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“H- Hummer?”
His voice was shakier, from outside the screen. Wifies didn’t know how he’d gotten here. His memory was fading towards him, the blackness he’d emerged from rushing at him from inside his own head.
“Are… are you here?”
He felt ridiculous, speaking to an empty screen. But he needed to say something.
“Sorry. I’m- sorry, Hummer…”
He’d been right.
Wifies wanted to cry. Hummer was dead, and that was game-dead, Minecraft-dead, but it felt real. If this felt real, now, pushing through an abandoned city with his fingers shaking on his keyboard, then Hummer could be real-dead. And it would be Wifies’s fault, for not trusting him sooner.
This wasn’t about a video, anymore. This wasn’t anything. This was about him, and the screen, and the room behind him he could no longer picture. About the name Hummer had called him, because Wifies couldn’t remember if he had any other. This was his name. That was him, inside the screen, but he had hands and cheeks to stain with tears, and fingers to grip his phone so hard it hurt. He had a body outside the game.
It didn’t feel like it. He felt the loneliness, the aching emptiness of the city before him. Wifies didn’t know what he was feeling, only that it wasn’t his to feel. He hadn’t believed. Hadn’t trusted Hummer, not enough. This could be punishment. He wasn’t religious, but for Minecraft… maybe. This was another thing after so many, and his aching incredulity was beginning to fray.
It was the Leviathan. That was what his life had become. It couldn’t all be a hoax. Wifies chased the evidence, chased the monster, and never looked behind him. He couldn’t remember if there was anything left to see. His life was an edited screenshot, missing the parts that would make it make sense. Reality was blurring out.
He could taste salt, in the back of his throat. Tears or ocean water, trust or suicide. He was the cynical genius, or he was the idiot who’d sent himself to a murky death outside of reality.
The water was growing larger. The screen made it strange, and Wifies could have sworn he saw his avatar trembling as his hand did, as he drew closer, closer. The timer on his phone blinked. His eyes stung. He heard the quiet running of the water.
It couldn’t be real. This world couldn’t be real. He knew, because his fingers didn’t fit right around his phone. It felt wrong, to feel himself breathe. He belonged in there, not out here.
The screen was blurring, at the edges. Wifies couldn’t remember his name. It wasn’t real, anyway, he’d made it up, he must have made it all up. This place inside the screen was real, and the room around him nothing more than a fiction he’d been repulsed into, when the being here realised he didn’t deserve it.
Hummer deserved this. Hummer knew what was real.
The water was getting louder. That must mean Wifies was working out how to concentrate, to will himself back to reality. The beige walls were dissolving, in the water, melting into salt that stung at his eyes, and he closed them, finally, as the pain became too much to bear.
The pain only got stronger. A sharp blow to his forehead, stinging through his head like he was being thrown backwards through the water, and Wifies heard himself yelp. He heard himself, from all around, and the offspray of the water dusted over his head, forcing him to lift himself off the wooden planks beneath him.
He looked up, at the fountain, and laughed.
Hummer had been right. This was real, this was what had been real, and he didn’t deserve to have found it, but he had.
Wifies felt his last hit point beat unsteady in his chest, felt the code move around him as he pushed himself to his feet, and staggered, resting his elbows on the edge as if in prayer. It had been a test of faith, to get this far.
And he hadn’t passed.
His breath caught, his addled thoughts catching on that, singular snag. This couldn’t be it, because he hadn’t done it right. Hummer had believed. Wifies had no paradise waiting for him.
“Wifies!”
A voice he recognised, from a thousand places at once, a timeline unfolding and sprawling across itself, and Wifies startled. A command on his lips, eyes roving for the swirl of particles, the urge to snap out his new name for himself, and it collapsed back in on itself, multiverses recombining, and he stared, nauseous to his bones.
Arronax, dressed in pinks and greys and a messy, dripping pair of buns.
Someone else. Somewhere else. Somewhere now impossible. An impossibility, achieved. Feeling the impossibility of keeping what he’d won, knowing, deep down to his sodden bones, that it was impossible, to keep hold of someone else long enough to understand them.
Wifies stared at Arronax, and realised he didn’t know her name. Her face. He didn’t know her, and yet here she was. He didn’t know her name, in much the same way he didn’t know his own.
But he knew her voice. That voice had nearly been what he’d abandoned Hummer for. Maybe he should have, and veered off his path of heresy before it landed him here.
“…you.”
It was the only answer he had it in himself to give. Everything else had been taken, robbed from him by the ocean.
“Me.” Goggles, adjusted, a dusty pink, a sharp smile. “And you. Both sinners, aren’t we?”
Hell wasn’t like what he’d pictured. Cool, and light, even if it remained unbearable. Wifies didn’t know how to he could stand to stand here, didn’t know how or if Arronax was alive before him.
“Is… is this real?”
“No.”
“Is… the- the- is Levi real?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“Nope!” A grin, and a startle of teeth and limbs and blue, blue darkness, and kindly hazel eyes were helping him back to his feet, away from the altar at which he’d had ideas of prying for forgiveness on. “Of course not. I’m the Leviathan.”
“No. You- you’re not.”
That would be to disservice Hummer. Wifies believed him, now, more than ever. Arronax couldn’t be the Leviathan, the Leviathan couldn’t be a person, not like that. It had to be a monster, even if only insomuch as it haunted children’s minds.
“I’m not.” She confirmed, a mimicry, a parroting back, and Wifies felt a headache hit him like the sharp edge of a desk to the temple. “I’m not Arronax, either.”
“You’re not real.”
“Correct.”
“I’m dying.”
“…No?” Another kind smile, and Wifies felt the sodden, kelp-entwined touch slip away. Arronax studied him, with eyes made misty by years of salt, and shook her head. “No. Why would you be dying, Wifies?”
“You’re dead.”
It was obvious, now he looked. There was kelp around her neck, and her arms, shackles of underwater shrubbery, there was salt dripping from her hair and crusted across her cheeks. The flesh of her arm was eaten, nibbled at first by one fish, then many, and Wifies could see hollowness inside her. Her clothes were torn, her goggles encrusted with barnacles. Of course she was dead. Wifies could see what was plainly before him.
“I am. And so are you, aren’t you?”
A world in which he was. Should be, even. A world in which he saw Hummer’s item floating to the surface, a world in which his heart was caught in its final beat, entangled in the net of something far, far bigger than him. A world where Wifies couldn’t honestly answer one way or another.
Or a world where he couldn’t possibly be dead. A world on dry land, with beige walls, with a name he couldn’t remember. Something outside, which he couldn’t remember.
The evidence seemed to sway it. Wifies took his time to answer, not quite being able to stomach looking down at himself, not when he could see watery blood oozing from a bite mark on Arronax’s collarbone.
“…No. I- I’m not dead, the… Levi didn’t kill me.”
Wifies frowned. It should be that Levi had kept him alive, but that didn’t come out so easy. That would suggests that there was some greater power. Which there wasn’t. Levi hadn’t killed him, but…
Levi had killed Hummer.
Nothing made sense again. Logic scattered like fish under the bearing current of a shark, and Wifies felt attacked from all angles, as he shook his head free of the water clogging his ears.
“The Leviathan doesn’t kill.” Arronax’s voice was grim in its agreement, so different from her cheery voiceovers. “I’ve been here long enough. I should know that better than anyone.”
“How long?”
“Hm?”
“How long? Has he kept you waiting?”
Another thing, that came without his input. Wifies hoped they were waiting. This couldn’t be it, he hadn’t done enough to deserve it. He needed to bring Hummer here.
“As long as it took you to arrive.”
“I… I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
“I- I should have… trusted him. Sorry.”
“It’s alright.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s not. He’s nearly gone, now.”
Wifies flinched, again, and looked back, like he was expecting a clock. Instead of the steady stream of water, instead of the clear sky, instead of their timeless surroundings.
“Hummer?”
“It hates me. More than you know.” Sighing, Arronax’s gaze finally dropped, and her water-damaged boot skidded harmlessly over the planks below in the arc of her kick. “I… should have left well enough alone. Or done it properly. It doesn’t reward half-heartedness.”
“That’s why Levi killed you.”
“Why do you call it that?”
Sharp eyes, sharp, damaged, long dead, yet beaming into his soul. Wifies took a small step back, feeling the attack bearing down from his front, now, and stumbled over his words.
“Hummer- Hummer calls it that. He... got me this far-“
“This far to where? Here?” Arronax laughed, high and ragged and manic, and looked half in mind to spit in the fountain, if her lips hadn’t looked dry and cracked from salt absorption. “It’s done you nothing, Wifies. Give this up. Give up now, and it might let you go.”
“Will it let me come back?”
“You don’t want to.”
“I do. Hummer needs to see this.”
“...You’re stupid.”
It was said with such disparagement, such offhanded cruelty, that it stopped Wifies dead in his tracks. All at once, the pressure behind his eyes was back, and he didn’t know why it hurt so bad. He only knew that his throat tightened, and he started forwards again, reaching out to grab that long-dead hand before she left him here.
“I’m not, I- I’m sorry.”
“You named it.” Baring her teeth, for just a moment, Arronax shook him off, and scoffed. “I’m no shining victor of this godawful game. But you don’t know what you’re doing any more than I ever did. You don’t know what you’re talking to. Give up.”
“But-“
“Give. Up. And pray you never see your Hummer again.”
Because he’d carry on searching, even without Wifies? Or because Wifies would drive him to stop searching entirely?
Arronax was giving him nothing, just sighing, and turning away. The back of her calf was missing, and kelp dangled like a boa down her spine. Her whole body was rotted, preserved, fish-bitten and rage-driven, and Wifies felt the pressure almost making him blank out, in blind panic at the idea he’d be left.
“I’m sorry. We can talk, I’ll… I can listen, I’m sorry, Arronax-“
“The real world’s waiting for you, Wifies. Don’t come near mine again.”
Wifies looked back to the fountain, at the faint, radiant glow, at the altar he’d never been brave enough to lie what truly mattered on.
He looked back to the darkness he’d emerged from, and felt it ripple under his gaze, him, a stone thrown in to disturb water that should have been left otherwise.
Like a shoal of fish, the darkness scattered.
Like the idiot he was, Wifies stood, and waited, feeling it gather towards him, closer, flicking towards its new prey.
He waited, and trusted that the darkness would let him leave.