Chapter Text
The QSMP Bureau has a strict staff conduct and management policy.
In the dawn’s watery light, Philza Minecraft is a ghost come to life. The lines of his silhouette strengthens into a tangible thing, over the ridge of his knuckles, the hard lines of his forearm. His shoulders rise in a slow, deep breath, rolling through him, living, breathing.
He is alive.
The brim of his fisherman’s hat lifted upward, towards the hummingbirds that flit about his palm. The loss of his children seemed to have shrunken him, his dark wings trail an unsteady path. It knows then, that the admins had already been by to ensure his compliance, because the sound of the trapdoor is slow to move him, perched against the cushions. He is talking to the birds. They hover about him in all manner, the light streaming in through the open skylight, avoiding the blot of nothing. Endless twittering in its ears, the odd spot of white among Real Things. Like a mannequin, stood in the corner.
He is alive, 5’11 feet of him, twenty feet away.
For a moment, there is an absurd thought. Ballooning in his chest. Very distant, out of its own body – If it doesn’t move, it won’t be noticed. Watching only the back of his well-worn haori over his sloping shoulders, the sloppy stitching to be found along the side seam. The kind of repair work that had to be done after a good fight.
It puts its hand to the film of its mask to stop the noise that has begun to filter through.
A ragged gathering of breath, diffusing through the porcelain. Bouncing back against its cool, shivery face, the wetness there. Streaking a line down the pallid curve of its cheek, and the gaunt hollow there. The sound escapes between the slip of space between its face and its mask, shifting with the stretch of its skin. The sound comes out of it, past the open, human mouth, to the pitch that it begins to startle the wildlife, and the Bureau Officer sinks into the spruce walls as if hunted, smothered by the flowering vines. The tips of its fingers cool and unsteady.
Above ground, even the walls are warmed by the sun above it. The kind of warmth that seeps through wood to its back.
And grounds it in the pleasant shade of the birdhouse.
To Philza Minecraft’s face in its direction, suddenly still in the face of the intruder.
On the monitors, everything is smoothened out by the fuzz of the camera. Lines of colour on glossy screens. Twenty feet away, his pale hair, slipped from his hat, is thick with grease. Stubble rough against his jaw, the glassy shine of his eyes. Twenty feet away, there is despair in the downward curl of his wide, cracked mouth, and deep worry lines etched into his round face, his teeth baring, he says –
“You.”
Short, and alien, like a foreign word. His voice dispersed into half nothingness. Void of feeling, utterly cold. So divorced from the voice he uses in the home, with the children-egg constructs. Obviously. That makes sense, because the Bureau Officer is not the egg construct. Yet it strikes all the same. Cut to the quick, between the gap of its rib cage. Standing there, throat hot, burning. Caught by the strange, dizzying urge to look back, apart from itself.
The Player rises, and stumbles over the uplift of the mossy carpets. Hard to walk on the uneven ground of flowering vines, bright and verdant, so unlike the sterile glare of quartz. Fruit trees that had been grown within the span of a day, wedged into the oasis of the birdhouse. It smells sweet, an underlying cloying ripeness. The Player’s hand catches onto the spruce walls, elongated talons digging in. Grows longer and sharper as awareness filters into his eagle-eyes, weight braced on his haunches, the thick, rumpled weight of his wings dragged behind him.
It stands unmoving at the trellis.
Fifteen feet.
The hummingbirds scatter in high-pitched cries, their perch disturbed when Philza Minecraft lunges. It stays rooted to the floor, watching the gap of ten feet close between them. A searing spike of pain lodges at the base of its skull, and worn hands grab fistfuls of its suit, nails sunken into the lapel of the soft, white blazer.
Philza Minecraft burns.
“Where are they,” the Player asks, the weight of him crashes against its front, the searing line from his thigh to his chest. He is a being made of flesh and blood. The Officer is made of thawing ice, clutched in the Player’s hands. Burning holes into its skin, melting only where it is being held, “You… you tell me,”
His speech is slow.
Gathering the words together with visible effort, creasing the deep lines of his face. The Officer is too out of it to shake those hands off. “He’s little, he’s just a child,” the Player says, “They’re… just children… not… not part of anything,”
It.
Crowds down, kneels along with the Player as it collapses.
It doesn’t push those hot, hot hands away. It is too aware of the crunch of moss underneath it, the way Philza Minecraft’s knees unlock and crumple. The Bureau Officer sits with it as the birds fly around them. The position is odd. Bone-deep warmth. The feeling of having done it before, but that’s not possible. Its hands gentle on the Player. From its throat, working at the tightness there, as if it could swallow back the words that had sprung there – It’ll be okay, kept locked tight behind its teeth, like some bizarre thing is looking out of its mouth. Like there isn’t control of itself, the words wanting out– It’ll be okay, Phil.
Like it’s the Officer’s words to say.
“Where are they?” the jagged edge of his talons press into its lapel, “Tallulah…” scrapes the body, barely, enough to feel discomfort, but it feels nothing at all.
“I can’t lose them too,”
Its head spikes with a searing, splitting throb.
“I can’t,”
The buzzing static of its thoughts seem to crowd around it. Suffocates in the stillness of the birdhouse, its four walls. The rush of sudden excitement had tired the Player out, blinking fatigue from his eyes. The laboured breath of every word prolonged, his knee pressed against the Officer’s. His body becoming heavier and heavier as the birds settled in their roosts, above their heads. Unable to keep himself upright, unable to keep his eyes open.
It sits there, a statue in the birdhouse. Watching the door, its back to Philza like a long-lost habit.
The first spray of the evening’s downpour scattered over the rooftops like knuckles rapping on wood. The sound reverberates through the walls, buoyed by the thunderstorm rolling through the forests, under the shelter of a thousand trees. The wind whistles through the nook and crannies the birdhouse made, coming in from the upper floors. The wind curls underneath the Bureau Officer’s hair, it winds around the lift of its throat, the bob of its Adam’s apple.
It’s nothing like the servers underground. The sound of the outside is nothing like the sterile click-clacking of its footsteps on quartz.
The glimpse of the outside peers through the shadows, cast onto the wall across the skylight. They chase each other throughout the morning, leaves buoyed on the wind, thin, swinging branches, and the Bureau Officer watches the play unfold, enamoured.
Until Philza Minecraft wakes.
It stops breathing.
There is a peculiarity in the way Philza Minecraft wakes. Philza wakes all at once. He wakes still, and silent. There is no outward change in his position, his wings folded over his curled body. It cocoons his body against the barrage of wind. The barest change in his breathing, kept deep and even, and even then, it’s clumsy work to his usual subterfuge. He must still be affected by what Cucurucho had given him.
It continues watching the door.
The weight of his eyes prick at the back of its neck, and it gets the impression of a mountain lion, dragging itself to its full height against its vulnerable back. Heavy wings drudged gracelessly forward along the floorboards, that when thin, sharp talons creep around its throat, it isn’t surprised at all.
Its arm snaps upward to knock the grip loose. Leg propelling it backwards as it turns, the porcelain shell of its mask facing the wide, half-feral snarl on Philza’s face. “Worth a try,” Phil says, with a kind of false levity that betrays the look on his face. Barely holding teeth back from his smile. His pupils are slightly enlarged; the air that was meant to keep him docile would need to be adjusted. He’s fighting it off like a champ.
His attention shifts to the door behind it, and it does nothing as he bats at the birds picking at his hair. Even that seems to take monumental effort, visibly flagging his approach to the padlock.
It doesn’t stop him.
After all, it doesn’t know the combination either.
Phil’s wings spread outward, the length of them crowding against the walls of the birdhouse. Dark feathers stood on end, drawing indignant outcries from the birds that was disturbed from their nesting. Their chattering increased tenfold, high-pitched and whinging, like a bell at the back of its head. The pounding headache there, folding its body to the back of the room. It’s only here to watch – there isn’t strength in Phil to fly, the entirety of his attention narrowed into only what is in front of him.
To the Bureau Officer standing there.
Some kind of amusement wells up within it, displaced. It’s not afraid of Phil. This certainty comes from nowhere. Is it a better fighter? The sentiment doesn’t feel right; it has seen Phil fight the Codes, and it’s in no position to keep up. The suit restrains half its movements.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” Phil says; his voice only slightly less slurred than the previous night. His teeth flashes, resentful of the strain that speaking brings him. Sinking down to rest again, back pressed to the cool, steel door. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” then, in a beleaguered breath that is half to himself, clipped, “Clearly.”
Dark eyes fall over its clothes, drifts away without picking on anything in particular.
It says nothing.
“What am I doing here?”
It unclips the notepad from its pocket, and writes.
Punishment has to be served.
Phil stares down at the paper for a long time. For a moment, his eyes seem to flicker. He crumples it between his talons, piercing the looping, scrawled letters of its handwriting, and curls in on himself.
It does nothing to comfort him.
Phil paces.
The air makes him lose all coordination. It breaks his attention from obvious logical thought, and drains his strength, makes him oscillate between forgetfulness and fury. He had attempted to wrangle the Bureau Officer into submission a few more times, the full weight of his wings bowling it over, before Phil, gasping with exertion, words broken in wheezing, had asked for a truce. Some unnamed emotion clawing out of its throat, it complies, and sets distance between them again.
It takes the third day, where Phil curls into himself, fingers digging into his belly, when the Bureau Officer realises abruptly that there is no food.
There hasn’t been an explicit command to feed him.
And yet it knows what to do then. There are a few spare fruits around the birdhouse, buried in the fauna. Wild carrots peeking through the flowering undergrowth, much too thin to eat. It sifts through them, and having deemed them insufficient, brings its wrist to itself. Rudimentary commands spawn spuds into his inventory, fingers curling around a family of potatoes. That, at least it knows. It doesn’t think much of its newfound certainty, there is only doing. Swaddle them in leaves, folding them over each other. Can’t throw them straight into the fire, or they burn, but wrapping them in thick palm leaves puts enough of a buffer. If wrapped properly, they look like little green packages.
The suit enforces dignity and grace in its movements, and it kneels, weight settled on the polished leather of its heels. Setting a campfire in the centre of the birdhouse, and pushing its packages into the coal.
Quick-fluttering wings zip past its ear, perched onto its head, catching wisps of hair between its talons.
It looks to Phil expectantly.
There’s that look on his face again, before it is shuttered away, before he begins to unwrap the leaves, and eat.
To a Bureau Officer, every day is allotted a Task.
An Observer’s task is to watch. Before it had been reassigned to the birdhouse, the Bureau Officer had its day separated by the hour. It would comb through the monitors for the report on its vessel experiments, adjust their training regimen, and submit the report to its supervisor. These papers would be given to the head of department, and eventually, wind up in Cucurucho’s desk. It doesn’t remember when it began monitoring the vessel experiments, just that it does. It never used to think of Observations at all, and then, it thought of it in the same breadth as thinking of Philza Minecraft.
Having been entrenched in the hybrid role of Observer, it wonders if an Observer has ever known a Player the way it knows Philza Minecraft.
It lies ten feet away from its charge, palms folded over the neat press of its suit buttons. There is a kind of bird nesting in Phil’s hair, underneath the wide brim of his hat, crooked downward. Shifting ever so slightly when Phil shifts. It wonders if there is an Observer that knows the rhythm of a Player’s breathing, the rise and fall of their chest, and be acutely aware of the heat that radiates from the broad span of their wings.
His feathers stick out at odd ends, as if he had been flying for hours, and hadn’t had the time to gather himself. The shine had been driven out of them, into something matted and dull. Heavier to lift, obvious in the way it impacts Phil’s gait. They weigh his shoulders down, make him drop onto the foliage with suppressed breathing, perspiring faintly in the din. To move tires him out, he wouldn’t have slept otherwise.
His back pressed to the wall. He had been watching the Bureau Officer before his eyes closed, the Bureau Officer watched him fight it. He brought his wings to himself, and he didn’t wake again. The fireplace crackles between them, the flame smouldering in the coals.
It hadn’t slept in a place like this in a long time. In– ever. The QSMP Bureau has accommodations for its employees. The rooms are small, made to be efficient. There is always the faint glow of the hallway lights underneath the door, but here, the fire casts the room in an orange hue. It turns on its side, and the sounds of its own breathing, the fabric of its clothes, seem to echo around it. Disturb the rest of the birds that press up against the Player, their wings fluttering loudly in retaliation, flicking against its temple.
Weird.
Its heartbeat slows, as if affected by the air the same way as its charge. It sleeps deeply, and doesn’t dream.
This animated persona had bleached gradually out of Phil, melted in the hotbox of the birdhouse.
He had found that anger only fatigued him. In the ephemeral, ever-present twilight of its new station, even time waits. Lethargic shadows creeping slow across the floor, aligned to the obscured sun, above them and out of sight. The days slunk slovenly by, and the Bureau Officer finds its own grasp of time slipping out of its hands. Alien to itself, the cloth clung to its long, damp fingers, even when it rubbed its palms against itself to keep the twitching, itching urge back. The twitching, incessant need to move, and walk, brimming to the surface, to speak.
Phil speaks a lot.
He speaks with the cadence of someone expecting a reply, he speaks until exhaustion is packed into his voice, turned thin and stale. Even after that, he continues to speak. Quiet under his breath, to the birds. Their stick-thin legs hopping atop his still body, tweeting and chirping in his ear. They say Philza Minecraft knows how to parse through the talk of birdsong, that he can understand mobspeak. Prone to sentimentality, he tells stories about his children, and his avid, bird-like eyes follow the tuck of its hair to the back of its ear. A fixation that even he doesn’t seem to understand, fair head cocked to the side, unable to claw through the fog.
Sometimes, he watches the Bureau Officer write, and takes his fingers to the writing.
“You’re the poor fuck that has to put up with me,” Phil murmurs.
I don’t have to put up with you, it almost says. But doesn’t.
It swallows that response down, and makes jacket potatoes on the fire.
A hand tightens around its wrist.
“Hey,” low and rough.
The Bureau Officer stares down at it. The hand clasped around where its sleeve had ridden up, and its gloves had not been long enough to catch the cuff of its dress shirt, the slip of bare skin in between. It thinks– that it isn’t supposed to be touched. It thinks– that El Quackity’s arm braced up against its throat is nothing like this. The Player’s palm is thick with old callouses, the shock of his skin is like the burning of an electrical wire. It is the touch of an alive thing, with a beating heart. Makes cold sweat break out in the small of its back, racing to its throat, unbearable in the warmth of the crackling campfire.
Phil is closer than he was when the Bureau Officer last looked, his jacket potato open where he sat. His eyes very, very blue, a keen shard of clarity within them that cooled his sluggish temper. The time spent without grooming had left his stubble a full scruff. It ages him, makes him look much, much older. Hair thick with grease, pressed to his forehead, thin lips chapped and dry. He hovers over speaking, and the Bureau Officer waits.
“If you know anything at all, if you know where my… my kids are,”
It stares blankly at Phil.
Bursting from it, a twisting anger. Bizarre, the sound half strangled and bitten-off, packed to the back of its teeth.
They’re not real, it writes. Just code. Just experiments, made of nothing.
It peels a page off its notepad, and Phil sets an arm forward, neck craned to watch its pencil. He takes its words, and reads it.
“Don’t talk about them like that,” he says finally, clipped, not having lifted his eyes from the paper. He breathes out, as if the Bureau Officer can’t see the pulse that jumps erratically at his throat.
The Bureau gave them to you so you would be easier to control. They’re mobs.
“They’re fucking children,” Phil says, still in that same, even tone, “If you– saw them, the way they grew up, they have personality, they have feelings,”
That is Phil’s great pitfall – he is sentimental to the core.
Humans are pack animals, it writes.
Phil is so close it can see the white flash of his teeth. The bulk of his body crouched forward, his black, crow eyes are heavy on the loop of its o’s and p’s, etched into the notepad, set against its thigh. A baseline level of sedation is required to strip away any of a Player’s violent tendencies. It’s likely that an Observer and an Operator is in control of how much sedation is filtered through the air vents, subject to the Player’s behaviour. A hand from the Bureau Officer is enough to signal an adjustment in living conditions, which include lighting and set effects. There is no danger except for the danger of the Player, with clarity in the gleam of his eyes. His ungroomed wings make his shoulders seem larger, crowded around its sides to block out the ambient candle-light.
Phil had taken in the same mix for thirteen days, strong avian blood cycling through a healthy, fit body. It’s too little, the Bureau Officer realises dimly. The sedation levels are too low.
And yet, it doesn’t move. It presses the paper into Phil’s chest, leaning back to bump against the tip of that dark, spread wing.
They’ll bond with any random thing. You watched a mob grow up and thought it loved you.
See, if Phil were truly under the influence, he would have lunged. He wanted to, the Bureau Officer could read it in the flex of his arm. Instead, he retreats, his eyes pools of animal black.
Flickering only briefly, thin, luminescent film sliding over his eyes, to the security camera at the corner.
The tension gives way on the eighteenth day.
Phil has been asleep for twenty-six hours. Birds shuffling closer to the subdued crackling of the fireplace, as the temperature drops into the evening. Creeping vines enfold the trellis, pressed up against the walls. Where he is sheltered, the Bureau Officer set four jacket potatoes in varying states of unwrap. They sat cooling overnight, one of them thoroughly picked apart by a northern cardinal. The Bureau Officer had only watched, its hands unable to keep still, soothing over the buttons of its sleeve cuff. Conscious of the tight fit of its jacket, its caretag rubbing a sorespot at the nape of its neck. Phil has eaten nothing.
Hybrids of Phil’s nature do not hibernate. They would sooner migrate in cold weather than sleep for long periods, and their metabolisms cannot be slowed down so drastically that they do not require food.
He had been lethargic, and quiet. “What’s your name,” he’d asked, half obscured in the din, “What do they call you?”
003 would have brayed with laughter.
It’s been a while since someone had last asked for the Bureau Officer’s name. Its employee ID is 1400, but that hadn’t been what Phil had been looking for. The answer made him fold in on himself, settling into the corner with his back to it. He had stayed there for twenty-six hours.
The Bureau Officer is acclimatised to petulant behaviour.
003 is petulant behaviour personified.
Somehow, it had not thought Philza Minecraft would be that way. It became more unsure as time went on, a bonedeep, boundless sort of exasperation echoing within it. It ran through the nutritional value of its potatoes – and concluded that there was nothing wrong with eating potatoes all hours of the day, it was a solid food source. At least the Player wouldn’t starve on its watch. Then the entire thing went on for longer, and it stood.
Crouched over Phil with a hand on his shoulder.
Phil gripped its wrist. Talons pressing in the flesh of its inner wrist, where the gloves had slipped back. Dark wings shrouding the view behind it. Away from the view of the security camera.
“You’re going to tell me how to get past that door,” quiet in its ear, “Or I’m going to send you right back to spawn,”
Sending it back to spawn won’t do a single thing.
Still, it motions towards its pocket. It was where it kept the paper and pencil there. Leaning down as if to pull them out, and swings.
Still, it motions towards its pocket. It was where it kept the paper and pencil, where it might even remotely begin to answer Phil. Leaning down as if to pull them out, head lowered in sham distraction, and swings.
Philza Minecraft fights with the burst adrenaline of the sick, charging through what bone-deep exhaustion that leadens his every limb. Past the smear of knuckles before there is the crack of a fist on its hard, shell-like mask, and it reacts without thinking. With a clumsy, heavy body, only reacting, knee-jerk, to the wild, desperate look in the Player’s eyes. Its arm stretching back to the glint of jagged-pinching talons, the sudden, unfamiliar burn of a torn muscle. Twisted its body and swung its leg directly into his head.
The blow slams up against the hard, flexing muscle of feather and bone, momentum swept away when Phil slid his wing underneath its calf, knocking its balance sideways with the entire upper wing covert. The wings came over it then, its palms scraping against the loose branch, the matted hay. There was no time to scramble for its bearings, only grounding itself and lunging.
The kind of violence it hasn’t felt in a long, long while.
But it isn’t violence, it thinks. It’s only Phil.
It hears the ragged gasps of air, half-snarled against its fringe. Like a dance, knowing the way Phil is going to swing, the slight preference for his left wide, because– the right left open in a glaring absence. Because– someone else had always covered the right. Grappling to keep those talons away from its throat, until a tight, firm jab slammed into its sternum, enough to knock its breath from it.
Its knuckles crack against Phil’s cheek, the force of the blow splitting his lip bloody, smeared across his teeth. Canines bared– they had cut through its gloves, cut through the skin. Knee lodged underneath its throat, the coppery taste of blood in its mouth from the slam, Phil’s temple to its own.
The pencil had stabbed through its thigh, red seeping in through the white.
It looks up at Phil, at the way his blue eyes are blown animal wide and dark, iris turned into thin rings. The kind of blue that comes from an open sky, slipping down as if he can barely keep himself awake. His hair curled against his working throat, staring down at the Bureau Officer with his breathing rattling through him, dragging deep, full breaths, gulping and swallowing.
Familiar, it thinks.
Philza Minecraft is so familiar. Even the bloody, aching violence, shoulders crowded around it, is familiar.
Phil stares that look again, the same look he has time and time again. Talons slide underneath the thin edge of its mask.
The world comes back to it slowly.
The shrill, chorus cry of an alarm that rumbles through the birdhouse. There had been an alarm since the first draw of blood. But it isn’t an alarm, it’s the birds. They scream their little throats out as if in agony.
The Player is a danger, and must be put to sleep.
The entire weight of him sinking down, grip slacking around its torn clothes. Its mask whirrs softly, filtering out the dense atmosphere of the cage so it can still breathe through the gas. The dull pounding of its thigh paling in comparison to the resounding split of its migraine. Gripped with a single, all-consuming thought. It blazes through the Bureau Officer, until it’s the only thing left–
Don't leave me here.
The Player doesn’t remember his altercation the next morning. The effort of crying himself out, and the sudden infusion of anaesthetic, seemed to have been too much for him. He sleeps onto the next day, and the air remains the same dizzying concoction of gas. In situations such as this, a fireplace is a hazard. Triggering a fire, or an explosion, with a sleeping Player raises unnecessary risk – it can no longer cook Phil’s meals. It rests on its right leg, the itch of grime and sweat coating its clothes.
The door it had come through creaks, and gives way to the black tunnel.
Cucurucho rises from it with sweeping steps.
“Your task is completed,” they say, the feminine, mechanical drone of their voice filtering through the sudden, creeping awareness of its state of dress. It hadn’t even tried to fix its thigh, where the pencil is lodged, red blooms outward, dark where it had dried. The pain is distant and twinging. “You may return.”
Phil is sleeping.
Ever since his outburst, he is only allowed to wake for brief periods of time. His downy head of hair pressed up against its knee, where it sits to keep him warm.
“Will his charges be returned,” it asks.
Cucurucho’s head turns slowly. Their stature seems, for a moment, to flicker into something larger. Shoulders broadening in confusion, wondering at its defiance. At the fact that it is still sitting in place, instead of standing, “That is outside your jurisdiction.” they say.
It thinks.
“It’s just not… ah… not sustainable…” it says, “Heightened levels of distress,” it rushes to say, the words falling out of it, unable to stop itself, “Doesn’t feel sustainable for the Island group.”
“That is outside your jurisdiction.”
“Just wanted, uh, t’ know,” It says, throat so tight and tremulous that it feels unable to breathe.
Cucurucho’s presence fills the room, and at once, its head spikes. It steps back. “You do not want anything,” they say. “You are a QSMP Bureau Officer.”
It stands.
Cucurucho’s ever present smiles follow it, head turning to watch it return into the tunnel. The warmth of Phil’s body resting against its lap. The scent of his hair on its hands.
It doesn’t think at all.