Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Bdubs is safe. 

He opens his eyes to warmth. Everything is quiet and drawn out like thick candy, dim orange sunlight spilling into the room in windowed squares. The air he breathes in sharply is caught between cool and comfortable, flooding his lungs with something that is, for once, not adrenaline. 

This is his bedroom. This is the Monolith. Bdubs stands in the middle of the room and waits for anything to happen to him that isn’t panic. 

Momentarily, he casts his mind back to the past month, and- nope, he doesn’t remember anything! Well- hey, so he hasn’t won Last Life, but he hadn’t really been expecting to. Maybe Etho will win it for both of them. 

The world slows around him as his heart rate finally starts to drop. He blinks, everything coming back into focus as breath returns to his lungs and movement to his body at long last. Bdubs heaves a shaky breath, shivering as he tries to remember what it is to feel alive again. Flexing the muscles of his hands, rolling his fingers through the air and trying to massage some life back into them, he swallows the bitterness in his mouth and cringes. Fuck- respawning doesn’t feel good, and respawning from a permadeath feels even worse. There is no good end to this story.

At least he’s home and safe. 

As good as he is pretty confident that killing people in Grian’s death games probably feels, not that he can remember what that actually feels like, he likes coming home even more. Bdubs is not a man who gets off on the kind of violence that Grian’s games promise- he’s just not built for that. 

There’s still adrenaline beating in his veins and his breath still comes unevenly when he exhales. He hadn’t died quietly , then, in that other world out there. Hey, at least he doesn’t have to remember it. 

He manages a single, staggered step towards the bed before he collapses forward onto it, exhaustion like nothing he has ever felt settling into his bones. Groaning, he buries his face in the pillow and shuts his eyes. Though worry nags at the back of his mind that he might have a concussion and that he might just be passing out, he can’t bring himself to get back up again. A cup of tea is not just going to fix this bone-deep aching.

In the late afternoon everything is warm and gentle, and sleep comes easy. 

Etho makes it back to the server two days later, face streaked with blood and body broken. Bdubs takes him up in his arms, whimpering, tears carving lines down the ash on his cheeks, and carries him home. In the dark, Bdubs touches his body in a way that does not hurt; says words that do not speak of the horrors they have had to endure. 

Sometimes, Bdubs has to wonder why they play the games that they do. Because Grian had asked? That’s not a good enough reason to watch Etho die, even if Bdubs doesn’t have to remember it in the end. 

Bdubs alights on his balcony and helps Etho stand. They both know that Etho’s living quarters are downstairs, and that there are far more convenient doors to take to get there. They both know that they are not going downstairs.

Stepping into the room where Bdubs has made his life, Etho makes himself at home. He sits on Bdubs’ bed and wipes his face clean with dirtier hands, then takes the damp cloth that Bdubs hands him. Bdubs sets out clean clothes and Etho’s designated toothbrush, then heads to the kitchen to grab snacks.

On Bdubs’ return, Etho is shirtless and dabbing uneasily at the blood on his chest. There are no injuries to accompany the blood, as there never are, but Etho still expects it to hurt. He doesn’t fight when Bdubs takes over, handing him a granola bar and pushing him back to lie down on the bed. 

Etho says nothing, tongue glued to the roof of his mouth, but he watches Bdubs take care of him. There is nothing between them, really, but at the end of the day Bdubs is the body that Etho will run back to when everything falls apart. Though neither of them can remember what exactly it is that they have broken with their bare hands, they can both feel it festering in the locked parts of their code where those memories are kept. 

There had been blood when Bdubs had returned- there must have been. Of course there had been. He just hadn’t cared about it in the afternoon sun.

Bdubs pauses, hand on Etho’s chest. The wet, half-bloodied cloth in his hand falls into the space between them. Bdubs is looking at him, something cold in his eyes, and he doesn’t say anything.

“Bdubs?” Etho puts his hand on Bdubs’ cheek, smoothing away the tears there. Bdubs is still looking at him, eyes blank. “What are you thinking about?”

Something is wrong. 

Bdubs is losing sleep. He goes to bed at the usual time, as soon as the sun sets, and does all of the things he usually does. He drops his armor to the floor, crawls into bed, and shuts his eyes. He lies there for a few minutes, then sits up and fluffs his pillow and rolls onto his side, then tries to think about all of the good things that have happened to him today.

Sleep just won’t damn take him. 

On X’s advice, and partially on Cleo’s, he tries all sorts of remedies. He drinks herbal teas before bed, which only give him nightmares, and he cuts down on his lactose intake. He tries going to sleep earlier, going to sleep later, sleeping outside, sleeping down in Etho’s living quarters, sleeping with one pillow, sleeping with seventeen pillows- anything you can think of, someone has suggested it to him. If anything, most of them make the few hours of broken sleep he gets worse, and none of them do anything in the way of helping.

This is, just for the record, completely and absolutely abnormal. Bdubs has only ever had one bad night’s sleep in his life, and that was back when he was seventeen and couldn’t appreciate the value of a good rest! Bdubs has never, in his life, had this level of insomnia. 

Etho finds it hilarious, the bastard. He makes jokes about Bdubs finally hitting puberty and maybe you’ll grow a little this time around , which isn’t funny at all. Though he does , to be fair, do his best to cook breakfast and clean the Monolith and help Bdubs out as much as possible, he is a little bit of a dick while doing it. 

But, if it were just the lack of sleep, Bdubs would take some melatonin and get over it. Of course- if he’s going to have something so terribly wrong with him that he’s losing sleep, he’s going to have something terribly wrong with him in a hundred other ways. 

Within a few weeks, the latter symptoms have made themselves known, and they are here to stay. He wakes up feeling nauseous and it never goes away. Some days are better than others, and some days he gets a full night’s sleep and wakes up feeling fresh as a daisy, but he spends most of his days with his vision blurred and a difficulty standing. On the worst days he can’t even get out of bed, condemned to lie in bed and rot all day. 

It goes away eventually, as everything must. The bad days are few and far between, though he never feels completely better. One day he is bed-ridden and the next he is sharply better, with no explanation on the matter. He chalks it up to leftover glitches from Last Life, which is not a thing that should be happening but which is a thing that could be happening anyway. 

He doesn’t worry about the memory gaps at first. 

Bdubs is eating dinner. He has no idea where he is or why he’s having dinner with Etho at what looks to be the middle of the night, but he takes it as it comes. 

“What was I just saying?”

Etho looks kindly up at him and grins. “You were talking about the Monolith and what you’re making next.”

“Ah, right. Well, you know,” Bdubs says eloquently, “all sorts of big things planned. All sorts.”

Etho snorts a laugh, returning to his food. “Right. Big things.”

Bdubs nods, and a pit of despair settles in his stomach. This isn’t the first time he has had to ask the question- what was I just saying? What question did you just ask that you’re waiting for an answer to? What is it that you want me to do here?

What have I missed?

He looks down at his plate, doing his best to act like he has been here and conscious the whole time. He reels at the sudden onslaught of stimulus. All of a sudden, the room absolutely reeks of cooked meat, turning his stomach with its vile intensity. The food looks like it should be good, and it meets all requirements for what a good meal looks like in Bdubs’ brain, but something about the plate of food kills Bdubs’ appetite instantly. 

Pushing his chair back and wincing at the sound of it scraping across the stone floor, Bdubs gets up from the table. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I just don’t think–”

“Aren’t you hungry, Bdubs?”

Etho’s all about jungles. That’s his calling card, isn’t it? Everything that Etho has ever built has been in a jungle or about a jungle. 

If Bdubs asks, Etho says it’s the color of the grass. While he’s not lying, per se, there’s more to it than that. There’s always more to it- some days he lives here because of the color of the water, sometimes it’s the birdcall, sometimes it’s the telltale signs that a wildcat has gotten into his chest system and has made off with only the most important components. 

There’s always more to it than the color of the grass. 

“Yeah, probably,” Bdubs says, hand on his hip. He eyes up the spot that Etho has chosen for his new base.

Etho hums a noise that doesn’t really mean all that much. He steps up to Bdubs’ side and follows his gaze, trying to figure out what problem Bdubs has with the terrain now. Can’t a man pick his own base location in peace?

“It’s just–” Bdubs halts, cutting himself off. He takes a sharp breath in, pauses, then lets it out slowly. “What are- what’re our coords again?”

Pressing the menu button on his communicator, Etho reels the coordinates off again. He grimaces, briefly rethinking his life decisions. 

“Okay, maybe it’s a little far away from spawn,” he agrees, double checking the coordinates to make sure he hasn’t said them wrong. “I could come a little closer to the rest of you, I guess. I’m not sure how much room there is over near Beef, though.”

“There’s not much, no.” Agreeing, Bdubs takes a few steps back to try to visualize the building Etho is going to put here. “We could cut you a sweet deal for some space in the middle, though– I’m sure Beef wouldn’t mind all that much.”

Etho hums again, still meaning about as much as he had last time. He starts unloading the shulker boxes from his inventory, then pauses. The stare he fixes Bdubs with means one thing: stop standing around uselessly and come help me move in. Preparing himself, Bdubs lifts his arms over his head and cracks his back, groaning. Etho laughs at him, calls him an old man, then builds himself a three-tall pillar out of logs to get a better view of the land. Beneath him, Bdubs whips out his axe playfully and breaks the block beneath Etho’s feet. Etho glares down at him from his, now one block shorter, perch. 

Complaining, Etho builds two higher, only for Bdubs to cut them down again. They continue like this, playfully building higher until Bdubs has to jump to cut down the blocks and his axe is running out of durability. He grins, admitting defeat, and motions for Etho to come back down to him. Etho tips his head back, laughing, exposing his throat and 

He is running.

There’s blood under his fingernails. 

Bdubs wrenches the body out of his mouth, forcefully ignoring the bile rising in his throat. He sits back in the dirt, gravel biting into his hands as he scrambles away from the animal in front of him. 

There is blood in his mouth. The taste of iron on his tongue won’t go away, no matter how many times Bdubs swallows through his disgust and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. 

The cow heaves a labored breath, huffing a low groan as it twitches weakly. Bdubs stares at it wide-eyed, panicking, trying desperately not to look at the blood on its body. 

He can’t help it. It’s his own doing, after all. What can he do but look?

There is less cow than there should be. The poor beast is on its side in the dirt and dust, blood dripping down its shoulder and flank and turning the ground to mud. Where there should be skin and beautiful, patterned fur, there is instead only meat- sinew and blood and wet, warm body where there should be rippling muscle and life. 

The cow’s rib cage is smashed in, remnant fragments of bone littering its bare insides and the surrounding ground. With every terrible, wheezing breath it takes, Bdubs watches its lungs inflate and deflate around the jagged bones that threaten to impale them.

Bdubs stands on shaky feet. He is keyed up on adrenaline and struggling to breathe, panic clouding his vision. This is his doing- this is him. He has done this- he has put his hands to this animal and done whatever this is. 

Crossing the terrible distance between them, Bdubs approaches the cow’s head and kneels down next to it. From this angle, there is nothing wrong with the beautiful creature aside from the terror in its eyes- that, Bdubs cannot hide. 

He pets its head, fingers passing gently through its soft fur. In the low darkness, he can almost pretend that nothing is wrong here- that he has just gone out to check on his cows, and that Old Bessie has laid down to let him give her pats. 

Bdubs does not check the tag on her ear. He doesn’t want to know whose cow he has- he has- he–

Quietly, careful not to startle the beast under his hands, he loosens the axe from his belt. He puts her out of her misery and kneels in her blood until her body vanishes beneath him. 

Bdubs is hungry. 

Etho watches Bdubs leave again. He’s not exactly sure what Bdubs spends his evenings doing that it so often has him out of the house until morning, but he doesn’t want to question it. Recently, Bdubs has been snappy and short-tempered and all too prone to lashing out for anyone’s good. 

Doing his best to let it be, Etho heads over to his own base, searching for that semblance of control that only living in something he has built himself can bring. He throws a jacket on around his wings and grabs a snack from the Monolith’s empty kitchen before heading out into the night.

Shivering happily as he tears into the air, Etho keeps himself just low enough in the clouds that he doesn’t freeze. He loves flying, adores the cold ripple of air under his wings and through his hair, but he really doesn’t want to clean ice crystals out of his clothes again just because he’d been cocky with it. 

Alighting at the edge of his property, cold but not frostbitten, he admires what exists of his base. In the dark, it’s really not all that impressive, but he loves it regardless. 

Etho sits by himself under the open air that will soon become his home. He checks idly through his communicator, catching up with messages that he should’ve responded to a week ago and keeping tabs on what kind of progress everyone else is making on their builds. He knows he shouldn’t be comparing himself to them, because he’s had a rough time starting out here, but he still feels a little bad about the little progress he’s made. 

He gets cold- properly cold. He doesn’t have much of a roof above his head, so this is not unexpected, but he really had been hoping that he’d be able to stay out here a little longer. 

Oh well, maybe Bdubs will be home when he gets there.

Bdubs comes to covered in something else's blood and wincing at his own pain. He is not uninjured, which is a good sign! Whatever he has been… hunting, for lack of a better, more humane word, has had a chance to fight back!

He picks fur out of his teeth and tries not to think about it. 

Bdubs goes home. What else is there to do? All that’s left is to go through the motions of being a perfectly healthy human being with no psychological problems at all. He takes his shoes off at the Monolith’s front door and wipes the blood from the soles with his sleeve. He checks the time on his communicator, then makes himself a sandwich. Up two floors, he strips himself down to his underwear and tries to drown himself in the bathtub. 

Etho finds him crying. This is unusual, but not as unusual as it once might have been. 

“Bdubs,” he says, in that tone of his that he takes when Bdubs has really not done all that much wrong but he needs to be chastised anyway. 

Bdubs briefly considers trying to drown Etho too. He blinks, coming back to himself, and he lets Etho coax him out of the bathtub and into rooms that do not so easily provoke suicidal desires. What the fuck had he been thinking? Why the fuck would he want to kill Etho?

He can’t stop thinking about it.

“I’m sick,” Bdubs says. 

“You don’t sound sick,” Etho responds. He sorts through his chest monster of shulker boxes to find a stack of fifty-three moss blocks and stares at his half-built base, trying to figure out where to put them. “Is it a sore throat? A cough? Insomnia again?”

Bdubs shakes his head. He puts down his stack of deepslate tiles to wipe his forehead, and he eyes the wall he’s building proudly. “Not that kind of sick. Y’ever feel like there’s just something wrong with you?”

“Yeah. Not often, but- yeah.”

Bdubs hums a noncommittal noise and returns to building his own wall. There’s something missing from it that he can’t quite put his finger on yet. It’s probably that feeling of wear and tear that he’s so far missing- that feeling of being lived in that he doesn’t quite get with this clean slate of a wall. Well, that’ll be the next step, then. 

“How’d you deal with it?” he asks as he adds another layer of deepslate tiles. 

“Got a healing potion. It was food poisoning the last time I felt like that, so.”

Yeah, what Bdubs is dealing with is probably not food poisoning. He’s not quite sure what exactly he is dealing with, but he knows that food poisoning doesn’t tend to cause long-term memory loss. 

He pauses. “Hey, Etho?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

Bdubs swallows, voice caught in the back of his throat. “I’m hungry.”

It takes Bdubs a month to admit that something is really wrong. He knows it, of course, from the first day of not sleeping right, but he can’t bring himself to admit it in a capacity that would allow him to get help. 

He’s sick. Really sick, in more ways than one. 

At the end of the day, it doesn’t make all that much sense to talk to Grian about it. The man isn’t a healer, and isn’t really good for much but starting wars and building unfinished masterpieces- he shouldn’t logically be able to fix whatever is wrong with Bdubs. It’s just that, well- Bdubs doesn’t want to blame Grian for it, but he hasn’t been feeling quite right since he came back from Last Life. As much as he hopes that the timing is purely coincidental, he can’t help but feel like there might be something more than meets the eye to his insomnia.

Bdubs checks the time. He’s five minutes early to their meeting, which is unusual for him. He builds himself a chair next to the Entity, away from the sun so that he can actually see the screen of his communicator instead of just the mid-afternoon glare, and waits. 

A few minutes later, still two minutes early, Grian flies in, landing heavily in front of Bdubs and rolling to a halt. He springs to his feet, brushing the dust off his cargo pants, then jumps when he sees Bdubs. 

“When did you get here?” he asks, not unkindly. “Did I make you wait?”

Bdubs shakes his head. “I only got here a few minutes ago.” He stands, dismantling his chair. “Can we talk inside?”

Grian looks at him for a moment, trying to parse what Bdubs is thinking, before he nods and waves Bdubs into the Entity. 

This isn’t really the most private of venues, but Bdubs hadn’t wanted to have this conversation anywhere too terribly intimate to either of them. This is, after all, nothing but a business meeting. 

Grian leads him up to the office above the Entity’s main shop, taking his usual seat on his side of the desk. Bdubs drops into the seat opposite him, sitting forward in the chair and putting his hands on the table. 

Noticing his urgency, Grian doesn’t bother with any sweet formalities. “What’s up, Bdubs?” he asks, managing to keep the worry out of his voice. “You said you were sick, but I don’t know why you’d–”

“I am sick,” Bdubs interrupts, only mostly desperate. “I’ve been having… problems since we came back from Last Life.”

Grian freezes, then pulls a device out of his pocket that is decidedly not his normal communicator. “What kind of sick are you, Bdubs? No, wait, I’ll just ask you the questions.”

Bdubs nods. He sits quietly and waits for Grian to finish clicking through the device in his hands until he gets to whatever it is he wants. To amuse himself, he tries to imagine what the device could possibly be. It must be one like X’s, right? Controlling a world, though the one in Grian’s hands controls the worlds where Grian plays out his little death games, rather than Hermitcraft as a whole. 

What does he need it for now? Is he just going to use it to take notes, or is he going to make changes to those other worlds in real time? Is this something that happens so often that Grian already has a survey ready to go?

Bdubs doesn’t get the time to fall further down that rabbit hole, as Grian looks up at him and clears his throat. Nodding, Bdubs sits back in his chair and motions for Grian to ask him the first question. 

“Okay, so, first we’ve got: Do you remember what happened during the most recent- during Last Life?”

“No.”

Grian nods, pressing something on the screen of the device. “If yes, what— Wait, hold on. That’s not the right question.” He laughs, scrolling down. It does not do much to lighten the mood. “Do you feel like your relationship with another person(s) who took part in the event has changed significantly since coming home?”

“No. I mean, not unless– No. No.” A piece of the lacquer on the arm of Bdubs’ chair is peeling, so he starts picking at it anxiously. 

“Okay. Are you experiencing intense feelings of grief, homesickness, unease, paranoia, guilt, discomfort, or anger without explainable cause?”

“No.”

“Good. Do you find yourself experiencing strong feelings of deja vu?”

“No.”

It continues in this way, always things that Bdubs isn’t experiencing. Have you experienced any of the following seventeen symptoms in the past three to five business days? No. Do you feel like there is something just beyond your fingertips or stuck in the back of your throat that you could just get to if something wasn’t keeping you psychologically from it? No, not really. Do you spend your days wandering around meaninglessly, wishing you could go back to a world that has forgotten your presence? No- wait, is that a thing that happens to people? Has this terrible and wildly unlikely thing happened to you recently? No. Come on, let’s be realistic here. 

It almost has Bdubs wondering whether there’s something actually wrong with him. I mean, if these are the kinds of things he was supposed to be watching out for, maybe all that’s happening to him really is just insomnia. 

That is, until–

“Do you want to hurt me?”

Bdubs looks sharply up at Grian. The piece of lacquer under his fingers is almost torn completely free of the chair, so he pats it down and tries to act like he hasn’t just completely ruined Grian’s chair. 

“What?”

Grian looks at him curiously, the halo of eyes that he wears so infrequently finally flickering into view around his face as he starts trying to figure out what is wrong with Bdubs from his brain waves alone. “Do you want to hurt me, Bdubs?”

Slowly, Bdubs nods. “Not right now, but that’s the closest you’ve gotten to asking the right question.”

Grian presses something on the screen of his device, then carefully puts it down on the table between them. The screen is blank. Bdubs has no idea whether that’s a good thing. 

“Tell me about it.” Not a question. 

“I’ve been losing chunks of time and waking up covered in blood.” Bdubs is having a hard time swallowing all of a sudden, like the things he’s saying aren’t supposed to be coming out of his mouth. “Just cows, so far, and I’m never conscious for it, so I could just be sleepwalking- you know, that’s happened to people before! If you look it up-!”

“Bdubs.”

Bdubs sighs. “Okay. I don’t know what to do. I think it’s leftover of Last Life. I don’t want to hurt you, I just- I’m hurting the cows anyway.”

Grian nods, then looks over at the only window in the room. His halo flickers away again as his face brightens with natural light. “You said you were missing time, right? What’s that like?”

“I mean, it does what it says on the tin.” Bdubs grins but he knows that it doesn’t come out quite right. “I blink and wake up somewhere else, twelve hours later.” He hesitates, grimacing. “Usually all bloody.”

“Say, is it warm in here?” Grian fans his face with his hand, and when Bdubs looks over at him he really is sweating. Is it warm? Bdubs hadn’t thought so. “Aren’t you boiling in that?”

Grian pulls his shirt open, undoing the top few buttons, and lets it fall loosely over his chest. Bdubs looks down at his bare skin and his throat constricts. 

“Bdubs?” Grian is looking at him but Bdubs can’t focus on his words. 

All Bdubs hears is Grian’s heartbeat in the air. 

Bdubs has his jaws around Grian’s throat. 

It takes him ten seconds longer than it should to get his motor controls back into gear and to retract whatever teeth he has buried in Grian’s jugular. When he’s finally back in control of himself, or at least as in control as he can be expected to be, he throws himself away from Grian’s body and scrambles away from him through the dirt. 

He splits his hands open on the stone beneath him but that hardly matters when faced with the body in front of him. Breaths coming to him in short, desperate spasms, Bdubs panics quietly in the center of the busiest part of the community. Here is Grian’s body, wheezing out air and spitting up blood. Here is Bdubs, entire body shaking, staring wide-eyed at Grian and unable to move. 

Dirt. Hold on. That’s not right. 

Trying to get a hold of himself, Bdubs glances at his surroundings. This isn’t the inside of the Entity, though it had probably been optimistic to hope that it would be. Instead, this is the shopping district’s main street, dirt and dust kicking up around him as Bdubs panics. He is partially blinded by the bright light over the horizon, carefully ticking down the moments until it is too late to save Grian from what Bdubs has done to him.

The thin trail of blood smeared from the Entity’s gaping mouth down to where they now lie does not leave much to the imagination. 

Bdubs, to his credit, does not entirely shut down upon realizing that he has quite possibly permanently killed one of his very good friends. He takes a shaky breath, swallowing his fear and whatever of Grian’s blood is left in his mouth, and gets to his feet. He is wobbly, but this is to be expected. 

He wants to run and hide and pray that this is all a terrible nightmare. Unfortunately, he’s not getting enough sleep to blame this on bad dreams. 

With shaking hands, he pings the emergency chat on his communicator. He does it again, and again, and again, until he’s too tense to hold the device and it slips through his fingers. It buzzes frantically, ignored, as what must be messages from the other people in the area flood the communicator. Bdubs leaves it to lie in the grass.

Making his way gingerly to Grian’s side, Bdubs tries desperately not to do any further damage to the man’s wings or halo than he has already done. He kneels on Grian’s left, avoiding looking at Grian’s injuries, and starts CPR. Bdubs isn’t trained in first aid for nothing, though this should not be the scenario in which he gets to practice his skills. 

One, two. Five to six centimeters. Breath. One, two. Hope he tells you to stop and to fuck off. Check his breathing. One, two. 

Short moments later Xisuma, guardian angel and caretaker that he is, crash lands next to Bdubs and takes over wordlessly. He grabs Grian’s chin and dumps a healing potion into his mouth, holding the man’s airways closed until he swallows. Bdubs continues to do CPR on Grian’s shuddering body until X pushes him out of the way to give himself space to smear a fresh bottle of healing potion over the gaping lacerations down Grian’s chest and neck. X takes over CPR, doing it correctly and confidently, and Bdubs gets out of his way. 

Bdubs finds it difficult to look anywhere other than at the dead man in front of him. He stares blankly at X’s muscular back tensing with every CPR compression and tries to convince himself that he doesn’t want to look at Grian’s body. He is not a very good liar.

Grian is mostly shirtless, the little scraps of red fabric clinging to his shoulders and belt the only indicator that he had ever been anything but undressed. His bare neck sports a human bite mark, if humans had a few too many teeth and a lot more force behind their bite than they really should have. It is purpling as Grian’s body begins to knit itself back together, the blood leaking from the tooth-shaped holes drying on his skin as the wounds close up. Grian’s chest is in no better shape, streaked with deep cross-hatched knife wounds from a weapon that Bdubs doesn’t recognize and can’t find. Those are taking longer to heal, tearing open every time X moves his hands. 

It takes Grian four minutes and thirteen seconds to heave a breath and for his heart to start beating right again. When he does, Xisuma’s entire body relaxes all at once and he sinks back onto his heels, sagging away from Grian. Both he and Bdubs watch as Grian’s body continues to quietly reform itself, smoothing over the bumps and bruises on his chest, leaving the bite mark dark but diminished.

X is shaking. Bdubs doesn’t think he is, but that is solely because adrenaline is still coursing through his veins. In another few minutes he will start to crash, and then he’ll be in an even worse state than X is. 

After a few minutes, gaze still trained intently on Grian, X asks, “What the hell happened?”

Bdubs swallows thickly and promises that this will be the only time. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “He was out when I got here. I don’t carry healing potions- I couldn’t’ve done anything without you.”

Reluctantly, X turns to look at Bdubs. He fixes Bdubs with a stare that makes it very clear that he doesn’t believe a word he said. Bdubs offers no further defense, and X doesn’t push it. 

Bdubs isn’t a very good liar. This, he hopes, won’t be important later. 

X returns his focus to Grian as the man coughs himself back into consciousness and starts seizing immediately. He is leaking blood from just about everywhere that it is possible to leak blood, and he grabs out frantically for anything at all as his body tries to acclimatize to rebuilding itself. X is there -or, at least, he tries to be- but it does little to help as Grian blindly panics.

It is… pitiful at best. 

Responding to the panic button, Etho alights gently behind Bdubs and steals his attention briefly from the other two as he pats Bdubs down and checks him over. Once reassured that Bdubs is uninjured, he heads to Grian’s aid. Kneeling, he helps X heave Grian’s upright, Grian’s arm thrown over his shoulder, and together they support Grian as he swallows desperate gasps of air and wipes his face clear of blood. 

On his knees in the dirt two feet away, Bdubs wants to die. He stands to leave, because this isn’t his place to be at all, and everyone looks at him. 

Grian manages to lift his head to meet Bdubs’ gaze. In the finally-falling sunset darkness, his face is hidden and his expression is unreadable. He says nothing, but that might just be because of the blood in his mouth.

His eyes follow Bdubs all the way home. 

Hour one: Bdubs gets into the shower and hoses himself down with scalding hot water. He’s not really all that covered in blood, but he feels like there’s something sickly growing in his lungs and on his skin and he needs to kill it with fire. 

Hour two: Bdubs sits, half-dressed, in the living room on the Monolith’s fourth floor and waits until Etho comes home. 

Hour three: Etho makes dinner because there isn’t anything else to do. It is late and dark outside, and Bdubs isn’t hungry. 

They eat in silence. Or, at least, Etho eats in silence. Bdubs can’t bring himself to touch the food on his plate, too full of disgust and remnant adrenaline to risk eating human food. Instead, he watches Etho eat and says nothing. 

Hour four: Everyone returns to the living room. They sit on opposite ends of the couch, wrapped up in different blankets, staring at the empty seat between them. There is a terrible, crushing silence, for a very long time. 

Etho coughs, when this whole thing really has gone on too long. “We- uh- we took Grian home. He’s with Mumbo, so he’ll be okay.” His voice is hoarse, like he has forgotten how to speak in the few hours he has spent quiet. “I’m sure you were- uh- worried.”

Bdubs nods. 

“We’re- I mean, X wasn’t– He didn’t know what to tell Mumbo, you know? Grian wouldn’t- couldn’t tell us what happened.” They both know where this is going, but Bdubs makes Etho spell it out. “What happened? You got there first, right?”

Bdubs nods. He can feel Etho’s gaze on him, heavy and expectant, but he doesn’t know how to make the words in his mouth come out as anything but an admission of guilt. 

“I don’t know,” he says eventually, which isn’t really all that far from the truth. “We were chatting and something attacked him- us, and, well….” 

“And?”

“I don’t know. You saw Grian. I don’t know what does that .”

Etho sighs and Bdubs doesn’t know what he’s supposed to make of the sound. Does Etho know? He must know that Bdubs is bullshitting him, surely. Is he going to do anything about it? Is X? Is Grian?

Someone is going to catch on eventually. Someone is going to wonder what kind of mob attacks with human weapons. 

Etho unfolds himself from the other end of the couch and crosses the small distance between them. He pats Bdubs’ head, running his fingers through the man’s curls, before he grabs Bdubs’ hand to pull him to his feet. 

“Okay,” he says, though he won’t meet Bdubs’ gaze. “You don’t know. Maybe you’ll, you know, feel better in the morning. We can talk about it later, okay?” He tugs on Bdubs’ hand until Bdubs follows him towards the stairs and whoever’s bedroom it is they end up in. 

“Okay.” Bdubs swallows the lump in his throat and tries not to think about it. “Okay.”

Bdubs’ life properly, absolutely and completely, falls apart on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s always the damn Tuesdays, isn’t it? If you’re going to drop your ice cream right out of your ice cream cone, it’s going to be on a Tuesday. If you’re going to make a bad decision into a pattern, that’s going to start on a Tuesday.

If you’re going to kill one of your coworkers, it’s going to be on a Tuesday. 

He’s out on something that should really, by all definitions, be a business meeting, except they had all forgotten about the business part of the business meeting a good hour ago and they’ve been talking about gradients for that same past hour. Etho is working on some new redstone machine for his base that Mumbo, perched on the roof of the building housing it, is quietly admiring. Bdubs has the prize spot on the throne he built himself outside of the main entrance, and is trying to convince Etho that he should build the whole machine out of netherrack. 

There are arguments that are easy to win. This is not one of them. It is unsurprisingly difficult to convince Etho to build his whole beautiful machine out of the worst block in the world. 

“No, see- there’s this fantastic red color to it, Etho! You just gotta appreciate the beauty of it more,” Bdubs argues, gesturing at the little display of netherrack blocks he has built for the express purpose of making Etho clean it up later. “It’s got some good texture on it, it pairs so well with redstone, you’ve got all sorts of shades of the stuff–”

“I’m not listening,” Etho says, listening. Out of sight down the pit he’s building in, he places another few blocks that certainly don’t sound like netherrack, before pausing to check whether that has fixed any of the problems he’s dealing with. “I’m building it out of wool as we speak.”

Bdubs bursts into loud complaining as Etho does, in fact, continue to build out of wool. Mumbo laughs good-naturedly and Bdubs grins at him, glad that there is at least one person here on his side. 

“Yo, Mumbo,” Etho says, sticking his head out of the pit. “Do you want to come look at this? Something’s not working, but I can’t quite figure out what it is.”

Flustered, Mumbo jumps down to the ground and dips out of view as he clambers down into the Redstone Pit. “I mean, haha- yeah, sure, I guess! I can have a look.” He laughs nervously and Bdubs has to chuckle at how awkward the man always is. “I don’t know if you want me near your redstone, though- things always tend to fall apart when I’m around, even if it’s my own machinery.”

“I thought that was Grian!” Bdubs calls, as he too gets up from his chair. Instead of joining the other two in the Redstone Pit, however, he starts setting up a nice little display house made out of netherrack and nether brick on Etho’s front lawn. 

“Ahaha, that's me as well. He rubs off on you!” Mumbo calls back, laughing. 

He and Etho chat about redstone in the unclear way that redstoners do for a few minutes, before Bdubs hears the damning, “Awh- Etho, mate, you’ve built your own hopper clock wrong!” and he starts laughing so hard he thinks he might cry. Etho just sighs, facepalming hard enough that it’s audible even outside of the Redstone Pit, and Mumbo dissolves into a fit of giggles.

 Mumbo returns from the Redstone Pit a moment later, wiping a tear from his eye, and heads over to Bdubs’ newly built, objectively hideous, house. He leaves Etho behind underground, still muttering incoherent nonsense about his own stupidity, which just makes the whole thing all that much funnier. 

“What are you building?” he asks, taking the tone that people occasionally do when they’re trying to hit on Bdubs. “Starting your megabase early?”

Bdubs laughs, placing the final shitty block on the roof. He shakes his head. “Starting? This is finished! It’s my pièce de résistance- my masterpiece.” He hops down to the ground and stares proudly at what has rapidly become the worst thing that anyone has quite possibly ever built. “This’ll convince Etho. I’m sure of it.”

Mumbo agrees loudly with plenty of praise and Bdubs has to sit down with how sick he feels. It is in moments like these, with the afternoon sun warm on Mumbo’s face and catching in his eyes that Bdubs sees what Grian does in the man. It is also, apparently, in moments like these that he realizes he is going to die if he doesn’t go lie down in a dark room for a very long time. 

Hello strange sickness that has come from absolutely fuck nowhere. Long time no see.

“Etho,” he calls weakly, “I’m gonna head home, okay? I’m not feeling so hot.”

“You alright?” Etho sticks his head out from the Redstone Pit again, blinking at the new house in his front yard. “It’s probably heat stroke. Sit down for a bit. You’ll be fine.”

“I’m not- I don’t think–” Bdubs does as he’s told anyway, leaning back against the wall of the netherrack house. He shuts his eyes and stares at the darkness on the inside of his eyelids, trying to convince himself that he’s feeling better. 

Is it nausea? That had been his first assumption, but he thinks it might be hunger. Yeah, that’s it- Bdubs is pretty sure he’s just hungry. 

He’s just hungry. 

There is a hand on his face and he knows that it is Mumbo without having to open his eyes. Only Mumbo has skin this cold and hands so cruelly confident. He touches Bdubs’ forehead and makes an anxious noise. 

“You’re burning up. Are you sure it’s just–”

“Yeah, he’ll be alright,” Etho says, somewhere off in the distance. “Give him a few minutes.”

Mumbo makes another noise. Bdubs blinks his eyes open to find Mumbo watching him, something like worry in his eyes. He smiles and

Bdubs wakes up on his back in the grass with Etho’s axe at his throat. This should be a surprise, but Bdubs already knows what he has done. 

Grian is going to kill him. Permanently.

He probably deserves it. 

“Sorry,” he says quietly, but Etho isn’t looking at him.

Shouting above him, Etho’s voice rattles through Bdubs’ entire body. “Grian! How is he?” The reply comes as something that Bdubs can’t hear with all the blood pumping through his ears, but Etho’s face whitens and Bdubs knows it’s not good. “Fuck,” Etho mutters, shifting his weight as he tries to decide what to do. “Couldn’t have fucking….”

Bdubs can’t move his hands. Though he wonders first whether Grian has already cut them off, it soon becomes apparent through the shooting pains in the rest of his arms that it’s Etho’s doing, not Grian’s. Etho’s knees digging into Bdubs’ arms with the man’s entire body weight behind them is cutting off the blood flow to his fingers. Okay, cool. Awesome.

He probably deserves it. 

“Help Mumbo,” Bdubs grits out, voice surprisingly strong for someone who was unconscious only a moment ago. “I’m not- I won’t attack him.”

“I can’t let you go,” Etho replies simply, without looking down. Then, “X! Is he-?”

“He’s… fine,” comes X’s voice, only somewhat muffled by Etho’s body on top of Bdubs. “He’s breathing, so he’s doing better than Grian was.” That is not, all things considered, difficult to be. 

Etho has blood on his face. His mask is dripping with it, spilling down his neck and seeping into his jacket and hair. Every so often a drop lands on Bdubs’ cheek, and as much as he wants to wipe it away, he has to let it dry there instead. 

“You did a good job defending him. Thank you,” X continues, tone caught somewhere between pride and grief. “I mean… yeah.”

Etho nods. He brings a hand up to wipe the blood from his mask but it does nothing to help. His hands are red too, ringed with bite marks and bruises. Bdubs can feel every breath the man takes above him, sharp and wavering, and when he coughs it comes out as a pained wince.

Oh. Oh.

Oh, what have you done?

Thick silence settles between X and Etho and whoever else is here with them. Etho pants until his breath has returned to him and he can move without adrenaline spiking through him again. Out of sight, Bdubs can hear what must be X and Grian moving around, presumably caring for what must be Mumbo’s corpse. 

Corpse. No, not yet. Mumbo isn’t dead. He’s just injured. 

Etho freezes, his entire body tensing, as footsteps approach from somewhere Bdubs can’t see. 

“Grian–”

“Etho. Let him fucking go.” Grian’s voice is icy, and though Bdubs can’t see him, he can tell the kind of fury the man is exuding. 

This is what you get when you don’t tell anyone about what’s wrong with you.

Etho swallows thickly, keeping the axe pressed firmly to Bdubs’ throat. “I’m taking him home. We’ll- we’ll deal with it there.” He pauses, still looking at Grian. “I’ll talk to you later- and you too, X.”

There is a flash of warmth behind Bdubs and he shivers as Grian makes his halo known, peering at both Etho and Bdubs in equal measure. Bdubs hates being observed -it makes him feel sick like nothing else- and it’s obvious by the tension in Etho’s body that he does not have a much better time of it.

“No the fuck you’re not, Etho,” Grian hisses. His hands appear in Bdubs’ sphere of vision just to push at Etho’s shoulders, then to grip him by the collar of his jacket. “You fucking listen to me, Etho–”

“I’m listening,” Etho says, voice calm but body strung as tight as a spring. “I’ll deal with it. We are going to–”

X interrupts- or, whoever the body at Etho’s side is interrupts. They have their hands on Etho’s shoulders, trying to encourage him elsewhere. “No, you’re not. We are going to settle this here.” At X’s words, Etho whips around to glare at him, fury spilling onto his face, animalistic. “Etho, you don’t know what’s wrong with him. You can’t just–”

“It’s the boogeyman curse.” Grian’s voice interrupts, and Etho finally gives in to the hands trying to get him to move. 

Bdubs scrambles into a sitting position before X grabs him by the back of his shirt and easily restricts any possibility of escaping with his legs. He hadn’t been planning on escaping, but with X’s militant body at his back and Grian staring daggers at him from Etho’s side, he doesn’t have a chance in hell. 

They are where he thinks they are- still out front of Etho’s house, kneeling in a muddy patch of blood and grass. Whatever had been of Bdubs’ netherrack house before is rubble behind them, wherever Mumbo’s body is. Well out of his reach, that much is certain. 

It’s the boogeyman curse.

Bdubs swallows the pit in his stomach and asks the question that he knows everyone is thinking. “What?”

Grian ignores the man and addresses his response to X. “My Last Life curse. He’s still carrying it.” Glancing down at Bdubs briefly, he continues, “That’s why he’s attacking me- us. He’s trying to get a kill.”

Grian is dangerous. He is dangerous. He is beautiful in this late afternoon half-light, red wings outstretched and body haloed with eyes, but he is no doubt the knife that will come back to haunt Bdubs. He knows too much and has all too much power and knows everyone all too well to not be able to get away with anything. 

“How do we cure it?” X asks, voice low and even. 

Grian shrugs. “Not a clue. I’ve been looking into it since… last week, but it’s not one of the eventualities I prepared for. He shouldn’t be possible.”

Exasperated, X sighs, “There were other eventualities? No- you know what, I don’t care right now. We’ll talk about this later.” He tightens his grip on the back of Bdubs’ collar. “How do we fix this?”

Etho gets to his feet slowly, like he’s trying not to startle a herd of wild animals. “He’s not- let me take care of him,” he starts, which is a bad place to start when there is an unconscious man in your peripheral vision and you’re trying to defend his attacker. “He’s not dangerous–”

Grian does not need the provocation but he takes it gladly. Etho doesn’t fight back as Grian grabs his jacket and jerks him down until they are at eye level, meeting the man’s furious gaze with his own quiet confidence. “How the fuck would you know, Etho? Huh?” Grian spits, jabbing a finger into Etho’s sternum. “What if you’re next, Etho? What if he kills you next! You can’t fix him by making heart eyes at him across the cafeteria!”

Is Etho next? Bdubs doesn’t know. This is a situation where it would be nice to have those kinds of answers and that kind of control, but Bdubs has not been afforded such luxuries. 

“Grian–” X warns, flinching forward defensively as Grian continues to shout in Etho’s face. Grian turns on him, screaming at him across the little, gaping distance between them. 

“You cannot expect me to sit back and let him have free reign of the server! He attacked me and he attacked Mumbo- what the fuck happens when he gets hungry again?” Grian throws his arms wide, gesturing at the life they have all built for themselves in their little safe haven of a world. “He’s going to hurt us, X! Eventually, he’s going to hurt someone you love in a way that we can’t deal with with healing pots and regen spells. What the fuck then, X, when he kills someone permanently because you couldn’t be fucked to deal with him now?”

What then, when it’s completely your fault because you couldn’t pull the trigger early on. What then, when Bdubs couldn’t just get that first kill.

Trying for placating and mostly coming off as stressed, X says, “Look, Grian. I know you’re pissed, but he’s still one of us.” This is a conditional truth. “We can’t just–”

Grian’s voice dips and this is worse, now, than when he was shouting. He crosses the three steps to stand in front of Bdubs and Xisuma, his razor sharp wings twitching eagerly in Bdubs’ direction. “I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt- let him burn off a little steam by attacking me and going on his merry way.” He heaves a shallow breath. “He does not get to attack the people I love. I want to kill him. I want to kill him right now.” Both Etho and X make a terrible noise of protest and Grian continues regardless. “I don’t give a fuck about what you want, X. I want him dead right now. He’s going to hurt us.”

Etho grabs his shoulder and yanks him away from Bdubs, manhandling Grian until he’s on his ass in the dirt. “You are not going to kill him,” he states, voice softer than Bdubs has ever heard it. “You’re not going to kill him, Grian.” 

This is a conditional truth. 

“Fucking watch me.”

Xisuma releases Bdubs to go stand in between the two men, trusting Bdubs enough not to run away. He’s such a good person like that, so convinced that Bdubs poses no threat to him and that there is nothing that Bdubs could do that could be a threat to him. 

X could kill him now, without question. He is the only person that Bdubs has ever been afraid of.

“You are not going to kill him, Grian,” he says, with the kind of tone that leaves no room for argument. He sticks his hands out, forcing a distance between Etho and the man on the floor. “We’re going to deal with this, okay? We’ll, I don’t know, put him on house arrest in the Monolith, and you and I will figure out how to fix him.” This is the voice of a man who has dealt with horrors before, though nobody will ever risk asking him about them. “We’ll get Doc and Cub and False on it, and we’ll figure out how to get that… whatever it is out of him.”

Grian is quiet now, any fight in him replaced only with hatred. “What happens,” he breathes, “when I tell you that the only way to get it out is to let him permakill someone?”

Then you tell Bdubs he should’ve gotten the first kill on the first attempt- you tell him that if he’s going to bring the boogeyman curse home, he’s gotta damn do it well.

X shakes his head. “Then we find another way.” He turns to Etho and there is a chasm between them that everyone can feel. There is a chasm between Etho and Grian too- from every angle, Etho is on his own in this. “Etho. Can I trust you to guard his house arrest?”

Wait. Beg him to refuse to imprison you- to imprison Bdubs.

“Of course you can. I’m- yeah. We’ll be fine.”

We’ll be fine.

Grian won’t look at anything that isn’t Mumbo, out of sight behind Bdubs. “I don’t trust you, Etho.”

“That’s a two-way street, Grian.”

Things are different now. 

That was always going to be the case. That’s what’s going to happen when you decide that it’s a good idea to carry a disease home with you and start attacking all of your neighbors. I mean, what else had Bdubs been expecting?

Things are different now. Bdubs wakes up alone at two in the afternoon and doesn’t even pretend like going through the motions of being a normal guy will save him. He doesn’t see Etho aside from rare glimpses of the man in the middle of the night or at dinner time when he has run out of milk and has to borrow some from Bdubs’ fridge. Every day, Bdubs loses his mind with boredom for ten hours, then passes out on the couch at midnight and wakes up with a blanket thrown over his midsection. 

This is normal only because it has to be. He goes stubbornly through the daily routine he has made for himself that makes him suicidal only because that is what X and Grian had asked, and because he knows that they will save him from it eventually. 

Things are better now- a few things, at least. When Bdubs makes himself a sandwich at lunch time, he can eat it without having to hype himself up first. The memory gaps don’t return, and when he goes to sleep he doesn’t wake up covered in blood. 

Small mercies. 

Lots of things are worse, but this is to be expected. Bdubs is having nightmares again, and the days of nauseating symptoms are back. He hasn’t seen anyone who isn’t himself in the mirror or Etho around a distant corner in weeks, and he’s starting to go insane. If he just had something to build or someone to talk to or anything to do –

And then, of course, there is the whole fact of Etho not talking to him anymore. That is its own beast unto itself. 

It’s not enough, of course, to conclude that Etho is never around. At the end of the day he still has to act as Bdubs’ guard, even if he hates the man now. He does his job well. Though he’s always out of sight, he is there as soon as Bdubs takes a single step into his garden or onto his front porch. Though he never engages, it is clear to see that he would take the man down in a heartbeat if he dared to stray off of their property. 

Their property. Can it even be called that anymore? This is a man and guard- a prisoner in a watchtower. There is no Etho and Bdubs. There is just the guard and the body he is guarding. 

Things are getting better. Somewhere, X and his team of scientists, with Grian at their side, are working to fix whatever is wrong with Bdubs. He can feel it, every time he takes a bite of real human food and doesn’t gag at the texture, and every time he wakes up in his own bed. This is healing! This is what getting better looks like!

Bdubs is pretty sure that getting better doesn’t look like driving yourself to suicidal boredom every day for a month, but he doesn’t mention that part.

Weeks of research come to a head on a Tuesday afternoon. Damn, what is it with these Tuesdays?

Or, at least, that’s what Bdubs hopes this meeting is for. Grian hadn’t really mentioned much more than the fact that there would be a meeting in his short message to Bdubs earlier this morning, and though it is clear that Etho knows more, there is no way the silent man will tell him anything. 

Bdubs steps out into the hot afternoon sun for the first time in close to a month and realizes that it has become summer without him realizing. Yeah, sure, okay, he has been in his garden a couple times, but this is the first time in a month that he has been able to be anywhere but within the bounds of his own property. 

Everything is hot. A thick, dusty haze has settled over the entire forest around Bdubs’ area, toning everything orange. Dappled light flickers through the leafy canopy above them, catching on Etho’s face and hair and outlining him in gold. 

They are headed to Ren’s old dungeon. Etho is doing the dutiful escorting of the prisoner and Bdubs is enjoying the warm summer air. It’s awkward as hell, sure, but Bdubs takes enough joy in being outside that it almost makes the month spent in solitary confinement worth it. 

Almost. 

Etho coughs in the way that he does when he wants to say something but can’t figure out how to say it. Bdubs lets him figure it out in his own time, following obediently onwards as they continue to make their way to Ren’s dungeon.

“You know…” Etho starts, his voice hoarse from what Bdubs can only imagine is disuse, “he’s not… Grian’s not….” He trails off, leaving the thought unfinished as they break the treeline into the spawn area. 

“Grian’s not what, Etho?”

Etho coughs again and adjusts the mask over his nose. Sweat glistens on his forehead and the back of his neck because he’s way too overdressed and he has never been good at heat anyway. When he shakes his head, strands of hair stick to his face and get tangled on his earrings. Bdubs wants to offer to carry his jacket, but he knows that Etho won’t let him. 

“Nothing,” Etho says, like that’s not what he wants to say. “Just… you don’t have to agree. When he gives you his ultimatum, you don’t have to like it.”

Okay. Well, that’s not threatening at all or anything. 

They pass the final short distance to the entrance to Ren’s castle in silence for one reason or another. Bdubs wants to beg for more information but he knows that he doesn’t deserve it. Etho wants to walk away but he knows that he has a job to do. 

Ren’s castle has never been anything but imposing. It really is beautiful, even when they’re here on official business that will no doubt be less than savory. They step into shadow out front of the main gates and Etho gestures quietly to the stairs down to the dungeons. 

Etho pauses at the top step and waits until Bdubs is at his side. Soft as anything, like he has not done for months, he brushes a curl of dark hair out of Bdubs’ eyes and looks at him head on. 

“Grian didn’t want me to come in,” he offers as a poor excuse for his behavior. “I’ll be out here if you… need me.”

Bdubs wonders whether he is going to die here. That must be why Etho can bring himself to act like this again. He wonders whether the boy who walks into the dungeon is going to be the same as the boy who walks out- if that is why Etho is doing this now, because he knows there will be no later.

Bdubs says nothing. If dying here is what it takes, well, so be it. 

He’s so scared. 

Nodding, not because he wants to but because he has to, he tries to touch Etho’s face. The man flinches back, hands jerking away from Bdubs’ hair, and that is that. There is no Etho and Bdubs, there is just Etho getting what little he can before everything between them ends. 

Alright. Okay. Bdubs can deal with that. 

He swallows the lump in his throat as he makes his way down the stairs to the dungeon. He has to be put together when he gets to the meeting- he can’t be crying and still trying to argue that he’s definitely not a danger to anyone. 

The door swings open before he even gets the chance to knock. Grian stands inside, fully clad in glittering armor with his wings and halo out from the get-go. Pearl and Cleo laze against the wall behind him, acting hopefully as nothing more than bodyguards. They are both carrying weapons and boast no less armor than Grian. 

“Hi, Bdubs,” Grian says, his voice anything but kind. You don’t have to like it. “Come in.” Grian is….

Bdubs is torn between terror and elation. Sure, this is the room in which someone else gets to decide his fate forever, but this is also the room in which there are people who aren’t Etho or himself, who are near strangers and who are within reach for the first time in a month–

“So. What do you think?”

Grian’s voice splits evenly through the haze. Bdubs blinks into life, coming back to himself cold and uncomfortable. The table beneath his hands and between the two men makes itself known damp and sticky, and the chair he is sitting on creaks with his every shallow movement. Jerked sharply back into existence, Bdubs freezes, caught in an interaction entirely stranger to him.

In the back of his mind, Bdubs knows why he is here. There exists the image of a savior- of a voice of reason; a cure. Before all, he knows he is here to make a deal. 

“Sorry,” Bdubs says, not because Grian’s dialogue warrants such an answer but because he doesn’t know what the question is. “What’d you say?”

Grian purses his lips and fixes Bdubs with a look, unamused. The two eyes held in place in midair at either side of his head blink lazily, maintaining a casual watch of Bdubs as the two converse. 

Glancing around, trying not to look desperately suspicious, Bdubs does his best to figure out what’s actually going on. He’s making a deal with Grian, that much is obvious, because he only ever works with Grian if it’s for this sort of business, and they are sat on opposite sides of a square wooden table like men who make deals so often are. But beyond that? Cleo and Pearl are keeping a careful watch of him from the other corners of the dark room, but he can’t remember why exactly it is that they need to be so worried about him. The room he is in remains unknown to him, despite its vague familiarity as one of the rooms in the basement of Ren’s castle, and he has no idea how to get out of here. 

What happens if this whole thing goes south? What happens if it goes well?

Grian coughs pointedly and folds his arms, sitting back in his seat. “What do you think of the plan, Bdubs? I’ll have to look at your code properly to figure out what’s wrong with you. I can’t promise you I won’t fuck around with what I find there, but I can promise you that you won’t remember it.”

“Sure.” Disregarding the sudden terror that settles in his bones at the idea of Grian messing with his code, Bdubs nods, not because it’s a good deal but because he doesn’t know what else to say and because his brain is shutting down on him. “Yeah, fine. Sure.”

Grian’s face splits into a wicked grin and Bdubs knows he has just made the worst choice of his life, but he can’t bring himself to care. There is no reasoning with Grian on a good day -he has taken after Scar too much to be good for anyone on the server- but this is not a good day. There has not been a good day for a very long time.

Grian gets to his feet, extra eyes glittering into alertness, and Bdubs follows suit automatically. Reaching his hand into the space between them, Grian motions to shake hands. Bdubs grips his hand, making to step around the table to pull the man into a hug before Grian jerks away from him, confusion and fear coloring his expression. 

Oh- okay. They aren’t those kinds of acquaintances. Alright. Okay. Bdubs knows this. Of course he does. He has dealt with Grian before. 

Grian looks Bdubs in the face, all seven of his eyes wide and tracking his movements carefully. “Good deal, Bdubs. Good to be working with you. Good luck.” His voice is quiet, like he’s running out of preloaded lines to spew at Bdubs. 

Nodding, trying to smile, Bdubs shakes Grian’s hand again. The boy’s hand is warm in his. Here endeth his dealings with Grian.

Everything goes quiet, and Bdubs stops being able to think.

He brings his free hand up to the back of Grian’s head and crushes his face down into the corner of the table. 

Grian explodes into light, punching Bdubs in the face with the force of more bodies than are his alone and throwing himself against the far wall, as far away from Bdubs as is physically possible. He wipes the blood streaming from his nose on the back of his hand, smearing it across his cheek, and takes a deep breath in through his mouth before looking up at Bdubs with murder in his eyes. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Bdubs watches Cleo and Pearl approach him. For now, they are focused on pinging the emergency chat and getting everyone else’s attention, but he knows that they will soon join the fray. They are both good fighters in their own right, and Bdubs probably can’t take both of them and Grian on at the same time. 

Yeah, he can probably ignore them for now. They’re not important right now. 

Grian is. Or, at least, the blood pumping through his veins is.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Grian hisses, clambering up the wall until he sits well above Bdubs. 

“I’m going to kill you,” Bdubs says lightly, though those are not the sounds that leave his throat. Massaging the spot on his face that is slowly becoming a bruise at Grian’s fist, he looks up to meet Grian’s eyes. He has not moved. “I am going to make it hurt.”

Grian freezes, the color seeping from his face. He slips down the wall, extra eyes flickering in and out of focus, the wings on his back shrinking in his fear. Bdubs takes a step closer, then another, then another, hand closing on the pommel of his axe. He thumbs the stone at the end of it, reacquainting himself with the weapon under his hands. 

He will not need it. In this light, spirits having deserted him, Grian is just a man- a boy at that. Under the watery soulfire torches, Grian is no threat. 

Grian cowers from him, shrinking back into the wall. It does nothing for him but make him an easier target. Bdubs plants a hand in the middle of his chest, pinning him to the mossy stone walls, and drags him upwards. 

Behind him, Cleo shouts something that Bdubs should probably be paying attention to. He does not pay attention to it. If they want to play with him, they are going to have to wait.

“What are you doing?” Grian gasps, forming the words breathlessly around Bdubs’ hands at his lungs. He whimpers as the stone digs into his back, rips through his shirt, tears into his skin– “What are you-!”

Bdubs puts his free hand on Grian’s face. For a moment, he holds it there and does nothing. Grian’s breaths puff over the palm of his hand, hot and panicked, as the blood from his broken nose drips down Bdubs’ arm. There exists a moment in which Bdubs considers not doing what he’s about to do.

Pearl starts, “Bdubs-!”

Bdubs pushes his fingers into Grian’s eyes and cracks his skull open on the wall. 

And then there is clarity. 

…

No- wait, now hold on. 

Bdubs wrenches his hand from Grian’s body and lets him crumple to the floor, adrenaline flooding his entire body with a sharp horror. He stumbles backwards, tripping over the chair behind him and crashing to the ground. From the other end of the room, buried deep in the earth wherever they are, Bdubs watches Grian die.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. He’s not supposed to be awake for this. He’s not supposed to be conscious for this aftermath and he is certainly not supposed to be conscious for the whole killing part. 

I mean, had he really been conscious for it? Like, yeah, he’d had his eyes open and he’d been aware of what he was doing, but that’s not what being conscious really is, right? When it comes down to it, he hadn’t made the active choice to attack Grian. 

Right? Right?

Cleo gets him in the back of the head with a punch that should probably kill him. 

Luckily, Bdubs is built of stronger stuff than any old victim! He, unlike your run of the mill punching bag, takes it like a fucking champ and gets back to his feet. 

Now, there are two attackers. He turns to face them, shifting back a few steps to get his bearings. Here is Pearl, who could kill him with her bare hands if she got a grip on him. Here is Cleo, who doesn’t even need to go that far to be able to hurt him. 

They approach him in unison, like this is a routine that they have practiced before: one takes the left, hands behind their back, and the other takes the right, sword at the ready. Cleo grins, cracking their knuckles and glowing with the silvery premonition of magic that they should not be able to wield. Pearl is gone before Bdubs gets the chance to gauge her behavior, tearing towards him with her sword outstretched. 

And Bdubs forgets how to think.

When he punches her, it probably does kill her. She crumples much like Grian had because she is only good at avoiding, not at tanking blows. Her broken face spits blood down Bdubs’ forearm until she’s on the floor, and then she’s only bleeding onto the cobblestone. He goes to stand on her chest and put her out of her whimpering misery, but Cleo distracts him before he gets what he wants. 

Cleo is a different fight. Bdubs could probably hit her as much as he wanted forever and she’d never fall. Comes with having a body that doesn’t care about how ragged it is, I guess. 

Cleo, however, has this beautiful, unique weakness that Bdubs just adores . He cups his hands together and watches as Cleo’s eyes widen and they stagger backwards trying to get out of the way of his magic. Sighing, he murmurs power into the space between his hands where all magic grows, and he lets the healing spell leak out. 

Being good at being undead does not make you very good at combating healing spells. 

Bdubs walks to the door as Cleo convulses behind him. He keeps his hands cupped together, channeling the healing spell he is so known for as he kicks the door open and shuts it behind him. Yeah, sure, he does release it as soon as the door is shut, but that is only so that Cleo is alive -undead- when he comes back for them later. 

He has to prioritize getting out of here over getting his fill. He can eat later, if he has to. First, he has to get past the guard outside.

The boy who comes out of the dungeon is not the boy who goes in. This is not the question. What Etho has to ask himself as the man he may or may not be in love with climbs the stairs back into the open world, is: Why is he covered in blood? Am I ready to deal with the consequences of what he has done?

Bdubs is always covered in blood. That seems to be his calling card nowadays. 

“Bdubs?” 

The boy who is no longer really Bdubs looks at Etho across the courtyard. The cloudy green remnants of a healing spell swirl around his wrists, and he has gore smeared up to his elbows. 

“What have you done, Bdubs?”

To his credit, Etho predicts the attack. He shouldn’t have had to predict any attack of any sort, but he can see it coming in Bdubs a mile away. It’s in the sharp drawback of his hand; the tensing of his muscles; the way his face flickers between confusion and complacency before he moves. 

Bdubs goes for the jugular, which Etho also expects. Etho repays him in kind, stepping defensively backwards before countering Bdubs’ sloppy attack with a hand to the throat. He doesn’t need to hit Bdubs because he has never had to, and he has the upper hand as soon as he gets a grip on the man’s neck. 

Bdubs lets him take control- lets Etho keep him at bay with a hand to his neck like he is a wild animal- lets Etho pin the arm he can get control of out to Bdubs’ side and hold it there, despite the blood between them. If he wanted to, he could probably get free, but he’s hungry. 

“What are you doing?”

Bdubs makes a face like he doesn’t quite know, but he doesn’t break down crying like they both know he would if he were really in control of himself. After all, this man isn’t quite Bdubs, and Etho doesn’t really know what to do about that fact. 

“You should call for help,” Bdubs says, voice terrifyingly clear. “Everyone is dead.”

Etho loosens his grip for an instant, taken aback both by the man’s clarity and by his killer efficiency, and Bdubs takes that instant to push back against Etho. He stumbles backwards, tripping over himself and crashing into the castle’s outer walls, cracking the back of his head on the stone and going momentarily blind. 

Dazed, he does nothing as Bdubs tackles him and rips his shirt apart at the seams. He gazes at the man above him as the boy who is not Bdubs reaches out a trembling hand, resting it on Etho’s bare shoulder. He leaves a bloodied handprint behind, some terrible mark of what he has done. 

The boy who is not Bdubs bites down. 

If Etho could breathe properly, he might scream. Probably. That seems like a thing that one should generally do while being eaten. 

But the boy who is not Bdubs is kind to him- Bdubs is kind to him. Etho, only mostly struggling, his entire frame of vision blurred and nausea rising in his chest, grabs Bdubs’ hand and presses the man’s palm to his chest, sighing as Bdubs’ healing spell floods through him. It won’t be enough to keep him whole, but it will be enough to keep him alive. 

He presses the emergency button on his communicator once. That had better be enough. 

When his vision has cleared and the pain has made itself sharply known, he lifts a hand to the back of Bdubs’ head and runs his fingers through the man’s curls. He can’t really move the other hand, the man who is not Bdubs having eaten through the tendons that should control it, but he manages to hook his fingers through the loops on Bdubs’ jeans. It does nothing in the way of defending him, but at least if he were ever able to regain some semblance of strength he would have a good grip on Bdubs to push him away. 

Etho isn’t sure he has done anything so far that can technically be counted as him pushing Bdubs away. 

It is only adrenaline and willpower that keep him from crying out. While he feels it every time the man who is not Bdubs bites into his shoulder or chest and tears a chunk from his body, the feeling is dulled by adrenaline and healing magic. He glances at the boy’s face, determined to keep himself from looking at his own mauled insides. 

The boy who is not Bdubs is happy. That’s all it is, at the end of the day- a satiated hunger. He shivers with every bite he takes of Etho’s body, trembling like some newborn colt where he is pressed up against Etho’s torso and legs. This should be romantic, but it falls comedically flat. 

Etho doesn’t know what he’s going to do when he gets home. Is he supposed to make dinner? Do you make dinner for someone who has just eaten you?

He tips his head up and stares at the sky instead of at Bdubs, because at least then he can convince himself that nothing is wrong. 

“Bdubs?” he asks, voice low and quiet and catching every time Bdubs moves against him. 

The man hums a question in response to his own name. 

Etho sighs. Okay. Alright.

Etho is pretty damn good at lying. When everyone in the area sprints to his defense, he tells them that it doesn’t hurt and they believe him. Instead of rushing to his aid, as he kind of hopes they will, they dash to help the other three, who must be in a much worse state than he if Bdubs had gone so far as to call them dead. 

Now, Etho knows that he’s definitely pulling Bdubs closer. If he lets go of Bdubs now, everything he has done to get them to this point will be in vain. 

He is missing the meat off his shoulder and some of the fat off his chest. At least Bdubs, having taken what of Etho’s body he had needed, has passed out against him, curled up against Etho’s abdomen like he is no better than a dog. 

In his sleep, his healing magic is stronger, so it still doesn’t hurt. Etho knows, however, that the second someone tears Bdubs away from him to put him into custody and his hand leaves Etho’s thigh, everything is going to hurt.

This is, of course, the kind of pain that you don’t recover from. 

This is also, of course, the kind of injury that can only be healed with magic. What is a healing pot going to do for Etho now? Absolutely fuck nothing. 

Etho chuckles to himself at the irony of it. What a hell of a thing- Bdubs is the only thing here that can fix him. Or, rather, the boy who is no longer Bdubs. 

X gets there eventually. He fixes Etho with a soft, gentle look, and says nothing. 

Etho knows what he’s thinking.

They let him go home. 

Etho, they say, if you let him out of the house or out of your sight, you are as much of a target as he is.

He’s just tired.

Etho isn’t very good at lying. It works sometimes, when nobody is really paying attention to what he’s saying, but most of the time just about everyone can see right through him. 

“Oh, yeah, Bdubs is home and safe with me,” is not really a lie you can get away with telling without proof. 

Etho isn’t totally making it up! Bdubs is around most of the time, staring at the sky or driving his fists rhythmically into his bedroom wall. More often than not, Bdubs can be found in the Monolith or in the surrounding parkland (his territory has expanded now that nobody will come near him), and it’s only rarely that he manages to slip out of Etho’s sight. If he does say so himself, Etho makes a damn good guard. 

“Etho,” Grian starts, voice like ice, “where is Bdubs?”

“I don’t know,” Etho admits. He had one job. “He’s probably out with his horses. I’ll find him. I promise.”

As Etho turns to leave, Grian stops him with a hand on his elbow. Etho halts at the command, unable to quite bring himself to turn around and look back at the man who has now borne the weight of two of Bdubs’ attacks. 

“You know there’s no fixing him, right?”

Etho swallows and tries not to think about the certainty in Grian’s voice. Instead, he echoes X, the image of the man on the day of Mumbo’s attack clear in his mind. “Then we find another way.”

Grian sighs and changes topics. “You’re not healing, Etho. Why is that?”

Etho is healing- he’s getting there. Healing potions can only do so much for regrowing chunks of flesh, and they certainly don’t do anything for recurring injuries. He doesn’t mention that last part. 

“I’m working on it, Grian.” There is no need to pretend like he and Grian are friends- not when, at the end of the day, Etho is always going to side with Bdubs.

Bdubs is hungry. What can you do?

Time passes in the languid, forwardgoing manner that it so often does when someone is losing their mind.

“-ubs? Bdubs? Bdubs?”

Bdubs blinks and looks up at Etho. Still sitting comfortably on his horse, Etho ruffles Bdubs’ hair and smiles at him. Bdubs grins reflexively back at him, patting Etho’s horse and running his fingers through her hair. 

The afternoon sun is thick and warm. They’re outside in what looks like Bdubs’ back garden, long grass up to Bdubs’ waist and flowers bright among the ruins. Etho dismounts his horse and lands smoothly on the nearby boulder that he has long since claimed as his mounting block, before leading her to the nearby fence and hitching her there. 

“What are you up to, Bdubs?” he asks, half-distracted by trying to tie the knot under his hands right. “You’ve been standing there for ten minutes.”

Bdubs frowns and starts pulling building blocks out of his inventory, staring at the spot where he’s definitely planning to build another rock. “I can’t even stand and think in my own house, man! I’m tryin’ to do some buildin’!”

Etho laughs, but it’s obvious from his tone that he doesn’t believe a word Bdubs says. “Whatever you say, Bdubs,” he says, finishing the knot with a sharp tug of the lead and stepping back towards Bdubs. “Are you busy?”

Bdubs starts packing things back up into his inventory, giving up on whatever idea he had of building another boulder. “Too busy for you? Never.” Really, he’s hit the limit on how many columns you can have in one fourteen-block space, so he’s not sure what he was thinking with adding another. 

What was he thinking?

“Oh, sweet. Are you hurt?”

Bdubs looks sharply up at Etho, halting in his packing away. “What?”

Etho smiles awkwardly. “Are you hurt?”

Slowly, Bdubs stands up straight and looks Etho in the eyes. Wary, he rests his hand on the handle of his axe, eyeing Etho through the tall grass. “No,” he says, trying for joking and managing something far closer to fear. “I’m not hurt. Why?”

In the way that he does, Etho laughs like he doesn’t quite understand what Bdubs is saying. “What? I asked if you’re hurt.”

Sun in his eyes, Bdubs can’t quite tell if Etho is joking. He smiles, flicking nervously between cobbled deepslate and his sharpness five axe. “Spell it out for me, Etho. I can’t hear you with all this damn wind.”

Etho takes a step forward and the grass moves around him, rippling with his steps. Everything is still, caught in the moment between now and later, when Bdubs will finally understand whatever it is Etho is trying to put down. 

“Are you hurt, Bdubs?” Etho asks, slow and deliberate. “Like, are you injured?”

“No.”

“That’s not– You can’t just say that. That’s not a real answer.”

Bdubs throws his hands up in the air, frustrated. “I don’t know what you want from me! ‘Are you hurt’ this, ‘are you hurt’ that- what do you mean?”

Carefully, like he’s dealing with some wild animal, Etho crosses the distance between them and puts his hand on Bdubs’ shoulder. 

“What are your plans for today, Bdubs?” he asks quietly. “I need some design advice for my base. Can you help me?”

Etho turns away, piling Bdubs’ blocks back into his shulker box for him. Sweat slides down the back of his neck as he works in the hot sun, the collar of his jacket pulled up high. For a short moment, Bdubs watches him work, wondering about his words, before he takes over. 

“Go inside,” he says, touching Etho’s hand and taking over his own shulker boxes again. “I’ve got this. I’ll be in in a minute, okay?”

Etho looks up at him. “Are you hurt?”

Bdubs watches him until he walks into the monolith and disappears into the relative darkness inside. 

“How long are you going to keep living in my damn basement, Etho?” Bdubs asks, half-joking. He grins, kicking his feet up on Etho’s footstool and relaxing into the couch. “You’ve built a nice place here, but with all your wild parties always kicking up a ruckus, I might have to evict you soon!”

“What?” Etho asks, distracted by looking after their dinner cooking on the stove. He glances up at Bdubs over on the couch and smiles to himself. 

Bdubs really does like this place that Etho has made. Here, there is space enough for both of them to live side by side and pretend they’re living separately- to eat at the same table and call it payback for Bdubs letting Etho live in his basement. Etho’s living quarters are lavish and comfortable, and wholly at odds with Bdubs’ monolith above. 

“When are you moving out?” Bdubs asks, leaning back to look at Etho upside down over the back of the couch. “You’re planning on building your own base eventually, aren’t ya?”

“What are you talking about? I started building a few weeks ago.”

Etho chops another two carrots into discs and dumps them into the pot boiling on the stove. Pausing, Bdubs sits up and turns around to look at Etho properly.

“Really? Why are we eating here, then?”

In the way he does, Etho laughs like he knows exactly what Bdubs is getting at but doesn’t know how he’s supposed to answer. “You asked me to cook dinner, so I-

So I came here to cook. So I came here to take care of you. So I came here to eat. 

Are you hurt?”

It takes Bdubs fifteen minutes to realize that he’s lucid. It takes him another five minutes to get his body to move again. It takes him a further two minutes to get his brain to give any real instructions- to get him off of the floor and out into the open air, under the dark sky. 

He stands. There isn’t anything else to do. It is dark and it is quiet, and there is nowhere to go. When he checks his communicator, it tells him that he is fifteen thousand blocks away from spawn. He is cold and scared, and his inventory is empty. 

He calls Etho. There isn’t anything else to do. There is a dirt hut behind him and the universe ahead of him, spilt like milk and sugar in the sea and reflected above the horizon. He could get himself home if he had to, but he knows Etho’s number without needing to think about it and there is no reason to suffer unnecessarily. 

Bdubs tells his body to move forward, through the forest until he reaches the shore. He sits on the beach, a certain safe distance from the water, and waits. 

Etho arrives, as no one is surprised to learn, five minutes later. He says nothing because he doesn’t need to, and he picks Bdubs up and carries him home. 

They arrive home. Etho says nothing. He takes Bdubs inside, takes him to bed, watches him sleep, watches him regear, makes him breakfast. 

Bdubs is quiet. He says none of what he wants to say. He says thank you when it’s all over. 

“What then?”

“What when?”

“What happens when you’ve had enough?”

“Had enough of what?”

“Had enough of this- of me. When you’re not hungry anymore.”

“What?”

“Bdubs. What happens when you’re not hungry anymore?”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I’m not hungry.”

“Hey, Bdubs?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the date?”

“Seventh.”

“It’s nice that you think that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Hey- what’s that supposed to mean, Etho?”

“Just- stay home today, okay? You’re not supposed to be outside.”

“What?”

“Bdubs. Stick with me here. Stay inside.”

“Why?”

“Trust me on this, okay? You should be inside.”

Cleo attacks him in the forest. This is a truth and it is not conditional at all, no sir, no way, not a chance in hell. 

He is completely and wholly justified in ripping through her with his teeth and claws and naked blade. She was going to attack him! See, she even had her hands out to start casting her magic on him!

Well, no, Bdubs can’t see right now. Grian has made sure he doesn’t get that right, blindfolded and gagged with his face down in the dirt. X and Cub tend to Cleo’s wounds a short distance away; Etho watches as they call forth X’s little knowledge of poison spells and instant damage, the red mist flickering around his wrists making him indistinguishable from both Cleo’s body and Bdubs’ hands. 

Etho yanks his collar up further over the hole in his chest and approaches Grian. He doesn’t try to get close to Bdubs. 

They can all hear him laughing. He’s laughing through the cloth gag in his mouth, leaking blood into it, grinning viciously. He’s laughing, like the damn sellout that he is, and won’t stop laughing as X puts his hands on Cleo’s body and tries to figure out how to fix them. 

Grian looks torn between fury and despair, something like desperation in his eyes. Though Bdubs is the one on the ground cackling victoriously, Grian looks like more of a madman himself- his eyes are wide and bloodshot and he looks so close to the edge of violence that Etho can practically see the thread that is holding him back. Maybe that’s just his halo, though. 

It’s red. Etho has never seen it like that. 

“We’re putting him away,” Grian says, softer than Etho has ever heard him. “I hope you’re happy you defended him, Etho. This is what compassion gets you.”

Etho wants to remind him that he’s the one who coded the boogeyman curse and who inadvertently gave it a back door into Hermitcraft, but he doesn’t say that. Mostly because he doesn’t want to get killed. 

“Sorry, Etho,” X says, not looking up from Cleo’s body. “It was– There’s nothing I can do. We can’t trust him. You know that.”

Etho says nothing. There is a part of him in the manic boy on the ground, and he doesn’t know how to move on from that.