Chapter Text
The second time that Avery mustered up the courage to look at the Google Drive again, the video was gone.
There was a document in its place, and Avery almost thought it was someone's cruel prank. Why would the D.M.S. leave behind a message about them seizing the footage? Why not lock the entire drive? And if it were a prank, who was awful enough to tamper with a dead man's Google Drive?
He was resolved to delete it until he saw the name in the document: Derek Hutchins.
Avery had only called him Derek once. Frankly, D3rlord3 didn't look or act like a Derek to him. From his Minecraft skin to his mannerisms and intellect, he was nothing short of royalty. He didn't expect one of those haughty rich-kid names for a guy like D3rlord3, but "Derek" sounded so awfully common. "Derek" made it sound like he was just like Avery—just as young and free and normal as Avery. "Derek" made it sound like D3rlord3 shouldn't have given his own life so that Avery could live to see the sun bleed over the horizon the next day. "Derek" made it sound like D3rlord3 wasn't the saint he was, but just a normal person.
At least he knew something about D3rlord3 now. Every day, he hoped he'd divine something from the universe—this sick, twisted universe that took D3rlord3 away—to learn something about his hero in pixels and code, and now it had finally answered. It was a reason to start digging the grave for his guilt: an almost pathetic one, but it would do. At least D3rlord3 wouldn't have died for someone who didn't know him now.
He read the name again. Derek Hutchins. It really was a nice name: the kind of name that'd be pleasant to hear called out for attendance in his college lectures or when his coffee order was ready. In the few hours he had been with D3rlord3, he sounded like the kind of guy who would have attended an Ivy League far from Avery's own college and made his own coffee at home. But Avery's mind always had a way of running wild, and it was a nice thought to imagine picking out D3rlord3 in the sea of heads in his lecture hall and small-town cafes.
Before the bitter afterthought flooded in, it really was a nice thought.
Only a week ago did Avery have the courage to open up his recordings again, and that was only because he had begun to forget what D3rlord3 truly looked like. It was only the little things—whether his cape was maroon or carmine and how long the plume on the top of his helmet was, but Avery cursed himself for forgetting such minute details about the person who had saved his life. He had replayed the same twenty-three minutes on the recording from sunrise until sunset, studying every detail on D3rlord3's skin until it was burned into his eyelids.
But a Minecraft skin and text on a screen wasn't enough anymore. It was a disservice to D3rlord3, to Derek, to remember him as pixels in a game.
Avery clicked out of the drive and opened up a new tab. It didn't feel right to type in D3rlord3's real name in a search bar. Out of all of Avery's online, never had he called any of them by anything other than their usernames, no matter how close they had gotten. Besides, wasn't this the kind of thing that nosy parents and lovesick teenagers did?
It didn't really matter. D3rlord3 was more important than a little embarrassment.
The first thing on the page was the obituary. He didn't expect anything else, but the big blue text on the screen still hit him like a train. The whole page was pretty standard, showing off Facebook links of other Derek Hutchinses with graying hair and black-and-white photos on their pages. But out of all the words and photos and links on the page and the rest of the internet, all that it had left of his Derek Hutchins was a reminder of his death.
When he opened the link, there was only a paragraph in a font so shrunken and boxy that it made Avery's eyes cross. There was no picture or quotes, just a wall of text that stretched from one side of the screen to the other for seven lines before the rest of the blank white page taunted him.
For such tiny text and so many words, there was so little said. Really, it read more like the summary to a mystery novel—detectives and government workers stumped about his death—than about D3rlord3 himself. When Avery had read it a third time, all that had been said about D3rlord3 was his birthday and the day they had found him unresponsive in his room.
Two days after New Year's.
The obituary said that his death was a mystery. The autopsy showed distress to his brain, but there were no external bleeds or clots to suggest an aneurysm or stroke. The only conclusion that the mortuary could reach was that every nerve in his brain had been completely shot by the time they found him, and his pupils were dilated as small as pins.
Avery should have just closed out of the tab. That should have been it: D3rlord3 was dead. He was becoming food for worms or ashes in an urn on a shelf. There was no point in clinging to false hope or thinking about things that could have been.
But Avery didn't dare move his cursor.
He had heard of that township once; a classmate in one of his pointless gen-eds had said they were from there: a sleepy town in the middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts, where they thought they'd never get out alive. Avery had given a polite laugh at their complaints back then, but now, he was doubtful that any place where D3rlord3 was could have possibly been sleepy.
When he did finally move his cursor, it was to the search bar. He typed in the township's name, and a quaint town showed up on his screen. It looked like the perfect set for a coming-of-age movie: corner stores and townhouses clustered into six humble miles.
All nine hours away.
Avery had no plan. He wasn't the world's most eager driver; his daily commutes were mostly to his campus or the store, and the farthest he had gone was two hours on the interstate to go to a beach in the next state over. He didn't think about hotels or itineraries or anything else to see like he typically did when he was planning a trip.
All he knew was that he had to drive.
* * *
Everything in the neighborhood was yellow.
He wanted to leave his house earlier, but he felt glued to his mattress for an hour. It was only when the golden hour had ended and the sunshine had shifted into a square of pure white on his wall. From there, he almost tripped over his feet to dress himself in mismatched socks and brush his teeth in only a minute. With the state he was in when he hurried out the door for his car, his neighbors probably thought he had lost his mind.
And, truthfully, they wouldn't have been too far off.
Avery had only managed to clean himself up a little more in the rest stop bathrooms, combing his hair until it sat half-decent on his head and tugging the wrinkles out of his Hawaiian shirt. He had never attempted a nine-hour drive in his life, and it showed in the way that every second on the interstate trickled by as tantalizingly slow as a leaking faucet.
He would have hoped that reaching his township would have been worth every dreadful second, but now, he wished that he had gotten stuck in traffic for only a few minutes longer. Winter aconites were peppered across every lawn, and the light bathed every house's roof and walls in the late afternoon light.
Yellow was such an abhorrent color in Massachusetts. Avery was no artist—hell, he was convinced he was half-colorblind, but even he could see how the yellow smeared across the sidewalks and grass until the suburbs looked like the victim of a fallout.
Avery looked down at his left hand on the steering wheel. The light was streaming in through the window and dressing his whole arm in yellow. The same yellow that had spread from floor to ceiling in that cave, beckoning him closer until it swarmed around him and suffocated him. The yellow that had cloaked him in a helpless trance, filling his lungs with water and pricked at his hands with the pines of the ferns.
The yellow that had drowned D3rlord3's mind and choked every nerve in his body until, all in one second, he was a corpse.
The tires screeched to a halt, and Avery swerved to the side of the road. He didn't even know why his foot had slammed on the brakes—there was nothing on the road but a few boxes on the strip of grass outside of a house a few doors down. The neighborhood was eerily quiet for this time of the spring, as if all the birds were still down south or snug in their nests.
Avery parked his car and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. His hands trembled around the rubber as he drew in a shaky breath. He was an idiot for doing this. He was hunting down any trace he could find of a dead man, just to panic and almost crash his car the moment the sun was falling west in the sky. There was a reason he had kept his blinds drawn for the last three months and refused to get up until the golden hour was done, but now the comfort and safety of his room were nine hours away.
When he dared to raise his head off the steering wheel, the light had changed a shade. It had grown just a little richer—no longer that vile yellow, but barely gold.
His hands relaxed and slipped into his lap. The flaps of the cardboard boxes ahead fluttered in the gentle spring breeze. A glint of golden light caught on the cover of a video game cartridge, glimmering so brightly that Avery couldn't see the title.
Curiosity was always his pitfall, but in this moment, it was his savior that let him reach for the door's handle.
When Avery stood over the box, he could see the game's label properly: Minecraft for the XBox360. Its edges were terribly dusty, and the plastic on the cover looked to be scratched up. He picked it up, wiping off the dust with the corner of his shirt and observing it.
On the bottom right corner, there was chicken scratch, no better than a child's: PROPERTY OF DEREK.
The rest of the first box was stacked from bottom to top with old XBox games, all with the same scribbles in the same spot. Every single one of them was well-loved, to say the least when "well-loved" meant that no video game store would want to buy them to sell as used copies. On top of them, a controller with an exposed wire and one of the buttons missing sat on top of them all.
That's two things he knew about D3rlord3 now: his name and that he was an XBox kid.
The second box was almost overflowing with books. Dusty textbooks were stuffed at the bottom, hardly a scratch on the sheen of their covers. They were buried by far too many paperbacks for Avery to count, their covers frayed and faded to the point that he couldn't discern the titles. The range of genres almost made Avery laugh: he couldn't think of a more jarring shift than from a science fiction series to a dictionary so used that the front cover was ripped off.
He could only imagine D3rlord3 reading them, his nose only inches from the pages as he flew through every paragraph in record time and squeezed his annotations into every space he could find from the edge to the spine. Avery couldn't think of him as anything other than a fast reader, whispering the words under his breath as he became lost in the world between the sentences. His parents probably had to pry his books away from his face to get him to eat his dinner or greet their guests.
Avery failed to suppress his laugh at the thought as he sorted through the books. But through the frayed cover pages, his finger almost sliced itself on the edge of a perfect cover.
At the bottom of the box was The King in Yellow. Unlike the other books, it looked to be barely touched, its cover still glossy with the laminate. All that was written was D3rlord3's name, scribbled in on the top right of the first page and barely visible through the crease in the page corner.
"All that because of this stupid book..." he snorted bitterly to himself. The idea still sounded so outlandish to him that he still had to laugh in disbelief, and he didn't need to say a word to know that talking about it would make him lonelier than he already was. Who could have possibly taken the idea of an Eldritch being trapped in a Minecraft world seriously?
Only one person could. The one person smart enough to solve riddles with no answer and find the loophole in a straight line. The one person strong enough to see everything—to see Avery in a world of future leaders and innovators—and still stay alive long enough to leave the paper trail behind for Avery to follow. The one and only person that Avery would chase to the last line of code.
Only Derek, his one and only person, could.
The book bent in Avery's hand. The fresh, neglected pages couldn't possibly carry the weight of the life that they held in every margin.
Avery would have never thought to destroy D3rlord3's property. As much as he wanted to shatter his laptop's screen that night and stick his hand through the broken glass in some idiotic attempt to reach through the pixels and blue light and save him, he had barely touched the laptop for two weeks straight. When he finally had the courage, he was almost scared his fingers were so graceless and heavy that he'd break a key.
It was almost impudent the way that the book mocked D3rlord3 after it sat on his shelf for years. It had watched him all this time, simply waiting for him to become its messenger. It knew him for years, probably infinitely and eternally, all while Avery got no longer than an hour with him. It knew Derek Hutchins and saw him as nothing more than its disposable errand boy, in this life and in every life that could have been.
Avery's thumb pressed into the corner of the cover. His nail pierced through the laminate and began to leave an indent in the paper. The seams between the cover and the spine strained as he pulled tighter, his eyes trained on the spine's edge of the page, waiting for the shadows to split away into an endless yellow chasm.
"Avery?"
He flinched, and the jolt of his hand tore the cover partway. The tear ran up from the bottom, splitting the laminate at a sharp, clean angle and cutting through the hem of the King's robes that flooded the bottom of the book cover.
There was a woman at the foot of the pathway of the property, swaddled in a red cardigan that looked more like a bloody straitjacket with the way her arms were folded over her chest. From first glance, he could tell that she was tired. The shadow of the house that had cast over her hid the more obvious signs like the circles under her eyes and the disheveled silhouette of her coils, but the way her body lulled forward was all that Avery needed to know.
"How did you—"
"You just look like an Avery," she interrupted. Her voice didn't snap in the way Avery had expected, but the tautness of wit still bent between her words. "The kind of person that he'd write to."
No matter how hard he tried to swallow the lump in his throat, he still croaked, "'He' as in Derek."
She nodded. Her arms tightened across her chest.
Avery bit on his bottom lip. He didn't mean to pick at his lips, but he absentmindedly ripped some of the skin away and felt the blood starting to bead from the wound. "I'm sorry for your loss, Ms. Hutchins."
"I could say the same to you."
Avery felt the blood seeping into his mouth. He wiped his lip on his wrist, and a thin red stain smudged across his skin. The taste of blood stuck to the roof of his mouth, pervading every breath with a thick hint of metal.
She folded a side of the cardigan over her chest and let her shoulders sag. "He wrote his last letter to you, you know."
"I saw," he said.
"Derek always had a beautiful way with words. I swear, he could have been anything in the world and still found a way to be exceptional." The tears welling in her eyes glimmered with the gold of the sun that they captured. Ms. Hutchins pulled a handkerchief from her cardigan's pocket and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. "But I've never seen him write something that beautiful. It's like he knew you more than anyone else.
Her shoulders shook with laughter, but the sound was anything but happy. The grit of bitterness pricked into every cold laugh before misery rubbed salt into every puncture wound. "If I didn't know any better, I would think he loved you."
Avery's flip-flops skidded against the sidewalk as he took a step back. The faintest streak of cheap black rubber stained the smooth concrete. It was a nice thought to him, but Ms. Hutchins had said it herself: it was a nice thought to anyone who didn't know any better.
He couldn't begin to figure out how stupid of a decision it was to do this—to drive nine hours to a forgettable town in Massachusetts and mourn a man he never even knew. It was nothing but naivety for him to believe that for all the infinite knowledge in the world, Derek would have dedicated so much a second of his precious, finite time in this world to thinking of Avery. For God's sake, Derek had more important things to worry about—how his poor mother would lose her son either way, consumed by the Yellow.
"But then again, I really don't know better."
She stepped into the light, and unlike everything else, she didn't look all that sickly in the light. It was strange, really—the yellow drowned out everything else but her. Avery's own skin looked as dead as the lawns, but her own skin seemed to glow a little more golden.
If he squinted, it almost looked like she wore gloves of gold.
"You should go to the corner store," she suggested. Her arms unraveled ever so slightly so her fingers could twirl around a loose thread hanging from her cardigan. "It's only five blocks down that way, on Main and Sunset right by the cemetery. They sell the prettiest carnations. The store owner grows them herself in her greenhouse."
Avery shouldn't have questioned it. It didn't matter whether his mother was right beside him or on the other side of the country; he knew better from her not to be difficult. Yet he found himself mumbling into the late March breeze, "Can I ask why, Ms. Hutchins?"
Her finger pulled on the loose thread, and the fabric of the cardigan around her heart cinched. Even still, she met Avery's eye and smiled.
"Derek loved them."
Avery couldn't help but laugh to himself. "I didn't take him for a flowers guy."
"He gets it from his mother," she smiled, "You should get going. They close at seven."
He nodded, but as he turned to walk away, Ms. Hutchins called out again, "Oh, Avery?"
His head whipped back in an instant. The diction in which she had said his name sounded almost exactly like he had imagined how D3rlord3 would have said it. "Yes?"
Her hand limply raised to point at the book in his hand. He tensed when he realized he still had it in his hands and was about to leave with it, but she told him, "Throw that book out if you get the chance. Derek was never really fond of it."
* * *
Avery was never one for flowers. It was ironic, considering half of his wardrobe was Hawaiian shirts printed with some pattern of colorful flowers and palm leaves. His Minecraft bases always looked a little empty without any sort of shrubbery or flower pots inside, but he filled in the space with armor stands and storage to make the lack of coziness a little less obvious. Now that he thought of it, he hadn't ever really touched a flower in Minecraft before.
At least, until his trance. Some nights, when the only light he could bear to let into his room was from his laptop screen, the shape of the blue orchids was still burned into the bottom right corner. Their silhouette looked spindly, almost like limbs trying to reach for him through the screen. When he thought back to the vague, fleeting memories of his trance outside of the church, for a moment, he swore his mind switched the colors of the petals from blue to yellow.
He hadn't touched a flower since. He despised the winter aconites and forsythias that were blooming into the turn of April. It wasn't spring's fault—Avery had always loved spring before, knowing that summer was only a whisper away. But it felt so wrong for spring to breathe life into Massachusetts when D3rlord3 was underneath its flourishing, blossoming soil.
Winter aconites were already starting to grow on his grave. The grass hadn't even grown in yet, and the yellow had already managed to reach D3rlord3 first, just as it had before.
Avery grabbed as much as he could from the patch and ripped them out of the soil. He threw them into the grass behind and kept grasping at their thin, fragile stems until the fresh dirt of the grave was clear.
The carnations were soundless as he laid them onto the soil, but it was still too loud to him. Their petals were a crimson as deep as the smear of blood still on his hand from earlier. Avery didn't need to search for the memory to realize that it was the same shade of red as the cape on D3rlord3's Minecraft skin.
His hands had nothing else to do but fall onto the bed of dirt. The crickets were warming up their cacophony with a funeral song for the dying day. The yellow of the golden hour had drained away by the time he had left the corner store, and the sidewalk he followed to the cemetery was now painted in a new coat of orange.
D3rlord3's name still looked a little peculiar to Avery. It looked odder on a headstone, carved permanently into the speckled granite. He still wanted each and every syllable to stick to the roof of his mouth, but he'd have no reason to say a dead man's name again and again until his voice was shot.
"I threw out the book. Your mom said you'd want me to do that," he said. Avery knew it was common for people to talk to the graves of their loved ones, but he couldn't help but feel quite awkward and half-insane for doing it himself. With how empty the cemetery felt—not even a chill to run down his spine, it felt like he was just talking to himself.
"Why didn't you let me stay?" Avery asked the grave. Part of him waited for someone to answer back—that deep and gentle timbre that he couldn't get out of his head, muffled under his knees. Instead, the crickets hidden in the blades of grass began to sing another hymn.
He sighed, and the cool breeze picked up his breath. "You don't have to answer that. I know why. Save the world and everything. But still..." The dirt parted softly around his finger, and he began to trace shapes in the bed. "You deserved to be saved, too. I would have saved you."
His finger stopped, and the orange light of sunset outlined D3rlord3's name. "I wish I had saved you."
"I still have so many questions. Not just questions about what we went through or about the King. Questions about life and all that junk. But so, so many questions about you," he said, "And you'd probably be able to answer them all."
Avery hadn't noticed that the crickets had stopped singing. D3rlord3's actual funeral was probably much more organized than this: the open-casket was supposed to come before the actual service even started, yet the crickets were only now giving him the chance to whisper into the coffin.
What was there to even say now? Was D3rlord3 even in the pink clouds above to hear him, or did the King pull him deeper than Hell itself, where the darkest red of the ninth circle stopped and the Yellow began?
Well, there was one thing to say. It was probably the one thing D3rlord3, in all his intelligence and the infinite knowledge beyond, didn't know about Avery. D3rlord3 had said it himself—Avery didn't even know him, but that wouldn't stop Avery's stubborn heart when nothing else did.
He bent over until he felt his cheek touch the dirt, and into the earth, he whispered, "I love you, Derek."
Avery loved D3rlord3. He didn't know whether it was worse to love a stranger or a dead man, but he knew damn well that it hurt so fucking bad to love a man who was both. He loved Derek Hutchins so badly that he would have let the Yellow consume him first if it meant that Derek lived. He would have let it cram his skull with the eldritch and the impossible until the King couldn't fit anymore, and then his head would shatter and the King would seep into the rest of his body. And he knew he'd let his head throb with thrice as much pain and every nerve and vein in his body become something else's with a smile on his face, knowing he did it all so Derek could watch the fireworks that night and enjoy them.
Avery loved Derek. Stupid, rash, and stubborn Avery loved the world's most perfect man, and now only food for worms would hear the confession.
Now, there was nothing else to say. Maybe Avery would come back another day, when he could enjoy the spring and the fireworks, and have more to say; maybe he'd come back with a better mindset, that he was speaking to Derek's spirit instead of his corpse six feet under.
But for now, the viewing was over. The crickets were starting to sing the opening song.
Avery finally raised himself upright again, and the first thing he saw was the sun. It bled on its canvas with a blinding red, seeping from the horizon and blending into the muted blue. A layer of yellow sat in between, and Avery grimaced. He hadn't realized until now just how jarring the yellow in the sky looked. It reached so far into the sky, trying to creep its way into the sleeping blue.
However, Avery knew it wouldn't be there for long. There was a reason why the yellow didn't swallow the constellations whole every night: when the red sun buried itself behind the horizon, it always pulled the yellow down with it.