#seally

The Temple is an opposing thing. He doesn’t remember it being this intimidating before, though he guesses that the circumstances have changed things.

Stalling is what he’s doing, Seawatt recognizes the habits of anxiousness innately, as he checks his inventory one, two, three, four times in just a minute, his hands shaking all the while. 

He’s turning to the stairs, his nerves finally calmed to the point of determination when he hears the sound of chainmail thudding against sandstone behind him. 

Ally looks mad, is the first thing he thinks when Seawatt realizes who exactly is approaching him. He’s the last of the migrators, maybe even the oldest of them, considering how little people he’s seen leave. 

“Ally?” he chokes out, something tight in his throat at the sight of her at this time, when he’s just about to–

“I thought that you were smarter.”

He swears his heart stops at those words. “What?”

“I thought that you weren’t a coward,” Ally spits, and he notes the trembling it takes on, as she takes a step closer. “Why are you leaving?’

“You know why! You know, you know what’s going to happen if we don’t!”

She scoffs at that. “You’re scared? Seawatt, I thought you were better. Where’s the Fighter who’d lie about doing four block jumps with me?” 

“Maybe I’ve just grown up,” Seawatt barely manages to choke out, voice taking on a pleading, desperate tinge to it, something he’d be embarrassed about anywhere else, any other time than this, as he begs her to “Just come with me, you know that you’re not going to make it here, Ally, I can’t–”

“You can't do what?” it interrupts, her eyes narrowed in anger, at what he can’t decipher. “You can’t leave your home? You can’t leave your family? News flash; you’re doing just that! I thought you were better than this. You’re really that eager to leave this layer that you’d believe baseless rumors?”

“We’re going to die, Ally!” he cuts off, his sheer anger pricking tears at the corners of his eyes, and he’ll be damned if that ruins his eyeliner, but that’s not the point– “You didn’t hear the Champion’s scribe when she begged all of us to leave, did you not listen when they told us about the Fighter layer’s soon exile?” 

“And what about your parents, the ones who are unable to parkour, the ones who do not wish to leave? Are we supposed to abandon them like you are doing right now?” she asks him, irrelevant and making him have to swallow down a wordless scream. 

“Would you rather die with them? Would you rather be stuck in a layer turned mausoleum?” he points out, leaving words choked down, their presence overhanging regardless.

Would you rather die without me?

“I’d rather fall surrounded by familiar corpses than that of strangers’ company,” she hisses, passing him another glare, before it’s turning away and deserting him without another word, leaving him no room to retort. 

“Ally–!” he shouts at her back, anger coursing through his veins, teeth gritting at the insolence which it possesses. He gives up on the endeavor soon after, swallowing past another call of its name in favor of doing what he sought out to do in the first place.

The Temple’s course is a thing which he barely defeats, not helped by the doubt which clings to every jump he makes, the only thing which prevents him from turning back being the papers stuffed into the hotbar of his inventory.

Seawatt has to keep his parents’ legacy alive somehow.

He mourns the chainmail as it burns in the lava, the sound of metal melting something he’ll never forget. The resistance potion is bittersweet under his tongue, the feeling of gold against his feet something uncomfortable, unfitting for a player like him.

Seawatt only has to take one look at the foggy skies above him, to the gleaming skyscrapers which tower over the highways, the smell of chlorine and mildew which sticks to every place he roams, before he decides that Ally was right about the Master layer.