Work Text:
He’s tiny and snuffling, cold in his threadbare nightshirt. He’s far from warm and safe, and the snow is coming down in drifts. There’s no one in the forest.
Later, he would remember this as days of tall black trees like massive fingers, and rustling, clicking noises in the brush, his feet bruising with snapped twigs. He still didn’t know how to talk, so he called like a baby bird would.
Then: a slight hissing noise. It sounded like warm and safe, so he stumbled towards the source, a fast-moving green tower. He collided. The hissing stopped. A series of clicks and confused chirrups as the thing nudged him on either side. Then it started moving off, paused until he got close, moved again, and he followed, jumping from each square footprint in the snow.
--
He makes fleecy clothes from sheep and the sharp dye of cacti and then he looks like his family, almost. They don’t mind that he can’t make humans run like they can. They also don’t mind that he can’t explode.
When he was very small, he saw his first explosion. His cousin saw a human digging, making scabs and taking away the dirt that fitted so nicely. His cousin hissed again, a noise he’d never heard since his father had found him, and then white light like scorched snow. The human had died and so had his cousin. His family pulled him close and told him, we must protect this. You must protect this. The humans would raze the world if we don’t raze it first.
(Because his cousin had left a deeper wound, but that was a rearrangement, not a subtraction.)
His family did not often go to war. Most times they stayed far away, and they told him that humans were easy to kill. Go quick, and go light. Stay close.
Ignition was easy, but reversible. The younglings practiced all the time, hissing and hissing and flickering white until suddenly, nothing happened, and they were just his family again.
He tried, every day. He thought at first that it was just the noise. But never would his too-pink arms flash that white, never would he feel the divine rage that drove his family. He ran from humans and pelted them with rocks and sticks until one dropped him with an arrow.
He had run home, clutching his arm, crying with high clicks until his mother appeared. She was distressed, too, and everyone else, that their small pink chick had been stuck. Eventually they helped him by taking the arrow out and stopping the bleeding, though they had clumsy green legs and rough mouths. Then the next day, his mother went.
They didn’t let him watch.
--
He would need to kill on his own power. He needed to know, now, how to do so. He digs to find something to help him, watches humans and pigs and cows, and sets fire to a red stick he finds lying out.
It explodes, and it is glorious.
He digs up more of the stuff, and makes it better. He weaves it all into a mess that he can slip over his head and then, then he is ready.
He shows his family what he’s made, and they are so proud that their pink chick has grown so much. They even forgive him the digging, because he replaces everything that he dug up. He uses his clever fingers to help them with arrows and knife and sword wounds, and finds food, and carries water, and somehow, then, he could make up for his mother.
--
It’s years after the night he stumbled blinking into the forest, and he knows everything like the back of his hand. Despite their best efforts, the forest is shrinking. There are only a double handful of them left now, where there used to be so many. He knows he will be called upon one day. He looks forward to it.
The day comes much sooner than he expects, when a human stumbles into a clearing, clutching an axe and kindling under his arm. He takes a deep breath. He lights a twig. He hisses.
The human turns immediately and drops his loot. It whips out a wooden sword but too late, and Gavin charges it as his boomstick takes light only to get a hand slammed into his face. There is a muttering sound, and then his harness is ripped off and tossed into the trees where it lights up a bush. Gavin lays there in shock as the human stares at him.
“???” it asks. Gavin blinks again. He springs to his feet and tries to run, but the human is faster and pins his arms. “???” the human says, and Gavin cries out like a baby bird would, clicks, chirrups for his family, but they had heard the explosion and they thought he was dead. He sobs dryly as the human abandons his wood, slings his axe and sword and drags him away.
--
The Geoff human doesn’t let him escape. He sits in the wooden box that the Geoff human has built out of skeleton trees. There is very little to do, aside from set the house on fire. He tries that several times until the Geoff human takes away the candles.
Later, he would remember this as a day of grudgingly accepting food and snapping at Geoff’s hands and escape attempts and the constant smell of burning wood. Geoff is nothing if not patient.
It is one day when he is sitting in a chair like Geoff said and picking up a piece of meat that he attempts to imitate him. “J-eff.” he says. The man brightens like a kid on Christmas morning.
“???? YES ????” he says, and points to himself. “Geoff!” Then he points to him. “????”
He doesn’t have a name. He’s never thought of this before. His family was his family with a string of clicks and whines that could summon them, but they were family relations. What he would call his dead mother would be different from what his father would call her. He tries what his mother said last.
“iKaa-vin”, he says. Geoff winces so he says it softer, rounder. “Kaa-vin.”
“Gavin? ?????” Geoff keeps talking. He’s made the first sound guttural, but Gavin doesn’t mind. He makes a Geoff face (which is putting the corners of his mouth up on either side) and eats.
--
Soon he can actually communicate. Geoff would start when he woke up. “Good morning!” he says. “Did you ??? well?”
“Sliip?” Gavin would parrot.
“Sleep. It’s, ??, like this.” Geoff mimed putting two hands together and under his chin and closed his eyes.
“Yes I did slip well.” Gavin says. “Slip slip slip.”
“Sleep.”
“Sliiiiiip.”
“Sleeeep.”
“Sliieeep”
“Close enough.”
“Close enough.”
“Are you ???ing me?”
“Are you kip’ing me?”
“You’re not doing a good ??”
“You’re not doing a good kob.”
“Eat your food, Gavin.”
And then again, and again.
“Good morning, Gavin. Did you sleep well?”
“Top, actually.”
“You don’t use top like that, Gavin.”
“It sounds cooler.”
--
Geoff finally thinks that he’s ready to help build things when it doesn’t look like he’ll sprint back to the forest. Gavin has very little hope of seeing his family again so he agrees all the way up until he has to dig and take away. Then he drops the shovel.
“Gav, come on.” Geoff sighs, when he sees the perfectly restacked dirt. “You have to take it and make things.”
“No no no no no.” Gavin starts putting the dirt back. “That’s what humans do.”
Geoff stares. “What?”
“I’m not a human. That’d be terrible. Not-top.” He pats the ground into place.
Geoff pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. “Gavin, what are you, then?”
“I’m a klickpr.” he says, puffing out his chest. The syllables roll off stranger than before.
“A-a creeper?” Geoff furrows his brows. “What do you mean?”
“No, a klickpr. We blow stuff up. It’s great.” Gavin hides a frown. “I couldn’t blow stuff up, though. I found TNT that could do that, so I was almost there. But then you survived. So I wasn’t the best klickpr I could’ve been.”
He sits. “I’m not a good klickpr at all.”
Geoff sits next to him. He sighs again. “How long have you been a creeper?”
“Since I was a tot. Very small,” he amended, when Geoff looked confused. “My mum found me.”
“But you don’t look like one,” tried Geoff, but then Gavin stood up and walked to the house. He knew that he didn’t look like his mother or father. He wasn’t green all over, wasn’t as tall, couldn’t hiss, couldn’t explode right, couldn’t speak with the crystal-clear clarity of his younger nieces and nephews, couldn’t be a klickpr. A creeper.
“Gav? I’m sorry.” Geoff says later.
Gavin doesn’t look up from his corner. “’m not a human. ’m not.”
--
That comes later.
Gavin watches Geoff level a clearing, fiddling with a piece of paper as he walks out what he wants to do. He puts blocks one way to make sure that one side isn’t sunken, and puts blocks another way to make sure that one side isn’t too high. He’s got a huge level field at the end of it.
It appeals a little bit to Gavin’s old sense of order. His creepers had touched nothing and sown chaos. He wanted to build things. He had been punished when he was found making little boxes out of twigs and pebbles. Not like the humans, don’t hurt the trees for them. Do not have hubris and rearrange the world for yourself.
Geoff starts pulling blocks to make the foundations of a house. Gavin finally speaks up, the first time since yesterday. “Why are you building?”
Geoff pauses, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Because I want to. I’m bored and it’s fun.”
“Is that it?” He’s disappointed.
“No, that’s just what I’m saying to shut you up.” Geoff puts a hand to shade his eyes. “I want to make something cool because I want to be productive. I want to show the world, hey, Geoff Ramsey built this! I made a difference!”
“Oh.”
“Also, I’m doing it for my ???” Geoff says.
“Frints?”
“Friends! Like we’re friends.” Geoff points at where he’s sitting. “I’ll help you make your house there, if you help me make mine. We’re gonna make an Achievement City, and then we’ll all live together. So really, I’m building for my friends. D’you wanna help?”
Gavin sits on his ledge, worrying two strands of grass. He plucks them and stands.
--
It takes time and a lot of effort and they often lie gasping, flat-backed on the achievement logo, as the houses take form. Gavin fetches the materials and orchestrates the lava, TNT and most of the fire. He digs out the caverns underneath the city.
It takes a week. By the end of it Gavin can cut down a tree and only wince a little bit when he feeds it to a furnace.
They sit out on the porch of Jack’s house, where they’ve been catching sleep while making the city. Geoff sweeps his hand around. “This would’ve been nothing without you.” he says. “And it’s not even the buildings that are most important. Michael, Ray, Jack-they’re gonna love this.”
“Of course! We put effort into this claptrap.” He swallows another morsel of roasted fish. “Hey, Geoff.”
“Yes?”
“’Bout the human thing, mate.”
“What?”
“I might be human.” he stretches out his hand, flexes his fingers. His creepers didn’t have them. “I look like one. I act like one. It isn’t a stretch.”
It isn’t at all. He’s just afraid of not being able to go back. He makes a fist under Geoff’s worried gaze. “I am human, then.”
“You sure?” Geoff elbows him.
“Positive!” Gavin elbows him back. “Now tell me more about Micool. Is he any fun?”
--
He jumps down from a cliff and takes off running. He’s late and needs to scrounge up some iron soon, and he could’ve sworn there was an item drop around. He scrambles down a few ledges when he gets face-to-face with a long green tower. It starts hissing and Gavin backpedals. “Oh chirst oh shit oh blimey.”
The creeper swings his face around and stops. Stops moving, stops hissing, stops flashing. It clicks, confused.
Gavin pulls his scarf closer around his neck. “Dad?”
No, that wasn’t it, wait. The creeper puts up another series of clicks and buzzes. He follows it. The colony has grown some, though not enough. He tries a greeting, but he’s too soft. The clicks come out wetly. They don’t acknowledge it anyway.
Only his dad bothers. He shepherds him around and they all greet him with half-familiar words. He talks back to them in English. A few words he doesn’t even know are from Creeper turn their heads. They are cold, and winter is approaching.
His dad hovers around him until Gavin can muster up a little bit of klickpr. “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” He says rustily. “I’ve got another family.”
He doesn’t even know if his dad understands. He can see that they’re all cold. He checks his stores-there’s a bunch of wood. He rolls up his sleeves.
Twenty minutes later he’s roughed out a house, and puts the creepers inside, and makes a roof and a bit of a fireplace. Almost all of them had left by now, leaving about three inside the house, including his dad, who hovers around the space.
“You’re all fine now!” he says, patting his dad’s head. “Look at you all! Nice and snuggled up. All good and warm.”
His dad-was it his dad? They all look the same to him, now-walks around and around the room, and Gavin mistakes it for joy.
Then the hissing starts.
Gavin dives for cover and the house implodes, burnt wood chips raining down. The creepers are nowhere to be seen. He slowly sits up.
Later, he would laugh off his lateness and pull Michael into a headlock. Later, he would crack open a gin and wake up in a fugue. Later, he would tell Geoff why he can’t leave the house.
Now, he sits while drifts of snow come down.