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Again?
And with a start of his lungs, a hitch of the oxygen clawing its way up his throat, Grian thuds into the grass and stares at the blue, swirling sky above him. His chest heaves and his mouth hangs open. It takes far too long for the bubble of overlapping chatter to reach him; he scrambles to his feet within a heartbeat and bounds towards the commotion.
(He crushes countless viridian blades beneath his soles. Behind him, chlorophyll seeps into the earth like clotted blood oozing from a cut.)
There is no circle of bedrock, this time. Nor a basic enchanting setup. Grian is struck by the notion of how he remembers, he remembers, he—
Pressing his palms to his face, digging his thumbs into the bulbous hollows of his eye sockets, Grian gives a huff of annoyance.
That was oak, he tells himself. This is birch. The eyes carved into the tree trunks stare out at him, swivelling to follow his spine as he still pads through the grass that whips his ankles and leaves thin, red welts on otherwise pale flesh.
( Third chance?, the birches whisper amongst themselves, bark cracking into a dust-filled, lichenous leer where they think he cannot see.)
And Grian plasters a smile on his face that is somehow not his own, stretching and splitting the skin on his lips, and hails the others from where they stand atop the hill.
Grian knows this feeling, the soul-deep tug of bone and sinew that reaches into his chest and yanks with the pull of the Void; he cannot feel the tears stream down his cheeks as his knees buckle beneath him, as Tango and Scott press shanks of mutton into his hands and he digs into them like a wild animal, fighting the deep pangs of agony writhing beneath his skin.
Has this happened before? he asks the world, and yet he knows the answer. The pain is familiar. The love that transcends worlds is more familiar still. And even then, as Grian slumps to the ground, limbs twitching and contorting, nails gouging into the meat and the bone in his palms, he sees a face scoured in the back of his mind as close as his own reflection.
I know you, he insists, but from his throat there only spills a bloody scream.
The canary’s song is by far the sweetest. The rending scratch and claw of the air in his lungs in a final, frantic grasp at life— even more so.
Even as his feet cling to the earth and his heart hammers in his jawbone, the quintessence of adrenaline-fuelled existence as the prey and the weakling and the sacrifice for the greater good, Jimmy is struck by the shockwave of an explosion he is nowhere near, rippling from his core outwards and turning his blood to ice.
He barely has time to register the impact before a shard of invisible shrapnel punctures his spinal cord, slamming him into the cold, hard abyss of respawn.
The sun is brighter than the rags of his wings, merely shreds of translucent flesh and bone hanging from the muscle of his shoulder blades. The earth is cold and damp beneath his cheek. He awakes with the ghosts of agony twisting through every nerve of his body, and he locks eyes with Tango — equally panting, crouched and hunched and vulnerable in the swishing, scratchy grass.
He offers Tango a hand. When Tango reaches back, his hands are faintly scarred with blisters and he bears the caustic, sulphuric reek of gunpowder.
He bears no grudge. A life has been torn from his soul, their souls, and crushed to bleed yellow between the scaled, too-sharp hands of the beings above.
Canary, canary, why do you sing?
Jimmy twists his head to the clouds. Tango does not flinch. Jimmy puts it down to residual ear trauma from the blast, and begins the slow, agonising descent to the riverbank, knees burning with the pain from an injury that is not his own.
Again?
Empty crowd, full of faces he does not recognise. None match the shadow lurking within his consciousness, the very bind between their spirits, a harmony to transcend even the stars.
He’s not here.
He must be. Try harder.
And as the hope in Grian’s chest extinguishes itself and dies, the face with a quirked smile and scars marring his skin like spilt oil materialises at the edge of the throng. Without thinking Grian hurls himself into Scar’s chest, warm, heavy arms wrapping around his shoulders, avoiding the stump of his one, paralysed wing as the muscles of the other quiver and writhe under some intense emotion Grian cannot care to name.
I’m here, is all he thinks, and for the briefest of moments, their souls entwine with the light of a dying star.