you are not immune to the good times

-

When Gem is six, she knows everything she needs to about nightwalking, and in the land where she’s twenty six, she knows all the people on planet H-8.

She’s part of a couple inside jokes, of which she tells her mother about over breakfast, and then never brings up afterwards (The people aren’t supposed to know about nightwalkers), and is working on a build she’s been calling “cottagecore.” Stress called it that first, but Gem knows what she’s really building is home.

-

When Gem is ten, she first learns about her mother’s nightwalking trips.

“I am a dragon in my other life,” her mother says, and Gem stares with big, big eyes. “Not the Mother Dragon, to be clear,” she explains.

“Father says they call it the End Dragon,” Gem says.

Gem’s mother scowls. “She is the Mother Dragon to us. He knows how I feel about these things. I call Her the Mother Dragon, but yes, in common, she is the End Dragon.”

“Is she the Mother Dragon to you because she’s your mother?”

Gem’s mother smiles. “Yes, yes. The Mother Dragon is the mother to all dragons. Much how like, in my world, the End is the start to all of existence. Not this existence,” she clarifies. “Nightwalking is a strange thing, dearest. You are two people at once. You are the princelet of Dawn, and you will believe all that is true to us here. When you have nightwalked, your values here do not have to follow.”

Gem’s mother brushes Gem’s hair out of her face, looking off into the distance. “Some of mine do, but yours do not have to. We worship the sun here. Your grandmother was a creature of the night.”

“A mob?” Gem gasps.

“Where do you learn these things?” Gem’s mother asks, shaking her head. Gem opens her mouth, but her mother sighs. “Yes, yes, your father, I know. I wish he’d let you learn the Dawn ways of saying things. I know he works with the other kingdoms, but our people say things quite nicely, I think.”

She stands, and Gem does too. She’ll learn more about nightwalking some other time.

-

When Gem is sixteen, she stays awake through a night for the first time ever.

She’s caught the next morning, when her father looks down on her and sighs.

“You didn’t sleep,” he says. It’s not a question.

Gem’s mother walks in at just the wrong time, and freezes in the doorway. “You what?”

“I slept!” Gem says.

Gem’s mother looks her over, then frowns. “No you didn’t.”

“Yes I did!!”

“What happened?” Gem’s mother asks, ignoring her. “Oh, love, she hasn’t been talking about her nightwalks- Oh, larva… What happened?”

Gem wrinkles her nose. “I’m not a caterpillar anymore,” she says.

“Our little pupa,” Gem’s father agrees from where he’s pouring an absurd amount of honey into his tea.

“Dearest, please, did something happen?”

Gem stares her mother in the eyes, and she holds herself together for all of five seconds.

-

Gem is sixteen in one life and twenty six in another, and the world is ending.

She’s told False and Stress that she’s staying, but she’s lying because she’s scared, scared, scared, and she doesn’t know how to feel like that now, because she’s rarely scared in Hermitcraft. She’s scared, and she doesn’t have either of her parents, and it’s the end of the world, and she doesn’t want to be on the world when the moon crashes into it.

She knows that the world always ends after they leave. She knows it’s never happened while they were on it.

-

Gem is sixteen.

“The world is going to end,” Gem tells her parents. “And I have a plan to get out, but I won’t be able to come back until I’m back out of the nether, but I’m going to be scared and I won’t know if it’ll work until I do it, and I won’t have you and I’m- I’m-“

Gem chokes on a breath, and her mother pulls her into a hug that squeezes every part of her.

“I will be your chrysalis for as long as I can be,” Gem’s mother tells her.

A phrase of Dawn’s, saying that they’ll keep you safe through the toughest time.

Gem sniffles, pressing into her mother. “I think I’m melting,” Gem says. Another phrase of Dawn’s.

‘I think I need protection.’

-

Gem is twenty six when she steps through a portal. She stands on the other side, feeling the stifling heat and trying so, so hard to get used to it. She’ll walk until she gets far enough to be on another planet, and then she’ll make another portal and call for the others from there.

…

… It’s a long walk. She better start going.

-

Gem is twenty six when the portal shatters behind her.

She feels like she’s sixteen again.

… She doesn’t have time to be.

-

Gem is twenty six when everything fades around her and she wakes up in the spaceship for in betweens.

She is twenty six and she is terrified and she scrambles for a bed faster than even Bdubs usually does, and runs herself into a small private room to sleep.

-

Gem is sixteen when she wakes up to her mother sleeping beside her and her father sleeping behind her and the sun rising from out the window.

She is sixteen, and her world didn’t even end, but it felt like it did, and she is sixteen again and she can be protected by her parents, now.

She holds onto her mother and pretends she is in a chrysalis.

-

Gem is sixteen - nearly seventeen! - when she nightwalks again and finally is on a world.

They’re on rock and it’s not a very good place to land, to be honest, but they all run off, and Gem finds herself with Impulse and Pearl and Cleo and they all run around and have fun.

And Gem doesn’t feel sixteen anymore.

-

Gem is eighteen when her mother explains the uncensored history of Dawn. She goes over it slowly- how they and Glimmer Grove were once the same place that split in two, and how nightwalkers were genetic and had narrowed down into the royalty of Dawn alone, and how Dawn and Glimmer Grove had changed so much, to turn from golds and greens to pinks, purples and yellows, respectively.

Gem’s mother explains that the first queen of the land that Dawn and Glimmer Grove used to be- she was born on an eclipse.

Gem gasps, because eclipses are magical and dangerous things in Dawn. They are a time to set out everything you want blessed, but a time to sleep through the dark, lest you be cursed.

“She was the first blessing,” Gem’s mother tells her. “The first blessing of the eclipse. She is the one who blesses the rest of us now.”

“But we don’t give her a church like we do to the Sun?”

“No. She was a queen first and a god last. She was humble, too. A church nor a castle would fit her.” She glances outside and smiles. “We have plants that remind us of her anyway.”

“We do?”

“Sunflowers, pupa,” Gem’s mother says.

“I’m eighteen!” Gem reminds. “I’m a butterfly now.” She flaps her wings for emphasis.

“Of course, of course,” Gem’s mother says. “Now, consider, a sunflower.”

“Yeah?”

“It is called a Sunflower, but why?”

“Because of the petals. They’re big and yellow and make the sunflower look round, like the sun, instead of pointed, like other flowers.”

“Ah,” Gem’s mother says, smirking. “But the center is black, isn’t it? Now, what blocks the sun and creates a black center?”

“Oh,” Gem says. “It’s an eclipse.”

“There you are,” Gem’s mother says. “My mother used to tell me that her grandmother called them something else. I don’t remember how she said it- I’m sorry - but it meant eclipse flower. That is what this was to us.”

Gem stares. She is eighteen, and she has two gods, and she is privy to a history that she only knows because she is the princelet.

-

Gem is twenty two, and her mother and father have died at fifty three and fifty one, respectively.

-

Gem is twenty six in both lives, and she has become princess. She has her own alliances, the bees belong, legally, to her now, and she is free to cross borders as she likes.

She has a good nightwalk-daydream balance (as her mother liked to call it) and she doesn’t have to worry about much.

-

Gem is twenty six when she meets another False.

She knows False. This is not False. This is also False.

False is safe back on H-9.

False is right in front of her.

Gem suddenly realizes she doesn’t know the difference in times between her waking worlds.

-

Gem is twenty six when she hears about a rift in Grian’s base.

-

Gem is twenty six when she finds a rift by the great bridge.

-

She’s twenty six when she hears her own voice through the rift on Hermitcraft.

-