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when phil opens the door to a gentle knock, one that almost sounds afraid, the last thing he expects to see is tommy.
tommy stands with snowflakes resting in his hair, settling on the shoulders of the knitted jumper he wore, and frozen teardrops falling down pale, blue-tinted cheeks. his nose is almost as flushed as his eyes, gaze watery and unsure. phil hasn't seen him in a long while, not since he'd visited with wilbur all those months ago, when wilbur was first asking for advice on apologies. it hadn't been that long, sure, but it feels like an infinity since he'd last seen the boy, given how much he seemed to have changed. phil had always meant to ask tommy if he'd been apologised to yet, but he'd never gotten around to it.
but seeing the boy at his door, looking nothing short of shattered?
well, phil doesn't exactly need an answer.
"tommy?" he spoke, the surprise in his warm voice betraying the calmness of his expression, eyes scrunching with half-recognition. "what are you doing here, mate?" his breath comes out in icy puffs, clouding through the thick fog of the tundra, broken through by the sharp fall of snowflakes. "come in, come in,"
he lets himself get ushered inside silently, staring blankly at the floor and making no move to remove his snow-stained jumper, or to brush his blue-tinted hands together for some semblance of warmth. he feels all too aware of phil's eyes watching him as the door shuts behind them, keeping out the biting winds and allowing the fireplace to begin to melt the chill clinging to tommy's bones.
"are you alright? what are you doing here?" phil asks again, almost unnerved by the boy's silence. he doesn't know him well, nowhere near as well as wilbur does, but he thinks he knows enough to recognise that quietness and tommy's presence are not two things that usually co-exist. phil has only actually spent time with him a handful of times, at some point during his stay in techno's cabin after exile, a few times when tommy accompanied wilbur in visiting the tundra after he was revived, but still, phil can tell something is wrong.
tommy blinks harshly, as if his distant staring had finally caught up with his stinging eyes. "sorry," he begins, and oh god, if that isn't bad enough, phil knows he will dread whatever comes next. tommy doesn't apologise. "sorry, i just, um, i-" he cuts himself off with a shuddering breath, though if it's from the cold, or nerves, phil can't tell.
forcing a smile on his face, phil attempts to calm him, "it's alright, mate, talk when you're ready, yeah?"
that's not true at all. phil would much rather he gets it out, because his stutter manner and distraught masked beneath his words is making him feel ill. he doesn't know the boy well enough to be comforting him, which only makes his nerves thrum through his veins faster once it sets in that tommy came to him. not wilbur, not tubbo. phil. something has to be wrong for him to go to phil, alone, for comfort.
"yeah, it's- uh, i'm fine," tommy promises hollowly, and phil doubts either of them actually believe it. "it's wilbur."
and that is the exact moment phil's heart sinks.
phil had never been exactly excited about having a child. it was lovely to talk about in theory, to ponder the possibilities of raising a kid, but he couldn't find it in himself to be excited; he was all too aware that, one day, he would have to bury them, because, despite the fact that their father would be immortal, and their mother would be a goddess of death, there would be nothing they could do to share their immortality to their child. it was only once wilbur had been born, and he was in phil's arms, swaddled in cloth with the softest face and tiny, chubby hands clutching at his fathers hair, that phil realised how much he truly loved the idea of being a father.
phil doesn't know tommy, but phil knows wilbur, and phil knows the way his name is said in that hollow, gravelly tone, and phil knows something is wrong.
"what about wilbur?" he almost chokes on his words trying to get them out, heart thundering in his ribcage, almost painfully. the last time he'd been so worried, he'd been stood in front of wilbur himself, a sword held loosely in his hands, listening with wide-eyes and a dull ache in his chest as his son pleaded to be killed. "is he alright? he's not hurt, is he?"
tommy's silence is answer enough.
it takes everything in phil not to crumble to the ground there and then. it was bad enough losing wilbur once, having to take his life himself, that had almost destroyed him. but phil had gotten him back. his son was alive, living and breathing, and phil had just gotten him back.
"he told me he was going home," tommy began quietly, sounding almost hollow, resigned, the same apathetic tone that wilburs' letters had been riddled with, the same empty, defeated way of wording things that always made phil's stomach turn when he re-read them. "he said he was from another server, and he was done here. but- phil, i looked, and he's not from any other servers. but he- he sailed away, he took a boat and left," tommy spits the words with such acid in his voice that phil wonders how many times the boy's been left by people he loves, by people like wilbur.
phil blinks numbly, only half-aware of the pain in his chest, the ache in his heart, and, when he blinks, it takes him a moment for the image of wilbur in front of him to shift back to tommy. "he's... no, mate, he's not from any other servers."
"i fucking knew it."
for someone who has just been proved right, tommy sounds nothing short of distraught, and phil can't help but wonder why. from what he knows about tommy, he was always competitive, and, according to techno, absolutely loved being right more than anything else. this didn't sound like the same boy who was described to him.
"he told me he was going home, and i knew what he meant!" tommy raises his voice, throwing his hands up in the air in frustration, almost hysterical, "i knew he wasn't going 'home', i knew he was going to kill himself again! i fucking- i fucking knew it," he shoves the heels of his hands into his eyes with such force that phil can almost feel it himself, scrubbing away the tears welling up in his grey eyes as if his life depended on it.
phil only stares.
"i tried to talk him out of it," tommy begins again, much calmer this time, voice low and sorrowful, "i did, really, but he- wilbur doesn't listen to anyone but himself. he said he was going to heal, that he would go away to get better," he scoffs loudly, harshly, as if he's sick and tired of the way wilbur gets himself so carried away in a web of lies that he starts believing them himself. phil almost understands where he's coming from. "what a fucking liar."
he swallows thickly, and it begins to sink in that he had to bury his son once, and now he'd have to do it again.
only, this time, he won't have a body to bury.
somehow, that makes everything worse.