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Wilbur’s return is not dramatic or climatic in any way. There isn’t a triumphant moment when he crosses from the dead to the living, when Phil feels the crackling magic of the totems all around ebb away and turn his son’s ghostly form solid again, when said totems he has carefully arranged explode into unearthly flame or something of the like.
The magic is simply gone, and Wilbur is suddenly there, looking pale and tired but very much alive, color seeping back into him like a wash of watercolor, bleeding out across the page.
Phil takes in a breath, rakes his eyes over him, taking in every bit and trying to convince himself that this is real, not just another one of the dreams that have haunted him since that fateful day when he did the unthinkable, heard Wilbur’s contented, dying breaths echo in his ears. He meets his son’s gaze and finds recognition there.
“Phil,” Wilbur rasps, voice weak and faint from disuse. “Phil, I’m so sorry.”
And then he’s in Phil’s arms, and neither could tell you who is hugging more fiercely, or who started crying first, or who is trembling more.
“I’m so sorry,” Wilbur repeats, face buried in Phil’s shoulder, and Phil feels himself smile for the first time in days.
He places a hand on the back of Wilbur’s head, rocks gently back and forth as though nothing has changed since the days when his children were small and their greatest fear was the monster underneath the bed, not the beast lurking in their own thoughts, whispering of buttons and revenge and abandonment.
Wilbur keeps saying it, and Phil lets him. He needs to say it more than Phil needs to hear it.
Eventually he sinks to the forest floor, the leaf rot damp and soft under his knees, and cradles his son in his arms. Phil tries not to think about the last time they were in this position, in the rubble of a nation Wilbur had both built and torn down with his own hands, dust choking his lungs and the iron tang of blood thick and cloying across his tongue.
He buries his nose in Wilbur’s hair and smells only clover and cedar and lavender soap, feels only the sting of the tears in his eyes instead of grit and dust. There is no blood on his hands or soaking his clothing, not this time. There is only the mud slowly seeping into his pants and Wilbur’s tears wetting his shoulder, and somehow, everything is going to be all right.
“It’s okay now, mate,” Phil murmurs, carding a hand through Wilbur’s hair like he’s done a million times before, in the aftermath of nightmares and fights, scraped knees and broken toys and failures alike.
(Like he did one last time in the wreckage of L’Manberg, trying to ignore the blood slicking everything and the wail, the scream of grief that clawed its way out of his throat, his very chest, with a vengeance like no explosives or withers could match.)
What’s done is done, the last chapter of that tragedy finished and signed, ink dried and pages closed gently. This is Philza Minecraft picking up the pen afresh to start a new story. This is a father slotting the broken pieces of his family together with shaking, careful hands, peeling away bits of himself to patch the many gaps and chinks and cracks. He will not write a tragedy, not a tale of bitterness and sorrow and chances lost. Not this time.
Here is how the story starts: Phil rises from a circle of scattered, broken totems, takes his son by the hand, and leads him to a new life.
“What’re your plans for when I finally kick you out of the house, then?” Phil asks him jokingly one evening. It's a rare week when both he and Techno are home from their travels, and Phil is savoring the time spent with Wilbur as much as he can. The windows are thrown open to let in the late spring breeze, bringing the smell of honeysuckle and grass. Despite the warmth, they each nurse a cup of tea.
Wilbur’s guitar sits beside him, his notebook laid open on the arm of the sofa, pages covered with crossed out lyrics and notations Phil can’t quite make sense of.
He hums thoughtfully, running a finger up the neck of his guitar where it leans against his knee.
“Don’t know,” says Wilbur, contemplatively. “Maybe I’ll find myself a little house in the woods. Write my songs. Ban Tommy from visiting.”
“Wil,” Phil reprimands gently, but not without a smile.
Wilbur smiles crookedly, glasses flashing golden-white in the lamplight. “No, no, don’t worry. I wouldn’t really.”
Phil waits.
“All right, maybe a little. Just once. For a bit.”
A snort, and Wilbur frowns playfully at him.
“He’s a gremlin and you know it, Phil.”
“Yes, but that gremlin, as you say, is your baby brother.”
Now, a familiar eyeroll from Wilbur, but it’s easy to see the gentle smile playing around the edges of his mouth, softening the angles of his face into warm fondness. No matter how irritated his sons get with each other, Phil knows their family will hold together through whatever the world throws at them. No matter how far Phil and Techno range in their expeditions and exploits, no matter what crazy scheme Wilbur and Tommy cook up together, no matter how chaotic and busy their lives become, the four of them will always come home again at the end of the day. They’ll always have each other.
Their love is made of sterner stuff than fairytales and wanderlust and childish bickering, and it shows.
(He came here with almost nothing, just the clothes on his back and a few items in his inventory. He can’t afford to lose anything, not now, but that hadn’t stopped Phil from setting his bloodied robes alight, watching them smolder with hollowed eyes in the crater that once was L’Manberg.
Niki had given him spare clothing for now, so Phil stands and feels his eyes water from the smoke and the cold and the dust and the devastation.
No matter how hard he scrubs his hands, no matter how much soap he uses or how red and raw and chapped his fingers become, no matter how many layers of skin he’s practically scraped off, Phil doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to forget the feeling of that sword hilt in his grasp, his son’s blood covering his hands.
Wilbur, oh Wilbur. My sweet, stupid son.
Their family was so close to being together again, for those few brief moments before Wilbur’s fist slammed into that button and Techno unleashed a secondary wave of destruction upon them all. Days, months, maybe years apart—how long has it been? Phil can’t recall. It’s all a haze now—and now they will never come home together, sit down for family dinner and lighthearted bickering. There won’t be another night where Wilbur sings and Techno lets Tommy harass him into telling a story, eyes gleaming with hidden affection in the firelight’s glow.
Their love was stronger than a fairytale, but they were always players in a tragedy, a tale of woes woven by the cruel and uncaring gods of the universe, and now his family is incomplete.
They are splintered and shattered, perhaps beyond repair, and as he stands in that crater, unprotected from mobs and the elements against every instinct he has, Philza shudders and shakes and weeps for his family.)
New L’Manberg doesn’t quite know what to do with itself when Wilbur—Ghostbur, as many of them call him—disappears. One day he’s there, puttering about with his books and his potions, building balloon stands and stringing paper lanterns across the sky, and the next he is simply gone.
(Phil knows where he is, sequestered away where no one can reach him, tucked in a cottage with only his guitar and Phil’s occasional presence as company, but he’ll never tell. Many of their citizens haven’t forgiven Wilbur for what he did, maybe never will—with rightful cause—and Phil refuses to lose his son again.)
It’s quieter in New L’Manberg. In the sewers beneath the crane, the little fire sputters out, leaving a room full of books and potions to molder peacefully in darkness. Slowly, the final rebuilding and refurbishing projects are taken up by the living residents.
This is Tubbo’s L’Manberg, they whisper to each other, smiling at the houses and water mill and market stalls, eyes skating over a sign about the world’s greatest musician, hanging lights in the L’Mantree with no thought for who poured so much work into building the nation they live in twice over.
Wilbur’s disappearance does not go unnoticed, but it does go unspoken by most. No one ever knew what to do with the happy, carefree version of the man who caused so much destruction. It’s easier, this way. It’s far simpler to pretend he was never there at all.
It’s a hell of a lot less of a headache to ignore any of the good things he’s done since he died, and instead stay angry about the bad ones, to use him as a monster beneath the bed to keep people in line. No one wants to end up like Wilbur did—outcast, alone, wallowing in his bitterness until nothing remained but a hollow shell of the kind and caring man who formed a nation meant to be a place of freedom and hope. People are cast in shades of grey, but it requires much less contemplation of moral conundrums to separate them into only the good and the bad, the right and the wrong.
Tubbo is right. Wilbur was wrong.
Simple. Easy. Oh, so terribly, desperately incorrect.
(Life goes on.)
Slipping away to visit Wilbur is easy, since he’s so often out farming for materials or strip mining in the Nether. Phil’s absence is a regularity in L’Manberg, and one not without a twinge of regret every time he hears of Tommy’s latest struggles in government, the spats between him and Tubbo and the other cabinet members as they all try to reconcile their ideas of how a nation should be run.
(Tommy seems angrier, lately, since Wilbur disappeared.)
It’s a trek to reach the little cabin in the woods Phil built, but he’s been known to spend days at a time in the Nether, so he’s not too terribly concerned about being found out. He’s still careful, though. He’s not sure he wants to know how Tubbo will react when he finds out one of his technical citizens broke one of the laws he established and practiced necromancy. Or Dream, for that matter.
Phil’s brows furrow and his mouth draws tight as he thinks about the man who helped push Wilbur right up to the impossible edge, who caused so much heartbreak for their family.
If he comes within a mile of Wilbur again, Phil’s going to throttle him.
(If he touches a single one of Phil’s sons, for that matter, there will be hell to pay.)
So he doesn’t visit as often as he likes, but today is one of those days, with the wintry sunlight filtering through the trees and making the last of the night’s frost glimmer and sparkle. Phil came two days before, spent days helping hunt and prepare the cabin for the snows, spent nights listening to Wilbur playing his guitar by the fireplace, the familiarity of it all plucking out a melody of contentment in Phil’s own veins.
He has to head back today. (He doesn’t want to. He wants his family back together.)
Phil slings his pack over his shoulder, says a warm goodbye to Wilbur, and turns to face the long journey back to L’Manberg when—
“Phil?” Wilbur sounds hesitant.
“Yeah, mate?”
He turns back and sees Wilbur worrying at his lower lip, fingers twisting in the cuff of his sweater.
“Why…” he trails away, voice falling hushed upon melting frosts and the silent deaths of tender plants unprepared for the coming winter.
Phil waits, content to listen until Wilbur is ready.
“Why don’t you ever fly? Back to L’Manberg, I mean. It would be faster.”
Ah.
He’s been wondering if anyone would ask that, if anyone had noticed the way he traverses the earth now instead of taking to the skies as he used to love, wings flexing and churning through an endless sky.
Here is a truth: flying is banned on the DreamSMP, be it by tridents or gliders or natural-born wings. Dream has given no reason for this, but Phil imagines it has something to do with distaste for anyone threatening to match his abilities.
To gain access to the world, Phil had to bargain, and bargain hard.
(It’s not enough to just clip your wings, Dream had scoffed at him, the words curling like a smile from behind that wretched mask of his. Feathers grow back, old man.
What are you suggesting? Phil had asked, weary and wary at once.
Dream had crossed his arms. I think you know what I mean.
He was allowed to keep them until after the end of the battle with the withers, until the war was over, but not so long that the dust had completely settled and the shock truly set in. Dream had come when he still wore his dusty, bloodied robes, still held a stained sword in a trembling grasp.
It’s time, Dream had said, and in his hands was an axe.)
Phil smiles softly at Wilbur, dropping his pack to the ground. Off comes the heavy cloak, off comes his outer tunic to reveal the open backed shirt he always favored underneath. Slits were always too complicated to wrangle his wings through, and the down at their bases helped shield his bare skin from the elements anyway.
He turns, stands still for a moment as he hears the strangled gasp behind him, the crunch of frozen grass and leaves as Wilbur steps closer and ghosts his fingertips just over the ugly, twisted scars that mark the spot where Phil’s wings once sprouted. It had taken him weeks to relearn how to walk afterwards, struggling to balance with such a familiar, heavy weight gone. If not for that, he might have revived Wilbur even sooner.
Phil turns to face him and sees the tears silently tracing their way down Wilbur’s cheeks. Sunlight catches on one for a moment, glittering and more precious than any diamond could ever be to Phil, because here is irrefutable proof, as concrete as the scars on his back, that his child cares.
“C'mere,” he whispers, and Wilbur all but falls into his arms, clinging to him like he’s the only solid matter in the world and the floor might drop out from under him at any moment.
“Why,” Wilbur sobs into his shoulder. “Why would you do this, why would you give up so much, I don’t—I don’t deserve this. Why?”
The wind is icy between Phil’s bared shoulder blades, and he aches to wrap his wings around them, protect Wilbur from the world, shield him like all his children are young and unbroken by the harrowing trials of life.
Here is a lie: Philza regrets giving up his wings for a chance to be with his children again.
“You’re my son, Wil,” he whispers. “I love you.”
He hears Fundy slipping out one night and decides to follow him. Someone has to look after his wayward grandchild, after all. Phil knows Fundy is perfectly capable of caring for himself, but that is decidedly beside the point. He deserves better than to be forced to be self-sufficient and fine all the time.
Fundy is clever and sneaky and hard to tail, but Phil raised three troublemakers and knows a thing or two about following people through the night. And anyway, it’s easy to guess where he’s headed a minute or two after he leaves L’Manberg’s borders, based on the direction he takes.
Phil loops around, deftly dodging mobs under the dark cover of the trees, and by the time Fundy reaches the abandoned entrance to Pogtopia, Phil is already waiting for him.
“Nice night for a stroll,” Phil says casually, and Fundy jumps, tail bushing out almost comically.
“How did you—”
“Your dad did plenty of sneaking about in his time,” he explains quietly, and can’t help the fond smile that tugs at his lips as he thinks of the trouble his twins used to get into. Wilbur would drag Techno into all sorts of chaos, and then Techno would return the favor, and Tommy loved to follow wherever his older brothers led.
Fundy sighs, a full body kind of sigh that pulls at Phil. A sound that weary shouldn’t come from someone so young.
“Any reason you’re here?” Fundy mutters, walking past him into the dusty and disused room that makes up the entrance to Pogtopia. It’s exactly the same as the first and only time Phil saw it, returning to free the fox Tommy said was tied there when Tommy himself refused to go. The blankets on the bed are still rumpled just so, and the chests, he imagines, contain exactly the same contents as before, rotting away in silence and stillness just like the rooms beneath New L’Manberg’s crane.
“Making sure you’re all right,” Phil says. “Any reason you’re here?”
He follows Fundy down the spiraling, roughly-hewn staircase, the only sound their footsteps and the distant drip of water, their only greeting the quiet echo of those very same steps. Fundy doesn’t respond for long enough that Phil thinks he might not at all. He traces his fingers across the raised surfaces of the dozens of buttons lining the walls, staring at them as though they contain answers to every question in the universe.
“I thought…”
Fundy’s voice is so small it’s nearly a whisper, and Phil aches to draw him into his arms. So many children with lives chipped and cracked and twisted irreparably on this server. How had it come to this?
“You thought he might be here,” Phil finishes for him, placing a gentle hand on Fundy’s shoulder, and his grandson crumples.
“I’m supposed to hate him, Phil,” he whispers. “He did horrible things, he wasn’t there for me, and I do, I do hate him, at least sometimes. But he’s gone and I can’t stop thinking that maybe my last words to him were something awful.”
Oh, Fundy.
No matter how much his heart aches, Phil can’t hold Fundy’s hurt against him. Wilbur did terrible things, not just to L’Manberg and her citizens, not just to his brothers, but to his son. Perhaps the worst of it was not in the things he did do, but all the things he didn’t. Everything he missed.
(I’m a terrible father, Wilbur had whispered to him one night in the cottage, tears poorly disguised in the lowlight. No, I was a terrible father. I don’t think I deserve to be one anymore. If I ever deserved it at all.)
There are a million things Phil could do or say in this moment, but he chooses what is perhaps the most direct option, in the long run.
“What do you say to a fishing trip tomorrow?”
Fundy’s head jerks up and he squints at Phil, clawed fingertips still hovering over a spruce button set into the craggy wall. The sight sends a shudder through his heart, but he ignores it.
“What?” Fundy asks, confused as to the sudden topic change.
Phil smiles wryly. “C’mon home, mate. We’re going to rest up, and tomorrow, I’m taking you on a fishing trip.”
“But—”
“Fishing,” Phil repeats firmly. “Tomorrow.”
He wraps an arm around Fundy’s slim shoulders and steers him up and out of the musty abandonment of Pogtopia, readying himself for tomorrow.
They leave at dawn, each carrying a stocked inventory and a fishing rod apiece. Phil has no intent of actually using the rods, but he wants to be sure his story holds up should anyone choose to question it.
It’s unlikely anyone will. New L’Manberg is far too trusting for a nation so many times destroyed and betrayed and manipulated. Some might see that as optimistic, as proof that the world spins on and people learn to trust and love and smile again. Phil would certainly like to see it that way.
He’s not so sure he does, though.
Fundy, to his credit, doesn’t ask why Phil had insisted on the trip, or where they’re even going. He simply follows, quiet curiosity emanating from him to the point where Phil can almost taste it on the back of his teeth, like the way salt coats your tongue when you stand near the sea.
Kids.
The sun is high in the sky by the time the cottage comes in view. The light dusting of snow that had covered the ground that morning is gone, evaporated in the meager midday warmth. There’s a faint trail of smoke piping from the chimney. It’s rather picturesque, this place that Phil started and Wilbur finished, took the bare bones of it and shaped and molded and crafted until it was less a house and more a home.
(How long has it been since Wilbur had a real home, not a sewer or a ravine or a van to live out of?)
“…Phil?” prompts Fundy quietly, at his elbow. “Where is this? Who lives here?”
Phil purses his lips, ready to give the whistle signal he and Wilbur had decided on, but the front door swings open before he can so much as draw a breath.
Wilbur practically glows with life in the midday sun, hair a curly mess, the sleeves of his worn blue sweater pushed up even in the chill. It’s a reassurance and a relief to see him like this. Sometimes, Phil fears that he’ll come to the cottage to find that grey and wan version of his son smiling vacantly at him once more. He doesn’t know what he would do if that happened.
Nothing good, some dark part of him that looks on Dream with a quietly smoldering rage whispers, but it is overwritten by Fundy’s sharp intake of breath.
Clawed fingers clutch at Phil’s arm, not drawing blood but pricking through his sleeve as Fundy trembles. Phil lays one hand over his grandson’s. Fundy’s fingertips are ice-cold.
“Hello son,” he hails, and Wilbur’s head snaps up, gold-rimmed glasses flashing in the light.
“Phil!” he exclaims cheerfully. “I wasn’t expecting—”
And then he sees who stands just behind Phil, shocked to silence, and his smile freezes. Something in his eyes seems to die, sobering and darkening and Phil feels an irrational stab of fear that all the warm brown of Wilbur’s eyes will simply evaporate into greyness and death once more.
“Fundy,” Wilbur breathes. Phil thinks his son might be shaking just as much as Fundy, but the cold makes it difficult to tell.
They stand in silence, the three of them, for a time. No one quite knows what to say or who to be in this moment, and no one is ready to take that first step into the unknown just yet either.
“It’s…good to see you,” Wilbur finally ventures, more subdued than Phil has heard him for a long while. “I…it’s good.”
He swallows, seems to shrink in on himself.
“You’re alive,” Fundy states, voice flat. Phil holds in a wince.
Wilbur clears his throat. “Thanks to…thanks to Phil, yes.”
“This is where you’ve been all this time.”
Wilbur nods.
Silence reigns once more, and Phil wonders if this time, he will have to be the one to break it. That feels wrong, somehow. Though he’s inserted himself into this situation quite thoroughly, it’s still not his place to act as a mediator, trying to shield each side from the pain and damage they’ve wrought on each other and themselves.
Off in the woods, a bird chirps. Its mate answers, trilling softly in the frosty air.
Wilbur breathes in, and Phil knows he’s steadying himself, preparing to take a step. (In what direction, Phil can’t guess.) He can read Wilbur’s body language, his posturing and the lines of his form, the tightening around his eyes and the furrowing of his brows, far better than anyone else on this server, barring Technoblade. Twins do have a way of understanding each other that even a father could never quite achieve.
The fact remains, however, that Wilbur is scared.
Perhaps more so than Phil has ever seen him—and he knows intimately what fear looks like on Wilbur.
(The worst part, Phil thinks, of those final moments of Wilbur’s life, was that he had looked at Phil, at his own father, with genuine terror in his eyes as he entered the room with words to a song meant to inspire hope and pride scrawled on the walls. It was manic, almost, but it was fear nonetheless.
Wilbur had been afraid of him.
He hadn’t been afraid to die, though. There was a light of happiness in his eyes in those last seconds before a second stroke extinguished it, Phil had thought, forever.)
But fear is not the end, and fear cannot stop Wilbur when he has set his mind to something.
Phil feels a surge of pride and hope in his chest when Wilbur breathes out resolutely and asks, “Won’t you come inside? It’s cold, and I have a feeling this will be a very long conversation.”
Phil vividly recalls receiving the first of many frantic messages from Wilbur after he had followed Tommy to the DreamSMP.
Dad help me, the ping on his communicator reads, and Phil squints at it, unsure if he ought to be worried in earnest or if this is just another one of Wilbur and Tommy’s spats.
A second message follows shortly.
I might have adopted a child.
He laughs at that, long and loud. The noise echoes through the empty house he had come back to, and for a moment Phil is reminded of happier, golden days when three children cavorted through the yard and the rooms and all the places they weren’t supposed to go, shouted laughter ringing out through summer’s late afternoons.
Gods, he misses his boys.
How do you expect me to help with that? Phil types back, still snorting softly. Also, how did you adopt a child, I thought you were living out of a van.
A hot dog van, if he remembers correctly from Wilbur's letters.
Aren’t you the father out of the two of us? Is quickly followed by, I found him in the woods and he looked cute and lonely and didn’t have a family, what else was I supposed to do?
Technically, if you’ve adopted him, you’re now a father as well, Phil sends. Congratulations, son. You know as much as I do.
Not funny.
It’s very funny, actually. It would be Wilbur who takes after him, finding children in the woods with no place to go and bringing them home. History repeats itself, they say. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
He does end up offering advice, of course. Phil might enjoy teasing his children, but he’s not one to deny them help. And he’s proud of Wilbur, as well, even if he’s just a mite concerned about one of his children suddenly becoming a father with no warning. It doesn’t surprise him at all that it’s Wilbur who landed himself in this situation, if he’s being honest. He always was soft-hearted, even under his chaos.
How does Tommy feel about being an uncle? Phil teases.
Fuck off, old man, Wilbur types back, and Phil can imagine the smile behind the words glowing on his screen. That child’s too young to be an uncle.
Later, Wilbur sends him a picture of his newly acquired child, curled up in a pile of blankets. Black-tipped ears poke up from the nest, as well as a bushy orange tail that hides most everything else.
This is Fundy, Wilbur messages. He's grown an inch since I found him, I swear.
“Hello, Fundy,” Phil whispers aloud, smiling past the tears that prickle at his eyes. “Welcome to the family.”
Phil isn’t there for most of Fundy and Wilbur’s first talk. He excuses himself to do whatever he can find to keep his hands busy—tending the greenhouse erected out back of the cottage, scouring the walls for any repairs the chinking might need, checking the snares he and Wilbur had built and set the last time he was there.
It’s dark by the time he reckons it’s safe to return to the cabin, and he does so with two rabbits in hand and the pleasant ache of good labor singing in his limbs. Phil’s careful to knock quietly before entering, stamping icy mud off his boots at the stoop and slinging off his cloak onto a peg as the door closes behind him, shutting out the creeping cold of the wintry night.
Wilbur and Fundy sit at the table, talking quietly.
It looks like Fundy is doing most of the talking, with Wilbur listening and responding occasionally. His hands are folded before him on the table, white-knuckled and trembling, but neither looks angry.
They just look tired, mostly.
When they hear Phil enter, they both swivel to look at him. The firelight reflects off Wilbur’s glasses, flashing like tiny lighthouses in the gloom of the cabin, a beacon welcoming ships home, offering safe harbor.
“We can talk more later,” Fundy says, after a moment of silence passes.
Wilbur nods, almost hesitantly. “We have time.”
“We have time,” Fundy echoes, and there’s an note of warmth there that gives Phil hope.
Here is how the story continues: no story is devoid of conflict, and this tale is no exception. Conflict is the lifeblood of the world, running hot and thick in veins through people and places alike. A story does not need to be a tragedy for things to start to go wrong.
Tensions are rising in L’Manberg.
Between his visits to Wilbur and Techno, his “fishing trips” with Fundy, and all his regular activities of farming and hunting and mining, Phil is in the city less and less these days. He owns property there in name more than anything else. If anything, his house is more a home for Fundy and an occasional place for Phil to stop in and spend the night, repair his materials under a solid roof, and then move on.
That doesn’t mean he’s blind to what’s going on, though.
He sees the way his youngest clashes with the other members of the server, chafes under the bit of democracy he’s been unexpectedly saddled with. Tommy is a wild thing, and wild things were not made to run nations and be presentable at all hours of the day.
At the end of the day, he’s a sixteen-year-old boy who has been through too many wars in too short a time, suddenly elevated to greatness and responsibility, and it weighs on him more than his brash grins and hoarsely-shouted insults care to reveal.
The other members of the cabinet look at Tommy and see a liability, a loose cannon who thirsts for war and cares only about mere music discs instead of the well-being of a nation.
Phil looks at his youngest and sees a bruised and beaten boy trying too hard at playing soldier, hero, and politician, with no time to simply be a kid.
Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor—but where is the time for healing? Where is the bright, happy child Tommy used to be? When will his son be allowed to breathe without the threat of war, to let his bruises fade and blood settle? Is there no peace to be had on this server?
(Judging by what he has seen, Phil is doubtful.
Don’t build your house out of wood, they’d told him after he joined. It’ll get burned down. No one wants that.
If no one wants it burned down, why burn it down in the first place? Phil tries not to think about the way New L’Manberg is full of houses and docks and platforms of wood.
Sometimes, he even succeeds.)
It comes to a head like this: Tommy does what wild teenage boys are prone to do. A light-hearted griefing spins out of control, and suddenly everything is on the line. Phil knows the obsidian walls Dream has begun erecting around New L’Manberg are not for their protection, or out of the goodness of his heart. They are a sick parody of the blackstone barrier that he knows used to mark L’Manberg’s borders—but this time, they aren’t for safety. They aren’t built to protect.
They’re built to contain.
That first night, Phil sits up by the window for a long time, holding Techno’s compass in his hands, staring off in the direction the needle points and thinking.
He starts his preparations the next morning, and when the time comes that he sees Tubbo, torn, stand between Dream and Tommy, the tipping point in an impossible choice, Phil knows his gut feeling was right.
Phil knows his sons well, knows better than most anyone on this server that when it comes down to it, Tommy will protect his friends to his dying breath, would rather die for them than let them go. Tubbo would rather keep those he cares about as alive and protected as possible.
Tubbo chooses the only option he can. Tubbo chooses L’Manberg.
Tommy is to be exiled.
Phil presses the button on his communicator, sending a message to his youngest. From atop the wall, even across the gap of grassy plain and water and dock between them, Tommy’s gaze finds his.
Run, Phil mouths, knowing that even though Tommy can’t make it out from where he stands, he’s seen the very same word in the message Phil just sent.
And Tommy is a good kid. A smart kid. He knows right now, he’s going to need help, and Phil is offering an outstretched hand, hoping beyond hope that his youngest will reach back after so many months of guilty avoidance and frosty silence in the face of all they could not bring themselves to discuss.
Tommy holds his gaze for what feels like an eternity. Overhead, thunder rumbles. For the first time in weeks, a storm is rolling in.
Tubbo says something, steps back, and Tommy flinches, tearing his gaze from his father’s. Phil can see it clearly, even at this distance. Dream takes one step forward, moving past Tubbo atop the wall. Behind Tommy, Fundy and Quackity shrink away from him in shock and terror.
Please, Phil thinks, some silent plea unheard in an indifferent universe. Please.
Tommy scrambles down the wall before Dream can even draw a weapon.
He runs, and Philza is there to meet him.
Through a flurry of exchanged coordinates and a wild goose chase down the wooden walkways of L’Manberg, father and son meet just by the podium in the town square. Dream and company are combing the area, but Phil managed to guide Tommy around them for long enough that they had moved on, satisfied. The threatening rain has driven any of the remaining stragglers inside, so the square is dark and still when Tommy skitters across the planks to meet Phil behind the presidential podium.
Neither of them says anything at first; instead, Tommy barrels into Phil’s arms and buries his face in Phil’s shoulder. They stand like that for a moment, suspended in a precariously fragile bubble, a momentary illusion of safety in this country that was intended as a refuge but is now more fraught with peril than either of them could have ever imagined.
He pretends not to hear the muffled sniffle from Tommy, or the prickle of hot tears against his neck.
Eventually, Tommy takes in a shaky breath and pushes back. Phil keeps his hands on his shoulders, looking him up and down.
He’s unharmed, but trembling slightly—whether that’s from the shock and fear or the chill wind that has picked up as storm clouds scud overheard, Phil isn’t sure—yet there is a firmness to him, a set to his jaw and slope to his shoulders, a fire in his blue eyes that reminds Phil, just a little, of Wilbur. He’s not broken or beaten just yet.
“What do I do, Phil?” Tommy whispers, and Phil wishes there was time to pull him into another hug, reassure him that this situation is impossible and Dream had to have known that when forcing the decision upon Tubbo.
“Come this way,” Phil says, and gently pulls Tommy by the hand to the cliff face behind the podium.
Tubbo had sealed off the room twice over—once in the rebuilding, a second time after Ghostbur had accidentally rediscovered it and subsequently fled—but Phil…he had come back under cover of darkness and carefully reopened an entrance into the remains of the room where Wilbur had smiled and told him it was never meant to be.
He had hoped Tommy would never have to see this room this close, this personal, but there’s no other choice now, so Phil lifts aside the tangle of vines shielding his entrance and leads his son into the room where the last exile L’Manberg had seen had come to an explosive end.
It’s smaller now, after being half-collapsed and sealed up. Only a fraction of the lyrics Wilbur had scrawled on the walls are anywhere near legible—a special place here, a few crumbled my L’Manberg’s there, one stark Tommy down in a corner. The rest are lost amongst the darkness and the piles of rubble, outlines made into menacing shapes in the faint light of the glowstone Phil had laid.
Phil imagines he can still smell the reek of Wilbur’s blood. He almost hopes it’s all in his head.
“Phil,” Tommy says, very quietly, and then he says nothing at all. His hand trembles in his father’s grasp.
“Shh,” Phil whispers, drawing him to his side and wrapping his arm around Tommy’s shoulders. “It’s all right, mate. It’ll be okay.”
There is a single, stuttering inhale, and Tommy nods.
Phil releases Tommy after a moment only to open the chest he stocked three nights ago, pulling out a pack of supplies, warm garments, and Techno’s compass. The enchantment glimmers faintly, bathing the two of them in a soft violet light.
“You need to leave,” Phil says, as gently as he can. “L’Manberg isn’t safe for you right now.”
“I…I don’t want to go,” Tommy whispers, clutching helplessly at his own arms as if to hold himself together, keep from falling into a thousand shattered pieces. “This is my home. I’ve given up everything.”
He sounds dazed. Phil wonders if he even intended to say that last bit out loud.
“Oh, Toms,” murmurs Phil. “I know. I know you don’t want to go. You’ll come back someday.”
Tommy emits a devastated noise, choked and immediately cut off, fingers turning white where they twist at his shirtsleeves. Outside the room, the rain begins to fall.
“Where do I go?” he whispers. “What do I do?”
Phil drapes a heavy cloak around Tommy’s shoulders, fastening the clasp with hands that shake almost as much as Tommy does.
“There’s a place you can go,” he murmurs, dusting the cloak’s shoulders and checking that the bag is fully stocked, just as he left it. He hands it to Tommy, then presses the enchanted compass into his hands.
“Follow this. It’ll take you to a safe house. Wait for me there until I can come.”
He doesn’t tell Tommy that the house belongs to a certain anarchist older brother. Phil isn’t an idiot; he knows Tommy still blames Techno for everything that happened—even the parts he wasn’t responsible for.
(If anything, Phil himself should carry a portion of that blame. He was the one who killed Wilbur, after all. He was the one who failed to stop him from hitting that button.)
Phil has already failed one son in this room. He refuses to fail another.
Tommy grips the compass like a lifeline, eyes searching Phil’s in its purple glow. Whatever he sees there, he must be satisfied, because he nods shakily.
“Okay,” he says.
“It’s a long journey,” Phil warns, resting his hands on Tommy’s shoulders, raking his gaze over him. Maybe if he can burn the memory of a safe and uninjured Tommy into his mind and hold it close, nothing bad can happen to his son. “You’ll need to be careful.”
“Why can’t you come now?”
Gods, Tommy’s voice is so small. Phil can remember every thunderstorm, every night interrupted by a nightmare that resulted in a tiny blond-headed boy stumbling into his room with that very voice, asking, “Dad?”
Phil hugs him tightly, plants a kiss into Tommy’s curls.
“I need to stay for a few days to throw them off, and so I can gather your things for you. I’ll come soon, I promise. Just wait for me.”
Tommy nods into his shoulder. There’s a short, sharp exhale, and then Phil feels the first of the tears begin to soak his shirt.
Oh, Toms.
Outside, the thunder rumbles and the rain pelts down, and Phil holds his child as he releases a wail of grief and helplessness at the impossibility of this situation. Phil rests his chin on Tommy’s bent head and does not think about the last time he held a son in his arms in this room.
“Where is he?” Dream asks two days later, as Phil is sharpening his sword.
Phil does not look up at the green-clothed figure in his doorway. He keeps his eyes focused on his task.
“I should think you’d know better than I would,” he says, not bothering to pretend he doesn’t know what Dream means. There’s not much point; everyone knows Dream has been scouring the area for Tommy. With any luck, he’s in the one place Dream will be unable to reach.
“He’s your son,” says Dream.
“Yes, my son whom you exiled,” Phil replies, and he makes no effort to disguise the bitterness in his tone.
“He’s a liability,” Dream begins, but with a screech of diamond on stone, Phil yanks the sword off the whetstone and stands to face him.
“He’s a sixteen-year-old boy, Dream, not a threat to whatever damned god complex you have in that sick head of yours. You and I both know perfectly well you were just using him to play your games, and everyone else might be willing to turn a blind eye to it, but I’m done. You’ve taken enough from my family. Get out of my house, and stay away from my children, or you’ll find out just why I’m called the Angel of Death.”
“I’d watch what you say. Remember who owns this server,” Dream tells him, but there’s an uncertain thread to his voice that wasn’t there before.
Phil smiles grimly. “Oh, I haven’t forgotten. But come near my family again and see just how few shits I give about it.”
Dream leaves.
He doesn’t come back.
After three days, the obsidian walls are finally near to coming down completely. A few sections still stand tall, but most of it has been reduced to a waist-high barrier around the entirety of New L’Manberg’s main city.
Night is falling when Wilbur meets him at the walls surrounding the L’Mantree. Under the faint light of the waning crescent moon, he almost looks like a ghost again—colorless and pale, blending into the darkness around him.
Phil closes his eyes, inhales, and when he opens them, Wilbur claps a solid, warm, alive hand on his shoulder and smiles at him.
“Ready?” he asks, and Wilbur’s grip tightens almost imperceptibly.
His son gives a resolute nod, and they go their separate ways. For a moment he stands and gazes after Wilbur as he heads towards Phil’s home, where Fundy awaits. He had offered to go with Wilbur, propose the idea together, but Wilbur had shaken his head. This is my duty, he’d said. I should do it. I want to do it.
And so they split, with Wilbur sneaking through the streets of his former nation, and Phil heading to Tommy’s home.
Phil already has his own belongings and an enderchest on him, so he slips down the prime path to collect Tommy’s things. The most important items will be accessible via enderchest, so it doesn’t take him long to finish. Checking his inventory one last time, Phil heads to the L’Mantree to wait.
Wilbur joins him soon after, alone.
When Phil asks, he shakes his head, but there’s a proud half-smile tugging at his lips.
“Maybe someday,” Wilbur murmurs, and Phil places a hand on his back.
For a moment they stand, gazing out over New L’Manberg, a warmly-lit island in an ocean of darkness. This place that was once so special to his sons. Still is, in many ways.
Maybe one day they will be able to return here and find the home they dreamed of. Stories are circular, after all. They love the rhyme and rhythm of repetition, curling back in on themselves to connect and mirror and grow.
This story is not a tragedy, in the end, so perhaps it will happen someday.
But for now, there is a different kind of homecoming.
Stories do not often have endings, in the conventional sense. There is simply a time when they are being told, and a time when they are not. They change and shift and circle back, existing in a fluid state. Depending on where you start, any tale can be a tragedy, or an adventure, or a fairytale.
This tale, however, is no longer a tragedy, no longer a story of heroes and villains and the rise and fall of a nation. It is not a history or an adventure, not in the traditional sense.
There is no triumphant return from battle, no celebration of victory.
There is only Technoblade sweeping open the door to his home, warm golden light spilling out over the snow as he welcomes his father and brother inside. There is only Tommy, seated by the fire, eyes widening at the sight of Wilbur, spilling his mug of cocoa to fling himself into his older brother’s arms. There is only a father watching his children reunite in full after far too long, wrapping their arms around each other and weeping from relief and joy and sorrow and a thousand other things they have been through.
There will be time for the hurt and the healing. There will be many late nights and serious talks and shouted words. There will always be nightmares and scars and hurts that ache on the most unexpected of days. No story has a truly perfect ending, after all.
But this is not a tragedy, not in the end.
Here is how this story ends: a family comes together once more, pushing past the scars and bruises and old hurts, reaching across death and betrayal and separation to join hands in the warmth and safety of the first true home they have shared in far too long.
Philza Minecraft sinks to his knees and gathers his sons in his arms, and that is ending enough for him.