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Theo’s minecarts detonate true, the rings of their blasts chipping through health and armor as he and the knight spin around in a deadly fray. Parrot sits encased in glass, feeling as though he’s put himself on display. He hates how it feels to publicly cower, but knows that if he took action he would only tangle up clumsily in Theo’s practiced combat.
The glass breaks, totems pop. He’s crowing with victory at one point and begging for his life in another. The fight moves from the room in a blur of action that Parrot can hardly sort into order.
The knight stands on a mountaintop. The sun stings Parrot’s eyes as he squints upward– here, being so blinded by it, it nearly looks like someone else. Parrot wheezes through a choked breath at the fear of it, steadying his dizzying thoughts as he shifts into a steadier stance and trades words back and forth with the player.
It’s Wemmbu, he tells himself. Logically, it is. The invisibility particles dance upward, taunting him. It can’t be the Director again. But Parrot can’t see his face. It might be. If it is, Parrot has no idea what he’ll do.
Someone lands in a split-second flash of dark colors. A cart explodes. Invisibility tears away from Wemmbu’s skin, exposing him in a flash of gold sparks, and all Parrot can taste is the cloying relief that it isn’t the Director wearing this new identity. That he isn’t somehow back to haunt him.
Diamond instead of netherite. A mace. An elytra. It feels so obvious now, but so relieving to have been proven wrong. He had first thought his theory was just a passing idea, something that springs up but is quickly shooed away by the logical answer. Being struck so heavily by Wemmbu’s reveal proves otherwise. It feels like he can breathe for the first time in days.
Theo’s shooting through the air again. Wemmbu is getting to his feet and promising death.
It starts to catch up to him then, that though his panic at another invisible player was driving his actions all this time, him being wrong also means there’s another person affected– Wemmbu, who glares with all the fury of a man hunted down and worn out, filled with anger at being so unjustly hated.
The Director wouldn’t have been easy to deal with. But Wemmbu will be a nightmare himself.
Wemmbu yells something about bans, sounding so starkly different from the voice changer that Parrot struggles to merge the identities together in his mind even after such obvious confirmation.
He’s swooping up and diving down at Parrot quicker than he can blink. There's an explosion, not of TNT, but pure force.
The air is cold as Parrot plummets, thrown off the mountainside from the momentum of Wemmbu’s attack. Totem sparks whistle through the air in his wake, and no sooner has his fist closed around a new one than he hits the ground and erupts in another burst of gold and green.
Traces of anger fade. Boomie wasn’t innocent, he had said. Honestly… Parrot hadn’t known anything about him. He’d seen someone in trouble, someone who had no items and no hope, and reached out a hand without considering that a beast could be hiding beneath his skin.
How could he have known, really? Parrot sees where the mistake happened. He knows the knight’s words ring true. He also knows he will take the same action again and again in the future– perhaps it’s a flaw, but Parrot would rather have a kind flaw than a cruel one. He thinks that even later, after his arms are bleeding from the monsters who bite the hand that feeds, he’ll never truly change.
He feels slow, distant. He fights his way back up. His wings beat to propel him with just a bit more speed back to Theo and the knight. Wemmbu. He shakes his head, jostling the idea around until he thinks it lodges in place.
His hands move as though pushing through mud. He reaches for his golden apples and comes up with a handful of cobwebs instead that stick to the ground he rolls against when dodging the weight of a mace. He hisses a curse, sharp and loud against the background noise blurring together. He keeps moving on but feels like his actions happen far away from himself, movements thick with whatever’s clogging his mind.
Despite it, he thinks he lands a few good hits between ducking below shelter and searching blindly for more totems each time one is spent.
He keeps fighting because he doesn’t know what else to do. He feels too sick to pivot in his actions and repent, and the fight’s moving too fast to get a word out.
Suddenly it’s too much. His legs shake and his knees buckle.
There’s a blade against his neck.
If you tell anyone who I am, I’ll kill him. Wemmbu. Parrot sees Theo’s outraged expression, raw with fury but flying into fear as Wemmbu pulls him even closer, presses the sword so close to the skin that Parrot feels its bite.
Parrot. Parrot. The sound feels like it's being said from underwater, even as he watches Theo say the words. He’s begging for a reaction, or a plan, or any other number of things that feel so far out of Parrot’s reach right now.
“W..” he gurgles, feels something welling up in his throat. “Wi.. Wifi…” he gasps, scrabbling at the armor holding him in place. But that’s not right. He saw someone beneath the invis, but can’t for the life of him remember who it was.
Another trick.
Theo’s screaming now, and the chestplate behind him hums with the shouts someone hurls back.
Parrot can’t breathe, his head feels light.
He thinks he hears his name again.
…Glass shatters nearby. Parrot feels skin start to pull itself together. Not just his neck, but all the scrapes and slices too minor for a golden apple to bother with when there are gaping gashes to tend to.
Since when was Parrot on the ground?
Theo’s gone. His name bursts from his mouth before Parrot even realizes he’s regained his voice.
“Gone–” Gone? “–to call off this whole hunt,” he snarls. “And make sure it’s over.” Parrot vaguely remembers Theo pressing at his communicator, shouting something over as his hands flew. He hopes he hasn’t done anything rash.
‘Don’t do anything rash.’
Words swim in his mind. There’s the crunch of glass hitting the ground again, and invisibility swallows up a form before Parrot can remember to study it.
He squints at the knight in front of him. He feels nearly paralyzed, lungs tired from their wild heaving. He mouths a word, a name, but it doesn’t fit right anymore and slides away from him again.
“...Wemmbu?”
He blinks slowly and wonders what the confusion on the player’s face looks like now. He’s not stupid enough to think their thought process could follow his own, not while Parrot’s chasing after and trying to pin together the facts in his mind. Lacing together a spiderweb of truth carefully picked from a field of lies.
He thinks Wemmbu has chosen not to humor him, shifting position and gazing off into the distance behind Parrot but never moving his mace from its close proximity. A reminder and a threat.
“Hmm,” Parrot murmurs. He’s sitting in the mountain snow, its cold sting sharpening the longer it presses against him. He wonders when he’d put away his armor.
“I only wanted a normal life.” Wemmbu’s voice is still normal, not distorted as it was. It helps bring Parrot further back to reality, helps him select the right truth to add to the story. “I wasn’t even– I wasn’t hurting you. I was helping! Why?! Why did you go and make it your problem?!” A deep sigh tinged with resentment. “I think I’ll never understand you, Parrot.”
He looks up at the sky. It’s started snowing, sending down small flakes that land gently and melt against skin in an instant. This one doesn’t help Parrot’s pondering. He looks back down to earth.
There’s a strange laugh out of Wemmbu, sounding much too desperate to be real. “You really messed this all up, man! I mean, you can fix it easy by dying, but right now you’re great leverage.” Parrot thinks Wemmbu might be grinning right now even while he sounds miserable. “I’m just glad you didn’t manage to pull this off in front of the whole server. Whew. Still, kind of ruined my life so far.”
Parrot’s eyes are glued on the helmet. He knows how weird it feels to hold a conversation while invis, to see someone’s gaze linger right above your eyes, latched onto the nearest visible part of you.
“I didn’t think I’d do that.” He looks up at the snow again. He hears someone else’s voice in the breeze.
“I mean. How.”
“I don’t know, W…” His whisper trails off. He frowns. “You’re Wemmbu,” he repeats, hammering in the nail until he thinks it’ll stick. He feels like he’s spiraling.
“Bro? Yeah I get it, you figured me out. You can shut up now. Like actually.” The mace arcs closer, but Parrot's hardly watching.
“Sorry,” Parrot says honestly, if hazily. “It’s hard to remember when you’re invis.”
“Hard to remem… wait, Parrot, did you not even think I was Wemmbu? Like not at all, this whole time?” There’s a disbelieving chuckle. Right. Parrot’s supposed to be smart.
“I mean, I did. Yeah. But like, another part of me thought you were…” He breaks off, doesn’t elaborate, lets the silence sit heavy like a blanket of snow. “No. But he’s long dead. I got in my head. I’m sorry.”
Wemmbu laughs. It sounds mean. Parrot only stares at him and tries to glue his identity together in pieces that drift away if he lets go for too long.
He never meant to damage Wemmbu. A ghost still lived at the edges of his life. Parrot had chased it, desperate in his fear, and because of him Wemmbu got caught up as a casualty to his messed-up mind.
He tucks his wings in closer against the cold but refuses to look away from the knight. From the Director. From the player in front of him.
“Sorry, could you…” Parrot shakes his head. Stupid question.
“I’m not drinking milk again,” He scoffs. Doesn’t tell him to shut up for some reason. Parrot thinks that maybe both players would have.
“You’re Wemmbu,” he repeats. And this time it feels like he’s lost something.
It’s a full minute later when Wemmbu shifts in place and mutters, “Yeah.”
Snow drifts to the ground. The moment is tinted differently than the one Parrot remembers. Colored in a different light. It’s more bitter, less sweet, maybe.
“...Wemmbu didn’t deserve this,” he adds. He shares the truths he’s collected together. He understands better after it’s sat with him for a little while. “Wifies would have. But you’re not him.” The helmet shifts and tilts. A slight fidget Wifies never displayed in his life. “You’re better than him. I'm sorry.”
He’s gulping air then, shoulders shaking with the weight of everything. He doesn’t say anything more, not when Wemmbu pulls his mace back with a muttered, “Whatever.” Not when he stands to meet Theo and shoves a finger at his chest, harsh words between them both meeting in a clash. There are two promises: one not to tell, and one of revenge if that’s ever broken. It all ends in Wemmbu flying away.
It feels anticlimactic– Parrot hadn’t really expected to see another day. Maybe it was that belief that made him so honest, made him come to terms with reality so brutally, or maybe his mind was just drifting too far to rein him back in once he’d started.
Silence wraps him like his own invisibility. He’ll sleep it off, break through this mood like dissipating fog, but nothing that happened here will ever truly leave him.