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Bdubs shudders. He didn’t know he could hurt this bad. Or, shit, maybe he knew, but he’d— he’d—
It’d been a long time.
Life on Hermitcraft is— bright. Easy. Doesn’t rain, usually, on Hermitcraft, not unless they’ve got it in their twenty-five heads to let it, by unanimous vote. (Or unless Xisuma makes a mistake. Bdubs loves the guy and so he will say this lovingly: his dear old admin Xisumavoid’s just full of mistakes. Heh. It’s charming.) A world for building, and for court cases thrown up on the big screen which are entirely true-to-life and verdicts decided absolutely justly with no mind paid at all to view counts except incidentally, he’ll have his audience know— a world for redstone geniuses such as himself, and for playing games with his friends.
Hard to believe a player could hurt this bad, after such a long time on Hermitcraft where Xisuma doesn't let that happen to them— hard to wrap his brain around it, shit, shit shitshitshit Judas Priest oh god. Hard to believe a universe that loves could let a player hurt this bad. Hah. You feel the touch of the universe that loves every time you respawn, right, you’re a player, you’re here to play the game— play, and play, and play till you’re done, whenever that is, and that’s up to you, right? Bdubs figures you gotta just know in your bones when you’re done, not that he’s ever stopped to wonder about it very much; that time ain’t coming around for him anytime soon— the universe loves you enough to catch you, when you die. Bring you back. Notice your breath, respawn in the long dream—
You could put a whole lot of suffering in between one respawn and the next, though. You could put an eternity there. He drinks in a gasp of air, and it’s cold enough in his lungs to hurt.
He’s on a bed, soft wool dyed black in a— alright, it’s a cell, emphasized by the fact it doesn’t even have a freaking door, but it’s decorated more like a fancy hotel room. This admin’s got a taste for luxury. Lots of the mean ones do, so that figures. The walls are a beautiful pristine white, with quartz and dark oak furnishings, end rods arranged in a fashionable light fixture overhead which is somehow turned off, how’s that for custom mods that are simply mean— plush black carpet on the ground. A jukebox on the opposite wall, reskinned to look like a classy wooden record player, a custom painting hanging above it with a gold frame— just yesterday the admin had put on a custom music disc, something light and jazzy, and poured himself a glass of expensive-looking whiskey before he set to tearing Bdubs apart some more.
The glass had frosted up from how cold the room is, before the alcohol hit it.
(Whiskey, sheesh, that’s hard to come by, that’s an intensive process— wheat malted, fermented, distilled and aged, that’s a lot of work to get from the raw materials a world offers to the bottle in the admin’s hand— not the kind of thing you’ll find on any old backwater server.)
(Bdubs had just about frosted up before the alcohol hit him— warm on his skin for half a second and then burning, as it soaked into the wounds that made up most of his torso and he screamed and screamed. Just, just freaking torture, okay. Glamorous torture, half the bottle poured out like this on a whim. Just— reckless waste, that’d speak to the admin’s wealth if nothing else did.)
He’s respawned here, uh, a couple times now. Respawns aren’t so bad, he’s respawned plenty of times in his long long career. The thing about the injuries is they won’t go away with respawn, so when he comes back to himself in the same exact spot he died in, he’s in the same amount of pain, too, same amount of awful bloody glitching wounds tearing right through him. The rope burns go away, at least. Small relief?
He gives himself new ones pretty quick, the amount he struggles and spasms.
Jeez. It’s cold in here. If he could move his arms or like any part of his body, he would huddle up under the blanket, but sadly he cannot do that.
He has been here for— five— days. That’s his running estimate. Yep. He’s not counting the ticks or anything, and there is, of course, no sign of sunlight anywhere to clue him in the typical way, but he wouldn’t be Bdubs if he didn’t find some way to tell the time. The admin took the six clocks he had in his inventory (good to have backups! Good to have, say, five backups— look, you never know—) along with all of his stuff— but he takes a consistent four-ish hours to drain a full hunger bar as his code tries and tries and fails to use it to stitch him back together and heal him, just eating uselessly away at it, unit by unit. That’s an estimate the admin actually gave him, like, for free, which landed like a chilling threat at the time— nothing a player likes to hear less than you’re not getting out of here, you’re going to die over and over— but in the absence of anything to do about it, he’s been using it as a measuring tool. World’s slowest spawntrap. Bdubs is going to leave a zero star review, when he gets out of this.
Possibly the meanest thing about this whole ordeal is the amount it is completely screwing up his perfect sleep schedule.
God. It hurts. Bdubs is not a trespasser, thank you very much, and he’s not a thief either, unlike some hermits he could name— he’s not a hostile mob, or a griefer, but even if he was all of those things, he is of the opinion that this would be overkill. Funny enough, he really doesn’t think helping an old professional contact get out of a crazy situation is worth this amount of fuss.
Not every admin is as forgiving as Xisuma is. Or if forgiving’s not really the right word— completely hermitlike, maybe? Xisuma’s okay with anything as long as he doesn’t find out about it, Etho will say, a little spark of mischief lighting up his voice.
And— speak of the devil.
Bdubs thinks he’s just hearing things, at first. He would try to piece together a hallucination of Etho’s voice out of nothing but the blood thumping in his ears.
But then two blocks out of the wall break and light spills in, and that alone brings shocked tears to his eyes; he hadn’t realized how much it was screwing him up just sitting in a dark room like this, every good instinct screaming at him to put a torch down or mobs’ll spawn. He was hearing cave noises. Cave noises aren’t good for a player’s psychological wellbeing.
All of this is background chatter in his overactive brain, fading into noise. Unimportant. There’s a backlit figure in the space the broken blocks left behind, cautious footsteps into the lavish hotel room of a cell Bdubs finds himself in. For half a second he’s terrified, heart in his throat, wanting to press into the wall behind him and flinch away— no more, no more, god, please—
But the admin wouldn’t need to bother coming in through the wall this way, didn’t even build a door in; an admin doesn’t need doors except for the fun of using them.
“Bdubs?”
His name in Etho’s voice is like— heavensent. Clouds opening right up, sun comin’ through em. Light literally spilling in through the two-block hole in front of him. Bdubs sobs. He doesn’t mean to let himself, but he does.
“E— Etho,” he says, shaking, reminding his mouth how to form words. His voice hasn’t gotten much use except for screaming, the last few days. “Etho? Tell me that’s— really you.”
“He’s here,” Etho yells to— someone, and that’s a good sign, an Etho with backup. Bdubs doesn’t care who backup is, actually.
“Etho,” he babbles, “Etho, for goodness’ sake, Etho, light of my life, sun in my sky—”
He cuts himself off with a shudder, and something terrible ripples up through him, starting at his stomach with the wounds that just won’t heal right no matter how they try to— up his chest and shoulders, and he spasms from the pain.
“Bdubs.”
Etho’s at his side, then. He’s breathing hard, eyes wide above his mask. Bdubs is never going to get how anyone can call Etho hard to read, everything he feels is written all freaking over him.
Bdubs has to say, for the record: this isn’t a very fun game. He’s played a lot of death games, gotten up to all sorts a’— chicanery, hooliganery, bloody sword in his hand, his pretty face all punched up, grinning madly as he brings the blade down, then howling something like if fury was glee, when it’s inevitably his turn to die— dang, never quite cinched a win, has he; maybe one of these days— he’s respawned maybe fifty thousand times in the long dream and boy, oh boy, is this a different kind of pain. The admin of this server was having plenty of fun. But. Let the record show that Bdubs is not.
“Okay,” says Etho. “Okay, thank you, I’ll, uh, I’ll keep that in mind.” Bdubs nods with authority. He’s just saying crap out loud now.
There’s more voices. Words, absolutely. Things being said. “Etho?” and “Oh my god. Bdubs,” and “Someone comm Xisuma,” and several whole strings of words that are not at all rated PG, and other things that aren’t that important.
“We— we gotta get you out of these,” is what Etho says, voice shaky, and that’s the thing Bdubs cares about. Etho’s voice.
It’s Etho.
Bdubs slumps into Etho’s chest the second the ropes are cut. Etho catches him, because of course he does. Bdubs slurs, “How’d you manage that, jeez, only spent five days tryin’ to do that myself—”
“Five days?” Etho chokes out, horror plain as day in his voice. Bdubs wants to sob again. Etho. It’s Etho, he’s right here, everything’s gonna be okay now, he is like ninety-nine percent certain.
“Or somethin’,” he says.
Hand on his cheek, cupping it. Thumb on his cheekbone, just under his eye, gentle as anything. Bdubs shudders into the touch, pressing his face into it. “You’re freezing,” Etho murmurs. Then: “Five days. You were— supposed to be at GradientCon.” He stumbles over the sentence, sounds sort of dumbstruck, like he still hasn’t processed the shock.
“That would have been nice,” Bdubs says wistfully, thinking of all the winning he would’ve done at the building convention he was, in fact, supposed to have attended and come home from by now. “Didn’t quite, uh, make it there. Got a little tied up on the way.”
He can’t manage a laugh at his own stupid joke. The idea is unbelievably painful, actually, he’s gonna avoid laughing for the foreseeable future. Let the record also show that he thinks he is very funny, though.
“Fuck,” says Etho, soft enough that probably nobody else hears it.
He shifts Bdubs in his arms, and Bdubs hisses a little through his teeth at the pain but doesn’t complain. Etho is very, very gentle. Bdubs is smaller than him, shorter and easy enough to maneuver, and then Etho is fully holding him, gathering him close and tucking his head into his shoulder, one arm under his knees. “I’ve got you,” he says quietly. “We’re getting you out of here. We’re getting you— healed. Fixed. Xisuma can fix this, I can fix this.”
The horror has an undercurrent of rage, now.
Bdubs turns his face into Etho’s chest, reeling at the touch, the warmth, the— everything. Everything. It’s Etho and he’s holding him. Bdubs can officially report he no longer has any doubt that he’ll get home to Hermitcraft okay— not that he had any to start, actually, he totally would’ve figured something out. He had that. He was biding his time, that’s all, he thinks to himself as he snuggles further into Etho’s chest, Etho’s anger settling over him like a protective blanket. Hard to make a guy like Etho angry, really angry.
He’s really angry now.
“You smell nice,” Bdubs announces, dazed.
“Uh. Thank you.” Someone’s holding a torch, and it lights Etho’s face up, shows his cheeks dusted pink over the edge of his mask.
“C’mon,” says someone else— sounds like Gem— “we should, y’know, we should hurry it up before someone comes back to do more of that to him—”
“How’d you find me,” Bdubs mumbles. “I couldn’t even find myself— they got rid of my comm, y’know, that’s just unfair. We’re pretty freaking far from Hermitcraft, aren’t we?”
There’s the distinct presence of an admin looming, suddenly, and it would make Bdubs flinch, except for how it’s his own admin. It almost makes him flinch anyway. Him and Etho, they haven’t always been hermits— haven’t always had an admin like Xisumavoid.
Xisuma’s gloved hand settles on Etho’s shoulder. (The one that Bdubs’ head is not currently laying on.) He says, soft and quietly steely with anger, “Time to take our leave, old friend.”
“Yessiree,” says Etho.
And, well. That explains that.
Bdubs figures he can ask for the rest of the details later. He promptly conks out, right there on Etho’s shoulder.