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There’s really not a lot Etho can do—but what little there is, he does. He changes the water in the mason jar every day, fresh from the river, and whenever he passes its place on the windowsill, he gives it a stir. He’d found the nicest sill in his house for it, too: bright and clear in the mornings before the sun reaches its zenith, and dappled with the rosy light filtering through the cherry blossoms all afternoon. In the evening, that window gets steeped in gold as clouds burn from red to blue and the sky shrugs on its coat of stars.
If the moss ball’s growing, Etho wonders vaguely, propping his chin up with his hands as he sits at his drafting table, does that mean Bdubs’ll come back taller?
When the last glimpse of deep lavender dusk turns dark behind the mountains, he stands and stretches and shakes off the day himself. The jar is cool to the touch when he picks it up, and the moss ball resting at the bottom bobs gently against the sides as the water moves inside.
“Come on,” he tells Bdubs. “We gotta shreep.”
Etho’d found him like this—small and green and fluffy, two inches in diameter—four days ago. At the end of the week, the server will reset, and the glitch will probably sort itself out on its own. Until then: mason jar, fresh river water, windowsill.
Except at night. He can never bring himself to leave Bdubs there alone at night.
He tries to walk as steadily as possible up the stairs, tries not to slosh the water too much. Hopes the feeling of bumping the sides of the jar isn’t painful, when you’re moss. Hopes it might even be a little fun.
He sets it down on top of the chest on Bdubs’s side of the bed, next to the clock that Etho had adjusted to give the jar a better view. There’s no way of knowing if Bdubs can see or hear or even feel anything, but if he can… Etho thinks of how raw and lonely he’s felt when he’s been incapacitated before. So maybe he can’t do a lot of Bdubs, but what little he can think of, he will.
It’s hard not to linger, whenever he has to put the jar down, but he tells Bdubs, “I’ll be right back,” so he can change into sleep clothes and wash up before he beds down.
Getting ready for bed on his own is the hardest part about the whole thing. It’s not even like they go to bed together that often—one or the other of them is usually away gathering materials or out working on a project on the other side of the server—but there’s something uniquely awful about knowing they’re together, knowing Bdubs is right there, but not being able to hold him.
So it feels strange. Too quiet, in the bedroom. Bdubs might be short, but he takes up a lot of space, and he talks to Etho all the time—he draws Etho into bickering even while he’s brushing his teeth; they’re laughing when Etho’s washing his face. When Bdubs is around, Etho can’t not be aware of him. Sure, he’s short, but he’s not small.
But being a ball of moss has made Bdubs small.
Etho crawls into bed and burrows into the covers. The pillow on Bdubs’s side still smells like his hair. He reaches out to touch the mason jar, just gently dragging his fingers across the cool glass, the place where Bdubs is waiting on the other side of it.
“Night, B-double-o,” he says.
A moonbeam slips in through a gap in the curtains and reclines quietly across the nightstand, reaching through the mason jar to refract a delicate, silverspun rainbow across the bedsheets. Etho runs his fingers over the place where it lands. It’s beautiful, but the sheets are still cold without another body lying beside him.