Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The atmosphere after the meeting was warm, though it was a rainy evening outside.

Hermits stood in clusters with their plates in hand, and a low indistinct chatter filled the room over the background of the rain hitting the windows.

There were more desserts on the potluck table than there were mains, but no one seemed to mind much; it had the pleasant effect of making the room smell like a bakery, which was nothing to get upset over.

Etho had found himself, through the strange alchemy of floating from one conversation to another without much thought, talking to Ren in a corner. The topic had turned to soulmates, of all things, though he couldn’t have told you how it got there for the life of him.

Maybe it wasn’t too strange of a topic, the hermits were, as a rule, huge gossips.

“— nothing new, no one has heard anything about Xelqua still.” He said to Ren, before he caught the flash of something being thrown in his direction from the corner of his eye, and immediately ducked on instinct.

The glass sailed directly through where his head had been a split second ago, hitting the wall with so much force that it shattered on impact, denting the wood panelling of the wall and spreading sharp shards and juice alike onto the floor.

Silence descended on the party like an anvil, the background chatter ceasing abruptly as everyone turned to look at the source of the sound.

The apple juice dripped down the wall, extending the stain.

Etho stayed in his half crouch, frozen as he stared at Grian. The other man was breathing heavily in the quiet, as though he had just run a marathon, or gotten the fright of his life; his face looked somewhere halfway between scared and furious. It was an ugly expression, and it only caused Etho to tense up further to have it directed at him — Grian had never seemed hostile towards him before this. They had barely spoken one on one, but nothing the other hermits had ever said had prepared him for this behaviour.

Something was clearly very wrong, but he had no idea what it could possibly be.

Mumbo, who had been Grian’s conversation partner, looked equally as clueless and shocked by the sudden attack as anyone else, still holding his half-full plate in one hand (and seemingly Grian’s own plate in the other) and staring dumbly along with everyone else in the room.

“What did you say?” Grian’s voice cracked horribly, both a hiss and a demand and at the same time rising hysterically, “Where did you hear that name?!”

Etho raised his hands non-threateningly, palms out, in an attempt to deescalate from whatever had set Grian off so badly. It felt like he was trying to calm down some kind of wild animal.

A beat passed and nobody else spoke up to bail him out.

“I said that nobody has heard anything new about Xelqua,” Grian flinched violently as he said the name. It looked painful, and a suspicion started to form in Etho’s mind, “Do you… know Xelqua?”

“Not that it’s any of your business,” he countered flatly, “since I was asking you where you heard it.” He seemed to consider for a moment, “But you could say that. I know for a fact that you don’t know him.”

The way Grian was speaking sounded like it hurt. The sentences cut off and disjointed. Like he was biting the words off before they were really finished.

Xisuma seemed not to notice any of it as be bustled eagerly over and out from the spectating ring of hermits that had formed around the conversation.

The admin took Grian’s hand in his own armoured one excitedly, seemingly without a care for the tension still lining the other man’s frame or the severe tone of the conversation.

“Etho and I have been friends for a long time,” he explained gently, staring somehow beseechingly through his helmet visor, “of course he knows about Xelqua. Xelqua is the name of my soulmate.”

The tension dropped out of Grian’s body all at once. “Oh.” He said, “It’s all just a misunderstanding then,” he laughed shakily. “Maybe it’s spelled differently or something then. It must be a different Xelqua.”

Etho… didn’t believe that. The way Grian pronounced ‘Xelqua’ was exactly the same as the way that Xisuma did it. With the strange static-y quality on the X sound — like a signal breaking up — that only creatures from the void seem to have the vocal cord set-up to say in the proper dialect.

Come to think of it, Etho didn’t know that he had ever heard Grian actually try to say ‘Xisuma’ properly. It had always been ‘X’ or ‘X-eye-zoom-a’ from him, which would be nothing strange if he simply didn’t want to admit to being unable to say it properly, though most hermits at least gave it their best try once in a while. It was polite to try, and Xisuma was always understanding.

But clearly Grian could have said it properly if he wanted to. Etho really didn’t think they were talking about a different person.

Ren’s ears were still pinned flat against his skull is distress from the glass throw, “That was still totally not cool dude, you could have hurt someone.”

Grian turned away from Xisuma to look back at Etho and Ren, his face was still pale, but he seemed much calmer now, “I’m sorry for freaking out on you like that Etho — I shouldn’t have thrown something at you.”

That was… oddly formal for Grian. But it did look like he was coming out of some kind of shock. And he really didn’t want to dig more into it and risk making this any worse.

“These things happen,” he ventured cautiously, “anyone can act strangely when they are startled. But are you sure you’re okay?”

“You’re right, I was just startled. That’s all.” He tacked on an obviously fake laugh, “Bad memories you know?” He said it as though he was trying to dismiss it from reality entirely. It really wasn’t as reassuring as Grian was clearly aiming for.

Xisuma squeezed Grian’s hand that he still had a hold of in a bid to regain his attention. Pain flashed across his expression for a moment, but it was gone in an instant and he didn’t try to pull his hand back from the admin’s grip.

“Are you sure it isn’t the same person? It’s spelled ̇/ ᒷ ꖎ ᑑ ⚍ ᔑ.” He pronounced each letter individually, and they fizzled together in Etho’s ears incomprehensibly. He couldn’t have repeated them back. “Please, if you know anything at all, tell me. I’ve been looking for a long time and haven’t found anything.”

Xisuma really had been looking everywhere, Etho had sat with him some nights as he used his Admin permissions to search through every public server he could access for even a trace of his soulmate.

But Grian was already clamming up again, that strange expression back on his face. He tore his hand out of Xisuma’s with no small amount of force and shoved the admin back, only succeeding in making the much larger man take a single step to steady himself, and even that only because he wasn’t expecting it.

“I need to go right now.”

Grian ducked through the crowd of shocked hermits at a startled rabbit speed, fleeing right out the door without another word.

Xisuma stood, stunned, in the middle of the room; his hand still raised.

Mumbo was still holding his own plate in one hand and Grian’s in the other.

Etho’s communicator buzzed in his pocket, going off in sync with every other hermits.

Etho turned and made eye contact with Ren.

Everyone started talking over each other all at once.

—

Grian crashed through the door of the (modest, by the standards of hermitcraft) home that he maintained on his own private server with all of the grace of a bird hitting a window.

Leaving the corner of the entry way rug that he had tripped on in his haste still turned up and the door half open he ran to the upstairs bathroom; the one with the largest mirror in the house.

No one else was in this world anyway, and it was broad daylight out since he had last left it in the middle of a morning, and time had obligingly waited to pass with no one online to watch it tick on.

In front of the mirror he hurried to strip out of his sweater and then the rest of his clothing. Twisting frantically back and forth in search of a soul mark that he was unsure if he even expected to find.

If he could have held onto his composure for a little longer he might have been able to ask Xisuma about the location of the supposed mark. That would have helped with locating its supposed match.

There was nothing at all. His skin was as bare as it had always been since the day he was born.

Carefully, he checked his few scars — the watchers had been inclined more toward the psychological than physical — for the broken lines that indicated a soul mark scarred through.

Still nothing; and he had no tattoos or burns that might have been large enough to conceal a name. There was no mark that had been miraculously missed for all these years.

But why would Xisuma lie about something like that? And why would Etho back it up? And even if the admin was lying, that wouldn’t explain where had he had learned that name in the first place. The watchers would never have told, and Grian certainly hadn’t ever said a word to anyone. Not even to Mumbo or Pearl when he had reappeared in their lives so abruptly after his long absence. Even when they had tried to gently hint at the topic he had always just deflected and smiled. They had understood, even if they were curious they were waiting still until he was ready.

Some wounds were too painful to yet consider reopening, even for the sake of people he loved.

He was putting it off. There was one more place that needed checking if he wanted to be sure. But then what? Go back and accuse Xisuma of lying? It wouldn’t even prove anything. He wasn’t going to get any answers. Better to keep his mouth shut either way.

He told himself that it was enough stalling.

Grian squeezed his eyes shut; he didn’t want to watch, though in a moment he wouldn’t be able to avoid it. The problem didn’t really lie in the eyes on his face.

He reached into himself, where he had tied up the flow of his magic into a knot to stop it from circulating or escaping, so that he could assume the shape of a normal human once again. The shape he had before. Imagining the knot being tugged free was repellent, but he did it anyway, as he always did when it got too much to contain. He focused until the magic unwound and flowed freely again, gently ballooning out, filling his entire body, like water flowing gently over the rocks of a stream, rather than the barren riverbed that damming it up made him feel like.

Even as he knew his physical eyes were shut, he could once again see himself, unable to stop watching. He was his own voyeur, unable to shut the eyes outside himself — for these eyes had no eyelids, and did not blink — as his wings reappeared, unfolding from the cut in space where they hid themselves when he put them away. Like the wings of a beetle emerging from their neat place tucked, undetectable, inside a seamless shell before it unexpectedly flew and caused everyone in the room to scream.

A watcher really was like a flying roach now that he thought about it, unexpected and unwelcome. A disgusting pest that refused to die when it should. Secret wings. He giggled a little hysterically through the line of thought. The other watchers would have hated that.

He could see himself from all angles as his skin bloomed with the purple shimmering of the watcher patterns, it was like looking at a shattered mirror or the compound eye of some bug, every version of himself from every angle fluttering his wings at once. The walls all around glittered with eyes, and all of them were his; dark hard beetle-like eyes, like jewels. He was distracted by it briefly, his eyes meeting his own eyes, caught up watching himself watching himself — and then he saw it.

There it was, between his wings, written sideways down his spine; ‘ ̇/╎ᓭ⚍ ᒲᔑ’, ‘Xisuma’.

His face-eyes snapped open, and his vision concentrated and congealed all at once within their view, he was in front of the mirror, looking into his own eyes still; entirely black-liquid and fathomless as the void itself under the end islands. No longer the brown of his human self. Watching the tears welling up in the corners of his eyes come out just as black was too much, and he turned away from the sight of it.

The corners of the bathroom where his spectral eyes remained bunched up in hideous clumps also wept black liquid and he tried to turn away from that as well, but there was no escaping it. It was every direction that he turned, and he could not look at nothing like this. That darkness escaped him.

Looking at his own body was out of the question, but all around the eyes that phased in and out of existence stained everything, crawling across the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Something dripped into his hair from above, and he didn’t dare look up. Hastily, he pulled at least his pants back on, though his shirt wasn’t designed to accommodate his wings so there was no need to bother with that until he could tuck them away again.

He needed to calm down, but he could feel a scream building up in his chest. The sound of his tears dripping from the ceiling and hitting the tile around him was maddening, he wiped his hands over his face. Even though he refused to let his body cry he was betrayed by the black rain around him. It was starting to form puddles, and perhaps in another circumstance the rain-like sound would have been soothing. If he could ignore what it was.

He swallowed the scream down and what emerged instead was a strangled sob, and once that was out more followed.

The bathroom tile was cool and damp against his cheek. When had he laid down?

He shut his primary eyes again as he sobbed into the tile, and immediately reconnected with his other eyes; once again seeing himself as though he were a dozen spiders clinging to walls and corners. His own little pity party panopticon, he thought wryly, through the hiccuping force of his pathetic wailing. If he couldn’t even be allowed to pretend at being human, couldn’t he at least have some of the watcher’s cold disaffected bearing instead? Something that wasn’t this crushing feeling.

The name between his wings was still there; staring, accusing, mocking.

It was hard to believe that he would ever calm down, that he could stop feeling this miserable.

What was he supposed to do about this? Go back onto hermitcraft, where his family was, and announce that he didn’t know anything at all about their admin’s soulmate after that public crash out at the potluck? No one was going to believe him.

Xisuma was a lovely man he was sure; Grian wasn’t particularly close with him among the hermits, but he was always working hard to take care of the hermits and their home. He was compassionate and warm and hard working. He was never controlling with the power he wielded, hearing everyone out at meetings and taking their feelings into account. At least Grian had though so. Had heard so from the others. Now he wasn’t so sure.

Why would his name not have appeared before he became Xelqua? What about Grian, as he had been before he was ruined, had not been good enough for Xisuma? Why was he only perfectly matched to him after he had been hurt? What that said about Xisuma and the kind of things, or people, he liked Grian didn’t know; but it scared him.

It didn’t matter. Xelqua wasn’t a real person who existed. Grian wouldn’t pretend to be him just to be loved. If it was only Xelqua who was capable of receiving love then Grian didn’t need or want it. He would take care of himself, just as always.

As he pushed himself up, still shuddering a little, he resolved that he wouldn’t be saying anything. No one could prove it if he just stonewalled hard enough. His wrist collapsed back onto the tile with an unexpectedly sharp pain as he put his weight on it and he let out a yelp as the tears welled up again. A bruise had ripened into an ugly shade of purple to match his magic when he wasn’t looking. He could see the long stripes where Xisuma’s fingers had wrapped around his wrist in the imprint. He shook his head and got up more carefully.

He wouldn’t let his newfound family flinch away from him or cast him out; no one had discovered the ugly truth of what he had become against his will for all of season six, and no would be finding out this season either. Better to be though of as rude or strange or closed off than to admit to anything that might get him caught.

Taking some toilet paper in hand he wiped the blackened tear tracks off of his face, preparing to flush the evidence and not use this particular bathroom again until he felt up to deep cleaning it.

On the counter his communicator rattled — and he vaguely remembered it going off before, while he had been having his little melt down.

And then, “Grian?”

That was Mumbo’s voice, calling from downstairs. Mumbo was whitelisted here.

“Grian!? Are you there?” Closer. More frantic.

There were footsteps on the stairs.

Grian dived for his communicator, opening the text box as fast as he could with fumbling fingers.

The footsteps were nearly at the top of the stairs now.

/ban MumboJumbo

—

Among the shouting and the talking over the top of each other that was going on in the meeting room after Grian’s dramatic flight, Mumbo was not having an easy time making himself heard.

Not that he really wanted to, but everyone else apparently felt the need to throw their opinion on the strange scene out there, and they were not taking turns.

He had swiftly retreated into a corner to put the plates he was holding down before someone knocked him over in their efforts to get closer to Xisuma, who everyone now stood clumped up around in a knot, theorising at and sympathising with him in turns.

Waiting for a small lull in the clamour, he announced to anyone who was paying attention, “I’m going to go try to log into Grian’s private server and see if he is there.”

Ren’s ears swivelled towards him first, and then he turned and caught Mumbo’s eye. That was good, he knew at least one person had heard him and would tell the others where he went. That was all the permission he needed. He was worried about his friend, and he was going to check on him. There were enough people here fussing over Xisuma, he didn’t need Mumbo now, not like Grian might.

Pulling out his communicator, he logged out decisively, not giving any time to talk himself out of it, and then he was logging back into Grian’s server.

Following the short path from spawn to approach the house at a hurried pace, something was clearly not right.

The front door was left wide open, and the rug was rucked up. The entry table was slightly crooked from its normal place flush with the wall, like someone had caught themselves against it and then kept going. There were boot prints on the floor; Grian hadn’t even stopped to take his shoes off as he went inside.

He caught the tail end of what might have been a wail from upstairs, and froze.

The muffled sobbing — he assumed it was sobbing? It was the sort of hysterical sound that made it hard to differentiate between crying or laughter, but he didn’t imagine anything was that funny right now — that followed wasn’t any more reassuring, and he stood awkwardly in the doorway, wondering if he really ought to leave and come back later maybe. Whatever was going on was clearly deeply personal to Grian, but it whatever it was it wasn’t something that he had ever spoken to Mumbo about.

As far as Mumbo knew, Grian was just like the majority of people, and had no soulmate of his own. Slightly less like the majority of people, Grian had no strong opinion on the bonds that Mumbo had ever heard him express; most people were prone to fantasies of being one of the lucky few — at least once or twice — that they might just be a late bloomer, that the universe cared enough for them specifically to have someone perfect picked out for them. Not so Grian. He had never entertained the thought of changing his name, just to see if he had become the sort of person who had a match.

Then again, anything at all might have changed in the mysterious time that Grian had been away. In the year and a half that his friend never spoke of to anyone, any number of things might have changed without Mumbo’s knowing. It was disconcerting to consider that he might no longer know his own best friend as well or as completely as he once had.

Xisuma had been thrilled with his own mark when it had come in during that year that Grian had been missing from Mumbo’s life; everyone on the server had heard about it then, and helped him, even in small ways, to look for his partner. It had been a welcome distraction for Mumbo during that worrying time, even if it had turned up nothing.

Everyone had agreed that there couldn’t have been anyone more deserving of a destined love than their kind and compassionate admin; Mumbo had remembered the thought floating through his mind when Xisuma had agreed — hearing out Mumbo’s overly emotional plea — to offer Grian a home with the hermits after his reappearance. The hermits would offer that home just as readily to Xelqua, for Xisuma’s sake.

By the time season six had begun and Mumbo was able to spend time with his old friend again, the frantic energy around the mark’s appearance had faded some, the hermits accepting that they would meet when they met. That Grian might have met their admin’s mysterious match in his time away wasn’t a thought that had every crossed Mumbo’s mind. Evidently, given Grian’s strong reaction to even the name, no one had found cause to bring it up in his presence before. It was lucky Etho had such quick reflexes.

Everyone would have undoubtedly heard about a freakout like the scene from the potluck as soon as it happened.

Maybe this was how the soulmates were destined to meet — because Xisuma had allowed Grian onto the server, he would hear about Xelqua from Grian. Maybe Grian would even introduce the two of them himself, after he sorted out whatever misunderstanding had caused the distress.

He nodded to himself as this train of thought wrapped up. Yes, needed to stay and make sure Grian was alright. Whatever was going on, the happiness of two of his dearest friends was on the line right now; Grian needed comfort and support, Xisuma needed to be able to find his soulmate. And Mumbo was here to help them.

Mumbo glanced wearily up the stairs, calling out as he stepped into the hall.

“Grian?”

Silence from the upper landing. That awful sound had stopped while Mumbo had been stuck in his head. He needed to get a move on.

He started climbing the stairs.

Was Grian even still there? Had he left while Mumbo wasn’t paying attention? He pulled up the server list on his communicator to check and almost jumped out of his skin: Grian, Xelqua, MumboJumbo.

Xelqua was on the server right now?? Since when?

“Grian!? Are you there?”

The bathroom door was, like the front door, open, though not all the way; he couldn’t yet see inside. Just the back wall, which looked to have … something dripping down it.

Then he couldn’t see anything at all. The stair beneath his foot disappeared mid-stride along with the walls of the house, and then the bare sky, and then everything else.

His foot went down onto the now flat floor of the hermit craft meeting room that he had left not even ten minutes ago, and he lost his balance and fell in an uncoordinated heap, attracting the attention of the few hermits still left in the room.

His head spun with vertigo as he sat back up, checking his communicator for an explanation.

He had been banned from Grian’s server, no reason given in the ban message.

At least he had managed to take the screenshot in time.

He looked back up from the screen at the other hermits — Xisuma, Etho, and Keralis at this point, sitting in a huddle — and set his shoulders as he decided what needed to be done. What the right thing to do was.

“So, Xisuma, there’s maybe something you should see…”

—

Xisuma was experiencing some of the wildest highs and lows of his life. Flipping between hope and elation to despair and worry every few waking hours. He struggled to get sleep, though the other hermits had been cycling through to check on him and try their best reassure him. He had made pots of tea one after another as his guests came and went, and participated in their distractions as best he could, trying his best not to let on how he was feeling, though everyone knew about as much as he did now, and had their own opinions on how Xisuma himself must have been taking it.

Finally, after years of waiting, he had his very first lead on his soulmate. And that lead was refusing to talk to him. Or anyone else.

He had a screenshot of a server list with Xelqua’s name on it. Grian (and Mumbo, however briefly, and Xisuma was grateful beyond measure for the screenshot; he already had it saved in three places) had been on the same server as them.

But something was very wrong. Nobody had been able to get ahold of Grian for the last three days. What if he never came back? What if Xisuma had missed his chance entirely because he hadn’t held onto him? He should have held on harder, with both hands. There must have been something he could have said that would have convinced him to say something. If he’d missed his only chance he had only himself to blame. He had to believe that wasn’t the case.

As much as he wanted to ride the high of his — possibly — imminent meeting with the destined love of his life, it was difficult to deny that the situation was alarming. He wanted to hope that it was all some kind of misunderstanding, but whenever he tried to imagine what about Xelqua could have possibly drawn that kind of reaction from Grian, normally playful, someone Xisuma had gotten to know a little in the season that he had been here, someone that other hermits who he was closer with spoke well of, he couldn’t come up with anything at all. It was a struggle to rationalise it.

Was his soulmate a bad person? Xisuma liked to think that he himself wasn’t so terrible as to be matched to someone like that. And if that were the case, why was Xelqua on Grian’s server? Surely he wouldn’t not only let in, but meet with someone who he actively disliked. Surely that couldn’t be the case.

He moved on to the next option. Did Grian think that Xisuma wasn’t good enough for Xelqua? If they were that close, close enough to talk about soulmates, since Xelqua had supposedly told Grian he didn’t have one, then maybe he was just being protective of a friend. Maybe Xisuma himself had done something that Grian took objection too. Maybe it was something he had said in passing and not noticed. Grian had never indicated he thought badly of Xisuma, or that he had a problem with him. Hopefully it was not that, although it was better than some other options he could think of; at least a misunderstanding like that could be cleared up easily. Other things he could think of wouldn’t be so easy to fix. Maybe he should hope that he had offended Grian in some way.

Was Grian jealous? Were he and Xelqua involved somehow? It would make sense; finding out your lover had been hiding a soulmate from you might invoke that kind of reaction. Maybe they were just friends but Grian still felt betrayed by the deception, but Xisuma shook his head to his own thoughts, that seemed an overblown reaction. If they were together what was Xisuma going to do? He didn’t relish the though of being a home wrecker, but he and Xelqua were meant to be, so surely Xisuma had the right of it in a situation like that.

Grian would hopefully calm down and talk soon, but it had already been a concerning amount of time that he had been ignoring even his best friends (Mumbo had even reached out to Grian’s friend Pearl to see if she had heard anything at all, she hadn’t, and everyone else he had reached out to had also been banned from Grian’s server without explanation, no could see what, or who, was going on inside it now).

Had Grian been holed up together with Xelqua the whole time? The thought brought a bitter taste to his mouth. He hoped, selfishly, that they were just friends, that it wasn’t like that.

Xisuma didn’t know if he could accept Grian into his relationship with his soulmate. He hadn’t ever wished for more than one partner. Since this was his soulmate, who was perfectly suited to him, surely Xelqua would want the same thing as him. Something like that would be a fundamental that they are on the same page about.

He had never thought on Grian as a romantic prospect before, since he had only met him after he had already got his soul mark; he hadn’t though on anyone that way since the mark’s appearance, since he didn’t wish to be disloyal or have to dump someone when his soulmate eventually walked into his life, didn’t want to already be in a relationship to pass the time and make Xelqua think he didn't want them, or to just throw someone aside when Xelqua finally made an appearance. It would be a cruel way to behave.

Could he learn to love Grian? Maybe they both would, together? But no, soulmates could come in groups of more than two, if that were necessary then he would be there also. They must just be friends. They had to be.

Grian was going to get over whatever this was and introduce the soulmates to each other, and surely remain a close friend of theirs when they were a couple. This would all be a funny story to tell at their wedding someday. Maybe Grian would be Xelqua’s best man (man of honour?). Etho and Keralis would surely duel each other for the right to be Xisuma’s.

Just trying to imagine it made him feel a bit calmer, even though he couldn’t yet picture the face of his partner, it was easy to picture all of his family having fun planning and attending the party, everyone being happy together and in one place. The hermits did love an Event. It was all going to turn out fine. No need to catastrophise before he even knew what was really going on.

Maybe Xelqua did have someone else right now, from before the mark even, and Grian knew about that but not about the mark and he was just sorting out a big mess; breaking the news to his friend and possibly Xelqua’s current partner. That would certainly be awkward enough to take some time, and quite dramatic besides.

Xisuma didn’t envy him the task if he really was having to break up someone else’s long term relationship right now. He’d probably also freak out like that if someone he was close with dumped a situation like that on him too, even if they didn’t mean to.

That was probably as sensible an explanation as he could come up with without speaking to Grian directly. There was no point torturing himself with speculation, even though it was difficult not to. He just needed to stop thinking about it until he had more information.

Easier said than done. But he would try to get back to his work; there was always something he had been avoiding somewhere to do, administration was like that. Things could always run smoother.

He sat down at his desk and pulled up the chat and the server monitoring tools on the side as he opened a fresh coding window and tried to decide what to work on first.

Not even five minutes later the world chat exploded into questions and exclamations, drawing his attention back away from the code again. It was moving so quickly it was hard to parse what had even happened, and he scrolled back to check the cause and paused to stare at the message he had been waiting for.

Should he … go talk to him?

Maybe not. Better to give him some time to settle, he’d surely come to Xisuma when he was ready.

It seemed Mumbo was already on his way over anyway. He could deal with it later. Give him few hours. Grian was surely going to be embarrassed about all the fuss he had caused. It was a little hard to suppress the voice in his head that told him that he was being a coward, but he managed, and turned back to his work. He’d wait just a little longer.

—

Chapter Text

The monthly all-hermit meeting had been tense since the beginning, despite the valiant attempts from everyone to ignore the ravager in the room. Even so, Xisuma felt as though any moment it was going to run him over.

The ravager, of course, being Grian, and his total lack of communication with anyone since the last time they had met like this as a group.

No one had been feeling brave enough to try and plan an after meeting party of any kind this time, and the resulting lack of extra decorations or the smell of food floating in the air left the meeting feeling sterile — it had been a while since such a thing had occurred; and that was on top of the noticeable atmosphere of stress in the room.

It was uncomfortable in much the same way sitting in a hospital waiting room was stressful; Xisuma was unable to convince himself that no news was not, in fact, bad news in this case. He had the feeling he was going to be told something that he really didn’t want to hear.

The feeling of just helplessly waiting for everything to go to shit was much like spotting a ghast out in the open before it spotted you, and bracing to deflect the fireball. Waiting for the scream, nowhere to hide. There wasn’t much else that anyone could think to do, since it seemed no one else had any better ideas for bringing up the awkward topic, or surely they would have used it and spared them all.

The meeting had dragged, awkward, but as he was finally starting to wrap things up, he felt a cautious sense of relief build inside him. It appeared that they might have gotten away with the low simmer of unease not coming to a boil.

And then, just as they were all packing up to leave, half the hermits having already scuttled out the door, “So are we going to talk about it or what?”

Ren. Why? It had waited a week since Grian’s wordless reappearance, and it could wait another day for a more private place. Public confrontation had not helped the last time.

No one pretended, now that it was out there, that they didn’t know what he was referring to. All eyes flicking towards Grian with varying levels of blatantness.

“No.”

Xisuma felt a shiver crawl down his spine as they all sat in silence with that blunt response.

“Maybe later, in private?” he suggested.

There was really no need for such a production, and pushing Grian appeared as though it was only going to make him dig his heels in. They could… talk it out later, surely. Away from all this.

Grian shoved his meeting notes into his inventory aggressively, and they disappeared with an audible pop, causing more than one person to flinch as they all held their breath in the silence.

“No.” He stated flatly, “There isn’t anything that needs talking about.”

“Why don’t we just set up a time to —” What? Have some tea? But Ren cut Xisuma off before he could finish the suggestion, or figure out what he wanted to suggest.

“Come on man, we all know thats a load of bullshit,” Grian flinched at the unexpected expletive, but Ren was on a roll. He had clearly been stewing on this, “We’ve all seen the screenshot —”

“What screenshot?” Grian demanded abruptly.

Xisuma pulled it up on his communicator obligingly, since it was at the top of his camera roll. He leaned around the head of the table to show it to Grian, who almost pressed his face up again the screen as he stared at it with singular focus, going almost white with horror when he understood what he was looking at.

“Mumbo!” He hissed, twisting around to look at his best friend with furious and betrayed eyes. Demanding an explanation without asking. If Xisuma hadn’t known the context he would have felt bad for him, and as it was he felt much like he was participating in a stage show where no one had bothered to give him a copy of the script.

“Everyone knows Grian. I get it if this is difficult for you, but we do need to talk about it — but it doesn’t need to be in front of everyone if it makes you uncomfortable.” He tried to smooth it over as much as he could. The hermits were family, and involved by definition in this mess, but there was no need for it to become a circus.

“It doesn’t matter what you all think you know,” Grian wasn’t meeting anyone’s eyes now, his hands had balled up into fists in his lap, his knuckles white with the force of it, “There isn’t anything to say about it, now or in private. It doesn’t concern any of you. And that's final.”

Why did he need to be so difficult about it? Avoiding it would get them nowhere — though maybe that was his goal, going nowhere; but Xisuma had no choice but to try again; there was nothing else to be done, Grian was still the only lead he had. And Xisuma was not satisfied with letting it lie.

“Please, why can’t —” he tried to start again, and was once again talked over.

“You’re being unfair and cruel!” It was Keralis this time. Xisuma just felt numb as the argument flowed passed him, like a doll propped up on a shelf, unable to move. “Xisuma has been waiting and searching for his soulmate right from the time he first found out about them, and he’s found nothing! Nothing at all! Now matter where he looked! And now here you are, preventing them from meeting for no reason! Don’t you care about him at all? Aren’t you supposed to be a part of this family now? How can you possibly be so cold?”

Xisuma wanted Keralis to shut up, for his friends not to talk to each other — treat each other — that way.

Xisuma also wanted to know the answers to those questions. He kept his mouth shut, staring placidly through the visor of his helmet at Grian.

Grian’s eyes met his own for a split second, before he snapped back to Keralis.

“Why are Xisuma’s feelings the only ones that matter?” He ground out.

The stunned silence hung for a long moment over the table.

“Why would your feelings matter in this? You’re the one interfering in something you have no stake in for no reason!” Keralis sounded more baffled than angry, thrown off by the absurd response.

It was a fair question, though Grian — obviously, from his reactions to it all — did have some kind of stake in this, and he wanted to know what it was. Xisuma hadn’t taken the time to tell Keralis about all his paranoid imaginings and theories though. There was no need to stir things up with baseless gossip, even if the entire situation was stressing him out. It had to resolve one way or the other eventually.

“Not my feelings, I meant — what about Xelqua’s feelings? Aren’t they just as important?”

It was like someone had shoved a handful of ice down the back of his suit. What could that possibly mean?

Thankfully, everyone was too engrossed in this development to even consider interrupting, and Keralis clearly wasn’t about to let that sit, even if Xisuma himself was having trouble unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth in order to form the questions he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answers to.

“This situation is … difficult for me,” Grian continued on hesitantly, not looking at anyone, “If one of your friends asked you to do something, and then another one of your friends asked you not to do that specific thing, what are you supposed to do? You have to make a choice, someone is going to be unhappy no matter what you decide. There’s no avoiding it.”

“You’re saying that Xelqua, specifically, asked you not to tell Xisuma anything? They don’t want to see him?”

Grian winced, “Yes? I had to make a choice here, and I’ve known Xelqua longer than I’ve known Xisuma. I owe them the loyalty first,” his grimace grew more pronounced at this admission, “even if it makes it worse for me this way, since I still have to live here too, and I know everyone else here is obviously on Xisuma’s side.” He paused, and then, “I suppose I could leave, if it gets to be too much. I wouldn’t want to, I care about my friends here, but I can’t stay here if its going to be like this.”

That really set off the yelling; it seemed that all of the hermits had an opinion about that statement, and where not shy about talking over each other about it, each turning to their neighbour and speculating shamelessly, or else trying to get more information out of Grian, who just sat there, shaking.

Xisuma couldn’t really blame any of them, this having been the most dramatic situation to take place on the server in some time. Season six had been fun and exciting, but not exactly in such a harrowing way. The drama had been playful, rather than as dire as this. And season seven had so far been very peaceful, with only the kind of play-fighting that the hermits regularly engaged in. This was almost a blood sport.

These sorts of things tended to bring in out the worst in anyone, and his friends and family had been largely caring and concerned. Gossip and high tempers were hardly a sin after a proclamation such as that.

He couldn’t have asked them not to speculate even if he had wanted too, still unable to find his voice again — he had no idea what the right question was to even ask at this point that would fix this, if there even was one, so he sat there still, stuck in his freeze response and listening for someone else to solve the problem.

It was frustrating to be able to do nothing except hope that someone else would fix this for him. He needed to zone back in, who was actually talking?

“— not lying? Do you actually have, like … a message from Xelqua saying that or something? A voice clip? Anything?”

Okay. It sounded like Etho was trying to reason this one out.

“No, I don’t. We discussed it in person.”

“Well can’t you just message them right now in front of everyone so that we know that it’s the truth? We can wait for a response, we’ve got time.” Etho threw the gauntlet down. That solution would work. There was no reason to refuse.

Grian shook his head, curling into himself like he was trying to disappear into his sweater.

Why not? It was a good point, and the urge to follow it to its conclusion, whatever that might be, was what finally allowed Xisuma to find his voice again, “I want to hear it from Xelqua directly, even if it’s just the once. If they truly don’t want me, I need them to say it to my face.” He swallowed around the pain of imagining such a rejection, “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

He wouldn’t take Grian’s word for it without any proof at all, as much as he wanted to believe that Grian had no ulterior motives, this was too important to take a chance like that on, and the situation was suspicious in and of itself besides that.

It was hard to believe that it could be true, that he was that unwanted, but he wanted to say that if he heard it directly he would be able to accept it. Process it at least.

“I’m not doing it. They asked me not to and I won’t.”

“Just set up a video call then! If nothing else! I can make myself available any time. Just ask them, and show me that you’ve asked.”

Grian still shook his head, refusing to make eye contact with anyone, despite everyone in the room looking at him.

He’d been on that server with Xelqua, he knew that for sure, so surely there must be some trace of them on his communicator, but he refused to show it, even just to ease Xisuma’s worry. He wasn’t even justifying himself, just refusing, and acting as though the hermits were all being the unreasonable ones for not accepting it.

Or maybe his shrinking into himself was an acknowledgement that he knew he was in the wrong, but either way he refused to bend even a little bit.

What harm could there possibly be in just showing them what was on his communicator? Why refuse to share if Xelqua had really said that? But by the same token: why lie?

Grian’s communicator was encrypted to the nether and back, just like his personal server, which hadn’t bothered Xisuma at all when he had first joined hermitcraft; the personal security and privacy of his hermits outside of the server was not his concern so long as they were being safe — unless they asked him for extra help. It had been a relief to not have to worry about taking on any extra work to protect Grian; not that any of his hermits were a burden, it had just been nice not to worry.

It wasn’t such a relief now. If he had been the one to put up the defences then at least he would be able to get in. But there was no chance of reading anything off of Grian’s communicator without a significant amount of time and effort, and it would be blatantly obvious what he was trying to do besides. He wasn’t even sure that he would succeed if he tried it.

It left a sour, slimy taste in his mouth to even be considering hacking into someone else’s private spaces. But what other choice did he have? He needed to do something. Anything at all.

One final try then. The words refused to come out the way he wanted them, sharp and bulky like gravel in his mouth. He persisted anyway.

“I just can’t understand why they would be so against meeting their own soulmate. How could they have already made a judgement without ever meeting me?” He said plaintively. If Grian would just explain…

“This isn’t about you,” Grian said tiredly, he looked defeated, as though he had any right to be the one feeling that way in this situation, “And if you can’t accept that and stop asking then I can just spare us all the drawn out dramatics and leave.”

Xisuma felt himself make a snap decision, drawing his spine up straight as though an electric shock had run through him. No, he wouldn’t allow his only chance to slip through his fingers. There was one thing that he could do. Maybe he couldn’t hack his way into Grian’s servers, but Grian likewise probably couldn’t hack his way out of here either.

He opened his admin panel, and before anyone could think to stop him — probably all under the impression that he was going to kick Grian from the server for that response — disabled Grian’s ability to logout and locked his moderators out from changing it.

Grian stared him down, stoically waiting for the blow to fall, the ban to take effect. His eyes widened sharply in alarm when Xisuma closed the panel and nothing at all happened.

A further beat passed, and then; “What did you do?!”

“You can stay here until Xelqua tells me themself that they don’t want to see me. They are whitelisted and can log in any time, and you can let them know that. You can be free to go once I hear it for myself.”

He tried to affect a calm steadiness that he really did not feel. No hermit had ever been prevented from leaving before. People had been barred from entering, but never from going. But desperate times called for desperate measures.

Grian’s face took on a thunderous appearance as he swept his gaze over the still assembled hermits. Mumbo ducked his head down to avoid his eyes as though he would be turned to stone if he met them. No one spoke up in his defence.

His cheeks puffed up momentarily, as though he were preparing to start yelling, and Xisuma braced himself for the inevitable blow up.

Grian exhaled all at once, kicking his chair back and away from where he was standing in front of it as he whirled towards the door.

He pivoted back towards Xisuma momentarily to cut him with a glance just as he reached the door frame, “I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to meet you.” he sneered, not even bothering to stay long enough to watch the resulting full body flinch.

The silence in the meeting room curdled for a long moment, before it was broken by the pointed sound of far more flight rockets than necessary being set off at once.

—

The mansion was lonely and cold.

Grian had had big plans at the start of the season for building farms inside of it, making the build, and all the effort that went into it, functional as well as decorative. It annoyed him that his builds were normally more ornamental than useful, and he had planned on turning his attention towards learning new things this season.

It was not to be.

Nothing of it had ever really materialised, save for the sorting system that he didn’t even use, though he had built it. The huge empty chambers in the mansion’s wings were hollow and echoed any passing sound, with uneven dirt floors and awkward geometry dictated more by the shape of the facade rather than any actual sectioning off of rooms. Even without the farms that he had envisioned he still hadn’t done anything with the interior in the vain belief that he would get around to it at some point.

And yet ‘Decorative’ was probably the only word that could be used for the structure at this point, being as a facade was almost all the build was — no back and almost no sides, approachable from only one angle without shattering the illusion of completeness. It wasn’t even an empty vase on a pedestal, more like three quarters of a vase that one hoped their guests wouldn’t look any closer at.

Decorative was also how Grian had felt for the past few days; building alone felt entirely futile, and refilling the barge wasn’t necessary with the current (pointed) lack of sales; even if it did need restocking, it wouldn’t have been worth the feeling — looming over the entire shopping district like the lingering stench of smoke the day after a house fire— that he was unwelcome there. And everywhere else. But going out and trying to talk to anyone was worse, even hermits who weren’t actively angry with Grian (Mumbo and Scar, basically, most everyone else was either fence sitting or rallying behind Xisuma and acting like Grian kicked puppies for fun in his spare time) had seemingly decided that the appropriate response to the situation was not to talk to him.

Or, going further, to pretend that he didn’t exist at all. As though they were all in preschool and the silent treatment was an appropriate way of solving conflict. As though they knew better than he did and were just waiting for him to realise it and apologise.

People acting as though Grian wasn’t there at all was less hurtful than those who were trying to scold him for the choices they thought he was making. It was frustrating to be unable to even defend himself or try to explain. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t make the situation worse, and he knew it. But the urge to just explode, scream at people, was worryingly a constant companion in these interactions.

Building was just a way to kill time before the inevitable, something that should have brought him joy reduced to a mindless drudgery, but it was better than nothing. With no one to drop by after his ill-wishers had trailed off, all by himself at the same base every day, being alone for long stretches wasn’t doing his stability any favours. It was making him feel like he was going a little insane.

At some point he was going to run out of energy, no matter how long he tried to endure, and then he would have to spend at least some time as Xelqua. His willpower was not infinite against the needs of his body. Nobody's was. Even thinking of it drew a hitch into his breath and a tightness into his chest.

Laying down to sleep was becoming a parade of constant nightmares where some wicked version of himself, perhaps the ‘Xelqua’ that everyone so ignorantly claimed to wish to meet, leaned down over his own prone body, face to lack-of-face, and then, as he looked up at that blank mask, Xelqua would reach down and lay a hand on Grian’s own face and tug, and the whole thing would pop right off, revealing a blank white mask underneath to match the watcher. And then he’d wake up and claw at his own cheeks, run into the bathroom to stare at himself in the mirror, carefully feeling around the edges of his jaw, behind his ears, for a seam that didn’t exist.

Grain really hadn’t been getting a lot of sleep these past two weeks.

Maybe he could try to time his breakdown out for when Xisuma next logged off, though the admin hadn’t left the server for so much as a moment since the last meeting.

Doing that would only be delaying the inevitable though. Grian was trapped, a bird in a cage, and the walls were closing in around him. There would be no leaving here while he was caught in the heart of Xisuma’s power, and any transformation would be both logged by the server as the arrival of Xelqua, and any hermit that saw the message would snitch without hesitation when that happened. Even Mumbo wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. He had been shown that.

There was almost no point prolonging it, but stubbornness drove him not to admit defeat just yet, to hold out as long as he could, despite the way that his skin was starting to pull and strain, tingling with pain; his power twisting and turning like a restless eel, almost slipping free of itself. Every day, and then every hour was just more holding on, just incase some solution he had missed suddenly presented itself, popping fully formed into his brain and saving him from this slowly closing trap that he couldn’t avoid, despite seeing it coming.

With numb hands, he tucked his blocks away in the teetering pile of shulkers that trailed behind him as he built and sat down, shivering, on the unfinished back wall. He was so tired. The wind blew cold this high up, even from the jungle, and it cut through his bleary thoughts, shredding them like tissue paper. He tucked his hands into his sweater sleeves and then wrapped his arms around himself, the only hug he was likely to get anytime soon, and huddled into himself for warmth. The ground seemed impossibly far down now.

Hold on. Just a bit longer, he thought to himself.

Hold on.

Hold.

—

No amount of willpower could overcome the reality of things as time continued passing. Holding back the transformation became less like tying a knot, or even holding onto a live eel, but like trying to catch smoke in a clenched fist.

Xisuma still hadn’t left the server, but it didn’t matter anymore. Time had run out for Grian, and he needed to choose a place to change, before his body chose it for him.

Somewhere far out from the main building area; even if Xisuma would just teleport to his location — though he hoped that the admin might go to spawn first when the message appeared — at least being remote would prevent any of the other hermits from stumbling upon him in that state.

Even if he was being forced to explain what had happened to him — what he was, against his will — to dig his fingers back into all his old wounds, at least he would only have to tell it to one person, not everyone. Maybe if he begged, if he made himself pitiable enough, Xisuma would accept his explanation and his wish for secrecy. Maybe he wouldn’t tell the other hermits. If he bared all his wounds maybe the admin would agree that it wasn’t necessary to put them on display for the judgement of everyone else.

It was all a lot of ‘maybe’, but it was all the hope that he had left.

It wasn’t important yet anyway. What was important now was finding the quickest way to get far from here and using it immediately. He came to a snap decision and dropped everything, walking through the nether portal before he overthought it more. The time was now, no more waiting.

Grian watched the number tick up on his coordinates as he spammed rockets, the flat, monochrome nether roof providing little to go off of other than the change in the fog colour biome to biome and the sparse mushroom colonies to track the fact that he was actually moving forwards at all by. Time lost meaning as he concentrated on nothing but getting away.

By the time he had blown through half an inventory of rocket stacks he was several million blocks further out than even the far mining deserts or the map art areas, and hopefully, he thought as he built his new portal, so far out that no one would be able to find him without commands.

Stepping through the portal he found himself high up over a deep ocean, dark blue water full of long tangles of swaying kelp as far as the eye could see in every direction.

Perfect.

He placed his ender chest down on the tiny platform provided by the floating portal and stowed away everything he had except for his rockets, his elytra and an emergency sword, and then changed into his watcher robes.

It felt strange to feel his elytra lying over the top of the robes. He really needed to think about making at least one version of his sweater that could accomodate his wings if he was going to be doing this again (Grian dearly hoped that he wouldn’t be. That he could go back to transforming on his own server in a corner somewhere no one could see him and then coming back when he was himself again. The fact that someone might see him like this made his eyes itch where they rested under his smooth white mask. He didn’t want to be a mask. He wanted to keep his face on around his family.)

Grian took a deep breath. The sea was moving softly, reflecting glimmers of moonlight. The portal roared behind him, breathing hot air down his back. Slowly, the smell of salt was overtaking the acrid scent of the nether, pushing the stale air out his lungs and nose. There were no mirrors out here. No chance that would catch even a glimpse of himself.

He smoothed out the front of his robes one more time, compulsively. As soon as he did this, Xisuma would know.

He readied his rockets in his offhand and crouched slightly to fan out his elytra, and then, with a bang, he was off.

Straight upwards he flew, like an arrow, until he burst out above the clouds, trailing vapour behind him from his robes and the tips of his elytra. Higher and higher he climbed, until the sea disappeared from sight, and then the clouds as well. Until the sky grew freezing cold, and the air grew so thin that he struggled to breath it in his human shape.

All alone at the very edge of the sky before it transformed into the endless expanse of the upper void he finally unequipped his elytra and let his body change and his wings burst out as he fell.

Each wing was longer than he was tall, and in one, two, beats he stopped falling and transitioned into a corkscrew dive. The thin air was no longer a concern as his lungs filled again, no longer struggling; the limit was removed, he could go higher forever now if he wished.

For a prolonged moment he daydreamed that if he just flew high enough he would escape this world entirely; slip out and into the space somewhere between servers, safely out of reach.

It didn’t work that way of course, and as he spiralled down he caught sight of the cloud layer once again. Just before he would have impacted them he pulled himself up, wings flaring out and then flipping him over onto his back to glide, face up to the moon, over the cotton-fluffy surface.

He put a hand out to his side and trailed his fingertips through it, as he could see his wingtips also doing, plowing narrow ditches in the clouds; it was cold, not soft, but still pretty.

It wasn’t so bad, to drift in the sky, stretching out. Like a feather floating on the breeze.

The cloud came to an end, and he flipped back over. In the gap between he could see the ocean shining and swaying; the air was crisp and icy, almost crystallising in his lungs, the roar of the wind in his ears was somehow soothing, blocking out even his troubled thoughts. The cold had reached out to embrace him, and welcoming it in was a joy as he danced through the air. Grian felt a laugh bubbling up in his chest as he soared, cutting through the clouds; the joy of flight that he had discovered among the hermits was still with him, even like this.

Maybe things could be okay, if he could just focus on this and nothing else.

And then something smacked into him. His bubble popped and reality came rushing back in as he frantically fought to disentangle himself from whatever had hit him.

The object had fallen from above, heavy, hard, large, and yellow as he disentangled himself from it. Thankfully for his wings his ‘feathers’ were composed more of shimmering void than actual material, and they held strong against the impact. He was able to right himself as whatever it was fell past him and impacted the surface of the water.

He swooped down to look at it, and it quickly became clear that the object had been a body: Xisuma, in his yellow bee armour, had clearly tried to teleport directly on top of him and the lack of a solid block to stand on had caused him to fall out of the sky.

He watched the admin flail in the water briefly and then sink below, and as he tried to catch up on what had happened he thought that this… might be able to work. If he could just keep running for long enough, gain some distance, he might be able to change back and make a break for home. If he could just draw it out long enough for him to be able to put this form away he could even kill himself and death warp home as soon as he changed back.

Sure it would be suspicious, but he just needed to be fast. His resolve hardened, he could get away from this. He could buy himself some more time. He wasn’t ready to change back yet, but soon. He could feel it; the flight had done him more good than three times the length of time sitting in his bathroom ever had.

He turned without a backward glance and started flying upwards again. The air wouldn’t bother Xisuma, void-born as he was, but the lack of solid blocks certainly would. The other man was not as skilled a flyer as Grian, and even if he followed it would be hard to carry on any conversation during a high speed chase, especially with the wind in both their ears like that.

And, of course, it would make Grian harder to see. In such different clothing, with his face covered, and with more limbs than he usually had, he might not be recognised.

He broke back through the clouds, but curiously no sound of rockets followed him. Maybe Xisuma was struggling to take off from the water. It didn’t matter, any lead was good.

Still, he wanted to check what he was working with. It would be foolish to turn back, so as he continued upward he opened additional eyes to try and figure out what the admin was doing. The sense of peace from his earlier soaring hadn’t entirely left him, and it was surprisingly easy to control the number and focus of the eyes when he was out in the open, rather than anywhere with walls for them to cling too. Easier to open them on purpose, rather than trying to keep them shut because he was filled with shame. For once, this was a tool he wanted to use.

It was the work of less than a minute to locate the admin; he had made his way to an island with birch trees and peonies just over the horizon that he must have teleported to, and he had his communicator in hand, typing something.

The movement of his wings stilled and he floated as he focused his attention on opening an additional eye on one of the leaves in the canopy above Xisuma so he could look down and see what he was typing.

Grian’s heart curled up like a dying insect inside his chest as he read the screen, all brittle spider legs withering into themselves. There wouldn’t be any getting away after all.

He had forgotten that teleport commands worked either way around.

—

Xisuma stared blearily at the time on his communicator. Three in the void-damned morning. His soulmate had certainly picked the worst time possible to show up. Maybe, he though wryly, they did actually hate him after all, behaving like that.

But this was why he had set the alarm to go off when the message came in. He could get up, and he would. For the chance to meet them, he would get up any time at all, even at the actual witching hour.

He rolled out of bed and tugged his armour on, checking that it was all secure before he left the comfortably pressurised environment of his bedroom to fly towards the spawn island.

When he arrived it was deserted. The lights of the shops were on and throwing shadows across the mycelium, but nothing was moving on the mobless island. Of course there were no hermits in the shopping district at this hour, but there was no sign at all of the new login either. Not so much as a single block out of place in the quiet and still night.

The fantasy he had of swooping in and seeing his soulmate for the first time, waiting there for him, blew away like a cloud of vapour breathed onto the surface of a window. If they truly had finally conceded to talking to him then why wouldn’t they wait where he could find them? He hadn’t taken that long, had come as quickly as he could have. And there was plenty to appreciate about his hermit’s builds, there was no shortage of things to look at while they waited. Maybe that was it — Xelqua had seen some building in the distance and been drawn in by curiosity and gone to look.

The stacks of shops were labyrinthine at this point in the season, sprawling and soaring, and all beautiful work of course, but there no hope of finding one person wandering among them if they were not out in the open.

It would have been nicer to meet naturally, but at least /locate commands were an option for him. He pulled out his communicator and started typing.

A moment later he stared dumbly at the result. How had Xelqua managed to get several millions blocks out from any inhabited area after just having logged into the server? Some kind of glitch? As he looked closer the chunks in between didn’t even seem to have been loaded. Perhaps they had just… spawned in all the way out there, for some reason.

Xisuma didn’t like considering what they must have thought of the server he was running, spawning in and seeing nothing built up at all, they must have thought it looked uninhabited. Hopefully it wouldn’t affect their view of the hermits once he brought them back to the proper spawn and explained. He was going to look like a terrible admin.

He didn’t like to use his admin access frivolously of course, but it really wouldn’t be practical to go all the way out there manually, and this needed to be fixed, so.

He was falling. It was to be expected to fall for a moment as the world adjusted to Xisuma suddenly being somewhere he hadn’t been. The flash of the void would reset and he would be on solid ground in a moment. He waited a moment for his perception to right itself, though it seemed to be taking longer than usual.

He hit something solid, and the sound of frantic wingbeats filled his ears as his visor was clouded by vapour — he couldn’t see anything except for solid white.

For a moment he felt fabric beneath his hands.

Against his expectations, he didn’t stop falling, and as his visor cleared he came to understand that he was falling from the sky. What he was seeing was the underside of a cloud. The wind rushed in his ears and then he was hitting the water and sinking down.

It was a struggle to reorient himself in the darkness.

The weak light of the moon as the clouds moved out of the way allowed him to figure out which way was up, and he breached the surface with a gasp after a desperate fight with the kelp that had tangled around his limbs.

A shadow passed over the ocean’s surface, like some kind of enormous bird, and Xisuma turned to look up just as the creature disappeared back into the clouds.

That was a person.

His soulmate had wings. He hadn’t considered that. Hadn’t given much thought to their form at all — if anything he had assumed from their name that they would be a voidwalker, like himself. He would need to look up wing care; he vaguely knew that was important to such people.

He bobbed in the waves for a minute, treading water and craning his neck to see through the gaps in the clouds, hopeful to catch another glimpse, but it didn’t look like they were coming back down anytime soon.

There was no point trying to teleport to them again, he would only fall out of the sky a second time. Maybe if he was quick he could catch himself with his elytra; but then he promptly remembered that he had teleported from the shopping district. He didn’t need to do anything complicated.

He brought his communicator carefully above water so that he could see the screen, and teleported himself to the nearest island.

Xisuma shook the water off of his armour — thankfully it was water tight enough to have prevented any dampness from getting into his body suit underneath, though it hadn’t protected him from the cold — and went to stand under one of the birch trees swaying in the sea breeze, a little away from the shore.

The idea of some kind of grand courtship type of flight was appealing, but he knew he had no hope of outflying someone with natural wings; they could always fly together later. For now, teleport commands worked both ways. He would simply bring Xelqua down here.

He glanced around. There was a pretty patch of peonies just a little ways off in a clearing, and beyond that a small beach. The moonlight sparkled on the surface of the ocean and turned the petals of the flowers to silver. Xisuma couldn’t have asked for a prettier first meeting place if he had chosen it on purpose.

He could always show his soulmate his builds later, here was nice enough, and he didn’t want to wait any longer. They seemed shy, so maybe they would appreciate the privacy and the natural landscape and be soothed by it.

He made up his mind and copied in his command from earlier, switching the order of the names.

Xelqua landed only a block away, without so much as a stumble, almost as though they had been expecting it. They immediately put distance between the two of them, using one powerful flap of their massive wings to launch neatly to the other side of the small clearing before stilling and just looking back at him, expectantly, almost.

It was the first good look that Xisuma was able to get of his soulmate, and look he did.

The first — and most obvious — thing was that his soulmate was clearly a Watcher. His wings were each at least as long as he was tall, their span massive and their feathers shimmering like the upper void, filled with impossibly distant stars; the wings were breathtaking, almost as though he could step through the space they occupied and be out there in the beyond himself. A portal.

The somewhat shapeless watcher robe made the gender slightly uncertain, but it looked likely that Grian’s original slip up, referring to Xelqua as a ‘him’ was accurate; he indeed appeared to be male if Xisuma had to guess. It was nice to know. It was good to learn anything about him after so long of nothing at all.

Once he was no longer distracted by the wings and started looking properly, Xelqua was … very similar in build to Grian. And he had the exactly the same hair as well. Maybe they were, what, related?

Where was Grian actually, anyway? Surely after all that fuss he had kicked up he would be out here with them? Then again, how would he get all the way out here?

“I think you can probably understand now, why I didn’t want to talk to you.”

Xisuma jumped; that was almost Grian’s voice. If Grian spoke with the static overlay of the void dialect, that was. He was starting to get a bad feeling about what might be happening here, but it wasn’t what he wanted to believe. It didn’t make any sense. How could Grian and Xelqua be the same person? How could someone have two names at once, be logged in twice at the same time?

With shaking hands, he opened his communicator and checked Grian’s coordinates. Grian should be here, right on top of them. Exactly where Xelqua was standing.

Xelqua tucked his white knuckled fists into the deep sleeves of his robe and turned his head away slightly.

“I don’t really want to talk about this, but you’ve made it very clear that I’m not going anywhere until you’re satisfied.” With every word he spoke, it sunk in more; what Xisuma already knew: this was indeed, somehow, Grian. “Just ask your questions then — get it over with.”

It was difficult to decide on how to even ask about any of the things swirling around in his head. Where to start, what was most important. How to phrase any of it.

“Why don’t you just … try and give me the basics? There is nothing about this that I understand.”

This did not appear to be the right thing to say, as Xelqua (Grian?) frowned. Not that Xisuma had anything else to go off guessing his mood, the upper half of his face still being covered with the mask. But clearly, neither of them wanted to be the one responsible for untangling this.

“The basics,” He repeated back incredulously, “You want me to give you the basics.”

“Sure? Why didn’t you want me to see you?” A watcher was bit unusual sure, and maybe not accepted on most servers, causing trouble as they did; but the hermits were a family, and they already loved Grian — Xelqua. They already loved Xelqua. A little bit of prejudice could be discarded, if the hermits had it, for the sake of love. Actually, “Did one of the hermits say something about watchers? I’m sure they didn’t really mean it — they didn’t know about you. They’ll apologise once we explain.”

Xelqua burst into bitter laughter like the dying crackling of some shattered electronic, and Xisuma flinched away from the sound.

“Did one of the hermits say something about watchers?” His voice rose hysterically, “Did one of the hermits say something!?”

Xelqua threw his wings out wide, and every star winking at him from their depths was suddenly an eye. They sky above went dark, the stars absent there too, and as Xisuma looked for the moon he released that it, too, had become a huge jewel-black eye, looking down at him. The sky was studded with eyes and Xelqua’s own wings blended in with it perfectly, invisible if not for the movement shifting their boundaries as the watcher shifted and swayed with his unfurling power. The eyes where everywhere, blotting out all light and opening from every leaf and petal, swarming like locusts, dark and accusing.

“Look at me!” Xelqua shrieked accusingly, “Aren’t you afraid? I’m a monster! Isn’t it ugly? Is this what you wished for? What you wanted to see!?” The static of his voice crackled so loudly that if he weren’t of the void himself it would have driven him to his knees. Is this what humans felt when the watchers spoke to them? If so, he could understand the root of their fear now. Still…

“No. I’m not afraid of you, you’re still yourself.” He tried to say it with conviction, even though he wasn’t sure he really felt it. It didn’t matter; he could learn to accept this. This was his destiny. He just needed Xelqua to calm down.

“Well you should be afraid! I’m afraid! The watchers ruined me when they made me like this!” The watchers what now? He didn’t like the thoughts taking shape in his mind, “They took me and tried to twist me into someone else entirely. They remade me into a different shape and branded me with a new name and tried to act like it was true —” he was hiccuping between the words now as he forced the explanation out, something that had clearly been festering; but Xisuma wasn’t sure if he could bear to listen. He almost — almost — didn’t want to know. But when had he been spared knowing anything since this started?

“Xelqua —” he tried, only to be cut off instantly.

“Don’t call me that!” the watcher wailed, “That’s not my name and it never was! I hate this, I’m not Xelqua! Xelqua isn’t real! He never existed! My name is Grian and I don’t look like this, there is no Xelqua and never has been! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” He was screaming now. Grian tore the mask from his face and flung it violently away into the bushes as he finally burst into tears, hunching into himself as he continued through his sobs. “I didn’t choose it, I doesn’t answer to that. Why can’t I choose what I want to be called by? I want nothing to do with it. If you can’t accept that then I won’t have anything to do with you either. I haven’t deceived you at all. I haven’t lied. Everyone is acting like I’m a liar.”

A thousand eyes stared accusingly at Xisuma where he stood, one hand still lifted toward the other side of the clearing, where his soulmate sat alone. He … had really misunderstood, hadn’t he? He needed to fix this somehow, and quickly.

“I’m still not afraid,” he said softly, approaching carefully, “I can learn to understand this, I’ll do better, we can still work this out —”

Grian looked up furiously, his hands and cheeks and sleeves smeared with his inky tears, “How can you possibly say that? You only want me because you thought I was Xelqua. You wanted the idea of me, the idea of your soulmate, a fantasy. You wouldn’t be saying that if I didn’t have that name, if I were a watcher but not called that you would have thrown me out without thinking twice! It wouldn’t have even have gone to a vote.” He sneered, “You never loved me as a human, the way I choose to be. You would have never looked my way. The universe only matched me to you once I’d been damaged. That’s the only way you want me, hurt. You think I can just accept that?”

Xisuma sat in mute horror in front of Grian as the watcher stared him down through it all, trying not to flinch away from the darkness of his fathomless eyes, from his shaking shoulders, from the tight grip of his stained fists, from any of it. He hadn’t allowed Grian to run from this, and so he shouldn’t have the option either.

He couldn’t say that it was untrue. He had been naive, and caused someone he was supposed to love unconditionally pain. Still, he wouldn’t allow this to be the end of it. He reached out slowly, telegraphing his movement, and drew Grian’s trembling frame into his arms.

He smoothed a hand down Grian’s back, between his wings. For all that was wrong here, that at least felt correct. Grian should be able to fly, should be free as a bird in the air.

“If … you’d remained human then I don’t think you would have needed me,” he opened cautiously, “the things that happened to you in the past aren’t — they aren’t some seperate entity from you. That’s only one part of you, you lived before that and you’re still here after it, living. I can be better. I can learn to love all of you, as Grian, not just the part that is Xelqua.” He was reasoning it out as he went, but it sounded right, or like it was beginning to be, “I can help you with this, I’m of the void myself, I can show you how to be comfortable as you are. We can work on it. The past won’t change, but I won’t believe that there’s not future for us, that you can’t be happy. You aren’t ruined, no matter how you feel.” He said firmly. “I won’t let you get hurt again.”

Grian knocked his head against Xisuma’s chest plate and let his wings droop down, blanketing the ground in a starry sky; at some point the extra eyes had closed once more, and Xisuma hadn’t even noticed the moonlight returning.

“I needed someone before this was done to me. Why couldn’t I have been worth saving before?”

“I don’t know,” it was all he could offer, “I don’t why something so cruel happened, but I won’t let it happen again. Please just let me try.” It wasn’t enough, a pitiful offering in the face of Grian’s suffering. But it was all he had.

“You can’t trap me like that again.” Grian said abruptly, “You have to let me leave. I won’t be held against my will again. Never again, you hear me?”

Xisuma winced, aware that he was probably white with horror under his helmet at the implication of what he had done, what it had reminded Grian of, “I promise,” he said immediately, “You can come and go as you please. You can shut me out of that command so I can’t do it again.”

“And I’m still a hermit?”

“Always. Even if you don’t want to talk to me for a while, or ever.” It would hurt, but he would have to endure it, “This is still your home, your family, too. I won’t take it from you. I shouldn’t have tried, it isn’t what I meant to do. I really thought … it doesn’t matter what I thought. I’m sorry, for all of it.”

Grian reached up and pulled his helmet off, and then took Xisuma’s face in his hands, scrutinising, somehow trying to divine his sincerity. His hands were still sticky from his tears, and they would probably leave palm prints. Oddly, he looked forward to seeing the marks in the mirror later. He’d have some proof that this had really happened, and wasn’t all some terrible dream. He held still, resisting the urge to apologise again, to try and make excuses, and prayed to anything that might be listening and hear him out that Grian would believe him.

“I think… I’ll think about it,” Xisuma’s heart soared with hope, “If I can still be a hermit, and you’ll really put a lock on the commands,” Xisuma nodded eagerly against his hands, reaching up to cover one of them with his own, “then maybe if you give me some time first, we can try — going very, very slowly.”

“That’s fine, you don’t have to decide for sure now, only don’t go where I’ll never see you again, just stay. And I’ll try to be better. You can go if you need to, but come back when you’re ready, please.” He pleaded softly, almost crying for relief.

Grian sniffled and offered him a single shaky nod of agreement before turning his head away, leaning back against Xisuma.

They sat there together there for a long while, watching the moon on the water, until Grian felt ready to tuck his wings and watcher marks away again so that they could return home. In the morning, he resolved, in the morning he would fix this, start again.

It would be a few more hours yet before the sunrise, but Xisuma felt confident that they could endure through the darkness and come out the other side. He had one chance, but that was all he needed. He would make the best of it. This, with Grian, was worth fighting for.