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Phil isn't thinking, when he pulls his dirt-stained tunic off for the night to change into a warm sweater for sleeping. It's not that he forgets Wilbur was there, because how could he, because every stuttering breath his boy takes is a miracle Phil does not take for granted. It's exactly because Wilbur is there, because this is the son he raised from an infant into a grown man, this is the son he changed every diaper of and bathed until Wilbur had insisted he was old enough to do himself. So Phil doesn't think twice before taking his shirt off to quickly change.
He forgets, though, that so much has changed since diapers and bath time.
There's a sudden, strangled noise from behind him, and the following sharp and shocked inhale immediately draws Phil's attention before he has a chance to grab his sweater.
"Woah, Will? You alright, mate?"
He meets Wilbur's eyes, uncertain how to react to the way his face has suddenly gone so deathly pale. Phil never knows, these days, what might cause something to shatter Wilbur's frame, already so precariously reconstructed.
Wilbur looks like he's going to be sick, and Phil doesn't know if it's something he did, or if Wilbur had simply remembered something without prompting. He goes to repeat his son's name, and steps forward. He means to try and ground him, work through some of those coping mechanisms they had only started to tentatively establish between them after a few too many nights of screaming nightmares that Wilbur wouldn't allow him to help with.
But Wilbur beats him to the punch, speaking so hoarsely Phil can barely hear him over the wind that pummels the sturdy walls of his roof. "I didn't realize that's what... shit, that's what it looked like, now."
"What are you talking about?" Phil blinks. At first, he utterly fails to comprehend what the fuck Wilbur is talking about— nothing in the attic has changed at all. But then he shivers, and that forces him to stifle a gasp as his bare back suddenly aches with a painful stiffness, and he understands why. "Oh. Have you— I guess you wouldn't have seen it before, huh?"
He feels guilty, then, for so suddenly exposing Wilbur to his scars. They're not pretty things to look at, Phil has craned his neck in front of a mirror long enough to know. The sudden amputation of his wings combined with a poor schedule of healing has left his scars jagged, raised, and all sorts of ugly spreading up his shoulder blades and creeping toward the back of his neck. Add on the scars from the explosion itself, and then they wrap all the way around each side, the shadowed imprint of debris left behind in the worst way. They ache where he can reach them to sooth the healing tissue, and they ache worse where he can't reach at all and has to ask Techno to help them.
Techno had looked a little like Wilbur when Phil first showed off their healing to him, although his friend was getting better at hiding his guilt, these days. He had been the one to amputate Phil's wings, when Phil had collapsed in his base after the adrenaline of battle had been replaced with soul crushing grief and unbearable pain from bearing the brunt of a devastating explosion. He had awoken two wings lighter, unable to move, only able to stare at the guilt-stricken expression on Techno's face as he comprehended what his friend had to do to him.
"They're really gone," Wilbur whispers. The sweater he's wearing is one of Ranboo's, but the Enderman hybrid is so tall the sweater hangs off Wilbur down to the middle of his thighs, and he has to keep scrunching up the sleeves to keep them from completely covering his hands. It's what they had though, as his only other option would be one of Techno's sweaters, which would certainly be too wide at the shoulders. "I thought... I thought maybe I was imagining things. That maybe you had just— that you had just hidden them really well, or, or—"
Phil can't help it: he chuckles. Gentle, more self-conscious than anything, he doesn't even mean to cut Wilbur off, but when his son lapses into silence Phil realizes it's his turn to speak and explain. "Yeah, well— wings aren't exactly meant to bear something like that, I'm afraid. They just weren't salvageable in the end."
He doesn't know for certain if that's the truth, but it's what Techno had said, and Phil trusts him more than he does himself most days. It's easier to repeat his friend's words, anyways, than come up with an explanation on his own.
"Phil, I—" Wilbur sways, and suddenly Phil fears he might collapse. "Oh, gods," Wilbur moans, thankfully grabbing onto the bedpost and slowly, with aching bones that Phil wishes his son didn't share, lowers himself onto the bed. Phil follows after tentatively, this time intentionally deciding to forego putting on the sweater. Wilbur's voice is raw with shock, and the slightest bit of awe creeping in at the edges. "Oh, gods, I— I did that to you. That was me."
Well, there's hardly any denying that. Phil hums, shutting his eyes as he, too, bends his stiff joints enough to sit down a little ways away from Wilbur on the bed. He can feel Wilbur's gaze on him before he opens his eyes again, and fights the urge to cross his arms around his side and hide himself.
"You weren't the one to amputate me," he denies anyways, a half joke before his throat tightens up and he relents. "But, yes. It was the explosion that did most of it in. I don't think fighting those withers afterward helped my chances much either."
"Don't—stop trying to put it off the subject." Phil hadn't been trying to, but he obediently shuts his mouth and lets Wilbur work his way toward his next words. It takes a while for him to get there. "Did it hurt?"
Phil swallows another bitter chuckle. "I was actually passed the fuck out at the time of it. Hurt like a motherfucker when the potions wore off, though. Thank god for Techno being overprepared, even back then." Wilbur's smile grows thin, and Phil finds himself unsure whether to push or pull back on that. "It hurt," he continues. "But Wilbur, there's not a world in which I wouldn't do it over again to protect you."
Now his son's smile slips away completely, looking almost angry for a brief second before he drops his head to look at his lap. "Why?" he asks, as if that's ever a question Phil could know how to put into words, as if there was ever a way he could express the breadth of his love to that one word. "You killed me afterward— which I'm grateful for, don't get me wrong—but if you hadn't shielded me, I think I, um, I would have died then and there."
Phil elects to ignore the middle part of that sentence, which he thinks is rather brave of him to do, seeing how those words make his heart want to shatter into a hundred different pieces. "Because you're my son, Wilbur." And oh, the last time he had said those words, the last time he had screamed them, there had been a sword in his hands and his back had been on fire and everything had been so very different. He speaks the words now with the same amount of love, though, always the same love.
Wilbur's lips are pressed in a thin line, practically trembling, and Phil wishes he knew how to soothe that complicated expression. But that's not something so easily done now that his son is grown, and it's harder still when Phil's the one to cause that look on his face to begin with.
He thinks about putting an arm around his son, but his body immediately protests the thought. Phil, having been out working on another project all day, only barely had the energy to change into a sleep shirt to begin with. Now, he slightly regrets not just passing out in his day clothes, if only because now his joints are beginning to stiffen to a painful degree and his back is full of painful aches that he doesn't have the energy to heat up a water bottle for. There's some regeneration cream Techno made him sitting at his bedside table, but Phil knows he doesn't have the strength to lather that on himself tonight, either.
Wilbur still hasn't said anything, so Phil takes a slow breath, and pushes. "What are you thinking about, mate?"
"Oh, I don't know," Wilbur says, blowing out the air from his lungs like he's blowing out smoke from a drag of a cigarette. "I dont, I don't...Could I- could I look at your scars, Phil? Would that be alright?"
And because Phil's never been able to deny his son anything, not a bed in his home, not a sword in his gut, he says, "Sure." Only to follow up with. "But if you're going to get a look at them, I'm gonna need to you to put in the work."
Wilbur's perplexed expression is enough to get Phil laughing again, and once he's able to fight through the giggles long enough to explain he sends Wilbur to get that pot of cream. In the meantime, Phil lights the lantern at Wilbur's bedside with only the slightest bit of reluctance, shivering as an orange glow is cast across the spread of scarring that covers his side.
Phil manage to pull his legs up onto the bed, crossing them at the ankle and turning so Wilbur has a better angle of his back when he sits down. He braces himself, shoulders hunched and head turned down to his fingers as they fiddle with each other, and it still isn't enough to prepare for the strangled noise Wilbur makes, again, upon seeing Phil's scars in a fuller light.
"This looks..." His son is not ever one Phil would describe as lost for words, and yet tonight it seems Phil's scars are continuing to steal Wilbur's voice away, over and over. "This looks awful, Phil."
Phil is so glad that his face is turned away from his son, because he can feel the stupid, self-conscious flush of shame settle on his cheeks with a warmness that doesn't help the rest of his chilly frame. "Yeah," he says hoarsely. "Bit difficult to care for it. Techno helps when he can."
He hadn't been there at the start, not that Phil blames him for it. New L'manburg, Tommy's exile, the execution. Those days seem so far away now, ever since Doomsday, Phil's preserved it as a crystallized memory marred mainly by the excruciating pain of the first few weeks in recovery, then again when the anvil had been dropped over Techno's head.
"Phil, where do I start?" Wilbur asks, with an urgency that makes Phil realize he must have missed the first time Wilbur asked.
"Anywhere's fine," he says, a little curtly. Pain and exhaustion are making him short-tempered, and it's all he can do to keep the anger out of his voice, because the last thing he wants now is to intentionally push Wilbur away from him over this. He can feel Wilbur's fingers ghosting over his back, though the sensation is admittedly muted by all the scar tissue.
"I, yeah, but, there's just... there's just so much of it. It's... hard to look at. I keep expecting to, well, see some wings there." Wilbur says. His voice splinters at the edges, and that's enough for Phil to crack in his own way, fingers fidgeting enough for the bones there to start aching too.
"Now who's the one between us feeling guilty, mate? That's meant to be my job, here." It's meant to be a gentle joke, but Phil knows it falls flat from the moment he says it. "What's done is done, mate. If you can't do this, right, that's okay. Just let me know so that we can both get to bed. I'll ask Techno to do it another time."
Wilbur's clearly considering it. The silence stretches long enough between them that Phil's about to make the call on his own, when Wilbur suddenly asks. "Does it hurt?"
"Always," Phil answers immediately. He tries to relax his shoulders, but that just makes it all hurt that much more. "I'm not taking back what I said, though. I'd do it all over again for you, Will. I really would."
He doesn't get a real response from that, just a soft, wounded noise, and then a gentle hand laid against his back. Cooling cream rubs into his scars, and Phil hadn't even realized how inflamed they'd become from his work until he starts to feel the regeneration cream doing its work, soaking into the scar tissue with a pleasant tingling sensation.
Wilbur takes this seriously, more seriously than Phil expected him to, if he's honest with himself about it. Still, Phil finds it a lot more difficult to find comfort in it, not like he's come to find in Techno. There's a difference there, he supposed. Techno's his oldest friend, someone who he's shared almost every scar from the past few centuries with. There's even ground between them, so when Phil needs help with his scars he's learned to ask for it in the same way Techno's learned to ask for help with his migraines. Wilbur's his son, and though he's grown, Phil still looks at him and see that little bright-eyes boy crying after falling and scraping his knees on the concrete. He's the father here, he's not meant to be the one with his back so bare and vulnerable here, scars shining in the lantern light, exposed for his son, the world, to see.
"You've got a cut, here," Wilbur says, gently prodding the edge of it. Phil's shoulder twitches at the sudden smarting pain, and that seems to prompt Wilbur into fresh action.
"I don't even know how I got that one," Phil says as Wilbur gets up from the bed, and it's the honest truth. Maybe it had been while he was mining stone, something had clipped his shoulder as it fell down. Maybe he banged it up while trying to repair the stable today. He really doesn't know.
With Wilbur gone, Phil's back feels that much colder now, as the regeneration cream sets into his skin and the chilly air of the attic settles against his spine. He hunches over further, jaw set, unwilling to speak aloud how much he regrets asking this of Wilbur in exchange for letting him see these scars. He should have just let him take a look, he should have just gone to bed to begin with.
Phil shuts his eyes, and exhales, forcing those thoughts away. This was a conversation that would have happened sooner or later. And at the very least, Wilbur's doing a good job at appearing collected tonight, even if Phil knows he's surely fraying at the seams all over again because of this.
It's alright. If he lets him, Phil will be there to pick up the pieces later tonight, or tomorrow, or whenever. He'll be there, no matter what.
The bed dips as Wilbur sits back down again, surprising Phil with the cold press of a dampened cloth against the cut on his shoulder. Phil twists his head around for a quick look at his son, still surprised by the concentrated expression on his face. He doesn't know if Wilbur is merely bottling this all up, or if his mind is cast back to a different time entirely. Phil wouldn't be surprised if it was a bit of both.
"Shouldn't get infected, now," Wilbur says, and presses some extra regeneration cream on the cut before dabbing the excess away with that same cloth.
"Think I eat enough golden apples for that to not be a problem," Phil says, a little dryly. "Bad habit, I know," he says, before Wilbur can say anything. "I'm working on it." That's a lie that slips from his mouth too easily, but that's a whole other conversation for a different time.
Wilbur makes a displeased noise in the back of his throat, and Phil's a beat too late to realize what this all is. "Thank you, Will," he says, twisting his fingers in his lap. "I appreciate this, mate."
And he genuinely does, even if a larger part of him is still struggling with these acts of care. His back already feels better, that much he can readily admit. It's causing that exhaustion to creep up on him again, this time with a much stronger pull toward slumber. He nearly manages to fight it off by standing and heading to bed, but Wilbur's hand on his opposite shoulder stops him.
"Wait," he says. "I haven't gotten all of it yet."
"You've gotten more than enough—" Phil starts to say, but Wilbur breaks his resolve with two quiet words.
"Dad," he says. Phil sits back down. "Please."
He isn't sure if that was an intentional move to keep him here or not, but Phil is far too tired to care. He settles back in, now actively fighting sleep. Drowsiness overcomes self-consciousness and worry, until he finally feels a little more like how he does when Techno helps him with this, falling asleep in front of him while they sit by the warm hearth in Techno's home. It's nothing like the preening he misses so deeply, in fact, it doesn't even begin to come close to that feeling, but it's as near as Phil will ever get again.
Wilbur's hands continue to move without tremors, massaging the regeneration cream carefully against Phil's aching skin. Phil's blinking becomes much slower as he's lulled into a doze, until he gradually becomes aware of a pillow underneath his head and a blanket being tucked over his aching shoulders.
Opening bleary eyes, Phil just gets a glimpse of his son, leaning over him with a complicated expression swimming in sorrow and guilt. He tries to hold his bearings, but the warmth of the brown blanket engulfs him before he can manage it. The last thing he sees is Wilbur leaning down, the last thing he feels is a gentle kiss to his forehead, and then finally, there is rest.