Work Text:
The building wasn't hard to find.
Wyll had built efficiently, which was predictable. The structure was nothing decorative, the kind of construction that communicated functional in every dimension with a glass dome sitting over the top that caught the moonlight and scattered it in pale fragments across the surrounding ground. Smart, in a way Slushly didn't want to acknowledge.
He circled it once at a distance, checking for tripwires, for guards, for the specific quality of stillness that meant someone was waiting with intent. Found nothing. The area was empty—late enough that the server had gone quiet, the last of the day's traffic long since retreated to bases and beds, and Wyll had apparently not thought to station anyone out here overnight.
Slushly filed this under mistakes Wyll has made and climbed the structure to get elevation.
From the roof, he could see straight down through the glass dome.
Wyll was inside.
He was standing near the command block—not using it, just near it, in the orbit of it—and he had something in his hands. The fishing rod. Even from up here Slushly could see the quality of it, the shimmer of something that hadn't come from a normal crafting table, the faint persistent glow of a command-block-generated item.
Division. The name had been mentioned in passing.
Slushly settled into a crouch on the roof and watched.
Wyll was holding the rod with both hands, and even from the distance of the dome above him, Slushly could see that something was wrong with the way he was doing it.
Not wrong like incompetence—Wyll was demonstrably not incompetent, the last few days of observations about how effectively he'd been deploying Division in fights had made that plenty clear. Wrong like the rod was pushing back against being held in a way that normal objects didn't, and Wyll was holding it anyway through the force of something that looked, from up here, distinctly like stubbornness.
Slushly watched him turn it over in his hands. Watched him adjust his grip. The faint crackling that Slushly could barely make out from this distance—a kind of electric shimmer around Wyll's fingers where they made contact with the rod's handle—seemed to pulse when Wyll moved, intensify when he gripped tighter, then settle marginally when he eased.
Wyll was watching it too. His jaw was set in the specific way of someone concentrating very hard on not reacting to something.
Huh. Slushly thought. Then, because this was not strictly his problem: Still going to kill him though.
He kept watching. It wasn't strategy exactly—more the instinct of someone who had learned, through extensive and occasionally painful experience, that watching Wyll carefully before engaging with him directly was more useful than the alternative.
Wyll shifted his grip again. The crackling intensified.
Wyll winced.
It was smallaabrief, controlled, the expression of someone who had decided not to make expressions and was mostly succeeding. His eyes tightened at the corners and one shoulder came up fractionally and then it was gone, smoothed back out, and he continued holding the rod with the same deliberate grip.
Slushly's first thought was: serves him right.
His second thought, following immediately and annoyingly on its heels, was: he's been using that thing in fights for days.
Which meant—if it was doing that when he was standing still in a building with no one around—then every fight he'd used it in, every time he'd wielded it against another player, every extended combat where he'd held it continuously—
Slushly looked down at Wyll's hands.
Even from up here, through the glass, he could see the marks. The discolouration at the fingertips. Not the kind of thing you'd notice in passing, not something that would be obvious across a battlefield—but he was directly above, the angle was good and the moonlight through the dome was doing him a favour, and those were definitely not healthy hands.
He's been doing this constantly, Slushly thought, with a feeling he refused to label as concern. Every fight. He's been holding it through every fight.
He was still thinking about this when the fishing rod sparked.
It wasn't a small spark. It was a crack of electricity that Slushly could hear clearly through the glass dome, a sharp report like something shorting out, and the light of it was harsh.
Wyll cried out.
Not a controlled sound. Not the brief, managed wince of before. A genuine, unguarded sound of pain, short and sharp, and then the rod hit the floor with a clatter as he dropped it.
Wyll was standing there with his right hand pulled against his chest, hissing something between his teeth that was probably a curse, his tail lashing sharply behind him in undisguised frustration and pain.
He was watching Wyll kick at the fallen fishing rod with clearly more force than was necessary, and then stand over it glaring at it, and then look down at his own hand.
Even from here, Slushly could see it. The right hand—the one that had been holding the rod, the one he was now cradling against his chest gingerly—was wrong in the way burned things were wrong. Darker at the fingertips. Smoke curling off it in thin, dissipating threads.
Charred, was the word Slushly's brain produced. His hand is charred.
He watched Wyll stand there, breathing through it, tail still moving in short, agitated sweeps. He watched him look from his hand to the rod on the floor and back again. He watched the expression on Wyll's face—the calculation, the assessment, the particular look of someone arriving at a conclusion they don't particularly like but are going to commit to anyway.
He's going to pick it up again, Slushly thought.
Wyll moved to do exactly that.
"Oh, you idiot," Slushly hissed, quietly, to the glass.
Wyll had gritted his teeth before his hand even closed around the handle—he'd known what was coming and had decided to go toward it anyway, which was the most aggressively Wyll thing Slushly had ever witnessed—and when the electricity came this time it was bigger. Significantly bigger. The largest one Slushly had seen out of the rod yet, a branching crack of light that lit the inside of the dome white for half a second, the sound of it was loud enough that Slushly physically pulled back from the glass.
And Wyll held on.
His whole body had locked with it—rigid, teeth clenched, hand probably making things worse by gripping. He was still standing, still holding the rod, smoke rising more noticeably now from his hand and also, Slushly noticed with a sharp and unpleasant lurch in his chest, from his forearm.
He was making small sounds of pain, the kind that escaped between clenched teeth regardless of intention—each inhale catching on something, punctuated by sharper notes when the electricity spiked and his body produced a response before his brain could suppress it.
He's going to kill himself at this rate, Slushly thought, and the thought came with a clarity and immediacy that surprised him.
He looked at the glass dome. Looked at Wyll below, cradling his arm now, head bowed, the rod still in his hand.
He wasn't sure exactly when the decision got made.
He broke into the dome with his pickaxe and dropped through.
He landed clean, knees bent, weight distributed correctly. He came up from the crouch and Wyll spun around with the rod raised before Slushly had fully straightened. For a moment they simply looked at each other across the small interior of the dome.
Wyll's expression cycled through several things very quickly. Surprise was first, and genuine—the unguarded version of it, the kind that meant Slushly had actually gotten past his awareness, which was harder than it looked. Then the composure came back like a door shutting.
"How long." Wyll demanded.
"Long enough," Slushly said. "What was that?"
"That's none of your— "
"The rod. It was reacting to you. Like it was—" Slushly gestured vaguely, because he didn't have the precise vocabulary for what he'd seen. "Doing something specific to you. Why?"
"Why are you in my building."
"Why is your hand on fire?"
"It's not on fire."
"There is smoke coming off your hand, Wyll."
"It's not— " Wyll paused. "I have it under control."
"The electricity was this big." Slushly spread his hands to an illustrative width. "That's not normal. That's not what it does to anyone else. I need you to explain what I just saw."
"You need to leave my building," Wyll snapped, "and then we can return to whatever this was going to be before you arrived."
"I arrived to deal with you," Slushly persisted. "And now I have additional questions."
"Answer to all of them: leave."
"Not yet," Slushly said, and moved.
It was reflexive for both of them—Wyll bringing Division up as Slushly closed the distance, the fishing rod doing its swap, and suddenly Slushly was where Wyll had been and Wyll was to his left, already resetting his position with the particular footwork of someone who'd been fighting with an unusual weapon long enough to have built tactics around it. Slushly adjusted immediately, cataloguing the space—the command block to his left, the exit behind Wyll, the ceiling too low for big swings.
He went again. Wyll used Division once more—the swap was smooth, clearly practiced—but as Slushly spun to track the repositioning he saw it. The rod was crackling at Wyll's fingertips. Not the faint shimmer from before. Something more insistent, the electricity running up the handle in a pattern that seemed to track where Wyll's grip was tightest.
Protesting, Slushly thought. The word arrived fully formed. It's protesting.
Wyll's jaw was set in the same locked, deliberate way it had been when he'd picked the rod up the second time. Whatever the electricity was doing to his hand—and his hand was in bad shape, Slushly could see it clearly now at close range, the discolouration going further up than he'd clocked from the dome—Wyll was containing his response to it with the focused effort of someone doing a very specific kind of endurance exercise.
He'd been doing this for days straight, Slushly remembered. Every fight. The whole time.
The rod snapped from use.
There was no other word for it. One moment it was crackling and the next the electricity released all at once, a full discharge that lit the room completely and the sound of it was in Slushly's teeth before he heard it. He threw himself sideways and felt the arc miss him by a distance he was not going to calculate after the fact because the number would be too small. The wall to his left had a new scorch mark.
Wyll was standing in the centre of the room.
The rod was still in his hand. Somehow. Impossibly. His grip had not released. But his arm was shaking—not the full-body violence of before, just a fine, deep tremor running from his shoulder to his fingertips.
Slushly heard Wyll whimper in pain softly, but he did not seem to notice.
"Drop the rod.”
"No," Wyll responded immediately. “Do you think I would drop this, just because you told me to?” He hissed.
"It just nearly took my head off."
"Then stand further away."
"Wyll—"
"This doesn't concern you."
"You are shaking," Slushly insisted, putting each word down separately. "You have a charred hand. That thing nearly electrocuted both of us. Drop the rod."
"I don't take instructions from—"
"Drop it next to you," Slushly said, and made himself take three deliberate steps back, putting distance between himself and Wyll. "Right there. I'm not going to take it—I'm out of ender pearls, I can't get away fast enough to make that worth it. Just put it down."
Wyll looked at him, layered with several emotions at once.
A long pause.
Wyll's hand opened.
The rod hit the ground between them, and the crackling stopped immediately, as though a switch had been flipped.
Wyll stepped back from it. His right arm came up against his chest, the damaged hand tucked close.
Slushly looked at him. Then he looked down at the rod on the ground, which was simply lying there now, entirely docile, not doing anything threatening.
Then he looked at Wyll's hand.
He reached into his inventory.
The health potion came out first—standard, nothing special—and then the bandages, the actual cloth ones he kept for the injuries that potions didn't quite reach on their own, and he tossed both across the space between them separately.
Wyll caught them both. His left hand was fast and certain; his right hand he didn't use.
He looked at the items in his hand. Then he looked at Slushly.
"These are laced," he deadpanned. "With something."
"You didn't see me lace them," Slushly pointed out.
A pause. "Fair enough," Wyll muttered, and uncorked the potion with his teeth.
The potion did what potions did—the visible tension in his shoulders dropping a fraction as the worst of the damage repaired itself. But the hand was still wrong. Still dark at the fingertips, still trailing the faint smell of something burned, and when Wyll set the empty bottle down and moved to address the bandages, the problem became immediately apparent.
You needed two hands to bandage one of them. It was a simple issue. He had his left hand, which was fine, and his right hand, which was what he was trying to wrap, and the math didn't work.
He tried twice but his right hand couldn't grip the bandage roll with enough control and his right hand couldn't wrap itself, and after the second try he stopped and stood there staring at it.
Slushly had been watching this with his arms crossed.
"I can—" he started.
"No." Wyll shut down the idea immediately.
"Your hand—"
"No."
"I'm aware you can hear that you're saying no to bandaging your own burned hand."
"I'm also aware of it," Wyll said. "I'm doing it anyway."
Slushly looked at him. Wyll looked at the bandages. The room was very quiet without the sound of the electricity, just the low, steady hum of the command block, which hadn't stopped this entire time, which Slushly had mostly tuned out but which he noticed now.
The silence stretched.
Slushly watched Wyll make the decision the same way he'd watched him make the decision to pick up the rod the second time—the same reluctant arrival at the same unwanted conclusion. Wyll's gaze moved from the bandages to the middle distance to, briefly, Slushly. Then away.
He moved his arm.
Not all the way. Not extended toward Slushly in anything that could be called offering. More like a shift in Wyll's body language—his right arm moving away from where it had been guarded against his chest, out into the space between them, a distance that required Slushly to come to him if he was going to do anything with it. And Wyll's gaze had gone to the ground. Specifically and deliberately to the ground, which he appeared to find fascinating.
Slushly unfolded his arms and crossed the space.
He took Wyll's hand carefully—or rather, he took Wyll's wrist, keeping his grip away from the damaged skin, tilting it toward the light to see what he was working with.
Wyll flinched.
Not from pain. Or not only from pain. It was a different quality—quicker, more total, the full-body startle of something that had not anticipated contact in this register. His arm pulled back a fraction before some other part of him registered intent and overrode the reflex. He didn't pull free. The arm stayed.
But the flinch had happened, and Slushly had felt it under his hands, and he didn’t comment.
Up close it was worse than it had looked from across the room. The burns were deepest at the fingertips and the palm, the places where the grip had been tightest, and they layered over older marks—fainter discolouration, things that had started to heal and then had the healing interrupted by the next instance of the same thing. Days of this. Days and he'd been fighting with it, and holding it.
Slushly said nothing about this. He picked up the bandages and began.
Wyll stayed very still. His gaze remained on the ground.
He worked slowly. Deliberately. His hands steady, his grip on Wyll's wrist careful, not pulling, not adjusting suddenly. He worked around the worst of the damage methodically, each layer set before the next.
Wyll stayed very still. His gaze remained fixed on the ground. His left hand had found his tail which originally was lashing and was holding it quietly, running his fingers on the smooth rubber casing.
The first time Slushly's fingers passed near the edge of a burn while rerouting the bandage, Wyll's breath caught. A small sound—barely an interruption—and his arm tensed under Slushly's hands, the muscles pulling taut, then releasing. He didn't move. Slushly adjusted his approach and didn't go near that area again without cause.
Wyll flinched twice more. Both times at moments of unexpected contact. Both times the same quality—the full-body startle of something encountering gentleness as an unfamiliar input, something its instincts didn't have a category for and therefore treated as a threat before other processing could catch up. Both times he caught himself. Both times the arm stayed.
Slushly did not think about what this meant. He kept working.
"The rod reacts to you specifically," he started, after a while. "Not to anyone else. Command block items don't do that to other people." He smoothed a layer flat.
Wyll said nothing.
Slushly kept working.
"The block bothers you just being near it," he continued. "I could see that from the dome before I dropped in. The way you were standing." He secured a layer and started the next. "Same origin. The block, Division. Made by the same people who built this server. That's why it reacts the way it does. Because it recognises where it came from."
A pause.
"And you came from the same place," Slushly murmured.
The arm under his hands went rigid.
"I don't know what you're implying," Wyll said slowly.
"I'm not implying anything," Slushly kept working. "I'm stating what I observed."
"You observed a command block item behaving unusually." The evenness in Wyll's voice was doing a lot of work, and Slushly would have believed it if he didn’t feel the tension of his arm. "That happens. They're unpredictable by nature.”
"It doesn't behave unusually with anyone else."
"It behaves differently with different people."
"Wyll—"
"What you saw was an unusual electrical discharge from an unstable item," Wyll snapped. "That's all. There's nothing further to read into it."
Slushly said nothing. He kept his hands steady on the bandaging and let the silence do what silence did.
It worked for about four seconds.
"I'm not—" Wyll started, and then stopped. The arm under Slushly's hands was still rigid. "Whatever conclusion you're building toward—"
"The port at the back of your neck," Slushly stated slowly, unsure where this would go, "The seam at your wrist. The tail.”
"You're describing things you've misinterpreted," Wyll said flatly, and the evenness was gone now, replaced with something more effortful, each word more deliberately placed than the last. "The port is—it's a modification. Cosmetic. Lots of people on this server have—there are mods—"
"Wyll," Slushly interjected.
The said man ignored him, continuing in his rambling, "—and the seam is from old armour damage, you can see that kind of scarring when the repair isn't— "
"Wyll."
"—and the tail is—that's not relevant to—" He stopped. The arm under Slushly's hands had begun to tremble slightly.
"You were made by this server's admins," Slushly said plainly. "The same people who made the command block and Division. That's why Division reacts. Same origin. It recognises you."
Silence.
Wyll's arm was still trembling. Slushly kept his hands steady around the wrist he was holding, maintaining the same careful contact he'd maintained throughout.
"That's—" Wyll started. His voice had lost its shape. He stopped. He tried again: "You don't—" Stopped again.
The command block hummed.
"You're an android, aren’t you?" Slushly assumed. "Made by whoever built this server."
A very long pause.
"I don't want to talk about it," Wyll muttered flatly.
"Okay," he hummed.
He kept working.
Slushly finished the final layer, checked the tension, and tied it off. He smoothed the edge down and held Wyll's wrist for a moment after before releasing it carefully and straightened up.
Wyll looked at his hand. At the bandaged hand, the wrapped wrist, all of it.
He looked at Slushly.
His expression was doing something complicated and not fully resolved.
Slushly glanced at Division on the floor. Lying there, no shimmer, no crackling, no protests.
"Why did you keep holding Division," Slushly asked after a moment’s silence. "After the first time it hurt you. Why not just stop?"
Wyll was quiet for a moment. "It's an advantage in battle. It’s worth it."
Wyll glanced at him, before sighing.
"You should go." he muttered.
"Yeah," Slushly agreed. He looked at Division. "Don't pick that up again tonight."
"You're not in a position to—"
"Don't pick it up tonight," Slushly insisted firmly, "Tomorrow, whatever you want. Tonight, leave it."
A long pause. Something in Wyll's expression moved and didn't fully resolve.
Slushly crossed to the exit, equipping his elytra, holding out his rockets.
"Wyll." he called.
Wyll was looking at the command block. He didn't turn. "What."
Slushly looked at him. At the set of his shoulders. At the bandaged hand. At Division, patient and silent on the floor.
"Nothing," he said. "Goodnight."
The sound of fireworks gently filled the air.