Chapter Text
Parrot didn’t sleep well that night. Obviously, something was wrong with Spoke. He wasn’t that easy to scare. Still, maybe it had just been the effects of going out into the unknown in the middle of the night and nearly dying. Then again, Spoke was the farthest thing from paranoid, so maybe something was actually going on. Parrot honestly couldn’t tell.
He went down the stairs, half worried that zombies or a wyrm-shryke had gotten in while they were sleeping. They creaked loudly, and Parrot cringed. The house was in terrible shape, and he sort of questioned the integrity of the stairs. They groaned again when he reached the bottom, and he grimaced.
Clown was already downstairs. He’d probably stayed up all night, simply watching the door. Parrot had attempted to tell him multiple times that sleeping for even an hour was acceptable, and he could take care of himself for that long at least, but Clown had refused at point blank.
Clown didn’t turn around when Parrot showed up, focusing on something he was holding. Probably food. Parrot’s stomach growled hopefully. “What’s that?”
“Mh.” Clown said, non-communicatively.
“Is Spoke awake?” Parrot asked. He hadn’t checked Spoke’s borrowed room on the way down, which had been an oversight.
“No.” Clown said. “And I wanted to talk to you about him before he comes down.”
Parrot scowled. “Are you going to try to convince me to dump him outside to die?”
“No, it’s about the-” A high-pitched shriek cut him off, undoubtedly Spoke’s voice. Parrot jumped to his feet and ran up the stairs, ignoring the creaking.
Spoke was curled up in the hallway, his back pressed against the wall, his eyes wide and terrified.
Are you okay!?” Parrot demanded, pulling him to his feet. His hands were shaking badly, and his breath was coming in sharp pants.
Y-yeah, I'm just.” Spoke forced out a pained sounding laugh. “Just my imagination, nothing to worry about.”
Was it really, though? Parrot didn’t think so. A chill ran down his spine. It sort of reminded him of those horror movies, the ones where the ghosts haunted people and made their life hell. “Are you coming down? I think there’s food,”
Spoke smiled, still a little forced, and nodded. “Yeah, i’m hungry.”
If it was a normal day, Spoke would have beamed and bolted down the stairs. Well, it wasn’t a normal day, but his point still stood. Parrot gestured to the stairs. He wanted to go after him, if only to soothe his nerves. He glanced behind him at the hallway, unwilling to turn his back to it. The more he looked at it, the creepier it looked, until Parrot was half certain there was a malevolent ghost glaring at him. (maybe a ghost whose body Clown had brutally murdered)
“I hope you like beans.” Clown said blandly to Parrot, already placing the bowls on the table. As if Parrot couldn’t see the mirth in his eyes.
Spoke wrinkled his nose. “No!”
Parrot vaguely remembered telling Clown about Spoke’s aversion to beans. That hadn’t been the smartest decision.
“Too bad. I don’t have anything else.” Clown shrugged, a definite air of smugness around him.
Spoke opened his mouth to complain, and something came over his face, fear unlike Parrot had ever seen before. He whipped his head around and stared at the broken refrigerator behind him. Both Parrot and Clown watched him, confused.
Spoke quickly turned back. “It’s nothing. I thought I saw something.”
“There’s nothing.” Clown said. “If there was, we’d already be dead. Unless it was something incredibly weak. Maybe if the creature was severely wounded?”
“Are you okay?” Parrot said seriously.
Spoke nodded insistently. “I’m fine! You can eat, I'm fine!”
Parrot gave him a look, but he accepted his bowl of cold, disgusting beans. Honestly, he was hungry enough that he didn’t really care what he ate, as long as it was food. Spoke picked at his beans disinterestedly, but Parrot couldn’t tell if that was just his dislike of them or something else.
Spoke looked up at Clown. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
Clown shook his head. “I ate already.” That was a lie. Clown ate as little and as rarely as possible, about as often as he slept. Parrot had tried to convince him to take care of himself, but he was of the firm belief that if he couldn’t die, then there was no point to eating or sleeping or breathing or anything else that humans generally needed to do.
More recently, whenever he talked about himself like that, it sort of made Parrot want to smack him. It had been years since the incident, and while it was probably even more traumatizing for him than Parrot, that didn’t mean he had to practically give up living. “Then eat again.”
Clown’s face darkened slightly. “There’d be no point in wasting food. I’m not even hungry.”
Parrot returned his glare. “Really. You-”
Spoke toppled backward off his chair and scrambled away from the table, a terrified yelp falling from his mouth. He grabbed at his shirt, twisting his hands into the fabric and kicking out at nothing. “Please! Leave!”
“What the hell?!” Parrot demanded, “So there is something wrong! Is it a ghost? You just told it to leave, did it-”
Clown knelt down next to Spoke, who trembled like a leaf. “Tell me. Are there weird, smoke-like tendrils? Nightmares? Several arms? Eyes in dark places?”
Spoke nodded frantically, blinking hard to try and dispel any tears, breathing hard. Clown almost smiled. “Well, that makes it easy then. I’ll just do what I did to get rid of it.”
“What- what did you do?” Spoke asked uncertainly.
Clown thoughtfully held Spoke to the wall with a hand on his chest. “It’s pretty simple, really…”
Parrot had a sudden, horrible feeling. “Does it hurt?”
Clown paused. “No. Can you pass me Grace?”
“No,” Parrot snapped. “I’m not giving you a weapon while you’re holding Spoke in place,”
“Uh. What?” Spoke asked, looking more and more scared by the second.
Clown rolled his eyes and yanked out a dagger from who knows where. “Shush, you.”
He stabbed Spoke in the eye, so quickly that all Parrot saw was a flash of silver, reflecting the light as it buried itself into Spoke’s eye. Spoke screamed in pain, and then seemed to almost double, an almost ghost version of him peeling away.
As quickly as Parrot saw it, it pulled fully away from Spoke’s limp body and shot past Parrot, brushing him with one of its tendrils. Parrot shivered, despite there being no sensation, and then he bolted to Spoke and Clown, fury surging through him.
Clown’s dagger was mere hair’s-breadth away from Spoke’s open eye. He hadn’t stabbed him, but he’d been pretty damn close. Clown started to pull away, but Parrot roughly shoved him to the side. He rolled and got to his feet again, but didn’t try to approach them again as Parrot pulled his shaking friend into a hug.
Parrot gave him as fierce a glare as he could muster. Clown scowled right back. “I never lied. It didn’t hurt.”
“You scared him half to death!”
“Yeah, that’s why that little weird thing left. Didn’t you see it left once it thought Spoke was gonna be killed?” Spoke shuddered, and let out a little whimper of fear, tears welling in his eyes. “It’s just what I did to get it away when it got me. ”
“You could’ve at least given me some warning!” Spoke cried, wiping his face frantically, “I thought I was actually dead!” he burst into tears and buried his face into Parrot’s arm.
Clown frowned. “But where’s the fun in that? And at least I didn't actually stab you. Did you really think I would?”
“Yes!” Spoke shouted, glaring at him.
Clown sighed. “I wouldn’t. I don’t wanna bother cleaning up the body.”
Spoke looked even more horrified. Clown glanced at Parrot’s face, and then quickly added on, “I'm joking.”
Parrot snorted derisively.
“Anyway, it’s gone now,” Clown said grumpily. “So you can eat and stop complaining about how I almost stabbed you.”
They ate in silence. Parrot kept his eyes on Clown, not fully trusting him enough to look away. He’d probably do something underhanded to make Spoke sad. Clown glared right back, his arms crossed and his shoulders hunched. Spoke ate as quietly as he could, glancing between them with an uneasy expression. He was obviously feeling the tension too, but thankfully he decided not to involve himself.
Parrot took his time eating, despite the hunger gnawing inside him. Mainly because he knew how much it frustrated Clown when he ate painfully slowly.
“Hurry up,” Clown grumbled. “We should be able to get back to our house. Provided we actually finish breakfast before it gets dark.” he bugged his eyes out at Parrot.
Parrot rolled his eyes, and scraped the sides of the bowl, finishing it. Clown grabbed his mask and tugged it on, glancing around the room in case anything was left out. “Is there anything upstairs that’s worth bringing with us?”
“But that’s stealing!” Spoke protested. Parrot winced. Usually he’d agree with Spoke, but they actually needed things to survive, while the owners of this house were… he stole a glance at the closet that was probably holding the dead or undead owners of the house.
“Zombies don’t need food or water.” Clown said. “We need to take anything we can to survive.”
Spoke stared sadly at his beans. “Oh. okay. That makes sense.”
“I’ll go check for anything,” Clown said, and went up the stairs.
“Are you okay?” Parrot asked Spoke quietly.
Spoke nodded half-heartedly. “Yeah. Sort of. Not really. I miss my family,” he added in a whisper.
“We could go check your house on the way to mine and Clown’s,” Parrot offered. “They might be there, we might find them.”
Spoke looked like he might throw up. “Actually-”
“There’s nothing worth carrying, “ Clown interrupted, then paused. “Did I interrupt you? I’m sorry, please continue.”
Spoke gave him a look, and kept his mouth firmly shut. Clown sighed. “No, I'm not being mean right now. I hate getting interrupted. What were you saying?”
“Can we stop at Spoke’s house?” Parrot asked, “his family might be there. Or maybe they left something for him.”
“Where do you live?” Clown asked Spoke, who looked like he was in pain. “Are you okay? You look like you got stabbed.”
“I’m fine,” Spoke said, still looking like he was in pain, so obviously he wasn’t fine, and somehow thought that Parrot wouldn’t notice. He told Clown his address.
“We can do it,” Clown said. “C’mon. We’re going.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Parrot asked Spoke.
Spoke shrugged. “I’ll be fine, it’s just emotions and stuff.”
Parrot wasn’t convinced, but he dropped it. If it really was ‘emotions and stuff’, then Spoke probably didn’t want to be pushed.
Clown banned the street as soon as they left the house, saying that the roads collapsed more often than the houses. That didn’t make any logical sense, because houses weighed more, so they’d probably collapse more, but Parrot admittedly did see a lot more roads with giant sinkholes in them than buildings half-buried. Probably it had more to do with whatever creatures were creating the sinkholes in the first place.
There were a few zombies, but they were surprisingly easy to avoid. They just had to tiptoe past them and hope for the best. They weren’t particularly sneaky, because the smell of rotting flesh pervaded the air around them. The few that did notice them sneaking past were slow enough that Clown could cut off their legs, and then they couldn’t really follow them. Unfortunately, that happened often enough that Parrot and Spoke got pretty nauseous by the time they got to Spoke’s street.
There surprisingly weren’t many monsters, but Clown said that they got more active around dusk and dawn, so the middle of the day was the safest. They did get to see an armadillo/small dragon without wings that Clown said wouldn’t attack such large prey. Then he started talking about how he’d seen the same species eat several children, and Parrot shut him down.
“We don’t have to do this, you know,” Spoke said nervously, as they got closer to his house.
Parrot paused. That didn’t make sense. Spoke missed his family, he wanted them back, and if they might be able to reunite him with them. Why wouldn’t he want to figure out what happened to them? “What’s wrong.”
Spoke stared at his feet for a long second, then lightly kicked a pebble on the sidewalk. “What if they're dead,” he whispered, “what if I go inside and find their dead bodies? Or their zombified bodies? I couldn’t- i couldn’t fight them, i don’t wanna hurt them, even if they're zombies and they're trying to eat my brains, Parrot. Right now I don't know what happened to them, and not knowing is better than knowing they're dead.”
Parrot opened his mouth to say something, and closed it. He didn’t know how to comfort Spoke, he’d never had to deal with something like this before. The closest thing was when Clown had been missing, and he’d been Schrodinger’s Clown. But that had been different, because Parrot had needed that closure. To him, even knowing Clown was actually dead would have been preferable to spend the rest of his days wondering if Clown was still alive. But apparently it wasn’t the same for Spoke.
“Do you have any siblings?” Clown asked abruptly.
Spoke glanced up at him, a little confused and a little sad. “Yeah. A younger sister. She always gets on my nerves.” he sniffled. “What if I find her body torn to pieces?”
“What’re you doing?” Parrot hissed to Clown.
“I. Am attempting to connect with your lame friend,” Clown said stiffly, before turning back to Spoke. “We don’t have to go in. We can turn around and leave if you want.”
Spoke didn’t look happy at the prospect. “But what if they're in there, waiting for me?”
Clown took a deep breath. “Well. we could come back later, whenever you want, but even if they're alive in there right now, they might not be if we came back later. And if they left any messages for you, those might also fade over time. If they're dead, then their bodies will either get eaten or decompose.”
Parrot grimaced. Clown was obviously trying to be helpful and give Spoke his options, and Parrot was thankful for that, but Spoke was looking more like he was gonna start crying with each sentence that Clown spoke.
“I’m sure they're not dead,” Parrot said soothingly, “they’re probably okay.”
Clown gave him an annoyed look.
“We haven’t even seen any other people,” Spoke said quietly. “They could be dead, Parrot. They might be.” his eyes were shiny with tears, but he wiped them away and took a deep breath. “I wanna be able to say goodbye to them. I don’t want them to decompose or get eaten. And if they're alive then I'd just be wasting my chance to get them back. I’m going in.”