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The arrow through Bdubs’ chest is pinning him into the hill. The thorns of the wither rose are digging deeply into the skin of his palm, sending its poison through his bloodstream and making it very, very difficult for him to unclench his hand.
He remembers, distantly, someone showing him a moth pinned to a board inside of a small glass case, its wings stretched wide and curling at the ends as it was maintained in a state of stasis inside of its oxygen-sealed chamber.
He can't breathe. He tries to burn the remaining, quickly draining energy in his arms to push himself out of the grass and onto his knees, but the head of the arrow stays firmly hooked deep within in the soil and keeps him pathetically pinned in place. This isn't what was supposed to happen. This isn't what Etho told him would happen. With the rose digging into one hand and the ribbon from Lizzie's hair in the other, all he can think of through the soft buzzing behind his eyes is the fact that he completed his mission. He can go back and get the life Etho promised him, and they can make it to the end of the game together and win— that was the plan, and he intends to stick with it.
Every part of him feels hot—unbearably so, like every extremity is being melted off at once and he can do nothing but writhe in place as poison seeps through him, making him weaker and weaker and warm, too warm. He can hardly think through all of this heat, but he can hear Grian’s goading words running through his mind loud and clear, as if the man is perched just next to him and is gleefully parroting his past self in light of Bdubs’ failure. The words all swim together—the “you can’t trust him”s and the “he’s using you”s and the “he doesn’t care about you” that stopped Bdubs in his tracks—but that doesn’t make it any less understandable. He can feel Grian’s malice like how you can feel a pair of eyes locked on the back of your neck, and it chokes him more effectively than the blood in his lungs.
He needs not pay any mind to that, now. He’s completed his quest and all he has to do to reunite with Etho and get his promised life is to pick…himself…up…
Minutes of futile struggling pass, and with each second that slowly creeps forward, exhaustion gathers in the base of his consciousness and starts to crash over him in waves. Not once does the thought that he won’t be able to make it cross his mind, but he does start to panic a bit—what if Etho thinks he abandoned him? What if he thinks he gave up on the mission? He’s in the middle of nowhere, out in the open and yet too close to the border for anyone to have any reason to come over here; the group of reds he was with don’t seem to be coming to help him out—the bastards—and he, strangely, can’t seem to force any words out of his mouth no matter how hard he tries. Is this what being strangled feels like? An impossible shortage of air that coils around his brain and makes the world pulse, pressing like an invisible weight on the inside of his forehead? He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stand it for much longer—it’s kind of starting to hurt—but he’s so tired that his arms won’t even shift to start trying to push himself up again.
When Bdubs registers the fact that he can’t move his arms, several other things register at the exact same time. For one, how cold the air is. It’s strange, coming off of being unbearably hot and suddenly being bone-chillingly cold, but the breeze tousling his hair sends painful, biting feeling to the tips of his fingers and his ears, and the hole inside of his chest almost feels like it’s freezing over and spreading through the rest of his body. He also registers the sound the grass makes in this aforementioned breeze, a slow rustling on either side of him that sounds far more soothing than it should be.
Bdubs’ eyes droop shut for a moment. When the world goes completely dark, the last remnants of his functioning brain screams at him, and he realises with a bit of a start that something within him was trying to slip away in that moment, that his body is slowly shutting down and is not preparing to respawn, and that oh. I’m dying.
He swears. Through the blood coming from the corner of his mouth and the pressure in his head and lungs, he manages to drop a swear, and everything comes crashing down on him at once and he lets his head drop. He tries to push himself one more time but can’t even get his hands to lay flat on the ground, so he lets his arms rest on either side of him, fist still curled tightly around the wither rose but letting Lizzie’s ribbon fall into the grass in a heap. He doesn’t want to die, of course, but he doesn’t want to experience what happens when this wound becomes painful again now that the adrenaline has started to wane.
He lets his eyes slip closed. Better to let it pass quickly instead of struggle and suffer—not that he can make those sorts of logical deductions as of right now, but his instinct to let the cold take him does quite enough of the deducing for him.
There is silence for a while. He has to admit, dying in a field surrounded by bugs and the wind and the grass is surprisingly peaceful. Everything is beautifully quiet.
“Bdubs?”
Bdubs’ eyebrows weakly pull together. That can’t be— “Etho?”
“No, it’s Jojo Siwa,” Etho jokes, and Bdubs feels a disgusting, wet laugh bubble up from the blood pooling in his mouth. “What are you doing here, buddy? Is that Lizzie’s ribbon?”
Bdubs nods with as much strength as he can muster, forcing his eyelids apart with all of his remaining might and seeing…nothing. Nothing but the sun in his eyes and the steadily blurring grass. “Etho…Etho, where are you?”
Etho laughs, the sound floating in the wind as if it was a part of it. “I’m behind you, stupid.”
“Can you come ‘round?” Bdubs mumbles, trying to lift his head to turn it to the other side, failing. “I can’t see you. I want—I want to see you.”
Etho’s boots emerge from the corner of his vision as black, formless blobs, but eventually stand in the dead centre of what he can see and he smiles. The tips are scuffed and stained with grass and coal and redstone, and they’re so recognisable that through the cold, Bdubs feels his eyes burning. At least he gets this. At least he gets to hold onto this.
“I got Lizzie for you,” Bdubs offers, his voice coming out as little more than a few gasps. “I got her real good. But—the other reds—”
His words get caught in his throat. Etho crouches down, but his head is still slightly out of Bdubs’ vision. “It’s alright, man, don’t worry about it. You’ve done me proud.”
Bdubs cracks a smile. Laughing hurts more than words can describe, so he just watches Etho’s boots and legs shift in and out of focus, disappearing and reappearing with every strong breeze. His smile slowly slips off of his face as the heavy silence settles on his neck and he finds it too difficult to breathe. His eyes are burning.
“Bdubs?” Etho asks, voice uncharacteristically soft. Bdubs still can’t see his face, but his voice is brimming with rare concern and compassion and it only makes the hissing tears forming in the corners of Bdubs’ eyes start to slip down his face. Every part of him is wracked with an awful, awful cold, but he has no energy to shiver. “What’s the matter with you?”
Black spots dance at the edges of his vision. “‘S…it’s cold, is all…”
Etho hums, and Bdubs feels something like a hand in his hair. If he could cry any harder than he already is, he would, but he can’t, so he instead closes his eyes and lets his face twist into a light grimace. “I don’t want to die, Etho.”
Bdubs hears nothing more than the wind, and his hair continues to be tousled by the breeze.