Work Text:
Pix jolts out of sleep to the distant sound of alarm bells clanging. He’s out of bed in seconds, racing for the museum. When he bursts through the entrance and skids to a stop in the middle of the main floor, only to find the deepslate emerald ore untouched, he draws himself up, confused. The sound of bells insistently continues.
“Hello?” Pix yells into the echoing space, turning a slow circle. He scans every corner of the room for movement from the shadows. “Come out! I have a—” he fumbles for something out of his inventory “—I have a shovel!”
The rhythm of the clanging bells stutters for a beat, just long enough that Pix catches the sound of a muffled yelp.
“Ah, under the floor, are you?” Pix mutters, hurrying for the makeshift stairs by the northern wall. “Halt, villain!”
But what he finds in the basement of the museum is no villain at all.
“Oh. Uh. Hello?”
There’s a child crouched by the bells, expression set and focused firmly on trying to grab the bells so they stop swinging. They look up when Pix stumbles to the bottom of the stairs, which means the redstone system the bells are hooked up to rip the mechanism out of their grasp and the bells carry on unabated.
The child stands. They’re dressed in dull teals and orange-browns, a bucket hat on their head and a loose, patterned scarf in the same colours tied neatly around their neck. They regard Pix with an air of profound seriousness, and say nothing.
“Oh my. Have Joel and Sausage been getting up to shenanigans again?” Pix puts his shovel away, and beckons to the child, who approaches at an unafraid trot. “What’s your name?”
“David,” the child says. After a beat, as if remembering a fragment of a recitation: “Copperfield, the fourth.”
“Uh…” Pix has a sudden urge to go check on the machinery under the catacombs. “Right. Like the—like the copper aging machine?”
David the child nods.
“Okay! Your parents must be very interesting.”
For the first time since this conversation began, there is a spark in the child’s eyes. “Yes,” they agree.
“Er—” Hm. This is weird. This is weird, right? Pix takes a breath. No, fine, okay, this may as well happen. This is not the weirdest thing he’s ever dealt with. “I’d like to meet your parents. Can you take me to them?”
David cocks their head, considering, as if Pix just presented them with a riddle. When no further movement or answer arrives, Pix glances at the stairs and says, “We may as well go up. What in the world were you doing down here anyway?”
David follows Pix up the stairs, and their reply to this question comes much easier. “I wanted to stop the bells. They’re loud.”
“And why were you in the museum hearing the bells to begin with?” Pix prompts.
“I wanted to see the things you like.” David’s voice is completely guileless.
Okay? Okay.
“Why’s that?” Pix keeps his prodding gentle, curious. He can guess from experience that pressing too hard will just make the kid clam up. He starts leading them out of the museum.
“I like you.” David pauses, mouth pursing as they think. “The universe likes you.”
Pix chuckles. “Well, I don’t doubt that. The universe likes everyone.”
David shakes their head. “It only likes me because you like me.”
Pix thinks for half a second or less about reminding this kid that they just met, but— C’mon. He’s not that heartless. “You know the poem, don’t you? And the universe said I love you because you are love. ‘You’ means you, too.”
David shakes their head more fiercely this time. “I’m here because it loves you.” With that, they stop at the top of the steps leading up to the museum and reach for Pix’s hand. Pix lets them take it.
“So,” Pix says, giving David’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Where are your parents?”
David actually frowns this time. They turn—just a little, refusing to let of Pix’s hand—and point right at Pix.
Yeah. He’d been maybe hoping that wouldn’t be the case.
“Oh, yeah, that’s how Hermes happened!” Sausage says brightly, hours later. Pix took David on a brief tour of the ancient capital, and then successfully got them to lie down in a bed and rest a bit when the shadows started stretching long.
Well. ‘Successfully.’ He suggested the action, and David went for the nearest bed as if commanded. They had to be patiently herded to a bed with an actual roof over it, and not one covered in rock dust and missing its mattress from centuries of exposure to the elements.
“I thought—” Pix starts, before it occurs to him that usually, he tries not to think about Joel and Sausage’s private activities, or the outcomes thereof, much at all. “Right. Okay. But you two did it on purpose, right?”
“Mhm! Very intentional.”
Pix runs a hand through his hair. “I did not mean to make my redstone contraption come to life. Do you think the catacombs sorting system is going to—? Actually, no. Never mind that. One problem at a time.”
He and Sausage are up late in Sanctuary, where Sausage is—in a house? It’s not totally clear whose house it is—embroidering gorgeously detailed patterns into banners. Something about the shopkeep needing some help with a sudden influx of customers.
Normally, Pix would be here just to keep him company, but now he kind of needs some advice on children left on your doorstep by the universe itself. Supernatural children aren’t uncommon in his line of work, but it’s weird to be the one that things are happening to, for once.
“You named the machine, right? You give something a name, it’s bound to get—” Sausage waves the needle in his hand to illustrate what he means. “A little weird. A little magical. It happens. You knew it might.”
Pix sighs. “I knew the universe might decide to play along if I started telling a story; I didn’t think it would give me a child.”
Sausage giggles. “Well, you have one now! Good luck! Can you pass me the pink thread?”
Sausage, it turns out, doesn’t have a ton of advice handy. Hermes is small enough to be carried around, and is divine in the godly sense, and has a playful streak about a hundred blocks wide. David—if this is David the machine—is only divine in the way that anything the universe loves is divine, and uncannily serious, and just big enough that it would be awkward to pick them up. The only thing the two have in common is how quiet they can be.
Pix wakes up later than usual the next day, and follows the sound of chests banging open and shut to find David fishing bottles of honey out of storage. He steps into the room and says, trying not to startle them, “I thought I told you to lie down.”
“I was lying down for a long time.” David speaks softly. “You were—I wanted to see the things you like. Do you like honey?” As they speak, they lean toward Pix, an odd urgency in their tone. “I thought you liked stone, but then yesterday you said all the grey was a little boring. Do you like being here in the capital?”
“I like honey fine, but—nope, taking that away—” he plucks the bottle from David’s hands when they tilt it toward their mouth “—not straight from the bottle. Come on, let’s get some bread and put the honey on that, how does that sound for breakfast?”
David thinks about this. “Okay.”
Pix adjusts their hat—he took it off them when he helped them into bed yesterday, they must have put it back on—and offers his hand without thinking. They take it without comment. He leads them out into the sunlight, which, machinic origins or no, is probably better for a kid than the dusty air of the catacombs. He’s probably going to have to devise some moderately more humane living conditions, if David’s going to be sticking around.
For the time being, he spreads a blanket in the grass in the shadow of the goddess statue, and offers David slices of bread soaked in honey.
“Are you going somewhere today, too?” David asks abruptly, between one slice of bread and another.
“I don’t have anywhere in particular in mind, no, unless someone urgently needs me for something. I was hoping to mess with the museum’s alarm system today, actually. I could show you some of the circuitry, if you’re interested?”
“Redstone?” David asks, which is pretty easy to answer.
“Yes, I expect so.”
“Like me?” David continues, which is much harder to answer.
“Well, I don’t know. Are you made of redstone, David?”
David’s expression fills with reproach. “You made me.”
“I made David-the-machine,” Pix argues mildly, slathering more honey on his own slice of bread. “I’m not entirely sure you’re my doing.”
David falls silent, the hand holding their slice of half-eaten bread dropping. With the trembling air of a child experiencing every emotion at once and trying desperately not to indicate it, David says, “I thought you liked me.”
Ah. Pix stops short. He sets down his bread and knife so he can look at David directly. “I do like you, David.”
“Do you?” they ask, all furious petulance. They shove the remainder of their bread in their mouth and begin chewing angrily, glaring at Pix all the while.
Pix reaches for them automatically. They shy away and he lets his hands fall. “Yes, of course. I—I’m sorry. I’m not sure where the machine ends and you begin. Do you remember me? Do you remember that I care for you?”
“Yes,” David hisses. They get up, bread eaten, and walk away into the untouched savannah.
“Uh huh…” Gem says slowly. “And then what’d you do?” She is very audibly humouring him at this point.
“I followed them for, I don’t even know, a minute? Eventually they just stopped walking. We spent the rest of the day at the museum and I’m not sure they blinked once while I was working?” Pix rolls out from underneath the hoppers he was poking at.
“Weird,” Gem says. “Right? That’s weird for a player?”
“I don’t know why you’re phrasing it like that, but yes, that is a little weird for a player. But it happens! That’s not my concern. My concern is: what set them off like that?” Pix flips a page in the notebook that he’s had propped against a nearby support. “Why is David so bothered by the question of whether I made them?”
“I… Okay. Have you tried asking them?”
“Second thing I did,” Pix replies. “I don’t think they’re speaking to me right now. I thought I’d give them some space, so when you called me—ah, that won’t work, that just breaks the line—Winchester’s keeping an eye on them right now.” He pauses, staring at a passing bee. “Was that—Hm. I may have done a bad thing here.”
“To my farm?” Gem asks, immediately more alarmed.
“Hm? Oh, no.” Pix steps around to the back, trails a line of redstone all the way across. “The farm’s fine. Or, at least, it isn’t broken yet. I’m realising I maybe shouldn’t have left.”
“Pix, I appreciate your help, I really do, but—I’m seriously considering charging you for therapy. You seem like you need it and I’m not gonna do it for free.”
“You’re not a licensed therapist.” Pix narrows his eyes, scanning the contraption as a whole, buzzing literally and figuratively to life as he yanks a lever.
“You don’t know that.”
Pix snaps his notebook shut. “I suppose I don’t. That’s the upgrade done! Let me know if anything explodes. I think… I think I had better go now.”
“Nice!” Gem nods, surveying the new additions to her farm. “You want honeycomb?”
Pix considers. “Actually, could I have some bottles of honey?”
Pix lands in front of the froglight orchard, cups his hands around his face, and shouts with no intentions in any direction in particular, “I’m back!”
The savannah is a soundless tableau. This isn’t the most unusual—sometimes days or weeks pass without a player or the universe changing much of the landscape—but Pix is beginning to wonder if he was a fool to think a kid summoned by the universe itself as a byproduct of his care for a machine could be treated with any less care than a child produced by other means.
“Machines,” Pix mutters, “just shouldn’t be children. Nothing but trouble comes of it.”
Nothing in his surroundings acknowledges him. He’d left Winchester and the other dodos with some very firm instructions to make sure David didn’t wander into danger, but. Dodos will be dodos.
Grass rustles, the distinctive sound of footsteps, and a flash of dull teal catches Pix’s eye.
“David?” he calls. “David, I’m back. Were you okay while I was gone?”
David peers out from behind a tree trunk. They look like they might be trying to hide. They’re doing a bad job of it.
“I can see you,” Pix says, amused. It’s tricky. The fondness warming his chest might be have more to do with the hours he spent building the machine in the catacombs—still there, when he went to check last night—than with the kid. He’s really not sure.
David shrinks further behind the tree, though their soft, soft voice gives them away again as they ask, “Are you tired?”
“I’d say I’m at about a three or four on a scale from one to ten.”
They step out from behind the tree and Pix moves instinctively toward them, but then they take off running.
“What—” Pix starts, half-expecting David to turn back around so it will turn out to have been a joke all along, but they don’t, and it seems it is not. They just keep running. Pix, caught off guard, stares after them for a beat, before giving chase.
As he runs after them, droplets of rain begin to hit him. Lovely. The clouds rumble, an omen of torrential rains to come, and Pix pulls his hat from his inventory and tugs it over his head. He has a brief, absurd thought that it’s a good thing David already has their own hat.
“David! Where are you going? Come back!”
Pix chases David to the edge of unmarked land, not a single built structure in sight. It’s raining properly by now, and Pix is sure it will only get worse. David stumbles over something and it gives Pix enough time to catch up.
“Wait.” He catches them by the shoulder and drops to a crouch in front of them. They freeze. “David. It’s dangerous out here. Where are you going?”
David says nothing, eyes wide, expression stubbornly blank.
“We’re both going to get soaked. Here, let’s at least get out of the worst of it.” Same as ever, David lets Pix take their hand, follows close and wordless as he takes them both to the mouth of a nearby cave.
The stone yawns open, warmer than it should be. The universe is not without its little kindnesses. Pix sits. David does not, even when Pix pats the spot next to himself and says, “It’s drier than outside.”
“Why did you follow me?” they ask.
Pix blinks. “David—”
“You only say my name when you’re being patronising,” David says, not raising their voice but conveying unspeakable volumes of anger anyway. “I was here for one night and you left as soon as I went to bed. You sound all surprised that I remember you. You don’t let me stay in the catacombs, and you think machines shouldn’t be kids. I didn’t—You—I thought you liked stone!”
At that bizarre final declaration, David paces one tight circle, seems to realise there’s nowhere to go while the storm rages, and bursts into tears.
Pix, at a loss for what else to do, holds his arms out. “I’m here now,” he says.
David sobs, and then launches themself at Pix, crumpling into his hold. Pix hugs what he supposes is the closest thing he’s ever had to his own child, and rubs awkward but gentle circles along David’s back. He leans, the cold stone pressing uncomfortably across his shoulder blades, and tugs the hat off David’s head so he can bury his nose in their coppery red-brown hair.
David clings to him and shakes with soundless gasps. At least Pix knows how to do this part. David doesn’t fit in Pix’s lap the way Hermes does, but the arrangement is the same. Their hair is greasy, and Pix inhales the scent of oil and ozone.
Why are you telling me this story? Pix thinks, more of the way to prayer than he’s been in a long time. I know this lesson already.
The rain is thundering away steadily at the earth by the time David’s breathing evens out. They haven’t complained about any of the current situation yet in any way Pix can detect, so he continues absently tracing circles on their back. He murmurs, looking at the grey, grey skies, “Could you tell me what happened there?”
There’s a vague shuffling, probably a shrug. Now that they’ve gone quiet, David has gone very quiet, their breaths so slow and careful that there’s a heart-jerking second where Pix thinks they’ve stopped entirely.
“Would you like me to let go of you?” Pix tries not to think about how David’s elbow is digging into his lower stomach. Pix tries not to think about how David’s fingers are chilled where they’re curled loosely around his wrist. Pix tries not to think of the unrelenting rain outside.
“No,” David says.
The stone of the cave is not particularly comfortable. Pix shifts his grip on David, hoping to adjust, and the way David stiffens, abrupt and silent, is another clue in the puzzle Pix is spinning in his head.
“I’m sorry I left,” he tries.
David’s answer is a whisper, hardly audible over the rain. “It’s okay.”
“I’d like to understand why you were upset.” That’s easy to say because it’s true. It’s harder to figure out how to ask. “Was it… Was it something I did?”
“No,” David says immediately. Then they shrug again. “You didn’t do any—” a hitch in their voice “—anything wrong.”
“That’s not quite what I asked, was it?”
They utter a tiny sound of profound frustration. They mumble something, then add, louder, plaintive, “Doesn’t matter.”
Pix swallows his first instinct and lets that idea sit for a moment. “You matter a great deal.”
“I’m not the machine! What am I for?” That little sound again. “Machines shouldn’t be children.”
Aha. Very funny, Pix thinks, startled by the bitter force of the thought. A fantastic story, I’m sure. There’s an old belief that the universe can hear you better when you speak your desires and beliefs aloud. You’re supposed to talk to it as you go about your day, and it might in its endless love grant a wish or two of yours.
He says out loud, “The choice should have been yours. This is… different, compared to your time as the machine, right?”
David nods.
“I wish I could have asked you if this is what you wanted.“
“You like me and the universe likes you,” they mumble, curling in on themself. “But what am I for?”
“I’m hoping,” Pix says, “you’ll be for whatever you’d like to be for. That’s the sort of thing you have to choose now. I’ll help you wherever I can.”
“Can I be for flying?” Their voice sounds so small.
“Okay.” Pix gives them a gentle squeeze without thinking, so it is very lucky that they seem to like that, or at least that they don’t freeze up. “I think we can figure something out.”
So Pix’s schedule shifts to accommodate this new shape in his life.
David, he discovers, has only the loosest grasp of what an elytra is, much less how to use it, so their shared mornings are spent running down the least rocky hills Pix can find, David managing short hops with a spare set of elytra.
The universe is not without its little kindnesses, so the grass is softer wherever David runs, and hillsides previously pocked with little holes and stones are smooth these days. There are convenient puddles of shade under the acacia trees for the two of them to rest under as the sun gets high and the day grows hot.
“I’ll give you rockets when you can glide from the top of the Nether portal tower to the base of the statue,” Pix promises them one day, and they nod solemnly.
There are other caveats, of course, and David nods along to all of those too, but Pix still spends the next couple of weeks with an array of extra potions bundled up and tucked away in his inventory, waiting to be jolted awake or called away from building by the sound of an unsupervised child crashing to earth too soon.
The occasion never comes. David is compliant to a fault, though they still murmur discontentedly when Pix points out their gliding is a bit wobbly.
“Are you bored of helping me fly?” they ask one afternoon, back against a tree trunk and picking the roundest berries out of a bowl Pix set out. (A gift from Animalia, Lizzie said, with a faint air of desperation. Pix accepted, mostly because David appeared at his side and the look Lizzie gave them was indulgent and fond before it was mischievous. David, politely, filled their bucket with water instead of slime so the feathers wouldn’t stick when Lizzie helped them dump it on Pix.)
“Not really,” Pix says honestly. He takes a handful of berries, and passes a few of the nicest looking ones to David. “At this point, it’s more of a novelty to have someone who can’t fly on the server than can. It’s an interesting change of pace, and I enjoy teaching you.”
“But I’m not…” They pause, mulling over words. “Optimised. This is taking a very long time.”
They are as precise as if aiming a bow.
This, Pix thinks with a spark of irritation that finds itself melting into resignation faster and faster these days, is exactly how machines and children are not interchangeable things.
“It’s not so long in the grand scheme of things,” is what Pix says out loud. He gestures at their surroundings. “This capital has been here for many times the length of my life or yours. The time we spend practising is but the smallest fraction of that time. There will be time for other things yet. For now, there’s nothing we can do but keep trying. Our efforts will bear fruit soon enough.”
They frown. “It can’t be sooner?”
“Eager to get a proper flight in, are you?” Pix chuckles.
David shifts, unreadable.
Pix offers them another handful of berries. “The squishy ones are the sweetest.”
“I want to try again,” they say, taking the berries and still frowning.
“If that’s what you want,” Pix says. “One more before I have to get back to digging.”
David nods, gazing fixedly at the middle distance.
Softly, Pix says, “I’m not trying to optimise you, David.”
They turn their owl-eyed stare on Pix. “Why not?”
That afternoon, Pix suggests they go fishing on the lake. David successfully negotiates for it being one hour instead of two, and spends the extra time turning over rocks on the shore.
The worst part is that they’re an easy kid. They follow instructions and swallow their feelings and hold themself perfectly still like—Well. Like a machine. So, in the afternoons, Pix tries by turns setting them loose to explore and inviting people out to the ruins to give David whatever lessons they might have to offer.
The results of the explorations are invariably charming. They come back to Pix—who takes the time to review his journals, or dig out new parts of the ruins, or translate the ancient books the others bring him sometimes—with pouches full of interestingly shaped twigs and carefully selected bundles of flowers. Sometimes, a particularly pretty leaf catches their eye, and they bring it to Pix. He helps them search through his field guide for the matching entry and coaxes them into telling the story of where they found it.
Fwhip drops by intermittently to show off new goblin recipes and explain minecarts and the rails they run on. David learns quickly how burns work, and Pix is relieved he continues to carry around potions with him these days.
Sausage is expressly forbidden from bringing crossbows until after David figures out regular bows, so Katherine starts stopping in for visits, smiling winkingly at them and swearing them to secrecy about how she knows so much about these weapons. She quite forgets to check whether Pix is within earshot before doing this, but that’s fine. He can keep a secret, and so can the entire rest of the server, probably.
Even Shelby manages to escape the Evermoore for an afternoon or two every other week, and David takes to her craft with both determination and curiosity. Some things might explode. Nothing irreplaceable, but after that, Pix makes sure the workshop he sets up for the two of them is more fireproof than not. The weeks Shelby can’t make it, Jimmy—griping about how the kid is better at this than me, how is that even possible!—hosts arts and crafts time.
It’s months after their first introduction that David and Hermes work out some type of impenetrable child-language that means they actually talk to each other, but it happens. The next bucket of feathers that gets dumped on Pix’s head is filled with slime, and after that point, he gets more careful about opening doors.
Pix’s old bed is David’s bed now. The ruins are his in a way that they are not David’s, and thus much easier to sleep in for him than for them. David wanders the savannah when they can’t or won’t sleep, and the grass parts for them as if in welcome. So the ancient capital becomes David’s too.
David makes it from the top of the Nether portal tower to the base of the goddess statue. The universe is not without its little kindnesses, so there are a few more stacks of rockets than Pix remembers having in his storage when he goes to look, and he shows David how to light them. The first one slips out of their hand and shoots up several blocks above them with a whistling noise. David grins watching it, and the second one attempt goes much smoother.
They rocket into the air, and Pix follows, ready to catch them if necessary.
It is not necessary.
David spends the rest of the morning making slow, happy circles of the ancient capital, pointing when they want Pix to look at some little detail that’s caught their eye, and because the universe is not without its little kindnesses, when the rain starts to fall, there’s still enough of all the important ingredients in the catacombs that Pix and David can have hot chocolate, and sit at the mouth of the catacombs, watching it pour.