Chapter Text
Tango should have seen the rabbit.
He’d known what was at stake. He’d clearly been aware of how precious his time was. He knew of the importance of his mission.
Yet somehow, he hadn’t been aware enough to notice the rabbit.
There was a heartbeat of complete stillness when Tango’s eyes locked with the small creature’s. In that small moment, a hundred things flew through his mind.
Oh dear gods.
Move away!
Leave!
Is this it?
This can’t be it!
Have I failed?
What about Bdubs? Did the others get away safely?
What am I going to tell them when -
The rabbit, almost mockingly, lifted a single paw and placed it gently on the pressure-pad. The movement was so soft, so controlled and delicate, that Tango wanted to believe nothing would happen.
Fate had other ideas.
The world exploded in a cataclysm of sound, heat, and color. Tango hardly had time to let out a cry before the pressure of the explosion was pressing against him, the heat washing over him in waves. The high-pitched squeal that cut through the thunderous booming of TNT signaled the mechanisms in his suit going haywire. Sharp, agonizing pains blossomed in his lower left-leg and along his back. There was the sharp sound of cracking glass.
The dazzling colors of orange, yellow, and red started to fade as fuzzy darkness crowded in from the corners of Tango’s vision, and he practically screamed in frustration.
I can’t pass out! He thought desperately. The world needs me! I can still finish this! I-I can - if I just…
He blinked rapidly, sucking in lungfuls of stale, filtered air, only to gasp and cough as horrifying pain ricocheted through his lungs. The darkness crowded in closer.
Somehow through all of this, he realized he was weightless.
Shallow breaths, Tango . The words came to him in the voice of Holsten, which almost made him smile until he remembered that Holsten was dead.
Sucking in small, agonizing breaths, Tango forced himself to focus on what he was seeing in front of him. He didn’t understand at first; there was darkness, and specks of light whizzing through it. A large blob of something blue and green. Something even larger that was white and cloudy…
“ No !” Tango gasped. He managed to get his limbs moving enough to grab the control panel on his left arm, frantically trying to control his stabilizers. The machinery groaned unhappily when he pressed the buttons, but the stabilizers on his left leg and right arm became alive, shooting jets of carbon monoxide into the vacuum of space in order to stop his crazed spinning. The world became much less disorienting.
Now that he was stable, Tango could take everything in. He could hear his breathing in the helmet, shallow and labored. The high pitched siren that signaled a suit breach had stopped, meaning the breach had been small enough that the suit’s self-repair systems had managed to close it. There was a spider-webbing crack across the glass of his helmet, but that too seemed pretty superficial and wasn’t leaking any air.
Beyond the glass, Tango could see his world.
HC-8, in all its glory. He could see the blues of the oceans and the greens of the land, punctuated by blossoms of orange where meteors had fallen. It was stunning to look at, and for several long moments all Tango could do was stare, because he hadn’t allowed himself to dilly-dally when he was working on the moon.
The moon.
No.
He could see it, ominously moving closer and closer. His explosion, improperly set off with not enough firepower, had done nothing but break larger chunks off the moon and send them hurtling down to the planet. A high pitched whine of absolute horror tore its way from his throat as he watched those pieces slam into the world.
Then, the moon struck.
It was space, so Tango technically wouldn’t have been able to hear anything, but he swore he heard the explosions, the cracking of stone, the crumbling of buildings. A loud, violent ringing seared its way into his skull. It was only when his throat started to hurt that he realized he was screaming - no, begging , anyone who could possibly hear: Watchers, Voidkind, spirits, Vex, anyone - to come and stop this, to save them.
Bdubs! Zedaph! My friends!
My HOME!
Nobody saved them. The moon continued to slam into the planet, crushing it, obliterating it. In what felt like hours but was probably just minutes, all that remained floating debris. The fires had been put out as the atmosphere was shattered, oxygen escaping into the vacuum of space. His entire world had been reduced to floating chunks of matter within just a few moments.
All Tango could do was stare.
He stared for a long time, unable to wrap his brain around what had happened. His failure . He didn’t notice the throbbing pain in his leg and back from where sharpened pieces of metal had impaled themselves after the premature explosion. He didn’t notice the whistle in his breath from where the same metal fragments in his back were nicking his lungs. He didn’t notice the way his fingertips were starting to go cold, because his suit had managed to stop most of the leaks but it was still damaged and wasn’t regulating temperature like it should.
He didn’t notice how he was drifting, further and further from his broken planet.
Tango only had eyes for the damage that he had caused.
As the shock started to fade, the numbness in his chest and head also faded, and a sudden painful lump began to grow in the back of Tango’s throat. A burning sensation started up behind his eyes, getting stronger with every passing moment. His hands started to shake in their gloves. His tail, tucked into one of his pant legs, wrapped itself around his right leg like it needed an anchor. His hair started to spark.
And then Tango started to cry.
It wasn’t advisable to cry in a damaged spacesuit. He didn’t know how broken his oxygen recyclers were, and using up too much air could be fatal.
(He tried not to think too hard about what would happen to him if he died, now that his spawn-point was gone.)
But how could Tango not cry, after everything? The guilt and sorrow was eating him alive. Sobs started to pour from his throat, only audible to him inside the helmet. The sobs quickly turned to hacking, wheezing wails as he was unable to stop his crying even as damaged lungs seized and burned. He tried to curl into a ball as much as his wounded body and chunky space suit would allow, still wailing his sorrow as steaming tears poured down his face.
I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry!
But nobody would hear his cries, and nobody would be there to forgive him. They were all gone - either evacuated to unknown lands or dead and gone on the ruins of HC-8.
Tango was alone, wounded, cold, and floating through space. He was probably going to be stuck like that for a long, long time.
It wasn’t like it was undeserved.
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Tango was cold.
It wasn’t exactly unheard of for the netherborn to feel cold. One would think it was contradictory considering this was the same being who lit himself on fire when feeling any strong emotion, but growing up conditioned to hot temperatures only made him that much more vulnerable to cold ones. There was a reason he always wore his heavy-duty vest, long sleeves, and heavy-duty cargo pants 24/7, even in the summer. The Overworld was just too darn cold and wet for this blazeborn’s comfort.
But if there was a place that was even colder than the Overworld, it was space.
Even the End was warmer than space. The End supported life; it had a fragile atmosphere with air that was much too thin, but it had air nonetheless. Here, there was no atmosphere, no air to trap heat and dispel the cold. There was nothing stopping the icy temperatures, which grew only more intense when the sun passed behind the wreckage of HC-8 and the moon, from digging their savage talons into Tango’s skin and burrowing their way into his bones.
What made it even worse were the fragments of metal still embedded in his skin. The shards were completely exposed to the vacuum of space, and the cold leaked inwards from where they protruded outside of his suit to the warmer area of Tango’s body. It felt like he’d been stabbed in multiple places with icicles. The cold spread through his core, dousing his internal flames, and making it utterly impossible to stay warm.
Which meant that Tango couldn’t even float through space in peace, he had to float while being completely and utterly freezing .
He could feel his sharp teeth clattering against each other as awful shivers wracked his frame within the suit. His hands were shaking so badly he could hardly bring them to his chest in an effort to keep them warm. His fingers were numb. He couldn’t feel his feet anymore. Even his head felt cold; the usual warmth of his hair had gone out. He simply didn’t have the energy to try and heat it, and he certainly didn’t have the strength to set it aflame.
The tips of his ears were numb. That hadn’t happened in a while.
A wave of self-pity crashed into him, so strong that it drew a shaky sob from his throat. Tango just wanted to be home . He closed his eyes, trying to imagine that the cold was from a time when he’d accidentally fallen into the ocean while hanging out with Zedaph and Impulse. He hadn’t had his water-repellent armor on, and the water had quickly begun its deadly work, pulling him down as it simultaneously burned and chilled him. They’d pulled him out quickly, but Tango had been utterly miserable, skin hurting and absolutely freezing as all of his fire was doused.
The chills in his current-day body grew stronger, prompting a whimper as he tried to curl up even tighter. He accidentally bit his lip as his jaw spasmed and cut himself with his fangs. Not even the blood felt warm.
Focus . What had they done after that? His friends had taken him back to Impulse’s base. Tango had hardly been conscious at that point, practically hanging off of Zedaph as his friend laid him on Impulse’s bed, while Impulse had run around grabbing stuff. The next thing Tango had known, he was sandwiched between his two friends with at least four blankets tucked around him. The awful cold had been draining away. Somebody - Tango suspected Impulse based on the size of the hands - had been gently running a towel over his hair, drawing most of the moisture out.
He’d felt so warm, so cared for.
Tango held onto that memory, smiling a little as icy tears began to fall, trying to call back some memory of warmth.
He drifted further and further away from home.
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Somehow, the cold faded away at some point.
Tango wasn’t sure that was a good sign.
He had no way of knowing how long he’d been floating like this, with his communicator and suit monitor broken. There were no daylight cycles. He’d tried counting but always lost track after a couple thousand. Now, he simply couldn’t focus enough to count.
He couldn’t see HC-8 anymore. Now it was just darkness and stars, as far as the eye could see. There was no up, no down, no left or right. Just darkness and stars.
Tango was hungry. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate something. He wasn’t actively losing blood, but the wounds on his back and in his leg were slowly sapping his health, and Tango had always been someone who burned through fuel rather quickly. He’d lasted this long because of his lower temperature and because he was so inactive, but it was only a matter of time before he started starving to death.
Tango thought a lot about his death.
HC-8 had respawn capabilities; Xisuma had set them up himself, their admin weaving the code together to make sure that no matter what death they suffered, they’d always wake up safely in their beds, or at least they would wake up at all . It wasn’t like a hardcore world where a single death kicked you off the server and onto a different world.
Which made Tango think. His spawn point was destroyed - would he respawn in a different server somewhere, then? Or would his code be dispersed like pollen in the wind, lost in the Void?
If he died, would Tango come back?
Tango didn’t want to disappear. Being forgotten, if he had to admit it, was one of his greatest fears. It wasn’t like Tango didn’t try to be friendly, he just inevitably found himself sliding into the background. People called on him for help with redstone work or when they needed resources.
Now, after everything that’s happened, Tango wonders if anyone would miss him.
He knows that at least some hermits escaped (he tried to swallow his tears as the unlucky face of Bdubs, frantically telling him not to come home, came to mind) and that they probably evacuated to personal or public servers. He wonders how many of them knew where he was, or that he was missing. Did they even care? He’d failed to save their world, after all.
Actually, Tango did feel cold.
His heart was freezing.
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Floating in space was boring.
After all the fear and pain and sadness, Tango had no idea he could actually get bored from this, but apparently he could.
He sings every song he can think of over and over again until his voice is cracking from overuse.
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It was getting hard to breathe.
The signature beeping that signaled low oxygen levels was nowhere to be heard, which meant the thick pain in his chest was coming from where that freezing-cold metal shard was nicking his lungs. The urge to cough had gotten stronger, but weak as he was he simply didn’t have the energy. The thickness just kept piling up, heavier and heavier.
Tango kept seeing things. He knew it was his eyes playing tricks on him, bored as they were by lack of stimulus and fueled by the low level of oxygen in his bloodstream. He saw streaks of color that morphed themselves into vestiges of his friends, or of the walls of his base. Sometimes he thought he heard them, and he became so convinced that maybe, just maybe, they’d come looking for him.
But then Tango would stretch out a hand, desperate and shaking, only for the colors to fade away. He was lost staring at darkness and stars once more.
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He couldn’t feel his hands anymore.
Was that a bad thing?
It felt kind of… nice, just floating.
Eyes started to drift shut, only to snap back open.
His chest was so tight. Something gurgled with every shallow, gasping breath.
He wanted to be home.
He wanted to be home.
I want to be HOME.
But home didn’t exist anymore.
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It was hard to breathe.
He couldn’t see anymore.
Was… this… it?
No feeling in his limbs. Thoughts were fuzzy.
I’m… sorry
Eyes slipped shut for the last time. He sees HC-8 burning.
I’m…
Sorry.