Chapter Text
He can’t stop looking at the lead.
The sun is setting over the Southlands. Grian watches it fracture into bits and pieces shining from behind the leaves of the trees, twist in the world border, mix its light with the blue world border before hitting the ground.
He’s sitting on the wall of the fortress, absentmindedly swinging his legs and scratching at the grain of the dark oak. His crossbow lies at his side, a few dozen arrows leaning out of their quiver next to it - a moment ago he was using one to carve a smiley face into the side of the wood, listening to Jimmy chase Mumbo around the inside of their fort for “losing” his spyglass yet again. The air smells like smoke - the good kind, from the campfire they all made dinner over, and the bad kind, from the pit of lava raging below him a few feet to the left and the heaps of ash from burning trees on the hills. The sunlight is highlighting the film of it in the air.
Grian looks at the limp lead next to him, watching it swing in the breeze, cut leather dangling over the lava. Maybe it’ll catch fire. Maybe it won’t.
Does he want it gone? He shouldn’t. This is who he is now. It shouldn’t make him feel sick to his stomach every time he looks at it. This is who he is. Better to accept that - than anything.
He sighs and lies down on his back, staring at that translucent sky lit up with blues and oranges. Jimmy is still yelling “I swear, if you ‘misplace’ another one, dear sir -” while Mumbo gasps for air to supply his fit of laughter. Martyn is probably inside. Nobody knows where Impulse is, but then again nobody ever knows where Impulse is. Grian feels his back arch over the wood and looks up.
In their first world, the night after Scar lost his second life, Grian had walked out into their yard, onto the highest point of their little mountain, and started towering upwards. It wasn’t neat - he didn’t have enough sand to make it high enough, and after he ran out of sand he switched to dirt, and then cobble, and then whatever bits of wood and ore he had on him.
No one had ever suspected him of being afraid of heights. No one ever suspected him of a lot of things.
When he reached the top, standing on a teetering pile of junk, sand miles below him, he wasn’t sure if the air was so thin because he was having a hard time breathing it or it just wasn’t around for him to breathe. It didn’t matter, because there it was, like a giant faceless billboard - the blue flat of the world border stretching across the sky, coming down to meet him with every heap of dirt.
He’s always been free. He’s always been able to go as high as he wanted to. The sky was brilliant and blue and terrifying, but it always made him feel free. Its limitlessness was his greatest joy and fear.
The realization that he was no longer afraid of the sky was the thing that changed his mind in the end.
A cage. He dug down, destroyed the makeshift pillar and never said a word about it to Scar. The sun rose on a stump in the grass. Three days later they stood in the wreckage of the crater that was their home, and Grian, soaking in blood and sweat and pond water, said “They want a fight,” because he knew there was no other way out.
Scar had wanted to be dual winners. They could have done that. Why didn’t they do that?
The first world was full of heat - heat in the desert and the swamp and even that awful spruce forest, drying out the dirt, baking the sand. Nights were the edge of a knife, pure, bright and cold. He felt alive when he died. He felt alive when he killed.
But that was third - last - that was this life. This world wants death. It screams in green fire and drowns and burns with ferocious tension. It buries its assets in the earth with bodies and fills the blank space with bloodlust. Everything is muted here. Everything is humid, wet, muffled by sheets of snow and stone, wilting, dead. If he’s careful he can smell the moss underneath that layer of ash. Nothing feels real anymore and everything smells like rain. Everything is a grave.
The sun has lost its battle with gravity, and now they’re all in that awkward space between dusk and night. The stars are dim behind an ever shifting cloud cover. He wonders what he would have done a few months ago. Not be here, probably, though it’s not like he had much of a choice in that. Not kill the horse. Gosh, he’d killed a horse, and he doesn’t know why that feels more monstrous than punching his best friend to death but it does for some reason and he can’t shake it.
The lead swings lazily at him, taunting.
He can’t fall asleep.
Darkness is settling on the land. It’s just him and the clouds and the lava bubbling lethargically away below him.
There’s a small figure in a small world sitting on the edge of a wall. He’s from a place where the sky is limitless and the size of the buildings dwarf most people’s dreams, and he’s never felt so small. There are a few pieces of his heart straining at the seams where they’ve been sewn back together, and he’s completely motionless but he’s straining at the effort to hold together.
He remembers a conversation he and Scar had, walking to that mountain for the last time.
“If you could do it all over again - would you change anything?”
Grian is walking at the same pace that he’s been going at, leading them on some charred path through the woods, but the air seems to still. It’s almost peaceful, a world with only the two of them left. There are phantom eyes watching him.
“Sure. I wouldn’t have sicced a creeper on you.”
“I’m serious!”
Grian giggles. “It was pretty funny, though, you gotta admit - I mean, I am sorry, but -”
Scar snorts and jumps over a creek. Grian can see sand through the trees.
“What would you have done?”
Scar thinks for a moment, red eyes blinking.
“Well, I mean, I would have talked about it.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean - we could just all...lived. If we were careful. We’re Hermits, right? We could make it safe. Nobody really had to die.”
Grian pauses and turns to look at Scar, whose red eyes are fixed on him. For once, maybe for the first time since the ravine, he doesn’t see a trace of bloodlust in them. It’s the same intensity with which he had suggested countless murders and none of the intention. It’s Scar, pure and optimistic and curious. It’s fresh air in the middle of the night.
“I wish that was true.”
“Oh, come on! If we went again - I mean, we’ve got experience now, right? We could have beat it. We could have.”
Scar’s eyes are so bright. There’s so much hope in that voice, as if he doesn’t know he’s walking to his death. They’ve come out of the forest, digging their way through piles of burning sand and past gaping craters where they made their last stand for home. Monopoly Mountain, or the bombed out shell that’s left of it, looms ahead, a pile of sandstone and craters and somewhere, maybe, the remains of a tower to heaven.
“I guess. Do you really think so?”
Scar doesn’t answer that for a long, long time, but for the first time, maybe it feels peaceful.
Something breaks, slowly and softly, and the different parts of him disperse and drift away like a sigh on the wind.
Leave, whispers the sigh and the earth and the sky and the cage.
So he does.