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Tulips are flowers that blossom from April to May. It is not April or May. It is the peak of summer in the smack middle of July, and Derapchu wonders how the flowers are not dead yet.
Where they were supposed to be browning, dead, rotting— all of them look like they’re at full bloom, the peak of their beauty. Their color radiates in the hot summer sun, and they are decidedly not dead at all, waving around their magnificence in the wind.
It is his first time stepping in a world like this, stained so wholly by blood and operating on violence and vengeance. Does the blood shed by the dead, or the bloodthirsty, keep the flowers alive? Derapchu doubts it.
Derapchu lowers his head to gaze down the savanna hill, and pushes away thoughts of the end fight happening in a couple of days. Wemmbu’s sitting by the edge of their base, dipping his feet into the cold water. In his hands, and laid beside him in a colorful mosaic, are a handful of flowers. Derap watches as Wemmbu tucks one into the hair tie keeping his ponytail up. A beautiful allium. He keeps watching as another flower is added— this time a tulip, white and snapped off at the stem.
“New fashion statement, huh?” Derap hops down, feet landing in the sand. He ignores how some of it gets in his shoe. “Looks neat.”
Wemmbu turns and grins. “I bet it does.” He points down at the pile next to his leg. “Choose the next one.”
Derap’s eyes follow Wemmbu’s hand. “The blue one.”
”The cornflower?”
”The cornflower,” Derap repeats. He faintly remembers seeing one that had a much lighter shade of blue that only grew in the swamp, but the pile evidently doesn’t have it yet. The blue one— cornflower— will have to do for now.
Derap sits down right next to Wemmbu as Wemmbu tucks in the spiky blue petals next to the white and purple. The water pulsing gently at the sand lightly grazes the tip of his sneaker, and then washes away. Derapchu stares into the blues and into his own brown eyes in his own wobbly, warped reflection.
He wonders, faintly: what will become of him in a couple months? He’s heard the rumors— death, blood, death, more death, control, power. Derapchu isn’t cut out for that type of thing and he knows the rest of the server can already tell. He’s died due to stupid accidents, multiple times, to the point where he was on the verge of dying permanently. Is he an idiot already, before he could even prove himself? Is he an idiot or an unrealized bloodthirsty murderer?
Derap doesn’t know, and the more he thinks he can’t tell if he’s scared, or if he’s ready. Blood. Death. Exploits. War.
He looks into his own brown eyes, quivering in the water, and then sneaks a quick glance at Wemmbu, peacefully pursing his lips together like he hasn’t got a care in the world except for stuffing a bunch of beautiful very alive flowers in his hair.
Friendships.
“Yo, Derap.”
Derap snaps out of his thoughts with a faint jolt. Wemmbu’s turned and fully staring at him back.
“Yeah?” Derap says sheepishly.
Wemmbu has about six more flowers in his hair now. Derap looks in the pile, and there’s only one singular orange tulip left. Still. Serene.
“What flower do you think I am?”
Derapchu blinks. Does Wemmbu want the deep, emotional answer, or something else? He’s got bad news for him, because he has no idea what any flower meanings are, much less off the top of his head. God, he might just be the idiot.
In place of a real answer, Derapchu decides to shrug. “An allium. Because you’re purple.”
Wemmbu pulls a serious thinking face, almost as if he were seriously pondering it for a second, and then shrugs in tandem and laughs. “Should’ve seen that one coming. I dunno what else I was expecting. I was kinda hoping you’d be able to tell me, like, oh, Wemmbu, you’re an awesome— uh— sunflower because of some deep meaning thing.”
”Yeah, you’re in bad luck, man. I know a total of zero of those.”
”Me neither. That’s more of a Zam thing, to be honest.”
Derap nods in agreement and slight relief that Wemmbu doesn’t know it either. He looks down at the lonely flower sitting on the sand again. “You gonna use that?”
Wemmbu picks up the orange tulip. “Oh, this? Nah, I ran out of space. I’m probably just gonna keep it and save it for later if I wanna do this again.” Wemmbu scrunches up his face. “Or maybe not, ‘cause this took way too long.”
Derap rolls his eyes and grins. “Yeah, of course you’re lazy. But, hey, wha’dya think I am?”
”A cornflower.”
Derap raises his eyebrows. “Not the light blue ones? From the swamps?”
Wemmbu purses his lips. “Not gonna lie, I forgot what they look like. But it’s still blue, so you get to be a beautiful cornflower.” He reaches up, patting the base of his hair tie, and pulls out the cornflower. Wemmbu reaches forward, and tucks the cornflower roughly in Derap’s messy hair. He doesn’t replace the empty space with the tulip.
”There,” Wemmbu says triumphantly. “Now we’re matching. Aw, isn’t that cute?”
Derap reaches up and feels the spiky petals with his finger. Teammates, he thinks again. Maybe he can actually do this.
Wemmbu revises Derap’s answer without saying it out loud. Wemmbu is an orange tulip.
Derapchu does not know what to think of this, really. Derap is supposed to be the weak one, the one that tagged along some stronger veteran of violence, the one everyone would try to kill to get back at said veteran, but also the one that got protected. The one who had someone always there, ready to defend them if anyone attacked.
But now it is just the getting killed for vengeance part and not the protected part. Because Wemmbu is gone. Not dead, but gone. He is still alive— like that tulip he planted in that little crevice in the wall— but he is not dead. That’s what matters, Derap tells himself. He ignores the dread in his gut— that budding feeling of loss— and he keeps moving.
Derap, now, is the target.
He gets killed (by Mapic, mostly). He doesn’t kill. He holds on to the hearts, like a protector, just enough to keep Wemmbu’s total of eleven. When Wemmbu comes back, he hands them off valiantly. Wemmbu thanks him, and walks off into the distance, and together they never share a base again and never fight side-by-side again and they probably never will. And all through that Derap still never even had the sliver of a thought to keep the hearts to himself. Because that’s his teammate. Or used to be his teammate. Maybe?
And now he’s all alone.
He needs a team. That’s what he needs. He needs someone else to rely on, so that they could defend him, and maybe even he could defend them. The Sticklers. That’s who he needs. And for nothing else other than practicality.
He trudges on. He ignores the little jolt he gets whenever he comes across that shade of orange, and he ignores the mental image of Wemmbu’s little flower sitting so lonely on that little pile of dirt. No way it’s alive after getting zero nutrients in that dark decrepit cave. He ignores the familiar pang of jealousy as he spots Wemmbu destroying spawn with the Blindfold Bandits and not him. He keeps walking. He does not pry, and Wemmbu does not pry, and they leave each other alone. They will never be close again and they will never be teamed again and they will never get to sit by the beach and put flowers in their hair ever again.
Derap, as he rounds the hill at Spawn, ignores the explosion sounds in the distance and shakes his head. He needs the Sticklers for practicality. Nothing else.
(Faintly, as Derap falls asleep down in his dark base, he lets his mind wander. Wemmbu, to him, is not that tulip. Wemmbu is alive and well, and flowers are supposed to be dead.)
Wemmbu dies in November.
But actually this time. It is hard for Derapchu to wrap his head around. He feels his own breath rattle in his chest as he paces around his underground base, pauses, and then keeps pacing erratically.
Without warning. All without a single warning. And Wemmbu got Flame to do it, out of all people— his own teammate, and he heard down the grapevine that Flame brandished the bloodied axe at Spawn, and laughed, and said that he betrayed Wemmbu.
Betrayed Wemmbu.
Derapchu knows in his heart he is a jealous person, and this time is not any exception at all, in that matter. He is livid. He is livid at Flame, and Wemmbu, and every single other person involved in the war for Spawn.
“Fuck,” Derap says, and then says it again, and then again, and then again. He kicks a pebble rolling around on the floor as if it were a vent for his frustration. Maybe it is. He doesn’t care.
What he does care about are the things sitting in his enderchest. Enough materials to craft a recovery compass, something that he knows multiple people would kill for or give up a hefty chunk of their hearts for, all because the instant he heard the news he flew to the edges of the world and dug as hard as he could for them like a madman.
But he’s not giving them up. They’re for revive beacons, and they’re going to be for his revive beacons only. He’s going to use all of them— every single one— and even if Wemmbu impaled himself a million other times on Flame’s axe, or his own sword, or some other thing, Derap will bring him back a million times. Because Derap needs his teammate. Not the Sticklers. Wemmbu.
(Tulips are supposed to be dead in November, just like how they’re supposed to be dead in the hottest parts of July.
Derapchu looks around until he can find something. Someone. It’s at the forefront of his head, when he goes to meet up with Zam at her flower field covered in oxeye daisies. He asks her, “what’s the meaning behind orange tulips?”
At first, Zam looks a little shocked that he knows that she knows flower meanings, but she doesn’t let it show in what she says next. “It means enthusiasm,” she says. “Appreciation for another person.”
Derap sits in that little bench, right next to Zam, and has to prevent himself from making a face. Appreciation, he thinks tentatively. Wemmbu appreciates him. He went to go kill SB after SB killed Derap. Derapchu appreciates Wemmbu. That would fit, in a way.
”What about an allium?”
Zam frowns. Derap gets the feeling that they’re thinking of the same person, and distantly recalls her field getting griefed by some other of Wemmbu’s extra teammates. “Prosperity, unity, and good fortune.”
Then maybe Derapchu was wrong, then, and Wemmbu is right. Because Wemmbu does not prosper, and is not of good fortune, and is unable to share any unity with anyone, because he is dead.)
(“A cornflower?” Zam tilts her head slightly, thinking. The night sky twinkles delicately outside of their treehouse window. “It means hope. Devotion. Or, at least, that’s what I remember.”
Derapchu nods slowly. Outside their window are small little baskets, hanging from a high-up branch in their tree. One has an oxeye daisy, and the other a cornflower. He stands by the window and watches them sway.
“Yeah,” he hums. “That sounds right. Thanks.”
”Any reason you’re asking? Was it the basket?” Zam’s voice is faint, as if she were about to fall asleep.
He thinks of a pile of flowers, and he thinks of dead things, and he thinks of a friend that’ll never be right next to him, his number one, ever again.
Derap doesn’t want to bother Zam, so he saves the story for another time. “Just thinking of something from a while back. It’s nothing.”)
It is everything.
Derapchu, after everything, is a fool. He is a sentimental, too-loyal, stubborn fool. He is all too aware of it— he does not weep, but he mourns, and it feels like daggers being wrestled directly into the left side of his chest every time he moves. It feels like a hole in his very being. He doesn’t feel good.
The treehouse’s flowers still swing, even at the end. They are still as saccharine as they were the day they— he and Zam together— wove the baskets, planted the flowers, and climbed up there to hang them up. They look peaceful, untouched. Zam and Derapchu are not friends, not anymore, but their flowers still are.
This place is stagnant. The only reason why things change are because of the people, and the violence happens because every single one of them are human. Flawed human beings, but still human. Derap learns that he is just as capable of violence as everyone else. He does not do it out of boredom or carelessness like Wemmbu, but he does it out of necessity, the sheer ferocity in him to keep someone close, bound together at his side. He is not a cold, emotionless murderer— just a too-loyal stubborn idiot murderer. Does that make him better? Derap doesn’t care.
Derap wrestles Wemmbu back from the dead, but Wemmbu lies. He betrays, because he cares about Flame more, and he breaks friendships, rips away lives, kills, wreaks destruction. And at the end of it Wemmbu leaves without saying goodbye again. Wemmbu is careless like that and Derap knew this from the beginning. He signed himself up for this. Derapchu is so, so, so stupid for caring. He cannot believe he cared at all, that he was so prone to trust. He really was the weak one after all, then, huh?
Maybe, just maybe, Wemmbu is a tulip. Tulips die in May; Wemmbu dies again in May. Wemmbu is the non-artificial tulip, the flawed one, the one that can curl up and rot and die like something real and not something from a fucked-up world. The one that flaunts itself first, and then reveals all the things it kept from you later.
The flower representing their friendship was only an afterthought after all of it. Wemmbu only kept it because it was the last one in that damn flower pile— perfectly just like how he would instantly give up Derap’s trust if it meant giving Flame an extra heart or two. It’s accurate in a cruel way that makes Derap feel sick.
But Derap stares into the very last revival beacon in his hands, in a cleared-out meadow surrounded by pine trees and covered by his and Zam’s builds, and he knows that he was wrong about Wemmbu and Wemmbu was right about him. Wemmbu knew he was weak. Derapchu didn’t know he couldn’t trust him, blinded by his loyalty. His sentimentality.
Derap is the cornflower. Wemmbu is the tulip. Together, they both rot.