Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Falling off the charts, burning all your bridges, you don’t wear a scar while I’m the one in stitches and I don’t know why you point the finger every time, got me shaking at the sight, got me quaking in my mind, you’re tripping over every fault of mine, you’re breaking open every single time, it’s never black and white, going seismic out of spite, I never know if it’s your fault or mine, you’re breaking open every single time, faultline…

The Void

“You will leave this world once, never to return. Once it is lost, there will be no reclaiming it. It will exist, adrift, in no other place than your memories. It will scatter your friends into the Universe and shatter them, only a great effort able to reclaim them. It will air secrets, it will fracture friendships along fault lines, and it will force the most tenuous of alliances. That is the price for this bargain. It will cost this world.”

The Void is cold.

That’s the second-worst part of it, really—the unrelenting, bone-bitter cold that, despite the impossibility, never quite seems to reach equilibrium. Logic and the laws of thermodynamics dictated that at some point he should die of hypothermia or at least stop being cold, and yet it never happens.

That’s still not the worst part, though for a while he thinks one leads into the next. No, the worst part is the ache of nothingness. It is the lack of sensation, the numbness, the nothing that is truly the worst. The floating, adrift and lost, with nothing to touch but simply to scrabble his fingers against the inside of his own suit—

No. Scratch that. Move it all down one.

The worst part is that only four of his Hermits are here, and Grian has no idea what’s happened to the rest of them.

(He has a good guess on at least one, and he knows all five of them—especially Impulse—are trying very, very hard not to dwell on it.)

There’s a burning, tingling itch that’s playing under his skin now, that makes him almost able to feel the distance stretching across to the other Hermits, wherever they are. It begs him to look, to Look, to stretch out across the universe to find them and pull them back into himself—

There are several problems with that, of course, given that Boatem is currently floating in the Void and dragging everyone else down to a certain suffocation doesn’t seem like it’d be very good for their long-term well-being. Nor his own, for that matter, considering that pulling out his Eyes would be a very good way to also pull out his wings, sending them through the meager layer of pressurized canvas (presumably) protecting him from certain death.

And so they wait. And wait. And wait.

Grian has never been especially good at quiet introspection, and yet the universe has currently left him little else to do.

Grian watches, only because he does not dare to Watch, as a million worlds spin on in the peripherals.

There’s a distinctive slide of canvas against itself that he tries valiantly to ignore, at least for a moment. That’s swiftly ended by the familiar lilting tone of, “Well, hello there.”

Quite valiantly resisting the urge to sigh, Grian says, “Hello, Scar.”

He finally turns his gaze away from the Void, seeing they’d managed to rearrange themselves while he hadn’t been looking. Scar, somehow, had shuffled himself over into Impulse’s spot at Grian’s right, and is now staring at him with a bright curiosity utterly at odds with the situation they currently found themselves in.

“What do you want now?” Grian asks when Scar doesn’t speak for a long moment.

“Am I not allowed to say hello to my good and great friend?” Scar asks.

“Do you need to say hello when we’ve been together the entire time?” Grian returns.

“Have you always managed to turn every conversation into an interrogation, or did you pick that up somewhere?”

“I’m not the one who started this conversation,” Grian points out. “So what was it you wanted?”

“To say hello,” Scar says again, maddeningly even. Grian glances over to where Impulse, Mumbo, and Pearl are all, well—not even bothering to hide that they’re staring, actually. Grian supposes there isn’t exactly much privacy when five people are stuck floating in the Void together for gods only knew how long.

…And really, just how long did they plan on staying here?

“Scar,” Grian says, abruptly mortified that no one had thought to ask this very relevant question. “How much air did you give us, exactly?”

A very, very long moment passes. “That’s a very good question,” Impulse points out.

Scar, rather alarmingly, clears his throat. “Enough?”

“Enough for what?” Grian presses. “How long did you think we’d be down here?”

Scar, rather than answering properly, lets out a yelp as something in his suit shifts and then, a beat later, a fuzzy gray-and-white head pops up into his helmet. “Excuse me—”

“You have Jellie in your suit?” Pearl asks.

“Well where else was I going to put her?” Scar asks sullenly.

“Scar,” Grian says. “Did you think a single second past jumping into the Void?”

“Well,” Scar says again, “I assumed we’d figure out a way out of the Void eventually.”

“And how—” Mumbo starts, sounding slightly more hysterical than Grian did but really not any more hysterical than Grian felt, “how exactly did you think we’d do that?”

“Um,” Scar says. “Now that part I didn’t really get to.”

A long moment passes.

“I’m going to,” Grian starts. “I don’t know what I’m going to do but I’m sure going to do something.”

“Yeah,” Impulse says. “I’m gonna do that too.”

Impulse looks—kind of terrible, actually, if Grian is willing to admit it to himself. They all probably do, really, although Impulse has the most right of any of them to look terrible, after Tango—

Tango had taken the most active effort of all of them to fix the end of the world, and as far as they all knew he’d paid for it with his life. He’d been too far out of range for their dying world to relay from his communicator, and the last they’d heard from him was a very definitive farewell. Impulse had every right to be a mess.

Except—

Except how was Grian supposed to reveal he had information otherwise, that Tango wasn’t dead, when said information came from getting stuck in a time loop featuring his own future self?

Actually, how was one supposed to explain meeting your own future self in your storage room in the first place? Was that something to just get brought up in casual conversation?

“I would like it to be known,” Scar says, “it was entirely unfair of all of you to put me in charge of both our escape and the emotional brain cell.”

A long moment passes. “Well, who else was gonna take it?” Pearl points out. “Grian?”

“Oi,” Grian says. “I’m a bit busy right now, thanks!”

“With what, exactly?” Pearl asks.

“Trying to think a smidgen further ahead than Scar did, apparently!” Grian snaps, trying to stretch out his vision as far as he dared, follow the lines of red-black- his out into the universe at large—

Oh, shit.

Had he been alone, Grian could have jumped—thrown himself into the nearest world, coming up just long enough to rebalance and send himself onward, hoping to lose his tail somewhere out in the far reaches of the galaxy.

He’s not alone, though, and he will not leave Boatem, and he runs out of time.

“Don’t you dare,” he spits into the seemingly still-empty Void. His friends react to his sudden vitriol, he’s sure, though he can’t devote the attention to them. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

“You’re hardly in a position to negotiate, Xelqua.”

“Fuck off,” Grian replies with all vehemence.

And the Void, in return, laughs. “Honestly, have you not tired of this game by now? You hide, we find you, you resort to your pitiful posturing. Is it not obvious you’re only delaying the inevitable yet?”

“Go to hell, Orez,” Grian says, though this time his voice unwittingly wavers.

“One would think at this point you would grow tired of the collateral damage,” Orez continues as they appear properly, and every single one of Grian’s nerves flares with alertness.

(Not quite fear. Not anymore. He’d been terrified, once, standing on a desert mountain with no reprieve but the stop at the bottom. But now?)

(Oh, now, the terror is replaced by nothing less than righteous fury.)

Only—

Collateral damage.

“You have already begun to pay the price,” the dragon had told him, so long ago and yet not long at all. “The bargain, already struck, began to echo back on you even before you stepped foot on this doomed world. It is a high price to pay indeed.”

“You’re going to destroy my home for the sake of my friends’ lives.”

“No. Not I. The decision echoes back into cause and effect and a plan already set in motion. It is a game played between you and your people, where knight takes rook, and pawns find themselves turned queens, and black will be transformed into white, with lives and worlds hanging in the balance. I am not the harbinger of this destruction, only the messenger.”

“You did this.”

Orez only snorts, four wings shifting against the backdrop of the Void, mass of eyes wheeling and blinking. “Hardly. The satellite’s orbit was already unstable. It would have fallen within the decade regardless of interference.” Then, “A coaxing of your admin towards this world in particular? A nudge of code alongside that already unstable orbit? That, indeed, was our interference.”

For a moment, it’s all Grian can do to breathe cool, canned air.

Because two death games hadn’t been enough. Because hacking his wings in half at the gods-damned joint hadn’t been enough.

And now Hermitcraft is gone.

“So really, now,” Orez continues. “Have you not tired of running from your own fate yet?”

“If you think my fate,” Grian spits, “will ever end with you—”

“And where else would it?” Orez asks. “Do you really think you can run forever? That you could force Time itself to crumble to pieces rather than return?”

Time.

Orez spoke of Time, when Time had already tied itself into a knot around Grian, when he had and always would pass himself at some unknown point of his own future.

Time.

Time, fraying around the edge of them right now—

And his friends really had been far too quiet, hadn’t they?

There is valiant red-black and deep steel-gray pulsing in the Void, and outside the tiniest pocket around them there is stillness.

“Let them go,” Grian says, and though he’s facing toward the edge of Boatem’s tiny circle he can still see (See) Impulse and Mumbo and Scar and Pearl, frozen somewhere in time.

“I haven’t got them,” Orez says, nothing less than smug. “All I have is you.”

Steel-gray.

Red-black.

Unacceptable outcome.

And Grian yanks, wings flaring, red-black surging in four distinct points around him, his own magic pulling him back into a net of its own devising that says Impulse-Pearl-Scar-Mumbo—

Five.

Five points.

Farther than the rest, but close, impossibly close, dead-ending into the oblivion of a world hidden from Grian’s own sight and an eon ago it would have pulled him up short, his own senses forcing him to haul up at the blank nothing—

Five points.

And Grian tugs on the nearest four, hauls them towards the fifth, and Orez falls away and five Hermits fall in towards the sixth.

~~~

Private Server

Water.

The Void gives way to water, water in every inch, rushing into a ruined suit around ruined wings and the directionless Void falls into a sea dragging him very much down.

And somewhere, somehow, a dying world screams.

Anything more than an instinctive thrash against Grian’s rapidly filling suit abruptly fails, and somewhere out in the universe Hermitcraft is dying, and it was his world and it had always been his world and he’d cradled it when it had cried out to him and now it screams.

And he screams too—how could he not— and far across reality a dying world thrashes against its own demise the same way he’s thrashing against the sea and it’s too late.

Water closes in over his head and a Watcher’s world dies—

Four.

Four points—

STILL THERE—

Arms haul him up by the shoulders and Grian sucks in an awful raw gasp as he clears the surface and his suit starts to empty again.

His world is dying and it isn’t empty.

If someone asked him later, he’d never quite be able to say what he did. There are too many eyes and too much power and a promise echoes in a dragon’s roar—

“I will give you the power to buy their safety by your own hand.”

And his own world helps him as it convulses and fails, pushes his Hermits out into his hands and from there out into some other oblivion he can’t follow—

(Keralis, aiming high and failing and falling.)

(XB, buried so far down and yet not far enough.)

(Zedaph, wrapped in denial and not enough time.)

(Bdubs, staring staring staring—)

(Wait no WAIT—)

Four points.

Three points.

Three out.

One left—

(NO WAIT NO—)

Hermitcraft dies.

Grian screams.

~~~

Whatever Impulse had expected to happen after the end of Season Eight, hauling Grian’s unconscious ass out of the ocean had been pretty low on the list.

“Does anyone know where the hell we are?” he demands, because the last few minutes are fuzzy and nonsensical, and even with Pearl latched onto Grian’s other side and kicking with all her might, Grian in a spacesuit full of water is ridiculously heavy. Finally Impulse scrapes something under the water, a hunk of wood that gives him just enough room to stand on before Grian manages to drown all three of them.

“Is this a world spawn?” Mumbo asks, also managing to find a high enough piece of wood to perch on. A shipwreck, apparently? “It’s a weird one.”

“Whose world, though?” Scar asks.

“Probably no one’s!” Pearl says, perhaps a touch too manic. She’s half-braced on Impulse’s post as well, half still treading water. “More importantly, what the hell happened to Grian?”

“Hell if I know,” Impulse says. He scans the faces of his friends, who are all looking at him far too expectantly, which—great. Really great. Apparently Scar had hot-potatoed the emotional brain cell back in his direction. Wonderful.

Gods, he’s tired.

“Have you got him?” he asks Pearl, not really waiting long enough for an answer before shrugging out from under Grian. Impulse kicks out back into the water, partly under the guise of searching the shipwreck but mainly to get out from the heaviness of the other three’s gazes.

Swimming in a space suit is a bit of a new experience, although at least Impulse doesn’t have to worry about running out of air. There will be a chest somewhere down in this shipwreck and if they were gods-only-knew-where they were going to have to be starting their survival from scratch.

Only—

Only the chest is already empty.

Impulse stares at it a little too long, through seawater and yellow-tinted glass. By the time he resurfaces, Scar and Mumbo have taken down enough wood to make some boats, one of which Pearl is hauling a still very unconscious Grian toward. Jellie is vehemently protesting the wet state of affairs, having climbed out of Scar’s suit now that he was sans-helmet and standing on his shoulders letting out a series of pitiful yowls.

“It’s someone’s world,” Impulse says, drawing their attention again. “Chest’s raided.”

“...Man,” Mumbo says. “That’s good? I hope?”

Impulse unbuckles his own helmet, chucking it in the nearest empty boat before climbing up after it. The whole thing wobbles for a moment, threatening to dump him right back into the ocean, though it finally stills just in time for Mumbo to come clambering in after him.

“All right,” Impulse says, fumbling for his comm. “Let’s see who we’ve—”

It’s already buzzing off the hook.

Oh. Oh.

<Skizzleman> Hello????

<Skizzleman> I didn’t realize I was hosting a Hermit party?

<Skizzleman> What are you guys doing here?

<Skizzleman> Also how did you guys get here?

<Skizzleman> Is everything okay?

<Skizzleman> Dippledop?

“...Skizz,” Impulse says, half in comfort and half in disbelief. He remembers, distantly, his best friend mentioning the strange spawn his new solo had dropped him in, but it had been so soon after Last Life and they’d been so caught up with the moon— “It’s Skizz’s world.”

“Oh, thank gods,” Scar says under his breath.

<impulseSV> hi Skizz

<Skizzleman> HELLO?

<Skizzleman> What are you doing here?????

Great question, Impulse thinks, feeling his shoulder slump even as his eyes blur and his hands start to shake. Of all the places they could have ended up, there weren’t many better alternatives.

<impulseSV> we’re qt spawn

<impulseSV> i thikn

<Skizzleman> I’ll be right there

[Gamerule keepInventory is now set to: true]

Skizzleman fell from a high place

And then Skizz is there, head popping out of the waves, Impulse’s best friend in the entire world, and it’s the first thing that’s gone remotely okay in far too long.

“You could have teleported,” Impulse points out, voice much too raw.

A beat passes. “Oh yeah,” Skizz says. “I forgot.” Another beat passes while he looks between the rest of them, clambering onto one of the ship’s higher posts to get out of the water. “What the hell are you doing here?”

And it’s so— surreal, to be sitting in a boat in the middle of his best friend’s ocean surrounded by the rest of Boatem, one of whom is very much unconscious, and the moon had fallen and Hermitcraft was gone and—

“Tango’s dead,” Impulse says bluntly, without pause or formality or—how the fuck did you say that anyways? How did you tell your best friend that your brother was dead? And then, belatedly, because it almost hadn’t even occurred to him— “Zed might well be too.”

“...What the hell?” Skizz says again, and Impulse watches the second the words actually hit home, watches his best friend’s face twist. “What the— what do you mean Tango’s dead—”

Impulse buries his head in his hands rather than answering, feels his chest shake, and unceremoniously hot-potatoes the brain cell right back to Scar.

Pearl, unfortunately, intercepts said brain cell on the way. “The moon crashed into the server,” she says. “We—we don’t know for sure who got out.” Then, a little quieter, “We just know Tango didn’t.”

There’s an ugly clatter of diamond on wood, and when Impulse looks up again Skizz has fallen to the edge of his perch, boots and the tips of his elytra dipping into the seawater. “What… I don’t… what do you mean?”

“He tried to push the moon back into orbit,” Pearl says.

“No, I mean, you don’t know who got out?” Skizz says. “You didn’t all just leave?”

“We couldn’t,” Scar says quietly. “We tried. It was bad, Skizz. I don’t—I’m not even sure how we ended up here? Has anyone figured that out?”

“Grian, I’d assume?” Mumbo points out, at which Skizz looks over at Grian and promptly does a double-take.

“Is he okay?”

A beat passes. “He’s breathing?” Pearl offers.

“I mean—” Skizz starts, then cuts himself off. Impulse doesn’t need to lean on thirty years of friendship to know what he means. Grian’s wings are out, after all. At least the half of them that remained.

Skizz doesn’t ask, though.

“Can we have this conversation somewhere other than the middle of the ocean?” Impulse finally says, sounding far too exhausted. “You’ve got a base somewhere?”

“Yeah, it’s a hike,” Skizz says, shaking his head and looking back at Impulse. “It’ll take a while. You don’t know about anyone else?” he presses again. “I mean, I know Etho’s okay—”

“Etho hasn’t been on the server since—gods, Last Life, I don’t think,” Impulse points out. “No reason he wouldn’t be—Iskall and Stress, too? We’ll have to talk to them—Hypno? Who else?” He pauses, the oddity finally setting in. “You’ve talked with Etho?”

Skizz doesn’t answer for a long moment. “We’ve been in touch.”

Huh. That was rather unexpected. Sure, Skizz and Etho had ended up allies in both Third Life and Last Life, but Impulse had never picked up any indication they’d maintained a friendship outside that. Then again, Impulse hadn’t seen much of Etho lately outside Third Life and Last Life anyways, so who was he to say? The man was hardly the definition of an open book.

“Yeah, no, I can show you guys where I’m at,” Skizz says, getting back to his feet. “Scar, share your butt?”

A long moment passes. “Excuse me?” Scar says.

“Boat,” Impulse says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “He’s talking about your boat.”

“Yeah, his butt,” Skizz repeats.

“OH!” Scar says. “Sure! Hop on in!”

“Skizz,” Impulse points out again. “Teleport.”

Skizz, halfway into the boat, turns back and looks at him. “Oh yeah.”

It’s the barest moment of levity.

Because what else were they supposed to do after the end of the world?

Chapter Text

Private Server, owned by Skizzleman

Mumbo was having a very bad week.

Like, a very bad week. A very bad four days, even! Which might be five now? He wasn’t sure. It’s kind of hard to keep track of days in the Void.

“What day is it?” he asks, apropos to nothing, while four-fifths of Boatem sit around Skizz’s barebones, very copper base and Grian sleeps on the bed in the corner. Mumbo’s been trying quite hard not to look at him, and it’s not working.

Skizz, halfway buried in one of his chests in search of things like bedding and extra clothes and food for his unexpected guests, pops his head out with a glance at his comm. “Well, the twenty-third, now.”

Mumbo blinks. It was after midnight already? It had been the dark, early hours of the twenty-second when they’d jumped into the Boatem Hole, but that still meant—what? That they’d only been floating for a matter of hours? It had felt like days. And then he’d blinked and it was the middle of the night?

Skizz’s comm buzzes before anyone can elaborate further, leaving him to press it to his ear with a low “Hey,” nudge the chest shut, and head for the stairs. Impulse stares after him with a faint furrow in his brow and Mumbo can just barely make out the sound of a voice on the other end, but it’s far too tinny and distant for him to make a guess at who. “No, I’ve got…” Skizz’s voice carries for a moment, before his, too, fades into distant unintelligibility.

Impulse sighs, heavily, and leans his head back against the wall. Mumbo is rather inclined to do the same, except—

Well, the past very bad four-maybe-more days had sort of included something that made that rather difficult, actually!

“What are you doing?” Scar asks.

“Being nosy,” Pearl says without an ounce of shame, having popped up to very obviously plant herself at the bottom of the staircase and craning her neck to peer up it. “What? Don’t you want to know who’s calling Skizz right now?”

Impulse sighs, and then says, “Etho? Apparently?” He shrugs. “Skizz would’ve said if it was anyone we hadn’t heard from yet.”

“I didn’t know they’d gotten close,” Scar says.

“I didn’t know you could call Etho close with anyone,” Pearl replies.

“Bdubs,” Scar points out.

“And we all know how that ended,” Pearl says, rolling her eyes.

Mumbo, rather than getting pulled into the debate, curls up tighter on himself. His suit jacket pulls across his back as he does. Thankfully, they’d all gotten rid of their awful spacesuits, but his normal clothes aren’t exactly forgiving of—

Horrible four days. Awful. He wants a refund.

(If only he could have refunded Grian’s soul. And the brand new, oversensitive, also kind-of-horrible wings that had come along with it.)

“Hey,” Scar says, suddenly closer than before. “Doing okay, Mumbo?”

Mumbo glances up again, only to open his mouth and find no words come out. How in the universe could he possibly be okay right now? When Hermitcraft was gone, when they didn’t know where any of their friends were, when they’d somehow popped out of the Void here only for Grian to scream and then go flat and unresponsive and unreachable in Mumbo’s head?

What good was being able to read your best friend’s mind when he was bloody unconscious?

“Gonna take that as a no,” Scar says lowly, then reaches out to wrap an arm over Mumbo’s shoulders. Mumbo doesn’t resist, leaning his head into his friend’s shoulder, and Scar might not be Grian but at least he was something.

He’s managing to hold it together well enough that he’s not crying, at least.

Skizz comes back down a few minutes later, comm still pressed to his ear as he makes pointed eye contact with Pearl, before taking a seat in their impromptu circle and setting it down. “You’re on, buddy.”

Sure enough, the voice that comes out of the speaker is in fact Etho’s, sounding remarkably as calm and unruffled as he always did even after a slightly too long pause. Mumbo could only wish he could be anything remotely approaching unruffled right now.

“...Are you guys okay?” Etho asks after that pause.

“As we can be,” Impulse ventures. Then, “Grian’s unconscious.”

“Is HE okay?” Etho asks. “What happened?”

“Wish I could tell you, man,” Impulse says. “We don’t even know how we ended up with Skizz. We jumped in the Boatem Hole.”

A very, very long moment drags out.

“You jumped into the Boatem Hole,” Etho repeats. “Should I ask why?” A beat passes. “No, never mind, I know about the moon and all—which, you could’ve told me?”

“Do you think we’d have been jumping into the Void if it were that simple?” Pearl points out, a little too sharply.

Another beat passes. “I’ve gotten ahold of Beef,” Etho says rather than answering. “He’s been off-server so he’s fine. I’m trying to catch Iskall and Stress, too, but with how far out they venture it might be a day or two before they see it. I’ve—” he pauses for a breath, “I’ve tried Bdubs and Doc and Xisuma and they’re erroring out. Assuming Hypno was still off-server, too? Beef’s trying him right now. Anyone else?”

“TFC had gone to visit his sister, I think,” Scar says. “He hadn’t been on in a bit.”

There’s a rustle of something that might be paper on the other end, then the distinct scratch of a pen.

“Etho, homie-buddy,” Skizz says. “You better not expect us to read those notes of yours later.”

There’s a light huff from Etho, then, “Well I’ll be able to read them later, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?”

Impulse raises a brow, and all right, yeah—the fact that Etho’s notes were so illegible to outside eyes they might as well be inside out and backwards was fairly common knowledge on the Hermitcraft server, but the fact that Skizz knew that rings odd even to Mumbo.

“So everyone else was still on the server,” Etho says, still audibly scribbling away. “Right?”

Pearl and Scar and Impulse start chiming in in turn, then, passing on what info they knew about who had gone where. It’s a startlingly incomplete picture—Xisuma to the Nether, Keralis and his space station, XB and his bunker, but far too many others just come up blank.

“Tango?” Etho asks as they go down the list. “Anything on him?”

Too long of a silence drags out. “Tango didn’t—” Impulse says, then chokes on the rest of the sentence.

“...Oh,” Etho says when the comprehension hits. “Oh, I—Snap. I don’t—” Then, clearing his throat, “Listen, do you want me there in person?”

“Yes,” Skizz says.

“Best not,” Impulse says at the same time. “I mean, this is a singleplayer. Six of us being here for any period of time is already going to strain it, we probably shouldn’t make it seven.”

“…Right,” Etho says. “Good point. Actually, on that note, hang on.”  There’s another shuffling of papers, footsteps, and the sound of something that might be a drawer, before the screen lights up with a text. “Skizzle, run that code as soon as we get off. Should help your world cope with having that many people a little better.”

“On it, boss,” Skizz says.

“I sure hope not,” Etho says, his tone going quieter like he’d leaned away from the speaker.

Mumbo, meanwhile, sighs. Of course Etho just had a code like that lying around. Of all the Hermits they could possibly end up in immediate contact with in a situation like this, Etho was pretty close to the top of the list for exactly that reason.

Only, well—

Etho was a good friend, of course! Mumbo would never even pretend to consider any of the Hermits anything but. And Mumbo had been aware, even before Etho had joined Hermitcraft, that the man was a much better redstoner than Mumbo was. Actually, Mumbo could say that about pretty much all the other redstoners on the server. His friends included Impulse and Tango and Doc, for gods’ sakes.

The only difference was, well, Impulse and Tango and Doc all had a decade or more on Mumbo. When Etho had joined Hermitcraft, he’d been twenty-two to Mumbo’s nineteen. And sure, six seasons later, the difference between twenty-nine and twenty-six felt even more silly to contemplate, but still. It was kind of hard not to feel inferior when you were only three years younger than one of the greatest, if not the greatest, redstoners of your generation. Possibly all time.

“That’s Beef,” Etho says a moment later. “He’s talked to Hypno. They’re both asking if we’re going to meet somewhere. Presumably not Skizz’s.”

“Hadn’t thought that far ahead yet,” Impulse admits. “Just… tell them to stand by, yeah? And let us know if you hear from Iskall and Stress or TFC. Or… anyone, actually.”

A long moment passes. “Yeah, will do,” Etho says, and the call ends.

~~~

“You’re a wreck.”

“Thanks, Skizz, I needed to hear that right now.”

Skizz snorts, settling down beside Impulse. The other three had gone to sleep hours ago. The night is cold and the copper of Skizz’s foundation is even colder, even with the first glow of sunrise peeking over the horizon. Skizz hasn’t exactly done much of lighting the place up, either, meaning there’s plenty of faint groans and rattles far too close for comfort.

“And you’re freezing,” Skizz adds.

“Occupational hazard,” Impulse says, like that made any sense whatsoever. His nose finally leads him to actually glance over to see the homely, rough-hewn mug Skizz is extending to him. “When’d you get that?”

“Last time I went home,” Skizz says. “You know Kinet always stocks me.”

It might be the smell and taste of crimson tea, of the Nether and of home, or it might be the mention of Impulse’s sister, or it might be the aside realization that Clan Tek was as much Skizz’s family and home as it always had been Impulse’s, but something sends him over the edge and draws out the ragged sob that’s been building in his throat all day.

Thirty years of friendship, and Skizz doesn’t have to say a word. He wraps an arm around him, draws him in, and lets Impulse cry into his shoulder.

The tea’s gone lukewarm by the time Impulse finally quiets. “What happened?” Skizz whispers, and they both know he’s not talking about Hermitcraft.

“He—” Impulse starts, and they both know who he is, and Tango is just too painful to say. “He tried to stop it—tried to save us—”

“Dippledop, I’m gonna need you to back up,” Skizz says. “I still don’t understand what happened.”

Impulse sucks in a breath and takes a steadying sip of his tea. “The moon fell out of orbit,” he says. “Into the server. We started noticing pretty much right after Last Life. It stopped cycling, just stayed full, and then it started getting bigger. Messing with gravity, earthquakes, started making things float. And then at the very end the whole server just… broke. Couldn’t get in or out, couldn’t even get messages off-server. So we all tried to just… scatter. Get out from under it long enough to regather. I’ve got no idea what half the Hermits did. I didn’t—I didn’t even hear from Zedaph. I don’t know what he managed to do. I don’t know if he managed—”

Skizz doesn’t answer when Impulse breaks off with a shrug, only staring out unfocused like he was trying to parse through a rapid back-and-forth even if Impulse was no longer speaking.

“Here,” Impulse says, swiping over to an old familiar chat and the farewell it held while trying not to actually look at it full-on. “Don’t—don’t put it on speaker, please.”

Skizz takes the comm, nods, and obligingly turns the volume down and presses it to his ear. Impulse, despite his best efforts, hears the message anyways.

“…Hey, Impy. I just wanted to—well. Yeah. We all know what’s happening here. We all know what’s going to happen. And I can’t—I can’t just sit here and wait for it. So I’m—I’m going to fix it. To try, at least. I mean—I’ve got to try, right?”

“Tango, may I remind you that your odds of survival on this mission are less than—”

“Shut UP, Holsten. Anyways, I just need to—I needed to talk to you. Before I— Anyways, I don’t know how long the rocket’s going to be in range to actually send this to you, so I’d better—just. Say hi to Mom and Dad, and Neph and Ursa and—everyone, really, you know, I just… Love ya, man. Bye.”

“...Gods,” Skizz says at long last, slowly lowering Impulse’s comm before handing it back. Then, with an awful, wet laugh, “What an idiot.”

“Yeah,” Impulse chokes out. “We always—we always knew he was, Skizz!”

And they’re both laughing, terrible and discordant sounds of grief, and Impulse’s entire world fell apart and shattered at his feet this morning, and one of his brothers is here and another is dead and the third is a mystery.

One out of three. How could Impulse ever possibly hope to make do with one out of three?

“Gods,” Skizz finally says again. Impulse leans on him harder again, shoulder to shoulder.

“I’m giving you the brain cell,” Impulse finally says. “I don’t want it anymore and Scar keeps trying to give it back to me.”

“...What?” Skizz asks, baffled.

“Do you think I’m trusting Mumbo or Pearl or Grian with whatever semblance of emotional intelligence we as a group have?”

A long moment passes. “Impulse,” Skizz says seriously. “It’s not your job to be in charge of their emotions for them.”

Impulse shrugs. “Someone has to.”

“...No?” Skizz says. “That’s not how it works? I thought you had a psych minor, man.”

Impulse shrugs again.

“You’re not in charge of them at all,” Skizz adds.

“I kind of am,” Impulse says with a slow twist in his stomach.

“What are you talking about?”

“...There’s,” Impulse starts, trying to figure out how to word it. “We established years ago that if anything ever happened to Xisuma that Doc was in charge. That’s why, when Last Life and everything, he was… you know.” Come to think about it, they’d never fully explained why Doc had been in charge to Skizz. Or even to Etho, for that matter. Still, that’s a conversation he hardly has the energy to get into now.

“Uh-huh. I’m following.”

“So, after we lost outside contact,” Impulse continues, “I went to talk to him. And he pointed out that there was, uh, not exactly a line of succession after that. And we, uh. Talked about that.” He clears his throat. “Point is, yeah, until we manage to find Doc or X, I am in charge, actually.”

“...Doc put you third in line?” Skizz asks.

“Something like that.”

“That’s unfair of him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Impulse,” Skizz says, turning a surprisingly piercing look on him. “When was the last time you had your meds?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I’ve known you for thirty years, buddy,” Skizz says, “and you’ve been on anxiety medication for twenty of them, and it took me all of five minutes to figure out you’re not.”

“...It’s been a minute,” Impulse hedges. “I ran out.” Mainly because he’d been intending to pick more up the last time he’d been on the city-server roster, which had also happened to be the day that Mumbo’s brain had exploded, which had rather neatly derailed that plan.

“You know I keep extras.”

“And the server broke, Skizz, I couldn’t have gotten to you if I wanted to,” Impulse snaps. “It’s fine. I’m fine. It hasn’t been too bad.”

“You’re here now,” Skizz points out.

“...Yeah,” Impulse says. “We’re here now.” He turns his head toward the burgeoning sunrise, away from the tremendously small moon, and can only hope to guess how many Hermits were safe enough to watch their own sunrises.

Chapter Text

Private Server, owned by Skizzleman

The first thing Grian notices when sleep finally lets slip its hold is that this is not his world.

The rest comes a little more slowly—the blurriness in his vision, the dryness of his mouth, the uncomfortable and numbing press of his own weight on his wings. The last seems the easiest to fix, though even trying to shift enough to prop himself up off his wings is enough to drag a wordless groan out of him.

“Whoa!” comes a voice he can’t quite place, though when Grian finally forces his vision to clear it coalesces into an image of Skizz.

Right. Skizz. Skizz’s world.

…Hermitcraft is gone.

Hermitcraft is gone, and Grian had felt it die.

“...day is it?” he tries to ask, though it probably comes out as more of an unintelligible slur. Skizz is rapidly approaching his location anyway with a glass of something that resembles liquid, and Grian downs it without even tasting what it is.

“Hey, buddy,” Skizz says gently. “How you doin’?”

“Been better,” Grian manages dryly, managing to lever himself properly upright. His wings spasm for a moment in familiar phantom pain and he watches Skizz’s gaze dart toward the motion, though he doesn’t say anything.

That was. Right. Someone else who knew. He doesn’t have the brainpower to go over that right now.

“What day is it?” he tries again. “Where is everyone?”

“About six-thirty in the morning on the twenty-fourth,” Skizz says, perching on the end of the bed. “You guys got here about a day and a half ago. And none of you are good at sitting still even at this hour, so everyone’s off doing something. Scar and Mumbo went mining, I think Impulse is around messing with my villagers, and—uh, actually, I’m not entirely sure where Pearlie-Pop went, but I’m sure she’s around.”

Pearlie-Pop? Grian thinks with an edge of derision. Since when were Skizz and Pearl close enough for a nickname like that? “What happened?”

“Well, see,” Skizz says. “Everyone seems to be under the impression you’re the one to ask about that, buddy.”

Right. Between Orez’s time manipulation and the rest of Boatem being unable to comprehend the Void the way a Watcher could, their arrival here would have been completely nonsensical. And then Season Eight had died and Grian had felt it and—

Oh.

Oh fuck.

“I could tell you were nearby,” Grian says, pushing down that awful thought. “Threw all of us at you. Figured you were another Hermit.”

Skizz, rather than questioning how that worked, seems to take it at face value. “Well, that I’m definitely not,” he says. “And I’d say glad to see you, buddy, if not for. Well.”

“Yeah,” Grian says. “Can you get everyone back here?” He swings his legs over the side of the bed and, despite a wince, manages to push himself upright. “We need to talk.”

He needn’t have worried. Mumbo bursts in a moment later, covered in stone dust, the distress in his face immediately melting into relief. Before Grian can take so much as two steps, Mumbo has crossed the distance and hauled him in.

“Don’t do that,” Mumbo says, still sounding almost on the verge of tears. The only response Grian can make is to hold on tighter himself and, instinctively, a little bump of his own mind against Mumbo’s. Mumbo relaxes a little further at that. It’s odd to consider how new an aspect of their friendship could feel so instinctive.

Scar, equally dusty as Mumbo, is making his way down the staircase when Grian pulls back. They have a brief moment of eye contact over the top of Mumbo’s shoulder.

“Mumbo,” Grian says, a little too flatly. “What are you doing?”

“I was, uh, mining, mate?” Mumbo ventures, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I mean, with Skizz putting us up—very nice of you Skizz, by the way, thanks again for that—I thought we could at least get the man some diamonds—”

“Mumbo, buddy, I’m not charging you rent,” Skizz says from somewhere over Grian’s shoulder.

“Can we have a second?” Grian says, just as Impulse’s sneakers appear at the top of the staircase. Wordlessly, said sneakers disappear again. Scar, too, nods and heads back up, then so does Skizz.

“...Are you upset with me?” Mumbo ventures.

“I’m not—” Grian starts, then pinches the bridge of his nose. “Take your jacket off.”

“That’s—that’s a bit forward of you, mate!” Mumbo says, though his vain attempt at humor only falls flat.

Grian doesn’t rise to it. “You’re going to hurt yourself,” he says quietly. “The spacesuit was one thing, but you can’t keep squishing them up like that.”

Mumbo obligingly starts to take off his jacket, though his next reply is a quiet, “Easy for you to say, mate, you can just send yours to hyperspace.”

“That’s not—” Grian starts, though he pulls up short at the unexpected bitterness in Mumbo’s voice. Sure, he could, but he’d also give anything to have Mumbo’s tiny, whole wings, even if it meant regrowing them from scratch and not being able to hide them.

Which, speaking of hiding. Skizz had already seen Grian’s wings, which was significantly less than ideal, but on the other hand, so had a lot of people, lately. It was almost starting to feel like less of a big deal than it once had. Still, they’re twitchy and sore, just as they usually were when they were out these days, the remaining half of his limbs echoing back pain from severed nerves that no longer existed. If Grian wanted to think straight through whatever the hell they were dealing with now, sending them away is the better choice, Mumbo’s odd bitterness or no.

So he does.

Except he doesn’t.

It’s not like anything happens. The opposite, in fact. Nothing happens. There’s no backlash, no jerk of surprise, no misfire of magic that would lead him to think he’d done something wrong.

Grian simply sends his wings away, and they don’t.

He stares into the middle distance for a long moment, past Mumbo’s increasing concern, and tries again. And then, again, nothing happens, up to the point his wings quiver with the sheer amount of nothing that’s happening, and still they stay out.

Right. Okay. That was.

That’s a big problem, actually.

“...Grian?” Mumbo ventures.

Okay. Sure. He could just. He could deal with this later. There were bigger things to worry about right now. He could make this Future Grian’s problem.

Right. Future Grian. About that.

“Don’t,” Grian says, his voice a little too faint. “Don’t squash them, all right?”

“...Okay,” Mumbo says in a small voice. Grian thinks his wings would probably quiver, if Mumbo had anything resembling the fine motor control needed yet. Instead, he simply follows Grian wordlessly up the stairs.

“...Hi, Grian,” Impulse says, after just slightly too long of a silence. “How are you feeling?”

Grian, rather than answering, lets out a slow exhale through his nose. “Where’s Pearl?”

Impulse, Scar, and Skizz all exchange glances. “Not sure, actually?” Impulse says. “I saw her—maybe an hour or so ago? She’s around somewhere.”

“I’ll text her,” Scar offers. Grian nods, leaving Scar to add something about her not being afk that Grian only barely listens to as he steps out Skizz’s front door.

And the sight below— far below—bathed in watery dawn light nearly takes him off his feet.

Skizz clearly hadn’t been living on this world for terribly long. There are only a few bits and bobs scattered around his base, a single person’s effort seeming tiny compared to the monolithic progress Hermitcraft made even in the first week or two of a new server. Nothing against Skizz, but it’s not his trading hall or his mob farm that rings so impressive.

It’s the mountain they’re standing on.

If Grian had had an elytra (or his bloody wings still worked), he’d have taken off right then to get a view of it. They’re standing at the top of high, snow-capped majesty, stretching out in one direction towards a distant taiga, the other eventually breaking into ice spires that stretch out into a rolling, half-frozen ocean.

It’s nothing he hasn’t seen before.

And yet it is.

“...This is incredible,” he breathes as the others shuffle out behind him.

“Pretty neat, huh?” Skizz says. “Found it by accident, honestly.”

“No, this is…” Grian says, then trails off when he can’t quite find the words. It’s different, is what it is. In so many years of roaming the universe, so many years of Watching, he’s never seen a world like it. “This is different,” he finally settles on. “This is new.”

“It’s deep, too,” Skizz says. “Super deep. You wouldn’t believe the caves down there.”

Grian nods. He would believe it, actually. He remembers the way Evo had changed on the very basest levels of code and terrain, forced forward through time as it had been, the world changing and fracturing by pieces as it had.

It’s been a long time since the worlds have changed like this.

Grian’s attention is quickly drawn by a familiar figure below, almost loping back up toward them despite the steepness of the mountain. “Hey, guys!” Pearl calls as soon as she’s in range for a shout. She’s hardly out of breath by the time she makes it to the top, either, though the brief moment of brightness fades from her voice once she’s face-to-face with the rest of them. “You all right, Griba?”

Grian doesn’t strictly answer. “Come inside,” he finally says. “We need to talk.”

“...Wow,” Pearl says after a moment. “It really is opposite day.”

One of them, somewhere, should probably have cracked a grin. No one does.

~~~

Skizz makes tea. Grian isn’t even sure he wants tea, but he takes it nonetheless.

Impulse, at least, takes the liberty of filling the initial silence with the events of the last day and a half, settling out notes between them written in his usual clear script. He explains that they’d talked to Etho, and Etho had talked to Beef and Hypno and was trying to get ahold of Iskall, Stress, and TFC. No one had heard anything from any of the Hermits who had been on-world.

It paints a very grim picture.

“It will scatter your friends into the Universe and shatter them, only a great effort able to reclaim them,” the dragon had said. Grian supposes it’s probably a good thing making a bargain with the dragon apparently came with word-perfect recall of said bargain.

And yet it seemed that his bargain had already started to fracture.

“I felt Season Eight die,” he says quietly, when Impulse reaches a breaking point that might not have even been the end of a sentence, actually. Something about having one set of legible notes. If Grian had followed the conversation correctly, that meant Etho had been keeping track so far, and Impulse had an extremely valid concern on that part.

“...What?” Impulse breaks off to say.

“I felt Season Eight die,” Grian says, a little stronger. “It was my world, and it reached for me, and I felt it.”

A long, long moment drags out, before Skizz finally says, “I feel like I’m missing something here.”

It’s not a harsh probe—in the admittedly limited time Grian has known Skizz, he’s never known the man to be harsh— but it definitely is one. It’s one that even Boatem wouldn’t have pushed up until very recently.

A year ago Grian wouldn’t have answered. A month ago he might have snapped back with all the vitriol of a bad night of drinking that had ended in Impulse’s storage room.

Now, though, Hermitcraft is gone, and more than half of his friends are written in Impulse’s notes with nothing more to their name than a question mark, and all of Grian’s secrets seem so much smaller in comparison to the disaster at their feet just now.

“I’m a Watcher,” he says flatly, and it’s only news to one person in the room, and he still buries his gaze in Impulse’s papers to avoid that one person’s reaction.

“Okay,” Skizz says.

Another very long moment drags out. “If you have a problem with that—” Grian starts, not entirely sure how he plans on ending that sentence and finding Skizz cuts him off anyway.

“Why would I have a problem with that?”

Grian isn’t entirely sure of the answer to that, either.

“I mean, so I’ve kind of gotten the impression they’re the bad guys here,” Skizz continues. “You’re not on the side of the bad guys, though. So why would I have a problem with that?”

Well. Who knew Skizz could be the rational one here?

“The point is,” Grian says, moving quickly beyond tearing open the first wound to start on the next. “I felt—when it—” He ducks his head a little further, squeezing his eyes shut. “There were still people there.”

“...Oh gods,” Scar says as those dark implications hit home. Pearl says something much ruder.

“I tried,” Grian continues, “I tried to pull them out—I don’t really know—but I tried, and I think I got—I think I got them.” He glances over at the spread of Impulse’s notes, at the one name bearing down on him more accusingly than the rest. (No wait no—) “I know I missed Bdubs.”

No one answers for a horrific eternity. Mumbo brings his knees up to his chest, curling up into the smallest possible space. Skizz drags a hand through his hair. Impulse hovers his pen over Bdubs’s name for a moment, then slowly withdraws, as if he can’t quite bring himself to be so callous as to overwrite that hopeful question mark.

“I don’t know where the rest of them went,” Grian finally continues. “I can try to find them, I’ll do the best I can, but I have no idea where to start—”

Someone’s comm buzzes.

All of their comms buzz, actually. And then again before anyone can manage to pull one out and check, and a third time as several of them scramble to do just that.

T⍑ᒷ v╎ᓭ╎𝙹リᔑ∷|| drowned.

T⍑ᒷ v╎ᓭ╎𝙹リᔑ∷|| drowned.

T⍑ᒷ v╎ᓭ╎𝙹リᔑ∷|| drowned.

“Uh,” Skizz says. “Can anybody here read that?”

Grian can. Unfortunately.

Oh, absolutely not.

“Absolutely the fuck not,” he continues.

“…Grian?” Pearl ventures.

T⍑ᒷ v╎ᓭ╎𝙹リᔑ∷|| drowned.

“The Visionary,” Grian says, with quite possibly the most disdain he’d ever put in his own voice. “That’s Quoroth.”

Chapter Text

Private Server, owned by Skizzleman

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Quoroth, of course, doesn’t answer, because he’s too busy hacking his lungs up. Extremely rude of him, if you asked Grian. And since Grian was currently the highest authority around, that meant it was in fact extremely rude of Quoroth.

Quoroth continues hacking his lungs up, and thus continues not answering, overall ending up as one of the most pathetic sights Grian has ever personally witnessed as he braces himself against the tallest boards of Skizz’s spawn shipwreck.

All right, so maybe teleporting immediately out to spawn to haul Quoroth out of the ocean before anyone else could even react to the other Watcher’s arrival might not have been his brightest decision, but what else was Grian supposed to do? Let Quoroth come in and immediately wreak whatever havoc he’d come for?

Granted, Quoroth doesn’t seem to be capable of much havoc right now.

“Well?” Grian demands, finding his footing on another part of the ship. Quoroth was lucky Grian had managed to haul him out of the ocean at all, with the way the wings he could no longer put away were holding onto the seawater. They feel awful, like heavy wet carpets that drag on every muscle in his torso, and he doesn’t even want to think about what they’re going to feel like in a few hours when the water is gone and all that’s left behind is the salt.

Quoroth makes an utterly pitiful wheeze, then manages to get out something that sounds like “Finding you.”

“Oh, well, that’s just fine then. What is it this time? Death game three? Relieve me of some more limbs? Honestly, stop dying and get on with it, would you, I’m a bit busy right now!”

Quoroth, finally, looks up and makes eye contact.

And Grian realizes, abruptly, that this is actually the first time they’ve made eye contact.

Pathetic had not been an exaggeration. Quoroth’s mask is gone, for the first time Grian has ever seen, his gaze hazy and out of focus; his robes are torn and dark, not just with seawater but with mottled brown streaks that look suspiciously like blood; and then, largest and most obvious of all—

Grian had approximately half a set of wings left.

Quoroth has none.

…Well, if that wasn’t some poetic fucking justice.

“Oh, how the tables turn, huh?”

Quoroth, at long last, seems to actually catch his breath, then says, “I didn’t have anywhere else—Orez and Xyrstad, they—they didn’t, I wasn’t—”

“Oh, wow! Orez and Xyrstad had plans bigger than you? Who would have fucking guessed?”

Quoroth, still making an absolutely piteous sight, only says, “They threw me out.”

A long, long moment drags out.

Grian snorts. “So you came here?”

“Where else was I supposed to go?”

Before Grian can make another snark along the lines of literally anywhere else, a splash sounds behind him. Quoroth looks up, Grian looks over, and Pearl’s head pops up out of the waves.

“‘Oh, that’s Quoroth,’” Pearl says scathingly. “You wanna tell us what the hell that’s supposed to mean, Grian?”

Grian, something hot and ugly unfurling in his chest, feels his lips curl into a thin smirk. “Oh, gladly.”

~~~

Okay, sure.

That’s about all Impulse can think at this point. The moon had fallen, Tango was dead, Skizz and Etho were friends, and Grian was dragging an almost literal wet cat in by what amounted to the scruff of his neck.

Granted, it was less by the scruff of his neck and more an impatient demand for a set of teleports back from Skizz, but the point remained. There’s still a sopping wet guy apparently named Quoroth now sitting on Skizz’s floor.

“Uh,” Impulse says, when no one seems inclined to speak. Skizz, ever the host, seems to be the only one capable of movement and has once again gone digging for spare clothes for his newest unexpected guest. “Hi?”

“...Hi?” Quoroth ventures back. Then, just as tentatively, “...Impulse.”

Impulse tries not to start and can’t quite manage it. “Have we met?”

“Oh,” Grian interjects dryly, arms crossed. “I think you’ll find you’ve been quite acquainted.”

It takes Impulse a long, long moment to parse the connection. It had been a different scene entirely, white porcelain mask and blazing purple wings against the hungry dark of the Void, and Impulse had been nearly unconscious anyway—

“Okay, so. I feel immensely guilty about the fact that I got possessed, apparently, and, you know, let a Watcher on the server that sent us all to Last Life. Despite the fact I was not in control of the situation and no one knew about it or had any means of stopping it so I can’t justifiably blame myself for it.”

“You were…” Impulse ventures with sudden realization. “That was you.”

“One and the same,” Grian says. “Creator of death games, possessor of Impulse, and maimer of wings everywhere, right here, folks.”

“Possessed?” Skizz interjects. “Hello?”

“Okay, wait, no,” Quoroth says, glancing back over at Grian, and Impulse finds something deeply uncomfortable in the fact that their newest guest is almost literally prostrate at their feet. “I’ll take credit for like, one and a half of those things.”

Grian snorts.

“Orez decided to trojan his way into your server,” Quoroth continues. “I didn’t—it wasn’t—I didn’t maim you!”

“Oh,” Grian snaps. “I’m sure they’re just going to grow back, then?”

“That was Orez!” Quoroth insists again.

It seems to put Grian on the back foot for a moment, though he pushes forward again almost immediately. “Oh, and I’m supposed to just forget about the rest, then?”

The thing is, Impulse has known Grian for the better part of four years now. And, truth be told, he’s seen Grian in more than a few different contexts, especially in the last year. He’s seen Grian after a prank that went a little too far, easily forgiven; he’s seen him mad with red bloodlust, laughing as he went; he’s even seen him, now, plastered in Impulse’s own storage room, intent on wallowing in his own misery.

Impulse has never seen Grian push with such cruelty until right now.

It’s Skizz, of course, who cuts the tension in the air with the precision of a scalpel and the subtlety of a hammer. “Dry those off, would you?” he says, throwing a towel that only narrowly misses Grian’s face. “You’re dripping on my floor.”

Grian shoots Skizz a dark look generally reserved for cats being witnessed falling from high places and Grians getting shot with nerf guns. He does, however, oblige, roughly scrubbing the towel over the feathers of his left wing. “You’re not staying here,” he tells Quoroth flatly.

Quoroth, somehow, shrinks a little more, then tentatively takes the towel Skizz is now handing him rather than throwing at him. “I don’t have anywhere else.”

“Tough shit.”

“Okay, no, hang on,” Impulse says, finally finding his voice again. “I’m not really in favor of throwing people out into the universe on their ear to fend for themselves.”

Grian abruptly levels his gaze back on Impulse. “He’s made his bed, he can go fucking lie in it.”

“Hey now,” Scar says, only for Grian’s eyes to snap to him as well.

“Don’t you start,” Grian snaps. “This entire mess we’re in right now is his fault.”

“I didn’t mean…” Quoroth starts. “I just wanted you to come back.”

“I’m not going back! And you’re not staying!”

“That’s not your choice to make, Grian,” Impulse says, surprised at how level his voice comes out.

“I have more right to make that choice than anyone here!” Grian retorts.

“Not over top of the rest of us.”

“Impulse,” Grian says. “I shouldn’t have to go over top of you! This isn’t something we should have to debate!”

“And it’s not something we should do without talking about, either,” Impulse says.

“Go upstairs,” Skizz says firmly. “Let him at least get dry clothes on.”

Grian looks from Impulse to Quoroth to Skizz, then turns on his heel and marches up the stairs.

~~~

“This is ridiculous,” Grian says flatly. Someone had set up a hasty table on Skizz’s upper floor sometime while he’d been out, by the look of it, but he crosses his arms rather than taking a seat, as if the mere act would open him up to a discussion that shouldn’t be a discussion at all.

“Impulse has a point,” Scar points out, and does take a seat. “You seem to be operating under the assumption we know a lot more about this than we actually do.”

The rest of them, annoyingly, also start to sit, including Skizz. Grian glares at all of them, then stiffly and begrudgingly takes the last seat beside Mumbo.

“Fine,” he snaps. “If I give you the info will you listen to me that he cannot stay?”

“I think it’s more that if you tell us what’s going on we can actually make an informed decision,” Impulse says.

“Genuine question, Impulse,” Grian says dryly. “Who put you in charge?”

“Hey, Grian,” Skizz interjects before Impulse can answer. “Cool it.”

“Doc did,” Impulse says flatly, then adds with a small motion of his hand, “It’s good, Skizz.”

“Not sure I follow your definition of ‘good,’ homie-buddy,” Skizz says, though he does sit back in his chair a little.

“...Doc did,” Grian repeats, then, “What?”

Impulse sighs, long and low, scratching at the stubble on his chin for a long moment before he answers. “We established years ago that Doc would take over for Xisuma if anything ever happened to him,” he says at least. “We never had to think far enough ahead of what would happen if someone needed to take over for Doc.”

For a moment, it pulls Grian up short. Of course they hadn’t. Grian had never even thought about Doc having to take over until it had been shoved in his face.

“Zisuma asked me because he knew he’d never step down for anything less than—He wouldn’t step down. He’d have to be taken out. And he figured if that happened Hermitcraft’s safety was best entrusted to someone mad enough the gods themselves had to nerf him.”

And now Xisuma was gone, and Doc was gone, and out of twenty-six Hermits they only know about eight.

Grian wouldn’t wish Impulse’s sudden promotion on anyone.

“Fine,” he says again, a little softer. “Fine. And what sort of informed decision are we making, exactly?”

“We’ll vote on it,” Impulse says. “Just like anything else the Hermits disagree on.”

“This isn’t about lag, Impulse,” Grian says. “It’s not something we bring up in a little meeting—”

“Does anyone else have a better solution?” Impulse asks.

Annoyingly, no one does.

“Quoroth’s like me,” Grian finally says flatly. “Born human, turned Watcher. Unlike me, he thinks that was a pretty sick deal.”

“...Wasn’t he, like, twelve?” Mumbo asks. Scar frowns.

“Yes,” Grian says, clipped. “And he’s the one that found Third Life. So really, we have him to thank for all of this. We can’t just let him tag along like some kind of lost puppy.”

“I’m still really not in favor of just throwing him out,” Impulse says.

“Impulse,” Grian sighs. “We’re not keeping him!”

“I mean—” Mumbo says, which might be the first time Grian’s heard him speak since Quoroth first showed up. “I mean, I’m not—I’m not really comfortable with just—having him around? That doesn’t. That doesn’t really seem safe?”

“Thank you, Mumbo,” Grian says. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Hang on,” Scar says. “Go back to the ‘twelve years old’ thing.”

“They pulled him off a permadeath server,” Grian says. “Saw potential or whatever their usual bullshit was. I never asked for the details.”

“...He’s been with the Watchers since he was twelve years old,” Scar says.

“That’s what I said the first time, yes.”

“That’s what Mumbo said the first time, actually,” Pearl points out.

Grian rolls his eyes. “And the point of that is? Being twelve doesn’t absolve him of his actions.”

“Grian,” Scar says flatly. “My daughter’s nine.”

“Your what,” Skizz says.

“Your what?” Pearl echoes.

“Okay, can we—listen, that’s not the important topic at hand, can we save the astonishment for later?” Scar asks. “I’m with Impulse.”

“Oh, come on, Scar,” Grian snaps.

“Don’t moan at me, Grian,” Scar says, voice surprisingly chilly.

“I can’t—come on,” Grian says again. “Pearl? Skizz?”

Skizz holds up his hands. “This is your whole Hermit thing,” he says. “I’m not part of this.”

“We’re on your world,” Grian points out.

“And I’m not a Hermit. It’s not my place to vote.”

Grian huffs, even if Skizz’s refusal does actually throw the situation back into Grian’s favor. If it was only the five of them, there could be no tie, and if anyone was as likely to back Grian as hard as Mumbo would it was the one remaining person who hadn’t cast her vote. “Pearl?” he presses again.

Pearl, interestingly enough, looks like the only one of the six of them who’s had a decent night’s rest in the last two days—rather ironic, considering what Grian knew of Pearl’s usual sleep schedule. Still, her eyes are bright and without bruises, despite the tight purse of her frown and the way she’s twirling her hair around her finger.

At long last, though, she tosses her hair back over her shoulder and decides, “I say he stays.”

“Pearl!” Grian bursts out before he can stop himself. “You can’t be serious!” Pearl, obnoxiously, only meets his gaze head on, and he finds he can only take it for a moment before he turns to Skizz. “Skizz, come on.”

Skizz shakes his head. “I’m not gonna, Grian,” he says. “The most I could do is tie it, anyways.”

“But you would tie it?” Grian presses. Skizz doesn’t answer. Then, grappling desperately, “We can’t just—look, it’s not like we’re the only Hermits around right now! There’s Beef and Etho and Hypno, and hopefully Stress and Iskall any time now—they’ve got a right to have input on this too!”

“...Okay,” Impulse says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Then consider this—a delay, I guess? Until we can talk to them.”

And Grian might be outvoted, might be on the back foot, but he pushes forward anyways. “One condition.”

Impulse, somehow sounding even more exhausted, says, “What?”

“Quoroth’s a Watcher. And exactly as dangerous as that sounds. If he stays,” Grian says, “we’ve got to contain him somehow. And the best way I know how to do that is Mumbo’s anti-Watcher codes.”

Impulse’s brow furrows, before he says, “Those are—that’s what we were putting on our worlds? Anti-Watcher codes?” At Grian’s nod, he continues, “But those are world- level codes, Grian.”

“Xisuma’s version is,” Grian says, ignoring the absolutely terrifying fact that they have no idea where Xisuma is right now. “Mumbo’s version is player-level. And it works.”

“...Define ‘works,’” Scar says.

Grian sighs, going to lean back in his chair until he remembers he can’t put his wings away, and ends up hunched oddly back over himself instead. “Last Life,” he says. “I had them on me for most of Last Life. I couldn’t even remember that I was. You know.” He shrugs. “How much of that was Mumbo’s code and how much of that was down to Last Life’s fuckery in general, I couldn’t tell you, but he sure wouldn’t be getting up to anything.”

A long, long moment passes.

“Grian, buddy,” Skizz finally says. “I’m pretty sure that counts as psychological torture.”

“...No it doesn’t,” Grian says. “Not unless you’re saying Mumbo psychologically tortured me.”

Another very long moment goes by.

“What would that even do?” Scar asks. “You couldn’t remember, but you had a whole life to fall back on. You’d actively distanced yourself from all that. For Quoroth, it would—what? Mentally send him back to being twelve years old, before he got converted?”

Grian shrugs.

“If that’s a possibility, then absolutely not,” Impulse says. “If they were nerfed way down from that, then maybe— but no. I’m not at all okay with potentially altering someone’s entire personality like that.”

“Yeah, no,” Scar says. “Definitely not.”

Pearl clears her throat. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea,” she says.

“Pearl, how can you possibly think that’s not a bad idea?” Impulse asks.

“I mean, he is dangerous,” Pearl points out. “It would definitely make him less dangerous!”

“You want him to stay!” Grian snaps at her.

“I don’t,” Mumbo says, and when Grian glances over he looks dizzy. “I don’t like that idea at all. That’s—that sounds horrible, actually!”

…Which puts Grian two-to-three, again. “...You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says. “We’re really just going to let him hang around and not do anything about it?”

“I mean, you do have a point that there are other people who probably have an opinion on it,” Impulse says. He blows out a breath, then says, “Okay. Idea. Skizz, you might not like it.”

“I think I would like any idea better than whatever the hell we’re talking about right now,” Skizz points out.

“Right,” Impulse says. “We’ve already established that staying here long-term is a bad idea, and I’d rather not put this poor singleplayer under any more pressure than it’s already under. We’ve got at least three other Hermits, hopefully soon to be at least five, who are pretty much in a holding pattern until we figure out where we’re going from here. So we go figure out a safer place, join up with Etho and Beef and Hypno, get their input, and leave Quoroth here until we’ve figured out exactly what the plan is.”

“That… probably works, yeah,” Grian admits. “I’m sure I can figure out a way to keep him here. Bedrock cage and a bunch of turtle master, if nothing else. It does mean this world’s kind of on the firing line if he tries anything, though.”

“That’s why I said Skizz might not like it,” Impulse says.

“I’ve started over before, I can do it again,” Skizz says. “Let me move a couple valuables off-world first and I don’t mind risking it.”

“Might as well just take them with us,” Impulse says. Skizz goes to open his mouth, only to get cut off. “Don’t even pretend you’re not coming with us, Skizz. I need you.”

Skizz looks, for a long moment, like he wants to either self-deprecate or make a joke, and then finally says nothing at all and simply nods.

“Come on, Skizz, you’re already an honorary Hermit,” Scar points out. “No point pretending you’re not. Where exactly are we going, though?”

“We already know Skizz is whitelisted on Season Seven,” Grian points out. “And if anyone’s managed to find their way out and is looking for somewhere to go, the last world we were on that isn’t a smoking heap of rubble seems like a pretty likely place for them to head to. Centralized.”

“Am I whitelisted on Season Seven?” Pearl asks.

“...I don’t know, actually,” Grian says. “I don’t know how far back X updated them. Although, worse comes to worst, we know Hypno’s okay and he’s got op. He can add you and Gem if you’re not.”

“Fair enough,” Pearl says. “It sounds good to me.”

For a moment, the room blurs, and the image in Grian’s eyes is no longer Skizz’s base but a long-abandoned mansion. He’d said his farewell to Season Six long ago and he’d held Season Eight as it died, but his exit from Season Seven had been so rushed and unceremonious he’d never even had the time to realize he wouldn’t be returning.

Until now, apparently.

“Season Seven it is, then,” Grian says quietly.

Impulse, once again, draws in a heavy and exhausted breath. “I’ll send out the message.”

~~~

[impulseSV created a chat with Grian, MumboJumbo, PearlescentMoon, GoodTimeWithScar, Skizzleman, Etho, hypnotized, VintageBeef, ZombieCleo, cubfan135, Docm77, falsesymmetry, GeminiTay, iJevin, iskall85, joehillssays, Keralis1, Renthedog, Stressmonster101, TinFoilChef, Welsknight, xBCrafted, Xisumavoid, and Zedaph]

<impulseSV> We’re going to be on Season Seven. If you can see this message and you’re capable of getting there, we’ll see you there.

<impulseSV> And if you can’t get to us, we’re coming to find you.

Chapter Text

Toon Towers—Hermitcraft Seven

He wakes up in Toon Towers. It might just be the weirdest thing that ever happened.

Death had been his longtime companion for a good many years—from the steady, central presence of the Tek respawn anchor, to the often less reassuring cold ground of a world spawn, and later on the deafening crack of a popped totem. Falling, drowning, broken bones, farm designs gone wrong.

Suffocating in space.

Waking up in a bed an entire season past.

He doesn’t know what to do with himself for a good hour. What were you supposed to do, exactly, after you stared down your friends’ hurtling fate that you’d failed to prevent and slowly used up every last molecule of oxygen?

His comm’s utterly fried. It doesn’t even turn on when he finally tries it. Maybe it had been the explosion, or the radiation, or whatever. It’s bustificated.

(He can’t even call and explain to Skizz.)

Overall, it’s a very unpleasant… day? Two days? Two days. Two days, utterly alone on the ghost of a home, cut off entirely from the universe at large.

He spends the first shuffling around Toon Towers, looking through old chests of meaningless objects. (This was what he had now, didn’t he? If he can’t get his comm fixed—and frankly he hasn’t done more than look at it in despair, not enough to know if it was even possible—then it was entirely possible he’d just stay stuck here. Forever. Never again to return to the roaring warmth of Clan Tek, never to tell Skizz just how badly he’d failed—)

He roams out a little further the next day on old diamond boots. There are old shops, payments never picked up. Games he has no one to play with. (The Dungeon still greets her Master, that fragment of hungry awareness, yet he can’t quite bring himself to descend back to her depths.)

(There’s the Nether, maybe, if his comm is truly unfixable. The barriers between servers were thinner there, but with how incredibly far out into the universe the Hermits strayed, how many weeks or months or years could he walk before he encountered another soul?)

Holsten, is the conclusion he finally comes to before he passes out that night. Holsten, that stupid, ridiculous, meddling AI, must have figured out how to set his spawn cross-world. Otherwise, even if he had respawned from suffocating in space, it should have been deep underneath the hurtling satellite that had killed everyone else anyway.

(Stupid supercomputers, going around changing spawns without asking.)

It’s eight, nine, maybe ten o’clock when he hauls himself out of bed the third day. It’s going to be just like the first two, presumably, and he still doesn’t know what to do about that.

He’s wrong.

He’s wrong, and there’s the sound of rockets overhead, and he hadn’t gotten a join notification because his comm is dead, and he’s standing in the flight-high doorway at the top of Toon Towers, and whoever is flying in is spamming rockets and coming in fast—

Impulse.

IMPULSE?

“TANGO!”

And it takes Tango a second to find his voice, and Impulse is coming in way too hot, actually, and though his feet touch down he’s still got far too much momentum to stop before he crashes into Tango and sends him straight on his ass.

“Impy,” Tango finally gasps out, not entirely sure if he’s gasping because of sheer emotion or the fact that he just got knocked over or that Impulse is holding him too tightly to get a breath in.

“Gods I could kill you,” Impulse says, which is mostly undermined by the way he’s heaving for breath too.

“You sure tried to, coming in like that!”

“I thought you were dead, you bastard!”

“So you’re coming to finish the job?”

“Strangling you,” Impulse says, finally pulling far enough away to look Tango in the eye, and he’s alive, they’re both alive—

“Doesn’t feel like it,” Tango says. “Try harder, Impy.”

Impulse cuffs him upside the head, and Tango laughs, heavy and watery, and leans back on Impulse’s shoulder. “You’re okay. Impulse, how the hell are you okay?”

Impulse sighs, not answering for a long moment. “We kind of jumped in the Void,” he says. “Boatem, I mean. We jumped in the Void, and Grian brought us to Skizz—”

“...What do you mean, Grian brought you to Skizz?” Tango asks.

Another pause. “Long story,” Impulse finally says. “Very long story. But Skizz is here, Etho and Beef and Hypno should be any time now, we’re trying to get ahold of Iskall and Stress and TFC since they were off-world, and—” He sighs again, pauses again, and finally sits back on his heels. “How the hell are you okay?”

“Uh,” Tango says. “Respawned here, actually. Assuming that was Holsten. Super fantastically obnoxious self-righteous supercomputer,” he explains at Impulse’s puzzlement.

“Remind me to thank your computer,” Impulse says at least.

And there they sit, on the cold blue floor of Toon Towers, so many years together meaning they almost don’t have to speak. Tango still does, eventually. “Do we know about anyone else?”

Impulse shakes his head, then stops. “We think—” he says, then trails off. “That’s, I mean—” And then, so haltingly that Tango knows what he means, “Bdubs.”

Bdubs. “Fuck,” Tango says, thinking of that utterly panicked last transmission— My only suggestion is that you stay up—stay on the moon, don’t come, this place is falling to shambles—I gotta get out of here— “He—” And Tango was supposed to fix this, stop this, save them, and he hadn’t— “Has anyone told Etho yet?” he asks quietly, instead.

Impulse shakes his head. “I think… I think we’ve all decided that’s an in-person conversation,” he admits. “He should be here any time.”

There’s another whizz of rockets and another figure landing in Tango’s doorway, backlit from the sun and the bad angle. “You could’ve told me where your rockets were, homie-buddy,” comes Skizz’s voice, and Tango almost cries again.

He doesn’t, not quite, although he does haul himself to his feet and promptly throws himself into a patented Skizz bear hug. “Hey, Top,” Skizz says, infinitely casual for all they’d apparently thought him dead up until five minutes ago, and gods if Tango doesn’t care.

He’ll care later. They’ll all care later.

~~~

Grian’s Mansion—Hermitcraft Seven

Mumbo finds Grian in his mansion.

Pretty unsurprising, actually. Grian had left Season Seven abruptly and unceremoniously and had never returned, so of course the server had dropped him back in the exact same spot Mumbo had watched him make his final exit a lifetime ago. The surprising part is how similar, and different, the picture is to that moment.

He’s still sitting, back to the wall, the same place he’d gone sinking down the better part of a year ago. His eyes are glassier, this time, deadened rather than panicked.

His wings are out, just like before. The whole half of them, now.

“…Tango’s here,” Mumbo says, for lack of anything better to say, because Grian doesn’t seem much inclined to break the silence.

“Yeah,” Grian says distantly, gaze still fixed on some distant chest of his storage room. “I saw.”

Then, though he’s slightly loath to mention it, Mumbo says, “Pearl’s not?”

“Yeah,” Grian says. “Hypno’s sorting her now. He just got to one of Xisuma’s test worlds, he’s got access to the whitelist from there. Says he’s grabbing some data before he meets us here.”

“Oh,” Mumbo says. “Okay.”

Grian still seems rather disinclined to continue the conversation, which is really not the greatest thing for Mumbo’s psyche at that moment. He does, however, slowly get to his feet.

“I’m sorry,” Mumbo blurts.

Grian, for the first time, seems to focus on him. “For what?”

“The codes,” Mumbo says. “I didn’t—I didn’t know they’d do that to you, I’m sorry, I should’ve tested them more—”

“We kind of ran out of time for testing,” Grian points out.

“But I—But I,” Mumbo starts again, floundering. Then, quieter, “Skizz said I tortured you.”

Grian snorts. “Skizz blew that a little out of the water,” he says flatly. “We didn’t really have a choice, all right? It happened, it’s done. I doubt it would’ve changed much.”

Mumbo frowns, glances away, and tangles his hands together, then is thankfully saved from having to answer.

<impulseSV> meet at town hall?

<Grian> can you tp me?

<impulseSV> …yeah so I haven’t got op. actually. we probably should have thought about that one

<Grian> Tango does?

<impulseSV> his comm’s broken

<Grian> it’s fine. I’ll be there

PearlescentMoon joined the game.

“Hard way it is,” Grian says, shoving his comm back into his pocket.

“...Why do you need a teleport?” Mumbo asks, while Grian makes a pointed path outside.

“Hyperspace isn’t doing so hot at the moment,” Grian says, without looking over his shoulder. “And I don’t really fancy getting there Overworld or Nether without an elytra. I’ve gotta go break my bed. I’ll see you there.”

“...Okay,” Mumbo says to his best friend’s back. With that rather clear dismissal, he double-checks his own elytra from his hurried flight over from his own base, looks over his shoulder one more time, and plunges into Grian’s Nether portal.

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

It’s a short jaunt across the bay to the shopping district proper from world spawn, spent in relative silence despite Grian sharing the boat Pearl had pulled out of the spawn supply chest. He could have directed her a little better from the back of the boat, maybe, though there wasn’t much point when they were very clearly headed for the giant developed island ahead of them and it didn’t really matter where exactly they landed.

Grian does, rather stupidly, take them up the path that leads past the Barge, although truth be told as close to the town hall as it was there really wasn’t any way he wouldn’t have seen it.

“This is nice,” Pearl finally says, in what was clearly a vain attempt to break the tension. Of course it was different for her, seeing such an old, developed world she’d never stepped foot on, without it being fraught with memories of when everything had just been easier.

Gods, what Grian wouldn’t give to go back to Season Seven in any way that wasn’t this.

“Yeah,” he says, as the cluster of Hermits under the shadow of the town hall unknots a little.

And there is Tango, looking whole enough if not utterly exhausted. So that was—

It wasn’t as though he hadn’t believed his future self, really. The thing about a stable time loop was that it was, well, stable, and he can’t picture any reason to have lied to himself about the matter.

Seeing Tango alive and well again when they’d all presumed him dead for more than a week is still a relief.

It looks as though Grian and Pearl are the last ones to arrive—Impulse, understandably, is hovering just a bit too close to Tango, Skizz hanging just behind and, in a moment of slightly comical dissonance, Grian can’t help but notice that Skizz is a full head taller than either Impulse or Tango. Scar and Mumbo are closer to the Nether portal, likely both having just come through, and their six has become seven and hopefully, given the buzz of comms that resounds through their little circle, it might have just become eight.

Grian has no time to check who the eighth might be, though, because the first words shared in their little gathering are Tango’s sharp, “Hey, what the hell?”

“...Good to see you too, Tango,” Grian says dryly, because his friend’s gaze has landed clearly and heavily on him in a way that sends an uncomfortable prickle all the way across his wings. They twitch a little under the scrutiny, despite his best effort, because it is very much scrutiny, leaving him to make another half-hearted effort to send them away that once again fails completely.

“...What the hell?” Tango says again, gaze darting rapidly around the group. It lands on Mumbo a little longer than the rest, before once again turning back on Grian. “Have I missed something?”

“A bit,” Grian says dryly, on reflex. It’s probably not his best response.

“...A bit,” Tango repeats, eyes narrowing. “People are dead, Grian.”

And if that doesn’t hit where it hurts. “I don’t,” Grian says. “I tried—”

“Tried what?” Tango demands. “Standing there and looking cryptic? I sure as hell didn’t see you up there fixing anything! At least I did something!”

“Tango,” Pearl says sharply, taking half a step ahead of Grian. “Calm down.”

Tango mirrors the step, though significantly more than half. “No, do not—do not tell me to calm down, Pearl. Don’t even try! This entire year has been one set of disasters after another—”

“Tango, buddy,” Skizz tries, only to be also soundly ignored.

“—and don’t think I don’t know who’s been at the center of it!” Tango continues.

Grian squares his shoulders and somehow manages to keep his voice level. “You’re not wrong.”

It’s like striking a match. Whatever shades of civility Tango had had left fall by the wayside. “What, even this isn’t enough for you to stop being cagey? Enough is enough! I don’t have Etho on my back about the goddamn backstory rules so fucking talk, Grian.”

No one quite seems prepared to interrupt—maybe they realize, just like Grian, that Tango has been told off too many times to be deterred now.

“What is it, then?” Tango prods. “We all know who this circles back to! What do they want with us? What do they want with you?”

“I won’t go back to them,” Grian says flatly. “I won’t.”

“And the rest of us don’t fucking matter, then? We can all just go die? Get crushed by the moon, suffocate in space and watch—”

“Don’t you dare talk to me about what you’ve been forced to watch.”

Tango jerks back like he’s been slapped, eyes going narrow and then wide again. “Dear gods,” he says, then another word that Grian doesn’t recognize—though, going by the way Impulse gasps, it’s certainly not a Netheric expression of friendship and goodwill. “They want you because you’re one of them.”

And there it is, every terrible reaction Grian had ever feared, boiling over into the white-hot rage of someone he would have considered one of his dearest friends five minutes ago.

“Did Xisuma know?” Tango demands. “Or did you go behind his back too? Mumbo?”

“I don’t—” Mumbo gasps out, curling in on himself. “Grian didn’t—Tango, it’s okay, he never meant to—”

“Oh, shut up,” Tango says. “Grow a spine! You could have fixed this!” he continues, rounding back on Grian.

“I TRIED! Gods dammit, Tango, do you think I didn’t try?”

“Clearly not fucking hard enough!”

“What did you want me to do?”

“You tell me!” Tango snaps. “You’re the Watcher!”

It’s a heavy blow—only barely not a physical one, by the volume they’ve reached at this point. “I’m not having this discussion with you,” Grian says, in one last-ditch attempt to salvage whatever the hell was happening.

“Oh yes you are! We’ve spent all these months running around trying to find the pieces and you’ve had them all along! And you sat on them! Everything that’s happened and you’ve just pretended you weren’t the only one that could go meet the Watchers on their own terms! You tried? Tried what? Sitting on your ass and letting the moon crash?”

“I would have done anything! Anything! I would have killed for you, I would have died for you, if I could have stopped it I would have!”

“No you wouldn’t! Because you just told me they don’t care about us! They care about you! So no! You won’t do anything for us, and you fucking didn’t!”

“Shut up, Tango,” Grian says, chest heaving. “Just shut up. Stop pretending you know my life.”

“Oh, I’m not pretending in the slightest,” Tango retorts. They’re all but face to face now, and it’s hard to tell who moved when. “Because clearly I don’t know you at all.”

“Clearly not.” Grian can scarcely see past Tango, now—the others are still there, barely in his peripherals, though no one seems quite ready to break into the bubble they’ve made. Grian might well be the only one capable of it at this moment, dragging in one more strangling breath before turning on his heel.

It’s not enough to stop Tango from throwing one last barb at his back. “Admit it, Grian,” he says, voice raising in some ungodly mix of fury and triumph. “You’re a fucking coward.”

It’s the last tip of an invisible scale. There had been no way to weigh them as they’d hurled in, no way to know just which one would snap the last thread of self-control.

One moment Grian is facing away, ears ringing, stock-still, and the next he’s turned around and driven his fist into Tango’s nose.

“Whoa!”

“Hey okay no—”

“Hang on there—”

“Hey knock it off—”

“—both of you—”

“Oh snappers—”

The bubble breaks firmly, Hermits descending from every side, though not before Tango has the chance to give back as good as he got. Skizz and Impulse drag him back by a shoulder each, leaving him reduced to incoherent noises and a very bloody nose; Grian’s likely to be more disposed to a black eye, given the way it’s smarting, with Scar hauling him back by the middle and Pearl crossing just in front of him as an annoyingly tall barrier, Mumbo mumbling incoherently and more hovering off to one side rather than actually intervening. Interestingly enough, barely half a step out of the Nether portal is Etho, looking deeply baffled and evidently the object of the server notification no one had gotten around to checking.

“Enough!” Pearl says after a long moment. “Enough! Just—go! Both of you! Go chill the hell out!”

Tango, still audibly breathing through his teeth, finally shakes his way out of both Impulse and Skizz’s grips. He pauses for a moment, looking as though he wants to throw one final insult, but only manages another wordless half-yell before stalking off. Impulse makes some sort of helpless, one-handed gesture, and follows after. Skizz stares past them for a moment, then glances at where Etho is very tentatively stepping out of the Nether portal, then shifts from foot to foot but eventually stays put.

“Scar,” Grian finally says flatly. “Let go of me.”

Scar obliges, slowly, while everyone else continues to stare at Grian, now the only object of the disturbance left.

And then he, too, turns and marches off into the shopping district.

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Whatever Etho had been expecting upon arriving in the shopping district, it was… not that. Least of all considering that the last he’d heard Tango was dead.

Well. Clearly not.

He’d known he was coming into something, given that Skizz’s music was—and still is, now that the fists have stopped flying—so full of conflicting emotions he’d sounded like an entire House all by himself. Etho’s own music must be a riot as well, given that Tango leaves and Impulse follows and Skizz stays. Thankfully.

Grian storms off as well, then, leaving just the five of them and a very awkward silence, broken to Etho only by Skizz’s tumult and Grian’s redoubled clatter. “Well,” Scar finally says. “That happened.”

“What exactly,” Etho ventures, given that he’d shown up basically just in time to hear a fucking coward, “was that?”

“Something that was a long time coming, I’m afraid,” Scar says, which doesn’t explain anything, actually. Then again, it was Scar.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Mumbo says, flipping his hands around each other—hold on.

Hold on. What.

Walking in on Grian having wings was one thing, given that as far as Etho knew Grian was in fact the only Watcher he knew of that didn’t have them. It was the entire reason that elytra existed in the first place—even in a fully armed Void warship, it was impossible not to be at a disadvantage if you couldn’t fly and your enemy could.

He is, on the other hand, fairly sure he would have noticed Mumbo having wings sometime in the last decade.

“Let him go cool off,” Pearl suggests, while Etho is busy doing the most backwards thing of his life—that is, trying to tune out Skizz in favor of Grian’s awful Watcher racket.

And that was. That was not just Grian anymore. Which.

What.

That’s about when Mumbo notices him staring—or at least Etho really hopes that’s when Mumbo notices him staring and not the mortifying alternative that he’d noticed several seconds ago. Etho hurriedly—and probably not subtly—looks away, and finally steps properly out of the Nether portal’s overhang to sidle over to Skizz.

“...Hi,” Skizz says under his breath, which is all it takes for his torrent of confused-angry-upset-hopeless-relieved to bubble back up to the surface.

“Hi,” Etho echoes. Then, “I feel like I missed something.”

Skizz barks a low laugh that sounds more exhausted than anything. “Yeah. You could say that.”

Scar, Mumbo, and Pearl are now all quite deep in the discussion of whether one, some, or all of them should go and talk to Grian, too absorbed to notice Etho’s careful glance at them before he takes the opportunity for a moment of privacy. Tango had gone west, down the road that eventually looped down to Decked Out; Grian had gone south, past or maybe even to the Barge.

Etho goes east, and Skizz follows barely half a step behind. It’s been over a year now since he met Skizz, at least by his own stretched-out timeline, and he still forgets how easy it is. He has no need to fill the silence with I’m glad you’re here, because he feels it, and that means so does Skizz.

Doesn’t mean Skizz can’t still get one over on him, though, because whatever he’d been expecting Skizz to say next it sure hadn’t been, “Etho, homie-buddy. Is there a reason you didn’t tell me we can hear Watchers?”

Etho glances over at him, startled.

“That’s why I’d always say you sounded better when we were on one of our solos, right?” Skizz presses. “Because it was just you?”

“Yeah,” Etho admits. “Yeah, that’s exactly why.”

Skizz blows out a breath. “Why didn’t you say?” he asks again.

“It wasn’t my story to tell.”

Skizz sighs again. “He’s telling it now.”

That… explained a lot, actually. “Ah,” Etho says. “And Tango… didn’t take it well?”

“Understatement of the century,” Skizz says dryly. “He’s always run the hottest of the four of us, but the only time I’ve seen him that mad was that damn Boogey kill—” He breaks off, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Fuck.”

Speaking of stories, this might just be the best time to ask the question Etho’s been just a little too nervous to ask. “Actually…” He pauses, scuffing his toe against the road for a moment. They’d ended up veering north almost immediately and were now nearly all the way into Aquatown, and the buildings towering over their heads almost seem to catch his voice and hold it down. “What have you, uh, told Impulse?”

“About what?” Skizz asks, because apparently even sharing your every emotion involuntarily couldn’t entirely make up for nonsequiturs.

“About…” Etho says, then trails off, at a loss to encompass what he’s trying to. “Me?” he finally settles on.

“Oh,” Skizz says. “I haven’t said anything, dude.”

“…Oh,” Etho says. “I assumed you had.”

“No?” Skizz says. “I figured if you wanted people to know you’d have told them. Geez, you see Impulse more than I do these days.”

“Oh,” Etho says again, even if that wasn’t really true. Or at least it didn’t feel like it.

“That wasn’t my story to tell,” Skizz adds with a faint prod of affection-fond.

“That one kind of is,” Etho points out. Then, “You can. If you want.”

“I wouldn’t say without your permission,” Skizz says.

Etho chews on his lip for a moment. Skizz can’t see it through his mask, though he could surely hear the indecision. Still, he finally says, “And I’m giving it to you.”

“…You sure, dude?”

“Yeah,” Etho says, not sure at all. “And Tango too, I guess.”

Skizz snorts. “Tango’s already having a conniption about the species of one of our friends. Let’s not make it two, huh?”

“…Yeah, that’s fair.”

Even under the circumstances, there’s a definite edge of excited-relieved from Skizz, and a moment later he says, “Thanks, dude. And you can too. I mean. If you want. Talk about me.”

“Yeah,” Etho says again, finally lowering himself to the raised curb of Aquatown’s roads. “I’m sorry,” he says. “To get in the middle of you and Impulse.”

Skizz chuckles as he settles beside. “Etho, buddy. I’ve known Impulse since I was ten years old. You’d have to try a lot harder than that to get between us.”

Etho sighs, lifting his head towards the weak winter sunlight, then says, “We had… a word,” he says, even though he knows Skizz wouldn’t know how to mimic it without several attempts. “It’s… almost a synonym for a House? But it’s not so much tied to the physical location. It’s more… when you meet someone, and there’s something tying you together, and it always will be.”

“I know what you mean,” Skizz says. “My brothers aren’t blood, you know. We’re not even related,” he adds, leaning over and not so much bumping Etho’s shoulder as barely grazing it.

“We could have been,” Etho says. “Lioneth and Helleath were always close. One of my father’s parents was born in your House, I think.”

“Still,” Skizz says. “I get it, yeah. It’s under the same roof in the Nether. Like, no matter how far you travel you’ll always be under that same Nether roof.” He chuckles, once. “We broke that one a little bit, being in the Overworld and all.”

“It’s like,” Etho says, then swallows. “We’re all just the notes in each other’s songs.” It’s far from a direct translation but it gets the point across. “And gods I hope that’s still true right now.”

Skizz’s music turns into a trill of concern-comfort-scared that hurts to even listen to. Etho draws his knees up to his chest and leans into them.

“Etho, buddy,” Skizz finally says. “I think you need to talk to Grian.”

“Yeah, I know,” Etho mumbles. “We’ve got to start figuring out where everyone—”

“No,” Skizz cuts in. “I think you need to talk to Grian.”

Well, that was… possibly the most daunting prospect anyone’s ever put in front of him. It wasn’t like either of them were the sort to go around just talking about that.

But Skizz, as per usual, damn him, is right.

“And I,” Skizz says with a sigh, “think I need to go make sure Tango isn’t attempting another homicide somewhere.” With a faint quirk of amusement, he says, “At least we’re in the outworlds. Do you know what a pain it is bailing someone out of jail?”

A long moment passes. “Wait,” Etho says. “Who went to jail?”

Skizz, rather than answering, bumps Etho’s shoulder again, then stands. And, again, he doesn’t need to speak for Etho to understand him in perfect clarity. Support-grief-upset-overwhelmed-scared.

Yeah. Etho could relate to that one.

~~~

Impulse, infuriatingly, is their mother’s son.

Tango had always been their father’s, right down to the inflections and mannerisms, much to the mortifying torment only five older sisters could provide. Just because Ron had turned his life’s attention to carpentry and Tango to redstone didn’t mean they didn’t share those same sharp angles of thinking.

But Impulse, right from the moment he’d started coming out of his shell and finding his place in their family, had always taken after Tarisha. And that was really, really annoying when your mother happened to be a therapist.

“Don’t start,” Tango snaps, before Impulse can even think about getting a word in edgewise.

“I haven’t said anything,” Impulse says, holding his hands up.

“I know you haven’t! You’ve been not saying anything real fucking loudly!”

Impulse, even more maddeningly, continues to not say anything. Tango may or may not kick the edge of the road, which may or may not result in anything other than bashing his toes in.

“I can’t believe this,” Tango says, refusing to hop or limp or swear despite the fact he really probably shouldn’t have kicked that hard. “I can’t believe— how do you just—how do you not even—” He rakes a hand through his hair. “I can’t believe this!” he says again, turning back to Impulse.

Impulse continues not saying anything.

“He just—he didn’t say anything!” Tango cries. “He didn’t do anything! It’s been a goddamn year, Impulse! It’s been a year and he knew the whole time and he didn’t say anything!”

“Gee,” Impulse says dryly. “I cannot possibly imagine why he didn’t say anything to you, Tango.”

“We should’ve,” Tango continues to mutter, now having made it so far down the road they’re nearly to Color Complete. “I knew we should have pushed him harder, I was right, Cleo was right, we should’ve—” He stops, spins on his heel. “Told me? What, like you knew?”

Impulse, damningly, doesn’t answer. Well, Tango’s learned by now how not pushing worked out for him.

“When the hell did you find out?”

“A month or so ago.”

“And you didn’t say anything either?” Tango demands. “What the hell are you covering him for, Impulse?”

“I’m not covering for him, Tango.”

“Oh yeah? Tell me how that works, then! A month ago was before the server locked down! We could’ve gotten off! Everyone would be alive!”

“No one knew how bad it was going to get until it did,” Impulse points out. “Including Grian.”

“I don’t understand why you’re defending him!” Tango snaps. “Why the hell are you on his side?”

“I’m not on his side!” Impulse says. “I’m not on yours either! I think both of you are being completely full of yourselves and idiots and I’d like you both to knock it off so we can worry about bigger problems!”

“Fat chance of that!”

“Oh, come on,” Impulse groans.

“Don’t give me that!” Tango says. “He’s in the wrong! I’m allowed to be mad about it!”

“I’m not saying you aren’t—” Impulse starts, before Tango cuts him off with a desperate grapple for the upper hand back.

“Skizz, back me up here!”

Skizz, having barely so much as touched down and stumbling a bit in the landing, finally straightens up and exchanges a glance with Impulse. “Uh. On what, buddy?”

“You know what,” Tango presses. “Don’t tell me you’re on Grian’s side too!”

“Whoa,” Skizz says. “I’m not on anyone’s side, homie-buddy—”

Tango cuts him off with a groan. “Do you two practice this shit?”

“I sure hope we haven’t practiced this one,” Impulse says. “But Tango, neither of you are going to be helping anyone if you’re too busy tearing each other’s throats out.”

Tango sniffs through his still-aching nose. Not broken, thankfully, though that was probably a near thing, and it had stopped bleeding. “Maybe he should have thought of that before he punched me.”

Impulse makes some sort of helpless gesture in his direction, clearly intended for Skizz. Skizz shrugs and opens his mouth.

“No, don’t bother,” Tango cuts in. “I don’t want to hear whatever half-baked defense you’re both coming up with. Talk to me later.”

“And you’re going where?” Impulse asks.

“At this point?” Tango snaps. “Might go run Decked Out. The ravagers might want to kill me but at least they’re fucking honest about it.”

~~~

“...Well. That could have gone better.”

Impulse sighs, sinking to the roadside. “I can see where he’s coming from,” he admits. “I can see where they’re both coming from.”

“Yeah,” Skizz says, settling beside him. “It sucks, dude.”

Impulse lets out a huff of a laugh, then says, “Only Tango can make me want to kill him for being alive and then make me want to kill him again for having his head up his ass, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Wish Zed were here,” Impulse says, aching and wistful. “He might be able to get a word in edgewise.”

“Mm,” Skizz says, and it’s familiar territory for all they’ve only been traversing it for two days. If only. If only.

Impulse glances sideways and watches Skizz stare into the middle distance for a moment. “Okay,” he finally says. “Spill.”

Skizz glances over. “Spill what?”

“Whatever it is that’s making me smell smoke from here,” Impulse says, and the joke almost lands. “C’mon, Skizz. Whatever you’re thinking I probably need to know it at this rate.”

Skizz glances over, then away again. “This is a bad time,” he says.

“The worst time, probably,” Impulse says. “Which means there isn’t a worse time you could do it, right?”

For a long moment, Skizz doesn’t answer. “Gods,” he says at last. “It’s been a year and you’re going to get it out of me within twenty minutes.” He opens his mouth, closes it again, and then finally says dryly, “You remember when we found out my superhero origin story, right?”

“...Yeah,” Impulse says, despite the fact it was hardly the turn he’d expected the conversation to take. It wasn’t so much that Skizz avoided talking about that missing quarter of his heritage so much as… there wasn’t much cause to bring it up, really. Just because it had been an open secret for twenty years didn’t mean it was something they had to talk about constantly. It had probably been a good half a decade since the last time Skizz had even mentioned it, actually. “...What about it?”

“Do you remember,” Skizz says, “when you offered to help me look for them?”

“Yeah?” Impulse says again. “Although this is a really bad time to take me up on a twenty-odd-year-old offer, yeah. Can we raincheck that one, buddy?”

“No,” Skizz says, shaking his head. “I mean—not on the raincheck, dude, I’m not asking you to help me look, that’s—” He cuts himself off, then adds quietly, “One found me.”

A long, long moment passes, and for a moment Impulse is able to shove the chaos around them into the back of his brain. “...Oh my gods?” he says. “Seriously? You’ve met—when? Where?”

“Third Life,” Skizz says.

Impulse’s brow furrows. “But we knew everyone from Third Life,” he says.

“You did. I didn’t.”

“Or—except Jimmy and Martyn and Big B, I guess?” Impulse continues. “You—shoot, Skizz, I’m sorry, you know we’ve all been trying to find—”

“No,” Skizz cuts in. “It’s not—it’s not any of them. Actually,” he says, “it’s one of the few people we actually know exactly where he is right now.”

Another very long moment passes while Impulse tries to parse that out, and finds out those two circles only overlap for exactly one person.

“...Etho?”

Skizz lets out a breathless laugh, cracking the faintest grin. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

“...Holy shit, Skizz,” Impulse says, unable to phrase anything more eloquent. “I don’t… you’ve got to be kidding. I’ve known Etho for like half a decade.”

“Yeah, dude, you sure have,” Skizz says.

“And I don’t—I mean, a bunch of us assumed he wasn’t entirely human, but it never even occurred to me that he could be—”

“He’s not human at all,” Skizz says. “I mean—he’s the real deal. Whole shebang. He—he grew up there, he knows all the culture, Impulse, he speaks the language.”

“Holy shit,” Impulse says again, for lack of anything better to say. “That’s—gods. I’m so happy for you, Skizz.” He glances over, then says, “Has he—like, taken you back or anything? Have you gotten to meet your family?”

Skizz doesn’t answer. When he does, it’s a complete nonsequitur Impulse definitely hasn’t followed. “I didn’t have tinnitus.”

“...Huh?” Impulse says. “That’s, uh. Something I do distinctly remember you having, actually.”

“Yeah,” Skizz says. “It wasn’t. It was—I don’t know how to explain it. We have this—this sense. You know, like, synesthesia? Where certain people always see the number nine as red, or they taste colors or something? It’s like that, except—there’s this song in the back of my brain and it sounds like every emotion everyone in my family is feeling all the time. Except,” he chokes a little. “Except I wasn’t with my family and I couldn’t hear them right.”

“...Skizz,” Impulse says, then throws his arm over his best friend’s shoulder the same way Skizz had done for him the other night. “Geez, Skizz, I’m so sorry.” Then, a horrible thought occurring to him, he says, “Didn’t—didn’t that, uh, stop? Like, a couple years ago?”

“Yeah,” Skizz says, leaning into Impulse’s hold a little heavier. “Yeah. When everybody died.” When Impulse has exactly zero way to answer that, he continues, “I’m the only other Ender Etho’s met in over a decade.” He lets out a ragged laugh, and then says, “Do you—do you know how weird it is to have an almost complete stranger show up at your house and then start crying about the fact that you exist?”

“I don’t,” Impulse says quietly. “I really don’t. And I—yeah, forgive me for saying I have a really hard time picturing Etho crying.” And yet, what Skizz says fits so many of the pieces of the mystery every Hermit acknowledged and no one pried about—just who or what Etho was, or where he’d come from, and why it always seemed like some piece of him persistently held himself away from the rest of them.

“Yeah,” Skizz says. “‘Cause you can’t hear him.”

Impulse stews on that for a moment as the pieces continue to fall into place. Of course Skizz and Etho had allied in both of the Life games. Of course they’d forged a friendship outside of it. Of course they’d bonded over these missing pieces of culture none of the rest of them were privy to. “Oh, yeah,” Impulse finally says, then puts on his best Skizz impression. “Etho and I have been in touch.”

Skizz’s laugh is genuine this time. “...So you’re not mad?”

“Why would I be mad?”

“...Think about how the rest of this morning has gone, Dippledop.”

Impulse sighs. “I’m trying not to.” Then, “He’s okay with you telling me this?”

“He thought I already had. But yeah. Yeah.” Skizz sighs. “I told him he should talk to Grian. We’ll see how that goes.”

“I’m hoping fewer bruises,” Impulse says dryly.

“We can only hope.”

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

It is, miraculously, almost sundown by the time Grian is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Mumbo. Or however that worked. He’d already had to deal with Pearl and Scar, despite his best attempts at shutting them down, so really he’s more surprised than anything that it’s taken his best friend this long to show up. Surely some joke could be made there, considering it was in fact Christmas Eve.

Doesn’t mean he’s any more eager for it, or any more inclined to play nice. “Honestly, Mumbo,” he says over his shoulder, not bothering to look back from where he’s perched on the edge of the lowered floor of the Barge. “Pretty sure whatever you want to say has been said, so can we skip the rehash?”

For a long moment, Mumbo doesn’t answer, and Grian thinks maybe he’s gotten away with it.

Except for the fact that the voice that answers him is very much not Mumbo.

“Well. I can’t believe I’ve gone from Canadian to British and no one bothered to tell me.”

That was—probably the last voice Grian had expected to hear, and he still doesn’t quite believe his eyes when he turns toward it. Which. That was in fact Etho standing in the doorway.

Grian’s fairly sure stranger things had happened that day, although he’s hard-pressed to think of them, actually.

“Hello,” he finally manages, and then in a vain attempt to lighten the situation, “not-Mumbo.”

“...I guess I’ve been called worse?” Etho ventures, shifting his weight but not actually stepping beyond his place just inside the doorway. When the silence grows interminable and then finally snaps, he briefly tugs on the edge of his vest and says, “Skizz told me I should talk to you.”

Grian sighs and squeezes his eyes shut. Of course. “Yeah,” he says. “He would, wouldn’t he.” He snorts. “‘This is Grian’s fault. We can let Grian break the news.’” When Etho doesn’t answer, he adds, “You probably want to sit down.”

“That’s not at all an ominous way to start a conversation,” Etho points out, though he does tentatively make his way over. He settles on the same perch Grian’s on, a few blocks to the side, drawing one leg up to his chest and staring into the middle distance rather than looking over.

Probably for the best, really. This conversation was going to be hard enough without being stared down the whole time.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Grian says at long last. “I wasn’t—I was supposed to—”

“Then, if you can’t stop them from entering, provide them an exit. Get them out. When it comes for me, keep them alive. Keep them safe.”

How could the very price with which he’d tried to buy their safety be what had ended them anyways?

He thinks of his own future self, of the sheer grief resonating in his magic, of Fate closing like a noose he wasn’t allowed to put his head into yet, of whole white wings and maimed black ones.

“I thought you’d all be safe,” he says, voice bordering on anguished.

Etho doesn’t answer. Were it anyone else, Grian might have even wondered if he was even listening, but somewhere along the line he’s figured out there’s a certain subtlety to Etho that usually only showed up in silence.

“Bdubs didn’t get off the server,” Grian says at last. “I’m sorry.”

It’s a pitiful apology, only exacerbated by the slow, almost puzzled way Etho finally glances over at him. “...What?”

“We were all… just trying to figure out a way out, in the end. As best we could. And I guess—guess he didn’t. I don’t—I shouldn’t—I tried. Fuck. I tried so hard. And it wasn’t enough.”

The silence hangs thick enough that Grian can hear Etho suck in a breath. It’s still another long moment before he breaks it. “Was anyone else?” Etho finally asks, a deeply careful levelness in his tone that’s both stark contrast to Tango’s wrath and worryingly inscrutable. “Still on the server, I mean?”

“XB,” Grian says, too bone-deep hurt to bother hedging. “Keralis. Zedaph. I tried to pull them all out. Really haven’t got a clue if I actually did.”

“Then,” Etho says, “then there’s still some chance that they could all be. Okay.”

“Maybe,” Grian says. “For those three. I just wasn’t fast enough to get Bdubs, too.”

Etho once again drops back into that alarming quiet. It had always set Grian’s teeth on edge for reasons he could never quite piece together, even when it wasn’t so pointedly directed at him.

“I’m sorry,” he offers again, in useless tribute to a broken promise.

“Yeah,” Etho says. “Me too.”

Grian should—go, maybe. Leave Etho to his grief, given that he seems less than inclined to leave at this point, and find somewhere else to go wallow in his own. He can’t quite bring himself to, though. Maybe out of self-flagellation. After Tango’s roaring fury, Etho’s subdued acceptance feels… wrong, somehow.

“I tried to get Xisuma to kick you off the server.”

It’s such a nonsensical string of words it takes Grian a moment too long to parse it, and even then it doesn’t make sense. “...Huh?”

“When I came back at the start of Season Seven,” Etho continues, like that made any more sense. “I told Xisuma he should boot you off the server.”

Grian blinks, then swallows. “...Dare I ask why?”

Etho glances at him from the corner of his eye again, a look more damning than most of the other Hermits could give him square on. “Don’t we both know why?” he asks mildly.

Well, Grian certainly knows what offense was worthy of that sentence—or really, what probably should have precluded him becoming a Hermit in the first place.

But that would mean that Etho—

“Have you known this entire time?” Grian asks, the words scraping his throat on the way out.

Etho, once again, takes just slightly too long to answer. “I wish you could understand just how awful you sound,” he says, with something like the snap of a rubber band in his words, the suddenness of tension giving way. “It took me weeks to be able to sleep.”

“I’m… sorry? About that?” Grian says, with a hysterical edging up his throat. “I don’t—uh—it’s not on purpose? I don’t think?”

“I got used to it,” Etho says.

A beat passes. “The whole time?” Grian asks again. It had been one thing to realize most of his friends had eventually suspected he wasn’t human, and another thing entirely to find out that Etho had known exactly what he was the moment they’d first encountered each other. And Grian can’t even say met, either—he’s fairly sure they hadn’t had an actual conversation until half a year or so into Season Seven. “You never said anything.”

“Well,” Etho says, “Xisuma made me feel about six inches tall for asking, so.”

“How the hell did that conversation go, actually?” Grian asks with morbid curiosity.

“He said you might be a Watcher,” Etho says, and the word hangs for a moment too long, “but you were also a Hermit, and if I had a problem with that I could either get over myself or I could leave.”

That was… a remarkably hard line for Xisuma to have taken, actually, and Grian can’t quite tell if the pang in his chest is from shock, affection, or loss.

“Which definitely was not what I wanted to hear,” Etho continues, “but very much what I needed to.”

Grian swallows. “You’d have had people with you,” he points out. “If you’d. If you’d taken it over X’s head. Made it known. People would have agreed with you. Especially when I was still that new.”

There’s a long moment. “I… didn’t think of that, honestly,” Etho admits.

“You’d have had every right.”

“No,” Etho says. “I wouldn’t have. Because he was right and I was wrong.” He sucks in a breath. “I knew you were a Watcher. It took me a lot longer to figure out you were a person.”

“Yeah,” Grian says, then blows out a snort. “Once upon a time I sure was.”

Etho makes a muted sound of query, and—sure. Why not? What was one more person, at this rate?

“You know what they did to X, right?” Grian says. “Yeah. Perfect that process for a couple decades of fucked-up End time and you get me.”

Grian’s never had much chance to watch Etho’s clearly very internalized thinking process at work before; frankly, there wasn’t much to watch, but there’s an interest to it all the same. “They made you,” he says quietly. Then, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” Grian says, then in a hollow echo of earlier, “Me too.” And again, another ghost of conversations gone by, “So. Was a person. Not anymore.”

Etho shifts a little, changes the leg he’s got drawn up to himself. “It still amazes me,” he says, “living among humans as long as I have, how much you all think the universe revolves around you.”

It takes Grian a moment to catch the subject change, shockingly enough. Considering how often he managed to avoid talking about himself by keeping the subject firmly on whoever he was talking to, he really ought to have noticed Etho was doing the exact same thing to him. “How do you mean?”

“Person,” Etho says, “is not a synonym solely for human.”

And—oh. It had been a long, long time since Mumbo had had his outburst on Season Six, and there had been so much happening then and after that Grian had given it exactly zero more thought.

“I’m pretty sure even Xisuma doesn’t know about Etho’s life before Mindcrack but Etho’s sure as hell not entirely human.”

“You’re the second person who’s told me I sound weird in the last couple weeks,” Grian ventures. “You don’t. Uh. Have anything to do with the Listeners, do you?”

Etho glances over again with utter bafflement. “The what?”

“The, uh—is that a no?”

“I don’t know what a Listener is.”

“You know what, I really don’t either.”

“You were… they had to have started taking humans after the war,” Etho says. “Or we— surely we’d have heard about that.”

“Uh,” Grian says, abruptly realizing he may in fact be missing a very large, very important piece here. “Uh. What war was that. Exactly.”

Etho, for the first time in the entire conversation, turns to stare Grian full in the face.

“…I’m missing something, aren’t I.”

“Did they,” Etho says, very deliberately. “Did they just. Not mention the genocide.”

“…No?” Grian ventures. “That’s. I don’t.” He chews on his lip. “I wasn’t the greatest student but I feel like I would have remembered that.”

Except—

“You are not the first to flee the fate of them. Some saw their obsoleteness, and took their leave, and decided to no longer be Watchers but Listeners. The Cinders know what is coming, and they bide their time, remaining in the safety of their great Netheric clans. And then, once chief among the rising races, were the Enders, who hastened to quicken the ticking of fate and lost themselves to their own impatience.”

“...The Enders,” Grian says quietly. “Is that what…?”

A long, long moment drags out. “...Did you not know I was?” Etho asks.

“Okay, listen,” Grian says. “Not the greatest student! Already established that part! And apparently my nonhuman radar is entirely broken.”

“You were afraid of me,” Etho points out.

“I’ve never been afraid of you a day in my life,” Grian says. “Except maybe when you soloed the wither in Last Life.”

Etho snorts at that, in such a way that Grian can’t tell if it’s amusement or disbelief. “Okay, Grian.”

“Okay, Etho,” Grian shoots back, and it’s a way they’ve never quite bickered before, but something in the air seems to suddenly deem it acceptable. “Just because your reputation precedes you doesn’t mean I’m scared of you.”

They fall back into silence—an easier, quieter one than they’d been in before. “I have a question,” Etho finally says. “What’s happened with Mumbo?”

A beat passes. “Stole my soul,” Grian says.

Another beat passes. “As you do,” Etho says.

“Yeah. As you do.” Grian tilts his head back, staring up at the night-darkening glass and heavy crossbeams of the Barge, and finally adds, “It’s been one shitty year, huh? Merry Christmas to us.”

“Something like that,” Etho says quietly.

“...Right,” Grian says, drumming his hands on his thighs. “Question for you, then. Do Enders drink? I’ve never seen you.”

“Technically yes,” Etho says, “if you want to see me black out after about half a glass of wine.”

“That explains it, yeah.” Grian rolls his shoulders, shoves down the voice in his brain that sounds an awful lot like Pearl, then adds, “I’m just saying. I’m tired of thinking, and I’m sure Doc’s still got something of a stash here. Depending on how you feel about substance abuse.”

It takes Etho long enough to answer that Grian’s momentarily worried he’s offended him. “Generally? Very negatively. Currently? Surprisingly positively.”

“...Well then,” Grian says. “Sounds like we have some catching up to do.”

“And a lot more to come, I’d think,” Etho says quietly, and something in the words sounds deeper than their syllables.

“What do you mean by that?”

“...I see it this way,” Etho says. “In a hundred years you and I are going to be the only ones still standing here.”

He might as well have just dumped an ice bucket over Grian’s head for the effect those words have. “You don’t know that,” Grian says, a little too desperately. At this point he barely knows how he’s going to get through the next day, the next hour; the thought of an entire century stretching out ahead of him is something he doesn’t even want to begin wrapping his head around. “None of the converts have been around long enough to have any idea what their lifespans are.”

There’s a deliberateness in Etho’s next answer that would almost be cold if it weren’t so matter-of-fact. “Do you really think the Watchers would put that much time and effort into creating tools that would only last a few decades?”

And—

And the problem is that Etho is so very right.

And the other thing is that there is nothing else he could have said that could have driven home more that Grian’s demons were Etho’s demons as well. One of them from the inside, one from the outside, but the same intimate, horrible knowledge all the same.

“Yeah,” Grian says, and they both know it’s not the answer to Etho’s question. “Yeah. Let’s—let’s go see what Doc left.”

Etho doesn’t answer, but it also doesn’t seem to be a no, so Grian clambers to his feet, twitching as a surge of phantom pain decides to make itself evident, and offers a hand.

There’s a very brief moment that lasts a very long time, and Etho takes it.

“...Okay, honestly,” Grian says, and he’s running his mouth with nonsense mainly because that’s what he’s good at and he needs to fill the silence. “None of you have the right to be this tall.”

Etho, now on his feet, once again doesn’t quite betray just what he’s thinking beyond a faint crinkle at the corner of his eyes. “I’m kind of short for an Ender, actually.”

Grian sighs, lets out an exhausted, “Fuck off,” and promptly ignores that the way Etho snorts this time is definitely amusement.

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

hypnotizd joined the game.

Hypno knows he’s coming into a mess.

He doesn’t expect it to be quite this big of a mess.

If he hadn’t known any better, he almost wouldn’t believe there’d been a season cut short in between the last time he’d been here and now. He hadn’t even spent that much time on Season Eight, after all, getting hit by the old wanderlust just a couple months in. So he’d packed up, left Horse Head Farms in XB’s capable hands, and figured he’d come wandering back again when the time was right.

That, clearly, had not worked out for him.

He just hadn’t had that much time to get attached to Season Eight, really. Being back on Season Seven feels far more like coming home.

The shopping district hardly even looks abandoned, stores and paths still lit up bright against the night. They’re uncannily quiet, without the usual bustle typical of Hermitcraft.

But this isn’t their season, and Hermitcraft is barely one-third strong.

The first person he finds is Scar, sitting on the top step at the entrance to Town Hall, Jellie pressed tight and purring against his thigh. “Hypno,” he says, scrambling to his feet as Hypno comes up the road. Then, with a soft sort of exhaustion, “It’s good to see you.”

Hypno, rather than answering, peers into the empty town hall and unceremoniously asks, “Where is everyone?” He’d been expecting Boatem at the least, had been pleasantly surprised to see Etho was already here, and then been even more pleasantly surprised to see Tango on the tab list. He’d promptly decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth, fired off a text to Beef asking for his ETA, and had made his way up to Town Hall expecting to be thrown into whatever planning had been started without him.

He hadn’t expected the lone welcome of Scar.

Scar shrugs. “Around, I suppose,” he says. “I think we’re all still here on the island?”

“...Around,” Hypno says flatly. “Around? Doing what? Lounging? Drinking margaritas? We kind of have a situation here, Scar.”

“Well, yeah,” Scar says. Hypno ignores him, pulling out his comm.

<hypnotizd> town hall

<hypnotizd> 10 minutes

There’s a scattering of answers in chat that Hypno takes in while Scar catches him up with the day’s events. Mumbo’s the first to poke his head in, fumbling as awkwardly as he usually does. Impulse is next, having fetched Tango in person given his broken comm, followed by an unfamiliar face that leaves Hypno doing a double-take before he realizes it must be Skizzleman. Odd as it feels to have a relative stranger to him on the server in an hour like this, Hypno can’t complain about another set of hands.

Pearl shows up a good twenty minutes after he’d requested, which would be annoying enough if she were the last person. “Okay, seriously?” Hypno says to no one in particular, flipping through his comm again as the rest of them mill uncertainly around the stairs. “Grian? Etho? Anybody home?”

“Oh, there’s a surprise,” Tango says dryly. “Grian won’t get his hands dirty and Etho’s not around. Shocking.”

Hypno, firing off another text to both of them, fixes an unimpressed gaze on Tango. “Shove it,” he says flatly. “Bigger problems right now.”

Tango glares at him. Hypno, frankly, doesn’t care.

Impulse leans over and says something to Skizz that Hypno doesn’t quite catch. He gets part of the reply, though, starting with “...know he’s upset…” and followed by “...do NOT know that that emotion is.” Hypno, once again, decides there are still bigger things to worry about.

It’s odd, really. Years and years ago he’d been considered for Hermitcraft’s admin, before Xisuma had returned to shoulder the title. Hypno had never considered it a loss when he’d never really wanted it in the first place, but maybe there’s an edge now of why he’d been in the running in the first place.

“Fine. If they show up they show up. We need to get this moving. Impulse, I’m giving you op. Someone else needs it besides me and it might be a while before we figure out if Tango’s comm is fixable. Everyone else, it’s going to be a long night.”

A beat passes before Impulse sighs. “I’ll start coffee.”

~~~

VintageBeef joined the game.

Beef comes into the middle of something much bigger than he is, and he doesn’t like it one bit.

He shows up only an hour or two into the meeting the Hermits are already in the thick of, and he still feels like he’s barely hanging on by the tips of his fingernails. The feeling’s made even worse by the fact he has nothing really to add—he had, apparently, been the last person to make it off-world before the server had collapsed in on itself and rendered travel impossible, which meant he’d been far enough removed that he has no idea what any of the other Hermits’ exit strategies had been and he has nothing to offer to the conversation. Given that Hypno had been off-world for far longer than that and Tango had, apparently, been in space, they’re still working off whatever limited information Boatem had at hand.

Well. Boatem minus Grian, it seemed like. And their group seemed to be down Etho as well, which seemed to fall under the weird category of typically Etho and wildly out of character given the amount of activity he’d been mounting in the fallout so far.

It’s Skizz, of all of them, who points out when the late morning winter light just starts to glow on the horizon that they were sentient beings who required periodic rest, and despite having known the man for all of ten hours Beef has to admit he’s kind of taken a liking to him.

Beef would really like to talk to Etho, though, and the newly oped Impulse is kind enough to get a general ping of his location for him. So Beef, ten hours into joining the biggest disaster of his life, finds himself nudging open the door to the old Stat Poker building.

And. Well. Of all the vices in the universe, a bit of friendly gambling didn’t have a smell, but drinking sure did.

Beef knew things were bad. He hadn’t quite expected them to be ‘Etho face down on the table’ bad.

“…Hey, Etho,” Beef says. Then, even though the answer seems to be a resounding no, he adds, “You doing okay?”

Etho’s immediate response is an incoherent groan, before a table-muttered reply of, “I am never trusting Grian with anything ever again.”

“That… seems like it might be a good choice, yeah,” Beef says. “Do you want some water?”

A beat passes. “Will that help?”

“Yes,” Beef says, “but also not really.” He clears his throat, then says, “Aren’t you. Uh. Allergic to alcohol?”

“Yes,” Etho replies deadpan, “but also not really.”

To be fair to Etho, that also explained nothing. He finally does peel himself off the table and sit up, eyes bloodshot and drawn, then slumps back down to put his head in his hands.

“Bdubs is dead.”

“…What?” Beef says, his heart sinking like a stone, because surely Etho hadn’t just said that.

“And we don’t know where Doc is,” Etho continues, still through his hands. “We don’t know where anyone is.”

Beef is no longer holding on by his fingertips. He’s freefalling off a mountain, not entirely sure if the landing is going to be worse than the fall itself.

Here’s the thing about the NHO that Beef had figured out a long time ago. He himself didn’t speak to his family anymore, and they more than deserved it. Doc, created in a lab, had never had a family to begin with. Bdubs had a brother who was decent and a father just as shitty as Beef’s family, who he’d finally cut ties with years ago at Beef’s urging. And while Etho never spoke of his past, he clearly had no one else to fall back on either.

So they had, years ago, without really noticing or intending to, made a family out of each other.

And sure, they were messy, as all families were. There had been long nights where Beef and Bdubs talked in-depth about the actual semantics of going no-contact with toxic family. There had been teased accusations of nerds back before they’d even met Etho in person, when he and Doc had spent their time messaging technical back-and-forths about the redstone revolution they were both on the forefront of. There had been many, many years of Doc and Beef watching from afar as Bdubs and Etho continuously fell into that same back-and-forth pattern about each other and still never quite managed to get past it.

(And there had been the jungle, of course, which. Beef tries really hard not to think about, most of the time.)

And now. Now. Bdubs is dead and Doc is missing and Etho is hungover and Beef had just left.

(He’d just left, and assumed everything would be fine, and absolutely nothing is fine.)

“I thought I’d be ready,” Etho says quietly, nonsensically. Beef had, at some point, taken the seat beside him. “And I really wish Grian would shut up.”

Again, that really didn’t make sense, and why Grian kept coming up would probably also not make sense if it weren’t coming into clarity that the current situation apparently may have been Grian’s fault. Baffling enough to Beef, who had seen Grian drink exactly as many times as he’d seen Etho drink, which was never.

Granted, at this point Beef was rather wishing he hadn’t missed the party himself.

(He hits the bottom, that’s nowhere near the bottom at all, and he still doesn’t know if it was better or worse than the fall.)

~~~

Mumbo’s week isn’t getting any better, actually. He thinks the only thing that might would be if he could just sleep for the rest of it.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem at all likely to happen, either. Grian’s gone all weird and distant and fuzzy in the back of his head, and Tango’s so angry Mumbo feels like he’s flinching every time he comes around the corner.

And there was the other thing.

“Hey, Impulse?”

Impulse, out of all of them, might just look the most exhausted. Mumbo feels kind of bad about it, actually. “Hey, Mumbo. What do you need?”

Well, now Mumbo feels even worse. Impulse is just assuming he needs something now. And the problem is that Mumbo does need something, actually. “I was wondering, uh, actually—well the thing is—if you could help me with something, maybe?”

Impulse somehow looks even more tired. He’d probably been hoping for a nap during their forced break. “What’s up?”

“It’s, well,” Mumbo says, tugging on his fingers. “It’s, you know, I was thinking about, like, the codes? You know, and, uh, Quoroth. And that he is, I mean, probably kind of dangerous? And I thought, well, maybe we could figure out how to nerf them? You know, a little less, uh, personality destroying? And, um, I was hoping you could help me.”

Impulse stares at him for a long moment, then sighs. “Mumbo, I’d love to,” he says, “but there’s really just—a lot of other things going on right now, you know? And it’s—yeah, we do have to bring that back up, actually, I’m just not really sure that’s the best use of time right now.” He shrugs, then says, “You could ask Etho, maybe?” A beat passes, then, “If he shows back up, I guess.”

Oh, no. Mumbo really would rather not ask Etho. He’d probably figure it out in ten minutes and then forever wonder why Mumbo hadn’t been smart enough to do it himself. Not that he’d ever say it out loud, of course. He’d be much too polite for that. But he’d still wonder, surely.

“Yeah,” Mumbo says. “I’ll ask Etho.” He pastes on a grin, then says, “Thanks, Impulse.”

“You’re—welcome?” Impulse says, as Mumbo scurries away without waiting for another answer.

It’s not quite bright enough to see without the myriad of lights and lamps in the shopping district yet, the sun only barely just peeking over one horizon and the moon still lingering on the other. There’s still enough light to catch a glimpse of someone further up the path. Too tall to be Grian, he can tell, even from here, and Grian still feels bad and fuzzy and out of sorts—

Pearl’s moving like she’s on a mission, though what on earth that mission could be Mumbo has no idea. This was supposed to be a break, after all, hopefully long for most of them to get a meal and maybe a nap, though something in the urgency of her gait leads him to believe she’s not aiming for either.

He could call out to her. He doesn’t, though, maybe just a little too curious at what Grian’s other best friend is up to draw attention to himself, simply picking up his own pace and trying to figure out where Pearl was going.

She doesn’t notice Mumbo, or at least doesn’t give any indication if she does. She just continues down the path towards wherever it is she’s going like she needs to get there now, turning the corner towards Lookie Lookie at my Bookie—

And she’s gone.

Now, Mumbo might be an idiot sometimes, but he’s not stupid. People don’t just disappear around corners without an enderporter, or a teleport command, or something along those lines. Pearl had to be around somewhere.

Only she isn’t.

Thoroughly concerned now, Mumbo noses through and around Keralis’s shop decidedly longer than would be polite. He even sneaks a couple diamonds out of his ender chest and grabs a couple enchanted books out of guilt about it, despite the fact there was no point to them now.

Maybe he saw something wrong, in the bad lighting. The sun’s truly up by the time he stops looking, but it had still been awfully dim. Maybe Pearl had just ducked sideways somewhere that Mumbo hadn’t noticed. That had to be it, surely. She’d only been doing her ghost thing when the moon had been busy messing everything up, right?

People didn’t just disappear, after all.

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

No one is happy to see Grian show up at nearly noon, least of all Grian.

So he’d had a bad night. Partially his own fault, for an absolutely terrible choice in drinking partner, given that Etho had not been exaggerating his (lack of) tolerance and had left Grian to an evening of drinking alone and babysitting. So, rather begrudgingly, he’d stayed until not long before dawn, then had decided when Etho had started stirring he was not particularly intent on sharing the experience of the man’s first hangover and had retreated to the relative safety of some anonymous corner of the shopping district he really hadn’t consciously chosen. And then he promptly hadn’t slept all that well anyways.

The other Hermits are clearly still in the thick of something when he shows up, several of them with death grips around coffee mugs, all of them looking up when he comes in.

“Glad to see you’ve finally joined us, Grian,” Tango says, with a very sharp and intentional bite to it.

Grian answers with a mocking salute, dropping into the remaining chair between Pearl and Mumbo. “Glad to know you missed me so much, Tango,” he returns, just as snippily, probably slightly ruined by the fact that he sounds about as garbage as he feels. At least there was coffee. “What did I miss?”

Hypno glances at him a moment too long, then says, “Contacts. Anyone we can get ahold of who might know or have heard anything from everyone that’s missing.”

“Scott’s the obvious first choice there,” Impulse points out. “I’ve already reached out to him, and whitelisted him here. That’ll spread to the other Empires folks, so there’s loads of eyes and ears right there.”

“Former Hermits, too,” Tango says. “I still keep in touch with some of them, and I’m not the only one.”

“I can try Slip,” Beef says, then adds aside, “Sl1pg8r. He and Keralis and Pause and me still hang out sometimes. And I know he’s still friends with Zueljin, too, so there’s someone else.”

Ah. There was the distant familiarity, finally clicking in Grian’s too-slow brain. Slip had, in all likelihood, been one of the very first Hermits to sign the wall on the sleepover world, given the size and prominence of his signature, though he’d left long before Grian had joined.

“And Pause already knows too, of course,” Beef adds.

“...Pungence,” Etho says, very quietly. “Someone needs to call Pungence.”

“Shit,” Beef hisses under his breath. Then, carefully, “...Do you want me to…?”

Etho, staring into his mug like it would share the secrets of the universe with him, finally shakes his head. “No. No, I’ll do it.”

“Who’s Pungence?” Pearl asks quietly.

No one answers her for a long moment. “Bdubs’s younger brother,” Impulse finally offers.

“...Oh.”

“Speaking of brothers,” Grian says, and this time it does come across exactly as dryly as he intends, “did you catch them up on that whole situation, or did you decide to leave that little tidbit for me to break, too?”

Going by the guilty shuffle that passes around the table, they had, in fact, left that one for him too.

“Wonderful,” Grian says. Then, without preamble, “We’ve got another stray Watcher currently squatting on Skizz’s world who may or may not be partially or wholly responsible for this whole situation that we’re trying to figure out what to do with.”

A very, very long moment passes.

“I’m sorry?” Hypno says.

Grian opens his mouth, pauses, then says, “I was about to give you the short version and then I realized there is no short version.”

“Oh, now you’ll give us that?” Tango says. “Shocking. Imagine if you’d done it earlier.”

“Imagine if you’d fucking let me,” Grian snaps back. “Right. Ignoring the politics and whatnot at play here. One of the leading forces behind just about everything that’s gone wrong in the last year showed up begging for mercy and Mumbo and I are the only two people who thought that maybe letting him stick around is a bad idea.”

A long, long moment passes.

“As much as I’m absolutely pissed that I have to agree with you right now,” Tango says, “uh, YEAH?”

“To be fair,” Pearl says, “you’re leaving a lot out.”

“I can’t possibly fathom even Grian leaving enough out to justify all four of you wanting to keep the Watcher behind the Life games as—what? Our little murder pet? Hello?”

“I didn’t vote,” Skizz points out.

“And there’s also the whole ‘twelve years old’ thing,” Scar says.

“You are so stuck on that!” Grian snaps at him. “Yes! He was twelve! I was twenty-four! I lost my whole goddamn life about it! And I am trying so very hard to keep that from happening again!”

Another long moment passes.

“I am so lost,” Beef admits.

“You and me both,” Hypno says.

“I am slightly less lost,” Etho says, “but I still don’t think that was a good short version.”

Grian pinches his nose, sucks in a breath, and blows it back out again. “Are we at least all on the same page that we all know what a Watcher is?”

“A myth,” Hypno says.

“Boy, wouldn’t that be fucking dandy,” Grian says. “Unfortunately very real. Recently figured out they could make more Watchers out of people. Humans. Quoroth’s one of them. Third Life, and everything that’s happened since then, is the chain reaction from his hissy fit that I thought the whole thing was shit and ran away. Except now he’s also gotten fucked over by them and expects me to bend down in ‘fucked-over-by-the-Watchers’ solidarity.”

“...And I’m assuming there’s some sort of reason that Impulse, Scar, and Pearl are on the murder pet side?” Tango presses.

“At least we’re not on the psychological torture side,” Impulse says. “Or. Well. Scar and Mumbo and I aren’t.”

“He is dangerous,” Pearl points out.

“And you want him to stick around!” Grian says, which basically means the conversation is circling right down the same drain it had the prior morning.

“Okay, no, I’m sorry,” Hypno finally cuts in. “So you want us all to vote on whether we’re just going to let this—Watcher kid hang around while we are trying to find our friends?”

“...That is kind of what it boils down to, yes,” Scar says.

Hypno very deliberately drags in a breath. “And did it not occur to anyone that we have, can I say it again, way more important things to worry about?”

“I’m gonna take it you’re abstaining,” Grian says.

“Okay, sure, that’s the nice way of putting it.”

Well, that put them back at an official tie, at least, even if it was Tango who’d dragged them to it. Three for, three against, two abstains, and two more to vote.

“I’m not,” Beef says, voice wavering, “I’m not at all comfortable deciding someone’s fate like that.”

So. Three to three to three then.

Etho, for once, doesn’t seem especially bothered when their attention mutually turns to him just about all at the same time. He’s circling the lip of his coffee mug with one thumb, not looking up from whatever pattern he was making.

“Abstain.”

And somehow, four more people’s opinions have put them back in the same holding pattern. “You can’t all just refuse,” Grian says. “We do have to actually make a decision— you can’t just—Skizz. Come on. One of you.”

“I’m not, Grian,” Skizz says.

“I also,” Mumbo finally pipes up, for the first time in the conversation, “I think I can. Um. Rework the codes. Make him—less dangerous? Without, um, the psychological. You know. Actually, Etho, I was going to ask—if you could, er, maybe help me.”

Etho does glance up then, the slightest spark of interest in his eyes. “I’d have to look at them,” he says. “But I didn’t finish, actually.”

There’s an expectant pause, and even after the unexpected insight of last night’s conversation, Grian can’t tell if it’s for effect or if Etho’s still trying to get his thoughts in order.

Etho does, finally, break the tension. “I won’t vote until I’ve spoken to him.”

…Okay, nope. Whatever weird fever dream of a conversation they’d had last night notwithstanding, Etho was still one of the most inscrutable people Grian had ever met.

“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request,” Etho points out.

The problem is, it really isn’t. Even grudgingly, Grian has to admit that. “...All right.”

“Is that, um,” Mumbo says, “safe?”

“I mean, I’d go with,” Grian says.

“Last I checked, your track record of keeping us safe has a pretty abysmal failure rate,” Tango says.

“Last I checked, yours wasn’t any better,” Grian retorts. “But hey, come along if you’d like, the more the merrier! We can go get Etho killed together.”

“Enough,” Hypno snaps. “This is—do literally any of you care about what’s going on here?”

“We all care, Hypno,” Scar says.

“Really? Because I sure can’t see it! All I see from here is bitching— and you two are hungover—”

“Hey, Hypno, I’m glad you live in a perfect world, but last I checked the rest of us don’t,” Grian says dryly.

“Oh, well, I’m glad you think my life is perfect,” Hypno replies. “I sure do love the part of my perfect life where all my friends go missing and might be dead.”

“This is ridiculous,” Tango says. Then, pushing back his chair, “Let me know when we’re actually working on something useful again.”

“Tango, the whole point of this is working on useful information,” Hypno says.

“It sure doesn’t feel like it!” Tango says. He gets to his feet, adding, “So someone come get me when we actually plan on doing something!”

No one stops him. Impulse, in the wake of his departure, firmly plants his head on the table and groans.

“Impulse,” Pearl says gravely. “Did you leave your nerf gun behind, by chance?”

“Yeah,” Impulse says to the table.

“Damn. That’s unfortunate.”

The silence drags out again. Grian glances over at Etho again. “Do you. Uh. Want to go, then?”

“...Give me an hour?” Etho ventures.

Right. An hour. What happened after that only remained to be seen.

~~~

It was all just so ridiculous. So obnoxiously ridiculous, the way they were all talking through so much nonsense—and sure, now Grian was talking, much too little and far too late to make a difference—

At least Tango had done something, and he’d hold onto that until the day he died. He’d done something and he’d gotten himself killed doing it but he’d done something.

He needs to do something now, practically itching with it, but there’s nothing to do. He hasn’t even gotten his comm fixed yet. He should probably get Etho or Mumbo to have a look at it, but Mumbo’s so deep in Grian’s camp that there was probably no pulling him out of it and Etho had been MIA the entire previous night. Getting wasted with Grian, apparently. Not a good sign. And even Impulse, Tango’s own brother, wasn’t even backing him up at this point.

Things did not really seem to be falling in Tango’s favor.

He pulls his comm out for a moment, eyes it, and shoves it back away in disgust. Still too big of a problem to deal with.

…Speaking of big problems.

“Yeah?” Tango says, probably a bit too snippily, but he’s not exactly hopeful as to where Pearl’s going to fall on the current conflict. “You coming to tell me off too?”

“No, actually, I was going to—” Pearl starts, then breaks off. She does come over to where Tango’s sitting, though, all way-too-tall of her standing over him in a way that might be intimidating if Tango currently gave a shit about it. “But if you want me to, yeah, I can.”

“Save it.”

Pearl, after a beat, crosses her arms. “No, you know what, actually? While I have you. Yeah, you are being way too hard on him.”

“Oh, good gods,” Tango groans. “I said save it. I really doubt you have anything to say to me that I want to hear right now.” He pauses, then says, “No, actually, do tell me why you’re in favor of the murder pet.”

Pearl stares him down for a moment, then shrugs. “He could be useful,” she muses. “He’s left the Watchers. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.”

“Yeah?” Tango scoffs. “You know which ridiculous trite saying I like better? If looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a fucking duck. Or a Watcher in this case. Forgive me for not wanting it on Hermitcraft.”

“Well,” Pearl says, “guess that’s down to Etho now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Tango says. “Great idea there.” It’s not like he’d usually mistrust Etho’s judgment, but right now—

He’s not sure he trusts anyone’s judgment, to be frank. Not even Impulse or Skizz.

Tango gets to his feet, now thoroughly disinterested in continuing the conversation. “See you, Pearl,” he says, then strides off without waiting for an answer.

The problem is the sky swallows him whole.

It shouldn’t, is the thing. It’s the same sky that’s always been above the shopping district and it’s never been a problem before. This wasn’t the server where the moon had crashed and fallen. Tango had seen it, a matter of hours ago, all normal and small. It had been full, sure, but very much the correct size.

He’s still not entirely sure he feels the server under his feet, or if he’s just floating in the low, cold winter skies.

He’s flying, or falling—

He lands back on the ground, his feet having never moved at all, and decides maybe inside is a better place to be.

~~~

Etho should have asked for a lot more than an hour. At least two. The whole day. A week. Maybe a year.

Or he should’ve just let Beef call Pungence.

Unfortunately, now he’s boxed himself into it, and worst of all he has a deadline.

It wasn’t like he’d ever been especially close with Pungence. They’d spent the one summer together, Etho and Bdubs and Pungence, and caught up in passing maybe once every few years. There hadn’t been that long of a period when all three of them were in the outworlds—when Pungence had been a Hermit and Etho and Bdubs had still been on Mindcrack—before Pungence had moved back to a city-server, and usually when Bdubs went to visit his brother Etho had very little reason to tag along.

So it’s not a surprise, really, that the first call rings through for an eternity and finally gives up. Etho, embarrassingly, hadn’t considered that potential, and spends several seconds trying to work out what he was going to do about it when Pungence calls back.

His head’s foggy enough that he almost misses the call himself, and he can’t quite work out how he’s supposed to open the conversation. Face-to-face was hard enough sometimes, bereft of the music; to lose facial expressions as well generally made voice calls even worse.

“...Etho?” Pungence finally ventures. “Is everything okay?”

No. No, everything was not okay, and it’s entirely possible that nothing will ever be okay ever again.

“There was,” Etho starts, and then lets out a breath. “There was a problem on Hermitcraft.”

Frankly, he tries very, very hard not to commit the conversation to memory. It comes one halting sentence at a time, a story so horrible it’s already gotten old and if he never had to tell it again for the next hundred and fifty years it would be far too soon. But he does tell it, and the wavering sentences finally add up to the same devastating whole.

Bdubs is gone. Bdubs is dead, and Etho hadn’t known, and he’d never gotten to say goodbye because he’d been busy hiding and the grief has made its home in his chest right next to the gaping cavern Lioneth had left behind.

Pungence isn’t crying, though he still sounds almost like he might. “You were the best thing that ever happened to him, you know.”

Etho balks at that, for obvious reasons. Hard to think he’d been the best thing when he’d been too busy trying to balance out their lifespans to even be around most of the time. Surely that accomplishment was better awarded to Beef or Doc. “I dunno about that.”

“You didn’t know him before he met you,” Pungence says.

“...I have to go,” Etho says, rather than fight the point any further. “There’s—we have to—there’s a lot to do.”

“Yeah,” says Pungence. “If I can—if there’s anything I can do.”

“...Mmhmm,” Etho says, then drops the call rather than lingering over an awkward goodbye. It wasn’t like he was any good at those.

Grian’s waiting for him on the steps of the town hall when he makes his way back, and has the decency not to mention that Etho’s late.

Chapter Text

Private Server, owned by iskall85

They’d planned on going back to Hermitcraft for Christmas.

It had been the obvious choice, they’d both agreed. They’d spent the last several months out farther in the universe than even the Hermits usually would tread, where the worlds were a little softer, a little easier to manipulate. The trade-off for the freedom of Iskall’s ever-evolving projects meant that even texting became an unreliable method of communication, and Stress especially had been looking forward to the chance to actually reconnect.

That had all been well and good, until they couldn’t get on Hermitcraft.

One mad scramble back to one of Iskall’s old worlds later, Stress is now staring in horror at the messages coming through two and three days late, and oh. Oh, she needs to sit down, actually.

She sits on the ground, because the messages had finally come through as soon as they’d joined the world and the thought of going inside is far too much to contemplate right now. Iskall, a beat later, sits down next to her.

“Shit,” Iskall finally says, at long last.

Stress, meanwhile, lets her comm fall from her fingers, and almost flinches when it lands accusingly still face up. We’re coming to find you, Impulse’s message still reads.

“I didn’t notice,” she says quietly. The last time she’d been on Hermitcraft had been in the horrible fallout of Last Life, and there had been far too much going on in those two weeks for her to worry about the moon. Had it already started by then? Could she have noticed if she’d thought to look? “I didn’t know.”

Iskall, meanwhile, is still flipping through his comm. “Etho, man,” he says, voice low. Stress had only been able to glance over that message before getting lost in the details, but Iskall apparently was taking in more detail.

“We have to go,” Stress says.

“Of course,” Iskall replies. “Of course we have to.”

“What do we need?” Stress asks. “What do they need?” There’d be medical supplies left on Season Seven, of course, and she always had the basics on her, but who knew what they’d really be walking into?

“I’ll ask Impulse,” Iskall says, swiping over. “I’m gonna guess it’s be there, though.”

Be there, Stress thinks, still staring down her own comm. “There’s people missin’,” she says, the list of names finally coming into focus. “What’s that supposed t’mean?”

Iskall glances over at her, then at her comm, and swears again.

~~~

Decked Out—Hermitcraft Seven

Hearing the full story doesn’t make it any better. It makes it much, much worse, actually.

Stress had stayed long enough to get the gist of things before ducking off to her old base in search of supplies. What supplies those were, Iskall wasn’t exactly sure, but he hadn’t gotten the chance to ask.

“So,” Iskall says at last. He’d known Tango long enough to know Tango had many, many thoughts on the current matter, and if Tango wanted to go all the way down to Decked Out to talk about them, Iskall wasn’t going to judge. “Etho and Grian are… where?”

“Skizz’s solo.”

“To talk to the other Watcher.”

“Yup,” Tango says with a pop.

Iskall frowns. The dim lighting of Decked Out didn’t do much for Tango’s facial expression, but it’s plain to see he’s not happy.

“The other Watcher,” Iskall says, then blows out a breath. “Man. There’s a lot he hasn’t told us, isn’t there?”

“Apparently so!” Tango says. “And never mind who gets hurt, I guess!”

It’s not quite what Tango means, Iskall knows, but it does hurt. He and Grian had spent a lot of time together, at least during Season Six and Seven—less so in Season Eight, obviously, given that Iskall had spent a large portion of it pursuing other projects.

Still. It wasn’t like Iskall felt entitled to his friend’s history or trauma. It was more just—well. He’d kind of thought Grian trusted him more than that.

Apparently not.

“But no,” Tango says. “I’m the one that’s being too hard on him.”

“I mean,” Iskall says, then blows out a breath and taps on his thigh. “He should have told us. Before it got to this.”

“That’s all I’m saying!” Tango says. “And no one else sees it!”

“But what would it have changed?” Iskall says. “In the end? Do you think it would have stopped this?”

“A lot, Iskall,” Tango says, which isn’t quite an answer. “I think it would have changed a lot.”

~~~

Dearthwood Mansion

Right, so. Escape from a collapsing server and the impending moon by rocket-launched llama hadn’t been his best idea, maybe.

Still, Cub hadn’t been especially worried. So what if he died? Doc had severed their respawns from Season Eight, so there was little risk of waking up there. And Cub was Vexblood— not, by any definition, especially easy to kill. He’d pop up somewhere or another on some old world and be good to go.

He’s very confident about that right up until he dies.

There’s a sort of grappling he’s vaguely aware of, his body trying to latch onto various old worlds and spawns and slipping at the last possible moment before he wakes. One by one they fall through, over and over, and in that split second of eternity he starts to worry if he’s made a grievous mistake.

And then, finally, he jerks, horizontal and gasping.

It takes a very long moment to figure out where he is. There’s a vague humming just below his range of hearing, thick curtains blocking most of his view when he blinks heavy eyes open. What he can see beyond them is a blurry mixture of deep wood and lush fabric, walls lined in bookshelves and a vaguely familiar view from the dusk-lined window.

Actually, not vaguely familiar at all. Very familiar, for all the intervening years.

Cub groans.

(That was the thing with Vexes. An Ender might change their House, and their name alongside. Cinders apprenticed and married into other clans. Humans moved servers at their own convenience. But a Vex?)

(Once a Dearthwood Vex, always a Dearthwood Vex, and no matter how far one strayed the name would always be the same.)

Dearthwood hums, and welcomes home a Dearthwood Vexblood that had once been her Second.

Well, at least Dearthwood was happy to see him. Considering the terms he’d left on, that was probably the extent of it.

Cub groans again, managing to roll over. Rough respawn. Made sense, considering how many attempts there had been to throw himself into some world strong enough to hold him.

The curtain rips back abruptly.

…Ah.

Cub had left Dearthwood as its Second. And that meant, even a decade later, he’d respawned in the room reserved for that position.

Which meant Dearthwood’s Second was now—

“Khuv Dearthwood,” says Feine Eldenbriar, Second of Dearthwood Mansion. “May I dare to ask what you’re doing in my bed?”

“Hi, Feine,” Cub says, finally managing to lift his head. “You’ve redecorated.” Then, levering himself up on his elbows, “I don’t like it.”

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

“...Well hello there,” Scar says by way of announcing himself, peeking into the room. The table they’d all been at two hours ago now only holds Hypno and Impulse—the rest had gone on their way for one thing or another. Skizz had stayed the longest, but even he had ducked out eventually, saying something about how someone around here needed to make sure everybody was eating.

“Hi, Scar,” Impulse says, hoping he doesn’t sound as exhausted as he already feels. His own notes were already starting to look about as illegible as Etho’s, and if the arrival of Stress and Iskall had taken anything off his shoulders it had been swiftly replaced by the fact they were still missing fifteen people.

“What do you need?” Hypno asks, which might come across even a little sharper than Impulse.

“Ah, well,” Scar says. “I have—a bit of an awkward question, actually? For both of you. Or either of you! Either of you will do!”

“What’s up?” Impulse asks.

“Well, you see—funny story, actually, although it is good news! Very good news, even! It’s just, well, coming from a bit of an awkward source, so there’s that, but overall it is in fact excellent news!”

“Spit it out, Scar,” Hypno says.

“Ah, that is, you see, Cub is okay!” Scar finally says. “Er, mostly. And, uh, as far as the question—it’s more of a favor, really, but—could you, ah, whitelist someone for me?”

~~~

I-65 South/I-40 East, mile 209, Broadway/Demonbreun St exit—Nashville, Tennessee

Oh, no.

Not again.

Well, this is certainly a pickle.

“This is certainly a pickle,” says Joe.

The driver screams.

And really, that would probably be a big problem, under most circumstances. Joe can’t blame the guy for screaming, really. It wasn’t exactly an everyday occurrence that someone magically appeared in the back seat of your car and started talking about pickles.

Fortunately for both Joe and the hapless driver, they were in Nashville, Tennessee at 4:27 pm, presumably on a weekday, so they weren’t moving.

“What the hell,” the driver says, probably reflexively slamming on the brakes—but again. Nashville on a weekday afternoon.

“Oh, I’m not from hell,” Joe says, sitting up from his horizontal perch. “I’m from Hermitcraft, actually.”

The driver whips around to look at him. He’s a young-looking guy, maybe Mumbo’s age. From the look on his face, he’s having a very bad day, or at least an unusual one. Which, again. Joe was in his back seat.

“I’m Joe Hills,” Joe says, ever polite. “And you?”

“...Hallucinating, I think,” says the driver. “Send help.”

Joe sighs. “Unfortunately, I do seem to really be here. Doubtless this is as upsetting for you as it is for me. At least I’ve hopefully spiced up your commute? Oh, traffic’s moving.”

The car lurches a little bit as the distance to the next car is erased and they come to a standstill again. “...Orwell,” the driver says. “Orwell Harrison Clementine.”

“Lovely to meet you, Orwell! Were your parents fans of 1984, perchance?” Joe sighs before Orwell gets the chance to answer. “I suppose all society is dystopian, in its own way.”

“Something… like that?” Orwell ventures. “How did you get in my car?”

“Oh, the moon crashed into the server and I must have respawned here,” Joe says, shrugging. “I suppose flying away from an impending celestial body wasn’t the greatest escape plan. A little odd, since I don’t remember ever sleeping in your car specifically, but things get a bit weird sometimes! Such is the life of an isekai protagonist, I suppose. It’s just a pity I ended up back in this hellscape.”

Orwell, gaping like a fish in the rearview mirror, makes up a little bit of ground on the road again.

“I mean, look at this!” Joe continues, gesturing out the windshield. “Do you even know how bad you have it? Look at this road! Who thought three right-hand merge lanes a mile before the divide of two major US interstates was a good idea?”

“Uh,” Orwell says. “It is a pretty stupid intersection, yeah.”

“And you have taxes! And insurance! Insurance is terrible! I had to get married to deal with insurance and then my wife became a zombie and we couldn’t get divorced because now she’s dead!”

“That… uh, that sucks, man?”

“Sometimes I can still hear her voice,” Joe says with a sigh. “Usually she’s making fun of me.”

“I’m… sorry about that?”

“I bet you’re on your way home from work, too,” Joe says, full of pity for this poor man whose car he’d accidentally respawned in.

“Well, actually, I work second shift, I’m heading to work—”

“Even worse,” Joe says. “You’re crawling into the very jaws of capitalism as we speak!”

“...Yeah, man. Gotta get that health insurance, you know?”

“Dystopian,” Joe says with disgust. The car creeps forward again. “I tell you what, it’s not worth it. There are whole other worlds out there, Orwell! And they might be full of zombies but at least there aren’t taxes! Well. If you’re me there aren’t taxes. There might be some fraud involved there, but you can’t prove it. Besides, is it truly a crime to steal from Walmart, or is it the only morally acceptable action?”

“I, uh—I dunno man, I just work in a warehouse,” Orwell says. “Take care of my parrots, you know how it is.”

“Oh, terrifying creatures, parrots,” Joe says. “I was haunted by parrots once. They kept asking about my bench. You’d better watch them. They’re horro-fying. One of them didn’t have legs.”

“That’s, uh,” Orwell says. “That does sound pretty weird.”

“To be fair, the one without legs may have been a cat, actually. You’d have to ask Zedaph. He’d know all that.”

“Uh,” says Orwell again.

Joe sighs. “Listen, I’m very sorry for the imposition,” he says, “but could you possibly drop me off at the library before your shift? It doesn’t matter which one.”

“...Sure, man? I should have time. What for?”

“Oh,” says Joe Hills, unfortunately once again from Nashville, Tennessee. “Libraries are the greatest source of my power.”

Chapter Text

Private Server, owned by Skizzleman

Skizz had made plenty of progress on his world since Etho had last visited, as much as the man himself was probably loath to admit it.

Skizz isn’t there to defer the praise, though, even if his music is ever-anxious as far away as another world. Etho’s starting to get the inkling he should be more anxious than he currently is.

Not that he isn’t anxious. It’s just sort of— muted, almost, by the sheer enormity hanging over him. It wasn’t even so much the decision he had to make himself. If everyone else hadn’t clamored over him and left him the last voice, he’d like to think he’d still have made the same decision to wait for more information. A proper conversation.

The fact that he’s currently bearing the entire weight of the swing vote is a lot worse.

“Well,” Grian says. “He’s stayed put.”

Like that wasn’t obvious. Without the mind-bending meddling of Third Life, it’s a lot easier to tease apart the two dissonant frequencies of Grian and the other Watcher, deeply unpleasant as they were. Grian and Mumbo, at least, whatever was going on with the soul-stealing, were similar enough to almost harmonize in their badness. Grian and Quoroth were just plain bad.

“I’m a little concerned you were worried he wouldn’t,” Etho says.

“I got vetoed on the bedrock cage,” Grian replies, decidedly sullen as he nudges open the door to Skizz’s base and heads down the stairs.

Afraid.

And sure, just because Etho could pick up the difference between two different Watchers didn’t mean it was especially easy to tell who was who. They weren’t like Enders, weren’t like a House, where the knowledge and understanding of who was who was nothing less than intuitive. They’re messy and painful and out of sync, and it’s only Etho’s own two years of knowledge of Grian that makes it clear the sudden wave of sheer fear isn’t coming from him.

That… complicated things.

Quoroth scrambles up as soon as he comes into view, leaving Etho momentarily struck with such cognitive dissonance he has to pause on the last step. It’s the same reeling conflict of senses as when he’d first met Grian—his eyes saying human even while his mind declared Watcher. Granted, it makes far more sense with the context of knowing the Watchers now kept human-born converts, but it still takes him a moment to reorient.

A moment Quoroth evidently hadn’t needed. “What are you doing here?”

Grian, thankfully, takes up the silence before Etho has to formulate an answer. “He’s,” he says, jerking a thumb in Etho’s direction, “currently the sole decider of your fate, so, you know. I’d play nice if I were you.”

Thanks, Grian.

Quoroth doesn’t seem to take that quite to heart, given that he only glances at Grian for a moment before fixing back on Etho. “Hang on. What are you?”

“Oh come on now, Quoroth,” Grian goes. “You remember Etho. We spent two whole death games together!”

Quoroth, in a move that abruptly makes him look a decade younger, snorts and rolls his eyes.

“I mean, I know you never had one of your little private chats, but still, that’s almost offensive.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Quoroth says. “It’s—you were hiding from me,” he accuses, taking a step closer. “I should have noticed you were—you’re not human. What are you?”

Etho’s not entirely sure what makes him answer the way he does, but the words are out in the air before he can take them back.

“Madafel. Eighth born of the twenty-seventh generation of the House of Lioneth.”

Afraid.

Afraid afraid AFRAID AFRAID AFRAID—

It’s a violent enough reaction that Etho has to take half a step back from it, ears ringing from the sudden onslaught even if it was mental. The only thing he can think to compare it to was the intensity of Grian’s distress as they neared the end of Third Life, but Quoroth’s physically shrinking from him, and this was an order of magnitude above even that.

“Ender,” Quoroth says, in something between a whisper and a plea.

…So Quoroth knew about the war, then.

The air in the room shifts abruptly. Quoroth’s on the back foot, almost supplicating, and war or no Etho’s not entirely sure what his species had to do with that. The Watchers had won, hadn’t they?

“What do you want from me?” Quoroth asks, no longer haughty but decidedly desperate.

“A conversation?” Etho says, still decidedly puzzled. It only barely mutes Quoroth’s terror.

Grian, meanwhile, does take a moment to drop his own posturing, and says, “I’m missing something.”

“...You never paid attention to anything, did you, Xelqua?” Quoroth says. Then, with a flickering glance between the two, “He’s the reason we exist.”

“That doesn’t…” Grian says, then, “Huh?”

“...The war, Xelqua,” Quoroth says. “We needed more Watchers after the war with the Enders. That’s why Experiment Zero started.”

That confirmed Etho’s suspicions about the converts, then, though the reasoning for it is still a mystery unless the Watchers had come out of the war significantly worse than he’d always suspected.

“And how do you know that?” Grian asks.

“Because I paid attention,” Quoroth says. “To a lot of things, actually. How do you think I got Orez to help me?”

“I really can’t express how much I don’t care about the current state of Watcher politics,” Grian says.

“Because I pay attention,” Quoroth continues. “I found things. I found something that Orez really, really doesn’t want getting out.” He glances back to Etho. “I found things that could help you, even.”

Grian barks a laugh. “You tried to blackmail Orez?” he says. “Xyrstad’s lapdog? Really?” He snorts. “I can see why that turned out well for you.”

“But didn’t you ever wonder why?” Quoroth asks. “Why Orez is so weird?”

“Again. Xyrstad’s lapdog. Kind of figured that came with the territory,” Grian says. “Also again, I avoid the politics. Orez can keep their weirdness right the way over there. As far away from me as possible, actually.”

“It’s not just that. It’s bigger than that,” Quoroth insists. “And it’s been staring everyone in the face the whole time.” Then, with an edge of triumph, “Spell it backwards.”

“...Zero?” Etho ventures, feeling just as baffled as Grian looks. Whatever back-and-forth they were on about had gone well over his head. “What does that mean?”

“Zero,” Quoroth confirms. “As in Experiment Zero.”

A long, long moment passes.

“Hang on, I’m sorry,” Grian says. “Orez is a convert?”

“A different kind,” Quoroth says. “Not like us. He’s supposed to be this two-point-oh thing or whatever. The host gets wiped and completely replaced. Orez got made from one of the stored clones from the original Experiment Zero.”

“You mean Xisuma?”

Grian glances over at Etho. “Xisuma was the original?”

Etho shrugs. “I mean. That’s what he said they talked about when he was there. Experiment Zero.”

A beat passes. “Does that mean Evil Xisuma is—no, that makes a lot of sense, actually.” Grian crosses his arms over his chest. “Anyways, that’s interesting, but not exactly helpful.”

“...I can help,” Quoroth insists. “I have more.” He swallows, sending another wary glance at Etho, then says, “I know where your friends are.”

That, at the very least, gets Grian’s attention. “Start talking.”

“Not all of them,” Quoroth says. “I can’t—I don’t know about all of them. But Orez—he was worried about the creeper. Really worried. Worried enough to make sure he was out of the way. And I don’t know where but I do know how.”

“...Doc,” Etho says quietly, voice pained. And of course it made sense— they didn’t call Doc the worldbreaker for nothing, and with Xisuma unfit then Doc would have been left acting admin in the final days of Season Eight.

“Ren too, probably,” Grian says. “I think they left the server together. I mean, I’m sure they needed our heads for something. Given the ritualistic chanting and everything.”

Etho decides, wisely, not to ask about that.

“I think so,” Quoroth says. “I mean, I wasn’t there, at the end, but that was the plan. Keep them together.”

“Together where?” Grian presses.

Quoroth sucks in a breath. “It was this sort of… ship,” he says. “Out in the Void. Not a whole world, just the illusion of one. Enough of an illusion to make them think their world was real, and the real world was fake. That their reality was safe, so they wouldn’t worry about what was happening outside of it. If their world was real, and everyone was safe, then they wouldn’t need to come looking for the rest of you. And your… Doc would be out of our way.”

Grian takes in one long, steady inhale, then lets it back out, and for the first time Etho picks up something intelligible that wasn’t just fear from him.

Fury.

“So you told them up was down and left was right,” Grian says, voice barely level, “and left them in a box in the middle of space to go rot.”

“They started calling it the Hermethius,” Quoroth says.

“That’s sick,” Grian says. “Even you have to realize that’s fucking sick, right?” He turns away, scrubbing a hand through his hair, wings trembling with whatever he was trying to contain. “And you conveniently don’t know where it is, of course.”

“Orez didn’t tell me,” Quoroth says. “But I didn’t have to tell you either, you know.”

“Oh, and I’m just supposed to trust you about it?” Grian says. “Is that what’s supposed to happen?”

“I can help you,” Quoroth says. “I can.” He fixes his gaze back on Etho. “Please, I can. I know more about what was happening than any of you.”

Etho takes in a slow breath, then finally probes with, “I still don’t quite understand why you’re here.”

Quoroth flinches a little again. “Orez set me up,” he says heatedly. “Made this whole fake conversation of Xelqua trying to convince me to join him when I was trying to—” He cuts off with a shaky exhale. “They said if I wanted to be human I could go back and do it.”

“Somehow that manages to be even faker than putting Doc and Ren in a Void ship,” Grian says dryly. “Does explain the wings-be-gone thing, though.”

“Well,” Quoroth says, “I can’t exactly come back with white wings bent on prophetic vengeance if I haven’t got wings, can I?”

Grian, abruptly, goes very still, to the point even the sound of him pauses for half a second. Etho, once again, is definitely missing something.

But Etho had also caught something—clearly something Grian wasn’t keen on, but something nonetheless. Because the similarities between Grian and Quoroth were too deeply uncomfortable to not draw parallels.

And he’d been wrong about Grian.

(Could a monster be afraid, or only a person?)

“You should have Stress take a look at that,” Etho says, barely able to hear himself speak. They’d heard from her and Iskall just before they’d come here, meaning they would hopefully be on Season Seven by the time Etho and Grian made it back. And he’d been assuming Quoroth had been hiding his wings the same way Grian had for so long, however that worked, but if it was an injury…

Grian hears him loud and clear and sends him a hooded glare. “Etho.”

“Grian,” Etho says back. Then, rather than voicing his currently uneasy train of thought, he says, “We need Doc back.”

It’s no slight against any other of their friends. It’s cold, hard, analytical fact, that Doc is the single most valuable Hermit they could have in this situation. The Watchers were afraid of Doc; finding him could very well be the snowball effect that would lead to tearing apart the universe in search of the rest of them.

Etho was many things, and already bound up in the center of all this, but he was not Doc.

It’s a blatant attempt on Quoroth’s part—a dangling thread that all three of them recognize, a desperate appeal for his own safety as the only thing he had left to bargain. “We don’t even know if he’s telling the truth,” Grian points out, his thoughts evidently following the same path as Etho’s.

“Can you find out?” Etho asks. “Is there a way for you to see it, or something?”

“...I don’t know,” Grian says.

“It is,” Quoroth says. “It’s real. I promise you that.”

“Then,” Etho says, drawing in a slow breath, “if he wants to help, he can stay. I’ll talk to Mumbo about the codes.”

He’s not sure if Grian actually sees his point of view there, or if he’s just pissed and resigned in a low-key way that doesn’t ring as clearly as his anger had earlier. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll see what I can find. And I will be looking.”

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Impulse had given up on trying to keep track of who was coming from where at this point, and they’d only been here for two days.

Iskall and Stress had been a welcome relief, of course. Even more so had been Joe, given he was the first person outside of Boatem and Tango who had actually been on Season Eight, though Impulse had also given up trying to figure out what Joe was explaining about how he’d gotten out and where he’d gone.

Now Etho and Grian were back, talking about a Void ship that possibly existed and possibly contained Ren and Doc, with the understanding Quoroth was coming as soon as Etho had time to look over Mumbo’s codes.

And now Cub was here, and whoever the hell it was Scar had had Impulse whitelist, and Impulse either needed to sleep for a week or about three more cups of coffee.

…Both of those things, actually. Impulse needs both of those things. And possibly also something to overwrite his brain, given that the first thing Scar’s ex-wife does upon arriving on the Hermitcraft server is kiss the man senseless.

“Oh, come on now,” Cub says, rolling his eyes. Impulse is rather inclined to agree.

“Hi, darling,” Feine says, promptly ignoring him. Scar, still looking rather like he’d been hit on the head, doesn’t immediately answer. “Brought you a present. We didn’t want him anymore.”

Cub mutters something under his breath that decidedly sounds like “My ass.”

Several other Hermits are starting to poke their heads out of nooks and crannies, drawn in either by the ping of Cub’s arrival or the sound of conversation. Grian, evidently, had been fast enough to catch the show.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he says dryly, “but I thought you weren’t married anymore.”

“I’m SORRY?” Tango squeaks from somewhere up the road.

“Is that relevant somehow?” Feine asks, finally taking a step back from Scar. “Is this your little debtee, dear? I do have to question your taste.”

“...I’m fairly sure I should be offended,” Grian says.

Feine only grins at him, with all her teeth.

“What the hell did I miss this time,” Tango says, sidling up beside Impulse.

“Oh, nothing important,” Impulse replies dryly.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have much else to offer,” Feine says. “We,” she says, gesturing to Scar, “do have a few things to talk about, considering the last time I had you over you were very concerned about a server breaking, but as far as friendly presents dear Khuv here is all I’ve got. …Hello, Em, glad to see you’re doing well for yourself.”

A long, long moment drags out. Scar stares Feine down, glances over at where Etho’s appeared, then back to Feine and back to Etho and back to Feine before he finally finds his voice. “Hang on,” he says. “WHAT?”

“....Scar. Darling,” Feine says. “Please tell me you haven’t been sharing a server with the kid we almost got slaughtered by Watchers over and you didn’t notice.”

“...You didn’t notice?” Etho says, voice rising by the word, and Impulse has perhaps never been more confused in his life.

“Wait, but—” Scar continues. “That doesn’t—wait—wait, Etho, you never said anything—”

“I thought you knew!”

“What is happening,” Tango says under his breath.

“Why did you think I knew!”

“You winked at me!”

“When did I do that!”

“Back when you joined?”

“Well maybe I had sand in my eye, Etho! Did you ever think of that!”

“I have no idea what’s happening right now,” Grian announces, “but at least it’s amusing.”

Etho, at least, takes a step back and runs a hand through his hair, perhaps the most actively flustered Impulse has ever seen him, then says again, “You didn’t notice?”

“...I do see the resemblance now that I think about it,” Scar admits. “But honestly, Etho, come on now! I can only see half your face! Give me fifty percent credit here!”

“...I’m starting to wonder if this is related to that time I wore a blue jumper and Scar almost didn’t recognize me,” Grian muses.

“I recognized you,” Scar protests. Then, “Wait. Wait, but if you’re Em— that means you’re—”

“Can we not talk about that, actually?” Etho says, voice decidedly higher than Impulse had heard it before. Which, interestingly, is exactly when Skizz shows up, leaving Impulse to briefly wonder over the sheer absurdity of the current situation just how their whole ‘hearing feelings’ thing worked, exactly.

“No, hang on,” Tango says. “Go back to the almost slaughtered by Watchers thing.”

“Well,” Feine says, “they weren’t too happy to have us sheltering an Enderian refugee when they were busy trying to win a war of extermination and all.”

There are, in that moment, too many people thinking too many things. Impulse is almost surprised the server doesn’t lag from it.

“I don’t…” Tango finally says. Then, quieter, “Skizz?”

Whatever info Tango was looking for, Skizz doesn’t have it. Impulse knows that instantly, from the way his best friend’s eyes go wide to the hurried, sideways glance he sends to Etho.

And it’s at the moment Impulse has a horrible thought, that he immediately wishes had never occurred to him.

It circles nonetheless.

If Skizz and Etho’s entire species had lost a war and their lives to the Watchers, what hope did the Hermits have?

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

(This time it was you.)

He shouldn’t be shaking. He can convince himself, if he tries, that it’s merely the chill of his ice shop sinking into his bones, but even he knows that’s a lie.

“Etho.”

Skizz is desperately upset, too, Etho can hear. Upset enough to have followed him across the shopping district, upset enough that it melds into Etho’s own into some suffocating blend that leaves him unable to answer. Trying to withdraw only partially works—Skizz clearly recognizes it this time and doesn’t chase, but it doesn’t quash the sick heaviness that’s abruptly settled in Etho’s stomach.

“Etho,” Skizz says again, when Etho doesn’t even turn to look. Then, quietly, “It was the Watchers?”

Oh.

Oh. Skizz was upset with Etho.

He’s heard Skizz upset before. This entire ordeal had carried a background current of Skizz being upset for fairly obvious reasons. It’s never been directed at Etho before, and it’s enough to further his mental retreat with something that resembled a flinch.

No matter how far he pulls, there’s no way to completely withdraw from Skizz—and he can’t fathom ever wanting to return to the horrible silence of his first sixteen years in the Overworld—which means he still hears the moment upset turns into concern-pity-worry. “Etho, buddy,” Skizz says for the third time.

“I can’t stay here,” Etho finally manages to blurt.

Even now, it’s still surprising how easily they can surprise each other when privy to every emotion. “You’re not leaving,” Skizz says, less of a question than it should be.

“I’m not staying,” Etho sends back. How could he, when he’d been right?

If we break that rule now, we will break it for less the next time.

The fact that it hadn’t even been a Hermit didn’t matter in the end. It had been Etho’s story to tell, and he hadn’t planned on doing the telling.

Skizz makes a helpless sort of sound, then, “You don’t have to leave.”

Etho can only stare at him, like the answer to that wasn’t Of course I do.

“...I don’t think they care,” Skizz offers.

“I care.”

Skizz sighs, then says, “I know you care, buddy.” There’s a faint edge of sad-puzzled now that almost feels like a slap in the face—like Skizz, whose best friends had been at his side for thirty years without a threat, simply couldn’t fathom why Etho hadn’t told his own.

(What would Skizz have told Impulse and Tango and Zedaph, Etho wonders, if he’d actually remembered the fall of Helleath?)

He feels guilty for the thought a moment later—how could he wish such a memory on Skizz, even for a second? Lioneth’s memory was Etho’s alone to carry, and Skizz not having to bear Helleath’s in the same way was so much the better.

Etho’s burden. Etho’s life. Not even Skizz had quite the right to it, not in the same way, no less what everyone else planned on doing with the pieces they’d just been presented without permission.

“I can’t be in two places at once,” Skizz finally says.

“I’m not asking you to?” Etho says, baffled as to where that came from.

“You won’t bring anyone else with you,” Skizz says, “and the last thing you need is to go run off alone.”

Etho balks a little at that—mainly because he’d found running off alone to be the solution to a lot of different problems—though Skizz continues before he gets the chance to speak.

“We need you, homie-buddy. We all need each other right now. And if that Hermethius thing turns out to be real? We’re really gonna need you.”

Doc, Etho thinks again, in the same sort of pained way as before. It might well be the only thing that could actually pull him up short at this point. They needed Doc, and Etho needed Doc, and he owed it to Doc, as Etho’s second-longest friend—

Longest living friend.

He shoves that thought down, to replace it firmly with another. They needed Doc. And until they had Doc, Etho was very well the closest thing they had.

And it is, shockingly, enough to make him stay.

“Okay,” Etho says quietly. He watches Skizz’s shoulders drop in time with relieved-reassured, only for his music to circle back around to that deeply uncomfortable upset-hurt-confused.

“I’m not saying you have to go—lay out every detail for everyone,” Skizz says. “Gods know it’s going to take me twenty years to get half of anything out of you. I just—” He breaks off with a shrug. “I really wish you’d mentioned it was the Watchers.”

“Who else did you think it was?” Etho asks, just a little too sharply. “The Cinders?”

Skizz flinches at that, a disjointed mix of offense-out-of-line that only manages to make this entire conversation about eight times worse.

“...There are only so many sentient races out there, Skizzle,” Etho says, in hopes that Skizz will take Etho’s own sorry-yes-out-of-line in place of actually having to spell it out. “There weren’t that many options.”

Skizz still doesn’t answer, still a swirling mix of upset mostly directed at Etho, and it’s too much.

“I need to,” Etho starts before he’s even come up with an excuse to finish the sentence with, “be—go—figure something out.” Shoulders creeping up towards his ears, he manages, “I’ll—see you later?”

“Yeah,” Skizz says. “Just—don’t go too far, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Etho echoes, voice quite a bit too high, and pushes past Skizz to make his way back into the shopping district.

Hopefully to not run into anyone else.

~~~

It’s a little uncomfortable how comfortable Grian’s gotten with this.

There had been a time, after Third Life and before Last Life, when he’d been so petrified of the idea he’d barely been able to force himself to do it. Scared of trying, scared of what it might bring down, scared of what it could attract.

Now? Well. Quoroth’s already there. Orez had all but laid out that they’d been tracking Hermitcraft from the beginning of Season Eight no matter how well Grian had tried to hide.

And he’s lost so much, now, he’s not sure what he’s got left to.

So at this point, without much left in the way of hesitation, Grian Watches.

Looking for the Hermits is not the same as looking for the Evolutionists. The Evolutionists turn up as nothing when he tries, a blank space in the universe so empty that Grian would almost be convinced they were all dead and had been all along if it weren’t for Martyn and Big B’s return to Last Life.

The Hermits, on the other hand, are some sort of messed up jumble, a shattered and fogged-over mirror scattered across the floor into indiscernible puzzle pieces. He can barely tell who he’s glimpsing and where, all of them blurred into the aching anonymity of red-black-his-Hermits-missing.

Feathers and leaves. A strange mountain, rising in the distance. Eye-searing flame. Choking rubble and dust. Glaring, fluorescent lights. The glimpse of a reflection not quite your own. And then, somewhere, out in the Void, falling—

He sees Doc.

He’s hard to focus on, still blurry and fractured at the edges, but it’s definitely Doc, seated at the helm of some sci-fi-looking console. He frowns, tapping at the screen in front of him, and the scene falls in and out for a moment, enough for Grian to catch a glimpse of the Void outside, sleek lines of metal and engines burning bright—

It was real, then. As real as any illusion the Watchers could make, to trap his friends in their own personal unreality prison.

“Ren, can you—” Doc starts to call down the corridor, half over his shoulder. He startles as he does, meeting Grian’s eyes—or his Eyes, more accurately, considering he isn’t actually there—

“Grian?”

The voice isn’t Doc’s, leaving Grian to jerk, hurrying to pull all those eyes back into himself, and he’s still left staring at Mumbo from about five angles too many.

“...Hi?” Grian says, maybe just a hair too questioning for the incredibly normal sight of seeing his best friend. Who he’d barely talked to since this entire debacle began. Oops.

“Hi,” Mumbo echoes; then, with a little more enthusiasm, “Hey, bud!” He’s still staring not quite at Grian’s face, but also still managing to look him in the Eye for the last few moments before Grian finally manages to neatly wrap that up and return to normality. “Just wanted—just thought I’d check on you, you know! After last night. And everything.”

“What about last night?” Grian says, despite the fact he very much knew what last night entailed, and he’d really rather not talk about it, actually. The last thing he needed on his plate right now was another Boatem Intervention.

“Oh. It’s. Well. I mean. You know. Actually, I just—what are you up to, anyways?”

They’re both failing at coherent conversation tonight, apparently, given that rather than explaining any sort of reasonable context Grian simply says, “It’s real.”

Somehow, Mumbo still seems to follow. “...It is?”

“I saw Doc,” Grian says, and it doesn’t seem any less surreal to say it out loud.

“Oh!” Mumbo says, with the first thing resembling genuine delight Grian thinks he’s heard from anyone in days. “Oh! That’s good, then! So, uh. How do we get there?”

How do we get there? “That’s the question, isn’t it,” Grian says quietly.

“I mean,” Mumbo continues, “if they could get here, they’d be here, right? So we’re probably going to have to go to them?”

“Yeah,” Grian says. The first half is scary enough to contemplate— if they could get here, they’d be here surely applied to every single one of the Hermits, and given that their current number was only thirteen of twenty-six, it didn’t bode well for the missing half.

On the other hand, going to them wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to plan, either. The Void was as vast and infinite as anything in the universe, and finding an infinitesimally tiny ship somewhere in its unending depths was somewhere approaching mathematically impossible. Just because Grian could See it didn’t mean he knew where it was, and it wasn’t like he could just put his Swaggon-patented spacesuit back on and go for a jaunt out there looking either.

The longer he looks at it, the more daunting the task seems. There has to be some way, through math or through magic or through sheer magnitude of effort, though gods only knew what the answer was at this point.

(He refuses to accept otherwise.)

“Actually, uh,” Mumbo says, after clearly too long of a silence while Grian crunched through that. “I was kind of hoping you might know where Etho is?”

“Why in gods’ names would I know where Etho is?” Grian asks, baffled.

“Oh. Well. I mean.” Mumbo chews on his lip, then says, “I dunno?”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Oh. Sorry. I just wanted to talk to him about the codes.”

“Yeah, no idea. Good luck with that one.”

He doesn’t quite mean it as a dismissal, though Mumbo clearly takes it as one. “Yeah,” he says, tugging on his sleeve. “Let me, uh. Let me know if you need any help with the, uh—the Hermethius, is it? The Hermethius thing. Just let me know.”

“Yeah,” Grian says, which is all he gets out before Mumbo makes his way out again.

And leaves Grian’s brain circling again, this time not about the ship two of his friends were trapped on.

“I can’t exactly come back with white wings bent on prophetic vengeance if I haven’t got wings, can I?”

He’d been forced to know Quoroth long enough to know his statement had been nothing more than bleeding sarcasm. The problem was, simply, that Grian had one single piece of vital information that made that tidbit significantly worse.

He’d met his future self.

With white wings.

It makes him vaguely nauseous to contemplate, trying to spin back to darker times for information he’d never bothered to properly file away. He’d never seen the relevance—

And now it’s far too relevant.

Try as he might, he can barely parse through the memories. He knows the wings, of course. Something about a cord, a braid or a noose, but the rest of it is like trying to call to mind facts he’d tried to memorize for some pedantic school test.

“So really, now. Have you not tired of running from your own fate yet? Do you really think you can run forever? That you could force Time itself to crumble to pieces rather than return?”

Then—

Then all these years—

They had never just been trying to bring him back as a wayward convert.

And if his future self had been in Watcher robes—

(A loop in Time opened will always close.)

This was so much bigger than he’d ever begun to realize.

He thinks he might be sick.

He thinks he needs a drink.

~~~

Mumbo does manage to find Etho, actually, which works out pretty well for him. He kind of thinks Etho might have forgotten about the whole code thing, but that was all right. All was well that ended well and all that!

“I haven’t looked at Xisuma’s codes for a while,” Etho says, scanning through them, “but this is really impressive, Mumbo.”

“Oh, well, I mean,” Mumbo says, rubbing the back of his neck, “Xisuma did all the hard work ages ago, really. I just figured out how to adapt it from world-level to player-level.”

“That’s still quite a lot,” Etho says. “How long did it take you?”

“Oh, like three months,” Mumbo says. “Ages. And they’re not exactly perfect! I mean. Well. That’s why you’re here. So I don’t split someone in half again.”

“...Right,” Etho says, before returning to his silent scanning of code. He only breaks it momentarily, with a murmured, “I wish we’d had this during the—” before abruptly cutting himself off.

During the what? Mumbo can’t help but wonder, though he doesn’t actually ask and Etho no longer seems inclined to volunteer. Not that that was new. He’s fairly sure Etho’s never volunteered anything in his life. He’d heard there’d been some sort of hullabaloo earlier—when Scar’s ex-wife had shown up, apparently? Mumbo thinks she’s still around somewhere, at least for the moment—but he had no idea what that had actually entailed.

Still, it’s more than a little awkward, sitting there watching Etho scrutinize his code and scribble notes to himself. Mumbo just has to sit, he supposes, until Etho has a question he can hope to answer.

He picks at his nails.

Mumbo still hasn’t gotten used to how loud the world is now. Sure, it’s not quite as bad as when he’d been driven under the table in a city-server, but even on a server as tiny as Hermitcraft it’s still kind of hard to block everyone. Grian’s fuzzy again in that deeply unpleasant way, Tango’s still so incredibly angry, there’s a steady undercurrent of grief too heavy to be coming from any one person, and even with all that extra info Mumbo’s being forced to process he still doesn’t have the slightest idea what Etho’s thinking—

Except that it feels really really bad.

He doesn’t know how else to describe it—weird and awful and alien and wrong, not like Grian stabbing him, just with this terrible sense of it being something he really wasn’t supposed to be looking at.

Mumbo jumps so hard he almost knocks over his chair, and Etho’s already staring at him—had probably asked him what the hell he was doing, actually, Mumbo’s fairly sure he heard his voice though he can’t begin to make out the words—

“Sorry,” he gasps out. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean—shoot, shoot, sorry, that’s my bad, I—um, you can, um, letmeknowifyouhaveanyquestions okay sorry see you later—”

Mumbo bolts up, and if Etho says anything else he doesn’t catch it either. Shoot, that was stupid, he’d gotten so much better at keeping his thoughts in order and not just blundering into people’s heads without permission.

Why did this have to be so hard? Didn’t they all have enough to worry about without Mumbo trying to figure out his newly borrowed powers? Couldn’t he just keep them under control?

He sinks to the ground, faintly shivering. It’s cold and damp and dark, not far off from midnight now, almost to the end of this horrible, horrible Christmas. Maybe things would get better from here. Maybe Mumbo would do better from here.

He shivers again, this time not entirely from the cold. He feels horrible, of course, not that he’d really picked up any sort of coherent thought, but he still feels weird and bad and slimy about it—

And what did it say, actually, that Grian— the Watcher— had a mind that felt far more warm and welcoming and real and human than Etho’s?

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

It’s gone two in the morning when Mumbo’s codes finally stop making sense—not through any fault of their own, but simply through Etho’s own inability to keep parsing them. He’d like to think he’d made some progress, though it’s hard to tell at this point.

It had been far too long of a day. Skizz is asleep, he can tell, his music that flat sort of fuzzy unconsciousness left it. He’s not entirely sure he’d want to talk to Skizz right now, anyway, given how their last conversation had gone. A check of the tablist said most everyone else was too—his own name is still lit up, obviously, as were Pearl’s and Joe’s, along with—

<Etho> are you still up?

<VintageBeef> Yeah, buddy, what’s up?

Etho blows out a slow breath through his nose, finally sends back where are you? and stares at the coordinates Beef sends back for too long of a moment.

The cold air clears his head a little, though not nearly enough. Not when one thing after another is getting laid down on top of him, from Quoroth to Feine’s arrival to Skizz’s hurt to Mumbo—

He’s not going to think about what Mumbo had done, actually. On purpose or not. He’s just going to talk to Beef.

What he’s going to talk to Beef about, he’s not entirely sure.

Etho should have recognized the coordinates, is the thing. He’s going to blame the hour for it, even if two in the morning was an hour he saw with almost daily regularity.

Still. He should have realized Beef was in Bdubs’s base.

Almost every instinct in his body tells him to turn around the moment he realizes, but it’s dark and late and Etho’s every definition of tired, so by the time he consciously recognizes the castle on the horizon he already sees Beef standing on the pathway, backlit by street lighting and the village houses. So there went the idea of turning tail and pleading falling asleep.

“...Hey,” Beef says when Etho alights in front of him, while Etho busily fusses with the straps of his elytra rather than actually look at him. He’s not sure he can manage that right now, actually.

“What are you doing here?” is what he finally ends up saying, though he directs the words closer to the ground than anything else. If he looks anywhere else he’s going to see things that hurt far too much.

Beef sighs, gesturing back into whatever house he’d clearly been in, and says, “I wanted to see if he left anything. Mementos or something, you know?” He sighs. “It’s just resources and things. I’ve been here all afternoon. Talked with Slip for a while, actually. But I guess he brought everything important to Season Eight.”

And now they’re gone, Etho thinks, stepping inside. No matter how hard he tries to keep his head down, there’s no avoiding seeing his surroundings now. This had clearly been where Bdubs had based out of while he’d been building—Etho had never spent that much time here during Season Seven itself to know the ins and outs of the base, but the place is full of chests and a bed that Beef must have been sat on or laid things on as he searched, because Bdubs would never have left it so rumpled for even a day, no less the end of a season.

Etho aches.

“Did you want to talk?” Beef asks quietly.

No, Etho thinks, then yes, then what actually comes out of his mouth is an incoherent sound of frustration. He can’t do this. He wants to. He can’t do it here.

He finally looks at Beef as his old friend takes a seat on the edge of the bed. Beef’s eyes are exhausted and red and he looks about as heavy as Etho feels and it’s too much.

“Have you ever been afraid of me?” Etho finally asks, which is clearly not the question Beef had been expecting.

“....Nnnno?” Beef says, drawing the syllable out. “Weird question there, buddy. Should I have?”

I don’t know.

“I mean, you’re not exactly intimidating…” Beef continues, just as puzzled.

“Quoroth was afraid of me,” Etho says, and Quoroth was Afraid of him, and he still doesn’t know how he’s supposed to feel about that.

A long moment passes. “I mean,” Beef says, “you kind of had him on the spot, Etho.”

“He was afraid of what I was,” Etho says, and it’s a sentence he can’t take back.

Beef knows it too, knows they’re edging perilously close to territory that they didn’t talk about, given by the incredibly tentative way he says, “...What you are?”

Etho sits, too—side by side, just like with Grian, and somehow this is so much harder than with Grian. Which is so incredibly backwards—he’s known Grian for two years, and he’s known Beef for ten.

But Bdubs is dead, and Doc is missing, possibly trapped, and Etho had had secrets ripped out of his hands in ways they never should have been, and he needs someone to hear this on his own terms.

“I’m not,” Etho says; then, with a heaving breath, “I’m not. Human.”

There’s a very long pause in which clearly Beef expects him to add something else to that, because the next thing he says is a quiet, “Okay?” When Etho still doesn’t continue, Beef picks up the silence with, “Did you think that would bother me? You remember our other best friend is a cyborg creeper, right? Whatever you are is not gonna faze me.”

It’s sure as hell fazing Etho. Even now, even in his own words, he feels like he’s being pulled apart nerve by nerve. “I don’t even know how many of us are left. I didn’t know anyone was left until I met—” He pauses again, automatically. Swallows. Stares too hard at the wall Bdubs had put up with his own two hands lifetimes ago and continues to ache. “Until I met Skizz.” Another slightly hysterical sound escapes him. “And I mean—in a death game, right? And we didn’t know, not yet, and I’m just sitting there trying to wrap my head around him being real and I didn’t—I didn’t think—and he doesn’t even remember—”

“Okay, so,” Beef cuts in, and even with all gentleness it’s enough to make Etho cringe. “Let me check if I’ve got this straight. You’re not human. And whatever you are there’s… not a lot of you? But Skizz is one?”

“A quarter,” Etho says roughly. “Skizz is a quarter. But it’s enough that I can hear—that I’m not—”

And then he has to break off again, because, well—

How did he explain the music, anyways?

“Okay, well,” he finally tries. “I know that you didn’t get along with your parents very well. But just. Imagine you did. Imagine they loved you with every fiber of their being and you could feel that at every moment no matter how far away they were. Even when they were off fighting a war that— Now imagine that applied to every extended relative in your entire family tree that was even remotely related to you. Everyone that you lived with and studied with and played with and worshiped with and you knew exactly how much they cared about you all the time. And then they all died.”

Beef, apparently, is far too stunned to find words for that for far too long of a moment. “...That seems like it’d be pretty awful, yeah.” With an audible inhale, he asks, “Are you. Okay?”

And with an awful bray of laughter that could have been a sob if Etho could ever find it in himself to sob, he says, “I don’t think I’ve ever been okay since the moment that happened.”

“Oh,” Beef says quietly. Then, evidently stunned into silence again, he finally manages, “How—how old were you?”

Explaining Enderian aging feels like opening another, entirely new book full of questions and explanations that Etho just really doesn’t have the energy for, so instead he answers, “About five months before I met Bdubs.”

“Oh,” Beef says again, and Etho knows he’s thinking sixteen because that would be how the math added up in his head, before he finally chokes out, “I’m so sorry.”

Yeah, Etho thinks, and that doesn’t quite make it out of his mouth either.

“Can I—” Beef continues before stopping again. “Is there anything—can I do anything?”

Nothing short of raising the dead, Etho thinks, so he shakes his head.

Beef reaches for him. Goes to put a hand on the crook of his elbow. Etho sees it coming a mile away and still flinches.

“Sorry,” Beef says again with a hurried withdrawal. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

So they sit, in silence, on Bdubs’s bed, because Etho can’t find anything else to say and apparently Beef can’t either.

“I’ll let you,” Beef finally says, “stay here. If you want. I think I’m done looking anyways.” He stands, brushing down his pants like they’d been sitting outside, then says again, “I’m so sorry.”

And it’s not that sorry doesn’t mean anything, not that Etho doesn’t appreciate the sentiment, but.

It doesn’t do anything. Beef is sorry and Lioneth is still gone and there’s no one for Etho to listen to except Skizz, fuzzy and sleeping, and there’s nothing left of Bdubs but old builds full of worthless junk.

He goes from sitting to lying on old sheets, manages one ragged breath that could have been a sob with a little more effort, and stays curled up with stinging eyes that give him no sleep until long after dawn paints the walls.

~~~

Toon Towers—Hermitcraft Seven

Tango had gone to sleep in his own bed that night—mainly because he had every right to, and also out of sheer stubbornness. Most everyone else, he thinks, had stayed holed up in the shopping district, though he’d heard someone come in about an hour after he’d gone to bed and assumed it was either Impulse or Skizz. He hadn’t actually gotten up to check.

Skizz turns out to be the answer, when Tango wakes to the smell of smoke. “Why have you got a campfire in my storage room?”

Skizz, aggressively stirring whatever was in the bowl sat on his lap, says flatly, “I asked Impulse where your kitchen was and he asked me if I’d really put ‘Tango’ and ‘kitchen’ in the same sentence.”

“Never been a problem for me,” Tango says with a shrug.

“Exactly,” Skizz says, turning to point his fork at Tango, then hurriedly bringing it back to his bowl before he drips egg all over the floor. “Someone has to feed you guys and gods know you won’t do it yourselves.”

“Golden carrots never steered me wrong,” Tango says. Then, a little quieter, “And you sound like Mom.”

“Gee, I wonder why,” Skizz says. “Speaking of, let me guess. You haven’t called home yet either, have you?”

“I haven’t got a comm,” Tango reminds him. He’d finally passed it off to Iskall last night in hopes of a repair, though he hadn’t heard anything back on the matter. “You have?”

“As a matter of fact,” Skizz says, upending his bowl into the pan he’s got set on the campfire, “I called Hilda last night.”

Tango sighs, then says, “And how’d that go?”

“About like you’d expect,” Skizz says, a little softer. “They can only offer us so much from out there, you know.”

“...Yeah,” Tango says. Same with everyone else they’d contacted, really. There’s only so many things people on the outside of all of this could do.

Skizz scrambles his eggs. Tango sits on the edge of the bed he’d respawned in after suffocating in space.

“So,” Tango finally says. “What was that whole debacle yesterday?” When Skizz doesn’t answer, he continues, “What have you not told us?”

“Well, you see,” Skizz says, “I don’t tell my friends things my other friends haven’t given me permission to.”

“Dude,” Tango says, maybe a little too sharply.

“Tango,” Skizz says. “His permission or no, I’m going to assume you understand why I’m maybe not offering you personal information right now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know exactly what that means.”

It’s been a long time since Tango’s heard Skizz this testy—long enough that he can’t even really place it. “Skizz,” he says.

Skizz pulls the eggs off the fire, emptying them into a fresh bowl Tango doesn’t remember having and covering them up. “We’re setting food up at the Town Hall, if you want any.”

“Do you really not trust me right now?” Tango asks instead of answering.

“With my life,” Skizz says, without hesitation. “But right now? Not with my secrets.”

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Impulse and Hypno had gotten started pretty much as soon as they were both awake, aided by fresh coffee and Skizz’s cooking. Various Hermits had shown up throughout the day for various periods, but overall, unfortunately, it had been a lot of retreading old ground—going back over ideas for where the Hermits could be and who to contact—that hadn’t turned up much in the way of new ideas.

The surprise guest, who shows up nearing three in the afternoon, is Etho. “Hey,” Impulse says, glancing up from the spread of papers he and Hypno have got out that, at this point, would probably make an excellent conspiracy board with the addition of some red string. “What’s up?”

“I’m not… entirely sure?” Etho says, overall looking about as shattered as Impulse already feels. “Grian asked if we could meet? He said you’d both probably be here too.”

“I haven’t heard anything,” Hypno says, glancing at his comm before shrugging. “Well, settle in. You’ve got notes that we haven’t looked at, haven’t you?”

Etho shrugs and obliges, still far on the subdued end even for him. It doesn’t seem like he has much in the way of untapped info, either, although they don’t get far in when the man of the hour shows up anyways.

Impulse would really like his first impression of all his friends to stop being how horrible they look—but, well, they all look horrible. Grian’s no exception, which is no real surprise, but that doesn’t make it any less unsettling.

“It’s real,” Grian says, apropos to nothing.

“…It’s real?” Impulse repeats, sounding significantly more baffled.

“Doc and Ren,” Grian continues. “The Hermethius. It’s real. I found it.”

A long moment passes before Hypno blows out a breath. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Fantastic. What’s the plan?”

“That,” Grian says, sinking into a chair and immediately wincing as he has to arrange his wings around the back, “I really wish I knew.” With a sigh, he continues, “Finding’s a relative term. Do I know it exists? Yes. Do I know where it exists? No, and I don’t really fancy trying to jump a rescue crew into the Void blind and promptly dying in the attempt.”

“…That does seem like a bit of an issue, yeah,” Etho says.

“Explains why Etho’s here,” Impulse says.

“…It does?”

“I mean,” Impulse continues, “I hope you’re not asking me to help track down a spaceship in the Void.”

“I’m asking how to figure out how to figure this out,” Grian says. “We need Doc. Gods do we need Doc. But we can’t just put finding everyone else on hold to find Doc and Ren specifically when the rest might be in places just as bad.”

“I agree,” says Hypno. “This needs to be a divide-and-conquer thing. Some of us continuing to track down everyone else, and some of us specifically focused on pinning down the Hermethius.”

“And finding the Hermethius also has to include some idea of how the hell we plan on getting Doc and Ren out,” Grian points out. “Which isn’t exactly going to be a cakewalk.”

“How much sense can you make of it?” Etho asks. “How detailed of an idea do you have? Floor plans? Power sources?”

“…Maybe?” Grian says. “I didn’t get that good of a look this time, but I might be able to get more, yeah.”

“I can work with that,” Etho says.

A beat passes. “Well,” Impulse says, “that kind of sounds like a split to me? You two on Hermethius duty while Hypno and I keep pursuing everyone else?” When no one objects, he continues, “Good. At least we’ve accomplished something today.”

“Gods hope we keep that up,” Grian says quietly, and it’s not a lot of progress, but it’s better than this morning.

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

“Hey Etho?” Impulse says, before they can properly split to their assigned duties. “Can I talk to you for a second, actually?”

“...Sure?” Etho says, looking vaguely baffled from the half of his face that Impulse can see. Impulse pushes back from his seat, legs protesting the movement. He could use the walk, if nothing else.

And there was plenty else. Impulse wonders, briefly, if Hypno and Grian would end up coming to blows in his absence, and decides that’s on them to sort out. He’d given Skizz the brain cell for a reason.

“I think I’ve nearly got Mumbo’s codes sorted,” Etho offers as they emerge into the weak afternoon daylight. “If you want to talk about. Bringing Quoroth over.”

“That’s good to know,” Impulse says, still vaguely uncomfortable with every possible avenue they had available to deal with Quoroth. Leaving him on Skizz’s world, unsupervised; bringing him to Hermitcraft, potentially to betray them all; or, lastly, being responsible for laying codes on him that might just fundamentally rewrite his personality. “Well, if they’re not right, we can always just pull them back off, right?”

“Should be how it works, yeah,” Etho says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I’ll pass them back to Mumbo and see what he thinks.”

It’s not what Impulse wants to talk about, but the entire situation they’re in is so over-the-top surreal that he’s not entirely sure how to broach the subject at all. “I talked to Skizz,” he finally offers.

Etho glances over, faintly wide-eyed, then quietly says, “Oh.”

There are times, Impulse has noticed without ever really giving conscious thought to it, that Etho looks like a caged animal. Now, he can only wonder what the cage is. “And I just,” he continues, “wanted to thank you.”

“...Oh,” Etho says again. “...I can’t really say I did anything.”

“You gave him back something he never really had,” Impulse says. “And I know how much that means to him.”

Etho, very quietly and still looking distinctly uncomfortable, says, “I wish I had more to offer.”

There’s something so heartbreaking in the softness that Impulse really doesn’t know how to acknowledge it. He hopes the roundabout way is enough. “Skizz has three cultures and he doesn’t think he belongs to any of them,” he says. “And you’re the only connection he’s ever had to the third. That’s offering more than you can even begin to know.” Then, with a light huff, “And gods know he’s turned me down on joining Hermitcraft for five seasons now. So, I mean, any time you want to put that in his ear then feel free.”

Just the slightest bit freer, Etho says, “What is up with that?” He glances over, then says, “Seriously, five seasons? I already asked him before last season even started and I still don’t get it.”

“Oh, good, you’ve already started on him? Maybe the two of us can finally get it through his skull,” Impulse says, riding the moment of levity as long as it will let him.

It doesn’t last long. Impulse can just about watch as Etho shutters back the brief solidarity. “Maybe.”

Impulse clears his throat, then says. “I’m sorry. About earlier. Last night. I’m sure that wasn’t exactly how you, uh, wanted that to happen.”

Etho shrinks back even a little further, then says, “Is she still here?”

“...No,” Impulse says. “No, she left a couple hours ago. I don’t know what she was trying to talk to Scar about but she’s gone.” Rubbing at the back of his neck, he adds, “I just. Yeah. Thank you. And good luck, with all this. I think we’re all going to need it.”

“Yeah,” Etho says. “Yeah, I think we are.”

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Skizz, perhaps unsurprisingly, has taken his self-assigned duties as Hermitcraft’s caterer very seriously.

“What’s the occasion?” Grian asks, perhaps a little too dryly. He might also be a bit cross-eyed at this point, if he’s being honest.

“The occasion,” Skizz says, “is that no one has seen either of you in a day and a half and I don’t trust either one of you to remember to feed yourselves when left to your own devices.”

Grian can only hope the glance he shares with Etho isn’t too guilty. They’d ended up holing back up in Stat Poker for what felt like a semi-permanent basis, given that it was still relatively central without stepping on the fact that Impulse and Hypno have still taken over Town Hall. “...A day and a half?”

“Monday,” Skizz says dryly, “December twenty-seventh, currently—” He sets down one plate, then the other, then juggles his comm free out of his pocket, “seven-thirty-seven pm. Yes. A day and a half.”

A beat passes. “Would it make you any happier to know I’m pretty sure we both got at least two hours of sleep between now and then?” Etho ventures.

Skizz sighs.

“...Thank you, Skizzle,” Etho says, more genuinely.

“Yeah, yeah,” Skizz says, waving him off. “I gotta go check in on Hypno and Dippledop. Tuck in.”

Grian doesn’t have to be told twice on that one—he’d certainly learned one thing from all this, and it was that Skizz was a darn fine cook, and just because he and Etho had both sort of forgotten that eating was a thing didn’t mean he wasn’t hungry. He doesn’t even bother trying to parse out exactly what it is—it’s pasta, and it’s tasty, and he could use twenty minutes to shut his brain off and stop running it in Hermethius-shaped circles.

“...What?” Etho asks, right about the time Grian realizes he’s sent about three or four rather unsubtle glances in his direction in as many minutes.

Grian looks away, stabs another piece of pasta, then admits, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the lower half of your face before.”

Etho, thankfully, sounds more amused than offended. He’s got the loop of black fabric that normally covered his face loose around his neck—Grian’s never paid enough attention to realize it’s more of a gaiter than the proper definition of a mask, which he has to admit would probably be more comfortable for that sort of long-term use. “I do eat at the sleepovers, you know.”

“Sounds fake,” Grian replies. “I’ve never seen it.” The point did remain that Etho hadn’t been on Season Six, had skipped Season Seven’s sleepover to meet them on-world, and Grian had been significantly distracted with about a billion other issues before Season Eight to have paid any bit of attention.

“Contrary to popular belief, I do in fact have a mouth.”

“I can’t believe it,” Grian says, leaning on the humor of the moment before they have to dive back into the horror of the current reality. “I’m going to have to tell everyone about this, you know.”

Etho, around his next bite, twists his lips into a wicked smirk the likes of which Grian’s never seen before—which, of course he’s never seen it before. “They’ll never believe you.”

Grian snorts.

“And I thought I was plastered the other night. You apparently thought I was drinking through osmosis.”

“Shut up,” Grian grumbles, which he thought was lighthearted enough, though given the fact that Etho goes quiet and doesn’t prod back it may have been too much.

“Okay,” Etho says after slightly too long of a silence, pushing his still mostly-full plate to the side to rearrange a few of the papers spread out in front of him. “I want to look at this from a different angle. We’ve been trying to figure out where, but the other relevant question is who?”

“…Huh?” Grian says.

“You threw around names I wasn’t familiar with the other day,” Etho says, clasping his hands on the table. “But there could be something you know that could be relevant. Could give us some hint.”

Grian sets down his fork. “Know thine enemy,” he murmurs.

“Essentially, yes.”

Grian sighs, shuffling through his own side of their organized mess for want of something to do with his hands. “Well, you heard a lot about Orez at the same time I did,” he says. “They’ve been wrapped up in all of this since Third Life, at least. Apparently due to the blackmail. And, uh.” He shrugs a little, the same gesture with both shoulder and wing, and watches the corner of Etho’s eye follow the movement. “Got them to thank for my little present from Last Life.”

That had been a weird enough adjustment to think about, actually, given that Grian had spent the last two months assuming that had been thanks to Quoroth. Realizing getting his wings chopped in half had instead been a gift from Orez, who up until recently Grian had assumed had no real emotional investment in his return or lack thereof, is more than a little disconcerting.

“...I see,” Etho says at last, twisting his pen through his fingers rather than writing anything down. “That does give me some indication of a threat level, yes.”

“Orez is very down with permanent maiming, yup,” Grian says dryly. “Hope that helps.”

Etho takes another nibble of pasta rather than answering. In some weird way, his sheer unflappability almost made this easier to discuss than it would have been with Boatem.

“And I’d really rather not contemplate the idea that Xyrstad might be personally invested in this situation and it’s not just their lackey going rogue,” Grian continues.

“...Given the way you spoke of them earlier I’m going to assume that has the potential to be really bad.”

“Xyrstad’s old as fuck,” Grian says flatly. “And powerful. Magically and politically. Second in the Iron Council, and they can. Well. Mimic any voice they’ve ever heard I think is technically what it entails, but whatever the definitive parameters are it is. Deeply unpleasant. I’ve had the displeasure of their acquaintance twice and I’d be perfectly happy never making it a third.” He shrugs. “And then there’s Quoroth. Who’s our murder pet now, I guess.”

“...Right,” Etho says, “That’s good to know, though. Thank you.”

“Yeah, well.” Grian shoves in another mouthful of pasta, mainly to avoid having to speak for a minute. Finally, he offers, “You’re better at this than I thought you’d be.”

“Sorry?”

“I mean,” Grian says. “You’re everyone’s favorite redstoner’s favorite redstoner. I didn’t really know that extended to this sort of strategy.”

Etho glances up properly, looking strangely vulnerable with his mask still down. “I’m what now?”

“I mean,” Grian says, “I’m not a redstoner, but my favorite redstoner is Mumbo and you’re Mumbo’s favorite, so I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.”

“...I’m Mumbo’s what?”

“Oh, Mr. Hopper Clock’s over here pretending he didn’t completely reinvent the field,” Grian says. “I’m pretty sure you’re now in, like, every textbook that gets written nowadays.”

Okay, this was actually amusing, because Grian can, for once, actually see Etho’s entire face turn red. “Grian, they didn’t even let me take redstone as my final education specialization. I had to drop it after third,” and the next word that comes out of his mouth has such a different lilt to it that it takes Grian two seconds to stop trying to parse the syllables and realize it had to be Enderian.

“What, they stopped you at your doctorate and you had to be content with a masters?” Grian asks.

“Humans need to name their education systems normally,” Etho declares. “Because I don’t know what a sophomore is and it’s not even that I’m afraid to ask anymore, I just don’t want to know.”

“Oh, I don’t either, it’s just that one weird corner of the city-servers that do that one and I try very hard not to think about it,” Grian says.

“We had four—blocks, I suppose you’d call them, of education?” Etho says. “The first is, you know, teaching young children how the world works. Reading and writing and mathematics and history and all. The second is quite varied, learning about the skills and specializations necessary for a House on a very shallow level so that by the third you’ll have it narrowed to four or five subjects to focus on, and by the fourth you’ll have it down to one. Two, if you’re very ambitious, but by that point your proficiencies are known and your House knows where you’d be of most use.” He shrugs. “I took redstone through third, but I wasn’t needed to take it to fourth. So—high school, I guess?”

“Ah. High school. The worst days of my life, and I got abducted by demigods in my twenties,” Grian says dryly. Then, “You didn’t get to choose your fourth?”

Etho shrugs again. “I mean. We were at war. What you were good at was more important than what you were interested in.”

There’s a long silence before Grian says, “All right. Put me out of my misery. Tell me whatever this House of yours decided that Etho was better at than redstone.”

Etho, very quietly, tugs his mask back up. “We studied the war a lot,” he says. “We had to. Worked on a lot of mock battles. Played out a lot of mock battles. I usually ended up in charge of the planning.” A beat passes, before he adds, “I was very good at it.”

“Ah,” Grian says. “So this isn’t new to you.”

“They’re not that different, if you think about it,” Etho says. “A comparator has a purpose. A set of specific things it can do. And people, when you learn their strengths and weaknesses, can be the same way. You just have to figure out the right way to put it all together.” He scratches down something Grian can’t even pretend to read, then finishes, “And it ran in the family, I suppose. Natural development.”

“How’s that?”

Etho, still busy scribbling, says without looking up, “My mother was vice-general of the army.”

“Ah,” Grian says dryly. “So you were a nepo baby.”

Etho, promptly managing to choke on nothing, says, “What?”

“Having a parent in a position of power and then being given favors about it is the definition of nepotism, Etho,” Grian points out.

A long moment passes. “I mean,” Etho says. “Actually, my parents weren’t supposed to get married? It was kind of a whole scandal when they were found out. When I, uh. You know.” He clears his throat. “Sprung from my mother’s head fully formed. As you do.”

Grian snorts. “I didn’t know Enders had a course on Greek mythology.”

“I could tell you right now that’s actually how we’re born and you wouldn’t know any better,” Etho points out.

“Well, you’ve given the game up now.”

“Or have I?”

Grian sighs, scraping the last of his pasta up and setting the bowl aside to return to thumbing through his papers. “Okay,” he says. “So going back to—”

He breaks off, heart jumping in his throat as his comm buzzes with the distinctive buzz of a join notification. No one had popped back off-world as far as he knew, so that meant someone new—

“Oh,” Etho says, having gone for his own comm at the same moment.

“…Wait, huh?” Grian says, decidedly more confused.

sl1pg8r joined the game.

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Sl1pg8r is, all told, just a guy.

Grian’s not sure what he expected, really. He’s never met the guy. His knowledge of Slip’s existence included that he was a former Hermit, he’d signed the wall on the sleepover world, and some of the longer-tenured Hermits were still friends with him. Other than that, Grian’s in the dark.

So Slip’s here, and Grian’s not entirely sure what to make of him. He’s an average guy—average height, average build, short brown hair, thick glasses, wearing a hoodie with a stylized S emblazoned on it under the light winter jacket he’s got hanging open. He’s standing outside Town Hall, already chatting with Hypno, Impulse, Beef, Tango, and Joe with the ease of familiarity.

It’s a little uncanny, Grian thinks, when Hermitcraft’s whitelist had been stable since Season Seven except for the addition of Pearl and Gem, to remember there were plenty of people who had once held the title of Hermit long before he had.

Slip glances over, eyes darting over Grian for a second before landing over his shoulder. “Hey, Etho.”

“Hi, Slip,” Etho says, stopping just off of Grian’s right shoulder. “It’s been a while.”

“My man, any time you want to come play prop hunt with the Pojkband you’re more than welcome,” Slip says easily.

“What in the world is a Pojkband?” Grian asks.

“That’d be us two, Pause, and Keralis,” Beef says. “Slip and I weren’t Hermits together, but there’s enough of an overlap in our friend groups we ended up hanging out.”

“Just four guys, doing stuff and things,” Slip says with a nod. “And you must be…?”

“Grian,” he introduces after slightly too long of a beat. Then, because it feels vaguely important, “Season Six.”

“Good to meet you, man,” Slip says, offering a handshake.

“Your mileage may vary,” Tango says under his breath.

“Your friendly neighborhood Sl1pg8r here, though you probably already guessed that,” Slip continues, shooting a glance over his shoulder at Tango.

“Anyways, man,” Impulse says, “Beef said you had some info?”

“Right!” Slip says with a nod, pushing his glasses up his nose. “So, funny story! Actually, I told Beef the funny story when he called the other night, I just didn’t think it was relevant, but, uh. It sure might be!”

“Do tell,” says Hypno.

“Right, so,” Slip says. “I was at a convention last week. Super cool! Hotel was kind of weird though, I think it might have been haunted. And then I had a nightmare that Keralis showed up at the end of my bed like my new sleep paralysis demon, which was pretty freaky, actually. But, you know, a little light carbon monoxide poisoning never hurt anybody! So I chalked it up to the creepy hotel and moved on with my life.” He clears his throat. “Then, you know, I went home, talked to Beef, heard about… Everything. Which is awful and I’m sorry. But then Weird Demon Keralis showed up again, except this time my wife woke up and started screaming.”

“...So you’re saying you’re being haunted by Keralis?” Beef says.

“I mean,” Slip says. “If anyone was going to do it, it would be Keralis, wouldn’t it?”

Joe sighs. “‘Sleep Keralysis demon’ is not how I expected my day to go when I woke up this morning, I must admit.”

“That’s,” Tango says. “Yeah, no, I don’t know what to say to that.”

“...So, are we thinking that’s really Keralis?” Impulse asks. “He’s somehow… haunting you in your sleep?”

“I mean,” Slip says, “last I knew my wife didn’t usually see into my dreams, so. Who knows!”

“Actually, that’s…” Tango says, then trails off. “No, I think he does have a point, actually.” He clears his throat, then says, “I saw Keralis too. In space. Kind of thought that was, you know. The oxygen deprivation. But it was before that, I think?”

“...Okay then,” Impulse says. “So Keralis is haunting people? How does that work? And why?”

“Oh, well, I figured that would probably be because of—” Slip starts, then breaks off. “I mean actually, I kind of just thought I’d sleep and we could see if he showed up again? Then we can ask him.”

“That does assume a certain level of consciousness in your Keralysis demon,” Joe points out, “but I suppose that is our best option?”

“That’s… yeah, okay,” Impulse says. “We can put you up somewhere? Have a sleepover?”

“That’d be much appreciated, man, thanks,” says Slip. “Hope I can help. Where are we hanging?”

~~~

Impulse hadn’t known Slip that well, all told—Impulse had joined Hermitcraft mid-Season Three, right around the same time Slip had ended up proposing to his now-wife and leaving behind the outworlds for the stability of a city-server. They’d had a passing acquaintance, but less than half a season hadn’t really been long enough to get to know someone. Hypno, Tango, Mumbo, and Joe had known him better, though Hypno had gone back to the depths of Hermit searching and Joe had muttered something about a containment field for Keralis before wandering off. Mumbo had ended up joining them, though, and despite all his usual anxiety he seems plenty cheerful about seeing Slip again.

“Do you ever miss being out here?” Tango asks, as Slip had marveled over the shopping district and they’d all done their best to forget why he was really there.

“What, the outworlds?” Slip asks. “Sometimes. I mean, civilization definitely has its perks. But yeah, sometimes I do.” He shrugs. “I still poke my head out here every so often. Keralis and I went Endbusting a couple years ago.”

“And it was VERY fun, sweetface!”

Impulse jumps about a foot in the air. Mumbo yelps, seeming to very valiantly pretend he hadn’t immediately after. Tango, unsurprisingly, swears.

Sure enough, illuminated under the nighttime lights of the shopping district, is Keralis. Looking rather translucent, if Impulse did say so himself.

“Keralis!” Mumbo blurts. “That’s—what are you—how did you get here?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” says the translucent Keralis, before abruptly fading away again.

A long moment passes.

“Told you,” Slip says weakly.

Another long moment passes.

Running footsteps abruptly sound from up the road, then a clatter of something hitting the ground. “...Oh,” Joe says, his arms full of indescribable equipment. “I missed him, didn’t I?”

“...Yeah,” Tango says after a moment. “You sure did.”

“Drats,” says Joe. “Okay. Perhaps we should relocate to somewhere more comfortable for when he appears again?”

“Man,” says Slip. “I thought I was going to get a nap out of all this at least.”

“...Joe,” Mumbo ventures. “What are you. What are you going to do, exactly?”

Joe stares at him like the answer should be overwhelmingly obvious. “Cleo’s a zombie,” he says flatly. “Do you think I don’t know how to contain ghosts, spirits, phantoms, specters, or apparitions of other varieties?”

A beat passes. “That would’ve helped with Pearl,” Impulse points out.

“You have a ghost named Pearl now?” Slip asks. “Rad.”

“I mean, she’s not always a ghost,” Mumbo says.

“I don’t even pretend to know what’s going on with Pearl,” Joe says. “It’s not my fault she routinely breaks the laws of ghost physics and I can’t be held accountable for that.”

“...Fair enough,” Impulse says.

“Anyways,” Joe says. “More comfortable. Yes?”

“Yeah,” Impulse says, then, “How about my base, actually? Might be easier to get us all in there rather than finding a spot around here.”

“...Do you want a shulker, Joe?” Mumbo asks, while Joe continues to juggle his equipment.

“Oh, that would be lovely, thanks!”

~~~

Impulse’s Sea Pyramid—Hermitcraft Seven

“Okay,” Pearl says, sitting primly cross-legged. “I’m a little confused. Do we all need to be here?”

“Well, logically,” Joe says, in the tone of his that says whatever’s about to come out of his mouth is going to be logical to exactly no one but him, “we can only assume that if our Keralis phantasm started appearin’ to Slip, he’s in search of a friendly face. Therefore, mathematically, the more friendly faces we have together, the more likely he is to show up.”

“Okay, but if that were the case,” Pearl points out, “wouldn’t he have showed up here in the first place? Where, you know, half of the Hermits already are?”

A long moment passes. “I don’t pretend to understand the thought process of Keralis on a normal day,” Joe says primly, “no less when he’s an intangible creature of Slip’s nightmares.”

Slip shrugs. “It beats me.”

“Well, personally,” Scar drawls, “I’m always in favor of a good sleepover, but, uh. What are we doing now, exactly?”

A beat passes.

“Waiting,” Impulse says.

“Yeah, Impy, we can see that,” Tango says dryly.

Another beat passes.

“I’m gonna go make coffee,” Impulse says, joints once again protesting as he gets to his feet. Gods, if he can give credit to this disaster for anything, it’s making him feel old.

By the time he comes back with the first pot, the Hermits have splintered into various groups along his floor. Grian and Etho are on the farthest fringe, notes already spreading out around them like a bad oil spill. Slip’s not far away, settled in with Beef, and Impulse’s heart lifts when it seems they’ve tugged Skizz into the conversation. Tango’s leaning over Iskall’s shoulder, going over what looks like his comm with Cub—hopefully Iskall had made some progress on it, then. Hypno’s buried in his own comm, not far from Scar, Pearl, and Stress, while Joe sets up his—whatever it is Joe’s setting up. And Mumbo, somehow, has ended up alone on the fringes.

Impulse settles back beside him. “Hey Mumbo,” he says. “Coffee? Or tea, I can set that up too.”

“Oh!” Mumbo says, jumping. “Oh. That would be lovely! If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No, of course not,” Impulse says. “That’s no trouble—”

“Booooooooooooooooooo—”

Impulse has jumped straight in the air entirely too many times today, he decides. At least this time he’s not the only one.

“—oooooooooooooooooooooo— oh. Good morning!”

A long moment passes. “It’s like, ten o’clock,” Mumbo says. “At night.”

“Well, there’s no need for semantics, Bumbo Jumbo,” says Keralis, this time looking significantly less translucent than he had earlier. He blinks. “The gang’s all here?”

“The gang’s, like, half here,” Hypno says, getting to his feet. “What’s going on, man? Are you good?”

“Well,” says Keralis, “I think that depends on your definition of good!” He then, promptly, glitches out like a badly coded armor stand, going almost invisible before returning to solidity. “Ow.”

“He’s not a ghost,” Joe says, staring at Keralis through the most godsawful lime green glasses Impulse has ever seen him wear. Granted, Impulse had never held Joe up as an aspiring fashion icon.

“Of course I’m not a ghost!” Keralis says, puffing up. “I’d have to be dead! And I’m awfully real to be dead.”

“Okay, actually,” Grian says. “Very important question here, a fair amount of personal investment. How aren’t you dead?”

“...You were still on the server, weren’t you,” Etho says, shuffling papers over to sit properly facing Keralis. Now that Impulse looks, they’ve all sort of oriented themselves around Keralis.

Keralis scratches his neck. “Ah, well,” he says. “I think I’ve got Kevin to thank for that.”

Another very long moment passes.

“Who the hell is Kevin?” Hypno asks.

“Oh,” says Keralis. “Kevin’s my roommate.”

No one quite seems to know how to answer that.

“My brain roommate,” Keralis adds.

No one really seems to know how to answer that.

“Slip, sweetface,” Keralis says, “did you not tell them?”

“Of course I didn’t tell them!” Slip says. “I didn’t even tell my wife, man!”

“Okay, hang on,” Tango says. “Tell us what?”

Keralis promptly glitches out, going translucent again, his lips still moving but no sound coming from them.

“...Shoot,” Slip says. “Well, guess that’s on me, then. Right, so, remember how I said Keralis and I decided to go out and do some stuff and things in the End a couple years ago?”

“It was sad,” Keralis says, solidifying again. “Your wife goes to visit her mom for a week and you’re moping around the house. I had to get you out of there.”

“I wasn’t moping!” Slip says. “But anyways, we’re out there doing stuff and things. Killed the dragon and all—nailed it, aced it, couldn’t be stopped. And then we’re, what, maybe a thousand blocks out? Bridging out towards this End city, and Keralis shears off this chunk of stone.”

“And what do I find,” Keralis says, “but a little guy?”

A beat passes. “A little guy?” Hypno ventures.

“A little guy,” Keralis confirms, then holds together his thumb and forefinger in a circle. “No bigger than this! All squishy and cute and sleepy. The future Kevin.”

“...Kevin’s a blob?” Impulse ventures.

“Well, that’s not very nice,” Keralis says. “He’s not just a blob. He’s my brain roommate. And a little guy.”

“How did a blob become your brain roommate?” Hypno asks.

Keralis doesn’t answer immediately. “You don’t want to know.”

“...There was a lot of screaming involved,” Slip adds.

“That’s—wait,” Tango says. “How long ago was this?”

“...Late Season Six?” Keralis ventures. “Bubbles was back on the server by then, I know that.”

Impulse flinches despite himself. Gods, they’re going to have to break the news about Bdubs. Again. That’s already getting painfully old.

“And you didn’t tell anyone?” Tango presses. “That you got—what, assaulted by a brain blob?”

“It’s not Kevin’s fault,” Keralis insists. “That’s just how his species works. A symbiotic relationship! How was he supposed to know I wasn’t the right species to be symbiotic with?”

Impulse is just close enough to hear when Grian leans over to Etho and asks, “Do you have any idea what species he’s talking about?”

Etho shakes his head. “Absolutely no clue.”

“So,” Stress pipes up. “You’re saying Kevin’s a person?”

The words hang for a moment. “Of course Kevin’s a person,” Keralis says. “He’s got thoughts. Feelings. Memories. Why wouldn’t he be a person?”

“He… talks to you, then?” Hypno asks.

“Talk’s a strong word,” Keralis says. “It’s not really words. But communicate? Yes. Emotions, and images. Sometimes the exact mathematical calculation of a black hole, if he thinks that’s relevant. I don’t know why he’d think it’s relevant, but sometimes he does.” Then, quieter, “He tells me a lot about his homeland.”

“But you found him in the End,” Scar points out. “Isn’t that his home?”

“Not unless there’s some part of the End we’ve never seen before,” Keralis says. “There’s a tree that lights up the whole dimension. Forests in colors you can’t even dream of. Flying whales.”

A beat passes. “Flying whales,” Impulse repeats.

“Flying whales!” Keralis says.

Etho, abruptly, leans over in search of a blank piece of paper, and hurriedly starts scribbling.

“I have no idea where or what that is,” Grian says, “but I can tell you it’s absolutely not the End.”

“So what are you implying?” Iskall asks. “A whole new dimension?”

“...I mean,” Hypno says, “that’s not entirely out of the question, is it? TFC’s old enough to remember when we first made contact with the Nether. And all of us are old enough to remember when we discovered the End. It could be very possible that there’s a fourth dimension we have no idea how to get to yet.”

“But then how did Kevin end up in the End in the first place?” Scar asks. “Also, side note: why is your brain roommate from a previously unknown dimension named Kevin?”

“Oh,” Slip says, “I named him Kevin, actually. It was either that or Jessica.”

A beat passes. “My fault for asking,” Scar says.

Keralis sighs, then glitches again. When he settles back into reality, he looks a lot more sober. “Kevin’s first host died,” he says quietly. “I don’t really understand why, but it’s… not pleasant, when he remembers it. A war? They were both just kids. So Kevin’s parents hid him, and he hibernated. I guess until he found me.” Keralis shrugs. “How he got from wherever he was to a random piece of endstone on my server, I don’t really know.”

“I mean, we heard about wars out in the End,” Tango says. “One of them could have crossed over somehow? Kevin got caught in the crossfire?”

Keralis shrugs again. Grian leans over to Etho a second time—Impulse can’t make out what he asks this time, but Etho’s response is a vehement shake of his head.

“Okay, so this is all very cool and all,” Pearl says, “but that really doesn’t explain how you. You know. Survived the moon.”

Keralis sighs. “Defense mechanism, I think. Kevin tried to take me home, to be safe. Except… I don’t think he really knows where home is. I think it’s a lot of places. It’s hard to think straight. Like being stretched.”

“...Are you telling me there are more Keralis ghosts around?” Impulse asks with a sigh.

“I’m not a ghost,” Keralis insists. “And—maybe? Problem is, I don’t know where any of the other Keralises are. Or what they’re doing. Or who they’re with. Or which of them is actually me. Or how to not be Many Keralises anymore.”

“Ah,” says Scar. “That would be a problem.”

“So if you’re Slip’s Keralis,” Hypno asks, “can you find us now that you know where we are? Or are you, like, attached to him?”

Keralis shrugs again. “One way to find out!”

“I mean, I’ll stay as long as you guys need me to,” Slip says.

“Also, out of curiosity,” Hypno says, “if Kevin’s trying to take you home, why would you end up with Slip and not, you know, us? No offense.”

“None taken, man.”

“Oh, well that’s easy,” Keralis says. “Slip named Kevin.”

That takes a moment to sink in. “Yeah,” Impulse says. “That makes sense.”

“Kevin might be a little guy,” Keralis points out, “but he’s not stupid.”

Chapter Text

Impulse’s Sea Pyramid—Hermitcraft Seven

Keralis, unfortunately, glitches so hard he completely disappears not long after that, and does not reappear. Or perhaps fortunately, if one could spin it that way, given that Keralis had actually had enough time to explain whatever it was he’d just explained. Mumbo’s not going to think too hard about that.

Anyways, once people start realizing Keralis has gone back to wherever specter-not-ghost Keralises with brain roommates go back to, it’s early enough in the night that there’s a slow splinter of the group as they decide whether or not they’re actually spending the night here. Mumbo gets to his feet, says something he doesn’t really notice to Impulse, and scrambles over to where Grian and Etho are gathering up their papers.

“...Hi,” Mumbo says after just slightly too long of a moment.

“Hey, Mumbo,” Grian says, maybe a hair too absently. Mumbo tries not to let it get to him.

“I, uh,” Mumbo says, twisting his hands together. “Wanted to talk to you—er, that is, well, Etho, you’ve probably already talked to him, but, uh—the codes? They’re, well, I think they’re ready? Or as ready as they can be. Right now. I think.”

“Ah,” says Grian, shoving the last of his pile into his inventory and getting to his feet. “A problem for Morning Grian. Possibly even Tomorrow Afternoon Grian.”

“...Oh,” Mumbo says. “That’s, um. So. Are you just going to go fetch him, then?”

“About that, actually,” comes a voice from behind Mumbo that almost makes him jump. “I’ve got something to say on the subject.”

“...Pearl,” Grian says, just a hint of wariness in his voice. Etho, getting to his feet as well, shuffles a bit behind him. “What is it, then?”

Pearl takes half a step sideways, no longer directly behind Mumbo, which he thinks is probably good for the condition of his heart. “I’m changing my vote,” she says. “I don’t think we should put the codes on Quoroth.”

A long moment passes.

“Sorry,” Grian says. “What?”

“You heard me,” Pearl says levelly.

“I sure did,” Grian says, voice rising a little. Then, “I just was apparently under the weird illusion that you were on my side here.”

“It’s not about sides, Grian,” Pearl says, rolling her eyes.

“Everything since we got out of the godsdamned Void has been about sides,” Grian snaps back. “Don’t pretend it hasn’t.”

“You’re kind of the one making it that way,” Pearl points out.

Grian throws his hands out with an exasperated huff. “Okay, right. Again. You just want me to bring him back here with no protection for any of us!”

“If he was going to do something, wouldn’t he have done it on Skizz’s world?” Pearl asks.

“Not if he was trying to finagle exactly this!” Grian says. “He’s no Orez but he knows how to play the long game! He possessed Impulse for like four months!”

“He offered to help,” Pearl insists. “He’s the only reason we have any idea where Doc and Ren are. And you’re running yourself ragged trying to figure out how to get to them. I just don’t think we should throw Quoroth’s knowledge away.”

“Also, um,” Mumbo says. “Most of us didn’t want to put the codes on him anyways.”

Another silence stretches out.

“You know what?” Grian says. “No. No, I’m not. Vote all you want, but he’s my prerogative and I’m not bringing him.”

A beat passes.

“Do what you want with that,” Grian continues flatly. “So sorry for trying to keep you all safe, considering how well that’s gone lately.”

He turns on his heel, stalking for the exit and leaving the three of them standing.

Etho, at long last, clears his throat. “Right,” he says. “Good talk.”

Pearl sends him a remarkably venomous glare that almost makes Mumbo want to shrink under it, then replies dryly, “Yeah, totally.”

“I’m, uh, yeah,” Mumbo says, rubbing the back of his neck. “Good night. And stuff.”

He scrambles away without waiting for a reply, waiting to catch his breath until he’s made it to one of Impulse’s exterior pathways. Even then he still doesn’t really feel like he does, though the chill night air helps a bit.

He reaches for Grian after a bit of hesitation—he’s been so quiet, so distant lately that Mumbo could almost forget he’s just there, hiding away under thick mental walls that Mumbo was so far from mastering.

The response Grian gives him is both delayed and absent, hardly a response at all. More like an automatic reaction than an actual answer. Mumbo bites his lip, almost reaching again, and then decides against it.

(He’d almost rather Grian had just brain stabbed him and gotten it over with.)

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Grian’s flounce the night before had, in short, left Etho on his own the rest of the night. Not that he didn’t know how to work on his own—he’d stayed in the quiet of the old Stat Poker, poring over notes again, until nearly four in the morning. Neither he nor Grian were early morning risers by choice, so he highly doubted he’d be disturbed at sunrise when he finally did make it off to bed.

There’d been a lot of holing up in random places the last few days—some people were staying in Tango and Impulse’s respective bases, the two closest to the shopping district, no one seeming willing to stray any farther away than that. Those who hadn’t had taken over old shops and minigames, too desperate for proximity to do anything else.

Etho hadn’t quite had that problem, per se—he’d dug himself a little hidey-hole under Brain-E-E’s, close enough to be nearby if anything happened but also sequestered off the main island to an extent no one was likely to stumble in on him by accident.

It’s also very, very quiet.

Not that that had helped him sleep any—despite attempting to give up on consciousness at four, it had been after six-thirty by the time he finally had. And then he’d woken up at noon, sort of, and had managed neither going back to sleep nor actually getting up.

He’d heard his comm go off half a dozen times—whether world messages or personal ones, he’s not entirely sure, but none of them had sounded like join notifications so he hadn’t bothered to check.

It was hard to want to, was the thing. There was the Kevin angle now, perhaps a lead into Keralis’s whereabouts—definitely more of a lead than they’d had, at the very least—but the previous night’s enthusiasm about that has gone like smoke on the wind. Under any other circumstances, the concept of a fourth dimension probably would have kept Etho up for four days right there by itself. Hypno’s point about the recentness of discovering other dimensions applied only to the humans (and Cinder) in the room; the Enders had known about the Nether and the Overworld for generations, so what were the odds such a fourth dimension could have been a mystery to Etho’s people as well? And how had Kevin ended up in the End for Keralis to find anyways?

Etho’s not entirely sure how Grian ends up finding him. Considering the whole ‘Grian is a Watcher’ thing he’s trying very hard not to think about it. There’s a knock on the trapdoor Etho had shoved in the floor, which is slightly awkward, considering that means that Etho has to force himself out of bed and climb the ladder to answer.

Grian sounds… cranky. It’s not a music thing, not in the way an Ender would sound cranky, and not in the way Afraid comes across either. It’s just an overall impression of cranky in the cacophony that Etho doesn’t bother trying to parse out.

Grian sits back on his heels when Etho pokes his head out, seeming surprised that he’d answered at all. “...Are you okay?” he finally ventures. “I hadn’t heard anything from you.”

“Yeah,” Etho says, the old rote answer that had served him well through many years of not being okay. “Sorry. Guess I overslept.” He sneaks a glance at his comm, sees that it’s nearly quarter to three, and decides not to mention he’d woken up several hours ago.

“It’s fine,” Grian says, going from sitting on his heels to just dropping on the floor. He looks awful, too, now that Etho looks at him—eyes bloodshot, wings clamped tight against his back, holding himself with an overall gingerness that reminds Etho of Bdubs on a bad pain day. He wonders, briefly, how badly losing half of a whole set of appendages has to hurt, and decides better than to ask.

Etho’s also fairly sure he’s got a good impression of what Grian had been doing the night before, and he doesn’t need to go count the leftovers of Doc’s alcohol stores to confirm it.

“So,” Grian says after a long moment, when Etho finally climbs out of the trap door and also proceeds to sit on the floor. He’d already slept in his clothes; it wasn’t like the floor was going to make them any worse. “Did we get anything actually useful out of that? At all?”

“...No,” Etho says. “Not that I can see right now, no.”

“Right,” Grian says. “That’s what I thought.”

“I mean,” Etho continues, “unrelated, I had one idea, but you’re not going to like it.”

Grian sighs, loud and long, then says, “Lay it on me.”

“Tango.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tango built a rocket ship from scratch,” Etho points out. “And we are also looking for a spaceship. Void ship. Whatever you want to call it. Same principle.”

“Tango also died about it,” Grain says. “And, right now, would refuse to help me out of spite.”

“I think this is a lot bigger than spite,” Etho says.

“Try telling him that.”

“Okay.”

A beat passes. “...Okay?” Grian says.

“Okay,” Etho says again. “I’ll go talk to Tango.”

“That is… not at all what I said.”

“I’m aware.”

Another beat passes. “You suck,” Grian says.

The very faintest hint of a grin might just cross Etho’s face. Not that Grian can see it.

The next sound to break their silence is both of their comms.

And this time it is a join notification.

TinFoilChef joined the game.

~~~

“I am so sorry,” are the first words TFC says to Impulse and Hypno. “I stayed the holiday with my sister’s family, I hadn’t checked my comm in days.”

“I think we’re just glad you’re here now, man,” Impulse says, with what looks like the weight of the world on his shoulders. Young shoulders, TFC thinks, then decides that age would be far from making this situation better.

Iskall’s the first to come actively seeking a hug as the Hermits assemble, and TFC offers without restraint. He makes it through a solid half of the current group before there’s a hissed argument up the road, just loud enough to immediately silence whatever anyone else’s conversation had been.

“—stand there on your soapbox and pretend you’ve done a godsdamned thing since we’ve gotten here.”

“I don’t see you coming down from on high with all our missing friends in tow either, Grian,” Tango snaps, “so spare me the lecture, if you will.”

“At least I’m fucking working on it!” Grian says. “What are you doing all day up on your ass in Toon Towers?”

“Not getting blackout wasted every night, at least!”

“Is there a problem here?” TFC asks, already knowing full well there’s a problem, and it’s one that makes his heart ache.

For a moment, it’s clearly enough to take the wind out of both of their sails. “Yeah,” Tango finally says. “You could say there’s a problem.”

“No fucking shit,” Grian mutters.

TFC doesn’t say anything. Neither of the other two do either, nor do they look TFC in the eye.

“Is this helping?” he finally asks.

“...What?” Tango says.

“Is this helping the problem?” TFC repeats.

Neither of them answer again.

“Pick fights on your own time,” TFC finally says. “Right now we have people to find.”

It does, for the moment, shut them both down. TFC wishes the whole thing was more unexpected; it isn’t, unfortunately. Not in a time like this.

He wishes a good cup of coffee could fix it.

(He hopes XB is okay.)

~~~

Tango’s exhausted.

Tango’s exhausted, and he’s been running Decked Out for about four hours straight now, and he’s bound to get caught up in a cascade of compounding mistakes due to sheer overtaxation. And he had. Oh, boy, had he! The last round had gotten him pinned by an angry ravager—not that Tango had ever met a ravager that wasn’t angry—through no fault other than his own, and had sent him soundly spinning into a respawn.

Respawns also generally go better when you don’t wake up to Etho hovering over you like some kind of damn cryptid.

“Blugherkle!”

“Hi, Tango,” Etho says, not like some kind of damn cryptid but very much like Etho.

“Well hi, E, gee, add five years to my life while you’re at it, thanks!” Tango grumbles, sitting upright. “You want to take a run too? I can tell you the dungeon’s still quite attached to her Champion.” A beat passes. “I just can’t quite tell if it’s fondness or murderous rage.”

“I won’t take bets on it, then,” Etho says. “But no. I wanted to talk to you.”

“Ah,” Tango says. “Talk to me. I see.” He taps his thighs. “Thought you were all buddy-buddy with Grian now.”

Etho already hadn’t been looking him in the eye, but his gaze slides a little more sideways at that. “I trust him.”

Now that’s worthy of an open scoff. “You trust him?” Tango asks. “After everything? After Bdubs?”

For the first time in the entire time they’ve known each other, Tango thinks he might have actually hit something resembling a fragile interior instead of Etho’s purely enigmatic exterior. “Don’t,” Etho says, a little too sharply. “Don’t drag him into—”

…Tango might have fucked up on that one a bit. “Listen,” he says. “I only meant—”

“I just wanted to know if you wanted to help with the Hermethius,” Etho says, as flat as before. “Space stuff. Kind of up your alley.”

Space stuff. Actually, one of the last things Tango wants to think about right now is space stuff. “I’d rather not get in on your private little planning sessions, personally.”

“I don’t want you to,” Etho says. “I doubt I’d get anything done with both of you in the room. Mainly I want another set of eyes on some of my math. Grian’s not much help with that.”

“I can imagine,” Tango says dryly. Then, “Yeah, all right, I’ll look at it. Send it over.”

“Physical or digital?”

“Digital. Or both.”

“I can do both.”

A long moment passes. Etho buries his head in his comm. “I didn’t mean,” Tango starts again. “Earlier. I didn’t mean to—I just. You can look at me and tell me you trust him after that?”

“Given the alternative is not trusting him,” Etho says, still not looking up, “I know which side I’d rather fall on.”

Tango doesn’t have an answer for that. Etho, evidently, takes that as his cue to leave.

“Hey,” Tango says. “When we figure this out? And get to Doc and Ren? I want in. The ones who’ve done this? Let me at them.”

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Hm.

Personally, Joel’s had better New Year’s Eves in his life. All of them, as a matter of fact.

Right, so. The Hermits were having a bad time of things. And also Empires had blown up. Thanks for that, Jim.

Whatever. It does mean the four of them—Joel, Lizzie, Scott, and Jimmy—had ended up on Hermitcraft’s Season Seven whitelist, free to offer whatever help they could. How Jimmy’s going to help is beyond Joel’s imagination, and Scott’s currently being a right bastard about the current failures of his book and also various other personal issues that Joel has no desire to explore with him. Lizzie, of course, would be far more help, though Joel’s not entirely sure how his beloved wife’s ‘magic’ scams would be of use after their friends’ server got exploded by moon.

Joel would be the most help of all of them, of course. He can’t help being amazing like that.

He’d be more help if people weren’t being ridiculous.

“So you’re saying the Watchers,” he says indulgently, “made the moon explode. Uh-huh.”

A long moment passes. “Yeah,” Grian says. Typical Grian, really, sticking to the bit long after it’s run its course. Joel’s kind of surprised he’s gotten Etho and Impulse and this Hypno guy playing along too. “That’s kind of what I said.”

“And how’d they do that, then?” Joel asks. “They put a tow truck up there or something?”

Another long moment passes. “I don’t know why I bother, actually,” Scott announces loftily. “Have you been paying any attention?”

“Okay, yeah, moon explode, bad things happen,” Joel says. “Fully understand that! Fully worried about everybody missing, hoping they’re not dead! Just wondering how you all actually think that happened.”

“You’d be surprised,” Etho says dryly.

“He’s like this,” Lizzie says. “Try not to worry about it. He doesn’t believe I’m a witch either.”

“You make an excellent ‘witch,’ babe,” Joel insists. “But I don’t see you exploding any moons.”

Lizzie sighs, leans over, and pats his knee. “Someday I’ll convince him magic is real,” she sighs. “But it’s been over a decade and it hasn’t worked yet.”

“...Sorry,” Impulse says. “You don’t believe magic is real?”

“Well,” says Joel, “if someone ever got around to proving it to me, then maybe I would, but since no one ever has…”

“He’s a magic black hole,” Lizzie says. “Doesn’t work on him.”

“Or maybe it doesn’t work because it’s not real.”

“Joel,” Grian says, “I have enchanted tools in my inventory right now.”

“Well that’s not magic,” Joel scoffs. “That’s normal. Next you’re going to tell me that pillagers existing is proof of magic.”

“Also,” Impulse says, “weren’t you red for, like, three-quarters of Last Life? What do you call that then?”

“What, are you saying a man can’t be a little unhinged?” Joel asks. “For enrichment? Did we not all decide that red meant killing time?”

“A decade, guys,” Lizzie says. “Just ignore him and move on.”

“With your collective magic ‘delusions,’” Joel says under his breath.

“Ask the Empires folks to help,” Hypno sighs. “It’ll be great.”

Grian, rather than entertaining that, instead apparently decides to announce, “Joel. I’m a Watcher.”

“Riiiight,” Joel says. “Prove it.”

A beat passes.

“What?” Grian says.

“You heard me. Prove it. Smite me.”

Etho, off to the side, runs a hand through his hair and buries his face in his elbow.

“Smite you?” Grian says. “That’s—that’s not how it works, Joel.”

“Smite me or I don’t buy it,” Joel says, throwing down the gauntlet.

No one says anything to that. Grian decidedly does not smite him.

“That’s what I thought,” Joel says with a smirk.

“Anyways,” Scott interjects. “Moving on to things that might actually be useful.”

“Fully in favor of that,” Hypno says.

“We could always ask the Listeners for help,” Jimmy pipes up.

“...For gods’ sakes, Jimmy,” Scott groans.

“Look, I’m just saying that they could probably help and you’re all just ignoring that possibility!” Jimmy insists.

“I’m not ignoring it,” Grian says. “I, personally, am just vetoing it.”

“I hate to say this, but thank you, Grian,” Scott says.

Joel sits back and watches as the other seven debate which kinds of fake magic will be the best ways to find the missing Hermits. Personally, he’s out of ideas, but he has the sneaking suspicion that they should maybe try using methods that were actually rationally proven.

Radical concept, he knows, but hey. They weren’t asking him.

~~~

Grian can’t tell if it’s better or worse if Scott’s completely oblivious that Grian is, in fact, still pretty pissed at him.

(He has to squirm away an awful wave of phantom pain as soon as he has the thought, as if to pointedly remind him of all the consequences Scott proposing Last Life had brought about.)

It’s been more than a week since he and Etho had split off to focus their efforts on the Hermethius, and the last two days had been nothing but slamming face-first into a brick wall as far as progress went. Grian could See the Hermethius just fine—he thinks he could pull together about half of a passable floor plan of the damn place at this point—but attempting to figure out where it was and how to get there still remained frustratingly fruitless, every avenue pursued coming up short.

So Scott, who had for the last four days been keeping his head down with Impulse and Hypno, had decided to join them.

At least Etho was being civil about the matter. Or at least so good at pretending that he seemed civil, at least.

“I’m going to say it out loud,” Scott says. “The fact that my book isn’t working is a personal affront to me.”

“What’s the plan, then?” Grian asks dryly. “Pull up another server, call it Hermethius Life and hope the Watchers take pity on us again?”

“I don’t know what you want from me as far as an apology,” Scott says without missing a beat. “Would you like it handwritten? Maybe notarized?”

“I’d like a lot of things in apology,” Grian says. “Unfortunately you’re not capable of providing any of them.”

“Anyways,” Etho says, an interjection that proves effective even if it is far from smooth. “Here, have a look at this.”

Grian takes the moment of respite for what it is. There should be something in solidarity between himself and Scott, the two victors of two equally brutal games. In reality, there’s too much in play and too much at stake for Grian to make the effort to let go of his grudge. Frankly, the sooner Scott went back to Impulse and Hypno’s side the better.

Scott, eventually, does seem to get that message, and takes his leave. It left them really no further than they’d started, which was no further than they’d been in several days. Grian, trying to ignore the pounding that had settled in his head on what seemed to be a permanent basis, folds his arms over the table and drops his head into them with a groan.

“Something like that,” Etho says, definitely not animated, though perhaps not quite as defeated as Grian felt.

“It shouldn’t be this bloody difficult,” Grian says into his elbow. They should have figured something out right now, and yet they’re still in the same nebulous position as they had been a week and a half ago when Quoroth had first told them about it. The only thing he can think might help pin down the location would be if he had his Watcher mask, but even that seems dubious as a potential in a situation like this.

“I mean,” Etho says, “if it were easy, everyone would be here by now.”

“Don’t ruin my moping with your logic, Etho.”

Etho snorts at that, and for a moment Grian is so incredibly grateful for his presence in all this. He’d never have thought for a moment he’d be coming into this reliant on Etho of all people, but it’s hard not to be glad he is.

“There has to be something we missed,” Grian says, lifting his head up again. “There has to be a way.”

There’s slightly too long of a moment before Etho answers. “There doesn’t. Technically.”

“No, there does,” Grian says, with a sudden wave of uncomfortably visceral anger. “I made a deal.”

Etho blinks at him, sounding slightly perturbed when he asks, “What do you mean?”

Grian sighs, scrubbing a hand back through his hair. “Look, it’s complicated. I, uh. Sort of asked the dragon?”

Etho looks, for a second, like he’s been struck. “You what?”

“Yeah, so,” Grian says. “The whole dragon’s bargain thing? That’s real, actually.”

“I know that,” Etho says, still sounding flabbergasted. “That’s just—I’m sorry, you what?”

“I thought,” Grian says, creasing a hastily torn piece of notebook paper along the edge in a vain attempt to smooth it, “I thought I could keep all of you safe. Turns out I managed to fuck that one up too.”

“You bargained with the dragon?”

“You seem very hung up on that,” Grian notes.

“I mean it’s. You know. Considered to be blasphemy of the highest order. And all. Just that little part.”

A beat passes. “Ah,” Grian says.

“If you were Enderian,” Etho says, “I would have to turn you out of House and society and never speak to you again.”

“...Ah,” Grian says again. “That’s. Well.”

“So. Good thing you’re not?” Etho offers. “I just. I don’t. Why?”

“The road to unspeakable dragon crimes is paved with good intentions?” Grian ventures. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“That’s. Okay. Sure.”

“At the risk of being horrifically rude,” Grian says, “what’s the big deal about it?”

“It’s,” Etho says, clearly struggling to find the words. “Disrespectful? Impertinent? Presumptuous, to bring your problems before a god.”

“Maybe if I make the gods handle my problems they’ll stop giving me more,” Grian says. “It’s worth a shot.” He clears his throat. “That is, uh. Assuming we’re still on speaking terms, I suppose?”

“…Yeah,” Etho says, almost absently. “Yeah, of course we are.”

Grian, valiantly resisting the urge to lay his head back on the table, says, “I’m going to make it an early night, if that’s all right. I need to just. Stop staring at this.”

“Yeah,” Etho says again. “Yeah, that’s. Sure.”

Grian waits a beat, feeling like one of them should say something more, but neither of them manage it. “Right,” he says at long last. “Tomorrow, then.”

Etho doesn’t answer, and Grian doesn’t press him for one.

~~~

Grian’s drinking again.

Needless to say, Mumbo’s having a bad time.

There had been—just, so many years when it had been such a non-issue so as to never even cross Mumbo’s mind. He didn’t drink, Grian didn’t drink, they could go to any Hermit gathering where people were and have a bit of a laugh about it. And then had come Impulse’s storage room, and Mumbo had found out that Grian’s reasons for not drinking were quite a bit different from his own, and then not long after Mumbo’s brain had exploded and now he can feel that Grian’s drinking.

So Mumbo is—not panicking. He’s doing a very good job of not panicking, he thinks, given that Grian’s brain feels all weird and fuzzy and horrible and Mumbo would really like it to stop and he can’t make it stop—

Mumbo’s panicking.

“Hey, Mumbo? You doing all right?”

Mumbo jerks up, abruptly remembering he’d tried to go for a walk and had ended up sitting in the grass on the side of the east road instead. “...Hi, Pearl,” he says, just managing not to choke on it. “How’s it—how’s it going?”

“...Better than you, it looks like?” Pearl says, sitting to half-straddle the road’s curb and pulling one knee up to her chest. “Are you okay? Do I need to punt Grian in the head again?”

“It’s. I mean. No. Well. Yes?” Mumbo ventures. “It’s. I mean. It’s just brain things again.”

Pearl sighs. “Okay. I can go punt him.”

“No. Well. I mean! He’s not stabbing me this time, so. I don’t know if that’s a good idea?” Mumbo tugs on his lapel, twists his hands together in his lap, then says, “I uh. Well. I think he’s. I think he’s drunk. So.”

He hears Pearl inhale slowly through her nose, then blow it out again through her mouth. “Right.”

“So. That’s.” A beat passes. Mumbo twiddles his thumbs again. “How’ve you been, then?”

“Not much,” Pearl says, which isn’t quite the answer to the question he’d asked, so maybe Mumbo had asked it wrong. He wouldn’t put it past himself. “Just. All this, I guess.” She twirls a hand in the air in a vague gesture that Mumbo somehow still interprets.

“Right. Yeah.” Mumbo lets out a horrible squeak of laughter, then says, “It’s pretty pants, isn’t it!”

He watches Pearl’s gaze turn from something almost… calculated, into something significantly looser. “Right! I mean, you know, it’s not like anyone wants our help.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen Grian in three days,” Mumbo admits.

“Neither have I,” Pearl says, glancing away. “They’re just getting up to whatever the hell they’re up to. Which clearly doesn’t involve either of us.”

“Or anyone else,” Mumbo says.

“Or anyone else!”

It stings a little, that Mumbo’s almost laughing—because it does hurt, that he’s barely had a conversation with Grian since they’d jumped into the Boatem Hole. And meanwhile Grian’s spending days on end in closed meetings with Etho and then going off and drinking about them afterwards.

“I mean,” Pearl continues, “at least I see Impulse and Hypno eat. And they’re, like, trying to keep us updated.” She shakes her head. “Not that they usually have much to update.”

Mumbo does his best not to mention that he’s pretty sure he hasn’t exactly seen Pearl hanging around much lately, either. As a matter of fact, he’s pretty sure the last time he’d seen more than her coming or going somewhere had been the night that Slip and his Keralis demon had shown up.

“Have you…” he ventures. “Figured anything out? Or tried, I mean?”

“No,” Pearl says, a little too quick and a little too flat.

And Mumbo is…

Kind of worried about that, actually.

“Oh,” he says. “That’s too bad.”

“What do you mean, too bad?”

“I mean,” Mumbo says hurriedly. “I mean, if you’d found anything out—you know. If we could find anybody.” Then, surely leaking anxiety, “What did you think I meant?”

Pearl doesn’t answer for just slightly too long. “No, you’re right,” she says. “Wish I could.”

And there’s something… just a little bit off in her words. Mumbo can’t quite put his finger on what, but it feels bad in a way that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Maybe it wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t caught her sneaking out the other night, but—

Did she know more than what she was letting on? And if she did, why was she sitting on it?

(...Grian wouldn’t notice, probably. Especially not right now. Not when he didn’t notice that Mumbo could tell he was drinking, that Tango’s background pulse of fury is sometimes so overwhelming Mumbo can’t help but drown in it, not when he’d accidentally gone stumbling into Etho’s head and come back out with his skin crawling from it.)

(And, well. If he was going to be saddled with all the soul-stealing stuff! Might as well use it!)

Except—

Except Pearl feels like nothing.

She probably notices the way Mumbo reels back when he notices, though she doesn’t say anything.

She’s not thinking anything, either.

How could she not think anything?

(And what could she be hiding?)

“I, um,” Mumbo stammers out. “Well. I mean. Hopefully someone finds something soon!”

“...I can talk to Grian if you want me to,” Pearl offers, still a bit of a nonsequitur. Mumbo doesn’t call her on it.

“No, that’s—that’s okay! Don’t worry about it,” he says, trying to scramble to his feet. He can’t tell if the way he sways is Grian’s fault or his own. “I’ll, um! I’ll see you around, Pearl!”

“...I’ll see you?” Pearl offers back, sounding baffled.

Mumbo doesn’t stick around to clarify.

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Etho has the feeling Grian’s not going to be much use today.

“...Sorry?” he says, clearly not having absorbed a word Etho just said. Unsurprising, given that he looks like he’d either fought six ravagers to get there, hadn’t slept in a week, or—more likely than the rest—was still paying for a night of overindulgence.

Rather than repeating himself, Etho attempts to shuffle the nearest stack of papers into something resembling neatness—a futile task at this point, given Stat Poker was looking more and more like a paper farm had exploded by the day—and says, “I don’t know if there’s much point to this today.”

“...And what’s that supposed to mean?” Grian asks, plainly a challenge even if he’s in no shape to back it up.

“There’s not really a point in bothering to do this right now when you’re not in the state to discuss anything useful.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Grian says again, with a prickle of something nastier in the words that would have given Etho cause for terror if it was coming from any other Watcher.

“We’re not getting anything done today,” Etho says, getting to his feet. “I can barely even make sense of this anymore. You’re hungover. There’s no point wasting the time bashing our heads into the wall.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not. None of us are.” He’d be more worried if he didn’t have his back to Grian, heading for the door, more worried of giving something away he’s trying so desperately hard not to let slip. “Just let it go for today, Grian. We’re not getting anything done.”

“Clearly you’re not,” Grian bites back. “But that’s on you, I guess.”

It’s designed to sting, no matter how hard Etho tries not to let it. “Do what you want, then.”

“So much for speaking terms,” Grian says under his breath, just loud enough for Etho to catch as he ducks out the door.

The sharpness of the winter air catches at Etho’s lungs as soon as he steps outside. It had started snowing faintly in the hour or so he’d been inside, the flakes catching in his hair and reminding him it was in dire need of a trim. He’s fairly sure he hadn’t gotten around to it since before Last Life.

And that brings along its own stinging set of memories, like a flock of birds circling his head and choosing to dive at the most inopportune moment with no chance of escape. Aquatown is only just up the road, buildings rising high; Etho can’t even stand in the snow without being in the very literal shadow of the pieces Bdubs had left behind.

Maybe drowning in it would be easier than continuing to hold himself afloat.

~~~

Transit Railway Across Interserver Networks

If anyone notices Etho leave the server, no one comments on it. Most of them, barring Grian, probably assume he’s off chasing some lead on something.

He wishes he could say he was.

It’s been a long, long time since he’s taken the Nether train system—another skill, like restaurants, he’d had to pick up on the fly from Bdubs while trying not to look too lost. He’d had fewer and fewer reasons to venture to city-servers over the years as more and more of his friends kept exclusively to the outworlds. He’d even managed to neatly avoid getting stuck on the roster for Hermit trips more often than not.

It’s hard to balance the sudden quiet with the surrounding loud. He’s some anonymous piece of a crowd that makes his skin crawl, while at the same time the piece of his brain that’s spent most of the last two years entirely dedicated to tuning out Grian is blessedly resting. Even Skizz, worlds away, is muted by the distance.

It’s the closest to solitude he can ever bear to get, he thinks.

He manages to grab a seat with no one next to him, and a window seat at that. Not that the Nether scenery in an area as developed at this was much to look at—an unending cave pattern that blurred into itself so often one distance became indistinguishable from another. It’s almost enough to put him to sleep.

It might, actually. He hadn’t slept well the night before, after all. Or any time in the last two weeks. And trying to get a server transfer so last minute had been such a pain he sure had the time to, anyways.

Etho?

Can you—

At this point it’s just—

Aren’t you THERE?

Haven’t you got—

Listen, I haven’t done anything WRONG—

Etho!

…Etho does fall asleep, then. And his subconscious is not kind to him. Part of him wishes he could have slept longer, so blissfully unaware of the waking nightmare of his current reality.

The thing about nightmares is that you were supposed to wake up.

He’s close enough to his destination that more sleep wouldn’t do him any good, though. He’ll have to get up soon anyways.

This whole thing might be a terrible idea.

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

The whole thing had been a terrible idea, actually. And now Etho’s back on Hermitcraft, still standing in the shadow of Aquatown, and none the better for it.

Beef finds him right around dusk. Etho supposes he hadn’t been doing a very good job of hiding for once.

“Hey, man.” There’s little in view except Beef’s shoes, not that Etho’s making much effort to look. “Did you find anything?”

That confirmed his assumption the other Hermits would have guessed he’d been chasing some lead. Wrong, but still not entirely incorrect. “No.”

He sure hadn’t found what he was looking for, at least.

(How could you have, when nothing less immutable than Time had stood between you and what you so desperately wanted?)

“Need to bounce anything off me?” Beef asks, something a little tentative in the way he settles beside Etho. “Doc tells me I make a good rubber ducky.”

Etho shakes his head. “Wouldn’t do me much good,” he says. “They didn’t even let me in.”

“...Let you in where?” Beef ventures.

(You hadn’t got as far as thinking that you didn’t know the gate code anymore. That you had no reason to be there, that they wouldn’t even let you in. That the barn had burned over a decade past and a new one had long been erected, that the pastures had been rearranged and new fences painted, that the trailer you’d lived in when you’d been relearning how to live was nowhere to be found.)

(Why would it have been? Why would anything have been the same?)

(“It doesn’t matter,” you tell Beef.)

Beef blows out a long, quiet sigh. “Etho, buddy,” he says softly.

“I hate this,” Etho says, a little too vehemently. He runs a hand through his hair, staring into the distance, not entirely sure if he wants to tear something or just curl up in the dark for a week.

“I know, buddy.” Beef clears his throat. “We’ll figure something out, yeah?”

Some strangled sound tries to crawl up Etho’s throat. Sure. Figure something out. Save Doc and Ren and whoever else they could. Piece some semblance of Hermitcraft back together. Go on to Season Nine, probably. Eventually.

And Etho would, like he had for the last eighteen years of his life, pretend everything was fine.

“...I miss him too,” Beef says.

Etho doesn’t answer. He keeps one palm to the side of his face, a semblance of a barrier. Like it could protect him from the conversation.

Beef clears his throat again. When he speaks again, it’s thick and tentative and wavers just a bit. “You know he loved you.”

Like that—like that meant anything. Like that changed anything now. Like Etho hadn’t been loved before and had that torn away from him too.

Like he doesn’t have a hundred and fifty more years to live with that knowledge.

“I just,” Beef says. “If you want to talk about it. Or anything. I’m here, you know.”

“Yeah,” Etho says. Not that it would help. Not that it would do anything, no matter how desperately he tries to cling to the quickly-splintered fragments of the past. He could sleep in Bdubs’s old base. He could go all the way back to Hundred Acre Farms, standing in front of the gate where everything had changed and yet he’d still been half-expecting Bdubs to be there when he turned.

And yet. And yet.

Time went on, and so did Etho.

~~~

Hypno, presumably, had gone to sleep. Hopefully in a bed.

Impulse, meanwhile, is face down on a table, and very much not asleep.

“...Aw, now. Isn’t this a sad sight.”

Impulse removes his face from the table, blinking, realizing that he had in fact maybe been closer to sleep than he thought. “...Keralis?” he says. “Hi.”

“Hi, Impulse,” says the Keralis who was not a ghost or a sleep paralysis demon but sure apparently was something. “You look like you need a nap.”

Impulse blows out a soft snort. “Yeah, well. I’d say no time for that, too much to do, but—” He breaks off, gesturing. “We’re doing a whole lot of doing and not getting done anything that needs to get done.”

Keralis hums, breezing through the papers as well as everything Hypno had imported to the larger screen he’d absconded from Xisuma’s test world that was now taking up a large portion of their meeting table.

“What are you doing here anyways?” Impulse asks. “Thought you were kind of stuck to Slip.”

“Well, I was!” Keralis says brightly. “But then Slip came here, and you’re all here, and I think Kevin’s remembered he’s quite fond of all of you too, so we’re here! So, you know, maybe we can send the poor man home to his wife.”

Impulse sighs. “Too bad that doesn’t work for everyone else,” he says. “I think the only people we’ve got a remotely solid lead on are Ren and Doc, and even that’s still up in the air.”

“Hmm,” Keralis says, swiping through the screen here. “You haven’t got much here. What’s going on with them?”

“That’s what Etho and Grian have been working on,” Impulse says. “That’s why we don’t have much. Ren and Doc are, uh. On a fake spaceship in the Void? Apparently. We just have no idea where.”

Keralis frowns. “Well, why didn’t you tell me that?” he asks.

“Uh,” Impulse says. “You didn’t ask? Why?”

“I mean,” Keralis says, “I did tell you Kevin likes to send me black hole calculations. He doesn’t do it just for fun.”

A long, long moment passes.

“Are you telling me you think Kevin can find the Hermethius?” Impulse asks.

Keralis doesn’t answer for another long moment. “He thinks he can try.”

“...That’s,” Impulse says, then sucks in a breath. “Shit. Okay. Hang on, let me—could you find Tango for me? And tell him to come? This is his area too.” He breaks off, scrambling for his comm and hoping Hypno hadn’t decided a good night’s sleep was more important than hearing his comm. And then, with a moment’s hesitation, he tosses messages to Etho and Grian as well. This was their fight as much as his.

<impulseSV> are you still up?

<Grian> waht do you want?

<impulseSV> new Hermethius info

<Grian> jfmmgl

<Grian> omw

~~~

“Okay,” Grian says. “So. How’s this supposed to work?”

“Give him time,” Keralis says with a sniff. “He’s working on it!”

“...Okay,” Grian points out, “But Etho and I’ve been working on this for almost two weeks.”

“All very helpful, all very helpful,” Keralis says, waving his hand as he studies said two weeks of work. “That’s—oh, hang on—hang on, not so fast—pen?”

It takes them all a moment to realize that question is directed at them, leaving Hypno to hurriedly pass one over. Keralis, moving so fast it almost looks as though there should be smoke coming off the paper, starts scribbling down whatever it was Kevin was apparently telling him.

“That’s…” Keralis says, abruptly stopping and staring down at the paper. “That’s it. Well. I hope this makes sense to someone!”

Tango and Etho, in almost the exact same motion, scramble to examine the paper.

“...Yeah,” Tango says, in a tone that’s half awe and half bafflement. “Yeah, that sure makes sense. It’s still a pretty wide area, but—”

“Much narrower than the scale we’ve been working at so far,” Etho finishes, catching the edge of the paper to push it across the table. “Impulse, can you—”

“Yeah, ahead of you,” Impulse says, already parked at the large screen and copying Keralis’s notes over as fast as his fingers could type.

“Seven there, Impulse, not a six,” Hypno catches, bent over his shoulder. Impulse nods, doubles back to fix it, and continues on.

“That is… not a large area at all, actually,” Grian says, just about having to stand on his tiptoes to get a good look. “That’s—what, a dozen servers’ worth of area? That’s—a day or two. We can look through that in a day or two.”

“Less than that,” Etho says, with a slightly pointed look in Grian’s direction.

Grian knows what he’s asking. It still makes him stumble momentarily, sending a slightly worried glance at Tango.

Tango doesn’t know what Etho’s implying, given the slightly baffled but still hard look he returns.

But this is—

So much bigger than Tango. So much bigger than any of them. And finally something is close enough to touch.

Grian lets out a slightly shuddering breath, throws his head back, and Looks.

And—

And it’s there.

There, plain as day, floating in the Void, no longer a distant mystery but a known point in space and time.

And Grian pulls back to himself, ignores the eyes that are a little harder to tug in, and writes it down. Not the simple X, Y, and Z of a server’s coordinates—the Void was far harder to navigate than that—

But a location nonetheless.

And no one seems to know what to say.

“That’s it, then,” Hypno finally says. “They’re there.”

They’re there. Close enough to see.

Close enough to save.

And it hangs, potently, between the seven of them, until Etho finally breaks it.

“We need a plan.”

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

As heady as their victory is, it comes crashing back down all too soon.

“Right,” Tango had said. “So we know where it is. How do we get there?”

And that, unfortunately, was proving to be an even harder topic to tackle.

Grian could throw himself there, sure. Toss himself into the Void and haul Doc and Ren home quick as you like. The actual logistics of that, as well as the fact that the Hermethius was in fact Watcher-designed unreality prison, meant it was likely a very suicidal thing to do.

The more people he tried to bring with him, though, the more complicated things got. The larger the rescue crew, maybe the safer they might be, yet so much the harder to get everyone there and back in one piece.

So they’d planned through the night, caffeine free-flowing, more and more Hermits piling in as they’d learned of the development until they’d outgrown the Town Hall entirely and had to relocate to the old Mycelium Resistance HQ. By quarter to ten in the morning, they’d pulled everyone in anyway, and going back over the basics had been held off after the fourth time to do it all at once.

“So that’s where we stand right now,” Impulse says, laying his hands on the table. “We know where Doc and Ren are, we’re just trying to figure out the best way to get there and get them out. And the safest.”

“I think ‘safe’ is kind of an incongruent term,” Grian says, not bothering to sugarcoat it at this point. “It’s not going to be safe. It’s not going to be easy. I’m not for a second going to ask anyone who doesn’t want to go. Volunteers only.”

Every hand in the room goes up, some faster than others, barring one. “We all know that’s not my strength,” says TFC. “But put me where you do need me, and I’ll do whatever you want.”

Grian nods, chewing on his lip and exchanging the smallest of glances with Etho. Fifteen Hermits, if you counted Keralis; plus Jimmy, Scott, Joel, and Lizzie. (Slip had ended up going home, now that Keralis was no longer tied exclusively to him, with promises to keep him updated and that he’d jump back in if they needed him for anything.)

It makes something in Grian’s heart buoy, to have them rally like this. “Okay,” he says quietly. “I don’t know what it looks like yet. I don’t know how many people it’s going to be feasible and sensible to take. But you’ll know when we do.”

For now, he has to—very valiantly attempt to pull himself back together. He’s miserable all around, overcaffeinated and dehydrated and, yes, also still hungover, but at this point of being awake it’s more of a background hum of misery than the predominant pulse. If he can choke down a healing potion and manage even two hours of a nap at this point he might actually be in the shape to figure this out. They’ve broken the meeting for now, at least, with so many of them running on fumes.

“Grian,” comes a familiar voice, one Grian’s barely even heard since they’d arrived on Season Seven.

“...Scar,” he replies, perhaps a little too grudgingly. “What is it?”

Scar crosses his arms, looking remarkably serious. “I want to come,” he says flatly.

Grian tries, with extreme valiance, not to burst out laughing. “Scar,” he finally manages. “You’ll forgive me for not having you on the top of my list for an extremely dangerous mission that’s most likely risking permadeath. For. You know. Obvious reasons.”

“I’m Vex,” Scar points out.

“You’re also Scar,” Grian reminds him.

A beat passes. “I can come whether you want me to or not,” Scar reminds him.

Grian’s too tired, maybe, to catch the implications of that. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ll be there,” Scar says.

It hits, a moment too late. The stupid life debt. “You know, I kind of thought you were supposed to be dealing with that whole thing,” Grian says, a little too icily.

“There’s been a bit more to worry about than that lately,” Scar replies.

Grian sighs. “Scar, let me take a gods-damned nap,” he says. “I’ll get back to you.”

~~~

The nap helps only marginally. Grian does wake up significantly less hungover, but the problems of the morning do not disappear in the afternoon. Or the evening. The simple problem of just getting two, five, ten people there and back, plus two more on the return trip, is enough to bring the entire thing up short.

“If I could just,” he says to the group which has shrunk and swelled as the day went by, which now contained himself, Etho, Impulse, Hypno, Pearl, Scott, Lizzie, and Iskall, “hold something open on this side that we could use to get back—but I’d have to be on this side to do that and on the other side to open it back up—”

“Like some kind of portal?” Iskall asks.

“Pretty much,” Grian says absently, still bent over the half-sketched floor plan of what he’d seen of the Hermethius. “Except I’d have to be in two places at once.”

“So you need another Watcher is what you’re saying,” Pearl says, just a little too innocently.

Grian looks up at her sharply. “Don’t.”

“That is what you need, isn’t it?” Pearl presses. “That’s who you need?”

“I would need another Watcher I trust,” Grian shoots back. “And Quoroth’s not in that category.”

“As far as I know, there aren’t any Watchers you trust,” Etho points out.

“Exactly,” Grian says. Then, a beat later, “Stop looking at me like that.”

“I don’t think we have any other choice.”

“I could ask Mumbo,” Grian points out.

A very long moment passes.

“....Is what I’d say if I wanted us all to die,” he adds. He takes a slow breath in, then lets it back out. “You do realize what you’re asking me.”

“To trust Quoroth,” Pearl says.

“With my life. And Doc’s and Ren’s. And whoever else comes with to rescue them.” Laying a hand on the table, Grian continues, “That’s not a price I’m willing to pay if we’re wrong.”

“Then let’s hope we’re not wrong,” Pearl says. “Because I also don’t think we have a choice.”

~~~

Private Server, owned by Skizzleman

Pearl, after all that, had wanted to come with. Grian’s not even sure why he’d let her, in the end. And then Mumbo had asked, who Grian was significantly less annoyed with, although he did present a significantly squishier target to Quoroth.

So the solution to that, apparently, had been to bring both of them.

Quoroth is in nearly the same place he’d been last time Grian had come with Etho, leaving him to briefly wonder just what exactly Quoroth had actually been doing for the last two weeks or so. Not plotting world domination, hopefully.

“...Xelqua?” Quoroth says tentatively, and it takes every ounce of Grian’s self-control to not instantly throttle him at the name.

It still takes several deep breaths to actually form an answer. “I have…” Grian starts, knowing the reluctance in his voice is beyond obvious. “A favor to ask you.”

“...A favor,” Quoroth repeats, a suspicious edge to his squint.

“You did say you wanted to help,” Pearl points out.

“I did,” Quoroth says hurriedly. “I do.”

“Right,” Pearl says. “So now’s a good time for that, I think.”

“I said I would,” Quoroth replies testily.

“So are you going to?” Grian cuts in. “Because the clock’s a-ticking.”

“On what, exactly?”

“If I ask you to hold open a return portal on Hermitcraft,” Grian says, “would you actually do it or would you just leave us all stranded in the middle of the Void? Genuine question, kind of need an answer on it.”

A beat passes. “I wouldn’t strand you,” Quoroth says, almost sullenly. “What good would that do me?”

“I’m going too,” Pearl says. “So keep that in mind.”

Grian sighs. “Pearl, we have not decided that yet.”

“You can’t tell me I’m not on your shortlist,” Pearl says.

Grian doesn’t answer, because she is. “Listen,” he says. “I can’t say I’m any happier about this than you.”

“I didn’t say I was unhappy about it,” Quoroth says. “I’ll help.”

Grian blows a slow breath out his nose. “All right,” he says finally. “Come on, then.”

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

…That had been weird, right? That had been really weird. Surely Mumbo was not the only person who thought that had been, all told, Really Weird.

Well. Not that Pearl hadn’t, overall, been being really weird lately. Enough that Mumbo had gotten suspicious. Even before he’d found out she apparently had no thoughts and a really weird dynamic with Quoroth of all people.

Had he missed something? Had they all missed something?

And if they had, wasn’t the time to figure it out now, before whatever the Hermethius had in store was upon them?

So. If no one else was going to figure this out, Mumbo would.

Step one: he needed to find Pearl. Step two: he needed to do… something. He’d figure that out when he got there.

Step one, remarkably, proves almost as easy done as it is said. Probably because Pearl finds him.

“Hi, Mumbo. What are you doing?”

Mumbo has every right to scream about it, actually. And in this instance there’s no shame in sounding way too much like Scar. “What are you—”

He turns around.

“—doing?”

“I asked first,” Pearl says, a moment before she stops being a ghost and lands on the road next to him. “Not taking a tour of the HEP factory for fun and profit, I’m guessing?”

“What are you—how are you a ghost again! I thought that was a moon big thing!” Mumbo says, still faintly gasping. “Have you been—you’ve been doing that this whole time, haven’t you!”

“...Did you seriously just figure that out?” Pearl asks, crossing her arms. “Were you just being incredibly suspicious for no reason?”

“I’m— I’m being incredibly suspicious?” Mumbo asks. “And what have you been doing?”

“Actually figuring stuff out,” Pearl says. “Important stuff!”

“Like what!”

“Like—that’s not important!”

“You literally just said it was important, Pearl!”

“Okay, fine,” Pearl says, rolling her eyes. “It’s important. Not super relevant right now, though. Why on earth have you been, like, stalking me?”

“Well maybe you were being incredibly suspicious too!” Mumbo says, mirroring her crossed arms. “And maybe you still are! If it’s so important, then tell me one thing, huh!”

Pearl huffs. “Wow, how generous of you,” she says. “Do you need a say in the one thing, too, or am I allowed to pick?”

Mumbo, with a sudden surge in his veins, straightens up. “Okay, yeah! I’ll ask! What on earth just happened with you and Quoroth when we picked him up? And why did you flip on the code thing? Etho and I spent ages on that and then we didn’t even use it!”

A long, long moment passes. Long enough that Mumbo thinks Pearl might not even answer.

“Quoroth’s going to give me my memories back,” she says.

“...Quoroth’s going to what?” Mumbo blinks. “Wait, what? He can do that? Why didn’t you ask Grian if that’s a thing?”

Pearl rolls her eyes. “Because Quoroth can and Grian can’t,” she says. “Look, I don’t trust him either! But what I said way back at the start is still true! Quoroth’s useful! And this is one of several ways in which he’s useful!”

Mumbo tugs on his hair with both hands. “So you’ve just—you’ve just been—making deals with him? And not telling anyone? And—you said he’s going to? He hasn’t yet?”

Pearl’s next words come grudgingly. “He said he’d do it if I kept the codes off him,” she says. “We didn’t know if he’d be able to if we put them on. So that’s why I changed my vote. Especially after—”

Her jaw clicks shut.

“After what?” Mumbo says. “Look, you’re the one who dropped in on me trying to figure out what you were doing! At least finish your sentences!”

Pearl pinches the bridge of her nose. “Well,” she says. “You did have to go and pass them off to Etho, didn’t you?”

A beat passes.

“What has that got to do with anything?” Mumbo asks, now thoroughly lost.

“I mean,” Pearl continues, like what she was saying made any sense whatsoever. “Mumbo. How much do we know about Etho, really?”

“Huh?” Mumbo says again. “Why are you saying that like he’s some sort of—like we should be worried about him? Etho’s been a Hermit for six seasons.”

“And what could you say you knew about him before that?” Pearl says. “Anything at all?”

“That’s—well,” Mumbo says. “We do have backstory rules! That’s for a reason!”

“So nothing. The answer’s nothing,” Pearl says with something resembling triumph.

“There’s a lot of people I don’t know a lot about! What’s your point?”

“I’m just saying,” Pearl says.

“Yeah, and I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying you’re awfully worried about me trying to help,” Pearl says, “when there are a lot of other people doing a lot of other things that maybe you should be worried about. So back off and let me do it, okay?”

And with that, she vanishes again.

~~~

They should likely both be asleep at this point, with the Hermethius in all likelihood looming before tomorrow was over. The very problem of that is why they were both still up.

Stacks of papers that had once taken over Stat Poker’s table had been relegated to messy piles on the floor, a single sheet now at the center.

And now, perhaps the contents of that single sheet were the extent of what mattered.

“Eight,” Grian says. “I think eight’s our number.”

“Eight,” Etho repeats, and there’s no more discussion on the number, only the people to fill it.

Grian stares at the twenty names on the paper, and tries to imagine how he could possibly pick eight and at the same time he wonders how he could ever narrow it down to eight. “TFC said no,” he starts with.

“Very understandable of him,” Etho says, summarily moving to cross it out. Then, “Iskall.”

“Yes,” Grian says immediately. Iskall had been at the top of his own mental shortlist as well.

Etho circles Iskall’s name, then says quietly, “I wish we had False.”

“Gods, yeah,” Grian says. The queen of heads, hearts, and body parts would have served them well, if only they had any clue where she was. “Take Mumbo off.”

Etho does so without comment. “Should I assume Scar as well?”

“Scar specifically requested to come,” Grian admits. “Under threat of life debt abuse if he doesn’t.”

“...Re-explain that to me,” Etho says. Grian does, as best he can given that he’d been an entire mess when Scar and Doc had come for him after Last Life and he’d shortly been even more of an entire mess afterward after getting back to Hermitcraft and discovering the state of his wings. “Okay. Different plan. Scar’s our emergency reserve, given that he’s got an entirely different method of travel that’s not dependent on the main group.”

“That… almost makes sense,” Grian admits.

“I told you I was good at this,” Etho says, leaving Grian to wonder if there’s a hint of that wicked smirk under his mask. “And, given that Scar can apparently take one person with him without too much trouble… Hypno?”

“I’m okay with that.” Worrying on his lip for a moment, Grian says, “Impulse should stay here, I think.”

“I agree with that,” Etho says. “Doc made him his successor for a reason, and it’s not this.” Then, “Skizz too. He’s better served here than there.”

“We know Jimmy’s not invited.”

“Would you kill me if I suggested Scott?”

“...No,” Grian says after slightly too long of a beat.

“Would you kill Scott?”

Grian sighs. “No,” he says. “Unfortunately you’re right on that one.”

“Okay. Strange suggestion. Lizzie.”

“Lizzie?”

“Lizzie’s a witch. Apparently,” Etho says. “That feels useful.”

“I’ll buy that,” Grian agrees. Then, after too long of a beat, “Pearl?”

Etho stares into the middle distance for a moment. “Yeah,” he finally says quietly.

“That was a weird ‘yeah,’” Grian says. “If you think it’s a bad idea, tell me now and not when we get there.”

“I don’t… think it’s a bad idea, necessarily,” Etho says. “It’s just—you were already red, weren’t you, when she went to get that last Boogey kill at the end?”

“Yeah,” Grian says, trying very hard not to think about the end of Last Life. “What about it?”

“Pearl fights like she has nothing to lose,” Etho says flatly. “And sometimes that’s a very good thing and sometimes that’s a very bad thing.” He hovers over the paper for a moment, then says, “I don’t think we have a better option, though.”

“Okay,” Grian says.

“...Beef and Tango have also specifically asked me to come,” Etho says after a pause.

Grian tries very hard not to screw his face up. “Okay, Tango almost makes sense,” he says. “Given that he’s spent the last two weeks claiming that no one except him has done enough of anything ever. Beef?”

“It’s Doc,” Etho says. “Beef’s known Doc longer than any of us. Including me.” He taps the pen against his lips, then says, “I don’t like it, but I’ve gotta give him credit for it. Veto him and I’ll back you but I’m not telling him no.”

Grian lets out a sigh. “No, I’ve got to give him credit on that one too,” he says. “Unless you think he shouldn’t come, that stands for a lot.”

Etho scratches his chin, then slowly circles Beef on the paper. “So again I ask: will you kill Tango?”

“Will Tango get himself killed is the more pertinent question, I feel,” Grian says dryly.

“He is the resident space guy.”

“Resident died in space guy, also,” Grian says. “We are probably going to be treading permadeath out there, and even I can’t affect that to any meaningful degree if we are.”

“Do we have any better options than Tango?” Etho points out.

Grian, unfortunately, does have to stew on that. Barring who they’d already ruled out, that left only Joel, Stress, Cub, and Joe. And Keralis, but given that Keralis was only sometimes tangible, he was probably off the list already anyways. “Cub would be my only suggestion,” he admits. “And I do have to admit Tango being the space guy does edge him out. Just a little. But either one of them leaves us at six on the team.”

A long moment passes.

“One of us should probably stay here,” Grian adds at last. “Given what we’ve worked on. There are things only the two of us know.”

“That’s true,” Etho says, in a very carefully neutral tone.

Grian, surprisingly enough, can read it—because Grian had to be the one who went. The entire plan hinged on having him on the Hermethius to be able to bring everyone home. Which would leave Etho staying by default.

“...Fat chance of that, right?” Grian finally says quietly.

There’s a faint slump of Etho’s shoulders when he says it, a slightly less faint sense of relief in his voice. “It’s a little late to kick my feet up now.” He clears his throat. “Well. As Skizz would say. I’ll be glad to have you watching my six.”

“I think I’ll need you watching mine,” Grian says with a little more anxiety than he intended.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Grian points out, then gestures over his shoulder. “Can’t put these away right now. Can’t really get a chestplate on.”

“...Ah,” Etho says with realization, peering over at him. “That’s a problem.” With a speculative look, he says, “We might be able to cobble something together in front? You’ll just. Well. Very literally need to watch your back.”

“Luckily for us, I can in fact have eyes in the back of my head,” Grian says, and marvels about the fact that two weeks ago he wouldn’t have come remotely near making that sort of joke. It only marginally distracts him from how sick to his stomach he feels.

But tomorrow would come, armor or no armor, and he can only hope that in a day’s time they’ll have Doc and Ren back with them.

Chapter Text

Impulse’s Sea Pyramid—Hermitcraft Seven

The Hermits were, in general, a jovial bunch. They had to be, when spending a life out in the wilds with no one but their wits and each other to rely on.

None of that is present now.

It’s gone late in the afternoon, January the eighth, two and a half weeks after the moon had fallen. The rest of the day had been filled with prep—eight new sets of diamond armor crafted, including one backless chestplate. Cub and Hypno had brought them back to an older world where glitched enchantments could still be laid down and stacked together, then returned back to Season Seven and covered them with every remaining scrap of netherite on the server. Stress had spent the day brewing potions of every possible sort; when Etho peers through the stash, he can only wonder where and when Stress learned how to brew Vex potions.

Their choices in weapons had been a little more individualized. Most of them had gone for some variation of a heavily enchanted axe or sword, an obvious default. Lizzie carried only a wickedly sharp netherite dagger, a wink, and a promise of more. Etho had gone with a bow, always the better with ranged combat than close.

Iskall had guns.

“Where did you get those?” Grian asks, still fiddling absently with his cobbled half-chestplate in an attempt to get it to lay right.

“Oh, come on, Grian,” Iskall says. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the legendary assassin Iskall85?” A beat passes. “Not that I am him.”

“The medic always knows,” Stress says with a wink, still divvying up potions.

“Yeah, yeah, the medic always knows,” Iskall says, sitting with casual ease as he rolls a bullet in his fingers and starts loading magazines. “Anyways, I do have a spare. Problem being, most of you I do not trust with a gun. I’d say the only people I would trust with a gun are Scott and Beef.”

A beat passes. “Beef does not trust Beef with a gun,” Beef says.

“That’s incredibly fair,” Iskall says, then glances over at Scott. “You want it, man?”

“Sure,” Scott says. As Iskall passes him the second gun, he asks, “Does anyone know where Pearl is?”

“...I’m sure she’ll turn up in a minute,” Grian says.

“Can’t believe Iskall doesn’t trust me with a gun,” Tango mutters.

“Do you know how to use a gun, Tango?” Grian points out.

“Yes!” Tango says. Then, “Mostly! It’s been a minute.”

“...Where did you learn how to use a gun, Tango?” Lizzie asks.

“I mean,” Impulse says, poking his head in. “You do have to worry about the Nafia sometimes.”

Etho, wisely, decides not to ask what a Nafia is.

“Ah,” Iskall says. “That explains it.”

The other Hermits trickle in not long after that, the atmosphere heavy and expectant and muted. Pearl comes in, wound tight and jaw set, yanking her hair back into a braid and pulling it up under her helmet in sharp silence. Joel and Lizzie have a muted conversation, as do Iskall and Stress; Impulse and Skizz both do the same with Tango, while Etho tries his best not to get caught up in the heaviness of Skizz’s worried-anxious-reassuring-scared.

And then, with no more buildup, everyone’s there, and there’s nothing left to prepare. Just eight people and whatever waited on the other side. And what did you say at that point?

Grian, evidently, is the only one with an answer to that, and the answer is to Quoroth.

“Don’t fuck this up.”

~~~

The Hermethius

The Hermethius is, at the same time, so obviously a spaceship and yet could be mistaken for any overambitious mechanical build any Hermit had put together.

There’s an overly uncomfortable hum of machinery radiating through the air, heavy and bass, that makes the hair on the back of Grian’s neck stand up. The hallway they’re in has few defining features, just undecorated metal walls and a handful of open doorways leading beyond.

“Okay,” Scott says, the first to find his voice. “What’s the plan exactly?”

“Find Doc and Ren,” Etho says. “And then leave very quickly.”

“Thanks, that’s helpful,” Scott replies.

“I think we’re towards the back of the ship, from what I’ve seen before,” Grian says. “Which isn’t ideal. They’re probably up closer to the front.”

“Okay,” Pearl says. “So which way’s front?”

Grian shrugs. “Until we find some defining feature besides ‘empty hallway’ your guess is as good as mine.”

“Right,” Tango says, evidently picking a direction and going for it. “Let’s figure it out.”

“Let’s not get split up,” Etho pleads, leaving the rest of them to go scrambling after.

They’re a few corridors down when the scene changes. The Hermethius, so far, looks eerily like a base someone had started mapping out but had yet to get to designing the interiors, all blank and unending walls that were already starting to get desperately maze-like. Finally, though, instead of a nesting labyrinth of hallways, one of the corridors finally leads off into an actual room.

“Oh, there’s finally something,” Etho says, immediately zeroing in on the desk and the screens it bore.

“What, do you think the creepy holographic spaceship is just gonna let you hack the mainframe?” Tango asks dryly.

Only for something resembling exactly that to happen, given that the screens immediately light up.

“Mainframe?” Etho says. “Probably not. A map? Hopefully yes.”

“Here, hang on,” Iskall says, bending over the desk as well.

The rest of them, unfortunately, are left with little more to do than mill around. Tango’s the only other redstoner in the group, and while he glances over a few times he’s evidently decided there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

“Well,” Lizzie says. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“I can agree with that,” Beef says with a shudder. “The sooner this is over with, the better.”

“Tango,” Grian says with a burst of exasperation. “What did we just say about splitting up?”

“I’m not splitting up, Grian,” Tango shoots back, peering back down the hallway and then through the next bulkhead in front of them. “I’m trying to see if there’s anything else around so we can get out of here faster. There’s a ladder down this way, actually. Might be a maintenance tube? Other than that it’s a dead end. We did, in fact, go the wrong way.”

“Good to know,” Grian calls back. “Don’t fall down the maintenance tube.”

“I’m not going to fall down it,” Tango calls back. Which. He should not be far enough away to be calling.

“Tango,” Grian says, craning his neck out the doorway. “Come on.” With a disgusted sound in the back of his throat, he steps out, Beef not far behind him.

Tango, thankfully, had not died, though he is firmly in the next room, which is decidedly beyond Grian’s definition of a comfortable distance. There’s something almost like Xelqua in the thought, a flashback to Last Life that he’d prefer not to dwell on, and a possessiveness he can’t help but raise in circumstances like this.

“Okay,” Grian says, as he steps past the hallway’s dividing archway. “Are you done?”

Before Tango can answer, there’s a heavy pneumatic wheeze, followed by a clap of metal that makes them both jump.

When Grian turns back, the bulkhead he’d just walked through is firmly shut.

“...Shit,” Tango says.

“What did I fucking say?” Grian snaps at him, already scrabbling at the door. There’s a plain joint in the middle where the doors meet, but it’s far too narrow to get his fingers through and devastatingly unlikely to budge. “Beef?”

Beef doesn’t answer—or the doors are too thick to hear Beef answer.

“Okay, well, at least I didn’t trip the door,” Tango shoots back, coming up to stand beside him.

“Oh, but you just had to go wandering off!” Grian says. There’s a screen on the side of the door, hopefully with some control to open it, though when he taps furiously on it it remains frustratingly blank.

“I didn’t wander off!”

“Oh, what d’you call this, then? Do you want to see if this stupid thing works?” Grian says, stepping back from the panel.

“Maybe if you didn’t break everything you touched,” Tango says, also frantically jabbing at the screen. “Oh, come on!”

“Grian? Tango?”

The immediate sense of relief from Etho’s voice is almost enough to outweigh the clearly mechanical note to it. “Yeah?” Grian says, just as the screen under Tango’s hands flickers to life. It’s Etho, Iskall still bent over from the side, plainly viewed from the screen they’d been at only a moment ago.

Neither of them say anything for a long moment.

“You any good at opening doors, man?” Tango asks, a decidedly desperate note in his voice.

“Beef and Pearl are already trying on this side,” Etho says. “No luck.”

“Right,” Grian says, with a slow inhale. “Great.”

“But,” Etho says, clearly swiping across the scene. “I did find a map. Are you seeing it?”

“You really did hack the mainframe,” Tango says, even if the joke falls flat.

A tiny version of the map does appear briefly in place of Etho’s image. “We are at the back end of the ship,” he says, “and those are maintenance tunnels. The bad news is I don’t think there’s a place for us to loop around and meet up anywhere close by.”

“That’s… yeah, not good,” Tango says.

“The good news is, if you follow those tunnels straight they should in fact meet back up,” Etho says. “There’s a pretty big room on the third level, about three-quarters of the way to the front—maybe some kind of cafeteria? That’s probably as good of a place as any.”

“Right,” Grian says. “Take the tunnels straight. Big cafeteria place. Don’t get killed. Hope we find Ren and Doc.” Hoping his voice doesn’t sound as strained as he feels, he says, “Good plan.”

“Emphasis on the ‘don’t get killed’ part,” Iskall adds.

“Yeah,” Tango says. “Big emphasis on that.”

There’s a long, painful moment after the map fades and Etho and Iskall return, the other four now also peering anxiously over their shoulders. “Hey,” Grian says, with as much trust as he can offer and nothing else to give. “Keep ‘em safe for me, Etho.”

Etho nods, almost imperceptibly, and then the screen cuts out.

~~~

This was. Not good.

This was very bad, actually.

Etho has to take about six steadying breaths after the video cuts out before he can look away. “Okay,” he says, mostly to himself, to the terrible steady undercurrent of Grian’s afraidafraidafraid.

“Right,” Scott says after a moment, with all his usual crafted authority. “Front of the ship, then? Pick Grian and Tango back up on the way?”

“You can’t seriously be saying we’re just going to leave them down in the tunnels to fend for themselves,” Pearl says.

“Do you have a better idea?” Scott says. “Or would you rather we told them to sit tight, doubled back over half the ship to find them, and then still had to turn the place upside down for Doc and Ren?”

“There’s got to be a better plan than that,” Pearl insists.

“By all means, then,” Scott says with a wide gesture.

“Guys,” Beef finally interjects. “Can we go? Now? And work on getting out of here as soon as possible?”

“I second that plan,” says Iskall.

“Third,” Lizzie says.

“...Right,” Etho finally adds, slowly straightening. Of all the people on this ship he trusted to get themselves out of trouble, he did have to put Grian at the top—although with the caveat that Grian also topped the list of the most likely person to get into trouble, which had clearly already come to fruition. “Let’s go.”

The tunnels, much like coming in, blur into maddening sameness on the way out. Their comms have no connection, though Beef takes to writing down every turn they’re forced to take until the constant repetition finally opens up into something more.

The left wall of the narrow hallways drops away, leaving only a thin railing on that side in an uncanny bridge over old-style, early stone and oak buildings Hermits had preferred years ago.

And on the right wall, in high, glowing letters, is written Season 1.

“Okay,” Iskall says, his voice hard. “That’s just wrong.”

The corridor stretches on, now a bridge hanging over massive pits of uncanny replicas. None of them had been Hermits in the first two seasons—only Tango went back that far—but by the time they cross Season Three, Etho recognizes the top two-thirds of Slip’s central Crown Hall building, Xisuma’s wizard-esque starter house, the squat little Boom Box building from Hermit Thrills—

He knows the Season Four section, too. So would Iskall and Beef. It’s Season Five that really pulls him up short.

NHO displays the sign, right on the front of Doc’s old skull base, creeping with too-familiar and too-green vines. Etho can almost, if he thinks too hard, hear a song that wasn’t music and smell campfire smoke.

It takes him a split-second too long to come up out of it, dragged out by Grian’s still-distant chorus of afraidafraid and Skizz’s even farther medley of tumult. And by the time he does—

“That was fast,” Lizzie says. “Did you guys find a shortcut?”

Etho turns, having been drawn far too close to the railing, only to see—

Grian and Tango.

Which didn’t—

“...Guys?” Pearl ventures after a moment. “Grian?”

Maybe they all knew it already. Or maybe they didn’t, and it’s only Etho’s sense of eerie, dead silence from the things-that-looked-like-Grian-and-Tango that tips them all off.

“That’s not Grian.”

Two loud, echoing bangs immediately sound.

By the time Etho’s ears stop ringing—and he figures out that he’d clapped his hands over them and nearly gone tumbling over the railing given how close he’s crouching to it—the not-Grian and not-Tango are laid out on the floor, and Iskall’s gun is still out.

“What did you do?” Pearl immediately demands, rounding on him.

“If Etho said that wasn’t Grian,” Iskall says, almost nonchalantly as he holsters his gun again, “then I’ve got no reason to doubt him.”

“And what if it was?”

“It wasn’t,” Etho says, a little wobblier than he’d like to be as he stands back up. Grian’s steady undercurrent of clatter remained unaffected, even with his doppelgänger dead on the floor. Whatever small comfort that was right now.

“…Right,” Beef says, his voice audibly shaking. “Right! Okay then!”

A long moment passes. “Well,” Scott says. “We knew this place was going to fuck with our heads. Good to know how.” He bends down, peers at the bodies for a moment, then says, “Can I suggest staying within sight of each other? There’s no telling how convincing these things can be if they want to be.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Lizzie says with a shudder.

Without further warning, the ship’s lights dim, going eerily red and pulsing in time with the deep, wavering alarm that blasts through the speakers.

“Ah,” Pearl says. “That’s not good.”

~~~

“Gee, Grian, you sure do take me to the nicest places.”

“Okay, listen,” Grian snaps, and would likely be whirling on him if they weren’t currently on a ladder. “I’m not any happier about this than you are, all right?”

Tango could almost be cowed by it, if he cared. He drops the last few rungs down to the next floor, boots clanking on the metal. “Oh, look. More hallways.”

“Better than more ladders,” Grian mutters, landing beside him.

“Did we have to make the unreality prison an entire ship?” Tango muses. “Couldn’t we have just done, like, the command center?”

“Never let it be said the Watchers aren’t completely extra,” Grian grumbles.

“Yeah, got that much from you, thanks,” Tango says.

They follow the hallway for a while, take another ladder back up, and continue on their way. “I didn’t have a choice in it, you know,” Grian says at last.

“What?” Tango says.

“Everything you’ve decided to blame me for,” Grian continues. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“We’re all responsible for our own actions,” Tango says, in a voice that sounds decidedly too much like his mother.

“Sure. And sometimes the universe is responsible for a bunch of actions that all amount to ‘fuck you in particular,’” Grian replies. “Not that you’d know anything about that—shh!”

“Shh?” Tango hisses under his breath. “I’m not talking!”

“You are now!” Grian says, glancing around another bulkhead like the one they’d gotten locked behind earlier. “That’s—”

Tango tries to peer past the doorway, maybe pushing at Grian a little harder than he needs to to make room, and—

Okay, yeah. All right. That’s worth a good old ‘what the fuck.’ Tango’s pretty sure they hadn’t expected anyone on this ship besides Doc, Ren, and themselves, no less—

“Martyn?” Grian says. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Martyn turns—and yeah, that’s definitely Martyn, albeit decidedly thinner than Tango had seen him in Last Life. “...Hey guys,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. Then, “It’s me. I can prove it if you want. Don’t need Grian giving me the old Cupid’s left hook.”

“Prove it—” Tango starts. “Cupid’s what?”

Grian, for some inexplicable reason, seems to relax at that. “Cupid’s left hook,” he says. “Martyn and I worked together not long out of high school. And so one day I punched him—”

“For no reason,” Martyn says.

“—because he was being kind of a dick, actually—anyways, long story short, our boss made me buy him dinner as an apology, and he brought Netty as backup, and I’m the sole reason they ended up together,” Grian finishes. “Any questions?”

“Many of them,” Tango says. “Why would we think you weren’t real?”

“...Oh,” Martyn says. “You haven’t—” He glances back over his shoulder, lets out a thin chuckle, then says, “That’d be why.”

Down the hall is Iskall.

Which—doesn’t make sense at all. Why would Iskall be there, by himself—and more importantly raising his gun—

Martyn slams something into the screen on the bulkhead between the three of them and Iskall, and not a moment too soon, given the awful bang and the bullet-sized dent that doesn’t quite bloom all the way through the door.

“What the fuck,” Tango yelps, wedging himself as far into the corner of the bulkhead as he can.

“Yeah,” Martyn says grimly. “That’ll be the puppets. Usually not that murderous, actually! But then again, it’s not like Doc and Ren and I are going anywhere so they probably haven’t had to be before now!”

“What do you mean, puppets?” Grian asks, all three of them shoved entirely too close together in the corner as Martyn works at the keypad. The door gives two more awful, banging rings as the not-Iskall shoots at it again. “Like, fake us?”

“Haven’t seen Iskall before, but I guess since he’s here!” Martyn says with a shrug. “Mainly it’s the Limited—Last Life crew. Never seen Skizz or Timmy—or Mumbo or Lizzie, for that matter, but if Lizzie’s here now she’ll probably turn up—but pretty much everyone else, yeah!”

“What for?” Grian asks.

“Hell if I know! Just to freak us out, I’d imagine! And apparently now to try to kill us!”

The other side of the bulkhead suddenly goes quiet. Martyn lets out a tiny sigh.

“...Is he gone?” Tango ventures.

“For now,” Martyn says, keying the bulkhead open again. “He’ll probably be back.”

Well. If the Iskall puppet could come back from being dead on the floor, that was. “He’s gonna come back from that?” Tango asks.

“Probably!” Martyn says, still sounding slightly hysterical. “You never know!”

“What did you do?” Grian asks, standing in the doorway with unrepentant horror. Good to know he could still be unrepentantly horrified, Tango thought.

“Popped the airlock in the next room remotely,” Martyn says faintly. “They might not be human but we figured out they do need to breathe.”

“You’ve been dealing with this a lot,” Grian says.

“Since I got here, yeah,” Martyn says. “That’s when they started getting real creepy and aggressive. Before that… Dunno if Ren and Doc knew how fake they were, really.”

“How did you get here?” Grian asks.

“Won one,” Martyn whispers. “Woke up here.”

“Shit,” Grian says quietly. Then, louder, “Tango, what the hell are you doing now?”

“If there’s gonna be murderous fake us walking around,” Tango says, trying to ignore the horrified distaste of rooting around the Fakeskall’s body, “I want something better than a sword. Fake Iskall, real guns.”

“Plural?” Grian says, then striding over and holding his hand out when Tango nods.

“Oh, and you know how to use a gun?” he asks.

“Is that such a surprise?” Grian asks, snapping his fingers for when Tango pockets the first gun and remains holding the second.

The silence builds for a moment. “Tango, man,” Martyn says. “There’s a reason Grian and Tim and I don’t go to the high school reunions. He knows how to use a gun.”

Tango, reluctantly, hands it over. “Gee, and I thought maybe you were avoiding your reunions because of the death loops.”

“That too,” Martyn says dryly.

The lights on the ship dim abruptly. And, well, if red lights and a horrible siren weren’t a no good very bad thing, then Tango’s sure his niblings could submit him to many humiliating things as payment for losing the bet.

Martyn’s face goes grim in the dim lighting. “C’mon, we better move.”

Move they do, Grian in the front right where he always wanted to be, and Tango leaves him to it, grumbling under his breath.

Right up until they clear the next room.

They’re clearly in the belly of the ship now, or more accurately on one of the exterior walls. There’s no way to really catch a glimpse of where they are in relation to the rest of it, even with the massive viewing glass right out into the Void.

The utterly unending Void—black and fathomless, faint pinprick lights of distant servers glimmering far off. Incomprehensibly massive to anyone, anywhere.

Especially not Tango.

(The sky is full of stars.)

(He thinks he might be sick.)

~~~

“This is not good, my dude!”

“I know it’s not good, man!”

Ren watches as Doc tips the chair with the force of which he throws himself to the next desk, frantically tapping away. “Do we even know where Martyn went?”

“No,” Doc snaps back, “and we’re not going to if the system doesn’t let me back in—FUCK!”

Bathed in that awful red light, trying to tune out the equally horrible siren, Ren scrambles over as well, hardly as useful in a situation like this as Doc would be but unable to stand helpless anyways. “I don’t even know what’s going on—”

“Can’t even override the—oh, sure, now it’s an intruder alert, couldn’t have set that off for those damn murder puppets, of course not—” Doc continues to mutter.

Trapped. Ren’s not sure he’s ever felt so trapped, this gods-awful claustrophobia that had crept up on them like invisible gas leaking in, that slowly-sinking certainty of something wrong that had taken so long to set in he doesn’t even trust his own senses anymore. How could he, when nothing was right and nothing was wrong, when they were trapped in the middle of space with no way out and it had taken them weeks to even realize this was wrong—

“DOC!”

… Beef?

Now that was just cruel.

Doc spins around, his flesh eye wide and his mechanical at a steady, too-bright glow, and—that is Beef in the doorway, and Etho and Pearl and Iskall and Lizzie and Scott—

“They’re talking now,” Ren says, voice sounding hollow to his own ears. “Doc, why are they talking now.”

“It’s us, guys,” Pearl says. “The real us. Promise.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” Doc says sharply. “Pretty sure that’s exactly what you’d say if you figured out how to talk.”

“It is,” Lizzie says. “We came to bring you home, yeah?”

“And we don’t trust whatever you’re gonna say ‘home’ is, all right?” Ren snaps back at her.

“You had to tell me what to wear,” Etho says, very quietly.

Doc, beside Ren, goes very still. “...What?”

“You had to tell me what to wear to a restaurant,” Etho says, a little louder. “Do you remember, Doc? We hadn’t even met yet. I hadn’t started on Mindcrack. And you were the only person I trusted to take it as a genuine question.” Then, with a tiny step forward, “Doc, it’s us, I swear.”

And Doc, all at once, relaxes.

“Man, no,” Ren says, all but throwing an arm over Doc’s chest, even knowing he’d never be able to physically stop the man if he got it in his head to blow through it. “They might—they might know stuff, just like this, to convince us—”

“Large caramel macchiato, light ice, four extra pumps of caramel,” Iskall says, even more nonsensically than Etho.

A long moment passes.

“What?” Ren says, very quietly.

“Your coffee order,” Iskall tells him. “When we were setting up Kingdomcraft. Usually Wels and I got stuck making the coffee runs. He’d always get a hot chocolate, I got mine black. Scar always wanted pumpkin spice, the basic man. Cub had his ridiculous quadruple shot, cream no sugar. And Stress would get a white chocolate frappe—”

“—or a black americano,” Ren finishes despite himself, “and she’d never tell you which one she wanted that day, you’d just have to guess and hope you were right.”

“Exactly,” Iskall says with a smirk. “You think some creepy copy’s gonna know that one, Ren?”

“...You’re here?” Ren says, sounding entirely too pathetic to his own ears.

“Hopefully not for much longer,” Scott says, glancing over his shoulders. “Soon as we grab Grian and Tango we’re out of here. And good riddance.”

And Ren, despite himself, bolts across the distance and flings himself on Iskall.

Iskall lets out a tiny burst of laughter, says, “Hey, man,” and squeezes him for a moment.

It lasts exactly until an arrow goes whizzing past their heads.

~~~

“Tango? Hey, Tango, c’mon.”

Whatever Tango’s seeing right now, it’s not Grian. His eyes are locked well past the viewing panel, far out into the Void, and sure not in the here and now.

Grian sends a slightly helpless glance at Martyn, who only shrugs. Tango, meanwhile, sucks in a gasp and tugs on his hair.

And.

Oh.

Oh, Grian knows what that feels like.

“Hey,” he says, a little gentler. Maybe the gentlest thing he’s said to Tango since the moon fell, actually. “Hey, you’re good. Great big window between us and out there.”

(What had it felt like, he wonders briefly, to die floating in the middle of space?)

(He doesn’t think he wants to know the answer.)

Tango blinks, finally. Takes a breath that’s slightly less ragged. “Get off me,” he says, the first moment Grian actually notices he’s put a hand on his shoulder.

Grian does. “It’s okay,” he says. “I get it.”

“Shut up,” Tango snaps back, turning from the window with a full-body shudder.

“I’m just saying—”

“Shut up.”

Two things happen just then.

Martyn bends double with a hissed curse, choking on a breath. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry, I don’t—I can’t—”

And another Watcher presses on Grian’s mind, heavy and massive, old and unyielding and terrifying.

“I don’t think I can anymore—” Martyn gasps out, and he’s gone before he can even finish the sentence—

And there’s nothing Grian can do about it—

And the press becomes pressure, enough to bend and break and snap, and the Watcher on the Hermethius is one Grian would have never wanted to see again.

~~~

The netherite and weapons finally make use of themselves.

It’s Lizzie and Pearl and Scott and Cleo this time—no need for trickery this time, for the hesitation of not immediately recognizing the threat. It’s still merely a distraction, the fakes outnumbered more than two to one—certainly still a dangerous distraction, given that the fake Lizzie immediately gives a wave of her hand and sets the room on fire—

But Iskall takes out Scott, and Lizzie distracts Lizzie, and Pearl ducks in with her blade raised toward Cleo with Scott on her heels, which leaves only—

Beef screams. It’s an awful scream, and even if Etho’s already got his bow out he’s got to squint through the smoke to see—

Pearl, the only fake unaccounted for, almost has him by the throat, and it’s too far—

(Etho remembers this, when he was younger. Remembers the way time slows, when every heartbeat counts. They hadn’t only had him plan mock battles, after all.)

(And he doesn’t even realize until he’s halfway through that he still has the muscle memory.)

It’s probably an inherently Enderian sense, to be able to compensate for a teleport before even getting through one. Etho’s never seen a human come up out of an ender pearl in the same way. It wasn’t inherent to know how to line up a shot on that instinctive proprioception, but, well.

He’d grown up in a war, and trained accordingly.

The fake Pearl drops, arrow through the side of her throat, and Beef seems relatively unharmed. Lizzie’s fanning the smoke away, the other Lizzie apparently handled and the last two along with her. Clearly less of a huge threat than a distraction.

“...Dude,” Beef says at long last. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

Several of the others clearly have the same sentiment, given the way they’re staring at Etho. Well. That was that out of the bag, then.

He pointedly clears his throat. “We need to get out of here,” he says, like that wasn’t obvious.

And then—

“Etho?”

No. They wouldn’t—

That wasn’t—

“Etho?”

It’s—fake-sounding. Like a recording, or a parrot, or something. It is, so evidently, not real, in the worst uncanny sort of way that makes so much sense why Ren and Doc had never heard the copies talk.

And Etho turns, eyes still stinging with smoke, and sees Bdubs, and it still almost brings him to his knees.

“Don’t—” he says, like that will make it stop, like the universe hasn’t stopped spinning—

Lizzie lights it on fire, too.

Etho can’t look. Etho can’t not look.

“Etho!”

And that—

That was different. Not fake, not a copy, down the hallway—

And he knows there’s something wrong—

“Etho, don’t—” Pearl yells, clearly crossing the hall, clearly reaching for him.

And Etho bolts before she’s close enough to catch him.

Chapter Text

The Hermethius

It’s so loud.

It’s—unfathomably loud, actually. Loud enough to drown out Grian.

Loud enough to drown out Skizz.

(The only time Etho hadn’t been able to hear his own House had been when he hadn’t had one.)

He pulls up short, in what he’d assumed was the cafeteria, though there’s nothing to betray that function. It’s just an empty room, blank space.

“What’s the matter? Are you lost, little Endling?”

It’s still Bdubs’s voice.

Etho spins, quickly enough that out of the three entrances to the room he can’t even tell which one he came in. There’s a Watcher here, so incomprehensibly loud it jars all the way into his teeth, and it’s still Bdubs’s voice.

“So few eyes, and so little to see. Perhaps only fitting after a millennium of so deliberately blinding yourself.”

And there are too many eyes, too many wings, bearing down on him, pinning him in place, sucking the air out of the room.

There’s nowhere to run but deeper into the bowels of the ship, nowhere to hide that a hundred piercing eyes couldn’t seek out in an instant. Fleeting thoughts to be discarded in an instant.

So there’s one singular solution, that Etho latches onto with all the desperation of a cornered animal.

Stall for Grian.

“Nothing to say for yourself, then,” the Watcher says, still in Bdubs’s almost perfect lilt. Which could only mean—

Mimic any voice they’ve ever heard.

Then this is Xyrstad.

(He’s going to die here.)

“Nothing at all?” Xyrstad prods again. “How the mighty have fallen. The ancient and respected House of Lioneth, reduced to nothing but a terrified child. For all that’s what you were, compared to us. Children pleading for a scrap of attention until the entire universe was forced to listen to your cries.” They scoff, then say, “And still even the day you were forced to listen back you did not withdraw your hand.”

“Etho!” comes a shout—Pearl again, he thinks, though he can’t turn to look. Thinks he couldn’t even if he wanted to, rooted to the floor.

Xyrstad scoffs again. “And the rest of you. Come to gawk.” With a wave of what might be their hand, they say, “Gawk you may, then.”

It’s—weird and horrible to hear Bdubs’s voice in what were definitely not Bdubs’s words. Etho does finally manage to sneak a glimpse over his shoulder, the rest of the group, still minus Grian and Tango, frayed out behind him—

And frozen, time slow and heavy and pulsing and wrong.

“What do you mean?” Etho finally manages, because the only thing left is stall, stall, stall. When he would give anything to run.

“You want to hear then? The secret that died with its keepers? The truth the dead never told?” Xyrstad asks. “I was there. I remember. Tell me, then, little Endling, if you’ve found your voice. Tell me what you know of your own history. Tell me what you know of a thousand years ago.”

It’s nonsensical. Etho doesn’t have enough spare brainpower left to contemplate the whys when he’s still too filled with terror to think anything but stall. “That’s when we got our music.”

Xyrstad’s laugh is not Bdubs’s laugh.

It’s awful, worse even than the cataclysmic sound of them that could drown out Grian on the ship and Skizz worlds away. A terrible amalgamation, an approximation of what laughter should be, with the odd note that rings of Doc, of Impulse, maybe of Xisuma.

“Your music,” Xyrstad finally says. “What a quaint, adorable little word for the curse they thought might stay the warmonger’s hand.”

Etho has no answer for that. Etho doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be answering.

“Did they not tell you? Were you not taught from your cradle the glories of conquest? Or had they turned to shame long before you sank your fangs into us?” Xyrstad shifts a little, wings flaring and too many eyes blinking. “Perhaps you should have asked the Dhake which inhabits your friend. Ask it of the war that killed the Dhakes and the Sekahds alike, neither host nor symbiote left. Ask,” Xyrstad continues with what might be a sneer if they had a proper face beyond the mask, “what it felt like when the Enders came to wipe them out.”

And—

But that—

“Perhaps the Dhake-child has hibernated where it fell for a thousand years. I have lived them. I Watched as so many races fell. As the Aether shattered into the cosmos, torn apart by so many wars. Until only the conquerors remained in their ruins, never slowing even when they were forced to absorb every drop of terror and anger and horror of every genocide they committed. Until there was no more Aether, only the wasteland of what remained after the End.”

And then, with one final twist of the knife:

“Why do you think they were called the Enders?”

That didn’t—

They hadn’t—

Kevin. Surely Xyrstad meant Kevin by Dhake-child. But that meant Kevin’s homeland had never been a fourth dimension—simply the End before, the Aether—

But surely Etho’s people hadn’t—

“The Noors were the first to fall. Hardly an ambitious war. And still your victory was not enough. Still you continued to end everything in your path. So with their dying breaths the Noors gave their parting gift. Imagine: your people are vile and violent and bloodthirsty. Here is a curse: you and every one of your children forevermore will be able to hear the emotions of others. You will hear their pain and fear as they die as if it were your own and maybe this will finally convince you to stay your hand.”

The Watcher watches, bears down, stares.

“And then it didn’t.”

AFRAID, rings Grian, somewhere deeper in the ship, just barely loud enough to sound over Xyrstad for a moment.

The only reliable emotion Etho had ever been able to pick up from him.

“And so we Watched. Watched as the Aether corrupted to only the End, sworn by our leader to avoid interference. So we did not, as the Enders settled back into their Houses in the wasteland of their own making. Until the day you turned on us. The Watchers, the greatest of all, we who were old when your race discovered that striking two stones might make a spark. And as the universe cycles, so too did you curse us with your last breath as the Noors did you. A mere tenth of our population survived when you turned your own destruction upon us—the scourge of the End gone, and so too its protectors.”

Protectors? After all of this, to call themselves protectors?

“We were forced to pull Time around ourselves, to be in many places at once, to keep the universe from falling into disarray. To find the patchwork solution of turning lesser races into lesser Watchers suitable for the menial tasks, so that we might focus our attention on the more important matters. For the Enders taught us, far too late, what happens when Watchers merely Watch.”

Then, with one last impassioned vow:

“And we said never again.”

“You’ve done a shit job of that.”

Pearl’s voice rings out, strident. Etho would turn to look at her if he could.

“You think you’re, what, some grand cosmic superheroes?” she continues. “That you’re the only thing keeping the universe together? I think we’re all better off without your help!”

The sound Xyrstad makes is almost a sigh, if they had a mouth under their mask. “The prize of the young and foolish is to never realize how young and foolish they are. Here you stand, a ghost forever circling your own death, thinking you’ve earned the right to lecture.”

“Maybe I’ve got more right than you,” Pearl says. “I’m not the one going around ruining every life I come across and telling myself it’s for some greater good.”

It’s so incredibly Pearl to be getting up in arms about this now, to push at the delicate balance of trying to give Grian time to show up. If she pushed too hard, and Xyrstad pushed back—

“You’re lying.”

Etho pulls where Pearl had pushed. It’s deliberate, for all he’s not entirely sure how he gets the words out. If he needs to draw Xyrstad’s attention back on himself, then he will.

It works. “Am I?” Xyrstad asks, deceptively mild, with the faintest of cracks in their voice.

Etho pulls harder. “Nothing about this has been real,” he says, finding his footing by the word. “A fake place full of fake people. Why should I believe anything you just told me?” Then, as much as it aches, “You can’t even get his voice right.”

Xyrstad gives that weird almost-sigh again, and it’s off. Like it had been all along. Like Etho hadn’t known Bdubs’s voice for seventeen years, like the wrongness hadn’t been creeping up all along.

“I suppose it is an imperfect copy, left over from a ghost of code. It was only his own attachment to you that even gave me that, at the end of the most recent of your games. Would you prefer this one then, Madafel?”

That’s the moment Etho realizes this is really, really bad.

Not that he hadn’t known before. But it sinks in then.

Xyrstad has his father’s voice.

“You doubt me still, then?” Xyrstad asks, in Schealionethal’s voice, pitch-perfect. A dead parent’s voice and a dead child’s name. “Do you think we did not wait for Klealionethum to return home before we struck down your House? Do you think the Enderian vice-general did not know their own history? Do you think we thought lightly of knowing the only way to stop your ravages was to do to the Enders what the Enders had done to the End? Do you think we enjoyed it, Madafellionetho?”

Their voice raises, all the more grating for belonging to Etho’s own father, then dies down again.

“Perhaps it is appropriate that the Endermen are all that remains of you. Mindless, vicious beasts who will kill anyone who looks at them wrong. Wasn’t that what you were all along? Do you want proof? I will give you proof.”

There’s nothing.

And then there’s everything.

(They screamed, and you hear it—every drop of fear and pain and terror and agony and grief and horror and death—)

(And there’s nothing, nothing else, nothing but music and a curse and knowledge and truth—)

(The first and the last and so many in between, more who fled and hid, the suffering of an entire dimension giving way under the weight of power and fury and greed—)

(And you’re screaming too, no option but to echo the death knell ringing in your ears of a million, ten million, a hundred million—)

(Hands on your ears and it doesn’t slow, knees on the ground and it doesn’t stop—)

(And—)

~~~

Impulse’s Sea Pyramid—Hermitcraft Seven

There’s nothing to do but wait.

It’s utterly brutal, every minute passing like an hour. Impulse has checked the time six times in the last ten minutes.

There’s nothing to do. There’s waiting and watching and hoping their friends come back okay and minutes passing in agony.

They’ll know, probably, if something happens. Mumbo’s here and Grian’s there, and given what Impulse remembers from New Jorida he’s fairly sure Mumbo would know if something went catastrophically wrong. Impulse has been watching him pace for the last hour with no real indication either way under the assumption they’d all know if he knew.

And they do know. Just not from Mumbo.

They’d been scattered throughout Impulse’s base since the Hermethius team had left, no one really comfortable enough to actually do much to pass the time. There are a few murmured discussions, some people sitting and others standing, while Impulse’s entire base feels like a bubble about to pop.

Skizz is standing, right up until the point he drops like a box of rocks.

“Skizz,” Impulse gasps out, bolting over. The other Hermits jump up after him, Stress in particular hot on his heels. “Skizz, what—”

Etho. Impulse had been so busy assuming about Grian and Mumbo’s connection he hadn’t thought about Etho and Skizz’s.

Skizz doesn’t answer. He’s staring about a thousand blocks deep into Impulse’s wall, mouth hanging faintly open, and Impulse’s only impression is this is not good.

“Are they okay?” Impulse asks, over top of whatever Stress was saying to his best friend that he can’t quite focus on. “Skizz?”

Skizz still doesn’t answer, until he finally, faintly manages a shake of his head.

Impulse’s stomach drops.

“Hypno,” Scar says somewhere, distantly. “Hypno, I’m going—”

“What happened?” Impulse asks, on his knees in front of his best friend with no idea what the answer would be.

“I don’t know,” Skizz gasps out, which might be the worst answer of all.

~~~

The Hermethius

“Shit shit shit shit shit—”

“Where did he go?” Tango asks, still clearly trying to keep the window behind his field of view.

“Don’t know,” Grian says, and as much as it pains him, Martyn had already been lost for so long that Grian simply couldn’t make him the priority when there were seven other people relying on him getting them out and Xyrstad had just shown up. “We’ve got to get up to the others, now.”

“But Martyn—”

“I know but Martyn, Tango! We’ve got company!”

Tango’s eyes go wide at that, and he finally cuts his protest and follows as Grian breaks into a run down the hallway.

Yet still not fast enough, every hallway and ladder dragging on endlessly until the most awful, ringing, pained scream comes echoing down the hallway.

It pulls Grian up short, as horrible as it is, even as every drawn-out second passes and it doesn’t stop, as the pull of his-Hermits tugs him ever forward.

He can’t even tell who it is.

(No one could make that sound and not be dying.)

Tango slows down. Grian can hear it in ragged breaths and pounding footsteps, and turns back with an irritated snap on his lips before he realizes.

Time.

Xyrstad was messing with time, the same way Orez had when Boatem was still floating in the Void, and they’re close enough now to whatever was happening that Tango can’t keep up.

Grian reaches back, grabs him by the wrist, grits out “Come on,” and tugs him along.

The screaming dies off, eventually. Not with the suddenness of death or relief, but a choking, fading wail of someone who simply couldn’t keep screaming.

They’re all there when Grian bursts into the room, Tango still on his heels. Pearl and Scott and Lizzie and Beef and Iskall and Doc and Ren— Doc and Ren—

Etho’s on the floor.

Grian can’t even tell if he’s alive.

It’s not that he hadn’t noticed Xyrstad—it’s kind of hard to ignore the fifteen-foot-tall glowing creature with six wings—but more that he’s too busy being wrapped in fear and pounding footsteps and no-mine-my-Hermits to really pay attention until Xyrstad knocks him straight on his ass.

It’s designed to distract, not to kill or hardly even to wound. Grian goes skittering across the floor, landing barely an arm’s length from Etho—a paltry distance, abruptly insurmountable—with nothing but scrapes and bruises from the slide. He’s panting, out of breath, and Tango’s frozen now on the other side of the room opposite of the rest—

He’s still got a gun, for all the good that would do against a Watcher.

“What do you want from me?”

Xyrstad’s voice is terrible, just as it has been when Grian was in Onix—a chorus of familiar voices, switching off and blending discordantly every few words. It had been the Evolutionists then; it was the Hermits now.

“I want you to realize that this is bigger than you realize, and that you are smaller than you think. That potential is not the same as power.”

“What potential?” Grian demands. He’s still just barely out of reach of Etho, and he still can’t even tell if he’s breathing. “What do you want! Because all I want is to be left alone! For all of us to be left alone!”

“…Now,” Xyrstad says, almost indulgently. “You hardly expect me to believe that, do you?”

Grian’s ears buzz, and Xyrstad’s many voices roll over them for a moment without truly registering.

“…hardly think Orez is incapable of handling this, but given the present company…”

And the worst possible thought occurs to Grian.

It might just be his only option.

“You can’t have me.”

Xyrstad regards him, cool as ever, and says, “Are you certain of that?”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Grian says. Maybe his voice shakes; maybe it doesn’t. “But I sure as hell don’t want it.”

(There’s a gun in his hand. It might be his last option.)

“So what do you do if you can’t have me?”

His hand is shaking, undeniably. The gun is heavy, and not just because he’s got it pointed at his head.

“Do you finally leave them alone?”

He knows Etho’s scream would haunt his nightmares. If he lives long enough to have nightmares.

Again and again. Over and over.

Was the only way to keep them safe to sever their link to the Watchers altogether? To take himself out of the picture completely?

Xyrstad seems almost genuinely startled by the fact that Grian’s got a gun to his own head. “Quite the play,” they say. “However much I doubt you’ll back it up.”

“I will if I have to.”

And then there’s a hand, fumbling for his knee. A voice, so harsh as to be almost unintentional and certainly completely unrecognizable.

“Don’t—don’t, Grian, please—”

Xyrstad does give a harshly startled laugh at that, all grating incoherent voices. “You lived, then,” they bark.

Etho doesn’t answer. Grian’s pretty sure Etho can’t answer. It’s shocking enough he’s even managed to reach for Grian.

“Well. That can be fixed.”

And Grian realizes a moment too late.

“Don’t you fucking dare—”

Xyrstad dares.

Grian doesn’t go out to the gun. It’s nothing less than purely instinctual, care and love and sacrifice and his Hermits—

He pivots on his hip, throws himself over Etho.

Xyrstad hits him right between the wings.

And

something

breaks.

Chapter Text

The Hermethius

They’re all there when Grian bursts into the room, Tango still on his heels. Scott and Lizzie and Beef and Iskall and Doc and Ren— Doc and Ren—

Etho’s on the floor.

Grian can’t even tell if he’s alive.

It’s not that he hadn’t noticed Xyrstad—it’s kind of hard to ignore the fifteen-foot-tall glowing creature with six wings—but more that he’s too busy being wrapped in fear and pounding footsteps and no-mine-my-Hermits to really pay attention until something hits him, sends him skittering sideways and forces him down, spins him around until there’s nothing but Xyrstad in his field of view.

Pearl.

How she’d gotten to him, Grian doesn’t know. They go down in an ungainly tangle of limbs, skidding across the cold metal floor, gun slipping from his fingers and continuing to slide until it’s halfway to Etho and well out of reach.

He takes a knee to the ribs, connects an elbow with something bony. He doesn’t have time to figure out what, or to free himself from the thigh Pearl’s got halfway slung around his waist.

And then there’s another, that familiar tug on his very soul, and fuck no Scar not now.

Grian can’t send him off, though—because Scar had come regardless of how stupid it was, and without even looking Grian can sense Hypno at his side, and Time is still sluggish and wrong and they can’t do anything.

In the ringing silence of the aftermath, Xyrstad says with thick disdain, “You’re all here, then.”

“What do you want from us?”

Xyrstad’s voice is terrible, just as it has been when Grian was in Onix—a chorus of familiar voices, switching off and blending discordantly every few words. It had been the Evolutionists then; it was the Hermits now.

“I want you to realize that this is bigger than you realize, and that you are smaller than you think. That potential is not the same as power.”

“If potential was all you wanted from me,” Grian snaps back, “you’d have been done with me long before now! So what the fuck do you want?”

Pearl’s got him by the arm now, nails digging in so hard Grian thinks they might be drawing blood even through his jumper. “Don’t,” she says. “Grian, don’t.”

He plunges on regardless. “Because all I see from you are stupid fucking pointless games—”

“A game?” Xyrstad scoffs. “I would think by now, Xelqua, you would surely realize the stakes of this are hardly as low as a game.”

(He still can’t tell if Etho’s still alive.)

(Except.)

“…hardly think Orez is incapable of handling this, but given the present company—”

“Except that’s exactly what it is.”

Xyrstad breaks off. “And how exactly is it you think that?”

“You could’ve just killed Doc if you were that worried about him,” Grian says, and there are pieces of him feeling out, catching on the edges of reality, searching for frays. “You could’ve put him in a box. And you went through all this trouble.”

Xyrstad doesn’t answer. Not that Grian expects them to.

Not that Grian needs them to.

There.

“All of this is just another game. For whatever you get out of it.”

Just there. That loose thread, that fraying edge, ripe for the taking.

“And you know what games are made of?”

A breath. A heartbeat.

“Code.”

And Xelqua tears on the Hermethius’s imperfect illusion, yanking on the old familiar red-black-his-Hermits until Time itself pops back into place.

His friends can tell the moment it does—Beef bolts for Etho, not a moment too soon; Iskall’s maybe two steps behind him, while Tango seems frozen for just an extra half second too long before he can finally scramble across the room and rejoin the rest.

There’s a crackle, power and energy, a surge of magic over a pair of ruined black wings.

“Is this what you call potential?”

He can still feel it, when he reaches through the dissolving field of the Hermethius—the tether home, the point Quoroth still held open. And eight of them, now ten, now twelve—all there, to be gathered up together with ease.

And Grian, once again, brings his Hermits home.

(And Time, once broken, undoes itself; and Fate, behind the scenes, rewrites the scene to her own narrative.)

~~~

Impulse’s Sea Pyramid—Hermitcraft Seven

“Can’t you do something?”

“No, I can’t!” Quoroth snaps back. “Because the whole reason I’m here is so that I can’t go anywhere else!”

Mumbo sucks in a breath and almost shouts back. Probably would shout back if he had any idea what to shout. Instead he exchanges some helpless glance with Impulse, still on the floor beside Skizz, and chokes on his own air.

Something’s wrong— that much is obvious, purely from how Skizz had reacted to whatever it was, though Mumbo’s not getting anything in the slightest from Grian.

Bloody terrifying, actually.

Then, between one heartbeat and the next while Mumbo stands there paralyzed, something skips—

And as soon as it starts it ends, and the world rights itself, and the Hermits come home.

The bubble pops as soon as it starts, the scrambling of nearly two dozen people echoing off the walls. Grian’s in the center, still on the floor, encircled with eyes that are swiftly fading and half-tangled with Pearl. The rest of the Hermits who had stayed were surely doing headcounts—eight, ten, twelve. The eight who had gone, Scar and Hypno, and Doc and Ren.

Then whatever had gone wrong, surely something had gone right.

“What happened?” Cub demands, and though it’s clearly directed at the group as a whole Grian takes it upon himself to seize the answer.

“I don’t know,” he snaps, getting to his feet and giving a distracted shake of his wings, then wincing. “We were still across the ship—”

“What do you mean, across the ship?”

“Well, if someone hadn’t wandered off—”

“Hey, don’t act like you’re some saint over here—”

“At least I didn’t—”

“—but you’re back, at least—”

“—and if you hadn’t—”

“...Etho, buddy?”

Skizz’s voice, for all its softness, breaks through the clamor. Mumbo glances over, follows his gaze.

And—

Mumbo had glossed over the group, trying to put names and numbers together, and hadn’t looked closer when he’d found everyone. He’d noted Etho between Iskall and Beef and moved on—he hadn’t noticed Iskall and Beef were holding Etho up.

Mumbo finds, now that he’s looked, he can’t look away.

Etho does finally glance up, though the way he’s hanging his head makes it look like a monumental effort. Skizz strides over, the other Hermits parting for him in the sudden quiet.

Etho sobs.

It’s an awful, gut-wrenching sound that makes Mumbo’s entire body cringe on instinct, and still with muted horror he can’t look away. Etho manages, barely, a couple lurching steps away from Iskall and Beef before Skizz catches him, and the force of it sends Skizz reeling too. They go down not quite in a heap, and whatever Skizz might say gets drowned out by sheer tearing sobs.

Mumbo almost, almost puts his hands over his ears. He thinks he would, if no one could see him.

It’s Impulse, finally, thank the gods, who finally breaks their discomforted quiet. “What happened?”

“Not sure that’s easy to explain,” Doc says, and under any other circumstances his familiar gruff voice would have been a relief to hear after so long. Now, though—

“Should we…?” Stress ventures, one hand vaguely outstretched toward the returning Hermethius crew, though who or what she’s actually reaching for is impossible to tell.

“...Tea,” Joe declares after a long moment. “Bad news goes down better with tea.” He pauses to glance at Skizz. “Unless…?”

“Go ahead,” Skizz says, at such a relative quiet it’s a surprise it’s audible above Etho still crying in his shoulder. “We’ll catch up.”

Beef, meanwhile, lets out a hysterical half-laugh. “I’m going to,” he starts. “I’m going to need something a lot stronger than tea, Joe.”

A beat passes. “That can be arranged,” Joe says.

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Doc’s hands are shaking.

Not technically true. Doc’s hand is shaking. His flesh one. His metal one, technical marvel that it was and with all the fine control of a natural appendage, didn’t quite have the wiring to mimic the physical effects of emotional overload.

Scott explains it, in the end. Glosses over the details, Doc thinks. He’s not paying that much attention. Ren’s knee pressed into his under the table might be the only thing keeping him grounded.

He hopes Scott glosses over the details, at least. He sure doesn’t want to hear again what he’s already heard. For Etho’s sake, if nothing else.

Gods. Etho. Who had, for so many years, kept everything about his past and his species under the tightest of wraps. Doc had known for years that Etho wasn’t human, of course, however long it had gone unspoken between them. Doc himself was so obviously far from human that he’d naturally been the one Etho would actually ask what to wear to a restaurant rather than just forging blindly ahead and pretending as he so often and so obviously did. Or, obviously to Doc, that was. Bdubs had his own off-the-wall theories of why Etho was the way he was, and Beef firmly minded his business.

And now it had all come spilling out like that. The worst of both unwilling and cruel.

When Skizz comes back, he looks about twenty years older. Doc doesn’t question it. They probably all look twenty years older at this point. Doc would question why it had been Skizz that Etho had gone falling onto—

Well. That’s a topic for another day.

“He’s asleep,” Skizz says after too long of a silence. “Hope you don’t mind your bed getting stolen, Dippledop.”

“What? No, of course not,” Impulse says.

“…Probably for the best,” Doc says. “Sleeping, that is. Not your bed specifically.”

He looks, maybe for the first time, around the group of assembled Hermits. The group’s raw, and fractured, and they’re all looking at him.

Which, well. Considering he doesn’t see Xisuma, that probably means he’s still in charge, huh.

“Who’s still missing?” Doc says, wondering if he also looks twenty years older and deciding a change-of-hands debriefing from Impulse was going to be very necessary.

There’s a beat before Impulse answers, “Everyone that’s here is here.” He clears his throat. “Well, minus the obvious.”

Etho, of course. Grian and Pearl had disappeared sometime between the end of Scott’s explanation and now without Doc actually noticing. It’s easy enough for Doc to get a headcount on the rest.

“Zisuma. False. Jevin. Cleo. Keralis. XB. Wels. Zedaph. Gem. And Bdubs.” Doc clears his throat, tapping his metal hand on the table. “Am I missing anyone?”

Too long of a moment passes, and Doc knows it.

“There’s, well,” Impulse says, visibly stalling. Gods, they all look old right now. “The only person we know for sure didn’t get off the server is Bdubs.”

If that hits Doc like an anvil to the head, he thinks he doesn’t show it. Only one hand is still shaking, and that’s easily hidden beneath the table. “...For sure,” he repeats slowly. “And we know that how?”

“Grian.”

Another beat passes. “And how does Grian know?” Doc presses.

“...I think that’s a question for Grian to answer,” Impulse says.

“Is it?” Tango says, with a layer of snark that somehow still sounds exhausted.

“Gods, don’t start,” Hypno says.

“Okay,” Doc interjects, getting ahead of that one before it starts, whatever it was. “Then I’ll talk to Grian.” Because he’s certainly not going to believe that without proof. “What do we know about everyone else?”

Impulse pinches the bridge of his nose, leaning back in his chair. “Jack,” he says. Then, “And shit.”

“Jack and shit,” Doc muses. “I can work with jack and shit.”

With a tired laugh, Impulse says, “Man, it’s good to have you back.”

“Just point me and tell me what you need me to break,” Doc says, and pushes aside every other thought, and wishes he could say it was good to be back.

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

“Grian.”

He’s pacing, hand scrubbing through his hair, wings pulsing in time with every step. “Pearl.”

She doesn’t answer. He finally sucks in a breath and spins on his heel. “What the hell happened?”

Pearl, bathed in the streaking sunset light coming through the roof of the barge, regards him for a minute. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“How am I supposed to know?” Grian demands. “I was busy chasing Tango!” With a wave of guilt, he adds, “And Martyn, apparently! Which! Gods only know if that was even actually Martyn!”

He’d almost prefer it hadn’t been, at this point. At least if Martyn hadn’t been real then Grian doesn’t owe himself a guilt trip for not saving him too.

Pearl’s voice is surprisingly quiet when she speaks, given how tightly wound she looks in every line, the way Grian can see her hands tumbling over each other in the front pocket of her hoodie. “I meant after that.”

Grian holds his hands to the side, then says scathingly, “I sang a song and Xyrstad ran away.” An impulse of the moment, maybe, to spirit his Hermits away when there had been no guarantee that the Hermethius unraveling would have deterred Xyrstad following at all.

And yet Hermitcraft remains quiet.

Pearl’s throat works for a moment. “Grian,” she says. “You—”

She breaks off.

When it becomes clear she’s not finishing the sentence, Grian pushes forward again. “How’d you even move?” he asks. “With Time like that, you shouldn’t have been…”

Pearl shrugs. “Dunno. I just could.” She looks away. “And Etho had a whole conversation, so.”

“Yeah, but that was probably on purpose,” Grian points out. Whatever the hell Xyrstad had done to Etho, they’d clearly wanted him as an active participant.

He pinches his nose, blows out of a breath. Even now, away from the Hermethius, with a minute to breathe, Xyrstad’s motivations remained entirely inscrutable.

Because the truth was, Xyrstad and Orez could have gotten Grian back half a dozen times over if that’s what they were really aiming for. Grian wasn’t taking either one of them in a fair fight—and sure, he’d buy his escape after Third Life as exploiting the element of surprise, but everything after that—

It’s hard to say he’s running on borrowed time when it looked more and more like his foes were just handing over the time.

And if they were doing that—

Well. Grian really doesn’t want to see what happened when they stopped.

“Hi. Um. Sorry. Am I—did I interrupt something?”

It feels like someone grabs Grian’s heart and wrings it dry with sheer affection. “Mumbo,” he says, turning toward where his best friend is poking his head in the doorway.

“...Hi, Mumbo,” Pearl says, strangely a little chilly.

“...Hi,” Mumbo echoes, hands shoved in his pockets. “Is. Is everything okay?”

“That’s sure a question, huh,” Grian says dryly. He’s definitely not okay.

Sure, Doc was back, and that was going to make a difference as far as getting the rest of the Hermits back. Unfortunately, Etho was likely also down and out for who even knew how long, and that’s a blow Grian couldn’t have guessed would hit as hard as it did until it had.

Was that a trade he would have made going in, if he’d known? Etho for Doc?

“I need,” Grian says, addressed to both of his friends and neither, hazy and distant as his thoughts coalesce. “I need—to go get something. It shouldn’t take me long.”

“...Go get what?” Pearl asks.

Grian turns away, half-formed thoughts turning into leaden certainty. Of a loop left open, ready to draw tight.

Maybe the first of many.

“My mask,” he says softly. “To find the other Hermits. I should’ve—I should’ve already. I just—”

I didn’t want to. I was scared. I thought maybe I wouldn’t have to.

But he does have to, purely for the reason that his future self had had it.

“Are you insane?” Pearl asks. “That’s—what? What does that even accomplish?”

“I’m running around half blind without it,” Grian says. “I can Look, but it’s all—it’s hard. It’s murky. And it’s not like the Evolutionists, where they’re just gone—I can See the Hermits. But it’s all just fragments, it’s useless—if I could find them properly, then we could—”

“Grian, I thought—” Mumbo says. “Isn’t it gone?”

“I mean,” Grian says, threading his fingers together. “Do I have it? No. But that’s only been since the start of Season Six. Do I know where it is? Yes.”

“...Then where is it?” Pearl asks.

Grian takes in a breath. Remembers why he left it there, to avoid exactly this.

Remembers white wings and Watcher robes and a mask hanging from his belt.

“Evo.”

~~~

The word hangs between the three of them, that old dead server that two had been part of and one never would.

Then, for reasons inexplicable to Mumbo—maybe because he was the one left out—Pearl goes along with it.

“Okay. When do we leave?”

“When do we—” Grian starts, with all his usual bluster, underscored now by genuine upset. “Pearl, there is no we involved here.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pearl says, waving a hand. “And this is the point where we argue about it, that you’re trying to keep us safe by being an idiot, and I point that out, and you get all over-the-top and try to be a hero, so can we skip to the part where you actually give in and just accept that I’m coming?”

It’s such an accurate consolidation of the conversation it makes a chill run up Mumbo’s spine. Before Grian can retort, Pearl speaks again.

“It was my home too.”

“You don’t even remember it,” Grian points out quietly.

“I didn’t remember you either, strictly speaking,” Pearl says. “But I’m still standing here.”

“Is it,” Mumbo finally manages to cut in, with what he feels might be a very pertinent question. “Is it dangerous? For you to go back?”

Grian doesn’t pointedly look away, though he doesn’t quite look Mumbo in the eye either. “It… shouldn’t be. I mean, I went back before. To drop it off. And nothing happened.”

“They weren’t watching you near as closely back then,” Mumbo points out. “I mean, they didn’t—they didn’t know where you were at all then, mate.”

Grian sucks in a breath. “If Xyrstad wanted to follow me home from the Hermethius, they would have,” he says. “I couldn’t have stopped that. Nothing could have. I don’t think they’re any more likely to follow me to Evo than they would be to Hermitcraft, at this point.”

“But Hermitcraft’s still hidden, right? The world codes still work, as far as we know?” Pearl asks. “Quoroth’s still the only Watcher who’s actually gotten on to one of our servers without our permission, and he had an inside man.”

“And me,” Grian points out. “I can. Which is a good thing, objectively. But if I can do it, they’re going to catch up eventually. So I’ve got to stay one step ahead of them.”

“We have new codes,” Mumbo says quietly.

“Which is also why I can’t—Mumbo, what?”

“We have new codes,” Mumbo says, a little louder. “For Quoroth. They’re different.”

Grian sighs. “Mumbo, the last thing I need going into a potentially dangerous situation is to be less Watcher.”

“No, that’s not—” Mumbo says, waving his hands. “Not what I meant! I mean, I mean—we were trying to make Quoroth less powerful without messing up his memory, right? But we weren’t worried about, um, actually hiding him like the original purpose. And we never tested it, not really, but I think I was close, so—I should be able to reverse the idea, I think? To do the hiding without making you less powerful? And then, if they are paying attention to Evo, they wouldn’t notice you showing up. Hopefully.”

Grian frowns, looking away again. “Back to the whole original concept we had.” An original concept that felt like years ago, at this point. “And it’s still not a bad idea, if it actually works this time. But how long would that actually take, Mumbo? I’ve had enough waiting around the last few weeks.”

“Soon,” Mumbo says, without really anything to back it up. “Soon. I think. I mean, I don’t really think I’ll have Etho’s help now—” The words are out of his mouth before he can think them through, and he feels his own internal wince reflected in Grian’s eyes, “—but I think I could. Soon. And then we could go.”

Grian takes in a slow breath. “So you’re inviting yourself too, I see.”

“That’s. Well.” Mumbo clears his throat, unable to come up with nearly as neat of a justification as Pearl. “Yeah.”

“...Okay,” Grian says, pinching his nose. “Two… two days? Does that sound good? I don’t think I can wait any longer than that.”

“Okay,” Mumbo says, too quickly. “Two days. Yeah. I can do that.”

“And then we go?” Pearl says. “All three of us?”

None of them need to actually voice the yes.

~~~

Grian feels distinctly like he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar when he leaves the Barge and immediately runs into Doc.

It’s not that he’s not happy Doc’s back—of course he is, imaginary trades haunting his head be damned—but more that his immediate worry is what Doc had overheard. Whatever their plans for Evo ended up being, he’s of the mind the other Hermits would be better left in the dark until they had been successfully accomplished.

“Hi, Doc.”

It’s hard to make out his old friend’s expression in the dim backlighting of the shopping district—had it really only been that afternoon that they’d been gearing up for the Hermethius? The hours had stretched on, but it couldn’t be later than midnight or so. “Grian,” Doc says. “Are you busy?”

“No,” Grian says, maybe a little too quickly. “What’s up?”

“We need to talk,” Doc says. “About several things.”

“Yeah,” Grian says, ready to fall in step when Doc starts off. “Yeah.”

They take the street in silence, to start. When Doc finally breaks it, it’s not in the way Grian expected.

“How are they healing?”

Grian swallows. Too long of a moment goes by while he works out an answer. It really hadn’t been that long since he and Doc had last talked, but it’s hard to parse the memory out anyways. Hard to believe only a matter of weeks ago Grian would rather have died than have his ruined wings on display and now they were simply a fact of life he had to work around. And on a practical level, the most he’d had to work around was how uncomfortable chair backs were.

“I dunno,” he says. “Well enough, I guess.”

“I’d like to have a look when the light’s better,” Doc says, leaving Grian suddenly grateful for the fall of night giving him an excuse to have a little forewarning. “If that’s all right.”

“Yeah,” Grian says, not entirely sure if it’s all right but deciding that was a problem later either way.

“And I wanted to let you know,” Doc says, reaching into the inner pocket of his lab coat for something, “That I didn’t spend the whole time in space kicking my boots up.”

He passes over a set of papers, neatly folded. Grian opens them with a little frown. The lighting is enough to keep mobs away, for sure—not that they strictly needed it here, given that they’d built this place over a mushroom island—but it wasn’t the greatest to read what were clearly detailed blueprints, and it takes him a moment to parse them out.

Prosthetics.

“Oh,” Grian says quietly, too blindsided to properly process everything that means. That Doc had been working on this, in the middle of his own personal unreality prison; that such a thing might be possible, and yet possibly unnecessary.

His future self hadn’t been sporting prosthetics, after all.

That’s too much to explain now, where they’ve stopped in front of Mount Scarmore, the faces of friends they’d found and friends they hadn’t staring down with their impassive judgment. Too many thoughts swirling in Grian’s head now that the implications of everything his future self represented seem to be bearing down harder by the moment.

A loop in time left open had no choice but to close.

“Thanks,” he croaks, because it’s been too long of a silence and Doc deserves an answer.

Doc nods. “Not now,” he says. “But later, when we have the chance, we’ll go over it.”

“Thanks,” Grian says again. He’s not sure if looking at Doc or Mount Scarmore was worse, at this point.

He knows it’s coming when Doc takes in a breath. “I’ve been told you’re the person to ask about Bdubs.”

And again. Would Grian ever be able to stop answering that question? “I didn’t get him out.”

“...I see.”

There’s more to say than that, but Grian is so tired of saying it. He clears his throat. “I’ll let you get back with Impulse and Hypno,” he says. “Let me know if you need me.”

How weird would it be, to fall back in with that group now, when he’d spent the last weeks locked in with Etho on a mission that was now complete, for better or worse?

Would he even have the chance to begin with?

Doc leaves, and Grian continues to stare down Mount Scarmore, and readies himself for the step off into oblivion.

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

“What are you doing?”

It’s hard to remember, with everything that had happened in the last three days, that they’d also given Quoroth free rein of the server.

“And what’s it to you?” Grian snaps in return. “None of your business, I’d think.”

“You keep disappearing,” Quoroth complains with all the petulance that had so gotten under Grian’s skin so many years ago. “How’ve you made that work?”

“How d’you think?” Grian retorts, trying to keep his voice cool despite the flicker of hope blooming in his chest. If Mumbo’s newest edition of the codes were potent enough to make Quoroth come complain about them— without splitting Grian in half this time, as far as he could tell—that boded incredibly well for their efficacy.

Even if that efficacy might prove to be a mixed bag all around.

“Starting to think we should put these ones on you,” Grian continues when Quoroth only stares at him unfocused. “Then I could ignore you more easily.”

“Like that changes anything,” Quoroth sulks back. Then, “You’re planning something.”

“And what’s it to you? You’re not part of it.”

“Oh, you always think I’m so stupid,” Quoroth snaps. “When I bet you’re about to do something stupid, aren’t you?”

“It’s none of your—” Grian starts, only for Quoroth to summarily cut him right back off.

“You’re going somewhere. Somewhere you’re worried enough about being found, or you wouldn’t be messing around with not being Seen. Which means wherever you’re going is somewhere that’s a genuine danger. And given that no one else thinks there are any leads, you’re not telling anyone where.”

“I’m telling who I want to where,” Grian says, for all it’s probably more confirmation than he should probably be given. “And you’re not in that group.”

“So I’m right,” Quoroth crows. “And you are being stupid.”

Grian sighs, thinking it would be a great time if Mumbo and Pearl wanted to show back up right about now. They might be asleep, given Grian had given them no indication he was ready to go, but most everyone being asleep might mean this was the best chance they’d get. “You know, if you wanted us to actually trust you with anything, you could be helping find people.”

“With what mask?”

If Quoroth had hit just a smidge closer than Grian liked, hopefully dipping his words in enough acid would cover it. “You can get by without it, you know.”

“Oh, trust me, I do know that,” Quoroth replies. Then, with a slight intake of breath, he adds, “Look. Don’t be stupid, all right?”

Right. Maybe Grian should go find Mumbo and Pearl himself. “We’ve got two definitions of that word, and I don’t think they’re ever going to match.”

~~~

Mumbo’s worrying. A lot. He’s not sure if he’s worrying more or less than he should be. He’d probably be worrying less if Grian hadn’t just woken him up in the middle of the night.

“Okay,” Grian says. They hadn’t had to wake up Pearl, at least. She’d already been haunting the shopping district and had beat both of them back to the Barge. “Quoroth just inadvertently gave me the biggest go-ahead we’re ever going to get, because apparently these codes are working on him. More or less.”

“So you want to go now,” Pearl says, which is exactly what Mumbo had been afraid someone was going to say. Then, flatly, “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” Grian snaps, which might not be entirely truthful; if he had been, it’s been too little to seep past the barriers that kept Mumbo from feeling it secondhand, which was something.

Pearl glances sideways at Mumbo, as if asking him for exactly that confirmation—he grimaces a little, hopes Grian doesn’t notice, and lifts one shoulder in a shrug.

“What?” Grian says. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“You’re not getting rid of me now,” Pearl says, with a verbal dig of her heels.

“...Right,” Mumbo says after too long of a moment. “Right. I mean. Me neither.”

Silence stretches out. Grian glances over his shoulder, out at the twinkling lights of the shopping district, the shadows of Aquatown’s towers. “Okay, then. Go for it, Mumbo.”

Mumbo goes for it, fumbling with his comm and laying the code down thrice. He’s fairly sure it’s the dark that’s making Grian seem fuzzy around the edges.

“So do you, uh. Do you have, like, the server address?” Mumbo asks when neither of the other two do. “Because, uh, I don’t.”

Grian, still with slightly too long of a pause, finally looks back. His brain’s as locked down as it has been since the moon had fallen, and even if he’s not actively stabbing Mumbo there’s no way Mumbo was getting anything out of him. Still, his put-upon “Honestly,” rings as harried as ever.

Grian holds out a hand to each of them, and Season Seven fades from view.

~~~

Grian’s Base—Evo

Grian didn’t expect the first thing to hit him to be the smell.

It’s not… awful, per se. It’s definitely musty, enough to make his nose wrinkle, with an uncomfortable damp note that probably came hand-in-hand with abandoning a base to the ocean it had been carved out of.

Besides, if he focuses on the smell, he can ignore every other uncomfortable feeling bubbling up in his stomach.

The last time he had been here had been as swift of an in-and-out as this one could be. The time before that is as glaringly obvious as the crumbling pillars and the leaking layer of water already seeping into his trainers. The grass had died off, drowned under the steady drip of salt water, leaving only decomposing brown blades and sucking mud.

(Here is the place he healed a decade ago. Here is the place he gave up, two years after that.)

“It’s not far from here,” he says, wincing at the squelch of mud beneath his feet as he takes a step towards his old storage system. The ocean mist coming through the walls is seeping uncomfortably through his jumper, too, sure to leave a prickling layer of salt in between his feathers for later.

If anything, he’s glad Pearl can’t remember having seen this place before, and Mumbo had never been. It’s worse, he thinks, to know what this place used to look like compared to the decaying ruins of now. They both look as uncomfortable being here as Grian feels, at least.

No one seems willing to break the gloomy silence as Grian traipses over to his chests. It’s a prickling unease, a distressing sort of reverence to this dying place more akin to a graveyard than a church. And maybe it is, in a way. The place Grian had died, for Xelqua to take his place, and for whoever the man he was now who had clawed his way free of his own grave.

It’s in a chest. Anticlimactic, overall. There’s no puzzle to solve, no perilous journey. There’s just a curve of familiar porcelain off-white, sitting at the top of dusty compartments full of long-abandoned rubble.

Grian does not put on the mask. He slips it away into his inventory to be dealt with later.

And that’s when a voice says, “Are you insane?”

Quoroth seems, perhaps, more startlingly out of place on Evo than he had on Hermitcraft. Grian had been too busy bitching earlier to realize he was wearing, of all things, jeans, and a plaid shirt far too large on him that might have been Beef’s at one point. It’s disarming, in a strange way.

Grian will not be disarmed.

“And what the hell are you doing here?” he demands. “So much for disappearing, I suppose?”

“I’ve spent time here,” Quoroth says. “Of course I was going to notice another Watcher showing up! And do you know who else will?”

It’s enough to yank Grian’s heart along a few extra beats, for all that his feathers flare on the defense. He takes half a step forward, enough to at least feel like he has Pearl and Mumbo behind him. “Well I wasn’t planning on staying long,” he snaps. “Not any longer than last time!”

“They weren’t around last time!” Quoroth says. “They were locked up! They’re around now!”

The decaying musk turns sour, a little. A dying world’s magic wheezes, and parts not for two Watchers but four.

And Grian stares at the beginning of his end, shudders under the press of two more minds on his, and can do nothing but stand as Evo’s Watchers alight in front of him.

“Well,” Yvelle says at long last with a click of her tongue, and Grian is laid bare under a hundred eyes, codes be damned and this was a mistake. “Hardly the family reunion I expected, but I suppose with two prodigal sons now this might be the best I can hope for.”

“I’m not a prodigal,” Quoroth says hotly, with enough venom that he’d surely be bristling the wings he no longer had if he still could.

“No?” Yvelle says, all familiar icy chill that Grian couldn’t have forgotten if he’d tried. And he had tried. “You’re going to stand there, and tell me that?”

“It is perhaps nothing short of a tragedy that our two most promising converts were also doomed to be the most rebellious,” Zyraus adds.

And there’s the tick, that had nagged at Grian for so long. Quoroth had been leagues ahead of him right from the very start, all smarts and power and motivation that Grian had never possessed.

So what else could put them in that same category, if not for—

“Maybe it says something about your methods,” Pearl says, and if Grian’s pulse weren’t pounding in his ears he probably would have told her off for it.

There’s a faint smirk coming to Yvelle’s lips then, once again too-familiar. “Well,” she says. “And doesn’t Xelqua keep the most interesting company these days?”

Grian can see the retort on Pearl’s lips. He tugs it away—tugs them forward, into the relative pocket of privacy that Time could afford them with remarkably too much ease.

“Listen,” he says, and his voice is raw and it’s such an effort to find it he’s not sure he’s going to get the words out. “It’s okay.”

“This—” Mumbo starts with a hysterical break in his voice. “This seems like the opposite of okay, actually!”

Pearl, meanwhile, is staring just over Grian’s shoulder with intrigue, at the trio of Watchers frozen just beyond. “How is this…”

“You’re on the inside this time,” Grian says, trying not to think, trying not to shake from the effort of holding up this little bubble of time before Yvelle would surely break through. “With me.”

Pearl glances back over at him sharply, though it’s Mumbo who breaks the silence. “That’s—okay. Right. Um. Can we go, then? Is that a thing we can do?”

“Yeah,” Grian says, and curses the way his voice cracks. “You can.”

They both catch it, in a way he wishes they hadn’t. “What do you mean, you?” Pearl demands. “Do not— do not tell me you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, I swear to every god, Grian—”

“I knew it was possible they’d find me here,” Grian says, and his voice at least sounds level even if it was also entirely dead. “It’s their world. I knew this might be how it happened.” Didn’t make it any easier to be standing here.

His heart’s in his throat. If saying it would make it real, then—

“I have to go back with them.”

“No you don’t,” Pearl says, with hardly a beat to catch a breath in between. “Whatever you’re thinking, whatever you’re trying to plan and self-sacrifice your way out of—just stop. You don’t need to do this.”

“I do,” Grian says quietly, only to be immediately drowned out by Mumbo.

“We could run away. Like we talked about at the start of the season. We could—we’ve got the codes. We’ve got weapons! That’s gotta mean something!”

Trying to talk is kind of like trying to drag his own voice up from the pits of hell. “We probably could,” he says. “For a while.”

“...Okay,” Mumbo says. “Then—then let’s go!”

“The problem is,” Grian continues, “is that I have to go back because I know I went back.”

Whole and brilliantly white.

And cloaked in Watcher robes.

And the noose is finally set to close.

“...What the hell does that mean?” Pearl says.

“I didn’t—I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you, I didn’t know how to explain—but I saw. I saw me. From the future. And it’s set now, because that happened, that’s how Time works, and I have to go back because I know he went back and I’m sorry.”

“That’s— what? What are you talking about?”

“That’s how I knew Tango was alive. Before we found him. Because I told myself. And—and because I told myself, because I saw and heard things that happened in between now and then, I can’t change them. I can fill in the blanks, guess at the bits in between, but I can’t change them. I know I went back and I don’t know how but I know I did so I know I have to— and if I have to—then I’m going now. Before more of you get hurt. Before I do any more damage fighting it. And if I’m going to—”

He glances back over his shoulder at Yvelle and Zyraus and Quoroth.

“Then I’m going to pick them over Xyrstad and Orez.”

Objective as the decision is, it’s hard to convince his own brain when he knows Yvelle is catching up to him, when this little sanctuary he’s holding up is bound to shatter any moment and his time is running out.

They’re both going to protest, he knows. Try to talk him out of it. Gods he wants to be talked out of it.

And he just doesn’t have time.

“Love you both,” Grian says. “Love you all. Bring everyone back for me, all right?”

Yvelle pushes the same moment Grian throws, and Time fractures around him again, just a moment too late for her to wrap her claws around Mumbo and Pearl as he sends them back where they belong.

And Grian stands in the ruins of Evo with his captors for a second time, not manhandled into place but just as trapped.

He turns back slowly, faces them. Their shoddy attempt at a family, the furthest cry from the family Grian had made for himself in their absence.

Quoroth mouths, What are you doing?

Grian ignores him, and says, quietly, “You win.”

Eternity passes in agony, some mental back-and-forth between Yvelle and Zyraus and maybe Quoroth as well. Something that Xelqua had never and probably would never manage to be privy to.

The world falls out from under him and the inexorable Void swallows him whole yet again.

~~~

???

Grian looks up and sees sky.

That, alone, is utterly fucking baffling, considering the End doesn’t have a sky.

He levers himself up on one elbow. He’s in what seems to be a perfectly normal taiga, although considering that nothing about this situation seems to be perfectly normal, he’s already a little suspect.

(The world below him roils, not so much a welcome as a fervent hunger for his bones, and that’s disconcerting enough even without the circumstances that had led him here.)

“...Hello?” he ventures, perhaps stupidly, though nothing but the wind of the forest answers him. No Yvelle. No Zyraus. Not even Quoroth.

Well. This was. Unexpected.

He props himself until he’s sitting firmly upright, and other than a set of mountains rising beyond the halo of spruce needles splayed out over his head, nothing about the situation becomes more apparent.

Grian picks up his comm, for lack of any better idea, and despite the single piece of information it presents him in plain, blinking characters, he still has no idea what the fuck is going on.

100:00:00:00

And then, after several blinks:

000:00:00:01

000:00:00:02

000:00:00:03

000:00:00:04

000:00:00:05

So Grian says, for all the empty, hungry world to hear:

“Fuck.”

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Mumbo’s not entirely convinced the sound Pearl makes when they get back to Hermitcraft is human.

“You can’t do this! You can’t leave!”

She’s shouting to an open sky, to winter dawn and hanging clouds. Which is kind of weird, because Mumbo’s pretty sure they’d left Hermitcraft in the middle of the night and that had been all of, like, ten minutes ago. He’s a little too shell-shocked to think through the implications of that.

Surely they hadn’t—

Surely Grian hadn’t—

“I want you to promise me something. If they take me back I don’t want you to come looking for me. Because I won’t be there.”

Mumbo thinks—

Mumbo thinks he’d feel Grian die.

But right now he’s not sure he can feel Grian at all.

He’s also not sure he can feel his face.

“Guys? What’s going on?”

Mumbo thinks Pearl had still been shouting, because Impulse’s voice cuts through the sudden silence like a knife. He’s not sure what she’d been shouting.

There are—several Hermits around now, peeking out of buildings and dropping out of the sky. Impulse and Hypno and Doc. Tango and Skizz. Scar. Cub and Beef and TFC.

“He’s gone,” Pearl says, and somehow it’s louder than her screaming.

“He’s—what—who?” Impulse says, and Mumbo’s sure glad at least someone can speak because it sure isn’t him.

“He left,” Pearl says, something vicious in her words and half-crazed in her eyes. She keeps looking toward the red-streaked horizon, and Mumbo has a dissonant thought of old sailors’ warnings. “He went back to them.”

The words hang. People process. It’s too quiet.

“He went back to them!”

Mumbo pulls on his hair. This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.

“Did you do this?”

Pearl spins, full of venom, and for a moment Mumbo thinks she’s looking at him. Which is nonsensical. He realizes only belatedly that she’s looking past him.

At—

Quoroth?

“Did you put it in his head? Tell them he was coming? Lie to him about the codes? What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything!” Quoroth says, hands in the air.

Pearl ignores him, picking up steam as she goes. “So was this the plan all along? Sneak your way in so you could set him up? Try to make me trust you, convince us you were safe, so you could get him back when he finally let his guard down?”

“If that was the plan,” Quoroth shouts back, “don’t you think I would have gone with, genius?”

It only pulls Pearl up for a second. “So I’m just supposed to believe they found us immediately with no warning?”

“It’s their world!” Quoroth retorts. “You don’t know what that’s like! That was their warning!”

“Oh, isn’t that convenient? I don’t know what it’s like?”

“They could have had warning,” Mumbo says quietly. Almost gravely. Tentative, as too many pieces slide into place and make almost too much sense.

They could have had warning.

“You could have told them.”

Pearl doesn’t answer. Pearl, clearly, does not immediately process what Mumbo’s saying.

Then, she turns toward him, and says with all offense, “I’m fucking sorry?”

“Well, I mean,” Mumbo continues, somehow managing to keep his voice level, to avoid being cowed. “You haven’t exactly been forthcoming about what you’re up to!”

“Why the hell would I turn Grian over to the Watchers?” Pearl asks. “Are you insane?”

“Mumbo, buddy,” Skizz cuts in, taking a half a step in from the crowd. Mumbo glances over at him, catches a glimpse of others continuing to join the throng. Ren’s come up beside Doc; even Etho’s visible just at the edge, who Mumbo hasn’t seen since the immediate aftermath of the Hermethius. Etho’s leaning up against the nearest building from head to hip, clothes rumpled and eyes dark and something almost terrifyingly vacant in his expression that Mumbo’s not going to dwell on, thanks.

Skizz is still talking.

“—I really don’t think this is gonna help—”

“No, but—hang on, think a second,” Mumbo says, still pushing forward. “It’s—I mean. Isn’t it awfully convenient that Grian’s dead best friend showed up right when everything—I mean, sorry, when everything started going to shit? The same time we ended up on a server that exploded? The same time Impulse got possessed? And—and—by the way, really convenient amnesia, so it’s not like we can try to compare anything to the real Pearl!”

“I’m not a mole, Mumbo!” Pearl says hotly. “What’s wrong with you?”

“You wouldn’t know if you were!”

The words hang for a long moment. “You’re out of your mind,” Pearl finally says. “I would never hurt him. Sorry I was busy being dead until it was inconvenient to you.”

With that, she spins on her heel and pushes her way through the crowd.

Nothing remains for a long moment but shocked silence. “I’m not,” Mumbo says, casting a wary glance around at the gathered faces. “I’m not the only one who sees that, right?”

More silence. Mumbo’s not sure he’s breathing. Not sure anything that’s happened in the last twenty minutes is real. He sure hopes it isn’t.

“...No,” Tango says at long last, gazing down the way Pearl had gone. “No, you’re not.”

“That’s not helping anyone,” Doc says firmly. Doc. Doc was back. If anyone could fix this, then surely Doc—

“I didn’t do anything,” Quoroth insists, evidently having found his voice again, still standing quiet and cowed in the middle of the road. “I didn’t. I tried to stop him when I figured it out.”

“...He did,” Mumbo has to admit, even still so tumultuous and upside down he’s not even sure whose side he should be on. But it is the truth.

“Well, if you all want to wag fingers and burn daylight then carry on,” Scar cuts in. “I’m going to go, oh, I don’t know, figure out where Grian’s gone?”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Impulse says immediately, and Mumbo wonders if his old friend is having the same horrible thought he is.

“I’m not—I’m not what they want me to be, I won’t ever be, I’m not—I won’t ever be. And I’m not going back to that, I’m not going to, I won’t let them—”

“I’d rather die.”

“How is that not a good idea, Impulse?” Scar asks. “Because as far as I know I’m the only one who has an instanton—instantoeneous—very fast ticket to wherever he is.”

“And if that’s the End?” Impulse points out. “They’ll probably kill you, Scar.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time they’ve tried,” Scar says. Then, defensively, “You can’t stop me.”

“No,” says Doc, “but we can strongly recommend against it.”

Scar rears back, then says exactly what Mumbo’s thinking. “So you just want me to leave him? After everything else, everyone else, all we’ve done for them, you just want me to leave him?”

“That’s not—” Impulse starts, then breaks off with a helpless hand gesture.

“I think what everyone’s tryin’ to say,” Joe cuts in, leaving Mumbo to wonder when he’d even arrived, “is that—Grian probably had a plan, don’t we think?”

A plan to give himself up to save the rest of us, Mumbo thinks, but manages a miserable nod all the same. Was there anything Scar could do, at this point?

He’s crying, actually. He hadn’t noticed when he’d started. TFC comes up beside him, holding out an arm, and Mumbo gratefully leans into it.

He’d— would he feel Grian die?

He’s not sure, as the others continue to argue, which alternative is better.

~~~

Toon Towers—Hermitcraft Seven

Tango leaves them arguing. Whatever they decide, they clearly don’t want his input anymore.

Tango, on the other hand, is suddenly in desperate want of some input.

It takes six rings on the comm, two more than usual. Just long enough that Tango’s started holding his breath when the familiar voice of Ferron Socrates Tek says, “‘Lo?”

Choking on his own exhale, Tango says, “Hi, Dad.”

“Everything all right?” Ron asks, and something in his words sounds oddly… distracted, given the circumstances. “Besides the obvious.”

“Skizz said he’d talked to Hilda,” Tango defers, with a little bit of fishing. “So, you know. Other than that.”

“Other than that,” Ron says.

“Yeah, other than that, it’s all gone to shit,” Tango says. Then, at the familiar jangle on the other end, nothing like the clatter of his father’s carpentry shop, he says, “Are you out riding?”

“Yes,” Ron says, once again a little too tersely. Tango can hear the lowing of a strider in the background, and wonders just what had dragged his father outside the confines of Clan Tek. Then, before he can ask, Ron continues, “Your nephew’s missing.”

“...I have six nephews, Dad,” Tango reminds him, despite the drop in his stomach. Missing, gone, dead. Could Tango not even escape that in his own family?

“Tokien,” Ron clarifies, which makes sickening sense and is somehow all the worse. Tokien was the youngest of Tango’s niblings, the only child of Hilda herself, the youngest of Tango’s older sisters. The kid was barely twenty-seven barks—nine Overworld years—and if his habits of wandering the outskirts of their village had developed into him actually going missing—

“How long?” Tango asks.

“...Two days,” Ron says.

Tango says a word under his breath that makes him abruptly glad it’s his father on the line and not his mother. “I’m sorry. Shit. Do you need—I don’t—gods, it’s enough of a mess up here—”

“Stay where you need to stay, Tango,” Ron tells him. “Or come home if you need to come home.”

The lure of that is… possibly a little more intoxicating than it should be, given that Tango feels like he’s currently sitting in the wreckage of all the bridges he’d burned. There’s a commotion on the other end of the line, though, interrupting before he can voice that thought.

“I have to go,” Ron says urgently, as more shouting sounds from the other side. “That’s—do what you need to, Tango. We’re here when you need us. That’s—” And then, just after a bellowing, “HELLO?” the call drops.

Tango stays, staring, off the edge of his base. It’s been barely a matter of weeks, and still Season Seven feels trapped in eternal winter, heavy clouds hanging ominously across the sky.

It’s daylight. Obviously daylight. There’s no way it can’t be daylight.

And yet.

(The sky is still full of stars.)

~~~

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

<Tango> Call home.

Impulse sees the messages far later than it was sent. They’d been busy trying to figure out what the hell to do about Grian—which they hadn’t, really, although Scar hadn’t gone running off to the End yet. Yet might be the keyword there, and Impulse is trying not to dwell on it.

He’s awful tired of every inch they gain losing them a mile.

Tango’s message seems serious, though, so Impulse steps out, gathers his nerve, and calls his mother.

She answers on the second ring, and Impulse barely gives her the time to pick up before he asks, “Is everything okay? Tango told me to call.”

There’s a quiet sigh from the other end, before Tarisha says, “Quite a bit better than when he called your father, yes.”

Impulse lets out a breath, then says, “Good. That’s good. What happened?”

He can hear his father’s voice somewhere in the background, along with another, quieter, that he can’t quite make out. “Tokien had himself an adventure,” Tarisha says dryly, but the worry in her undertone betrays just how perilous of an adventure he must have had. “And, I think, brought home some of the best news we could give you right now.”

Gods, if Impulse couldn’t use some good news right now. “What do you mean?”

His mother turns away from the comm for a moment, plainly addressing someone other than him. “How is she?”

She’s plainly put him on speaker, given the clarity of the voice that answers. A voice that would have, perhaps, brought Impulse to his knees if he weren’t already sitting. It does bring tears to his eyes.

“She should be all right. She’ll need to actually rest it, which is going to be half the battle for Gem, I think. Goodness.”

“Xisuma,” Impulse croaks, and despite the way his eyes are swimming he feels like he’s coming up for air for the first time since he’d surfaced on Skizz’s world. “X!”

There’s a shuffle of changing hands, and it is, at last, the voice of Hermitcraft’s admin that finally answers, “Hello, Impulse.”

Chapter Text

Shopping District—Hermitcraft Seven

Skizz worries.

Not in the way Impulse worries, the anxiety disorder that had reared its ugly head when they’d been off to college. Skizz had started worrying far earlier than that, keenly aware he was a year older than Zedaph and two years older than Tango and Impulse and that probably meant he should have his shit together enough to look out for them.

And, well. Skizz had gotten older, which only meant the group of people he worried about expanded.

He is, at the moment, very worried about Etho.

Skizz wishes he had more than the year or so of experience he currently held with a single person’s music. Maybe, if he’d understood it for longer, or if he had more people to compare it to, or if he’d paid more attention when he’d assumed it was tinnitus the first half of his life, he’d have some better idea of what was going on. And hopefully be less worried.

(He has the sinking feeling that knowledge might make him more worried, actually.)

Etho’s hiding from him, or at least that feels like the best way to describe it. And sure, after whatever the hell had happened— which Skizz, of course, had not gotten a word edgewise of, only the innate knowledge that it had been terrible— that makes sense. He’d probably be hiding too. That doesn’t make it any less concerning that Skizz had heard nothing but incoherent agony only for Etho to come home and cry until he passed out. From that point on, no matter how weird and out-of-sorts he sounded, he’d been asleep or at least very good at pretending to be asleep every time Skizz had checked on him.

Other than the worrying, this whole thing is so far out of Skizz’s wheelhouse the only thing he can think of is bringing in an expert. That being Tarisha Theodora Tek.

The morning’s kerfuffle had been the first time Skizz had even seen Etho out of bed in the last two and a half days, which he’s hoping is an encouraging sign. What isn’t encouraging is that, several hours and several phone calls and several important updates all the way from Clan Tek later, he finds Etho in pretty much the exact same spot, curled up against the side of the building Skizz was pretty sure Impulse had pointed out as his and Bdubs’s lamp shop.

“...Hey, buddy,” Skizz says, hoping he sounded relatively upbeat and not as worried as he felt. “How you doin’?”

Etho doesn’t immediately answer, nor lift his head from his knees. When he finally does speak, it’s so rough and disjointed it sounds like the words hurt. “Mumbo’s very loud.”

“Yeah,” Skizz says, assuming Etho’s able to tell the difference between the Watchers in some way, even though the only indication Skizz can parse out between Grian, Quoroth, and Mumbo was that it clearly wasn’t Grian being loud because Grian was gone. “Actually,” Skizz continues, settling on the grass and wondering how Etho wasn’t actively freezing if he’d really been sitting out here since Mumbo’s meltdown. “Might have a solution there, if you want a little peace and quiet?”

Etho doesn’t lift his head, strictly, but there’s enough of a shift Skizz is pretty sure it counts as a continuation of the conversation on his end.

“Xisuma and Gem turned up with Tango and Impulse’s family,” Skizz says. “I think a lot of the Hermits are going to head that way. We’ve all been invited. If you need a little quiet, we can probably split the group, at least for a few days.”

Etho makes a sound that’s probably affirmative. Skizz hopes it’s affirmative.

He’s not quite sure what he’s going to do if it isn’t.

~~~

Clan Tek

Whether Etho had fully agreed in the moment or not, he comes along. Under better circumstances, Skizz would be happier showing him the place that had been refuge and second home for most of his childhood.

As it is, they arrive in the center of the Tek village by virtue of the fact that Skizz is a Tek, cutting out the necessity of journeying in most other visitors would be subject to. There’s the quick, familiar stop at the respawn anchor, where they both barely manage to toss in their hunks of glowstone before being accosted by the equally familiar gang of Tek niblings.

Skizz fends off the crowd—at least seven of them already, with the distant chatter of voices revealing more were on the way—with all the adeptness his ‘favorite uncle’ privileges give him, and manages the keen disappointment of the young nieces, nephews, and first/second/third cousins of various removals mainly by the fact that Etho looks like he’s been thrown to a pack of bloodthirsty wolves.

“I was about to tell you they don’t bite,” Skizz says to the abject sound of relief Etho gives him as they extricate themselves, “but that’s a lie, actually. You really should watch out for the teeth.”

Etho’s answer is, once again, a little belated and slightly clipped, but he does answer, gripping tightly to the railing as Skizz guides him up the porch steps to their ultimate destination. “Reassuring.”

Skizz laughs, even if it’s forced, and opens the front door like he lives there. By every law of Tek tradition, he does, after all.

“Uncle Skizz!” cries another voice, and even though Skizz knows exactly the reason he hadn’t been greeted outside he’s already on his knees on the floor.

“I bet you are in so much trouble, young man,” he says, then lets out a grunt as Tokien flings himself into his arms.

“Mom says I’m grounded until I’m thirty-five,” Tokien says with a sigh. “Grandpa talked her down to thirty-three.”

“And maybe you’ll have learned your lesson by then, huh?” Skizz says, giving the kid one last squeeze before letting go and settling back on his heels.

“I helped,” Tokien insists. “Uncle Xisuma and Aunt Gem would have been lost forever if I hadn’t found them!”

“...Xisuma and Gem are here?” Etho asks, which Skizz had definitely mentioned, though clearly it hadn’t processed.

“They both took to the Nether when the moon fell, they said,” comes another voice, as Hilda comes around the kitchen island drying her hands. “They’re staying with Mom and Dad—across the street, two houses towards center,” she adds for Etho’s sake. “You’d have passed it on the way in. Do you know how many of the Hermits are coming? Nephel and Ursa have already cleared out their guest rooms, and you know Mom and Dad’s place has plenty of space. And I swear if Impulse and Tango don’t get their behinds over here for at least a few days—”

“Most of them, I think,” Skizz cuts in. “They’re just working out the logistics. And you and me both on Dop and Top.” He works his way up off the floor and holds out his arms for Hilda as well.

“I’d have been coming for your behind next,” she says, with an obliging squeeze and a kiss on the cheek.

“Rude,” Skizz says, then, “And I’ve told you about Etho.” Not everything about Etho, of course—not even the most important bits, really. That could be saved for when they had a little more privacy. “And this is Hilda, Etho. The only one of Tango’s sisters who wasn’t basically a whole adult already when we were growing up.”

“It’s good to meet you,” Hilda says. “And make yourself at home, please. Anything you need. I have to head out; I had to bump off all my appointments the past few days. Tak’s out too—my husband—so Tokien’s going to Mom and Dad’s. I’d say just shout if you need anything, but Skizz knows better than to think he needs to shout.”

“I still can shout,” Skizz says. Normally he would have been fine watching Tokien for the afternoon—would have volunteered, even. For the moment, he’s worried enough about Etho that a few hours of quiet were probably for the best.

“You never stopped,” Hilda teases. “Tokien, let’s go.”

Tokien drags his feet, though he does give a big wave on the way out the door and says, “Bye, Uncle Skizz! Bye, Uncle Etho!”

That leaves a mark, apparently, given that Etho’s staring wide-eyed at Skizz for a solid thirty seconds after the front door closes. “Happens,” he says. “It’s like stray cats. Tango brings Impulse home, Impulse brings me home, now you’re here. It’s a never-ending chain of uncles. You’ll know you’ve really made it when Peleus wants you, Nephel, Impulse, and me to stand together for the family sweater photos.”

Even with Skizz’s vain attempt to lighten the mood, Etho still very much has the ‘thrown to the wolves look’ in his eyes, and Skizz is pretty sure the sound he’s making is the musical equivalent of an overloaded comm stalling out. Skizz can’t really blame him for not getting the joke; even if the kids acted like they’d invented the joke of trying to make bad words in the family photos, it had been ZITS who were the true pioneers of it. (Or so they liked to think. It was hard to beat the fact that Hilda, the closest to them in age, had a very convenient initial for such shenanigans.)

“Here,” Skizz says when the silence drags out. “Guest room’s down here. You’re across from Tokien, but he’s a good kid. Shouldn’t bother you any.” Skizz props open the door to the guest room. There’s always something a little disjointed and slapdash about Cinder architecture; it came from their never-ending expansion, the way families and clans grew by bits and pieces and jumps, and their houses responded in kind, new rooms added wherever and whenever needed. “Bathroom’s down that side,” he continues, pointing past the bed to the door on the far wall. “You’ve got it to yourself.”

Etho takes it all with that passive sort of acceptance that’s become the norm, and Skizz wishes it weren’t so worrying. “Where will you be?”

Skizz glances away, stepping into the room and making a show of double-checking the bed and closet, like the Teks weren’t meticulous hosts more than prepared for an influx of guests. “I stay with Hilda and Tak.”

A long moment passes. Skizz hadn’t explained that in the slightest—hadn’t quite known the best way to explain, or how Etho would react to said explanation. Skizz also can’t tell if Etho’s quiet “Oh,” is genuinely puzzled or just more of his current unreadability. Skizz is fairly sure that note that comes through is actually puzzled, though.

“...Hilda and I dated the summer I was sixteen and she was seventeen,” Skizz says after a longer moment. “Which ended as the most amicable disaster you can begin to imagine. Took us a decade to figure out what queerplatonic was and why it was different from romantic attraction. That made the second time around work a whole lot better. And I got to be man of honor at her wedding.”

That… clearly did not make any more sense to Etho, but at least he doesn’t sound upset about it. “Oh. Okay.”

“So,” Skizz says, clearing his throat and figuring the easiest thing was to spell it out. “Hilda and Tak are married. Hilda and I are queerplatonic partners. Tak and I are good friends. Everyone’s happy and I usually stay with them when I’m here.”

“...Okay,” Etho says again, with what might be the musical equivalent of a shrug.

Skizz will take the shrug. He’s also going to change the subject.

“Do you need anything?” he asks. “Lunch is kind of catch as catch can, if you want anything, and dinner’s in the pavilion that we passed by the respawn anchor unless you hear otherwise. And contrary to what you might think, plenty of water. There are underground springs this deep in the Nether.”

“...Have you got anything for a headache?”

“Sure,” Skizz says quickly. “Hang tight.” He ducks into Hilda and Tak’s bathroom, then returns with a small bottle. “We’re a little closer to modern city-server medicine than outworld potions,” he explains. “Tak’s an optometrist, Hilda’s a dentist, and Tarisha’s a therapist. There’s a lot of crossover with the Overworld medical community. Two of these when you need it—it’s usually in the master bathroom from when Tokien was a kiddo, so you’re welcome to keep it for a while.”

Etho nods, gives a vague impression of thankful, then disappears into the guest room and closes the door behind him.

Skizz stands, lets out a breath, and worries some more.

Being home could only fix so much.

~~~

Grian’s Mansion—Hermitcraft Seven

Mumbo knows the other Hermits are talking about whether or not they should go stay with the Teks. Mumbo also knows he should probably be part of that discussion. He just…

Can’t bring himself to.

He made it as far as just inside Grian’s Nether portal before he’d simply fallen over and stayed there. He’s staring at the far wall, just where Grian had been the last time Mumbo had come flailing into this room at full speed, albeit from the other direction. Grian, newly respawned from Third Life, a shadow of a ghost, wings gleaming black and on full display.

And Mumbo, of course, thinks of Grian’s return from Last Life, in a room Mumbo could never return to. Of Grian, pained and terrified and maimed.

How could he go back to them? How could he LEAVE?

Mumbo curls up tighter on himself, and the walls of his best friend’s base suddenly press in on top of him, claustrophobic and accusing. He shudders, feels a second twitch go up his spine, and suddenly the elbow of his own wing smacks him in the back of his head. He lets out a cry, muffled into his knees, not entirely sure if it was from surprise or pain or sheer despair.

“I can’t do this without you,” he gasps out. “You have to come back.”

He reaches out, even. Flails with his pitiful brain as far as he can reach.

Grian doesn’t answer.

Grian doesn’t come back.

Mumbo’s comm buzzes. He’s almost planning on ignoring it, like he’d ignored everything else, but the sheer tumult of his brain forces him to check it out of desperation for a distraction.

PearlescentMoon has made the advancement [The End?]

Something snaps.

Mumbo scrambles to his feet, no picture of grace, heart pounding hot and ugly in his chest. After all this—

After everything—

No. She’s not doing this. She’s not—

He ducks through the Nether portal, takes flight through unfinished and winding tunnels towards the nearest Stronghold.

He’s not letting her.

~~~

The End—Hermitcraft Seven

Mumbo stumbles. He’s probably too late. Pearl’s probably already gone, fleeing at what he’d figured out, and he’d never catch her now, he was too late and too useless as usual—

“—not your PLAYTHING to call upon—”

Mumbo straightens. Feels the obsidian under his feet yawn away even if he doesn’t move.

Pearl looks over at him.

The Ender dragon looks over at him.

Mumbo clears his throat.

“Right then. Um. Am I interrupting something?”

SERIES TO BE CONTINUED IN SOMETHING WICKED