Work Text:
Dear Sapnap
There was a line through it. A tearstain beside it.
Sapnap
Dear Sapnap.
You’ll never see this, so I give up. The salutation doesn’t matter.
The words don’t, either. I can write every thought I ever kept from you, and you’ll never know, because I’m going to die here.
I can hear the lava drip down, morning till night, although I never see any daylight. It sizzles, almost. I turn my back to it, most of the time. It reminds me of you.
I’m wasting away in front of a reminder of what I called hell--what you called home. You always promised we would be safe, if we went together.
When we built that community house with its crafting table floor, you were the one who insisted the Nether portal be out back. Right out back--scarcely five blocks from the door. You wanted a quick way home, a quiet, familiar getaway, of crackling fire and burbling lava, and creatures that could do me immense harm but who came, docile, at your call.
We spent weeks in that house after we built it, sharing the same bed before you convinced me to walk through that damn portal.
I’m water, Sapnap, have always been. I am the coolness to your anger, and I am that which extinguishes your flame if left unchecked. You, in turn, heat me to a boiling point and I don’t know what--how--to control myself.
That’s how George found out, wasn’t it?
Boy, he was mad when he saw. You were careless, too. I’d said you could have anywhere you liked below the collar--shoulders, stomach, below the belt…
But you got too excited, and I didn’t stop you, instead I reveled in the feeling of your mouth on my neck. I never told you that. It’s a fearsome thing to say out loud, to describe the soft glide of tongue and the insistent pressure of teeth. Sometimes you’d mix the tongue and your lips, and I couldn’t tell one from the other. When it got to that point, I closed my eyes and let you take me apart.
George saw the evidence next morning. You were always showing your love in shades of red. It’s in the fire that houses our vows. We didn’t want to deal in words or written promises, and I remember how proud I was at your solution, the warmth cupped in your hands as you lit the fire in the house we shared. I remember the glimmer in your eye, the soft dark hair falling around my fingers as you bent your head for my necklace. I hung it over your heart, an Eye for an Eye, to match the one I always wore.
I’m off track. I was telling the story of how we went through the portal the first time.
Come with me, you said. A getaway. As if it was as simple as that--as if your birthplace was the ocean and mine the forests, not that we were born in two different realities, the literal top and bottom of our very existence (no switch, joke there, I promise.).
A getaway, you said. You promised me safety. Because you had never lied before, I took you up on that offer.
The second we stepped--hand in hand, yours was so warm. I miss it--through the lavender mists of the portal, I felt the power being sucked off of me. Much like you always did, dear heart.
You, firebringer, navigated the crags and rocks over fiery lakes with a languid grace that I couldn’t dream of replicating. You were as careless as a child, jumping from precipice to precipice, knowing it didn’t matter if you fell.
I stayed, frozen, staring down at the fire beneath. When you saw my fear, your hands extended. Warm. Safe.
There are creatures that know your call, as I said. The ghasts that used to attack me, the striders that would only dance away from my proffered fungi. They follow you as you whisper, the words cracking like flames.
When you embraced me as we left, you smelled of smoke. Not the way I had known the Nether before, as a place of death and danger. You smelled of our home hearth, of the fire you lit to commemorate what we meant to each other.
I know you’ve said it before, that you regret I can’t carry something of yours like you do something of mine. I don’t mind it. I see you wherever there is fire. I know you could traverse it easily. I know that the defences that guard this prison are your welcome sign, your home territory. I know you could rescue me in a heartbeat.
I know you could keep me safe.
I owe you an apology. It’s thoughtless not to respond to a letter until months after you received it. It’s heartless, and cruel. The writer may wonder where you’ve got to, what’s happened to you. Is your health critical?
Is their affection returned?
I don’t mean to ever send this letter, so I’ll allow myself that bit of sarcastic anger. My heart soared when Sam handed me the note, its edges smudged in smoke.
‘give me a few days. I’ll make it in to see you, d.h. -s’
Every note you left on the kitchen table began with ‘d.h.’ I’d wake up, and find you gone early. When I read them, I joked, for the longest time that it meant ‘dream-haver’, and it should really be me who calls you that.
You kept the secret for weeks, until our vows were about a month old.
“Dear heart,” you whispered into the cool spring air, the words fluttering over my cheek. “It means dear heart.”
I clutched my necklace all the tighter that day.
I told you once that throwing an Eye was a promise between you and the universe. An understanding. She understood that you were calling on her power, and she understood you trusted her to send you where you asked. She was harnessed, more than borrowed from.
I was wrong to call it a promise.
Was I wrong to give you that Eye?
I know I loved you farther than I could ever throw it, farther than it could’ve carried either of us. I’d say I’d fight for you, but the truth is I’d fear for you--walk every step of that hell I’m so scared of just to see what makes it your home.
I’m in love with you, Sapnap, and I will be till the last Eye shatters.
Dream
Ps. I promised you’ll never see this, and you promised to visit.
May the Nether and the End conspire against us.
“His personal effects.” the jailer said, monotone. The creak of the chest revealed a set of armor, half a stack of food. Some stray blocks, and a book and quill. Unsigned.
“That was all that was in the cell with him, and what he had on him before he was imprisoned.”
Sapnap took the items with shaking, guilty hands, drawing a tight breath.
“One more thing,” Sam held up a hand before reaching into his own enderchest. “We couldn’t determine the nature of this object, so it was held at max security.”
In his hand dangled the silver chain with the Eye as its charm. The whole, unblemished Eye, glimmering in the half-light from the crying obsidian.
“Thanks.” Sapnap said, thickly. He took the chain and looped it around his neck.
~
It takes ten obsidian to make a Nether portal.
Sapnap knows this too well.
Three up, two over. Leave out the corners, they’re too expensive. Ten will get you there quickly enough.
He lights it with the blaze of fire contained in his palm, and walks through it, fingers held loosely at his side. Hands empty.
It takes nine seconds--nine full-strength strikes--to break obsidian with a diamond pickaxe.
Sapnap has better tools. He has weapons more efficient, pickaxes more up to the task. But he wants the burn in his arms, the protest of muscles not used to such aggressive labor.
A penance for something that can no longer be forgiven.
When the single block appears in his hotbar, he carries it to the precipice overlooking the lava lake.
He saw it as a safety net, a cool respite when he lost his footing. Now, with two necklaces adorning him and an empty place by his side, he understands, in a flash, the hell it seemed to Dream.
His hands open to drop the block. To destroy his way back home.
The rock doesn’t budge. His home, the hell he was born in, will not allow him to sabotage himself in that way.
He shoves the item back in his inventory, and with a cry, throws himself off the edge. Freefall is delicious, and he wishes it would last forever, that sort of limbo between solid ground. But flames engulf him quickly, from head to feet, and his breath comes thick under the magma. It would be so easy to drown in it, if he were even able. When he breaks the surface, he pants for a second before drawing a hand across his eyes.
Tears never lasted long in the Nether, but these ones burn his cheeks.
~
He doesn’t reconstruct the portal, but spends days wardering the red and orange landscape. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. None of the mobs come at his call.
~
He’s forced to defend himself, at long last. He should’ve known. Blazes only defend their kind, what’s theirs, what’s precious to them. He got too close to the spawner, and they shot.
He shot back.
The drop was a single rod, and as he bends to claim it, he remembers what that sort of achievement is called.
Into fire.
Dream had gone into fire for him, every time they visited the Nether.
Could Sapnap bear to do the same?
There would be another portal to cross, with hands empty and his weak side undefended. A desperate landscape to traverse, peopled with creatures that knew Dream better, eerie yellow terrain hostile to his every footfall.
I’ll love you till the last Eye shatters .
His hand moves up to grip both pendants, the cracked and the whole.