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The fire had been Cleo's idea, which meant it was less of a suggestion and more of an event that materialized around them whether they'd agreed to it or not. She'd built the pit herself that afternoon, stacked the logs in a neat crosshatch, and told everyone within earshot that if they didn't show up she'd take it personally and they'd all know about it for weeks.
So: ten of them, give or take. A clear night. The kind of warm that still bit if you sat too far from the flames.
Beef settled into his spot on one of the half-log benches and stretched his legs out toward the heat. Etho had already been there when he arrived, which was unusual — Etho tended to show up after things started, sliding into whatever gap existed like he'd always been there. But tonight he was cross-legged on the ground with his back against the bench Bdubs was sitting on, close enough that Bdubs's knee was almost touching his shoulder. Almost. Not quite. The gap between them was precise in the way only Etho's gaps were precise.
Beef noticed. He always noticed.
Ren had brought something in a bottle that he refused to identify, and Keralis had brought a truly unnecessary amount of bread, and the combination was doing its work. The conversation had been loose for an hour — server logistics, a build dispute between Gem and Doc that had apparently escalated to the point of formal mediation by Xisuma, whether or not the hostile mob spawns near the eastern ridge were a feature or a bug.
"Feature," Xisuma said, in the way he said things that meant he'd designed it and was choosing not to apologize.
"They blew up my storage system," Gem said.
"That's the feature."
Gem threw bread at him. The conversation moved on.
It was good. It was the kind of night Beef had learned to value — everyone a little loose, a little honest, the fire making everyone's face look warmer than they were. He watched Etho poke at the edge of the coals with a stick, methodical, like he was running calculations on the combustion rate. Bdubs said something low to him that Beef couldn't hear and Etho shook his head without looking up, but the corners of his eyes moved. If you knew what to look for — and Beef did — that was almost a laugh.
It started with Gem.
She'd been telling a story about a project she and Etho had collaborated on — a redstone-powered irrigation system for her farm district, something absurdly overengineered for what amounted to a wheat field. She was animated about it, gesturing, recounting how Etho had solved a timing problem she'd been stuck on for days.
"He just looked at it for maybe thirty seconds and said, 'your repeater chain is two ticks too long,' and walked away. That was it. Problem solved. I've never felt so smart and so stupid at the same time." She was laughing. "And I thought, okay, I know this guy. We've worked together, I know how his brain works, I know—"
She stopped. Tilted her head. The laughter faded into something more puzzled.
"Actually. Huh." She looked at Etho across the fire. "I was going to say I know you really well, and I just realized I have absolutely no idea if that's true. I know your redstone. I know how you think about systems. But like, you you?" She gestured vaguely at all of him. "I've got nothing."
"You've got the redstone," Etho said. "That's the good part."
Everyone chuckled. Gem shook her head but she was smiling. She let it go.
Cleo didn't.
"She's right, though." Cleo was sitting with her legs crossed on the bench, chin in her hand, looking at Etho with the expression she got when she'd found something interesting to poke at. "I've known you for — what, three years? Four? And I think I could tell someone you like foxes and redstone and that you're quiet. That's what I've got. That's a loading screen, not a person."
"It's a good loading screen," Etho said.
"Your favorite color," Cleo said. "Go."
Silence. Not awkward — amused, almost. Everyone looking at Etho.
"I don't think I have one," he said.
"Everyone has a favorite color."
"Then I've got all of them." He spread his hands. "I'm easy."
"You are the opposite of easy," Doc said, and there was a ripple of agreement around the fire, and Etho accepted it the way he accepted most things — with a tilt of his head and a silence that looked like a smile if you didn't examine it too closely.
Beef took a drink. He knew what was happening. He'd seen it before at smaller scales — in pairs, in quick conversations — but never like this, never with an audience. The group was assembling Etho. Each of them reaching for their piece of him and holding it up to the light.
"I've got one," Keralis said, cheerful, unbothered. He was lying on his back on the grass with his hands behind his head. "He never sits with his back to a door. You notice? Every room, every meeting, he's against the wall, facing the way in. Every time."
"That's not —" Etho started.
"Every time," Keralis repeated, serene. "I am a very observant person and I notice these things and I am telling you, my friend, you do this."
"Survival habit," Etho said, like that closed the subject. It didn't. Beef saw False shift slightly across the fire, something clicking into place behind her eyes.
“Okay, makes sense.” She started. “The whole base you build for the resistance. All the outs and ins and measures. I see it.”
The fire cracked. A log shifted. Etho said nothing.
Beef watched him. Etho's face was steady and blank in the way it got when he was choosing not to react, which was different from not reacting. The stick in his hand was still, held at the same angle, like even his fidgeting had frozen.
"Okay, I've got a story," Beef said, because the silence was starting to press and he knew how to fill a room. "This is an old one. Before the server — way before. Etho was what, nineteen?"
"Nineteen," Etho confirmed. The stick started moving again. He saw Etho wink at him, the tell tale I knew what you are wanting to say.
Beef gave him a look, Etho nodded. Permission.
"Right. I was twenty-one. We were in Millhaven — one of the big trade cities on the eastern hub, the old one before it got rebuilt. And we got chased. Less 'wrong place wrong time' and more 'Etho had made some very specific enemies that he did not warn me about' —"
"I warned you."
"You said 'we should walk fast.' That is not a warning."
"Walking fast would have solved it."
"We ended up in the salt caves under the city," Beef continued, ignoring him. "The ones that connect to the old sewer system, the pre-rebuild pipes. Pitch black. Mobs. The works. I am nineteen years old —"
"Twenty-one."
"— I am twenty-one years old and I'm making peace with a very ugly respawn, and this kid —" he gestured at Etho — "starts navigating in the dark. No torch, no map. Making turns like he's walking through his own house. Left, right, right, down a ladder I couldn't even see, through a sealed pipe that hadn't been on any city plan in decades."
Beef paused. He could feel the weight of the group's attention. Etho was poking the coals. Unbothered. Or performing unbothered. With Etho it was always both.
"We got out in maybe twenty minutes. Would've taken me two hours and a few deaths. And I said — I remember exactly what I said — 'You had a suspiciously good knowledge of the old sewer pipe layouts.'"
"I'd been down there before," Etho said.
"When?"
"Before."
Laughter. The usual. Beef smiled and let the beat land, and for a moment that was the shape of the story — a funny anecdote, a classic Etho deflection, another fragment for the pile.
But Beef wasn't done.
He hadn't planned to keep going. He usually didn't. This was the part of the story he kept in the cabinet with everything else — the things Etho had let slip and then sealed over, the drawers Beef never forced open. But there was something about the fire tonight, the accumulation of all these people reaching for pieces of Etho and coming back with air, that made him want to put one real thing on the table.
"Those damn handguns, man," Beef said, quieter. He was looking at the fire now, not at Etho. "You had to lose the pretty green eye and not the sludge brown one?"
The campfire went very still.
"I still have that sweater, by the way," Beef said. "Your yellow one."
He could feel the silence change shape. Could feel people recalculating. Not just the eye — though that was enough, the revelation that Beef knew the specific mechanism of something Etho never discussed and everyone had learned not to ask about. But pretty green eye. The tenderness of that. The history in it. The fact that Beef had seen both eyes, had known Etho's face when it was whole, and had carried the memory of it for years alongside a bloodstained sweater he couldn't throw away.
Etho was quiet for a long moment. The stick had stopped.
"Man, I loved that sweater," he said. His voice was the same as always — light, easy, faintly amused. "Keep it for me still. I think the bloodstains look like art."
Someone laughed, short and uncertain. No one else did. Beef could see them trying to find the right face to make — the face for my friend just casually referenced his own blood on a garment from his teenage years and I don't know if that's a joke or a scar or both.
Etho picked up his stick and went back to the coals, and the moment closed like water over a stone.
That was the thing Beef had learned about him, back in those tunnels when they were barely more than kids. Etho moved through the dark like someone who had lived in it — the sureness of his hands on the walls, the way he'd known which pipes were load-bearing by touch, the way he'd said watch your step, it drops away here about a ledge that had been invisible in the pitch black. You didn't learn that on a visit. You learned it by needing to. And Beef had filed it away with everything else, and he'd kept the sweater, and he'd never once asked Etho what he'd been doing in the years between when they'd met as teenagers and when Etho finally resurfaced on the server, older and quieter and missing an eye.
Etho disappeared sometimes. That was the other thing people didn't know. He'd vanish for a year, two years, and then come back like no time had passed, and Beef would look at him and catalogue what was different — thinner, or steadier, or with a new scar he'd never explain — and say welcome back and nothing else, because that was the deal.
"Even your code baffles me," Xisuma said, almost to himself. He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, firelight catching the edge of his helmet. As admin, Xisuma had access to everything on the server — build logs, redstone schematics, every line of command code anyone had ever written. "I've gone through your redstone schematics, your command structures. There's some kind of encryption on them. Not standard — something custom."
Etho glanced at him. "Encryption's a strong word."
"It's an accurate word. I've never seen notation like it. I can tell it works — the outputs are clean — but I can't read the process."
"If I told you, you'd figure it out," Etho said.
Xisuma looked at him for a moment. "Is that a compliment or a refusal?"
"Yes," Etho said.
Beef took another drink. The bottle was making its way back around and Ren had settled into the boneless, expansive posture that meant he was two drinks past careful.
"You know what I think," Ren said, pointing at Etho with the hand that was also holding bread. "I think you are the most — what is the word. Committed. To the bit. Of anyone I have ever met."
"Thank you," Etho said.
"It is not entirely a compliment." Ren sat up a little. He was grinning, loose and easy. "Man, we almost hooked up once and I still don't know your gender. I'm guessing!"
The fire crackled. Someone — Gem, maybe — let out a short, startled laugh. Beef kept his eyes on his drink and did not, very carefully did not, look at Bdubs.
"Yeah," Etho said. The stick traced a slow circle in the coals. "That's half the fun."
More laughter. Ren threw his hands up — you see? You see what I'm dealing with? — and it was funny, it was a good moment, everyone was enjoying it. Beef laughed too. But he was tracking two things at once now: Etho's careful stillness and the small, specific movement of Bdubs rolling his eyes behind Etho's head.
Not at Etho. At Ren. At the whole performance. An eye roll that said oh, please with a possessiveness so subtle that no one would catch it unless they already knew what Bdubs was to Etho, and Beef was the only person at this fire who did.
Doc opened his mouth.
"Don't you dare say it," Bdubs said.
Doc closed his mouth. He held up both hands in surrender. But his grin was enormous and knowing, and the implication — same, buddy, and I don't know either — hung in the air like smoke.
Beef exhaled through his nose and stared at the fire. There were too many threads here. He needed to just breathe and let it pass.
The conversation moved on, the way campfire conversations do — it drifted, doubled back, someone told a completely unrelated story about a creeper that had spawned inside a chest somehow and Keralis did a dramatic reenactment of finding it. The Etho thing settled. People forgot they'd been assembling him.
Beef didn't forget.
It was maybe twenty minutes later when the names came up. They'd been talking about the supply ledger — Cleo had been on logistics that month and was complaining about handwriting.
"I'm just saying, if everyone could sign legibly, my life would be significantly better," she said. "I had to decode Doc's signature like it was ancient scripture."
"My name is long," Doc said. "Derrick is a lot of letters."
"Derrick is seven letters."
"Seven important letters in a specific order and I did my best, Cleo."
Ren leaned over. "I keep forgetting your name is Derrick. That does not sound like a Doc."
"What does a Doc sound like?"
"More... German?"
"Derrick is German."
This devolved. People started trading real names — the ones on the ledger, the ones on supply orders and server paperwork. False signed as Maike. Gem confirmed hers was Gemma. Xisuma gave an answer that everyone immediately forgot because the relationship between Xisuma's real name and his server name was apparently several steps of logic that no one could follow.
"What about you?" Cleo looked at Etho. "You sign the ledger as Etho. Same as your server name."
"That's my name," Etho said.
"Your real name."
"My real name."
"Everyone else has a — you know. A real name and a name they go by. You're just Etho both ways?"
"I changed it," Etho said, and his voice was still easy, still unbothered, but Beef noticed the stick had stopped moving again. "Legally. A while ago."
"Before you came to the server?"
"Before a lot of things."
"So what was it before?" Ren asked.
"Gone," Etho said. "That's the whole point of changing it."
Doc sat up straighter. He had the expression he got when he knew something — really knew it, was sure of it — and was about to deliver it like a verdict.
"Okay," he said, spreading his hands. "I'm going to prove that I actually know this man. Because I do. Despite what tonight's little campfire therapy session would suggest." He looked at Etho with real affection, the kind that came from years of proximity. "What's your middle name, Etho?"
Etho looked back at him. Said nothing.
"Trick question," Doc said, triumphant. "You don't have a middle name. You changed your name and never picked one. I know this because I was there when you filed the paperwork and I watched you leave it blank."
He leaned back, arms crossed, satisfied. A murmur around the fire — impressed, amused. Doc had cracked it. Doc had the answer.
Beef watched Etho. Etho was doing the thing where his face was a mask of a mask — the outer layer casual, the inner layer unreadable, and somewhere beneath both of those, something that moved too fast to catch.
"It's Gideon," Bdubs said.
He didn't look up. He was pulling apart a piece of bread, methodical, his eyes on his hands. He said it the way you'd say pass the salt or it's supposed to rain tomorrow. Like it was nothing. Like it was obvious.
The fire was the only sound for about three seconds.
Beef saw it happen — the tiny fracture in Etho's composure. His eyes went wide for just a moment, a flash of something that wasn't panic exactly but was adjacent to it, the look of someone who'd built a house and heard a window break. He turned his head a few inches toward Bdubs. Not enough that anyone across the fire would read it as significant. But Beef was right there. Beef was always right there.
"I'm supposed to be vague," Etho whispered.
Bdubs didn't look up from his bread. "You named yourself after a horse," he whispered back.
And Etho's face did something Beef had almost never seen it do.
It cracked open. Not a lot — you'd have to know what you were looking for, you'd have to have spent years cataloguing every micro-expression that made it past the mask — but the corners of his mouth pulled upward and his eyes creased and for one unguarded second he was looking at Bdubs with something so nakedly fond that Beef had to look away.
He looked anyway.
Around the fire, the reaction was still unfolding. Doc was sputtering — "When did you — what? — Gideon? Since when?" — and Gem was laughing with her hand over her mouth and Ren was saying "A horse? What horse?" and Cleo was looking between Bdubs and Etho with a sharpness that suggested she was recalculating several things at once.
But that was all out there, at the edges. The center of it — the real thing that had happened — was between Etho and Bdubs, and it was already over, already sealed, the mask sliding back into place as Etho turned back to the fire and said "No comment" to the erupting questions and became, once again, exactly as unknowable as he wanted to be.
Bdubs ate his bread.
Beef sat with it.
He sat with the fact that he'd known Etho since they were kids. That he'd held a yellow sweater to the side of Etho's face in a sewer tunnel while Etho told him, very calmly, very clearly, which way to turn to find the exit. That he'd carried that sweater home and washed it and couldn't get the stain out and kept it anyway, and it was still in his bottom drawer, folded neatly, and he'd never once in all those years seen the expression Etho had just made for Bdubs. He sat with the fact that Etho had told him about Bdubs — had trusted him with it, had looked at him with that one careful eye and said I need you not to tell anyone — and that Beef had said yes immediately and meant it and would keep meaning it for as long as Etho needed, which might be forever.
He sat with the jealousy, which was small and precise and unworthy of him, and he acknowledged it, and he let it exist without feeding it.
Because here was the thing. Here was the thing Beef had learned in the salt mines and relearned tonight and would probably keep relearning for as long as he knew Etho:
You didn't get to choose what Etho gave you. You got what he could manage, and you held it carefully, and you didn't ask for more. That was the deal. Beef had honored it for years and he would keep honoring it because Etho was worth it — the redstone and the silence and the sewer pipes and the way he'd handed Beef a drink tonight without being asked, which was its own kind of intimacy, even if it wasn't the kind Beef sometimes wished for.
And Bdubs got more. Bdubs got Gideon. Bdubs got the whispered argument and the involuntary smile and whatever else happened between them in the hours Beef wasn't there to see. And that was — fine. It was good. Beef had watched Etho for years and wanted, more than almost anything, to see him happy. To see the mask come down. To see the real face underneath, even for a second.
He'd seen it tonight. It just wasn't pointed at him.
The fire burned. The conversation reformed around easier things. Someone brought up the creeper-in-the-chest story again and it was funnier the second time, or maybe Beef was just more willing to laugh.
Later — much later, when the fire was down to embers and people were peeling off in pairs and small groups toward their builds — Beef stood and stretched and did not watch Etho and Bdubs leave together. He didn't need to watch. He knew the careful distance they'd keep until they were out of the firelight, and he knew the distance would close in the dark, and he knew that somewhere in whatever home they shared — the one everyone thought was just Bdubs's — Etho would take the mask off and be someone Beef would never meet.
That was okay.
Beef kicked a stray ember back into the pit and looked up at the sky, which was vast and full of the kind of stars you only got out here, away from everything, on a server at the edge of the world. He thought about the salt mines. Nineteen and twenty-one. Etho's hand finding his arm in the dark — skinny fingers, iron grip, steadier than anyone that age had a right to be — guiding him around a corner while blood ran down the side of Etho's face and neither of them mentioned it. Beef had thought he trusts me and had held that thought like a coal in his chest for years afterward.
Etho did trust him. Enough to navigate by. Enough to hand a secret to.
Just not enough to name.
Beef put out the last of the fire and walked home alone, and that was alright, and the night was warm. He thought, what had Etho told him that he hadn’t told anyone else? Did beef have any relic of Etho that was his alone?
He thought of the sweater, he thought of the years back and forth, next to each other and separated.
Yeah. He knew Etho. He knew Ethos old name. He had called Etho by his old name for 15 years.
He thought about Doc, being there when Etho filed the paperwork, and how Etho almost bit Doc hand when Doc tried to look over and see his old name.
Etho would never tell Bdubs. Beef was sure of that. His old name was a private shame, from a worse world, pre accident, pre sewers, pre surgery, pre everything.
Four letters, end in a, three vowels, two do them the same. Beef could think over every aspect of the name and the shape of it, and couldn’t bring himself to think it.
Beef looked at the stars, felt the wind. It was a hazy memory, and Beef had substituted ‘Etho’ in all his memories going back to age 4 when he first had memories and remembered, vaugly, being carried upstairs in a pillowcase by Ethos teenage brother, and him and Etho laughing like maniacs as he bumped them on each step purposelfuly.
But this memory. Different.
“I don’t know, it’s different if it’s you, or Zach, but i don’t like it.”
“It’s unique, it’s pretty.” Beef brushed the comment off, focusing back on braiding ####’s hair.
“Yeah, it’s pretty. I don’t want to be pretty, you say it enough, about my eyes and shit, my mom doesn’t want to let you sleep over anymore because of it ya know?”
“Okay, okay, I’ll call you brutish instead.” #### Reached backed to slap Beef, and Beef just laughed as he finished with the two waist long braids. “Your mom knows my preference so I think she is saying that to get under your skin.”
#### turned to look at Beef. “Pick a different name for me?”
“Why me?”
“You know me better than anyone.”
“Glenda.”
“I hate you.”
“Maria.”
“Worse.”
“Uh, Lent?”
“No, make it- unique. Pretty.”
“Wow, hypocrite. Okay, Patho.”
“Close.”
“Etho?”
#### looked at Beef for a moment. “Yeah. I like that.”
Beef stared for a moment. “Are you still gonna keep Iria?”
“Only for family, only for now. Keep it- secret. When we grow up.”
Beef nodded. “I can do that. If you promise not to tell anyone my legal middle name actually Beef and help me keep the ‘unfortunate nickname’ shitck up.”
Etho looked up at Beef. “Do you want to cut my hair?”
“I just braided that and your mom will kill me. Get me some scissors."