Chapter Text
Tick tick tock, the time bomb clock ticks counting down, tick tick stop, you know I speak in riddles and I’m plotting to destroy, villain as I always was, crazy is as crazy does, my sanity’s in short supply, mad as a hatter, hey, surprise! The ticking bomb on the inside, living with the villain pacing in my mind…
It is a rare thing in the universe, to stand proud and unbroken against the wrath of a Watcher, even for another of their species.
Quoroth manages.
Barely.
“WHAT IN VALIX’S NAME HAVE YOU DONE, QUOROTH?”
Quoroth doesn’t quite bare his teeth in return, but he does sneer a little, rolling the joint that connected wing to back so the firelike, incorporeal sails flutter a bit. “I got tired of waiting for your overcomplicated plots,” he says, fixing his masked gaze on his erstwhile compatriot—and Void, had he missed his mask. If nothing else, accelerating the timeline on that point alone had to be worth it. He can finally See properly again without having to drive himself into agony doing so.
The second Watcher present in the black, hanging Void does indeed let out a feral, devastatingly inhuman snarl. “Your impatience has undone everything we’ve built!” Orez shouts, loud enough that it ought to echo, though there is nothing for the sound to bounce off.
“Oh, hardly—”
“Hardly? Hardly? My timing was not of stagnation or reluctance, we are not yet ready for our next progression! The pieces are not yet all in place on the board, the moment is not yet right for our confrontation—”
“Have you noticed something?” Quoroth interjects, a hint of what he considered well-founded pride in his voice.
A long, long moment drags out before Orez says, “Yes, obviously, I have noticed.”
“So tell me again how we aren’t ready?” Quoroth asks smugly, only for the third—and very much unconscious—Watcher they discussed to interject with a high, pained, incognizant moan.
Quoroth smirks and tilts his head to finally, finally regard his wayward brother.
Xelqua was—well. Xelqua was certainly not the epitome of Watcherkind at the moment. He would, were they in a world, likely be in an unconscious heap on the floor, though where they float in the Void he hangs more-or-less still upright. His hair is too short to form into even the most paltry of braids, floating wild around his head in the weightless Void but for where a faint streak of blood above his left temple mats it down. His skin is pale, clammy, sweat-slick, covered by the plain trappings of human clothing rather than the glorious robes he’d once worn.
One might even, should they be uninformed, think he was entirely human if it weren’t for the grand set of black wings hanging from his back. Or they would be grand, perhaps—the right one still is, lightly folded in its natural state of rest. The left, however, lays twisted at a bizarre angle, popped out of joint to hang strangely sideways and back in a way that might curdle a stomach weaker than Quoroth’s.
Well, really, Xelqua should have known better than to try and haul someone who’d outweigh him in solid muscle even before the obvious size difference up out of the Void. It was frankly a miracle his wings had held out as long as they had.
Plainly, despite the way his head lolls from the spell which binds him stupefied, he can still feel the injury, going by his pain-labored breathing and the faint whimpers still spilling past his lips. Really, he could be quieter. The others had been, before Quoroth sent them along to the world beneath them.
Orez regards Xelqua with a steady sort of disdain that reveals they’re probably thinking along similar lines. “And what, exactly, do you plan on doing with him?” they ask dryly.
“I want him to Watch with me,” Quoroth says brightly. “He was so determined to finish his game last time. I’m rather hoping he’ll find an outside view on things… refreshing. Enlightening, even. A reminder that players play, while Watchers Watch.”
And Watch Quoroth does, for the briefest moment, focusing on the still sluggish world below. The sixteen players below lay yet quiet, held in the same stasis as Xelqua, his entertainment waiting for him to awaken.
“And how, exactly,” Orez says, “do you plan on making him do that? That is quite the challenge you present yourself.”
Quoroth scoffs, gives a pointed nod toward Xelqua’s hanging wing, then says, “It’s not like he’s flying anywhere. And this is quite the game you’ve made.”
“Then you are twice the fool I thought you, Quoroth, to make the same mistake a second time.”
“I—don’t you call me that when I’ve just done in hours what you’ve been failing to for months—”
“Did he fly to escape us last time, Quoroth?”
A long moment passes. “No,” Quoroth says.
“Then do you doubt his title as the Trickster? Because I find myself beginning to doubt your own, considering tenacity with which you cling to your own short-sightedness.”
Quoroth bristles—he was quite proud of his title, thank you very much—and says, “If you don’t stop insulting me—”
“You’ll what?” Orez demands, wheeling on him. “You will insult me back? Challenge me? You have already done so, you contemptible fool, in the greatest way imaginable. This is my game. This is my world. I offered you no piece of it and you dare tread upon my claim.”
That was—
Oh.
That was not good.
Quoroth swallows, retreating the faintest bit. He had—
He had assumed Orez’s newest twist on what the players were calling ‘Third Life’ was some part of their plot, some piece of it Quoroth was not yet privy to, considering how much time Orez had been putting into it.
He hadn’t realized the devastating misstep he was making, stepping into the claim of another Watcher’s territory without permission, a disrespect of the highest order.
“They wanted another game,” Quoroth says, fighting back the surge of something like fear. “Who was I to deny them, the fools?”
Orez does not answer, merely sweeping around to Xelqua’s back in a wordless glide. A moment later there is the distinctive slice of fabric, palm-sized obsidian blade effortlessly working through thread until Xelqua’s torso hangs bare and strands and scraps of red wool flutter in the windless Void.
“What are you doing?”
A look of plain disdain comes to Orez’s face, only intensified as they lay hands on Xelqua’s twisted wing, shoving joint back into socket in a brusque motion that makes even Quoroth wince in sympathy. Xelqua himself ekes out a terrible noise between his teeth, his eyelids fluttering wildly for a moment with the threat of tumbling headlong back into consciousness, before finally the tension eases and he falls limp once more.
“What are you doing?” Quoroth demands again, jerking around toward Orez. “Trying to make it easier for him to escape?” There’s a truly horrific amount of bruising creeping down Xelqua’s back now, plain to see without his jumper in the way, stemming mainly from the newly-set wing but crawling heavily across both sides of his spine and nearly up to the top of his left shoulder before finally fading to faint yellows and greens just above the belt. There’s hardly a hand’s worth of still-pale skin left to see, and despite Quoroth’s words Xelqua was unlikely to be properly flying more than a short glide any time soon even when the formerly dislocated joint settled back into place.
There’s a strange sort of urge in Quoroth’s fingertips, the itch to touch, to reach out along the battered skin. A foreign urge, a human one, one he thought he’d long since shaken. He doesn’t answer to it.
“He would have done it himself before long,” Orez gets out through their teeth, plainly still furious, though at least for the moment they seem to be taking out on Xelqua rather than Quoroth. They forcibly stretch the left wing out, eyeing it for a moment, tracing the lines of joints and bone before their eyes finally trail to a stop along the gleaming line of primary feathers. “I’m merely contributing to a more permanent solution.”
And that—
That doesn’t seem right—
But he dares not risk Orez’s wrath turning back on him.
Quoroth cringes again, unable to help the icy finger that seems to drag down his spine, while Orez lifts the knife again and this time does not cut through fabric.
~~~
Grian wakes screaming.
It is an instantaneous thing, going from fully black to fully aware in the blink of an eye, and what he’s aware of is pain.
It does not abate a moment later when the screaming does, invisible fingers wrapping around his throat. He claws at them despite knowing they’re not there, nails raking at his own flesh, lungs spasming for air he can’t take in, gods above he hadn’t missed this—
Black starts to curl around the edges of his vision again—maybe, possibly, it’s hard to tell against the black of the Void—before a familiar voice interjects, “Please, I’ve already got a headache, you could at least be quiet.”
And Grian can’t answer, obviously, because Quoroth had gone straight for the most violent and brutal of silencing spells, the one where you couldn’t make noise because you couldn’t breathe, the magic clogging up your throat like sand until you either blacked out or the caster deigned to remove it.
It was, if short-lived, an extremely effective way of getting someone to shut up, which was frankly something Grian had never been very good at. He does manage to clamp his teeth out of sheer terror when the spell comes off, though it’s only a strong enough deterrent for about five seconds before he has to shove a knuckle in his mouth and bite to keep from starting the cycle of screaming and silencing over again.
Think think think think think, he tries to tell himself, but the only thing he can think is that he failed and he’s in the Void and his wings and they hurt—
Broken? Maybe. It’s the only level of agony he has to compare it to, though he finds they twitch when he asks them to and there are no bandages wrapped around his chest to bind them down—his bare chest, he manages to note absently, because of course he could just add that final fucking indignity to the entire situation, though at the very least he’d been left his trousers—
Wings. Wings wings wings wings wings. He can still move them, though they’re slow and sluggish, the left one especially sending fresh spikes of pain from the point where it met his back. Plainly it had been set back into socket, but the muscles had already been heavily overstrained even before they’d had to follow a joint snapped out of place. Because he’d—
Impulse.
Impulse.
Grian sucks in a gasp, then presses his tongue up against where his knuckle has started bleeding to remind himself not to. Quoroth does not bring the silencing spell back to bear for that crime, thankfully, though he is saying something Grian cannot and does not care to process in the slightest.
Impulse. Minutes or hours or a lifetime of unconsciousness ago, on the paths of Boatem with Quoroth’s mask on his face, surging past Grian to leap into the Void below. That moment, that singular moment of eternity where he’d thought they were okay, when he’d caught his friend and the mask had fallen into the Void and they were inches away from crawling back into the bottom of the Boatem Hole—
And then out had come Quoroth from the depths of the Void, and out had gone Grian’s wing, and out of his grasp had gone Impulse.
He’d dropped him.
Some rational part of his brain reminds him that the results would have been the same either way—Grian couldn’t fly with a dislocated wing no matter how desperately he tried and Impulse hadn’t been wearing an elytra, they both would have gone into the Void no matter what—but the rest of him is only subsumed by a raging wave of guilt. He’d been so close, so careful, so desperate, and then he’d just—dropped him.
“Xelqua,” Quoroth says, huffily. “Are you even listening to me?”
Grian pauses, laps at his bloody knuckle again, then carefully removes it from his mouth and hopes he doesn’t start screaming again. “Not really, no.”
Quoroth sighs—a long, exaggerated, melodramatic thing—and tilts his head to rest it in his hand. “Well, you need to be. This is important.”
“I’m sure it fucking is,” Grian says, and doesn’t care enough to regret the fact he’s fallen back into vocal tics he’d made a conscious effort to abandon some ten-odd years ago. He was fairly sure at this point most of the Hermits hadn’t heard so much as an irritated damn out of him, no less the sort of words he’d been dropping left, right, and center tonight. If it was still tonight. “I’m just worried about bigger things than your ego right now. Which, I know, is saying a lot.”
“You could learn to be nicer, you know,” Quoroth says, sounding genuinely a bit stung.
“I’m plenty nice,” Grian replies. “To people I actually like.”
“Oh, right. Your Hermits. Who I thought you’d be rather interested in knowing what happened to, but if you’d rather I shut up I’ll just do that for you.”
Grian’s blood turns to ice, even as part of him he doesn’t want to think about puffs up and preens and says Yes, MY Hermits! “What have you done to them?”
“No no,” says Quoroth, “you weren’t listening, that’s on you. I’m done now.”
“Quoroth!”
“Xelqua.”
“Don’t fucking call me that!”
“It’s your name.”
That’s obviously a fight Grian’s not going to win, going by Quoroth’s maddeningly even, absolutely certain tone, and despite the absolutely visceral reaction Grian has to hearing it there really are bigger issues to worry about. “What have you done to them?”
Quoroth waggles his finger, then shakes his head and drags it across his lips, leaving Grian with nothing less than the overwhelming urge to throttle him. He’d be screwed before he even made it a third of the distance between them, obviously, even if he weren’t fogged by whatever was tremendously, painfully wrong with his wings, but that doesn’t lessen the desire.
They had to be broken. It’s not quite the same sensation as last time, but it’s further up, the small metacarpal bones near the tip where the primary feathers sprouted from, rather than the thin radius in the section of secondaries that had been snapped previously. It would prove equally effective at grounding him, of course, and he has no idea if they’d even be able to heal properly while hidden away as he usually had his wings these days. He doesn’t have the time or the pain tolerance to pull them around himself to examine closer, though.
Quoroth, still maddeningly silent, taps the side of his mask this time in a gesture that plainly says See for yourself, then slides his gaze off to the side. The tension in his shoulders reads as weirdly uncomfortable.
Grian bites back a sigh, realizes Quoroth is petty enough to remain silent for the next thousand years, then braces himself and does what he’s been told.
It’s as horrific and dizzying as it always is, to Look without the white porcelain mask to filter the sensory input of seeing the Universe and all its code laid bare before him. He feels like he’s pitching upside down and sideways all at once, and maybe he is without any point of reference in the Void to tell him he isn’t—
There’s a world just below them, though, their vantage point that preferred bird’s-eye view above it, and it veritably drips with the blunt steel-gray of Orez’s magic. Surprising to see, considering Grian hadn’t gotten the faintest other hint of Orez’s presence all night, but clearly their partnership with Quoroth was still as strong as ever.
Or… perhaps not. Watchers were territorial creatures, as plainly evidenced with the ferocity yes-my-Hermits had surged to the front of his mind, and Orez’s claim on this world is as plain for Grian (for Xelqua) to see and understand with a Watcher’s eyes as it was to tell granite from obsidian with a human’s. But the claim is only shot through at intervals with Quoroth’s own shades of lilac, weaving its way through the cracks like moss clinging to cobble. It is not a mutual arrangement of shared territory—it is one encroaching onto another’s.
Trouble in paradise, then.
And then Grian looks a little closer, spies the sixteen still-sleeping souls occupying the tiny fraction of the world available to them, and he can’t breathe.
One is Orez’s, soaking blue-gray, and he, like both the world and the rest that occupy it, has tangles and threads of lilac. But there is a third color which weaves around him, only faintly in his case, just as faint in another’s, but bursting forth in blinding brilliance over the other fourteen, and even as Grian watches he can see it strengthen and flare out over the two with such a minimal claim.
Because he’s strengthening it even as he looks, the pulse of his heart that beats painfully through his wounded wings, the surge of mine-mine-mine and blinding red-black-Xelqua’s-do-not-TOUCH.
And Grian (Xelqua) curls around them instinctively, wraps the remaining two— Martyn and Big B, unmistakable, as familiar as the last time he saw them in hell— into himself until they glow as brightly red-black as the others as the only protection he can offer them. He can’t rid Martyn of Orez’s hold on him, nor anyone else of Quoroth’s subtle touch of claim, even as he yanks vainly at gray and lilac and he silently hisses Mumbo-Pearl-Scar-Impulse-MINE, Tango-Ren-Etho-Cleo-Bdubs-MY-Hermits, Scott-Jimmy-Joel-Lizzie-Skizz-get-OFF, you can’t have them you bastard they’re already MINE—
There’s a hand on his chin, Quoroth crouched in front of him, and Grian jerks back to reality, back to Grian, trembling slightly as if that will help him shake off the remnants of Xelqua and the instincts, the possession that came along with him. It shouldn’t be this hard, not when he’s spent so long fighting it off, pretending to be human—
But Grian’s not human, and he hasn’t been in a very long time, and that’s the reason he’s here wheezing in agony and his friends are slowly coming back to their senses on the world below.
“What have you done?” he chokes out, his wings too stiff and too battered to flare in a threat like he wants them to.
Quoroth plainly notices the pitiful attempt at it, though, and seems to stare over Grian’s shoulder for a moment before turning too quickly away. “They wanted another game,” he says, suddenly clipped, without any of the pride that the words should have come with. “I obliged them.”
“You bastard,” is the only thing Grian manages to say in return, struggling vainly to straighten himself up a little—he’d curled up into some pathetic ball while he’d been Watching and his already-sore shoulders are aching from the position.
“Why do you care?” Quoroth demands. “They’re just— people! They’re just people! Why do you care?”
Grian sucks down a breath he shouldn’t be able to take in the Void—not that a Watcher had any reason to care about such things—and answers, “If you don’t understand that by now, nothing I can tell you will change that.”
Quoroth doesn’t answer, still turned away with his gaze on the world below.
Grian bows his head, finds the urge to scream has been replaced by the urge to sob. Wounded, helpless, exhausted, his rage nearly spent and burnt away to ashes, helpless, useless, unable to do anything but sit in the Void and Watch his friends go through their second round of torment, helpless—
“You’re so much better than them,” Quoroth finally says at last. “Why don’t you understand that? We’re so infinitely superior and you spend all this time playing pretend with them. Why can’t you just be who you are?”
Grian’s not sure if that question was actually intended to have an answer and he doesn’t bother to give one either way. He’s helpless and he’s freezing, he’d forgotten how cold the Void was and the shirtless aspect is certainly not helping matters—he’s probably got a spare jumper in his inventory that might have survived the Void death and respawn Quoroth had snatched him from, clothes usually did. Still, even if he did it’s not made to fit over his wings, he’s not sure he dares hide them until he figures out what’s wrong, and it would be an impossible exercise of agony trying to fit it over top.
His—
His inventory.
He hadn’t been thinking about it—obviously, he’d had bigger things to worry about, and he’d come straight out of a Void death that would have left it empty anyway. But Quoroth isn’t looking and it gives Grian enough time to sneak in a glance—
His communicator.
He squeezes his eyes shut, shifts the device into his more easily accessible pocket, and bites his lip in an attempt at hiding the surge of hope rising in him.
It’s tremendously easy to slide his way into the code of the world below, glimpsing as his friends begin to wake fully, work out where they are and what they’re doing with various degrees of understanding and panic. Easier still to twist and ply it into surrendering the power of control over to him. One could call it child’s play, even, for a Watcher to demand admin powers from a world.
It’s harder to give them to someone else, so with another furtive glance at Quoroth’s still turned back Grian reaches into his pocket and types out, as quickly as he dares, /op MumboJumbo.
He’s flying by the seat of his pants, half plan and half instinct, but it’s something, it’s far better shape than he was in two minutes ago, and he’s got something in his back pocket.
Codes, developed to hide a world from a Watcher that had kept him safe and hidden from them for more than three years, now tweaked and twisted to work successfully on a player level. It might be just enough of an ace to give him the advantage. He crosses his fingers on his free hand as he swipes over to the chat with his best friend.
<Grian> mumbo
<Grian> code
<Grian> on me now
<Grian> youve got op
He stows the communicator away without daring to wait for a response, then pipes up, “Hey, Quoroth?”
“Mm?” Quoroth replies, turning back.
“I’m not better than them,” Grian says. “Not by a long shot. But I’m sure as hell better than you lot. So yeah, anyways? Fuck off.”
And he lunges and leaps for the world below, already knowing he has no hope of getting his friends out.
What he can do is get himself in.
It’s just going to be one hell of a fall.
Underestimating that fall is the first of two mistakes he makes.
It’s the second Void fall he’s taken in probably as many hours and it sends his heart leaping up into his throat. The difference this time is that he’s coming from above a world rather than below it—there’s still nigh certain death waiting at the end of it, but this time it’s of the fell from a high place variety rather than the fell out of the world one.
And the thing is, even in a world where death was temporary and respawn an uncomfortable inconvenience, Grian’s survival instincts are still some of his strongest.
So his wings—his poor, battered, broken, abused wings—still flare open in a desperate attempt to save him from the fall.
It’s not their fault they can’t.
It’s not their fault the snap of them open is sheer agony, it’s not their fault the muscle and feather just can’t quite seem to catch the air properly, it’s not their fault that all they can do is turn Grian’s fall from a streamlined one into a tumbling mess, buffeted by the wind as he leaves the Void for atmosphere. He glimpses them, briefly, the familiar black gleam against the blur of clouds and sky and earth, and some part of him is still aware enough to register there’s something deeply wrong in the shape of them, squared-off and blunt and not working—
Quoroth could have caught him, could have dragged him back and forced him to Watch again as he plainly intended to, but clearly he’d been too surprised at Grian’s leap to react immediately, and by the time he does—
Mumbo’s code hits, and the second mistake along with it.
It wracks him, splits him open, cracks him in two. His brain shrieks as it divides, as part of him disappears, fading from his grasp like smoke—
The second mistake is that they never considered what running a code designed to hide someone from Watchers would do when run on a Watcher.
The part of him that is Grian falls and the part of him that is Xelqua hides, repressed from mind and soul, leaving only soft humanity to be descended upon by a hungry world eager for blood.
He had known what was at stake last time, fought it with every inch of desperation he had. He’d shored himself up, leaned on the powers he hated to protect himself from the greedy game’s feast on their minds, and it had hurt to see his friends consumed by the death of their selves long before the deaths of their bodies.
His curse in the first game was to remember.
His curse in the second is to forget.
Grian’s tortured wings are gone before he smashes into the ground, hidden away from himself no less than the rest of the world, and the server itself jerks from his death, letting the error of a death message through for half a second before course-correcting and erasing it from chat before anyone might notice the oddity.
ℸ ̣⍑ᒷ ℸ ̣∷╎ᓵꖌᓭℸ ̣ᒷ∷ fell from a high place.