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They’d been doing so well, is the thing. They thought they’d been doing well.
They’ve been collecting little victories, see— the Resistance has only gotten as far as it has by keeping one step ahead at every turn, and they hadn’t quite yet missed a single beat. Everything according to plan, every minor loss and setback twisted into something new they could use, they’ve been— they thought they’d been so, so clever, so careful.
Little victories.
Grian… may have made the mistake of allowing himself to feel safe.
He is stood in the Resistance base— the real one, this time. Oh, the fake had served its purpose well, and how he had loved having that card in his hand to play. One step ahead, always. It made him feel fatally untouchable. They won’t, they can’t find the real one, such is his certainty that they’ve covered their tracks well enough, that he has been careful enough to deserve it.
It allows him to feel secure as he sifts through their rather disastrous storage chests, making halfhearted promises to himself to put it on his mental to-do list to come back and deal with the disarray one of these days. Yeah, this is… this thing is a giant mess, Grian admits to himself faintly, pushing aside miscellany and tallying up all the mycelium they’ve got in their possession. Plenty, now that they’ve taken it all back. Swiped right from the HEP storage vault— a major success. Still not enough for his next project, perhaps, and there’s no point in starting unless he’s got it all, but there is a smug satisfaction in what they have nonetheless.
And he’s lost in thought, at first, maybe a moment too long, but Grian’s hand stills at the edge of the chest. He can feel… something. It’s faint. It’s a hum at the back of his awareness, a slight tremble in his fingertips that he’s grown increasingly sure isn’t his doing.
He rises slowly to his feet, straining to listen close. There: a faint rumbling, distant still, but he feels it now in the way the room trembles just so, and—
Was that an explosion?
Hesitating another moment in disbelief (they’ve been careful, they’ve covered their tracks, how—), he takes one unsteady step, and then another, ducking away from a thin shower of dust from above. No. No, he must be hearing things. Was that coming from the vault?
He presses against the wall, listening close— is this Tango’s doing? Is this part of a game, is it just that he’s missed a memo somewhere? Maybe he’s just gone mad, is all. There’s quiet for a moment, thick and stifling. Is he just jumpy? He’s making things up. No. They’ve been careful. He’s paranoid, is what he is, and he’s— oh, no, there’s no mistaking that one. He can hear it now.
So they’re definitely getting closer, is what that means.
He slips inside the vault and it shakes, and his eyes flick up to the top of the rough stone wall, in the back. Another cascade of dust and gravel spills down and he thinks, numbly, that he’d really meant to finish this room. This has to be the direction of the blasts, he’s sure of it. As if on cue there’s another, and he yelps, stumbling, bracing himself against cold metal.
The sound is… high up, almost, distant still but not distant enough. There’s a mechanical rumbling he can hear in the lull between explosions. It doesn’t mask the approaching murmur of voices, and Grian’s heart leaps to his throat as he catches a faint snatch of Scar’s voice— expected, alarming— and Mumbo’s, too, and that’s when the panic finally begins to set in, welling up in his chest like an opened wound. Mumbo?
No, he thinks, that can’t be right, I’m hearing things, but the ground heaves again and when the dust settles the traitorous sound could not be clearer. He can’t quite make out the words. He needs to get out of the vault. He needs to— why? Why him? That’s, surely there must be some very good reason, he can’t bring himself to believe it’s what it seems. What on earth is he doing with Scar, of all people, Mumbo who ran against him and not so long ago that the loss doesn’t still taste faintly bitter, Mumbo who is Grian’s own best friend—
(And wasn’t Scar, not so long ago, whispers something poisonous in Grian’s mind, that the loss doesn’t still sting?)
No. No. This is not a line of thought he has time to entertain. He needs to focus. He is focusing. But the thing is— it wasn’t supposed to be this way, right? How was Grian meant to know? It was only ever meant to be a joke, and they were both meant to be in on it. How was he to know, when he’d sown the first spores, how deep and how far the roots of this thing would spread?
He’d never wanted to see what Scar would do with power, is the thing. (He knew from the start that he wouldn’t like it. He wavered on that resolve, once, and spent much of the aftermath wishing he hadn’t.) No, he’d just wanted them both to go home.
It was only ever meant to be a joke. No one is laughing anymore. No, Grian’s terrified.
The floor shakes.
He sucks in a jagged deep breath, reigns in his composure as best as he can muster. He needs to focus. He’s stood currently in the base— the real one, oh, god, this is the real one and they’re coming straight for it— but we were so careful, but we covered all our tracks, but— he is stood in the Resistance base and it’s starting to look like the odds are grim of this place surviving the day if he doesn’t do… do… what is he supposed to do about this?? What is he supposed to do about the murmur of his own best friend somewhere beyond this wall, about the way Scar’s voice rises sharp in laughter in response to something unheard?
They’ve already gone too far, is the thing— if there is a point of no return left for him to flee from, then it’s rapidly approaching, and he is stood here in the vault, and his legs won’t move.
This isn’t happening. They’re going to go over us, Grian thinks desperately. The sounds are too high, surely. None of this was ever meant to happen. They’re not going to break in. He’s not even convinced they know he’s here, they can’t possibly know, it doesn’t add up, it isn’t fair, this isn’t how it was meant to go—
He looks up, and as he does the wall tears open. Shards of debris spray out in the blast, and there, in the hole, is a contraption the likes of which he’s never seen before, bulky and looming starkly in the swirling dust. There beside it stands the Mayor himself, peering down at him with a look so gleeful and sharp that it makes him feel hunted, a trapped animal, a deer in headlights, frozen in a single instant of horror.
Scar’s eyes pierce Grian’s, and for a moment he forgets how to breathe, heart thrashing wildly in the confines of his ribcage. “Hi ho, Grian!” Scar calls down, the perfect picture of smug delight, and Grian won’t give him the chance to strike first, he’s turned on his heels and lunged for the stasis trigger almost before he knows what he’s doing.
His disorientation is certainly not solved by the weightless swoop in the pit of his stomach as the pearl wrenches him away, rending open space in a single instant with neat, merciless precision. He’s falling. Fear and nausea catch up with him all at once, and the floor rushes up towards him with dizzying speed— he’s vaguely aware of screaming, and oh, that might be his voice, but it’s too hard to say. True to design, the mechanism dumps him unceremoniously at the head of the table, and around him the familiar faces of the other Resistance members make him feel faint with something that isn’t quite relief. It’s Etho at his right, and then Impulse, and he hears a yelp from Ren at his left as he, too, falls.
“Panic!” Grian chokes out. The room spins. He can’t breathe. “Panic, panic, they found us, we have to get—”
“What,” gasps Ren, the first to react. “Dudes—!? What is going on, why are we…” He trails off, extending a reassuring hand towards Grian, who seizes it and points.
“They’re here,” Grian hisses. “They’re here. I- I- I don’t know how they found us, I don’t know who must have been careless, but they’re here—”
“How!? It can’t have been us! I don’t understand, we’ve been careful!!” protests Impulse. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? After everything they’ve done, how is it still not enough? What other weapons do the HEP have up their sleeve they can’t have prepared for?
“Etho, the machine!” Grian forces out, and Etho traces his gaze.
“No way,” Etho says. “Are you telling me they just brute-forced their way in with that? Oh— they’re coming in, they’ve got more TNT! Everybody d—”
He is cut off by the sound of the blast, and Grian hurriedly raises his arms to shield his face from debris, choking on smoke and dust. “W- We need to grab everything we can and get out of here!” Grian gasps, swaying.
There’s a thump as a figure jumps down, and two more in short succession as the Mayor is joined by his right hand and his newly-named engineer. Bdubs, first to react, roars something furious that Grian doesn’t catch.
“You!” Bdubs says, pointing viciously, sword drawn. “filthy mold-people! We’re here to arrest you!”
“Mole-people?” Mumbo repeats erroneously, apparently perplexed. He wipes flecks of gravel from his suit. “That doesn’t really make any— well, I mean, I guess we did find them underground, okay, I can see how that would…”
Scar halts him with a hand. “Hullo, little bird! Fancy meeting you here, of all places, oh, what a nice little treat!” And he laughs to himself, as if he is hilarious for this. “No need for alarm, we’re just here to talk, see? We can all be friends here!”
He can’t possibly expect Grian to believe that, not when his method for gaining an audience involved blasting their way in by force. The HEP are outnumbered, but the Resistance are under-armed and poorly prepared.
Every bone in his body is telling him he is in danger. But it’s not like there’s nowhere else to go: Scar’s gaze has him pinned in place as sure as any knife.
“Now, would you believe it?” Scar continues casually, pointedly. Drives the knife in just a little deeper. Grian wants to look away. “I happen to have, hm, misplaced some things of mine recently! And I’m told you lot might have something to do with all this, isn’t that odd?”
“Huh, weird. Good luck with that,” Grian interjects sarcastically, mouth moving before his mind catches up to it. He wishes he hadn’t. Scar frowns, as this is, apparently, the wrong answer.
“We’re down about a dozen shulkers full of illegal, contraband mycelium, swiped right out of our containment vault, isn’t that something! You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that… would you?” Scar presses in, and Grian—
—Doesn’t get a chance to react to this before Scar suddenly frowns and says, “wait, is it shulkers full or shulkerfulls? Shulkerfulls…? Is that right? I think it might be, uhhh,” he trails off and glances to his side questioningly.
“Shulkerfulls?” Bdubs suggests.
“Erm, I’m fairly sure it’s shulkers full,” Mumbo supplies helpfully. “You know, ‘cause like… It’s shulkers, plural, that we’re measuring here, I assume, so…”
Grian, witnessing this little debate rather against his will, feels mildly insane.
“Mumbo!” Grian starts accusingly. “What on earth are you doing with them!? Tell me there’s a good reason for this, I- I- I thought we were friends, man! What is going on??”
“O- Oh. Uhhh, about that… hm…!” Mumbo runs a hand through his hair awkwardly. “Er, the HEP fellows have made me a pretty good offer for this! Sorry, mate! No hard feelings?”
“Yes, hard feelings!” Scar corrects, lightly indignant. “They’re dirty mold-people, remember?”
“Sorry, mate??” Grian echoes furiously. “You— Mumbo, you betray me, you break into my home—”
“Wait, seriously, is this your house now? I knew the mansion situation was bad, Grian, but this just is a bit sad,” Mumbo chimes. It was just a turn of phrase! Grian wants to shake him!
“Mumbo!! You come into my— my base with bombs, you stand there beside my enemies, and all you have to say to me… is ‘sorry, mate’???”
“Uh, I have a feeling that’s not the right answer!”
“Enough!” Scar says, and, oh, he’s drawn his bow at the flick of a shadow behind them. “Impulse, my friend! Just where might you be off to?” There’s a muffled gasp, and Scar smirks.
“Tisk tisk, I say. And here we’ve been having such a nice conversation, what did I tell you, Mumbo, these mold-people just don’t have any manners…” Scar laughs to himself quietly, apparently amused.
Behind them, Impulse had been surreptitiously edging towards the storage room— smart, or it would have been, had it worked. “If I were you,” Scar continues, voice dipping threateningly low, “I would stay right where you are.”
The words are for Impulse, but that doesn’t matter when Scar’s eyes flick back to Grian’s and something inside of him goes cold.
“I think we’ve had enough of you,” Scar says congenially. “We’re here to recover the mycelium you stole from us, and to accept the unconditional surrender of your Resistance. How’s that?”
“Not a chance,” Grian says bitingly. “What, you really thought it was going to be that easy? Just walk in and ask nicely? And here I thought you knew me.”
Scar hums, disappointed. “Ah, but I was willing to hope you’d be reasonable,” he says, his tone sympathetic but his gaze icy and so, so sharp, when did Scar ever become so sharp? He sighs, like he’s just been put upon to make a tough decision he really doesn’t want to be making. “Well, it’s been nice chatting with you all! If you all really don’t want to play— have it your way, then. Mumbo, the TNT!”
“Right-o!”
“What??” Grian exclaims.
“Get them,” Scar says, and Bdubs lunges.
Things… spiral out of hand alarmingly quickly, after that.
Grian dives out of the way as soon as he sees movement, a tightly-coiled spring already too eager to snap. Somewhere behind him, he hears Impulse cry out, and Bdubs screaming god knows what, and Ren draws his sword without hesitation to defend his teammate. There’s an explosion, the shuddering sound of the back wall collapsing in as their machine advances.
There’s Mumbo’s high-pitched laughter, the way he always does when he’s pulled something off far better than he expected to, and Grian wants so badly to scrub the sound from his ears.
“Seize the mycelium!” Scar calls above the clamor. “Take everything we can use and get rid of the rest! If we don’t need it, they can’t have it! This place is going down!”
“Way ahead of you, boss!” Mumbo cheers.
“I’m gonna trample their crops!” Bdubs chimes helpfully, followed by a harsh clang as he barely parries Ren’s strike in time.
If they get to their supplies first, Grian’s plans will be for nothing. This is not a loss they can recover from.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this, none of this was supposed to— “Etho??”
“They’re taking out the support beams!” Etho exclaims.
“Oh, for god’s sake, with all of us inside, Scar!?” Grian hisses under his breath. “Really!?” Another explosion confirms it so, Grian curses Scar internally for being ill-thought out until the very end. “Etho, the base is forfeit! The mycelium is the only thing we can save!”
“Roger that,” Etho affirms, “go, go, grab what you can, I’ve got your back—”
“Where do you think you’re off to so soon, little bird?” Scar calls with vicious glee, and the rush of panic that rises up in Grian nearly blinds him as Scar surges forward.
His blade glances off of Etho’s shield. “Grian, go!” Etho repeats urgently, and he doesn’t waste another moment.
The storage room shakes, and it nearly knocks Grian off of his feet as he stumbles through the disarray. God, he really, he really should have done something about this place when he had the chance—! He hears Ren’s voice rise high and sharp with what might be pain or fury, words lost in the chaos, he hears Mumbo cheer as he reports back what he’s managed to swipe from the wreckage of the vault. A section of the roof caves and Grian dives out of the way as debris shower down. Oh, that could have crushed him, fun! Fun! Most of the shulkers are thankfully intact (He has enough, it has to be enough), but when a beam falls through and shatters the one Grian had just been about to reach for, he takes that as his cue to stop pushing his luck. A shard of brittle shell cuts into his arm as he hastily shields his face. There is something about the faint sensation of blood and dust starting to trickle down his forearm that drives him to near-hysteria, and he can’t tell if the room spinning is his own mind’s tricks or just the aftershocks of the explosion. And it probably doesn’t matter, does it? They’re probably doomed all the same. Grian chokes down a shaky, high-pitched giggle. This isn’t a joke anymore. No one is laughing.
He's jarred from his imminent mental spiral by Etho calling his name again, a note of panic that makes Grian’s stomach flip. He scrambles from the wreckage and peers out through the door of the storage room, scanning rapidly— Bdubs ducks into another room and just out of sight, Mumbo is suspiciously nowhere to be found, Scar lunges forward and Etho struggles to stop his advance.
“Dudes, we have to evacuate!!” Ren urges. “Impulse is hurt! The roof’s coming down and it nearly took my freakin’ head off!!”
“We’re trying—” Etho gasps as Scar’s next blow connects with his shield and it finally crumples, damaged to the point of uselessness.
Scar’s eyes light up. Grian has to move.
“Scar! Look out behind you!” Grian calls, and hurls the nearest chunk of broken stone he can get his hands on at the wall behind. It connects with a thud, and it—
And it works, because they were friends, first, weren’t they? Nothing they could have done was enough to bury the fact that the instinct to trust each other is already woven too deep.
Scar gives an undignified little squeak-yelp and stumbles back, because this is far from the first time he’s reacted to the sound of Grian’s panicked voice in warning before the rest of his mind caught up with him. It’s saved him before, that instinct, but does him no good as a weapon. Etho, seizing the opportunity he’s been given, gives one last brute-force shove forth with the mangled remnants of his shield, and it takes Scar completely off-guard, knocks him rather unceremoniously on his sorry hide.
And it’s funny, seeing him like that. This is an old pattern, and he’s still weak for it. For a moment Grian wants, more than anything, to laugh lightly and take him by both of his hands, tease his clumsiness. For a moment he would have given anything to cast this whole stupid war aside, he wants to throw away all common sense and drag him giggling to his feet, wants to give up, go back to the way things were, he wants to go home. Like this is something they can just— call it a day on, step back from and smile knowingly to each other like it’s always, always been. (They were friends first, weren’t they?)
His eyes fall on Scar and he finds exactly what he was afraid of finding there, the same wash of mangled-up loyalties all broken and bleeding still, the same doomed fondness mirrored back bitter and distorted. And it haunts him, that look on Scar’s face: dark and furious, fractured and wounded, longing for a hand up that Grian can’t give him and an excuse to take everything back.
In another moment, Grian will be jarred from this line of thinking by the sound of another explosion, Etho taking him sharply by the wrist and leading him from the scene while they still have the chance.
Ren will follow in staggering steps, Impulse’s arm draped dizzy and half-conscious over his shoulder. In another moment, it’ll be Bdubs who pulls Scar back to his feet— not Grian, it can’t be Grian— and he’ll risk one last glance back to meet an expression dazed and shuttered closed, unreadable, blood dripping from his temple that Grian can’t be sure he didn’t have a hand in causing one way or another. And the notion will make bile rise in his throat, make his steps shaky, Etho’s guiding hand the only thing holding him up from being crushed under the weight of this nameless thing that’s overcome him.
In another moment, they’ll make it out. They’ll have to keep going. They’ll have to settle all of their scores and finish this war. Grian will have to put on a brave face and play the lead role, and he will, because it’s far too late to turn away, and he won’t be given any other option. The script is written in his hand, after all. But this is not how it was meant to end.
In this moment, however, he is trapped, a deer in headlights, a butterfly pinned by the wings.
He can’t tear his eyes away from Scar. It haunts him. What use is a broken friendship if not as a weapon? The knife digs in, and it cuts them both the same.
Grian can’t be sure he’s not the one wielding it anymore.