Chapter Text
Phil hates blood.
Red Viners leave a lot of blood behind instead of despawning.
Phil hates Red Viners.
There are other reasons: authoritarianism, an unwillingness to die, kidnapping. None are as visceral as making him deal with so much blood.
The fighting is easy. Phil spent fifty years alone running Hardcore, fighting is not his problem. But Hardcore mobs drop loot when they die, they do not leave bodies. Red Viners make a point of leaving bodies.
A captured Red Viner explained the ideology to Phil once. He had listened through a building migraine entirely against his will because Red (and to be fair, Technoblade) thought it would be useful.
Red exists because Phil hates blood.
Wait, no.
Red exists because Phil needed to kill many, many mobs while running Hardcore and it became tiring. It is not quite Pink, that soft and bubbly sweet misericorde serial killer, but they are paired in Phil’s mind, when he thinks of the people in his head.
And they are people, all of them, built for when Phil needed to be somewhere else and now full-grown into themselves.
Red exists now because Phil hates blood, and so Phil, who is ancient and jaded and should really be used to what the Red Viners do by now, slips away, and Red takes hold.
-
Red finds Tubbo in a box
Tubbox
son boy
son tubbox son boy
Red rolls his eyes at the crows.
Red finds Tubbo in a box.
“You’re not a corpse,” Red says, to Tubbo, who is in a box.
“What,” says Tubbo. Because Tubbo is curled up in a box, he sees Red as Ph1Lza Minecraft towering over him, his cloak-like wings flared out behind him.
The box was good when he was hiding from the weirdos in red cloaks holding long bladed weapons but now that Ph1Lza Minecraft is here he is more than a little bit entirely trapped.
Ph1Lza Minecraft taps the side of the box with a silver crow-headed cane. “Red Vines killed everyone here. We killed them. So many corpses to clean up. You’re not a corpse.” He steps back, gives Tubbo room to step out.
Ph1Lza Minecraft is so much bigger up close than on TV. He is also, apparently, much weirder.
Tubbo doesn't remember his eyes being that shade of red, either.
“No,” Tubbo says, carefully. “I hid so I wouldn’t become a corpse.
Ph1Lza nods. “Good job,” he praises. “Follow me?”
Tubbo notices the crows. They are everywhere , and one of them lands on the side of the box. Ph1Lza laughs when they caw, as though they’re talking.
“Uh,” Tubbo says. He sits up slightly. Ph1Lza is a hero. He probably won’t murder children (not a child, Tubbo remembers himself saying, as though that matters right now) he just found in a box.
“I have food?” Ph1Lza suggests, making a weird pecking gesture with his hands. “Crumbs, for you.”
Remembering food makes Tubbo remember that he hasn’t eaten in… a long time.
Whoops. Not pog.
His stomach grumbles.
"Okay," Tubbo says. He levers himself out of the box and self-consciously tries to pat down his curly hair.
"Tubbo is out of tubbox!" Ph1Lza crows. His smile is a weird razor blade.
Tubbo freezes. "How do you know my name?" he asks.
"They told me," Ph1Lza says, sweeping his hands to gesture towards all the crows. "S'good name."
Right. Talking to crows. That is one of Ph1Lza Minecraft's superpowers. "Thank you?" Tubbo pitches his voice up to cover the warmth he feels. It is, after all, a good name.
Tubbo picked it himself.
Ph1Lza wanders off. Tubbo realizes that he should follow, if he's going to be getting food.
He scrambles after. He stretches his thin, membranous wings out behind himself. They still feel cramped from the box.
Red Viners take hybrids and try to recruit them.
Hybrids who won't go with them die in a way that leaves bodies behind.
Tubbo didn't want to find out what they would choose to do with him.
That's moot now.
-
Red can't stop smiling as Tubbo follows it.
A child! It found a child! A son boy, even, as the crows repeat. It hasn't had a child in years ! Not since Wilbur left.
They reach Phil's jump-boat.
Tubbo looks at Red from under his ridiculous curls.
Red is smug. That is what it is feeling. Smug that this time it is why they have a child, not Phil.
No fridges required.
It has no idea what kind of food Tubbo eats. Tubbo has wings, but they're like dragonflies or bees, not bird like Red.
Red points to the wall of chests one room back from the flight controls and says, "Food."
Tubbo's eyes are huge like the proverbial dinner plate. “Oh!”
Red hears the familiar chest-opening sound as Tubbo accesses their inventories, and turns back to look at him to see he has selected one (1) yellow flower and half a cake.
“Tubbo eats flowers?” Red asks.
It knows people who eat flowers. Like Tubbo, they usually have some kind of insect trait. Too bad the chests don’t have many flowers, Phil doesn’t think of flowers as food and so he does not stock them in the food-chests.
“Tubbo--I eat flowers, yeah.”
He shoves the plant flower first into his mouth to demonstrate. He swallows in an exaggerated manner, before putting the cake on the floor to eat with his hands.
Red sees no problem with this.
“Wilby eats sand,” Red offers.
Tubbo makes a dramatic spitting noise.
“Ew.”
Red cackles. “Yes. Veeeery weirdchamp. Wilby is--”
Wilbur is gone.
Red decides it is time to go to sleep. Phil can handle the consequences of its actions.
-
Phil expects to wake up to a clean warehouse and the leftover smell of iron in his nairs but no instead he is on the jump-ship and there is a child eating a cake off the floor.
Or not a child, exactly. This is clearly a teenager.
Tubbo! The real Tubbo! one of the crows supplies helpfully.
Did Red kidnap a child?
Oh, fuck. Red kidnapped a child.
"Do you want to be here?" Phil asks.
Tubbo stops halfway through a mouthful of cake.
"Yes," he says. "You have food. Are you okay? Your eyes are green now. That's weird."
At least the kidnapping seems to have been partially consensual. This isn't reassuring.
"Right," Phil says. "I'm Phil. That was Red. He's--"
"Red?" Tubbo asks.
The innocent, wide-eyed look breaks down into snickers immediately.
"Yes. You weren't scared of it?"
Tubbo blinks at him.
He shoves another piece of cake into his mouth. "Nah. Superheroes don't scare me. "
Oh, good. Red used their reputation as Ph1Lza to kidnap a teenager. Even better.
"You can leave," he says. "If you want."
This only serves to make Tubbo actually upset.
"No!" He half-shouts. His wings are fluttering so hard they're buzzing . "Red liked me, I think. Why would you send me away?"
Because you'll abandon us anyway Phil does not say. That's not fair. Wilbur didn't abandon his father.
He left .
That's different.
"No," Phil says. "You can stay."
Tubbo sags, seeming to melt into the ground. "The Red Vines kill hybrids," he explains, and Phil's heart clenches.
"Do you want to help fight them?"
"I don't know how," Tubbo admits. That’s why I was in the box he doesn’t say.
Phil grins. "Let me show you."
This, he can do.