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Avery opens his inventory, and he falls. He falls and falls and falls down into the oppressive nothing, frantically searching his pockets for ender pearls, elytra, something that’ll get him back up to that platform—something that he knows isn’t there. He screams obscenities and pleading fragments as he watches his one chance to save his savior—his—his d3rlord3—shrink from a circle to a pinprick in the sky.
Then suddenly, there is nothing. Familiar vertigo, the swooping in his stomach that always accompanies a respawn, then his feet are on grass again. He can’t help it. His legs buckle under him, collapsing into the grass. He rips out handfuls at a time, screaming and sobbing into the dirt.
The tears blur his vision. Instinctually, he takes out the book in his inventory. Trying to cling to something, anything of d3rlord3 that still exists. He pulls it out of his inventory. Looks at the way the words repeat themselves on the pages.
He sounded so scared. Avery sobs, getting tearstains all over the pages. He must have been so scared.
He sinks into his normal routine with a dull numbness. He walks into his house, settling on the bed and holding his head in his hands. It presses the cool leather of the book to his cheek. He refuses to let it go, even for a second. Clutching it to his chest like a lifeline as he tries to think of what he should do next.
Live. He owes it to d3rlord3. But how is he supposed to live, knowing what it cost to get him back here? He should leave this world—delete it. He should go back home and celebrate new years with his family and friends. But, but, but…
It takes him an hour or two to realize that something is wrong.
He’s staring, vacant, at the book in his hands, trying to process everything that he’s seen in the past fifteen hours. He has the desperate thought that he’s glad he still has the book, after everything. At least one thing to remember d3rlord3 by.
Then it dawns on him. He shouldn’t have the book. He died. He respawned. Avery searches himself. Not a single item out of place. None of the blocks that he used on his journey. All the pieces he collected along his way. His inventory should’ve been lost to the void, but it’s still here.
He looks up. He’s back at the world’s spawn. About a day’s travel by boat from the cave that started this whole mess. He makes the journey in about half that time, stumbling down the stairs. Shaky with fear and adrenaline and a horrifying kind of hope, he opens the chest at the bottom.
Inside, there’s an identical copy of the book in his inventory. Avery can’t help it, he starts laughing. At first, loud and joyous. A second chance! He can go back—he can save him. He can save his dr3dlord3. But then the fear sets in. He has to do that, to go through all of that over again. Knowing what it leads to. Knowing how it ends.
All this terrible knowing. Avery misses when he could confidently say he didn’t know anything at all.
He hardly thinks to flip the gamemode to creative before he’s running through the cave at breakneck speed. Flying, tunneling through every obstacle in his path. Going left, left, left, even as he hears dr3dlord3’s voice in his head berating him.
He expects it, this time. Running back through the yellow doors to see that long hallway—to feel his gamemode switch against his control. He tests it, just like he did the first time around. No admin access. Great.
Avery shrugs his shoulders like he does before a game of skywars, heading through the first door. He just needs to find d3rlord3 again. He won’t fall for his tricks this time. He’ll save him—or he’ll stay with him. Whatever it takes.
He won’t let him die alone. Not again.
***********************
He finds him in the library, just like last time. Unlike last time, d3rlord3 is browsing through a book when he stumbles through the main doors.
Avery can see the way his whole body tenses up. “Avery,” he says, like they’re old friends.
Avery rushes forward, grabbing onto the sides of d3rlord3’s armored shoulders. He resists the urge to pull him into a hug, if only because this is technically the first time they’ve met. And the other man looks like he’s about to try to run him through with a sword. “d3rlord3,” Avery manages. “I’m so glad I found you again. We need to get out of here—”
“Again?” d3rlord3 questions. Suspicion radiates from him, thick and painful in light of everything they’ve been through—will go through—would have gone through together. Fuck, Avery’s head hurts when he tries to think about it all.
“I’m from the future,” Avery says, because frankly he doesn’t think he’s smart enough to put all of it together on his own. But d3rlord3 is. If there’s anything he’s learned about the man that makes sense, it’s that.
This seems to baffle d3rlord3 so much that he loses most of the tension in his shoulders. It’s clearly not the response he expected. “What?” he barks out. Low and commanding. Pained, just slightly. Like he’s trying to search all of that infinite knowledge the King lodged in his head for an explanation.
“I have no idea. I woke up with my inventory from after—when you—” With a sudden twist of anger, Avery shoves d3rlord3 hard in the meat of his shoulder. The man stumbles back a few steps, so dangerously close to the edge of the platform they’re on that Avery has to resist the urge to tug him back to safety. “You pushed me off!” Avery berates, even though he knows d3rlord3 must have no idea what he’s talking about.
“I…” d3rlord3 trails off. He winces and brings a hand up to his helmet. “In the—you—the ritual?”
Embarrassed, Avery feels heat start to build in his eyes. “You fucking—you idiot! You self-sacrificing idiot! How could you?”
There’s a levity that’s completely new to him when d3rlord3 replies to Avery’s nonsensical rant with a simple, “Avery, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The weight of the sentence crashes over Avery, and the heat in his eyes gets worse. He’s not sure if he wants to push d3rlord3 over the railing or beat him up like an opponent in skywars or beg him for forgiveness or bury his face in his shoulder and refuse to let go. Surely the King can’t get them if they stay here forever, right? They could just stop moving forward anywhere. They could stay here. Where he never has to fall again and d3rlord3 will be safe.
Avery shakes his head. The man probably deserves an explanation. “So…uh—” he starts, giving the world’s worst summary of what he remembers from the first time around. d3rlord3 interjects every few seconds with a gruff, ‘that doesn’t make sense,’ or other similar sentiment. At the end, he stands with his arms crossed, looking at Avery like a three step cypher that he needs fifteen more minutes to solve. Avery can’t tell if the explanation he gave was bad, or if what happened was so ridiculous and unexplainable that there’s no way to make the other man understand without reliving it again.
“And then you pushed me off the ledge,” he finishes. He shoves at d3rlord3 again for good measure. The man takes the hit with a surprising fluidity.
He can almost sense him frowning under the mask. “Well, that does seem like something I would do,” he says eventually.
There’s a long pause. Antsy, Avery frowns at him. “Derek, what do we do now?”
d3rlord3 flinches just slightly at the use of his real name. He looks into the distance for a second, then lets out a long breath. “We do it again.”
Avery’s mouth drops open. “What? You can’t be serious, man. You die. Don’t you get that? If we go in there, you die.”
The sadness in d3rlord3’s gaze when he looks back at Avery manages to penetrate through the mask on his face. It seeps into every fiber of Avery’s being, preparing him for the wave of fear and horror that rushes through him when he replies, “I know. There’s no other way.”
Immediately, Avery denies it. “No. No way. I’m not letting you—”
“Avery,” d3rlord3 interrupts. “I’m already dying.”
“You’re fine,” Avery insists. “You’ll be fine.” It comes out like a beg.
“I won’t.” The way d3rlord3 says it leaves no room for argument. It’s soft, and sad, and twinged with so much barely restrained fear that Avery tightens his hold on the other man’s shoulder.
“It’s not fair,” Avery responds, barely more than a whisper.
d3rlord3 nods. “It’s not.”
“I’m staying with you,” Avery grits out. Angry at the King and the world for placing the two of them on this stupid server.
There’s a long pause. “Okay,” d3rlord3 accepts.
***********************
He pushes Avery off the edge again. This time, it’s before they can even have their conversation. He acts while Avery’s back is turned, staring at the eyes around him as he feels something terrible try to prod at his mind.
He falls and he falls and he falls. There’s a swooping in his stomach and he’s back again. Collapsing into the grass and sobbing up bile and slime. He’s a gross, sticky mess as he takes the boat back to the cave. Back to d3rlord3.
He’s going to get it right this time, he promises to himself. He’s going to get it right.
***********************
He doesn’t.
And he doesn’t the next time either.
He comes to expect it, the pain and betrayal. The guilt and aching grief when he wakes up again, falling to his knees in the grass. Every time, d3rlord3 gets the better of him. Derek gets the better of him. Two, three, five, ten, it doesn’t matter. He’s just smarter than Avery.
In desperation, Avery tries to push him off first once. He’s stronger. It’s so deeply engrained in him from his skyward training that he finds it almost comically easy to knock d3rlord3 off the platform.
It still doesn’t work. He jumps off the ledge to follow d3rlord3 home and wakes up kneeling in the grass with the horrible realization that maybe this is the King’s doing. That he’s spending time that doesn’t really exist replaying the same tragic story over and over and over again until he finally gives in.
And it must be him. Everything in this place is a part of him, in some way. But he hasn’t won yet. Avery knows that in the way that the prodding grows more violent with each iteration. With how each time he wakes up, it feels like he knows things in a way that he shouldn’t.
Nothing painful. Not yet. But he’s pretty sure he didn’t study well enough in high school biology to remember half the things he does about the function of glycoproteins in creating signal chains on the lipid bilayer. No one who slept through as many history classes as he did should know the entire life story of an obscure 18th century poet.
The information is overwhelming. It comes to him when he calls on it. His microscopic slice of an infinity of knowledge that does nothing to help him figure out how to get out of this mess. It’s just trivia. And he’s never been the type to think through his problems with logical principles and facts.
That’s d3rlord3’s job. If he would stop fucking sacrificing himself every single time, maybe they could find a way out of here.
It’s after a particularly brutal run that Avery finally snaps. When he tracks d3rlord3 down—halfway through the library this time, he stopped to trash half of his house in a fit of anger on the way there—he only pauses for a second before launching himself at the other man.
He has him pinned to the floor in an undignified position, helmet clanking against the ground and tilting up at an awkward angle. “You IDIOT,” Avery shouts into d3rlord3’s face as the other man tries to push him off. It’s ineffective. As he learned from several routes of throwing them both over the edge, Avery is much, much stronger.
“A—Avery?” d3rlord3 asks. It’s that strange tone again. The King had been sending fake versions of him. Avery heard that in a loop or had the knowledge bestowed upon him in the eyeball room or something—he doesn’t know when. It’s all a blur. Time has begun to lose meaning. Everything is anywhere and all at once and before and now and thirty years in the future, sitting in a rocking chair and looking at the ocean.
He holds onto that memory? Knowledge? Idea? As hard as he can. He will make it out of this. They will make it out of this. He’ll do whatever it takes to get there.
“You shut the FUCKING DOOR on me!” Avery pounds his fists into d3rlord3’s armor. It only succeeds in shaking him up a bit, held at an awkward angle on the ground.
The two of them freeze as d3rlord3’s helmet peels off, making a high pitched clink along the tile flooring.
Avery snaps his head back to look at d3rlord3’s face. He has sweat-soaked black hair, long enough to reach his shoulders. It looks matted and tangled—probably from spending an unknowable amount of time crawling through the…whatever this is that they’ve trapped themselves in.
Nine days, Avery’s mind supplies. Somehow, he knows it’s the truth. It makes no sense. The world has been abandoned for far longer than a week and a half—and he himself has only been inside it for about fifteen hours, give or take a few hundred depending on how you count it.
Before he can stop himself, he’s running his fingers through it. Derek freezes under his touch, expression panicked in a way that makes something inside of Avery purr in delight. It’s so open in a way he’s never seen before. And yet. He can read every twitch of his eyes—every micro expression and subtle change in posture as if they’ve known each other for years.
Avery mutters scathing insults under his breath as he untangles a knot with his fingers. It feels soft and wet in his hands when he’s done, like something freshly washed and conditioned. It should confuse him, the way that d3rlord3 lets him remained splayed out on top of him like this. How he practically vibrates under the touch, like he’s only barely resisting the urge to lean into it.
It doesn’t. Avery knows him too well for that.
“Your hair hasn’t been this knotted since you went skiing in the eighth grade,” Avery says, eyes glazed over with a memory that shouldn’t be his. “Your mother told you to pin it up, but you thought it looked stupid. She was right. It got soo messed up, dude,”
If he paid more attention, he would’ve noticed how d3rlord3’s chest flutters against his. “Avery,” he manages. His voice sounds strained and raw without the reverberation of the helmet to filter it. “How do you know that?”
Avery looks back to Derek’s face, tilting his head just slightly to the side. His eyes remain locked on d3rlord3’s. They’re so blue. With little rings of yellow around the irises. But so, so much more blue than yellow. He’ll do anything to keep it that way.
“I don’t know,” Avery replies. It sounds cold and vacant, even to his own ears. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care. Not when every time he’s back on that stupid patch of grass it just means that there’s one more memory in his head of Derek dying. Of falling, falling, falling deep into the darkness below him and knowing that he’s failed again.
And again and again and again and again.
Derek’s eyes widen for just a second, and he moves a hand up to Avery’s shoulder to squeeze him tight, as if it will shield him from the information rattling uncontrollably inside his head. “You’re in a time loop,” he grits out.
Avery says, “Yeah, duh.”
d3rlord3 glares at him in response. He probably deserves that. “You’re in a time loop. And you’re—you’ve seen him,” Derek amends, such raw horror and sadness in his voice that Avery’s hand in his hair stills.
He shakes his head. “I think I’d be in, like, more pain. It’s a fraction of a fraction. Little pieces that manage to sneak through every time before you push me off the ledge.”
Derek gasps, wincing hard. The motion tucks his face into the palm of Avery’s hand and the purring thing inside of him grows louder. He leans his weight further into d3rlord3 space unconsciously, bringing his other hand up to grab d3rlord3’s wrist where it lays limply at his side. “The ledge. In the room with the eyes,” d3rlord3 says.
Avery goes rigid with shock. “You remember?” He can’t keep the offense out of his voice. “Are you kidding—this whole time, you’ve remembered?”
Derek shakes his head, opening his blue, blue, blue eyes again. “This is the first time. I think.”
And then he sits up so fast that Avery has to nearly fall backwards just to stop their noses from bumping. It leaves them practically in each other’s laps. Avery braces his hands on Derek’s shoulders, desperate for any kind of physical confirmation that the man in front of him is still there and breathing—all too familiar with how easily that stops.
Voice gruff with pain and disuse, d3rlord3 says, “We need to find a way out of here.”
Anger rushing back, Avery shakes him gently back and forth. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do this entire time?”
“I—” d3rlord3 winces, “I haven’t.”
It’s an admission that rings through the silent library like a gong in the air. Avery clenches his hands around the other man’s shoulders until he’s sure it probably hurts a little, barely resisting the urge to tackle him again and wail against his chest plate. “What,” he asks, tone icy.
“I know myself. I haven’t been trying. I only care about saving you. I’m—” gone, dead, in too deep, Avery hears following that sentence. Echoes of tens of different versions of him making excuses for why Avery should save himself and abandon his—his d3rlord3 in this hellscape.
“But you’re never going to leave me here,” d3rlord3 finishes. It hangs like a weight in the air.
“Damn right I’m not,” Avery grumbles, giving d3rlord3 a friendly shove in the shoulder for emphasis.
“You should,” d3rlord3 tries. At a glare from Avery, he continues, “I’m already—”
“I swear to whatever god you believe in—to the King himself—that if you say ‘I’m already dead’ to me one more fucking time, I will be the one to kill you this time.”
With something resembling a laugh, Derek says, “It would be better than the alternative.”
Avery blames the emotional rollercoaster of the past day—week? Year?—on the speed with which tears flood his eyes. “Shut up,” he begins to repeat over and over again, hardly coherent enough to be audible. He practically throws himself at d3rlord3, shoving and shaking him and sobbing into his shoulder like he’s his only lifeline. And he is. He always has been.
Arms wrap around him, so much and not enough all at once. Squeezing him back with a tenacity that surprises him. Derek shakes against him, just as close to falling apart as Avery feels.
The two of them sit there, wrapped up in each other, until the darkness comes to take him away.
***********************
This time, they fall together. Not one after the other. Not Avery—alone, alone, alone. Both of them at the same time. Together.
When he respawns, he lands on his feet for the first time since the loops began. Without a moment to feel sorry for himself or quantify how much more information he’s gained this time, he takes off running.
There’s no stopping to grab food—to grab a map or blocks. No trashing his house or sobbing into his bed covers until he pulls himself together enough to sail across the ocean.
No, this time he swims.
It’s a risky move. Not many people could make it as far as he needs to, to reach d3rlord3 in time. But Avery knows that there’s a pack of dolphins hiding out in the cove where he built his house in the same way that he knows that Derek’s favorite holiday is Halloween because he loves to walk his little niece around trick-or-treating. And the dolphins are more than happy to boost his speed when he empties his entire food supply into the water as an offering.
He thought he was insane, before. Making the journey in half a day. This time, it only takes him two hours.
His lungs burn with saltwater when he heaves himself up onto dry land, choking up mouthfuls that he gasped down in desperation to move faster, dammit. Arms and legs only a step away from melting down into the sticky goop his people are famous for, he stumbles through the trees and practically falls down the stairs.
He doesn’t bother setting his gamemode to creative, this time. He’ll be faster without it.
The cold tile is slippery under his feet as he crashes through the tunnels. His lungs burn with lasting saltwater and sobs and aching breaths. He nearly breaks his neck trying to dive faster into the water below him. Has to gag up more water after he nearly drowns trying to hold his breath through the underground tunnels.
When he sees the entrance to the yellow doors in the distance, he shouts Derek’s name at the top of his lungs. The man in question pauses, right in front of the set of doors. He turns around, helmet gleaming aggressively in the dark lighting.
And then, all at once, his demeanor shifts into a startled calm. “Avery?” he questions, and for a second, Avery thinks that he’s too late again. That he’ll have to fall, fall, fall again. Maybe forever. Until every last drop of the knowledge in the King’s essence has been infused into him. But then: “Why do I know your name?”
It’s muttered to himself, so low that Avery shouldn’t be able to hear it. And yet, he does. Only when he tries to figure it out, but still. “Derek,” Avery says, relief so evident in his voice as he steps forward that it causes Derek to do that cute head tilt that he does when he’s trying to figure out a puzzle.
Avery loves that look. He wants to see that look so much. Every day. He wants the evidence that there’s so many things about this world that Derek doesn’t know, still.
“I made it in time,” Avery mutters to himself.
Then, with the vigor of a man possessed, he bodily grabs d3rlord3 and hauls him away from the yellow doors. The man puts up a fight, but by now Avery can tell when he’s only doing it for show. His helmet clinks to the ground in the process and Avery laughs. He really has to get him a chin strap at some point. “I saved you,” he smiles down at d3rlord3, voice terribly soft.
And then, eyes wide with fear and confusion and a whole lot of something else, Derek grabs his face in both hands and crashes their lips together.
Avery nearly drops him in shock, hands curling around to cup his jaw and deepen the kiss. He presses d3rlord3 against the cave wall, hooking the other man’s legs around his torso. Groaning into d3rlord3’s mouth, he lets his other hand rub circles into the soft fabric between his chest plate and waistband. Carding through the thick locks of black hair—shorter than before, just slightly—and marvels in the way that it’s clean and untangled. Just barely greasy, from being held in that helmet of his all day.
They’ll untangle eventually and he’ll bring Derek home and they’ll get distracted on the couch and then he’ll usher him up to his bedroom and bathe him and in twenty years, they’ll get married in the mountains where Derek used to go skiing as a child and—
Avery shuts off the part of his brain that knows, letting himself feel instead—heart soaring at the fact that he can still do that. He’s not too far gone. Neither of them are. They won, they won, they won. “We won,” Avery murmurs against Derek’s lips, smiling wide.
The other man looks up at him with blissfully blue eyes. Entirely blue. They’re clouded with confusion, but not pain. Not anymore. “I don’t understand,” he grits out.
Avery chuckles against them, the noise rattling in both of their chests from how tightly they’re pressed against each other. “I’ll tell you later. It’s amazing—” he kisses Derek’s forehead, “—It’s fantastic—” he kisses Derek’s cheeks and the corner of his mouth and the underside of his jaw for good measure, “—It’s literally the best thing, like, ever. That you don’t know.”
Derek looks like he’s about to disagree with that, so Avery shuts him up with another kiss. He melts into it after a second. There’s a desperate kind of ferocity in the way that he pulls Avery closer that tells him that neither of them are unaffected. But. They are alive.
Happy and together and alive. And with Derek’s fingers running trails along his spine and the pulse point on his neck under his mouth, Avery couldn’t care less to figure the rest of it out.