Chapter Text
Thirty seven minutes after midnight on New Years Day and seven seconds after being knocked into the void, Avery stares speechless at his screen. Nerveless fingers twitch over unresponsive keys. “You Died!” Spouts cheerfully up at him, but his frantic clicks on the respawn button bear no fruit. One minute and four seconds after death and fifteen hours after he started recording, Avery slumps over, dead to the world. No one comes to check on him.
He wakes to bright afternoon sunlight and an unresponsive laptop. He scrabbles at the power button for a useless moment before he plugs it in and then is forced to wait for it to charge. He doesn’t want to get up from his chair and leave his laptop alone, but his stomach complains of neglect and his mouth is dry as dust.
His head hurts in a familiar way, a gentle ache he had been well acquainted with when he used to pull all-nighters with his school friends so many years ago. They’re all gone now, pulled in every direction by life. The thought hurts in an old way. Avery hasn’t had friends to play with in a long, long time.
By the time he is sure the laptop is charged, Avery stares at it like a snake waiting to strike. Those last words from d3rLord3, from Derek, had sounded bleakly final. It’s over with, isn’t it? All done. Avery wants find Derek again, to demand answers- were the doors just a red herring? Did all that time he spent snagging materials to close every one he could find cost him the precious minutes he and Derek could have used to find a better way? Wasn’t there something someone, anyone could have done? He made it past that crimson wasteland. He’d broken through the netherite door. Surely…surely there had been another way out. But both that awful yellow eye- speaking words in Minecraft- and Derek had been very certain. And if Derek succeeded, then there is no longer any way to ask either.
Avery thinks about making a recording, of trying to reach out to others on the internet again. He wants desperately to ask for advice. Derek had seemed so incredibly smart and maybe there were other smart people who could help him…what, find Derek somehow. But Avery is alone, sitting at his discount cheap desk and scavenged laptop, with nothing to offer but his own failure. Just thinking about trying to explain how badly he failed Derek hurts like a knife to the chest. Avery closes the laptop and doesn’t touch it again.
The event haunts his steps for the next few days. Avery finds himself rambling, narrating to no one, to one who is probably dead. He finds himself missing some of his favorite YouTubers, then quails at the thought of opening his laptop. He used to hop on Hypixel every evening, and finds himself spinning out without anything to fill the time. He tries to read a book-a ragged old thing he’s not sure why he owns, and can barely make it through the first two pages before he wants to cry.
Two weeks in, starved of his comfort game, Avery summons his courage and opens the laptop again. The game app is installed. His browser opens normally. His recordings are still there, but Avery can’t bring himself to open them. If that final one has been tampered with...if it shows anything beyond when it cut off after the game crashed the first time, it no longer matters. He knows what has happened. Remembering that final dash to Derek after making it all the way to the top of the tree still makes his heart race. But he can’t tell anyone either. Who would believe him anything other than a lunatic?
One month later, he skims through his last recording until the very end before his laptop bugged and he lost control of his character before crashing in front of Derek’s character. His coworkers have picked up on him acting a little odd, and after on of them asks about a conversation they’d had the day before, Avery realizes he doesn’t remember exactly how that final confrontation went down. The thought hits like a bullet train.
He remembers seeing Derek on that platform surrounded by those horrible eyes that made his vision go fuzzy. He remembers the sickening, choking feeling of helplessness. He knows how it ended. For all that the final flash of his inventory won’t leave his mind, Avery can’t remember the last words they said to each other. He doesn’t even have a recording, too focused as he was at the time on relaunching the game and getting back to his friend’s side to remember to hit the button. All he has on record are the first words they’d ever spoken to each other, when Avery nearly had a heart attack upon being dropped while reading that book before cheering at finaly meeting d3rLord3. That tiny clip at the end is all that’s left to him. That night, Avery sits with his face buried in his hands, crushed under the weight in his chest. If he cries, there is no one there to witness.
Two and a half months later, Avery opens Minecraft again. Rather, he opens it and then closes it immediately, before uninstalling and reinstalling the game. When he finally makes it to the title screen, Avery looses his nerve at the Singleplayer button. That world, and all those worlds, and that horrible book and church that still makes his stomach lurch, he just can’t face. Not now. He jumps into the Hypixel server instead, and for all that it feels like everything’s changed, nothing has. He sprints down a path he’s sprinted down a thousand times unchanged and his hands feel stiff and unfamiliar. He tries a game of skywars and fails miserably. Cold and unhappy, Avery goes to bed.
Nearly four months later, Avery finally puts the last recording up on his channel. He skims it one more time to make sure the video is intact and there’s nothing he really missed, but he can’t find the energy to edit or cut any of the footage. Whatever the people of the internet find, he can’t bring himself to care. It’s missing so much of the end, but putting the whole of it into words feels impossible.
Then the comments start pouring in about a Google Drive link, and Avery feels really stupid. It’s been there. He’d seen the gibberish and assumed it to be just another crazy plan by Derek. Foolish, stupid Avery. All this time and he still hasn’t seen the whole of Derek’s foresight.
Reading the letter makes him feel angry, for a hot second, and then he just feels hollow. Avery wonders, bleakly, why it hurts so bad to miss someone he’s never met. He tries to watch the video, and loses his nerve at the first minute. He goes back to Hypixel and the games go better. It’s better. He comes so close to winning a match and wants to tell Derek. He tells the letter. At least he has the letter.
He watches Derek’s video the day after. He watches it in chunks over the course of the week- it leaves him the weekend to grieve. What tears he didn’t shed at the letter, choke him at the end, watching what he didn’t get to witness after his character died off of the platform. He saves both the video and the letter to his laptop, and then to a USB drive. He tells the letter, tells Derek, that he won’t forget him. He won’t lose either of them.
A week after finding Derek’s farewell, Avery opens singleplayer to find the only world there corrupted. The game crashes the one time when he tries to open the it, and Avery doesn’t try again. Even if that thing is gone, he doesn’t want to risk it. He doesn’t quite have the courage to delete it- a small, dreaming part of Avery holds onto his connection to d3rLord3, to Derek, whatever is left of them. But he puts it out of his mind, and moves on.
Half a year after Derek defeats the King in Yellow and one month after finding Derek’s final letter, Avery makes a new singleplayer world. There’s only so much Hypixel he can play before he finally musters the courage to open the singleplayer menu again. Initially, Avery vows to record every second, just in case, but he doesn’t expect much.
Progress in the new world goes slowly. Avery makes a house, barely a hovel in the ground, before heading back to play more skywars. He’s good at it, and he doesn’t have to worry about going caving. Several days later, Avery runs out of surface iron and debates descending for more. He goes back to building out his house a bit better.
Going underground takes some time, and the first few expeditions nerve-wracking. Despite him constantly checking over his shoulder and making sure wherever he goes is well lit, Avery doesn’t find anything out of the ordinary. He reviews his recordings a couple of times, but there’s nothing of interest. Avery eventually deletes them. He wants to feel relieved about the lack of incursion, but… he had been hoping for something, anything, that might give a clue on who Derek had been. The letter had been very final, but Avery still wonders just who his friend really had been. Did his body get found? Or is Avery the last person left who knew who he was? Avery has coworkers who chat with him sometimes, but even he’s not sure how much they would care if he just stopped showing up one day. The thought bothers him. He wants to complain to someone, but…well. He talks to his world instead, and hopes vainly that his words reach ears that no longer listen.
The next couple months pass by in a gray blur. Avery makes it to the nether and dies to a piglin. Reviewing his footage nearly gives him a heart attack when he notices a suspicious black figure, but it’s just an enderman. He returns to the nether and dies again to a ghast. Annoyed, he doesn’t play for two days. It’s mundane, and uneventful. Slowly building up a nether tunnel, Avery wishes he had someone else to speed up the tedium. At least Hypixel always had other players and matches always going, even if he never sees them again afterwards.
The first time Avery forgets to record, he panics. But he has the seven diamonds and uncountable redstone and no strange inexplicable structures have shown up, so he takes a deep breath to let his heartbeat calm down and settles for the night instead of another skywars game like he’d wanted before bed.
More time passes. Avery rereads Derek’s letter. It’s comforting, even as his eyes burn. He won’t forget Derek, not ever. But it’s over. The world is gone, Derek is gone, and Avery is left alone. Time goes on. Avery builds a proper bedroom in his new survival world house, and then puts a second. No one will ever use it, but it’s there just in case. He builds a barn for a cow farm, and then runs out of patience with his librarian villagers. He forgets to record a second time, and then a third, before eventually giving up on it altogether. He spends most of his time on Hypixel but pecks away at his survival world when the whim takes him. He doesn’t look at the old world, still showing a death screen in a void.
During a frigid December, four days before the anniversary of that awful night, Avery finds a stronghold. He hadn’t planned on fighting the dragon initially, but getting around the world has started to become slightly inconvenient and an elytra will make things easier. He still chats into his empty world, and not once gotten a reply, but he’s long past the stage of expecting one. He hasn’t seen hide nor hair of anything unusual since he made the thing half a year ago.
The fight itself takes a handful of attempts. The first attempt ends with a missed bucket clutch and splatter off a tower. The second and third go similarly. On the fourth attempt, brimming with adrenaline, Avery finally sees the beast finally felled in a flurry of arrows. It’s a little anticlimactic, if Avery’s being honest. It’s also the first time Avery has ever slain the boss. Avery makes sure to tell his world that. He hopes…but there’s no one around to peacock about with. He feels a little regret he didn’t record the fight.
Avery doesn’t usually stick around in singlplayer worlds for very long. Once he starts thinking about larger builds or more tedious farming, he usually dips out and makes a new one or jumps back on a server. When he first got his laptop, he only really hopped on the old world to see what the previous owner had built. Then he’d found the mine, and for a lack of anyone to talk to about it, posted a video online. Avery, slightly unnerved, left the world alone after that. Maybe he should have just stayed away, instead of blundering forwards to rescue his friend.
By the time the dragon falls, it’s late at night and he needs to go to bed. He may have the week off for New Years, but he’s tired and his vision is blurring a bit.
He hops into the portal, and then the screen bugs out. Flickers of green and blue spaz across the screen as the fans kick in hard. Slightly freaked, Avery scrabbles to turn on his recording software, but doesn’t get it running in time before everything clears up and the credits suddenly begin to play. It’s eerie, but Avery doesn’t see anything else suspicious even when the credits finally end and he finds his player character respawned to the bed he left outside the end portal.
Avery closes the game and quickly begins googling. He finds out that he’s missed a portion of the ending. A poem, which he reads on the wiki. It’s flowery and he doesn’t find it very interesting, and skimming through it holds no mention of yellow or kings or anything suspicious. It just happened to break his game. He can’t find any bug reports on the support page of any similar incidents either. Giving up on that avenue of investigation, Avery then spends a ridiculous amount of time comparing his recording of his credits to a YouTube video of the same. There’s no difference that he can find, but Avery still finds himself rattled.
The next morning Avery pulls his laptop open right after a sad breakfast of corn flakes. He’s out of milk, but finding the energy to go shopping, especially after what had happened last night, doesn’t seem appealing.
He had had the oddest dream. He had dreamed of wearing a coat, the kind that’s warm and expensive. He had been in a bubble, and then had been walking on a road. The streetlights had been blue on one side, and green on the other. The lights were safe. There was burning in the distance, but the flames were yellow and impossible to see through. The flames couldn’t reach him under the light. There was something in the fire that he thought he recognized for a second, but it vanished in a flash. Avery had woken up feeling slightly lost, like something that had been on his shoulders had sloughed off during the night.
His first clue that something is off is how long it takes to load up Minecraft. He doesn’t know for sure how old his laptop is, but it does its job fine even when recording at the same time as playing so the unusual length of time to load is odd but not particularly notable. He’s careful to turn on his recording software beforehand, but it doesn’t help when he finds the second clue. The second clue is unmistakable. Avery closes his laptop immediately.
The first world, corrupted file and all, is gone.