#because also apparently i'm fixating on ray atm and he's my fave to write about

[goldenkid2]

update: the ydyd fanfiction is now nearly 8k words long and went from me being like I think i’ll write everyone’s deaths from ydyd 3 but with more feelings and dramatic licence to a story about a team of people dropped into the wilderness with the distant goal to fight the dragon and the knowledge that not all of them will make it, people dying and everyone having no choice but to carry on even as they become more burdened with grief, the horror of watching people die suddenly in front of you and the knowledge that it doesn’t matter, that you have no choice but to keep going

anyway here’s a couple excerpts (cw death, mild body horror, grief n that)

The day Gavin dug his own grave was the day the commune started to knit itself back together. The gaping wound of loss turned to a scar, and they got back on with their work. The nether portal was boarded up, a rough wall of stones blocking it off on either side, and someone erected a memorial board just behind it. Every day they walked past the blocked portal and the names of the fallen, and every day they inched closer to their goal.

---

They sit silently in the graveyard for a little while, but somehow it’s peaceful, and when Gavin looks at Michael’s grave the hole inside him aches a little less.

‘Trevor told me about this place,’ Fiona says finally. She pauses. ‘He told me about the others too.’

Gavin just nods. He finds that he’s glad—and also a little sad, that Fiona is now burdened with the same ghosts as the rest of them.

‘I’m sorry,’ Fiona says, following his line of sight to Michael’s grave. The way she says it, quiet and sad in the misty morning air, betrays an edge to Fiona that Gavin’s never heard before. He’s used to confusion, bravado, enthusiasm. Not this. Somehow, it makes the apology seem even more sincere.

---

Fiona looks up, away from Trevor’s body, a crumpled heap of armour on the ground but he fell face up and she can see his face, empty with the eyes wide open, still looking, still seeing, and the ragged hole through his chest, blood and muscle and pale twisted ribs, warped by the enderman’s hand and she wonders how much it hurt, in those moments before he died, and knows that her face was the last thing Trevor saw, the thing Trevor died for—

---

Ryan holds the sword in both hands, the blade notched and dull from months of fighting and then repairing. He’s fixed it up as well as he knows how, repaired it countless times, but the blade will never be what it once was. It’s dull and scarred and some part of Ryan—a large part of him—knows that it won’t stand up to this fight. That he won’t either, bruised and exhausted and reeling with fresh grief.

But maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe, as he steps forward and takes a swing at the enderman, Ryan just doesn’t want to see anyone else die.