Work Text:
“Anyone else, uh, get nervous about things like this?”
“Nah, they’ll bounce off the firewall. It’ll be fine.”
“I’ve seen meteors crash through firewalls before…”
“This is X we’re talking about.”
Xisuma looked up from his comm, Cleo and Mumbo’s conversation startling him away from the server details he’d been checking repeatedly since nightfall. “Hey, wait, I’m new to this! My firewalls haven’t been tested this way before!”
“So?” Cleo waved dismissively. “I believe in you. Stop fussing.”
A murmur of general agreement went through the gathered players, and Xisuma ducked his head back towards his comm, glad no one could see the flush on his ears through his helmet.
Not that it was light enough to see anyway. It was the dead of night, and the vast majority of the server was gathered on a hill near New Hermiton, blankets and towels spread out on the grass, players huddled in little groups and talking softly. Xisuma was sitting in the grass near the back, False and Keralis sat on either side of him, and Biffa sprawled out a few feet away.
Joe had been talking about an upcoming meteor shower for weeks, and a few of them had decided to turn it into an event. Hypno had spent a while teaching Xisuma how to turn off mob spawning, as many lights had been stripped from the nearby area as possible, and it was so dark out that Xisuma could barely even see the shadows of his friends scattered alongside the hillside.
The spawning setting would objectively hold, but he still wasn’t sure he trusted it. Let alone the amateur firewalls, even though Hypno wouldn’t have let those be shoddy work… It just seemed like a recipe for disaster: away from their things with only Tango for light, waiting for debris from the void to come careening into their defences.
Xisuma’s comm was suddenly plucked from his hands. He blinked as it was set facedown in the grass, then he looked up at Keralis, indistinct in the darkness even while directly in front of him.
“Relax. You worry too much. Have fun!”
“But what if—“
“Relax, sweetface.”
Xisuma let his hands fall into his lap with a sigh, looking up at the starry sky above. His visor made everything darker, but he could see some of them, so unlike the densely packed pinpricks of half-light that crowded the void. The constellations were easier to trace here. Changing with the seasons, but returning as the cycle rounded, not the shifting expanse he’d tried to find patterns in as a boy.
“Joe! How late is this supposed to be?!” Tango called from where he, Hypno, and Jevin had started playing card games by the light of Tango’s hair.
“Should start around 2 A.M.!” Joe replied, and a collective groan went around the group.
“Rookie numbers,” Hypno said. “If you tap out you’re a coward.”
They all lapsed back into silence. Xisuma’s hands twitched towards his comm with the impulse to check the firewalls one more time, just to be sure, before ignoring it. That probably wouldn’t be a good habit to start.
Instead he turned into the conversation Keralis, Biffa, and False were having. The builds they wanted to get done before the end of the season, sounding so confident in the idea there would be another. Elsewhere, Cleo was asking Mumbo if he was excited to be an adult. Joe sounded like he was reading poetry. Jevin cheered suddenly, and ripples of questions and laughter went around the gathered players as Hypno tried to claim Jevin had cheated.
Xisuma closed his eyes, listening to the hum of the code at the back of his thoughts for a few seconds before shifting his awareness around the gathering. He picked up the bubble of voices all at once, indistinct but at equal volume, relaxed and cheerful, like the threat of voidborn debris meant nothing.
He wasn’t sure what he’d done to earn that kind of trust.
Maybe they were all fools, but they were too smart for that. Maybe they’d never had to worry about who was out to get them and who wasn’t worth believing in. Maybe they just didn’t care to wonder. That was a frightening thought.
Someone gasped, and the voices raised all at once. Xisuma’s eyes snapped open just in time to see a faint streak cross the sky, burning rock skimming by just beyond the firewalls, gone in a blip.
“That’s super early, isn’t it??”
“Well yeah, we might see some throughout the night! It’ll pick up speed, but it ain’t happening all at once.”
“Could have said that earlier!”
Xisuma blinked up at the sky, feeling some otherworldly mixture of fear and awe and disappointment. Fear at the threat to his firewalls, at how the movement of the sky looked like the eyes of monsters he’d fought. Awe at the heavens and the weave of the universe, at how it could make the breath catch his throat.
And disappointment at how faint it was through the tint of his visor.
Why did these people trust him? Why did they leave their lives in his hands? These hopeful, laughing voices who had decided what they had was worth doing again, a group of whom had sat around a table and made a pledge to carry on, and who looked at each other with a conviction that grew stronger every day.
Maybe that was the soul of this place. The heart of the server. A little group of ragtag players who weren’t quite sure where it would all go, but trusted each other enough to charge forward into the next day. The next game. The next world.
Maybe…
Just maybe…
Maybe he could learn to trust them too?
False chuckled, the same awkward chuckle he’d heard so many times throughout the years, that he’d first heard on a riverbank when he’d slipped on what he’d later learned was called mud and landed face first in the water. It had pooled in the edges of his armor, getting stuck around airtight seals and squelching in horrible ways, but he’d been too stubborn to take it off and False had laughed at him the whole way back home.
Joe was talking about something or another, confident in that particular manner only Joe had. In just the same way as when he’d stood on top of a table in front of those solemn few who couldn’t quite place why it felt like the world was ending and managed to explain exactly why, the rallying call of what would become the second season of Hermitcraft.
Keralis’ voice was sweet as his words, a song that had first greeted him from a deadman’s lips and pulled him through the forgotten parts of the universe they had both been born to. It sounded so familiar now, and so close to human that Xisuma thought only he could hear the echo of something which had known his nature without needing to be told.
How odd, to know he was known. Known without being known, all his cards kept close to his chest, but Keralis knew the nature of his soul and Keralis trusted him.
Another shining bolt of rock skimmed by overhead, lost in the inky black. Everyone was looking up at the sky, oohing and aahing at the beginnings of a greater show, everyone hushed for that moment before voices began to softly bubble once again.
Xisuma was at the back of the group, a couple feet behind anyone else, there wasn’t an eye on him.
And he’d never seen the stars with his own eyes before.
A tug on the code suppressed the hiss of air as Xisuma released the seals on his helmet, the crisp environment of his suit quickly replaced with thick humidity and the feeling of his lungs being too full. It would be fine for a bit. He could manage a couple of hours before it started to affect him.
He set the helmet on the grass next to his comm, and looked up.
Up at the starry expanse that spread out as far as the eye could see, the infinite patterns of the universe and its weave, all the suns for all the different worlds where players might be staring up at the same constellations from a different angle.
Xisuma’s breath caught. There was so much more light than he’d thought, so many pinpricks that had faded into the ink when his visor had dimmed it. He could see swaths of color now, the faint clouds of purple and pink and blue where the stars grew denser and the sky almost seemed to glow with its own colorful light.
Then he looked down at all his players, at how much warmer the scene seemed now. Tango’s ambient glow, the way it reflected off Jevin’s blue, False’s blonde hair shifting as she leaned forward to look at something over Biffa’s shoulder. Colors he’d seen before, but somehow different in the starlight.
His throat felt tight. Suddenly he wanted to reach out, take his gauntlets off and join them, learn how all that color felt, better know what he cradled beyond the symphonies of their code.
Keralis was closest to him, looking up at the stars, his skin painted shades of blue by the tones of the sky. Keralis wouldn’t be mad. He wouldn’t be frightened. Keralis knew what Xisuma was, even if they never acknowledged it with words.
Scooting around his comm and helmet, abandoned on the earth, Xisuma shifted closer to Keralis. He took a deep breath, barely audible even to himself, and — feeling like the world might shatter, like all the horrors of the universe might descend upon them for Xisuma’s one selfish moment — dropped his head onto Keralis’ shoulder.
A faint gasp made Xisuma flinch, and he nearly pulled away before Keralis’ cheek bumped softly against his hair in a moment of acceptance. Not pushing him away. Permission to stay.
Xisuma’s breath came shaky this time, as he let himself relax into that point of contact. The first he’d had in…was it a decade? A decade since he’d left the city he’d been born in behind, leaving friends alone in his wake.
He pressed himself closer to the plane of Keralis’ shoulder, feeling the way the other’s breath shifted them both, the way the fabric of his shirt wrinkled, the warmth that was so distinctly real and present and of another soul who allowed him to be this close. He blinked, only half registering the tears that slid quietly down his cheeks until a hand tugged gently on his gauntlets, and Xisuma accepted the coaxing without protest, falling into Keralis’ lap.
It was more comfortable there, and he buried his face into Keralis’ shirt, able to hear the reverberation of his responding chuckle.
“Are you okay, sweetface?”
Xisuma had to think for a moment to realize he was being addressed. It felt more like a thought, a press on his mind rather than words. He’d forgotten Keralis could do that.
He nodded.
“Do you want anything else?”
That didn’t make as much sense, and he tried to stumble through his thoughts on the matter. Then a calloused hand brushed through his hair, gentle and soft, like a suggestion.
“Perhaps like this?”
Xisuma nodded fervently. Keralis hummed, the sound a thrum this close to his diaphragm, and that hand continued to comb through his hair. Moving in little patterns, undoing tangles with all the care in the world.
Voices continued to bubble on around him. He let himself slip into the code again, listening to all their voices all at once as though from a great distance, knowing where each of his players was and what they were doing. The way their codes sang, a song that moved with the rising and falling of Keralis’ breath.
When he slipped fully back into his body he felt a bit more steady. Keralis was still combing through his hair, he still felt so warm, but it no longer felt like Xisuma was going to sob.
As reply, thanks maybe, he started to rub a circle against Keralis’ leg. He could feel that same fabric against his cheek, and wondered if it would feel the same against his hands if the gauntlets weren’t in the way.
“There!”
Oh, right!
Xisuma rolled so that the back of his head rested against Keralis’ thigh and he could look up at the vast expanse of stars and color once again. A flash darted through the sky, bolder in Xisuma’s vision than before. Then another, and another.
They weren’t constant. The gathered players waited in hushed silence, staring up at the sky, trying to catch those little streaks of light that sometimes only lasted for a blink. Beauty, come and gone in a moment.
Something pinged against the awareness in his mind, barely a blip, and he investigated it best as he could without his comm. The firewalls were fine, a single rock had hit and bounced off.
They were fine.
“X, have you ever actually—” False trailed off as she turned to look at him, and without the tint of his visor he could see the flash of confusion on her face. “…seen one of these before?”
How must he look to her? Like a ghost? Some creature that barely existed? Skin like fogged glass, blood and bones pale, and the matter of his organs barely enough to prove he was real and alive? Did the sight of bones through his skin frighten her, in this lighting could she see Keralis through him?
The bold evidence he wasn’t human. If it was dark enough, his armor would be the only thing that proved he was there.
“No.” He muttered, tearing his eyes back to the sky. A streak of light flashed by. “I’m…not even sure I can say I’ve seen the stars before.”
“Seems like a good time for it, then.”
“Yeah.”
He saw False turn back to Biffa from the corner of his vision. A simple conversation, as though nothing had been wrong.
Xisuma shook a little, and Keralis’ hand returned to his hair, providing a grounding contact. That probably felt strange too, his hair was only a few shades browner than the void itself and thicker in the face of sunless chill. With all the overworld humidity he’d had so much trouble taming it that cutting it short was the better option, only letting it grow out as much as he could deal with.
All those adaptations to the void that made life in the overworld difficult. How easily he overheated, how every bit of his body responded to the humidity, how the sunlight would burn through his translucent skin and fry him from the inside out, and how the colors were so bright and bold as to be blinding. There was even too much oxygen, the air good as toxin to his lungs. Xisuma could already feel the tingling of it passing through his throat and the building ache in his chest. It would get worse the longer he went without his helmet or a climate controlled room.
But for now, Xisuma couldn’t bear to seal himself off from the world again. Not just yet. Not with all the colors in the sky, the warmth from Keralis, and the unfiltered sound of his friends’ voices. The reminders that he was alive. That he was wanted here.
False hadn’t flinched.
These people trusted him. Not one of them had voted against letting him take up a leadership position, Hypno seemed so sure Xisuma would outpace him as an admin, and they all seemed so certain that he could protect them.
Xisuma would do everything in his power to live up to that. For the people he’d left behind. For his friends. For these players who made up the spirit of what Hermitcraft was and could be.
He grinned it himself as the thought crossed his mind.
Hermits. My hermits.