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The thing about the Main Hub is that it’s crowded at best and stifling at worst.
Grian glanced around nervously, wings tucked flat to his back as he tried to take in his surroundings properly. It had been— stars, had it been weeks or months or years even since he had made a proper visit to the Hub?
(He remembered the last couple times he went, sort of; the blue in the corner of his vision contrasting with the red of his jumper, laughing with his old servermates as they collected around him before setting off, colours dancing around him and he didn’t remember where they had been going and he didn’t know, back then, that there would be consequences for leaving that cursed server and that, one by one, they would stop going on these childish adventures, and one day it would be just him, naïve, still wingless, standing outside a broken portal with opposite corners cut off the frame and floating in the air—)
Grian breathed, in, out, once, twice. He looked up— the sky over his head was bright blue, tall towers of concrete and wood and terracotta and a mishmash of nearly every block ever stretching up into that expanse, crowding out the clouds. It was different enough to the Farthest End (pitch black and purple and white and eyes and eyes and eyes and eyes and eyes—) to let him relax, dipping his shoulders down and face unscrunching, allowing the violet in his vision to dissipate entirely. His eyes darted around, but none of the players around him had noticed enough to care. Perks of being in a proper city, he supposed.
The moment he stepped outside the barrier wall surrounding the Hermit’s portals, though, he was hit with noise.
Outside the space, players from all over flooded the streets with the sound of footsteps, bumping shoulders and raising the temperature with body heat. Closer to the centre of the Hub, shops, also loud and crowded, lined the too-thin roads. Pedestrians bustled through the roads busily, barely paying attention as they bumped into each other. Above, winged and elytra-ed people alike twisted through the air and between buildings; pinpricks, that high up. Briefly, he considered joining them.
Grian stepped further into the crowd, trying to stop the tips of his wings from dragging on the floor behind him, back hunched and making his already-short figure even smaller. A young lady dashed past him, forcing him to duck out of the way as who he assumed to be her friends sprinted after her, kicking up dust in their wake and almost making him sneeze. He peeked down their trail; sure enough, there was an empty line that marked their path, quickly being filled back up with pedestrians as he turned to see the way they came. He relaxed, starting to walk down a smaller side path, through some sort of garden.
That, of course, was when someone stepped on the ends of his wings.
He didn't react, for a second. Then, of course, the pain hit and suddenly Grian could feel himself snap, barely managing to force his false eyes shut. His wings beat once, twice, in a show of panicked aggression, and he could hear someone shout in what was probably surprise, but could have been fear and he didn’t want anyone to fucking fear him anymore, then other people were shouting and some part of his brain that wasn’t trying to make a run for it on shaking feet went huh, the Hub is a bit humid but it feels way too hot out right now, and also seriously, not again this is really inconvenient.
His vision blurred, and he stumbled back, landing hard on the prickling, grassy floor. His hands pressed palm first into the ground, as he tried to focus on something, in some sort of— regulation? Was that the word? Suns he didn’t know— that he knew he learned from someone but he couldn’t remember who, and his heart rate, which had been lowering, spiked again. His wings flew up around his face, darkening the light from the somehow too-bright sun and tinting his immediate surroundings a dark purple, too close too close too close to those eyes (boring into his back and his side and he could feel them on his wings blinking awake which he didn’t want to hurt anyone anymore—). His fingernails dug into the soil. That helped a little, at least.
He calmed, after a while. The sun overhead continued its path, disappearing behind some tall buildings far in the distance. Grian filtered back into his mind, suddenly aware of the rough bark of the tree behind him, the warm wind ruffling his already puffed up feathers. He inhaled slowly, then exhaled. He blinked away the fuzziness in his eyes, the black spots in his vision dissipating after a long moment. Slowly, he lowered his wings, folding them neatly behind his back. He looked up; in front of him, standing in a way that would be considered ‘looming’ if he wasn’t being so awkward about it, was Mumbo.
The taller man wrung his hands. “Hi— hi, mate,” he said, a slight frown on his face, “Are you okay? Are you okay now?”
Grian stared into the worried eyes of his friend and snapped.
“I think it would be best,” he said, voice tight, “if you stayed away for now.”
A pause. Grian's hands were still shaking. “I'm— sorry,” Mumbo stuttered, “do you need me to, uh, do anything—”
“You need to leave me alone,” Grian bit out, because suns he could not do this anymore. He only got a tiny peek of Mumbo’s face— surprised, but only slightly, which was… something— before he disappeared into the garden, wings held well above the cobblestone path.