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I know we last met years ago, but
I’ll still see movies I think you’d like
We could watch them together and rant on the phone
You’d like the scene where they quit their job
And I’d hate it and call it so stupid
Xisuma had so much work to do that keeping track of everything had become a beast of its own. He'd started with a simple, torn-out page, which he'd since flipped over, scribbled all over the margins of, then moved to a corkboard which got so full it fell, the various half-to-not-finished tasks scattering around his office like dry, autumn leaves.
Despite dutifully sleeping eight hours each night and eating what technically counted as three meals a day, his energy was waning. His senses slowly gave out, sight and hearing dissolving to give way to living like a rigid automaton, processing one task after the other. It was fine. For the sake of the server, Xisuma could endure this. He wouldn’t get upset. He wouldn’t get angry. His players all had their own wants and needs and it was his responsibility to weave their demands together into a seamless whole.
He wasn’t exhausted. And he definitely wasn’t starting to break down every other day.
Xisuma hated being irritated – which he absolutely wasn’t right now – because he didn’t want to risk lashing out at anybody. Why couldn’t he handle this better, really? What good was an admin who was so overly sensitive, so weak that he couldn’t take a bit of overtime? He did his best to hide his troubles. He was upset no one took note of them.
His communicator flashed red. The server’s firewall had been breached. This day could not get any better, could it?
> EvilX joined the server
Ex had many hobbies in life. Bribery. Blackmail. Arson. If he had to pick a favorite, though, it was pestering his goody-two-shoes clone. The “better” brother. Xisuma “Everyone-has-good-qualities” Void and his server of holier-than-thou loons whose trust-based system had, against all odds, yet to implode. Ex had made it his mission in life to tear it apart, but had yet to succeed that was still a work-in-progress… Which had nothing to do with the fact that every time he got even slightly close his heart seemed to clench into a tight knot and his body refused to carry out the final steps of the plan. Perhaps those were the effects of countermeasures implemented by the admin? They couldn’t have been, he was too much of a derp to make that work. But surely, Ex wasn’t experiencing fondness for this backwards place. It certainly hadn’t grown on him after countless hours spent attempting to bring about its demise. Not at all.
He had carefully thought out what he’d do once he breached the firewall, but instead found himself simply standing at spawn, letting the wind play with his cape. Some guy with angel wings walked by on the dirt road – Why was he walking if he had wings? Was nobody on this server normal? – and Ex hid himself around the corner of the spawn building. He wasn’t scared! It was simply a… Tactical maneuver, yes.
He sighed. Spawn was so quiet. Birds were chirping, a stream was rushing by. None of the cannon-fire and lava-pops of Hels's griefed-to-bedrock world spawn. It made him want to destroy this tepid lie of a server even more.
He peeked back around the corner – the angel was gone, now, thankfully – and spied the shopping district ahead. Yes, people here built shops, where one could exchange diamonds for goods and services. With no supervision. Among bribery, blackmail and arson, petty to grand theft was also among Ex’s favorite activities. He figured it’d be a decent enough plan to simply… Steal the entire stock of the server. This quickly proved to be way too annoying of an undertaking, however, after the fifth trip with an inventory full of honey blocks left him horribly sticky. How extremely undignified for an evil overlord. He did get a few bees following him, which made him curious if he could forge an army of the things, but on closer inspection all they strove for in life was wiggling their butts around and asking for pets. What useless creatures. He got so upset with their incompetence at waging war that he decided he’d simply blow up the shopping district. Building a bomb would surely attract Xisuma’s attention, too. Where was that derp, anyway? Ex had been messing around for an hour and his brother was late. Not that the evil overlord wanted to see his stupid face, but there was something undeniably concerning about the ever-diligent admin not even bothering to check what his foil was up to. Could Ex have lost his edge? Had this ridiculous server turned him too soft? Was he not threatening enough to warrant intercepting him anymore? No… No… That couldn’t have been the case. This must’ve been some kind of trap. Well, he’d show Xisuma! He wouldn’t fall for it!
So, he ended up sitting on a bench, twiddling with his thumbs for forty more minutes. The angel, named Skizz, as he later found out, showed back up in the meantime and he begrudgingly engaged him in conversation. He reasoned he was gathering intel, but in truth, he was just bored out of his mind. The buffoon must’ve mistaken him for his clone because he was being very friendly – good, deception was also among Ex’s hobbies. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to have any actually useful information, instead talking the overlord’s ear off about how great some other guy’s walled city was. He wasn’t even boasting about himself! Weird people on this server. Thankfully, he had to leave eventually and walked off with a big wave and a “Bye, Evil X!”
…
At least his visor was tinted crimson so nobody could see his face turn red as a tomato. Stupid! He clonked himself on the head. Stupid Exavier! And also stupid that guy, what was he doing casually chatting with the enemy?
Ex ended up lamenting that Skizz had left, because, now, he was bored, again. He didn’t even feel like blowing up the shopping district, anymore, that was how bored he was! When his idiot brother showed up he was going to give him a piece of his mind.
Almost like he had summoned the derp by thought alone, Xisuma half-fell out of the sky, stumbling as his elytra fluttered closed behind him.
“I’ve come to stop you!” he exclaimed, brandishing his netherite sword, then lowering it in confusion. “… What are you doing?”
Ex dramatically leaned forward, pretending to check a watch he wasn’t actually wearing. “Well, well, if it isn’t my favorite brother, just in time to stop me ”
“… I’m your only brother” Xisuma noted. “Wait, did you say brother? ”
Ex cleared his throat, “No, I didn’t”, and drew his own sword to hide his embarrassment. Xisuma was his clone. His inferior replica, it would have been outlandish to consider him family. He mentally swatted that thought away, shoving aside any pesky fondness to put on his best evil overlord voice instead. “So, do you care for my ingenious contraption or are you itching to give me one of your stupid ‘I know you’re good deep inside!’ speeches first?” he asked, bluffing, as he had not bothered to finish his explosive. If Xisuma put in no effort, why should he, really? He didn’t even get up from the bench, absently leaning on a fist, elbow staked into a knee crossed over a leg, his body folding up like a shrimp while he used his other hand to gesture with his sword.
Xisuma rolled his eyes behind his visor. “If only I had the time. Can’t you just go back to Hels?”
Exavier frowned.“You ignore me for two hours only to tell me to leave?! The – The disrespect!” he sputtered, rising to his feet. “That calls for retaliation, my foolish copy”
Something was very off. The admin was usually polite to a fault and despite all his pushing, Ex had never managed to wrangle a single rude word out of him. Yet, here he was, outwardly hostile from minute one. Had he perhaps grown a backbone? What could have prompted such character development?
His thoughts were interrupted by a swing – that was also new, his brother clone had never swung first, “violence only in self-defense” and all – that landed square against his helmet and he stumbled back, his vision fragmenting into a million pieces as the glass of his visor splintered.
“Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry, I thought you’d block that ” the admin frantically apologized. Ex blindly lunged at him and felt the flat of his blade hit something soft – his brother’s suit, no doubt – had it been the edge, it would have sliced his arm clean off.
“Silly Xisuma, you don’t apologize after an opening like that” he spat, clearing his vision by tearing the stuck glass shards from his visor with the help of his gloved hands, aware of how some of the sharp pieces were now pooling under his helmet. He raised his sword again. While the prior hit had been born from the instinctual need to regain ground, this one was filled with precision and intent. “You go in for the kill!”
It was Xisuma’s turn to be caught off-guard – how had he not expected Ex to retaliate? Had the sight of his visor cracking shocked him that badly? It only served to reaffirm his belief that fondness was a weakness. Foolish admin.
The two clashed, Xisuma finally remembering himself, though he still hadn’t switched out his elytra for his chestplate – a mistake Ex made sure to thoroughly punish him for. His clone’s suit granted some protection, but it wasn’t nearly strong enough to withstand the wrath of a netherite blade. And Xisuma was stumbling. He fought clumsily, like a malnourished dog, some of his swings missing Ex entirely, his blocks not faring much better. He decided if his clone had broken his helmet, it was only fair for him to return the favor. He knew it’d be easy, too.
The thing was, the admin got way too attached to things. And his current helmet, one with a creaking motif, had been a gift from one of his servermates. A gift which had already once cracked and been repaired, the splinter running down across two of the three eye holes. It wouldn’t take much to split it in half.
It didn’t take much to split it in half.
The admin fell to the ground, kicking up dust from the road, pieces of his mask flying off in opposite directions. Xisuma brought his hands to his head – Ex had no doubt it hurt and that didn’t make him feel bad. It didn’t make his heart unwillingly clench up whatsoever . Ugh, what was with all of this?
It was time to finish him off. At least if he died, the pain would probably go awa – … Did Exavier need his head checked? Maybe Xisuma was the one who’d hit him too hard, not the other way around.
“If it isn’t the consequences of your actions” he laughed, dragging his sword along the ground as he approached. “See where all your little attachments get you?”
Xisuma would usually talk back at times like this. Contradict him somehow, tell him off in that sagely voice of his he had reserved for when he was about to lose and wanted to seem dignified. But there was nothing. The admin turned to his side and pulled his legs up, hands still clutched to his head. His elytra wings twitched behind him as if he was a moth on the door of death. Disappointing, Ex looked forward to their chats.
There seemed to be some odd noise mixing in with the slight breeze. Some sort of strange, high-pitched… Was Xisuma crying?
Ex held his breath, trying to listen – though the sound wasn’t what gave it away in the end. It was the ragged, uneven trembling of his brother’s shoulders.
“Suma?”
The nickname slipped through his lips subconsciously, dry from a decade of dormancy, but still imbued with the taste of stale chocolate chip cookies found tucked in a drawer, hot soup served during a cold, blankets draped over his shoulders, sensations from a time before either of them realized why Xisuma had been made, long before their lives evolved into ruthless competition and constant one-upmanship, and even longer before all of that broke down into unyielding silence about the past and only sarcasm in regards to the present.
The admin shook again and Exavier looked it in the eye. All of it. All of him. All of that pathetic thing writhing on the ground, exactly alike, just like Exavier. There was no escaping it, not when he was his spitting image under the mask. Not when he sometimes startled from his bedroom mirror, thinking it had become a door to the other’s. Xisuma’s hand extended for his sword, laying flat beside him. Ex intercepted it, taking it in his instead.
His eyes shot up at him, as if startled, lids red and swollen in a way Ex hadn’t seen them in years – and even then, it had always been from the corner of his vision, carefully wrapped up by the time he could observe in full.
“What happened to you? You’re not – Were you…”
While Ex and Xisuma certainly didn’t ever meet up for brunch to catch up, Ex knew his clone brother well enough. They’d talked a surprising amount on the occasion they got into a fight. Call it weird, call it whatever. It was their thing. That’s why he knew Xisuma wouldn’t crack this hard from a hit to the head. Something was wrong.
“Come on, you’re better than that”
(He was better. At everything, really. He was made to be, so how could he not be ?)
A sob tore from the admin’s throat, louder than when Ex had swung at him, louder when he hit his helmet or when he fell to the ground.
“What if I’m not?” he choked out, gloved fingers gripping into his hair.
“Then…” Ex ran a thumb across the flat of Xisuma’s hand, “Then we can share the title of disappointment, together. Come on, I can be generous”
Xisuma absently blinked into the middle distance, his darkened living room blurring, then coming into focus to the beat of his heart. He’d been venting about nonsense not even he could make heads or tails of for the past hour or so and now it was abruptly quiet. Not because he’d run out of things to say, he’d simply tired himself out. All that was left was the softness of a shoulder pad against his squished cheek, a gloved hand somewhere on his arm and an unmasked face, which he was too afraid to look in the eye, lingering above him.
“Sounds like you’ve had a tough week, then” Ex said, finally. He hadn’t spoken a word all this time.
Xisuma hummed. Understatement of the season, he thought.
“Doc might come by soon for some blueprints I don’t have” he acknowledged.
“It’s okay, I’ll tell him to fuck off”
Xisuma chuckled. “No, that’s – ”
“Or I’ll kill him”
He shook his head. “No violence, Ex”
His brother let out a disappointed sigh, blowing hair out of his face. “Fine”
X glanced up to see him touching a hand to the fresh cuts on his neck, left by shattered glass, little red dots peppered across his skin like freckles. The light from the room adjacent outlined the contour of his face and shone through the loose strands of hair. Xisuma would look like this in six years, too, he thought. It was odd to constantly have someone remind him of things like that. He let his head fall back down, listening to the breathing of the warmth beside him.
“Remember how we used to sneak out onto the roof?” Exavier asked.
Xisuma smiled. “Yeah. And we’d argue about which constellation that weird thing in the sky was” he recalled, “… and it was the new server hub”
“And then one time you fell off and I had to sneak you back into the house”
They both chuckled, then fell into a hazy silence. Xisuma was sure Exavier was dancing around the same sentences he was – it had long since become second nature, the wider context of their lives mere background noise to moments they did their best to highlight and isolate from everything else. Like bubbles floating up from a solaced exhale, reaching some imagined surface only to pop.
There was nothing unusual about the day when Exavier told him he was going. It was a perfectly average morning, so, so sunny and bright it was almost sickening. And Xisuma just nodded and packed his bags. It was a sequence he’d rehearsed a thousand times over in his head on nights spent against his bedroom floor. They were out the door in under thirty minutes. Xisuma sometimes wondered when they realized they had left. And when they realized they were gone.
Everything was off on the day he told Xisuma he was leaving. Maybe because he had already packed his bags the night before and had been on pins and needles since. He didn’t know what to bring. He didn’t know if he wanted to bring anything. He would have been fine walking off into the world with just the clothes on his back, he’d thought. And yet, with one foot over the doorstep, he realized he’d left something (someone) behind.
“I’m sorry about what I said at the server hub” Xisuma said, eventually, eyes reflecting some far away, starry sky. They’d talked at many server hubs on many different occasions, but there was no need to clarify what he meant.
Exavier briefly froze before relaxing his posture again, in a way that still came off as rigid and forced. He didn’t move away from Xisuma, thinking that’d be a show of weakness.
“It’s fine. I didn’t care”
(If the lifetime of the universe had been a number, he could have picked out the moment it happened to the last digit)
“I’m glad I went with you, Xav” Xisuma continued.
“Why?” he found himself asking, withdrawing his arm to face him. “You could’ve stayed, they liked you, you could’ve been the admin of a real server –”
“This is a real server” Xisuma objected, “My… What did you call it? My ensemble of holier-than-thou loons?” he chuckled with a voice so fond it was hard to deny he held anything but immense love for the people he’d been absently ranting about half an hour prior. “And I don’t think they liked me, for the record” he added with a sigh, “I’m sure they thought they did”
Exavier stayed silent. His hand reached up to the scars on his neck.
“Don’t pick at those or I’ll chase you around the room with disinfectant spray like that time you fell into a rose bush” Xisuma teased.
Ex tried to look serious, but a smile unwillingly crept onto his face. “Shut up!” he sputtered.
“Anyway, just in case you… Feel like you haven’t found your place yet, Hermitcraft always has room for one more” he offered sheepishly, “Just wanted to get that out there”
Ex rolled his eyes. “I’d rather eat my gloves than talk to any of these people” he scoffed, “Besides, I already have a place. In Hels” he added with a rare, fond smile.
Xisuma beamed. “I’m glad”
They fell into silence again, after that, letting the time pass with eyelids that grew heavier by the minute. Xisuma held back a chuckle when he heard quiet snoring from beside him. It seemed he wasn’t the only tired one between the two of them. He never wanted to let Xav hear the end of it. He also wanted to make it the world’s most well-kept secret. Perhaps one could have both.
I’m still so, so worried about you
Even when you’re not mine to shelter
I hope you’ll still let me hold an umbrella
As we meet like two ghosts at the bus stop together