Chapter Text
Ren wipes his hands, stepping back and smiling at his handiwork. His big wooden definitely-not-suspicious-at-all present box is complete, standing proudly on Sahara’s lawn, trap primed for an oblivious Grian to stumble in to his death. After packing his building materials all up he takes off on his elytra, pulling out his communicator on the way to send a few messages that would lure Grian towards the pitfall. He starts making his way over to his current base, tail wagging with all the mischief.
However, halfway there he starts considering his options. It doesn’t take him long to decide he should hang out at the cemetery instead of his initial destination; not that there’s some fancy reason behind wanting to, but he feels like getting into character, and it’s near Halloween anyway. He’d been the first to die, so he’ll own it. And having made a death trap for another Hermit and already conceiving another trap idea in the back of his mind, being the reaper of souls would only be fitting.
He doesn’t really know what had kindled the bloodlust that’s been burning in his mind since the very moment he died. When thoughts about sending Grian plummeting to his death with a trap first entered his conscious, he was nothing but disturbed. He’d been mid-conversation with this man, saying that he had no hard feelings about dying to his game, yet there he was contemplating how to return the favor. It was as if the thought had inserted itself into his mind without his say-so.
But then his thirst for death had grown, and he’d stopped fighting it, putting together that it was all part of the game. The guilt didn’t last for long, and Grian was the perfect victim; Ren’s first strike could double as revenge. Plus, when your team has a demand for mischief, who wouldn’t want to bring Grian over? He’s nothing short of a master with traps and pranks, even if the redstoning behind them is subpar. Ren can help on that front anyways.
His mind is totally distant as he gathers up shulker boxes of stuff from his base to move over to the graveyard, preoccupied with plotting how to take Xisuma’s heartbeat as well, when he notices something off. He had been feeling himself getting a bit chillier as he built earlier but he’d paid it little mind; now he’s quite a bit colder and starting to feel a stiffness to himself, his entire body ever-so-slightly tense despite him never telling it to be.
After a few dozen boxes, a trip to his new crypt, and awhile of decorating to make himself at home, the deep cold and tenseness had only gotten worse, and he decides to stop ignoring whatever’s going on. He takes out his communicator to ask the other hermits what might be going on, before remembering with a sinking feeling that he’s the only one dead.
Outing himself to those who didn’t know yet would be a less than desirable course of action. He needs to keep his death under wraps as best he could, at least until he had a plan. But he’s getting ever so slightly colder and more stiff by the minute, and he’s afraid to find out what will happen if he doesn’t do anything about it. His thoughts swim in a worried bubble for awhile before the perfect solution comes to mind.
He takes off, making his way back to the nether portal to return to the mainland, then the pirate district, then onto the deck of the big rainbow-sailed wooden ship. Upon not seeing her out and about, Ren lightly makes his way over to the door of the captain’s quarters, and gives it a knock.
“‘EY! Who goes there? What business ye have with th’ captain?” Ren turns around to find one of Cleo’s bewitched armor stands scowling its mask behind him, spindly wooden hands gripping a cutlass that it points at his chest. The rest of the armor stand crew stare at him warily, hands on their weapons. Ren slowly puts his hands up.
“I’m a friend of Cleo’s,” he speaks slowly. “just wanna talk and be with her.” The armor stand moves the cutlass further forward threateningly.
“Likely story.” It gestures to Ren’s waist. “I see th’ sheath. Drop your weapon.”
“Calm down man, I’m a friend, she’ll tell you.”
“Drop it!”
Just as Ren begins to reach for the hilt of his sword, the door he had knocked on creaks open to reveal a sleepy-looking human Cleo in pajamas, speaking bumbly through a yawn.
“Wha… Ren? What are you… hey!” She notices the armor stand behind Ren and shoves it out of the way with ease. “Leave him alone,” she scolds her crewmember, “The Hermits are friends, they’re always welcome on board the Juggernaut!”
“Well ye yelled at us earlier for lettin’ the others build that ghost ship,” it grumbles back at her, “an’ he’s dead! You told us yrself the' dead Hermits be out to getcha.” Cleo stops rubbing her eyes and looks over at Ren, raising her eyebrows slightly as if she hadn’t noticed his grayness before her anthropomorphized crewman pointed it out.
Ren returns her suspicion-riddled gaze with his best puppy-dog eyes, his ears and tail droopy and his head hung low. He worries a little that it’d be less effective with no life in his eyes, but he can tell from the slips in her stern expression that it works a treat. Cleo sighs and shoos the armor stand away.
“Fine. Just keep manning your stations, I’ll take care of ‘im.” The crew obey her order with little hesitation, looking back towards their tasks of moving about cargo, manning the cannons, and scanning from the mast lookout. The armor stand that had just threatened Ren gives a halfhearted “aye aye, cap’” and walks off to join the rest of them. “Sentience spells,” Cleo grumbles after it turns away, “sometimes you wish you could take ‘em back.” With a slight chuckle, she turns around to face her uninvited guest.
“So. What’s the deal with you bein’ here, oh Undemisable?” Ren cringes with regret. He knows he’d never hear the end of having dubbed himself an unsinkable ship, only to be the first to fall beneath the waves of mortality.
“Well, Grian gave me diamonds to do some dangerous stunts, and, I, uh, got a bit too reckless. I was hoping--”
“Y’know Ren, I don’t wanna give you any ideas here, but you probably shouldn’t go knocking on your target’s door when settin’ traps.”
“What? Nah, I wouldn’t trap you man, never!” he jokes, brushing off the tinge of hurt from Cleo’s accusation. “I was just--ugh, this is embarrassing--I’ve been having some weirdness going on with my body--or maybe corpse would be the right word now--since ‘demising’, but I didn’t want to just announce my death to the server for help, so I was just thinking, who here would have more experience in life as an undead than yourself?”
“You want me to teach you how to be dead?” Cleo queries slowly, seemingly half to herself, raising an eyebrow. Ren puts his hand to his forehead, thumb on his temple to hide his fluster, and looks out from under it with ears perked hopefully.
“Yeah? ...I guess that sums it up.” he confirms quietly. Cleo thinks for a moment.
“You’re not gonna do anything?” she checks, “Y’know, along the lines of having me ‘join you’?” Ren shakes his head.
“No, man. Just need some help, honest.” Cleo rubs her eyes again and considers.
“Alright, sure. If you could return the favor.” she says, stepping out of the way to invite Ren into her cabin with a quick gesture. “Make yourself at home.”
“What exactly do you mean by ‘return the favor’?” Ren asks, taking a seat on one of the many shulker boxes scattered about. Cleo sits next to him.
“Well, it’s been decades since I’ve had a pulse, so I could use a refresher myself.”
“But Demise started, like, a week ago,” Ren replies, “wouldn’t you have adjusted?” In response, Cleo simply gestures to her pajamaed body and the tangled mess that is her hair. Her eyes are less sunken since coming back to life, but she still has notable bags beneath them from exhaustion alone. Behind the curtain rod in the corner of the cabin, her bed is unmade and the clock points to around 3pm. “I see.” he replies simply, sitting corrected.
“The whole ‘needing sleep’ thing has definitely thrown me for a loop,” she states with a sigh, “how in the world do you guys live your life having to spend half your time unconscious?” Ren gives it a thought. He’d never considered how much of an adjustment it would be for someone like Cleo to have to become fully alive and breathing again after living as a zombie for so long, needing sleep and food, feeling pain and her survival instincts again after years of nothing of the sort. Before he can respond, though, she continues. “But I digress. You were the one who came to me for help, so what’s going on?”
“U-uhm,” he hesitates, “Well, I’ve been getting colder and colder since respawning monochrome. Not like the nip-at-your-skin, make-your-ears-pink cold, it’s like this... heavy numbness, deep in your heart and bones.” A shiver tickles its way down Ren’s spine as he describes it, and he takes a shaky breath.
“To be expected,” Cleo says casually with a nod. “With no warm blood pumping around, things get chilly. You get used to it after a while.” Upon receiving no response, she looks over at Ren. He looks up at her pitifully, and she seems to realize as the casual tone leaves her expression and voice. “Oh… oh…” she gently puts her fingers to her wrist, closing her eyes as she embraces her own heat and pulse. “That... must be hard to lose, after living like this all your life. I’m sorry.” Ren nods solemnly and they sit in silence for a moment until Cleo interrupts it.
“Heh, though I gotta say it must be nice to have that annoying thumping in your chest not bothering you anymore,” Cleo comments, giving a little chuckle that quickly falls out when Ren doesn’t join in. She sighs defeatedly. “So, uhm… what else is going on?”
“I dunno, it’s this kind of stiffness?” Ren replies, then shakes his head. “No, no, that’s not the right word. It’s more tense. I’m getting slightly tense all over, and I can’t relax my body. It’s starting to hurt a little, and it’s getting tricky to move.”
“Huh. Good thing dead muscles don’t tire out, eh?” Cleo said, then looks down and thinks for a second. “I don’t remember that happening to me before. I mean, I’d get a bit of dead stiffness sometimes, but nothing a stretch and some heat couldn’t solve. And it wasn’t tense like you describe. I wish I had a solution for ya.” Ren looks up at her with a worried expression, turning away the moment she looks over to meet it.
“It’s... only getting worse.” Ren says quietly, failing to hide any fear in his voice as he’s trembling, beginning to curl up on the boxes. He’s sure if his heart was pumping it’d be doing so pretty rapidly at this point, with everything setting in. The cold that’ll never cease, the slow loss of control over his own body that gets continually worse and threatens to consume him, that even the veteran undead can’t recognize. He shuts his eyes, trying to deny any tears before they surface.
“I can’t… I can’t control it, a-and it hurts, all over, it hurts--” he cuts off with a stifled gasp as he feels something touch just above his knee. He fights himself a little to look up at Cleo, resting her hand on him and holding a soft smile; as if she’s trying to calm him with just her presence and touch, and Ren can’t deny it’s working.
He’s able to bring himself into a manageably calm state until he feels a tear make its way down his cheek, and he lets down his little floodgates as more follow suit and his chest begins to shudder and flutter the way it does when you cry. Though there’s no breath to back it up, he takes solace in at least that bit of familiarity carried from his living body, and lets his cold tears fall.
Cleo gets up off her shulker box and kneels in front of him, continuing to ground him with her presence. To his surprise, she reaches out for his face and puts her hand to his cold, tense cheek and wipes away his tears with a gentleness Ren never would have expected from her of all hermits.
Everything about the action catches him off-guard, but what entrances his attention most is the warmth in her hand. He finds himself leaning into her touch, already missing the warmth of life mere hours after passing on. He tries to comfort himself in the idea that maybe it’ll get easier as time goes on, but the ever-worsening cold and tenseness do nothing to back up such glimmers of hope. So he just refuses to let his mind wander and enjoys the warmth he’s given until she slowly pulls her hand away.
“I’ll tell ya what, Ren.” He looks up, slightly startled by the sudden break in the delicate silence. “They’re kinda shoddy, but I have a few spare beds down in the hold. You may not
need
sleep now that you’re dead, but, well… I think getting some would really help you right now. Emotionally speaking.” She stands up and puts her hand on his shoulder, pressing slightly to urge him to his feet. “This has got to be a huge shift for you, your mind needs a rest.” Ren stares at her for a moment, then turns and sighs deeply.
“A-alright…” he mutters, paired with a slight nod that takes far more effort than it should. “Thank you.”
“Good. I’ll be right back, you stay he-- er, actually no, come on with, could you?” Cleo stands, and Ren fights his way onto his own feet when she beckons, internally questioning her double-take. He follows her as she goes back out into the sun, noticing her brief hesitation before letting herself step into it directly. He hadn’t considered the dangers of burning, and makes a point to very slowly let his hand into the sunlight, only following with the rest of him when there’s no unusual reaction.
Cleo leads him down a stairway on the main deck into the hold, glancing back at him frequently. Low in the massive body of the ship there are dozens of densely-packed chests and barrels, stacked tightly and neatly against the interior hull. She opens the hatch of one of the barrels and pulls out the pieces of a bedframe and a sad-looking mattress, and a sleeping bag from another. She drags the stuff over to a spare room in the middle deck and sets it up as a basic kind of bed, giving it a hard shove from the top to test that it isn’t about to fall apart when Ren sinks his weight into it. When it holds with nothing more than a slight lurch, she pats for him to sit.
Ren does so and sighs deeply. He’d expected to feel relief for resting his legs, or some urge to lay down from tiredness, but no such feeling comes. Just the empty cold that leaves him feeling little more than hollow. He stares at the floor mindlessly, and Cleo stands there for a moment watching him before speaking up.
“Alright, fine, I give in. Come on, you can sleep in my bed, I should be getting back to work anyways.” Ren looks up as Cleo takes a step towards the door, his airy mind taking a moment to catch up to what she just said. He hadn’t even tried to puppy-eye her.
“Oh. Thank you, but uhm… are you sure?” He looks down at his body. “I’m not sure if or when I’m gonna start getting all rotty and gross, wouldn’t want to mess up your nice captain’s bed.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” Cleo replies casually, “I had a chat with Grian around the time Demise started and he said the magic behind the game has you covered. You won’t wither or fall apart, so no worries about all that… fun.” she says, grimacing a little on the last word, and Ren can’t help but sympathize with a slightly wrinkled nose at whatever experience she’d been speaking from. “He said the only thing that you’d be dealing with is ri-” she cuts herself off, an expression of worried realization crossing her face.
“Is what now?”
“Uh, don’t worry about it.” she replies dismissively, as if she hadn’t any reaction in the first place, and Ren decides it’s probably in his best interests not to question it. “Now come on.” She beckons him over, and with some effort he comes to follow her once again as she leads him past the curtain in her quarters.
“Thank you for all this, by the way.” Ren says as he sits down, breaking the silence.
“Oh, it’s no problem, really,” she assures, “and thanks for helping me out, too. Though I guess we’ll get to that tomorrow.”
“Didn’t you make it, like, a condition though?”
“Eh,” she shrugs, “I woulda helped you either way to be honest, just felt that’d make it less awkward for the both of us and kill two birds with one stone.” she chuckles slightly and Ren can’t help but agree with her logic, blunt as it may be. He tucks into bed, mind beginning to wander, and he stops Cleo before she leaves around the now drawn-closed curtain.
“Hey, uhm, Cleo?”
“Hm? Is something wrong?”
“No, just… another thing. I, uh, don’t mean to worry you, but when you were dead did you feel this…” he takes a deep breath, “urge to kill?” Her eyes widen as he finishes his sentence, soon replaced by a look of judgmental concern.
“No, no, that’s… a Demise thing. Definitely a Demise thing.” Ren sighs, instantly regretting having asked.
“Alright. Just… don’t worry about it, okay?”
“Right.” she replies, the sting of her suspicion-riddled sarcasm striking Ren without mercy. He sighs and turns over, facing the wall.
“Goodnight, Cleo.”
“Sleep tight.”
“It’s hard not to,” Ren replies with a dark chuckle. Cleo lets out an amused and pitying sigh before making her way past the curtain and out of the captain’s quarters.
With that, Ren is left to himself and his thoughts, like nothing. He’s left to the image of Cleo’s fearful gaze, and his tenseness and the cold.
And how it is so, so cold.