#gemgo

Caves are included on that list of things, along with anywhere underground, which is… kind of a problem, given the number of pretty essential resources only available there. But he makes do. He makes wooden tools, then stone ones from rock he scavenges above ground. He plants wheat, and melon seeds, and potatoes and beetroots and pumpkin too when he finds a nearby village. He trades with the villagers for the things he cannot get on the surface, begs the redstone components needed for a few basic farms from Zedaph. He makes do.

He builds his first base out of wood, mostly, with little else to hand. He nestles it in a small pocket space between the sheer side of a mountain, and a copse of trees at the edge of a flower forest – closed in enough to be safe, but not so close as to be claustrophobic. No view of the sea; no endless plains; no nearby crevices or caves full of pooling darkness. It’s perfect. Cradled between the cliffs and the trees, he can feel safe.

The finished house has small, cosy rooms, and floor-to-ceiling windows, and a roof with a generous enough overhang that he can see little else but trees and mountain through them. It has more lights than he needs, small glowing mushrooms and lichens and lamps and torches fit haphazardly into every available space. It has a fireplace in every room.

He’s found that he can’t stand the cold, nowadays. Nor the dark. Nor the sight of the sky.

His friends try to come calling, and he fends them off with next week and let me settle in. Keralis takes the bullshit excuses at face value. Impulse and Zedaph, less so, but they have the decency to at least feign patience. Or perhaps they just get distracted, and forget he never actually gave them his coordinates, never actually put a date in the diary for a visit. He’s grateful either way.

And Bdubs. Bdubs tries to visit, too. Bdubs is the worst of all of them at taking no for answer gracefully.

Tango’s not proud of how he handles it. He’s not sure he feels bad, because that’s a thing he tries not to do, feeling bad for the stuff he does – but he’s really, really not proud. Words are had, via communicator.

Bdubs says he’s going to visit. Tango declines. Bdubs insists he’s going to visit. Tango refuses to give him his coordinates. Bdubs says he will scour the continent in search of Tango’s base. Tango tells him to fuck off.

He doesn’t get any more messages from Bdubs, after that.

It’s fine.

He’s alone, now, and it’s easier like that. It is. Really, honestly. It means he doesn’t have to explain anything to anyone – these stupid aversions he has now, the way he avoids the ocean and caves and the night sky. The panic attacks. The sleepless nights, and screaming night terrors. The shakes in his hands, the nausea, the fuzziness in his head. The way there’s some things he just can’t stand now, like the cold, or the dark, or not being able to breathe, or anything touching his chest or face, or rabbits or horses or small spaces or wide open spaces or–

Or the way he still sees it, sometimes. Behind his eyelids, when he closes his eyes. The way the universe had looked, huge and splayed out and glittering before him, endless, infinite, brilliantly dark. The way it had reached out with open arms, right before the oxygen ran out.

The way it had consumed him whole.

So, anyway. It’s easier to be alone. And now he’s alone! Really, truly alone. Lucky him.

Or, at least, he’s alone until four months into his solitude, when there’s a knock at his front door at just past sundown. A knock at the door that no one should have the coordinates to.

He opens it slowly, reluctantly, half-expecting against all odds to see Bdubs waiting there. Half-hoping, if he’s being honest with himself. Half-dreading, if he’s being more honest.

It’s not Bdubs.

“Hey, you old hermit, you!” It’s Gem, lichen trailing from her antlers and a bright, fixed smile on her face and a package almost bigger than her torso in her arms. “How’re you doing? I’m here with a little housewarming present.” She holds the package up, by way of explanation. It briefly blots out her face. “It’s been a really big job tracking you down, I can tell you, but hey! I’m here now. Only a couple of months late. Can I come in?”

“Oh, uh. Hey, hermit, back atcha.” Tango pushes a smile onto his own face, tries to match her energy – tries to find his old energy, that boundless enthusiasm, that go go go drive. It falls flat. Reluctantly, he steps back, steps aside, opens the door a little wider. “Yeah– yeah, sure, come in. Sure.”

Gem trots on in. She doesn’t comment on the fireplace in every room, on the torches everywhere, on the near-total absence of stone or other quarried materials. On the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Oh, this is so nice, Tango,” she says, and try as he might, he can’t find any hint of insincerity in her voice. “So cosy. And you’ve got the forest all around you, and that lovely mountain with the waterfall… Such a nice area. So much potential!”

“Yeah, well.” He shuts the door, doesn’t lock it. He never locks it. Doesn’t like feeling trapped, for some reason, nowadays. “It’s somewhere to sleep.”

“Oh?” He can feel her eyes on the back of his neck, as he pads over to the kitchen. She follows. He can hear her hooves on the wooden flooring, tap tap tap tap. “You are sleeping, then.”

He grunts, which is rude, but – whatever. It’s not like his social skills were ever that great to begin with, and a few months in relative isolation after dying alone in the cold, endless vacuum of space– he shudders, full-body shudders, as though to throw the thought off. His social skills sucked, and now they suck even more. Enough said.

“Did Bdubs send you over here?” he asks, filling the kettle from a bucket and hanging it over the kitchen fireplace. He’ll get round to plumbing and stuff eventually. He will. When his energy comes back. “Making sure that everyone does their part to keep the moon at bay?” He means it as a joke. It mostly just makes him feel sick.

“Oh, no, I came myself. To give you your present, remember?” She holds it up, an amorphous lump wrapped in brown packing paper and tied with dyed twine. “Though… if you don’t want it…”

The quiet reproach in her voice makes him wince.

“Look. Sorry,” says Tango, his voice rough with disuse, with lack of sleep. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. Been, uh. It’s been a while since I had visitors. I’m out of practice.”

“Well. Bdubs didn’t send me, but he did ask me to send you his regards.” The reproach is lighter, now, but it remains. “He said you didn’t want to see him. I told him that seemed a bit out of character, but he was pretty insistent!” He cannot bring himself to turn and look at her, to see the disapproval in her eyes that he’s sure will be there.

“Never said he couldn’t visit,” Tango mutters, pulling down cups out of the cupboards. Terracotta, hand-glazed, made by yours truly. He was pretty awful at it, to start out with. He’s getting better, though. Gem gets one of the more recent ones, glazed bright yellow, with half-hearted attempts at decorations scratched in before baking; he takes an older attempt, plain and lopsided, with a crack through the lip.

“That’s not what he said to me.”

“Yeah, well.” Tango thinks of fuck off, and very carefully does not flinch. He gets the tea down, too, one bag in Gem’s cup and another in his. “He got it wrong, then.”

There’s the soft rustle of Gem setting her parcel down on the table behind him. “Did he?” she says, quietly. “Because it seems like no one’s been to see you, Tango. I asked around, trying to find someone who knew where you were, so I could get your present to you. No one did. …And a lot of people were worried about you, you know.”

Tango very carefully places the box of tea back on the shelf, before he crushes it, and says nothing. The kettle on the fire boils. He retrieves it, and pours water into both their cups, without ever turning to look at Gem.

“It’s not good.” Gem picks her words the same way he’s seen her picking up butterflies, each movement tentative, carefully considered. “Shutting yourself away like this. I– I really did just come here to give you a housewarming gift, Tango, but… you should know that people miss you. And that there are ways of… of dealing with this, with what happened, to all of us, without isolating yourself. Without hiding.”

He hates, a little bit, that she feels she has to be so gentle with him. He hates that that’s what he is now. Fragile. Breakable.

“It’s just–” he says, and then his throat closes up like there’s a fist around it, and abruptly he cannot speak. His shoulders hunch, involuntary. He curls fingers around the edge of the counter, in a useless attempt to ground himself.

“It’s just different for me, okay?” he chokes out, eventually, through the sudden lack of air in the kitchen. He can’t breathe in, can’t get enough into his lungs, and– oh hey, it’s basically like suffocating in the cold, dark vacuum of space again, except he can’t think about that or he’ll panic, except he’s already thinking about it, and– oh boy– oh boy–

“Tango,” says Gem.

He expects her to say it’s not. He expects her to say that they’ve all suffered. And they have! Of course they have. He’s stupid, and selfish, but he’s not so stupid and selfish as to think that no one else is hurting. It’s just no one is hurting the same as him, is the problem. None of them died failed and alone and drowning in space.

What she actually says, though, is, “Tango. It’s different for everyone.”

“Yeah,” he croaks, fingers white-knuckled where he’s still clutching at the counter. “Yeah, but–”

“No buts.” Gem sighs, but not a sigh of exasperation – just a tired little exhale, a noise of grief, of trauma-release. “Cleo got stuck in the End, alone, for what she says felt like a year. Quite a few of us got stuck in the Nether, either together or apart for. For a while. Boatem were drifting in the void for… weeks, I think, they said, weeks and weeks. Ren and Doc got possessed, before– before the moon hit.” She hesitates. “…And Bdubs was still at his base when it hit. He was alone, too.”

It’s not meant to be a scolding. He knows that. But it still cuts like a knife to the spine.

When Gem touches his shoulder, soft, hesitant, he jumps. It’s been months since anyone touched him. He whips round to stare at her in cornered-animal panic, grabs her wrist without thinking before she can try to touch him again.

He becomes aware, as her pulse hammers beneath his fingers, that he is crying. He becomes aware, as he stares at her, wide-eyed and wild, that she can see he is crying.

He becomes aware, as his chest heaves and his shoulders shake and warmth trails down his cheeks, that he cannot stop.

Gem mouth does something soft, something complicated. There’s kindness in her eyes, but no pity. She doesn’t try to pull away from him, either, he’s sure he’s holding her too hard – desperate for something, anything to stop him from drifting away. “Oh,” she says, gently. “Oh, Tango.”

When she reaches out for him this time, he doesn’t flinch away. She’s shorter than him, but not by much, and when she steps closer and curls a hand around the back of his neck and tugs his face into the crook of her neck, he lets her. He lets her hold him there, as he cries into her neck, and her hair, and the softness of her shirt.

He cries until there is nothing left in him.

By the time his breathing steadies, he feels hollowed out. Like someone’s scooped out the space in his chest, emptied him. It should be an awful feeling, too close to the vast expanse of the night sky, too close to the nothingness of vacuum. Instead, it feels… clean. There’s no panic pressing out of him, making his ribcage creak with its weight, no fear or grief or anger. Just quiet. Easy, empty quiet.

Gem’s hand is still on his neck, stroking at the soft hair of his nape. His hand is still on her wrist, her pulse still under his fingers. Alive. They’re both alive. And he’s got both his feet on solid ground.

“That was. Uh. I don’t.” He sniffles, and detaches himself, reluctantly, from the crook of Gem’s neck to wipe his face. She lets him pull away, and does him the courtesy of not watching as he wipes his nose on his sleeve. “I’m sorry. Don’t know what, what that. Was. Uh.”

“Why don’t,” says Gem, softly, “we go and sit down? Do you have any sofas?” He nods, still unsteady, and she smiles at him. “That’s good. Let’s go sit on that. You can show me your living room.”

She snags the unopened present from the table as they pass, Tango leading her by her wrist across the hall and to his sofa, singular. He’d considered making more, but the room is small, like all the rooms in his house, and he’d not been expecting guests.

Unsure what else to do when they get there, he follows instructions, and sits. His legs fold gratefully beneath him and he slumps back, exhausted, into the cushions.

“Oh, this is nice,” says Gem, as he sits down. She does not sit, but stands, looking around – passing judgement on the fire, crackling away in its fireplace, and the low ceiling with its dark beams, the carpets on the floor and the little coffee tables and the view out into the forest through the tall, wide windows. “Very warm. Very cosy. You did a really good job with this, Tango, I like this a lot.”

“…Thank you,” he says, quietly, hoarsely, because he’s not sure what else to say. She smiles at him again. Again, it feels a little bit like he’s won something valuable. Precious.

“Why don’t you open your present.” Gem, very gently, tugs her wrist free from his grip. He definitely does not mourn the loss of contact, the loss of touch and warmth and pulse. He does not. “And I’ll go get our tea. Hmm?”

She’s gone before he can argue, which is probably for the best, because he wants to argue but has no idea what he might say. Instead, his hands drift to the parcel across his thighs, to the twine tied neatly around it and fashioned into a bow on the top. When he pulls the tail of it, it unravels, into two ends of a length of string and an unfolding rose of brown paper in his lap.

Underneath the wrapping is a blanket, soft and pale pink and woollen. Hand-knitted, by the looks of things – the wool maybe hand-spun, though Tango’s knowledge of fibrecrafts ends well before the spinning stage of things. Well before the knitting stage, too, if he’s being honest. He runs his fingers over the surface of it, tracing the little bumps and vees of it, before discarding the paper to the floor and pulling the blanket over his thighs.

His legs warm beneath it. The weight settles him, enough to ground but not enough to trap. The texture is good beneath his hands. When he inhales, he smells sheep, and dirt, and a little of Gem’s perfume, over the woodsmoke of the fire. It’s a nice smell.

He closes his eyes, and does not open them again until he hears the quiet tap of Gem’s hooves become muffled by carpet.

“S’... nice,” is the best he can manage, when she returns – which is, frankly, a bit pathetic, because the blanket’s gorgeous, and was probably quite a lot of work to make, and definitely a lot of work to deliver. Nice seems kind of inadequate in the face of all that. “Really nice. Thank you. I. I appreciate it. I, no, not just– I like it. Really like it.”

Gem sets his tea down on the little table next to his side of the sofa, and hers down on the little table next to hers, and then sits down beside him. “Good,” she says, softly, and when his hand finds her wrist again, she says nothing. He curls his fingers around it, just to feel her pulse. Alive. “I’m glad you like it! I was going for red, with the colour, you know, but then I got the dye a little wrong, and I thought– well. Sometimes you just need a bit of encouragement to step outside your usual colour palette, you know? I thought it might be a little bit of inspiration, for your main base, if you hadn’t started making one yet.”

Tango shakes his head. “I haven’t,” he says, and this, this is easier. This is safer territory. Standard territory. Talk of buildings, of machinery, of plots and plans and projects. “Don’t really, uh. Don’t know what I wanna make. If I wanna make anything…” He closes his eyes again, briefly, tries to sort through his words. “Not sure if I want to build, this time round. Or even do redstone. I’ve been making– other stuff.”

“Other stuff?”

“Yeah. Making, uhh. Been making pottery. Terracotta. Is there a difference?” He sniffs, shrugs. “Probably. I don’t care. Been making stuff, with dirt and whatever. I’ve… I’ve enjoyed it. S’been fun, so far.”

“Oh yeah?” Gem’s voice is gentle, encouraging. She still hasn’t made him let go of her wrist again. The skin there is very soft, under his fingers, almost velvety beneath his callouses. The steady beat of her pulse is surprisingly grounding. “Like what?”

“Like that cup. ‘N this one. Yours is better, though, I made that, like… a couple days ago. Mine was way back. When I’d just gotten my house done, I think.”

“Wow, really?” Gem picks hers up, tilting it this way and that – careful so as not to spill the tea inside. Her sharp eye takes in the colouring, the slight wonkiness, the little lines pressed into the terracotta in the shape of haphazard flowers. “They’re lovely, Tango. You’ll have to give me lessons sometime.”

“Hey! You don’t– you don’t have to sound so surprised.” Tango sniffs again, wetly. The lump in his throat eases, just a little. “...You can. You can keep it, if you want. Buy it. One diamond. Great price, a real bargain. Scout’s honour.”

Gem laughs, her eyes crinkling at the corners. The lichen on her antlers sways as she shakes her head. “Oh, I see. I see. Are you going to throw a glow ink sac in there, too? A sign about how great I am?”

“I.” The lump is back. “Not got any glow ink right now.” And then, compelled by some strange force behind his ribs, “I don’t– like the ocean, any more. Too big. Too cold. Too dark. Too– there’s too much of it. Caves, too. Just, just being underground in generally, actually, and the, uh, the night sky, and. And a bunch of stuff.” He draws in a breath, deep, unsteady, and wills back the panic threatening to tighten around his throat again. “Stupid, I know, like– it’s stupid. But. Hey! There you go. That’s me, now, I guess. Bunch of stupid shit I can’t look at, or do, or whatever, because it reminds me of–” The word catches in his throat. He jerks a thumb up towards the ceiling.

“Oh.” Gem hums, thoughtfully, drawing her feet up onto the couch and leaning into his side. He tugs the blanket to cover her lap, too, almost on reflex. She flashes him a smile full of small, bright teeth. His thumb has, at some point, begun drawing small circles on the warmth of her wrist. “I don’t think that’s stupid at all, Tango. I think that’s… that’s very normal. Being afraid. It’s just part of being alive.”

The muscles in his jawn tense, relax. His molars grind together. He says nothing.

“…We should go swimming, at some point, then,” she says, eventually. “Find a reef somewhere, so it’s nice and warm. And bright! I need some sea pickles anyway, I think. Or– maybe caving would be better, if you’re in such desperate need of diamonds that you’re trying to scam me again. Badly, I might add. You’ve not gotten any better at that.”

It’s Tango’s turn to laugh, a shocked little snort that breaks free without his permission. “Yeah, no, that’s– that’s Keralis’ thing, not mine, the whole conning people out of their stuff thing. Even Bdubs is better than me at–” He cuts himself off, tip of his tongue between his teeth, biting down until he tastes copper.

“…Maybe we could invite Bdubs swimming with us,” says Gem, carefully, after a long moment. He thinks, maybe, she was waiting to see if he’d start crying again. The thought should be humiliating. It is not. “Or caving. Or whatever it is you want to do. I’m sure he’d like to come.”

“S’a reef near here,” is all Tango says, when he finally finds his voice. “Just past the village. Saw it the first night I was here, when I was camping out in one of their houses – it made the whole sea glow…” He trails off, worries at one canine with his bloodied tongue, before blurting, “I could– I could make us all dinner. I’ve been practising that, too. Cooking.”

“Good.” There’s firm approval in Gem’s voice, and Tango thinks maybe he shouldn’t like that as much as he does. He definitely shouldn’t like the kiss she presses to his cheek as much as he does – but if she notices the way his ears pink, she says nothing of it. “I can send him your coordinates, if you like? We could go tomorrow afternoon.”

“You inviting yourself to stay the night?” he grouses, but there’s no heat to his voice, and Gem only laughs at him.

“Are you telling me you don’t have a guest bedroom?” she asks, teasingly. “Tango. Tango. I know you’re a redstoner first and a builder second, but still! Honestly. Even starter bases should really have a guest room. It’s only polite.”

“Of course I’ve got a guest room!” he snaps back, indignant. Finally, he releases her wrist – but only to poke her in the shoulder. She giggles, and sticks her tongue out at him, which only makes him scowl harder. “What do you take me for? I’m not some– some–”

“Some what?” asks Gem, innocently. “Huh? Tango?”

“Well, I’m not gonna insult anyone, now, am I,” he says, and sniffs, decisively. “Because I’m above all that. I’m better than that. The point is, I’ve got a guest room, yeah, sure, you can sleep there, Miss Inviting-herself-over-to-a-man’s-private-house. Costs one diamond a night. And it’s an extra diamond for breakfast in bed.”

“Deal.” Gem yawns, and lets her head rest a little more heavily on his shoulder. Her antlers poke at his cheek, a little. He finds he doesn’t mind. “Two diamonds, because I want breakfast in bed, and then we’ll go swimming tomorrow. With Bdubs.”

“Deal.” If his cheeks are still as pink as the blanket across their laps, then neither of them mention it.