Chapter Text
愛人者，兼愛其屋上之烏
Love for a person extends even to the crows on their roof
idiom.
If you truly love somebody, you would love everything that comes with them, for better or for worse.
Quite some time ago.
Phil stared up at the vast, simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming, expanse of white hospital ceiling. It’s all he could do to amuse himself, since his phone got busted and his arms fucked to the point that it wouldn’t even matter if he had one. Phil hasn’t been able to move around in a while and his injured shoulder was beyond saving.
It was over for him, and he knew it.
Broken wings can heal to some degree, yes, but he’d never be able to fly again. Not with his people. Not with the world he’d grown up in. It was all over the moment they decided to enter him into an actual hospital and not to the same, strange quack in the back of some equally as strange establishment. No… this was going on his record, and it didn’t matter, because this failed mission was going to be written off as him getting caught up in a mysterious turf fight— as a civilian. Some part of him knew he should be crying— anyone in his position would, but he couldn’t. Physically couldn’t. All of the grief manifested itself as a perpetually churning whirlpool of disappointment and shame that bubbled in his chest and his stomach.
…But that might also just be the broken ribs.
“Mister Fumihisa?”
Phil wearily turned his head just enough to face the door. There, the nurse that’s been taking care of him, stands. Strange. He doesn’t usually get called by his real name. Even Tristin would usually default to Phil— only really using Fumi or Minefumi in moments when they were alone and safe together… and those were rare.
“You have visitors.”
Phil nodded weakly. The nurse stepped aside to let them enter.
It took a moment for Phil to fully recognise the figures entering the room. Not to say that Phil would be needing glasses, but the medication and the constant monotony of what his life has become have significantly dulled his senses.
The tallest one of the bunch rushed towards his side. The other two smaller figures followed them. When they got closer, Phil’s vision finally focused enough to recognise exactly who were in front of him.
“M…ssssaa…” he mumbled.
Stupidly, Phil tried to reach out for Chayanne and Tallulah’s face the same way he did all those times before. It didn’t work and his arms cramped. He winced.
Oh.
They’re all saying something now, voices overlapping one another, their eyes wet with tears about to be shed.
Why couldn’t he hear them anymore?
His vision blurred.
He remembered seeing Chayanne for the first time: a small, sickly child. He was abandoned by his parents who had incurred debts with the wrong people— people that Phil worked for. He killed that boy’s parents in front of him and would have killed him, too.
Why wouldn’t he?
Phil was like that, too, when he was young. Now, he’d rather have just been killed than to be forced into this trade. If left alive, Chayanne would just grow up into another “Angel of Death” in a perpetual loop of dirty work and dirty money in order to pay the debts of his mother and father. Tallulah on the other hand had, basically, the same background. Abandoned— failed by everybody in her life who should have stepped in, done something, anything.
Missa had talked Phil out of killing them both on several occasions. Phil isn’t sure if he regrets it or not.
All he knows is that this is love.
And the only kind he’ll ever know.
Missa kissed his forehead, his tears dampening the hair on Phil’s head. Chayanne’s head was buried in his own hands while Tallulah held onto the iron bars of the bed rail with shaking arms.
Phil’s vision gradually faded.
…He wondered if Tristin would ever visit. He hoped she wouldn’t.