Chapter Text
He remembered hitting the ground.
There was a snap as his bones shattered from the impact that had sent agonizing shocks up his bruised limbs. In only a second the air had been punched out of him, so the scream that threatened to tear its way out of his vocal cords had been silent, locked in his chest.
He remembered the sand.
It was a deep sensation of grit under his skin, stuck between the broken, bent feathers of his wings in awful clumps. It had been itchy to the point of being unbearable, hungrily soaking up blood that dripped, dripped, dripped from his broken flesh, wet trails that stained him with gore.
He remembered the way the sun beat down on him for hours as he lay there, cooking him. The heat had washed over his ruined skin, and the awful stench of his slow death rose around him.
He remembered closing his eyes for the last time, as death took him into her arms at last.
The game was over. He won.
He lost. It should have been Scar.
Grian woke up.
There was grass beneath him. It bent under the weight of his body, and he could feel each blade under his hands, and everything about the sensation was wrong.
There was no grass on Monopoly Mountain. Grian had long since grown adjusted to the warm sand that got into every single crevice it could. Even when Grian left the sandy biome it would still be stuck between each fold of his clothes, and cling onto every strand of his hair. At first, it may have been annoying, something to complain about, but over time he had grown used to the sensation. Over time, sand had been linked to safe, and home in his mind.
The cool grass beneath his fingers was strange enough, but the distinct lack of that constant layer of grit was what really sent alarms through his mind. Grian opened his eyes and sat up in a flurry of limbs, wings unfolding and curling up around his shoulders.
He took in his surroundings quickly, shoulders tense and fingers curled so that they were digging into the ground. Grian was sitting by what seemed to be a small river, the sound of the water rushing over the rocks filling the mostly quiet space. Oak trees grew around him, rustling in the gentle breeze that blew a few strands of his hair into his eyes.
There was a wild pig a few feet away, and it looked over at him as he moved, its small eyes dark and beady. As Grian made eye contact with the animal it snorted at him before returning to its task of nosing at the ground beneath it, searching for something to eat.
Grian knew where he was. Across the water, there was a ruined portal and a small hill behind it, which was enough of a landmark for him to instantly turn to stare in the direction that he knew Monopoly Mountain would be in. Third Life was a small place with borders that blocked any of them from leaving, and after a year Grian knew the entire place like the back of his hand.
He was far from Monopoly Mountain, practically on the other side of their small world. It would take him around three to four days to get there. Half that, if he didn’t sleep. The Crastle should be within his sight at the moment, but he figured since he was dead, perhaps the structures didn’t carry over.
He also knew how he died.
It had been slow. He had been at the base of a mountain he called home, and he thought he would go quickly, but he hadn’t.
Was this some sort of afterlife? If it was, where was everyone else?
“Scar?” Grian called out, the name falling from his mouth thoughtlessly as he slowly stood. His wings twitched on his back, and he folded them carefully. There was no answer, even as his voice echoed around him.
Maybe Scar just didn’t want to see him. Could Grian really blame him, if Scar never wanted to speak with him again? He would have to respect any distance between him and his partner, his best friend, even if it would slowly burn him up from the inside.
“Scar,” he tried again, doing his best to keep his voice steady, “if you don’t want - it’s fine if you don’t want to talk. Just… let me know you’re okay.”
Nothing.
“... Please.”
More nothing.
Grian dug his nails into the palms of his hand, and the shock of pain made him flinch and look down. Did pain still exist, even here? As he rose his palms to look at them, he could see blood in crimson moon-shaped patterns. Could you still bleed, even when you’re dead?
Grian’s next breath came out shaky, and he had to close his eyes as he breathed back in. A quick check revealed that his inventory was empty. His health and hunger were both full, for now.
Why did he have health and hunger at all, if he were dead?
Something vulnerable trickled down his spine, and he felt horribly exposed with nothing to defend himself with. If he were attacked like this, he would be easy to kill. A single swipe from any weapon would be enough to break into his skin, bruise him, and cut him open if enough force was applied.
Could you die again, in the afterlife? You could bleed. You could go hungry and get hurt, apparently.
And so Grian grit his teeth and started collecting oak wood from the world around him. He had no idea what was going on, and the confusion and hurt in his chest felt like it was crushing him. But he couldn’t just stand around and do nothing, and he had to fix one issue at a time. He continued until he had a few stacks of logs tucked away into his inventory, making a crafting table and some awkward wooden tools that he wrinkled his nose at. It wasn’t much but it was something, and Grian turned to start crossing the river with his gaze locked on the ruined portal.
The place was looking more and more familiar to him. It was where he woke up on his first day on Third Life, his mind devoid of any memory of his past. He had known how to survive in the world around him, but he hadn’t known where the knowledge came from. He had known that dying twice would mean losing himself to bloodlust, and drying thrice meant he would be gone forever, but he hadn’t known enough to be afraid of the idea.
He had a desire to explore and create inside of him though, and he had started by looting the first chest he set his eyes on - which meant that when Grian opened the same chest now, it should be empty.
He ignored the water that dripped from where it had soaked into his clothing as he walked up close to the ruined portal, careful to avoid the magma blocks as he cracked the chest open once more. The chest was full of items that shouldn’t exist. Items such as a golden chest plate that took up most of the room inside the chest, gleaming softly with enchants. Flint had fallen down to the bottom of the chest alongside some fire charges, and a golden apple was tucked away in the corner.
Grian held the apple in a fist so tight his knuckles turned white, staring for a long moment before he tucked it away in his inventory along with the rest of the items.
He remembered dying.
He didn’t feel like he was dead though - Grian felt like something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.
At the very beginning of Third Life, Grian had spent a week alone. He had been content to view the sights, walking along rivers and letting fish swim around his legs, naming flowers he came across, and slowly upgrading his wooden tools into sharp, chiseled stone.
At night he climbed the trees. His wings may have been heavy and useless on his back, nothing more than apparent decoration, but he still felt comfort being up high where the wind could shift through his feathers. The monsters that crawled out at night couldn’t get him up there, and he would drift off under the twinkling stars above.
There had been no fear, that first week.
This time, Grian ignored the flowers that were crushed under his feet as he walked briskly, and spent the night traveling, using his stone sword to tear into any zombies or skeletons that tried to approach. He made it to the village in twenty-four hours. The first time around, it had taken him an entire week with how slowly he moved.
It had been a stressful twenty-four hours.
The land of Third Life, Grian had noticed quickly, looked untouched around him. In his memories it had been ransacked, stripped of any material that could be useful, fires set and trees destroyed. There had been nowhere you could go anymore without seeing some sign of destruction during those last few months, scars deep in the universe that Grian and the other members of Third Life had torn down alongside themselves.
However, just like with the chest by the ruined portal, it looked like someone had pressed rewind and undone everything that occurred since the fourteen of them had woken up and begun their lives there. It was strange, and… eerie. Grian didn’t understand what was happening, and it was frustrating him deeply.
He had died. It was meant to be over.
When he finally spotted the village, Grian didn’t run forwards to search for others, eager to introduce himself and brag about his items as he may have once. Instead, he approached slowly, sticking to the outer edges before slowly climbing upwards onto a roof of one of the village homes. He didn’t even know if anyone would be there, but some part of his mind was still screaming at him to use caution.
Voices carried on the wind, and Grian’s breath caught in his throat as he pulled himself upwards on the roof, peering over the edge and down below.
Standing side by side in the village were Martyn and BigB.
It become obvious, very quickly, that they had changed from the Martyn and BigB he had known.
Martyn caught Grian’s attention first. After Ren had turned red and rose as the Red King, he had gifted a cloak to Martyn that was a mixture of deep midnight black and startling blood red. Despite the fact that the man had still been a green life at the time, he had worn it and refused to take it off ever since. The sight of the crimson handprint on the back of the clothing had caused everyone to become anxious in those last few months, aware that the Hand was approaching them.
The cloak was gone.
Whatever was going on - if they were dead and this was some twisted afterlife, if this was some strange joke the members of his server were trying to pull on him - the Martyn that Grian knew would never take off that cloak.
Nor would he look so carefree. Martyn was smiling, shoulders shaking with laughter, though Grian wasn’t close enough to actually hear their words and figure out the cause. A wood pickaxe was clutched in his hand, and it looked like he was taking down one of the villager's houses. The half-destroyed build of the house felt a lot more familiar in Grian’s memories, even if on a much lesser scale. He watched as Martyn took down a few more blocks of cobblestone, seemingly chatting to BigB the entire while.
BigB looked so carefree as well. He seemed to be listening to whatever Martyn was saying, nodding along as he collected birch wood from a tree, a smile playing on his lips. A much different expression that Grian was used to whenever he saw BigB on the battlefield, standing across from one another.
Grian had taken BigB’s first life on Dogwarts grounds, shooting him with an arrow and leaving him there to gasp and wheeze for a final breath.
BigB had attempted to return the favor near the end, backing Grian up into cacti, cornering him with his sword - and he had failed.
Now, BigB looked nothing like that man that had snarled with blood on his teeth and pain in every line of his expression, hands gripping his sword like a lifeline, the last surviving member of Dogwarts.
Now, he looked more like a man that had built a cookie above his home, looking so surprised and sad when Scar had stolen it away. He looked like a man who was naive, who could laugh and smile and joke around so easily, he looked like who he was on the first day of Third Life before everything had gone so wrong -
Grian sunk back out of sight, his stomach in knots.
This made no sense.
He remembered dying.
When he jumped, he thought it would be instant. He thought his skull would crack and his ribs would pierce his heart, and he would die as quickly as he had the first two times.
In pain. Afraid - so afraid, in a way that ached bone-deep, in a way that made him gasp and shake and tremble - for a blinding moment before he collapsed and it was over.
He hadn’t expected the hours as they crawled by, the way his sight slowly dimmed, as the sensation in his limbs faded bit by bit.
It wasn’t something that he could have made up.
He stayed out of sight. It was pathetically easy, with these strange versions of his enemies. There was no paranoid caution in the way they moved, no constant glancing over their shoulders or thorough checks for enemies before they slept at night. The way they exposed their backs and necks and all the vulnerable parts of their front and sides, where organs sat, weak and undefended -
It made his skin crawl. He could kill them so easily.
But he didn’t need to.
It had been a startling realization. Grian hadn’t been red for very long at all, hardly even a few days. He had died outside of the Wool Fortress and woken up underground in his bunker back in the Sand Land.
Not on Monopoly Mountain. It had been destroyed by then.
He had started traveling back towards the Wool Fortress, but Scar and Bdubs met him halfway, and that was the only time he had ever spent red. It had been… strange, to say the least.
It wasn’t like he had to kill, but he wanted to, and he had seen no reason not to. Grian had always thrived in chaos - even before he turned red, or even yellow, he had stuck by Scar’s side and caused it, and it had ended in people dying. It had been for Scar, for them, so he had smiled through it and enjoyed the process, but he still felt something.
These were people that he once joked around with, once smiled with, and laughed with. There was still a bit of hesitance before he acted, still a flash of guilt in the middle of the night, nightmares of the bodies and blood on his hands.
Maybe not as many nightmares as he should have had, but it wasn’t like he didn’t care at all.
Being red was different. The death of the people around him didn’t even register in his head. It was all his morals had been shut off. All of his inhibitions, gone. If there was someone in Grian’s way, someone that made him angry, then he would kill them without hesitance, and it would be so much fun to do so, to plan it out. He could enjoy the entire process, without annoying hesitance or reluctance. He could make it painful, and he wanted to.
He had been so angry, too. Scar had just betrayed him, slashed into him with his sword that set fire to his skin, Grian screaming and stumbling back and burning, and Scar hadn’t flinched, his expression hadn’t so much as shifted in regret or guilt. Killed and betrayed for a piece of paper, thrown aside so easily.
He had been red, and the anger had thrummed beneath his skin, so he took it out on animals and mobs and anything living that crossed his path as he walked back to Wool Fortress, and the second he came across Scar halfway there, he had slashed into his back with a sword and shoved him off the side of a cliff.
And then everything that came after that had occurred, and -
He remembered dying.
He was red when he died, so it should be over now.
But it wasn’t.
So Grian watched Martyn and BigB as they moved around the village, collecting resources and laughing, taking down the iron golem, and joking with one another, and he tried to cope with the fact that he had gone back to green.
Here’s the thing.
Grian was back on his green life, with hunger, and health, and had woken up in the place that the Crastle should have been but wasn’t, with a chest that should be empty but wasn’t, without scars that should have been there.
The entire world was missing things that should have been there, structures and holes and destruction trails.
Martyn was smiling, without his cloak and without his King, laughing without hesitation and showing his back without a second thought.
BigB wasn’t flinching at noises in the dark of the night, didn’t once bare blood-stained teeth as he had in Grian’s last memory, just rolled his eyes at Martyn and collected resources with him side by side.
They were both green.
The village was whole, for the most part, Martyn and BigB were both green, and they didn’t seem to ever remember being anything else.
It seemed as though Grian had returned to the beginning of Third Life. It was impossible, but it was the only answer that made sense, the only explanation that would tick all the boxes that were appearing in front of him.
He had a second chance.
A few days after Grian made it to the village, he doubled back a bit and then walked to it again - this time without hiding, ensuring he was in full sight of the occupants. He was dressed from head to toe in iron armor, clutching an iron sword at his side, but he kept an easy smile on his face.
As he approached, Martyn and BigB came out to meet him, nothing but open curiosity and welcome in their expressions.
“Hello! How are you?” Grian greeted, raising his free hand in a wave. Plans were swiftly forming in his mind, lists of things he had to do, materials he had to collect, events to reach towards, and events to avoid.
“Hi!” Martyn greeted, BigB already laughing, one of his hands resting over his chest, where his heart was.
“Oh my goodness, you startled us,” BigB complained as Grian walked closer, grass crunching under his feet before it turned into the dirt roads of the village. He was careful to stay a few steps away, out of reach of their weapons.
“Ahaha, sorry,” he chuckled, “I’m Grian. Nice to meet the competition.”
He had a second chance.
He was going to make sure Scar won this time.