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Things were strange in Boatem.
Admittedly, that was an incredibly bold statement to make. By most people’s standards, the ordinary in Boatem was strange. There were upside-down animals, a candy factory requested by a man that had never shown his face, more hats than you could shake a stick at, and a hole in the world that regularly sacrificed its inhabitants to the void.
It had surely only been a matter of time until the world they had created began to fight back. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the small town, but it seemed unlikely. They had broken the server in ways it shouldn’t have been broken, they had done things that no Admin should ever let them get away with.
But now the moon was getting bigger, and the ground beneath their feet was beginning to shake, and Mumbo didn’t like it one bit.
He’d been on the Hermitcraft server for years. It was his home, these people were his family, this was where he’d grown up. Change wasn’t something that thrilled him, and unexpected change even less so.
It certainly didn’t help that he’d been standing on a rope bridge the first time he felt it.
When the wooden planks started to jostle back and forth, the thick twine stretching, twisting, and snapping under the strain he had never thought he’d have to account for, Mumbo had done his best to get back to solid ground. His hands gripped tightly enough to the rope that as it moved between his palms he felt friction burning his skin. His concentration was enough that he damn near bit through his tongue as he tried to place his foot on the wood that sought to evade him. Even when he eventually found himself back on rock and dirt and moss, the ground felt a lot less safe than he wanted it to be. Better than the bridge, yes, but did he really have faith in his own constructions enough to assume it wouldn’t simply collapse the next time the world decided to shake?
But there wouldn’t be a next time, because that wasn’t normal. Maybe it was a bug, a glitch, something Xisuma would fix and tell them all not to worry about.
Strangely enough, Mumbo wasn’t convinced by his own half hearted attempts to reassure himself.
The second time it happened, Grian was there, and he took a little relief in the fact that his friend noticed it too. At least that meant he wasn’t going utterly crazy - but it also meant that it hadn’t been an odd, one-off occurrence that he could more or less forget about. Instead it meant that it was something that was here to stay: at least for the foreseeable future.
The third time it happened, he was alone again.
This time he wasn’t standing on a bridge, or in a bunker underground, but in his own home.
He felt his van shaking, as if Treesa’s grip could somehow weaken and let go, as if he would go crashing to the ground and be trapped under a pile of rubble that the Hermits might never think to search. He wasn’t in a place that he could really try to avoid moving forward - because he had already mentally put steps in place to avoid ever returning to the bunker, or that exact spot on the bridge, in case it had been him at fault.
He was in his bed, in his home, where he was supposed to be safest.
Mumbo felt anything but safe.
When the shaking didn’t stop after the first few seconds he found himself curling up, his legs brought to his chest and his hands balling up fists full of his duvet. When the shaking didn’t stop after a minute, he closed his eyes, and he listened to the faint sounds of crumbling and crashing as less-secure builds were disturbed.
But Treesa had been reinforced. She would be fine. He would be fine.
The second minute passed. It felt like a lifetime, but it had only been one hundred and twenty ticks. The strength of the shaking that had gradually increased seemed to plateau, and he could only hope that it meant it would soon taper off and fade out to nothing. He hoped that this was it, the main event, and that any aftershocks would be smaller in scale. If this was only a foreshock - if the very fabric of the server was still building up to releasing something huge - then he wasn’t sure he’d be able to cope with what came next.
By the time the third minute had elapsed, Mumbo had decided that he was unable to cope with even this.
His blanket had been pulled over his head, tears were falling from his eyes and wetting the mattress beneath him, and he was saying goodbye to everything that he’d ever loved.
Exactly seventeen ticks later, it stopped. What had felt like an eternity finally came to an end, and the world was still and silent. The silence, now, seemed wrong. It seemed ominous and it seemed misplaced. All that broke it were Mumbo’s heavy breaths and the occasional sob that he was unable to conceal. Even now that he was safe, he couldn’t control his emotions, and he wept openly into his bedsheets. He was alone after all, he had no one to hide just how afraid he’d been and just how much he’d hated it.
There were voices outside. Distantly, he could identify them as Impulse, Pearl, Scar and Grian. It made sense he supposed - they would be out surveying the damage, curious as to what had happened, checking they were all okay - but Mumbo didn’t have the strength to leave his bed. He’d been part of the server longer than any of them but he was still the youngest of the group, but he still felt a sense of guilt that he was in there, panicking, while they were outside trying to fix things. Pearl was new, what if she’d been hurt? Surely as the longest-standing Hermit in close proximity he should be checking on her. And what about Grian? His best friend? Impulse’s factory was huge, there was surely something he should be doing to help identify potential damage. And Scar’s mountains, beautiful as they were, now posed a very real avalanche risk.
He should be out there helping, if not as their friend or servermate, but as their CEO, but he couldn’t. He could only curl up smaller and tighter, only gasp more desperately for air, and only hope that he’d eventually wake up from this horrible, awful, nightmare.
When Mumbo heard his communicator vibrate he yelped. The noise was utterly undignified and unwarranted, but it had sounded so much like the build up to yet another quake that it had been instinctual. He had cried out like an infant, like a puppy that had been kicked, and despite his face being pressed firmly into his pillow he doubted it had been muffled even half as well as it needed to have been to avoid being carried out into the night.
When the voices began to come closer, the vague words starting to take the shape of his name, Mumbo tried to breathe.
Could he really be seen like this? The four of them seemed so put together, they were dealing with whatever had happened instead of hiding from it like a coward. Surely they deserved to be allowed to continue dealing with it, surely they didn’t need to be burdened with him. They had all taken this strange change in their strides, he was the only one that was struggling to any degree.
He shifted in his bed, moving his hands from his blankets to instead cover his mouth. It made breathing harder, but at least if he couldn’t breathe he wouldn’t be able to scream either.
“Mumbo?!”
The first time he heard his voice called clearly it was Grian, and that was almost enough for him to break. He knew the builder would have no qualms about reassuring him, he knew he’d say it was no bother and that he was happy to help, but could that really be true?
“Mumbo? Are you there? Are you hurt?”
That was Pearl’s voice, and the concern in her tone grabbed his heartstrings and twisted them. They must have thought he was injured - and surely to have made such a pathetic noise because his communicator buzzed he would have to be - but he wasn’t. He wasn’t injured and he shouldn’t have made them worry about him.
“I’m gonna message X, you guys keep looking.”
Impulse. And now he wasn’t just becoming a problem to his neighbours, but to the wider server. To the Admin. He’d known X since he was seventeen, since he’d joined the server, the man was practically a father to him, but that didn’t mean he should be the reason he was being disturbed in the dead of night. Xisuma probably had a thousand more important things to be worrying about now that their world was almost being torn apart at the seams, he was nothing compared to the rest of the server. A redstoner that had built something that he was probably more proud of than he should have been, a man that wasn’t present for meetings enough to be considered even remotely qualified for the position of CEO, a man that joked about insecurities and fears because if he didn’t, he had to face the horrible truth that he simply wasn’t confident enough to be where he was.
If he hadn’t joined the server when he was a child, he wondered if they’d ever have had him at all.
“I think he’s in Treesa, the lights are on.”
Scar. And he’d been found. Well, they knew the lights were on. If he kept quiet, if he kept a low profile, maybe he could stay hidden. Maybe they would look elsewhere. Maybe they’d forget, and give up looking, and he could stay curled up beneath his blankets and he could panic and cry in peace.
He wasn’t sure why he thought that was even a remote possibility.
Mumbo needed to breathe, but when he slowly removed his hands from his mouth and shifted just a little under the blanket to make it easier to take in a steady breath, he felt something touching his shoulder. A gloved hand.
If he hadn’t already been so on edge he might have been able to keep himself quiet, but he was, and when he first felt the contact he not only jumped out of his skin but let out a similar cry to the one before. The fingers on him tightened their grip - not firmly enough to bruise or harm him, but enough to tell him that whoever was there wasn’t about to leave him alone - and he heard footsteps against the ground running toward Treesa.
“It’s alright, I’m here.”
Xisuma. He hadn’t expected him to come - even after Impulse had shouted that he was messaging the Admin he hadn’t - and he certainly hadn’t anticipated such a quick response.
“The four of you check your own builds, we’ll be having an emergency meeting in the morning, but make sure everything’s secure and stable and get a little more rest if you can. I’ll take it from here.”
Alright. Okay. So he wouldn’t be surrounded by the people he looked up to. That was a good thing. He didn’t have to feel like a burden to his friends, and they didn’t have to see him as such, but he still had Xisuma to worry about. The father figure that had the final say of whether or not he was even permitted on the server, the man that could ban him with the click of his fingers.
X would never ban him, but what if he did? What if he decided that these problems were caused by Mumbo somehow? What if he decided that Mumbo’s inability to deal with them meant he shouldn’t be on the server any longer? What if--
“I can hear your thoughts.” Xisuma laughed, indicating that he couldn’t literally hear the questions going through his mind. “Can you take in a deep breath for me? I’ll do it too, alright? I’m gonna count to five and then I want you to hold your breath.”
Somewhere during that sentence, Xisuma had moved so that he was no longer standing behind Mumbo with a hand on his shoulder but crouched before him and looking at him kindly through his visor. Mumbo nodded, and as Xisuma began to count he began to breathe. When he got to five, he held his breath as instructed.
“Now we’re going to breathe out for seven - is that okay?”
Mumbo nodded quickly, already struggling to hold the air in his lungs any longer, and as Xisuma started counting again he let out a gasp of air. By the time he reached six, he was straining to push anything further out, and was breathless by the time the word seven left Xisuma’s lips. The Admin didn’t seem perturbed by his inability to follow such simple instructions, and instead only repeated the routine again. And again. And again. Each time it became easier to breathe than before, and his control over his air supply began to return to him. The tears that had fallen from his eyes stopped falling, and his cheeks began to dry. The sobs that had fought to leave his chest now seemed content to remain there, before eventually fading from existence completely. It was night, and he had already been exhausted before the earthquake, but now all he wanted to do was collapse forward until his head rested upon Xisuma’s lap and he fell asleep in his hold.
Except that would be incredibly embarrassing. Father figure or not, Xisuma was his Admin. He deserved far more respect than that, and after talking him through his tears he had put up with him more than enough for the night.
“I’m sorry.” Were the first words that left Mumbo’s lips, and even in his state he could see Xisuma’s eyebrows furrow behind tinted glass.
“Sorry?” He asked. “Why, whatever for?”
“Everything that’s happening… You’ve got a thousand more things to be worried about and instead you’re sitting here with me, and I’m sorry to distract you from everything that you should be doing. I’m sorry I’m taking you away from your important jobs and making you help me breathe. I know I’m pants at everything but redstone, but you’d think after this long I’d at least have breathing down.” He said, a nervous laugh accompanying his self-deprecating humour. “I’m sorry. You can get back to whatever you need to be doing now. I’ll be at the meeting in the morning.”
Xisuma was silent for a moment, and Mumbo swore this was it. This was when he would be kicked. But he just felt the hand on his shoulder move to his upper arm and another hand reached out to tip his chin back just enough to make eye contact.
“Are you quite done?” Xisuma asked, and Mumbo winced at the question. He nodded, as much as he could, and he closed his eyes. He didn’t need to watch this happen.
“You’re one of my Hermits. I’d do this for anyone, you know that, and you’re absolutely no different. You’re right, I do have a thousand things on my to-do list, but I always have a thousand things on it. Every time I finish something, I add three more things. That’s how it always is as an admin. There’s always code to be checked, bugs to be fixed, updates to be integrated. But those things, none of them matter more than making sure my Hermits are okay. It doesn’t matter how smoothly everything works on a technical level if you or anyone else here is struggling or unhappy. Whatever’s going on - and I’ll admit that even I’m not completely sure - it’s scary, and it’s new, and it’s confusing. It’s completely understandable to feel lost or afraid, and there’s nothing wrong with needing an extra person to help you through it.”
Mumbo had stopped crying before, but the words of comfort that washed over him brought tears back to his eyes. He closed them again, ashamed of his own vulnerability, and he tried his damnedest to stiffen his upper lip and push it all away. Xisuma was his Admin, Xisuma cared, but Xisuma didn’t deserve this. Even if he said it was fine.
“It’s okay.” The man said quietly. “I’m not going to go and tell all the other Hermits what happened here, you can cry as much or as little as you want. If it looks like you’re struggling for air again, we’ll do the same counting thing as before. Take your time, let everything out. I’m staying here as long as you need me to.”
“I don’t--”
“Mumbo, weirdly enough I don’t quite believe you.” Xisuma told him, and there wasn’t an air of annoyance to his words. “If you really think you’re getting in the way, I’ll sit here and read through everything I’ve been sent so far. I can try to figure out what’s going on, and if you need anything I’ll be right here to help. Could you settle with that?”
It wasn’t a battle he was going to win. Xisuma, quite clearly, wasn’t going anywhere. But if he could read over the code and try to piece together what the issue was then maybe he wasn’t going to be so much of a burden. Maybe it would be alright.
Mumbo nodded just a little, and he felt Xisuma’s hands leave him to reach instead for his helmet - unclipping the armour and taking it off.
“Right then, I’ll get comfortable. Tea?” He asked. Mumbo nodded again. He didn’t need to tell Xisuma how he took it - Xisuma had asked once when he’d first invited Mumbo to join the server and never forgotten - and with the man’s back turned as he busied himself with boiling water he let himself cry again. He let the fear he’d felt escape him - not just the fear of what had happened, but the fear of what was to come. He let himself mourn the changing world around him, and he let himself fail to think up a hundred different redstone contraptions to fix it all.
He did, however, come up with a theoretical device that used pistons to help keep a less structurally sound building in place during a violent quake.
It was little coincidence that the idea came to him when he felt a warm mug of tea being pressed into his hands, the smell of far too much sugar being carried by the steam straight to his nose. Even just holding the cup made him feel warmer, and when he eventually got round to drinking its contents he felt calmer than before.
Mumbo wondered if Xisuma had settled himself beside him for a reason. This was his bed, and he had a table that the Admin could have sat at, but he was inches away from Mumbo. He wondered if it was a deliberate choice, so that when his emotions had drained from him completely and he was beginning to sag under the weight of his tiredness he had no choice but for his head to fall to the side - resting gently on Xisuma’s shoulder.
When he felt fingers coming to his hair, pressing ever so softly against his scalp and rubbing back and forth, he was sure it had been done on purpose.
He fell asleep like that, more easily than he’d fallen asleep in months. He hadn’t realised just how much he’d needed the comfort and touch of another person.
If he woke up in Xisuma’s lap, fingers still carding through his hair, then maybe it was a little less embarrassing than he’d first considered it to be.