Chapter Text
Avery, still, is not that smart. If he had tried to be smart and tried to do everything on his own, things wouldn't have possibly worked out. They still might not.
But other people know how to do things, and all his stubbornness had drained out of him the moment it was urgent.
All he had to do was go back to that fucking storage locker and awkwardly ask around for who owned it previously, without seeming like either a stalker or someone who was actively losing their mind out of terror, and get his shit together enough to go do the address he was given after a certain amount of pleading and vague reasoning.
He’s shuffling to get out of his car now, certain he crossed red lights and has incoming tickets, but he doesn’t care even if he knows he doesn’t have the money for all that.
The building in front of him barely feels like a lesser evil to his Minecraft save file somehow, but he goes unsteadily and quickly both to the doors, the concrete in early stages of corrosion wholly forgotten alongside every sickly part of this abandoned street, and he finds the only room a few stories up the apartment until there’s the only floor, only room that has any sign of “life” left inside of it.
He feels ill, furthermore. It’s hard to feel any more queasy than this, for he still hasn’t eaten or drank in roughly fourteen hours and just… everything is affecting him, but he does. It’s the most describable thing he’s seen in a while, unfortunately.
In a baking room from how long a computer has been constantly running, there’s.., presumably D3rlord3— some physical form to put the name to, curled up over a keyboard without any hope of having been able to escape his wallless tomb, with the life drained out of him almost surreally. It’s not really a person– he doesn’t look like one, though Avery really doesn’t wanna think about him that way, but it’s just a body at this point.
A body. Right. Not just a body if he figures this out, for once.
He pushes his horror aside and scrabbles to the body’s side, albeit while avoiding emptied out drinks left about without thought, and he grabs onto the face that’s dove into the metal. Eyes empty and skin pallid, Avery finally doesn’t have to stare at pixels through a screen, and yet this is the reason why? D3rlord3 is barely breathing, and this is when Avery gets to meet him, who saved him from something unimaginable as well as a New Years spent completely alone, now when he might never hear his voice or hear his thoughts in all of their horror or just experience the presence of someone that has abruptly taken up all of his own empty head.
Still breathing, though.
A whispered apology later, Avery grabs onto him from his torso with an imperfect, uncomfortable hold and drags him to the nearby bed, even as he notices the ghostly eyes twitching in pain that persists through consciousness. He makes room to look at the continuously glowing screen in the background, though he’s uncertain of movement even of the eyes is… possible like this, while he focuses on some kind of resuscitation he learned years ago and never used up until now,
“Uhm,” he mounts the mattress and stares down for a moment, “frick. Sorry again. I’m really sorry.”
He pushes down onto his chest, gets a minute twitch in response, does it again on an off-beat tune playing in his head. Something in his horrible form works, because he hears a chirp beneath him; pained, breathless, not all there just the body’s natural reaction to whatever could possibly be happening inside it solely derived of something in fucking Minecraft. He keeps going, more so out of restlessness and wholehearted fear than expectation that it will help, let alone a thought that him doing it in the first place helped at all either, He tries different forms, does different practices because he doesn’t know what the fuck is wrong let alone how he would fix it if he knew.
Derek ends up shivering beneath Avery’s hands, he feels it, as though in spite of the temperature and how Avery is exuding sweat. His eyes eventually make a slow loll to one side, toward the screen as expected, and they blink, albeit infrequently, and whatever hollow has taken place beneath his cool flesh is ebbed away, only a miniscule corner of the void, with something.
It isn’t exactly part of him, nor is it any piece of him that should be there, but it’s enough.
Avery dives down immediately, too fast out of relief that overtakes his reason shortly, and clings to his shoulders with a slight lift off the bedding. His head falls just against Avery’s own shoulders, vision still hazily drifting to the only source of light he can find.
The pain doesn’t seem to stop, the pixelation isn’t enough without the world being open and unpaused, obviously. It soothes him somewhat, and his jumpstarted heart rate and breathing begin to even out painstakingly, cradled close throughout the whole, slow process that displaces the silence. Silence, with fans still running in the background, but they’ve both been listening to exactly that for hours anyway. It blends into the sound of nothingness now.
“I’m so sorry.”
Everything of this eventually blends together for Avery, although he notices vaguely when he’s leaned into, rather, slumped into bonelessly, and the arrays of fireworks rising in intensity after an uncounted amount of minutes make him flinch just the first time he hears them popping. Neither person in this room is in their right mind to judge him for pussying out on his usual antics, and so he lets himself melt into it, fearlessly tearing up with only one soul who might have been able to see the liquid trailing down his face if not for everything.
He takes D3rlord by his sides again after he’s sniffled himself into exhaustion, stress letting up while he can feel his friend breathing smoothly, and starts trying to haul him down a flight of stairs, down to his car, yes, but first and foremost, just out of this room. He doesn’t like knowing that this of all places is where Derek has been staying, where he said he had spent his time just barely surviving while living off his attachment to a fake world and if not that, spending every second disconnected in agony.
He didn’t describe it very well, like most things he tried to explain to Avery, but for once, he’s smart enough to piece it together himself.
Pain and suffering and dependency, probably. That’s what he gathered. Inability. Hauling the dead weight with him, roughly due to his own inability to carry someone of similar if not larger mass, he only gets Derek out of the threshold before settling him down gently against a wall. He shivers again, but it's better for him to be out of suffocation.
Avery next handles pulling plugs and taking along whatever items seem important with him, from the PC and more importantly the screen connected to it (please, please don’t let it continue to be D3rlord’s lifeline any longer, though), to a pile of clothes that’s started to dust unworn, carrying it in hasty shifts to his car like it’s moving day before he returns for the final time, huffing and dizzy, and crouches next to D3rlord.
He smells like corrosion itself, looks… in pain even though his eyes have fallen shut for the first time, sounds ragged and hoarse as he breathes softly. Avery doesn’t know what he expected him to look like, though. He didn’t imagine anything past descriptors: Heroic, selfless, damaged. He finds red tinted ebony, greasy, yes, but still soft when he tilts his head to his shoulder and grazes it. Pale skin, but that’s because he’s not healthy, he hasn’t been for a while. Skinny in an unbefitting way, he’s taller than Avery, but has lost the mass that would make him bigger.
Avery’s a small, miniscule being in this world. He really is. No one important, forgotten by family and friends and left to his own devices. And yet he garnered the attention and protection of someone else, the importance that they would take their own life rather than risk his. He knows it might just be that D3rlord wanted to save the world as a whole from the King in Yellow, and that just happened to depend on his personal safety. Maybe someone really did — does — believe that he matters so much.
He tucks away his selfish thoughts to the back of his head, gathers his strength and stretches knowing it won’t help his own weakness, and begins the very careful process of taking a living, breathing body down many jagged edges repeating in close succession without giving him a concussion or skinning his legs. Or sending them both down to the bottom and possibly killing them both through sheer impact and collision against each other.
Avery would really, really like to get professional help. Maybe he should. His phone is in his pocket, albeit his hands aren’t completely clean, and is easily accessible for a 911 dial. It’s just that
He doesn’t trust anyone else to handle this.
No one can fully, clearly understand what Derek went through, what he is going through, what he will go through if Avery keeps him alive on his own. And he’s scared of what would happen if someone tried to understand. He is possibly the closest any other person will come to that, to knowing through his own slightly sheltered experience what it was like, and he doubts D3rlord would tell another what he told him. Not the same way with the same words, at least.
Would a nurse or someone alike think he’s insane? That’s all he looks like. A madman that spent too much time at home playing games, and if Avery tried to back him up, he’d be written off as a second case. If he was able to momentarily “fix” whatever physically was wrong with his friend, the problem wasn’t detrimental enough in that factor for it to show in any way how badly he’s hurting. Would a brain scan show anything? Maybe he has brain damage from this, Avery doesn’t know what this means and how Derek is going to be, or is currently suffering, because what if what he thought was going to happen to him did, but worse?
What if he’s deteriorating from the inside and Avery is just fucking oblivious? If not that, is he mentally okay? Is he forever going to suffer still from that… brain melting knowledge until he’s allowed to die??
They’re both a floor down by the time their surroundings are remembered, and Avery uses the same mixture of anxious shaking and precise caution to get down the rest safely. The fireworks are louder outside, booming every second and turning the inside of his skull into throbbing green goo, but they’re muffled once again as he pulls them both into the car and thuds against the left door in the back when he does so harder than he needs to.
Derek blinks up at him emptily before drifting off into another world. He holds his breath, fails to do so and gasps, and lets himself completely let go of his minimal strength against the elongated carseat. He has a man he has never met outside of a game, that saved his life and tried to sacrifice his own for the greater good, and after skulking out this guy’s address, he’s kidnapping him in a half-dead state because Avery is scared of letting him die. Alone, at that.
He runs a hand through his hair, blond and mussled from roots to split ends, and pulls his legs to his chest. The cold is starting to bite at him for the first time, neither diluted nor is he distracted by adrenaline, and he’s just in a nothing burger of an outfit that’s the spare clothes he had before laundry day. They’re both in a similar state in that way, actually, as far as he can tell from scanning Derek’s body.
He tilts his legs to press a sideways thigh into his abdomen, sighing in relief.
The bright colors bursting in the sky are almost mind-numbing, though he’s enamored by the pretentious beauty of it like every year. His eyes are glassy, yeah, every part of him is messed up somehow, but it’s nice. He can just stare through the blurs of water as a rainbow flashes in the sky. This is just pushing his astonishing hours of sitting somewhere dark staring at over saturated colors farther.
He tucks a seatbelt over Derek’s laying form, the same way he probably would were it a dog he was buckling in, and clambers to the front seat, left— driver’s, opposite to where he’s piled up the few items and buckled them in the same.
Five, ten minutes of letting the engine warm up, his goosebumps start to smooth out as well. He keeps the radio off, occasionally remembers to abide traffic laws despite the streets’ emptiness, has to look at a map on his phone to get from streets foreign to him back to where it’s familiar and lonely in a more quiet way than desolate.
Thank God people are too busy enjoying their holiday with their partners, or whatever, to notice someone hauling an entire computer and small wardrobe, not to mention an entire man, through a populated complex, of which has an elevator, so there’s another thing Avery can thank someone somewhere for. He doesn’t have time to properly freak out about how incriminating everything about that is until he gets his door locked and the floodgates open all the way.
It’s harder to “carry” Derek the final stretch now that his adrenaline has run dry, drier, but he manages with what little there is left, combined with determination to get him somewhere… safe.
Coming to what he’s been prolonging the wait of, Avery collapses on his floor once he lets Derek lay down for the third time (though it’s probably not enough to fix his back yet), slowly kneeling, shaking, then starting to hunch, and outright curling up in the middle of his bedroom with a gag.
Nothing is right, in fact, everything is immensely terrible and horrifying and confusing and he just needs to stop any part of him from hurting.
He’s caught between immediately getting back up to eat something before he loses control of when he lays down or not, and he could also get a drink while he’s up, but he’s already anchored down. He could crawl his way to the bathroom and puke whatever he has left from nearly a day ago inside him, but maybe he won’t feel sick if he just sleeps it off, and yet it’s also kinda hard to sleep when he’s starving, but either way, he’ll probably be too stressed to do anything, so maybe he should go excrete all his feelings through his mouth, into a toilet,
He sits still. Sobs. Sniffles and coughs. His muscles give up furthermore and he headbutts the floor, continuing to sob. The fireworks continue to go off, intensity already spiked and showing no signs of slowing down, though there’s no window in Avery’s very limited line of sight to admire them.. His laptop sits on a desk next to his bed, blaring pale light into the otherwise unlit room. Derek shows no more signs of life than he has so far.
Avery huffs at the absurdity of it all, aborts it to make way for a hiccup instead. He sobs.