Chapter Text
Before the tree burns down and Etho boxes himself up tightly; before the Crastle is built; before any of them really understand the stakes of the game—that even if death isn’t final it’s still death and hurts and hurts like it’ll never end, and dying is only sometimes cold but always frightening even if you’re told you’ll come back—and before Bdubs knows why his hands' calluses match the shape of a sword, or why he remembers how to swing a blade in a long low cut through the dark to meet its mark; so long before any alliance is made that betrayal isn’t an idea even if it’s an inevitability; and other befores, too: before Bdubs knows the fleeting feeling of Etho’s hand in his and the soft rise and fall of his chest in the night; before love, and all the rest, they fish for salmon in the river together.
“I heard you’re teaming with Cleo,” Etho says. He’s not watching his line, even though it has a fish on the end of it, tugging, tugging.
Bdubs eyes him. “Maybe I am. What’s it to you?”
Etho shrugs, and Skizz, on the riverbank beside him, laughs. “Etho’s paranoid,” he says.
“Are we even allowed alliances?” Etho says. “I feel like even when you’re on yellow, you’re on thin ice.”
“Hey, I could do with some ice right now,” Bdubs mutters. It’s a hot, stuffy day even out in the forest. His shirt clings to him uncomfortably, like being tied with heavy rope. It’d be much nicer to—
Bdubs throws his shirt off and jumps into the river. The water’s perfect, cool like silk and soft as lambswool. Just the remedy for the heat. When he comes up to the surface, he shakes the water off him. It flies off his hair and his chest in a spray of sparkling droplets. He shouts over to Etho and Skizz, “come on in, the water’s great!”
Skizz shouts something back about scaring away all the fish, but Bdubs is—completely distracted. By Etho, who’s staring at him blatantly, ears slowly turning bright pink.
Okay , Bdubs thinks, and finds himself grinning, warmth uncurling inside him. It feels, weirdly, like rediscovering something. Like he’s been fumbling around in the dark and has finally found the lightswitch.
Etho’s eyes flick up to his, and he’s so surprised to find Bdubs meeting his gaze that he jerks around and stumbles over a rock.
“I’m, uh, going to go back to the village,” he shouts, and hurries into the woods. Bdubs watches him go and thinks, okay. Yeah, okay.
—
It’s kind of amazing, how quickly things fall apart. There are stretches where the Crastle is under constant attack from all sides, and they’re never as well resourced as everyone else seems to be. Bdubs takes to sleeping with his bow in his hand. The hairs on his neck prickle when he hears shouting in the distance.
It only occurs to him much later that when Etho had asked him to stay there in the village, after the dark oak had burned, that he might’ve meant it. But even if they’re not on the same side, he sees Etho around, and his heart somersaults with every shared glance. He can tell when Etho’s smiling behind his mask, somehow. The way his eyes crinkle. The way his shoulders shake when he laughs. Then he dies, and there’s too much going on to dwell on it, too many people falling too quickly, and Bdubs casts around, unmoored. But I didn’t, we never…
Bdubs loses his third life up to his knees in water, looking down at where Scar’s sword has run through his belly. He doesn’t really think of anything as the red trickles out of him. He hopes Scar dies. He hopes Grian dies. He hopes—
then—
he murders Grian not even knowing if it’s bloodlust or revenge. The curse drains out of him like water through white rapids: violent, dangerous, and then suddenly, eerily calm.
“I did it!” he shouts to Etho, breathless. “I’m cured!”
He grabs Etho and pulls him into a tight hug, hardly caring that he’s covering Etho with the blood that’s all over him. The woods are cold, and there’s thick hoar frost covering the ground and trees, but Etho’s breath near his ear is hot, vibrant.
“I was sure it wasn’t you,” Etho whispers.
Bdubs pulls back and thumbs a smudge of red off Etho’s cheek, just above the mask. It’s a new game. Maybe they can be on the same side, this time.
—
There aren’t any footprints in the snow around the fort. Bdubs checks all around the outside while Etho goes in, but they don’t find any indication that it’s been disturbed since the last snowfall.
Etho calls down from the wall, “no sign of Tango and Skizz.” His hair blends in with the pale clouds blanketing the sky. “Looks like they haven’t been back in days.”
They check the area for traps, too, and come up blank. All they find are the cold cobble walls of the keep, overgrown sugarcane, and cows that need feeding. Etho disappears down the trapdoor to the farm. Bdubs shovels snow off the stairs and ramparts. It’s tiring work, and by the time the sky starts darkening, he’s frozen through and stiff to the bone. He drags himself back inside long after nightfall.
The thick stone walls are normally good at keeping heat in, but after days with no fires lit, the bedroom is freezing cold. When Etho emerges from the trapdoor he doesn’t wait, just kicks off his boots and crawls straight into bed, not even taking off his thick, khaki green coat.
“We should light a fire,” Bdubs says. Even fully dressed under the blankets, the room’s too cold to get a good night’s sleep in.
“Whatever you want,” Etho says, voice muffled a bit by the pillow. He prefers to sleep on his front. Bdubs hadn’t noticed on purpose, but he still has—noticed. Etho likes to sprawls out, and he snores. He’d probably be terrible to share a bed with. Bdubs kind of wants to try anyway.
It takes Bdubs a lot longer than it should to set up a little fire in the hearth and stoke it to a steady blaze. He can’t tell if it’s because his fingers are too cold and stiff to make light work of it, or if it’s the wood. Dry firewood is scarce, around the fort. They’ve been rationing what little there is since the beginning of the game, but it’s hard to find the time to dry out more with everything going on.
It’s an instant relief when he does get the fire going, heat washing over and soaking through him. When he glances over his shoulder, Etho’s sitting up in the bed with the blanket pooled around him. For once, his eyes match: the orange fire-glow reflects off both, dancing in time with the shadows on the walls.
“You think the game’s going to go on much longer?” Bdubs asks him.
“I don’t know,” Etho says. “No one’s out yet, but there’s a lot of red and yellow going around.”
Bdubs checks the list of players on his communicator. Some greens, a few reds, and a sea of yellow—Bdubs’s name among them. It’d been red the day before.
“You’re okay,” Etho says. Bdubs isn’t sure if that’s supposed to be a fact or a reassurance.
He pulls off his own boots and goes to sit on the bed next to Etho’s. The room’s small, so the beds are only a foot apart, and his knees knock against Etho’s bed frame. “Calling me just okay? I’m better than that,” he says, putting as much bluster into it as he can. “I’m gonna win this whole thing.”
Etho’s eyes crinkle a bit, and that means he’s smiling, and right then, Bdubs can’t think of a reason not to any more. He hooks a finger through the mask covering Etho’s nose and chin and carefully pulls it down, then cups his face with both hands, and kisses him.
It’s slow, undemanding. Etho sighs into it, lips dragging pliably against Bdubs’s, his hands coming up to rest on Bdubs’s thighs. His mouth is warm and he sinks into Bdubs’s touch like an anchor falling onto a bed of sand—heavily, like he has no intention of moving. Bdubs tangles his fingers into his soft hair as their mouths slide together, and thinks, yes, this. Exactly this.
But then Etho pulls away, forehead pressing against Bdubs’s, millimetres between them, just enough space for his hands to grip onto Bdubs’s shoulders, just enough for him to whisper, “don’t.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay—“ Bdubs tries to lean in again, chasing his lips, but Etho draws back completely, pulling Bdubs’s hands away from him and sitting back on the bed.
“Don’t,” Etho repeats. His breath is ragged. “Don’t do that.”
Bdubs has to wade back to himself, so caught up in the lingering feeling of Etho kissing him back that he almost misses it. “What?”
“You can’t just—throw it all away, like it means nothing,” Etho says, nonsensically, like he’s continuing half a conversation Bdubs hasn’t been a part of. “Or like it doesn’t matter, so that you can go out and get yourself killed tomorrow—“
No, he isn’t going to let Etho think himself out of it. He pushes off his bed and crawls onto Etho’s, and pulls him into another searing kiss. Etho’s lips part against Bdubs’s and his good eye slides shut, and he kisses back softly. “That’s not—“ Bdubs says between kisses— “what this is. I’m not—” pressing them sweetly against Etho’s soft, yielding mouth— “going to die.”
Etho lets Bdubs push him down onto the pillow, slide his hands up under Etho’s jacket and shirt and run them over the skin of his waist. He feels scars everywhere. He feels Etho arch to his touch. He presses hot kisses into Etho’s mouth and feels his body respond.
Then there’s a hard pressure at his chest, and he’s pushed back, again. He sits up, tears his hands away from Etho reluctantly.
“Why not when you were green?” Etho asks. His voice is shaking, threadbare.
Bdubs swallows. Why hadn’t he?
For a second, Etho looks at him, completely raw and open like a wound. Then he pulls his mask up and something closes off in his eyes. He takes a long, deep breath.
“Go to sleep, Bdubs,” he says. He pulls the blanket up over him and turns over to face the wall.
They don’t speak again, that night.
—
Later, Bdubs dies at the bottom of a ravine, arrows feathering his back. On the permafrost, the blood seeps out of him into a pool. It’s sort of a lovely sight, the blood, and the pain is hardly even pain, and the scarlet haze in his vision is a cloud, floating, floating.
Any second, now, he’ll save me. He thinks about how the tips of Etho’s ears had reddened that day by the river. How he’d been flustered, looking down at the grass and tripping away when Bdubs caught his eye.
He does love me , he tells himself as the light fades. I know he loves me. He cares .