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“I just miss you, man,” Skeppy says. He’s laying on his side, his phone on the pillow next to him, putting out a dim light in the dark room.
“I know. I miss you too, Skeppy.” Bad’s discord icon lights up when he talks. It’s a little silly of them to still be using it to talk when Bad could just call him, but he could also just be here and isn’t, so it makes sense. It’s just another way they’ve reverted back to how things were before.
Sleep-calling and making promises they didn’t intend to keep.
“You’re gonna visit again this year, right?” Skeppy asks. “You said—what was it, three times?”
“Yeah. At least three times.”
“So. We should probably get going on that. Only so many months in the year.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.”
He can tell from Bad’s tone that he doesn’t want to talk about it today, so Skeppy shuts his mouth. He’s lucky Bad is here at all, on the other end of the line, instead of streaming all through the night. Skeppy puts his hand up on the pillow, on the other side of the phone, and represses the sad sigh that wants to whine from his lips.
Once, over six months ago now, if he reached out like that, it would have been Bad’s face in his hand. Just once, they shared a bed in a hotel on the other side of the country. They joked that it would be just like sleep-calling, only better.
But then they flew home on separate planes, a promise to see each other soon tucked under their ribs with their hearts. At least, that’s where Skeppy kept it. He wasn’t so sure about Bad, since that promise slipped away, unfulfilled.
Skeppy can hardly remember what his lips feel like anymore, and it scares him, thinking he’ll never get another reminder.
“You sleeping?” Bad asks quietly, and Skeppy blinks his eyes open, batting his lashes against a film of tears.
“No,” he says.
“You should. It’s almost morning.”
“Says you,” Skeppy scoffs. “I know you haven’t slept, either.”
“Well it’s not exactly a sleep-call if we don’t sleep, is it?”
Skeppy sighs, grumbles, rolls his eyes.
The truth is, he doesn’t want to sleep.
He’s been having dreams. Dreams that feel real. He wakes up in a short, hard bed, and the world is all angles. His hands are blue, except, of course, when they are red. The world is empty, usually. Fires flicker, contained to their lantern cages, and the occasional chicken goes clucking by. But no people. They’ve all left.
In the dream, he feels indescribable loneliness. It is so real, the wind on his diamond skin. The sun that rises in the same path, the moon that replaces it each night. When he wakes, he feels stupid, childish, to be bleeding feelings all over a dead Minecraft SMP.
But his subconscious doesn’t care. It remembers, and it feels. That’s what it’s supposed to do.
“I’ll sleep if you sleep,” Skeppy says. A promise. One Bad might actually keep.
“I’ll try,” Bad says. “I’m not that tired.”
“How? It’s like four AM?”
“I uh… may have had a coffee.”
“Just a coffee? When?”
“I don’t know. A while ago.”
“And you’re still tired now?”
Bad groans, then mumbles: “And maybe a redbull.”
“You are so stupid,” Skeppy says, but he’s laughing. Bad laughs too, and it feels like old times.
“Yeah, a little…”
They sigh, and silence stretches. Skeppy feels warm and heavy in his bed. If he closed his eyes, he’d probably sink right into sleep.
“I know I have to sleep eventually,” Bad says then, his voice smaller, closer to the phone. “But I—and don’t laugh, Skeppy—I don’t want to because I—I’m serious Skeppy—”
“I’m not laughing!” Skeppy interjects.
“But you will!”
“I won’t!”
Bad grumbles for a moment, then it sounds like he rolls over in bed, taking the phone with him.
“I’ve been having nightmares.”
“Oh.” True to his word, Skeppy doesn’t laugh. To be fair, he probably would have in any other situation, but not now. Not when it hits too close to home.
“Nightmares about what?” he asks.
Bad sighs.
“I don’t know. Stupid stuff,” he says.
“But enough to keep you up at night?”
“Um…” Bad doesn’t answer. Skeppy gets a funny feeling in his stomach, but he pushes the words down. He doesn’t dare ask, when you wake up in the dream, has the world gone square?
“Do you think sleeping with me on call would help?” Skeppy asks. “I know it used to, you know, help us sleep better.”
“Maybe.” Bad doesn’t sound convinced.
“Just try, okay? For me?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Skeppy grins, caressing the side of his phone with his thumb, and finally lets his eyes flutter shut.
“Goodnight, Bad,” he whispers.
“Goodnight, Skeppy.”
He wakes up in the empty house, again. His hands are blue tonight, which means he gets to control the dream—not that there’s much to control in an empty world. His first instinct is to find the other bedroom. It’s crazy, but it makes sense to his dreaming mind to think Bad will be there, in the other bed.
He finds red, empty sheets tucked crisply under the mattress.
So his feet carry him away. Down the stairs, out the door, up the hill and onto the path. Everything is as it was. Dark windows in empty buildings. The world so wide, and yet, pressing in on Skeppy, making him small and dense. Heavy with loneliness. Then, out of the corner of his eye: red.
He turns, sees a crimson vine curling around the corner of a building. He can’t remember seeing one there before. And the more he stares, the more convinced he becomes that it’s moving—growing—ever-so-slowly starting to consume more of the building it’s wrapping itself around.
Skeppy picks up the pace. He keeps his head on swivel, spots another vine, then another. The closer he gets to tunnel down to the spider spawner, the more of them there are and the faster they move, slithering through cracked windows, around spires and across eaves. He almost trips when one darts out across the path.
He’s panting, now. Running across the field to the tunnel. In the distance, the sun is setting and the sky looks red. He looks down at his hands, afraid he’ll see the same hue reflected, but it has not reached him yet.
Skeppy is still blue.
He jumps down, lands safely in the water. The tunnel yawns dark to his right, seems to twist as it bores deeper into the earth. Then the whole room seems to darken, the sunlight no longer pouring in from above. He thinks it has just set, but when he looks up, his blood runs cold.
The vines are crawling down, reaching for him like the twisted fingers of a wicked hand, and he screams, bolting down the dark tunnel. It’s a stupid move, he knows he’s only getting closer to the Egg, but he has nowhere else to run.
He’s being led to the Egg chamber. There is no escaping it.
He is not in control of this dream.
The room is crawling with vines, pouring down from the ceiling, writhing on the floor like worms, but there is no Egg. It must have moved already, retreated further into the earth to that dark den where it’s destined to hatch.
Skeppy stumbles, trying to walk over the shifting ground. He crawls, struggling through the vines like sinking sand, the mindless tendrils lazily pulling him down, but he refuses to drown.
He makes it to the craggy cavern, navigates the dark with a hand on the wall. He knows this route: in another life, he walked these abandoned rooms with purpose, with an offer on his tongue.
In another life, he sought this eldritch god to beg mercy for his best friend’s captive soul.
In this dream, however, there is no purpose, no offer, no mercy. He stumbles into the red, damp room and is bowled over by the heat of the magma pouring down from the ceiling. The vines bloom here, fill the stagnant air with cloying pollen, and the Egg pulses with blood-red life. It’s surface sticky, traced with veins, thudding like a beating heart.
And by its side: a cage.
“Bad?”
The trapped figure does not move. He is curled into a ball, leathery wings pulled around his naked body like a shield.
“Bad!” Skeppy moves closer. He knows he can hear him, he sees him shudder in response to his name, hears the whimper of tears.
“What happened? Are you okay? How did you get up there?” Worry streams from Skeppy’s mouth. He jumps, tries to graze the bottom of the cage with his fingers, but he can’t reach.
“Go away.” Bad finally speaks, hands over his face so the words come out muffled. “You’re just taunting me.”
“What? Bad…” Skeppy trails off, not sure what he can say to help the sorry state his friend is in. Instead, he sharpens his mind to action. He follows the line of chain from which the cage hangs, how it loops along the ceiling before trailing back down the far wall and hooks into an anchor there.
“I’m gonna get you down,” he says, though he isn’t sure Bad hears him. He pries with his fingers, but this is sold metal. Of course it does nothing. He scans the room for anything he can use, finds the rock around the size of his fist, and picks it up. It’s got a nice heft to it, he decides, and raises it to strike against the weaker, thinner part of the chain connected to the anchor.
Sparks fly at contact. A shrill clank echoes through the room, and finally Bad’s head lifts, attentive now to Skeppy.
“What are you doing?” he asks as Skeppy strikes again, the metal starting to warp thinner under the successive blows.
“Getting you down!” Skeppy tells him, hitting the link again. The chain shudders, and Bad gasps, hands reaching for bars the of his cage for support.
“What? No! I’ll fall, Skeppy!”
“You’re strong. You’ll survive.”
“But—you don’t know that! It’s safe here, in the cage.”
Skeppy pauses with his fist raised, even though he’s sure the next hit will finally snap the metal. He turns, browns folded, and meets Bad with a confronting gaze.
“You’d rather stay trapped than even try to break free?” he asks. “Because—what? Because the cage is comfortable?”
Bad’s mouth hangs open, a strained noise escaping instead of an answer.
“You know how crazy that sounds, right? I mean—” Skeppy’s breath shudders. There’s something heavy in his chest, pressing down, making it hard to breathe. “Aren’t you lonely, up there? I was so happy when I found you. I’ve been—I am —so alone, Bad. So, so alone.”
“Skeppy…”
Skeppy sniffles, grips the rock tighter in his fist.
“I won’t break it if you don’t want me to,” he says. “I need to hear you say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you want to come down. That you want to be with me.”
They stare at each other. The Egg pulses, and the sound makes Skeppy sick, makes his eyes cloud with tears. Bad trembles like he’s fighting something, a battle waging in his chest. But his eyes tell Skeppy the truth. He’s just as alone. Just as afraid. He just needs one more push—
“Break it, Skeppy,” he croaks. “Let me down.”
Skeppy turns and strikes it in an instant. The chain hisses, flying through the loops along the ceiling, and the cage comes crashing to the ground. Dust flies, vines rear their heads like disgruntled snakes, and the bars creak as they bend, the cage deflating around Bad.
He shrieks, too. The drop is terrifying and yet—over in an instant.
“Bad!” Skeppy fights the writhing vines to get closer. He thinks he sees him, pushing his way from the mangled cage in the cloud of dust, but he can’t be sure. It’s all distant shaddows.
“Skeppy?” Bad calls back. He pushes, but the vines are everywhere now, holding him back. Keeping them apart.
“Bad! Bad I’m coming! I’m here! Just—”
“Skeppy! Reach for my hand!”
He strains, swears he can almost feel fingertips slipping against his own, but the vines are absorbing him, wrapping around his waist, his legs, his arms.
“Bad!” he screams one last time, before they consume his face, muffle his voice, stifle the air from his lungs.
He wakes with a gasp, rocketed upright in bed.
Hands fly to his face. He feels his cheeks, wet, cups his throat, breathes deep and clear. He could have sworn he was choking. He could have sworn—
He looks to his right, sees his phone has fallen from his pillow, now rests tucked against the mattress. He reaches for it, and the screen flashes on, shows him that his call with Bad is still going. The timer reads eight hours and counting.
“Skeppy?” It’s Bad who breaks the silence first.
“Yeah?”
“Oh. I thought I heard you wake up.”
Skeppy holds his phone in his lap, curls over it, shoulders arched and heavy. His breathing has calmed, but his mind is still struggling to catch up.
“Did you… also just wake up?”
“Um. Yeah. Why?”
“Did you have a bad dream?”
“Something like that,” Bad says, quiet, a little muffled.
“So did I,” Skeppy admits. “I also, um… I’d also been having dreams. Like you said. Before.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Silence stretches. Skeppy’s phone is hot in his hands, but he presses it closer to his palms because the burn is grounding.
They don’t want to say it. They don’t want it to be real—it couldn’t have been real—and yet Skeppy knows. He hears it in all Bad doesn’t say. He was there, too. He was in the cage.
He asked Skeppy to break the chain.
“Bad. I want to see you,” he says. “I don’t want to keep—I can’t keep playing this game.”
“I know.”
“I’m serious. No more talking. Just doing.” Skeppy chews his lip. He really hopes he’s right about this. “Please?”
He can only imagine the turmoil on Bad’s face. He thinks he hears a shuddered breath, like he’s holding back tears, and that gives him enough of a clue to paint a picture. He’s struggling. He wants it, too. Wants it so bad. But something’s stopping him.
The cage is comfortable. Freedom is scary. New. Unpredictable. But isn’t Skeppy worth the fall?
“I can be there tomorrow,” Bad says, and Skeppy’s heart soars.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m… looking at plane tickets right now.”
“Oh my gosh—”
“And if I go home, it’s only to get my things.”
Skeppy gasps for air. Is he being serious? Is this real?
“Pinch me,” he says. “Pinch me, Bad.”
“What? I can’t pinch you. I’m not there yet.”
“No, but—I need to know I’m not dreaming anymore.”
Bad laughs, and the sound is so sweet, Skeppy could cry.
“You’re not dreaming, you muffinhead,” Bad says. “I’m coming, and I’m staying. End of story.”
Skeppy smiles, falling back against the bed, and nods, repeating those words to himself.
End of story.
But it’s only the end of one story. The old story they wrote for themselves when there was no hope of meeting. When the loneliness was all-consuming. When this story—the new story they will write today and tomorrow and the day after that—seemed impossible.