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Fit MC (really his name is Fit, just Fit. He has no family name, no legacy to carry on, no road to travel home. MC- Minecraft is the name of bastards, of lost souls, of single pairs of feet) knows explosions.
He knows them intimately, the nose hair burning scent of gunpowder in the air and the singe of your arm hair burning off. He knows the sharp pain of explosions and the jabbing knives of debris.
Fit knows explosions logically, he knows the best way to build every sort of bomb imaginable and the best way to use them.
TNT, is made with a checkers-board of sand and gunpowder. (Best harvested from the ever rare desert and automated creeper farms respectively) it is most useful for destroying bases in large quantities, or smaller more harmless greifing.
Those who know how can rig up redstone traps with TNT so complicated they make Fit’s head spin. The most he himself ever accomplished in 2b2t (the wasteland, his home, his hell) was a simple pressure plate trap.
Quick explosions, the ones you make to kill people you run into by chance on Nether highways, are both simpler and more complex.
You need obsidian, the strongest substance man can use against another man, though some may argue that is netherite. Fit has never personally understood that argument, after all even the best sword is only as good as who yields it, any fool with time could trap you in a obsidian box though and leave you clawing at the wall until your fingers bleed. (Some rumor that gods can use unbreakable blocks, Fit has long stopped believing in gods though.)
Obsidian is laughably easy to make, you just need a few blocks and the knowledge of how to combine deadly lava with its antinome of life giving water. (Lava isn’t really all that deadly not if you have magma cream and a brewing stand, in fact for the more daring a base built under lava is safer than any on land. Water is just as deadly, an obsidian box filled with water is a slow death for those dumb enough to end up there.)
The hard part is, of course, The End crystal, a crafting recipe Fit could do in his sleep but no one else on the island seems to understand. Maybe the problem is their lack of time spent in the Nether? Maybe their problem is a lack of violence flowing like blood through their veins?
First you need a Nether highway that brings you somewhere untouched enough by human hands that Ghasts still spawn, then as it wails and fights to kill you on sight with everything it has, you need to kill it first. (Fit can feel the burn of a near miss from a fire ball as he adjusts his grip on his trident, his last two shots have missed as the Ghast flew right or left just in time. Never has he been more thankful for Loyalty 3.) when you kill the Ghast you need to take its tear with you as you flee.
Next you need to find a Nether Fortress, a decrepit bastion of the past left to rot and be pilfered. Then you have to kill a Blaze guarding it (Blazes spawn in with one goal, to protect what is theirs and kill you, Fit needs to break a rod from its burning floating body before it can accomplish that goal)
From there you can go home (as much as the Overworld of a wasteland can be home) and track down an Enderman that would be elusive even if most of their species haven’t been killed to extinction within a hundred chucks of your base.
An Eye of Ender is made with the eye gouged from an Enderman’s socket and Blaze power made from the crushed up remains of a burning life.
From there all that is needed is a furnace you can keep running long enough to cook enough sand into glass to encase the Eye of Ender and the tear.
An End crystal slammed down on a block of obsidian makes a quick, portable, and horribly violent explosion. One perfect for running through the totems of your enemies and wearing down their armor durability.
More than once Fit has been on the giving and receiving end of an End Crystals blast, it is a horribly violent and more often than not painful thing. (That is what they don’t tell you about the magic of totems, how much it hurts to get put back together again.) Above all else Fit knows explosions.
He may not know why Pac makes him feel the way he does, or why Ramón trusts him with his life the way he does, or why everyone seems to think trust and joy come easy, but Fit does know explosions.
He knows the feeling of your fleshing cooking and the pungent odor it leaves behind. He knows what it feels like to have your nerves fried and to only leave scar tissue behind. He knows heat so strong you become cold. Fit knows explosions.
He knows the startling quiet that comes in the wake of an explosion. The moment when everyone tensed to see what came next. The world is always signing, life and death and End and Neather and you and them and him singing in a loud cacophonous harmony that makes up everything and anything, but for a split second, one that seems to last forever, after an explosion there is silence.
The silence is then cut in with the loud ringing that showcases a lifetime of loud noises and tinnitus. The silence is then cut with the sound of metal on metal and sword on sword or more explosions until your opponent depleted all of their totems or you did.
Fit knows explosions and objectively he is aware of their side effects. Death and pain are of course the most prominent but hearing loss often sneaks up on those of them who spend their lifetime facing the heat of explosions.
Fit has seen basemates (people who trust easier than Fit could ever hope to) before, in passing sign to one another. A way to silently communicate after you have spent so long facing the noise of chaos.
It’s mostly disjointed miming, he knows now, after flipping through a book on sign language one afternoon on the island.
(2b2t as disjointed and separate as it is means people never commune enough to make a true language. They come up with a hundred different home signs that no one else could ever hope to understand. In a way Fit vaguely understands it as a metaphor for their sever as a whole.)
Fit himself though has never lingered much on what any of this means for him.
In fact Fit does his very best not to linger on anything at all, lingering keeps you idle and being idle gets you killed. So fit keeps moving and fills his thoughts with battles plans, escape routes and saturation. He doesn't have any room to spare for hearing loss and communication, at least he didn’t then.
Now though, Fit has come to regret that as he attempts to read Pac’s lips in a desperate attempt to understand what the other is saying over the din of background noise in Tubbo’s warehouse.
“Are you even listening?” Pac laughs, speaking notably louder now.
“Sorry.” Fit apologizes, the rest of his sentence trails off, he has come to a crossroad. On one hand he could brush it off, stay safe in the knowledge that no one will know about this particular weakness. On the other hand he could give this olive branch to Pac, give Pac another show of his trust. (Traitorously Fit’s mind provides him with images of Basemates holding their palms towards one another with their middle and ring fingers bent down before a battle. A sign of love and trust without words.)
“Can you hear the world sing?” Fit asks instead, mostly panicked.
“Sing?” Tubbo cuts in, his brows furrowing, Sunny follows close behind but she seems mostly uninterested in what they are talking about.
“Everything sings, you know? The vibrations of the trees and the Neather and The End and even Silverfish. The harmony?” Fit says.
“I’ve never heard it described that way before.” Pac says.
“Are you a religious man, Fit?” Tubbo asks. “Do you believe in harmony and all that?”
“I don’t believe in gods if that’s what you mean. I do believe things are connected though, that is just a fact. Every action and all that.”
Pac makes a noise at Fit’s dismissal of gods but doesn’t say much else.
“I can’t hear the singing anymore of some things.” Fit says, his hand going to his scabbard as if that could protect him in this horrifying moment of trust and weakness. (He feels like a child reaching for a toy to comfort it knowing there is no comfort to be found in cloth, he feels like a beaten dog baring its stomach to new owners hoping not to be beaten.)
“You can’t hear?” Pac asks cutting through with a scientist’s precision.
“I can hear some things.” Fit corrects. “Just not high pitched ones, or quiet ones, or ones with too much background noise.”
Realization dawns on Tubbo’s faces and he turns and walks towards the door, leading them outside. Obediently the others follow.
“You can’t hear?” Pac repeats once outside.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It happens sometimes where I’m from.” Fit shrugs, attempting nonchalance. “You stand too close to too many explosions and your hearing goes with your limbs.” (None of them need to look at the metallic arm or leg, their phantom pain is enough of a reminder)
“What did you do then?” Tubbo asks, a spark in his eye that makes Fit sure he will probably regret giving Tubbo any new information.
“I didn’t do anything.” Fit says. “Some people would write and some had home signs but there was nothing universal.” (Violence is universal, pain is too. Neither of those help much, both act as striking cymbals in the world’s melody.)
“Like the eggs!” Pac says, seemingly elated for some reason that there is a solution. (It is love or foolishness that makes you care about someone who has the capacity to hurt you. Maybe both. Maybe all lovers are fools. Maybe Fit is a fool)
“I guess.” Fit agrees. “It’s not usually this bad though. The ringing has been worse since purgatory though.”
“Like tinnitus?” Tubbo asks.
“Yeah. Tinnitus and hearing loss.”
“I bet we could do that.” Pac says after a minute of thoughtful silence.
“What? Have hearing loss?” Tubbo asks, confused.
“No, sign.” Pac corrects. “The eggs don’t because there are too many variations to teach but we could learn one.”
“It could be like a secret language!” Tubbo cheers.
Fit’s throat suddenly feels like he is attempting to force down and undercooked baked potato.
“Yes!” Pac agrees enthusiastically. “That way Fit will always know what we are saying. I’m pretty sure one of the Feds left a book on sign around here somewhere.”
There is a book on American Sign Language tucked neatly on Fit’s bookshelf, he has no clue how it got there but he can only imagine it was the same way that Portuguese books keep filling up Pac’s shelves.
“Oh.” Fit says suddenly a little overcome with something large and abundant filling up every vein in his body. They would do that for him, they would learn a whole new language simply to communicate with him instead of making him work his own way around this new hurdle. “That sounds nice.”
“You sound like you’re going to cry.” Tubbo crows, clearly ecstatic at the idea of having something to tease Fit with.
“I don’t cry.” Fit denies.
“It’s okay Fit.” Pac says, patting him on the shoulder. “I know you cried the first time Ramón said I love you dad.”
“You said you wouldn’t tell anyone.” Fit says betrayed.
Pac just grins and winks exaggeratedly at Tubbo.
Despite the new challenge Fit feels strangely secure in his safety, no one here is out to get him right now, and even if they were he would have help.
~~~
“Show me A agian.” Tubbo demands the Beginners guide to ASL book held in his hands.
Fit and Pac both make a fist with their thumbs sticking out and their palms facing Tubbo.
“X.” Tubbo demands.
They bend their index finger of their right hands.
“I”
Fit holds only his index finger out straight.
“Wrong.” Tubbo snickers holding only his pinky out in the correct form.
“You’re getting too much joy out of correcting me.” Fit complains.
“I’m getting joy out of us learning together.” Tubbo says like a liar.
Fit watches Pac laugh and Tubbo flips through the book for the next sign to test them on, and suddenly though he can not hear it, Fit knows the universe is singing.