Work Text:
There’s an unfamiliar ceiling looking down at Etho, sterile white with too-bright lights that make his head hurt. Closing his eyes doesn’t stop the headache, which is his second sign that something's not right.
The fact that this is clearly a hospital room is the first.
He becomes aware of everything else in a strange order. There's a piece of paper on his lap covered in handwriting, but his tired eyes slip off the words when he looks at them. There’s a hand holding his, to his left. The air smells like coffee and antibacterial spray. There’s a book in Bdubs’s lap, and his dark hair’s falling across his forehead into his eyes. The hand’s holding Etho’s is attached to Bdubs.
“You look like you’re worried about someone,” Etho observes, and laughs when Bdubs startles and jolts the little table beside him.
“Don’t do that!” Bdubs yelps, dropping Etho’s hand to steady the mug of coffee that’s sloshing its contents all over the surface. “Goodness sakes, Etho.”
Etho laughs again, although it makes his head hurt more. “Just keeping you on your toes.”
“You’re a piece of work sometimes, you know that?” Bdubs chuckles, and mops at the spilled liquid with a tissue. “How’re you feeling? You want me to get you some painkillers?”
“I got a bit of a headache,” Etho says, and sniffs. “What’s with the chicken noodle soup treatment? Would’ve thought you’d be rubbing my face in your perfect health.”
“Yeah, well, a seizure’s a little different to getting the man flu every November.” There’s a ghost of an attempted laugh in Bdubs’s voice, but it’s severely undercut by the obvious concern there too.
It has Etho snapping to attention. “A seizure? I don’t remember that.”
Bdubs nods to the sheet of paper on Etho’s lap. “You—uhm—I wrote it all out for you. You kept waking up all night, asking what happened, so I wrote all the questions you kept asking.”
The paper, when Etho looks at it, is exactly that: a list of questions and answers in Bdubs’s messy scrawl.
WHERE AM I/WHAT HAPPENED?
You’re at Pearl’s hospital. I found you on the floor at home yesterday afternoon having a seizure. It looked like you shorted a redstone cerc circuit in your face. Don’t worry, your eye is fine.
PEARL’S HOSPITAL? I DON’T REMEMBER THAT
Yes. She’s a doctor this season. The seizure left your short term memory pretty messed up. Dr Pearl says things should start coming back to you soon.
WHAT WAS I TRYING TO DO?
I don’t know, you mentioned something a couple of days ago about setting up automatic watering in the greenhouse, so it might’ve been that.
GREENHOUSE?
Me & you are building a greenhouse together. I’m kinda offended you forgot this one.
There’s a couple more lines under that with more details about his condition; Etho skims it, the paper shaking in his hands a little. A redstone accident? The only other time he’s ever had a run-in with redstone this bad, he’d blinded himself in one eye and got scarred all the way from his hairline to his lips. The scar and the eye have always been pretty effective reminders to use proper protection when working. Enough to see out a good few years without an accident, anyway.
Down at the bottom of the page is the question that concerns him the most.
HOW LONG WAS THE SEIZURE?
I don’t know.
Etho tries to summon up a mental image of the greenhouse, and comes up blank. He looks around the hospital room—it, too, doesn’t ring a bell at all. He’d lost a couple of weeks of memories that he’d never got back after that first accident—the result, Doc had concluded, of a seizure caused by the redstone pulse that’d run straight through his brain. Maybe there’s now another big blank hole in his memory. Except rather than forgetting a couple of random weeks on Mindcrack where he hadn’t got up to too much, he’s forgotten the whole beginning of a season on Hermitcraft.
He looks over at Bdubs. “When did this season start?”
Bdubs frowns. “A little under a month ago.”
Etho blinks down at the paper in his lap again, and worries his bottom lip between his teeth.
“You alright, sweetheart?” Bdubs asks.
Nodding, Etho swallows around the lump rapidly forming in his throat. A little under a month. It’s fine. “Yeah, just thinking.”
“Alright.” Bdubs grunts an old-man sound as he stands up out of his chair. When Etho looks up at him again, he reaches out and strokes through Etho’s hair with a broad, solid hand—his hands are rough and knuckley, and always so distracting when Etho catches sight of him at work. The touch is warm, and a strange kind of comforting. It’s weirdly familiar too, even though Etho’s certain he would remember if anyone had ever touched him like that before. Some deep, ugly, needy thing inside of him urges him to lean into the touch. Etho resists it. “I’m going to go get you something to eat,” Bdubs says. “I’ll be right back.”
Etho watches him go and feels, for some reason, terrible. Everything around his chest is sour and clenched, like he’s done something horribly wrong.
Sweetheart. You alright, sweetheart—that’s what Bdubs just said.
It’s been six years since the last time he called you that, Etho thinks, then feels guilty that he’s been counting. He’s not supposed to think about that stuff. It’s a bad idea to entertain. It’s just Bdubs, he tells himself. Affectionate as a joke. Poking and teasing. It doesn’t mean anything when he calls you that now, any more than it ever did before.
Bdubs comes back with a cookie in hand and Pearl—Doctor Pearl—in tow.
“Hey, Etho,” Pearl says. “Bdubs says you’re sounding a bit more lucid.”
Etho shrugs. “He was saying I kept waking up all last night, but I don’t really remember it.”
Pearl nods. “That’s not exactly a surprise. You got a redstone pulse straight to the head for a good couple of minutes. Basically your brain got a little bit fried and had to spend all last night sorting itself out again. I’d expect a couple of things to get mixed around up in there.”
“Mm-hm.” He doesn’t really want to mention the fact that a little more than just last night seems to have got lost in the mix. “How long do I need to stay laid up here?”
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re free to go as soon as you have some lunch,” Pearl says. “You haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
Etho eyes the cookie Bdubs had put down on the coffee-spotted table. “Does that count as lunch?”
Bdubs chuckles, and says to Pearl. “I’ll make sure he gets something down.”
“That sounds good to me,” Pearl says. “Just let me know if you need another prescription for painkillers, alright?”
Etho nods and huffs a laugh as he breaks the cookie in half over his lap. “What a way to start season nine, right?”
There’s something darkly comical about the way the smiles drop off Bdubs and Pearl’s faces simultaneously.
“What are those looks for?” Etho asks, blinking with confusion.
“You mean season eleven,” Bdubs says slowly.
“Um. I don’t think I do,” Etho says. “We just wrapped season eight, right? So this is nine.”
“Season nine ended two years ago,” Pearl says, brow creasing into a deep, worried frown. “Etho, what year do you think it is?”
—
Four years missing, they work out together. Etho’s got hazy memories of the last few weeks of season eight, then a big black hole after that. What he’d assumed was just a few weeks—well. Four years.
Pearl makes a lot of noises about how it’ll probably start coming back to him soon, and that he just needs to give it a few days. Etho’s not that convinced. Of the time he’d lost back in Mindcrack, none of it had come back—not one single hour of it.
He nods along, though. Tries to sound agreeable. Four years. How’s he supposed to wrap his swiss cheese of a brain around that?
Bdubs keeps stealing looks at him, biting his lip. Etho’s got no idea what to make of it. Instead, he focuses all of his attention on convincing a reluctant Pearl to let him go home, because maybe that’ll jog my memory. But when he does get out of the hospital, he realises that he’s got absolutely no idea where home is, this season. Bdubs had said something on that piece of paper about them working on a greenhouse together, but—
“You going my way?” Bdubs asks, closing the hospital’s front door behind him. Outside, it’s a crisp fall afternoon, chocolate brown leaves getting picked up on the breeze to blow across the darkening sky.
“Maybe,” Etho says. “I’ll let you ply me with cookies if you want to.”
Bdubs breathes out an unsteady laugh, and pulls on his elytra. Etho shrugs into his own. “Right this way, then. Let me see what I can do.”
—
The cold November air bites at the tops of his cheeks at the fly far out, beyond where a fledgeling shopping district is just starting to take shape, to a clearing on the edge of a jungle. An enormous glass building juts up out of the trees, orange lanternlight shining out of every window, making it look for all the world like a giant hunk of amber bursting out of the ground. Approaching, it’s a clear Bdubs build: arching windows with smooth, clean lines—layers of glass doing things Etho didn’t even know glass was capable of. The light inside casts shadows of plants out over the grass into the deepening afternoon twilight.
“We built a greenhouse, huh?” he teases Bdubs when they land.
“Hey! Your input’s in here,” Bdubs says. “Somewhere, surely.”
Etho laughs, and follows him in. It’s cold outside, but the interior of the glasshouse is balmy. Butterflies flit between tall ferns and enormous flowers he’s never seen before, glowing bioluminescent blue and purple. In raised flowerbeds, golden blossoms wink into bloom as they pass through. Etho hears the cawing of a parrot, high up somewhere out of sight.
It’s totally unfamiliar—he doesn’t remember ever being here in his life, and he can’t even identify half the plants he can see—but he recognises, strangely, the way he’d lay a greenhouse out, if it were him making one. Lower maintenance plants out towards the edges, with the ones that need more tending a little more central. On the back wall, leading into a brick house he’d caught a glimpse of when gliding in, is a faucet and basin just the right height for Etho to use.
“Ringing any bells?” Bdubs asks over his shoulder, draping his elytra over a coatstand by the door into the house.
“Not yet.” Etho does the same, and kicks his shoes off by the mat. “But maybe if you showed me your diamond storage…”
“Oh, right,” Bdubs says, but the grin he throws Etho’s way, as he’s dodging around the couch into what looks like a kitchen— “You’re a real comedian, sweetheart.”
There again. Sweetheart.
Bdubs had been holding his hand, before he’d woken up. Bdubs had brushed his hand through Etho’s hair, and they were living together and Bdubs was calling him sweetheart, and—and it’s been four years. Anything can happen in four years. Four years is a whole lifetime.
“Bdubs,” he says, glancing down at his left hand, half expecting to see a ring on it.
“Just a second!” Bdubs calls from the other room. “I’m getting coffee on.”
Horrible guilt fills Etho’s chest as he looks around the main room. A couple of Bdubs’s soft sweaters are strewn over the backs of the couch and the chairs. Redstone blueprints in Etho’s own scratchy handwriting lie folded on the table, next to a pair of stained mugs—a squat one for the gritty long blacks Bdubs likes to drink and a deep, bland grey one that looks just like the kind of thing Etho would choose for his own creamy coffee.
All their things, scattered amongst each other. Not just a shared base. Not even just a shared home. A shared life.
“Bdubs.” His voice sounds tight and strange coming out of him, almost unrecognisable.
Bdubs pokes his head back around the kitchen doorway, and his lips form a W to say what? but he doesn’t get there, because he must see it all on Etho’s face. “You—you didn’t—I thought maybe, but," Bdubs stammers. "You don’t remember this,” he finishes, with wild, wide eyes.
“Remember what?” Etho says, desperate for it to mean anything other than what he thinks it does. Because it can’t.
“You and me,” Bdubs says. “We’re—we’re together.”
Etho shakes his head. “No. No, I wouldn’t forget something like that. I don’t think I would forget something like that.” But everywhere he looks, the room’s shouting it at him: the clock up on the wall that Etho would’ve never bothered to hang, the cyan wall paint underneath it that Bdubs would’ve never picked out for himself; the pictures hanging up on those walls of the two of them, arms around each other, Bdubs looking at him like no one in the whole world ever has.
Four years, he thinks. You would. In four years, if he asked, you would.
“It’s okay,” Bdubs says, even though it’s clear from the look in his eye that it’s really not.
“No, I—I haven’t forgotten anything,” Etho says nonsensically. Then his hand’s twisting a doorknob and pulling it open before his brain registers that he’s somehow made it to the front door.
—
He bolts down the hill in long, stumbling strides, not even knowing where he’s headed. He hadn’t been paying attention to the layout of the server on the way over here; now he’s picked a direction, he’s got no clue where he’s going to end up.
The afternoon’s rolling on towards night quickly, gathering momentum like it’s running down the hill with him. By the time he finds a path, it’s almost pitch black out. All he can do is follow the path until it runs out in front of a cottage made entirely out of what looks, undeniably, like gingerbread.
Gingerbread. Now that—that rings a bell.
Etho knocks with the marzipan knocker, and isn’t surprised at all when Cleo answers the door. “Hello, Etho,” they say. “I have to say, I was not expecting to see you this evening.”
They usher him in over the taffy doormat to sit on a couch made of cotton candy in front of a hearth with no real fire in it, but with a sculpture of one instead, each tongue of flame made of a shard of pure, bubble-stricken sugar.
“Didn’t you already make a gingerbread house? Years ago, right?” Etho asks her.
“Years ago,” Cleo emphasises. “I thought it was about time to give the idea another go. I barely even remember what I did the first time around.” Etho can’t help but wince a short, sharp laugh at the irony of that. Cleo looks at him askance. “Are you okay? I heard about the accident.”
“I don’t remember anything since season eight,” Etho says, unable to meet their eye. “I—nothing.”
Cleo’s lips twist into a frown. She says, “oh,” like it’s all she can come up with.
“Did you know me and Bdubs are together?” Etho asks them.
They regard him with a long, assessing look. It could possibly even be classified as a Look. “I do,” she says. “Everyone does, darling.”
That awful feeling in his chest asserts itself again, like a fist gripping around his heart and lungs and squeezing. “Oh,” is all he can say, then.
Cleo’s hand drops onto his shoulder, and she gives him a squeeze. “Let me make you something, and we can have a chat.”
A chat. Etho shakes his head as Cleo moves away, unable to—to—because even now, the idea of actually talking about it—about what he is—is overwhelming.
There was a day a long time ago, when he was much, much younger, when he’d watched a couple of guys, his friends, running past him along the beach. They’d stripped their shirts and pants off and dived into the sea, and surfaced to shake the water off their bare chests. Etho had watched them, and all of a sudden he’d just known.
In the next heartbeat, he’d sworn he’d never do anything, never act on it, because it was wrong. By the time he was on Mindcrack, he’d shoved that part of himself down so deep he almost never thought about it, almost never looked at other guys.
Almost never.
He never knew if the rest of them worked it out, but Pause... Pause did.
Ten minutes of awkward, heated fumbling—Pause had laughed it off afterwards, and Etho had tried to as well, but it had felt like there was this huge sign hung over him, that would flash lights and point a big red arrow at his head, shouting to the world FAG! FAG! FAG! any time he so much as looked at Pause, let alone actually doing anything with him after that first time. Every time Pause dragged him behind a closed door to have Etho suck him off or screw him, Etho would feel for weeks after like everyone was looking at him, like they could just tell.
“You know no one cares if you’re a queer,” Pause had said, once, afterwards, when he’d been zipping his fly back up.
Etho had wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, pulled his mask back on, and sat back on his heels to stare up at him. “I’m not,” he’d said.
“Right, and I’m the Queen of Sheba,” Pause said, patting Etho’s cheek indulgently. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna tell anyone. You give too good head for me to give it up.”
Etho had rolled his eyes and shoved him back. “And I’m the—right.”
“Straight as an arrow, me. You’re just lucky there’s no ladies around, or else there’s no way I’d be so generously donating my amazing body to your cause,” Pause said. Then added, “your gay-ass cause.”
The terrible thing was that Etho totally believed it. Pause loved a handjob, loved a mouth on his cock, loved getting screwed—but he could’ve gotten any of those things from a sufficiently motivated girl with a strap-on. Pause wasn’t into Etho at all.
Anyway, Pause was wrong. There were definitely guys back then who would’ve cared.
It was a risk. It was wrong. And every time he and Pause did anything, every single time, Etho went back to his house alone thinking, stupid, I’m so stupid, I wish I never, I wish, I wish.
When did he get over that? When did he get over that enough to even think about trying anything with Bdubs?
The last thing he remembers... Last Life. That was what the game had been called, wasn't it? He remembers, vaguely, standing on grass and looking up at a frozen white wall and not being able to tell where it ended and the white sky began. He remembers Bdubs shaping their walls out of snow.
A mug of hot chocolate gets folded into his hands. “Thanks,” he tells Cleo. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me what-ever you like,” she says lightly, distracted as she juggles her own mug and a tin of gingernuts unsteadily down onto the table.
“Before me and Bdubs were—you know—did you know?” Cleo frowns at him, and he forces himself to go on, “I mean, about me. And Bdubs—but—did you know?” Man, why can’t he just talk clearly?
Cleo seems to guess what he means, though, because they sigh, and shake their head, and say, “I’m not sure. I know I used to joke about you and Bdubs a lot, because it’s you and Bdubs, but I’m not really sure. I didn’t think you liked girls, but I didn’t think you really liked anyone.”
“What about Bdubs? He always liked women.”
“Etho, I know you know what bisexuality is,” Cleo says flatly.
He winces. “Obviously I know about. Um. Bisexuals,” he says. “But—Bdubs? Really?”
Cleo rolls her eyes. “He’s your boyfriend, Etho. If you want to know about his romantic history, probably all you need to do is ask.”
Uh-huh. Not a chance. What if he’s had a long string of wonderful boyfriends that Etho just never knew about because he’d never asked? That would just prove that Etho’s a freak for being so messed up. Or maybe it’s just been girls for him, his whole life up to when he decided to go insane and pick Etho. If that’s the case, Etho doesn’t want to know either. He doesn’t want to think about Bdubs packing up one day and finding a girl to settle down with. He hasn’t earned any of the love Bdubs is apparently giving him but he still wants it jealously. He doesn’t want to think about even a sliver of it going to someone else.
“You’re not saying you didn’t know,” he pushes.
They take a sip from their mug. It’s still scalding hot if the clouds of steam rising off it are any indication, but they don’t even flinch. What was it they used to say? Perks of being undead. “Fine: yes, Etho. I knew about Bdubs.”
Etho nods, staring into the milky depths of his mug. Takes a long breath in, and breathes it out even longer. “I hate this,” he says. Looking back up at Cleo, he finds her just watching him with patient, sympathetic eyes. It’s a funny look on Cleo, like she’s making a dedicated effort with it. Gritting her teeth to wait for some kind of elaboration, maybe, though he doesn’t have a good one to give. The words don’t come easily. They never do. “I feel like I’m a wardrobe. Like someone’s yanked open the doors and started emptying all the clothes out. All the stuff I didn’t ever want anyone to see.” He laughs, because it’s a stupid thing to say, but it doesn’t sound all that convincing even to him.
Cleo finishes her cocoa and wraps her hands around his. They’re normally cold and clammy, but the mug she’d been holding has warmed them up significantly. “Believe me, darling, I get that it feels weird, me and everyone suddenly knowing everything after so, so long. Honestly, it sounds like a bit of a mindfuck. But everyone here is someone you trusted to tell.”
“Me a couple of years ago,” Etho says, and puts on a smile. “I don’t know what that guy was thinking, I tell ya.”
“I know, it’s like you love us or something.” Cleo grins.
“Mm-hm.” It sounds like a joke, but it mustn’t be, because Cleo’s right. The other hermits only know because Etho and Bdubs told them. Maybe Etho can’t put a whole lot of faith in his own decision making, but he can put all that lacking faith in Bdubs, because Bdubs would never have asked Etho to do anything he wasn’t happy to.
There’s an irony in that too, probably. Bdubs never asks for any more than he thinks Etho’s willing to give, but Etho would do just about anything if Bdubs asked him to. He’s spent the last decade waiting for Bdubs to ask, audaciously, for more of him.
Just his luck that he’d forget the moment Bdubs finally decided to start crossing some lines.
—
In the grey dawn, he wakes on the couch with Bdubs’s hand on his shoulder.
“Morning, gorgeous,” Bdubs says. He says it carefully, like Etho’s something a delicate pot he’s worried about breaking. He puts a steaming mug down on the coffee table and perches at the end of the couch near Etho’s feet. “You doing okay down here?”
Etho sits up and rubs the sleep out of his eye, and nods. “I went to Cleo’s.”
“I know,” Bdubs says. “She messaged.”
Etho kinda expected they would. “Apparently, you and me have been together for a couple of years,” he says. “She called us boyfriends.”
Bdubs hums. “It’s something like that.”
That makes Etho smile. Yeah, he can’t imagine himself or Bdubs saying boyfriend about it either. He sits up and picks up the mug to take a sip—perfect temperature for the chilly morning air. “How did it happen?” he asks. “Me and you.”
A fond smile colours Bdubs’s face. “What, how we got together?” Etho nods, and Bdubs chuffs. “It was, uh, late season nine. After Last Life, all season nine, we were hanging out together more. I don’t know, making excuses to see each other. Coming around. Then, you know, Decked Out 2—did I tell you, Tango made a sequel? But playing that, it was the happiest I’d ever seen you. Like you’d swallowed the sun, you’d come out of runs of it glowing all over. Just—so you, you know? And there was this one time, you got killed doing something stupid on a run, and you came out of the dungeon laughing about it. Not mad, just—laughing. And I saw you and I thought, that’s it. Right? That’s it.”
“What then?”
“I thought it’d be obvious,” Bdubs says, and grins. “I kissed you. Pulled you into an alcove and laid one right on you.”
Etho flushes, cheeks going hot. He’s glad his mask is covering most of his face, hiding the blush. “And did I kiss you back?”
“What—! Of course you did,” Bdubs flares. “You kidding? A catch like me kisses you and you think you’re not kissing back?”
It draws a little laugh out of Etho. “I don’t know,” he teases, and gets a light jab to the leg from Bdubs’s elbow for his effort.
“You’ll remember. Then you’ll see.” Maybe the sky outside is anaemic and grey, but who needs sunshine when Bdubs is smiling like that?
—
He’s, strictly speaking, supposed to be on bed rest, but it’s impossible to stay still when everything around him is shiny and new to him. Etho pokes around the house, looks around the greenhouse. He finds the line of redstone he’d been working on when the accident had happened; it looks exactly like any other. Nothing special about it at all.
He doesn’t stop to wonder what had happened or why he hadn’t been wearing his redstone safety gear. There’s no point in it. He’d probably just forgotten, or thought it wasn’t worth it for something so small and ordinary. Stupid mistakes.
The line isn’t hooked up to an automatic watering system like Bdubs had hypothesised he’d been working on. It’s connected to a labyrinth of wiring running all under the greenhouse where the main flower farms are set up—much more wiring than would be needed for a regular automatic farm. Once he realises that, it only takes another couple of minutes to get inside his own brain: it’s the setup for a scoreboard system. He was making a minigame down here.
“You remember what you were doing?” Bdubs asks.
Etho shrugs. He hasn’t found any plans or blueprints for this specific build, but it’s obvious. “No, but I can sort of see where I was going to go with it.”
“What, from this mess?” Bdubs says incredulously, kicking at a wool line that goes to nowhere.
“What can I say.” Etho throws him a smile. “It doesn’t look like a mess to me.”
—
Days and weeks. Bdubs tries to jog his memory. He cooks foods he thinks Etho will have an association with from the last couple of years, plays music from the minigames from last season, teaches Etho about all the plants they’re growing in the greenhouse. He tells Etho stories: Last Life, Secret Life, Past Life, how they beat the Tangler together, how Etho won Decked Out 2. None of it works. It wouldn’t—the pathways in Etho’s brain to those memories are gone, fried up and sizzled away.
It’s still nice, though, having Bdubs recounting it all, doing things for him. He feels greedy, liking it so much, especially since he can tell, without Bdubs having to say it, that Bdubs is just waiting for the memories to all come rushing back. He’s being—he’s being respectful about it, is the only way Etho can put it. Not touching Etho, certainly not trying to make a move, and letting Etho sleep on the couch.
Etho finds himself wishing he wouldn’t. He doesn’t know how to cross the line himself—the tight, liquid black guilt in his chest comes back whenever he thinks about it—so he just ends up wishing Bdubs would force the issue.
—
“I was just at the weather station,” Bdubs says, kicking the mud off his shoes as he gets back into the house one evening. “Cub says we’re gonna get snow tonight. First snow of the year.”
Etho looks up from the blueprints he’s been working on. He’s making great progress on the minigame downstairs, but there’s some snags that have been driving him crazy. He needs a break. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” Bdubs affirms. “I was thinking, I’ll make us a couple thermoses and we sit out in it.”
“You want to get us caught in a blizzard.”
“Light, fluffy snowflakes, is what Cub said,” Bdubs says blithely. “I made us a bench outside. All you gotta do is go out and sit on it, sweetheart.”
Like it always has, the word makes something warm and delicate bloom in Etho’s chest. “I think that’s something I might be capable of.”
It’s cold out, of course, but with his thick down coat on, it’s easily bearable. Sitting on the bench, Etho gazes up at the heavy, cotton candy clouds above. Perfect snow clouds. Bdubs comes to sit beside him a minute later and thunks two heavy thermoses between them on the wood.
“Is this a memory you’re trying to jog?” Etho asks him. It’s half curiosity, half—something. Anxiety, maybe.
Bdubs shakes his head. “I think if your memory’s going to get jogged by anything, it’s gonna have pretty much nothing to do with anything I’m doing on purpose.”
“What if it never comes back?
“It will.”
“It won’t, Bdubs.” Etho folds his hands in his lap. “I never got back the time I lost after the first accident I had. I don’t think this time will be any different. It’s not coming, Bdubs. I’m never going to remember. I’m never going to—” He stops. He can't make himself say any more.
Bdubs looks down at the thermoses between them, then up and out over the long shoulder of the hill where it shrugs down into the valley. There’s a campfire at the bottom of the hill, near the trees. Someone with the same idea as them, maybe. “When I was a kid,” Bdubs says, “someone told me that once you make a memory, you’re not actually remembering the real thing that happened, you’re just remembering the memory. And then the next time you remember it, you’re remembering the memory of the memory, and then the memory of the memory of the memory, and then—you get the idea.”
“Is that true?” Etho asks.
Shrugging, Bdubs shakes his head. “I don’t know. It scared me, though. I used to try not to think about any of my memories, because I didn’t want the real thing to get further away from me.”
A short laugh escapes Etho, a breath. “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”
“Let me get to my point, for goodness sakes,” Bdubs teases. “If you’d let me finish—stuff stays the same, right? Even if you forget the original memory. I don’t remember the exact first time I rode a horse, but I know I love riding. I don’t remember when I came up with my tree designs, but I still use them all the time. Maybe my memories are worse remembered than most, maybe they’re all gonna forget themselves—fly off in the wind, blow away like smoke—but I’ll still love you. I love you. That goes on and on and on.”
Etho looks at him with wide, unguarded eyes, and pulls his mask down under his chin. The night’s cool on his face. He doesn’t have the courage to do the thing he wants to, so he reaches out and takes Bdubs’s hand instead. Bdubs looks up at him, and smiles softly as the air around them turns to glitter with falling snow.
—
Upstairs in the house, Etho climbs into their bed and cracks open the window. The snow hadn’t lasted long, and already the clouds have passed, leaving a wide open sky in their wake. The stars are like pinpricks of bright light shining through a blanket of heavy velvet. A lazy strumming of guitar strings rolls through the dark, and Ren’s voice with it, singing a song Etho doesn’t recognise. He looks down the hill and sees the campfire at the foot of the valley in the middle of a circle of trees, its golden light cast on Ren with False next to him, drowsing with her head on his shoulder.
Etho rests his chin on his arms and watches them for a moment longer. “Did those two get together yet?” Behind him, Bdubs breathes a laugh, and Etho turns to catch him grinning. “What?”
“Nothing.” Bdubs’s eyes are dark and warm, and they make Etho’s heart start doing somersaults when they settle on him. “Only, you said that same thing just a few weeks ago.”
“What did you say then?”
Another smile spreads across Bdubs’s face. “No,” he says. “I don’t think they did get together yet.”
He turns off the light and climbs into bed, leaving only the platinum starlight to illuminate the room. Etho half expects Bdubs to lean over and kiss him, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t touch Etho at all, except for where his leg brushes against Etho’s foot under the thick blanket.
“Leave the window open,” Bdubs says, voice already sleepy. He tucks one arm under his pillow and pulls the covers up over himself. “The air’s nice.”
“It’ll get cold,” Etho tells him.
“Then we’ll close it when it does,” Bdubs murmurs. His soft hair falls across his forehead over his half-closed eyes.
Etho slides down to lie under the covers himself and inches towards the warmth on the other side of the bed. What he wants feels so big, so terrifying, that he doesn’t know how to ask for it even if it’s right here in front of him. “Bdubs,” he says, and nudges Bdubs’s leg with his own.
Bdubs regards him softly, and his lips curl up a little bit. “Yeah?” he asks.
Etho shifts an inch closer, and nods against his pillow.
It’s such a good thing Bdubs can read his mind. Without any more prompting, and without any fuss at all, Bdubs’s arm curls around Etho’s waist and hauls him close, and he tangles their legs together. Bdubs is toasty warm and solid and he sighs with summery contentment.
“Happy?” he asks.
Etho nods again. “Yeah.”
Etho feels doused in affection, completely soaked by it, more than he’s ever felt before. The air’s cool, but Bdubs doesn’t let him feel cold. The distant strums of Ren’s guitar keep drifting in through the window. Even after the last notes fade into the night, the song stays in Etho’s head as he falls into sleep. In his dreams, he doesn’t remember the words, but the tune’s there all the same.