oxygen is getting low (one last round before we go)

by Odaigahara

Summary:

The power fluctuated, lights going out. Phil was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, but his eyes might as well have been closed. The darkness was so complete it was like it clasped its fingers in his, breathed through his throat-- and then, slowly, he became aware of a shift on the other side of the glass. Faint, distant movement. A soft pulse of light, pinkish-red mingled with off-white, gentle bioluminescent flickers in the engulfing blackness. Fear twisted so far around that it turned to wonder.

He thought the lights were multiple creatures close together, at first. Then the emergency lights hummed back on, and the lights on the other side suddenly resolved into a being, a huge one with a long snaking tail and brightness down its side and shoulders and flowing hair and was that a goddamn fucking mer--

The mer reeled back and disappeared into the gloom. Phil stared after it and said blankly, forgetting it was only a plush crow listening: "What the actual fuck."

Notes:

TW's at end notes, and thank you to antimony_medusa for beta reading! This is done and just needs editing, but I've split it into chapters anyway XD

Chapter 1

Notes:

General TW: I've selected "Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings" to avoid spoilers (though to be clear any warnings about sexual content will not apply), but some archive warnings may still appear in this fic. Please consider the title and other tags with this in mind before reading.

Phil decided on hypothermia as a cause of death two weeks in, after the third sector of the base imploded and the emergency lights started to flicker. Before that, he’d been hoping against hope that the distress ping was getting farther than the math told him it was, but power outages meant the signal wasn’t going out at all,  never mind the odds of anyone listening for transmissions from an abandoned base in the first place. They wouldn’t have left if they'd known he was alive. 

Honestly, even if the signal had reached the surface, it would only have distressed everyone for no good reason. Evacuating a group of scientists from Challenger Deep had been hard enough with the escape pods; extracting one errant biologist without killing him would be nearly impossible. The base was so degraded that a rescue mission might just crush him under sixteen thousand psi like a soda can in a trash compactor.

That left Phil to relocate to the observation deck, sealing off sections as he went–- to rework the atmospheric generators so he wouldn’t suffocate, turn off the useless alarms, collect what food and water he could–- and to wait, restless and cold, for death to reach him.

The majority of the observation deck was one clear wall, reinforced to stave off the pressure of the hadal zone. With the outer lights shut off, looking into it was like staring into a black hole, one that ate light and gave nothing back. Sitting beside it felt as though Phil had opened an airlock and swung his legs over the side, a swoop in his stomach identical to vertigo. Endless, terrible blackness.

It was an eerie place to die, that was for sure. Phil had no one to blame but himself, though, so he couldn't complain too much about it. Good enough that he hadn't died with the researchers who'd been killed instantly when their sector failed, that he'd crammed himself into an emergency pod and ridden out the worst of the destabilization there, before he'd crept back into the main base like a spooked rat. It meant a slower death, and a lonelier one, but it meant a few more months of life, too. Enough to savor while he had it. 

Hypothermia wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, anyways. Once he was tired of clinging on to life, he could just leave off his blankets and lean against the observation window, let the cold of the Marianas Trench eat away his strength. Drowse away like that, sluggish and soft, and close his eyes for the last time. 

For now he had water bottles, and a working mechanism for reclaiming fresh water from salt. He had rations for eight people to live off for several months. He had a pressure suit, if he wanted to walk out the airlock and die fast that way instead, and a sort-of-working bathroom, and a little plush crow that cawed if you squeezed it. It wasn't nothing.

The boring part was how there was nothing to do. So Phil wrote down all the observations he'd made in the past months, working in analysis between diagrams of the little creatures they'd caught on film or in person-- how the pressure shaped them, what they might have lived on. The exploration drones had located a whalefall near the start of the expedition, when all of them had been getting to know each other, and the sheer quantity of creatures that had amassed around it had brought Puffy to tears.

Phil indulged himself sketching out the weird crabs, the sea cucumbers and zombie worms and oily transparent things they'd only glimpsed before the disaster. Marine snow. Silt samples. Hydrothermal vents, single-celled xenophyophores, a pool of liquid sulfur-- the wink of some bioluminescent creature in the view of the camera-- fuck, it was wondrous, even with his death looming over his shoulder like an overzealous chaperone. Coming down here had been too much of an opportunity not to grab at with both hands. He'd thought: Wilbur's an adult, he can do without me for six months. Tommy’s at university, and this is the chance of a lifetime.

The chance of a shortened lifetime, apparently. He hoped his boys wouldn't take it too hard.

All the clocks blinked 12:00 if they worked at all, lights kept at a constant dimness, and Phil slipped in and out of sleep fitfully as the days crawled by, curling up in corners whenever his eyelids itched and grew heavy. Chills crept over his limbs, stabbing through the one blanket he'd managed to save. His waking moments were spent writing, exercising, checking the life support, and talking to the plush crow like a madman.

The crow was the one thing keeping him from madness, really. The observation room swallowed his words, echoed them back distorted. The plexiglass radiated cold. He slept more and more, ate less and less, started thinking fleetingly about how easy it would be to finish things now . Anything to fight the silence, the certainty of how his life would end. The creeping doom, oil in his lungs to weigh him down.

He slept, and he dreamed he was standing in the park behind his old house, the place they'd lived before Wilbur went off to university. Dandelions kissed his feet. The sky gleamed an unearthly pale blue. Wilbur sat cross-legged on the picnic blanket with his guitar in his lap, looking mildly disgruntled at the mud smeared at the corner of his guitar case; Tommy, maybe eight years old, ran back at them from the playground, legs scuffed with grass stains.

It was a summer day. Phil spoke, the words he’d actually said ages ago-- “Mate, if you didn’t want to get it dirty, you shouldn’t have brought it out after it'd rained”-- and heard Wilbur say, “It’s picturesque, Dad, you don’t understand.”

“A bit less picturesque now that it’s covered in mud,” Phil said. Wilbur rolled his eyes. “I like your music, though. Where’d you get that last song?”

“I wrote it," Wilbur said, straightening his shoulders. "Do you like it? The chorus needs some work, I expect I have to change around some chords, but as is, I mean. As a concept."

“It’s fucking good, you should put it on YouTube or something.”

Tommy reached them, panting for breath, and declared, “I made a friend today! A good’un, a fucking–-”

“Language–-”

“ Non-bitch,” Tommy declared, with all the confidence of a child who’d gotten Phil into three parent-teacher meetings in the last four months alone. “He’s nice and he likes bees and his name is Tubbo, and he is going to attend my birthday party. Dad, say he can go to my party.”

“Ah,” Phil said, or remembered himself saying. “Are his parents here?”

“His dad’s on the bench over there,” Tommy said, and Phil realized for the first time what felt so wrong . The sun shined down on all of them, but his skin was cold. The shadows under his feet were pools of ink, deeper than they should have been. “Are you gonna go talk to him? I’m gonna go back and talk to Tubbo.”

“Sure, whatever, I’ll talk to him,” Phil heard himself say. He turned around and saw Wilbur watching him, fingers frozen on the strings of his guitar. “Wil? I’ll be right back, okay?”

“No, you won’t,” Wilbur said, plucking out a few more chords. “What possessed you to come down here, anyway? You’re so strange.”

“What?”

Wilbur’s eyes were dark as the void. It wasn’t Wilbur sitting there on that blanket. “Kind of interesting, though,” the person said, tilting their chin back, taking in the sun. “I’ve never seen one of you alive.”

Phil’s eyes shot open, and the power fluctuated, lights going out. He was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, but his eyes might as well have been closed. The darkness was so complete it was like it clasped its fingers in his, breathed through his throat-- and then, slowly, he became aware of a shift on the other side of the glass. Faint, distant movement. A soft pulse of light, pinkish-red mingled with off-white, gentle bioluminescent flickers in the engulfing blackness. Fear twisted so far around that it turned to wonder.

He forced himself to stand on stiff feet and lean on the observation window, palms flat against the freezing surface. His breath condensed in front of his mouth. Only gravity held him; all around him was such emptiness that he could have been floating, untouched and alone in the void. In freefall.

He thought the lights were multiple creatures close together, at first. Then the emergency lights hummed back on, and the lights on the other side suddenly resolved into a being, a huge one with a long snaking tail and brightness down its side and shoulders and flowing hair and was that a goddamn fucking mer--

The mer reeled back and disappeared into the gloom. Phil stared after it-- him? He thought that fin arrangement meant male, but that in itself was hardly a guarantee-- and said blankly, forgetting it was only a plush crow listening, "What the actual fuck ."

*

Mer weren't technically a myth, but they were pretty fucking peripheral to them. Common scholarly consensus was that they'd died out with the Roman Empire from a mix of undersea wars and conflicts with humans, not to mention some climate fuckery beforehand that'd driven them out to deeper seas. Marine biologists held out hope that mer held on somewhere in the oceans, steering clear of where humans frequented, but there hadn't been any discoveries of artifacts or corpses younger than a thousand years, not in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean or the depths of the Pacific. Live mer were a pipe dream, a child's wish, on par with wanting to meet an Ancient Egyptian.

Phil hadn't expected to see one in the fucking Marianas Trench. What was he surviving on? Had to be an apex predator with that size and those teeth— maybe he went after squid and crabs, or scavenged from whale falls. His body had looked eel-like, a bit like a dragonfish, and the bioluminescence was probably at least partially for communication.

But that had been a mer. Mer were real, were alive, hadn’t gone extinct. Unless Phil was hallucinating, but at this point he didn’t care to check. Fuck scientific integrity. No one else was gonna see his results anyway.

His heart was a drumbeat in his chest. He felt painfully, exhilaratingly awake. 

He waited all the next day for the mer to reappear, keeping the lights low in case the brightness scared him off. He ate his ration sparingly, keeping to minimum daily calories–- wrote down everything he recalled about his sighting, including a little doodle of the mer’s surprised face– and received nothing but the usual darkness until the day after his first glimpse, when he finally caved and cut the lights off completely.

He kept a flashlight at hand, one of the little pocket ones with the service life that rarely passed a few months. The chill of it in his hand made it easier to stand the darkness, which was so complete that he might have been sitting in a cave tour or a bunker deep under soil, a pocket of air standing up beneath millions of pounds of rock. A man could trick himself, if he wasn’t careful–- tell himself he was in the moment of silence before the tour guide flicked the lights back on, that there were people breathing at his back and in front of him and if he reached out his hand he'd feel the zipper of Tommy’s backpack, hear him yelp and immediately deny that he’d done so.

That way laid madness, though, and Phil was bound to acquire enough of that without chivvying it along. He knew where he was. He knew he was breathing recycled air, and that if he reached out a hand it would press against freezing glass. 

The darkness was restful. His eyes struggled to adjust, throwing phantoms back along his optic nerves, flitting colorless shapes that melted away before they solidified, but they quieted after a while. His inhales and exhales became the only sound in the world, undercut by the low unsteady hum of the machinery keeping him alive. Somewhere in the distance, a sensor beeped. 

Somewhere past the glass, a light flickered and cut out, brightened again so slowly that Phil almost thought he was imagining it. Pale pink, darkening into something warmer. 

“Hello there, mate,” Phil whispered, like it might hear him and dart away. 

The mer slipped out of view, then approached from the bottom of the window and tapped the glass, sidling along its edge with the faintest little frown. He was gigantic, easily twenty feet long, with a pale upper half and a fish half that might’ve been deep pink or light red. Photophores dotted across his tail–- horizontal, like a whale or dolphin, which raised questions about mer taxonomy when combined with the fucking gills–- in symmetrical pairs, two big ones at his hips and smaller ones all down to his tailfin, two others on his shoulders like epaulettes and a collection of glowing constellations across his arms and torso. He might have had more down his spine, but it was hard to tell from Phil’s angle; the mer was too busy staring at the base to let Phil catch a glimpse of the rest of him. 

He had pink hair that floated behind him when he moved. Visible gills along his ribs, at the sides of his neck. Black eyes with white rings and small frilled fins in place of ears.

The only source of light was the mer’s own bioluminescence, so faint that Phil wouldn’t have made it out with the lights on. That was the reason he hesitated before tapping the glass–- if the mer went dark and ran off, that’d be it for observation time–- but venturing nothing would gain him nothing, and anyway the glass was thick enough that the mer probably couldn’t break it if he lunged. 

Plus, what the fuck did Phil care if he broke the glass, anyway? Being the first person in centuries to die from mer aggression beat starvation any day.

He tapped the glass. The mer jerked back, lights pulsing on and off–- definite pattern there, Phil couldn’t tell what–- then cocked his head, slipping closer. Phil smothered the end of his flashlight with one palm and flicked it on, suffusing his skin with a red-orange glow; the mer flashed his lights again and stared, eyes flitting from the light to Phil’s face. 

Dude looked shocked as hell. Phil smiled at him, close-lipped in case showing teeth was a declaration of war, and covered his flashlight completely with five fingers, pressing his other hand against the freezing glass. The mer ventured toward him and pressed a hand over top, twice as broad with webbing between the digits, spiny claws at the tips. 

Elation sang through him. Phil stood up, straightening his aching legs, and the mer stared at his feet for a long moment, intensely still. Then he swam back a couple feet and twisted in the water, pulling the whole of his long tail up behind him, and returned just after the display with expectant eyes. 

Phil had raised two sons, one from toddlerhood. He knew all about show and tell. Over the course of the next few hours he held up his flashlight for inspection, his plush crow, his pens and papers and a couple examples of writing, his defunct tablet and a screwdriver he’d found in some corner, and the mer obliged him with something of the same: smooth beads on his wrist and a chunk of pitted metal, a tubeworm and an amphipod larger than the survey crew had ever seen on camera. Phil took notes the entire time, showing the mer his sketches of the creatures when he was done, and the mer started disappearing for longer, diving and coming back with bits and pieces, watching Phil to see whether he’d go wild over them, too. 

He could be induced to bring an amphipod closer so Phil could see its legs, though he did so in a deadpan way, like an employee at a coffee shop who’d received the dumbest fucking request he’d ever heard. He was greatly interested in the shapes behind Phil in the observation deck. And before he left, he came back empty-handed and pulsed a soft pattern of colors, placing his hand against the glass again until Phil copied him. A sort of goodbye.

Phil stared after the darkness for a long time after he’d gone, heart pumping energy coursing through him like a fucking drug. Then he dove for his notes to write everything down in detail, a whole catalog of his personal first contact, and couldn’t sleep for hours after no matter how cold he felt. 

He passed out eventually, though. His body didn't have the resources to keep him awake for long.

*

Rationing food went from uncomfortable to unbearable as the days dragged on. The rations had been packed for long shelf life-- astronaut food brought as a last resort, canned ingredients for the tiny kitchen, packaged junk and dried fruits and jerky that Puffy had smuggled in-- but the power outage had made reheating it impossible, so it all tasted like shit. Phil ate soup cold, spent a day chewing through banana chips as slowly as he could stand despite how they cut into his gums. He drank water sparsely, checking the reclaimer every day for signs of wear or overheating, and scanned the atmospheric generators just as intensely, a little panicky at the thought of them breaking. He wasn't a fucking engineer. He could replace a part or two, but anything past that would spell his death.

And he didn't want to die yet, not anymore. He had an incentive to drag things out.

The mer returned on something of a schedule, lingering and blinking his photophores in the far-off dark until Phil turned off the lights on the observation deck. When Phil did so-- he suspected the mer's hesitation was because the brightness hurt his eyes-- his new friend would venture closer, press his hand against the glass. Wait, patiently, for Phil to complete the gesture.

They didn't have much to do. Mostly they just hung out, Phil chattering about this or that and doodling on whatever papers he found lying around, showing the mer pictures of landscapes and animals that he probably thought nonsense, for all they could actually communicate. In return, the mer sometimes brought things for Phil to draw-- he had a lot of trinkets, things that would've been snapped up by private collectors or museums as artifacts if they were on the surface-- and generally hung around, digging his claws into the crag beneath the observation deck and lounging there, tail wrapped over the rock.

His new friend was magnificent up close. Phil's science brain was thrilled, overriding his practical brain in favor of getting all the information and recording it someplace it might survive a base collapse. The mer's sheer existence was a revelation: the flare of his gills, the dull pink shimmer of his cycloid scales, his luminous eyes and the braids in his hair and the scars scored down his tail that tore through part of his spinal fin, bisecting it through the middle.

How the fuck did he feed himself? What the fuck did he eat, was there a mer society, did they have social status-- did they lay eggs or give live birth like great white sharks-- was their language all visual, or was there an auditory component that Phil just couldn't pick up, ears optimized for sound waves traveling through air instead of water?

"So many questions," Phil told the mer, and had to laugh at the expression he got in return. The guy knew he was talking. He was likely talking back, given the faint motions of his lips, though Phil doubted his vocal chords were formed the same way. They just couldn't understand each other, and that seemed to disgruntle the mer more by the day. "Don't look at me like that, it's not my fault we're from different evolutionary lines. Blame convergence! I'm just the messenger. You can observe me like a fish in a fucking aquarium, how's that for turning the tables."

The mer glowered at him, a collection of flickers pooling at his shoulders and shooting down towards his tail like the turn of a strobe light. Phil got the strong feeling it meant something like bruh . An exasperated bruh , like a college student who'd picked up tutoring as a side job and was now faced with several rambunctious ten-year-olds who wanted to talk about anything but critical thinking.

It was nice having company. Phil let himself stay in the darkness of the observation deck for longer than he should have, putting a blanket between himself and the glass so he could lean against it without killing himself, and opened his eyes to an identical dark, deep and soothing as the underside of a blanket.

His fingers dug into slick silt, grit slipping between his fingers and his thumb, under his fingernails. His bare knees dug into the same silt; he was wearing swim trunks, a surf tee that reminded him of his beach-going days in grad school. His hair drifted around his temple. It was so dark that he couldn’t make out his legs beneath him, so dark that proprioception took precedence over sight. 

Water roared in his ears. He groped around for a handhold, salt filling his mouth, and breathed in water until it weighed him down, buoyancy going on a vacation. Pressure squeezed his bones. He forced himself to step forward until a faint glimmer of light caught his attention; then he struggled toward it, alternating between swimming and walking the ocean floor.

The world lightened. It was a little cabin at the edge of the ravine, warm yellow light streaming from the windows. Phil kicked off the seafloor in a spray of sediment and swam to the door, and as his feet hit the welcome mat it swung open, allowing him inside.

A woman sat at the table, dressed in black with a veil over her face. Its edges waved in the currents, catching at strands of her hair. She held a bagel so tightly that it squished around the middle.

"What is this?" she asked, and her voice was-- Phil couldn't describe it. Melodious, amused. Deep as chasms, not in tone but in echoing, like huge lungs squeezing out a tiny bit of air, just enough for a voice. Compressed, somehow. "I saw you eating it, so I assumed it was food, but it's so soft. How did you kill it? Did it die on its own? Was it grown?"

"It's a bagel," Phil said, bemused. He took a seat across from her. It seemed like the thing to do. "It's made of bread, usually. Grains. We grow wheat and take part of it to grind up, and then we mix it with fucking-- yeast and shit. Water, sugar, heat. And it becomes a bagel. I can't give you more detail than that, cooking's not my department. My kids ate a shit ton of takeout." The woman stared at him with delighted incomprehension. "It's-- we grow them," Phil added, defeated. "They're from a crop."

"Fascinating," the woman said. "You're fascinating, do you know that? I could look at you forever."

To his horror, Phil felt himself blush. "Not sure I have a reason to object," he said, glancing down at the table. The newspaper laid across it was open to the comics page, something he hadn't paid attention to in years, but the words crept away when he looked at them, sentences going on and on like autogenerated captions: it was late and rainbow and the knight radical telling tell blood for the skulls for the death for the throne , mindless and repetitive. "You're nicer than most folks I meet in my dreams."

Because he was dreaming. He knew it like he knew he had bones.

"You said that last time, too," the woman said, and laughed. "And the time before that! You weren't kidding when you said you wouldn't remember."

Phil caught himself before the first what the fuck do you mean by that left his tongue. The cabin was lit by gas lamps, furnished with a mix of 70s furniture that Phil distantly recognized from his grandparents' house and old barrels, collections of sculpted shells, a portrait he recognized from his graduate advisor's office. The wooden floors were gritty with salt and sand. He tasted salt. And he knew the woman in front of him because for a moment she'd been in Wilbur's place on a picnic blanket, but he knew her from elsewhere, too. From this table, sitting across from him. "We played cards," he offered. "I gave you a fucking Nerf gun, since you wanted to see how it worked."

"That's right!" the woman exclaimed. "Wow, I think I'm getting good at this, there must be some pathways forming. Do you remember my name, Philza?"

"I called you Kristin," Phil said, thinking back. "But I don't think I could pronounce your actual name. Too many syllables my mouth can't form."

"I guess I can't expect that much from an alien," the woman sighed, teasing. Somehow Phil knew it was teasing, though he couldn't see her face curl into a smile. "Do you remember why you're here?"

His blood turned to ice. "I expect it's because I'm stranded miles under the surface and running out of oxygen," he said lightly. "Having fucked-up dreams from the deprivation, that kind of shit. Going mad."

"Not mad," the woman corrected. "The fucked-up dreams, maybe? I thought I was doing good, but... well, whatever. You're right about one thing, though. You will run out of oxygen eventually. And food, and water, and light. You're dying, Phil."

They were underwater. Somehow his mouth still felt dry. "I figured."

"It's a gift! Death enriches life. It floods the waters, gives you everything you need. To end life in the deep dark, where the earth is hot beneath us-- that's amazing, Phil, you have no idea. All the soft parts are on your body still. I’m so glad that you came down here to die with us.”

“Come on, it wasn’t exactly the fucking plan,” Phil said. The words had spurred something in him— a quickening of the heartbeat, an uptick in adrenaline. Suddenly he felt present, clear-eyed, awake . “I was left behind, mate, I didn’t come down here as some kind of ritual. We had a malfunction and they thought I was dead.”

“You are dead,” the woman said. “It’s just taking longer! You have to starve first. Or suffocate. If you want to make it faster, you could always open that seal of yours, so you implode—“

“Okay, this feels like it should be a much creepier discussion than it actually is,” Phil interrupted, bewildered. “We’re talking death here, not shopping for wedding rings.”

“What’s a wedding ring?” the woman asked, leaning forward. Her veil drifted up off her face; Phil caught a flash of ferociously sharp teeth, rowed like a shark’s, and then she shook her head and it disappeared entirely, leaving a warm, round human face in its place. She could’ve been any attractive woman off the street.

“It’s a ritual thing,” Phil told her. “Signifies a bond between a married couple. I'm not sure if merfolk go in for monogamy, but generally that’s also in the cards. Where I’m from, at least.”

“A special bond,” the woman said, dreamily contemplative. “I have a special bond with all the mer down here, where the light doesn’t reach. I keep the earth for them, so it doesn’t boil the seas; I am Death, and they are my people. There are other gods, but I’m the best one! Shallowfolk don’t get how cool I am.”

Phil jolted. “Shallowfolk? There’s mer outside the Trench?”

“Well, of course!” the woman laughed. “They’re everywhere. Not as many as once there were, but they’re plentiful as fishes in the sea. And they all drift down eventually.” She gave him a mischievous look, eyes crinkling. “You and I have a special bond, too.”

“Do we now,” Phil said slowly. Despite everything, he felt more fascinated than frightened; conversation over a table in a warm, inexplicably underwater cabin was much nicer than sitting in a dying ocean base, even if it had to be a dream. The only difference was the absence of his mer friend, which he felt more than he’d expected: funny how fast you got attached to the only other guy you knew when you were stranded. 

“He’ll be along,” the woman assured him cheerfully. “Technoblade didn’t have a way in yet, but don't worry! I’ve made one for him.”

“Did you just read my thoughts?”

“We’re in your mind, of course I did,” the woman said. “And yeah, duh we have a special bond. You’re the first human I’ve ever met in person, and you have a mind like a coral reef, it’s so bright and colorful. You think I’m amazing. You want to see my real face. That’s love, isn’t it? Mutual fascination, shared admiration? We both think the other person is gorgeous.”

She wasn’t wrong. Phil managed, “And what do you think is beautiful about me?”

"You're dying," Kristin said again, eyes wide and dark, black from corner to corner. Her presence was a weight on the universe, sixteen thousand pounds per square inch of pressure across his skin, ardently dense like the core of a star. "Right in front of me. Right here with me. What’s more beautiful than that?”

Something slammed against the glass. Phil startled awake, fighting through fuzzy distant numbness to move his fingers, and realized to his horror that his skin was stiff with cold. He pulled himself away from the observation window, dragging himself across the floor. His blanket had tangled around his legs.

Technoblade drew back from the glass, earfins flared wide in what Phil now instinctively recognized as alarm. He’d almost died, he realized distantly. He would’ve frozen in his sleep, right there, and died.

You are dead, the woman’s voice echoed, still familiar. Even outside of a dream, it was familiar. It could have been the darkness talking on the other side of the glass, reaching in to caress his face.

Dead and entombed in a watery grave. Phil shivered, huffing air onto his fingers to warm them, and wondered if anyone would ever find the body.

Chapter 2

Notes:

TW for claustrophobia/animal death for this chapter! Also, minor self-harm

“So you’re Technoblade,” Phil said to the mer on the other side of the glass, surveying him more closely. His wrists had grown skinnier, his clothes ill-fitting; his tongue was like sandpaper against the roof of his mouth. He couldn’t remember the last chance he’d had to wash his hair or take a shower, and the less said about the room of the intact base he’d designated a bathroom, the better. 

He’d used to do jumping jacks or jog around when he got antsy. Now he curled up on his blanket and jacket, shivering against the cold that emanated from the floor, and faced his mer friend with his hands cushioning his cheek, too drowsy to sit upright. It had been over a month since he’d been stranded. “That’s a weird fucking name. ‘S it a translation or something? It’s a shame I don’t have an Arduino or some shit, I might approximate it with a fuckton of LEDs.”

Technoblade flared his fins, gave him an unimpressed look. His photophores danced a message Phil couldn’t decipher, slow glimmers up his torso that ended in the tines of his earfins and hung there like fireflies.

“Listen, mate, I don’t know what the fuck that means,” Phil informed him. He stood to approach the glass, and Technoblade bared his teeth and flared all his lights at once, an obvious threat display. Phil halted. “What the fuck?"

Time to test this shit. Another step forward— threat display. Fuck, that was a lot of teeth, what the hell did they eat down here. Had to be some kind of agriculture, right? Underwater ranching, maybe, since that amphipod earlier had been fucking gigantic. Shit, no, focus. So hard to focus these days.

Step back, and there was the calm, Techno’s fins settling down, his lights going dim and approachable. Except for how he still, apparently, didn’t want Phil to approach the glass. Silly, considering how he hadn’t sat next to it since his close call, but mer seemed to have long memories.

“I really scared you that time, didn’t I,” Phil said, a little rueful. “Must’ve been like watching your goldfish swim in place at the bottom of the tank, you had to tap the fucking glass to check it was alive.”

Technoblade ruffled his lights and settled, flicking his tail like he was swatting a fly. His hair was braided fancy today, tied back and intertwined with beads. Phil couldn’t make out their color in the pinkish light.

Phil hummed thoughtfully. He settled down on the blanket again, folding back over, and closed his eyes, deliberately thinking of nothing.

For what felt like ages, he couldn’t get to sleep. He was too cold, goosebumps cutting at his skin. He rubbed his limbs together, struggling to curl up tighter without subjecting himself to cramping, and all of a sudden his consciousness drifted, plummeting like a water slide.

He came out to open air.

Phil stood at the bottom of a wide stone staircase, looking up at the entrance to a natural history museum. The sky was white with clouds, air faintly cold but mostly from wind chill; the kids grouped up by the stairs wore thin puffy jackets that obscured their school t-shirts, hoods pulled up, a couple tied around their waists. He could see the back of Wilbur’s head in the crowd, where he was chatting with some of his friends. Age seventeen: that had been the year of his school trip to Washington DC, the one that Phil had volunteered to chaperone. They were at the Smithsonian.

“So this is significantly weirder than I expected,” a new voice said behind him. Phil knew who it was without turning around; a smile tugged at his lips, which in the dream weren’t even chapped. Technoblade sounded younger than he’d imagined. He sounded like a grad student. “You live like this? What do you do when you need to go up?”

“Elevators,” Phil said. “Running, jumping. Some tech shit. We don’t have any predators that fly, though, so it’s not such a fucking concern. We humans don’t have much in the way of predators at all.”

Technoblade looked different as a human. His form was blurred, rippling between the light-speckled mer and a tall man about Wilbur’s age, spectacles perched on his nose. The beads in his braids were mother of pearl, opalescent. He had a backpack shaped like a pig face from Minecraft, beat-up hiking boots, and brown eyes so dark they were nearly black.

He looked like a grad student, too. Phil grinned at him, not bothering to repress his amusement. “Did you just pick your appearance from my brain?”

”I’m using your preconceived notions,” Technoblade said. Phil sensed he wanted to smile, but the expression didn’t reach most of his face: it lingered around his eyes and the line of his mouth, never stretching to show teeth. More of a shifting towards neutrality, in human terms. “This is creativity, dude, it’s engaging with the local culture. I’m enlightening myself.” He squinted up at the banner over the museum entrance, advertising an exhibit on fossils. “I hate to say it, though, but being stuck on one surface like that sounds kinda lame.” He paused, shuffled his feet. “It’s, uh. Philza, right?”

“That’s right,” Phil said, and smiled at him. Technoblade hesitantly quirked his lip, looking like he wasn’t sure whether that made sense as a thing to do. “You can call me Phil, everyone does. And you’re Technoblade, yeah? Does that have any special meaning?”

“I mean, if you wanna say it right, it’s—“ Technoblade made an odd, low clicking sound, almost subvocal, and interspersed it with a glimmer of pink down one arm, centering at his fingers. “But I don’t think you can make that sound, so whatever, I’m not too bothered by it. Nonsensical human syllables it is.” He tested one of the great stone steps. “Speaking of nonsensical human things, is this where you live?”

“Nah, it’s a museum,” Phil said. “A place you go to learn things and be entertained. I came here chaperoning a school group, years ago. Seven years, now.”

“So you guys just have places to go see new things whenever you want?” Techno asked, offended. “In waking life?”

 “What, do you do it all in dreams?” Phil said incredulously. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing to do at the bottom of the ocean, the place is fucking huge.”

“Sure, but we don’t have whatever these are,” Techno said. “Being cooped up is bad, you want a few escape routes. Otherwise the sharks get you.”

Sharks. Sharks? “Shut the fuck up,” Phil blurted. “You’re fucking with me. You’re so fucking with me. What kind of sharks? What the fuck kind of shark do you get in Challenger Deep?”

“Y’know, the huge ones,” Techno said. He looked a little bewildered. “You’ve seen sharks, they’re in your brain! You know how many teeth they have!”

“But there shouldn’t be sharks big enough to kill you in the Marianas Trench!”

“Bruh, one of us is trapped in a weird shell and the other one lives here, but sure, think what you want.”

“You need to bring me one of those for show and tell,” Phil accused. “Fuck those amphipods, I want to see a fucking Megalodon. ”

“You want me to fight a shark to the death so you can do science?”

“Well, not if it’d fucking kill you, mate, I don’t need to see one that bad—“

“Nah it’s fine, just gimme a day,” Techno interrupted him, and Phil had to laugh. “And show me this museum place, it seems like it might somehow be slightly interesting.”

“Oh, sure, slightly,” Phil snickered. He gave Techno a tour of all he remembered, the wall of taxidermied animals and bisections of the earth’s surface, a Megalodon’s jawbone— “That’s on the small side,” Techno said, and this time Phil could tell he was bullshitting, okay, no fucking way— and reconstructed fossils of dinosaurs. The artificial ones, not the real ones that the paleontologists kept behind for research, but that didn’t make them less impressive. You couldn’t not be impressed by a dinosaur, it went against all sense. 

“You’re mad about sharks and you have those running around?” Techno demanded at the sight of the T-Rex, throwing up his hands. 

Phil laughed helplessly. “We don’t have them anymore,” he said. “They’re extinct, mate, have been for millions of years. All of these animals have been extinct for that long, or thereabouts.”

The pteranodon skeleton hanging over their heads, casting a yellow shadow in the strategically-dimmed exhibit lights. The Triceratops head in the glass box, the artfully posted Maiasaura above the doorway, the sauropods with their arching necks and the shadowed eye sockets of the predators— all of it gone. Relics of a bygone age, and here Phil was standing by a modern relic, someone that the scientific world had never predicted. Here Technoblade was standing in the mind of an alien, wearing an alien body to explore a dry, light-smothered world. 

Phil thought idly about what would’ve happened if they had kept the Tyrannosaurus Rex around, a daydream he’d kept in the back of his head since primary school, and the skeleton shuddered to life, grew flesh and feathers before his eyes.

“Shit,” Phil blurted, stepping back, but his alarm was short-lived, an instinctive flicker; he knew he was dreaming. Dreaming-ness was the most important thing about the world, inescapable, as obvious as Techno looming beside him.

“Yo,” the mer said appreciatively, crowding closer. “I thought you said they were dead, are you making this up?”

“It’s current consensus,” Phil said, staring up at the dinosaur. It glared at him, snarling low, feathers bristling end on end. “Last I checked, anyway, I’m not a paleontologist.” 

“Nope, just a guy who makes up words,” Techno drawled. Phil shoved him lightly, and he let out his breath with an oof. “You’re gonna want to wake up soon, by the way. It’s been hours, and I’m not sure you know how.”

“Not from this,” Phil agreed. He waggled his fingers in front of his face, amazed by the realness of things. By the not-realness. The surreal lightness, one step removed, brain sending signals and carrying them out on a delay. “Wish I’d stop feeling so fucking cold all the time. You’d think dreaming would get me out of that.”

“Not until you’re dead,” Techno said, “and maybe you’re about to be, but I have bigger plans. C’mon, old man, focus. Think about where you fell asleep.”

“I’d rather fucking not,” Phil said ruefully. He did it anyway: the lightless, freezing base, the emergency lights he had to ration lest he lose too much power, the leaks at the base of the airlock where the crushed portions lay beyond, the plush crow he hugged when he gave up on dignity and the journals scattered across the ground, crumbled by errant footsteps, smudged with ink and what definitely had not been tears, that first week, when he’d had to come to terms with–

With–

Two boys stood at the entrance to the gift shop. Wilbur was holding up a stuffed animal, saying something that made Tommy bluster with indignation, but as Phil watched he turned and looked around, scanning the crowd. Caught Phil’s eyes and lit up, the unthinking oh there’s Dad that must’ve marked his face a million times, from when he was a toddler lost at the shopping center to his college graduation. 

Phil wrenched himself awake. Stood up in the empty blackness and shouted a while, until his voice was hoarse– until he’d forgotten what the fuck he was saying. His words echoed, meaningless, heard by no one. There was no one on the other side of the glass. 

The thought struck him that he might have imagined it all, really. A colony of merpeople in the Marianas Trench, where he’d been abandoned to die alone in the dark— a friendly scientific marvel that talked to him in dreams— what were the odds of any of it being real? He spent his time chattering to a plush crow and scribbling in a journal. He’d last seen the sun eight months ago.

Who was to say he hadn’t gone mad, down here in the blackness with stale oxygen for company? How did he know he wasn’t already dead?

Phil dug his fingernails into his forearm until they drew blood, stared at the welling liquid as it trickled down his wrist. His fingertips tasted like copper when he brought them to his lips. The emergency lights made his blood look black as oil. 

It felt real enough. Phil taped up his wounds with a first-aid kit and huddled into his knees, fighting back to urge to just sit there and watch himself bleed. Dead or not, he had better things to do with his time than that.

*

Dreams became his constant companions.

Phil teetered on the boundary between waking and sleeping, sometimes writing his findings in his journal, other times pacing the length of the base and counting his steps: fifty down the hallway to the sealed door, beyond which lay the flooded portions, which contained at least two corpses that he tried not to think about; another fifty to the portion of the base he’d closed off to conserve energy, and at least a hundred past that to the airlock and the pressure suits, if any were functional at this point; thirty across the observation deck, heel to toe, and then the glass; then the freezing glass and the blackness beyond, so complete that his brain threw up shapes to fill it. 

He ached for warmth. His sense of time was shot, moments stretching into eternities or crushing into instants, and his memory had gone with it. Heat was present only occasionally, if he breathed into his cupped hands or rubbed them together.

His blanket didn’t reach his ankles. He’d had to cut his power use even more, fucking with wires until he was sure he’d signed his own death warrant, and it had thrown temperature regulation out the fucking window. He estimated the average temperature to be about thirteen degrees Celsius.

He ate. He drank. He gazed into the darkness, imagining what lay beyond, crammed into his little soda can with over a mile of water between him and the sun. 

Technoblade followed him around the beach as he pointed out tidal pools and the effects of pollution, and was ridiculously aghast at natural predation of sea turtle hatchlings. Kristin had him over for a ridiculously fancy tea service that owed more to Europe-inspired anime settings than any real cultures. 

Technoblade insisted on seeing how he fought in a dream, obviously grasping at whatever scraps of memory Phil had from fucking gladiator movies, and placed them in a coliseum arena, surrounded by screaming spectators in robes and sandals. 

“Bro, what,” Phil snickered as soon as he saw it, wiggling his feet in his sandals. Techno had made them out of seaweed. They squelched. 

Wet silt blanketed the arena floor, in some places supplemented by rocks and little puddles, limp drying kelp and barnacles. Coral blossomed out of the coliseum walls, peppering the stone with pinks and oranges. The sky above them was impossibly dim, cloudless, sun filtered through layers of nothing; the arena was about as well-lit as a room with curtains closed. It was restful on his eyes.

“What, I can’t have fun with it? That’s just rude, Phil. Here I am going to all this effort to co-opt your memories for my own entertainment, and you’re nitpicking the obvious inaccuracies. Horrible. Inhospitable. Why do I even bother, Phil, why do I do anything but float and filter particles like a civilized barely-animate creature–”

“Shut the fuck up, I’ve seen you fight sharks,” Phil said. He stretched out, going on tiptoes, turning his wrists up to face the meager light. The memory of the Megalodon was something he kept close at hand, turning it over in his mind like a precious pearl: an epic moment, one he’d never thought he’d see in the flesh. Technoblade had speared it through and brought it thrashing to the observation deck. He had pinned it there to die. 

The fucker had been massive, easily twenty-five feet long and wide. Male, gray in a washed-out way, pale-eyed to compensate for the lack of light. Likely it’d been adapted to navigate without sight, going off electromagnetic signals and smell, taste and touch. Quick enough to hunt mer, but not intimidating enough to avoid getting hunted in turn. 

Other sharks had come by to tear it up, jawing at its fins and tail, spilling dark blood into the water. Different creatures had followed: spider crabs, amphipods, darting little things that shied from the emergency lights and crept back in the shark’s shadow, chewing uneven chunks from its underside. 

It had been gorgeous and terrible. Phil would never be able to share it with anyone.

“How the fuck are we doing this, anyway?” Phil asked. “It’s a dream, what are we trying for, first blood? Ultimate murder? This isn’t some Inception shit, is it, I’m not about to die in real life if I die here?”

“Have you tried being coherent for once in your life,” Techno said, staring at him. Phil flipped him off. “I mean, personally I was thinking we just fight for fun and see what happens. That’s a thing for humans, right, casual sparring? Imagine yourself at war.”

Phil imagined himself in his karate gi, the one he’d stopped wearing about the time he adopted Wilbur– once his supply of free time had dried up like a tide pool in high summer. “You have wars?”

“Theoretically,” Techno said, materializing a wickedly long spear, thin and hydrodynamic with a flinty tip. “A long time ago.”

He took a step to the left. Phil moved a foot back, taking a fighting stance: half side stance, half-forward, hands up to guard his face. Techno regarded him with lidded eyes, looking amused, and between one blink and the next he was under Phil’s guard, spear cutting into his side–

Until he wasn’t, because Phil was above him, yanking at his braid and grappling him down from behind, catching him in a headlock. Techno hit the ground and slipped out of his grip, slick as an eel, and the arena light changed, wavered, vanished; they were in darkness. 

Phil lashed out with a kick, connected with something. Hit out again, a series of blows, on guard against a foe he couldn’t see, and hands caught his ankles from below, dragged him down. He shouted, air bubbling out of his mouth, and slashed down at them with a weapon of his own, a sword that’d appeared in his hands like it was meant for them. 

“Bruh, just focus,” Techno said in his ear, and Phil elbowed him back, pulled up his limbs to swim farther back. All around him was blackness. “You don’t need your eyes, it’s a dream! Use everything else!”

“Long as you’re not saying shit like wax on, wax off,” Phil tried to say, though it came out garbled. He pushed his worst thoughts away, focusing on the fight, and for what felt like forever, he and Techno traded blows: the lash of a tail, the cut of a claw, swords and hands and feet and teeth, until the water was a mess of blood and motion, reactions on reactions, thrashing like a feeding frenzy. And Phil started to see what Techno meant. 

There were other senses, here in the dream. A sense of a mind, sure, but the sense of current, a metallic sort of smell, prickling over his scales like static. He noticed sort of distantly that at some point in the fight he’d turned mer, instead of Techno being human. 

He couldn’t see himself well. It was all proprioception: the sensation of a tail catching water, fins along his back, weight carried differently. Little white lights along his body, a hint of what might’ve been green. So much of it unknowable. 

Techno’s lights winked at him, far in the distance. Phil reached out, glimmering back– wait a sec, he was saying, wait for me– but his focus dipped, fell away. Technoblade lit up all at once with alarm. 

What was the pattern, if you wanted to communicate distress? Not what Techno was flickering, not for humans. It was, it was—

Short-short-short– long– long– long– 

Phil fumbled against the blanket, struggled free of its hold on his limbs. The emergency lights were solid, buzzing the same as usual; his crow had been tossed into a corner, but he thought he’d kicked it there. It hadn’t moved on its own. 

Technoblade was on the other side of the glass, broadcasting distress in every photophore, in his bristled fins. It wasn’t SOS. Phil had tried SOS and it hadn’t worked, no one had answered, he was alone. Except for Technoblade. Except for Death, he–

Was confused. Clammy. His heart fluttered in his chest like a trapped moth, tickling the inside of his ribcage. Those were symptoms of something, weren’t they? 

He wouldn’t have alarms, he’d rerouted the power. Hard to think, lights still on– not dehydration not starvation not vitamin deficiency not drowning, but—

Fuck. Phil staggered upright and ran for the atmospheric generators. His breath left him before he’d gone more than eight steps, wheezing like he was trapped under a vice; he diverted before he could throw too much energy after a bad idea, scrabbled towards the one storage room in that part of the base, clambered for the spare suits until he could yank out some tubing and bite into it, take pure oxygen into his lungs.

One breath, two breaths, three– tie it off so it wouldn’t leak– and he got to the generators in time to see the short-circuit, water seeping under the terrible fucking airlock and grounding the electronics in exactly the wrong place. 

He had to circumvent it. It took him too long to route power around the short, fucking with resistances, barely getting enough to the generators to get them running again and who knew how long this would last until something blew out, but eventually the fans started running again, the machinery humming on. Eventually he took a breath, and another one, and they got easier. 

His hands shook. He tucked his head into his knees and let them shake, figuring that the adrenaline rush was better to get over with now, and prayed that the generator would keep running, because he couldn’t fix it a second time. 

He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He heard birdsong.

Phil opened his eyes to blinding sunlight and screamed, writhing to the side to cover his eyes. Twigs cut into his face, rubbed the tear tracks on his cheeks, and suddenly the robins’ chirps cut out to rainpatter and thunder. 

He opened them again to soothing dark, a wash of warm dense rain that pooled mud around his knees and ran into his mouth. Lightning jagged over the treetops. Thunder boomed immediately after, a shock of noise that vibrated through Phil’s bones, grounded into the earth: the storm was just above him. He gasped and breathed in water, forced himself to his feet as it drenched him, stuck his clothes to his skin.

Trees to one side, a hill to the other. Rock jutted out of the earth, limestone, karst country. Cave country. Phil recognized it, just slightly. It was someplace he’d been before.

A shape stood at the top of the hill, lit from behind by another flash of lightning. Phil caught himself looking for patterns in the lightning, language, and shook his head, sending raindrops flying. He staggered up the hill, grabbing at fistfulls of grass to keep going, heels sinking ankle-deep into the slick mud. 

Kristin’s dark hair was plastered against her face, hanging past her shoulders in tangled knots. She had human ears, human hands, but her eyes were the same unbreaking black, shining like opals.

“You’re not dead yet,” she told him at once, starting forward to give him a hand over the last bit of elevation; Phil took it gladly, levering himself up and rocking to catch himself before he fell. Her fingers were slick and cold. “You just passed out.”

“You don’t have to sound disappointed,” Phil said with a roll of his eyes. “So I got the generators working properly? I’m not losing brain cells as we speak?”

“Well, I dunno about that,” Kristin drew out, “but your heart’s pretty steady, you’re probably fine, right? Until you won’t be.”

Rain slammed into the ground, hit like flechettes and seeped into his clothes, made the whole of him heavy. He started feeling cold again, water sapping his heat, but it was a tolerable cold, mild, soft as the brush of seaweed by his leg. Easy to put from his mind.

“Real fucking encouraging,” Phil said, laughing a little. Seeing another person after that ordeal was inordinately relieving. “Should I be staying here, then? If I’m about to go hypothermic, I’d rather head it off at the fucking pass, instead of waiting around an hour or two and having to break off a toe.”

“Humans do that? That can happen?”

“Course it can. We’re meant for wildly different environments, right? If we get ice crystals in our cells, the cells fucking die. Sometimes it takes an extremity or two with it, that’s called frostbite.”

“I’ve never seen ice,” Kristin said. “Cold water sinks, though. I guess it’s cold where I am, but I don’t feel it. I’m always warm.”

“Because of the heat vents?”

“Something like that,” Kristin said, smiling at him with all her teeth. “Will you show me around this place? I don’t think we’ve dreamed of it before.”

They hiked down to the cliffside, to a rope bridge leading to a hole in the rock. “Come on,” Phil said, holding out a hand when Kristin paused to look down, eyes wide with fascination. “Usually I’d ask if you’ve worn those shoes in any other caves, but it’s a fucking dream, we don’t have to deal with that shit. We’ll skip to the fun bits.”

“I’ve never been small enough to fit in a cave,” Kristin remarked. She let him help her over the bridge. The inside of the cave smelled cool and fresh, comforting in a subterranean way. The rain became a distant murmur. Water dripped somewhere far off, impossible to pinpoint in the mess of tunnels. 

Phil had loved spelunking when he was younger. He’d loved it in the same way he loved the ocean, the way he loved all things vast and wild: here was a thing larger and older than him, a thing that went on into fathomless depths beneath his feet. He’d slipped through canals that scraped flesh off his ribs, gotten stuck once for at least an hour, named a passageway after an anime character because he’d been the first to get through it. He hadn’t thought of those days in years. 

“People tour caves on the surface,” Phil said softly. The limestone formations took shape before his eyes, glistening and animated, still forming as they watched. It would take hundreds of years, but they would change shape, build on each particle as the sediments clung on.

The earth was alive here. Columns taking shape as stalagmites and stalactites met, cave popcorn practically sparkling in the tiny bit of light from the entrance, curtains cutting down close enough that their shoulders touched them as they passed–

“We’ve got rules. Don’t touch the formations, that’s a fucking big one. Just the slightest touch, and you could ruin it forever. The oils on our fingers stop them from changing.”

“Sounds stressful,” Kristin said, not sounding stressed at all. “Show me more?”

“Sure,” Phil said, smiling back at her. He gave the tour slowly, basking in the sensation of solid ground under his feet, the implication of forest overhead. Caverns of towering formations, stone like layered cakes in the center of huge chambers, needles stabbing from the ceiling, dripping water down the backs of their necks. “It depends on geography, really. You get this kind of cave from calcium carbonate, that’s what makes the stalactites. Chemical reactions as the water percolates through the soil above, then it carries it down. It’s all water, though. Fucking everything comes down to water.”

“Naturally,” Kristin said wryly. “How far does it go?”

“We tour mapped sections,” Phil said. “Dunno about unmapped, those can go on longer. Usually you have to fucking widen them, though, they’re horrible if you don’t. Tiny passages, hidden caverns, all sorts of shit. People die exploring them.”

“Humans do that a lot, from the sound of it,” Kristin said, amused. “Going in too far to turn back around again, so the only way out is death. You have to push all the way to the end. It’s silly of you, but I appreciate it. I wouldn’t have met you otherwise.”

”You’d never have come investigating?” Phil asked. “Come on, mate, if any of you’d stopped by while the base was populated, it would’ve scared the shit out of everyone. Eret would have loved you folks, we’d have had to drag them to the surface kicking and screaming.”

”Someone might have gotten curious eventually,” Kristin allowed, sneaking Phil a conspiratorial grin, “but let’s just say I’m not in a position to visit.”

They reached a gap in the rock, thin enough that Phil could squeeze through if he wriggled. Kristin smiled at it and then him, watching expectantly, and Phil huffed, stepped forward to push his way in. It took a good few minutes of struggle, and then he was in a tunnel not large enough to stand upright, so skinny that his elbows scraped the rock before his arms were half extended. He thought up a head lantern, but the light flickered like his emergency lights and went out.

“That’s better,” Kristin said, ahead of him in the void. Phil inhaled the moist air and groped out with his fingers, running them along the worn-smooth rock. “Did you ever want to keep going? I would want to keep going, if I were a human. I don’t think I’d be able to stand leaving it half-done. That’d be lame.”

He had wanted to keep going. Sometimes he’d wanted to follow the passages as far as they went, endlessly deep in the bowels of the earth, past where his supplies would see him safely back. A one-way walk into his grave.

The observation room would be his coffin, technically speaking. A sea burial, wrapped in metal in place of sailcloth. He thought that fit a marine biologist well enough.

”Are you real?” Phil asked, apropos of nothing. He didn’t know where it had come from. The rock felt exactly as he remembered under his hands. 

“No, silly, this is a dream,” Kristin giggled. “None of it’s real.”

”That’s not what I mean.” Phil stopped, hugged his arms around his chest. Breathed, so the panic would dissipate instead of setting in. “I’m asking if you’re out there somewhere. I’m trying to learn if I’m insane.”

“I’m real,” Kristin said after a long pause. She could have been standing right in front of him or a hundred yards away. Her voice echoed. “You’re dying, Phil, but you’re dying with company. Before you die, you’ll see me with your true eyes just as you see Technoblade.”

Phil managed, “That’s good to know.”

”Do you miss them?” Kristin asked. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist, ice cold. Phil shuddered into the touch. “Your offspring, I mean. Spawn? Sorry, I don’t know the term.”

”Children,” Phil said, huffing a laugh. His heart felt like it was made of lead. “They’re called children. And yeah, shit, of course I do. I miss them every fucking day.”

“Would you want them down here with you?”

”Not in a million fucking years,” Phil said fervently. 

“But you can talk about them,” Kristin said. The rock beneath them had become dark, volcanic. Far, far below, a line of searing yellow trickled through the stone. Phil blinked down at it, dizzy at the sudden light, pupils struggling to adjust. “It’s important for stories to continue past us, in my opinion. After you die, we’ll remember your mind for centuries.”

She added thoughtfully, “It’d be a shame to lose you, though. You have such a good mind. You would have made a great mer.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Phil said. “I like to think I have a good mind. I’ve certainly crammed enough shit into it to last a lifetime.”

”It would take a lifetime to explore it all,” Kristin agreed, grinning at him.

The magma was rising, slow as erosion. Phil sat at the edge of the cliff, dangling his legs over the side, and Death sat down beside him. Put her head on his shoulder, cold as deep water, and stayed until he opened his eyes alone.

Chapter 3

Notes:

TW's in end notes, and thank you to antimony_medusa for beta reading!

I had this much finished, so I figured I might as well post it. Take care of yourselves, though-- this is still a horror fic, though I can promise nothing bad happens to c!Techno in it.

The cold made him miserable. His appetite left him, thirst a distant pang. Technoblade tugged at his mind, pulled him into flimsy dreams, but his body’s needs overthrew them. He shivered all the time now. The chill of the Marianas Trench crept inexorably in. In damp corners, frost spiderwebbed across the walls.

His thoughts drifted back to Wilbur and Tommy like a returning tide. To them, he was a dead man already, being pulled apart like the crabs had pulled apart the shark outside the observation window. Drowned and bloated, smashed between crushed metal spars somewhere in the base, outside of the pocket he'd kept running past its expiration date. No rescue coming. No human voices, no human touch, no warmth, no sunlight--

What the fuck did they think had happened to him? Had they prayed it had been a quick death, nearly painless? Surely not this creeping malaise, the slowing faculties of a man on the verge of starvation, a man whose body had cannibalized his muscle because he wasn't using it anyway. Tommy was more optimistic than that. Even if Wilbur had reservations, he wouldn't have shared them. He'd have taken every opportunity to assure Tommy that Phil couldn't have suffered for long. That he was in heaven, if Wilbur decided to get sentimental about shit, or at least someplace he wouldn't suffer.

Wilbur would take care of the estate, too. Phil wondered vaguely whether he’d track down the silver Phil had inherited from his great aunt, or if it would be lost to the ravages of the storage unit. Funny how inconvenient death was for the people around you, when you weren’t there to explain all the shit you’d kept in your head.

“Is it time?” he asked the plush crow. He squeezed it lightly, not enough to set off the cawing noise. As the weeks had slipped by, he’d gotten paranoid about running out the battery. It had been three months by now. “There's nothing to do but dream these days, and I’m one malfunction away from suffocating to death as it is. Could be nice to go out quicker.”

Technoblade lingered at the edge of his thoughts, closer than Kristin. Phil received him like a turned-down radio, dial cracked just above zero, muffled and distantly concerned.

He swam a territory that spanned miles of the sea floor. When mer were that far from their friends, they kept up constant dreaming, using the drowsiness of reduced metabolic activity to rest and share the news. Techno had been sending him impressions of hydrothermal vents, of the blistering heat and chemicals, and the bleached-white shrimp that lived there. Crabs, too, coating the sides in scuttling masses: an ecosystem based on chemical-loving bacteria, who passed energy up the food chain independent of the Sun.

“Showoff,” Phil muttered fondly, shutting his eyes and leaning his head back against the metal wall, and received smugness-hiding-concern , an invitation to dream again. He saw the words in lights: uneven blinking up the spine, glimmers like a disco ball catching the light.

“If you want warmth, the vents are pretty good,” Technoblade offered, guiding him down. Phil eeled after him, admiring how his reddish-pink coloration camouflaged him in the darkness. Red light never reached this far into the ocean. A red animal was fundamentally black, to the eyes of a deep-sea predator: like a black fish, a red one would absorb all visible wavelengths of light, reflecting none of it.

Phil's conception of himself as a mer-- easier than being a human in these dreams, since he could keep up with anyone else who appeared-- was indistinct, a collection of sense-memories that purred through him like a smooth-running engine. He didn't have to think of it. Techno thought of it for him, like how Phil had given him a human form. Phil was borrowing from his side of the dream.

His scales were greenish, he thought, more frilled than Techno's, shading black along the edges of his fins. He spoke in white lights. "I'm not much of a fan of being boiled alive," he remarked, keeping close to Techno's side. He'd be able to find him again if they were separated, would have been able to do so even in real life, but he was enjoying the company. "How's your heat resistance?"

"Bruh, you think I'd get close to heat vents if I didn't know how to handle them? I'm a pro, I've trained for this. I've only been laughed at several times for scalding myself like a fool."

Phil snickered, a burst of glitter down his dorsal fin. "What, you weren't born with the resistance? For shame, Techno. What kind of fish man are you?"

"I reach all the way out to your container thing and get clowned on, mercilessly," Techno complained. "This is cruelty, Phil. This is persec-- oh, hey, we're here."

On the surface, Phil had only seen hydrothermal vents by the light of undersea drones, black or white plumes billowing out from chimney-like mineral deposits into the vast blue of the ocean. He knew all the technical terms for their existence, the reasons they formed. And yet, following after his best friend into the blackness by the sea floor, it took him a while to sense the difference, the unaccustomed heat on his face. It registered as discomfort at first; Phil recoiled a little, snaking back around, and the sensation grew painful, intense. The light of his photophores reflected oddly around him, hazed and muffled as if surrounded by smoke.

"C'mon, old man, this is a little too close," Techno said, catching his hand, and Phil let him lead the way, felt his hand guided onto the rough surface of the surface deposit. Not much lived this close to the sulfide-laden fluid emanating from the vent. Microorganisms, mostly. Chemosynthetic organisms. Farther away were the multicellular creatures-- the yeti crabs and mussels, and the worms. Phil settled at a comfortable distance from the vent, heat drawing back into luxurious warmth, and Techno smiled at him with his eyes, floating just close enough to the vent that Phil knew the water had to be at least forty degrees Celsius. Showoff. 

"Feels like it loses something when I can't see it all clearly," Phil admitted, scooping a yeti crab off the sand. It waved its claws at him. He wondered how many times Techno had done just this, for one reason or another. Were yeti crabs edible for mer? "That could be bias, though, fuck if I know. Usually as a scientist we're supposed to avoid that shit."

"That's what you get for relying on eyes," Techno drawled. "Cringe organ for fail senses."

"Fuck off, you communicate with light ."

"And psychic energies! It's a mix, Phil, we diversify here in the deep dark. Skills galore."

"Sure, mate," Phil sighed, mock-disappointed. "Whatever you say."

Techno threw a crab at him. He caught a claw to the fin and bared his teeth in playful warning, flashing oh that is IT with every photophore at once, and dashed after Techno into the blackness, leaving the warmth behind completely.

*

The dream started slowly, on the day he decided to die. It wasn't a conscious decision-- at least, not one that rose to the level of saying aloud , of giving form through voice-- but a decision like flicking a switch, letting a fan power down slowly, momentum bleeding out to stillness. He was in the home stretch now, running on fumes. The wheels were spinning with nothing behind them. Entropy would take care of the rest.

Phil walked through the whole base first, those parts of it he could reach. He touched the airlock doors connecting the observation area to the crushed-up domiciles, imagining the decayed corpses of his crewmates that lay beyond, and said some respectful words. He traced his hands along the cool metal walls, feeling out the dents, the place where Puffy had accidentally banged a table hard enough to leave a mark, where he'd scratched a picture of a crow sometime in the second month of being alone. He pressed the plush crow to his face and made it caw-- fuck, he missed real birds, he'd befriended a flock of crows at his old house and they'd used to bring him bottle caps, when was the last time he'd thought of that-- and exhaled, luxuriating in the flow of air.

This had been his home for months now. He was synonymous with these things: with being alone, with being trapped, with the darkness outside and the minds reaching in. His mind reaching back.

Death hovered over his shoulder.

She closed a hand around his wrist, gently, so he could break free if he liked. Her skin smelled bitingly like sulfur. "Are you ready to try? I don't know if I can catch both of their minds, but I'm sure I can get one. It's night up there."

"Here's hoping," Phil said with a tired grin. "Thank you for doing this. You didn't have to."

"Of course I did," Kristin said, blinking with surprise. "You're gonna die down here one way or another, Philza. That makes you my responsibility-- and anyway, you're great to talk to. Believe me, it's no imposition."

"Well, if you're sure," Phil said. He meandered over to the emergency pressure suits, leaving the one he'd butchered for its oxygen and pulling another one over his bare feet, strapping on all its layers. Sealing himself in, like a hermit crab choosing a shell. The helmet pressurized with a hiss, light blinking on; he had to close his eyes against it, reflexive tears blurring his vision. "Fuck, that's bright."

"Are these all readouts?" Kristin asked, poking at the little screens on his arms.

"Oxygen levels," Phil confirmed, "shit to monitor for breaches, the whole shebang."

"Six hours," she read aloud. "That should give you enough time, right?"

"Depends on how fast Technoblade can swim," Phil said lightly. He picked his crow up and put him gently down onto his stacked notes, patted its head. He had days of food and water left; he left them by his notebooks, some little part of him settling at having his belongings safely entombed in one place, and went down to the lower airlock, the one they used for drones. Some repairs had been judged too risky for robotics, back when the base had been operational. They'd had emergency measures for fixing shit by hand.

The airlock filled up with a hiss, water rushing past his knees and chest and chin, enclosing his head. The emergency lights stuttered and went out; Phil waited until he felt submerged, then groped around for the release, the switch that would throw him into open water. 

Technoblade was floating on the other side, a line of glimmers in the all-encompassing dark. His hands were twice the size of Phil’s, tipped with claws that could puncture his suit in an instant; his tail snaked out into the black behind him, massive as a whale's, half out of view. All that illuminated him was himself, faint light lending shape to his face and arms, a living constellation. "You, uh, sure about this?"

“I’m sure,” Phil told him. It felt odd to speak aloud, when the light of his faceplate was sending a different message. Like signing one thing and singing another. “Fuck living in a fishbowl. I want to see the bottom of the trench."

Technoblade flashed assent, grim with concentration. Phil grinned at him and plummeted into a dream.

Blue shadows danced on the floor: aquarium lighting, straddling the line between dimness and clarity, casting ripples across the faces of enthralled children. The plaque in front of him listed common reef fish— reef triggerfish, convict tang, and Hawaiian flagtail flitting close to the glass. Colorful fish meant for sun-warmed coral.

The floor was soft, thinly carpeted. Little kids squealed and ducked under his elbows, weaving through the press of the crowd, some parents holding them up so they could see the tanks. Phil put a hand against the glass with a helpless smile. "I used to lift you up just like that," he remarked, watching the reflection behind him in the glass. Wilbur's face was superimposed over the sea anemone, a faint outline with rounded glasses and uncombed hair. "Do you remember? You weren't much more than a baby, it might not have survived you growing up."

Wilbur was tight-lipped and pale, frozen in place. Phil turned around, waiting for his reply, but none came. A nurse shark circled in the tank across from them and nosed at the gravel, and his oldest son stayed silent, white as a wraith, staring like he'd seen a ghost. Like he was seeing a ghost. It wasn't too inaccurate an impression, really.

"Is Tommy here?" Phil asked, and Wilbur shook his head sharply, drew his wrist across his eyes.

"No," he said, voice cracking. "No, no, he's at Tubbo's house, Phil. Not at the aquarium. He hates them now, I-- fuck. Fuck, I'm dreaming about my dead father. I'm dreaming about you."

"That's not so unusual," Phil said wryly. "We populate our dreams with what's familiar to us, Wil, that's how they work. I've missed you, you know." Wilbur’s bangs were a little longer, his style darker than Phil remembered. He'd taken to wearing a long brown coat, apparently. Turtlenecks. His face was sallow with lack of sleep. “You don’t look too good, mate. Have you been eating right?”

“Have I been eating right,” Wilbur choked out, incredulous. “Well, my father was left for dead in the Marianas Trench and it’s devastated my brother, never mind how it’s affected me, but sure, I’ve been keeping up with my nutrition requirements! An apple a day, that’s me. Doctors flee me like the Four fucking Horsemen.”

“Grief doesn’t mean you should neglect your physical needs,” Phil scolded. Wilbur gave him a weak smile. “Try and eat better from now on, it’ll make you feel better, too. Death’s not a thing to fear, she’s a blessing. Everything rots down here eventually.”

“Let’s just look around,” Wilbur said. He’d flinched at something Phil had told him, but Phil had no idea what. It was hard to keep track of himself in a dream, especially when the other player knew less about keeping things steady than he did. “This is Newport Aquarium, right? I remember it. You took us once on a visit to the States.”

“You complained,” Phil reminisced. “Fucking bratty, you wouldn't let us leave without something from the gift shop.”

“Hey, that was Tommy insisting on a plush toy every time,” Wilbur corrected. “I went for the books, like an educated gentleman.”

They walked into a water tunnel, the warped tank arching over their heads. A black tipped shark sliced through the water on their right, dipping under a loggerhead turtle. Pale fish bellies slithered back and forth above their heads.

The water cast ripples of pale blue shadow across Wilbur’s face, catching in his eyes. He kept messing with something in his pocket. 

Visitors bustled past, shoving at their shoulders. Phil asked, “How is Tommy?” 

“Bad,” Wilbur said shortly. “But he’ll get over it. He’s strong, he has plenty of friends. This can all be a bad dream for him.”

“Not such a bad dream,” Phil said, a little stung. “We’re surrounded by ray sharks, Wil, those are a fucking delight to experience.”

“That’s true,” Wilbur said with a harsh laugh. “And I look more like a corpse than you do.”

Phil realized he was fiddling with cigarettes . “You know those’ll kill you.”

“Slowly,” Wilbur said. He took out a lighter and tossed it, caught it with a deft swoop of his hand, flicked it on. The tiny flame hung in the blue light like a visitor from another world. “And it’s worth the rush. Nothing like the quick death of being crushed under kilopascals of pressure, though, now is it.”

“We’ll see,” Phil said with a shrug. He grinned at his son. “Name that fish for me, won’t you? Let’s see if you ever listened to me.”

“Redhook Myleus,” Wilbur said promptly, and gave Phil a smug look. “And that other one’s a striped headstander. You can’t bamboozle me, Dadza. I recall this shit even in a dream.”

“I’m glad. I’m fucking glad.”

“You’d better be,” Wilbur muttered, and went so pale all of a sudden that Phil jerked toward him, wondering insanely if reaching out in a dream had given his son some kind of stroke. 

He followed Wilbur’s gaze and saw that the aquarium tunnel ended in the observation deck, emergency lights so faint that it was nearly impossible to see. Phil’s blanket was laid out on the floor, stuffed crow lying forlornly on its side. Empty food packets piled up in one corner.

Beyond the observation deck was pure void. Phil sensed with the certainty of a dream that the glass was absent entirely. The deep sea was poised at the edge, just waiting to pour in and swallow them whole.

“It’s a bit fucked,” Phil admitted, stepping forward. The place looked like a bachelor pad. “Kept the crow, though. You remember that thing?”

“I remember,” Wilbur croaked. He flicked his lighter again, throwing up sparks before another flame licked up into the air, agonizingly bright. Hung back, clutching his other hand in the hem of his coat. "We found it online, Tommy and me. Gave it to you because-- because of the crows at the old house. They swooped us, but they never swooped you, Phil. They waited every morning for you to come outside."

"I hope they're not still waiting," Phil said regretfully. "I lasted a good few months, but there was never any hope of me returning to the surface. The base is shit anyway, even if they'd sent a rescue it wouldn't have gotten far."

"Is it true that pain can wake you up from a dream?" Wilbur asked apropos of nothing.

"I banged my toe one time talking to Techno and woke up pretty fucking fast, but I don't know that it'd work here," Phil said. "Why, is something wrong?"

"I don't like this," Wilbur said. "I'd like to go back to the aquarium now, I think. Nightmares about my dead father weren't on my agenda for tonight."

“I'm not dead just yet,” Phil corrected him. "I'm saying goodbye first, mate, that's what this dream is."

"But you are dead," Wilbur croaked. "You are, they-- this wouldn't all be here, they wouldn't have left you, I-- this is a nightmare--"

His flame went out, and the emergency lights went with it, plunging them into darkness so intense Phil could have breathed it in. Water sucked the warmth from his skin, lightened the hold of gravity; Wilbur choked out a cry of fright, somewhere in front of him, and Phil caught his hands, felt him grip back hard.

“Dad?”

“It’s fine, Wil,” Phil said, trying for comforting. His son's voice sounded incredibly small. "It's just darkness. You don't need light down here, they talk other ways."

"I don't understand," Wilbur choked out. "I should-- I should be waking up. This isn't happening."

Lights in the distance, glimmers twisting closer. Wilbur's breathing quickened. "I don't want to be here," he said softly. "I don't want to be here, I don't want to be here..."

"It's just Techno," Phil told him. He could feel his grip on the dream slipping, wakefulness seeping in and muddling his thoughts. "Don't worry about me, mate, it's beautiful down here. The trench is so much deeper than we thought, Wil, it goes to the mantle, and she's beautiful--"

"Dad," Wilbur begged, nearly sobbing, and Phil's feet hit silt.

He opened his eyes to the faint pink of Techno’s photophores, the sensation of his friend’s claws digging lightly into his shoulders. There were other lights in the distance, blinking in language-patterns, too far for him to make out their faces.

A cliff's edge yawned open beneath him, only visible from the thin beams of the flashlights in the suit. He switched them off, vaguely annoyed that they'd turned on automatically in the first place. After a moment of fiddling, he managed to switch off the lights inside his helmet, too.

His vision took a few minutes to adjust to the dark. "Is that the bottom right there?"

"Yep," Technoblade said. "Or, y'know, the closest we can get to it if you wanna see her directly."

"Right," Phil said thickly. He took a breath of precious oxygen and looked up at the nothingness above him, imagining seven miles of water pressing down on his body, squishing him like a mountain crushing an ant. His eyes might as well have been closed. "It was good knowing you."

Techno sighed, eeled around him to press their foreheads together. “Good to know you too,” he said, low. "You're down here with us no matter what, Phil. This is the end of it."

Silt boiled up in front of them, clouding the lights of Technoblade's fins out completely. The ground jolted under his feet. Stars gleamed to life under the distant surface, flickering closer over what must have been a mile, almost like the mer version of a hello .

Phil stumbled, clinging onto Techno's arm. The seafloor beyond the cliff shifted, contracted, pulled open. Revealed an opalescent surface the size of a football field, fires dancing in the deepest dark Phil had ever seen.

A single half-buried eye, rolling back to smile at him. Phil smiled back and unsealed his helmet.

Notes:

TW: same as previous, with the addition of an implied/ambiguous suicide.

Notes:

TW: mentions of suicide, starvation/abandonment, darkness, isolation

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 34 of dream smp fic my beloved