#does grian and scar know scott is putting them on blast like this

[solargeist]

scott smajor saying " 'Grian and Scar are siblings' ? Incorrect, Grian and Scar are an old married couple that have divorced once and then got back together. You can't tell me I'm wrong. Like they're the ones who got married, learned they kinda hate each other, but then actually got better when they split and realized they've grown as people and decided to give it another shot. And sometimes Grian regrets it."

[sixteenth-days]

and it's dark, and there is nobody driving

(some more 3rd life fic because i have The Brainrot, unfortunately. this time featuring scott smajor, grian, and a bunch of my headcanons for how all this works. also on ao3!)

“I don’t think I can stop it,” Grian mumbles into his hands, and Scott’s sure he’s not supposed to hear it, but the silence between them and the bombed-out remnants of the desert is thick and absolute, and in the quiet, the whisper may as well be a scream.

If Scott were nicer, if his better half hadn’t just died and taken his heart with, maybe he would do the polite thing, and pretend not to hear. Instead, he angles a miserable, yellow-eyed stare at Grian and frowns. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Grian glances up at him, then looks away, wings curling defensively around his shoulders. There was blue in his feathers, before. There isn’t, anymore. “I don’t… I shouldn’t tell you.”

Scott narrows his eyes, abruptly bitter. “If you still don’t trust me, after- after everything that’s just happened-“

“It’s not that!” Grian says, head snapping up, hasty enough that Scott believes him immediately. “It’s not- it’s really not that. It’s just… worse, I think, when you know. It’s…” he trails off, makes an unhappy little laughing sound. “You’re going to hate me.”

“Grian, there’s literally nothing you could do or say right now to put you higher than like… four on my kill list,” Scott informs him flatly. “You’re fine.”

Grian snickers a little, drops his head to rest his forehead against his arms. “I don’t know how I messed this up so badly,” he admits, eventually, quiet. “It always goes so well when you do it.”

Scott blinks, thrown. “…When I do what?”

“Make games,” Grian mutters. “For your friends.”

“What game?”

Grian lifts his head a little; one battered red-and-yellow wing stretches out, feathers fanning open in a wordless gesture out at the empty, ruined desert around them. “All of this. It’s just- it was just supposed to be a game. Just an experiment. I just… wanted to see what would happen.”

“An experiment,” Scott echoes, and all of a sudden you’re going to hate me makes a lot more sense. “People have died- my husband died-”

Grian cringes a little, pulling his wings back around himself. “I know-”

“You killed people!”

“I know!” Grian snaps, feathers spiking up, before he closes his eyes and takes a deep, painful-sounding breath. “I know.”

He goes quiet, then, for a minute or three. Scott watches him, nerves all set on end, unsure what to do.

He’s suddenly, uncomfortably aware that he doesn’t know where he was before he was here. Doesn’t know how he first met Grian, or even how he first met Jimmy, and the realization puts ice down his spine.

“I didn’t know it was going to be like this,” Grian says eventually. “It was just supposed to be… fun. Not- real. I should’ve-” a breathless, unhappy little laugh- “I should’ve learned by now, really. I keep making things that take on lives of their own.”

Scott’s throat still hurts from where Etho’s arrow punched clear through it.

“It was just supposed to be fun,” Grian repeats, miserable, “and then we’d all go home after. But instead-” he hesitates, glances over at Scott. “You haven’t killed anyone yet, right?”

“Yeah.” Skizz, Ren, Martyn, Etho, Skizz- “Not yet.”

“It feels good,” Grian says, a note in his voice that might be distress or muted horror or grief or something else entirely. “Exhilarating. And I can’t stop, you know? We can’t stop. It’s the rules.”

And that’s… true. He knows it’s true. Because maybe there was a point, earlier, before anyone died or anything was ruined, where this could have gone well and they could’ve been happy, but now there’s a widow’s ring weighing heavy on his hand and his fingers keep itching for his sword and this can only end in blood.

“None of us are making it out alive, are we,” Scott says. It’s not a question. They’re both sitting here with yellow eyes and fresh scars and pieces of their hearts missing, and neither of them are making it out.

It’s not really a question, but Grian nods anyways.

He should be angry at Grian, he thinks, and maybe he is. Mostly, though, his heart just hurts, and he’s tired, and resigned, and he wants to water the ground with the Red Army’s blood before he dies.

“Earlier,” he says eventually, and is proud of how even he manages to keep his voice. “You said, you meant for it to be fun, and we’d all go home after.”

“We might, still,” Grian says. “I don’t- I don’t know. I don’t know how real any of this is, even.” He sighs. “I’m so stupid. I never should have joined the game myself. I thought it would be okay. It’s so boring to just Watch, and- it was only ever meant to be fun, really. But as soon as I did that, I- it wasn’t my game anymore. I couldn’t stop it. I tried.”

He picks up a fallen blue feather from the bunker’s dusty floor, flips it around in his fingers.

“And- when you say home,” Scott says, and doesn’t think about Jimmy, and doesn’t think about their little flower valley, and doesn’t think about how he’ll never be able to make it perfect, now.

“Other worlds,” Grian says after a moment, answering the unfinished question. “You don’t remember- that’s my fault too, probably. There’s so many of them, every type you could think of.” He pauses, laughs a little. “Most of them are a lot nicer than this one. The one where I live- it’s nice. It’s really nice. Beautiful, all full of incredible builds and crazy terraforming. You’d love it. A lot of the people here are friends I met there.”

Scott swallows, tries to picture it. It’s hard, when they’re surrounded on all sides by utter devastation, by splashes of dried blood on sand and blasted stone. “That does sound lovely.”

“You should come visit,” Grian says. “If we all keep existing after this is over. Bring Jimmy. I’m sure I can talk Xisuma into it.”

“Do you think that’ll really happen?” Scott asks, and hates, a little, that he can’t keep a little cracking shard of hope out of his hollowed-out voice.

“To be honest, I haven’t the faintest,” Grian admits, rueful, wings shifting in a helpless kind of shrug. “But it’s nice to think about, isn’t it?”

His eyes are welling up against his will; he sucks in a breath and holds it, presses the heels of his hands to his eyes and tries to smother back the tears.

“Yeah,” he manages after a moment. “It is.”

[acerace]

What magic would each duo have in your au? :o

This concept has spiraled into a full blown au now anon look what you’ve done /j

Cleo is the queen of the undead. Bdubs is human, and scared of the dark. Every day he's asleep by sundown to will the monsters away. After an encounter with a dark and mangled mass of green deep within a jungle years ago, Bdubs wants nothing to do with the supernatural, full stop. One night he stays up building and is chased by monsters into a thick and twisted forest, stumbles across a dead and rotting woman with fiery red hair and a crown of bones and flowers. They talk. Time passes. Cleo, one day, promises Bdubs a way to keep the monsters away, to drive off the dark and the things that lurk within it. It will cost him, and change him, and probably not for the better, but he'll be safe. Bdubs agrees.

Bdubs no longer sleeps. His phantom membrane wings give him flight, his wide and piercing eyes able to see perfectly in the dark. Cleo is the queen of the undead, and they are charmed by her voice, follow her commands, an unending army constantly replenished with every battle. When Bdubs and Cleo bound their souls together, their mutual magic flourished as flowers, as twisting tangling thorny vines erupting from the ground, as wither roses blooming from their fingertips. Water turned turned to wine turned to poison.

The Red King is a creature of the night, grey skinned and red eyed. A howling snarling beast with a crown dripping eternal blood, sword clutched in clawed fingers, a crimson cloak around his shoulders. Martyn is human, with no ties to land or kin or purpose. A wanderer. One night there is a hunt, a chilling howl echoing across the mountains. Martyn is alone. Martyn is chased. Wolf jaws close around his arm, another set snaps for his throat, death a hair's breath away when the Red King calls them off. Later, Martyn will say the Red King is kind, and he'll be scoffed at, dismissed, but he'll be thinking of this moment. The Red King tells Martyn in a gruff voice that he had not realized his dogs had scented human, apologizes for the misunderstanding, leaves with his pack of wolves milling around his legs in search of actual game. Martyn is terrified. Martyn is enamoured.

When they meet the second time, Martyn is walking into the court of the Red King with his head raised high and defiant. It had taken some ingenuity to find this place, but he's done it, and he swears fealty to the Red King, who accepts his loyalty, impressed by his boldness and determination despite himself. To join the Red King’s court, you must leave your humanity behind, and Martyn does, shedding mortal coils like snakeskin, newly pointed ears the most obvious sign of his new allegiance, new abilities. The persuasion in his voice is a coincidence, he swears, and his perfect mimicry of mobs nothing more than a party trick. He is lying. Time passes. Martyn and the Red King talk, and often. When Martyn swears his soul to Ren and when Ren gifts his in return, their mutual magic is cold. Winter bites, as does their magic, snapping and frozen and tinged red. It surprises them both, but the warmth they feel when they look at each other more than makes up for it. 

Jimmy is human, a farmer, in search of his missing cow. He is not very wealthy, and he can’t afford to lose even one of his herd, and besides, Daisy is his favourite and he can’t just abandon her. Jimmy finds Daisy on the other side of one of many magic barriers in the world, the kind that keep humans and beings separate, the kind easily crossed by mobs and monsters alike. A line that cannot be uncrossed, should he choose to go in. He hesitates, and enters the land of the nature spirits. The flower kingdom is isolationist, borders closed year round, even to other beings. The king of the meadow is said to be cold and aloof, distant as the stars, but when Jimmy stumbles across him with Daisy happily following on her lead some days later, he finds Scott is nothing like the rumours. He finds he doesn’t want to leave. Time passes. Jimmy has found a home among the nature spirits, a home hidden in the side of a hill for him and Daisy both. And he’s found a friendship with Scott deeper than anything he’s experienced before. Scott’s magic is elemental, powerful, visible in the way poppies bloom at his touch, in the way water purifies in cupped hands, in the way he makes ice sparkle like chips of stars and in the way the wind tousles Jimmy’s hair like a gentle caress. Scott swears the breeze isn’t him, but Jimmy simply smiles, tells Scott that if he wants to play with his hair all he has to do is ask. When Jimmy and Scott tie their souls together, they do it with a bouquet of poppies and with iron rings. Their mutual magic makes a lightshow- fireworks and constellations and conflagrations. Sparks fly from their fingertips, green and yellow and red, float around them like burning harmless wisps. Their magic is light and energy, rainbows in reflections. 

Grian and Scar are lying to each other. They’re still lying when Scar puts his soul in Grian’s hands, when Grian drops it, when Grian gives his to Scar in exchange. Grian is a being, brightly coloured wings at his back, but nothing- no one- special, he swears, poker face far better than Scar’s. Scar is human, all charisma and business deals, and that’s all, he says, with fingers crossed behind his back. They do not talk about the purple in Grian’s eyes or in his feathers, about the shattered halo half visible around his head. They do not talk about how Scar’s eyes glint blue or the jagged wings half visible at his back, and neither brings up their masks, one white and eyeless and the other grey and smirking. They’re lying and they both know it. Beings are not supposed to be able to make soul bonds, so Grian and Scar are very surprised to find their mutual magic exists at all, let alone how it scorches them. It’s fire and flame, controlled explosions and smoke in their lungs. It’s molten rock and sand blasted into glass and obsidian, cut into daggers. Their mutual magic is combustion, air and fire partners in crime, and there is nothing more fitting. 

Or, there is a distant land blessed by a myriad of magic, and there is a curse settling into its soil, and very soon it will make itself known, and when it does blood will reign. What happens when you rip a soul in two?