Work Text:
He’s running, stumbling through the dense forest in one final attempt to get away from her. The streaks of blood trailing behind him act as morbid footsteps, tracing his path as he scrambles through the trees and bushes. Smiling at his desperation, she pulls back her bow, notching an arrow and carefully lining it up with the receding figure. The arrow flies true, embedding itself in the flesh of his back with enough force to knock him forward. This time, though, he doesn’t get back up.
She did it.
She won.
As Gem exhales, tension drains from her body. Relief washes over her, though her nervous system hasn’t quite gotten the message that she’s no longer in danger. For the first time in the three months she’s been in this cursed place, she’s safe. She is still pumped up on adrenaline, but she can finally take a moment to just breathe. Collapsing onto a nearby log, the world around her fades out of focus. All that exists in this moment are her ragged breaths and racing heartbeat. She doesn’t know how long she sits there. His blood from their earlier fight has begun to dry on her hands, but she can’t bring herself to move to clean it off. She feels frozen to the wood beneath her, not registering the dampness seeping into her clothes or the sun falling below the horizon.
She is jolted back to reality by an arrow flying past her head, just barely sinking into the tree behind her instead of her skull. Jumping up with a start, she quickly moves to position the tree between her and the direction the arrow came from. In her temporary hiding spot, panic wells up in her chest. She should be safe. She did it, she won, she should be safe now. Why can’t the universe just give her a break? Her heart rate quickens again as her breaths shorten. Flipping back into survival mode, she scans the forest around her for the source of the projectile. There. She locks onto the motion in the shadows, trying to identify her assailant, as she moves her hands to the bow at her hip in preparation to shoot. As the figure in the shadows begins to emerge from the treeline, Gem screams.
He’s dead. She killed him. She watched as he bled out on the forest floor and the world reclaimed his limp body. So why does she see his face staring back at her? The red of his eye seems to glow in the darkness, his white hair shining under the moonlight.
“Etho?” she yells out, anguish, confusion, and fear mixing in her voice
He doesn’t answer, doesn’t even seem to react to her voice. He just notches another arrow and releases it toward her. She manages to duck behind the tree again with a fraction of a second to spare, but for once, her survival isn’t the only thing at the front of her mind.
“Etho, what are you doing?” she cries in desperation. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
At the lack of response or even just a noise to acknowledge her presence, she peeks out from behind the tree. Standing in the clearing, bathed in moonlight, is a skeleton. Gem sinks to the forest floor, knees curled into her chest, and sobs.
The universe must be finally having mercy on her, because she stays there, unbothered by monsters, until daybreak. The warmth she feels as the sun climbs into the sky slowly brings her back to awareness. She blinks rapidly as she lifts her head, struggling to adjust to the sudden brightness. She sighs as she moves to stand up. As nice as it sounds to sit in a forest clearing under the sun forevermore, she needs to get back to her base and take inventory of what remains. The last two weeks were a chaotic bloodbath as alliances fell one by one, and now Gem has been left alone to rebuild from the aftermath. Some clean, dry, clothes, free from the blood of her closest ally, wouldn’t be remiss either.
In the end, she burns the clothes. They’re just one more reminder of the life she took, of the best friend who’d been by her side since day one until he died at her hands. Everything she’s been doing in the days following the final fight has been in an effort to erase the memories that still haunt her. She would have been good on food for years if not a lifetime, if only the farm hadn’t been built by Etho. She’d have had enough materials to create whatever she desired, if only he hadn’t gathered them. She’d have had a perfectly good set of clothes once cleaned, if only they wouldn’t be forever stained with his blood in her head. Instead, she starts almost from scratch, looting the bases of her adversaries but never touching what was once Etho’s. She’d feel a bit guilty about stealing, even from the dead, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’d all tried to kill her at one point or another. Etho, though, had stood by her side until the end, loyal to a fault, and he’d died for it.
The home they’d built together is the one thing she can’t bear to replace, but she sees him in every corner, hears his voice whispering in her ear. She hears him teasing her when she makes a silly mistake, guiding her as she tries to construct contraptions a fraction as complicated as his, encouraging her when she gets frustrated over a build. Every time she hears him, the part of her brain that doesn’t understand death lights up, elated at his return, and she has to remind herself that it’s fake. He’s dead. She killed him. The reminder stings, sending waves of grief through her all over again.
Seeing him is even worse. When she sees him, it feels so real. She longs desperately to reach out and touch him, to embrace him again, to sob into his chest as she apologizes endlessly. When she draws closer to do so, though, she inevitably extends her hand to meet nothing but air, and the mirage fades. It feels like she loses a part of him again every time his illusion vanishes, and the anguish that overcomes her is unbearable. She doesn’t get much, if anything, done on the days she sees him.
Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and eventually, she hasn’t heard him in almost a year. Gem misses it, sometimes, his snarky remarks and unconditional support. If she tries too hard to imagine his voice, she breaks down at the realization that she’s forgetting how he sounded. Instead, she’s taken to talking to him. She tells him about her day, her plans for the future, her dreams, and anything else she can think to talk about. She sees him less and less, too. Every so often, though, she swears she can see a glint of red in the corner of her vision, his eyes betraying the smirk his mask covers. He’s always gone by the time she turns toward him, but she’s grateful to get to see him for even just a second. Maybe, one day, she won’t rely on visions of her dead best friend for company. Maybe she’ll be really, truly okay one day. Today isn’t that day, though, so Gem waves at the illusion over her shoulder and smiles wetly as he disappears.