#hello the idea of Tango dragging Tanguish along on a harrowing escape is what jump-started this

[silverskye13]

I love how all the hermits and hels have different relationships with each other!! Like the hels are all mirrors of their respective person and how the different hermits interact with them is so cool! Also Tango straight up snatching his hels is hilarious, imagine if ren or wels walked in on them building it would be fantastic. Or tango just randomly yoinking tanguish when he needs help escaping something. They seem like a fun duo! :D

Tanguish was a bad helsmit. That wasn't opinion, or conjecture, or bad self-esteem or even really up for debate. It was just a statement of fact. He didn't mean to be. Really. It wasn't a decision he made one day, though liability was in him somewhere. He hadn't admitted it to himself yet, and probably he would someday. The fact remained though. For better or for worse, he was a bad hels. He was just made that way. 

---

"Get back here you little thief!" Helsknight screamed, pounding after him down the street. Tanguish flinched and dashed around a corner, clutching the knight's coin purse tight in his claws. He laughed, but it was less the exhilarated thrill-laugh of victory and more the odd-squeak shrill of barely contained panic. This was bad? Yeah, this was bad.

(He definitely shouldn't have stolen from the second scariest helsmet he knew of. But he couldn't help himself! It'd been right there, out in the open. Helsknight should know better. You don’t just leave your coin purse dangling on your hip at perfect stealing height! It’s like putting a wallet in your back pocket: you’re not exactly asking to get robbed, but you’re sure as hels not making it hard!)

Tanguish skid down an alley, vaulted nimbly over a wall, and let out a horrified gasp when the crash of armor told him Helsknight was still right behind him.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Tanguish gasped. "You can afford to lose it though!"

"You'll be losing your head when I catch you!" Helsknight snarled from, really, unacceptably close behind him. Tanguish had about half a breath to think, ‘Oh, he runs faster than me,’ before Helsknight tackled him from behind, and they went tumbling to the ground. The offending coin purse slipped from Tanguish’s hands and scattered diamonds onto the dirty cobblestones in a way that reminded him of someone muddying a stained glass window - mildly blasphemous, but still kinda pretty, all things considered. 

(This was, in hindsight, a very dumb thing to be paying attention to when there was a large, angry knight shoving an armored knee into his left kidney, but he had his priorities). 

Helsknight braced a hand against Tanguish’s shoulder and pulled the other back for a punch, “I’m gonna--!”

“Heyyyyy Tanguish!” a familiar, chipper voice piped up in Tanguish’s head. “Buddy, pal, you doing anything right now? I could use a ha-”

“Yes I’d love to help!” Tanguish shouted, shielding his face from Helsknight’s fist. The steel gauntlet arched towards him and Tanguish screwed his eyes shut. A hand, all claws and no gauntlet, clamped on his arm and yanked. His stomach leaped into his throat as he felt himself suddenly falling.

If Tanguish hadn’t just disappeared through his barely-present reflection in a facet of one of Helsknight’s diamonds, he would’ve watched Helsknight punch the nether brick of the alley floor so hard it cracked the tile. He would’ve watched Helsknight snarl and shake his fist, and curse as he tried to unbend the metal of his gauntlet from where it was now shaped to every knuckle. Then he would’ve seen Helsknight stand, kick a nearby trash can so hard it crumpled like a can of soda, and pick up his diamonds and his spilled coin purse. (Or, more realistically, if Tanguish hadn’t just fallen through his reflection guided by Tango’s hand, he would have instead been punched so hard in the face he’d lose six memories, three ounces of his dwindling common sense, and his claim to having never broken his nose. As fate would have it though, Tanguish was pulled through his reflection from the hels dimension straight into Hermitcraft at his double’s behest, so he saw none of these things.)

--

Most of the other helsmets knew when, why, how they were made. There was, for example, The Red King. He was made during Third Life, a last-ditch effort to protect something precious, a sacrifice on a black altar. There was Helsknight, made when Welsknight’s many fears and shortcomings finally grew a spine and started walking, because he wouldn’t confront them any other way. Cleo was made to honor a death game, and split from her hermit when that death game ended for her, and now she stood as a monument to ZombieCleo’s losses. JoeKills was… well… he was a lot of things. There were many more helsmets and hels denizens and dark mirrors and evil halves that lived in hels, and all of them seemed to know what they were about. 

Tanguish didn’t know when, or why, or how he was, really. He knew what he was - he was a helsmet. There was nothing else he could really be. He knew some of Tango’s Last Life memories, but he didn’t think he was made because of them. He remembered helping Tango with Decked Out, and that had certainly happened before Last Life. It was more like, those memories brought Tanguish into focus, like he was a list of shortcomings simmering in the background before suddenly stumbling into the light. If he thought about it really hard, and guessed as best as he could, he might say he was born from Tango’s sacrifices. His unwilling sacrifices. From playing second fiddle to everyone else’s more compelling volitions. Tanguish thought this made the most sense. He was, in fact, very good at playing second best to Tango.

--

Tanguish tumbled out of Tango’s reflection in an ice pillar and fell with a startled ‘oof!’ onto cold stone. He opened his eyes, took a breath to say something, and then slammed it shut again when a loud roar reverberated around the artificial cavern. Tanguish looked at Tango backing away in the snow, looked to the towering creature lumbering towards him, and thought maybe he would’ve preferred the broken nose waiting for him in hels. Most people preferred broken bones to facing down an entire Warden. (Tango wasn't most people.)

Tanguish scrambled to his feet and ran, snatching Tango’s wrist as he did so. The pair of them sprinted wordlessly, which didn’t really matter, since the Warden had immaculate hearing, and the sound of their breathing and footsteps served it just fine. The Warden howled, an ear-splitting noise that shattered shockwave lines in the icicles and columns Tango had spent weeks building. They gonged and crashed like the world’s deadliest wind-chimes over their heads, and Tanguish tracked a few to their left and right as they fell. This was their only saving grace; the falling ice was much louder than Tango and Tanguish were. The Warden, confused, hesitated as it tried to track the different sounds. 

“Hey man, thanks for comi-”

“Shhhhh!” Tanguish interrupted him. Tango gave an exaggerated nod and a thumbs-up and focused on running. 

They were good at that: running. It was one of the things they shared in common. They were both terribly good at running from things. (Tanguish got his practice stealing, and Tango got his wrangling dangerous creatures, but practice was practice no matter where it came from.) They were also terribly good at avoiding the fact that they were hels and hermit, and that wasn't really supposed to make them friends. They ran so fast together, so often, they'd gotten quite good at running from what they were supposed to be (not friends) and you tended to grow fond of the people you kept pace with. (They kept pace well.)

--

Tanguish couldn't remember why they first met. It was in much the same way he first spawned in hels: wholly accidental, a bit sudden, and mildly inconvenient. He hadn't asked to be created. He didn't particularly mind that he was, but it also wasn't exactly expected, springing into consciousness from random emotions and void. But he did. 

When he first met Tango, it was when he was minding his own business, counting a collection of coins he'd stolen from someone in the main market. The person was from a place called Pixandria, or they were the hels version of someone who'd been to Pixandria at some point, and they had the most beautiful copper coins Tanguish had ever seen. He took them onto his favorite roof - a tall steepled thing made of deepslate and burnished iron that he thought might be a church, or some villain-y builder's lair. He'd never been inside. He didn't care about interiors much. He liked things. He liked those pretty little copper coins. He flipped each one in his hand, marked their faces, cataloged their iconography, sulked a little that he hadn't stolen more. And then a voice interrupted him.

"They used me, and I got selfish."

Tanguish looked around the roof, confused. There was no one else here. No one else had his claws for scaling buildings, or his tail for balance, or the ice that sprung to his touch that his skin liked to stick to for just a few seconds before it melted, helping him cling to things. 

"I mean, I was trying to be cool, and I blew it. Hah - literally. That's a pretty pathetic way to go."

Tanguish looked down at the coins in his hand, at his reflection on the red-orange surface, and was not ashamed to admit he thought the coins were talking to him. It took awhile for him to realize it was his reflection, and not the odd face of the coin, speaking. It was a reflection he could barely see, a black silhouette with tired, despondent eyes.

"I bet no one cared, either."

Tanguish tilted his head at the coins in his hand, waited for them to speak again, and when they didn't, tossed them one-by-one into a fountain far below. All of them, except for the shiniest one. That one he polished and slipped in his pocket. Talking coins were pretty rare, he figured. (He was right.)

--

"Okay," Tanguish breathed, hiding behind a half-finished wall, "we're pretty far away now."

"Are we out of its hearing range?" Tango squeaked, louder than Tanguish (that was the only way he knew how to talk: just a few decibels louder than Tanguish at all times). "I mean that thing is scary good at hearing."

The two of them fell silent. They strained their ears to listen. In the distance Tanguish heard the quiet clicks of sculk sensors listening for noise, but nothing else. Finally, he nodded.

"Okay," Tango whispered, "so first of all, sorry for not warning you-"

Tanguish shrugged.

"-but I figured you wouldn't be too-- yeah, exactly. You're not mad. Of course you're not. I get mad at things."

Tanguish wasn't entirely sure he'd ever been mad before. Tango told him it was the kind of emotion you didn't forget once you'd felt it. Tango tended to be right about these kinds of things. (He got mad at redstone all the time - or at least, Tanguish figured he did. Redstone seemed like something you'd get mad at, and Tango was, in part, made of the stuff.) 

"I thought we weren't catching Wardens until Decked Out was closer to done?" Tanguish asked him, a little annoyed, but still sort of favoring this to Helsknight's wrath.

"Well, you know, we did say that. But I wanted to just test some shriekers-"

"Tango."

"Good news! The shriekers definitely work!"

Tanguish chuckled. "Good news."

Tango shot him some finger-guns and grinned. "Well it's gotta be good, if it's even got Grim McGee over here laughing."

Tanguish found himself chuckling more. He shook his head.

"Anyway, so I was thinking-"

The Warden's growl sounded suddenly, bouncing off every icicle and snow bank in the foundling Decked Out cavern. Tango and Tanguish moved as one, slapping their hands on each other’s mouths to shut each other up. Eyes wide, they watched each other. They listened. The Warden sniffed twice, groaned in exasperation, and wandered further into the ice.

--

The first time Tango met Tanguish, it too, had been by accident. One moment Tanguish was leaning into the fountain by his favorite spot to drink some water. The next, he was sputtering and clawing his way out of a beautiful bay. His claws grabbed a cartoonishly built boardwalk and he hauled himself out of the water, ice smoothing the surface at his touch. He found himself staring at the reflection he’d heard talking to him for the past… well… he didn’t know how long.

It was funny, really, looking back on it. They were like a pair of scared cats who thought each of them respectively was the only cat in the world. They tumbled away from each other, all bristles and spines and fire and ice and redstone and skulk and it was a calm night from anywhere else on Hermitcraft but there. They blinked, they stared, they recognized what each of them were. They were perfect mirrors of shock and confusion. 

Tanguish didn’t know what was going through Tango’s head. (He never knew what was going through his head, if there was anything going on up there at all besides the impulses and whims that drove him.) For his part, Tanguish spent the moments thinking hermits and helsmits were supposed to hate each other, eat each other up like fire and ice, burn and hiss like redstone and skulk. They were supposed to fight maybe, or at least bring out the worst in each other. And Tanguish thought if he’d known he’d meet his other half so soon, he’d maybe have spent less time stealing, and more time learning how to properly handle your double.

Then Tango held his hand out to Tanguish, and flashed him a dazzling smile that was equal parts nervous and excited. “Hey! Oh man, uh -- well, I guess you already know who I am, huh? It’s nice to finally meet you!”

Tanguish had expected treachery (as he should, given who and why and what they were to each other). But the thing about Tango was he was friendly, and transparent in that way friendly people are when they’re trying to make new friends. His red eyes were scary, shielded by impractically large glasses, and his hair sparked and flickered, and the freckles on his skin were charged with redstone, and Tanguish thought by nature of who and why and what they were, taking Tango’s hand should hurt.

“We’re supposed to hate each other,” Tanguish pointed out to him. 

Tango shrugged. “Why should we? Opposites attract, right?” Then he’d flashed another dazzling, teeth-barred and infectious grin. “Besides, I was never that great at doing what I was supposed to.”

A proper helsmet would’ve refused. Scratched his hand away maybe, or done some other dramatic thing that set them apart as enemies. He should loathe the voice he’d been hearing in his head, always talking down to itself, or despairing over troubles and failures. At the very least, some primal helsmet-y thing should drive him to be cruel and self-righteous.

Instead, Tanguish took the hand extended to him, and found it was pleasantly warm. Tango winced, obviously fearing his ice would sting and freeze, and when it didn’t, he pulled Tanguish to his feet.

“I’m Tango,” Tanguish had introduced himself, because Tango hadn’t given him anything different yet.

Tango smiled at him, close-mouthed and melancholy. Tanguish preferred his other smile, despite how sharp his teeth looked. “Yeah… you really are, aren’t you buddy?”

--

“You got a name tag on you?”

“Yep! I had it all sorted out,” Tango said proudly, and Tanguish shushed him. Tango continued only a little softer this time. “We just gotta nametag him and lure him into the glass box I showed you. Easy-peasy! And hey, then that’s one less Warden we gotta wrangle when Decked Out II is fully operational. This is less work in the long run.”

Tango is saying this like he’s trying to convince Tanguish it’s a good idea. In reality, he’s trying to convince himself, but Tanguish lets him talk. He would probably follow Tango down a dragon’s throat, if Tango told him it was a good idea. This wasn’t a dragon’s throat. It was a Warden’s crushing embrace (Tanguish was more scared of falling than small spaces, so this was for him the lesser of two very bad things. Tango probably felt differently).

“I’ll name tag it,” Tanguish told him.

“You don’t have to do that,” Tango laughed nervously, and it bounced off the icicles and out into the cavern around them. Tanguish looked out into the field of ice like he could track the noise. All he saw was the quiet glitter. That, and skulk. There was a lot of skulk in here already. Tango had been busy. Really the whole cavern was impressive. They’d planned it together. The icicles were Tango’s idea - the better to make you feel like you were walking into the mouth of something big and scary. The floor was slick, and every surface was hard in a way that amplified noise, except where the sculk creeped, listening and feeling and crawling like skin. Tanguish thought it was pretty, but then again, he probably would. 

“You brought me here to help you.”

“Well I was thinking you’d be moral support,” Tango lied. Tanguish knew he was lying, because his nose scrunched up a little like the words tasted funny (Tango always did this when he was lying). “But hey, if you’re offering, I mean--”

Tango motioned in a mock ‘after you’ sort of bow. Tanguish grabbed the name tag from him and started walking. The skulk clicked. The shriekers chirped. The Warden was silent, and Tanguish hoped that meant it was waiting on noise, and not that it had burrowed somewhere. The ice showed him his reflection, because Tango was here beside him and not in a mirror somewhere.

“This is huge,” Tanguish grunted, clambering up a wall to get a better vantage point. He reached for Tango and pulled his double up beside him.

“I know right?” Tango beamed pridefully. “Dug out the bottom of a mountain for it! You should see upstairs. The snow biome’s almost done. Just gotta make a few more ice spikes.”

They looked, they listened, they hopped down the wall and kept going.

“That was a good suggestion by the way,” Tango grinned, “the ice spikes.”

“I like tall things,” Tanguish told him.

“Aren’t you scared of heights though?”

“Falling.”

“Huh. You ever used an elytra before? I think you’d like it.”

“Do you fall with it?”

“Sometimes.” Tango chuckled in that way people did when they were remembering something unfortunate. “Mostly though, you fly.”

“Oh. That sounds nice.”

--

“It’s a parasite.”

Tanguish took a bite of a muffin he’d stolen off his favorite pastry cart and shamelessly eavesdropped. He didn’t have much else to do but sit on rooftops and eavesdrop and steal things - unless he was running from someone he’d stolen from. He did that often as well. The muffin he’d stolen today had nuts in it, which wasn’t his favorite thing in the world, but he’d take it over nothing any day. The couple he was eavesdropping on were a guard and a butcher, judging from their clothes. The guard, as people tended to do when they were bored and procrastinating getting somewhere, had started reading the newspaper her beef cuts were wrapped in. The butcher listened, sharpening his knife. There was no one standing in line at the stall, so he let her talk.

“It spreads when it eats,” she continued. “That’s probably how it took so long to find it. Growing up by the bedrock like that, it could only really eat ghasts if they floated too close.”

Tanguish looked at the nether ceiling. It was high and well built here, a rare gift from Evil Xisuma. There was a plaque about it somewhere, how he’d helped terraform the ceiling to make it look like a kaleidoscope of stars. Tanguish had never met Evil Xisuma, but the name suggested they probably wouldn’t like each other. Evil people didn’t like most people.

“What are we going to do about it?” the butcher asked the guard. “We’re not in danger, are we?”

“Not as long as no one gets close,” she explained. “Skulk mostly feeds on corpses anyway. But wander around it too long and it’ll find a way to get you, and with how dangerous hels is anyway, well--”

She spoke like the danger was thrilling. To her, it probably was.

“There’s only one way to deal with a parasite,” the guard continued, “you’ve got to starve it of what it wants. Otherwise, it’ll spread until it’s the only thing that’s left. That’s probably how it got here in the first place. It ate out everything else on some world somewhere, and some hels from that place tracked it here when they couldn’t find their other half.”

Tanguish frowned at his muffin. He broke apart a piece of it and watched as frost hardened the bread. He wondered how long he’d have to hold it for the skulk on his arms to leap to it.

--

“Oh shoot.”

“What?”

Tanguish turned to look at Tango, who’d stopped in his tracks abruptly. He stared wide-eyed ahead of them, unblinking. Tanguish was on the edge of asking what was going on, when Tango waved a hand in front of his eyes, blinked, and did it again. He mouthed the word ‘blind’. Tanguish mouthed a wide, “Oh” that Tango couldn’t see. He forgot the Warden could blind people. It didn’t work on Tanguish. He was made of ice and skulk, after all. Something about the way he was made didn’t care that the Warden ate the light. Tango did, though.

Tanguish grabbed Tango’s wrist and pulled him along, leading him through the maze of ice and skulk. They crept as fast as they could past sensors and shriekers, wincing at the little noises so dangerously close. Tanguish was starting to hear the Warden now, its grumbles and groans as it walked, the loud huffing of its breath as it drew closer to them. It was tracking Tango. His smell probably bit its nose like redstone, and it followed relentlessly. Tanguish could ditch him, leave him stranded in the ice as bait. He could tag the Warden while it was preoccupied and run, leave Tango to deal with the fallout, dive through his reflection somewhere. That was probably what a good helsmet would do. Leave their hermit to suffer, steep in feelings of betrayal and ill-deserving. It’d make him stronger, turn him into something that wasn’t hiding in his hermit’s shadow.

Tanguish was a bad helsmet, though.

Instead, he pulled Tango along, and Tango trusted him blindly. Literally blindly, but he’d probably trust him blindly anyway. Tanguish shoved him at the corner where two half-finished maze walls met.

“Don’t move,” Tanguish breathed in his ear, and Tango nodded and froze. Tanguish stood in front of him bravely, bristled like a startled cat. He grabbed an armful of skulk off the ground, stuck his tongue out at the way it pulsed against his skin. He could feel its little roots creeping on his arms, whatever odd plant-flesh it was made of reaching to infect him. Parasite. But Tanguish was made of skulk and ice, and while the skulk that wasn’t his felt uncomfortable, it certainly couldn’t harm him.

The Warden growled and emerged from behind a pair of ice columns. It took two deep breaths, sniffing for Tango, and shambled in their direction. Its footsteps were heavy. They didn’t shake the ground, but Tanguish still felt like he could feel them in his toes. It was like the skulk under his feet responded to the movement, saying through tiny motions and flashes and pulses here, what you’re looking for is here. Come get it. Come kill the thing that isn’t us.

The Warden rose like a dark tower in Tanguish’s vision, blocking out the rest of the half-built cavern that Tango had made. It leaned over Tanguish, breath whooshing in heavy huffs as it smelled for its prey. Tanguish only pressed himself a little closer to Tango and hugged the skulk in his arms tighter, and held his breath. He felt a little lightheaded, because he was scared and not breathing, and doing his best to pretend his noisy, living body was instead a statue of some kind. With one shuddering hand, Tanguish reached forward and gently hooked the name tag on one of the Warden’s exposed ribs. Its heart was loud and close, mesmerizing in the way it moved, in the way whatever soul-stuff swirled around it pulsed and flickered its eerie blue light. If it weren’t such a dangerous, fruitless endeavor, Tanguish would try to steal it. Pluck the pretty, flashing, pulsing thing from its home in those grinning ribs and hang it up on one of his favorite rooftops. It would probably stop glowing though, just as soon as it left the Warden’s chest.

The Warden let out one more long, low, growling groan. It turned and lumbered away.

--

“I’m a parasite,” Tanguish informed Tango matter-of-factly from his reflection in a broken window. 

“What? No you’re not.” Tango scowled. “Don’t say things like that about yourself, man. It’ll kill your self-esteem.”

Tanguish tilted his head at his double, and tried not to feel grateful for the concern. Tango didn’t seem to realize this wasn’t an opinion. It wasn’t conjecture. It wasn’t bad self-esteem and it wasn’t up for debate. It was, in its simplest form, a warning. Tango should be grateful for it. Most leeches didn’t give an introduction when they attached themselves to your skin.

“I’ll just get stronger if you keep feeding me.”

Tango opened his mouth to argue, but then closed it again, finding nothing to say. Tango was optimistic to a fault. He seemed to think the two of them were allowed to both be strong, to thrive. He seemed to think they were here for each other, to help each other, to make each other better. That is not how helsmets and hermits worked. At least, Tanguish didn’t think so. 

Regardless, Tango kept looking at him with that odd, conflicted expression.

“I’m not here to help you, Tango,” Tanguish said quietly. “I will get worse.”

“We’re friends.”

“We’re comfortable.”

Like an old fur coat, made of long dead things but still pleasantly warm.

“We can be friends,” Tango insisted, his voice withering. “We don’t have to be like all the other hels and hermits out there. We can be friends.”

Tanguish sighed. He told Tango the only truth he knew for sure. “I will devour you, Tango.”

Tango closed his eyes and shook his head. His face in Tanguish’s reflection disappeared. Tanguish hoped they never talked again. That was the only way to kill a parasite, after all. Starve it of the thing it wanted.

--

Together they lured the Warden into Tango’s glass box. It couldn’t burrow through it, couldn’t despawn because of the tag. They had it well and truly trapped. Sure, it screeched and roared, and shook the walls with its sonic howls, but eventually it fell silent and submitted to its fate. It was kind of pathetic, sure, but it would be happy enough smacking around players once Decked Out II was done. Tanguish thought it was crazy keeping a pet Warden around, but Tango had a habit for keeping company with dangerous things. He had a pet helsmet, after all. A pet helsmet who had even grown to like him. Who put himself in harm's way to protect him. Who guided him through the dark when he should leave him behind.

“Where are the other hermits?” Tanguish asked when the Warden was finally still in its cage. “Why didn’t they come and help you?”

Tango winced and pulled out a shulker box full of ice so he could pretend he was busy when he talked. “Oh, you know, they were just… I mean Scar and Grian are doing collabs. Cub is making his crazy death game. The Soup Crew are all gathering materials together--”

“Did you ask them for help?”

Tango grimaced. He rifled uselessly through his shulker box.

“You should ask them first next time.”

“I knew you’d be available,” Tango shrugged. “Besides, you want something done right, you do it yourself.”

Tanguish nodded. He liked the praise, the idea he was the only one who could help Tango in a tough situation. It made his back a little straighter. The skulk, like bioluminescent freckles on his arms, glowed a little brighter. He felt warm. He felt fed.

(Maybe Tanguish wasn’t such a bad helsmet after all.)