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The first thing Derek Hutchins did when he could finally look away from the screen was cry.
Not dramatically , not the heaving, chest-splitting kind of crying that the situation probably warranted. Just quiet tears, the kind that come when your body realizes it's been holding its breath for so long it forgot what breathing felt like. He sat on the edge of a hospital bed in a room that smelled like antiseptic and bad coffee, and he let the tears fall without wiping them away, because both of his hands were shaking too hard to be useful anyway.
The doctors called it "acute dissociative episode complicated by extreme sleep deprivation and malnutrition." They said it with the confident, clipped tone of people who had seen strange things before and learned to file them under familiar labels. Derek didn't correct them. He didn't say actually, I got trapped in a digital realm by an eldritch entity who flooded my mind with the sum total of all universal knowledge and then used my deteriorating consciousness as a prison. He just nodded and drank the terrible coffee and answered their questions in a voice that still didn't quite sound like his own.
He had been in that world for what felt like weeks. His phone said it had been eleven days since anyone had heard from him.
The smoothies in the fridge had run out on day six. He didn't remember days seven through nine at all.
He was alive, though. That was the part that kept surprising him, the way a word stops making sense if you repeat it too many times. Alive, alive, alive. He kept checking , pressing two fingers to his wrist, feeling the pulse there, undeniable and rhythmic. Still here. Still real.
The King was gone.
That was the other thing. Derek couldn't feel it anymore, that crushing weight of infinite knowledge pressing against the inside of his skull like the universe was trying to fit itself into a walnut shell. The doctors said this was a good sign. Derek thought that was the understatement of the century, possibly of all centuries, including the ones he had briefly and terribly known about in perfect detail.
What remained was something gentler. Like the memory of a dream that's already fading , he knew it had been vast, and important, and horrible, but the specifics were blurring at the edges. He was grateful for that. He was more grateful for that than he had words to say.
His phone had forty-seven unread messages when the nurses finally gave it back to him.
Forty-six of them were from his mother, escalating in tone from hey just checking in to DEREK HUTCHINS YOU CALL ME RIGHT NOW to several that were just strings of punctuation that conveyed maternal panic without the need for actual language.
The forty-seventh was from a number he didn't have saved.
hey. it's avery. they said you were awake. i'm in the waiting room if that's okay. you don't have to see me if you don't want to. i just. i wanted to make sure you were okay. i owe you that much. actually i owe you basically everything but. yeah.
Derek stared at the message for a long time.
Then he texted back: room 214.
Avery was shorter than Derek had expected.
This was a completely irrational thought , Derek had never seen Avery in real life before, had only ever known him as a voice and a slime skin and a YouTube channel, so he had no basis for any expectation of height whatsoever , but when the door opened and Avery stepped in, the first thing Derek's brain offered was oh, he's shorter than I thought.
The second thing his brain offered was that Avery looked like he hadn't slept in eleven days either.
He was wearing a sunflower on his hoodie, a small embroidered one near the left chest pocket. His eyes were red-rimmed and a little too bright, and he was gripping a vending machine coffee cup with both hands like it was the only solid thing in the room.
They looked at each other.
"Hey," Avery said.
"Hey," Derek said.
A pause.
"You look terrible," Avery said.
"You also look terrible," Derek said.
Avery laughed , short and surprised, like he hadn't expected to laugh, and then he covered his mouth with the back of his hand and the laugh turned into something that was maybe also a little bit crying, and he crossed the room in three steps and hugged Derek so hard that the coffee sloshed dangerously in its cup.
Derek's arms came up automatically. He held on.
"I thought," Avery started, voice muffled against Derek's shoulder. "When the footage cut out, I thought-”
"I know."
"I wasn't going to leave, you know. I want you to know that. I know you pushed me out, but I wasn't going to-”
"I know, Avery."
"I'm really mad at you," Avery said, which was undermined somewhat by the fact that he was still hugging Derek and showing no signs of stopping.
"I know that too," Derek said, and tightened his arms.
They stayed like that for a while, in the antiseptic-smelling hospital room, while Derek's monitors beeped steadily and the universe continued turning on its axis, completely indifferent to the fact that the two of them had spent eleven days trying very hard to save it.
Derek was discharged three days later, which the doctors said was faster than expected given everything, and which Derek privately attributed to the fact that he had absorbed enough cosmic knowledge to understand the general mechanics of human cellular recovery, even if he'd lost most of the specifics. The body remembered what the mind forgot.
He had no idea where to go. His apartment felt strange and distant, like a place he'd read about in a book once. His laptop , that laptop, the one that had started everything , had been confiscated by what two very serious people in grey blazers had described as "a government agency with an interest in unusual digital phenomena," and which Derek was approximately 94% sure was the DMS.
He didn't fight them on it. The laptop could go. He had a feeling he was done with Minecraft for a while.
Avery offered his couch without being asked.
"You don't have to," Derek said.
"I know," Avery said. "I want to. Also, you literally saved the world and your brain is still recovering from being used as an eldritch prison, so I think you should probably not be alone for a bit."
Derek opened his mouth.
"Don't argue with me," Avery said. "I looked up the King in Yellow on the way here and I read three separate academic papers about the psychological effects of forbidden knowledge and I'm not letting you be alone in an apartment."
"You read academic papers," Derek said.
"I can read," Avery said, with great dignity. "I'm a YouTuber, not an illiterate."
Derek smiled. It felt unfamiliar, like a muscle he hadn't used in a while. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Thank you."
Avery's apartment was small and aggressively lived-in, the kind of space that said a person actually exists here in the way that Derek's own apartment had never quite managed. There were plants on the windowsill , real ones, with dirt and everything, not plastic. There was a stack of books on the coffee table next to a half-finished mug of something that had gone cold. There was a sunflower magnet on the fridge holding up a takeout menu and what appeared to be a very bad crayon drawing of a slime wearing sunglasses, which Derek stared at for a moment.
"My little cousin made that," Avery said, without looking up from where he was clearing space on the couch.
"It's good," Derek said.
"It really isn't, but thank you."
The couch was comfortable and the blanket Avery threw at him smelled like laundry detergent and something warm that Derek couldn't name but that made the tight thing in his chest loosen slightly. He lay there that first night staring at the ceiling of someone else's apartment and listened to Avery's soft, even breathing from the bedroom and thought: I'm alive. I'm really alive. I'm in someone's living room and the universe is enormous and mostly unknowable and I am alive.
He fell asleep before he finished the thought, and he did not dream at all, and when he woke up there was sunlight coming through the curtains and Avery was in the kitchen making eggs and the radio was playing something forgettable and good.
Recovery, it turned out, was mostly boring. This surprised Derek more than it probably should have.
He had expected it to be dramatic , flashbacks, maybe, or fits of staring at walls, or the persistent sensation of cosmic weight pressing down behind his eyes. And there was some of that, in the first week. Moments where he would go very still and Avery would look at him carefully and ask hey, you back? and Derek would blink and say yeah, sorry. The knowledge was fading but it faded unevenly, like paint peeling from a wall , mostly gone but with stubborn patches that took longer to loosen.
But mostly recovery was: eating breakfast, going for walks, watching television with Avery on the couch and arguing mildly about which shows were good (Avery's taste was eclectic and aggressively defended; Derek had not watched enough television in recent years to have developed taste at all, which Avery treated as a personal project).
It was normal. Aggressively, beautifully, small-ly normal.
On the ninth day of Derek's residency on Avery's couch, Avery came home from a grocery run looking slightly guilty.
"I bought a new laptop," he said.
Derek looked at him.
"For me," Avery said quickly. "Obviously for me. My old one was already kind of dying before all this. And I thought maybe , not Minecraft, obviously, you don't have to go near Minecraft ever again if you don't want to, I will personally delete the entire game from existence , but I thought maybe I would stream again eventually and I need a laptop that can-”
"Avery."
“-handle the recording software because my old one kept-”
"Avery."
“-overheating and-”
"I want to play Minecraft," Derek said.
Avery stopped. "What?"
"I want to play Minecraft," Derek repeated. "Regular Minecraft. Not , not that world, not anything to do with any of that. Just. Minecraft." He paused. "I liked it, before. I was good at it."
Avery stared at him for a moment. "You were incredibly good at it," he said, with a kind of reverence. "You solved a cipher stack with a pen and paper."
"In seventeen minutes," Derek agreed.
"Which is insane, by the way."
"I know."
Avery set the laptop bag down on the counter. He was quiet for a moment, and Derek watched something move across his face , something careful and soft and considering.
"Okay," Avery said finally. "Okay. But if we're playing Minecraft, I'm teaching you Skywars."
The thing about Derek Hutchins was that he was, objectively, one of the most competent people Avery had ever encountered. He had watched the footage. He had seen the cipher, the trap with the hopper and the grass block, the mountain puzzle, the impossible logic of surviving in a realm governed by rules designed to break you. Derek thought sideways and diagonally and in dimensions that most people didn't have access to. He was, as Avery had said to his recording camera approximately fourteen separate times, the smartest protagonist he had ever seen.
Derek Hutchins was absolutely catastrophic at Skywars.
"You're walking off the edge," Avery said.
"I know," Derek said, falling for the third time.
"You can see the edge. It's right there."
"I can see it, yes."
"So why are you walking off it?"
"I'm trying to bridge to the middle island," Derek said, with the dignity of someone who was not currently respawning for the fourth time in six minutes.
"You don't have enough blocks to bridge to the middle island from that angle."
"I had calculated that I did."
"You had miscalculated," Avery said, in a voice of great gentleness.
Derek made a noise that might have been a word in a language Avery didn't speak. On screen, his slime skin , Avery had helped him pick it, had not said anything about the fact that Derek had chosen a skin that wasn't entirely dissimilar to Avery's own, though he had perhaps smiled at his laptop screen for a moment before remembering to keep his expression neutral , respawned on the starting island with four wooden planks and a leather chestpiece.
"Okay," Avery said, leaning over so his shoulder pressed against Derek's, which was completely incidental and had nothing to do with anything. "Here's what you're going to do. You see the player on the island to your left?"
"Yes."
"Don't go there."
"Why?"
"They have diamond armor."
Derek squinted at the screen. "How can you tell from here?"
"Experience," Avery said. "Years and years of getting diamond-armored people. It lives in my bones now. You see the island to your right?"
"The one with the-”
"Leather chestpiece, yeah. That's your target. Bridge there first, grab whatever they have, then we work our way to the middle."
"That seems unethical," Derek said.
Avery turned to look at him. "Derek. It's Skywars."
"Still."
"It is literally a game about throwing people off floating islands into a bottomless void."
"I know what Skywars is."
"Do you? Because it doesn't seem like-”
Derek had already started bridging toward the leather-chestpiece player with an expression of deep philosophical discomfort. Avery bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
"See, now you're doing it," he said. "A little faster, though, or they'll-”
The leather-chestpiece player knocked Derek off the bridge.
Derek fell in silence, which somehow made it funnier than if he'd made any sound at all.
"Okay," Avery said. "So. We'll work on bridging speed."
They played for three hours.
Derek died forty-one times, which Avery privately thought was actually a reasonable number for a first session and also for someone whose spatial reasoning had been temporarily scrambled by eldritch forces. Derek did not seem to agree. He had that particular expression he got when something wasn't working the way his brain said it should , a slight furrow between his brows, his mouth pressed into a considering line , and Avery had learned in the past two weeks that this expression meant Derek was about thirty seconds away from approaching the problem from a completely different angle.
"What if," Derek said, on the forty-second respawn, "instead of trying to reach other players, I build up?"
"Build up?"
"Vertically. To get the high ground."
Avery considered this. "That's... actually a legitimate strategy. It's not the fastest, but-”
"I'm not fast," Derek said. "I know I'm not fast. But I'm patient." A pause. "And I had a very vivid lesson recently about the strategic value of being in an elevated position."
Avery thought about the mountains. The disappearing mountains and the rule Derek had decoded and the way he'd used it to outmaneuver something ancient and incomprehensible using nothing but Minecraft logic and stubbornness.
"Yeah," Avery said softly. "Okay. Try it."
Derek built up.
He died twice more , once because he ran out of blocks and once because a player with a knockback sword sent him spiraling into the void in a way that was almost artistic , but on the third attempt, something clicked. Avery watched Derek's methodical, patient construction and felt something warm settle in his chest. The high ground changed the whole picture. Derek started picking off players from above, slowly, carefully, with the kind of precise unhurried confidence of someone who had once identified a hidden shulker box by noticing that a zombie wasn't burning the way physics said it should.
The final circle came down to Derek and one other player.
"Okay," Avery said, sitting up straighter. "Okay, you got this. You've got the high ground, they're on the bridge below you-”
"I see them."
"Don't rush it, just-”
"Avery."
"Sorry, sorry. You've got it."
Derek got it.
It wasn't graceful. It involved Derek accidentally breaking his own bridge and nearly falling, and then recovering by placing a block one frame before the void claimed him, and then delivering a finishing blow that Avery was fairly sure Derek had aimed approximately thirty degrees to the left of where it landed and gotten lucky. But the victory screen appeared, and Derek's slime skin stood in the center of the explosion of fireworks and confetti, and Avery let out a noise that was embarrassingly loud for a living room.
"Let's just say," Derek said, slowly, reading something on his screen with the air of someone tasting a new food and finding it acceptable, "that they got mayo'd."
There was a pause.
"Did you just," Avery started.
"I've been watching your channel," Derek said. His ears had gone slightly pink. "For context."
"You've been watching my channel."
"You're entertaining."
Avery put his hands over his face. He was smiling so hard it hurt. "You can't just say that," he said, muffled by his palms.
"Say what? It's true."
"You can't just say that's what you've been doing."
"I've been recovering," Derek said. "I had time. Also your Skywars content is genuinely-”
"Stop," Avery said, which was absolutely not what he meant. He lowered his hands. Derek was looking at him with that careful, sideways attention that meant he was reading more than just the surface of the situation, and Avery had the sudden, distinct impression of being accurately mapped.
"You're good at this," Derek said, quieter now, and he didn't seem to be talking about Skywars anymore. "At making things feel normal. I don't think you know how much that's helped."
The apartment was quiet. Outside, the sun was doing something golden and particular to the light that came through the curtains, and somewhere down the street there was the distant sound of kids playing, and the universe was enormous and mostly unknowable and for once, right now, it felt manageable.
"I had good motivation," Avery said.
Derek looked at him. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." Avery's heart was doing something complicated and inadvisable. He had read forty-seven academic papers (slight exaggeration; it had been three) in the past two weeks, and none of them had prepared him for this, for Derek's ears still slightly pink and his eyes carrying something that was mostly back to being just Derek and not the hollow, distant weight that had been there when Avery first walked into room 214. "I um. I'm really glad you're alive, is the thing."
"I'm glad I'm alive too," Derek said. "Genuinely. First time in a while I've been able to say that and mean it simply."
Avery nodded. He was going to say something sensible and appropriate, something that fit the moment without making it awkward. He had a whole set of words lined up.
What he said instead was: "Can I, is it weird if I-”
"No," Derek said, which was either mind-reading or just very good pattern recognition.
"You don't even know what I was going to ask."
"I know enough," Derek said, and then, with the same precise and patient confidence he had used to win his first Skywars game, he leaned over and closed the distance between them.
It was a small thing, a quiet thing. The kind of thing that had been building for two weeks of shared breakfasts and television arguments and hands passing each other mugs of coffee, and it settled into place with the soft inevitability of a piece you didn't know was missing until the puzzle suddenly made sense.
When they pulled back, Avery's laptop was still open to the post-game Skywars screen, Derek's slime skin standing in confetti. Derek was very close. His eyes, when he looked at Avery, were clear.
"For the record," Avery said, a little breathlessly, "you still have a lot to learn about bridging speed."
"I know," Derek said. "Fortunately I have a good teacher."
"The best," Avery agreed.
"Modest."
"Accurate." Avery grabbed his laptop and settled it between them, pulling up a new lobby. "Okay. Again. And this time, I want you to try rushing the center island."
"That seems statistically inadvisable."
"Derek."
"The probability of encountering a more well-equipped opponent at the center island is-”
"Derek."
“-significantly higher than the probability of-”
"If you cite statistics at me one more time I'm making you play on a PVP server."
Derek looked at the screen. He looked at Avery. There was something in his expression that was warm and wry and so specifically him that Avery felt it like a point of gravity, like a thing to orient by.
"Fine," Derek said. "Center island."
He lasted until the third bridge.
Avery laughed for approximately forty-five seconds straight, and Derek watched him laugh with the expression of someone cataloguing a very important piece of data, filing it carefully away somewhere it would not be forgotten.
Outside, the sun finished going golden and started going orange, and neither of them noticed for a long time.
Later, when the Skywars session had dissolved into Avery explaining knockback mechanics using increasingly elaborate hand gestures and Derek countering every point with precise logic that was theoretically correct and practically useless and both of them had given up on actually playing in favor of just talking, Avery said:
"Do you think you'll ever make a video? About all of it?"
Derek was quiet for a moment. "I don't know," he said. "I'm not a YouTuber."
"You could be."
"I solved a cipher on camera. That's not exactly content."
"It's incredibly content," Avery said. "I watched you solve that cipher. Do you know how many people are in the comments of that video asking if you're okay?"
Derek blinked. "People left comments?"
"Thousands of people left comments." Avery nudged his shoulder. "You have fans, Derek. You went through something impossible and you kept going and you found your way out. People want to know you're alright."
Derek considered this for a long moment. "Are you going to post the footage?" he asked.
"Only if you're okay with it. The whole thing. From weird book to behind the gates to-”
"To me crying in a hospital bed?"
"You weren't on camera for that part."
"Small mercies." Derek looked at the ceiling. "Yes," he said, finally. "Post it. He deserves to have his story told." He paused. "I deserve to have my story told, I suppose."
"You do," Avery said quietly. "You really do."
"And , maybe." Derek looked at him sideways. "Maybe. I could. Be in a video sometime."
"Yeah?"
"If there was a co-host situation available."
Avery felt the smile start somewhere around his sternum. "I might be able to arrange something," he said.
"Skywars tutorial, maybe," Derek said, with an expression of complete innocence. "Since I'm learning."
"From the ground up," Avery agreed. "We'll call it-”
"A Lord Learns Skywars," Derek said, at the exact same moment Avery said "From the King's Domain to the Void," and they both stopped, and then Avery started laughing again, and Derek's mouth curved, and outside the last of the sunlight finally finished what it was doing and left them in the soft, ordinary dark of a Tuesday evening.
The universe was enormous and full of things that shouldn't exist.
Right now, in this particular small corner of it, that felt fine.
Later, on a YouTube channel that had recently updated its about page to include a second co-host, a comment would read: "wait are they dating" with 47,000 likes and a reply from AveryTheMayo that simply said "he still can't bridge to save his life (literally)" and a reply to that from an account called D3rLord3Returns that said "i outsmarted an eldritch god with minecraft logic, i think i can figure out bridging" and a reply to THAT from AveryTheMayo that said "you've died 200 times this week" and a reply to THAT from D3rLord3Returns that said "statistically that's an improvement" and the thread went on for another 847 replies and was, by general consensus, the best comment section on the internet.