”

Ice cascades down Grian’s spine in a rapid, soul-wrenching spiral, so swift and with such vicious fervor that the world beneath him tilts sharply to the left. “Uh,” he says intelligently, and snaps his eyes back open, flicking them up to where Pearl stands, guarded, at his side. Veiled by the disheveled muss of her hair, her gaze is hidden— but the angle of her head pins it, unmistakable and unerring, directly to the dirt-encrusted boots.

His lungs jar all the way into his throat. “Mumbo,” Grian pushes out, wheezy and tight, vocal chords shrinking.

“Mumbo,” Pearl repeats. Her voice is flat.

“Yep. Mumbo.” He wavers, worrying a tooth into the soft flesh of his lower lip. “He, uh— he may have gone and visited me last night?”

“And— what, brought you boots?”

Deep within his stomach, a forgotten match strikes without warning. “I asked,” Grian snaps, abandoning his tattered lip in favor of peeling them both back in a snarl. For as limp and worthless as they’ve proven to be, his feathers still punch the air behind him with their bristles, forming a mountain of jagged edges against the pallid gold pillowing their silhouettes.

A beat. Silent reproach outside his own begins to spoil the air, pooling sour beneath his tongue. When Pearl’s head tilts, it’s by a single degree— just enough to split a part in the natural curtain of her hair. Beyond that glittering slit, her eyes are cool: chips of agate embedded in an equally stony face.

Grian flinches.

“... Tango wants to go out today,” he offers at last, terse. Grits his teeth around the sentence, mangles it on his tongue until it forms a noose; within the flimsy confines of his skull, the hooks tangle, a rat-king’s nest of swollen, abscessed impulsion. Only sheer, cataclysmic determination prevents them from slinking forward just so he can drink.

Pearl’s fingers tighten around his arm in a brief, voltaic squeeze. “Touching grass, are we?” she asks sweetly, and turns at last, pinning him to the wall with a single, dubious slant of her eyes.

The subcutaneous tissue trapped underneath her hand begins to crawl. “Sure,” Grian mutters, and drops his gaze, jutting his chin instead at the luminescence founting in from the window. “You could call it that.”

For another thousand small eternities, Pearl says nothing.

Then, without warning, she releases him. Two mincing steps to the left bring her well within the boots’ orbit; without ceremony, Pearl bends and closes the gap, hooking a finger under both their tongues before dragging them up to dangle, precarious, right in front of his nose.

“Well, go on, then,” she says, and the words pour from her mouth with the effluence of summer sunshine, dripping bright and cloying into his lap. Each syllable chars where it sinks into flesh; reddened, blistering, they corrode the skin around his heart, splay out his ribcage in a ragged halo to expose its continuous, stubborn beat. Silly; doesn’t it know this is the crowing finale? Can’t it count down these final ticks, and find them so very, desperately, wanting?

The boots before him jangle pointedly. “Hey, you listening to me? Get’cher shoes on! You’re burnin’ valuable daylight, y’know, unless you want everybody else waking up and drinking our morning tea.”

With absent, mechanical motions, Grian nods— and with both hands outstretched, he accepts.