Chapter Text
Wilbur has known his fate since the day he was made, pulled from stardust, first breath cold.
He is a child of Death.
Phil was always honest about that aspect, if not a bit persistent about its importance when he was growing up. Wil’s not sure if it’s because of his purpose, or if Phil simply wanted to have Wilbur know where he came from. Either way, he was painfully aware of how his existence was meant to play out.
On the day where he would eventually come of age, many, many years later, he is meant to follow in his mother’s footsteps. He is meant to handle souls, to guide them. Not quite how like Phil does it, an Angel reaping the souls of the stubborn, but rather, a collector of sorts. Someone who watches over those who pass.
His mother has done this same task for beyond millenia now. Phil says that when Wilbur goes to join her, she’ll surely be happy to have company. Phil can’t visit all that often, not with how he sticks to the moral realm so much, his blood too warm, as cold as it might be at times, but Wilbur is something else. A young, growing god. He’ll be able to come and go as he pleases when he comes of age.
But it never happens as it's meant to. His fate doesn’t sit right in his stomach. He explores the mortal realm with his father all throughout childhood, and while Phil means it to be an experience to meet the souls he’ll one day protect and harbor, Wilbur sees it as an opportunity out of reach. An existence to envy.
One day, he’ll never age again. He’ll never falter, never change. He will stay as he is, for as long as eternity lasts, beside his mother. Only subdued, whispering souls will be his peek into all the lives within the realm, all their accomplishments, all their ambitions.
He wants ambitions. He wants to want more. Being human is to never be satisfied, Phil once told him, because they just never have enough time. But Wilbur is not satisfied now, as he is. So maybe he’s human. Maybe he can be human, live as them, live as something beautifully fleeting. He almost goes to try, once.
That’s how he finds Tommy.
Wilbur takes the boy with both hands, greedy, desperate, and still so loving. Tommy is young, dirty, and curious, and his small hands reach back up to him, touching at Wil’s cold face. He is warm. He is mortal. For a second, Wilbur is mortal with him. For a single, wonderful second, they are both nothing more than human.
Then Phil finds him. Phil brings them back home, scolding Wil for wandering off, of the dangers of getting lost, and Wilbur hardly listens, for he holds a new little brother in his arms. He’s happier than he has been in a long while, and Wil thinks it’s for that reason that Phil allows for Tommy to stay. He takes Tommy into his own arms with as much care as he once did to Wil, when he was still tiny, and Wilbur couldn’t be happier, if it weren’t for the fact that Phil refused to keep Tommy mortal.
Excuses after excuses, Phil insisted it was for the better. Tommy could not stay human, because neither he or Wilbur were human. Humans do not last, he would say, humans get hurt, sentences Wil has heard a thousand times before, and none of it lessened the anger in his chest. He picked his brother up into his arms because he was human. He cries when hungry, he laughs with a hiccup, he is warm to the touch. Phil wants to change that. Tries to.
He’s Wilbur’s little brother, and he is perfect as he is. Wilbur is too perfect as he lives, too much. He wants to tear it down, wants to step away, so that is what he does. One night, when Phil leaves home to reap a few stubborn souls, Wilbur takes his little brother into his arms, and runs. He runs and runs until the sun comes up, and even then, he keeps going. He has no need for exhaustion. When they feel a safe distance, Tommy stirring from the weight of a nap, Wilbur does something that shouldn’t be possible.
He turns human.
Not entirely. Not exactly. But every ounce of his envy, every little last drop of that want, that need to be something else, to be like Tommy, to be a brother that is just like him-- it lets him play at being mortal. It brushes away the other aspects, the lasting gifts from his mother.
As the years pass, this new form sinks into his bones. As Tommy grows, learning to walk, to run, to yell and whine and shriek Wilbur’s name in his annoying little voice, Wil changes like he so badly wished to. He grows, adult at last, but unable to meet his mother. Unable to hold souls. Unable to do what he was born for.
He doesn’t care about the loss. Frankly, he pushes away that side of him in every instance he can. He takes his little brother by the hand, exploring the realm around them, never lingering in one spot, because he knows his father must be searching. He makes himself ambitious. He creates a dream, creates a home, a place for himself and his friends and his baby brother to declare themselves as who they are.
And then it all falls.
And then Wilbur meets the other side of being human, the frailness of it, the pain. He loses everything all too quickly, and he’s powerless to take it back. He’s desperate. He’s mortal.
But faintly, in the back of his mind, he still remembers the existence of gods. He knows a few old calling rituals.
One day, he bleeds red onto a stone floor, and he calls out a warrior to come fight for him.
He’s been human for too long.
He forgets that gods do not play by rules.
