Work Text:
They have a house made of cherry wood. It sits silently by the calm lake, breeze rippling the surface of the water. There’s a handmade dock, shabby, never-used boats sitting inside. There’s a little carrot farm.
All the makings of a good base. It is anything but.
Late nights, Parrot will stare up at the pink ceiling unseeingly. All he can see is a tiny droplet of blood from Wifies’ shoulder where he was clipped by the fishing rod soaking into the snow, turning it from white to pink.
They share this house, the two of them. Parrot hates it. Wifies loves it. Or - no, the Director loves it. Wifies and the Director are two different people. He tries to keep them separate in his head, tries to keep the image of his best friend laughing under the sun separate from the image of an invisible person cocking their head while their mechanical voice grated into his ears.
Still, once in a while, the Director will do something so distinctly human and Wifies that the boundaries become muddied, blurred. He can’t - would never, not even if the world ended - kill Wifies, so he can’t kill the Director.
He can, however, do this. He can slip flint against steel and watch sparks fly and blazes of red-hot fire emerge. He can burn the whole cherry grove down. He can do this. He feels in control. He is not. Click, click, click, the flint and steel rings merrily, singing out his revenge.
Click. A cherry petal blazes away, leaving only soot and ash behind in a matter of seconds. It feels good. It feels freeing, like he’s finally in control of something for once in his life. (It feels terrible. It feels like betraying Wifies.)
Click. The pillar buttressing their house goes up in flames. He watches with satisfaction as the house burns and burns and burns, finally letting some of the anger-grief-guilt that’s been broiling away in his stomach out.
Click. He tramples on carrots heedlessly, burning the ground just to make sure nothing will grow there ever again. In a smart move, (it’s hard to be smart when you feel like you’re actively dying, but he manages it) he grabs the little bottle of salt from the collapsing house and scatters white on the ground. He lays it so thickly that it starts to remind him of snow, and that’s when he drops the almost-empty bottle on the ground and runs away.
Runs away to where? To the obsidian walls? To greener pastures, clearer skies, brighter days?
He can’t run away. Some part of him will always be stuck in Paragon. Some part of him died, was buried in the rubble with Wifies and the Director. He’s never getting that part of him back.
Maybe it’s okay, though, because he has a new friend to help him fill in the gaps with something better.