Chapter Text
Paragon was not quiet because it was peaceful. It was quiet because it had learned how to hold its breath. The walls did not sleep; they watched, layers upon layers of obsidian, lava, redstone, pistons, pearl chambles, and fail-safes, every block placed with a kind of care that only paranoia could produce. It was not a prison in the simple way that a cage was a prison. A cage was honest. Bars admitted what they were. But Paragon? Paragon pretended to be something greater—forgotten memories, monuments, solutions to problems that were always going to exist. It stood beneath the bruised dark sky like a black thought that someone had made real, humming with power, cold enough that even torches seemed to burn reluctantly along its edges. Wifies knew every biome, every hidden passage, every pressure plate hidden beneath moss carpets and stone, every place where an escape could begin, and every place it would end. He had helped make it impossible. That was the point. Impossible meant safe. Impossible meant no one could get in. Impossible meant no one could get out. Impossible meant perfect. And now, after everything, after all the wars and betrayals and civilizations that would never return, and the names that were carved into the server like scars, impossible had become the only word he trusted.
Parrot had tried to escape only after a few days of being stuck on an obsidian pillar surrounded by lava. Of course, he had tried to escape. Wifies hated himself for being surprised, because Parrot was not the kind of person who accepted a locked door as the end of a conversation. He was sharp in the way flint was sharp, all sparks and edges, always thinking three steps ahead, always smiling like the world was a puzzle he had already half-solved. Even while trapped, stripped of gear, even while being watched by walls that would kill him if he moved wrong, Parrot had found a flaw. Not a big one. Paragon did not have big flaws. It would be a chance between time and fate, half a second before one mechanism would reset, and the guards would be too confused to know where he went. He waited for the perfect moment, the way a drowning man waited for air. But Wifies had known, found him scurrying to scale the prison wall. One hand braced against the wall, feathers torn from where his wings had scraped too hard against the black shiny stone. His eyes bright with pain and fury and something far worse than either, hope. That hope is what frightened Wifies the most. Pain could be treated. Fury could be endured. But hope was a blade that pointed towards the sky.
He dragged Parrot back himself, though drag was not the right word, because Parrot fought the entire way with the vicious, stubborn strength of someone who believed that losing did not make him beaten. He twisted, kicked, cursed Wifies, and then he went silent, and somehow the silence was worse than the struggle. Wifies had expected rage. He understood rage. Rage was clean. Rage gave him something to push against. But Parrots’ silence had filled the prison like smoke, thick and accusing, and every step toward the underground chamber felt like walking deeper into a decision he had already made but not yet admitted to himself. The wings were the problem. He had known it for weeks. Maybe longer. Everyone else saw them as a part of Parrot, a strange, beautiful extension of the avian himself, freedom stitched into bone and feather. Wifies saw them differently now. He saw escape routes. He saw the void beneath floating platforms, the snap of rockets, the blur of an elytra, the thousands of ways someone like Parrot could vanish the second the world gave him enough space to open himself. Wings made distance possible. Distance made loss inevitable. And wifies, who had lost too much and survived it badly, had started to think of prevention as mercy.
The chamber at the center of Paragon was warmer than the edges. Only because of the machinery that lived in the walls. Redstone pulsed beneath the floor in slow rhythms. The underground lights flickered on and off with the patient cruelty of something that did not care what it was built to contain. Wifies pushed Parrot inside and sealed the entrance behind them. For a moment, neither moved. Parrot stood in the middle of the dark chamber wth his back half-turned, shoulders rising and falling, wings held tense and close, feathers bent out of place from his earlier escape attempt. He looked exhausted. He looked furious. He looked, horribly, alive. Wifies stared at him and felt the whole server crowding into the room; every betrayal, every execution, every laugh before this twisted trap was sprung, every friend who became a threat because that was what power did here. It did not matter how smart Parrot was. Smart people died, too. Strong people died. Dictators died. Prison builders died. Heroes died. Villains died and returned wearing better armour. The server did not reward freedom; it hunted it. Parrot thought escape meant survival because Parrot had always believed he could outthink the ending. Wifies knew better, or believed he did, and belief was the most dangerous material in the room.
“You can’t keep doing this,” Parrot said at last, his voice low, not pleading, not yet. “You can’t call this protection forever.”
Wifies almost answered too quickly. The words were already there, lined up like arrows: Yes, I can; I have to; you don’t understand; they’ll kill you; you’ll make them kill you. But when he opened his mouth, nothing came out. Because some small, buried part of him knew Parrot did understand. That was the worst of it. Parrot understood traps. He understood prisons. He understood what it meant to be studied, cornered, forced into moves by someone who claimed to know the board better than him. His anger was not ignorance. It was recognition. Wifies turned away because looking at him was becoming unbearable, and from the chest beneath the wall, he took out what he had prepared days ago, the things he had hated himself for preparing. Splints. Chains. Potions. Bandages. Not weapons exactly, but tools could become cruel depending on the hands that held them. Parrot noticed. His expression changed, just slightly, and the room seemed to shrink around that change. Wifies wished he would shout. He wished he would lunge. Anything would have been easier than the way Parrot went still, as if every instinct had gone silent to listen.
“No,” Parrot said.
It was only one word, but it broke something open.
Wifies moved before the courage could leave him. Later, he would remember it in pieces because the mind is merciful only when the mercy is useless. The flash of Parrot’s wings spreading too wide for the room, desperate and magnificent. The crack of his shoulder against stone. The redstone blinking like startled eyes. Wifies catching him, forcing him down, whispering apologies that mean nothing because his hands kept moving. Parrot fought until first break, and after that, there was no fight in him, only sound, sharp and terrible and human enough that Wifies nearly stopped. Nearly. That word would rot inside him for the rest of his life. He told himself it had to be complete or it would be worse. He told himself a half-broken wing was only pain without purpose. He told himself healers could set the bones badly enough that flight would become impossible, but walking, living, staying would remain. He told himself many things. None of them changes the fact that Parrot was on the floor of Paragon, shaking beneath him, feathers scattered across the black stone like pieces of a ruined banner, while Wifies did the unforgivable with careful hands.
When it was over, the room became impossibly quiet. Not peaceful. Never peaceful. Just emptied. Parrot lay curled on his side, both wings bound tight and wrong, face turned away, breathing in small controlled pulls as though even pain would not be allied to take too much from him. Wifies knelt beside him with blood on his sleeves and bandages in his hands and felt, for one sickening second, relief. It came before guilt, and that made it monstrous. Relief because Parrot would not fly. Relief because the window in the world had been shut. Relief because there was no enemy, no war, no clever trick, no perfect half-second in Paragon’s machinery could carry him out of reach now. The guilt arrived behind it, vast and black and heavy enough to crush breath from his lungs. He reached toward Parrot’s shoulder, but Parrot fliched before he touched him, and Wifies pulled his hand back like he had been burned. The wound was larger than bone. He understood that then. He had not only broken wings. He had broken the last place where Parrot had believed Wifies might still choose him over fear.
Days became rituals. Wifies changed the bandages. Wifies brought food. Wifies adjusted the room so Parrot would not need to climb, would not need to reach, would not need to ask. He spoke rarely because every word sounded like an excuse even before it left his mouth. Parrot spoke less. His silence sharpened until it became part of the prison, another system Wifies could not disarm. Sometimes, when pain pulled him unwillingly toward sleep, Parrot’s face softened into something younger, and Wifies would remember the version of him who laughed too easily after surviving something impossible, who turned danger into strategy, who wore confidence like armour because on this server anything softer got eaten alive. Wifies had loved that about him once. Maybe he still did. Maybe that was why he destroyed it. Love, when twisted through enough fear, stopped looking like warmth and started looking like ownership. It became inventory management. It became locked chests and reinforced walls, and coordinates were never written down. It became the belief that a person could be saved by being reduced to the parts of them easiest to protect.
Weeks later, Parrot finally looked at him for longer than a second. The bruising had faded. The wings had healed enough to fold, but not enough to open properly. They sat against his back like closed doors. He was thinner, quieter, but not weaker. That spark of hope never left his eyes. Not once. That frightened Wifies. Something in him had survived cleanly, like a diamond pulled from fire, and it watched Wifies now with cold understanding. There was no dramatic forgiveness in his eyes, no simple hatred either. Hatred would have been kinder. Hatred would have meant Wifies still occupied the center of him. Instead, Parrot looked at him like a problem. Like a trap with visible wiring. Like something to escape from eventually, even if not by sky. ‘
“You didn’t save me,” Parrot said
Wifies stood very still.
Parrot's voice was rough from disuse, but steady, and every word landed with the weight of a final block placed in a wall. “You just made sure I would remember you every time I tried to move.”
Wifies wanted to deny it. He wanted to say the server forced him, Paragon had forced him, history had forced him, fear had forced him. He wanted to gather every terrible thing that had ever happened and stack it between and blame until the blame could no longer see him. But Parrot was looking at him, and Parrot had always hated lies most when they pretend to be protection. So Wifies said nothing. The machines behind the walls kept pulsing. Somewhere far above them, beyond all the stone and systems, the sky continued without either of them. It spread over the server careless and enourmous, full of flight paths Parrot could no longer take and dangers Wifies could no longer use as proof. Paragon held them both in its black heart: the prisoner who had lost his wings, and the jailer who had mistaken breaking for saving. And for the first time, Wifies wondered whether Paragon’s greatest trap had never been its walls at all, but the way it convinced broken people that if they built something strong enough, they would never have to learn how to let go.