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They stay in the new base after the snails freeze, because the island probably has a trap set somewhere in it and none of them have the energy to be disarming bombs right now. They’ve pushed back the treeline some, but the leaves’ rustling still carries on the wind, painting the world smaller and quieter.
Impulse snores on their single grey bed, and Cleo has wandered outside the walls, maybe to visit the others, maybe just to touch the river. Pearl’s sitting against the low wooden wall she built up. Maybe there will be time to turn it into a house before anything more deadly happens.
But it’s also made of wood. So who knows.
“See, I’d get it if it was Impulse or Cleo,” she says, tearing off a strip of jerky and dangling it over Scott’s face. He opens his mouth, tentative, like he’s expecting her to hit him with it. “But I know you know how to fight, Scott.”
“So do you?” Scott pauses to chew, swallow. He scarfs food down like it’s mildly embarrassing to be hungry, even when they aren’t all feeling the echoes of that second wild card. In the aftermath of this latest session though, he’s finally worn down enough to let her watch him eat, his head heavy in Pearl’s lap. “I guess that’s a bad comparison since you like making enemies.”
“I don’t like it!” Pearl grumbles. Tears off another strip and eats it herself. “It’s just… I don’t think you need to be best buddies with everyone. Where’s the fun in that?”
Scott hums. It’s getting dark, and his new eyes gleam orange-gold in the dusk. “I can tell. Going by lives, you clearly care more about having fun than about staying alive.”
“Hey now! Those were helpful, right? If it weren’t for me—”
“If it weren’t for you,” Scott says, squinting, “we probably would have found out stuff from Jimmy dying. And he’s not on my team, so he can die as much as he wants. He’s probably going to, either way.”
Pearl sighs dramatically. “Heartless, Scott, just heartless.”
“I’m not trying to be best buddies with everyone,” Scott murmurs. He clears his throat and his next words come out louder, though not more careful. “You and Impulse keep destroying potential alliances with every other group! It doesn’t matter how good any of us is at PvP if the whole server wants us dead.”
“Of course the whole server wants us dead, Scott.” Pearl pokes Scott in the cheek and uses his affronted noise to shove another piece of jerky into his mouth. He accepts it, which Pearl counts as a win. “Didn’t you see the snails? That’s the whole point, us dying.”
“The point,” Scott insists, pressing his thumb to the corner of Pearl’s mouth as if to wipe away something there, “is to stop them from killing us. That’s the game, not… whatever it is you’re doing.” His nail is digging into her skin a little, and he brushes over where it hurts as if in apology before retracting his hand.
“You’re supposed to be supportive of me and the things I want to do,” Pearl complains, not meaning it. “You and Cleo, I swear. Sometimes I think you don’t want me around at all. Then where will you be? Then you’d have to die for the other two, wouldn’t you, instead of me?”
Scott sighs, dream-slow and lazy. “Of course I want you around. You’re our Pearl.” And Impulse is asleep just on the other side of the wall, and Scott is talking in low tones, and so he doesn’t elaborate on that.
“I wouldn’t want you to die for me anyways,” Pearl mutters. “Once was enough, I think.”
“Yeah?” Scott says, as if he has no idea what she’s talking about. But he does know, because he starts tapping his fingers on his arm and the next words out of his mouth are, “I’ve been thinking— If you are planning on it, don’t bother giving me a life, either. When it comes down to the final few of us, you should give it to Cleo. Or Impulse.” His mouth twists. “Realistically, it’s going to be Impulse, isn’t it? Not really anyone else it can be, with—”
“Planning for the endgame already? We just got done with the last wild card.” She doesn’t want to hear the end of that sentence. She is a bruising collection of wounds healed badly.
Scott is all mercy, and maybe something of Pearl’s tone gets through to him, helps dull that mercy’s edges; he subsides with a faint “Still not bad to start preparing for it now.”
He does not elaborate. Pearl tilts her head back to rest it against wood planks. “It doesn’t actually matter,” she says softly.
“What do you mean?” he asks, quiet.
“Everyone on the server can think you’re the most evil person in the world, but all that really does is make you invisible.” Pearl giggles. So she’s tired too. So he’s right, there are some things she never let go of. She doesn’t howl anything about it. A howl is just the lonely background noise of a long night to almost everyone.
“Double Life again,” Scott mutters. He takes the last of the jerky out of Pearl’s hands and rips it in half. Gives her the bigger half and absently starts chewing on his. “That was so long ago.”
“If I can’t forget it,” Pearl says, keeping careful pace with Scott’s bites, “neither can any of you. I won’t let you.”
Scott cracks a smile, but he doesn’t make a joke. “I know you won’t.”
“Does it scare you?” Pearl asks. She shoves the last of the jerky in her mouth.
“What?” Scott blinks, which is the closest he gets to flinching, usually. Pearl takes her due pleasure from it, from the beat of pause as he realizes he’s still holding his piece of jerky and hurries to finish it. “No? Which part? Because the dying horribly, yes, but—”
Pearl runs a hand down the length of Scott’s arm, and his fingers open and close at her touch like butterfly wings. He substitutes a confused noise for words.
“You’re so tense,” Pearl mutters. “Why aren’t you relaxing, Scott? The snails are gone.” She leans forward, curling over him, and Scott repeats his bafflement as if she might not have heard him the first time. “Scott, you didn’t want to cuddle with me before. What changed?”
Scott’s smile widens abruptly. He reaches up with the arm she touched and hooks a hand behind her neck, drawing her face close. “I want to cuddle now. It feels like I don’t see you enough. Family, right?”
Pearl snorts, gaze flitting to the wild grass. “I’ll say. It fits, but only because… Because that’s what family does, right?”
“They hurt you and you’re still stuck with them forever,” Scott singsongs. “You gonna hurt me, Pearl?” he asks, soft and bold because she isn’t looking at him. His mouth shuts when she does, when she nudges him into rolling out of her lap. She pins him, and he lets her with only a twitch of his hands, his eyes half-lidded.
“I’m yellow now,” Pearl says brightly. “I could. You haven’t died once, Scott. Does that seem fair to you? ‘Cause it doesn’t seem fair to me.”
Scott’s grinning now, almost giggling. “And here you were just saying you know how to fight. You can’t take a life from anyone else?”
“And here you were saying I’m always dying!” Pearl fires back. “You never make it any fun, Scott. You stop fighting so quickly for someone who keeps making it to the final battles.”
“Because I want to stay out of trouble!” He brushes strands of her hair out of his own face. “If I’m going to die for you later, I need to not die right now.”
Pearl shakes her head; her hair falls right back into his face. The hood of her sweater flops over her shoulder. “I’ll die for us, then. Will that do it? What will it take for you not to die for us? Can it be me who dies this time?”
Scott’s expression flickers. “You’re on your way there already. D’you actually want to fight? Like— no weapons, like this?” He repeats his earlier motion, dragging Pearl down by the back of her neck. He’s not stronger than her, but he rolls them, and Pearl is satisfied enough by the grass caught in his hair to let herself be laid flat on her back.
They wrestle. It’s still half-hearted, but for once it’s because they’re both tired and not because Scott won’t deign to try. Then they stop, Pearl first, then Scott; he plays fair and thinks that will protect him.
“I missed when I didn’t think about this kind of thing with you,” Pearl says. “Who’s supposed to have whose back. All the reasons why. Don’t you?” It’s a conscious choice now, to feel his body heat, to respond to the pressure and weight of him like an animal in a body and not— whatever Pearl is now. Paper. Metaphor. Machineries of the universe.
He is left staring down at her for a long moment. It’s not fair, Pearl decides distantly, that she’s supposed to show underbelly first. But he answers her in kind: “I mean. It’s not— I don’t want it either. But someone has to go first.”
“Someone has to tell you what the danger is,” Pearl agrees, something in her chest too light to pin down and examine. She lunges up, and he laughs, real and loud and ragged. He resists it, but she’s stronger, and she puts them back in the positions they started in, her on top. “You know Cleo called me a canary?”
“You’re yellow. I—” He is flushed and valiant about stifling another laugh. “I would say it suits you? But you’re—”
“I am yellow.” Pearl sits up, letting go of Scott’s wrists. “You’re supposed to take care of your canaries, did you know that? You have to love them so they keep singing for you, and that’s what keeps you alive. Is that why you’re here? Did Cleo send you and tell you to play nice?”
“No?” Scott says. Then he goes limp, a doll without its spirit, and even this— Pearl’s sure he would be smug about her pulling her sword out and plunging it into his stomach. No, not smug, just— He would say, I knew that was going to happen, and it would be simple. He would be right, because she made him right. “No,” he repeats. “You don’t trust me at all. Whispering with Impulse behind me and Cleo’s backs, running off to Gem to cause trouble for her and Joel—”
This again? Pearl imagines in Cleo’s voice. “Maybe I would trust you more if you trusted me, Scott. I can’t even play a little game with Impulse without you butting your face into it.” She pinches his cheek and he bears that with a faint smile too. “Always the same things with you, over and over. Did you like the snails, at least?”
“I did like the snails.” He’s warm. He says it warm. “They were adorable.”
“Yours was so cute,” Pearl says. She decides it quietly, hearing Impulse snore in their bed, Cleo tromping toward the two of them with a rising, tired tone to the question they ask. “We’re just playing, Cleo! Just for funsies.”
“I… didn’t think you weren’t?” Cleo says. She lets out a sound that gets very close to being a laugh. “I think if you two were trying to kill each other, one of you would already be dead.”
“Nah,” Pearl says. “That’s not the kind of game we’re playing.”
Scott covers for her lie without missing a beat. Or maybe he just doesn’t know.
Pearl’s going to die for them. She’s aching all over again. She goes to the gate, to sleep there with the grass tickling her nose, the lingering warmth of Scott’s palm on her back. In her ears, the unsteady rhythm of his fingers drumming.