Archive of Our Own

It's probably a bit fucked up to admit, but Phil's marrying the Emperor because he's funny. Well, okay—Phil's marrying because it's his duty, something something, blah blah blah. He's been given the great honor of being a political pawn in a wargame between two powerful nations. ...Empires? One of them is called an Empire, at least.

Anyways, he's been bestowed the great gift of dying from inevitable assassination instead of the traditional execution methods, in no small part because it turned out Hardcore wasn't meant to be a survivable trip, but from Phil's end it really hadn't been all that bad. It wasn't his fault they didn't tell him he was supposed to die there. All it would have taken was one singular mention of death-by-world and he would have stayed where he was. He might've even faked his death, leaving traces of it near the entrance of the banishing point and living his life in the deeper parts of Hardcore nobody but him went to.

He came back, though, and for as hard as that process was it granted him some kind of reward. A boon, to account for the suffering he endured to prove his innocence for the laundry list of crimes attached to his name. He did those crimes, by the way. Traditional justice systems make zero fuckin' sense. Things were more clear cut and sensible during the war.

Instead of sense, he gets marriage. Technically, some noble's advisor gave him a list of people he could choose to marry from. He did have some choice, even as a recently-pardoned criminal. But his only options were Murderer Noble That Probably Kills Babies, Rich Guy Whose Three Spouses All Mysteriously Died, Some Other People, Guy Who Hates Philza Personally, and then, of course, The Emperor of the Antarctic.

It wasn't exactly a difficult decision. Of the available choices, Phil's only met one of them, but they explicitly stated they wanted to cut his wings off his back and break every one of the bones in his body. The other option he knows a bit about has…not done that. He’s even been described as polite, funny, and a damn good fighter. One singular person described him as awkward and lame, but omitting that he has perfect reviews across the board. Even if that’s true it’s still better than anyone else. If Phil can ignore the whole ”taking over the world” thing that made the marriage necessary, he might even end up liking the guy.

Maybe.

He's not going to be able to keep up politically. Phil knew that from day one. He hasn’t had the training or the expertise or even enough of the information that the upper classes get on the regular. His only hope is that the Emperor doesn't need or want to play the games the rest of nobility does, that the person he’d been described to be during the war aligns with the person he is now, no matter how unlikely that is. They'd send some experienced politician to marry the man in a more sensible world. But, yeah, Phil is kind of jeopardizing his entire nation’s stability because he doesn't want to marry a complete and total stranger. Oops?

Yeah, oops. Mostly “fuck em” but a little bit oops. When everything goes to shit because of him he'll probably feel a little bit sorry.

So he's marrying the Emperor, but before that he has to get there. Phil’s heard enough talk about the trade lines to know the survival rates of travel are downright abysmal. Even the safest paths are risky endeavors. Most people would go by boat to minimize that risk. The journey would surely last months, and they'd only get there if the ice permitted.

The Antarctic Empire, however, arrives by plane. It's long and sleek, metal painted grey on the belly and blue and white on the underside of the wings like a real bird’s might. Phil watches it descend in slow circles, hovering the same way he does when he's hunting, zoning in on an invisible mark somewhere on the stone courtyard.

When the plane stops circling and moves to dive in and land, it churns up a scream. The nobility and their staff that are watching the courtyard either cover their ears or rush inside. It's a haunting and familiar sound, a whining shudder of wind that grows the closer it gets, interspersed with low groans as its wings pick up wind to slow it down. The sound is like a canyon whistle, layers of noise trapping itself in the crevices of the metal flyer.

Then it lands. Wheels hit the ground spinning, and the plane does a little bounce as it makes contact with the earth. It moves from one end of the massive courtyard to the other in the span of seconds, rushing to a stop only a meter away from the stone archways Phil and the chosen delegates stand under. Phil’s wings puff up, bristling automatically as it closes in. He takes a half-step back before it stops. The delegates freeze or try to jerk out of the way, even after it stops.

The plane’s engine hums, then it clanks, and then all noise from it dies as it powers down. The door opens with a clang, and the Antarctic Empire's most experienced pilot steps out. He’s gotten taller in the years since Phil has seen him, which is ridiculous since he was already a head taller than him back then. He casts a broad silhouette, signature red cloak fluttering in the wind behind him. There’s a crown tied to a belt loop on his pants.

Huh.

Phil recognizes that crown. He saw illustrations of it during the war.

The Emperor lumbers forward, graceless on the ground and seeming almost dizzy. Phil has to smother a laugh in his hand. Emperor or not, Phil’s spent too many days walking around like he has sea legs after long flights to not know the feeling. It isn’t just altitude changes you have to get used to. Long enough in the air, and the ground stops feeling like ground. It’s probably a good thing Antarctic pilots wear helmets, now that he thinks about it. Their flightpaths are notoriously long.

“What was that?!” one of the delegates next to Phil snaps, “You nearly killed us with your display! Are you truly trying to sabotage our nations’ treaty?”

The Emperor squints. “Heh?” he asks articulately. His face is pure confusion. Phil is just as confused. What? They have to know he’s an excellent pilot, everyone knows that. Even after years, there isn’t much chance that he’s dropped far from number one. And why the fuck are they talking to him like he’s a commoner hybrid they can order arou—oh.

Oh.

A gleeful realization spreads through Phil. They haven’t spotted the crown glinting at his side, or if they have, they don’t realize what it means. They’ve only seen the pink hair, the red eyes, the pointed ears and the small tusks that protrude from the sides of his mouth. No one’s realized he’s the Emperor. They’re going to make complete asses of themselves before the tradeoff and ruin every chance of trading they have. Phil isn’t going to fuck up everything because the fuckin’ nobility is going to do it for him.

“Well?” they snap, looking back at the Emperor, “Were you?”

Phil can’t help it. He snorts, and all eyes move to him. The delegate’s face turns bright red in enraged embarrassment. He’d be worried about retribution if he wasn’t leaving today.

“Uh…No?” the Emperor says to the delegate, but his eyes are on Phil. He’s looking close, like he knows he’s familiar and is trying to place him. Phil can’t blame him for not remembering. There was a lot going on during those battles, and he certainly doesn’t remember every enemy. Phil sees him clock his wings, though, and there’s a look of realization.

“Did you…hmm.” The Emperor starts to say something, then stops himself, looking conflicted.

“Rip you out of your plane during the war?” Phil asks for him, “Yep.” He did it to him more than once, actually. He was hard to catch, especially as the number one pilot, but Phil still got him frequently enough to familiarize them. Not that Phil knew he was the Emperor then, what the fuck? Was that something that came about after the war, or had Phil really been catch-and-releasing the single most important person in their entire artillery? Shit.

“Nice,” says the Emperor, looking relieved, “Would’ve been kinda’ awkward if that wasn’t you. Phil, right?”

Phil startles. How the fuck did he remember that? Phil definitely doesn’t remember his name after all this time. Sure, he remembers the guy’s unending obsession with potatoes, and sure, he’s got some vague memories of teaching him to build zero-tic farms, but names? Names? Who remembers names?

“Yes…” he starts, but trails off. What does someone call an Emperor? Sir? Your Highness? Shit, he doesn’t fuckin’ know. He doesn’t think he knew even before Hardcore, it just didn’t come up because he’s never exactly been buddy-buddy with royalty. Or nobility. Or even the citizens. Honestly, he's never gotten along with most people outside the social class of “so dirt poor we don’t even have a category for you.” Point is, he’s got no clue what the proper form of address is.

The silence drags on enough that he just decides not to say anything. Well, if the Emperor wants him to call him something he’ll just have to say so. Phil’s gonna play stupid and pretend he doesn’t know he’s supposed to show respect, yep, he’s already decided and he’s sticking to it. Surely there will be no consequences for this decision whatsoever.

“Cool,” the Emperor says, “Would’ve been terrible if I got that one wrong. Do you—”

The delegate steps in front of the Emperor. “Where is your respect?!” they practically screech at him, “Ugh! The nerve!”

“Uhh….” the Emperor blinks, then glances over at Phil like he can make sense of it all.

Phil barely holds in a laugh. He’s gonna do a thing. He’s obligated to, really. He’d be disappointed in himself if he didn’t. These delegates suck, he’s not even gonna feel bad.

“You’re right,” Phil says to the delegate before turning to the Emperor and giving an overdramatic bow, angling his wings downward to really sell the silhouette and speaking in a grave voice, “My sincerest apologies, Your Majesty.” That’s definitely not the right title, but it doesn’t matter because Phil’s not going to call him Your High Royal Excellency or whatever it actually is. Besides, it gets the message across well enough.

“…You’re good,” the Emperor says slowly, and from the glances he makes between Phil and the delegate it’s clear he’s figuring out what’s going on. Phil grins like the cat that got the cream.

The delegate has gone pale. They start to sputter out an apologetic reply but the Emperor ignores them.

“So, uh, how do you feel about headin’ out early?” he asks Phil, “Weather’s being a bit of pain.”

“Fine by me, mate,” Phil says, gripping the strap of his bag slung over his shoulder. He’s been ready to leave since the moment it became an option. The list of perks marrying the Antarctic Emperor has been growing ever since Phil found out it meant he wouldn’t have to live here anymore. It shot up when he realized he’s met the Emperor before, and that he’d been one of the pilots. That, more than anything, validates Phil’s decision.

“Alright. Well, I’ll be sending someone else to finalize everything here,” the Emperor says, sparing a glance at the delegate, “I’ve got a lot of work to do, shouldn’t really be here at all, but I figured I’d see my partner to the Empire myself to make sure there aren’t any problems.”

That’s fuckin’ ominous, but Phil’s pretty sure he means the assassination kind of problems, and not the “I’m killing him the second we’re alone” variety. Which is nice of him, really. Phil’s adding it to the list of things he likes about the man. There’s still plenty of time for a second, more negative list to start growing, but for now? It’s looking pretty good — at least, way better than marrying anyone else on that list would be.

Yeah, Phil can work with this.

The plane needs refueling and a look-over before they leave, so Phil gets an extra hour to run around grabbing shit he forgot. This is great news because apparently in the hecticness of getting ready to leave his entire life behind he forgot a lot. He ends up needing a second bag to throw everything in. Most of it is useless garbage he’s thieved from the surrounding nobles, but he also managed to forget a few more important things.

It’s his journals from Hardcore, mostly. Those go into the bag carefully, old bound stacks of homemade paper pressed neatly together inside an inner pocket. He covers them with extra clothes to keep them from ripping. After that, he starts picking stuff at random. No one ever really told him what he’ll need in the Antarctic, even when he was packing the first time. Phil has made educated guesses like “clothes” and “other stuff,” but getting the specifics had been like pulling the advisor’s teeth. It turns out no one really knows how the people down there live, so Phil mostly gave in to the age-old advice of finding whatever looked right and yoinking it, whether it belonged to him or not.

It’s the same practice he’s doing now. He grabs jewelry and books and bottles of ink, little things that will go unnoticed when they’re gone. Not that it will matter if someone does notice. He’s not going to be here to get convicted again.

He pauses his impromptu second round of stealing shit after he slips through the kitchens and pockets enough dried meats and hidden stashes of hardtack to give him war flashbacks. Not the bad ones—honestly, most of those have died out over time, even if they picked back up when he left Hardcore—it’s just little flickers of sensation. There’s the startled muscle memory of rifling through dead people’s bags and pockets for food, the snap of years-gone-useless knowledge that most people kept rations somewhere on their sides and not their fronts, and a hit of the nostalgic feeling of casual morbidity.

Phil pulls back from the kitchens and starts making his way back to the courtyard. He’s got more than enough. He doesn’t even really need the food, to be honest, but it’s one of those habits that stuck around for Hardcore and never really left. Even though he hadn’t known death was the entire point of the place and had assumed it was just a permanent place of exile, he’d found plenty of dead in Hardcore. Food was food, even then — not dead people, dead people were not food, despite the rumors Phil never resorted to cannibalism, he’s not actually a fuckin’ animal and he feels a little stupid having to remind himself of that. Plenty of criminals had food on them when they died, is all. People kept a hold of things in Hardcore just like in the war.

That’s what he’s doing now. He’s stocking up, even if he doesn’t imagine he’ll need it. The Antarctic Empire has to have a way of feeding their people, and he doesn’t exactly think they’re going to starve him. He just wants to have it. Just ‘cause.

While he’s walking back through the halls, he pops in and out of rooms while he pilfers small, shiny objects from various nobility. Hair clips, fancy pens, decorative knives. He avoids the guards, but he lets the servants see him. They don’t get paid enough to care. One of them even points out a pair of emerald earrings for him to snatch. Phil thanks them by very accidentally dropping a diamond necklace in front of them. They won’t get caught for stealing if someone sees them with it since he yoinked it from some rich fuck during the war.

Like Phil repeatedly told everyone before and after Hardcore, he committed the crimes he was accused of. Robbing rich people of inconsequential shit was practically a rite of passage for the poor enlisted during the war. They had to do something when they weren’t being used as cannon fodder, after all.

Phil makes it back to the courtyard without a fuss. The plane has been moved for optimal liftoff conditions, and Phil goes over with heavy bags and pockets.

The Emperor looks undeniably relieved when he sees him loading his bag into the plane, and Phil snorts. The delegates have been predictably sucking up to him the entire time. They even sent out some of the higher nobility to smooth things over.

It doesn’t look like it’s worked.

“Well,” the Emperor says, and it’s crystal clear he’s wanted to extract himself from this conversation for a while, “It was great chattin’, but I actually have to go. Right now. Good luck with that guy’s sister’s neighbor’s dog. Oh, hey Phil, I was just wonderin’ where you were, are you ready to get out of here?”

Phil almost wants to say no, just to fuck with him, but the Emperor’s been nice enough and he looks genuinely pained by the conversation. His eye is twitching and he looks like he might actually start murdering people. It would sell the whole “Blood God” thing people were saying about him during the war, but dying sucks and if he didn’t kill Phil too then he would probably get married off to someone else.

“I’m ready,” Phil says instead, and he bites his lip and tries not to laugh. He shouldn’t make fun of the Emperor, that’s a bad idea. He absolutely should not do it. It’s a terrible idea that will undoubtedly fuck up his chances at having a decent time, maybe. Probably not, the Emperor kinda’ seems like nobility that still has some sense of humor.

He’s just—the Emperor is so clearly not a talker, at least not with other nobility, though Phil remembers him being pretty talkative to the infantry, and the expression on his face is the exact same feeling Phil’s been experiencing for the months and months of this strange, post-Hardcore-post-war pre-marriage life.

“Amazing,” says the Emperor, “Let’s go as quickly as possible for no reason whatsoever.”

Phil laughs. “Alright. Do you need me to do anything?” he asks, looking over the plane. He’s not going to be much help on the specifics—Antarctic models are very different from the rest of the world’s. Planes like theirs have to survive far harsher elements than anywhere else, so they’re set up differently. It was those unique schematics that made them so hard to take down during the war. No one could find the engines. So Phil won’t be useful for making sure anything isn’t broken, but he can put shit where he’s told.

“Just throw your stuff here—Oh, you already did it, why am I even talkin’? Nevermind. Why don’t you fly us to Antarctica instead, clearly I am not the experienced flier here.” The Emperor talks fast, a mix of nerves and agitation. He’s deliberately ignoring the pestering nobility beside him. He definitely wants to get the fuck out of here. Which, fair. This place is shit. The food’s alright, but the people and government are worse.

“Right, let me get in first. You’re probably gonna hafta squeeze to get in, but once you’re in there’s plenty of legroom—” the Emperor stops halfway in the plane and sqints at Phil, gauging his height, “—actually, you’ll be fine. I hope you don’t mind I’m flyin’ pilot.”

Phil snorts. Oh no, the number one pilot is going to be flying him across the world, whatever will he do? Get married about it, apparently.

“I think I’ll live,” he says, climbing in after him. The plane’s tall enough that he uses a couple flaps of his wings to get over the edge, and then he slides in neatly behind the Emperor. He hasn’t flown in many planes before, but it’s—there’s an extra degree of closeness required to fly in Antarctic two-seaters, apparently. It looks more like one-and-a-half seats than two. His knees brush the other man’s back.

Phil hasn’t been in Antarctic planes, technically, but he’s yanked enough people out of them that he figures out the harness mechanism pretty quickly. He has to brute-force his wings through one of the straps, but other than a few ruffled feathers he fits in fine. The harnesses connect to several points on the plane, but Phil already knows where those are. The only difference between now and then are a few additional straps. The locking points are still the same.

He clicks them into place. The harnesses aren’t that complicated, honestly. He doesn’t know why the Antarctic Empire stopped using them, only that most of their pilots did sometime during the midpoint of the war. Phil’s job specifically got a lot easier around then. He could just grab the enemy pilots and go, instead of the dangerous balancing act of getting them out of their harnesses before their planes crashed to the ground.

“Wings fit alright?” The Emperor asks as he locks his own harness in.

Phil startles.

“It’s fine,” he says after a second, blinking away the confusion. Right. Sometime between Hardcore and now, he forgot that the Antarctic Empire has a high hybrid population count. They consider things like wings and horns and tusks. It makes sense, their fuckin’ Emperor is a hybrid. It’s just…different. A new kind of new, really.

“Alright. You, uh—you have much experience flyin’?” the Emperor asks while he starts to power up the plane. Phil just stops. He stares dead ahead, looking at the back of the man’s head with an eyebrow raised. The Emperor looks back and immediately winces.

“Bruh,” he says, flushing a bit, “Flyin’ planes. Come on, Phil, you’re gonna make ‘em think I’m stupid.” Luckily for the Emperor, the delegates and nobility alike have finally got the message and stepped away from the plane—not that they’re going to think well of him anyway, but some things can’t be helped.

“Still a stupid question,” he says, to an Emperor, because Phil’s as dumb as a bag of rocks. The first step—literally the very first rule on the long list of rules he needed to remember—was to be agreeable. Being polite and respectful were also high up on that list, but the Emperor hasn’t exactly indicated that to be necessary. Nobility is eye-rollingly clear when you’re not being respectful enough and it bothers them.

Still, there’s stupid and then there’s stupid, and Phil tries to be the first more than the second, so he opens his mouth to apologize and— “Nah, mate. Took a few people out of them, that’s all.”

The Emperor laughs, “Gonna be honest, not sure I could forget. Generally that was a pretty remarkable occasion.”

Even if it wasn’t what he meant to say, it works well enough. The shared camaraderie of being any kind of flier during the war has connected them. It’s fine. Everything goes smoothly.

The Emperor warns him about the noise before the plane’s engine turns on with a roar.

It’s harder to take off in small spaces than it is to land. Pilots have told him so enough that Phil still remembers their groaning years later. The courtyard is the biggest one in the city, belonging to the richest noble beside their own Emperor (Phil’s pretty sure he’s an Emperor, anyway, but fuck if he knows). Still, Phil knows it’s small.

The takeoff looks graceful. The plane slides forward and shudders beneath them as it lifts into the air, rumbling like the purr of a giant metal cat. Phil’s heart drops to his stomach as they incline. They just barely miss the edge of a building as they zoom past it. Up and up and up. It’s a faster height gain than Phil could do on his own, and it feels faster too. He isn’t used to speed in enclosed spaces. If a minecart went this fast, he’d probably be feeling it just as much.

Air whips past them, and they whip past the city. It’s not like the kind of flying he does. Buildings don’t blur with the movement. Instead, they miniaturize like the small models of a wealthy child’s dollhouse. The lake just past the capital grows smaller, but still clear.

Flight, for Phil, happens in steps. Liftoff, obviously. That’s one thing he’s better at than a plane. He doesn’t need much room to get in the air. Once he’s up, and then once he’s going, he’s traveling faster than any horse or carriage. Still, there are drawbacks. He can catch the air and glide along wind currents when they come, sure, but he’s still doing most of the work. That’s where planes win. Fuel takes longer to burn than food, and there’s only so much Phil can carry on him. There’s only so far he can make it, and only so fast he can go.

It’s more than just different to be up in the air and moving without doing a thing. There isn’t the same exhilaration he gets when the wind whips past him, because wind whips past the plane. He’s inside it. Phil feels like he’s flying by the mouth of a dragon. The wind roars around him like one might.

There’s no adrenaline rush from flying, no rush of anything once his heart settles from the quick climb, and there’s very little danger.

It’s almost comforting. He’s sitting, curled up behind the literal best pilot in the world, while the world rushes past underneath them. Marriage and political circumstance feels far off and separate as he watches the city fall behind them. Green grasslands take its place, interspersed with wild deer.

Phil watches the world below and, slowly, for the first time in a very, very long while, relaxes.

The journey is slow. It’s paradoxical, almost. They’re going so fast. The ground below them is whipping by at breakneck speeds, but still somehow it feels slow. He can’t even identify the reason he feels this way, just that he does.

Phil looks away from the ground below and settles back in his seat. He slips out pieces of the dried meats he took and gnaws on them. He’d share, like he used to in the war, but he’s not sure he could safely communicate the offer through the wind, let alone hand it to the Emperor without distracting him. Besides, it’s not the most appetizing anyway. He grabbed things that would last, not things that were good. Giving the Emperor hardtack and oversalted jerky isn’t going to win him any favors.

While he eats, he does what he usually does when he has unanswered questions during long trips: he thinks about it. Why does it feel slow? It’s not. As far as planes go, this one’s speed is somewhere around the middle of the pack.

Then it hits him. They’re moving with safety in mind. Pilots flew like their lives depended on it in the war, because they did. Safety was less important than getting the plans and maps and supplies and information into their general’s hands. In particular, the Emperor flew like a maniac during the war. Phil spent ages calculating patterns to find decent enough places to jump him, and he still lost most of the time.

Now, they’re probably going at a reasonable speed. It just feels that much slower because he’s never seen the Emperor fly during anything other than a dogfight or a desperate supply run.

The slowness isn’t agitating, or at least not more agitating than the rumble of the plane beneath him is calming.

They hit the open ocean and the calmness is gone. Phil jerks back. His wings flare against the confines of the plane around him. His pulse starts racing in his ears.

That’s—that’s water, that’s a never-ending deathtrap. If they run out of energy here, they’re dead. That’s how you drown. It doesn’t matter if it’s a river or the fuckin’ ocean, if they stop now they die, and so many people do.

There’s a second where Phil starts to rebuke himself. They have fuel, he isn’t flying like normal, it’s fine, but—

Altitude drops quickly. The plane drops just as quick, and Phil’s stomach goes down with it. He grips the straps of his harness and clings. It’s fine. The Emperor knows what he’s doing more than anyone else, and killing himself to kill Phil just doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to be closer down, probably. It’s fine. If he really needs to he knows how to get out.

After a long moment of extended terror, long enough that he starts reaching for the locks, the plane levels out. Their flightpath evens.

They fly past the water, but there’s still just more of it. Minute after minute, and hour after hour. The sun sinks. There’s no flying back to land if he needs to. If they go down here he’s fucked.

This is how it’s going to feel after the joking is over. When the familiarity leaves the terror is going to be sharp and gutting. Dread will live inside him. He’s going to have to cling to the nearest semblance of safety and pray the Emperor shows him mercy. He’ll have to hope that the Emperor’s plan of action includes him, that the Emperor isn’t already planning on ways to cut his losses. He has to hope that the terror is accidental.

Shit.

Phil stops watching. He curls back against the seat, and the Emperor’s figure blurs in his vision.

It’s fine.

And if it’s not, there isn’t much he can do about it anyway.

Phil doesn't settle much until he sees land. Once he does, though, relief hits him like a physical weight, gut-punching and then making home in his chest. He scrubs off stray tearstains as they make their way over it, and he breathes a little easier with ground below them. He recognizes the trees underneath them, thick and massively tall with small, feathery white flowers blooming off the branches. He can’t see the flowers from here, but he remembers what they look like nestled in the branches. The trees are good rest spots if the animals leave you be.

Phil feels better with ground in sight, but not knowing when they’re landing has him jittery. The earth moves underneath them, trees disappearing to unfamiliar beaches and mountains. He bites down his nails to their beds until they move to land.

They do stop eventually. There’s Antarctic territory in Australia, apparently, because guards with white and blue painted armor come to meet them when they land. It’s a real runway, the kind Phil has never seen before but has heard plenty of Antarctic pilots speak of. Illuminated by the last slivers of sunlight, long strips of stone and concrete extend across a field the size of a village. The smallest line is tenfold the size of the courtyard they took off from. Still, it feels almost…smaller than the pilots described it.

Smaller is still plenty big, though. It takes the guards at least ten minutes to get to them. Planes speed by in the air, sure, but they still go plenty fast on the ground. Once they make contact, plane bouncing and jerking Phil forward nearly face-first into the Emperor’s back, they go from pretty-far-away to actually-quite-close to the scattered assortment of buildings Phil can see.

The plane powers down, a rumble choked out with the sharp catch of metal, and Phil takes a breath, winded not from the landing but from the anticipation of it.

The Emperor helps him out when his harness catches on the last lock, because apparently that’s a problem that hasn’t gone away for them since the war. Phil accepts the help, half because he’s the Emperor and saying no is a bad idea and half because there’s nothing he hates more than being stuck. Fortunately, getting his wings out of the harness is much easier than getting them in, so he doesn’t need help a second time. He climbs out of the plane on his own, using one of the wings like a kind of stair.

“Oh, fuck,” Phil says when he hits solid ground. The ground, predictably, does not feel like ground beneath him. It’s a million times more unyielding than it actually is, and it feels tilted. But it feels like a different kind of off-balance than Phil is used to, and he doesn’t know how to account for it. Is this how it feels every time? He stumbles hard when he tries to walk and falls against the side of someone else as he tries not to fall face-first.

“Heh?” the Emperor sounds as Phil half-collides into him. He has better balance than Phil, though, and manages to keep them both upright.

“Shit, sorry, mate,” Phil says, clinging to the Emperor’s arm like he did to the harness and scrambling to keep his legs underneath himself, “‘m a bit dizzy, just give me a minute.”

Phil expects to be dropped. Something something assassination, sure, but mostly because he’s a fuckin’ Emperor, and Phil’s just out-of-balance, he’s not gonna die. There isn’t any real reason not to. It’s not like Phil’s going to call off the marriage. He’s not the one making the shots in this situation.

So, dropped. He isn’t, which is nice, even when the touch starts to burn. He hasn’t exactly been hugging and shaking hands with the nobility. Even during the war, him pulling enemy pilots out of their planes was as much contact as he got most of the time. People don’t like hybrids. They don’t like to see them, and they really don’t like when they’re touched by them. They think of hybrid traits like infectious disease, like if they spend long enough around them they’ll start growing gills or scales themselves. It’s different in the Antarctic Empire, different for the Emperor who is a hybrid himself. But still. Emperor of the Antarctic, and then Phil.

The Emperor gives him the five minutes it takes to get his bearings, and even starts to reach out once Phil lets go and stumbles again. He’s fine, though, the second time is more fatigue than dizziness. It’s honestly a little embarrassing to be this out of whack from a flight, especially one where he did fuckall, but Phil’s pretty sure the Emperor trains the Antarctic pilots himself, so—

Well, if he hasn’t seen worse he doesn't say anything.

The Emperor guides him inside of an industrial building while a set of uniformed people go over the plane. Mechanics, probably. People are going to want to make sure it’s safe for when the Emperor is going over the ocean like they did before. It isn’t a factory or a workhouse they walk inside, which makes sense, but the simple architecture throws Phil off a bit. It’s one of those refueling and rest stations meant for long flights, the ones with bunks and canteens and permanently placed welders and repairmen.

Phil listens to the Emperor’s conversation with one of the guards while he trails behind. From the sounds of things, they’re staying overnight. Phil doesn’t mind. Chances of death-by-assassin probably increase but, honestly, he’s tired enough that he doesn’t care. Dying in a warm bed is hardly the worst way to go. The flight took all the energy he had out of him, which makes no sense at all. He didn’t do any of the flying. It’s nothing like the exhausting day-long flights he used to make during the war. He literally just sat there.

More importantly than that immediate bedrest, though, they walk to the canteen. The scent of spiced meat wafts through the room, and Phil’s stomach clenches. The small pieces of jerky he ate during the flight did nothing but wake his stomach with a fervor. The Emperor is just as hungry, apparently, because he deserts the guards at the door and rushes over to the serving line.

One of the guards laughs, then turns to Phil.

“Better hurry after him, or he’ll leave you with nothing, no potatoes,” they say.

Another guard chuckles and says, “Oh, he’ll eat all the potatoes no matter what, man. He and Squid are always two seconds away from killing each other over them. The question is if he’ll eat literally anything else.”

Phil snorts. He remembers that feud, and he’s not really surprised it’s still ongoing. No matter what the Emperor claims, the only good wartime food did not have potatoes in it—that honor is bestowed to the weird spicy coffee-honey-chocolate drink he and the Antarctic pilots made whenever they combined their rations—but during the war he heard plenty of talk about the “diverse and beautiful carb base of the century.”

“Nah, ‘cause it’s all pork,” says the first guard, grabbing a serving tray from a stack and handing it over, “He won’t eat that. Still, you’ll want to get your food now. New shift comes in about five minutes and they will fight you over whatever’s left until the next batch comes.”

“Alright. Thanks, mate,” Phil says, taking the tray and following after the Emperor. It’s more than a little strange to see an Emperor going through the line like the rest of the public, instead of being partitioned off to somewhere fancier with more ornate cutlery and expensive meals, but no one around them seems to find it so. He gets the same food as everyone else. He goes through the line and sits down at a standard table. He doesn’t even sit at the head of it. He just takes a seat and starts eating.

There’s no grandiosity here. No flourishes or gold plating or finery on the plates, on the chairs and the tables and the entryways. The food is simple and filling. Conversations are casual with no regard to class or status, and information is shared relaxedly.

It’s a remnant of the war, maybe. A place like this, a pit-stop in between the semirare Antarctic flights, would have no reason to change if the system it operates under is functional enough. And the Emperor is used to rubbing elbows with the other pilots and their ilk. The way he pulls out a chair and offers it to Phil is an old and vaguely familiar routine. He was a pilot, and Phil was the only person the Antarctic pilots saw regularly that didn’t want to rip their spines out of their throats. They broke bread often enough, is the point.

It’s not like back then. They aren’t making a tenuous peace, sharing resources in the middle of nowhere, days out from the nearest battle or camp. The food is leagues better. No one here is at risk of death from exposure or infection. Things are different now, very different, but the informality is the same. The casual regard people have for the Emperor and him both speaks to the relaxed culture Phil remembers noticing. Pilots, and especially drunk pilots, are a talkative lot. Loose lips sink ships and all that, but a drunk pilot could bring down a nation.

It isn’t just the pilots, though, it’s the guards and the mechanics and even the Emperor himself. It’s in the food and tables and the clothes. It’s in their breaths, laughs and sighs and shouts of conversation shared over tables. It’s in the way people slowly drift over to the Emperor and then to Phil, starting awkward and stilted conversations that boil down to hey, we know you. Do you know us?

It’s in the way someone starts the beginning of a joke and Phil bursts out laughing before it ends because even after all these years he still remembers the punchline. Phil spots toothy scars on someone’s hand and says, “You’ve got to stop petting those fuckin’ wolves, mate,” before he consciously recognizes them, and it’s in that, too.

Do you know us?

It’s in the way he does . Even with everything different, with the war stripped away, there’s a fine thread of familiarity woven in it all.

A bit optimistically, Phil wonders if this is how it will be in the Antarctic.

The next morning starts fuckin’ rough. That’s the only accurate way to describe the situation. Phil panics when someone comes into his room to wake him up—okay, so it’s not his room, technically it’s just a guest room, but he was the only one in there and then suddenly someone was grabbing his shoulder, and he fought in the war, did they really expect he wouldn’t pin whoever grabbed him after they gave him a heart attack—and it’s a good thing he doesn’t keep a knife on him anymore, because for the first hour of the morning he keeps reaching for one every time anyone gets close.

He’s jumpy all the way back to the Emperor. Once he’s there, though, out on the runway strip, things start to calm. His heart, for one, but also the postures of the guards, the nearby pilots, the mechanics. Everyone breathes a little easier with the Emperor nearby.

Well, Phil doesn't breathe easier, but that’s because the Emperor keeps making him laugh while he triple-triple-checks the plane.

“For a chicken?” Phil asks, wheezing, “Really?”

“They thought it was structurally sound,” says the Emperor, glancing between a checklist and different parts of the plane, “I mean, hey, maybe doin’ some research on the people you want to ally with is a good idea? Or not, you could just assume that we bathe in the blood of our enemies and worship—literally one singular chicken.”

“You don’t?” Phil asks with a wry smile.

“I mean, I’m gonna deny the blood part for legal reasons, but we do have a chicken,” says the Emperor, “His name’s Alfred. He’s a decent bird.”

Phil snorts. That’s what they say about me, he’s about to say, but a few of the mechanics walk over. It’s probably a good thing. Now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t want or need to open that can of worms, even for a laugh. The mechanics are smiling good-naturedly, clearly very used to the Emperor’s need to check over his planes again and again.

“Emperor Technoblade,” one of them starts longsufferingly but with a smile, and Phil doesn’t pay attention to the rest of what they say because that’s his fuckin’ name.

It’s been on the tip of Phil’s tongue the entire time, but he wasn’t going to ask the Emperor because it seemed like the sort of thing Phil’s own people were supposed to tell him. Besides, it’s rude. He should definitely remember the guy. And he does. He just couldn’t put a name to his face. Phil doesn’t admit it often, but he knows faces a million times better than names. Part of that is because people rarely bother to tell him their names. He probably remembers more names of enemy pilots than names of the people he fought with. But another part is just how he’s wired. He forgets names all the time. He’s half-surprised he’s never managed to forget his own.

Still, Technoblade. Phil hasn’t heard many names like that before. How’d he manage to forget that? He’s not going to call the Emperor by his name, obviously, because he’s actively trying to keep from getting in serious shit this early, but he’ll remember it.

…Hopefully. It would be a little embarrassing to forget his name twice.

The sun’s starting to come up by the time all the checks are done, slivers of light peeking over hills and catching on the metal of the plane, the clipboard, the edge of the Emperor’s crown still tied to his belt.

What they don’t tell you about moving to new places— flying to new places—is that the sun stops looking like the sun. It still rises and falls, sure, but it feels just as foreign and new as the land around you. Phil’s been close to this place before. He never actually found the waystations Antarctic pilots stopped at, mostly because he didn’t look and he can’t report what he didn’t see, but he knew the general areas.

He’s seen the sun here before. He wouldn’t believe it if he didn’t still remember it. The sun rises like he’s never seen it before. Light catches strangely, like a reflection in the water. It clings to the line of the Technoblade’s jaw, curled around the side of his nose and slipping in his mouth to glint off his teeth and tusks. The way the light bounces is almost mesmerizing.

Technoblade doesn’t catch him staring. One of the guards does. He nudges Phil’s shoulder and waggles his eyebrows.

“Oh, fuck off,” Phil mutters, shoving him back. Just because he’s a fresh face doesn’t mean he has no spine. The implication the guard makes leaves him bristling, just for one uneasy moment, but Phil recognizes them as one of the wartime pilots and rolls his eyes. Still starting shit long after the war, he sees.

“Ready?” Technoblade asks, and the guard makes kissing faces after he turns his back.

“Ready,” Phil agrees politely, actively flipping the guard off with both hands.

Fuckin’ pilots. They never change, do they?

The plane takes off slowly. There’s no narrow window of ascent they need to reach to avoid buildings, so it’s a slower incline, especially compared to the almost-immediate climb up Phil would make on his own. They go up and forward, higher and to the south, steadying off high above the ground. Ground turns to mountain and then to beach, rocky and sandy shores underneath.

It’s still a bit nerve-wracking, going over water like this, but this time he’s been properly warned. Most of the trip from here on out will be water and ice. There’s less fear because there’s less shock. His breath catches when they leave land behind, but it’s mostly anticipation that gets him.

They’re going. Water stretches onward, endless and all-encompassing, and they’re going to the Antarctic Empire.

He ignores worry for a minute, just so he can really revel in it. He’s out.

He’ll live in the Antarctic Empire now. Married to Technoblade, sure, but what’s marriage in the face of it all? He got out. Phil sits with the feeling. He doesn’t want to focus on the more stressful parts like all the shit he’ll have to do once he’s there, but it’s easy enough to cast it all aside for now. He’s out.

The first few hours of the trip blur by in the face of it all. Phil relaxes, genuinely and honestly. It’s not something he makes his body do. It just happens, all on its own, even over the water.

He finds himself slow-blinking, with the sun beating down on the water below, glimmering like an endless diamond sea. It’s the good kind of tired that takes hold of him. Not exhausted, but content. He’s honestly a little sleepy. He kept waking up in the night, and it’s weighing on him now.

Staring at Technoblade’s back, with the rumble of engines surrounding him, he lets himself doze off.

There’s a dead man hanging off the edge of a wall. He’s been there for years, and he’s not really a man anymore. Just bones, with flowering vines wrapping around them and keeping them in place. They hang like a chandelier. There’s a skeleton hanging over the southern entrance of Hardcore. Phil only ever saw it twice. Once when they threw him in and once when he walked out.

It looks different now. More real, almost, compared to the bleach-white grin he remembers. The bones are chipped and yellow. There are no teeth in the skull.

There are bodies in shallow graves below, hastily made and rarely marked just like in the war. People bury their own. When it comes down to it, man buries man. Person buries person.

Phil buries plenty. Hardcore takes its toll on everyone, and it’s a big enough space that he doesn’t run into anyone until they’re already dead. Most of them starve out. Most of them are already starved when they get there.

Person buries person.

There’s ash below his feet. Snow crunches under his boots. Sleet turns them both into grey sludge that slides into the graves. Phil leans over to look in one, just to see if he remembers their face. He remembers faces. He’ll remember them.

But there are no bodies anymore. No bones, just rectangular ditches with soil-soft impressions where heads and hands and feet used to be. Phil checks in every one, going down along the rows, but no one is in them. It’s like they all got up and walked away.

He stops. Nameless delegates pull up beside him.

There’s no body, no casket. Just a dirt ditch with a bed inside it.

Oh.

“There are expectations,” says one of the advisors, grinning wide and unnatural, “Ways to prove your commitment to the union, things you’ll have to do. You understand.”

Phil’s general laughs from inside his tent, cutting up a meal worth twenty of Phil’s with fancy silverware. Hungry soldiers watch from outside, lower-ranking soldiers and imprisoned enemies alike. The general holds out a paper. Budget cuts for the footsoldiers again. People are going to die, and they don’t have to, but someone like the general won’t listen to someone like Phil.

“Come on. War is meant for killing, and the ones like you die so well,” he smiles like he’s letting Phil in on the joke, and the glint of his medallions and pins shines in the corner of Phil’s eye. The ones like you. Fuck him. Phil hopes he dies choking on his food. He’ll kill him before he even thinks of marrying him. Or the general will kill him. Someone’s dying, though.

Phil steals his food when he isn’t looking. He starts splitting it up, dividing it into pieces between a nameless and faceless crowd. He hands the food out to dead people. They’re already dead. Even if everyone dies in a war, the poor always die first.

Technoblade stands next to him, face blank and unmoving like when he’s making a point or a joke. There’s a plane crashing to the ground with a pilot in it behind him, but Phil can’t even try to get them out of their harness. They’re dead when they hit the ground. Phil hears the snap of bones underneath the crashing.

“You already agreed. That won’t be a problem, will it?” Technoblade says, morphing into a delegate beside him, and the grave in front of him has no body, but the person who belongs in it is dead.

Will it?

Phil gets in the bed.

He jerks awake, caught and dropping. His limbs stick and he flails blindly, smacking something with his wings and hitting something metal and solid with his arm. It’s not until he catches the strap of the harness that he orients himself, heart hammering and eyes wide.

He’s flying over the near-endless ocean towards the Antarctic, in a plane. Not falling or drowning or caught but clinging to a safety harness and descending altitude, getting lower at a normal rate. The water is fine. The descent is fine. The plane is fine. The best pilot in the world is flying him to the heart of the Antarctic Empire, and they’re both fine.

Right.

The Emperor. Technoblade. The Antarctic Emperor, who he’s getting married to.

Right.

Fuck.

Technoblade turns back to check on him. He can’t really turn around all the way. The planes weren’t designed with enough room to do that, let alone the harnesses, but he twists around enough to give a questioning thumbs up.

Phil’s awake, so he’s fine. The shitty part is over. He nods, gives a thumbs up back, and, when Technoblade has gone back to flying, presses his palms into his eyes until he calms down.

Not all dreams are nightmares. These days, most of them are quiet. For every one warped narrative about the war or Hardcore or even that one specific dickhead general, he has ten mundane ones. He dreamt about farming last night, listening to someone he knew but couldn’t recognize spout facts about sugarcane and water irrigation. The night before and he was building a temple from giant, monolithic quartz slabs. The night before that was about the end of the war.

It happens.

It’s inconvenient that it happened while he was flying above water, before the wedding.

Inconvenient.

The wedding.

Right.

Something shifts, here. Emotion drains from him like sand in an hourglass, like fuel from a busted tank. The hot press of fear that Phil presses down dissipates in his hold, turning to something cold and bitter, like the chill of the wind. Fear melts into—into nothing.

The world turns and there’s nothing there. There’s no disdain, no resentment or anger. Not even fear. It’s a hollowed-out mountain he’s living in, one that’s empty but protecting all the same.

If he starts with nothing, then he has nothing to lose.

And if he keeps what he has now, this camaraderie and familiar ease, this idyllic circumstance—if he gets dizzy and thrown off and tries to cling, if he reaches out and grips Technoblade’s arm for support and expects him to keep holding on, if then he’s let go—

There’s a lot to lose in that. But if he doesn’t hold on, if he lets go before it rips itself away, then there’s something left in the rubble, scraps of a whole to steal away. If he can live with letting this go, there might even be a life to build in the remains.

There’s no world where he can build something out of this, not as it is now, not when he knows how it will be later. Not when that is what’s coming.

Phil lets go of the harness straps.

The feeling, or the lack of it, stays past the end of the trip. Stone brick structures cleave out from icy mountaintops, arching up into the skyline. It’s massive, and it’s not even the stronghold. There might have been awe in it before. The architecture is firm and unyielding and old, lasting through the icy winters and coming out unscathed.

There isn’t much awe now. Phil fights it back into a passive wonder. When the plane descends into the mountain, into a gorge through the ice that spans deep into an unrelenting blackness before coming out on the crystal-lit other side, his breath hitches because of the cold. That’s all it is.

He views the Antarctic landing zone without much feeling. This is what the pilots were describing. The cavernous ceiling above him, the monolithic walls towering over, the endless expanse of stone below. A landing zone the size of a mountain, nestled inside a mountain. This is where the Antarctic Empire stored the bulk of their supplies during the war, the place the pilots came from that Phil never managed to reach.

Phil sees it, recognizes it, and takes in none of its weight. The almost reverent feeling the pilots described dies in the face of apathy. He doesn’t care. He can’t afford to care. Not here, not now. Not with what’s coming.

The plane lands. He’s just as dizzy as before, but when Technoblade reaches out, Phil pulls away. There’s no point in clinging to him now, not when he won’t be able to when it counts. Tricking himself into thinking he’s safe will ruin him in the long run.

Even if it doesn’t feel like it now, it’s better this way.

It is.

There’s little time for conversation. Phil doesn’t need to avoid Technoblade. The Council—who are a group of elected officials that oversee the entire goddamn planet, why does no one tell him these things, genuinely—splits them apart immediately, and Phil gets thrown into a whirlwind of meeting after meeting, emergency tailor visits and health checks and a million conversations between delegates and officiants about what’s going to happen.

About what’s going to happen. They’re all vague about it, beating around the bush to keep the bush from fighting back. But he’s not going to. Phil knew it would be like this no matter who he married. The only thing that changed was marrying out, so he could get out. And he did. The hard part comes next, and after that, but he’s met his goal.

The point is, it’s easy to keep away from Technoblade, and it’s easy to stay away. The Council didn’t pencil in time for them to talk to each other, instead throwing them both through the hoops of endless preparation. Days pass without them even seeing each other. When Phil does see Technoblade, he pretends he doesn’t.

Still, somewhere during the days, Technoblade manages to find time to slip away and try to talk to him.

To him.

Phil doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to feel better, or to break this wall he’s building. He’s going to need it, and he doesn’t want to talk.

He’s dumb, though, so he ends up doing it anyway. Technoblade hands him a baked potato—and seriously, where is he getting them from, Phil knows it’s not from the kitchens because the cooks bring it up every time he sees them and he has done the math—and Phil takes it, eats it, and talks. Because of course he does. It’s too familiar to the before for him not to. At the table of some random room, sharing food and sitting beside each other, the distance lessens. It doesn’t feel like the present, like they’re in the middle of the Antarctic stronghold, like marriage is a second away and so is the rest of it.

Phil wipes salt and butter off his hands and it’s a flashback of memory. Day after day of sharing food in an unspoken truce during the war hits him, over and over again, little sensations of memory and flashes of taste. Chocolate, bread, blood. The feeling of bodies pressed together at the mouth of a cave to keep away the worst of the rain. Honey sticking to his fingers. Flight in the dark. A burning plane.

Phil breaks.

"It was Hardcore or this," he mutters, because Technoblade didn’t ask but he knows it’s the question on his mind.

Technoblade shifts beside him.

"Bruh," he says, casual where he shouldn’t be, and he shouldn’t be, "Didn't you say you liked it there? Why are you even here?"

Phil can’t help but to respond in kind. Camaraderie is ice cracking underneath his feet, the crack in the wall that grows and grows. He talks before he catches up to himself.

"Look, mate, if I went back to Hardcore, they'd do this to me when I got out. ‘Congrats you're alive, now marriage.’ Fuck that. Fuck that. At least I know you."

He knows who they’d have him marry if he went back, if he stayed.

He knows what would have happened.

"Fair enough," Technoblade says, "Our bond is unshakable. We've had at least three conversations together, and I think that's the minimum for someone to be a friend."

"We're not friends," Phil says sharply, because the distinction has been growing since he knew it needed to, and he fucking needs it to, "We're allies. Who are getting married."

Technoblade snorts, like the wall between them is see-through, like it isn’t there at all. Phil wants to hate him for it. He can’t, because the wall isn't there. That’s the problem. By the time he remembered to build one, it was too late. The foundation didn’t have time to set.

“‘Course, Phil. We’re just two associates bindin’ our hands in marriage for the rest of our lives,” Technoblade says, before he makes his voice waver comically, “Are you sayin’ you don’t want my friendship bracelet?”

Despite himself, Phil laughs.

“Maybe in a week or two,” he concedes, because of course he does. He can’t help it.

“Yay, friendship!” Technoblade says with that same comical voice, then chuckles genuinely.

“We’ll be fine,” he says, like he means it—like he’s sure, “This whole marriage thing will be easy, Phil.”

“Trivially,” Phil agrees, not really believing it, not after the weight started settling in with the dread. Still, it’s a nice thought. Easy. It feels almost reasonable when Technoblade says it.

Technoblade grins. “Exactly.”

It isn’t trivial, of course. The grandiosity of the ceremony they have once the final Councilmember reaches the heart of the Antarctic Empire makes that very clear. The main hall is adorned and decorated lavishly. People stand on either side of a temporary walkway, brightly colored carpets lining the path Phil is led down. Up ahead, at the ceremony’s center, Technoblade stands waiting with a member of the Council.

Behind them both, flowers curl through a delicate trellis. How the fuck did they manage to get flowers here? Phil is led closer, and they aren’t flowers at all. Instead, embroidered and textured wool twists through the trellis, woven and spiraling into the shapes of plants. Green snakes of lace hang like vines, casting small, spiderweb shadows across Technoblade’s face.

Technoblade is watching him.

Everyone is watching as he’s guided down the path.

The yellows and whites and blues and red of the carpet press beneath his boots. It’s easier if he focuses on that. If he pays close attention to the trellis, to the carpet, to the gold embroidery of his cuffs—he doesn’t have to think about the way he walks, footfall after footfall. He doesn’t have to pay attention to his wings trailing behind him like a cape. He doesn’t have to focus on the hand of a Councilmember that’s wrapped around his arm, guiding him down the aisle like he’s going to up and run.

He won’t. He agreed to this. Even if it isn’t the smartest decision by his people or the Empire, it’s the best option for him. He’s out. No more Hardcore, no more nobles. No more pressing weight of decisions that aren’t actual fuckin’ choices.

Not, even, anymore war.

He’s led up to the podium, to the two-step stairs in front of the trellis. The Councilmember lets him go. The sensation of touch ghosts across his arm, and Phil tucks it behind his back and under his wings until the feeling dies.

He breathes, slowly, in and out. He doesn’t flinch from his choices. He doesn’t shy away from this. The Councilmembers start talking, and Phil barely hears what they say, but he stays. He watches the flowers and feels the cold of the Antarctic. He doesn’t run.

He watches Technoblade. He looks concerned. It takes more than a minute to figure out why, to realize he’s staring until Technoblade shifts, subtly raising a thumb and furrowing his brow. It’s a literal check-in, a “you alright?” in the face of a political event a million times the size of him.

It works, too. None of this is going to be easy. But for a minute—for just a second, Phil believes it might be. Technoblade is question thumbs-upping him at the pulpit. Phil trying to stay distanced doesn’t stop the relief that comes from the groundedness of it, the partial absurdity.

The Councilmembers stop talking, and then it’s Phil’s turn.

He can’t say his part by rote. He stumbles through the marriage lines, half-memorized bureaucratic talk that he mixes up at least twice, and Technoblade has to help him keep everything in order. But he gets out the underthread of promise, the you are the universe and we are us together that’s buried under a political union, and that’s enough.

Techno says his monologue with a blank face. He does it word for painfully-written word, but he stresses them strangely, emphasizing randomly like he’s blatantly telling people some secret message. Given the stifled laughs from around the room, Phil’s pretty sure it’s just to fuck with the Council.

He’s almost annoyed at how much he likes that. Technoblade’s an Emperor. He is the government, he’s probably just trying to start shit.

…But also fuck the Council.

Technoblade finishes his speech, which somehow devolves into slipping words about farming into his “proof of bond of political matrimony.” Phil has no idea how he managed with a straight face, but he does, ending his analogy of farming potatoes fully deadpan.

Phil offers his hand, custom of the Antarctic, and Technoblade offers a ceremonial ring. It’s pretty—simpler than rich people’s usual shit, a solid gold band with a small engraved sun on its face. Then, somewhat discreetly, Technoblade slips something over Phil’s wrist. Phil looks down. It’s a knotted leather bracelet, painted green and white. Phil looks over to him.

Technoblade smiles, and then, when the Councilmembers have looked away, he glances over at Phil and winks. Friendship bracelet, he mouths, and Phil snorts so hard the Councilmembers stop their spiel to glare at him.

Damnit.

Phil is trying to be distanced, to separate himself from the good parts of this before the bad hits, which it will, but Technoblade—The Emperor of the Antarctic—is making it uniquely hard. He’s giggly, okay? It happens. Stick him in a war for years, and then in exile, and then in marriage with an enemy, and he’s bound to get a few wires crossed.

And Technoblade is funny. It’s hard to be afraid when there’s someone starting bits in the corner. The dread feels further away.

A friendship bracelet. The knotted cord is like an anchor, like a compass leading him back to himself. Here is his body, in the Antarctic, and here is the Emperor and the Councilmembers. The war is far away. Hardcore is farther. Here is a marriage with a guy that thumbs-ups you and makes you a friendship bracelet. He’s the Emperor and also you used to crash his planes during the war. He doesn’t seem to have minded much.

Reality is bewildering and terrifying. It’s a little less so with a friendship bracelet around his wrist.

Phil will have to give him something later in return. He still has some shit, fancy little trinkets tucked away in his new room. Maybe the earrings? The green is the same shade as the bracelet.

Technoblade would look nice with them.

The rest of the ceremony goes smoothly—well, it goes stiltedly, awkwardly, but it doesn’t suck for Phil more than anyone else until the Concilmembers bring up the reception.

Until they bring up tradition, and custom.

Phil’s mood drops instantly, like an unmanned plane. Sourness takes its place. Friendship and camaraderie aren’t enough to stop it. His face falls, visibly enough that Technoblace glances over.

Whatever he sees, he clearly doesn’t like, but he doesn’t say anything. He understands the meaning of the words too.

Right.

Right. He almost forgot.

Shit.

“So,” Technoblade starts awkwardly, stiffly, as though this is just as strange and unfamiliar a custom as it is for Phil. They’re together now, after the ceremony, alone in a decorated room meant clearly for only one thing. The bedspread is just as fine and ornate as the wedding hall. There are bottles with easily-read labels on the desk. Phil can’t quite read them from the doorway, but he knows what they are anyway. There's really only one thing they can be.

The knowledge of it sits like a weight tied to his feet, like the ball-and-chain shackles his own people fitted him with after the war, before they’d sent him out to Hardcore.

If there’s a way out of this part, literally any degree of lessening no matter the cost, Phil’s going to take it. Sue him, but he isn’t really in the mood for having sex with a man he doesn’t fuckin’ trust (even if he trusts him more than every other option). Especially in a nation that isn’t his own, with unfamiliar cultures and rules and rights he isn’t familiar enough with to defend. Stubbornness is at least going to try to win out.

He knows the expectations. He got it, understood it perfectly clear, he's not that dense. There are customs that follow after a marriage, and rulers of a nation must uphold that nation’s standards to a strict degree. People involved in a treaty follow the customs of both and of the Council. Phil doesn’t know all of the rules — fuck, he barely knows any of the Antarctic-specific ones, he doesn’t even know most of his own — but he knows this one. They warned him about this one.

It’s his people’s custom, after all, an open secret of the aristocracy. The only reason he didn’t know it before this is because he wasn’t in that cushioned upper class, wasn’t ever one of the people who look down on people like him. He is now. Getting married to the fuckin’ Emperor has certain advantages, Phil will give him that.

But they did warn him. Eventually. After he’d already agreed to it. They let him know it was never really a choice, that he was never really going to have a choice again.

Still…

He was warned.

Warnings aren’t doing shit. Not now. Phil is left with a deep, thickening dread that weighs down his chest. His heartbeat thuds in his ears, and he’s pretty sure he’s trembling.

“So,” he parrots tensely. His feathers bristled sometime when the officiant mentioned the customs and never went back down during the reception. He knows people noticed, but no one commented. They didn't even look all that much, even though Phil knows there aren't other Elytrians in the Antarctic. There aren't many anywhere, but flight is more of a fleeting concept than a reality in a place with winds like these.

For Elytrians, flying is freedom. It's the heart thundering underneath all life, trailing and curling in the winds and weather. It's protected viciously. Even temporary wing injuries are something to be mourned, a kind of impermanent death most other hybrids can't understand. When it comes to permanent wounds, to crippling blows and amputations, well...

Most would rather die than lose them.

Antarctic winds are strong enough to shoot someone down all on their own, squashed like a bug underneath the weather. Even the winds in the small and boxy corridors of the mines are strong enough to kill anyone in flight, to send someone crashing against the walls at sharp angles. Phil thinks he might be able to figure out the winds eventually. He’s gonna try. The preparation he’ll need to do will take time. Charting flight courses takes months. In a place like the Antarctic, it might take years.

It's of no real surprise that there isn't anyone else that flies.

There's an expected degree of novelty involved in being a rarer hybrid. Phil had prepared for a level of poking and prodding he'd need to put up with, but they've all left him alone, until now. They made no demands of him, and he'd started to think they never would.

Until now.

Technoblade steps forward minutely — really, it's barely more than a subtle shift towards him — and a noise gets strangled in the back of Phil’s throat. He presses himself back against the door and his wings twitch, trying to flare open in defense before he jerks them back down.

Technoblade watches him, glances over at his wings, then carefully takes a step back. His brow is furrowed.

Phil grits his teeth.

“Wanted to talk about the marriage,” Technoblade tries again, “Figure we should probably communicate a bit.”

“Then talk,” says Phil, still just as tense. He doesn’t want to talk about this. He’s been actively avoiding talking about this part. But he needs to now, because it’s happening now.

“Alright,” Technoblade says after a long moment of silence, “How do you feel about not doin’ that right now?” He jerks his hand back, pointing with his thumb toward the bed behind him.

“What?”

“Havin’ sex,” he clarifies, “I mean, I’m not against the idea, but I usually appreciate it when my partners are also not against the idea. Prefer it when they’re for it, actually.”

“What?” Phil says again, because what. There’s a second, a brief, terrified and pissed-off instant where he thinks Technoblade is telling him to pretend to like it, but—

No. That isn’t what he means. Phil doesn’t think he’s lying. Technoblade doesn’t look like he’s lying.

How is that not what he means?

Anxiety falls off him like water off the edge of a cliff, most of it disappearing in the sheer absurdity of the implications. “Mate, you’re willing to void a political marriage because you think I don’t want to fuck you?"

“I mean,” Technoblade says with an awkward smile, rubbing the back of his neck, “it’s only lyin’ to the government if we get caught. Otherwise we had perfectly respectable sex that fulfills our nations’ agreements.”

Phil inhales.

He can’t be that lucky. This can’t be how it actually plays out. Any moment now, Technoblade is going to start demanding that he call him an Emperor, and any moment now he’s going to start acting like one. He’ll stop acting like he did during the war, because there is no world where the Technoblade he sees now is the same as he’s always been.

It’s been years. The war has been over for nearly five years. Phil was in Hardcore for four. That’s long enough for the memories to start warping, long enough for the people in them to change. There is no way Technoblade is being genuine here. He’s just—trying to relax him, trying to get Phil to lower his guard so he can do what he actually intends to do.

He isn’t, though. Phil’s pretty confident in his ability to know when Technoblade is lying, and he fucking isn’t.

Again, how?

“Unless I’m misreading that,” Technoblade says slowly, “But I, uh, don’t really think I am.”

"You aren't," Phil gives him that, confirms it with a tilt to his head. He’s pretty sure it will be the wrong assumption eventually. Technoblade isn’t unattractive by any means. Phil has caught himself staring more than a few times.

But, Phil isn’t there yet. He hasn’t really had any time to get there, either. Six days ago, he was on an entirely different continent. Now he’s married.

“Sooo,” Technoblade says, drawing the word out and watching Phil. He’s biting his lip, just barely, in a subtle way that Phil probably isn’t meant to notice, in a way he wouldn’t notice if he wasn’t staring right at them. Like he said, he doesn’t think it will be the right assumption forever. Just—now, here, it isn’t.

Technoblade sits down on the floor. Phil jumps a bit when he moves, a flash of terror biting through the calm, but it’s fine. It’s fine. Even though it doesn’t mean anything—even though it wouldn’t change anything if Technoblade did want to hurt him, his wings settle low once he’s the one towering above Technoblade.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Phil asks, because even with the rugs the cold stone floor cannot be comfortable, and also what, and also was it really that easy the whole time? Is he really getting out of this?

“Relaxin’. Wanna’ play a game?” Technoblade asks back, and he’s sitting on the floor with his legs crossed. His cape fans out on the floor around him. The crown he bears is crooked on his head.

He doesn’t look like much of an Emperor. He doesn’t look much like the Blood God, either, like the murderous soldier during the war that Phil heard about, the one he could never connect to the pilot he met.

He doesn’t look like a tyrant.

He looks like the Technoblade the Antarctic pilot, the one Phil stole out of planes and shared rations with, the enemy soldier that he saw regularly enough to identify him by his footsteps alone.

“What kind of fuckin’—sure, mate,” Phil says, because he needs to be agreeable when it isn’t like pulling teeth so that when it is Technoblade might consider defiance as the exception instead of the rule—but is that even true because it’s not some random noble or Emperor, it’s Technoblade, it’s the pilot that deliriously called him pretty after Phil crashed his plane into the side of a mountain and dropped him at the base of it, it’s the person who said “good game” every time Phil did it, again, again, again, and — It’s him.

It’s him. How is Phil supposed to be afraid of him?

How is he supposed to not be?

“What game?” he asks. It better not be a fuckin’ blowjob. Phil doesn’t think it is, but it better not be. And there it is again—he feels like he knows Technoblade would never, like this is a fact and his fear is built out of some logical fallacy, but he’s the Emperor. That means something. Doesn’t that mean something?

“I’ve always been partial to talkin’ games, personally,” Technoblade says, and Phil calls bullshit immediately.

He scoffs before he can stop himself, “You hate talking to people, mate. What the fuck are you even talking about?”

And there it is. When the dust and terror settles, being around each other is easy, comfortable. It feels like they’ve known each other for years. They have, in a way. The war was years-long. They fought each other for years. And Phil—Phil was never fighting that war to win. He just wanted to make it out, to last as long as he could and to take out as few as he could manage.

Somehow, the Empire had seen that, and they let him go. At every turn, even in the middle of a war, they let him go.

Technoblade let him go.

Phil remembers the capture. He remembers some upstart asshole of an Antarctic captain ambushing him during a drop-off. He remembers the gloating and sick, dehumanizing way he’d treated him. He remembers hands carding through feathers, and he remembers those same hands trying to do worse.

More than that, though, he remembers the pilots. He remembers the quiet way they started taking over guard shifts. He remembers one of them, name and face lost to time, angrily interceding on his behalf when things went too far. And when that didn’t work, he remembers them conveniently leaving the door unlocked. He remembers a bag of stale hardtack and a map.

He remembers getting out. He remembers a desperate flight in the middle of the night, the way he flew as far away until he collapsed. He remembers finding Technoblade again and telling him, careful to keep names of all but the captain out of it, and he remembers Technoblade being glad. The Emperor of the Antarctic, glad that an enemy got out from underneath his clutches.

“You let us go literally every time,” Technoblade had said, “Sorta’ feels like a fair trade. Actually, you get us way more than we get you. Honestly, we’re scammin’ you, Phil. You should file a report.”

They had laughed, and it never got brought up again, but Phil also never ran across that captain for the rest of the war. It had made Phil paranoid at first, not being able to find the man so he could avoid him, but eventually he’d settled down.

Before it was—coincidence, maybe. He never would have thought that Technoblade would do something, that he would want to, that he would even have the power. But he had. They were enemies, and he still did more to protect Phil than anyone else on his own side.

And there it is.

“Bruh,” Technoblade says dryly, but honestly, and there it is, “I like talkin’ to you.”

A memory surfaces, grainy and half-lost to time.

“Like the shit we did during the war?” Phil asks, smiling despite himself, and there it was. Even when they were enemies they had each other’s backs. Phil and the Antarctic pilots talked shop where they should have been fighting, shared information and gossip and food. Technoblade shared information, details of battles and places Phil and his people should avoid. Even though Technoblade was keeping a secret—an Emperor, honestly, what the fuck—Phil was keeping one, too.

He was keeping a lot of secrets, really. It just didn’t feel that way because no one ever asked. He was a poor enlisted hybrid in the middle of a war. Never mind that his job was pretty damn specialized, or that he might have competent thoughts every once in a while, no one on his side ever thought he knew anything worth asking.

So Phil didn’t tell them.

Most of them were little things, like what Antarctic pilots kept in their bags, or the fact that most of them stopped with the harnesses. Sometimes, someone would drop the big stuff. A pilot would get drunk, or sick, or just plain old bored. They’d spill secrets without noticing, and Phil would catch them and hold onto them. He never had to worry about lying to his government about them because they never fucking asked.

“Yep,” Technoblade says, “Here, I’ll go first… Uh, hmm… Hang on, let me think of something.”

Phil snorts. “Emperor of Social Anxiety,” he dubs Technoblade.

Technoblade grins, and Phil relaxes, says fuck it to the lingering fear, and sits down on the floor across from him. The stone is cold, but barely. The carpets are more insulating than he thought they would be. It’s surprising, but it’s not. It makes sense, but it doesn’t.

All of this is so new, but it’s exactly the way it’s always been.

“I’ll go,” he says.

Technoblade sighs heavily. “Thank God, Phil, I was comin’ up blank.”

“You were the Emperor during the war,” Phil says. He’s overheard enough to be sure of that, but the implications hadn’t clicked until now. That’s not the question, that’s him slowly coming to a realization, but Technoblade nods in agreement until— “Mate, did you actually describe yourself to me as a lame, awkward loser with no friends?”

Techoblade goes red in the face. “I was experiencin’ second-hand embarrassment, Phil. You called me huggable.”

“I told you your pilots said that,” Phil says with a laugh, before tilting his head, “But…yeah, I see it.”

Technoblade covers his flushed face with his hands. “Bruh, ” he says, and the noise is strangled.

Phil cackles, and there it is.

“Are you an engineer or an architect?” Technoblade asks, once Phil’s stopped laughing and his face has gone from bright red to a dusty pink.

Phil blinks. “…I worked under an architect,” he says slowly, narrowing his eyes, “How the fuck did you know that?” It’s not suspicion, not really, but how did he know that? Phil can’t remember talking about it, can barely remember even thinking much about his life before the war.

Technoblade shifts forward. There’s a moment—there’s a split second of wait, wait, no—and then it’s gone. Technoblade settles back without a word.

“You were runnin’ some pretty intense calculations,” he says, “I hear there’s a lot of plannin’ involved in non-lethal plane crashin’. Like… angles.”

Phil laughs.

“Oh, god, the fuckin’ angles,” he says, “Your planes were wicked fast, mate, I don’t know how I managed to take down even one of those things.”

Technoblade nods, “Built to last and to go fast, the perfect war machine. Only completely destroyed by some random guy with wings.” He says it fondly, like he holds no resentment against him, and Phil believes it.

He remembers the bewilderment Technoblade faced when they first met face-to-face. “I can’t believe our Achilles heel is one individual guy that doesn’t even wear a helmet,” Technoblade had said, watching his plane sink deep into a lake, “Have you considered changin’ sides?”

“Nah, mate,” Phil had said, grinning from his perch on a tree, “What was it you said? ‘Try getting good?’”

Even back then, way back when most of the pilots had never seen Phil’s face before, Technoblade had laughed. They’d shared directions and supplies and parted ways. No fighting, no bloodshed, not even much shouting beyond the surprised noise Technoblade had made when Phil swooped in and yoinked him.

It was true, though, Phil was the only person that could take down Antarctic planes. He’s the only one that even tried without wasting a fuckton of supplies, too, so he got thrown at them again and again once it worked. He never figured out how to blow out the engines, or how to fuck with their navigations enough to send them into the sides of mountains. He’s not an engineer, and Antarctic planes were tough. To Phil, the answer was obvious: take out the pilot, and you’ve taken out the plane. He just stuck to a more literal, less violent interpretation of “take out.”

“They were fuckin’ built, yeah. Genuinely, did you design them to go through the fuckin’ End?” Phil wouldn’t be surprised. The winds are probably pretty similar to the Antarctic weather, cold and punishingly fast. He’s—well, he doesn't know for sure, but he’s heard talk.

“That was the plan,” Technoblade agrees with a wry grin, then pauses.

“Hey, Phil, quick question,” he says after a second, “No pressure, but how do you…know about that?”

“The portal?” Phil asks, raising an eyebrow.

“M’yep,” Technoblade says.

It’s only when he goes to answer that he realizes he actually doesn’t know who he heard it from. One of the pilots, definitely, but was it Technoblade himself or someone else? Did he overhear Antarctic soldiers talking to each other when he dropped one of the newer pilots off close to one of the Antarctic base camps?

“I—You know, I don’t actually remember,” Phil admits, “Kind of been a while since it was relevant, honestly.”

“But you didn’t tell anyone? Like, anyone at all? I’m only askin’ because it is sorta a matter of national security and we were in the middle of a war, you know how it goes. I’m not gonna blame you, but it is still kinda relevant, actually.”

“Nope,” Phil says simply, because even if he doesn’t remember where he learned it, he knows how to stick to his guns. War or no war, he’s not a snitch. Besides, by the time he started picking up  that kind of information, there wasn’t anyone else around worth telling.

“...Really?” Technoblade asks.

“Well, they didn’t ask. If they wanted to know so badly then they should’ve fuckin’ asked, mate,” Phil says, a little huffy just thinking about it, “Also they’re shit so fuck em.”

“Huh,” Technoblade says, and there’s a familiar look of understanding, a settling of sorts as they both relax into the knowledge they have of each other, “Right, that tracks. ‘Course you knew about the End Portal, what am I even sayin’?”

Technoblade laughs, and it sounds a little like relief and a lot like coming home. Phil breathes in the sound, brushes the carpet with his fingers, and the world falls into place. Being around Technoblade—being here—it doesn’t feel like losing a home, like losing a people or a life.

When the war started for Phil, not when it began but when he got thrown into it without warning, he set a three-month goal. It started simple and ridiculous: if he was still alive by the end of three months he’d steal one of the rich dickhead’s shiny little pin. He didn’t take it to use it, at least not initially. The enlisted poor weren’t told shit. How was Phil supposed to know that the pin was some kind of status symbol? He wanted it so he took it, and he had it so he wore it. For most of the war, the only people that saw him long enough to identify it were enemy pilots, and generally they had bigger problems than a pin.

They also had bigger problems than killing him, and he them, so the goal continued, crept slowly forward along with him. He just…didn’t die, so rich assholes kept losing shit during the course of the war. Books, pins, maps. Fancy jewelry and ornamentation that had no place in a battlefront disappeared, either by him or the many, many others that followed in his tracks.

Bring a knife to a bow fight and you’re prepared. Bring a diamond encrusted one, and you’re getting robbed regardless of sides, especially when you’re a dick. Phil didn’t make the rules, and neither did anyone else who decided to make their dwindling lives a little more interesting. Cannon fodder fucks around when they know they’ve been firmly thrown into the “find out” stage of life.

Phil’s people never expected him to survive, because they weren’t really his people at all. The ones in the war that were his died or got captured. That’s what happens in a war where the footsoldiers are poor and the generals are overwhelmingly rich. When resources go down, so do people. Something something dying for your fellow man, maybe, but it was never the commanders, the captains, the generals. Phil never looted a rich man’s corpse, because rich men don’t die in war.

That…isn’t what happened, on the Antarctic side of things. Everyone signed up, voluntarily, without the pressure of imprisonment for the crime of being born, and got paid. Most of them fought fair, and the ones that didn’t never stuck around. Trade lines were distributed proportionally to population, not to class.

Phil never knew Technoblade was an Emperor because he was just like everyone else. There was literally no difference between him and the other pilots. Phil knew them all as the same, and they knew each other that way, too.

Phil’s people—the ones that lived, his real people—are here.

One of them is in front of him.

Flying is freedom, to Elytrians. There was no one in the world that understood that better than the Antarctic pilots. No one knew him better than the enemy combatants that Phil grounded, over and over, an impermanent death he helped them climb out of, helped them make their way back to base camps and battlegrounds, traveled with, broke bread and bones and planes and secrecy.

The war Phil fought—the real one that happened between the battles, the heavy crush of a bootheel on your back—that one, that one he was fighting to win.

When the Antarctic won, everyone like Phil won too. Even when his people chained him up and cast him into banishment, he fuckin’ won.

He just didn’t realize the fighting was over until now. Until now, here on the floor of a bedroom while a goddamn Emperor schemes to lie to the Council on behalf of his people. On behalf of Phil, who was his people even when they were enemies.

Technoblade nods like he’s come to a decision.

“Say, Phil, how do you feel about takin’ over the world?” he asks.

“What?” Phil asks, thrown off guard but also not. Surprised, but not. A little bewildered, he asks, “Didn’t you already do that?” He’d only heard talk about it, but Phil’s pretty sure he’d done something that declared him ruler of the world in writing. It’s why the Council had been so insistent about the marriage, they’d said, to tie Technoblade down—and isn’t it funny that anyone thought that would work, it’s Technoblade. Even before Phil knew it was him he knew it wouldn’t work. One random marriage between parties, of an Emperor and then just some guy? Yeah, Phil’s not a political mastermind, but he knows a desperate measure when he sees one. He knows biding for time better than most.

“Nah, Phil, you see, that was just a warmup, just a little logistical test provin’ a theory.” Technoblade grins. “We’re startin’ the real takeover soon, and I—Well, I wouldn’t mind a co-ruler. Might even prefer it.”

So, Technoblade took over the world. Only he didn’t, because the Council stuck their noses in some shit and undid the whole thing.

Technoblade is going to take over the world, for real, and he means it. Phil knows a scheme that’s set in stone when he sees one. It’s definitely happening with or without his help.

But Technoblade wants his help.

His.

He could say no. By now, he’s sure Technoblade would let him. He might even let him go if he asked. He’s the sort of guy that would even help him fake his death, moving him out to a place with kinder winds and better prospects if he asked.

Phil doesn’t want to ask. He wants, somewhat daringly, to stay. Until the—shit, even after the End, actually.

And there it is.

“Fuckin’—Yeah, alright. Let’s take over the world,” Phil agrees.

And they do.