Chapter Text
Chapter Four
The thoughts in his head run rampant and simultaneously go nowhere at all.
It feels a lot like being high, which Grian supposes isn’t too much of a stretch given the influx of potions that had hit his system earlier. Even before that, even before he foolishly knocked over that display Doc left out in front of him, Grian had been out of it from his own sickness.
He’s been like this before, and the memory is just enough to bring him a moment of clarity.
Back in season six, Grian was struggling. Quite a bit.
He wasn’t used to living in a society like Hermitcraft, not with the break of reality he’d lived through for years. Floating in the void disconnected him from himself, his body -- it’s all he had ever known. Days in nothingness spread like lifetimes. Soon memories of this body, of hunger in his stomach, was nothing more than a distant dream. He had no proof that any of it was ever real. Those days, his thoughts were nowhere. Head empty, full of whispers from voices that might have never been real in the first place.
Sometimes, Grian wouldn’t register the hunger in his belly. It was something of a cruel joke. The Watchers say they had a reason for picking him. He was special.
Watchers know players in the way a viewer sits on their couch and thinks they understand the people they see on the TV. They know what makes them tick, and they know that they bloom under false praise.
Afterall, what’s the most common theme in what the players watch? Stories where they’re told, “You’re the chosen one.” That’s all anyone wants to hear, right? That their pitiful little life is something more than they ever knew. It’s supposed to be hopeful.
For Grian, it destroyed everything he knew. Where one life ended, a new one was supposed to begin.
Those years that followed, however, were hardly described as living. Those years where Grian moved, that body wasn’t his. It didn’t eat, it didn’t shower, he was a Deity, he was nothing.
Going back to a life that was no longer his, of course, of course, he forgot to eat. Forgot to shower. What started as his neighbor cracking a joke about his morning breath turned into a mouthful of cavities. Grian’s body was rotting in place, and he didn’t know.
The Watchers loved what they called character development. A boy who barely survived a childhood with a weak, malnourished body growing into a creature that never needed to eat? That boy that grew into a tall child, who forgot how to feed himself - oh, as if he ever learned how?
Where Grian had been sick, those days had been a blur. Mumbo had been with him through most of it. Someone else had been there with fingertips against his vitals, putting needles through his arms. Someone green and someone mistrusted.
“Relax, birdie, I’m here to help,” his memory tells him and scares him enough that his reality breaks.
Impulse is carrying him. His body is contorted in his arms, but it’s a personal carry, nothing like how Doc had chosen to throw him over his shoulder from time to time.
It’s happened again, his mind supplies him with. He’s been here before, lost in a trance of delusion. He had forgotten - how had he?
“Impulse--” Grian tries, but the words take so much more effort than what he can handle.
“Go back to sleep,” Impulse says shortly. His tone’s lost some of its chipperness. The builder must be tired. Grian wonders if he’s been asleep at all, and wonders if Doc too is awake, looking for him.
He’s caused a lot of trouble, hasn’t he?
“I don’t know how much longer--” Speaking is hard, breathing is harder. His time is running out. “Mumbo -- where is he, really?”
“You’ve been real confused,” Impulse says with a heavy sigh. He walks rhythmically through the shopping district. Grian doesn’t waste his breath to ask where he’s been headed.
Tell me something I don’t know, he thinks dryly. His hours have been constant confusion, and this is his one chance before his world gets clouded again. What does he want? What can he do?
The answer seemed to be clear before, even in the confusion. Getting away was simple. Being aware makes it all much more complex. His thoughts are lost on him the same way this skin hangs on his bones, hangs because he’s made himself sick like this.
“I’m sick,” he says with such an urgency. He’s burning with the proclamation.
“I know, Grian,” Impulse says and shifts him up higher in his hold.
For a while, Grian can’t find it in him to speak. His mind is racing now. Thinking of the others, what must they be thinking? Pearl hasn’t been around; has this stirred up troublesome memories for her? What about the others, what about Doc, what about Mumbo?
He needs Mumbo before the clouds come again, he needs Mumbo before his reality breaks again. He might not come out of it this time.
This body of his is tired. Hair’s growing in places to make up for the warmth he’s deprived of himself. He’s an avian. He’s built for warmth, built to keep his bones and muscles strong enough to be able to take to the skies.
He hasn’t been well lately. Hasn’t been taking care of himself like he was supposed to, and now… Now the others are trying to fix it for him.
There isn’t any fixing what was ever working, was there?
“I was ugly,” Grian says.
“Stop.” Impulse knew this was coming.
“When you -- when you come into your senses, remember I said I forgive you for that.”
Grian remembers and has to apologize, nonetheless. Before he can’t.
“Jus’ list’n.” Speaking was hard before, but it’s nearing impossible now. Grian closes his eyes to save some of his energy. He swallows around a dry mouth and ignores the crust he feels in the edges of his lips. “‘M s’rry, o’ay?”
“I know,” Impulse says. His voice sounds hoarse. He coughs, coughs like how Grian coughs when that stomach of his is eating itself. His tone softens before he starts again with a quiet, “I know, Grian. I’m not mad.”
Well, maybe that much is true. Impulse may not be mad, but there’s something heavier sitting on those shoulders of his. While it may not be anger, a darker depravity eats away at Impulse tonight.
“S’rry,” he says again out of fear it’s all he can do.
He must have gotten stuck on the word because his lips are still moving even when he can’t hear the sounds his mouth has started to procure. Impulse is shushing him softly, trying to quell his worries as they all but worsen the further he gets from reality.
On the horizon the sun starts to peak above the clouds, and it will take Grian’s sanity with it.
His hands reach for Impulse’s cheeks. He pinches, his head moving to push against his collarbone with an incessant need. He tries to hush him again, but this causes Grian some pause and some motive. He doesn’t stop pushing and wiggling with the little energy he has left because he knows what he wants now. He knows and needs Impulse to know.
Grian’s feeble hand wraps around his cheek with enough mustered strength to pull him towards himself. He tries to steady himself under his gaze and pretend there isn’t dried sick all over his body and dirt caked all over him.
“Take me home,” he says. “Help me.” As the first morning rays of sunlight break over Impulse’s soft gaze, Grian’s eyes flutter shut. His body prepares to slip back under the restless dreams, and with it, he hears the branches snap.
He’s floating. Moments before he could feel Impulse and his steady arms, but now he feels nothing but waves of water. Something’s carried him under and away, but there’s weight all against him to keep him from drowning.
Someone’s demanding him to keep upright, stopping his head from going completely under. He’s drowning, anyways, with a tightness in his chest and fluid packed tightly into his lungs.
“Breathe,” a familiar voice tells him. He inhales through his mouth before realizing there’s something blocking there, and he reaches up to bat away at it. “Had a machine doing it for you, but you have to now.”
There’d been a mask, he can feel it with his hand. His face is exposed to the sterile air he’d been in only moments before. He’s back here, back here again. The sterile stench is insult to injury and a reminder to all that he’d failed.
Coders know he couldn’t have gotten far. Damned Impulse, damned Tango, damned the lot of them! There’s no one he can trust here, not fully. He’s on his own until Mumbo returns home.
There’s an astonished gasp at his side before Grian’s eyes have fully opened, and butterflies are filling that turning stomach of his. Preening under the praise as if he’s a child. He’s not, he’s far from it, a tall child grown into his thirties. Yet he’s wasting away under it, this soft gasping and a proud, “There you go, birdie, breathe. ”
Grian starts to twist away from it as the scent invades his nose. The clinical smell is too familiar for him to not understand where he was. He knows damn well who sits at his bedside spitting out nonsensical condolences to him.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” Doc says, and it almost sounds comforting if not for the laugh that follows it shortly. Grian bristles under it, a tremor wracking its way like a tornado follows a path along a road. “You knew that you wouldn’t make it far.”
It’s not a question. It’s not because he doesn’t have to ask to know they both knew. Yet Grian went and tried anyways. He tried even if he knew this fate wouldn’t have been avoidable.
“For the record,” Doc begins abruptly, “With that much toxin in your system, you should’ve been out for longer -- until late afternoon, at least .”
Grian snorts. His pride won’t even allow him this one slip-up. He meets his eye, notices the red one’s gone. He doesn’t need both of them to take Grian apart and understand what makes his brain tick.
“You made a mistake,” Grian says, and now he’s the one laughing like a madman. Doc’s clearing the air for a mistake he’s made. Defending his pride to the prisoner he’s caught. “Didn’t do your calculations right?”
It’s meant to be a jeer. Feels right on his lips, but with the way Doc’s face contorts into something more than a grimace, it falls flat. Grian’s fingers graze over his dry, cracked lips. There’s no longer gunk where there once was.
“Believe me, pesky bird, I don’t make oversights,” Doc boasts. Grian scoffs. Doc scoots his chair closer, reaching for him and feigning pain when Grian winces at the growing proximity. “...Not when it comes to you.”
Grian gasps before his poker face can help it. He’s supposed to be smarter than this. He may not be a genius, but he can play as one. This is new, this caring side is nothing he’s ever faced before, and it has him spinning into a whirlwind.
He’s the one that plays kindness to get Doc on his side. He’s foolish to it. But this, the tables turning, is nothing he’s ever expected. Not from Doc of all people.
“What?” Grian asks when his mind can’t manage anything better. Doc’s laugh tells him he should’ve kept silent after all. He has to demand an answer, not when this act, this play of sweetness is making his skin crawl with spiders.
“I wasn’t expecting to use all those potions. Those were enough to knock a normal person out for a while.” Grian tries to sit up. Lifting his head only to rest it against the board as he scoots his back flush with it to steady himself. “But you -- you know why you woke up early, right?”
Grian shakes his head.
“You know more than you like to let on,” Doc drawls. He’s amused. Amused as if it’s all play. A long game of cat and mouse that they’ve only known. “So tell me.”
Grian stares at him blankly. Grian is the one demanding an answer, forcing himself with his weak strength for Doc to tell him. He doesn’t know, not with his brain so busy and dead.
“Come on, birdie, I want you to say it.”
The nickname makes him wish he did know, if only for him to dangle it over his head.
Doc wags his finger. He’s not going to tell him. Grian lulls his head to where the mess once was, as if that will give him the answers he needs. What’s Doc’s game, what’s he have to be mad about?
“‘Cause I’m avian,” Grian supplies. “My metabolism -- it’s fast?”
“Think deeper than that,” Doc says, and now he really looks amused in the same way a lion appears when he’s caught something good. Laying low in the grass, watching an unexpecting gazelle. Grian’s no gazelle, he’s no genius, but he does know wild beasts. And more importantly, how to evade them.
Doc wants him to lose. The game they’re playing, but Grian’s already here in his grasp, so what more can he give him?
Answers, right. Doc’s made it clear he’s not wanting to move until Grian gives him what he wants. Submission, further proof that he’s lost.
“What, wanna hear that I didn’t stand a chance?” His own words bite at him like bad fruit. “You need me to say I couldn’t run away from you?”
Where there was once amusement, nothing remains.
It’s like a snap. Doc’s expression goes empty, goes stoic. Grian can’t find anything on his face waiting for him. He stares at him endlessly until his expression is hardening, watching as Grian’s anguish takes over his own failed poker face.
Doc scoots his chair as close as it can go to the bed. Grian can no longer push himself back. Once again, he has nowhere he can go. Nowhere left.
“Why?”
Simply question, difficult answer.
Why couldn’t he run?
“‘Cause the potions.” His confusion is known on him. “‘Cause you drugged me up to my ears, couldn’t even feel my toenails--”
“Why?”
If Grian hasn’t lost already, he’s submitting under this omission. He squirms in place, not knowing what Doc can stand to gain outside of his own pride. He’s already got what he wants - Grian to lose. If he wants more than that, well, greed’s a bitch and karma will come his way.
He’s sure of it.
It’s a simple question he’s asking. Grian’s not sure what answer he’s expecting. Why the potions worked so fast? Doc might’ve laced them, but -- no, that’s not what he’d want. He’d have nothing to gain over his own insight. Something to do with Grian, then.
His head comes up empty over his metabolism. It’s a distinct avian trait that food absorbs quicker in bodies like his own. But more than that? Grian’s got nothing.
“Grian,” Doc tsks. It isn’t only Doc’s height that has him towering over Grian. Desperate to get a ledge up on him, desperate to make him sweat under the lordly tone. Disappointment, of all emotions, makes a pretty resting place for itself on Doc’s lips.
Grian wants to punch it off.
“What did you fail to do?” Doc prompts. Then, he scoffs. “Can’t help you anymore than that.”
His nails dig into his palms until his talons are threatening to unsheath from their enclosure and cut up his skin. He manages not to, keep them under in case he needs them more for the threat at hand.
Grian failed, alright, but at what? Getting away?
Grian’s fast, Grian’s good at getting away, but he’d been slowed down from his injuries, from the nausea, from--
From his stomach.
Grian hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t eaten that day. He was too carried away with aging copper, at first, while Mumbo was away. He had been too distracted to realize his hunger, and by the time he had, the tunnel bore had been ruined and Grian’s stomach was up in knots. He couldn’t have eaten then, and it especially wasn’t on his mind for long after locking himself up in his house. While preparing for the endtime, Grian hadn’t thought to drink water or eat or do anything to nourish himself and his fast-acting metabolism.
Is that the answer he wants? For Grian to admit he’d forgotten to feed himself? Some other edge for him to be able to gloat on him, call him foolish and degrade him.
Yeah, right, like Hell, he’d tell him.
…Doc isn’t giving him much of a choice.
It’s a weird territory. There’s been no outwardly threat, not quite yet, but Grian is at his mercy - trapped in this base of his. It would be in his best interest to follow along with his wants, his demands, his seemingly nonsensical questions.
When Doc speaks, Grian wants to rebel.
His body makes the decision for him, against his will. He doesn’t want to listen, something in him telling he’s supposed to rebel. Push and pull.
He’s gotten so used to antagonizing Doc, he forgot what comes after.
“Don’t want to tell me?” Doc’s eyebrow is quirked incredulously. He’s either bluffing or he knows Grian knows. His poker face has nothing on a man dedicated to dissecting him under his watchful gaze. Lying doesn’t come easy when it’s in front of Doc, no matter how excellent and convincing of a liar Grian thinks he is.
“Alright,” Doc says simply. His chair makes a squeal as he rolls away from the hospital bed to his desk. He makes an obnoxious show of aligning some papers into a neat stack against the desk. Grian’s gaze is glued to the back of his neck and the little tufts of green that escape over the pristine white coat. “Guess I’ll tell Mumbo not to come in, afterall.”
What was unsettled in his stomach violently lurches at a mere mention. If his hands were any slower, Grian would’ve dry heaved over himself. He’s supposed to be keeping a stoic expression, not giving away any more to the one person who will not waste time gloating it over him. He can’t help it, not when he’s dangling Mumbo’s presence like a carrot on a stick.
It’s a bluff. It has to be. Stress had mentioned him, but Mumbo would have called. He would have, he’d go to Grian first. Mumbo is the one who wouldn’t destroy him, Mumbo’s the one who wouldn’t hurt him, unlike the others here. Unlike Stress, Tango, Impulse.
“Mumbo’s off-world.” Doc doesn’t even turn to look at him. Somehow that infuriates him more. “He’s -- he’s not here, and he wouldn’t be with you.”
Did Doc trick him? But Grian had messaged him, he’d know better -- Mumbo is on his side. He’s his friend, his flock, his everything. He wouldn’t be here on his volition. Not with Doc.
“You took him,” Grian accuses suddenly. Doc still hasn’t turned in that rolly chair. If looks could kill, there would be a dagger lodged somewhere into Doc’s spine.
Doc doesn’t need to tell him the deal for Grian to understand. A silent but ricocheting “Answer my question, and I’ll answer yours,” drowns in his ears.
It’s humiliating enough to have to answer him in the first place, but the answer in question causes him more pause. He feels childish, like he’s twelve years old and Pearl’s telling him he has to take better care of himself because she won’t always be around. Pearl who barely managed to brush her own hair, Pearl who spent more time washing blood off her hands than she did her clothes.
“Oh, Griba, you’re not taking care of yourself again.”
His knuckles turn into a pale white with the grip he has. Clinging is all that he can manage as he shudders in Doc’s domain.
“Doc.” The demand of his name has him turning, a wiry grin waiting for him. Doc still doesn’t speak, only looks at him expectantly. Waiting like he has all of eternity to sit here and wait for Grian’s pitiful answer.
What little courage Grian had built up drowns out once Doc sets his condescending gaze back upon him. He can’t meet his eyes, not like this, not when he’s making some sort of terrible expression of shame and loss, all twisted and contorted into something of a nightmare. All for him to witness.
Starting is the hardest part. Grian chokes on his own struggling breath. He swallows around a dry mouth and tries, tries and fails to get the words out.
“I was hungry?” he says, at last, and Grian wants to dissolve into earth for how completely idiodic he feels. His shame toes with his overwhelming anger - his fury that Doc’s the one forcing himself to make himself feel stupid. “So my metabolism - the potions hit my system with nothing to slow it down.”
He braces himself for the silence that follows. Doc nods, waits patiently, makes a hum once he’s finished. Sweat beads across Grian’s forehead, but he doesn’t dare reach up to wipe it when Doc’s staring at him so intently.
“You were hungry.” Now, now, Grian doesn’t know what the fuck that is. It’s teasing, teasing but Doc sounds unfathomably angry. He sounds like he’s holding himself back from flipping his desk over or tearing Grian apart. For what, answering? Is that all he was waiting for, a submission before he can end his life?
I don’t know what you want, Grian thinks, and the admission in the safety of his own mind is what causes his resolve to rip open down the seams.
“Y-yeah,” Grian stammers out. He has to get ahold of himself, but he can’t, with this rope tied around his feet and dragging him down under. “I didn’t eat because I knew it was… a matter of time.” Some of the anger returns, climbing over his trepidation, and Grian musters a glare towards him. “Before you found me.”
“Found me after what?” Doc asks, prompts. He’s a moment away from his breaking point, and there isn’t any telling what it’ll be that pushes him over that final ledge. Grian dances the line like a ballerina with a gun pointed to their head.
“After…” Grian starts speaking before his mind can catch up. His memory is blurry, but he remembers Impulse giving him an ultimatum, Grian running, Scar laughing. Down in the tunnel bore before it exploded, before they caused it to explode.
“Where’s Scar?” Mortified panic claws up his throat. How had he forgotten? Scar -- he hadn’t thought of him once.
“He’s alright,” Doc says cooly. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
‘Cause you’re fucking crazy, is what Grian wants to say.
Instead, he thinks.
If Doc’s here, is Scar already… Is he gone? He made it off-server, away because--
“Scar didn’t run, did he?” Grian asks hopelessly. “He stayed. He wasn’t - he wasn’t feeling good.” He remembers that. He remembers when they snuck down there, prodding where they weren’t supposed to be, Scar’s muscles were aching something horrible. He didn’t have the energy to fly out of there, not far.
“No, he didn’t,” Doc says. “He’s with Cub. Sent me a nice apology and some cat ears.”
Grian’s eye twitches.
“He gets left off the hook?” he repeats incredulously. “Because of -- cat ears?”
“More than that,” Doc redirects him. Right, he wants him to think, figure out what Doc wants from him like he’s some sort of profiler.
“He didn’t run,” Grian finishes dryly. “That’s what this is about? Because I ran? You were-- you were gonna hurt me -- you did--”
“Did I?” Doc asks. Hums a question aloud to the empty room.
“Yeah--” Grian says, he starts, and then he realizes.
Doc hadn’t.
Doc hadn’t.
He’d chased him, kidnapped him, drugged him, and yet - arguably, he hadn’t hurt him. Not yet, anyways.
Not yet.
“You really don’t get it?”
Mocking anger, back again, and Grian doesn’t know what the hell he’s supposed to do with it. He holds his breath when Doc moves closer again, grabs his wrist even when Grian draws it back. His grip tightens, albeit gently, and pulls it forward until he can pick at the skin there. Doesn’t pinch hard enough to hurt, just to grab and let go.
“You made yourself sick,” Doc says.
“Oh -- that’s--” Grian’s laughing. Off his rocker, he takes his hand back and Doc lets him have it. “Yeah, congrats, Doc, you won, didn’t even have to do anything! Happy now?”
“No,” Doc all but growls.
Grian’s laughing tapers off, sobering up as he straighens his back to the best of his ability.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” he admits quietly, narrowing his eyes into what he hopes is a harmful gaze. Doc matches it, and more.
“You--” When Doc turns, Grian holds his breath long enough to see him lose it on his desk. His leg kicks out against the chair, sends it flying and crashing on its axis. He forcefully rips himself away, grabs ahold of his mechanical arm and chokes out, “You think I won? ”
The door slams shut behind him, angry cursing following on the other side of the wall, and Grian is left alone in the sterile room with his thoughts.
What the hell was that?