cheapposts

"What do you want," Grian said, not bothering to make it sound like a question.

"I've got a little something for you."

Grian measured his chances of getting back to sleep. Without a blanket, it was an impossible task. He was already getting cold. And if he'd stole Scar's blanket, Scar would simply steal it back.

"Fine," he said. He turned to lay on his back so he could face Scar. "Where is it?"

"Ah! That's the spirit."

"Scar."

"It's actually... not ready yet."

"What?" for the (at least) third time this week, Grian found himself to be angry at Scar. "Why would you wake me then?"

"Waking you up has everything to do with my little something, I swear on my hat." Scar said very officially. "It has a significant role in my plan."

"Your plan?" Grian asked, suddenly not so angry anymore. "This is getting interesting."

"That's what I'm saying."

Grian snorted and got up. And shivered. Desert nights were not nice. Well, the days there weren't pleasant either. At their first few weeks out there he and Scar were constantly catching colds. Their bodies hadn't adjusted to the constant change of extreme heat and chilling cold back then. If anyone really was that interested in the sand Scar tried so hard to monopolize, they'd win the desert over back then just because Scar and Grian had running nose all the time.

"So, where is my..."

Grian trailed off when Scar stepped closer and covered his eyes with a piece of fabric. Grian flinched and blinked, confused. Scar was tying a knot on the back of his head.

"And what's that?" Grian chuckled.

"This? Oh, this is your scarf. Too tight?.."

"No, it's fine. Scar, I want to sleep. Just don't make it take too long, would you?"

Scar hummed something that couldn't count as an agreement by any stretch and put his hands on Grian's shoulders. Grian grumbled but didn't fight Scar when he walked him to the...

"I'm not going outside," Grian said sternly when he realized that Scar walked him right to the front door. Scar continued pushing him forward.

"Yes you are!" Scar objected cheerfully.

Grian held onto the door frame for dear life. He tried slapping his wings against Scar's torso, but they were, as always, too weak and small to do any damage.

"No I'm not! It's cold! Get off me!"

They fought for a few more seconds before Scar finally pushed him out and closed the door with a loud thud.

"Scar!"

Grian spun around, planted his fist on the now closed door and tore the scarf off of his head.

"Let me in, you piece of fish! It's freezing!"

"Please put the scarf back on," Scar said from the inside. "I promise it won't take too long."

He stood there, alone, at the mercy of the cold wind and the cold sand, without his poncho, at night, and monsters still wandered onto their land sometimes despite all their efforts of lighting it up with torches. And Scar had the nerve to ask him to put the blindfold back on.

Griand huffed and put the blindfold back on.

"Is it on?"

"It is, you worm."

Scar didn't say anything else. There were sounds of things getting moved around and some quiet muttering but Grian couldn't make anything out so he gave up on listening and sat down on the sand instead. It was more than uncomfortable and cold but he didn't feel like standing on their porch like an idiot for the rest of the night.

If he could see, he'd watch the horizon, or stare in the general direction of Renchanting. But he couldn't see, so he was quickly getting bored out of his mind.

"Are you done?" he asked after barely a minute of silence.

The door opened slightly. Grian jumped a little, feathers puffed, and turned around, but before he could say anything a warm cloth was put on him. Scar gently smoothed it out on his shoulders. By the shape and weight of the cloth alone Grian recognized it as his poncho.

"Oh. Well, thanks."

"My pleasure."

Scar closed the door again. Grian sighed and accepted his fate.

Somewhere far away the forest whispered with its leaves. The lava river at the border of their desert poped gently every few seconds - if the wind was just a little louder, Grian wouldn't even hear that. Pizza's breathing was heard from the spot near the castle wall Scar had made into the llama's bed. Pizza could've easily be staring at him at that moment and Grian wouldn't have known. The thought was entertaining enough for Grian to not make any effort to take his blindfold off.

It was almost nice to sit there like that, listening the world going timid and kind. The warmth of his poncho was slowly lulling him to sleep.

Scar's voice startled him.

"I'm done," he announced.

Grian heard the door open and jumped on his feet. He sniffed the air. It smelled slightly of fire.

"Did you set our castle on fire?" he asked, suspicious.

"Well, in some sense, yes, I did," Scar said and immediately grabbed Grian's forearm, not giving him time to freak out. "Come on in, you're letting the wind in."

When the door closed behind him, Grian, to his surprise, realized that the air inside was way warmer than before. Scar absolutely did set their home on fire.

"Can I take the scarf off?" he asked tiredly.

"Not yet! Follow me."

And Grian followed. He didn't have any choice since he was still blindfolded and lead by the hand by Scar. Scar tossed him around with a quite "mhm". Then he changed his mind and moved Grian to a different spot. The whole thing was becoming even more annoying than it already was and Grian was about to speak up about it when Scar finally stopped his manipulations and began untying the scarf. Grian didn't lose his chance to grumble a bit.

"If you really did start a fire in our castle, I will kill you."

"You sure will," Scar said with odd certainty.

Grian figured he was being sarcastic. It was hard to remember that Scar's smirks and smiles weren't always friendly; that his lighthearted attitude, although sincere most of the time, sometimes was just Scar's way of hiding his true emotions.

"I will," he insisted.

"I know."

Grian wanted to say something else, but at the same exact moment he opened his mouth, his blindfold was removed.

Their bedroom was full of light. There were at least two dozens of torches, and even though Scar managed to not set the castle on fire, it was a very close call. There also was a bunch of leaves and dry grass on the floor. Grian had no idea why Scar would put all this rubbish on the floor.

"What is that?" Grian found himself asking. He didn't want to come across as rude (Scar had obviously put a lot of effort into this) so he added hurriedly, "May I ask."

"Happy New Year, Grian."

When Grian turned around Scar was standing behind him, smiling and holding... a cake.

Grian blinked. The cake refused do disappear from Scar's arms. He blinked again.

"Is it New Year already?.." Grian whispered almost to himself.

"I have no idea!"

Scar's stupid smile was so familiar that it pulled Grian out of his confusion.

"But we don't have wheat."

"I have my sources."

"And cows."

"You don't want to know."

"What? You know what, you're right, I don't. Where did you get the sugarcane?"

Scar just smiled mysteriously. Grian rubbed his face with an impressed groan.

"Scar, this is..." he paused and looked around with big eyes, and immediately regretted it when his gaze fell upon the green mess of leaves and grass on the floor. He was fast to look back at Scar instead. "I don't know why are you doing this, but i haven't eaten a cake in years."

"I told you, it's the New Year. Miracles happen. Wishes get fulfilled."

"Yeah, sure."

They sat on the floor. Scar used this sword to cut the cake into pieces. A bit unsanitary, but who cares. Grian was granted with the honor of tasting the cake first. He bit into his piece and couldn't contain a satisfied hum.

"Scar, it's sweet."

"As all cakes are."

"I know, but... You know what I mean. The last time I ate sugar was... forever ago."

"Yeah."

Grian sneaked a peak at Scar and furrowed his brow.

"Why aren't you eating?"

"Oh, it's simple," Scar said. "The cake is poisoned."

Grian almost choked. Scar was laughing now, and continued to do so even when Grian glared at him.

"Scar! You can't joke like this while we're in the middle of a death game," Grian grumbled.

"Aw Grian, you think I could do this to you? Do you not trust me?"

Grian wrinkled his nose and bit into the remains of his piece, while looking Scar into the eyes. Scar blinked and smiled, accepting Grian's show of trust wordlessly.

When Grian was finished with his piece, he took Scar's sword from his lap (inevitably making its hilt sticky with sugar because he didn't bother to wipe his hand off) and cut a piece of cake for Scar. Maybe this will encourage Scar to eat it. When Grian handed it so Scar, he looked surprised but took it and finally took a bite. His eyes widened. Grian grinned.

"Sugar, right?"

"Sugar," Scar agreed and took another bite with his eyes closed.

Delight was written all over his face in big bold letters. Grian's grin softened into a smile. Now he understood why Scar was staring at him earlier. Seeing his ally and friend satisfied and happy felt like he was satisfied and happy himself. He could watch Scar eat this cake the whole day. It was a weirdly soothing scene.

"I feel like I'm high on sugar." Scar confessed.

"Me too. Second round?"

"Sure!"

They had a second round. This time, they didn't waste time on looking at each other and went straight to devouring their portions. Then they lay down on the floor, right on top of the pile of dry leaves. It felt uncomfortable but Grian didn't find it in himself to argue. His stomach was full, their room was warm, and his friend was by his side, sighing with unusual calmness. And they were still alive.

"Happy New Year," Grian said to the ceiling.

"Mhm."

"Now I feel like a bad friend," he chuckled. "I don't have a present for you."

"Not an issue. Just find something later and tell me it's the New Year when you're ready to gift it to me."

"Yeah, because that's exactly how the New Year works."

"Oh, absolutely."

"Your present was great, by the way," Grian said somewhat awkwardly. "The cake, I mean."

"Are implying that some other part of my present wasn't good?" Scar asked, turning to face Grian.

Grian looked at him. Scar was squinting at him, offended in advance.

"Actually, yes. What in the void's name are we lying on?"

"It's spruce needles!"

"It's very much not. It's dry oak leaves."

"Well excuse me, I had nothing to work with! If I went on an adventure to collect some real spruce needles you'd start suspecting something. I had to improvise!"

"Okay, okay," Grian laughed. "I appreciate the effort."

Scar smiled too, completely letting go of his exaggerated offense.

"I'm glad."

Scar finds sand on Grian’s temples and on his neck, under his fingernails and on his clothes. In all the places they don’t have time or water to wash properly. He inspects Grian’s hands, rough from… everything they’ve been up to lately. The fingernails are looking less human-like now, in a way that Scar knows they do whenever Grian doesn’t cut them for too long. They look almost like claws now.

Grian frees his hand from Scar’s gently to tuck him and Scar under the blanket. He sighs, satisfied, and puts his hand back onto Scar’s; Scar grabs it immediately and resumes his inspection.

“What, never seen my hands?” Grian asks sleepily and bumps his forehead into Scar's ribs.

“Of course I did. I just never noticed how amazing they are.”

“Void,” Grian mutters. “You’re disgusting.”

Scar laughs soundlessly.

“What- Stop shaking! Are you laughing? Stop that, it’s like an earthquake down here.”

“Well if you weren’t snuggling me like that maybe it wouldn’t feel like an earthquake.”

“Oh, so you want me to stop snuggling you.”

“When did I say that?”

“That’s what I thought. Stop laughing.”

Scar does, eventually, but only after his sleep deprivation-induced hysteria decides to. Grian frees his hand again and Scar misses the contact immediately, but then Grian puts his arm over his chest and keeps it there in a tight embrace. Scar’s right arm gets squashed between them in the process and he briefly thinks about finding a more comfortable position but decides against it. Even with the promise of his arm going numb by the morning, and with the blanket barely covering his chest, he can’t imagine a place he would be more comfortable than he is now.

Grian stretches his wings - and wow does he make it look satisfying - and puts one of them over Scar’s body too, for good measure.

“This isn’t fair,” Scar complains. “I don’t have a second pair of forelimbs.”

From his position he can’t even hug Grian properly, and there he is, the bastard, one-upping Scar with his superior number of limbs.

“Hush. Sleep,” Grian says. “It’s gonna be a long day tomorrow.”

When was the last time their day wasn’t long?

“Goodnight,” Scar says. He pats Grian on the forearm and leaves it there - the only form of hug he’s allowed to perform right now. “Sweet dreams.”

Grian hums in response. After a few minutes his breathing gets quiet and slow.

How easy it would’ve been to break his neck right now. The thought doesn’t disturb Scar as much as it probably should. He could do it and it would’ve been easy, with Grian laying beside him with his neck, stomach, even his wings laid out for Scar to hurt. But he won’t. Not here, not now. Not this Grian.

He’d hate to cut the dream short. This is the first time in years that he’s been allowed to breathe.

He takes Grian’s hand in his and fights the urge to sink his (overgrown, too, but not predator-like) nails into the back of Grian’s hand. Sleep finds him when he gets too tired to fight it.

______

There was no one, in the end.

If Scar knew that it gets so lonely, he wouldn’t have even thought of winning.

The more he lived among his flowers, the more he wished it to never happen. A natural reaction to his situation, really. His loneliness just grew and grew until it wasn’t just self-pity anymore, not just despair and longing, but bitterness and anger.

He knew that if he’d die the current game would end, and the next game would begin, and all that would start anew and hurt just as much as the last time. So he just kept living.

He didn’t have any remains to bury. Even the items eventually disappeared from their chests. Their houses became overgrown with young plants and moss, some even begun to crack. Logically Scar knew that it definitely wasn’t long enough since the end of the game for all that to happen, but reality in the game worlds rarely followed logic.

Then the shadows came back, and Scar had enough.

“I want to make a deal with you,” he said without turning his head to look at them because that would make them disappear. “You guys probably want me to die, right? So that you could throw me and the others into the next game. And I really don’t want it to happen.”

They didn’t interrupt him. He didn’t expect them to.

“So how about we meet in the middle? Say, I jump off the nearest cliff right now, you get your next game, but after it’s over - it’s going to be over for good. Forever. No more games. And you can have my code. All of it. Do with it what you want. You guys probably love eating code for breakfast, and surely I’m absolutely delicious. What do you think?”

He swallowed a lump in his throat.

“Would my code, freely given, be enough for you to leave me alone?”

“Scar.”

Scar froze. The voice. He remembered the importance of this voice now that his past memories have been partially returned to him. He didn’t remember all of it but he remembered enough to know to listen when the voice spoke. He simply couldn’t help it.

The shadows usually disappeared when Scar looked at them. He knew that. It didn’t stop him from spinning on his heels sharply and looking at that one.

_____

Grian is smiling but Scar knows him well enough to know: he’s mildly alarmed.

“What are you doing, Scar?” he chuckles.

“We’re almost there! It’s just over that hill.”

“What could possibly be over that hill that is not just more sand?”

Scar only hums a tune in response. Grian huffs in annoyance but follows him anyway, lets him lead him by the hand wherever Scar wants. Scar’s chest aches at how trusting he is. How trusting he used to be.

The sun is beginning to set. It’s comfortably warm now but the temperature will start to drop soon. It’s foolish to stray so far away from any shelter and warmth with the sunset so close. Scar doesn’t think he cares. Grian doesn’t seem to either, even if he complains.

Scar stops. They’re standing at the top of a dune.

“Yep,” Grian tries to cross his arms but one of them is still occupied with Scar’s, so he puts his free hand on his waist instead. “Like I said. More sand.”

“Well hold on, it’s not just some sand.”

“Yeah? What’s so special about it? Looks like just good ol’ sand to me.”

“This is the sand I will defeat you on!”

Grian yelps when Scar tackles them to the ground. He grabs Grian, mindful of his wings, and they start rolling down the hill. Grian’s laughing, there’s sand in Scar’s mouth, there’s probably sand in Grian’s mouth, too. After a few seconds they slow down to a stop.

When the world stops spinning and Grian stops giggling, he asks, “What was that about?”

“Oh, you know, nothing. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”

“For how long?”

“Embarrassingly long.”

“Dude. You’re actually gross.”

They stay like that, staring at the darkening sky. The sun hides behind one particularly big sand-dune but the sand they’re laying on is still warm enough to be pleasant and to keep the soon-to-be chilly air from making them cold.

Scar turns to look at Grian. There’s sand in his hair - still. Grian probably won’t be able to get rid of it at this point. Not in this life, anyway. Without saying anything, Scar reaches out and puts a handful of sand on Grian’s chest. Grian looks down at it in confusion, then glances at Scar and arches an eyebrow. Scar shrugs. Grian shrugs back and turns his attention back to the sky.

Bury me in it, Scar wants to say. Bury me in warm sand.

Maybe this way he’ll escape it. Buried in a place he will always call home. Maybe if they stay here, warm and safe in the desert’s warm, dry hands, they won’t have to do it again. Maybe if they curl right here beside each other like little kids the desert will accept them as her children and keep them away from everything and everyone else, forever.

He doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he takes another handful of rapidly cooling sand and pours it in Grian’s hair. Grian side eyes him, says nothing and smiles.

_____

“They don’t want you,” Grian said.

Scar was pretty sure it was Grian. Even if he looked different and was slightly see-through, he sounded the same.

“They don’t want your code, Scar. There’s nothing- There’s nothing you can offer that’d make them stop.”

Scar felt cold dread spreading from his heart to his lungs and down into his stomach.

“They will kill you now,” Grian continued almost impassively. “They’ll have a- punishment waiting for you. When you wake up. Something they think will be entertaining to watch.”

He understood then. He wasn’t really doing anything by staying alive. They were allowing him to do it. There was nothing he had that he could use to bargain with them. Not even his life. Not even his code.

Scar suddenly realised that he wasn’t angry anymore. He was just tired.

“Will the others be there?” he asked, voice quiet. "Will you?"

Grian looked like the question physically hurt him.

“Yes.”

_____

They’re preparing for battle. Scar’s red and Grian’s green, because Scar couldn’t change that part of the story, apparently. The castle is quiet and cold in the early morning hours.

Grian puts his armour on and watches Scar struggle with his. It’s theatrics and they both know it.

“Do you need help?” Grian asks, smirking.

“Who? Me? Pffft! Never.”

He lets his helmet fall to the ground with a loud clunk.

“Whoops.”

Grian stares at him, both annoyed and amused, and picks the helmet up. He fixes Scar’s hair gently, brushes his hair off his forehead before putting it on his head and making sure it won’t fall off this time.

“Hey,” Grian says, still standing close to him. His voice is small and serious. “Don’t die.”

He puts his hand on the part of Scar’s shoulder that’s not protected by the iron. There’s steel in his eyes, a quiet kind of determination, as if he can will Scar’s life into never ending, as if he can make him immortal.

At first he was confused. Maybe there’s been some kind of mistake. Maybe he’ll drop dead any minute now. But then a day came by. Two days. A week. And no god struck him down with a lightning. Scar was becoming more and more weirded out by that. He tried taking matters in his own hands, but no amount of jumping from a cliff to his death led him to freedom. He respawned again and again, wearing the same clothes with poppies and lilacs, having the same red eyes looking back at him from the river, staring at the same shade of red his name had every time he took his communicator in his hand and typed, "Hey?", "Anybody alive?", "Hello?", because what if the reason why he’s still alive is that he’s not actually a winner yet? What if there’s another player, and all he has to do to end this is to find and kill them, or let them kill him? But he never found anyone, and two weeks after the day he won, he stopped searching.

Three weeks after the day Scar won, he already had a new house going on. He settled at the edge of the map near mesa. "Screw this," he figured, "I’m not going to just wander around the land for months if the gods forgot to kill me. I’ll do things!" And things he did. After he was done with his new house, he fixed his old base, and tore down Mumbo's tower, and built a couple of things here and there. It was nice.

The next week was spent relaxing. He tended to his crops and fed cows he’d stolen from someone (not that the person would mind; they were dead). He died once that week and woke up in his bed again, but at that point it was starting to feel normal.

Five weeks after the day Scar won, he finally had to admit that the gods were not going to kill him. That for some reason, they decided to trap him there. Or maybe that’s what their idea of a happy ending was, maybe Scar happened to become the winner of the final game, the final round, and this was his reward. Maybe all the other players have gone home. Maybe Scar’s the only one left behind, and they live on without him.

There was no use in thinking about possibilities. It was only upsetting him. No - terrifying him. Instead, he took the matters in his own hands once again, and paid a visit to The Secret Keeper.

"I don’t want that," he said to it. "If this is my reward, I don’t want it. I want to go home. To Hermitcraft. Back to my friends. Back to where they’re alive."

The Secret Keeper didn’t seem to react. Scar felt his chest heat up with rage.

"Get me out of here!" he yelled, voice wavering. "You psychos! I- I miss my cat!"

The Secret Keeper didn’t answer.

Scar went home, laid down on his bed, and spent the evening thinking about Jellie's warm fur and his friends' smiles.