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So here's how it goes.
Neo dies again. Avoma kills him. It's the hundredth game he’s played, and the process of bleeding out on the ground as a battle rages around him is nothing new by now. If anything, he’s ashamed he didn’t die a little faster, get it over with instead of making his teammates worry.
So in between the planes of life and death, there’s another one. It’s misty and cold and there’s no food or water to quench your thirst, but then again Neo’s been here enough times to know that hunger and thirst don’t exist here anyway. When he assesses his vitals, the health bar comes up blank. Just as well - he just hopes the fragmented heart he left behind would end up in good hands.
Right now, he’s walking, because there’s nothing better to do now that his heart has stopped beating and any feeling in his muscles has since been killed by the cold. The mist curls around his body like water, and when he reaches out to touch it, his hands are dim and clear.
The fog thins out after a while, and he finds himself standing on a balcony in the middle of nowhere, looking out over the void. The ledge is made of something that looks a little like marble, shimmering white under a gray sky. The mist writhes and dances in the emptiness below.
But here’s the real kicker - beside the ledge, there’s a bench. It's marble at first, but then he takes a step closer and suddenly it’s wood, in a brown so vibrant he has to blink twice to remind himself that he’s not resting in his mountain base anymore. As he watches it, it shifts from dark oak to palm and then back to marble again.
Warily, he kicks it. He half expects it to kick him back, but instead it just shifts back to dark oak. He waits a beat, but it doesn’t change again.
So he sits. After all, he’s got nothing better to do.
-
Neo's never been particularly good at this killing game thing, but he’s never been bad either. So when he stumbles across Silver in his cell, two dead men walking by his side, and it’s clear to both of them that they need each other rather than Neo simply just needing them, he agrees to team.
He helps Silver with his quest, and follows him into the wilderness.
He wore black back then. The spacesuit’s always been a bit of a weird fashion statement when he’s a creature of stones and mountains by nature, but it’s served him well in terms of armor and warmth. Plus, the black looks nice, in his very intellectual opinion.
He meets Avoma in this spacesuit, as he and Silver hightail it away from the sharp end of the former’s sword. After years, his memory of this game returns only in bits and pieces, muddled by time and too many deaths to count, but here’s the gist of it:
- Neo stays by Silver's side. they are not close, not friends but they stick together right up till the end. He can still remember the look on Silver’s face when he saw Neo still alive, the spray of blood on his face as the sky rises on a world with them somehow, miraculously, still in it.
- Dingle dies alone. They don’t find his body, but what they do find is enough for them to look at and know. Neo gathers up what’s left of him in his arms and swallows the lump in his throat. He refuses to cry, not now. Not again.
- They lose Quals, and revive him, and then lose him again. The first time, Neo sobs long and hard, this first loss rubbing his voice raw against his throat. The second time, he looks over Quals’s body, his blood dashed twice over across the pretty stones, and resolves to never wear black again. It’s too much of a mourning color. He hears Silver’s quiet wails and turns away.
He meets Avoma in this game. There's a new scar across his arm in memory of him. But they don’t talk here. not yet.
-
He's not sure how long he sits there, but eventually he becomes aware of the fact that he’s not alone.
“Who is it?” he asks, but the question falls flat. In all honesty, he thinks the emptiness of this other plane may be getting to him. He's already lost feeling in his fingers, but after so long sitting here he feels as if he’s lost the capacity for emotions, too. Feelings, he supposes, are not a dead man’s quality.
But then the mist clears around the spot on the seat next to him, and he swears he’s almost shocked back into breathing again.
Bundled in a bright blue jacket, face clear of scars, Avoma waves awkwardly at him.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing here?” Neo says. Feelings aren’t a dead man’s quality, but Avoma’s the exception for a lot of things.
And right now he’s trying for a smile, the toothy one that he uses when he’s trying (and failing) to appear friendly. “Can I sit here?”
“ What are you doing here,” Neo repeats, and suddenly he wishes his hands were corporeal so he could grab Avoma by the jacket and throttle him. “I swear, if this is some kind of sick jo-“
“Chill, oh my god. I was killed a few minutes ago,” Avoma replies quickly, raising his hands in a placating gesture. Then he pauses, tilting his head contemplatively. “I think. Can I sit here?”
“You’re already sitting.” he sags his shoulders. No use in fighting anymore. Once Avoma’s in his life, he rarely leaves except to die. “Why are you asking for permission?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Avoma blinks at him, and it’s so earnest. Neo wants to throw up.
Something along that train of thought must’ve been showing in the look he gives Avoma from beneath his helmet, because the other man throws his hands up in the air in exasperation. “Fine! Fine, whatever. Sorry I asked, or something. Jesus christ.”
They lapse into uncomfortable silence. He fiddles with the rim of his white gloves despairingly. Avoma keeps giving him glances when he thinks Neo isn’t looking, and Neo refuses to turn around.
“...How’d you die?” he finally says, resigning himself to his fate of having to share the company of the one person who was more emotionally dense than he was. “Knowing you, it was probably stupid.”
“Wow, rude,” Avoma sniffs, despite being seemingly relieved to be talking. “and I died the same way you did. In a fight. Someone got me from behind with an arrow, or at least it felt like an arrow. I dunno.”
“Huh.” It's surprisingly anticlimactic. “Who was it? The person who shot you, I mean,” He clarifies, when avoma gives him a quizzical glance.
“Oh. I’m not sure,” he replies, brow furrowing. “Like I said, it was from behind, so they must’ve been a little ways off. It wasn’t one of yours though,” he added, glancing at Neo nervously again. “I, uh. Heard one of the bigger teams got them all in one swoop at the Middle.”
Neo stares at him. “All of them?”
“All of them.”
The mist roars in his ears. Avoma is watching him, and his face is so full of pity, and it was the same face Neo had seen before he bled out on the cobblestones of the Middle, and his entire team is dead. They’re dead.
He exhales. It's almost scary how easy he can push it all away, nowadays. “That's a damn shame.”
Avoma hums. “Sure is.”
Neo rolls his eyes. “You don’t have to pretend to feel bad. If it wasn’t that team that wiped them out, it would’ve been yours.”
For the first time since he’d sat down, Avoma looks away.
“Yeah, I guess,” he says.
-
“I want to be king,” Avoma says, shining brilliantly in the starlight. Neo stands behind him and smiles.
It’s a new game, with new players and new rules. Their people are sectioned off in a patch of stone and starlight, and right now, they need a king. So Neo brings them a king. the other candidate, Dufcin, splutters and sneers at them. A duel is arranged for the next day.
“I'll win it, trust me,” Avoma laughs dismissively, and his grin only widens when Neo joins in. It's been the two of them since the beginning. Neo and Avoma, Avoma and Neo. The king and the right hand of the end.
Neo's not sure why Avoma chose him to latch onto as a companion. He is loud and brash and threatening when he doesn’t mean to be, violent where Neo is passive. Neo would never call himself a voice of reason, but more often than not he’s the one reeling Avoma away from one potential disaster to another. They trade jabs and insult each other, and Neo makes a big show of not trusting him - but beyond their own pettiness, Avoma is his friend, and he quietly hopes that the latter feels the same.
Avoma wins the duel, of course, standing bloody and triumphant over Dufcin’s body while his subjects pick apart the loot. Neo never worried about that.
He worries after, though, when they’re building and when they’re fighting and when they’re hiding in the crannies from the warden. Avoma fights and fights and fights - fighting their enemies, fighting his own people. He'll even pick a fight with Neo if he’s cranky enough. He tries not to blame him too much. Between the demands of their people, the building contests, and the ever encroaching nether and overworld populations, the king of the end has a lot on his plate. But Neo never fails to remind him that he’s also just Avoma.
At one point, he finds Avoma nearly hyperventilating on the outskirts of the city they built, minutes before they were to give the Warden’s Speaker a tour of the end.
“Calm down,” he snaps, shaking his king by the shoulders. “Snap out of it. We need to win this.”
“I know! I’m shaking, bro - shaking. ” he shrugs off Neo's hands helplessly, his crown falling off his head in the process. Neo picks it up and places it back over his curls as he complains. “I feel like I'm gonna pass out.”
He sinks down against the wall and sighs, holding his face in his hands. Neo kneels down with him, and he doesn’t really know what possessed him to do it - but he takes off his helmet, letting avoma see his face for the first time. “Look, we survived the warden, we survived the nether… you’re our king, Avoma. You can’t fail. We need this reward.”
The king of the end pouts as he meets Neo's eye before looking away, forlorn. “Ugh. Look at all the people on the hilltop. They’re all fuckin’ relying on me .”
There was nothing more he could say. So he holds out his hand and helps Avoma to his feet. They have a tour to give and a game to win.
-
Neo finally turns to look at him. His jacket is a splash of color against the gray, burning blue in a silvery sea.
“Is your team still alive?” he asks. It comes out hesitant and he hates himself for it.
Avoma startles, whipping around to face him again. “Oh shit. I forgot you were here. Nah, I think they might’ve died. Maybe Lunari’s still alive, she’s pretty plucky when it comes to getting chased - but the rest are probably dead, yeah.”
He leans in conspiratorially. “Between you and me, I was carrying them all. They were just cannon fodder.”
Neo groans. “I wish your ego had stayed with your fragment in the living world.”
Avoma cackles at that, and it’s a real struggle for Neo to keep his face straight.
-
They win in the dimension game. It is everything, the burst of fireworks and cheers in his ears. The nether king’s mask is raised high in Avoma’s hands as he presents it to the jubilant crowd below the throne. beneath an endless sea of stars, as festivities commence, Neo takes his king’s hands in his own and bows low and deep.
Avoma’s hands were warm against his forehead. Yes, they won in that game.
They aren’t so lucky in the next one.
Neo can’t see the stars anymore, here under the trees. Even the moon is obscured. Instead, there’s the smell of rotting flesh all around, the vicious scrape of claws against his backside, and the moans of the infected as they stumble after him, pus leaking from their wounds. He’s grateful for his helmet - it blocks out the worst of the smell. If Karan's queasy face beside him is anything to go by, the full force of it would probably make him blow chunks in the middle of the forest road.
In this game, a virus, purposefully planted in the code, has spread to the game’s mobs. What once was people prowled the streets. Sentinels dotted the high grounds. He goes hunting with Methai one day, when they’re low on food, and they both shriek girlishly as a cow’s jaws peel back to reveal a set of jagged, worm-eaten teeth.
He endures, though. He survives. Just long enough to reunite with Avoma.
They’re both worse for wear when they meet again. Neo’s suit is dented, his helmet draped in blood, and Avoma’s jacket is splattered with mud and matter. But he meets Neo’s gaze, his blue eyes just as tired as Neo feels, and understands.
They trek - or limp, in Karan’s case - all the way back to Neo’s base. They make fun of the wood from which it was built. Everyone dogpiles on Neo, as per usual - and when Avoma laughs long and hard, Neo just can’t find it in him to shush him.
Everything goes to shit soon after that. They make battle plans that get derailed. They set up traps that don’t work. They get into fights they can’t win, and Avoma dies.
Neo sees it happen. There’s a sneer on his face, right up till the end. He'd fallen as he’d tried to retreat, breaking his own neck. After so many losses, it’s all Neo can do to hope he didn’t suffer too much in the end.
He sends Wesley out to burn the body, and gets a sympathetic pat on the shoulders for his troubles. Wesley understands. Avoma would’ve hated the idea of being eaten.
Neo lives to see the game’s end, nearly collapsing onto the ground before Pool catches him, the two of them watching the parasite god thrash as it withers away into nothing. A little ways away from them, Karan pumps a sooty fist into the air with a cheer.
They’ve won. He's won, with Avoma reduced to ashes in some blighted wood far away. No point in staying in this world now that it’s over. Neo bleeds out into the next.
He dreams of the house Avoma hated.
-
There’s cigarettes in his pocket, Neo suddenly realizes, as his fingers close around the box. Surprise is quickly followed by confusion. He rarely smoked in the living world, and he sure as hell wasn’t carrying any marlboro when he died.
He takes a long look out at the misty sea. If this was the universe’s way of telling him something, it would have to be a bit more upfront than that. Or maybe it just wanted to give him a bit of a reprieve.
He withdraws the box from his pocket. It’s not like he has anything better to do.
“Whatcha got there?” Avoma drawls, leaning over to peer at the box. He ooo ’s at the sight of it. “Cigarettes! Neat. Can I have one?”
“I have no idea how they got there,” Neo admits, turning it over in his hands. “I don't smoke.”
“Neither do I, plus vaping is cringe,” Avoma replies. “But then again, we’re dead. What’s gonna happen to us, a secret cancer only ghosts know about?”
Well, that’s… fair enough, he supposes. Neo stares thoughtfully at the box. “We don't have a light.”
“Nah, hang on,” Avoma interrupts, holding up a finger as he digs through his own pockets. Then he pulls out a lighter, finger on the switch. a click, and the flames sputter to life. It casts his face in an orange glow as he grins triumphantly. “I gotchu.”
He flicks off the lighter. Beneath his helmet, expression encased safety behind a visor of black, Neo thinks of fire and shudders.
-
He bites down hard on his lip as Pool works, trying and failing not to wince. Burns were nasty business, especially as an airbender.
They are hiding in a cave, their numbers lower than low. Libly’s dead, Jira’s dead, their whole team dead, dead, dead.
Because of Commonhat.
Because of Avoma.
“I want to be king,” Avoma had said, ten games and several lifetimes ago. Neo had been by his side then, and together they had ruled the world. But now Avoma was the Firelord and Neo was more alone than he ever realized.
“You’re good to go,” Pool announces quietly, as he finishes cleaning the wound and wrapping it up in bandages. Guilt gnaws at Neo. They were low on supplies as it was, and Pool hadn’t even treated his own wounds yet. Much of their supplies had burned away and died alongside their teammates. A quiet rage is simmering inside of him, and he swears to avenge them.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter.
Btek is killed. Pool dies, set ablaze by the Fire Nation’s many soldiers. A man named Pierce takes the helm of the avatar, and adds his strength to the oncoming hoard. And as the soldiers close in, battering at the last of his strength to take down his airwalls, Neo looks into the Firelord’s eyes and sees nothing.
Avoma does not care about him. perhaps he never had.
Neo screams and screams until the fire swallows him whole.
-
“I'm still mad at you, just so you know,” Neo mutters, opening the box and taking out a cig. He holds it out for Avoma to take.
Avoma laughs at him. It's infuriating. “Yeah, I know. You always are.” He takes the cigarette from Neo without much fanfare, murmuring a quiet thank-you under his breath.
Neo raises a brow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Does it have to mean anything?” Avoma gives him a little nudge with his shoulder. It doesn’t feel like quite as friendly a gesture as it should. “Maybe I just think you’re taking this whole thing a little too seriously, Neo.”
Neo snorts. “You killed me in the last game, Avoma. And the one before that and the one before that. forgive me if I stay bitter for a bit.”
“Bitterness isn’t a very good look on you, sweetheart. Not to mention this whole thing,” he raises his arms to gesture vaguely in the direction of the colorless sky, “is just a game. You don’t have to feel anything about it. I sure as hell don’t.”
They stare at each other.
“So that's just it then,” Neo says quietly, his lip curling into a sneer under the helmet. “I was always a means to an end.”
Avoma glares, and it’s the first sign of anger he’s shone all day. “I never said that.”
“Not in so many words,” Neo spat. He gets to his feet and feels the sting of tears in his eyes, swallowing hard. He refused to cry. Not over this.
Avoma's fists curl tight at his side. a note of despair has crept into his voice and face. “I never said that.”
“I heard you the first ti-”
Avoma grabs Neo's hands, warmth radiating from his palms. The touch is firm yet soft, everlastingly gentle. Neo feels bile rise to his throat. but before he can wrench his hand away and tell Avoma to fuck off, Avoma lifts his hands to his face.
“You were only a means to an end,” Avoma bites out, “ Sometimes. We’re in a death game, Neo. Of course you would be. But despite it all, I look at you and I see one of the only people in my life worth standing by.” He visibly swallows. “Do you hear me, Neo? I look at you and see the closest thing I have to a friend.”
He says it like he’s being held at gunpoint, but his grip on Neo’s hand is steady.
-
He’s wary of Avoma from the minute they meet. But with an enemy hard on his tail, what choice does he have?
Avoma strikes down the enemy player, grabs his hand as they run, and laughs all the way to safety. They are quickly proclaimed Enemy Of The State by Pharolen. It wasn’t much of a choice, really.
Neo and Avoma, Avoma and Neo. There’s no crown to claim, no stars to run under, but the calluses on Avoma’s palms are so familiar it hurts. It is hard even for Neo to remember the burning of his own flesh at his newfound teammate’s hands. Not when the moment he comes back from the dead, the ghost of Lokay’s blood still staining his face, it is Avoma who takes him up in his arms and watches him weep.
They make a formidable duo. This fact would’ve been devastating to Neo had it not been a lifesaver against their enemies from time and time again. Neo and Avoma, Avoma and Neo. But even then, the two of them couldn’t make it to the end.
They rush up the twining roots of the tree, the countdown of a clock flashing red in Neo’s vision. One more. He needed just one more kill to get the bow. One more kill before he’s able to avenge Methai and Lokay and Jenenic and all the rest.
I’m not going to make it, he realized.
And then, why isn’t Avoma following me?
He turns around, and blindly watches his teammate rip his own armor off from his body and sink to his knees before the pieces fall in place. “Oh, no no no no no, I’m not doing this right now - “
But Avoma cut him off with an outstretched hand. He’s bleeding from his nose, and the blood stains his teeth when he smiles one final time.
“This is where my story ends,” he says, and Neo wants to punch him in the jaw, wants to string a wreath of flowers from his hair. “Kill Pharolen. Avenge everyone. But take care of yourself first, alright? You’re too trusting, Neo. Please.”
He can’t stop himself. A strangled sob escapes his throat. “ Avoma.”
Avoma’s smile wavers, but he doesn’t look away. “Neo. You’re running out of time.”
What will you do?
-
So here's how it goes.
Slowly, hesitantly, Neo places his hand over the one Avoma has atop his own. and just as slowly, but not quite as hesitantly, he lets out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Avoma chokes out, his voice cracking on the last syllable.
“Okay,” Neo repeats, and he thinks he’s starting to mean it. “I heard you. I hear you, I mean.”
“Oh. Well, good, " Avoma huffs, dropping Neo's hand and shifting away from him on the bench. “I don't think the government could waterboard that statement out of me again. Jesus Christ, Neo, you’re so needy. ”
That startles a laugh out of him, and Neo's shoulders shake as he wheezes. “ God, you’re such an asshole.”
“Well, you know what they say,” Avoma shoots him a serial killer’s smile, like that isn’t every smile he gives. “You are what you eat, MindofNeo.”
And just like that, the serious atmosphere is gone. They fall silent again, but it’s a comfortable one. The type you might find shared between two friends. Or whatever relationship status that you have been and will be everything to me that matters entailed.
And here’s how it goes: Avoma holds out his lighter, cigarette tucked between his teeth, and Neo sees the burst of the fire and doesn’t flinch. Pulling off his helmet, he takes a cig of his own and leans in close, and within seconds both of their smokes are alight.
Maybe it was days, or months or years on end, or simply just a few seconds. That's however long it takes for Neo to feel the pleasant burn of smoke inside his lungs, in his throat, slipping through the space between his teeth and tongue.
He lowers the cig from his face, looking out over the void. Beside him, Avoma throws his head back and exhales, the smoke curling through the mist like a homecoming.
“Hey,” he says. “I'm sorry about your team, Neo.”
Neo only hums.
It’s not an I’m sorry I hurt you more than either of us can say. Not an I will try to do right by you. But it is a start. An outstretched hand, or perhaps an offer for a light. And in these games, where friendship is only an afterthought, he supposes that’s all he can ask for.
So as he sits on a bench beside his friend and king and victim and killer, Neo takes a grateful drag of his cigarette and sighs.
It’s not like he’s got anything better to do.