Chapter Text
“Shh, hey there. Egg? C’mon, man, look at me.” Wemmbu kneels on the dirt of a desolate world; cratered like the moon as he cradles an old friend in his arms.
There are feathers scattered on the ground and they are no longer white; there are shards of armor sparkling in the raw soil. The body pressed to his chest is still warm; still breathing. This is enough. It’s really, truly, all he needs. It’s all he could ever want.
“Ooh,” his best friend gasps. “They got me good.”
“I know, buddy,” Wemmbu whispers. He wipes a little bit of blood off of Egg’s cheek; brushes a bit of reddened hair out of the way of his eyepatch. Easy, gentle touches for a friend in a bad, bad spot. “I know.”
“Why are you talkin’ like that?” Egg mumbles. “Don’t talk like that. Don’t talk to me like it’s over.”
That makes him laugh—really laugh, straight from the gut, high and cackling and ringing over this alien landscape and its massacred thousands. It makes him rock in place; curl around his dying friend as the pitch of it turns into something more desperate.
“Fuck,” he huffs. “God fucking damn it. How do you want me to talk, then, bro?”
“Nicely,” Egg sighs, though it’s more of a wheeze. “Can you even do nicely?”
“I could do nicely,” Wemmbu lies.
“I don’t believe it,” Egg laughs. It catches on something in his friend’s chest and starts to rattle.
It’s a horrible rattle. It crackles in him like a fire and rolls unnaturally as Egg’s eye goes wide and his skin pales and he grasps at his chest feebly and then Wemmbu has to hold him upright and coach him through it; one breath at a time.
“You’re okay,” he murmurs. “In– one, two, three, four. Hold it. Out– one, two, three, four. Follow me. C’mon, now, bro, lock in. Didn’t know breathing was above your skill level.”
“I…” Egg gasps. “I told you… you couldn’t… be nice.”
He’s pressed his last totem into Egg’s bloodied palm, so once the withering finally steals his breath, his friend will come back. He just has to die, first, and withering– withering is so, so slow. If he were a better man, he would just–
“Sorry, Egg,” Wemmbu mumbles, propping his friend up against his chest so he can breathe better. “I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t say that… either,” he sighs. “You never apo—“
The next wave of dying comes in a rush of hacking wheezes that steal Egg’s voice from him— it’s back to the counting.
There’s time, and there’s a litany of numbers, but it becomes clear to Wemmbu very soon that this breathlessness is not temporary; that this suffocation that will doggedly follow his friend to the grave; that he will not hear his friend speak until the last die falls and the totem pops at last.
“I could be nice,” Wemmbu says, just to fill the silence-that-isn’t-silence, just to cover up the rattling gasps and desperate, airless wheezing. “I could be really nice. I think you’re good, Egg. Really, really good.”
Gloved hands wrap around his forearm, gripping tightly as his best friend, his only friend, his most loyal and steadfast friend struggles to breathe.
“Really good,” he chokes. “Not at PVP, y’know, or like, any of the mechanical shit, but— fuck. I don’t like this. Egg, I really don’t like this at all.”
Resurrection, most of the time, is very, very quick.
In battle, that’s how it goes; a cart blows up at your feet and your body shatters; something sharp slices through your arteries; a mace smashes the little mirrors in your skull. It’s instant, and so is the tug back to reality. There’s only a flash of darkness before the multicolored light comes streaming back in to welcome you home; before the roll of thunder brings you back to the long dream.
Sometimes, however, at the end of a long battle, the toll of the dead catches up to you. The injuries left behind by your enemies don’t stop bleeding when they die; your shattered armor doesn’t reconstruct in the wasteland. Sluggishly, slowly, they collect their due.
Egg is learning this first-hand. Wemmbu, on the other hand, is also learning new things: this, for example, is what true helplessness feels like.
Here is his best friend. Here is Eggchan, the scholar, gasping in his arms like a fish on land as the withering collects and clots in his lungs.
Here is Wemmbu, cradling the most dear thing in the world to his chest, unable to do anything at all. He killed the wither, sure, and he tore the players who summoned it limb-from-limb, but now—right now, as glassiness steals into the eye of the one person he’s ever wanted to protect— he can do nothing.
“I don’t like this,” Wemmbu murmurs, again, rocking slightly in place, like the motion might soothe his dying friend. “I don’t like this. I really don’t like this. C’mon, Egg. It’s okay. You can let go. Totem’s right there. I’m right here.”
Gasping, instead. Writhing. His one eye wide and bloodshot. Nothing, nothing. No words; only animal thrashing in that last, unforgiving, fearful struggle to survive.
Most would say Wemmbu is a selfish person. They’re right, too— he takes what he wants and he makes it his and he never lets go of the things that are important to him.
Sometimes, though. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices.
He just wishes he didn’t have to make this one.
Wemmbu’s done it before— popped his friend’s totem for fun or for a bit or for whatever, because that doesn’t hurt like this hurts; doesn’t linger, doesn’t take its time; isn’t so brutally cruel.
He raises his sword, carefully. He can feel Egg’s stuttering chest hitch. His friend turns his face into Wemmbu’s shoulder.
Is it hiding from the blade? Is he baring his neck? Wemmbu can’t tell. He doesn’t want to know.
“It’s—“ he stutters, the sound caught somewhere in his throat. “It’s gonna be quicker. Less painful. You’re okay. I got you.”
His blade hovers at the edge of precious skin, nearly reverent.
“Deep breath. Or, well. You know. Three, two—“ Wemmbu starts, and then opens up his best friend’s throat with a sword before his countdown can end.
His friend stiffens, gurgles something, curls into Wemmbu’s chest, and goes still.
For one desperate, infinite moment there’s nothing. It’s like the roiling void underneath the bedrock; perfectly black and still and endless. Not space, not air; pure nothing. A world where there isn’t anything at all.
Then a thunderous roll and a radiant snap of gold and green has Egg heaving to life in his hands again, gone from his drowning into a universe where there’s as much air as he could possibly want. Back again, whole again, here again.
Wemmbu watches his best friend; the heavy heaving of his chest, as if he’s still trying to understand what it is to breathe; the gentle trembling of his wings, white as a cloud and just as weightless; the way he grasps at the shiny, raised pink scar across his neck where the totem stitched life back into him. He could stay here forever, but he can’t, and he won’t, and this’ll happen again for as long as they live.
What a brutal life.
“Why didn’t you die faster,” Wemmbu whines, and then he breaks down, collapsing onto Egg’s bloodied, whole shoulder. “Fuck you.”
“I thought I was good?” Egg jokes. His voice is a little rocky. Of course it is; it was just stitched back together after Wemmbu destroyed it.
“I hate you,” Wemmbu repeats, again, and is horrified to find that his voice is shaky. And really that all of his body is shaky, trembling in the shade of Egg’s wings as he curls them around the two of them. “I hate you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
“Bro hates me and holds me in his arms on the battlefield?” His friend’s laugh is hoarse, ringing, lovely. “Make it make sense.”
“Fuck off and die,” he mutters into Egg’s ruined suit.
“Again?” Egg asks.
“Again.”
“Well, if you say so,” his friend huffs. “Can I do it later, though? There’s, like, blood everywhere.”
Wemmbu breathes in iron and whatever the hell Egg uses to clean his suit. A terrible awful familiar smell. He breathes out. Egg’s hug is so tight, so stable.
“Sure,” he says. “Later. Let’s get outta here.”