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canned-goose-feathers · 2 years ago

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IX.

It's odd how quickly the presence in his head becomes normal. It still scares him occasionally with a whisper in his ear or warmth spread down his spine. He steers clear of the other hermits, though some are easier to avoid than others, Scar being the absolute worst. While the man still gives him space, it's like he's waiting for something to happen. He talks to Grian like he's waiting for some big surprise, like a child who knows his parents have planned a surprise party, but he knows that he's not supposed to know. The difference is that Grian knows that he knows, except Grian doesn't really know what Scar thinks he knows (or should know).

It's very confusing. Grian tries not to think about it.

Grian is sitting in front of a dormant Grumbot. He wonders if Grumbot is sleeping. Can he dream? He didn't program h to, but then again he'd had been showing some . . . Interesting attributes Grian definitely didn't program in. The sound of a rocket breaks his thoughts and he looks up to see someone gliding into his little hole.

Xisuma lands easily, his elytra folding behind him. Grian can't really see the bottom half of his face through the visor, but the crinkle of his eyes tells him the admin is smiling.

"Hello Grian!"

Grian grins, "Fancy seeing you here, X-eye-zuma. What brings you to my rift?"

Xisuma visibly rolls his eyes, then says "Just wanted to check in with you, mate. Mumbo's not here to do it, someone has to."

"That is true." Grian tries not to let the longing seep into his voice. He misses Mumbo more than he'd dare to say. Grian purses his lips for a second, then looks back up to Xisuma. He opens his mouth to say something, but suddenly there's static in his head. He blinks away the stars that have gathered in his vision. His tongue refuses to work, as if the words have just left him.

"Grian?" Xisuma says. He doesn't sound confused. He doesn't know why that sticks out; in any other situation like this, the other should sound confused, maybe even worried. He doesn't sound like he's either of those. He sounds almost . . . Wary? No, that's not quite right. His voice is almost like a warning, like the kind one would a cat about to get into something it shouldn't.

Xisuma's hand touches Grian's shoulder and glass shatters.

Grian is stumbling backwards, uncoordinated and frantic. He doesn't even notice the movement over the screaming in his head.

He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows He Knows-

Grian claps his hands over his ears as the Entity shrieks in his head. He feels his wings raise and it takes every ounce of strength in him to shove them tight against his back.

"Shut up!" he yells over the cacophony, "stop it, stop it!"

The screaming stops. He's shaking hard, rattled in the sudden silence. He's never felt so out of control, never had it use his body like that. He wants it out, wants to tear out red feathers and extract this thing from him in any way that he can, he wants it gone.

Xisuma stares. His visor is darker and Grian can't even begin to guess at his expression. His hand is still outstretched towards him.

Grian stares back, his mind racing to recover from the onslaught and somehow say something, anything, to cover for the fact that he just lost it at a single touch and, oh void, he'd yelled out loud, hadn't he? He needs to say something, but his brain is scrambled and all that comes out is "Please don't touch me."

Xisuma drops his hand.

"Okay," he says softly. "I'm sorry. Are you . . ."

"I think you should leave," Grian says. Or, rather, tries to say. What comes out instead is "Voidwalker. Leave."

Xisuma stills.

Grian tries to stop the words as they tumble out of his mouth. "He is mine, don't touch. You corrupt. Get out, get out, get out—" Grian snaps his jaw closed so hard that he bites his tongue. Blood fills his mouth and he seems to gain back some control, but Xisuma is already moving away, turning and rocketing out of the cave.

Grian sinks down until he's sitting again. He's not sure he trusts himself to stand at this point. That . . . Could have gone better. Warmth spreads down his spine across his wings, safe, comfort, security. He feels the push, a want to return to the Entity. It's easier now that he can see the distinction between what he wants and what it wants. It's also easier to disregard it.

He ends up flying over the forests and mountains surrounding his base. Really, what else can he do? The Entity stops clamoring in his head, though he can still feel its hunger. It's been hungry for a while now; he'd managed to catch a few rabbits and eat one of his sheep, but he still hated it. It was enough to keep the Entity fed. At least that's what he'd thought.

He makes it as far as the villager ship by the time his wings start to ache. The rising air from the water feels good on his wings. The miniature handmade ocean around the villager "farm" is so much nicer than the actual ocean, mainly because he doesn't get salt everywhere. He lands gently, the noise of villagers below perking his interest.

The thing is, Grian knows better than this. There's a reason he hadn't been to the villager farm, and it's the same reason he'd been avoiding the hermits. He was a starved dog, willingly throwing himself into a pen of sheep and hoping that he wouldn't kill them.

The scent of sweat and leather and metal hits him as soon as he descends the ladder. He stares as the villagers bustle around their respective work stations. They look at him every once in a while with the same wary expression he remembers seeing on the horse; like they trust him, but something deeper tells them not to. He hates how excited that makes him.

It couldn't be bad, right? No one would have to know. The villagers are easily replaced anyway, and it's not like there aren't a lot of them. No one would even notice. His stomach churns and his mouth waters. He's not thinking straight. Maybe the Entity didn't really leave him alone. He wants, so badly, more than ever before.

Just once, then he's done.

He steps forward and grabs the arm of a villager, a calligrapher he thinks. They pull against him, but he's far stronger. He pulls them into a quiet area of the ship, ignoring it's rushed words of a language he can't understand.

He should have brought potions. Then again, he hadn't gone and planned this. His vision is swimming in red and his hands move of their own accord, or the accord of another.

He thinks, maybe, that he's starting to understand

It's dark here, enough that he can barely see what's happening, what he's doing. He thinks he might be shaking with excitement as his hunger roars in his ears like a torrent.

Grian can't let go of the villager. He's trying— oh god, he's trying— but his hand is a vice and no matter how much he wrestles with his fingers, they remain wrapped around, unmoving, like a statue, like some sort of immovable force. He didn't ask for this. How is he going to sleep tonight if he does this? Is it going to stay in his head, is it going to haunt his nightmares, will he dream of the taste of blood on his tongue forever now, is this what it's going to be like forever—

His ears are ringing. He thinks he'd be screaming if he could. He can't. His mouth is full. Pleasure floods through his brain. He's alive again, like the break of a fever. It's too much and not enough all at once.

Horror dawns slowly, the coppery smell of blood becoming acrid in his mouth. The mangled corpse in front of him is burned into the forefront of his brain. He wants to vomit and rid himself of the new contents of his stomach, but the pressure in the back of his head tells him that it'll end poorly. He's trembling, breath coming too fast, black spots dancing in his vision. There's an echo, like the whispers he hears deep in the caves or the crackle of sculk under his feet. It sounds just distant enough that he thinks it might be his name, but it might not.

"Stop stop stop stop! " He yells, hands clamped tight over his ears to block out the sounds, until the words lose meaning. His fingers twitch and he imagines digging into his ears until something pops so he can finally have silence. His talons dig in and the pinpricks of pain aren't helping. Something touches him and he feels like he's been shocked, he wants it off.

His eyes snap open to meet worried green eyes and bloody hands cradling his face.

"Grian, are you hurt?" Scar says. He's scared, and that fact scares Grian more than anything. Why is he here? Where did he come from? Doesn't he see—

Grian gasps in a breath as his lungs scream. "Hey, it's okay, just breathe with me—"

"Don't touch me," Grian wants to scream, but it comes out more like a plea. He can't, it's too much, there's so much noise and his skin doesn't feel right and he wants to claw at it until he can't feel it anymore. Scar's hands are off of him and the shrieking noise in his head quiets to only a cacophony. He's moving before he can really think about it, Void he just wants the noise to stop.

He's up the stairs when Scar reaches out to him again, calling his name. Anger flares hot and fast, a roaring fire burning from barely even a spark.

"Don't touch me!" he whirls, roaring, "just shut up!"

Scar looks far too neutral. Grian should feel guilty. He doesn't mean it, but the electric-charged feeling isn't going away and he needs out.

He trades the constant noise of the ship for the rush of wind. It's not better, not by a long shot, but he manages to fly until he nearly crashes into the side of a mountain. He lands at the mouth of a cave.

It's quiet. He tucks himself against the cave wall, his hands tight in his hair and his eyes firmly closed. Even the touch of stone against him feels like too much, and yet the gentle hum of approaching night wraps around him like a soft blanket.

Scar's approach comes sometime later, although Grian isn't sure when. It's long enough that he's stopped shaking, which is a plus. Scar lands as quietly as he can and then just . . . Stands there, waiting.

"I'm not— There's something—" he stutters and starts, unsure what he even wants to say, what he should say. He takes a quick breath. "That. Wasn't me."

"I know," Scar says softly. Grian stares at him, raw emotion flickering across his face. Scar knew? He knew something was wrong this whole time and he never said anything? He just let it happen.

He must have said some of that out loud because Scar stares resolutely at the floor as he says "I was pretty sure, at least, but I didn't know what to do. It's not . . . It's not simple, G."

Grian wants to shatter into a million pieces. He feels so small suddenly. "What's happening?" he asks, voice nearing a whine, "I don't want this, I don't understand. I don't know what's happening to me and . . . And I don't know who you are, Scar."

Hurt flashes across Scar's face. He kneels in front of him and raises his hand — still coated in blood — to Grian’s cheek. He hates that he leans into the touch. "I wish I could explain—"

"Why can't you?"

"—But this isn't something that can be explained. It's . . . Complicated."

Frustrated tears well up in his eyes and he grabs Scar's shirt in his hands, scrunching it up until his fingers protest. "What did you do to me, what's happening? I don't— this is wrong, I just want it to stop."

Scar's thumb rubs over Grian's cheek. Before he can protest, Scar has pulled him into a crushing hug. He should hate it, he should shove Scar away, but a little bit more of his resolve is chipped away and he finds himself leaning into the hug.

"I'm so sorry, Grian," Scar murmurs in his ear. "It's gonna be okay, I promise. I know. I know how hard this is. And I'm so, so sorry."

Grian holds on to scar like a lifeline, and at this point he very well may be. He feels so tired. His eyes close as exhaustion waves over him. There's something he wants to say, some question to make everything make sense or some accusation — the accusation, the thoughts he's not had the strength to put to words, the blood in Scar's teeth he resolutely ignores — but there's a ping that sounds from both of their comms. Grian wants a reason to pull away anyway, he doesn't, and to hold on to at least some of his dignity, so he does and fishes his comm out of his pocket.

His stomach drops.

Mumbo has joined the game.

#prion au #hermitcraft #grian #hermitcraft fanfic #mcyt #hermitblr #gtws #mcyt fanfiction #scarian #hermitshipping

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nicoforlifetrue · 3 years ago

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He doesn't stay in the world for long, at first jumping from these worlds of left-behind not-yet watchers. Then, finally, he reaches out and draws out a world of his own, hiding it in magic so thoroughly it's overkill.

Then he builds.

He builds and he builds, from cityscapes to cottage towns, ignoring the phantom hands and feathers on his back.

He learns and he plays, crafting structures ..and at times turning over his shoulder to ask if they're proud, to find no one.

Just empty space.

Endless, flat, empty space with no movement other than his creations.

He's alone.

And so instead he spends his time building and flying, once even revisiting his almost forgotten engineering skills to maybe just manufacture a friend, hell even a chat bot would work… And then realizing maybe they should have stayed forgotten— as, for a few weeks, he spent hours frantically fixing the code of a robot he had locked in his closet after it had deleted the laws of robotics out of its own files. Sure a fully functioning AI was groundbreaking and all, but it being convinced it was literally a demon that wanted to seemingly kill him and/or work him to death was one weird bug to come out of the whole thing.

He elected to not tell it that he was incapable of dying. Last thing it needed was even more reason to make him build more rustic houses.

He then of course didn't learn his lesson and made a second one, someone to entertain his first when he just didn't have the energy to.

Npg, he named the first one, Robo he named the second.

They lived to annoy each other and make his life a nightmare. Because unfortunately now that there were two of them, they now had someone on the outside to edit their code.

Robo seemed set on turning Npg’s builds into a completely different style when the other turned its back, which led to Grian having to reattach Robo’s arm and yet again re-code Npg out of a rage loop that Grian couldn't figure out how to just remove without a complete and total system failure.

His only real confusion is why they stopped targeting him in their fits of rage.

And why they went into the closet when they had a virus, that was weird too. Learned habits maybe? He did tend to lock them in there when he was fixing the homicidal tendencies, and it is where he kept a mass majority of his more fine tuned engineering instruments. So maybe the learning AI had put the closet as the bug fixing space, and then also learned that it was faster to be repaired when in that area? Grian did tend to notice something was wrong faster now that they had picked up the habit. It seemed a bit too advanced considering the simple learning program he had installed, but then again it had also learned how to delete something grian had hard wired into its code so, at this rate, anything was possible.

He still can't believe he had managed to code it considering most of his knowledge was self taught. Not that he'd claim to have done much, Npg and Robo had made most of the more impressive edits to their own code.

He learned his lesson and stopped at Robo, deciding to focus on his current bots instead of stress over making new ones. The bots had enough issues where it didn't matter either way. Not to mention Robo seemed to be developing a praise seeking personality, as well as a jealousy streak. He couldn't be sure any new bots would survive it. Also considering he's pretty sure the only reason Robo isn't trying to get rid of Npg is because of how Grian would scold both of them when they hurt the other. It seemed like his scolding triggered a “bad” tick in the code, thankfully, so they should learn out of harming things soon.

He hopes.

He quietly thanks whatever higher power is controlling the two’s code that even touching the rewards and punishments system causes a complete system failure. A thing he learned when Robo had tried to get rid of said bad tick and Grian had found it face down on its build.

…He also spent a lot of time thinking— thinking about what happened, what he doesn't like, what he adores, often about himself.

And he finds things he didn't quite like.

He notes first how the ‘they’ he so adored growing up has dropped from his inner monologue, the pronoun a bit spoiled by the connection to them, although there still a cherry sweetness to the letters when he thinks of them— a flash of straw blond hair and a hidden smile— but with some good news he feels pleased when running over third person phrases; he finds himself using words like person instead of boy, or partner instead of boyfriend, or child instead of son, the only exception being the same as before with brother instead of sibling.

A discovery he made when one time his mentor was feeling particularly talkative and had murmured plans for children, about how Grian would be a great sibling.

He always loved how all it took was “brother” from him and the immediate shift in his mentor's words.

But his pronouns had changed, not much else.

With this revelation he trailed after it, noted with no small pleasure that they did not change who he was— he was still a demiboy, that hadn't changed, and he found no small joy in thinking it never would, the image of him telling his mentor and the soft wings that had pulled him just a bit closer lighting up in his mind as he thought of it; their silent “ok” when they couldn't bring themselves to whisper the word.

Then he chases after what he hates now, things to tiptoe around.

He finds the end revolting; not enough to never go, but enough to avoid, blacks and purples send shivers up his spine and he finds cloaks quite pleasant to burn, whittling himself a staff fills him with confidence instead of disdain, and with a couple testing jabs he finds the weapon a comfort instead of a nuisance.

He finds quite quickly that his diet has changed.

Outside of their realm he finds himself growing hungry, and thus discovers the variety of things he can no longer consume, which just so happens to be near everything; meats are off the table, too many fruits give him a stomach ache, bread is kind of okay but too much and he gets a headache— the only thing he doesn't have much problems with seems to be seeds which, oddly enough, keep him feeling fairly full.

He ends up finding himself mixing together meal bags, comprised mostly of seed with the max amount of other things before he gets sick. As far as he can tell he hasn't been malnourished, at least according to the bots and how he himself feels, so he calls it good and moves on to other issues.

Like the loneliness, how it surrounded him, made haunting whispers echo at the edge of his hearing, gunshots now mixed with snapping wings.

He was alone, painfully alone. Other than his two homicidal robot sons who he loves dearly yet still, they don't make much for conversation. Or much anything to socialize with. They were… hollow, unable to chase away his thoughts for more than a few seconds at most.

He wanted people�� real honest people… But he was alone.

But things change.

#watcher phil #watcher grian #npg #npc grian #robot grian #2/10 #the finch fanfic #grian

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