Chapter Text
The last thing Wemmbu remembered was the ravine.
Not the fight itself—that had blurred into a red haze of screaming and the clash of weapons hours ago. The sickening moment when the cobblestone bridge beneath his feet gave way, courtesy of a well-placed TNT minecart he'd been too slow to notice.
He remembered tumbling. Remembered his back slamming into a rocky outcropping halfway down.
He heard his bones crack, which is hilarious；he‘s literally wearing netherite armor.
After that, everything became a slideshow of pain.
He'd crawled. He knew that much. His left leg dragged uselessly behind him, something sharp grinding in his knee with every movement. His right arm hung at an odd angle, the shoulder screaming whenever he tried to put weight on it.
His inventory had been picked clean by whoever scavenged the battlefield after he fell—no food, no potions, no spare rockets.
Just half a stack of steak and a single healing II potion he'd been saving for emergencies.
This qualifies as an emergency, he thought hazily, fumbling for the glass bottle with trembling fingers. He drank it in desperate gulps, felt the warmth spread through his chest, watched in dim satisfaction as the gash across his ribs knitted itself closed.
But the potion couldn't fix everything.
It couldn't un-break his leg. It couldn't replenish the blood he'd lost. It couldn't stop the world from tilting sideways every time he tried to stand.
So he crawled.
Through snow. Through a biome he didn't recognize, pine trees looming overhead like silent monsters. His fingers went numb first, then his feet—well, the one foot he could feel. The other leg just dragged behind him, a dead weight he'd stopped checking on hours ago.
He needed shelter. He needed food. He needed—
Someone to help him.
The thought made the ex-strongest player want to laugh, except laughter would hurt too much. He didn't have anyone with him. That was the whole point of being a solo player, wasn't it? No allies to betray you. No friends to stab you in the back. No one to disappoint.
Who could he go to？
He didn’t know. To be honest, Wemmbu himself didn‘t even know what he did to piss off the whole organisation that at least 100+ people went after him. Obviously he would not just blow up 100 bases, right？He’s too lazy to do that.
He opened the communicator with trembling hands.
Unfortunately, only one person was online. And to make it worse, the person was not egg, not minute, not Zam, not even boosfer——
Okay, his rival. Flamefrags.
Rivals are meant to fight each other, and both of them know that. So Wemmbu hesitated upon clicking to that person‘s pfp.
Not safe, his survival instincts screamed. Not safe not safe not safe.
But his leg was broken. His shoulder was wrecked. His vision kept greying out at the edges. And the snow was starting to look less like snow and more like a very comfortable bed, soft and white and warm—
No.
He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper, forcing his eyes to focus. He was hallucinating. That was bad. Hallucinating meant blood loss. Blood loss meant—
Please——Shelter. Fire. Food.
He dragged himself another twenty feet. Thirty. His arms were shaking now, elbows threatening to buckle. The healing potion's effects were fading, the gash across his ribs starting to ache again.
Forty feet. Fifty. His right hand slipped on an icy rock, and he face-planted into the snow, and for a long moment he just lay there, breathing in the cold, letting the white flakes settle on his hair, his cheeks, his eyelids.
Just a rest, he told himself. Just a minute. Then I'll get up.
But his body wasn't listening anymore. His body had already started to shut down, conserving heat, conserving energy, conserving life for whatever essential functions still needed to run.
His thoughts scattered like startled birds.
Flame, he thought again, and this time he didn't push the name away. Flame would...
Would what? Laugh at him? Leave him to freeze? Take his stuff and call it a day?
Probably. Definitely. That's what rivals did.
But Wemmbu was too tired to care anymore.
His fingers dug into the snow one last time, a futile attempt to pull himself forward. Then they curled inward, empty-handed, and he let his cheek rest against the frozen ground.
If I die here, he thought vaguely, they'll probably find my body in the spring. All that gear, wasted.
What a stupid way to go.
His eyes slipped closed.
The snow had stopped falling.
That was the first thing Wemmbu noticed when consciousness trickled back—the absence of flakes against his face. The second thing was the warmth.
Instead of the desperate, internal warmth of a body burning its last reserves, which Wemmbu had often experienced——it was Actual, external warmth, seeping into his frozen limbs from somewhere above.
Am I dead? he wondered. Is this what dying feels like?
He tried to open his eyes and failed. His eyelids felt like they'd been welded shut.
But he could hear. Wind. The crackle of—was that fire? And footsteps. Someone was walking. Someone was here.
His throat worked, producing a sound that might have been a word in another life. It came out as a dry rasp, barely audible, lost in the whistling of the wind.
He tried again. Harder. Dragged air up from lungs that felt lined with frost.
"Hel—"
The word broke apart in a coughing fit that made his ribs scream. He tasted blood.
Stupid, he told himself. No one's going to hear you. No one's going to come. You're alone in a frozen forest with a busted leg and—
The footsteps stopped.
Wemmbu's heart lurched. He forced his eyes open—just a crack, just enough to see blurry shapes—and found himself staring up at a figure silhouetted against the grey sky.
Okay, Too tall to be a zombie. Too still to be a wolf or dog or whatever. And the armor—the armor gleamed dark, almost purple in the weak light, and Wemmbu's brain supplied a name before he could stop it.
Oh shit. Netherite.
Not just any netherite. He knew that specific shade. Knew the enchantment glow that flickered along the blade of the sword hanging at the figure's hip. Knew the way the shoulder pauldrons sat slightly askew, like the wearer had put them on in a hurry.
No, he thought. No, no, no—
But his body, traitor that it was, had already started to move. His good arm stretched out, fingers trembling, reaching for that dark silhouette like a drowning man reaching for shore.
"F—" His voice cracked. "Fl—"
The figure crouched down, and suddenly there was a face in front of him. Sharp features. Dark hair tousled by the wind. Eyes that flickered with something Wemmbu couldn't read—surprise? Irritation? Concern?
Concern? From him?
"What the hell happened to you?"
Flame's voice was exactly as Wemmbu remembered—rough, impatient, edged with the particular annoyance of someone who'd stumbled into a situation they hadn't asked for.
Wemmbu tried to answer. Tried to form words. Tried to explain about the ambush, the bridge, the fall, the twelve hours of crawling through snow.
What came out was: "'M... 'm fine."
Flame stared at him.
"You're bleeding in three different places, your leg's pointing the wrong direction, and you're lying face-down in a biome fifty blocks from my base." Flame's tone was flat. "Bro. Define 'fine.'"
Wemmbu's vision was greying out again. He blinked rapidly, trying to keep the world in focus.
“I‘m…i’m fine.”
"Oh my god." Flame pinched the bridge of his nose. "You're impossible."
"'M not."
Flame made a sound somewhere between a groan and a laugh. "You're so weird, bro. You know that, right?"
But he was moving. Wemmbu watched through half-closed eyes as Flame pulled out a stack of golden apple, broke off a piece, and held it to his lips.
"Eat."
Wemmbu tried to shake his head. "Not hungry."
"That's the blood loss talking. Eat or I'll shove it down your throat."
The threat was so absurd, and Wemmbu felt his lips twitch in something that might have been a smile. He opened his mouth, let Flame feed him small bites of golden apple slices, chewed mechanically while the world swam in and out of focus.
"Your shoulder's dislocated," Flame muttered, more to himself than to Wemmbu. "You've got a concussion, probably. And hypoglycaemia——oh my god how long did you not eat anything."
“Eh I dont know. I‘ve been chased——”
A dizzy wave hits Wemmbu, and he felt blood coming out at the corner of his mouth. He whimpered loudly because of the pain, feeling his vision blurring even more. He could not dare look at Flame’s expression anymore.
Wemmbu stumbled a few steps, trying to hold himself up.
Flame caught the other‘s wrist and shoved him back to the sitting position. He paused, looking at Wemmbu with something that might have been grudging respect. "How are you still conscious?"
"Pure spite," Wemmbu whispered.
Flame snorted. "Yeah. That explains."
He finished feeding Wemmbu the food, then pulled out a water bottle and helped him drink. The water was cold and clean and made Wemmbu realize how desperately thirsty he'd been.
"Can you stand?" Flame asked.
Wemmbu considered the question. His leg was screaming. His shoulder was on fire. His head felt like someone had replaced his brain with a bag of rocks.
"No," he said honestly.
Flame sighed. "Didn't think so."
He stood up, and for a horrible moment Wemmbu thought he was going to leave—walk away, go back to whatever he'd been doing before he stumbled across his rival bleeding in the snow.
Would serve me right, Wemmbu thought. Shouldn't have called out. Shouldn't have—
But Flame didn't leave.
Instead, he crouched down again, slid one arm under Wemmbu's shoulders and the other under his knees, and lifted him.
Wemmbu made a sound that was definitely not a yelp. "What are you—"
"Carrying you home," Flame said flatly, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. "You‘re literally immobile. I'm not leaving you here to freeze. So shut up and let me do this."
"But—"
"I said shut up."
Wemmbu shut up.
Partly because he was too tired to argue. Partly because his brain had short-circuited somewhere around the realization that Flame was carrying him. Wow, like, Flame, his rival, the man who'd tried to kill him at least four hundred times, was holding him like he weighed nothing, walking through the snow with an expression of supreme irritation on his face.
Wemmbu's head lolled against Flame's shoulder. The man's armor was cold against his cheek, but beneath it, there was warmth. Body heat.
"You're a weirdo," Flame complained.
“Fuck off."
"I'm carrying you."
"Your point?"
Flame's grip tightened slightly, and Wemmbu felt more than heard the low growl that rumbled through his chest. "I could drop you here."
"You won't."
"How do you know?"
Wemmbu closed his eyes. The world was spinning less now, anchored by the steady rhythm of Flame's footsteps, the warmth seeping through his frozen clothes.
"Because," he murmured, "you already picked me up."
Flame didn't respond to that.
They walked in silence—or rather, Flame walked, and Wemmbu tried very hard not to pass out again. The snow had started falling once more, tiny flakes catching in Flame's dark hair, dusting his shoulders like powdered sugar.
He looks softer like this, Wemmbu thought foggily. All covered in snow. Like he's not just a menace.
He must have said that out loud, because Flame's jaw tightened.
"I heard that."
"What."
"I’m not a fucking menace"
"Sure."
Another silence. Wemmbu was pretty sure that at one point, his rival was so close to dropping him onto the ground and leave. But in the end, Flame didn‘t do that anyways.
Lol, he thought, so this is the magic of love, is it？
Wemmbu let his eyes drift closed again, focusing on the sensation of being carried—the solidity of it, the safety of it. He couldn't remember the last time someone had carried him. Couldn't remember the last time he'd let someone this close.
This is stupid, he told himself. He's your rival. He's going to put you down and kill you the second you're healed.
But the thought didn't have any teeth anymore. It just floated through his mind, weightless and irrelevant, while the rhythm of Flame's heartbeat—or was that his own?—thrummed in his ears.
"Still awake?" Flame asked.
"No,"
"You're an idiot."
"Sure."
Flame shifted his grip, and Wemmbu felt a brief, sharp spike of pain from his leg. He must have made a sound, because Flame's arms tightened.
"Almost there," Flame said. The words were gruff, almost unwilling. "Just... hold on."
Hold on.
Wemmbu had been holding on for hours—through the crawl, through the cold, through the moments when death had seemed like a quite reasonable alternative to another inch of progress. He'd held on because that was what he did. Because giving up wasn't in his vocabulary.
But now, with Flame's arms around him and warmth seeping back into his bones, he felt something loosen in his chest. He couldn’t hold on anymore.
"You came," he breathed.
"What?"
"I like you so much…mphhh…”
"What？？？”
“Nothing.”
“What the fuck Wemmbumc you just said you liked me？？’
Wemmbu didn‘t answer. He let himself drop into the darkness.