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“Did you know,” Spoke starts, which immediately draws all of Mapicc’s attention. That is fair, because usually if Spoke starts a sentence like that, he’s uniquely manic. “That most whalefalls disappear before they hit the sea floor?”
“What?” Mapicc indulges.
“Whalefall. When a whale dies and its body sinks into the abyssal zone. It’s a buffet for detritivores. In coastal areas, when they sink, they never get that deep; usually predators get them. Or decomposition.” Spoke continues. “It’s interesting, because there’s need for food on every level.”
“Do you have any fun fun facts?” Mapicc huffs, then shoves golden carrots into Spoke’s hand. “There, happy?”
A smile works its way up Spoke’s face, twisted slightly incorrectly. Mapicc visibly attempts to not falter.
“Yeah. Thank you.” Spoke says, staring into Mapicc’s eyes and not scrunching his own enough for the smile to be a happy one.
“Okay bro. Come help me farm, stop being weird.” Mapicc moves on, nodding at the carrots.
“Okay,” Spoke agrees easily. Farming like this instead of trading or stealing is weird. It’s reminiscent of bright days, splashing around in liquid sunlight, donning trims that creeped them both out. Only a few meters deep into Unstable.
Spoke helps Mapicc farm carrots.
He knows that not everything is like something else. The first big lie he told Mapicc, the first one he really registered, was a hundred blocks up on a happy ghast, and five hundred deep underwater. Not everything is like something else, but not telling Mapicc that he was still in contact with Rose’s family was a little like realizing there’s a hole in his oxygen tank when he’s already underwater.
Not everything is like something else, but sometimes Spoke wakes up in murky twilight and feels like he’s drowning. Drowning is something actually like nothing else, it’s like a number; there’s no synonym for “ten” and there’s no way to describe drowning besides technicality. You hold your breath, your head pounds, then you breathe water in a panic and your lungs collapse. That’s it. One two three four five. That’s all.
Sometimes, Mapicc wakes up and performs CPR, pulls Spoke away from the tides of nightmares. Sometimes, CPR doesn’t work, and Spoke’s ribs crack but it’s okay, it’ll always be okay, because Mapicc’s doing his best. Sometimes, he thinks that maybe– maybe, maybe, he might deserve broken ribs.
Enough dancing around it, Mapicc’s his whalefall, and Spoke is layered. He’s fulfilled in the lighter areas, his photic zone is satisfied, the easy parts are easy. Hanging out with friends, eating food, having fun– all of those are done. Achieved, fulfilled, check. And then the whalefall dissolves dry into the waters, and Mapicc has nothing to give for all the other issues Spoke has. The deeper ones, darker, aphotic fears; he doesn’t think he’s good, really, he doesn’t feel connection with anyone, and he is fundamentally different from every other thing– Nothing about that is fulfilling.
Is it selfish? Is Mapicc selfish? Sometimes Spoke thinks so, wishes Mapicc would better take care of him, but how is the whale meant to know how many creatures might need it? How could Mapicc choose which area to help when he doesn’t even know all of them? How is a corpse supposed to twist out of reach and bat at carnivores, ask them to wait for the deep-sea detritivores? Spoke’s being given so much, and it isn’t enough for him. Maybe he’s the selfish one. Then again, miles and miles and miles of sea warrants that kind of hunger. As always, Spoke is hungry.
Mapicc loves Spoke, he knows that much, but sometimes love is only as compact as a sponge, and hovers right above where the density levels get too heavy. Sometimes, love is a whalefall that gets torn apart by nibbling fish before it reaches bone-eating worms on the floor.
Which is to say, it’s midnight, and Mapicc is gone.
Vaguely, his mind tickles at the idea of Jumper and an Abyss. He doesn’t have time to dwell on that, because he’s– they’re being hunted. By the same people that took Mapicc, his Mapicc his bestfriend and whalefall.
He runs with Jumper because he has no other leads. NULL has to go somewhere, the ‘road of null’ can’t just be something random, it–
Spoke’s blood runs cold, four thousand meters deep, less than five celsius. That pearl cannon idea was one of his worst. He finds that he doesn’t care at all, finds that, even with everything sacrificed, he still misses Mapicc. His Mapicc, his lovely lovely beautiful whalefall of a bestfriend who has to be alive, or else Spoke…
Would be cooked. But he’s not. They’re in a blizzard-y snow biome and he’s freezing. Then they’re in a grasslands and he’s still freezing, so he realizes that it’s not just the biomes making him cold, it’s the lack of his bestfriend. Fitting. Fitting. The inside of a whale and a human are the exact same temperature, 98.6 Fahrenheit. He misses his whalefall bestfriend. He misses his Mapicc.
Spoke thinks that if he nestled close enough, Mapicc would let him claw open his skin to crawl inside. He’d stitch it up nice too, and stay inside the warm beating blood blubber body of his bestfriend.
But that’s insane to say. Mapicc would call him gross, and then they’d both be unsettled. Just not a normal thing to say. Jumper’s spies are dead, and Spoke is thinking about cutting Mapicc open. He’s bad. He’s horrible and gross and he misses Mapicc.
Jumper takes him back to the base. They make a feeble attempt at regearing, and Spoke just spirals deeper and deeper down into the abyss. Slow and steady, like a rock. These things take time.
Then, his fall is cut off, and he lands on the body of a whale. In the breaking hug, Spoke digs his nails in until Mapicc hisses in pain and tells him to chill. But he’s starving.
Yeah. He should’ve known nothing ever stops falling. He guesses he’ll just never touch the ground now, because Mapicc is his submarine down to the bottom of the deepest trench. They descend spiral stairs and neither Mapicc or Jumper say a word. Spoke’s suffocating. Not everything feels like something else.
JamatoP has decided not to die, and Spoke immediately knows he has evil intentions. Hunter. Jamato’s a hunter and he’s tried before to take Spoke’s meal. This time, Spoke decides to stop him before they’re cutting it too close.
He should have known. Who takes that long to repair armor? He’s stupid, and now his only nutrient source left him and he has nothing, nobody– Hah, null. There we go. Spoke has lost everything besides the few things he’s smuggled, and the stuff in his echest, but his hopes are about as low as he is.
Mapicc hates him. The only thing keeping him alive has suddenly become toxic to him, and Spoke has no idea how to go on. He lies benthic on the sea floor, deeper than sperm whales and gulper eels and hadal snailfish. All he has to protect him now are the walls and floor. The very breakable walls and floor.
He climbs a wall, but really how much of a difference are thirty feet in the face of thirty-six thousand?
Mapicc hates him. It’s so fucked just to think of Mapicc as a generous corpse. More importnat than being Spoke’s whalefall, Mapicc is his bestfriend. Or– was. Was his…
Mapicc hates him. He’s at his own deep sea version of Point Nemo, alone and under a billion square pounds of pressure. He misses raiding bases. He misses his bestfriend.
Spoke jumps off the wall, entirely in the dark of if he plans to make a splash. He just wants to stop swimming altogether.
His bestfriend who hates him breaks every part of him. He’s free from his shackles but the chestplate was the last thing he had of his first best friend and– Mapicc rips and tears apart Spoke in ways no one thought possible. Spoke sinks below benthic, and comes face to face with an undiscovered burrowing species that drags him below Mariana’s Trench and into the very core of the world.
Distantly, through the burning pain, Spoke wonders if his chunk splicing left a scar on the server. As far as he knows, there’s a barrier block placed somewhere on this server.
Mapicc hates and snarls and bites and leaves and then he’s gone. His two former best friends team up to squeeze him of everything. Honestly it’s a miracle he gets to keep the clothes on his back. Spoke doesn’t even think to try and smuggle something past Jamato. Mapicc hates him. Why should he try anything?
It’s the roughest crash he’s had, worse than after Rose, worse than after Parrot laughed in his face, worse than any other time Mapicc has left. Now, he'd had a taste of company, and he is truly, truly alone.
Thankfully– Thankfully, nothing like that lasts. Spoke repairs his submarine, and tries to surface. The hardest part, the part that nearly kills him (nearly makes him kill himself) is pulling his not-corpse out of the trenches of the world’s rock. Back in the Hadal zone, he ends up face to face with an arrow cannon, dying with people he barely knows. An escape attempt on day one was never destined to work, they all knew that, but heroes are supposed to always have hope. And that is something Spoke very, very much wants to be. A hero. A martyr.
So he accepts his fate, entirely accepts that he is going to die. God. He’s a long time overdue, with everything he’s done. Which isn’t to say he wants it, but–
Except a totem is slipped into his hand, and the arrows slide right back out of his face and chest, and he doesn’t die. And then he keeps not dying. Everyone around him, yes, but Spoke doesn’t, and something absolutely revolting forms in his chest. I want to, but I won’t. He doesn’t like that feeling– hates it, actually. That not-hope, that obligation. It’s all pretend, god, all anything is for him nowadays is a big elaborate puppet show.
So he lives. He lives, heart pounding, blood rushing, nerves on fire, he lives. When he meets Mapicc again, his no-longer-bestfriend, he thinks oh. oh he is whalefall. Because Spoke is alive, tender like a bruise type of alive, fed, but Mapicc… looks dead on his feet. He’s almost at the sea floor, too.
Like always, Spoke saves him. He’s good like that. He’s a hero. He’s–
Not Mapicc’s bestfriend. Any celebration gets cut short.
Still, because Mapicc, his Mapicc, is amazing, and Jumper is okay, they help him reverse the rest of the drowning process. With harsh-gentle words, they scoop heavy, dark water out of his throat like a pet that ate something it shouldn’t have. Up past the hadal zone- shockingly close to sunlit seas, for being in prison.
He takes deep breaths and doesn’t feel water rattle with it. Maybe this is love, scooping water out of a drowning victim’s throat. If that’s the case, Spoke loves Mapicc and Jumper. He thinks he can end up on a beach, someday. What a weird, lovely feeling.
Because he is who he is, everyone and thing he loves dies anyways.
Back to benthic.