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Betty receives the message when she’s feeling more alone than she has for a very long time.
She’s a long long way from the server, now. There is water on all sides of her, an endless sea stretching out all the way to the horizon, and she is alone .
The message seems like a cruelty, of a sort. ‘It.’ Choose an issue, anonymous questioner. There are many to pick from.
And sometimes it feels like she's the common denominator of all of them.
There’s a cemetery only metres away from where she sleeps. It feels fitting in a way that she’s not willing to examine further.
There is a cemetery only metres away from where she sleeps and when she sleeps she is restless, her dreams run quick and terrifying then slip out of her fingers like ashes when she wakes, leaving nothing behind but the yawning sense of loss.
Where do you think it went wrong?
She thinks about it again when she opens the curtains, stares out at the graves.
She doesn’t like thinking like this - she’s supposed to be getting better, she’s supposed to no longer be wallowing in self-hatred because she’s not helping anyone when she’s acting like this - except wasn’t that the point? You wanted to be less capable because maybe it would mean that people would stop expecting things of you that you couldn’t provide you wanted to be less capable because it meant you’d be less able to hurt people -
And yet somehow, even here, she’s managed to hurt people. Even here , with the sea on all sides of her, so impossibly far from that world, she’s managed to hurt people and she doesn’t want to think about this she doesn’t have time there is so little time -
Betty runs out of the room.
It’s a while later when she next has time to think about it, when she is once again alone - where do you think it went wrong?
She’s not sure she can remember the last time things went right .
Thinking about this doesn’t help . Though she might be far away from everything there are still things she can do, surely - she pulls out her notebook, leafs through the pages, searches in vain for a pattern and after a while the roaring in her ears sounds like the ocean - she puts the notebook down, breathes.
Where do you think it went wrong?
You don’t know, but you want things to start going right sometime soon.
Except - what does Betty know about right? Every single thing she has done recently has been wrong, she’s hurt people and she’s failed at coming up with plans and she’s been the reason her teammate’s four month long plan was destroyed - and she couldn’t even stop her husband from leaving her.
When her teammates have come up with plans this week, she’s been unhappy with them - this feels wrong, why do we want to cause more hurt - but what right does she have to disagree when all of her own plans have failed or done the same? It’s not like she can log on, anyway.
She gets back to the server a few days later. She’s so tired and she can still hear the sound of the sea in her ears when she looks around at her house in the sunflower field.
She’s so tired.
She stays at her house for a little while - there’s memories here. Not many - it was only built the day before she left, but - it was a refuge, of a sort.
When she steps outside, someone has built a tree, a pond, a bench - it makes her want to cry, but not in a bad way.
It’s a good place to wait, but eventually she does needs to leave, equipping her elytra with practised hands and pulling more rockets out of her e-chest.
The dizziness crashes over her head the moment she goes to fly away and it is smothering, choking - she falls to her knees and waits for it to pass.
It doesn’t pass. But she has things to do, so she forces herself to stand on unsteady legs, and leaves the field.
Where do you think it went wrong?
She wishes she didn’t have to think about this at all. There are wrongs she can’t right but she wants to try anyway and how does thinking about where things went wrong help that?
What matters is things went wrong. Things went so horribly wrong, and a lot of it was her fault, and what matters is moving forwards. What matters is fixing things.
Except she doesn’t know how to fix things she doesn’t know and she can’t help but think of a conversation with Arch in her communicator, one line in particular: I want to be able to move on. I want everyone to be able to
She doesn’t know if there’s a path for things to get better anymore. She can’t trust her own judgement, what has today proven if not that? It’s not really a new feeling, though - she hasn’t trusted herself for a long time, too easily angered, too quick to judge - the hours and hours staring at tiny snippets of information and trying to put things together trying to figure things out mean nothing if the conclusions she came to meant nothing -
She’s a long way from the sea now, but she can still hear it rushing in her ears when her thoughts come rushing too fast or the dizziness tugs at her hands, trying to make her fall.
When she was there , all she wanted to do was be back home. Now she’s here she’s not sure it’s any better.
The next day finds her flying towards a platform above a spruce forest, over an hour late to a meeting she wasn’t sure she even wanted to show up to. What would be the point? She doesn’t think she could stay with a team that differed so much to her, and she can’t trust herself to try and sway people to her opinion because what if she was wrong again ?
She still feels shaky and off-kilter from her earlier talks when she lands on the platform, but she doesn’t stumble too much despite the sea rushing in her ears. When they tell her the plan, it’s like yet another wave crashing over her head - it’s what she wants, it’s a plan that tries to make things better but she doesn’t want to be hopeful and have that taken away from her yet again.
They discuss names and recent events and the fact Will and Betty need to talk soon and it’s all a little distant. She’ll feel better about this tomorrow. She just has to believe it.
The next week is busy. There’s materials to gather and things to build and conversations to have, but busy is good. It stops her thinking too much.
She gets married, too. And no one dies - other than her, three times, but all three of those are due to her own clumsiness and she’s able to laugh it off each time.
The next day, she talks to Will, and it tells her of a plan that makes her heart skip a beat. This is wrong wrong wrong and Will doesn’t deserve this but at the end of the day Betty can’t help other than to talk about it and offer an escape if necessary and pray things work out - she’s glad, in a way, that they’re not looking at each other, both focussed on mining. It makes it easier to hide her worry.
Later, she talks to Evi. And it’s awkward and weird because there’s still so much love there but she’s scared and it doesn’t help when Evi tries to pressure her into setting her spawn then asks her heart count and lunges at her with a sword when she tells them.
She jumps into the ocean, and for the first time in a while the sound of the sea rushing in her ears is not just in her head. Once she’s a little way out from spawn and pretty sure she’s not being followed, she stops, treading water. She can’t tell if the wetness on her face is from the saltwater around her or from tears.
Where do you think it went wrong?
Another example, there, she guesses. Her marriage . Where did things go wrong there? Where did things go so wrong that Evi thought the only option was betrayal?
A long, long time ago, she reckons. She thinks about a book that Evi’s been writing since February, January, so many months ago, things they never said to her despite all her attempts to get them to talk. She thinks of signs written at Serapy and a realisation that she’s hurt them too and -
She doesn’t think there was a set point where things “went wrong” with Evi. Maybe they were just too different from the start.
She doesn’t want to believe that, though. She doesn’t want to lose them completely.
She’d stopped treading water without meaning to, and now kicks out towards the surface, blinking salt out of her eyes. From here, she can’t see spawn, only the obsidian wall between her and land, and the water all around her. There’s water all around her, and the thought makes panic rise in her throat. She starts swimming to shore.
At the end of the world, Betty’s hands are drenched in ink. Her fingers ache, from writing book after book after book - her whole body aches, really, from running from build to build, resource stash to resource stash, clambering up the sides of the pyramid with glow lichen filling her inventory.
Her hands maybe took the worst of it - she’d lost her gloves a long while ago, and the skin is scraped and bruised, not that you can really tell under the ink smudges.
She doesn’t really mind, though. She’s written a lot of books in her time over the server, love letters and apologies and explanations and promises, but somehow the ones she’s writing today feel the most meaningful.
They’re as simple as she can make them, as genuine as is possible - she wants to be understood and she hopes she will be, because she doesn’t want anyone to be unhappy at the end.
After the world ends, Betty finds herself staring at old messages on a now defunct communicator.
Where do you think it went wrong?
It’s been a while since the end of the world, and she feels better. Not good, not okay, but her ears no longer roar like the sea the moment she feels the tiniest bit panicked (they still do sometimes, they always will, but this at least is bearable), she doesn’t get dizzy anywhere near as often, and past mistakes feel distant. Past mistakes feel like things she can learn from, instead of hate herself for.
Where do you think it went wrong?
She’s not sure, but she hopes that it ended up alright at the end.