Archive of Our Own

He’s looking at him, eyes blue and considering, careful, as if trying to cajole a cornered animal. 

“Wemmbu?”

In the dark of the caves, the irises look almost black. They’re pinched at the corners; his voice is low.

“Wemmbu, calm down.”

Hands wet and grime trapped under his fingernails. Wemmbu’s chest aches something awful. Like that time they were at the Farlands, with the End portal and the sniper and an arrow piercing his best friend’s shoulder, ribbons of blood, stained white wings, and, and then, no, he shouldn’t, shouldn’t, ah. Ah.

Dirt under his fingernails, dirt under his boots. It grits the underside of his sole in a way almost relaxing, the grains scraping together as he steps back. The caves are dark, but they can get a lot darker if he keeps turning away, and so he will. 

Egg’s eyes don’t ever look black. That’s something Wemmbu’s teased him about before, how even in pure pitch darkness they’ll still glow faintly and illuminate the path ahead. His eyesight somehow helps Wemmbu, while he himself can barely read words on a page more than two handspans away from his face.

Egg cites his angelic heritage whenever this occurs, and then he’ll talk about how freaky it is that Wemmbu’s eyes don’t reflect any light, only absorbs it. Then, about how this is actually a metaphor, or symbolism, or something analogous to that. If he’s really unlucky, Egg will whip out one of his many pocket notebooks and force them to halt all action while he uses Wemmbu’s shoulder as a table to scrawl something down. 

“You’re not— c’mon, Wemmbu, please.”

What he’d give to have Egg’s eyes now. The tunnels are thick with webs and mildew. Something wet cracks under his boot, and Wemmbu walks on forward into the dark.

Given two options, to stay or to go, neither of them had ever been any good at choosing. 

Egg was a victim of the server more often than not, but he was in love with the future, with luck and all of her empty promises. He found the thrill of faith a joy after years of stagnation, and so when they came to Unstable, on his journey to document the past and look blindly towards the future, it was Wemmbu whom he trusted to defend his present.

The budding blooms of something fresh and terrifying, a future or a thousand futures, they kept Wemmbu in the server until he could no longer clearly recall the time before. And, of course, the sight of his best friend’s dull gaze lit with enjoyment for the first time in forever.

It wasn’t good for them, no matter how much they both liked to ignore it. There were countless wakeless nights, either Wemmbu bolting out of bed to check that his best friend was still alive, or Egg, unable to differentiate between reality and nightmare, prison or home, whether the hand held out to him would next strike or comfort. They found each other most nights, and then they would cling to the other like mad, pray with the desperation of an animal hunted, and they knew it could not last, this tense safety, and they were stupid to think otherwise, and there was nothing they could do besides accepting defeat than to think otherwise. 

He crouches down. Grey water laps at his ankles, seeping through the rips in his gloves. Egg’s eyes could never be black. Only when they turned hollow and empty for the final time did Wemmbu’s guiding light finally fade, but even then they remained a brilliant blue. 

He hears a thin sound to his right, a sword unsheathing. Someone’s shaky breathing, the kind of sound you make when you know that you must stay silent but your body refuses to obey your mind. Wemmbu knows it well.

Gambit is heavy in his hands. She hasn’t felt that way in years. It’s strange, almost burdensome. 

Leather creaking, creaking, and Wemmbu falls back to the ground hard. 

He rights himself. 

He keeps on moving. 

The scene shifts and the buzzing in his ears remains. Wemmbu doesn’t…mind it, much. It muffles the other sounds of players around him, cracking and splashes, voices hysterical and pleading. He likes it here. 

“You have to stop, dude,” Egg says to him. 

He wouldn’t say that. Egg wouldn’t. He knows, he knows how much Wemmbu hates being on a leash.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Wemmbu replies.

Jaden’s face screws up in confusion.

“Doing what wrong?” He asks.

Wemmbu turns away. A bolt of pain lances through the centre of his head, right through his ears, and his skull somehow feels simultaneously heavy and light, tipping forward against his will.

“Hey, talk to me. What am I doing wrong?”

Sensation returns, briefly, in waves. He’s sore all over. His throat is dry. His face feels wet. His hands are shaking; Gambit hasn’t left them in weeks, he imagines.

A creaking whine. From below. The player pushes themself away from him, shuffling backwards into the cave’s wall on broken legs. 

“Wemmbu. Dude, look at me, talk to me.”

The player’s face is a picture of terror, turned away from him, shrunken in on herself. 

She looks— just, just, just like he did. But Wemmbu blinks, and her hair is only a light grey, not cloud white, and her wings are the fletched feathers of avian hybrids, not the soft down of angels. Still, the scene is much too familiar. 

He stutters physically. She’s curled into a ball now, and when he blinks it’s Jaden, standing in front of her, hands held out beseechingly, half shielding and half begging. 

“Are you with me?” Jaden asks. His voice is lowered, deliberately quiet. 

“You— what?” Wemmbu hears himself say after a while. It’s dark here. He hadn’t been this deep in his entire time in the empire; the tunnels around him feel disorientating, labyrinthine.

“You’re saying something, at least,” Jaden laughs, hesitantly. “It was freaky seeing you go all silent before.”

He says something else after that, but Wemmbu can’t remember it now.  

It’s darker still, when he wakes up and realises he’s moved locations. His head is sticky with blood and heavy as a boulder against the jagged stone floor. Jaden is gone. Egg is gone. Flame was here for a short while; he’s gone, too. Even Yungy and Codmaster. It’s cold, too quiet without the ever present sound of pen on paper or pages flipping, and Wemmbu won’t be able to find the exit like this. 

Please, the player had said, her voice barely audible, please don’t kill me, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Egg hadn’t had time to beg. Wemmbu hadn’t a chance to apologise. But he’d looked the same when Arachnid’s sword carved through his unarmoured throat, too shocked to be terrified, and he’d looked straight at Wemmbu, whose heart began to beat fast as an animal hunted, and—

“Egg?” 

And it is silent, in this cold and hollow cave; it goes on for thousands of blocks in every direction. 

“Egg?” Louder, so he might hear. His voice cracks, and the crack opens a chasm that cuts straight down through his gullet.

Footsteps of someone behind him, and he spins and drives his sword into their gut. The player dies suddenly and without noise. 

There is nowhere left to run.

There’s a wall that is, for some inexplicable reason, perfectly flat. Smooth stone, like the blade of a sword, and Wemmbu finds himself returning to it against his will. There are words carved into it that he can’t make out. 

Jaden finds him there sometimes, staring and staring. It’s then that he leaves.

—they had clung to each other. Well, it was Wemmbu clinging to him. Egg’s hands had been too lax to hold on properly, but Wemmbu had pulled him close and placed a totem over his heart and prayed with all his might, and it was all—

“You’re not okay,” Jaden tells him, one of these times.

Wemmbu doesn’t say anything. He hoists Gambit up. 

“Windcharge?” He asks.

“What?” Jaden frowns, off-kilter.

“I’m out. Give me some.”

He looks exasperated. “Dude, did you even hear what I—” 

“Heard you. I need windcharges.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Jaden sighs, pinching at the bridge of his nose. “You look like you’re about to pass out at any moment.”

“I need them,” he repeats.

“What, so you can keep killing anyone who crosses paths with you? When did you last eat something besides a golden apple?”

“I don’t care.”

“Do you even have food on you?”

Slowly, sluggishly, a thought forms.

“I do,” Wemmbu says carefully. “In my e-chest.”

“Really.”

“I had them saved up. For…”

His voice fails him, here. His stomach clenches, bile rising up his throat.

Jaden’s voice softens. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” It’s Wemmbu who should be. Is.

But Jaden shakes his head, and places an Enderchest on the rough ground between them. 

Wemmbu kneels down to rummage through it. His vision greys out briefly before returning in fractures; blood rushing through his ears, swirling around his skull. 

“Can I stay?” Jaden asks, when he’s done.

“Stay where?”

“With you, bro.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want you to die, too.”

“I won’t. You should go. Before I accidentally, accidentally… um. Just go.”

Jaden crosses his arms. “I’m not doing that. I’m worried for you, dude.”

“Why?”

“I know you’re gonna die.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m the strongest player in this entire cave. Entire server. Who could kill me?”

“Yourself, if you keep going on like this.”

Wemmbu leaves. 

Here’s something they don’t tell you about cave ceilings: they’re tall. Not enough for him to safely use his elytra, but windcharges are fair game— he launches himself up, again and again and again, the tips of his horns grazing stalactites; wind throws his limp hair up around his face, and he lands in a splatter, Gambit first before his own two legs. Screaming all around him. 

He doesn’t know why Jaden keeps flitting around him like an asteroid stuck in his orbit. The guy refuses to leave. 

He’s only trying to be a good friend, says Egg. 

Wemmbu wants to go home. He severed Arachnid’s rust-stained emblem off his crushed chestplate and it clanks loudly on his armoured leggings now from where he’d tied it to his belt. A reminder. 

—futile, in the end, because Egg’s head tipped onto his shoulder and he mumbled something, and Wemmbu felt the blood spilling down the front of their shirts. Egg? He remembers asking. His voice was hoarse. Egg, bro, lock in, we have to go, we can leave now. His head was heavy on Wemmbu’s shoulder, and it never came back up. He never came back. He never—

A few years ago, when their biggest problem was the Mafia, and he was still in touch with Parrot, Spoke, and the rest, Egg had gone missing. 

It was the usual kidnapping, but it wasn’t, because there had never been a power like the Mafia before that, and they had been so incredibly unprepared, and they hadn’t any idea how desperate an entity like the Mafia was to retain domination. 

And Egg didn’t talk about it until months later, but Wemmbu knew— that Egg had been taken because he was the most vulnerable member of that group, that the interrogation had not been peaceful. Electricity arcing through his body, Wemmbu’s greatest, most exploitable weak spot, and they had kept him strapped down in that chair for an entire week, and he had beaten the back of his head bloody against the backrest. And he had been brave. They didn’t get a scrap of information. Parrot thanked him, Wifies apologised, Spoke stared at him in his usual eerie manner, and Mapicc nodded like he understood.

He was Wemmbu’s weak spot. He was the only reason Wemmbu became strong in the first place. White feathers against purple hair, was how it was meant to be forever, and ever, ad infinitum. 

But these days he will lie down in a passage, where he can be alone, and he will look towards the ceiling and wait to die. 

—got the chance to apologise, he never got to beg for Egg’s forgiveness, for being the reason why he was dragged into this dog-eat-dog world to begin with, for being so weak, for letting him get taken again, and again, and again, and—

The reality is, even though Wemmbu said he’d never invest in Egg’s Scholarly Studies, he still learnt so much from him. About love, trust, grief, and all the thousand million possible forms of free-fall.

“You’re back,” Jaden says. 

“Where is he?” 

“Who?”

Egg, he wants to say. Where is my friend? I miss him, Jaden, can you help me find him?

“Bandit King,” he says instead, because he is not that stupid. 

“…You killed him, dude. Like you killed everyone else. I haven’t seen another player in weeks, is anyone from the civ even—”

“No. No, fuck you, you know where he is, so where is he?” Wemmbu takes a step forward, barely staggering this time, so take that, Jaden’s concern. Jaden backs away a little, and it isn’t satisfying or fulfilling at all. “You took him somewhere, didn’t you?”

“I…”

You’re scaring him, Egg sighs. Chill out.

“Where is he? Why are you keeping him safe? He’s a traitor.”

Jaden’s shoulders droop, he’s given up. “He ran to the surface. Uh, I asked Flame to put Codmaster somewhere safe above the caves while I kept an eye on you, and Bandit King followed them.”

It’s cold here, against the smooth surface of the stone wall. 

—he was so cold. Open hand, fingers half curled. Nails broken, skin sallow from months in captivity. He never got to escape. Consequently, Wemmbu will not let himself see the daylight, either. His eyes were hollow and dull, gazing into nothing—

“So he could be anywhere.” 

—his hair matted red, it hadn’t been peaceful at all. It had been silent, yes, but the battle was there, he could feel it, Egg’s body, frail before and falling apart now, his breaths became slower and slower and his heartbeat stuttered weakly. He’d pressed the totem to Egg’s chest, the beating subsiding, and there was blood seeping a treacherous smile on his neck, dripping through the gaps between his fingers where his other hand had cupped over the bleeding, trying to stem the flow. 

He remembers begging. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Please. Arachnid had laughed, vicious, opened his mouth to crow—

“Yes. I’m sorry,” Jaden says, and it doesn’t sound like he’s just apologising for letting Bandit King free.

Wemmbu doesn’t say anything else. He can’t, he thinks.

“What will you do now?” asks Jaden, when it’s made clear to him that he doesn’t have anything else to offer. “I think you got the entire civ. There isn’t much left here.”

“What else is there to do?”

“You could go up. Return to the rest of the world, pay Flame a visit. Actually, no, he’s annoying. We could find Codmaster again— you think he’s still fishing?”

“I can’t.”

Jaden blinks. “What do you mean, you can’t?”

“There’s nothing left for me up there anymore.”

“So you’re just gonna stay here forever?”

“Maybe I will.”

“I’ll keep you company, then,” he says decidedly. Like it’s that simple. 

“Don’t.”

“No?”

“It sucks down here.”

“Then why’re you staying?”

“For exactly that reason.”

“Well…” Jaden shrugs. “You don’t suck. So I’ll have that, at least.”

Jaden tails him when he walks away. He isn’t even subtle about it. At some point, Wemmbu thinks, he’ll get tired of following behind him, wandering through the grottos and spiralling deeper and deeper, closer to bedrock. 

They take breaks frequently. Wemmbu’s bones feel heavy with exhaustion. Periodically, his eyes will flare with pain that diffuses slowly through his entire body, and his hair hangs in stringy bunches around his face. There are tens of tiny fractures and sprains that he has no energy to heal beyond a golden apple. He’s seen what he looks like, in the reflection of pools. It’s not pretty.

“Bro, you always do this,” Egg would say, fond and exasperated, dragging the fine toothed comb through his locks. He’d seat Wemmbu down on the floor in front of him, while he sat on his bed, and he would painstakingly tease out all the knots, the torn or burnt pieces. At the end, long after Wemmbu fell asleep with his head leaning against Egg’s knees, he’d tie it up neatly, or braid it if he had enough time. 

They keep walking. Onwards, onwards, forever more and nevermore. Until the torches stop and they have to start placing themselves, and the cave dips down deeper, deeper. There are no more homes or mines in sight. No more churches, no more cathedrals. Not down here. 

Another thing that they don’t tell you about grief is that at some point, the pain becomes physical. It’s in him, everywhere, omnipresent and wracking his entire body, and he can’t stop shaking. There are no more bodies to kill, lives to snuff out, and without that outlet he is left to his own devices, and Jaden is concerned in his own way, but there isn’t much he can do. You look genuinely tragic, Egg would say. Wemmbu misses his fussing. 

Because that’s what this is— grief. Isn’t it? Wemmbu could swear that Egg was still with him, crouched behind a corner, leaning his head on top of Wemmbu’s in that annoying way he did when he wanted to flaunt his height. But Wemmbu keeps turning to him, and Egg keeps disappearing from his periphery. 

“Where’s our destination?” Jaden asks him.

“The bottom.”

“Bedrock?”

“Probably.”

“What’re we gonna do once we’re there?”

Wemmbu doesn’t respond to that one. Jaden’ll just get sad again.

“Wemmbu?”

“I’m going to keep walking. You do what you want.”

It goes without saying that he continues to follow behind him.

“Not far now,” Jaden says, days later.

—his voice thundering, and when Wemmbu blinked, Gambit was driving a dent in his chest, her spikes sinking through Arachnid’s armour and crushing his ribs in a single strike. Arachnid’s laughter died then, devolved into screams, and it was silent all around him. Oh shit, Flame said, and Yungy swore under his breath, and Egg did not say anything at all. He was— he looked— small, his limp form lying in the centre of the battlefield, where he didn’t belong, where he should never have—

The caves are frigid enough that the bodies had not rotted. Piled in corners or burnt to ash or blown up by TNT when Wemmbu remembered to discard them, they did not degrade in the short few days of limbo before natural despawn. 

He looked like he was only sleeping. 

“I was worried, you know?” Jaden tells him as they walk. When Wemmbu doesn’t respond, “You weren’t, uh, well. I don’t think you were really… here. For a while.”

Wemmbu’s hand trails on the right wall of the passageway. They’ve run out of torches. Jaden carries the last lantern behind him, held aloft to illuminate the path as best he can. 

“I mean, I get it.” He doesn’t. Nobody can. “In a sense. I’ve never…lost…someone as close to me before, so maybe it’s not really the same. But I know how it can fuck with your mind.”

Yet even with the lantern, he can still barely make out the interior. He’s cut his fingers on the wall by accident enough times that they’ve gone numb. I’ll bandage them for you, Egg says, but Wemmbu knows, now, that he won’t.

“And I’m sorry,” Jaden goes on to say, hesitant. “I don’t think I got the chance to say that properly. He was a cool guy.”

Wemmbu snickers involuntarily. “The coolest,” he mumbles, an echo of words long passed.

“Yeah?” Jaden prods.

“Yeah,” Wemmbu parrots. 

“Like, how?” Egg asked. “I was with Loppezz for most of our time, so I didn’t talk much to this Rejoice guy.”

Wemmbu blinks.

“I’m bored, dude, talk to me.”

“Just. He was good. A good person,” Wemmbu said. “Better than me. It should’ve been me.”

“Don’t say that,” Egg—Jaden—replied, without humour. 

“Why not?”

“You’re gonna leave me all alone in this world?” Egg joked. 

“I didn’t mean it like tha—”

There’s a lurching sensation somewhere between his ribs that Wemmbu soon realises is physical when his next footfall slips, not on moss or mildew, but through pure air. 

The rest of his body follows. Briefly, he catches sight of the lush cave around him, a hundred blocks tall if not more, and his water bucket is empty, and he threw out all of his totems weeks ago, and something in him settles at the realisation that he’s not surviving this. 

Sharp pain shoots through his arm. It forces out a shout of pain, abrupt, and he glances up to see Jaden kneeling by the edge of the hole, gripping onto his hand so tightly it begins to pulsate unpleasantly, like a bruise. He looks terrified, eyes black, not blue, but similarly wide and trembling. Something rushes by his ear; Wemmbu looks back down at the lantern, which lands in a bed of moss a hundred blocks beneath him.

“You good?” Jaden asks, breathless.

Wemmbu nods. His legs dangle over thin air, and he can hear his heartbeat in his ears, a furious thumping.

Roughly, Jaden drags him back up to solid ground, then further back, away from the edge.

“Oh my gosh, dude,” he sighs, when he’s satisfied that Wemmbu is safe and his shoulder hasn’t been dislocated. “I told you I should’ve gone in front. Where’s your water bucket?”

Wemmbu shows him his empty iron pail and Jaden’s face sours. 

“We have to go down,” he says; Jaden somehow looks even more affronted at this. “That was our last lantern. And I want to keep going in this direction.”

“Fine, but I’m going first.”

And he does, landing in a splash, before Wemmbu follows. They reclaim the discarded lantern, but now that they’re down here, they can see it much more clearly— the glowberries illuminate the whole subcave in a gentle glow that renders the device useless. 

—come even close. He was made for gentleness, quiet domesticity; Wemmbu, no matter how much he craved the same, was born for the never-ending violence of war. 

“Wemmbu!” Egg yelled. 

It was strange, because his best friend rarely ever raised his voice, not this loud.

The battlefield was chaotic and disorientating. The din of clamouring netherite and diamond, swords and spears against armour or shields, rose until Wemmbu could barely hear anything. But he heard Egg, of course.

Midair, Wemmbu turned his attention away from his opponent to glance down, and Arachnid was right there, his sword raised in a deadly arc aimed towards his heart. He reacted—too slow—his totem popped minutes ago and with the angle he was falling at, he could not bring down his mace or another windcharge without being intercepted with Arachnid’s blade. 

Oh, fuck, he thought. And, then, what the hell?

He landed, miraculously, alive. Arachnid stumbled backwards, and there were a pair of arms clad in suit jacket sleeves, out of place and grossly unarmoured, pulling him back, the remnant purple particles of an ender pearl rapidly fading into the air around them. 

“Egg?” he asked.

“Egg?” Arachnid repeated, infuriated.

He turned, and Wemmbu was too slow, and with a twist of his sword—

Well. You already know how that ends.

The lush cave is…

“Beautiful,” Jaden whispers. 

Egg would like this place, Wemmbu thinks absently. And then he stumbles, knee–first into soft moss, and this time Jaden is not quick enough to catch him, his head rushes painfully, the dull ache sharpening into a fever pitch as it slams into the ground. After that, he doesn’t know.

The thing is, it was always going to end this way. He knew, and they both knew. Witching hour nightmares under the crescent moon, fruitless prayers and aching ribs. Yungy handed him a book, when it was all over— the one that Egg had been carrying for years, which he was working on in secret while trapped in the heart of Arachnid’s empire. 

Egg promised he would try his best. He didn’t promise that he wouldn’t die, because that was both bad luck and a promise he would inevitably have to break, but he sat Wemmbu down and looked him straight in the eye and swore that he would hold on for as long as he could. 

Wemmbu knew that he would. Of course he would. But he also knew that it was never going to be enough.

He comes to, to the scent of cooking meat and soft humming. 

The taste of plant in his mouth is both familiar and completely out of place. Wemmbu splutters, struggles briefly, and jolts up, woozy. He spits out a clump of moss and gags.

“You’re up,” Jaden acknowledges, before he goes back to tending his furnace. 

“What the hell are you cooking for?” Wemmbu asks, wiping his mouth.

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

“I…guess? Not really.”

“Well, you passed out for something. I’ll give you a gapple too. That, the food, and your nap will cover all the bases that I can think of.”

Wemmbu shrugs.

Yet another thing they don’t tell you about grief is that you can run from it for as much as you like, but it will catch up to you months later while you are waiting to die. It will paralyse you. It will hurt.

And, for a while, he sat with Egg and waited for him to come back. 

See, Wemmbu wasn’t a patient person at all, but he could do or be anything, anything at all, for Egg. 

(He cried until his throat ached, and then some more.)

“How can I convince you to stay alive?” Jaden asks him, while they’re eating.

This time, he waits for Wemmbu to reply. They’re sitting by the brightest tendril of glowberries, a steak each. Wemmbu thinks about it, and keeps thinking. 

“I don’t know,” he says, eventually. He hugs his knees closer. “I miss him.”

Dear Wemmbu, the book had started with. I’m sorry that I am dead. That part was crossed out. It was all crossed out. Pages upon pages of drafted wills and apologies and messages. Please don’t be too sad, on page 15. I didn’t want to die, I hope you know that, on page 49. You can’t follow me. You have to keep going, on page 70. And on almost every page, I love you, I love you, I love you. On almost every page, Please don’t forget that you are my brother. You’re the only family I’ve ever known. I’m sorry.

“I miss him,” he repeats. “He was selfish. He was always trying to save me— me, like I’m not already strong enough. And I never got to apologise for it.”

Jaden waits. 

“There’s nothing left for me without him,” Wemmbu tells him. 

“No, there are still things left,” Jaden argues.

“Yeah, what?” Wemmbu says, caustic. He glares at his steak. “Don’t give me some anti-suicide PSA bullshit.”

He hears Jaden sigh. “I know not to. That’ll never gonna work on you.”

“Then what?”

“There’s still the rest of the server, isn’t there?”

Wemmbu tilts his head, indicating to him to continue.

“You— I mean, you’re gonna let yourself die, just like that?” Jaden questions. “The rest of the server will never know what happened to you, or him. I mean, you haven’t used any of your orbitals yet, ‘cause they don’t work underground, right? I’m just saying, you could do so much more. I know you can.”

Then, Egg said, “If Rejoice’s death affected you that much, you should do something about it.”

“What could I even do?” Wemmbu asks, or asked, both times. “I’ll get revenge—I already got revenge—but it won’t change the fact that he’s never coming back.”

Jaden shrugs. Egg shook his head. “But it’ll be good for you,” Jaden says. “It’ll help you move on,” Egg considered. “You know?”

“What if I don’t want to move on?” or, “I shouldn’t have good things. I keep fucking them over.”

Jaden’s looking at him, steadily. “I can’t let you die,” he insists. Egg is silent.

“Why not?” 

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t. I won’t let another one of my friends die if I can help it.”

“I could beat you in a fight,” Wemmbu points out. “I could run.”

“And then what, Wemmbu?” Jaden says tiredly. 

“…I don’t know.”

They keep eating.

The next day, they leave the cave. Down, and down, and further down they go. 

“You said you lost someone too,” Wemmbu says, before he realises he’s talking. 

Jaden startles. “I—yeah, I did. I didn’t know them for that long.”

“What was it like?”

“They were, uh, kids. Three of them. Well, not really kids— but they were barely adults, you know? Still fresh. I visited their group sometimes, since they lived on one of those smaller islands on the edge of my civ, and— I liked them. I really did. I tried my best to protect them, and I think we could have been good friends.”

“What happened?” 

Jaden scratches the back of his neck. “Same as you. Some power hungry random. They weren’t that weak, but they were inexperienced. But—” he pauses, suddenly flustered. “But it’s been ages. I’ve moved on, really. And, like I said, I didn’t get to know them that well.”

“…Huh,” Wemmbu considers.

Without much fanfare, they reach the natural end of the caves. It was bound to happen, with how much they’ve been travelling. 

“What now?” Jaden asks him.

Wemmbu pulls out his pickaxe. Jaden’s face drops.

“Do you even know how to build a bedrock breaker?” He asks, sounding slightly anxious. 

“I’ll figure it out. I already have redstone.”

“Oh, oh, so you were prepared for this, fantastic. Okay. Okay.” Jaden squeezes his eyes shut, like he’s steeling himself, then turns to look intensely at him. “Wemmbu.”

“Yes?”

“You don’t want to do this.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because— well, you’re scared, aren’t you?” He reasons.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“Whatever you want to think.”

“No, listen to me,” Jaden says, grasping Wemmbu’s shoulders, who barely avoids flinching at the sudden contact. “You are. Why else would— why, why else would you be crying right now?”

Wemmbu falters. 

“Shut up,” he says, and shrugs Jaden off. He continues to mine.

“Please, Wemmbu.”

The block beneath them breaks, and they are at bedrock. 

“You— deliberately took the most winding path possible,” Jaden insists. “We’ve probably gone through every single cave in this entire system by now. You kept returning to higher levels before coming down. You were delaying this, the entire time, because you know— you know you don’t want this! You’re scared! That’s fine, that’s— normal!”

“So what?” Wemmbu shoots back, his voice rough. 

“If you’re scared, then don’t do it,” he reasons. 

Wemmbu sits down on the bedrock and looks up at him, hesitant. 

“Then, what should I do?” he asks. “What can I do?”

“When I’m gone,” Egg had started, one of those nights.

Wemmbu jolted, lifted his head to glare at him.

“No, dude, listen to me. Come on, don’t be mad because of that.”

“I thought you were meant to be the smart one,” Wemmbu muttered. “That’s our whole thing. Stop saying stupid things.”

“I’m not gonna say anything crazy,” Egg sighed. “No death flags for me, alright?”

“What could you possibly say after “When I’m gone” that wouldn't raise a death flag, bro?”

“Nothing. Just— just, when I’m gone…stop glaring…when I’m gone, you have to promise me something, alright?”

“Fucking— fine,” Wemmbu replied reluctantly. “You won’t die that soon, so this is a pointless conversation anyway. Fine, what?”

“Who said anything about dying? Wait, I did.” Egg said, fiddling with his wings. “No, but I could leave you voluntarily, right? I’ll become Parrot’s sidekick or something.”

“Parrot?” Wemmbu parroted, incredulous. “Bro, at least pick Flame or something.”

“Heh. Yeah, you’re right, Parrot’s life is kinda trenches. Too much politics,” Egg snickered. “Look, anyway, what I was saying was that when I’m gone, you have to promise me you won’t— do anything crazy, okay? You’re always tweaking when I get kidnapped. You gotta… one of these times, you’ll have to move on.”

“Can we just go to bed?” Wemmbu asked. His throat stung.

Egg smiled, then. “Yeah, okay. Sorry I brought up something weird.”

“You should be,” he sulked, but shifted closer under the blankets anyway. 

“I’m going back to the surface after this,” Jaden offers. “I mean— there’s not much left down here for us. You…could come with me?”

I love you, the book had said. And he did. And he did. 

“…Yeah,” Wemmbu says, finally. “Okay.”

“Yeah?” Jaden smiles, for the first time in a while.

Wemmbu— can’t match that, yet. But, still, “Yeah, I’ll come with you. You can— keep an eye on me, or whatever it is you want. Do what you want.”

It’s like somebody’s cut his strings. Jaden crumples, sitting down hard next to hiim, and his whole body seems to droop in relief.

“Dude, are you good?” Wemmbu asks his newly deflated friend.

“Yeah,” Jaden answers, voice muffled from being smothered by his hands, in which he’s buried his head. “Yeah. Just— I’m glad. Oh, I am glad. Thank you. For choosing this.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m only doing this so I can orbital everyone and everything on the surface. Like you said. They don’t deserve to keep living.”

“That’s great,” Jaden’s grinning now. “Genuinely. That’s the best thing I’ve heard in weeks.”

“You’re weird as hell, man,” Wemmbu decides. Like that hasn’t been made obvious from the months of Jaden following him around in this cave system. 

“That’s still great.”

He shakes his head. “So— should we get back to the surface now?”

“Yes,” Jaden blurts out forcefully. Then, a little more sheepishly, “As soon as possible. God, I miss the sun… I guess we have to climb for a few days to get there, though.”

“Nah, we don’t. You forgot who I am, bro.”

Jaden looks at him inquisitively, and Wemmbu mines out a few more blocks, before gesturing at him to get back. 

Rummaging through his inventory, he pulls out a stab shot.

“Ohh,” Jaden hums, and plugs his ears.

With a flick of his wrist, a new skyhole is formed. 

“You have an elytra, right?” Wemmbu asks.

“Nah, but I have my trident. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Hey!” Somebody yells down at them, hundreds of blocks above. 

They both crane their necks up to squint at the new person. From this distance, Wemmbu can make out a few of them, all wearing haphazard, mismatched iron and diamond armour.

“What the hell, bro?” The person continues. “You freaking broke my house!”

“My first target,” Wemmbu mutters. To his left, Jaden laughs. 

“My bad!” He yells back up. “That was my friend’s doing. He says sorry!”

“I don’t.”

“Screw you, come up here and fight me!” The chungus calls down. 

“Okay,” Wemmbu says solemnly.

“What was that?” They yell.

“Don’t be too slow,” he tells Jaden. “I’m not waiting for you.”

“You don’t need to worry about me. Go get your chungus.”

In a cloud of gunpowder ash, he’s accelerating towards the surface. When he's about halfway there, his ears pop. 

When he breaks the surface, it is dawn. There’s grass all around, the Sun beaming down, faint clouds on the horizon. Below is a small village of similarly clad chunguses, all staring up, slack-jawed, at him. 

In his left hand, he switches to a nuke shot orbital, which rains down like hellfire on the village. In his right, he readies Gambit; leather creaks, familiar and welcome. 

There’s no mistaking the ache in his chest; there’s no taking it away. He knows, now, that nothing will change the pain of grief, the tremor in his fingers, the nights he will spend awake and alone. Nothing he might do can fix this.

So he won't. 

The rest of the server will feel it. And then they won't feel anything at all.