Chapter Text
Carve your name into my wings and call it protection.
Morning on the valley floor did not arrive with a fanfare of light. It seeped into the loft like grey water through a cracked seam, dull and sluggish, carrying the faint, cold scent of wet earth and damp cedar.
Parrot did not wake up so much as he drifted upward out of the dark, his mind surfacing slowly from a deep, dreamless well. For the first time in twenty-one days, the white room had not found him. There had been no iron table, no flickering light of sea lanterns, no cold voice calculating his flight speed down to the millisecond. There had only been the rhythmic, heavy thud of rain striking the shingles three inches above his head, a soft, imperfect percussion that belonged entirely to the world of living things.
He lay still under the heavy wool blanket, staring at the exposed rafter beams overhead. The wood was raw pine, unpolished and rough, holding the pale gold sap-lines of a tree that had been felled with a hand-axe rather than an automated tnt-duper.
He moved his fingers slowly against the mattress. Down feathers. Real feathers. Not the synthetic, foam-stuffed mats of The Director’s high-altitude barracks, but actual goose down, smelling faintly of lavender and old linen.
A floorboard creaked below.
Parrot’s body went instantly rigid, his breath seizing in his chest. His right hand twitched toward his belt, searching for the weight of an iron dagger, the smooth curve of an ender pearl, anything, before his fingers met only the soft, worn cotton of an oversized tunic Wemmbu had tossed onto the chair the night before.
The sound came again: the low, dry scrape of a iron kettle being dragged across a hearth-grate, followed by the soft, rhythmic chink of a spoon against ceramic.
No boots. No frictionless stride. Just the slow, heavy-footed shuffle of a man who hadn't put his shoes on yet.
Parrot swallowed hard, the dry skin of his throat sticking together. Slowly, carefully, he swung his legs over the edge of the low cot. The physical toll of the previous night hit him all at once: his joints felt filled with wet sand, his core bruised as if he had been kicked by a horse, and his left wing, bound tightly now against his ribcage with strips of clean linen Wemmbu must have wrapped while he was unconscious,nthrobbing with a dull, persistent heat.
He gripped the wooden railing of the ladder, his bad wing flaring slightly under the bandages, and made his way down into the kitchen.
Wemmbu was sitting at the table, his bare feet pulled up onto the rungs of the wooden stool, a steaming mug held between both hands. He wore a faded linen shirt, the collar unbuttoned, exposing the thick scar across his collarbone from an old border war that everyone else had forgotten three map-resets ago.
He didn't turn around when Parrot reached the bottom of the ladder, but he shifted his weight slightly, making room at the table without a word.
"You sleep?" Wemmbu asked into his mug. His voice was thick with sleep, low and gravelly like dry gravel turning in a stream.
Parrot stood near the foot of the ladder, his arms crossed tight over his chest, his fingers clutching the oversized sleeves of the borrowed shirt. He felt terribly small, stripped of his green cloak, his armor, his sky. "I... I think so. I don't remember."
"Good," Wemmbu said, setting the mug down with a small thud. "Dreamless is best. Dreamless means your brain is too tired to lie to you."
He gestured with a chin toward the hearth, where a small iron pot was simmering, sending up a thin plume of steam that smelled of crushed oat-grains and dried apples. "Food's hot. Plates are in the cubby. Don't touch the iron kettle with your bare hand; the handle’s loose."
Parrot lingered for a moment, caught in the strange, frictionless orbit of Wemmbu’s mundane routine. In the high tower, breakfast had been an affair of timed rations, consumed standing up while reviewing the daily territorial shifts. Here, the passage of time felt thick, viscous, measuring itself not in server ticks or efficiency percentages, but in the time it took for an apple slice to soften in hot water.
Parrot walked to the hearth, his bare feet silent against the stone. He pulled a shallow wooden bowl from the shelf, his fingers tracing the uneven lathe-marks on the bottom. It wasn't symmetrical. One side was thicker than the other by a fraction of an inch, the sort of tiny, human error that The Director would have discarded as scrap metal.
He brought the bowl to the table and sat down across from Wemmbu.
For several minutes, neither of them spoke. The only sound was the rain outside, steady and gentle now, washing the dark forest mud from the valley floor, and the occasional soft scrape of Parrot’s wooden spoon against his bowl.
Parrot watched Wemmbu’s hands over the rim of his mug. They were large, broad hands, stained faintly yellow around the cuticles from handling sulfur and saltpetre, the knuckles thick and scarred. They were the hands of someone who built things to hold weight, not to be looked at.
"You don't have a clock," Parrot said, the observation slipping out before he could stop it.
Wemmbu looked up, one eyebrow raised slightly. "Why would I need a clock?"
"To check the tick-rate. The crop cycles. The—" Parrot cut himself off, feeling a sudden, sharp heat rise in his cheeks. He set his spoon down, his hand trembling slightly. "Sorry. I forgot."
"Sun comes up, I work. Sun goes down, I eat. It gets dark, I sleep," Wemmbu said simply, taking a slow sip of his tea. "If the wheat takes ten minutes longer to grow because the server’s running slow, the wheat takes ten minutes longer. It doesn't owe me anything."
"He used to have six of them," Parrot whispered, his eyes fixing on the grain of the oak table. "In the old base. Redstone clocks, water clocks, item-despawn timers... he said if we weren't measuring the seconds, we were letting the server steal from us."
Wemmbu set his mug down with a slightly heavier click this time. He didn't look angry, but his green eyes held a sudden, concentrated weight that made Parrot’s breath hitch.
"Parrot," Wemmbu said softly.
Parrot hesitated, then forced his chin up.
"He's not in this room," Wemmbu said, his voice entirely devoid of malice, but sharp enough to cut through the haze in Parrot’s mind. "He's not under the floor. He's not watching you through the window. You're carrying him around in your head like a pocket full of rocks, and every time you talk about him, you drop one on your own foot."
Parrot choked on a dry laugh, a sound like glass snapping underfoot. "I can't just... turn it off, Wemmbu. Every time I look at a piece of wood, I remember who taught me how to lay the foundation. Every time I see a piece of redstone, I hear his voice telling me which way the current flows. He's built into everything I know how to do."
"Then learn to do something else," Wemmbu said.
The rain cleared by mid-afternoon, leaving the valley washed in a brilliant, pale light that smelled of ozone and wet grass.
Wemmbu didn't leave the cabin. He didn't go to his fields, and he didn't pick up his sword. Instead, he pulled a small wooden stool up to the edge of the porch, sat down with a roll of soft, unbleached linen and a small clay jar of green salve that smelled sharply of pine resin and crushed mint, and pointed at the empty space beside him.
"Sit," he ordered gently.
Parrot pulled the oversized shirt close around his chest, suddenly hyper-aware of the missing cloak, the missing armor, the bare skin of his throat. "What are you doing?"
"Fixing what you broke in the dark last night," Wemmbu said, uncapping the jar. "The bandages I put on you at midnight were just to stop the bleeding. If we leave 'em like that, the quills are gonna set crooked, and you'll never fly straight again."
Parrot froze on the threshold. The phantom pain in his back flared instantly, a sharp, electric memory of the white room, of hands made of light pulling primary feathers from their sockets. "No. Wemmbu, no, I—"
"I'm not gonna pull 'em," Wemmbu said, his voice dropping into that flat, unshakeable register that seemed to hold the whole house together. "I'm just gonna clean 'em. And if it hurts too much, you tell me to stop, and I stop. Simple as that."
Parrot stood in the doorway for a long, agonizing minute, his lungs working in fast, shallow cycles. The fear was a cold iron band around his ribs, but beneath it, deeper, quieter, was a profound, bone-deep exhaustion. He was tired of running. He was tired of holding his own wings together with string and prayer.
Slowly, his bare feet dragging against the porch boards, Parrot moved to the stool. He sat down with his back turned to Wemmbu, his fingers gripping the edge of the seat so hard his knuckles turned grey.
"Shirt off," Wemmbu said quietly.
Parrot’s hands shook as he pulled the linen tunic over his head, exposing his back to the cool mountain air.
The damage was worse than it had looked in the dark. The left wing was a pale, ragged thing, the base of the primary feathers matted with dark, dried blood and forest dirt. Several of the major flight quills were bent at sharp, unnatural angles, the delicate barbs torn and frayed from his frantic scramble through the dark oak roots.
Wemmbu let out a low, slow breath behind him. He didn't swear. He didn't gasp. He just reached into his pouch, pulled out a small cloth soaked in warm water, and gently, so gently it felt like a breeze passing over raw skin, pressed it against the base of the wing.
Parrot flinched violently, a sharp, gasping sound tearing from his throat.
"I know," Wemmbu murmured, his left hand coming up to rest firm and steady on Parrot’s right shoulder, grounding him, holding him against the wooden seat. "I got you. Just hold onto the stool."
The touch of Wemmbu’s hand on his shoulder was warm. It wasn't the clinical, precise grip of a doctor or the cold, iron hold of an enforcer. It was just heavy. It was the weight of a stone wall built to take the wind.
Slowly, carefully, Wemmbu began to work. He wiped away the dried mud, his calloused fingers moving with an agonizing, meticulous patience. When he reached a broken quill that had twisted sideways into the flesh, he paused, his thumb rubbing small, soothing circles into the uninjured muscle at the base of Parrot’s neck.
"He used to do this," Parrot whispered, his forehead dropping down against his own knees, his voice muffled by the cotton of his trousers. "When we were building the nether hub. A ghast shot out the bridge, and I caught a blast of gravel to the left wing. We hid in a three-by-three hole in the netherrack for six hours while the lava poured down outside."
Wemmbu didn't stop his hands. "Yeah?"
"He was so scared," Parrot rasped, a tear slipping down his nose and darkening the wood between his feet. "He didn't have any healing potions left. He just sat there with a water bucket in his lap, crying, rubbing healing salve into my feathers with his thumbs, swearing he’d never let me get hurt again. He called me his 'fledgling.' He said if I lost my wings, he’d build a ladder all the way to the build-limit so I could still see the clouds."
Wemmbu’s fingers paused for a fraction of a second against the bent feather.
"And now?" Wemmbu asked softly.
"He kept his promise" Parrot choked out, a full, wrenching sob breaking through his chest. "The world never had a chance to hurt me. But a cage is still a cage, no matter how sweetly you bleed inside it."
Wemmbu didn't answer with words. He leaned forward, pressing his forehead lightly against the back of Parrot’s uninjured shoulder, a quiet, heavy gesture of solidarity that shared the weight without asking for anything in return.
He applied the mint-scented salve to the raw skin, his rough thumbs working the cooling paste into the inflamed tissue until the burning heat began to fade, replaced by a deep, numbing chill.
"He built a lots of things, Parrot," Wemmbu murmured against his skin, his hands moving to wrap the fresh linen tightly, but not too tightly, around the joint, binding the wing back against his ribs in a secure, protective cradle. "But he didn't build you. You were flying before you met him, and you'll fly after he's forgotten what the sky looks like."
By evening, the sky had turned a deep, bruised violet, streak with long ribbons of amber and gold along the ridge line.
Parrot sat on the edge of the porch, his knees pulled up to his chin, wrapped once again in the heavy grey wool blanket. The bandage across his back was firm, holding his left wing motionless, but the throbbing pain had settled into a dull, manageable ache.
Wemmbu came out of the house carrying two fresh mugs of tea. He sat down on the porch step right beside Parrot, close enough that their shoulders brushed, close enough that Parrot could feel the steady, uncomplicated heat radiating off the builder’s frame.
He didn't offer a lecture. He didn't ask Parrot what his next move was, or where he was going to go when the wing healed, or how they were going to fight back against the high tower. He just handed Parrot a mug, blew on his own, and looked out over the quiet, dark valley.
"The wind comes from the west down here," Wemmbu said softly, pointing with his chin toward the gap in the mountains. "Brings the rain off the ocean. It’s good for the wheat. Makes the wood expand in the frames so the draft doesn't get in."
Parrot looked at the gap in the mountains. Beyond it, miles away and hundreds of blocks high, he knew The Director’s basalt rings were turning in the dark, humming their silent, sixty-cycle song of order and control.
But down here, in the small, crooked valley made of rough oak and unpolished stone, the air was still. The rain had stopped. And for the first time in a month, the silence didn't feel like an ambush.
Parrot leaned his head sideways, just an inch, until his temple rested lightly against Wemmbu’s shoulder.
Wemmbu didn't move away. He didn't stiffen. He just shifted his weight slightly to give Parrot a better angle to rest, took a quiet sip of his tea, and let the dark settle over them both like a blanket that had been made to fit.