Chapter Text
Techno knew from the beginning that something was wrong. Phil never took them on vacation in June, not with the specter of upcoming exams on the horizon and a mountain of his own assignments. Techno sensed the trick as soon as the word 'camping' was mentioned, but naively ignored all logic and let himself be seduced by the promise of a few days of peace and quiet, far from his friends stressed out by school and his own textbooks. It's their tradition, after all. Traditions are untouchable and cannot be misused. Phil would never fool them like this.
So while everything was a little weird and not particularly sensible, and even Wilbur looked a bit suspicious, they all pretended that red flags were just an element of the landscape and a mirage.
He would be lying if he said he wasn't having a good time. Even if Wilbur complained that the lake water was still too cold for swimming, the rain caught them far beyond the camp a few times and the sun stubbornly refused to come out from behind the clouds, and on the third day Techno ran out of the dry sweatshirts and he had to sneak a few of his brothers. They were a bit too narrow at the shoulders, and the sleeves were far behind his fingertips, but it didn't matter as they sat by the fire, roasting marshmallows and trying to stab each other with sticks.
"If you hurt yourself, I won't feel sorry for you," Phil warned them as he confiscated the murder weapons, but it was hard to take him seriously as he glanced over at thefirst aid kit.
"Of course you will," Wilbur said, already reaching back for another stick. He still had colored bandages on his knees, because apparently being clumsy and getting into thorny bushes could lead to severe infection, bleeding out and death. "You love us way too much to not feel sorry for us."
Phil scowled at him, but it was hard not to notice that his eyes softened quickly and a smile appeared on his lips.
"I definitely do," he admitted, and even though his tone was playful and it wasn't a direct confession, Techno looked away anyway, pulling his sweatshirt up to his nose to hide that he was blushing.
He should be used to it by now. It should be the norm for him that Phil would say such things sometimes, and that he was always honest about it no matter the circumstances. But he still remembered the same sincere and much less pleasant things that he had listened to for years and still expected at times. When he heard footsteps in the corridor and instinctively looked for a hiding place. When he came home from school and froze for a second with his hand on the doorknob, listening for the screams. And sometimes he even flinched when someone suddenly put a hand on his shoulder. He’d had two long years to get used to being safe, and yet there were still days when he just couldn't believe it and looked for a trick in everything.
Phil never complained. He never reminded him that he was running away from touch, that he was able to remain silent for days, that he sometimes closed in on himself or was angry for no reason at all. That sometimes he would wake up in a bad mood and do absolutely anything to spoil the day for everyone around him. That he once threw a plate against the wall and then just cried out like he was the victim. That sometimes he was unbearable on purpose and tried with all his strength to cross some invisible line, because something in his head had stopped working, something had changed in it, and he suddenly desperately needed to prove that he didn't deserve it all. He doesn't deserve to be happy, he doesn't deserve to be safe, he doesn't deserve Phil to pull his own fingers away from painfully torn hair, to hold them tightly in his hands, to hug him, comfort him, and repeat that everything will be fine.
Because sometimes Techno just didn't believe him. Sometimes it took a long time to remember that he really was safe and loved. And even more, to stop being ashamed of the fact that he still has to be reassured about it.
Phil had once shown him an interview with astronauts who had spent way too long in orbit and forgot how gravity works. They tried to hang mugs and pens in the air, and each time they looked genuinely amazed when the object fell to the ground instead of levitating quietly.
"You do that too, sometimes." Phil rested his chin on the top of his head as he swiped finger across the screen of the phone to play the video again. Techno, still crying, his sleeves carelessly rubbed against his cheeks and reddened eyes, gripped his fingers tighter on his forearms. "Not literally," he added quickly. "But sometimes you forget that the world works a little differently from what you're used to."
Techno didn't take his eyes off the screen, but the more he tried to understand, the worse he felt.
"But I wasn't in space," he said dryly.
Phil exhaled slowly.
"No," he admitted, leaning in to kiss his hair. "But you've been to a lot of very, very bad places. And that's about the same difference as between Earth and space."
Techno didn't feel like an astronaut at all. He felt like a goddamn alien tossed on a sudden alien planet. But the arms around him were strong and warm and able to protect him from anything, so maybe it didn't matter where he was from or how much he stood out from the rest. Maybe it was just that he matched his family - small, abnormal, and sewn together from various elements.
He couldn't sleep that night. Maybe because of the air, cool and damp, maybe because all the animals of the night have resolved to remind them of their existence, or maybe because of Wilbur rolling from side to side in his sleeping bag. Whatever the reason, Techno lay on his back, staring at the roof of the tent, feeling absolutely anything but sleepy, before finally, annoyed, disentangling himself from his own sleeping bag, pulled on his boots and opened the zipper. He tried to be as quiet as possible, which turned out to be completely unnecessary, since Phil was awake as well. He sat by the fire, staring at the dying flames with such intense thought as if he were trying to fuel them by sheer willpower. When Techno cleared his throat loudly, he jumped in place and grabbed his heart.
"God, kiddo...!" He took a deep breath, shaking his head. "Someday you'll be the death of me, you'll see."
He tried to look stern, but quickly gave it up and shifted so the boy could sit next to him on the fallen log. Techno didn't need a special invitation.
"I'm not a kid anymore," he muttered, because he was really thirteen, practically an adult, even if the law said otherwise.
And Phil, apparently, too, because he just looked at him with fondness.
"You'll always be my little sleepy boy," he assured, ruffling his hair, which was utterly unacceptable and undermining all adulthood, and maybe a little too nice to just push his hand away.
"If you say so..."
They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the crackle of the fire and warming their hands, while the chill wind left goose bumps on their backs. Before Phil took them camping for the first time, Techno had never really stared at the sky at night. First, because he had spent most of his life in a city where the lights of houses and street lamps effectively obscured the stars, partly because he had never thought of it. Nothing in the sky could change his situation in any way. But now, in the forest, far from the city, in the little patch of sky between the treetops, the stars seemed even brighter than in books and movies.
"Do you think I'm a good father?"
Techno blinked, completely confused. At first he thought he had misheard, but when he looked at Phil, his expression was serious and expectant.
"Um... Yes?" He shifted nervously, not quite sure what answer he expected from him. "I wouldn't be here if you weren't, would I?"
Phil looked at him for a moment longer, as if intensely searching for something, and Techno wasn't entirely sure if he liked this conversation. He didn't mind saying nice things (though, to tell the truth, Wilbur was much better at it), and he really felt that of all the people in the world Phil deserved the assurance that he had done a great job. But there was too much desperation in his voice and gaze to consider the question entirely normal. Of course, he had this kind of breakdown at times, Techno was pretty sure anyone would go mad if he had to deal with him and Wilbur for days on end, but he had never shown it so directly.
Techno cleared his throat and moved a little closer, despite the awkward atmosphere.
"I'm serious. You're... okay. Really. Very okay." He shrugged. "You're the best parent I've ever had. And there was a bunch of them."
Phil smiled, but he didn't look really happy.
"That’s not a particularly great achievement," he remarked, and okay, there was a lot of point in that, but Techno had never said he was good at comforting, and if he knew they were going to talk about feelings, he would have taken Wilbur with him. Or he would have stayed in the tent and sent his brother to the front alone. Could he still do this? Would it be mean if he just went away and sent in a replacement? Maybe no one would notice...
He scraped his boots against the ground, kicking several smaller stones aside.
"I guess," he admitted. "But that's still something, right? And, well..." He shuffled his legs a second time, this time kicking a lump of dirt straight into the fire. "I don't know, you're good to me. You've always been good." He pulled up the long sleeves of his blouse, staring at his feet. "You never even yell at us. And you never hit me, even when I deserved it. I would beat the shit out of myself sometimes," he added half-jokingly, trying to loosen the atmosphere a bit.
But when he glanced at Phil, he didn't look amused at all. Rather worried and deeply touched for the wrong reasons.
"Techno, do you know what it means that 'the bar is on the floor'?"
The boy shrugged.
"That you settle for anything?"
"Yhm. Kinda. That you have very low expectations." Phil rested his elbows on his thighs, turning more towards him. "Like when you say the food was good because you didn't poison yourself with it. Or that someone drives well because they didn't crash the car into a tree."
Techno had no idea where this whole definition was going to lead them, but he nodded for the sake of peace.
"Yeah?"
Phil's face tightened.
"Not yelling at you or using violence doesn't make me a good person," he said so firmly that Techno nodded automatically. "Means I'm not a complete asshole, but nothing else. You just met so many bad people, everyone seems better now."
The boy opened his mouth, then closed it again, not sure how to respond to it.
"That's a bad thing?" He stammered at last, gripping his fingers tighter on the sleeves of his blouse.
This time it was Phil who hesitated.
"Yes."
"Oh." Although the fire was not going to die down yet, he suddenly felt very cold. He swallowed hard. "Are you mad at me?"
Phil's face softened instantly.
"No, of course not," he said, carefully placing his hand over Techno's as if asking for permission. The boy hesitated only a moment before squeezing his fingers in a mute reply. "It's just... When you have low expectations, people often take advantage of it. They see that they don't have to try, and you'll be pleased anyway. I wish you could understand that you deserve more." He looked at him, but whatever he was looking for, he clearly didn't find it, because he sighed heavily. "You don't like bacon, do you?"
Techno wrinkled his nose.
"No. It's greasy."
"But you ate it all when you started living with me."
"Because I didn't know if you'd give me something else." He threw up his arms. "I didn't want to be hungry."
Phil nodded.
"Exactly. See?" He leaned in, keeping his hand just above the ground. "Your bar was here - on the 'I want to survive' level. That is definitely too low."
Techno studied his hand for a moment before raising his eyebrows.
"So I have to be picky?"
"You could say so. You need to know you deserve good things."
The boy nodded slowly, though, to tell the truth, he was very far from sincere consent. It was easy for Phil to tell since he had never done anything wrong. And it was surely just as easy to think that way, looking at Wilbur, irritating and stupid and innocent to the limit. But Techno... Techno was a completely different story.
Who knows, maybe he did deserve good things. But he wasn't at all sure if the 'good things' deserved to be stuck with him.
He had a very strong feeling that he shouldn't say it aloud if he didn't want to hear how wrong he was for the rest of the night.
"I think you're good anyway," he muttered instead, quickly looking away. "With or without a bar. You're good."
Phil released his hand and for a moment Techno could only focus on how cold the air suddenly felt. But then he was pulled to Phil's warm side, and involuntarily winced because, really, he was too old for such things. Though perhaps at times, under certain circumstances, he may consider a minor exception...
"Thank you."
He looked up at the night sky. And then a little lower, at the first person that had shown it to him.
"It's fine."
It wasn't fine.
It couldn't be because when Techno emerged from the tent the next day, still sleepy and a bit stiff, Phil announced immediately that he wanted to talk to them about something. He didn't look angry, rather stressed out, which, in fact, was even worse. The last time he sat in front of them with that face, he had to leave for a few days and leave them with their babysitter. Techno hated every minute of her presence. Not because he missed his dad or anything, absolutely not. He didn't run out of the house just to be able to watch the car drive away until it disappeared around a corner and he didn't lock himself in the room afterwards and didn't cry at all for the rest of the evening, it's all slander, no one has evidence. He just didn't like the constant presence of a stranger in the house. And he didn't like being sent to bed at night when he was having a bad dream, instead of being offered hot chocolate. And that she let Wilbur skip meals and doesn't see at all that the moron was ready to starve himself out of sadness.
Techno was not a baby. He could take care of himself and he could comfort himself, and he could stand over his brother until he finally emptied his plate. But he was the first to throw himself into Phil's arms as soon as he crossed the threshold. He was self-sufficient all his life - he deserved to be helped.
Wilbur, apparently, remembered it just as clearly and dramatically, for as soon as they sat down by the extinguished fire, he blurted out:
"You're leaving again?"
Phil looked a bit offended.
"That was one time two years ago. Is this 'again' really necessary here?"
Techno frowned.
"So you're leaving?" he made sure, mentally already preparing the list of arguments, so that this time they could at least get by without a babysitter. He could be left alone, that was fine, but he absolutely didn't want a stranger in his house to make stupid rules and think she knew anything about them after two minutes of talking.
Phil closed his eyes for a moment.
"I'm not going anywhere," he assured, which, surprisingly, didn't sound particularly reassuring. Perhaps the tone he used. As if he were saying, 'Yes, your hamster survived the meeting with the cat, but soon after it was killed by a vacuum cleaner.' "In fact, quite the opposite. Someone will come to us."
The boys exchanged glances. No one ever had the heart to talk about it aloud, but Phil didn't have many friends, and his contact with his extended family was 'by letter, once a year, if he doesn't forget.' So the list of potential guests wasn't particularly long. The list of guests whose visits would cause such a fuss - was practically non-existent.
"Oookeeey?" Wilbur finally decided to pace the conversation. "But are you going to tell us more, or should we guess?"
Phil was not at all eager to answer, which was absolutely not reassuring to anyone.
"I had a call recently. From social services," he said, and Techno suddenly felt very hot. "They wanted to know if I could take care of a child for a while." He waited a moment as if the atmosphere wasn't tense enough without a dramatic pause. "A boy."
It grew quiet in the camp. Quite absurdly quiet, as if all nature held its breath for a moment so as not to disturb an important moment. No birds, no cracks, no wind and no rustling of leaves. Complete silence.
The perfect contrast to an inner scream that no one else could hear.
"You've agreed?" Wilbur asked at the exact same moment Techno said:
"You told them to piss off?"
Phil looked from one to the other, and although his expression hadn't changed a bit, Techno felt so damn judged anyway. Mainly by himself.
"I said I would think about it. I would like to ask you for your opinion first."
Techno appreciated the gesture. Really. Completely honestly. It didn't change anything at all, but he appreciated it. Phil could ask as much he wanted in the subtlest possible way, but the proposition itself had a pressure that was hard to ignore.
He glanced at Wilbur, expecting any form of support and unanimity, but his brother seemed surprisingly calm for the circumstances.
"What does 'for a while' mean?"
Phil relaxed a bit as he saw a relief on the horizon that shouldn't have been meant for him.
"He's new in the system. They're looking for a place for him to wait until his legal situation gets a little less complicated."
"Oh." Wilbur frowned. "Means he has parents."
It was by no means a novelty, the vast majority of children in the system had at least one very inept parent and a greater or lesser chance of returning to their family home in an undefined 'sometime'. Mostly 'sometime' was not a longed-for date at all, but rather a source of problems and a missed opportunity for a new, potentially better home, but Techno never thought about it deeply. He himself was perfectly good at ruining his future, he didn't need the help of hazy ghosts from the past. But now he pricked up his ears, feeling a sudden rush of hope, because if his years of being shoved from house to house had taught him anything, it was that the children whose biological parents were still around never stayed anywhere for long.
Phil hesitated for a moment, and it was clear that he was calculating exactly what and how to tell them.
"Yet," he finally admitted. "Mother, as far as I know. Sam had said nothing about any father."
Techno looked down at the still visible traces he had carved in the ground with his shoes yesterday. He felt bloody silly about how confident he had been until a few hours ago. How naively he accepted his present life as something stable and unchanging.
"So they want you to tame him, so then someone normal will want him permanently?" He said, looking up at Phil, who was obviously confused right now.
"I wouldn't put it that way-"
"But it is so."
Phil sighed heavily.
"Yes. I guess you could say that, yes."
"And how long will it take?" He didn't care how rough and cold his tone was: he needed answers, clear and specific.
This time, Phil thought a little longer, which was actually a good sign. Techno didn't like when someone lied to calm him down. Phil, well... he did it practically all the time. But in his defense - most of these things he seemed to believe himself. Like when he assured Techno that he wasn't stupid or horrible or hopeless at all. Or when he said that nothing could stop him from loving him. Very nice, innocent little lies. Techno had a goddamn weakness for them.
"A few months, probably," Phil finally replied, and then he looked at his second child, waving his raised hand in the air for a long moment. "Wilbur, this isn't school. You can talk."
The boy lowered his hand.
"What's his name?" He asked because of course he asked, because he was himself, absolutely unable to sense that very serious negotiations were taking place right next to him. Techno was eager to kick him for it.
Phil, on the other hand, smiled broadly.
"Tommy," he said, and oh, Techno didn't like that tone a lot, that note of affection, as if by some miracle he had already attached himself to the baby before he saw it in front of his eyes. It couldn't be worse. "He's six."
Ah. So it was worse. Six years - the worst possible age. Big enough to turn everyone's life into hell, but too small to discreetly punch him.
Wilbur beamed as if he had taken over the remnants of his brother's joy and will to live.
"A baby!" he was glad, because apparently he has never seen a toddler rolling on the floor of a supermarket. "Almost an infant!"
Phil laughed and shook his head, clearly happy to be able to count on a minimum of cooperation on at least one side.
"Wilbur, you weren't much older when you came to me."
"Yes, but I was already well trained so it doesn't count."
Phil immediately stopped smiling.
"Wil, I asked you..." He sighed heavily, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
"It was funny! And you smiled, I saw!"
"It was a grimace of pain," he muttered, straightening up. He looked first at one boy, then at the other, and his face turned serious. "Listen, both of you." He moved to the very edge of the stump, leaning towards them, and they both copied the gesture immediately and without any thought. "I won't do anything you don't agree to. We're family, and this is a family decision, so please be honest about your thoughts."
'Family decision'. When Techno first heard this term, his utterly automatic response was 'So why am I here too?' Phil wasn't thrilled with it. He made that face of his when he looked like he was about to cry, and you could almost hear a very sad violin in the background.
"You're part of the family, Techno," he assured, brushing the boy's hair back behind his ears, perhaps more to have an excuse to pull him a little closer.
And okay, Techno knew that. In theory. Of course he was formally part of the family, he had even been given the same last name and new papers, and Phil was stuck with him more than ever. But he was still a child. And that was more than enough to make his opinion worth shit. He knew it was worth shit. He'd heard it every day for a good few years.
But Phil didn't think that way. Of course Phil didn't think that way, he always had to defy and stand out.
"I want to know what you think," he pleaded, then really listened and heeded his opinion.
"No. Absolutely not," he would say and then patiently explain why, as if he had never heard of the golden rule 'Because I said so'.
"Ah. Yes, I guess you're right," he admitted, and even for the hundredth time, Techno was still as surprised as the first time.
Of course he could have said 'no' earlier too. And then scream, kick, and scratch when his protest was completely ignored. When he watched more strands of his hair land on the floor. When in the middle of the day he suddenly felt like sleeping. When he smelled cigarettes in the room and wanted to run away, wanted to hide, but his legs felt like cotton wool and he knew that sooner or later they would find him anyway.
When they said he could stay and then-
Phil liked it when they had their own opinion. He liked to listen to them and correct them if they were wrong, and he didn't get angry if they made mistakes. Like when Techno said something very stupid about Sapnap's parents, which he was then really ashamed of and apologized for, even though it wasn't his fault that he had heard exactly such things most of his life.
Phil was... special. When he said 'family decision' he really meant it, and he really did give each of them a veto equal to his own.
But he was also very, very poor at hiding that he cares about something. He might have thought he would fool anyone if he kept his expression indifferent, but there was sincere hope in his eyes, and his shoulders relaxed significantly as Wilbur nodded after a moment's thought.
"It'll be fun," he said completely carelessly. Techno didn't expect anything else from him, but was disappointed anyway. "We'll feed him and take him for walks and I'll teach him some cool tricks..."
Phil raised an eyebrow.
"He's not a dog, Wilbur."
"No, but you don't want to buy me a puppy, so I have to work with what I have."
Though Techno was very much in favor of buying a leash and a muzzle, he could understand why Phil had eloquently ignored the idea.
"Techno?"
He looked down at his shoes again.
"You want to take him," he said more than asked, and maybe in his heart, very, very deeply, he was hoping Phil would lie. That he would give him any starting point and a way to get around his remorse.
"I want to help," he heard instead, and he clenched his fists tighter. "But I won't be angry if you say no. You have every right to disagree."
Techno knew he had. And, in fact, he was planning to make use of it at first. He didn't want any strange child, he didn't want it to hang around the house, to move his stuff, to even get close to Phil and try to trick him by doing... absolutely anything, Phil could be tricked by anything, no barriers, no thought.
He wanted to do this. He wanted to refuse. But he hesitated a second too long, and that was enough to make him feel bad about his own resistance.
Phil was the best the system had ever offered him, the only good thing that had happened to him, the only parent who actually deserved to be called that way. And Techno had just assured him about it! He himself called him kind and caring and tender and painfully understanding, and he might not have said most of these things out loud, but that was what he meant.
He might not understand why Phil was so concerned about whether his expectations of life and people were low or high. But he was well aware that if he was really going to raise the bar, it would be good if he could reach it himself afterwards. And denying another child a good home, even if only for a while, when he knew perfectly well that a second chance practically never happened - wasn't supposed to make it easier for him.
A few months didn’t sounded so bad. Like a nightmare, to be precise, but with a vision of an imminent end. Phil will be happy to help. Wilbur will take care of torturing someone else for a while. And he himself will have a slightly cleaner conscience and maybe he will feel slightly better with himself.
Couple months. Not forever. Just for a moment. He won't even know how it's going to be over.
Techno could hear his heart pounding, the blood rushing in his ears, his breath suddenly seeming deafening.
Not forever.
Phil wasn't like that. He kept his promises. He asked him for his opinion. He wouldn't ask if he wanted to cheat him, he wouldn't ask if he tried to replace him, he wouldn't ask if he was fed up with him, and he would look for an excuse if he could find someone better, someone 'real'.
Not forever. Not forever. Not forever, not forever, not forever, not forever, he will stay here, this is his house, his family, he was here first... !
He swallowed, suddenly realizing that his fingers on his thigh were a little too tight to still feel. It took a lot more effort to loosen the hand than it should have been.
"Just for a while?" He said, in a strangely harsh, uneasy voice.
Phil watched him closely, so he cleared his throat, trying to pull himself together. He didn't want to talk about it. Never, but especially not now.
"Couple months."
Techno took a deep breath.
"Okay. Let it be. But if he touches my stuff-"
Wilbur snorted loudly.
"Who wants your books? He's six, not that nerdy yet," he sneered and then squeaked as he landed with his back on the ground. "Ah! Dad, tell him to stop...!"
Phil just laughed and for a moment, one brief moment, everything was just as it should be. Only the three of them, their little family, a little crookedly glued together. They needed no one else, now or ever.