Chapter Text
The first time BigB saw Scar smile was in the orientation circle at the start of Third Life.
Scar wasn’t even looking at him. He was bustling excitedly in a random direction like everyone else, getting ready to collect materials and run into each other at random places and make teams and eventually kill each other.
BigB was moving too. He needed to find somewhere private. But he looked around at the other players as they ran off, just out of idle curiosity, and among the unfamiliar faces still visible to him he saw Scar’s smile.
The smile was excited, plain and simple. Scar was happy to be here, looking forward to the game. He had heard the pitch, heard the rules, signed the contract, felt the laws of the world plug into his code, and he was still expecting to have a good time.
That was dangerous, BigB decided. Anyone who was excited for a slaughter/torture session designed to feed a hungry Watcher their pain, even if it was their friend, was dangerous.
Martyn wasn’t excited. Martyn was smiling, sure, but it was a bit too wide. He was playing it all up, making sure from the get go that this would be dramatic. He was only here out of an obligation to Grian, and he was going to make sure Grian got the show he needed.
Martyn would have fun where he could, he would indulge in the hunting and the drama. He would enjoy it.
But he wasn’t looking forward to it.
BigB wasn’t either, albeit for different reasons.
Perhaps Scar wasn’t sadistic. Maybe Scar was just naive, or naive to the nature of Watchers, or whatever, but that naivety could be dangerous too. It would be, if the worst happened.
That was probably the big difference between the people who were excited and the ones who weren't. Knowing, knowing in their bones, what happens if this goes wrong.
Well, that wasn’t quite fair. No one really knew what would happen, not even the people who’d seen it happen before. They could only guess.
But boy, could they guess.
That was why Martyn was putting on a show, because he was determined for Grian to get his money’s worth so they wouldn’t have to do this again for a long, long time.
Jimmy could guess, and he was ready to get out in a second no matter what he said. He didn’t even know it himself, but the truth was that he would abandon the others to the worst of it just before it could all implode. No one would blame him, exactly. The only people who would know he’d chosen to leave would have felt the same fear.
That instinct was why Pearl hadn’t come in the first place. Even though she loved Grian she just couldn’t do it, not even to keep his hunger afloat for a little bit longer, not even to spare the others a piece of the pain they were agreeing to give up. She wouldn’t make herself need to run.
Grian had the most guesses, because he had designed this game. He knew all the weakest places, and knew that all of those weaknesses stemmed from him.
Whether the Red Curse would balance bloodlust and free will comfortably. Whether he would be able to resist taking a deeper drink from everyone’s fear. Whether the server’s cloaking would hold up against the entities it was meant to and if it would let emergency rescuers through.
BigB could guess too. He had the best guess out of anyone, because he already knew exactly how the problems would start.
A player was going to dig up some hidden, secluded cavern, and then after everyone gets comfortable he’ll open up a tear. The tear, regardless of its actual position in the world, would cut right through the world border, right through the bedrock beneath, right through the space between dimensions, and right through the painstaking protections Grian had laid around the server, and something will have officially gone wrong.
There was a certain comfort in it, BigB thought, to not have to wonder if.
(It was a sparse comfort.)
BigB smiled, and looked for somewhere to start digging.
The second time BigB saw Scar smile, he was being scammed out of the two diamonds he had leftover from his mining expedition.
The scamming was actually the problem, as it so often is. Scar had a smile that made BigB want to go along with whatever he was saying, though from the sounds of it BigB wasn’t the only person who felt that way.
That was dangerous, because BigB had some secrets he was quite attached to and a certain degree of separation from the action of the game that he hoped to maintain. Smiles like that, that could make BigB smile back and nod along and follow Scar to wherever he led him, would get BigB in a lot more trouble than they could do for anyone else.
BigB gave Scar the diamonds and left. Some battles weren’t worth fighting, and BigB already suspected that Scar’s smile would be enemy-number-one if he let it, so he resolved to avoid it as much as possible.
For a long time, this was a very easy thing to do.
BigB avoided Scar within reason, but he couldn’t do much when he came right up to his house to steal the cookie off of it.
He could have, technically, just ran away down into his mines where the tear in reality was, but he didn’t need to yet. He was only wary of Scar, just being extra careful because this was the first game and the first time BigB was sneaking around to let the Watchers in, so he was a little more cautious than he thought might be necessary.
Later, BigB would start to be afraid. If this happened in Double Life, maybe he would have run. Then again, in Double Life Scar might have chased him.
But here in Third Life, BigB stepped out and made a few moments of conversation, just long enough to get the gist that Scar and Grian had just failed whatever their real plan was and were after the cookie as a consolation.
That explained why Grian was so mopey in the midst of a prank, but from Scar he never would have known. The man was smiling, just like always.
Scar’s smile was a large but toothless smile of no particular suggestion, so neutral in its positivity that BigB had to think he almost never stopped, regardless of whether he had any reason to be smiling.
That was dangerous too. The Watchers were going to love that.
They’d wait with bated breath, what’s his trump card?, why is he still smiling?, and they’d all fall over each other with amusement whenever it turned out he had none.
And then, whenever they did manage to wipe the grin off his face, there would be uproar. They would all close in and gaze upon his broken face, giddy for such a tiny victory that he’d made so valuable to them.
Then half of the Dogwarts alliance exploded, and BigB got the impression it may be a while before Scar really lost, at least in the eyes of the Watchers.
At that same time, BigB saw a softer smile from Scar too. BigB could see the shift from looking at his success and looking at his partner in crime openly reflected on his face.
The Watchers had decided Scar would be more entertaining if he was desperately, tragically in love, so they had simply made it so.
Honestly, BigB knew it had only been a matter of time. The Watchers were, at the end of the day, here for a show, and who could resist a love story?
Then again, they never seemed to care for happy endings, so perhaps that wasn’t a perfect way to think of them.
(Somewhere shallow and unimportant in his mind, BigB was uncomfortable watching Scar be in love. He didn’t think to interrogate the feeling, and so it stayed to wriggle deeper towards his heart with every smile.
(In an endless sequence of bad luck for BigB, that might have been his one great mistake, to not find the weakness for Scar growing beneath his skin and tear it out before it was too deep.)
Ironically, when Scar took his final life, BigB didn’t consider the smile on Scar’s face to be all that dangerous.
Well, he did in the moment, but once he died and came a bit out of the haze of the game, the Watchers’ implanted feeling that this was it, there is no life after this, it occurred to him that that was probably the least worrying grin he’d seen on the man.
Malice. Murder. Vicious glee at BigB’s pain and his death.
BigB was far more comfortable with that. Death could be recovered from, but breaks in his cover were harder to fix.
BigB watched the final fight with the rest of the ghosts.
Scar’s smile stubbornly refused to be wiped away, right up to the moment he died.
Scar held up against the Watchers again.
That was dangerous.
That was love, BigB idly noted. And it wasn’t even real.
(The weakness that BigB failed to uproot whispered, so quietly BigB didn’t register the thought, I wonder if he loves the same without them.)
The next smile of note is far too soon, and far worse than any before it.
Just as he came out of his mine where he’d made the tear in the Last Life server and gotten a headstart on diamonds, BigB heard Scar’s muffled humming and turned right around to go back to the mines.
Scar, unfortunately, dug through the ceiling and landed in front of BigB, blocking his path.
He stumbled a bit on his rough landing, reoriented himself, and smiled an entirely new smile. “Hel-lo, Big-B!”
Scar’s smile knew BigB was wary of him. Scar’s smile knew BigB was hiding something. Scar’s smile knew BigB had a secret, and that it knew secrets were the best bargaining chip.
BigB just had to convince him he was wrong. “Hey Scar!”
It’d have been easier if his voice didn’t shake, he knew, thank you. He wasn’t happy about it either.
“BigB, Let me level with you.” And then Scar started walking down the mineshaft. Towards where BigB had hidden the quite distinctive tear in reality.
“Wait, how can you level with me if we aren’t on the same level?” BigB tried to get him to come back with the stupid joke, but Scar just turned around with that smug smile that knew he had a secret and that now knew he had him nervous.
“Let me level with you.”
BigB braced himself to make excuses, to call him crazy, to gaslight him, to beg, when–
“I am the boogeyguy, the boogeyman man.”
What?
“You are?” BigB couldn’t believe it.
“But you know what, I’m maintaining our friendship forever–”
“Me and you?” He couldn’t believe his luck.
“Yes. So the question is, the only way I can leave without your head, is with a life.” Scar was using BigB’s secret as leverage for the game.
Of course he was! He didn’t know what it was! He didn’t know it was dangerous!
BigB’s sense of relief lasted less than a minute, when their banter led to its natural continuation.
BigB, at the top of the mineshaft, blocking Scar’s exit, looked down at him and spoke with a perfect imitation of confusion.
“Wait, you can’t be, because I’m the boogeyman.”
Scar met his eyes, smirked his terrifying ‘you have a secret’ smirk, and simply, confidently called his bluff.
“No you’re not.”
It became immediately apparent to BigB that just because Scar didn’t know his secret now didn’t mean he wouldn’t know it later, if BigB didn’t get rid of him as soon as possible for as long as possible and as often as possible.
Liars know liars, it seems, and although a lot could be said about exactly how good a liar either of them actually were, they were apparently good enough to see through each other.
Not that they were the same: Scar lied to get things out of other people, but BigB just lied to see if he could. Because he liked to get away with it, or to push it until he got caught.
It’d been a long time since anyone didn’t believe something he said who didn’t already know he was lying.
On principle, sure, Grian would look a little closer at the things BigB invented just because he knew he liked to lie, but it was never because he didn’t believe his words.
It was just because he didn’t believe BigB.
It was a good smokescreen for all this Watcher business, at least. No one looks twice when BigB gets caught in a lie over nothing.
(No one but Scar, apparently.)
BigB, at least, still had the upper hand, in that he understood Scar’s position perfectly:
BigB gave the conman a diamond and sent him on his way.
If a protection racket was all it took to keep his secret safe, BigB would spend the rest of the game in the mines.
The next time BigB saw Scar, Last Life was almost over, and his smile knew no secrets but his own.
He had just shared torrential piles of sand and gunpowder with their group of gathered Reds, and BigB could’ve died from the relief that Scar’s big trump card reveal was something so normal.
Running around and hunting Greens with him, it was like he’d forgotten their interaction at the beginning of the game entirely.
It was entirely possible he did forget. That was what made Scar so tricky, was that half the time he seemed like a bumbling man with no ulterior motives, it’s because he was. That’s what made the other half so potent, is that you fell for his act because it wasn’t an act, and he was just genuinely like that.
BigB felt himself relaxing around Scar’s cocky smile, his satisfied hunting smirk, his mistake cover-up grin, and all the ways he smiled when he wasn't in danger of finding out anything important.
As with almost every new smile of Scar’s, these would turn out to be far more dangerous than the ones before them, because they tried to train BigB to relax around his greatest threat.
And as with almost every new smile, they would pale in comparison with the danger of smiles to come. After all, this was just the ambient effect of Scar’s smiles. Imagine what would happen if he turned this innocent, harmless part of himself back towards BigB:
BigB was falling for it hook, line, and sinker, and Scar wasn’t even looking at him.
(The weakness was still nowhere near his heart, but it was primed. Without fear, the only thing stopping it was time.)
The next time BigB saw Scar’s smile, it was another one of the harmless ones. Or rather, the slow-acting poison.
The danger wasn’t so much with the smile in particular, but just the fact that he could see it at all, as this was not a Life server, and Scar was definitely not supposed to be here.
“What are you guys doing here?” BigB counted five arrivals, Grian, Pearl, Impulse, Mumbo, and Scar, in a pile on the floor in his living room, in his private home server, all wearing strange padded jumpsuits with glass helmets around their heads.
“Hermitcraft eight got got.” Pearl provided through her glass shield, before passing out.
“Moon big.” Grian elaborated, following Pearl's lead right after.
“Have you met Jellie?” Scar smiled nervously, and in his teeth were a hundred reassurances given in a moment – ‘so sorry to bother you’, ‘don’t you worry a bit’, ‘you won’t have to do a thing’ – and he passed out as well.
A cat in a jumpsuit of its own crawled over Impulse and Mumbo’s long-unconscious forms and fell over sideways, presumably as dead asleep as the rest of them.
BigB, thoroughly doomed, went to the kitchen and started making cookies.
The story, as it turned out, was not incredibly complicated, and far worse than BigB had hoped.
Hermitcraft season eight had experienced problems with the moon, they explained. It had gone so far as to crash into the server and take it out entirely. In the time running up to this, Scar had created suits to allow them to exist safely into the void while they navigated to a safer place.
Scar had also taken responsibility for the navigation part, and had apparently, completely dropped the ball. It was a point of quite a bit of contention, soothed not at all by Scar’s complete deflection of the topic in favour of discussing BigB’s: “amazing, really just amazing cookies, don’t you think so guys?”
BigB was oddly more happy with this route of deflection than compliments would normally find him: he already knew his cookies were amazing, as much as he didn’t mind hearing it, so there was no reason he should stumble over his words when responding.
Internally, BigB attributed this stutter to fear. Externally, it distracted his guests from Scar’s mess-up better than the deflection itself did.
After that bit of giggling and eyebrow wiggling had passed, Grian explained that to get them of the void he’d had had to use a bit of admin skill and a bit of Watcher magic to anchor them to a player and drag them into that server.
BigB didn’t ask why they chose him. Grian needed a sure shot, a clear target, and Watchers like him could lock onto BigB from halfway across the universe.
And so now, the five of them – “And Jellie!” – were trapped on BigB’s server until their code reacclimated to not being in the void, and if any of them left before then they might dissolve. If BigB left before then, they might all dissolve.
At first glance, this appeared disastrous, but BigB tried to have hope: the way Scar acted in the Life series wasn’t necessarily one to one with how he normally acted.
In the games, there was tension and Watchers playing around with his head. Odds were that he wouldn’t try and push something that made his friend’s friend uncomfortable if he didn’t have a magic switch flipped in his head telling him to be aggro all the time.
(What BigB failed to consider was that without the ever-present pull to leverage, kill, win, Scar would have to keep himself busy. He should have known that someone who was forced to kill and took the most talkative route every time would be an awfully social creature when left to his devices.)
Talking to Scar was easy, BigB discovered.
BigB already knew that, of course, anyone could tell you Scar’s easy to talk to, he made a point of it, but it was true.
BigB didn’t find people hard to talk to, either. BigB was social, he talked to people as easy as breathing, even if he liked to yank ‘em around a bit with a couple jumps sprinkled in. BigB liked to take the people he was talking to off balance, make them lose track of exactly what was happening.
Scar, as has been said before and will doubtless be said again, hardly needed BigB’s expert help to come off balance in a conversation. However, Scar also had a certain amount of wherewithal and adaptability that meant he never trailed off, never got so lost that he just gave up and left like Grian did.
Perhaps worst of all, Scar and BigB had things to talk about.
Impulse and Mumbo were perfectly pleasant, but they had so much to say about redstone and aesthetics that BigB didn’t have a good foothold in. It was fun enough to hang out with them, but they just ran out of things to say.
Grian and Pearl had all sorts of things they could talk about, years of memories together and catching-up that was chock-full of conversational landmines that ranged from somber to friendship-ruining.
They were almost worse than Impulse, because one wrong move and they could be plunged into a reminder of something that once was, and they would all have to pretend they weren’t thinking of the same thing.
Scar and BigB shared few hobbies and few interests, but as it turned out they had a compatible sort of flow whenever BigB wasn’t terrified of him.
Scar could talk for hours about science fiction franchises, which BigB had no better an understanding of than redstone but which at least he could bounce off of. There was a malleability with fiction, where BigB could say something ridiculous and made-up and as long as BigB defended his stance well (or retroactively edited it enough), Scar would have to admit that it was a valid interpretation or prediction.
(“Ohhhh.” BigB gasped. “And so Kylo Ren is Yoda’s son!”
(“No no no, because it turned out that Kylo Ren was Han Solo’s son, which was actually a whole uh– controversial writing choice itself.” Scar rambled on.
(“I mean yeah, Yoda’s obviously not his biological dad.”
(“Actually, Kylo Ren wasn’t even born when Yoda was alive.” Something, BigB had to assume, clicked in Scar’s brain. “Oh. Oh-hoh no.”
(“Mhm.” BigB had no idea what conclusion Scar just reached.
(“No!”
(“Think about it, it makes sense!”
(“Force ghosts can’t raise children!”
(“Why not?”
(“Wuh–! buh–! guh–!” There was, apparently, no actual answer to that question, if Scar’s rerouting was any sign. “Why would he do that!?”
(“To make sure Kylo Ren didn’t turn evil.”
(“Kylo Ren did turn evil!”
(“He messed up one thing, man, give him a break. He’s a ghost!”)
Of the few passionate hobbies they did share – besides lying to people – they quickly found baking to be an accessible and repeatable activity for them to enjoy together.
BigB technically knew more, but they both had enough interest for intelligent conversation, and to teach each other things about different ways of creaming butter or whatever else, and they had an endless stockpile of baking materials and an endless amount of time to bake and a captive audience of three with nothing better to do than eat whatever they made, and it was…
It was just easy.
Grian’s smile, of course, was also dangerous.
BigB hadn't bothered to consider this, because it was only dangerous in all the normal ways one would quickly learn to expect from Grian: dangerous when he has an idea for a prank, dangerous when he has an idea for a kill, dangerous when he wants to cause chaos.
Right now, it seemed, Grian was going for something between the three.
“He’s single, you know.”
BigB slowed for only a moment before he kept back at his pace. “What?”
He was churning butter, because he didn’t like to go out to hub servers and he liked making cookies without crafting magic so he did his baking all the way from scratch, and Grian was hovering around him with a smile that didn’t bode well.
“Scar. You know. That guy you have a massive crush on.” Grian shrugged, as if his voice hadn’t just cracked from holding back laughter.
BigB chuckled neutrally, keeping his eyes down on his work. “What are you talking about, man?”
“Oh Scar, you like my cookies?” Pearl crooned, because Pearl was there now, wasn’t that great. “That means a lot, coming from you. Do you want to bake together? What’s your favorite kind of cookie? Let’s make that!”
It was a ridiculous and totally childish conclusion to jump to. Odds were 50/50 that neither of them even believed it, and were just messing with him. Higher, really, because goodness knows Grian wasn’t the type to try and push relationships like this.
But when BigB responded “You’re crazy, man,” he couldn’t tell who was lying.
Grian continued, taking advantage of the fact that he always lies to just ignore his denial on principle. “I know the Watchers have that thing where they make me and him fall in love in the games because we have an entertaining dynamic, but we aren’t actually dating. In case you wanted an in there.”
Pearl nodded. “Yeah B, we’re all trapped here together. Why don’t you take the opportunity to get to know him?”
BigB chuckled again, his same stock chuckle, and started to get worried because he could hear himself and he really sounded like he was lying. “How bored are you guys?”
“So bored.” Grian groaned.
“But we’re also looking out for you!” Pearl added. “I think a relationship would do you some good, you’re so isolated.”
BigB rolled his eyes affectionately. “Come on guys.”
“When we told you you had to stay here or else we’d all dissolve, you were not nearly bothered enough.” Grian dismantled. “Were you even going to leave this server in the next month anyway?”
“Besides,” Mumbo chimed in, because he had also decided to come and be here in this room instead of literally anywhere else in the world, “Scar’s a perfectly, uh, eligible, er- romantic young man.”
“Oh you don’t know the half of it. You know he brought me flowers when he turned Red in Third Life?” Grian sounded absurdly like he was complaining.
“Hey, don’t be down on the guy for flowers!” BigB admonished.
Impulse huffed across from him, just about completing the set of random people entering this random room for no reason other than the psychic link, teleportation powers, and sadism they apparently all shared.
“Just because you wish it was you, B, doesn’t mean you need to be snappy about it!” Impulse grinned.
BigB stared down into the barrel in front of him and decided he could afford a little bit of a wrinkle in the cookie process if it got him away from this conversation. “Wow, the butter’s done! I gotta go put this away, sorry guys.”
“So you want to talk in the hallway?” Grian challenged.
Dang it. BigB sighed, trapped. “Guys, I swear, I’m really ok.”
“What’s ok?” Scar asked, entering the room and making BigB regret not installing a door with a lock.
Before BigB could say anything reasonable, or at least deflectingly on-brand, Pearl spoke up: “Oh Scar, we were just talking about you!”
Scar smiled (of course) bemusedly and tilted his head. “You were?”
“Yeah, they were thinking of going to get you to help me make butter, but I didn’t see the need.” BigB covered.
“What, they wouldn’t help you themselves?” Scar pointed at BigB and looked among the others. “Look at poor BigB slaving away all alone on the butter he needs to make you guys cookies! Shame! Shame on you all!”
“We asked!” Grian defended, falsely. “He wouldn’t let us because we didn’t have enough experience.”
“It looks simple enough to me.” Pearl added with a huff, as if they’d already been having this disagreement.
“So that’s why we thought of you, Mr. Cookies!” Impulse was a worse liar than the rest of them, but some finger guns covered up any uncertainty in his voice.
“Hey!” BigB yapped. “In this house, I’m Mr. Cookies.”
Impulse held up his hands in surrender. “Of course, I'm sorry Mr. Cookies Sir.”
“Well since I’m already here, I might as well help out!” Scar moseyed into the tight circle of his friends and started shooing them towards the door. “Go on, we’ve got work to do. We don’t need anyone seeing BigB’s secret butter recipe. It’s proprietary.”
Grian moved away, then turned back around halfway to the door. “Why do you get to see it then?”
“That– that’s proprietary too.” Scar stuttered. “Now shoo!” Grian spun and left with an impish grin.
“We’re going, we’re going.” Pearl placated offhandedly. “Have fun you two!” She waved goodbye and disappeared around the doorframe.
“Tell us all about it later!” Impulse ordered as he rushed out.
After leaving a second for the three to get a decent distance away, BigB spoke again. “There’s really not much for you to do at this point, it’s almost done.”
“You could teach me.” Scar suggested, with a twitch of his lips that suggested he was trying to hold back a wider grin that was trying to break out over his resting smile. “I have no idea how to make butter.”
At a certain point, BigB almost began to wonder if his paranoia of Scar in the games was encouraged by the Watchers tampering with his mind.
BigB would have guessed this earlier, the Watchers have certainly done worse before, except he always got a lighter touch from the Watchers during the games.
He thought it was a mix of payment and practicality: withholding torture in return for him bringing them their food, and leaving him the presence of mind to address any complications.
(Complications like Scar’s smile.)
But then BigB was learning how to make elven kisses from Scar because he’d been curious what Scar’s favorite thing he could make was and then decided he needed more context for the made-up cookie Scar named, and they’d already finished making the filling and shaping the dough into little cookie buckets, and Scar was saying something very smart about leavening agents in a completely ridiculous and roundabout way, and he had a bit of the filling on his face, which BigB saw happen when he was aggressively stirring it together and he didn’t mention it because he was waiting for Scar to notice by himself so he could act like it’d been there for way longer than actually had been, but then Scar smiled while giving some detail about cookie spacing, just a little turn in the corner of his mouth, and the smidge of filling got moved up with it, and BigB thought I should get that, and so he just spoke up,
“Hey Scar, hold on a second.”
And Scar stilled and looked up, and smiled a bit more when he made eye contact with BigB, his eyes lit up a little and he said “Oh, what is it?” and it’s not like he was bursting at the seams all of a sudden or anything but he just seemed excited to hear what BigB has to say, even though they’d been talking this whole time anyway, and BigB–
BigB
felt
his
heart
do something
dangerous.
That smile almost killed him, because in that moment, BigB wanted to say something else, something real.
BigB wanted to tell him so bad.
BigB wanted to tell him that when EVO fell apart and they were all flung in random directions, and that most of them didn’t make it, and the only ones who did did it out of sheer luck – Grian not included.
BigB wanted to tell him that making it out alive didn’t mean making it out the same: Martyn couldn’t stay on one server for much more than a month or else his code started to destabilize; Pearl broke laws of physics sometimes and made things fall upwards and lag behind; Jimmy got morphed along with whatever story was told about him, on his server of residence he got called a fish and lost the ability to breathe above water, he got called a toy and shrunk down to fit on a shelf.
BigB wanted to tell him that he, specifically, had been flung through the void the Watchers called home, that the magic there kept him alive but marked him, made it impossible to hide.
BigB wanted to tell him that they couldn’t change him, like they could Grian, that he wasn’t pinioned and bound like Grian was, just plain old trapped. That they couldn’t tear him apart, but they could feed and feed and never grow full. (He could run and run and never escape.)
BigB wanted to say that he hadn’t wanted to betray his friends, but he’d known there was nothing they could do to help short of suffering alongside him and drawing some of the Watchers’ fire, and that Grian had already given them the chance to sign off on almost exactly that with the death games, and the Watchers had given him the tools to make it happen.
BigB wanted to tell him that he didn’t feel as bad as he maybe should have, because when he came back to his home server he was able to bake cookies without a Watcher-induced panic attack or sudden, roaring bloodlust for the first time in years, because those invisible eyes that haunted him were not full, they were never full, but they were content and willing to leave BigB alone.
BigB wanted to say he knew he was doing something wrong, and he knew that if it was Martyn he’d just keep outrunning it, or if it was Grian he’d just bear it, and Jimmy would ask for help, and Pearl would figure it out somehow, but he also knew that Martyn would still be trapped under them at least half the time, and Grian would cave just like he did when he made the death games in the first place, and Jimmy would be shunned as a bad omen, and Pearl would probably end up right where he is now.
BigB wanted to say he was sorry for everything, for Scar falling in and out of love so violently in Third Life just because the Watchers wanted to see it happen, and for Scar being abandoned again and again in Last Life because his stupid smile made them want to break him, and that if it weren’t for BigB he might not have even noticed the effects of Watcher feeding because it would have been just Grian’s appetite spread out over 13 players, not however many Watchers BigB was letting in.
BigB wanted to tell Scar he never would have told anyone any of this if it weren’t for that stupid smile, all of his stupid smiles, that made it so hard to hold back from telling him all this.
Above all that, however, BigB didn’t want to be cut off from his only escape, didn’t want to be trapped forever, and didn’t want to die.
BigB smiled. BigB had already been smiling, by default, so actually he just pushed his dimples up a bit more and pointed to a spot right below them.
“You’ve got some filling on your face.”
BigB knew the secret soulmate thing was, technically speaking, a bad idea.
The Watchers had gone all out this time, wrapping everyone around each other with these soulmate bonds, pairing up every single person there to be in love, and there Grian was asking BigB to betray their poor partners just to stir up more drama to feed him.
It was times like this that BigB had to suspect Grian knew he was working with the Watchers, because why else would he ask him to betray Ren? If Grian didn’t know that the Watchers rewarded BigB’s service by exempting him from their emotional tampering, then why would he approach him, supposedly drawn hopelessly in love with his soulmate, and think that he would agree to hurt him?
But then BigB had to shut that down, because he didn’t know what to think if Grian knew, had known this whole time, and still invited him to every game and said nothing, did nothing.
Was he supposed to be grateful? Grateful that Grian would betray all of his friends for BigB? Grateful that Grian would do him the favour of keeping his secret, never talking to him, never trying to relate, never trying to help, never apologizing for not being able to help, for letting this happen to him, for the fact he had to keep this secret?
Because why would he have to keep this secret alone if Grian knew? Why wouldn’t he say anything?
Why would he leave him alone?
Besides, there were other explanations for Grian's request: it wasn't as if he, of all people, didn't know that Watcher-induced love didn't make betrayal impossible.
Regardless, BigB knew that Grian wasn’t getting nearly as much sustenance from these games as he should have been, thanks to all the other Watchers feeding off them as well, and so he owed him this drama.
Even if it made Scar’s smiles tighter.
Perhaps that was another explanation for Grian choosing BigB. He knew that having BigB be the one to hurt Scar would give him a little extra turmoil to feed from.
Grian would understand, after all: he wasn’t exempt from the other Watchers’ influence, he was as in love with Scar as Scar was him, but he needed this. He couldn’t have another game so soon, not with the margins of acceptable torment to put his friends through growing and growing, not if he wanted them to keep coming back.
Maybe Grian’s suffering from his own plan would pull the Watchers’ gazes and give him a little more room to take from his friends.
Grian brought him cookies.
“From Scar.” He’d said, as if BigB would think he’d made cookies this professional.
“I think he’s onto us.” He’d said, as if it wasn’t the plan, putting on a show for the Watchers to believe that their connection wasn’t calculated and transactional, discussed and agreed upon in the silent mutual understanding they held of their audience and the hunger that drove this game.
BigB smiled and accepted the cookies, and he went home and ate them with Ren, who knew exactly where they were from but said nothing and stewed silently instead.
BigB thought about Scar’s smile baking between the games, and compared them to the smiles he’d seen crossing paths with him in Double Life. Scar would flicker whenever he saw him, as if he was simultaneously happy to see him and wanted him dead, and he couldn’t quite figure out how to feel either.
BigB focused on the feeling he got when he saw Scar’s face fight with itself. He focused on the fact that it was his fault, that he’d done this to him, and he would keep doing it, and that this would have to be the closest he would ever be with Scar again if he wanted to keep his secret safe.
If BigB focused hard enough, he could give Grian a little bit more. He could give back some of what he’d taken with the tear that let the other Watchers in. He could get away from Scar and his pained, confused, and happy smiles that agonized him, just for a little bit longer.
The cookies were some of the best he’d ever had. It helped.
A few betrayals and a few calm months later, BigB sat in his and Pearl’s tower and watched Grian come to consciousness across the way where he was standing in his recently added stone box under his base.
Well, technically he’d been watching Scar pour his heart out to Grian’s empty husk, but BigB had to admit that Grian coming out of his little coma was probably the more important thing happening there.
Limited Life had been calm for BigB thus far, partially thanks to the fact that it’d been a total bloodbath, and no one, (ie; not Scar,) had spare time to find and corner BigB into any conversations he didn’t want to have.
Grian, to some extent, must have felt the same, because he’d taken this game as the opportunity to properly confront the Watchers and look into how they were there and how to stop them.
Maybe it was just that it was the first game Grian was so well fed so quickly: in the others, he’d been so ravenous from fasting between games that he could hardly be expected to scheme the downfall of anyone who’d take more than a bundle of tnt and steady hands to be dealt with.
Grian’s newly-conscious form jerked awake, fell forward, and quickly braced against Scar's rambling self.
Scar smiled warmly at his friend’s return, but then Grian pushed himself up from Scar’s chest, revealing his own expression, and Scar’s smile froze.
From BigB’s distance, Grian’s expression looked… neutral. Which could really mean anything for how it looked up close. Annoyed? Conflicted? Bored? Maybe even afraid?
BigB couldn’t read lips, and he wouldn’t have been able to from his tower regardless, but if he could he might have been privy the following conversation:
“Grian, what happened?” Scar’s voice had a strained optimism that wanted this to turn out to be nothing, but could tell the odds of that were shrinking.
Grian inhaled. “The Watchers said… They said there’s a mole.”
Scar’s smile, already frozen brittle, stayed on his face. It was just as well, because he had no idea how to react to something like that. “What?”
“They’re lying,” Grian forced out, “obviously.”
“Obviously!” Scar forced his body to relax, tried to make his smile look more natural and less like a grimace. “I mean, it wouldn’t make any sense!”
“...It would.” Grian muttered. At Scar’s questioning look, he continued a little louder, almost defensively. “I mean, mechanically, it’d explain how they keep getting in. They’ve been getting in through rifts in the world made– I mean, they could have been made from the outside, but they would need to wait for everything to align right to let an outside attack manifest in a single point inside the server, or else they would need to attack coordinatedly in the perfect positions for the moment…” Grian shook away his tangent and moved on. “And really, if they can pierce the defenses from the outside at all then they shouldn’t need to make a physical hole in the world in one spot because they’d just break in and filter in. And there’s the fact that the tear always appears in empty air, not in walls or anything, which the Watchers shouldn’t need to care about because they don’t have physical forms. So mechanically, physically, the Watchers having a person on their side makes a lot of sense.”
“Except that no one would let them in.” Scar added, perfunctory.
“Except that no one would let them in. It’s impossible.” Grian agreed.
“I mean, what could the Watchers offer someone?” Scar phrased the question almost like it was rhetorical, but it was clear he was actually asking.
“Well…” Grian suddenly looked a little ill. ”Anything, I guess.”
(After all, Grian had been given that same offer on EVO: let the Watchers in, and they would give him the power and knowledge to pull his server through time. He would be known as a genius throughout the universe, and all the Watchers wanted in return was a front row seat.)
Scar’s smile stayed plastered on his face like it would stop the Watchers’ lackey from seeing that they knew something was wrong.
“Anything’s a lot.” He remarked neutrally.
(Scar, for his part, was a businessman. No, worse, he was a conman. He knew what ‘anything’ could get someone to do.)
“They were lying.” Grian insisted.
(As far as the price of anything went, no one had even been truly killed yet. Scar had seen worse done for less.)
“They just want us to be paranoid. No one– none of us would betray us.”
(In his homeworld, surrounded by grasping infected zombies and one slip from becoming one of them, Scar would have done worse for less.)
Scar hummed noncommittally. Grian narrowed his eyes.
(He still would, if he appeared back there.)
“I don’t want us turning against each other,” Grian warned, “that’s just what they want us to do. We’re not going to make a thing of this, ok?”
(He arguably had done worse, depending on if you choose to believe in the possibility of a cure.)
Scar broke his plastic smile and beamed perfectly at Grian’s words. “Sure thing, Grian! We don’t want everyone getting paranoid on their home servers.”
(Scar had chosen not to.)
Grian didn’t relax, skeptical. “I mean it.”
Scar nodded cartoonishly. “And I agree completely! We don’t need to make anyone else worry about the mole. We can solve this ourselves.” Scar pulled Grian in close over the half-wall of his unconsciousness box and gestured out into the world like he was discussing any other adventure.
(Scar still chose not to, even knowing now there were forces like the Watchers putting anythings into the equation. Otherwise it was too much to think of, too much guilt to carry.)
“They were lying, Scar.” Grian pushed him away, but didn’t sound in any way certain. “They have to be.”
(Scar wondered what the Watcher’s mole chose not to believe.)
“Why don’t we prove it?”
BigB found out they knew, of course, but true to Scar’s word it wasn’t through the grapevine: it was from the Watchers themselves, who did him the courtesy of letting him know that the game had changed.
Needless to say, he was not impressed.
“I can’t do my job if you go ratting me out!” He said.
“They didn’t even know they were supposed to be suspicious of anyone, you’re ruining your own operation!” He said.
BigB said a lot of things to the not-truly-empty air of his home server, confused and angry, because even if he knew the Watchers weren’t omnipotent, they had never been this stupid or self-defeating.
The Watchers’ response, silently appearing on signs whenever he looked away, was ultimately quite simple in its message:
“You are no longer necessary.” This is paraphrased, of course, because goodness forbid the Watchers not be in rhyme and verse or take less than a stanza to say a single sentence.
“We can get in without you.” This is actually not from the Watchers’ words at all, but BigB’s extrapolations. The Watchers would rather BigB never know why he was being cut loose, but he’d spent too much time with them not to catch the subtext.
“We will let you flounder and be found out, because your panic will be worth more entertainment than your ability as a tool.” This is somewhere between those two states: half implied, half gloated outright. The lines are a bit blurry due to their whole bad poetry thing.
“I can get you something else!” He shouted into the air. This is not paraphrased, because BigB does not speak in rhyme, although he was hiding as much from the Watchers as they hoped to hide from him. “You can get in without me, but I can do something you can’t!”
The Watchers did not bother to respond this time, only to let their gazes weigh heavier on him, a physical pressure that pushed on the back of his neck and into his eyes and made a wordless demand for more.
And the thing was… BigB didn’t know what else he had that he could give them. But he knew what they wanted, and he knew how to keep it vague enough for comfort.
“I can give you someone else.”
He would’ve liked to say he tried something else first, that he begged and haggled and fought all the way these malevolent gods tried to make him offer a sacrifice, but the truth was that BigB was not a businessman, and he did not know how to get a compromise out of an immovable object: all he knew was how to evade and how to fold.
The gazes stayed for a moment, intense, and then out of the corner of his eye BigB saw a shadow move.
When he turned, there was nothing, of course, but the impression of that brief shadow stayed, and Scar’s familiar smirk that the Watchers had put on its face.
The Watchers message was as clear as it ever was.
They wanted Scar, and BigB was going to give him to them.