Chapter Text
Grian, when it comes down to it, is many things— a patchwork quilt of stolen code, copied memories, disparate ashes lifted from the last dregs of fire and pressed back into a mold; the facsimile of a Player. Of his own borrowed faults, he cradles many: stubborn persistence, reckless impulsivity, a cruelty born of his own capricious fractals. All gnash their teeth against the speckled woodgrain of Grian’s self-control, a gnawing beast at the distal roots of rotting trees.
With the sun’s tempered ascent limning every raddled board in the wall, what wells up between his gums and teeth now is impatience. Last night’s fall had been snake eyes in a roll of the dice, paid for in the hot, tender pulses at the back of his skull, collected tenfold in the blossom of bruises swallowing his skin beneath the jumper. The warm, giddy buzz thrilling in his chest has begun to cool somewhat, making deferential way for a wash of numb static; blinding, a little stupid— lutulent where he stares blankly at the wall.
Blink; the world falls prey to a hazy fog, twin cotton veils tumbling over his eyes. Blink again; it peels back at the corners, a wince in the early march of morn. Caught between two maligned realities, Grian traces the muzzy halftones where they curve and melt into the floor, and follows each crevice in the wood until his eyes begin to burn.
How can there be so few hours within a day, yet still so many? Each passing moment presents a burr, a nettle itch clawing at the underside of his skin, demanding kinesis, motion— but in the wake of last night’s misadventure, all he has left to give is the molten quiver of his mutinous left wing. Muscle scorches beneath the burgeoning sun, an icy-white strike from halting humerus all the way to the trembling base of his spine. The nerves within it seethe, a conflagration so intense it borders on arctic, glacial; Grian’s upper teeth pierce the tender flesh of his lip in one harsh stroke, choking off the involuntary whine scoring deep inside his throat before it can bubble past his lips.
Instead, he bows, folding forward beneath the weight of fervid, fractured bone. Breathes. In— slow and purposeful. Deep. With herculean force the jag of his lungs smooths out, faltering their fits and starts in a hasty, scrabbled lull before they can begin to betray him. These are misplaced messages, insignificant warnings blaring with sharp impotence; leftover signals still yowling danger. He can bear them for another petty handful of hours. He can.
Caught in the undertow of his own body’s revolt, Grian almost misses it: a rustle, straddling the very edges of sound. An ear-pricking susurrus that projects itself past the wayward hiss of burning undead outside; even the air stills, frozen in a parody of serenity as it wisps through chipped gaps in the wall’s logs. Boxed within the scarlet haze of his wing and his head, Grian angles himself to that murmur of motion, honing every muscle to the tentative scuff of feet on wooden tread. His feathers bristle, breath catching sore and ragged in the back of his throat.
Beyond the confines of his prison: the soft click of a latch. Quiet bootsteps. The ring of aquine crystal.
Pearl.
The turbid churn of her mind strikes him in one swift, belated beat— resonates as a thick, ugly squelch in the Greater Code. Muddied as it is with the last dregs of sleep, Grian can’t paw any meaning from it; it simply rests, a black, bloated boil thrumming in the field of his cognizance, curdling as it pauses from just inside the hall.
Floorboards whine as her weight shifts, a rhythmic back and forth that ignites the morning in a series of thin, operatic shrieks. With the slow, coiling tauten of a prey animal cornered, Grian’s muscles stiffen, threaten to ossify— his vision constricts to the thin strip of air between the door and hardwood flooring. Within that space blisters a stygian shadow, painted in code fragments and the desolate threads of still-fresh memory: I’m not leaving you alone anymore.
Stuffed deep within the recess of his pillowcase behind him, the spider eyes begin to smolder.
Another shrill of wood breaches the threshold as the planks beneath her feet groan, locked beneath deliberate, deliberating pressure. Grian’s blood crystallizes, congeals to ice as the glister of her boots begins to pace—
— past the trajectory of his closed door. Pearl strides away in cold, measured lockstep, cut to the toll-beat of diamond boots ringing out against inelegant hardwood, and with all the rigid precision of a soldier preparing for swift-commencing war.
And Grian is many things, many stolen fault lines and riddled hairline fractures— but at the beating heart of him, measured in each line of caustic code is a raw, distended nerve still bleeding for those he calls home. All at once, the coiled spring of his ribcage shatters, makes a wild leap from his heart to the impossible edge of the door; their last parting was so strained, and he has less than a day before he kills himself— and if there were ever a time for last wishes, it would have to be now.
His lips part before his mind can overtake the action, two paces ahead and already shaping the syllables that will pull this ship back to harbor. “Pearl,” he calls out, pitching his voice just low enough to snake it under the door. “Is that you?”
A startled, peppered spike of adrenaline jabs out from the hall and right into his skull in response; Pearl’s feet pause, infinitesimal in their hesitation, before snapping back on their heel, approaching his door in cautious, mincing steps. Her lanky shadow rolls back to a halt just underneath it, a writhing mass recoiling from the torrent of pale sunshine pouring in from his window. Slowly, in a tone reminiscent of long-past slumber parties, Pearl whispers back: “Ye-e-es?”
Grian’s lungs spasm. He has to— if he can just see her, one last time— “You, uh, you mind comin’ in here for just a second?”
He waits, breathless. For the span of a single, ambered eternity, his oldest friend does not respond.
Then, delicately, the knob turns— a metallic chink— and the door swings open, revealing Pearl in all her early, rumpled glory.
She’s foregone her hoodie, this time— in its stark, burning absence the gilded rays of morning sigh wistfully across her collar, illuminating stray strands in the messy cloud of her unbrushed hair. Like this, the cut of her silhouette shrinks; she huddles at the threshold with shoulders hunched, arms crossed in a shield over her chest. For one shining, calcified moment, the sheer vulnerability in her poise punches Grian’s heart clean out the other side of his sternum.
Her eyes flash— twin burgundy flares squinting him up and down in turns from the darkness. “How’d you know it was me?” she demands.
Below her voice winds a wary crackle, burbling sweetly through the air. Grian blinks, curling his tongue around it; has to clear his throat, drag the words past the bloodied pulse of his head before his hooks disappear in the cloying dance of her reticence. “... You do know you walk different from everybody else, right?”
He settles that morsel of truth on the bedcovers, fanning it out to play in the light. An olive branch, of sorts. Bait, of another. At its core, a begging invitation for what was never said to her the first time: goodbye.
Pearl churns over that, ruddy eyes narrowing to sundogs, a binary orbit around the halo of her cheeks. “Wait, hang on, you knew it was me just because of my footsteps?” The palest flicker of a smile abruptly twines itself across her lips, twitching up by degrees at each corner. “That’s uh, a little creepy, Grian, I’m not gonna lie.”
“Well, I’m not trying to be creepy,” Grian says, punching eager claws into the ancient, playful instinct welling between them— anything for a shred, a single scrap of normalcy. Anything to reinforce that smile. “I just— you just walk weird, that’s all. Anybody could tell it’s you if they were really paying attention.”
“I walk weird?” Pearl echoes, eyebrows snapping up into her hairline. Her spine straightens from its miserable slouch, incredulity scorching the air between them in one bright, ribboned stroke. The curve of her lips climbs by another meagre fraction, tilting and lopsided.“Well, excuse me! I think I walk perfectly fine, thank-you-very-much.”
A selfish, molten glow begins to unfold beneath his skin, veins fluming with it: gilted whispers of the past, the truncated promise of an empty future. “No, no, it’s definitely weird,” he insists, warming to his subject. A laugh, now, a laugh— if he can just get her to laugh— “You get— look, nobody else walks like they’re hunting a character in a horror game, is all I’m saying—”
The thin, sportive lines of Pearl’s face gutter so rapidly they fall back into a mask— one smooth, blank canvas, eerie in its affixion to her flesh. Plastic and cutting, the fragile smile that had tripped along her mouth curls, freezes into a rictus, and the snap of Grian’s jaw as he shuts it explodes in the sudden, pin-drop silence.
Stiff quiescence drapes itself down from the high beams, swaying slow on an invisible breeze as a volley of frost buries its teeth full in the marrow of Grian’s bones. He cringes, grappling the reflexive urge to press himself back against the cabin wall as the nubilous waters of Pearl’s mind begin to swill. Her exposed teeth glint as the light cants, digging grooves into clean enamel; when she speaks, her voice is casual, still plucking at the lilting strings of old banter— but the back of each word is coated in ice.
“So— just to be clear, then, that wasn’t one of your weird little, uh… brain-eating thingies? Telling you who I was, earlier?”
This time Grian does duck his chin in a flinch, eyes darting down to the dizzying display of gold dappling his blankets. Ripples churn as the fabric draws taut, stretching between his tortive fingers. “No, no, I, uh— I’m not. I’m not doing that now.”
As if on cue the hooks wriggle, hooking nauseous claws into the lining of his stomach. Hollow, it gurgles, begs to scrabble its way into Pearl’s head— her heart— and drink, until her code collapses and the universe subsumes what remains of the dust. This ugly, gaping maw at the core of him yawns, endless and black, less a hole and more a pit that scratches, over and over, for a chance to reach out from the darkness and feed until there’s nothing left.
“I promise,” he finishes belatedly, lips numb and buzzing. It is the only one he will ever keep.
Pearl’s heart-searing eyes dart across the sparse circumflexions of his face, studying him, cataloguing. “You sure do promise a lot,” she says, and draws it out, a deadly slink that curves around his shoulders to reveal the pristine contours of a knife. Her nod is iron, and just as sharp. “Alright then, I’ll bite,” she continues, snuggling her shoulder up against the wooden door frame. She leans into it, chin falling to rest against the right side of her collarbone. One eyebrow shifts, clipping shadows into the outline of her nose. “So, what’s up? What’cha want?”
… Surely here, in the bleating tremor of this last scrap of a life left to lose, there’s something still salvageable. Just for today. Just until tonight. In these final hours between his next breath and his last, Grian hesitates, glancing back at the blinding incandescence that spills from his window. His eyes catch on a whorl in the wooden sill around it, tracing a labyrinth all the way to its heart before flicking back up to hers. “Look, Pearl,” he says, and the words trip, stumble, clambering over clumsy, half-bared teeth, “are you— I need your help with something. Can you— do that for me, maybe?”
A budding stormcloud descends over Pearl’s eyes, snaked through with lightning. “Depends on what it is, but sure, go on.” One hand breaks off from its protective cradle, extending with fingers wide open, an invitation outstretched. “Lay it on me, big guy.”
Grian sucks in a deep, shaking breath— and comes up grasping, empty. Every word lodged in his throat, buried like the hilt of a dagger in his trachea; frantic, he fishes for them one by one, rolling them in his mouth until they well with enough force to spit past the porcelain gates of his teeth. “I just— uh—”
Wait. The brewing stand. The sugar.
This, he can use.
Both pieces fall into place with a sharp, staccato snap. “I just need a little help,” he rushes out, faint, breathless, heart hammering a violent tattoo beneath his chest. “To the, uh. Th— the kitchen?”
A beat; Pearl blinks, and the acerbic weight of her caution falters, begins to slip from her braced shoulders with the grace of a loose stole. “The kitchen,” she echoes slowly. Within the syllables gleam a thin wire of curiosity, spinning out from the spool of her bright, gleaming mind as she mulls them over and over.
Eventually: “... What for?”
“Well, let me put it this way,” Grian says, right on cue, and doesn’t bother disguising the sheer, brittle note of humor that threatens to snap his voice like glass, “if I have to go a single second more, cooped up in this empty room, okay, I’m going to— I’m—” He bites the inside of his cheek. Copper wells in the corner of his mouth; just another caustic ember sparking in the ruined battlefield of his body. “I am going to lose my marbles, Pearl,” he says at last, succinct. “All of them. And let me tell you, I’ve never had too many of those in the first place.”
Another guarded beat, punctuated by the brisk leap of Pearl’s eyebrows as they arch. For one long, scrutinizing moment, she says nothing— only studies him, eyes flickering across his face, mapping out the lines there as if to paint each innumerable fault in burning red across his skin. At last, she drawls out, “Yeah, okay. I guess I can see why you’d want outta here. So….” She stops, and the last coils of cinnamon skepticism, wary and pungent, float forward to wreathe around the tender hollow of Grian’s throat. He swallows on reflex, stomach gurgling; her eyes track the motion as the flavour swells, sweeping dust into his too-dry mouth. “Why the kitchen, then?” she asks.
It’s Grian’s turn to falter; hope is a dull swoop in his chest, an invasion, a pestilent fever pillaging the fragile muscles of his heart. He picks each word with care, cut to the phantom tune of Scar’s aureate voice breathing instructions in his ears. One beat, two. “Just— I’unno,” he mutters finally, flinging his gaze out to the section of hall framed diligently by her pale shoulders. No matter the effort, he’ll never emulate Scar’s gilded cadence with perfect accuracy— but he can invert it, coat his own tongue in lead to sell a better story. “I, uh.” Another wince, this one appended with the deliberate brushstrokes of self-conscious chagrin. “I kinda just really wanted, um—” sugar, sugar and a gentle goodnight— “some tea?”
Silence flutters. Grian braces himself between heartbeats for her verdict.
“Wait.” Pearl’s stare is a hook, glittering in the lambent wells of dayspring. “That’s it? All that stuttering and stammering for a little bit of tea? Seriously?”
Grian breathes in sharp, bordering on a hiss. “Look, okay— it’s not like there’s other rooms to go to either, Pearl. I’ve kinda got limited options here. I dunno what your plans for today exactly were, but—”
“Oh, I was actually gonna come and visit you,” Pearl says, mild, “right after I got a spot of breakfast.” Her eyes flash, razor-edged above a fixed, pleasant smile. “‘S just surprising, I guess. You’re not normally in the habit of making my life easier, these days.”
Grian blinks, limbs stiff, tongue a swollen parasite in his mouth. He swallows it down, slips its weight back into his throat to dam up the breath threatening to swoop from his lungs. “Oh,” he says at last, lame. The word tumbles out in a pathetic heap at Pearl’s feet, a bundle of strained vowels wreathed in chagrin. “Well, uh. Guess that works out, then.”
The smile still stitched across her lips stretches wider, revealing a glimpse of bright, pink gums. “My, don’t you look surprised,” she says brightly, leaning down and plucking absently at the hem of her trousers. “What for? I did say I was gonna come back.”
Danger. The klaxon rings through his mind like a clarion bell, and Grian shrinks once again, tightening his grip once more on the blankets. They shudder and compress, threatening to rend the weave. “I— I guess?”
Thin lips, white teeth; Pearl beams at him, far too chipper for the starburst of seething spite that roils out from her. “And I guess I can’t blame you for doubting me,” she says, with all the keen slice of an axe tipped beneath his chin, hovering close and nicking at loose veins. “It’s not like you’ve got the best track record with your own promises, now do you?”
It’s both freeze and flinch, the jolting of his spine; jogged from their torpid rest, the twitch of his wings— an instinctive bristle, the prey-animal urge to threaten, to expand— scorches right through him, razing every last nerve to the smoldering ground. His muscles lock as one, a deer in honeyed headlights braced for impact.
It never comes. Whiplash is a metallic creel, tires screeching protest as the driver makes a different choice; Pearl claps her hands together, stepping forward as the whirlpool fractals of her mind abruptly still, drift down like dense sediment at the bottom of a lake. “Well alrighty, then, let’s get you outta here!” she says, and crosses the room in three hearty strides, eating up the distance between them faster than Grian can blink. “I can get you set up at the dining table.”
Hunted, haunted, Grian stares up at her, a sheer, white canvas in the face of last-minute mercy.
Pearl wiggles her fingers at him. “C’mon now, we don’t got all day. Start gettin’ up!”
The spell shatters. “Right— right, okay,” Grian says, and the words bounce, rebound off the dark inner planes of his mind, crystal shards of dizzying truth lodged deep beneath his sternum. He doesn’t have all day. Just these few paltry hours, an offering held up on beseeching hands to build one last, ramshackle bridge across the fissures yawning wide between them. Just until tonight. “Let me, uh— I’ve gotta—”
The last crumbling dregs of adrenaline boost him sideways in a slow, calculated shuffle, angling his body toward the head of the bed. With cautious, rolling motions, Grian tilts, one hand digging into the mattress for purchase while the other gropes blind for the leather boots Mumbo had left by his bedside just hours earlier.
A low swoop in his gut is his only warning before gravity claws at him, dragging him forward on an invisible tide— his wings. They tip the careful scale of his balance over the mattress’s edge, and Grian sucks in a sharp, involuntary breath as his fingers contract, tendons rubberbanding. A rapid, branching line of condensed heat shrieks through him; the broken arm of his left wing is tugged too harsh, too fast, as Grian finds himself reeling between the last shreds of his stability and yet another tumultuous crash against the floor.
Pearl’s hand forms an abrupt, iron vice around his upper arm, dragging him back as he lurches. “Hey now— hey now,” she says, and the heady thrill of her alarm cleaves past his jaws, laced with sugar and still fizzling. Grian gasps as the bones of his wing grind together in response, a push-and-pull rattle that alights his nerves and cramps his muscles into complex, juddery knots. “Don’t go fallin’ on me now, okay? I don’t wanna have to lug all those feathers down the hall on my lonesome.”
Blooms of ink bruise the corners of his vision; when he shuts his eyes, the veins ribboned behind them pulse scarlet. “Sor— sorry,” he chokes out, then hacks a little laugh: rueful, rough, barking. “Just— uh. Just got— got a little dizzy there, for a second.”
“Yeah, sure mate… happens to the best of us, right?” The air beside him shifts, a brush of warmth branding the very edge of his shoulder as Pearl hesitates. “So…” she says slowly, and between them a cherry-hot stone sinks, hissing symphonic steam into his ears, “where'd you get the shoes from?”
Ice cascades down Grian’s spine in a rapid, soul-wrenching spiral, so swift and with such vicious fervor that the world beneath him tilts sharply to the left. “Uh,” he says intelligently, and snaps his eyes back open, flicking them up to where Pearl stands, guarded, at his side. Veiled by the disheveled muss of her hair, her gaze is hidden— but the angle of her head pins it, unmistakable and unerring, directly to the dirt-encrusted boots.
His lungs jar all the way into his throat. “Mumbo,” Grian pushes out, wheezy and tight, vocal chords shrinking.
“Mumbo,” Pearl repeats. Her voice is flat.
“Yep. Mumbo.” He wavers, worrying a tooth into the soft flesh of his lower lip. “He, uh— he may have gone and visited me last night?”
“And— what, brought you boots?”
Deep within his stomach, a forgotten match strikes without warning. “I asked,” Grian snaps, abandoning his tattered lip in favor of peeling them both back in a snarl. For as limp and worthless as they’ve proven to be, his feathers still punch the air behind him with their bristles, forming a mountain of jagged edges against the pallid gold pillowing their silhouettes.
A beat. Silent reproach outside his own begins to spoil the air, pooling sour beneath his tongue. When Pearl’s head tilts, it’s by a single degree— just enough to split a part in the natural curtain of her hair. Beyond that glittering slit, her eyes are cool: chips of agate embedded in an equally stony face.
Grian flinches.
“... Tango wants to go out today,” he offers at last, terse. Grits his teeth around the sentence, mangles it on his tongue until it forms a noose; within the flimsy confines of his skull, the hooks tangle, a rat-king’s nest of swollen, abscessed impulsion. Only sheer, cataclysmic determination prevents them from slinking forward just so he can drink.
Pearl’s fingers tighten around his arm in a brief, voltaic squeeze. “Touching grass, are we?” she asks sweetly, and turns at last, pinning him to the wall with a single, dubious slant of her eyes.
The subcutaneous tissue trapped underneath her hand begins to crawl. “Sure,” Grian mutters, and drops his gaze, jutting his chin instead at the luminescence founting in from the window. “You could call it that.”
For another thousand small eternities, Pearl says nothing.
Then, without warning, she releases him. Two mincing steps to the left bring her well within the boots’ orbit; without ceremony, Pearl bends and closes the gap, hooking a finger under both their tongues before dragging them up to dangle, precarious, right in front of his nose.
“Well, go on, then,” she says, and the words pour from her mouth with the effluence of summer sunshine, dripping bright and cloying into his lap. Each syllable chars where it sinks into flesh; reddened, blistering, they corrode the skin around his heart, splay out his ribcage in a ragged halo to expose its continuous, stubborn beat. Silly; doesn’t it know this is the crowing finale? Can’t it count down these final ticks, and find them so very, desperately, wanting?
The boots before him jangle pointedly. “Hey, you listening to me? Get’cher shoes on! You’re burnin’ valuable daylight, y’know, unless you want everybody else waking up and drinking our morning tea.”
With absent, mechanical motions, Grian nods— and with both hands outstretched, he accepts.