Chapter Text
He sits on my shoulder where you used to lean. A tiny, feathered monument to everything you abandoned
There was an old architecture to the way Wifies used to hold his shoulders.
It was a small thing.
The sort of microscopic detail you only notice when you have spent three years monitoring a man’s six o’clock, when you have memorized the specific, heavy thud of his iron-toed boots against the spruce planks of a shared base so well that you could identify his stride through a three-block-thick wall of cobblestone. The old Wifies had carried himself with a slight, forward-leaning hunch, a perpetual posture of curiosity, as if he were always half a second away from dropping to his knees to inspect the redstone dust ticking in the grass or to check the growth rate of a malfunctioning sugar cane patch. He had been a man made of small, clumsy angles and soft woolen sweaters that smelled permanently of gunpowder and damp earth.
The Director did not hunch.
The Director stood like a plumb line dropped from the ceiling of a cathedral, mercilessly straight, perfectly balanced, an iron rod disguised as a spine. When he walked, his heels never dragged. He moved with a terrifying, frictionless efficiency that made no sound at all until he was already standing behind you, the shadow of his high-collared coat falling across your workbench like an eclipse.
Parrot sat in the dark of his own redoubt, his back pressed against the cold, unyielding obsidian of the reinforcement wall, counting his own breaths. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. The breathing exercise was something an old server-hopper had told him once, three lifelines ago, back when the world was wide and the sky didn't feel like a lid closing over a box. It didn't work. It had never worked. The air in his lungs felt thin and metallic, like he was breathing through a copper pipe.
On the table three feet away lay a single piece of paper, illuminated by the dying, amber coal of a single redstone torch. It was an invoice. It was a manifesto. It was a death warrant.
It was written in a hand so perfectly neat, so utterly devoid of the sprawling, left-handed ink-smudges that used to ruin Wifies’ blueprints, that Parrot had spent the first ten minutes after its delivery simply running his thumb over the parchment, waiting for the ink to dissolve into something recognisable.
To the Citizens of the Eastern Sector:
Effective immediately, the distribution of iron ore and redstone repeaters will be centralised through the Primary Office. Non-compliance will be treated as an act of systemic destabilisation.
— The Director.
"Systemic destabilisation," Parrot whispered to the empty room. His voice sounded like dry leaves scraping across stone. "You used to call it 'hoarding the good stuff.' You used to giggle like a thief when we stole three stacks of iron from the community chest. You used to be a person."
The silence did not answer. The base around him felt less like a home and more like a beautifully constructed cage, every corner pregnant with the ghost of a friendship that had been dismantled with the clean, surgical precision of a pistons-and-observers trap.
He closed his eyes, and immediately the contradictions began their rhythmic, agonizing march through his skull.
Wifies used to love the rain. Parrot remembered an evening, six months ago? A year? The timeline of this world was a jagged thing, broken by resets and betrayals until it resembled a shattered mirror, when a thunderstorm had rolled over the plains. The rain had been loud, heavy, turning the dirt roads into soup. Wifies had thrown his iron helmet into the grass and stood in the middle of the field with his arms out, laughing until he choked, his hair plastered to his forehead, shouting about how the weather cleared the lag out of the server’s lungs.
The Director stays inside. Two weeks ago, during a lightning storm that shook the bedrock, Parrot had caught a glimpse of him through the tinted glass window of the high tower. The Director had been standing with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the lightning strike the lightning rods with a cold, analytical squint, his expression indistinguishable from a man watching sand pour through an hourglass. He hadn't even blinked when a bolt hit the parapet three feet from his face. He had simply adjusted the cuff of his dark coat and turned back to his ledger.
Wifies used to patch up Parrot’s wings after a rough fight. Parrot’s left wing twitched, the primary feathers rustling with a dry, hollow sound. There was a spot near the joint, a three-inch scar where an arrow had torn through the muscle during the first border skirmish, that still burned when the humidity rose. Wifies had sat him down on a chest, his hands shaking so violently he could barely hold the glistering melon slice, swearing softly under his breath as he pressed the healing paste into the wound.
‘Don’t die on me, birds,’ he had muttered, his voice thick with a terror so raw it had made Parrot feel safe. ‘If you die, I’m lighting this whole server on fire.’
The Director was the one who clipped them.
The memory brought a sudden, violent surge of nausea that forced Parrot to open his eyes, his breath hitching in his throat. It hadn't been a literal clipping, not with shears, not with iron blades, but it had been far worse. It had been the calculated removal of his sky. The Director had instituted the ceiling height restrictions. The Director had built the automated AA-turrets along the perimeter. The Director had looked Parrot dead in the eye during the assembly and said, "Flight is an administrative variable we can no longer afford to leave unmonitored."
No warmth. No trembling hands. Just the cool, grey eyes of a stranger who had stolen his best friend’s skin.
Parrot pulled his knees closer to his chest, burying his face in the coarse fabric of his trousers. The phantom pain in his wings was a low, dull throb, a constant reminder of the gravity he was now forced to live in. He was hyperventilating now, the four-count breath entirely forgotten as the room began to spin, the dark edges of his vision closing in until the redstone torch looked like a small, bleeding wound in the center of the world.
He couldn't stay here. The walls were breathing. The logs were listening. The entire base was an extension of the system Wifies had built, and if he stayed inside it for one more second, he was going to claw his own skin off just to see if there was still someone real underneath the feathers.
The night air was an iron fist against his face.
Parrot didn't remember opening the iron door. He didn't remember climbing the ladder or crossing the threshold of his own hidden trench. He only knew that he was running, his boots striking the frozen grass with a erratic, desperate rhythm that sounded like a dying pulse.
The sky above him was black and starless, choked out by the massive, floating basalt rings of The Director’s defensive grid. The grid hummed, a low, sixty-cycle vibration that lived inside the bones of Parrot’s jaw, a constant reminder that even out here, in the supposed wilderness between claims, he was still walking through the guts of a machine.
His lungs burned. The air was too cold, too sharp, cutting through his throat like broken glass. Every shadow was a figure in a long coat. Every rustle of the dark oak leaves was the sound of a clipboard turning, a pencil sketching out the coordinates of his execution.
He’s behind you, the dark whispered, the voice sounding horribly like his own, only cracked and ancient. He knows your sprint speed. He calculated your stamina bar three patches ago. He knows exactly how many blocks you can run before your legs give out.
"Get out," Parrot gasped, his foot catching on a protruding root. He stumbled, his wings flaring instinctively to catch his balance, but the wind caught the damaged feathers of his left wing and sent him spinning sideways into the dirt.
He hit the ground hard, the wind knocking out what little air he had left. He lay there in the mud, his cheek pressed against the cold earth, staring at a small patch of glow-lichen growing between two stones. His heart was a trapped bird, throwing itself against the cage of his ribs with such violence that he could feel it in his teeth.
The nightmare started before he even closed his eyes.
Suddenly, he wasn't on the grass anymore. He was back in the white room.
It was the dream that had hunted him every night for three weeks, the one that left him waking up with his sheets torn to ribbons and his throat raw from screaming. In the dream, the world was made of polished white quartz, endless, seamless, with no doors and no windows. There was only a single table in the center of the room, and on it sat an empty glass bottle and a feather.
And Wifies was there. But he wasn't Wifies, and he wasn't even quite The Director. He was a silhouette made of pure, white light, his face an empty void where his eyes should have been. He would stand over Parrot, his hands perfectly still at his sides, and he would begin to speak. Not in his voice, but in the sound of a thousand pistons firing in perfect unison.
‘We are optimising the infrastructure, Parrot,’ the machine-voice would say, while the white light grew so bright it burned through Parrot’s eyelids. ‘We are removing the friction. You are the friction. Your memory is a legacy system that no longer supports the current build. Please remain still while we update.’
And then the light would reach down, fingers made of white-hot iron, and begin to pull the feathers out of his back one by one, not with anger, but with the casual, detached indifference of a farmer plucking a chicken for market.
"Stop," Parrot choked out into the mud, his fingers clawing into the dirt, tearing up chunks of moss and cold soil. "Stop, please, just, Wifies, please, I don't want to play anymore. Let’s just go back to the spawn island. Let’s just build the stupid house by the river."
But there was no river. There was only the hum of the basalt rings and the distant, mechanical clack of a skeleton’s bow somewhere in the dark oak forest.
He forced himself up onto his hands and knees, his body shaking so violently that his elbows kept locking and clicking. He was in a fugue state, his brain entirely uncoupled from his surroundings, his vision blurred by tears and the thick, oily sheen of panic. He didn't know where he was on the map. He had lost his compass three days ago during a frantic flight from a scouting drone, and his coordinates were a jumble of meaningless numbers shifting behind his eyes.
He needed a door. Any door. He needed a ceiling that wasn't made of Wifies’ glass and walls that hadn't been mapped by Wifies’ redstone.
He dragged himself to his feet, his left wing dragging behind him like a broken sail, and stumbled forward through the trees. He was blind, deafened by the roar of his own blood, running entirely on the ancient, animal instinct that tells a dying creature to find a small, dark hole to hide in before the crows find it.
The forest gave way to a cleared valley, a patch of land that smelled faintly of sugar cane and baked clay. Through the mist, a light appeared. It wasn't the harsh, blue-white glare of a sea lantern that The Director favored; it was the soft, yellow, flickering light of a standard wooden torch, stuck carelessly into a fence post.
Parrot didn't look at the banners. He didn't look at the build style. He didn't care if it belonged to an enemy, a stranger, or the devil himself.
He threw his weight against the heavy dark oak door, his fists striking the wood in a ragged, chaotic rhythm, before his knees finally gave out completely and he slid down the doorframe into a shivering, pathetic heap on the porch.
Inside the house, Wemmbu had been having a perfectly quiet evening.
He had been sitting at his small kitchen table, a single iron ingot in one hand and a piece of sandpaper in the other, slowly working the rust off the edge of an old shield. It was tedious work, the sort of low-stakes, domestic chore that kept his mind from wandering too close to the borders of the server where the big houses were being built and the big names were drawing lines in the dirt. Wemmbu liked the quiet. He liked the fact that his house was small, that his roof leaked slightly when it rained from the east, and that his name was rarely mentioned in the long, angry manifestos that appeared on the community boards every Tuesday morning.
Then came the noise at the door.
It wasn't a knock. A knock had intention; a knock had rhythm. This was the sound of a sack of potatoes being dropped from a high ledge, followed by a frantic, scratching scramble against the wood that sounded horribly like a wolf trying to escape a bear.
Wemmbu set the shield down with a low click. His hand went instinctively to the iron sword leaning against the table legs, his fingers wrapping around the leather grip. He didn't want a fight, he never wanted a fight, but you didn't live on the Unstable SMP without learning that things coming out of the woods at midnight rarely wanted to talk about their feelings.
He stood up, his boots quiet against the smooth stone floor, and approached the door. "Who’s out there?" he called out, his voice level, carrying that flat, unbothered cadence that usually made people think twice about trying to rattle him.
No answer. Only a wet, choked sound from the bottom of the frame, like someone trying to clear their throat through a mouthful of water.
Wemmbu frowned. He shifted his grip on the sword, slid the iron bolt back with a sharp clack, and pulled the door inward.
The weight fell instantly.
If Wemmbu hadn't stepped back, the shape would have dropped directly onto his feet. Instead, it collapsed across his threshold, a tangle of green fabric, dark feathers, and limbs that were shaking so hard they looked like they were vibrating.
Wemmbu dropped the sword. It hit the floor with a loud, metallic clatter, but he didn't even notice. He was already on his knees, his hands hovering over the shape, his eyes wide as they adjusted to the dim light of the porch torch.
"Parrot?"
The name felt heavy in his mouth, entirely wrong for the creature lying before him. Parrot was the server’s shadow-man. Parrot was the guy who lived in the rafters, who watched everyone from three hundred blocks up with a spyglass and an enchanted bow, who moved through the politics of the world with the cool, untouchable arrogance of someone who knew he could out-fly his problems.
The man on the floor was not untouchable. He was covered in black forest mud, his green cloak torn along the seam until the white wool padding underneath was showing through like raw flesh. His left wing was twisted at an ugly, unnatural angle under his body, several of the primary feathers snapped off at the quill, oozing a dark, sluggish fluid that didn't look entirely like blood.
"Hey, hey, look at me," Wemmbu said, his voice dropping an octave, losing its caution and replacing it with a sudden, sharp focus. He reached out, his large, calloused hands catching Parrot by the shoulders to stop him from thrashing against the floorboards. "Parrot. Stop. You're at my place. You're at the valley base. Look at me."
Parrot’s head snapped up, but his eyes were completely blown out, the pupils so large the dark iris had swallowed the color entirely. He looked right through Wemmbu, his teeth chattering with a sound like dice shaking in a cup.
"He's... he's got the coordinates," Parrot rattled, his fingers digging into the fabric of Wemmbu’s sleeves with a grip that felt like iron pincers. "He’s got the... the repeaters are centralized, Wemmbu, he’s going to- he’s going to turn off the sky. He told me. He told me in the room. The white room. He’s plucking them out, one by one, he’s-"
"Parrot, shut up," Wemmbu said, not unkindly, but with a heavy, grounding weight that cut through the frantic stream of words like a knife through thread. "You're rambling. You're having a panic attack. Breathe. Look at my hand."
Wemmbu took one of Parrot’s trembling hands and pressed it flat against his own chest, right over the heavy, slow beat of his heart. "Right there. Follow that. In. Out. Stop looking at the woods."
"He's coming," Parrot wept, his forehead dropping onto Wemmbu’s shoulder, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps that smelled of ozone and old terror. "Wifies is coming. He’s going to find me here. He’s going to optimise you, Wemmbu. He’s going to make you straight. He hates the angles. He hates the—"
"Wifies isn't within five miles of this valley," Wemmbu said, his voice hard as cobblestone now, his eyes scanning the dark treeline over Parrot’s head just to be sure. The forest was quiet. The hum of the rings was distant here, muffled by the ridge of the mountains. "And if he comes here, he’s going to find out that my door doesn't open for The Director. Come on. Get your feet under you. I’m not leaving you on the porch like a dead chicken."
It took three attempts to get Parrot off the floor. The avian’s legs were like water, completely useless, his wings trailing behind him like heavy, wet blankets as Wemmbu practically hoisted him by the armpits and dragged him into the warmth of the cabin.
Wemmbu kicked the door shut with his heel, threw the heavy iron bolt back into place, and for the first time in three weeks, Parrot heard a sound that didn't carry an echo.
The kitchen smelled of dried sage, old leather, and the sweet, burnt smell of the tallow candle burning down on the windowsill. It was a small room, six blocks by six, with a low ceiling made of dark oak slabs that felt incredibly heavy, but in a way that felt like a shield rather than a lid.
Wemmbu deposited Parrot into the heavy wooden armchair near the hearth. The chair was wide, built for someone with a larger frame, and Parrot seemed to disappear into it, his green cloak wrapping around him until he looked like a broken bird stuffed into a basket.
He was still shaking, though the violent thrashing had subsided into a low, rhythmic shudder that took over his body every four or five seconds. His eyes were fixed on the iron sword lying on the floor where Wemmbu had dropped it.
Wemmbu didn't say anything for a long time. He moved around the kitchen with a slow, deliberate domesticity that was entirely foreign to Parrot’s world. He picked up the sword and set it back against the wall. He walked to the chest in the corner, pulled out a clean white towel and a wooden bowl, and filled it with warm water from the pot sitting on the hearth’s edge.
He didn't ask questions. He didn't ask what Parrot had been doing in the woods, or what Wifies had done, or why the server's primary enforcer looked like he had been dragged through a gravel crusher. He just brought the bowl over and sat down on a low stool in front of the chair.
"Give me your hand," Wemmbu said.
Parrot pulled his arms in closer to his chest, his feathers flaring in a weak, defensive posture. "Don't touch the wings," he whispered, his voice cracking on the final word. "Please. Don't."
"I'm not touching the wings," Wemmbu said patiently. "I'm touching your hands. They're covered in mud and you're bleeding from your knuckles. Give 'em here."
Slowly, with an agony that had nothing to do with physical pain, Parrot extended his right hand. His knuckles were raw, scraped down to the pink skin from where he had been clawing at the roots in the forest.
Wemmbu took the hand. His skin was rough, the skin of a builder, someone who spent his days handling stone and rough timber, but his touch was incredibly light. He dipped the towel into the warm water and began to wipe away the dark mud, his movements rhythmic and steady.
"He used to have ink on his thumb," Parrot said suddenly. The words came out without his permission, a sudden, erratic leak from the dam that had broken inside his head.
Wemmbu didn't look up from his scrubbing. "Who did?"
"Wifies. When he was working on the sorting system. He’d get so frustrated because the signs would smudge if he wrote them too fast. He’d spend twenty minutes trying to scrape the black ink out from under his fingernails with a flint shard." Parrot let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob, his head falling back against the wooden slats of the chair.
"The Director doesn't use ink. He uses the system interface. His hands are completely clean, Wemmbu. I looked at them during the meeting. Not a single spot. Not a scratch. Like he’s never touched a block of stone in his entire life."
"Sounds convenient," Wemmbu murmured, turning Parrot’s hand over to clean the palm. "Less laundry to do."
"It's not convenient!" Parrot shouted, his voice exploding into the small room with a violence that made the candle flame flicker. He pulled his hand out of Wemmbu’s grip, his chest heaving as he stared at the builder with a wild, accusatory glare. "It’s wrong! Don't you see it? It's like someone took him apart and put him back together with half the pieces missing! The pieces that made him; him. The pieces that made him stop when I asked him to. He doesn't stop anymore, Wemmbu. You haven't seen his eyes."
With a shaky breath, Parrot shrugged, exhaling a sigh that was more of a trembling, watery laugh. "Was he real? Tell me he was. Tell me you see it, too."
Wemmbu set the towel down in the bowl. The water was a murky, dark brown now. He looked at Parrot, really looked at him, with those calm, green eyes that didn't have any redstone in them, didn't have any mandates or grand designs.
"I see it," Wemmbu said quietly.
"Then why aren't you running?" Parrot rasped, his voice dropping into a desperate whisper. "Why aren't you building walls? He’s going to come for this valley eventually. He’s going to look at your little farm and your little house and he’s going to say it’s an inefficient use of the chunk space. He’s going to take it, Wemmbu."
"Let him try," Wemmbu said. There was no bravado in it. It was the simple, factual statement of a man who knew exactly how many obsidian blocks it took to fill a trench and how many iron doors it took to stop a piston. "This isn't his chunk. It’s mine. And until he comes down here himself with an administrative command, it stays mine. Now give me your other hand."
Parrot stared at him, his mouth opening slightly, completely disarmed by the total lack of panic in the room. In Parrot’s world, every conversation for the last month had been an exercise in hypervigilance, every word weighed for hidden meanings, every ally suspected of secretly carrying a comm-link to the high tower.
But Wemmbu just sat there on his little stool, waiting with a dirty towel, looking like the most boring, predictable, and incredibly safe thing on the entire face of the earth.
Slowly, the second hand came out.
An hour later, the fire had burned down to a low, crimson glow that cast long, soft shadows across the floorboards.
Parrot had stayed in the chair. He had stopped shaking, though his body still felt incredibly heavy, as if his bones had been replaced with lead pipe. Wemmbu had disappeared into the back room for ten minutes and returned with a large, heavy blanket made of thick grey wool that smelled faintly of sweetgrass. He had thrown it over Parrot’s shoulders without a word, taking care to drape it loosely over the damaged wing so it wouldn't press against the broken quills.
Now, Wemmbu was back at the table, a fresh mug of chicory tea sitting between them. He had pushed the shield aside, recognizing that the domestic illusion was over for the night.
"You can't go back there," Wemmbu said, his voice flat, staring into the dark amber depths of his mug.
Parrot was holding his own mug with both hands, using the warmth of the clay to keep his fingers from stiffening up again. "I have to. My stuff is there. My gear—"
"Your gear is just iron and netherite, Parrot. You can mine more iron. You can find more ancient debris." Wemmbu looked up, his expression hard under the firelight. "You go back to that trench, and you’re going to wake up one morning with a redstone line running under your bed and a sign on your door telling you your chunk has been reclaimed by the management. You're losing your mind out there."
"I'm not losing my mind," Parrot said defensively, though his voice lacked any real conviction. "I'm just... I'm tired, Wemmbu. I haven't slept more than two hours a night since the reveal. Every time I close my eyes, I’m back in that room. I can hear the pistons."
"That is losing your mind," Wemmbu pointed out, his tone dry, almost blunt. It wasn't the gentle, coddling tone that people usually used when someone was breaking down, and strangely, that was exactly why Parrot didn't flinch. It felt honest. It felt like an actual diagnosis rather than pity. "You’ve got the shakes so bad you can’t even hold a spoon right. You look like you’re about three days away from jumping into the void just to see if it’s quieter down there."
Parrot flinched slightly, his fingers tightening around the clay mug until his knuckles turned white again. "He was my best friend, Wemmbu. We built the first iron farm together. We spent four hours trapped in a cave during the first week because neither of us brought wood for torches, and we just... we just sat there in the dark and talked about what we wanted the server to look like. He wanted it to be a place where everyone had a garden. He said he was tired of servers where everything was just concrete and redstone."
Parrot looked down, a single tear escaping his eye and dropping into the tea with a small, clean plop.
"He built the concrete factory three days ago," Parrot whispered. "He paved over the garden at spawn. He said the grass was causing entity lag."
Wemmbu let out a long, slow breath through his nose. He leaned back in his chair, his arms crossing over his chest. "People change, Parrot. Sometimes they change because they get scared. Sometimes they change because someone gives them a crown and they realise they like the way it fits."
"But it's Wifies," Parrot insisted, his voice rising again, desperate for Wemmbu to understand the sheer, impossible wrongness of it.
"It's not some stranger. It's the guy who used to lose his boots in the mud. How do you just... how do you just delete that part of yourself? How do you look at the person who helped you build your first base and see an 'administrative variable'?"
"You don't delete it," Wemmbu said softly. "You just bury it under enough iron that you don't have to look at it anymore."
Silence fell over the cabin again, heavy, thick, but no longer terrifying. The hum of the basalt rings seemed to have finally faded into the background, drowned out by the steady, rhythmic clicking of the cooling embers in the hearth.
Parrot took a small sip of the tea. It was bitter, tasting more of roots than leaves, but it was hot, and it felt like a small, solid anchor dropping down into the hollow space inside his stomach. He looked across the table at Wemmbu, at the simple brown shirt, the dirt under his fingernails, the total absence of any title or uniform.
Wemmbu was the last person anyone on the server would have expected him to find. They had never been close; they had moved in entirely different circles. Parrot had been the soldier, the elite, the man who lived in the high sky of the politics; Wemmbu had been the guy who stayed in the dirt, who built the walls that keep the monsters out and didn't ask for a thank you note.
But as Parrot looked at him, he realized that the dirt was the only place left on the entire server that wasn't made of Wifies’ polished quartz.
"Can I stay?" Parrot asked, the words so small they barely carried across the three feet of space between them. "Just... just until the wings heal? Just until I can sleep without the pistons?"
Wemmbu looked at him for a long, quiet moment. He didn't smile. He didn't offer a grand speech about alliance or brotherhood. He just stood up, picked up his empty mug, and walked over to the sink.
"The bed in the loft has a down mattress," Wemmbu said over his shoulder, his voice level and steady as the mountain roots. "The roof leaks a little if the wind comes from the east, but the blankets are dry. Go upstairs, Parrot. Stop trying to save the ghost. Let him be dead. Save yourself instead."
Parrot didn't move for a long time. He sat in the large wooden chair, wrapped in the heavy wool blanket, watching the very last ember in the hearth turn from red to grey.
He didn't know if he would sleep. He didn't know if the white room was waiting for him the second he closed his eyes. But as he finally stood up, his legs trembling but holding, he knew that the door downstairs was bolted with iron, and for tonight, that was enough.