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Phil finds himself growing used to this new and strange place. It would be worrying, but there’s too much to do at the moment. He has to survive, starting from scratch and carving out a new place to live, trying to get resources so his family can survive. Worrying is a luxury that he hasn’t got the time for.
This routine he’s found himself in is oddly familiar, like he’s following the steps of a dance he learned in some long-forgotten dream. The rabbits visit him, ask questions in a voice he once heard leaving the lips of bears, and he finds himself growing accustomed to seeing long twitching ears rather than rounded ones whenever he hears a jarring monotone voice. The unfamiliar slowly slips into normalcy as the days pass by.
In a strange way, his new life has the echoes of Purgatory. There’s no natural disasters, and the oppressive eye of the Watcher isn’t a constant presence, but all the same, he feels the lingering presence of those two wretched weeks. Maybe it’s the bounties, and the way that each time he takes one, part of him thinks that he’s going to see someone’s name written down, a target for him to hunt down like the loyal servant of Death that he is. Maybe it’s the gold coins, though they lack the stupid name and dumb little smile that the ones in purgatory had.
A small part of him, one that he’s trying to let die, like embers untended, thinks it’s maybe the fact that his little fledglings built their homes around his. He doesn’t want to be hopeful - can’t be hopeful, because it reminds him of a little girl waiting for the sound of her father’s footsteps - but when has the universe ever cared for what he wants? The universe is a loaded roulette, spinning the barrel of a revolver and managing to fire a shot every time.
(He remembers him and his team chanting every time that they felt the world shift into that uncanny weightlessness of possibility, the knowledge that anything could happen, praying to dead gods and an apathetic audience for the air to become thick and choking. For the noxious fog to force their once-friends to donn the mask that would allow their team to pretend, in the haze, that they were looking at an ally and not an enemy. The poisonous gas that would burn out the throats of anyone who was not them. However, the universe is a stacked deck, so instead they would find themselves dizzy and spun around, left and right flip-flopping until jumping came from the intention to crouch, and attempting to drink water would result in punching out at whatever was in front of them.)
Phil has learned to not trust in the universe, and he hopes it does not trust him either. So, despite how hard he might wish to lose this stupid and childish hope, he hopes that the reason why Cellbit agreed to live on the same island as him is because Cellbit wants to stay close too. He hopes that the reason why Baghera made her home near his is because she too feels that itch under her skin when their group is spread too far apart.
It’s awful and codependent and he can’t voice it aloud, so he doesn’t, but he’d give her gold and diamonds, anything that shines, if it means that she will stay close. She refuses his gifts though, and that makes it easier for him to accept that she wants to move on. Baghera digs a hole into his basement, and while it breaks him, he knows he needs to let her go. She’s a bird like him, and he knows he's holding her back. He refuses to put someone he cares about into a cage. If she needs him to be the one to push her from the nest, he will be. Phil trusts that Baghera can fly, even if he’s stuck and grounded in the past.
Cellbit lives on the same island, so in some ways it’s harder for him to convince himself to let Cellbit move on from their strange Bolas family back in purgatory. It’s harder still when Cellbit almost calls him ‘dad’, a stumble in his speech that he hides with a cough, like it was an embarrassing hiccup.
(That hurts, a bruise that he knows will stay for the next few days, perhaps even longer, what with the way he pokes at it out of some masochistic urge to extend the pain. He learns most of his lessons through pain - the pain of hammering his fists into the walls of a birdhouse, the pain of a sword through his back, the pain of slamming directly into water as weightless possibility turns into a rush of air and the sound of a revolver firing - so maybe this is how he’ll teach himself to let the past be the past. The pain is familiar but new, a stranger and a friend at the same time.)
Tomorrow, he will have to figure out how to keep surviving like he has done so many times before, but for now, the night is dark and still. He hopes he does not dream, because while his dreams are beautiful, he never rests in them. In his dreams, he’s always surviving, walking on a tightrope that coils and spirals ever downward, one misstep from non-existence.
It scares him, the idea of death being such an easy thing to achieve. No need to smuggle in technology to turn oneself into a smudge on the ground of an island that no one will ever return to. No quiet departure into the sunset, his fate ambiguous until it’s laid out in clinical and overly clear terms. No fumbling hands and too-wide sword swings that manage to hurt more than a stab to the gut ever could.
Phil waits for sleep, the kind that is thick and dreamless. While he waits for sleep to come, he digs into the tender places in his mind, and lets himself hurt. He hopes that Baghera and Cellbit will force him to move on, and he doesn’t dwell on the fact that he knows that the universe refuses to give him what he wants.