Work Text:
Pearl didn’t have anything in mind for today; maybe record a timelapse, do some terraforming on her side of the river. Really, she just wanted to lay out the groundwork for her terrain, using a palette of oranges and greens to really stick out and contrast against what’s eventually going to be alien plant life and giant purple mushrooms. But that was getting ahead of herself; right now, she had a wonderful afternoon of building ahead of her, so she takes one last sip of her coffee and gazes out at the budding April scenery, then gets off her couch and heads to her computer setup.
She logs in to the Hermitcraft server, and, when she spots Tango, flies over to him. Pearl returns his beacon, and then sings a little song in order to use it again, as per the former’s rules. He’s happy to lend the beacon to her, and so she spends a few hours off-camera mining for stone and granite, until she’s satisfied with the number of blocks she’s got.
Starting up OBS again, Pearl addresses her audience, proudly showing off what she’s mined before explaining her plan for her base’s terrain in detail. It’s one of her favorite parts of being a content creator, the getting to talk to her audience, and though she’s not actually talking to them in real time, it still feels nice to ramble and feel like someone’s listening.
“-I’m very excited to just get going, and get building, so… let’s start that timelapse!”
After cue-ing to her editor self (who she fondly calls Editing Pearl) when to cut the clip, Pearl lands gracefully down near a pumpkin patch and a number of oak trees and turns off her mic, finding a playlist to listen to on her phone. The next few hours are spent clearing away at the terrain, laying out a path, and overall shaping the land into something fitting her vision of an alien environment . The orange-and-green scenery reminds her of a painting, and she pauses a couple times to fly around and see how the terrain is turning along, each time coming away satisfied with her progress.
She’s about halfway done with the overall structure and getting started on the detailing when she hears a distant sound of humming getting closer to her. Pearl pays it no mind; that is, until she’s hit with a flaming arrow, the only warning being Scar’s triumphant “Hawkeye!” as he soars over her.
Pearl respawns as soon as possible, blinking as she processes what just happened.
<GoodTimeWithScar> OMG
Seeing Scar’s reaction, Pearl can’t help but laugh. Of course, in typical Scar fashion, he managed to accidentally murder her.
<PearlescentMoon> Scar you cheeky nugget
Though she can’t help but be a bit miffed at the lost levels, Pearl doesn’t really mind. She pulls up Scar’s stream, and smiles when she sees him covering his mouth in shock, before exclaiming something about Hawkeye not killing people. Pearl rolls her eyes fondly, and tabs back into Minecraft, sending him a quick explanation.
<PearlescentMoon> I had no food, so was down on health xD
It takes a few seconds for her message to appear on stream, what with the delay and all, but soon she sees Scar let out an embarrassed laugh and take off flying to find her. “Don’t- no don’t worry Pearl, I’ve got cookies!” He grins. “I’ve got cookies Pearl!”
“That’s a relief,” she says, before realizing her mic’s muted. Pearl starts walking away from her bed, turning on her mic and trying to find Scar. She runs past him, not noticing until his voice comes through stream, calling her name. She turns around to face him.
<PearlescentMoon> oh I can’t hear one mo
She mutes Scar’s stream, and fidgets with her voice settings. She just catches the end of what he’s saying — something about letting her items despawn — and panics.
“No,” Pearl says, earning a gasp of surprise from Scar. Oh good, they can hear each other . “Don’t lose my items, I need to get my items back!”
Scar simply laughs, and Pearl finds herself laughing along, simply because it’s Scar who’s laughing with her.
“Pearl, you’re not supposed to die from Hawkeye,” he tries to explain.
“Didya notice I was only wearing an egg on my head and not any armor?” She responds, to which Scar admits sheepishly that no, he’s not the most observant person in the world. Pearl rolls her eyes and rests her cheek on her left hand.
“Ya silly goof!”
As she picks up her items, sorting them in her inventory, Scar helps her out, and explains his true purpose for visiting her; he comes with gifts — cookies, the most delicious cookies she’ll ever have in her life, he claims. Pearl’s admittedly distracted by her own head, which she can put on her character’s head to make it a bit bigger.
They get into a discussion about how traditional Minecraft cookies appear orange, and Pearl finds it nice. She hasn’t spent much time with Scar this season, but she has missed this ; getting lost in conversation with him, talking about the most insignificant things until they become important and meaningful. He makes her notice things she wouldn’t have otherwise, and for that she’s grateful.
Scar tosses her another cookie, this one resembling jam drops, with the jam part swirled and colored the lavender of purpur blocks and chorus fruit.
“Ooh, it’s purple!” Pearl exclaims.
She turns her attention to the muted stream for a fraction of a second, and catches Scar’s smile grow wider. “Try it out, try it out!”
“I shall, I shall- it’s an Elven Kiss, am I kissing the cookie as I’m eating it?” Pearl wonders aloud, not expecting what happens next.
The Elven Kiss, being a reskinned chorus fruit, teleports her. That’s not the issue; if anything, it catches her off-guard, but not enough to throw her off as much as it did. No, what happened is that she’s teleported right in front of Scar, his face taking up her whole screen. Their characters are so close that she can imagine their noses touching, and she feels her face heat up.
As if that’s not enough, Scar is live, live in front of thousands of people. And from a glance at his stream, one can tell he’s just as flustered, just as disoriented as she is.
“Wh- oh. OH!”
Both of them make strangled sounds, and Pearl turns her head and walks away. Scar tries to laugh it off, and Pearl’s secretly glad Karn is out of the house today; he’d tease her mercilessly if he could see this.
It’s funny, is the thing; Pearl’s been thinking a lot about Scar recently, about how she’d like to spend more time with him, but for their characters to be thrown into something that is just so blatantly romantic at a glance gives an unpleasant new perspective to imagining meeting up with the man someday, going out for coffee and showing him the corners of the city she lives in.
So, Pearl laughs. She laughs until she’s wheezing, until she’s red in the face not just from embarrassment but from lack of air, and she smiles wide at seeing that Scar’s the same, looking anywhere but the camera and burying his hands in his face in a way that’s almost adorable. Pearl flushes at the thought, and rests her head on her desk, continuing to laugh off the incident.
She barely registers that he tossed her more Elven Kisses until someone in his chat points it out, and she feels a need to save face, to not let all the embarrassment fall on him. Flustered or no, he’s still her friend, and Pearl knows how their fans can be.
She’s just about to say something — compliment the cookies, or else change the topic, when Scar crosses his arms and stares at her character.
“Well, that got awkward,” he quips, still red in the face, and the slight delay between sound and image, and the fact that she’s this close to having a realization about her buried feelings for this man, and the fact that it’s been a long day, just sends her into another fit of giggles.
“O-okay, um,” she says, catching her breath and fighting down another fit of laughter. “Eh-hem.”
“Good cookie, I enjoyed it-”
“I don’t have my Elven Surprise,” Scar laments, talking over her. Pearl blushes, and hopes he didn’t hear what she said. Clearly he wanted to move on from the topic, so she’d oblige him.
“But anyway, Pearl,” he says, going to pick up the Elven Kisses he’d tossed on the ground. Pearl smiles in a way that’s a little too fond for her tastes, but she’d unpack that later. Lovely.
“Can I just- can I count on you to be,” he says, tossing some more cookies at her. Pearl “oh”-s as she picks them up, mouse hovering over the Elven Kiss for a second longer than needed.
“-a customer of the Cookie Empire?”
Pearl nods in real life. “Yeah, yeahyeahyeah, I think you can, I think you can. I think this cookie,” she pulls out the Elven Kiss, mostly to tease him, “is gonna do it justice. Oh-”
She teleports away, just underneath the part she’d been working on, and laughs.
“I’m gone!”
“She gone!”
Pearl flies back up, and crouches under Scar as he talks about his other cookie, the Elven Surprise. Though he won’t tell her what the surprise is, she’s still tempted to check it out, if only to satiate her curiosity. And she tells him just as much.
“I mean, I’m not gonna shy away from a surprise,” she hums. “I’d love to.”
Scar tries to bid her farewell — and by trying, Pearl means saying goodbye, only to shoot her in the face and then panic. Pearl can’t even be mad at him as she respawns and heads back to pick up her stuff.
“Twice in 15 minutes, Scar, that’s-”
“I’ve never killed anyone with Hawkeye before.” He pauses. “I could get used to killing people.”
Pearl laughs, even as fear enters her voice at the sound of what she’s created. “No, no, no.”
They laugh a bit more, with Scar hinting at a build plan for this season that Pearl’s more than excited to see come to fruition. For the second time that day, Scar bids her goodbye, and flies off into the distance.
Pearl finishes her timelapse a few hours later, and records the end to her episode shortly thereafter. She stretches, deciding to leave editing for another day, and heads to the kitchen to get herself a snack. And if Karn comes home to find her eating jam drops and watching a sappy Hallmark movie, well, that’s not something anyone else needs to know.