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The soft gust of air that announces his arrival has become so familiar to Seawatt that he does not even bother to look around. He doesn’t wish to give Evbo the pleasure of surprising him. For a few minutes there’s silence - Seawatt guesses Evbo is waiting for him to turn around and scream in shock - but Seawatt trusts in his patience to be infinitely greater than the other man.
It is, of course, rewarded. Soft steps on sandstone as the other approaches him from behind.
“Yo, Seawatt! Are you deaf or something?”
Seawatt finally turns around and looks Evbo up and down. “Of course not. I was just hoping I’d imagined you appearing.”
The other man rolls his eyes, and steps back.
“Jeez, I didn’t know I was so unwanted.”
“You do know that.”
He brings his hand up to his gaping open mouth, eyebrows raising dramatically. “And after all the effort I put into bringing a gift as well!”
“A gift?” Seawatt turns his body around too and fixes his gaze on Evbo, who tries his best to smile nonchalantly. “That you made? What is it, a parkour course?”
“Aw, come on, you don’t have to reduce everything about me to parkour!”
“You are quite literally the Parkour God. I think that line has already been crossed.”
“I know that,” Evbo huffs, then digs around in his inventory somewhat violently. Seawatt hears the clink of glass, metal, and maybe even golden apples before Evbo finally pulls out the object he was looking for.
“Ta-da!” he announces with a grin, and shakes a bottle with what seems like liquid gold in it. Seawatt blinks. It is something he has not seen for a very long time.
“Mead.”
“Uh-huh!” he nods, chirping. “It was kinda a pain to brew this - it was so weird that you’re supposed to mix a Potion of Slowness and we even had to use the command blocks to mix this thing called nausea in it, and we had to use a whole ton of honey before we got it right and it was such a pain to have to wait like a month before it was ready but it turned out pretty good!”
“You really have no idea what mead is meant to be, do you?”
“No, should I?”
Seawatt rolls his eyes. “Doesn’t matter. Are you gonna drink it or not?”
“Wow, not even asking for first dibs? Who’s this stranger?”
“I’ll decide if I want to drink it or not based on your reaction.”
Evbo chuckles. “Should’ve known you weren’t being nice.” He uncorks the bottle and swirls it around, the liquid inside bathing in the last vestiges of sunset light. The two stare at it for a second.
“It’s pretty,” Seawatt finds himself muttering.
“I know, right?”
“I’m surprised you made it.”
“Hey!” Evbo frowns. “I…well, EMF helped a bit, but you know I did most of it, okay?” He takes a swig. Seawatt hopes his reaction will be amusing.
It is, but for better reasons than Seawatt would’ve liked. Evbo’s eyes widen as the liquid hits his tongue. For a second Seawatt wonders if he’s going to spit the whole thing out, but he swallows it down and pulls the bottle away, staring at it with wonder.
“Wow! This is really good!” Seawatt’s eyebrows raise, and he wonders if he should trust the tastebuds of someone who ate raw chicken for years. “It’s like…you got the sweetness of the honey but it’s got this kick behind it that balances it all out. Wanna try some?”
He offers the bottle, hand outstretched, to Seawatt.
“Seriously? After your raw chicken-filled mouth has touched it?”
“What? Afraid of cooties?”
“Ugh. Fine. Whatever.” He takes it - Seawatt has not tasted mead in ages. He thought he never would again. He takes a small sip.
It is passable - not the best thing that he has had, but not as terrible as he expected it to be. The honey mixes around in his mouth for a few seconds, before the tang of alcohol cuts through - slightly too sweet for his liking, but the fermentation is evident. It seems that Evbo did put in a lot of effort in making it.
“It’s not bad.” To his horror, Evbo grins wildly.
“Really? You think so? I’ll have to tell EMF that we gotta make more of these. Maybe we could make one for everyone for the parkour-versary!”
“How’d you know how to make this in the first place?”
Evbo somehow manoeuvres the bottle out of Seawatt’s grasp and takes another drink. “I found the recipe in an old parkour book at the champion library. Pretty cool, right?”
“This is a fighter recipe.”
“Whoa, really?” Evbo peers at the mead like he’s seeing it for the first time. “So you know about it, right?”
“Uh-huh. Parkour fighters used to drink it after successful battles as a sign of victory. Or beforehand, to give them courage and strength. Or at celebrations. Honestly, I think they just had excuses to drink it whenever.” He wins the bottle back from Evbo and has some more. The memories are flooding back to him now; sneaking sips of it from his parents’ cabinet, the first time he had a proper cup of it, being able to brew it himself with his potion skills. He shivers as the images run rampant in his mind. How much has he forgotten already?
While he is lost in thought, Evbo somehow ends up drinking at least half the mead. Seawatt only notices when Evbo tips the bottle a bit too far and lets out a loud, hacking cough.
“Hey! I thought this was my gift?”
Evbo coughs, hacks, coughs and draws in a deep breath. “Sorry…” he manages to wheeze out.
“Jeez, slow down. Otherwise you’re going to get the worst end of the nausea.”
Evbo’s face immediately falls. “Oh, I forgot that was in there.”
“Mm-hm. Better give it to me for safekeeping.”
“Fine, but only ‘cause it’s your gift.” Seawatt finally gets another chance to have some more mead. It’s good for how different it is, at the very least. Evbo slumps down on the wall of the half-destroyed fighter house. Seawatt follows suit, but does so with much more grace, sliding down and sitting about a metre away from the Parkour God.
It’s funny to think of it like that. That Seawatt could be in God’s presence, so close to him; hell, even snipe and exchange banter with a divine being. A strange situation to be in - when he was young, Seawatt still remembers how people prayed and made shrines to the Parkour God. Once every while there would be a festival, where fighters would burn something precious to them in order to sacrifice and appease. Now, as that power manifest leans lazily on a wall beside him, Seawatt almost wants to laugh at how absurd it now all seems.
He sips some more mead. Much of the old parkour knowledge had probably been lost. Fighters weren’t really one for keeping documentation. It’s a little funny that one of the only remaining traces of his brethren was the damned mead recipe.
“Why were you reading anyway?”
“What?”
Seawatt rolls his head around languidly to look at Evbo, who’s considering the bottle, now almost fully drained. “You said you got the mead recipe from an old parkour book you found in the master library. Why were you in the library anyway?”
“I…why do I have to have a reason for everything I do? Sometimes I just feel like doing something, and cool things come outta it.”
“You just don’t seem like the type to spend your time reading, Parkour God.”
Evbo looks away. “I..I got, like, nothing else to do, so I decided to brush up on my understanding of the parkour language! Some of those old books are pretty interesting too!”
It seems that being the Parkour God does not make you any better at lying. Seawatt narrows his eyes and glares at Evbo with a raised eyebrow.
The Parkour God fares a lot worse than he would in a parkour battle. “Okay, okay, fine! I wasn’t just reading for fun. I was also trying to research something.”
“Research…what?”
Evbo sighs, refuses to look at Seawatt, and sighs again. “I just wanted to get a clue of what I’m meant to do.”
“…what?”
“I mean, as the Parkour God. Cause, like, what is God even meant to do? I know you’re meant to look after everyone and make sure the world is mostly peaceful, but I don’t even know anything about my powers, or capabilities or anything like that.”
“God is…” The answer dies on his lips. Evbo is right. What is God even meant to do? Before Evbo, Seawatt would have had a million things he would’ve wanted a divine power to do. Now, as all his desires have long crumbled around him, he can think of no sufficient answer either.
“Yeah, see? It’s hard. So I was reading through the fighter tomes. Didn’t find much though. Except the mead recipe. So hey, at least I got something, right?”
Seawatt only nods in response, head still full of questions. Evbo hands the bottle back to Seawatt, who takes the last few drops of mead.
“As much as I hate to say it, that was pretty good.”
Evboo smiles. “I’m happy you enjoyed it. EMF and I will make some more. Maybe you could come help us, since you know all about it.”
“Perhaps.” As much as he hates to admit it, even to himself, Seawatt is still scared of going back to the upper layers. A million faces of people he condemned to certain death await him up there. Evbo throws a side glance at him, and thankfully changes the subject.
“What would you do if you were the Parkour God?”
Seawatt hums. “I don’t know. Perhaps I’d turn back time.”
“You really hate the stuff I’ve done that much?”
“No, not like that. I meant to when this…this layer was still alive.” He looks up, breathes in the cold night air. “I…I kind of miss when there was an actual other layer here. I don’t know why I miss it - most of them never liked me much anyway.”
Seawatt half laughs at how stupid he sounds. Evbo remains silent, so he continues.
“I…even though I was never good at parkour, they…I just liked being a part of something kind of special, I guess. Now I’m one of the only people who remember. The old Champion never cared to do so, and he’s gone too. And…”
He can think of nothing more to say. He has likely said too much already.
“Oh.” Evbo is quiet for a few seconds. His fingers tap on his legs. “Sorry. I don’t know if you could do that as the Parkour God. I don’t think I could.”
“Are you sure? I thought the Parkour God was meant to be able to do everything.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Evbo chuckles. “But even reviving you and the others was such a pain. I don’t know if I could go through something half that hard again.”
“Can the Parkour God make a gap too big for even him to jump?”
“I…what?”
Seawatt smiles and repeats himself.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that. Of course I can make, like, six block jumps. But I could teleport across those.”
“So you can do basically anything, even things that are supposed to be ‘impossible’ in some way. You could break the boundaries of this world.”
Evbo considers for a moment, frowning. He looks to the side. “Maybe. I wish it was that easy. I wish I could do anything I wanted. Anything I could dream of.”
You’re literally God, Seawatt wants to repeat, but decides that will get him nowhere productive. Instead he offers an observation. “There are things you want to do, but can’t.”
“Mm-hm.”
There’s an obvious question hiding in the conversation. Seawatt wonders if it would be rude to ask, then decides Evbo has never been one for much social tact anyway, so there’s no point in holding back.
“What do you want to do that you can’t? Make the whole world different? See the future?”
“It’s not really something new I want to do, it’s something I can’t do anymore.” Seawatt prompts him with an attentive gaze, so Evbo continues. “I…since I became the Parkour God, I’m not even sure of what I look like anymore.” He half smiles, and as if by instinct, his fingertips reach up and brush his face. “I…I know I have blond hair and a green headband, and my eyes are…green, I think. And I think I remember having freckles from when I used to be someone - or, at least I have a memory of thinking about my freckles. But maybe that’s made up too.”
Seawatt moves closer, trying to parse out every detail of Evbo’s features - the shape of his jawline, the imperfections in his skin, the freckles, the usually emerald green eyes which have suddenly dulled, and his straw blond hair.
“And, like…when I try to think about what I look like, the person I’m supposed to be - there’s just nothing. It feels like there’s this fog obscuring my face and everything about me that I can’t ever clear. No matter how hard I try…I just can’t see who I am - who I’m meant to be.”
Seawatt stares. He will remember. He will remember what makes up Evbo.
“Like, I don’t think I even breathe, or blink, or have a heartbeat anymore. I’m just a physical projection of this idea of me. If there even is a me anymore. Like, the real me is just the mist up there and this body is just another creation I’ve made to serve my own purpose. And every time I vanish into my seeing-all mode, or I teleport somewhere, it’s like I’m destroying myself and creating a new me. But I don’t even know how I’m doing that without knowing what I even look like.”
Seawatt’s fingers snake over to Evbo’s wrist.
“You feel pretty real to me.” But even as he says that, he searches for a pulse, and there is nothing at all. His fingers scrabble over Evbo’s skin, and although warmth radiates off every inch of the other’s being, there is no sign of a heartbeat. The other man smiles gently at him.
“It’s okay.”
“Sorry.” His fingers linger for a few seconds too long, trying to convince himself that he was wrong, that there is still blood coursing through Evbo’s veins. But there is nothing but bleak numbness. The god’s heat radiates, but that is no replacement for a heartbeat.
“Yeah…” Evbo says, agreeing to nothing that Seawatt said out loud. His voice devolves into a low whistle, lost in the cold night air. And Evbo is still so warm, almost as if he is made of pure heat energy. Seawatt’s eyes hover onto Evbo’s face. The man is not flushed at all - no, he is his same pale self. It’s not the alcohol.
“Come with me,” Seawatt says, and he gets up to his feet a lot slower than he would’ve liked. Evbo rises like nothing is wrong, and stretches out his limbs. Seawatt breathes in deeply.
He’s drunk. Evbo is not. That should’ve been expected, yet Seawatt almost wants to laugh. Getting drunk with the Parkour God. He has gotten drunk and Evbo has not - does that mean anything? He does not know, and can think even less with how cloudy it seems in his mind. It’s been a long time since Seawatt has had anything remotely alcoholic.
“Do you think you could manage a short trip?” He asks, out of pure hope that Evbo’s just very good at hiding his intoxication.
“Dude. I’m the Parkour God. Of course I could do some one blocks.” He half smiles. “Honestly, I’d be more concerned about you.”
“The mead hasn’t affected you.”
“No,” Evbo replies. “No. I guess I should’ve expected that. I mean, I don’t know what it’s meant to feel like to drink this stuff, so I can’t imagine it and make it real, you know?”
“Right.”
“Even the taste…I…I don’t know. Maybe we’re tasting different things. Maybe I’m just tasting what I think it’s meant to taste like. But…hey, it’s good, so…”
“I see. Your expectations basically become real.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s a better way to put it. Whatever I think will happen, or want to happen, happens.”
Gods can shape worlds with a single thought. Seawatt looks at the person in front of him - if he can even still call Evbo that - with inquiring eyes. Evbo is slightly shorter than him, perfectly casual in his striped hoodie and jeans, and yet he holds the power of creation and destruction all within that body.
“Follow me, Seawatt says. Evbo silently does so. The parkour is short, and silent save for the whistling of a cool night breeze. Seawatt’s robes flow out behind him, billowing white flourishes in the dark, illuminated by the full moon.
“I suppose you could’ve just teleported where I wanted to take you.”
“Yeah,” Evbo replies, sprinting to be neck-to-neck with Seawatt. “But aren’t surprises more fun?”
“Maybe for someone like you.”
He lets out an amused chuckle. “Well, yeah. Besides, it’s nice to do some parkour with you anyway. We don’t do it so often.”
“Maybe that’s because you’d beat me in any parkour battle ever?”
“Hey, parkour battles don’t need to decide literally everything.”
“And yet everyone on the master level still uses them.”
“That’s personal choice. I can’t stop people from having their fun, man.”
They’ve arrived at the place Seawatt was leading them to: the amethyst course.
“Did you take me back here to re-traumatise me?”
“No.” Seawatt jumps towards a particularly large crystal and peers into it. His reflection is broken up into a thousand tiny shards, illuminated perfectly clearly by the full moon. He looks deeper into the crystal, at the rest of the world around him, and yet there is nothing. Seawatt stands alone, a purple sheen over his body. He looks behind him; Evbo is still there, and yet he does not appear in the reflection. The crystals whisper, telling Seawatt there is nothing but pure night air at his back.
“Told you.” The other man sheepishly smiles. “I’ve tried water buckets, water blocks, glass panes, crystals, anything I could think of. There’s just nothing. It’s like I’m not even real.”
“This doesn’t make sense. How can you be here physically but not in the reflection?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t have to make sense. I’m God. That doesn’t make sense.” Seawatt cannot argue with that. Evbo sits down on the sandstone block, legs dangling over the edge, and reaches a hand out to the other man, waving him down. Seawatt eyes him.
“Don’t worry. If you fall, I’ll grab you.”
“I’m not sure I’d trust your reflexes,” Seawatt mutters, but he sits down, crosslegged, anyway. Evbo smiles and looks at him with a knowing gaze. Seawatt rolls his eyes.
“You could probably revive me again anyway.”
“Dude. I told you that was like parkour hell. Mainly because I literally had to go through parkour hell.” His eyes sparkle, like they are made of a million stars. “But I would do it, yeah.”
Silence fills the spaces. Seawatt wonders if there is any reason for him to speak - Evbo seems more than capable of digging into his thoughts if he truly wanted to. His plan failed, like all his plans before.
“Sorry I couldn’t help you. I thought maybe…I don’t know.” Seawatt hangs his head. The void, deep, rich and dark swims beneath his feet.
“It’s okay.” Evbo chews on his lip for a few seconds, before looking up at the night sky. “What do you think I look like?”
It seems so much like a loaded question that Seawatt half smirks. “Do you want me to be honest, or not?”
“Honest, of course.” He’s so quiet now, quieter than Seawatt has ever heard him before. “I want to know what I really look like now. I want to know how other people see me.”
You look like sunlight incarnate. You look like the entirety of the Parkour Universe all wrapped up into a bunch of stupid beautifully contradictions. You look like everything I’d ever want to know.
“You’ve got blond, messy hair. Green headband which keeps most of the mess out of your eyes. Large green eyes, pretty round, short eyelashes. You were right about the freckles but they’re not very prominent. Small button nose, big mouth, and you tend to stick your tongue out when you think.”
Evbo, funnily enough, is sticking his tongue out as he takes all this information in. Then he nods.
“I see. At least I know that now. It’s still difficult for me to imagine how all the pieces fit together but…something’s better than nothing.”
He is the Parkour God. Somehow that fact has become such an essential, immutable part of him that Seawatt could not imagine a universe where Evbo is not the Parkour God. And yet, right now, he seems so small and fragile, hunched over a sandstone island in the middle of a dark, dark sea.
“You look…well, I don’t know how to say this, but you look nothing like someone who’d be the Parkour God, and yet you have this aura around you.”
Evbo sighs. “I guess that’s just the price you gotta pay when you’re God. At least I look normal. I wish people wouldn’t treat me differently, but…it’s like I can’t even really get to know anyone new anymore.
“You have me.” It’s weak comfort - your enemy turned fake friend turned enemy turned real friend? Hardly good company at all, some would argue. Seawatt hastens to add on. “You have your master friend too, and your fighter ally, and your neighbour. There are others who knew you before.”
“I know.” Not for the first time, Evbo sighs again, one the few precious breaths he takes as a God. “And I’m happy for that. Sometimes I wonder if the old God was really, really lonely. Maybe that’s partly why he kept the world as it was and didn’t interfere at all. Maybe he was, in this weird twisted way, kinda happy to see everyone so isolated themselves.”
“Wow. I didn’t know you were going to psychoanalyse him.”
The other man shrugs. “What else am I meant to do? Might as well, right?” Evbo laughs, a dry chuckle. “Sorry. I just realised how sad this whole thing was. I didn’t really mean to show up and make it all depressing.”
“It’s fine.” He wants to say that with his whole heart. “It’s probably better if you said something about it. Wouldn’t want you to end up like the old champion.”
“I know.” Evbo replies quietly. “Do you think I’ll ever become like him?”
“No.” He punctuates it with an almost audible full stop. “I don’t think so. I think you’ll be a good Parkour God. I mean that as much as I meant saying I was happy to work with you.”
For the first time in a while, a full grin appears on Evbo’s lips. Seawatt sees it, and internally curses.
“You’re never going to let that go, are you?”
“No, of course not.” Evbo lets out a noise that is a mixture of a laugh and a sigh, and looks up to the night sky. “But thanks. Thanks for saying that. It means a lot.”
The stars move overhead, and the inky darkness of the void shifts underneath. Still, Seawatt wouldn’t rather be anywhere else in the world.