Work Text:
Eggchan is halfway through writing if the one is, it cannot be many when the door opens.
It’s almost funny, in the bleak, cosmic-joke way things tend to be funny around here, because Egg is pretty sure his current living arrangement makes a pretty compelling argument for the one, actually. He pauses with the quill still pressed to the page, ink pooling under the tip, and listens to the scrape of armored boots against the stone floor as they enter the room.
Egg does not turn around immediately. He finishes writing the line instead, because he is a prisoner of refined taste; a scholar of philosophical pursuits. Behind him, a boot taps once against the floor, stops, then taps again, its owner clearly losing a private battle against patience.
“Bro,” he says, still writing, “if this is another interrogation, I have to say, the hospitality here is getting repetitive.”
“Egg,” says a familiar voice.
Egg turns in his chair.
Wemmbu is standing beside Arachn1d in the doorway, alive and armored and streaked with the kind of battle-grime that says he did not have a fun day at the beach. His long purple hair is still tied in a high ponytail, but pieces of it have come loose around his face. There’s soot on one cheek, a dark smear across his jaw, and something dried along the edge of his sleeve that Egg does not look at for too long.
His eyes find him instantly. He looks exhausted and wound tight, caught somewhere between relief and something Egg does not know how to name yet.
Arachn1d steps forward, hands folded behind his back. His attention briefly shifts to the guards stationed in the room. “Leave.”
The guards obey at once, filing out past him with their heads slightly bowed. Their footsteps fade until the room settles into the kind of silence that gives important people a chance to say important things. Egg keeps his posture loose, one elbow resting on the desk, the picture of calm scholarly captivity.
“You’re free to go,” Arachn1d says simply.
“Oh,” Egg says. “Sick. I was starting to run out of philosophers.”
He waits for the hidden clause tucked somewhere under all that generosity, but it never comes. Arachn1d only glances toward Wemmbu and nods.
Something twists unpleasantly in his stomach, though he does not know why. Across the room, Wemmbu nods slowly in return. He looks like he has been awake for three days and is running entirely on spite, adrenaline, and whatever deeply unhealthy emotion keeps his hands flexing at his sides, ready for a fight nobody has started.
Finally, Arachn1d turns toward the door. “I’ll see you around, Eggchan.”
Egg waits until he can no longer hear footsteps before he speaks. After days of nothing but guards, books, and his own slowly decaying patience, it feels almost luxurious to have someone worth complaining to.
“So,” he drawls. “That guy sucks. I was, like, three days away from naming the furniture.”
Wemmbu makes a choked sound that could almost count as a laugh, then crosses the room in three fast steps and drops face-first onto the bed.
The bed, Egg would like to note, is technically very nice. It’s unnecessarily large, dressed in dark sheets, and framed by carved posts dramatic enough to suggest someone spent a lot of diamonds on the gothic kidnapping suite experience. Wemmbu ruins the aesthetic immediately by flopping on top of it with all the grace of a body thrown from a balcony.
“Ugh,” Wemmbu groans into the blanket. “I need a nap.”
Egg turns fully in his chair to stare at him. His wings give a thoughtful little flutter.
“Cool,” Egg says. “Before you do that, can we leave?”
His friend does not answer. He shifts onto his side, facing away, and curls up slightly with one hand tucked under his cheek.
Egg watches him for a second longer, waiting for the part where Wemmbu gets up again, or laughs, or complains, or does literally anything.
“I know you can hear me, bro.”
Wemmbu is quiet for a long time, which is usually the first sign he is about to say something that will damage Egg’s faith in the universe. Then he rolls onto his back, dragging one of the pillows closer to his chest, and says, “I was thinking…”
“That’s dangerous,” Egg quips.
“Shut up!” Wemmbu snaps, but there’s no bite to it. He throws the pillow directly at Egg’s face.
Egg fails to catch it. This is devastating for his reputation, but in his defense, he was busy being intellectually superior.
His friend is sitting upright now, hair falling loose over one shoulder. His fingers dig into the blanket. “What if we stayed here for a bit?”
Egg lowers the pillow into his lap. “Bro, I have been entertaining myself with ancient philosophy and staring at the walls. You want to stay here?”
Wemmbu looks away for half a second, which is already suspicious. Wemmbu is many things, but subtle is not usually one of them, and the expression on his face has the frantic, overworked quality of someone trying to choose between three terrible explanations and realizing none of them sound good out loud.
“Yeah,” Wemmbu says, awkwardly. “Just until the war is over, y’know? I mean, it’s pretty safe here. Super fortified, lots of guards, big underground civilization thing going on.”
There is a lot in that sentence. Egg starts at the end and works backwards, because if he starts at the beginning, he has to deal with the word war, and he is not emotionally prepared to find out he missed a whole international incident because he was in forced philosopher jail.
“Bro, you hate civilizations.”
“I don’t hate civilizations. I hate being in them.”
“That’s literally the same thing.”
“This one is different,” his friend argues, which is such an obvious lie that Egg almost respects it. “I have a title. And I can go wherever I want.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And it’s underground, which is bad for elytra-macing, obviously, don’t get me wrong, like, the terrain here is actually dogshit for anything fun.” Wemmbu gestures vaguely at the walls, the ceiling, maybe the entire concept of subterranean architecture. “But it’s safe.”
Egg knows what his friend sounds like when he is lying to other people. More importantly, he knows what he sounds like when he is lying to himself.
Wemmbu does not like safe. He likes high ground and speed and awful angles and turning every fight into a vertical physics problem no sane person would willingly enter. He likes being able to launch himself into the sky and go wherever he pleases. He likes freedom.
He drags a hand over his face. “It’s kind of a mess on the surface. Even if we leave, we’d probably have a hard time finding food.”
“Why would we have a hard time finding food?”
Wemmbu conveniently skips over the question. “Also, I have a mansion now. I can ask Arachn1d to let you move in with me—”
“Huh?”
“—even though you’re not royalty, it should be fine, probably. I mean, I don’t see why he’d care. Jaden is here too, so that’s cool. Oh, and we met someone named Codmaster. You’ll probably get along with him.”
Wemmbu laughs, but Egg knows what his laugh is supposed to sound like, and this isn’t it.
“This place sucks, bro,” Egg says, finally. “I don’t want to stay here.”
Wemmbu blinks at him, as if this answer was somehow not what he expected. “Why not?”
Egg stares at him. “Seriously?”
“Yeah,” Wemmbu scoffs, defensive already. “I literally just explained. It’s safe here, and I have a place, and you wouldn’t have to be in this room anymore. You could go fishing or whatever.”
“Fishing or whatever…”
“You know what I mean.”
“I really don’t, actually.” Egg folds his hands on top of the pillow, deliberately patient, because one of them has to pretend this is a reasonable conversation. “Because from where I’m sitting, your plan is to move me from one prison to another.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” Wemmbu hisses.
“It is, bro.”
“No, it isn’t.” Wemmbu pushes himself upright and steps closer. “I’m saying we stay here until things calm down. Parrot’s not just gonna let Highwater go. People are gonna retaliate. People always retaliate, because apparently nobody on this server has hobbies.”
“Highwater?” Egg tilts his head. “What happened at Highwater?”
Wemmbu’s shoulders go tight. His eyes flick away, and Egg knows immediately that whatever answer is coming will be terrible.
“It’s not like I did it for fun—” Wemmbu starts, then cuts himself off. “It was a battle. Things happen in battles.”
“Did you blow up my favourite fishing spot, bro?”
Wemmbu frowns. “That’s what you’re worried about?”
No, obviously. It’s not. Highwater City was nice, sure. Great fishing spot. Usually a low-to-moderate chance of somebody trying to murder him while he cast his line, which made it one of the better places on the server by default. But Wemmbu should know that is not what he’s asking.
Wemmbu should know because, on any other day, he would have made some stupid comment about improving the water feature with tactical explosions. He would have grinned, or deflected, or gotten loudly offended on behalf of his own property damage. He would have sounded like Wemmbu, at least.
Instead, his friend looks at him like the question is another accusation.
Wemmbu turns away, dragging both hands through his hair hard enough to pull strands loose from the ponytail. He looks like he wants to hit something. He looks like he wants someone to swing first so he can stop thinking and start doing what he’s good at.
“This is what I mean,” Wemmbu’s voice rises before he seems to notice. “Everything is chaos up there. You don’t know what it’s been like.”
“I know what it’s like to get transferred from one obsidian box to another,” Egg says, bluntly.
Wemmbu lets out a short, humorless laugh. “Yeah. I know.”
“Do you?”
Wemmbu turns back toward him, eyes bright with something too tired to be anger and too angry to be anything else. “What do you want me to say? That it sucked? That I hated it? That every time I found out where you were, somebody moved you again, or put another wall between us, or made it very clear what would happen if I messed up?”
He keeps going, the words spilling faster now. “I did everything right, or I tried to, and it still kept happening. I’d get close, and then you’d be somewhere else. I’d win one fight, and there’d be another one behind it. So yeah, maybe I don’t want to run around all over the server looking for you again because you keep getting kidnapped.”
There it is, then.
Egg is good at noticing things. That’s kind of his whole deal. But there are some things he has maybe been looking at sideways, because looking directly at his best friend’s fear feels weirdly worse than being the reason for it.
“Sorry,” Wemmbu says quickly. He’s staring at the floor now, fingers curled tight at his sides. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean, like…” He swallows. “At least you’re safe here. And we can be together.”
Egg hates that this works on him.
Not enough to make the room stop feeling like a cage. But a little, because Wemmbu says together like it is the only word in the sentence he actually trusts, and Egg is tired too.
Egg taps his thumb once against his knuckles. He’s quiet for a long time. Then, he asks, “Just until the war is over?”
Wemmbu looks back at him. For a heartbeat, something like relief moves across his face so fast Egg almost misses it. Then his friend smiles brightly at him, fake enough to make Egg’s stomach hurt.
“Yeah,” Wemmbu says. “Then we can leave.”
“…Okay,” Egg mumbles.
Wemmbu’s whole body sags at once.
“Great!” he says, too loud. “I’ll go talk to Arachn1d, then I’ll show you to the mansion.”
“Right now?”
“Yeah, right now. I mean, I should probably get it handled before he gets busy doing, uh, important stuff or whatever.” Wemmbu is already moving toward the door, energy snapping back into him in the worst possible way. “Don’t go anywhere.”
Egg looks around the windowless room.
“Damn,” he says. “There goes my plan.”
Wemmbu huffs a laugh, but he doesn’t turn around. His hand lands on the door handle, pauses there for a second, and then he looks back. His expression is painfully soft. “I’ll be right back.”
Egg nods. “Okay.”
The door shuts behind him.
Egg sits there with his hands folded in his lap, staring at the place where Wemmbu stood. The room is quiet again. The ink on his desk is drying. His unfinished translation waits patiently on the page, all that nonsense about the one and the many, about what something is and is not, about whether a thing can change and still be itself.
Egg stares at nothing.
Then, very slowly, he looks toward the door.