Chapter Text
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“Grian.”
He hadn’t expected to hear that voice. Out of everyone… Grian didn’t think it would be Scar. Xisuma, maybe, or Doc, or Gem or False would’ve made sense — someone with a relevant skill set, someone who knows how to take the game apart or who’s good with a sword at least. Scar does not have a relevant skill set. He has a bleeding heart that gets him into places he shouldn’t be.
“Scar —”
Grian's body lurches upward to cut himself off, chest heaving, back arched. His face is screwed up tight, trying not to scream or make any scream-adjacent sounds, and he half succeeds. Scar makes a small sound in the back of his throat, almost like a whine, and drops to his knees beside him.
“What happened — what happened?” he asks, voice high and frightened. “Grian? Talk to me, please talk to me.”
He doesn’t know what to do. Of course he doesn’t know what to do. Scar isn’t — isn't built for this kind of thing, Grian thinks miserably. Why is it Scar?
“You shouldn’t—”
He arches again, the pain radiating from his center outward, dying near the tips of his fingers and toes. His chest seizes with it, and he thinks he can feel himself breaking down, internal code components falling apart, loops breaking and circuits misfiring, the pileup of unfortunate exit statuses.
There’s a kiss pressed to the top of his sweaty forehead, feather-light. Grian whimpers despite himself, and he hates how he melts against the human contact, the warmth and the gentleness of it. “I’ve gotcha, buddy,” Scar whispers. “I’m here — you’re not gonna be alone anymore, ‘kay? I’m — it — it seems like talking’s kind of hard right now, so don’t worry about that. Just — I’m here. You’re not alone. Not anymore.”
That’s worse, Grian is thinking, that’s worse — Scar shouldn’t be here, in a place like this. Bad things have happened here. Scar should be at home, safe, Jellie on his lap while he pages through plans for another massive build. Scar should be telling dumb jokes and shooting fire arrows out of the sky and bothering Tango for the hundred thousandth time. Scar should not be here.
“You shouldn’t b—” Blood bubbles at his lips, choking off the words — again the pain comes, a wave ripping through his body nerve by nerve, and again he arches upward, and this time a real whimper slips out. Scar makes that sound again, that — that kicked puppy sound. Grian hates that sound. “You shouldn’t b-be here,” he gasps out, finally.
“None of that,” Scar chides softly, shakily, and then there’s a pair of strong arms underneath him, lifting him by his knees and his shoulders. “As if there’s — god, Grian, as if there’s anywhere else in the world I’d be right now.” Grian’s head lolls to one side, and he blinks bleary eyes open, finally taking in Scar’s face. He’s crying, Grian realizes dimly.
“We’re getting you out of here,” Scar says, and Grian thinks they’re going to make me watch. They’re going to kill you and they’re going to make me watch. He shouldn’t be here. God, why, why is it Scar?
Another wave of pain — and this one’s a little too much. Grian’s back arches, and in response Scar holds him tighter, pulling him close to his chest like it’ll make any difference at all, like the pain’s not inside Grian, scraping and shattering from the inside out. “When did you get so light?” he asks, sounding more than a little broken. It’s the last thing Grian hears before he slips into the soundless dark.
He wakes somewhere else. There are sounds — lots of sounds, bad ones, and Grian whimpers, turning his head into the warmth of whoever’s holding him. It’s loud and it’s everywhere, diamond blades on armor, battle-shouts, and — the familiar hiss of something not quite human that makes Grian’s whole body stutter. The pain is still in him, the thing inside still wreaking havoc on his code. Painful, painful havoc. “Run,” someone’s yelling, “you have to run, get to the boat, X is waiting—”
“They’re not gonna touch you,” Scar is murmuring in Grian’s ear. “We brought the whole cavalry, don’t you worry — they’re not getting their hands on you again. Not ever.” He sounds furious. He sounds — he sounds so angry. His hold tightens as he speaks. Grian feels distinctly like something precious, something protected, which he has not felt in… weeks, at least. It’s enough to make him cry. In his pain-soaked delirium he lets himself believe the spoken promises, and he curls still further into Scar’s chest.
(On second thought maybe he should’ve expected Scar, after all.)
He’s passed from hand to hand, still gently, still like something precious. “He doesn’t look good,” says Xisuma’s voice, and Scar responds, saying something Grian can’t make out. Grian feels something probing at his code, and he jerks away, gasping, before realizing it’s Xisuma. Still the sensation makes him shudder, his mind thrown back to weeks upon weeks of someone, something in his code, breaking things, putting things in it.
Xisuma actually swears. “There… is definitely damage here. I’ll look over him in detail when we get back. How was he when you found him?”
Scar speaks louder this time, and his voice is high again, sounding helpless as he had back in the chamber. “It was — he was just like this. He was just lying there, I mean, and he kept doing that. I don’t know what’s wrong, it’s — there’s something hurting him. Still. I thought it would stop when we got him out.”
“Well, we aren’t out yet, are we? Hold on tight. To him and the boat. This isn’t the safest way to travel, and we don’t have time to make it any safer.”
There’s some shuffling — Grian is nestled into a hard wooden corner, Scar’s arm over his middle like a seatbelt. His hands twitch upward, the pads of his fingers brushing over Scar’s forearm, the rough skin there. He holds on weakly.
“You got it, boss,” Scar says, and his voice is still shaky. “Ready to go.”
What happens next is definitely complicated, and definitely not safe in the slightest. If Grian had a little more presence of mind, he’d be guessing at the details of their getaway strategy; years of Watching have given him an idea of how the game works, and how Xisuma’s job works in particular. He’d be drawing connections between the commands that Xisuma is sending, the code that he is tugging on, and the usefulness of a boat for keeping two players’ positions linked while absolutely and completely fucking around with things that shouldn’t be fucked around with, generally.
But he does not have that presence of mind. When they start to move, he discovers that the current condition of his code is not conducive to being dragged through thousands of blocks per microsecond, and he promptly passes out.
He won’t wake again for several days — not consciously, not in any way he’ll remember, though the pain will hang suspended in his mind for a very long time. He’ll have nightmares about it, but he won’t remember those, either.
Whatever they’d done to him was exacerbated by Xisuma’s careful exploitation of the game — it'd been their only way out of a situation so absolutely upside down and sideways, but it still nearly killed him, and Grian spends those several half-conscious days with many hands deep in his code. Everyone that anyone knows, with any experience, is called in to help.
There’s nothing for the pain, though. Not if they care about keeping him from becoming one big undefined behavior and glitching right out of existence. The thing that’s inside him is ugly and destructive, demanding a constant struggle, and pain relief’s not really a priority over keeping him alive; the work, too, is ugly, tearing malformed functions apart and stitching them painstakingly back together. So that’s what Scar stays for — holding Grian’s hand tight while he whimpers, or screams, or just writhes away with voiceless gasps. Sometimes he begs, barely-formed words babbling out evidence of the kinds of things done to him in that chamber.
“Please, please, please, please,” he’ll beg, over and over, “don’t, I don’t, I can’t — don’t touch me, don’t touch me, get it out of me—”
There’s nothing to make it better. There’s nothing at all to do but stay, and so Scar stays, trading off shifts with Pearl. They’re the only ones forcing each other to take breaks and sleep and eat and unimportant things like that — almost everyone else who would is elbow-deep in Grian’s code right now. It’s day — three? Four, maybe? — and Scar has been awake for thirty hours or so when Tango finally collapses. He’s been on the brink of it for awhile, shrugging off any cautious suggestions that he rest for a little bit, that he let someone else take the lead on whatever section he’s working on — he goes down slowly, eyes glazed over as he drops first to one knee and then the other, palms hitting the floor. He’s crying, and the flames on the back of his neck and his head are sputtering weakly, and it’s Scar who pulls him away with gentle hands and soft coaxing tones. Grian is still screaming as Xisuma steps into the space that Tango leaves. Bitterly Scar wishes he could close his ears.
“Come here, come on, you — you’ve been at it for awhile,” Scar says. “How — how long have you been up?” Tango doesn’t answer, and Scar has the sinking feeling, as he casts his mind back over his memories, that he hasn’t slept since the start of this at all.
“That big brain of yours needs rest if you’re gonna work at full capacity,” he says. “Grian — Grian needs you to sleep, right now. Come on.” He leads Tango out of the room, into the quiet of the hallway — they’re in Pearl’s base, because it just happened to be closest to where they spawned on return, and they’ve got a haphazard medical setup in her living room. There’s a collection of beds (also a haphazard setup) down one hallway, so that’s where Scar takes him, sitting on the closest one and dragging Tango down with him. He doesn’t plan on staying, but Tango’s head drops onto his shoulder, and, well. Scar cannot do much right now. Being a human pillow is — it’s something.
He pulls the covers over both of them because — well, Tango looks cold, and cold is probably not something that a blaze hybrid should be. So, covers. He doesn’t look comfortable, but Scar is pretty sure that neither of them is going to get comfortable. Because — because this hallway is not soundproofed.
There’s another scream, and Scar flinches. Tango doesn’t.
“It’s bad,” Tango says finally, his voice hoarse. “It’s — bad. It’s so — I’ve never seen something like this before. It’s worse than Gem was, it’s… I don’t know how we’re going to fix him.” Distantly Scar remembers that Gem came back hurt, too, taken out by a blow unlike any kind of PvP anyone had seen before. Scar was on extraction duty, so he wasn’t really there for the fighting part, but he’d heard about it from Cub, who is apparently alive because of her. She’s been on bed rest, healed to the point that she can stitch herself the rest of the way back together as long as she doesn’t try anything stupid.
Scar doesn’t know what to say to that. Platitudes aren’t going to make a difference — not when Tango’s the one who’s been over the code.
Eventually Tango falls asleep like that, and Scar soon after — tucked under covers, and heads leaned on shoulders.
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