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Grian is back at Magical Mountain again.
It's silly. He has no reason to be here, nothing to trade for (he already got his yellow life back), no business with the mountain's resident wizard. And yet here he is for the third time this week, sitting perched on the wizard-hat roof, legs swinging idly as the sun sinks slowly in the sky.
He's not sure why he keeps coming back. It might have something to do with Scar sitting beside him.
Scar, who he killed and killed for, who he bled beside, who he built a home for, who he loved. Who he beat to death with his fists and then woke up in a new world pretending it never happened.
Yes, Grian knows it's silly.
But here's the thing: every time he's shown up here with some flimsy excuse, Scar's merely opened the door wider and offered him tea.
There's some comfort in that, he thinks. He might be continually drawn to this place, but Scar continually lets him in. In this, at least, they're agreed.
The world is quiet up here: no crickets chirping in the trees, no owls calling into the evening air. Just the wind and the gentle thrum of their own heartbeats. Something about it has him softening, letting his guard down.
He sneaks a glance to his left. Scar's let the wind blow his hood down so it's hanging loose around his neck, face bared to the sun and hair ruffled by the wind. He looks...different, in this game. More worn-down. Older. And still, he's beautiful.
His eyes, like his current life, are yellow.
Grian doesn't mean to speak, but the words beg to slip out and he doesn't try all that hard to stop them.
"Your eyes are brown," he says.
"Huh?"
Grian looks resolutely forward, though he can feel Scar looking at him. "When they're not...green, or yellow, or red. Your eyes are brown."
There's a long silence, but it's not tense and it's not uncomfortable. Scar is thinking. Grian knows he probably has a hundred questions.
What he settles on is this: "You looked?"
Ah.
Not how could you tell? Not what does that mean, for all of us trapped in this game? No; he's asking you cared enough to notice?
Yes, Grian wants to say. I cared. I cared too much. I stared at your blank face in the sand and I shut your eyes when I couldn't take it anymore. I buried you next to Pizza and then I walked right off a cliff with the naive hope that i might see you again.
But in this world, he and Scar are not lovers. They are not friends. They're hardly even allies.
And maybe he's bold enough, desperate enough to share this one vulnerable fact—but he doesn't think he can bare to talk about what happened after the game ended. After he won.
He's already too dangerously close to peeling back open an old wound, something that never healed completely but had at least stopped bleeding. If he keeps going any further he might do something he regrets. Like joining him. Like killing him. Like kissing him.
So he doesn't say all that. Instead he shrugs, and hopes Scar doesn't still know how to read his every movement (not very likely).
"Just. Thought you should know, I guess." It's a lie, and not even a good one. Grian is the one who needs him to know.
The wind whistles over the jagged mountain rocks and echoes emptily around them. It sounded like that in the desert, too.
Here they are again, he thinks. They always come back here.
Scar nods slowly, still watching him with an odd look on his face and the wrong color eyes. "Thanks, Grian."
Thanks. Thank you for staying with me. Thank you for fighting for me. Thank you for killing me, so that I don't have to be the one to live with that guilt.
Grian doesn't reply. He's too busy picturing brown eyes.
-
Later it turns out that that was Grian's last time at Magical Mountain.
Two weeks after the two of them sat peacefully together watching the sunset, Scar is red again. A week after that, he's dead. Dead by Grian's hand, Grian's blade, Grian's heart.
This time, he doesn't look at the body long enough to watch the red fade.