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On reflection, Parrot was beginning to realise that he’d never seen Spoke.
Spoke was normally moving, for one. Practically vibrating, the bundle of shadowy energy that he was, his physical form occasionally dissolving into wisps of darkness in his overflowing excitement. He bounced around, he gestured, he obscured his own body and caught Parrot’s attention with cheap tricks and lofty proclamations.
Secondly, they never seemed to be on the same side. Not even different ones, exactly, just… worlds apart. Spoke was a world away from him, on a different plane, a different level of operation.
Parrot had never really noted it. He’d hardly had a break, not since long, long before now. And nor was this, so it was no reason on its own to start now.
No, his sudden fascination with Spoke could be excused by nothing other than his own terror and guilt.
Because, in all the years he’d known Spoke, in all the time he’d stared him down and been on the receiving end of his dark whirlwind, Parrot had never noticed how his eyes, milky white, could show emotion, after all.
It was an easy assumption to make, that voidlings couldn’t express emotion. They had no pupils, no real facial features they were construct out of their stock of shadows. It was why Spoke moved so much, channeling improvised body language into everything he did.
But Spoke’s eyes were wide, pure white at the centre and fading at the edges, and Parrot realised that they held no messages themselves, but he could see through, and see the dizzying effect this world had wreaked on his first friend.
Spoke looked deranged. Unsettled, unhinged, unstable, and a laugh would have formed, if the all-consuming emptiness inside the void monster wasn’t looking out of those milky eyes, craning out towards him as Spoke reached for Parrot’s face.
Spoke was made of shadows, and for the first time, Parrot was looking through the single gap in his armour, gazing in horror at the nothing within. Spoke was a shell of darkness, guarding an empty core of blankness.
Perhaps there had used to be something. Perhaps Parrot didn’t want to know.
Perhaps he wanted to be anywhere, anywhere away from Spoke, reaching towards him like he’d never seen a real person before.
“Spoke, b- bro-“
Parrot choked off, his voice strangled, his back aching where the sharp edge of the low wall he was pressed against cut in. He wasn’t sure what to do with the instinctive, visceral, avian fear inside him, scratching at his heart as his claws itched to lash out.
He couldn’t. It was Spoke. His bird brain told him to claw his way out of the imposing threat, and his memory told him he’d failed Spoke enough, and he wouldn’t…
Well, he couldn’t do anything anyway. Touch Spoke, and these thousand shadow-guards would be on him, before Parrot could muster up the time to be paranoid of every flicker of darkness.
He was helpless. Yet, still restraining himself, as Spoke’s smoky fingers made contact with his cheek, touching as if in wonder. Parrot could see straight through those wide, vulnerable eyes, straight through Spoke’s body, nothing but white emptiness.
“Parrot…”
The giggle cut through the background noise of the Nether, and straight through Parrot’s fragile-feeling skin. The blade of it settled near his heart, making him shiver with how close it felt to his jugular, where Spoke’s sightless gaze was coming to rest.
“What- whatcha looking for, bro?”
There was no speaking normally, when that razor-sharp knife of Spoke’s undivided attention was held so close to his vital organs. Parrot felt every vibration of his throat, every roll of heat against his feathers, a thin protection against the inhospitability of this place.
“I’ve missed you.” Spoke’s eyes dragged up his throat, and locked onto Parrot. “Lonely, out here. Y’know?”
Parrot didn’t, actually.
He was more bothered by the look in Spoke’s eyes, a hunger to the hollowness, and wondering if he was about to be devoured whole by a raging form of shadows and hedonism.
“I… don’t. How… long have you-“
“Long. Long time.” Spoke’s tongue moved over his lips, a purely cosmetic motion, like how a snake would taste the air, but entirely without purpose. “Sorry. They don’t- y’know how they don’t- speak, around here.”
“Not even to- to you?”
“No.”
Spoke’s voice came in an almost reverent breath, leaning in in such a way that would have made Parrot recoil, if his presence wasn’t flickering shadows, insubstantial to the touch. Spoke licked across his neck, and Parrot felt nothing at all, but he still felt.
If he reached out, there would be nothing to shove away. Parrot was in a realm of dark ghosts, and this one was desperately hungry, and Spoke hardly wanted more than to feel blood beneath his ghostly teeth.
“Bro- can you- get off?”
“Please, Parrot. Just…”
Shadows crept between his feathers, and Parrot released a breath. Spoke was difficult. He got what he wanted, but he recognised his own hedonism. He was capable of apologising, in the same breath he’d rip out your heart.
And he wanted. He wanted things so badly Parrot felt like his own desires must be meaningless.
Hopefully, he wouldn’t take anything so far from beneath the skin.
Trembling as he exhaled, Parrot relaxed, slumping down the wall and letting Spoke’s shadows play around the openings to his airways. He would be everywhere, and then it would be over. Spoke came and went like a shadow passing as the sun moved over, always hiding from the light.
Parrot let the hunger role over him, and Spoke didn’t feel like anything, really, but he felt like feeling, and the feeling ebbed from need, to desire, to want, to a blanket of heavy smoke draped over Parrot, clinging to his waist with those milky eyes staring vacantly somewhere near his hip, like he was wondering how many of Parrot’s internal organs he could devour by sight alone.
Spoke settled, and Parrot looked down, when he dared to, somewhat surprised to find himself unharmed.
He wasn’t certain what Spoke would have done to him. Choked him, perhaps. Taken something more than the warmth of his blood. But Parrot was left entirely untouched, and a near-humanoid form shivering in a pale imitation of tears around his waist.
“Done down there?”
“Th- there is something- dude, y’know how… there’s something wrong.”
“About here? Is someone making you do something, bro?”
“With me.” Spoke sniffed, another pretence he put on to make himself pitiful, an otherworldly creature pretending to be weak for no reason other than to pretend to be a predator, luring in its prey. “With- with me.”
“What is it?”
Carefully, Parrot moved one hand down, running it over Spoke’s back as the shadows dripped down to coil behind his waist. For all he was sitting over Spoke, right now, Spoke was the one gripping him. Parrot couldn’t move, you couldn’t resist a voidling’s touch. They weren’t insubstantial as the smoke they appeared as, they felt like nothing and they did something, until it wasn’t physical form you were fighting against, but mental suffocation, like smoke through the top floor of a building.
Even if Spoke seemed docile, Parrot was just a bird, his heart as capable of stopping as it was of continuing to beat. The voidling whined under his thumb, one of those pitiful noises Soke loved to use to make himself seem more human, and all Parrot could think of was how he knew he wasn’t.
“It’s lonely. It- doesn’t feel it, like, but… you can feel it, can’t you?”
“The Nether-?”
“Yeah. And- these guys, and me, and… it- it’s really weird, dude. There’s something so wrong with me, I-“
“You missed me?”
“Don’t make this about you, bro.” Spoke’s laugh was short, and broken, and the small movement of his body something Parrot didn’t react to as he perhaps should have. “You’re just, like- nice.”
“How so?”
Spoke had clearly missed human contact. He didn’t even need it, he wasn’t human, but Parrot knew well enough how forced conformity drove people to crave strange things.
“You- like, you mean nothing here, y’know?”
Smoke began to trickle up his spine, as Parrot’s thoughts froze, and began to reverse, in slow trepidation. Spoke suddenly seemed close. And not helpless, he’d never been helpless. And Parrot had underestimated his friends before, but he’d thought Spoke…
Well, he’d thought Spoke human enough to genuinely care.
“Why… is that important, bro?”
“You’re so small.” Sighing happily, Spoke pressed and pulled away with different parts of his shadows, creating a jittering map of nervousness across Parrot’s body as his nerves tingled. “And warm, like- that’s important, after a while. And you’re just… staying still…”
This was no heartfelt reunion. Parrot had read Spoke’s hunger right the first time. There was a type of starvation where who and what and why didn’t matter. He was nothing more than something.
“Spoke, bro, can you… get off, now?”
“Why?”
“What- what’s this meant to mean, bro? That I’m stuck here?”
“I mean… you are.”
As far as Parrot was aware, voidlings couldn’t purr. Which meant Spoke had acquired the habit off something else, the magpie that he was, stealing trinkets from every being he wanted, and Parrot remembered that humans were very small, and very vulnerable, and grounded birds even more so.
“Can you get off me?”
“Can. Won’t.”
“Spoke-“
“Talkin’ like you know me, dude, have you ever really cared?”
“-What is this, Spoke?”
“You’re gonna have so much fun here, bro.” Spoke’s head rose, nuzzling against his shoulder, and when the upper part of his form pulled away, Parrot still felt pinned by those shadows, quailing under Spoke’s starved gaze. “Don’t look so scared. You’re good! Don’t you trust me?”
Parrot didn’t really trust anyone.
“What… am I trusting you… with, bro?”
Every movement had to be very careful. Parrot was scared. He was realising that there had always been reasons to be scared of Spoke, he’d just never been… close enough, before.
“You.”
Spoke giggled, those bottomless eyes wide, clean holes enough the darkness that looked like they’d quite like to eat Parrot whole.
“Spoke-“
“Parrot.” Spoke’s eyes widened, and Parrot imagined falling into them, losing himself in whatever anti-universe existed within a voidling. Maybe they consumed one, to be created. “Parrot. Parrot.”
Broken record. Parrot would have slapped him, if he hadn’t been in Spoke’s domain, under Spoke’s form, hypnotised by Spoke’s white-void eyes.
“What?”
“Thank you.”
Parrot had already been eaten alive, he was pretty sure. He was already in the dying universe Spoke contained.