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The afternoon was trudging along that day. Cerulean skies were just past their brightest, the sun pacing its regular path between blocky clouds and toward the distant mountains. The rainforest canopy, dark green and lovely, swayed with the hot breeze. A parrot mimicked the clatter of a nearby skeleton. Faintly, a hundred or two blocks away, a nether portal hummed, purple swirls seeping into the obsidian frame, and another to match harmonised beneath a towering tree.
Nearby, shadowed by a treehouse, was Purple.
Sweat rolled down the back of their neck as they slashed their sword, left, right, at the armour stand dummy in front of them, wielding a sword of its own— courtesy of Yellow— and blocking every other hit. They gasped in a breath; tiring already, they thought, with no small amount of scorn, I could do much better.
Purple reached up into their hotbar and a fishing rod popped into their hand. They threw out the hook a second later (a second too late, too slow, not accurate enough), arm jolting slightly as it buried into the ground, feet then skidding across the dirt and kicking up dust as they followed it (why are you running away?).
The armour stand wasn’t far behind, though, and so their rod swapped hands and they pulled out an axe, slashing down its middle. It briefly buried into the wooden frame, splintering the wood. Purple tried to pull it back out, almost reaching for their fishing rod, but it was too deeply embedded for them to have time to pull it out and leave to recover (oh, yes, flee, boy, see how far that gets you—) and then there was an impact and a sword in their chest and blinding, scalding hot pain and then they blinked, eyes still watering, and Purple gasped in a breath with hands on their knees and one, two, three seconds later they ran back to the dummy on shaky legs. Too hesitant, hit like you give a fuck, something in the back of their mind whispered. Vaguely, they realised that their internal monologue has taken on their father’s voice. When did it do that?
Not something Purple could think about now, though, because they couldn't afford to think about their trembling limbs or their weak deflects of an opposing sword that could match their speed for some stupid reason or the hand that they swore they could feel, holding onto a bruising shoulder, phantom nails digging into painfully real-or-was-it-actually flesh.
Their swings were growing desperate. The training grounds around them shifted, flickers of a room, then a face, blurring into their peripheral and Purple barely knew what they were even fighting at this point. Grains of dirt under bare feet turned translucent into shards of broken glass, and they wanted to scream but they choked on the words building up in their throat. There was a voice that wasn't theirs.
And then the dummy was their father, so much taller than they remembered but just as angry, and so they swung sideways (clumsy, overcompensating, far too slow, I don't want a son that fights like this you need to move, boy) and the sword seemed to cut through the form entirely. Their legs felt wobbly; faintly, they noticed the ache in their jaw from clenching their teeth together a little too hard, the tiny dribbles of blood from the occasional hair-thin scratch that the respawn apparently hadn’t been focused on in favour of bigger injuries that they hadn't even noticed. Purple ignored the latter thought, because they were still fighting, and they were slowing down and—
And there was an arrow, darting in front of their face, landing with a thock into the spine of the armour stand.
The stand fell, popping into its floating item form— because that’s what it really was, wasn’t it— and the arrow clattered onto the stamped-down dirt floor. Purple felt numb. Some unidentifiable emotion wrung under their skin.
They breathed in and out and in and out rapidly, eyes tracing the path the arrow had travelled back to its archer. Their arms were limp at their sides. The sword clattered to the ground.
It was Green, some tiny logical thing at the back of their brain realised, but the rest of their body did not could not follow along. They stared, briefly, and they felt their arms and legs move, and Purple could feel their heart rate increase again alongside the feeling of déjà vu in their chest, because something about this not-feeling—
(stepping back from a figure walking into the distance stepping back from a sickly body stepping back from a corpse buried deep in the ground)
—something about this was familiar.
Green (was it Green? Purple couldn’t tell, not when flickers of another face kept appearing in the corners of their vision) looked concerned, through their blurry vision. He said some words, they thought, but the sound didn’t reach their still-ringing ears, much less the meaning.
Purple blinked, and he was next to them, and they were sitting on the floor— how did they get there? Then there was a hand on their shoulder and they flinched back, eyes widening again because even though the muffled terror that was this stupid numbness they could feel the touch with such sudden clarity that they could feel the sensation tingling down their spine. (It was maybe also because there were still echoes of their father’s voice whistling into their ear, but that didn’t matter because it wasn’t real even as their idiot brain decided to make it so.)
Their hand was squeezed. A brief pause, a hundred years long and a milliseconds short, and Purple was still, then they could feel the dirt beneath them, pebbles scratching the skin of their legs, and there was Green, sitting next to them, a concerned look on his face and cursors though they had seen him Purple had barely known, really, that he was there.
It was all they could do to not break down in tears.