Chapter Text
When Jimmy feels the lightning strike at the same time as all of the bones in his body breaking at once, the white-hot jolt of pain is enough to immediately knock him into pain-induced unconsciousness—he could call it 'dying' to save a few letters, but he feels like he owes it to himself to add a layer to the usual repetitiveness of him losing his final life.
When he wakes up, he wakes up slowly. It's cool, where he is—a crisp coolness with a slow breeze whistling by, making the plants around him rustle in their wake as he struggles to register every part of his body after waking up from such a deep sleep and peels his eyes open to look at the pale blue sky. The clouds are only wisps up here, and the sun is comfortably just out of his vision.
He snaps his eyes shut and groans. Christ, he's getting tired of waking up in perfect dreamscapes. Maybe the first couple of times it helped, but ever since Double Life, it just feels mocking. A poke at him, as if to say that this is what he could have had if he had done better, loved harder, thrown himself into more danger for his friends and less danger to preserve his life at the same time. Contradictions upon contradictions telling him that no, having this would have been impossible, really. He gets it out of pity from Death—gods know that the Watchers would rather watch him shrivel up and burn like a bug under a magnifying glass than give him anything akin to a happy, peaceful afterlife (especially since it pulls in other players afterwards and they don't get to watch them suffer in the void until the game is over like the others). Lady Death, despite being the one to sic him with the curse in the first place, has always been a rather nice woman, and these afterlives are just testaments to that. And as much as he complains in his mind, he'd take this over the unrelenting, cold void on any day of the week.
He sighs and pushes himself into a sitting position, his mind seemingly lagging behind and slamming back into his body at full force a moment after he's properly sat up. With the sudden feeling of nausea and dizziness, in come memories of his final death—not that there's much to think about. He pushed the TNT minecart and was pulled with it—not by any fabric getting hooked or his own tripping, no—Jimmy might be incompetent sometimes, but he can at least stand on his own two feet—he got very deliberately pulled forward from something rooted in his chest, something cold and gross that filled the edges with his vision with purple as he was unceremoniously yanked off the bridge and frozen so he couldn't pearl or clutch before hitting the ground.
It comes to Jimmy in pieces, along with the realisation that it was most likely the Watchers compensating for Etho's boogey kill not killing him outright (honestly, he thought for a while there that the power of friendship and bad boys had protected him or something, but no—just a glitch), and he can't help but feel pissed.
Contrary to popular belief, Jimmy does not enjoy suffering. He joins these games because he and Martyn have a job to do, and also because they are fun when you get really into them. He is fully aware that he is cursed, but he's been cursed since he was a child and it doesn't do much to affect his actual gameplay. Sure, he dies first every time, but from what he's heard about what happens after he dies, he's pretty sure it's safe to say that it might be a bit of a blessing.
He didn't always think that way. Once upon a time, his curse caused him serious heartache and anger and turmoil—and it was fair, because who would want to end up in a barren dreamscape alone for hours, situated in a perfect mockery of what you once had and could never have at the same time? But Jimmy does not enjoy suffering, and suffer from his curse he would not, he refused. It was inevitable, so why hurt because of it? Why not play into it? Why not live his life, have the best time he could possibly have, be reckless and unafraid of what was to come until it really mattered in the same way that it mattered to everyone else? Only panic when everyone else starts panicking instead of living with that constant paranoia that would get him nowhere because he's cursed?
Some people thought he had finally snapped after he played this game so recklessly. So many of his deaths were simply because of jokes or bad bits with Joel, a disregard for the weight of those limited lives (ha) that surely made the Watchers quake with anger in their stupid robes or whatever. He decided to live.
And it was going bloody perfectly until his final death was literally caused by forces completely out of his control, which sort of takes the idea of "taking his life into his own hands, dying when he wants to die, not being a slave to his curse when he is already so familiar with its effects" and mashes it into bloody bits with a meat tenderizer.
Jimmy groans into his hands again, glaring up at the sky with the nastiest look he can muster on his face.
He points up at the beautiful clouds, the breeze carrying the scent of sweet bread past his nose as the rows upon rows of wheat that surround him rustle, and whispers, "You're a bunch of bastards, you know that?"
He doesn't get a reply. He lets his shoulders slump, runs a hand through his hair, and stands up, walking through the fields and trailing his hands over the wheat, lugging his body over to the adorable little house situated at the end of the bridge where the mansion would have been, homey and decorated despite it being atop the most monotonous slab of cobblestone Jimmy has ever seen outside of a Skywars game.
It's built in his exact style and decorated just as well—which is to say, not much, but enough that it looks like there was effort put into it (which there was and always is, but people tend to think otherwise when there's a lack of detailing). He cracks open the door and marvels at how quietly it opens, not banging open at someone running in or creaking on its shoddily installed hinges. It allows him pleasant entry, and the inside of the house is just as cute as the outside. A little coatrack by the door, a welcome mat under his feet ('Good Boys At Heart'—ha), a large rug covering the wooden floor with a couch and a table, a small kitchen off to the side in the same room, and a ladder that leads upstairs.
Jimmy shrugs off his leather jacket, running his hands over the embroidered bits as he hangs it up on the coatrack and lets out a quiet smile as his lips turn upwards. There's, of course, the word 'BAD' written in a huge font, the letters in red, yellow, and green in that order. Then there are more Jimmy-specific things—a yellow feather, a goat horn, a frog that he and Joel added themselves because Grian was too huffy about being excluded from a plotline to join in...there is a quiet moment where his mind and his heart betray him and he aches to see his friends again, but he shoves the feeling down and pulls his hand away from the coat. He hopes he doesn't see them for a long, long time. He hopes he doesn't see one of them at all, because then that'll mean that one of them won, which means all of them won, really.
He ignores how the feeling returns when he climbs up the ladder and finds a single bedroom with a bed made for three.
He left the house because it was making him feel sad and because he was getting hungry. For the sake of the aesthetic, he went to the very end of Bread Bridge to collect the wheat for food and promptly got distracted by what he saw in the distance.
To his far left, a little house embedded in the wall of a hill, a beautiful flower garden and a pond in the centre of the lush valley it was surrounded by. Directly across from him, an imposing set of towers and walls, a small bit of smoke rising from the middle where he knows something is cooking on campfires as its inhabitants sit around and trade secrets and stories alike with each other. To his far right, a ranch, both ugly and endearing at the same time, cows and chickens and goats all in their pens outside as the chimney puffs with a warmth he wishes he could feel.
It is cold up here, he thinks—colder than the last three areas. He supposes that it's because of being up in the sky, far above where mountains could reach, but it sends goosebumps up his arms all the same and makes him shiver. Maybe he should go put his jacket back on, because the white t-shirt just isn't doing it for him.
He doesn't remember when he sat down, legs dangling over the edge, but when he stands up, his bones ache and creak in protest until he fully stretches out his body, his small wings elongating out behind him. He wonders, fleetingly, if he would actually hit the ground if he slipped from this edge or if he would just fall into the void. He isn't too keen on trying, so he walks the centre of the bridge back to the house, wheat bundled up in his inventory and enough to feed a person for at least an entire day.
When he makes it back to the house, he sees the front door left slightly ajar. He definitely did not leave the front door ajar. Several years of paranoia choked that carelessness out of him a long time ago, and despite him being in the safest possible place, he feels his feathers raise for just a moment before he steps forward and pushes open the door.
There, in the living room, is Joel. Joel, with a green streak in his hair that Jimmy feels like he hasn't seen in weeks (which he hasn't, he quickly recalls), looking lost and dazed and confused as he meets Jimmy's eyes, his own shining something fierce as he doesn't move to respond.
Jimmy fights the urge to break out into a huge smile. It's only been—it's only been, like, an hour. What happened to all of Joel's time? There's no way that he died second.
"I—I didn't," Joel stutters, still staring at Jimmy like he's seen a ghost. Jimmy smacks himself and his dopey expression when he realises he spoke aloud. "Skizz got out before me. I was third."
Jimmy doesn't respond immediately, just staring at his teammate and the way his wings seem to flutter expectantly, even as Joel is frozen in place. Joel takes in a shuddering breath, one that sounds entirely too close to tears, and quietly asks, "Are you...real?"
Jimmy breaks into a watery smile, taking a few steps forward before engulfing Joel in a hug. He, for Joel's sake, ignores how tightly he hugs back and ignores how his hiccups make the both of them shake and his tears are making Jimmy's shirt all damp. Jimmy, as if he's done this a thousand times before (and if not a thousand, then it's probably something close), rests his head on Joel's and takes his hair between his fingers, trying to soothe the very emotional teammate shaking himself to pieces in his arms. He's never worked with Joel in Life Games before—is this how he always is afterward? Or did something happen?
"It's so quiet," Joel whispers, turning his head to the side so he can speak. He sniffs, then repeats, "It's quiet. I can hear myself think again, I..."
Joel trails off and shudders again before pulling away from Jimmy, scrubbing at his eyes with the back of his wrists as he swears under his breath. "Gods, 'm sorry, I just..."
"No! No, no, no," Jimmy placates, placing a hand on Joel's shoulder comfortingly. "Don't worry about it, man."
"It's just—I hate the end of the games, I hate them so blummin' much." Joel wrings his hands and sags, and Jimmy leads him back towards the couch and sits him down. "Right after you die, it's always just after you die, it always gets worse. I'm always red, and I can't hear myself think anymore. It's like, I just go mad at the end of every single season and I feel like I'm getting strung across lightning in my own body, like if I don't get a kill then the redness will just kill me instead. It hurts." Joel clutches at his chest, nails very pointedly starting to dig into his skin. Jimmy gently removes his hand and holds it on his lap. "It just...and it doesn't fully go away. Not when I'm in the void after sessions, not for a few days after everything is over. But it's..."
He trails off, and Jimmy picks up. "It's quiet?"
Joel blinks, absentmindedly squeezing Jimmy's hand in his lap. "Where are we?"
"The afterlife," Jimmy says simply, and the panic on Joel's face is enough to make him kick himself.
"What, are we actually—?"
"No!" Jimmy yelps, waving his hands back and forth. "No, no, never. I just—I always get an afterlife after the games. I don't know if it's because of my curse or if it's a thing that's meant to happen to the first player that gets out...but there'll never be a difference, so who cares, honestly."
Joel seems to calm down after a few seconds, staring into the wall before asking, "You get an afterlife while we all have to wait in the blummin' void for days?"
Jimmy winces. "I bring in people sometimes. Well, no—I don't have any control over who joins me. It's just the people that I'm closest to."
"And we've never been close," Joel mutters, mostly to himself, but Jimmy nods anyway. "Does that mean Grian's gonna show up?"
"If he doesn't win, yeah," Jimmy confirms, and Joel hums.
They sit in silence for a bit, Joel having leaned onto Jimmy's side after a few minutes. Jimmy doesn't initiate conversation or ask what had happened—if Joel wanted to talk about it, he'd bring it up himself. He doesn't want to accidentally trigger something, not when he was apparently so forcefully torn from the red haze and placed into utter tranquility. He just wants Joel to have that, even if Jimmy's mind is plagued with gruesome curiosity.
"I'm...sorry," Joel says after a while. "For crying all over you."
"Don't apologise for that, man," Jimmy chastises gently. "It's an emotional game. You're allowed to get emotional."
Joel halfheartedly laughs, swiping discreetly at his eyes. Jimmy politely looks away as he does so. "Who would've thought, yeah? Big bad Joel gets all teary-eyed every time he gets out of the game."
Jimmy resists the inherently birdish urge to coo. Joel might have taken on avian traits, but he probably won't share the same instinctive feeling of comfort from being cooed at. Instead, he just smiles sadly and tilts his head to the side, resting a hand on Joel's shoulder. "Aw, mate...it's a lot to get torn out of all of a sudden, 'specially after all the...hype. That you seem to experience towards the end."
Joel snorts, then fixes Jimmy with a look. "You know, I was wondering if this was a dreamscape that I was making up in my head to cope with being trapped in the void again, but even I couldn't make up you saying that me going clinically insane at the end of every season is hype."
Jimmy splutters, face tinting red. "That's—that's not what I said!"
"It literally is," Joel says, running a hand through his hair and jostling it around like he does when he's either nervous, in deep thought, or overstimulated. He still has a smile on his face, though his eyes are blown wide and staring at some fixed point in the ground. "That's literally..."
He trails off, and his brows furrow slightly. "That's, um..."
Jimmy's expression softens, and he lets his hand slip from Joel's shoulder to his wings, brushing over them gently as Joel shudders. "You alright?"
Joel seems to struggle with his words for a moment (which is a terrifying idea in and of itself; Joel is, quite possibly, one of the only people Jimmy has ever met that doesn't hesitate on what he says, ever) before he turns and looks up at Jimmy. "I was going to let you kill me."
Goosebumps tear up and down Jimmy's arms. "What?"
"That's why I was so reckless," Joel says, brows fully pulled inwards, mouth tilted into a small frown. "I just needed to get down to around your time, and then I was gonna—so you wouldn't be out first. And then you just fell."
Jimmy just stares at him, absolutely shell-shocked. Joel? Joel, of all people, was going to sacrifice himself for Jimmy? It makes his head spin—not because he wouldn't have done the same thing for him in a heartbeat, but because Joel felt the same way about him. It just doesn't make sense—but it makes his chest ache all the same, confused but warmed at the same time.
"I..." Jimmy starts, voice getting caught in his throat. "Joel, I—"
"I'm not upset," Joel interrupts, flexing his hands and blinking away the mildly dazed expression on his face. "I think getting out of there fast does me good, y'know? It just...sucks."
Jimmy slinks his hand across Joel's shoulders and pulls him in for a side-hug, laying his chin upon his black hair and closing his eyes. "That's very kind of you, Joel. And—look, if it makes you any better, it's a curse. You really think I just tripped and fell?" He lopsidedly smiles, despite Joel being unable to see it. "Come on. I'm not that bad at these games."
Joel is silent, so Jimmy continues, "Ow. Anyways, I was meant to die earlier than I did because Etho boogey killed me while I was under two hours. But I didn't—I think Grian let it slip—and the universe just...course-corrected. I felt like I was pulled. Or, like...flicked."
"You were flicked?" Joel says incredulously. "I'm going to flick those bloody Watchers in their goddamn—"
"Hey..." Jimmy says firmly, cutting him off with a light shake. "Maybe don't talk bad about the things that are probably allowing us to be here and not in the void, yeah?"
"But—"
"I don't like them either," Jimmy says. "I just don't want to get kicked out."
Joel huffs. "Fine. I'm still giving Grian a piece of my mind when he gets here."
Jimmy laughs slightly. "Good to know. Let's hope we don't see him too soon."
"I hope he wins so I don't feel bad for decking 'im in the nose," Joel says, sitting up and fixing his expression into something that Jimmy can only describe as a pout. "Did you know he joined the Nosy Neighbors 'cause he knew I was gonna die?"
"He what?" Jimmy exclaims, wings flaring out in a playful bit of anger. "Even after everything with Judge Judy And Executioner?"
"I can't believe it either," Joel grumbles. "Couldn't even wait for my bloody body to get cold, he just jumped ship as soon as keeping me alive got too expensive."
Jimmy harrumphs and leans on his knees in a similar position to Joel. "Who actually got you in the end?"
"Uh..." Joel frowns and tilts his head to the side. "I don't know. A lot was going on...think it might've been Scott?"
Jimmy scoffs and rolls his eyes. "'Course it was. What a menace."
"Seriously."
The conversation peters off into a comfortable silence, only broken up by the rustling of the wheat outside and the occasional sharp inhale from Joel when he snaps his head back up after having dozed off. On the fourth time, Jimmy has to hold back a snicker. "When did you sleep last, Joel?"
Joel just swears at him, which in turn makes Jimmy burst out laughing. "Recently—" He is cut off by a yawn, because of course he is. "Recently 'nough. Screw you."
"There's a bed upstairs," Jimmy says lightly, trying not to sound as teasing as he feels. "And I don't think I've properly slept, either. We can go be Sad Dead Bed Boys together."
Joel's laugh is quiet and blown from his nose as he rubs his eyes and straightens. He pauses, then lowly asks, "Is it...like the bed back on the server?"
There's a good long moment before Jimmy realises what he means. "Oh, uh—yeah, it's three wide."
Joel doesn't say anything at that, and Jimmy fills in the blanks from there. "It'd be weird without Grian, wouldn't it?" Joel nods. Jimmy still can't believe how out of it he is. Sure, he can joke and look and sound as normal and mildly aggressive as ever, but he keeps...zoning out. Going quiet. Sort of like he did in their downtime up in the sky, but Jimmy doesn't think it's because of newfound tranquility this time. He doesn't know what happened back there, and he's starting to wonder whether he really wants to.
Instead, he falls back on what he knows how to do—console. He shifts all the way to the end of the couch and leans on the arm, asking, "Wanna just lay down here?"
Joel manages to make a face at him. "What, and cuddle on the couch together?"
Jimmy rolls his eyes. "We have slept in the same bed literal dozens of times. I feel like we're past the stage of 'physical affection is awkward,' Joel, and you need sleep. The bags underneath your eyes could carry bricks."
Joel glares at him, but his wings have already fluffed up in anticipation, so Jimmy can't take him seriously in the slightest. He pointedly looks away so Joel doesn't feel genuinely awkward, and he doesn't look back until most of Joel's short frame is laid up against the bottom three-quarters of Jimmy's body. Jimmy lets his hands rest loosely on Joel, fingers thumbing through feathers wherever they find them.
"You good?" Jimmy asks quietly, and the hum Joel gives reverberates around Jimmy's body.
"Yeah," Joel says shortly. "Now shut it, I'm tired."
Jimmy laughs at that, then closes his eyes and leans against the pillow at the end o the couch. With nothing but the sound of the wind and the wheat outside, they both drift off to sleep.