Chapter Text
Joe and Keralis were peacefully asleep when Cleo came back.
Between when she left and now, they’d experienced a second case of floats, though the chaos stayed mild as Bdubs never freaked out. (Not at all, not even internally.) He handled everything like a mature adult, as he had been for the past weeks.
Cleo however, wasn’t handling these out of control situations with such ease though.
“Hi Cleo!”
“Hey Bdubs,” Cleo responded with much less enthusiasm. She placed a stack of loose notes and small journals near her messy set-up. “You managed to keep both of them asleep. I’m mildly impressed.”
“Doesn’t take much. Wore ‘em out with running around down here.”
Cleo pulled back from conversing, frowning at her set of notes. On another piece of paper, she drew a chart and marked down the information she’d gathered. “...at least Cub’s recordings were in order,” she muttered.
“Joe’s weren’t?”
“Maybe to him.” Cleo gave a small laugh. “They were anything but organized. I don’t know how he functions.” She put the new graph in the binder and then continued to write side effects the moon gave them. “When Cub’s back to normal again, he’ll have to track the floating. Notch knows I have no time for that.” Cleo frowned as she continued her work, giving an almost exasperated sigh.
“Speaking of Cub, how’s he doing?”
“Tin’s got him handled. They seem to be doing decent. Though I do worry about cave-ins given that’s Tin’s entire base and the quakes are getting stronger by day. Today’s been… a lot worse than normal.” Cleo went quiet again, squinting at the handwriting of one of the notes. Bdubs leaned over, trying to read it himself, the notes seeming to revolve around the intensity of the earthquakes, and how many included aftershocks.
“Well how about yourself? How are you doing?”
Cleo kept her eyes on the factual, and with how low she spoke and because she wasn’t facing Bdubs, it was difficult to catch. “I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Everything’s fine.” Cleo got some of her things, moving to a bed at another corner of the open space. “Now then… I’ll need you to be focused on something else while I work. I can’t have distractions.”
“Haven’t you already done enough?”
“I’m theorizing. That’s why I had to get together the notes. I’m seeing what the moon is doing, and deciding if it’s really growing or if it’s encroaching. And using that, then coming up with a plan to fix it. When Joe and Cub are available, we’ll execute said plan. But unless I work now, we’ll be behind by at least a week.”
Bdubs watched as Cleo moved farther away from the group, with a cup of coffee and snacks in one hand, and her workload in another. “Good luck!”
“I don’t believe in luck!” Cleo called back dismally. “Thanks for taking care of Joe for me!”
“No problem!”
If Cleo wanted to be left alone for a few hours, Bdubs could respect that. But on his watch he would not let her overwork herself to insanity or lose sleep like Boatem.
No way in the overworld, nether, or end combined would that happen.
~ ~ ~
impulseSV was slain by Docm77 using [Order of Octa]
That was what woke Bdubs up from a light sleep.
He’d be grumpy about it, but he was more worried for the crew there. One moment they were moving forward, and the next they were taking five steps back.
<BdoubleO100 whispers to GoodTimeWithScar> Do you need some help there? Have G and Mumbo been spotted yet?
He left the message there, trying to calm that overwhelming nerve again that wanted to spiral at the sight of Doc and Ren creating problems.
Instead, he tried to ground himself. Ground himself with problems he could handle. Like the problem with Cleo staying up way too late for her own good.
“Cleo?”
“Yes Bdubs.”
“Are you planning on getting any sleep there?”
Cleo sighed, not looking up from what she was now doing. “I’m fine.”
“But you need sleep. It doesn’t do any good to avoid it.”
Cleo glanced at Bdubs for a second, before turning her view away. “Then why are you up?”
“Comm notification woke me.”
“What happened?” Cleo asked with a heavy annoyance.
“Doc’s continuing to kill everyone. …Impulse now, and we were just getting him to quit this whole Mooners nonsense!”
“You know, if you kept your head outta everybody’s business, you wouldn’t be half as stressed,” Cleo said with much agitation now.
“It’s my job to help, Cleo. I won’t feel at rest until everyone is safe, sleeping, and accounted for.”
Cleo gave a small look to him now that was hard to fully understand. Something between a face of gratitude and annoyance and amusement. “Well, the sleeping thing may be a bit ambitious. And some of us, like myself, are not sleeping because working is too important to allow slacking off.”
Bdubs moved over to Cleo, forcing her to deal with a lack of space. “Well, can I help with any of it?”
Cleo seemed to give it a thought for just a moment. “I need space to finish this up. It’ll be over eventually. It’s more helpful to have you tackle those two over there.” Cleo looked over at Joe and Keralis, who still managed to sleep peacefully through all this.
“But I could help you now no problem, and once you’re done, you can just hang out with all of us. I can even be quiet if you need me to!”
Cleo again looked at Bdubs as if what he was saying was a bit endearing but still far from rational.
“Please?”
“You’re already doing a ton for us. You deserve some rest too.” Cleo was very definite in wanting to do this all herself with no distractions.
“I’m probably not going to be able to sleep anymore anyways, so I’d be more useful helping you than just sitting around,” Bdubs went on. “If all I’m here for is you to bounce ideas off of and explain what’s going on around us, I’m perfectly fine with that. But I can’t just— I can’t stop helping. …everything’s gonna… fall apart otherwise.”
Maybe that last bit he hadn’t meant to say out loud when making his point, but it was too late to go back now. That in itself broke Cleo’s attention towards work, as she pulled an arm around Bdubs and started actually speaking to him instead of just giving a weak response of aggravation. “Here you are telling me to take a break when you’re the one that needs it.” Cleo pulled him into a hug, and it was one of those rare times where he could trust somebody else to be there for him instead of the reverse.
“I can’t though— I– Boatem needs me and you and Joe need me and Keralis does and Doc and Ren need me to knock sense into them. I can’t just—”
Cleo patted him on the back, shushing him as if he were a child. “You’re asking more of yourself than you can give. You’re not the solution to everyone’s problems, no matter how much you’d like to be.” She rubbed circles into his back and that very closed off and “work only” stance fell away as she took the role of “parent” in the room.
“I’m sorry— I’m distracting you from–”
“Those hypotheses can wait. I’ve gotten enough done tonight anyway.”
“But you said–”
“I know what I said.” Cleo gave a few rough breaths, calming whatever stress she’d put herself through as well. “And you were right. I do need a break. The moon hasn’t crashed into our world just yet, and when it does, we’ll all die as a group instead of working ourselves to death as individuals.”
Bdubs leaned his head on Cleo’s shoulder, feeling a bit more tired now.
“I can’t— can’t promise things will work out,” Cleo said, a bit more of her worries seeping out in her voice. “But– I’m–I’m here. We’re here right now. And–and we’re okay, or as close to okay as we can be.”
They sat in silence, more peaceful than the silence had been in a long time, before Cleo moved off all the scraps of paper and mess on her bed. “We’ll worry about that issue at Boatem tomorrow,” Cleo said, getting in the covers, leaving a bit of room for Bdubs.
“Thank you.”
Cleo smiled back.
Things might not be as great as desired, but things were looking up.
~ ~ ~
It was a more decent hour, though not a great one, when Keralis and Joe decided to wake Bdubs and Cleo up. And “waking them up” was jumping on the bed until they acknowledged their presence.
Bdubs got up sleepily, giving a mild look of annoyance to the two.
“Get off, Joe,” Cleo mumbled out, her bones creaking as she got up and stretched.
All of Cleo’s work from last night was scattered, instead of in the pile it was last night. A few other more organized areas seemed unkempt, making it seem like a tornado came through. Maybe just a tremor though.
“I’m hungry,” Keralis said, looking at the two with imploring eyes, as if all his wishes would be granted at the action.
“Hey hungry,” Cleo said back, rather flatly. “What d’you want for breakfast? We’ve probably got something over at the Drawn ‘n Courtier.”
Joe nodded in agreement. “Do we still have pop-tarts?”
“Yes, but I’m not toasting them. I don’t trust anything plugged in anymore.”
Surprisingly, there was no complaint to that rule, and with their minds set on pop-tarts, they headed over to the building near the castle.
It wasn’t too bad of a walk, besides Cleo’s constant vigilance towards the world, for fear they might start floating again, or the earth would rumble more than they could handle. And soon they were in safety, collecting all the food and entertainment from the place, before heading back to the “basement” of the castle.
Bdubs assumed they wouldn’t be getting much sunlight in the next few days. It was a shame really, it was pretty out, if you excluded the fact that the moon was visible constantly now.
It was interesting to see how the moon issue progressed. It wasn’t until Bdubs looked at all those moon notes Joe took that he realized really how much bigger it had gotten. And to think at one point he’d considered it made-up.
No, it was real alright, and Cleo was taking it much more seriously than anyone else Bdubs had run into.
“So you were saying something about the moon getting closer instead of bigger last night?” Bdubs asked as he and Cleo set up paper plates with the simple breakfast of pop-tarts along with glasses of milk on a picnic blanket.
“Yeah. It seems to make more sense. The earthquakes and even weird gravity that’s popped up. The moon’s out of alignment, which is much more plausible than it just growing suddenly. The moon is rock, not a plant, so it wouldn’t gain any mass unless more rock was added to it, and in that case, it wouldn’t keep the exact same dimensions.”
Bdubs nodded along, only half following in his stressed out, almost sleep deprived state.
“The moon is still square, and no bigger or smaller on the sides of it. You’d expect the symmetry to mess up if it were getting bigger, but instead it’s stayed the same and its details are more noticeable. Hence why I think it’s nearing us.”
“Oh.”
Cleo didn’t respond to his comment.
“So which case is worse?”
Cleo frowned. “Well, it depends on how you view it. It’s getting closer, which isn’t good at all because there is a chance it just continues to come closer until… crash. On the other hand, we may have a chance to align it properly, or just stop its movement altogether. If it’s growing… well the moon itself could explode and leave meteors flying towards us. And I don’t think Cub or Doc or anyone else could build something to shrink it back to a proper size, and even then, shrinking it rapidly could mess up its orbit. And if it is coming closer, and we shrink it, that might make matters worse.”
“How long have you been… thinking about all this?” Bdubs gave her a concerned look as Cleo bit into a chocolate chip pop-tart, with a look like she wasn’t bothered by thinking of this at the moment.
“Been trying to figure it out since we noticed something was up. But I didn’t consider it coming closer until about a week ago.”
Bdubs bit into his strawberry pop-tart hesitantly, losing his appetite at the conversation. “Are you not bothered by this?”
“Yes. Very much so yes. But we can’t worry the little ones with fear right now,” Cleo said before calling the two over. Their conversation shifted from moon events to activities they could get through today. There were plenty of books Joe picked out from the Drawn and Courtier, most of them picture books, along with some small novels and comics he’d get Cleo or Bdubs to read to him.
And quite honestly, Bdubs was glad this was what he was setting his mind on, as a longer conversation with Cleo around the progressively worsening state of things wasn’t helping his mental state.
He could handle a few picture books, though he had a distaste for Goodnight, Moon now.
~ ~ ~
<GoodTimeWithScar whispers to BdoubleO100> Don’t worry about us. Pearl found Grian and Mumbo releesing a wither today. TFC came in to help. Cub’s hanging out with us now too. There having fun here
The message came in a day after Bdubs had sent the message regarding Impulse. Given the delay, Bdubs questioned how “fine” they were doing.
“Scar wasn’t fine last time,” Bdubs thought, remembering how stressed he was at all of Boatem’s issues regarding lack of sleep. And with the earthquakes, which got more often throughout the day, at a maximum of two very noticeable ones and two smaller ones in a 24-hour timeframe so far; and the levitation which they’d only seen three times now, Bdubs couldn’t be too sure how he was handling it.
But he had Pearl and TFC there.
“I could ask Pearl if anything’s up. She’d be honest with me.”
It wasn’t for a lack of trusting Scar, but Scar knew Bdubs had been pressuring issues on himself, and had been quite the advocate for getting Bdubs to admit that he needed a break. Bdubs was aware, yes, but he also knew that affording those moments of peace was a different story.
And it was much harder now to take his mind off of the moon and off of his friends’ issues, so “peace” was rarer to come by.
<BdoubleO100 whispers to PearlescentMoon> Everything handled over there? Scar told me about the withers.
Is Scar doing okay with all the earthquakes and weird gravity effects? Is anybody still sleeping?
Bdubs tried pulling away from that conversation, especially when invited to play a game of Uno. He kept his comm on silent, deciding that he only needed messages that came in as urgent. Pearl could tag messages appropriately surely, and even then, she could get someone else’s help…
…right?
That’s what he told himself as he played down his green five over Joe’s green “time” skip.
That’s what he told himself, in a weak attempt to calm the heaviness and pounding in his chest.
There was really no denying it now. BdoubleO was overwhelmed and it was starting to take its toll.