#smeefo

chat how we feelin about the boys ??? tanuki joel design from @mellozheist :D

ao3 has yet to send me an invite email so ill be posting this fic here :3 very inspired by 'feral love' by bdoubleds on ao3 !!! i wouldnt say its to the point of a rewrite but i thought the fire metaphor was too good not to try out ,,, absolutely open to criticism, but pls try to keep it polite :D i copied the text str8 from my word doc so the formatting is a little off in some areas for some reason :( word count : 967

              Etho was burning. He was being swallowed by it. Flames licking at every bit of his body, consuming. The red and yellow of his bone marrow was blackening, charring with the outside, crumbling off in pieces.

              Being red was smoldering him alive, and he wanted more. Uncontrollable. The forest fire in him would engulf everything in its path, taking him with it.

              The flame in his chest didn’t start out blue-hot and rising. Episode 1, as he was spawned into the Game, something was gnawing at his upper torso like someone had taken a diamond pick between his pecs and hollowed him out. Then he met Joel in the mines. Playing around, joking about how he was so disappointed. Beside the hole, a small, supine red candle-flame flourished to life.

              Then Joel built him the ‘Relation’ ship. The fire swelled, crackling orange and marigold. Joel’s hand fit perfectly in his as he dragged him along, and so did he himself inside the soulmate-shaped cave in his chest. With Joel above him that night, Etho took to memorizing every mole and freckle on his skin, and all the constellations they linked together to make. Committing to memory very scar and discolouration, and the sandy beaches and crashing, rolling, foamy waves that consisted of them.

              Etho began to fall in love with everything Joel did. With Joel. With the green streak in his bangs, how he stuck out his tongue in concentration while belatedly redying the clump of hair yellow in the Relation after their Joel-enderman caused death. With his little cackle-giggles. With how he softened the ‘th’ in Etho’s name to a ‘f’ as a result of his lisp.

He too, softened around Joel, trusting him so far as to close his eyes as his soulbound would pluck arrows out of his body from the pillagers and smear an herbal ointment stretched with an awkward potion over the openings. Relaxed as he woke in the early mornings to Joel beside him. Thanked his mask for hiding any sort of embarrassing emotion after Joel traced the scar across his one red eye with tender, feather-light fingertips. Not that it did too much for him, as the tips of his pointed ears would flush pink-red occasionally. Traitorous things.

The transparent string of the fishing rod wrapped around Joel as he was tugged up. Unable to clutch, he plummeted.

<Smallishbeans> fell from a high place

<Etho died>               Joel’s eyes had turned to red after they respawned.

“They killed me, Etho. They killed me.”

Red. Red. They were Red.

Yellow. Canary. White-hot.

Joel chased Pearl down, who was clutching his chestplate. He sliced at her with his diamond axe before she died and her items exploded out across the moonlit grass, the blue-teal of the head of his axe shimmering with red.

Red.

“Shouldn’t have messed with us, Pearl! Shouldn’t have messed with us!” Joel cried as he laughed and took his items back.

The others started scrambling and fleeing. Cowards. Etho’s gaze connected with one before they’d left.               ‘You really let him do that?’

Etho’s eyes conveyed a message of their own.

‘You think I can control anything he does?’

Nah. He was just along for the ride. Joel was an unstoppable force. No immoveable object would even slow him. He didn’t let Joel do anything. He simply watched, strapped into the rollercoaster that was his soulmate. The most he could do was throw his arms up and laugh along.

“You do have it, we’ve been- we’ve been told you have it, you just lied through your teeth to us,” manic, frenzied red eyes focused in on Scar as Joel cornered him, diamond axe to his throat, “do you wanna lie to a red-name, Scar?”

Nervous laughs, attempted de-escalation from Grian.

“Oh, you don’t have any sugarcane, huh, Grian?” Etho felt the red curse biting as he walked towards Grian, “No sugarcane?”

He reveled at the laugh and hiss through his teeth he heard Joel make, teeth bared under his mask mirroring the sharp grin of his soulbound’s that he knew was boring into his back. Joel had changed him, or perhaps it was the curse, or both, and he had to tug himself back from slicing at Grian, from watching the crimson flower bloom and blossom and pour out.

Etho had never been red for long before in the Life Games. His series always ended soon after. This, this was different. He was with the infamous Red Joel. He was alive, and the red curse was swirling in his brain, and he’d wake up in the middle of the night, crazed for blood.

The Games tinkered with everyone’s brains, especially when the end of them were close. Everything became more lucid, nothing seemed real. It made people do stupid things. Too stupid.

They burned the ship.

Blue. Perano.

“The ship burns, everything burns! The ship burns, everything burns!” Joel yelled, chanting hysterically as he sprinted across the server, flint and steel in hand as he set fire to anything in his path.

The ship had burned. Everything would burn.

The yellow streak in Joel’s hair was red. Smeared, having been dyed from soaking up the blood of his kills.

Joel screamed, groaning, growling after he’d killed Scott. His red eyes glowed. If Etho looked too long, too hard, he could spot the flames flickering behind them.

“Etho, they trapped it, get back through!” Joel’s voice was shaky for once, not with mania, but with fear. He sputtered incoherently as his hands scrambled, latching onto Etho.

And they laughed. Foreheads pressed together. Laughed.

<Etho> tried to swim in lava

<Smallishbeans> burned to death

The flame in Etho’s chest mixed with the lava, dwindling, flickering out, as did the ones behind Joel’s irises.

After all.