Chapter Text
The day the world ends, Wilbur Soot packs a suitcase and leaves.
It’s the last - or maybe the first - moment of clarity he’s ever had. It’s the one thing that still sticks fresh in his head, even after everything. He remembers the harsh zip as he closes the suitcase. He remembers the thud of the car trunk slamming shut, sun-hot metal under his hand. He remembers half a tank of gas, knowing he’ll have to stop soon, wondering how stopping for gas works if it’s the apocalypse; he remembers leaving dishes unwashed in the sink; he remembers not bothering to lock the door.
(He is never going to come back here, after all. There’s no reason to do more than kick the door shut behind him on the way out.)
Like a crepuscular ray, this moment breaks through a memory that holds very little else. In the light of it, standing on a cement porch in the dying red beams of a sun past its prime and an eerily silent city, Wilbur makes a decision that is the only clear choice.
He puts his back to home. Keys in his hand and gas pedal under his foot. Dust kicks up under spinning, screeching tires as he makes the last noise this city will ever hear.
This is not his home anymore. It never will be again.
It takes three days before Wilbur realizes he doesn’t remember how he got here.
He sleeps in the back of his car, between his suitcases and a cooler he stole from an empty gas station, full of whatever food he could still salvage from broken freezers at any pit stop. It’s getting harder to find any that’s still edible, and he’s pretty much given up on ever drinking milk again. It’s all gone bad by this point, and he doesn’t know if the cows are alive either. He hasn’t seen anyone in three days. Maybe longer. He hasn’t seen anything this whole time. The roads are dusty and long and empty. When he stops at a gas station, he looks on instinct for lizards on the pavement, keeps his eyes out for rattlesnakes on the rocks in the sun, and he never sees them. The sun goes down, and the sky is painted in shades of purple and pink against the silhouette of plateau and cactus, and then it goes dark, and still, everything is silent.
Wilbur has not heard another voice in three days. He lays in the back of his car, looks through an open sunroof to the vast starry sky above him. It’s a beautiful sight, if nothing else; this far from civilization, there’s no light pollution to obscure even a single star. The Milky Way flows across the whole of his vision, endless and bright.
He wishes he’d brought his telescope. He thinks he left it at home. He doesn’t remember where home used to be.
He doesn’t remember how he got here.
Wilbur’s in a car, driving forever. He keeps extra gas cans in his backseat, in case he doesn’t make it to a gas station before his tank runs empty. He pays for it, the first couple times, because somehow, the system for that is still online. Then he realizes there’s no need for it, because he still hasn’t seen anyone, and he starts siphoning it straight out of the other cars still parked around truck stop parking lots and pulled off on the side of roads. He finds a tanker truck, and he steals gas cans out of the station inside, and he fills enough to keep him going for days without stopping.
Wilbur’s in a car, driving for days on end. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. He’s got no destination. Just a foot on the gas pedal, and a long dusty road, and a purple sky, and stars above him, and a cooler with no milk left, and gas cans in his backseat.
Wilbur’s in a car, and that’s all he knows. He’s driving, not to get away from something, not to go anywhere, but because that’s what he is doing. The world is empty. Wilbur is incredibly small and alone in the middle of it. So he goes for a drive, and he never remembers how he got this far.
The world’s ending and empty, so Wilbur decides to see the sights.
He stops in a small town off the highway, picks a random exit that leads to all roadside tourist traps and signs flapping in the wind and the faint ring of windchimes clinking against themselves. The doors are unlocked. A sign reads OPEN in one window, handwritten on printer paper. Everything is still in place, unransacked, untouched. Wilbur is the first one here.
There’s still merchandise on the counters, left behind, somewhere between purchase and abandonment. As if whoever was buying it just gave up and walked away. As if something more important called them elsewhere.
Wilbur’s the only sinner left behind in the rapture. He sorts through an empty gift shop.
The wind plays with windchimes hung outside, a cacophony of tinkling music. Wilbur turns a rack of keychains, and they clink into one another in time with the windchimes. He hums along with the cheap, souvenir-fueled symphony, in notes of wood and metal and rows upon rows of names on shitty little keychains. Despite himself, Wilbur sorts through them to find his own. Wilbur, written out on a little stainless steel cactus, painted bright green. There’s one left, as if it’s waiting just for him; he closes his hand around it and tucks it into his pocket.
He hangs on the rearview mirror of his car. He thinks about taking a wind chime too, but decides against it. Not enough room in the car, and he thinks he’d get sick of the noise eventually. It’s already a bit much, just standing here in total silence save the clink of metal against wood.
So he just hangs up the keychain on the mirror, and he watches it sway when he starts the car. The engine sputters softly for a moment; Wilbur’s shitty old car was already due to be taken into the shop before the apocalypse happened, which was incredibly poor timing. He hopes it holds together for awhile longer, because he has no idea what’s even wrong with it, let alone how to fix the problem. For now, he employs his standard method of dealing with car trouble: ignore it, and hope it goes away.
It goes away for now. The engine sputters to life, and Wilbur backs out of the gift shop’s parking lot.
He has his first dream five nights after he packs a suitcase and leaves.
He’s been tracking on a paper calendar, pinned onto the back of his passenger seat and scribbled on in sharpie. It’s good to keep track of the days, to fill the listless emptiness with something a little more concrete in numbers and squares and the click of the sharpie cap going on and off. Makes him feel a little more like he’s a real person. Like this is something actually happening.
(He sometimes wonders if it isn’t real. If this is some incredibly strange dream. But then the sun beats down on him, and the night air turns chill and sharp, and he feels it too clearly to doubt it. If Wilbur’s senses can be trusted, this is reality now.)
There are other words written on the calendar too, pre-filled from a life that isn’t his anymore. He traces a finger over them, carefully mouths the words and the names, familiar and too distant to recall.
Dad’s birthday, one of the squares says, but a few months ago. It’s already crossed out. It’s May; on the next page, one says our birthday. Wilbur doesn’t know why it’s written that way. His birthday, and who else’s?
“Our birthday,” he says aloud, as if to jog his memory. He says it again, a little louder, ours, ours. He doesn’t understand. That’s all he has to go off of, and he doesn’t remember who the other half of our birthday is, but he knows it’s someone. He has a dad, he has someone with the same birthday as him, he has himself, he has a calendar, he has a car and a long, long road to travel, and stars underneath it to live in.
And tonight, he has a dream.
He’s ten years old in the dream,a fact he knows instinctively. It’s cold outside, bare toes against cool balcony flooring, and he’s staring up at an endlessly starry sky. Beside him, his father is moving something.
He knows it’s his father, another instinctive fact held somewhere deep in him. Awake-Wilbur doesn’t know if this is a memory or a fiction created by a mind trying to place the illusion of a father, or if it’s a combination of them both, but he continues to dream.
His father is setting up a telescope on their balcony, and Wilbur bounces impatiently from foot to foot. He wants to see.
“There we go,” his dad says finally, taking a step back with a wide smile. “You ready to take a peek?”
It’s all the invitation Wilbur needs. He bounds forward, gravitational pull towards the telescope, and lines his eye up with his father’s hand resting on his shoulder.
This is not Wilbur’s first moment looking through a telescope, but it is a beautiful one. Something grows in his chest right then and there. He has a hand on his shoulder, warm and solid and here on earth while his head and his heart float somewhere in the cosmos far above. An indescribable feeling, both small and huge at once, and he knows then and there, ten years old, that he will spend the rest of his life trying to put that feeling into words.
“If you turn a little,” his father tells him, the voice here on earth, “you can see Venus. She’s bright tonight, isn’t she?”
It takes him a second before he finds it, the planet in orange and gold spots, big and clear in the gaze of his telescope. “I see.”
“She’s forty million miles away,” his father says. “Pretty far, huh? And that’s about the closest she gets, which is why she’s so big and bright and easy to see tonight.”
Wilbur does his best to keep his eye fixed on the planet, but something draws him away from it. The bright stars all around call him; the dark space between equally enticing as the brilliant spots of light. There’s something whispering, and sound is not something that travels through a telescope, but Wilbur hears it as he gazes up.
“I can hear them,” he whispers, and his father says, “It sometimes feels like that, doesn’t it?”
Wilbur wants to say no, it doesn’t feel like that. He can hear them. They’re calling his attention, away from Venus, away from the planets, away from the stars and the light and the thousands of speckled dots he could turn his telescope to view from this place on his balcony. Something is calling him from the space between them. Something is in the dark, and it knows his name.
When he takes his gaze away from the telescope, the dark space follows him. It’s on his hands, fingertips turning purple and indigo and midnight blue. He looks at them, and then up at his father as something catches in his chest.
“What’s in between the stars?” Wilbur asks, because whatever it is, it’s in him too.
“Space,” his father tells him. “It’s the rest of the galaxy, and other stars too far away for us to see.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“What rest of it, Wilbur?”
And Wilbur’s too frozen to answer, because space is spilling out of his telescope and onto his fingers, and there’s something in his chest still calling him out to the stars, or to the place in between them. It’s cold, endlessly cold, like ice crawling up his veins and freezing in starry crystals in his blood.
It’s still whispering. He still hears his name.
Wilbur wakes up, an adult alone in a car with breath stuck in his chest and rushing in and out of his lungs, and he can almost still hear something whispering his name.
He doesn’t trust the stars after that. When he falls asleep at night, he rolls over onto his side, and he closes his eyes. He doesn’t look at them. He pulls a pillow over his ears to block out the whispering call of his name. He doesn’t hear them. Not at all during the day, when he’s driving around and looking for someone else left alive in the end of the world. And at night, he doesn’t hear them either with his eyes screwed shut and a pillow clamped over his ears.
Wilbur refuses to hear them. The stars do not speak. It’s too early for Wilbur to start hallucinating. The calendar is only one week along, even if he hasn’t seen anyone yet. Wilbur’s spent nearly that long alone in his apartment watching Netflix, he thinks to himself with a wry laugh. And as soon as he thinks the joke, he doesn’t remember the circumstances to go with it, but he’s certain it’s happened. It’s a slippery little memory, but he pins it down like a butterfly and hopes to understand it someday.
He spends the days driving with the air conditioner cranked up as high as it’ll go, and he spends the nights under a blanket staring up at the stars. He doesn’t drive at night, not if he can help it. At night, he gets tired, and then the whispers start showing up, and he hates that. He hates looking through his windshield at the stars and feeling like he’s driving towards them in this endless landscape, and he feels like they’re staring right back at him.
There is one fact he remembers about the stars, and that’s that it takes years and years, sometimes hundreds of thousands of them, for the light from stars to reach earth. A star can be dead for a long, long time before humanity finds out about it.
That’s weirdly comforting.
“You’re probably dead,” Wilbur informs the stars, lying on his back on the car. “Most of you, anyway. Maybe all of you, I don’t know. The world ended, so you might be going with it.”
He lays in the back of his car and stares up at negative space sky and the blackness between light that is hundreds of thousands of years away. How many of these stars aren’t actually real, and just an ancient illusion? How many have burned bright and died without him there to measure the patterns? How long can a thing be dead and still be seen?
He’s probably never going to know. He won’t live long enough to find the answer. The world’s ending and the stars are gonna go with it, but not before Wilbur does first.
Wilbur dreams of swirling stars and empty space and something too big to keep inside of his chest.
He starts taking things from each place he stops at. An empty shop doesn’t need them, and there’s nobody to even miss the crap, so he pockets more and more trinkets that he’ll never need. He lines them up on the dash of his car, keychains and figurines and colorful little gemstones. Anything that catches his eye. He’s a bit like a crow, hoarding anything particularly shiny, or maybe a dragon with a treasure trove for a lair.
Or maybe, he considers, turning one of the figures before starting the car, it’s more like decorating a tomb. Because the car coughs and spits while it starts, and the sun beats down on it and turns the air inside stiflingly hot, as if Wilbur is something cooking inside a can. Someday, the car is going to stop working entirely, and Wilbur will have to just lay down in the back and say his goodbyes. This is Wilbur’s own colorful grave.
Morbid.
Maybe he’ll just live out of the car when it breaks. Outfit it as a little house, parked near some city big enough to scavenge for years. That’ll be his long term plan. Drive until he can’t anymore, and then pick a big city and hope for the best.
It’s not like he’ll have to fight to share the space, anyway. He can pick anywhere he wants as his final resting place.
The car makes it another week before something breaks. The air conditioner stops blowing cold air, and Wilbur has no fucking clue why. He turns it off entirely, rolls all the windows down and lets the hot summer air race through through them, whipping his hair out of his face and sending sweat beading back away from his eyes. It does very little to cut the heat. He’s still being cooked alive, but at least the car runs. The air conditioning never comes back, but the car still turns on, still runs on gas siphoned out of strangers’ tanks. Wilbur is endlessly relieved for this. As long as it drives, it’s good enough.
Or, at least, it’s good enough for the first day.
On day two of no air conditioning–A.A.C., Wilbur thinks with a wry bit of amusement, and B.A.C., as if its two different eras of his life–it’s even hotter, and he gives up on being in the car entirely. It’s so hot he feels as if he’s melting, skin peeling off of his flesh and bone and dripping like candle wax down the inside of his shirt. He’s Icarus too close to the sun, except that he’s just the wings, and he’s standing on a dusty highway, not soaring above the sea.
(God, he wishes he were at the sea. Maybe that should be his goal, somewhere near the ocean, just so he can dive below the waves and cool the fuck down.)
It’s not much cooler standing outside of the car, though, so he gets back in and drives until he hits a town, and then he parks under the overhang of a gas station. After raiding the gas station for bottled water, he himself lies in the shade of it, on a blanket stolen from a souvenir shop, and tries to sleep.
It’s all he can do to pass the time. The choices are sleep, or be boiled to death in a tin can of a car by an unforgiving sun. He naps until the sun dips below the horizon and the temperature drops, plummeting mercifully by tens of degrees. Wilbur’s never been more thankful for the cold night air. Even the stars, unsettlingly restless in their glimmering above him, are a sight he’s happy to see.
“Don’t think this makes us even,” he tells them, head tipped back as he watches the sky turn purple and indigo and midnight blue. As the first glittering specks of white come into view, shining back down at him with nothing but impassioned annoyance. “I’m just doing this to avoid the sun. Doesn’t make us friends or anything.”
He’s losing his mind. He’s begun a rivalry with the fucking stars. But he laughs to himself nonetheless–they started it, anyway–and he climbs into the drivers side of his car.
He becomes all but nocturnal after that. Sunlight is for naps and exploring shops and towns, gathering bottled water and canned food and mourning every jug of milk long-warm and past its expiration date. He steals more trinkets, bottle openers and turquoise beads to hang from his mirror besides the keychain with his name. He bathes when he can find water, and when he can’t, a bottle of water upended over his head is good enough.
The day is for surviving and resting and making sure he gathers enough to stay alive.
The night is for an uneasy alliance with the stars overhead.
He doesn’t hear the whispering quite as often, which he chalks up to the naps during the day. He’s more awake, better rested, so it makes it easier to tell what’s real and what isn’t.
(And what isn’t real is the sound of the literal sky above him calling his name.)
When he does hear the sound, he takes it as a sign to stop driving and turn in. It means he’s spent too long out on the road when he starts hearing things. It’s his sign to call it quits, to cross another day off of the calendar when he stops driving for the night. As the sun comes up, he draws an X over a box, and he settles down for sleep. It’s almost June, which means it’s almost the birthday he shares with someone else, though he still doesn’t know who that is.
It’s been almost a month. Wilbur hasn’t seen anyone.
He has the realization on day twenty-five.
His birthday is tomorrow. It’s daytime, but he’s already slept, so he’s exploring a silent city. One of the bigger ones he’s been to, and part of him hopes he’ll find signs of life somewhere here, because if there would be, it’d be here. At this point he thinks he’d even take the cliche hordes of undead crawling over themselves, because then at least he’d know where everyone’s gone.
It’s just eerie silence, though. Not even zombies to set the scene.
He has to have been in this city before, because some parts of it feel familiar, and muscle memory takes over on the streets. He ends up in an apartment, lets himself in with a key he knows just where to find under a welcome mat outside the door, and then he’s here, in some random ass little place he doesn’t know but still recognizes, somehow.
Rooting through the apartment, he searches for any sign of who this once belonged to. Through a closet that’s full of boring clothing in the same set of muted tones, a few flannels and t-shirts and jeans, all of which might fit Wilbur. They’re all very nearly his size, but they’re not his own. He’d know if he’d accidentally gone in a circle and ended up back in his own apartment, because he still remembers leaving it, even if he doesn’t remember why.
This is someone else’s apartment. This is someone else’s, and he realizes why it’s familiar when he opens a drawer and finds a wallet with an ID.
There’s a photo of a man, and he doesn’t know them, but they’re familiar all the same. Pink hair, descriptions of a height shorter than Wilbur–and he knows Techno’s shorter than him, because Wilbur used to always make fun of him about it, teasing that he was the taller twin, the better twin, the smarter one–and it never was true, any of it except being taller, and now here Wilbur is, standing in his apartment with Techno’s wallet in his hand.
On the ID, Techno’s birthday is listed. It’s tomorrow.
“Oh,” he whispers, like it’s been punched out of him. The memory is there. It’s in fractured pieces, just pink hair and shorter than him and Techno.
There’s no sign that he’d packed and left. All of his things are still here; no dishes in the sink, because he’d kept tidy. Laundry hamper carefully tucked into a corner. His wallet still in the drawer by his bed.
Techno’s just gone. Like everyone else in the world.
Wilbur’s completely alone. He’s the only one left.
And it’s not just people; the whole world is dead. There are no animals, and the plants don’t seem to be growing, though they’re not exactly rotting either. Everything is in some state of frozen nothingness. And there’s no life. There’s only him, wandering and wandering and wandering.
Wilbur is the only man alive in the end of the world. He’s decorated his car like a tomb, and he’s driven back and forth across half the country as if he’ll be able to find someone to change his mind.
There’s no one here. He’s the only one alive. He’s the only one alive.
He sits on the floor of Techno’s apartment, and his chest feels like someone is prying it apart with a crowbar. His birthday is tomorrow. Their birthday is tomorrow.
And Wilbur’s the only one left.
Wilbur keeps Techno’s wallet. He sets it on the dash of his car, beside every other souvenir he’s taken to decorate a tomb.
When Wilbur was younger, his father had taken him and Techno to the Grand Canyon on their birthday. He remembers it now, in bits and pieces. They were turning twelve, he thinks, or maybe thirteen. He remembers driving there, and the skywalk thousands of feet above the ground, and making up a story about growing wings and flying through the canyon. There’s not much more to recall, except that they hadn’t gone to it again after that. Not that Wilbur can remember. There wasn’t really a reason to go more than once. They’d already seen it, and living so nearby meant it sort of faded into familiarity. It’d become a tourist thing, in Wilbur’s head.
But it’s the end of the world, and there’s nothing left to do. Wilbur drives all night. The stars whisper at him, and the space between them calls his name.
It’s still dark when he gets there. He parks his car, breaks into the building, and lets himself out on the skywalk.
He remembers standing here beside Techno, years and years ago. He remembers being young and alive, the both of them. He can almost hear Techno’s voice like an old, old ghost as he sits down on the skywalk. He tries to remember what they were talking about. Wings, and flying, and–and–
And negative space.
Techno had a new sketchbook, and he was trying to draw the canyon in nothing but black ink. Wilbur was bothering him–he remembers that now, and he remembers a lot of it–and Techno had tried to satiate him with a description of how negative space worked in art. “It draws attention to the subject when you leave white space in an interesting shape. See, like–the way the emptiness of the canyon is is carved out here. It draws your eye to the canyon itself.”
And Wilbur hadn’t really been listening, but he still remembers the description. He can almost place the image in his head, a decade-old drawing made here on this walkway.
Wilbur stares up at the stars and the negative space between them, and he wonders how he got here. He feels empty. He feels scraped out all over this walkway, nothing but a shell left as he lays flat on his back and stares upwards. Out of the corner of his eye, he can still see pink hair and an open sketchbook. A ghost sitting beside him, still drawing.
The world is completely empty, and the stars aren’t even real. They’re all dead, just like Techno and everyone else. The only difference is that he can still see the stars.
If Wilbur is the only one who can see the stars, are they still real?
It’s like the question that pissed him off as a kid. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to here, does it still make a sound? Of course it does, he’d always thought, annoyed and frustrated, of course it does, because you can put out a microphone or a camera and you can record it, you can play back the sound. A tree falling is just vibrations in the air, all sounds are just the world moving piece by infinitesimal piece, and whether humanity is there to perceive it or not, it still is.
“But who are we to decide,” his father said once, “that what we perceive of the universe is real?”
Wilbur lies on his back on a skywalk thousands of feet in the air and stares up at a dark, dark sky.
We measure the frequencies, his father says. He’s almost standing beside Wilbur now, standing beside what’s left of Techno, a decade old ghost. The patterns and the regularities. We decide what they mean, and how to use the tools we have created. We decide what is or isn’t real, and doesn’t that mean none of it is actually real in the end?
“The universe exists outside of our comprehension, too,” Wilbur mumbles, raises his hands to cup the spaces where stars should be between his fingers. A crude measuring device with nothing left to record. “Just because we can’t see or understand it doesn’t mean it ceases to exist.”
And just because we can see or think we understand, doesn’t mean we’re right. This is where Phil–his dad, he remembers him, blonde hair and big smile and the source of Wilbur’s own love of the stars–this is where Phil loses him. This is always where things spiral too far for Wilbur to keep up. He always wanted to be an astronomer, to follow his father down the road of space and stars and all the billions of things that exist that he loves, but sometimes it gets too big for him to keep up. The cosmos is vast, and for all we know, infinite. We have sets of conditions here on earth to keep things in order, but those conditions don’t exist everywhere. What is true on earth is untrue in space. What is real for us is nonexistent to some life far, far away.
“I’m never going to understand that,” Wilbur says. It’s truer now than it ever was before.
We aren’t made to. Yet we try anyway.
Years and years ago, a tree was just a tree. It wasn’t a pile of shapes and molecules and atoms, an incomprehensible jumble of DNA and mass and magnetic pull. If a tree fell, the wood splintered and made a sound like a crack or a gunshot or crash. Whether or not Wilbur was there to hear it, the universe would hear it anyway.
There are trees falling all over the world, Wilbur thinks. There are things dying, things already dead, broken and snapping and splintered wood, with no one left to hear. And that means they’re not real anymore. It means they were never real to begin with, because the world is nothing but a pile of fucking atoms that humans can only measure with instruments that they made up.
Wilbur is a speck in the infinite. He’s nothingness in the middle of unreality.
He gets to his feet in cold and still dark air, and he stands on the edge of the deepest canyon in the country, and he knows none of what he sees is real. It’s thousands of feet to the ground - cold empty nothingness ground - and feet are a stupid fucking measurement, but so are meters, and in the end it doesn’t matter because it’s all just garbage spat out by humans desperate for nonsense to be real.
Wilbur’s so fucking desperate for something to be real.
Techno’s gone. His dad’s gone. The whole world’s gone, and all that’s left is Wilbur and a shattered memory and nothing. None of it matters, in the end.
If a man is the only one left in a universe, does he ever make a sound?
There is something in between the stars, and Wilbur is floating in it.
He thinks this is how astronauts feel, weightless in space, no gravity to pull them and only a tether to keep them from drifting far, far away. Wilbur doesn’t even have a tether. He’s just floating in that emptiness, and nothing really matters.
He’s staring into the infinite. He’s looking the space between the stars right in the eye, and when they whisper, he can hear the words they say.
Wilbur, something whispers. Wilbur.
“I’m tired.” It’s honesty in its purest form, something weary and true. “I’m too tired.”
You’re still growing, it tells him. You’re not done yet.
He doesn’t know what that means. He’s cold, like ice crystals starry in his veins and indigo on his fingertips. Reality shifts around him in purple and pink and brilliant light and dark, dark empty space.
“I’m tired,” he whispers again. “Please. I’m tired.”
A little longer. Hold on for us, little one. A little longer.
And he wants to argue, because he doesn’t understand; he is too small and too tired to comprehend, and he wants to float in this emptiness for as long as they’ll let him. He’s tired. He’s tired of being alone.
But when his eyes drift shut, nothing is real, and he’s only opening them again.
He wakes up beside his car.
The sun beats down on him. Midday. There’s dust in his mouth, and something that tastes like tar and death and an incomprehensible bitterness. He rolls over, gags and coughs everything in his stomach up onto dry dirt on the side of the road. Down his arms run scratched lines, dried beads of blood smeared rust and brown, chest aching as if someone has pried open his chest, pulling his ribs like they’re a box to be opened and then closing them again with a sewing needle to stitch shut the scars. He rolls his shirt up. Bruises, angry purple and indigo. Nothing else.
“Shit,” he whispers. “Shit.”
He has the rest of the day to consider the weight of what he’s done. He uses a bottle of his water to clean the blood from his arms and ribs. His clothes are so dusty and torn he doesn’t bother trying to save them. Dumps them in a bin here at the visitors center. He’s got extra, and if he needs more, he’ll stop and find some.
(He considers driving back to Techno’s and taking some of his flannels, but he decides against it in the end. It’s a little too raw.)
For some reason, Wilbur’s alive, or something that looks like it. Nothing in the world is alive, just caught in fucking stasis, which means Wilbur can’t die with the rest of his family. No matter how much he wants to.
It’s his birthday now. His and Techno’s.
He sits in the visitor center and waits for the sun to set. Waits for the stars to come back.
When night falls, he picks a direction entirely at random. He drives and drives and drives, and he pretends he doesn’t hear his own name.
Something startles him awake.
He’s asleep in the back of a gas station in the middle of nowhere, the only pit stop he’d found before the sun started rising. With a blanket down on linoleum floor, it’s better than nothing. But now he hears a sound that startles him right out his sleep.
First of all, he hears a sound. That’s–it’s not him making the noise. He’s asleep. Or was. Now he’s blinking sleep out of his eyes, and trying to understand–
Something clatters, like a series of cans hitting the floor, and he hears a voice. Someone says, “Aw, fuck. Ow. Fuckin’ bitch, ow.”
The string of curses continues, and Wilbur has to wonder if he’s still dreaming. He gets up uncertainly, and he creeps towards the edge of the aisle to peer around it, looking for the source of the voice. And–there it is.
There’s a kid.
A teenager, all lanky limbs and wild, dirty hair, currently hopping on one foot with the other in his hand, glaring down at a mess of cans as if they’ve personally insulted him. “You fuckin’ jerk, goddammit, that hurt. Bitch. Ow.”
“Uh,” Wilbur says, because for a moment he forgets how to speak. His throat is dry. The teenager’s head snaps up, curses cut off the instant Wilbur makes a noise, and then piercing blue eyes bore into his own. “Are you okay?”
“Do I fucking look okay?” the kid snaps. “Fuckin’ broke my toe or some shit, Jesus, hurts like a bitch. What kind of stupid question, are you okay–”
Wilbur laughs. He can’t help it; the sound spills out of his mouth unbidden and unexpected, and he’s laughing. Something like hysteria, relief, disbelief, all at once. The kid’s eyes narrow further.
“The fuck’s so funny, you piece of shit?”
“You’re real,” Wilbur says, trying to calm his laughter. “Are you real?”
“No, I’m a fucking ghost,” he snaps. “What do you think?”
“I’ve been hallucinating for weeks,” Wilbur says, full honesty. He stops laughing, and he shrugs instead. “I saw two ghosts last night.”
The kid’s mouth opens, and then it snaps shut. Something on his face changes. “Oh. Sorry. I’m real, then. You wanna touch my arm?”
Immediately, Wilbur steps forward. The teenager holds on his hand, and Wilbur reaches back, somewhere between desperate and terrified, and his fingers grab onto the real, solid, dirty and patched fabric of a shirt sleeve.
“Oh,” Wilbur says. “You are.”
“Yep.” Both feet back on the ground now, he pulls his arm back out of Wilbur’s grasp. “Haven’t seen anyone else around this whole time, nice to know everyone else isn’t fuckin’ dead everywhere. Name’s Tommy.”
“Wilbur.” He feels dizzy. “You’re not dead.”
“Last I checked.”
“I’m not the only one.”
“Surprise.”
“I kinda thought–” Wilbur stops. He doesn’t know what he thought. “Huh. All right. How did you get here?”
“Walked,” Tommy says.
“In the middle of the day?”
“Sun’s going down,” Tommy says. “It’s not too hot today, so I thought I’d make it out to the gas station before it got too late.”
Wilbur blinks. He sounds so sure of himself. “You’ve got a whole plan.”
“‘Course,” Tommy says. “I’m going to Colorado.”
“On foot?”
“S’all I’ve got.”
“Why?”
“Why’m I going? Tubbo’s there.”
Wilbur bites the bait. “Who’s Tubbo?”
“My friend. He moved out there with his brother, and now that the whole world’s fuckin’ died, I’m gonna go find him.”
Wilbur does not say the obvious. He figures Tommy doesn’t need it. “You want a lift? Might be faster than walking the whole way.”
Tommy’s eyes narrow. “Stranger danger, dude.”
Wilbur laughs again, a little less hysterical. It’s a genuinely funny thing to say in the middle of the apocalypse–or the end of it, whatever. “Okay. Walk, then.”
“No, fuck off,” Tommy says. “Drive me to Denver.”
“All right.”
“You’re not a serial killer?”
“Actually, yeah,” Wilbur says, solemn. “Such a big one, actually, I killed the whole rest of the world. You’re my last victim.”
“Fuck off,” Tommy says. “Jesus, you’re weird.”
“I’ve been alone for a month,” Wilbur says.
“So’ve I. Get a better excuse.”
Wilbur laughs for a third time. He’s still not entirely convinced Tommy’s real instead of something created by his mind, something like grief and loneliness taken a human form, but–well, he’s here. And Wilbur’s laughing. He won’t wish him away any time soon.
“Car’s outside,” Wilbur says. “AC’s broke, so we only drive at night, or else it’s so fuckin’ hot you’ll wish I was a serial killer just to put you out of your misery.”
“Jesus, dude,” Tommy says, but he follows Wilbur out of the gas station. “Fix your AC.”
“I have no idea how cars work,” Wilbur confesses. “I just drive it.”
Tommy looks thoughtful in the setting sunlight. “Tubbo worked at a mechanic two summers. I bet he could look at it when we get there.”
Wilbur climbs into the driver’s seat. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Tommy gets in across from him. He stars at the dash and the variety of trinkets spread across it. “Oh my god. You’re a hoarder as well as a serial killer.”
“They’re souvenirs,” Wilbur tries to defend. “To remember where I’ve been.”
“You worried you might forget it?”
“Yeah,” Wilbur says. He doesn’t know why he’s being honest with a kid he’s just met, but–well. It’s not like there’s any reason to lie. What’s it matter, if none of this is real anyway? “Kinda got a shit memory. Don’t even remember–Do you know what you were doing when the world ended?”
Tommy’s eyebrows furrow. “Watching tv. I was just sitting in my room, and it all went out and got dark, so I figured the power went out. Nobody else was home, and nobody else came home. By the time I started looking around, everyone was long gone to–wherever they went.”
So Tommy doesn’t know either. Wilbur starts the car with a sputtering cough. “I don’t even remember the world ending. I just got in my car and started driving.”
“It wasn’t anything dramatic,” Tommy says. “You didn’t miss much. It just all stopped, and that was it.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Tommy peers out the window. “I’d always thought the apocalypse would be, like–different, I guess. Dramatic. Like, you’d know the exact moment it started, and nothing would be the same. And it is like that, I guess, because everybody’s gone, but it’s like–”
Tommy points at the sky. It’s purple and pink and orange and crimson, a gorgeous painting of a sunset. Indigo fades into midnight blue.
“The sunset’s still pretty even at the end of the world,” Tommy says. “Kinda fucked up, right?”
Wilbur hums. He hadn’t considered it before. Maybe Tommy’s right. There is something unsettling about it. The way the apocalypse is still colorful and beautiful outside his windshield. The first few stars take their place overhead. Wilbur ignores them as pointedly as he can. He hopes they know he’s ignoring them.
(There’s something to tell Tommy much, much later. He can find out about the stars and the way they hate Wilbur specifically later.)
“Well,” Wilbur says. He breaks himself from his thoughts. “Next stop Denver.”
“Next stop Tubbo,” Tommy says.
“Next stop Tubbo.”
The day after his birthday, Wilbur is in a car driving. He remembers how he got here this time, even if he doesn’t fully understand it. Tommy is asleep in the passenger seat, head against the window in a way that’s surely uncomfortable for his neck, but Wilbur doesn’t wake him up yet. He will soon, but… he can rest a moment longer.
He crosses off another day on the calendar. One month. Things have changed.
It’s not just Wilbur in a car, driving anywhere, looking for anything. It’s not just the end of the world, not just emptiness and loneliness. Not just Wilbur alone, Wilbur in a car, Wilbur who can’t remember how he got here.
The world’s still over; he’s pretty damn sure of that. The world’s done. For now, it takes it’s time to catch up to the two of them.
For now, it’s Wilbur and Tommy in a car, looking for Tubbo, until the world ends for them too.