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The first thing Mapicc sees on the other side of the portal is the void.
“Oh my god–” he shrinks back, turns around, but there’s only endless empty red on the other side of him too. He spins slowly, void stretching around him, his only purchase the portal frame and one block already occupied by a crazed JamatoP.
“Shoot,” he mutters under his breath. Wow. This sucks.
Spoke is there on a ledge before him, swaths of Null all surrounding the center farther above. Mapicc doesn’t know what’s going on, not really, just wants to be on solid ground again.
Jamato says Spoke still cares. Mapicc thinks, ‘Does he?’ He finds Spoke’s eyes, wide and terrified, and the two only stare at each other wordlessly.
He remembers the panic in the arena when Spoke realized Mapicc was really going to fight him. He remembers the relief as he’d scanned the book, looking up from it not to watch Jamato but to find Mapicc, his expression so full of hope it almost hurt to look at. Was that just for his own life, or was it for their friendship?
He remembers arguing the last time they’d talked. He then remembers spotting Spoke from a distance, seeing him turn instinctively toward an empty space at his side before startling at the absence. He remembers how his tail had drooped and wrapped around one leg, like he was feeling small. That can’t have been an act.
Spoke does care, Mapicc decides.
It makes him feel all the more stupid when he sees a wind charge hurtling toward him.
Mapicc gasps, stumbles, somehow finds a grip on the jagged obsidian, then is torn from it as another punch of air collides with his stomach.
He plummets. And he hates himself for how his eyes still search out Spoke, watching his figure shrink as he falls away forever.
So. This is how he dies, huh?
There’s no escape from this.
He swallows. He’s so terrified, but there’s nothing he can do other than sit with it, sit with the fear flooding his body as he drops.
Maybe he forgives Spoke anyway, in his final moments. That’s for him alone to know.
Huh. Mapicc’s been falling for a while.
The void… it starts to feel warm. Even in the nether the void is chilled and freezing, but now as it brushes past it feels heated, almost pleasant.
Mapicc slows. He slows in the air like he’s been caught in a spiderweb, gradual enough that it doesn’t hurt. The void… cradles him, surrounds and suspends him in the air, and it feels almost like a hug.
Mapicc blinks up at the bedrock stupidly, it being his only reference for direction here.
What?
He tries to move around, but the void shudders and he drops an inch. Mapicc freezes. ‘Let’s not do that.’
He stares upward, slowly settles down. He wonders if he’ll starve here, now that the void isn’t killing him. He wonders if this happens to all players who drop into the void, because after all, he’s never died in it before– but then he remembers that he’s felt the bite of the void before, he’s grazed the surface when he dropped too low in an elytra, and it’s always been painful, sharp, cold.
Spoke. His thoughts always circle back to Spoke, huh? He tries to focus on other things– on Jumper, Planet, even a dog he’d tamed once that he forgets the name of.
Nope. His life revolves around Spoke, and now his mind does too.
He doesn’t know much of what Spoke had been doing before he stepped through the portal, but the simple fact is that he threw Mapicc into the void. The sting of betrayal sits heavily in his chest. He’d really thought Spoke wouldn’t harm him, he’d thought he would find a way to bring Mapicc over safely even at the cost of everything else.
There go his assumptions talking again. Spoke doesn’t care for him after all. The two years had been a lie.
He’d discovered that before, but now it feels cemented as truth. Coming to the same realization twice hurts.
Maybe his certainty is why it’s such a shock when, hours later, he opens his closed eyes to see Spoke himself in front of him.
Spoke, who hadn’t left him here after all.
His form is blurry like smoke, wavering and mixing with the red around him, darkness spilling around like ink whenever he moves.
A hand touches Mapicc’s shoulder. A noise warbles through the void, but it’s incomprehensible, only sound and not words. Spoke’s cold, cold fingers cup his cheek and brush at something, and Mapicc realizes there are tears dried there.
He then notices that the bedrock is coming closer. The void, it’s raising him up, like he’d only fallen into fabric and can now be drawn upward. Spoke lingers in his vision, his form swirling together with the nether, big white eyes always fixed on Mapicc.
Mapicc is confused. Mapicc is unharmed, and he’s soon deposited on the ledge where he’d seen Spoke standing hours before. Hours? He thinks it was hours. Hopes it wasn’t anything longer.
Spoke… stares up at him, and it takes Mapicc a minute but he crouches and reaches a hand out toward him. He gets the feeling Spoke is thinking thoughts much too complicated for him to understand, his eyes shifting down to focus on Mapicc’s palm.
Spoke’s hand latches around his own. He tears himself from the nether void, black bleeding into red and ripping away, wisps dissipating in the air and dissolving into the space behind him. Mapicc pulls him upward as he forces his form away from where it seems to fit so naturally.
And then Spoke’s standing on the ledge beside him. Spoke is staring at him with round eyes, wordless, and Mapicc can’t really deal with that right now, so he turns to find more solid ground than obsidian bridging outward. He leads Spoke over, away from the edge, to a rough staircase that guides them upward and away from it all.
Spoke pauses once, on the stairs, and his eyes drift downward to stare at the void below. He looks blank, empty, and it’s terrifying– but once Mapicc steps into his view something in his face softens and turns warm, and he trails behind him obediently like a duckling as they continue up. Their hands are intertwined, and Mapicc keeps too tight of a grip to ever let him stop like that again.
Solid ground. Deepslate below, stifling nether fog above.
Mapicc pulls Spoke into a crushing hug. Mapicc doesn’t really know what had happened, but he holds Spoke tight and refuses to let go, feeling his best friend sag against him and grip his hoodie too.
There’s a garbled noise. It sounds like silent and empty spaces, and incomprehensible void.
Mapicc pulls back, frames Spoke’s face in his hands, and says, “Spoke.”
Jumbled sounds, warping in the air, falling from his mouth.
“Spoke.”
The noise is quieter, muffled.
“Spoke.”
“...Mapicc.” Comes the muted whisper. The edges of his form still twist, foggy, into the air.
Mapicc pulls him into a hug again.
“Yeah, bro. It’s me.”
“Oh god.” Spoke is crying, whining and wailing as he slumps against Mapicc, who lowers them both to the ground so they don’t have to try to stand on shaky legs.
“What did you do, Spoke?” He whispers. Spoke’s voice hitches in a laugh.
“What I had to. What I…”
His blurry fingers tighten in the fabric of Mapicc’s hoodie.
“I… hmm.”
Mapicc is patient. Spoke solidifies as they sit, shreds of void slowly drawing together until Mapicc clutches the whole, familiar form of his best friend.
“...I asked it to take care of you,” he murmurs.
“The void?” Mapicc asks, something like dread in his throat. “I didn't know you could do that.”
“Yeah.” Spoke is still slumped against Mapicc, whose arms remain wrapped around him. “Took a lot out of me though, I think.”
Mapicc feels himself tense. “What do you mean? Are you… okay?”
Spoke hums and doesn't answer the question, but pulls away so he can sandwich Mapicc's face between his hands. He stares like he holds the stars between his two palms, like Mapicc's the best thing ever and he's in awe of it.
“Are you?”
“Yeah bro.” Mapicc reaches up to tug his arms gently down, holding both hands in his own. “I'm fine. Happy and healthy.”
Spoke smiles, then his expression cracks. “I didn't think it through enough. You could've been hurt. I promise- I promise I didn't want to hurt you.”
“Spoke. Listen. Here I am.” His grasp tightens. “And here you are. It's all okay.”
“It's all okay,” Spoke echoes. Then grins, tentative. “...It's all okay.”
Mapicc's about to pull him in again, not ready to lose the hug just yet, when Spoke's face goes… distant. His eyes lose their focus, shifting away from Mapicc's face. He sits straight where he'd just been leaning forward, and his hands turn limp in Mapicc's hold.
“Spoke?”
His head turns, drifting to stare again at the pit they'd climbed out of. His eyes stare, and stare, and stare while Mapicc repeats his name, growing louder, voice cracking when Spoke fails to spare him even a glance.
“Please, Spoke.” Mapicc's grip on his hands has turned his knuckles white. He feels his lip quiver, embarrassingly, but this is just all too much.
He releases one to gently angle Spoke's head back over, pressing their foreheads together and squeezing his eyes shut, stomach twisting with fear. “Spoke.”
A small break in the stillness, a jolt of Spoke’s shoulders.
“Mapicc.” His quiet murmur sounds impossibly tired, like the life has been drained out of him. The pit in Mapicc’s gut only grows deeper.
“...hey. It's… okay,” Spoke repeats Mapicc's words to him again, Mapicc who only holds onto him silently as he tries to piece together a solution and fears that maybe… no.
No. It isn't.