Chapter Text
Skizz had never actually seen a seizure before.
He knew what they were - he wasn’t an idiot. He’d heard the stories from others. He’d just never seen one before, and so when Tango - looking more and more each minute like he was becoming some sort of imploding star - began seizing, there was a moment when Skizz didn’t know what to do besides scream for help. He didn’t have experience with this - he didn’t know whether he should try and hold Tango down or stop touching him completely, or if there was some sort of special technique he was supposed to use. Fortunately for him, as he sat there frozen in horror, Cubfan stepped in.
“Don’t touch him!” Cub barked the minute he stepped into the room, eyes sparking blue and steely. “Try not to let him fall off the bed but otherwise don’t touch him.” Skizz pressed a hand to his mouth to avoid letting out a sob, watching helplessly as his friend seized on the bed, awful shudders rocking through him. His tail thrashed and left scorch marks on the sheets, claws scrambling for purchase. His eyes were half open, glowing as hot and bright as the sun, but didn’t seem to be seeing anything.
The seizure lasted much longer than Skizz would have guessed, much longer than he could stand. At some point he’d gotten up off the bed and was pacing because if he didn’t he was going to scream. Finally, the tremors began to die down, leaving Tango wheezing and limp on the bed. A single trail of glowing blood trickled from one nostril, the coloring vastly different than what it should be. Cub, who’d given himself and Skizz another fire res potion, rushed forward to help move Tango onto his side.
“It’s alright, Tango.” The hermit whispered, hands gentle and tender. Cub’s dark eyes had actively turned blue, now, and Skizz noticed that the man’s ears had gone pointed. “You’re going to be okay.” Tango didn’t respond other than to keep breathing heavily, his breaths sounding more and more like those an actual blaze would make, rattling in his chest. Each exhale brought a plume of smoke with it, and Skizz felt his own throat begin to tighten. The startling realization that they could die here because of the heat and smoke inhalation was horrifying.
“Okay.” Cub’s voice trembled slightly as he stood up. “There’s only one more thing left to try.”
Skizz tried to keep his emotions in check. “What’s that?”
“We need to put water on him.”
“We can’t do that!” Skizz cried. “That would kill him!”
“We don’t know that!” Cub snapped back. “Water has always dropped his temperature like nothing else. It might be the only thing that can stop him from burning to death from the inside , Skizzleman!”
Skizz gritted his teeth. He was right, of course. If they continued to wait, Tango was going to die; that was certain. If there was a chance water would help…
Cub swore, and Skizz looked at the bed in alarm to see that Tango had started seizing again, more red-hot blood gushing from both nostrils this time. A strangled sob echoed through the room, and it took Skizz a moment to realize that it was him who’d made it.
The seizing lasted for longer, this time. When it finished, Tango was bleeding from both nostrils and both of his ears.
Skizz grabbed a bucket of water.
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“We’re going to have to be quick with this.” Cub warned, adjusting his grip on Tango and trying not to shift around at the unsettling heat. Fire res was the only thing standing between him and getting incinerated; standing in a newly dug out section of Skizz’s basement, Tango’s heat was causing the walls to shimmer. Skizz had created a pool of deep water in the center of the room, deep enough that Cub would be able to walk in holding Tango and submerge most of their bodies. The man also had ice on him, since most likely the water would heat up pretty fast and they’d have to regulate the temperature.
Cub tried not to think about what he was going to do too much. The HC server was a caring community; the players cared about each other and went to great lengths to accommodate their unique needs. It was practically programmed into each of them at this point: Don’t leave Bdubs in the dark, don’t probe too deeply into Scar’s vex background, never mess with Xisuma’s helmet,
And don’t let Tango near water unless he had his water-repellant armor.
That armor was missing, here, and there was something that felt so wrong about this whole entire thing. But Tango was quite literally burning alive, and Cub couldn’t just stand by and let that happen.
“You ready?” He asked Skizz. The man nodded, face a mask of anguish. Cub took a deep breath, held Tango tight to his chest, and stepped into the water.
It was cool and still, a welcome sensation after all the heat he’d been exposed to. As it passed Cub’s ankles, then his knees, it felt incredibly pleasant.
The minute he stepped down to the bottom of the pool, and Tango’s body slipped into the water, he might well have been dipping the blazeborn in acid.
Tango screamed , the sound high-pitched and terrible, and jerked in Cub’s hold like he was trying to escape. The water steamed violently, the temperature rising the minute Tango was submerged, and through the cloud Cub could see Skizz dumping ice into the pool to counter it.
Tango tried to claw himself free again, the pain giving him a jolt of adrenaline, and the vex-hybrid was forced to hold on tight.
“It’s okay. It’s okay, Tango.” He said desperately, hoping the words could get through to Tango’s pain-crazed brain. “You’re okay.”
“ H-hurts ,” Tango sobbed, shuddering violently against Cub’s chest. Cub felt tears rise to his eyes again, and this time he let them fall. Over the splash of ice being dumped into the water, he could hear Skizz openly crying.
“I know it hurts.” Cub croaked. “I know, I’m so sorry.” He couldn’t try to explain it all to Tango right now - it wouldn’t make sense to him in this state. “I’m sorry.” He tried to comfort his friend, but nothing could stop Tango from wailing and sobbing and trying to escape the one substance he’d been avoiding all his life.
But beyond the trauma of the moment - and dear void were they all going to have nightmares about this afterwards - Cub noticed the most important thing: Tango’s temperature wasn’t rising.
It wasn’t dropping, not like it would have before. Normally, even a quick dip in the ocean or a few moments exposure to a thunderstorm would leave Tango borderline hypothermic, his inner fire getting snuffed out like a candle left out in the rain. Now, even though it was clearly painful, Tango’s temperature remained hot but stable. It was a battle between the elements and the glitch, heat versus the cold.
And caught in the middle was Tango, torn between the two. At least this way he didn’t succumb to either one.
Cub didn’t know how long they stayed like that, with him holding Tango firmly in the water and Skizz adding ice. At some point Tango stopped fighting and instead clung to Cub like he was his lifeline, which was horribly ironic since Cub was the one causing his suffering in the first place. The vex-hybrid tried not to dwell on that too much.
But then - because of course it couldn’t just end here, it had to keep going - Skizz ran out of ice. And the minute he rushed out of the room to go grab more, the heat that had been simmering under Tango’s skin seemed to explode.
The water around the two hermits grew from warm to hot within seconds, startling Cub into almost dropping Tango. He felt the netherborn grow tense, strange shudders wracking through him as his breath hissed rapidly by Cub’s ear. His skin began to heat up again, hotter than before, so hot it began to burn through the power of the fire res potion. Cub swore as he felt Tango’s skin start to break under his fingertips, molten heat sizzling through. The air around them was cloudy with steam, the water level beginning to drop in the pool.
“Skizz!” Cub shouted out, panicking. “Skizz I need you here now! ”
“I’m out of ice!” Came the terrified reply from upstairs. “We used all of it up!”
Damn it.
“Tango, Tango hold on. You can do it.” Cub pleaded, trying to look at his friend’s face. Tango’s eyes blazed yellow-white with heat, their familiar red no longer present. The blazeborn looked completely dazed and lost, not seeing anything around him as his body cracked and burned and gasped for air. His oddly fluorescent blood was leaking from both nostrils again, trickling from the cracked areas of his skin. Most shocking of all, Cub could see his heart inside of his chest, the organ’s blaze rod components burning a brilliant, searing gold, illuminating his insides. It was beating so fast it hardly looked real.
And then, and then , just as Skizz hurried back into the room and caught sight of one of his best friends slowly unraveling under his own heat, Tango went limp against Cub’s chest like a puppet with its strings cut. A horrid sound like a player’s moan combined with a blaze’s death-rattle leaked from his mouth, and as if in slow motion, Cub watched his heart struggle once, twice, three times… and stop.
The heat began to rapidly dissipate, the glow fading within seconds. Skizz only had a moment to give a strangled, “Tango…” before the netherborn vanished in a hiss of white vapor.
The two of them were frozen for a moment, both of them staring blankly at the space where Tango had been in Cub’s arms only moments before. Then, in a flurry of movement, Skizz helped pull Cub out of the pool of water before they both hurried to Skizz’s room again, where Tango’s new respawn point was.
The heat smacked Cub in the face the minute he walked in, immediately causing his clothes to steam, and his heart fell to the pit of his stomach at the sight of Tango on the bed. There had been a part of him - a very small, foolish part - that had hoped a respawn would fix the fever. This confirmed that their original thought had been correct; it hadn’t.
“Oh, Top.” Skizz said brokenly, hurriedly chugging another fire resistance potion before darting to Tango’s side, drawing his friend up in his arms again. Tango himself looked completely wiped from the respawn, eyes barely open, body limp with exhaustion. That didn’t stop the fever from slowly growing, though, beginning the process of burning his skin anew and once again causing his claws to crack and sizzle with heat.
It suddenly dawned on Cub that unless Xisuma and the others fixed the glitch, Tango’s death was going to be inevitable. They had tried literally everything, from ice to magic to water, and it had done nothing but postpone the inevitable.
Cub came to sat down by Skizz and Tango, numb with this realization. Wearily, he asked, “Skizz, how many more fire res potions do you have?”
Skizz glanced at him over Tango’s shoulder. “Enough.”
So Skizzleman knew what he was getting at. Good, it would be easier for both of them.
Without saying a word, Cub shifted so he was on Tango’s other side, providing another surface for the netherborn to lean against.
And then they waited.
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Tango died five more times.
Cub had given up trying to call Xisuma; it wouldn’t do any good. Instead, he and Skizz sat on that bed, drinking their potions, doing their best to comfort Tango as their friend slowly but steadily burned to death over and over again. Each time Tango grew more weary, hurting from the violent respawns as well as the fever, until he couldn’t move at all as the heat ravaged him, eyelids drooping and body limp.
And still he burned.
Until, finally, something changed.
After Tango’s sixth respawn, Skizz had bundled the netherborn into his arms again, rocking back and forth with silent tears streaming down his face, steaming at Tango’s proximity. Tango was unresponsive, breathing wheezily but otherwise unmoving as he twitched and shivered.
But then, a sudden jolt shot through Tango’s body like he’d been electrocuted. A moment later, the blazeborn relaxed completely in Skizz’s arms, exhaling a large cloud of blindingly hot, red/gold vapor. Cub’s heart leaped in his chest with fright, thinking that maybe this was a new, sooner death - but as the blinding light began to lessen in Tango’s hair, and the burning cracks in his arms and legs started to scab over, Cub realized this was something else.
“He’s cooling off.” Skizz breathed, eyes huge and full of hope. “Cub, feel…” Cub reached out with one hand to touch Tango’s back, feeling the netherborn breathe - smoothly, for the first time in hours - under his hand.
His skin was cooling down. The longer they watched, the more hopeful Cub felt. Tango’s hair and tail continued to die down to their usual glow, the wounds on his skin completely scabbing. Each breath seemed like it came a little easier, and when Skizz choked out that Tango had fallen asleep, Cub felt so relieved he almost got dizzy.
It was over. It was finally, beautifully over.
They cleaned and bandaged Tango’s wounds before watching him carefully, monitoring his temperature. The room still had a few chunks of ice in it so when they first saw Tango start to shiver for a reason that didn’t have to do with a fever, they bundled him back up in blankets and tucked him in bed, getting rid of the ice.
When Xisuma called, Cub told the truth: Tango’s fever was gone and he was sleeping. He didn’t plan on telling the admin right away the details of what had happened, because that was already going to be seared in his memory and poor, stressed Xisuma didn’t need anything else on his conscience.
For now, Tango was fine, and the fever was gone.
That was all that mattered.