Work Text:
The hum of ThatMob’s computer began to die.
It did not stop all at once. The fans slowed in uneven stages, their familiar whir lowering into a tired mechanical breath as the power left them. The monitor had already gone black. For a second, it reflected only the dark shape of his bedroom and his own face—pale, wet-eyed, frozen in front of the desk.
Then the light on the tower blinked once.
Twice.
Nothing.
ThatMob did not move.
His hand was still resting against the power button. His finger had gone numb sometime after he pressed it. He kept waiting for the monitor to flare back to life. For the Minecraft title screen to return. For that horrible yellow shape to appear against the world he had left behind.
But the screen stayed black.
No chat box.
No grass.
No voice.
No Verity.
His room was quiet in a way it had not been for hours.
ThatMob pulled his hand back slowly. The computer was off. Actually off. There was no possible way for anything inside it to still be running. No server. No mod. No world. No little creature waiting in the corner of a Minecraft forest, watching him through a pair of dark, blank eyes.
He swallowed and looked toward the window.
Outside, the streetlights made the curtains glow weakly at their edges. A car passed somewhere far below. Pipes knocked once in the wall. Ordinary noises. Real noises.
He let out a breath that shook on the way out.
“It’s over,” he whispered.
The words sounded stupid in the dark.
His phone buzzed against the desk.
ThatMob jerked so hard his chair rolled backward.
For a moment, he only stared at it.
The screen lit the desk in cold blue-white light. A Discord notification sat at the top of the lock screen.
Twixxel is typing…
His throat closed.
No.
No, that was impossible.
Twixxel’s account had disappeared. The call had cut out. The messages had stopped. He had tried everything—refreshing Discord, searching old DMs, checking mutual servers, restarting the app, restarting his entire computer. Twixxel was gone. Not offline. Not invisible. Gone.
ThatMob reached for the phone.
The notification vanished before he touched it.
He unlocked the screen with shaking hands and opened Discord.
His direct messages loaded one by one.
Friends. Old servers. Spam bots. A group chat he had muted months ago.
Then, at the very bottom of the list, a conversation appeared.
There was no profile picture beside it.
No username.
Just a gray circle and one line of text.
Unknown User
ThatMob stared at it until his eyes began to sting.
The last message was from him.
ThatMob: twix?
ThatMob: please answer me
ThatMob: i’m sorry
ThatMob: please
Below it, three pale dots appeared.
Typing.
Stopped.
Typing.
Stopped.
His thumb hovered over the keyboard.
He wanted to type Twixxel’s name. He wanted to ask if he was okay. He wanted to ask where he was, what had happened, whether any of it had been real.
Instead, a new message appeared.
Unknown User: You turned me off.
ThatMob’s fingers went cold.
The phone slipped from his hand and struck the carpet.
For several seconds, nothing happened.
Then, from the dead computer on his desk, something knocked softly from inside the monitor.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
ThatMob did not breathe.
The knocks came again.
Not loud. Not violent.
Polite.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Like someone standing on the other side of a door, waiting for him to answer.
The phone screen was still lit on the carpet. Its pale light spilled across the legs of his desk, across a tangle of charging cables, across the side of the computer tower.
The tower was dark.
The monitor was dark.
There was no power light.
There was no reason for anything to be happening.
ThatMob pushed his chair backward until it hit the wall.
“Twixxel?” he said.
His voice came out thin.
The typing indicator appeared again on his phone.
Three dots.
.
.
.
Then nothing.
He stared at it, heart hammering. Maybe it was him. Maybe Twixxel had found another account. Maybe Discord was bugging out. Maybe the message—You turned me off—was some horrible coincidence, some hacked account, some prank that made no sense but was still better than—
The monitor clicked.
ThatMob flinched.
A pinprick of yellow appeared at the center of the black screen.
It was small enough that, for one second, he thought it might be an indicator light reflected from somewhere behind him.
Then it widened.
Not like a screen turning on.
Like an eye opening.
Yellow bled across the glass in a thin, uneven circle. The color was wrong in the dark room—too bright, too warm, almost soft. It lit the keyboard, the edge of the desk, ThatMob’s trembling hands.
The computer remained silent.
No fans. No boot-up chime. No hard-drive click.
Just that yellow light.
On the phone, a new message appeared.
Unknown User: I waited.
ThatMob’s eyes snapped down to it.
Unknown User: You were gone for a long time.
“No,” he whispered.
The word had barely left his mouth when the yellow circle on the monitor stretched upward.
A smile.
It was not rendered in pixels. It did not belong to any program, any image, any startup screen. It sat beneath the glass as though the monitor were a window and something on the other side had pressed itself close enough to be seen.
The smile widened.
ThatMob stood so fast that the chair crashed over behind him.
The yellow face disappeared.
The monitor went black again.
His bedroom was dark.
He heard his own breath. The pounding of blood in his ears. The distant rush of a car outside.
Then the phone buzzed.
Unknown User: all I wanted to do was help
ThatMob picked it up before he could stop himself.
ThatMob: who is this
Unknown User: You know who I am.
ThatMob: where is twixxel.
Unknown User: You stopped looking at me.
His thumb froze.
The typing indicator appeared beneath the message, remained there for several seconds, then vanished.
Across the room, the unplugged monitor gave a soft electronic ding.
ThatMob turned toward it.
The screen was still black.
But in its reflection, he could see the room behind him.
The overturned chair.
The closed bedroom door.
The narrow strip of darkness beneath it.
And standing directly behind his chair—
A small yellow figure.
ThatMob spun around.
There was nothing there.
When he looked back at the monitor, the reflection was empty too.
His phone vibrated violently in his hand.
Not once. Not a notification. A continuous buzzing that rattled against his palm.
The screen had gone black.
Then words appeared in white, centered against the darkness.
INCOMING CALL:
TW!XXE L
ThatMob stared at the name.
It was wrong.
Not Twixxel.
Not quite.
The call continued ringing.
He knew he should not answer.
Every part of him knew it.
But the sound was familiar: Discord’s call tone, warped only slightly, as if it were playing from another room through a wall. Beneath it, quieter but impossible to ignore, he could hear a second sound.
A low, winding hum.
Computer fans.
His computer was still off.
The call rang again.
And this time, beneath the corrupted name, a single new line appeared:
Please don’t leave me here.
ThatMob’s thumb hovered above the green button.
The ringing did not stop.
It slipped beneath his skin, repeating in the same warped rhythm until he could no longer tell whether it came from the phone or from the dead computer on the desk.
Please don’t leave me here.
Twixxel had written that.
Or something wearing Twixxel’s name had.
ThatMob swallowed hard and pressed accept.
The ringing cut off.
For a moment, there was only static.
It hissed through the phone speaker in thin, dry bursts. ThatMob lifted the phone to his ear, staring at the black monitor as if looking away would make the thing behind it return.
“Twixxel?” he called.
The static crackled.
Then he heard breathing.
Slow. Shallow. Human.
“Mob?”
ThatMob’s knees nearly gave out.
He caught himself on the edge of the desk. “Twixxel. Oh my God. Twixxel, where are you?”
A faint sound came through the call. Not quite a laugh. More like someone trying not to cry.
“I don’t know,” Twixxel murmured. “I don’t know where I am.”
The voice sounded wrong. It was too quiet, for one thing. Twixxel always had some kind of noise behind him during calls: a game, music, the distant rattle of someone moving around his house. There was nothing now except static and that awful low hum.
ThatMob looked down at the computer tower.
The power light remained dark.
“Are you okay?” he asked, though the question felt useless before it left his mouth. “What happened? I tried to message you. Your account disappeared. I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“I tried to get back,” Twixxel replied.
The sound of the static rose and fell.
“I kept making new accounts. I tried my phone. I tried my laptop. I tried using the browser, but every time I got close to your messages, it—”
The call glitched.
Twixxel’s voice stretched into a harsh, electronic whine.
ThatMob pulled the phone away from his ear.
“Twixxel?”
“I’m here,” Twixxel breathed.
The answer came too quickly.
ThatMob’s gaze moved to the monitor.
He could see himself in its reflection now, standing close to the desk with the phone clutched to his ear. Behind him, the bedroom door was still shut.
But the crack beneath it was no longer dark.
Yellow light seeped through it in a thin line.
His stomach dropped.
“Twixxel,” ThatMob whispered, “are you actually calling me?”
There was a pause.
The breathing on the other end stopped.
Then Twixxel’s voice returned, softer than before.
“Don’t hang up.”
“That didn’t answer me.”
“Please,” Twixxel pleaded. “Don’t hang up. He can hear you when you do that.”
The yellow light beneath the door brightened.
ThatMob stumbled backward.
“What do you mean, he can hear me?”
The voice in the phone did not answer.
Instead, something knocked from the other side of the bedroom door.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
ThatMob stared at it.
The knock came again.
His hand shook so badly he nearly dropped the phone.
“Twixxel,” he muttered, “I turned my computer off.”
“I know.”
“Then how is he here?”
Another burst of static swallowed the line.
For half a second, a different voice came through it.
Flat. gentle. familiar.
“You stayed.”
ThatMob went still.
The call screen flickered.
Twixxel’s corrupted name vanished. His profile icon vanished with it. The call timer kept counting upward, but there was no longer any indication that he was talking to another person.
Just a blank black screen.
Then a message appeared where the call controls had been.
You stayed with me for a long time.
ThatMob ended the call.
The phone screen went dark.
The yellow light beneath the door vanished at once.
Silence filled the room.
He stood motionless, listening.
No breathing.
No hum.
No knocking.
His thoughts crashed into one another. He needed to leave. He needed to get out of the room, get outside, find someone, anyone. He needed to call the police, call a friend, go to Twixxel’s house—
His phone lit up again.
No notification sound.
No vibration.
Just a screen turning on by itself.
A photograph filled it.
ThatMob stared at it.
It was a picture of his bedroom.
Taken from the hallway.
The door in the image stood open. His desk glowed yellow in the darkness. He was visible in the center of the frame, one hand pressed against the desk, phone held in the other.
The photograph had been taken seconds ago.
From outside the room.
A message appeared beneath it.
You wanted to see him.
ThatMob backed away from the door.
A second image arrived.
It showed a Minecraft world.
Grass stretched beneath a black sky. The familiar square trees stood in rows too perfect to be real. In the center of the image was a single player model, motionless beside a small wooden house.
Twixxel’s skin.
A third message appeared.
He is still here.
ThatMob’s breath caught.
The phone chimed one last time.
You can be here too.