Chapter Text
Wemmbu POV
Wemmbu freezes. What the fuck?
Well yeah, the memory of this fight was definitely not right, because Flame definitely never fell on his sword in the middle of it. He’s frozen where he stands, watching Flame bleed out on the ground in front of him. The blood looks so real. And there’s a lot of it. It’s pouring out of Flame’s stomach onto the ground; everywhere it touches, the scenery starts glitching and sizzling into black smoke.
“No, yeah,” he chokes out at Wemmbu. “Take your time with the heals. Not like I’m bleeding out or anything, bro.”
Wemmbu silently holds Gambit out to him where he’s collapsed on the ground, not touching him and also not bothering to activate the mace’s healing ability. If this was really Flame, he should be able to reach out and activate it himself with a single touch.
Sure enough, he lays a hand over the metal and is suddenly washed in blinding light, gasping as the healing effect floods through him. He takes his other hand off of the wound to show Wemmbu that it is in fact remedied.
Wemmbu drops the mace and falls to his knees as well, putting them face to face. “Oh my god,” he rushes, reaching out for him. “You’re real, you’re actually real. Bro, we are in my brain right now. What are you even doing here?”
Flame sits up from his near-death and says, “I followed it bro, the entity, I felt it come here. The little wind-breeze thing, you know?”
Wemmbu just shakes his head no and frowns. “Dude, I have no idea what you’re talking about. There is no wind. I’ve been stuck in my memories, it’s using our memories against us.”
“Yeah yeah, I figured that out too. You really can’t follow it though?”
He shakes his head again. “Why would it bring you here? Why risk putting us together again?”
Flame shrugs. “I think it’s probably injured. I got a hit off on it earlier. Probably easier to make us fight each other than fight both of us individually at the same time. We need to keep going after it though.”
Flame POV
Flame watches the helpless, confused look in Wemmbu’s eyes and sighs internally. The best way to do this would be to fight with their eyes closed and go only off of what they can feel, hear, and smell, but Wemmbu has no idea how to fight like that. The next best thing would be to blindfold him, slightly reducing his vision. Giving up his blindfold would suck, but Flame would rather fight handicapped with Wemmbu at his side than at full strength on his own.
He really is just full of awful ideas today. He grabs Wemmbu’s hand and asks, “Do you trust me?”
Wemmbu just gives him an irritated look that says, yes, obviously, are you serious?
Flame closes his eyes and—with a deep breath—reaches his hands back to undo the knot of his blindfold. The fabric falls off his face, and he lifts it to cover Wemmbu’s eyes and ties it around the back of his head. Throughout the entire exchange, Wemmbu is dead silent. Once the knot is secure, Flame lets his fingers fall, trailing lovingly over the long braid down Wemmbu’s back.
“This will help. You need to focus less on what you see, and more on like, everything else you can feel. It can make visual illusions really well, but everything else is kinda scuffed.”
They’re silent for another moment before Wemmbu laughs and says, “Yeah, yeah, sorry, I just nodded and then realized you can’t see me bro. But like yes, I get it.”
Flame laughs as well and links their hands together again. “Okay bro, let’s do this.”
Wemmbu POV
He honestly still has no idea how Flame is tracking this thing, so Wemmbu just follows him through his own brain blindly. Flame follows the entity, and Wemmbu follows Flame; which is easy, because his presence in Wemmbu’s mind is like a raging inferno, impossible to ignore or lose track of.
Just as it did before, the entity hides amongst the memories he has buried deep, the things that hurt, the things he doesn’t want to see.
Even blindfolded, Wemmbu can still clearly sense each and every memory they land through. The burning of ManePear’s tree. Eggchan sacrificing himself, falling through the portal and getting trapped in the End. A small, dark obsidian box, sunken deep underground as if to bury him alive.
Guilty. Helpless. Trapped.
But through every single one, Flame is there with him, radiating heat and screaming taunts at the entity, demanding it come out and fight. Wemmbu shared an identical sentiment, extremely tired of the mind games and tricks, wishing they could just have a real fight and end this.
As soon as that wish crosses through his mind, the memory-landscape shifts around them, forming into a traditional battle arena.
Flame turns to him, shocked. “How did you do that?”
“I don’t know! I was just like, wishing we could have an actual fight, and it just happened.”
They stand together on one side of the arena, and the familiar foggy black smoke of the entity swirls around on the other, condensing into the form of a player. It has a netherite axe in one hand, and a speed pot in the other. Wemmbu intuitively knows it’s speed II without a doubt. There’s only one player who could hope to equal himself and Flame at the same time, and he always fought with speed II.
Gambit and Fragger materialize in their hands as the entity’s false projection of ManePear stalks towards them.
Flame laughs nervously. “Uh, any strategy going into this?”
Wemmbu grins back. “Yeah. Win, bro.”