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When he finds her she’s hugging herself, head tucked into her knees, and she looks very small.
Etho has known Gem for a long time. Admittedly she’s known him longer — she was a fan of his work long before they were friends — but now they’re close as siblings, and he knows that freckled face and those strong arms, the way she moves and jumps and swings an ax. She builds massive works of art, and she runs off on big adventures, and she teases him to no end, and she never looks small.
Objectively she is a bit small. Smaller than him. Younger, too, not that it stops her from being better than he is at almost every single aspect of the game — she just doesn’t tend to look small.
He knew it’d be bad, when they found her, if they found her — after all this time. Some of the other hermits weren’t so pessimistic, but Etho knew all the way down to his bones that whatever had happened to her… it was very, very bad, or else she would have already come back to them. Gem can take a lot of things, can take on almost anybody one-on-one, and Etho had seen the truth in Xisuma’s eyes the day the search parties came home empty — how the admin’s breath had caught, had kept catching as he tried to speak steadily, organizing next steps — whatever could take Gem away from them like this, whatever could kill her or keep her could also do much, much worse.
And evidently they have done.
She’s alive, though. So that’s something. It’s a hell of a something. He’ll take it, he’ll cling to it — he steps forward, afraid to even breathe, like if he makes the wrong move or the wrong sound she’ll just slip right through his fingers again.
“Gem,” he says, approaching her like he’d approach a — a feral cat, or something. He is cautious. He is slow. He is maybe more terrified than Gem is. “Gem, it’s Etho. Hey.”
She startles so badly at his voice that he flinches, but recognition flashes in her eyes in the next half-second, and then she’s scrambling forward, nearly crying. “Etho,” she says. “ Etho. Oh god — oh my god.”
Her voice is small, too, and she crashes into him with half the strength that he expects from her. Instinctively his arms come up to wrap around her, settling tentatively on her back, then more surely — holding her close. She’s warm and solid and real, holding tight right back, and he doesn’t know what to say. She’s — she’s here. She’s in his arms, she’s here , and he finds himself holding tighter as the realness of it sinks in. She’s alive.
After all this time.
“It's okay,” he says awkwardly, trying to reassure her, even though it — it really isn't. She's skinnier than she was, and there are bruises on her arms, yellowed and faded, and he doesn't want to know what happened in this concrete room. What’s left her clinging to him like this.
“Let's get you out of here,” he says, and this, at least, he is sure of.
She was supposed to come home. It should’ve lasted a day, maybe two, accounting for travel time — she’d had plans, things to keep working on, huge towers to raise, adventures through nether fortresses and other Gem-type things. It was a simple tournament off-server, not one of Grian’s this time — a faster-paced one, PvP focused, with some old acquaintances, mostly players she admittedly didn’t know. A game. One day and done, she’d be home in a jiff.
But she just — didn’t. She didn’t come home.
“Gem,” he’d shouted into an empty world, trudging through its burnt underbrush and felled cobblestone walls, the remains of battles long over — “Gem!”
They didn’t find her that day, or the day after that. Search parties of frantic hermits convened, marked new territory, and split up again the next dawn, and they found nothing and no one. They scoured that whole boxed-in world and it was empty . “She can’t just be gone ,” Pearl had insisted, fists clenched tight, but they went home to Hermitcraft defeated and still very Gem-less.
It was Xisuma, in the end, who triangulated her position, after weeks of combing through servers and hunting down backdoors, assisted by technical hermits. Cub and False snuck in to scout the place, and the plan came together quickly after that — a remote server full of players who’d banked too hard on never getting caught, taken out easily by thirty-odd enraged hermits and a few other allied servers, each with missing players of their own. Because it wasn’t just Gem they’d taken, turns out. Etho has determinedly avoided any and all information about just what they were doing, kidnapping prestigious players and locking them away from the world, but he’s caught whispers of it anyway; he knows they’d had something big planned, but they were still in the collection phase. The word alone makes his lip curl.
They got her back, though — found her, picked her up and brought her home, freed every single captive from that awful place.
Everything’s gonna be okay again. He’s not sure when, but it will be.
She counts the days.
It takes him awhile to realize. In one corner of his basement she’s placed a little white bed, and there are little marks carved into the oak wall above it. He realizes what they stand for at about the same time he realizes she’s not leaving.
Because it was an improvised measure, at first, the little white bed in the corner of his basement — because the day she came home she could barely stand on her own two feet, and she was more than a little clingy, and she wasn’t the only one, so everyone slept over that first night. It just sort of happened. And the first morning after, there were hermits cooking and changing bandages and carrying things around, helping any way they could, like anxious little nursemaids. (She’d been gone for so, so long. Weeks had turned into months and Etho had seen, by their faces and their silences, that some of the hermits had started to grieve. ) Cleo had to shoo people out more than once, just to give the girl some space.
They’d all trickled out eventually, tucking beds back into hotbars and returning to routine as the days wore on, but Gem had stayed, and not in an “I’m crashing your basement for the rest of the season” way. Etho realizes, as he counts up the marks and matches them to the days that have passed, as he recalls the scratches in the concrete in that windowless room, that Gem is still afraid. She hardly acts like it. She’s pestering him all the time, teasing him gleefully alongside Bdubs, following Tango around to chatter at him aimlessly — she flies all over the server with Grian or Pearl or whoever else is in the mood for flying, accepts every invitation to every adventure, but she goes home with someone at the end of every night. That someone is usually Etho. There are chests collecting next to the little white bed, next to the wall that’s marked by thirty-six tallies. She’s not leaving, and he thinks maybe it’s because she can’t.
So he supposes that he’d better not force her, and the arrangement stays unspoken between them. Thirty-six days become forty, and then fifty, and then it’s two months, and Gem stays, and Etho doesn’t mind at all.
“Die!” she howls, landing an ax crit to the head, and Etho, obligingly, dies. Because he's obliging like that. Definitely not because he had no choice in the matter and the duel was only ever going to go one way and she's terrifying without that ax, let alone with it.
He wakes up in the bed they'd thrown down as spawn, groaning and holding his head. He hears her cackling, sees her bouncing around with leftover energy, and his heart lifts a little. The headache subsides after a few moments, last bits of damage undoing themselves.
“That was a good one,” he says weakly, “I — did I even land a hit that time?”
“Nope,” she says, chipper, and he breathes out a laugh.
“Right. Of course. I'm — you know, I've had a day,” he says, and it's true, he has; there was a morning full of redstone with Tango, being bothered by Bdubs, and he hardly had a moment to rest before Gem was bugging him for PvP practice. “I think I'm done, if that's alright?” He expects that it’ll go over fine, because plenty of other hermits have afternoons wide open and Gem’s never one to shy away from inviting herself over.
But when she replies, her tone has shifted. It has shifted dramatically. “Wait — wait, Etho, no.” She sounds small, and he's thrown back to that windowless room, its empty concrete floors and the little scratches on its walls. “Don't leave.”
Small and angry and more frightened than she'd ever admit to — Etho's brow is furrowed with concern, watching the way she raises her ax over her chest, the way her shoulders tense around her ears.
“I … wasn't going to,” he says carefully. “I was thinking — we could do something else instead? Maybe head down to the shopping district? Something a little lighter on the death.” And ax crits. Fewer ax crits, please, thank you, it has been such a long day and he is so tired.
Her shoulders drop again, gradually, and she looks at him, big green eyes shining, before her brain seems to catch up — “Oh. Okay!” — she's chipper again, grinning widely at him, though he thinks it might be less certain now. Etho has never been good with facial expressions, but Gem's are Gem's. He knows those ones pretty well.
His explanation is far from the truth — he absolutely was planning to spend the rest of the afternoon alone — but he won't tell Gem that, and he doesn't really mind the change in plans for the day. He reminds himself that Gem has only appeared fine. She's seemed downright dandy — for all intents and purposes unaffected by those weeks held captive — but he only ever sees her when she isn’t alone. Due to the nature of — of seeing people, and proximity, and how that works. Gem’s almost never alone these days, anyway, and that is intentional, and it is Etho’s self-appointed job to help with that.
More weeks pass like this. She gets better, he thinks, but she also avoids the whole idea like the plague. She’s never alone when she can help it, and she shuts down any and all questions about what happened; by the time things fall apart, she has made changing the subject into a sport. She is Olympic-level, Etho thinks. She is — she is very good at it.
And things do fall apart. Gem’s status quo is tenuous, much as she probably hates that, and it can’t last forever. So it doesn’t. Eventually she just — breaks. They’re perched in opposite corners of Etho’s living room; she’s curled up on one sofa with a sketchbook, and he’s messing with the fireplace that Grian somehow managed to break. (How do you even break a fireplace, he’s thinking, teeth gritted as he pulls the bricks out to examine the wiring. He is not inviting Grian over ever again. Grian is banned from his house.)
Fiddling with redstone is thirsty work. When he stands up, dusting his pants off, and heads to the kitchen for a glass of water — just one room away — Gem’s head snaps up so fast that Etho startles. She actually grabs him as she walks by, fingers painfully tight around his wrist. “Don’t,” she says, “don’t leave. Please don’t leave.”
“Okay,” he says, reaching over to try and… carefully detach his wrist from her grip. “I won’t. Don’t worry. Gem, c’mon, let go — I’m not leaving. Just grabbing something from the kitchen.”
The reassurance apparently does not work, because she grabs his wrist with both hands, shaking her head frantically. “Don’t leave, don’t leave,” she repeats, and he wonders if she’s heard him at all.
“Gem,” he says. “I’m not — it’s okay. Look, look, I’m staying right here, I’m sitting down —” and he does, he sits down right beside her, a little awkwardly (her grip on his wrist hasn’t loosened at all). “See? Right here. You’re not alone, I promise.”
But whatever happened — whatever he did, whatever’s snapped into place in her brain, it’s sent her somewhere that his voice can’t reach. “Don’t,” she’s repeating still, verging on tears, “don’t, don’t go, please. I can’t go back there — don’t leave me, Etho, please .”
“Gem—”
“ Please ,” she sobs, and then she’s crying. Full-body sobs, shoulders heaving with the force of them. She cries in a way that he has never, ever heard her cry before.
“Hey — hey ,” he murmurs, terror rising in his own chest because he has no idea what to do, how to handle this, “Gem, hey. It’s okay. Hey, breathe with me. C’mon.” Gently his hands cup each side of her face, lifting her gaze to him. She stares right through him. “ Breathe ,” he repeats, and he breathes as example, long and slow, steady and deep. “Come on, Gem, you can do it. Please breathe with me.”
She keeps crying, keeps panicking, keeps breathing too fast and too shallow, so he takes one of her hands and guides it to his chest. “ Breathe ,” he says again. “Match me, can you — can you match me? I’m right here, yeah? It’s Etho — your Etho — I’m not going anywhere. I need you to match my breathing.”
He’s not sure what does it, but he keeps breathing and speaking in gentle tones, and eventually something seems to click. She falls boneless against him, burying her face in his shoulder, and he lets her because what else is he going to do, and after a few minutes her sobs taper off.
“Etho,” she whimpers.
“I’m here,” he says automatically. “It’s me. Etho. Yay, your favorite.”
That makes her snort. “You’re a dork,” she says, and she’s clearly still crying, voice weak and watery, but she sounds like herself again. “...washed-up dork. Not my favorite, just a… a dork man.” It’s feeble, as far as insults go. Gem’s insults especially. He’s not gonna hold it against her.
They stay like that for a little while, on the sofa, broken fireplace forgotten. He holds her, and he really, really hopes it makes a difference.
They don’t talk about it until the next day. Etho thinks probably Gem would never talk about it at all, left to her own devices, but he is not going to leave her to her own devices. He’s tried that for two — three months now, and it’s obviously not working. Etho may not be the best person to stage an intervention, but he is the person that Gem’s clinging to and crying on, and her chest monster and her little white bed are in his basement, so he thinks he might have the most luck.
And she’s — she’s Gem. His Gem. He’s not just going to let her keep … whatever she’s been doing. Avoiding it? Suppressing? It isn’t good, whatever it is. And sue him, he wants her to be happy again.
He sits down on the floor next to her little white bed; she sits on it, knees tucked up against her chest, and pointedly looks anywhere but him. He waits. There’s a clock on the wall, ticking steadily along. Etho does not remember putting that clock there, so it was probably Bdubs’ doing.
“They didn’t hurt me,” Gem says quietly, breaking the silence. Etho lifts his gaze to her, and she continues. “Not really, not after they… got me in there. I — I hurt myself, mostly, trying to get out.” She cracks half a smile at that, like it’s funny. Etho does not smile back, because his brain is coming up with images of Gem in that windowless room.
“They just… left,” she says. “They left me. In there — alone. I was alone. Etho, I was all alone. I think — I think it was — they gave me food and stuff, you know, they didn’t want me dying all over the place, so I counted that way, but that was all I had. I don’t even know if they fed me every day.”
Her voice is trembling, and cracking, and it’s unbearably small. She keeps talking — about the loneliness, the way the shape and color of the light on the ground never changed at all, and she tells him all the things she talked to herself about. She tells him how her voice sounded, bouncing off the empty concrete floors and back at her. At some point he makes his way up onto the bed beside her, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against him sideways. She curls toward him, leaning her head on his shoulder. The position is becoming familiar.
“I started — I don’t know — I was seeing you guys, your player tags through the concrete, I could swear. Hearing you — like you were yelling my name from far away or — or — I was going crazy , Etho.” Her voice is soft with horror, hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt. “And I was like — that’s it, Gem, it’s over. This is it forever. I was never… never, ever getting out. There were so many marks on the wall. And I was all alone, and every time I thought I heard someone or saw someone it wasn’t real. It was just me in there.”
She starts crying again, and Etho holds her tighter because it’s all he can do. She cries and cries, and he wonders how much crying she did in the months she was gone, with nobody there to hear it. He tries to stop wondering. It doesn’t work. All he can think about is that room, and Gem inside it, all alone. He holds her tighter, reminding himself that she’s right here and no one’s ever letting something like that happen to her again.
“We got you out,” he says quietly. “You’re never going back there.”
“I know,” she says, “I know, I know —” she curls still further into him, crying, and he holds her, and he tells himself it’s going to be okay. She’s talking about it, so that’s better than two days ago, and he is doing… something helpful, hopefully, and small progress is still progress.
He holds her tighter. She’s warm and solid against him — there’s a lot more meat on her bones now than when they found her.
She’ll be okay again.
And he’s right. Eventually, she is. Eventually it is one year later, and the sun is beaming down on the bright green grass of a brand-new world, and she’s laughing with her head thrown back. She’s talking about plans for a base, something real big, and she’s pointing into the distance — east, toward the morning sun, the direction opposite Etho’s own plans. He doesn’t think that anyone’s picked that direction yet, actually.
“Can’t wait to see it when it’s done,” he calls out, and she turns toward him, grinning. Her hair is blazing in the late morning light.
“You’ll have to come visit,” she calls back, and he nods.
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