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At breakfast this morning, Philza Minecraft had hoped for an easy day. That was his downfall, probably, and he’s going to have to make a note to stop being optimistic. From now on, he resolves, he is going to hold his cup of coffee in his hands and think to himself, ‘Wow, today is going to be really bad, I bet. Just gonna suck all around. It’ll be really difficult and messy and there will be just so much blood, and it’ll take me forever to do all the paperwork on it.’
And hopefully, since the universe lives to spite him, then he will have normal easy days after that.
This morning, Philza Minecraft made himself and his son breakfast, and then he dropped Wilbur off at school - “Love you!” shouted through the window, and his teenager brushing him off, too cool to return the phrase - and it was right then that the message came through.
Angel - new update on the case you’ve been working on. We’ve got a tip on a location. Sending you the address now.
And he has the damning thought right then and there. He thinks, oh, good. Maybe he’ll get a major lead and he’ll finally figure out exactly what this thing he’s been tracking is. Maybe he’ll even find it, and it’ll wrap up nice and easy, and he’ll get a nice paycheck and take a week or two off to spend some time with Wilbur. Wilbur’s got a play performance coming up, after all. It would be nice to know he won’t miss it.
So for that, he drives the two hours out to the city. The gps takes him to an apartment building on the outskirts of the city - the side that you don’t want to be on. Places you don’t want to be seem to be a hotspot for the sort of activity he’s looking for, though. Comes with the job.
He parks in front of the building, red and chipped brick, crusty fire escapes the whole way up. At least two of them look broken. Thing’s a massive fire hazard, and rules out both the possibility of getting into the apartment from the back and an easy escape out should he need it.
Any other information on what I’m looking at?
Negative. The tip was anonymous.
Fucking great.
Wilbur’s teachers think that Phil is a very busy real estate agent with important, impatient, and very wealthy clients. Long business trips are part of the deal, as well as unexpected appointments that come up far more often than he wishes they would. Even now, he’s putting together a text for Wilbur in his head.
Sorry, mate. Might be a little late tonight.
Well, there’s no time for wasting. There’s a potential crime scene three floors above him, and he’d better beat the police there if he wants a chance at fudging the details enough to make it look human.
Philza Minecraft is no stranger to the scent of blood and death. Desensitization, he thinks, is part of the job - to see an excess of gore and viscera in one room and keep his lunch down despite it is a practiced skill he has earned over years of hard work. Hard work that, more often than not, has spilled enough blood from his own hands, his own gun, his own silver-plated blades. He is not known in this field as Angel - Angel of Death - for nothing.
So when he rams open the door to this apartment building after a shout of identification, and the stench of death and blood hits his nose, he can’t exactly say he’s surprised.
It’s a few hours old by now. Maybe more. Just by the scent he knows that whatever did this is long gone.
Things never can be easy for him, can they?
Phil looks at the remains of whatever poor souls had once lived in this death-drenched apartment. There’s no less than three corpses, all adults, but there’s not many other details that he can pick out besides that. They are well and truly torn apart, an assortment of weapons on the ground, which is the strangest part of this case. If it weren’t for that, he’d chalk it up to a newly turned vampire, or maybe a whole nest of the things. A new infestation somewhere in the city for him to clear out. That makes the most sense, given the mangling of the corpses and the sheer amount of blood spilled. Infant vampires are far from precise in their bloodlust, and the blood soaked into this carpet would reinforce that.
But it’s the weapons that throw him off. These people were armed, and the injuries on the corpses–
Well. It matches up a little too well.
This case has been frustrating, to say the least. Reports of bodies left behind, mangled and bloodied, but it seems as though they tore themselves apart. Slashes that fit the knife in this man’s hands; a bloodied gun across the room and a corpse with no features left behind from the gunshot. It doesn’t stop there. Disembowelment, dismemberment, pieces of body parts left under fingernails and stained on clothing.
What killed these people was each other.
And what Phil needs to figure out is what made them do it.
The door was still locked and shut when he arrived at this apartment, and despite the silence and the obvious length of time these bodies have been lying here, Phil does not relax his guard entirely even as he crouches down to take a closer look at the nearest corpse. His fingers stay poised near the trigger, he stays balanced and ready to spring back to his feet, he keeps his ears tuned and listening to the sounds of the building - the hum of appliances that have not ceased their running even in their owners demise, the rustle of a branch outside hitting the window every time the wind shifts, the click of—
There.
Phil’s attention snaps to the side at the sound. It’s quiet, imperceptible to anyone who had not been listening quite so intently. It’s the sound of a door, the tiniest creak of hinges, further into the apartment.
There are two ways Phil can approach this. This might be a survivor, injured, hidden away and hoping for safety; he could call out and announce himself, coax them out of hiding.
Or it could be the monster, waiting to catch one more victim.
Phil goes quiet. Carefully, he steps over the limp arm of one of the bodies and makes his way across the living room, boots squelching slightly on the crimson-wet carpet. It’s the only sound he makes. He peeks into the next room - a bedroom, sparse furniture as torn apart as the living room with bedding spilling onto the floor, a dresser knocked on its side, a clock knocked down and trailing a long torn piece of wallpaper along with it.
And behind the dresser, almost as if the fallen furniture was hiding it, is the cracked-open door of a closet.
For one long second, and then another, there is no sound. No movement. Phil can’t make out even the noise of breathing, whether the inhabitant of the closet is holding their breath or simply has no use for lungs.
He risks it. “Is someone there? I’m with the police. I’m here to help.”
It’s a lie, naturally, but Phil has a fake ID to back it up, and it’s an easy enough one to use in a situation like this. But even with it, there’s no answer. Phil takes a step closer to the closet, and then he hears it again - a soft, hoarse, muffled gasp that lapses into another breath-holding silence.
Philza Minecraft, Angel of Death, has been doing this for a long, long time. Hunting. Tracking down monsters, recognizing them and their signs, eliminating them and keeping humanity safe from the threat of the supernatural. He prides himself on being able to assess a situation and pick out, more often than not, exactly what sort of monster is behind it. All he needs is one little detail to know just what he’s looking at.
This detail gives it away in an instant. The gasp is human, and it is young.
Phil lowers his gun. His guard is not down completely, but he crosses the room with his posture softened, and he eases open the closet door.
Instantly, a figure in the closet throws itself back, scurrying like a startled animal further into the closet, hiding amid the clothing hanging above. All Phil catches a glimpse of is baggy clothes and bloodstains before the shape is hidden by shadow and draping fabric, but it’s all he needs to see.
This is a kid.
“Hey,” he says, immediately lowering his gun and his voice, gentle, quiet. “Hey there, it’s okay. My name’s Phil. I’m here to help.”
Silence meets him again, but they’re breathing now, at least. Phil tries again. He sets his hands down, clearly visible, not a threat. It’s not often he deals with the survivors of this sort of thing. It’s not often there are survivors at all, but Phil has a son, and, well. His heartstrings are easy to tug at.
“What’s your name?” he attempts, gives the kid something easy to answer, but there’s no response to that either, so Phil tracks back to reassurances. “That’s okay, you don’t have to talk yet. Nothing’s gonna hurt you now, you’re safe. Why don’t you come out of the closet and I’ll help you get somewhere safer, okay? I can take you to some people who can help you. The people I work for, they take care of—of things like this. Monsters. Did you see a monster?”
There’s no answer for a moment, and then, quietly, “Yes.”
Phil wonders how the kid survived this. His heart aches for the poor thing, even as his skin still crawls with something tense - the pulsing rush of adrenaline. He glances around again, but there’s still no sound, no movement from anywhere in the apartment but the closet in front of him. “That’s what I thought. I’m here to help, okay? I’m gonna find out whatever did this, and make sure they don’t hurt anyone again. Do you want to come with me?”
“They’ll kill me.”
The words take Phil by surprise. They’re spoken so darkly and surely, a stark contrast to the fearful breathing he’s been hearing, that he’s surprised for a moment that those two sounds came from the same child.
“What?” he says, and then shakes his head. “No, no, they’re gone, it’s just me out here. You’re safe now. The monster’s gone.”
There’s a long, long silence and no answer. Then, “You promise not to hurt me?”
Phil’s heart aches. “I promise. I swear. Here, look.” And he makes a show of taking the gun in his hand and holstering it again, and then raises both hands slowly. “See? I’m not going to–”
In a split second, a figure comes barreling out of the closet. It’s trained, skilled, practiced reflexes that let Phil react even before he’s fully caught up to what’s happening.
First, he sees two specks of light staring out at him from the dark of the closet. Two eyes, glowing blood-red. His stomach lurches, and then he sees the reflection of light on metal - a blade, gripped tight in a hand flying straight towards his throat.
He doesn’t have time to reach for his gun, so he rolls to the side instead. He feels a slash of pain across his arm, shoves it down with gritted teeth as he catches the figure barreling towards him. A blow to the wrist - down clatters the knife and Phil traps it under his foot - and then he’s pinning his opponent down.
Rookie mistake, he scolds himself. It’s a shapeshifter’s favorite trick - steal a kid’s face, a kid’s voice, and you can get even an experienced hunter to drop their guard. In that split second, they’ll drop the act and then you’re face to face with a full demon, or fae, or whatever other monster has decided to be a fucking pain in the ass today.
But as Phil stares down at the face pinned down, it’s…
It’s still just a kid.
Two eyes stare up at him, wide and red and shining with tears, surrounded by a face that’s too fucking young. Now that he’s out in the light, Phil can see the round line of his chin, the crease between his eyebrows, the blood spilling down his lips and sprayed across his face. He’s a teenager, Phil thinks, and a young one. Younger than Wilbur. The kid bares his teeth - bloodstained, snapping as if he could reach Phil’s wrists with them - and they’re just human teeth. No freshly turned vampire canines springing out at the scent of so much blood.
“Let me go,” the kid snarls, frantic, panicked, breath rushing in an out of his chest as he struggles under Phil’s hands. “Let me go, let me go, I didn’t kill them, I didn’t do this, I didn’t mean to–”
He thinks of the human bite marks torn into the arm of one of the bodies in the living room.
Oh, realizes Phil. Oh.
He has been doing this - hunting and tracking and knowing his prey - for so long that he prides himself on being one of the best in the business. He is an expert in both recognizing and reacting. And now he kneels here, looking down at a monster wearing a child’s face, and he feels at a loss for any response.
“You lied,” the kid’s saying, sobbing the words in his panic, “You promised, you promised, I didn’t want to and I didn’t mean to and I don’t–I don’t want to–”
“Hey,” Phil says. His mind rushes to make sense of this. “It’s okay. Calm down.”
“I didn’t–I wasn’t trying to! I don’t try to, I didn’t kill them I didn’t mean to please letmego letmego–”
There’s a bloodstained kid with wild eyes and long, overgrown hair in a curious shade of pink splayed across the floor. As Phil looks down, he catches sight of a few new details - a bruise half-hidden under the blood on his jaw, red and raw lines on his wrist, and Phil’s seen ropeburn before.
He feels sick.
This kid is looking up at him with terror and panic and Phil feels like he wants to go stab something, and he also kind of feels like the worst person in the world keeping him pinned here. If this is a shapeshifter, it is a damn good one. It’s a risk he’ll take right now.
“I’m going to let you go,” Phil says, and the kid’s panicked sobs fall quiet. “Don’t attack me again, okay?”
And he lets go, already raising one arm in case those blood-stained teeth aim anywhere near his very human, very vulnerable throat. They don’t, though. Instead the kid bolts - scrambles across the room so fast Phil could nearly see the cartoon clouds of dust under his feet.
He tucks himself against the far corner of the room, even though it’s away from the door, and he just stands there watching Phil.
Fuck, Phil thinks. Fuck. Now what?
“Okay,” Phil says. “Let’s… Let’s back up a little here. Can you tell me your name now?”
There’s one long second of heavy silence, and then another, and finally, muttered and small, “Techno.”
That’s not really a name, Phil thinks, but it’s progress. “Okay. Techno. I’m Phil, like I said earlier. Do you want to explain to me what happened here?”
“I didn’t mean to,” Techno repeats, breath hitching once again. “I never mean to, I swear, I don’t want to.”
“Don’t want to what?” Phil urges, keeping his voice calm and steady even as his hands itch towards the knife under his boot. “What don’t you mean to do?”
A shaky breath. “Make them hurt each other.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” Techno whispers. “I just–I get–I get scared. I get scared and it turns red.”
So there’s a mystery solved, and another one opened. He wants to keep pushing - how long has Techno had this, what does turning red mean, though he knows what it results in - this - but more than that, there is a very scared kid hiding across the room from Phil, and it still makes him feel like shit to have Techno look at him like that.
“You’re here to kill me.” Techno says it shaky but decisive. Like he already knows.
“No,” Phil says. “I made a promise, didn’t I? I’m not going to hurt you.”
And shakily, Techno says, “I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Phil promises, gentle. “I won’t let you.”
“You’re here to kill me,” the kid says, insistent. His breath stutters. “You’re—You said. Earlier. Your job is to take care of the monsters, and I’m– I’m the monster.”
That hits Phil somewhere right between the ribs. The tone—the way his voice shakes—
There are a few options that Phil has now. He has sedatives; he could bring Techno in, but he knows where that will lead. He knows the best the kid could hope for will be sterile white containment walls until they find out exactly what he is and how to control him. He knows the kid might never be let back out, even as young as he is.
The supernatural are not meant to exist in this world. Phil knows this. He knows what his job is, knows what the goal he’s been working towards his whole life is - to keep humanity safe from the supernatural.
But he’s looking here at the intersection of both of those things, and he already knows deep down that he is never going to tell his superiors about Techno. This is a vampire nest, he’s decided, and nothing more.
“You’re not a monster,” Phil decides, then and there. “You’re gonna be okay, all right? I’m going to keep you safe.”
“I’ll hurt people again,” Techno says. “I always do.”
“Then we’ll find a way to control it,” Phil says firmly. “I think you can. Okay? Look, you’re feeling better already, right?”
And it’s true - Techno takes a slow breath now as if he’s noticing it, and with it, Phil feels some of the skin-prickling tension in the room lift. It’s a little easier to stand without looking over his shoulder in expectation.
It will take a little longer to convince Techno to trust him enough to leave this room - to let Phil clean what he needs to of the scene in the next room, to begin putting together the story he needs to share to keep Techno’s existence a carefully hidden secret. To convince Techno to trust him, just long enough to put Phil’s coat over his blood-stained clothes and follow him to the car.
And it’ll be after that, that Phil will sit in the driver’s seat and remember the unsent text to Wilbur.
Wilbur. His own son. Back at home, waiting for his dad to get back from a job that is certainly not real estate.
Well.
This will take a little bit of explaining.
(It has not been an easy day for Philza Minecraft, or any of them, not by a long shot. But, Phil thinks, maybe it’s been a good one anyway.)