Chapter Text
The morning comes as it always does: quiet, still, and cold. Phil wakes with a shudder and a sigh, curling up tighter under his blankets to hide from the pale sunlight peeking through the crack in his curtains. His room is freezing, his wing and knee are aching, and he can already feel a headache coming on.
It’s really not worth it to get out of bed. It’s not—there isn’t anything for him out there, not really. He could lie here all day and not a damn thing would happen and not a damn thing would change. It doesn’t matter what Phil does, because each morning will be the same from here on out. There used to be a time where Phil took comfort in that, just like how there used to be a time where mornings weren’t so quiet, or still, or cold.
(Gods, he always kept such odd hours. Most nights, he would come into Phil’s cabin while Phil was sleeping and toss a fresh log into the fireplace to help keep the bedroom warm until morning. He was always doing little things like that, wasn’t he? Gods. )
But the dogs—the dogs need to be fed, don’t they? They have to be fed. Wouldn’t do to let the dogs go hungry. He has to get up today. For the dogs. At least to feed the dogs. C’mon, Phil…
It’s not easy. He’s heavy and achy all over, and every fiber of him is protesting as he forces himself to become vertical, but he does it. He pushes the clutter around on his nightstand to look for a hair tie. He nudges a powered-down Brian aside, and he brushes his fingers over the screen of his muted communicator on accident.
The screen lights up. The last messages in global were four days ago.
Nihachu whispers to you: Hi Phil! Just wanted to see how you’re doing. Message me back when you see this.
Nihachu whispers to you: It doesn’t have to be anything much. I just want to know you’re okay. <3
Nihachu whispers to you: I can’t imagine how difficult this must be for you, but—
Phil flips his communicator so it’s screen-side down. He finds the hair tie. He pulls back his hair (greasy; he needs a wash) into a lazy ponytail and scrubs the sleep from his eyes.
Now, swing legs over mattress. Toes on floor. Shuffle onto feet. Grab robe off hook and pull it on and get cane from inventory and cross room and sit by door and pull on boots and throw cloak over shoulders and go out into the morning and make like a human being.
Feeding the dogs doesn’t take long. All he has to do is grab some meat scraps from the storage room and toss them out into the yard. The dogs, at the smell of the scraps, come trotting out of the kennel and start nosing through the snow for the food. Phil watches them peruse the options. A pup brings a stick over to him, so he plays fetch with her for a little while. When his fingers start to go stiff with cold, he throws the stick one last time and heads back towards the cabins.
He climbs the stairs to the bridge, passing the door to the other cabin as he goes. He passed it on his way out, of course, but back then he had still been half asleep. Now fully roused by the biting chill, Phil is painfully aware of it as he passes by. Frost creeps along the hinges, ice coats the handle, and there’s a shallow pile of snow in front of the door.
The crows—once chatty, now eerily silent—peer at him from their somber roost on the cabin’s roof. Phil can feel them staring at him staring at the door. He thinks of Brian on his nightstand, collecting dust. He turns and crosses the bridge.
When he gets back into his cabin, he shucks off his cloak and boots and shakes the snow off his wings, wincing at the usual twinge of pain that follows. He has a look around the room. If anyone asks, it’s “controlled chaos,” though it hasn’t been “controlled” in a good few weeks. He’s got about a dozen half-done or barely-started projects scattered around, some of which he can’t even remember what the goal was.
Phil knows he isn’t the most tidy person, but this is too much, even for him. Just looking at it makes his chest tight. One great big mess, completely out of control, and if he were to try cleaning it, he wouldn’t have a clue where to start. Too much.
(That was always his department, anyway—walking through Phil’s workshop and bemoaning the mess, fighting with Phil about cleanliness and health hazards until Phil inevitably folded and started putting things away. He always stuck around to help Phil get the ball rolling, cracking jokes and making Phil laugh to help him forget about the drudgery of cleaning. He knew how much Phil hated tidying up.)
Instead, Phil tiptoes his way around the disaster zone and sits down in front of a random project. Old Galactic translation of a tome on…something. He got it as a gift from Her. Something about other worlds? He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t care. He just picks up a pencil and starts writing. Old Galactic is tricky, runes folded in on each other to make shapes out of words instead of being written out in lines. It takes a lot of time and concentration, and…
He blinks. The room is dark. He’s got eight new pages, front to back, of translated Old Galactic. His eyes hurt. His head hurts. His back and shoulders and neck hurt. His mouth feels like sand. His stomach twists like it’s trying to digest itself. Skies, he needs to piss. Phil stands, slams a hand on the table and fans his wings when the room does a summersault, breathes, grabs his cane, and heads off to the bathroom.
Later, when he’s trying to stretch the cricks out of his neck, he starts thinking about food. His cabin isn’t outfitted with a full kitchen. The other cabin is, but. Well. So he settles for some stale bread he fishes out of one of his chests. He doesn’t have a clean plate, so he eats it over the sink so he doesn’t have to worry about cleaning up crumbs.
He chugs a glass of water (and a second, and a third) before contemplating the bottle of mead he spots in the back of a cabinet. No. Bad idea. Also, it’s dusty and unlabeled, so it could just as easily be a soured healing potion— not something he should be putting in his body. He closes the cabinet.
He needs a bath. He can smell himself, which is the worst thing possible, actually. Washing up feels like a lot, though, and all he wants to do is go back to bed. He fights himself on it anyway. He didn’t clean up the workroom today, so instead, he has to take a bath. It’s only fair. He doesn’t even have to go through washing his hair. The warmth will help with the ache in his knee, too. C’mon, Phil…
He eventually convinces himself to draw a bath, but it’s a near thing. Washing up is quick and mechanical. He manages to wash his hair and ear feathers, but he doesn’t do a thing with his mussed wings except let them hang out the sides of the tub. They itch something awful.
While he feels slightly more human by the end of it, he’s also exhausted. Hair still damp from some half-assed toweling, he pulls on some (maybe) fresh sleep clothes and collapses into bed. He curls up on his side and pulls the covers up to his chin.
Quiet, still, and cold. Dark now, too. He looks into the deep shadows of his bedroom. He watches them move and swirl, an optical illusion conjured by his tired eyes as they try to make something of nothing. It’s the most life he’s seen in this place in a long time.
Phil draws in a shuddering breath. Swallows thickly. He flips himself around so his back is to the room and curls up even tighter, squeezing his eyes shut. Damp, salty lashes cling together. He shoves his face into his pillow and waits for sleep.
Tomorrow will come, and he’ll be here, just as always. He’ll be here.
He’ll be here…
~*~
It’s warm when he wakes up. Phil’s sleepy brain is already trying to rationalize it before he can even open his eyes— he must have stopped by in the middle of the night again to put a fresh log on— but that thought doesn’t get very far at all. He doesn’t know why it’s so warm, but his aches are less intense because of it, so that’s a plus. He gets the sense that it’s brighter out this morning, too. The cloud coverage must be thinner today. He sighs and cracks open his eyes.
This isn’t his room.
Phil is up like a shot, eyes wide as he takes in his surroundings. He’s in a small, one-room house, lying in the middle of a bed big enough for two. The curtains are drawn back so that golden, late-morning sunlight can pour into the room from the several windows. Many pictures are hung on the walls on the other side of the house, though the glare from the light against the glass frames makes it hard to tell who or what they depict from where he sits.
Phil stares down at his lap, blinking. Okay. Alright. Don’t panic. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. Weird dream? This doesn’t feel like a dream. His dreams are always vivid, but there’s no way his brain has the processing power to make these bed sheets feel this real. Kidnapped, then? But who would kidnap him, and why? It’s been quiet on the mainland for months now. The only person who makes even just a little bit of sense is Quackity, but shouldn’t Phil be tied up, if that were the case? Quackity is a fool, but he’s not that stupid—unless he’s trying to go for some sort of…fucking power play or something. Skies, if Quackity is behind this…
The sound of voices outside pulls Phil from his thoughts. He drops down flat on his back on the mattress as he hears two people pass by the window at the head of the bed, holding his breath. Once they’ve passed, Phil creeps over to the edge of the mattress and peeks through the window that looks into the flowery garden out front.
There’s two people out there: an adult— a man? —with a short but heavy purple cloak around his shoulders and an empty basket balanced on his hip, as well as a kid— probably twelve-ish? —with what looks like a duck floatie around his waist. The man sets the basket down beneath one of the trees in the yard while the kid scurries up the tree, little webbed wings on his back flapping for extra lift.
The man calls out to the child (“¡Cuidado, mijo!”), to which the child responds by sticking his clawed hand out of the thick leaves and giving a thumbs up. The man exchanges a few more words with the kid, and then what looks to be an avocado falls out of the tree. The man catches it and tosses it gently into the basket. The leaves rustle, and a moment later, another avocado falls. This one goes into the basket as well.
They’re…they’re just picking avocados. Phil is lying in a bed big enough for two in a little one-room house with pictures on the walls and a flowery front garden out front watching a man and a little kid as they’re picking avocados and holy fuck, this is someone’s home.
Phil can’t stand it anymore—he needs answers. He does a quick flick through his inventory, checking to see what he has. It’s pretty barren (he doesn’t leave the cabins very much anymore, so there’s no need to carry supplies) but he’s got his cane and a couple tools, including an axe. Good enough for him. Keeping his eye on the two in the front garden, Phil swings his legs over the side of the bed, creeps over to the door, and pushes it open.
He’s instantly hit with a wave of clammy, tropical air. Phil pulls a face as his wings puff up at the humidity. Yeesh. His knee still hurts despite the warmer weather, so he keeps a hand on the doorframe just to be safe.
The two in the front yard haven’t noticed him yet. Phil speaks up: “H—” He immediately chokes, voice rough from disuse; he clears his throat and tries again: “H-Hello?”
“Oh!” The man jumps a little, fumbling an avocado. It lands among the others in the basket. The man turns towards him, allowing Phil to see his face for the first time: tan, but dusted with grayish markings, making his cheeks and lips look skeletal; half-covered by a skull-shaped mask and framed by his long, thick black hair. Phil can make out glowing white lights in the sockets of the skull—eyes.
“Philza, my darling!” the skull-man laughs. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you come home.” There’s clapping from the branches of the tree, and the man turns back in time to catch the next avocado that falls. “Did Fit have what you needed? Oh, and where is Tallulah? Didn’t Wilbur say you needed to pick her up today?”
…Wow. There is a lot to unpack here. This guy knows his name. And this guy called him darling. And someone named Fit is here. And someone named Wilbur— Wilbur? —is also here. And this guy called him darling.
“Uh,” says Phil. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck… “Who’s Tallulah?”
“Ha! Qué chistoso eres,” says the skull-man, grinning wryly. “You completely forgot, didn’t you?”
“I…no?” says Phil. Holy shit, he’s never been confused in his life.
“It’s fine,” the skull-man assures him. He catches another avocado and dumps it into the basket; it’s getting full now. “I’m sure Tallulah won’t be too upset about it. You should probably go get her now, though. If Wilbur’s recording today, then he needs the quiet.” The skull-man waves a hand towards a rune-etched pillar at the center of the yard. “¡Ándale!”
Phil doesn’t move. What does he do?
After a long pause, the skull-man glances at Phil again. “...So? ¿Ya te vas?”
“Uhm.” Phil winces. “Sorry—wh-who are you, exactly?”
The skull-man freezes, missing the next avocado that’s tossed down to him. It bounces off the rim of the basket and rolls through the grass. He turns fully towards Phil for the first time, and while the mask covers much of his face, Phil can still see the way his smile goes from relaxed to uneasy. “Phil? ¿Estás bien?”
“What?”
The skull-man is walking towards him now, a pinch in his lips that wasn’t there before. “Are you alright, man?” The child—also wearing a skull mask, though it’s got more of an animal-like shape to it—jumps out of the tree and trots after him.
“Uh,” Phil says for the millionth time as the skull-man gets closer. The skull-man reaches for him, and Phil backs up half a step, flaring his wings and gliding his hand across his hotbar. “ Woah, hold it—” The kid is at the skull-man’s side now. He has his mask pushed back so that Phil can see his full face: light freckled cheeks, black scleras, green glowing eyes, long blond braid—blonde like Phil’s.
What. The. Fuck.
The skull-man has retracted his hand, though it still hovers in the space between them, uncertain. Phil can see his glowing white eyes darting about Phil’s body, lingering particularly long on his flared wings. Phil folds them back. “Look, mate,” Phil says, “I have no idea what the fuck is going on, but clearly there’s—there’s been some sort of mistake, or, or…”
“...You’re not Philza,” the skull-man says slowly.
“No,” says Phil. Then: “I mean—! Yes, I am, I am Philza, Philza is my name, but I’m not—I don’t think I’m who you think I am.”
“You don’t think… No lo crees… Who I think…” The skull-man runs a thin, bony hand through his hair. “Dios mío, me duele la cabeza. Do you have a translator?”
“No?” Phil says, baffled once more. He watches the kid suddenly reach into his inventory and pull out a notebook and pencil, writing. “Am I—should I have one?”
“It would help,” the skull-man says with a lopsided laugh.
The kid stops writing and flips his notebook around so the skull man can read it: “ ‘Está diciendo que no es Dad, pero su nombre también es Philza.’ Okay, gracias, Chayanne.” The boy—Chayanne, apparently—smiles up at him. The skull-man smiles in return before looking back at Phil again. “So, you’re Philza, but you’re not the Philza that I know.”
“Uh, no, I’m—I’m not.”
“That is strange, because you look very similar to him.”
Phil blinks. “Do I?”
“Sí. Ehhhh—oh!” He points over Phil’s shoulder into the house. “Go inside. I can show you!”
Phil steps aside and lets the skull-man lead him into the little house, where he takes one of the many picture frames off the wall. “Here,” he says, handing it to Phil. “Look. This is us—me, Chayanne, and Phil. My Phil.”
Phil takes the frame, and sure enough, the photo inside shows the skull-man, Chayanne, and a man that looks…yeah, almost exactly like him. Granted, his hair is shorter, his striped hat has a wider brim, he’s actually dressed for the weather, and from what Phil can tell, his wings are undamaged and preened.
Most of all, though, the Philza in the picture looks…he looks happy. Very happy. He’s holding Chayanne on his hip and he has a wing draped around the skull-man’s shoulders. The skull-man’s mask is pushed back in this photo, revealing that the grayish markings cover his whole face and his eyes are similar to Chayanne’s: black scleras with white glowing eyes.
La Familia Minecraft-Sinfonia, says the bottom of the frame, carved in flowing script. All three of them are smiling.
The sound of scribbling pulls Phil’s attention away from the photo. He looks up in time to see Chayanne flip his notebook around for the skull-man to read again: “‘Debería enviarle un mensaje a Dad.’ Ah, buena idea, mijo, lo haré ahora.”
“What are you doing?” Phil asks, watching the skull-man pull a communicator out of his inventory.
“I’m sending a message asking for my Phil to come home,” says the skull-man, typing away. “I think he should know what’s happening.”
The skull-man sends the message. He holds it up for Phil to see. At first, Phil has a hard time spotting the messages in question amid the crowded global chat, but he spots them at the very bottom of the screen:
<MissaSinf> phil can you come back please?
<MissaSinf> now. it is urgent.
They’re gone in a blink, though, whisked off by the flurry of replies:
<Ph1LzA> sure thing m8
<iRoier> todo bien missa?
<FoolishG> WUH OH
<BadBoyHalo> O.o
<BagheraJones> is something happening ?
Phil pushes the comm towards the skull man again. “I think you need to clarify, mate,” he says. “People are getting worried.”
The skull-man— Missa, Phil guesses—looks at his comm once more. He clicks his tongue. “Ah. Yeah…” He types out another message. “Phil doesn’t pay a lot of attention to his comm. If I want him to react to my text, I need to make sure he notices it, you know? So I say ‘urgent’ to make sure he reads it.” He drops his comm into his hotbar and dismisses it, though it continues to pop up with new messages.
Phil is about to ask if he should check those when there’s an echoing whoosh outside. “Missa!” a voice (that sounds exactly like Phil’s, skies, that’s fucking creepy) calls out. “I’m back, and I’ve got Tallulah!” The lilting tune of what Phil thinks is a flute drifts after this statement.
At the sound of the flute, Chayanne spins around and runs out into the garden. As Missa exits the house, Phil watches Chayanne crash into the girl—Tallulah, apparently—and pull her into a spinning hug, both of them giggling and lashing their leathery spined tails around.
“Philza,” Missa says to the other, “thanks for coming back.”
“‘Course, mate,” says Other-Phil. Phil can’t really see Other-Phil from where he’s standing, but he sure as hell can hear him. “So, er, what’s so urgent? Don’t tell me you missed me that much.”
“Oh, quisieras,” Missa replies with no small amount of snark. Phil doesn’t know what that means, but Other-Phil sure seems to, as he tilts his head back in a cackle. “But no, really. We have sort of a, uh—una situación, ¿ sabes?"
“What kind of situation? Auto-farmer break down again?”
“No, it’s—I think it is best if I just show you.” Missa turns back towards the house again and makes a beckoning motion. “Philza!”
“Uh, yeah?” says Other-Phil. He laughs bemusedly. “Missa, the hell are you…?”
Phil stands at the threshold of the door. Missa steps aside so they can look at each other face-to-face and that. That is. That is him. That’s him, that’s literally—oh gods. Seeing a picture is one thing, but seeing a living, breathing replica of himself, voice and all, in the flesh…
“...Oh, what in the fucking shit!” Other-Phil blurts.
And in the sheer absurdity of it all, Phil can’t help but laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “My thoughts exactly, mate.”