Chapter Text
“Oh, no, I wasn’t born with my wings,” Phil explains to three sets of curious eyes, peering at him from the living room floor where they’d been play-fighting to tire themselves out before bedtime.
“Really?” Wilbur asks, reaching a tentative hand out to pet Phil’s grey-violet flight feathers, his touch as soft as a whisper. “Then how did you get them on?”
“They didn’t attach to me, they sprouted out from my back.”
“Ew,” says Techno. He waddles around Phil’s wings, giving them a wide berth, until he stops directly behind Phil, presumably to scrutinize the place where his feathered wings join with the smooth skin of his back.
“Yep,” Phil says, popping the P. “It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever gone through. A bunch of my traveling buddies had to keep splashing me with numbing and instant healing throughout the whole thing, and even then I still felt like I was going to pass out or just die a few times. I do not recommend it.”
“That’s fucked,” chirps Tommy, who has somehow adopted the vocabulary of a bitter old sailor despite the fact that he’s only four years old. Phil has long since given up on trying to train him out of it, especially considering how hypocritical it would be to let slide his own frequent (but accidental) potty mouth.
“Am I gonna have to get wings someday?” Wilbur asks, apprehension warbling his voice.
“No, love. Avian genetics are very, very rare. I’ve only ever met one other like me in my lifetime of travels. You have to have the right genes and a very specific bone structure in order to accommodate for wings, and I’m pretty sure the trait is almost completely evolved out by now,” Phil explains. Once, long ago, he’d scoured every library, census, registry—hell, even the veterinarian’s records—within a hundred miles of himself no matter where he went, desperately searching for some sign that he wasn’t alone. He always came up with very little, and was always bitterly disappointed.
But then he met Techno, Tommy, and Wilbur, and he realized that he’d been searching for family in all the wrong places.
“Boo,” Tommy jeers. “I wanna fly, too!”
“You can!” Phil replies, a mischievous glint in his eye. Tommy barely has time to squeal before he’s being lifted in the air, Phil swinging Tommy around the room like he weighs less than a sack of carrots.
(They checked, and Tommy weighs as much as a sack and a half. Big man shit.)
Phil drops a giggling Tommy onto the soft couch behind them before turning his attention to the other two, who erupt into delighted screams as they let themselves be caught and tossed through the air by their adopted father.
Inside, the house is boisterous with laughter.
All around, the forest is still.