Chapter Text
After almost a year of wishing for a break from all the violence that being with Wemmbu all the time entails, Egg finally received it in the form of Minute’s End base. It’s all he’s ever wished for– his own little bubble, away from the fighting and noise of the overworld, stuffed to the brim with bookshelves and a seemingly endless supply of paper and quills.
Logic dictates that Egg should be the happiest he’s ever felt in his entire life. He definitely isn’t complaining– in all his time on Unstable, he’s never been as safe to do what he wants as now.
Where he previously used to sleep with a knife under his pillow, never too deeply for fear of an enemy sneaking up on him, and in shifts so he and Wemmbu could watch each others’ backs, now he can snooze entire days away without fear of being jumped in his sleep.
All the essay plans that were mere pipe dreams before have now been carefully inscribed into organised volumes and meticulously stored away, categorised by subject into his personal filing system.
(Well, as carefully as his hands can manage– even though it’s been months since he was kidnapped, his hands still shake near-constantly. Some days, the tremor is almost imperceptible, but other days it jars his handwriting into gibberish that looks like an entirely different language.)
He hasn’t needed to pick up a weapon in weeks; the most physical strain he experiences consists of going on walks or helping out the occasional visitor.
Logic does not, however, account for the irrational nature of human emotion.
It’s not that he dislikes the End base, per se, but…
To be completely honest, he just kind of misses Wemmbu. Down in the End, weeks can pass without a word from him, and he can’t even rely on the flow of server-wide rumours to keep him informed anymore after his “death”. The invisible knight persona isn’t nearly as notorious as Wemmbu was, so nobody really cares to gossip about him. Just a status update is rare, entire conversations even rarer.
Egg wants to believe in his friend’s abilities, he really does, but unease creeps into his stomach whenever he thinks about Wemmbu, alone and without any real allies in the overworld.
Fighting as a solo player is troubling for even the strongest players, and he knows how impatient and irritable Wemmbu can be; while Egg wasn’t exactly the best at pvp, he could at least watch his back, healing him in the middle of fights or providing some semblance of backup with his subpar bow skills.
At least, when he was by his side, he could reassure himself that Wemmbu was still alive.
It has been 23 days since he last heard from Wemmbu.
Yes, Egg’s been counting the days. Yes, he’s been checking his communicator every hour and sending his own messages every day. Yes, he’s this close to going back through the portal to the Farlands and journeying back to find Wemmbu himself.
The spiral is all too familiar. Despite how often this occurs, it never gets easier, because how could it?
One wrong move, one wrong person that Wemmbu makes his enemy, is all it would take for Egg to become truly alone in this server.
He’s startled out of his near-obsessive rumination by a knock on his door.
Egg blinks at the notebook before him. The quill in his hand has long since dried out, delicate barbs strangled by his rapidly tightening grip. He doesn’t even remember what he’d been writing.
There is a second round of knocking, more insistent this time.
Minute said he’d be out for the next few hours, something about accompanying a player to one of the End Islands, so unless he’d made a sudden u-turn, this is someone else. A lost visitor, probably–
“Hello?”
–or the very person who’s been slowly driving him mad for the past three weeks.
Irritation flashes through his chest like a matchbox spark. So does relief, but he pushes it aside as he storms towards the door. Weeks of being fully ignored, of Egg anxiously awaiting news like a pet wolf waiting for scraps of food, and Wemmbu just, what, decides it’s time to start acknowledging his existence again?
Egg’s knuckles are white against the handle as he opens the door, but his anger falters when he takes in the sight in front of him.
Wemmbu looks like absolute hell– what’s left of his armour is webbed with cracks, holes, and scorch marks; his boots are entirely absent, and his right ankle is twisted to a completely incorrect angle. Blood trickles down his face into his eyes, which are glazed over as if he’s been drugged. He’s blinking slowly, one eyelid at a time, like a frog.
His hand grips the doorframe as if it’s the only thing holding him up, and even then, he’s still swaying. Egg realises with a start that he isn’t even invisible– what had happened?.
“Egg–”
And then his grip goes slack, eyes rolling back into his skull as he collapses on the spot.
Egg lunges forward, barely stopping him from face-planting into the ground. They land in a heap on the wooden floor, Wemmbu completely limp in his arms.
He presses his fingers against Wemmbu’s neck to check for a pulse, but his hands are shaking so badly he can’t feel anything through them. Because now’s the perfect time for old scars to start acting up again.
No matter. Egg shifts their position, laying Wemmbu flat against the ground as he presses his head against the diamond chestplate. For a moment, it’s terrifyingly still, until he hears it– thready, slightly too slow, but it’s a heartbeat.
So he’s still alive, at least for now. Egg rushes into action, shuddering fingers scrabbling over armour straps and buckles. The chestplate is removed first, then the leggings, and finally the helmet, each piece revealing more wounds beneath.
Wemmbu’s communicator, covered in bloodstains and crushed into an almost unrecognisable clump of wires and metal, tumbles onto the ground when his leggings are removed.
For a second, Egg is frozen. There is so much happening at once, so many places he needs to tend to, that he doesn’t know where to start.
Which one should he try to fix first, the gash in Wemmbu’s thigh, or the millions of cuts scattered across his entire body, or the burn marks that blister across his torso like the worst tattoo of all time, or the mangled right ankle, or the ribs that are most definitely cracked, if not broken, or the spot on his head where blood is still leaking like a broken tap? Every time Egg blinks, ten more injuries seem to spawn in from thin air.
Blood rushes to Egg’s head in sharp bursts; the tremors have spread from his hands to his entire upper body. In the faint yellow lighting of the room, Wemmbu looks almost dead, the amalgamation of countless nightmares brought to life, tangible under his own two jittery hands.
He isn’t, but he will be, unless Egg gets his act together right now.
He breathes in, holds for five, lets it out. He allows himself two more breaths before springing to action.
The medicine cabinet is four or five rooms down, further than he’d like, but he’s there and back in a heartbeat. With him, Egg carries everything he could think of– a healing potion, golden apples, two different first aid kits, and a roll of gauze thicker than his own bicep.
Skidding to a stop besides Wemmbu, Egg tries to remember what the correct course of action is. There’s only one half-empty bottle of healing potion left – for some reason, Minute’s been running incredibly low on melons – so he should use it on the most life-threatening injury.
In the back of his mind, he vaguely recalls someone – Manepear, perhaps – lecturing him about the potential fatality of head trauma. One good hit to an unguarded skull and you could be disabled for life, or just straight up dead.
(Luckily, the wisdom Mane imparted upon him and Wemmbu had extended beyond fighting. Although he’d given up on Egg’s pvp abilities almost immediately, Mane had still decided that he could be useful for something. And so, Egg had received a free crash course on first-aid.)
Egg fumbles through violet hair until he finds the wound, a sizable dent that’s still slowly oozing blood. He removes the bottle cork with a pop and pours the neon pink contents directly onto the spot, watching as torn skin begins to reconnect itself together. It leaves a tiny bald spot, something he can tease Wemmbu about after he’s recovered.
One down.
He feels himself begin to unwind as he strategically works through the various injuries, one after the other. Wemmbu’s shirt, already shredded to pieces by some previous foe, is now fully cut apart to allow for better access to his wounds.
Burn salve goes over the blisters, stitches – definitely not the best Egg’s ever done, but with how shaky his hands are, he’s surprised he’d even managed to thread the needle in the first place – go into the seemingly hundreds of cuts. Gauze goes over, well, everything.
When he’s almost done, Egg leans back to survey his work. Bandages cover almost every square centimetre, lavender skin now almost fully obstructed from view. Wemmbu looks ridiculous, like some sort of Halloween mummy costume. It’s almost enough to make him laugh.
The last thing left is the ankle. Egg scoots around to a better spot, bandages ready to go on the side. He unbuckles Wemmbu’s shoe before pulling off his sock; without anything covering it, the sight is almost nauseating– the ankle has swollen to almost double the size of the uninjured one, his whole right foot mottled black and deep indigo.
Egg reaches down and takes a breath, before re-orienting the foot with a sickening snap.
Wemmbu startles awake, gasping in pain. He tries to sit up but Egg holds him down by the shoulders, preventing him from tearing his stitches or further jarring his fractured ribs. Wine-purple eyes, wide in terror, flicker across the room before they settle on him.
He blinks at Egg – once, twice – before his expression rapidly fades from pure panic into something raw and trusting. For a few moments, the two just look at each other; Egg, trying to school his face back to its usual nonchalance, and Wemmbu, eyes glazed over in pain as he struggles to make his vision focus. His blinking turns sluggish, each one longer than the last, until he passes out a second time.
“...Wemmbu? You awake?”
No response. Egg sighs.
It’s way too risky to move Wemmbu in his current condition– it would probably pop, like, fifty stitches at once. Instead, Egg heads to his bedroom, bringing back a spare blanket from the cabinet and a few pillows from his own bed. The book room’s carpet is thick enough, and it’s not like the two of them haven’t slept on rockier, more uneven flooring.
He does his best to make the impromptu floor-bed as comfortable as possible. He props Wemmbu’s head up on two pillows at once, just the way he likes it, drapes the blanket over him gently.
Wemmbu looks downright cozy, like this. Egg wonders what Flame or the Law would say if they saw him in this state, swaddled up like a little kid. He can’t resist the urge to take a few screenshots.
“Goodnight, bro,” Egg whispers.