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Grian is having a nightmare. Pearl wakes up when she registers that the shaking she's feeling isn't a dream-earthquake but Grian twitching, from head to wing-tip.
"Grian," Pearl mumbles sleepily, pushing against his shoulder. Grian makes a strange, wheezy sound of fear. "Grian, wake up."
"Taurtis?" Pearl's not ever heard Grian speak in his sleep before, so it makes her jump when the name falls out of Grian's mouth. "Stay — stay," Grian begs, and Pearl rubs the sleep from her eyes to sit up.
"Hey, Grian." Pearl grabs him with both hands now and shakes harder. Grian's eyes snap open, feathers fluffing up in alarm. "Sorry. You were dreaming." It's nicer to not call attention to it. Pearl prefers when people don't call attention to her nightmares, after all.
"Thanks." Grian says absently as he runs a hand over his face.
Usually, this is the kind of thing Pearl would forget almost instantly, but it's those words that stick with her. Days later, she and Grian and Xisuma are working together when Pearl carefully broaches the subject. Xisuma's nearby, but not too close — Pearl knows he had some sense of Grian's past, otherwise she'd never mention such things with other nearby.
"You said something in your sleep the other day." Pearl looks at the sky while she says it. "I was wondering if you remembered what you were dreaming about."
"The Watchers." Grian's words come out with a terrifying casualness that makes Pearl's eyes snap to him immediately. "What?"
"Just…" Pearl twirls her hand in the air and fails to finish the sentence. Xisuma is walking their way. "We don't talk about it. Usually."
"We can. If you think we should."
"Talk about…?" Xisuma wonders aloud.
"Watchers." Grian repeats, eyes intently on Pearl as if to check if she'll jump this time. Pearl just frowns at him.
"Ah." Xisuma's helmet tilts minutely as he's likely looking back and forth between them rapidly.
"I don't ask because I figure I know most of the answers." Pearl finally says. And she knows the answers will be things she does not want to hear.
"Eh." Grian is still so painfully casual, and it makes Pearl want to fucking shake him, tell him to wince or grimace or something. "It's hard to explain anyways. Being with them, experiencing that, it was — it's not something a regular person can understand, literally. If I — If I had stayed as I was, I'd have died. Gone mad first, but died." Grian partially extends his elytrian wings to punctuate the point. Xisuma is very still and Pearl is looking at her hands. "So I changed."
Pearl and Xisuma are, incidentally, two people primed to comprehend what Grian is saying. Xisuma changed in Hermitcraft's hands and awoke a domain god, boundaries forever expanded. Pearl … Pearl, like Grian, shattered in the hands of the server that they were born in, beneath the auspice of the All-Seeing-Eyes, and they both redefined themselves in the image of their own desires afterwards: Grian as the runaway Watcher turned Player again, and Pearl as the Wicked, savior of the scorned.
"It's dream-like, to remember it now." Grian goes on. "Taurtis was with me. He kept me grounded, in those places."
Now Pearl's eyebrows go up. Grian's in a weird mood today, to speak so much of this, but — it's Taurtis' name, again. "What do you mean, Taurtis was there?" Grian doesn't seem to pay much mind to her abject confusion.
Grian nods distantly. "Wandering through dreams, that's the only way I can explain it — Taurtis and I were there together, in the space between realities. Not like the void, someplace different even. I still could barely understand what I was, couldn't quite grasp the sight I had, but I got out."
"Grian," Pearl begins carefully, patiently. "I don't think — Taurtis came back from the End with us, after you - and he never left Evo. When things got unstable and most of the rest of us left, he said he didn't want to yet. He stayed, but that was a long time after you disappeared."
"Time wasn't …" Grian waves vaguely. "We were outside reality. I don't know how long any of it was. I know how long it was for you, from you telling me, but not from my perspective. All I know is it took awhile before I knew how to wriggle my way out."
"You said regular Players couldn't be there." Pearl ventures. Unless Taurtis had changed, too, in the hands of the Watchers, but Pearl isn't so sure about that. "How would Taurtis have been there? And if he was, then … where did he go?"
Grian shrugs, eyes refocusing. "I don't know. It's easier to not think about it too hard, honestly. It's not really healthy for the mortal mind? That's more of the reason I don't talk about it."
He's not answering her about Taurtis. Pearl sighs. "I can't blame you."
Pearl finds Xisuma alone the day after and says with no preamble, "I'm scared something's wrong with Grian."
She wrenched out all those horrible feelings the night before to Gem and now she has to bring them to the admin, because Xisuma will know more. He has to.
Measured, Xisuma says, "What do you mean, exactly?"
"The way he talks about it, X, about madness, about being outside reality. How is he in one piece? After all that?"
Xisuma takes a deep breath, reaching up and making his visor go clear so Pearl can see his eyes. "It's generally understood by Mojang," He starts to say. "That gods operate on a plane that is not visible, not comprehensible, to the mortal eyes or mind. It's like … we see in three dimensions, right? All humanoids. But for gods, there's a fourth. Seeing outside three dimensions is incomprehensible and damaging to a mortal mind. You changed, I changed, and we're something different now. Watchers, they aren't gods, though I know you were taught to worship them in that way. They're best described as eldritchj beings, which is really just a shorthand for saying that they function outside reality as we understand it." Xisuma gestures with his hands as he speaks. "Grian probably can't explain thins to us with any more clarity because there are no words, no concepts to possibly quantify it. If he can even still fully comprehend his own memories, at this point, because he's obviously choosing to exist in the mortal plane and is, despite being a Watcher, also a Player."
"What the fuck." Pearl whispers, because how else can she possibly respond? She feels like her heart should be racing. "I don't understand."
"I'm not the best at explaining it." Xisuma admits. "Keralis is better, but that's also because of what he is."
"Do not tell me about other eldritch beings right now, please." Pearl interrupts, rubbing her face.
"Sorry." Xisuma apologizes. "But Grian is a creature of contradictions. I doubt anything like he exists anywhere, or may ever again. My best guess is that his Fledging, especially timed as it was, makes his mind about to shoulder the inherent cognitive dissonance of existence. But I don't think you need to worry. He's lived this way for awhile now, and as I said, there are others who can manage some of the … eldritch side of things."
Xisuma picks his words carefully, but there is question of the most terrible weight curled up in Pearl's ribcage, slinking around her heart and trying to constrict it. She does not, will not say it, because she can't. Xisuma seems to recognize this internal struggle and reaches out to lay a hand on her shoulder.
"Grian's strong. You know that."
"He has to carry it alone." Pearl murmurs ina nguish. "That's not fair."
"It's not." Xisuma agrees. "He talked about having help. I assume Taurtis is an old friend."
"God, I don't know if Taurtis is dead and haunting him, or if he's a hallucination." Pearl bursts out. "Something his brain made up just to stay alive. I feel so helpless, Xisuma, he's my brother. It's not fair."
The image of Grian's mind, shattered into pieces by Watchers and knit back together by the essence of his wings, conjuring up his childhood best friend just to get him to walk out of Hell — it's awful. Pearl wishes she'd never asked. She wishes she'd asked sooner.
"I know, Pearl, and I'm sorry. But he has you now, and your younger brother. I think, between the two of you, there is a lot you can come to understand, if he wanted to share." Between Pearl reborn a god, and Jimmy Fledged now … it's not a bad point. "And he has all of us."
Pearl takes a slow, deep breath. "You're right, X. Thank you."
"Of course."
Pearl finds Grian later that day still intent on working on building into the night, and forcibly drags him to his nest for sleep. He grumbles, but when they curl up together, feathers and mothlin wings tangled, with no way to see where each of their dark curls begin and end … the sleep is dreamless, and good.