Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You know, this is like a road trip,” Impulse says brightly. “I’ve always wanted to do a family road trip!”

“How is this anything like a road trip?” Grian asks as the five of them drift through the cold, unforgiving void of… somewhere… together. There are stars, and flecks of strange colors, and they can see even though it feels like there shouldn’t be much light. Also, the suits are letting them breathe, and they sure are drifting and waiting, but.

“I mean, just look at it!” Impulse says.

“What?” mumbles Mumbo.

“Road trip! Road trip!” agrees Scar brightly. “Exactly! A wonderful road trip with five-star service from the Swaggon Corporation!” He throws Grian a thumbs-up.

“Where is the road,” asks Grian.

“Road trip is a state of mind,” says Impulse.

“We should play the cow game,” says Pearl.

Everyone pauses for a moment.

“The what?”

“The cow game. Have you ever played the cow game?” she asks, brightly. “You know, when you go on a long trip, and you count how many cows are on your side of the car, and whoever gets the most cows wins. But if one of your opponents notices a graveyard on your side, all your cows die.”

“Oh, that sounds like a great idea,” Scar says.

“WHAT COWS,” Grian asks, with perhaps a bit more feeling than is really called for. In his defense, he’s a bit stressed.

“The ones you’ve been looking at,” Pearl says.

Grian stops to think. “Do… do you mean the horrors from beyond that I keep on having to glare at? The creatures watching us? The things I keep on glaring at to make go away?”

“Yeah,” says Pearl. “Those cows.”

Grian considers for a long time. On the one hand, trying to count the terrifying things floating through the void will probably drive them all mad. On the other hand, they’re already driving each other mad.

“Yeah, sure,” says Grian. “I call… that vague area of void.”

“No fair, that’s the one I was going to take,” Mumbo complains.

“Road trip,” says Impulse reverently.

Grian tries not to consider too hard that he’s pretty sure it’s only been one day. One day of this so far only. Nope. Counting… cows… now. Yep. He’ll be fine.

Chapter Text

“Please stop poking me,” Mumbo says.

“I’m not, though! I’m not touching you!” Grian says, a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Yeah, but I can feel it, Grian. You’re… you’re poking me in spirit.”

“Yeah, but I’m not touching you.”

Impulse turns to Pearl. Pearl is watching the two of them like it’s a ping-pong match, a steady amusement on her face. Well, he thinks, they are all rather bored, and the novelty of the road trip thing had worn off, oh, some nondescript amount of time ago. It is also rather funny to watch Mumbo try to figure out how to contort properly in freefall to prevent Grian from touching him.

“Well then, I’m not touching you!” says Mumbo, with a huff, slamming his hand towards Grian’s face and stopping it at the last minute. Grian’s wings instinctively puff up and spread out, immediately whacking both Scar and Mumbo. “B—but you just lost! You touched me!”

Pearl cheers. Impulse resists the urge to.

“This isn’t a competition,” Grian says. “Besides, that’s cheating. You know that I puff out my wings when I’m startled!”

“Oh, like you wouldn’t use the same tactics.”

“I wouldn’t!”

“Yes, you would!”

“I wouldn’t!”

“Grian, yes—”

“If you two don’t stop I’m turning this evacuation around,” Scar says, having finally gotten free of the wing that had been flung into his face. “Don’t think I won’t! I will use patented Swaggon technology and turn us right around!”

There’s a strange quiet.

“Scar,” Mumbo says, his voice eerily steady. “Scar. If you have had a way to actually steer us this whole time, and have not been using it, let me assure you, Grian broke my no-killing streak. I have no need to maintain peace. So, when we are on solid land again and I have the ability to move properly? You will never know peace again! In fact, I will make it my mission to kill you! You will step out of your house, and bang, end crystal! You go to build? TNT canons! You try to sleep, and I’ve set up traps in all of your beds! You try to run, well, I have very long legs! You will not know a day of safety again! In fact, I am contemplating a way to kill you right now! Do you understand?”

Next to him, Impulse watches Pearl and Grian’s mouths drop open into twin expressions of naked delight. Scar blinks, meanwhile, rather in the manner of a deer that has just noticed a mountain lion in front of him.

Ah, Impulse thinks. Friendship.

Chapter Text

The thing about the Void, Scar thinks quietly to himself, is that it’s empty.

There are a million purple sparks, of course, and white and green and they’re all shimmering, moving when he moves his head. But they’re also… empty. He couldn’t reach out and touch them if he tried. He can’t reach out and touch much of anything, actually—just Grian to one side of him, and Impulse to the other.

Now, normally, Scar would be fine with this! He has trouble reaching out and touching things and moving around all the time! The fact none of them can properly change their trajectory at this point is even something he’d planned for—he knows a lot of things about space, and one of those things is “a lack of friction or things to push off of makes it hard to move”. He would have included air pumps in the suits to move around with, but in a rare moment of self-reflection, he’d decided that they would have all used all of their air jetting around and then promptly suffocated, a thing Scar did not want to happen.

So, they’re in the void, and they can’t move. And normally, with his friends nearby, that wouldn’t get to Scar.

But sometimes, he looks out, and…

It’s not frightening, he tells himself, not really. The void itself isn’t frightening. He’d certainly fallen into it enough this season, let alone to speak of last season when he’d been selling shulkers. He’d done enough raids through the End, hovering over the void, that he’s not scared of nothingness, not really.

What’s frightening him is not nothingness.

It’s that it’s not nothing. It’s that he can look out, and out, and he never seems to stop seeing, and it’s empty, but it’s not nothing, and he’d thought this idea was genius but he doesn’t know how long it’s been and everything is so, it’s so big, it’s so endless, and he has no control over any of it, just nothing nothing nothing n—

“SIXTY-FOUR BOTTLES OF FIZZY LIFTING DRINK ON THE WALL,” Grian practically screams.

“That doesn’t even WORK,” complains Impulse, as he has for the past, oh, how long does it take to sing thirty-five verses of the song? “Come on, man, the syllables are all wrong!”

“Why do you have so much fizzy lifting drink anyway,” says Mumbo.

“YOU TAKE ONE DOWN YOU PASS IT AROUND,” Grian sings over top of everyone else.

Pearl groans and covers her ears with her hands. “Make it stooop,” she says. “You aren’t even on-key. The louder you get, the worse—”

“SIXTY-THREE BOTTLES—”

“If I had a bottle to throw at you I would!” threatens Impulse, and Scar’s dragged back into his own skin, and the world seems… less horrifically empty, honestly, with that much horrible singing filling it.

“Sixty-seven,” Scar says.

“SIXTY-SEV—you made me lose count!” complains Grian. “Well, now I just have to start over.”

Mumbo, slowly, reaches to grab Grian by the throat. Scar leans back to admire his handywork. Ah, yes. They say hell is other people, and Scar’s a vex! That’s some kind of demon, or maybe fae, or maybe illager? (He’s never really checked.) The point is, he knows hell! It’s the five of them, in a circle, able to brush fingers against each other, falling, waiting, together.

Now, to wait for another strategic moment to interrupt Grian.

Chapter Text

“Hey Pearl,” says Impulse.

“Impulse,” Pearl says. “Impulse, if you’re going to start explaining rotational velocity to me again—”

“No, not that,” Impulse says. “But also, listen, if you just. Picture a cog.”

“Please no,” Pearl says.

“Right. I was going to ask you if you knew your helmet was cracked,” he says.

“WHAT?” Pearl says, at the same time as the other three rapidly turn to face the two of them.

“HER HELMET IS WHAT?” Grian says, his voice higher and more hysterical than he probably intended to sound.

“There’s this big… crack on it! It looks like a stress fracture,” Impulse says cheerfully. “I mean, it might not be, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my engineering stuff, and it definitely looks like a stress fracture to me! It’s kind of neat. I was just wondering if, you know, you’d known.”

“No,” Pearl says, her voice a bit faint. “I had not.”

“Weird,” Impulse says. “Anyway. So about the—”

“Impulse I cannot listen to you talk about gears again,” Pearl says, still sounding faint. “My helmet has a crack? Oh god. It does. Impulse, why did you tell me? No, why didn’t you tell me? No, what do I do?”

Impulse feels wounded. “I mean, you didn’t want to hear me talk about machines anymore.”

“No, no I do not!” says Pearl.

“Uh,” Scar says. Everyone turns to him. “Look, I uh—the Swaggon Corporation—does not take responsibility for injury or death.” A pause. “However, you’re wearing the exact same suit I am, and guys I might be unreliable but I really didn’t think they’d crack, please don’t be mad at me, I don’t wanna die either.”

“Is she gonna die?” says Mumbo, clearly panicking.

“Let’s not panic!” says Scar, clearly also panicking.

“I don’t know, this seems like a good time to panic!” says Grian, clearly also also panicking.

Impulse blinks and looks between them. “I don’t know why you all are freaking out so much. I mean, if we were gonna die of our suits being inadequate, we would have like, a month ago. I still wouldn’t take off the helmet but a crack’s not going to be worse than they already are.”

Everyone turns to Impulse. Impulse shrugs.

“The zippers have air gaps,” he says. “Anyway, I just thought the crack looked neat?”

A pause.

“Guys? Guys why are you looking at me like that. Guys, what did I say? Guys…?”

“Well,” Scar says, sounding as faint as Pearl had. “Well! That certainly can’t be good.”

Chapter Text

Here’s how it has been going, though you only notice it now:

You are breathing in ice, and cold, and nothingness, but not air. You are not hungry, but you think you begin to hunger. For what, you do not know. How long have you been here? You should be starving. You should be starving, not—

There a gap where your middle should be. You feel emptiness, hollow in every part of you but the surface. Maybe the surface is hollow too. There’s nothing, something, nothing there, and it is vast, and you are not who you were before.

You are alive. You have always been alive.

You breathe in the abyss through the cracks in your helmet and it breathes in you. You have always been gazing at it. It is too late to prevent it from gazing back. It is holding you, or you are holding it, or you are infinite, or—

There are cracks in your helmet. You were never meant to live.

There are cracks in your helmet. You were never meant to die.

Right now, it is night, day, night, you aren’t sure, and you turn to your side, and you’re aware of it now. You aren’t hungry, you think, you aren’t thirsty, but there’s an emptiness made of the void you breathe in, even though you think maybe none of you have actually been breathing for a long time now.

Suspended animation—no, that’s not quite right. You sit in the abyss and the abyss sits in you.

You could wake up Grian, you think. He is asleep. The other half of your soul should know. You think you know what you are.

But…

You grew used to, in six months, changing. You are what you eat—you are what you think you are. The others, they change in a different way. They aren’t used to it. They haven’t figured it out on their own, the way you felt it the moment you knew you had to think.

You are what eats you.

Huh. You know, that is rather literal, isn’t it? That is how the world works.

You let them sleep.

They’ll figure it out later, or never, or somewhere in-between, and you’ll forget it, bury it like everything that concerns you, eventually. One day it will be normal. One day it already is. One day you think you’re thinking too hard.

You look out at emptiness and nod your head in quiet thanks, because you think it did what it could.

You go to sleep yourself.

Chapter Text

“Hey guys,” Grian says.

That, Pearl thinks, is a dangerous tone of voice. Not dangerous in the ‘Grian is about to make up new games’ sort of way, or even dangerous in the 'Grian has had more cows on his side of the void’ than me way—Pearl has been winning the cow game, by the way, and she will continue this streak that she definitely actually has control over—but in a far more concerning sort of dangerous way.

That tone of voice is dangerous in the way of 'we have been trying not to talk about the revelation Impulse gave us the other day, or our general lack of food/hope/way out, and whatever he’s about to say is going to rub up against that somehow’. That tone of voice is dangerous in the way of Grian doesn’t want to talk about it but is anyway.

“Yes?” says Scar cheerfully, either entirely failing to pick up the tone Pearl had, or deliberately ignoring it.

“How mad would you be if I said I was hiding something?”

“I would kill you,” Mumbo says.

Everyone looks at him for a moment. His expression is light. Pearl mentally says a prayer for Grian. F.

“Right,” says Grian. “So, hypothetically, if I were to tell you I kept the dragon egg—”

“Hypothetically, I would kill you,” agrees Mumbo.

“Hm. Maybe I shouldn’t say that it’s hatching then.”

Pearl blinks. “Oh, it won’t have a suit.”

“Technically neither do we,” Impulse says.

“Thanks,” says Pearl, trying not to look at the crack in her suit.

“No problem!”

“I’m just saying, though. Your hypothetical dragon won’t have a suit. What if it gets cold?”

“Don’t dragons live in the End?” counters Impulse. “Dragons don’t normally wear suits there.”

“I mean, we don’t either,” says Mumbo. “Should we? Maybe that’s why Endermen attack us. Because we aren’t wearing suits. I don’t think that makes sense, but it could. Maybe I should test that. Someone normally builds a nice enderman farm, so if I tested it—”

“I think dragons don’t breathe,” says Scar.

“What?” says Grian, baffled. “No, wait, focus. So, my hypothetical dragon egg is hatching—”

“It’ll be so cold and alone,” Pearl says.

“Where do you think we’ll be?” Grian says.

“I mean, if I were a baby dragon, I would not want to be here with you all,” Mumbo says.

“Mood,” Impulse adds.

“AS I WAS SAYING,” Grian says. “My hypothetical dragon egg is hatching. Should we like… make a plan?”

“How?” Pearl asks.

All five of them contemplate this for several minutes. Pearl considers their options. They’ve all only gotten somewhat better at moving. Maybe a dragon, with its wings, would be better at moving than they are? There’s not really air. Actually, maybe Mumbo had a point—does the End have air? How did they breathe there? Maybe the suits have been a placebo all along, for real, instead of anything else happening? Anyway, she’s not sure how to make a plan. Not that she can’t plan. Several well-executed pranks indicate otherwise. No, it’s that she has no plan-making tools on hands, and four other idiots to account for. These are not ideal planning circumstances. These are, in fact, anti-planning circumstances.

They’re interrupted from contemplating how to make a plan when there’s a very audible cracking noise. Pearl reaches instinctively for the cracks on her helmet, but they continue to do nothing, just as they have since she noticed them.

Instead, there’s a tiny chirp as a dragon crawls out of Grian’s pocket.

“Aw,” Pearl says, all thoughts of plans leaving her mind. “I didn’t know they’d be so cute as babies. Oh, I need to teach you to fly upside-down. Who’s a sweet little thing?”

“Pearl,” says Grian, faintly. “Pearl that dragon doesn’t look right.”

Pearl looks up. “What on earth do you mean? It’s an ADORABLE dragon. Don’t insult it.”

“Pearl,” Grian says again. “Guys. You all see it, don’t you?”

The dragon blinks its five, pitch-black eyes and mewls.

“Yeah, that doesn’t look right,” agrees Impulse.

Pearl huffs. “Stop being mean to it. Come here, sweetie.”

“It’s leaking black goop,” Mumbo says.

“It’s a baby!” Pearl says, holding out her arms. “I will teach you to fly upside-down, yes I will, yes I will…”

“I am definitely going to kill you,” Mumbo says to Grian as Pearl begins to scratch under the baby dragon’s chin.

“You know, that’s fair,” Grian says.

Chapter Text

Mumbo is resolutely pretending he is not awake when Grian turns to him and says: “Mumbo, you’ve been awfully quiet about what’s going on.”

“No I haven’t,” Mumbo says on instinct.

“I think you know what’s happening, with the dragon, at least. Given the way you were looking at it.”

Mumbo’s heart sinks. Please don’t ask him, he thinks. Ask anyone else! Theorize with other people! Please! He doesn’t want to talk about what he realized in the middle of the night.

“Um, uh, no, I definitely don’t know what’s happening.”

There. Technically not a lie.

“You are so terrible at hiding things,” Grian says.

“You’ll panic! I don’t want people to panic,” Mumbo says.

Grian squints at Mumbo. “I’ll panic more if you don’t tell me.”

“I. Ohhhhh.” Mumbo wrings his hands. “Everyone else is asleep, right? I’m all… shapeshifter-y lately, you know? So when I really paid attention…”

A long silence.

“Go on.”

“It’s, uh, look. How long has it been since you thought about food?”

Grian stops to think.

“…what the heck,” he says, blankly.

“How long do you think we’ve been here?”

“What the heck.”

“And, um, are you… cold at all?”

“Mumbo,” Grian says, and then stops.

“I don’t know! I don’t actually know! But, uh, it’s just…”

“Mumbo,” Grian says, a little more hysterical.

“I don’t think it’s going to hurt us! Probably! We won’t really know until we’re out of the void?” Mumbo waves his hands. “But while we’re here it’s not… hurting us? I don’t know, it doesn’t feel bad to me? I just—I didn’t want to have to actually explain it! I just wanted to…”

“Mumbo,” Grian says one more time. “Mumbo, why do I feel hollow?”

Mumbo shuts up.

They’re both quiet for a while.

“You can’t do anything about it. I can’t do anything about it. None of us… ohhhh, I knew this was a bad idea,” Grian says.

“No other options,” Mumbo says, quietly.

“No other options,” agrees Grian. “We really didn’t… With the hunger, thing, I’m sort of still…”

“I know.”

“But not for…”

Mumbo grimaces. “It might go away. I mean, when I ate your soul my problem went away?”

“Great. Thanks,” Grian says. “You know what, I’m just gonna have a panic attack for the next ten minutes, and then we’re never going to talk about this again, barring all of us ending up in trouble once we end up on solid land again.”

“If,” Mumbo says, and immediately regrets it. The word echoes like a bullet. The silence is louder than any words either of them could say.

Around them, the terrible things that lurk on the edges of the void seem more and more familiar, and Mumbo thinks: you are what you eat. You are what eats you. You are what helps you survive, mostly.

And for them, that’s—

“If,” repeats Grian, quietly, with a sort of shattered sound his voice isn’t supposed to make. “If. Mumbo, if. Mumbo, Mumbo, if we don’t—if we don’t—Mumbo—”

“I shouldn’t have said it,” Mumbo says.

Grian nods.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault I asked,” Grian says. “Not your fault this is happening. Not even Scar’s. Just. Should I…”

He turns to the other three, still sleeping. Mumbo does too, and since Mumbo knows to look for it, he feels the hollowness in his chest, and it matches the things around them that are starting to look familiar. When you know to look for it, Mumbo thinks, you can see it in other people too, and it curls around all of them and the dragon sleeping in Pearl’s hair.

“…when they wake up,” Mumbo says.

Grian wraps his arms around himself, and after a moment, Mumbo grabs Grian’s shoulders, and wraps his own arms around Grian too. “We’ll, uh, figure it out,” Mumbo says.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Grian says, and neither of them say anything else.

Chapter Text

“Is it just me, or are the cows getting closer? Also, I’m at 327.”

“I’m at 388 then,” Grian responds instinctively.

“No you aren’t,” Mumbo says. “You’re at 234.”

“How do you even know that?” Grian says, annoyed.

“Well, it’s just numbers,” Mumbo says. Scar watches Grian mouth ‘it’s just numbers’ before clearly deciding not to say anything, which is sort of a shame, because Scar could have totally gotten them to get in a funny discussion had Grian decided to continue discussing it.

“Anyway,” Pearl says, “is it just me, or are the cows getting closer?”

Scar turns to look with the rest of them. The things that Pearl had decided were cows are, in fact, getting closer. Scar should probably be a bit more worried about that than he is. The 'cows’ are, after all, not really cows. They are, in fact, typically horrors! Terrifying beings! Terrifying somethings, at least—it’s a good question if they’re actually beings, thinking about it!

Scar should be more worried, but honestly, with everything else going on, sure, the horrors from beyond are getting closer!

“They’ll be much easier to count now,” Impulse says.

“You know, normally there are graveyards in this game,” Pearl says.

“Graveyards,” Scar says, his voice a little high.

“To kill the cows with.”

“I see?” Scar says.

They are getting closer. They are getting familiar.

“You know, if the cows are getting closer, does that mean that we’re going to need to come up with a new game?” Mumbo asks, and something is coiling in Scar. He should be frightened.

“Why?”

“Well, you are winning.”

“Neither I nor Pancake—”

“Pancake?”

“The dragon,” Pearl explains.

“Why is the dragon yours to name?” complains Grian. “It was my egg!”

“She likes me best,” Pearl says. She strokes her fingers along the dragon. “As I was saying, neither I nor Pancake should be punished just because I’m winning.”

Scar shrugs. “You know, I could use a new game. We’ve been playing this one for quite some time now! We can say Pearl won and start over and oh dear they are getting very close aren’t they,” he says.

They’re all quiet for a bit. The dragon makes an annoyed roar.

“You know, that works,” Pearl says. “I don’t really want to look at the cows any longer anyway. Not until we start seeing graveyards.”

“Pearl if we start seeing graveyards I will cry,” Mumbo says.

“That would be funny,” Impulse says, in the tone of voice of someone not quite aware they’re speaking out loud. Scar pouts. He was gonna say that.

“I know!” says Scar. “We can play Uno!”

“NO!” says Grian. Everyone stares.

“…what?” says Pearl, bemused.

“I’M NOT PLAYING UNO,” Grian says, with horror in his voice. “I’M NOT. ANY OTHER GAME. PLEASE.”

Scar looks between the other four. There’s a kinship in them, then, in that moment. He turns back to Grian. He smiles.

“That’s too bad. It’s the only card game I have!” he lies to Grian’s face.

“WHAT?” Grian says.

“I really want to play cards,” Pearl says.

“Oh, agreed,” Mumbo says. “Really would help with the boredom.”

“I’m down!” Impulse says.

“NO,” Grian says. “NO, NOT WHEN I CAN’T ESCAPE, NO—”

A smile curls onto Scar’s face.

“No,” says Grian, quiet and despairing.

“Yes,” says Scar, and honestly, he thinks, the journey Grian’s face goes on? The best entertainment he’s gotten in months.

Chapter Text

“Now Grian,” says Scar, sounding disappointed, which is rich, really. Scar, being disappointed in Grian; anyone here, being disappointed, in him? After everything that had happened?

He turns his head away to illustrate his point.

“Grian,” Scar says again. “Now look what you’ve done.”

“It was a stupid game!” Grian says.

“Yeah, but Grian,” Mumbo says, “now we’re going to have to go back to Pearl’s ideas.”

“Twenty questions,” Pearl says, as though on cue.

“See, that’s way worse,” Mumbo says patiently.

“No, no its not!”

Scar sighs. “That was my only deck of Uno, too… man… Grian…”

Honestly, it is rich of them to be complaining that, okay, maybe Grian lost it slightly, but in his defense he’d seen how Impulse was playing and, listen, Impulse is bad at Uno, okay? And Grian has had bad experiences with bad Uno, and he swears the game had been going on for an hour, and he knew Scar had been intentionally trying to prolong it, he could see it in Scar’s eyes, okay? He could see it in his eyes! Scar was making the game longer on purpose! Grian had the right to respond how he had!

Maybe on his turn he’d grabbed the deck from where they’d been awkwardly floating it between them, and maybe he’d thrown the Uno deck as hard as he could out into the abyss of the void, scattering Uno cards in its wake, leaving a trail of cards that could no longer be retrieved, since none of them could easily move from their current locations. Maybe they were currently surrounded by Uno cards that Grian kept on picking up and trying to throw, just so he can be untrapped by them.

Maybe.

In his defense, Scar had been making the game longer.

“I was entirely justified in my actions,” Grian says.

“Look, just because the game went poorly…” Impulse finally says.

“I told you I didn’t want to play,” Grian says.

“You were winning,” Scar says mournfully. “I was just playing appropriate cards, given that you were winning…”

“I took matters into my own hands,” Grian says.

“You aren’t normally this mean,” Mumbo says, and Grian says—

“Maybe if I weren’t still trapped here with you lot with absolutely no chance of ever being rescued I’d be more agreeable! Maybe if we weren’t, we weren’t, all going to die miserable together, I’d be happier! If we weren’t—our helmets weren’t broken, we hadn’t been here since the end of the season, if we weren’t possibly the last people alive, if they weren’t getting closer. Maybe if I had any time to myself! Maybe if, if—if I thought we were ever getting out of this, if I thought we’d escape, but we won’t! We won’t escape! So maybe I’m not particularly agreeable, alright? Maybe, have you considered that? Have you considered I hate this? Have you considered I considered throwing myself out there instead of the cards but the only—and I do mean the only—worse thing than being stuck here with you would be being stuck alone!”

For a long moment, everyone is silent.

“Grian,” says Mumbo.

“Shut up,” says Grian, and he should probably be more apologetic about it, but he isn’t. He reaches to wipe his eyes. When he realizes the helmet is in the way, he sniffs, unlatches the helmet, throws it away, and wipes them, because, well, they all know the helmets are placebos at this point anyway, now don’t they?

They’re all quiet again. They’re all quiet again for a while. The Uno cards continue to float around them like a taunt. Grian’s lost the energy to care.

Chapter Text

“Is it orange?”

“Yes, strangely enough.”

Impulse looks between Scar and Pearl. The two of them are leaned forward intently at each other, as Pearl counts on her fingers how many questions Scar has left. (He has six.) To Impulse’s side, Mumbo is fretting, but has also calmed down from fretting enough to be sort of paying attention to the game of twenty questions. So, for that matter, is Grian, who isn’t wearing his helmet.

Honestly, Impulse might take his off too? They are kinda uncomfortable.

“Oh, I know. Is it halite?”

“…how on earth did you get that,” Pearl says.

“I was a rock kid,” Scar says, very confidently. “Wait, hold on. If you didn’t think I would get it, how did you come up with it?”

“Oh, I memorized a book about minerals once for a build.”

“Okay, that makes sense.”

“You’re both insane,” Impulse says cheerfully. Next to him, he hears Grian snort incredulously, which is probably a bit rude. Honestly. He’s never memorized a book about rocks for a build! Now, he won’t pretend he hasn’t done a few other—questionably sane—things for a build before, but memorize a book about minerals? He hasn’t gone that far before!

“Right then, that’s another point for Scar. How’d you get so good at twenty questions, anyhow?” asks Pearl.

“Oh, I’m not, I’m just very lucky,” says Scar.

“…alright,” says Pearl, very slowly. “Oh, um, Mumbo, if you want to play—”

“I have one,” Grian says. His voice is hoarse.

“Yeah, but it’s Mumbo’s turn,” Pearl says.

Mumbo looks at Grian. “No, no, let him go,” he says, after a moment.

“…alright,” Pearl says.

“Alright, Mumbo, you know how to start,” says Grian, intently. “You ask animal, vegetable, or—”

“Is it my mustache?”

There is a long pause.

“…you didn’t ask if it was an animal, vegetable, or mineral first,” Grian says, as Impulse shrugs, gives in, and unlatches his helmet. For all Grian’s voice is hoarse, that’s not the void, it’s just that Grian had been yelling earlier, and there’s not much to soothe the throat after yelling around here. He takes an almost pavlonian gulp of air in as he takes the helmet off. It does nothing, but he doesn’t feel like he’s choking? It’s more like he inhaled ice, except not enough to make him get a brain freeze or something, more like it chilled the entire inside of his lungs. Even though there probably isn’t air? He doesn’t really feel like he’s got to breathe, honestly, but…

“Fine,” Mumbo says. “Is my mustache an animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“…it’s an animal,” mumbles Grian.

“Hm. Okay, I guess I see it,” says Mumbo. “Makes more sense than the other two. Anyway, that’s a point for me. Can I still take my turn?”

“Yeah, go for it,” Pearl says.

“How are you remembering the scores?” Impulse finds himself asking.

“Well, I’m remembering it in the same place I memorized the rocks,” Pearl says.

“Oh, that makes sense,” Impulse says.

“Is it any wonder I snapped?” mutters Grian, who has clearly decided to go back to using humor to hide everything else like the rest of them. That’s probably for the best, Impulse thinks. Why, if he said exactly what he thought of everyone all the time, they’d probably have all killed each other by now, well before the cows can finish getting close enough to do it!

“Anyway. Impulse. I have one for you.”

“Okay! Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Vegetable.”

“Oh, that’s the hard one. Alright…”

Chapter Text

“You know, why do we have color vision?”

The other four turn to look at Scar. Scar looks back at them. Mumbo is making a slashing gesture by his throat, as though trying to tell Scar to stop talking. He has absolutely no idea why, however, and besides, someone else telling him to stop has never got him to stop when he’s on a train of thought before!

“What do you mean by that?” asks Impulse, who also clearly is ignoring Mumbo’s increasingly frantic attempts to get them to stop talking.

“I mean, we’re all floating in the void, right? And there isn’t really much light nearby that we could be seeing with. And we do have night vision! I put a night vision filter on the helmets. I don’t think it turns on anymore, though, it was one of the first things that shut off when the suits needed more power.”

“Why is there a night vision filter on the helmet?” Impulse asks.

“Because I was bored,” Scar explains.

“Oh, I totally understand,” Impulse says. Mumbo has given up trying to get Scar to stop talking, and is instead trying to bury his head in his hands while simultaneously patting Grian on the shoulder. It’s not working very well. Grian looks mainly baffled.

Pearl, meanwhile, isn’t paying any attention, and appears to be playing with Pancake. Which, rude! Scar is asking important questions, here! A baby dragon can’t possibly be more exciting than Scar’s very, very serious question.

“Anyway, why do we have color vision? Because I’m not a biologist, but I think that color vision isn’t a thing that we have in the dark.”

“Uh, don’t we?” Mumbo says, and then grimaces, as though he hadn’t meant to engage.

“No, we don’t,” Scar says authoritatively.

“We were playing Uno earlier. Clearly we can see color in the dark. It’s just harder to see color,” Mumbo says.

“See, that’s what I was thinking! That everyone only seems brightly colored because we know what color they ought to be! But like you said, we played Uno!” Scar waves his hands. “We played Uno!”

“Stop reminding me,” Grian says.

“Which means we had to be able to distinguish the colors! And, you know, Grian’s probably got bird eyes and I really don’t know how good they are at seeing the dark—”

“Bird eyes? Rude assumption,” Grian says, not answering Scar’s query at all.

“—and I bet Mumbo and Impulse have… redstoner eyes.”

“I definitely do,” Impulse says sagely.

“I mean, I can’t argue with that,” Mumbo says, far less sagely.

“So, you know, I thought, maybe we can all see color because of that. Then I remembered that I’m really, really good at distinguishing patterns, and I can’t see color in the dark! And if a builder can’t, then a redstoner probably can’t either.”

“I feel stereotyped?” Mumbo says.

“…I’m not sure he’s wrong,” Impulse says.

“I mean, yes, he’s not wrong. He once gave me a lecture on the difference between different shades of wood. They all just looked brown. But still.”

“Bird eyes,” mutters Grian, who clearly isn’t over Scar’s perfectly normal observation.

“ANYWAY. That made me wonder. Why can we see color? Our eyes may be adjusted to the dark, but they can’t possibly be that adjusted, right?”

All four of them stop to try to think about it.

“Maybe the cows are glowing?” Mumbo proposes.

“See, that’s what I was thinking!” Scar says.

“That doesn’t explain why we could see color before they got close, though,” Grian says.

“Could we?” asks Impulse.

“…could we?” echoes Mumbo.

All four of them pause to think about it again. It hits Scar that he’s not entirely sure whether he just thinks he remembers seeing color before they played Uno, or if he’s just filling in colors, given that he knows what all of the colors in the small pocket of infinite, horrible void that the five of them float in would contain. It’s sort of hard to tell? Memories aren’t black-and-white, but memories of color can be hazy.

“I don’t know,” Scar says, finally.

The four of them are quiet for a while.

“You know,” Pearl suddenly says, where she’s still patting Pancake. “You know. If we’re just filling in what colors things are with our minds or something, I think that means that we might not look like we think, right? We could look cute, like Pancake.”

“Horrible,” Mumbo says immediately. “I prefer to imagine we have color vision, in defiance of how biology works.”

“Yeah, same,” Grian says.

“Agreed,” Scar says.

“I think having weird eyes would be cool,” Impulse says. “Which is probably good, because I don’t think there’s an answer here that doesn’t involve weird eyes.”

“And that’s why this conversation is a bad idea,” Mumbo says.

“No, it’s a great one,” Scar says. “Weird eyes. Let’s discuss this further. That’s a great theory! I like it a lot more than the glowing cows.”

“Great,” Grian says, and Scar valiantly decides to ignore the sarcasm and take it as the encouragement that Grian’s heart must have meant.

Chapter Text

“Absolutely not,” are the first words out of Mumbo’s mouth when Scar suggests Never Have I Ever. Honestly, he thinks it’s probably, uh, a pretty reasonable response? He could be saying so many other things right now. So, so many other things, about the mere concept of playing never have I ever with this lot.

“Come on,” Scar needles. “I’ll forbid inappropriate jokes!”

“Well, that just ruins the game,” says Pearl.

“That, and that we can’t drink,” agrees Impulse. “It’s a drinking game, right? I mean, when I played with Zed and Tango we always got ridiculously—”

“You guys have no sense of adventure,” Scar says, interrupting before Impulse could finish his story. Probably, Mumbo admits, for the best—Team ZIT stories were always hilarious, but also often quite a lot. Nearly as bad as Boatem stories, probably.

“What we have is a sense of self-preservation,” Grian says, dryly. “If we’ve removed inappropriate jokes and drinking from the question, all that’s left is forcing each other to admit to embarrassing things. And, Scar?”

“Yes Grian?”

“Do you really want to play that game with me?”

“…well when you put it like that,” Scar says.

Mumbo thinks about it for a bit. He thinks about the number of things his friends could make him admit to—painfully quite high, really, although he’s never really kept a secret how much of an embarrassing fool he can be sometime, there’s a reason he’s called a spoon—and the number of things he knows about his friends that he could get them to admit. Or even the things he doesn’t know about his friends that he could get them to admit!

“Actually, it might not be a bad idea,” Mumbo says.

“Mumbo?” says Grian, sounding vaguely betrayed.

“I mean, I thought about it, and it would be very funny,” Mumbo explains. “I mean, I certainly know a lot of stories about you that I could use against you. You had a good point.”

“That was supposed to be a deterrent! Besides, if we’re all targeted, that makes the game more boring. You’re supposed to ask general—”

“Never have I ever moved my base after I built it,” Scar says.

“See, that’s…”

Grian pauses.

“…why are there two of us who have done that, actually?”

“Why did you give your idea away before we started playing?” Impulse asks idly. “Now if you use it, it’ll be seen coming. Kind of boring, if you ask me.”

“You’re right. Darn.”

“You talked me into Uno, you aren’t talking me into this,” interrupts Grian. “Also, I think I don’t believe you about the inappropriate jokes being banned, actually. I think we’ll devolve to that pretty quickly.”

“Why, I’d never. I’m a man of my word!” Scar says.

“Also, I think I can make you lose well before then if you’re worried,” Mumbo adds.

“Thanks, that really appeals—”

“Pancake!”

Everyone rapidly switches their attention to Pearl, who is reaching after the dragon. The dragon, who is flying away. The dragon, who is…

“How is he doing that?” Mumbo asks, dazed. “There’s no air. How is he flying? There shouldn’t be a way to control his…”

“Pancake! Oh, it’s going to be dangerous out there, please come back!” says Pearl, fretting. “Don’t go near the cows! Did you know cows kill more people than, than sharks, or bears, or wolves, or most things? They do! They’re dangerous! Come back!”

“Wait, cows kill how many people?” asks Scar.

“Are we forgetting those aren’t actually cows? Pearl, you may be taking care of Pancake, but technically, that’s my baby—come back! Hey! You!”

The baby dragon doesn’t listen, awkwardly flying in jolting patterns that don’t remotely make sense with how their momentum in the void ought to be working, and getting further away from them, further and further, and closer to… to… well.

“Pancake,” says Pearl, miserably.

They’re all quiet for a bit, in various states of contemplation.

“We could still play,” Scar starts, and Pearl hits him before he can finish.

“Ow! Yeah, okay,” Scar says, rubbing his arm. “I probably deserve that.”

Chapter Text

The worst moments, Scar thinks, are the ones where they’re all quiet, because then he can’t stop thinking.

Oh, he knows full well that that’s why everyone’s quiet right now. They’re quiet because they’re thinking too, because there’s not much else to do, not while Pearl is likely to bite off their heads for talking. Which, you know, can’t even really blame her. When they talk, it is normally rather inevitably irritating. Isn’t there a meme like that? Something like… guys… irritating? And a hand motion? Yeah, that’s definitely it, Scar thinks. Maybe he should do that. Do a silly hand motion and say “so guys irritating”. That’s definitely how the meme goes and definitely won’t get him hit again.

Okay, but the point is—everyone’s quiet, and thinking, and that’s when Scar starts to feel hollow, when Scar remembers the dirty fact that he’d only ever planned for them to be here like, two weeks max, and had designed the suits for three, that he doesn’t know how long has passed, that he knows full well that at this point they aren’t going to just land in a new universe, that he did his research for all he acts like the idiot, and that the world is big, and that he doesn’t feel separate from it, and he doesn’t feel like a person, and it’s his fault in the first place but that doesn’t change that he feels like, it’s empty and quiet and horrible and vast and he is empty and quiet and horrible and vast and—

He wants the others to start talking again. He should talk again, but he doesn’t know what to say. He’s not sure why everyone’s so upset about Pancake. He knows exactly why. He wants Jellie to be okay. He thinks Jellie has to be okay; he’d done his research, for all he’d acted the idiot about it, because that’s what was expected.

The void doesn’t make noise, so everyone thinking is horribly silent. In the distance, he thinks he can hear Pancake screech, near the horrors that have started to look fam…

Have…

“Hey guys, maybe it’s not all that bad,” comes out of his mouth. “I mean, just look around us! Don’t those guys look familiar now? And, as we all know, we aren’t familiar with things that would kill us.”

There’s more silence. Talk, dang it, talk! He’d made a joke! At least be mad at him for it being in poor taste!

“Scar,” Grian says, and. Thank goodness. Someone’s talking “Why are they familiar?”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Mumbo says.

“We talked about it earlier but we didn’t… we didn’t answer,” Grian says. “Why are they familiar? I need to think about it, I need… is that why Pancake went over there?”

“You think that Pancake mistook the cows for something safe?” Pearl says.

“Maybe,” Grian says.

“They don’t feel safe though,” Impulse says. “They just feel familiar.”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Mumbo says again.

“No, we’re having this conversation now, I think,” Grian says, and oh. Oh no. This… isn’t where Scar meant for this to go. Arguments are fine, of course! Scar has purposefully induced many of them in the fuzzy-syrupy amount of time they’ve been in the void! But there’s a difference between an argument and an argument, and—

“Well, I don’t know, Grian,” Mumbo says. “Maybe it’s because they’re either familiar because we’ve been looking at them for long enough for them to become normal, or, if what Pearl was saying is true, because we’re one of them. And, to be honest, we’re already the void, so sure, why not? Is that what you want to talk about, Grian? Because talking about it won’t change anything! That’s why I haven’t—”

“What do you mean we’re the void?” Impulse says, his voice finally cracking.

“Oh. Oh dear. Right, I hadn’t… oh, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Halfway dead anyway, may as well be—”

“Don’t give me that, Mumbo, you were optimistic enough about it earlier,” snaps Grian.

“Like you can talk about optimism,” Mumbo snaps back.

“How does any of this help Pancake?” Pearl says.

“Well, it doesn’t,” Grian starts.

“Well, shouldn’t we be focusing on that?”

“I don’t know,” Impulse says. (Scar’s ears are ringing.) “I don’t know. I can’t believe I’m finally hitting my breaking point, but—”

“Maybe I want company that isn’t any of you!” says Pearl.

“And you’ve chosen the dragon?” Mumbo says.

(Scar’s ears keep rininging.)

“The dragon,” Pearl huffs, “hasn’t been arguing every five minutes.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Grian says.

“We probably shouldn’t be arguing every five minutes,” Impulse says.

“We probably shouldn’t be acting like nothing is wrong!” Grian says.

“Oh dear,” Mumbo says.

“You count too!”

Scar suddenly wishes everyone would be quiet again, because this is an argument, not an argument. And this is…

“Well, sorry if I don’t want to talk much about something I know we can’t change and I know you all will be mad at me for realizing far earlier! And fight about! Like we’re doing right now! I mean, geez, we could be doing anything else, but we’re fighting about, about nothing!” Mumbo says, his voice getting steadily higher.

“About nothing? Pancake isn’t nothing!”

“That’s not what I mean! Don’t take it like that!”

“Well, maybe I want to take it like that, because it sure feels like we’re being treated as nothing if you’re lying about—we’re the void?” Pearl says. “What does that mean? What do you mean we’re the cows now? I look fine! And frankly, I’m insulted! I’m not a—”

“Oh, Mumbo’s not lying about that. All you have to do is stop trying to look,” Grian says. “Mind you, I only figured that out a minute ago, but it hit me that the color vision is—”

“I don’t want to look!” says Impulse.

“Tough luck!” says Grian.

“What does any of this change!” Mumbo says. “What does any of this mean other than that, that Scar threw us down here and now we’re never going home! What does it change? It changes nothing! It means nothing! So what if we aren’t human, it means nothing!”

“It matters to me! It matters to—to the dragon that we accidentally brought down here, and that isn’t safe, because I didn’t know that we weren’t human, and didn’t prepare for it!” responds Pearl. “And, I don’t know! Maybe it matters to me! Maybe everything everyone is pretending doesn’t matter matters a lot to me! Maybe following Scar into the abyss had been a bad idea! Maybe—”

“Scar?”

It takes Scar a moment to process that Grian’s said something.

“Oh, um, yes?” Scar says, surprised to hear his voice come out as a strange, hoarse whimper.

“Scar, are you…”

“I’m—I’m fine over here! Just… just the person that’s to blame for all of this! Just… just carry on arguing. I’m fine,” Scar says, and, oh no. He’d meant for that to be reassuring, not sarcastic. He’d wanted nothing to do with the argument. He’d wanted nothing to do with, with, with… “The, the person who thought we’d, it’d take barely any time at all, really. And who’s to say, I can’t tell. I’m… just keep arguing, it’s okay, don’t look at me, I’m…”

He shakes. Everyone is quiet. He doesn’t like it.

“Guys, guys please just keep talking. Please, please it’s, I think the arguing is better than silence, really. Or, or I know. We can play, we can—I lied about the cards, I thought it would be funny, and—and, god, you’re all right. What’s even the point? I don’t know. I lied about, about turning us around, I can’t control our trajectory, I can’t, I can’t even, and now—now the dragon’s gone and everyone’s fighting and—and why are you all still quiet? Please, please just—”

He continues to shake.

“Please. I don’t know. Sorry.”

They’re quiet for a bit longer, and then, suddenly, Scar feels something strange. He looks up, and Impulse is hugging him, tightly.

“Oh,” Scar says. “How did you…”

“I don’t think it matters,” Impulse says. “I just… realized I could.”

“Okay,” Scar says. “Okay.” He sniffles. “It still doesn’t change anything. We can’t get anywhere from here anyway. If we want the slightest chance of being rescued, we shouldn’t move too far. We…”

“I know,” Impulse says. “Let me have this.”

It’s quiet again. For a long while, it’s quiet again. Then, Scar feels another pair of arms.

“You know, I wouldn’t have thought the way I’d finally move would be to try to get closer to you all,” Grian says. “Rather thought the exact opposite, really.”

“True,” Mumbo says, from far closer than he’d been before. “Honestly? Still planning on running as far as I can in the other direction as soon as we’re on the ground again. Contemplating doing it now, if it weren’t for the fact I know that complicates some potential search and rescue.”

Pearl giggles, from somewhere behind Scar, and, oh. How’d she gotten there? It’s a watery giggle. “True. That’s the only reason we’re all here right now. Complicates search and rescue if we aren’t.”

“Yeah. That’s why we need to stick close,” agrees Mumbo.

Scar relaxes, just a little. “Oh, yes, of course. And naturally, my… my charm and charisma is what brought you all here.”

“Exactly,” says Impluse.

In a few minutes, they’ll make a proper plan to rescue Pancake, and to figure out what it means, what Impulse had done, and then what the rest of them had done. They’ll talk through whatever they’d been arguing about.

But it’s quiet, for a moment, in a way that Scar doesn’t mind.

Chapter Text

“So,” says Mumbo.

“So,” agrees Grian.

“Any of you figured it out yet?”

“As much as I appreciated the hug, if I could figure out how to move again, I would,” Scar says. “There comes a point when a man needs a little personal space!”

Pearl threads her fingers through the part of Scar’s suit that she’s carefully holding on to. “We could all just let go.”

“No, don’t do that,” Scar says. “Not until you can control where you’re going.”

The five members of Boatem are currently all tightly huddled around Scar, vaguely squished between them, as they hover through the void. Earlier, in a moment of solidarity, they’d managed to all collect around Scar, and stop arguing.

Now, however.

“You know, if you keep on elbowing me in the chest—”

“I’m sorry, Grian, but you’re literally right behind me. I can’t do anything about it. I’m trying.”

“Try harder, Impulse!”

Now, they’ve run into the problem that none of them can figure out how to do it again.

“You know, it might be fine if we let go,” Mumbo says. “I mean, we are in the void. We’d probably be attracted to each other again by gravity, I think.”

“…what? We aren’t planets, Mumbo,” Grian says.

“Oh, I know this one! Everything has gravity, it’s just negligible on planets. But now we should have gravity ourselves, since there’s no planet to override it!” Scar says. He attempts to excitedly wave his hands. Pearl attempts to duck, but does not do so before Scar hits her in the face. “…whoops.”

“Shouldn’t the Uno cards be orbiting us then?” Impulse says.

“Are they? I have been trying not to look at them,” Grian says.

All five of them immediately crane their heads to attempt to look at the Uno cards. Honestly, Pearl thinks, its sort of hard to tell what they’re doing. They don’t seem to have moved much, really, other than to have continued to drift in the directions they have momentum. If Pearl had to guess, she’d say they weren’t orbiting them? But she doesn’t know how to tell.

“I think they’re just kinda floating,” Mumbo finally says.

“Does that mean we don’t have gravity?” asks Grian.

“That would break physics,” Mumbo says, and then stops. He looks down. He scratches his chin. He looks up again. “Which, you know? Honestly, not the weirdest thing to happen to us. I think breaking physics is fairly normal, all things considered.”

“Cool,” says Impulse, in a tone of voice that suggests it isn’t actually cool. “Actually, no, I don’t like that? Are you sure that’s how that works?”

Pearl gets the sense that none of them are actually going to help her figure out how to move again. Which is fine! It’s fine. They’ll figure it out eventually, and being next to each other for the moment is fine—

Scar nearly hits her in the face again.

“Can we just turn the gravity off?” she asks.

“Can we just turn gravity off?” Mumbo parrots back.

“I mean, sure. If we make it, I figure we could just hold our breaths and turn gravity off. Not literally hold our breath. But something like that,” Pearl says.

“And turn gravity off?” Mumbo says again.

“You know what, I’m down to try that,” Grian says. “It’d be like crossing your eyes or holding your breath, right? You have to actively think about stopping doing it right?”

“You understand me perfect, Grain.”

“Understand turning gravity off?”

Pearl decides to ignore Mumbo. She loves him, she really does, but ignoring him is often the best decision to get things done. Instead, she tries to think about turning gravity off. She isn’t sure what she will have to focus on turning off? Hm. Is it like… how did she get to Scar? Well, she’d really wanted to, and for a moment, she hadn’t cared about much else. Maybe she just doesn’t have to care about… something?

If she turned gravity off, would she be a solid thing, she wonders? Or would she be exactly as much void as everything around her, just with a vague shape? If she were just void, she supposes she could just—decide to be void over there—

She lets go of Scar’s suit. Be a void over there, she thinks, regardless of gravity. Okay. She can do that.

She moves.

She grins. “Yes!”

Mumbo sobs quietly into his hands.

“I can’t believe you turned gravity off,” Impulse says reverently, and Pearl beams.

“Thanks! Wasn’t too hard.”

Mumbo sobs a little louder.

Chapter Text

“This is a really stupid plan.”

“Do you have a better one, Mumbo?”

“I mean, no, why would I? I’m just saying that it’s stupid. We can continue with it. We continue with a lot of stupid plans. I just wanted to make sure you knew.”

“We know, so shut it!”

“You know, you’re being rather mean, Grian. This is all very distressing.”

“You two know you’re not the ones actually doing this, right?”

Mumbo and Grian turn to Pearl. To Grian’s chagrin, she’s still the only one of them any good at turning off gravity. (He’s. Fairly certain that name is incorrect, but it makes Mumbo cry every time he uses it, so he’s going to keep calling ‘moving in the void’ that.) She’d tried to explain, but her explanation had been vague. Something about deciding she was the void, and deciding to be a void in a different place? And, look, Grian’s fine enough at self-determination, right, but that seems like a bit much.

“Right. Sorry,” Mumbo says. “This is a really stupid plan.”

“Thanks,” Pearl says.

“I personally think it’s brilliant,” Scar says.

“If you die we’ll be really sad!” Impulse says, with far more glee than Grian thinks is really necessary.

“Right,” says Pearl. “With that resounding vote of confidence, I can’t possibly fail. See you in a few!”

She waves and then she—

Well, Grian’s brain interprets it as Pearl walking, at least. Once again, the concept of 'movement’ is a bit confusing and foreign. It requires admitting certain things to himself that he’s not really ready for, he thinks. He can, however, watch Pearl move like a video game model with a walk cycle that doesn’t quite match the speed of the movement, and which doesn’t quite have enough weight to make it feel like anything is hitting the ground. Her feet are moving, but her body is—moving—and it is, frankly, one of the silliest things Grian has ever watched.

It does not take her long to reach the cows around them. That should probably be concerning, but Grian just feels—

“Pancake!” says Pearl, standing in front of the rolling masses of the creatures of the abyss, reaching towards her, surrounding her. “You’ve been very naughty, you know. Come on back! We have treats!”

Grian thinks he hears something. He gets the vague sense that, maybe, it should hurt his ears? He gets the vague sense a lot of things should hurt him right now, actually, but Grian just feels—

Pearl shifts strangely in the air. She turns to the cows and glares. They reel back slightly. She turns back to the abyss. “Come on now, Pancake. I know they look like family, but they’re going to hurt you. We have cookies. Don’t you want our delicious cookies?”

“Why was our plan to lie to the dragon again?” asks Impulse.

“I’m sure we can invent cookies. If nothing else we’re surrounded by cows?” Scar says.

“Beef cookies?” Impulse says, almost offended.

“Shhhh,” Grian hisses. “I can’t believe this, but it’s actually working!”

Sure enough, from the mass, comes Pancake. Pancake looks—scratched up, perhaps? Shaken? But the dragon goes to Pearl regardless, seemingly drawn in by the promise of cookies. Grian hears Pearl laugh as she grabs Pancake in her arms. “Oh, thank goodness! You gave us all quite the fright, little fella!”

“Pearl—” says Mumbo, strangled.

“You’re never going to run off like that again, do you hear? Sweet little guy.”

“Pearl,” says Mumbo again, a bit louder.

“Now let’s—oh dear.”

At some point, though, while baiting the dragon with cookies that don’t exist, Pearl had become surrounded.

Grian’s heart pounds. How did Pearl do the moving trick? They did it once to go help Scar—even Grian had done it that time! He can do it again to go get to Pearl. He can do it again to get to her! This whole thing had been stupid, actually, they should have just—just left—no, Grian can’t think of leaving even a baby dragon in this place, but—

What had Pearl done?

She’d given in, something in Grian says. She’d given in, and admitted there was not a 'her’ left that wasn’t the void, and chosen to move as though that was true.

But how does he do that? How do any of them—

Pearl stops flinching. She breathes out.

And suddenly, it is as thought Grian is cross-eyed, or maybe as though Grian’s stopped seeing a veil that he chose to see the world with. The void is black, and it is empty. and they are also black and empty, simply spaces in the void, any meaningful solid thing of them already long eaten away, replaced with the Other. And oh, are they Other, and it is empty, the world is empty, and the emptiness is full of monsters, and the monsters are held in the embrace of nothingness.

And the nothingness tells Grian: you are me.

Grian couldn’t scream if he wanted to, and oh, he wants to, because he doesn’t want to be nothing, surrounded by hostile nothingnesses, and Pearl, Pearl must be something but for all he can see the borders of people, they are empty spaces with names, the way every part of the void is just a meaningless space with a name, and it is all him and he is meaningless in it. He wants to laugh hysterically, but he can’t breathe or speak, because he doesn’t need to!

And the nothingness is made of monsters. And the monsters are hungry. And Grian is hungry.

And the monsters reach for Pearl, but Pearl—

Pearl is hungry too.

And this great mass of nothingness and faint light that isn’t a person, god none of them are people, they’re all dead, the void having eaten them long ago, how long had it taken him to realize and he wants to scream wants to laugh wants to—he’s dead they’re all dead they’re all the void they are all nothingness given a name, that emptiness, that lack of self, the lack of a person named Pearl reaches towards the monsters that the darkness is made of and it

eats.

She is not surrounded anymore.

And Grian can’t force the veil back over his eyes as the nothingness named Pearl turns to him and the nothingnesses named for his friends (and they are all dead god they have to be, this is death, this is—if they have replaced themselves with emptiness what are they) and there is someone saying something and it sounds like someone he knows and—

—and—

—and Grian is hungry.

And the void is hungry, and they are the void.

And the nothingness tells Grian: you are me.

And Pearl tells Grian: “I don’t know what I just—it’s fine, see, I’m alive? I’m going to touch you, is that okay? I’m going to—I’m alive, we’re alive, we’re alive.”

Nothingness cannot touch nothingness, but Grian forces his eyes to uncross as he hears Pearl’s hands touch his. He forces himself to see everyone as people once again, even though he knows its a lie now. He feels Mumbo’s hand on his shoulder, too, and Mumbo—Mumbo had talked like he’d always known. He can’t shake it off. He’s shaking. His ears are ringing.

There are probably more sensible things to say after breaking the veil of the universe on yourself, but what Grian says is this:

“Oh. So that’s how you turned gravity off.”

Pearl shrugs. “I mean. Probably not like that.”

Everyone is quiet for a bit.

“You know, if the cows were trying to eat you, and you ate it instead,” says Impulse. “Does that make you a cow?”

Everyone is quiet for a bit again, but this time with a distinctly incredulous air.

“Sure,” Pearl finally says. “Why not.”

“…the plan worked!” says Scar, far too bright for how any of them feel.

“So when do we explain to Pancake we lied?” asks Mumbo, and Pancake makes a startled snort.

The nothingness tells Grian: you are me.

Grian tells the nothingness: well it’s not like that functionally changes much, now is it? Frankly, this revelation is horrifying and all, but at this point I’m sort of numb. At least it’s not boring?

The nothingness says: well, fair enough I guess?

Grian turns back to the others. “I mean, the way I see it, since we have proof we can eat the horrifying monsters from beyond the mortal ken, there really is nothing stopping us from trying to make cookies or whatever.”

“Do you know what a cookie is?” says Impulse, incredulously.

“You were eating rocks all season!”

They go back to normal.

Chapter Text

“You know, now that we move we can play hide-and-seek,” Pearl suggests, holding the dragon to her chest tightly.

“Oh, that sounds fun!” Scar says. “I do have a question, though.”

“Go ahead,” Pearl says magnanimously.

“Where do we hide?”

“Well, if I tell you, I’ll know where to find you.”

“Oh, that’s true, that’s true!” Scar says. He squints. He looks around the void. He frowns. “…there aren’t any good hiding places though, really.”

“I think you aren’t looking hard enough,” Pearl says. “I already know where I’d hide.”

“Alright,” Scar says. He squints more as he looks around the void they’re in. “Can I seek first?”

“I have to keep track of Pancake! I can’t hide.”

“Oh, fine. I’ll hide first. Geez. You drive a hard bargain, Pearl!”

Grian watches on, bemused, as Scar begins looking harder in the mostly-empty void before quietly leaning in to Impulse. “How long do you think Pearl’s gonna manage to keep stringing him along?”

“Another twenty minutes at most,” Impulse says.

“…I bet you our sixth diamond next time we start earning diamonds that she goes longer.”

Impulse takes Grian’s hand and shakes it.

“Why the sixth?”

“I don’t give anyone else my first, I need three for pickaxes, and I already owe Mumbo my fourth and fifth.”

“Huh. Fair.”

They look back at Pearl and Scar. Scar seems to have opted to hide behind a very confused-looking Mumbo. It is incredibly ineffective. Scar is holding his hands over his head like that helps him hide as well. This, too, is incredibly ineffective.

“Alright, and—Scar, you’re hiding behind Mumbo.”

“Darn! Okay, lets try it again, I have a new place.”

Pearl covers her eyes and starts counting again. Impulse leans over to Grian. “Odds that it’s behind Mumbo again?”

Grian snorts as Scar attempts to fold himself smaller and Mumbo looks over his shoulder at Scar incredulously. “No bet.”

Chapter Text

To one side of him, Impulse and Grian are playing some complicated game with their hands, something that involves too much dexterity for the situation they’re in. To the other side, Pearl is trying to get Mumbo to befriend Pancake, a thing that isn’t going well. And Scar?

Hm. Well, Scar is thinking again. Honestly, ought to stop doing that, thinking.

He looks at his hand. Technically, does his hand exist? After Grian’s freakout, and Mumbo’s—whatever’s going on with him—and Pearl showing them how to walk, and Scar’s own freakout, and, oh geez, this whole “escape to the void thing” continues to go really badly, doesn’t it? Well, the point is, after all that, he’d picked up the gist. They were all part of the void, right? Or, uh, voids themselves? So, okay, maybe he hadn’t really followed, maybe he’d screwed the eyes he’s not sure he has anymore shut and thought of Jellie, but—

The point is that if he looks at everyone right, then he can probably see them as voids, or at least as—how did Pearl put it—cows? But Scar doesn’t want to be a cow! Jellie gets nervous around cows, because one time one kicked her and she’d never forgiven it! Scar doesn’t want to be a, a large bovine, and…

He is off-track. They aren’t actually cows, anyway. He thinks they have tentacles? Or, uh, don’t have tentacles? Since they all sort of exist as voids? Hey, wait, is that why he’s hungry? The void had always seemed kind of hungry, and if they were all part of it…

He should have packed sandwiches, even if he thought they weren’t going to be able to eat them through the helmets. Oh. Wait. He also hasn’t eaten in, geez, it’s probably been months, if not years at this point? So maybe that’s why he’s hungry, and not any void thing.

Wait.

Hold on.

“Am I naked?” Scar asks idly.

Grian spins around so fast you could forget that he hadn’t been able to do that not too long ago. “WHAT?” he says.

“I mean, if we’re all like, eaten by the void or something, and are absences of space—”

“I could have sworn we weren’t talking about that,” Impulse says, sounding more curious than upset. “But continue.”

“Right. So like, if Grian was right, and we don’t exist with a physical form, then technically I’m naked, right?”

Everyone stares for a moment.

“I think that makes all of us naked actually.”

“Don’t encourage him, Pearl!”

Scar nods, and immediately adds this to his worldview. Okay. That makes sense. They’re all naked then.

Hm.

“In that case can I—”

“ABSOLUTELY NOT.”

“Yeah, also gonna veto that one, sorry Scar,“ Impulse says.

“Oh dear,” Mumbo says quietly.

“Don’t see why not,” says Pearl.

“I WILL GO OFF WORSE THAN THE UNO.”

Scar sighs. “You people are determined to stifle perfectly reasonable expressions of fashion! We’ve all been wearing these things for—well I don’t know how long, but definitely long enough they should smell bad. But since they don’t exist, and therefore we aren’t wearing them, I see no reason I can’t take them off!”

“You know,” Mumbo says, “I think that was more existentially horrifying than whatever Grian did.”

“Agreed,” Grian says, something dark in his voice.

“It’s a reasonable question!” Scar says, and Pearl, apparently either on Scar’s side or just in the mood for chaos, smiles widely.

“I mean, he does have a point. How dare you all be naked, hm?”

“AUGH,” Grian says, with great feeling, before everyone immediately descends into chaos.

Scar reaches out to high-five Pearl.

…he’s a little disappointed no one properly answered him, though…

Chapter Text

So they’re still in the void, and the thing is, it’s like…

It’s good! Everyone can move now, and that’s good. Even though, oh, he’s known what’s going on for a bit now, he hadn’t, er, figured out how to move? So Pearl, Pearl saying the thing about them all being the void—well, or was it Grian who finally actually said it out loud? Mumbo isn’t certain. He’s getting confused. Things are blending together; faces are blending together; he’s not doing a very good job staying focused on what everyone’s supposed to look like now that they’ve acknowledged it.

“It” being the whole “they are all a part of the void and possibly dead” thing. Although maybe the “possibly dead” is just him? That might just be him. Um. Not just him being possibly dead. Everyone is possibly dead. Just him that’s realized it properly, though, the same way he was the first one to realize what they are because he has gotten used to changing shapes and he knew he was not the shape he was yesterday the moment Impulse had said something.

It feels like it’s been months since Impulse said something. It feels like its only been days. Mumbo really wishes he had a sense of time down here.

Anyway, the point’s something like: okay, so if they don’t technically have physical bodies, and their existence is mostly defined by their will, or perhaps whatever nebulous soul they have, or don’t have, and Mumbo is hungry, and…

“Hey Grian,” he asks suddenly. “Didn’t I eat your soul?”

There’s a long pause as everyone turns to look at him. Oh dear.

“Yes,” Grian says. “Yes, you did in fact do that.”

“Mumbo ate what?” asks Scar, thrown off.

“He ate my soul, he juiced me technically? It was like—”

“How do you juice a person?” Pearl asks.

“With a juicer,” Grian explains. “It like, presses—is this really—”

“Maybe my factory needs a person juicer,” Impulse says.

“That does sound useful,” Scar agrees.

“No, you don’t need a person juicer, there are much more efficient ways to kill people and probably get their soul?” Grian says. “Anyway. The point is that this was before we got down here, and that technically—”

“Maybe there’s a faster person juice press you could be using instead,” Scar advises.

“Will you all shut up!” Grian says, throwing his hands in the air.

There’s a long pause.

“No,” Scar says cheerfully after a moment.

“Look, this is all very enlightening, but Grian, if I ate your soul, are you technically soulless?” asks Mumbo. “I mean, that doesn’t make sense, right?”

“Oh I was soulless anyway,” Grian says. “Don’t really believe in the things.”

“Then how did I eat your soul?” Mumbo asks, baffled.

“Eh. Chutzpah,” Grian decides.

“What?”

“Was there a point to asking this?”

Mumbo tries to remember his train of thought. He’s certain he had one. He’s certain it was important. Something metaphysical about how they were all held together? The problem, Mumbo thinks, is that even when he knows things, he doesn’t actually tend to know anything.

“Honestly, I just have more questions now,” Mumbo says.

“Yeah. Like how to make a person juicer,” Impulse says intently.

“That wasn’t one of my questions, but I can show you later,” Mumbo says.

“I should be concerned with how badly you want to juice people for your candy factory, but honestly? Sounds hilarious,” Grian says.

Mumbo’s thoughts slip away again. They do that a lot. Ah, well. He can go back to being anxious after he’s done being baffled over the material reality that, apparently, Grian never had a soul to begin with. Does that mean Mumbo doesn’t have a soul? Does anyone have a soul? Much to consider.

They float on through the void.

Chapter Text

Impulse looks over. Grian and Pearl have taken to playing with Pancake, and Mumbo appears to be contemplating life while staring at the void and also the things in the void in the distance. Scar isn’t too nearby any of them; perfect. Impulse doesn’t know how far sound carries, given that they’re all only imagining there’s sound in the first place, so Impulse is pretty sure everyone can hear conversations they think they’re supposed to be able to overhear, or something.

This conversation… this is one he just wants to have between the two of them, y’know? So it’s good he can catch Scar alone now. He ambles (for whatever definition of ambles is their physics-defying movement in this place) up to the man and taps him on the shoulder.

“Why, hello there Impulse!” says Scar brightly.

“Hey Scar,” Impulse says.

“What brings you here?”

“Yeah, I had a question for you,” Impulse says. “I was wondering if you could explain again—why exactly is it smarter for us to wait here, instead of trying to hunt down a universe on our own?”

“The Swaggon—”

“Plainly, please? You know neither of us have actually cared about the Swaggon or its reputation for probably months now.”

Scar falls quiet again. “Alright. Give me a moment to collect my thoughts, okay?”

“I can wait,” Impulse says. “Although, it is sorta urgent.”

“How?”

“We’ll get there. Like I said, I can wait,” Impulse says, and he does, while Scar clearly takes time to carefully think through his words. Scar doesn’t do that often, so Impulse is pretty sure the man’s actually taking this seriously. Slipping the salesman idiot off for a bit. It’s honestly disconcerting, but hey, Impulse can’t judge disconcerting decisions on how to interact with others, right?

Finally, and with some weight, Scar begins speaking. “Okay. So, my calculations were wrong,” he starts. He’s clearly holding back comments about the Swaggon and refunds. Impulse appreciates the effort. “I thought we’d hit the nearest neighbor universe through the void months ago. So it’s safe to say I miscalculated, or even just misunderstood how deep the void between worlds was, if you could get past the killing part. I swear, I used all the latest research! I may sometimes exaggerate the truth, but for something like this…”

“For what it’s worth, I do trust you not to be careless with our lives,” Impulse says. “Or, uh, sorta trust you? I mean, I figured you’d do something wrong, and the zippers did have air gaps, but…”

Scar winces. “I…”

Impulse shrugs. “Perils of the job, really. Honestly did not realize those were a problem. Figured it was intentional until, well… But, okay, you were wrong, no nearby universe in our path. We can move now. Why not just go looking?”

“Because the odds we find one are tiny,” Scar says. “It’s a void! We’d just as likely navigate in circles! And even if I—well, I sort of feel like I may be able to actually navigate some, I don’t think I can figure out how to navigate out. Not anymore. Not when clearly I already got a lot of things wrong.“

Impulse inclines his head. “Isn’t that better than nothing?”

“Well, we’d leave the search radius the others would be looking in, then!” Scar exclaims. “My calculations may have been wrong, but I’d talked to Cub about them! And he’s far better at math than me. He could figure out the radius we’d end up in, based on all his own fancy calculations, but only if we stay in it! Why, I imagine even Xisuma, or Tango, or—the point is that if we just stay put, we’re far more likely to be rescued than if we go searching for things we won’t find.”

“Right, but they won’t,” Impulse says.

“Excuse you! Cub—”

“Wasn’t really doing so well at the end, we both saw him. He, at best, was going to rocket himself off alone. He’s dead, Scar. Xisuma? Xisuma’s been out of it for months, and we all know it. He didn’t know what was happening, let alone have time to make an escape plan. He’s dead too. I’d suggest Tango or Zedaph, but Tango was missing before we did this trip, and Zedaph refused to acknowledge anything was wrong. Dead. Next on my list—”

“Impulse—”

“—I’d check with maybe Doc? Doc and Ren said they were trying something, which could be good, but they seemed pretty possessed, so honestly sounds like they’re dead too—”

“Impulse—”

“—which leaves, who, Xb? Man builds survival bunkers, but that’s not something that can survive a moon crash, let’s be real. So he’s dead t—”

“IMPULSE, STOP,” Scar says, and his voice cracks, and Impulse stops. “Impulse, I’ve—I’ve already had my breakdown. Impulse, I—we’re here and that’s my fault already, I don’t need you to calmly explain why all of our friends are dead.”

Impulse blinks. “Oh. Sorry, I guess. I was more making the point that there’s probably no point anymore waiting for—”

“Just stop,” Scar says. “They aren’t dead.”

“Scar, we have to be proactive,” Impulse says. “Unless you noticed, Pearl ate an eldritch horror earlier. If we don’t go finding a way out soon, we’re going to go over an event horizon, and then we may not be able to leave.”

And Scar… Scar laughs, and it’s a little high and wild. Irrationally, Impulse’s first thought is: oh, he got that from Grian. But then he processes Scar’s words:

“Impulse, we’re long over any event horizon there may have been. You’re the one who pointed that out. If there was a point of no return it was two months ago. Too late, buddy! It’s too late!”

Impulse blinks again. For a moment, something in him cracks. It’s probably the dam he’d built out of cheerful obliviousness and a friendly apathy. Yeah, it’s that wall, because everything starts getting fuzzy, because everything sort of goes out of focus, because he stops being able to happily ignore that they’re all already monsters, because he can’t stop noticing that he doesn’t have to breathe so what’s the point of trying to control his breath when he’s panicking, because they have weird vision and he’d been acting blasé about it but it’s not nothing it’s, because he’s hungry too, because the wall has cracked and, and—

“Scar, Scar, I’m terrified, though,” Impulse says, shakily. “Because—there has to be something we can do, Scar. We can’t just have to wait and never be able to—”

He feels Scar’s hand on his shoulder.

“Impulse, buddy, tell you what. If you find a way to find us a universe, we’ll go. Event horizon, rescue, or not. But until then…”

Scar is shaking too, Impulse realizes.

“Until then… god, I’m so, so sorry. I never wanted this. I never wanted this.”

They stay there next to each other until Impulse has carefully rebuilt the dam again, and, Impulse thinks, until Scar’s own breathing stops getting fuzzy thinking about the things Impulse has said. Then, they both turn back to the others.

Impulse stares, and then laughs quietly as he realizes all three of them are pretending they hadn’t been eavesdropping. Still, they all look so shaky that Impulse can’t help but feel a bit bad he didn’t find a way for them to not overhear. He takes a deep breath.

“I think now’s a great time for truth or dare,” he says, and Grian groans, and it’s a terrible distraction, but terrible distractions are how Impulse has been staying sane this whole time, so no one calls him out for it.

Scar begins proposing rules, and Impulse starts thinking of truths, and dares, and universes.

Chapter Text

“Alright,” Grian says. “If we’re doing this—and unfortunately I think we’ve finally reached the point we’re doing this—we need to set rules. We may be playing Truth or Dare like schoolchildren, but we aren’t animals.”

There’s a long, very loud pause as everyone takes that in.

“Technically,” Pearl starts.

“We aren’t animals,” Grian says very definitively.

“I mean, he is right,” Mumbo says. “If we’re being technical, I’m pretty sure that whatever we are probably isn’t an animal, in the strictest sense of that word. So he is right. Probably.”

The five members of Boatem float through the void, or are one with the void. Eh, details. There’s Truth or Dare to be played! Scar watches them argue, fascinated. He looks over at Grian and then looks back to Mumbo and Pearl. “You know, I’m beginning to get the sense I know why we have never managed to get to the part where we actually play yet,” he says. “And like, guys, it’s definitely been weeks, at least. Or months.”

“Possibly years,” Grian says.

“If it’s been more than a year, I think I’m legally allowed to kill all of you the moment that won’t make me start crying,” Mumbo says.

“Oh god, we’re doomed. Killing things makes him laugh, not cry,” Pearl says.

“RULES,” Grian says, somehow managing to emphasize the word as though it has three syllables instead of one. “How is it that I keep on being the voice of reason? The only reason I was agreeing to play this is because I want to make Scar do something really stupid!”

“Hey!”

“Would you pick truth?”

“No, that’s the coward option, but—”

“My point stands.”

Scar huffs, but doesn’t argue.

“Alright then! Rules!” repeats Grian. “They’re simple! If you can’t do a dare, you can take the truth, or vis versa, but then you have to do whatever you’re given. After your turn, you give whoever you want the next truth and/or dare, but you can’t just retaliate against whoever made you do something, that’s boring. If you lie, Mumbo gets to kill you, and if you chicken out, Mumbo also gets to kill you. Any questions?”

“Yeah. How do we lose?” Impulse asks.

“That’s the neat part: the game never ends,” Grian says.

“Oh, fun,” Impulse says.

“I like this idea,” Mumbo says darkly.

“Er, not that I don’t want to play infinite truth or dare, that does sound delightful,” Pearl says, “but what if, uh, after you’ve done at least three rounds yourself, you can choose to end the game instead of asking another question?”

Scar feels such relief as he shakily nods. Yes. Good rule. Pearl is his new favorite. Pearl is definitely his new favorite.

“Fine,” Grian says, pouting. “But that means we can’t target someone! They’ll just end the game!”

“It’s a good rule we’re keeping it alright how do we decide who goes first?” Scar says, very quickly, determined to prevent Grian from talking anyone out of changing that rule before he could presumably make Scar’s life hell. Why him, huh? Mumbo’s right there! Mumbo’s even got a funnier name, and reacts all silly to pranks! He’s like, just as fun to mess with as Scar is!

Honestly, Grian, bullying behavior.

“I’ll go first!” Impulse says cheerfully.

“Why do you get to go first?” Mumbo asks suspiciously.

“I mean, were you going to dare me?”

“…no.”

“Was anyone else?”

“You honestly just feel like a bad first—”

“There we go!” Impulse says, smiling. “Any objections?”

It seems, for a moment, that Grian may try to object. However, it seems that even Grian finally wants to actually play. Technically, this isn’t the first time they’ve had this rules conversation. It isn’t even the second. Heck, it isn’t even the third. It’s, uh, more like the fifth? The first time they’d tried to play truth or dare was way back before they even realized anything was more wrong than the apocalypse, in fact! Man. Those had been wild times. They’d just normally descended into in-fighting before this point, or descended into pointless arguments about what a “valid dare” would be, given that none of them could easily do anything back then. But now all of them can move! So…

“Alright then. Scar. Truth or dare?”

“Oh come on!” Scar says loudly.

“Well?” Impulse says. “This is one more round Grian can’t get you, you know.”

“Fine. Dare.”

“Lick Grian,” Impulse says promptly.

Everyone stares for a moment. Pearl is the first one to speak. “Is that… the best you can…?”

“I mean, yeah,” Impulse says. “What did you think I was going to say? We’re in the void, I can’t do half of my fun ideas! Unless you want me to dare him to lick Pancake instead?”

“That’s worse, that’s worse, just come lick me,” Grian says.

Scar stares at Grian, shrugs, approaches him, and licks his face in a long stripe. It tastes like face. Actually, like weird face. Like the platonic ideal of a face, more than a real face. Not that Scar’s licked that many faces, that’s not a thing he goes around doing, he licks diamonds! Not faces! Those are different, and man, is he glad he’s not talking out loud right now.

Grian rubs furiously at where Scar licked him. “You know, technically you didn’t lick me.”

“I know! So you don’t have to worry about it,” Scar says, as Grian continues to furiously wipe his face.

“Ugh,” Grian says.

“Anyway! Truth or dare, Grian!”

“Oh, come on, now I can’t go for you!”

“It’s your rules.”

“Truth.”

Scar blinks several times. He looks at Grian sideways. “Who are you and what have you done with Grian?”

“You’re going to dare me something really stupid so I’m choosing truth to head it off at the pass,” Grian explains.

“Still. Anyway. Uhhhh. What kind of bird are you?”

“Don’t know. Scar, I’ve told you I don’t know. Also, wait, if we were being technical earlier, am I even a bird anymore?” Grian clearly stops to think about it. His wings flutter uselessly behind him, as though some subconscious thought in Grian requires he move them whenever he’s thinking about them. This, of course, had been Scar’s real goal. Grian literally always does that when talking about his wings. Scar’s just got to get him talking a little more…. “I mean, I still think of myself as a bird. Or, a bird-person, at least.”

“A birson,” Scar says. ‘Yes, we’re aware.“

"I… a… yeah, okay, sure. But, like, we’ve established our current general non-person-ness.” Grian flutters his wings a little more. Mumbo hasn’t noticed yet. Just a little more. “So, you know, my wings here, they’re probably just—”

He stretches his wings. They smack Mumbo in the face.

“GRIAN!” Mumbo says.

“…SCAR,” Grian says in turn.

“I didn’t do anything,” Scar says, lying entirely, as Grian, now flustered, tries to get his wings back in control. It really is fascinating, Scar thinks—technically, he knows, if they all squint, Grian doesn’t have wings! Or, he has wings? Or, uh, he has the void-y perception of wings? The point is that, technically, Grian isn’t Grian-shaped anymore. And yet, even his most annoying instincts are still all right there, ripe for Scar to use against him! It’s hilarious!

Grian, meanwhile, is clearly fed up. “Fine then. Mumbo. Truth or Dare, if you’re so annoyed!”

“Why, I think I’ll take dare!”

“I dare you to shut up about my wings!”

“That’s stupid. Why are we only coming up with stupid dares?”

“Well? Are you gonna?”

“I’d rather lick them.”

“No one else is licking me!”

The two of them begin to argue about the dare. Scar turns to Impulse. “Hey, Impulse, do you think that counts as Mumbo refusing the dare? You know, if Mumbo cheats, does that mean Mumbo has to kill Mumbo? Since Grian said Mumbo’s doing the killing in our rules.”

“I really don’t know,” Impulse says, as Grian very purposefully smacks Mumbo with another wing as Mumbo lunges at him. “I think Mumbo’s doing his best to kill Grian, though.”

“Maybe we should stop him,” says Pearl, sounding entirely disinterested.

“Nah, they’ll get over it,” Impulse advises. “They haven’t actually killed each other yet.”

“No, I mean, so we can keep playing. I don’t care if Mumbo manages to succeed in, uh. Pulling enough feathers to never complain again? It was unclear. But I want to keep playing, I haven’t had a turn yet! We’d barely gotten going!”

“Ohhh. Yeah, you have a point,” Scar says. “Empty threats, or even completely full threats, are totally fine. So are fights. But we’ve barely gotten anywhere in this game yet, have we?”

Grian is now saying something incomprehensible about Mumbo and legs. Scar has no idea what they’re talking about, but Mumbo seems deathly offended. Scar is briefly touched by the age of Mumbo and Grian’s friendship. They clearly don’t only have inside jokes by now, but inside insults. Only the absolute closest of friends can collect things like that.

“It really was a lame dare to end on,” Scar says. “And a super lame dare to be fighting about. Those two are horribly irresponsible, really. Uh. Who’s going to break them up?”

“Not it,” Impulse and Pearl say simultaneously.

“Dangit! I should have said not it,” Scar says. He turns to Grian and Mumbo, who have taken advantage of their full range of movement to—

—to—

Scar. Scar isn’t sure what they’re doing. This isn’t just because Grian and Mumbo fights are incomprehensible. It’s because they’re—so, okay. Scar knows where they are. Scar knows, in general, the outline of their shapes, the way the vague impression of great, terrible, black wings must be Grian, and the way the thing seemingly coiled out of vines, or perhaps wires, must be Mumbo, except they also aren’t there? It’s like with them arguing like this, whatever perception filter they had on simply had decided to stop working, and had left them…

Well.

Scar thinks the horrors from beyond must get in a lot of fights, is all he’s saying.

It’s not that he doesn’t know, intellectually, that they’re all like that. It’s more that this is the first time in a while that, instead of joking about it, or accidentally looking at it for themselves, Grian and Mumbo seem to have just. Well. Scar presumes they don’t know, that they’ve given up pretending mortality. It’s the sort of thing that both of them had been panicking about earlier. And Scar presumes they don’t know, because it’s terrifying, skirting on that edge where he has to actually think about the fact that they’re all—

—that—

—what do you call an absence of space—

—the void had always felt like a thing that dissolved—

—focus. He shudders. Okay. Have Pearl and Impulse noticed? Probably? Impulse was… and Pearl had been the first to mostly… okay. Okay! He can do this. He just—

—he’s—

—he’s not a thing that’s alive. Okay. Cool. Or, is it that the void is a thing that’s alive, but he’s only a piece of it? Or. No. Doesn’t matter. How is he going to break them up? How? Grian and Mumbo, when they play-fight like this (and it is, for all of its current viciousness, still play-fighting), are the worst to try to get between, because neither of them have moderation. Scar knows! He got his beautiful custom tree blown up for his troubles, because Grian and Mumbo don’t know moderation! And that had been silly early-game things, back when the season was bright and normal and they weren’t all, you know, well.

“Scar,” Impulse says, behind the distant roaring in Scar’s ears. “Scar, are you—oh. Oh.”

Luckily, Scar doesn’t know moderation either.

BOYS, BOYS, YOU’RE BOTH BEAUTIFUL HORRIFIC ABOMINATIONS FROM THE DEPTHS OF HELL! THERE’S NO NEED TO FIGHT ABOUT IT, he says, and for the first time it registers that he does not hear his voice but he hears his voice but his voice is simply present. He supposes it makes sense. There is no air for their voices to travel in. But now, now it is obvious, because Scar does not move his lips, and does not shout, and yet his voice sticks to the forefront of the world, heard in perfect clarity, not heard, no clarity, just known.

Huh.

They turn not turn they are looking at him, Scar knows suddenly, and he would feel hunted, but suddenly he knows he is nothing-void-predator as well, and isn’t that… interesting. For a moment—just one—Scar stops bothering with pretense and lets himself feel that, and…

He knows the others are afraid, perhaps. In that moment, Scar decides he is not. He is still afraid of many things. Of never going home. Of finding no one there. Of the fact this is all his fault. But of this? This is… something else.

He is being looked at. He is being perceived by emptiness. But Scar’s used to being the center of attention, so he simply perceives them right back. He can feel the moment Grian realizes what’s happening, and he can feel the dread in Mumbo, and, hm. That’s not quite what he was going for. But it did break them up, and that was the goal.

WE’RE SO CLOSE TO ACTUALLY FINISHING A GAME OF TRUTH OR DARE. OR, WELL, NOT PARTICULARLY CLOSE, I GUESS, BUT WE’VE STARTED FOR ONCE! THIS IS A SILLY REASON TO GIVE UP ON IT.

“Scar,” says Grian, and, huh. Okay, Scar’s the only one who has the voice thing down. Well, now he just feels rude. “Scar, given—is now the time to be worried about—”

ABSOLUTELY, Scar says.

Mumbo laughs, a little high and hysterical, and its halfway to being the thing Scar has done with his voice. Scar shakes it off.

“Besides,” Scar says, “I think you’re scaring yourselves? And that wasn’t even the dare! I mean, this isn’t talking about Grian’s wings, I guess, but—”

“Okay,” says Grian, and he’s managed to go back to pretending to be Grian again, or thinking of himself as Grian, or however that works. “Cool. That was weird. I hate that. It’s your turn, Mumbo.”

“Right,” says Mumbo, who has gone back to being Mumbo shaped. Scar sits back, pleased with himself. “In that case. Scar.”

“What!” Scar says. “After that!”

“Come on,” Pearl says, “Impulse and I haven’t gone yet!”

“Told you that I could go first,” Impulse says cheerfully. “I give it even odds the game ends before I get to go, because everyone here knows I have no shame.”

“I won’t allow that,” Pearl says.

“…was that a threat?” Impulse asks.

“Absolutely,” Pearl says.

“…huh,” Impulse says. “Neat.”

“I’m still going for Scar,” Mumbo says. “Truth or dare.”

“I regret being the reason this game continued,” Scar complains. “You all are playing to gang up on me!”

“Yeah. Gang up on me instead,” Pearl says.

“I wonder about everyone’s priorities,” Grian says, and Scar agrees, even though he gets the sense they are talking about two very different kinds of priorities.

The game continues.

Chapter Text

They’re getting closer again.

Pearl watches them and hums to herself. Behind her—or, well, not behind her, if she thinks about it she’s perfectly aware of them too, but not in her focus, then—Grian shifts uncomfortably. She’s being watched too, she realizes, amused. At least most of the others are arguing about the truth or dare game, still.

…she’s still disappointed she didn’t get as good of a dare as impulse managed to get out of people. That was going to be a legendary story one day, presuming they ever leave. Which, given… they may not. Pearl’s made her peace with that.

She’d made her peace with it a while ago, honestly? Around when she’d—

She continues to watch the circling beasts around them. She hums to herself again. The sound echoes strangely when it leaves her throat, like a bell or a warning growl. She’s just… thinking, though. And watching the threat. She’s the one who knows how to deal with it, after all.

And she’s still—

“Pearl?” Grian asks.

Pearl considers. “Hey, Grian.”

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking about the Ship of Theseus,” Pearl says. “Also, I’m hungry.”

“We don’t have any food left, you know that.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“…geez, Pearl. Thinking about anything lighter?”

Pearl watches the beasts circle. She doesn’t smile, or perhaps she does. She does something. She knows its a threat. They rear back worse than any glares she’d given them before.

“I don’t want to be hungry forever.”

“We won’t.”

“You aren’t convincing, Grian.”

“…jesus, Pearl.”

“I’m being practical!”

She’s watching the cows, but that doesn’t stop her from seeing Grian shudder. It’s amazing what you can do, after you’ve accepted there’s nothing to you anymore to stop you.

“Fine. Tell me about the Ship of Theseus.”

“I mean, it’s easy, right? If you replaced parts of us with other things long enough—”

“I changed my mind. Can we make fun of the fact that Mumbo’s managed to shapeshift his hair funny and hasn’t noticed yet?”

“Sure.”

She continues watching. She probably should talk. Mumbo’s hair really is amusing. She has no idea how Grian and Impulse and Scar had managed to get him to do that, but if she had to pick out of a hat who’s fault it was, she’d say Grian? It seems like a Grian kind of thing to do. She just doesn’t have much to add, really.

Her silence must be loud enough, because Grian sighs loudly. “Fine. Talk about the hunger instead. That’s easier to talk about than your Ship of Theseus thing. Barely, but—”

“If we were hungry enough, and there were none of them left, would we finally eat each other?”

“Jesus, Pearl!”

“Because, you know, I was defending myself. But I could tell, in just a moment, it was just someone else who had fallen, and had fallen too far, too. But now it just wanted to hunt. Had just waited for us to separate. Had. Well.”

She finally, finally turns back to Grian, for whatever measure that counts. “They were us, once. They’ve been hunting us this whole time, but they were us, once, too.”

“Pearl—”

“And, you aren’t convincing. If we can’t leave at this point. I’m wondering about the Ship of Theseus. And being very, very hungry. That’s all.”

Grian is quiet for quite a while.

“I hate that,” he says.

“So do I,” Pearl says. “But, well, I mean, it’s true, right? So it’s better to adapt now?”

Grian scoffs. “No. No, I don’t think I will.”

Pearl turns back out to the monsters that now look so familiar, she cannot tell the difference between them and herself.

“Suit yourself.”

Chapter Text

The thing with staying long enough in the void, Mumbo thinks, is that eventually it weighs on you. Sort of like a weighted blanket? Except there’s nothing there, and it’s all emotional and not physical at all, and it isn’t comforting in any way, and, well, maybe it isn’t like a weighted blanket at all, actually? It’s more like a particularly bad game of truth-or-dare, maybe, he thinks. Yes, that sounds more correct. Probably. Mumbo isn’t the world’s best at metaphors.

The point is something like: they are all in the void, and none of them are human anymore, and there’s this tension between them. Mumbo doesn’t like it. The problem is that the tension feels real. Mumbo sort of gets it? It is distressing. Everything is distressing. They’re hungry, or maybe empty, or maybe those words mean the same thing, in this context. They’re trapped, and frankly, Mumbo’s yet to figure out a sensible way to leave. Also, Mumbo sort of, kind of, wants to murder everyone here. Several times, actually! He’s very pent up, and they would deserve it! The only thing stopping him is the uncertainty on whether they’d respawn, unanchored from any worldspawn as they are at the moment. If it weren’t for that? He would have strangled at least one of them. Probably all of them. And not in a fun way, either! Or, fun for anyone but Mumbo. He would have—

Ahem.

This is all rather not the point, actually. The point is that there are a number of reasons that the tension has gotten bad enough that even Mumbo, the absolute king of social graces, has noticed. And he has to say, he’s not particularly a fan. He’s not a fan of the mild panic that’s started to finally leak into how Impulse talks, or the almost forced cheer of Pearl, or the angry way Grian’s been looking, or the just sad way Scar has, or, if Mumbo had to guess, the confused way he’s looking, confused in a way that isn’t his usual kind of confused, but a bone-deep sort of confused that comes from having known too long.

(To be honest, he’s not afraid of not being human. Mostly. He’s maybe afraid of being hungry. He’s more afraid of the way no one is talking. That’s worse.)

Oh dear. He should break the tension. How have they in the past? Oh, right.

“You know, would you all like to play imaginary chutes and ladders?”

There’s a long pause as the silent other members of Boatem turn to look at him.

“Imaginary what?” says Impulse.

“I’ve told you, we can keep track of something more complicated than chutes and ladders. Honestly, Mumbo, we’ve at least pulled off Candyland!” Grian says.

“You cheated at Candyland.”

“You cheated at chutes and ladders!”

“You’ve done this before?” says Scar, with a level of delight that Mumbo feels a sinking feeling in his chest about. But also, strangely, relief? He is relieved that Scar is able to make Mumbo feel dread with his delight again and, oh dear, this whole void nonsense has absolutely ruined his ability to read his own emotions. Let alone anyone else’s. Not that he can read anyone else’s, either.

“Of course we have,” Grian says.

“What do you mean ‘of course’?” Pearl asks.

“I just think chutes and ladders is far more boring than Candyland.”

“Which you will cheat at,” Mumbo says.

“You cheat too! It’s all in our head!”

“I can randomize it,” Impulse says. “I won’t play, I’ll just be the deck!”

Mumbo opens his mouth, intending to say something like: 'won’t you also cheat’, or like 'humans can’t effectively randomize things in their head’, or like 'we may not be human anymore but I still don’t think we can generate truly random cards from a deck in our head’, or 'why do you have a skill like that’.

Mumbo is tired, though. Mumbo is tired, and everyone is talking again. Everyone is talking to each other, and laughing, and Mumbo—this is all he can do, right? This is all he can do to keep that going. To keep them awake. To keep them next to each other. To keep them in a place where they all stay sane, to keep them from fighting about any of the things that matter that are so, so close to being fought about. The things that will actually hurt each other. Those things.

Getting into arguments about Candyland and/or chutes and ladders is nothing compared to staving that off for just a moment longer, Mumbo thinks.

From the strangely desperate way the other are looking at him, he’s not the only one.

“Fine,” Mumbo says. “If Impulse is the deck, we can play Candyland. Or, er, imaginary Candyland.”

“YES!” Grian says.

“Why do you like Candyland?” Scar asks.

“It lets out my violent urges,” Grian says.

Scar stares. “…Candyland?”

“You don’t get to judge me,” Grian says, and Pearl laughs, and if it’s all a little desperate, a little more of an act…

“Right then, who goes first, so I can tell you what color you get?” Impulse asks.

If it’s a little more of an act, it’s better than nothing.

“I think I should go first, since I actually know what the board looks like,” Mumbo says.

“I have it memorized too!” Grian says.

“You all are weirdos,” Scar says.

“You really, really don’t get to talk,” Grian snaps back, and Pearl laughs again.

Okay. Okay. Okay. One more day. He’s got this. He can be optimistic, for a moment, as he imagines Candyland in front of them. They’ll be okay, right? They’ve gotta.

They’ve gotta.

Chapter Text

The beginning of the end goes like this:

They’ve moved on from Candyland, somewhere after Grian and Impulse of all people got into a fight about modifying the rules to make it more interesting. They’d had a debate about whether or not it was possible to play Diplomacy—on the one hand, it’s entirely deterministic, so they would only have to memorize the board, not randomize anything. On the other hand, resolving turns in Diplomacy can get messy enough when there aren’t arguments about whether or not the boardstate has even been remembered properly. Also, maybe it’s just Mumbo, but a game that’s actively about betraying alliances right now seems a bit… ill-planned?

They’d tried playing Mafia for a bit, but unfortunately it didn’t work so well when only four of them could play at a time. Pearl tried to teach Pancake to play, if only because five players at least meant they could play two rounds. The dragon mostly used it as an excuse to chew on their hair. That seemed reasonable to Mumbo. If he were a dragon, he’d probably be chewing on people’s hair too.

…what does that say about Mumbo, actually? Hm.

The point is: the beginning of the end starts like the beginning of the end did; arguably, the beginning of the end started however long ago it had been for them. After all, the five of them (and one dragon) have been floating through the void for quite some time. The beginning of the end could have very well been when Scar had pulled that lever. But, as far as things are concerned, the beginning of the end is something like:

Grian turns over one of the blue Uno cards they’d been using to try to play Connect Four with in his hands and looks at the others and his face is strange and his wings are curled around him and if Mumbo looks at him sideways, the entire emptiness that takes up Grian’s space is twisted sideways, too.

“How long are we just going to do this?” he asks.

“What, lose Connect Four? Because I totally won that round,” Pearl says.

“No!” says Grian. “I mean, no, I’m going to win at Connect Four one of these days. I mean—this! All of this!”

Impulse makes a quiet scoff against the back of his throat. Mumbo shifts uncomfortably. Oh dear.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Scar says nervously. “I mean, we can play something else while we wait to—”

“You know what I mean. Pretend this is all normal.” He flips his hand and throws it up in the same motion that he stops bothering to really look like Grian. Mumbo doesn’t look away, this time. He’s almost used to it, for all he’s looking at nothing.

“I mean, I don’t think we’ve really done a good job at that,” Pearl says.

“You,” Grian says, and then stops. “No, I’m not going to—that’s not the point! We’re just sitting here playing Connect Four with Uno cards instead of—”

“We can’t,” Scar says quietly. “If we want any chance, we have to—”

“What, stay sitting ducks?”

Mumbo swallows. “I mean. They haven’t really gotten close again,” he says, gesturing to the horrors from beyond that really don’t look so much horrifying as just like them, these days. “Given that, every time they have… well, um. So we don’t have to worry about that.”

“And what about us? We’re just going to accept that? Not worry about it? Or, oh, I know. It’ll be like my conversation with Pearl. We’re just going to accept that we’re those things, and we’re drifting through the void forever, aren’t we?”

Mumbo turns to look at Pearl, who is trying to gently extricate an Uno card from Pancake’s mouth. She shrugs. “I mean, not particularly much of a choice, is there?” she says, and, ah. This is a standing debate, isn’t it? Mumbo suddenly feels awfully, awfully like he’s missed things, like—he doesn’t want to have this argument. Maybe he can figure out how to repurpose the Uno cards into a Diplomacy board after all? He’ll think about that, like how Candyland worked before, and like it’s worked every time before.

“We could go looking,” Impulse says.

“We shouldn’t, since we’re surviving here,” Scar says. “We shouldn’t make it harder to find us.”

“Who? Please.”

“What… no, no we’re not doing this again,” Scar says, and Mumbo sort of wants to cover his ears. The worst part is that this isn’t the first time they’ve had this argument. Of course it isn’t. There’s only but so much to talk about. There’s only but so much to do to distract themselves. Eventually, it always descends back to their arguments. They’ve normally been nice, Mumbo thinks distantly. Done them in smaller groups. But it’s always just going to come back to this.

DIplomacy, Mumbo thinks. At least if they’re arguing about alliances and betrayals and wars, they won’t be arguing about this.

“I don’t know whether to agree with you or hit you,” Mumbo hears Grian say. “On the one hand, if we go looking, hey, at least we’re going somewhere! On the other hand, Impulse, not particularly a fan of implying…”

“Oh. My bad. Sorry.”

“He’s probably not wrong,” Pearl says.

“He is,” Scar says, “and we aren’t having this argument.”

Mumbo throws out Diplomacy. He’s not sure how to do the pieces. Also, the arguments won’t be fun after all, he decides. He shakes. He wants… he wants…. he’ll make… hah, maybe they can use the Uno cards to build base plans, actually? They haven’t talked about those since the first few—weeks? Days? He’s not sure. Time’s passed strangely. When did they stop talking about their plans for next season, actually? When had they…

“Still, it’s clear that if they are around, they’ve abandoned us,” Impulse says, and Mumbo wants to do—do something. Shake him? Shake everyone? No, he’s resolutely not paying attention, actually. What was his plan, actually? He’d been planning on—a vault, right? He’d wanted to be rich, and to build a vault, first, before anything else, because it had been too long since he’d built a proper vault door. That had been his plan. What had the others been planning? He can’t remember. They’d all talked about it, but he can’t…

“No one’s abandoned anyone,” Scar says, and he doesn’t even sound angry, he just sounds sad.

“It doesn’t matter! What matters is—we have to move forward! We have to do something!” Grian says.

“What?” Pearl says.

“I don’t know! I don’t care!”

Mumbo’s thinking about vault doors, though.

“We just have to—we can’t let this keep happening! We can’t pretend this is normal! We can’t! It’s not normal to be monsters, it’s not normal to—how long have we even been here?”

“Well, if we don’t pretend it’s at least a little normal,” Impulse says, before sighing. “No, sorry, you have a point.”

Pearl is quiet. “…fine,” she says. “What do we do?”

“I thought there would be more fighting,” Grian says, deflating.

“I think we’re all tired for that,” Scar says. And Mumbo says—

“What were you all going to build? Next season. Are you going to build, I mean.”

Grian blinks. “Does it matter? We have to find something to do about what we are now, not—”

“I wanted to study aliens,” Pearl says promptly, before sounding a little surprised she said it at all. “I mean… I was going to theme my stuff around aliens. I wanted to build with bright colors. I had a whole alien I was going to bring over, too. A giant deer-bird.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” Mumbo says. “I’d only gotten as far as vault. It’s been too long since I built a vault door, and I thought, what if I themed my whole start around it? And becoming the richest hermit.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” Pearl says.

Everyone is quiet for a bit. Grian is much quieter when he says: “We just decided we can’t pretend this is normal.”

“I know,” Mumbo says.

“Why are we talking about our plans for next season, then? Why aren’t we doing something?”

“I was going to be an elf next season,” Scar says. “Am. I am going to be an elf.” He smiles, and it’s strange and crooked thing. “And you’re going to study aliens. And Mumbo—well, my friend, I’m not sure you’ll be the richest hermit, actually, but you will make an attempt.”

“I have plans for a raid farm,” Impulse says. “I like emeralds! Oh, and a wither skull farm with Tango. We’d been talking about it, before the moon. Decked Out 2.0, you know? I’m going to help with that!”

“Oh, he’s doing that next season?” Mumbo says. “I’m excited, I think.”

“…oh,” Grian says, and then he says: “I’m going to build a rock. Except it’s not a rock. I have this—well, there’s this thing, it’s not that big of a deal, but you know, it told me it needed to be a rock, so I’m going to make that.”

“Yeah. That’s our plans for next season,” Mumbo says, and he feels more like himself than he has in a long time. “I think the first thing I want to do is… I think I’ll need slime. How do I even build a slime farm, though?”

“Don’t you do that all the time?”

“Not without knowing where ahead of time,” Mumbo explains.

“Oh, right.”

Grian wipes at his face. “Oh. Okay. I guess this is what we can do about it,” he says, quietly.

“Yeah,” Mumbo says. “I just…”

“It’s a good idea. Um. I think that—do you know what month it is?”

“Not at all.”

“Well, if we make it there by whatever planetary April is…”

The beginning of the end goes like this: the five of them start talking about the future again. Not now, and not the terrifying part, but the future they want.

It’s nicer. It’s nicer than anything they’ve talked about it quite a while. Mumbo starts making plans for vault doors with the Uno cards, and they all start building card houses and arguing about design choices, and none of these will hold, but it feels different, somehow. This time, it feels different.

Impulse chases Pancake after the dragon steals one of the cards he was using to try to demonstrate to Mumbo the structure of the raid farm he has planned, and they’re all talking, and Mumbo hears Scar laugh genuinely for the first time in a while, and he looks out at the endless void for which they still have no exit, and the future for which they have no proof it’s coming. Then, he turns back to trying to explain to Grian how his vault is going to be Grian-proof, and it feels good.

Chapter Text

The five members of Boatem drift through the void. They are surrounded by Uno cards that have been bent and torn into a million attempts to build plans. A dragon is curled up in Pearl’s hood. Helmets are piled in the middle of the five of them. In a set of ordinary playing cards that Scar had revealed after they’d run out of cards for him to try to build trees with, there are abandoned maps and plans for leaving. There’s an exhaustion in the bones of this place, alongside frantic attempts to stay awake and from getting so bored they lost themselves entirely. There’s something almost despairing, about the attempts to build with only the scraps they’d had on hand. There’s something terrifying, about a circle of ten people, built out of nothingness and terror these days. There’s—

“Three points,” Pearl says.

“What? No, those are the same ones that were there earlier,” Grian says.

“No, no, they’re new ones. See, the void’s shaped differently around them,” Pearl says. “They move differently.”

Grian squints, the void twisting around his vision. “Uh. No, they definitely look like the same guys to me. I mean, I know defining them as separate from the void’s actually a whole thing, but I think they haven’t actually moved, and—”

“I think I get three more points.”

“You absolutely don’t.”

“Hold on, I can arbitrate,” Scar says brightly.

“No, you can’t!” says Grian, throwing his hands up. “Because you’ll give them to Pearl!”

“There are definitely new cows there,” Scar says sagely.

“There are not!”

The five members of Boatem drift through the void, doing the same thing they’ve always done: being incredibly petty to each other. Honestly, Grian thinks he should be proud.

“Look, fine, then we should get Impulse in on the arbitration too,” Pearl says. Grian scoffs loudly. “Oh, come on, he doesn’t have that much of a bias for me! Didn’t he do several whole things with you, too? You two have known each other longer!”

“I’m just saying, if you’re getting Impulse, who will agree with you, and Scar, who just wants me to lose, involved, I should get Mumbo involved,” Grian says. “The stakes are high this round, after all.”

“Your head will make my base beautiful,” Pearl says primly.

“I think you mean your head,” Grian says.

“You wish. I just got two points up,” Pearl says.

“No you didn’t! Mumbo!” Grian says. “Mumbo, tell her that those aren’t three new cows, that they’re the same cows as before.”

Mumbo is quiet.

“Mumbo?”

“Is it just me,” Mumbo says, and then he stops. He swallows. “Grian, is it just me, or do you—feel? See? I don’t know? I mean, I don’t think I really see yet, I think… I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Grian turns and looks where Mumbo is. There’s nothing there. Grian breathes out, and stops bothering to pretend to look at things that make sense in a human way, stops pretending to be human for a moment, and just tries to feel.

He feels… hungry. Empty, and hungry, and like he is reaching, reaching, reaching, a yawning abyss in the him that is the void that is nothing that is made of emptiness that wants to fill it that wants to eat that which falls into him that—

He stops after a moment and looks back to Mumbo. “…yeah. Yeah, there is something, isn’t there?”

Mumbo nods.

“I spotted it before Pearl,” Grian says on instinct.

“What?” Pearl says, furious.

“I saw it before Pearl, so that’s points to me,” he says.

“Whatever it is isn’t a cow!” Pearl says. “Excuse me, you don’t get points you, you nugget! Just because it’s something strange doesn’t make it points in the game!”

“Maybe that’s a graveyard, and he gets to wipe all of your points,” Impulse says.

“Who’s side are you on?” Pearl asks.

Impulse shrugs. “No one’s? I’m busy building little houses, see, I’m undecided on my base floorplan. Do you think people would want iTrade again? I think I could do iTrade again. Would you want to live in iTrade?”

“Nevermind,” Pearl says. “Scar.”

Scar has a very particular kind of pained expression on his face, and that’s when Grian knows he has him. Grian says, softly: “I know you want an excuse for Pearl to kill me, but she’ll definitely kill me if I beat her in this game this thoroughly.” He smiles a little wider. “And, Scar, don’t you think it would be funnier if we counted whatever that thing is as a graveyard? I mean, we’d been arguing about how the cow game didn’t have a pretty fundamental game piece, and now we have one! When a, uh, whatever that is…”

“A meal,” Mumbo says, sounding vaguely nauseous.

“Yeah, no, we aren’t calling it that. A graveyard,” Grian says. “Since, you know, that’s what it’ll be in the cow game.”

“Hm,” Scar says.

“There’s no reason it should be anything special. Also, Mumbo told him about it, which I think makes it cheating, Scar,” Pearl says.

“Oh, I don’t mind cheating,” Scar says.

“He doesn’t,” says Grian.

“Fine. But still, Scar, if you let Grian make this arbitrary rule, you know he will in games he plays against you next season. Given that I’m sure Grian’s planning Tag again, do you really want to give him the ability to change the rules on the fly?”

“I would never,” Grian says, genuinely offended.

“Hm. You have a point as well,” Scar says. “…which one of you wants to help me build my tree more? Best offer gets to decide what we’re doing about this.”

Before either of them can make an argument, Pancake pokes her head up from inside of Pearl’s hoodie. The dragon screeches, a sound that sounds more like shattering glass and metal scraping against metal than it does properly sound like a dragon cry. Grian grimaces. He reaches out again, trying to sense what it is that Pancake is screeching about, and then he stops.

There’s a figure in a suit. It reminds Grian of the suits they’d used, only there’s what seems to be a long cord attached to it, reaching so far out that Grian can’t tell where it leads anymore. Also, Grian notes a bit drily, he doesn’t think the zipper the figure is wearing has air gaps, the way their zippers had. But it’s unmistakably meant to protect them from the void, protect them long enough to get past the impersonal void that wants to eat them, to the void that has personal reasons to feel hungry.

And Grian feels hungry. And he feels desperate. But more than he feels any of those things, he feels—

He feels like he can’t breathe. Which is silly. He doesn’t need to anymore. All the same, he feels like there’s no air in his lungs. The playing cards and cow game and helmets and even the cows and the feeling of being inhuman and everything feels… embarrassing. Empty. Meaningless.

The figure looks forward through their visor and no one speaks, for a bit.

Then, Scar speaks: “…Iskall?”

“Scar?” says the figure, unmistakably Iskall, and Grian starts laughing, and laughing, and he’s not able to focus enough to make it come out of him like it should a human. He has never been happier to hear his fellow Architech in his life. “No, not Scar! A… get back, thingy! Where’s my friends, huh?”

“No, Iskall,” says Mumbo. “It’s us. Can’t you see? Iskall—”

“They’re supposed to be near here, according to Cub’s math. So where are you?”

“We’re right here!” Scar says. “No no no, we’re right here, come on Iskall, what are you even doing here?”

Iskall stares right at them, shuddering. “Where?” he asks.

“We’re,” starts Grian, and he looks at the cows that he and Pearl had been counting a moment ago. “We’re. Right here. It’s a long story. I’ll come over. I’ll…”

Grian goes to Iskall. He starts trying a bit harder to look human, but he’s not sure how to do that for Iskall. As he moves, he sees Iskall and Scar start to frantically collect floating playing cards, as though cleaning up. Pearl is holding Pancake so tightly that the dragon might burst. Mumbo hasn’t moved in what feels like several minutes.

“We’re… what do you see?” Grian asks.

“A monster of the void, but you sound like Grian,” Iskall says. “And if I squint, you sort of look like him, I guess. But you’re hard to look at, dude.”

“You believe me?”

“I sort of have to. If I don’t, I think those helmets I see would mean you’re dead, and, Grian, I don’t want you to be…”

“Okay,” says Grian, because he’s not sure how to respond to that at all. “That’s—it didn’t matter anymore, okay? But we aren’t dead.”

(Well. It’s a difficult semantic argument. Once they’re out of here, Grian will get them all together with Zedaph and Ren and they’ll argue about what death means until they run out of ways to argue about it. They’ll argue if what’s happened to them killed them meaningfully, or if there’s a meaning to being alive, or. But that’s not what Iskall needs to hear right now, and it’s not what Grian needs to say, either.)

“Sure,” Iskall says.

“Sure,” Grian repeats.

“I’m supposed to come down here and get you all,” Iskall says.

“Our valiant rescue,” Grian says. “What’s the damage?”

“Three months,” Iskall says.

“You’re lying,” Impulse says from behind Grian, and oh. They’re all collected right here now.

“I…” Iskall shakes. Iskall looks away. “Sorry. It makes me sick, looking at all of you. Is it all of you? Something about it…”

“It can’t have been three months,” Mumbo says.

“How long are you thinking it was?”

Everyone’s quiet for a while. It hits Grian that he has no idea how to contextualize any of this to Iskall. Three months feels wrong, though. Maybe it’s too long? But that doesn’t seem right. Maybe it’s too short? No, that’s… all Grian knows is that three months is wrong. It can’t be right. He’s not sure what number he expected to hear, but three months is…

“So it’s March?” Pearl says. “It doesn’t feel like March.”

“True, it doesn’t,” Scar says.

“Guys,” Iskall says. “Can you—one at a time—my head.”

“Oh,” Scar says, very quietly, and then they’re all quiet. It takes Grian a moment to realize he’s been put in charge of continuing the conversation he started.

“Well, I guess it’s March,” Grian says. “Um. If you’re here to get us…”

“I tug on this, it pulls us all up. Here’s a hand,” Iskall says, and Grian steps back, trying to gesture for someone else to take it first. He has a strong desire to—to grab, to, to… he’s not sure. But the part of Grian that loves Iskall knows he can’t take Iskall’s hand.

No one grabs Iskall’s hand.

Iskall frowns. “Dudes, don’t be like that. I don’t bite.”

Before Grian can say anything, Iskall screws his eyes closed and he reaches to grab Grian.

The hand goes right through, and suddenly Grian feels—he is empty, and there is a gap, and he needs to fill it, and something in him pulls, and Iskall screams.

Someone else moves before Grian does. He feels, rather than sees, Pearl surround him, and yank him away from Iskall. He feels, rather than sees, someone yank violently on the connection Iskall has to the surface. Iskall is still screaming and Grian is hungry and Grian is lonely and Grian is desperate and Grian is horrified. He didn’t know he would—but he hadn’t want to take—but he hadn’t known. He hadn’t—of course he would, though. Hadn’t they established what they were? Hadn’t they established—they are the void, and when the void touches a player, it does one thing only, and when a player touches the void—hadn’t they established? Hadn’t they, hadn’t they…

And Iskall is gone and Grian’s still not quite sure what happened.

“I sent him back up,” Impulse says, finally.

“That’s… good. He probably just broke his suit,” Scar says, finally. “Given the screaming. We don’t want him…”

“No, we don’t,” agrees Impulse.

“What now?” Pearl asks.

“I didn’t mean to,” Grian says, and Pearl sighs.

“You didn’t do anything,” she says quietly.

“They know where we are,” Impulse says. “It’ll…”

“We can’t touch them,” Grian says.

“We’ll figure it out,” Mumbo says, because that’s all he can say.

They’re all still gathered around the spot Iskall was. Grian realizes he’s lost track of his score in the cow game again. Graveyard. All of the cows, gone. Pearl’s graveyard, he thinks distantly, not his. She wins after all.

“…we’ll take each other’s heads,” Pearl says.

“Okay,” Grian says. “Obviously, that’s the important part of all of this. Obviously, that’s…”

“Yeah,” Pearl says. “Don’t worry about it.”

Slowly, they return to the cards that are still floating, and while they’ve been floating in an infinite void, it’s never felt more like a tiny box, looking back at it then. Still, they’ve got to get ready.

Grian picks up his useless helmet, turns it over in his hands, and puts it on. Best not to litter, for when they leave, he thinks, and he resolutely doesn’t think about any other option.

Chapter Text

Iskall's stopped screaming by the time Stress and Cub yank him out of the void by the cord they’d sent him down on, but he’s cold, and everything hurts, hurts worse than any time he’s fallen into the void’s embrace before. For a while, he lies on the ground next to their tiny fishing hole into the void, and he desperately breathes in the air from the surface.

Cub and Stress’s words echo in his ears. He stares at the sky, mercifully blue, and he doesn’t know what to tell them. They’re asking if he’s okay. (He’s not.) They’re asking if he needs to go back. (Does he?)

They’re asking about Boatem, and Iskall thinks about what he saw: cracked, empty helmets, familiar ones. Scattered and torn playing cards. broken pieces of dragon shell. Torn uniforms. And endless things he still can’t define, shards of the void given horrible form, creatures he’s fairly certain he will see in his nightmares for the rest of his life.

He thinks about reaching for the thing that almost sounded like Grian, and the horror of suddenly realizing he’s reaching into the place things are unmade.

He thinks of empty, broken suits.

And Cub and Stress—they’re asking him about it. They’re asking him what happened. They’re asking him to, to say what he doesn’t want to say—

“They’re where you said they’d be,” Iskall says hoarsely, and he’s not yet sure if he’s lying. But he has to try to think it’s the truth, just a little bit, doesn’t he?

…doesn’t he?

Chapter Text

The thing is: knowing that rescue is possible, suddenly, makes everything much more real to Pearl in ways she’s not quite sure how to quantify.

They’ve cleaned up as best they can. Wearing the suit’s helmet again feels strange. Hers was the first anyone pointed out cracks on, and they take up most of the visor now. If she actually saw with her eyes these days, it would probably be hard to see through. She’s picked up the pieces of Pancake’s shell and split who was carrying them between her and Grian. The dragon has latched onto Pearl’s shoulders. The whole space looks so empty and tiny, she thinks, for something that’s infinite.

The thing is: knowing that rescue is possible feels strange to Pearl. She’d pretty well decided she accepted where she was, or at least, did enough to work with it. Not much of another choice, she thought, but to accept her lot in life, or un-life. But to acknowledge what she was. She wasn’t afraid of what she was, but…

Rescue is possible. Is it possible? Someone was here. Grian’s still shell-shocked, and has been for however long it’s been, and maybe Pearl’s shell-shocked, too. Maybe they all are. They haven’t talked much. They’ve just cleaned, by some silent agreement, and prepared, not that any of them know how to prepare. The games are gone. They don’t know how long it will be. They don’t know if he’ll come back. They don’t know if anyone will be coming back, after that. But it’s possible, in a way it hadn’t been before.

If no one comes, thinks Pearl, and, to be honest, she wouldn’t be surprised if no one did—Iskall had. Well. After that, it would be reasonable for them to have assumed only monsters remained, and while Pearl personally thinks that she’s at least still Pearl, there is a reasonable difference between the Pearl that they would care about, and the Pearl she is. Pearl, before, was not a piece of the void. So, there’s that.

Still. They’re all just waiting. She thinks that maybe the others are afraid to say anything. Just in case they’re actually being rescued. Just in case they get to go home. Just in case saying the words jinxes it.

She’d judge, but she can’t bring herself to say anything, either. She just holds onto Pancake, and she watches the others, and she tries not to hope too much.

She has no idea how much time passes like this. She hasn’t known how much time has passed for, well, three months apparently, though. None of them have. It shouldn’t feel like it aches, not knowing how much time is passing.

They probably won’t come back, Pearl decides. It would be the smart decision. It… hurts, though. She doesn’t want to be the one to say it. She doesn’t mind saying things that upset other people sometimes, but the silence right now, it’s not something she thinks she can break. Not with news like that. If nothing else, Grian will yell at her again. Likely Mumbo and Scar would get upset as well. Impulse might agree with her, but Impulse had insisted everyone was dead, which is a level of pessimism that Pearl hadn’t been on, so. She’s not sure with that.

It’s probably better to wait. She has to say something eventually. No one else will. Everyone else will keep on waiting, and hoping, and she doesn’t want to do that to them. She should resign herself, then explain to the others why she has. She should.

She’s about to do just that when she hears a strange popping sound, looks up, and sees what seems to be a surprisingly functional toy rocket ship awkwardly spiraling towards them.

“Cub!” says Scar, sounding like he might cry. “I know that design. I helped him make it, you know. That’s how I know it’s an effective, perfect design. It has a compartment for carrying secret messages, we made it for the Concorp weapons division.”

“Why does it look like an action figure?” Grian asks.

“…I had a little too much fun designing it. Plus, it’s innocuous! Way harder to spot than a Concorp drone, if… not particularly practical inside of an atmosphere.”

“Why did you make something during Season 6 that doesn’t work in an atmosphere? You never actually built your moon base!”

“Listen. Grian. I know that Sahara didn’t have the kind of cash to relate to this, but we had more time and money for R&D than we knew what to do with. Of course we did personal projects!”

“Okay, rude,” cuts in Mumbo. Scar laughs. None of this conversation means anything to Pearl, but it makes something hard and strange ache in Pearl’s heart.

“Oh, you’re right, you’re right. I shouldn’t be rude to people about things they can’t help! People can’t help their business acumen.”

“That’s ruder?”

Pearl stares at the little blue-and-white toy rocket as Scar grabs it with limbs he’s not supposed to have, cradling it close to his chest like it will become a part of him, but not destroying it. He’s so careful not to destroy it.

The color looks wrong, Pearl thinks. Not in any material way. Not wrong like Pancake’s eyes, or the shade of Grian’s wings, or trying to look for too long at any of their faces. Wrong in a different way. Bright, and kind, in a place it doesn’t belong after what had just happened.

Scar opens it. There’s a letter, blank paper, and a pen inside.

“It’s a note. Uh, it’s from Cub.”

“His handwriting is awful,” says Impulse, leaning over Scar’s shoulder.

“I know. I can’t read it,” Scar says.

“Okay, how did you two take over the server like, twice?” Impulse asks. Scar opens his mouth. “Actually? I don’t want to know,” Impulse says. Scar closes his mouth.

“I can figure it out,” Pearl finds herself saying. “I had to read some of his handwriting when we made that passage from his canyon into my base, and I’m normally pretty good at deciphering bad handwriting.”

“Read away!” Scar says. He holds onto the rocket, but he hands Pearl the letter. Scar’s right; the handwriting is atrocious. Pearl wasn’t around when apparently Scar and Cub had taken over the server (and that’s a story she wants to hear now), but between Scar’s complete lack of ability to spell and Cub’s apparent complete lack of anything resembling neat handwriting, she has some questions about how the two of them manage to communicate as best friends. It takes her longer than she’d like to sort out what the note says. It takes her longer than she’d like to process it, too.

“…he says. He wants us to write everything we know,” she says slowly. “About our situation. Everything we know. Also, anything we want them to know. He says he can explain more news if we need it. He says he has a plan?”

She doesn’t mean to make it sound like a question. In the letter, Cub had phrased having a plan like it was the most natural thing in the world. It doesn’t feel that way, though.

“He says Iskall isn’t mad,” she says.

“Good old Cubfan,” Scar says, and it’s probably not meant to sound as shaky as it does. “Gotta love him. Always has a plan, or at least knows how to fake it, that guy.”

“He’s probably faking it,” Impulse says.

“Oh yeah. Probably,” says Scar. “But he said he’d tell us the plan. That means he’s going to make one. That means… oh. Did he say how to send him the notes?”

“Send him the rocket, I think. He said you’d know how to,” Pearl says.

“Good. Get over here. We’re writing everything down,” Scar says, and for the first time in a long time, he sounds like the man who had planned all of this escape into the void in the first place, instead of someone just as scared and lost as the rest of them. For the first time in what has apparently been three months, it’s Pearl who suddenly feels like she’s the only one who doesn’t understand what’s happening. She watches the others go to argue about what they are, and what Cubfan means by telling him everything, and whether they can write things down, and everything about themselves that they’d never agreed on, and gravity and weird eyes and Pancake and hunger and—

Pearl makes a sound. She’s not sure what sound it is. She certainly makes it, though.

“…Pearl?” asks Impulse, turning around.

“It’s nothing,” she says. “It’s. They’re coming.”

“They’re alive,” Impulse says, simply. “The fact they hadn’t yet is why I’d—but why wouldn’t they, if they’re alive?”

Pearl can list a million reasons.

“I guess you’re right,” she says hoarsely instead, and she goes to join them in their arguments about what to write in the letter, before they leave out something important or put in some assumption that is obviously, obviously false, and something she didn’t know she was waiting for uncurls in her chest as she does.

(Knowing that rescue is possible, suddenly—it makes everything different.)

Chapter Text

The plan to get Boatem out of the void, in the end, isn’t anything like what Scar’s original plan was. That’s fine; he’d abandoned the plan a long time ago, for all he had been hanging onto the idea of being found. He definitely knows that he’s never, ever, ever making a plan like that again, anytime something like this happens again. No plans to fall through the void and eventually hit what’s on the other side; he knows inherently the void doesn’t quite work like that, and he doesn’t want to wait again. No, if the moon falls again, he’ll simply, well, he’ll simply—

His brain just said “eat it”. How would… eating the moon even work? Is that a thing people can do? Is that a thing they can do now? It’s probably not something most people can do, but for them, is it something that…

Not the point! The point is, they have a plan now. They’d worked it out with Cub. Scar’s sure it’ll go fine! Or, he’s sure they’ll try, and they’ll try, and it’s hard for him to worry when he knows that a few people he knows are waiting for him at the end of the line connected to one last toy rocket, the same cord Iskall had used to safely connect him back to the surface. Now, it’s going to be a guide. A path to the surface again, where they’ll find… whatever happens next.

Scar turns to the others. “Well, it appears that your Swaggon-certified moon-escape journey will shortly come to an end. We here at the Swaggon Corporation hope that you all had a wonderful journey, and that you will rate us five stars for all of your future space-travel needs.”

“Zero out of ten, I turned into a monster,” Grian says.

“Um, yes, I don’t think I can call this… good?” Mumbo says.

“Will the Swaggon even exist after we get there?” Pearl asks.

“I give you 2.5 stars,” Impulse says.

“Good enough!” Scar says brightly, moving on immediately. “Now, remember to follow the line out of the void for as far as you can go, and if we don’t make it all the way, to tug on the cord so we can figure out where to go from there. But, ideally—”

“Scar, we’ve gone over this six times,” Impulse says.

“Yeah,” Scar says, “but I’m nervous!”

“Explaining it again isn’t making me less nervous, personally,” Impulse says.

“…I just want to make sure we all know,” Scar says. “Before we leave. I don’t know. It feels weird! I just wanted—I thought a good theme park safety speech would help me feel better.”

“Did it?”

Scar looks up. There’s no curvature in the void, and technically, nothing to stop them from seeing infinitely. That’s part of what terrifies him about the void: the fact he can look through it infinitely, and there’s nothing that should block his vision, at yet, there’s clearly some distance at which everything grows invisible, or too small to comprehend. The fact that he can’t tell how long it goes, can’t tell how far away anything is, but everything is also totally clear. Or, it should be.

The simple cord they’re meant to be following to out of the void, to where Cub and Iskall and Stress are, to where the end of the nightmare is—it vanishes into the void. He can’t see where the other end is.

“Oh, it totally did,” Scar lies. “Made me feel a lot better.”

“I’m glad that theme park helped make you feel better then,” Grian mutters. “Absolutely makes me feel better. Definitely.”

“I’m very glad for that, Grian!” Scar says, valiantly ignoring Grian’s sarcasm. He’s sure it didn’t actually mean anything! Grian acts all sarcastic all the time, after all, and that doesn’t mean Grian’s upset! Normally it just means Grian will get a little stabby later. And they can’t get stabby right now! Probably. Grian doesn’t have a knife. Or a sword. Or general stabby instruments.

“Why don’t we just go?” asks Pearl.

“I mean,” Scar says. “I. I guess we do ought to just go, shouldn’t we. You’re right, Pearl.”

He stares up the cord again. It leads further and further up into the void. Towards leaving. Towards getting out of here. He’s just got to… go. Pearl’s right. They just have to… he’s just going to…

“No time better to start, then!” It’s something said with far more confidence than Scar feels. It’s true, though. They just have to go. They’re only supposed to signal if something goes wrong. There’s no reason to signal when they start. Scar keeps on staring. They all keep on staring, he thinks, because he doesn’t see anyone else move, either. It’s still just all five of them, staring at the cord that leads out, and not taking it, and really Scar’s feeling a lot less bad about it now that he’s not the only one who isn’t able to bring himself to leave.

“Well,” Pearl says.

“Yeah,” Scar says.

“Um. We really ought to…” Mumbo says.

“Yeah,” Scar agrees, and they still don’t move.

“This is ridiculous!” Grian says. “We’ve spent months waiting to leave! Months! We’ve argued about it! If I’m stuck down here with you all because we’re too scared to follow a rope, I’m going to… I’m going to tell Mumbo to kill all of you.”

“Rude,” Mumbo mumbles.

“Well, you would,” Grian says.

“That is true. I would,” Mumbo says.

“My point is, I’m not dying down here because we’re all too afraid to find out what happens when we leave. Personally, I bet it’s nothing good, but that’s not going to stop me, now is it?”

“I mean,” Mumbo starts, but then stops. Grian huffs, and then he moves, slowly starting to follow the cord up. Scar’s not sure he’s supposed to have a beating heart anymore, but something races in him, seeing it happen. It’s heavy and makes him feel like he’s shaking. He stares at Grian as he continues slowly going up.

“Well?” Grian says, and Scar swallows, and Scar follows Grian upwards. For a moment, he looks behind him, as the others follow them both up. He looks around them.

Here is what the void looks like, as they start to climb up it: the same as it did when they were staying still, but from a different angle.

It makes Scar’s head hurt, somehow. He’s not sure he can describe how, though, so he keeps going. There is, he supposes, the choice of staying behind, but that’s not a choice he’d make alone, and he’s pretty sure it’s not much of a choice at all. Still. Everything is a choice, he thinks. He chose to get everyone into this whole situation in the first place, and now he’s choosing to leave it. Such is the way of things.

They go on upwards into the void.

For a time, they’re all quiet. Their heads might hurt too, Scar thinks. It would only make sense. The void continues to look the same, but from different angles, and with different cows. Scar decides to start thinking about them as they go up. From what they understand, they have a long ways anyway. He can entertain himself with the surroundings a little! It’s… well it’s not new, but it sort of—

“Are we there yet?”

“Grian, it can’t have been more than ten minutes.”

“Yeah. And are we there yet?”

“No, no we aren’t there yet.”

Ah. Grian and Mumbo break the silence.

“Well, why aren’t we there yet?” Grian asks.

“That’s not how time or space works,” Mumbo responds. “And, before you say anything: I am well aware time and space work differently now, even if I’m not sure they work differently in the way that you all keep on claiming. I’m aware we don’t, uh, move in a normal way. But I’m fairly certain we still follow most of the universal laws that—”

“I mean, do we though?” Impulse asks.

“Maybe! I don’t know! We aren’t there yet though!” Mumbo says.

“Can we be there yet? I need to use the bathroom,” Pearl says.

“Oh, just go in your suit,” Scar says cheerfully.

“What do you mean you need to use the bathroom?” Mumbo asks. “None of us have—you know, that’s an existential crisis to have later, actually. My point is that no, you don’t.”

“I’m bored and I need to go. Are we there yet?” Pearl says.

“Are we there yet,” Grian responds.

“Are were there yet?”

“Are were there yet?”

“Are we—”

“The moment I have my capacity to murder you in a way I know you will respawn from, oh, oh buddy, oh pals, you won’t like what’s coming.”

Scar thinks for a moment. “Is what’s coming being there yet? Because—”

Mumbo makes a wonderfully strangled sound.

“Aren’t you technically in the lead?” Impulse asks Scar.

“I’m so glad you asked! While the Swaggon Corporation takes limited liability for what happens to you on your journey safely to the next season, I also have no idea what I’m doing at this point and, frankly, would be stunned if you chose to follow me in any way, shape, or form! So, you know, as I am saying: are you there yet?”

“Scar, your days? They’re numbered!” Mumbo says. It’s definitely a threat. It’s probably even threatening? However, even though Scar knows for certain Mumbo will go through with it, it’s just really, really hard to take Mumbo as threatening. It’s not Mumbo’s fault! His voice is just so… so Mumbo, you know?

Scar laughs.

“Are they numbered in how far it is to be there?”

Scar’s proud of Mumbo’s self-control. Mumbo does not immediately start trying to strangle Scar. That is, frankly, better than he’d thought Mumbo would do, considering.

“You do seem like the person who would know,” Pearl says.

Mumbo makes another very wonderfully strangled sound. They keep on climbing upwards, and nothing seems to change, and the world around them stays the same, generally, and Scar knows, intellectually, that the line they’re following has to go somewhere.

“if I knew if we were there yet I would tell you and you wouldn’t have to ask?” Mumbo says. He sounds like he might cry.

“Are you… okay, Mumbo?” Grian asks.

“We aren’t there yet,” Mumbo says miserably.

“Well, you could have just said that,” Grian says. “That answers our question, you know.” This time, Mumbo does not have self control, and Scar watches Mumbo attempt to bite Grian. It doesn’t quite work, but it is impressive.

“You all are menaces who should not be allowed into polite society,” Impulse says, sounding more proud than anything else.

“Too late now. We’re heading to polite society again,” Pearl says. Impulse starts wheezing. “W. What? That wasn’t the joke, Impulse.”

“The hermits. Polite society. You’re implying the hermits are polite society. You’ve been here a season, Pearl, and you’re implying that—”

“Well, I had no way to know if it was just us, now did I? Or, well. I guess I knew Gem was hardly polite society. And Keralis did help me steal from Bdubs just constantly. And, there was the ravagers Tango dropped on us, and I’d hardly call those goats polite, and… hm. You know, you’re right. It’s a good thing there’s no polite society for us to go back to, then, because we would absolutely destroy any polite society foolish enough to let us in,” Pearl reasons, and Impulse wheezes harder with every word.

“I mean, that isn’t fair. I’m sure there are some hermits capable of being polite. I think Xisuma would cry if someone told him he had to be rude, actually,” Grian says.

“We should get Xisuma to say fuck,” Pearl says, and Scar gasps alongside everyone else.

“PEARL!” Scar says.

“Your family-friendliness,” Mumbo says. “Pearl, you can’t just do that.”

“Also Xisuma already says fuck,” Impulse says.

“IMPULSE!” Grian says. “I have to kill both of you now. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that I have to assassinate anyone who swears in my general vicinity.”

“Entirely understandable,” Impulse says. “I submit myself to your—”

Impulse cuts himself off as, suddenly, they all feel heavier. Scar looks—well, he supposes up, if the void is down. He’s been thinking of it as up. He supposes it must be. He sees something now. There’s something at the end of the line. They’re going somewhere. They’re…

“Well,” Grian says, suddenly far more breathless.

“Well,” agrees Scar.

“I’d say we might be there yet,” Mumbo says, and they stare up the cord as it heads upwards, upwards into a light.

“All we have to do is take it,” Scar says. “All we have to do is…”

They go.

It doesn’t take long for the strange sense of pressure to almost hurt. It hurts Scar in the way that he would hurt, he realizes, when he ends up laid down on his back, and he can’t quite get his chest to move right to breathe like that. But it’s not just that, either. The whole world feels heavy on his shoulders, suddenly, even though he doesn’t have shoulders, and it doesn’t feel heavy. Something’s eating at his head, he thinks. Something’s chewing the space between his ears.

And the emptiness says: are you sure you’re meant to leave here?

And the emptiness says: Iskall already knows you’re a monster.

And the emptiness says: isn’t the same thing you’ve always known easier?

And Scar says to himself: well, not alone it isn’t. Besides, he’s all about going off into that great new adventure! Seeing new places! Building new things—he can’t do that here, now can he?

And the emptiness says: aren’t you hungry?

And Scar says to himself: aren’t I always? Maybe not in the way you mean. Maybe not in that way. But, you know, people forget how he’s ambitious, sometimes. It gets lost in the rest of him! Not that he minds, but, you see, he’s ambitious. And he’s remembering that now. So, yeah, sure, he’s hungry.

And maybe the void laughs at him at that, and maybe something keeps on chewing on the inside of his head, and he’s dizzy and strange, but it doesn’t really matter, because everyone else is coming with him, and when he looks up he sees light.

The world presses even harder against Scar. It’s across the bridge of his nose now, and in his chest, and in body parts he doesn’t have. Technically, he thinks, he doesn’t have any body parts anymore, but it’s strange feeling pain in parts of himself he hadn’t conceptualized. Maybe he should put it like—it hurts, somewhere to his left, and it hurts, somewhere below him. Yes; that’s the easiest way to describe how it’s getting harder and harder to move again, like it hurts on some detached part of him off to the side, except he knows its a part of himself, too.

(And he is hungry. The emptiness wasn’t lying. But there’s more than one kind of hunger, and…)

DO YOU THINK THAT IF WE KEEP GOING FORWARD, WE’LL BE THERE? I SEE LIGHT AHEAD. I SEE SHAPES, Scar doesn’t say.

IT HURTS, Pearl doesn’t say back.

I KNOW IT HURTS, BUT IF I HAVE TO STAY HERE LONGER THAN I HAVE TO… Grian doesn’t say.

IT HURTS, THOUGH. SHE’S RIGHT. IT HURTS, Mumbo doesn’t say.

I KNOW. BUT WE HAVE TO KEEP GOING, Impulse doesn’t say, and that’s all there is to the matter.

Follow the cord. Scar feels less Scar-shaped. He feels less like he can bring himself to care if he’s Scar-shaped. He feels like emptiness and everything shaped, like he’s falling apart. It gets hard to focus. The emptiness isn’t talking to him, now. Now, he’s remembering that he is the emptiness, and that he belongs there, as a piece of it, and it hurts it hurts it hurts. Distantly, Scar remembers: right, this is probably why they had the contingency to pull the line and send messages to figure out what happens next. But Scar, he feels the others next to him, and even though he’s burning and not entirely certain he’s Scar, he feels them keep on moving.

Just keep following. Just keep following. Just keep—

Until it finally gets unbearable.

Scar looks up again and sees the bottoms of what look like end islands. Everything hurts, and if he reaches any further, it hurts too much to even think. But—there are the bottom of end islands. If he just reaches—reaches—reaches—

Everything goes—not. And then it swims back into focus and he can’t reach any further.

He stares at it a long while. He doesn’t speak.

“You know, I’m pretty sure the thing we can’t reach past is the edge of the void,” Impulse finally says.

“Oh. That makes sense,” Mumbo says, and it sounds a little bit like despair.

One of them turns to the cord and slowly, deliberately, tugs on it. All five of them look at the solid land that they can’t quite reach past, can’t quite break through the surface to get to.

“Well. This sucks,” Grian says, and suddenly, Scar finds himself laughing, right up until he sees Cub and Iskall look over the edge and start shouting something. They’re too far away to hear, though, so Scar just looks at them, and wonders about gaps that are too hard to cross.

Chapter Text

Here’s the funny thing about the end of the story, Impulse will explain later, to a shaking Tango and a quiet Zedaph: it goes about the same as the beginning does, and in a lot of ways, that’s a little boring, isn’t it? A story that starts with five people falling into the void, and unable to leave, and making up games, it ends like that too; five people in the void, and unable to leave, and making up games. Impulse will explain how he’s not sure how to explain what happens next, or why it was any different. They hadn’t made it yet, and there was no guarantee they’d make it further. Impulse will explain, though, that it was different, because—

Iskall will tell the story like this when Mumbo asks, Iskall dangling his legs off the edge of a platform he, Stress, and Cub had built to the very edge of the void, the limit to where they could build. Iskall and Stress had been away when the moon fell, and that’s—Iskall clarifies he doesn’t want to talk about that, about going to finally return to Hermitcraft after a long time away and finding nothing left, of desperately trying to find someone, anyone in the rubble, of contacting Stress and—he doesn’t really say what he did, but it’s fairly easy to extrapolate. Of spending a long time, thinking they were alone. Of trying to make a hub world with Iskall’s admin strength, something about gods and blood sacrifice and Tenos being for the knowing and the lucky and finding Cub, somehow, in the nothing. Iskall gets brighter when he tells this part. He will smile, for the first time he smiles while telling the story, when he explains them finding someone. And he will explain, how that was different, because—

Grian will roll his eyes, exasperated, as he admits he let them get him playing Uno again. He did his best to try to strangle Stress after the third time in a row she won, even though he couldn’t actually properly reach out of the void through the void, and didn’t want to eat her through the pain or the touching or whatever he’d done to Iskall. She’d just laughed, though, and told him that he was being cheeky, and Grian had felt something else. He will explain how he looks like a monster now, and knows it, but it’s a bit different, because—

The thing about not being able to leave, Scar says quietly, is that they really didn’t know what would happen if someone tried to force them. Would the world break first? Would they? Stress said something about Velara, and mercy, and things that are not kind but are mercy all the same, and finding an answer. Scar says something about not sacrificing more of themselves. Mumbo says something about not exactly minding sacrifices, all things considered, being a void and all. Sacrifices actually seem pretty cool.

Here in the story, Scar clarifies: no sacrifices you do not want to. However, the elven cookie empire appreciates sacrifices!

This is normally the point in the story people start backing away from Scar. He used to be good at getting people to hand over random sacrifices too. It must be the way his teeth are still something terrible and unsettling. Oh well. He’ll regroup. It’s different now, because—

Pearl will tell the story like this, or maybe not so much tell the story as explain the important parts: even if they couldn’t quite reach all the way out of the void, and the people who’d found them couldn’t quite reach back into it properly, they’d still built a platform to the line between them, and they reached out towards the people on the platform. Pearl, the way she tells it to Gem, talks a lot less about the things they did, and a lot more about the way it felt. The way she wasn’t sure she remembered how to type normally when there was a loud blaring from their communicators. A message from the void, repeated three times, pause, repeated three times, pause, from Xisuma. (Everyone, Pearl says, got that message, right? Gem nods eagerly. They all had, wherever they were, and Pearl will get that story out of Gem later. But this story is for her.) And the energy in the room, it became different, because—

The plan was simple. Mumbo will be very clear about this. The plan was simple. They could not leave on their own, but if they got an admin to do a mass-teleport, they’d be forced onto the surface of the overworld. What would happen from there, they—well to tell the truth, Mumbo admits, they still don’t really know? All of the consequences, he means. He got really sick, he explains self-deprecatingly. The others didn’t get as sick because they didn’t have the same sort of shapeshifter’s shock that he has, but he—well, you know. No, don’t blame yourself, Grian, that’s stupid, all of them were there when they made that plan, this isn’t your fault, it’s different because—

Scar will flip over his communicator and silently hand it to Doc, who will look at the photo on it and look back at Scar and grimace.

“Now that I know what I’m actually looking at—”

“It didn’t really fix itself,” Scar will say. “Once you know what you’re looking at—I hadn’t actually seen a photo until Cub took that. But, you know, I am pretty aware it’s more easily seen, once you know you shouldn’t be seeing. You know. Me.”

“…that sounds…”

“Probably not as bad as my sock puppet, honestly?”

“That thing was an abomination against nature, man!”

“No, no, this is different, because—”

“So that’s just how it ends?” Tango will ask Impulse. “What’s the resolution, man? Do you get fixed?”

Impulse will think about it. He will shrug. He’ll say: “Did you?”

Tango doesn’t answer that. There’s no answering that. It’s different, sure, but it’s not at al different, because—

“That’s why I’m wearing gloves,” Pearl tells Gem. “Also why I haven’t really been hugging you.”

“You’re a coward,” Gem says cheerfully, “and if you do eat me or whatever, I’ll respawn. Come here.”

Pearl wants to tell her that it’s different because—

Because—

Impulse will say they never left entirely. There’s no one to disprove it.

These are all things that will happen later. These are the ways that everyone involved attempts to tell the story, afterwards, when it works. They have Xisuma force teleport them to spawn with everyone else, and it nearly goes horribly wrong, but it works, because the world does not give them a choice but to have it work. They can’t get back to the void again from where they were teleported. So, their bodies are forced to adapt. And it doesn’t quite work, in its totality, just like the platform that had been built to the void while they waited for Xisuma to communicate hadn’t quite worked, like how if you look at them out of the corner of your eye their faces don’t work, but it’s different, because—

Here is what happens now.

Scar laughs. “It’s exactly the same, in a way, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“To get here, we jumped through a hole in the world into the unknown. To leave, we leap into the world, but it’s unknown what happens next. Also, the lever’s going to be hit by surprise, and you’re all probably going to yell at me. It’s exactly the same.”

“You idiot,” Grian says, “it’s different, because—”

Everything goes white, and they head into the rest of their lives.