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“I’m gonna name you Ted,” he cheerfully says. The teddy bear looks up at him with big, shiny button eyes, and does not say anything.
Dinner – a whisper of a word that might as well not have existed in the first place.
“Sure, you can call me that.” Sweat gathers at the base of his neck, despite the freezing air. When he turns to leave the facility, he can feel its gaze burning into his back.
Just a pilomotor reflex, he tells himself. Nothing to worry about, not when he was still standing and alive.
The teddy follows after him placidly.
***
The outpost is made of wood, still unfinished and left open to the sky. The only thing of note is the crafting table placed on the dirt. Branzy opens the door with a flourish anyway, arms spread out in a manner akin to a circus ringmaster.
“This is your new home! You’ll be safe here,” he tells Ted, voice filled with a confidence he doesn’t really feel. Ted stares at him blankly. It looks at the crafting table, at the sky and then back at Branzy – there’s no roof.
“Yeah, I know.” Branzy sighs. He really needed to work on that. Not like there were other things to worry about, like the zombie hordes and trying to capture SCPs and literally everything out there trying to kill him.
No pressure at all.
Moonlight bleeds through the clouds like a watercolor. It takes him another hour to fill in the roof, keeping up a steady, one-sided conversation with Ted. He’s pretty sure all the noise he’s making is getting the attention of more zombies, but Ted sits there on the dirt, grass rustling when it fidgets, turning its face this way and that but most importantly listening.
His throat is dry. He keeps talking, because Ted does not try to kill him and honestly the bar is on the floor but it’s been a while since he’s seen a somewhat friendly face. Branzy’s glad for the company.
Wood chips fall into the dirt as he works, faintly visible in the dim light. Ted pokes at a piece to it, curiosity emanating from its’ features. Branzy pauses in his rambling. “Careful, those can hurt if you press too hard on them.”
Ted wisely moves its paw away. The next time Branzy glances at it, most of the wood chips around it are gone.
When he finally settles in for the night, the outpost is mostly secure and a furnace has been set up in place next to the crafting table. Ted curls up next to him when he lies down, a small spot of warmth right next to his ribcage.
***
There was only so much pent up anxiety and terror you could run on before your brain gives in – enough. At some point the fear melts into becoming a part of him, a second pulse superimposed over his movements.
He’s laughing, two octaves higher than his usual pitch and on the verge of hysterical. Souli laughs along with him, frantically trying to shove the Old Man into the cell. The roof rots under its feet, the material groaning and cracking when it stays still for too long. “Souli come on, just a bit closer-”
“ Yes!” Souli exclaims, eyes bright in the firelight. Branzy’s still laughing when they knock their shoulders together in celebration, glee and fear alike wracking their frames.
He kneels next to the edge of the hole to patch it over, carefully breaking off the corroded pieces and fitting in newer ones. Souli hovers next to him, keeping an eye out for monsters.
“Oh, Ted is going to be upset when it hears about this,” Branzy mutters. The teddy bear had an unfortunate preoccupation with roofs, which wasn’t all that surprising considering the state the outpost used to be in.
Souli looks over at him curiously. “Who’s Ted?”
And that’s how Branzy ends up leading Souli to the outpost. He knocks twice on the door before opening it, wincing slightly at the sudden influx of light from the torches. It’s still sparsely decorated, comfort given up in place of security.
Ted looks up from where its sitting at the slab of oak which functions as a table, paw curled around a piece of wool. Branzy’s not sure where it got that from, since all the sheep around here were less wool and more teeth.
He smiles anyway, shelving that line of thought for later. “Hi Ted! This is Souli,” he gestures at the man frozen next to him, “my friend.”
Ted tilts its head. Hello .
Silence fills the room, only broken up by the sound of a zombie groaning in the distance. Branzy fidgets with the sword at his hip. He elbows Souli, “Aren’t you gonna say hello?”
Souli blinks at him. “What?”
“Ted said hi to you. It’s rude not to say hi back.”
“I– Alright. Hello?” he says uncertainly, hand lifted up in a half-wave.
Right. So this isn’t awkward. Ted unceremoniously gets up from its spot and leaves out through the back. There’s a brief glimpse of the beginnings of a vegetable garden – and the door swings shut behind it.
“...Well, I don’t think Ted likes you very much.”
“I think I’m okay with that.” Souli clears his throat. “Did Rek meet …it?”
“No, we didn’t have time before he, uh,” Branzy swallows. “I’m pretty sure he would’ve liked Ted though. It’s a little bit sarcastic, but you know, it’s a friendly guy.”
“That– that thing is cursed, Branzy! Cursed. ”
Branzy laughs. “I mean, sure, but what’s the worst thing a cursed teddy bear could do?”
***
He goes back to the Nether only once after Rekrap’s death, only because he’s tired and doesn’t want to put in the effort to hike back all the way to the cells. There are monsters and death lurking around every corner, but then again, it’s pretty much the same way in the Overworld. He’d take it if it meant less walking.
There are bones in the Nether. They curve up and out of the earth, a facsimile of a rib cage left out in the blistering heat. He runs a hand gingerly over the surface of it; it’s the same surface heat of everything that thrives in the Nether, but running deeper than that – cold. Unsettlingly cold.
A bone deep cold, he snickers, because the only one around to appreciate his poorly timed jokes was just himself.
The bones are cold and warm, too hard and too brittle all at once. Under his hands, the groves fit into place like fingertips. He breaks off a piece that’s jutting out of place – a little souvenir for Teddy, he thinks.
The Nether is an enclosed space – no moonlight, not in the way he’d expect of the Overworld – but the light from the flowing lava glints off the bones, protruding structures turning into a vision of antlers in the shimmering heat.
He’s standing in the center of a site of destruction. Something died here. The fear isn’t in the death – it’s in the knowing , that something was there. Something was here once, and now there’s barely anything left of it, nothing left to remember it by.
It feels like a warning.
Then a ghast tries to set him on fire, and Branzy’s too busy screaming and sprinting for the portal to think too closely about what it could mean.
***
The few villages stubbornly clinging to life even with the world’s harsh conditions have a kind of tenacity to them that Branzy admires – though not enough to replicate. He’s telling Teddy about them, about the villagers he’d met and lost along the way, in between smelting iron and making more tools.
“-and we had to get Chief to pick us up – not like that, Teddy, don’t look at me like-”
He stops, looking down at the ingots in his hands. The furnace crackles in front him, a soothing white noise. He counts the iron ingots, and counts them again.
“Ted, do you know where I left the rest of the iron?”
A moment of quiet. No, Teddy says sleepily. It’s curled up around his knee, facing the furnace. The flames throw up odd patterns of shadows on its features, twisting and flickering.
There’s a loud screech from outside, too close to the outpost – Branzy’s reaching for his bow well before the sound fades. It keeps ringing in his ears for a long while afterwards. He shakes his head, looking back down at Teddy.
“Must be nice,” he muses, “being a stuffed toy. You wouldn’t have to worry about much.”
Other than being ripped to shreds.
“Most humans have to worry about that too.”
Oh, well then. Teddy’s stitches gleam in the light. I’d give you the shiniest buttons for eyes, the teddy bear tells him, and Branzy grins.
“Aw, thanks Ted.”
***
He tracks down and captures Shy Guy after a grueling three days of digging, running for his life, and almost getting blown up.
Multiple times. If it wasn’t necessary for saving the world and bringing the sun back to the land et cetera, he’d have just given up and let the dirt claim him by now.
When Branzy opens the book to check the name of the last SCP, he’s heavily reconsidering the idea.
The letters are bold, the ink heavy and wet against his fingertips: SCP 1084. A part of him – who’d used and lost multiple friends over the course of around eighty days, the part that stays awake at night too nervous to sleep – is expecting it.
The rest of him just aches.
Still, he has work to do. Branzy shakes his head, neatly placing his conflicting emotions into a box at the back of his mind. When he gets up and turns to head to the outpost, his knuckles are white around the hilt of his sword.
“Okay Teddy,” he announces, bursting into the room with the same flair for dramatics he’d shown countless nights ago, “this is kinda awkward, but-”
The usual, then.
“I try to introduce you to my friends one time and this is what I get? You need friends other than me, Ted.”
Teddy rolls over, throwing a paw over its face in a way that was familiar. It’s endearing, an action that Branzy knows was picked up from himself. He firmly stamps that thought down.
“We’re gonna stay here until you do something evil, Teddy.” Branzy says, moving to block the exits with the spare materials left in his inventory. “...I don’t want to put one of my friends into a cell without actually making sure you’re an evil SCP trying to kill me.”
(I am, it tells him. I am, it keeps telling him. I am – like a warning, and his heart aches so all he can do is pretend he doesn’t hear it.)
***
The week passes by excruciatingly slowly. Being in constant, close quarters with someone for extended periods of time, even if the other person was a cursed teddy bear was enough to set his teeth on edge.
It’s only when they get to the point of snapping at each other, that Branzy decides a break is in order.
He leaves to circle the perimeter after repeatedly reassuring Teddy that he’d be back soon – “Just ten minutes, don’t do anything evil without me around to see it-” stars, just LEAVE – and spends half of those ten minutes trying to clear out a horde of monsters. Despite the number of times he’d seen the giant spiders and glimpses of the grue, it still manages to startle him before the fight instinct kicks in.
His sword drips a trail of gore behind him when he jogs back. It’s brighter out today, which is the only reason why he manages to catch the glint of metal from the fenced area behind the outpost.
“Teddy?” he calls out. Twenty blocks, ten–
And Branzy halts to a stop at the sight of the creatures standing next to their vegetable garden.
Amalgamations of iron and wood, layered with rotten flesh and bits of dyed wool peeking out from where the seams are loose. It’s a stark contrast to Teddy’s soft fabrics.
Teddy’s eyes gleam when it looks up at Branzy.
Hello, Dinner.
“...This isn't exactly what I meant by, 'making friends.'”
One of the creatures shrieks, lunging over the fence and towards Branzy’s face with a surprising amount of ferocity for something that was barely a block tall. He yells, swinging his sword on instinct – it hits the side of the creature with a noise that makes his teeth hurt.
He kicks at it, hissing when the side of his foot hits the iron pieces embedded into the rotting flesh. Still, the force is enough to knock it away from him, rolling down and away from the outpost. Branzy turns, throwing a boat down with his other hand.
“Get in the boat!”
You won’t take me alive! Teddy spits back at him, right before Branzy reaches over the fence – almost getting his fingers bitten off by the remaining amalgamation – picks it up under its arms and bolts towards the facility.
There’s a quiet dang it audible from the bundle in his arms as he sprints. Despite himself, Branzy laughs.
***
The facility is overrun with monsters. He’s panting, shaking as he runs through the hallways, terror and every survival instinct instilled in his bones shrieking at him, throwing up every single alarm in an effort to keep him alive.
“We got this, we got this-” he ducks under the arm of a creature made of what looked to be an excessive amount of bones, slamming the door shut behind him and barely stopping for breath before moving on to the next room.
The next room, and the next, and he doesn’t have the air to reply to Teddy’s mumbled, my fluff is wet . The cells are so, so close – Branzy grits his teeth when a zombie lets out a screech from behind him and keeps running.
The walls change from the white of the facility to the darker gray of the holding area. He runs past the Doctor, the Old Man, Bigfoot, and there – Shy Guy, and the empty holding cell next to it.
He places Teddy on the floor of the cell – gently, despite everything – and goes through the motions like clockwork; closing the trapdoor, blocking the exit, leaving the cell and –
The final piece of cobblestone covers up the entrance, and something in the world clicks into place.
“I see daylight,” he breathes, and Teddy is cold and silent from behind the walls, “I see daylight.”
Branzy stands there, breaths still shallow. His eyes are stinging. When he covers his face with his hands, he can feel tears drip on his palms.
The sun rises. There’s no one left in the world to share his victory with.