Archive of Our Own

Tango isn’t breathing, and then he is.

Desperately, he finds himself choking on air. He shakes. He feels himself fall back against something hard, which doesn’t make much sense, but nothing makes sense. He chokes on more air, his throat aching and burning and there’s air. His hands scramble for some sort of purchase. His ears are ringing oddly. People are speaking. Why are his fingers touching something hard and smooth? He doesn’t understand—

Tango breathes. Tango remembers why he hadn’t been breathing. Tango gasps, scrambling to—he’s not sure. Where is he? Everything is strangely white, and grey, and not black, and—the moon, he had just watched the moon—he hadn’t been able to breathe, a bit after that, but he had just watched—he can’t figure out how to stand up. He can’t—what is he even on? He sees something. It’s too bright. He’s pressed hard against whatever it is behind him, scrambling backwards.

He doesn’t feel dead. He feels like throwing up. He can’t breathe again. He’s breathing so quickly, and he isn’t getting any air, and he’s going to throw up, and his throat hurts, and something is wrong—

There’s someone talking to him. He doesn’t know where he is.

“—you’re hyperventilating, breathe Tango, slower, come on—”

He makes a pained sound. His throat hurts. His whole body feels sore and strange and drawn out and aching, like it’s been in place too long. He can breathe again. Everything’s too bright. Everything hurts. He chokes desperately on air and feels terrible for it, because he shouldn’t be breathing anything right now.

“—sedate—”

“He’ll—just as upset—”

“—this wasn’t supposed to—he can’t breathe, we have to—”

Someone approaches him. It looks like Ren. Ren, though, is dead. Everyone is. Oh god, everyone is dead.

“I’m sorry, dude,” he hears, and he feels the edges of his vision fuzzing out again, and no, no, no, he can’t breathe, and then he could, and everything is too bright and everyone is dead and—

Tango hadn’t been breathing, but now he is. He hadn’t been awake, but now he is.

His back is against something soft. As he tries to draw his eyes open, the place he’s in is bright. He doesn’t have a helmet on. The place is quiet, but there’s a thin rumbling throughout it, a sense of movement and vibrations that there hadn’t been, before. And he can breathe. He can breathe. He hadn’t been before, but he is now.

The moon fell, he thinks. Everyone is dead. He’s alive, somehow, because he thinks if he were dead, he would have returned to ashes, instead of feeling dizzy and sick as he gulps in air from what has to be a hospital bed.

Someone is in the doorway—or, well. Someone has drawn back the curtains, at least. He’s not sure this room has doorways.

“Hey, dude,” says—

“You’re not Ren,” says Tango. He’s surprised by how hoarse his voice is.

“Nope. I’m his cousin, man. Renbob, at your service.”

Tango nods. “Makes sense, since Ren’s dead.”

“He’s not,” Renbob says.

“Moon—I didn’t—”

Tango stops talking. It’s not just because his throat hurts. The totality of everything is catching up on him again, in fuzzy little bubbles. He can breathe again now. The moon fell. Everyone is dead.

“It wasn’t real,” Renbob says.

Tango stares at him blankly.

“You’ll remember, the—the Hermatrix. You’re on the Hermethius. You’re on your way to—you’re all calling it season nine now, man.”

Everything keeps on creeping up in his head in fuzzy bubbles and it doesn’t make much sense. He can breathe now. Everyone is dead. Renbob, he thinks, must be lying. He remembers going to sleep. He doesn’t remember sleeping at all. He doesn’t know where he is. He recognizes it. Everything is too bright.

“You woke up in a panic, man. We had to sedate you. You’re in the hospital wing. Once you’re feeling a bit better, you’ll be able to walk around, dude—your trouble breathing is like, psychosomatic and stuff.”

He can breathe. He shouldn’t be. Not-Ren—Renbob—sighs at what must be Tango’s blank expression.

“Sorry. Your vitals and stuff are like, normal, dude, but I probably should have waited. You weren’t supposed to wake up like this. Goatman’s better at like, medicine, man.”

Tango continues staring. Fuzzy waves in his head. Everyone is dead. He knows what the Hermatrix is. He’d asked about it, when they’d made that plan. Fuzzy waves in his head. Everyone is dead. He can breathe. Not-Ren-but-Renbob says that the moon wasn’t real, but Tango had stood on it, and Tango had failed.

He thinks he’s been drugged, actually.

Renbob snorts. “You have. You were hyperventilating. We sedated you.”

“Oh,” Tango says.

“I’ll tell you what, man. You’ll—who do you want to talk to? You’ll talk to someone. They aren’t dead. It was the simulation, man. It was…”

Everyone he knows is dead. There was a tape at the end of the world. Tango doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Everything’s sort of a lot, right now.

“I’ll pick someone,” Renbob says. “Hey, man, uh…”

He wrings his hands. It’s bright in here.

“...god, I’m sorry,” Renbob says quietly, and he leaves Tango alone for a while to think, and to breathe the air he hadn’t been able to before.

He’s not the only one in the medical wing of—the Hermethius—Tango’s memories still feel a little like he’d been put through a blender. He’s not the only one in the medical wing, though. He gets the sense it was never meant to hold quite so many of them at once. Something about how many of them it was safe to wake up at a time? The curtains don’t do a great job of keeping sound out, is Tango’s point.

The first time he’d heard someone, he’d sort of suspected he’d been hallucinating. It was a little depressing. Bdubs had been very loud. He’d said something about fire. Tango hadn’t particularly wanted to hear about it, but if he’d been about to hallucinate someone talking about burning, it probably would have been him.

He’d just kept hearing people, was the thing. Even the people, like Welsknight, that he probably wouldn’t hallucinate. (Not that he has anything against Wels. He’ll probably appear in Tango’s nightmares, too, but just not nearly as immediately as—well.)

He’d had to accept he wasn’t alone then. All of his bones felt like they were aching, as he’d laid in a cot and listened to the cool sound of people talking that made it through the curtains.

Intellectually, then, if anyone is alive—Tango’s memories are messy. Like TV static. If he tries to remember his plans for the beginning of the season, it’s hard. He remembers the slow, painful death of season 7, but the plans for—it’s not the point.

The medical wing of the Hermethius. He remembers that much. Doc’s weird clone, Goatman comes to check on him, and he’s looking at his hands and listening to the sound of the fact people are alive.

“My throat hurts,” he says.

“Um, yes. You screamed a lot. Not much to be done,” Goatman says. “Let me check some things. We’re trying to get people out of here again. Figure you don’t want to be stuck in the hospital. It’s, eh, bad for you.”

“Who else is here?” Tango asks.

“Everyone?” Goatman says. “You were all here. You were all here always. You never left; we wouldn’t lose people.”

Tango has questions. Tango stares out of the curtains.

“In the medical wing?” he asks instead.

“Eh, Xisuma and Wels have already left. Iskall and Stress are doing fine too, didn’t have so many, eh, issues, from being woken up. We’re going through you now.” He looks down at a checklist and grimaces before looking up at Tango again. “Do you feel like you can breathe?”

No. “Yes.”

“Do you feel safe?”

No. “Yes.”

“Do you know where you are.”

Tango considers lying again, but then decides he may as well give a little bit of something. He gives a little half-shrug. Goatman notes it down.

“The Hermethius. You aren’t in the simulation anymore. You remember it was all—”

“Renbob said.” Tango doesn’t believe that one at all. But he knows if he acts like he doesn’t believe it, he won’t be leaving this cot, so. Needs must.

“Right. Uh… do you need medical assistance? Sorry, man, your vitals are fine, but we’ve gotta—”

“I’m fine,” Tango lies. “Let me free, doc.”

“Uh, that’s not me.”

Tango laughs. It hurts his throat, and feels a little like crying. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

“Trust me, I know,” Tango says. Doc is one of the voices he hasn’t heard yet, but he’s sure he’ll hear it soon enough, one way or another. Doc’s one of the ones he’d be expecting. “Wrong kind of doc, buddy.”

Goatman studies Tango for a minute, but he must be as tired as he looks, because he doesn’t say anything about Tango’s obvious facade. “There’s nothing keeping you here,” he says. “You, eh, have a clean bill of health when you’re ready, besides the memory loss, and given your sudden removal from the Hermatrix, it’s expected. Do you know where your room is?”

Tango snorts. “Now, why would I know a thing like that?”

“It was worth asking. I can get you to it in a few minutes. I have a few more people I need to check if we can clear, first. Easier to show you all at once.”

“Yeah, sure, okay.”

Goatman leaves. Tango stares at the curtains, then stares in the direction his voice goes when he starts talking again. He stares in that direction as he hears another Hermit answer—Pearl, it sounds like—and then he leans back against his pillow and breathes and waits to be picked up to take to his room. He tries to sort out his thoughts.

Pearl raises her voice.

Sucker. She won’t be let out early, if she’s shouting, Tango thinks. The thought feels like it’s coming to him through a fishtank. Boatem had a plan. They had. He wonders how it went.

He wonders if it matters.

The argument Tango can’t quite make out quiets down again. Tango swings his feet over the side of the cot and stands. His physical strength was never the problem anyway. He always could have been standing.

Pearl stops talking and Tango waits for Goatman to show him where his room is.

There aren’t any glasses in his room.

Walking the Hermethius is—he’s been here before, and Tango’s trying to remember it. In their rooms, though, he knows—they normally carry mementos from previous seasons, on trips like this. Tango had been talking to Bdubs about it, about what he could carry to season nine with them. It had come up while Tango sat in the crescent moon, cheerfully ribbing Bdubs about keeping Scar for Mayor merch.

They’d agreed to keep the glasses.

There’s a suitcase with the sum of all the belongings Tango has between seasons. It could fit in the overhead bins of a small plane if he wanted it to. He doesn’t normally need more than a few changes of clothes, an old Decked Out key and a few cards, some iron from that first farm, an old air sheep delivery service uniform, a—

There aren’t any glasses.

He’d promised Bdubs and Keralis. He’d promised.

“Fuck,” he says, and he curls his knees to his chest on the bed and breathes, breathes, breathes. “Fuck. Fuck.” He’d promised. He’d promised, but they weren’t real to bring to the next season, were they? His suitcase is full of, of the same clothes he’d been wearing in season seven, and there are no glasses, and he can’t fucking breathe.

His ears are ringing without sound. He stays there a while.

At least it’s not a cot in the medical wing.

He stays in all day.

Tango’s memories might be scrambled, but as he goes to get food, he has to say, he doesn’t remember breakfast ever being so quiet on trips like this before. He almost makes a joke, asking if someone had spit in the food or something, but—

Well.

Tango’s not that insensitive, he’ll have you know. He’s having trouble breathing, anyway, so he probably shouldn’t be making any stupid jokes, just in case. (He’s fine.)

“HEY! TANGO!” someone shouts, and it’s Zedaph. He’s smiling. Tango is momentarily overwhelmed. The quiet had hid from him that everyone was here. There’s Zedaph, right there, in that stupid brown sweater, practically jumping up and down in the oddly silent dining room. He’s alive. He’s not wearing a lab coat. “TANGO! YOO-HOO! TANGO OF THE TEK VARIETY! I GRABBED A PLATE FOR YOU!”

Someone else snorts, and then a dam breaks, and the room starts to fill with quiet chatter. Possibly making fun of whatever that was. Good old Zedaph, Tango thinks weakly. Terrible at socializing, but great at getting people talking.

(Probably not a sentiment he should share out loud, thinking about it. Worse or better, if Zedaph takes it as a compliment?)

“Zed! How—how are you doing, man?” Tango asks. His throat still hurts, which is probably why it comes out a little choked. Zed beams like nothing’s wrong and Tango goes to sit next to him, because what else is he gonna do? Not sit next to Zed? That’s just gonna get Tango shouted at more, he’s known Zedaph long enough to know that.

“I’m doing good! Did you know, I have a natural extension for my previous experimental goals all lined up,” Zedaph starts, and Tango hms appropriately as he stares at the table. He hears what would probably be about three paragraphs of information about what a ‘zedvancement’ over the next three minutes, and he stares at the food Zedaph’s eating. Oh, Tango realizes, it’s probably Doc cooking, Doc likes waffles, and he’s pretty good at them. Tango’s certainly never been able to replicate whatever he does with them.

Yesterday, the world ended, and now he’s eating waffles, Tango thinks. He can’t quite breathe right, but his throat still hurts, so that’s probably it.

“…and that’s how I’m going to break my legs,” Zedaph concludes… whatever he’d been saying with… and Tango nods idly. He eats the waffles. Definitely Doc; the vanilla’s all him. He plays with the syrup on his plate. It’s quiet again. Tango’s not sure he likes it.

“You know, if that’s how I am, how are you?” Zedaph asks.

“Oh, doing great,” Tango says. “After everything happened with the moon turned out to be fake and all. Fantastic news that.”

“It’s fascinating, right?” Zedaph says like absolutely nothing has changed and absolutely nothing could be wrong.

“Yeah, sure,” Tango says. He pauses. “How did…”

“I mean, a little sad that I don’t have my lab results on me, but I’m sure I can go back and visit, even if the whole simulation thing was cut short. Did you know how many hours my lab was alive for, by the way? So many hours, Tango. And I never saw a pitch drop in-person!”

Tango looks at Zedaph for a moment. He studies Zedaph’s face. He finds nothing there.

“Yeah, buddy, that’s pretty famously how that experiment has gone in the past,” Tango finally says.

Zedaph nods resolutely and turns to his waffles. He’s exactly the same as he always is.

“Tell me again why you’re breaking your legs?” Tango says after amoment of quiet.

“It’s like you weren’t even listening,” Zedaph says with a long-suffering sigh. “Zedvancements, Tango! Cool stunts! I think they call it an MLG!”

“Huh. Neat,” Tango says distantly. Right. Finish his waffles. He can definitely do that. Zedaph starts talking again. Chew and swallow. He should check if he has a turn to cook. Normally they don’t let him, but if that Renbob guy had done the schedules, he may have a turn to put some proper spices on things. Not waffles, though. Waffles shouldn’t be spicy, generally. Vanilla’s fine.

Swallow. He pauses to breathe. Having trouble doing that, for some reason.

Zedaph pauses. Tango nods. Zedaph looks at him curiously. Shoot, wrong reaction. Uh. “You know, you could wear gear so you don’t break your legs,” Tango says. Feels like a safe bet.

“Where would the fun in that be? I have a stunt costume I’m trying to get designed—”

There he goes. Good choice.

Tango looks at his plate. Half a waffle’s probably fine. Simulations do things to how hungry a guy is, right? Stomach’s probably just getting used to deciding for itself when it’s hungry, given that apparently, nothing that had been happening had been real or worth worrying about. ‘Nothing had been real’ included things like getting hungry building giants. So that’s probably why he’s not very hungry.

Zedaph is quiet again. He looks at Tango. Abruptly, Tango feels very bad indeed, because as tired as Tango is, as much as he can’t breathe right now, Zedaph is his friend, and he’s been sitting here getting Zedaph to talk solely so Tango doesn’t have to.

“You’re not really listening, are you?” Zedaph says.

“...sorry,” Tango says, sheepishly. “Still waking up, I guess.”

“Are you alright?” Zedaph asks, and Tango—

“Are you?”

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Tango laughs. His throat hurts. He has to stop himself so he doesn’t choke.

“Yeah. That’s—why wouldn’t I be?” Tango says, and he stands, abruptly. “Uh, sorry Zed. I guess I’m more tired than I am hungry.”

“Okay,” Zedaph says, slowly.

“I might just go sleep in a little longer. Not like—I should check the schedule, but other than that, not like there’s much for me to do, right?”

“You’re being weirder than usual,” Zedaph says, eyes narrowed, and Tango resists the urge to laugh again. He’s pretty sure that will only make Zedaph conclude he’s even weirder, and Tango mostly just wants to leave, now, not get into an argument about if he’s acting weirder than usual.

“Maybe?” Tango says.

“Hm,” Zedaph says.

“Thank you for getting me a plate,” Tango says.

“Yes… yes indeed,” Zedaph says, and Tango does laugh, a little clearer, this time.

“Don’t worry too much about it, Zed, bud.”

“Hmph. Fine,” Zedaph says, and Tango, carefully, reaches to give Zedaph a hug. Zedaph blinks for a moment. They hug. It’s nice enough. Tango lets go and looks over the dining room again. There are several hermits in. As he gets up to leave, Tango tries to look at all of them. There’s Ren, by himself for some reason. There’s Grian and Mumbo, having a quiet debate about something. There’s Cub, seemingly trying to make some kind of strange waffle volcano for reasons unknown to Tango. There’s Xb, leaning against the side of the table and talking to—Kerlias—there’s, Bdubs—

Their eyes meet for a minute. Tango swallows. His throat hurts and it’s hard to breathe. They both look away. He leaves the dining room to go find the chore schedule instead of thinking about that any more, carefully regulating his breaths to get enough air.

Next to the usual chore list, Joe Hills is slumped over in a chair, snoring. Judging by the numerous scratch marks on the list, Tango would have to guess that Joe had spent all night fixing it up. That makes sense. They weren’t supposed to be awake yet; their usual rotation of things to do between seasons wasn’t meant to be necessary so much, what with the Hermatrix. (Tango might remember talking about it. It’s fuzzy. He’s not sure.)

There’s a list of dates for meetings on it. Tango grimaces. He wants to wake up Joe, because they—they definitely had season eight plans, right? Or… season nine, now? His head hurts. Messy memories echo around in it. The next one after seven is eight, and that wasn’t a full season, and it wasn’t real, but—

Joe has it listed as “season nine planning”. Easy question for him, Tango supposes. From what he’d seen, Joe and Cleo had done everything they could have wanted except for interiors, and no one finishes interiors, anyway. Tango had…

Joe’s put them very frequently, the meetings. Underlined the word ‘mandatory’ like six time on the next three meetings. Then, apparently, passed out.

Unfortunately, he’s remembered Tango isn’t allowed to cook.

Tango sighs. He doesn’t mind his chores, mostly checking up on mechanisms and sweeping and boring, repetitive things, but he doesn’t have any he’s supposed to do today. There are twenty-six of them, and…

Pearl and Gem’s names are on there. Gem. Tango likes Gem. When did Gem join? Obviously before now, obviously she’s real, but season eight wasn’t real. So. His head hurts. They’d agreed, they’d picked them up, they’d agreed, they’d found them in a hole, they’d… He sort of remembers what he thinks he’s meant to, and he can’t breathe properly. If he’s having trouble breathing, it’s probably best he doesn’t have any to do today. Gives him more time to get his breathing back in order, really.

He starts to walk off. Joe sniffs and nearly falls off of the chair he’s fallen asleep on. Tango looks at him. He’s very alive. That’s good. Maybe Tango should wake him up, though, so he stops drawing on himself with the pen he’d been using to fix the chore list.

…nah.

Tango laughs a little as Joe pokes himself in the face with the pen, snorts, turns over, snorts again, and then stays asleep, now with a giant line on his face. Very alive indeed.

Anyway, the next thing Tango’s required to do with the others is—uh—mop? Mop. Who’d been mopping before they woke up, anyway? (Briefly, he imagines Goatman doing it with his great fluffy creeper feet. Yeah, that works.) Until then, he should… He thinks there’s a room somewhere with redstone snap circuits, and charts for it, and planning things. Normally, that’s what he’s done on journeys in the past, to real seasons and from them.

But…

He goes back to his room instead and doesn’t fall back asleep. He takes out a notebook and starts writing out everything he can about Decked Out. Yeah. He’s doing that again now, right? He is.

He doesn’t leave until lunch, and that time, he doesn’t sit with anyone.

Tango hasn’t actually mopped anywhere in a while, but it’s surprisingly meditative. It’s the sort of thing where he can ignore what else he’s doing for a while. Put on headphones—he takes them off again, stares, turns off the noise cancellation, and puts on music before he puts them on again—and he can do it instead of working on redstone and plans for a season he is having trouble believing exists. He just has to be careful to do it in a proper pattern, because, given that he has no idea what he’s doing, he kept on walking all over his previously cleaned floors for a while before realizing he maybe shouldn’t be doing that.

Feels different from anything else he’s done. It’s nice. He’s doing this, listening to music, when he comes across someone else who’s helping clean.

“Oh, hey!” Welsknight says, a bit loudly. Tango looks up.

“Oh, hey Wels,” Tango says. “How you doing?”

“Eh,” Wels says, and doesn’t elaborate. Tango can respect that. They can talk about something else, like…

Like…

See, this is the part, Tango thinks, where he asks how the end of the season went. How Wels is feeling about the next one. About any of that, but, well, it can’t just be Tango who thinks it’s maybe a bit insensitive to ask, right?

“Hey Tango,” Wels asks, suddenly. “It didn’t work, right? What you tried there, at the end. None of it worked, right? There wasn’t any way…”

Tango stiffens. He tries to breathe in, but it’s hard. The air must be thin on this part of the ship.

“No,” he says.

“Okay. So there wasn’t—it’s fine. Sorry. Uh.”

“Did you ever finish—”

“No, no I didn’t.”

“I didn’t—I mean, I finished a lot of what I wanted from, but I didn’t—”

Welsknight laughs. “Sorry. Sorry. I don’t know what to say these days, it seems like.”

“That’s fine,” Tango says. “I wasn’t feeling…”

“Maybe next season,” Wels says. “Maybe then. I have sketches of it, and all the plans I’d actually finished. Maybe then I’ll finally finish a season.”

“Yeah, yeah. Maybe.”

Tango takes another deep breath, and another. He’s not sure it’s working, but it’s something.

“I guess this past one doesn’t count, anyway. Since it wasn’t real. Not a third instance of—I mean, I left before you all could, this—”

“Can we stop talking?” Tango snaps, and he’s startled at himself how harsh it comes out.

“Right. Sorry. I shouldn’t have. I just…”

“I can—we can put on music.”

“That works.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

Tango turns up his music loud, and listens to the sound. He tries not to be mad at Welsknight, because he’s not, and it’s not Wels’s fault Tango’s chest hurts, or that Tango is doing just absolutely peachy on the social interaction front so far. Then again, shouldn’t Wels have known better than to bring it up? Tango’s sure not brought it up with anyone, not intentionally, anyway. He doesn’t want to talk about it, that much. Besides, maybe Wels is right. It doesn’t count.

He nearly slips on an area he’d mopped and decides to give up talking more as a bad job. His throat hurts. For a while, they both clean the hallway in silence. The halls of the Hermethius are surprisingly tight for a ship that’s meant to hold twenty-six people. The only part of the ship that’s truly massive is the area for the past seasons’ mementos, and, conspicuously, there’s been no one assigned to clean that area. The cleaning’s mostly busywork anyway, so it doesn’t matter if it collects a little dust. It’s just because, as a group of people, they’re liable to go a little crazy without something to do.

Nice and repetitive. Tango breathes with the motions of what he’s cleaning. Welsknight has music on too. Probably rock of some kind; Wels likes that stuff. Briefly, Tango entertains a vision of Wels listening to something more stereotypically ‘knightly’. Which would be what, choral music?

(Tango’s not paying attention to what kind of music he’s listening to, just that he can hear it, and it’s loud.)

They’re quiet for a while before Welsknight looks up again. He considers for a moment.

“I’m going to build a cute sandstone house first, though. Not try to finish the castle.”

Tango blinks several times.

“Just thought I’d—nevermind,” Welsknight says. “Geez. Staying out where I did on my own did completely break my ability to talk to living people, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s the peril,” Tango says. “Uh, my throat still hurts, though, so…”

“Oh, okay. You don’t have to answer. I just want to talk to someone. I won’t talk about—well. You know.”

Tango nods.

“Alright. So I’ve been thinking,” Welsknight starts, and the words wash over Tango. It’s not quite the same thing as the music. The music had been noise, instead of deafening silence, but Wels talking combined with the music, that’s something else entirely. Tango, at least, doesn’t have to pretend to be that good of a conversationalist. He just has to respond sometimes. Doesn’t even have to feel that guilty about it, though he does. He’s normally better at talking, it’s just, breathing issues, he really should talk to the doctor again about that but he doesn’t want to. Wels doesn’t mind that Tango’s barely listening, though. Wels seems to just want someone to periodically respond to what he’s saying.

Tango would say that’s kind of sad, but he doesn’t really have room to talk, given the lack of that he’s been doing.

And that’s how it goes, for a while, before they both realize there isn’t much left to mop. Tango’s ears and head hurt now, too, from the loud music and trying to hear what Wels had been saying, but hey, he did that to himself. Can’t say he’d do it again, though.

Welsknight turns and leaves before Tango can say anything. Tango shrugs. Tango decides that maybe he will go to the redstone testing room after all. Get used to drawing the Decked Out circuits again, what with him planning a second version and all. It’ll be better than nothing. He leaves the music on.

According to Renbob, who comes by each of their cabins, they’re going to take another two months to get to any kind of usable planetary space, even with the emergency re-adjustments they’d made when they’d realized the Hermatrix was failing. Even with the emergency antivirus they’d had to implement. Even with—

“Antivirus?” Tango asks.

“Well,” Renbob says uncomfortably, and doesn’t say anything else. Tango lets it go.

The point is, Renbob says to him, as Tango’s sure Goatman’s explaining elsewhere, they’re gonna be stuck on board for a while. They’ll make stops—something about a diner at the end of the world?—but beyond that, they’re stuck here for now. Which, fair, normally they’ve better planned shorter hops between seasons, that’s why the whole Hermatrix thing happened in the first place, apparently, but…

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Tango says.

“That’s good, dude. We can try to get the Hermatrix running again, but—”

“Nah, you don’t have to,” Tango says.

“Good, because like, man, we probably won’t?”

“Good,” Tango says without thinking. Renbob flinches, full-body. Tango stares at him for a moment. Not really his problem.

“That’s all,” Renbob says, and he leaves.

Two months, huh? Fine. Tango can live with that.

The first official Hermitcraft meeting after the moon fell in a dream they were all collectively having goes a bit like this:

Tango arrives in the meeting room, which is still kind of a mess. Joe is somehow already asleep in a chair. In one of the corners, Grian and Mumbo are arguing while trying to stack up as many markers as they can on top of the whiteboard. Pearl is sitting like someone who hasn’t been to these before and doesn’t know what kind of chaos they are, except, Tango realizes, that she has like eight markers. Zedaph is once again waving and hollering for him, and Impulse is sitting next to him. Keralis is saying something to Xb, who doesn’t appear to be listening. Tango watches them for a little longer than he should before letting Zedaph take him to sit next to him.

Xisuma is one of the last people to walk into the room on-time (almost exactly on the dot; he isn’t normally nearly that punctual, so it’s a bit impressive to Tango he is this time). There are still several people who are late. One of them is Bdubs. He and Tango look at each other for a moment again. Maybe Tango should say something to him. Say he got his message. He doesn’t want to, though, and neither does Bdubs, apparently, because he goes to sit next to Cleo, and that’s that.

It takes a while for them to start properly. TFC is the last person to get in, and he sits quietly, and then no one starts the meeting properly until Ren slams his hands against the table and says something about finding nearby worlds, and then everyone’s talking at once.

Tango tries very, very hard to remember if they’d picked a seed before now. They had to have picked a seed world, right? Before the simulation? Because it’s always such an ordeal, but here they are, arguing about how to pick a seed world from the ones in range of the Hermethius, and it’s sounding concerningly like they may have not actually picked one. That isn’t good, Tango thinks, and then he thinks that’s probably an understatement.

“Hey, X,” Tango asks.

Xisuma looks up.

“Did we pick a seed world, or…?”

“If we did, I, uh, lost it. Sorry. I’m, uh, such an idiot, right?” Xisuma says, and it’s strangely hesitant. Tango sighs.

“Geez. Thanks,” he says.

“I can—I can fix that, I can pick one—” X says nervously, and about four people start talking at once. Joe snores particularly loudly, but somehow has managed to stay asleep. He’s sleeping, like, a lot.Tango’s frankly kind of jealous. Tango hasn’t been sleeping at all, let alone napping in the middle of hallways and meetings like Joe seems to be. Sleep evades him still. It’s hard to sleep when you have breathing problems, Tango thinks.

Anyway, everyone’s arguing about how to pick a seed world, and the only thing Tango thinks is important is that it’s nearby. Besides, none of the people arguing seem to know what they want, either; they’re just arguing.

Zedaph leans to Tango and whispers, a bit loudly: “I hope they pick somewhere with room for a lot of idiots.”

Tango snorts. “Thanks, Holston.”

“Who?”

Tango blinks several times. “I said, thanks, H… Zedaph. I said thanks Zedaph,” Tango says. His heart feels strange. “Hey, how fake exactly was…?”

“I mean, pretty fake?”

“Yeah, okay,” Tango says. His ears feel funny. Everyone’s talking so much, and he can’t breathe, though, so that’s probably why.

“Anyway,” Tango says. “Anyway.” He falls silent. He doesn’t have more to add. He wants to ask what the probability of moon-related problems are in their next world. Their next world won’t be fake, after all, and Tango has no desire to die in space a second time. He’d go to space a second time, sure, but he’s no desire to die there.

Someone—Tango isn’t paying attention to who—says: “As long as we get somewhere, I don’t care where it is! As long as it’s a real place this time. A safe one.”

Tango looks up. Everyone goes a little quiet.

“Safe, huh?” Bdubs says, and snorts. “Yeah, sure, okay.”

“And what do you mean by that?” someone else says, bristling. Tango’s a little surprised to see that it’s Beef, who normally has a temperament calmer than anything else Tango’s ever seen. But there’s something a little wild in Beef’s eyes. “We’ve been plenty of places that are safe before. We’ve just got to—”

“I mean, how do we guarantee? Hardly the first time things went wrong, is it?” Bdubs says. “Oh, sure, no—”

“It wasn’t real!” Beef says.

“Of course it wasn’t,” Bdubs says, and suddenly Tango feels dizzy. There are people arguing again but Tango is so dizzy that he hears something Holsten—Zedaph, it’s Zedaph—says to him and nearly falls onto Zedaph instead of answering, so.

“That’s all I want,” he says. He’s breathless. He can hear how breathless he is. “Somewhere Bdubs is safe.”

Bdubs turns to Tango, or Tango thinks he does, and more people are talking, and nothing meaningful gets done for the rest of the meeting, which is probably good, since Tango’s busy trying to figure out what’s wrong with his chest instead of thinking about important things like things they might want at a spawn or why Scar and Bdubs are quietly arguing or who finally woke Joe up or the fact that the only thing on the whiteboard at the end of the meeting is the following:

Safe, if that is possible.

Good start, everyone, he thinks. Good start, Tango. Safe, if that is possible. Brilliant. Inspiring. No wonder they’re here now—

His bedroom still feels too empty. He’s hung up posters. He doesn’t normally collect them, so he’d printed them out in the ship crafting area. He can’t quite get the design of the Pass-n-Gas logo right, though, and besides, he doesn’t want to look at it. He leaves it be.

The thing about the redstone testing room is that it’s never quiet. It’s not just Tango in there. Mumbo’s in a corner, muttering to himself, and Doc is—actually, Doc is absent. Tango’s not sure why he hasn’t seen Doc here yet this trip, but after several days, it’s been basically everyone but Doc. Tango’s even said hi to Cubfan at least once, and Cub often works on his own redstone in his cabin. (He is not, strictly, supposed to be doing that. The risk of something going wrong in the bedrooms is supposed to be avoided. Telling Cubfan not to do something, however, is a fool’s errand, and everyone knows it. Tango wishes everyone knew that about him, too, but then again, that would be inviting people to tell Tango he couldn’t do something, and he’d rather avoid that, too.)

It’s… almost annoying how there’s always someone in. Tango doesn’t want to be interrupted. He feels… strange, still. He needs to focus. He has to do his new circuits perfectly. If he’s going to build something complicated, it has to be perfect, to have the highest rate of success it can possibly have. He can’t afford mistakes in Decked Out 2.0, or in anything else. Nope. No mistakes here.

Depending on who’s in, though, that’s easier some times than others. Right now, for example, Mumbo’s in a corner, muttering to himself. Mumbo talks out loud about his ideas a lot, but Mumbo has been pretty reticent to talk as well. He’ll explain what he’s done if asked, but he’s stuck to himself. That makes Tango’s life easier. If it’s Xisuma, he’s dead silent, which is weird, given Xisuma used to be a mutterer too, but maybe he’s gotten over that.

If it’s Zedaph, he’ll try to talk to Tango the whole time, and Tango just has to put up with it, because it doesn’t matter how antisocial Tango’s feeling lately; Zedaph’s basically Tango’s best friend, and it’s pretty rude to just brush off your best friend.

If it’s Impulse, well—

Impulse comes in with a collection of tiny gears and a strange expression on his face, the first time Tango sees him in the redstone room. “I can’t quite replicate it,” he’d said, and Tango had left him be, and thought, well, he’s not the only one who can’t replicate things, and then he ignores Impulse, right up until Impulse asks Tango about replicating things from past seasons, or capturing their essence, and Impulse is one of Tango’s best friends, too, so Tango can’t be antisocial about Impulse, either. He ends up spending most of the time Tango has exhausted, trying to be polite about listening to Impulse talk about factories and visions and how hard it had been to try to build, even with the small amount of time they’d had.

And Impulse is normally a lot better than Zedaph is at social cues, so Tango had thought…

But if it’s Impulse, the thing is, Impulse doesn’t talk the way Zedaph does. He doesn’t talk in a way that’s easy. It’s dumb, of course. Zedaph’s talking, it grates against Tango too, because Zedaph always, always talks like Zedaph, like nothing in the world has ever changed. That hurts sometimes. Like, okay, Tango’s started avoiding the times he knows Zedaph normally eats meals. He’s going to stop being able to avoid them soon, because Zedaph knows when he’s being avoided, but it’s like… Zedaph doesn’t seem to recognize why Tango’s so exhausted in the mornings. Zedaph doesn’t look like a guy who’s been having nightmares for weeks, which, you know, good! Zedaph’s Tango’s friend, he doesn’t want him to be having nightmares, it’s just that Zedaph talks like he doesn’t know why anyone would, which—

The point is that sometimes Zedaph is a bit like sandpaper, but it’s consistent sandpaper. Impulse, however…

Impulse knows something was wrong. He just…

Tango looks up when the door opens, and resists the urge to just leave when Impulse cheerfully smiles. “Another day of trying to figure out what lessons I can take from the factory!” he says, and his smile doesn’t reach his eyes.

It’s not consistent sandpaper, is the problem.

Tango nods, and Impulse comes over, and Tango looks at all of the places where his new plans for Decked Out don’t make any sense and breathes, breathes in, breathes out, shallow breaths that do almost nothing. He’s not sure he’ll be able to work on them while Impulse is here. Impulse isn’t actually trying to monopolize anyone’s time, and if Tango had enough air and had enough time to think about anything, enough space in his head, Impulse wouldn’t be monopolizing anything. It’s just that Tango doesn’t currently really have the energy to figure out if this will be a survivable sandpaper, or a sandpaper he can’t stand, because Impulse isn’t consistent.

Impulse says something about phantoms, almost manic. He means well, Tango tells himself, looking at Impulse’s wild expression as he tries to recapture something he hadn’t finished. He means well. Tango can’t talk, anyway. He means well.

Everyone means so, so goddamn well.

Tango wishes it had been Cub again instead of Impulse and he can’t stand himself for that.

After basic cleaning, the other thing Tango is largely signed up for, in rotations with Cub and Scar and Beef, is helping with navigation. Xb sometimes, too. He’s good with computers, is the reason, and he somewhat knows his way around the navigation controls. (Although, funny—Ren isn’t on the list, he’s normally on it too.)

It’s relaxing, normally. It’s not like the Hermethius actually needs navigators at this point. It runs pretty well on autopilot. There just has to be someone in the seats to do something should anything weird happen. Tango supposes that while they were in season eight, that was only Renbob and Goatman, taking turns. Now, though, may as well provide relief while they can. It’d probably be rude not to.

He’s sitting in a chair, alone, looking at the stars, though, and he can’t breathe right, and he really does have to actually… talk to someone about that. He should. It’s probably not a great sign.

God, space is big.

It’s so big, and cold, and empty, and it’s full of dust from dead moons. He can see it there. Not in the way enough to have to navigate the ship around it, and if it’s there, it’s too late to avoid anyway, so he just watches the pieces of the world hover.

He’s supposed to be on this shift for three hours. He’d said he was fine with it. He is. He’s just watching stars, and he’s lonely, but someone has to do it.

He can’t fuck up a second time.

When Renbob comes to get him, he has a strange expression on his face. “I won’t leave anyone in here alone anymore,” he mumbles, and Tango doesn’t know what must be on his face, the same as he can’t read Renbob’s.

Tango stands outside of Bdubs’s door and stares at it for a while. It is two am, and Tango has not slept. It’d be rude to open the door, though, even just to—just to check if he’s in there and alive. It’s stupid, though. Tango sits down next to the door and leans against it and it feels cold.

He wonders what Bdubs would say if Tango told him he was leaving Tango breathless. Nothing good, probably. Tango wouldn’t live it down for weeks. To be fair, Tango wouldn’t let Bdubs live it down either, just as soon as he stopped seeing panic where there was none in the lines of Bdubs’s face.

It’s stupid. It wasn’t real. It’s stupid. Tango leaves again, and he doesn’t sleep.

It’s lunchtime, and Gem’s sat next to Tango, for some reason. It’s not that they aren’t friends—they are—but he’s not sure why she’s chosen him to be the person she sits by. Surely, Impulse or Pearl or any of the people Gem’s a bit closer to are available, right? And it’s not that he’s antisocial, exactly, it’s that—well, he’s antisocial, but only Zedaph has been trying to do anything about it up until now, and Zedaph isn’t exactly social either, so he’s just… He’s surprised.

Gem sits next to him with a clatter and then doesn’t say anything else as she eats a salad. Tango looks to his own meal, then back at Gem’s. He’s kind of curious where she’d gotten a salad, actually. They’re having rice. Gem is perfectly capable of eating rice, as far as Tango knows. There are no dietary restrictions here, and given that it had been Xisuma cooking this time, they probably only had rice. Xisuma’s great at cooking in bulk but burns everything if he tries to cook more than one thing at a time because he gets too distracted, so where on earth did the salad come from?

And Gem isn’t talking. That’s fine. Tango pulls out his Decked Out notes again. He’s having trouble with his warden plans. Mind, that’s definitely in part because he’s not yet quite certain how the warden will ask, but they can burrow, and trying to figure out how to get a burrowing mob to stay in one place is proving tricky. The easiest way would be to prevent them from burrowing altogether, but that requires noise, and Decked Out already required the heartbeat noise, at least, unless he wants to entirely change how the audio cues for the game work, and he’s not sure he wants to redo anything that works. The idea of building something that doesn’t work makes his breath short. So, it has to work.

He’s doodling on his napkin when Gem says: “Hey Tango, tell me about Decked Out, will you?”

“Uh,” Tango says.

“Because I wasn’t there last season, and I want to hear all about it! You’re making a second version, right?”

She sounds strange and chipper. Tango says: “Sure. It’s based on this board game called Clank,” he starts, and then he watches Gem’s face. She’s looking across the dining room. False is talking to Ren about something, but is looking their direction. He looks back at Gem. “...in season 7, it was about, uh, ravagers. And exploring a specially-made map. And collectable cards and artifacts, you’d be able to win points based on what sets of artifacts you had, and change how the game worked with cards.”

“And you did all of that with redstone? Wow!” Gem says. She’s not looking at Tango.

“Well, it took most of a season. This time I’m planning on getting help. I just have to get the circuits right. A lot of things can go wrong, with redstone, if you don’t plan it right. I mean, you could blow yourself up instead of sending something the direction you meant to, or something. So I have to make sure everything is perfect, especially if I plan on putting the warden in.”

“The warden? That sounds hard,” Gem says, and, hm. This must be how Zedaph’s been feeling with Tango. Strange. Tango doesn’t mind, exactly, but Gem still isn’t looking at him, and isn’t looking at False, either, and False is looking at them with a dark expression Tango can’t quite read. False’s face has always been hard to read, though; she looks so naturally serious that it can be easy to miss other bits. Maybe Gem’s intimidated? But no, hadn’t they lived together?

“Yeah, that’s the problem. They burrow, except when they hear a threat. But Decked Out’s always used noise, so that should be easy, right? But I want to control what they hear when. I want them to hear players sometimes, and I don’t want the sound that has to be consistent for the wardens to be mistaken for the sound of clank, which is an important part of the game.”

“What’s clank?”

“Uh,” Tango says. “It’s—the longer you’re in Decked Out, the more ways there are for the ravagers to reach you, in the original, or for enemies in general to reach you, in the new version. Clank is—you have to be sneaky to avoid it? That is the idea.”

“That’s so neat!”

Tango snorts. “You have no idea what I’m talking about.”

“I’m paying so much attention,” Gem says. “I know so much about what you’re saying, and it all makes so much sense! Oh no, she’s coming over anyway.”

Tango looks up, and False is standing in front of them.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she says.

“Um,” Gem says.

“We’re friends, right?”

“Oh, yeah, best friends,” Gem says. “Nothing’s changed there.”

Tango winces. Yeah, what a way to answer that, Gem.

“Right. Of course,” False says. “Best friends who would never leave each other.”

“That isn’t fair,” Gem says.

“Why?”

“Because. Because you did too.”

“Well then,” False says. “Well then. You’ve been avoiding me.”

Tango swallows. The air’s thin in here, and he hears the sound of rockets and ticking timers in his ears.

“I have,” Gem admits.

Tango probably shouldn’t be here for this conversation, especially because it’s all he can do to think about how long it’s been since he’s talked to Bdubs or Keralis. He didn’t abandon them, he thinks. He did, perhaps, the opposite, except they died anyway. He didn’t abandon them, though, he didn’t. He didn’t abandon anyone, right?

“Good to know we’re both good at not talking to each other,” False says.

“Falsie,” Ren says, and then falls quiet again.

“You’re talking now.”

“Are we?”

“I don’t have a choice now, False.”

“Uh,” Tango says.

“Well?”

“Do you want me to say sorry?” Gem says.

“Am I?” False asks, and then says something under her breath, and then says, “Are you?”

Tango looks at Ren, who is looking away. Tango watches them. They’re both silent for a while, and neither of them say anything. Holsten would say something here about unreliable humans or something, or something about how their point is made. Bdubs would simply barrel through the conversation as though nothing were wrong. Tango stands there like a coward who died instead of fixing anything, watching his two friends stare at each other and not apologize.

“Well,” False says.

Gem looks at her salad.

“...how’s the plans for Decked Out going, then?” False asks.

“They’re—they’re great,” Tango says. “None of them work yet but I have months, so they’re—they’re…”

He has to stop to breathe for a moment. Gem puts her hands on the table.

“Uh. I finished my salad. I’m actually not hungry,” she says. “Thanks for telling me about your game. I’m excited! And, uh, False…”

“Go ahead and go,” False says. “I’m leaving too. I, uh. Maybe this wasn’t a great idea.”

“Where did you get a salad?” Rendog asks.

“It was nice talking to you,” Gem says.

“Nice talking to you,” agrees False.

They both leave.

“Dude,” Rendog says. Tango buries his face in his hands and tries very hard to breathe for a while.

The second Hermitcraft meeting goes a bit like this:

“Why did we agree to this in the first place?” says Ren, and his voice is quiet in a way it hasn’t been in a long time. “I mean, I asked Renbob, man, but why did we agree to this?”

“To be fair, we didn’t agree to die,” says Mumbo, and he probably means it as a joke, but it very much does not come out as one.

Tango leans against the table. The whiteboard only has their one criteria on it still. This is a conversation he wants an answer to, too, but he’s not sure it’s one they’ll be able to answer over the course of a single meeting. He knows what argument is about to start again, anyway. He doesn’t have an answer for it.

“We didn’t actually die,” Scar says. “As the foremost expert on dying—”

“Can hardly still claim that, now can you?” Grian says.

“Actually, I can. I downloaded statistics and everything. As the foremost expert on dying—”

“Statistics?” Grian says. “You downloaded statistics?”

“You can’t be that far ahead of everyone, right?” Joe says. “I’m pretty good at gettin’ distracted and dyin’ at random.”

“No, I was like a hundred ahead of—”

“A hundred? Scar!”

“Will you let me finish?” Scar says.

“I actually don’t see why this is relevant?” Hypno says. “Weren’t we talking about trying to recall why we agreed to the whole season eight thing in the first place? Like, isn’t doing a whole fake season sorta…”

“I think I remember why I agreed,” Keralis says. “I wanted to build a house.”

Everyone’s silent for a while.

“...that’s it?” Ren says, his voice cracking.

“Yes?”

“Dude, you can build a house whenever you want. You can do all of the house-age. Why did that require a simulation.”

“Well, I wanted to build a house in sooner than a year, and it was going to be a year until we could get to another stable seed world. So I figured, a pretend house was better than no house?”

“Your logic skills know no equal,” Xb says dryly.

“Aw, thanks Princess!” Keralis says cheerfully.

“Well, for me,” Doc says slowly. “For me. A lot of my skills would get rusty, if I went that long without using them. And it wasn’t meant to go wrong, yeah?”

There’s a long silence.

“Would we be having this conversation if it had gone right?” Ren asks.

Doc snorts and looks away. “We should have known better. Since when do any of our plans go right?”

Tango looks down. Since when indeed.

“Normally they don’t end that catastrophically,” Ren says. “Normally… well, normally, that’s just me.”

“Just you?” Doc says.

“Yeah, buddy, hate to break it to you, we’re all idiots here,” Tango says. It sounds a little distant. “You’re hardly the only failure in the room.”

“Sorry,” X says, and Tango turns to look at him.

“...we weren’t. Talking to you…?” he says.

“I just thought—failure—geez, I’ve gone and messed up everything even more. I really should just shut up, shouldn’t I?” Xisuma says.

Everyone is quiet for a bit.

“What I’m gathering is that none of us have a very good answer, do we?” Mumbo says.

“Not sure why you expected that,” Tango says.

“If this is what happens when we try to make things go to plan,” Ren says, “maybe we just shouldn’t have a plan at all, huh?”

Several people start talking at once and Tango freezes in place, because, no. They can’t just not have a plan. That’s the stupidest thing he’s heard yet. Sure, a plan with low odds of success, they can’t have that, but they really can’t just not have a plan. Not having a plan is being alone in a spaceship with no time left. Not having a plan is, not having a plan is a horrible idea. Not having a plan will get them killed. Not having a plan will get them so killed. No, that can’t be allowed, they have to have a plan. They have to have one. Unacceptable, for things to have… have slip-ups that could lead to failure. He wants to say it, but there are already several other people talking, and he needs to focus for a moment on breathing, instead.

But they have to have a plan.

They have to have a plan.

(By the time they leave for the day, they don’t even agree on that, and Tango wants to punch the stupid whiteboard in the face. This is entirely rational. He doesn’t care.)

Tango and Scar are silent from the control room. There’s still so much moon dust in the path of the Hermethius. It’s dizzying. It’s all so dizzying.

“You know, it’s awfully dark in here,” Scar says.

“Is it?” Tango says.

“Yeah,” Scar says. “Dark and endless and empty.”

“Huh,” Tango says. “Looks pretty full to me.”

“Really?”

“Full of broken rock.”

“Huh.”

They both watch and keep an eye on the controls together. Ren’s on the list again; he’s with Doc when they come to relieve them. Tango hadn’t known Doc knew how to pilot a spaceship, but he doesn’t want to argue. He just wants to get out. So does Scar. They both leave without a word. Neither of them say anything to anyone, and both of them are scheduled to monitor the ship again.

“Alright,” Zedaph says. Oh, boy. Zedaph does know when Tango eats, huh. He’s been ambushed over his eggs. Tango wants to tell Zedaph how disconcerting it is, being ambushed over his eggs. He wants to just eat them! He doesn’t want them to get cold.

“Hey, Zed,” Tango says.

“Alright,” Zedaph says, louder and more insistently. “We’re having a Team ZIT day!”

“A what?” Tango asks.

“I am getting Impulse and we’re going to go blow things up,” Zedaph says, and Tango—

“No. No explosions. We aren’t—not on a spaceship, we aren’t—”

“...Tango?”

Tango takes a deep breath, and feels like he isn’t getting air.

“We can have a Team ZIT day, but we aren’t blowing anything up.”

“Fine, fine, geez. Normally you love explosions.”

Yeah. Normally he does. “They wouldn’t be super safe in the vacuum of space, Zedaph.”

“And?”

“You don’t… you don’t want that,” Tango says.

Zedaph looks at Tango for a while, and it takes most of what Tango has in him for him not to look away immediately. It does help, after a moment, to be looking at Zedaph, though. To see another person’s eyes. Makes it a little easier to breathe, given how hard it’s been lately, doing that.

“You probably have a point,” Zedaph says, sounding disconcertingly disappointed. “I’ll come up with something else—don’t we have recreated minigames?”

“Yeah, we have to use the simulation system for that, and even if it’s not the Hermatrix…”

“Hm. Yeah, I can see why people might not want to… oh, I know! Stay there, I’m getting Impulse,” Zedaph says, and he quickly leaves Tango there, standing over his eggs. Bemused, Tango decides to eat what he can before Zedaph shows up again and everything inevitably gets horrifically derailed. He gets probably five minutes of it, and he’s wolfing down his food so fast that he doesn’t think he’s actually tasted any of the eggs at all, but at least he’s eaten something when Zedaph comes back, Impulse trailing behind him.

“We’re playing hide and seek,” Zedaph says confidently.

“I’m not five,” Tango says.

“What, are you saying you’d lose?” Impulse says.

“Excuse you, I’d definitely win,” Tango says.

“I mean, my other idea was setting up Among Us, but I think we don’t have the redstone for that, and also that murder is normally frowned upon between seasons when respawn is a little more awkward.”

“Yeah, that’s… fair?” Impulse says, before he looks at Tango. Tango shrugs. Yeah, sure, fair.

“Anyway, I think I can hide better than either of you, so who wants to look first?”

“We should set rules about where we can hide. No going into our rooms, nothing in the navigation rooms, let's not go into the memory room,” Tango says.

“Fine, okay. Rude. My plan was to lock my door and—”

“You were going to cheat!” says Impulse, scandalized. “Zedaph!”

“We hadn’t established the rules yet!” Zedaph says. “It’s not cheating!”

Tango laughs. “I’ll hunt first,” he says. “I’ll count from thirty, starting now. Twenty-nine… twenty-eight…”

“You have to give us a warning!” complains Impulse, and he hears the two of them scramble away. He also hears at least one of them run into someone else on the way, judging by the apology and TFC’s mildly amused exclamation. He huffs to himself and finishes counting. Maybe he even speeds up the last few numbers a little. If Zedaph is going to have them playing a game like they’re five, he’s going to act like he’s five about it.

He turns around. He sees TFC has sat down to eat his own eggs (although he gets to have his at a proper, non-Zedaph-interrupted speed, doesn’t he, the lucky bastard). Tango walks up to him. “Hey, do you know which way Zedaph and Impulse went?” he asks.

He watches TFC consider the fact that they’re clearly playing a game versus the inherent chaos of just answering. The man finally cackles. “Smart move. They went towards the supply rooms. I think Impulse said something about the walk-in freezer.”

“I’m sorry, Impulse said what—I have to go get my idiots,” Tango says, and TFC cackles.

Two hours and a series of increasingly stupid hiding places later, and it’s the first time in almost two weeks Tango has felt comfortable with his best friends. He tries not to think too much about how part of it is that he spends most of the time hiding from them or looking for them, rather than talking to them, but it’s nice, all the same, to separate laughing, instead of feeling like he’s been put in a blender. It’s nice.

The thing that makes Tango finally give in and check on why he can’t breathe goes like this: he’s walking down the hallway, and he accidentally goes into the room where they keep the bigger mementos of previous seasons, the big builds and murals and everything they don’t want to lose. And he’s looking in it, and there’s nothing from Season Eight, because it wasn’t real, and he’s—would there be things there if they’d made it through the season? What would he want to remember?

And he looks at it, and he thinks about the shoreline, and the paths Bdubs had built, and the mountain Tango had taken, and he thinks about a tree farm and glasses and gas stations and then he thinks about the moon and then he thinks about death. He thinks about death. He thinks about that and he thinks that he promised to keep the glasses, but that the thing is that he hadn’t managed to save the glasses either way, he hadn’t.

And he’s standing there, thinking about death, when he realizes that he’s horrendously dizzy, and the ground feels like it’s very far away. He has to run his hand along the wall to get himself to where he’s sitting, and it still feels wrong, like if he moves wrong, he’ll float away. It’s not a symptom of oxygen deprivation he’s experienced before, but he knows that’s what it has to be, especially as a headache blazes behind his brow. What else could it be?

There should be a Pass-n-Gas here, he thinks, and then he has trouble thinking and his vision swims. He asks Holsten to check his vitals, but he doesn’t get an answer, and in that horrible moment of silence, Tango has to admit that there’s something wrong with his heart. There’s no other answer for why he’s nearly passed out on the floor. Or it’s his lungs. His lungs could be the problem too, but when he’s sitting there trying to remember how to breathe, feeling like the whole world is ending again in front of him, it feels a whole lot more like his heart is broken than his lungs are.

Keralis is in the medical wing helping Goatman sort something out with Pearl. Tango had forgotten that Keralis, Doc, and Cub were basically the only hermits with real medical experience. He’s not ready for this. He’s not ready for Keralis to be here.

At first, Keralis doesn’t say anything. Then—

“Tango! My friend! Why are you here? Are you sick?”

“Yeah, I’m…”

He can’t get enough air for a moment.

“Oh no!” Keralis says. “You’re definitely sick! You’re breathing all heavy!”

“Yeah,” Tango says.

“It’s okay! We’ll check you out,” Keralis says. Tango just keeps on looking at him. His eyes. Keralis hadn’t had an exit plan, not really. Tango had heard he’d built himself something resembling an exit plan, and remembered the not-really-Keralis in the Pass-n-Gas in space, but Keralis had been Keralis. He hadn’t had an exit plan. He’d probably tried. A lot of people had probably tried. By the time anyone had tried, though, it had been so late. It had been so late. And Tango, he’d failed everyone, but not everyone had been living with him. Not everyone had been filming a stupid commercial just a few weeks ago, had thrown a pool party for him and ‘Bubbles’, had joined in on their profit-splitting, had—

Not everyone had been Keralis.

Keralis and Goatman come over. Keralis is smiling. Keralis’s smile looks… odd. Tango doesn’t know how to put his finger on it, but there’s something odd in Keralis’s smile. It’s hard to focus when it’s this hard to breathe, though. It’s gotten worse. It feels like the world is sucking the air that should be in his lungs out of it. Like he’s run out again.

What had it looked like when the moon fell, he wondered?

He’d already been too close to HC-8 when he’d tried to change its trajectory, when he’d been thrown into the void of space. Had they been able to see it? Had Keralis looked up and seen an explosion timed wrong? Did he know that had been his last chance, or did he not? Tango… Tango hadn’t talked to many people before the end. He hadn’t. He had been trying not to think about it, but—

He needs to try to breathe but it’s hard. He wonders if Keralis had been afraid.

Tango had been afraid. Tango had been so, so fucking afraid.

(Does it matter? Does the fear matter? None of it was real. None of it was real.)

He looks up at Keralis again. Keralis is frowning at Tango now. He and Goatman are doing their medical thing, and Keralis is frowning.

“Sorry,” Tango says.

“What for?” Keralis says.

“Sorry,” Tango says again.

“You don’t have anything to apologize for,” Keralis says, and this time, it almost sounds like Keralis knows what Tango’s trying to say.

“The problem,” Goatman interrupts to say, “is that our scans, eh, don’t reveal a problem. And…”

“I haven’t been able to breathe since I woke up,” Tango says.

“Your lungs are fine. Your heart is fine,” Goatman says. “It’s, uh…”

“I didn’t make it all up. This is real. This is real,” Tango says, a little desperately.

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t all in your head,” Keralis says quietly. “I—it still hurt. All in my head, though. I’m all fine! See? No burns!” he says, helpfully holding his hands out. “But it still—oh, but I’m fine.”

Tango feels dizzy. “You’re kidding.”

Goatman looks away. “There have been a lot of mistakes, man, we made a lot of mistakes, but the systems we used to make sure you’d be in perfect health when you got out, those, eh. Those weren’t the mistake. Those were fine. Those were always fine.”

“No burns,” Keralis says again, and he holds out a hand for Tango to take. Tango does, and Keralis flinches, but he smiles even brighter as he does.

“No burns,” Tango says, breathless. “No burns.”

The third Hermitcraft meeting they have after everything feels odd. Everyone goes in knowing full well what they’re discussing: do they make a plan? If they make a plan, what sort of plan do they make? Do they bother picking a seed? Tango looks over and Joe is holding cue cards; he’s prepared a speech. Cleo’s holding some too, so maybe it’s they’ve prepared a speech. He looks over to where, shoulder-to-shoulder, Doc is sitting with Ren. Neither of them have cue cards, but neither of them have been talking much. Over off to another side, Mumbo and Impulse don’t have cue cards, but they do have transparent slides. With Xisuma, Welsknight is standing to Xisuma’s left, and Beef to his right. Xisuma looks hunched over as he looks between everyone. And Tango—

They can’t just not have a plan, he thinks. They can’t leave the plan to the last minute. Not again. Not again.

Joe is the first one to talk. “We’re meant to be focusin’ on explorin’ this new kind of world,” he says. “It’s easier to explore if we don’t know what it looks like first. The way I figure, we go to the first seed world we get to, and that one becomes HC-9. Simple and easy. No arguments about that. As for other plannin’, we never quite have things go to plan regardless, so we should strike some sort of balance. That’s all I have to say on the matter.”

Mumbo and Impulse look at each other and nod. Impulse holds up his transparency. It has a picture of a slime. “How,” Impulse says.

“...how much slime do you need early on?” Cleo asks. “Please.”

“How!” Impulse says, a bit more insistently.

“Yeah, I have a pretty big project I have planned,” Beef says. “I need to know where there will be large amounts of ocean space. Not sure how I’m going to do that if we don’t know what the seed will look like before we get there.”

“Dude, everywhere has big oceans,” Ren says.

“Yeah, unused oceans,” Beef says.

“I need a guardian farm, but I don’t mind finding one!” Gem says.

And that’s how the debate starts. It’s surprisingly level, for a debate about something as fundamental as ‘actually checking what the place they’re landing looks like’. Tango quickly finds that the debate is a little less about not having a plan, and a little more about the specifics of how much plan they should have. Tango’s not a big fan of not controlling for all the variables, at the moment. The problem is that he doesn’t have a good argument, just…

“What if the place we land isn’t safe?” he says. “Some seed worlds drop you in the middle of the ocean or even right by lava or something. Seems like the sort of thing we should check.”

Yeah. That sounds perfectly level-headed to him. Impulse even agrees.

“Tango’s got a point,” Doc says quietly. Ren looks faintly betrayed. “If we’re dropped somewhere we know nothing about, how do we make sure it’s a good place? How do we make sure it’s somewhere with room for shopping districts and everything? It would be hard to tell, wouldn’t it?”

“Dude, we agreed,” Ren says.

“I know, but…”

“The safety of our fellow hermits is of utmost importance,” Joe starts, pulling out another cue card. “However, must safety stifle innovation? Also we normally completely tear down and terraform where we live at this point anyway. Should we not prove we can make any location work, regardless of seed or safety?”

“What he’s saying is that I’ll laugh if zombies kill you all night one,” Cleo says.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Joe says.

“No, that sounds funny,” Xb says. “I’m convinced.”

“Dude,” Ren says, a little wounded. “That does not help.”

Xb shrugs. “We’ll survive, won’t we? Went and proved that, didn’t we?”

“No we didn’t,” Bdubs says.

Tango looks at him. Everyone looks at him, really. He looks sort of confused for a moment before he laughs, and he laughs hard.

“We didn’t prove we’ll survive,” Bdubs says. “I mean, I’m big and strong and the moon? Not scary at all! I wasn’t scared one bit,” he lies, and Tango thinks of the terror in his face as he told Tango not to come back, as he said goodbye, as he explained how everything was ending. “But we didn’t prove we’ll survive. Some of us didn’t.”

The room is silent for that.

“We’re here, though,” Cubfan finally says. “We all made it in the end. Some of us chose strange ways around, true—”

“We’re here because it wasn’t real!” Tango hears himself saying. “If it had been real—what was your plan again? The llama thing?”

“Dude, don’t insult the llamas.”

“How much air did you have?” Tango asks. His chest hurts. “We’re here because it wasn’t real, and here we are, arguing about it even though it wasn’t real. If anything that means—that means—what does that mean, anyway?”

“We should have a plan!” Impulse says.

“It means I want to do something I know nothing about this time! Something that couldn’t be faked!” snarls Ren back. “So what if it’s a little dangerous? Real danger is better than, than—”

“Octa,” Doc finishes, and Ren snarls again.

“Real danger is not better than—I’m not doing that again,” Grian says. Tango’s startled. He hadn’t expected that Grian, of all people, would… “I’m not—falling without wings that can catch me. I’m not doing that again.”

“I—”

“Oh, shut up, Scar,” Grian says, like it’s an older argument.

“We’re not proposing—” Joe starts, but it’s too late. Things devolve once again. Tango looks across the room at Bdubs. Bdubs looks back at him. The space between them is too wide for Tango to cross. Zedaph’s hand is on Tango’s leg, a quiet anchor to the ground, and Tango starts counting seconds between when he breathes in and breathes out.

The whiteboard still only has the one phrase on it.

“Hey, uh, Bdubs,” Tango says.

“Oh, hey, Tango,” Bdubs says, and they both stare for a while.

“I—I’m sorry.”

“...you didn’t come back.”

“I know. I’m—”

“I didn’t want you to, anyway. Uh. I’m sorry, though. For the last thing—”

“You needed to—to someone. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

They stare at each other for a while longer, but Tango’s pretty sure neither of them are looking at each other. They leave again.

Tango’s not sure how he and Cleo are meant to organize cans, but they’re sure in the storage room doing that, and the cans are sure mysteriously unorganized. Judging by Cleo’s muttering, the disorganization was either maliciously done by Jevin or done by Joe in a well-meaning attempt to actually give the chore list some meaning, either/or. Tango lets it be. He doesn’t have any answers here, and definitely doesn’t want to admit to any Team ZIT shenanigans that may or may not have taken place in this room.

Also, organizing cans is hard. Putting all the similar canned food together, that’s one thing—all the canned vegetables, for example, should definitely go together, right, but then, like, does the canned soup go by the vegetables or the meat? Should the canned soup with meat in it go with the meats? Should the canned soup with vegetables go with vegetables? What about fruit? By the vegetables, right? But then where does soup go? Does it all go together as its own category? What’s a soup anyway?

Tango asks Cleo what is or isn’t a soup. She snorts and tells him to ask Joe. He’s… definitely not going to do that.

For a while, they work mostly quietly, making sarcastic statements about why fish and honey had, for some reason, been put on the same shelves. It’s nice. Easy and sarcastic and not something Tango has to think about much. It’s sort of nice that Cleo really, really doesn’t seem to be the kind of person to pretend everything is normal, but also really, really doesn’t seem like the kind of person to bring it up. Instead, it’s mostly good old sarcastic commentary. Tango can do sarcastic commentary. Sarcastic commentary is nice.

He’s looking at one of the cans when Cleo sighs. “I’m going to have to be the one to say this, aren’t I?”

“Huh?” Tango says, very eloquently.

“Bdubs is moping about you avoiding him.”

“He’s avoiding me.”

“Oh, that’s the worst. You’re both mutually moping, then,” Cleo says. She examines a can of peaches and puts it near the canned apples. (There have to be more peaches somewhere, Tango thinks, but he has no idea where they are.)

“I’m not—it’s not moping,” Tango says quietly.

“Don’t—don’t leave him behind because you don’t want to hurt yourself,” Cleo says. “Even if he tells you to. You’ll regret it.”

“Yeah?”

“The secret is that I don’t normally actually regret listening to—just, don’t, okay?” Cleo says. “Don’t do that to Bdubs. He’s delicate. He’ll say things because he doesn’t want to hurt too, but—but you have to not listen. Even if he asks you to. Even when he asks.”

“Delicate is not a word I’d use to describe him,” Tango says.

“You wouldn’t, would you?” Cleo says, laughing.

“Nope, not me,” Tango says. “It’d be like describing you as delicate.”

“Oh, I’m real delicate. I can show you exactly how delicate I am,” Cleo says.

“Please,” Tango says.

“Oh yeah. Super delicate. Rotten flesh? Way squishier than the real stuff.”

“...gross? We’re handling canned food?”

“Not that delicate,” Cleo says, and they just move on. They go back to banter and making fun of the organization system and arguing about whether or not the canned pasta counts as a soup or not. (They decide it's in its own category, and also whoever invented canned pasta was having a strange day. It’s a reasonable decision, Tango feels.)

It isn’t until Cleo makes Tango leave the room first, and doesn’t leave herself until she can be sure she’s the last one out of the door, that Tango realizes she may not have fully been talking about Bdubs. The thing is, he’s not sure if that changes the advice or not. The thing is, he tried. He tried talking to Bdubs. He’ll have to try again, though. He just… he broke the promise about the glasses, is all, and he’s not ready to have to apologize a second time.

He sits with Zedaph every morning now, and he sits with Impulse at least once a day in the redstone room. Impulse has finally stopped talking so much about the factory. It’s nice. They don’t feel so much like sandpaper. He can almost breathe again.

Tango has a shift in the control room with Renbob eventually. It’s a little strange. Tango never interacted much with Renbob; Renbob had been a part of the world Tango was not familiar with until now. Sure, Ren’s cousin had helped out a lot around the places that the hermits couldn’t easily help out with themselves, but that didn’t translate to interacting often. The ship’s control room, though—Renbob would be more familiar with the Hermethius than Tango would, so ideally, this would be an easy shift.

He looks out at the stars. They’re in a clearer part of space, Tango thinks. Emptier.

“It’s probably easier with all of us awake, keeping track of things,” Tango says.

“A little bit,” Renbob says. “It was a lot, trying to run the antivirus and monitor you all and watch to make sure nothing weird happened with the ship, dude. Goatman and I wore a lot of hats.”

“Antivirus. You know, the Hermatrix getting a virus is sort of a wild thing to have happened, isn’t it?” Tango says.

“Yeah,” Renbob says. “Luckily, the moon protocol—”

“The… what?” Tango says.

Renbob is silent.

“No, no, you don’t get to shut up. The what?”

“We… didn’t know it would affect you like that,” Renbob finally says. “We—I tried my best. I—I’m sorry I tried my best it wasn’t supposed to end that way—”

And suddenly, Tango can see it out the window, there, in front of him, the burning. The distant burning. There isn’t sound; it doesn’t make sound, in space, no matter how much it feels like it ought to. No matter how much it feels like Tango should be able to see, to feel, to understand the world crumbling in front of him. He thinks he should be able to hear them screaming. He thinks he should be able to hear them, because they’re his fault, they’re his fault, Bdubs had begged him to stay away, to stay escaped, Bdubs had been scared. Tango hadn’t done enough. Tango is sitting there, watching the world out the window, and he can’t hear anything because that’s not how a vacuum works, and—

“It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t fucking enough.”

He stares out the window. He can’t breathe. He can’t move. He should probably sit down. He should probably—the world is ending out the window, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

“I know,” Renbob says. “God, I know.”

Tango wonders if everyone’s glasses shattered on the impact. He should do something. He reaches towards the controls of the ship. The world is ending out the window.

The instruments say there’s nothing.

“It wasn’t enough,” Tango says, and he can’t breathe anymore, and he sits down. “It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t. I wasn’t. I wasn’t enough. None of it was enough.”

Renbob makes a strange, horrible, keening sound behind him. “I know,” he says. “I know. I know.”

They sit there for a long while, and Tango watches the world end a second, third, watches it end like he has every time he's closed his eyes since he woke up. Neither of them offer each other absolution. They have none to give.

Tango doesn’t talk to anyone else for the rest of the day. Zedaph looks even more wounded than Impulse, and he’s not even the one Tango’s normally been eating dinner with. That night, he finds himself outside of Bdubs’s door again, staring at it. He doesn’t open it. It’s probably locked. Tango locks his door at night, too; they’ll unlock in case of emergency, but he doesn’t want people bothering him.

He wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough.

He’s already said sorry. Still, he says it to the door again. He says it so many times. He’s not sure any of them matter. None of it is real. If he’s being charitable, it’s all Renbob and Goatman and a poorly made simulation’s fault, not his. Still.

None of it was real, and his lungs are fine.

What the head knows, though, the heart doesn’t always understand.

“Sorry,” he says. He goes back to his room and for the third night in a row, he doesn’t sleep. When he wakes up, he goes to get breakfast with Zedaph, and he wonders why it tastes like mud again now. One little thing, huh? One little…

The fourth Hermitcraft meeting is a bit like this:

The world seed argument has not gone anywhere. One camp has a list of demands they would need to know about the seed before they’d be comfortable landing. One camp has a list of reasons why knowing nothing would be best. One camp is mostly concerned with having a plan once they do land. One camp isn’t paying attention at all. They’ve all brough cards this time, lists of reasons for their decisions, all the best plans they can come up with to convince everyone else.

(Well, except for everyone who hasn’t been paying attention. Those people don’t have arguments. For example: Zedaph. Zedaph hasn’t made any plans for the meeting at all. Zedaph claims that he will simply solve whatever the answer to the argument is with ‘logic’ and ‘brilliant insight’. It was enough to make Tango laugh, no matter how anxious he’d been, so he supposes it counts.)

Tango’s settled somewhere in the middle. He’d prefer to know the seed world. He wants to know it. He wants to know what they’re going to do. But, if they don’t have the ability to pick a particularly good seed world before they get off the ship, well, he can live with that. He just needs to know they have a plan for what to do with that. He’s not letting anyone else get hurt that he could prevent getting hurt, and that may not be all rational, he knows that now, but… He’s still not letting it happen. He’s not.

The arguments are still largely circular. The ‘don’t pick a seed’ crowd has a new, very good argument, though—if they don’t have to seed hunt, they’re more likely to be able to land on-time. They’re also arguing for the adventure, for less time being taken up arguing about land they want to claim ahead of time, more time spent at spawn—it’s well-reasoned. Tango finds himself nodding along to some of it, and he can see even some of the most adamant ‘we need to know the seed’ people nodding too.

Still, the thing of ‘we don’t want anything bad to happen to everyone’ is a strong argument. The chance of the seed being awful is strong. A new argument has joined that side, in fact—the way the worlds are in these new versions, there’s new mountains and caves. Everyone desperately want to see the new caves and cliffs; that’s one of the reasons they were taking the long trip with the Hermatrix between seasons this time, and not simply going to the next available seed world. If they pick a bad seed world, the chance that they don’t get any good caves or cliffs exists.

This is also a very good argument. The problem is, neither side’s argument is one that the other side can easily refute, and both sides are coming from a very good place. They both just want what’s best for everyone. They just… wildly disagree on what’s best.

That’s always the worst kind of arguments, Tango has found. The ones where no one is wrong and everyone wants everyone to be as happy as they can be.

The other problem, of course, is that they aren’t actually arguing about season nine. They’re arguing about the previous one.

They sit there for an hour and then Iskall stands up.

“Right,” he says. “Right.”

He walks over to the door and closes it. The latch clicks.

“We’ve all noticed what we’re actually talking about. So, we’re… we’re going to talk about it,” he says. “We’re going to fucking talk about it. We’re going to say something about what we’re actually trying to talk about, or we’re never going to be ready for the next season, and I don’t think I can stand to be on this ship with the rest of you forever. I mean, no offense, dudes, but this has gone on long enough.”

Everyone is silent.

“Who wants to go first? I can, if no one else is. I’m ready. We have to get this done,” Iskall says, and it’s like he’s put a loaded gun on the table. Everyone looks at the gun, and looks at each other, and it sits there, waiting for the first person to fire it. Waiting for the person to take the killing shot they know is coming.

Slowly—so slowly, and only with Welsknight’s hand on his shoulder—Xisuma stands up.

After the meeting, Tango cracks.

“When does it get better?” he asks Zedaph.

“What?”

“When does it get better?” he asks again, to the person who’s been acting fine since day one.

“I mean, does it?” Zedaph asks. He looks away from Tango. “I mean, uh. I’m not too worried, since none of it actually happened, but if—if I were worried, and I weren’t only being myself because I’m more worried about you than me—I think—I think it wouldn’t be getting better. I’d just be… getting better at dealing with it?”

“Huh,” Tango says. “You aren’t allowed to be this smart.”

“Hah,” Zedaph says. “Well, I’ll have you know I’m actually the smartest friend you have!”

“Big doubt,” Tango says, and he’s quiet for a moment. “You don’t have to uh. Pretend for me. I know I haven’t been pretending for you. Or, uh, being the best friend, honestly. So you don’t have to. I won’t be…”

“It’s not really for you,” Zedaph says, and Tango nods. He understands.

“Hey, hey Bdubs!”

“Oh, Tango! What’s up?”

Tango sighs. “You know what’s a shame? I don’t have any of my big eyes glasses in my luggage. So I figured I’d make some. Do you want to come with me?”

“Do I?” says Bdubs. “Oh boy! Did you know—I want to re-make my moss hoodie, but even bigger. But the glasses, oh, the glasses! That’s brilliant, Tango! The glasses. You know, those were pretty great, even if they made everything look red.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t notice anything weird about them.”

“That’s because you’re a weirdo!” Bdubs says in a disconcertingly chipper tone of voice, and Tango laughs.

“We both are, aren’t we?”

It’s nice, sitting in the workshop and figuring out how to recreate the glasses Tango had made the first time, and catching up with Bdubs. Neither of them talk about the end of the world, but it’s not because they’re avoiding it. It’s just not important, right then. Not as important as making sure they had the thing they’d promised each other they’d keep in order to remember each other as well as they could.

When they’re done, Tango can tell they aren’t quite the originals. Frankly, he’s not sure he could recreate the originals if he wanted to. After all, those hadn’t been real. Those had been exactly what Tango imagined he would have wanted. But these…

“How do I look?” Bdubs asks, and he does his best cool guy pose. Tango breaks down laughing on the table.

Yeah, these ones are real.

They promise they’ll go to the ocean together when they get to season nine. They’ll sit by the rocks, and they’ll smell the water, and they’ll be happier. Maybe they shouldn’t have promised to be happier, but they promise it anyway.

That night at dinner, Bdubs comes to sit next to Tango and Impulse, just the once. He shouts a lot about a clock. Tango can’t breathe, not entirely. Still, that night, he sleeps.

In the fifth Hermitcraft meeting, they all promise to live next to each other, in the beginning. No one argues with this one.