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“Be careful with it,” Parrot chokes out, clutching the bedsheet and hissing in pain as he tries to sit straight. One of his wings is bent unnaturally, like someone gripped its delicate bones and forcefully pulled them into a crude new structure.
Wifies gently cradles a hand under it, a roll of medical tape in the other. It’s one roll of twenty he’s stored in his house, among rows and rows of splash potions of instant health and slow falling. With Parrot unable to move his wing away from him, green-blue feathers spread phantom brushes against his skin. Warm and soft against his cold, calloused hand. The last time he felt this was before the Director killed him.
“Stay still.” Wifies measures out an appropriate length of tape, watching the wing tremble. He remembers hearing a bang from the towering obsidian walls, Parrot slumped against them like a dead bird sliding down from a window. He’d sat dazed for a while, where Wifies had made him patch up the exit. In the crook of Parrot’s neck, a spot of light trickled through a small hole.
He’s a bird flying amok, he thinks. Even in a new world manufactured for his safety, if Wifies isn’t keeping an eye on Parrot at all times, he’ll still get hurt. Why can’t he understand that trying to escape is useless? When will it get through to him?
Parrot shifts and squirms almost imperceptibly as Wifies wraps the tape around his wing with surgical precision, staring anywhere else except his former best friend. There’s a strange sort of distance that exists in their closeness, where the inches between their arms grow into miles. Where their faces are separated by white again and again, the falling snow or swirling invis particles.
His voice becomes a soft echo in this faraway world. “How did you even find me so quickly? I thought you came back here to our houses.”
Wifies pauses, the tape held in his fist like a knife poised to dissect. “It was pretty loud.” The next loop around the wing digs into its feathers. His laugh masks Parrot’s flinch. “I told you. I know everything that happens here.”
“It can’t be that serious when I’m just trying to get wood, bro.”
“Well, it kind of is that serious now.”
He doesn’t say: I’m not stupid, Parrot. Don’t lie to me.
But that matters little compared to this, the slow straightening of Parrot’s wing in the tape under Wifies’ careful hands and control, the rising and falling of his chest with each breath. The knowledge that Parrot is safe.
“Am I hurting you? Do you need me to be gentler?” He asks instead.
There’s something to relish in Parrot’s hesitation, the sight so stunning Wifies doesn’t know if he wants to smile or throw up. Both, maybe. He’s not the Director today, just Wifies, Parrot-and-a-Wifies on an everlasting adventure, and so he has the ability to selfishly react.
He does neither, and braces for the inevitable lie. “No,” Parrot says finally. “I’m– it’s fine, it’s good.”
It doesn’t matter, as long as Parrot is safe.
Wifies plucks out small twigs and leaves stuck in his uninjured wing, allowing his knuckles to skim across its soft feathers. “It’s like when we were in the mining civilization, do you remember? Your wings got so messed up you could barely glide.” Wifies would preen his wings for him like that again if he could, but that was when Parrot would fully entrust his back to him. So, this will have to do.
Surprisingly, Parrot’s body seems to relax. If Wifies allows it, he can think that Parrot is leaning into his touch. “Thanks for taking care of them. To be honest, I don’t even know where you learnt how to do that. Like, I guess you know every… I guess you’ve always been smart.”
There’s a lot Parrot doesn’t know about Wifies. And it’s all the better for Wifies’ plan to keep him safe forever, when he is warped into a paradox that Parrot can’t wrap his head around. The Director is infallible and Wifies is a fool; one is dead, so surely, they will never coexist. Parrot, kind, naive, Parrot will always chase after a villain.
But Wifies can play a fool today, if it means savouring this illusory warmth for a little longer. “I read up on it. I think it was when we were building that end civilization?” He finishes holding the wing against Parrot’s body with the tape. “It’s only fair that I learn how to help you. Can’t have you feeling awful all the time.”
“No way you learned how from just a book.” The low sound of a chuckle is threaded into Parrot’s voice, unearthed from a bygone dream.
“What can I say, I’m a fast learner.” There’s nothing more in the world that Wifies misses more than this. Even if it’s a lie and just part of Parrot’s plan to escape, he doesn’t mind pretending for a bit.
Wifies reaches out and picks up a pair of scissors beside him to cut the tape. It’s thin, its sharp, silver tip glinting in the light. He doesn’t catch its harshness until Parrot stiffens, and only when his eyes narrow and lock onto it does Wifies realise there had just been some softness in them.
It’s not the first time Wifies has seen this kind of look from Parrot. He always had it when he was brainstorming something, or trying to figure out a puzzle, and Wifies has seen it more times than he can count in Paragon. That gentle gaze of his would never be given to Wifies again, only to a ghost he still dreamed of.
Wifies would be lying if he said he didn’t miss it, but he’s playing a pointless game anyway in burying this truth– that with the twinge of disappointment in his heart, he felt relief, like ice to an bruise, at watching Parrot try to pick him apart with amateurish hands.
(“He– he was always so smart, like, genuinely smarter than me, if I’m being honest, and he was kind to everybody and he cared for everybody. He was a good friend,” Parrot had told Leo, and Wifies had heard him through the frosted glass windows. His hand had hovered above it, with a sudden, inexplicable urge to be violent.)
Wifies catches a glance of a few of the many scars on Parrot’s back as he inches away slightly and turns the scissors in his hand. Nothing and no one will ever touch him again. The Director will make sure of that.
“Are you gonna cut it off?” Parrot finally asks.
“...Yeah.”
He cuts off the tape and sets the scissors back down, watching Parrot relax and settle down on the bed. Whatever charade they had been playing is now gone, as his eyes dart away from the scissors to an empty space in the room.
Wifies gets up. “I’ll go get you some food, okay? Just rest. Is bread good?”
“It is, thanks.”
Parrot can’t fly for some time now, and perhaps he will be safer for the time being, but Wifies knows that won’t stop him. When he comes back, Parrot is staring out the window, at the blazing sunset beginning to creep in over the obsidian walls.
The threat of being burnt alive has never stopped him.