Chapter Text
As yet another anarchic season of Lifesteal has come to a close, many people —like you, my dear reader— have come to wonder about just what happens to the server members during the off time between seasons.
Do they simply turn off their bodies and go into a month long coma to rest and prepare their aching limbs for the next season? Or do they go somewhere else, far, far away into another dimension away from the Lifesteal server to lick their wounds and finally award themselves the well-needed rest that their bodies were owed?
Or maybe, just maybe, do they just cease to exist altogether? Do they simply just explode into pixels the second the server closes, only to reform again once the next season starts?
Well, my dear reader, the real answer is all of the above.
In all truthfulness, the server members are free to do whatever they want in their off time between seasons. Want to bend time and space to travel to another dimension made up of solely sunshine and rainbows? Go for it! That’s what Spepticle prefers to do. Want to be like Woogie and roam around the icy tundras of the arctic as a polar bear for a month straight? You do you. Just make sure to remember to switch back into human form before you log back onto Lifesteal.
Or, you could even be like Ashswag at the end of Season 4, filled to the brim with so much pent-up anger and grief from the season that he just exploded into a million black-and-purple pixels the second the server ended (and the fact that he literally splinched his body between worlds to use it as a hacking device had definitely played a part in his demise, too). The man had simply glitched himself out of reality until Parrot (who had sent himself on a vacation to Bora Bora to eat mangos and paddle around in lagoons in peace) had taken notice and had wrangled the shattered pieces of his soul back together, just in time so that the man could start the next season.
Now that had been an interesting process. Parrot had unwillingly pulled himself away from his sunny tropical island to dimension hop a couple times in order to gather the people he needed to reform Ash’s soul; Reddoons (because recipe for reforming a shattered soul included “the breath of a soul-tied partner”, and, well, Parrot had figured that the closest thing Ash had to one of those was whatever twisted romantic relations he had harbored with Reddoons), Spoke (because soul-mending is a very complicated process that only an expert hacker like Spoke could twist the laws of mortality around to do), and MrCube (to design and build the soul-reforming machine, of course).
Parrot had considered getting Branzy to do Cube’s task for a solid five seconds before realizing that getting Branzy involved would mean also getting ClownPierce involved, and, well…
Nobody liked to disturb ClownPierce, even in the off-season.
Like the stupidly overpowered overachiever that he was, Clown was one of the only Lifestealers who opted to spend their free time training (the other was Leowook, but even he didn’t do it for the entire break). It had become a tradition for him to hit up the PVPLegacy dimension the second a Lifesteal server closed to sharpen his already extremely sharp (and pokey) PVP skills, which really set some of his fellow server members on edge.
I mean, what type of absolute maniac would choose to spend his one month of peace every year or so training??? The guy was an absolute psychopath, who apparently also trained with other absolute psychopaths by the names of Doly and Rasplin.
But not everyone on Lifesteal was a raging lunatic all twelve months of the year. Sometimes, just sometimes, a month or so off the trauma-inducing anarchy server could do wonders to the healths of the madmen (and women) the server created.
Just as it did at the end of Season 5 to a certain ex-god and ex-businessman.
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As soon as the void had sucked in the last living server member, the server closed and as per usual, all of the Lifestealers were immediately teleported into a temporary holding world. But unlike the past few seasons, where Parrot had owned the server (and had at least had sensibility to teleport the members to somewhere relatively comfortable to ease the combined side effects of void jumping and teleportation), Spoke had absolutely zero qualms about the type of dimension he transported the group into.
So he just dumped them all into the middle of a zero-gravity galaxy and called it a day.
Which really didn’t help anyone deal with the side effects of dying by the void, because, really, falling into the void might just be one of the most painful things a player could experience. Compared to all the traps the Lifesteal members had made and pulled over all the seasons, like a killer theme park, TNT, withers, or even just straight up ambushes, void traps were notoriously known to be the most physically and psychologically damaging of them all. It made sense, as they were also notoriously one of the hardest types of traps one could attempt to make and lure someone into, but the payout in the end made it all worth the labor.
No matter how much armor they were wearing, or how many apples and potions they had on them, when a player fell into the void, a couple things would happen simultaneously as they lost altitude to the gaping black hole.
All of which were sure to lead them to a horrible, painful death.
First, the second the player hit bedrock level, the temperature would immediately drop to far below freezing. Unlike the scorching nether, which was Minecraft’s version of hell, the void was cold and unforgiving, unable to sustain life for more than half a minute or so at max if the player was properly prepared (and it wasn’t as if anyone was especially keen on taking a vacation down there, anyway).
Then, as the player’s body would begin to suffer the side effects of hypothermia just a mere few seconds after dropping below bedrock level, the void would start to claw at and rip apart at their soul. After that came insanity, where the magnetic force below would start to drive their mortal mind crazy, along with mutilation, in which the void would start to tear apart their inner organs and limbs. It would claw at their insides, ripping at their intestines and unraveling strings of heart and brain, a process scarily similar to ancient Egyptian embalming.
Except that the mummy was alive.
The process would end fatally, with the gaping monster of chaos below completely tearing the soul out of the body before it was annihilated, just so it could be sent back up to the overworld to respawn again.
It was an absolutely harrowing process that would leave the player mentally and physically incapacitated for days after if they were thrown into the claws of Chaos by surprise, drifting in and out of consciousness as they tiptoed the tightrope of insanity. Only the very strongest would completely recover from a trip to the void, and even then they would never truly be the same again until the server closed.
Knowing the excruciating anguish of the process, every time all of the Lifestealers jumped into the void together to end the season, someone would always brew an insanely strong painkiller potion beforehand to help their bodies withstand the pain. Because there was no need for their soul to respawn back above if the server was ending, the potion more or less completely shut down a player’s nerve and sensory systems before they even hit bedrock, making their brain unable to feel the effects of void-dropping.
It was like anesthesia in a way, except that it was a lot more dangerous. A single drop too much could deal fatal consequences to a player, and could leave them incapacitated for an unknown extended period of time even after the void drop.
But it didn’t come without its side effects. Of course it couldn’t, as such a powerful potion couldn’t just completely shut down a person’s body without leaving some negative traces of itself behind. When the players woke back up in whatever world Parrot (or now, Spoke) had teleported them into, they would all immediately be hit with a wave of pain and nausea for an amount of time that would be determined by the health of the person.
Usually, the side effects were pretty manageable and caused minimal damage and pain to the server members that were at least in decent bodily and mental condition. At max, they would go through the same amount of pain amounting to a quarter of the explosion of a single block of TNT for only fifteen seconds or so, so it really wasn’t that horrible compared to some of the other horrors that some of them had gone through during the actual season.
It wasn’t perfect, admittedly, but it was at least painless. Such a potion could only be brewed through the Lifesteal Admin account to prevent players from using it during the season (because of the horrible side effects after. If a player took it in the middle of the season, it would keep killing them on the spot as they respawned and respawned over again until they were banned, because they were respawned on the same Lifesteal server).
All in all, the potion basically killed your soul off the server, and unless it was transported to another dimension, it would just keep trying to kill you over and over again until it did (getting rid of all of one’s hearts in the process).
But in that short span of time, they would be walking the edge of insanity. It wasn’t impossible to pull someone back if they had fallen over the wrong edge (like Ashswag), but it was extremely difficult, and something everyone desperately wanted to avoid.
After all, insanity was an indescribable pain far worse than anything any of their human imaginations could imagine. Insanity was a state of being far beyond the comprehension of a stable mind, and something that couldn’t even be remembered after experiencing. Because of the complexities of the human mind and its bare nature to protect the being it inhabited, when someone was pulled back from the land of insanity, their mind would erase all memory of the hell they had been through to protect the wellbeing of their mental state.
Not even Ashswag, a bit less human than the rest of them, could even describe his memory of the land beyond comprehension. Whenever he tried, all that he could come up with was a picture of static, with a bit of red gradient tinting the background. No matter how hard he tried, how far back he dug into his memory, he always came back with nothing. No memory of his fall, no recollection of his time spent insane.
All he knew was that it was something so horrible no amount of physical pain could ever match up to, and something that he was lucky to have survived.
So that was why Parrot had always teleported his server members into a comfortable world, one made up of fluffy cotton-candy clouds and gentle sunlight to ease them through the initial pain of the first minute after waking up. He did it all to make sure that none of his dear Lifestealers would be lost over the edge, so that nobody had to bear the mental anguish of losing themself to Chaos.
His success rate was about 26/27.
Ash had never quite gotten used to the short window of pain no matter how many times he went through it, as the side effects were far more amplified for him because of his notoriously bad health and high ping.
This time around, it wasn’t much better than the last.
At the end of Season 5, Ash had been one of the very first members to down the potion and jump into the void, so eager to get out of that hell of a Lifesteal server that he hadn’t even realized that he had shattered the glass of the potion bottle against his own skin. Blood began to ooze from the cuts, but it didn’t end up mattering much, though, when the effects of the potion began to kick in a few moments later and he began to lose feeling of the pain, the searing red-hot flames licking up his arm slowly being extinguished into numbness.
Then he let himself fall.
He let out a sigh as he fell below the bedrock, and his last memory before losing consciousness was the sight of his warm breath floating up in the void, the last cloudy wisp of his lifeline being lost to chaos.
Then the world went to static.
########
Agony.
Anguish.
Ache.
The world swam in Ash’s eyes as his eyelids fluttered open, his brain working overtime to try to make sense of the pictures his eyes were taking in. Bits and bobs of black, white, and neon colors he could not pinpoint twirled and danced in his sight like a troupe of killer ballerinas twirling around disco ribbon sticks, which was honestly the only image his useless brain could come up with in the moment.
Nothing he was seeing made sense. Was he hallucinating? He sure hoped not. Hallucinations were one of the first symptoms of insanity.
Blinking through the pain, Ash squeezed his eyes shut and tried again, which really wasn’t easy to do through the continuous waves of increasing pain coursing through his body. Nevertheless, he brute forced his eyelids open, and just before the tears in his eyes completely blocked out his vision again, he managed to make out the outlines of a blurry figure drifting across his line of sight. He squinted, trying to put a name to the person, but was knocked out by a massive migraine blazing across his skull before he could do so.
His head lolled backwards as scalding hands of lava gripped his neck and chest, sending bursts of fire and magma shooting up and down the entire length of his body. It felt as if he was being burned alive, his beating heart being engulfed in the thirsty flames of a funeral pyre as his skin melted off of his flesh in dripping pools of melted pennies, hissing and fizzing as they burned into oblivion.
It was excruciating, the physical pain of the potion’s side effects, but he knew that it was nothing compared to the mental anguish that was sure to arrive soon. Knowing that he didn’t have much time before he would have to start battling the swords of Chaos in his own mind, the man gritted his teeth and tried to think through the smoke clouding over his mind.
Fat, warm tears began to waterfall down his face as he mentally prepared himself for the torture that was to come, wishing over and over again for the pain to just stop. Salty tears and oozing blood stained dark copper skin and cracked lips as the man fought with everything he had against the suffocating tendrils of Chaos, like a pirate ship trying to stay afloat against the stormy sea of the Kraken.
He cried out as burning flames of anguish licked up the inside of his skeleton and wrapped around his ribcage, setting his heart on fire as his body writhed around in the anti-gravity world. His brain had no perception of time, so he could only hope and wish with all of his might that his suffering would soon be over. But he immediately lost that train of thought when his body was hit with a wave of nausea, signaling the beginning of the mental side of his battle. The zero gravity wasn’t helping, either, as the unfamiliar floating sensation taking control of his body was only causing more trouble.
After an entire season of constantly wearing netherite armor and yielding heavy weapons, there was no way anyone’s body would be accustomed to zero gravity, and especially not Ashswag’s. That was probably another one of the many things Spoke overlooked while trying to find a dimension to transport his server members into, the fact that absolutely none of their bodies would be even remotely accustomed to such a universe.
Although most of the stronger server members who kept their bodies in good shape during the season (mostly the good fighters and builders) would probably get used to the effects of zero gravity relatively quickly, anyone whose body wasn’t decently healthy would be in store for an additional layer of massive discomfort.
Ash knew that it was his fault for not keeping himself in good health during the season, as that would have definitely helped squelch the intensity of the moment, but it just simply wasn’t in his nature to maintain a healthy body. The man had literally turned his body into a cross-dimensional hacking device during S4 (and had promptly destroyed his very own essence the second the season had ended), and had spent the entirety of Season 5 either extremely malnourished or thriving with power he could not control, so it wasn’t like he had even tried to even care about his health.
And now he was paying the price for his actions. Now he was feeling the consequences of riding his highest highs and lowest lows without an in between, and he was hating it.
He felt himself slipping, his mind inching dangerously close to the edge of insanity that he had tumbled over last time he was in this position. Desperately using the last few drops of his sanity to hold himself together, the man tried to open his eyes again to look for something to tether himself and his mind to consciousness forever.
But his eyelids wouldn’t open, and his mind began to slip faster and faster towards that cliff side.
His hands shot out in front of him, wild limbs and fingers flailing around for something solid to grab onto to tether himself to the real world, looking for anything to stabilize himself with.
But he found nothing. His hands felt nothing but cold, dark nothingness in front of him, something slightly akin to the darkness that was threatening to devour his mind.
His body felt cold, cold as if all of the blood in his limbs had frozen solid and had been turned into ice. A certain feeling of numbness had started to take over his body and was slowly oozing its way into his mind, in a way that worked to destroy his ability to feel anything other than pain all together.
He was surely hyperventilating by now, choking on his own tears and saliva, writhing around in agony as his consciousness was slipping away from him, away into a place where he had sworn to himself that he would never go again.
He could only watch in fear as his own life began to slip from his very own fingertips, that glowing golden orb of his heart starting to drop out of his shaking hands.
Please, no! Ashswag, you can’t go there again. Please Ash, not agai-
Just as his foot began to slip over the crumbling cliff side, an arm around his waist and a warm presence against his back tied a rope around his mind and violently flung him backwards away from the edge.
“Stay with me, Ash.”
Suddenly, like a ball of fire being dropped in a pool of ice, his back and waist burned the heat of a thousand fires. The feeling of someone else touching his ice-cold skin (even through his suit) felt like the sudden burn of boiling water against human flesh, making him flinch and writhe against the flames. It was painful no doubt, but a different type of pain from the touch of the void.
For while the grasp of Chaos was stinging and prickly, this type of pain was grounding and slightly comfortable in a way, as if it wanted to help him. As it began to take over more and more parts of his body, fighting against the dark anguish that the void had slathered over his skin, Ash felt himself regaining back his consciousness, the consciousness that was no longer teetering on the edge of his fingertips.
Through the burning pain, he could feel himself regaining feeling in the areas where someone was pressed up against his suit. It was first his back, as the life essence of whoever it was soaked into his skin through his clothing, and then his waist, where the arm wrapped around it radiated life into his writhing body. He sobbed at the feeling of someone else’s warmth cutting through his glacial numbness, and wildly clawed at the arm around his waist for reassurance that he would make it through in one piece.
He needed this to keep him sane, needed something or someone to permanently tie him down to reality, to promise to him that he wouldn’t lose himself again.
“You can fight it, both you and I know this. You know how powerful you are, so fight it and stay with me.”
Oh, so this was Reddoons.
A dry sob escaped Ash’s lips when his brain processed the identity of the person behind him, the one and only source of life keeping his mind and body from tumbling over the edge. He tried to speak, but could only choke out another sob as a pair of lips brushed the shell of his right ear and whispered in words that he could not understand in his current state, but comprehended all the same.
Despite everything, I want you here, with me.
He and Reddoons had not exactly been…friendly, per say, during the season (apart from joining a common cause to literally prevent spawn from turning into pure void), but honestly when had they ever been? Ash couldn’t even remember the last time they had actually been teammates without either of them being a spy or a traitor.
It wasn’t as if they tried to always be on opposing sides of conflict, but the seasons just always seemed to play out in a way that favored the two of them being enemies. Red would kill Ash, Ash would kill Red, Red would get revenge, Ash would become a god, yadda yadda, you know the drill. Just the norm.
It wasn’t like the two of them had a rockier history than, DualityDuo, per say, (as they had never really gotten the chance to betray each other because they had never been by each other’s sides for long enough to do so), but that didn’t mean that they didn’t have a tangle of underlying issues lying in the undergrowth of their barely entwined lives.
It was that snarl and coil of poisonous vines that curled themselves around the basis of their relationship and dictated the nature of it, the nature in which the two of them loved each other. It was the type of twisted love that sent them piercing sword blades through each other's rib cages and arrows into the other's heart, the type of love that made Red wear Ash’s stolen heart like a medal as he paraded it around the server with pride.
It was the type of love that made them run to each other no matter their individual allegiances, the type of bloody, mangled love that rendered the two of them unable to truly hate each other no matter how many times they single handedly wretched the lifeline out of each other.
It was just their sick, twisted way of loving each other. Taking each other’s hearts and then ripping them out, only to shove them back into each other's rib cage when time was up.
After all, how could two half-mad people harbor an uncrazed relationship? How would any relationship with origins stemming from the anarchic Lifesteal be even remotely healthy?
And that was okay with Ash. He didn’t need a healthy relationship, he didn’t even want one. Didn’t even try for one.
All he wanted was Reddoons. He didn’t need him, normally, but wanted him. Not his affection, not his allegiance, not even his presence, but his life.
But right now, he needed the other man’s life source to save himself. He usually hated relying on other people for protection or safety, as he could very well defend himself against another player with minimal strain, but against Chaos?
No. He couldn’t fight Chaos on his own. Chaos was dark and unforgiving, an immortal entity that feasted on the souls and minds of the living.
He had given into its sinister pull one time, and swore to never to do ever again for as long as he lived.
“Red-“ Ash forced out through gritted teeth, his voice coming out scratchy and pained from his anguish. He wasn’t even sure if the other man had heard him, but figured that he had as the arm wrapped around his waist moved up his chest to grip at his jaw and turn it to the side.
A warm breath hit his cheek as calloused fingers dug into his skin, the touch burning against frozen copper. He wasn’t sure if Red could actually feel how cold his skin was, or if the coldness was simply just his mind playing tricks on him, but it all didn’t matter in the end as the biting freeze began to recede more and more every time Red touched him.
“Mhm…” Red’s low mummer filtered through his ringing ears, cutting through the static clouding over his mind as the hand on his jaw dropped down to loosen his tie.
“I never understood why you insisted on wearing your tie so tight,” the red-haired man mumbled, “it’s just cutting off your oxygen flow right now.” Quick, nimble fingers gripped and pulled at the knot at the base of Ash’s neck, taking a few seconds to loosen and free the black cloth from around his neck, letting the untied fabric hang down his chest.
Through his sweat-soaked undershirt, Ash could feel Red’s hands moving again to shove the shoulders of his purple suit jacket down his back, pressing his shoulder blades and elbows together behind him to yank it off his body. A sigh of relief escaped his lips as his limbs were freed from the repressing piece of clothing (that was definitely not helping him regain his sense of feeling in his upper body), and his mind began to clear up a bit as a wave of cool air hit his back.
“Are you undressing me? C'mon Red, you couldn’t even wait until we were alone?” he muttered, mustering up a small smirk to flash at the other man.
Red scoffed and took off his sunglasses to roll his eyes at the other man. “Of course the only thing you say to me while I’m literally saving your life here is a crude joke. Shut up and help me help you.”
“Mm…no,” the ravenette muttered back, but let himself be manhandled into a position that did wonders to his throbbing skull. He let out a sigh as a gentle hand brought the back of his head down against a solid chest, pressed close enough so that Ash could hear a thumping heartbeat in his right ear.
It was oddly soothing in a way, but just as he thought things were starting to look up for him, a bolt of pain shot up his spine and nearly sent him unconscious. He jerked up in Red’s grip, nearly smacking the top of his head into the other man’s chin as he trembled in agony, using the last remaining bit of both his mental and physical strength to keep himself from being pulled into the abyss again.
“Red- I’m gonna pass ou-“
“If you pass out now, you’re not going to wake up, Ash. Stay with me for a couple more seconds, please!” Reddoon’s voice pitched up a couple octaves in alarm, panickingly doing everything he could to keep the other man awake. Ash’s head was harshly pushed back against the redhead’s chest (heartbeat beating a lot faster this time around) with a hand tightly splayed out against his cheek, Red’s thumb harshly digging into the underside of his jaw to keep his neck in place. The man’s other arm tightly wound itself around Ash’s midsection as his two legs were suddenly secured within the twist of the other man’s, effectively pressing him completely against Red’s figure.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ashswag wondered how Red had known exactly what to do in that type of situation. Was it common knowledge? Did Reddoons just know it, somehow? Did he look it up somewhere beforehand, scared that it would be needed one day?
He’d need to ask him sometime. Sometime that was not right now.
Whatever it was, Ash was eternally grateful for Reddoon’s quick thinking as the pain in his system began to recede—partially from the effects of anti-gravity being canceled out from being pressed against a solid form—and the mind-numbing agony plaguing his body started to simmer away. He shivered and shook the rest of the agony away in Red’s arms, trying to focus on the warmth of the other man’s body against his cold skin as he rode out the last few seconds of anguish.
It was horrible, a type of pain that he wouldn’t even wish upon his worst enemies, but in the end Ash had made it through sane and alive. Later, he would look back on it and pride himself for being able to survive such a thing after failing the first time, and also bash himself for letting his body fall into such poor health prior to the server closing.
But deep down, he knew that it was his poor mental health that had caused him this much pain. When he wasn’t actively trying to stop the world from turning into void, furiously participating in server politics, bribing Wemmbu for his life, or becoming a raging capitalist, all Ashswag had done was wallow down in his solidarity pain. The only real thing driving him forward at the end had been the PB&J and its mission to end the server peacefully, but at that point it had been too late.
By the time he was actively working in the PB&J, his mental state had taken such a plunge that he had only been a shell of the man he had once been in The Foundation. He had been drained to the core on the inside, like a ghost with no life essence left to give, no life essence left to live for.
He had been severely ill, tired, and mentally unstable, but had decided to work himself to death until the end anyway because he had just needed something to live for when the end was nearing.
Ash had needed a cause to live for, because he had no longer had the strength to live for himself. So he had killed himself living for his cause.
It was a decision that had come back to haunt him in the worst way possible.
Ash writhed and squirmed in Red’s arms until the last of the pain had disappeared, fighting off the last few tendrils of the void until they gave up and retreated back into the darkness. He slumped against the other man’s chest in exhaustion, too mentally and physically exhausted from everything to stay active.
Red’s heart dropped to his stomach the second the other man stopped moving and went still against him, and fearing the worst, he slid a hand over Ash’s chest looking for a heartbeat.
The one he found was weak, but still beating all the same.
“I’m not dead, Reddoons. Just tired, that’s all,” Ash weakly mumbled into the other man’s chest, voice slightly muffled by the thick material of Red’s suit jacket. Reddoons let out a sigh of relief and removed his hand.
“Good. I’m not letting you die on me now,” he replied, eliciting a small laugh out of Ash followed by a series of loud, hacking coughs. Red panicked for a second before the other man brought a hand up to his chest and thumped at it a few times, making the coughs recede immediately.
They stayed like that for a few more minutes, Ash’s head on Red’s chest and legs entangled together, just basking in each other's life essence for as long as they needed to. Neither of them were big fans of skinship, in fact Ash tended to stay away from it as much as humanly possible (which was probably a great contributing factor to his poor mental health), but in the moment, they could throw all of their preconceived notions away and just take what they needed from each other.
In this moment, they were no longer Ashswag and Reddoons, ex-god and feared businessman, but Ashswag and Reddoons, two broken young men who needed each other.
There were so many things that they both held in their hearts, so many things that they might never tell each other. Terrible, dark things that they had both buried and vowed to never see the light of day again, things that they had gone through on their own.
Sometime in the future, they would need to talk for a long, long time, about the things that held their hearts in chains.
But for now, silence would be enough.
There was no need for “thank yous” and “you’re welcomes” between them, as they had gotten far beyond the point of exchanging such flowery formalities between them. No, deep down, they both knew what their hearts desired, and knew that the other desired the same thing, too.
So they just stayed there, wrapped up in each other, floating around in a zero gravity dimension, their hearts slowly beginning the healing process that would take them forevermore. Pressed chest-to-back and so entangled that you could barely tell where one of them started and the other one ended, the two young men basked in each other’s presence, one for healing, and the other for comfort.
It was a sort of peace that neither of them had ever had the comfort of experiencing on Lifesteal, a sort of peace that only existed where the threat of the reaper was near nonexistent.
Somewhere in that time frame, Ash had mustered up enough energy to raise his head up and look around at his surroundings for the first time since the teleportation, and what he saw almost made him pass out again from shock.
In every direction he looked, an endless galaxy of obsidian-black darkness, glittering white stars, and neon colored wisps of rocky dust stretched out for as far as the eye could see, the galactic colors swimming in his dark brown eyes as they widened. Spoke had teleported them straight into the middle of another galaxy, Ash slowly realized, a galaxy far, far away from their own. He didn’t know how he, or anyone, could even breathe in this type of environment, but when it came to Spoke, it was better to not ask questions.
But the world around him was alluring, and rightfully so. Organic shapes of glowing fuchsia pink, sapphire blue, and royal purple floated aimlessly around the world like strips of neon clouds, yet there was no gravity to keep them in place like the real clouds back on Lifesteal. These colorful alien clouds freely floated in every direction without a single driving force, collecting space dust and small bits of debris as they twirled and danced around him.
There was no up and down in this place, he realized, no cardinal directions, no directions at all, really, because there was no ground nor gravity.
The world was maddeningly free. Too free, too much calculated disorder for the mortal mind to comprehend.
He couldn’t help but stare at his surroundings, through the neon clouds and twinkling stars into the vast blackness that seemed to stretch on for eternity, his unblinking eyes trained in on it in wonder. Everything else seemed to blur out and turn into white noise the longer he stared into the neverending universe, its magnetic pull not quite as strong as that of the void’s, but ever present all the same.
“Don’t look into the darkness for too long, Ash,” Reddoon’s voice pulled him out of his galaxy-induced trance, “I don’t know what the issue with it is, but it seems to put people into a hypnotic sort of trance when you give it your attention for too long.”
Ash slowly twisted his neck back around to stare at him.
“How do you know that?”
Red just shrugged and removed the hand from Ash’s face to gesture out at something in front of them. Ash twisted around and followed the line of the other man’s outstretched arm to see 4CVIT being cradled in Branzy’s arms like a baby, his shaggy blue hair floating out behind him as the silver-haired man waved a frantic hand in front of his face. Ash frowned.
“What happened to him?” he asked.
Red grimaced, and the arm around Ash’s waist tightened as he opened his mouth again. “Unlike you, he seemed perfectly fine half a minute or so after we teleported, but whe-”
“Wait, how long have I been out for?” Ash interrupted, suddenly realizing that he had had absolutely no perception of time since jumping into the void back on Lifesteal, and for all he knew, he could have been suffering in pain for hours, days, or even months.
It was hard to keep track of time through the shackles of agony.
“I’m not sure, but I would assume around ten minutes.” Red replied hesitantly, the waver in his voice showing that he truly didn’t know, and that he didn’t like that he didn’t know. Red had always been the type of person who always liked to be on top of things, to know his own future, and to be aware of everything going on around him at any point in time.
It was unnerving to him to not be fully aware of his own reality, the one thing in his life that truly unsettled him.
“After my own initial wave of nausea, which I assume lasted at most half a minute, I looked around and saw you writhing and thrashing around against some unseen force a couple yards away from me. Your mouth was open like you were screaming, but I couldn’t hear you, so I panicked and somehow managed to get over here to you, which probably took another half a minute or so?” A shudder went through the other man’s body as he recounted the series of events. “I’m honestly not sure how long it took for the pain to finally leave you, but based on the state of your clothing and hair, I’d assume it was around ten or so minutes.” As if to prove his point, Red took a hold of Ash’s long braid–which was now less of a braid and more of a tangled bunch of hair–and set it down on his sweat-soaked chest.
The ravenette looked down at his unkempt braid and let out a massive sigh of relief, deflating back against the other man as the ache in his chest began to recede with the reassurance that he hadn’t been out for days. The pain seemed like a faraway memory to him now–probably just another effort of his mortal mind trying to keep him sane– just a dim red dot moving further away in the timespan of his life.
And he intended to keep it that way, out of sight, out of mind.
“Okay, phew. Sorry, what were you saying about 4C?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah,” Red scratched his head and shifted his line of sight back over to the blue-haired man lying limp in Branzy’s arms, “he seemed just fine after teleportation, but then he somehow ended up staring into the black beyond the color for too long and just started to…float away? I’m not quite sure how that worked in this type of world where gravity doesn’t exist, but it kinda just seemed as if there was a force hypnotizing his body to go into the darkness.”
Ash shuddered, internally cursing out Spoke for his poor choice of dimension. “That’s actually kind of scary,” he admitted, watching with wide eyes as Branzy carded one of his hands through the mess of blue hair. Behind him stood an uncharacteristically obedient ClownPierce, worriedly looking over one of Branzy’s shoulders while his hands fiddled with 4C’s glasses.
Now that was a sight that made Ash question if he was even awake anymore, or just dreaming of a random situation that would never truly happen in reality. Because in what world would ClownPierce, out of all people, be worried about someone else’s well being, and anxious about their survival, no less?! The only person Clown had really ever cared about on Lifesteal beyond alliances was Branzy, whom he loved, but even that was a yandere type of love, not the type of love that had him anxiously fiddling with another’s glasses as he silently watched that person be saved from the brink of the unknown.
It was shocking, but perhaps sometimes, in the light of darkness, even the most brutal people could find a heart within themselves to care for others.
“I know, it was honestly kind of scary turning around and suddenly seeing 4C floating away,” Reddoons said, “like he wasn’t even there. His eyes looked weird, like he’d just been hypnotized or something. But Branzy caught his ankle just in time and pulled him back, and he’ll be alright. Branzy knows what he’s doing.” The confidence in Red’s voice was unwavering, and for a moment, Ash truly believed him. It was easy to delude yourself into thinking that everything would turn out alright in the end if you just let time pass, but he had gone through far too much in his lifetime to believe such a thing.
Because time was neutral. It was what you did with it that made it positive or negative.
Ash couldn’t do anything but reply with a hum as he lazily watched Branzy fuss over 4CVIT through half-lidded eyes, and soon his mind began to drift off in thought.
After going through the hell that had been the last 15 minutes, Ash was just starting to come to his senses again, and with that, his hamster-wheel of a mind began spinning at max speed once more, trying to figure out his next move.
He had made no plans for his offtime beforehand, having been too busy with the PB&J and keeping himself just barely alive to think about his future (and even if he had had the time to do so, he had been in absolutely no good headspace to make decisions). But now that he had no real threats or issues at hand (something that rarely happened to him), he simply didn’t know what he was going to do.
Ash hadn’t had an offtime after the ending of S4 (he hadn’t even had a soul in the offtime after Season 4), and could not remember for the life of him what he had done in between seasons 1, 2 or 3, so the reality that he actually didn’t know where he was going to go from here on out dawned on him.
Perhaps he could build himself a little den on a random server and hibernate for the entire month like a squirrel during winter, he thought. That option was quite attractive, as it would give him the rest and comfort that he needed to heal. Or maybe he could join ClownPierce in the PVPLegacy universe and sharpen up his combat skills to ensure himself a safer Season 6, but that option looked less attractive to his poor health and aching body.
But, in every single scenario Ashswag could think of, there was always an issue with it. Too strenuous, too dangerous, too lonely, you name it. He didn’t know it then, but later on, when he had finally settled down in a place that he could call his own, he would finally understand why.
Those places were all good, but they weren’t home.
He must have been quiet for a little too long, lost in his thoughts about the future, because the next thing he knew, Red had removed the arm from around his waist and moved it up to take ahold of the end of his braid, toying with the purple elastic at the end.
“What are you thinking about?” Red’s voice came out far softer than Ash had ever heard it, laced with a level of compassion that he had never even thought was possible for the other man. He was so shocked that he didn’t even hesitate to give the true answer instead of coming up with a lie like he usually would have, the emotion in the redhead’s voice piercing straight through the walls around his heart.
“I don’t know where to go from here,” Ash admitted, “I didn’t make any plans last season for the off time.”
Feeling a little bit of his energy come back to him, the ravenette slowly untangled his legs from Red’s and completely excavated himself from the other man so that he could turn around and face him properly.
This was the first time he had properly seen Reddoon’s bare face up close in a very long time, as the other man had always been either wearing a helmet or his sunglasses (or both) every time Ash had been in a close enough proximity on Lifesteal to make out the features of his face. The lines of his face were weathered with stress and exhaustion (as all of the Lifestealers’ were), but even after everything the server had done to him, Ash still found him just as handsome as he had found him on the very first day he had arrived onto the server.
But this was not the young, naive version of Red that Ash had met during Season 2. The Reddoons that was currently looking at him was a fully grown young man who had gone through the full extent of adulthood and beyond in only a couple years, and it was clearly displayed on his face. Those cobalt eyes held so much pain and bravery behind them that they seemed like titanium against Ash’s brain, weathered beyond repair by the amount of things they had seen. His strong Greek nose and fox-like jawline had both been broken far too many times to count, but yet, as Ashswag traced his eyes over the sharp lines of the other man’s face, all he could find was evidence of the other man’s overcome trials.
And that just made him all the more alluring in Ash’s eyes.
Red’s lips pressed into a thin line as he contemplated something in his head, rolling his eyes up to stare at something above his head in an all-too familiar way that reminded Ash a lot of his younger self. It was a habit that the redhead had never quite gotten rid of, the way his eyes always gravitated upwards whenever he was mulling over words in his brain.
So Ash waited for them.
“I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, even before we knew how the server was going to end,” Red eventually started in a low voice, “and only very recently have I actually started to consider following through with it.”
“Yeah?” Ash was not one for suspense, and Red knew that.
“Mhm…” his eyes drifted back down to meet Ash’s, filled with a newfound look of something the ravenette could not put his finger on.
“And it involves you.”
Ash co*cked his head to the side in surprise. A plan of Red’s involving Ashswag? Unheard of! A part of him just wanted to say no and walk away without even hearing what the other man had to say, but he knew that, rationally, Red would be the answer to the question that he could not answer by himself. So he pushed that immature, irrational part of himself down and willed himself to listen.
“Go on, I’m listening.”
Red took in a deep breath, as if he was going to begin a long-winded speech, but then exhaled it all the second he saw the look in Ash’s eyes.
A determined look crossed his face.
“Forget it, I’m just going to cut to the chase. Ashswag, do you want to spend this off time before Season 6 building a home with me?”
Wait, what?
Before Ash could even open his mouth to reply, Red barreled on, afraid that the other man would immediately turn him down before he had explained every part of his idea.
“Ash, I want to build a home with you. I started thinking about this back when we all realized that the end of the server was fast approaching, about how homes on Lifesteal are never permanent. I'm not talking just about bases or whatever, because a home doesn’t have to be a physical location, but about a mental home. On Lifesteal, we have to resort to finding homes in places, people, or goals, but those are never guaranteed to be permanent. Bases get destroyed, people get betrayed, and goals get shattered or turn evil every day in that forsaken place. That’s why I think Subz gave up on rebuilding bases over and over again just for someone to find it and destroy his home again, why Ro was such a mess after Mapicc betrayed him. I think his allegiance was simply to Mapicc and nothing else, which technically made Mapicc his home, so when Mapicc left him, he nearly lost himself because his home had just left him.”
Suddenly spurred on by his rambling, Red reached out and cupped Ash’s face in his hands, cradling it in his two palms.
“But you, Ash, you’ve never made yourself a home in Lifesteal, and no, New Texas doesn’t count. You’re smart enough to make your bases temporary and easily moveable, you have no allegiance to anyone but yourself, and your goals are, at least in my opinion, always self destructive. You can tell me if I’m wrong, but you’ve never had the true comfort of having a home before on Lifesteal, right?”
Ash nodded.
“That’s why I want to offer you a home, Ash,” Reddoon’s tone turned pleading, “I want to build a home with you in this off time. I want to build a home with you in a peaceful world where the only thing either of us will ever have to worry about is getting out of bed in the morning. You could finally have the physical and mental rest we both know you owe yourself, could finally go to bed every night completely at ease, and could finally have something to call your own. We could create a safe haven together, Ash, and I could be your homestead.”
There were very few circ*mstances in this world that could render Ash speechless, as his usually witty and sarcastic brain could always conjure up some snarky response to anything that came his way, but this?!
This was not something he could just deflect with a lazy drawl, he realized as Red’s words settled in his brain. No, he thought as Reddoons let out a wheeze at the end of his speech, this was life-changing.
Ash, by nature, was a solitary creature. He had no true allegiance to anyone but himself, preferred to spend his time quietly hacking through the laws of Minecraft, and was never one for semantics.
But humans, by nature, are social creatures.
And a permanent part of Ash would forever be human whether he liked it or not. So for while he lived in solitary, feeding the non-human part of him, the mortal portion of him had been slowly dying on the inside, crying out to be treated as a person. It was just now, after listening to Reddoon’s speech, that he realized just how horribly he had been neglecting the human part of him with his solidarity.
That was why his teleportation process had been so horrible. When transferring the neglected human portion of his soul over to another world, it had nearly been killed from the strain, henceforth why he had been in so much pain trying to keep a dying essence alive.
Now, Ash slowly came to realize as Reddoon’s words replayed themselves over and over in his mind, was the time that he needed to start recovering the human side of him. Now was the time that he needed to throw away his inhumane thirst for solitary and tap into the human side of him, to let himself take whatever he humanely needed to survive.
Maybe it was time to wretch the mortal part of his soul out of his heart and hand it to Reddoons, so that the two of them could slowly start to repair the part of himself that he had unknowingly broken. Maybe it was time for him to truly let someone else into his heart, for the sake of both him and the one he let in.
Maybe it was time for him to find a homestead.
Suddenly unable to look at Red for any longer, Ash twisted his neck to look at all of the people around him, at all his fellow server members finding each other again after a long season. He saw the three heart trio reunited again, furiously hugging each other and laughing as they whirled around in circles. He saw Zam trying to jump rope with Pangi’s tail, the other man staring at him in disbelief as the blonde failed and failed over and over again (because how in the world did he expect to jump rope in a world with no gravity and no ground)? He saw Minutetech and Wemmbu quietly conversing a little ways out from the crowd, Minute’s lanky figure towering over Wemmbu’s shorter one, no doubt trying to start down the path of reconciliation together. He saw Leowook and Cube playfighting off to the side, the two of them happily tumbling over each other and through the neon clouds like a pair of kittens.
Turning around, Ash then saw Mapicc holding onto a battered Roshambo for dear life, the man’s long, blood-spattered snowy hair being drenched with tears. The white ribbon that he always wore over his eyes was wrapped around one of Mapicc’s wrists, the white silk so bloodied and battered that it looked more scarlet than milky as it left streaks of red on Mapicc’s skin.
Ash knew that Ro had had an even harder time than himself last season, and although he did not know, nor guess the true extent of Ro’s suffering, he sympathized with the younger man. Ro had gone through so much at the hands of his best friend, his best friend who was currently sobbing his eyes out while gripping the white-haired man’s face like it was the only thing in the world that he cared about, and Ash could only guess a fraction of the mental agony Roshambo was going through at the moment.
But he didn’t intervene, as he knew that it wasn’t his job to do so. Despite their history, Mapicc would heal his best friend, just as Red would heal Ash. Perhaps their individual journeys would be different, but something deep inside Ash’s heart told him that Roshambo would be okay in the hands of Mapicc, even if he had not been once before.
It was okay to rely on other people sometimes, Ash would learn somewhere far, far down the line.
Averting his gaze once more, Ash laid eyes upon Jumper floating alone in the middle of the group, her iconic pink goggles pushed into her frizzy brown hair as usual. But unlike everyone else, she was not hugging or playing around with another member. That was when Ash realized that she had lost her greatest companion to another universe entirely, and to see her without Vitalasy’s lanky figure by her side pained him a little bit.
But she didn’t even seem sad in the slightest. Slowly looking up to meet her eyes, he only saw a content sort of happiness in those rosy pools of pink, shining through the veil of sadness that he knew she was feeling. Wordlessly, Ash knew that she had seen most of his and Red’s interactions, and that she was giving him the final push that he needed to finally let go of his doubts and accept Red’s offer.
Go, be happy, her eyes seemed to say, you deserve it.
But you deserve it too, Jumper. Where will you go?
Don’t worry about me, you’ve done that far too much in the past. I’ll find the path that’s right for me, but I think you've already found yours.
She gave him one last wink before turning around and disappearing into the crowd of people, and he followed her with his eyes until he saw the last of the twin pink ribbons tying off the ends of her braids vanish behind Pentar’s back.
And at that very moment, Ashswag knew the decision that he was going to make.
He turned back around to meet a pair of brilliant blue eyes, two pools of shining crystal belonging to a man who had just offered him a home. A home where he could finally rest, recuperate, and recover.
A home for two.
They had been individually broken and wounded for so long, but now they would begin to heal together.
“Alright, Red, let’s go home.”
