Chapter Text
an apple fell from the tree, and upon impact it broke into two
For some reason, Aiden couldn’t remember if their group had won or lost the building competition.
As he stands in the auditorium with the crowd, he could barely listen to Gabriel’s speech as his thoughts completely take over his mind, fuzzy memories that he can barely comprehend replaying in his head. His friends were- where were they?
He looks around the crowd, cramped, full of faceless figures; blending together in a haze.
His brows furrow.
Was he hurting?
“These people were promised greatness, and I’m ready to deliver!” he hears. It seemed far away, muffled by an unidentifiable mass. Wasn’t it just onstage? Come to think of it, it didn’t sound like Gabriel at all.
(Where were the others? Maya? Gill? Lukas?)
“IVOR! NO!”
Aiden barely realized that somebody had yelled before the stage exploded, pushing everybody to their backs. He’d fallen to the farther corners of the auditorium, but he wasted no time in getting on his feet and sprinting as far out of there as he could the moment he laid eyes on the Wither rising.
All he could do was run.
It wasn’t out of selfishness, it wasn’t out of arrogance; Aiden genuinely couldn’t focus on anything, taken over completely by mind-numbing fear. Lukas, Maya, Gill; they didn’t manifest fully in his mind until he managed to stop and breathe at a stall momentarily. When he was forced to run again as the thing clouding his head burst out of the auditorium in a dark, dizzying cloud, he thought he caught glimpses of them that he automatically thought, “Are they okay?” “I have to get to them.” “We have to stick together.”
But he’d lost them in the forest fire.
He remembers seeing Lukas and Petra and that group Olivia always hung out with, but he couldn’t get to any of them. The fire spreading and causing trees to topple over, the tentacles of the enormous, monstrous beast swinging around carelessly, had isolated him from them as he tried to dodge and run and stay alive.
That was all he could do. Just run.
By then, Aiden had completely lost track of time.
As he wandered aimlessly, he never stopped thinking about his friends, about Lukas. Where could they be? Are they okay? He’d thought about looking for them himself, but where would he even start? The lone man thought of retracing his steps, but he was so far away from anything familiar, he had no idea where he was. And even then, the Witherstorm had probably already eaten everything up. He’d seen the people, the buildings, the builds, being taken by the tractor beam and transformed into shadow-less darkness that melted with the monster’s body. It was terrifying.
“Eaten everything up.”
Aiden froze in his steps and stared at nothing in horror.
“Our house is gone, isn’t it?”
Their house. His and Lukas’, their whole group’s. Their home. All their mementos, all their belongings-
Boris’ things
-gone. Just like that.
There were a few hours or so that comprised entirely of Aiden sitting under a tree, curled up in a ball, tired, scared, and grieving.
(His dog died because Aiden couldn’t catch up to him to stop him from jumping into the flood. Would his friends die too because he didn’t find them in time?)
His breath hitched and he didn’t even realize he was crying.
Some time later, Aiden finally stood up, though he was still aching. He wouldn’t disclose to himself why he stood, why he insisted on going; and he refused to think about anything at all.
(Aiden didn’t know if he lost or gained hope.)
He had no idea when it was that he arrived at an empty village, still somehow not eaten up by the Witherstorm. It was void of any life, all the villagers, he assumed, having evacuated a long while ago. Plenty of resources were left behind, and Aiden barely hesitated in taking food and materials from the chests.
Replenishing his health and eating a steak, Aiden only realized then that he felt ill.
Uncomfortable.
He felt like something was wrong. He felt a pull, a call, a cry for help, but he had no idea what or where the source even was. Yet, it nagged at him; it had been the entire time. He mistook it for fear, but this feeling was far more than that.
Initially, he chalked it up to being alone, not knowing where his friends were; but he’d been plagued by thoughts about them ever since he managed to catch his breath, and he didn’t even realize that pit in his chest then. So what was it?
Aiden couldn’t come up with any answers, so he did what he always did best: he avoided it.
Aiden woke up to the sound of the growls that have branded themselves into his mind, made him react immediately with a jolt that ran through him. He felt the noise in his bones, shrivel up his skin and grab at his eyes.
He yelped as he woke up. The earth trembled beneath him, the air heavy still as it rushed through him, blowing the trees violently and threatening to uproot them.
The pull inside of him became stronger. The cries were louder.
It was irresistible.
It pulled him out of the village to the edge of the cliff, and he followed it, even if his whole body ached and thrummed with foggy nausea. Reaching the outside, he was greeted by a bright flash of white light, and a shockwave that pushed him back to a house, his head hitting the wall hard.
A hum of pain came in waves, rippling from the back of his head and washing over the rest of his body, making him stumble as he tried to walk.
The pull was at its strongest, calling for him to come to the wreckage that was the Wither Storm’s corpse. So he did, even if it was painful for him, even if the rotting smell of black blood permeated the air. He ambled through the bushes and the trees until he arrived at the corpse site. Huge tentacles now lying limp surrounded him. They were meaty, seemed to be made of stone or obsidian, hard to the touch and with a rough, rocky texture; yet somehow still moist with a thick, black slick that made Aiden recoil in disgust.
Still, despite the gross environment, he pushed through and stepped over the dead remnants. He looked and searched, still not knowing exactly what for.
He thought he had found his answer when he found Gill, and when Maya found them both, but still he felt like something was off, something was missing; even as they searched for Lukas, then had to run away from the revived storm.
Confusion and fear and relief clouded his mind, then, and he became too busy fussing over his friends and cherishing the reunion to think too hard on it.
Like everything else, it came back to bite him hard.
Aiden died with the Witherstorm.
Its death wasn’t just when the Command Block, its heart, was destroyed. No, its death was slow and agonizing, and Aiden felt every second of it.
It first started with the killing blow. A sharp cut right into the fracture, tearing it to pieces. He felt it in his own heart first, the blade digging itself into him, sending shockwaves of sharp, stinging pain through his whole body. The ache soon followed, an amorphous shape made of screams and incomprehensible, garbled noise; and he felt it everywhere, inside and out. His eyes hurt, he felt like something was lodged in his throat, he felt like he was being gagged, he felt like something was crushing his brain - his mind - and refusing to let go.
Then it fell apart. That came right after its heart shattered, when the physical body no longer had strings to keep it together, and the flying beast was now subjected to gravity, falling lifelessly to the stone floor of Soren’s fortress. He felt the crash, the fall, the breaking of the bones and the splatter of blood and loose muscle. He fell over and cried out in pain, his knees weak and giving away as he felt his limbs become entangled in and squeezed by coils of pain. A black and purple hurting that grasped his heart with a prismarine fist and never let go.
It subjected him to an intangible wither.
The final stage of its death was its decay. The shadow matter it was made up of, the melted obsidian, had dispersed among the atoms of the world, the atmosphere, and returned to its original state. It seeped into the cracks of the bedrock and sprung anew. Dirt, wood, stone, lava, water- it reformed. It reshaped itself, a sedimentary lifeform reverting to an igneous state, now no longer bound by the heart, the Command Block.
By then, Aiden could barely feel. He was drained and limp, lacking any willpower to even move, let alone think. He could barely form a coherent thought, everything to him now just shapes and colors with superficial definitions he couldn’t devote the energy to decipher. The sounds around him were muffled and so far away, like a noise in another room several doors from him; blasting a song that couldn’t penetrate the soundproof walls.
As far as he knew, he lay in nothing. His soul was left alone, now a mere fraction struggling to power its own body and consciousness.
Gill and Maya told him he couldn’t stop screaming.
…
…
When Aiden woke up, Lukas was at his bedside, and he felt like he was in a dream.
“Lukas?” He croaked weakly, all that he could say despite the indescribable relief that washed over him. The man smiled and squeezed his hand. Aiden let out a choked laugh. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself. How are you feeling?”
Aiden gave himself a mental once-over and sighed, laying his head back on the pillow behind him. “Perishing.”
Lukas chuckled. “At least you’re in one piece, man.”
At this, Aiden didn’t dare resist the emotions that returned to him, vague memories of being worried sick over Lukas and Maya and Gill during the days of the storm. They manifested into tears that blurred his vision.
“I love you, Lukas,” was all he managed to say, a mere murmur as his consciousness died out once more, keeping him from seeing Lukas frown and look the other way.
The man retracted his hand slowly and left the room without another word.
Try as he might, Aiden couldn’t do much to help with repairs.
At best, he could do 2 hours of work before he got too tired to do anything, an exhaustion that not even a 30 minute merienda or break would help. Eating by itself already became a chore for him, drinking much the same. Several times he’s had to resist the urge to vomit, and when he couldn’t he had to run and could only make it so far before he embarrassed himself and inconvenienced everyone around him with a day's worth of food spilling on the ground.
Most of the time post-Witherstorm, he’d just been trying to recover.
“Don’t worry about it, Aiden,” Lukas said to him with a brief pat on the back. “You’re sick, nobody can help that.”
He did most of the work sitting down, or being checked on by Villager doctors, then being let go because none of them could figure out what was wrong with him.
As he took materials from the chest next to him to craft and set them on the table, he caught sight of Lukas faraway, by some scaffolding for the massive shelter that was being built for everyone. He was going to wave and greet him, but he stopped; not because he might make a noise, but because he saw him with Jesse.
This wouldn’t bother him. This normally wouldn’t bother him because Lukas was always the kind of guy who tried to be friends with everyone, and Aiden could barely count on two hands how many times Lukas tried to convince him to stop getting up in people’s faces (which he liked to think he had a good enough excuse for).
No, this encounter he was witnessing bothered him because Lukas didn’t seem like he was being friendly, he seemed flirty. The same kind of acting he recognized from whenever Lukas was with him, whenever the man teased him and made love to him.
Was he being petty about this? Yes, but he’s petty about everything. And Aiden thought he had a reasonable pettiness for this when Lukas was his boyfriend.
He felt his heart sink into a dark pit.
He knew from being caught up that Lukas ended up going with Olivia’s friends and Petra to take down the Witherstorm, and he barely cared about the details because he was just glad to know that the man he loved was safe, and he was proud of him for what he accomplished. But seeing what he did now, Aiden couldn’t stop himself from wondering.
Had he fallen out of love?
Aiden felt himself go limp.
He looked away from the spectacle and down at his hands, his focus eventually giving way to a mindless stare into space.
The man continued the work for today lifelessly.
“Lukas, where are you going?”
His boyfriend stood there, in their bedroom. He still wore the same clothes as the day the Witherstorm was first unleashed, though they were cleaner now; the striped shirt he’d gotten when they went out shopping one day, the leather jacket they all made together as a group, and his hair still styled in his ridiculously meticulous fashion. Walking in their room, he wouldn’t have thought anything was different today. Of course Lukas would be in the same clothes, they were on a shortage after their homes were destroyed in the storm; but it was the bag in Lukas’s hand that made Aiden’s heart drop.
In those few seconds, he’d have thought everything was okay, his anxiety was just getting to him again, Lukas was probably just running an errand.
But those were few, fast, small seconds within agonizingly slow minutes.
“I have to go, Aiden,” he said, slowly yet far too quickly. He looked away, eyes pointedly keeping at everything but the man at the door. Before Aiden could even get a word out, could even ask why, Lukas continued in a hurry with rushed words. “We just- don’t work together anymore.”
As if whatever sickness had taken hold of him since the Witherstorm hadn’t done enough, Aiden felt like he’d been hollowed out. The sinking feeling latched onto him once more.
“Lukas-”
But he interrupted him, “Look, I’m laying it straight okay? I'm breaking up with you,” he said in a frustrated rush. He let out a ragged breath, “I’m breaking up with you, I don’t love you anymore, and I’m leaving the Ocelots.”
The moment each word was spoken, as it hit him, Aiden felt a piece of him break in a way he didn’t even know could.
(As if he wasn’t already broken.)
“Goodbye, Aiden,” was the last thing Lukas said to him.
Everything was a blur, hazy and indescribable, just moving, lineless images flying past him with noises too loud for him to understand.
“Guys?”
Gill entered the house, oblivious as to what had transpired.
“Lukas just left, is he-?”
He trailed off as he took in what he’d come home to: both of his friends stunned, shellshocked, and quiet.
No matter how much any of them hoped for the opposite to be true, their heads made sure that reality made itself crystal clear to them in every waking moment.
Aiden did nothing as Maya screamed into the abyss, in her bedroom, just down the corridor. He sat in the kitchen, hunched over a mug of hot chocolate that had gone cold; and Gill lay still, noiseless, on the couch, clutching a pillow.
Lukas had left them.
It wasn’t like they lost him in the Witherstorm event, he didn’t die.
He just left.
Perhaps Aiden should have seen this coming. And he did, in a way.
He wondered, as he stared into the dark chocolate; if he talked to Lukas earlier, would things have been different? If he talked to him about his concerns and his feelings, as his boyfriend, as his friend; would things stay the same? Would Lukas have stayed?
Aiden didn’t want to face the gnawing inside of him that said bitterly, “No, he wouldn’t have. He’d have left us anyway.”
He twitched and his breath trembled with him. The young man didn’t even realize that he started crying until he sniffled and audibly gasped for breath, prompting his friend within earshot to come to him with a gentle hand on his back.
“Aiden?”
He broke down.
Everything scared Aiden today.
He was scared because Lukas had up and left him without much explanation. He was scared because he felt like he wasn’t the only person who’s left him recently, that somebody else was gone and they were why he’s been so sick. He was scared because none of that made any logical sense, but a feeling in his heart told him that that was exactly it.
He was scared because nothing made any sense.
He was scared because he was losing everything and he couldn’t care less.
If he didn’t feel hollow and void before, he did now. He felt purposeless, with no direction or goal in sight, no reason to stay alive. Maya and Gill weren’t of much help in these regards, just as hopeless and confused on what to do as he was.
Aiden stood in front of the bar he remembered Lukas frequenting before. Somehow it was untouched by the storm, miles away from the town where everything had started. Other places were the same too, still up and running and largely unaffected by the catastrophe that occurred no more than a year prior. Intact at the other side of the globe.
Thinking about that frustrated him to no end.
(How could they? How could the Witherstorm completely destroy this huge fraction of the Earth, and every other place could care less? How could anybody have a remotely normal life after everything?
How could the Witherstorm take everything from him and not them?
It felt so unfair.)
It felt so unfair as he tried to get groceries and heard every stranger he passed by gushing over the New Order of the Stone. It felt so unfair as he looked at his Ocelors jacket and recalled the building competitions. It felt so unfair as he thought about the illness he’d been afflicted with this whole time, about the first Order’s lie that started everything.
They lied. They lied and they became heroes and their hubris and undeserving fame caused the Witherstorm. If it weren’t for their lies, Aiden’s and several other peoples’ homes wouldn’t be destroyed. If it weren’t for the storm, the New Order wouldn’t have any reason to exist. If it weren’t for the storm and the Order’s lies and Olivia’s stupid group, Lukas wouldn’t have fallen out of love with him and left him.
It wasn’t fair.
He tried to drown it all and move on by having a drink or two. If he could pretend that nothing had happened, that nothing had changed, as if there was nobody to miss, maybe he could move on.
But he was staring at the same first drink and remembering Lukas, and hearing patrons around him talk about this hot new “New Order of the Stone.”
(‘Still not a creative name,’ he thinks with a roll of his eyes.)
“This is old news at this point,” a woman beside him says passive-aggressively. He can’t help the bitter chuckle that escaped him.
“Can’t disagree.”
The woman mirrors his reaction as she took another sip of her drink, her twin-tails dragging behind her.
“I’ll give you something different. Something hot and new?” She tilted her head towards him and smirked. “Have you heard of something called the Eversource?”
The woman scared Aiden, as did his eagerness to hear more, and his excitable thoughts of getting back at Lukas for what he did.
But Aiden was never good at stopping himself from reacting, be it in envy or fear. If he wanted something done, barely anything could stop him, especially if it was impulsive.
And anything that could was long gone.
“You guys wanna go back to some competition?” He asked Gill and Maya one day. “For old times’ sake?”
There didn’t need to be much explaining for the both of them to know what he meant.
It wasn’t like he could, anyway, because both his remaining friends were eager and quick to say, “Yes!”
Burning a city tore him apart and exhilarated him.
Pushing Lukas into the void was thrilling, and it screamed over the silent inklings of regret and the guilt.
Building that narrow, fragile ledge, and standing on the slippery cobblestone, made him feel calm and at peace; even as he yelled and screamed and everything hurt.
Everything scared Aiden and that was all his fault.
So far in his time in prison, Aiden had contracted many a-disease, plenty of times. None of them were ever actually cured, which only exacerbated his pre-existing sickness.
After Sky City, he felt more unwell than he did before, all his energy drained after being devoted to his impulsive hate and envy and fear. It felt like some sort of parasite was eating at him from the inside-out. He could imagine it: teeth forming from his spine and chomping on everything in its way, tearing through muscles and intestines, blood dripping from the tips with torn arteries and veins.
(It wasn’t like he had to have a shortage of nightmares, right?)
Aiden laughed to himself bitterly.
“Aiden?”
He struggled to move his head to get closer to the bars, to the wall separating him from his friend.
“You okay, dude?” Gill asked. His voice was low and soft, and dammit, Aiden could hear the hopelessness there, too. It was catching up to his friend quicker than he liked.
“No,” Aiden replied weakly. He didn’t know he was letting out tears until they trailed down his face, over his nose and his other eye and finally landing on the soil.
Gill hummed. “I’m sorry.”
The ex-leader found that he didn’t need to steady his breathing, as it already was; he was calm as ever, even if he was deathly ill; even if he was crying.
In a way, that horrified him.
“It’s not your fault,” Aiden sobs. Gill says nothing to respond, because they both knew the truth.
...
Hours later, around midnight, Aiden’s sickness let him go, and his eyes finally rested, closed.
The prisoner of that cell never woke up.