Chapter Text
Pearl's POV:
"You were the one who said we should do dinner at your base tonight. So don't get upset at me for seeing your murder board."
"It's not a murder board," Grian mumbles, gathering up the books and papers strewn across his office.
Pearl refuses to apologize for walking in on him because if he had been on time for their family dinner rather than buried in his work, she wouldn’t have ever had to go searching for him. It's Grian's fault, really, that she caught a glimpse of his new Life series plans.
She's an innocent party in all of this.
"My call with the admins ran long. It's just that testing for the mods is behind schedule because of apples of all things and then Mumbo screwed up everything with-"
"Yeah, I'm sure Mumbo is to blame for whatever your perfectionism is bothered by," Pearl teases over the sound of a Grian thudding a book down in frustration.
"He actually did because his leaving messed up the pairings for- fuck." Grian cut himself off just a little too late. Pearl heard all she needed to pounce.
"Pairings? Hmmmmm? Care to share what you mean by that?" "Okay fine, there's going to be a team element. We had to move some things around because Mumbo left. But please don't tell anyone. With how testing is going, we might have to scrap the whole idea anyway," Grian sighs, the genuine tension in his face shadowing over his teasing.
"Fine." Her brother knows her well enough to know she means it. She may drive him crazy, but not in ways that really count.
"And before you start to worry, I paired you with Scott so you'll be fine," Grian continues, reading Pearl's mind. If she has to have a partner, it does make her feel better knowing her friend will be there with her for whatever nonsense her brother is about to throw at them.
She and Grian look out for each other, in the end.
"I think I can keep your secret to myself then," she smiles, adding just little too much sweetness. She won’t let him get away with everything.
"Whatever, now come downstairs and help me cook. If I eat one more golden carrot this week, I think my whole body will glitch," Grian grumbles, locking the Life series plans in his Ender chest before pushing past her.
"You made me come all this way and are going to make me cook?! You're a terrible host!" Pearl calls out as she follows Grian down to his kitchen.
She manages to duck just in time to avoid the golden apple he throws at her head before he starts rifling through his kitchen cabinets looking for anything dinner worthy.
----------
Pearl and Martyn are still covered in a thin film of Nether dust when Cleo and Scott finally find them, the sun setting behind them on the first day of Double Life.
"Pearl I want you to stand in here and face the east, so you're looking away," Martyn says, pushing her towards the first stall of his ridiculous soulmate gameshow scheme. She shoots a look over her shoulder back to Scott and Cleo, catching their eyes as all three share the same look of barely contained laughter.
What's one more shenanigan, right? Grian told them to get finding their soulmate out of the way at some point today, and Martyn's gameshow bit will be as good content as any for pairing up her and Scott.
And given the giggles, Scott and Cleo must have figured out Pearl and Scott already. Maybe it's even Cleo and Martyn too. Which would make this a tidy little scene to pair them all off.
But the most pressing thing is Martyn's theatrics, his constant babbling filling the air as he slots Cleo and Scott into the stalls behind her.
"And Scott, face me," Martyn says before his explanation about some nonsense with coal is cut off by yet another goat horn.
"Shut up!" he shouts over the ridge, but it's useless because the rest of their laughter is too loud to talk over anyway.
Scrap the Cleo idea, Grian would be silly to pair Martyn with anyone other than Ren's overdramatic ass. Which leaves BigB as the fourth in their group this season. How would BigB fit into 'gaslight gatekeep girlboss' bit? BigG?
Whatever, they'll have plenty of time to figure it out once they pair off.
The belting of another goat cuts off Martyn again, and his over-the-top irritation is the perfect distraction from hearing Pearl's twined 'ows' with Scott.
But she can hear Cleo's laugh floating over the walls, confirmation enough that Cleo heard it.
"I think I already know who my soulmate is," Pearl says, barely trying to stifle her laugh.
"Hmmm, really Pearl?" Scott giggles, living up to every inch of the gatekeep title.
She lets Martyn get through most of his explanation this time about sticks and pairings before the giggles become too much.
"I, I already know Martyn," Pearl sputters out, her only shreds of composure coming from not seeing Scott's equally giggly face.
"What have I done?" Martyn says, so innocent and confused that she can't even hear the other's laughing over the sound of her own.
"Nothing. It's nothing you've done, " Scott giggles.
"Keep going, it's fine, keep going," Pearl gets out between laughs.
"You've done all this work, it's fine. Keep going," Scott insists.
"No, what is it?" Martyn says, dejected enough that Scott must finally decide to take pity on him.
"Martyn, just watch. Stay where you are and just watch, okay?" That’s all the warning Pearl gets before the phantom pain of impact as boots hit the ground shoots up her legs.
"Ow," Pearl perfunctorily lets out before turning to face Martyn. Who, to his credit, seems to have finally pieced it together. He lets out a long sigh before shaking his head at the three giggling faces standing before him.
"And also Martyn," Scott says as Pearl catches the sight of him punching Cleo in the arm in her peripheral vision. Martyn's instinctive flinch to grab his untouched arm reveals the last pairing.
Very tidy, if Pearl may say so. Scott and Cleo must have figured it out on their own by process of elimination and planned the whole reveal. Very clever. Pearl didn’t even know about Martyn and Cleo when she ran off on her Nether adventure, but it ties them together nicely like she planned it. Bonus that Martyn will have no problem figuring out his own G name as he joins their little group.
Pearl is still laughing when Scott declares, "So you know what? Me and Cleo are actually soul bound to ourselves, we decided."
"Yeah, we've decided we're together," Cleo says, straightening up as they stand shoulder to shoulder with Scott.
"Oh, okay," Pearl stumbles out, looking to Martyn.
His chest is already puffed up, the same dramatic anger previously written on his face as he shouted across the hills about goat horns, now directed at the united front of Scott and Cleo standing before them.
He's going with righteous anger?
"Right, fine!" Martyn spits out.
Before Pearl can figure out how she's supposed to be playing this, or what side she's even supposed to be on, Scott continues. "We put ourselves out there all day. We were ready to meet people, we were vulnerable, and you two were just off together in the Nether, doing your own things."
"We had to save you both! You kept burning!" Cleo shouts.
"We were fine, we had food! We were eating!" Martyn quickly spits back.
"Hey, you’re the one that was-" Pearl gets out before a goat pushes her into Scott, the pain of knocking against his shoulder echoing with a strange mirrored pain of her own.
Steadying herself against Scott, Pearl looks up to see Cleo and Martyn already coming to blows as they chase each other up the hillside.
"Oh gosh, what are they doing?" she sighs, watching Martyn pull his sword. She leans over to Scott, shaking her head towards him.
"You know they're just gonna kill each other," she adds, as if Scott doesn't already know where this is going between Cleo and Martyn's inability to back down from a bit.
But rather than laugh back, Scott doesn’t even look at her as he climbs up the hill.
"Come on Cleo," he calls out, getting the attention of the bickering pair as another half-hearted strike clangs against Cleo's shield.
"We're gonna leave," Scott says, looking between Marytn and Pearl as he steps in line with Cleo again.
"We thought we'd humor you, but Pearl clocked on pretty quickly when I got hit by a goat."
"Oh. Are, are we not gonna gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss?" Pearl finally asks, lost enough to break the scene for a moment. Grian's panopticon of cameras and microphones throughout the map will clearly catch this. They'll all have to edit out her question from their videos, but she has no idea what's supposed to be happening. It's not like she could have told Scott ahead of time that they were paired, but surely they aren’t really leaving? She can’t tell what Cleo and Scott are trying to set up here. How is she supposed to play this out so their team comes out of this?
This is why she hates improv.
She's missing something.
She has to be missing something.
"I think you should all be disappointed in yourselves," Martyn barrels through, still rolling with the antagonism against Cleo like nothing happened.
"Oh no Pearl, you abandoned us," Scott says, ignoring Martyn and glaring right at her in a way that almost feels…genuinely angry?
"I didn’t abandon you, I was just following Martyn. Martyn's like 'You want to go to the nether? Fine okay I'll do it sure'," Pearl tries.
Because it's true. That’s how the series worked. You have to fill the time and do possibly dangerous stuff with other people to get down your hearts. That’s what fills out the videos. That's what the players are supposed to do.
"You knew your soulmate was out there," Cleo insists.
"You knew it wasn't him and you cheated," Scott tacks on.
He looks away from Pearl and huffs out a laugh to Cleo beside him. "This is the definition of 'Welcome home cheaters'."
The two of them aren’t just laughing at the joke; they are sharing the joke. The joke at Pearl's expense.
Okay. Okay.
So no Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss.
Okay.
They must have another plan. Pearl can figure out another plan.
Okay.
"We'll see you, we're going to the homes that we already made," Cleo says before turning her back on the rest of them and striding up the hill.
"Yeah, we already have homes together. We'll see you later," is the last thing Scott says to her before he turns and follows Cleo.
Presumably off to their homes. Definitely without her.
"I hate you!" Martyn shouts after them before Pearl can even begin to formulate a response.
"I hate you too," Cleo calls back, distant enough that she and Scott must be already making their way deeper into the forest.
"I feel like I've just been broken up with," Pearl says, staring at the spot Cleo and Scott vanished into.
"Yeah, I don't know what going on there," Martyn mutters, already moving back to break down the remnants of the gameshow.
"Everybody else is together with their soul bounds, and our two are just like, thinking we abandoned them or something?"
"How did they even know, I don't understand."
"Everybody else is soul bound. They've been exploring and we were the only 2 they hadn’t met up with, so they put it together," Pearl explains, half for Martyn and half because she can already see the comments on the video asking the same question.
"It's a little bit demoralizing," Martyn says, dropping the last of the gameshow set they'd just torn down into his chest. "You know what, they're gonna come crawling back to us in a moment of need."
"Exactly," Pearl adds.
"I'm already heartbroken. No gaslight gatekeep girlboss reunion then," she muses. Because apparently this is how it's going to go then, some anti-soulmates alliance with Martyn. He'll probably come up with a cool name for it though. It's not gaslight gatekeep girlboss, but there are perks to being with the drama kid of the server.
"Yeah, you guys have got this whole weird vibe going on, I'm an innocent party in all of this," Martyn says, before turning to her with a flash of something running across his face.
"I blame you for this," he says before Pearl can even formulate her comeback. "I'm breaking up with you too. Goodbye."
"Oh. Wait! Oh." But Martyn doesn’t turn around, doesn’t look back as he walks off into the trees as well.
She stares for a moment at the spot he left, then looks up the hill to where Cleo and Scott disappeared. There's a moment where she almost breaks character, almost lets the confusion bleed through at what just happened. But then she looks around at the cameras and microphones she knows are surrounding her, hidden well by Grian's admins to capture her every move.
She's still performing.
This is a game. This is a show.
Okay.
She'll figure something out.
She has to. That's how this game works.
She'll find Scott and Cleo and Martyn again or make other allies or something.
She'll figure something out.
----------
Pearl can't figure it out.
She tries to make friends and allies. It worked last time. It worked in Last Life.
Except it doesn't this time.
Things just keep going wrong.
She tries an angle with her dogs, which sort of works. But the simulated mechanics of her life tied to a dog's life isn't real. Not real like the way she can feel the aches of Scott's damage radiating from her bones.
It's complicated for Pearl to explain that Tilly is actually her soulmate because Scott didn’t want to join her.
It's easy for everyone to say she is vindictive and driven mad by the loneliness.
So she tries to be that.
Tries to play along with everyone else and follow their lead whenever their paths cross.
She tries to be cruel and scorned and witchy.
But she keeps misstepping, keeps misjudging how she's supposed to react.
She keeps getting it wrong right up until the last moment.
Pearl is ready to have Tilly, her chosen soulmate, tear her real soulmate apart with her fangs in a poetic moment of justice. Pearl is ready to sink arrows into Scott's body to show they really were soulmates all along because she will win against Scott in exactly the same way he won last time. Pearl is ready to slice into Scott in a PvP fight so nasty that it deserves to soak her in blood that would finally let her live up to the Scarlet Pearl title.
But she misjudges.
Again.
Because after everything that’s happened, Pearl is once again stuck staring up at Scott, wondering how she got it so wrong.
Except this time he's not running away from her only hours after they started on this server. This time, he's standing atop a lit stack of TNT. Smiling at her.
Smiling at her like her friend Scott. The friend she was so excited to be soulmates with in this game. The friend who left her for Cleo. The friend she endured the burn of frostbite for, just to leech cold into his bones. The friend who called her a traitor. The friend whose about to kill himself so she can-
Pearl respawns outside the world barrier still screaming his name.
"Congrats!" Grian says, beaming down at her as he tugs her upright in the bed. She feels Scar high-five her and Martyn shake her hand. She hears Cleo congratulate her and Ren whoop up a cheer from somewhere beside her.
Scott hugs her as he pulls her to her feet.
'But I didn't do anything,' she tries to say. But the words don't come out.
Her mouth tastes like ash.
----------
She doesn’t try to fight the story in her editing.
Pearl doesn't understand what happened within the Double Life borders. Can't even piece together all the ways she should have done things differently to change the outcome.
But she knows that trying to figure it out would drive her crazy.
She also knows that she can’t change it. What's done is done, and now it's just about taking all the raw footage from Grian and turning it into something that does make sense.
She doesn’t fight the story this time.
She goes over rough cuts with Scar and Bdubs and Tango and anyone else she includes in each video.
She calls Scott for hours, mapping out how they want their stories to align as soulmates.
She goes over her rough draft of the whole series side by side with Grian to ensure the Scarlet Pearl arc is cohesive.
Pearl doesn't understand what happened in Double Life.
But she understands how to edit a video and how to tell a story.
She understands she just needs 1 more cup of coffee before it will finally all be done.
----------
She doesn’t want to see her viewers' reaction to her videos.
She doesn't want to explain and defend Scarlet Pearl.
She doesn't know how to explain it to herself. Which is maybe why the idea of locking herself away from it all sounds so appealing. But Pearl definitely blames the countless pots of coffee for why she thinks grabbing Mumbo's book and literally hiding inside a vault is a reasonable idea.
----------
She feels Mumbo's vault door closing behind her with her whole body.
It's not just the vibrations of the locking mechanism reverberating up through her feet.
It's a deeper feeling than the physical release of her muscles as the stillness of the air settles over her.
It's like her soul can finally rest.
The vault surrounds her with a soft blue glow and Pearl barely registers as her body sinks to the metal floor.
The first real thought Pearl has after what feels like an eternity of just sitting in the silence of the vault, is that she likes the blue. Red is her favorite color, always has been and always will be. It's just not something she can handle right now. Just like the last thing she wants to see is another rolling hill of a forest biome.
The inside of Mumbo's vault feels uncanny in the best way possible. The blue glow reflecting off glass and metal makes everything feel so…..man made. So constructed.
It looks nothing like her tower. Nothing like Double Life. Nothing like her base.
It's nice.
The moonlight filtering in through the skylights adds to the unnatural glow, and her body takes the moment to remind her that she hasn’t really slept since before Double Life started. The adrenaline and coffee she's been running on are finally failing. In the rush to get over here, she hadn’t even thought to bring a change of clothes to sleep in, and going outside means dealing with everything else outside these walls.
She's not ready for that. Not yet.
So picks herself up off the floor and, for the first time since Scott and Cleo turned and disappeared into the woods, Pearl is confident she knows how to solve the problem in front of her.
Finding Mumbo's closest doesn't take long, considering the whole vault is smaller than her starter base.
She trails her fingers over the rows of suit jackets hanging in the closet. She never considered that he had multiple suits, which is stupid in retrospect.
But the rest of his closet is just as surprising as she opens up the drawers one by one looking for anything even slightly less than business casual. She figured there would be all the clothes from season 8, at least. The silly potato costumes and the ridiculous floral shirts. But those aren’t anywhere to be found.
She pulls open a drawer to find a bunch of threadbare flannel pants, all the colors muted from years of washing and the pale glow of the blue lights. The mere possibility that yellow or green froglights are waiting to be triggered by the light switches along the wall had her sticking with the muted light. Red, yellow, and green are too much. The blue synthetic cast off the entire build seemed to naturally emit would have would have to do.
It's enough light to pull a pair of flannel pants out and throw them over her shoulder before she opens the next drawer. It reveals a stack of wrinkled white undershirts next to a pile of long-sleeve shirts tee shirts with the cuffs stretched out. The ironed-on letters across the chest are starting to crack on many of them after years of wear. She recognizes some of the logos and merch runs, but others are totally foreign, referencing what she can only assume are years old Hermitcraft jokes or servers she's never heard of.
She tugs an UltraHardcore tee shirt from the pile and slides the drawer shut, the muffled thump the loudest sound she's heard since coming inside.
Her jean shorts and hoodie falling to the floor barely make any sound. These aren't the same shorts and hoodie that she was wearing in Double Life. Pearl knows that. The respawn refreshed them.
But it still feels good to take them off. Peel them off her body and leave them behind.
The cotton is soft against her skin as her makeshift pajamas hang off her.
The feeling of tension leaving her body is the last thing Pearl feels as she crawls into Mumbo's bed, letting the exhaustion finally wash over her.
----------
She sleeps for nearly 2 days straight.
----------
The first meal Pearl is able to scrape together in the vault is, ironically, an entire plate of perfectly cooked hashbrowns. Her laugh echoes around the vault as she opens a cabinet to find a bowl of forgotten potatoes.
She also polishes off a golden apple while she fries the shredded potatoes up. She eats it mostly because the nutrients will do her some good. She only thinks about how golden apples were the glitch to undermine the soul bound mechanic for a moment before she adds more butter to her skillet full of potatoes.
She almost forgets she's still wearing Mumbo's clothes until she catches a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror.
She fidgets with the rolled waistband of the flannel pants before she takes a moment to really look at herself in his clothes.
It's strange, how close the clothes are to fitting her.
It shouldn't be a surprise thought, that Mumbo's clothes fit her. He's tall. She's tall. But the contrast between her gangly limbs and Mumbo’s solid frame is obvious in every stitch of fabric.
The pants are a little too baggy and the shirt is a little roomy, something absolutely cut for someone with broader shoulders than Pearl's. The clothes hang off her almost like her oversized hoodie. But it doesn't remind Pearl of her red life hoodie, the fabric speckled with white dog hair or turning to ash against her skin as Scott burned them both alive.
It reminds her of why she wears her big blue hoodies most days on Hermitcraft. So she can do things like tuck her knees up inside it as she hunches over build plans late at night, or pull it around even the bulkiest armor as the season goes by.
Reasons she should keep wearing the hoodie once she picks it up off the floor of Mumbo's closet.
She keeps touching the shirt, readjusting the shoulders and pushing the sleeves up.
She’s never been able to fit into someone else’s clothes before. She'd always been too tall for her friend's clothes, tugging on the sleeves of borrowed sweatshirts and the hems of skirts her friends insisted she would look good in. But even if the clothes did manage to fit over her thin frame, she never looked good in them. They never looked right. Pearl had always been composed of nothing but skin pulled taunt over sharp angles, tugging and pulling at clothes in all the wrong places.
It always felt like she was wearing something that clearly wasn’t meant for her.
The borrowed pajamas aren't meant for her either. Obviously.
But they are comfortable.
It’s nice that she can wear these clothes and not feel like she’s pushing against the seams and struggling to fit into something.
It’s comfortable. She’s comfortable.
Comfortable enough to crawl back into Mumbo's bed and let the exhaustion take her once more.