Chapter Text
Are they themselves to blame, the misery, the pain? Didn’t we let go, allowed it, let it grow? If we can’t restrain the beast which dwells inside, it will find its way, somehow, sanctus espiritus, redeem us from our solemn hour, insanity is all around us, is this what we deserve, can we break free from chains of never-ending agony?
Pearl was having a very bad week.
Well, if you counted it from when Scar and Doc had hauled Grian back from a death game, seemingly fine, only for Stress and False to go bolting out to him an hour later at Mumbo’s behest under the presumption of grievous injuries that neither of them would actually explain afterward, Pearl was having a very bad week. If you counted it from when Grian up and disappeared two days after that, the server still insistent he was present despite all inability to find him, she was having a very bad five days.
Of course, if you counted it from the beginning of the death game in question, Last Life itself, Pearl was having a very bad two months. And if you took into account the fact that Pearl had, all told, a little more than six months of memories?
Well, Pearl’s life kind of sucked as far back as she remembered, actually.
And now she doesn’t have a body.
Again.
She really thinks she should be allowed to curl up and cry about that, actually. Unfortunately for her, she has the ability to do exactly neither of those things, thanks to the aforementioned lack of body.
Bit of a circular issue, there.
It takes her a minute—well, quite a bit more than a minute, actually—to calm herself back down when she’d suddenly fazed through the pumpkin she was building. It was almost Halloween, by Hermitcraft time (and she pointedly ignores the fact that it had also been Almost Halloween when they’d been snatched into Last Life, and they’d been there long enough that they should have passed Christmas too). She hadn’t quite gotten as far as she wanted before she left, and the server clearly needed some more festive sprucing up since everyone had apparently unanimously decided they just weren’t going to talk about the bloody death game nearly a dozen of them had just been in, and so Pearl had decided to just continue all the spooky shenanigans she’d started beforehand.
Think about the decorations. Don’t think about the death game. Don’t think about how Grian’s missing, ostensibly still on the server, ostensibly horrifically injured.
That had been the idea, anyway, right up until the point she lost her body and phased through the pumpkin.
It’s sort of like when redstone wiring shorts out, Pearl thinks, and you know you have to fix it but you immediately try to turn your lamp on to see better to fix the wiring that won’t let your lamp turn on. She tries to both huff and bite her lip, and she can’t do either of those things, because she doesn’t have a body. She can’t sigh, can’t bury her face in her hands, and she definitely can’t curl up in a ball and cry about it either.
Pearl’s lip can’t tremble, but she feels the phantom sensation of something like it anyway as she tips her head up toward the full moon that’s just cresting the horizon of her section of the Boatem Gigabase. She can just see, from the corner of her eye, (the eye she doesn’t have), the newly-added and glimmering midnight sky of Grian’s alleyway tucked underneath Scar’s peaks, and if she tilts her not-head she can look back at Mumbo’s mountain and Impulse’s factory.
(Or she can picture the exploded splinters of the Scottage, the caved-in roof of Magical Mountain, the faintly smoking wreckage of the Southlands—)
No, Pearl. Don’t think about that. Don’t think about the death game, don’t think about the sizzle of TNT and the glint of red, don’t think about Ren piercing her through, don’t think about how she should be counting herself lucky that her first game had been cut short when she was still green and she was one of the only people who’d only properly gone through it once—
Pearl can’t cry, and she wants her brother, and she can’t stop thinking about the stupid death game, and she wants her brother, and she can’t find him, and she wants Grian—
And in the blink of an eye Pearl doesn’t have, she finds him. (It’s just like last time this had happened, she realizes dully, almost having forgotten how nigh-instantly she’d latched onto him, waiting for a meeting she couldn’t make.)
It’s… a bit different, this time.
The first thing she notices is his wings, just the barest glimpse of them out from under his blankets, because they’re just as much of a shock to behold as last time. She remembers black feathers and sinewed glory against the night, a secret so carefully kept that Grian had turned some very interesting colors when Pearl, quite pointedly cocooned inside, had had the audacity to bring them up, to call them beautiful—
Grian hasn’t noticed she’s there yet, anyway, for any sort of similar reaction this time. She’s not even sure he’s awake. He’s stretched out on his belly in his blanket nest, the only thing saving him from the cold of the raw terracotta floor (they’re out in the mining mesa, then, entirely off the main continent, no wonder no one had stumbled onto him yet). He sounds… awful, if Pearl’s being honest, his breathing uneven and labored. There’s a definite line of sweat on his brow that’s just glinting in the meager torchlight.
Pearl thinks to swallow, and can’t. Was he sick? He doesn’t look injured, but she’d known something had gone wrong, because she’d seen the death-pale look on Mumbo’s face when he’d come working his way through the Octagon and gone pleading for Stress—
And then she notices his wings, for the second time.
And she can’t fucking cry. (Because that explained it, that explained everything besides why he was out in the mesa sick as a dog and refusing to ask for bloody help— and that could be explained, quite simply, by the fact that it was Grian and he’d always been an idiot.)
There are feathers scattered in the blankets—some tiny, soft, and downy, barely the length of her last knuckle, while others are more than the span of her hand, black and dulled of the gleam even the meager torchlight should offer. She can see, equally, the gaps where the larger feathers have worked themselves loose from his wings, patches where the rows lay unevenly or have bared completely.
And then his wings, quite simply, end.
Pearl had thought them half-folded, earlier. She’d assumed the angle, the torchlight, the fact that she didn’t actually have eyes was creating some odd optical illusion.
She’d been wrong.
They’ve been cut. Hacked off, and a bloody ragged job of it too. Severed.
There’s a surge of red-hot, liquid rage on the tongue Pearl doesn’t have as she traces the line where the wings had been carved in two—remembers the only night she’d been given the unintentional privilege of seeing them. Remembers the massive, shining, black feathers that had stretched out against the night, remembers the joint and bone and muscle that had caught the air with a precision no elytra could clearly ever hope to match.
And it was just—
Gone. Stolen. Taken away, with the shell of Grian left behind to rot, to hide away in feverish half-sleep in some mining biome because of some ridiculous psychological inability to seek out help.
“Hi, Griba,” Pearl says, and Grian doesn’t stir. She can’t—oh, this was going to be a nightmare, because apparently she’d been in this stupid ghost form well before but she has no idea how she left it the first time, thanks to her stupid, shoddy memory, and the only way she knows how to get out of it and back into her stupid, touch-and-go body involves Grian.
So clearly that isn’t going to fly right now, though Pearl cringes (or doesn’t) at the morbidity of the pun when she thinks it. Because she rather doubts Grian can do whatever the hell it was he did last time to bring her back right now, and she can’t exactly make him feel any better when she has no body.
Fortunately, Pearl is not psychologically incapable of asking for help.
It takes her a while to get where she wants to—because it took an awful lot of concentration to move around in this form, and because she really, really wants to be with Grian and it’s really hard to overcome that, and because he head is ringing with the last time she’d called him Griba and— Don’t. Don’t ‘Griba’ me right now, don’t you dare, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what they’re like, you don’t know what’s at stake, you don’t know what you’re risking, you don’t know what they did to me—
And they hadn’t. Clearly. They hadn’t known.
And it had—
It had cost him his wings, maybe.
However powerful you think the Watchers are, however cruel, they are a hundred times worse and I’m not letting you all throw yourselves at their mercy again!
(And maybe he had, instead, because Grian is that reckless and that foolish and he loved them, Pearl thinks, more brilliantly with every beat of his ridiculous heart.)
…This really wasn’t making it any easier to get back to Boatem.
Pearl manages, eventually, though it takes her more than a few minutes to disconnect Grian from Boatem enough to really tear herself away from his side. It’s bad enough she’s looking for Mumbo, and the two were damn near inseparable as it was, and he’s in Treesa which carries too many memories in itself—
But she manages, eventually, and the lights in Mumbo’s van are still on, and the man in question is curled up too-small in his window, chin in his hand as he stares out into Boatem.
“Mumbo,” Pearl says, and despite the fact that Mumbo seems significantly more aware than Grian is at present, he makes no move to acknowledge her. “Mumbo. Mumbo! Mumbo? MUMBO!”
Mumbo finally jolts at that, nearly dislodging himself from his perch, though he’s staring rather blankly around the room and it takes another half a dozen tries and a significant amount of effort on Pearl’s part before he makes anything resembling eye contact with her.
“…Pearl?” Mumbo ventures, giving a slow sort of blink not all unlike the face Jellie or Nugget might make upon being woken from a nap. Then, staring, “You’re a ghost again.”
“I’ve noticed,” Pearl says, perhaps a bit too sharply. Since they apparently seem to be stating the obvious, she replies, “You’re a potato again.”
Mumbo sighs bitterly, nods, and scrubs his very potato-like face in his very potato-like hands. “I don’t know why,” he says in something that borders on a wail. “Because I wasn’t when we were—that’s one of the perks of death games they don’t put on the tin, you know! You might end up brutally betraying and murdering your friends but at least it un-potatoes you!”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Pearl says dryly.
“But I was thinking, you know, last night, that I could sure use a nice baked potato after my death game! Just a nice, relaxing, tasty, totally normal baked potato! And then! Here I am! I don’t know about you, but I feel like a man should be able to enjoy a nice baked potato after his death game without turning back into one! But no!”
Then, because Pearl’s never been very good at mincing her words, and because Mumbo seems to be on the verge of a potato-related breakdown that she’s ill-equipped to handle, she cuts in, “I found Grian.”
“O-oh,” Mumbo says, and his potato-skin cheeks somehow flush. “I. Um. Oh, that’s good! Is he, um—well, I suppose he’s—well. That’s good!” He bits his lip, then says, “He’s okay, then?”
Pearl doesn’t shake her head, because she can’t. “Not really,” she says, and watches Mumbo’s shoulders slump. “He’s out in the mesa like an idiot, and he looks miserable, and you might have noticed I’m not exactly in any state to bring him anything. So I was hoping you could—geez, by the look of him you could pour a brewery of potions down his throat right now, what have you got on hand?”
“Oh,” Mumbo says again, then curls up further on himself and says, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
Pearl pauses, flabbergasted, then says, “What are you talking about?”
“Well. It’s. Um. I’m not sure he’ll be very happy to see me right now, is all,” Mumbo says, head pointedly downturned. “So I guess I’m just… probably not the best person to ask.”
“You’re his best friend,” Pearl says, and there’s something bitter in the words, something that might just taste a little too much like jealousy.
“And I—” Mumbo starts, then breaks off with a sharp intake of breath. “I did the one thing he asked me never to do, I did the one thing that could jeopardize that—and I—but I couldn’t, Pearl! There wasn’t anything I could do, I am so not qualified to—I had to get Stress, Pearl, I had to, and I shouldn’t have told her but I had to—”
“His wings?” Pearl says, and watches Mumbo’s eyes go wide in a way hers can’t. “...I saw.”
Mumbo’s eyes well up a little, before he pointedly clears his throat and straightens up. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. I don’t know why they did it. I don’t know why they—” He breaks off, shoves a knuckle in his mouth, and Pearl wonders a bit too morbidly how that worked when one was a potato.
“Should I go get Scar instead?” she asks.
“No!” Mumbo cries. “Don’t—Scar doesn’t know. Scar doesn’t know anything, that was just me and X and then you—”
“Scar knows,” Pearl points out. “He’s seen them. Well, before.”
“...Oh,” Mumbo says, and he sounds a bit hurt, and frankly Pearl is too busy thinking about the picture of misery that’s currently out in the mesa to try to untangle the web of secrets there. Then, standing up with all the lanky unsteadiness that characterized him, Mumbo says, “No. No, I’ve got potions, I’ll go, don’t get Scar—G’s in the mesa, you said? Have you got coords?”
Pearl gestures, or at least thinks about gesturing as best she can with this stupid not-body that’s held together by strands of moonlight and code. “Do I look like I can check coords like this?” she asks, maybe a little too sharply, but whatever. Mumbo, with a chagrined look, shrugs and rubs at the back of his neck. Softer, she adds, “Listen, I’ll head back out and meet you at the portal out there when I figure out where he is exactly, all right?” She hums, somehow, then says, “Um, change of clothes for him, maybe? Fresh blankets, food and water? I don’t know what he bothered to take or what he’s got out there.”
Mumbo nods, and it’s far easier for Pearl to leave Boatem again than it had been to show up, because it’s impossible not to admit that deep down she just wants her brother.
Even if it’s not any easier to look at him the second time.
She stretches the sense of herself down, face to should-be face, feet pointed the opposite direction—because even without a proper body, trying to contort herself around Grian’s ragged left wing feels almost a strange sort of sacrilegious. She doesn’t like the odd sense of familiarity that’s rising in her, one that she would normally grab at like fading tendrils of smoke, like they’d offer some hint beyond the heavy black curtain that shrouds her memories.
(She feels like she’s been here before, silently forced to watch her best friend suffer, and she thinks maybe that’s a memory she doesn’t really want back.)
The difference this time—if it is a difference, which Pearl can’t know for sure—is that Grian sucks in a waking breath, and blinks his eyes open, and latches his gaze onto her almost instantly.
“...Pearl?” he manages, and she can hear the word itself catch in his throat, can only watch as a cough rips up after, leaving him curling around himself and his breath hissing when he finally stops. He swears, quite vehemently, when he does, and presses his face back into his thin pillow with a bitter sigh.
“Sorry,” says Pearl, wondering how she can still feel heartache when she hasn’t got a heart. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. I just thought I’d—”
“Yeah,” Grian mumbles against the fabric, and the word is heavy with exhaustion. “I can see. Give me a min.”
Pearl stays silent, and gives him his minute, and thinks it’s entirely unfair that she can’t touch him.
He groans, quietly, at the end of it, and shifts to prop himself on his hip. Pearl pointedly ignores the obvious stiffness in what remains of the near wing as he shifts it up over his back, the way the far one thumps too hard against the ground as he plainly and unsuccessfully attempts to keep weight off it. “C’mere,” Grian says, extending the arm that isn’t holding him up (and the one that is is trembling with the effort of even levering him a few inches off the ground), palm raised and fingers curled.
It would, under any other circumstances, be a plain invitation for Pearl to take it, so she pushes what she thinks of herself into that same half-sitting, half-lounging position and fixes her gaze on his hand. She can just, if she concentrates hard enough, wind the cool mist of her own almost-hand into harmony with his warm flesh.
And then her chest yanks, hard, and she has a chest to get yanked, and Pearl chokes on air again, and she slams her elbow against the terracotta hard enough to jolt up to her shoulder, and the hand tangled with her own is rough with builder’s callouses.
“Grian—” she gasps out, half in chastisement and half in shock, and she barely has time to push herself more properly upright before his arm goes out from under him and he drops almost bonelessly back into the blankets. “You absolute idiot, I wasn’t asking you to—”
“Oh, right,” he mutters, and he’s definitely wheezing now, and the way he’s laying cannot be comfortable but he looks like he hardly has the energy to even contemplate fixing it. “Because I was just going to leave you like that.”
“I was going to tell you,” Pearl huffs, “that Mumbo is coming with potions, and we could have worried about me when we got some of those in you!”
A long moment passes, and Grian doesn’t move. “Ah,” he says. “That might’ve been smart.”
Pearl barks out a laugh that might be half a sob, and it hurts to look at him, and how dare they hurt him like this? Were the death games not bloody enough? “C’mere yourself,” she says, and flips so they’re arranged in the same direction, and very neatly avoids touching his wings, and very gently tugs on his waist.
Grian, without protest, shifts to throw his arm around her ribs and bury his head in her shoulder, and she counts a dozen laboring breaths from him before the silence breaks.
“Did you even bring your own potions?” Pearl asks, and it’s less sharp than she would have normally intended such words.
“Mm,” Grian manages, which is probably an affirmative, but it doesn’t seem like he’s even spending the effort to really emote. “Ran out.”
“Eating? Drinking?” Pearl presses, and she can’t even tell if the sound he makes is supposed to be positive or negative. He’s fever-hot pressed against her, and she’d be lying to say he smelled like sunshine and fresh daisies. “Any sort of normal bodily function whatsoever?” He pointedly doesn’t answer and she blows out a breath. “Why didn’t you text someone?” Speaking of texting, she probably ought to text Mumbo, since she can now access coordinates again and it doesn’t seem like Grian’s going to be letting her up to meet Mumbo at the portal anytime soon.
“Didn’t want to be a bother,” Grian mumbles, and Pearl thinks if he were any further from death’s doorstep she might have cuffed him for it.
“You are, as they say,” Pearl says, tracing an affectionate hand up his side to soften her words, “an absolute spoon.”
Grian does at least laugh at that, full-throated and hearty, though it quickly dissolves into another coughing it sends him bowing away from her and, when he finishes, sends the wing he’d been pointedly holding away from her to slide weakly over to cover her hips and belly. It’s hotter than the rest of him, somehow, leaving Pearl with little to guess about where the problem was coming from. “So,” she says. “That’s a lovely little infection you’ve got going on there.”
“Oh, yeah. Lovely’s the word.”
“You’re an idiot,” Pearl says, “and you should have texted someone.”
A long silence drags out.
“She drugged me.”
“...What?” Pearl asks, because she can’t quite wrap her head around how that sentence is supposed to fit, and she really hopes Grian isn’t about to drop off into complete incoherency.
“I told her—that I didn’t want her to—and she drugged me,” Grian bites out, and there’s an edge of something a little too watery in his voice. “And I—I didn’t want—” He shifts, burying his head more firmly in Pearl’s shoulder, and doesn’t continue.
“I’m sorry,” Pearl says in a soft voice, and tucks her chin in against his head. Then, softly, tentatively, “Can I look?”
She feels him go tense in every line, feels the weight of his wing ease a little bit even if he doesn’t entirely remove it.
“Griba,” she says, a little more firmly. “For once in your life.”
Grian shifts. He twists his head away from her, returns to facing the wall. “Fine,” he mutters. “Whatever.”
Well, it was something, Pearl thinks, and shimmies out from under him. He still flinches, barely, as she ghosts careful fingers over what remains of his feathers.
(Although, frankly, she would rather have not looked at what lays under the bandages, and thinks she could count it in the quite small category of memories she’d actually rather be without.)
“I’m not sure potions are going to do much,” Pearl admits, conscientious of how she strings the words together. Grian’s so terribly fragile in this moment, and probably closer to death than life, and she has a feeling it’s not just pain and exhaustion that’s clipping his words so thoroughly.
“Stress,” Grian says, a little too sharply, still facing away, “said I’m not allowed to respawn for three days.”
Pearl bites her lip, and ghosts her hand over his wing without actually touching. “You’ve been gone almost twice that,” she points out.
A beat passes, and there’s a note of genuine surprise in his tone. “Have I?”
Pearl forces her hands to steeple together, swallowing back the sour taste in her throat. “I don’t think Mumbo thought to bring harming potions,” she says, which feels terribly cavalier of her.
“Oh, gods,” Grian says. “Have you ever gone out to a bloody harming potion? It’s worse than—” He breaks off, then adds, quieter, “Most things.”
“...Right,” Pearl says. “Do you want to—”
“Stick a sword in me and be done with it, Pearl,” Grian says, and there’s a note of vulnerability he can’t quite hide under the gruffness of the words. “I’d rather chance the respawn at this point.”
Pearl swallows, and finds herself hyper-aware of the sensation now that she’d been bereft of it. There are situations in which killing her best friend could constitute a fun way to spend the night, and this is decidedly not one of them. “I don’t know if I trust myself to do it from the back,” she says, and the words turn out a touch more hysterical than she wanted.
Grian groans, and levers himself partway back up, though Pearl has to help him flip the rest of the way, and he’s little more than dead weight, and she knows it has to be torment to lay on his wings like that—
(And Pearl’s not staring, even if his eyes are closed and he’s probably only half-aware of where her gaze is at anyways, and it’s—)
(It’s brutal, and it’s unfathomably cruel what they’ve done to him, and she wants to cry and she wants to scream and she does neither, and what she does is hate the Watchers in some terribly familiar way she’s never hated anything before.)
“Do you care at all about these?” she asks, nudging at a blanket, because they definitely will get bloody in the hang before the respawn, and she definitely isn’t procrastinating on drawing her sword from her inventory. “Mumbo’s bringing more.”
“Then no,” Grian says, and for the barest moment he blinks his eyes open, bloodshot and shadowed and full of trust, before he closes them once more and tilts his head and bares his throat to her. “Make it quick.”
And Pearl draws her sword from her inventory, and hates the Watchers, and reminds herself this is not a death game, and steels herself, and does not look at the mutilated remnants of her best friend’s wings, and sucks in a breath, and drives her sword into her brother’s throat.