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The worst part about amnesia isn't not knowing the names of any of his friends, or the fact that these people he’s apparently known for years who keep coming over to re-introduce themselves immediately jump in on teasing him—because Bdubs can take a joke pretty well, and he might not know anything about himself yet, but he thinks that if the situation were reversed for any of them, he’d probably be doing the same.
And it’s not getting lost all the time—even though he is, because the server is a jigsaw of crazy-amazing builds joined up together all higgledy-piggledy—because it’s easy to get his bearings again when he can just shoot himself up into the air on a firework and glide back to familiar territory.
No, the worst part about having amnesia, the part that really sucks, is not knowing where any of his crap is. BdoubleO100, in his all-memoried-up, regular-degular state, seemingly has millions and millions of chests and barrels and shulkers all over his base, and none of them are goddamn labelled. Spare pickaxes, food, elytra… he can’t find anything he looks for. The tall, tan guy with the scars all over him—aptly named Scar—tells Bdubs that he always carries a clock. Okay, cool, cool-cool-cool. Good to know. So where is the stupid thing?
In the two days since that Xisuma guy partitioned Bdubs’s memories off to try de-corrupting them, Bdubs has holed himself up in the cottage that he’s been told belongs to him and turned the entire place upside down looking through his belongings for anything useful.
A few of his friends had been by to check in on him earlier—Bdubs tries to remember the faces and names… this one was Tango, that one was Pearl—but it was clear that no one but him has ever spent enough time here to know where anything is.
He’s ended up turning most of his chests out onto the floor to assemble half an inventory of bare essentials. Then sitting on his couch and going through the few notebooks he’s found scattered throughout the house, trying to piece together anything, just anything, about his life. He’s not fantastically successful at it. Seems like BdoubleO100, whoever he is, isn’t much of a minute-taker.
There's a shadow at the door, blocking the light. Bdubs’s eyes adjust and the shadow resolves into the shape of a man in a thick parka. Tall, pale hair, a mask covering half his face and a scar running over his left eye—all mysterious. Mystery up to here.
“Hey, Bdubs,” the guy says.
Bdubs frowns. It shouldn’t still be surprising that everyone knows who he is, but it keeps catching him off guard. “Hello, person,” he replies flatly. “I haven’t met you yet, have I?”
The guy laughs—a warm, low sound, caramel-sweet. Immediately, Bdubs wants to wrap himself up in it. “I’m not sure how to answer that question,” he says. “Tango was telling the truth then, I guess. You really don’t remember anything?”
Bdubs shakes his head. “Not a blip.” He hasn’t forgotten, exactly; Xisuma told him that he’d fallen into the void, and there was some kind of glitch when he respawned. The easiest solution was to partition his memory off completely to fix the corrupted parts. It’s like they’re in a box, X had explained. I have to take them out of the box to fix them, then I’ll put them back afterwards. So Bdubs hasn’t really forgotten anything. He doesn’t have the memories to even try remembering.
“So weird,” the guy says. His voice is light, like there’s a smile in it. “Are you holding up okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Bdubs gripes. “Just don’t know where any of my stuff is. You know where I keep my axes?”
The guy looks at Bdubs, then glances back over his shoulder towards the wood at the bottom of the hill. “You were working on your stables a couple days ago. Maybe you left a spare down there?”
Bdubs blinks. “Stables?”
The guy laughs again, bright and surprised this time. “You haven’t been down there yet?”
“I didn’t even know I had stables,” Bdubs says testily. He’s beyond fed up with not knowing what he has and doesn’t have.
“Come on,” the guy tells him. “It’s this way.”
Bdubs follows him out of the house and down the path towards the wood. It’s early afternoon, and there’s a misty, saturating rain blowing across the plain. The stable’s hard to spot through it, but the guy leads him straight there through the foul weather. Inside, it’s warm and dry and he’s hit with the musty smell of hay and, as promised, a couple of horses are waiting there for him. One dark with white stockings, the other chestnut brown. They nicker as he approaches and push their velvet noses into his hands, strong and beautiful and maybe the most wonderful things Bdubs has seen in his entire life, all two days of it.
“The black one’s called Climb 10. I don’t think the other one has a name, actually. Wait, I almost forgot why I came over,” the guy says. “Here.”
He holds something out, something that glints gold in the lantern light. Bdubs takes it off him: a pocket watch on a chain. The cover clicks open smoothly when Bdubs tries it, revealing an elegant dial with a tiny window at the centre and whirring clockwork beneath.
“I guess you wouldn’t recognise it,” the guy is saying. “It’s yours. I… you asked me to fix it for you. Good thing you didn’t have it on you when you fell in the void.”
“Yeah.” Bdubs wonders at it, the intricate detailing. Redstone dust glows through the face, illuminating up the numbers with flickering light. It’s beautiful. It’s a really beautiful thing. “Thank you.”
The guy breathes out a short chuckle. “That’s okay. I’m going to head out. Just, let me know if you need any help with anything. I guess you don’t remember, but I’ve known you for like… almost fifteen years. If there’s something—maybe I know it better than you, right now. Anyway.” He shuffles towards the stable door and digs a rocket out the inside of his jacket.
“Wait!” Bdubs grabs onto his wrist. The guy startles and turns, wide eyes meeting Bdubs’s. “I didn’t get your name. What’s your name?”
There’s a second when Bdubs thinks he won’t answer—he just looks at Bdubs, and his eyes go strangely crinkly around the corners. Then, he says, “Etho. I’m Etho, Bdubs.”
Etho. He writes the name on his brain in red ink. Etho.
Etho does go, then. When he shoots off on his elytra, Bdubs turns the watch over in his hand, feeling the solid weight of it. On the back, he notices, there’s an engraving in the gold: two tiny horses, prancing together around the edge.
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡
Impulse shows him around the city they’ve built.
“I wish I could see what you’re seeing,” Impulse says. “It’s cool looking, but I mostly just see the hard work and the mistakes I made.”
Bdubs walks around the streets for hours, stopping at hatch windows to pick up street food and wandering down alleyways that sprawl and interconnect. He doesn’t ever get lost, though. His feet always point him in the right direction.
He looks for the mistakes—Impulse said they were there, after all—but can’t find a single one.
In the cottage, milky light spills in through the window over his bedsheets. Motes of dust catch in the sunbeams. Bdubs rubs the sleep out of his eyes and watches them dance on a draft, and wonders if he’s ever taken the time to do it before. He wonders if he’s the kind of person who would.
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡
“I wasn’t expecting you to say yes to this,” Etho tells him as he rows them out across the lake. The afternoon heat is cooling into evening, and though the sky’s still light, the water, dotted with dusty-green lily pads, is grape-dark and opaque. Pines at the treeline cast long shadows over the gentle ripples, and those ripples cast quiet sounds back over the lake—almost musical, like windchimes. “It’s not usually your thing.”
“What, I don’t like fishing?” Bdubs asks. He’s glad to have taken off his sweater. The breeze is subtle, almost non-existent, but it feels good on his skin. Etho’s stripped off a layer as well, his green jacket lying in a heap on the floor of the boat. It’s the first time Bdubs has seen him without it. His eyes keep landing on Etho’s lean arms where they pull the oars.
“Not normally,” Etho replies mildly, and it’s kind of funny how Bdubs can tell what he means—that memoried-up Bdubs hates fishing with a passion—from just those two words alone.
“Wha—why’d you invite me, then, if you knew I’m going to hate it?” Bdubs huffs, kicking a foot out to swipe at Etho’s ankle. Etho dodges it easily, and the boat bobs side to side as he chuckles, low and relaxed.
“You would’ve enjoyed it if you ever just tried it,” he replies. “Me and Scar and Cub have been trying to get you to come out here for forever.”
“So you’re taking advantage of me in my vulnerable state?” Bdubs gripes, not meaning it at all. “Oh, that’s very nice of you.”
“Uh-huh,” Etho says, and he’s grinning behind the mask, even if Bdubs can only see his eyes crinkling at the corners.
They row out to the far side of an island that juts up out of the lake, emerald green. The sun is just dipping behind the conifer-covered hills as they cast their first lines out into the water. Bdubs only half listens when Etho starts talking about the types of lure they’re using; he holds loosely onto his rod and lets the sound of Etho’s voice wash over him. A bright blue damselfly lands on Etho’s shoulder and sits there for almost ten minutes, like it’s listening too, as though when Etho speaks the whole world leans in towards him.
They drift on the lake for hours, catching fish and talking. The sky swells from light blue to gold to inky purple, littered with bright stars. Their reflections dust the lake like icing sugar. Bdubs dips his fingers in the water and almost expects them to come back sweet and sticky.
“Don’t do that. You’ll spook the fish,” Etho says.
Bdubs snorts a little and flicks water off his hands at him. “Doesn’t matter—doesn’t matter. You keep throwing them back in. The ones we got earlier have probably told all their friends, hey, don’t go near that big wooden floaty thing. Bad times, bad juju up there. I got a lip piercing, now.”
He hears the smile in Etho’s voice when he says, “so I guess you’re not a convert?”
“To fishing? No,” Bdubs admits.
“That’s a shame.” Etho looks out westwards towards where the lake disappears into the distance, between the dark, hushed hills. “There’s a backwater up that way where you can row right into a lush cave. The fish there must eat the glowberries when they fall in the water, I think. It’s not all the time, but sometimes if you catch them, they glow the same colour gold.”
The way he describes it, Bdubs can see it almost crystal-clearly in his mind’s eye. “That sounds nice. I’d go there.”
Etho raises an eyebrow at him. “Even though you don’t like fishing?”
“Yeah!” Bdubs almost adds on to that, I just like hanging out with you, but stops himself at the last minute, unsure if it’s the kind of thing he would ever normally say out loud.
“That’s very gracious of you, Bdubs,” Etho says, teasing.
“Don’t say I never indulge you, Etho.”
It’s easy, is the thing. Talking to Etho, spending the evening with him. It feels so easy. It kind of makes sense—they’ve been friends for more than a decade, after all—but shouldn’t that make it harder? Trying to pick up and continue a friendship that long in the tooth, without knowing why or how they work together.
Because they do work. It’s like knowing how to be with Etho is written on him deeper than memory. On his heart—or something else cliche like that.
“It’s late. We should get back,” Etho says, and starts reeling in his line. Bdubs helps him get the gear put away into his bag. Etho checks it all over, scratching his chin absently as he makes sure it’s all there. His fingers creep up under the mask, and Bdubs hears the faint scratch of stubble, and—
“Do you ever take that thing off?” Bdubs asks, without really meaning to. The question falls out of him before he can stop it.
Etho’s gaze flickers over to him, taking a second to work out what Bdubs means. “Sometimes,” he says, which Bdubs can tell is Etho-speak for pretty much never.
“Have I ever seen you with it off?” he prods.
The moonlight’s filtering through the trees and turning Etho’s white hair to stardust where it shadows his face. Bdubs can’t read his expression at all.
“Mhm,” Etho hums. “A couple times.”
“Can I—?” Bdubs starts to ask, but he doesn’t need to—Etho’s already pulling the mask down for him.
It’s funny: sure, he’s never seen Etho without his mask before, but for some reason he’s never put too much thought into why he wears the stupid thing. It’s not like Bdubs stands around all day wondering. He’s got much better stuff to do with his time. Even seeing the scar that runs through his eye and under the black fabric, he hadn’t really put two and two together, that there’s the scar and the mask and that maybe Etho wears one to cover the other.
But now? The twilight pours over Etho’s bare face and Bdubs takes the invitation; he looks.
His eyes brush over Etho’s skin—the way his lips snag and snarl around the slash that crooks down from his cheekbone, red scar tissue turned midnight blue by the dark. The skin pulls back to reveal a flash of canine, and from there the scar traces a jagged line that runs over his chin and across his pale neck to finish just above his Adam’s apple.
Etho ducks his head and looks at his shoes. “I know, it’s kind of freaky,” he says.
No, no, nonono—that’s the sound of Etho shutting down, getting nervous and shy. Bdubs might not have known him for long, but he knows that, and he’s worked too damn hard to feel like normal, like Etho’s his friend , to allow that to happen. At all. “Freaky—no way,” he scoffs, scrabbling for words, heart racing. “Makes you look all, uh, distinguished. Mysterious.”
Etho flushes and laughs, and wow —isn’t that the most interesting smile Bdubs has ever seen? Scarred and uneven and toothy and genuine, completely genuine. And—there!—it crinkles his eyes and Bdubs tries to commit it to memory, so he recognises it even when the mask’s back on and covering it up.
It’s a gorgeous smile. Like no other.
Etho does pull the mask up then, even as he’s laughing. “I don’t think anyone’s ever called me distinguished before. Normally that’s a Mumbo kind of word.”
Bdubs wracks his brains to put a face to the name. Mumbo—right, the one with the moustache.
“That guy is pretty dapper,” Bdubs concedes. “But you’re more—hey, wait a minute! I thought we were only doing one type of fishing today. Didn’t think you were going for compliments as well.”
Man, that laugh—Bdubs thinks he could dedicate a whole lifetime to getting Etho to laugh and not get tired of it. And knowing, now, the smile that goes with it? Bdubs feels like he’s floating on it, a water lily on the lake.
“We really should be getting back,” Etho says, then.
Bdubs takes the oars this time. Muscle memory does its thing; his strokes are long and sure, all the way back to the dock.
When they part ways for the night, he stands still for a moment and watches Etho go, walking back towards his house down a path twinkling with fireflies.
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡
Bdubs has a kind of double vision—when he catches sight of Etho the next day, and the day after, and after that: in reality with the mask, and in his mind’s eye without . It’s odd to think he ever didn’t know the grin hiding underneath it.
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡
He gets restless. Xisuma’s making progress uncorrupting his memories (or so he says) but he’s not done yet, Bdubs, just a bit longer, Bdubs, I promise. And Bdubs tries to be nice about it—he really does!—but it’s been almost two weeks and he’s met (re-met?) all the other hermits and been on a grand, Grian-led tour of the whole server and played frogger a hundred times and Pearldle until his brain’s melted out, and he might have a stress-related heart attack if he hears the music that plays in Tango’s restaurant for one more second. He’s not bored— never bored—but he wants… he wants to build something.
“So do it,” Scar tells him. “You know where all your materials are, right?”
“Yeah, but what if I end up hating it? When I get my memories back, I mean. It’ll have been a big waste of time.”
Scar pats his shoulder. “Then, Bdubs, you will be joining the honourable ranks of people who have had to tear down an awful, awful project they spent waaaaay too long on. Which, it should come as no surprise, includes every single person you know.”
From where they’re standing, at the edge of Scar’s redwood forest, he can just about see his tall mountains through the blue haze, just beyond the wood on the hill. Compared to everyone else’s base, his own seems so sparse. Maybe he had spent most of his time working in the city with Impulse. Or maybe he built a lot of stuff for himself and had to tear most of it down, like Scar said.
“It’s the way it is. Trying something new comes with the risk of making mistakes,” Scar adds.
That surprises a laugh out of Bdubs. “You going philosophical on me now, Scar?”
“I’m just saying,” Scar says. “I remember you once told me that building is like painting, for you. Maybe take a moment, and see where the brush takes you.”
In the storage room under his house, Bdubs finds a well-worn sketchbook filled with annotated drawings of trees, of mountains. He flicks through them—they get more familiar, more detailed as the pages go on, until the images look almost identical to the ones around his base.
Not nature journaling, then. Preparatory sketches for projects, with all the notes he’d have needed to create them in real life.
He climbs the steps out of the storage room and leans on the doorframe, looking out at the woods on the horizon.
I made those trees.
When he tries to remember building them, he can’t—of course. He’s not out of the habit of searching for memories that aren’t there, even now. But it seems unbelievable. The trees must only be a few months old, but they look ancient and magnificent—eternal.
He’d made them. Him.
That’s it, then. Bdubs gets together a few shulkers of wood and leaves that evening. In the morning, he wakes early, and sets to work.
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡
It’s after a couple of days straight building brand new, big, beautiful trees out in the western plain, that Bdubs gets back to his storage basement and chances across it. In the small corner dedicated to redstone, there’s a little box that he hasn’t noticed before, tucked away on a high shelf.
He blows a thin layer of dust off the top and cracks it open.
Cushioned in soft folds of woolen fabric are four clocks. Each a little different—this one a wristwatch, the face inlaid with dark, iridescent ender pearl, another a pocket watch just a bit smaller than the one Bdubs is carrying, decorated with emeralds and amber and rubies cut in the shape of hearts. The third, attached to a long neck chain, is set with a mosaic of hundreds of tiny chips of diorite. Bdubs picks each clock up gently to look close. The largest one is the least intricate, and obviously the oldest, covered in tiny scratches and scuff marks, but still lovely in its own way. He turns it over and is surprised to find a message engraved on the back.
NHO stopping us now!
Good to have you back, Bdubs
—Etho
The handwriting is untidy, a little chicken-scratchy, but what sticks out to Bdubs is the capital E—written funny, like it’s a backwards three. And Bdubs recognises that E. He pulls out the watch in his pocket to compare and yes , there, etched on the central pin holding the hands together, is the same E. Like a maker’s mark. Etho’s signature, right under his nose this whole time. You asked me to fix it, Etho had said. Bdubs should’ve put it together before: that Etho had been the one to make it in the first place.
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡
“Pff—yeuch.” Bdubs grimaces, wiping spider gloop off his hand onto his pants. “Jeez, that shows me for trying to help you out.”
Etho had swung by the house, asking if Bdubs was free to lend a hand clearing out a clutch of spider spawners, all grouped together in a mineshaft in the south. Bdubs had magnanimously agreed—and paid the price near instantly. About a million spiders had spawned at once. The two of them had been back to back for the last hour, slicing through spiders and getting covered in web and whatever kind of goo it is that spiders are full of.
Bdubs needs a shower. He maybe needs several showers in a row, and to top it off with a nice, purifying chemical peel.
“I think this is a teaching moment for both of us, actually,” Etho says. He shakes himself off, goo-covered clothes sending droplets flying everywhere.
Bdubs grabs a blanket out of his inventory and starts using it like a towel, brushing the worst of the gunk off and sopping up the rest. Beside him, Etho pulls the mask off his face to wring it out and Bdubs—Bdubs is there, and yeah they’re both disgusting right now but… the mask is off, so he indulges his curiosity. Just a little.
Across the bony planes of Etho’s pale skin, the scar is just the same as it was that evening on the lake. But now, Bdubs has the time to take in the rest of Etho’s face, and somehow that’s even more striking. The line of his jaw is sharp, and his nose is a little crooked, and there’s a splash of pale freckles across his cheeks. Scruff on his chin. And there, the colour of his eyes: one dark brown like rich earth and the other red like strawberries where they flick up to glance at him and—
“Didn’t your mom ever tell you it’s rude to stare, Bdubs?” Etho says, a faint blush spreading across his cheeks.
“I was not!” Bdubs protests. “I wasn’t staring.” Okay, no—he had definitely been staring. Etho looks at him with obvious skepticism. No escaping it, then. “Does it hurt?” Bdubs asks cautiously.
“It’s a lot better than it was,” Etho says. “It used to look… worse.”
Worse. The scar looks sore enough now.
There’s a shine on his cheekbone. Bdubs laughs a little—despite his best efforts, Etho’s still got a glob of spider on his face. Bdubs says, “here, let me,” and reaches up to try and wipe it off with his sleeve. Etho holds still has he does.
It comes away easily. Bdubs runs his thumb over Etho’s cheek, grazing the edge of his scar, to make sure he’s got all of it.
“There you go,” he says. “Clean as a whistle.”
He doesn’t take his hand away, though. He gets distracted tracing his thumb over the scar, the crooked line of it.
“Bdubs.”
“Does this hurt?” Bdubs asks.
“No.” Etho says it softly, softer than Bdubs has ever heard him.
Bdubs should pull away, but instead he finds his thumb following the scar down to where it crosses Etho’s lips. Like this, the pad of his thumb fits perfectly into Etho’s philtrum. Perfectly. Did he ever know that before? How’s he supposed to go on, knowing it now?
The word philtrum comes from Greek. It means love charm, his holey memory supplies.
Yeah, I bet it does.
“What are you doing?” Etho says, eyes bright.
Bdubs hums. “Just looking at you, sweetheart.”
Is that Etho’s breath catching?
“You haven’t called me that in a while.”
Bdubs should—he really should—pull back. Make a joke. Keep it light. But Etho’s right there, and his face is so lovely and so close, and it’s like those two facts are the last digits of a combination lock suddenly sliding into place and clicking something open. A yes. An of course, this.
“Can’t imagine why not,” he murmurs, and pulls Etho down to kiss him.
It’s not a quick peck. When he presses his lips to Etho’s, it’s soft and sweet and lingering, and completely unambiguous.
Etho breathes a small noise against him, and then his mouth is pliant, amazing. Hands come up to rest on Bdubs’s waist, little fingers slotting into his belt loops, just where Bdubs would’ve put them.
It’s so stupid, in hindsight. Why hadn’t he put it together before? Of course this is what they do. Of course. They’re in sync about everything else—why not this as well? It makes sense. Bdubs and Etho, coffee and cream; together, they just work.
Their lips slide together, rich like butter. The kiss isn’t deep, but it’s—everything. Completely complete. Nonsensical. Bdubs brushes the hair falling out of Etho’s headband back and is amazed by how soft it is, how fluffy.
When he draws back to catch his breath, he catches sight of Etho’s stunned gaze and breathes a laugh.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Bdubs asks him. “About—” he tips his forehead against Etho’s and his eyes slip closed, and it feels so right— “this?”
But he doesn’t get Etho’s deep, quiet laugh in response, like he’d thought he would. He doesn’t get that at all. Instead, Etho lets out a long, shuddering breath. His hands drop from Bdubs’s waist, and he steps back—almost a stumble, slipping on the goop-covered floor. Trying to get away.
“That’s not—we don’t,” Etho stammers, “we don’t do that.”
What? No, no, that can’t be right—Bdubs had felt it. That was real. No way they don’t do that. No way they’ve never done it before. He startles himself with the intensity of the feeling, the rightness of it.
“But you love me,” Bdubs says, and the moment he says it, he knows it’s true. He’s never been more sure of anything.
Etho’s face cracks, and the look he gives Bdubs is so open, so raw, like he’s splintering. No wonder he keeps the mask on all the time, Bdubs thinks wildly. His feelings get written all over him.
“That’s not fair,” Etho says.
It’s not a no.
“You do. You love me.” Bdubs moves forward, fruitlessly reaching out to try and take Etho’s hand. “It’s alright. I think—I think I love you too.”
The noise Etho lets out is almost a strangled laugh. “No you don’t, Bdubs. I promise you, you don’t.”
“Etho—”
Jerking back, Etho’s feet slip again on the slick stone. Bdubs grabs his shoulder to steady him but Etho shrugs him off. “Don’t,” he says. “Just—don’t. You don’t remember how you really, that you—you’re going to get your memories back, and you’ll remember that you don’t, and…”
He gives Bdubs a look like he’s breaking to pieces.
“I’m sorry,” Bdubs says.
Etho looks down at his hand, holding his mask tightly. It’s shaking, a little. “It’s alright. I—I’m going to go, actually.”
“Etho, wait—” Bdubs tries, but Etho’s already moving, back into the main mineshaft towards the exit ladder. “You don’t have to.”
He doesn’t say anything, just takes one last look over his shoulder at Bdubs before disappearing around the corner.
Bdubs stands there for a long time staring at the space where he was, trying to make sense of it, trying to make the afterimage of him last.
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡
“Am I very different?” he asks Scar. “You know—normally.”
Scar looks at him, assessing. He’s a funny sight, with a cat on each shoulder and a kitten in each hand. When he’d asked Bdubs to come over and help move them into their new enclosure in the zoo, Bdubs had been grateful for the distraction.
“Not really,” Scar says, and puts the kittens in a crate for transport. “I would’ve thought you’d be more different, actually. I guess a Bdubs is always a Bdubs, whether you’ve got your memories or not.”
The enclosure is near the zoo entrance. Scar had mentioned something about wanting the animals to get more exotic the further into the zoo you go. Bdubs shades his eyes against the sun and can just about see the gates in the distance.
“I think I ruined everything with Etho,” he says.
There’s a nudge at shoulder, and when he turns, Scar hands him another pair or kittens. “Impossible,” Scar says.
“I mean it, Scar. I really think I messed everything up.”
“I mean it too,” Scar tells him. “I’ve known you two for a while. And at this particular moment, I know you better than you know yourself, too. Trust me. Even if you and Etho have had a little tiff, nothing’s ruined.”
Bdubs’s throat feels very tight, the breath he pulls in wet and difficult. In his hands, the kittens let out sweet little peeps, batting him softly with their tiny paws. He thinks about burying his face in their soft fur and never coming out again.
Scar drags him into a hug. “Whatever it is, it’s okay, Bdubs.”
Whatever it is. Bdubs just wants his memories back. He wants his chest to stop aching. More than anything, he wants to be the version of himself that has no idea what Etho’s lips taste like.
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡
He thinks about trying to find Etho, but he wouldn’t know where to start. Maybe the real Bdubs—the Bdubs who hadn’t screwed it all up yet—would know Etho’s hiding places are. This version of Bdubs, just a couple of short weeks old and new to the world, has no idea where those places might be.
Instead, he builds more trees. He tears a couple down, dissatisfied, and builds six better to replace them. He spends a whole day on a fallen trunk in the undergrowth, making it look just right, and brings one of his birds out to nest in it. It tweets at him happily and starts fluttering about, collecting twigs and moss right away.
Watching it, his tight heart unravels a little.
A message buzzes on the communicator in his pocket.
<Xisuma> memories all fixed bdubs
<Xisuma> come to mine when ur free
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡
By the time Bdubs makes it out onto the lake, the evening is already cooling the air. The only sounds on the water are the lap of waves against the side of his boat and the grasshoppers in the reeds, their quiet chorus.
Up on the hill, the silhouette of the roof of Etho’s house rests against the dusky sky. He’d teased Etho for how long it’d taken him to finish that roof. He rolls the memory around in his mind—Etho had been laughing and Bdubs had basked in the sound like a lizard in the sun, soaking up as much of it as he could. Such an ordinary moment, so normal. Remembering it now, it feels diamond-bright and brand new.
Talk about things you take for granted. Now Bdubs knows what it’s like to have no memories at all, he wants to hold them all close to him, examine them individually. Discover himself through fresh eyes.
The moon lights the way as he rows past the emerald-coloured island, towards where the lake narrows between the hills. It’s this way, he’s sure. Etho had said that it’s this way. He keeps his oar strokes slow and strong. Don’t spook the fish. Don’t—don’t spook the fish.
Bdubs rows for a long time to find it, but he does. He glances over his shoulder and sees a golden glow, just a flash, that shimmers under the water before disappearing into the dark. He lights a torch and is glad he did; he’d have missed it otherwise, the overgrown inlet of water the golden flash vanished into.
The channel is so narrow that he has to punt his boat down it, pushing off from the banks to propel it through the bulrushes. It’s easy going. A lot of the plants are pushed aside already, like someone else has been through here recently.
A toad hops onto the boat as he passes a thick matt of reeds. It croaks tunelessly, and Bdubs catches a glimpse of glowing gold in its belly before it leaps back into the water, gone in an instant with a watery plop. Up ahead, there’s a curtain of leafy vines blocking the channel, the same golden light peeking out from behind through the gaps in the foliage.
They part around the boat’s prow. Bdubs pushes through.
The cave is just as Etho had described it, that evening on the lake. Glowberry vines drape down from the low roof straight into the water, lighting the flooded cavern with dancing light where the gold shines up through the ripples. Dozens of little fish, no bigger than a finger, shoal around his oars and the underwater vines, their tiny scales shining out gold too.
Pink azalea petals float delicately on the water. There, on the far side of the cavern, on a pebbly beach tucked between mossy walls, vivid and vibrant green as they creep up towards the cave rood, is Etho. Knees drawn up, fishing rod propped up between the bigger rocks nearby.
Bdubs’s chest swoops at the sight of him. Like it always has before.
He rows close and moors the boat by where Etho’s left his, and goes to sit beside him. He’s got this far.
“Hello, stranger,” he says, and nudges Etho’s shoulder with his own.
Etho meets his eye. He looks distant—guarded—but he gives Bdubs a little smile anyway. Bdubs stops himself from reaching out to touch the faint crinkles by his eyes, just over the mask. How could Bdubs have ever forgotten what that smile looks like?
“I saw the message from Xisuma. Didn’t think you’d find me this quickly,” Etho says, almost conspiratorially, like he’s letting Bdubs in on a joke.
“Oh, don’t give me any credit. I looked a lot of other places, first.”
Etho breathes a small laugh.
“Hey, don’t laugh!” Bdubs pretends to bristle, bumping him again. “Took me a while to remember you mentioning this place. Got so many memories to sort through now. Don’t know what to do with them all.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes. Like, for example, I remember now that Scar owes me a shulkerful of dark oak. I’ve seen him, like, a billion times in the last two weeks! Did he mention it once? Of course not.”
That draws another laugh out of Etho—quiet but genuine and lovely. Bdubs’s heart skips.
“And I remember where all my stuff is, now. You know, I spent a full day making signs for all my chests. Completely pointless! I don’t need them any more, now I’ve got all my memories back. So stupid.”
His heart thumps in his chest as he catches Etho’s eye. “And, I remember the day you gave me this,” he continues, and pulls his clock out of his pocket. His thumb traces around the back cover, where Etho had engraved a pair of horses dancing around the edge. “I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life, and I could hardly believe you’d made it just for me.”
Etho flushes, and looks out over the water, away from Bdubs. “Yeah. Well,” he says.
“I remember, I wanted to kiss you,” Bdubs tells him, and that has Etho’s gaze snapping right back to him. “I thought, I could do it, right now. And then he’d know.” Bdubs remembers it so clearly. They’d been hiding from an early morning drizzle on Etho’s porch. Etho’d had a cherry blossom petal caught in his hair. He’d been looking at Bdubs cautiously as he’d given Bdubs the clock, like he’d thought Bdubs would hate it. As if Bdubs could. “I chickened out, I guess.”
“B-double-o—”
“I’m trying to say that it’s not just you, in the middle of this thing. I’m here, too,” Bdubs says. He swallows around the lump in his throat, runs a nervous hand through his hair. “I’m sorry I scared you, the other day. I didn’t mean to. I was just—so sure. About it, about me and you. It felt… obvious. Like the answer to all the questions my life left behind.”
It still feels that way now. Maybe even more than it did before.
Etho reaches over and takes the clock from him, clicking open the cover to look at the face, lit by its crimson redstone glow. He steals a glance at Bdubs before looking back to the clock, hesitating. “This isn’t a new thing for me, Bdubs,” he says, finally.
“Well, for the record," Bdubs says, a smile working its way across his lips, “I’ve been crushing on you for the last decade or so.”
That gets a laugh out of Etho, and when Etho pulls down his mask then, Bdubs finally gets to enjoy it with nothing in the way.
Before the last two weeks, it’d been years since he’s seen Etho without it on. Bdubs cups a hand to Etho’s cheek and brushes it with his thumb, and swears right then that he’ll never take the ability to do that for granted.
“Can I try kissing you again?” he asks.
Etho looks at him helplessly, then reels Bdubs in and crushes their mouths together. The drag of his lips over Bdubs’s is overwhelming, the way he breathes into Bdubs, inhaling him, and how his hand latches into Bdubs's hair and stays there, tight, fierce, secure as he kisses Bdubs and kisses Bdubs and Bdubs lets himself be kissed.
Then Etho tilts his head forward, his lips parting from Bdubs’s, foreheads just touching. Not moving away. Staying right there.
“I think you just wanted to see this place without having to come fishing again,” Etho breathes, a grin in his voice.
Bdubs laughs, winds an arm around his shoulders to pull him close. “You caught me.”
Sick of the millimetres between them, he leans in and captures Etho’s lower lip between his teeth. He thinks about the freckles on Etho’s face and wants to kiss each one, and peel off Etho’s jacket and lay him out flat somewhere he can get his hands on him, and he tries to pour all of it, all of it and more, into kissing Etho breathless right there on the stony lakeshore.
I knew it, he thinks when they part for air.
Of course we work, when Etho rows them back across the lake, and Bdubs tangles their legs together in the boat, under the moon.
Bdubs and Etho, when Etho takes his hand and pulls him up the steps onto his porch, and kisses him on the threshold. Me and him, coffee and cream.
*·˚ ༘ ➳♡