It's been 16 years, yet Etho was reliving that day like it was yesterday.
He was barely in middle school, starting a new era of his life with the friends that were most dear to him. And all of a sudden, like it all happened at once, he was standing on the edge of the bridge, his back turned away from the violent waters of the Great Ravine below. The wooden bridge was now lit ablaze on either side, the flames to the left engulfing the two bodies Etho had once called his friends. Someone stood directly in front of him, though he could hardly make out the face with his left eye injured the way it was, a whole chunk of glass cutting through it. He had also gotten burns on his forearms, but that was his own fault when he tried to pull someone out of the fire.
"You... you should've stayed out of our business..." the figure in front of him spoke, though their voice sounded... confused. It was like the words they were speaking weren't their own, like they were just an innocent victim attached to the strings of a puppeteer's cross.
He didn't notice it beforehand, but Etho was crying. From the grief or from the pain, he was too far along to tell. It hindered his ability to speak, to shout back at the person who had, in one fell swoop, killed the people he cared about. The bridge cracked beneath him, threatening to give out and send him plunging into the Great Ravine, but at this point, he didn't care.
"...what do you think you are?" The figure asked. "What makes you think any of this is worth it? What convinces you to stick your snout where it doesn't belong, Slab?"
After a long bout of silence, Etho still didn't answer.
"It doesn't really matter then, does it?" They said. "All that matters is that your little dream is dead. A team isn't much of a team when it only has one member, much less zero when you're gone. None of you could stop us anyway. What were a couple of humans and some furry kid going to do to something so powerful? Were you trying to get them killed?"
Etho had a million things to say, but the quietness continued anyway. He almost convinced himself to speak up, but the bridge finally gave way and fell apart, dunking the fox-boy into the rapid waters.
For a while, the dream died here. He was found washed up on a beach about a day later, and returned to his family the same afternoon. Physically, he was okay for the most part. He wasn't completely blind in his left eye, it was just blurry and hard to make out anything smaller than the palm of his hand. The burns on his forearms healed to scars without an issue, and all he had to use to cover them up was a set of bandages.
Mentally, everything was wrong. He had shut himself out from the world for a long time, and even when he was finally coaxed out of his house, he had stopped speaking to anyone around him. In all honesty, it was Tango and Bdubs that had brought him out of this state. Their silly little mini soccer team had given him a new spark, a piece of hope that he could still solve this mystery on his own.
Even if the BEST team didn't speak very often anymore, he still had Joel too. As careless as his bound could be at times, he was the key to everything. Etho wouldn't have been able to join the project had Joel not existed, and that on its own was like a sign from a higher power encouraging him to move forward.
As Etho awoke in a cold sweat, having witnessed the nightmare of the incident once again in his dreams, he was filled with another sense of dread. His thoughts often went back and forth on him. One day he felt like he could do it, that nothing was in his way, then the next morning he would wake up like the way he was now; realizing how much work and effort and risk this was and wishing that he had never gotten involved. He stared into the glass of warm milk he had made himself, hoping that in sipping it for a while, it would help him fall back asleep.
Pause and Beef were dead. Team Canada was dead.
But for as long as Etho lived, the dream would never die.
For as long as Etho lived, Team Canada would find a way.
—
Grian was up on the balcony of his new home, setting up a telescope he used to always keep in his attic back in the city. Everyone knew by now that the blonde was a Watcher, but no one realized that the key word was "was." He was thrown out a long time ago, meanwhile he told everyone who asked that he was simply sent down. The Watchers had originally recruited him for his creative talents, his ability to build almost anything he could possibly picture to the most perfect degree he could manage. But he had a balance, that being his talent to destroy as well. When he was bored, he was an agent of chaos, and wether he tried to be or not, he was uncontrollable. Slowly, his fellow Watchers lost their patience with him, and he was thrown out of their sanctuary in the sky.
Where he landed, it was storming in the middle of the night. One of his wings had caught on a power line, and the force of his fall had torn down the poles holding the wires up, causing him to not only still slam into the grass right beside the road without even so much as a break from his fall, but he had also broken his wing every which way. For a while, he was scared and alone, afraid to move.
He was unsure of how much time had passed before a car drove down the road. It pulled over right by Grian, and someone holding an umbrella stepped out of the vehicle and started walking towards him. Before he knew it, the ex-Watcher was out of the rain, wing untangled from the wires and in the backseat of this stranger's warm and cozy car.
For years, Grian lived with this person. They loved him for who he was, they enjoyed his company, they were even proud of his destructive prankster side. Then one day, he came home to a silent house. There was no clicking of a redstone contraption being built, no ticking from the kitchen timer as potatoes were being left to bake, no hellos as he stepped through the front door.
Grian waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Suddenly, he woke up and couldn't remember who this person was. Even all of the pictures of them in the house had vanished, like they never even existed in the first place. It shocked him. This person was his savior, and for a long time, his best friend. How did he forget who they were? Why did he forget who they were? Why did they even disappear in the first place?
His first instinct was the Watchers. They had something to do with it, he had no doubt about it.
Now, 8 years later, the night owl in him was getting him to look up at the stars. But not before he looked below his balcony and saw a familiar figure in the darkness. To keep from being loud as to not awaken Scar, he texted the person down below from the recently added number.
—
Normally Ren would be apposed to his soulbound going out alone this late at night. But with their new living arrangements, and with the notion that BigB had a hard time sleeping in unfamiliar places, he decided that it would be okay. So there the cookie man went, wearing a deep blue hoodie over his sweater to counteract the near freezing temperatures of the night as he walked about.
B suddenly got a text as he walked by someone's house. It was from Grian.
<look up lol)
In doing so, he saw the avian up on his balcony, waving down at him. B smiled a little, texting back.
(Wanna come walk with me? Got some trouble sleeping rn>
<sure, be there in a sec)
B watched as Grian disappeared into house, coming out the front door a few minutes later wearing a bright red scarf and with his goggles now positioned atop his head. His wings on both his head and back looked fluffed up, like a bird in the winter trying to stay warm.
"I guess Scar's asleep?" B said. Grian nodded.
"He basically passed out as soon as we got here," he said, "I don't blame him, honestly,"
The two of them continued down the road, talking about whatever decided to fall out of their mouths. At some point, B had mentioned something about visiting his parents again. Out of curiosity, Grian asked him where they lived.
When they met up the first time earlier that day, they thought they were just two strangers to each other. A single sentence in their conversation now changed that.
In fact, that sentence changed everything.
"You know that little island off the east coast? Evo Island? Yeah, they haven't moved from there since I was a kid," B answered.
Grian almost went on about how he used to live there as well, but a set of gears started turning in his brain, and he ended up asking a different question.
"BigB, what's your full name?" Grian asked. When Ren introduced his bound to Scar and Grian, he had just introduced him as "BigB". But if the blonde had the right idea...
"Oh, BigB Statz," B said, "Why?"
Grian's heart nearly leaped out of his chest. "Oh my goodness! I can't believe I didn't recognize you!"
B was confused for a moment, then he started to remember too.
"Wait, Grian?!" He exclaimed. When they were kids, way before Grian had become a Watcher and way before the two even knew what a soulbound was, they were childhood best friends. In fact, when Grian did leave to be recruited by the many eyed beasts, B had come to tell him goodbye, and even gave him a homemade cookie as a gift.
Now, almost 15 years later, they were reunited despite both of them believing they would never see each other again.
And as the two shared a long awaited hug, someone in the distance was wishing they could reunite the same way.