Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Phil gets the call at midnight sharp. The clocks change, the night becoming day, and a chime sounds from his phone, discarded on a pile of books near his bed. 

It isn’t that he’s being an insomniac. Sure- he’d been diagnosed, years ago, but his meds ran out then and he’d never had them refilled. But tonight’s restlessness isn’t fueled by a chemical imbalance, by the electricity of energy. He’s just… 

Thinking. 

But then his phone goes off, screen lighting his room up blue, slicing deep, bleeding shadows into all the cracks, behind the bookcase and under his bed. He sighs, as it buzzes, not wanting to pick it up. But the moment the noises stop, they pick back up again, making his phone start to spin with the impact. 

So he reaches over and groans, pushing his long, unkempt hair out of his face, making a mental reminder to braid it when whoever it is is done with their call — whatever could be so important at 12 am. 

Phil recognizes the number, though, and it doesn’t make him happy. The last time he’d gotten a call had been about twelve years ago. When he’d met his sons.

Sam’s voice is starting the moment Phil answers, tucking it to his ear. There are the soft sounds of human discussion somewhere in the background — a hazard of working at a displaced person’s shelter. But they aren’t his focus. Sam sounds, if not heavily accented, bordering on panicked.

“Phil,” he says, tense and slow. He annunciates each syllable and keeps the lilt out of them, the marker that he is very distinctly not from this realm. “Do you have a moment?”

“It’s 12 am, mate,” Phil responds tiredly, pushing sleep from his eyes and shuffling up to a seated position on his bed. His blankets fall down on his knees, pooling around his bare feet. “What is it?”

“I need you to be ready to hear something that you’re not going to like, Watson.”

“Again- 12 am. He shrugs, though Sam obviously can’t see it through the call. “I’m about ready for you to tell me anything.”

There’s a long, silent pause, in which even the background conversation goes quiet. All that can be heard is the brief crackle of breath over the call; the whistle of wind battering at Phil’s flimsy glass windows, in need of replacement. He runs thin fingers through his hair, ignoring the way they’ve begun to shake in his exhaustion. They’re nearly always shivering regardless of how little he sleeps, nowadays.

“Tommy’s alive.”

The words hit like a blow to the sternum. Phil reels backward, a wheeze of air escaping him before his breathing stops altogether. Silence, stunned, empty, as his eyes widen, his wings twitching upwards with all of the emotions that statement draws up within in. Grief, and anger, and betrayal, and whatever you feel when your children are dead and lost and gone.

“I buried Tommy two years ago,” Phil says sharply, yanking the phone away from his ear and posing to hang up, voice a low, ragged snarl, air and a flurry of emotions still caught in his chest.

“But you never found a body,” comes tinny and quiet from the speaker, and Phil pauses. His hand, shaking, moves back as if on instinct. 

A pregnant pause, in which his full-body shudders as if someone is walking across his grave. Then, with all the voice he can muster, barely a whisper, cracked and barren. “This is a cruel joke, Sam-”

“It’s not a joke,” replies the man, matter of fact, and Phil deflates all in an instant, something wounded and gurgling curling up within his ribs, catching hold of his heart, that has only just begun to heal. Sam and his brother, Warden, have never been the types to joke around. Never with anything, especially something like this. Phil’s heart feels like it hiccups as the weight of the words smacks into him. 

But at the same time, there is denial, just as strong. Whoever Sam thinks is Tommy is either lying or a fraud, and it makes Phil want to listen if only to meet the person and give them a taste of his grief, make them feel even a hint of what he’s suffered. 

“I’m not lying to you, Philza,” Sam replies, and his voice is so soft it hurts. He sounds like he’s speaking to a child, using Phil’s full name as a weapon. 

He has known Sam for years, back in his days of isolation and those first few years of drifting tirelessly, hopping between jobs, between fights. But the name hurts. People don’t just… call him that. They speak of him in whispers, in fear, in courtrooms, and murmured through legends.

“He’s-” Sam pauses. “I didn’t believe it when I first saw him, too. But I called Warden in, a few days ago, and he’s got connections within the medical industry. The DNA match was…”

Phil fills in the blanks. “There are ways to trick machines.”

“Absolutely. But…” Sam sighs, and his voice fills with something harsher, the accented flourish to it all that Phil remembers, spent years learning how to understand. “I’d like you to come down, Phil. You just need to see what I see, before I’m forced to call Child Protective Services on the kid.”

He considers the idea. Of meeting this fraud, when his youngest child is gone and rotted, body never to be retrieved because of how long it waited to be found. Because Dream had torn it apart with his teeth when his supplies of food had been limited.  Phil thinks he hates Warden, just a bit, for being Dream’s caseworker. He hates himself even more for ever letting Tommy leave home. Ever letting him meet Dream, in the same way he regrets letting Wilbur run off and hates letting Techno’s mental illness go unchecked for years. These things aren’t his fault, he reminds himself. But something close to the surface of his subconscious mumbles otherwise.

“He’s at the center, then?”

“With me, yes. I’ve had him here for about a week now. I would’ve called sooner, but I couldn’t, not without a conclusive m-”

“I get it,” Phil interrupts, sharp, waving a dismissive hand for only he to see. His wings, behind him, are mantling upwards. He can’t quite quell the urge to pull at the feathers — but he subdues it, replacing the urge for self-destruction with a desire to hurt someone other than himself. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

And he hangs up. 

He doesn’t tell Wil or Techno where he’s going. It would be cruel, he thinks, to even introduce this idea to them, to give them the false hope that their brother could be alive. And the lights beneath their doors are both off either way, so he hopes that they’ve managed to find sleep where he has not. Both of their medications seem to be working effectively in helping them sleep, cope, live.

Phil is exhausted every time he thinks about how he’s been able to help them, how he’s failed his youngest son in comparison. You can’t bring a dead child to therapy. 

The funeral had sent Wilbur into hysterics. He hadn’t been suicidal in the traditional way, but he’d stopped eating, drinking, spending all his time writing until Phil had found him digging a huge gash through his wrist with the pen he’d held within his fist, absentmindedly, as if he hadn’t realized he was doing it. He’d been put into the best inpatient ward money could buy. It had been agony to do so, but Phil knew he could not help his son in the way he needed. Still, Wilbur had scream-sobbed like his father was killing him by doing it. But when he’d come out he’d been subdued enough — with a new prescription, a new therapist — that things had been able to progress. 

It had, in contrast, made Technoblade quiet. He’d hole himself up in his room for days at a time, murmuring to the noise in his head. Sometimes, the scent of burning would flicker up from beneath the door, Phil’s eldest son consumed by his weapons, by sharpening his tools till his fingers bled and sparks scattered across the hardwood of his floors. They’d been confiscated when Techno’d started dissociating with them again, walking around the house carrying knives and swords and arrows. 

When Wilbur had been in inpatient, the house had gotten far too quiet. When he’d come back, though, it hadn’t changed much.

But that was right after the funeral. It’s been two years. They’ve all slowly begun to heal, and Phil refuses to allow some fake ruin every inch of progress they’ve made, clawed for with blood and fangs and broken wings. 

(Phil had been in denial, for quite some time, and in the quiet way that meant no one knew. There was no body to be found in Dream’s cell, by the time someone visited. No body. Just bloodstains and the traces of human meat in the man’s system, teeth turned red.)

Phil’s wings slot up to his back and shiver into that plane between worlds, black feathers crumpling as he shoves them roughly away. He slams the car door on his way in — and regrets it a moment later, hoping neither of his sons has heard it. But this fall night is uncharacteristically warm, and he rolls his windows down, letting the wind braid fingers through his hair and make his eyes sting. The madness of sounds outside his windows fuels the fire in his chest, stifling the wound of grief inside him and patching it with a familiar, comfortable, rage.

His long, spindly fingers tap anxiously against the steering wheel and expose his nerves. He’s always hated his tells, and the abnormally long, near-inhuman canvas of his hands has always been one. Wringing fingers, tapping palms, clenched fists. 

Therapy had revealed to him that it was likely because of his brain’s habit of filling itself with as much stimulation as he can get. His atmosphere, before this realm, had been one of constant danger, of isolation and quiet. When no one is around to talk to you, it’s valid to fill the silence.

The homeless shelter — downtown, surrounded on either side by apartment buildings, cruelly ironic — looms above him when he pulls into the open parking spot in front of it. Sprawling, brick surface, the harm-reduction sign in the front window, the decrepit and useless fire escape at its side. The air smells like smog and decay.

Phil pulls the front door open, taking a moment to feel the weight of the doorknob beneath his fingers. The reception room is large, with old hardwood floors and lit up by flickering fluorescent lights. Posters for things like sterile needles, free HIV testing sights, and people’s band gigs line the walls, along with many drawings of people, crayon and marker and graphite and paint and anything else the residents can find.

He remembers when he first came here, Sam trusting him enough to call about the three tiny children who had come. It had been back when Phil’s name had a bit of a reputation, and the kids had asked if anyone at the shelter knew who he was, how to access him. They needed to talk to the Angel, apparently. He’d been intrigued, and Sam had told him that they weren’t legally allowed to stay, so he needed to do something.

Technoblade had been eight. Wilbur had been six. Tommy had been three. All of them had asked, once Phil had come — for they’d refused to speak to anyone else after they’d made their demands clear — if he would kill their parents for them.

It was an odd request. Phil had told them they’d need to pay, humoring the idea. They’d told him, with dirty faces and torn clothes, that they’d give him anything. So, he listed his price. 

Them.

And then they’d gone, coming into his house, terrified and paranoid and angry. His price had been their lives and their fates, but Phil hadn’t actually killed their parents, and he’d told them as much. They’d been arrested within a week of the three children moving in with him though, and no one would ever find out why one of them could no longer walk and the other no longer had function in their hands. No one asked. Not even the boys, who could remember the feelings of boots against their skin and hands to their throats well enough for it to be permanently etched to their skin.

When Phil had first entered the building — he’d never even visited before, not since Sam started the place, deciding to put his proclivity for engineering and his sprawling fortune for good — Wilbur had been in the reception room, kicking his legs and humming happily to himself. He’d been scribbling in a yellow-lined notebook, looking up every so often and adding more details to his drawing of Sam, who was frozen in place, a perfect model. He’d looked up at Phil, shrieked, and then smiled so wide his lips began to bleed.

It’s been over a decade, since then. Phil’s watched those same traumatized children become older, become his sons. He’s watched them go to school, graduate, and grow. He’s buried one.

The room smells like old wood and alcohol. There’s only one other person besides the one at the front desk, slumped over in a chair and shuffling a pack of cards. Long black hair moves back and forth as they sway, mumbling, exposing skin so gnarled and twisted with scars an eye is covered, a mouth is garishly posed in a smile.

“Mr. Watson?”

He looks up. The woman at reception is one he hasn’t met before, with long brown hair and soft, almond eyes, hidden behind glasses. A badge on her chest reads “Niki!” in a bubbly script, along with “she/her” and several heart stickers. Phil nods and smiles, his resolve strengthening with anger, enough that she suddenly looks uncomfortable. He knows he can look frightening. It’s where his reputation had come from, so many years ago now. 

“That’s me,” he tells her, untucking his hands from the pockets of his long, flowing black coat, putting one against the back of his neck, rubbing at the fabric of the turtleneck there. “Sam should be waiting for me. Sorry to pop in so late. I won’t be here long.”

For a long moment, she doesn’t respond, smile sliding into something tenser. He just casually grins even harder. Niki nods.

“Erm- he’s attending to someone right now. Would you mind waiting a few minutes for him to finish?”

“It’s a bit rude of him to call me in at midnight and then not even show up, isn’t it?” He says rapidly, leaning closer. Niki purses her lips, but to his surprise, nods.

“Yeah- I’m sorry about that, I don’t know what he was thinking. Do you uhm… want a coffee? Or tea?” She looks down at her desk and huffs a chuckle. “I’ve got… needles! Too! But I don’t think you’re here for that.”

“No, I’m not,” with a smile that is faking its warmth. “I’ll take a coffee.”

She disappears behind the plastic covering in front of her desk. He can hear her rummaging about, and he finally lets his smile drop, the rise in his blood pressure practically palpable. Sam calls him down to talk to an impostor and doesn’t even have the dignity to greet him.

Well. He’s got enough experience with inhospitable situations. So he turns from the desk, going and sitting a few chairs away from the muttering man, the cards that flick through his fingers, rapid quick. But Phil doesn’t bother looking away, casting his eyes down the other’s shivering frame. Needle scars pockmark and scab down his inner arm, just beneath the ripped and dirty surface of his sleeves. His feet tap rapidly against the ground, wrapped in the same sort of shitty tennis shoes that Wilbur had worn in this room years ago.

Phil wonders if this man is a reflection of what his sons might’ve become if he’d been too late. If he’d left them there, with a soft voice, telling them that the world would handle it, the law would prevail. He is not a perfect father by any stretch of the imagination. But the sort of monsters that trek this world have nothing over human capability. They are nothing when put side by side next to the people who had once had Phil’s sons in their hands.

“Do you take sugar?” Niki calls from a few yards away, the sound of a percolator dripping. 

“Just a spoonful,” he calls back. “And nothing else, thank you, though.”

There’s a moment more of silence. Then, she walks out from behind her desk, holding two styrofoam cups. One is a milky tan, the other the deep black-brown of instant coffee. Phil accepts his cup with a nod and a genuine smile, sipping it and observing as she walks over to the other man in the room.

She shakes his shoulder. He looks up and exposes his face — one half crawling with burns, thickened and red, the other with a watery brown eye and a mouth full of fanged teeth. He smiles like she’s just given him all he’s ever wanted, and starts drinking, silent. Phil turns away when tears start to drip down the man’s face, fingers shaking so badly against the coffee that Niki has to steady them.

He won’t intrude. This is personal.

But he’s lucky with his timing, and a door opens. There stands Sam, pointed tail flicking about anxiously behind him, facemask pulled down enough only to expose his nose. He’s dressed in a light green shirt and simple jeans, with ornate braces supporting his knees and elbows, dusted with gold, one clawed hand clutching his cane. For a moment, they simply stare at each other.

Then Phil downs the rest of the boiling coffee in one gulp. He stands, and Sam nods, and he wishes he had his wings to intimidate with.

“Phil.”

“Sam,” Phil responds, with a curt nod. He sets his cup down on the lip of the reception desk, smiling once more at Niki — who looks as if she’s bordering on frightened, but still helping the man in the chair drink his coffee. “Show me.”

They walk down the hallway in silence. Offices and rooms and closets shine light and darkness at regular intervals, lights flickering, bills clearly underfunded. Sam doesn’t make a single noise save for the tap of his cane against his ground. 

“He’s different,” Sam begins suddenly, looking back at Phil. It’s like a dam broken — once the first words are out, they don’t stop. “He flew all the way here from… I don’t know where. Miles away. Won’t tell me anything. Won’t talk at all, actually. I can’t diagnose him with anything, but Tommy is completely catatonic. Won’t speak, won’t eat, won’t sleep.”

All the better to not expose themself as a fraud, Phil thinks. But he keeps the words inside, nodding instead. 

The door they come to is the same as all the others, save for the paper on its front that reads “Sam Nook’s office!” with a smiley face carved into the wood next to it. The man in question pulls out a key and slides it into the lock. That doesn’t bode well.

“You’ve been locking him in here?” Phil asks, carefully neutral.

“I don’t want him panicking if he comes out of catatonia,” Sam explains, as the door unlocks and he settles a hand on the doorknob. It opens a moment later, and Phil’s stomach flips. 

He’d been in here with the cops, over a decade ago, being interrogated about his relationship with the children he’d met, the parents they’d found traumatized. It had looked exactly the same as it does now. A desk, papers neatly arranged atop it, a small creeper head keychain hanging from the bottom. A bookshelf beside it, filled with pictures of Sam, Warden, and all the people that have made marks on the shelter’s life. 

Phil’s eyes immediately land on a photo of his family. Wilbur, Technoblade, and Tommy. Wilbur had been on Phil’s shoulders. Techno had been smiling far less than his younger brother but had been cradling Tommy in his arms regardless, genuine happiness to his face as Phil’s wings squared over all three of them. A moment later, Tommy had started squirming around and shouting at Techno to let him go. But it had been a nice photo regardless.

The one most distinctive change to the room sits on the cot in the corner, and they breathe.

They're completely shaved. Blonde hair singed brown at the edges with burns, where someone has ripped it away in chunks. Bruises, almost completely black, push watery grey eyes backward into a skullish and inhumanely sunken face. Their skin is waxy, so light as to be almost white. Cheekbones jut out, a jaw completely still, skin shrink-wrapped to their bones. Mottled grey-red splotches dot all of their visible skin, looking as if it has begun to decay. 

They’re wearing a hospital gown and a pair of sweatpants, swallowing them so much that it seems the only weight to their form has gone to their height. Every single bone is highlighted in vicious detail, slashed through with angry, red scars. One of their legs ends in a jagged stump, tissue collecting, a reddened purple hue, as if it’s a new wound, potion-treated. Their other limbs end in hands and feet as normal, but they’re so thin that Phil is sure, if the person leaned back to the wall right now hard enough, it would likely break any bone that touched it.

They are missing all of their fingernails. 

They don’t look up when Phil and Sam enter the room. They don’t move at all, save for the quick, soft sound of their breathing. He doesn’t focus on any one part of their body. This is not his son.

“He came like this,” Sam says, speaking as if the subject isn’t directly in front of him. “I had to treat the leg with potions. It was new.”

The person’s lips are slightly parted, exposing teeth slightly sharper than the average human’s. It’s as if there isn’t enough skin around their mouth to close it, like their chapped, cracked lips have been pulled back by their weight loss. Their nose is crooked, a jagged thing across their face, skin pulled back till it looks nearly nightmarish, pressed against the bridge between their eyes and back into their nostrils.

“He hasn’t said anything,” Sam continues, for the second time in the night. He leans his cane up against the wall and shudders down into his desk chair, folding his hands under his arms. “Phil?”

“That’s not my son,” he replies in an instant. It’s not. His son is tall and gangly and tan, and starting to grow healthy muscles, his cheeks rippling upwards with a smile. His son is harsh words and a refusal of quiet, even after every trauma he’s experienced. His son is-

“It’s Tommy.” There’s the soft sound of a swallow, as Sam nods. “I don’t know how, or why, but it’s Tommy.”

“No, it isn’t,” Phil says, focusing on individual details, refusing to take in the whole picture of the fraud in front of him. He won’t scan that chillingly blank face, the dizzying emptiness in their eyes. If Phil couldn’t hear the soft whir or their breathing, he would immediately think they were at least a few days dead. 

“Phil.” 

“Stop,” he mutters, shutting his eyes against the rise of nausea rippling in his gut. It crawls up his throat and claws at his tongue. “Stop it.”

“Philza, you need-”

“Stop,” he commands, in a voice far sharper than usual. “Mate, I don’t know how gullible you think I am, but whatever this thing is, it is not my goddamn son!”

Phil’s wings span out. He hasn’t even realized how much this is affecting him till his feathers are up and shaking, extended as far as they can be in the cramped office. But he suddenly realizes his hands are shaking uncontrollably, his face hot, something wet to his eyes. His chest burns with the heat of his grief, starting to heave as his breathing increases in speed. It’s like all the air in the room is being sucked up by the corpse on the bed, their slightly-open mouth, silent.

“I can’t-” he says, voice merely a wheeze. He can’t fucking breathe. “It’s- it’s not my- my son. Sam, this is not my son.”

But Sam, still facing the opposite direction, blanches. Phil turns back around in a moment, trying desperately to quell the rattling in his chest.

The person on the bed hasn’t moved at all. They’re still staring thousands of realms away, eyes blank and empty and dead, a long look. They haven’t moved, but they have changed.

New appendages hang from their back. Wings, a tawny white, an almost iridescent purple to the bottom sides of their feathers. They shake with the effort to hold themselves up. At the bottom, the lightened color turns deeper, fading softly downward until they’re the color of blood, whipping up at the bottom, dancing in the ventilated air of the room.

Phil’s knees buckle. He can’t help it, when he lets out a low wheeze, a hand shaking in its movement, coming up to clutch shakily at his neck. He can’t breathe-

Because this is Tommy.

The wings. The blonde of his hair. The dull blue of his eyes, gone grey and misty. Phil chokes on his own air and doubles over, hair falling into his face as he sits on his knees, balancing between the darkness of unconsciousness and the awful reality he’s faced with. Someone is speaking, in the background, something about catatonia and echopraxia, the copying of movements. But he can barely hear it over the sound of a funeral march, over the feeling of wood grain and dirt in his hands, a coffin buried. 

Someone steps in front of him, and distantly, he can feel hands on his shoulders. Someone is still speaking, and they move his hand — clutched tightly around his neck, cutting off his air even move, lips gone blue — away. They murmur, and he wheezes, something embarrassingly like a sob rippling out of him when his air returns, still crushing, bruising, his chest. 

“Philza, you need to breathe,” Sam says in a firm, but sad voice. He sounds like he’s sharing in Phil’s misery. But he knows that the other man could never conceptualize this, never understand how it feels to bury your son and find his corpse years later. Maybe, he doesn’t want, to breathe, doesn’t want to be alive in this sort of world. Or maybe he’s simply too panicked. 

But Sam reaches out, settling his palm against Phil’s chest and pushing, hard, in the square of his sternum. Phil looks up through his hair, brow creased with awful grief. 

Tommy hasn’t moved. His wings have disappeared again, but his body is still motionless, lips barely parted. 

“I can’t, Sam,” Phil rhasps. “It- it can’t be him, it- it can’t- no, no no- I- I- I don’t even want it to- to be him.”

“I’m sorry, Phil,” replies the other man, voice thick, choked. “I’m so sorry.”

They sit there, on the rotting floors of the homeless shelter, backs framed by the flickering, endless white LEDs above them, both of them shaking like they’ve been put out in the snow. Phil is reminded of something his therapist has told him- 

He’s still young.

Phil is only thirty-two. He’s killed hundreds, and he’s saved three, and he’s become a father, and he’s lost a son. He has gone through thousands of worlds and done horrible, wonderful, things, breaking the boundaries between right and wrong and coming out a stronger, arguably better, person. 

But here’s the son he’d made peace with burying. Whose empty coffin he’d carried. Whose gravestone he’d helped to carve. Tommy is still and corpse-like, and Phil has no choice but to dig up every ounce of grief he’s ever felt and relive it.

His breathing manages to even, though. Sam pulls his hands away a moment later — Phil almost falling over, realizing he’s been leaning forward, hard. The other man nods, with an inquisitive look, he’s ok, and Phil nods back. 

“I-” he swallows bile, finally looking away from the corpse on the bed, avoiding him. “What do I- do here?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Phil supposes that’s probably valid. Sam is just as lost as he is — though minus most of the grief, minus that awful feeling of an unburied coffin between his ribs and his spine. So he nods, and Sam loops an arm around his shoulder, leveraging the two of them up at once with his cane. The room seems foggier and sharper all at once as if his entire vision has changed. As if his entire world has lurched forever away.

It spins for a moment, and Phil flinches when his eyes meet Tommy’s, still staring right through him.

“I need to make a call.”

Chapter Text

Ten minutes later, Techno is awake and retrieving Wilbur, the two only aware that something has gone terribly wrong, nothing further. How do you tell your sons that their brother is alive, two years after he’s been killed, beaten and cannibalized by a madman, till there were no bones nor body left to bury? How do you tell them that their mourning was useless, their insanity needlessly wasted? How do you tell them, over phone, that the brother they thought was dead is back, but so completely destroyed he might as well still be gone?

You don’t, as Phil discovers. You tell them, with a cracked and shaking voice, that you will be home in an hour and the two of them need to prepare themselves. When you’re asked what, exactly, they need to prepare for, you tell them to gather blankets, pillows, water, and a first aid kit. And please, if they could, prepare themselves each a cup of tea. Phil included. They’ll have a guest.

When Phil re-enters Sam’s office, the man himself is sitting next to Tommy on the cot, rubbing soft circle’s on the boy’s back. 

For a moment, it’s like Phil’s back before everything had gone wrong. He’s watching Techno hold Wilbur, sniffling a little, as they watched a sad movie, only a week into their life with their father. The scene shifts, and it’s Wilbur, singing a lullaby to Tommy, tucking a blanket over his shoulders as his eyes shudder closed. Then, with an ugly pang to his heart, Phil sees Techno, holding Wilbur tightly once more, the younger boy collapsed, screaming, just after returning home, no longer with another brother to return with.

Sam looks up and gives Phil a twitch of his brow, a microexpression, and a question. “Will you be alright to drive? I can leave Niki in charge and-“

“I’ll be fine,” Phil interrupts, relieved to find that his voice has gone firm, no longer shaking. It’s icy, cold, and hard as stone, but the two conscious inhabitants in the room can clearly hear that it still threatens to shatter. Sam doesn’t comment. “We- we’ll all be fine.”

He’s lying through his teeth. Sam doesn’t comment about this either.

But he does stand, hand trailing up against Tommy’s back then landing softly in the boy’s hair. It had been years ago when Sam had been named Tommy’s godfather. But it is clear his protectiveness has never faded, in the gentle curl of his claws, running fingers through Tommy’s cut and singed curls. 

For a moment Phil is frozen. He stands in the doorway of his eldest companion’s office, the only sound the breathing of all occupants. He has to strain to hear his son’s.

But then he steps over, shaking his head free of as much anxiety as he can and moving his long hair away from his eyes. Tommy takes precedence over his own guilt and nerve, now. The boy doesn’t respond when Sam moves his hand away, nor when Phil replaces it with his own.

There’s a long pause, wherein Phil spends his time desperately trying to not start crying again, at the feeling of Tommy’s head against his hands. The bunches of hair that have matted together ripple under his palm when he moves it, little bits of charcoal rubbing off between his fingers. The touch doesn’t feel like anything special, though. It doesn’t feel like any significant event. Something deep in his mind that his therapist would likely agree with murmurs that he’s probably in shock.

But there’s no time to analyze that, nor his shivering, his frozen skin. Phil leans over. “I’m going to pick you up, Tommy,” he whispers, as he sets one hand under his son’s knees, the other against his spine. The bones there do not shift, but they ripple out from under his skin, thin and brittle. Phil is careful not to press too hard or grip too tightly, when he curves a forearm under Tommy’s legs, the other beneath his back, making sure to keep one hand cradling his skull. Tommy is lifeless and silent, with wide, unseeing eyes, blinking. They don’t focus anywhere in particular, but they do slide lazily to Phil’s chest when his father settles him against it. 

The gaze feels like it burns straight through Phil’s ribs, and he has to stop from recoiling.

Sam helps gather Tommy’s arms, draping the emaciated appendages across his chest, just as thin. He doesn’t move, doesn’t readjust, doesn’t protest. He just stares up at the area around Phil’s collarbones, empty grey eyes impassive. Phil lets out a long breath of air and resigns himself to ignore Tommy’s eyes for the time being. He focuses his efforts on the slow journey back to his car. 

The hallway is just as silent and empty as it had been, before the earthshaking revelation that is Phil’s son had appeared. He thanks Sam internally, for his silence when tears start to freckle Phil’s cheeks, the feeling of Tommy’s chest rising against his own too much to bear, too overwhelming to conceive.

Niki doesn’t comment on it, either, when Sam pressed the automatic button next to the door, letting it hold itself open so Phil can maneuver Tommy’s gangly limbs through. She must have seen his son earlier, he thinks, because she doesn’t say a word, doesn’t do anything but sit in her spot next to the man earlier, nodding sadly. 

Phil sees far more of his sons in that man, now. His quieted state, his ragged appearance. Tommy is all too similar.

“Are you absolutely sure you’ll be alright?” Asks Sam, and his eyes are steely over his mask. “It would be absolutely no issue if you wanted someone to drive you home. I’m always willing. For Tommy.”

Phil shakes his head. He half appreciates the offer, half detests it. “Thank you, Sam. But I’ll be alright. Call once I’ve got him home, ok? We can go over some details.”

Sam nods. They exchange no more words, as the half-creeper opens Phil’s passenger door. Tommy is silent, malleable, when Phil slides him into the seat, making sure to be gentle when he slides the buckle into place, when he ties the sweatpants on his halved calf into a knot, letting it hit the seat. Tommy doesn’t smile at Sam in goodbye, or start rambling excitedly about his adventures when Phil shuts his own door, or complain about the feeling of the seatbelt on his ribs. 

So Phil sits there, for a moment, when Sam leaves. He sits, and slowly, something uncurls in his chest. He sets his hands on the steering wheel and starts to drive.

“I’m taking you home,” he says, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. He doesn’t need to look at Tommy to know he hasn’t moved. “You’re going to see Techno, and Wilbur, mate. They’ve missed you, yknow?” 

They hit a red light. Phil takes a moment to turn. Tommy’s glassy eyes reflect the bloody color. He looks away and waits for green.

“I have too. I’ve- hm. Jesus , Tommy. I’ve missed you more than anything. Don’t tell Wilbur that,” he jokes, though he’s sure his son couldn’t say anything if he wanted to, not in this frozen state. 

Phil continues filling the car with aimless noise, rolling on through city streets till they hit something more rural, more trees than skyscrapers, more dirt than concrete. 

“Sam said you- heh- flew all the way down here. I dunno where it was you actually flew from, but that’s- that’s fucking impressive.” Phil doesn’t know what he’s saying anymore. He can’t think of anything productive. Anything that would be worth it, not in this cataclysmic situation. But Tommy is alive. Phil is determined to at least try and find out how to bring him back completely, even if he fails. (Though he’s already determined that failure will not be an option.) So, for the lack of a better thing to do, he continues. And, maybe, it helps to ease the ache inside his chest momentarily. 

“I’m proud of you,” Phil says, in a cracked voice. He clears his throat. “I’m- I’m proud that you’re alive.”

Tommy does not respond. Phil drives onwards.

For a long time, he rambles about nothing. He remembers a time when Tommy had been the one to take this part of a conversation, to illustrate random adventures, to wave about wildly with his hands and gesticulate like his life depended on it. Tommy stays deathly silent in the passenger seat, but Phil doesn’t let the car go quiet. He talks about Wilbur’s budding career in music, the songs he’s written, the albums he’s poured his soul into. He talks about Techno’s recent rise in the competitive sparring leagues, the casual skill platform he has assumed. He talks little of himself — because what has he done, really, in the years past, other than keep his last remaining sons from falling apart? Phil will never regret how he has helped Techno and Wilbur since their youngest brother’s death. But he does, sometimes, think about what he could have been achieving, had Tommy never passed.

But Tommy is alive, right here, sitting in Phil’s car. The idea hits him again for what feels like the thousandth time that night, and he pauses in his one-sided discussion to lean forward, to sink his chest into the surface of the steering wheel while he realigns his breathing. 

His house is a simple thing, one that sits at the edge of the countryside, all stone foundations and wooden cabin walls. The people around are almost always either rich socialites with their getaway houses, or tundra farmers, harvesting the cold-faring animals and plants that live in this snowy area. Phil drives up the dirt path to his home and into the makeshift driveway, up behind the two other cars that are currently parked there. The lights in the front room and living room are on. 

The keys to the car weigh heavy as he slips them into his inventory, that space between realms where he stores things he doesn’t want anyone else finding. That will only ever be revealed with his consent or in his death. Then, when he begins to open his door, feeling how the night has cooled, he stretches inward again.

Phil hasn’t worn his cloak since he was a much younger, much different, man. It’s a long thing, stretching down to his ankles, black as ink and obsidian. The hood is lined with soft, real fur, an unnecessary touch to most clothes people would wear today. The clasp upon its neckline still hasn’t begun to rust. It fills his hands and pools against his legs when he pulls it out, the material as soft as starlight. It hums in recognition of his touch. Only then does he step out of the car, shutting the door gently behind him.

Tommy doesn’t move, when Phil wraps the cloak around him, bundling the boy close to his chest and pulling the fabric around his form. But, when he is lifted to his father’s chest, the man thinks he feels his son curl up closer, and his jaw trembles with the idea, no matter how small of a movement it might’ve been. 

Opening the front door is an affair. Phil slides the key in one-handedly and jiggles it in the lock till it’s effective, carefully rearranging Tommy to keep him from being jostled, whispering soft reassurances that he’s not sure his son can even hear. He pulls the door open, though, and braces himself for what he will find inside.

---

When Phil enters, he is lit in shadows. They curve past the brim of his hat, over the long tendrils of his hair, over the collar of his coat. His wings are curved into nothingness, withdrawn into that space between inventory and void that the man has always had access to. But even in the darkness, Technoblade can see that he’s carrying something, bundled up in the lightless fabric of an ancient cloak.

He has been sat on the couch in the living room for a full two hours. He’d first come to sit upon it when his father had left, slamming the door angrily behind him. He’d then remained there until he was called upon, given a message that was, frankly, incredibly ominous. Then he’d stood, retrieving Wilbur — who had been about as asleep as his brother, an insomniac till death — and starting on tea.

Wilbur sits next to him now, hands rummaging around in the house’s ancient first aid kit. The last time they’d used it had been when Wilbur had come home, about two years ago now, badly injured and driven into a frantic sort of anxiety. Techno dismisses the thought, though. Those memories only lead back to when he’d lost Tommy.

“I haven’t seen that in a long time,” Techno remarks quietly, nudging his brother. Wilbur looks up, and though his face is shadowed and tired, he smiles at the sight of the cloak. Phil steps further in, green shirt meeting the yellow lighting of the room, his face appearing in the doorway. It is bitten deeply by purples and blues, gaunt and…

Mournful. There’s something haunted on Phil’s face, something that has aged him far past his years, as slowly as they might’ve once progressed. Techno stands before he can analyze the look further. The last time his father had looked like this-

“What are you holding, dad?” Wilbur says suddenly, his hands gone very still. He does not stand, but Techno doesn’t need to be facing his brother to hear the fear in his voice. 

“I-” and Phil’s face screws up, now, into a grimace, a wince, something devastated, making his jaw twitch and his already red-rimmed eyes go wet again. 

“Your brother is alive.”

And then, there is oppressive silence.

But Phil repeats it. Techno isn’t sure who asks for clarification — Wilbur or he, or maybe it was just in his head, maybe Phil only repeats himself in disbelief, because it’s a joke, because he’s about to tell them he’s kidding — but his mouth barely moves, not to breathe, not to answer. 

“Tommy is-”

Wilbur stands, now, and Phil cuts off. 

The bundle in his arms doesn’t move.

Technoblade still remembers when he’d first found out about Tommy’s fate. How Wilbur had come into the house, bloody and raving and terrified, sobbing into Techno’s side as he tried to communicate what had happened, as Phil attempted to bandage his wounds past his thrashing movements. They’d only figured out what had actually been done when Warden called, in a voice that suggested something had gone terribly wrong, that he hated himself for it, and told Techno that his brother was dead, and there would be no burial.

He hadn’t reacted, then. His therapist, months later, told him it was shock that kept him from the same sort of mania that had plagued Wilbur at the revelation. Techno thinks he was just in denial. 

His brother could not have been dead. Not Tommy, youngest of them all, loudest, most boisterous, never backing down from a challenge. He’d come to Techno and Phil with some new trauma to his eyes, sure, after his exile from L’Manberg, but he’d left confident and angry at the world, angry at his family and his friends.

Warden had told them it was to be Tommy’s final visit. But something in the prison went wrong. It went into lockdown, and so Techno’s little brother died, a week after he was meant to deliver one final goodbye to his abuser. Warden had said, as Phil waited for Techno to tell him what the man was calling about, that there would be no body to bury.

Techno feels a bit like that, right now, how he’d felt when he’d first learned of Tommy’s horror-movie death. But there’s anger, too — who is Phil to play this sort of joke on them, to dig up old memories and old traumas? To ruin everything Wilbur has done to regain his sanity, to undermine every inch Techno has crawled to remove himself from his dissociation.

But then he sees.

No one speaks. Not even Phil, as he walks closer, every step silent, even with the bundle in his arms. The couch has been cleared, now that both Wilbur and Techno have stood, watching with muted horror as the cloak in Phil’s arms unwraps just enough to reveal a figure. 

Blond hair, charcoal-brown with burns. Blue eyes grey and unseeing and unfocused, pupils swimming lazily. Techno feels his body recoil. The corpse within his father’s cloak does not move, when it is set upon the couch, when the man above him pulls the cloak up and lies it across his skeletal form. His sunken ribs, the bruise-yellow surface of his elbows, the sweatpants that Techno realizes have been knotted just beneath an empty stump of a leg, 

“No,” Wilbur whispers, and Techno turns to find that his brother’s eyes have filled with tears. He shakes his head, one, shaking hand coming up to cup his jaw, the jagged burn scar beneath it from when he’d had his suicide mission to explode his own country, only barely stopped when Phil came and ended the war. “No, that’s not my brother.”

“It is,” Phil whispers, and his voice is choked and ragged, as if he’s just run a marathon. He sits on the lip of the couch where Tommy’s thin frame doesn’t lie, and presses a hand to the boy’s forehead, feeling the skin there. 

“No, no it’s- it’s not, Phil, Tommy is-“ Wilbur giggles hysterically. His medication has been working so well, but Techno can smell the electricity in the air, the start of a breakdown. He's quick to stumble backward, to lie a palm against his brother’s back. Wilbur doesn’t even seem to notice. “Tommy is-“

“They tested it,” Phil says, voice growing even more hoarse. Techno kind of hates him for it. “They tested his DNA, mate, it’s- it’s Tommy. It’s your brother.”

Techno’s brother lets out a moaning sob, ghostlike and grating. It makes him want to move closer, want to hug him, want to cry out with him. But he’s frozen, looking at Tommy’s empty expression, the nothingness behind his eyes. 

Phil’s hands are jackrabbiting around, shaking so badly they nearly hit something when he starts to move the cloak back and away from Tommy’s shoulders. The corpse doesn’t move, when his father leans over him, grabbing the other end of the fabric and pulling it off of him entirely. He doesn’t move, when Phil unwinds the knot beneath his knee, pulls out a roll of bandages from the coffee table in front of them, starts to unfurl it. He doesn’t move when the pant leg is rolled up above his calf, revealing red, angrily stretched skin. 

There’s a soft sort of grimace to his face, though, when Phil lifts the leg, prods at the skin. The man looks up at the low wheeze Techno thinks he gives out, immediately pausing when he notices Tommy’s expression.

“Hey, kiddo,” murmurs Phil, expression trembling between indecision and relief. “I’m going to bandage this, ok?”

And- back to complete silence. Tommy moves his head away from any of their faces, staring blankly into the couch with that same, grimace of an expression. His eyes do not focus anymore. They simply stare, blank, empty pools of blue and black, into the stained and worn green surface of the couch. 

“How-“ Techno clears his throat. He finally manages to unstick his legs, stumbling a step closer to Wilbur, sliding his arm over his brother’s shoulder. Wilbur is shaking violently, still rubbing frantically at his jaw, like he might find the truth behind it if it bleeds enough, lies draining with crimson. “How did this happen, Phil? How is he-“ 

He cuts off. His words are already full of implications.

Phil doesn’t look up, absorbed in the gentle task of wrapping bandages around skin, covering the violent red crisscrossing of scars. “Sam said he flew here. We’re-“

“Hold on- Sam?”

“Sam,” Phil confirms, nodding. “He flew to the shelter. He’s been there for about a week now, Sam said he’d’ve called sooner, but he needed a conclusive match to the DNA test. He had Warden do it.”

Techno can’t quite stifle the scoff that name elicits within him. Warden- Dream’s caseworker, Techno’s Godfather’s brother, the man who managed to allow Tommy’s death. But he’s more occupied with holding Wilbur close, listening to the rapid hiss of his breathing, sliding a hand over his brother’s back, and running calloused fingers over his shoulder blades. 

“I- I didn’t believe it either when I saw him. But my fucking wings came out on reflex, and…” Phil shrugs. “Whatever Tommy is right now, it’s some sort of catatonic state. A symptom of that is-“

“Echopraxia. Did he show his wings?” 

Before Phil can answer with anything more than a nod, Wilbur lets out a wet chuckle. “Wings. Wings and machinery, like that proves jack shit.”

“Wilbur-“

“No, no no no.” He moves away From Techno’s gentle hold, stepping closer to Tommy, to the couch. 

But really, there’s no way this isn’t Tommy, in Techno’s eye. Somewhere deep inside he wishes he could lie to himself and say his brother is still dead, not here to ruin everything. He shoves it down and reaches for his hope instead. But Wilbur is clearly in more denial than he, staring down at Tommy with wide, manic eyes. “That thing isn’t my brother.”

No one moves, save for Wilbur, twitching his fingers at his sides. He stares down at Tommy with hunched shoulders, eyes heavy and slit. He leans over, peering closer and closer to Tommy’s face, hands coming up to clutch at his own, as if it’ll prove to him that Tommy is still gone.

Wilbur had been hit the hardest out of all of them, at first. He’d still been recovering from the final decimation of L’Manberg, his country completely destroyed. Phil and Techno had implored him to come home — with Tommy or not — but the boy hadn’t heeded their warnings, preferring instead to try and thrive away from home. 

The prison Dream had been locked in had very few prisoners, and he was the one with the highest threat level. So the land was meant to be safe. Wilbur and Tommy would be fine on their own, rebuilding and caring for their friends. Then, Tommy had gone into the prison. He’d sought closure. 

He’d ended up dead.

Wilbur had walked all the way back home from the SMP on several speed potions and rations for less than a day. He’d appeared in Techno and Phil’s yard in hysterics, slamming his body repeatedly against their front door, attracting the attention of anyone who might be around to see. He’d been living with Tommy for years, starting an entire realm together, fighting wars. Phil and Techno had let them dance their waltz, spin their webs, never intervening save for when Wilbur almost died and when Dream blew up L’Manberg after Tommy’s exile, finally landing himself in prison. 

Neither Phil nor Techno had been with their family through those wars, through those events. It’s bitten them every day since.

But Wilbur isn’t hysterical, now. There’s a mania to his eyes, yes, but it’s shrouded, split by awful grief that everyone else in the room partakes in. Wilbur slides down onto the floor, and moves even closer, till he trembles a hand over Tommy’s shoulder, cautions a frown.

Tommy doesn’t move, when Wilbur’s hand lands on his brother’s arm. He doesn’t move when the man recoils a moment later, feeling the thinness of his limbs. He doesn’t move when Wilbur leans back, then forward, then back again, indecision in his stilted movements.

Phil starts again, bandaging the stump of his youngest son’s leg. Techno breathes out a heavy sigh, something caught in his lungs. Wilbur is silent, and rocks back and forth on his heels, staring at Tommy like he might disappear if someone stops looking. 

Techno almost wishes that this wasn’t real. That he could be sure in Tommy’s death, knowing that his brother was gone, buried, at peace, regardless of whether he went peacefully or not. 

But it is real, and Techno is faced with the awful realization that he has spent the past two years mourning for a brother who was never gone. He accepted a death that never happened, burying Tommy before he ever should’ve been buried. He could’ve spent his time looking for his brother. Killing whoever had done this to him, slow and painful and deserved. But instead, Techno has somehow allowed Tommy to become what he has today, even if the things in his head whisper that it could not really be his fault.

“We need to take him to a hospital,” Techno whispers, voice bone dry. His hands do not shake, and his body is still, but it feels as if he’s about to keel over, ripping his feet from their foundation. He clears his throat for the lack of anything better to do.

“I don’t know that he can handle that,” Phil says, in a voice more worn than grieving now. He tucks the end of the bandage into the beginning, just above Tommy’s knee, the warped scars against his skin only barely showing. “Sam had him checked out by Ponk. I might call him again.”

Techno nods. Sam, if anyone, can be vaguely trusted. He’s a neutral stature in all the wars to ensue in the past years, but he’s always had a soft place in his heart for Techno and his family, and that is enough for him to extend a tentative trust. Ponk, as Sam’s husband, is deserving of respect, if nothing else. 

And he has to agree with his father’s sentiment, — there isn’t much else to do but agree, he’s too busy compartmentalizing all of his shock, all of his grief, to combat anything presented to him right now — Tommy looks bad. He looks like if someone were to get too close to his face he’d fall over and disintegrate with one breathe, ashen skin the color of an already dying fire. 

Phil’s phone rings in his pocket. It lights up the dim yellow of the room, sending a firm beam of blue-white scattering across the carpet. He rummages around in the fabric one-handedly, retrieving it, and then looks up at Techno with a disparaging expression.

“I’m sorry. Can you just-“

“Of course,” Techno says, reaching out and taking the vibrating phone. It’s an unnamed contact, but that’s fine. Phil memorizes all of his phone numbers. This is one of the rare ones that Techno remembers just as well.

“Hello, Sam,” he says, turning away from his family and going to stand a few feet away, in the doorway. He still keeps an ear out for anything he might need to see, but he leans into the speaker, breathing in the crackling silence. 

He’s glad to be out of that room, for some selfish, cruel reason. To leave the others to deal with the disgusting, dead thing that lies between them. He feels like the air has cleared, smelling more of pine and forest-wood than graveyard dirt and ash.

“Techno? Is your dad there?”

“Phil’s busy with-“ Techno cuts off. He finds the name lodged in his throat. It’s too much.

But Sam seems to understand, letting out a soft, hiss of a sigh. “Of course. Are you and Wilbur holding up alright?”

“We’re something,” he says, for lack of a better explanation. He’s not sure how to describe how he feels, how either he or Wilbur had reacted. A tense silence ensues. 

“Right,” Sam says, breaking the quiet awkwardly. “I was going to tell your dad what I know about Tommy right now. Would you rather pass it off to him?”

For a moment, Techno’s tempted. He doesn’t even know whether he’d remember all the details if they were given to him, lodged somewhere between dissociation and overstimulation. But at the same time, curiosity outweighs every inch of his indecision, and he leans up against the doorway, shrugging his shoulder to the wood. He’ll be standing here for a while, if Sam’s exhausted voice is any indication. Might as well get comfortable.

“Lay it on me.”

A pause, and the rustling of paper. “I’m just going to read from my list. If I sound like I don’t care, just assume it’s because I’m just… keeping it together.”

And so Sam begins. 

Chapter Text

Wilbur categorizes Tommy’s (Tommy’s?) injuries in comparison to his own. Technoblade reports back what Sam has told him after a surprisingly short phone call. But his appearance betrays the fact that, as short as the call was, it was heavy. Techno shakes. Wilbur can see it in the way he drags hand after hand through his hair, in the way his voice warbles. It is not a pleasant discussion. 

Obviously, Wilbur can start with the biggest things. He has never lost a limb. Tommy’s(?) leg is cut down from just below his knee and has been healed only recently, amputated cleanly in a way that suggests it was meant to ground someone, not kill them. It hadn’t been an accident, but the purple-green of infection had been.

Alongside that, there is Tommy’s(?) clear malnutrition. Wilbur can only half relate to that. After leaving the ruins of L’Manberg, the first thing his family had forced him to do was eat. Later on, they’d told him he’d been dangerously close to genuine starvation. The other injuries that Tommy(?) has accumulated are mostly old or finished healing, even if their scars haven’t quite formed. Jagged lacerations at the base of his wings, as if something had managed to slice through them. Huge burns, stretching all across his arms, chest, and legs. Some of them crawl up his neck and towards his head, the burnt hair there. Swaths of wounds clearly meant to disable and warn, cut through most visible inches of his body. There’s some awful rattle to the way he breathes, too loud to be good, and Techno informs them all that Sam and Ponk have been treating Tommy (Tommy?) for some sort of lung infection. From drowning, Wilbur thinks, but there is no need to say what is implied.

Altogether, it’s a mixed bag. And Wilbur isn’t entirely sure what to believe.

Tommy(?) moves. He breathes. He grimaces. He twitches. Wilbur can bring a hand out and lie it gently upon him — or cruelly, though he sees no need to yet — and feel the shifting of his bones, the movement of fabric on skin. But Tommy’s(?) energy has shifted entirely into a new form of being, and Wilbur isn’t sure that he can ever trust that.

Tommy, when his family was young, had always been the loudest of his two siblings. When he was a baby, he’d been abnormally quiet, to the point where the doctors thought there might’ve been something wrong. But then he’d gotten older, and he’d have died for the attention of his parents. Tommy would live breath and die for his voice, using it to shout and scream and fight for anything he wanted. His parent’s abuse had made Wilbur quiet. Techno, violent. It had made Tommy unable to do anything but hurt, himself and others, either with the force of his fists or the cut of his voice. 

Every inch of the abuse Tommy had suffered from the world had made him more and more sure that vulnerability was not an option, and that his voice was a weapon just as terrible as Phil’s Benihime, part of the initial reason they’d looked for him. In the end, though, Tommy had begun to show slivers of uncertainty.

This Tommy(?) is almost as if someone has taken that worry and cracked it open at the edges, pouring waves of bloody catastrophe between two halves. 

Phil looks up when Techno falls silent. His face has hardened into something reflexively angry, the grief Wilbur had witnessed shoved back. He often wishes he could do the same — categorize his emotions, compartmentalize, understand just what it is he’s feeling. Somewhere along the line, he thinks, he’s definitely earned his inability to hold onto his own mind.

“Is that all?” Asks their father, like he’d expected the list to be longer. Techno leans heavily against the doorway. His eyes are rimmed bloody, his tusks worrying at the hardened line of his lips. The horror he displays is minute but no less there. 

“Sam also wanted us to know he’s got Warden looking into possible prison breaches.”

Wilbur flinches. No. There can’t be. Dream is trapped, in obsidian and blackstone and quartz and machinery. He’s trapped in a building made for him and him alone and no one could ever get him out. 

But he looks at Tommy. (Tommy? Could it-) Sitting on their couch, chest breathing steadily, eyes blinking at whatever they stare into, endlessly, realms away. And Wilbur thinks that he might not be able to dismiss the idea that Dream could be more powerful than he’d initially proven himself.

“Alright.” Phil breathes out, slowly, his hands ghosting over his own knees and then landing there. He can’t be comfortable, crouched on the floor, but Wilbur can’t seem to unstick his throat and call him out on it. Something creeps over his chest and steals away his air, cobwebbed memories and that choking feeling of awful, all-consuming terror. But his father just sits there, eyes scanning the couch. It seems no one really wants to look at Tommy.

Wilbur takes up the mantle. Techno and Phil can avoid the corpse-like figure for as long as they want. But his eyes slide across the ground and over his own hands, trailing soft lines into the couch as they reach his brother’s back. 

Tommy hasn’t moved. His wings stay hidden. One arm is tucked up against the couch. The other is draped lightly over the first, hand looped limply around his wrist. Scars, small and large, deep and thin, gouge through much of the skin. It twists up and down his sides, and Wilbur is instantly reminded of his own. Burns, threading across his chest, just below his jaw, looping up and around his legs. His father had taken the brunt of the explosion in L’Manberg with his wings — and they’d barely managed to recover. But Wilbur had not been able to escape his own destruction.

Wilbur still wishes Phil had killed him in L’Manberg. He’ll say as much without hesitation, no matter who it hurts. He deserves it. 

(And oh Ender- what he would do to die, right now, to avoid the awful idea that his brother is alive, that Wilbur has mourned and sobbed and screamed for naught, that the apologies he’s never been able to give could have been spoken, that the feeling of his brother’s bones beneath his hands could’ve been a gentle touch, something of reality and not of nightmares. He wishes Techno would frown and pull out a blade, saying: “No, this isn’t right,” and then plunge it right in the middle of Wilbur’s head.)

But no one makes a move to raise their hand. Wilbur commits to his duties and watches his brother (oh Tommy-) in silence. 

“I don’t think there’s much for us to do,” he says, because someone has to break the silence. He knows his voice is monotone, uncaring. Inside, it feels like he’s being ripped apart, hands pulling the seams of skin back from organs and teeth pulling eyes from sockets. Outside, he watches, and he does what he must. “We should sleep.”

“I’m not going to,” Phil says in a matter-of-fact voice. There’s a pause, then he stands, his knees making awful cracks as he does. Wilbur doesn’t watch, but he feels the soft brush of his father’s leg up against his back as he slides past, picking up a cup of tea from the coffee table. “Wasn’t planning on doing it earlier, and I certainly won’t now. You’re both… welcome to- do anything. I don’t- I don’t know what we should do, right now.”

“Watch him, I think.” Wilbur blinks. It stings his eyes. He realizes, suddenly, that they’re watering, and he has yet to shut them until now. He takes a break and wipes at the lenses of his glasses, sniffling. 

“We can… plan more in the morning,” Techno says, nodding to himself, his voice definite. He unfolds his arms and hoists himself up off the wall, walking closer in a few quick strides. It looks like he’s spent his time speaking to them steeling up for coming close again. “Do we tell anyone about this?”

“I think it’d be cruel not to, really.” 

Wilbur almost argues. Telling other people about his brother, no matter how much he believes this is Tommy, makes it concrete. It makes the idea of his brother being back too real. But it would be cruel to not tell people who knew Tommy in life, and he’s not supposed to be manipulative like that. 

Phil settles at the edge of the couch, where Tommy’s leg ends. When Wilbur looks over, he looks exhausted, but he hands a mug of tea down regardless. Wilbur accepts it without a noise, stirring a finger lazily in the top of the burning liquid. It stings pleasantly when his first sip goes down. Techno joins them in the armchair near Tommy’s head, lowering himself down into the thing like it contains a bomb. 

Tommy does not move. He does not blink. He does not speak.

Wilbur’s hands tremble around the mug, and he drifts.

Morning comes streaking through the only open curtains in the house. It bleeds red and yellow and orange across the floorboards, teasing Wilbur’s legs and toeing at the line between kitchen and living room. It burns a low, warm pleasure through his knees, the flickering heat like a summer’s day in childhood. It feels good against his aching joints.

When Wilbur opens his eyes and takes in his surroundings, he finds that he is no longer alone on the floor. His mug of tea is gone, no longer scalding his fingers. Instead, he’s sleeping atop a small pile of blankets, pillows tucked under his knees, his feet, his head. 

That’s not quite right. Something shifts beneath his skull and he turns, ever so slightly, half-lidded eyes finding Phil’s thighs against the side of his face, pillowing his jaw. His father is leaned up against the back of the couch, head tipped up against the pair of legs that occupy it. His hands don’t move, lightly settled across Wilbur’s hair, over Techno’s back. His older brother breathes heavily with sleep, chest draped over Phil’s legs, one arm wound down and over Wilbur’s — splayed out ahead of him — the other wrapped around their dad’s calves. Wilbur can’t help but shiver at the touch.

Something awful goes taught within him at the sight of the person on the couch. 

They’re still there, from the night before. Their eyes are open and unseeing. They stare blankly down at the people on the floor, blue penetrating the floorboards rather than their family. The bags under their eyes, sunken and blown out and wet, have not deepened, but Wilbur knows in his soul that Tommy has not slept.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Wilbur whispers, in a voice that he can barely hear. The words brush up against Phil’s legs, over Techno’s spine, shrugging up the back of the couch until Tommy finally seems to register something. He does not move, but his pupils drag lazily across the landscape, landing on Wilbur.

The gaze is piercing. It fucking hurts.

So Wilbur slowly pulls himself away from his family, gently removing his arm from Techno’s loose fist, picking up Phil’s hand and setting it on his elder brother’s head. It doesn’t take much — the two have always been deeper sleepers than Wilbur. They get up the instant they sense danger, but otherwise, they’re quiet. Wilbur has always been the one to toss and turn, just like Tommy, never sleeping properly until the conditions were perfect, waking up at a too-loud movement of the floorboards. 

Nothing makes a sound when he stands. His spine cracks under its own weight, and he stretches backward, relishing in the feeling. Tommy’s eyes do not leave the spot his own had occupied a moment before, and Wilbur takes his time, awakening his body as best he can. 

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he repeats, though, turning back to Tommy. The boy’s eyes don’t move this time, so still that Wilbur might guess the earlier movement had been a trick of the light. But they still occupy where Wilbur had just been, faithfully. Irritatingly. “You’re supposed to be fucking dead.”

Talking to a ghost is hard, but feasible. Jschlatt’s spectral form apparently had taken up residence in Tubbo’s home not long after he’d died. While his flesh melted off with every step outside, and his son despised him, he was there, and he would speak to anyone who would listen. Tommy is different. He’s silent, a pale imitation of a once lively and flighty boy. There’s nothing there to speak to or to respond to or to see. It’s as if Wilbur is simply looking into the couch, and finding a memory display atop it. 

“Say something,” he tries, regardless, attempting to ignore the pathetic shaking of his tone. His cadence makes it seem more like he’s begging than asking. He steels himself and tries again. It doesn’t work, his voice coming out like a sob. “Say anything.”

Wilbur doesn’t try again, realizing that the next time he opens his mouth, it won’t be words to fall. He’s afraid if he blinks too much tears won’t be able to stop once they’ve started. So, he stares, silent, shaking getting worse by the second when Tommy’s violently empty eyes refuse to move. 

“Wil?”

He doesn’t look down. Techno’s rough, morning-scratched voice is immediately familiar, as is the sound of his rousing. The elder boy shifts gently from his father, just as careful as Wilbur not to wake Phil. When he stands, his hooves make no noise against the ground. 

“This isn’t real,” He mutters. This time it’s punctuated by a sob, something wet and awful and air-stealing, making his throat contract until nothing more than some animalistic whimper can come up.

Wilbur has betrayed, hurt, manipulated, and killed, many people. He has done so to every member in his family as well, though they’ve never fallen to his hands. He’d raised words and hands against Tommy in his insanity in Pogtopia. He’d screamed and ranted and shouted and sobbed, using his brother as a support or as a verbal punching back interchangeably. 

He’d destroyed himself and his mind until his moral compass exploded, glass raining down when right became wrong and love became betrayal. Tommy died at Dream’s hands before Wilbur could hug him, could apologize, could ever hope to say goodbye. Tommy died, at sixteen years old, while Wilbur drafted up a speech that would never be given.

Another cry leeches out of his throat before it can choke him. His chest heaves, and all at once, the dam breaks.

Wilbur stands as best he can and sobs, letting his face screw up into something even more hideous than before, lips turned every which way and eyes painfully wide. Tears and snot start to dribble down his face before he can wipe them back, hands limp at his sides. He can feel the heat of his sobs on his face, the way everything is too hot, too close to bear. Ender , he’s fucking disgusting, everything inside of him pointed and venomous, every inch of his body a warped thing that has hurt and hurt and hurt. And, now that it has a chance to make amends, the only person that it has ever needed to apologize to, like it needs air, like it needs love and blood and warmth and sustenance, it can’t. 

Because Tommy refuses to move. His eyes, lazily shifting, center on nothing at all. His limbs do not make any effort to lift. Wilbur wishes the boy would hit him, even if it would hurt. Anything would be better than this. 

“Hey,” whispers Technoblade off to the side, and hands slide over Wilbur’s shoulders, pull his arms away from his face — when had he begun to scratch at his scar? — and the gouges they attempt to dig there. “You’ve got to stop that.”

Wilbur can’t, though, he doesn’t deserve to stop, and Tommy just stares, impassive and uncaring and dead. Dead dead dead-

Someone is whispering to Techno, on the floor. They stand, a heavy shadow cast where they interior the morning sunlight, little bits of dust kicked up where they stand. Wilbur just chokes, biting bloody holes through his lips and then opening them to let out shivering, hiccuping breaths every few seconds when his chest can no longer handle the pressure. His vision has begun to shrink, spots of white ash drifting down from the ceiling and into his eyes, punctuating every blink with less and less space to see. 

And he’s falling. His limbs clatter against the floor, wood meeting skin with a sickening crack, the noise of his bones snapping to attention. His eyes are rolling, and his vision has decreased by halves, and-

Maybe he’ll see Tommy if he finally manages to die here. If his panic consumes him, leaving his body empty and broken, chest unmoving. Perhaps, his brother will welcome him. Wilbur might even be able to apologize, if death brings peace, and peace brings family. They’ll wait for Technoblade and Phil to join them, watching from above. It will be kind to them. 

But Wilbur knows, deep inside, he deserves nothing. What he will receive after death will be as awful as his own actions.

Something hits his back with a force both gentle and insistent. It feels full, and warm, and something makes noise within it, beating and fast. Wilbur leans over and coughs on his grief and his vision is so white he can’t see Tommy’s eyes and it’s a small mercy-

“Breathe,” says the thing at his back, as the black spots encompassing his vision make feathers. Wings swamp his body, pulling him closer to the heartbeat behind him. Hands wrap themselves around his own, and he groans-

Another thing lands just above his heart, his hand shooting up to grab at it. Techno’s palm curls around Wilbur’s, as the mantra of “breathe,” from their father becomes clear, murmured at Wilbur’s neck as he keens. 

He doesn’t deserve this. He deserves a blade through the chest. He deserves to lose his limbs, his mind, he deserves to be tortured and burned and broken and destroyed. Wilbur deserves to be ruined so terribly he goes catatonic and quiet and he dies, before his breathing can ever shudder to a stop. 

“This isn’t your fault,” someone whispers from behind him, though, and Wilbur can almost imagine it’s Tommy. But Phil’s wings circle closer, and the pressure of a hand against his own, against his chest, proves that his brother still hasn’t moved. The words feel empty and hollow, and Wilbur chokes. 

“He’s supposed to be dead,” he says, coming out as more of a cracked whine, a desperate cough than anything. But his vision has begun to let up, only lightly spinning, his chest finally able to heave in the air it desperately needs. (But doesn’t want.) “He- he can’t be alive.” Wilbur gasps, shaking his head. Techno’s hand steadies him, held to his chest, held in his own clutched fist, a rock in the midst of all his panic. “Dream- Dream killed him, he’s not-“

“We’ve got some facts beyond that.” Phil says this in a detached sort of voice as if Wilbur is floating a few inches above him. “He’s… somehow not dead. And we don’t know how. But there’s no use in workin’ yourself up into a panic attack, either, Wil. You’re just… hurting yourself.”

He wants to tell them that that’s what he needs. He needs the pressure of a snapped bone or a jagged cut or his windpipe compressed. Wilbur doesn’t think there’s anything he deserves more.

But his family seems to disagree. They’ve always been too kind to him, too good to him, and he’s done nothing but manipulate and hurt them. His brother’s death was closure. His brother’s return is a nightmare. 

“I know,” murmurs the eldest of his siblings, and Wilbur realizes that he must be rambling aloud. “I know, but you need to breathe.”

It takes much longer than a moment for him to finally be able to listen to them. To slow the thud of his heart, crashing against his ribs, shoving his lungs away. To open his mouth and let something more than desperate pants fall out. Technoblade and Phil let out meaningless — not to him, to Wilbur they mean everything, as undeserved as they are — encouragements, and they do not move, staying close to him as his body catches up to his mind. It’s a slow, painful, process. But Wilbur weathers through it. Because maybe, even if his brother’s return is some awful punishment from the world, he might be able to utilize it.

Maybe he could finally apologize. Wilbur has wanted to hug Tommy for years, and he’s only now got the means to do so. 

If Tommy would move.

But, when Wilbur’s vision clears completely, Techno blocks his view of his younger brother, broad back leaning over to cover where his face lies against the couch. He doesn’t whisper his thank you, but he means it.

Wilbur steadily avoids Tommy for the rest of the morning. He stands in the kitchen with Phil for most of it, helping to organize dirty dishes from the night before. His dad works on heating up some breakfast casserole they’d made a few nights ago, but it tastes a bit like ash against his tongue. Techno helps pull together a list of things they need. 

It feels almost normal. The tension in the air is so taught one wrong move could snap it in half, though, so Wilbur doesn’t push it. 

Phil abandons the kitchen with a plate of casserole in his hands. He pauses, though, in the doorway, when Techno says his name.

“He can’t eat that.”

For a moment, Phil doesn’t seem to understand. Then he nods, face going pale, his eyes widening a fraction. Techno just walks past his father — stuck in the doorway between kitchen and living room, holding a plate of half-cooled food, shoulders hunched — and opens up his spices cupboard, pulling out a large bowl full of potatoes and a peeler from a drawer below. 

“This is what he ate in exile,” Techno explains, as he starts washing the spuds, peeling the skin as they get soft enough. “He- he wasn’t this skinny, but I think it’ll work. They’re high in potassium, and often used when things like IV nutrients aren’t available to stop refeeding syndrome.”

“Exile,” Phil murmurs. It seems to break him from his spot, unfreezing his legs and arms so he can go and put the plate back down on the table. Wilbur watches from his seated position as the two start to peel the potatoes together, rhythmic scraping filling the room. “That’s been… it was five years ago, now, wasn’t it?”

Techno nods. “Two in exile, one with us.”

The mention brings back odd memories. Wilbur had been in a half-living state back then, so dissociated and traumatized he could barely recognize his surroundings, his family. Dream had managed to manipulate him away from Tommy, and even though the younger boy eventually found his way back to his family, it was still something Wilbur would always regret. He wishes that his mental health hadn’t taken such a harsh dive after L’Manberg. He wishes his dad would’ve just ended him, right then and there.

But those are wants. Could-have-beens. There is no use dwelling on them. Wilbur shrugs himself up and off his chair with unsteady legs, abandoning his half-eaten pile of lukewarm casserole and picking up a knife.

They peel potatoes in silence. 

“I need to call Ponk,” Phil says suddenly, interrupting the silence. “I might as well call anyone else, too. Who can be told over call?”

“Did Sam tell Puffy?” Asks Techno, tilting his head, frowning. Wilbur remembers her, if only barely. Tommy’s first therapist. They’d had to find another. Not because she was bad at her job — but because Tommy became something of a son to her. As he did with everyone, really. She’d been dubbed something of an honorary Godparent for the boy, alongside Sam. His death had hit her just as hard as the death of a child could hit anyone, and Wilbur hasn’t seen her in many years.

“Ah- that’s a good idea, I’ll ask him.” 

Wilbur coughs. “We’ve got to tell- uhm- Tubbo. And Ranboo. I think they’ve still got their li- little community going, h- haven’t they?”

“Oh, right, Mr. Government,” grumbles Techno, slicing a particularly vicious cut through the potato in his hands. “Hold on- this is enough.”

They work on setting up the potatoes to boil, next. Hot water splashes up against the sides of the pot as it begins to bubble, Techno endlessly fiddling with nobs and dials until it’s just right. He’s always been the second-best cook of the family, right behind Phil. Potions, herbs, potatoes.

“I still think he should know,” argues Wilbur. “He- he was there for Tommy. When we weren’t.”

He swallows. Silence crawls back into the room, creeping up his spine. It sings- guilt, guilt, guilt.

“I suppose some shitty commune is better than totalitarianism,” Techno muses. Wilbur exhales slowly, starting to drop potatoes into the water. “And we’re stacked as anything: if they come running up swords blazing, we know what to do.”

The unspoken we know who to protect hangs in the air. No one comments.

Chapter Text

Soft pulses of pain radiate out from the bottom of its chest. It feels like the gentle waves of a sea, just verging on angry, moonlight swaying its tide. Something foreign controls the feeling, just sharp enough to make it frown.

It is lying down against something. It is likely not allowed to be doing this, but it does so anyway, because no one is stopping it, and it does not think it could move if it tried. Its fingers shift with its breathing, and it feels fabric beneath them. This is a foreign sensation, but it’s not uncomfortable, so it doesn’t move.

The boy who had looked like its brother is gone. He left after sitting in front of it and sobbing, speaking the truth.

It should be dead.

It knows this more than anything. It had been meant to die years ago, and it was meant to have died a week before. It was meant to be killed or beaten or it was meant to fall apart. It no longer remembers which it desired — but it knows, even though He had never allowed it to speak of it, that it wishes for nothing else but to be dead.

It knows it had once been a fighter. It had once been violent and cruel and unkind and annoying, hurting everyone, its family, its friends, Him. It had tortured every land it’d found, spreading awful wings and shading it all with darkness. But now, so far past those memories, that fight has finally left it, after years of having it trained from it. It has experienced the pain it has inflicted upon everyone else, and it has fixed it. 

The man who had looked like its father has returned, kneeling down in front of it. He’s dressed in a mossy-green sweater, a shade that makes it wish it deserved to recoil. But the man does not do what He would, once. He smiles, thin lips stretched into a smile. It waits for the press of a fist, or the snap of bone. 

But the man just leans forward. He’s holding a bowl against his knees, crouched upon his haunches, ankles folded and back hunched. He lifts a spoon from within it.

“Can you feed yourself?” says the man. His voice is unreal, shifting from several miles away, each syllable foggy, distended. It’s warped as if from behind fire and flame, not right in the slightest. It can’t bring itself to respond. But the man doesn’t look surprised by this, and he sighs, and he nods, stretching his arm out and running a gentle thumb over its cheek. It is an undeserved touch, and it would roll out of its path if it had the strength to. “That’s alright, Toms.”

The thumb trails soft circles against its jaw. It dips into the rotting surface of its dermis, the once-freckled flesh there, the thin layer of peach fuzz that grows all across its body, too emaciated to conserve its heat in any other way. Its eyes unfocus as something pushes up against its lips. Someone speaks, and it barely understands anything other than the order they give.

It opens its mouth. A curved, metallic thing enters, warmed with the material sat atop it. The food is tasteless, and it sits in its mouth, up until the man who cannot be its father asks it to swallow. It does. It does not deserve to argue. 

It’s not sure how long they go on like that. But it eventually begins to recognize the rhythm — it’s being fed, not dosed or poisoned. This man is giving it spoonfuls of food, not something toxic, sharp, disgusting. It thinks it deserves something cruel more than it does this kindness, but it accepts it at the man’s request. 

Its stomach starts to hurt right around the fifth spoonful. The man seems to notice its badly-concealed grimace because the spoon does not return. It curls inward slightly, knees shifting in their ascent. 

But then it remembers it’s meant to be quiet and still. Food is a privilege, no matter how little it wants it. It freezes, willing itself to relax, willing its face to be unafraid.

It fails. The man notices, far too damned perceptive, his hand still cooling its aching skin, the bruised feeling of its face. The touch moves, and it closes its eyes, exhausted of this routine, waiting to feel the pressure of a blow-

The hand returns. This time, fingers land just beneath its jaw, the thumb returning to the divot of its hollow cheeks. They caress the underside of its chin then move back, massaging at the area just beside its ear. The touch is familiar, something it remembers out of ancient memories. It knows He must have found out, at some point, that this makes it vulnerable. But it can’t help but sink into the touch, accepting the lull in pain. 

It remembers, before it’d been trained, before it was good, when it was still something evil and hated, a man it’d once called father would do the same. Nimble fingers, dancing across the crest of its forehead, nipping at its nose, and his smile opening wide. They’d land on the side of its face and they’d rest there, holding it close, a one-handed touch. It wonders what it did to convince the man it deserved it.

It’s always been manipulative. Torturing its brothers, betraying its father, ripping apart its friends with both words and weapons. It had convinced thousands of people of His guilt and then realized that the blood it’d pinned on His hands had been all over its own.

It prays to no one in particular that whoever this person is, they leave it alone soon. It wishes for nothing but death and this gentle touch at once, but it knows it cannot help manipulating those around it. It does not want to hurt anyone else. It does not want to be hurt.

The first boy, the one with pink hair and sharp teeth and a hardened look to his eyes, the one who might’ve been betrayed or broken or hurt, appears. He takes the bowl from the man’s lap, studying the couch. Studying it, with red eyes, some awful grief dragging his eyelids shut. It wonders if the grief is because the boy wishes it were still dead. It would not blame him. 

“How much was that?” Asks the boy, his painful gaze finally turning away, looking back down at the man. 

The man lets out a grunt as he sinks into the ground, ungraceful, with the sound of creaking bones. He lands in a normal sitting position and sighs, but his hand does not move from its cheek and ministrations, painfully kind, and it watches. “Only about five bites. I’ll call Ponk in a few minutes, then, see if we can get some sort of appointment set up.”

The name is vaguely familiar. It remembers a red-orange mask, dark brown skin, smiles expressed through eyes and not lips. It remembers the man’s partner, it thinks, with golden braces and stormy eyes, a hiss to his words-

It hurts to think about. It has so cruelly destroyed these people, their homes, and their livelihoods. It can’t help the soft noise that slips out, even if it’s only half-listening, half-aware.

The conversation goes silent. It chokes on the noise as soon as it finishes, high and weak and manipulative. It thinks it’s like a wild animal, begging for scraps and then biting the hand that feeds it, in pursuit of a larger meal. It does not want to manipulate these people, but it can’t help it. It’s in its nature. And, even if He has trained it out of some of its habits, a leopard cannot change its spots. There had not been much hope for it when it had first started to learn, and there is not much now.

It wishes He would come and take it away from this place. It’s already beginning to regret its disappearance. Its lessons, clearly, have not sunk in. They’ve left physical scars and broken bones and they have ruined it, but they have not worked.

“Oh, love,” whispers someone soft and sweet, sounding like protection and home and love and someone it has hurt all the same. 

It drifts.

---

When its brain registers its senses once again, it has been moved. It isn’t sure where to, or how long it has been, but it blinks and it sees again, sees a boy in a brown beanie and a boy with pink hair and a man in a light blue sweater, this time. Standing in front of it is a red and yellow mask from some long-suppressed memory, the sound of his humming registering a moment later. 

“There are several things that we’ve gotta treat before we even get to the fact that he’s not well in the mind either. That isn’t my realm, anyways, you’d be better off asking Puffy about all the neurological impacts of…” He trails off. “Of whatever this is.”

The man in the blue sweater nods, standing beside the man in the mask. His hand no longer holds it in its gentle touch, absorbed instead with a small paper pamphlet, but it supposes the kindness was never meant to last anyways. Behind him, the boy with pink hair and the boy with the beanie are holding identical papers. The boy in the beanie leans up against the boy with pink hair, the latter trailing a thin hand through the former’s moused brown hair. It makes its chest hurt. 

“Is this all something we can convince you to help us do out of the hospital?” says the blonde man. Long black phantom appendages shuffle at his back, wings shivering with anxiety. It has an odd urge to copy the movement. It quells it, leaned back against this solid mass, soft and pillowy. A twitch of its hand confirms it as a blanket, wrapped around its back and settling it up against a bed frame. Its surroundings are unfamiliar in the way a dream is. Known by every detail, yet utterly foreign. “Honestly, mate, he doesn't look like he could take it.”

“Eh- he doesn’t, does he,” mutters the first man. “There are probably some things you’ll have to do there, eventually. But we can start on the simple things first, there’s no need to rush.” He leans over, sitting at knee height, and his hand slides fingers across the bandages around its stumped leg. 

For a moment, it doesn’t think anything of it. It is unworried because it must be, and it stares blankly past, ignoring every inch of the tension in the air. The man starts unwinding the bandages, cupping the back of its knee with one hand, palming at the tight, white, bindings.

But the man who had been its father had wrapped these. It was such a gentle thing, so needlessly kind. It didn’t deserve that touch at all, but it had been given it despite its expectations. Those carefully wound bandages start to fall away, revealing pink-white-red scarring, stretched over thin bone, freckled with burns.

It knows it isn’t meant to vomit on anyone when nausea rolls in its chest, and when the bandages start to come off, when it realizes it must’ve done something wrong, must’ve hurt someone, and that gentle gesture of bandaging its leg must’ve been a test, and- and it makes to stand because it knows that even if it cannot move, it isn’t not meant to vomit on anyone.

It had happened quite often, early in its training. The urge had lessened greatly over however long it had been confined there with Him, but it had been its first lesson to stick. Do not dirty the hands of the one who teaches you.

It forgets itself, forgets its inability, and it falls to the ground, its one foot slipping out from under them. It doesn’t make a noise as it crashes down into the wooden flooring, its head knocking against the ground and making a sickening thud. Someone shouts, and oh End, it has ruined things, it has been cruel and bad and it is going to be hurt-

Chunks of bile and half-digested food lurch up from its gut, and they flow freely from its lips, staining the ground. It is putrid and foul, white-pink that floods the grain of the wood, dripping out of its nose and mouth as it convulses, hands scratching desperately at the floor as it tries to stand.

Something slides under its flailing side, and it wants to scream, because it was an accident, and it just wanted to keep the reminder that someone could touch it without hurting it, wrapped upon its leg. The arm loops around its chest and pulls it up onto its rear on the ground, and it wants to sob and whimper and try to avoid the pain that is sure to come, but it knows that is manipulative, and it is pathetic, and it deserves everything coming.

But its head bounces up against someone’s chest. Heavy breaths, shivering up and down and up and down, their other hand coming up and placing itself gently in its hair. 

It heaves silently again and waits for them to clamp their hand over its mouth, over its nose, suffocate it until it can’t help but swallow the remnants of food it hadn’t deserved. 

It had been taught not to make waste of what it had been given, so long ago, and it refuses to let go of it now, but it can’t help it. 

It gags, doubling over and finding its chin pushed into someone’s hands, its face pulled towards a can. The vomit comes up like chunks of magma, dribbling down its chin and scalding its face, eyes welling up with tears. It is agony, but it hates that someone is holding it even more, because it hurts to be touched. It wants so badly to be- to be-

Pink hair falls against its shoulders as the boy who cannot be its brother leans over, his head falling on its shoulder, murmured reassurances falling out. They are lies and it knows it, but it feels nice to be held, so it tries desperately to hold onto every moment of this memory. The blond man is holding a trashcan beneath its lips when it looks up, unable to do much more than stare. The masked man is gone, and the boy with the beanie is at its leg instead, rewrapping the white.

It doesn’t understand. They couldn’t possibly expect it to understand, could they? This doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like His kindness, doesn’t feel like the way He would pull it close and braid its hair, wipe away its tears, teach it to be better. It knows, though, that these people are being complacent. It will surely bite them later, even if for some reason, it so desperately does not want to.

It drifts.

Chapter Text

How the fuck does he make this better?

Phil finds himself asking that question, over and over, when he slides a trashcan under Tommy’s chin, the bloody vomit dribbling out of his mouth a frightening sight, the wide and unseeing fear in his eyes even more so. How the fuck does he fix this?

He dismisses Ponk to start with. How the fuck does he-

He doesn’t. 

But Phil dismisses Ponk as a first step, because the man’s actions have clearly set his catatonic son into enough panic to fall off of the bed they’ve wrapped him up on, puking his meager breakfast on the floor before it can even be digested. He supposes it’s a good thing Techno is so accustomed to things like vomit and sickness and death, because he doesn’t shy away from grabbing Tommy the moment he falls over, no matter what sort of food is strew down his jaw. Phil stands, shell shocked, for another second, before he rushes to the other side of the bed, grabbing the trashcan and sliding it up to Tommy’s throat.

And then they stay there. Ponk stands outside. Wilbur rewraps the bandages. Techno and Phil are silent. Tommy is gone. 

All the energy he’d expelled in his pursuit of- of whatever that had been- seems to have gone away entirely, abandoned in preference of the catatonia he’d inhabited before. 

But it does make Phil think. How much of this is catatonia, a genuine inability to move, to think, to see? And how much of it is born only out of the fear of those things?

He supposes it doesn’t matter. Both ideas are equally as terrifying. 

When his son has stopped having some sort of frozen anxiety attack, he takes him from Techno’s arms, slipping a hand beneath his knees and another behind his back, carefully pulling him up and setting him on top of the wrecked nest of bedsheets on the mattress. Tommy’s head tips back and lies there on its pillows, no longer with any semblance of life. Wil, on the ground, lets out a wet sniffle.

“I’ll get a towel,” Techno mutters. He stands from his spot, body uncertain. For a moment he only stands, staring unseeingly out the window. It’s a frightening look from Phil’s eldest. His son has always been stoic at the best and completely uncaring at the worst upon first notice. Phil and Wilbur and Tommy have always been able to pick apart the subtle emotions he presents.

But this is new. Techno stares, with a foggy gaze, eyes glazed over, and then turns in one abrupt movement, banging his hip on the nearby dresser. He is not unemotional. He is not overly emotional, either. He looks like he’s too much in shock to do anything else but escape. 

Phil settles himself on the edge of Tommy’s bed and tries to ignore the scent of puke. Wilbur doesn’t move from the floor, hunched over, his knees tucked beneath his chin and a hand shoved deep into his hair, scratching lightly. Phil places one hand on Tommy’s knee, then moves, the other settling gently atop Wil’s crown. The boy does not look up. But he pushes himself closer with a low, whine of a noise, sniffling again.

Where did he go wrong? Where did Phil fail so terribly that this is what is left? Traumatized children and shellshocked gazes, so broken that they can’t speak, can’t walk, can’t see — or simply won’t? His hands are tightly wound about this whole situation, his lack of attention, his relaxed permissions. Tommy had died at his inadequacies, and now he’s back, and somehow, it’s even worse than if he were still dead.

Phil shakes the intrusive thought from his head. He’s terrified by the fact that his son has returned, but he’s also...

Wait.

How does he feel? He’s mourning a son that has never been dead. He’s mourning the years he’s lost to that grief, and mourning the fact that they could’ve been spent with that son. He’s waiting for the anvil to drop and for this to reveal itself as some fucked-up fever dream, something invented by his own brain, either to torture him or to give him a tiny sliver of useless hope.

Because he is hopeful. It’s a tentative hope, and he won’t admit to it yet, but this is his son. Tommy isn’t dead, and while that is a terrifying revelation, Phil will grasp it between his hands and hold it to his heart for as long as he can. If this is a fever dream then he would prefer to remain asleep forever.

Techno returns. Wilbur lets out a pitifully mournful noise as Phil moves his hand, accepting the cool, damp rag in his eldest son’s hands. Tommy doesn’t flinch when Phil leans in closer, smoothing the cloth first against his forehead, the sweat beading there, then his chin, his lips, the awful stink of vomit cloying to the room.

“Will you call Ponk back in?” Phil asks Techno, because they really do need to do this examination. Tommy will never recover, no matter how uncomfortable it makes him, if he doesn’t get real medical help. Techno nods, vision seeming to narrow back to the present. When he steps from the room, this time he does not stagger.

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing Ponk says, a hand tugging at the edge of his mask. “I’m not sure what happened- this is why I’d like to call a psychiatrist or neurologist in-”

“It’s alright, Ponk,” Phil sighs, setting the soiled rag down on the nightstand beside the bed. They’re in his own room — Tommy’s has been left in stasis, curtained with dust — and he will probably regret putting the foul-smelling cloth right next to his notebook and a tin of feather-wax, but he’s too distracted to care. “I think I know what happened. Kind of.”

“Hm?”

“He didn’t seem to like it when I bandaged his leg yesterday,” Phil explains. “I think it might be a sore spot. Obviously. Since he lost it recently, as Sam said?”

“It was still bleeding when I came down and checked it,” says the man, leaning over and twisting the wedding band around his finger. Phil remembers attending Sam and Ponk’s wedding. It had been such a beautiful occasion, a small ceremony, only a few friends. Tommy, Wilbur, and Techno hadn’t even been born yet. Nowadays, Phil thinks the funerals have begun to overtake the weddings. The birthdays, the baby showers, the happy moments. He’s used to watching people pass. But after he’d met his children, it felt like the death might allow itself to pause, if only long enough for him to watch them grow up.

It hadn’t. It had come, and it had knocked upon his door, and it had claimed his youngest.

“I told him to use one quick-healing potion because I really didn’t think Tommy could handle a bunch more. I’d still advise you didn’t give him healing potions until we have a chance to get his weight up- they can come with serious risks, and I’d like to make sure he doesn’t keel over while we’re trying to help him.”

“That’s not fucking funny,” Wilbur growls, on the ground. But he’s looking up now, eyes narrowed, teeth bared into a snarl. Phil has to agree. It seems Techno does as well, because he glares, folding his arms and staring.

Ponk flushes. “No- no, uhm, sorry, no it’s not, is it? I-” He shuts his mouth. Then, with a sigh, seeming to accept his admonishment, he nods. “Sorry. Can I continue?”

There’s a slow pause. Then Wilbur nods, going back to tucking his head into his knees, ankles twisted together. It’s a miserable sight. Phil’s heart aches, seeing his sons so shambled. Wilbur, face still pale, eyes still red, lips chewed to bloodiness. Techno, dizzy with confusion, off his balance for the first time in years. Tommy-

Tommy is what he is. Phil doesn’t think he needs to recount every little bruise to himself at all times.

(Or does he? He’s had some hand in this, hasn’t he? Is this not partially his fault, whether by intention or not? Is Tommy’s undoing not his own responsibility?) 

He shakes that line of thought away and lets Ponk move back, pressing gentle, gloved fingers into Tommy’s ribs. He frowns, then nods to himself, eyes creased and narrowed.

“I’d say it’s likely that his ribs are broken, but I can’t know for sure without an X-Ray. Is there any way I could bring him to the hospital once, just to get the most important things done? I promise, Watson, I’ll do everything I can to get him back out quickly.”

“What does that list include, right now?” Phil asks. 

“I’d like to make sure his leg-” Ponk gestures to the bandages limb “-will be properly looked at. I want to do some x-rays and see what else is going on. I may be able to use sedation and help him in more ways than I can in your house, of course. And- uhm. His breathing, Phil.” Ponk breathes out, his eyes fluttering shut for a moment. “It’s bad. I don’t think I can rule out the possibility that someone has tried some sort of water-based-” 

He pauses again. It seems a struggle to get the words out, and Ponk raises a hand, pinching his brow. When he speaks again, his voice is watery, his brow wet. “I already spoke to Sam about this. But I don’t think we can rule out the idea that whatever happened to Tommy- it likely included some form of torture.”

The room is silent. Ponk leans over, gloved fingers brushing over Tommy’s neck. There’s a long, garish wound there, crusted over, blood vessels burst. It’s shaped almost like a hand. “This, along with his breathing, and everything else combined, makes me think he may have been waterboarded.”

There’s a bang. Phil looks down. Wilbur’s fist has slammed into the wooden flooring, and his head is up, a stricken expression to it all. For a moment the entire room is still, staring at him, waiting. 

Then Wilbur stands, nearly pitching over and onto the floor before he catches himself. He leaves the room.

After a long, steady pause, Phil attempts to nod. It’s too shaky to be a clear gesture. HIs chest thrums, heart slamming against his ribs, but he already knows what Ponk has said is probably true. He just- didn’t want to have to confront it. From the looks of it, neither did his sons. 

“People don’t just- get these sort of wounds,” Ponk continues, voice soft, choking on its own weight. “I- I don’t know who happened to give him them, but it’s- they’re certainly not self-inflicted.”

Techno barks out a laugh, startling them all. It’s dry and cruel and, behind it all, shaken, something hollow and pained in its straining innotation. “Tommy never was the masochist in the family,” he says, and his voice cracks. “Wilbur’s the self-destructive bastard. I’m the freak. Phil’s the shit parent.” He shrugs. “What can we say?”

Phil reels back, feeling a bit as if he’s just had his teeth punched out. His skin goes cold, then burning, face pale and ears flushed. Because Techno is right, and Phil stares at his back as it retreats out the door, leaving Ponk and his father the only two left with Tommy in the room. He tries to convince himself that Techno is just angry. He tells himself: Techno and Wilbur are still young, whether they’re legal adults or not. They’re only barely older than children, and they’re traumatized, and-

And Techno is right, of course. Wilbur wishes he were dead. Techno’s head isn’t his and his alone. Phil is a terrible parent, who took on the job of raising three traumatized children who would’ve preferred he’d just killed their parents and slapped them off into foster care. He will never regret meeting his sons. He loves them more than anything he’s ever seen. But sometimes, he wishes someone else had saved them first. 

This was never the plan. The plan was for Phil to kill and murder and be cruel and uncaring and then die, preferably by suicide, before someone else could get the chance to end his life. It’s not as if anyone would mourn. 

But then he’d met his kids, and his entire agenda had flipped. They’d become his priority, and death had been left behind. Or- he’d thought as much. Some little vestige of it had followed him along and claimed his son. Now he’s left trying to fix some fracture that has only just been uncovered, and all too aware of how little he can do.

“Phil.”

He looks up. Ponk has moved closer. It looks like he’s been calling his name for a few minutes now, his expression one of worry. 

“Oh- uhm. Yes. Sorry, mate,” he sighs. 

Ponk’s frown deepens. He takes another step towards the bed, then shakes his head, clearly rethinking his next words. Some useless comfort. “When would you like to schedule an appointment?”

---

The ride to the hospital is spent in silence. Tommy sits in the back seat, with Wilbur beside him, staring out the window. Techno is beside Phil in the passenger seat.

They have not spoken about the night before. They have not discussed what harsh words were shared, what anger was spit. They don’t need to- Phil won’t make Techno rescind his opinion. Not if it’s true.

It does make the car ride more awkward, but he can live with that. He can even live with the guilt, and the self-hatred, and whatever else, because he knows it is nothing to what his sons must feel.

It isn’t fair of him to wallow in self-pity, though. He keeps his eyes on the road and he drives on, ground slick with rain, splashing muddy puddles across the windows when someone drives beside them. It’s a windy, miserable day, with the air heavy and humid, the rain pounding endlessly. The drive to the hospital is a long one, but there’s nothing to clear the air as they go towards it.

There’s no conversation. If it had been just three years before, perhaps Tommy would’ve been the one to break the silence. He’d call them out on their awkwardness with a grin, telling them they’re all absolutely insufferable and boring. He’d smack the back of Techno’s seat, and he’d kick Phil’s, and he’d steal Wilbur’s beanie. The car would erupt into demands — Wilbur, to have his beanie back, Techno, to get Tommy to stop being so loud, Phil, telling them all to shut up before he accidentally crashes the car.

But it’s silent. There’s no music nor discussion, the only sound the rain pounding up against the windows, the wet crackle of Tommy’s breathing. 

The hospital isn’t busy when Phil pulls into the parking lot. He turns the key in the car and the windshield wipers stop, rain immediately obscuring his view of the building and everything around. It blurs the landscape into sharp, jagged, contrasts, blues turned black and yellows turned white. The sky is dark as night despite the fact that it’s only midday, and he sighs, muffling the sound with the back of his hand. 

“I’ll get a wheelchair,” Techno says, voice gruff and uncaring. He pushes open his door and immediately begins to be doused in rain, black pants turning an even deeper, almost-obsidian, shade. He sticks a hand out and winces at the heavy precipitation, but he does not falter as he stands, shaking his head and glasses free of the water The door slams back shut, and Phil watches his son walk off towards the building. 

Phil doesn’t say anything for a moment longer. Techno becomes nothing more than a white blur on the hazy horizon, as he pulls the door open, walks into the main building. Phil stares before he turns, looking back at Wilbur and Tommy.

His middle son has curled up into his jacket. His eyes are hazy, unseeing as Tommy’s, fingers gripping the edges of his beanie. One of his thighs is pressed up against Tommy’s, a silent gesture of comfort that makes Phil’s heart squeeze tighter, wound up against his ribs. 

“You doing alright back there?” he asks, directing the question towards anyone who can answer.

Wilbur continues to be silent. Then, with a blink, his pupils dilate, and he nods, stretching out of his curled up position and removing his hands from their white-knuckled position. 

“I’m- I’m alright, dad. Just tired,” he finishes, in a voice that goes more hoarse by the moment. Phil knows what tired means in regards to Wilbur. But he doesn’t comment. 

Techno returns with one of the nurses Phil has seen before — all of his family have ended up here far more often than he’d like to admit — and a wheelchair, covered with a plastic tarp to keep it out of the rain. Phil curses as he pulls the door open and realizes he doesn’t have umbrellas.

“Hello, Mr. Watson,” says the woman, her smile tensed. He appreciates her worried demeanor — if she’d come in cheerful and nonchalant, he thinks he would’ve been tempted to put a fist through his own skull. “Dr. Ponk explained to me some of the basics of what happened. Can I help you get him out of the car?”

“Erm- I think I’d better do it,” Phil tells her. He shivers, and his wings unfurl with a snap, going to their full length and then quickly rearranging into something more condensed. She takes a step back, eyes wide, and nods, as he curves one wing back outward, hanging it over his own head and leaning into the backseat of the car.

Tommy is as still as ever when he’s lifted. Techno obligingly lifts the tarp from the wheelchair as Phil swerves a wing to hang above it, shielding Tommy and the seat from the rain with his feathers. The nerves on his back start to strain painfully with the weight of his own wings, but he suffers through it, planting his hands on the wheelchair’s handles and steering it towards the hospital. The nurse follows beside him, and Techno stands in the back. Wilbur trails ten feet ahead.

The front room of the hospital is quiet — and unchanged since the last Phil occupied it. There’s a small cafe at the front with a bored-looking cashier and an equally bored-looking barista, shaking a cup of ice aimlessly. There are high, arched, ceilings, glass windows above exposing the sky, a balcony in the middle where the second floor starts. Fake plants line the edges of the long front area, couches and tables and a magazine stand strewn about in an arrangement that is probably meant to look reassuring, homely. 

Phil isn’t unsettled. He isn’t worried. He isn’t scared. But nothing about this place feeling promising, no matter the architect’s efforts. He folds his wings at the front door and shakes. After a moment to let them dry, he folds both of the appendages tight to his back. Putting them away entirely while they’re still wet can lead to mold, and that’s something he would like to avoid between his feathers.

After a short discussion with the front desk, they’re on their way to radiology. Phil’s only been there twice — once, when his car got hit by a drunk driver and he’d broken a wing, and the second time when Techno had been almost squashed by a massive pile of anvils and Phil wasn’t willing to leave him alone without making sure he wasn’t hurt. The place brings back conflicting memories. On the one hand, he’s not been there enough for it to affect him badly. On the other hand, it makes him think of when Technoblade had attempted to retire. When he’d almost been executed for that decision. When Phil had been arrested.

Phil shivers as they take Tommy inside. The waiting room is cold. 

Chapter Text

Technoblade thinks, after he wakes up, he might’ve cried in his sleep. He’d gotten home from the hospital and immediately dismissed himself to bed, wanting nothing more than to stop existing for a bit. To have a break from the constant beating of his heart. Of the consistent pain that thrums through his chest. 

He wakes up in the middle of the night with his eyes half-crusted shut. His mouth is dry as the blankets beneath him, the soles of the shoes he’d neglected to pull from his feet. Techno lets out a few well-placed groans and pushes himself from the blankets, wiping crust from his eyes, pulling the worst of his hair out of his face.

His hair is an unbraided, matted mess. His face is hot, and dotted in sweat, such a huge contrast to the burnt-up surface of his tongue and lips that he groans, rolling over onto his back and blinking away sleep at the ceiling.

Cracked stone comes to meet him, eager to grow moss once its inhabitants leave. Phil had laid this house down, nearly brick by brick when he’d first emigrated to this realm. At least- that’s what he’d told his kids when they’d first move in, so frightened of the place that the only possible consolation he could offer them was that he trusted it with his own life.

Techno isn’t totally sure what to think about Phil right now. On the one hand — he’s not angry at all. None of this is entirely Phil’s fault, or Wil’s fault, or even his own, really. On the other hand… 

How did things even get to this point? How did someone along the way fuck up so badly that Techno’s youngest brother fell apart, careening down cliffsides and smashing every bit of his psyche into pieces, till the thing they were left with was hollow and silent and unmoving-

It’s too early in the morning to be thinking about this. He pushes himself up into a seated position and checks the clock on the wall, silently ticking away. And he’s right- 3 am is a terrible time to discuss the life choices that have torn his family apart. Not that it’s ever stopped him. 

Techno pushes off of the bed and lands on the ground with unsteady feet. Pressing a hand to the wall in an effort to keep himself from falling does just enough that he makes it to the doorway, leaning against it for support. And then he falls to the ground, back to the door, tipping his head to the wood and reaching to his boots. He unwinds the laces, his feet aching with how tight they’ve been tied, with how long the leather has bitten into his ankles. Techno sets them carefully against the wall beside him and steels himself to stand.

The hallway is empty and quiet. He steps through it without making a noise, footsteps silenced against the wooden flooring without his boots to clunk heavily across it. He peers down at the doorways within the fall and finds the lights off in nearly all of them. Only the faintest hints of light stream out of one, at the far end, silence to accompany the yellow hue. 

They’d never actually gotten around to completely clearing out Tommy’s room. They’d filled in the hiding-hole he’d made in the basement as soon as he’d moved back up with them during exile, but his room has stayed stagnant for years after his death. Wilbur had once attempted to clean it up. He’d spiraled, going through old clothes and old books and old music discs, unable to find anything he could bear to be the one to throw away. The burden had fallen to Techno and Phil. Neither of them ever made the time to clean up.

It’s a small mercy now. No one else has a room clean enough to accommodate Tommy or the sort of things he needs. Techno’s not even sure this house — this family — has what Tommy needs. They’re a group of failures, damaged and spiraled and broken in places, mended bones that have never twisted around to sit quite right again. (But he supposes misery loves company.)

Phil sits in Tommy’s old desk chair, rickety and greying with time and the bleach of the sun from the window, usually kept open. It’s turned to face the boy, lying on the bed. Phil’s head is sunk into his hands, wings folded neatly to his back. Techno watches, the scene fuzzy, as Phil breathes, shoulders shrugging up and down.

Time moves slowly when he steps within, carefully turning his gaze to avoid the IV drip hanging on a pole beside the bed. It slips into Tommy’s wrist, the twitching muscles there, the thin blue veins, stark and bright. So, when Techno rests a hand on Phil’s back, firm against the knotted muscle of his shoulder blades, he can no longer avoid the obvious drip of electrolytes and some unknown concoction of drugs.

“Hmh.” Phil clears his throat, turning his head tiredly. “Hey, mate.”

The smile he gives Techno is a facsimile. It’s stretched and exhausted. Techno does not return it.

“Go to bed, dad,” he says, voice thin. He’s just as tired as Phil, he thinks, but his father was the one to deal with the doctors at the hospital, the prying questions, the thinly veiled threats to call CPS. Ponk had shooed them off. It had mostly been the newest doctors, anyways. 

Those who have been there as long as Ponk know of Phil and his family, the way that what might seem like child abuse is actually something so totally different, so much worse, that the only thing they can do to help is to listen. Some of them might have even been the first to hear the news of Tommy’s death. 

For a moment Phil looks like he wants to argue. But his face draws into a pinched expression, and he grimaces, and- 

And he yawns, abrupt and comical. It’s a loud one, tapering off into a cough, which Phil doubles over to encompass, directing it into his elbow. Techno raises an eyebrow, his point made, his arms crossed. When his father sits back up, he sends his son a withering look and nods, back cracking as he makes to lean off of the chair. 

“Don’t do this, Phil,” Techno murmurs. The man in question pauses, halfway to the door, his head giving an interested tilt. He makes to turn around, to listen to Techno, to look, but before he can, his eldest son continues. “Don’t run yourself on like this. Don’t let yourself go. Wilbur needs you.”

There’s a pause. “Tommy needs you.”

Neither mentions the unspoken addition. I need you.

Phil nods without turning. His shoulders, along with his wings, seem to sag, shifting downward until his primaries drag on the ground. Techno watches him until he leaves the room, unable to take his eyes off of the man’s form.

And then he turns, gaze still carefully curved to avoid the boy on the bed. He sinks into the chair beside Tommy, splaying his knees out and sliding his long legs beneath the bed. Technoblade hums out a nonsensical noise, lowering his chin to his chest and peering out the window.

Starlight flickers through the glass and into the room. Snow, gentle, falling fast through the night, contrasts the deep blackness of the sky, of the forest sprawled out beneath them, behind their home. It flurries into the trees, hits the window, melting when the heat of the room makes the glass just too warm to bear. The spiraling fractals mingle with the stars, the two groups dancing in tandem.

Techno wonders what it would be like, to fly through the snow. He’d never envied his brother or his father for their abilities when he was a child. He’d had his own skillset, and that was that. But as he’s grown older, he’s seen. Seen the need to fly away, high up to where only the Heavens can stare at you. Where the stars don’t seem quite as far, and the hands which hung them brush up against your feathers.

He finally looks down. Tommy looks no different than he has these past four days — four days, oh End, how has it been anything more than a second? — pressed up against the bed, eyes just barely open, his expression still staticky and unchanged.

Tommy smells like blood. Techno knows it’s the old touch of Piglin, deep inside of his blood, that tells him this, that shifts about inside of him. His hybridic blood is more there than Wilbur’s — only manifesting in his intense charisma, his fangs, Phantom blood running through him — but certainly not there nearly as much as Tommy’s. Props to the people who came before Philza, he muses. They sure knew how to sleep around. 

“You could just fly off,” he murmurs, voice croaked and undusted. Tommy doesn’t move. Even his eyes stay affixed on the ceiling, rolling in lazy circles every once in a while at seemingly random intervals. “Nothin’s keeping you here. Even if I don’t want you to leave.”

It’s scary to admit that out loud. Techno sucks in a soft breath, but he nods anyway, ignoring the voices in their head and the gentle murmur of encouragement they give him. They’ve been so eerily silent for the past few days. He thinks they’ve only been so quiet around things such as funerals. It’s a frightening comparison. 

Admitting that he doesn’t want Tommy to leave again feels like playing with fire. It’s manifesting the idea that Tommy could run off, could be stolen as quickly as he’d been returned. 

No matter how much Techno has been betrayed, beaten, and broken, by Tommy and his friends, he will always hold out hope for his brother. Especially when he’s been reduced to this.

“I bet you would, if you could, huh?” Techno trails a thin hand over the blankets on the bed. Tommy has been redressed in a simple white shirt and black sweatpants, completely unassuming. The blankets on the bed have been pulled up to his hips, resting on the two jutting bones, just thin enough that Techno sees where they jut out of the fabric. “You always ran off when things got hard. I don’t tell y’ that as anything mean, not that I think you can understand me well an’all right now. ‘Jus’ think you’re afraid a lot.”

He sighs, curling forward and pulling his legs back to kick up beneath the chair. Tommy tilts his head, a minute shift in Techno’s direction, eyes drifting lazily to stare at him. Even with the broken glaze to them they’re still lapis blue, electric scleras a bright grey. It’s an impassive, judging gaze, even if Techno thinks Tommy likely doesn’t even recognize he’s done it. But he doesn’t look away.

“I would be too. Heh. I think most’a us would’ve been, given your situation spit you back up again lookin’ like this. It’s cruel.” 

There’s a short pause, in which Techno only stares out the window, observing the boundless snow. The stars have started to wink out with the incoming cloud cover. It feels right, the soft sort of darkness the bright white precipitation brings.

“I don’t like speakin’ all my thoughts out loud like this. I’m not great at speakin’ in general.” Techno snorts dryly. “You knew that, huh? Always tried to tell me how bad I was at it. 

“Called me a bitch uh- a- a fair amount’a times. Heh. Or ya’ just called everyone that, which- uh- not a fair amount’a times. Not gonna lie to you there. You cuss an obscene amount, child. Or you did.”

That small admittance — that Tommy did, rather than does — gives Techno enough pause to look away, rethinking his words.

But it’s true. As true as snowfall, and clouds, winking out the stars. Tommy probably hasn’t cursed in a while. Not for Techno to hear it at the very least. 

(He hopes, privately, that Tommy has verbally abused everyone he’s been around in these past two years. Whatever has been done to him makes Techno’s blood boil. Makes his head pound. Makes his fist ache to curl around the hilt of a sword, ache to- to cut-)

“But eh- maybe that was fair, wasn’t it? Maybe you-“ a gruff snort “-I don’t know. We are an absolutely wreck of a family, aren’t we. You’re no exception, Tommy. Clearly.”

He can almost imagine Tommy giving him an unimpressed eye roll at that. A vicious “ what's that supposed to mean, dickhead?”

All that returns to Techno is silence, and the gentle beat of the snow against the window. He rests his weary head in his hands and he sighs, tearing at his skin with the edge of his nails. 

“I’m absolutely roarin’ in excitement to find out what happened to you. Just so you know. If I get up an’- and start jumping for joy when you finally start talking, then that’s why. Not the fact that I uh-“

Techno’s voice cracks. He chuckles, wet and dry at once, examining the irony of the scene. Tommy, the broken once, the silent one. Techno the one who can’t keep a grip on his emotions, in the clutches of grief he thought he’d bled out years ago.

“Not the fact that I’ve missed you talk. Nothing like that. Wilbur talks enough for the both’a’ you.”

He looks up again. Tommy’s looking at him. His eyes are just barely open. But they’re wet, expressionless, tears collecting in the feathered edges of his eyelashes. Techno swallows back a thousand different words, a thousand different soliloquies and obituaries and speeches. He just watches, letting go of his face and stretching out a hand to rest just on the edge of the bed. 

“I love you, kid. I hope you know that. I’ve got- uhm. A funny feeling you’ve probably not been told that a whole lot recently, so I’m tryna’ break that down, and- and be maybe the first one, yknow. Cause you-“

He sucks in a sharp breath. Tommy doesn’t react. But the wet spills, and pools in the dip of a bag beneath his eye, leaving the purple-blue skin shining. His jaw trembles. 

“You’re not lookin’ too good,” he finishes, studying his brother’s face. “And I’m startin’ to think it might be just a bit my fault.”

Chapter Text

Wilbur knows everyone thinks he’s completely nuts. It’s been a constant for several years now. And, he supposes, it’s a reasonable thing to assume. Only those who aren’t closest to him ever are ever really afraid, either way, and that’s all that matters. He would not hurt his family. Maybe in the past, when he’d been fraying at the seams, every brush of his hand the curve of a blade. But not now.

Not even as he sits, out in the cold, two fingers curved around a cigarette. Smoke billows up into the sky, twisting languidly through empty grey. It’s a foggy day, the streetlights at the very end of their empty road spreading golden tendrils of light all across the concrete path down to their home. He leans over, hair sweeping over his eyes where it falls out of his beanie.

He’s not supposed to be smoking. He doesn’t even like it. It’s a little fucking disgusting, biting at his chest and nipping his throat shut, forcing him to cough with the effort to exhale.

Tubbo and Ranboo still haven’t been called. It’s what he came out here to do. He was supposed to pull his phone out, type in the familiar phone numbers — because he has never put them into his phone, his therapist said he should allow himself space away from that part of his life, but he can never forget the digits that make up their numbers. 

Does he care enough to put his cigarette out before he speaks? There’s no doubt Phil will be annoyed at him for smoking it, either way. Techno probably won’t like it either. Tommy won’t be able to react. 

Or- he won’t want to. Wilbur has no idea whether his brother simply refuses to speak — to react or move or breathe — or if he just can’t, all stoppered up inside of him. Wilbur sympathizes, though. He remembers a time when his own depression fell heavy and hard, sending him spiraling from mania into absolute exhaustion.

He squeezes his eyes shut against the memory, breath fogging through the air as he exhales. The cigarette hisses when he smashes it into the ground beneath him, knobby knees jutting out from beside where the new scorch mark lies, atop a step up to their porch. 

The ringer on his phone does not make a single noise as he types in the numbers. It’s been a long time — over a full year, now, — since he has spoken to the boy. The last Wilbur had heard, his father had finally moved on, Jschlatt dissipating into nothingness when Tubbo and he were able to make the only sorts of apologies they could. 

Wilbur hadn’t had the capacity to call back, after that. It had been painful to think about the fact that Tubbo’s bastard of a father could return, but his own brother could not. 

Now that Wilbur has Tommy back, he doesn’t think Tubbo’s so lucky.

(He loves his brother. This — having Tommy back from the dead, alive and whole — was all he’d wanted, for so long. This shell of a thing that has returned in his brother’s stead feels cruel. But Wilbur still desperately clings to the idea of having his brother back, like a child.)

The phone rings out. Each noise pulses through his temples, sending a low murmur of pain behind his eyelids. Smoke of a more metaphorical sort than cigarette bubbles up in his throat, only exhaled when he sighs, running thin, shaking fingers across his brow. His forehead is beaded in sweat despite the chilled air around him, and he realizes, quite suddenly, that he is absolutely terrified. 

It’s too late to hang up, though. The rings taper off.

“Hello?”

The voice is cautious. Not a single thing about it has changed since last Wilbur heard the boy, save for the tremble that had permanently occupied it when they last spoke. He wants so badly to hang up, but then-

He groans, steeling himself up and cursing his own caution. Someone breathes out a sigh across the line, confused and high-pitched.

“Hello, Tubbo,” Wilbur whispers, hoarse, breaking. And, all in one sudden realization-

He’s not going to be able to do this. He can’t. He’s a failure, unable to even alert the boy to his best friend’s status, the fact that Tommy is alive. He’s a coward, unable to face that same fact himself. He’s an idiot, who hurts people, who can’t do simple things, who should be dead-

“Wil- Wilbur?” Says the boy, though, in a voice that sounds like a sort of gasp. He can’t help the soft, wounded groan he lets off, regretting ever being born. “Hey- hey! It’s been such a long time! How have you… How’ve you been?”

And- and he cannot do this. He just can’t. “Sit down, Tubbo,” he murmurs, while the boy rambles his hello’s. “Sit- go sit down, Tubbo, for fucks sake.”

“What?” A small laugh, nervous and shaky. “Wilbur, are you doing alright? It’s been such a long time-”

He can’t do this. Not at all. He- he wants to vomit. He just- just can not do it. But he pushes, further and further, trying his best, even though he can’t-

“Just sit!” He demands, because he can’t do this properly if he can’t do it at all.

Silence rings out.

Wilbur is being unfair, and he knows it. The sort of information he’s about to drop on Tubbo, still a child, is cruel. It’s something he wishes he could tell him in person, but his family doesn’t have that luxury. A ride to Snowchester is a nearly three day drive, and it makes no sense to uproot one of their family members to go and tell Tubbo and Ranboo. Not when the subject of this discussion is so fractured, still, needing all of the help he can get.

There’s the sound of a chair being pulled out, and then the muffled rubbing of fabric and skin and wood together. A sigh, heavy, knowing. Tubbo thinks he’s nuts, too. Wilbur knows it. And it’s a fair assumption. He will never forgive himself for how he treated the people around him in Pogtopia. In L’Manberg, even. 

Tubbo bares the scars of his battles more than most. Stretched, raw, pink-white skin, an explosion creeping up his face, one of his eyes a milky, blind, white. He’s an incredibly strong kid, but noticeably broken. Wilbur just hopes that Ranboo and him are taking care of themselves. 

He hates this. He’s going to ruin everything by telling Tubbo what the boy must know. He is going to break their family into bits, and he knows it. But Wilbur does what he must.

“Can you. Uhm- get Ranboo on the phone as well?”

He runs a heavy hand over his face in the silence. His fingers itch to bend around a cigarette, if just for something to occupy each pause between words. There’s the tinny noise of someone shifting again, and then a shout, a name called with the phone held away from the voice. Wilbur winces regardless, every second bringing him closer to what he has to say.

“There,” Tubbo says, and his voice is undeservingly soft. “I’ve got Ranboo listening too, Wilbur. Is everything… alright?”

That’s a million dollar question if there ever was one. Wilbur laughs, but it comes out sideways, choked and wet. 

“No. It is not.”

“Alright,” comes the sighed response, along with quiet muttering from in the background. “Can I put you on speaker?”

“Yeah, that’d be best. Make Ranboo sit too, ok? This is… heavy.”

Suddenly, sound blooms. They’re in a kitchen — Wilbur can hear the steady drone of a microwave, somewhere in the background, along with another chair being scooted out. He has yet to visit their home in Snowchester, but he does genuinely hope they love it. Ranboo and Tubbo, out of anyone, deserve to rest. Wilbur is just too shit to be able to let them keep that peace.

How does he even approach this idea? How does he just tell them? How did Phil tell him and Techno? The man had done it as if it weighed upon him, yes, of course he had, but he’d done it all the same. He’d been there, too, to make sure that neither Techno nor Wilbur were dangerous in their reactions. Ranboo and Tubbo are miles away, at home with only their son, still trying to knit themselves together after the constant trauma they’ve been subject to. 

Tommy, though, seems to have gone through worse. (He knows it isn’t a competition, but oh God, his brother is ruined.) Wilbur knows how horrifying it is to have your trauma ripped back open. To be dragged right back into a mess you were trying so painfully to avoid. But here he is. Not for the first time, he’s being put into a position where he has no choice but to react.

“Tommy’s alive.”

The starlight of an empty moment closes into a square shape, his phone spreading led-white through the air, illuminating his cheek as he chew on his lip. Silence is hard and heavy about his shoulders, his collarbones bending under the weight, threatening to snap. There’s so little time between his words and the next, and yet it feels like centuries. Thin skin snaps, teeth falling through red-bruised lips, crimson bubbling up between with the porcelain white of bone and the same, ivory tone of skin, where he has pressed too hard. 

“What.”

The word is a demand. Not a question. There’s nothing curious about its flat tone, all sharp and angry, Tubbo’s compassionate tone dropping into something that could almost be described as violent. It’s a quick 180, but a deserved one, considering the subject. 

“He’s alive,” Wilbur says, surprised to find that his voice no longer shakes. He thinks he might be dissociating a bit more than usual, as he wets his lips with his tongue, tastes copper where it runs over the pinprick cuts his teeth have left. Cool air runs against the gouges when he purses his lips, making them sting. “You can ask Phil, or Techno, if you like-”

“This isn’t funny,” Tubbo says, and his voice, though strong, wavers, going high at the end. “Wilbur, this is- this is cruel.”

“Uhm- why would you even lie about that?” comes the voice in the background, Ranboo finally speaking. Wilbur’s stomach drops. They really don’t believe him. “That’s- that’s really- a shitty thing to call us about.”

“I’m not. Lying to you-” he adds, because God, he does feel like he needs to clarify. His knee bounces rhythmically, shattering the foggy air with his anxiety. “It’s only been a few days, but-”

“But what?” Ranboo says, and his ordinarily diplomatic front has shattered, leaving behind anger, and there’s a noise like shifting, a noise like a wet sob from Tubbo in the background, and- “Wilbur, we- you’re supposed to be better.”

Better.

That smacks into him like a sword to the gut. He falls against the blade, defiant, anger rippling up along with blood at the jagged wound. Better. Is that what they expect of him? Crazy, nutjob Wilbur? Traumatized Wilbur, blowing things up and melting down into tiny spiraling fractals of skin, and forgetting and in denial. Wilbur, who is-

Who’s just trying to tell them. But they’re treating him as if instead of delivering news that physically hurts to acknowledge, he’s only manipulating them, lying to them for a chance to speak at all. As if he’s just opening his mouth out here for attention, trying to rebuild something between him and Tubbo and Ranboo that has been dead for years. 

Better. 

Wilbur is a bad person. A cruel person, to some, to those who haven’t known him well enough for a long time. Wilbur is a bad person and he fucking knows it, but he is not a manipulative scumbag of a man. He tells the truth and he only hopes to inform. Just because he has been broken in the past does not mean that his brokenness is what makes him bad. His cruelty is innate, not something born of mental illness or breakdown or trauma. He has killed people, manipulated friends. He has forgotten and remembered and relived every little awful thing he has ever done.

Wilbur is a fucking terrible person. It is not a matter of getting better. 

And suddenly, all of the exhaustion and misery he has felt for days comes crashing down alongside the knife in his gut, and he barks out a laugh, something like anger returning in its stead. He burns, yanking the phone back from his head so he doesn’t have to hear the sound of someone beginning to cry, of someone else asking him why? Why would he lie? Why about this?

Well, he’s not fucking lying, is he? He’s not lying, even though he wishes he could. He isn’t crazy, or manipulative, or cruel, not in the way that people want him to be. He is not the villain in this story, no matter how awful he can be. He’s just-

Tired. Traumatized and tired and as miserable as anyone else. Anything wrong inside of him is extra- it is not what makes him bad. That’s just Wilbur, behind any mental issues he might have. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themself. 

He hangs up.

Chapter Text

 A cold hand guides it through the space between worlds. Careful wings flicker and unfold from behind an inky black circle behind a pervasive porcelain mask behind nothing, behind air and everything that is not. Its own wings remain folded in that sliver of an area outside of the realm where things like feathers lie. It treads carefully and it does not limp and the hand curls, just above the junction between wing and shoulderblade, aching with the hours it has spent postured in the air.

“It has its job,” says the voice attached to the hand, many shades of crimson against the wall. “All in due time.”

“Tommy.”

A soft sigh. The sound of fabric rustling. It is well accustomed to the people in this house by now, though it has no way of knowing how long it’s been here. 

Today is a strange day. It understands, more than it typically does, the words and the actions of those around it. It is awake when the older man first enters the room, wearily shutting the door behind him, holding a small plate of food. He feeds it, and it obeys the mechanical movement of the hand before it, opening its mouth and allowing itself to chew. It needs to remain useful, after all. There’s no point in starvation.

Now, the man has stood, still holding the empty plate. Its stomach rolls uncomfortably with the weight of the food. It’s far more than it’s used to getting — or, really, far more than it deserves — but it is well past arguing, even if it’s punished for its greed later on. The food had tasted like ash against its tongue anyways.

“I’ve got someone here who… knew you.” The man twists his hands nervously against the fabric of his shirt. His wings twitch, splayed out as they are. Or — are they closed, and its simply imposing those feathers upon someone, so familiar yet impossible? Because it knows, this is not the man it thinks it is. This is not the man who helped and this is not its family and-

“Puffy,” he says, after a long pause. The name sparks recognition in the way a word in a nightmare might. The man sighs, letting his hands drop to his sides. Then, he murmurs, and he turns, and he opens the door. It drifts as the man leaves, because it knows it will be called upon if it must be.

It drifts, and-

There’s a shocking plume of white hair hanging above it. It curls up and down and waves along with whatever it is attached to, billowing up along a face. A black hat that normally stands atop it is held in someone’s hands, trembling where they lie, upon the woman’s lap.

“Hello, Tommy,” warbles the form, horrifically familiar, dark eyes and soft smiles and the protection of someone almost like a mother and-

And it shies away, cowardice overtaking it. Because this is undeniably the woman it knew, once upon a time, though she is hunched and her eyes have darkened. She trembles, her jaw pinched as it shakes, her familiar smile a thousand leagues away and yet so terrifyingly close. It can’t help but recoil from her. 

Because how is she here? Has she too been taken, forced to stay with it, her undeserved stay marked by Him, her death sentence surely imminent? Because it knows its place and it knows its job and it knows that this whole ordeal has been a test, orchestrated directly by the illusionist mask that feeds it. This woman can’t be here, can’t be beside it, because that would mean-

That would mean that she too is trapped. That would mean that she too must have a purpose, whether that be to die without return or to die in the way that it has, over and over and over and over. Her face wrinkles with concern as it moves, shrugging its shoulders away, mouth opening slightly though no words can escape it.

It can’t speak. It can’t breathe. No words grace it with their presence because it has been so long since it deserved speech. It’s always given a paper and a quill and a purpose, once it has returned from its empty black coffin of death.

“Hey,” she croons, leaning in, hands pulling away from her thighs and her hat, white hair drifting out in long, flowing streaks. She hasn’t changed a bit, save for the bags beneath her eyes, the worry lines about her cheeks. She’s older, but not by much, mostly changed by what seems like stress more than injury. But she doesn’t know yet, doesn’t understand, because-

Because He gave it purpose and He will surely give her one too, and that isn’t a fate it wishes on anyone.

“It’s ok, Tommy,” she says, and it’s the wrong name too, and it will surely be punished just for daring to listen. “I’m not going anywhere-”

Go. It latches onto the syllables and its mouth opens and it feels like agony to press the letters out, to squeeze past the dizziness and exhaustion inside of it. It can barely muster up the energy to speak, to warn, but it’s important that she knows, that she starts looking for a way out as soon as she can. 

“Go,” it says, because she has said it and it feels like permission from the universe to repeat it. “Go,” it gasps, pressing itself elbows into the surface beneath it and lifting itself, staring into her eyes. It needs to communicate that she needs to run, but she simply goes stark white as her hair, eyes shooting open. 

“No- Tommy, it’s ok,” she says, but it’s a lie and she doesn’t understand. Blackness creeps at its vision as it struggles to move, its point so urgent it makes itself feel physically ill in its attempt to speak. She adopts a pained grimace and begins to stand, and for a moment it can relax, because it looks as if she’s going to leave, and it isn’t safe here. “Hey. Just- lie back down, ok?”

And then her hands fall.

It freezes, as calloused fingers sink gently into the surface of its shoulders. They nudge at its skin, pressing downward in a way that is only insistent, not cruel nor painful. It is led gently down to the cushions below it. Puffy smiles, unaware of its internal struggle, as it obeys her gentle movement, sinking back down and closing its mouth.

She sits at the edge of the bed this time, trying to placate it by brushing her hands up against the sheets. It watches, eyes wide.

It is not touched. It is not moved nor maneuvered nor touched save for when it has something to do. A purpose to fulfill. It spends endless time in harsh nothingness, no light nor body to expand the depths of its mind. 

It has been hurt. It has been shoved roughly to the ground or into water or against a wall and broken, blows raining against its skin. Its disobedience has been a product of its selfish nature in the past, but it has been cured by the many hours it's spent being retaught how to function. How to live. In a way that benefits both future and past, makes up for the things that quantify its sins.

“You’re ok,” she whispers, a flicker of white hair falling past her temple. The strands lounge against her shoulder and stay there. It stares up at her, finally focuses for the first time since it has come here.

This is Puffy. And, surrounding her, is a home, so endlessly familiar yet impossible. She’s the same as she always has been. But there is so obsidian darkness to dampen their meeting, nor the sound of lava bubbling, chains rattling, the bone-deep whistle of death pervading the air.

It can’t be true — genuinely. It can’t. Memories and hallucinations are certainly not foreign to it. Its father reaching down and taking its hand when it can’t quite gather the strength to stand. Wilbur singing gently in the corner of a cell. Technoblade at His side, holding a blade and waiting for his moment to cut its jailer down.

But this is Puffy, isn’t it? It has never hallucinated her, so almost forgotten and shying away from delusions.

“You’ve had a rough go of it, sweetheart,” she says softly. It's frozen against the sheets. “But you’re… back now. Somehow. I don’t understand it, but you are.”

Her hand skates across the sheets, and then folds. Her loose fist trails its knuckles across her knee, her eyes casting down to stare at the subtle movement of her hand. It notices — she’s no longer wearing any rings or jewelry upon her fingers. Once upon a time, she’d worn many layers of gold and white and silver, cascading across her fingers.

If this was a hallucination, it thinks, her hand would be weighed down with all the jewels in the world.

“I’ll. Uhm- tell you what we know.”

It blinks. 

“You went to visit Warden at the prison. He let you in.” Puffy nods to herself, tilting her head. Their eyes meet. “Do you remember that? I saw you that day. I tried to tell you not to go, Tommy.”

She isn’t dignified with a response. It doesn’t think it could speak even if it was less selfish and desired to. But she just sighs, wrapping fingers about her knees and crossing her legs.

“You went in. Something went wrong in the prison, and…”

Her voice curls in on itself and chokes. She leans to the side, eyes squeezing shut when they move away from it. What does she hide from? It’s not as if it wants to criminalize her for fate — and certainly not when it has been repaired and molded and changed for the better under His hands. 

“And you didn’t come out.” She lets out a breath as if shes been waiting since arrived to do so. “You… were stuck in the prison, and nothing I did could help. Nothing we did. Phil was there. He came as soon as he heard the news. I think he nearly fistfought the Warden.”

Thats news to it. He had always told it that no one would come — and perhaps that had been a lie, but what does it matter? It doesn’t deserve the efforts of its family or its allies. It needed to be rearranged and torn and sewn together for a greater purpose and it had been, as simple as that. 

(It does know Phil, though. And something burns deep in its gut at that name, cutting a hole through its stomach, slicing back the meat from its bones. Phil had been its, once, hadn’t he? Family in a way much deeper than blood, adopting a group of three children far too cruel to be taken in. It had loved him, and it had been loved in return, and-)

“We got in far too late. We all assumed Dream had just-” a sharp intake of breath and she shuffles, chuckling darkly. Puffy’s voice warbles. “Dream had just gotten hungry, I suppose.”

It almost wishes that had been its fate. For resurrection requires a body, does it not? If it had been taken and eaten at least its death would have been swifter, not repeated for sycophants and for their nightmarish leader, masked and dark and cruel. 

“It destroyed Wilbur first. Before we even knew you were…” She waves a hand and dismisses whatever words she’d been about to say. “Then, there was the funeral. I think… everything went a bit downhill after that.”

Her breath has begun to pick up its pace by the time she goes silent. It watches her impassively, eyes wide, still unable to process the revelation that she is here. It’s certainly not safe, but if Puffy is here — and Puffy doesn’t lie — then perhaps it has an instant to catch its breath. To stretch its wings from nothingness and feel, perhaps for the first time in years, the sun against its back. 

“Wilbur had to be hospitalized. Nearly broke Phil t’do it. Technoblade wasn’t much better off. Warden- uhm. Was inconsolable. He’s- he’s changed. I won’t go into it.” She unwinds her knees and her knuckles and leans forward, till her chest just brushes her legs. She breathes, deep, down into the ground. Then she straightens, eyes wet, voice warbling as she looks it in the eyes. “I. Can’t help but feel that this is my fault, Tommy. I-” her mouth opens and shuts. “I let you go in. I… I could have fought harder- to- to keep you out. And.” She swallows. “And I’m sorry.”

It seems her words take a monumental amount of effort. It’s helpless to return her apologies — undeserved, because it has never been anything but selfish, and she should not blame herself for its failures. 

But she does anyway. Seen in the way her voice hitches, in the way her eyes are filled with awful, pervasive guilt. It can’t deny — what emotion she shares is real. She isn’t lying, even if she is misguided.

(But- that’s cruel to say, isn’t it? Because it has never been able to center itself on the right track without intervention, and it has no clue what to do, floating without a leash to loop about its neck and yank it back to the surface of the ocean. Puffy is not stupid. Puffy is as intelligent as anyone else, and is better than it, is good in a way it has never achieved.)

“But you’re back, aren’t you? I’m sure you’ve heard this same train of thought from everyone else here, but truly, Tommy. We are elated to have you back. Even if its… hard.”

Oh.

It supposes that makes sense. The anvil was always going to fall. She wasn’t lying — perhaps she really is happy to see him back. Perhaps she truly is relieved. But at the same time she knows, whether it be subconscious or obvious, that it will only burden them. It will drag them down without a rope to hold it afloat, pulling its family deep underwater and feeding off the air bubbles they choke on until they’re cold. It will remain there, on the brink of fatigue, paddling upward only to realize that it has left its family deep in the ocean, cold and swollen with the pressure of gravity.

Puffy may be happy that it is back. That doesn’t stop her from acknowledging its faults. Its return is a burden. There’s really only one thing to do about that.

(It needs to go back.)

“I wish I knew what you’re thinking,” she murmurs suddenly, snapping it from its misery. “I used to be… So good at deciphering your thoughts. But now you’re… You’re at a place where I think you are going to need all of us to help. We’ve all fucked up. Now it's our turn to try and fix things.”

If she knew what it was thinking, perhaps she would help. It needs to go back. It needs to find Him and it needs to leave. It cannot continue to leach from its family's bonds, to rip them apart and to let them put themselves together in its absence and then to ruin things again, just as they’ve begun to improve.

But there’s no way for it to communicate what twists inside of it, darkness billowing up until the final vestiges of a plan slip through its fingers.

It is hardly lucid enough to understand its own thoughts. But it will try when the time comes to leave once again.

Chapter Text

Phil is told, in no uncertain terms, that Tommy will get better.

Puffy leaves his youngest son’s room with a watery smile and an offer of a hug, whispering about movement and words that Phil has yet to see. His physical injuries, too, are ones that can all be healed despite their more permanent ramifications.

He’s not sure that he can truly believe the words he’s fed, of optimism and kindness. He’d been told before the truth was revealed, that Tommy would be ok in the prison. That Dream had no way of touching him, and that the boy trapped within his cell would be safe.

So sue him for being doubtful, even if he knows he should have hope. 

Tommy’s a little bit more expressive now that a bit of time since his initial disappearance has passed. He moves — even if it’s just slight inclines of the head, soft frowns. He speaks in monosyllabic expressions, typically repeating other people’s words when he can’t speak on his own.

There… isn’t a lot to do in the meantime as his youngest heals. He’s easily able to settle into a comfortable routine of grief and of self-maintenance. His sons don’t even need to be considered part of his routine anymore — they take precedence more than anything he’d ever call important. He drives Wilbur to therapy appointments and he goes to the library to pick up books for Technoblade and he shops for groceries and he does. He goes, and he goes, and he…

He tries. Phil really, truly tries. He feeds and cares for the ghost in his home with all the love a parent should, but something still feels missing.

He hates himself for it.

(Tommy is back. His son is--)

Phil has spent a lot of time thinking recently. About grief, and about mourning, and about how it feels to find someone that was meant to have been dead returned. He knows that his apprehension towards his son is warranted, but that doesn’t make it any less selfish.

He starts with sorting through old belongings of Tommy’s that have been sent to storage. Clothes, books, art, toys. Anything from when he was a baby to when he left home, onesies to suits. Things that none of them — not even Technoblade, who spurred them on to pack his younger brother’s room in the first place — have touched in years or dared to throw away.

The living room feels oddly packed. Which makes sense — considering the piles of boxes sitting all around. But it’s as if there are people milling about as well, only there in spirit and memory. There- in the corner stands Sam, screwing the back onto an old broken pocketwatch Wilbur had asked him for help with. Jschlatt is by the cabinets, obnoxiously slamming them when none of them reveal any liquor. Dream leans up against Phil’s couch and murmurs sweet, honeyed words. 

That particular remnant has Phil forced to set down a box and breathe for a moment. The idea that that man had ever entered his home is — enraging. Horrifying. Completely neutral.

He’s had a lot of trouble deciphering his emotions lately, but who can blame him? He picks up an old L’Manberg-flag tie out of a box and tosses it into a discard pile. There are a lot of memories to shift through, in his case. Phil is old. Much older than most and then a bit older still, to the point that any of his companions are significantly younger than he. He sets a worn leather notebook — empty, never used — into a box full of items to keep. Long black feathers twitch and settle behind him, roused by his own unconscious anxiety.

Is he keeping the right things? Tommy can’t protest. Can’t look at his own two hands and chose right from left let alone decide what belongings he needs or wants. Is Phil making the right decisions here? He tosses a broken number 2 pencil into the discard pile. A sheet with small cars on it in the storage pile. Should he wait for Tommy’s input? Should he maybe ask Wilbur or Technoblade about it all? Or even Puffy or Sam? Should he-

“Dad.”

He whirls around. There’s Wilbur, holding a pack of nicotine gum and raising an eyebrow. That’s when he realizes — his wings are shuddering, his breathing heavy.

But Wilbur just considers him for a moment, neither of them able to speak. Then, with a soft exhale — and even from this proximity Phil can smell the nicotine upon his breath — he nods.

“Right. Come on. Let’s take a walk.”

Phil has to snort. “I’m the one meant to be parenting you, Wil.”

“I’m adopted,” says the boy, simple as that. Then he gestures upward and grins, lazily extending a hand outward. “Let’s go.”

Five minutes later — his wings tucked behind a shawl, a cigarette parsing his fingers — Phil finds himself out. Warm smoke fills the air, both he and Wilbur engaging in a habit that they both know is terrible. Fuck it. Phil’s son and Wilbur’s brother has just come back from the dead — getting lung cancer seems as far away as the stars. 

Their boots crunch across the driveway, gravel speckling a pathway for them to follow. Wilbur tips his head back, eyes shut behind his glasses as he takes a long drag from his cigarette. Then, when vertigo claims him, he laughs and steadies himself with Phil’s elbow, the elder man more than happy to steady him.

“So,” says Phil.

“So,” replies Wilbur, nodding. “Why are you having an anxiety attack over baby clothes, old man?”

A chuckle and a snort. It’s a fair question. “I’m damn sure you know the answer to that.”

“Sorta. Explain it anyways.”

Phil almost protests. But a gust of air knocks against his back and he cuts him off, so he considers his answer, silent for a long moment. 

“I hardly have any idea how to do this right. You can read all the parenting books in the world and still fly blind. It’s not like I had good examples for parents — they were shit.” He lets out a wry laugh. “I just- fucking hell. Am I doing any of this right? Heh.”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” Wilbur says. Phil laughs.

“That’s why you’re the person I asked. I don’t need an answer from you. It’s not your duty to tell me if I’m a good parent.”

“Well.” Another drag of his cigarette. Wilbur coughs lightly into the open chilled air. “I don’t think most people have to deal with their kids being murdered and then… resurrected. Minus a leg.”

“I suppose not.” This time it’s Phil’s turn to turn to his cigarette. It tastes as awful as it always has. He doesn’t cough. “Though I’m sure that’s sort of… every parent’s nightmare. Subconscious nightmare,” he adds as an afterthought. “I doubt my very specific situation gets dreamt up a whole lot.”

For another long moment, there’s silence. They meet the edge of the driveway and start walking down the unpaved sidewalk, careful upon the rocky terrain. Wilbur pulls his jacket closer and sighs, muttering some complaint about the chill as his glasses fog. “Technoblade’s been drafting up ideas for a prosthetic.”

Phil nods. “He showed me one. I’ve been asking around.”

“I reckon Sam knows someone.”

“He probably does. It’s just…” He cuts off.

“Weird?” Wilbur suggests. Phil nods, and the boy does in return. “Everything is. All of it. Talking to literally anyone feels like- like shoving through jello.”

“Oh?” As far as Phil knew, no one else has really heard much about their situation. “Who’d you talk to?”

“Tubbo and Ranboo,” Wilbur says, voice not without a hint of mournfulness. “They’re… coping. Frightened, probably. Were right dicks to me, yeah, but I can’t really blame them too much. They just- said some shit things.”

Phil doesn’t get angry. He just sighs. He’s more than used to people being odd about Wilbur, and he knows that their concerns are warranted. But Ranboo hardly knew his son for long, and Tubbo hasn’t seen him in years. So he slides a hand across Wil’s shoulders, letting the boy lean back some, supporting himself on Phil’s arm. “Like what?”

“Mm… Just assumed I was lying. Dumb shit.” He gestures vaguely, sparks flying off of his cigarette and stomping out under his heels. Phil’s wings shrug out of the shawl atop them, unfurling just enough to hang across both his own and Wilbur’s backs. “Told me I was- supposed to be better.”

Phil scoffs. He’s had enough of people making their own assumptions about him and his sons to last a lifetime. But this isn’t about him — and he doesn’t make it that way. “They’re… kids. And they’re scared. I didn’t believe Sam at first when he told me. You didn’t believe me either. Their disbelief is shit, and they’re not reacting well, but I can understand why.”

“That doesn’t excuse what they said,” Wilbur mumbles.

Phil’s heart soars with pride at that subtle admittance of confidence. Of that knowledge that Wilbur deserves to be treated with love, given by the boy himself. “No. It doesn’t.”

The words hang in the air for a moment. The sun has started to lower in the sky, orange and pink tones surrounding bright yellow rays, clouds starting to crawl through and mask it all. No stars have appeared yet, but there’s the promise of a bright night on the horizon.

“If I’m being honest,” Phil starts once again, “the lot you and your brothers have been given in this life makes me— fucking furious. Especially because I can’t always do anything to help, even though I’m your father, and I should- should be able to help.” Wilbur makes to protest — but Phil raises a hand, silencing him. “I think- uhm. I’ve been letting my own grief take me over. For a long time. What I think is that I’ve been distant, and unfairly. Maybe we all have- but I have a duty as your parent to be there for you. For Technoblade. And, now that he’s back- Tommy.”

“I think you’ve had a pretty decent reaction, all things considered.”

Phil muses on that for a moment. “Well. What I think is that we need to go back inside. And that maybe I need to talk with Technoblade soon. And Tommy — even if he doesn’t listen. Or- or can’t.”

A soft sigh. Wilbur drops his cigarette stub on the ground and sparks burst against his heel when he steps on it, flame gone out. Phil doesn’t comment. “It might be both at this point, heh?” They start walking back toward the house. “Like- not that he doesn’t want to listen. But he was with Dream for some amount of time and that’ll fuck anyone up. Maybe he thinks- he’s not allowed to? Or he shouldn’t?”

“That would definitely explain the…” He waves a hand around in an attempt to demonstrate an abstract topic. It doesn’t work. “All the silence. The refusal or inability to speak.”

“Techno told me he didn’t talk a whole lot after exile either.”

“He didn’t.” Phil nods, confirming. “Walked around like a livin’ ghost. We didn’t get the story of exile out of him for a long time.”

“After he stopped stealing all of Technoblade’s gapples and just started- yknow, asking for them, I presume?” Wilbur grins.

Phil, in response, laughs. “Oh- yeah. Certainly a while after that. Uh- was a little worryingly obsessed with absorption, for a while there.”

“I mean- Tommy could take some fucking beatings, couldn’t he!” Wilbur replies, eyes widening. “Shit- Phil, he was a little beserker. And- and it was on purpose sometimes!”

A shared cackle. “Guess it sorta runs in the family, doesn’t it? All of my kids are infuriatingly self-destructive.”

Wilbur gives him a salute and a strick, solemn glare. Phil bursts out into more chuckles, the two of them both suddenly sniffling a bit. The whole conversation is so absurd from an outside standpoint that in retrospect they both have to laugh. (And, maybe, privately- cry a little. Though no one is around to notice, and neither of them mentions it either.)

---

Philza finds Technoblade sitting on the front steps leading up to the porch of the house. There’s a small fire lit in the gravel beneath him, smoldering chunks of ash crawling up into the sky and fizzling out when their sparks can no longer sustain themselves. There’s a small mass within it, though its form is unidentifiable. 

Red eyes are reflected by yellow flame when Phil faces his son. Pink hair drapes messily down across Techno’s chest, unbraided and loose. His neck tensing as he swallows is the only indication that he sees Phil at all, knees tucked to his chest and hands intertwined into fists.

His father slides onto the steps beside him. They do not touch. No wings are seen.

For a long time — minutes or hours, only the stars and moon could possibly say — they’re silent. The fire crackles quietly, faced with two pairs of glazed eyes, smoke a cozy smelling tinge to the air.

“It’s a prosthesis design I was thinkin’ about. I carved it up. Didn’t like it much.” Technoblade’s explanation isn’t asked for, but Phil nods slowly. “And It just-” a soft exhale “- felt wrong.”

“What about it?”

Technoblade stretches a hand out and waves it around, fingers dancing across the air, golden light reflected upon the sharpened ends of his nails. His vision remains transfixed upon the fire bouncing back upon him. “All of it. Tommy in general, I think. That’s- hm. Kind of horrible to say, honestly, but-”

“No, no it makes sense,” Phil argues back. “You can be happy he’s back and also confused. Or even scared. Anything. Your emotions are your emotions. This entire situation is…”

He grapples with the words for a moment. Fortunately, Techno seems to understand. “Ridiculous.”

“Scuffed,” Phil adds. “All of it, I think. And I haven’t been helping. Not as much as I could be.”

He braces himself for a laugh and an agreement. But Technoblade only nods, half to his chest, almost unsure in movement. 

“Sure,” he says, voice soft. “But — Phil, you’re Tommy’s dad just as much as Wil an’ I’s. You’ve been taking care of Wilbur an’ I for… years. And you’ve been grieving beyond all that, too. I don’t think… I don’t think you being distant bothered me at all in the way that it did Wilbur.”

The lump in his throat stays stubbornly there. Phil nods, wordlessly, chin dipping down to his chest, head half-hung. “You’re both incredibly resilient, you know that? Incredible kids in general?”

Technoblade shrugs and stretches out, holding his hands over the fire before him. It’s begun to die down, and he waves at it slightly, coaxing it back up. The prosthetic within is nearly dust. He warms his palms against the flame. 

“I mean it.” Phil looks away, eyes darting up to the sky instead. There’s the moon — high above, wavering behind a soft covering of clouds. She smiles kindly upon him. “And- sometimes I hate this world a little more for what it’s done to you three.”

“That’s life.”

“That’s life,” Phil agrees, nodding. “But I don’t think any of us are very practiced in liking it.”

“Or accepting it,” Technoblade pitches in. He chuckles, gruff and thick. “You-”

He cuts off. His voice is heavy in a way it rarely is. 

Techno has never been one for physical affection. Out of all of Phil’s sons, his eldest has always seemed to dislike it the most, always darting away from fleeting touches or shaking his head awkwardly at the offer of a hug. But Phil shrugs his shoulder outward, and the man moves closer, resting his head gently upon the extended limb.

It only takes a moment before Phil moves in, pulling Technoblade closer with an arm around his broad shoulders as if he’s still only a child. For a moment Techno is frozen, before he turns his head, burying it within Phil’s hair, breathing strained, hands shaking where they clutch at his own knees.

“I’m tired,” he says, parsed around soft lips, an admittance so fragile that Phil can’t help the deep ache in his heart that it elicits. 

“I’m sorry,” is all the elder can reply, as he cards his free hand gently through Technoblade’s hair, down his back. It’s as if he’s soothing a much younger boy. But neither Technoblade nor his brothers ever had the luxury of a true childhood — and so Phil doesn’t mind at all, leaning in and cradling his son with a fierceness that burns like the flames in front of them.

“You deserve so much better, Tech. I’ve never met someone with as much resilience as you, mate. Not in any of my… various centuries.” He looks away from the moon, back to the collapsing fire beneath them, the dirt packed beneath that. Technoblade is still and silent beneath his arm, breathing deep and heavy as if he’s trying to hold back some unnamed, harsh emotion. “And I love you. All three of you. I’d kill and I’d die for any of you in an instant. Not saying I’m gonna do either anytime soon. But I need you to know that. I love you.”

And then, shaking, Technoblade nods, face hidden. 

---

He manages to get the sorting-out of Tommy’s old belongings done, which Phil certainly counts as a success — no matter how minute. Sure- he has a few more minor breakdowns, but who can blame him? Tommy can’t. Wilbur apparently doesn’t. Neither does Technoblade, to his surprise. After his elder son’s show of vitriol against barely a week ago, any affection from Techno is odd to Phil. But he welcomes it readily — he won’t let fighting words spit in the heat of a moment stick with him for long.

He makes it through the week without his house destroyed or his family broken. Tommy doesn’t improve — but he doesn’t get any worse, either. Phil makes plans to call Tubbo once again, to prove that the impossible really has happened. Techno makes plans to calls Sam, asking about his connections within the world of disability and prostheses. It’s a calm week.

It feels like things have finally begun to settle some, after the revelations that have been beating them, over and over, piled higher and higher and higher up each member of the household’s back. Phil’s wings feel as if they could break apart into ash and dust at the smallest of touches, wrapped away within the universe and kept hidden from disturbance. He feels, in general, tired.

But it’s not a bad exhaustion. It’s not necessarily a bad week — not in the way that they’ve been for so long. It’s neutral, which is a rare occasion. It doesn’t mean that he’s spent his time joyful and exuberant, but he can say that he was productive, and that he was ok. 

Ok. That’s the best anyone can hope for nowadays, isn’t it?

So Phil walks up the stairs to the upper floor of his home with feet that drag — yes. But he does so like a man spent from a day’s work would, not one weighed down by the death of a child or the ruin of a country. His hands feel echoes of skulls and of deadly sand and of a knife between them. He ignores the call and he presses his fingers instead to the grain of Tommy’s door, sliding it ajar.

His son has been moving more often recently. Only small things — a flicker of an expression other than guilt or fear, a slight nod. Tommy is a ghost in suspension, but warmth seems able to coax itself back into his frozen limbs.

Phil looks inside the room. There’s no longer an iv pole nor any clunky monitors, replaced with less advanced and more compact items as Tommy gradually — and at a snail’s pace — improves physically. The window billows with a soft wind, shadowed by curtains and slightly opened. Tommy’s bed is messy and unmade, the pillows thrown to the ground and the blankets tugged about, pushed towards the walls.

It occurs to Phil in less than a second that it looks as if a struggle has occurred. He scans the room, panic rising, and his eyes fall upon the window. Tommy sits there on the sill with his legs hung out, his head tipped back. His atrophied wings shiver at his back as if he’s about to take flight. He's haloed in silver moonlight, pooling upon his shoulders and dipping into his neck and rolling over his hair in waves where golden curls have begun to grow back.

Then he shifts forward atop his legs, and his wings do not open, and he falls.

Chapter Text

There’s a slam and a snap. The sound of bone curving in the wrong direction, a hoarse scream. It sounds far too deep to be Tommy’s. Phil’s back drags against the ground as he freefalls and then tumbles, arms curved around a wildly struggling bundle.

Then the pain hits him again, and he turns his head against the ground to see one of his wings pressed beneath his back at a terrible angle. He groans, and Tommy jerks upward out of his grasp, wings flapping wildly around the dim midnight air.

“What are you doing!” Phil shouts, lurching up off the ground. He can’t quite keep himself straight —  his vision twists, black at the edges. His wing —  oh end, his wing —  pulses with pain, but he runs forward anyways, grabbing Tommy by the arm right before he stumbles and falls.

This is the most movement he’s seen from his son in a long time, and it’s coming right after the kid tried to jump out of an open window, presumably chasing death. So Phil half-tackles him, gripping Tommy by the waist and falling back to the ground. This time, when Tommy starts to struggle, Phil doesn’t dare let go. 

“I-“ 

And then Tommy is gasping, struggling to speak, lip flecked in blood where he’s bit through it. “Phil- I need to go.”

It’s the first time his son has said his name in almost three full years. Phil pauses as Tommy’s fingernails dig into his arms, clawing at them for release.

“I’ve-“ his voice is croaky and broken and soft, a whisper if a whisper could be a shout. Tommy’s face twists into an incredulous grin and then a frightened grimace and then a mixture of both, brow drawn together but a smile tugging at his lips. “I need to go back, it- it isn’t safe here, I can’t- can’t-“

“What’s not safe?” Phil demands, a mix of pain and alarm and some odd elation at seeing Tommy so animated filling him. “Breathe, mate, just- just breathe-“

“No!” Shrieks Tommy, and his struggling doubles, his breath sounding more like wet sobs than inhales. He kicks Phil and his wings snap out, the two of them still half sitting, half lying on the ground as Tommy tries to wrestle from his grip. “No- no no no no- I can’t- I can’t- it’s- it’s going to hurt you-“

“Tommy,” Phil begs, and he finds that his own voice sounds like a sob, all choked and broken. Because this is terrifying. Bloodshot eyes and bloody teeth and sharpened nails, Tommy is frantic and terrified and Phil cannot do anything to protect him. “Please-“

His son manages to wrench himself from his grasp once again. Phil watches as Tommy tries to stand and then immediately trips over his own missing leg, slamming back down to the ground. He tries again and again, though, fingers digging holes into the dirt. Phil stands, one wing trailing behind him, and runs, tripping over his own feathers to get to Tommy. He falls to his knees in front of the boy, watching as Tommy’s unseeing eyes flicked between everything around, the nothingness behind the ocean blue a sickening sight. He lurches forward but Phil catches him, gripping Tommy’s elbows and then pulling him forward and then-

He pushes his son into a hug, equal parts keeping him from hurting himself and also because End, Phil misses his son. Misses hugging him. Misses smiling at him. Misses everything about Tommy, and his grief comes flooding back with a dry sob split from his lips, finally ripping past the shroud of numbness he’s been forced under for so long. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, almost as if a prayer, as he wraps his shaking arms around his son and pulls Tommy close to his chest, one arm snaking around to settle on blond, close-shaven hair, the other between two wings. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Tommy continues to struggle, dry heaving on sobs and desperately scrambling at Phil’s arms. Bloody streaks scratch up and down his skin but he does not move, refusing to let Tommy disappear once again. Wordless begging noises continue to fall from the boy’s lips and pile up against the dirt like sins, as if Tommy has anything to apologize for.

“I’m sorry,” Phil cries, rocking the boy in his arms back and forth, doing everything he can to soothe him. Tommy shrieks out a terrified sob. Phil flinches back, but then just quietly shushes him, tucking Tommy’s head into the crook of his neck.

And then he goes limp. Phil feels Tommy’s head fall, his shoulders untensing. His wings slump behind him, his hands dropping down to the ground and hanging limply, dragging slight trails in the dirt as Phil rocks him like a child. 

And Tommy screams.

That’s all it can be called, really. The awful, broken noise that shreds the air as soon as it touches it, equal parts sob and wail and fearful cry for release. He screams, and Phil feels him shaking so terribly it’s like the whole ground moves beneath him. There’s a soft nudge upon his neck as Tommy buries his head there, and then wetness as tears are yanked from his eyes, his jaw shifting with the force of another sob. The next comes quieter — but with a grief so terrible that Phil has to choke down his own cry, rubbing circles into the space between Tommy’s wings and still rocking him like he might’ve once done when his son was still a baby. Horrible cries continue to ring out in the air as Tommy shakes, his hands crawling up through the air and then landing on Phil’s chest, gripping the front of his shirt for dear life. 

“I’ve got you,” says the elder, because Tommy looks as if he thinks he might fall. Phil knows the feeling — he’s been waiting for Tommy to be revealed as some terrible and beautiful illusion since the day he was returned. “I’ve- I’ve got you, Tommy. I’ve- you’re ok. It’s ok. It’s ok.”

It isn’t. Tommy isn’t ok. Nothing about this is ok. But Phil can lie now and make up the difference later. He will maneuver the stars into alignment and the sun into the sky for his sons — and he will make it alright.

On the bright side, his son is no longer struggling. The kid seems to have expended all of his painfully limited energy, exhausted and shivering in the night. His wails taper off into sobs and hiccups, his voice so shot that he falls into a fit off coughing every few moments. Phil just runs his hand over Tommy’s back and waits for it to subside, still shifting back and forth, back and forth on his knees, head tilted to the side and lying softly on top of Tommy’s. The proximity is terrifying . The proximity is wonderful. To be able to hug his son is something he never thought he could ever do again, but here’s Tommy, wrapped in his protective arms and shrouded by his wings. 

“I need you to be safe,” says Tommy, a whistle to his words, throat torn with disuse. “I- I- I need-”

He cuts off, grappling so intensely with his thoughts that he can’t communicate at all, shutting down and clawing closer to Phil. Despite the pain in his wing, Phil drags his double appendages forward and drapes them across his son, swallowing him with feathers as if this itself will keep him safe.

But then Phil moves forward, pulling Tommy off of his chest and squeezing his fingers into the boy’s shoulders. Tommy stares, expression lost, face torn apart by a sob. Everything about him screams fear and pain.

“And how is killing yourself going to help us?” Phil demands, voice equal parts soft and horrified. Tommy flinches anyways, ducking his head as if expecting a hit. “No- hey, kid, I’m not gonna hurt you. I just- I just want to know why?”

Tommy trembles, as he ever so slowly lifts his head. His shoulders hunch inward, back bent. His hands, draped across the ground, shiver forward and clutch the fabric of his sweatpants, creasing the black and rippling it with the force of his shaking grip. 

A soft sniff. “I- I come back. I- always- come back,” he says, careful, voice wavering, forceful as he tries to drag the words out. “H- He makes me c- come back.”

“From-” Phil sucks in a breath, hoping the answers to his questions aren’t what he expects. That his suspicions —  as outlandish as they are —  can’t be true. “From what?”

Tommy lets out a panicked laugh, and his eyes widen, tears dripping steadily down his cheeks. “The- it’s so empty, dad- he- it’s just-” He cuts off, mouth opening and closing, eyes squeezing themselves shut for the force of a hiccup. When he looks back up, he looks broken. “I- die, Phil. I die, and I- I come back, and I just keep dying, and it won’t stop-”

Another broken keen as he slips forward, collapsing under the force of a cry. Phil is quick to lean over and steady Tommy, pulling him back in towards his chest. The boy lies there, wracked with sobs, cheek pressed into Phil’s shirt and hands clutching just beneath it. Phil does all he can. He sits, and he waits, and he tries not to break under the force of it all.

In all of his many hundreds of years, Phil has very rarely seen any form of necromancy magic. It happens, of course, with zombies and skeletons madmen’s projects gone wrong upon cursed land. He’s seen terrible amalgamations of dead things crawl up from the first and assimilate with the world, pretending to live. 

But Tommy is whole. Tommy is traumatized and frightened and injured, but he’s not dead, and he’s not yet halved by his experience. Phil has seen ghosts and zombies and skeletons and trickery and illusions. Smoke upon mirrors, blurring the lines between reality. 

He heard, once, about a book.

A book bound in simple leather, with paper as thick as any other. Written with unassuming black pen ink, and short at that. It was only a few pages within it that had caught Phil’s attention —  through retellings, for he could never actually locate the book.

Why? Because you had to be dead to get it.

So he’d never actually gotten to see it. He’s had his fair brushes with death —  to the point that her embrace could be like a lover’s —  but he’s never truly met her, only caught glimpses in the edge of a sword or in a pool of his blood, gurgling from wounds that should be fatal. The book has never been found, and the world has not suffered from that fact.

Or so he’d thought. Phil had thought the book to be a myth. Phil had thought death was the one true end, untouchable by all, a last-resort, a final option that was always in reach. Phil had thought Tommy was dead, as well. 

But here’s his son. Shaking, sobbing, clutching to Phil’s chest as if the slightest movement will have them torn apart. So he wonders- could Dream have found this book?

“Oh,” he says, because there’s not anything else to be said. He leans in closer, eyes wide and unblinking and unseeing as he tries to process. “O- Ok. Ok, Tommy,” he continues, finally managing to catch his trailing consciousness and shuffle it back together enough to see past the static of rage-horror-grief in his mind. 

It’s cold. 

Cool, light air blankets them. It flutters through Phil’s hair and feathers and tousles at the back of Tommy’s t-shirt, his hair not yet long enough to be moved in the wind. The night is black. Endlessly so, with the moonlight spanning forward for infinity. Phil feels as if he can see every mile about him, every inch of the land between him and the universe pressed beneath his fingers, his vision high above and foggy, twisting as it lands upon Tommy and himself. 

He slips deft fingers upon Tommy’s spine and shifts the other hand to the crook of his knees. Phil is careful — endlessly careful — as he presses spindly ribs up to his chest and feels thin fingers clutch at his shoulders, his son letting out a fearful half-gasp at the movement. “It’s ok,” Phil says, and Tommy stills. “I’m just bringing you back inside.”

He lands on one knee, and then another. He twists himself upwards and though it hurts, shooting varied pulses of pain through his injured wing, the feeling of Tommy actively moving within his arms is worth it. A thin cheek settles against his shoulder and corpse-like hands drape across his chest and legs bounce, ever so slightly, with the movement of carrying his son inside.

It feels a bit like walking a coffin down an aisle at a funeral. Except there’s a body to be found, now, and no one topples in on themselves at the wake. There are no choked words and a broken eulogy, nor the soft sounds of crying in one of the chairs at the threshold of the room. Dirt piles upon an open grave and buries an empty casket, lined in silk and never really meant to be buried at all.

Of course- no one could have known at the time, Phil thinks, starstruck and dizzy as he holds his son, reanimated in a way he hasn’t been for — for what? For nearing three years, isn’t it? Tommy’s still crying. It’s quieter, now, but it’s emotional and pained and Phil feels tears dance down his button-down, feels wetness crawl up his skin. 

“S’ ok,” he says to Tommy, words heard secondhand, a door slipped open and a light turned on as he steps within his home, reeling and processing and grieving again. Phil says it as a promise, because he vows to make it true.