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1.
A village house, at least an empty one, provides the most technical of cover: mobs can’t get in at night. This is why Will is curled in on herself inside one; if she sleeps through the night, her spawn point will no longer be somewhere safe, next to an ender chest, but if she goes outside—
—Seven hearts beat in her chest, the rhythm too-fast. Maybe if she were better at this she wouldn’t feel them so intensely, but she’s not. She can hear monsters outside: a skeleton, a zombie. She needs to be careful. It’s safer for her here, in the attic of a tiny wooden house, paws drawn under her, tail wrapping around her body, eyes tracking the movement of the stars outside the window.
Still, she’s very aware that it’s only technical cover. She doesn’t have a second layer, at least, but she’s stupid and unobservant and bad at fighting and her sword still isn’t maxed out and her inventory doesn’t have a single potion in it. If anyone saw her—
—she didn’t even know who landed the last blow on her until she saw the death message in chat, 75hearts was slain by kamariaki, tipsy and not quite realizing it wasn’t a joke until she was on the respawn screen, Void’s half-laughter still ringing in her ears—
—It’s probably for the best that she hasn’t seen another person in a few days. Still, it’s lonely here. The three of them keep missing each other, and without any help or companionship everything goes frustratingly slow. She’s not technically out of rockets, but the number she has left is in the single digits, so she’s saving them for emergencies. At least boats are easy to make. There’s a gunpowder farm at spawn, but there have been no less than three members of Pathogen online every time she’s checked the tab list in the past few days, no more than one ally, and exactly zero teammates. So: more exploring, yes, but no more rockets. Maybe it doesn’t matter; everywhere she might go with rockets is somewhere she doesn’t want to go with Pathogen around. She should just focus on what she needs to do here. She needs to transport villagers, needs to set up a new base, and she doesn’t need rockets for that.
The wood underneath her is hard. She shifts, tries to get comfortable, leans against a wall. At least she’s not going to fall asleep on accident. She’s not sure she could fall asleep on purpose right now. Everything aches. She misses Chips, misses Angel. She needs to transport villagers. This village is too close to habitation, someone’s been here, sea lanterns shining a warning in the dark, and if she’s sloppy then they’ll have to do this a fourth time. She’s got a plan, a hole to bedrock for taking the villagers down, and then another a thousand blocks away for an actual base entrance. She could dig a tunnel between them. Should dig a tunnel in between them, because Chips is a target right now, Chips needs her. She can’t fight but she can do this, can transport villagers and set up a breeder and set up a farm and set up a trading hall. Right? She can do this. She told Chips she could do this. She doesn’t want to have been lying. She wants to see them again, but not with nothing to show for her time away.
She thinks her fever’s broken by now. She hasn’t checked, but it doesn’t feel like she’s still running a fever. Exhausted, in pain, unable to breathe through her nose, sure. All of that. But she’s not shaking anymore, not ping-ponging between too hot and too cold. When the sun rises, she should get up. She should start laying down tracks, start moving villagers. The longer she stays here, the more likely it is that someone finds her; the doors weren’t blocked up when whoever put the sea lanterns down came here, and now they are. That’s the whole reason they have to go a thousand blocks out from the village instead of just a couple hundred. Pathogen aren’t going to call a truce just because she’s been sick, and Chips is causing problems to draw fire from everyone else, and Angel isn’t here to help, and no one else can know where their base is. It’s all on her now. She said she could be helpful, could be worth something. This is her chance to prove it.
The sun rises. Will doesn’t move, just stares out the window. A sliver of wood works its way into the pad of her left back paw, and she doesn’t do anything to stop it.
*
The base doesn’t take that long to make, once she’s not sick anymore. No zombification chamber, she hasn’t made one without minecarts or boats before and so she’s putting it off, but she doesn’t mind doing the extra work of trading with uncured villagers for a while. They can add it later, just like they can add a fairy torture machine later, if they end up staying here long enough for it to be worth the hassle. It seems a bit premature to make everything here nice. Or maybe she’s just paranoid. Still, the breeder isn’t that hard to make, and neither is the hall. Make a list of enchantments, roll villagers, cross the ones you have off the list. Expand the hall three blocks down when you need to. Mine melons and pumpkins when there’s nothing else to do. She needs more dirt to expand the melon and pumpkin farm; she’ll get it when she goes back up to the surface next. Right now she’s staying down to roll villagers. It’s nice. Calming. Her back hurts but it’s a good sort of hurt; she likes having made something. It’s a pleasant reminder: when she’s not miserable, she likes rolling villagers and grinding out gear sets for her team. Next she should get supplies for a potion setup here. Maybe—maybe they can stay here. Angel will get on soon and make it look nice and maybe they’ll have a home again, a home Will made for them.
2.
The first time Will thinks hey, maybe I should go to sleep, she’s in her base.
In the third base. She should stop thinking of it as her base now. Maybe Angel sold it well enough, with Void, but honestly the acting is less important than the facts on the ground. For a month at least, probably closer to two, Void has seen their second base stop growing and changing. Empty, unused. There’s no way he thinks Elysium still lives there. He’s showing it to Angel as a power play, to taunt them—but he’s also showing it to Angel because he doesn’t have plans with it that might be ruined if Angel goes to Will and Chips with this.
Stupid. Fucking—stupid. The first base wasn’t Will’s fault, and the second probably wasn't either. This one will be. Because she didn’t fucking think, just—copied the tutorial. The tutorial that had signs in the villager breeder. At least she caught it before the wardens started pouring in. Maybe she can even make a new base before things go entirely to shit.
She makes four new shulkers, fills them up with potions and any random valuables still lying around. Jumps at phantom nametags in the walls. Puts everything into her ender chest.
It’s midnight but it doesn’t matter. Cogmented logs on and Will leaves the base, picks a direction, and flies.
*
Angel is sweet. They show up at the base, tempt Will back with the promise of companionship when she can’t sleep. Afraid of nightmares, partly, and too keyed up from the rest of the day, partly. And it is nice, pressing her face into Angel’s shoulder, wrapping her arms around Angel like she wants the border between their bodies to dissolve, fur on skin. She only lets go when they smell the same. Angel jokes a little and they wait for trades to refresh. Will tries to offer to help and Angel says no, for the most part, although they do take a stack of xp. Waiting for trades to refresh is—a little boring when you’re doing it alone. It’s agonizing when you don’t even get to make the trades.
So after a while Will heads off. Looks for villages to start the fourth Elysium base. Finds three in a row where all the villagers are dead. Gets bored and cuts down some bamboo for scaffolding.
It’s 1am now, maybe 1:30. She has to be up in the morning.
She’s in a savannah when she sees a spike on her pie chart. Ender chest. Then: shulker box. She gets it narrowed down to five chunks when it disappears, and then a creeper explodes and she has to run away before getting coordinates and besides they might have heard an explosion like that. Still. Ender chest in five chunks, on her first time doing this. She wanders around a bit more, smiling. Another spike: sign. She marks out the area, calculates, digs down. Doesn’t quite expect it to work until she’s in a pit with labeled horses. She’s smiling, for not quite the first time all day but close. 2am.
Is this how Void felt? Sign spike. Calculate. Dig down. Except better, because he found a base.
There’s no way he could have known it was theirs. Nothing identifying in the barrels, no heads or banners. Just a utilitarian trading hall. Maybe he knew that they moved out but not where to, and he wanted to see how honest Angel was going to be with him. Maybe he actually didn’t know, or only suspected. It’s not like Elysium is known for being rich, recently.
Except that paranoia is why they moved out of the second base, and now they know he found the second base. Paranoia keeps you alive. Also keeps you poor, because while Pathogen is adding a sixth cleric Will is going to be scrambling to roll librarians again, but that’s—not something that they can help. (Except by not leaving signs this time, fucking idiot, stupid—)
Will isn’t smiling anymore. She’s curled up in the corner, listening to the sounds of horses. What the hell, here’s as safe a place as any. She shouldn’t have gotten distracted like this. She was supposed to find a village for them. For the fourth Elysium base. 3am.
For a moment, she had thought: maybe I won’t have a nightmare tonight. Maybe I’ll dream of Angel’s feathers tickling my cheek.
The sick feeling in her stomach is back. She already knows what she’ll dream of. The same nightmare that’s repeated on and off since mid-December: wardens. This time, her fault.
Is this how Angel felt? Will can’t imagine wanting to hide it. No, that’s not quite right. She can imagine being scared, can imagine the fear closing her throat entirely. The thing she can’t imagine is prefacing a confession with please don’t be mad, please don’t hurt me, please don’t abandon me. She can imagine what she would say instead: I understand if you’re mad, if you want to hurt me, if you want to leave me. I’m sorry I keep getting you hurt. I’m sorry for being worse than useless. She knows Chips would never do it, knows Chips would forgive her in a heartbeat (because Chips has no one else, a voice inside her says, and it feels more plausible than it did yesterday) but it doesn’t feel right. Is this how Chips felt today, talking to Betty and Sin about the temptation to just push everyone away? Maybe. Will remembers dying to wardens, the way the terrible noise felt like it was drilling into her very being, vibrating her bones until they all exploded. She thinks of a single sign in their villager breeder. She remembers the blunt force impact of Chips’s hammer going through her skull and tries to let it comfort her. The memory feels right, feels just.
3:40am. She has to get up early tomorrow. She shifts and shifts, trying to find a position that doesn’t hurt her back. Eventually, she lets herself close her eyes.
*
She doesn’t know if she dreams of wardens that night; all she knows is that she wakes up two hours earlier than normal, jolting, hyperventilating, hand flying to her sword. No memory of why. She shakes it off. Eventually finds a village with actual living villagers three days later. The day after that, Betty tells Angel that Pathogen know every base on the server. There’s no such thing as a safe base, an uncompromised base. Something to do with the maze, or with Leoo, or with—something. Maybe, Betty says, if they do what Team Friendship does, have one base that’s a compromised villager trading hall and one base with no villagers just for them.
Will—can’t help with that. She can find a spot, maybe, dig an entrance down to bedrock, dig some space out. But she’s not a builder like Angel is. She can transport villagers, make a breeder, make a trading hall.
She should be glad to not have something else to work on. She can relax, she can talk to people, hang out with her team, improve the halls they do have, grind more gear. Flirt with Sin. She’s… not glad. She ruined things and she can’t fix them, can’t even help. As much as she complains—if only internally—about the moving, she likes it. Likes having something to do. Likes being helpful, being needed. It’s like the one Defunctland quote. The only thing worse than making a villager trading hall is not making a villager trading hall.
There are people around. She could go talk to them. Probably should.
She imagines messaging someone and her breath speeds up and she remembers all the times she’s gone to spawn only to chicken out and turn around at the last second. She types /msg sinoptics and do you want and stares at it with tears building in her eyes for a long few moments before deleting it. She can’t. She just—can’t. She knows waiting for other people to make the first move is a big part of why she’s as isolated as she is, but it’s—hard.
Instead she heads back to the third base. No point in staying at a random village thousands of blocks away. Huge obsidian walls have appeared around the map that she has to fly over—she needs to get Litematica and help with that, but right now she just thinks a bitter thanks Pathogen and spams rockets as she squints to try and spot any players on them that might want to follow her—but she gets there. It’s scary to be back, but it’s not scarier than any of her other options at this point. She can be helpful here. They still need xp bottles, right? She can do that.
3.
Betty is—Betty is nice. Betty is trying to include Will, and Will appreciates it. She’s probably the person Will’s hung out with the most on this server.
Still. Still. The first time they talked, Betty kept pausing, laughing at chat and then saying she couldn’t say why, responding to things her teammates said that Will couldn’t learn. Well, her teammates and Evi, who’s practically Betty’s teammate in some ways. And Will—Will gets it, right? Why Betty wouldn’t trust her. If she had plans, she would probably trust Betty even less. It’s not personal. But it’s definitely a sharp reminder that Betty has a team, and Will’s not on it.
Betty and Sin keep including her. And it’s nice. Mostly. Better than being alone, definitely, even if every conversation makes it obvious she’s not teamed with Sunset, that they don’t trust her. It’s still nice, collecting quartz, placing signs, discussing the newest ominous happenings at spawn, hanging out with Betty and Sin and Evi. Sometimes she’s bored, when they’re not around or she’s too scared to reach out to them because they’re probably busy, but… it’s better than it used to be. Even with the end of the world starting to properly loom. Maybe especially; it makes the question of what to do next urgent in a fun way. She’s placing signs and boats when Blue starts asking in chat if she’s bored.
Which. Kind of? She definitely wants to be doing more. But—she is doing something. She’s doing things right now, which is—better than sometimes, and probably more than Blue thinks. She hasn’t been trading with villagers much, now that the Elysium base is compromised—she’s still got those four shulkers in her ender chest, for the next time Angel logs on—so having a task is nice.
Still. Blue’s not wrong. She is bored. The end of the world is coming and what is she doing? Placing signs. Waiting for her teammates to come back. Hanging out with people who are only ever having half a conversation with her. She asks Blue what Blue thinks she should do, and in the silence that stretches she panics, sends a not that I would necessarily do it, I’m just curious.
Why should I tell you then? Figure it out.
It’s a fair response. She places a few more signs. Blue’s sick; Will makes a joke about dropping out of school and Blue whispers right, you’d know all about giving up, and it’s true enough to sting.
And then Blue logs off and Betty logs on, asks Will if she wants to grief a Pathogen base with her and Evi. It’s fun, really fun, going through all the books and building a miniature obsidian maze up to the ceiling and covering the walls with buttons and the floors with pressure plates, invis in everyone’s hotbars just in case.
One of the books has a list of the teams. Elysium’s there, and notes on all the members. Next to Will’s name: team pet.
It shouldn’t bother her. Pathogen probably didn’t think much of it. They don’t know her well. She’s made that joke before. She’s the one who wants Chips to put a collar on her, right? But it’s different, from the enemy.
They finish up the maze, head out, and then Will finds a village right next to the base. With two living villagers, holy shit, and they move them a few hundred blocks away while in call with Arch, trying to act normal. So, overall, a good day.
It’s that night, with no base to go home to, staring awake at the stars, that Will’s able to put her finger on what bothered her about the book. She doesn’t mind being owned. If that’s all being team pet means, that’s alright with her. She would give her life to Chips, if Chips wanted. She minds the implication that she’s—a mascot. Decorative, useless for everything except moral support and looking cute. That Chips and Angel do things, they matter, and Will is just there as a stray they took pity on. That no matter how much Will tries to do things, no matter how much Chips and Angel stop doing things, that isn’t going to change.
She joined Elysium because she wanted to do things. She wanted to matter. What have they done? What has she done? Nothing. If the server ends tomorrow, she’ll go down as an insignificant footnote: the pet of a team that didn’t do anything. Someone who helped Sunset when the people they actually trusted weren’t around. Or maybe just because they felt bad for her. She’s not sure which is worse.
She doesn’t want to prove Blue right by giving up. She doesn’t know what else she can do, from here.
*
It’s been over a month since Will has seen either of her teammates. There’s a new megateam on the server, which isn’t surprising. Jay betrayed Atlahua for them, which is surprising, and now Jay and Vio are both—gone.
Will feels like a ghost. Frozen in time. Which is maybe insensitive to Chips, given—plans—but it’s true. She doesn’t want to make a new base so she’s living out of her ender chest. Making a new base feels like admitting that Angel won’t come back before the end of the world. She doesn’t have any plans; Chips wants a soft ending, Angel’s MIA, and no one else trusts her enough. She can’t even grind gear now that all the villagers are gone. (She could use the trading hall Seri made, or the one at Animal Crossing, but neither of those are hers . It feels wrong, somehow.) Sometimes Betty will throw her a bone and give her something to do, and Will appreciates that, she does, it’s just—
—She’d be lying if she said she had gotten Blue’s messages out of her head. Or the book. Team Pet. It’d be easier if she thought they were wrong. They’re not. She’s bored. But what is she supposed to do? She’s thought about betraying, but she doesn’t have anything to offer, really. Elysium doesn’t have any plans, has never had any plans. Thousand Suns doesn’t trust me enough to tell me their plans. Nothing that would matter. And what would she get from it? It’s not like Pathogen would welcome her more than Betty does right now; they’ve talked less, done less together, and they have a negative history. Best case scenario she’d just be seventh wheeling a different group that doesn’t trust her. And—she saw what betrayal did to Jay and Vio. She saw what it did to Chips. She can’t do that. She wouldn’t be able to do it to a stranger, let alone the people she loves. Or maybe she’s just a coward.
She doesn’t like hanging out at spawn now that there’s wardens. It reminds her too much of her second and third deaths. She wanders the server. Mostly on foot or by boat; she used to repair her elytra by trading with villagers, and that’s not really an option anymore. It’s lonely. It’s boring, because Blue was right, she is bored. She hates having nothing to do and no one to do it for. (The only thing worse than making a villager trading hall is not making a villager trading hall.) She wishes she had never sent that second message, her version of a haha jk unless. She wishes she were smarter, less of a coward, that she would step up and do things on her own. The sunrise reflects off the obsidian walls, and then the sunset. She sleeps in trees or in little holes dug into the side of a hill. No beds; her spawn point is somewhere safe, or as safe as anywhere can be, in a hole halfway across the server. She remembers her first days on the server, the bed at one end of the first Elysium base, the warmth of their bodies pressed against each other. She checks the tab list and doesn’t know why; there’s not really anyone on this server who she knows how to talk to right now. Well, her teammates, but she never checks the tab list with any hope of that. The sun peeks over the horizon again and the maze lights up with a soft glow, pink-orange and bright.
It’d be easier, she thinks, if she didn’t still care. If she didn’t want to care. She could leave. Everyone else is.
Even now, here, she doesn’t want to. She wants to be here, for better or worse. Her claws pick at the ends of her sleeves. She jumps off of the tree she spent the night on top of, picks a direction, and walks.
4.
Before Chips said she was leaving, Will would send a message in the BARLAST Floor Lamp 59” group chat, once a week, sometimes twice, asking for schedules, asking for please can we meet this week.
She doesn’t anymore. There’s no point.
Chips… Chips isn’t planning on dying anymore. But Chips wanted to die—wanted to leave, wanted something to change, wanted to make a point of her pain, who knows—because everyone left her.
Will doesn’t want to leave her. She’s one of three people in the entire fucking world who haven’t left Chips on bad terms, and Chips is already so fucking lonely, so convinced that everyone will leave, that everyone should leave. It’s more than that, she’s bright and beautiful and funny and when she’s around she sweeps Will into cleaning up spawn or digging up a chunk and talking to people and when she’s around she makes the world less scary to exist in and Will doesn’t want to hurt her. Maybe she’ll take it well, be happy that Will has other people. But—maybe she won’t. Maybe it’ll just prove what she always thought, that Will was always going to leave, that Will was just waiting for someone better. And if it does hurt Chips it would be a real hurt, Will knows that. Will doesn’t know how real, but the worst case scenario haunts her.
(A memory: Mace testing. It took Will an embarrassing number of tries to hit Chips. They were both giggling like schoolgirls. Her blood was so, so red. They didn’t even try to get the stain out of the floor, left it there as a memory. At the time it was a rush. Exhilarating. The sort of thing that she never would have done except for Chips’s encouragement, only to discover she liked it. Now the memory makes her feel sick.)
Will thinks of spending another day walking at random and she can’t do this anymore. She can’t. She flips a coin for whether she should talk to Seri or Betty first. It feels like there’s something eating her alive from the inside out. Maybe once it’s done with her it’ll escape and eat everyone else. Maybe it already has. The different shades of fear blend together as she types out a message to Seri and hits send.
*
In the two days leading up to Thousand Suns running away to the End—because it turns out that’s what their plan was—Will can’t actually help. Well, she can if they really need her, but she spent so much effort in trying to join, staying upright and talking to people for almost ten hours straight, that her back gives out. Moving hurts. She tries once, to gather saplings, gets as far as two and a half stacks; by the end of it, she’s whispering ow ow ow ow ow like a mantra, making little yelps of pain with every slash of her hoe, until she gives up and just lays down on a branch of a half-destroyed jungle tree. It’s uniquely humiliating: to be so desperate to help, to beg for something to do, only to be entirely unhelpful when push comes to shove while her allies—not teammates, allies, she still has a team and it’s not them, she was clear about that—help her. This was supposed to be the one thing she can do, and she can’t do it. The pain is still there when she lays down, paws dangling, but it’s better, especially when she’s not trying to move her shoulders.
She’s not sure how she feels about the plan. Well, she wants to help with it, that much is clear, but—after?
Part of why she wanted to join Thousand Suns in the first place was so that she would have something to do. She wants to help fight, not just—stand around. Chips’s quiet ending doesn’t appeal as much to her. And this is a quiet end, too.
But… It is fighting back, sort of. It’s closer to fighting back than staying in the overworld would be: as soon as Betty and Sin and Evi go through to the End, she’d be back to wandering the server with no real purpose, no one to talk to, nothing to do, just waiting for Pathogen to end everything, having lost her two-day window of having things to do to her own stupid need to push herself too far. Making farms would at least be doing something. And Betty and Sin said Chips and Angel could come later, as long as Will didn’t tell them before. There’s one way that the time crunch works in her favor, at least: she only has to keep a secret from them for two days. She was worried that Chips would take it poorly—and even now she’s not sure if Chips or Angel would like the plan—but she asked Chips about their plans for end-of-server, because she would drop Thousand Suns in a heartbeat if Chips had a different plan, and Chips just said they’re only in the business of supporting Will and Angel at this point. The announcement of Will joining Thousand Suns went out and Chips seemed fine with it. Happy for her, even. Angel won’t like the plan, but—honestly, Will can’t plan anything around Angel at this point.
Will’s not sure if she wants the plan to work or not, if she’s being fully honest with herself. She doesn’t love the plan. But she doesn’t hate it enough to betray for Pathogen; most of the reasons she didn’t in the first place are still there. She doesn’t know them. She’s talked to Pathogen once, while tipsy, and it ended with her dead, whereas she’s spent a good chunk of the past month with Betty. She thinks she can make the End work, and she doesn’t have any better plans to suggest.
She could wait and come through after, in the second wave of maybes, with Chips and Angel and Van. But they’ve got a limited number of end crystals, a limited number of people who get to come through after. She doesn’t want them to use anything they don’t need to on her. And—that’s not her whole motive, not if she’s being honest with herself. She’s already agreed to spend Friday breaking End portals, she’ll be there when everyone else goes through, and it’ll be less dramatic if they don’t all go through at once, if it’s a slow trickle instead of a sudden disappearance.
Until the last second, she can still change her mind. But she’s talking herself into it. She tries to imagine it: all of them in the End together. Maybe it’ll go okay.
5.
When Chips kills her, really kills her, it’s not a hammer through her skull. It feels—closer to Mari’s sword, but not quite that, either, because for that she had fire res. This time she doesn’t. Not a single potion. She didn’t kit up for their meeting. Why would she? It’s Chips. When Chips swings it feels like all of her joints have frozen in place. She can’t bring herself to fight back, even when Chips begs her to.
She was right about one thing, at least. It feels like justice.