Work Text:
What Tango find, as they settle slowly into the new normal of knowing about one another, is that it becomes less of a slip and more of a struggle.
Which is to say that - Tango, remember-er Tango, -ification Tango, Tango in the red corner - now that he knows the signs, can feel the tell-tale pull of having consciousness tugged away from him… he tends to put up a little bit more of a fight. And Tango - blue Tango, forgetificator Tango - she doesn’t like that very much.
Case in point:
“Hey, Tango!”
“Oh, what’s up, Gem?”
“Nothin’ much, just need a little more gunpowder for my rockets.”
“You can never have too many rockets!” he grins.
“And how about you, what are you looking for today?”
“I’m hoping I can buy a little deepslate, if I’m honest. Like, sure, I can mine it -” and he has, they have, for days on end “- but I’m getting a little cold down in the mines, y’know? Figure this way I’m helping the economy, I can lend a hand to a fellow Hermit, and I can also skip the grind a couple more days.”
“Seems like Decked Out is nothing but grind to me!” Gem jokes, and Tango -
uh, Tango does not bite out an insult about how her base is probably half the size and a tenth of the effort, actually, he keeps that down and inside his brain.
It’s the kind of thing he would have passed off as just an impulsive thought before, a random and unwanted fragment of what he could say but isn’t going to. Now that he recognises the voice in his thoughts as being someone else’s, though…
“Haha, yeah,” he says, already having half-forgotten whatever it was Gem said to make Tango so mad, “I’m gonna… go do that, then.”
“Alright, have a good day!”
“G’bye, g’bye!” Tango waves, and makes himself scarce before Tango can actually get anything they’ll both regret to come out of their mouth.
Gah. One of them is gonna have to change, and it won’t be Tango if he’s got any say in the matter.
Well, it’s not gonna be me, either, Tango tells him, while they’re rocketing back towards the citadel.
How had Impulse dealt with it? They’d just called her Blue, right?
My name is Tango, though.
Blue will work.
He sequesters the pair of them to interior decoration again, because at least Blue’s not insulting anybody when he’s making the foyer look pretty. Case in point, he pressure-headache pulls his way ahead of Tango, something which apparently gets less weird with time.
It’s kind of super incredibly strange, knowing you’re not always the one in charge. Before, Tango blithely forgetificated his way through switching periods. Now, there’s a Tango back there, constantly reminding him that their life’s a group project now.
Easier, though, is the part where he lets himself go quiet, where he can just feel his body puppet itself through picking up and replacing deepslate from one column to the next. Tango doesn’t think about much when she’s working, and maybe that’s a good thing for both of them. They could probably have a playlist or something going right now, huh?
Tango doesn’t know what music she likes, actually. Or if she even likes music in the first place. It’s something that’s just never really occurred to him. Maybe he should spend some time figuring that out.
You’re gonna get your own taste in music?
“Maybe. Why, you gonna have opinions about it?”
No, no, that’s cool! That’s real cool, actually. Go for it.
Tango doesn’t bother responding to that. Bad enough she’s giving in to the natural inclination to respond to whatever Tango’s saying back there. Where did the uhhh, I don’t know, please leave energy go?
And there’s not so much a response to that thought as there is a general vibe - that Tango thinks whatever she’s doing right now is great, that he wants her to keep it up.
Okay. Yeah. Well, spite probably isn’t gonna get either of them anywhere. Now that the cat’s outta the bag, no thanks to Impulse, he may as well commit to keeping up with affairs instead of reserving himself for particularly bad moon days and extensive digging operations.
“Tango! Hello!”
Tango freezes, mid-place of a cobbled deepslate stair, back shooting up rod-straight. “Um. Hi.”
Who is that?
Tango, the one who’s supposed to do all the socialising around here, makes no moves to come grab the front back off of her. That’s Zedaph!
“Hi, Zedaph.” He swings around to make eye contact, trying to pass his presence off as, like, a bad mood or something. “I’m a little busy right now.”
“What are you up to, then, my icy-looking friend?”
“I’m. Building.”
Who is Zedaph. And when is he going to leave.
Aw, c’mon, Blue! Zed’s our buddy! Y’know, the zee from the ZITS? You gotta be nice to Zed.
We have a ZITS?
Zedaph - Zed - looks increasingly puzzled. “Ah, yeah, I can… see that. If it’s a bad time, I’ll go -”
“No,” says Tango - the - (Tango sighs, regretting every life choice she’s made up to this moment) - red Tango, flamin’ hot Tango of the friendly variety, and now… Now they’re kinda both in the driver’s seat at the same time, almost.
It’s not quite like it was in the initial conversation with Impulse - there, she was technically backseating, and just kinda leaning over to pull the steering wheel every time she tried - and failed - to change the subject. Now, they’re equal parts trying to have this conversation, and it’s weird and mushy and he’s not a fan, he’s gotta say.
“No, it’s fine,” Tango continues, heavy on the red-influence, the redfluence, even. “Just a little fuzzy today. You know how it gets.”
“Ah,” says Zed, nodding knowingly. “I tend to break out the energy drinks for that.”
Tango nods back. He has no idea where to go from here. “So how’s, uh. The thing you’re working on?”
“The Zedvancement hall? Yeah, it’s good, it’s good! Still trying to get killed by every mob, of course, and I’ve been working with Bdubs on trying to breed the slowest possible horse, so that’s been taking a while…”
“Uh-huh,” says Tango, and who’s Bdubs?
He likes horses, supplies Tango.
Not very helpful.
Tango is beamed a real-time mental image of Tango blowing a raspberry at her. (And not even the blue kind. Subpar.)
Zedaph is looking at him with tilted head and unsettling sideways-ey pupils. (Why does he have those?) (He’s a sheep! C’mon, is that sheep looking at me? You don’t remember that?)
“No,” he accidentally says aloud. “I mean, uh. That’s great, Zedaph.”
“Thanks,” says Zedaph, and keeps giving him that offputting look. “I mean it; if it’s a bad time I can come back later.”
Red Tango pulls forward again to frown and slap her on the wrist. “No, Zed, buddy, I just - I promise I’m just, uh… Well, you know how it is with the Dungeon!”
“Do I?”
“I mean, yeah! You spend all that time in a hole, you go a little crazy, right? Sometimes it’s, heh -” and she knows what he’s about to say before he says it, and she winces “- sometimes it’s like the Dungeon Master is a whole different guy that just takes over, y’know?”
“Huh!” Zed makes a musing little face, scrunches his nose, nods like he’s chewing it over. “Yeah, I can see that.”
“You can?”
“I mean, sure! Like, last time I came over was for the Deathbed, right? And when I told you I was coming over you hadn’t said anything in chat for like six hours, but then I turned up and you were all high spirits, right?”
He does remember that! The buzz of the communicator had startled him into remembering who he was and he’d scrambled his way up out of the hole just in time to sock Zed in the nose as requested. (How was he to know that it’d lead to ten more deaths chiming in chat in quick succession, and increasing levels of giggling on the other line? … Well, how was he to expect anything less from Zed?)
“It can’t exactly help your mindset, being holed up in the caverns like that.”
“It’s fine,” Tango argues. “I like it, really. Time to be alone with my thoughts.”
It’s a little pointed, which is good, because Zedaph gives him another calculating look. Tango, beside her, feels something close to dread about it.
“But,” he tags on, “that doesn’t mean I don’t have a little time to come hang out with my buddy!”
“M’kay,” says Zed. “If there’s something I shouldn’t know about back here, you don’t have to keep running in circles about it.”
Tango huffs, and then realises he probably shouldn’t have done that, because it’s not even Zed’s fault, it’s freakin’ Blue. “I’m sorry, Zed! I didn’t get you an early birthday present! I’m just gettin’ messed about back here, is all!”
“I’d be surprised if it was an early birthday present, considering my birthday’s just passed, and you were there,” he points out teasingly.
“I know that!” Tango lies. (Which is probably a concern for later.) “And I’m not tryin’ to be a bad friend! I still care about you,” even if this jerk doesn’t seem to care about what we have.
Blue is mad at him, but trying not to let it bubble over. It’s an interesting feeling, having someone else’s suppressed emotions just to the left of him, as if through frosted glass. He doesn’t really know what she has to be mad for, though - what was he supposed to do, not be nice to his buddy when he saw him?
Zed’s demeanour shifts quite visibly. “I know what this is about,” he tells Tango.
Tango frowns. “Ya do?”
“And I understand if you don’t want to seem like a weirdo, but - come on. Look around you. We’re on Hermitcraft - this is probably not even the weirdest thing that’s been thought today.”
It’s a good point. And last time he talked to someone about this, it was Impulse, who turned out to have pretty much the exact same thing going on, didn’t he? Two in twenty-five is pretty unusual odds, unless you take into account that Hermitcraft is an unusual place full of unusual people and of course this kind of thing is gonna crop up here and there.
“So I’m thinking, if your dungeon-master-brain means you don’t want me to come bumbling about in here and change the vibe, then we can just go somewhere else!”
Huh. Tango frowns, mulling it over - would it really scare off Blue?
Stop calling me that, he sends him, but it’s over top of a current of yeah probably I don’t like being anywhere that’s not my house.
Good enough for Tango! “Yeah,” he nods slowly, “I think you’re on to somethin’ there.”
Zedaph lights up. “Fantastic! How about we go and have a look at Scarland, get a sneaky peek in before it opens?”
“Zed, buddy, that sounds like a great idea to me.”
While Zed gets a head-start, Tango takes the time afforded to reorient the pair of them. She’s… not super pleased that her work time is being cut short, to put it politely… but at the same time she understands that they can’t spend all their waking hours making Decked Out perfect. (As much as she might want to.) As long as she gets to finish her business before the end of the day - she grimaces - a little detour isn’t the end of the world.
Thanks, Tango broadcasts across the brain, loud and warm and all-encompassingly mushy.
Ugh, she sends him back.
It’d be nice, he muses as he flies across the server, if they could explain the whole story to Zed start to finish. That would involve getting Impulse in on the whole dealie, though, and he’s really not sure if Impulse would be ready for that. Dee had said that only Skizz knew, right? And that means that now Zed is the last of the ZITS to be left in the dark about their pluralification processes, which… feels mean. They should probably discuss it.
Not right now, though. Right now Tango’s gonna do some urban exploration and not even think about the struggle.
(Although he does note, with a level of relief, that blue-Tango slipped away pretty smoothly just now. He hadn’t even noticed it.)