Work Text:
Cleo is in a boat.
She doesn’t look unhappy to be in the boat, which is good. Not only for her (although Joe would hate for her to be unhappily in a boat, or, indeed, anywhere) but for whoever happened to leave a boat laying around their base.
Grian, probably, if the glass bottle just under the surface of the water is anything to go by.
Joe swims up to Cleo, treading water until he can grab the side of the boat and hold himself in place. “Hey, Cleo,” he says, and she lets out a groan and smacks him. Not hard, but… maybe she’s a little less happy about the boat than he’d realized?
“Hey, Joe!” Grian’s voice calls, and then there’s a splash as he lands, like some ungainly duck, a few feet away in the water. His wings fold into nothing, and he floats a little closer. “Careful - you’re not wearing Thorns, are you?”
“Not at all,” Joe says, letting himself drift until he’s floating spread out on his back. “Um - what’s going on here?”
“Curing a villager!” Grian tells him, at the same time Cleo lets out a wretched, rumbling groan. “I just got back from Mumbo’s, he lent me the netherwort -”
“Ah,” Joe says, and several things click into place in his head. “Um - you haven’t met my roommate yet, have you? Cleo?”
“No,” Grian answers. “Why?”
Cleo lets out another moan - this one much more pointed, and matched by her glare.
“No reason in particular,” Joe assures her, waving a hand dismissively. “Just - thought you might want to. After you’re done here, of course.”
“Sure!” Grian grins, and gestures at Cleo. “I just have to go brew a potion, real quick. Do you want to come in, or…?”
“Oh, I’ll be fine out here,” Joe tells him. “Floating. You know.”
“Sure,” the avian agrees, and then dives under the surface of the water -
“If you mess this up for me, Joe,” Cleo starts, as soon as he’s gone, and Joe laughs.
“I would never,” he promises. And then, because she didn’t come home last night - “How long has he had you in that boat?”
“He caught me out by the desert,” she tells him. “And - let me tell you - it was slow going, getting back here -”
“He didn’t row the whole way back, did he?”
She snorts. “He tried. I kept punching him in the back of the head.”
“Ow.” He considers that, for a moment. “So…”
“He broke the boat,” she says. “And then - well. It’s so tricky to kite mobs into minecarts, you know?”
It - isn’t, usually, but Cleo’s always enjoyed toying with her victims. “Sure.”
“So he got me back in another boat,” she says. “And then started using buckets of water to slide me -”
She cuts off, the splash of Grian’s reemergence fortunately enough to keep him from hearing her words. “Got it!” he calls over, raising a potion in one hand, an apple in the other. “One minute -”
He gestures for Joe to swim back, a little bit, and Joe obliges, staying well clear as the vial of weakness shatters on the wood of the boat.
Cleo snarls, the sound rotting and horrid and feral, the sort of thing that would send anyone running if it were echoing down the walls of a cave -
But she takes the apple when Grian offers it.
Holds it, for a long moment, as if considering -
And then Grian yelps in pain as it’s flung with a marksman’s precision at his head.
“Brains!” Cleo howls, snarling and fearsome, as she clambers out of the boat. “Brains!”
Grian shrieks.
And then - even weakened, Cleo has always been a good swimmer. She doesn’t need to breath, either, and Grian’s head start doesn’t do him much good as he dives, desperately, for the entrance to his base, gurgling out bubbles of air in his panic -
And… oh. Cleo had a trident on her when he caught her. That’s… unfortunate for Grian, who dies to it, easily, as he struggles with his bottle’s cork -
Cleo calls it back to her hand with a grin as his body drifts downward and dissipates - but she doesn’t hesitate, swimming down, tearing the cork out with the casual ease of an inexhaustible creature, and squeezing into the bottle.
Joe follows, picking up Grian’s gear as he goes, more out of curiosity than any real desire to intervene. He knows Cleo won’t hurt Grian, after all, and a good scare is an excellent way to remind people about boundaries, and Grian probably can’t do anything too serious to Cleo, either -
Especially not when he screams in terror as soon as he respawns, scrambling away from the red-haired zombie standing over his bed, grabbing for a sword that isn’t there -
- and Cleo sort of jabs the trident at him, a bit, groaning and snarling, as he rolls off the bed in a tangle of sheets and tries, desperately, to fly.
This time, he cracks his head on the top of his own base and goes limp, neck at an angle that would only be normal on Cleo. She laughs as he drapes over his own wooden boat, wings floppy and lifeless, and digs through her inventory before chugging down a bottle of milk.
“He’s having a time of it, huh?”
The second time Grian respawns, he runs for it.
Cleo nails him from halfway across the bottle with a trident throw. The weapon snaps back to her hand with a flick of her fingers, and she grins.
“So you might’ve realized,” Joe says to Grian, who wisely decides to get to cover when he comes back for the third time, “that that isn’t a normal zombie.”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaah!” Grian shrieks, as Cleo clambers up on top of the boat, where she has an excellent line of sight on both of them. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
He grabs onto Joe, which is probably smart - it’d be a lot less funny if he dies and respawns halfway across the server, so Cleo probably won’t risk it if they’re too close together.
“Aaaaaaaaaah!” Grian screams again, as the trident embeds itself in the wood next to his head. “Aaaaaaaaaaaah!”
“It’s - you don’t have to scream,” Joe tells him. “I’m perfectly capable of figuring out how upset you are without it.”
“Brains!” Cleo shouts unhelpfully, clambering over the wood towards them. “Brains!”
“AAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” Grian’s fingers dig into Joe’s arm as she closes the distance, grabbing him by his hair and dragging his head towards her mouth -
Where her blunt, short teeth thunk gently against his skull. She gnaws on him, for a few moments, and Joe knows she could shatter bones if she really wanted to -
“No braaaaains!” she says, instead, when she finally lets him go. “No braaaaaaaaaaains -”
“Aaaaaaaa- what?” Grian says, chest rising and falling frantically as he tries to catch his breath. Cleo shuffles away, a little, calling back her trident, and letting out another little grumbling snarl. “What?”
She makes her way out of the bottle, sliding out into the warm ocean beyond like a corpse.
“So,” Joe starts, as she begins to float away, trident in hand, looking very much like the silhouette of a drowned, “That was Cleo. And - on that note, I should say, it’s pretty rude to stick your servermates in boats. And to throw potions at them without asking - this isn’t a PVP server, really -”
Grian stairs at him, wild-eyed, hair a mess and a little drooled on.
“What?” he says again, and he sounds so lost that Joe -
Joe can’t quite keep the mask up any longer.
He snorts a laugh, one that turns into something full-body and inescapable, and he doesn’t blame Grian at all when the avian stabs him to death five minutes into his explanation.