Chapter Text
Like all dreams, it starts somewhere Phil doesn’t remember- memory is a slippery, silvery thing now, something in a musty corner of his head telling him ‘this is how it has been’ and that it makes sense going forwards, keeping his rationale just as asleep as he unwittingly is.
Like most dreams, he finds himself perfectly balanced- there is no gentle list to one side where his wings’ muscles are thin with disuse; Phil can still feel the not-quite-fullness of his feathers, the scarred tissue keeping his movement tight, and yet, that one simple aspect is missing.
Like a decent pinch of dreams- not too many anymore, but still not an insignificant number- Phil stands over the dawn of a crater, ash seeping, embers raining, a hollow silence as though he had just missed the explosion ring out itself, and he is the first new thing in the gasping aftermath.
Something once known as L’Manberg weeps far below him in the crumble of rock and debris, in the spray of fountain water now unbound. No one cries out with it; no one else is there.
Or he had thought.
A gentle clearing of someone’s throat.
Phil whirls around, and the longest feathers on his low-stretched wings trace rubble on the stone floor.
“Ah. Uhm- My line was…” Wilbur doesn’t look at him, gaze fixed on his own feet as he curses under his breath, snaps his fingers before jerking his head back up, eyes fluttering closed. “Right. This is- It’s- My L’Manberg, Phil! My unfinished symphony, forever unfinished- and etcetera.”
Phil does not move, or provide any other reaction as far as he is aware. He is too busy looking.
Wilbur- his son Wilbur- draped in ragged old coat he remembers from this day but with the more recently familiar yellow sweater under it, reciting requiem before his death impassionately, on his own two feet instead of the already dry corpse Phil always finds waiting in these nightmares. This is not his usual dream.
“Wilbur?” Phil’s voice cracks as he speaks.
Wilbur wobbles slightly in his stance as he blinks his eyes open, meets Phil’s burning look head-on.
“Wilbur, you’re not dead.”
“I- Phil? You didn’t say that. That- that’s not what you’re supposed to say.”
“Supposed to say?” Phil is nothing but an echo.
Wilbur’s face crumples slowly, some sort of apparent realization he makes heel-turn-quick. An expression of simple ill-ease and resignation turns into something bitter.
“No, no, you really need to move this along, now, Phil. Whatever this is. I haven’t had these dreams in forever, and now of all times-” A gusty sigh, closer to pissed off than anything else. “Fuck.” He says, so quiet Phil almost can’t hear him, and Phil thinks that's how it was meant to be. “Of course, you would go ‘supposed to say’.”
Phil finds himself utterly confused.
“I don’t know what you’re- what in the world you’re talking about.”
A scoff is Wilbur’s reply to Phil’s stuttered sentence, his scuff of shoes a backdrop as he steps back and he offers only a sneer.
“Of course you don’t. You’re a- a figment of the unconscious mind. Some amalgamation of guilt and resentment threaded into familiarity, aren’t you?”
The words, however maliciously uttered, are incoherent to Phil for a good few seconds until he can twist them around in his head the right way.
“Wilbur, I’m not some dream manifestation,” He finds himself trying to defend his own sentience, somehow. “You’re in my dream. If you think you’re dreaming… We both are. Somehow.” More tentatively, Phil says, “It would make more sense if this wasn’t purely my own dream. Otherwise I don’t think there would be… You. Here.”
“Me. Here.”
Arms suddenly sweeping wide, Wilbur sidesteps closer to that great, horrible ledge where everything else drops off from. A wrecked, sprawling crater waiting with upturned stones like teeth. His eyes burn deeper in his disbelieving gaze than a stray ember that catches the back of Phil’s hand.
“Phil, shouldn’t this be where I’m remembered most? My natural habitat- a smoldering, blistering disaster. Everything that makes me. You know.”
Ignoring the other instinct to answer Wilbur’s first question with ‘No, this is where I remember you too-still and too-cold in my arms,’ Phil bites back; “What do I know?”
Wilbur is talking in- not in circles, no, but he loops around things that matter (we appear to both be dreaming and in turn sharing a dream and expecting different things out of our dreams when they started and just how much do you dream about this place if you have lines to repeat do they always go the same way) only to? What? Talk about things he assumes Phil knows about?
Phil can feel his wings fold from their floor-brushing pose, his shoulders and all the larger muscles in his wings tense as he becomes only more confused.
“I don’t know anything you’re talking about at all right now; I just said I think we’re sharing some sort of dream, after you were mad I wasn’t being how you expected or some shit, and you’re acting like L’Manberg matters?”
“I-”
Phil shakes his head in exasperation as Wilbur’s brow furrows.
“Of course L’Manberg matters. You’re supposed to. Be upset I blew it up. To kill me. In these dreams.”
“Wilbur. Do you talk about how your dreams actually work with the characters in your dreams?”
There’s no answer. None is really needed, when the entire fragile, antagonistic mask on Wilbur’s face falls apart into blatant confusion, giving into actually listening to what Phil had been saying.
There’s also no answer because Wilbur takes another step back on instinct when a flake of ash threatens to fall onto his glasses lens, and then any reply is stolen away by his botched gasp for air as he stumbles backwards over uneven ground.
Phil’s wings unfold at the same time as his hands, haloing him in dusky feathers while he catches Wilbur’s wrist in his grip.
Both of their breathing is loud compared to the still oppressive absence of anything else when they draw away from the ridge.
Wilbur draws back, and runs both hands through his hair, sighing.
His hands come down together, palms facing up. Philza closes his eyes to blink.
And they are inexplicably holding a diamond sword, blood coating it wetly at the tip, Wilbur’s jaw dropped as his sweater turns red and red and redder.
And the ledge and the ashes and the ruin once known as L’Manberg vanish in the span of a thought.
WilburSoot is whispering to you
<WilburSoot> Phil
<WilburSoot> dire emergency.
<Ph1lza> is it dire
<WilburSoot> So, so very
<Ph1lza> in what way
<WilburSoot> Okay so what sounds more appealing; tonka bean, vertiver, and moss, or grapefruit, mandarin, and juniper?
<Ph1lza> tonka bean??
<Ph1lza> moss
<Ph1lza> wil are you about to eat moss again
<WilburSoot> NO
<Ph1lza> i fucking hope not
<WilburSoot> Please choose an option
<Ph1lza> what is this for??
<WilburSoot> i will not tell you for my own personal values.
<Ph1lza> the one with out the moss and whatever the hell tonka bean is
<WilburSoot> Good enough.
<Ph1lza> srsly what is vetiver
<WilburSoot> Shhh, old man. do not worry about it for another few months
<Ph1lza> ???
<WilburSoot> all in good time, Phil. All in good time
<WilburSoot> (Cologne for Father’s day.)
<Ph1lza> OH
<Ph1lza> aww
<Ph1lza> still dont know what tonka bean is
The sword is gone, as is the blood that had for those last few seconds, begun inking itself all down Wilbur’s front.
Phil's hands are coated in glittery dust, dried flakes of blood. It’s as if he brushed them all down the blade of the weapon and tried to pick up every fragment left on it, crystal and cruor both. He’d never even handled the thing, here.
It’s not like Phil can make himself ignore the way his palms’ newfound decor catch the light- there’s so much of it, which seems odd to say when both he and Wilbur appear to be sitting in the night-shaded, short soft grasses of a field that doesn’t seem to end in any direction.
But despite the sky’s inky hue, the stars above- if everything else before hadn’t been enough, if it had all just started here, the way the stars seemed to be quite literally hung - almost invisible threads reaching even higher into that distance- would have made Phil know this was a dream.
“So. What is this?”
Wilbur’s throat bobs with his words. While Phil has been staring at his newly-stained fingertips- and the stars- he seems to have buttoned up his coat, for once, over his sweater.
It’s still the one from Pogtopia rather than the more familiar one he wore after he was revived and stayed in Phil’s own attic, odd in Phil’s eyes to see as untattered as it is.
“Are you asking me, or is that rhetorical,” Phil says back, his tone at ease despite himself.
Wilbur turns his head and glares.
“Well, what do you think all of this is? The- the dreaming.”
“Genuine question then. I dunno. It’s never happened to me before, and I’m not an expert or any other sort of educated on weird dreams, you know.” Phil shifts himself from kneeling to sitting with his legs crossed, exhaling heavily as he does. “Fuck, my knees. Anyways. How’s Utah, then?”
Wilbur flinches as if struck, at the question, and then lets his gaze dart all over Philza’s face.
“What?” He asks, mutinously.
Phil is, at very least understandably to himself, baffled by this reaction.
“I asked about Utah? And how things are going?”
“Why.”
“It doesn’t look like anything’s happening, now does it. I mean, while we’re both here-” Phil’s hands leave his knees to gesture at the empty and sprawling field. “-together, shouldn’t we catch up?”
“I- Ugh.” A short huff as Wilbur rocks from his own kneeling position to match Phil’s. “Utah is fine.”
“Hm. Did you get your old job back, then? Or something new?”
“I did get my old job back. And then I quit after a while and got a different one.”
It takes Phil a moment to realize Wilbur isn’t volunteering the information himself, bent over his knees and plucking the grass from the ground and watching it regrow- which is apparently something that dream grass does in seconds.
“And that new one is?”
“...Editing. It isn’t probably going to be a long-term gig, I just got in with some local author who needed a line editor for a bit until their usual one could be available again,” Wilbur explains. “I might freelance for smaller works after, or find an entirely different thing to do. I dunno.”
There’s probably an entire story behind Wilbur ‘just getting in’ with a local author, but the tenseness in his shoulders and the clipped way he speaks- Phil won’t go prying.
“Aw, that sounds really cool actually, mate. I’m glad you’re working with words.”
“Working with words?”
Phil snorts. “Okay, yeah, weird way to word that. I just meant- You had that entire desk setup back when you were little, you know? You and that desk and that typewriter. We went through so much paper. It feels like it makes sense that you’d do something- Literary, that’s a better word.”
“Oh, God, the typewriter,” Wilbur bemoans with his face planted into cupped hands, a lonely blade of grass caught on his sleeve. “I never told you, but I cried when it broke for good.”
“Oh, mate,” Phil sighs, the words consoling but tone utterly teasing.
Wilbur takes his head out of his hands, and for the first time meets Philza’s gaze straight-on since he had seemingly thought Phil was merely a character in his own dream. His face is finally, finally slightly relaxed, and he begins talking, something in an amused tone, but Phil is not hearing any of it.
“What the hell?” He splutters, interrupting Wilbur.
“What?”
“Your fucking-” Phil gestures around the entirety of Wilbur’s head. “Your hair? And your face??”
“What??”
Blinking stupefied back at him is Wilbur’s own face, yes, but stripped of the brittler white hairs that Phil had gotten used to seeing form the majority of Wilbur’s fringe after a few haircuts since his revival, and his scars- from L’Manberg’s explosion, a tree branch and an unfortunate storm, who-even-knows-what-happened-there, and even the one that marked the corner of his jaw since he was 4- all gone.
Phil watches as Wilbur’s expression slackens in shock, and leans back slightly when Phil’s wings shift gently on the grass.
“You too.”
Him too. Every single one of Phil’s feathers are fresh and preened and ink-black and shining in the unreal starlight. Unscarred. His arms, under their sleeves, are brushed clean of their own aged scrapes and scratches that had once made their way white, and the strands of wheat-gold that fall in his line of sight are greyless.
The reverie of his strangely-changed form ends when a soft touch alights itself on the edge of Phil’s now outstretched wing- Wilbur’s hand, connected to the rest of his concerned-looking self.
“Is this just a- a dream thing?” Wilbur says, his hand dropping as Phil brings his wings behind his back again.
Phil runs his fingertips over his forearms, mourning the crisscross of white lines that he had always thought were hard-won, deserved.
“Oh,” He sighs, utter relief in his voice. “I can like- feel them underneath. It’s as though it’s a layer on top, or something.”
Wilbur mmhs in reply, and then looks above to the crystalline sky above. His sweater, thankfully, remains scrubbed clean of the blood that had just- appeared there, before the two of them appeared here.
“That whole sword thing scared the fuck out of me,” Phil tries to say as casually as possible.
A brief wince is visible in Wilbur’s posture.
“Same, I guess.”
“You guess?” Philza knows he’s closer to taunting than trying to get an actual answer- Wilbur, in the span of a question, has gone back to his demeanor of keep-away he had been nearly this entire time.
“Yes.”
This time, it’s closer to a sneer.
“Okay.” It’s useless, Phil’s platitude, he knows, but he can’t leave that bitterness as the last words hanging in the air.
Silence stretches, as does some impossible-to-identify distance between the two of them- not visibly, they both sit in the wafting grasses that never seem to part for weeds- but somewhere else.
And then they’re somewhere else.
WilburSoot is whispering to you
<WilburSoot> hey Phil
<WilburSoot> Is Fundy still not back in town yet?
<Ph1lza> hey mate
<Ph1lza> no i doubt it
<Ph1lza> why
<WilburSoot> worried about him
<Ph1lza> that’s what being a parent is like Wil, you already know that
<WilburSoot> in a different way
<Ph1lza> i figured
<WilburSoot> He’s not going to be okay by himself
<Ph1lza> he’s an adult
<WilburSoot> he went as far as possible from other people to live.
<Ph1lza> he’s an adult. He can make decisions for himself and judge situations for himself too
<WilburSoot> he shouldnt have to be entirely alone when he already feels unsupported or
<WilburSoot> Uncared for in a possibly unhealthy state of mind
<Ph1lza> and you’re certain he feels this way… how
<Ph1lza> you said the last time you spoke went awfully
<WilburSoot> It did so badly
<WilburSoot> he sure as hell doesnt need to see me again but he still doesnt need to be alone i can tell
<Ph1lza> you should really just
<Ph1lza> Wilbur you had an entire war for independence
<Ph1lza> I dont know if you have room to speak on encroaching on someone else’s.
<WilburSoot> That was entirely different in so many ways Phil, it was for a nation.
<Ph1lza> I don’t see how that matters
<WilburSoot> It is!
<WilburSoot> But I just want to know Fundy has someone there when he needs someone to be there, and for Fundy to know that he doesnt have to feel like he needs to stay away because he’ll never get meaningful interaction
<WilburSoot> and that he’s okay
<Ph1lza> i want him to be okay too
<WilburSoot> I know.
Like every dream before this one, Phil doesn’t question where he is right now.
Though that’s less because the usual slipstream of questioning reality and its appearances has gone dull with his and Wilbur’s sudden change of scenery, and more because he can recognize the etching of his floorboards with a glance.
The fireplace crackles, absent of warmth as Phil straightens himself up, but the mantle is cracked in every familiar spot. Wilbur nearly trips over a rug, and Phil knows instinctively he wouldn’t have done the same if only because the weave is as intimate under his boot as is under his fingertips.
The firelight brings Phil’s returned scars into warm relief, the grey of his feathers, the brights of Wilbur’s hair even from where he faces away from Phil. Ease at the recognizability of all the details of his own appearance sink into Phil within a heartbeat.
There’s a stray blade of grass where it was stuck to Wilbur’s sole left on the rug, abandoned as Wilbur sighs and trudges to flop onto Phil’s couch, at first curling his entire form onto it, then flinching and kicking his boots off.
“Thanks for not putting your shoes on my couch even in your dreams, Wil,” Phil says dryly, sitting on the other side of Wilbur’s sprawling form.
Wilbur squirms and twists his head to stare at Phil from upside down, brows furrowed.
“So I can put my shoes on the couch?”
“No.”
“Ugh.” With this, Wilbur turns back to face the back cushion, his hands knotting into fists.
The two of them are still, silent. The fire roars. And then Phil is jostled as Wilbur decides to sit up and join normal person sitting on couch society with him.
Phil runs his hands over his pant legs, wishing the fireplace would cast genuine heat over his body- he’s not cold, but it’s the dissonance of the lack of sensation contrasted with the sight, the sound. It becomes eerie the longer it goes on.
When Phil looks back at his rug, the lone blade of grass is gone, with nothing left in its place.
A sudden shift startles Phil, just slightly- Wilbur’s only moved a little bit, but it was enough to make him jump, and Wilbur can tell, judging by the way he meets Phil’s eyes with his own knowingly.
Phil finds himself holding his breath for no good reason. He has a reason, but it’s not a good one.
There’s nothing about the scene that replicates it; They were in the kitchen sitting across from each other. Wilbur was ill-eased, yes, but warm in demeanor at the time, and they were nothing like this silence, silence, silence.
But Phil is vividly remembering those words he never knew what to make of- ‘Good. Because I’m not afraid of you either.’
Phil, for a moment, had forgotten that this was a dream.
Wilbur breaks the staring contest first, sliding off the couch entirely in discomfort and brushing his hand across the mantle, half of his face descending into shadow.
Phil exhales quietly and scrubs one hand through his hair.
This too shall pass.
He doesn’t know what he’s hoping will end first- his and Wilbur’s strenuous dynamics, or whatever unlapsing hell this dream is.
The dream carries on for now, he concedes, as his floorboards dissolve beneath his feet.
You are whispering to WilburSoot
<Ph1lza> hey wil
<Ph1lza> i think youre busy
<Ph1lza> im just going to spam text you now okay
<Ph1lza> Im also going to pretend you said okay
<Ph1lza> ghostbur was kind of freaky but i would never say it to his face
<Ph1lza> not genuinely because of anything he did
<Ph1lza> he was fine
<Ph1lza> he was you
<Ph1lza> i think thats what made him a little bit terrifying
<Ph1lza> you were dead and also there was ‘you’ hanging around and laughing and sticking your hands in the rain
<Ph1lza> also then that one time he fucking shouted at me about that sheep and i wont lie the
<Ph1lza> message sent too soon :/
<Ph1lza> the rain made his face smear and melt he looked like he would have dragged me into that crater if i said the wrong thing
<Ph1lza> sometimes i feel silly that i stuck around l’manberg to be honest
<Ph1lza> i knew it was your? place?
<Ph1lza> like before you blew it up n shit
<Ph1lza> but i think i had too many nightmares about your body falling off the ledge when the bombs went off and you crashing onto the rocks below and turning the water under new lmanberg’s posts into blood to enjoy the scenery properly
<Ph1lza> aaaaaaaaaaa too many words. going to bed now.
<Ph1lza> goodnight wilbur
This time, Phil does, really, just a little bit, question where the hell he is at the moment.
At the same time, he’s just smeared way too much dark blue into his grey, and he thinks that to be honest, he’s been using far too much paint on his brush in general and sort of doubts his canvas will dry anytime soon. He’s more concerned with this presently, because he’s also kind of accepted that this is just a fucking batshit dream at this point and- Three pairs of wings shift on his back in time with his rising-yet-casual hysteria. That. Somehow, he and Wilbur had both accepted this after a mutual minor freakout, however, chalking it up to ‘Shared Fucky Dream Mechanics.’
Between the ever-shifting dynamic of his surroundings (and himself) and of Wilbur’s apparent mood, Phil decides that maybe he can afford to focus on painting a pretty little nighttime scene before he and Wilbur are whisked away. Or something.
Phil turns, slightly, from the propped-up canvas on its pristine white easel to rinse his brush in the bowl of water he and Wilbur share. The water never gets dirty, no matter how much pure black Wilbur uses- Phil doesn’t think he’s used another colour yet.
Phil looks at his palette held in off-hand, dark tones in one corner oozing with pale greens and bright whites.
“Ugh.”
He picks up white on his brush- he could have sworn it was bigger three seconds ago, but at least he needed a smaller brush now- and daubs it into black-blues mottling some sort of sky. Scattered points of light turn into distant stars, and then as if without conscious heed, Phil draws thin pale lines from the larger of them off the top of the canvas.
Phil tries to admire his work so far- it’s hard, because he’s not great at layering colours nicely, and the grass is much too thick and looks much too blocky and doesn’t match well with the sky’s shade.
So he turns to Wilbur instead, a distraction until he can figure out what to do next. A long, half-matted braid makes its way down Wilbur’s back. It’s exactly how it had looked when he first clambered up to Phil’s doorsteps, unsteady in his gait, slightly wild in his eyes. The shock of white seems more prominent than it’s ever been.
“How’s it going, mate?” Phil asks, tapping his brush handle against own idle wrist.
“Mmmmmh,” Wilbur ‘responds.’ His head is bent severely over his own canvas cradled in his lap where he leans against a tall, smooth stone.
"Wow. Such reply. Very information.”
Still absent from listening, Wilbur’s brush makes a faint scraping sound and Phil’s spine shudders like someone ran sharp nails the wrong way all through his feathers.
“What are you even painting over there?”
The answer appears to be a great dark monstrous shadow- which makes sense, given all the black Wilbur’s been solely using. He hadn’t even bothered to cover parts of the canvas he doesn’t seem to be using with white paint, leaving the texture still visible.
Wilbur looks up at Phil, who’s gotten close enough to lean down in order to see his work, and looks slightly shaken out of a stupor.
“Oh, hullo, Phil.”
“Hello, Wil. What is that,” Phil gestures to the scratchily-composed creature, and then the frayed and nearly-paint-bare edges of Wilbur’s brush.
“I think it’s a dragon, to be quite frank with you. But I didn’t want to use any colours so it’s just the like- Silhouette.”
Phil blinks. “You can paint a silhouette without trying to carve it into the canvas, you know. It’s a paintbrush, not a pencil- you don’t really need to press. You kind of just need. Paint.”
“I like it looking scratchy,” Is all Wilbur says before dipping his brush into possibly the smallest amount of paint ever and going back to making his canvas very, very upset.
“Ugh,” Phil scoffs half-heartedly. “Fine, all art is art or whatever actual artists would say.” He spins his own brush in his grip once more and tries to balance out the hues of ground versus sky while also balancing his stance against extraneous dream-limbs.
When Phil eventually tires of fighting the slow march of time (read: gives up on trying to layer paint before it’s dried) he glances once more at Wilbur’s hunched-over form carving away at his piece before taking a good look around their surroundings for the first time.
They both stand in a miraculously-lit ring of marble tile floor, easily absent in perception until it itself is focused on. And then Phil looks beyond the circle of light, that dropping off into darkness where tile is subsumed and cracked by the sprouting of weeds, quickly overtaken by larger and larger plants. A broad-leafed fan of deep red he recognizes as something tropical reaches for nonexistent sunlight. Phil thinks he sees a pitcher plant.
Now that he’s genuinely paying attention to the backdrop, Phil notices that nearly everything unlit in their little halo, their mockup studio light, is deep and dark and red. The air is sickly sweet when he breathes it in, but turned at the edges, the same way the breeze did that one time a fox had died downstream of Wilbur’s childhood home.
His eyes scan the undergrowth, halting on every tiny detail that just turns out to be another part of a plant glittering in lowlights- sundews, bromeliads, fly-catcher plants dipped in dew.
And then bone. Slick with red rivulets, hollow of meat, a ribcage and spine sit with curling vine and frail cabbage white fanning its wings atop the sickly mess. It’s not the only set of remains out there.
Now that Philza has found one, more glistening sets of cavities dusted with spare life and dripping in blood make themselves apparent to him; an old, cracked pelvis in the embrace of a tree’s root, a split deer’s corpse decorated in active, feeding rot.
Phil becomes aware of just how inadequate his own canvas feels when Death herself paints life in a thousand different aging colours in his dreams, and goes to shake Wilbur’s shoulder, to make him realize the same, before pausing.
Wilbur, revived, before he left for old-new lands, was all big talk about his Limbo and layers of hell and heat deaths, but, judging by the way he shook from the sidelines when Phil had to bury a horse that had gotten too old, he is not too different from the boy who cried at the dead fox downstream.
Philza is the Angel of Death. He knows his associations, and he also knows that Wilbur would not find the same beauty he has found in their macabre surroundings.
So he retreats his hand, casts on more look out to the bleeding-deep darkness, and picks up his brush.
Somewhere along the way, the quiet gets to him, and the staleness of his own canvas.
Wilbur has barely changed position- his head is less crooked over his canvas now, and his hair falls into his face a modicum less, but he is still physically focused on his work.
“Wilbur,” Phil finds himself speaking without warning, interrupting that position.
“Hmm? What- What is it, Phil?”
How often do you dream of me killing you?
Part of Phil wanted to know ever since the question occurred to him; the other part was very, very afraid to know. And now, every single bit of him is too afraid to ask.
Wilbur looks at Phil and despite appearing so unlike the son he remembered before Everything Happened, for once this entire experience his expression doesn't look as though there’s some impossible distance, an impenetrable wall that has to be maintained between them.
Phil falters. “I- I really like your painting, Wil.”
“Thanks.”
Wilbur paints, and Phil mourns his sentimentality for a little while more (or it may be much longer. It is a dream.) and then the entire fucking place disappears yet again.
You are whispering to WilburSoot
<Ph1lza> Techno got another new polar bear cub
<Ph1lza> save me
<Ph1lza> save me from the onslaught of animals this man brings
<Ph1lza> did i tell you he tried to take in a full-grown zoglin as a pet
<Ph1lza> it kept headbutting him and everything and busted down the pen he tried to put it in i had to tell him to either send it back to the nether or kill it
<Ph1lza> it’s probably terrorizing piglins rn
<WilburSoot> I’d expect nothing less from him.
<WilburSoot> What is your new polar bear cub-in-law called?
<Ph1lza> i dont even want to know what relations you’re implying by having the cub be an in-law
<Ph1lza> i think its named something with ‘fangs’ but also i think there’s a z in there somewhere
<WilburSoot> Excellent
<Ph1lza> you would say that
<Ph1lza> anyways
<Ph1lza> whats up with you
<WilburSoot> Mmmm not much to be honest. No work today but I’m just sitting in the laundromat waiting for my jackets n shit to dry because it’s too cold to go without them.
<Ph1lza> too cold already??
<WilburSoot> Yes, the sun is gone and thus, and lo, it’s fucking freezing it sucks
<WilburSoot> And now I have to wait for my jackets :(
<Ph1lza> poor poor wil
<WilburSoot> :( yeah poor me
<WilburSoot> I did get to pet someone’s dog on the way here though so that was cool.
<Ph1lza> very good
<WilburSoot> And I saw the same stray cat by my apartment that usually sticks around there too
<Ph1lza> ohhhh the one that lets you pet it?
<WilburSoot> yeah, I think she used to actually be someone’s pet, probably, just because of the way she acts and loves to be stroked, but she gets skittish if you try to actually pick her up.
<WilburSoot> I should probably buy like
<WilburSoot> a cat bowl and cat food and see if she’ll eat.
<Ph1lza> she’s probably getting fed or at least finding food if she’s staying nearby and isnt visibly starved but it cant hurt to offer
<WilburSoot> Right.
<Ph1lza> are you still sending tommy letters btw?
<WilburSoot> Yeah
<WilburSoot> Does he not tell you about them?
<Ph1lza> sometimes? not regularly and i didn’t know if there was one recently
<WilburSoot> I try to send him a letter about every two weeks
<Ph1lza> when was the last time he sent you one back
<WilburSoot> Uh
<WilburSoot> I think two months ago.
<WilburSoot> why
<Ph1lza> just curious tbh
<WilburSoot> Oh okay.
<WilburSoot> Do you think there would ever be a time Tommy would want me to visit again
<WilburSoot> or
<WilburSoot> NVM my clothes are done. Talk to you later
<Ph1lza> sorry, was helping techno feed the animals
<Ph1lza> and yes, I do
<Ph1lza> love ya wil
They’re back in Phil’s house. However, it’s now his attic.
A bed sits in the middle of the room, desolate and wood-framed and lonely, the same bed Phil had given to Wilbur to stay in and had moved out to storage a few weeks after he’d left for Utah. The quilt is free of dust, sheets rumpled and peeled back as though Wilbur, standing looking down at it, had just gotten up from there that morning.
Phil has a lump in his throat, he realizes, looking at his son and the once-familiar sight.
Wilbur sits on the mattress, bouncing slightly with the springs, and taps fingers idly at the wood sideboards like he’s finding the rhythm of a song. It’s enough to make Phil sick with misery, missing Wilbur in every single way that he hadn’t had in admittedly, a shorter span than when he was dead, but still so long.
These casual actions he displays without second thought- contrasted with the way he’s quick to bite his own tongue, or turn sour at the edges while Phil doesn’t know the trigger- the reversals makes Phil feel like he doesn’t understand anything anymore.
It has to end, someway or another.
And somehow, the only thing Phil knows how to begin to address- anything - is with a question that’s been plaguing him from the start of this.
“So,” Phil starts, stilted, voice cracking harshly. ‘I’m in your dreams, and I kill you over and over again,’ or some approximate amalgamation about to follow, when Wilbur curls into himself and the clack of his teeth into a snarl is audible in the stifling quiet of the room.
“What do you even want me to apologize for?! I’m not going to apologize to you!” Wilbur barks.
Phil breathes slow.
“What?”
“I- You- I don’t know what you expect from me. Or- I do. But I have. Nothing. I have nothing for you, Phil.”
“What the hell do you mean.”
Phil is so lost.
Wilbur’s eyes narrow. He unfolds himself from where he sits on his bed.
“I mean, that I am not apologizing for anything.”
This last word is hissed, low and cruel, in Phil’s face. He stumbles back, blinking wildly at Wilbur’s expression- it’s not misplaced from something forever and ever ago; Less agonized, but not entirely, more biting, but still somehow delivered as though it’s something self-destructive in purpose. Phil thinks he saw this last on Wilbur’s face on that November 16th.
Phil’s boots echoing on the floorboards suddenly turns to a scrape of gravel-sound; Seagulls burst into chorus with ocean waves.
Wilbur is blocks below Phil now, but not many, on a towering pillar same as Phil’s own.
“What the fuck-” The scenery change is quickly dismissed by Phil, he doesn’t recognize this place, at least at the moment, and it could very well be a dreamt up location. “Wilbur, what do you have to apologize for?”
Wilbur’s head snaps up from gawking at the sea far below him.
“What? No! I don’t have anything to apologize for.”
Hands knot themselves into Wilbur’s coat, indignant, and Phil finds himself growing more frustrated. He doesn’t understand. Sometimes he thinks he never will, anymore.
“Then why are you yelling it at me!” He shouts down the tower, and then the tower dissolves until he’s just shouting in Wilbur’s face on his old L’Manberg porch.
“Because I need you to know that!”
Snow is falling fast past the awning of Phil’s roof, and some long-forgotten part of him, despite the entirety of the situation almost yanks Wilbur back under it when Wilbur huffs and steps out backwards into the snow- a habit of his when Ghostbur trailed his hand through raindrops and seeped through snow.
Phil knows he’s faltering in whatever previous passion he had, however confusion-borne it was.
“Wilbur. What do you think I need you to apologize to me for?” He thinks this time, he’s worded it right.
There’s a hitch in Wilbur’s breath as he slips slightly on icy stairs before clutching onto a railing.
“I don’t know.” His voice is finally quiet, not at a volume just to get distance. “I don’t know what you want me to say, but I know I can’t say it. I… You told me to- to apologize to people, right? And I did. Most of the time, I really, really meant what I said from the start, and other times, I figured out what they needed me to mean as I went along. But…” Wilbur’s shoulders shake, just a little bit. “I don’t know if there’s anything more I can apologize to you for, and mean it.”
“I don’t- I don’t care about that, Wil. None of that matters to me. Is that all?”
Somehow, this makes things worse, Phil thinks. Wilbur’s face crumples.
“And then I left you.”
“Oh. Wilbur, no, you didn’t.”
Phil’s heart shudders with sympathy, and he walks forward to tug Wilbur into his arms, wings coming forward in embrace.
But L’Manberg fades away, and stone rises on all sides, crooked letters carving themselves into the walls in scrawled font, a single wooden chair now sitting frail and practically- were it not an inanimate object- shuddering in the center of a small, too-familiar room.
Phil can hear his gasp mingle with Wilbur’s, the both of them sounding as though the air’s been punched out of them, strangled. Wilbur jerks away from the wall like it’ll bite.
Phil looks down at the stone by their feet- not of own volition, really, but the simple shock of his surroundings- and sees.
His shadow is in the form of wings upon wings upon wings, and thus is a big mess of nothing at all.
And Wilbur’s shadow is the sketchy, bleeding silhouette of a monster: claws rending the earth, fire spitting from a horrendous maw. The flitting echoes of some long-lost maunder of Ghostbur’s, a dragon slain, reach Philza’s memory.
His head shakes numbly until the sensation of Wilbur’s shoulder brushing his gently jolts him out of it. Phil slides a wing behind Wilbur’s back, some sort of cradle, he barely thinks, and they drag each other to sit on the floor, as far as possible from any wall, facing that horrible thing, The Button, before them.
It’s a very nice silence, Phil thinks. It’s horrible, yes, what brings them both to their knees, but it is just a dream. And he knows this.
“Before I dreamed this- with you, and it was you you, alive, I kept having nightmares. I was scared you were dead,” Wilbur says in a low voice.
“Huh?”
“I-” The sigh that Wilbur takes is felt through Phil’s shoulder. “Last week, I- I was just walking across the street- I was getting groceries. And I was going across the crosswalk, but, but then I just. Had the thought that-” Slow breath. Phil presses his wing to Wilbur’s back. “That everyone on the SMP had just died, and then forgot themselves, and forgot me, and then- I was almost run over by a car, to be honest, but someone dragged me out of the road before then. And I went home and was fine and then I had the same nightmare every night.”
Wilbur wipes his undereyes, teary now, but somehow lighter. A miserable, yes, but still-there grin makes its way onto his face.
“Oh, mate,” Phil says, voice thick with emotion.
“Don’t ‘Oh mate’ me.”
“Sorry, it’s too late to take it back. It’s irreversible. But- No, Wilbur. We’re alive. We’re all okay. I promise, I promise every single one of us are alive and well and we remember you. It’s all okay.” Phil swings an arm around Wilbur’s neck (even sitting he’s taller than Phil) and tugs him into his arms, an odd sideways hug that he reinforces with his wings.
“I- Okay,” Wilbur says into Phil’s wings.
"And if you ever doubt that- Just- Just text me. Call me. You’ve always been able to do that. I’ll never want you to stop contacting me, even if you think I’m mad, or if I really am mad. You didn’t have to stop talking just because you left the server, Wil.”
“I…” Wilbur’s hands dig into Philza’s feathers tightly, but Phil makes no moves to get away. “Phil. I lost my communicator as soon as I left.”
Something hot falls onto Phil’s hand, startling him, and it takes a second for him to realize it’s Wilbur’s tear.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay. We’ll get you a new one, alright? I can- I can send you one next time Tommy sends you a letter, or just send it the same way he sends those anyways.”
Phil shifts, bringing Wilbur up from his knees and the both of them standing, finally dragging Wilbur into a full-out hug, his own eyes starting to sting.
“And- And I’m going to visit you soon, okay? It doesn’t have to even be a full day. No worrying about hotels, or- or anything. I just. I just want to see you. Okay?”
When Phil’s feathers come down, when father and son finally let go of each other, and wipe respective damp eyes, the button room is gone. It’s a small, modern apartment, one Phil immediately knows is Wilbur’s current one- Polaroid images of his younger days line the walls, but so do assumedly newer ones. His AC rattles away, whirring, and the paint job is an atrocious pink that Phil can tell Wilbur adores.
“Oh-”
“You hate the paint, right?” Wilbur laughs wetly.
“Exactly what I was going to say.”
“Good. I think I kind of wanted it that way.”
“When do you think this- all of this ends?” Phil finds himself asking.
"I don’t know,” Wilbur replies, scuffing his heel against the carpeted floor. “Now that I’m not worrying about things that aren’t- Stupid, I guess, or- not stupid, that’s wrong, but, incorrect-”
“Yeah. I just want to be able to get to talk to you when I’m awake, too.”
Wilbur nods, and looking down at his coat, dusts off the small stray feathers that ended up on it in when he and Phil were sprawled on the ground.
Phil looks down at himself and brushes his pants down too, hopefully resolving that problem for himself, when he pauses. He reaches into his pocket, suddenly heavy, and pulls out a yellow communicator, scratched and dented on one side, antenna painted teal.
“Wil-”
There’s text on the screen- he thinks it’s his own colour, actually, but doesn’t read what it says, passing the device to Wilbur’s now outstretched hand. The metal slips from Phil’s grip to Wilbur’s, and then-
WilburSoot is whispering to you
<WilburSoot> If truth in hearts that perish
<WilburSoot> could move the powers on high,
<WilburSoot> I think the love i bear you
<Ph1lzA> Wilbur?
<WilburSoot> should make you not to die
<WilburSoot> Sure sure if steadfast meaning
<WilburSoot> If single thought could save
<Ph1lzA> whats this
<WilburSoot> the world might end tomorrow
<Ph1lzA> Wil
<Ph1lzA> wtf r you doing
<WilburSoot> You should not see the grave
<Ph1lzA> are these like
<Ph1lzA> song lyrics??
<Ph1lzA> are you lyricposting again
<Ph1lzA> or
<Ph1lzA> wait is this
<Ph1lzA> a poem????
<Ph1lzA> oh wait is this
<Ph1lzA> is this that one poem you read?
<Ph1lzA> About the statue in the desert
<WilburSoot> You never heard that one. i never read it to you
<Ph1lzA> oh
<WilburSoot> can I finish?
<Ph1lzA> yea sorry
<WilburSoot> you’re fine
<WilburSoot> This long and sure set liking
<WilburSoot> this boundless will to please
<WilburSoot> Oh you should
<WilburSoot> actually nevermind, I’m bored
<Ph1lzA> yea sorry
<WilburSoot> Sorry
<Ph1lzA> you’re fine mate
<WilburSoot> Okay.
<WilburSoot> Do you want to hear a poem I used to tease Tommy with back in L’Manberg
<Ph1lzA> oh hell yeah
Phil wakes up in a cocoon of comforters on the floor, soaked in sweat, panting. Air eludes his reach until he can wrestle the mass of down-and-cloth off of his form and picks up his aching body from the hardwood floor.
He massages his forehead with his palm, partially inclined to collapse back onto the blanket-less mattress and just go back to sleep, until the buzzing of his communicator on his nightstand startles him, and he picks it up, expecting maroon text of Techno, or the bright red of Tommy barreling at him.
It’s not either of those, or anyone else he had reasonably expected.
A dream comes flooding back.
“Wilbur?”