Chapter Text
The next day was quiet.
And oh, It was a bad thing.
The inside of his head was so silent that his senses crossed wires. He could taste it, the lack of noise. Absence itself on the tip of his tongue, Scar had never experienced anything like it. Not sweet, not sour or bitter, it was nothing because nothing is what it was.
But it was there. Palpable.
He wanted the fly back, a swarm of them to fill his brain. It was that bad.
Scar hobbled to the bathroom, brushing his teeth until his gums were bleeding in the hope that it would help. Spitting out mouthful after mouthful of minty fresh soundwaves. When that didn’t work, he began to hum. No song in particular, deep baritone notes exploring everything from disney to classic piano pieces that he didn’t know he knew.
Whenever he spoke, the taste went away.
The curious side of him found the whole thing interesting. Peculiar. If one of his friends had come to him and said ‘hey, I can taste silence’ he would have drilled them relentlessly, spilling question after question. Details. Specifics. Comparisons. He would want it all.
The rational part of him was going to purposefully walk off a cliff with a broken elytra if it continued on.
“It’s worse than the flesh thing.”
Grian pinched his nose bridge tighter, staring down at the mass of ores on the floor. He was never, ever going to get his chests organised at this rate.
He had had it in his planner for over a week now.
Scar rolled onto his back, grass stalks and daisies warping under his frame. The clouds were so fluffy, wispy patches of fur on the skies pelt. If the universe was a cat, would it be a tortoise shell or a tabby? Probably not a tabby, their pattern was too consistent. Whereas a tortoise shell, they had some variation to them, markings messy like splotches of paint. The distinction was important.
“I can see how a slight feeling in your mouth is worse than cannibalism.”
“It’s not a feeling, G. I can taste… something. Whenever there isn’t any noise. It is disgusting, you could not begin to understand my pain right now,” hyperbolic, perhaps, but it wasn’t one of his favourite flavours. Wasn’t a nice strawberry, or a tart apple pie. So it was bad! It was the worst!
Plus…
Was he a cannibal? He hadn’t eaten anyone. Scar was convinced that to qualify, you had to have eaten at least one person. But was that whole? Or did parts count? He could see a limb being enough, even a small one. Simply biting did not make someone a cannibal, though. Lots of people bit, for lots of different reasons. And he had even gone to the lengths to force down toast for breakfast that morning, not one of his friend’s liver.
(It hadn’t done anything for his hunger. That was still growing inside like mould, expanding beyond the confines of his body to encase him. He felt it everywhere.)
Maybe he was like those vegetarian vampires from the cheesy books. Wanting, but abstaining through will alone.
…They were still classified as vampires, though…
An object was thrown his way, landing next to him. A book, the quill completing a spiral before it hit the ground. “You could start listing off these piles. If you wanted,” Grian drew out the end of his sentence, trying to come across as a sweet angel. An innocent being. Scar knew well of his many, many atrocities, including but not limited to propagating various wars. And then making money off of said wars.
When it wasn’t working, Grian aimed lower. “You bit me yesterday.”
“Fine, fine,” he agreed, but he made sure to be lazy about it. Excusably so, he was very sick. As he was admitting it now, he might as well make use of the privileges that followed when your brain went boom. Laying on his stomach as he wrote, feet doing loops. He even managed to count a pile of lapis without the dark blue pushing him out of place again.
That dream was far away now. Near forgettable
He could almost see everything working out for him. Yeah, so he had left some bolts at the bottom of the ravine, a couple of crucial screws. The lid that stopped his insides from spilling out like spaghetti, for instance. A few shards of empathy. His health crystal… that hadn’t done much good… he’d best not tell his customers about that one. But wasn’t he managing it well! No one, as far as he was aware, had even died yet to their new hardcore world.
Most people were staying in their bases, health potions clutched close.
Grian reached up towards one of the higher chests, fabric bunching at his waistband. He had two dimples on his back that Scar had never noticed before. Or had he? Promptly, he looked away, hands resuming in their pigeon scratch. It was a little difficult determining what was the new problem in him and what had been there before.
Hunger. His brain verbal vomited.
“Hey. So uh. What were you and Mumbo talking about? Yesterday?” Cheeks dusted in high pink, he prayed Grian blamed the sun.
“Me and Mumbo spoke a lot yesterday,” one of the chests was complete, every type of ore sectioned off. Grian was mixing raw and smelted in the same row, something that Scar would never do. And he wasn’t even sane.
Okay, he wouldn’t even organise a chest in the first place, but that wasn’t the point.
“About…” he tried to recall. It was a question he wanted answered, had been waiting to ask, but his memory never failed to hinder him. Gooped up, as Grian had put it the night before. “Like, hm… oh! ruling a thing out?”
A sigh.
Grian closed what he was working on, crossing his legs to get comfortable in the grass. Scar wasn’t sure why they were suddenly so serious, but he mirrored all the same.
Facing each other under the cat clouds. They slowly passed on by.
“Are you gonna freak out on me again? I… I don’t really know what to do if you do.”
Yep.
“No, no. Never. I’d never do that. Phft. When have I ever freaked out?”
It was not the answer Grian wanted, but it was the answer they both knew he would give.
“Just say it, G,” Scar tried again, placing a hand on his shoulder. He squeezed, reassuring smile unusually small. He felt unusually small. It had been a while since he’d last sat up straight. “I’m okay.”
It was obvious in the axis of his jaw that he did not believe him. Grian spoke all the same. “We… me, and a lot of the others,” who were the others? How many people knew the whole story? Had they had a meeting without him? That was rude. “Think that to fix the… whew… the uh, situation … you need to die.”
Die.
“You need to die. To reset it. You fell in that ravine Scar… and you didn’t… you didn’t respawn. But you died. You’re stuck—” …and because it was a hardcore world, the outcome of his second demise would be unsure. “---in some kind of between thing.”
“Ah,” Scar already knew that. In some kind of between thing. Right. He felt dizzy, mouth full of that vile taste. He wasn’t a misunderstood genius, but over the last twenty four hours a lot had become apparent to him.
One, he had died to fall damage and came back differently. Adjacent. Starved of something he had never needed before. These problems worsened during moments of stress. Body haunted by whispers that knew how to screech. And screech they would, words of horror and despair. It was incredibly problematic.
And two, he was the issue. The frayed knot, the odd one out. No health bar. Purgatory stuck. His fellow hermits were scared in their homes, pushed into hiding as a result of his curse. They weren’t trying to eat people, or tear up floorboards and start fires. Most of them, anyway. Some of them had been doing that stuff all along, so that was fine.
Had he truly died one too many times? Broken what had been a functional system for decades?
It was almost impressive. He hadn’t realised he could be such a force.
“Scar, buddy?” Grian had taken one of his hands at some point, which was weird but not unwanted. It was clammy in his own, anxious despite putting itself there. It had been there many times before, in sandstone and red velvet bases. Scar wanted to shout, tell Grian that the difference in time and place was null. They were the same. Their hands were the same. He kept his mouth shut. “Still with me, Scar?”
He nodded, holding loosely. It was dangerous, really, to be given a pulse under his fingertips that was not his own. Scar needed to feel it against his tongue, the warmth that radiated springing free. Instead, he bit his own cheek. Was that auto-cannibalism? Someone ought to make a handbook for situations like his. Maybe he would write one… become a bestseller… “Okay. I’ll die.”
“What? No,” on occasion Grian’s vocal chords reached new heights. Every time Scar thought he had heard their limit he was proved wrong. “I already told Mumbo that it’s stupid and we aren’t doing that.”
Scar chuckled. “It’s my choice, Grian. Not yours, right?” it wasn’t a scathing sentence, but a carefully spoken one. Grian rarely showed moments of fondness. Or if he did, it was not in the raw conventional way others might look for. He would kill for you, or sometimes when it counted, kill you. The obvious ones? Those were rare. He wanted to find a way to keep it forever.
His resident parasite was quick to tell him a way. Scar was not going to be doing that.
“...I’m not happy with it.”
Scar played with their joint fingers, took in the differences in size, in shape, in scars and freckles. He did not say anything else.
——————————
Back in the desert, the night before the final destruction of dogwarts, Grian and Scar had started a tradition of sorts.
Air thick with sand and gunpowder, they had escaped to their underground bunker. What was left of above ground in craters and pitfalls. enough to rival the moon.
Scar on red, Grian freshly yellow, though you wouldn’t have known it. His eyes never seemed to change as everyone else’s did. A shame, Scar would have liked to see how the colour fared on him. It would need to be the right shade for his hair, of course. A mustard?
A marigold, maybe.
They waited for hours in the dark to talk, to dare breath louder than a rabbit could pant. Once the sun had gone down and the festivities were on hold, only then did Scar allow himself to decompress from the day. Taking stock of their weapons and food supplies, making sure his health was in place. Even trying to strike up a conversation about their plans or the next move, but Grian wasn’t having it.
Too tired. Too warm. Too irritated.
So Scar had let it slide, thinking that was the last he’d see of his partner in crime until morning.
The bunker had two beds, equipped for emergency respawn purposes.
Scar had watched, confused as Grian shoved one foot under the right of the pair, half-dragging half-stumbling across the room until it met flush with his own. Then, wordlessly, he crawled in. He hadn’t even looked his way.
It had taken another full hour of pretending to be busy before Scar felt brave enough to join him. Leg knocking into Grian’s clumsily as he did, the summit of his devotion bared in a scary way. Ripe for judging, if it should fall into cruel hands.
He needn’t have waited.
They were tangled by morning, one man starting before another ended.
From then on, the habit had followed them. Across worlds, across bases. It didn’t matter where Grian and Scar were, if it had two beds it was fair game. If it was bad enough, they fit a singular. Not always. Not often. But if needed, if one of them were having a particularly stressful week, the other would never deny them a space to lay.
Yet …Scar hadn’t been expecting it.
It was funny, in a way. He was already in Grian’s bed. Grian had insisted on it for one last night, telling him that he would die to the spiders in his basement, and it ‘wasn’t a good way to go’ (Was there a good way to go? Or was he facing a classic case of hobson’s choice?)
That his tree wasn’t ‘Scar-safe.’ He was right, but Scar wouldn’t admit that.
It still surprised him, though, when he felt the mattress shift. The lack of hesitation, that too was… something. Grian coming across as bored as he slipped under the sheet, shuffling over to press against his side. In the dark, the corner of Scar’s lips twitched up in a smile.
Grian thought he was so sly. He wasn’t.
“Thank goodness you’re here, I was getting hungry, you know.”
Grian scoffed, moving around to get comfortable. Arm to arm, landing on settling with not an inch of space between them. “Ew. I have a lot of feathers,” a wing twitched to prove its existence. “They wouldn’t taste good.”
Scar disagreed, his digestive system overactive and ready to try anything that moved. They would probably be hard to swallow, but he could work around them. Clean the bones. How did cats go about it, eating birds? It never stopped Jellie, the poor animals left by his door as partly devoured gifts. Headless, torn open, and feathered. That’s what the body produced acid for, right? “Yeah. Probably not,” better to not scare him away.
He went back to his prior task, studying the way Grian’s ceiling had changed hues since the night before. Was the copper not waxed? How ridiculous. If he ever did end up respawning, he would fix that free of charge. “Do you think we should do this more often?”
“Do what?” Grian feigned ignorance. “Break the world? Endanger everyone? Ruin my plans to finally sort out my storage?” He needed to let that last one go. They both knew it was never happening, and Grian was surely grateful for the excuse to let it be.
They could do those things, sure. “No,” Scar nudged him in the shoulder, demonstrating how he did not have to move to apply direct pressure.
“Oh.”
Oh. Always the oh.
“I guess I never think about it,” Grian shrugged, making Scar’s nightshirt ride uncomfortably up the arm. He adjusted by hooking it under, bicep tight around the other man’s. Skin on skin.
It was almost like a game, the little things they could do to get closer. It had spanned for years, he hoped it wouldn’t end.
“Goodnight, Grian.”
“Night, Scar.”
——————————
Xisuma had the information pool of a brick wall.
Scar had it in him to bite his head off then and there. He had come to him with hope, sparkling eyes and a straight spine. Which, with his current state being akin to a resurrected corpse, took a lot. He’d even cleaned the last remaining specks of dirt from under his nails! If that was not dedication to getting answers, then he did not know what was.
“I just— I do not know what you want me to say, Scar. You’re not in the system anymore.”
Yikes. The man was useless! He had access to things none of them did. “Can’t you just go in there and… press some stuff? Jiggle it all about?,” he was begging, desperate, head tilted further to the left than it was humanly supposed to be able to rotate. “Ooh! Have you tried to type some numbers, like they do in spy movies?” The numbers always worked. Throw in a letter or two, a hashtag key at the start. A colon.
“That is not how it works. Also, I do not ‘go in’ anywhere. It is a computer.”
…He knew it wasn’t X’s fault.
You see, Scar had woken up from a terrible dream, and boy, it was becoming the week for them, In which he had fallen through an endless void. Cold. Blue. Frankly, he thought it was a tad on the nose. His subconscious needed to get creative with it, have some fun with the concepts and themes. Let loose! Spin! Add some practical effects to really shake things up. Had it never heard of a soundboard before? If he was going to get haunted, he at least wanted it to be interesting to the eye.
Still, it had rattled him. Blame the repetition.
(It was possible he was just looking for an excuse to yell at someone, too. It wasn’t very nice of him, but in his defence he had gone days insatiable. As easy to joke about as it was, he really was hungry. The fact that he had not given in to his needs was incredibly impressive. He was strong.)
“Alright, alright. Whaddabout some kind of machine.” Surely he had some kind of machine.
“...No.”
Scar sighed. Xisuma was lucky he wore a helmet every day. A kill was difficult without the target's weak spots exposed. Some neck bare to slice, a quick rock to the head. He liked that one, for some reason. His hands knew it. Blunt force trauma.
Christ. He had to go.
Grian was waiting for him once he got outside.
“Can I eat him?”
“No.”
Not one damn person wanted him to have a good day. And the fly was back! The wretched thing invisible to the eye, buzzing and humming and screaming. Who had invented such a tortuous bug? What did they provide to the ecosystem? Scar swore there were two of them now, circling him like a planetary ring. “Fine. Can I eat you?”
“No.”
Scar groaned, all open mouthed and backwards. He was reaching some kind of point.
“I went to see Mumbo,” Grian continued as if he had not just heard a modern day pterodactyl. “He’s been working on something,” a machine? “The dude is ridiculously stressed. …It doesn’t seem to be going very well. I don’t… Scar I don’t think he’s slept for a while.”
So it was a dud. Of course it was. No handouts from the universe for Scar, only parasitic intruders.
It was steadily becoming harder not to give up. Had he been better off clueless, tearing up dirt until the end of time? Maybe if he had kept going he would have knocked out two birds with one stone and dug himself a nice little grave. Scar knew what had to be done. All he had been doing day long was prolonging the inevitable, grasping at straws they knew to be full of holes.
Everyone else was aware, too. People kept coming up to him and having awkward conversations, foreheads twisted in angles as they attempted to have one final jest. A passing smile, a compliment on the progress of his tree. (They were awful, awful liars. The new trench severed his sightlines in half. He could feel the property value as it went down the drain. Call him an empath.)
False eulogies. Scar tried to accept them with grace. No one was being intentionally mean, but his mood was sour.
He wished that they wouldn’t, though. It was embarrassing, to be treated as dead when you were still alive. Could they not at least wait until he was 6 feet under to start mourning? He wasn’t even dying! Worst case he would be kicked from the world, forced to live elsewhere for a while. A king of kings. A hermit of hermits.
Right?
He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath inwards until his lungs hurt. They gurgled like a stab wound. One, two, three. He exhaled.
Grian was trying his hardest to hide a concerned look, thinly veiled behind a weird expression.
It was horrible. He never wanted to see it again but he had a feeling that he would. “Hey,” Scar hunched as they walked, bones feeling heavier than ever. They must have been filled up with lead as he slept. Or sand. Diamonds. Dust. His feet had no idea where they were going. Maybe they were just walking, enjoying the overcast. Would it rain again? If it did, he was going to open a store selling wooden sleds. The hermits could ride the mud slopes outside of his base in his honour. “There’s always other worlds.”
But not this one. They would lose everything.
Their knowledge on how hardcore worlds functioned was… limited, at best. At least, Scar’s was. Maybe out there in the great big beautiful unknown, there was a scientist type who had it all figured out. Someone who could drop an advanced spaceship on their world, swoop on down and say ‘this is how you revert it. This is how you go back.’
Mumbo was trying. Xisuma had tried, too. There were others, whiteboards out, minds at work.
It was okay. Not everyone could know everything, and he was tired. His stomach rumbled. If they didn’t try his way… it would not be long before Scar did something he deeply regretted.
Those walking feet kept going until they ended up near a ravine. The very same one. It was his ravine now. Perhaps they could build a bench near the top. Wasn’t that what people did? He wasn’t sure why, being sat on for an eternity wasn’t his idea of a good time. But the commemoration could be nice.
In what way would his friends remember him? Like he was now, or how he had been? Where the two blurred?
Scar peered into the plummet, soles teetering against loose stone. The silly thing about the entire situation was that It wasn’t even that deep; had he just clipped the side on his way down, slid a bit against the gravel, maybe even grabbed a root, he probably wouldn’t have died that night.
Naturally, that would be the case. He held the record for most preventable deaths, leading by an unbeatable amount. Until quite recently, Scar had been proud of it. Now with foresight the trophy had been a shiny golden warning.
How had he died that night? The memory lost to the annoyance of the fly the second he had woken up. Had he been building late and forgot to look down? A creeper explosion launching him too far? Or was his elytra faulty. That was a common one for him, forgetting to check the charge before takeoff.
Everyone did it sometimes, having a laugh over the message on their comms. Scar did it often.
The chasm had lava on one side of it, gushing down from top to bottom, gathering into a pool. He hadn’t burnt to death, though. His dreams and visions would be different had he, filled with neon flames and charred skin. Scar didn’t know why, but he knew that to be true.
He was becoming quite the seer as of late. He also loved to make things up for the hell of it.
People had their thrills.
Grian was loitering at his side, one wing shielding them from the downpour. He was quick with it, the dark clouds only just beginning to show.
If the universe was a cat, it was a Russian Blue.
“You were right earlier. We could always move worlds,” Grian spoke to the breeze.
That was true. They’d done it multiple times, once a world had run dry and they’d built everything from sprawling cities to gigantic game arenas. Scar had gone through a mystical portal under his bed once. That was a fun one. Another time had been through space, a journey of which he’d slept the entire way, waking up on untouched land.
It wasn’t just the world that was broken, though.
There was a problem with him. With Scar. Never once had someone's communicator stopped showing vitals. Never once had someone died and returned so starved. Scar didn’t want to eat his friends to survive. Not really, so moving worlds just would not do. It wasn’t fair, either. Everyone had their lives started. Their plans already in motion.
The void inside him was strangely quiet, and not in a way he could taste anymore. It lived through him, was trying to feed through him. Surely it would fight back if he tried to remove it somehow?
Or was it misplaced, too? As unhappy in their symbiotic relationship as he was? He tried to put himself in the shoes of the beast, the abstract concept that needed him, was being refused by its host. His immune system didn’t seem to care, but Scar did, very much.
He would kill both himself and the void before he let it take his freedom.
Ah. He wasn’t a good home.
“Let’s go. We can figure something out.”
“Unless you’re planning on offering up your flesh for interval snacking, G, I can’t see how,” he tried to keep his smile, despite it all.
——————————
Scar didn’t sleep that night.
Grian was there again, a warm mass hogging his pillow. At least he’d thought up a better excuse this time, complaining about the lumpy couch and how it hurt his back. Scar had pointed out that he shouldn’t have made such a lumpy couch, but he was glad he’d put in the effort to seem casual. It was always amusing to watch Grian be vulnerable, like a cactus trying to climb into bed with a balloon.
And it was likely true. His couch did suck. He’d carved it all wrong, edges too harsh for the soft human body. But back pain was no reason for him to curl their fingers together against the bed. It was no reason for the thumb that moved against his own, soft patterns, lines, shapes that were yet to exist coming to form for the first time on Scar’s skin.
It was no reason.
Grian didn’t need a reason. Scar didn’t want one, never had. He was welcome for as long or as little as he wanted to stay. For as much as he could take from him.
Scar would give him anything, if he just asked.
So why was there a selfish part of him, a loud uncaring part, that debated waking his friend up and asking him if he would be the one to do it. To kill him.
Grian had done it before, once on purpose. Many times by mistake. The intentional, so bittersweet, pulled punches and rushed apologies in a desert ring that they’d quickly outgrown. It had been a victory, but it hadn’t felt like one.
A prairie victory?
No, that was… grassland.
A pyrrhic victory.
Scar decided not to wake him, after all. Not because he didn’t think Grian would do it, he would. He would do that and worse if he just asked. Instead it was his stomach that stopped him, creaking like an unoiled door. If Grian started moving, he didn’t trust himself to control his teeth. The poor man didn’t need any more marks than the ones he had already given him.
So he uncoiled their hands, slipping out of the inviting sheets, and into the darkness once more.
He knew what he had to do.
——————————
The void was unsaturated.
Not black. Not even adjacent. It was white as a dove, without a single tinge of blue.
Scar knew why that was, swimming through the limitless space at the edge of the universe. Fingers reached forward, an entire galaxy weaving in and out of each one. The colours were inside of him, stolen, by accident, but stolen nonetheless. That was fine, It was welcome to have them back. Could he strike a deal with his silver tongue? The world. He wanted the world back.
He opened his mouth to speak, a trail of bubbles popping out to float downwards.
GoodTimeWithScar was slain by an Enderman.
——————————
There was silence in the room.
Pure, unfiltered silence. No static. No humming. No taste to it, either. Scar bathed in it, letting true nothingness roll over him for the first time in days. His lashes fluttered against his cheeks, eyes softly shut, not daring to open his eyes. Not just yet.
In the room was an open window, — he could smell it on the air. Wet dirt and mildew tumbling in on the remnants of a storm. He hoped that was the last of the rain, he had a lot of mud to clean up, after all.
Scar listened intensely, held his breath to hear better. Waited an extra ten seconds after his initial judgement, just to be sure.
No fly.
Slowly, he opened his eyes. The room… was normal. He felt normal. A quick scan of his limbs, with fingers splayed out in front of him. He counted ten. That was good.
“You look ridiculous right now.”
Grian was there, seated in a chair by his desk. Working away at some kind of sword. “Hello there,” Scar yawned, bringing a fist up to swipe away sleep dust. “We gotta stop meeting like this. It’s getting silly.”
“You mean In my base? I don’t think I’m the issue here.”
Yeah. …That was fair. Grian lived there, he did not. But It was his last respawn point. What was he supposed to do about that? He’d spent days as a walking mist, fading in and out of existence. And he had succeeded in saving them all from the terrors (himself.) Everyone needed to cut him some slack. “World fixed?” Scar rolled over, face pressed into the pillow. Vision going from blank to dazzling phosphenes within seconds. As if it was so casual.
As if he hadn’t been through hell and back.
Grian watched him very carefully. “Seems world is fixed,” he was asking a question without saying it.
“I feel… good. I think. No freaky voices, at least not yet,” he answered the question without hearing it.
But something was there. Something did not feel right.
Maybe he was still adjusting.
…?
Scar knew what happened next. In ten minutes, Grian would throw a pillow at him. If that did not work, he would take the sheets and leave the room until Scar got up. It was part of the routine, the tradition. The push and pull that made them them. Then, he would go back to his own house, waking up to tree sap every morning and an empty space until the next time one of them shattered their sense of reality.
Metaphorically or physical. Although he would love it if they could go without another problem like his. At least for a while.
That was fine. Scar spent the ten minutes he was allocated waiting, allowing himself to sit with the feeling of being realigned. He might be a little rough for a few days, weeks, even, but he was ...himself... again. Everything in the right place, organs where they should be. Heart pumping blood. It felt right when the pillow hit, chased by contagious laughter. He was ready to go head first into the world.
And when he did finally settle down for lunch later that day, the smell of onions and garlic simmering away in a stew, if the flavours did nothing for his palette, if his stomach did not feel quite full once the bowl was empty…
Scar didn’t mention it to anyone. He had a basement to sell, after all.