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Grian has screamed so many times in this series.
No! when he found out Scar was his soulmate, a drawn-out whine like a petulant child.
Scar, no! so many times, as he watched his soulmate jump off the tower and land on his feet, as he watched him fall into a pit of mobs, as his heart dropped time and time again.
Yes! a triumphant cry as Ren ran under his dripstone, skewered at Grian’s hand while the elusive high of bloodlust and victory that came with a kill as a red burst through his heart.
It is fitting, he thinks, that he dies to a scream. As his lungs crumple and his eardrums burst, there’s only one thing he can think of (besides the pain, the pain that he has—unintentionally—bestowed upon Scar) is that he’s sorry. He’s sorry that he never told Scar that he’s sorry. He’s sorry about Big B, sorry that he was responsible for his lost lives, sorry that as much as he complained about Scar’s recklessness, it’s Grian who is dying. It’s Grian who chose Big B over Scar. It’s Grian, who has tried so hard to keep this from happening and who has failed most spectacularly.
Grian has learned from these experiences. His first life—his true first life, the one with a desert a a llama and Scar—taught him that if you don’t think you can live without something, you should lose it as soon as possible. Then you’ll never have to see yourself fall apart. Scar was like that. Grian knows that Scar was like that, and yet the universe had a sense of irony and tied three knots between the two of them, binding them for three lives.
As his last breath leaves his lungs, Grian wishes he wasn’t alone.
Putting distance between him and Scar didn’t work. It failed, and not only did it fail in saving them, it failed in keeping either of them happy. He wishes Scar was here and that they were going down together, like two red lives on the top of a mountain.
He is so selfish for wanting that again, for wanting to die together, blood caked under his fingernails as he throws himself over Scar’s fallen body and over a cliff. Tangled, entwined, together.
Grian dies, and he is sorry, and he regrets things, and he wishes Scar was here to see him fall.
//
Scar is used to the quiet.
The vast majority of his time has been spent with himself and the Jellie pandas, murmuring jokes and laughing at them to pretend that he is not alone. There was silence in the first episode, when he wandered around before finally accepting that his soulmate either didn’t know or didn’t care. (It was the latter. That was painful.)
There was silence in long days at the panda reserve, and there was silence as he crept through the Deep Dark, lips pressed together because any word would set off the sensors. At the beginning of nearly every episode he has been alone in the silence, filling it with empty words and prattling on about how he should be finding Grian, who always has something better to be doing.
It is fitting that he sits on a horse, lazily babbling about his revenge and his plans to stay alive and make grand gestures, when his chest seizes up and he can hardly breathe, as if a wave of something has thrown his insides into disarray.
His shield goes up, but he knows that the danger is far away.
The only sound is his body hitting the ground as Scar struggles to continue, irrational fear bubbling and bursting through the surface as he wonders what has happened to Grian. His breaths are loud in the vacuum of sound, foreign to his own ears as his health bar goes down. He wants to scream something, anything, but he stays silent. He stays silent because no one can hear him, and if they could, he is not sure that anyone on this server would help him.
As his last breath leaves his lungs, Scar wishes he wasn’t alone.
Maybe if he’d confronted Grian earlier, begged him to drop Big B and stay. Maybe if he hadn’t stolen the enchanter, maybe if he’d done anything different, then perhaps Grian would have wanted him—or maybe not.
Maybe it was nothing that Scar could have done, because maybe the burden he brings to Grian is his simple existence. An obligation, that’s all Scar has been to him—from a creeper explosion to fists at the top of a mountain surrounded by cacti, to a stolen life and a lava moat, to a piece of dripstone and a lucky water bucket.
Grian is obligated to hang onto Scar, and he has made it widely known that he doesn’t want this. There’s no reason for Scar to believe that Grian is sorry, that Grian is rueful, that Grian cares for anything other than his own precious life.
But Scar forgives him nonetheless, on the off chance that somewhere, deep underground, Grian is whispering an apology as his lungs cave in from the pressure of a scream.