Chapter Text
Grian gave them a short explanation anyway. Not of the trauma or the bad things about the Watchers or his history with them just . . . what they were. Mumbo stared at him with a look that said you don’t have to do this, you know that right? and Grian was grateful, but he just needed them to know something. Because of what he was going to do next.
They’d all discarded their helmets at this point. No point in wearing them in the room. Pearl worked quietly with Impulse’s the whole time, looking for that pesky leak in the event that they might need to wear the helmets again. Or maybe she just wanted something to do with her hands to distract her. With her brow furrowed and tongue stuck partially out, one might make this mistake of thinking she wasn’t listening, but Grian knew better. She simply knew this story already.
“Can you get us out?” Impulse asked.
Grian looked up, and met eyes with Mumbo. “I think so,” he said. “I have a plan, but I’ve never done it with more than one person.”
“What is it?” Scar asked, and Grian knew he wouldn’t have to worry about Scar’s faith wavering in him at all. Scar, who didn’t know a thing about the Watchers but thought Grian was now officially the coolest person he’d ever seen–Grian was sure this idea of his coolness would vanish the moment he made another stupid joke or pranked Scar again, but for now it just made him feel warm.
“Watchers can walk between worlds,” he started.
“That’s where we are, yeah?” Pearl asked, not looking up from her work. “You said the void was between worlds.”
“It is, yeah,” said Grian. “In fact, many Watchers utilize the void a lot. Some even live out here, but I don’t really know how they do that, ‘cause it always just seems to want to kill me.”
“You know,” Mumbo said with amusement, “whenever you tell me about the Watchers, it’s always about how you don’t know how to do something the others could.” Grian huffed and crossed his arms. “Watchers train for, like, forever. I didn’t have time for that, obviously. I ran away before I got a chance to figure all of that stuff out!”
“You were in training,” Scar said. “Oh my god, you were their intern! Hey, can you do that glowy thing with your hands and Watcher-me-up some coffee?”
“I saved you from this void, and I can put you back in it, Scar.” Grian fixed him with a glare. “I was not their intern, they let me do things by myself. I know how to use all my powers. I just wasn’t practiced enough to do all the super complicated things.”
“So you were an entry-level employee,” Impulse said.
“. . . Sure. Yeah, whatever. If Watcher society was an office I guess.”
“We were discussing ways to leave this place?” Pearl prompted.
“Right,” Grian said. “Watchers can server hop without admin approval by walking between worlds. It uh . . . helps them watch all the places they need to. So maybe I could . . . server hop with all of us into a new world.”
“Would it work?” Scar asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Grian. “I’ve only used it on myself. It’s how Watchers move from server to server. It’s how I found Hermitcraft, actually, but that’s a story for another day. I, uh–taught Mumbo how, recently, but he also used it on just himself. I don’t know if it’s even possible to open a path for more than one person. If it is, I don’t know if it’s possible for someone who isn’t a Watcher to traverse that path.” He gave Mumbo a look. “I need your help on this.”
“Oh! Right, erm . . .” Mumbo said. “Just like with MCC, yeah? That went well, I guess, I wouldn't call myself an expert at it by any means, but I only had one major mishap on the way, and well I am actually a little scared of it, but . . .”
“Mumbo,” Grian said, cutting him off. “We don’t have a choice. We have to try or else we’ll just die out here in the void. We need a new world. And we share a power, so I need you to try for me.”
We have to try, because we can’t stay here. We could run out of air in this stupid bedrock box if whatever’s filling it stops. The void could prove to be infinite, and we could be falling forever. I could get too tired and my grip on this sanctuary could slip, because that’s happened before and you were hurt then, Mumbo, and I can’t let that happen again.
Mumbo nodded. His eyes were wide but his jaw was set in determination.
“I think it’s worth a shot,” Impulse said. He glanced at the rest of them, with a nervous smile. “Call me petty, but I almost died here once and I don’t plan on dying here again.”
“Do we agree?” asked Grian, looking around at his friends. “Are we trying this? I can’t guarantee your safety. But it’s a chance.”
One by one, the rest of Boatem nodded.
“Well,” he said, “Let’s go.”
Server-hopping, especially to an unknown or random location, took a great deal more creativity than one may assume. You were opening a doorway between worlds, but if an admin’s portal was the grand front doors on a mansion, a Watcher’s portal was the disused staff entrance in the back that led to a maze of rooms and hallways. Dusty, confusing, and with the perpetual chance that the door might be rusted shut and you’d have to climb in a window or something.
Just like all navigation, it was easiest if you had a map or an address. Mumbo had been able to find MCC quite easily since Grian had provided the address; Grian, when assigned places by the Watchers, had also normally known where his destination was. But nobody back on Hermitcraft had agreed upon a meeting place before they all scattered to the winds fleeing the moon. So now? They were striking off into the unknown.
Grian had done that once before–when he’d run from the Watchers, he had been too panicked to put any care into his routes. He knew his destination: Evo. Home. And when he arrived and found it empty, he disappeared back into those pathways between worlds and opened doors at random. He didn’t have anywhere else left to go back to. He didn’t care where he went either, just so long as it was away from the Watchers.
It’d been sheer luck that he found a place as good as Hermitcraft, that he’d found the server Mumbo was from, that he’d found a place that let him stay.
He hoped they’d get so lucky this time around too.
Grian quietly briefed Mumbo on their plans while the others gathered their things. It wasn’t like they had much to gather, though–they planned on leaving the helmets behind because they were too clunky to carry and wouldn’t save their lives anyway. It was mostly an exercise in self preparation, but pretending to make sure everyone had their supplies made it feel more important and less personal.
As for Mumbo, he’d been given an important task: keep the pathway stable. “Are you sure I can do that?” he asked. “That seems, well, rather important.”
“I have to be able to focus energy into connecting our pathway to a new world, and choosing the world. You have half my powers–you’re not experienced in it, sure, but you have the innate ability.”
Mumbo sighed. “You know, I can’t help but think we got the short end of the stick with this whole sharing thing. Why couldn’t the stupid soul stealing thing have just duplicated the souls instead of making us share one? Then we’d have double the power. It’s a bit pants, innit?”
“Mumbo,” Grian said, “the only thing scarier than you casually walking around with Watcher powers would be you walking around with double the amount of Watcher powers.”
“Yeah, but I’d be able to make a pretty sweet pathway with it all, wouldn’t I?”
“Just keep it from collapsing, please.”
He took a deep breath and tried to steady his heart, which beat a little too rapidly and loudly inside his ears. He wanted to say he was confident in his abilities, that he was well practiced and knew that he wasn’t just leading his friends off into potential death. But these powers, despite belonging to him, had never truly felt like they were his, and he questioned the control he had over them.
Too human to be a Watcher. Too Watcher to be a human.
“Hey,” Scar said, as they all gathered by the entrance. “So maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, since carrying five people through the void is apparently a pretty big deal, but uh . . . there’s six of us? I hope you can accommodate that.”
“What.” Pearl’s voice was deadpan.
From somewhere, as if summoned by Scar’s voice, a cat meowed. Scar unzipped the top part of his suit, revealing two little grey striped triangle ears, and a round oval face that swiveled around to look at them with slightly bored and judgemental green eyes.
“You brought JELLIE?” Impulse exclaimed. “Has she been in there this whole time? Where on earth were you even keeping her?”
“Oh, she was sleeping against my chest,” Scar said. “I made my suit so it had a little spot for her. She normally wouldn’t like being trapped like that–she’s a bit of a free spirit, you know–but she was more than willing to stay put in order to evacuate. Animals are great at sensing when something is wrong, I’ve heard.”
“Scar,” Impulse said, “the moon took up half the sky. Everyone knew something was wrong, not just your cat.”
Grian just stared, speechless. Scar and that cat, always. Even when left behind on another world, she somehow always found her way back to Scar each and every time. Nobody really understood how, except that Jellie was possibly more than just a cat, and Scar was her person, and she’d cross different worlds to find her way back to him. It was really quite sweet.
Grian’s incredulousness gradually morphed into absurdity, and then into hilarity. Scar gave him a concerned look, and Jellie somehow matched the exact same look in a grumpier way, and it was like a dam in Grian broke and let out a rush of emotion that swept him off his feet. He started hysterically laughing.
“Are you alright there, G?” Pearl asked.
He wiped tears from his eyes. “It’s just- the cat, and Scar, and . . .” He couldn’t finish his sentence before another fit of laughter overtook him. It was just so Scar. And it was all of them, and it was the danger they were in, and it was how they were standing in a circle where Grian could reach out and touch any one of them right now if he needed to, and it was how they could all lose each other forever in the next few minutes, and it was about how preposterous it sounded that the moon fell out of the sky and they fell into the void and now Scar’s brought his cat along for the ride.
Mumbo started laughing too. Did he feel it too, because Grian was feeling it? The worry? The nerves? The love?
“Scar’s been carrying a cat in a swaddle like a baby for, like, a few hours now,” Mumbo snickered.
“Jellie is definitely smarter than some baby,” Scar pouted. “I just wanted to make sure she wouldn’t cause problems for our void-walking thing!”
Grian took a deep breath and steadied himself. “It’ll be fine, Scar. If a cat was going to cause us to fail we’d probably have failed anyway.” He gave Jellie a serious look. She yawned. “You better behave, though. No distractions.”
“Jellie is an angel,” Scar said, with the air of a man who was lying through his teeth about a lifetime of knocked over vases and scratched up curtains and mysteriously missing pesky birds, “she will be perfect.”
Grian threw his hands up. “Alright, alright. Does anyone else have any other random pets hiding in their clothing?”
Pearl raised her hand.
“Pearl???” Impulse cried.
She lowered it and started giggling. “No, no, I’m just joking,” she said. “I don’t have anything. I’m ready.” She winked at Grian. “You know I could have been hiding something though, don’t lie.”
“So then . . . are we ready?” Mumbo asked. He was quiet, standing next to Grian, wearing an expression of concentration on his face normally only reserved for particularly difficult redstone builds.
“I think we are,” Pearl said.
Summoning the path was predictably hard, splitting his attention between holding the room they were presently in, and making the portal. He found himself pushing most of the weight of the bedrock room off onto Mumbo, who took the burden gladly.
A door swung open in the corner, made of dark oak.
Pathways could resemble whatever you wanted–a void, a tunnel, a rift. A standard purple portal was the most basic default option. But Grian was trying to take them all home, and thus the door beckoned.
“That’s our exit,” he said, before sizing the rest of them up. “I will go in first, and make sure it’s stable, and then I’ll lead the way. Pearl, Scar, Impulse–please follow. Mumbo, I need you to follow behind. It’s very important. You need to keep the room in place until we’re all out.” Mumbo nodded, eyes solemn.
Grian stepped through the door, testing the waters. In these back alleys between worlds, the path wasn’t totally clear. His boots met ground that he couldn’t see, sinking a bit like mud. He recalled the void rooms that he had so much fun making back in season six. The pathway was a bit like those, but instead of blank white walls there was just endless blackness. Unlike the void, however, which was populated with a myriad of twinkling little purple and teal lights, this place held nothing. Just total darkness.
“It’s safe,” he said. “Follow me in.”
The other trailed quietly behind him, eyes serious and footsteps careful. Grian didn’t say anything, but he was happy to see that they all seemed to be able to breathe in here just fine. Mumbo stepped in last, closing the door behind them with a decisive click. For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of their breathing and the soft purple glow from Mumbo and Grian that was their only illumination.
“I’m letting the void room go,” said Mumbo. “We don’t need it anymore.” Instantly, Grian felt the difference in their shared burden. Mumbo picked up the slack on the pathway immediately after. He was getting good at following Grian’s cues; this power, unlike the flying or watching, was incredibly mental and required a lot of strength. The soul connection was helping them, allowing Mumbo to copy Grian’s actions as they went.
“Where did the void room go?” Impulse said.
“It never really existed in the first place,” Grian replied. “It wasn’t made of real objects. Just the thought of them.” He took a deep breath. “Alright, let’s go. No need to waste our time here. Follow me exactly.”
They walked from some time, Grian occasionally turning or guiding their paths gently. He didn’t really know how he knew where to go, but there were places he instinctively knew to avoid, where they needed to turn or else risk stepping off the edge into the abyss.
“There’s a door up there,” Scar said. “Is that where we’re going?”
“No,” Grian said.
“Why not?”
“There’s many worlds to pick from. 2^64, actually, which is like 18 quintillion. We shouldn’t go to all of them, though we might stumble across their doors. Some might be corrupted like ours was, or stuck in the past on an unstable version of reality. Some might be occupied, and if our arrival doesn’t cause any instability in the server, we might not be welcome anyway. Some worlds might be hostile. We’d do best to choose one that’s empty.”
Scar eyed the door as they passed it. Its paint, once a deep blue with gold accents, was now chipped. Its hinges were rusty, but it seemed well used. “And is this one . . . hostile?” he asked.
“I just don’t think we belong in there,” Grian said darkly. “Let’s keep going.”
They kept moving, past more doors and openings to servers. None of them satisfied Grian. He moved quickly–they couldn’t afford to be in here longer than necessary, especially as with each step he could feel exhaustion weighing down on him more and more–but he also moved carefully. What’s that saying? “Measure twice, cut once”? They didn’t have room for error if Grian chose badly.
He thought about the last time he’d used these passageways when running from the Watchers. He hadn’t moved so carefully or so purposefully. He’d been a total wreck, paranoid that around every turn he’d get caught. He chose the server he planned to flee to recklessly.
He might never have met some of the people behind him, if that didn’t happen. Oh, Pearl and Mumbo he had known, but Scar? Impulse? He thought about Hermitcraft and his heart twisted. They’d escaped with their own, Boatem, but when they split up they left so many others behind.
They weren’t any less his friends than Boatem was. He missed them fiercely, and the feeling settled in the back of his throat, nearly choking him. He just hoped that from a stable server, they could begin the process of trying to contact everyone else again.
He first became aware of trouble as they rounded a corner and he felt a slipping feeling in his mind. Though he kept his footing on the physical plane, it felt like wearing socks on a polished floor, just a moment of instability before Grian pulled them back up with no small amount of exertion.
“Mumbo,” he said. “How are you doing?”
He was tired. And if he knew he was, he knew Mumbo was.
“I’m fine,” Mumbo said, at the exact moment his foot slipped and he fell flat on his face.
Pearl rushed to help him up, asking if he was alright. “I’m fi-” he started to repeat, before cutting himself off. “My foot’s stuck,” he said, pulling at it. The floor, which had seemed featureless just a moment ago, was sticky, pulling onto Mumbo’s feet and holding them there.
“Is it just me,” Impulse started, “or does it seem harder to walk now?”
“The tunnel,” Grian realized. “It’s becoming more unstable. We need to go fast.” It was too much. They had too many people in here, and Grian didn’t know if he and Mumbo were strong enough to hold them all safely.
“I’m sorry,” Mumbo said, “I’m trying, I’m just tired, I feel like there’s this big weight on me. Like I’m pushing something back but the weight of it is crushing me.”
“Let me help you,” Pearl said, and with a momentous effort, yanked Mumbo by the arms until he became unstuck. “Lean on me.” She wrapped his arm around her shoulders and helped him move on.
The path felt more hazardous now. Some of the doors they passed seemed to flicker in and out, tenuously connected to their reality. This wasn’t a good sign. Grian needed to find them a place immediately. He could already feel the bone deep exhaustion wearing on him, how every step felt harder than the last. It felt like they’d been wandering this maze for hours, but it was likely only a few minutes.
“Grian,” Mumbo murmured, “I don’t think I can keep going.”
Grian reached for the next door he saw, pulling it closer and firmly rooting it in reality. It was made of birch, smooth and new. It was a blank world with no inhabitants. He couldn’t see what it looked like, or what its address was, but they’d officially run out of time to look.
“Is this it?” Scar said.
“We have to get out of here,” Grian said. “This will do.” He opened it, persuading that reality to line up with theirs. Like stepping from a boat to a dock, they were temporarily tied in.
The sky was, rather alarmingly, blue. Grian supposed he should be grateful for that, or perhaps even comforted, but after hours of adjusting to dim lighting and the endless blackness that surrounded him, it just felt garish and assaulting.
“I need to stay here to keep the door open,” Grian said. “You all go. I’ll go last.”
The Boatem members all glanced at each other. This was just another step into the unknown, but they’d made many of those in the past day. This one signaled safety though.
Scar went first, stepping through with his head held high and an arm on his chest supporting Jellie. Impulse followed, and then Pearl. Then it was just him and Mumbo.
“Are you ready?” he asked, and Mumbo nodded, arm slung around his shoulders.
“Let’s go,” Mumbo said.
Together, they stepped through into the brightness, and as soon as they stepped beyond the threshold of the door, they released their claim on the passageway between worlds.
The next thing he remembers is falling and falling, tangled up with Mumbo, and then landing roughly in a path of gravel. It felt hot from the sun and he scrunched up his eyes at where it was poking him in the face. His feet were tangled in someone else’s and he could hear somebody talking, but they sounded far away.
He breathed in deeply, smelling the sharp fresh scent of water and tree sap, and felt the harsh sun beating down on his back. He wasn’t in the void anywhere. He was on land. Stable land, unmoving below his body, and not at the risk of disintegrating underneath him. Exhaustion slammed into Grian like a sledgehammer and he nearly felt like he was falling again, precipitously. An adrenaline crash. He couldn’t focus on the voices speaking anymore.
They were safe now. He could rest.
He closed his eyes, and gave himself over to the exhaustion.
When he awoke, the sun was lower in the sky and he was in the shade. Someone had built a canopy over his head out of plain planks. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, taking stock of himself. Someone had also taken him out of his crash test dummy suit, and his wings were back out again, resting. There was not, however, a bed.
“I’m sorry,” Impulse said from somewhere behind him. “I couldn’t find any wool.”
Grian nodded silently. Honestly, the gravel hadn’t been half bad, except for the marks it left on his face. One doesn’t know how much they take solid ground for granted until it’s taken from you. Even sleeping on rocks felt like a luxury.
“How long has it been?” Grian asked, voice scratchy. Impulse handed him a water bottle, which he took gratefully.
“Just a few hours. Mumbo was asleep too, but he woke up about half an hour ago and went off to explore the woods. You two seemed pretty tired. Honestly, Scar was afraid you might be dead, but once we realized you were just asleep we decided to let you. We don’t have much of anything so far, we just collected some wood and necessities.”
Grian stretched out his wings, feeling the joints ache. Thinking he might be dead probably explained why he was out of his suit; they’d have wanted to make sure he wasn’t injured when he didn’t wake up. “Where are we?”
“Some new world,” Impulse said. “Whatever you and Mumbo did, it worked.”
Grian stood up, and wandered to the edge of the small little canopy. They were on the edge of a wide river with a stone and gravel bank. A birch forest surrounded them. But what really caught his eye were the mountains surrounding them, towering higher than he thought possible.
“It’s gorgeous isn’t it?” Impulse said. “You sure picked a good one.”
“I picked it blindly,” he said. “We just needed to get out of there.”
Impulse put a hand on Grian’s shoulder. “You did good.” Withdrawing his hand, he went over to some furnaces a little further away and began fiddling with them.
Grian sat on the edge of the riverbank for a while, watching how the water rippled at the edge of the stones. He felt like maybe he should be helping, or doing much of anything, but he couldn’t bring himself to stand up to do so. So he just sat, and stared.
He heard voices behind him after a bit. Must be Pearl, Scar, and Mumbo returning from wherever they had been off too. “Oh, Grian’s awake!” Scar called.
The other dropped some things off haphazardly into a few chests that were lying around. It was mostly wood, saplings, and other odds and ends. Mumbo dropped a handful of apples in the corner for them. Pearl dropped a stack of logs. “I figured we could build a fire tonight,” she said. “Keep mobs away.”
“Griannnnnnn,” Scar whined, “Mumbo tried to kill me earlier!”
“Did not!” Mumbo defended. “That, my friend, was an accident.”
“You literally said it would be ‘so easy to push me off the edge’, and then you pushed me off the edge into a cave.”
“Well, it’s not my fault you’re so pushable. Have you tried that, Scar? Not being so pushable?”
“I found a woodland mansion,” Pearl said, breaking in between Scar and Mumbo. “Not very far from here. I didn’t venture inside, though. But that could be the source of some early supplies if we ever want to make an effort to clear it.”
“Let’s at least get some weapons before we try that,” Impulse said.
They began to get to work, preparing for the evening. They didn’t have shelter yet, but the little stone beach felt oddly protected. Someone handed Grian some coal and sticks, and he got to work crafting torches to be placed in the area to light it up.
As the sun began to set, Pearl stirred the small campfire she had made for them. They’d eaten fish from the lake and grilled it over the fire and then huddled around the fire. It wasn’t that cold outside, but the fire was warm and satisfying and tangible in a way the void hadn’t been.
They chatted, about how cute Jellie looked curled up on one of the crash test suits, or about the massive cave Scar had found semi-accidentally when Mumbo pushed him into a hole. Laced through the conversation was a feeling of unease. It didn’t take a genius to piece together what it was. Grian felt it. Everyone else felt it. Nobody said anything; they just redirected the conversation.
Slowly, as they spoke, the moon rose over the valley, pretty white light reflecting on the river. It was full. Grian wished it was a new moon so he didn’t have to look at it.
“It’s small,” Pearl said finally, quietly.
“It feels too small,” Mumbo said. “Like, this doesn’t feel normal either. Obviously it was too big before, but now it’s just . . . small.”
“It looks fake,” Grian said. “Like a toy someone threw up into the sky and left there.”
“Moon’s a scam,” Scar said. “It’s not real. Who needs the moon? Not us.”
“Did you just decide that?” Mumbo asked.
“Yep. Moon’s a scam.”
“What if it gets bigger again?” Impulse asked quietly. “I don’t trust it.”
“Then I’ll just . . . I’ll keep an eye on it,” Grian said. He could keep measuring it.
“Well, you sure have enough of those,” Pearl said amusedly.
“Yeah,” Scar said. “Speaking of, where’s all your . . . “ he trailed off, gesturing around his head.
“I choose to look like this instead,” Grian said simply.
“We don’t use the Watching powers all the time,” Mumbo said. “It’s like, an on/off switch? Grian told me that using certain powers will make us always look like that, but when we aren’t actively using it we have a degree of control for what we appear like.”
Grian’s mind flickered over the words Mumbo used. We. Us.
He didn’t mind it.
Scar nodded, looking satisfied. “That’s really cool.”
They all stared at the moon once more. The firelight flickered across their faces. They looked tired, Grian noted. They all looked tired. How long had they been awake? It was nighttime when they evacuated and now it’s nighttime again. Only Grian and Mumbo had slept at all, and it had been more of a crash than a restful night’s sleep. The night was pleasantly warm, with a light breeze that blew the crisp smell of the nearby forest to him.
It seemed like a nice world, one that wasn’t trying to actively kill them. The ground hadn’t shaken once since they’d arrived. The moon was small like it was supposed to be. No blocks were floating randomly, and gravity had remained normal the entire time.Grian felt like his standards for a world these days were pretty low–you mean the ground isn’t tearing itself apart below his feet? Wow, just like paradise!
Its beauty was still breathtaking though, with the white-capped peaks and huge river. Grian was numb to it; the beauty seemed like a farce, and if he let his guard down for even just a moment it might all come tumbling down on them again.
If it was such a nice world, why did he feel so bad?
It was just too empty.
“We have to find the others,” Impulse said, staring into the fire and reading Grian’s mind. “We have to find a way to contact them all again. Do we have a meeting spot? Where do we go? Did they all get out?”
Nobody really wanted to answer that last question. Nobody wanted to think about the implications that maybe they lost anyone. That in splitting up, some of them hadn’t made it out. Not everyone had even been present during the last meeting they held on the server, but for the life of Grian he couldn’t remember who all was missing. He’d never got to say a proper goodbye.
And if . . . Boatem were the only ones who made it out, what then?
There was a knot in his throat. He swallowed against it.
“We’ll find them,” Grian said. “We can use this world as a meeting place if there isn’t another one.” I’ll open it to everyone who needs it. I’ll walk through worlds again if I need to. I’ll use my Watcher sight to find them if they’re lost. I’ll do anything.
“I’ll help save them if they need it,” Pearl said, “even if it kills me.”
The others murmured in agreement.
“We need rest first,” Grian said. “We can start making a plan in the morning. But you are all exhausted.”
Impulse poked a stick he was holding into the fire, twisting it around aimlessly. His back was against the moon. “I don’t know if- I don’t know if I feel like sleeping,” he said.
Grian heard the words he left unspoken. It just didn’t feel safe.
“What if we took turns?” Pearl said. “Some of us could sleep and somebody could stay awake. We could rotate. It’ll be better anyway to make sure the mobs in the forest don’t try to wander into our area.”
He knew that if they couldn’t sleep, Pearl could guide them into it with her powers.
Impulse nodded, a very small gesture.
“I’ll go first,” Grian said. He just needed to.
It was a little cute how they’d all piled together to sleep. They didn’t have any beds yet, so they’d been forced to sleep on the ground under the built shade. Sleeping together provided warmth. But, Grian suspected, it provided an even more valuable commodity: closeness. A sort of hey-I’m-here-and-I’m-not-leaving.
They were all each other had now. Grian was used to the busyness of a full Hermitcraft server, where at any given moment day or night, someone was likely to be awake and doing things. Peace and quiet did exist on the server, but not in any of the main areas. In this world, it was just the five of them, and the silence was deafening.
Grian sat on a rock and watched the river rippled around the stones, trying to perfect the art of thinking just enough to stay awake, and not thinking just enough to guide his mind away from the heavy parts of the last few hours.
It was working about as well as everything else had worked out for him these past two months.
There was a rustling behind him, and Grian whirled around, sword in hand ready to fight whatever mobs may have moved into their camp. Instead, he came face to face with a very flustered looking Mumbo with his hands up.
“Whoa,” Mumbo said. “It’s just me.”
Grian lowered the sword, and wordlessly patted the spot next to him on the rock for Mumbo to sit in. “You should be sleeping,” he said.
“Couldn’t. Besides, you looked lonely.” Mumbo stared out at the water. They didn’t look at each other. “It’s too quiet, isn't it?” he said, echoing Grian’s thoughts.
“Aside from Pearl snoring over there?” Grian said, forcing his strained voice to be lighthearted. “Yes. Very.” On another day Mumbo might have chuckled at that, but on another day Grian might have actually been able to deliver it in a way that actually found some humor in their situation. Tonight, they just sat and stared.
Mumbo put his head in his hands, doubled over. He sucked in a deep breath. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. Nothing like this is ever supposed to happen. I, I mean we’ve all had strange things, or, or questionable things happen on the server, but it’s never– I mean, we never . . . Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
Grian placed a hand on Mumbo’s back, feeling it shudder as he began to cry.
He thought about Mumbo and the only home he’d ever really had, the only place he’d ever really been from. It wasn’t the server–they changed worlds so frequently–but the people on it who made it home. He thought about how Mumbo didn’t really have anyplace else.
He thought about the day that he was told he wasn’t going to see any of the Evolutionists again. He thought about returning to the server to find them and finding it empty instead. He thought about how Pearl had told him what it was like to wake back up after the dragon fight, be given the information that he was gone, and have to find a way to keep moving. He thought about Jimmy’s face when he’d quietly said I think about it too.
He thought about the Hermits who welcomed him and made him one of their own. He thought about how happy he’d been with them, when he could set his disquieting thoughts aside and be someone else who hadn’t gone through what he had. He thought about how they’d welcomed Gem and Pearl the same way they welcomed him, and had an idea that their same story had played out over and over again with each new member of the server long before him.
This wasn’t about him or Mumbo being Watchers or soulmates. This wasn’t about his identity as a human or a Watcher. This was his identity as a hermit. They were his community now–his family. And he was missing all but four of them.
“You did good today,” Grian whispered to Mumbo, rubbing circles on his back. “I didn’t get a chance to say that but you did.”
“It was scary,” he said. “I don’t know how you . . .” he trailed off. “I don’t know how you did that. Ever.”
“We would’ve died if not for you,” Grian said. “Don’t sell yourself short. I need you.”
Mumbo was silent, but he’d seemingly stopped crying and his breath had evened out. Grian fumbled through his pockets, trying to find an object he’d put in there earlier after they let the fire die down and tried to get some sleep. He pulled it out, and its stark whiteness nearly seemed to glow in the dark night. It was a piece of a fish bone, pointed on one end and clearly hastily whittled into a tool.
“Where did you get that?” Mumbo asked.
“I made it earlier. It’s one of the preening tools.” He squinted at it in the dim light. “It’s not really perfect but it’ll do for now. Come on,” he said softly, “you’re a mess. Let me fix your feathers.”
Mumbo sat stock still as Grian positioned himself behind him, and gently began working on the feathers. He was tense, and Grian wondered if he didn’t really feel like being touched at all in that moment, but his tension began to melt as Grian straightened and cleaned his feathers. The light was almost too little to work by, but the full moon was bright, and Grian would not be complaining about it not being any bigger or any brighter. It didn’t seem to matter, though, because even a haphazard preening job in the middle of the night was something that Mumbo needed right now.
“I’m sorry again,” Mumbo said into the night. “I know I–I keep apologizing but. I’m sorry. I didn’t think the soul thing would turn out like this. And I can’t help but feel like it was the beginning of the end.”
“You couldn’t have predicted the moon. You couldn’t have caused the moon,” Grian said. “I mean, your timing kind of sucked, but you didn’t cause the apocalypse by making a mistake. And besides, I already forgave you for that. I forgave you the night you knocked on my door.”
“Even after this? All of this?”
The side of Grian’s mouth turned up in a not-quite smile, the bittersweet kind. “I . . . guess I needed someone else to know,” he said. “Not that you really signed up for all of this, of course.”
Mumbo was quiet for a long moment, and there was just the scratching of Grian’s tool and the gentle lapping of the water. A gently smoldering fire and a pile of sleeping Boatem members. An owl hooting in the distance and the distant clank of a skeleton. The ground was stable beneath their feet.
Mumbo spoke. “I don’t regret picking you.”
Grian smoothed one of the feathers out. It was black, soaking in the light like the void had before, but it was warmer in hue. It picked up the faint embers of the dying fire, and the cool light of the too-small moon.
“I don’t regret it either,” he said. “I’m glad it was you.”