Chapter Text
Wifies hasn’t been home in a long time. He's been avoiding it for going on two years now, but he can’t help himself, banned from Unstable and every connection on it burnt to ash, he has nothing but to return to it. No matter how much his hands shake as he inputs the IP, and how much he expects to be stuck rotting in an all too large bedrock box.
He logged on where he’d left, obviously, back to the cold void and eyes staring into its vast sky, his hands clasped loosely over a trident that lay splayed across his chest, pointing away from him because Wifies isn’t as much of an idiot as his double would believe him to be.
Sitting up on nothing, Wifies takes in the world in hazy pictures, one sense at a time, smog still permeates the would be clear air, Wifies would say it smelt like blood if he didn’t know the smell of copper off the back of his hand. Nor the fact no blood could ever be spilled on this server since the only him that ever bled it has been gone for longer than he’s been active.
Active, not alive.
Because is he so?
Wifies drew himself to his feet, and like a puppet walked himself back into a prison of his own design, built of cracked blackstone and terracotta. Somewhere he knows this isn’t good for him, hadn’t been the first time surely, but it was all he’d had left, aside from Unstable, the only home server he would consider crashing in was populated with shitty one shot horror mods that he fears he may literally and metaphorically crash out from, malware pinging around angrily in his skull just as his frazzled screaming would have all the same.
Not that he doesn’t miss Squiddo. He does, but he can’t do that right now. So, here he was. Somewhere closer to hell than any of those modpacks would ever hope to achieve.
Wifies placed the redstone torch by the door and allowed himself through their rusting hinges, heels clacking uncomfortably loudly in the distinctly empty halls of his childhood home.
Was it weird to call it that when he’d never really been a child? Wifies wasn’t quite sure. But regardless of whatever those days had been, they had certainly been formative, his first conscious day on Earth, even if his own memories pulled him back further along the pipeline, so to him they would remain childhood memories, even if the definition was loose at best.
They were some of the worst days of his life too. Alongside his first. Only some because Paragon's ash still laid metaphorically under his nails and that would always sting more ferociously in his non-existent heart than anything else.
Parrot had been so kind, so accommodating, so understanding when he’d learnt of Wifies’ true nature. Aside from Ken and Wato he was the only person ever to know what Wifies was to the fullest and he’d never regret him finding out.
It was innocuous, one night Wifies had boarded himself up in the bathroom, as he frequently did, fiddling with the rust under his skin and fractured wires in the face of the mafias ire, a tedious job for sure, but an easy one, one he figured he’d get away with, with hide himself away in the bathroom for a few hours fussing over himself as he so often did, he’d just planned a simple excuse, something just as simple as the job, a bid to pretend he’d just had a long shower or something of the sort, it was easy.
But Parrot had never once been fooled that easily, which was why Wifies didn’t frequently repair himself when Parrot was home, but regardless. With his excuse in mind, Parrot had waited for all of ten minutes before kicking the bathroom door down off its hinges, and startled Wifies half to death, Parrot catching him fumbling in the act of pulling wiring from his arms.
Parrots eyes had widened, and as he sat still, Wifies wound himself up tight, waiting for anything really. Something dismissive, maybe angry at his secret hiding, but no, none of that supposed ire had supposed would come so readily ever did come to pass, instead once Parrot had seemingly taken the scene in, he exhaled some relieved tone out of his nose and looked down at Wifies in a way that mimicked the one Ken had given him in the escape room itself.
“Is that all you're hiding from me bro? I thought you died!”
Parrot had crossed the room to Wifies’ side between his own panicked mumblings and excuses and peered down at the exposed wiring that lined his arms, and the filtered out motor oil that stained the bathtub and refracted as a bright pinky purply hue, patterns that Wifies knew would stain, just as they had before, that he’d meticulously cleaned and scrubbed with bleach before, that Parrot waved off easily.
“Dude, I’m not making you clean all that, it literally doesn’t matter, don’t sweat it.”
Ever since that night Parrot had helped him with maintenance, sure he didn’t know much about the internal mechanisms of his body much, but what he could do was simple things, things like fetching him spare parts and tying back his hair so it wouldn’t get stained the same violent hues as the tub, tiny things that helped Wifies more than if he’d done the work himself.
He’d kept him company so he didn’t zone out, he’d made sure Wifies actually did it at all with his frazzled schedule, and made sure that he did it well. Kept him in check, essentially.
It was nice. Parrot never saw him as lesser, never forced him to be perfect, no more than the human hybrid boy he’d always been to him, and it was nice. For a time. But then that soon passed and he’d let himself rot in Parrot’s absence.
Now, Wifies arms were covered with rust, barely moving fingers on his semi non-dominant hand and a twitchy eye he never bothered to fix because it didn’t bother him enough to do so. All his mind was left with being a beyond wasted hunk of metal as a body, barely a man, not even a dog.
Just as decayed as the factory he now wandered. It was an ironic, almost beautiful image, that Wifies didn’t give himself the right to fester on, because he felt like he nary had the right to the breaths he borrowed from stolen air, pretty pictures were pushing the envelope into human more than he was able to stomach.
Wifies was not human, he never would be. Despite how people pretended otherwise, he was just that. Other. He could not change who he was at his core no matter if he cut off his ears or swapped sweaters for dresses, he would always be wrong in one way or the other.
Winding stairs and empty creaking of metal lead Wifies above the factory floor, up to where winding pipes filled with god knows what sat stagnant, and half broken tech peppered the air in a bid not too unlike himself.
The office was untouched from how he’d remembered. No one had taken it over in the absence of his double, no clone to take the reins, it sat dormant, frazzled notes and untouched bedsheets sat in front of an empty horizon.
There was a book on the table, Wifies plucked it up into barely functioning hands and saw himself, a better him. A better friend, a better brother, a better son that he would never be because that was not him that was staring back at him. He didn’t glide his thumb over a sketch of himself in ego because the body, perfect and pure wasn’t himself.
It could have been, maybe he hoped it was. But it would never be, no matter how much he pined for it to be so.
Because there was no one around to make him into that person. No evil him to pull the strings, no Kenadian to tell him who he is, and no Parrot to coax him into his machinery. No one left because he simply was not that person.
But then who was he?
He was not sure. Between heavy robes and invisibility you start to lose yourself at some point across the way, but there was enough in there to tell him he’d been someone once. Some part of him, biological and real and blooming flowers had to be someone, right?
Was he a villain? No. Was he a hero, decidedly not that either. Was he selfish, of course, but was he selfless too? Maybe that as well.
Who was Wifies? Who was he trying to live up to the image of?
Did it matter?
He asked the air in question, and it gave no reply, still whistling as if he’d never spoken at all. But the question lingered on his tongue still.
Why did Wifies get to decide who he was to be when he wasn’t here to tell him how? Why was he to be shoved into boxes and labelled faulty or functional when there was no real determinant of which was which?
Who was there to stop him from being someone real?
No one. Because the factory was empty. He was alone, the others of him all scattered to the wind in visages he’d never see, and his only guide dead in a ditch.
Wifies could be whoever he wanted to be because there was no one to tell him who anymore.
How's that for a pretty picture?