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Phil has had a long day. Granted, it’s only been about two hours since their little party arrived safely back in the tundra and sent Dream on his way, even less since Techno set off, determined to find Tubbo, and Niki departed for her city with a wave and the intent to lay low, but it’s felt like an eternity.
The entire prison break process only took, what, an hour? Less? And yet here Phil stands in his kitchen, hands hovering in the air in search of something to do, feeling exhausted right down to his bones.
Gods, he thinks wryly, running a hand down his face, I really am getting too old for this sort of thing.
(He knows, deep down, that it doesn’t really matter in the end. If Techno needs him, he’ll be there. No questions asked.)
He’s just thinking he might make some tea—if nothing else, it’ll occupy his hands for a bit, take his mind off things with the familiarity of it all—when the door bangs open, letting in a gust of wind and snow and one very damp Wilbur Soot.
“Philza Minecraft!” Wilbur crows cheerfully, completely missing how badly Phil jumps at his unexpected arrival. “How are you on this fine afternoon?”
“Hey, mate,” Phil says, fondness and exhaustion warring within him. “I’m fine.”
Wilbur hums, walking past Phil to the kitchen table, where he opens his coat to deposit a—is that a cat? A very bedraggled, very scrawny tuxedo cat that he just pulled out of his trench coat. Like it was the most normal thing in the world. Somehow, nothing about this is surprising to Phil.
It’s just one thing after another today, isn’t it? Bad things always come in threes. The prison, Ranboo, and now…well. Wilbur’s certainly not the bad thing, and a surprise pet doesn’t exactly count as one, does it? Not on the same level as the rest of this day. It’s just a cat.
A very scraggly cat, anyway.
It’s just his exhausted brain grasping for that third thing.
(Phil supposes that it’s better to have a round three than wait fearfully for another shoe to drop, another disaster to strike. Everything is fine, he tells himself.
He almost believes it.)
Phil draws out a chair at the table, settles into it with a wince of saddle-sore muscles and holds out a finger for the patchy cat to sniff.
“Where’ve you been, then?” he asks, as Wilbur strides across the tidy kitchen.
“Out,” Wilbur says with a half-shrug of one shoulder. “Went for a wander. Got a little lost. Couldn't find my comm, either, so I thought I'd come back here. The whole server’s damn near empty, or at least Las Nevadas was when I dropped in.”
That would make sense, considering how everyone congregated nearer to the main hub when the alarms went off. Idly, Phil wonders how Wilbur missed the claxon—it must have gone on for half an hour, at least, and it still rings in his ears with a high-pitched keening he can’t quite tune out. He’s so caught up in his musings he misses the forced casualness to Wilbur’s tone, the lingering jerkiness in his movements.
But then Wilbur asks, “By the way, where’s Ranboo? He’s not been about in days. I’m, ah, I’m starting to think the fucker quit on me.”
There’s an odd quality to his voice, something crackling and sharp, something akin to grief, almost, but that doesn’t make any sense, because surely he can’t know if he hasn't seen the server pings. Can he?
Phil feels his shoulders tighten, but Wilbur misses it, too busy rummaging about in the cabinets, presumably for dried fish for the cat he has somehow procured and kept in his coat for heaven knows how long.
“I don’t know,” Phil admits.
It’s the truth, really, or close enough to it.
They fall silent, then, as Wilbur rocks back and forth on his heels, staring into the depths of Phil’s kitchen cabinets.
Looking at him, seeing the tousled mess of his hair, shot through with white, and the back of his old coat, clumsily patched with an old L’Manberg flag, Phil has a single thought, startling in its clarity: I can’t tell him. What—Ranboo, the prison, hell, Doomsday—he’s not sure. He just…can’t.
So Phil says nothing.
For a moment, he can almost reclaim the sense of normalcy he’s been missing for so long, back before this prison business. He sits in his warm kitchen in his little house on the tundra, and he listens to Wilbur rattle around in his cabinets and babytalk his half-feral cat, tapping it on the nose as he feeds it bits of fish, humming snatches of unfamiliar songs under his breath. Things are good. Things are okay.
And then they hear the first scream.
Wilbur drops the fish, eyes widening, but Phil beats him to the door, soreness be damned, and they stand on the porch to behold the other shoe dropping, the completion to the trio of bad things in Phil’s day.
Because TommyInnit has come tearing out of the surrounding woods, scraped and battered, completely underdressed for the tundra, hoarsely screaming Techno, Phil, Phil, anyone, HELP!
And then before Phil can really begin to process any of that, Wilbur is off, swearing under his breath as he stumbles down the steps to meet Tommy in the snowy yard. Phil is a bit slower on the uptake, following cautiously behind.
“Shit,” Wilbur says, nearly crashing into Tommy, grasping at his upper arms, “fuck. Tommy.”
Tommy’s breathing is ragged and his eyes are red-rimmed.
“Wilbur,” he all but sobs, “Wil, please, he’s—he’s out and he’s, he, he was just there, and—”
Whatever Tommy is trying to say dissolves into shaky breathing and hiccuping sobs, muffled by the hand he claps over his mouth, as though trying to dampen the noise. Phil makes out a few more muffled words—axe, it sounds like, and ran, and hero, and one very strangled please—but that’s all.
There are leaves in Tommy’s hair, dirt smudged across his cheeks, dents in his armor. His hand not slapped across his mouth is fisted tight in Wilbur’s coat sleeve. His knuckles are bloodied.
Phil feels, quite suddenly, out of his depth.
“Tommy, hey,” Wilbur says, and Tommy lets out another stream of garbled half-sobbed words.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, Phil makes out.
“Tommy,” Wilbur says again, like he’s soothing a spooked animal, “Tommy calm.”
Tommy’s eyes are blown wide. Phil can hear the note of panic in Wilbur’s voice.
This feels like something he shouldn’t be here for, something he’s not supposed to witness. As Wilbur begins coaching Tommy through breathing exercises, Phil draws his sword and lets his gaze sweep across the property, from Techno’s house on his left to the snowy hills before him to the woods on his right, where Tommy had come running out of.
There’s no one there, except—was that a snap of a twig? A flash of netherite in the dappled shade? He can’t be certain, not with the near-blinding brilliance of the afternoon sun flashing off the snow, but Phil feels distinctly uneasy.
Not safe, a crow caws from the peak of his roof. Not safe, not safe.
Another joins in, screeching, the game is in play!
When it notices him listening, it adds a nevermore just to be contrary.
“You’re not even a fucking raven,” Phil tells it.
“Phil,” Wilbur calls, and Phil startles, turning to see Wilbur has led Tommy to the porch, one arm around his shoulders and his free hand poised as though ready to pull up his inventory at any moment. “We’re going in.”
“I’ll stay outside for a minute,” Phil says. “I just…want to check something.”
He waits until the door swings shut behind them before tromping through the snow, boots catching at the icy crust atop it, to stand at the warded fence around the property. Phil gazes for a long, long time into the shadows of the spruce trees. He dislikes the thought that someone might be using her forest, her gift, for something nefarious.
In the end, though, nothing moves, and the crows on the roof seem to settle, so Phil slowly heads back into the house. Still, he doesn’t fully turn his back to the forest until he reaches the front door and grasps the knob in his free hand.
He has a very bad feeling about all of this.
🝔
When he steps inside, it’s to find Tommy crumpled on the floor, shaking, and Wilbur knelt beside him, arm still around the kid’s shoulders.
Alarmed, Phil opens his mouth, but Wilbur’s gaze snaps up to him as the floor creaks with his footstep, and he hisses, “Fuck’s sake, Phil, close the door!”
Phil blinks, uneasiness roiling in his gut, but he closes the door behind him and bolts it. Wilbur lets out a breath and returns his full attention to Tommy, who is still near-hyperventilating.
“Tommy,” Wilbur says, “you’re safe now.”
Tommy lets out a strangled little laugh, might try to nod, but doesn’t stop trembling, nor his clear attempts to stop trembling. The scrawny cat meows loudly, hopping down from the tabletop to rub its head against Wilbur’s knee. He scoops it up and hands it to Tommy, who holds it carefully and seems to still a bit more.
“Tell me what happened,” Wilbur instructs.
And so Tommy does.
🝔
(It all comes out, the whole jumbled mess of it, from Tommy’s spot on Phil’s muddied kitchen floor. The claxon, the panic, Niki skulking suspiciously near the prison, Techno bursting from Pandora’s Vault like a bat out of hell with Dream close behind.
Sam killed Ranboo, Tommy says in an almost disbelieving whisper, for good, I think, and Wilbur stiffens, face twisting. He says nothing, though, and Tommy carries on, faltering words describing his frantic dash back to the site of his exile, the empty chest, the broken portal, fleeing from Dream towards Techno’s base—again, he says bitterly. Just like old times.
At the end of it, there is an unsteady silence before Wilbur speaks.
Phil, he asks, almost desperate, almost pleading. What the fuck have you done, Phil?)
🝔
By the end of it, the sun is setting outside, throwing magnificent hues of purple and gold across the sky and snow with its nightly retreat, and there is a tenuous agreement among the three of them to continue this tomorrow. Wilbur bandages Tommy’s bleeding knuckles and many scrapes—Phil tells himself it does not sting when neither of them will allow him to help. It’s not like Tommy’s his son, or even his friend, anyway, so why should he care?—and they eat an uncomfortably silent dinner of stew Phil warmed in the meantime.
Tommy sleeps in Wilbur’s bed in the attic that night, the patchy-furred cat, apparently dubbed Mr. President (“To piss Techno off,” Wilbur had whispered conspiratorially to Tommy over a wad of alcohol-soaked cotton swiping across the cuts on Tommy’s forearm, and it had dragged a quiet, surprised laugh out of Tommy) curled up on the pillow beside him.
After a good long while, Wilbur climbs down the ladder from the attic. He stops at the bottom, one foot still on the lowest rung, hands clenched around the ladder in a white-knuckled grip. Phil, sitting at the kitchen table, feeling far more exhausted than he’d thought possible, watches him, observing the tight, drawn lines of Wilbur’s shoulders beneath his dingy coat, dreading what his son might say.
“Tubbo told me about Doomsday,” Wilbur says after an agonizing stretch of minutes. The forced levity in his tone makes Phil wince. Releasing the ladder, Wilbur spins on his heel to face him. In the golden light of the kitchen, he is a man cut of shadows, soot-blackened edges and dark circles under his eyes. He looks as tired as Phil feels.
“Did he,” Phil says, voice as even as he can manage.
“He did,” Wilbur says, crossing to lean on the counter, crossing his arms, “and you know, Phil, it got me thinking.”
“About?”
Wilbur hums. It’s not a cheerful sound. “About what happened today, apparently. You and Techno acting like you’re the leading authority of what’s best for people on this shithole of a server.”
“And you’ve never done that?” Phil asks. Wilbur looks like he’s been slapped, and Phil wishes he could take the words back, true or not. But it’s too late for that. Wilbur carries on.
“The thing is, Phil, you knew,” he says caustically. “You knew I lied, I told you I lied, and you didn’t even try to learn the truth. To talk to anyone about it. You knew I cared about these people and you destroyed their home to, what, avenge me? Or was it to assuage your own guilt?”
Phil refuses to flinch, refuses to rise to his feet. He doesn’t want this to turn into a fight, can’t fight with Wilbur about this. It was hard enough when it was just a shell of his son screaming at him under a weeping sky.
“You,” he says, “did the same thing to them.”
“At least I regret it,” Wilbur snaps, and Phil thinks there might be a sheen of tears in his overbright eyes, but his disheveled hair falls over his face, hiding them from view before Phil can be sure. “You didn’t even give them the honor of learning why they cared,” he finishes, softer.
(Phil does not say: it was easier this way. It was easier not to know.)
“You just do whatever you want, no matter the consequences,” Wilbur murmurs. He laughs bitterly. “Like father, like son, I guess.”
Phil doesn’t have a response to that. Wilbur doesn’t seem surprised.
🝔
(“Why,” begins Wilbur, and pauses to lick his lips, clench his fingers, steady his breathing, “why did you do it, Phil?”
“Do what?” his father asks, and the hopeless note in his voice means he knows exactly what Wilbur means, that they're just trapped in this frustrating in-between, this loss of trust despite the fact that Wilbur loves his father, and Phil loves his son.
“All of it,” Wilbur says. “Destroying L'Manberg. Letting Dream out. All of it.”
Phil gives him a look; the same kind Wilbur has blurry memories of from when he was a small child asking particularly inane questions to be pert.
“I did it because Techno asked, Wil,” he replies softly. “And Techno's my friend.”
(I'm your son, Wilbur thinks, but does not say.)
Instead, he snorts.
“Yeah,” he says, bitterness sharp on his tongue, phantom pain between his ribs, “I guess you always were good at doing what people asked, huh?”
He turns away so he doesn't have to see his father's stricken look.)
🝔
Tommy finds him sitting on the railing of the bridge between Phil’s and Techno’s houses a few hours later, somewhere between his third and sixth cigarette. He’s bundled in the quilt from Wilbur’s bed, deep shadows under his eyes, and he comes to lean heavily on the rail near where Wilbur is sitting, gazing up at the stars spread out brilliantly over the plains of the tundra.
“You’re gonna ruin your lungs again,” Tommy huffs, glaring at the blue-flaring embers of Wilbur’s cigarette, and Wilbur simply shrugs.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asks, taking another drag and feeling the saccharine burn of soul-sand on the back of his tongue. The numbness it brings is a familiar, welcome relief from the aching left in his chest after his conversation with Phil. Wilbur doesn’t particularly like being angry. It takes too much energy, sometimes.
(Ghostbur had his blue and Wilbur has his cigarettes, and sometimes he wonders which is worse, in the end: the hopeful attempts to forget and be happy, or the miserable addiction to a slow death in favor of temporary relief, fleeting numbness.)
Tommy grunts. “Tried. Couldn’t sleep. It’s too fuckin’ cold up here.”
Wilbur stubs the cigarette out on the railing, leaving behind a small scorch mark. “It’s colder outside than inside,” he points out, unhelpfully.
There’s a moment before Tommy grumbles, “I don’t like being alone.”
“Aww, Tommy,” Wilbur coos, because he knows exactly how Tommy will react, “are you lonely?”
“I hate you,” Tommy says, “dickhead.”
He doesn’t complain when Wilbur slings an arm around his shoulders and drags him closer to his side, though, just pulls the quilt tighter around his shoulders and lets out a resigned sigh.
“You stink of smoke,” Tommy informs him, but makes no move to pull away.
“Mm,” Wilbur replies, “I’ll shower when we go back inside.”
“Good, ‘cause it smells gross, and I hate it.”
They watch the stars for a little while longer, and Wilbur wonders what it must be like to be one of those pinpricks of light, shooting endlessly through space, on and on through an infinite universe. (He fancies he knows exactly how the stars themselves must feel. They’re already dead, after all, the biggest collapsing into the brilliant death of a supernova while most exhaust their fuel and burn away quietly into dark, cold desolation. Stars die, just like the rest of them. Just like Wilbur.)
The companionable silence weighs on his shoulders heavily, painfully, the tightness in his chest feeling like someone has taken a fork and scraped it along the inside of his lungs—or that could just be the cigarettes, he supposes.
Because here is the thing: everything Tommy told him lingers in his head, rattling back and forth endlessly like someone has loosed a handful of marbles in his skull, but one thing stands out starkly, horribly: Sam killed Ranboo. Ranboo, it seems, is somehow dead, third life lost at the stroke of the Warden’s sword, and Wilbur thinks: it’s my fault.
He can close his eyes and relive it perfectly: the taste of blood on his tongue, Quackity’s fist colliding with his stomach, shattered glass digging into his palms and knees, Tubbo’s fear, Ranboo’s knowing smile, Ranboo jumping, the explosion, so horribly, wonderfully familiar—
If not for Wilbur, Ranboo would have still had another life.
“Tommy,” Wilbur whispers, the knowledge expanding behind his ribs, pressing, pressing, crawling like a swarm of ants up his throat, “do you…trust me?”
The silence that follows is almost unbearable, and then Tommy says, with surprising conviction:
“Right now? Maybe, I guess.”
Wilbur almost wants to cry.
“You shouldn’t,” he says, the words cutting into his gums, tasting like pennies on his tongue. He pulls back from Tommy, folding his hands in his lap, as though clenching his fingers together tight enough can mask the way they’re shaking with some barely-contained emotion. Regret, maybe. Self-loathing, more likely.
“Yeah?” Tommy challenges. “Why the fuck shouldn’t I?”
“Because Ranboo’s dead,” says Wilbur, “and it’s my fucking fault.”
Tommy does not recoil in horror. Tommy does not yell at him. Tommy does not storm off into the house to get away from him. Tommy just looks at Wilbur.
“It’s not, actually,” he says shortly.
“You don’t get it,” Wilbur says, hunching his shoulders. “He—he lost a life because of my stupid trap we set for Quackity’s horse.”
“Yeah,” Tommy says, unsurprised, “I know.”
“You know?” Wilbur echoes.
“Ranboo told me, dickhead.”
“What?”
“That’s what friends do, you know,” Tommy says, and there’s an undertone of something there that Wilbur can’t quite pin down. “I know what happened, Wilbur. You know what he told me?”
Wilbur can only shake his head. Nothing about this conversation, this day, is going like he expected.
“He said he wanted to prove a point,” Tommy says, “which is fucking stupid, if you ask me, blowing yourself up just to get a point across”—here, Wilbur inhales sharply, but Tommy barrels on—“but it’s his choice, innit? And I guess I can’t fault him for it, since you’re pretty fuckin’ stupid when you want to be.”
Wilbur almost laughs at that. Almost.
“But I put him in that situation,” Wilbur says, frustrated. “If I hadn’t done that, he would have had another life, and—”
“I mean, yeah,” Tommy cuts him off, “that was pretty shitty of you. You’ve kind of got a habit of doing that, you know. Putting people in dangerous situations. But we still followed you there. It’s not like you’re the one who killed him today.” His face darkens slightly, something like grief flitting through his tone. “That was Sam.”
(And Wilbur fleetingly thinks he might remember pumpkin pies, a visit to a rainy coast in the dark, a hotel rising beside the Prime path with Tommy in a hard hat more chipper than before. There is a weight to the way Tommy says Sam’s name that pulls at him. It reminds Wilbur, just the slightest, of trying to talk to Ranboo about Phil.)
“So,” Tommy says, eyes boring into Wilbur, and all Wilbur can think is when did you get so old? So insightful? “Did it work? Did he prove his point?”
Wilbur doesn’t have the words to answer.
After a while, Tommy huffs, breath clouding in the frosty air.
“It’s cold as balls out here. I’m going back to bed.”
“Okay,” Wilbur says, only half-registering it. When Tommy turns to go, he calls quietly after him, “We can go back to the main SMP tomorrow, if you want, and get things from your house.”
Whether or not Phil regrets letting Dream out, he promised he’d let Tommy stay with him for safety’s sake, and Tommy had accepted it warily, but accepted it nonetheless. He hasn’t got anything but the clothes and half-broken armor on his back, so he’ll need to get some of his own things, but Wilbur has no intention of letting him venture off on his own, not after seeing the long, clean slice left down his arm, clearly made by the blade of an axe. No way in hell.
“Okay,” Tommy says, and he leaves Wilbur to his messy, tangled thoughts.
Wilbur stays outside until he can’t feel his fingers and toes, even with the light of the beacon at his back, and as he stands in the shower with his forehead pressed against the wall, lungs full of steam, he feels even more at a loss than before. Nothing makes sense anymore. Maybe it never did. He doesn’t even begin to know how to fix it.
He doesn’t sleep much that night.
🝔
On the way back from the dandelion-dotted amalgamation that is Tommy’s dirt house the next day, they’re both quiet. Wilbur tries to hum a song, but it peters out quickly as they pass near L’Manberg’s ruins. He finds himself averting his eyes from the scrubby brush, the few stubborn redwood trees, the overgrown obsidian grid overhead. He catches Tommy hunching his shoulders at his side and walks a little faster.
Tommy matches him step for step.
Their walk down the Prime path leads them onwards, past the crater and Eret’s museum and finally the Holy Lands, and it is here, in front of Church Prime’s simple quartz façade, that Tommy’s steps falter. He hesitates, taking one step off the path to stand knee-deep in the tall grasses. Limned in sunlight and framed with untended nature, he looks almost like a painting of a saint, wild curls as his halo and the weight of the world on his skinny shoulders.
Wilbur waits a moment, listening to the rustling of the grass in the wind, the cry of a watchful crow circling overhead, Tommy’s shaky breathing. A beetle skitters by, dashing off the path and into cover. When it becomes apparent Tommy isn’t going to move, lost in thought, Wilbur steps off the path to stand beside him.
“Do you want to go in?” he asks softly. He’s never understood Tommy’s dedication to Prime and all the rituals that come with it, but he understands, in a way, the comfort it can bring. When there is nothing and no one else, there is God, right? He doesn’t believe in such things, not even before spending a miserable eternity in the dank confines of Limbo, but sometimes he wishes he did. That he could have something so unassuming and unwavering as Tommy’s faith.
Tommy inhales sharply, tucking his chin close to his chest.
“He made me commit blasphemy, you know,” he finally says, voice smaller than Wilbur has ever heard it, and Wilbur does not have to ask who the he in question is.
It all comes pouring out, then, every ugly truth and gritty detail of the time when Wilbur was gone, was dead, and they sit in the wild grasses growing unkempt in front of Tommy’s refuge, and Wilbur, though he might not understand all of it, listens. Clouds scud by and crows wheel above them, and Wilbur listens.
“Did you know,” Tommy says wetly at the end of it, “did you know, Wilbur, that I performed burial rites for you?”
Wilbur startles. “You said—I didn’t get a grave.”
Tommy snorts. “Well it’s not like we had a body to bury, did we, and fuckin’, fuckin’ Ghostbur was rattling around, so we…never got ‘round to it, I guess. But I did the rites. Rang the bells. All the proper shit, even if—even if you didn’t believe in it.”
“Why?” Wilbur asks curiously. There’s an odd feeling in his chest, thinking about it. About being mourned. Being missed. He supposes this is what he wanted, in a way—to know that people cared enough to mourn him, though he was convinced they did not—but to know the reality of it leaves him feeling oddly hollow. Bereft, almost, as though he is grieving not his own death but the devastation it left behind.
It's rather self-centered, he supposes, but Wilbur has long made peace with his own narcissism. Perhaps is more comfortable with it than he should be.
“Because I wanted you to find peace, dumbass,” Tommy bites. “Even…after everything.”
Why? Wilbur wants to ask again. Wants to scream it, maybe, or sob it. He doesn’t.
Instead, head full of roaring trains and fog-filled platforms, he says, “I didn’t.”
“Yeah,” Tommy snorts, “I know.”
Softer now, because he knows Tommy better than he knows himself sometimes, Wilbur says, “It’s not your fault.”
Tommy looks away. “I know that too.”
(It’s only a little bit of a lie.)
They fall silent for a while after that, sitting cross-legged in the golden afternoon sunlight. Wilbur finds himself tapping a tuneless melody against the ankle of his boot, staring blankly into the distance.
“Wilbur,” begins Tommy, and only now does Wilbur realize he’s been gazing back towards L’Manberg. What’s left of it anyway. “Do you regret it?” Tommy asks him. They both know what he means.
“Yes,” Wilbur admits, without an ounce of hesitation. “Yes.”
“Then, if you could go back,” Tommy asks, “would you do it different?”
The Ancient Greeks had a saying, Wilbur knows, and he knows this because Techno told him, as Techno is wont to do. The playwrights used to say character is fate. Who you are determines the outcome. Who you are means you could have made a different choice, could have averted that tragedy, time and time again, over and over, if you had just been able to do it. But you wouldn’t because you are yourself and no one else. I know what I’m like, Wilbur once told Tommy, and that’s the issue. It still is.
Character is fate.
“No,” Wilbur says, and it is a bitter pill to swallow now with Tommy’s eyes on him. He knows exactly what he’s like. “No, I wouldn’t have.”
He wishes he could say Tommy looks surprised or disappointed or disgusted. Any kind of typical, deserving response to what Wilbur has just admitted to. But Tommy merely looks resigned.
“We should get back to Phil’s,” he says. “We’re exposed out here and I don’t want to spend the night sleeping on a pew.”
“Okay,” Wilbur replies, climbing to his feet. They don’t talk the rest of the way to the Nether hub and on towards the portal back to the tundra. Wilbur’s almost glad. He doesn’t think there’s anything he could say that would do more good than harm at this point.
🝔
“What am I going to do when Dream comes after me?” Tommy asks him the next night. He’s sat on the bed, Mr. President in his lap, running his fingers through the cat’s fur. Mr. President is purring so loud Wilbur can hear him from his perch on the windowsill, cheek leaned against the icy glass. His fingers itch for a cigarette, but he isn’t one to smoke indoors. Tommy will just get upset, and they’re both too tired to be upset, really.
“What are we going to do,” Wilbur corrects. “I’m not letting you deal with that bastard on your own.”
“Yeah, well,” Tommy mumbles, tucking his chin down towards his chest, voice dipping uncertainly, “you said he was your, your fuckin’ hero, you know. Right in front of me and everything.”
Wilbur hesitates. “I’m sorry. I…shouldn’t have.”
Tommy shrugs listlessly. Somehow, this is worse than anger.
“I should have listened to you,” he says.
“Yeah,” Tommy replies, “you should have.”
For approximately two minutes, the only noises are Mr. President’s purring and the creaking of the house as it settles. From somewhere below, there’s the creak of a chest and Phil’s familiar footfalls.
“Tubbo and I thought about running away, once,” Tommy says at long last.
Wilbur wants to ask why didn’t you? But something about the way Tommy twists his fingers in the bedspread makes him bite back the words. Tommy doesn’t owe him answers or explanations. It isn’t his place to ask for them.
“We could run away,” he murmurs, and it’s only half of a joke.
He’s thought about it, before—just leaving, cutting all ties and walking away. Finding somewhere else to live. Maybe going back to his childhood home, or Newfoundland. Being anywhere but here. He’s never been able to do it. There’s too many people he cares about, too many memories bound up in the soil of this server. Maybe it would be better if he did leave—better for everyone he hurt, everything he destroyed—but Wilbur is selfish and Wilbur is human and Wilbur cannot bring himself to leave them behind, whether or not he ought to.
He thinks he would regret it if he did. He worries he’ll regret it if he doesn’t.
“Run away, huh,” Tommy says, scratching under Mr. President’s mangy chin.
(Here is a dream: the both of them, standing still, knee-deep in wild grass in a faraway land. The sky above them is blue and the sun is warm on their necks. They do not look behind them, and there is nothing to fear but the end.
Here was another: blackstone walls and redwood trees, a hand-stitched flag snapping in the wind, a cramped van for shelter and the dearest of friends at their sides.
Neither, it seems, is meant to last.)
“I can’t go,” Tommy says. “I couldn’t then. I can’t now. I,” his voice stumbles, wavers, “don’t want to leave, really.”
“I don’t think I do, either,” Wilbur admits.
There’s an unspoken promise between them: I’ll stay. I won’t leave. I’ll be here for as long as I can. Wilbur has broken it once before. He doesn’t intend to again.
He swallows—hard. “I’m not going to let Dream hurt you again, Tommy. I…I meant it when I said I wanted to build a place for us to be safe. You, me, Tubbo, all of us.”
Tommy looks at him, really looks at him, in the way only a few people have ever done, seeing through the bravado and the masks and the showmanship, the desperate need to be perfect. Niki used to look at him like that when he lied about having eaten, having slept.
He misses Niki. He misses a lot of things.
“How?” Tommy challenges.
“I don’t know,” Wilbur says. He wishes he had it in him to lie, to say he knows exactly how to fix this disaster their lives have turned into, can cleverly untangle the Gordian knot with ease. But he can’t. And he thinks he owes Tommy the truth by now. “I don’t know, Tommy. But I’ll figure it out. Somehow.”
Tommy meets his gaze steadily, one tired boy looking at one burnt-out man, and despite everything, despite all Wilbur’s failures and broken promises and lies, Tommy nods.
“I believe you,” he says quietly.
Maybe you shouldn’t, Wilbur wants to say, but I’m glad. I’m glad you do.
“We’ll figure it out together,” Tommy says.
And for right here, right now, that’s good enough for both of them.