Work Text:
"Wifies!" Ken calls. "Get out here!"
Wifies breaks the leftmost pane of glass blocking him—minus one glass pane; he bookkeeps the blocks at his disposal by instinct and isn't sure if he could stop if he tried—and crosses the gap to Ken's larger platform on ginger footsteps.
"He's really gone?" Wifies looks at the other makeshift chamber. There's no body; he supposes he shouldn't have expected one. Back in the factory, there's sure be a body slowly reforming into a soul. He blinks at the realization that he knows players respawn, and knows that he does not, and had never noticed that conflict before.
The two spaces are eerie mirrors, twin empty windows. The bright wool marking answers on the floor is dulled by shadow. One has a single broken pane, and the other is intact. Wifies waits a moment for them to blink at him, as if the face of an enormous monster stares back at him in bedrock.
It's a ridiculous thing to think, but he allows it. There is a sense, somewhere in his gut, that this world is a monster, that it wants to digest him back into whatever he was made of. He glances at his hands and realizes they cannot be player-stuff, and that he has no idea what they might be otherwise.
"Wifies?" Ken nudges against his shoulder—he startles, looks down at them. Their ears are pricked forward, their hair still flat with sweat and their clothes scorched around the hems. "You alright? You look… a little out of it."
"I'm alright," he reassures them. "It's just a lot to think about."
"Yeah," Ken allows. "So… where are you gonna go?"
Wifies hesitates. He doesn't know and he tells Ken as much. "I guess the factory is mine?"
Ken squints at him. He feels horribly dissected under their gaze, believes another ridiculous proposition for a moment that Ken can see each of his organs and nerves and thoughts, can pick apart each flaw and weigh it against what permits him to continue existing. Wifies fears that the scale would not be balanced.
"Do you want the factory?" Ken prods, lips pursed.
"I don't," Wifies admits in a rush. The factory will eat him alive. The universe will do it, pull him back to nothingness. He is not playerkind; the realization works its way under his skin and stays there. The world will not be an ally to him. "Why me?" He directs the question to the eyes of the monster staring ravenously down at him, then glances at Ken. "Why us?"
Ken shrugs. "Look, things just happen sometimes. Maybe Wato set us up. Oh, I gotta check on Wato, don't I? If she was here?"
Wato has a vague shape in Wifies' mind, he discovers. No sharper than Kenadian was, hours ago when they met, but less fearsome. Wato, to whatever storage of people Wifies inherited, is less teeth and claws than Ken. Less of a predator.
Ken shakes their head fiercely. "That's a later issue. You, right now, are you alright?"
"I'm fine," Wifies assures them. "As fine as I can be." He glances over the edge of the bedrock, into the belly of the beast, and voices what's been half in his mind since stepping off the win platform. "Look, maybe I should just…" He gestures, vaguely, but it's enough that Ken gives him a horrified look.
"No."
"There's nothing left for me," Wifies explains. He doesn't have a particular feeling on his continued existence. It would certainly be easier to follow the undertow. "I did what I was… made to do. I don't know where else to go. I—I'm not like you, or like him; I'm not supposed to be here."
Ken is already shaking their head, muttering a string of no's under their breath. As soon as Wifies stops talking they grab his upper arms, turn him to face them and stare until he makes eye contact.
"Listen. Listen to me, okay? You deserve to exist, because you exist. That's—that's all there is. You deserve to be free. So listen—no, keep looking at me, I need to be sure you get it." Wifies holds eye contact, pinned in place like a butterfly on corkboard under Ken's knife-sharp gaze. "You have to survive. No matter what happens, you have to survive."
The words rest between them. They have a certain appeal to Wifies, an addictive slickness to the way they slide against his memory, a speed with which they dig roots into him. The world wants to swallow him whole, and Ken's imperative offers him a bitter coating: the beginnings of venom.
Wifies nods and accepts the mantle.