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whilmsy · 2 years ago

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TCD Scar AU Drabble

hello welcome to my silly drabble inspired by @stiffyck and the anons that helped in the asks as i wrote! you are not immune to TCD Scar angst in its many forms across servers <3

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Grian learnt about Scar’s trauma the hard way.

A new season, a new day, and of course, new pranks.

He’d set it up with a grin on his face and hid with a laugh hard to stop. He did it without a second thought, a way of welcoming his neighbour to the jungle! Grian did it without a second thought, they’d been quick to grow as friends after he first joined last season, and so Grian can’t help it when he wants to pull this trick on his friend. Mumbo’s next, he tells himself, plans already forming in his mind as he hides behind bamboo and watches the zombies bounce up from the water elevator. What Grian doesn’t expect to watch unfold is the way that Scar seems more and more scared as time goes by, as the mobs keep showing up. At first he takes it as his friend being overwhelmed with confusion, but the more he watches on, the more he can tell Scar is panicking.

It��s… not exactly what he planned for, to be honest.

In front of him, he can hear Scar’s heavy gasps for oxygen, and that dread merging with guilt forms quickly, settling hard and heavy in his chest. Scar doesn’t panic like this, he doesn’t really show a sign of weakness despite the amount of times he dies on accident, and so to look at him and watch it unfold, it hurts that this isn’t fake.

This is real, and Grian feels frozen for a moment as he takes the scene in.

His friend is terrified, panicking and barely catching his breath. With wide eyes and a paleness to his skin that wasn’t there before, Scar seems to be in a sort of trance as he takes them out - and Grian will give it to the builder, he honestly thought Scar would’ve been taken down by now, but he knows he’s crossed a line he wasn’t meant to. The look on Scar’s face as he fights these undead is a look Grian knows too well; guilt, fear, exhaustion. Finally Grian frees himself out of his unmoving state from behind the line of bamboo, and he wastes no time racing forward with his axe drawn, coming in from behind to take down the closest zombie. He swears he hears Scar asking himself about not bringing a gun - he doesn’t want to think about the meaning of that just yet.

Taking down the mobs is hard, but they take them down quite quickly, and Scar uses a lot more aggression in his fighting style than Grian thought was possible for him. He doesn’t say anything until he blocks up the source of their exit with a block of cobblestone from his inventory

Grian takes a moment to catch his breath afterwards, frowning at the undead blood left staining his axe, and yet he decides to clean it off later with a wave of his hand as the weapon fades back into his inventory. Scar hasn’t, though - not that gracefully. His sword clutters to the ground and disappears back into his own inventory, and he seems on edge, calming himself with whispered words and clenched fists. He’s pleading, begging, for what exactly, Grian has no idea, but he knows he needs to help him - he started it after all. “Oh Scar, I’m so sorry.” He speaks as he moves, his hands on Scar’s shoulders at an attempt to keep his friend grounded. “I took the rest of them out-” “Were you bitten?” Scar’s voice is firm and straightforward in a way Grian hasn’t experienced before, and had never expected from him before; he looks him dead in the eyes but his expression shows nothing. The tension in his shoulders and the dull, panicked look in his wide eyes tells him so much and yet it tells him nothing at the same time. Bitten? What? “What? Scar-” “No- I need- Grian I need to know.”

For someone so adamant on asking the man if he had been bitten during the fight, Grian frowns, because none of the mobs really had a moment to exactly grab him - and Scar would’ve seen that, right? “Scar, I promise you I wasn’t- I just- It was a prank, man,” It confuses him, Scar’s panic about that specifically, but the way his friend seems to show that bit of relief makes him both grateful and more concerned. “Why were you worried about that? Wait- that came out wrong, but you know what I mean, right?” Scar pauses again, a sense of defeat weighing him down as he closes his eyes and takes a moment to breathe. “You don’t need to explain it now actually, just take a moment, sorry. You’re worrying me, and I can’t help you if I don’t know why it got to you so much.” It sounds forceful, it probably is, but he can’t fix what he’s done if he doesn’t know how to fix it.

“It was- uhm… It was an old world, let's just say that,” Scar says it so casually, and yet his voice shakes. His hands are still clenched into fists, but they move as he crosses his arms over his chest; Grian frowns, lightening his grip on Scar’s shoulders. “I don’t know what happened or how it happened but… let’s just say me and zombies don’t get along well…or get along really well? It’s hard to really tell, but it’s like how Jellie was when she first met you, all weird around the new person and-” It’s obvious he’s changing the subject, Grian knows it too well by now with all the times ConCorp had worked back in their last season. “Scar,” his friend stops talking immediately, tensing right back up, “If you don’t want to talk about it in detail I’m not forcing you to, I just need to understand.” Another moment of silence, Grian doesn’t say anything else as he removes his hands from Scar’s shoulders and moves one of his hands down to Scar’s forearm - not once does he stop the grounding technique, and he leads them towards Scar’s starter base. Grian sits and leans against it, and Scar follows without complaint; he fidgets with his hands, running fingers along his knuckles as he looks at anything else but Grian, and yet he stays as close as he possibly can to him, and Grian rests his hand against Scar’s back. And Scar talks. He talks about bites and turnings and loneliness, of scavenging old buildings and travelling and loneliness. In every bit of this story, from the beginning until the end, there is loneliness. Scar doesn’t explain it all, even though he tries to, choking on his words and blinking back tears until Grian pulls him closer after wrapping an arm around his shoulders and the man breaks. Grian doesn’t ask him to keep going, he doesn’t want to be told until his friend feels comfortable enough to explain more - as much or as little as he wants to. “I'm sorry,” he says, and he means it. “You don’t need to be okay all the time, you don’t need to be sorry about holding it in, I’m sorry that you had to relive that. I’ll make sure to do my best so you don’t have to, alright?” Scar says nothing, but he nods, and it’s enough for that moment.

–

In this new game, the closest thing Scar has to having company is the red life at the bottom of a mountain - a friend he wants, who he’s willing to put himself into danger with - and the memories he has of every place that isn’t this one.

The loneliness is its own chokehold, crushing his ribcage and squeezing his heart; it’s so similar to a world before, a world that gave up on itself and yet still lived on. At least the living dead were company, something that resembled a person. That’s what he tells himself. Up on a mountain, so far away and yet so close whenever people need him for a life or two, Scar mourns what he knows he will grow used to again - what he’s already used to. The only difference between now and then is that the undead crawling around his base during those days were a sense of normality - their undead groans were a comfort, they had been living before; if he looked at it from that perspective, it was both sickening and comforting in a way he had to get used to. The undead were better company then no company at all. He probably really needs to unlearn that, he knows that the mindset he had during that time isn’t okay, isn’t entirely healthy - but hey! At least he knows how to deal with loneliness!

Scar tells himself that, and yet the silence has never been more suffocating.

And when the arrow enters his back and strikes true, he tells himself that at least he didn’t die alone; it’s so hard to believe when he’d given away everything he had for company, when no one’s there by his side. He misses Monopoly Mountain, even though his partner killed him after it all, it was so much better than this.

–

He feels as though he can’t catch his breath, his soul connected to Grian and their pain shared like a loop of him meowing back at Jellie when she would cry for food. They’ve once again become enemies with every member possible - though he tries not to think about secret soulmates and heartbreak.

It’s hard to remember what’s happened since he lived from that high of a fall after he watched them attack some of the Jellie Panda’s, that’s really the last thing he can remember easily. The adrenaline of being on the run courses through his veins, the only difference between this game and the others is that in the first one he’d never been on the run, and in the second he hadn’t been wanted; though the only difference between the second game and this one is the fact that Grian didn’t him out of his sight in case he got into danger. It hurts a bit, knowing Grian wants another soulmate, that he has another soulmate, but he’d take it if Grian wanted to keep him around a moment longer. Despite knowing it’s because his soulmate didn’t want them to lose, he tries to believe it’s because he cares. They’re the last green lives for heaven's sake, cut him some slack! He wishes Grian would have faith in him, wishes all of them would. It’s all fuzzy, words spoken and anxious laughter shared. They were the last greens.

They had been until he and Grian started hearing those horrible, painfully familiar cries of the undead, and Scar’s heart drops in his chest just like he does into that pit of them.

He remembers asking “Is this safe?” and yet he knew it wouldn’t be.

Grian shouts for him in a panic, he doesn’t whether it be for their life or for Scar himself. There are other people talking too, and yet all he hears is Grian - asking him to do something, to get out, and he feels guilty for knowing they both feel his fear. Scar tries, he really, really, does, but the pain is too much, too familiar.

Scar tries escaping, running through the hoard and trying to dig his way back up, but there’s nothing you can do when you’re cornered.

Teeth sink into his flesh, and the faint memory of jumping from a building - thinking he would make it only to break his leg and pump himself with enough drugs to keep him moving until he made it back to his base - comes to his mind as he screams, as Grian’s shouting echoes it. Scar remembers doing what he could’ve to fix himself up when no one else could; you learn a lot when you’re alone.

They had been the last greens, and when he heard Grian’s shouting cut short, feels another set of teeth sinking into his flesh, another cold hand gripping onto him, and then nothing? It’s not hard to tell he’d died and respawned.

He respawns in Pearl’s tower, body aching with phantom pains that he knows are probably scars now and his heart racing as his breath comes in short bursts while trying to calm himself.

He’s in Pearl’s tower, his soulmate is Grian, and the world he’s in is not that one. He is not back there. What is hard is trying to keep his breathing steady. Cub wasn’t there to help him, reminding him of the world they made it to, his brother wasn’t there to keep his gasping breaths steady. Jellie wasn’t there to nudge him when she knew when something was up, to distract him when those thoughts of panic and dread swirled in his mind whenever he caught sight of one of the undead mobs that roamed as if they never died. Grian isn’t there, and though Scar doesn’t remember setting his spawn here after taking Pearl’s last bed, he does know that he needs to find his soulmate.

With trembling hands and a forced steadiness of his breathing after time that feels like minutes and hours of calming himself to the best of his ability, Scar makes his way down the tower - using his time on the ladder to make sure he could try and calm himself to the best of his ability.

He was expecting Pearl there, but he wasn’t expecting the entire Divorce Quartet or whatever the other members called them. He wasn’t expecting Cleo. Scar feels his heart pounding in his chest, feels the need to run all over again, and yet he puts on the businessman mask. Pearl’s look of understanding and a hint of pity is all too easy to see in her yellow gleaming eyes; she found out when Scar tried masking his breakdown after a run in with armoured zombies, and Grian held a meeting and explained it to their fellow Boatem members with Scar’s consent, but it still made him feel weak.

It makes him feel weaker when he takes a step back in panic after Cleo hands him steak, but he hopes she doesn’t take notice.

Scott asks how he died, and he tries to make himself sound as Scar as he possibly can when he explains the pit full of them. Ren’s zombie spawner, Martyn says, and that doesn’t make him feel any better.

He rides back on Etho’s horse, in a daze with his anxiety simmering, but Grian destroying the spawner with eagerness after it all makes him feel a little bit better. Grian knew, and it felt nice to watch him destroy it when he knew his soulmate was doing it for him.

He makes a comment about becoming secret best friends with Joel and Etho - a subtle nudge at secret soulmates, but it doesn’t work, and so he continues on. At least they were the last greens. At least he wasn’t alone this time.

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