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Wifies had learnt to hate Jumper.
She was one of those faces that followed him, one of the ones he could imagine… taking apart. If he was ever given the power, to close his fist and yank out someone’s spine, Jumper would be one of those more satisfying to see collapse to the floor in agony.
Moments later, it was those thoughts that sent him bolting out of whatever room Parrot had allowed him in to find a quiet corner in which to throw up the food he was given.
They were being so nice to him. They’d accepted him, and Wifies knew he was lying to each and every one of them, but he couldn’t work out where the lie was. He didn’t know anything, and it made him sick, for Parrot to look at him like he knew a single thing about him.
So he ran, and Parrot triggered his collar, and Wifies remembered that if he was lying to these people, they probably fucking deserved it, because Parrot was a strange, strange boy who somehow no one saw straight through like Wifies could.
That was why he couldn’t run, now. He was gathering evidence on Parrot. Maybe that would make the others like him, or maybe it would be what made them decide to just kill him on sight. Except- no, they trusted him. It was just Parrot. Just Parrot, who could control Wifies’s consciousness with the push of a button.
Jumper, then was less of a threat. Wifies liked to think backwards, to trace the thread of his thoughts back to the starting point so he could assure himself he hadn’t forgotten something. Parrot was the one he needed to trust him, and yet he didn’t trust Parrot, so he needed a way to stab him in the back. And what better way than the person no one trusted, their resident aspiring psychologist who Wifies was certain would call any member of their little group the Director if she noticed any changes in their behaviour.
Jumper was an easy target, because Wifies knew she hated him back, and yet she was the kindest to him, out of everyone. Even Parrot could be cruel sometimes, to push Wifies off without a word, even when he was meant to be here to help. It was infuriating, to be caught on both side of the one-way glass at once.
Jumper was kind, and she was smart, and she was untrustworthy enough for Wifies to hopefully win her over. It would take effort, and secrecy, because Parrot had such an iron hold on these people. But he had confidence in himself.
Wifies sat next to Jumper, in their next meeting. Parrot was at the head of their coffee table, laptop open on his knees, and his eyes tracked Wifies all the way across the room as he walked to the floor, and sat cross-legged, the picture of innocence. He hadn’t even touched his collar. He was going nowhere, playing the perfect prisoner while he worked out why and how he was escaping.
He got Jumper’s attention. Almost perfect. Almost, because Parrot was looking, which meant he might already suspect something, even if there was nothing to suspect. Outside of the evidence in his own head, there was nothing to say Wifies wasn’t just seeking some friendship in his captivity.
When his and Parrot’s eyes met, Wifies made sure to remember to smile. Murderers didn’t smile. Or maybe they did. Wifies wouldn’t know either way, because he wasn’t a murderer.
“Alright, team.” Parrot lead the same way he always did. It was a signal, maybe, that Wifies should be consistent too, if he really wanted to prove himself to be on the good guys’ side. “Not much new intel. No one wants to talk to us, still, but, I have a lead on a health insurance agency that think their databases could have been hacked into.”
“Why health insurance?”
“People don’t want any terminal illnesses getting out to their family. Or debilitating ones to their employers.” Shrugging, Parrot met Wifies’s eyes, and smiled. “Some people just like their privacy.”
Good thing Wifies didn’t care for it. If Parrot was trying to make him feel pressured, or upset by his denial thereof, he wouldn’t cave to it. Parrot could watch him change and feed himself and pace as far as his collar would allow him and he wouldn’t care for an inch of it.
Parrot, after all, was nothing more than a story Wifies was trying to tell anew. His protagonist meant little, in the face of winning over his audience.
As Derapchu spoke up, misguided and as good a bait as any Wifies could make, to such an inconsolable genius as Parrot, he leaned his head back, playing the tamed, wayward puppy at Jumper’s heels. He didn’t try to smile. He knew Parrot had told him it looked grotesque, when he tried.
“Hey.”
“Hi there.” Jumper’s eyes were cold, her smile warm, and her teeth showed in a picture-perfect smile. “How’s it with the boy genius?”
“Oh, painful.”
More than she could ever know. Parrot was simultaneously everything and nothing to him. Wifies woke up, and he felt the man he answered to, and felt the inconsistency grate at his detective’s bones. It was galling, to feel as if he knew something of the schoolboy turned stalker, a hero in his own right, and not to be able to put a name to it. Something about Parrot… meant something to him.
“He really can’t keep you here much longer.” Jumper’s lips twisted, and either she was so far beyond Wifies’s abilities in creating her own emotions from nothing that she might as well be godlike, or her intelligence was masked by a genuine layer of simpering emotionality. “His father doesn’t like it. Thinks Parrot’s being too harsh on you.”
“It’s… for the greater good. I don’t know what don’t know.”
Jumper liked little tidbits like that. Wifies, in his more charitable moments, thought of her as an unpolished compass, a rusted spyglass. Her true purpose was concealed beneath decay, of a world that didn’t seem what she could be.
In his less charitable, Wifies found a strange revulsion in him, that she would pander to such an egotist as Parrot Craft, when he’d far rather she be the one to summon him to court than Parrot or his irritatingly manipulatable father.
Wifies really did hate people, who could be useful, and refused to make themselves so, or those that proved themselves to be at the moment they were needed least.
Jumper, however, could prove herself. If Wifies pulled this off just right.
“I… suppose. He can’t be wrong, he’s just being cautious.”
“He told me he doesn’t suspect me at all.” Wifies looked down, feigning shyness, feigning every inch of the bashful, endearing persona he’d played, barking for the bit and sitting at Parrot’s feet. “I’m just… the best suspect he still has.”
All true. All leaving out the part where Parrot had pointed the remote at him like a gun, and told Wifies in a low, furious voice, that just because he was innocent now didn’t mean he’d always been.
“He wha-“ Jumper caught herself, and glanced up, guiltily. She couldn’t be caught doubting their great leader, after all. “Ok. I… will need to talk to him.”
“It’s ok. He’s working hard, and I’m ok here.” Wifies toyed with the cuff of his own jeans, the same ones he’d worn this whole time. He didn’t have much of a taste for those Parrot offered him. “I’m not scared.”
If he was the Director, Wifies was sure Jumper would be the first to know. Then himself, then maybe Parrot.
“Still…”
Nothing put Jumper on a scent like someone trying to nudge her off it. She would be a ready recipient, if ever Wifies needed to style Parrot as the teenager driven mad by his own quest for the truth.
Wifies felt his lips twitch into a smile, as he deliberately let his attention be pulled back to Parrot, who was glaring at him like Wifies had personal chewed his over-polished school shoes while somehow left unsupervised.
He smiled a little more, just for the sake of Parrot’s disgust.
“That’s all for today. I have more questions for Wifies, privately.”
Parrot was so blind, when it came to walking into each and every pitfall Wifies laid behind his back. He had a habit of walking away from all his problems, after all.
And that should have been just the thing to cement Jumper’s suspicions, the easily-manipulated soul that she was. Perhaps she could be forgiven, for being either despicable or wasteful.
Leo was the one to nod, because for all he would start a fight with Parrot, he valued order above all. He would always defer to the higher power, which would do him no favours if Wifies managed to reveal that higher power was nothing more than a neurotic schoolboy.
Besides, Wifies had a pet theory that there was blackmail available on Leo, based on his body language on meeting the lesser-known of Parrot’s parents. Something to look into, at a later date. Out of Parrot’s sight.
There were many things Wifies would like to do, when Parrot stopped watching him.
He’d know when that happened, of course, because until it did, he was watching Parrot just as closely.
The filler characters filed out, and Wifies sat against his sofa, tracing patterns wth his fingertips down the line between two thin bamboo sticks. Parrot did like the modern-traditional look about this little base of operations. It showed some attachment to his culture, more than Wifies would have expected from the armchair detective—or bedroom detective, would be better.
Then again, Parrot was nothing more than a schoolboy, at heart, and one who’d never truly left home before. Wifies was the cultured one, between them, now tied down to this single country.
“…questions, Parrot-kun?”
Unlike Parrot with Wifies’s tastes, Wifies had taken the time to learn Parrot’s culture. He wouldn’t want to disrespect Derapchu-san, after all. Or Parrot’s parents, whose opinion he would value highly, as he sought to discredit their son.
“Drop it. What do you want with Jumper?”
Ah, so he had noticed. Wifies’s eyes traced the ceiling, then down the walls, then dripped onto Parrot, taking in every inch of the schoolboy, acting captor.
“A friend.”
“I thought I was your friend.”
“Then Parrot-kun overestimates himself.” With a wry smile, Wifies averted his gaze, but his attention lingered, watching in the corner of his eye. It was fun, to overact this role. To play unstably, tilting the board with every move. “I have plenty of ways to make friends.”
“Blackmail?”
“The Director uses that. And by our profile, he doesn’t really have friends.”
Parrot was easy to infuriate. Wifies glanced back, to check his own progress, and found thin spots of colour, lurking beneath Parrot’s skin. For all he maintained perfect skincare, and had the sun-weathered advantage of many family vacations, he blushed patchily.
It made Wifies’s heart sink, that such crude measures were necessary. He’d really like to be Parrot’s friend. And it was a thin, if convincing, lie. He wasn’t very good at making friends.
One of his nails made its way into his mouth, and Wifies was sure Parrot would like to see it as a claw. To see him as some sort of threat. But he wasn’t. Really, he wasn’t. The only way he was threatening Parrot was by threatening to prove him wrong.
Parrot narrowed his eyes, and Wifies’s own gaze landed, somehow, back on him. On his wrist, more specifically, that trigger that could send bursts of volts through his body, and he knew first hand were more than capable of rendering him in too much agony for thought.
Parrot was cruel, for giving Wifies such an easy out as announcing to the team that Parrot didn’t use it as he’d claimed. If anyone asked, their great detective would prosaically maintain it was solely to keep Wifies from leaving the base.
In private, when he used it at will, every press of that button was a reminder to Wifies that he could use this as all the evidence he’d ever need to knock Parrot from his pedestal, and he’d never use it. Because it was cheating, to use something Parrot had freely given him.
Because it would make him seem like the Director, to use knowledge of Parrot’s fetish for control against him. It was something other people might not even realise, but Parrot would, and he’d announce it without an ounce of shame—despite everything he otherwise maintained—that Wifies was far, far too smart and strange to throw a tantrum about something as simple as physical abuse. It would be solely to deny Parrot his fun.
Which would make him look very suspicious. Only to Parrot, but Parrot was convincing enough for it to spread like a disease.
Instead, electricity needled through him like swathes of cholera through a population, and Wifies yelped, nearly falling flat ton his face as he slipped off his backrest.
Parrot grabbed his collar and yanked him up and back, onto the sofa, much to Wifies’s chagrin. Parrot was rude, like that. Not at all the perfect son Craft-san seemed to see in him. Violent, and petty, and sadistic, and Wifies had so much to use against him, but for some reason he was still chasing for more.
For something that would truly break Parrot, maybe, for his family and friends to know. Sexual deviance, childishness, anger issues and control issues and self-confidence issues were all excusable. Wifies wanted to make Parrot look like a failure, and the best way to do that was to prove himself right.
So Wifies smiled, even if Parrot said it made him look like a ghoul, and let the schoolboy cool off, closing his eyes and pressing one hand over the, the other tugging at his hair until strands came loose.
“Parrot-kun should stop doing that to himself.”
“Protective.”
It was spat like a curse. Wifies would take the loss, only because it was true. Another similarity he’d never admit, but he could respect the care the Director had taken with Parrot’s wellbeing. The care they would take, if they ever got everything they wanted from Parrot.
Parrot was just one of those people Wifies could see himself living for. His own lifestyle was that of scattered papers and coffee cups, laptops left open and cork boards on every wall, but he could change that, for Parrot.
Oh, the things Parrot would never gouge out from Wifies’s head unless he killed him to reach in there himself. Which he’d never do, possessive man he was, more interested in Wifies alive and as a sounding board than a dead body to gloat over.
“Human decency.”
“Like you’d know what that is.”
“We do tend to hold the same philosophies.”
The smile had disappeared, somewhere along the way. Parrot was right, after all. It was always forced. This was Wifies’s true state, blank-eyed, all emotion tunnelling into Parrot’s cool drive. Immovable, meet unstoppable.
They were each folding something inside themselves, flipping it back and forth until it was hard to tell if they were truly empty or hiding. They both must look it, to the outside. But it was the traces, that defined them, that infinitesimal portion of their genome that told them apart from the rabble below, that made them so similar.
Wifies jolted, when Parrot shocked him. Not much. It shocked Parrot in return, made his jaw clench, but Wifies was let free from the posturing attempts at intimidation. Parrot was above such schoolboy tactics, anyway.
“Get up. That was everything.”
“What are we working on tonight?”
“Sleeping. Can you stop thinking about Jumper, or anything, if you concentrate on proving your innocence instead?”
Wifies slid off the sofa, landing on his feet and straightening, as Parrot glanced back at him. There was something earnest, in his young eyes. Something tired.
“We can find out? You’re being nice to me.”
“It’s not… kindness. Do you seriously think I want you to be him, Wifies?”
“I- don’t like to think I do know what you think, Parrot-kun.”
“I don’t. Someone has to be friends with us, and it might as well be each other.”