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tunastime · 3 months

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Dog in the Nighttime

in which there is a moment of concern right before the end of the world. or, Martyn and Jimmy have a quiet night. Which doesn't often happen for brothers, does it? (2393 words) (read it on ao3!)

Jimmy takes a while to get home, one night. He doesn’t mean to. He gets side-tracked. It’s just easy to—it’s easy when people are chatting, and nobody thinks you're a threat, and nobody sees that your name is red and thinks that it means you’ll kill at any provocation. People still talk to you, and they still giggle, and sometimes, just sometimes, they tell you to be careful. They ask you how many hearts you have left. They get, for a brief moment, a look of pity, of shame. Something makes Jimmy wonder if they wished they could give out any extra hearts. Jimmy wonders if they even would.

But the blood in Jimmy’s ears is much too strong to hear any mumblings, and so he treks his way back home slowly, and carefully, and makes sure he doesn’t slip and cut himself—since that won’t heal right, not even after he gets his lives back, and Martyn isn’t any good at dressing wounds, really. He takes a while to get home, so Martyn is waiting in the doorway with his arms folded when he gets back. He’s trying his best not to look like his mother, or maybe his older brother, or anything like that, when he stands there looking disapproving. It’s not working, though, because Jimmy feels the cold wave of disappointment and shame regardless, just like he used to when they were younger and Jimmy had done something really stupid, and Martyn had been there to tell him off for it.

It wasn’t like that now, though, because Jimmy hadn’t done anything stupid. At least he thinks so, so Martyn’s just doing it because he can. And because as soon as that frown breaks, he knows Jimmy will laugh, and the mood will be so much better then. He sighs, stretching around as he night starts to get chilly around them, trying to get his back and arms to stop aching so much from the heavy diamond chestplate. Martyn’s mouth stays in a fine line until Jimmy raises his eyebrows at him. His expression falters. then, just a little.

“You’re standing there like you’re my mum,” Jimmy says, pausing for a moment before the paws of the dog settled over their house. “You got a problem with me comin’ in late, do ya?”

Martyn’s expression wavers. Jimmy grins at him, folding his arms, too.

“Maybe I do,” Martyn huffs. “You ever think about your teammate being all alone at home?”

“Of course not,” Jimmy says, voice on the verge of laughing. “You’re a big dog! Big man! You can handle it!”

Martyn rolls his eyes. He’s smiling now, though, which means his facade’s finally broke, which makes Jimmy actually laugh. Martyn drops his arms, ushering Jimmy inside, where it’s a bit warmer, where the stove is going, where there’s a warm glow and a bed with too many, rather than too few, blankets.

Something about the space, as soon as he steps into it, makes his muscles relax. His body sags, wings first, then shoulders, and arms, and knees, and legs, as a comfortably warm wave passes over him. He feels safe here, as Martyn moves around him, pushing Jimmy over to their small, shitty crafting table that wobbles when he presses against it, to leave Jimmy to sit in an equally wobbly chair. He’s not sure how long it’s been since he felt this safe in a death game. A while, he thinks. Maybe the time before last. Maybe not at all. He takes off his chestplate. Ow.

“How are you, Tim?” Martyn asks as he lifts his still-hot pan from the stove and makes his way over to the table.

“Doin’ alright,” Jimmy sighs, sinking back into his chair. “A bit nostalgic. A bit tired. You know how it is.”

“Do I,” Martyn agrees, sitting across from him. “Did’ya ever expect this would happen again?”

When he says this, he gestures to the two of them sitting together, to the plate of food, and the room around them. Jimmy knows what he means. He’s talking about Evo. It’s tickled the back of Jimmy’s mind for weeks, like deja-vu, like he’s repeating scenarios he thinks he should know but can’t really remember. It all feels very dreamy—Evo does, that is. Here feels very real, he promises. His legs are very much sore from walking so much, and his heart is a somewhat bleeding, heavy thing he has to carry. That’s all good and fine. But he doesn’t remember much of Evo anymore. Well—he remembers enough, now. Enough now so that this feels a little different than it always had. Like there’s something else there behind things in the shadow. But Martyn’s waiting on his answer and Jimmy feigns a smile and shakes his head.

“‘S nice, honestly,” Jimmy says, leaning forward to tear off a large chunk of bread and sitting back in his chair. “Feels good t’team up.”

Jimmy takes a bite. He lets his eyes shut for a moment, just chewing, just letting the room be quiet around him. He hears Martyn suck in a breath as he takes a large bite of too-hot steak. He laughs a little as Martyn’s exhale whistles, and feels him kick his shin under the table.

“Ow!”

“Don’t be mean,” Martyn says through a mouthful. “We’re brothers.”

Jimmy pulls a face, furrowing his eyebrows.

“Grian’s mean to me all the time,” he huffs, stuffing another piece of bread into his mouth. “So…”

“Yeah, well that’s Grian,” Martyn says, swallowing with a touch of difficulty. “That’s different.”

“How’s it different?”

Martyn shrugs. He tears off another piece of steak, seemingly cooler this time. Jimmy follows suit. The meat is much tougher than he’s expecting, jaw working to chew. For a sudden, despite how well needed this meal is, he misses, achingly, the chance to cook.

“Just is,” Martyn finishes.

“‘S not like I’m related to any of you,” Jimmy snorts, swallowing. “You’ve all just decided to make yourselves my siblings.”

“You love it!”

“You’re putting words in my mouth,” Jimmy says, scrunching his face up. Martyn takes another big bite, talking with his mouth full.

“You like Lizzie just fine,” he manages. Jimmy leans back in his chair, folding his arms. His appetite hasn’t been much lately, coming and going in waves.

“Liz is different—it’s just different, it’s different!” Jimmy huffs, which turns into a little giggle, which he tries to stifle and fails. Martyn rolls his eyes.

“I hope she’s doin’ alright…” Jimmy adds after a beat. He sees Martyn nod, just a small bob of his head.

He couldn’t help it. There was something that nagged at him every time he noticed the red glint in her eye. Maybe it was guilt that still lingered. Maybe it was knowing she was alone enough to worry about. Joel wandered around. Scott, too. Himself. Grian. But nobody stayed. It was starting to worry him. But Martyn kicks his leg under the table again, and Jimmy jolts to, and stuffs the last bit of bread into his mouth before he scoots back from the table with a creak to the chair. Martyn seems to swallow with some difficulty as he watches Jimmy stand. Jimmy stretches, high over his head, to both sides, and then sighs. He drops his arms.

“Bedtime, I think,” Jimmy says, reaching up to scrub his face. Martyn nods, shutting his eyes for a moment.

“You’re tellin’ me,” he says. Jimmy watches his face for a moment, seeing tired lines and too much tension. He feels a little awkward, standing here, something fumbling around loosely in his chest. He coughs. Things seem to right themselves, then, enough for him to wander around and find another pair of socks, because his shoes are full of sand. And a sweater. He dumps sand from his shoes outside their door and shuts it against the chilly air. He hears Martyn at the sink and the stove, muttering to himself as he cleans up dinner. After a beat, as Jimmy weasels on a crudely made sweater with two, too-small holes in the back, he starts rearranging covers. He says:

“Thanks for dinner, Martyn,” and even though he tries to keep the tired from seeping into his voice, his words kind of slur together and Martyn laughs.

“You sound tired, mate,” he says. Jimmy watches him scrape at the pan with a knife, which can’t be good for the seasoning layer. Something actually hurts in Jimmy’s hands to see him do that. Whatever. Martyn can’t cook for shit anyways, so he doesn’t really care. But maybe he does. He crushes together another sentence, though.

“Well duh,” he garbles out. “Spent the whole day trying to snoop around and steal and hit people over the head like it’s whack-a-mole, ‘course I’m tired, Martyn.”

He flops into bed, face down. His wings splay out behind him like a cheap imitation of a blanket. He eventually manages to wiggle his way up his side of the bed and under the slightly-patchy quilt. He’s still lying face down, though, and his wing is very much in Martyn’s business. He’s expecting a poke or a whap on the back of his head when Martyn finally sits down next to him, but there’s a beat before he does. He peeks an eye open, frowning at the outline of Martyn in the half-dark. There’s still the furnace going, low and slow, keeping the room warm.

“What?” he asks. “You want me to move?”

Martyn blinks.

“Sorry,” he says, which is such a weird word to hear out of Martyn’s mouth, now that he thinks about it. “I was thinkin’ about something.”

“Anything important?” Jimmy asks, shifting over. He folds his wings in, making ample space for Martyn beside him. They’ll still end up crowded, shoulder to shoulder or back to back, holding heat between them.

“That’s none of your business,” Martyn says, lifting his chin. “You snoop.”

Jimmy barks out a laugh, rolling his eyes. Whatever, he wants to say, but it doesn’t quite make it out of his mouth, not before Martyn lies down and rearranges his perfectly balanced blankets, and he has to gripe about it as loud as he can. Martyn laughs, something Jimmy feels, too, as Martyn weasels in next to him. His laugh peters out in the dark. It’s like a sleepover, actually. But with a lot more dying. But still—last time Jimmy had Grian and Joel, and that was kind of fun, except they both complained a lot, and Joel hogged the covers. And he also had Tango, which was really nice, because his soulmate was a cuddler, and he was kind of hoping maybe they’d end up being allies so he’d have that again, but it didn’t work out, and that was fine. Scott and him hadn’t slept in the same room, which was also fine, but it also wasn’t cold. Here it was cold, and he was glad Martyn didn’t mind sleeping so close, and also they only had one bed. Which was also fine. It made Jimmy feel like a little kid again, and that was always fun. Almost like they were little kids again, and nothing mattered. He sighs.

“It’s a little important,” Martyn says, lowering his voice. Jimmy hums. His eyes are too tired to open. He feels a bit like soup, right now, so he lets Martyn do all the talking.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Jimmy manages. He feels Martyn shake his head.

“It’s alright, Timmy—just go to sleep, yeah?”

Jimmy hums. Yeah. Yeah. His body is a tired, heavy thing, even on their tiny mattress that isn’t all that comfortable (and Jimmy pretends like he isn’t thinking about his mattress back home on what he could call his home server and how nice and soft that one is. Definitely not longing for more pillows and maybe a bit more space). Martyn sighs, shuffling a bit to get comfortable. They stay shoulder to shoulder, and the warmth of being red and being human seeps into Jimmy’s shoulder and his sweater sleeve and Martyn mumbles out a good night.

The worst part about this interaction is its finality. Jimmy knows things end. He’s really, really used to things ending, and being red, and having things slip through his fingers too fast, too soon. He tries to savor the moment as he slips into dreamless sleep. He tries to screw up his face and keep awake for a second longer, like Martyn might tell him off again for not sleeping, or throw around that threat about leaving him to the phantoms. Jimmy swallows down the bad taste of that thought—the one about endings. He wishes it tasted a little better. It mostly tastes like burnt steak and toothpaste. Gross.

He mumbles a good night back.

Tomorrow Martyn sleeps in a cold bed alone. Because Jimmy’s right about endings, and he can usually taste them right before they happen, except he can never do anything about it, because why would he be able to? He’s not a superhero. He’s a psychopomp. Whatever.

Somewhere in that blank space, he makes a little place for Lizze and Mumbo to sit next to him. It won’t be for long—never, it never is, and the ache of being half dead with no real tether kind of gets old after a while—but it’s long enough for Lizzie to sigh out tiredly and rest her head against his shoulder, despite how hate bubbled up in her voice when she spat at him. He pats Mumbo’s shoulder. Mumbo laughs. They watch the games below them from a place very safe, and wait for someone else to join them. The world feels a little less heavy, then. His wings weigh a little more. The shape of him lingers in everything, even on Grian’s shoulder, even after Mumbo and Lizzie have left. His belongings linger in chests Martyn doesn’t empty. His name lingers in minds and mouths and his sweater ends up tied around someone’s waist. Lizzie lingers with him, crowding in that same space, and Jimmy welcomes sitting shoulder to shoulder again. He says to find him after they leave. Lizzie brightens, then. Like a sleepover, of course.

Yeah. That warm feeling lingers, even as Jimmy returns home, covered in feathers. Sure. Like a sleepover.

#jimmy solidarity #martyn inthelittlewood #secret life smp #slsmp #secret life jimmy #secret life martyn #fics #text #mcyt #mcyt fic #i call this one: tuna learns a new word and then uses it forever and ever amen #the word was psychopomp btw. if you were wondering. i briefly considered calling him a church grim #he's a harbinger but he also. lingers. he's there afterwards. for more deaths. of course he would be kind about it #he knows how much death stings. why wouldn't he help?#anyway i'm in my big dogs feels #theyre like brothers to me. their family is so fucked up <3 #i love them #martyn lizzie grian joel jimmy pearl sparkles and parvis. dont ask me how it makes sense #it just does

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ironraven · 6 months

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lore of psychopomp?

(what this doesn't show is that, because I used plexicon, I also got all pearls from vanilla and all those modded regions. and all echoes!) (don't mind that kill count too much either. that only counts survived cycles; I killed way more than this)

tl;dr; despite trying to separate itself from the world entirely, enough to kill indiscriminately without even thinking about it, having one single driving goal is Bad For Your Karma. tl;dr;tl;dr; reach heaven through violence, but fuck it up anyway.

The long version is kind of a hard tale to talk about, though, because it's been looping over itself for a long while. Psychopomp was originally just a fun skin I used for playing hunter, when I was first getting into modded hunter. It was a merge of echocat and the vordt, actually, the former of which ended up influencing a lot of the plot thoughts I had going forward. Vulture masks, especially king vulture masks, for the bonus lizard fear time, quickly become my favourite item. I carry them everywhere.

Time passes. I don't play modded for a while, I wipe my game and re-mod it from the ground up. I want to play modded hunter--but, specifically, I want to play through a lot of regions, especially some that I'd never played before, like Aether Ridge. And that's when the Psychopomp run begins. The goal I set for the run was to get all echoes and all pearls, to force myself to thoroughly explore regions instead of just running through. For smaller regions, I'd even try to fully light up the map. Psychopomp is as much of a wanderer as any slugcat can get, and obtaining the full passage--to see everything the world has to offer--is their main goal. Meeting echoes (hence the name) and reading pearls are bonuses. For this run, instead of using Fancy Slugcats, I used Colourfoot. It was mostly because I didn't want to deal with sprites, but it had the effect of, instead of being an echoed, warped thing, Psychopomp was still a living breathing slugcat.

Time passes. I play off and on for months. A single slugcat, no matter how good at travelling and obliterating lizards, can only go so fast. Despite killing so often, it's detached from the action. Violence weighs on a person, and that weight will tie you to the Cycle--but if it doesn't weigh on you, you could kill anything and have no burden. It's about the thought that goes into the action just as much as the action itself. Every other passage goes the same way. I take my regions from easiest to hardest, and depending on what's nearby. This leaves the two largest regions, Aether Ridge and Oceanic Aqueducts, which are both in Sky Islands, for last.

Time passes. I spend a small lifetime tracking down every pearl, and figuring out unique ways of getting white pearls. A region, Scrapped Peaks, utterly broke every white pearl in the game. Any white pearl not newly spawned in (so ones placed manually, as opposed to treasury and dropwig pearls) will be transformed into one of Scrapped Peaks' pearls. Psychopomp is haunted by this awful cursed "fluora pearl". Aether Ridge and Aqueducts take several years off of my lifespan. Psychopomp's too, because these regions should be the last pips needed for Wanderer--there is still one pip left. I wander around the map more, checking regions I wasn't sure if I remembered visiting or not. The pip remains. I visit Subterranean; the pip remains. I give up. Psychopomp decides that the last pip must be from the Void Sea itself, and makes the trek down.

I carry the vulture mask with me into the Sea anyway, because even though it was a burden throughout Filtration System, I am deeply attached to it. I never use my left hand slot for anything else, because I never put down the mask. It's as much a part of Psychopomp as their face is. It was not, in fact, the last pip. It wasn't the end of my bugs, either, because after Taxi (the worm) drags me down to the last section of the Sea, where the clones spawn and you swim towards the slight, my game freezes entirely. Psychopomp sits motionless in the empty black void. I restart the cycle, and ascend again. Same bug. Every time the other slugcats try to spawn in, it freezes. Even though Psychopomp had already been decided to be echoed before this run even started, this solidified it for me. I felt like I had actually been echoed, stuck right at the very teetering edge of Ascension. That one single pip, that uncompleted passage wheel, preventing me from finishing the run--its existence. (I only got that end screen screenshot because I installed devtools, and dragged myself to the light before any other slugcats could spawn in and freeze the game. It's entirely unlegit, unlike the rest of the run, where I didn't even have it installed)

An ancient's echo is forced into one place, stuck monologuing to themselves--literally echoing. A slugcat wouldn't monologue, though, and the echo of their actions wouldn't be only in one place. Instead, Psychopomp's ghost, the restless remnants of what the Void Sea couldn't dissolve, spends eternity wandering after that final pip. No pearl will be enough, no region mapped completely. But, maybe, just past that gate--or over that building, or up past that tower, or

#this is a MESS but I hope it explains some of my thoughts a little #psychopomp's whole gist is too tied up in that run to really explain without the context of it #please feel free to ask more specific questions though! it's hard writing All of it haha. I already missed so much #fun fact; those two screenshots are what the little comic thing was based off of!#rain world #rw oc

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