Archive of Our Own

Jude’s base was a masterpiece of paranoia and precision, a symphony of redstone and pistons woven into the very bones of the earth. It was Jude’s sanctuary, his art, and today, it was his interrogation room. He stood on the edge of a newly dug pit, the clean, sharp scent of fresh-cut stone filling his lungs. Below, a neat arrangement of sticky pistons and signs promised a brutal end. 

It was a good trap. An efficient trap. But it wasn’t a real one. The real trap was the man standing beside him, a silent, dangerous question mark in netherite armor.

Sharpness.

“So, this is the primary system,” Jude explained, his voice casual, almost bored. He gestured with a flick of his wrist, not even bothering to look at Sharpness, affecting an air of nonchalant superiority. “Simple, effective. Anyone falls in, they’re cooked. But you know me, Sharp. I’m a man who loves a backup.”

He led him around the corner to a second, smaller alcove. “This is the secondary trap. It’s a bit of a bitch to reset, but it’s a guaranteed kill if the first one fails.” He stopped, standing directly over the opening, the stone platform deceptively solid beneath his boots. 

He looked at Sharpness, a small, his posture casual and relaxed. “The lever is right here. All it takes is a flick.”

This was it. The culmination of weeks of… something. He was giving him everything. The opportunity, the excuse, the perfect deniability. It was a test, of course. A stupid, romantic, idiotic test, but it was the only one he could think of. 

Jude needed to know. He remembered the late nights spent hunched over a crafting table, their shoulders brushing as they planned raids, the warmth of his proximity a quiet fire against the chill of the stone. He remembered the flawless, almost telepathic way they moved together in a fight, a whirlwind of swords and arrows that left their enemies broken, a brutal, beautiful dance only they understood. He remembered the way Sharpness had looked at him after he’d saved his skin with that well-timed health potion, his eyes wide with a mixture of shock and something Jude hadn’t dared to name, something that made his own breath catch.

He needed to know if any of it was real. If what they had was real.

He could feel his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic, desperate rhythm that he hoped was masked by the clink of his armor. 

He was standing on a precipice in more ways than one. Beneath his feet was the fake trap, but beneath even that was the real risk: the hope that Sharpness would see this for what it was and refuse. That he would laugh, call Jude an idiot for being so trusting, and turn away, not even glancing twice at the trigger. That Sharpness would choose him over the easy, temporary victory. 

He was hoping against hope, a dangerous, foolish emotion, that the legendary PVPer, the man who valued strength and victory above all else, would prove his loyalty here. Not to the server, not to some abstract code of honor, but to Jude.

He watched Sharpness’s face, trying to read the unreadable. Sharpness’s gaze flickered from the lever to Jude’s face, his expression a carefully constructed blank slate. Jude saw it then, the microsecond of calculation. The weighing of options. The consideration of what Jude represented versus what this lever represented. And in that moment, Jude’s hope began to curdle.

There was no hesitation. Not even a second of it.

Sharpness’s hand moved with a swift, decisive motion, and the world tilted.

Jude fell. The snap of the trapdoor closing above him was a clean, final sound, like the lid of a coffin being shut. 

Darkness. 

For a single, heart-stopping second, he thought he’d miscalculated, that his arrogance had been his undoing, that he’d built his own grave. Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through him. Then, the hidden chestplate mechanism clicked, a soft, satisfying thunk that only he knew was coming. The floor beneath his feet gave way not to a collection of suffocating armor stands, but to a small, dark chamber. He landed softly on his feet, his knees bending to absorb the impact. He was fine. He was alive.

Jude didn’t make a sound as he stood there in the darkness, the silence pressing in on him as he absorbed the result of his test. 

Sharpness had made his choice. 

It was so clear it was blinding. The hope that Jude had so foolishly nurtured was extinguished, leaving behind a cold, hollow ache. He wasn’t angry. Not yet. Anger was a hot, clean emotion, and what he felt was murky and complex. It was a profound, soul-deep disappointment. 

He had wanted, prayed, for Sharpness not to betray him. He had wanted them to become something… something more. He had wanted the partnership that felt so right, so effortless, to be real. He had wanted him.

Jude swallowed, forcing down the nauseating cocktail of emotions, and triggered his second trap. He heard the faint hiss of pistons, the confused shout from beside him, and then the satisfying, sickening crunch of a player being caught and crushed. 

He broke his way out of his hole, back into the light, and made his way to Sharpness’s trapped form. “Why?” he asked, the word heavy on his tongue as he hefted his sword and swung. “Sharpness, why did you do this?”

Jude got no response. At least, no response that could quell the melancholic disappointment festering inside of him. With a final swing of his netherite sword, Sharpness’s form flickered and died, leaving behind nothing but a pile of meaningless loot.

Jude kicked his way through it, uncaring, and climbed back upward to the empty space where Sharpness had been standing. He looked at the lever, still pulled down. The evidence of his partner’s betrayal.

And then he laughed. It was a short, sharp, ugly sound, completely devoid of humor. It was the sound of something breaking inside him. Of course, Jude thought bitterly. Of course, Sharpness had turned on him. What had he expected? Loyalty? Something more? He was a fool. A sentimental, romantic fool who had confused battlefield camaraderie for something deeper, who had mistaken a shared enemy for a shared soul.

The air caught in his lungs, a sudden, sharp scratch, like he’d inhaled a grain of sand. He coughed, once, twice, a dry, hacking sound that felt wrong, alien. He brought a hand up to his mouth, frowning. When he pulled it away, something soft and crimson was sitting in his palm.

A single, perfect rose petal.

Jude stared at it for a second too long. It was impossibly red against the pale skin of his hand, impossibly soft, impossibly fragile. It felt like a physical manifestation of his own foolish, shattered heart. 

He felt a cold dread creep up his spine, a feeling so foreign and terrifying he immediately shoved it down. He closed his hand into a fist, crushing the petal, and threw it away. He told himself it was nothing. A fluke. The dust from the stone. He told himself it would go away if he just left it alone. 

But as he stood there, surrounded by the ruins of his failed test and the ghost of a partnership that never was, he knew, with a chilling certainty, that it wouldn't.

—

Ignorance became Jude’s new favorite game, the perfect strategy. 

And it was a strategy Jude was good at, one he’d perfected over years of building walls around himself. He moved on from the trap, from the betrayal, from the violent, bloody end of their partnership, like it was nothing more than a failed experiment. He threw himself back into the chaos of the server, into the familiar rhythm of trap and be trapped.

But the coughing wouldn’t go away.

It started subtly. A tickle in his throat during a quiet moment at the trading hub. A sudden, sharp intake of breath that he’d disguise as a laugh at one of Parker’s bad jokes. He’d turn his head, cough into his elbow, and do his best to force out the pressure building in his lungs. 

The petals always followed. Always the same deep, impossible red. At first, they were soft, silken things. Easy to swallow. Easy to ignore.

He was crouched in the rafters of the main hub, watching the players mill about below, when the tickle started again. 

It was more insistent this time, a persistent, scratching itch deep in his chest. He pressed his lips together, his jaw tight, but the pressure built and built, an insistent wave rising up his throat. He could feel them, a soft, velvety mass pushing against his windpipe. He squeezed his eyes shut, his whole body tensing as he fought it down. Jude swallowed, hard, the edges of the petals scraping his esophagus, a faint, burning sting. 

He took a swig from his water bottle, trying to wash the feeling away, but it didn’t work. It never worked.

These days, it was happening more and more often.

Jude refused to look at the petals too closely when he couldn’t force them down. He refused to acknowledge the growing pile of them he’d secretly disposed of in lava pits or deep, abandoned mineshafts.

He told himself it was just stress. A weird side effect of the server air. Anything but what he knew, in the deepest, most terrified part of his soul, it was.

The only time he felt a semblance of peace was when he was moving, when his body and mind were fully occupied with a task. So he moved. He ran. He built. He fought. He did anything to keep the silence at bay, because in the silence, he could feel it. A slow, creeping growth in his chest, a vine wrapping itself around his lungs, tightening just a little more each day. It was a restriction, a constant, low-grade pressure that served as a permanent, physical reminder of Sharpness’s choice.

He’d be in the middle of a conversation with Parker about the price of diamonds, and the urge to cough would hit. It was a sudden, violent thing, a clenching in his gut. 

"Excuse me," he'd mutter, turning away before Parker could see the strain on his face. He’d walk a few paces, pretend to be interested in a display case, and then the convulsion would wrack him. He’d clamp a hand over his mouth, his shoulders shaking as he forced the wet, silken mass back down. The air would whistle through his teeth, a pained hiss. 

When he turned back, his eyes would be watering, and he’d blame it on the dust. "Just a tickle in my throat!" he'd say, his voice a rough, scraping thing. Parker would look at him, a concerned frown creasing his brow, but Jude would just wave it off, a practiced, dismissive gesture.

He was lying to everyone. To Parker, to Tai, to himself. But the lie was flimsy, a paper-thin shield against an encroaching, blooming truth. 

Jude was dying. But he was all too willing to pretend he wasn’t.

—

The grand 2v30 was Tai’s idea, of course. A glorious, suicidal charge against the entire server. It was the perfect distraction. Jude threw himself into the planning with a feverish intensity that bordered on manic. He and Tai became a two-man army of chaos and destruction.

Jude built traps that were bigger, more elaborate, more cruel than anything he’d made before. Giant arrow cannons that could rain death from a hundred blocks away. Deep pitfall traps lined with sines and culminating in armor stands. Complex redstone contraptions that could ensnare a dozen players at once. 

He worked through the night, his hands moving with a desperate, frantic energy. If he was building, he wasn’t thinking. If he was planning, he wasn’t feeling. The rhythmic click-clack of the redstone repeaters was a mantra, a way to drown out the whisper of vines growing in his chest.

The fight began in a blur of motion and noise. Arrows whizzed past his head as they set off as explosions rocked the ground, and the clash of steel on steel filled the air. 

Despite himself, Jude laughed, louder, sharper, a wild, unhinged sound that made even Tai glance at him sideways. He was daring something to catch up to him, daring to die, to escape.

But he couldn’t. The petals were always there, a persistent, suffocating presence. 

Soon, he and Tai were separated in the chaos of the battle. Tai ran off to man his cannons, leaving Jude the sole bait for an entire army of enemies.

He was in the middle of a frantic reset, his fingers fumbling with the XP-bottles, when he felt the pressure in his chest begin to build. He turned away from the fight, a cough wracking his body, and forced a mouthful of petals out of his throat, the bitter taste of pollen mixing with the coppery tang of adrenaline. Tai shouted for him in voice call, asking if he was okay, and Jude straightened before taking off again, his voice strained as he yelled back, “Sorry!”

It was getting worse. He knew it was. 

These days, the petals were no longer always soft. Sometimes they came with thorns, tiny, sharp barbs that would catch and tear, leaving his throat raw and bleeding. The coughing fits were harder to control, the pressure in his chest a constant, heavy weight. He was running out of breath faster, his stamina failing him in long fights. He’d feel a lancing pain in his side, a sharp, deep ache that had nothing to do with exertion.

Nothing had made his sudden lethargy more noticeable than this god-awful 20V2. 

He knew he was pushing himself too hard, that the exertion was only making it worse. But the alternative—stopping, being alone with the silence and the creeping dread—was unthinkable. The various battles he was involved in were a fire, and he was using it to burn away the fear, even if it was burning him alive in the process. 

He was losing, he could feel it, but as long as the battle raged on, he could pretend he was still fighting.

Then, he saw him. Across the chaotic battlefield, a flash of netherite and a blur of elytra. Sharpness. 

And for a moment, everything else fell away. 

Sharpness was chasing him, a comet of deadly intent, his movements fluid and precise. He was weaving through arrows, his sword a gleaming streak of silver. 

Jude’s heart hammered against his ribs, but it wasn’t just fear. It was something else, something dark and mesmerizing. He’s beautiful, the thought surfaced, unbidden and unwelcome. A perfect, deadly predator. The yearning was a physical ache, a sudden, sharp tightening in his chest that made him stumble. 

He shook his head, trying to clear it, trying to focus on the fight, on Tai, on survival. But the image of Sharpness was burned into his mind, as all-consuming and permanent as the flowers in his chest.

—

The worst part, Jude soon realized, the part that truly broke him, was that Sharpness didn’t stay consistent. He wasn’t a simple, clean-cut enemy. He was a storm front, unpredictable and devastating. One moment, he was the enemy who had pulled the lever without a second thought, shouting taunts from across the battlefield, his eyes cold and distant. The next, he was… almost the same Sharpness he’d teamed up with, all those weeks ago.

During a chaotic skirmish at spawn, Jude found himself cornered by three players. He was out of potions, his shield cracked, his health bar flashing a dangerous red. He was bracing for the inevitable respawn screen when a blur of wind and spear shot past him. 

Sharpness. 

“Hi, Jude!” he said, deceptively chipper as he moved with a brutal, fluid grace, his sword a whirlwind of death. He took out two of the players in seconds, giving Jude the opening he needed to land a critical hit on the third.

As the last player dissolved in a shower of loot, Sharpness landed lightly a few feet away. For a moment, they just stood there, breathing heavily in the aftermath. Sharpness looked at him, his expression unreadable, no matter how hard Jude stared into the depths of those pretty green eyes. The, he smiled, and gave a short, sharp nod, a gesture of acknowledgment between fighters, and then launched himself back into the sky, leaving Jude alone with the ringing in his ears and the vines in his chest tightening, squeezing the air from his lungs.

Soon, the horrifying truth came crashing down on Jude. Sharpness’s cruelty wasn’t the worst thing he could do. His kindness was.

Every time Sharpness was soft with him, every time their eyes met across a crowded battlefield and held for a second too long, every time he showed a flicker of the camaraderie they once had, the flowers in Jude’s chest would bloom. It was a false hope, a cruel trick of the heart, and his lungs reacted to it like poison. The pressure would intensify, the petals would rise faster, thicker, sometimes accompanied by the sharp, stabbing pain of thorns.

Jude’s love for Sharpness was like a weed. One he was unwilling and unable to pull from the root.

He started to see the pattern in fragments he refused to piece together. A moment of proximity, followed by a night spent choking on rose petals in the dark. A shared victory in a small skirmish, followed by a day when he could barely speak without his voice cracking and choking around the roses. 

Sharpness wasn’t just not helping. He was actively, unknowingly, making it worse. Every mixed signal was a handful of seeds thrown onto fertile ground. Every shift from enemy to ally and back again was a gallon of water. Jude’s heart was the soil, and it was determined to grow a garden of his own ruin.

Nowhere was his devastating unpredictability more apparent than with the arrival of Flowtives. 

The server was in an uproar. A notorious rage baiter had managed to get onto the SMP using Leekleek’s account. Worse still, he was cheating, ignoring all the sacred rules of the server. Ex-bows with impossible power, elytra spearing that defied the game’s physics. He was a virus, and he was targeting everyone. His first major victim was Jude, killed in a single, deceptive hit when his guard was down.

Jude respawned, furious and humiliated. He was gearing up to hunt the cheater down when he saw Sharpness land nearby. Their eyes met, and for a second, Jude expected a taunt, a sneer. Instead, Sharpness’s expression was grim, his jaw tight.

“He got you, too?” Sharpness asked, his voice simmering with an undeniable anger.

Jude just nodded, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword.

“He’s coming this way,” Sharpness said, his gaze scanning the horizon. “We can take him. Together.”

The word hung in the air. Together.

The fight that followed was unlike anything they’d experienced since their partnership ended. It was just like old times. 

They moved in sync, a fluid, deadly dance. Sharpness engaged Flowtives head-on, his shield absorbing the impossible blasts, while Jude circled, doing his best to bait Flow to where Sharpness could most easily get a hit on him. 

Jude felt it then, something fragile and dangerous blooming in his chest alongside the roses. It felt… right. It felt like coming home. In the middle of the fight, Flowtives managed to knock Sharpness out of the sky with a well-aimed spear. He hit the ground hard, his health plummeting. 

Without thinking, Jude switched to his hotbar, his fingers finding the familiar glass shape of a health potion. He threw it, a perfect arc, landing right at Sharpness’s feet. The pinkish-red cloud of healing enveloped him, and Sharpness was back on his feet in an instant, his eyes finding Jude’s across the chaos. There was a flicker of something there—gratitude, surprise, something more.

The fight reached a fever pitch. Flowtives, cornered and enraged, turned his full attention on Sharpness, his spears flying with impossible speed. Sharpness was a blur of motion, dodging and weaving, his own spear a silver streak. Jude watched, mesmerized, his heart hammering against his ribs. He saw the opening before Sharpness did, a slight misstep from the cheater, a moment of overextension. 

Sharpness, of course, was quick to take advantage of Flow’s error. He was a whirlwind of steel, his movements so fast they were almost a blur. He launched himself into the air, matching Flowtives, and dove at him with his elytra fanned out and his spearhead aiming true. In an instant, the fight was over, and Flow’s body dissolved into a shower of loot. He stood there for a moment, chest heaving, his netherite armor gleaming under the digital sun.

He was beautiful.

Beautiful enough to steal what little breath lived in Judelow’s lungs. 

A wave of pure, unadulterated elation washed over him, so powerful it eclipsed the constant, low-grade ache in his chest. This was it. This was what they were supposed to be. An unstoppable force. A perfect partnership. 

The hope he’d been trying to suffocate roared back to life, a raging inferno that burned away all doubt and fear. It was more than only a flicker this time; it was a bonfire.

He didn't care who was watching. He didn't care about the server, or the war, or anything else. He strode forward, a wide, disbelieving grin splitting his face. "That was incredible!" he whooped, his voice full of a reverence he couldn't hide. "We gotta team again. We’ve gotta team again, Sharp." The words tumbled out, desperate and earnest, a plea and a celebration all at once. He was so close, so close to having it back, to having him back.

Sharpness turned to him, and for a breathtaking second, Jude thought he saw it. The same fire. The same hope. A flicker of a smile touched Sharpness’s lips, and Jude’s heart soared.

Slowly, a real genuine grin that reached Sharpness’s eyes, warming them from their usual cool gray to something like molten silver. He let out a short, breathless laugh, a sound Jude hadn’t heard in what felt like a lifetime.

"Yeah," Sharpness said, his voice still rough from the fight, but holding an undeniable note of agreement. "Yeah, we do." He took a step closer, his gaze fixed on Jude's, and for the first time in months, there was no mask, no distance. Just him. "It's not the same without you watching my back, trapper."

The words washed over Jude, a healing balm on a wound he hadn't let himself acknowledge. The air, which had felt so thin moments before, suddenly seemed rich and easy to breathe. He felt the constant, constricting pressure in his chest ease, the thorns that had been digging into his lungs retracting their scornful grip. The flowers were still there, a quiet hum beneath his ribs, but for the first time, they didn't feel like a death sentence. They felt… dormant. Peaceful, even. 

Hope, real and tangible, bloomed in their place, bright and brilliant.

Sharpness clapped a hand on his shoulder, a firm, familiar weight that grounded him. "Let's get out of here. We've got planning to do."

Jude just nodded, unable to speak past the lump in his throat, a grin so wide it hurt his cheeks. As Sharpness launched into the sky, Jude watched him go, for once, absent of that familiar, aching sense of loss. For the first time in a long time, he felt like he could breathe.

—

Jude was at the main trading hub, a genuine smile still tugging at his lips as he chatted easily with ItsNoob, when Parker found him. His friend’s face was ashen, his eyes wide with a kind of horrified disbelief.

“Jude,” Parker said, his voice shaking. “You need to come. Now.”

The world narrowed to a pinprick. The base. Somehow, he knew before Parker even said the words. He followed Parker back, his legs feeling like lead, his heart a cold, heavy stone in his chest. He could see the smoke from a mile away, a thick, black column rising into the sky.

When he arrived, it was worse than he could have ever imagined. The beautiful, well-trapped structure he had poured his soul into was gone. In its place was a massive, smoking crater, the edges still glowing with the purple and black energy of wither explosions. The land was corrupted, the sky dark above it. It was a wound in the world.

And standing at the edge of the crater, his elytra folded neatly behind him, was Sharpness.

Rage, pure and blinding, eclipsed everything. The hope, the promise, the memory of that shared smile, of that tentative promise—it all burned away in the face of this absolute, final act of destruction. Sharpness hadn’t just blown up a base. He blew up their base.

Jude stormed toward him, his hands clenched into fists, his vision tinged red. “Why?” he screamed, his voice raw with fury. “Why the hell would you do this?!”

Sharpness turned, his expression unreadable, but his eyes held a flicker of something that looked like satisfaction. “Twirps wanted it done. We’re cleaning up spawn, getting rid of the trappers.”

“Trappers?!” Jude spat, getting right in his face. “I use this base! You use this base! You use this fucking base more than me!” Jude could barely think, barely speak. He was choking up, but whether it was from the vines in his throat or from raw emotion, he couldn’t tell.

“I hate this base!” Sharpness yelled back, his own voice rising to match Jude’s. “I hate everything about it! I died in it more than anywhere else, and I was sick of it. So I decided to– to fucking blow it up.”

Jude felt something in his chest snap, ripping through him with a wet, tearing sound. The flowers, which had been a slow, creeping growth, surged up his esophagus in a violent, overwhelming wave. It was an explosion inside him, mirroring the one that had destroyed his home. Thorns scraped and tore, the feeling of a hundred tiny knives raking his esophagus. He doubled over, a choking, guttural sound tearing from his lips.

“Jude?” Parker’s voice was distant, concerned.

Jude fought it. He fought with everything he had. He couldn’t let Sharpness see. He couldn’t let him see this, the ultimate, humiliating proof of his own pathetic, unrequited feelings. He clenched his jaw, his muscles straining, forcing the torrent of petals and thorns back down. The pain was excruciating, a white-hot fire in his chest and throat. He could feel them, a thick, suffocating mass, pressing against his windpipe, stealing his breath.

He straightened up, swaying slightly, his vision swimming. Jude glared at Sharpness, his eyes burning with unshed tears of pain and rage. “You’re a goddamned bastard,” he choked out, the words barely recognizable, his voice a strained, broken thing. He could feel the petals and thorns crawling up again, a relentless tide, and he fought it down with a sheer force of will that made him tremble. 

He would not break. Not here. Not in front of him.

Sharpness just stared at him, his expression shifting slightly, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes. Confusion? Concern? Jude didn’t care. He couldn’t afford to.

The sound of approaching voices broke the standoff. Tai, Seosibe, and the rest of Tai’s kingdom were arriving, their faces grim as they took in the destruction. The battle lines were being drawn.

“Jude, come on!” Tai shouted, his voice urgent. “We have to go! We’ve gotta– We have to regroup and prepare. Leave him!”

Jude didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay, to fight, to make Sharpness hurt as much as he was hurting. But he could barely breathe. Every inhale was a struggle, a conscious effort against the crushing in his chest as it swelled with the weight of Sharpness’s betrayal. Jude knew he couldn’t win a fight like this. He knew he’d be dead in seconds.

Shooting another venomous glare at Sharpness, a look that promised a thousand different kinds of pain, Jude turned and ran, following Tai into the cover of the trees. 

But even after everything, even with the roses tightening sound his lungs, their thorns stabbing into the soft flesh of his insides… Jude couldn’t resist and singular, pained glance behind him.

God help me, he thought as he hurried after Tai. But even as the prayer echoed in his mind, Jude knew the truth…

It was too late for him now.

—

Just hours later, Tai and his soldiers — Jude included — made their return.

The battle was a chaotic, messy blur. The Kingdom of Anarchists versus Tai’s Kingdom. It was a clash of ideologies and steel, a war for the soul of the server. Jude was in the thick of it, his sword a cold, heavy weight in his hand, but his heart wasn’t in it. His lungs weren’t in it.

He was suffocating.

It felt like the vines in his chest had finally bloomed into full, monstrous flowers, their petals thick and dense, filling every available space. Every breath he managed to drag in was shallow and unsatisfying, like trying to breathe through a thick, wet cloth. The world around him seemed to be moving at a different speed, faster and more vibrant, while he was trapped in a slow, suffocating haze.

He was slower than he should be. Weaker. He could feel it in the way his arm burned after only a few swings of his sword, in the way his vision swam when he dodged. He was fighting on pure instinct, his movements clumsy and defensive. Fighting like he was, Jude was far from the trapper who could outsmart a thousand men. He was a cornered animal, giving his all just trying to survive to the next minute.

He locked eyes with Sharpness across the battlefield. The other man was a whirlwind of motion, graceful and deadly, his every move precise and lethal. He saw Jude, and his focus narrowed. He abandoned his current fight, his elytra flaring as he shot toward him.

This was it. The fight he wanted. The fight he’d been waiting for.

Jude braced himself, his knuckles white on his sword hilt. He met Sharpness’s charge, their swords clashing with a deafening clang. The force of the impact sent a shockwave through Jude’s body, and a fresh wave of agony erupted in his chest. He stumbled back, gasping, a cough wracking his frame. He barely managed to swallow the petals that surged into his mouth, the taste of copper and pollen thick on his tongue.

“Getting slow, Jude,” Sharpness taunted, circling him. His voice was cold, but there was something else in his eyes. A flicker of… confusion? He was expecting a better fight than this. He was expecting Jude.

Jude couldn’t answer. He just gritted his teeth and lunged, his movements clumsy and predictable. Sharpness parried him easily, his movements fluid and effortless. Sharpness was toying with him, and the humiliation burned hotter than any fire.

The tides were turning. Jude could feel it. He was losing, and not just the fight. His grip on consciousness was starting to fray, the edges of his vision going dark. The pressure in his chest was immense, a physical weight that was slowly crushing him. He knew, with a cold, terrifying certainty, that if he stayed, if he kept this up, he was going to die. 

For real, this time.

Forever.

He saw an opening, a brief moment of distraction as Seosibe called out to Sharpness. It was his only chance. Jude took it.

He ran.

Jude moved quicker than he ever had before, filled with the desperate, panicked flight of a cornered prey. He broke away from the fight, ignoring Tai’s shouts and Sharpness’s confused cry of his name. He just ran, his lungs burning, his chest screaming in protest. 

He scrambled into a dense forest, his only thought to get away, to be alone. Jude fumbled for his shovel, his hands shaking so badly he could barely grip it. He dropped to his knees and started digging, clawing at the dirt like a madman, creating a crude, desperate hole. He plunged into the darkness, pulling the dirt in after him, sealing himself in a shallow, suffocating grave of his own making.

The moment he was alone, the control broke.

Jude collapsed forward onto his hands and knees, his body convulsing with a violent, heaving spasm. A torrent of flower petals and thorns vomited from his mouth, spilling onto the dirt floor of his makeshift hiding spot. They were red and wet and tangled, a horrifying, beautiful mess of life and death. It didn’t stop. Wave after wave came, each more painful than the last, his body desperately trying to expel the garden that was growing inside him.

He realized distantly that he was crying, hot, silent tears tracking paths through the grime on his face. But the tears felt disconnected, like they were happening to someone else. He was just a passenger in his own body, a horrified witness to its destruction.

He collapsed onto his side, the spasms finally subsiding, leaving him weak and trembling. He lay there in the dark, surrounded by the evidence of his own slow, blooming death, and the thought landed in his mind with the heavy, undeniable weight of a tombstone.

This is it.

The end.

He had ignored it for too long. He had let it get too far. He had pretended it wasn’t real, and now it was too late. Sharpness’s final act of betrayal hadn’t started this, but it had finished it. It had been the last, brutal shock to a system that was already failing. It might’ve just killed him.

Why? Jude thought, half mad with oxygen deprivation. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why had Sharpness destroyed their base? Why had he crushed the last, smoldering embers of Jude’s hope? Of his love?

He could hear the muffled sounds of the battle above him, the faint thud of pickaxes on stone. They were looking for him. They were getting closer. He closed his eyes, a strange sense of calm settling over him. He was too tired to run anymore. Too tired to fight.

Jude tried to be quiet. He knew they were searching for him, knew the entire anarchy team was above him, breaking blocks, getting closer. He pressed a hand to his mouth, trying to stifle the sound, to breathe through the suffocating pressure.

But he couldn’t stop it.

The coughing started again, low and deep, then quickly escalated into something loud, harsh, and completely out of his control. It was a wet, ragged sound, the sound of something being torn apart from the inside. More petals spilled out, piling up around him, thorns catching, tearing, making it impossible to draw a clean breath. The air in his small, dark hole was thick with the scent of roses and blood.

He dropped to his knees, his body giving out from under him. He was barely conscious, his vision tunneling, the sounds from above growing faint and distorted. He was dying. The realization was no longer something he could push away or deny. It was here, a solid, undeniable presence in the room with him. 

And worse — Jude knew this wasn’t a death he could recover from. There was no respawn from this. No reset. No coming back. This was the end.

The sound above him got closer, sharper. The block directly above his head broke open, and a rectangle of painfully bright light spilled into his little tomb. Jude forced his head up, his neck straining, just enough to look. He was so weak that just lifting his gaze and forcing his eyes open was enough to drain all the remaining strength from his body.

God damn it all.

Sharpness was there, staring down at him, his pickaxe hanging loosely in his hand. His face was a mask of confusion at first, then it shifted into something else. Something horrified. His eyes widened, taking in the scene—the petals, the blood, the sheer amount of it. He saw Jude, pale and trembling, drowning in a sea of red flowers.

“Jude–” he said, his voice a choked, horrified whisper.

But Jude could barely hear it. The world was fading, the sound of Sharpness’s voice distant and warped, like he was hearing it from underwater. There were petals everywhere. Covering the ground. Filling his lungs. He was drowning in them.

For a moment, their eyes locked, and there was something there in Sharpness’s gaze that Jude had wanted, once. A flicker of understanding, of regret, of something that looked horrifyingly like love.

But it didn’t matter anymore. It couldn’t.

He’s beautiful, so perfectly beautiful. Even now. Even like this. The thought was a final, quiet spark in the encroaching darkness. Sharpness was a glorious, tragic statue carved from horror and understanding and regret. It was the face of his ruin, and yet it was the only thing Jude had ever truly wanted to see.

Jude closed his eyes. The world around faded out around the edges, the scent of roses and the memory of a beautiful, devastating boy his final, lingering sensations. 

When he finally faded away, the darkness that welcomed Jude wasn’t empty. It was full of flowers.