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He’ll get used to it, eventually, but after the first death game—after the very first one—the rush of all his memories coming back makes him so dizzy he falls over onto all fours and collapses on the grass.
Fighting for his green-yellow-red lives, he hadn’t remembered a thing about all the ones he’s lived outside of the game. Hermitcraft, Mindcrack, all his work and all his friends—everything had been gone completely. Not even an outline to fumble around, to feel the shape of what was missing.
Then the game had ended, and he’d been dumped back in his home server, and it’d all come back at once.
He looks up at the sky, littered with clouds and extraordinarily blue.
YOU’VE BEEN ETHO’D, the statue across the lake tells him.
Yep, he thinks, breathing a laugh and feeling strange and very bright, no missing parts. You’re a whole Etho again.
—
So a new season starts on Hermitcraft. It’s normal. No one talks much about the death game—what is there to say, anyways?
The only time Etho really thinks about it is when he’s working on the horse course with Bdubs. After a long, hot afternoon digging out the track, Bdubs strips off his heavy sweater and jumps into the sea to cool off.
Etho catches sight of him coming back up the beach, broad-shouldered, chest sparkling with drops of saltwater, and feels himself flushing. Thinks, oh, right. There was that.
He turns back to the redstone circuit he’s building into the track wall and puts it out of his mind. Later, when they’re riding back to base, he trains his eye away from the still-damp hair curling carelessly at the back of Bdubs’s neck. He still thinks about it, though. He thinks about it all night long.
—
After the next game, he keeps waking up shivering. The game had lasted weeks—much longer than the first—and it left its ice in him, somehow. Like he’s brought the winter back with him. It’s not even like things are much better on Hermitcraft. His friends are panicking, and the sky’s aching with the weight of a moon that’s far too big for it.
“You worked out how you’re getting out of here?” he asks Bdubs.
Bdubs shrugs. “I thought I might stick around a little longer. Finish up some old projects. We never got done with this old thing,” he says, nodding to the horse course as they ride past it. “You want to finish it with me?”
You never finish anything you start with him, a voice in the back of Etho’s mind tells him.
“I think I need a break,” he says.
When Bdubs looks at him, then, his eyes flicker between meeting Etho’s gaze and glancing down to where his mouth’s hidden behind his mask. He’d been doing that a lot, lately.
Bdubs draws a long breath, and shakes his head, looking away. “Look, I know I can be an idiot.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Just tell me everything isn’t all screwed up, with me and you.”
They haven’t really talked about what happened that night in the snow fort—how Bdubs had, had kissed him—and Etho doesn’t want to start now.
“Nothing’s messed up,” he says, hoping it comes across like he means it. “I just need a minute.”
—
A minute turns into months.
—
“You think Jimmy’s really your soulmate?” he asks Tango.
When the invite had lit up his communicator—USER [GRIAN] HAS INVITED YOU TO SERVER: DOUBLE LIFE—he hadn’t even hesitated before accepting. In the few weeks it’s been since the game ended, and Etho’s finally made his way back to Hermitcraft, he’s wondered more than once why he hadn't. He can still sometimes feel a phantom itch crawling across his skin where he’d been burnt to death by lava. Funny thing: death hurts more, in a death game. It clings even after Etho’s shaken off the grave dust.
Tango shrugs, and takes another bite of porkchop as he steps back to assess his blueprints. Decked Out 2’s starting to take shape. Roughly. “I don’t know,” he says. “It was just a game mechanic, right? Grian said it was all random.”
“And then Grian got Scar.”
A high laugh bubbles out of Tango. “Random numbers. That’s how they work. Random numbers do randomness.”
“It’s kinda real, though, right?” Etho presses. “You barely knew Jimmy before. Now you miss him.”
“Yeah, I miss him,” Tango says. “I miss other people who aren't here, too. What’s this about? Are you thinking about Joel?”
“I guess,” Etho says, even though he hadn’t been. “Aren’t those two Hazard lines going to conflict?”
Tango turns back to the blueprints, and doesn’t even call Etho out for so obviously changing the subject.
—
“You know,” he had told Bdubs, the first night in the monolith, letting his voice get a little teasing, “your stupid nether portal trap for the others got me and Joel killed.”
“I feel so bad,” Bdubs had said. There’d been a laugh behind it. “The minute you went in there, I was like, oh no.”
Etho’d laughed too. In the hearth, the fire crackled steadily. “Thanks for letting me stay, by the way.”
“Yes, I’m amazing and generous,” Bdubs had said, and yawned. His eyes had landed on Etho with a kind of affection Etho never knew what to do with. “Hey, don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been missing you.”
—
There’s games and there’s games. Turns out Bdubs has rebuilt their horse course, exactly as it had been. The wind tugs through his hair as they race around and around and around until they’re hot and flushed and exhausted. Grian invites everyone to another death game and Etho goes, counting his lives down on a clock. Tango opens Decked Out 2, and Etho dies again and again and wakes up grinning.
Feels like he’s got a smile etched onto his soul, these days.
The next death game begins, and the lightness carries through there too, somehow. Cleo and Grian sleeping down the hall. Bdubs swinging by every day, staying over, kissing Etho. Sure, it’s a death game. But it’s a game more than it’s death, this time.
When he gets back to Hermitcraft, he sits next to Bdubs in the Decked Out lobby and bumps Bdubs’s knee with his own.
Bdubs’s face is cherry-red when he looks up. “Guess Life-Bdubs is still an idiot, huh?” he says.
Etho breathes a laugh. There’s that voice in the back of his head again, saying, why is it that every time you lose your memories, and the only thing you’re left with is instinct and feeling, the first thing you do is fall in love with him all over again?
There’s probably a very simple answer to that.
“I think I should be offended, actually,” Etho tells him. “Why do you only want to kiss me when you don’t remember me?”
Bdubs growls and Etho laughs and wonders how he ever got by, not even knowing he loved Bdubs before.
—
Maybe it was inevitable, that the game versions of themselves would work it out in the end. Instinct and feeling and the correctness of being together is all they’ve got. It never could’ve ended any other way.
Etho gets ejected from the Wild Life server back to his home one with the force of the explosion he’d died in. He tumbles onto the patchy grass and rips his jacket on a rock and gets green stains on his hands, and doesn’t even care.
“Want to eat you alive,” Bdubs had whispered, pressing hot, needy kisses against his neck in the night.
Etho’d shivered and grasped for him, trying to draw him closer like he’d never be close enough. “Come here,” he’d said. “Come here, Bdubs, come here—”
He flops over onto his back and, without really intending to, touches his fingers to his lips.
Above, the sky is ensconced in a blanket of soft grey clouds. He can’t find it in himself to be annoyed even when he gets pattered with little drops of rain.
—
It’s just a few days later that they’re in Bdubs’s cottage kitchen. Etho warms up soup on the stove, and when he looks around to tell Bdubs to get the spoons out, Bdubs steps in close and cups Etho’s face with his hand, and kisses him.
It’s warm, soft. Etho's hips meet the kitchen counter. When he pulls back, Bdubs’s lips shine, wet and perfect.
“Sorry,” Bdubs says.
“That’s okay,” Etho replies automatically.
Bdubs nods. Once. Twice. His hand is still cradling Etho’s cheek. “Sorry,” he says again. “Don’t think that I—I mean, I don’t want you to think that I want—you know. That.”
Of course he doesn’t. You won’t let it happen in the games, he won’t let it happen out of them. Etho tugs his mask back up. “It’s okay,” he says. Again. “I know you don’t.”
He turns back to the stove, chest feeling all sharp and painful, like he’s raking it through shards of broken glass.
—
He sits on the sand, staring at the message on his communicator for too long.
USER [GRIAN] HAS INVITED TO YOU SERVER: SIMPLE LIFE
ACCEPT?
[Y] [N]
A wave washes high up the beach, almost reaching his sandals. The white froth it leaves behind shines on sand, glitter under the sun. The breeze is perfect.
And there’s a pit in his stomach.
Etho hits [N].
You’re a coward, that voice in the back of his mind tells him. You’re such a coward.
He knows it. He knows.
—
“Where were you?” Bdubs asks. “In the last game, you didn’t come.”
Etho shrugs and keeps his gaze fixed on the redstone in front of him. “I’m pretty busy at the moment.”
“Right. Couldn’t even spare a couple of days.”
“Mm-hm.”
Bdubs sighs. “I’m not gonna kiss you, if that’s what you’re scared of.”
“I’m not scared of—” Etho starts, and stops himself. Puts down the comparator and turns to fix Bdubs with a look. “I’m just busy.”
Bdubs stares back at him, eyebrow raised. The light is catching his eyes at just the right angle, turning their deep brown to shining copper. Etho’s throat feels very tight, and the moment hangs between them like an arrow in the air, like they’re both waiting to see where it’ll land. Who’ll get hurt.
“Alright, fine,” Bdubs says, finally, and kicks a lump of dirt and grass. “I didn’t want to talk about it anyway. But I’m not too much of a man to say I miss you. Quit hiding on that stupid fishing server.”
“I’m not hiding—”
Bdubs waves his protest off. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say.”
He doesn’t let Etho get another word in before he flies off on a firework. Etho watches him go, watches the trail of smoke he leaves behind, and tries very hard to ignore the way his heart’s tying itself in knots, knots, knots, knots.
—
If there was ever a point of turning back, Etho’s long past it. Completely, hopelessly past it. Simple pleasures never stay simple.
He sees Bdubs around, and tries not to think about it. He leans against the smooth obsidian of a portal and watches Bdubs placing blocks high up on one of his pale towers in the nether hub. Thinks he can see Bdubs’s bright smile as he works all the way from down here, and feels his heart flutter.
Some days it's like he’s casting out a fishing line into the wide open sea: HELLO? HELLO? ARE YOU OUT THERE? I’M ETHO, I LOVE YOU, CAN YOU SEE ME? DO YOU LOVE ME TOO? And he’s just waiting, waiting, waiting for a bite that’s never going to come.
In a way, it’s almost nice. It’s reliable: the tightness in his chest is like the tautness of a rope. If nothing else, he can hang onto it. Bdubs says his name, offers his laughter, smiles that smile, and Etho’s hanging on. A fish on a hook.
It washes over and over him, day after day, closeness upon closeness, wave after wave.
—
It’s not just Bdubs’s stupid tennis whites that do it in the end, but they certainly don’t do any harm. It’s that Bdubs is grinning maybe wider than Etho’s ever seen him—and that’s saying something. It’s that he’s shouting and delighted, cheeks flushed with happiness. It’s that he catches Etho staring and laughs.
“You okay, Etho?” he asks.
Etho swallows hard, trying not to let his eyes linger on Bdubs’s bare thighs, and says, “you look good.”
He gets a long, cartoonish blink—a genuine double take—from Bdubs in response. “Wha—? Did you just check me out?”
“Um,” Etho says, suddenly very glad his mask is covering his cheeks.
From across the court, Tango calls over, “Bdubs, it’s your serve!”
Bdubs hardly looks at him, keeps looking, amazed, straight at Etho, who shrugs helplessly. “I—” he starts.
“Bdubs! Serve, my dude!” Ren shouts.
That gets Bdubs’s attention, at least. “Right!”
They play a rough set, mostly because Bdubs keeps glancing around behind himself at Etho, and a little bit because Etho’s distracted, looking right back at him.
The match is lost by the time they get back into their stride, and the moment gets almost forgotten. Tango and Ren head into the clubhouse to get water, and Bdubs turns around and hits Etho with an electric, fantastic smile, ten times brighter than the sun. “Isn’t this the best?!”
Etho doesn’t even think about it, then. He just steps into Bdubs’s space and kisses him.
Bdubs doesn’t stop him, so Etho holds him there, lips pressed softly against his, until there’s a clatter at the far end of the court, and he steps away just as Tango and Ren come out of the clubhouse with topped-up bottles. Etho wipes his mouth with the back of his glove and pulls his mask back up.
“What was that for?” Bdubs asks.
“Nothin’,” Etho says.
Bdubs looks across the net at Tango and Ren, down at his scuffed white tennis shoes, then back up at Etho from under his eyebrows. “This isn’t a Life game.”
Etho crosses his arms. “It’s not,” he agrees.
“Okay,” Bdubs says. Then, “do you want to—“
“Yes,” Etho says immediately.
Bdubs huffs a laugh. A genuine one. Etho relaxes a little. “I didn’t even say anything.”
“What were you going to say?”
“Do you want to shower at my place, after?”
“Yes,” Etho says again, and means it just as much as he’d meant it the first time. He doesn’t think Bdubs could ever suggest something he wouldn’t agree to.
“Hey, dummies!” Tango shouts out from across the clay. “Are you ready? We playing another game or what?”