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“I don’t think I can stop it,” Grian mumbles into his hands, and Scott’s sure he’s not supposed to hear it, but the silence between them and the bombed-out remnants of the desert is thick and absolute, and in the quiet, the whisper may as well be a scream.
If Scott were nicer, if his better half hadn’t just died and taken his heart with, maybe he would do the polite thing, and pretend not to hear. Instead, he angles a miserable, yellow-eyed stare at Grian and frowns. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Grian glances up at him, then looks away, wings curling defensively around his shoulders. There was blue in his feathers, before. There isn’t, anymore. “I don’t… I shouldn’t tell you.”
Scott narrows his eyes, abruptly bitter. “If you still don’t trust me, after- after everything that’s just happened-”
“It’s not that!” Grian says, head snapping up, hasty enough that Scott believes him immediately. “It’s not- it’s really not that. It’s just… worse, I think, when you know. It’s…” he trails off, makes an unhappy little laughing sound. “You’re going to hate me.”
“Grian, there’s literally nothing you could do or say right now to put you higher than like… four on my kill list,” Scott informs him flatly. “You’re fine.”
Grian snickers a little, drops his head to rest his forehead against his arms. “I don’t know how I messed this up so badly,” he admits, eventually, quiet. “It always goes so well when you do it.”
Scott blinks, thrown. “…When I do what?”
“Make games,” Grian mutters. “For your friends.”
“What game?”
Grian lifts his head a little; one battered red-and-yellow wing stretches out, feathers fanning open in a wordless gesture out at the empty, ruined desert around them. “All of this. It’s just- it was just supposed to be a game. Just an experiment. I just… wanted to see what would happen.”
“An experiment,” Scott echoes, and all of a sudden you’re going to hate me makes a lot more sense. “People have died- my husband died-”
Grian cringes a little, pulling his wings back around himself. “I know-”
“You killed people!”
“I know!” Grian snaps, feathers spiking up, before he closes his eyes and takes a deep, painful-sounding breath. “I know.”
He goes quiet, then, for a minute or three. Scott watches him, nerves all set on end, unsure what to do.
He’s suddenly, uncomfortably aware that he doesn’t know where he was before he was here. Doesn’t know how he first met Grian, or even how he first met Jimmy, and the realization puts ice down his spine.
“I didn’t know it was going to be like this,” Grian says eventually. “It was just supposed to be… fun. Not- real. I should’ve-” a breathless, unhappy little laugh- “I should’ve learned by now, really. I keep making things that take on lives of their own.”
Scott’s throat still hurts from where Etho’s arrow punched clear through it.
“It was just supposed to be fun,” Grian repeats, miserable, “and then we’d all go home after. But instead-” he hesitates, glances over at Scott. “You haven’t killed anyone yet, right?”
“Yeah.” Skizz, Ren, Martyn, Etho, Skizz- “Not yet.”
“It feels good,” Grian says, a note in his voice that might be distress or muted horror or grief or something else entirely. “Exhilarating. And I can’t stop, you know? We can’t stop. It’s the rules.”
And that’s… true. He knows it’s true. Because maybe there was a point, earlier, before anyone died or anything was ruined, where this could have gone well and they could’ve been happy, but now there’s a widow’s ring weighing heavy on his hand and his fingers keep itching for his sword and this can only end in blood.
“None of us are making it out alive, are we,” Scott says. It’s not a question. They’re both sitting here with yellow eyes and fresh scars and pieces of their hearts missing, and neither of them are making it out.
It’s not really a question, but Grian nods anyways.
He should be angry at Grian, he thinks, and maybe he is. Mostly, though, his heart just hurts, and he’s tired, and resigned, and he wants to water the ground with the Red Army’s blood before he dies.
“Earlier,” he says eventually, and is proud of how even he manages to keep his voice. “You said, you meant for it to be fun, and we’d all go home after.”
“We might, still,” Grian says. “I don’t- I don’t know. I don’t know how real any of this is, even.” He sighs. “I’m so stupid. I never should have joined the game myself. I thought it would be okay. It’s so boring to just Watch, and- it was only ever meant to be fun, really. But as soon as I did that, I- it wasn’t my game anymore. I couldn’t stop it. I tried.”
He picks up a fallen blue feather from the bunker’s dusty floor, flips it around in his fingers.
“And- when you say home,” Scott says, and doesn’t think about Jimmy, and doesn’t think about their little flower valley, and doesn’t think about how he’ll never be able to make it perfect, now.
“Other worlds,” Grian says after a moment, answering the unfinished question. “You don’t remember- that’s my fault too, probably. There’s so many of them, every type you could think of.” He pauses, laughs a little. “Most of them are a lot nicer than this one. The one where I live- it’s nice. It’s really nice. Beautiful, all full of incredible builds and crazy terraforming. You’d love it. A lot of the people here are friends I met there.”
Scott swallows, tries to picture it. It’s hard, when they’re surrounded on all sides by utter devastation, by splashes of dried blood on sand and blasted stone. “That does sound lovely.”
“You should come visit,” Grian says. “If we all keep existing after this is over. Bring Jimmy. I’m sure I can talk Xisuma into it.”
“Do you think that’ll really happen?” Scott asks, and hates, a little, that he can’t keep a little cracking shard of hope out of his hollowed-out voice.
“To be honest, I haven’t the faintest,” Grian admits, rueful, wings shifting in a helpless kind of shrug. “But it’s nice to think about, isn’t it?”
His eyes are welling up against his will; he sucks in a breath and holds it, presses the heels of his hands to his eyes and tries to smother back the tears.
“Yeah,” he manages after a moment. “It is.”