Their history would suggest that fighting was what the Vizion aliens did best and, certainly, they went about it with enthusiasm.
Or, at least, one of them did. Quiz's arguments, for all their vehemence, were clumsy as handfuls of cake, smearing blame on everyone but himself. As could perhaps be expected, Diz wielded his words a little more like knives or needles. Viz spectated, in the way a bored parent 'spectates' their child's fortieth trip down the slide—they don't, and he wasn't.
("It's not my fault you're the lowest ranked officer here. If you'd done a little better in testing, you could have made Enquiry too."
"You think that's what I would have wanted? To be indolent and complacent like you?"
"At least I wasn't being blown to pieces on a daily basis!"
"No, you were killing us.")
There was more to the argument, infinitely more, but if you had asked Phil Eggtree to regale you with the specifics, he would be hard pressed to tell you, having vacated the scene shortly after the whole thing started—he had enough to think about, thank you very much, and learning the alien word for 'lying bastard' wasn't going to improve his fortunes.
He didn't go very far, only walking until distance had carved away the shape of words in the Quiz-noises behind him, and there he stopped. In strange silence, in striped darkness, Phil began an earnest contemplation of his trainers and the earth they stood on.
Many things could have been discovered during what promised to be an intensive period of rumination. Phil could have been granted the sort of revelations that alter one's entire perception of the world entirely, and yet are forgotten after a good night's rest, a temporary transcendence of the normal like a spectacular sunrise. It promised to be an experience incomparable... and it was very quickly forfeit by the insistent blare of a nearby phone. Phil's phone.
(Secretly, he was glad of this—it was a little late in the day for soul-searching, and sunrise was a long way off. He didn't want to think anymore.)
19 missed calls
107 new messages
The incoming call was from Smiley's phone. Had he persevered and thought just a little more, Phil would have recognised the warning signs that indicated, in big, red letters, that this was assuredly not a casual sort of phone call. This was the Other Sort Of Phone Call, the sort you got after cheerfully making a missing person's case of yourself all day. The sort of Very Concerned phone call that is almost inevitable if you make the questionable choice to ghost your loved ones under suspicious circumstances.
Phil, maker of all these grand moves, considered none of this, and so, upon answering the phone with a fairly standard 'yo', was surprised when the response wasn't an answering 'hi', or a 'how are you?', or even an 'I miss you', but instead—
"PHIL EGGTREE, where the HELL have you been?!"
This slightly hellish, many-voiced shriek, distorted by volume and poor reception, was in fact such a surprise, the brave adventurer dropped his phone. It shouted at him as his clumsy attempts to fumble it back in to his hands buried it deeper in leaves. By the time he succeeded in picking it up, the voices had cooled and separated in to their distinct and familiar three strands; Phred was apologising to someone for the racket, Smiley was embroiled in an upset monologue of epic proportions. From the sound of it, a distant Zach was making an effort to be consoling.
"Okay, okay, ease down now. It's over, it's fine, it's all cool. Unless this is your phone with a line to the recently deceased, he's fine." To address Phil, he raised his voice (despite Mrs Sundae's shushing.) He couldn't take phone calls longer than two minutes by himself without the heat from his head melting the screen. "Back me up here mate; you're fine aren't you?"
"Better than ever," Phil lied fiercely. This reassurance made lamentable headway in pacifying the enraged girlfriend tapping her foot on a roof many miles away. "How long have you been trying to reach me for?"
"Eighty four years."
"All my life."
"Since this afternoon," Smiley said firmly. "You had me really freaked out."
To say Phil felt wretched was an understatement. Finding out his absence had been noted in the worst fashion was like coming home after a gruelling day of work to find he'd left every light in the shared house on, left every faucet running, and the drains were clogged. And he'd forgotten his friend's birthday party. He felt defeated, unworthy, deeply guilty, but also like he could collapse on a dripping wet sofa and not move for a month.
No sofas, dripping wet or otherwise, existed in the forest; he folded down on to a tree stump soft with rot and moss instead.
"I'm so sorry. I turned my phone off to save the battery in case something went wrong... then things went really fucking wrong and there was no time to call. I never meant to worry you."
"'Never meant to worry us?!'" Phred interjected, a hybrid of exasperation, bewilderment, and frustration. "Phil, mate, we almost called the police."
'We took your three friends to prevent them causing a stir.' Best as he could, Phil brushed off the cobweb-clammy strands of imaginary-Diz's voice. He didn't want to think about the aliens—he definitely didn't want one of them to have a point.
"I'm sorry."
"You stole my mum's car!"
"I did." It had seemed such an inconsequential thing to do at the time... less so now, when his certainty in getting it back was shaky at best. "I did do that. In my defence, I had every intention of giving it back."
"Where is it? Where are you?"
Phil looked at the anonymous forest where the surrounding shrubbery did nothing to introduce itself; if this place had a name, he'd long since plunged too deeply into its heart to discover it.
"In a ditch, and in the woods very far away from said ditch, respectively."
"And my dad's revolver? If you've lost that too, I-I—I won't kill you, but, oh god Phil, will I be mad." Smiley's tone trembled with the sort of tremors that could easily transition into either tears or the sort of slap that might conceivably span the distance between them that was making the phone crackle.
"It's safe, Smiles, I've got it right here." Reassuringly, Phil rattled the gun close to the microphone; this didn't actually reassure any of them.
"So you did take it?" Zach whistled. "Wow. And here I was defending you like a fool. Word of advice—you're fucked mate."
"Hey, I never said I took it," Phil protested. "Diz stole it."
"Diz? Less surprising. But he is definitely still fucked; the Doctor's on the warpath."
"What happened?" Smiley asked, and her voice was forceful, all hard-edges, despite the wavering that suggested that it might break. It sounded like slammed doors and torn pages.
For once, Phil held all of the careful gathered jigsaw pieces and was at a complete loss as to what to do with them. Bewilderingly, he felt a little betrayed—not by his friends, but by the situation at large; 'it didn't happen like this last time. It didn't go this wrong, back then, I would have remembered. What happened? What changed?'
"I..." His mouth was coated in a moth-wing concoction made from the dust of old thoughts. "I don't... have a short answer for that. A lot. I really wish there was an easy way to summarise this shit, but, honestly, if you want the full explanation, you're gonna need some notepaper. And alcohol. God, I wish there were shots in the woods... I'd let the fae have me if they came offering Malibu."
Immediately, the atmosphere on the other end of the phone changed in a subtle but vital fashion. It was still frantic, but there was something questing in it now, something to the high energy that made it urgent rather than just frightened.
"Are you safe?"
"I mean, I am now. I wasn't, but we've done a lot of running since then. The aliens aren't getting out of this one, though; you remember I told you they thought they were being followed? Yeah, well, turns out that wasn't paranoia, that was real—it's their government. Apparently all three of them are war criminals."
"Career path checks out, I suppose," Zach muttered in an undertone before raising his voice to yell again. "Did you find the ship."
"Bits of it." Grimly, he recalled the ravaged husk languishing in an aircraft hanger which seemed to be slowly fading from existence, and the observation chambers filled with weird, multi-armed puppeteers now pulling the enterprise's strings. "Like I said, they're probably not getting out of this one."
A beat of silence like an old computer catching up with the rigours of a new game.
"Shit," Zach swore, before getting into an argument with someone on the street below about why he shouldn't have to be quiet at a time like this.
"You need a ride?" Phred offered instantly. He was speaking with the slightly projected tone of someone trying to shout a delivery order over the clamour of an eager party. "We'll come get you."
"You've not got a car."
"We'll get the bus."
"I don't think there's a service running to the middle of nowhere at this hour."
"Yeah... when I said we'd get a bus, I meant we'd nick one and come find you. It's illegal, but it's for a good cause."
Startled by a burst of affection, a sensation like being shot in the chest with a warm paintball, Phil laughed. It hurt slightly to do so. Far away on a rooftop that was cold without the sun, Phred joined in, and the sound settled in to a space beneath Phil's ribs that had been hollowed out by the evening's trials. His eyes ached like a leftover bit of headache had lodged there.
Why hadn't he brought his friends along on this final venture? It wasn't something he had particularly thought about—their absence wasn't something consciously constructed it was just... there (or 'not there', depending on one's perspective of such things.) He felt their distance now, like cold wind blowing through a house he had been foolish enough to build without walls.
He wanted to apologise for leaving them behind. He wanted to tell them everything that had happened, everything he had learnt—he wanted to say a lot of things. If he could unknit history and have his time again, he would do it differently and they would all be there, surrounded by looming dark and misery absolute but Together.
Instead, he clung to a phone line full of cheerful, teasing voices and laughed until the cryptic threats from the undergrowth, Mrs Sundae, and a handful of sleepy passersby succeeded in shutting them all up.
"What do you want to do Phil?" Smiley asked eventually, with the same readiness for instruction she had once turned on her teachers. Around her, everyone else fell into attentiveness. He could sense them—loyal and unflinching as knights of old—just a few miles of phone line away. "What do you want us to do?"
They meant well, and he loved them more than words for that, but, suddenly the object of their collective expectation, Phil felt insurmountably lost. He waited for that reliable burst of inspiration that had served him so steadfastly since the misadventures of his youth, but the seconds of waiting stretched out like inches of rope lowering a bucket into a once-bountiful well. Nothing returned from the pit.
"I... I don't know." It was what he had wanted to say earlier. It was easier to do so now. "I don't know anymore Smiley. I don't know what to do."
There was a pause. A quiet pause that nonetheless had the sentiment of someone going 'oh'. Not really realisation, but it did, perhaps, have the immediate sympathy of recognition.
Carefully, tenderly, Smiley took the question off of Phil, inverted it, and gave it back: 'what do I want Phil to do?'
"Come home," she instructed tenderly, all her ire gone.
And the world crumpled as though it had been constructed from cards, all the trees in the forest around Phil turning flat and receding gently like fold-outs in a pop-up storybook. The world as a whole felt less real, as though he could put his foot through it.
Go home.
Forget it all.
Leave everything awful behind to wilt among the trees. Rot for the rotten.
Phil shut his eyes. Faintly, he could hear the snappish voices hidden from him by a layer of woods growing louder, harsher. His nose was numb and pulsing.
She said it so simply... and perhaps it was.
Once upon a time, Phil had envisioned himself a hero, a knight in shining armour who had managed feats mundane eleven-year-olds could only dream of. He was King Arthur at the head of the round table, his knights ranked before him. He was King of a naive and unappreciative kingdom, but a King nonetheless. He'd held on to this fact as he grew older and the world grew duller.
It wasn't that he was wrong—Phil had, indeed, done heroic things—but heroism itself is a fickle thing.
Heroism is really a bunch of positive traits shoved in a trench coat and stuck up on a pedestal. It is resilience, and selflessness, altruism, and dedication and, while Phil was in possession of all these qualities, they weren't the impetus behind his adventures. Ultimately, at the bare bones of the matter, he had been being selfish: he wanted to go home early; he wanted to go home in general; he needed Diz to fly the spaceship.
The fact of the matter was, Phil hadn't been a hero; Phil had been eleven years old.
And the Phil of seven-years-later, though not cruel or indifferent, was a pragmatic man who had been given permission to stop. He had his answers. He had reached the end of the game. Save Game. Log Out. Turn Off Computer.
Briefly, he considered the weight of the alien remote still hidden in his pocket. It would make, he thought idly, an interesting parting gift, a two-finger salute made physical—'Here you go, here's a new choice; you can wait for The Enquiry to find you, or you can call your ship, dox yourselves, and end it right now.' It would be a little bitter, a little funny, thoroughly miserable—precisely how Phil felt about the whole affair. It would have been a cruel thing to do, however, and even in defeat, Phil was not cruel. In the end, he left the little lump of metal where it lay, warm against his belly.
Even a horrible trip deserves a souvenir. He would keep it, he decided, as a memento, some unhappy thing to sit in the back of a cabinet gathering dust. A memorial, of sorts, for a childhood that had felt so much brighter and more triumphant than the reality of this world he was stuck in. The only tombstone the doomed aliens would get, one without flowers or mourners.
With a departing glance back towards the source of the muffled shouting, and the subtle awkwardness of a man ducking out of a party early, Phil set off in the direction his phone indicated should, eventually, lead to a highway.
His regrets minimal, his musings quiet but endless, Phil started the long walk home.
