Chapter Text
In the early days, before the Universe had created the Hub, before the Updates expanded worlds and even before Players could learn to create those worlds, there were the Voidwalkers. As the very first Players, they traveled through the Void between worlds without need for a Hub or protection from the raw Code of the Universe, thus earning their name.
While some still exist to this day, Watchers are known to hold a visceral hatred toward their kind, and so those that remain live in hiding.
All this to say that Xander, a Voidwalker, wasn’t particularly happy with his current situation—trapped in a cell in the heart of a Watcher observatory. While his brother Xisuma was happily living out his cottagecore dreams in his not-so-cottagecore bases in his super secret hidden server full of eccentrics, Xander had never been good at staying in one place. So—he wasn’t doing so well at the whole ‘hiding’ thing, and now lately he’d been getting worse at the ‘avoiding the overpowered beings who want to kill you’ thing too. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried sneaking up on one of the famously all-seeing Watchers.
Alas, the consequences of his own actions.
“Where do you come from?” The Watcher in front of him asked, all long draping robes and oversized ego.
“Where you found me. Do you not remember the coords?” Xander intoned. He tried his best to copy the Watcher’s voice—just for giggles, really, he wasn’t good enough at intimidation or mind games or whatever. He was bored, okay? There wasn’t much to look at here besides bedrock, bedrock, and more bedrock. Watchers had a very specific interior design sense, and it was the same as their exterior design sense—stuck back in the Universe creation age. Ugh. So last millennium.
Xander was kindly broken out of his very important musings by the abrupt burn of wither attacking his bones and muscles. How courteous of them to remind him that he was being interrogated! His limbs twitched uncontrollably with the wither as Xander stared back at his interrogator, like they knew he wanted to raise a few very specific fingers in a very specific direction.
Sadly they were unable to follow through, as his limbs were paralysed by a festive little combination of slowness and mining fatigue, leaving him unable to move but still able to think clearly. A combination they had learned, of course, from experimenting on Voidwalkers.
Even outside of the whole having his family massacred for no reason thing, Xander wasn’t a huge fan of Watchers. Go figure.
“Where are your kin?” The Watcher asked, moving right along while Xander’s body continued to rot away from the inside out. Instead of answering, Xander blinked slowly back. He would sigh if his chest wasn’t currently seizing.
Now, see. As a self-declared expert on Watchers, Xander felt he had an obligation to educate. His students were a little limited here in the unforgiving expanse of the Void, but there was something very important that Xander felt all Players should know about Watchers, even the ones who didn’t know that Watchers were real.
Watchers are really, really stupid. Those face-like masks? There was nothing behind them.
Literally. They had no heads. It was just the mask.
…He was getting off-topic. But, okay, look. This was the third time they’d gone through this script. The Watchers would ask the same questions every time and every time they would be surprised when they didn’t get an answer. Xander was feeling rather generous and had given up the silent treatment once he’d gotten bored of it, but then he was a gracious exception. And then they asked questions like this! He dared the Universe to look him in the eyes and tell him, with complete seriousness, that ‘where is your family’ was not a stupid question.
“Are you insane?” Xander asked, with totally earnest intellectual curiosity, “Or are you just the dumbest one in the group and that’s why you got stuck with interrogating the Voidwalker?” Why would anyone ever truthfully admit to where they were hiding their family? For that matter, why would the Watchers, famously dedicated to destroying every Voidwalker they came across, assume that Xander had any family left—?
Ah, fifteen more seconds of wither. And with some nausea on top this time! How kind of them.
“Our time together is over, for now,” intoned the second Watcher. It was always—hah—watching these little sessions each time, and Xander thought that it might be the leader of this group.
(The official term for a group of Watchers was an audience, but there was no way Xander would use something that sounded so cool.)
“We will return.” Xander would rather swim through lava while being chased by ghasts. He would have loved to tell them this, but unfortunately the withering had eaten through the muscle in his jaw and he was sentenced to silence until his body’s natural regeneration kicked back in. Very inconvenient.
The Watchers left without any further conversation, and Xander was left alone to shake through the lingering status effects and count the stripes in the bedrock of his cell.
(And maybe, finally, figure out how to open his cell from the inside.)
“A Player?”
Xander woke up instantly. His vision did not, though, and it felt like his eyeballs were vibrating in his skull as they struggled to adjust from blissful darkness to mind-numbing bedrock patterning again.
“We would not afford any common Player such attention, Xelqua. Do you know of Voidwalkers?” A Watcher’s voice boomed. Ah yes, self-obsessed Watcher rhetoric at its finest—
“...Voidwalkers…a myth?” The voice was quiet, and the words faded in and out of Xander’s hearing. This distantly registered as strange, since Watchers all kind of had the same volume setting.
“Speak up, Xelqua. You know that volume level is unacceptable.”
“I thought that Voidwalkers were a myth,” the smaller voice repeated, steadier, “That looks like an ordinary Player.” The voice came across younger, somehow, despite the fact that all Watchers sounded pretty much the same and were all the same age. Maybe it was the strange lack of echo.
“Players have long forgotten Voidwalkers, due to their dwindling population—”
“Caused by Watchers,” Xander interjected sternly, finally recovered and able to look up at his unwelcome visitors. One of them was the leader Watcher that always came (ew), but the other was new. And much… shorter.
Huh.
Watchers all generally looked the same, aside from small differences in outfit and wing size, in Xander’s experience. And he could, again, confidently say that he was the most experienced when it came to seeing Watchers and surviving. While this new Watcher had the same robes and full-face mask where its face would be if it were Player, it was also three and a half heads shorter than the Watcher beside it.
That wasn’t normal.
“You… kill Voidwalkers?” The short one asked. There was something else strange about it, aside from the height, but Xander couldn’t pin it down from where he was looking, lying on the floor. While his body had healed enough to talk again, it wasn’t enough to stand or even sit up. It might have been poor manners to stay down when there were visitors, but Xander didn’t particularly mind being rude to these guests.
Xander entertained a brief daydream of a Watcher knocking on his front door and him slamming it in its face.
“We will teach you why they need to be erased, Xelqua.” Xander bristled instinctively. The genocidal superiority complex wasn’t anything new. What did this new Watcher think it was going to achieve, pretending like it was?
“Then, uh—why is this one still here? Actually, how do you even know this is a Voidwalker?” This Watcher—Xelqua? Awful name, by the way—was it playing dumb? If it was, it was trying too hard. These were things that every surviving Voidwalker and Watcher knew.
“You are young, Xelqua, and have much to learn. We need this Voidwalker to tell us where its kin are before it dies,” the leader Watcher explained as simply and inconsequentially as a Player would say zombies burn in the sun, “As for your other question, it is in their code. Look, and you will see.”
Then, in an absolutely horrifying move, the Watcher raised a hand and placed it on Xelqua’s head.
Its hand dwarfed the smaller Watcher, extra-jointed fingers dangling down past where its ears would be and pointed tips grazing its jaw. Xander continued to boggle at this completely out of character behaviour—the sight of a Watcher holding someone’s head like an apple would haunt his dreams and his nightmares—as Xelqua went abruptly still. The broken portal symbol on its mask glowed, light flickering like a nether portal.
“Ah.”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
The leader Watcher removed its hand. “You will be accompanying Six and I in the future interrogations. This is not something that we anticipated being able to teach you for some time, but the opportunity has arrived earlier than expected.”
“Yes,” Xelqua agreed, moving again, “I can See on my own, now. You did not need to for—guide me.”
“You are still young, Xelqua.” The leader said, turning away from Xander’s cell.
“You were the one who taught me, One,” Xelqua insisted quietly, “You know that I have learned.” Xelqua followed after One hastily, the both of them leaving Xander to panic over the last parts of that conversation.
Most importantly, there were at least six Watchers in this observatory. Watchers didn’t actually have titles or use any kind of names like Players did, instead numbering themselves in a hierarchy as needed. A Six could leave one group and join a different group as a Three based on the situation—they never had any kind of preference. But they never left a number unused, so if there was a Six then there had to be a One to Five. Not to mention Xelqua, which was a weird exception he didn’t know what to do with.
He’d thought there were three, at most four Watchers in this group. But if there were six, maybe more, then he had no chance of getting out of this on his own even once he got past the cell. He would have to call for help.
(He really hadn’t wanted to call for help.)
The Watchers came back.
This time Xander was ready for them, since it was around their usual interrogation torture appointment time. Watchers were nothing if not punctual when it came to times they’d set themselves and not told anyone else.
“Be sure to watch closely, Xelqua,” The lead Watcher—One, if that last interaction was anything to go by—said.
Xelqua didn’t say anything, just nodded silently.
“Voidwalker,” One continued, ignoring Xelqua’s comment, “Why were you following us?”
Xander felt the now-familiar mix of slowness and mining fatigue being applied to his still-withered body. What did they think he was going to be able to do when he couldn’t move anyway?
But—ah, Nether. He’d been busy with that last conversation between Xelqua and One. He hadn’t had time to think of any fun responses for this time around.
“Well you were just so interesting, I couldn’t help but want to watch what you were up to,” he drawled, “It was entertaining, I’m sure you understand.”
Ten seconds of poison for that. He must be losing his touch. Definitely should have prepared.
“Where do you come from?”
He’d already used ‘your mom’ for this one before, so, “The Universe. It creates all things. Loves them, too. But again, you already know that—oh wait.” Xander widened his eyes for dramatic effect, but he wasn’t sure how well it got across through the helmet visor.
Fifteen seconds poison, and wither on top! Much better feedback this time.
“Where are your kin?”
“Busy beating your mom at hunger games,” He blurted instantly. Someone made a scoffing noise, and it must have been him because Watchers didn’t make that sort of sound. He grinned.
Ten seconds poison and nausea. Pity. Now they would leave like usual, leaving Xander to - “Who were you trying to contact?”
What.
“What?”
“Who were you trying to contact?”
Had they actually noticed? That distress signal was designed to be untraceable. Granted, it was the first time he’d had to actually use it, so he could have messed it up— “What do you mean?”
“A message was sent, originating from this location. What did you send?” So they’d noticed it go out, but couldn’t read or trace it. Okay. He could work with that.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Yeah, that worked. Stick with the classics.
More poison and nausea. Great.
“Xelqua.”
“It’s a general distress signal, a call for help,” Came a voice, louder than he’d heard it before. It still sounded smaller somehow, not echoing as much as the other Watchers’ simulated voices. Again, Xander was struck by the fact that Xelqua was definitely different from the standard Watcher—but he hadn’t decided if he wanted to care yet.
Then he realized that Xelqua had read his distress signal. “Wait, how—!? There’s no way you can read that!” He’d been sure of the encryption, at least. He’d tested it with other Watchers. None of them could read it, it directly countered their code makeup.
“It seems that is correct. Xelqua, who was it directed to?” Witherspit. If it could read the message, then Xisuma—!
“No particular group. It was set to go to the Main Hub, then disperse to several of the largest populated servers. However, it stopped at the Hub.” Wait. That wasn’t right.
“A useless attempt, then. Perhaps it will stop fighting now that it knows its message did not reach anyone.” Yeah. As if.
“Yes.”
The Watchers, One and the one that was probably Six, turned and left. Xelqua lingered for a moment, staring at Xander’s sprawled form. Then, curiosity sated, it too turned and left Xander alone.
It hadn’t been long when Xander was rudely awakened by another unexpected visit. This time not by two Watchers loudly gawking at him like he was a zoo exhibit, but by the slowness and mining fatigue abruptly vanishing. He’d gotten used to sleeping it off after every questioning session, and it should have lasted at least another fifteen minutes.
Ugh. Why was he complaining about less misery again?
Blearily, he blinked his eyes open to see little Xelqua standing outside the one barred wall of his cell, the rest seamless bedrock. Xelqua didn’t move or make a sound, but in another moment, the familiar soothing feeling of regeneration filled his body.
“Wha…” He slurred, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Xelqua jerked silently, then disappeared.
…Had he dreamed that?
Creepy. Xander decided to put nonsensical Watchers out of his mind, and set to work rewriting his distress call to his brother, triple checking the address and encryption this time.
“Why were you following us?”
“Felt like it,” Xander was getting very used to the feeling of wither layered with slowness, mining fatigue, and nausea. A couple more goes and it would barely phase him. Torture was such an efficient training method.
“Where do you come from?”
“Wherever I feel like,” Hm. That was actually getting a little too close to the truth. Better dial it back.
“Where are your kin?”
“Ate ‘em.”
“...What?” Heheh.
“Nom nom.” Would licking his lips be too much?
“Perhaps less wither next time. It has become hysterical.” One definitely didn’t know what hysterical looked like. “It tried to send another message. Did it succeed this time?” It better have. Xander was getting very bored of all this.
“No,” What? “It’s the same result as the last one. You can’t read the encryption but you can still see that the content is the exact same here, see? It would have done the same thing.” No, no, he’d checked this time. He hadn’t been distracted by slowness or fatigue, in fact it had been easier to concentrate with the regen, and he’d been sure to put the address in correctly. It would have either reached Xisuma this time or Xelqua would have seen the target location.
Something wasn’t right. What was going on here?
Xander was once again woken by the feeling of slowness and fatigue dissipating earlier than it should. He opened his eyes to see Xelqua standing in front of his cell bars.
“So it was real.”
Xelqua’s shoulders hitched. It vanished.
Xander felt the regen relax his muscles and wondered if he was becoming a conspiracy theorist.
“Where are your kin?”
“Dunno, my parents haven’t been born yet.”
Poison, nausea, blindness.
Waking up to an unexpected clarity in his mind and vision, Xander squinted.
“It’s you again. Xelqua?”
Xelqua stiffened and shuffled back. Regeneration replaced the pain in his limbs, and the small Watcher vanished.
“Where do you come from?”
“The Void, obviously. Someone never read the manual.”
Wither, poison, blindness.
This time, Xander tried to stay awake for as long as he could. Even so, he never heard any footsteps before the blindness suddenly lifted and the pain lessened from an active pulsing to a dull ache.
He raced to blink into focus to see— “Xelqua? Why do you keep doing this? What’s the point?”
A sharp intake of breath. Xelqua vanished. This was starting to get old.
“Why were you following us?”
“What can I say, I kind of had a crush. Not on you, of course. But bedrock… you know what I mean?”
Wither, wither, wither.
Hehehehe.
Regeneration. “Xelqua? You’re back again.”
Silence. Then, “You’re a Voidwalker.” Xelqua’s voice lilted uncertainly, almost like a question but not quite. Xander paused, surprised to finally get a response.
“Wouldn’t you know? You saw my code.” That was what the creepy apple-hand thing with One was, right?
Xelqua’s shoulders hitched like an aborted shrug, “But you’re also a Player?”
Xander’s face scrunched in confused offence, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Watchers aren’t.” Oh.
“That’s… true, I guess. But yeah, Voidwalkers are Players. Your buddies didn’t tell you that?”
Another stilted shrug. Xelqua disappeared into the shadows.
At least one of them was getting better at their dramatic exits.
They were on interrogation number, what, nine? When the Watchers arrived and said, “Your resistance is inconvenient. Answer, or the punishments will increase.”
This didn’t bode well, but Xander still acted on autopilot when they started their questions, “Why were you following us?”
“I have been answering. Not my fault you don’t like the answers.”
Blindness—wait, no. The black in his eyes was obsidian. In his face, in his arms, in his legs, in his chest. So they were going for suffocation. He could still move, but like usual, moving through solid blocks felt like grinding his flayed bones against rough granite and dragging burned flesh through gravel at the same time. It was not a pleasant feeling and Xander liked to avoid it whenever possible. Most Players did.
The obsidian disappeared and he gasped for air like a fish out of water.
“Where do you come from?”
Xander caught his breath. “Not obsidian, that’s for sure.” And yet, the obsidian was back. They never listened, did they?
“Where are your kin?”
“Also not in obsidian. Haven’t you been listening?”
Obsidian, obsidian, obsidian. If it was only getting worse from here, Xander wasn’t sure how well he’d perform.
(Xander also wasn’t sure how he was getting out of this.)
Regeneration.
Xander peeled his eyes open to stare at Xelqua. “Why did it get worse? Did you say something?”
“Wha—like what?” Even quietly, Xelqua somehow managed to sound offended, “What would I say to make them hate you even more? ‘I went to talk to them without your permission and they told me that Voidwalkers are Players - you know, basic information that you already knew?’ Where’s the point in that?”
“‘Without permission’?” Xander picked out, immediately interested.
“I—well of course, do I look like the other Watchers? Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.” Xelqua retorted, putting its hands on its hips. Its overlong sleeves bunched awkwardly around its hands.
“I just figured you were weirdly small. Do Watchers have runts?” Xander asked only half-mockingly, eyebrows raising at the immediate response.
“Excuse me!? I am perfectly average-sized for a—” Xelqua stopped.
“...For a what?”
“...For a,” The Watcher hunched into itself and checked over its shoulder. Which was completely unnecessary, considering Watchers can always see in all directions, “...Player.”
The last word was whispered so quietly that Xander had to strain to hear it, and even then he questioned if he’d heard it right.
“You’re a Player?” Xander asked incredulously, part insulted that it would try to fool him and part horrified that that was a possibility in the first place.
“Shhshshh!” Xelqua hissed, crouching down and flapping its sleeves at him, “Not so loud! They get so bad whenever they hear that!”
“That you’re a Player?” Xander repeated obstinately, but reluctantly quieter this time.
“I used to be. They changed my code,” Xelqua bit out, unexpectedly vitriolic, “And supposedly I’m not a Player anymore. But I don’t quite look like a Watcher, do I?”
“No,” Xander agreed, still in shock, “You’re small.”
“I’m average—!” Xelqua sighed. “Anyway. Don’t call me a Player, because they will get mad, and it will be at both us, and it will suck more than it already does. Okay?”
“I don’t know why you think I would tell them anything.”
“Just. Letting you know. Okay bye.” Xelqua stood and disappeared, once more leaving Xander to reel over what he’d just learned.
Watchers were supposed to have a limited number. They couldn’t reproduce, the Universe wouldn’t let them. So it seemed they had turned to creating more Watchers.
But it didn’t sound like Xelqua was very happy about it.
The next torture session - he wasn’t bothering calling it an interrogation anymore, it was just straight up torture at this point - had Xander waiting more anxiously than before. The possibilities of what could happen had extended past status effects and into the unknown, and he didn’t like it. And as far as he could tell, there was no help coming.
Thankfully, or unfortunately, One and Six stuck to suffocation in obsidian again this time. Like all other times, Xelqua simply stood between them, mask pointed at Xander’s prone form. Just watching.
In the short periods between suffocation, Xander sucked in breath like he’d lost his helmet in the Overworld and stared back at Xelqua. Did it know what it was like to suffer under the Watchers’ games? To spend hours under painful status effects or suffocate in obsidian? Did it know that the Watchers had systematically eradicated the Voidwalkers to the point that they were near extinct? Did it know the reasons why Xander would hunt down and kill any Watcher he came across in return?
Did it know why being a Watcher was such a shameful thing?
He wouldn’t be afraid to admit that he had seriously considered revealing Xelqua’s secrets to the other Watchers after suffocation number two out of three. Shout out that it had been healing him after each session, maybe just call it a Player and see if it had been bluffing. Even if it hadn’t been lying and the other Watchers did actually get upset, it would serve it right after just watching Xander suffer like this for so long when it could do something about it.
But thinking about that had made him realize - he was only alive because of Xelqua’s regular healing after every visit from the Watchers. With the first few sessions he’d been deteriorating faster than he could naturally heal, regeneration limited in the Void as it was, and the other Watchers hadn’t seemed to notice. There was the possibility that Xelqua had been instructed to go and heal him, but it hadn’t acted like it was doing something it was supposed to do. Xander himself had never scared it, but it had run away every time he noticed it. It was scared of getting caught.
He’d give it one more chance, he decided. It had earned that much.
“Where are your kin?”
“Just leave me alone.” Gasping for air, Xander decided he was rather done for the day. Of course, the Watchers weren’t.
Obsidian, obsidian, obsidian.
Once the Watchers had had their fill of suffering for the time being and left, Xander allowed himself his first moment of weakness since being captured and held here. Curling onto his side and hugging his arms around himself, he shivered. Sure, he’d gone without seeing another Player around for months at a time. And sure, he’d been through worse pain before, and been left to deal with it alone. But usually, at the end of it, he could drop by his brother’s server for a quick hug and a few well-received pranks on his Players.
But here, the Void was cold and dark and vast and full of unsympathetic enemies. He was surrounded by unbreakable bedrock and the hopelessness that came with knowing no help was coming. Could he even help himself?
What could he even do?
Tap-tap.
Tap.
A soft rustling of clothing. A presence next to him.
“Are you okay?”
Xander was too tired to bother moving. “What do you think.”
“You look worse than usual.”
“You look shorter than usual.”
A huff. “I’m not actually that insecure about my height, you know. And you’re not even looking at me.”
Xander dragged his eyes over to where Xelqua was crouching next to him. He didn’t bother asking how it had gotten into the cell. “You look short.”
“Thanks,” It said, voice thick with sarcasm, “And you look like you’re in pain. Do you mind if I—? It’ll be stronger this way.”
It took Xander a second to realize what it meant, hand gesturing towards his shoulder. “Oh. Sure. Why not.”
“Great.” The hand made contact with his shoulder and regeneration flowed through, easing muscles and smoothing out trembling nerves. True to its word, it was stronger this time. Xander relaxed into the first semi-friendly contact he’d had since a month before he was captured and asked again.
“Why are you doing this? What’s the point?”
This time, Xelqua answered. “Regen is better for the body than instant healing,” It said, like it was an indisputable fact that had been beaten into badly healed bones, “And I can’t fully top you up because they’d notice. They don’t really check if the health bar is the same as when they left it, since they know Players heal naturally, but it’s pretty obvious to them if you’re at a hundred percent. It tends to make things worse.”
“But why heal me at all?” The Void suddenly seemed so cold. Voidwalkers had a natural resistance to it, but Xander had been there for so long… even through the armor he always wore, Xelqua’s hand felt three times warmer than anything else in the Void. If he focused too hard on the feeling, it almost burned.
“Why suffer when there’s no need to? Especially when I can help. Besides, you’d die,” Xelqua said like it was obvious, and maybe it should have been. Xander just blinked, head foggy and warm.
“But why…?”
Xelqua shrugged, hand not moving from his shoulder, “Look, I’m not here because I want to be, and they know it. There’re a lot of restrictions on me. I can’t get you out. But I can make it more bearable, and if you’re anything like me… I know I would have appreciated it.”
Xander watched, eyelids heavy and mind focused on his shoulder, as Xelqua hesitantly gave his arm a final pat before taking their hand back. He felt the loss immediately.
“I’ll let you get some sleep. I’m sure you’ll need it.”
Xander drifted off more peacefully than he ever had since waking up in the bedrock cell, listening to Xelqua walk away.
In visit eleven, because he was keeping track for some reason, they switched to lava. Burning in lava was something every Player experienced, but that didn’t mean it was a good feeling. And a quick accidental dip was very different from a long swim that he couldn’t escape.
When Xelqua arrived an hour after leaving with the Watchers, Xander was still trying to find a balance between shaking in pain and staying still because every movement hurt. Xelqua moved to his side without a word, and regen rippled over the burned and bubbling skin.
“Can I?”
“Please.”
A hand settled on his chest once the skin was healed enough to tolerate it, increasing the regeneration. Xander just focused on the contact and ignored the rest of the world, taking comfort in the quiet for once.
They sat there in silence as Xander healed. They both knew it wouldn’t last.
“I can’t do anything about the cell,” Xelqua said eventually, hushed in the quiet, “I said it before, but I think you were asleep? They’ll know if I so much as touch the bars, and I don’t have the access to open it or anything. Sorry. I wish I could do more.”
“How do you get into the cell, then?” It wasn’t accusing.
Xelqua still flinched, ducking back into themself for a moment before resettling their shoulders in a practised movement. “I can’t do it for you. And—you can’t tell anyone. Please.”
“I haven’t been telling anyone about you being here.”
“I know but—this is bigger. It’s—they know I have compassion, still, and this could just be brushed off as a defect, a moment of weakness. But if they knew I could move around on my own, without their knowing,” —a shudder— “they’d try to take it away. And I don’t think they can.” Meaning pointless pain. And didn’t Xander know all about that.
Xander turned his head to look at Xelqua’s mask. “I won’t tell anyone.”
He tried to project his sincerity as best he could through his helmet, because he was. Sincere, that was. This clearly wasn’t a trivial fear that Xelqua had, and they had proven to be both Player and a Player that cared. Xisuma’s server alone, full of wonderful people with reasons to hide, was proof that that was rarer than it should be. Xander owed it to them to have a fraction of the consideration Xelqua had shown him. It hadn’t escaped him that Xelqua had finished funneling regeneration into him, and yet had left their hand on his chest as a comfort.
Xelqua paused, looking for something in Xander’s face. They must have found it, because they drooped a little and shifted to sit on the floor. They sat in silence for another while, before Xelqua took an audible breath.
“It’s my feathers,” They said, picking at one of their unusually corporeal wings. Xelqua was the only Watcher he’d seen with actual physical wings, the dull purple feathers oddly defined and making the limbs look like large bird wings where other Watchers simply had wing-shaped energy billowing out behind them. “They’re—well basically they’re a part of me, even when they’re not actually attached to the wings. If one of my feathers is there, it’s like I’m already there. I can just bring the rest of me to wherever the part of me is.”
Xavier’s exhausted mind parsed through the ramble and came up with: “So you can teleport to wherever one of your feathers is?”
“Um. Basically. Yeah.” So they hadn’t been teleporting like a Watcher or even an admin with /tp, like he’d thought. More like an ender pearl that didn’t break. It would be harder to track since it wasn’t a command, which is probably why they’d been using it.
“You throw a feather into the cell every time you come?”
“I left one here after the first time. It’s hidden, the others won’t find it.”
“Where is it?”
“Um,” They pointed to the corner opposite the cell bars, too far for the light to reach, “Back there.”
He couldn’t see it. “Shadows won’t hide it from the Watchers.”
“I’m a Watcher too. I can hide it.”
“If you say so.” Xander sighed, then, “That doesn’t help me at all. How am I supposed to get out?”
“I don’t know. Sorry.”
“It’s fine, I know. Since when can Watchers even do that? With their wings?”
“They can’t? At least I don’t think so,” Xelqua went to fidget with their hands, realized one was still on Xander, and switched to playing with the hem of their robes. Their feathered wings flexed and brushed over the floor. “I mean, you’ve seen them. They don’t have feathers. And they can just /tp everywhere, they don’t need it.”
“Can’t you just teleport wherever too? Why would you need it?”
Xelqua shrugged. “They code-locked me. I should be able to /tp, but they won’t let me. Can’t even go through portals. And I just. Have feathers. They don’t know why either.”
“They don’t? Didn’t they know what they were doing when they made you into a Watcher?”
A strained hum, “I’m their first attempt at it, so no, they didn’t have any clue what they were doing when they tore out chunks of my code and randomly replaced them with Watcher parts.” Xander could tell that Xelqua was trying to stay calm, probably for his sake. But while their voice was quiet, it shook with a cold anger that wouldn’t fade any time soon.
Xander was honestly impressed at the restraint. He had decided to hunt down and kill as many Watchers as he could after Watchers had killed his parents. But to have your body and soul torn apart by clumsy hands pawing through your code like they were sifting gravel for flint with a sword? To then have it put back together but inside out and upside down and with the wrong pieces, to be presented the scrambled mess and be told, look we fixed it?
They weren’t something that could be compared, Xander knew. But it was a loss all the same. They had both faced mythical, ego-tripping, super-powered beings and been found wanting. And the Watchers had hurt them for it.
Xander put a hand over Xelqua’s, still on his chest, and their mask turned to face him. “We’ll get out of here,” Xander promised.
“Get some sleep,” Xelqua returned, and Xander saw no reason to protest.
Number twelve is lava again, which is strangely comforting in its familiarity. Xander is worried he may be starting to lose it a little. It is worse this time though, time spent in lava seeming to double - though that may just be his mind. Maybe he’d ask Xelqua if he was right. He might be left. Or. Wait…
Xander waited until Xelqua appeared, instantly feeling better just knowing they were there. “That was worse,” he slurred, “It was, right? It’s getting worse?”
A hand settled on his chest. “It’ll keep getting worse every time. The first eight are status effects only, and then for the next eight it just keeps getting worse. ‘S their rule. I’m sorry.”
So he was right! “You can’t do anything about it,” Xander dismissed, “D’you know what’s next? So I can be ready.”
“Not sure how ready you can be for these things,” Xelqua muttered sardonically, but, “It won’t be lava again. It’ll be something new. Dunno what.”
“Yaaaayyy,” Xander droned, entirely done with all of this, “‘What a time to be alive!’”
A huff, “I guess so—”
“‘A Player said that once’,” Xander continued quoting on a whim, “‘But aren’t they alive at all times?’”
“Um. What?”
“I heard a Watcher say that once,” Xander explained, shoving down the urge to giggle like a maniac, “Sounded like a robot. Didn’t get it at all. Ew. Hate those guys.” He blinked hazily, “Sorry. I think I’m starting to lose it.”
“That’s… understandable.” The regen pulsed a little more. “Hold on just a little longer, though. I’ll get you out.”
“How?” Xander asked, healed and suddenly feeling much more lucid.
“I—I don’t know how I’ll get you out of the cell,” Xelqua stuttered, quiet and unsure, “But once you’re outside of the observatory, portals will work again. You can just leave. I would have done it long before you came if they hadn’t locked portals for me.”
“Wouldn’t they just—follow? Watchers can use portals. And they don’t give up if you just leave the Void.” Xander would know. He’d been caught off guard by it the first time, and used it to set a trap the second. But he didn’t have a trap ready this time, and he was too weak to put up much of a fight. Their best bet was to just run.
“Not if you go to the Main Hub.”
“The Hub?” The Main Hub was the connecting point between the various servers and worlds that Players lived on and visited. It was constantly filled with Players moving to and fro, and it linked to every world and server that had ever existed. There was no way he was bringing a Watcher there. “Are you crazy—?”
“—Watchers can’t access the Hub,” Xelqua murmured, like saying it too loud would make it untrue, “It’s too—Player, too woven into the fabric of the Universe. Watchers are a part of the code, like all things are, but they’re not—not loved, not like the Universe loves Players.”
And if Xander had had any lingering doubt that Xelqua was a Player, it would have been washed away at that. Because unlike the Watchers, who repeated things they’d heard from Players without comprehension, Xelqua said loved like they knew it. They’d said the Universe loves Players with the hint of wonder that came from knowing that something as big as the Universe knew you and loved you individually, and that all you needed to do to earn that love was to exist.
It was a knowledge that Watchers had chosen to abandon; something that only a Player would know.
“Okay,” Xander relented, tension seeping out of his shoulders, “So get out of the cell, get out of the observatory, portal to the Main Hub. Then we’re safe.”
“Then you’re home free.” Xelqua nodded.
“Sounds like a plan.” And Xander felt just a bit more grounded, with something to hold on to. They could do this. They would.