Chapter Text
Calm down, girl, why you so mad? Why’s your heart gone rotten? It’s all good, girl, why you upset? Guess they have forgotten what they did, does it get your blood boiling? Does it make you see red? Do you wanna destroy it? Does it get in your head? ‘Cause it gets my blood boiling, and I’m coming unglued, it would hit you like poison, if you knew what I knew, you would be angry too…
Pearl’s forgotten a lot of things. It’s kind of how her life’s been going lately.
She has a feeling she’s not going to forget this one, amnesia or no.
The first thing that hits her is the sort of—not slowness, really. She’s not fuzzy or foggy or discombobulated, but she is very aware of every breath of recycled air she’s taking and every sluggish beat of her heart.
“Don’t you dare,” Grian snaps, abruptly and without warning. Pearl has a feeling it isn’t a reaction to her teasing him about the brain cell. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
Pearl, too focused on bone and muscle and joint and blood and every hair on the back of her neck standing to attention, still can’t quite catch up, even when something answers.
“You’re hardly in a position to negotiate, Xelqua.”
“Fuck off,” Grian says in return.
“Honestly, have you not tired of this game by now? You hide, we find you, you resort to your pitiful posturing. Is it not obvious you’re only delaying the inevitable yet?”
“Go to hell, Orez.”
Pearl can’t move, and there’s a Watcher here.
She thinks she should be scared. She is, a little bit.
But, more importantly and more overwhelmingly, she’s furious.
Pearl realizes, maybe, at the exact same time Grian does. “You did this,” he says, and sounds almost as angry as she feels.
Hadn’t it been enough? The death games, the torment, the loss of Evo, Grian’s wings? They’d had to take Hermitcraft as well?
“Hardly,” says the Watcher with a scoff. “The satellite’s orbit was already unstable. It would have fallen within the decade regardless of interference. A coaxing of your admin towards this world in particular? A nudge of code alongside that already unstable orbit? That, indeed, was our interference. So really, now. Have you not tired of running from your own fate yet?”
Pearl’s heart beats on, too hard and too slow, and she feels so terribly powerless it seems more like it shouldn’t be beating at all.
“If you think my fate,” Grian spits, “will ever end with you—”
“And where else would it?” Orez asks. “Do you really think you can run forever? That you could force Time itself to crumble to pieces rather than return?”
Yes, Pearl thinks, even if she can’t get it off her lips, because even without her memories she knows that Grian must never, ever go back to the Watchers, and if she’d defeated Death then she’s going to put money that Time couldn’t hold a candle either.
“How many times are we going to let them hurt him?” she’d asked Mumbo, what felt like a lifetime ago now.
And the answer now, she decides, is never again.
~~~
Pearl’s not entirely sure how they make it to Skizz’s world. She’s a bit busy making sure Grian doesn’t drown to really process whatever just happened.
It doesn’t mean she’s not thinking about it. She’s thinking about a lot of things, actually. A Watcher in the Void; the destruction of Hermitcraft; death and time and fate.
A conversation she’d had with a certain dragon just hours earlier.
There is hardly a power greater in the Universe than the love one has for one’s friends.
So what was this, then? The real power was the friendship we made along the way?
If that were true, she doesn’t think she’d be sitting on Skizz’s floor right now, wondering whether the other Hermits were alive or dead with Grian unconscious in the corner.
And what about Grian’s bargain? How did asking to keep them all safe even work when they all but knew for a fact that Tango was dead and so many others were in question?
“Okay,” Skizz mutters, scrounging through his chests. “Clothes? Extra clothes? Who still needs more clothes? Pearlie-Pop, you got enough blankets?”
“Yeah, but I’d take some better conditioner,” she says with forced levity. Given the current state of Skizz’s base, she’s thankful she’s had the chance for a shower at all, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t taken as long to get her hair untangled after than she actually had in the shower. Apparently little things like hair products got lost when your world exploded.
“Oh,” Scar says, digging in his inventory. “I’ve got you.”
Pearl lifts a hand from the tail end of the braid she’s forcing her hair back in, catches the bottle he throws her in midair, then raises a brow and finally sighs. “You know, I’m not going to question it,” she says, “but you couldn’t have passed this along before I took a shower?”
“Well, you didn’t ask before you showered,” Scar points out. “I’m not a mind reader, Pearl.”
Mumbo gives a hysterical little snort at that.
It is, overall, a very subdued round of bickering for Boatem. As it has to be, on a night like this, with Grian unconscious in the corner. They haven’t heard from anyone else in the hours since they’d arrived, and for all Pearl knows they’re all gone.
It is, fortunately, almost immediately after she has that thought that Skizz picks up his comm. “Hey,” he says, pinning it to his ear with his shoulder and heading upstairs before Pearl can even try making out who’s on the other end. “No, I’ve got…”
Pearl ties her braid off, tosses it over her shoulder, and gets to her feet.
“...What are you doing?” Scar asks, sounding mildly more concerned than he had a minute ago.
“Being nosy,” Pearl says, peering up the stairs in a vain attempt to catch a glimpse of Skizz. Not that she could hear his call any better from here than she could have when he was still downstairs. “What? Don’t you want to know who’s calling Skizz right now?”
“Etho, apparently?” Impulse ventures. Right. Because Skizz had heard from Etho, for some reason, at some point. “Skizz would’ve said if it was anyone we hadn’t heard from yet.”
“I didn’t know they’d gotten close,” Scar says.
Pearl snorts, then says, “I didn’t know you could call Etho close with anyone.”
“Bdubs,” Scar points out.
“And we all know how that ended,” Pearl says, rolling her eyes. Frankly, Last Life and the little of Season Eight Etho had been around for hadn’t really been enough for her to form much of an opinion on him; and what she had seen, especially as Last Life had circled to a close, hadn’t left the most favorable impression. No, most of her actual opinion on Etho had come straight from Bdubs, who had been around to actually talk to decidedly more. Ignore the fact she’d been trying to steal his clocks most of the time they’d been quote-unquote hanging out.
And, well. What she’d gotten from Bdubs had led her to believe it was entirely possible Etho was an incarnation of the god of commitment issues given human form, so. Maybe not her first choice as their immediate point of contact, but not much she could do about that.
Still, it’s something resembling progress when they get off the call with him, for any definition of progress right now. Even if Skizz does look decidedly miffed with her for blatantly eavesdropping when he comes down.
Well. Not Pearl’s fault Skizz was being secretive.
~~~
It’s about four-thirty when Pearl wakes up, according to her comm. Still pitch dark at this time of year, though in Skizz’s basement it’s hard to tell. She’s not sure if it was Impulse’s shuffling around that had woken her, though when she sits up and catches his eye he gives her a wave and a mouthed Morning.
Not a good morning. Pearl didn’t blame him for that one.
Impulse makes his way upstairs, leaving four people still sleeping and Pearl unable to return to it. She’s not sure Impulse had slept at all, given she was pretty sure he hadn’t been around when she’d dropped off, but that wasn’t her business.
She could use a chat with Impulse, actually.
Unluckily for her, by the time she makes it upstairs Impulse has moved on from that too. Pearl huffs, having to re-knot the ties on the sweatpants she was currently borrowing from Skizz that were pretty much the right length but twice the size she needed in the waist. Again, things that got lost at the end of the world.
Well, scratch talking to Impulse, then. And scratch going back to sleep, she’s pretty sure. There’s a layer of frost on the ground when she makes her way outside, broken by Impulse’s footsteps, though it’s chilly enough Pearl tugs the hoodie that was still thankfully her own tighter around herself and stares at the gleaming moon.
Even full, it seems uncannily tiny compared to the last two months of Hermitcraft. Pearl’s eyes are already adjusting down to the dim of it, but proper nightfall is suddenly, strangely dark.
She’s also pretty sure she can’t go all moon-ghost anymore, by accident or on purpose, and finds herself remarkably disappointed by the fact. Once Zedaph had given her a hand actually getting the shift between both phases under control and she wasn’t getting stuck as a ghost, it had come in remarkably handy. So it really was a shame that—
Oh.
Except.
Well, scratch all that, then, because though it takes a little more effort without the massive moon aiding whatever messed-up bit of code let her go intangible, it decidedly did still work.
Well. That might be useful.
Pearl doesn’t take in a deep breath of the night air, considering she currently doesn’t have lungs, but something tight eases in her chest all the same.
“Hello.”
If Pearl still had skin, she might have jumped out of it. Her first instinct is the voice had to belong to one of the other members of Boatem or Skizz, the logical answer, even if it doesn’t sound like any of them. A glance over the shoulder she doesn’t have proves none of them have come upstairs, and there’s no indication Impulse had come back from wherever he was—
“I must admit, I never did think we’d be able to speak quite like this again, my dear.”
“What the fuck,” Pearl replies, still casting around for the voice.
Except—
There’d been that one moment in Boatem, hadn’t there, where she could have sworn she’d heard—and then there was the first night she’d ended up stuck as a ghost, with her friends having to track down Xisuma to figure it out and explain—
“What you told me was that the night you died happened to be under the full moon, and you were able to come back as a spirit, tied to its power.”
“...Hello?” Pearl ventures again in return.
“Hello,” the moon says again.
“...I am,” Pearl announces, “so confused.”
The moon can laugh, apparently, though the sound is tinged with strange melancholy. “The time was once you could hardly stand this form,” she says. “When you were willing to give up everything to be rid of it. And here you are again.”
Pearl’s drifting now, vaguely aware that Skizz’s mountain was a lot easier to descend when you didn’t have to worry about things like having legs. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
There’s a faint sigh, then, “Oh, my darling. Never did I think I would have to tell you all of this again.”
And Pearl, with a surge in the blood she doesn’t have, desperately grapples for a well of knowledge she never thought she’d get. “Tell me what?”