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“...It feels so weird.”
Tubbo looks up from the chicken cooking in the oven and blinks. “What?”
“I just meant, like-- To hear them talking again. Hasn’t happened in ages, y’know?”
“Oh… yeah, I guess. A little bit.”
“Like with the whole…” Phil mimes an explosion with his hands and chuckles. “It just- I figured they’d never look each other in the eyes again, even.”
He looks past Phil and up at the half-open shutters, lamplight flickering through stuttered squares and illuminating the snowflakes that are piling up on the sill. Someone’s talking in there; sometimes they shout, sometimes they speak sincerely. Mostly it’s snow noise to Tubbo - white and fuzzy and blurry and just part of the background. Maybe once, he would have wanted to be in there - feeling warm without needing his armour to ward off the cold, among other things.
“Surprised you came with him, ‘n stuck around.” Phil remarks, one shoulder against the doorframe. The villagers below him are still hemming and hawing, and Tubbo still can’t hear them, even with his good ear. “What with you not being allowed in, and all that. I mean, Tommy said you both wanted to talk, but you know how Techno is…”
Tubbo rubs the snow out of his eyes. “Yeah, well. Wouldn’t wanna be in there anyways, y’know. Too hot.”
He’d seen how Techno had held that axe the moment the door was opened, how reluctant he was to put it away. The house was warmed by a fire that didn’t care about staying behind the grate, no matter how much fuel it had.
“ ‘specially with my armour. Man, I’d suffocate.”
“Yeah, pffft-- what, what is it with everyone wearing armour in the house? I spent like, a day with Techno, and suddenly I started doing it, too! Don’t really know why, I guess it’s just comfortable. Can’t get stolen.”
He can feel the holes forming under his heels, the snow seeping into his toes, the random staticky, numbing spikes of pain that comes from low durability on Thorns III iron shoes. He can see from here that Phil’s crisscrossed netherite boots cast a somewhat eerie glow that sparkles like diamonds on the stone floor, but can’t do more than flicker on the snow just beyond the doorway.
Yeah, as if corpse-looters would ever be a threat to you two.
“Well, good thing you haven’t died. Yet.”
Phil’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes. Tubbo turns away and takes the chicken out. The voices inside the cabin get a little louder, though Tubbo barely notices until he realises he can actually understand some of the words now.
“It, it ended up being useless , y'know, cause I--
“Oi, is that-- is that my name?”
“I’d hoped that-- I’d hoped he’d get me out sooner, but apparently--”
“This your will, is it?”
“Apparently Phil can’t read anymore-- I mean it was my will, technically.”
“.......You put me in your will?? Holy fucking shit, I must get like-- this netherite must be all mine then--””
“Bro, nah nah nah nah nah -- look-- hang on a second, lemme just---”
Tubbo flinches as clumps of snow are shoved off the sill and directly onto his head. Looking up through squinted eyes, he can see reading glasses resting on a snout poking over the edge. The light reflects through the glasses and makes little rainbows appear on the window frame, in such a way that Tubbo suddenly remembers the smell of gunpowder and smoke, and the all-too familiar feeling of looking up at his executioner. Chests are opening and closing one by one in the room behind him.
“Do I get to be in your will too?” He jokes, half-heartedly.
“I don’t owe anything to the government.” Techno snorts, and the shutters slam closed.
“You wish.” Tubbo mumbles, quietly enough that Phil’s birdlike laugh covers it, softly enough that he’s not even sure he really said it.
“So wait-- does that mean you’ve got a will too, Phil?”
“What? Why would I-- no, I don’t have one.”
“Not yet, huh? Wait, no, you should totally get one. You could, you’d get to call it your Phil-Will! That’d be so funny!!”
“Oh my god, Phil-Will? Really?”
“Yes, absolutely. Like- ‘OK, Techno wants a sword, and Tommy wants attention - lemme just consult my Phil-Will to make some minor changes’. Or, ‘Don’t annoy me or you won’t get in my Phil-Will!’ Yeah, it’d be so funny!”
Phil wheezes like he’s coming up for air, and the smile doesn’t feel so forced anymore. If anything he’s trying (and failing) to hold it back. He looks every bit the father Wilbur said he was.
“There’s-- There’s nothing else in the Phil-Will, just blank page after page. And at the very end it’s just: ‘I leave everything to Technoblade. Peace out’ , pffFHAHAA!”
Tubbo smirks and starts to eat, watching an enderman in the distance as it carries a clump of snow through the trees. A few moments pass before the silence is broken.
“Then what-- alright then, since we’re talking wills, what would you put in yours?”
“Won’t need one.”
“Really? Haven’t you got, like, anything you’re gonna pass on to anyone?” He pauses. “...Not even Michael?”
“No, I won’t. I don’t want people taking my shit again, see? If I’m gonna be honest, I’ll probably get Ranboo to put it in a box and bury it. Maybe burn it, I dunno.”
“I mean, yeah-- makes sense. As long as you don’t, like, pull a Wilbur... Yeah, sure, that’s fine.”
Tubbo takes another bite to unclench his teeth. “Oh now-- now that’s a good idea, heh.”
Neither of them are convinced he’s joking.
“...Is that a threat?”
“Hmm.” He shrugs. “I dunno. What answer do you wanna hear?”
“For your sake, it had better be ‘no’.”
“For my sake, huh? When did you start caring about what’s good for me?”
“I care about you not doing something dangerous. ” Phil’s stance shifts, moving his weight away from the doorframe and back onto his feet. “Don’t want you hurting people again.”
Tubbo takes out his pickaxe and packs up the oven to give his hands something to do that he won't immediately regret. He looks up once he’s done to see Phil quietly unsheathe his sword behind his back. Like he’d expected (or hoped for) that pickaxe to hit something else. He stares at it pointedly, making sure Phil knows that he’s not as blind in both eyes as he is deaf in one ear.
“Yeah, cause I’m always the one hurting people around here.”
Phil huffs and looks away. Tubbo takes another bite of his chicken and starts kicking around clumps of snow on their soon-to-stop-being-neat front lawn. He can feel Phil’s eyes on his back and it only bolsters him to make more of a mess. He knows that’s at least one thing he’s good at.
“...Why did you make them?”
“Self-defence.”
“No, but-- Look, why did you really make them? It can’t be that simple.”
“It can actually, it literally can. It is that simple. I was sick of people taking my shit, and threats seem to work a lot around here - especially with you two - so I figured--”
“Hey, now, that’s not on.” Phil shakes his head like a disappointed teacher as he sheaths his sword. “You can’t… mate, going around making threats, that’s not on. It never worked for you before, why start now? You’ll scare--”
Phil looks up to see something small being fiddled with in Tubbo's hands. Something he’d thought was meant to stay in Snowchester. He almost yelps when it looks like the device has slipped from his fingers, and Tubbo looks way too pleased at his reaction.
“Ohh, whoops-- hang on, I probs shouldn’t fiddle with this, my fingers are all frozen. Might hit a button or something, oh man…”
But it stays out in the open, it doesn’t go away, it doesn’t stop moving. Tubbo barely even looks at it. Phil resists the urge to ask what it is, because he knows without needing to. He knows that if anyone could figure out how to programme something remotely, if anyone could find a way to carry their biggest weapon in their pocket at all times, Tubbo would.
They stay locked in that stalemate for what feels like years. It’s the bell ringing and the shrill yelling upstairs that breaks the spell, that finally makes that tiny little death device stop moving.
“...Y’know, you’re lucky Tommy’s here right now.” Tubbo says through a bitter smile, pocketing it away as quickly as he’d pulled it out. “You are so fucking lucky that I didn’t come here alone.”
“You know you’d die if you did.”
Phil didn’t intend for it to come out so quickly, or even for that to be the only thing he said. And he didn’t intend to make Tubbo laugh in response.
“I'm not the one here who's afraid of dying, Phil. Once it happens to you twice you learn to expect it. Well--” He stops himself, and shakes his head. “Nah, I shouldn’t bother, really. You’ll never understand how that feels. Besides, I’m just following the lesson you taught, about threatening people - y’know, with Doomsday being a message and all, I had to learn something from it. And-- and I don't have a reputation to uphold, like you.”
He kicks at the ground again, scuffing the grass and dirt underneath, soiling the snow around him.
“Not that I have to
try
, anyways-- like, it’s not one that I really care about fighting anymore. But hey, at least I didn't name myself after something I'm scared of."
“ Ohhh , my god. You’re kidding right? You’re actually kidding!” The dig at his pride must have struck a nerve. “You were meant to learn that your government was corrupt, that you’d ruined L’manburg beyond saving. You chose materials and items-- you chose a country over everything else! You chose your little friend group in the cabinet over caring about anyone else, going on that little adventure to the execution block to settle your grudge. You’ve got no right to talk.”
“Maybe… but then isn’t talking things out, like, the way to go now? Like-- oh my god, is it true then, that violence isn’t always the answer? Could I-- is it that easy? No way, could I have just talked to Technoblade, all this time?”
He snickers to himself and continues. "I mean-- OK, well, we say that, but… he really wasn’t willing to talk, I don’t think. If we didn’t fight him, he’d just retreat into his little cottage and call for timeout, naptime, whatever. Make us still look like the bad guys for interrupting his brooding, probably.”
“That’s, ahhhhhh-- mmmm, nuh uh, no, I saw-- heard what really happened with the Butcher Army, Tubbo.”
Phil wasn’t the only one who caught the stutter. Tubbo’s frown deepens as he files that away to address later. He doesn’t want to start thinking about how much that could explain.
”I know you showed up at his place with armour and weapons in hand. Like, maybe if you hadn’t done that, then--"
"You say that as if that's not exactly what you did. Both of you.” Tubbo pulls his pickaxe out again and holds it up for Phil to see, before hitting the side of the cabin once. He barely reacts as a deep crack appears in the wooden handle.
“This is my fifth pickaxe this week. I don’t know who has my first set of netherite or if it’s still even out there, and not burned up or exploded. And right now you're wearing the exact same armour that you wore when you destroyed my home and refused to talk it out beforehand. And y’know-- y’know what? I bet you've never lost that armour, ever. You've always worn it to defend your home and your pets and your friend, to savour all your hard work that went into building a home and feeling safe--”
Phil’s indignation shows in the way he raises his sword to match Tubbo’s pickaxe.
“--But you're also perfectly happy to rain fucking hellfire on the place I tried to make safe, to ruin my home and kill my pets and attack my friends. That’s the message you gave us. Violence is only the answer when you’re rich and powerful enough to win.”
“That's what you would've become-- were becoming. That's why people gravitate towards governments, Tubbo, they want the money and the power."
"Oh, is that how you got so rich? Is that where you and Techno got all the wither skulls from-- did you form your own little Aged Care Presidential Board or some shit like that?"
"Fuck no, you’re missing the point, mate!! Government twists people’s minds with promises of that stuff and never fulfills it. It makes them do bad things, it makes people chase power over everything else. You went too far trying to win, I spent my time watching you go down this-- this dark path, and in the end you went too far. You crossed the line and you stomped all over people to get there.”
A breath. Two condensation clouds amid the snowflakes.
"...I felt pretty stomped on when you set those withers on us. When Ranboo and I tried to save the bee dome, and you laughed at us.”
Phil pinches the bridge of his nose and breathes deeply, running out of air and patience. “Like I said already , we needed to send a message. And especially to the Butcher Army. What they did to Techno, to me-- nobody deserves that treatment.”
The irony would be so, so funny to Tubbo if it wasn’t the very thing that had turned his home into a museum exhibit. Something that would make people think of evil things being defeated, and not the defeated being made so by evil things.
“If I’m gonna be honest, I think we’re more alike than you want to admit, Phil. My country wasn’t so different from your little Old Folk’s Cottage Home, in the end. Except for, y’know, the whole death and destruction of everything I hold dear… Hmm. ”
He turns to look up at the bricks and woodwork above him. Sizing it up.
“Don’t-- Don’t you dare--”
“Hey, that could change though! Any day now, or maybe later. Depends on if I change my mind.”
Phil has barely noticed Tubbo's moved until he hears the slosh of snow being kicked into the pond under the bridge and the splashing of fish disturbed by the sudden cold shock. The beacon's light stutters and struggles to shine through the interruption, light bouncing off the pickaxe's blade even as he turns away from the water.
"Depends on if you piss me off."
“...Did losing on Doomsday hurt your pride that much?”
Not as much as I’m willing to rip yours to shreds.
The communicator in his pocket buzzes, and Tubbo pulls it out to see Ranboo asking where he is, if he’s busy, does he have any spare eggs cause ‘Michael looks like he could really do withsome more cake honestly’.
“Look, I’ve got better things to care about than you thinking I'm a narcissist. I’ve always had shit to care about, in fact. Crazy concept, huh?? But, now I can like-- actually defend myself. Without you swooping in and scolding me for trying.”
He sends a quick message to Tommy before he starts to tread through the snow, towards the nether portal. “Look, all I’m saying is, if you’re gonna preach all about people being more important than items, then you shouldn’t-- I mean-- Look, just don’t get too comfortable with your riches. You’ll get a taste of your own medicine if you do.”
Phil glares daggers at the boy. “ Fine, fine. Whatever. Just know that if you threaten us again I will gladly come and teach you another lesson.” The lamps are rocked by an abrupt gust of wind, and briefly his shadow on the snow seems to show the cause for their disruption. But really, all the man can do is pull one wing back from the cold, from the snow that gets kicked onto his boots and the burned feathers of the other.
Tubbo knows it’s dangerous to provoke the guy who’s hurt him so badly; but then again, warning sirens were becoming the norm nowadays. It felt good to look someone in the eyes without being the one who was afraid.
“Yeah, and if you or Techno set foot in Snowchester again or even try to get that nuke off me, I’ll blow your base to bedrock. Bring you down to my level. And if you survive, I’ll tear those totems from your fingers and bash your fucking head in with them.”