Work Text:
The crunch of dirt and mud echoed in his mouth. He chewed his way around the hardest pebbles.
“Skizz, how have you managed this? Why are you floating midair?” Mumbo stared at him, exasperated.
“Aw, don’t worry, Jumbolio! I’m perfectly fine up here. Got tons of dirt, just doing some easy training…”
“But we’re right here, Skizz! Can’t you do it over the wall?”
Grian leaned over, trying to poke Skizz from behind the sandstone. His chubby fingers couldn’t enter his vicinity, though, and he threw up his hands in a dramatic fashion. “I give up! Mumbo, you’re taller, you try!”
Mumbo gaped at the friend next to him. “No! What if I fall?”
Skizz rolled his eyes. “I said, don’t worry! Plus, I look cool hanging around like this! I could be a superhero!”
“You’re going to get in trouble with the Wardwatch again, you know.”
”They’ll have to catch me first! And anyways, don’t act like you guys are all high and mighty, too! Kids aren’t allowed on the walls, either.”
Grian blustered. “I’m not a kid! I— I’m a ward. That’s what we’re called, innit?”
Skizz snorted, making swimming motions while scooping out another handful of soil. “Then why do I get to hang out with all the big kids?”
”That’s because they’re afraid of you flying off. Like this.” Mumbo crossed his arms. “You think they’ll be happy, either? ‘Cause they won’t.”
“Oh, you…!” Skizz makes a lunge towards Mumbo, and, for a brief moment in time the levitation breaks as they play-wrestle on the ground. Yet a second later, Skizz’s feet sweep up from under him and he is pulled upside-down with a yelp, swinging helplessly. Grian cries out in a panic, both of them pulling him back down as the effects of the Blessing wear off. With an “oomph!”, they fall onto a heap on the sandstone. Skizz feels the sting of the stone against his knee, and groans.
“Dang it! I thought I had it. This stupid Blessing…”
Mumbo laughs, extricating himself from the mess. “Nobody else can fly here, Skizz. Or eat dirt, or pickaxes for that matter. There’s a reason you haven’t learnt it sooner.”
“Yeah, but still…” He brings himself into an upright sitting position, his eyes catching sight of the sun setting below the desert. The dunes in the distance wafted in the heat, looking especially fanciful with the cactus flowers. “Pretty,” Grian said— the understatement of the century.
Skizz sighed. He liked it here, their sandy fortress in the middle of nowhere. If he could stay here forever, content with his best buds spanning the desert… a thought nudged at his mind, a saying he’d picked up from their textbooks. “Hey guys, do you remember reading chapter fourteen? In our books?”
Next to him, Grian wrinkled his nose. “Bold of you to assume I can read,” he muttered.
“No, seriously. I thought it was really interesting, very psychological.” Skizz leans back onto his hands, reiterating the passage to his friends. “But— but the question I remember best, it was something like… ‘If a tree were to fall with no one around, would it even make a sound?’”
The two were silent. For a second, Skizz worried he had bored them. Then Mumbo spoke. “Isn’t that, like, a common saying? One of those hypotheticals, along with Schrödinger’s cat?”
Grian groaned. “What? Who is Schrödinger?!”
“Beats me!” Mumbo said with a laugh. “Must be some old philosopher.”
Skizz cracked a smile. “Seriously, though! If a tree fell, alone, did it ever make a sound?”
“Why don’t you ask Schrödinger?” Mumbo giggled. Grian erupted in laughs.
Skizz gave in, chuckling with them, and threw his arms around both of them. “I think— and hear me out! hear me out— that if a tree ever fell, it would make a sound. ‘Cause although nobody would be around to hear, someone would come. They’d see the little critters making their homes in the trunk of the tree, watch the fungi grow out of its branches. And they’d know, right? They’d know the tree had fallen.”
Grian snorted. “Well, obviously. If a tree fell, it fell.”
Skizz shouldered him playfully. “Not the point, Menores!”
Grian laughed, then paused. His face paled. “M-menores? Skizz, what did you just…”
The grip on Grian’s shoulders turned cold. Skizz turned to him now, eyes a sickly shade of purple. “You heard me, Menores Love. When a tree falls, somebody will know.”
Whatever wore Skizzleman’s face cackled, and Grian watched in horror as the sky turned red. “Someone will know, someone will know… but whether they remember, that’s up to them, isn’t it?”
—- - —-
Grian woke with a start in his apartment. The echoes of a scream ran through his veins. A dream. He’d had a dream. He soaked in the last dregs of nostalgia, before opening his eyes and scrambling to the notebook on his nightstand. Remember. That was what Skizz said— right? He scratched out the word, before writing his old friend’s name next to it.
What had happened? They were in the old Wardwatch hideout, Skizz and him and… who was it? Grian rubbed his eyes. Someone important, someone Grian shouldn’t forget.
Yet even as he strained to remember, eyes bolting around his room, he couldn’t. He simply couldn’t. He sobbed, kneading harder at his eyes like it would make the memories come back. The dream, the memories… they were leaving him. His ‘before’ was disappearing.
With a shriek, he threw his notebook across the room. Why was he like this? Why did he use his Blessing so wastefully, why did he have to forget every time he did so? Skizz and all his friends, the soft sunset childhood he had, Grian was the only one who still remembered but he. Couldn’t. Remember. He sunk to the floor, hands still on his eyelids.
Skizz’s words came back to him. “If a tree falls without anyone around, does it make a sound?”
But Grian had heard. He simply didn’t remember the fall.