Archive of Our Own

Tango wouldn’t necessarily say he was good at breaking the server.

Sure, people liked to joke about it. His redstone monstrosities, his labyrinthine contraptions with pistons that fired like machine guns, the occasional… overpopulation of wardens. Maybe he had, on one or two completely hypothetical occasions, summoned more entities than the server strictly preferred.

But that wasn’t the same thing as intending to break it.

He prided himself on knowing the limits. Or at least… hovering near them without quite tipping over the edge. So when the server suddenly died around him, Tango’s first thought was not “Oh no, what have I done.”

His first thought was, “That definitely wasn’t me.”

The day had been quiet. Suspiciously quiet.

Tango stood halfway up the slope of his mountain base, sleeves rolled up, dirt blocks vanishing beneath quick swings of his shovel. Terraforming wasn’t glamorous work, but there was something satisfying about it; shaping the landscape with steady rhythm.

Shovel. Toss block. Step forward.

The wind carried the distant hum of bees from the valley below. Somewhere far off, redstone clicked in the background of a contraption he’d built days earlier. The world ticked along with its familiar mechanical heartbeat.

Normal. Comfortably normal.

He adjusted his red-tinted glasses with the back of his wrist, leaning back to inspect the slope he’d been smoothing.

“Eh… little more curvature there,” he muttered to himself.

He swapped tools. Then the world stuttered. It was subtle at first. A block he broke hung in the air a second too long before popping into existence as an item.

“…Huh.”

Then another hitch. The distant bees froze mid-flight, redstone clicks stretched into slow, warped echoes.

Tango frowned. “Okay… that’s—”

The server died.

Not gently and certainly not politely.

The sky ripped sideways like corrupted fabric, pixels tearing into jagged strips of colour. Sound cut off mid-tick. Gravity vanished.

And then:

The ground disappeared beneath his feet.

“Wha— HEY!”

Darkness swallowed him whole. The void opened like a mouth beneath the world, and Tango plunged straight into it. Cold nothing rushed past him, wind tearing at his cape as the shattered remnants of terrain flickered overhead like broken glass suspended in time. Then everything went black.

Reboot.

The server returned the way a dying machine coughs back to life. Slow and uneven. Reality loaded in layers. First came the sky: flat and pale, clouds frozen like painted brushstrokes. Then the mountain. Then the ground beneath Tango’s back.

He gasped sharply as gravity remembered him and slammed him onto the dirt. “Damn it!”

The impact knocked the breath from his lungs. Dust puffed around him as he lay there, blinking up at the sky. For several long seconds, the world flickered between frames: trees phasing in and out, shadows sliding across the terrain like they couldn’t decide where they belonged.

“…Great,” Tango groaned as he pushed himself upright, rubbing the back of his neck. “Please tell me my redstone didn’t explode.”

Because that.. that would be a nightmare.

He staggered to his feet, brushing dirt off his coat and adjusting his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose.

The server still felt… wrong.

The air carried a faint electrical hum, like static vibrating beneath the surface of the world.

Chunks rendered late the grass flickered. Something in the distance popped in and out of existence.

Tango exhaled slowly. “Okay. Okay. Crash recovery. Happens.” His eyes scanned the horizon, checking landmarks.

Mountain? Fine.

Base entrance? Still there.

The start of Decked Out 3? Seemed intact.

Good.

Good good good.

Then he noticed it, floating in the air a few blocks away. A small sphere of buzzing light.

Tango blinked. “…Uh.”

The orb hovered about chest-height, spinning slowly. Its surface glowed an eerie blue-white, threads of pixelated code crawling across it like living circuitry. It made a sound, faint but constant.

A fizzing hum. Like a corrupted file struggling to exist.

Tango tilted his head. “Well that’s… not normal.” He stepped closer. The orb jittered violently as if noticing him, lines of raw code flashing across its surface.

Fragments.

Entity ID: ——

Render state: corrupted.

Memory allocation: unstable.

“Ah,” Tango said slowly. “That’s… definitely not supposed to be there.” His first thought was that it might be a warden, he had summoned a lot of them lately. Maybe one had glitched during the crash?

Still.

He couldn’t just leave a broken entity floating around the server. And technically speaking… He did have moderator privileges.

Which meant:

Tango flexed his fingers. “Alright, let’s see what you are.” With a practiced motion, he flicked his wrist and holographic panels burst into existence around him. Translucent screens unfolded like glass wings, glowing lines of code cascading down their surfaces. The faint blue light illuminated Tango’s face as he leaned forward, already skimming through data streams.

“Entity registry… chunk memory… event logs…” His hands moved through the air, swiping and pulling code apart with casual precision. Lines rearranged themselves beneath his fingertips as he filtered error reports. “Server crash origin… aha.”

His lips twitched. “Windchargers.” Of course. “Grian,” Tango sighed. And probably Gem. And.. he squinted at another log: “…Etho.”

Yep. That tracked.

He dragged another panel closer, isolating the corrupted orb’s ID. “Huh.” It didn’t match anything. Not a mob. Not an item. Not  an environmental entity. Just a block of fractured data.

The orb pulsed brighter.

Tango frowned. “Okay… that’s weird.” He leaned in closer, squinting through his glasses. The code jittered wildly, rewriting itself faster than the system could stabilise it. Like two programs trying to overwrite each other simultaneously.

“…Server’s trying to repair it,” Tango murmured.

That wasn’t unusual after a crash. But this… This looked messy.

He lifted a hand and reached toward the hologram. “Let’s just run a quick bug refilter…” His fingers slid through the screen and lines of code parted around his hand.

Then, he touched the orb.

Everything exploded. A violent burst of light surged outward, raw data spilling into the air like shattered glass.

“WHOA!”

The force slammed into him. Tango went flying backwards in a chaotic tangle of limbs and fabric. His cape whipped around him as he hit the ground hard, skidding across the dirt, his glasses flew off his face, one boot caught a rock and he tumbled fully onto his back with a startled grunt.

“Okay!” He lay there for a moment, blinking at the sky. “…didn’t expect that.”

A soft clink nearby caught his attention. His glasses. He scrambled up onto his elbows, reaching for them.

“Don’t break, don’t break—”

Thankfully, they seemed intact. He shoved them back on his face and staggered upright again. The orb still hovered where it had been. But now.. now it looked different.

Tango narrowed his eyes. “Uh.” His holographic panels flickered back to life around him automatically. Warning text crawled across every screen.

DATA MERGE IN PROGRESS

Tango froze. “…What.” He leaned forward, scanning the code. The orb had split open slightly, thin threads of light extending from its surface like roots searching for something. The holographic panels reacted to it, data flowed between them.

Player ID: TANGO TEK

And then another string. Unreadable and completely glitched. A corrupted identifier that twisted across the screen in broken characters.

Tango’s stomach dropped. “…That’s not good.”

The server wasn’t just repairing the entity. It was trying to merge it. With him.

“Okay, no no no..” He started typing commands into the air, fingers flying through menus. “Abort merge.”

Nothing happened.

“Cancel process.”

Still nothing. The progress bar ticked forward.

>5%

The orb pulsed again. Tango took a step back. “…You’ve gotta be kidding me.” He swiped another command into existence. 

>Force delete entity.

>Error.

The code rejected him. “Excuse me?” Tango snapped. He was a moderator. The system never ignored moderator commands.

Unless…

His breath caught. Unless the server thought the process was part of him. The progress bar ticked again.

>12%

The orb’s tendrils lashed outward. One brushed against Tango’s arm. Pain shot through him instantly, white-hot and burning. He stumbled backward, clutching his sleeve, beneath the fabric, faint lines of glowing code flickered briefly across his skin before fading.

His heart began to pound. “That is definitely not good.” The holographic screens around him warped violently as the merge accelerated, data streamed through them like a storm.

Player ID: Tango Tek

Entity ID: ————

Merge status: ACTIVE

Tango stared at the corrupted string again. The characters shifted constantly, rearranging into impossible symbols. Whatever the entity had been before the crash.. The server didn’t remember anymore and now it was trying to solve the problem the only way it knew how. By combining the fragments with the nearest stable data structure.

Him.

The progress bar crept higher.

>21%

Tango’s pulse hammered in his ears. “…Okay.” He swallowed. “Okay okay okay.”

Think.

Think.

He flexed his hands again, summoning deeper system panels. Admin-level ones. If the server thought this was part of his player data… Then maybe he could access it from inside. New holograms unfolded around him like a storm of glowing glass. Hundreds of lines of code flooded his vision and in the center of it all.. The orb pulsed brighter.

Reaching.

Hungry.

The progress bar climbed.

>29%

Tango stared at it, breath shallow. “…This,” he muttered under his breath, “is gonna be a problem.”

His fingers hovered over the translucent air-keyboard, tremors betraying his calm exterior. He flexed them again, summoning the holographic admin console with a flourish, light spilling across his coat in ghostly arcs. The orb hovered before him, pulsating violently, like some tiny, furious sun trapped in a fragile membrane. Sparks crackled off its surface in harsh blue-white arcs that hissed through the air, painting the jagged terrain with flashes of light. Tango winced instinctively, jerking his arm back as a tongue of code lashed out at him. The static buzz tore at his ears, made the back of his neck prickle, like standing too close to lightning.

He exhaled slowly, grit in his teeth. He tried the command again. /abort_merge, typed cleanly in the air, the symbols glowing as they hung suspended in front of him. Nothing.

The orb shuddered violently, flickering in bursts of raw, chaotic code. Sparks jumped from its surface, splintering into the air like fiery insects. Tango’s stomach sank. This wasn’t just a corrupted entity. This was alive, in some terrifying sense. Alive and angry.

He sighed heavily, shaking his head. “Alright… okay…” he muttered to himself, trying again, fingers swiping through menus and strings of code, voice low and precise, almost ceremonial. Each attempt made the orb flare brighter, sending shards of luminous static spiraling outward. The ground beneath him thrummed with energy, his boots sinking slightly into the pale moss that had somehow grown along the fractured stone.

Another command. Another failure. Tango’s eyes narrowed, teeth grit together as he ground through the frustration, wincing each time the orb cracked, sparking at him like it was learning to fight back. It spat shards of corrupted code at him like a serpent of light, each flicker leaving a sting across his skin and a bitter taste in the back of his throat.

And then it struck.

The orb jolted forward, tendrils of flickering code whipping through the air with brutal precision, and made contact with his hand. Tango barely had time to react before a violent shock surged through him, wrenching him off his feet. The world tilted violently, the sky streaking into jagged lines as he flew backward, cape thrashing, boots skidding against moss-covered rock. A sharp thud reverberated through his spine as he slammed into the uneven terrain. Pain bloomed in his shoulder, jagged, familiar in the way that said “yeah… that definitely hurt.”

He groaned, dusting himself off, rubbing at his aching back. The orb, or what he assumed was still the orb, was gone. A faint, buzzing echo lingered in the air, but the space where it had floated shimmered with a pale light.

Tango’s eyes fell.

There.

Cradled in the soft, ghostly moss that carpeted the fractured stone like an otherworldly blanket, lay a small figure. A real figure. Not a mob. Not an amorphous glimmer of corrupted data. Not a twisted fragment of code. But a player entity.

Small. Fragile. Unmistakably new. It hadn’t been here before, and the server had clearly just… made it.

Tango froze, heart hammering in disbelief. This wasn’t just another glitch. This wasn’t another failed summoning.

This… was alive.

Well, as alive as Hermitcraft code could make a living player. But alive enough that Tango could hear the subtle hum in the air, feel the faint warmth radiating from it like heat bleeding through pixels.

It stirred, lifting its head lazily, soft wavy white hair falling over pale features. Half-open eyes blinked up at him: blood red, unmistakably his own. Not an exact copy, but the closest thing the server could produce. His DNA, his player ID, fused with whatever fragment of corrupted code had exploded in the merge.

And somehow, somehow, this baby… was his.

Tango swallowed, a strange, surreal knot tightening in his chest. He reached out a trembling hand, not sure whether to touch or to simply back away and let the server… undo it. But a glance at the entity’s faintly glowing ID line; still flickering, still forming, made his decision for him.

He scrambled forward, uneven steps across the pale moss and jagged rocks. His gloves brushed against the soft strands of the baby’s hair. It blinked up at him again, curious but placid, tiny chest rising and falling in careful, rhythmic pulses of code.

Tango’s breath hitched. “Okay… okay,” he whispered, voice rough. “You… you’re… you’re mine. I guess.”

The server, of course, decided to announce it.

He hadn’t even had a chance to cradle the small figure against his chest when a notification streaked across the global Hermitcraft chat.

[SERVER] ___ has joined the server.

No name. Just blank space. But everyone logged in would see it. Everyone.

Tango froze, blinking. The baby cooed softly, turning its head slightly, hair shimmering faintly under the fractured sun. The ID slowly solidified as the server attempted to finalise the creation process.

Player ID: <0bdacfbbd5394abb9d6116c12750120c>

The line flickered again, reassembling, this time readable, tentative, delicate. Tango reached out and, careful this time and gently drew the tiny figure closer to him, cradling it like he would a fragile artifact, a treasure too complex for the world to understand.

It smelled faintly of data. Not just digital, but… something more. The faint hum of code, like a heartbeat, radiated from its small body. Tango couldn’t help but let his hands linger on its tiny shoulders. His own red-tinted glasses caught the flickering reflections of the baby’s white hair and crimson eyes, and for a moment he felt the surreal truth in his chest like a sharp, bright weight.

Somewhere far off, the server’s ambient hum had turned anxious. Logs streamed across his vision again, highlighting merge processes, entity stabilization routines, memory allocation errors. And yet… despite all the chaos, despite the incomprehensible merging of corrupted code and his player ID, the baby had stabilised slowly. Tango let out a breath he didn’t realise he had been holding. He adjusted the glasses on his face, gloves still clutching the infant figure against his chest.

“Oh, of course…” he muttered, voice low, incredulous. “Of course this would happen.”

He knew the next steps would be… difficult. Explaining this to Xisuma would be… catastrophic.

Because how exactly does one justify a Hermitcraft server crash that spontaneously created a whitelisted player? A baby. From his own DNA and a shard of glitched code.

He looked down at the tiny face staring up at him. Pale skin, soft curves, hair like silk. Half-formed, blinking eyes that mirrored his own in colour. And in that absurd, impossible moment, Tango felt the strangest mixture of awe, terror, and… something dangerously close to protectiveness.

He sighed, heavily, running a hand through his own hair in disbelief.

He wasn’t entirely sure how this had happened. Maybe it was the redstone. Maybe it was the combined chaos of Grian, Gem, and Etho’s windcharger mishap. Maybe the server had simply decided that he needed… a new project.

Whatever it was, the baby had chosen him, or rather, the server had forged him.

Tango’s gaze swept over the jagged landscape, the moss, the fractured stone, the lingering remnants of corrupted light from the orb-turned-baby. And for the first time that day, he allowed himself a moment of clarity amidst the chaos.

This was real. And it was his.

And yet…

“Ohhhhh…” Tango groaned softly, voice barely audible. “I cannot wait to explain this to Xisuma.”

The baby cooed again, reaching up with tiny hands. Tango’s fingers closed around them instinctively, heart hammering, mind spinning. Already, the server’s ambient hum had softened, the merged lines of code stabilising, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before global logs reflected every detail.

Every Hermit would know something unprecedented had occurred.

He adjusted his stance, glancing down at the tiny player entity in his arms. Breath trembling, he whispered softly: “You’re not going anywhere, little one. Not today. Not ever.”

The moss beneath them swayed faintly as if in acknowledgment, the fractured world holding its breath. Tango’s mind raced, trying to map out every next step: player permissions, spawn point corrections, server logs, admin explanations, security patches. But all that could wait.

For now, he just held the impossibility in his arms, a strange, flickering miracle born from chaos and his own player ID. Tango adjusted his grip again, muttering under his breath with a grim sort of awe: “Well… this day just got a lot more interesting.” He had a whitelisted baby in his arms. From a server crash. From corrupted code. From him.

And Hermitcraft… Hermitcraft was about to get very, very complicated.

Tango kept one arm firmly beneath the baby's back and the other carefully cupped beneath its head as he started walking. Every instinct he had, whether from years of surviving Hermitcraft's ridiculous antics or something far newer, something frighteningly parental; had narrowed into one singular thought.

Don't drop the baby.

His boots crunched softly against the stone pathways winding through the mountain. Behind him, the place where the impossible had happened slowly disappeared around corners of carved deepslate and unfinished tunnels. Residual static still prickled beneath his skin where the corrupted orb had struck him. Every now and then tiny sparks danced across his fingertips before fading away, lingering reminders that none of this should have been possible.

The baby stirred in his arms.

A tiny sound escaped it: not quite a cry, not quite a yawn, but something soft enough that Tango instinctively looked down.

"...Hey."

His voice came out quieter than he'd intended. "So... we're doing this now, huh?" The infant blinked sleepily back at him. Those eyes… there was absolutely no mistaking them.

Ruby red, brilliant even in the dim lighting of the cavern, identical to his own. They weren't merely similar. The exact same shade stared back at him, framed by tiny lashes that fluttered as the baby struggled to stay awake. The weight of that realisation settled heavily inside his chest.

Mine.

The server logs hadn't been mistaken. Player data, player ID, a genetic template. Whatever corrupted entity had existed before was gone. This little baby had been created from him.

"...Well," Tango muttered, swallowing around the lump in his throat. "I guess that makes this official." The infant answered by grabbing a fistful of his coat with astonishing determination. "...Strong grip." Despite everything, a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "That's... probably a good sign."

He continued deeper into the mountain, moving much slower than he normally would.

Decked Out Three stretched around him in various stages of completion. Massive stone corridors opened into half-finished chambers. Oak supports climbed toward the cavern ceiling while bundles of exposed redstone wiring snaked across walls waiting to be hidden behind decoration. Minecart rails stopped abruptly where future rooms would eventually branch off.

Normally, Tango loved walking through unfinished projects. He could already picture every completed hallway, every trap, every carefully designed encounter.

Today, he barely noticed any of it. Instead, he found himself slowing before every staircase. Avoiding every loose stone, carefully stepping around every unfinished hole in the floor and without consciously deciding to, he shifted the baby's weight closer against his chest every time he stepped down onto a lower ledge.

"...Didn't realise this place was such a deathtrap."

He glanced around.

"...Actually..."

A quiet snort escaped him.

"It absolutely is."

The baby seemed completely unconcerned, instead, tiny fingers had become fascinated with the silver clasp fastening Tango's cape. The infant poked it experimentally before wrapping both little hands around it, attempting with all the determination in its tiny body to pull it loose.

"...Nope." Tango gently freed the clasp from curious fingers. "You are definitely not allowed sharp objects."

The baby frowned.

"...Don't give me that look."

Eventually the unfinished dungeon gave way to one of the more complete sections of his base. Compared to the construction site outside, this room felt almost cozy: warm lanterns hung from chains overhead, filling the carved stone chamber with amber light that chased shadows into the corners. Organised storage systems lined one wall, every chest neatly labelled. Workbenches were scattered around the room beside anvils and furnaces. Shelves overflowed with enchanted books, carefully sorted redstone components, stacks of building blocks and half-finished inventions waiting for inspiration to strike again.

The familiar surroundings eased some of the frantic tension buzzing beneath Tango's skin.

Home.

Safe.

Or at least... safer.

Balancing the baby carefully in one arm, he nudged the heavy oak door open with his shoulder before stepping inside. Once through, he hooked one boot behind the door and gently pushed it shut and the latch clicked softly into place. Silence settled over the room, the constant barrage of server chat notifications faded into the background.

No buzzing orb, no corrupted code, no crackling energy.

Just… the two of them and for the first time since the server crash, Tango simply stood there.

Then, slowly, he looked down. Really looked.

The infant lay quietly against his chest, wrapped securely inside the thick bundle of pale moss Tango had hastily gathered back at the crash site. It had seemed like the only thing soft enough to protect the baby from the cold stone.

Now… It looked ridiculous. Like someone had attempted to swaddle an infant in an entire patch of forest floor.

"...Yeah..." He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. "We're definitely fixing that."

Carefully lowering himself onto a stool beside one of his crafting benches, Tango shifted the baby into the crook of one arm, the infant yawned. Tiny pointed teeth flashed inside its mouth. Not human. Small little netherborn fangs.

"...Oh." Tango blinked. "Right..." His gaze drifted upward toward the baby's hair. He hadn't truly noticed before. Back beside the corrupted orb everything had happened too quickly. Between the panic, the server notifications and the overwhelming realisation that he was suddenly holding a baby, he hadn't stopped to examine the finer details.

Now he did.

The soft hair wasn't white anymore, it was changing.

Each delicate strand shimmered with colour, pale silver giving way to vivid crimson. Here and there tiny streaks of molten orange had begun appearing near the roots, spreading slowly like embers beneath cooling ash.

Not fully orange. Not yet, just beginning. Like newly kindled fire.

Like...

His own hair had once looked.

Very carefully, Tango reached out one finger. "...Can I?" He hesitated only a second before gently brushing the soft strands away from the baby's forehead.

Warm. Not painfully hot. Just pleasantly warm, like holding his hands near a fireplace during winter. Tiny flames danced lazily between the strands no bigger than candlelight, flickering gently with every slow breath the infant took.

"...Oh wow." His voice barely rose above a whisper. "It really is fire."

The baby giggled and the tiny flames brightened happily.

Tango instinctively leaned back. "...Okay." A helpless smile spread across his face. "You're adorable." Another delighted giggle answered him. "...That's dangerous."

His own flames hadn't always burned bright orange, when he'd first spawned on Hermitcraft years ago, they had been crimson too. Young, weak and way too small to burn anyone. As he'd grown older, the flames had matured alongside him, deepening into brilliant oranges and molten golds and sometimes vibrant blues.

This… This was exactly how young netherborn children developed.

His eyes wandered lower: pointed ears, tiny ember-like freckles dusting soft cheeks, the faintest bumps beneath the hairline where horns would eventually grow.

Everything about the baby mirrored him.

Then something shifted beneath the moss blanket. A tiny crimson tail slipped free, it flicked lazily back and forth behind the baby.

Tango stared. "...You have a tail." The infant blinked innocently. "...I forgot babies had those." He paused. "...Actually..." Another pause. "I've never met a baby before."

The infant continued staring at him.

"...We're both figuring this out."

Then reality returned all at once.

"...Clothes."

Tango looked down at the moss, the baby looked down too.

Silence.

"...Yeah." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Moss doesn't count as clothing."

As if agreeing, the baby sneezed, though instead of air, a tiny puff of glowing sparks burst from its nose, floating lazily upward before disappearing.

"...Bless you."

The baby blinked, then sneezed again, more sparks drifted through the room.

"...Okay..." Tango laughed quietly. "That's actually pretty cute."

He carefully arranged several folded blankets on top of his workbench, creating the softest nest he could manage before gently laying the baby down.

"There." He tucked another folded cloth beneath its head. "Don't..." He pointed dramatically. "...Go anywhere."

The baby immediately reached both tiny arms toward him.

"...Right." He smiled. "I suppose that's fair."

Keeping one hand resting gently against the baby's side, Tango began opening storage chests one-handed. "No..." Leather. "That'll burn." Wool. "Nope." Cotton. "Absolutely not." His fingers dug deeper through neatly organised supplies until they brushed something smoother.

Dark fabric.

His face brightened. "There you are."

Fireproof cloth.

Originally intended for insulating delicate redstone mechanisms built near lava reservoirs: Heat resistant, flexible and soft.

"...Perfect." He spread the fabric across the crafting table and the baby watched every movement with wide ruby eyes, head tilting curiously from one side to the other. "You supervising?"

A happy little noise answered him.

"I'm taking that as a yes."

He measured by eye; tiny sleeves, tiny trousers and creating a very, very tiny shirt. "...I've never made baby clothes before." He glanced toward the infant. "So..." Picking up a pair of enchanted shears, he smiled nervously. "We're improvising."

The rhythmic snipping of fabric filled the quiet room, every few moments Tango looked over to check on the baby. Every single time those bright crimson eyes were watching him; Following his hands, watching the scissors, watching everything and eventually the infant yawned. Its eyelids drooped sleepily. The little flames in its hair dimmed.

Then:

"Hic."

A tiny hiccup escaped, a marble-sized fireball floated gently into the air.

Tango froze.

The tiny fireball drifted lazily upward until it bumped harmlessly against the stone ceiling.

Pop.

It burst into harmless sparks. Silence. The baby blinked. Tango blinked. "...Okay." He reached for a nearby notebook and opening it, he carefully wrote:

Things Baby Does:

-Sneezes sparks.

-Hiccups fireballs.

-Surprisingly strong grip.

He hesitated before smiling to himself.

Then added one final note.

-Absolutely adorable.**

He stared at the words. "...I'm talking to myself." The baby cooed happily. "...Yeah." He laughed softly. "I guess I've got company now." Without another thought, Tango set the unfinished shirt aside and scooped the baby back into his arms and the little netherborn immediately curled against his chest as though it had always belonged there, its tiny tail lazily wrapped around the sleeve of his coat. A warm, contented hum vibrated through its little body, resting his chin gently atop the baby's fiery hair, Tango closed his eyes for a moment.

"...You know..." His voice barely carried through the quiet workshop. "I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing." A tiny hand reached up and wrapped around one of the loose orange flames framing his own face and it gave an experimental tug.

Tango chuckled. "...Neither do you." His gaze drifted around the room at all the half-finished redstone projects. Blueprints, Decked Out plans and machines waiting to be completed. For years, his life had revolved around creating things. Now, nestled against his heartbeat, was the most impossible creation the server had ever produced.

Not a machine, not a project, not redstone. A child. His child.

"...First things first," he whispered, gently rocking the sleepy infant as its ruby eyes slowly drifted shut. "We're getting you dressed." A soft smile settled naturally onto his face. "And then..." He looked down at the peaceful little face tucked against his chest. "...Then we'll figure out what your name is.”

Tango took one look at the pile of fireproof cloth he had thrown together, then at the baby blinking up at him with those impossible ruby eyes, and let out a breath that sounded dangerously close to a laugh. He had built machines that could think, sort, trap, kill, reset, rewire, and punish entire teams of players for walking in the wrong direction. He had spent hours buried in logic, timing, repeaters, comparator chains, and command strings that twisted the brain into knots.

Surely, he told himself as he carefully laid the baby down on the padded workbench, surely dressing a baby could not be worse than debugging one of his own contraptions at three in the morning with his brain half melted from lack of sleep.

The baby made a soft little noise as he unfolded the fabric. Tiny fingers flexed in the air, opening and closing as if trying to grasp the world before it could slip away again. 

Tango swallowed against the tightness in his throat and focused on the practical details, because that was what he always did when the impossible started breathing in his arms. He adjusted the improvised nappy first, a fireproof wrap layered and folded with more care than elegance, the seams rough from his own impatient stitching but functional enough. The baby wiggled once, then again, a tiny indignant squirm that nearly made him miss the fastening. Tango immediately stiffened.

“Hey, hey,” he murmured, voice gentler than he was used to hearing from himself. “I know. I know. Not exactly a five-star changing room experience, huh?”

The baby stared at him solemnly, then blinked. Its little mouth puckered, and for one terrifying second Tango thought it might cry. Instead a spark popped from its nose in a tiny, harmless burst of heat that singed the air but vanished before it could touch the cloth. Tango froze with one hand still under the baby’s back, then blinked hard.

“…Okay,” he muttered. “That is going to be a recurring issue, I think.”

He finished the makeshift nappy with exaggerated concentration, tugging it snug but not too tight, testing the edges with the tip of one finger as though he were calibrating a delicate redstone trigger. Once he was satisfied it would hold, he began dressing the baby in the tiny fireproof layers he had cut from the cloth. The sleeves were clumsy at first, his fingers too large and his patience too thin, but the baby was surprisingly cooperative, lifting an arm when he needed one and curling its tiny legs when he adjusted the lower wrap. The whole process made his chest ache in a way he didn't have a name for. 

This was absurd. This was ridiculous. This was a baby in his workshop, made from code and his own damn player data, and yet as he pulled the last bit of cloth into place, the whole thing felt strangely intimate, like he had been allowed to touch something precious and fragile before the universe could remember to take it away.

When he finally lifted the baby again, Tango held it close for a second longer than necessary, staring down at the soft shift of fiery hair, the little horns not fully grown in yet, the tiny tail curling sleepily against the fabric. His hands hovered for a moment, unsure where to rest, before he settled into certainty by force. He had never been the kind of person who naturally knew what to do. He figured things out by doing them wrong first. So he kept going.

The baby wrap was the next challenge. Tango muttered under his breath as he cut another strip of fireproof cloth, then draped it over himself in front of the workbench mirror he usually used to check cape placement and costume alterations. It took him a few tries to get the wrap positioned right, long loops crossing over his chest and around his shoulders, then down and under again like some strange hybrid of redstone engineering and survival parenting. He had to lay the baby down for a second and reposition the straps, then pick it back up carefully and ease it into the sling against his chest. 

The infant squirmed, tiny hands bunching into the fabric, and Tango bit back a swear as he tried not to drop one end of the wrap while securing the other.

“Okay. Okay. This is… this is fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “This is a totally normal thing that normal people do all the time.”

The baby blinked up at him from inches away, warm and solid against his sternum. Tango froze for a beat, then huffed a laugh that came out thinner than he intended. “Yeah, I know. You’re laughing at me.”

But the wrap held. It actually held. 

He tested it by shifting his weight from one foot to the other, then bending slightly at the knees. The baby bobbed gently against him, still snug and secure, and after a moment the tiny body settled, one hand curling around the edge of the cloth near his collarbone. Tango’s heart gave a strange, painful little stutter at that. His own hands moved automatically after that, tugging at the fabric here, smoothing it there, until the makeshift carrier sat across his torso in a stable, if ugly, knot of fireproof layers that kept the baby close enough to feel his heartbeat.

“There,” he said softly, breath easing out of him in one long stream. “That’s… good enough.”

The baby made a quiet sound, almost a coo, and Tango looked down at it with a little helpless tilt of his head. He really should name it, he thought dimly. He was aware that this was important. Important in the way a player name was important. Important in the way identity mattered when the server had somehow stitched a living being from his own code and left it in his arms. 

But the thought was slippery, hard to pin down while he was still trying to stop himself from staring. 

The baby looked so much like him it was almost obscene. Firey hair, pale skin warmed by a faint inner glow, ruby eyes half-lidded with sleep. A smaller version. A softer version. A newborn version of something the server had decided he was responsible for.

He swallowed, then brushed his knuckles lightly over the baby’s cheek. “Alright,” he murmured, mostly to himself. “We can do this.”

The baby snuffled and pressed its face closer to his chest, making a little nest of heat and cloth and warmth against him. Tango closed his eyes for the span of a single breath, then opened them again and squared his shoulders. He had work to do. Of course he did. 

The universe had not given him a baby and then politely paused the rest of his life. Somewhere in the unfinished belly of Decked Out 3, his coding project was still waiting for him. Redstone was still placed. Logic was still incomplete. He had a half-finished system to calibrate and a whole game to make sure didn’t violently eat someone alive because a comparator chain decided to misbehave.

“Okay,” he said aloud, more firmly this time, as if convincing himself the words could become true. “We can handle a baby and a code project. Totally normal. A little multitasking. Easy.”

He was lying, obviously. He knew he was lying. But it was the kind of lie he needed.

He adjusted the baby wrap one last time and stepped away from the workbench. The mountain air hit him as he moved out of the completed chamber and back through the rougher tunnels toward Decked Out 3’s lower levels. The path was still half-finished in places, the walls raw stone in some stretches, polished in others, with redstone veins exposed like nerves beneath the skin of the build. Tango moved carefully anyway, one hand often drifting to support the baby through the wrap even though it was already secure. The little body against his chest rose and fell with warm, steady breaths that made him acutely aware of every step he took. 

He hadn't realised before how much of his own body language would change once he had something so fragile pinned to him. Every turn became slower. Every descent became measured. Every sudden sound made him tense before he even thought to.

He kept talking to the baby as he walked, because silence suddenly felt too big. “You’re gonna hate the smell down there,” he said, glancing down at the glowing hair peeking from the wrap. “Lots of stone, lots of dust, lots of me being a menace to the server’s structural integrity. But I’ve got to finish some work, so you’re gonna be my little… supervisor, I guess.”

The baby blinked at him, expression unreadable and somehow already judgmental.

“Yeah, that look. I know,” Tango muttered. “I’m improvising.”

He reached the lower work area of Decked Out 3, where the half-finished coding setup sat in one of the more stable chambers he had carved out for testing. The room was a mix of practical and chaotic. Screens of floating code hovered near the wall, redstone dust was laid out in precise lines across the floor, and the surrounding construction still looked raw enough that the place felt like a thought that had not quite become a building yet. 

Tango stepped inside, nudging the door shut behind him with his heel, then approached the console with the baby snug against his chest. The quiet hum of machinery and the distant drip of water through stone soothed him in a mechanical way he understood better than emotion.

He bent over the holographic interface and began working. Lines of code unspooled before his eyes, clean and sharp and comforting in their own abstract way. He toggled variables, checked timing values, recalibrated a sequence, and muttered to himself as he worked through the logic. The baby stayed pressed against him, occasionally shifting with small, sleepy movements whenever he leaned too far forward.

“Okay,” Tango murmured, eyes narrowing at one line that kept misfiring. “If the trigger delay is here, then the output should not be looping back into itself. So why are you..”

The coding replied in the language he understood best: misbehavior.

A section of the hologram flickered, shifted, and spat a burst of error text across the display. Tango made a face. “Of course you do that now.”

He reached up, swiped away the error, and kept going. The baby made a little huff against his chest, as if protesting the way he was leaning. Tango looked down and immediately straightened.

“Sorry. Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I’m supposed to be taking care of you, not trying to be swallowed by my own spaghetti code.”

He was halfway through adjusting a timing loop when the sound of rockets echoed somewhere nearby, sharp and sudden in the stone chamber. Tango didn’t react at first. A lot of people flew near his builds. A lot of Hermits drifted through the mountain for one reason or another. He kept his attention on the code for another few seconds, then another, trying to ignore the feeling crawling up the back of his neck.

And then a voice came from behind him.

“Tango.”

He went utterly still.

It was like the whole room had snapped taut. His shoulders locked, his jaw clenched, and every ounce of heat in his body seemed to rush directly into his face. He knew that voice. Of course he knew that voice.

Xisuma.

Tango stared straight ahead at the holographic code without turning around. The baby shifted inside the wrap as if sensing his tension. One tiny hand pressed against his chest. Tango barely managed to keep his breathing even.

Behind him, Xisuma spoke again, calm and impossibly composed in the way only an admin could be when everyone else’s entire world had just been thrown into chaos. “I’ve been checking with everyone online. No one seems to know who the new player is. I’m planning to temporarily shut the server down to keep anyone else from joining until I can identify them. It’s for safety.”

Tango’s throat constricted.

The baby was suddenly the heaviest thing he had ever carried.

He stared fixedly at the code in front of him, every line blurring as the blood rushed in his ears. His mind sprinted wildly in three directions at once. 

Don't turn around. Don't make a weird face. Don’t let Xisuma see the baby. Don’t say the baby is yours. Don’t explain the crash. Don’t explain the merge. Don’t say “code” out loud because then you’ll have to explain why there is a living, breathing, server-recognised infant attached to your chest and somehow that sounds worse every time you think it.

Tango swallowed. “Uh,” he managed, and hated how small it sounded.

There was a brief pause behind him. Not suspicious, not yet. Just patient.

“Tango?” Xisuma asked, a little more carefully now. “Are you okay?”

The baby made a tiny noise. A soft, sleepy hum that seemed far too loud in the sudden silence. Tango reflexively lifted one hand to press gently over the wrap, as if he could physically keep the sound contained. He had the ridiculous, panicked urge to apologise to the entire universe.

He still didn’t turn.

“Well,” he said, aiming for casual and landing somewhere closer to strangled, “that depends on your definition of okay.”

There was another pause.

“Tango,” Xisuma said, still calm, but now with the unmistakable shape of concern. “What exactly is going on?”

Tango could feel the baby’s warmth against his chest, the tiny rise and fall of its breath, the minute shift of its body as it settled into the wrap. He had never wanted a cloak of invisibility more in his life. He’d never wanted to become one with the wall. He’d never wanted his own redstone setup to swallow him whole and hide him in some secret maintenance tunnel where no one could ask reasonable questions.

He opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again.

And, very stupidly, very awkwardly, very Tango-like, said the first thing that came to mind.

“…Nothing.”

The word hung in the air like a broken circuit.

Xisuma’s silence behind him was not at all reassuring.

Tango shut his eyes for a second, then forced out a breath. “I mean, uh, nothing bad. Nothing dangerous. It’s just… there’s a thing. A small thing. A very small thing. And I’m handling it.”

From the wrap against his chest came the tiniest movement, a soft wriggle and a barely audible coo, and Tango’s entire spine went rigid. He could practically feel the moment Xisuma heard it too, because the air behind him changed in a way that made every hair on the back of his neck stand up.

“…Tango,” Xisuma said slowly now, and there was definitely something in the tone that suggested he had heard exactly enough. “What do you mean by small thing?”

Tango shut his eyes harder.

Oh no.

No, no, no.

The baby shifted again, tiny fingers flexing against his shirt. Tango clutched the coding console with one hand like it was the only solid object left in the universe and tried to think of literally anything else. But Xisuma was still behind him, and the server felt suddenly too quiet, as if it had decided to lean in and listen along.

He took one breath.

Then another.

And realised, with the coldest little drop in his stomach, that there was absolutely no reasonable answer to the question standing behind him except the one he had been avoiding from the moment the server crashed.

Because Xisuma had come looking for the new player.

And Tango, standing in the middle of his unfinished dungeon with a newborn on his chest and redstone code open in front of him, had somehow become the very first person on the server to know exactly where that new player was.

Right against his heart.

“How… weird would it be to say I had a baby?” Tango blurted out, and the second the words were in the air he wanted to snatch them back with both hands and shove them back into his mouth.

The silence that followed was so complete it seemed to press against the walls.

Even the redstone in the room sounded too loud. The faint ticking from the unfinished mechanisms suddenly felt obscene, like the whole mountain had heard him and decided to freeze in place out of sheer disbelief. Tango stood with one hand still half-raised over the coding console, the other unconsciously bracing the baby against his chest beneath the wrap. His heart hammered hard enough to make him feel nauseous. He could feel the tiny warmth of the infant through the fireproof layers, a living little furnace tucked against his ribs, and that warmth only made the moment more surreal.

He had just said it.

Out loud.

To Xisuma.

The admin had gone completely still behind him.

Tango didn’t turn around immediately. He couldn’t. He could feel the shape of the silence like a physical thing, sharp and weighty, stretching between them in the red-lit chamber. For a second he wondered if Xisuma had simply glitched out of existence. That would have been preferable. That would have been easier. He could deal with server problems. He could deal with broken code, unstable entities, corrupted data, absurdly overcomplicated redstone, the bizarre mechanics of Hermitcraft behaving like Hermitcraft. He could even deal with a child made from his own player data and some impossible glitch. 

What he couldn’t deal with was hearing himself say ‘I had a baby’ and then having to exist in the same room as another sentient person afterward.

Because who said that?

Who said that in a situation like this?

Tango squeezed his eyes shut and swore silently at himself.

As far as anyone on the server knew, he was a man. A born man. And yes, he was netherborn, which already meant the rules of everything involving bodies, heat, sleep, hunger, pain, and probably a hundred other things behaved differently around him than they did for most of the others. Netherborn anatomy was weird. Everybody knew that much in the vague, hand-wavy way that Minecraft-world logic allowed. 

People understood enough to accept that hybrids could have wildly different needs. Avians nested. Vampires like Mumbo sometimes needed the dark for long stretches before they could properly function again. Some beings ran hot, some cold, some needed strange foods, strange conditions, strange rhythms to survive.

So maybe, technically, “I had a baby” was not the most impossible sentence in the world.

It still felt like the most impossible sentence he had ever said.

Behind him, Xisuma made a tiny sound, more breath than word, and Tango’s stomach twisted.

When he finally forced himself to turn, it was slowly, like approaching a live wire. The baby shifted in the wrap against his chest, not upset, just sleepy and warm, its tiny body cocooned against him as if it had already decided that he was the safest place in the world and intended to remain there. That thought hit Tango so hard it almost knocked the breath out of him. The infant had fallen half-asleep against his sternum, but when he rotated his body the little thing stirred and lifted its face.

Ruby eyes.

His eyes.

Small and round and bleary with drowsiness, but unmistakably his in colour, in shape, in that same odd nether-born intensity that made them look like they had something burning very deep inside. The baby stared up at him with soft, almost dazed trust, and Tango’s throat went tight. It was a look so open, so unguarded, that it scraped right through him. There was no fear in it. No suspicion. No awareness of the absurdity. Just the simple, heavy fact of a baby looking up at the person holding it like that person was the whole of existence.

He wanted to look away from it and couldn’t.

The tiny thing gave another faint coo, almost a sigh, and tucked itself closer to his chest.

Tango’s chest hurt.

He looked up at Xisuma, bracing for the worst.

The admin was standing several paces away, posture frozen in that alert, controlled way of his, as if even his surprise had been forced into neat lines. But his helmet angle had shifted slightly downward, and Tango could feel the weight of his stare going from Tango’s face to the wrap at his chest and back again, trying to assemble a coherent reality from the fragments it was being handed.

Xisuma’s first reaction was not accusation. Not panic. Not even the sheer comic horror Tango had braced himself for.

It was concern.

Immediately, visibly, painfully earnest concern.

“Tango,” he said, and there was a soft edge to his voice now, gentler than before. “You shouldn't be working.”

Tango blinked.

Xisuma took a step forward, then stopped, as if not wanting to crowd him. “You look exhausted.”

Tango stared at him. He wanted to protest. He wanted to say he was fine, absolutely fine, perfectly operational, completely able to continue making terrible life decisions while half-buried in code and redstone and baby logistics. Instead, his mouth opened and nothing came out but a weak, startled exhale.

Xisuma continued, tone still careful. “If you just had a baby, then the last thing you need is to be out here coding and building. You should be resting.”

Tango’s brain snagged hard on the phrase. ‘Just had a baby.’

There was a brief, horrible moment where he simply stood there in silence, because part of him wanted to correct that statement and part of him was too tired to even find the energy to explain the truth. He could already feel the beginning of exhaustion grinding behind his eyes. It was not just emotional. It was physical. The earlier data merge, the crash, the way the baby’s formation had pulled and torn at his senses through the server’s code; everything had left him feeling wrung out, like a towel twisted until no water could possibly remain. Standing upright felt like a performance at this point.

And Xisuma looked so deeply convinced of his own interpretation that Tango almost felt guilty for being the cause of it.

Almost.

He glanced down at the baby again, and the little thing blinked back at him, a tiny sleepy crease between its brows. One hand had worked free of the wrap and now rested against Tango’s collarbone, a warm little weight that shifted every time Tango breathed. The baby was too small to understand any of this. Too small to know that it had apparently been delivered into the world by a server crash and a corrupted glitch and Tango’s own bloody player data. Too small to care about the social complications of explaining netherborn biology to the admin while pretending not to be on the verge of collapse.

Tango ran a hand over the back of his neck.

“I mean,” he said weakly, because apparently he had chosen honesty by accident and now couldn’t escape it, “I am tired.”

Xisuma’s posture softened in an instant, as if that admitted weakness had confirmed everything he already thought he knew. “Of course you are.”

Tango made a tiny helpless noise in the back of his throat. He could not decide whether to laugh or disappear. The urge to explain that no, he hadn’t gone through a normal human birth experience, because this baby had been literally manufactured by a catastrophic data merge and was probably more “rendered into being” than “born,” was so overwhelming that it almost hurt. But then he looked at Xisuma, at the admin’s concerned stillness and measured tone, and at the way his gaze kept flicking to the baby with a protective seriousness, and he just… stopped.

There was too much exhaustion. Too much embarrassment. Too much emotional clutter piled up around the truth. He didn’t have the strength to force the exact explanation into place. He didn’t have the energy to unravel the misconception or to make the whole impossible event sound less insane than it was.

And maybe, just maybe, there was a kind of mercy in letting Xisuma believe the lie.

Not because it was accurate.

Because it was easier.

Xisuma took another step closer, slower this time, and peered at the infant with the kind of guarded amazement usually reserved for rare mobs, unhinged builds, and the occasional server anomaly. “That’s…” He paused, searching for the right words. “That’s very small.”

Tango almost barked a laugh. It came out brittle and short. “Yeah,” he said, voice rough. “That’s kind of the deal.”

The baby blinked up at Xisuma, then yawned widely enough to reveal tiny pointed teeth, a flash of warm netherborn ivory that made Tango’s stomach flip with a strange, protective tenderness. Xisuma’s head tipped slightly to one side.

“They look like you,” he said, sounding both impressed and baffled.

Tango’s face went hot all over again. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I noticed.”

The infant made a little noise and burrowed deeper into the wrap, turning its face against Tango’s chest. Tango’s hands moved instantly, one flattening gently against the baby’s back in a reflexive protective gesture. He could feel the warmth of the tiny body, could feel the way the little breaths puffed softly against his shirt. The sensation should have been overwhelming, and it was, but not in the way he’d expected. It wasn’t panic now. It was a fierce, strange ache. A sense of being tethered to something so fragile that the entire world suddenly felt like a place he needed to negotiate with, not survive from.

Xisuma’s voice lowered. “Have you been eating? Properly?”

Tango looked at him. “Xisuma.”

“No, seriously.” The admin’s tone had shifted into that unmistakable mode of absolute authority disguised as concern. “You look like you’ve been awake for days.”

Tango opened his mouth to deny it and found that he couldn’t. Not convincingly. The truth was that he was tired. Bone-deep, luminous exhaustion. The kind that lived behind the eyes and in the hands. The kind that made every decision feel slightly slower than it should have been. He had held the baby through the dressing, the wrapping, the walk back through Decked Out 3, and then the coding. He had run himself on momentum and adrenaline and the sheer impossible fact of the child in his arms. 

But now that Xisuma was here and speaking to him in that steady, administrative voice, the adrenaline had begun to peel away, and what remained underneath it was a trembling, aching fatigue.

Still, admitting that out loud felt ridiculous.

It felt like handing over the last thread of dignity he had.

“I’m fine,” he said automatically.

Xisuma’s response was immediate and flat. “You aren’t.”

Tango made a face. “Okay, rude.”

Xisuma did not budge. “You’re exhausted, you’ve clearly just been through a major server incident, and now you’re carrying a newborn while trying to code. That isn’t ‘fine.’”

Tango opened his mouth again, ready to argue purely out of reflex, then stopped. Because the word newborn had landed with a strange finality. It made everything sound more real. Less absurd. More weighted. The baby in the wrap shifted with a tiny sleepy hiccup, and Tango felt the tiny movement all the way to his bones.

Newborn.

He let out a long, tired breath.

Xisuma seemed to interpret the silence as agreement. “You need to stop working.”

“I know,” Tango muttered, and he did know. He hated that he knew. The coding project sat unfinished behind him in floating holograms, its variables waiting, its logic still unstable. Decked Out 3 wasn't done. The server wasn’t stable. The baby wasn’t named. His brain was full of static, and he was still standing in a room with an admin who believed he had just given birth to a baby he’d made from netherborn biology and server weirdness.

He did not have the bandwidth to say no.

And, strangely, he did not want to.

Xisuma looked at him for a long second, then softened even more. “You don’t have to do this alone, you know.”

Tango’s throat tightened again, this time with something much more dangerous than embarrassment. He blinked hard and looked away for a fraction of a second, as if he could hide the way his face was threatening to betray him. That was the thing about being tired: the defenses got thin. The little bruises in the soul became visible. He could feel the weight of the day in every shoulder muscle, every ache in his back, every pulse in his wrists.

The baby made a soft, sleepy sound, and Tango lowered his gaze to it. The tiny face was relaxed now, almost boneless with drowsiness, and one tiny hand had curled against the fabric over his heart. There was something so absurdly tender about the contact that it made him feel almost guilty for how quickly he was beginning to accept it. 

The infant trusted him. Instinctively, inexplicably and utterly completely.

He thought of telling Xisuma the truth; that this wasn’t a normal birth, wasn’t a normal baby, wasn’t even really a normal anything. That he had not “had” the child in the bodily sense the admin was clearly assuming. That the server had made it from his data, his code, his own impossible netherborn identity tangled up with corruption and a crash and whatever strange half-magic Hermitcraft used to keep itself from falling apart. But the thought of opening all of that up felt like lifting a box packed too tightly with knives. Possible, but not wise.

So he let the misunderstanding stand.

The words tasted strange in his mouth, but he did not correct them.

Xisuma, perhaps sensing that further pressing would only drive him deeper into shutdown, gave a small nod. “Then at minimum, you need to stop typing and sit down.”

Tango gave a tiny, exhausted huff that might once have been a laugh. “I am sitting.”

Xisuma tilted his head toward the bench behind him. “Not like that.”

Tango glanced back at the workbench, then at the floating code, then down at the baby tucked against him in the wrap. He could feel the last of his energy seeping away from the edges of his thoughts like water through cracked stone. 

He was tired enough to be pliable now. Tired enough to let someone else take the lead for a minute. He didn’t like that. He appreciated it with a ferocity that made his chest hurt.

At last he muttered, “Fine.”

Xisuma’s posture loosened slightly, as if he had been waiting for exactly that.

Tango looked down one more time at the baby, who had drifted half-asleep again, the tiny rise and fall of its breath steady beneath the cloth. He thought of the name he still hadn’t given it. Thought of the fact that it was his, in some impossible way the server had decided was true. Thought of the embarrassment of explaining this to anyone else, the admin, the rest of the server, the endless stream of questions that were inevitably coming.

And then he thought, with a strange quietness underneath all the chaos, that maybe he could let this one misconception remain for now.

Maybe later he would tell the truth. Maybe later he would find the words. Maybe later he would explain the crash and the code and the glitch and how the server had stitched something living out of pieces of him. But right now he was too tired to unmake the shape Xisuma had already accepted. Right now the easiest thing in the world was to nod, pretend, and let the admin think what he wanted.

So Tango gave the smallest of shrugs, careful not to disturb the baby, and said nothing at all.

Xisuma took that silence as permission, or mercy, or both. “Good,” he said quietly. “Then let’s get you some rest. And food. And somewhere the baby can sleep properly.”

Tango’s lips twitched despite himself. “That does sound suspiciously like a plan.”

“It is a plan,” Xisuma replied.

And Tango, exhausted and overwhelmed and far too fond of the tiny warm weight against his chest already, let him believe that too.

Xisuma found Tango’s kitchen the way one found a strange machine in a half-collapsed basement: by following the heat, the hum, and the faintly alarming certainty that someone had built it with too much confidence and not nearly enough concern for convenience. If it could even be called a kitchen at all, it was really just a furnace array wrapped around a smelter system, a long, glowing spine of stone and iron where stacked furnaces breathed orange light into the room. 

The whole thing radiated a dry, baking heat that immediately made the air feel thick in the throat. Cinders drifted up from the coals in little sparks of gold. Metal clinked faintly somewhere deep inside the machine as items moved through its automated guts. It was less a cooking space and more an industrial altar to efficiency, and somehow Tango had looked at it and apparently thought, yes, this is where food happens.

Tango stood near the entrance with the baby still pressed against his chest in the fireproof wrap, one hand half-curled protectively over the little bundle as if he feared the world might lunge and snatch it away. 

He looked wrecked in the quiet, ordinary way exhaustion made people look worse than injury did. His shoulders were drawn inward. His eyes had that strained, overlit quality of someone running on fumes and adrenaline and refusing to admit it. The baby had settled again, tucked warm and sleepy against his sternum, the tiny rise and fall of its breath making the wrap shift. 

Every so often a faint ember-glow threaded through its hair where the red deepened toward orange at the tips. It looked impossibly delicate in the furnace light, as though it had been forged rather than born, a living spark held in fabric and skin and the shape of Tango’s arms.

Xisuma took in the whole scene with a silence that said he was filing it away into a mental archive labeled “things I never expected to witness on this server.” Then, with the practiced determination of someone who had spent far too long managing chaos, he gently steered Tango away from the code console and toward a stool by the furnace wall.

Tango didn’t resist so much as he wilted. He sat because the room, the heat, and Xisuma’s tone all somehow made sitting feel inevitable. The stool scraped against the stone floor with a rough metallic sound. Tango lowered himself onto it carefully, as though too sudden a motion might make the baby jolt awake or make his own bones remember they were tired. The wrap stayed snug against him, the infant a soft weight warm enough that he could feel it through his shirt, through the fatigue, through the thick, muffled ache of his body.

Xisuma moved immediately into caretaker mode. He looked around once, saw the supplies or lack thereof, and seemed to decide not to comment on the state of the “kitchen.” Instead he set about opening fuel hoppers, checking what ingredients Tango had managed to stash nearby, and muttering as he worked. “You’re absolutely not cooking for yourself right now,” he said, the words said with the calm firmness of a person who knew they were right and intended to be unbearable about it. “You look like you haven’t eaten since the crash.”

Tango gave a weak, exhausted little sound that was meant to be a protest but lacked the energy to become one. “I’m not hungry.”

Xisuma gave him a look over one shoulder. “That is not what I asked.”

Tango slumped further into the stool and closed his eyes for a second. The baby shifted when he did, tiny hands moving beneath the wrap and finding his chest again as if orienting itself by heartbeat. Tango opened his eyes immediately and rubbed a thumb over the little shape without thinking.

“I’m serious,” he said, quieter now. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” Xisuma replied, and the answer came with enough gentle certainty to make arguing feel stupid. He was already pulling things together with brisk efficiency, moving around the furnace array like he knew exactly where not to stand. “And since you are, in fact, not fine, I’m going to feed you while I ask what on earth a netherborn baby eats.”

That made Tango look up despite himself. Xisuma had stopped at one of the counters, hands full of supplies, wearing the kind of focused bewilderment that meant he was trying very hard to be respectful while also realising he was flying blind. Tango’s mouth twitched once before flattening again.

“Okay,” he said, because it was easier to answer questions than to deal with the awful tenderness of being looked after. “Right. So. Netherborn babies.”

Xisuma nodded once, waiting.

Tango exhaled through his nose and dragged one hand down his face. “They usually drink from their parent.”

Xisuma paused mid-reach for a bowl. “Ah.”

There was a beat.

“Or?”

Then Tango hurried on, because he could already see the misconception trying to form in Xisuma’s head like an annoying thought bubble. “Or not like.. not literally dragon milk, okay? People always make it sound way weirder than it is.”

Xisuma’s head tipped. “I didn’t say dragon milk.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I was,” Xisuma admitted, sounding faintly guilty about it.

Tango made a tired, helpless noise. “Yeah, well, it’s not that. It’s powdered blaze powder in milk. Heated up over coals. Warm, nutrient-dense, basically very stupidly adapted for netherborn infants who run hot and need something that won’t make them freeze up or burn out. It’s kind of a survival food.”

The admin’s posture shifted from curiosity into careful listening. “So… milk, blaze powder, heat.”

“Yeah.”

“And this is normal for them?”

Tango gave a long-suffering look that would have been more effective if it weren’t directed at a person trying very hard to help him. “As normal as anything about netherborns is. Baby ones especially. They need warmth, calories, and usually someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Xisuma looked at him with pointed emphasis. “And do you know what you’re doing?”

Tango stared back, expression deadpan. “Absolutely not.”

That earned him the smallest snort of amusement from the admin, which, under the circumstances, was basically a win. Xisuma turned back to the furnace array and began gathering a pot, a spoon, and a jar of milk from one of the storage shelves Tango used more as a dumping ground than a pantry. The whole time, Tango sat with the baby wrapped against him and watched in a dazed sort of horror as Xisuma behaved like this was the most natural thing in the world.

The smell of the place slowly shifted as the milk began warming. The furnace heat grew richer, carrying the faint mineral scent of stone and the sweet burn of cooking ingredients. Xisuma moved with surprising gentleness for someone who had just been informed, in effect, that the server had somehow produced a new player out of Tango’s own biology and exhaustion. He measured the blaze powder carefully, not dumping too much at once, and the moment the orange dust hit the milk and began to dissolve, a warm, spicy scent unfurled through the room. It smelled like heat and comfort and something a little dangerous. Tango could feel the baby stir at the scent, tiny brows knitting together before relaxing again.

Xisuma noticed. “It reacts to the smell?”

Tango nodded. “Yeah. The warmth. The flavour. They know.”

“Remarkable,” Xisuma murmured, and there was no sarcasm in it at all.

Tango looked away first.

He should have been embarrassed by how relieved he felt to be in a room with someone who was simply taking the baby seriously. Instead he found himself oddly undone by it. Xisuma wasn’t making jokes. Not about the baby. Not about the impossibility of it. Not about Tango’s state. He was just moving through the facts as they came, trying to make sure the world around Tango didn’t collapse under the weight of what had happened.

Then, as Xisuma stirred the milk and blaze powder together with a wooden spoon, he asked carefully, “Was anyone else involved?”

The question came gently. Too gently, in fact, which made it somehow harder.

Tango froze for half a second.

Xisuma glanced over, immediately recognizing the pause. “I don’t mean to pry. I’m only trying to understand whether there’s another parent we need to contact, or whether I should be—”

“No,” Tango said at once, then winced at how fast he’d cut in. “No. There isn’t.”

Xisuma blinked.

Tango dragged a hand through his hair and stared at the furnaces instead of at the admin. “Netherborns are… not like that.”

Xisuma waited.

Tango’s jaw worked once. He hated explaining this. He hated that his own body felt like a lecture topic. He hated that the words sounded stranger coming out of his mouth than they did in his head. “We’re an asexually reproducing hybrid species,” he said at last, each word chosen as carefully as a redstone placement. “Or. Well. Some of us are. It depends. Stress, heat, emotions, the whole mess. It’s not exactly common knowledge because it’s not exactly a thing people ask about unless they’re already in the middle of something bizarre.”

Xisuma processed that with visible effort. The spoon kept moving in his hand, stirring the warmed milk in slow circles. “So there isn’t another parent.”

Tango let out a flat breath. “No. It was just me.”

The silence after that was not awkward so much as intellectually overworked. Xisuma’s head tilted in that way he had when his brain was sorting through a new category of information. “Then… the baby is yours by that process.”

Tango rubbed at the back of his neck. “Yeah.”

Xisuma gave a slow, thoughtful nod as if that explained more than it did and yet somehow enough. “And you said you’ve been under stress.”

Tango’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “That wasn’t really a question.”

“No.” Xisuma kept stirring. “It wasn’t.”

Tango should have objected there. Should have denied it. But the words landed wrong in the room, because the truth was already moving through him with sickening clarity. The last days had been a blur of overwork. The mountain base. Decked Out 3. The crash. The panic. The constant pressure of unfinished systems and server obligations and the undercurrent of his own anxiety tightening around every decision until it felt normal. He hadn’t slept properly. He hadn’t eaten properly. He hadn’t given himself any real chance to recover from the last thing before the next thing happened.

And now his own body was sitting in front of him through its consequences.

Xisuma asked another question, still carefully casual. “What usually triggers it?”

Tango stared at him. “Why are you asking like you’re trying to write a field guide.”

“Because I’m trying not to ask something rude,” Xisuma said.

That, despite everything, made Tango laugh once under his breath. It came out rough and tired and edged with disbelief. “Fair.”

He rubbed his forehead, then looked down at the baby. The tiny thing had begun to doze again, tucked against his chest, one hand lightly splayed over the wrap as if it had fallen asleep while holding onto him. Seeing that made something inside Tango shift in a way he couldn’t ignore. He had been so busy insisting on code, on glitches, on server anomalies, on the absurdity of the crash that he had let the simplest biological answer sit in front of him without touching it. 

Stress. Overwork. Emotional overload. Heat. Pressure. Everything he had been carrying for days, maybe longer. Not a corrupted line of code. Not a bug in the system. A body responding to strain the way netherborn bodies did.

The realisation struck with the force of a slap.

He hadn’t glitched.

He hadn’t broken.

He had reproduced.

A hard, cold flush of understanding rolled through him, and suddenly the baby in his arms was not just a server incident or a miraculous mistake or a consequence of an unpredictable crash. It was biology. His biology. His body’s answer to having been pushed too far for too long. The child wasn’t a bug at all. It was the result of a process his own hybrid nature had apparently been capable of all along.

Tango went very still.

Xisuma, noticing the change in him, looked over immediately. “Tango?”

But Tango barely heard him.

His eyes unfocused for one long second as the memory of the crash and the merge rearranged itself in his mind. The orb. The code. The data flow. The server’s attempt to mend corruption by merging it with his player data. He had thought the server had forced the baby into existence from broken files. He had assumed the whole thing was an accident of code and error. But now, with each question Xisuma had asked, the truth had been nudging itself into place beneath the panic. 

The server hadn’t created something wholly alien. It had amplified, shaped, and caught something his own body had already begun making.

That was why the data had found him. That was why it had formed around him. That was why the baby looked like him, sounded like him, burned like him.

Because it was him.

His own body, pushed past some internal threshold, had done exactly what it was built to do.

He breathed in sharply. The air in the furnace room suddenly felt too warm, too close, too full of the smell of milk and blaze powder and hot stone. His pulse ticked fast and hard in his throat.

Xisuma watched him carefully. “What is it?”

Tango lifted one hand slowly, almost as if he were touching an invisible thread that might break if he moved too quickly. “Oh,” he said, the word hollow with stunned realisation. “Oh, that’s..”

Xisuma’s brows knit. “Tango?”

He shook his head once, small and disbelieving. Then the whole shape of the truth slammed into him with sickening certainty, and he actually had to swallow hard against the rush of heat behind his eyes.

“It wasn’t the server,” he said, voice thin. “Not really. I mean, it was, but—”

Xisuma froze.

Tango stared at the baby again, at the little body rising and falling against his chest, at the tiny netherborn shape made from heat and stress and his own impossible nature. “I’m not holding a bug,” he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. “I’m holding… this happened because I was overloaded. My body did this.”

The admin’s posture changed subtly. The concern in it sharpened into something more careful, more compassionate. “A stress response?”

Tango gave a shaky exhale. “Yeah.”

Xisuma looked from Tango to the baby and back again, and in that instant whatever mental model he had been using to understand the situation had to have snapped and reassembled itself. “Then the baby is…” He paused, then finished softly, “a part of you.”

Tango couldn't answer immediately. His throat had gone too tight.

Xisuma must’ve seen the expression on his face, because his tone gentled almost to a murmur. “And that’s why you’re reacting so strongly.”

Tango’s lips parted. He wanted to say yes. He wanted to say no. He wanted to say he didn’t know. Instead he sat there with the baby warm against his chest and the milk steaming faintly on the furnace beside him and the truth settling into his bones in a way that made him feel both exposed and oddly relieved.

Part of him had been waiting for the word glitch to explain the whole thing. Glitch meant mistake. Glitch meant accident. Glitch meant the universe had gone wrong in a way that could maybe be fixed later. But this? This was different. This was his own body, his own hybrid inheritance, his own biology answering pressure with creation. 

The baby wasn’t an error. The baby was a consequence. A living one.

He covered his face with one hand for a second, then let out a long, disbelieving laugh that sounded dangerously close to a sob. “Oh my god.”

Xisuma didn’t mock him. He just gave a small, sympathetic nod as if he understood more than he was saying out loud. “That’s a lot to realise at once.”

Tango dragged his hand down his face and looked at the baby again, now with an entirely different kind of exhaustion. Not confusion. Not alarm. Recognition. There was something almost horrifying and deeply tender about understanding that the baby had not been imposed on him by the server after all. His body had answered the pressure it had been under with life. He had been so busy treating himself like a machine that he had failed to notice he was still a biological creature with thresholds, hormones, heat, strain, and a legacy of netherborn weirdness written into him at the level of instinct.

He laughed again, quieter this time, shaking his head in incredulity. “That’s… that’s actually insane.”

Xisuma handed him a bowl of the warmed milk and blaze powder mixture, then hesitated, as though gauging whether he should say the next part. Finally he did, very carefully: “Then this is, in a sense, postpartum.”

Tango stared at him.

The word sat there in the furnace heat, oddly soft and yet impossible to ignore. Postpartum. After birth. After the body has done what it was built to do and now has to recover from the consequences. It sounded absurd tied to him, and yet not absurd enough. He looked down at the bowl in his hands, then at the baby, then back at Xisuma. His mind, still raw with revelation, accepted the term with a kind of stunned reluctance. 

The admin wasn’t wrong. Not entirely. He had made a life. He was tired, overwhelmed, hungry, emotionally overloaded, and suddenly in possession of a newborn who was literally his body’s answer to stress. If that wasn’t some twisted version of postpartum, he didn’t know what was.

He leaned back slowly on the stool, the bowl warm against his palms. The baby stirred once and resettled. Tango stared at the glowing furnace doors and let the truth sit in him until it stopped feeling like a shock and started feeling like a fact.

Then, because he was still Tango, because he could not help himself from speaking when the silence became too meaningful, he muttered, “Well. That makes it less of a glitch.”

Xisuma made a noise that wasn’t quite laughter, not quite relief. “Significantly less.”

Tango looked down at the baby sleeping against his chest, at the tiny red-orange hair, at the little warm mouth parted in breath, at the impossible little body made from him and yet separate from him. His shoulders lowered by a fraction. He was still exhausted. Still overwhelmed. Still completely unprepared. But now there was a new shape to the exhaustion, one that made sense.

And somehow, that made it easier to bear.

Xisuma settled beside him, still watching with that same steady calm, while the furnace array glowed around them like a bank of captive suns. Tango held the bowl in one hand, the baby in the other arm, and for the first time since the crash he let himself believe that perhaps this strange, terrifying, tender thing was not a server error waiting to be fixed, but a life waiting to be understood.

Xisuma stayed beside him while Tango fed the baby, the admin’s presence quiet and solid in the furnace-warm room like a wall built to hold things up when they started to lean. 

He didn’t hover, exactly. He didn’t fuss. But he watched with the kind of careful attention that made Tango’s shoulders want to unclench and also made him painfully aware of every movement of his own hands. The baby lay curled against his chest in the fireproof wrap, warm and small and absurdly precious, one tiny hand fisting and unfisting near the edge of the cloth while Tango tipped the bowl toward its mouth with almost excruciating caution.

The milk mixture smelled rich and strange, the blaze powder dissolved into it until it carried a faint mineral spice beneath the creaminess. Steam drifted up in delicate threads and blurred the lanternlight. Tango could feel the heat through the ceramic, not enough. Not enough for him. Not nearly enough for the baby. 

The first sip that reached his tongue was comforting anyway, a hot swath down his throat, enough to make him close his eyes for a beat and breathe it in. It hit his empty stomach with a soft ache of relief. He hadn’t realised how tightly wound he’d been until warmth finally got into him. The room still spun faintly around the edges from exhaustion, but the milk anchored him in place, a simple physical thing he could understand.

Xisuma’s voice was gentle when he spoke. “You’re sure it’s all right for it to be that hot?”

Tango made a soft sound that was almost a laugh, almost a sigh, and looked down into the bowl. “For you? Probably not. For us? It’s barely warm.”

That earned him a small pause. Xisuma glanced between Tango’s face and the baby, trying to judge the difference between what looked hot to a standard player and what counted as warm to a netherborn body. Tango could practically see the admin recalculating his assumptions in real time. The bowl sat in Tango’s hands, the liquid inside shivering slightly with the movement of the furnace air, and Tango tightened his grip around it, then took another sip just to prove the point. It was good. Too cool still, if he was honest. The kind of warm that soothed but didn’t properly settle into the bones the way he wanted.

He noticed the baby’s mouth fuss at the edge of the bowl and immediately lowered it back down. A little trickle of the milk mixture caught on the infant’s lip, and Tango dabbed it away with one thumb, his heart doing a strange, heavy roll in his chest.

“It needs to be hotter,” he murmured.

Xisuma’s head tilted. “Hotter?”

Tango nodded, then shifted one shoulder so the baby could settle better against him as he adjusted the bowl again. The infant’s hair, still a soft mix of red and ember-orange, brushed against his shirt, tiny heat radiating through the layers like a living coal. “Not dangerously hot,” he said, because apparently now he was the world’s least qualified explanation for netherborn child rearing, “just… warm enough. If it gets too cold, it can make us sick. Really sick.”

Xisuma frowned faintly. “Just cold?”

Tango looked down, and his answer came with the bluntness of someone who knew the risk too well to dress it up. “Cold can kill us.”

The furnace room seemed to go quiet around the words.

Xisuma’s posture changed immediately. Concern sharpened across his face beneath the mask, a clean and serious shift from curiosity into respect. “Right,” he said, more softly now.

Tango could feel the baby’s little body against his chest, tiny and easy to forget was there until it shifted or breathed or made a tiny noise against the wrap. “We’re born from fire,” he continued, voice lower, more matter-of-fact than he felt. “Made for heat. That’s not a poetic thing, either. It’s just the way it is. We run hot. We cool too fast, and everything starts going wrong. Shivering, burning out, getting weak. Babies are worse. Newborns especially.”

Xisuma listened without interrupting, and Tango found himself oddly grateful for that. He did not want pity. He wanted understanding. He wanted someone to know enough that the baby would be safe if he was too tired to think clearly later. “So if we’re ever too cold,” he said, more quietly, “that’s bad. Really bad.”

Xisuma gave a single, solemn nod. “Then we keep you both warm.”

The simple certainty in the statement made something in Tango’s chest ache. He stared down at the baby, who had finally resumed drinking, tiny swallows moving delicately in its throat. The infant made a tiny contented sound when the warmed milk touched the back of its mouth, and Tango’s fingers tightened for a second around the bowl. That little noise: small, satisfied and deeply trusting was enough to make him feel both tender and wrecked at the same time. He found himself stroking the baby’s back with the side of his thumb in a slow rhythm without even thinking about it. The baby settled instantly, as if the motion had become part of the world it trusted.

Xisuma rose to adjust the furnace behind him, and the room brightened just a fraction more as the coals were fed. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing,” he admitted after a moment. “You, the server crash, the baby, the biology. It’s a lot.”

Tango let out a tired, crooked little exhale. “Yeah. No kidding.”

He took another sip of his own milk, then automatically angled the bowl so the baby could drink again. The baby’s tiny fingers brushed the rim and then curled inward again, and Tango’s breath hitched at the contact. He had been so busy processing the fact of the child that he had barely let himself think about what came next. 

Food, yes. Heat, yes. Rest, yes. But also a name. A real name. Something the server could hold, something the baby could answer to, something that made it feel less like a miracle and more like a person.

The thought settled on him with a heavy kind of pressure. Name.

He blinked slowly, staring past the warm bowl in his hands as the furnace light flickered over the walls. Naming things had always meant something to him. Redstone projects got names, of course, half-joking and half-serious, because names helped him remember them, gave them a shape in his head. The baby deserved more than that. It deserved a real name. Something that belonged to it. Something with weight.

He opened his mouth, closed it, then found himself speaking before he had thought it through. “What about Volta?”

Xisuma, who had been watching the baby’s drinking with that same careful concentration he’d brought to the milk mixture, looked up. “Volta?”

“Yeah,” Tango said, suddenly aware of how awkward he sounded. “Like.. not because it sounds cool, though it does sound cool, but because of the coding scientist. You know, Volta. Or— no, wait, maybe that’s too nerdy?”

Xisuma blinked once.

Tango could feel himself spiralling already and somehow could not stop. “I mean, I like nerdy. Obviously. I live in it. It’s not like I’m naming a dog or something, it’s a person, but also it’s my baby, and it’s got all uh.. this,” he gestured helplessly with one hand, almost sloshing the bowl, “—data and fire and electricity and weird code stuff, so maybe Volta actually fits? But maybe it’s too much? Like, too on-the-nose? I don’t want the kid to grow up and hate me because I named it like I was trying to brand a circuit board.”

Xisuma’s shoulders twitched as if he were holding back a laugh and a sigh at the same time. “Tango.”

Tango stopped long enough to breathe.

“Volta isn’t terrible,” Xisuma said carefully.

That was so mildly diplomatic that Tango almost winced. “That bad, huh.”

“No, no,” Xisuma said at once, because clearly he had heard the wounded tone and did not want to make it worse. “It’s actually quite good. It feels… energetic.”

Tango stared at him. “Energetic.”

Xisuma nodded with all the earnestness of someone trying not to step on a live wire. “Yes. Like voltage. Sparks. Movement.”

The baby made a small, sleepy noise into the bowl, apparently uninterested in the entire debate unless it interrupted its dinner.

Tango huffed a quiet laugh despite himself. “Okay, but that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m worried about. It sounds like I’m naming it after a machine part.”

Xisuma tipped his head. “You are.”

Tango pointed at him with the hand not holding the bowl. “See? That.”

Xisuma’s mouth curved at the corner. “You asked.”

“I know, I know.” Tango sighed and looked back down at the baby. “It’s just. I don’t know. It feels weird. I keep thinking I should choose something stronger. Softer. Something that doesn’t sound like I’m going to plug it into a wall.”

The baby, having drained a little more of the milk, made a tiny satisfied sound and then nuzzled into the wrap as if trying to fall asleep in the middle of the conversation. Tango’s expression melted for a second before he gathered it back into something more practical. He adjusted the infant higher against his chest and continued, because once he started thinking aloud, it came out in a rush. “Maybe Cisco.”

Xisuma made a soft noise of consideration. “Cisco?”

“Yeah,” Tango said, warming to it as he spoke. “Like the company. Networks, systems, connections. That kind of thing. It sounds sleek. Smart. Techy without being too obvious. I mean, this kid was literally formed from player data and glitch code and my own stress, which is honestly a pretty ridiculous origin story for a person, so maybe Cisco fits better than Volta.”

Xisuma’s tone was dry, but not unkind. “You’re naming a child like a software project.”

Tango shot him a look. “You say that like it’s a problem.”

Xisuma actually smiled then, brief and small and very much aimed at keeping Tango from completely derailing himself. “It is not my place to judge. I’ve seen your builds.”

“Exactly,” Tango muttered. Then, after a second, he frowned thoughtfully. “But maybe Cisco’s too clean. Too polished. This baby’s got tiny fire sneezes. That doesn’t feel polished.”

Xisuma’s gaze flicked to the little creature in the wrap. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

Tango’s rambling took a breath, then poured onward because now that the possibilities had begun, they were impossible to stop. “Or Zeal. I like Zeal. That one feels good. It sounds alive. Sharp. Driven. A little intense, but in a good way. Like the kid already decided it was going to be trouble and somehow I respect that.”

Xisuma’s head tilted, and this time the approval in his silence was easier to read. “Zeal does suit it more than the other two.”

Tango looked up at that. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” Xisuma said. “It has a spark to it.”

That made Tango go quiet for a moment. The baby had finished the milk and now lay tucked against him, heavy in the gentle way of a fed newborn, the little body softened by warmth and drowsiness. One tiny hand had drifted loose from the wrap and now rested against Tango’s shirt over his heart. The contact made him feel almost absurdly exposed. He stared at the child for a long moment, and the names he’d said aloud began to circle in his head in new shapes. Volta. Cisco. Zeal.

He repeated them internally, feeling them against the weight of the baby in his arms.

Volta had edge. A pulse. A machine-bright kind of intensity.

Cisco had polish. Intelligence. Clean lines.

Zeal had fire.

Something hot and eager and alive.

Tango’s own mouth shaped around the word before he meant to say it. “Zeal.”

Xisuma looked up. “Hmm?”

Tango stared down at the tiny sleeping face and said it again, quieter this time. “Zeal.”

The name settled strangely well in the room. Not perfect. Not final. But enough to make his chest tighten in a different way than before. The baby stirred, not waking, just shifting in the wrap with a tiny little hum. Its red-orange hair caught the furnace light and seemed to glow brighter for a second, as if reacting to the name as much as the warmth.

Xisuma watched Tango carefully. “You seem to like that one.”

Tango let out a slow breath and leaned back just slightly, careful not to disturb the little thing in his arms. “I do,” he admitted. Then, with a tired little shrug of one shoulder, “It kind of suits him.”

Xisuma’s posture changed in the subtlest way at the word. Him. Not it. Not baby. Not newborn. Him. The admin caught it instantly, and Tango could see him processing that too, quietly, gently, without making a spectacle of it. The fact that he didn’t comment made the room feel safer.

“Zeal,” Xisuma repeated thoughtfully, as if testing it. “That’s strong. Good and strong.”

Tango looked down at the sleeping infant again, his own reflection faint in the round dark surface of the baby’s eyes as they briefly fluttered open and shut in drowsiness. He couldn’t say the word without feeling the strangeness of it move through him. Zeal. Something born from stress and heat and his own body pushing back against exhaustion. Something that shouldn’t exist and yet did. Something with a name now, maybe, if he kept holding it there long enough.

The baby made a tiny sound against his chest, and Tango adjusted the wrap instinctively, tucking the little body deeper against his warmth. 

He hadn’t expected this. None of it. Not the crash. Not the biological realisation. Not the admin quietly cooking in his furnace-kitchen while discussing newborn feeding habits and possible names. Not the fact that his own exhaustion had apparently become a person.

 Yet there he was, sitting in the furnace glow with an empty bowl in one hand and a living spark asleep against his heart, trying to decide whether a name could be both ridiculous and exactly right at the same time.

Xisuma glanced at him. “You’re getting attached to the idea.”

Tango made a face. “The idea is literally attached to my chest.”

That got a quiet huff of amusement out of the admin. “Fair enough.”

Tango looked down once more and rubbed his thumb in a slow, absent pattern over the baby’s back. Zeal. It still felt strange. It also felt right in a way he could not quite articulate. The name had heat in it. Motion. Refusal. The baby had all of that already, even in sleep. Tiny flames in soft hair. Tiny sparks when it sneezed. A stubborn little pulse of life that had come into the world through a thing Tango had once dismissed as a server error and now had to understand as his own body’s answer to everything it had endured.

He swallowed, then spoke in a low voice, almost to himself. “Zeal.”

The baby’s hand twitched against his shirt, as if hearing it.

Xisuma leaned back against the counter, satisfied that the room had not collapsed, and let Tango hold the word for a moment. In the furnace light, the whole scene looked impossible and yet stubbornly, beautifully real: the glowing bowl, the industrial kitchen built from furnaces, the exhausted netherborn father with a newborn wrapped to his chest, the admin who had come to help and stayed to witness something no one on the server had a language for yet.

Tango exhaled slowly. The name sat on his tongue like a coal, warm and alive.

He let the name sit in the air for a while after he said it, the word Zeal lingering between the furnace heat and the low crackle of the coals like it had weight of its own. The baby was still tucked against his chest, warm and slack with sleep, its tiny hand spread over the cloth of his shirt in a way that made Tango’s whole body feel oddly, stupidly anchored. Xisuma had gone quiet beside him, not in the awkward, searching way of before, but in the careful, charged silence of someone who had been handed something fragile and had not yet decided how to hold it.

Tango could feel the shift in him even before he said anything. It wasn’t visible exactly, not under the helmet and the practiced composure and the steady stillness of an admin who had probably spent years being the person everyone else looked to when things went sideways. But there was a change in the air all the same. A hesitation. A pause so full it felt almost physical.

Then Tango, because apparently he was incapable of stopping himself once he had gotten this far, looked up with the baby still cradled against him and asked:

“How do you feel about being an uncle?”

The words came out rougher than he meant them to, not quite playful and not quite serious, hovering somewhere in the middle with the strange nervous tremor of someone offering something precious while pretending it was casual. He rubbed his thumb in a slow absent motion across the baby’s back as he kept going, the ramble already building. “I mean, you’re kinda like a dad to me. Not by blood, obviously, I know that’s weird, but like… you’re also kind of like a dad to the rest of the server too? So technically, yeah, you’re an uncle. If you wanna be, I mean. No pressure. If not, that is also fine. I just—”

He stopped when Xisuma made a sound that might have been a breath catching in his throat.

The admin had gone utterly still.

Tango blinked at him once, the rapid rush of his own nervous speech abruptly crashing against the silence. Xisuma was looking at him, or rather at the baby, though the helmet made it impossible to tell exactly where his eyes were fixed. For one heartbeat the furnace room held its breath around them. The milk bowl still warmed Tango’s hand. The baby remained asleep, blissfully unaware that it had apparently just presented a whole new category of relationship to someone who had spent years effectively being the server’s steady center of gravity.

Xisuma swallowed. Tango saw the movement in the line of his throat just beneath the mask. When he finally answered, his voice was not quite steady.

“That would be… wonderful.”

The words came out soft, thick with feeling. Choked, really. Like they had to fight their way through something bigger than speech before they could reach the room.

Tango stared at him for a second, then squinted. “Are you crying?”

Xisuma made a noise that sounded suspiciously like he had been caught doing exactly that. “No.”

“You’re absolutely crying.”

“I am not.”

“You are too.”

Xisuma turned his head away in a deliberate, almost dramatic angle, as if avoiding Tango’s gaze might keep him from noticing the way his own voice had gone strange. The helmet concealed the worst of it, but not quite enough. Tango could tell. There was a softness to the whole posture now, a kind of emotional collapse held together by habit and embarrassment. The admin lifted one hand toward the side of his mask as though to adjust it or hide behind it, and Tango, for all his own exhaustion and shock and lingering sense of absurdity, felt something in his chest give a small, helpless twist.

“Xisuma,” Tango said quietly, and the joke had slipped out of him now. There was too much sincerity in the room for him to keep pretending otherwise.

Xisuma took a breath that sounded a little too sharp. “This is…” He stopped, tried again. “This is the first time any of the Hermits have had a child on the server.”

Tango watched him with a strange softness of his own. The baby slept on, warm and tiny and glowing faintly at the edges of its red-orange hair. Zeal. The name seemed to belong more and more with each passing second, and the thought of the server orbiting around that fact; around this little impossible being, around this new life that had somehow become part of all of them, made the room feel larger and smaller at the same time.

Xisuma’s voice dropped even lower. “I’m an uncle.”

The phrase landed in the chamber with near-sacred weight.

He said it once like he was testing whether it belonged to him. Then, with a slow, dawning wonder that Tango could hear even through the rough edge of emotion, he said it again, quieter this time. “I’m an uncle.”

The realisation seemed to run through him like a current. Tango saw it in the way Xisuma stood a little straighter despite himself, in the way his hands hovered uncertainly in front of him as though the title might burn if he touched it wrong. The server’s admin, the one who had to carry the burden of structure, rules, moderation and balance suddenly looked like someone who had been handed a role he had never expected but was already trying to cradle carefully.

And Tango, for all the embarrassment and the lingering confusion and the faint ache of his own body still recovering from creation, felt the corners of his mouth twitch. There was something almost absurdly touching about it. Xisuma, who had probably dealt with countless server disasters, now emotionally wrecked by the word uncle.

It was ridiculous.

It was perfect.

Xisuma let out a shaky breath. “It feels…” He paused, and when he spoke again, the words were rough around the edges. “It feels incredible.”

Tango looked down at Zeal and then back up at him, the sight of the admin visibly trying to compose himself somehow making the whole thing feel even more real. “Yeah?”

Xisuma nodded once, hard. “Yes.”

There was no trace of hesitation in it now. The earlier confusion had settled, and in its place was something so immediate and fierce it was almost startling. The players on his server were his family; Tango knew that in the abstract, knew it in the way Hermitcraft had always held together through weirdness and loyalty and years of shared chaos but seeing Xisuma reach for that truth so openly made something warm and aching bloom deep in his chest.

Not blood family.

Not conventional family.

But family all the same.

The admin drew himself back a little, as though his own emotion had briefly gotten the better of him and he needed to reassemble. “I never thought I’d be an uncle,” he said, almost to himself. “Or… a granduncle? I’m not sure what the exact structure is supposed to be here.”

Tango gave a tired, crooked snort. “Don’t start trying to make this family tree traditional. The server would explode.”

Xisuma’s shoulders shook with something that might have been laughter if it had not still been tangled up with the raw edge of tears. He lifted a hand again, this time clearly to wipe at his face in the most discreet way a helmet would allow. Tango had the sudden absurd urge to laugh and cry at once, because of course Xisuma would be the kind of person to be emotional under a mask and then try to pretend it wasn’t happening. The admin had been trying to look composed, but his voice still carried that faint thread of breakdown around the edges, the kind that made it obvious he had been hit right in the softest part of himself.

Tango shifted the baby slightly and glanced down at the tiny face sleeping against him. Zeal’s mouth had gone slack in the deep, heavy sleep of an infant who had finally had enough milk and warmth and safety to let go. One tiny ember-bright curl of hair had fallen across the baby’s forehead. Its little chest rose and fell in a rhythm so small and complete that Tango found himself looking at it with an almost dizzy respect. He had made this. His body had made this. The server had caught it and shaped it, but it had begun in him, in stress and instinct and the raw, difficult heat of being too much for too long.

He looked back up at Xisuma, who was still trying very hard to regain his composure. “You can hold him, you know.”

That made Xisuma freeze in place all over again.

Tango immediately held up a hand. “Careful. Sorry. That sounded way less dangerous in my head.”

Xisuma let out a breath. “No, I understand.”

Tango adjusted the wrap a little, careful and slow, then glanced down at the baby as if checking that the tiny netherborn was still settled. “You just have to be careful. He’s hot. Like, actually hot. Newborn netherborn and all that. His flames are still unstable, so don’t grab near the hair unless you want to get singed.”

Xisuma stared at him. “I wasn’t planning to do that.”

“Good.”

“But thank you for the warning.”

Tango nodded, then hesitated because now came the awkward part: transferring the baby from his own chest to someone else’s arms. Even with the wrap still secure, the idea made him tense. Zeal had spent maybe all of a few hours in the world, and already Tango had developed that ridiculous instinct common to anyone handling something tiny and breakable: the certainty that nobody else could possibly do it right. He knew that was irrational. Xisuma, for all the admin seriousness and carefully hidden emotion, was not incompetent. But still.

Still.

He breathed out. “Okay. I’m gonna hand him over slowly.”

Xisuma’s posture shifted at once, all attention and readiness. “All right.”

Tango gathered the baby closer for just a second longer, looking down at the little face, at the dark lashes and the warm flush beneath the skin and the faint ember-light that seemed to live in the edges of Zeal’s hair. The weight of the infant in his arms wasn’t heavy, not exactly, but it had a gravity to it that made the rest of the world seem briefly irrelevant. He could feel his own heartbeat under the wrap, feel the baby’s tiny warmth answering it. Then he carefully slid one hand under Zeal’s back, the other supporting the head, and lifted him away from his chest with the exaggerated precision of someone handling live explosives and a memory at the same time.

The baby stirred, making a small sleepy sound, and Tango instantly paused.

Xisuma stepped closer with his arms half-open, palms angled upward. He looked unsure in the honest, deeply human way people do when they are afraid of hurting something they already love more than they expected to. Tango saw it and softened.

“Just here,” Tango murmured, guiding the baby into Xisuma’s arms inch by inch. “Like that. Support the head. Yeah. Good. Don’t let him get cold.”

Xisuma took Zeal carefully, one arm slipping under the tiny body while the other adjusted around the back, and the second the baby settled against him, the admin went completely still again. Tango watched his whole body lock into that cautious, reverent hold. Zeal remained asleep, unfazed by the transfer, only making a tiny exhaling sound as he tucked one warm cheek against Xisuma’s chest.

For several seconds no one said anything.

The furnace popped softly behind them.

The second bowl of milk on the counter gave off a faint sweet steam.

Xisuma looked down at the child in his arms as though he was trying to understand how something so tiny could feel so immense. Tango saw the exact moment the reality of it fully caught up with him. The way his shoulders lowered, not in defeat, but in surrender to joy. The way his head tipped down a fraction, as if he were afraid moving too much would disturb the miracle asleep against him. The way the warmth of Zeal seemed to imprint itself on him immediately, like the baby had found a place in the world and chosen Xisuma as part of it.

And then Xisuma made a tiny sound, so broken and delighted and tender that Tango’s throat closed in response.

“He’s so small,” he whispered.

Tango made a face. “That is, in fact, the standard baby experience.”

Xisuma gave him a watery little laugh. “No, I mean..” He cut himself off, unable to say the thing clearly, perhaps because it was too big, or too new, or too emotional to fit into words all at once. He just looked down again, and there was such open wonder in the posture that Tango felt it like heat.

“It’s okay,” Tango said quietly. “You can admit he’s adorable.”

Xisuma’s response was immediate, and because his face was hidden it somehow became even funnier. “I was going to say that anyway.”

Tango laughed then, real and tired and helplessly fond. The sound came out softer than he expected, but it was honest. The kind of laugh that does not solve anything but makes the room gentler for existing in it. Xisuma’s shoulders bounced just a little in response, and even though he still looked like a man trying not to completely fall apart from emotion, there was now unmistakable joy in him too. Pure, sincere, almost childish in its intensity.

A first grandson.

The first child any of them had had on the server.

Tango’s mind snagged on the phrase for a second, because it sounded so bizarre and so deeply right that he almost couldn’t believe the server had reached this point. He looked at Zeal in Xisuma’s arms and then at the admin himself, and something warm and shaky and overwhelming moved through him.

 This thing was not just his. Not just netherborn biology. Not just stress made flesh. It belonged to the server now, too. To all of them in the strange, collective, ridiculous way Hermitcraft made everything personal.

Xisuma lifted his gaze from the baby at last, visibly trying to stabilise himself enough to speak again. “I can’t believe you asked me if I wanted to be an uncle,” he said, voice still rough with feeling.

Tango shrugged one shoulder, a little embarrassed now that the moment had become real. “Well, I wasn’t gonna just assign you a title and hope for the best.”

Xisuma’s laugh this time was warmer. “That might actually have been easier.”

“Probably,” Tango admitted. “But less polite.”

Xisuma looked down at Zeal again, and his voice dropped to something almost reverent. “I would be honoured.”

The room seemed to settle around that answer.

Tango felt it like a pressure release in his own chest. He had not known, when he’d first stumbled through the impossible aftermath of the server crash, that this would be one of the places it led. Not just a baby. Not just a revelation about his own body. Not just a name. But this: Xisuma, emotional under his helmet, looking down at a tiny netherborn infant with the kind of love that makes a family real whether blood is involved or not.

He let his head fall back against the chair for a second and exhaled through his nose. The exhaustion was still there. The bewilderment was still there. The world remained strange and too bright and too warm and far too full of consequences. But something in him eased anyway.

Zeal shifted in Xisuma’s arms, a tiny unconscious movement, then settled back in. One miniature hand had curled against the front of Xisuma’s suit without waking. The admin looked down at it as though the touch itself might be a blessing.

Tango watched them both and felt, in spite of everything, a slow and reluctant sort of peace begin to take root.

“Yeah,” he said quietly after a moment. “I think you’ll do.”

Xisuma glanced up. “Do what?”

Tango’s lips curved, tired but sincere. “Be an amazing uncle.”

Xisuma’s response was immediate and unexpectedly bright. “I’ll do my best.”

And there, in the heat and hum of the furnace room, with a newborn asleep in the arms of one of the server’s oldest guardians and Tango sitting half-collapsed in a chair like he had been dragged through the underside of reality, the word uncle stopped sounding like a joke and started sounding like the beginning of something enormous.

The first sign that something else was coming was the fireworks.

Sharp cracks split the air outside the mountain, bright little detonations echoing off the stone like snapped bones of light. Tango’s head jerked up immediately, every muscle in his body tightening before his mind had even caught up. His gaze flicked toward the entrance, then to Xisuma, and the admin’s helmet tilted in a way that suggested he had heard the same thing and already regretted whatever decision had led him here.

Tango groaned, the sound rough and exhausted and instantly filled with recognition. “Of course.”

Xisuma went very still.

Another burst of firework thundered somewhere beyond the walls, followed by the deep, heavy rhythm of footsteps approaching the base. Not light footsteps. Not cautious ones. These came with the solid certainty of someone who never tried to be subtle and saw no reason to start now. The floor itself seemed to carry the weight of them, each step thudding through the stone in a way that made the furnace flames tremble slightly in their housings.

Tango gave Xisuma a long, unimpressed look, the kind usually reserved for particularly absurd server decisions or a redstone component that had betrayed him at the worst possible moment. It wasn’t a subtle look. It wasn’t polite. It was the look of someone silently asking: ‘Did you summon Doc on purpose?’

Xisuma gave him the kind of look that said ‘I didn’t summon anyone; I simply called the only person on this server who can recognise when someone is about to collapse in on themselves.’

That made Tango sigh harder.

The knocking came a second later, heavy and confident against the front door.

Tango stared at it, then down at the baby in Xisuma’s arms, then back at the door as though hoping he could will the entire situation into another reality. Zeal had been warm and quiet in Xisuma’s hold, tiny fists tucked against his chest, the little body sleeping off the milk and heat and whatever impossible storm had brought him into being. Tango still could not quite believe that any of this had happened, and yet now the universe was apparently delivering a medical checkup directly to his front door.

He rubbed a hand down his face. “Fine,” he muttered. “He can come in.” The door opened before Tango had fully finished speaking, because of course it did.

Doc stooped through the doorway with the exaggerated care of a man too tall for most spaces and too stubborn to treat that as anyone else’s problem. His broad shoulders brushed the stone frame on the way in, and he angled himself sideways with practiced ease, one hand lifting slightly as if he were politely apologising to the architecture for violating it. The moment he entered, the room changed. It wasn’t that he was loud. He wasn’t. It was not that he filled space in some theatrical way. It was simply that he arrived with the kind of physical presence that made a room aware of him immediately. Half goat, half creeper, built with the kind of impossible hybrid strength that made even standing still feel charged. His silhouette seemed to cut a new shape into the furnace glow.

He ducked fully inside and straightened, the tips of his horns nearly grazing the ceiling before he adjusted with a faint click of his neck. His gaze swept over the room in one clean motion, taking in the furnace kitchen, the bowl still warming on the counter, Xisuma standing rigid with the baby, and Tango perched like a disgruntled, overworked dragon who had been interrupted in the middle of trying not to panic.

Doc’s voice, when it came, was warm enough to cut through the tension. “Well. This isn’t the sort of message I expected to be called in for.”

Xisuma, despite all his earlier composure, visibly relaxed in the shoulders at the sight of him. “Doc.”

Tango narrowed his eyes. “Why are you here.”

Doc turned that calm, level look on him. “Because someone had a server crash, an unexplained new player, a newborn, and a netherborn parent running on fumes. I was.. available.”

Tango gave him another look, this one significantly more suspicious. “You say that like X didn’t specifically hunt you down.”

Xisuma didn’t answer. That answer was enough.

Doc’s mouth twitched. “Maybe he did. I’m still the only one here with enough medical knowledge to make sense of what I’m looking at.”

That sent a second, smaller wave of tension through Tango, because it meant this was real enough now to require actual checking. Not a joke. Not a server anecdote. Not something he could wave away with embarrassment and hope would evaporate. His instincts, which had been barely holding themselves in check since the moment Zeal existed, flared at the word check like a struck match. He immediately shifted in his chair.

Doc caught the movement at once. His tone did not change, but his eyes sharpened with professional focus. “All right. First I need a look at Tango’s data and the baby’s data. Nothing invasive unless I need it. Just making sure the merge didn’t leave either of you unstable.”

Tango’s expression tightened. He didn't like the phrase “the baby’s data” at all. It made Zeal sound less like a living thing and more like a file someone might accidentally delete. Still, he knew Doc was speaking in the language he had. The language of systems. Of bodies. Of evidence.

“And,” Doc added, not unkindly, “I also need to ask whether you want to nest.”

Tango blinked. “What.”

Doc looked at him evenly. “Netherborn instincts. New parent, new hatchling, overwhelmed environment. Some hybrids nest when they’re trying to stabilise. It helps with warmth, protection, and lowering stress response. You may already be doing it without realising.”

Xisuma’s head tilted. The baby in his arms made a tiny sleepy sound, only half conscious, and Tango felt his own face grow hot with something like irritation and embarrassment tangled together. Nest. Of course there was a word for it. Of course his body was apparently pulling him toward a behaviour that sounded natural and humiliating all at once.

“I’m not,” Tango began, then stopped because the room around him was already full of furnace heat and soft blankets and warm milk and the baby’s wrap and the carefully rearranged stool and the stupid, impossible little den he had started creating without noticing. He looked around and immediately hated how much it looked like nesting.

Doc’s eyes flicked around the room once and his expression turned almost smug. “Right.”

Tango bared his teeth in a way that was meant to be a glare but probably looked more like defeat. “Shut up.”

Doc lifted his hands. “I am not criticising. It’s a perfectly reasonable instinct. Just one that tends to become very obvious very quickly.”

Xisuma adjusted Zeal in his arms as though preparing to hand him over, but before he could say anything Doc stepped a little closer, slow enough not to startle anyone, and angled his head toward the infant with open curiosity. “May I?”

Tango opened his mouth.

Then closed it again.

The baby was asleep. Warm. Tiny. Soft. The idea of anyone else touching him already made Tango’s skin crawl with a primitive spike of warning. But Doc was careful. Doc had medical knowledge. Doc had not barrelled in demanding to know what had happened. He had come in with the grim practicality of someone who knew that if this was going to go wrong, it would do so in the body long before it showed up anywhere else.

Xisuma looked at Tango for permission rather than deciding himself, which only made the whole thing feel more intimate. Tango glanced down at Zeal’s little face, at the faint ember glow at the edges of the hair, at the tiny hands curled like hooks against the fabric.

He exhaled slowly. “Fine. But be careful.”

Doc’s nod was immediate and serious. “Always.”

So Xisuma carefully transferred the baby back into Tango’s arms first, and Tango took him with the automatic precision of someone who had already become far too practiced at this in too short a time. Zeal curled instantly into his heat, the moment the baby left Xisuma and settled against Tango’s chest seeming to pull a visible tension out of the infant’s tiny body. Tango felt it at once and his own shoulders lowered unconsciously. His fingers moved on instinct, sliding over the newborn’s hair in one soft stroke, and the flames in his hand rose just enough to warm without burning.

Zeal sighed in contentment the instant the fire touched his hair.

The sound was so small and so deeply trusting that Tango’s whole expression went slack for half a heartbeat. His hand remained there, stroking gently through the soft flame-red strands, and the baby melted into the warmth like it had been made for exactly that touch. Tango’s chest tightened painfully with how natural it felt. He would have liked to pretend he had not noticed, but the truth was that the contact grounded both of them. The infant was soothed. Tango was steadied.

Doc noticed too. Of course he did.

His gaze moved over the infant’s face, the wrap, Tango’s hand, the improvised warmth of the whole arrangement, and then back to Tango. There was no judgment in his expression, only a sharpened kind of interest. “All right,” he said. “I’m going to run a basic data scan first.”

That was when it happened.

Doc took one more step toward them, probably meaning only to get a better angle on Zeal’s ID overlay or to check the stabilising code flickering around the baby’s player data, but Tango’s body reacted before his mind could catch up. The movement was so fast and so instinctive that it startled even him. Something hot and raw tore through his chest like a spark hitting dry tinder. His arms tightened around Zeal. His shoulders hunched. A sound ripped out of him; low, rough, and far too close to a hiss. His flames surged up his arms without permission, brightening and lengthening in a flare of protective heat.

“Don’t,” Tango snapped, and the word came out sharper than he intended.

The room changed instantly.

Xisuma froze. Doc stopped mid-motion. The baby stirred against Tango’s chest with a tiny anxious noise, and Tango’s breath hitched hard at the sound.

He hadn’t meant to do that. Not to either of them. Not to anyone. But his body had already decided. His hybrid instincts had risen with a ferocity that felt almost spiritual in how ancient it was. New parent. Threat nearby. Baby exposed. The world narrowed into a single raw command: protect.

His flames lifted higher, licking brighter around his hands and forearms, hot enough now that the air shimmered in their wake. Not enough to hurt the baby. He kept one hand cupped carefully around Zeal’s back, shielding him with his body, but the posture itself had turned wild, defensive, animal in the way of a creature protecting its den. Tango realised with a sick lurch that he was baring his teeth.

A hiss escaped him again, this one less conscious than the first.

“Easy,” Xisuma said at once, voice low and calm.

Doc did not move. His eyes stayed on Tango, not the baby, which somehow made him feel safer and more dangerous at once. “Tango. You’re okay. Nobody is taking him from you.”

The words were sensible. They should have helped.

They didn’t.

Because it wasn’t about logic. It was about the heat under Tango’s skin, about the sudden pressure of instinct in his ribs, about every part of him roaring that there was a thing in his arms and it was his and nothing must touch it, not even kind hands, not even careful hands, not even hands that were only there to help.

Zeal made a tiny sound, a soft distressed chirp, and that was almost worse. Tango’s entire body flinched in response. His grip tightened harder before he forced it not to. He tucked the baby closer under his chin as if his own body could make a shield. The flames along his arms flared in reflex, then settled into a hot, pulsing glow that made the room warmer by several degrees.

Doc’s expression changed. The medical focus remained, but there was an additional layer now: understanding. “That’s a protection response,” he said carefully. “Likely from the stress of the crash, the merge, and your current parental state. You’re not in danger of hurting us unless you panic further.”

“Helpful,” Tango muttered through clenched teeth, but the voice shook.

Xisuma took one very deliberate step back. Then another. Not because he was afraid, not exactly, but because he understood that distance mattered right now. The baby quieted a fraction at the shift. Tango’s breathing was shallow, fast, and hot enough to feel painful in his own lungs. He hated how little control he had over it. He hated that his body had become a live furnace with teeth the moment anyone approached his child too quickly. He hated that the fear of being judged made it worse.

Doc held up one hand, palm out in a universal gesture of ‘I’m not advancing.’ “I’m going to stay right here.”

Tango gave him a wild, distrustful look, still half hissing, still too keyed up to parse words properly. His flames lifted and then curled tighter around him, a halo of heat gone defensive and harsh. Zeal was tucked beneath his chin, the baby’s tiny body protected by Tango’s forearm and chest and the wrap and every ounce of possessive instinct he could drag between it and the world.

“No one’s coming near him,” Tango said, and the sentence came out so strained it almost cracked in the middle.

“No one’s trying to,” Doc answered, calm as stone. “I’m checking you both. That’s all.”

Tango’s eyes flicked from Doc to Xisuma, then down to Zeal, and the sight of the tiny face; sleep-frightened now, mouth puckering, the little flame-red hair stirred by the heat of his own hand and it hit him harder than anything else had. He swallowed. His grip remained firm, but the urge to bare his teeth at the room didn’t fully leave him. He felt like a lit match stuffed into his own chest.

Xisuma’s voice broke into the space carefully. “Tango, it’s all right. We’re not going to take him.”

That almost undid him.

Because that was the truth, and his body knew it and still didn’t care. The instinct was older than words. Older than trust. It was the raw physics of needing to keep the newborn alive in a world that suddenly felt much too full of hands. Tango stood.. or rather, half rose from the stool before realising his legs were shaking and he was not actually in a state to be standing anywhere and held Zeal tighter.

The baby’s tiny fingers had curled into the fabric at his chest. One little ember-bright brow wrinkled. Zeal wasn't crying, not yet, but there was enough awake unease in him now that Tango could feel it as clearly as his own pulse.

Something broke loose in Tango’s expression then, not his fear exactly, but his recognition of it. He had become the kind of parent who would turn into a furnace if somebody stepped too close. He had become the kind of parent who would scare away help with his own instinctive need to guard what was his. And the worst part was that the instinct did not feel embarrassing anymore. It felt righteous. Terrifying, but righteous.

Doc saw the moment the shift happened. His voice softened again. “That’s enough. I don’t need to come closer.”

Tango breathed once, hard and trembling.

His flames remained up, bright and hot and defensive. But now they were no longer surging forward. They were holding. Holding the line. Holding the baby. Holding the room at bay while Tango tried to regain himself from the inside out.

“Sorry,” he said at last, the word rough and begrudging and completely honest.

Doc gave a tiny shake of his head. “Don’t apologise for instinct. Just let it settle.”

The baby stirred under Tango’s chin, one small hand brushing the edge of his collarbone. Zeal’s soft warmth grounded him by inches, but the tension in his body remained. He kept one arm around the infant and the other pressed protectively across his back, still watching the room like it might try something.

Xisuma had gone very quiet. When Tango finally dared to glance at him, the admin stood with visible care, hands lowered, posture gentle in a way that made the whole scene feel less like an intrusion and more like a careful orbit around a dangerous sun.

Doc’s gaze dropped to the baby’s hair, then to Tango’s face, then to the line of heat radiating from both of them. “You’re not wrong,” he said quietly. “That’s a very strong protective response.”

Tango gave a raw little laugh that was not funny at all. “Yeah. You think?”

Doc’s mouth twitched faintly. “I think you’re a new parent with a netherborn stress response and a newborn that appears to be functioning on instinct and heat. I think that is exactly what I would expect.”

Tango’s shoulders eased by the smallest possible fraction. Not much. Barely enough to matter. But enough.

The flames around his arms dimmed one slow degree, still present but less sharp. The baby’s breathing evened out again. The room kept its distance. And in that new, fragile quiet, Tango realised how close he had come to losing himself to the instinct entirely.

He kept Zeal tucked close anyway.

Just because his body had decided the world was a threat did not mean he was wrong to want the baby safe. It only meant the cost of loving something this small was going to be uglier and hotter than he had expected.

Doc, seeing the danger shift from immediate to manageable, nodded once. “All right. Let’s do this carefully.”

Tango didn’t answer right away.

He only stood there, flame-bright and trembling, holding Zeal against his chest while the room waited around him, and let the fact of being a parent settle in all the way down to the bones.

Doc didn’t push closer after Tango’s flare of instinct. Instead, he settled into the only position that seemed to matter right now: at a careful distance, within reach of the walls but not within reach of the flames, with his attention sharpened into something almost surgical. He raised one hand and a moderator panel shimmered into existence before him, a lattice of translucent screens that hovered in the furnace light like panes of blue glass. Lines of code began to spill across them in neat columns, live diagnostic data scrolling so quickly Tango couldn’t even pretend to follow it. He only knew enough to recognize the shape of it: health checks, player data integrity, stability readings, the kind of deeply annoying information that confirmed the impossible had become technical.

Tango still had Zeal tucked under his chin, one arm curved around the baby’s back like a barricade. The little body had gone quiet again after the protective flare, the tension in its tiny frame easing now that the room had not, in fact, attacked. Its hair glowed softly in the furnace heat, a warm red threaded with ember-orange at the edges, and every few breaths a faint pulse of warmth spilled from it into Tango’s chest. The newborn’s face had relaxed into a sleepy, slightly fussy expression, as if even in sleep it had not yet decided whether this world deserved trust. Tango could feel the baby’s tiny heartbeat through the wrap. Fast, but steady, alive and real. He hated how much that steadiness comforted him.

Doc’s eyes moved between the screens and the infant. “The merge is stabilising,” he said at last, voice low and thoughtful. “There’s no sign of corruption actively spreading. Whatever happened during the crash seems to have resolved into a legitimate player ID.”

Tango let out a breath he had not realised he’d been holding. It came out rough, almost painful. “You mean he’s not going to suddenly turn into a pile of server errors?”

Doc’s mouth twitched. “I mean he appears to be a functional person and not a glitch that forgot how to be an entity.”

“Comforting,” Tango muttered, though the tightness in his shoulders eased by a fraction.

Xisuma stood nearby with that familiar controlled stillness that suggested he was trying not to crowd the room and failing only in the sense that his concern was present no matter where he stood. He had not stepped back into Tango’s personal space, not after the protective flare, but he had not left either. His posture made him look like someone trying to hold an entire situation in both hands without letting it fall apart. When Doc glanced up at him, he nodded toward the far side of the room without breaking his focus on the panel.

“Can you contact Grian?” Doc asked.

Xisuma blinked. “Grian?”

“Yes,” Doc said. “He’s an avian hybrid. If Tango is going to nest properly, Grian will know how to help him set up the space around his instincts. Not the fire part, obviously.” His tone sharpened faintly on that word, practical and precise. “That part will need to be arranged carefully. But avians understand nesting better than most of us. He can help make the physical structure safe before any heat sources are introduced.”

Tango’s head tipped toward him, distrust and reluctant interest warring in the same expression. “You’re bringing Grian into this?”

Doc did not look up from the panel. “Yes.”

“Why him?”

“Because he nests.”

Tango stared at him.

Doc continued, matter-of-fact as ever. “And because the server’s collective understanding of nesting behavior is largely theoretical unless it comes from someone who actually does it. Avians do. He’ll know how to make the structure comfortable without accidentally creating a hazard. The heat and fire part will be your territory. The nest structure can be his.”

Tango looked like he wanted to argue purely on principle, but the logic underneath the request was difficult to fight. He hated how much he needed help. Hated even more that the help made sense. His nest instincts were already present in the room whether he acknowledged them or not. There were blankets folded too neatly, warm surfaces chosen with obsessive care, the furnace glow tuned lower in some places and higher in others based on where he and Zeal had sat the longest. He had already started making a den, and apparently the only thing stopping it from becoming an actual one was the fact that he was too exhausted to notice it forming around him. 

Grian, for all his chaos, might actually understand the shape of it faster than Tango did.

Xisuma seemed to sense Tango’s resistance softening just enough to become usable. “I can message him,” he said. “He’s nearby.”

Doc gave a curt nod. “Tell him to come quietly if possible.”

That earned a faint, snorting sound from Xisuma that might have been a laugh in another circumstance. “I’ll try.”

Tango huffed under his breath, still not convinced. “Great. Fantastic. So now I’m being nest-managed.”

Doc finally looked up from the panel, eyes steady and not unkind. “You’re being supported.”

Tango opened his mouth.

Then closed it.

Because the annoying thing was that Doc was right. The even more annoying thing was that hearing it from someone else made the truth easier to swallow. Tango’s body was still too full of fire and instinct and fatigue to be trusted with anything graceful. He had already spent enough energy reacting to threats that no longer existed. Maybe letting someone else help build the environment around him was not a failure. Maybe it was the only reason he hadn’t already collapsed into a pile of blankets and stubbornness.

Xisuma must have reached Grian quickly, because it was not long before the sound of wings came through the mountain.

Not elytra this time.

Real wings.

The difference was audible before it was visible: a rush of air in the tunnel outside, the small but unmistakable drag of feathers against stone, followed by a clumsy bump and a muttered curse that echoed down the corridor. Tango had only a second to brace himself before the front of the base door gave a rapid knock and then opened too fast, as though whoever was on the other side had decided speed was more useful than elegance.

Grian entered with the bustle of someone trying very hard not to knock over anything in a space built by a person with significantly less concern for avian wing clearance than he personally might prefer. He folded himself sideways through the doorway, wings tucked tight behind him and angled awkwardly so the feathers wouldn’t scrape the frame. Even so, one wingtip brushed the stone and he made a soft, annoyed sound before correcting his balance. His expression brightened the second he actually got inside, and the whole room seemed to wake a little around his arrival.

“Hello!” Grian said, far too cheerfully for the tension hanging in the room. Then he looked around once, taking in the furnaces, the half-assembled nest-like spread of blankets, the baby in Tango’s arms, the moderator panel still hovering in Doc’s hand, and the fact that Tango looked one more bad sentence away from either hissing or collapsing. His face shifted from bright curiosity to immediate understanding. “Oh. Right. This is the situation.”

Tango shot him a flat look. “You say that like it’s normal.”

Grian lifted one shoulder. “On this server? It kind of is.”

That, bizarrely, made Xisuma let out the smallest relieved sigh.

Grian moved a step farther into the room, then another, carefully watching his wings so they would not disturb the shelves or clip the hanging lanterns. He was taller than Tango in a way that made the furnace room feel more crowded, but he carried that height with the loose, alert posture of someone used to occupying space without damaging it. His gaze flicked straight to Zeal with immediate interest and then softened. 

Unlike Doc, who looked at the baby as a medical mystery to solve, Grian looked at him like a fellow creature with instincts he recognised, even if they weren’t his own.

Tango noticed that immediately and felt, against his will, a small release of tension in his chest.

Grian’s voice dropped a little. “He’s tiny.”

Tango stared at him. “That’s also the standard baby experience, apparently.”

Grian gave a small laugh and moved his wings slightly, a careful test of space. “No, I mean really tiny. I’ve seen chicks with more attitude than this.”

The baby stirred at the voice, tiny fingers flexing against Tango’s shirt. Tango’s hand instinctively shifted up and down the little back in a slow, protective stroke. He could feel Zeal’s warmth increase and settle again under his palm. The infant’s eyes cracked open for a second, revealing those molten red irises that still made Tango’s stomach ache in a way he had not yet figured out how to define. The baby looked vaguely toward Grian, then back into Tango’s chest and made a soft, sleepy sound.

Grian’s expression changed at once into something almost reverent. “Oh, wow. He’s already got your eyes.”

Tango groaned. “Please don't say that like it’s a compliment. It’s weird enough as it is.”

“It is a compliment,” Grian said, then grinned. “Mostly.”

Doc, still scanning the panel, cut in without looking up. “We need Tango nested before he runs himself into the ground. Help him structure the space. He’s got the instincts, but he’s exhausted and hasn’t fully built the environment yet.”

Grian’s face sharpened into immediate practicality. “Right. Okay. Yes. That I can do.”

He turned in a slow circle, taking stock of the room the way avians do when they are looking for what a space wants to become. Tango had watched Grian build before. Not in the obsessive, redstone-heavy way he built, but in the messy, intuitive way avians made places into places. 

Grian seemed to assess not just the shape of the room but the air in it, the corners, the weight of the ceiling, the direction light fell, where a creature might want to retreat, where it might want to perch. He took in the warm glow from the furnace array, the folded blankets, the stool Tango had been using, the open counter space, the way Tango had unconsciously arranged himself as a barrier between the baby and the room.

Then Grian nodded once to himself. “Okay. So first we make this less… industrial.”

Tango gave him a look. “It is literally built out of furnaces.”

“Yes,” Grian said, sounding unbothered. “That’s why it’s less nesting and more accidental foundry.”

Xisuma made a sound that was definitely laughter this time.

Tango looked deeply offended. “It’s a perfectly good furnace-based residence.”

“Temporary residence,” Doc corrected.

“Unhelpful,” Tango snapped automatically, though there was no real bite in it.

Grian moved toward the pile of blankets and immediately started rearranging them with the focus of someone who had done this sort of thing before, albeit in a very different body and scale. He didn’t just throw things down randomly. He tested texture with his hands, folded edges inward to create a soft hollow, shifted the stack so the warmer materials sat closer to the furnace side without touching it, and even angled the nearest stool and crate into a partial windbreak. It looked subtle at first, but after a minute or two the room began to change under his hands. What had been a storage-and-work area slowly started becoming a place with a center, a protected dip, a place to sink into and stay.

Tango watched despite himself.

Grian glanced back at him. “You said he likes heat?”

“Absolutely,” Tango said at once. “Too much cold is bad. Warm is good. Very warm, but not so warm it gets dangerous. I can manage the fire part once the layout’s right.”

Grian nodded. “Okay. So we keep the core of the nest warm but indirect. Soft stuff around the outside. Nothing sharp. Nothing loose that can snag. And probably keep any heat source offset from where he’ll actually sleep.” He paused, then looked at Tango. “You’re going to want the nest near you, by the way. If he’s a newborn and netherborn, I’d keep him close. Probably as close as possible.”

Tango looked down at Zeal, who had drifted back into sleep while the adults talked around him as if the world was not currently rearranging itself around his existence. The infant’s tiny body remained curled to Tango’s chest, trusting and warm and absurdly heavy with meaning. The urge to keep him tucked there indefinitely struck with such force that Tango nearly laughed at himself. 

Of course he wanted the baby close. The baby had spent all of maybe a day in the world and already Tango felt like separating them would be a crime.

He muttered, “Yeah. I gathered.”

Grian flashed him a quick, understanding grin and kept arranging the nest. “Good. Then we’ll build around that.”

Doc straightened from the panel, satisfied with whatever he’d found there for the moment. “No major corruption. Player data is stable. Tango’s data is stable. The newborn is physically viable and reacting normally to warmth and protection stimuli.”

Tango made a face. “You make him sound like a lab report.”

Doc’s answer was calm. “He’s also that.”

That drew another quiet laugh from Xisuma, who had been standing off to one side with the expression of someone watching the room become something else entirely. He looked less strained now than he had a few minutes before, though the emotion remained visible in the softening around his posture. Maybe it was the presence of people who knew what they were doing. Maybe it was the fact that there was now actual motion instead of crisis. Maybe it was just the strange relief of being surrounded by people who treated the impossible like a thing that could be managed rather than feared.

Grian stepped back from the nest area and brushed his hands together, then glanced over at Tango. “Okay. Show me where you want the center of it.”

Tango blinked. “Me?”

Grian pointed at him matter-of-factly. “Yes, you. It’s your nest. His too, obviously, but you’re the one who needs the heat and the secure zone. I can help position it for both of you. Where do you naturally keep him? Where do you feel him settle best?”

The question caught Tango off guard. It was so practical, so intimate, and so totally in Grian’s wheelhouse that for a moment he just stared. Then, slowly, almost reluctantly, he looked down at Zeal again. The baby was still tucked under his chin, one tiny hand curled against his collarbone, the little body already drifting toward sleep whenever Tango held still. The answer was embarrassingly obvious.

“Here,” Tango admitted quietly, touching the center of his own chest with two fingers. “Right here.”

Grian’s expression softened. “Then that’s where the nest starts.”

Tango stood there with his baby in his arms, a half-built furnace kitchen around him, Doc muttering over data panels, Xisuma watching with a look that was still tender around the edges, and Grian already rearranging the room as though he’d been born to turn chaos into shelter. The whole thing should have felt impossible. It did, to some extent. But underneath the exhaustion and the disbelief and the instinctive protectiveness that still lurked in Tango’s bloodstream like a warning, there was something else now too.

A beginning.

And, somehow, it was being built one careful blanket, one cautious question, one warm hand at a time.