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His parents once told him to take care of his brothers, while they went on business trips. They gave him the weight of the world, at a young age, because they told him that he was responsible, they trusted him. They trusted him, to lie.
( “YOUR JUST A LIER , I SHOULD HAVE NEVER TRUSTED YOU!”
“AT LEAST I PUT FAITH IN YOU TO NOT BE LIKE ME”)
Atlas’s tale was never a happy one, he wants to scream at them, weren’t they supposed to make his life better? He wants to scream and shout he’s meant to travel the world when he was young, not hold it, he’s not ready. But he takes it with a smile and learns what it’s like to shut his mouth tight.
( “You forgot about my soccer game….again” “I was busy” “Again?” )
He reads and reads and reads, because no one’s here to give him a hands-on lesson on how to raise three brothers, and he’s determined that his brothers never need to know about the lie their parents gave him.
( “Do you all hate your parents?” “yes.” “yep” “yeah” “.......not that much”)
-
Atlas never got pity from anyone, it was a punishment to hold the world on his shoulders. He was never congratulated for not throwing it off, or letting it simply drop the earth, and Phil wishes that greek mythology wasn’t accurate about the heroes and villains it portrayed.
( “why do we learn about greek mythology? This is boring.” “it’s because the greeks were right about human nature.” )
Phil walks into the house every single day, wondering if maybe a different universe, he isn’t taking care of his brothers. Maybe he isn’t Atlas, and he’s not dealing with an Icarus, or a Theseus, or even an Achilles. He wishes he was in highschool again, last semester before he said he was going to travel the world with a buddie, see Paris and the Northern Lights, not the local pizzeria and an office space.
He can’t take it out on his parents, the one’s who decided a kid was the best option for a father, and his mind becomes a battlefield of emotions, ones scream at him that it’s his BROTHER’S FAULT FOR BEING BORN, IT’S THEIR’S FOR MAKING YOUR LIFE HARDER, other’s tell him IT’S HIS PARENTS , the rest whisper to him you're barely in their lifes at the moment, why don’t you just disappear, travel the world like you were supposed to?
He supposes Atlas never saw what the world looked like from the back of his head.
( “Tommy, we need to talk.” “About?” “Everything.” )
-
Christmas Morning comes, and he hands Tommy a poster of Gumball, a show Phil is confident Tommy likes.
Tommy accepts the poster with fake gratitude, something he realizes that comes easy to him. Phil doesn't notice the mask, and smiles as Tommy takes the poster. Tommy rushes up the stairs and shoves the poster into the back of the closet, the big-cartoonish eyes of Gumball staring straight back at him through the jackets. He closes the doors so that Gumball doesn't remind him that his family's relationship is built on the desperate hold of the past.
( Google Search: How to let go of the past )
Later, Phil walks into Tommy's room, while Tommy's out, something about going to the mall with friends. Phil opens up the closet to check Tommy's laundry basket, only to notice a jagged-looking Gumball staring at him through the jackets. W-why would the poster be in the closet? D-didn't tommy like that show?
He quickly closes the closet door with shaking hands, remembering the receipt he'd left on the kitchen counter. He rushes down to the kitchen, only to see no trace of the receipt. He's....confused....he could've sworn he remembers Tommy bouncing up and down the walls asking for a Gumball poster....
Then he remembers Tommy's barely talked to him in the past few months.
( “Hey Tommy!” “..........”) ( “Phil, I’m going out” “okay be- nevermind then.”)
The humming of the music on the radio taunts him, "Santa always knows what you want...."
But Santa's a failure.
-
Phil wonders how much he doesn’t know about Tommy, considering he’s squinted through red and blue blinking lights because Tommy’s decided that running from the cops is a fun Thursday night activity, or that bloodied bandages should become a regular occurrence in their household.
(The answer is that when Atlas took on the weight of the world, he never saw any of his siblings ever again, only in passing)
When it’s only him in the house, he takes out his old guitar, something he shoved in the garage a long time ago. It’s dusty to be sure, the strings are soft under his touch, no longer rough, but he fixes it up no problem.
(Same can’t be said for the number of times he’s tumbled down the stairs attempting to fix his relationships with his brothers)
Sometimes, he’ll strum along to whatever the radio decides to play that day. Occasionally it’s pop music, other times it’s indie music, he finds that his hands appreciate it more when it’s indie. Other days, he’ll pick at the strings until he gets a chord, that doesn’t scream at him. It’s soothing and calming, something he finds that is rare these days.
( It’s probably his fault at this point, but the number of tallies is blurring.)
He doesn’t like it when the radio changes violently and without warning.
(He doesn’t like it when his brothers kids do that either)
-
Phil does the laundry every week and every week he peaks into Tommy's closet to check on the gumball poster. Some weeks it's covered by a jacket or a school project, other weeks it's in clear-sight when he opens the door.
And every single week, his hands shake as he closes the door.
(They shake a lot these days, google tells him it’s stress, his mind tells him it’s karma)
One week, Tommy's at the mall again, and Phil doesn't see gumball anywhere.
Tommy comes home with change jingling in his pocket and reverberates through the house like a warning. Phil listens to every beat of the coins, and every beat matches the music that played on Christmas "Santa always knows what you want, because that's Santa's job"
Phil dusts off an old-parenting book he had from when he had first been given the world to hold on his shoulders, while a song plays in the background. The pages are yellowed and crinkled from dis-use, and the back of the book still reads "you'll find it useful" .
Phil reads the part about teenagers, silently wondering about where he went wrong as he reads, or about the ways Teenagers feel like they're in a cage, (in the corner of his eye, Tommy- grounded is written six-times over on the calendar).
The book says they feel their wings are broken , (the ER bills sit on the counter, a point of contention in the household) , but the book also says one wing was torn by them, the other by their parents. (Phil could’ve sworn he was an outlier)
The book mentions how adults treat teens like kids and adults ,and it’s lighting the flames inside their hearts, screaming at them. His heart slowly begins to sink deeper and deeper into the pit of his stomach, worse than it had before.
( “Phil...what are you doing up here?” “Remembering”)
And yet again, when he shuts the book as the song reaches the last part-
"Please don’t hold me
I wouldn’t know how to let go"
And with that, Wilbur's guitar rings through the house, apparently he’s been practicing while Phil’s been screaming at himself.
Phil realizes that he's scared of the music,
the music that's growing up with his brothers children.
He’s scared of change
, but his brothers kids seem to dare it to take them every single day.
-
In the myths, Atlas’s father was Iapetus, whose myth’s are blurry as Phil’s connections to his brothers. Iapetus was sometimes referred to as the titan of mortality, of the ever-looming threat that was Thantos, and Phil knew it better than anyone, that mortality would come for them in the end, that it’s distant but at the same time right in front of them. Just like their father.
Atlas’s mother was one of the oceanids , children of the titans that ruled the seas. The seas are something everyone learns about in school, the way the waves crash against shore-lines and take lives, but at the same time bring lost souls together and carry children to safety. At the beach, the ocean is in front of people’s eyes, yet it stretches so far that sometimes people forget about it.
Phil thinks it’s funny how it ended up, with Atlas staring down at his reincarnation.
-
Phil’s voice has gotten croakier with time, not because of age, but because of screaming.
He yells and he yells and he yells. He screams that he never got a childhood, at Tommy who rebuts it with the shell of a youthhood Phil’s given him. He screams when Tommy’s hair is dyed, and not because it most certainly did not appear on the bill, but because why .
( “I JUST WANTED TO BE A KID, PHIL!” “SO DID I, BUT LOOK WHERE WE’RE STANDING!”)
He learns Tommy doesn’t want to associate with him, he would rather have Phil gone from his life, then in. Tommy runs out the door before Phil can even register it.
When he does register it, he grabs his guitar, the old one that he spent time to fix, because he wanted to get back into their lifes once more, but he guess that was futile now.
And he smashes it against the wall of their house, leaving a dent in the side. Techno’s out of the house, a competition with a couple of classmates Phil realizes he doesn’t remember the names of.
He screams louder than he’s ever had before, screams incomprehensible words that lace his throat with an lighting anger and fear. He knows he had it better then them, that he shouldn’t deserve to be able to call (?) them family, he knows that he’s treated them terribly, but at the same time he’s fighting to not agree with the little voice telling him it’s them, not you.
(Google Search : Is it selfish to blame someone for your own issues?)
He’sindenial,he’sindenial,he’sindenial, he’s in denial about everything and he doesn’t know how to get out.
His brothers have left (it’s because of you..)
No one trusts him at the point, (they have a fair point)
Can he rebuild? Is this hole in the ground something he can fill back up again?
( Answer : The shovel is trapped in hell, and hell is an area only reachable in his nightmares.)
-
Techno screams at him that he’s given Wilbur too much pressure, he screams that at this point Atlas has given the weight of the world slowly but surely to the gods who can’t handle such a weight. His brothers are dying, and no one seems to care.
( “TOMMY IS FALLING APART AND THE LAST TIME I HEARD YOUR VOICE WAS TWO MONTHS AGO, PHIL! THAT’S NOT A WHAT A GUARDIAN DOES.”)
Wilbur screams that Tommy’s breaking apart right under his eyes, that Tommy’s cried six times in three days over trivial things he’s worried Phil’s going to scream at him for. Tommy’s been doing shit that isn’t legal and he's gotten six marks on his record.
(“HE’S CRIED SIX TIMES AND YOU DON’T SEEM TO CARE, WHY?? AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO??”)
Tommy screams that Phil’s stopped giving a damn at this point about his brothers, that he’s too focused on the past he’s never gotten, that the stories skip over, to care his brothers are falling apart at the seams.
( “YOUR FUCKING CHILDHOOD DOESN’T MATTER ANYMORE, BECAUSE THAT'S IN THE PAST, WHILE IM STILL LIVING MINE OUT.”)
Phil knows he didn’t have it as bad as them, he had a childhood before their parents left. He got to figure out family was, not what the shambles of a relationship they had now.
( “I'M TRYING,OKAY??!?!?? IT’S NOT LIKE YOU GUYS MAKE IT ANY EASIER!” )
-
They ask him about the dent in the wall, and Phil says it’s nothing.
Just like his problems. Because Atlas never complained about the weight of the world on his shoulders, because no one looked closely at the way his shoulders trembled.
( Google Search: morality in shades of grey )