All posts by D4wn1n9 Sh4d3

His voice cracks as he says it. Mango himself isn’t really sure whether he actually means it anymore, when he says something. Every conversation with Purple is coated in six different layers of how do i do this without f*cking it up and hurt and longing. He can’t get a single word out without feeling chains around his neck.

“Who?” Purple asks back, apparently busying herself with some items. He notices how her hands never stop moving, moving moving, twitchy and restless. Her eyes don’t meet Mango’s. He’s almost forgotten what they look like under natural sunlight, somewhere that’s not deep in the belly of a bastion, tucked away within a different dimension where bones rattle and voices shriek. Mango thinks that they might’ve been flecked gold, once.

“My wife. My son. Whatever.” He’s suddenly lost any motivation or interest in this conversation. He doesn’t want to talk about Neon, he doesn’t want to talk about Gold, and he can already feel a barrier sliding into place in his throat. It holds on and doesn’t want to let go– Mango gets these fits sometimes. He chokes on his words and has to force them down again if he wants to breathe. It’s the work of a king, or something. Doesn’t necessarily matter to him much anymore, being a king. The crown on his head was too heavy for him anyways, (he tells himself).

Deep inside himself, Mango reflects. There hasn’t been a moment where Purple wasn’t a servant, or a follower, or a f*cked-up daughter figure. Mango was the sun, and all the plants lean to him for a drop of his power. Look at him now. His halo is gone.

Purple mumbles something, too low for him to make out. He doesn’t want to be able to hear it, so it shouldn’t matter to him(emphasis on shouldn’t, because the word there should be doesn’t). Despite it all, there is a fanciful, cursed feeling of family to Purple. She feels like a daughter. Mango thinks back to the hundreds of x’s lining his walls, one for each day without Gold, one for each day where he was alone. He messed up on his son, he can’t, he can’t mess up with Purple.

(It feels like she’s already been gone for a long time, though. He tucks that thought away inside his heart. He will fix it. Mango will fix the vacant look in her eyes and the heartbreaking way she keeps her arms close to her chest in case of attack and how she doesn’t like turning her back on him for a single second. The war is over, so why now?)

He sighs. There isn’t anything that he can do, nothing in his power, anyways, to stop Purple from clipping on the belts of her elytra and picking up the fireworks and casting a glance at the bastion, and speeding away into the distance. She does just that, and then it’s just Mango on the edge of a netherrack cliff, listening to the bones rattle and the voices shriek and then the choruses of distant growling join them. It smells like gunpowder and explosives. It smells like bloo–

–blood. He screeches as he sees his son’s skin bubble with black code, infected, ugly. The developers are watching from behind him. Mango can’t care less, but he’s still turning his chest inside out to expose the most raw parts of himself. He can’t. He’s the ki–

–king, and he’s at the bastion. Gold is long gone, lost to the black and the congealed void that sucks at his heart from somewhere deep within him–

–heart pounds and leaps erratically as he watches helplessly. (he knows, in that exact moment, that he can never fail again. Even as his fingers burn from pulling at the slight crack in the glass, never widening even how hard he tried– Mango feels tears pricking at the edges of his eyes, hot and vulnerable, and he feels his chest split open, crack crack crackcrackcrack crack, and his insides are cloying with decay and love. It’s sickeningly sweet. He pours his heart out for Gold.

“Dad!” Cries the yellow stick inside the simulation machine. The child’s skin is pale, now. (paleness is death. Paleness is weakness.) Who is the person calling for him, anyways? Mango turns. Red crowds on the edge of his vision, and he sees the developer sticks standing quietly in shock, one still holding the broken lever. They shrink under his glare. (He likes that feeling of power. He wants to feel more of it, make others feel the pain he felt for losing– who did he lose, anyways?)

A childish kind of grief comes over him. Is it childlike if it’s oh so worthy of him to get revenge for Gold? He raises his fists and throws–

–throws the crown on his head to his feet in a fit of anger. The golden, shiny color doesn’t mean anything to him now. It doesn’t look like power or a plush velvet throne or a hundred thousand soldiers to fight for him. It looks like pain and hunger and sticks in cages, hanging over his room. It looks like–

–like Gold, he thinks as he looks at the metal of a watch nestled into the hoodie of an unconscious Zaffre. Mango punches him in the face, again and again and again and again. The red in his vision has receded slightly but now there’s red on his hands, on his face on his hair and all over his clothes. He exits out the back alley, and becomes just a shadow among the void.

(At night, when he sleeps, he dreams of ashy yellow skin bubbling black with infected code. He doesn’t sleep after that.)

Mango comes to again, hands on his knees and a sheen of sweat on his forehead. It smells like rotting meat, flesh left out in the sun for too long. It smells like the nether. His crown is laying on the floor and– he momentarily wonders how that’d happened before looking right past it. At the purple figure that was fleeing towards a similarly purple portal in the distance.

- - -

“Hello.”

Purple’s head jerks back in shock, and she nearly hits it on a stone column nearby. That’s the voice of Mango. It’s him, she needs to run, she should be putting on her elytra and taking to the skies and flying with her wings– she thinks of red velvet plush thrones and crowns and her skin glitching out, the feeling of all her organs being displaced–

“Hi,” She responds instead of fleeing, flight like a second instinct against this person who halos light and challenges the sun in glory. Purple hopes that her voice doesn’t betray fear. If it shakes, if it shivers(like a leaf clinging to its branch in the winter, rattling with frost), it is weakness. There’s no such thing as weakness in her world, where everything is hard thrown punches and daggers in a ribcage. The feathers on her elytra ruffle; the tips are stained with crusted blood.

“I mean– I just wanted to say that I’m sorry,” Mango says, and it all kind of rushes out after that. Purple wants to scream.

You don’t know what it’s like– you don’t know pain and flinches and when every time i have to run and my mother when she’s dead and my father when he’s kicking my chest and the feeling when my head floats to the ceiling and all my veins burst and–

“Okay.” It sounds flat. It sounds empty. It’s not the way to respond to a genuine, sorry apology. Her own deadpan tone is unfamiliar– when did she start saying things like this? When did she start sounding like her father? It’s nothing, not really, but when Purple catches sight of a puddle, she sees; her eyes, dead and gray, gold flecks chipped and gone– her expression, somewhat carefully crafted into hopefulness but just a bit too broken on the edges. She promised that she wouldn’t be like her father. (In this moment, she looks like her father. She looks like wars fought and gone and she looks like Navy, whose face is buried under several layers of grief.

“Okay–” She repeats. It sounds flat. It sounds empty. It’s not the way to respond to a genuine, sorry apology. If Purple hadn’t known better, if she stopped shoveling the topsoil over her own layer, her voice would ring bitter and sour to her ears. It’s not regretful. She turns to Mango, and takes a breath only to release it before even holding it in.

“I don’t want an apology. You took me in, treated me like a daughter, and ripped that canvas to pieces. Do you think I want to talk to you? Do you think I want to become your daughter figure again, and do you think, for even the slightest bit, that I can trust you?”

It comes out harsh. She sounds ragged, and broken, and tired (tired), and occupied. It’s not like anyone had ever accused Purple of being the most sympathetic stick. No one’s like that. The world doesn’t work that way. Still, she can’t bring herself to yell more. It was obvious that Mango really did think of her like a daughter, but–

Her mouth still tastes like gunpowder and explosions. She doesn’t think it’s going to stop tasting like that for a really, really long time.

- - - - -

Anyways I'm sorry that i haven't been online as i've wanted to be... school getting busier and stuff :c

My writing style has changed a lot(and gotten better, i think!). heres the first fic i've ever posted for comparison:

https://animatorvsanimation.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000000163816