#r.ws

The portal swirls in hues of purple-black, a would-be void. Even ten or so blocks away from the portal frame, you can feel the static electricity on your skin, something stale and bitter coating your tongue. 

Server hopping wasn't particularly pleasant. Especially when you can’t be entirely sure of what or who was waiting on the other side.

If Purpled was lucky – if he was fucking smart – he’d go back home, if he still had one at all.

The antennae on his head twitch, swivel over in your direction even before he turns to face you. His eyes narrow, reflected amethysts in the dim sunlight. There’s a slight part of you that itches to tear your hands into his face and the delicate fluid-flesh of his eyes and scrape, if only to feel capillaries burst into technicolor under your fingers and finally give him a proper scar instead of the smooth skin and phantom pain voiding leaves behind. You could hold gems enclosed in your fingertips just for a few minutes, pretend it meant anything – until Purpled hunted you down and perma-killed you for the slight, at least.

You shove your hands into the pockets of your overalls instead. You’re not here to pick a fight.

The server was dying anyway. The day cycles had grown longer. Crops wilted despite any attempts at coaxing them back to life. Then again, no one on this run-down server had been particularly good at that. 

What was a few moments of pain and spite in the face of knowing you could finally fuck off and leave?

"Quackity," he says, a warning and a question wrapped up into one. He hesitates.

And, you think, there’s something to read in the barest twitches of phantom pains wracking his frame and the dog fur covering him the same way the armor glints, all the soft bits charred and hacked away. There are band-aids with colorful pictures wrapped around his fingers. The juxtaposition almost makes you grin.

You don’t say anything, in the end. Words escape you. You’ve talked, you’ve poked at buttons labelled don’t fucking touch, you came into this server running your mouth and you know you’re good at it, you’re good at talking–

So you stay quiet, just this once, a last – gift, compensation, whatever – to a kid you had never really known in the first place.

And also because you can see the sword from this angle, and you haven’t exactly written ‘getting stabbed’ into your plans for today.

Grass sifts, crumples under your shoes when you take a step back. Twelve blocks away. If he tried to hit you, you’d have a split-second head start on him. 

It probably says something about you, that you know more about how likely Purpled was to stab you than you know about his motivations, or his goddamn personal life. Assuming he had one. You still can’t remember the dog’s name.

The air is heavy with more than just the static electricity and the characteristic mold smell of a decaying server.  Your lungs are burning even though the walk here has been maybe a dozen minutes. In a hypothetical chase, you wouldn’t keep that head start for long. 

Mouth stretched into a facsimile of a grin, you bring up your hands into the air in the universal gesture for calm the fuck down, ignoring the way Purpled narrows his eyes at you. Thirteen blocks. Fourteen. Fifteen. He doesn’t take his eyes off you even as he dips his head and steps into the portal, vanishing in a haze of bright purple particles and the sudden spike of ozone in the air. 

Well. It’s the closest thing to a peaceful goodbye you’d get. You’d take it. 

—

"This is a bad idea."

"Worse than when I-"

"Yes."

"Have you thought about just helping me out."

"Have you thought about being less of an idiot. Those are gonna get stuck."

Illumina stands up, ready to start listing off reasons why this is a good, very well thought out idea actually, then hits his horns on the shelf above him and immediately crumples into a heap over the table again. Fruit pokes his shoulder, mouth curved up into a faint smile. “Why do you even need my help?”

There’s a muffled noise from the table. Illumina tilts his head up. He gives Fruit a look that would probably belong on a wet cat and fiddles with the plastic yak horns in his hands, turning them over. “I can’t tie these back on my own.” He holds up his claws in demonstration. The tips are painted dark yellow, near gleaming in the lantern light. Yellow for the yellow yaks.

Fruit hums. “You could put them on a little band. Y’know, like rabbit ears.”

“No??”

“Why the fuck not?”

“It’s not the same, Fruit.”

“Why are you like this. Just–” he lunges forward, almost knocking over the lantern. Illumina shrieks and scrambles back, falling out of his chair and onto the floor but keeps holding onto his little pieces of plastic anyway.

He stuffs them into his mouth, goes through a series of expressions that Fruit interprets as horror, disgust, and resignation in that order, and stubbornly does not spit it out. It's honestly a bit gross to watch.

"What," he says, "is wrong with you?"

Illumina wisely keeps his mouth shut.

“Oh my god,” Fruit sighs, reaching forward to haul him up, “I’ll help you, just spit that out — not on my hands, Illumina!”

—

“There,” Fruit’s voice is slightly muffled behind the mask covering his face. He wraps the last bit of tape around the base of the plastic yellow horns placed over the existing horns on Illumina’s head, and smooths over a strand of hair. “Dunno how long it’ll hold for but you should be alright.”  

“Thanks.” Illumina leans back carefully, grinning up at him.