wipe the blood off your face (it may stain)

But Your Smile Tells Me I'm Safe

"I didn't take you for a gardener, Phil." Tommy commented, leaning on the doorway of the house.

Tommy had been having a little bit of a hard time moving in. Things were still naturally tense with the SBI, which still made everything hard. There was still progress, but it was painfully slow.

Though, as they finally managed to organize the house in the past two weeks, things had gotten a little better. He started watching dumb musicals on YouTube with Wilbur that were very boring, but it was the least he could do for the sake of progress. It also just proved Tommy's theory more that Wilbur was a theatre kid, especially when he knew that you could search up 'slime tutorials' only for there to be musicals to show up.

Phil was still... Phil. It was obvious how guilty the man felt over Tommy's lack of using his powers, but he was still visibly upset with him.

Then again, he suddenly seemed to warm up to Tommy a little bit more the other week. The teen would take it, no matter how strange it was.

Social interaction was weird. And confusing. Techno was right.

There was still a big divide between them, not only because of the betrayal, but because of the secrets the ex-Heroes were continuing to keep from him. They were still hiding the details of what happened at the Hero Tower which seemed completely unnecessary. They were obviously hiding something about it, but Tommy was a Villain. It should be pretty clear that he didn't really care about how brutally Dream was murdered or not. In fact, Tommy argued, the more suffering Dream went through, the better.

"Yeah, well," Phil shrugged, crouching over some dirt with a shovel, "it's relaxing. I used to do it before I lived at the Hero Tower, but never really got to have an opportunity to do it there."

"Oh. It seems nice." Tommy said in a poor attempt to be supportive. He had no problem supporting Phil in this hobby, but he found it quite boring. Tommy was a restless person at heart. He always wanted to be doing something fun and action filled. If he wasn't doing that, his idea of relaxing was watching an action or thriller movie. Sitting down and waiting for plants to grow didn't seem to be the most adventurous thing out there.

Phil chuckled, most likely picking up on Tommy's fake enthusiasm. "You better be glad that I like gardening, otherwise our backyard would look like a disaster."

Tommy couldn't deny that. The house itself was nice, but the yard both in front and in the back could definitely use some work. There was a fence around the backyard for their house, and while there was some pavement that they could possibly put a table with a couple chairs, the backyard looked like the rest of the forest, with sticks fallen from trees and an uncomfortable number of fallen leaves.

Tommy was also pretty sure the real reason why there was a backyard in the first place was to mainly keep out the bears around the forest from somehow getting in the house.

"Fair enough," Tommy responded. "You want help or something?"

As he stated before, this seemed just as fun as watching paint dry, but unluckily, Phil was the person he was struggling the most with healing their relationship. He needed to fix that somehow, and that included doing hobbies with the avian, however boring.

Phil's wings twitched in a way Tommy had no idea what meant. He should really get around in trying to learn the telltale signs of hybrid traits reacting a certain way, besides from the few things he picked up through Ranboo and Tubbo, he knew next to nothing.

"Okay, mate." Phil replied a beat later. "I've got another shovel over by the door and then I can hand you some seeds."

Tommy, somewhat surprised that Phil agreed, went to pick up the shovel and came back. "What are we planting?" He asked, standing over Phil's shoulder to see.