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Grian’s mouth was full of blood. He hunched over so he wouldn’t stain his white shirt collar, his palm growing sticky. The seconds were replaced by drips.
Another thing about Grian: he couldn’t cut his hair. This was learned a couple days ago. Years into his stint of Hermitcraft, he thought himself in need of a change. Nothing too serious, he promised his friends, when they mock grieved at the news. The characteristic waffle was to stay. Just a touch up, something he could do on his own.
He went into the bathroom with scissors and a dream. Later, he told his friends that he had decided at the last minute not to cut his hair. He said it with a shrug, to make the words weightless, to leave no impression on their minds. He made it sound like it was his choice.
He didn’t mention how shorn locks blanketed the bathroom tiles, sticking to his bare soles, and even after rinsing off his heels over and over in the tub, he went to bed with itchy feet and dreamt about walking into rooms with cut hair imitating a floor, a floor he believed was solid enough to stand on, and was wrong.
He didn’t mention how he really did try, cutting real short around the sides to expose his ears, trimming an undercut while goosepimples dimpled the back of his neck. He showered, giddy at how petite the dollop of conditioner needed to be. Minutes later, he felt a pull on his scalp, a creepy crawly sensation. It burned in the way ice on bare skin did. There was a tinnitus whine in the air. The hair slipped out, shiny and plastic, and Grian felt the roots grow deeper into his skull as much as it grew outwards, no longer content to root in skin. The growing ended right where it needed to be. His hair was the same, the mirror told him. He tried again. A couple nicks on his scalp were made during his third, maybe fourth, attempt, where he got so distraught that he went in willy-nilly, grabbing fistfuls and half cutting, half ripping.
No matter: his scalp healed the cuts, and a mop of hair grew within the hour.
It was only then, prevented from changing, finally understanding that a body was as much of a prison as it was a privilege, that Grian realized he didn’t like how his hair looked. No longer a simple dislike, he saw the mirror reach out and touch him, making him really feel as much as see the wrongness.
The back of it hung low, skirting the edge of his shirt collar, limp as if its only purpose was to grow damp and heavy as he worked in the sun, resting there like a reprimanding hand. The sides cloistered his face, cowlicks teasing the insides of his ears, filling them with a constant insect skittering.
And it was just too long. That was all it took for him to hate it.
He leaned in real close to the mirror, as if that would change anything, his breath a little amoeba on the glass, and cut again, growing a little pile of hair in the sink which reeked like a soggy log pile.
Later, he burned the hair, a dishtowel held over his nose. The hair wasn’t something to throw away. He had intrusive thoughts of it growing past the lip of the trashcan.
Grian used to play with his hair a lot while lying in bed. While others thought of clouds as gaseous, he thought of them as filamentous webs cradling a mini pond in the sky. He would run his hands through his puffy, cloud hair. The motion was especially relaxing as exhaustion tugged at his limbs, weighting them, and he could almost believe it was someone else. Someone with soft, pudgy fingers. Someone entirely new and yet already tailored. He couldn’t anymore.
“Grian?”
“Oh, boy, did he take a tumble.”
Grian braced against a dripstone for support, the very same that got him into this bloody situation.
They—him, Impulse, Tango, Scar, and Cub—were exploring the new caves, having found one that opened maw-like in the landscape, natural sunlight bejeweling the condensation on upwards dripstone. They talked casually, Impulse and Tango caught up in potential farm designs, Scar talking Cub’s ear off about terraforming, when Grian decided to balance on a dripstone. Atop the rocky needle, he felt like a globe spinning idly on a cartographer’s desk. Then he listed too far and fell, the abundance of dripstone nearby preventing a neat tuck and roll. He smashed face first into a dripstone, the blood pouring before anyone had time to shout.
So, Grian’s mouth was full of blood, and his hair dangled like fishhooks across his vision. He didn’t know whether to swallow. The blood was thick and sweet, not something he wanted in his stomach. He rocked his lips back and forth, suckling the blood from his cheek hollows and herding it to the tip of his tongue, where he then spat a glob to land squarely on the stone floor. It barely missed Impulse’s boot, who was approaching with a bit of recently crushed ice wrapped in a rabbit skin. Grian was mutely amazed by the man’s ingenuity.
Grian accepted the macgyvered comfort and pressed it to his cheek. At least now he wouldn’t worry about staining a tea towel. Blood in the mouth really poured, like the blood saw the Colosseum of teeth and needed to get out as fast as possible. His jaw ached terribly. He wished blood could wick away pain as sweat does with heat.
“Yeah, just hold it there Grian.” Impulse took the opportunity to run a hand, calloused and thick, through Grian’s unwashed hair, checking for bumps.
“G, how you feeling?” Tango said. Tango’s voice was scratchy and distinct, a bit high pitched, but never annoying, never ill suited. His strange accent carried sympathy. Grian wished he had a voice like that. A voice that gained weight and experience over the decades. Considering everything, Grian’s voice was still babyish. Whenever he bemoaned his situation, it was just Grian being dramatic, something that prompted a chuckle. Always conspicuous.
“Oh man,” Scar said. “Right in the Kiester!”
“Kisser,” Cub corrected. Strangely, he was crouched low to the ground, searching for something. He picked up a little red and white bug.
Grian reflexively reached out as Cub approached, palm up.
“Grian, I think you dropped this.”
A tooth. Suddenly the ache in his jaw became very localized, centered left and boring up to his cheekbone. He tongued the fresh divot glut with blood. It replied painfully, but also enticingly.
The tooth had two long horns. He ran a finger over them, surprised by how smooth they were. He expected sharpness.
I don’t think I can put this back in.
The hole already seemed caved in, and the thought of those bony horns driving through his gums again made his stomach turn. But he really didn’t know, and that scared him the most.
He took a chance, choosing to smile (albeit painfully) and say, “Whoops. Well, that’s gone.”
Impulse and Tango laughed good naturedly. Scar whistled appreciatively. “You’re taking this in stride.”
Grian hummed, the left-over blood in his mouth jiggling. He really was. He was okay with this. He tongued the ache again. A premolar, by the feel of it. Nothing too noticeable, but still there. If the others weren’t here, he’d celebrate. He was missing a piece of what the Watchers gave him. And that made him more real.
Cub said, “Open for me?”
Grian complied. He almost laughed at how focused Cub was. It wouldn’t surprise him at all to hear that Cub once served as a dental technician. The Hermit was constantly surprising them, even Scar, who claimed he knew everything about the man.
Cub tilted Grian’s chin up, and a drop of blood, saliva slick, landed squarely on his uvula. He resisted the urge to cough.
“Alright. None of your teeth look out of place. You’re very lucky.”
Tango snickered. “Don’t know if I’d call losing a tooth lucky, but okay.”
“No, I get it,” Grian said. “It could be worse.” He even shrugged.
Impulse smiled and shook his head. “Only you, Grian, could take losing a tooth so casually.”
“Okay,” Tango said. “But we need to come up with a better story though. High fiving a dripstone with your face is kinda embarrassing. No offense G.”
“None taken.”
He sat down on a shelf of stone, the urge to get up and pace having been literally knocked out of him. Sometimes, it was nice just to sit and watch his friends.
The conversation drifted into potential stories of how Grian should’ve lost his tooth. A battle against a ravenger where Grian left victorious and without a scratch save for a missing tooth (Impulse). A never-before-seen flying maneuver in a ravine involving lava spouts and skeleton armies (Tango). A fishing accident (Cub, who would not elaborate; no one wanted him to). Scar was a bit different, trying to convince the others into gaslighting the whole community into thinking that Grian had always been missing a tooth. They made Grian laugh around the blood in his mouth.
His ears rang with tinnitus.
What? No, my hair isn’t—
Pain in his jaw. Hot, very hot, the gums receding like a hand against a stovetop. He nearly chocked on his own spit, the only thing muffling his cry. Immediately he knew it was an unnatural pain. An enforced pain. So, he didn’t react strongly, not again, as this pain needed to be kept secret. It scared him terribly how quickly he came to this conclusion. The others didn’t notice how Grian tied his hands into knots to keep them from reaching out. It was natural to reach for others when in pain. But Grian had long ago defined himself as unnatural. He wouldn’t let them know.
His jaw pulsed like an exhausted wolf’s flank. An intrusion, a material made solid out of nothingness, grew, rattling around as bone was no cushion at all. It shoved, pushing, pushing. A tooth.
It scraped against the sides of his other teeth, and he tasted the friction of enamel against enamel. It breached his gums, fountaining blood that he was forced to swallow, coating his throat in sticky red. The tooth hung, lead heavy, a living dripstone.
The Watcher influence, flimsy yet cloying, receded, satisfied. Then, that empty rush of endorphins. Good job. His tongue tasted sweet, sour. His gums were over ripe fruits, almost begging for him to bite down, to tear—spit the teeth out, they were just the seeds—because there was no consequence. It would all grow back. Reanimate. Fill this static mold.
He was allotted this one body. Every part of this body, fettered by its circulatory system. He was to keep it all. A Watcher was entirely the sum of their parts. To lose anything was to become less. And that’s all he ever wanted.
“Why…”
“What was that, Grian?” Scar asked. Attention reared its two-faced head, glorious and ugly, towards him.
“I need help. My body’s in pain. I think you’re supposed to go to others when you’re in pain. But I really don’t know. I don’t know whether this is a big deal or not. I’m so worried that I’m going to get a tiny cut somewhere and I’ll just brush it off, but I don’t know that getting a cut right there is the worst place to get a cut because it will automatically contract tetanus and I’ll die and everyone will wonder how I didn’t know I couldn’t just let a cut heal on its own there. I’m afraid that I’ll bleed out and I won’t even do anything. That I won’t even notice. But what am I even saying? I will notice. It’s just that I won’t do anything. I didn’t reach out for you. Do you know what that feels like? I think I strained something. My hearts, sure, why not, they’re muscles and that’s really scary because you’re supposed to rest a strained muscle. I can’t do that or I’ll die.”
He didn’t actually say that.
He kept his lips as still as possible. He murmured, “Nothing.”
Grian excused himself bluntly, saying he had a headache, which wasn’t a lie. He left swiftly, the ice dribbling out of the rabbit hide. He kept it to his mouth still, downy fur tacky with dried blood, hiding his face.
^^^^^
Grian didn’t leave his base for many days. He wore down the layers of cotton in his socks, ruining pair after pair as he paced, a handheld mirror glued to his palm. He watched his lips move. Noticing his distress, his cats trailed after him, meowing frequently.
Everyone already knew. Scar, contrary to his gaslighting idea, made quick work of letting everybody know that Grian lost a tooth, which Grian cursed him endlessly for.
Maybe though, and this was a small maybe, Scar gave the story so many embellishments that the original kernel was lost. It could become a game of telephone, turning from “Grian lost a tooth” to “Grian almost lost a tooth.” Regardless, he couldn’t rely on that. People were sure to notice the discrepancy. He spent hours practicing on a new way of speaking, of subtly moving his lips to always cover his top row of teeth. His words came out slurred and conspicuous.
They were going to find out. He hardly slept, instead speaking softly to the dark room, hiding his teeth and all his inflections behind puffy lips. He mourned the loss of his voice, still so young, but with hours put into it. He wished it was a physical object, something that he could put away in a drawer and not have it hum in the space beneath his tongue every waking moment.
His isolation didn’t last forever. Scar barged in to drop off materials for a build that Grian had totally abandoned. He accepted them all the same, stacking the items into his 12th “miscellaneous” chest.
“Doesn’t look puffy,” Scar said, filling the space. Grian could tell he was uncomfortable with the new silence.
Scar poked Grian’s right cheek.
“And it doesn’t seem to be paining you.”
“That’s because you poked the wrong one,” Grian retorted, then regretted it instantly.
Scar smiled mischievously and reached to poke Grian’s other cheek. Grian swatted him away with more force than necessary.
I just don’t want you to poke my cheek, that’s all. Grian prepared his words. He said it. Only his two front teeth were exposed to air. His tone came out rough, apathetic.
“I haven’t seen you outside of your base in a while. I guess your projects are keeping you busy!” He said it hopefully, trying to tease out more words.
Grian just shrugged. Scar deflated.
“Grian?”
“Mhm.”
“What’s going on? Is this about your tooth?”
“No.”
“Talking with Bdubs might help. Oh boy, does he have an origin story! Might make you feel less embarrassed.”
“I’m not embarrassed.” He shut the chest lid before standing up. As he turned to Scar, an excuse on his lips, Scar trapped Grian by holding his shoulders and leaning down, their breaths mingling.
“You know, I haven’t seen your new smile without all the blood. How’s it look now?”
Scar looked at him with such warm acceptance. Maybe this was it. Maybe this panic in his chest was not of things ending, but of missing an opportunity.
Grian opened his mouth.
He expected Scar’s hands to shift and cradle his jaw, for a look of confused worry to color Scar’s features. For him to ask what happened to Grian.
Scar’s face did indeed flicker with worry. But that’s all it was: a flicker. It was paved over by some kinder expression. He clapped Grian on the back and said, “See? I can’t even tell where it’s missing. You still got your smile, Grian.”
Grian stood there, swaying on his feet. Scar had to have noticed. He wasn’t an absentminded person. His terraforming relied on details so slight they were almost invisible. There was one thing though, Grian realized then, that Scar and the rest of the Hermits had within their capabilities: to think themselves minutely crazy over a particular issue and move on. They were moving on.
Grian was safe. Everyone was content to let the discrepancy go. Was he lucky?
Grian smiled, with all his teeth, where it was impossible to determine what emotion it held.