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Jamato has never really had a home.
Before the Mafia, the rise of the PrinceZam Empire, and Spoke, home was a cave filled with broken zeros and ones and cracks within the very seams of the world. Home suggests a place of safety and comfort, something to look forward to, someplace you know you’ll be safe. Jamato doesn’t feel safe within his home, knowing the things he knows, after the things he’s done. And comfort was the first thing he sacrificed when he decided to be the server’s guardian to stop Spoke and use the exploits for good.
For the longest time, Jamato thought the void and the quiet hum of the world would be his one and only company until a man with pale sandy locks, eyes the hue of Jamato’s favorite gemstone, and a lax, but playful manner came into his life forcefully. And it’s funny because, it’s not like Mane made himself known in Jamato’s life in the way he’s always known companionship to be. It wasn’t a draw of fate or something gentle and quiet.
Mane was like the sun: bright and unable to be ignored, and Jamato, despite everything, was drawn to it. The longer they had stayed friends, the larger the jar of sunlight that Jamato stole specifically from Mane became. It was a single player mini game of his to make Mane smile and laugh because he wanted to see it for himself: the joy of living that comes from a world intact. Without having to worry about the floor breaking underneath your feet, without having to wonder whether the void will swallow the pixels in your bones and the people you love.
Mane’s happiness, Mane’s ability to be was proof that Jamato’s efforts are succeeding. That stopping Spoke in exploiting the world further, that using the exploits for good is as true as it sounds.
But despite his happiness, Mane has always desired something to tether his freedom to. Jamato sees it in his eyes when they linger on the passing civilizations and villages they discover throughout their wandering. Jamato says nothing when Mane pretends to have a home, a place to return to when he boxes them away in a small three by three house with a single window and its door. Jamato has long gotten used to Mane pushing their beds together—a clean white dye for Jamato’s sheets whilst Mane’s remains bright orange.
He justifies it by saying it gets cold at night, but Mane’s got more than enough body heat to compensate and his sheets aren’t the cheap thin ones that crafting a new bed is often known for. Jamato knows because Mane’s picky. He likes to sleep comfortably whenever he can. In the morning, Jamato always finds Mane’s arm wrapped around him, hugging him like some kind of oversized teddy bear.
It’s warm. It’s solid. It’s domestic in the ways people like Jamato and Mane were never allowed and it’s a sliver of what Mane has always desired: a home. Someplace where he knows he’ll wake up without a sword pointed to his throat, a base that isn’t filled with enemies but just himself and, maybe, hopefully, Jamato.
So when Mane had Squiddo build his base for him thousands and thousands of blocks away and tucked in thick forest with a large, ancient tree carved hollow and covered in architecture that followed the paths of the branches, Jamato wasn’t surprised. He wouldn’t glance twice when he saw Mane lazing around in the sun while he laid in the canopies and he didn’t ask any questions when Mane stopped wearing his armor, little by little.
“Jamato,” Mane starts, never having actually asked this but expressed this through his actions, “Would you like to live with me?”
And Jamato says no. He says no in the subtle ways: by untangling himself from Mane’s arms during warm mornings, by going out to the markets thousands of blocks away without Mane by his side, by leaving without saying anything—probably for weeks—before returning.
Jamato has never used the chests in Mane’s base for his stuff, even though his ender chest is packed to the brim and his body aches from sleeping with a full inventory every night. He has never asked Mane for anything, never tried to comment on his decoration or add any interior himself.
Jamato was a ghost that had free passage to Mane’s only space of vulnerability and Mane knew. Mane knew that Jamato wasn’t intending to stay, so he kept to his corner, stopped asking questions when Jamato would show up on long periods of weeks without his presence, he stopped trying to convince Jamato to stay, to linger, to live.
Sometimes his heart, or at least, the thing within Jamato’s chest would twist. He looks at Mane with the ease in his eyes, the clothes drying on the hanger, the armor sitting on stands, the pots of strength potions untouched in their shulker boxes along the wall and Jamato’s breath would hitch, the world would hum, and he would take a step forward and indulge in shared dinners, sunrises with warmth that came from more than the wakening sky, and long, quiet afternoons of cat naps and reading and idle things that Mane has so delicately cherished.
And then Jamato steps back when Mane looks at him a little too long, when he’s measuring twice as many ingredients to make breakfast, and creating lists of things Jamato has quietly alluded to needing because he can’t weave himself into the tapestry of the world. He can’t let himself rest when Spoke is still out there with the things he knows, with the selfishness that he harbors.
Jamato runs away because he needs to. He has to. It’s better this way.
And when he returns to that treehouse, Mane’s home, the time accumulated is the equivalent of months.
A faction called the Invisible Mafia has burned the beautiful limb of bark and arms twining and twisting disastrously elegantly into black ash and death. The leaves crumble with the wind instead of dancing with it, the wood of the extensions that Squiddo had built creak with uncertainty.
Jamato is not an emotional person. He shouldn’t actually. He doesn’t know what he is and therefore he probably shouldn’t be able to feel anything. The void, he knows, is probably where he originated from. But the void is quiet, unfeeling. So he should be too.
He hears a shuffle of movement and particles of invisibility are faintly emanating off of floating netherite armor.
Jamato feels basic things. That he knows of, but nothing too complicated. Nothing beyond that foundation.
His eyes lock onto where that invisible player’s eyes would’ve been and his hands find the hilt of a sword.
JamatoP, the unattached guardian of the UnstableSMP, does not collect a jar of sunshine to keep his insides from existing in the dark. He does not linger in places or ask for more than what he has. Only people—players—do that. Only selfish, thoughtless, but alive players do that—
The world shatters into pixels. Jamato sees each and every one of them: the codes, the invisible atoms of the world, and when he breaks through his player’s armor, he attacks the word “heart” and watches his sword sink impossibly through the armor, straight into flesh, piercing through this player’s heart, and producing a sickening wet sound.
Manepear. He was bright, loud, and demanding. He was imperfect. That’s what drew Jamato in. He asked everything from the world unapologetically, and Jamato usually hates that kind of selfishness but when he did get what he wanted he shined even brighter. He smiled at Jamato one time, when he won some trivial, useless duel and banned a player for it. Jamato couldn’t help but smile back. He shouldn’t have, but he did.
Jamato hears a totem pop, the invisibility melts away like rotting skin and that’s how he knows just how much blood a chest from a living player can make. It’s all over the floor, his sword, the body, still impaled with a sword that simply won’t let him go.
“What did you do?” Jamato asks, his voice eerily calm despite the trembling in his hand, the shivering numbers and zeros and ones that look back at Jamato like they’re afraid of him. “Where is Manepear?”
He gets a death rattle in response. Jamato doesn’t register it at first but he sees the player’s body breaking away, disappearing until the particles leave nothing but empty space, a void of a solid presence, of an existence that once filled the line of codes and commands.
Oh. Jamato realizes. He set a stasis somewhere.
In the void.
Jamato knows because when the void feasts on players, their body simply bursts into red smoke. There’s nothing left of them when it finally finishes the last of their hearts. Jamato kind of remembers how it felt to break away from the void, to splice himself apart from the larger mass and become a sentiment being of his own. They like to call him a voidling, and voidlings can kind of feel, can definitely touch.
It probably feels like drowning instead of being quietly swallowed when falling into the void. There is more than enough air to breath, no water to drink or food to eat, but that doesn’t matter if the codes in your body simply cease to exist.
It’s too simple for Jamato.
He breaks the chain of the codes from the stasis. A loud sound emerges from the player’s mouth and he’s looking at Jamato a strange way. Like he’s scared.
He’s the guardian of the server. It sounds impressive but it’s ultimately unremarkable. The player doesn’t need to look at him like that.
Jamato peers into this player’s code.
“Eye, left. Eye, right.”
He erases them, smudges it away like a stain on a shirt.
Another loud sound. A scream, maybe? Why would this thing be screaming though? Jamato is not selfish. He does no harm. The only person who needs to be stopped is Spoke and if other people are in the way then maybe Jamato might do something about it but he never kills. He’s not even good at PvP. He’s only good at—
Caution! Erasure of [Insert Player’s User] is a permanent action and cannot be reverted. Continue anyways?
The scream stops. The room grows quiet. The scent of something distinct teases Jamato’s nose but he wipes his mouth from his saliva instead because when the void feasts it’s like swallowing something whole.
Like a snake would a helpless rat.
Jamato looks around, his eyes drifting over the dozens of dismembered bodies and wondering if he’d accidently killed Mane. There’s no way, right? It’s gotten a little quieter but the sun is still shining outside.
“Manepear,” Jamato whispers, wondering if Mane’s sharp, brilliant ears can catch his plea. “Where did you go?”
Where is home when this imperfect, violent, and disruptive world has forced him to flee?