Archive of Our Own ^beta

Where can I bury all of my suffering, casualties of poison and pride?

Jimmy’s been here before.

Not here, specifically, not this world. The Hobbit Hole is new, the Sandlands, the Crastle, Renchanting. Most of the people are new, too. He likes them. He wishes he could spend more time with them.

But some of them aren’t new. Some of them he knows.

And Jimmy’s been here before.

He dreams of it, sometimes, and he wonders if that’s where the sensation comes from. It’s just Big B and Martyn he dreams of, at first. He dreams that one of them or the other has him at the wrong end of their sword, or sometimes he has them at the wrong end of his.

Sometimes it’s a bow or an axe instead.

Jimmy always wakes up before the swing.

Sometimes the dreams are more pleasant. Sometimes it’s about lighthearted pranks or something called the Property Police. He’s always tempted to visit Martyn after those but he can’t quite figure out why. Sometimes Grian’s in them in that same, oddly familiar way, but no one else from this place is. Just Grian, Martyn, and Big B.

(Grian’s never showed up in Jimmy’s dreams with a sword, though. TNT, sometimes, but that doesn’t hold the same terror as when his mind conjures Martyn’s fingers on the bowstring.)

“Do you ever feel like,” Jimmy asks Scott one day, when the sun beats down on the flower forest and bees buzz in the breeze, “you’ve done this a hundred times before?”

“What, harvesting sugar cane?” Scott asks, looking up with a laugh. “Yeah, definitely.”

“No,” Jimmy says, gesturing to the bright blue sky in some attempt to encompass what he means. “Like we’ve done all this before. Like none of it matters, and when we’re done we’re just going to wake up and start all over again.”

Scott looks up from the reeds he’s gathering together, a troubled look on his face. “No, not really,” he says. “Are you feeling okay, Jimmy?”

“…Yeah,” he says after too long a beat. “S’just me being silly, I guess.”

Scott stares at him for a moment more, then goes back to his work.

Jimmy doesn’t ask him that question again.

(Sometimes he wonders if Martyn or Big B would give him a different answer.)

~~~

Where is the line between losing everything, and giving it all to say that you’ve tried?

He starts to think of the bad dreams as Before. It feels like they were Before he woke up here, after all.

He doesn’t know much about Before Before. He wonders if those are the good dreams, and doesn’t quite dare to hope.

(But Grian calls him “Timmy” in his dreams one night, and when next Jimmy and Scott cross paths with the Sand People, the real Grian calls him Timmy too, and it feels familiar.)

The world feels like it crashes in a bit when Scar dies the second time and Jimmy can’t quite figure out why.

There are other people in his dreams that night, not from Here, but he knows them.

(Taurtis has a sword to his throat while Salem and Netty flank him, and Jimmy wakes again before the blow.)

~~~

Where can I find some kind of a remedy, a cure for my pain, a rest for my eyes?

One of the first things Jimmy notices while living with Scott is that Scott writes constantly.

He carries a notebook that seems too nice for this world, all thick leather cover and gilt edges with a red ribbon down the middle. It matches the ribbon on the quill he always uses that never seems to use ink.

It definitely didn’t come from Here, that’s obvious enough. It’s not pulled together with the scraps of hide that just barely bind the enchantments of Impulse’s books, and it’s not a scraggly and half-bare chicken feather like the one Scar used to scrawl out his very important 25 Reputation Points . Jimmy doesn’t ask where it’s from, because he has a feeling he’ll only be disappointed to hear of wherever it is that he can’t go.

But he does ask, “What are you writing?”

“Letters,” Scott answers absently. “My friend Fwhip’s setting up a new server with some friends of ours and we’re working out a bit of code.”

Jimmy can’t quite understand how that works—there’s definitely no one named Fwhip here, so he’s not entirely sure how Scott plans on getting all his writing to his friend, wouldn’t a communicator be easier?—but he shrugs it off.

(The others had talked about “logging off” before, which doesn’t really make sense to Jimmy because all he knows is that he sleeps and when he awakes they all come back, but maybe that has something to do with it.)

Scott folds his letter into a paper airplane—(Jimmy’s offended to see him so easily tear out a page from such a nice book)—and launches it into the cloudless sky above and Jimmy watches it until it’s too small to see.

~~~

Where can I pray when nothing means anything, in some kind of cage no god could devise?

(It was an accident, an accident, he hadn’t known it would go off, he hadn’t meant to—)

He is burning, he is falling, he is Red.

Jimmy wakes in his bed, head pounding fit to burst, heart thumping out of his chest, and he hurts.

It was an accident, he types in chat though his fingers feel too big and too numb to hit the keys properly. im so sorry.

Ren and Skizz were going to kill him.

(When Grian, Scar, and Scott show up to check on him, he tries not to think too hard about the red-tinged voice in the back of his head that really wants to kill them back.)

~~~

When I dared to dream of something greater, I flew away into the sky, nothing’s going to fill the space between you and I…

It’s a tense, quiet night. One more night back in the Hobbit Hole before they gather their things in the morning to aid Scar and Grian in luring Dogwarts into the desert.

Jimmy knows as soon as they arrive home that he’s not going to sleep well.

He still tries for a few hours, tossing and turning, before finally forcing himself out of the covers and up the stairs. An omen seems to hang in the air over him, a black harbinger of Death, a choking miasma that makes it hard to breathe.

Scott’s sitting at the bottom of the staircase to his house, notebook out, and he’s clearly familiar enough with Jimmy’s footsteps to recognize them and not go on the defensive at this stage in the game. “You should be sleeping.”

“So should you,” Jimmy shoots back. “Gotta be well-rested to face Dogwarts.”

Scott only snorts, and that’s the most acknowledgment either of them gives to their mutual bad decisions.

Jimmy stands in silence above his friend for a long moment, then, when Scott doesn’t say any more, carefully lowers himself to the grass beside him.

The three green heart charms on Scott’s wrist click gently against each other as he scrawls across the page, sharp contrast to Jimmy’s own single, broken red heart.

“Working on your friend’s server again?” he finally asks when the only sound is this slip of ink on paper. He gives the page a cursory glance, but finds nothing beyond technical jabber that means less than nothing to him.

“Yes,” Scott says. “It’s nearly done now.”

Jimmy swallows and it tastes sour, tastes like mortality. “So that’s where you’re going when you’re done here, huh?” he asks, too lightly.

“Yes,” Scott says again, lifting his quill from the page and contemplating.

Then, as Jimmy watches, the paper begins to write on itself.

“Whoa!” he cries, jumping half out of his skin while Scott has the audacity to laugh at him. “Your book, it—”

Scott’s still chuckling, shaking his head. “You ever hear the others joke ‘Scott Smajor can find you anywhere’?” he asks. “Don’t tell anyone, but it’s not me, it’s the book.”

“I—huh—what?” Jimmy says, still blinking rapidly as the paper continues writing on itself.

“Any page, sent with intent, knows where to find you,” Scott explains. “And the book knows where to find itself. So any page that leaves the book doesn’t really ever leave it.”

“So that’s why you’re tearing stuff out of it all the time!” Jimmy cries triumphantly. “I thought you just really hated books.”

“Why do you care? You’re the one who can’t read,” Scott says loftily, though he breaks into a smirk and a breathy laugh when Jimmy elbows him.

They descend into silence and Scott goes back to his writing. Finally, after a long moment, he speaks again.

“Where are you going? After this?”

It’s weirdly tentative for Scott and Jimmy feels the air shift as the words hang in it. It takes a while for him to bring himself to answer.

“I don’t know,” he finally whispers, thinking of Before, and of Before Before, and wondering if someday soon he’ll wake up in another world with different people and the only time he’ll remember Scott is in his dreams.

Scott clears his throat, but his quill has stilled against the paper. “You could probably join us. We’ve got room. The others wouldn’t mind.” He pauses, then adds, “If you wanted to, that is.”

Jimmy picks at the bright green grass of their home and says again, “I don’t know.”

(I don’t know if I can, is what that sentence really means.)

Scott stays silent, then briefly turns to another section of his notebook and tears out a blank page. “Well, if you change your mind,” he says, handing it to Jimmy. “Write me and I’ll find you. Wherever you are.”

Jimmy stares at the paper for a moment, then folds it into quarters and tucks it into his pocket.

(Then, so softly he’s not sure if Scott even hears, he says, “I’d like that.”)

~~~

And I felt the world grow so much colder as we drifted away over time, living in the past, in our apocalypse state of mind…

The paper’s with him through the battle. It’s moved to the breast pocket of his jacket, under his chestplate, and he can just barely feel the creases of it as he sits in the bunker with Scar and waits for Dogwarts.

It would be fun, almost, him and Scar shooting the breeze while Grian and Scott patrol the perimeter outside, but Jimmy can still feel the aura of death hanging in the air while Dogwarts stalks on the edges of the desert.

(If only he’d known the death he felt would be his own—)

He screams when Scott dies, even though Scott is still green and now he’s only yellow, it’s not like he’s dead—

And then he goes half-deaf from the explosion, arrows are flying, Grian’s dead and gone yellow too—

One arrow would’ve hit home in his chest, but instead plinks off his armor just above where Scott’s paper was laying—

And the next one hits his throat, and there isn’t time to so much as utter a startled gurgle before his life seeps away onto the sandstone beneath.

And

Jimmy

falls

again

and

again

and

again.

~~~

Now can you hear the sounds of a melody, playing a tune to soften our hearts?

Jimmy wakes in a forest, and the first person he sees in this game is Netty and he is the first to die again—

Jimmy wakes in a desert, and the first person he sees in this game is Zee and he is the second to die—

Jimmy wakes in a jungle, and the first person he sees in this game is Martyn and he is the first to die again— (Martyn doesn’t seem to remember but Jimmy doesn’t ask)

Jimmy wakes in the plains, and the first people he sees in this game are Taurtis and Big B and he is the first to die again— (Big B doesn’t remember either but Jimmy still doesn’t ask)

Jimmy wakes in a mesa, and the first person he sees in this game is Salem and he makes it as far as the third to die this time but only by a matter of hours—

Jimmy wakes in a forest, and the first person he sees in this game is Pearl and he hasn’t died yet.

But he’s very close.

He wishes he could stop remembering how many times he’s been so close since That Game, since Scott, since he’d become unable to forget every bloody detail of every game he relives except That Game which remains tantalizingly, frustratingly blurry.

(He remembers all of their names, though, all of their faces, whereas the people who hunt him now hardly even seem to have faces besides Pearl.)

He finds a piece of paper in the breast pocket of his jacket. He can’t remember putting it there—he and Pearl had gotten their entire sugarcane supply stolen within the first week and they hadn’t been able to get their hands on more and as people start going red they’re going to be really, really screwed soon without any decent enchantments.

Write me and I’ll find you, comes the faintest hint of a whisper, and for a moment it sounds like Scott. Wherever you are.

He sits in the middle of his barebones bedroom (no sense decorating when he might be dead tomorrow) and unfolds the paper and it’s almost covered in writing.

Hey Jimmy. Just wanted to see how you were doing.

Is everything okay? Where are you these days?

The book’s not working right, I can’t track your paper.

Are you answering me? It’s not showing up.

Jimmy?

This is wrong, it shouldn’t be happening, the book always knows where to find itself

I can’t fix it

I’m sorry I broke my promise

I won’t write anymore. Just in case you need space to write me back. I won’t risk running out of room.

I hope you’re okay, wherever you are.

Bye Jimmy

Jimmy sits, and blinks, and thinks of a lush hobbit hole and his first clear memories of life in this horrible, endless death loop.

Out of whimsy, not quite knowing why, he digs out a quill.

I miss you, he writes.

(Like the words really would find their way back to Scott somehow.)

~~~

We can move on past all of the memories, the lapses in faith that time will impart…

“You have to go—you’re still green, you can still win this, I can slow them down—” Jimmy pants as they hurtle through the swamp as fast as the mucky terrain will let them. The worldborder shimmers up ahead and that means they’re close to the bunker, close close close, but he’s red and he wants to stand and fight—

(He doesn’t want to be the first to die again—)

“Don’t be stupid,” Pearl hisses back at him. “I’ve got the lives to spare, I’ll slow them down.”

(It was only by chance they’d allied, seeing each other first and sticking together ever since. It was the same way he’d ended up with Scott.)

Nameless voices shout after them, baying for blood.

(He’s going to be the first to die again. Maybe he does want to be. Maybe the next game will be kinder to him.)

(Probably not.)

They’re nearly at the worldborder, and Jimmy looks up at it, scanning for a landmark—

And there’s a deafening crash, not unlike the TNT in the Red Desert— (his ears had still been ringing from that for the entire next game, he’d swear)— and the world caves in on them.

Or at least the worldborder does.

Jimmy looks at Pearl and Pearl looks at Jimmy.

And Jimmy looks at Scott, standing on the mountain that had once been outside the worldborder in full enchanted armor—(not even diamond, bloody netherite, he didn’t think there were enough ancient debris in a single world to make a full suit of that, not that he’d ever gone looking—)

“What?” Pearl says eloquently.

“Didn’t you hear?” Scott says, with a lilting tilt to his voice, as if he wasn’t standing there looking like some sort of god. “Scott Smajor can find you anywhere.”

Jimmy runs and Pearl follows and the baying for blood dies down in their ears.

(His one red charm and her three green fall to the depths of the swampy muck and their bracelets unravel themselves somewhere at the edge of the world.)

(He wonders why he’d waited so long to think of the paper.)

He hits the line of the old worldborder and promptly blacks out.

~~~

Take me to places beyond our biosphere, into the unknown where we could reside…

Jimmy feels like he’s falling again but he never seems to hit the bottom. When he wakes, his head is killing him.

He’s in a white bed in a white room with a dark ceiling that is, quite simply… way, way too nice to exist. There’s a tall clock to the side, decoratively impractical but still making itself useful by telling him it’s almost midnight.

“Pearl?” he rasps, because the last thing he remembers is the two of them running and he supposed he must have died but he doesn’t remember ever waking up in a new game like this. A place like this was better suited to Evo than any sort of practical shelter—

Evo—

Evo!

“Evo,” he says aloud, and despite the dysfunction of his vocal cords the word tastes sweet and familiar on his tongue. It’s hard to remember, still blurry, but it’s there and familiar, he remembers so much with Martyn and Big B and Pearl and Grian—

He promptly starts coughing and his thoughts are quickly displaced by the amount of effort it’s taking to breathe.

There’s a swift padding of feet up the staircase and even though Jimmy can barely even see straight he gratefully accepts the glass of water being pressed into his hands. Half of him thinks it’s poisoned or just a distraction for the next knife in the back but he can’t quite bring himself to care.

He finally looks up and focuses and he sees Scott.

And he’s Scott as he’d been in the earliest days of That Game, too—armorless, casual attire, the entire air of him relaxed and bereft of the tension that had started building the moment Scar went red. Jimmy blinks and for a moment his vision crosses, seeing full armor and a trident in one hand and Scott’s stupid magic book in the other as he stood atop that hill beyond the worldborder.

Write me and I’ll find you. Wherever you are.

“Hey,” says Scott, and he hardly looks godlike now as he’s crouched beside Jimmy’s bed.

“Hey,” Jimmy echoes—then, because he can’t quite reconcile the two pictures, he blurts, “Where’s the netherite?”

Scott chuckles, then says, “It’s a brand new server, I think everyone else would be a bit upset to see me strutting about in enchanted netherite,” he says. Softer, he adds, “I wasn’t sure where you were gonna be so I came prepared. Stopped off at an old server first to gear up.”

“Oh,” says Jimmy. “Thanks.” He peers around, suddenly far more interested, then says, “This is the server, then? The one you were working on with…” He trails off, wracking his head for a moment before triumphantly finishing, “Fwhip!”

“The one and only,” Scott says. “This is Empires.” He pauses. “Well, we don’t really have empires yet per se, but we’ll get there.”

Jimmy blinks, manages an eloquent “Oh,” again, and can’t seem to find anything else. This was a proper server, then. Like Evo. Not like the games he’d been stuck in. A server where things mattered.

“You can stay, if you want,” Scott says. “Pearl’s going to. She didn’t black out like you did so we’ve talked a little. She doesn’t really know what’s going on but she’s glad to be out of… Third Life two-point-oh or whatever you guys were stuck in.”

“Third Life?” Jimmy asks.

“That’s what we’ve been calling Grian’s game, yeah.”

Grian. “Oh. I should probably talk to him,” Jimmy says. Grian had been his friend, once, his ally in That Game—Third Life—but even before that, he’d been—

His admin.

“Yeah,” says Scott. “I was planning on talking to Xisuma as soon as you woke up.” At Jimmy’s puzzled look, he adds, “That’s Grian’s admin. Going to talk to him because Grian likes to ignore texts.”

“Oh,” Jimmy says again. (That does sound like something Grian would do, now that he thinks of it.)

A long silence drags out. “Anyway,” Scott says, glancing away. “You can stay here—at my house, I mean—until you’re back on your feet, and then you can stay on Empires with us or just… wherever you want to go from there, I guess.”

Jimmy doesn’t answer.

(Where else was there to go, really?)

~~~

Find me in winter when all the paths are clear, in cities of ash we’re healing in time…

“What took you so long?” Scott’s voice sounds vaguely accusatory and Jimmy can’t tell if it’s supposed to or not. “To write me?”

Jimmy shrugs. “Just didn’t think of it,” he says.

“For four weeks?” Scott asks.

(Jimmy’s pretty sure it was a lot longer than that. Six games’ worth, to be precise.)

“Hey,” says Pearl. “If we’ve really been stuck cycling through games since the end of Evo like Jimmy thinks, whatever happened messed with our heads pretty good. I don’t remember anything except the world you pulled us out of, Scott, it’s not a stretch to think Jimmy actually just didn’t think of it.”

Scott huffs a little and checks his communicator (it says Xisumavoid has joined the game but has no response from Grian) then shoves it in his pocket and pulls out his book. ANSWER YOUR TEXTS GRIAN is hastily scrawled out and folded into a paper airplane.

“I’ve never had to wait for someone to answer me to track the page,” Scott says absently. “Oh, huh, he’s in their old Season Six? Weird.”

(Not long after, ANSWER YOUR TEXTS GRIAN appears in a perfect copy on the next page, followed by You are so DRAMATIC.)

It’s not exactly a short walk to spawn (Jimmy realizes that Scott and Pearl must have carried his unconscious body the entire way to Scott’s house, and absently hopes they’d had some help) but they arrive before too long. Fwhip’s already there (he and Jimmy had spoken briefly just to officially extend Scott’s offer to stay, but the conversation hadn’t really been long enough for Jimmy to form an opinion on him yet). Joel’s there too, with the woman who’d introduced herself as his wife Lizzie, leaving the strange, green set of armor standing across from them to be Xisumavoid.

“I was under the impression Grian would be here…?” Fwhip ventures once the necessary introductions have been passed around.

“Grian’s not on Hermitcraft at the moment,” Xisumavoid explains.

“Yeah, I know, I’m talking to him,” Scott says, nose buried in his book. “He probably thinks I won’t notice he’s sulking.” Unceremoniously, he shoves the book at Pearl. “Your turn, he’s being especially obnoxious today.”

Pearl gives a wide grin, then writes with a flourish, Griba, get your butt over here, it’s been forever and you’re making Jimmy cry. -Pearl

“Hey!” Jimmy cries, wrestling the quill from her and sending ink splattering across the page. I AM NOT CRYING , he hurriedly writes.

Grian doesn’t answer—not via the paper, that is. Xisumavoid’s communicator buzzes a moment later. “Ah, there he is,” Hermitcraft’s admin says with a chuckle. “He’ll be here in a minute.”

Less than five minutes later, Grian joined the game. He comes stumbling out of the jungle’s underbrush a moment later, his hair askew and jumper rumpled.

And it’s only then, after everything, that Jimmy truly realizes how much those games had messed with their heads.

Because Grian should have had this look on his face last time they saw each other.

He stands frozen on the edge of the clearing, his eyes wide as they dart between Pearl and Jimmy, his throat plainly working to form words. “You were real,” he finally chokes out. “You were—oh, gods, Jimmy, you were all really there—you’re alive—”

Grian surges forward and wraps around him (part of Jimmy thinks that Grian maybe wasn’t always so affectionate but he can’t complain because now it all makes sense) and a moment later Pearl squeezes her way into the hug and even if he can’t remember everything Jimmy suddenly feels like he’s home.

The three who had escaped the curse of Evo stand together and breathe and it’s only a moment in the grand scheme of things, there’s so much left to do, so many others left to save but it’s a start.

They pull away, finally, both Grian’s and Pearl’s eyes are shining and hell, Jimmy’s probably are too as he casts a look over at Scott and mouths a Thank you.

Because a start is a start.

(And they’d figure it out from here.)