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secondhand-elytra · 1 month ago

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Whumpmas In July - Tears

Summary:

All of the people curse to be in this death "game" cry sometimes. This is a hint of when.

Notes:

This thing is semi-dependent on reading using my designs for these characters and their “life markers.” Sorry about the possible confusion. I dunno how else to write them. Also each character kinda has a backstory sorta? Like, Scar’s Crafting Dead and Jimmy’s X Life and BigB’s How To Train Your Dragon mod series and stuff like that. (I should figure out a way to describe all that at another date lol.) Warnings: Crying, referenced death game, animal injury, self doubt, treachery, and other things natural to this minecraft series. Words: 4,222

*Designs included here but were originally posted here with more details and an extra image.

Fic also here or under the cut. @whumpmasinjuly-archive

Crying came easier or harder for different people, but in times of stress it is likely and natural to see even those that you wouldn't expect to cry with tears running down their faces. A cursed death “game” was certainly one of them. Especially when they had been placed into it so many times over. It hurt every time, and every time they cried.

Grian tended to cry when no one was looking, or when he realized how totally screwed all of his plans had become. Back home he didn't cry much at all, ever since he'd moved to Hermitcraft and away from Evo, he'd been relatively free to live happily and as he pleased. Yes, even when he started a war or a death game. The difference between Demise and this, however, was that this “game” was not a game, and it was not his doing.

He cried when he remembered that he was trapped, that his personality was crumbling under his fight to understand what was happening and how it may be connected to him. He cried when it was unfair (which it always was) and when he remembered that the heart in his feathers gave away just how vulnerable he really was. He was scared, and ever since he'd “won” the first time (and found out how terrible the limbo of in between the cursed land and home was), he knew he didn't want to get trapped all over again.

But he always did anyway.

Even his wings couldn't carry him out of a magical barrier that went from the void below all the way into infinity. He cried because he knew he was trapped and that everything he cared about was crumbling around him.

Even friendships.

Back home, Mumbo had sometimes cried when his redstone was really malfunctioning. Or when he spilled a bucket of water and took out an entire stack worth of redstone dust, leaving it smeared like blood across his poor contraption. This didn't happen very often, but when he'd had a particularly low amount of sleep or a particularly close deadline for the project in question, crying was a possibility. Still in even those cases, he had really not cried that often. Those kinds of puzzles were easier to solve without tears in his eyes, and he liked solving puzzles.

But this, this was not a puzzle that could be solved by thinking long and hard about it. No, they were trapped, and they weren't getting out any time soon, no matter how long he thought about it. Every single time in his bunker of the “season,” Mumbo curled up and felt the tears slip from his eyes. His eye color had shifted, and he didn't like that. He didn't like the way that this cursed land changed them. He didn't like it and he didn't know how to get out. He wanted to get out.

But the puzzle was unsolvable, and the smeared redstone really wasn't redstone this time and no matter what he did he couldn't get through to the other side of the border. Safety was unreachable, and no amount of walking houses or huge redstone powered fans could fix that. And worse, he couldn't even find it in him to win. He just couldn't.

At least he had only been cursed this way a few times. Many of his friends were not so lucky.

Scar, for better or for worse, was an emotional person. He snickered loudly at his own jokes, and danced when he was feeling happy, he pinned his ears back when he was mad and fluffed his tail when he was scared. It wasn't his fault! There wasn't anything wrong with being a person who cried easy. At home he would cry laughing or sometimes when he curled up in bed and remembered the rot and broken-ness of the zombies that he had escaped on his way to Hermitcraft.

They'd clawed a scar on his chest, and now it shifted, unnaturally bright in color as it showed off what was left of his life. He was emotional, but his claws were sharp and his fangs were sharper. He knew he had to defend himself, and he wasn't afraid to, but that didn't mean it didn't hurt when he had to twist the knife (figuratively or literally) in the side of someone who was meant to be his friend.

At home he wouldn't be afraid to cry on any of their shoulders, but here he couldn't, because here wasn't home and here wasn't safe. And even though it wasn't fair he couldn't help it that he wanted to live. He wasn't strong enough to break through the border, and being nice only ever worked so long. To get through the curse was to end the game, no matter how much heartbreak it caused and how many tears he shed over it.

He wanted to go home.

Home.

Jimmy had been one of the lucky ones to have found a home in the midst of one of the curses. A nice home with hobbit hole style housing and a nice lake that he totally wasn't scared of and a border that was way too close and a flammable wall. But having a home didn't help. He never made it long in these situations anyway. Despite that first curse not being his first rodeo at a death “game,” he had failed just as much as any of his friends to protect the memory of life on the outside. They'd panicked when they realized they were trapped, and he had as well.

He didn't want a repeat of the last time. What would happen when an already undead individual died again? He knew how these things went. The insides of those borders had felt just like the shores of his old Looser's Lagoon. And oh man, he knew what drowning felt like. That limbo between life and death when the curse of the land couldn't decide if you truly belonged to it or not. That space where he was trapped and the flowers in his hair turned red and the tears burned his half rotted skin when they fell from his eyes and his wings shook until the yellow feathers came right out.

He'd cried into his husband's shoulder about it, if he was completely honest.

Just having the stripes on his tail to mark him a leader didn't make it any easier to actually be that leader when doing so made you kill the people that were meant to be your friends. Feeling that itch in you to fight wasn't appreciated when you had tried so hard to repress it. He didn't want to hurt people, but the way his life was telegraphed by the stars that circled his head made it hard to hide that eventually he would need to.

And yeah, Scott had cried too.

Scott always made it look like he never cried. None of his allies in the curses had seen him when he did. (As far as he knew anyway, since actually making sure of it unlocked a box of so much regret and pain that he didn't even want to think about the possibility that he wasn't right.) He was too proud to cry, but he did anyway. When nobody was looking.

He'd curl his tail around himself tightly, wrap his arms around his chest, and try to ignore whatever unnatural color was coming from the stars around his head. He'd pretend he was home, where he was happy and didn't have a reason to cry. But even with his imagination, pretending didn't always work and the tears came anyway.

He tried to hide it.

Etho too found it very important that he always made sure that people couldn't see what he was thinking. At home, he wore his mask almost all the time, put his hands in his pockets when they were shaking, and put his hair in his face to hide it when things were getting bad. He'd even trained his ears and tail to stay casual even in stressful situations. These were all things he'd picked up when he'd part-time moved to Mindcrack (and eventually to Hermitcraft). He'd just lived alone for so long before that that it was unnerving when people knew what he was thinking. Now, it was unnerving to think about how long he'd gone without the mask over his fangs, and furthur still to try to imagine himself that open on Hermitcraft.

And that wasn't even the main push. This curse was far stronger, worse. The difference between here and Hermitcraft, of course, was that here it really did actually matter when people knew what he was thinking. Here it really did actually make a difference if his mask was up or down, or if the glow coming from underneath gave away an aura of his bloodlust or safety at his side. He'd grown so caged by even the second curse that he hadn't even cried when he'd heard that Bdubs had died under Grian's arrows. He had barely even shown that it hurt.

But it had.

It had hurt so bad he wanted to rip his claws through Grian's ridiculous sweatshirt until it was even redder and more horrible. It had hurt so bad that he wished he had never left Chocolate Island and gotten mixed in with this crowd. Maybe then he wouldn't have been cursed along with them. Maybe then he would never have felt the need to pull up the mask. Maybe then his best friend wouldn't die where he couldn't save him. If they had never been friends, it couldn't hurt.

Bdubs never really wished that he wasn't Etho's friend. What he wished was that his friends would get along for a second long enough for them to figure out together a way to get through to whatever it was that was cursing them and tell it to leave them alone. He wanted to have fun and smile wide just because someone said it would be cool if he did. He wanted to live normally. Or even just to live at all.

See, the only problem with his plan of teaming up was how incredibly easy it was to join in the fighting. (In his defence, it could be quite fun to let oneself forget that the fighting was real, that it mattered, that it was a curse forcing it through you.) But then again, he liked messing with people and he liked living, what else was he meant to do? Lie back and wait for someone stronger and less reckless than him to “win?” All so that he would be trapped in that terrible limbo and feel his relationship with his friends deteriorating every single time they found themselves back home?

If they even would find their ways back home?

No, he had to keep starting fights and losing them terribly because it was the only way to make sure that he wouldn't cry. He did anyway, but it had to help because it was all he could do. He had to try.

Trying usually worked for Tango.

When he made Decked Out, Hungry Hermits, Decked Out 2, or any other of his large array of projects back home, he always just kept trying until something clicked. Sure, sometimes he'd cried out in frustration when he couldn't fix a bug for the thousandth time of attempting to. But even in those situations he'd just kept trying until he could shed a happy tear when a sequence finally ran as planned. Back home, he always kept trying because it eventually paid off.

Trying didn't work here.

His flames, no matter if they were unnaturally green, yellow, or red, told him that every time he summoned them in the “games.“ They told him that he was really cursed, that there was no way out of this, that this horror was an intended feature and not a bug. Here, when he cried in frustration or rage or panic or sadness or any others of the natural emotions when you were trapped in a death game -he knew there was no bug to fix.

Nothing he could do could help, and gradually he was learning. He was learning that trying wasn't enough, that nothing was enough, and that he wanted to go home back to where things made sense so badly that it really actually pained him.

That pain was pretty much the only thing that kept Gem running.

She was new to this curse, only been through it a couple of times, but she had figured out just as fast as anyone else that it was inescapable. Flying didn't work (even if she had been any good at that skill she could tell there were no gaps in the barriers), force didn't work (her sword had shattered once with the force she had used in slashing it against the border), and that only left fighting. Luckily, Gem was a good fighter.

Her antlers were pretty sharp, and her blade was sharper. It naturally followed then, that her glowing reindeer nose would look the most normal when she was on a final life. It was natural that she'd fight well if her life marker was as red at home as it was in the final weeks of the curse.

Sometimes thinking that made her wonder if she had always been destined to betray her friends the way the curse forced her to. And then, naturally, it sometimes followed that thinking that kind of way made her cry because she didn't really want her friends hurt. It was just the only way she knew how to even possibly counter them.

Impulse was not a fighter, and seeing his friends twist and struggle under the weight of the curse made him cry. The first time this had happened he had betrayed his allies (what even were allies in a place where they had once all been friends), and he regretted beyond belief. It hadn't helped anyone, it had just made the fighting worse and bloodier. It had just made it harder for them to trust each other the next time the curse caught up to them. It made him hurt when he saw that his friends too felt that urge to fight and betray. (And even more so when he recognized along with them that it really was necessary if everyone was going to keep doing it.)

Back home he cried at birthdays and weddings, at building unveilings and when someone did something that made him remember how amazing it was to have friends and live. Here he cried because he knew that none of those things were possible.

The tears tracked down the stripes on his face, and they made the marks shine as a reminder that he too was forced into this. No matter how much he hated fighting, he had to. And he wasn't scared, he was just sad every time he remembered how much he would then regret it because he always did.

Regret bit deep on all of them, but maybe the most for BigB.

Yeah, even compared to Impulse, because in the grand sceme of things, betraying your allies by supplying your other allies with a fair amount of gear was not as bad as betraying your allies by killing one of them. The fact that he'd been under the Boogeyman curse explained why he had felt the need to do it, but not why he had followed through with it.

Following through with it just made him realize that the amber heart in his chest was right all along. He wasn't a person to be trusted. At home with his dragons (and as many cookies to eat as he could ever want), he could feel almost human. He could feel like himself. He could remember that it was a curse that made all this happen, and in fact two of them that had led to him turning on his friend. But here it was hard to tell. Here his body creaked and every time he froze under someone's eyes he couldn't help but feel they'd figure him out eventually.

He cried because he didn't feel like himself, and he regretted the fact that he hadn't been himself. He didn't want to be a monster, but he was scared he was being made into one.

Cleo knew that BigB wasn't a monster. In fact, they knew that none of their friends were. Not Lizzie with her horns, not Jimmy with his rot and strange flowers, not Ren with his partially removable head. Of course they knew. After becoming a zombie, Cleo had found a bit of a warped view on how being a ”monster“ worked. It wasn't what was in your DNA, and it wasn't even your actions. Not necessarily anyway.

But still, she couldn't find it in herself to forgive the people who turned on her. She wanted too. She knew that she had to if this curse were to ever end. But she couldn't, because while it didn't make you a monster to turn on a friend, it did mean that it was hard to see the traitor as anything but a traitor.

It made them kind of sad to realize how easy it was to think of former friends that way. In fact, it made them sad enough to cry. (And that was very difficult, since Cleo wasn't usually the type to cry. Their rotted skin burned when the salty tears touched it, but here they found themself crying anyway.)

She was not a monster, just someone who had been hurt, and someone who wished that there was a way to make that trust come back. But it wouldn't, because her heart had been shattered where it lay exposed under her ribs. Green, yellow, red. It changed as her life did, and that made forgiving hard.

Lizzie was a forgiving person. At home she would forgive Joel for not making the bed or for blowing her hair to tangles around her horns when he flapped his gossamer wings too hard. (In fact, that forgiveness hardly counted as forgiveness since she didn't even find it in herself to be mad.) She was nice, she liked things to be cute and pink and just her style. She liked when people were nice to each other and when her friends found progress fighting against the whatever-it-was that held them.

But she couldn't stay happy and upbeat forever.

For a dragon, she was an awfully weak link sometimes. (At least she thought so.) Her wings, no matter how strong looking, were really just paper between bones. Paper that showed how low on time she was every time she unrolled it. (Plus, flying out of here didn't work.) Her tail, no matter how sharp, was hard to use in a fight, and her horns curled uncomfortably close to her skull.

How would it be possible not to cry in the grasp of such a curse? Her friends were fighting, she was fighting, Joel was nowhere to be found.

He was scared.

His wings were thin, his antennae were weird, after the first game of death, Joel had already known that conflict would make the others squash him like, well, like a bug. He'd gotten scared, and that made him act like he wasn't scared, like he was untouchable and non-breakable, even though it wasn't true. The lie made his chest hurt, and that made his throat ache and his eyes sting until every single curse (without fail) he cried himself to sleep

He didn't like being confronted with the fact that he wasn't the powerful god he so liked to think of himself as. His muscles nor his cults couldn't save him now, and for the first time in his life he had felt like just scurrying under a rotted log and hiding like a real bug.

He didn't like feeling like a bug. Just having the wings didn't make him as disposable as one, right?

He knew he was right, but knowing something was wrong didn't make it feel any less true. He felt breakable, even though he really wasn't. He felt like a bump in the road, even when he was the one driving the car through the finish line. The feeling didn't go away.

He wished he could just teleport on out of the cursed borders.

Skizz knew that teleporting out of there wasn't possible. He'd tried as soon as they'd realized they were trapped the first time, after all. Tried a lot, actually, but every time his purple particles swarmed him to take him away, they always dropped him a foot short of the border. He'd tried to envision every place he could think of, but none ever worked. He'd tried so many times that he had collapsed into the sand from the effort, his hair a mess and his scars glowing purple.

All the marks except the rings around his wrists, were purple, as they would be after that effort. Instead those marks were a sickening green, and instantly he had known just how stuck they were. That was his life there, a thin tether that anyone could snap. And then he'd cried, and it had hurt so bad that he knew he wouldn't be able to stop. Water, even his own tears, had never mixed well with his ender based skin.

He never cried back home for that exact reason.

He wanted to be nice to people, but being nice didn't help when you were trapped. Being kind didn't work when it wasn't really accepted. Still, he sucked it up and kept the tears away. (At least as long as nothing really awful happened.)

Of course, awful things did, in fact, happen.

Pearl knew that first hand.

Oh poor Tilly.

Poor poor Tilly.

What had that little dog ever done to deserve what she had gotten?

The injustice of it all made Pearl's ears snap back and her tail to go between her legs. It made her ball up her fists so that the life marker that was her paw pads weren't visible. It made her mad. So mad that the tears came.

And every time that the curse came again (and it always did, and she knew it always would), she couldn't help but feel a bit of that rage well up in her again. It wasn't fair. None of it was fair. All of the innocence destroyed for no reason other than bloodlust and a want to live. She was so angry that she couldn't help the tears except to fuel them with further visions of winning for herself. Even when she had gotten a taste of the win it hadn't really been her choice. Now she wanted to win on her own terms.

Like him.

Martyn. Cleo's fake soul-bound. He'd won once, and it had been entirely of his on his own accord. He'd known he had to, he'd known that he was going to lose anyway. He'd known

He knew he had been a traitor for it, but winning had been the goal, and the goal he had achieved.

He didn't grow up playing Property Police for nothing. No, he could assert himself and he wasn't scared too. Totally. For real. Yeah. Definitely. There was nothing about attacking people unfairly that made him feel like something was wrong in him, like his music disc was skipping. Yup. And when every time he died it came back a closer shade to bloody red there was nothing wrong either. For sure.

Right before his ”win,” he'd played that record out of curiosity after it had shifted to red, and he'd cried when the song had been unrecognizable. He'd realized then that the curse was not something to be removed by being nice. It was something that could only be fought by fighting your own battle, because then at least some part of you would still be something you were fighting to keep the same. (Even if that “same” was being a traitor.)

Ren didn't think of Martyn as a traitor.

Ren thought of Martyn as his right hand man, the guy who had almost gotten them to a point where peace could come from their little Renchanting stand. (But then, in the same breath, a guy who would fight at his side against all of their former friends when it came down to it.) He’d even cut off Ren’s head when he’d asked, leaving a mark that now told the story of what was left of his lives. He wagged his tail when he thought about him, to be completely honest.

He couldn't help it. It was so hard to find someone to place your trust in when the very fabric of the land was out to get you. It was hard to want to be anything but a king when it was your final wish you were forced to fulfill. Control had to be grasped. He hated losing it when he cried.

So he always just pretended like he wasn't. Hard to see tears from under his sunglasses anyway. (At least he hoped.)

It was in this way that all of them cried.

Maybe that was what the curse wanted.

Blood, tears, and regret.

Notes:

I hope I didn't miss anyone? This was a long ride haha. Sort of a style test but a long ride nonetheless. :) Comments appreciated!!