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Niki goes mining, like she never does, to try and make a present for Wilbur, something he could use or want, or look at and be happy. She tries to think about what he wants. What all those other boys are after - iron, gapples, a silk touch pickaxe. Wheat has always been enough for her - wheat, companionship, an infinite water source. The drug van was more Wilbur’s thing, Niki didn’t really see the appeal, but she could make it work. If she didn’t think he’d snap at her, or grow bitter and distant. She gets hopelessly turned around in some hole in the dark and gets killed by the same skeleton twice.
She wants Wilbur to talk to, to be in the hole with her, to also get shot by the skeleton so she can laugh at him. They were together, in this world where everyone was good at the game. And it had been enough, to be like each other and together. Wilbur had founded a nation on it.
Without Wilbur, it’s just frustrating, being bad at the game.
One week later, L’manberg blows sky-high, and something goes wrong with Niki’s left leg. Maybe she pulled a muscle running, she thinks, or something’s off with the respawn. Could be lag, maybe. It’s annoying, it hurts like hell, and she doesn’t want L’manberg’s new president and his friends telling her to just get better internet so she picks a direction and walks until she can’t see civilization, trying to put distance between herself and all those entities.
Night falls, and she finds her way back home. Tries to sleep it off. But the nature of her leg pain crystallizes overnight, and she wakes up to the truth: A stretch of land, just a few loaded chunks across, is in her leg now. It’s centered between her hip and her outer thigh, reaching up, down, and over from there to the rest of her left side. Niki looks down at her thighs, to the place they’d normally touch, and sees her leg spill over into green hills, wells and rivers of blue, the prickle of farms and infrastructure. Something’s been torn or ripped out of the bottom - a great big hole.
Jagged cobblestone at the edge drags her gaze down, and down, until she’s bent in half clutching at the grassy dirt. The hole goes down.
Niki has been calling it pain, but that’s not exactly what’s happening. It’s stranger than pain. The thing about pain that makes it pain is that it hurts. Her leg hurts, she could tell people, but it wouldn’t be true. It feels like her leg is holding its breath. If her leg had a heart, it would be racing.
Niki hauls herself upright, heats a mostly empty water bucket and adds flour. It thickens to a paste, smokes, sticks to the bottom. Niki sits on the floor behind the bakery counter and eats it in the dark. She’s sat with the pain in her left hip for a week now, and it’s never the same each time. It touches the same area, from her hip to the center of her thigh, and then it deepens like a lake, sharpens like the swing of an axe.
Fundy whispers to her: why are you avoiding me ;__; . The pain ripples like an obsidian flag.
It’s winter now. She coughs when the air hits her lungs. The snow and candy canes shiver in the sun, freeze into horrific twisted figures every night. Niki dreams of underground mazes, torchlight on stone, of always being too warm or too cold.
The cold doesn’t stop things from moving and growing. The slow creep of red vines over the paths, the slow itching of her legs chasm. By morning, Niki’s loaves are blossoming with grey and purple mold.
She thinks about telling Fundy. She trusted him. She named a fox for him, once, even if it took something from L’manberg as a collective and made it something only theirs.
As much as it was good to come home, she’d wanted it even then. Something only hers.
Niki stands at the crater’s edge and empties her inventory into the pit. She looks at her life bobbing in the water - sticks and bread and bones and wool and somebody’s diamond sword with horrible durability and a dozen sheaves of wheat. Niki does not want the hole filled, she wants the hole on the outside of her body. She wants to look down through her abdomen and know the hole is really there. She wants to break apart and fracture into nothing. Eventually she grabs the sword to harvest more wheat, and tosses it over the ledge too. She can feel someone building with obsidian, a long low structure looping from her ribs to her knee.
“I’m keeping a record,” Eret tells her. “Everything we’ve made together has changed the world. We can’t live in the world the same way ever again.” “I thought you’d say something about making sure we don’t forget what they did to us.” Niki says. “This is - I mean, I was making things. The only thing they made was a big hole.” She wants to see what Eret’s been working on, but keeps lingering in the doorway. Eret looks back across the threshold and smiles sadly. “They certainly did make a really big hole,” they say. “That’s all in here. But I hope I’ve captured enough of the essence of this place to get what you’ve been trying to make here, too.”
Niki shifts her weight off her left leg. Eret says “It’s okay if you don’t want to come in, though. I understand there’s a lot of painful memories in here,” which is stupid enough to snap her out of it. She literally just came in from her bakery. She can look up from the front step and see where they wrote CRY. The painful memories are out there, she’s living inside them. She has no other choice. And they’re - well - they’re -
Niki walks in with Eret, past the maps and hot dog van and its declaration, and lets herself think about how it’s living inside her, too.
Niki almost tells Jack about the hole in her leg. She doesn’t want him to tell her she’s being weird, and she thinks he might. Or maybe it’s a holdover from Schlatt’s presidency, scrutinizing and scrutinizing her weakness. Later, it strikes her just how young he is. He shouldn’t have to deal with any of this shit. He doesn’t need to know about her weird leg hole on top of everything else. He has the world to take over.
Tubbo stops by the bakery to steal wheat. Niki was pretty sure her latest batch was moldy from the seed, and she’d thrown it all away. Tubbo sighs, and Niki takes a deep slow breath and completely loses it. “You were stealing it anyway. You were stealing it anyway, Tubbo!” she shouts. “What am I doing here, what am I even doing here,” she cries. “Nobody buys from me, anyway. You’re all eating steak.”
“I mean,” Tubbo says “It’s great for the saturation. Maybe you can branch out, get a cow farm.” “You can help your own saturation,” she spits. “What am I supposed to do here?” “I dunno, man.” Tubbo sighs again. “Listen to your heart, or whatever.”
Niki closes her eyes and tries to listen to her heart, or whatever. The only thing she can read there is CRY or, sometimes, YOU BROKEN-HEART LITTLE PENIS. She hears no wisdom but the sound of the land holding its breath.
Niki understands the moral outrage and the impending fucking war again, but she’s a little sad to see the obsidian wall go. She’s still fucking mad about Schlatt and Quackity taking down the first one.It was perfect. You couldn’t get lost looking for it, you’d spot the walls and know which way was home.
They have their stupid festival. They don’t have anything to say to her - “Niki, get some better clothes. What the heck, Niki” - they don’t have anything to say to her. Niki stops talking to them all, officially closes down the shop. She sits down by the dock or where the prime path crests the hill or in Eret’s flamingo garden, and ignores all messages. Just her and the land. She wishes she could string a sentence together. She wishes the hole in her leg didn’t hurt so much. She’s started dreaming about it, the wound of earth under the houses going straight down to bedrock. The hole shudders with impact. At midnight it grows red vines, all night it throbs and bleeds, and eventually, where the sun touches it, it burns.
Nighttime, the mobs are out. They hiss and slobber and crunch dirt, in the shadows and mineshafts. Somewhere in her thigh, water trickles into and out of the lake of tears. Nothing in the world is hers.
They slept three or four to a bed in Pogtopia, when the most people lived there. It wasn’t too bad - they were rarely all asleep at the same time, and as far as anyone new Techno slept in the potato farm. But leaving was rough work. Underground, someone or other always collapsed in the bed at all times. Niki dreams she lies down next to Tommy and Tubbo and sleeps through an afternoon. She dozes as they get up for their nightly arson sessions or whatever Tommy’s up to this time - she traces their passage, She stirs, rolls over, and someone else is lying on her other side, just beyond the reach of the torch. She wiggles forward, to try and catch a look at their face and her breath catches. “Wilbur?”
He is almost nothing in the darkness. He could be anyone, if she’d known anyone else that tall and narrow. She doesn’t know why she spoke, she curses herself. She prays against everything she wanted for him during that long month, for him to stay asleep, for him to close his eyes - for, when he lets out a muffled “Niki?” for him to recede into incoherent mumbling. She is frozen as he begins to roll over, begging the scene not to play.
He rolls over. “Niki! Niki, where have you been? Niki, I’ve been so lonely -” He rolls over, bridges the gap between them, takes an interest in her face. His lips and chin are slick with dark water, black mold dotting up to his cheeks. His eyes are bright with l’manberg spirit. He grins.
Help me. Fuck you. She can’t get her face to move. The smell is choking her.
They’re really blowing L’manburg sky-high tonight. All Niki can think is, finally. The rain of tnt pounds like a drill, throbs like a bass. She closes her eyes and looks for answers, and finally the only thing she can feel is the flames.
They were working on expanding L’manberg, reclaiming territory they’d lost or never had. Doomsday expanded it even further, clear down to the bedrock in some places. Niki isn’t sure what this means for her leg. She can’t wiggle her toes and feel the trees bending in the wind anymore. Maybe it’s gone numb in there. Maybe it’s all hole. Niki starts carving out another place, entirely underground. She wants her body to feel safe. There’s not a lot going on - torches, cobble, dirt. New l’manberg was a pretty colorful city on stilts; Niki’s bringing it back to basics. Good old dirt and stone. It has to stay secret, so there’s not a ton of room for Fundy to restart the space project if he wants. It’s like Niki’s old house, though. Maybe there’s room for a fox.
She could message him - Fundy. We are redying my hair or I am going to kill someone - She could message any of them.
It’s not the same.
Niki finds a sign - anarchy in flaming letters - to show her she’s on the right track. She’s been hanging out with Jack, and it feels right. They forget about him, too. She reads, schemes, finds the moments she feels safe and bright and hopeful and white-knuckles them. In a cavern in her left side, vines creep. Rain collects in pools, washes egg and blood from stone. A flag stirs. In her dreams, Niki rolls it, folds it, goes at it with shears and a pickaxe until she can move it a little closer to her heart.