Battle Scars - A Watcher-Grian AU story

Chapter 23 - In which the server goes *poof*

TW: Death, Slight gore, Self hatred, Trauma, Torture, Flashbacks, YHS stuff (Basically everything we've seen so far.)

The world faded in and out of view, replaced by horrific images instead of darkness.

They grabbed him, running through the hazy purple tinted world...
He needed to run, the players had him trapped... shackled... He pulled and pulled and pulled but they wouldn't snap, wouldn't give, wouldn't do anything. The parts of memory seemed... off. Almost... shiny, as if they weren't real. He reached through the haze of the memory, pulling the veil over the shiny sections with a flash of violet light. It wasn't the Hermits. It was the rebels...

Sounds of screams of agony, all around them...
His own screams echoing in his ears as Mumbo slid the knife into his arms... as blood flowed out... splashing onto the ground. The cold expression on his supposed friend's face.
Not Mumbo, he realized... The rebels, it was just the rebels again...

Smoke stung his nostrils...
A crater, him crying over the bodies within it, purple fires dying off... The numbness that came when the tears were gone. The feeling of regret. He was meant to protect the players and he'd killed them. What type of Watcher was he...

Someone speaking... one word filtering through his hazed mind. "...Taurtis..."
Him scrambling over the wreckage of the bus to get to Taurtis... His panic as he typed '911' into the phone. The terror coursing through his veins as he cried, telling Taurtis to hold on, that help was on the way.
And a more terrifying memory, of Sam speaking to him, calling him Taurtis, forcing him to eat plastic chip bags, punishing him if he did anything wrong...

The feeling of teleportation...
Ark and Kanvi greeting him, as they saved him from Sam... Them caring for him like he was their child. Them teaching him how to become a watcher. Giving him his mask...

Someone poured milk down his throat, and the dazed feeling retracted as the potion wore off... Leaving him with the full force of his emotions and reality.
He heard people sobbing from behind his closed eyelids... Caught a snippet of conversation.
"... Taurtis and Pearl sacrificed themselves so we could get out with Grian..." X said quietly.

Pearl and Taurtis died? Taurtis had been alive? No no no- They couldn't have died... He didn't even know Taurtis was alive... They'd died because of him, to try and save him...
He was such a idiot- He remembered what had happened in the city. He'd let himself be manipulated... He'd burnt Taurtis didn't he- He lost control, again, and hurt people.... All he ever did was hurt people...

He was trying to weave a protection spell around the server frantically. The rebels were coming and he needed to save his friends, the evolutionists! He was the closest they had to an admin aside from NPG, who technically was the admin of the EVO smp.
The aforementioned Evolutionists spotted their friend frantically weaving purple flames, and panicked, the group running forwards to try to understand, thinking their friend was in danger.
Grian turned around, hearing their footsteps and panicked. They all hated the watchers with a burning passion... If they knew...
His panic made the weaving spiral and spiral away from it's purpose, becoming a spell of destruction. He lost control, and the weaving slipped out of his hands. The shockwave hit him, flinging him away. Instinctively, his magic shielded him with the remains of the protection spell.
The smoke and flame cleared to show a giant crater, bodies strewn across it...

He sobbed. He should have stopped Sam somehow, should have stopped Taurtis from driving while bleeding out, he was such a idiot... Now he was stuck pretending to be Taurtis...Taurtis was in the hospital... It was all his fault...

Memory after memory floated through him, emotions coiling and fighting, until he could barely breath... Memory after memory of pain overwhelming him, drowning him in a flood of pain, pain, pain. Violet fire flared in his hands, wings, eyes as he struggled to breath, fighting the current trying to pull him down into more pain...

X looked up to see the watcher awaking from the effects of the potion. Grian had begun to scream, sobbing, as he held his hands over his ears.
"Grian..?" X whispered, before realizing with a shock that the gremlin's hands had begun to glow with violet fire, not the weaved, controlled type that made up watcher's spells, but a wild, untamed type that was the magic in it's purest form. The glow transferred from his hands to his wings, his feathers, until instead of the color of the night sky, the feathers glowed bright purple, violet trails floating up towards the sky.
X hugged Grian, despite the searing pain from the fire coating the watcher's skin. X frantically tried to figured out what to do... Grian still had the mask, it would be alright, right? The watcher wouldn't lose control... The mask would restrict his magic before it killed him... or worse... Right..?

The violet light leaked out behind it... Glowing violet cracks began to form across the mask, spreading quickly. X gasped, trying to figure out what to do, how he could help. False scrambled forwards with a sleeping potion, but arrived a second too late. Despite everyone's best efforts, with a frightening crack, the one thing between the world and the watcher's emotionally charged magic was broken... For a split second he saw the watcher's face, wearing expression of agony and scarred almost beyond recognition. His eyes were glowing similarly to his wings, bright violet. That was the last thing X saw before the world exploded in flames.

The untamed inferno of violet fire flared out, swallowing X in agony. But he managed to hold on. The fire didn't target the players, but instead, the land. It burned all the blocked until there was nothing left between the players and the void...

Falling into the void was the only way to permadie outside of watcher magic on a server your whitelisted on, and from what X had heard, it was a slow and painful death. And now, he could confirm it.

Falling, falling, falling, until he reached the level where his body began to destabilize. He heard the others screaming in pain, as Grian, as a watcher, was unaffected...

X felt like his body was getting torn apart, pulling, pulling, pulling all his limbs apart. His lungs burned as the oxygen became difficult to breathe, even with his filter... He coughed, and felt the tang of blood on his tongue... Soon the pain became all he knew, just pain, pain, pain... As everything became black.

A/N:
PLEASE DON'T MURDER ME, THE STORY WILL HAVE A HAPPY ENDING I SWEAR!
BUT I WARNED YOU- The story's not exactly fluffy rn
But yeah now we know why watchers don't show emotion. It's because it powers their magic beyond their control. Most times the mask would negate this, but the rebels' masks are slightly weaker in make then the one Grian had before. After all they weren't made expecting a traumatized bird boi to suddenly get all his memories back.
Wc: 1206
- Xera