Chapter Text
You've heard of the five stages of grief before: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
But are you aware of how long they last?
How they affect people differently?
Sometimes their toll is immediate, the news tugging at the heart, tearing it apart.
Sometimes it's a slow burn that slowly creeps along a lanyard, waiting to set off a cannon.
Sometimes it comes in waves, where one second you've forgotten while laughing along with your friends, only for a whirlwind to strike when you least expect it.
Sometimes it's a weight you carry that creates a physical drag on the body, one that crushes its victim.
Sometimes it comes in a physical form, a familiar sight, scent, sound, a light touch, taste, or tears.
For Parrot, his grief didn't come in the form of an explosion, unlike the one he left behind, climbing the steep steps out of a ruined chapel. He at first attempted to drown his grief with a focus on his hunger, where he was sapped of his ability to run and forced to walk ceremoniously from what now lay a tomb with his captor's corpse.
He refuses to look back. He cannot, for fear he will die alongside him in this cage. He needs to keep moving.
Paragon, the perfect cage, his cage.
Made to trap him, tame him, keep him safe, away from the skies of the world, where he would never be free to soar with his friends.
He reaches the top of the stairs, a level below the gleaming obsidian platform he had previously been trapped on, and he finds the materials miraculously placed within a barrel to build a flying machine that could take him across the ravenous lava lake below.
He doesn't toil for long, having mastered the art of creating such machines during his time at the Farlands City, working with Kanadian and the other Farmers.
His mind remains quiet despite the noisy machinery carrying him across the bubbling lava below, which is odd, unnatural for a man like Parrot, who is constantly in motion.
The loud thrusts of piston machinery come to an end once he reaches the platform that leads up to the tower atop the central part of Paragon, with a seemingly never-ending spiral of stairs that make their way up the side of the circular obsidian cage.
He stops for a moment, leaning on the remnants of the flying machine no longer in motion.
He wants to turn back. He wants to see him again. He wants to make sure he's dead this time.
But he has to keep moving.
Being constantly in motion is how Parrot works; it's how he's supposed to work. That's the way he was born. To yearn for the boundaries beyond and test the limits of this world.
So he keeps moving, climbing up the everlasting staircase towards the light of the sky, calling out to him, telling him to hurry, telling him to fly faster.
Unfortunately for a man who wants to fly, for a man who should be grieving, during his ascent, his senses begin returning to him.
He first feels his wings bound on his back, heavy and stiff, as per their inability to move, caused by whatever enchantment this prison held to keep him grounded.
His hunger becomes more apparent, with a snarl coming from his middle, ravenous to devour any morsel of food outside, and he, too, hallucinates the smell of a burning grill coming from lava below.
The edges of his vision become clearer, the waves of light burning his eyes as if it were something he wasn't meant to see.
He begins to hear the whispering wind from outside, its cold making the lava rather inviting; he could simply fall into its embrace.
At the top of the stairs, before the final step, he tastes the stale air at the top of the tower, a familiar sensation that reminds him of his brief time running the End Civilization, where the lands were void of wildlife.
He steps forward and walks over to the side of the tower. He is greeted with a clear blue sky, one he thought he'd never have the chance to see again. A sky he wishes his best friend were here to view with him.
He realizes his hands have been trembling as he grips the edge of the tower. Whether it be due to the frigid winds or a hole forming in his chest, he doesn't know.
He can't stop here. He needs to keep moving. He fears he'll drop dead in this cage, as if an owner spent too long away from home and left their pet unattended.
He takes one of the extra slime blocks out from his pocket, jumps on top of the ledge, and quickly maneuvers himself to place it right before he lands, bouncing up and down rhythmically before he leaps off of it and touches the ground.
He touches down onto moist grass, and Parrot wants to immediately lie down in it, to close his eyes and rest his weary wings.
But he doesn't want his journey to end here. He needs to keep moving. He's hungry.
He doesn't want to die.
Clutching his stomach, he robotically pushes off his knee to stand up again, walking towards the valley where he had built a house, slower than he should've been for a bird who desperately wanted to escape his cage.
The cherry blossom valley he lived in never looked beautiful to him, more artificial, like a set upon a stage, while he was an actor.
The houses, or at least his, were one-dimensional, made to be taken down and used for spare parts after the play was over, never made to be a home. The blue lake in the middle of the valley was shallow, a painted backdrop made for some symbolic purpose, like dramatizing the scene, or to contrast with the bright pink of the cherry trees. The obsidian wall that surrounded the entirety of his cage could be seen behind the valley, where Parrot liked to imagine that it was the edge of the stage, separating the audience from the actors.
Disregarding his imagination, Parrot approached the wheat farm he and his best friend had made, kneeling to admire the yellow stocks that reached upwards, and harvesting its bountiful fields to bake bread.
Before long, the bread was cooling on the counter while Parrot dug through chests for blocks to scale the side of the obsidian wall.
Finding leftover cherry and birch wood, he stacks them in his satchel. Practically starving by now, Parrot finally walks over to the counter to eat.
The meal isn't much, if it can even be considered a meal. Parrot never liked mundane chores like cooking meals or renovating a home; it was too slow, and gave him too much time to think. Think about his friends, doomed civilizations, the wars he fought, the fleeting faces he's seen, the innocent people slaughtered in the pursuit of power, about anything and everything he'd lived, lost, and loved.
His captor knew this, so he would cook his meals, built a pretty house he offered Parrot to live in with him, and give him a fenced-in backyard to run around in and do what he pleased, as long as he wouldn't dig under the fence and escape. Sometimes he felt like he was being treated as a pet, continuously being fed and cared for by his owner, losing his ability to survive without dependency.
He's been done with his food for a while. He's thinking too much. He should be on his way now. The poor insulation in the house was starting to make him shiver, making the bed very inviting.
But he doesn't want to die here.
Not in this house.
Not in a cage.
So he forces himself to step into the air outside- it's still bright, about midday.
He starts walking away from his house and past his captors. He doesn't set it on fire this time; he wouldn't be that cruel. But he almost stopped for a minute, hesitated just for a moment, to peek at the yellow and white stained windows, shining arrays of light that reminded him of hope. Hope he would've changed his mind.
He pushes himself past the house; he needs to keep moving, and once he crosses the threshold beyond the pond, he jogs.
He doesn't remember when he started sprinting, wings flared out behind him, head wings flapping as if they were trying to be bigger than they were and replace the bound wings on his back in flight, didn't recall how much he yearned to escape, slip through the bars and run for the rest of his life, run away from him. His smile his corpse-
He stood staring high at the wall reaching to the sky.
Fatigue crawling up his fingers, he knew the effects of Elder Guardians too well.
He towered, he jumped, he placed blocks beneath him and rose, up, and up, and up, higher, and higher, and higher, seeing smelling tasting feeling hearing the ringing sound of freedom from the skyline, knowing the guards, just as trapped as him were now as free as he, and wouldn't stop his final ascent to the top.
Even with his leftover blocks, he knew he couldn't build any higher than the sky's limit, toeing the edge of the stage.
The invisible weight wafted off his wings immediately, and he finally was able to spread them out to their grand, full range, stretching the aches and tension away, feeling the wind brush through his wingspan, the sunlight shining down on them, highlighting their gentle grooves and vibrantly colored feathers.
He could barely make out the jungle below him, clouds obscuring his vision, the rushing wind was deafening, the air tasted so thin, he could smell the condensation, thinking rain would soon fall, and the feeling of freedom was just so elating.
For a moment, senses blinded, mind clouded, overloaded with feeling, Parrot turned around. He stopped moving.
No one was perfect, and therefore Paragon, a cage becoming a tomb, the extension of Wifies mind, was not.
Paragon was a falsehood, but not a lie.
The prison below him didn't have clouds to block his view; it never did. Wifies always wanted him to be able to see the sky, out of pity or something else, he didn't know. Wifies told him there was no wildlife, no danger. It was always so quiet, the only noise being the flow of water and wind whistling by on the highest mountains. Everything he felt, tasted, and smelled seemed artificial, which could've been a byproduct of Wifies tamperment with the environment, but even if he knew the trees were real and the crops were real and the minerals and stone and sand, the aroma of the rain hitting the ground, the taste of the food he ate, day in and day out, that it was all real, he didn't believe it was. Everything captured by the obsidian was safe, uncomfortably safe, too safe to be real.
Wifies was the smartest person he knew.
Wifies adventured with him.
Wifies cared for him.
Wifies sacrificed himself for him.
Wifies faked his death for him.
Wifies betrayed him.
Wifies almost killed him.
Wifies was his best friend.
Wifies caged him.
Wifies wanted so desperately to keep him safe.
Parrot murdered Wifies.
Parrot murdered Wifies.
Parrot murdered Wifies.
Parrot murdered Wifies.
I never even get to tell him what I've always felt, what he made me feel every day that I was lucky enough to be beside him, that I lo-
Parrot physically recoiled from his thoughts, finally moving-
-and falling back.
Parrot falls from the sky in a bolt of light, his wings flaring upwards in a blur that made them seem as if they were melting off his body, not descending, not scaling, but falling, down down down downwards, hurling towards the ground.
He can't stop thinking about him, about-
"But, realistically, there is nothing that you can do alone, that is better than what we can do as two people."
Wifies.
"Please, be selfish for once, Parrot."
Wifies...
"Do I have to die like him to get you to listen to me? To get you to care?"
Wifies!
"No one will ever hurt you again."
WIFIES!
"I'm going to keep you safe, Parrot."
WIFIES!!
Tears leisurely stroll down his face like morning dew on a summers' day, where he sits with his knees tucked to his chest underneath a jungle tree. He's leaning on a bush he'd settled into behind him, surrounded by sprawling poison ivy, the faint rustling of ocelots, and the foreboding setting sun in the distance- urging him to get up and find shelter. The surrounding forest obscures most of his view, but he can clearly see Paragon's obsidian wall in front of him, a dark, quiet contrast to the jungle's chatter and vibrancy.
Parrot isn't moving anymore. He hasn't been for a while.
But he needs to, he can't make his grave here, not like Wifies, if Parrot was going to go out at all, it should've been with him and not alone.
Despite the urgency to get up, shift his gears, to get moving, Parrot is paralyzed. Which gives him a lot of time to think before he can take his first steps outside of Paragon, when he can be truly free.
At the thought of Wifies, tears prick at his eyes, and his breathing becomes unsteady. Parrot tries to regulate his breathing but it will only hitch; he tries to stretch out but can only curl further inwards; he tries to stop the tears from falling but Wifies-
Wifies is dead.
Parrot killed him.
I killed him.
I've been ignoring my communication watch for quite some time now. I know why. But I don't want to think about why.
I don't want to see the message. I don't want it to be real. It isn't real.
He's my best friend, he's my everything, and I killed him.
The tears are starting to fall from my face faster.
I killed my best friend.
Tear tracks stain my face.
I finally look at my communication watch-
Wifies was exploded by ParrotX2
Wifies left the game.
Everything around me suddenly sounds very wrong, like an untuned violin screeching into my ears, my vision is blurry from the tears that won't stop falling, my clothes feel too restricting on my feathers, the jungle smells like it's burning, and I can taste its suffocating smoke in the air, and it's all too much.
The tears won't stop falling, I can't stop them, and Wifies, oh Wifies.
It could've been different. It should've been different, He can't be dead he can't be, he must've faked it again and he's going to see me wrapped up in myself crying over him and coax me back into Paragon and make me dependent on him which is so stupid and ironic because I can't live like that and he knows that I can't I need to fly I need to help others I need to adventure and Wifies kept me trapped. Bro I killed Wifies oh my God I killed my best friend, I literally just walked away and I don't even have my spyglass anymore his spyglass the one he entrusted to me and it was used to betray him but he betrayed me and I don't even know if he let it despawn or if he grabbed it one final time and I'm acting like I deserve to be sobbing when it was my fault, no it was his, he ruined everything, he trapped me, us, in a cage of his mind and games and expected me to play by his rules, I can't drown in this weakness I can't I can't-
"Parrot."
My head jerks up. My senses clear, just for a moment, I look to the direction of the voice and-
I'm hallucinating. I'm delusional. He's dead. I saw the message this time- the real message. He left the game. Wifies left the game.
He isn't here. I'm alone. It's done. It's over.
I snicker to myself bitterly, almost maniacally.
How sad, how weak is that. To hallucinate his voice. At that point, I should've just played by his rules if I wanted to be with him so desperately.
I'm back in the prison even though I've escaped, maybe I never will with Wifies ghost haunting me. My wings are shivering and I cannot fly, the sounds of the jungle are drowned out my the volume of my hyperventilating and sobs, and the most pathetic of all, I miss my captor, the one who kept me in a cage he built just for me, who lured me in originally with sweet words and camaraderie turned into false assassinations and threats to trap me, crafting a cage around where I flew, closing me in while I didn't even notice.
I should've known the director was him. Who could know me better than Wifies.
Maybe if I guessed correctly, or at the very least had just slightly more self-preservation, he would have stopped and realized what he did, what he was doing.
He wouldn't have hurt me.
He wouldn't have hurt us.
Parrot lifts his head to the sky, the darkness closing in like obsidian walls.
He drags himself to open up the bush behind him and dives in, attempting to make the ground flatter to build a makeshift nest for the night.
He pulls leaves from the bush to make a place to sleep on, collecting rocks to make a circle around his sleeping space, pushing twigs off to the side and dusting away dirt from the nest and himself to be slightly more comfortable, or at least as comfortable as it can get sleeping in a bush.
He flips onto his stomach and curls his wings around him in a cocoon-like shape to protect himself, a habit formed during the hunt for the Farlands Civilization, sleeping in unfamiliar territory to keep himself safe.
Despite his attempts to fully cover himself, specks of moonlight dot his face and dance on his wings, shining through the leaves above him.
He can still feel the tear tracks left behind, and the thought of what caused them makes them spark again.
Closing his eyes, he mumbles something into the night that he should've told him long ago.
Before it was too late.