Chapter Text
Tommy is sitting at a table while a man with glasses and a nice face and a scraggly, scraggly beard wraps his hand in bandages.
He’s ushered to a couch, once glasses man has finished cleaning and bandaging it.
His head hits the pillow and he goes the fuck to sleep, and honestly, he deserves it.
--
Joe Hills is a good man, and he hopes, a good father.
If he were to ever have a child, of course, which is incredibly unlikely to happen. Block people don’t really have reproductive organs.
But gosh darn, the teenager on his couch is making him feel some latent paternal instincts. It’s probably just the blotchyness the tears left on his face and the bits of blood drying on the outside of the bandages on his hand. And is it really paternal instinct? Joe’s never *felt* like a father, per say, and he's pretty sure the kid on the couch has a father already, the blonde one with the bucket hat and the kimono, or the piglin lookin' one with the tattered cape that lives with Etho, or the sweater and beanie one with the guitar. He's not really sure.
He's pretty sure the teenager is Falsie's kid, the one from that tournament thing that lead to that whole mix up. He's been far too busy with the winery and the lighthouse to give more than a few cursory glances to the Hermiton Herald on his wall.
The teenager and False are both blonde. He feels like she would have told them if she had a biological child, though. And of course, it's not Joe's place to assume that, or to assume she hadn't adopted, or that she hadn't summoned up a child through magical means. The Vex were tricky, they could probably magic up a child. Then again, he thinks False is too practical to do that. But it is a possibility.
Cleo clicks her tongue, like the system they developed way back when when Xisuma was really into yoga and had all the hermits come out to his and learn it, insisted on almost complete silence. Not that Joe has anything against yoga, or Xisuma, but it could be a bit much. Poor Jevin melted because it was too hot for his slime to hold together, and X stopped posting yoga on the community boards, although he did keep inviting Cleo and Joe until they politenessed their way out of it.
She snaps him out of his reverie. She's always been good at that.
He follows her outside.
She's lookin' at him, intense in the way that only her eyes can be, not only because she's so important and frankly just plain scary to him especially after all this time, but also because the cloudyness of partially dead eyes is striking in a way he's never been able to describe, hazy and piercing all at once and fuckin' scary to be on the wrong side of.
He isn't- on the wrong side of them, of her. She's looking at his eyes but staring right through them, through the open door to the couch with a sleeping teen- and Joe feels real weird, about calling Tommy a teen, but he feels weirder about adressin' him like he's really met him, is gonna get to know him; the anonymity of forsaking the kid's proper name is comforting to him in a way he doesn't want to confront, not right now. And anyways. Cleo needs him.
"I don't-" She's quiet for a while.
The wind whistles through the berry bushes and the foxes are crying, and it's eerie in a way that's never able to be acclimated to.
Foxes sound like people screamin'.
"I told False I would take care of him." She's quiet again.
--
Zombiecleo does not cry. Not for shit like this.
But goddamn, she's tearing up even before she can say a word, has to pause for far too long between sentences so she doesn't choke, give up the gambit. She's so fucking close, when she tells Joe what she told False. She croaks a little, her voice breaks on the second syllable of False's name.
She recovers it.
She's good at her job, and her job is not showing her fucking hand. Not even to Joe. Not even to Joe.
"I told False I would take care of him."
She decides to amend her statement while it still hangs in the air between her and Joe and the open door behind him that she's looking into because what else is there.
"I told her I'd watch him."
Joe is still silent and she wants to yell, get angry and get a reaction like she knows she could with False or Jevin.
"I think we should call False."
--
False hasn't slept.
She got home. Put her stuff away, freshened up. Her bomber jacket, her favorite one, got torn from where she was sleeping on it, and she wants to cry but she doesn't think she has the energy or the tears for it.
She puts on one of Jevins sweatshirts, holds her jacket in her arms, and sits down on the nearest bed and looks down between her knees and rocks back and forth.
She gets the message at about 4 in the evening, 12 whole hours since Cleo woke her up and sent her home and she doesn't know how the time went that fast. She's thinking about Mumbo's timelapse of the sun rising and setting, all sped up so it happens in 24 seconds not 24 hours when she looks away from the clock and the orange of a sun just barely starting to set to see the message.
Joe Hills: Please come to the winery -Cleo
--
"You send it. My hands are too-" She wiggles them almost like the pantomime for 'so-so' but he can see them shaking even as she moves them.
--
False is in the tunnels quicker than she really thought she could be, given that she's barely slept, and she's tired; from the night out, from sparring with Tommy. From the whole portals ordeal, from everything before that.
It's only when she's so physically tired that she can recognize that she's just so, so tired in the panorama of it all.
She's still running down the ice.
Didn't bring a boat.
If she slips, she'll regret it, but Joe will have healing potions on hand, and it's not like resetting an arm or a leg ever caused either of them too much trouble. Not like it'll hurt more than the latticework of fractures and bruises that already cover her bones anyways.
It's a while, til she gets to the portal she has to take to get to the other portal to get to Joe's, the portal that isn't in the bottom of the lighthouse near the spiders but in the top, where she can descend the stairs and run up the vineyard to the house.
It's when she's running that she registers she made it here without hurting herself, even all wrapped up in Jevin's jacket and barely awake.
It's the least she should be able to do, really. She's Falsesymmetry; she's *the* PvPer of Hermitcraft, she's the best at what she does and she does it a lot.
So why can't she fucking do *anything*. The past few days- weeks, even, *months* have been shit- is she losing her touch? Can't get back into the game? Because of what? A teenager and his family crash landing in her world and then she crash lands in theirs? Because her closest friends abandoned her to go play politics with children? Because she spent two fucking months alone with nothing and no one?
She gets rattled that goddamn easily, what can she really do, even?
If she *had* fallen on her way to the vineyard, on the iceboat road, could she have even gotten back up?
Would she have wanted to?
But Cleo is rushing out the door too fast because Cleo is slow and deliberate and she plans her movement to make you uncomfortable in a way False can never understand because movement is all about purpose and her purpose is to do things simple and easy and the way she understands and Cleo is all bravado and trickery and strings and irons in the fire and False gets burned every time she tries to follow her friends machinations without warning and now False is crying, and Cleo's crying too; the stitches near her eyes scrunching too tight and they're hugging, now.
Maybe it isn't so bad, False thinks. Cleo's arms are strong like the rest of her, holding her up and walking her backwards to the door, False thinks, though she can't see with her head all tucked up in Cleo's vest; Maybe it isn't so bad, she thinks, to be in the arms of someone who loves you even when everything else has fallen apart.
She lets Cleo go when they sit down on the big couch in the winery's living room, only to adjust to the blanket Cleo tucks around her before grabbing her hand right back and holding it hard, like it's the only thing keeping False from drifting away.
In another time, it was; all high seas and cutlasses and eyepatches that only Cleo really needed.
But that's not now, because now False is sitting on a couch with her hand in Cleo's and a sleeping boy is on the couch opposite to them and Joe Hills, beard and @ and all, sitting the wrong way forward in a kitchen chair and looking at the sad and hurt people in his living room and wondering what he can do about all of it.
--
He smiles mouth open just enough that it doesn't look like he's bearing his teeth. He briefly considers that not baring your teeth is more important for dogs but concludes it can't hurt with humans.
"Howdy y'all. Glad you could join us, False. I think we're havin' a bit of a moment, right now."
Joe Hills is a firm believer in the restorative power of tea, and god knows what he'll do if that notion falls through for him.
He's just finished pulling the kettle off the stove and pouring some cups of tea when he walks back into the living room.
It'll take a while for the tea to steep.
"How're we doin' out here?"
False sniffs a little, pulls herself up off Cleo's lap onto the far side of the small couch so she can sit up proper. She nods at him like she's steadyin' herself and not acknowledging him, more of a preparation than anything. He nods back anyways, not quite manners not quite habit. That's the Joe Hills difference, after all.
He waits. Probably for someone to speak, because of how incredibly, overwhelmingly awkward this situation now is to him, in all of its absolutely awful discomfort.
Cleo doesn't speak.
False doesn't speak.
The kid doesn't speak.
Joe actually takes a peak at the kid, who appears to be pretending to be asleep still, and he can't say that he blames him.
"I don't- I don't really know what's goin' on, all things considered."
He can feel his accent getting thicker as he talks.
"But I'm real glad I got the chance to meet Tommy. I know he's been a part of False's life for some time and he seems like a real good kid. I- I uhm, I'm glad, as always, that ya'll can come to me if and when y'all need help. Like y'all always have. It sure seems like y'all needed it, right now. If any of y'all. Want to talk, I guess, you can, here or in private, and I'd be happy to listen. Sometimes you just need someone to listen."
Speaking of listening, Joe remembers that he took the kettle off and poured some tea, came out to talk while it steeped, and he hustles back into the kitchen for it, loads up a tray with the mugs and brings it out, sets it on the coffee table in the middle of the living room.
No one takes a mug.
Joe hands one to Cleo, who hands it to False and then leans over to grab another for herself. Joe also takes one, leaving one on the tray for the kid, for Tommy. He doesn't move to take it, but that's fine. It's the kid's first time bein' in this place, and he's a smart kid, albeit one who's a bit freaked out, evidently.
"Say, didn't they go back?"
"Who?"
"The-" Joe gestures to Tommy. "Those folks. The ones from the place, from that whole mix up."
Cleo nods.
"Yeah, they did go back. False asked me to talk to Tango, get it sorted out. The respawning and everything."
"You know you could have asked me."
Cleo gives him a skeptical, piercing glance.
"Would you know how?"
"I- well, if you asked I would have told you I didn't. It's about the principle of it."
"You've been spending too much time with Grian."
Tommy looks at them questioningly.
"You have more than one admin?"
Cleo nods.
"X is the admin, really. Like, that's his thing. But Tango and Joe also are admins. And Cub, I think."
Joe nods.
"Way back when, probably a good couple years ago, I accidentally cleared my entire inventory. Fun way of remembering I had admin powers."
Tommy gawks.
"What do you have so many admins for?"
"Mostly just makin' sure we're runnin' well; sometimes farms and gizmos lag us out and admins have to fix it. I don't do much of that, X does, but theoretically I could. Probably."
Cleo cocks her head to the side.
"Do you not have many admins?"
"No."
The answer is too quick and too quiet and Joe and Cleo don't meet each others eyes even though they both want to.
"Say, you haven't even seen much of the winery! If y'all are feelin' up to it, how about a tour!"