i like phil being near-immortal, and i like techno being near-immortal alongside him, but i think that it works better when their specific brands of immortality are different. u know?
so it goes a little something like this:
The first time they meet, Philza is still young. Not young, you understand, but young enough that he has not yet been cut down to stark and jaded utilitarianism. He sets out on a journey into the nether and feels a tug on his sleeve and looks down to see some wide-eyed little piglin child whose parents are nowhere to be found, and his heart stirs.
So he teaches him: combat and farming and life in the Overworld, all of the knowledge that he’s gained over the years. Raises the boy like a son.
It takes twenty years before war starts building in the neighboring empire. Twenty years before the piglin child — now grown, of course, but still so desperately young — offers his service. Like he wants blood on his hands, like he wants to make somebody pay.
Phil buries him before the war is over.
He’s lost people before, of course. So many people. But it’s been a long time since those people were family. He plants a tree on top of the grave, a tiny sapling behind their home — his home now — and makes a promise to himself to stop getting attached.
The second time they meet, the sapling is fully grown.
The soul that will one day call itself Technoblade comes gasping into the world again, trembling memories of wings and violence that flit around the edges of his consciousness when he’s suspended between sleep and wakefulness, and he grows up a fighter. Bruised knuckles and scars that crisscross his back and shoulders like delicate lace, and when he runs into a man who holds himself with world-weary poise and the same wings that have haunted Techno’s dreams, he feels a jolt down his spine.
“Sorry, mate,” says the man. “You just reminded me of someone I used to know.”
“Oh,” says Technoblade.
They get four years together this time before Phil has to plant another sapling.
Techno lives through six lives before Phil’s certain that it’s the same man every time. There’s another voice added to the chorus in each one, another whisper in his ear demanding things of him; at night, his dreams are full of a man with long blond hair and gray-purple wings and cold blue eyes. The memories slip through his fingers like sand whenever he tries to get a solid grasp on them, but the surety with which he holds a sword can only come from years of muscle memory that he’s never practiced.
They say that ‘Technoblade never dies.’ And it’s a lie, but there’s some piece of truth in it: Technoblade dies, and then he comes home again.
There’s a room for him in Phil’s house, kept tidy and waiting in his absence. There’s a journal that Phil keeps, writing down the history of each new lifetime, so that when they find one another Techno will be able to remember. There’s a vault beneath the floorboards that holds bits and pieces of the lives that Techno’s lead, armor and items and memories. There’s a place for him in the world, and Phil keeps it carefully maintained for the next time he finds it.
One lifetime becomes ten lifetimes becomes a thousand lifetimes.
It’s never quite the same, of course. Techno’s a grown man, battered and beaten and bitter but still standing tall; Techno’s a child, tugging on Phil’s sleeve like he did so long ago and asking if they’ve met before; Techno’s already in old age, battle-scarred but determined to track down the man he sees in his dreams. Sometimes they raze empires together, side by side in a blaze of glory. Sometimes they’re content to simply live in one another’s company. Sometimes they don’t meet at all.
Phil’s journal becomes a library, his vault an archive. The valley he lives in goes from open grass to a dense forest of trees that are planted in far-too-orderly rows to be natural.
And for every life that Techno leads, Phil’s always the one to bury him.
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